Written by: Jana Fedtke & Mohammed Ibahrine
This essay presents some of our recent experiences in digitality at an American-style liberal arts university in the Arab world, specifically in the United Arab Emirates. Reflecting on our own practices in the Social Sciences and Humanities, we explore what it means to engage in digital teaching and scholarship in and after a time of crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. What are some of the opportunities that this mode of teaching and researching affords us? What are some of the challenges it has presented?
We argue that digitality per se does not present a panacea for the current problems in higher education. Our focus is on engaged teaching, which we envision as a skill that works in tandem with our research interests, not in opposition to them. This hybrid model of education welcomes the incorporation of digital education to a certain extent, but it is also aware of the pressures of corporate interests and the invasion of privacy in this context. The processes of knowledge creation and dissemination predominantly rely on our vibrant residential community of 90+ nationalities at the American University of Sharjah.
Rethinking Community in Times of Crisis
As the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has been raging across countries, our university, the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, was moved to digital education in early March 2020 just as many other universities worldwide. This abrupt shift has left us reluctantly remote, but it has also presented us with an opportunity to rethink our current practices as well as the meaning of learning and research communities in an environment that heavily relies on in-person interaction.
The American University of Sharjah (AUS) was founded in 1997. It is “an independent, non-profit, coeducational institution of higher education formed on the American model, which integrates broad-based liberal arts education with professional education studies” (AUS website). The language of instruction is English. With students and faculty members from more than 90 countries all over the world, diversity and cross-cultural understanding are an integral part of the AUS community. Yet recently, these learning and research communities could no longer interact in their usual close-knit networks, but had to rely on digital communication due to the coronavirus pandemic in Spring 2020.
Published in April 2020, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s latest book titled, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World, also discusses the idea of community in times of crisis. Speculating about the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic in “Communism or Barbarism, as Simple as That!” (chapter 10), Žižek proposes what he calls “‘disaster Communism’ as an antidote to disaster capitalism” (p. 103). The author envisions “some kind of effective international cooperation … to produce and share resources” (p. 104). He warns that, “If states simply isolate, wars will explode. These sorts of developments are what I’m referring to when I talk about ‘communism,’ and I see no alternative to it except new barbarism” (p. 104). Žižek’s reference to “community” is reflected in the idea of sharing resources coupled with the warning against isolation and resulting barbarism. While Žižek is primarily concerned with the political and global contexts, we argue that this idea of rethinking our current communities also applies in the context of higher education and academic publishing.
Researchers and instructors can seize the 2020 “corona crisis” as an opportunity to rethink processes of knowledge creation in the classroom and the accessibility of their research to serve the public. In the context of higher education, the “corona crisis” can function as a catalyst for overdue change. Teaching and research communities should use this watershed moment to rethink their teaching and publication practices to reach wider audiences and to make their knowledge more accessible to the general public.
Knowledge Creation in Digital Learning Communities
The American University of Sharjah has provided its students and faculty members with regular updates regarding Covid-19 and appropriate measures. Over the past few months, the university has also held a number of workshops, webinars, and virtual fairs to keep its student population and faculty members engaged. Faculty members could choose from a variety of options in synchronous and asynchronous online education. Adjusting to the new circumstances has taken much time and energy in addition to the personal worries and healthcare-related issues with which both students and faculty members have been dealing.
At AUS, we were moved to remote education in early March 2020. With the experiences of a new digitality over the past few months in mind, we can attest to the fact that technology enabled us to finish the semester successfully. At the same time, we need to call Spring 2020 “emergency e-learning” rather than “real” online education to avoid doing the latter as an established field an injustice. As we are still engaging in digital teaching in Summer 2020, thinking about the pandemic has become part of our ways of processing the current events. One of us is currently teaching a writing class, for example, in which pandemics have taken center-stage with students writing about the current pandemic and mental health, education, the economy, the arts, architecture, and other related fields. To a certain extent, this way of knowledge creation can be unsettling and yet therapeutic. It engages the students in discussions of relevant topics while teaching them how to do research on a timely issue.
