Craig Fees, "Background, evolution and issues in an online oral history course".
Unpublished first, and longer, version of a presentation for ‘Beyond Text in the Digital Age? Oral History, Images and the Written Word’, Oral History Society Annual Conference, London, July 9, 2016
SLIDE 1
What I am speaking about today is an ongoing work-in-progress, a standalone module on Oral History, run by the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, within their distance learning programme. As a first caveat, I am speaking in my own voice, as myself and not officially or for CAIS or the University of Dundee.
In a second caveat, the history I present is an impressionistic one. I can ground it to an extent, but there is not, as far as I'm aware, an institutional history, yet, of the Centre, which burst into life in 2004 and seems to me to be in a perpetual process of discovery and invention. So the Centre for Archive and Information Studies itself is a work-in-progress.
My aim is to provide myself with a reflective space in which to think about a project I've been involved with since 2010, when I was asked to step in and take over an Oral History Unit within a larger Sound and Vision Module from its original author, John Benson, an archivist who was on the move from Cheshire Archives to the Shakespeare Library in Stratford on Avon. There were four Units in the Module, and John Benson's co-author and co-tutor on the Module David Lee, then of the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, took over full responsibility for the two specifically Sound and Vision Units, and main responsibility for the Introductory Unit on the background history. The Oral History Unit was a kind of transitional one between the Introduction and the two heavily technical ones, but it was no after-thought: Conducting an oral history interview, with transcription, discussion and documentation was one of the two required final assignments for the Module. It seemed to me a heavy responsibility, which I took on while learning about this very exciting and daunting thing called Distance Learning. I changed virtually nothing in John Benson's version of the Unit in my first run in 2010, apart from a new opening task; and I still maintain several significant features, including an excellent self-reporting exercise in which students are asked to carry out a five minute interview with someone using only their skills at listening, and then feeding back to their interviewee what they heard the interviewee say. The more times that is done, the better.
But the Unit fit rather awkwardly into the Module, especially as I began to relax into and develop it; and in 2014, with more development, it went independent. David Lee enlisted the excellent Susi Clark, a scientist turned photographic conservator, to refocus the Sound and Vision Module fully on the gubbins of sound and vision; and Oral History became its own 9 week 10 credit Module. It has been run twice, with significant revisions between the first run and the second. I'm now preparing further revisions as it approaches a third run, and wondering about a number of things. Hence taking this opportunity to reflect and, I hope, get feedback.
SLIDE 2
Before launching in to that: I expect many people caught the news story of a buffalo calf in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, who had to be put down after a very kind family decided it was cold and needed to be rescued. It was subsequently rejected by the herd, and euthanised. You may have missed the recent Dover story, where a large group of youths on an adult-led outing had to be rescued from the rising tide at the foot of the cliffs of Dover by the coast guard and other emergency services, because they took a non-existent shortcut and ignored 9 – 9 [!] – warning signs to turn back. Or perhaps, again going back to Yellowstone, the death of a man for whom there was no point in even trying to recover his body as he fell into a hot-spring and disintegrated, because he had ignored the warning signs and left the safety of the walk-way provided by the National Park Service. Or the section of a State Park cordoned off from tourists because of the number being attacked by bears as they insisted on trying to take selfies with bears. And similarly in Yellowstone again, the number of people injured trying to get up close to take selfies with wild elk and buffalo. There is a point, which I hope I will have time to come back to, and it isn't about Brexit as such. And while I'm here I should declare an interest. Many years ago our families went on a picnic at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State, and my cousin Johnny and I went into the woods and made a den for ourselves, putting branches over a pair of fallen trees to create a shelter. When we came back after having been called to lunch we were very surprised and gratified when a black bear dashed out of the den. We were chuffed it had met its approval, and left it to him. Or her.
SLIDE 3
The University of Dundee began running distance learning courses in the 1970s. The pre-history I'm not familiar with, but by the late 1990s, when the remarkable Internet Archive kicks in, there is an extensive range of distance learning courses, primarily medical, health and social work related, with one in Town and Country Planning. Standing out from these, because it is not so obviously vocational, is a course in Scottish History, run by the History Department with involvement by the Department of Archives and Manuscripts, and by 1999 in association with the Open University.
SLIDE 4
The real excitement begins to mount from 2004, when the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, CAIS, is formed and launches a programme in Archives and Records Management leading to a Certificate, Diploma or MPhil, developed later into an MLitt. It is post-graduate, right from the beginning; and it is modular. For the MPhil – later the Mlitt -, there were four core modules, which every student had to take, totalling 70 credits; and then a set of optional modules, taking a total of 120 credits to graduate.
Among the new Optional Modules were Module 6: “Oral History and Archives Part 1”; and Module 7, “Oral History and Archives Part 2”, each worth 20 credits. It is worth noting the two halves of this equation: Part 1 is focused on oral history as an activity and a service – and to note the reference to oral history and sound archives as non-traditional in relation to archives: “Students will be provided with the tools and skills necessary to carry out an oral history project.” There will be ensured “a thorough understanding of the complex legal and ethical considerations involved”, “fully appreciating the needs of sound and oral history users”.
Part 2 focuses on the Technical issues of the equipment, formats, processing and management, with an introduction to “the historical development of sound recording technology and media”, and attention to “the financial and management options available.”
The oral historian CAIS engaged to write the modules was Murray Watson, who had graduated with a PhD in History from the University of Dundee teh year before, in 2003, and was one of those historians Bartie and McIvor identify in their 2013 “Oral History in Scotland” as an exponent of the “new” oral history, an oral history which recognises “that memories are composed and reconstructed, influenced by a range of factors”(p.127). His doctoral thesis, published by Edinburgh University Press towards the end of 2003 as “Being English in Scotland”, was called 'Scotland's Invisible Immigrants: The English', a title which surfaces again in his latest book, written with historian Marilyn Barber of Carleton University in Canada, and published in 2015. Dr. Watson began work on what became “Invisible Immigrants – The English in Canada since 1945” in 2005, and was in Canada in 2007 carrying out fieldwork. The significance of the latter date is that the Oral History and Archives Modules were not working as CAIS had hoped, and in 2007 it was decided to combine the two modules into one. Murray Watson was clearly busy, so CAIS turned to John Benson of Cheshire Archives. At the same time CAIS was thinking of doing a separate film archives module with David Lee, of the Wessex Film and Sound Archive. Caroline Brown writes, in a personal communication, “We decided there was value in having an audiovisual module with an oral history element”.
So, the new 20 credit Module, “Sound And Vision: Collecting, Preserving And Managing Film, Sound And Oral History” was launched in 2008, bringing the two halves of the 2004 Modules together: Unit 1 “Historical Overview”, Unit 2 “Oral History”, Unit 3 “Management and Administration” and Unit 4 “Preservation”.
It might be worth while looking at the components of a Distance Learning Module.
The basic mechanisms underpinning and delivering the Module are effectively unchanged since 2008. You have, of course, the tutor. Because it's a Distance Learning course, the tutor can be anywhere in the world, although most of us are in the United Kingdom. But the students really can be anywhere where there is an Internet connection: So we have had students in North America, China, the Caribbean and elsewhere, as well as all over the United Kingdom and Ireland. This, of course, raises occasional practical as well as cultural and other issues.
The primary medium for online course delivery or Virtual Learning Environment is Blackboard, a resource delivery and communication platform which - like all these things - like Facebook, or YouTube, or any other "interactive" Web2 Internet based service -, is made up of components: A calendar, a messaging system, a discussion board, and content delivery as such, as well as individual and group management and monitoring tools, and other things. We can embed files - audio, video, images. We can link. It is what you would expect in the Joomla and Facebook and WordPress era, except clunkier; and as with anything to do with software and apps, it is continually evolving, at least in the background.
Given how crucial two-way communication is in any learning, tutoring situation, you would be right to focus on what the options are. In the VLE itself, this is the Discussion Board. As part of a Module there are both Assessed Tasks, which are graded, and Discussion Board tasks, which are not. An example of the latter would be the first significant change I made when I took over the Oral History Unit. Having given a bit of personal and oral history information about myself, the First Discussion Board Task was:
SLIDE
What about you: What experience do you have with oral history? Have you ever made an oral history recording? Was it at school, in college, at university, as part of your work, in pursuit of a private interest? When, where, what, how? What equipment did you use? Share your experience on the Discussion Board.
When I first joined the enterprise in 2010, we were advised as tutors that the Discussion Board was primarily a communication tool for and among students, and to intervene as little as possible. As tutors, our final assessment - the grade we gave a student at the end of the Module - was based in part on our assessment of the the quality and extent of the students' participation in the Discussion Board. Both of those have now changed. I found it difficult to stay out of the Discussion Board in any event, and I am pleased that we are now encouraged to take part. On the other hand, participation is no longer part of a student's assessment. There is no compulsion to take part, so those who do participate are doing it for the right reason. But what about those who don't take part, and some don't - how do you question, challenge, elicit, provoke, correct, learn from, and generally model what oral history is about? How do you take the multiple isolations which a Distant Learning situation is all about, almost by definition; and in a very short time generate the group processes which can help to encourage students who are struggling, and through which groups as wholes can become enriched learning environments in themselves through the rich diversities of experiences and ideas and approaches which are shared?
We can in theory have skype conversations, and some that I've had one-to-one have been very successful. On the other hand, with people scattered throughout the world, in sometimes polar opposite time zones, just finding a time for group skype calls in itself can be daunting. Throw in other variables - a student who can only access the Internet from work, or another who has child care duties in the evenings, for example - remembering that the people who enroll in distant learning courses are doing it for a reason, often at or through work and certainly around it, and around family obligations as well, and possibly with health issues that make it impossible to study in any other way - and the group skype option becomes tricky.
In theory we can have face-to-face group meetings, and distance learning students in general have an annual study day at Dundee. It has been useful and rewarding when a student has been able to meet me physically in the Archive where I work, because so much around oral history is more easily seen and understood - by me, in learning about the student and who they are as an oral historian - and then conveyed; but those students have been rarities.
The other real point of contact is in the student's assessed work. For the Oral History Unit and now the Module there two assessed tasks prior to the Final Assignment, the one a Report, and the other an Essay. There are technical reasons for this, including the University's style guide for Reports and Essays, and for citations, on which we have to assess the students. But one has an opportunity to speak directly to students in one's commentary on their report and essay; in which one is again evoking, provoking and modelling the essence of oral history; helping them to build the groundwork for their Final Assignment, which begins with a recorded oral history interview, includes transcription, and documentation and then - most key of all - a Report in which they reflect on each element of what they've done, and provide a critical and concise assessment and evaluation. Remembering that however they are taking the Module - whether for CPD, or a degree - they are expected to be operating at a postgraduate level.