The question that lies behind much of the discussion of digital resources at UO is a question of audience. Just who do our online courses serve? What audiences have we overlooked? It’s not just questions of popularity, but of targeted outreach and advertising, or of partnering with members of those desired audiences to make future ventures successful.

One of our largest and most significant audiences for digital course materials is our own residential student body. Being “in residence” is a hallmark feature of the University of Oregon experience–it’s such a big piece of the culture that the word “residential” has shown up in official definitions and descriptions of the university with some regularity since mine and Greg’s arrival, nearly five months ago.

As someone who arrived from what is generally a commuter institution, it’s been a valuable point of comparison, just how much the culture here is grounded in a sense of physical place. Even that sappy song Mat Kearney released early on in football season starts by articulating the geography, “down Interstate 5.”

So what do you do when your learning, your student experience, it’s all caught up in your physical location? How does that shape education in a digital age or in digital environments? These observations and questions are some of the reasons I was so interested in Steven Taylor’s recent article on the Academic Commons: “Remote Learning at a Residential College.”

Taylor’s home institution, Vassar, is essentially running a “flipped class” for all of their incoming first-year students–using their LMS, Moodle, to run a space where admitted students can discuss a common summer reading prior to arriving on campus.

A couple of things about this stood out to me:

First, this is a common digital experience based around an experience that might happen in a wide variety of forms–the reading of the common book might happen on a device, or with a print copy, and could happen at any physical location. So there’s not just a diversity of opinions and reactions, there’s a diversity of experiences. I would guess that more students used the print version, as that was mailed to them, but some might well have read digitally–and the structure of the experience makes room for diversity. It also blurs online and offline experiences in productive ways!

Second, the experience everyone was sharing was simultaneously internal and external. We know that reading makes you a more empathetic person, that it stimulates compassion for others based on a greater perceived understanding of the experiences of other people. When we read, we are alone, but we are practicing being in the world–and that includes practicing and learning about how to be with others. To take that experience then into a digital environment, interacting with one’s peers, actually mirrors and reinforces the lessons of the offline reading.

Finally, this was a large-scale effort at a school known for small class sizes. That’s an intriguing conceptual difference to me, and makes me wonder if there’s a way we could turn the expected Ducks experience on its head once in a while, and give our students a taste of a different way to learn through a similar “flipped” experience.

Taylor’s article has a bunch of interesting stats and some faculty reflections. Check it out!