Since universities are spaces of discussion, meetings, and public discourse, the lack of a physical presence implies a reduction in the exchange of ideas. While it is certainly possible to create a digital presence and an online community, this digital discourse does not present the same kind of interactivity as a physical classroom. It requires time to establish such a presence and it presupposes a different kind of trust between the community members that may or may not be present. As untrained online educators, we missed the element of control that we usually experience in a physical setting. The lack of visibility was also accompanied by a loss of an emotional connection with the students as well as a sense of diminished enthusiasm. Body language as a reliable cue was equally absent. While interactivity is usually key in our discussion-based classes in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, remote education did not allow for the quick, spontaneous, and effective interaction to which we were used in the physical classroom.
Many questions remain as we reflect on Spring and Summer 2020 and move into Fall 2020: How did the students experience this dramatic shift to remote education? What can we learn from their experiences? What toll might this pandemic have taken on students and faculty members in terms of physical health and mental health? How can we support students who might have experienced personal loss during these times? For a vast majority of our students, their parents pay the university fees – but what if the parents have lost their jobs due to Covid-19? What about the quality of this type of remote education? How do different people, for example, introverts and extroverts, deal with e-learning? What about the ethical delivery of exams? What about the invasion of privacy in the context of online education? How can we deliver class content without relying on corporate platforms through which we have to channel our ideas? How will we approach Fall 2020?
Some might see digital education as a sustainable solution for the future that allows universities to reach wider audiences at reduced costs. Even before Covid-19, Palvia et al. (2018) observed that, “online education is on track to become mainstream by 2025” (p. 233). Some universities and instructors embrace online learning as a tool to “modernize their approach to instruction” (para. 8). This assumes that the use of technology and the practices of digitality are necessarily forward-looking and “modern.” On the other hand, Bowen (2012) has argued that “teaching naked” without technology can improve student learning.
In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2020) has composed a “Requiem for the students.” He argues that, “the so-called pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies” (para. 1). Agamben sees this move to online education as part of what he calls “technological barbarism” (para. 2). He compares professors who welcome online education to collaborators during fascism: “Professors who agree — as they are doing en masse — to submit to the new dictatorship of telematics and to hold their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime” (para. 6, emphasis in the original).
There is no simple dichotomy between remote learning and “regular” classes in the physical classroom. These questions and positions show us that we need to continue to rethink the meaning of community, learning, knowledge creation, and our own practices. Reflection of current changes, flexibility, and adaptability are key to being successful in this new context. Whether we see this development as a new opportunity, as “technological barbarism,” or something else, rethinking one’s practices and attitudes enables us to find new ways of engaging our students and ourselves.
Knowledge Dissemination in Digital Research Communities
More than other crises before, the current pandemic has shown how researchers are responding immediately to pressing issues. Research related to the coronavirus is “being published at a furious pace” and with “unprecedented global research effort.” Over 24,000 papers are available in a central dataset. The World Health Organization (WHO) is collecting resources related to the virus. Major publishers such as Elsevier, SAGE, and Oxford University Press are providing free access to research on coronaviruses and related topics. The practice of fast review or an accelerated publication model have been instituted by several academic publishers. Leading universities have made some of their online classes available for free. These measures prove how attitudes and practices can shift in a short period of time based on a major global event and its impact. Such a shift has the potential to become permanent, leaving a lasting legacy on publishing practices in higher education.
For the past few years, the American University of Sharjah has been engaged in strengthening its research profile. Theme III of the Strategic Plan 2020-2025 expresses the aim of “becoming globally recognized for outstanding and innovative research and creative activity” (“Theme III: Research and Creative Work”). Faculty members can apply for a number of funding opportunities – both internal and external. Most recently in April 2020, AUS began piloting an Open Access Program that allows faculty members to apply for reimbursement of fees incurred in Open Access publishing (AUS Webinar, April 2020).
Publishing their research is one of the central pillars for most academics in higher education. In addition to teaching and service activities, faculty members are expected to publish regularly and in venues with high impact factors. If anything, the pressure to “publish or perish” has continually increased given decreased funding opportunities, competition between researchers and universities, and the dismal job market for academics. Yet despite heightened requirements and pressure for academics to produce more and better research, the actual research output is accessible to only a few people due to at least two reasons: on the one hand, the often specialized scientific language and, on the other hand, the current publication models that provide access to the vast majority of research only to paying customers, be it universities, libraries, companies, or individuals.
Prof. Agnes Callard argues that researchers need to be “prepared to move somewhat outside [their] comfort zones of specialized terminology; technical apparatuses; hypercomplex academic syntax; and narrow, disciplinary-specific lines of thought” (para. 6). This call for accessible writing and jargon-free language presents one way of leaving the upper echelons of research and the ivory tower of higher education in general. Another possibility, which would work in conjunction with this first suggestion, is making research accessible more freely than it currently is on suitable digital platforms such as academic journals, institutional repositories, or Open Access publications. Open Access based models have recently gained traction. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), for example, provides a database of 12,000 Open Access journals. In some disciplines, preprint servers allow researchers to publish and discuss their findings before the official peer review process, “emphasizing the preliminary nature of the information” (para. 9).
These practices seem more democratic and indicative of future directions, yet important questions remain if Open Access based models are to become mainstream: What role does peer review play? How to avoid the misuse of information that is accessible, but has not yet been properly vetted? What about predatory publishers? Who pays for publication costs of fact-checking, reviewing, and proofreading if we are to move from corporate practices of academic publishing to new models such as Open Access? How will researchers be evaluated at their respective institutions? Why would researchers want to publish in venues that are currently perceived as less prestigious? How can we foster worldwide research collaboration in communities when there are different standards in different countries?
While these issues are central to a potential shift in favor of Open Access and other new publication models, the advantages of such a move already seem to outweigh the drawbacks. Research findings could become accessible more freely to the public. This is particularly relevant in environments that currently struggle to pay the sometimes exorbitant fees for academic journals in their current form. Publications could potentially happen at a quicker pace. Guidelines for evaluating researchers would have to change accordingly, allowing for recognition of Open Access publications. Our digital world is ideally suited to accommodate this model of publishing since digital accessibility promises more inclusivity, foregrounds collaboration, and serves public interests.
Such advances in the future of higher education would incur more social responsibility and accountability in research communities that focus on collectivity and fostering conversation. Instead of individual business interests and corporate practices, knowledge creation and accessibility would be at the forefront of such a model, which would also enable researchers to redefine ownership, authorship, and copyright. Ultimately, both the publishing community and public interest would benefit from this model.
Conclusion
In times of uncertainty such as the current coronavirus pandemic, we need to rethink the meaning of community – who are we as human beings, how do we relate to one another, how can we contribute to the common good of society? Fostering learning and research communities to share ideas would be one way of contributing to this common good.
Cooperation, academic collaboration, and sharing research on easily accessible platforms such as Open Access publications, online repositories, or preprint servers can eventually become an integral part of higher education. Publishing research in such venues would focus on knowledge creation and dissemination for the common good. While this may seem utopian to some at this point in time, a time of crisis is a pivotal moment of disruptive innovation in society that is ideal to rethink the status quo and envision best practices for the future. Rethinking access to knowledge could transform the ways we think about society and community – not just in times of crisis.
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Short Bios
Dr. Jana Fedtke is Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Her research and teaching interests include transnational literatures with a focus on South Asia; gender studies; and postcolonial literatures. Dr. Fedtke’s work has been published in South Asian History and Culture (Taylor and Francis), Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge), and South Asian Review (Taylor and Francis).
Dr. Mohammed Ibahrine is Associate Professor of Mass Communication at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. His book New Media and Neo-Islamism is published in its second edition (2012). His main research interests focus on the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, design thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship.