Introduction: The role of technologies

Replacing conventional on-site teaching with a blended or online learning format is not supposed to modify directly what is learned, namely the subject matter or the curriculum. It is expected to affect how this curriculum is learned. Prior to questions of technology and mediatization, it matters which instructional formats are selected and which modes of learning are required or encouraged. Depending on their respective qualities, these selections again impact how learning takes place and therefore what is learned. For a blended program, it is therefore useful to consider these instructional formats not primarily for their technological characteristics. Instead, the first question is how they correspond to the available modes of guided, self-directed or peer-learning. Technological mediation might help or hinder some aspects of the learning outcomes, but they do not fundamentally change the fact that a combination of these three modes is inherent in each format.

A crucial insight to be gleaned from this paradox is that effective use of digital technologies can solve some of these challenges, whereas others are augmented or made more difficult by the use of mediating technologies and thus have to be addressed separately. Although sometimes prior technology decisions pose some constraints on program design, the decision for or against a given format, practice or structure of learning should therefore be determined by pedagogical considerations, and not be driven by an a priori technological decision.

The online setting has created a different kind of spatial arrangement for the IEIW program. The instructional focus is no longer the location or format of teaching, but on the process of learning. Aspects of this process have become the main driver of learning design (Jahnke, 2015). Students co-expand the space to include their own resources and practices of effective learning. They need guidance and feedback, however, on what constitutes appropriate and acceptable extensions of the classroom space. An obvious example is plagiarism. In early program iterations, for example, it became clear that the pressure of impending deadlines lead some students to turn in papers not with any sophisticated type of forgery, but with large sections copied and pasted from freely accessible online resources such as Wikipedia. As such, they were easily discernible by instructors as inadequate, but understood not as an activity to be sanctioned as would have been appropriate in a case of blatant plagiarism during an ordinary course. Instead, these cases highlighted the need for more specific attention to the expectations demarcating acceptable academic practices. Such demands are intimately related to the exigencies of a virtual space in which multiple educational systems and institutional backgrounds are entangled. Just like intercultural issues, many unspoken assumptions of an on-site educational setting need to be reexamined because they are not equally obvious or self-evident to all participants.

This further reinforces the observation that locations and their real-world contexts do not completely disappear or become irrelevant within the virtual setting. In fact, the online learning process is best considered as situated in a multiple, co-located context that will influence the individual learning journey for each student and strongly shape this journey’s ultimate outcomes. Rather than as a hindrance or an obstacle, this spatial arrangement can be considered in terms of diversity as an enabling condition for a more complex learning expedition (Jahnke, Norqvist, & Olsson, 2014).

Such spatial considerations are helpful, because they highlight similar structures in conventional teaching and learning. In their current form, analog academic formats such as lectures, seminars, tutorials and workshops are the result of temporal and spatial constraints. They are shaped by the constraints of a system whose formats and structures have evolved in Europe since the Age of Enlightenment and are now sturdy enough to withstand any kind of superficial innovative change. The use of digital instructional formats have made these conditions of time and space malleable, negotiable and contingent. The innovative impulse is not so much to disrupt these formats and replace them with something unfamiliar, which invariably requires learning by students and instructors alike about the technology used by.

Indeed, relying on more established forms, such as lectures, seminars, group exercises and tutorials as well as relying on a globally known LMS (Learning Management System) achieves two separate results. Adopting them with only slight modifications related to their mediatization paid respect to the educational pedigree of these formats within the humanities, by acknowledging their effectiveness. Even more importantly, the reliance on established and familiar formats as far as digital instruction was concerned acknowledged that the project’s course access was defined in regard to educational and development goals, not technological innovation.

Defining multi-level learning goals

A distinguishing feature of design processes for graduate programs in the humanities is uncertainty regarding the definition of learning goals. Whether a student has mastered the subject matter and the corresponding disciplinary methods can be assessed in a straightforward manner, because factual knowledge is testable and research skills can be demonstrated. But successful graduates of a master program are expected to command more general cognitive skills as well, including those relating to problem-solving, self-reflection, critical thinking, practical ethics, communicative range and leadership abilities (Whetten & Clark, 1996). Nor are they limited to cognitive competencies, since they include meta-cognitive skills to realistically gauge the quality of these skills for oneself (Mayer, 1998).

Difficult to define as they are, the importance of these learning goals cannot be overstated. An indication is the shift in terminology used to describe them¹⁰. The sociological figure “academic habit” underscores their intimate, if nebulous connection to higher education (Bourdieu, 2004). The label “soft skills” that continues to be prevalent in the human resources literature points to difficulties in quantifying them, but the connotation of a somehow lesser set of capabilities annoys liberal arts educators (Lee, 2006; Welzer, 2007). Meanwhile, “soft skills” have taken center stage in the arena of higher education policy under the label of “employability” (Andrews & Higson, 2008), which explicitly includes various “literacies” related, for example, to media, digital technologies, and learning strategies (Kalantzis, 2006). In contemporary knowledge societies, they are considered career fundamentals for entrepreneurship (Jaroschinsky & Rózsa, 2015) and managerial responsibilities (Kirchherr et al. 2018).

It is easy to recognize mastery of such skills when they are present, but designing a framework for their acquisition and training remains problematic. Educators responsible for creating suitable programs cannot usually give a unified definition for the learning goals and operative means of their assessment, because curriculum and instructional formats cannot teach the desired skills directly. Rather, they emerge gradually as indirect learning outcomes over the course of an entire program – not as a by-product, but as properties transcending individual learning units. To consider them in the design of an educational format then means to pay special attention to learning processes that transcend individual instructional units (such as lectures or seminars) and include settings like the interaction of the student peer-group and the relationship between instructors and students that impact the respective learning outcomes.

Manuscript Workshop 2016, Picture: Wannenmacher

Including transdisciplinary cognitive skills of employability as formal learning goals makes their mastery contingent on the actual student population, whose characteristics can only be approximated at a time when core decisions about the instructional design have to be made. Depending on motivation, prior education, personal experience and learning strategy, achievements in these skills will in all likelihood follow a bell curve distribution for a given student cohort. Some will stand out, some will struggle, most will demonstrate average achievements. Plausible as this distribution is, there is no formalized assessment, let alone grading of these skills. Instead, the general assumption is that all graduates of an appropriately rigorous degree program at a sufficiently reputable university will have acquired these skills above a minimum threshold. Their perception in some circles as “soft” is attributable to their viscuous nature, which continues to withstand any attempt to capture them in a “hard” sieve of quantitative indicators. The conventional shorthand for such skill-sets refers to someone as “an educated person”, but has fallen apparently out of use for fear of banality.

The IEIW project took this reasoning one step further when it foregrounded competencies of intercultural dialogue among its formal learning goals. Such skills arguably contribute to managerial qualifications in a diverse work environment anywhere, but they are particularly relevant in the polarized settings of the Middle East. Because of their elusive nature, these skills are not usually formally graded past kindergarten age, where categories such as “plays well with others” or “treats others with respect” continue to be part of the feedback roster. In a graduate program for autonomous adults, then, shortcomings in the requisite intercultural skills would not impact a student’s ability to complete the program successfully.

The starting point for an understanding of the IEIW learning design is therefore a consideration of its emphasis on the achievement and practice of these skills. They are so prominently bound up in the program’s instructional setup that a given student would hardly be able to achieve successful subject-related learning outcomes without having developed them. This process starts with faculty being recruited from a diverse international pool of specialists. This intentionally leads to some unexpected encounters that require the development of intercultural competencies in student-teacher interactions. Some male Palestinian students, for example, needed a good while and the investment of some tangible cognitive efforts before they were able to accept that a female Jewish professor could be a leading expert in Islamic law who could impart a substantial amount of knowledge in an area they had felt supremely familiar with. Similarly, instructional formats actively encourage the development of intercultural dialogue among the student cohort. During most course assignments, students collaborate with each other out of necessity. Correctly teasing apart translations from Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, to choose the most common example simultaneously serves to reinforce an appreciation of each other’s differing and the mutually complementary competencies (and concomitant world views) among the students.

The mediated nature of teaching entailed in e-learning turned out to be quite helpful in these processes of adaptation. Online learning reduces the potential for unfiltered irritation emanating from the social presence of such unfamiliar circumstances in the same physical room. The reduced immediacy of the virtual environment not only creates a protected, neutral space for intercultural learning, one which could also be achieved in a suitable physical room. The mediated nature of such encounters create a virtual space between the participants in an online course, a fact that is often argued as reducing the efficacy of digital distance learning. In this case, however, it facilitates learning because the competencies to be acquired benefit from the mediated setting by making the encounter with an unfamiliar or potentially conflictual situation much less threatening and disturbing.

Leveraging diversity and capturing practices

Normalization of academic disciplines and study degrees dates back to the roots of modern educational systems f the industrial revolution. An ever-increasing body of knowledge and the necessity to organize advanced learning for an ever-growing number of students, along with the social broadening of higher education to include more and more societal groups that were formerly excluded have increased the need for homogeneity in a given learner community. These processes are easily observable in school curricula, where graduates are expected to bring a suitably normalized body of knowledge and skills to the next step of their education. It is easy to recognize these mechanisms as a kind of socially constructed shorthand to create sufficient homogeneity in a student body. Yet worries and complaints abound that graduates are not sufficiently equipped for learning strategies as university students. In Germany in particular, the prevailing popular and political myth of the high school graduation (Abitur) as the universal and indispensable formal qualification for entering a program of academic study persists and has recently become even stronger in light of mass immigration to Europe.

The corresponding standard model of education requires an adequately homogenous frame of reference at the beginning of a unit of learning for all learners, so as to make the uniform learning goals achievable within the defined timeframe and the expected degree of effort. While the latter will vary individually from learner to learner, the variance is considered due to the learners’ respective aptitudes and abilities to learn (their learning traits), and their ability to master different learning strategies, including discipline and repetition (their learning skills). The assumption of homogeneity in the student body, then, is a side effect of the much maligned industrial model of higher education.

Notions of diversity challenge this assumption, and the proponents of diversity have emphasized the added benefit for learning communities that comprise different nationalities, cultures and religions with such conviction that it has become a matter of course that a diverse student body is a desirable characteristic of modern universities in the Western mold. Regarding boundaries of culture and religion, we are used to acknowledging both their reality and the possibility of transcending them as false dichotomies. The very presence of these boundaries is also a reminder that changing or ignoring them is much easier said than done.

Alumni Konference 2017, Picture: Wannenmacher

The diversity argument does not, however, extend to a variance in reference knowledge. Because so much intercultural, interreligious and international reflection and learning take place in a diverse group of learners, demanding the requisite degree of cognitive effort, the apparent need for a homogenous frame of reference knowledge among all learners upon entering the learning unit has become even more prominent. While graduates of the unit will have learned individually about diverse perspectives and approaches, ideally integrating this kind of self-reflected communicative attitude into their own identities, we implicitly expect them to have learned more or less the same regarding subject matter and knowledge. Otherwise, they will receive a failing grade – no matter how much intercultural dialogue they have participated in.

Once we have accepted these benefits of diversity in education and learning, a dilemma immediately presents itself: What if the perceived differences, in culture or religion, say, are so deeply engrained and conflictual that they prevent students from collaborating and instead lead them to conflict? Do the basic preconditions for diverse learning groups entail a fundamental readiness to question or at least relativize the very cultural imprints that would require such a discourse? In other words, does the social creation of a space for intercultural dialogue presuppose a basic willingness to engage in such dialogue from all participants? Diversity by itself is not a guarantor of consensus und cooperation – without normative grounding, a diverse space is easily (ab)used to further estrangement and foster conflict based on precisely those differences among participants it is supposed to overcome.

This dilemma affects not only the formalized aspects of such a venture. In a conventional on-site program, students collaborate and cohabitate on campus. Faculty share office space and jointly attend departmental events. The collective memory of a department or a school accrues informal learning in its collective memory. Novices can ask or simply emulate the seasoned hands and minds to find out what the rules are, what is considered proper and acceptable, where the boundaries and pitfalls are. In the case of an online master program such as the IEIW, the timeframe of the program severely curtails similar processes of peer-learning. Informal practices of students and staff only become social habits based on an actual contiguity of multiple cohorts. If there is no overlap in academic years, the wheel keeps being invented time and time again. Due to the 12-month duration of the program, there was little to no overlap between student cohorts. Faculty was similarly affected, because hardly any instructors were able to commit to teaching two years in a row, so that for every new incoming cohort arriving in the fall, likewise a new slate of lecturers began teaching in the program for the first time.

The program’s institutional memory rests with its sole continuous unit, the project team at its core. It became apparent even before the pilot iteration of the academic cycle was completed that a formalization of usually informal educational support practices was necessary for the faculty, especially regarding the digitally supported and mediated formats unfamiliar to many of them. It became equally clear that similar strategies were needed to make the collective lessons and experiences of previous years available to incoming students.

A conscious decision was therefore made to devote project team resources to scaffolding for the learning process. These activities existed in a gray zone, not amounting to actual teaching, but clearly exceeding the tasks of mere administration. At the beginning of each academic cycle, an explicit phase of on-boarding was implemented to allow students to familiarize themselves with the academic “rules of the game” expected of them, and to allow for reflection and mediation on the intercultural frictions to be expected within the student cohort. A handbook for best practices of digital teaching was created for faculty. Continuous tutoring by professional academics in geographic proximity played an important additional role, especially during the distance phases of instruction, so as to effectively address both questions regarding subject matters as well as the skill-set of digital literacies necessary to successfully navigate the online classroom.

Expected value and recruiting

The properties of the IEIW Master Degree interdisciplinary subject matter, the implications of its cross-cultural methodology and the international academic community presupposed that a sufficient number of individual students would be both interested and qualified to apply for program participation each year. The academic program thus inherited a performative challenge, in the sense that ideal applicants for successful participation in the program would possess at the outset a key skill expected of its alumni, namely a strong desire to continuously improve their volition and aptitude for intercultural dialogue.

It became clear in the course of the program that some expectations about the target audience had to be substantially corrected. The majority of applicants and participants, mainly on the Palestinian/Arab side, were not so much recent undergraduates looking to continue their academic education, but more likely to be professionals with substantial employment experience, including management positions. The average age of participants has proven to be significantly higher than originally envisioned, between 33 and 35 years old. The majority of program alumni are employed in positions that do not formally require a master’s degree as qualification.

The age differences and divergent professional backgrounds are an unintended additional dimension of diversity in the student cohort. From the perspective of faculty, the varied composition of each cohort poses substantive challenges for the development of course syllabi and teaching styles that have little to do with the intercultural aspects of the program but require additional effort to be properly addressed. On the other hand, the unexpected additional degree of diversity is an immense resource as it brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to course assignments and student discussions. During the course of the program, it has positively impacted the alumni network as well, which, though small in absolute numbers, boasts multifarious institutional connections that aid job-seeking students just as much as PhD applicants.

In terms of the formal indicators of the project grant, this result seems to suggest that criteria for professional training and career qualifications were insufficiently met. From a perspective of conventional project management, a lack of sufficiently qualified applicants from the intended target cohort of junior academics and young professionals in their late twenties, mostly the participants from countries in the “Western” hemisphere, can be interpreted either as a sign of insufficient marketing and ineffective communication or, more fundamentally, as a deficit in market research when ascertaining the actual interest in the program and its subject matter. With the pilot nature of the project in mind, however, it is easily discernible that the initial iterations of the program constituted what would commonly be referred to as market research and that it had furthermore projected an assumption of career trajectories in Germany and Western Europe onto the target region.

Both labor market conditions and educational traditions in Germany lead a majority of students who commence a master degree program to do so consecutively, that is, immediately or soon after completing their bachelor’s degree. Even if they gather practical employment experience in the interval, it is often not yet in pursuit of a steady career goal, but to “test the waters” of one or several fields of potential interest. Within these educational systems, such a decision is reasonable from their point of view, because the post-Bologna bachelor’s degree is not (yet) associated with the same amount of academic and cultural capital as its historic predecessors, the Magister Artium or Diplom, especially when it comes to ambitious high-potentials.

Corresponding with this mindset is the prevalent practice for employers to specify a master’s degree as the formal requirement for corresponding positions with lower and middle management occupations. In a labor market where the first academic degree is awarded to such a high percentage of high school graduates so as to be no longer a sufficiently clear indicator of the necessary skills, the master’s degree is an efficient threshold to more easily identify qualified candidates.

Präsentation Studiengang Dt-fr Zentrum Ramallah 2015, picture: IEIW

The international compatibility of degrees, one of the main goals of the Bologna reforms, creates this interchangeability as intended, but the result remains somewhat ambiguous. Easily obscured are the underlying cultural patterns of education and employment that form the cultural context of these degrees and define their meanings, which can be highly context specific. In much of the Anglo-Saxon world, for example, the relationship between a bachelor and a master degree education is quite different in the sense that an undergraduate education is considered less of an academic or disciplinary specialization (Ausbildung) and places a stronger emphasis on acquiring a well-rounded personality (Bildung).

In many parts of the Southern hemisphere, where the opportunities for access to higher education (and the corresponding advanced positions in the labor market) are much more circumscribed than in Western Europe, a much lower percentage of a given cohort receives an undergraduate degree, so it follows that the degree’s social valuation tends to be proportionally higher.

Given the precarious employment options of fragile contexts, it is first of all plausible to leverage an undergraduate degree initially into the pursuit of a career path. It is equally plausible that secondary academic degrees – with the possible exception of MBAs – will be pursued primarily by students interested in academic careers or professional academic fields such as medicine or engineering. This in turn leads to the observation that a number of even advanced employment positions with substantial managerial tasks do not specify a formal master’s degree as a necessary qualification, especially in a context of fragility where individual experience, cultural familiarity or traditional bonds of community and family may significantly outweigh disciplinary education.

Turning back to the perspective of prospective students, their view of the IEIW program offering appears quite different from what its founders and funders had originally intended. The added benefit of a second academic degree is a worthwhile investment from the targeted student’s point of view only when sufficiently steady employment has allowed for an accumulation of professional experience, enabling an individual to feel secure enough in the probability of regaining a position later. This tension played an important role in developing suitable strategies for the program’s marketing and recruiting.

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Notes

10. In a German context, of course, the distinction between utilitarian skills and competencies of self-reflection are conventionally captured in the dichotomy of „Ausbildung” and „Bildung” rooted in the educational philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt in the early 19th century (cf. Jamme & Schröder, 2011).

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References

• Andrews, J., & Higson, H. (2008). Graduate Employability, ‘Soft Skills’ versus ‘Hard’ Business Knowledge: A European Study. Higher Education in Europe, 33(4), 411–422. http://doi.org/10.1080/03797720802522627
• Bourdieu, P. (2004). From the King‘s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field. Constellations, 11(1), 16–36. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1351-0487.2004.00359.x
• Jahnke, I. (2015). Digital Didactical Designs. London: Routledge.
• Jahnke, I., Norqvist, L., & Olsson, A. (2014). Digital Didactical Designs of Learning Expeditions (LNCS 8719, pp. 165–178). Presented at the EC-TEL, Cham: Springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11200-8_13
• Jamme, C., & von Schröder, A. (2011). Einsamkeit und Freiheit. München: Fink.
• Jaroschinsky, A., & Rózsa, J. (2015). Kompetenzorientierte Didaktik der Entrepreneurship Education. Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung, 10(3), 113–127. http://doi.org/10.3217/zfhe-10-03/07
• Kalantzis, M. (2006). Changing Subjectivities, New Learning. Pedagogies, 1(1), 7–12. http://doi.org/10.1207/s15544818ped0101_2
• Kirchherr, J. (2018). Future Skills: Welche Kompetenzen in Deutschland fehlen. Berlin: Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft.
• Lee, D.E. (2006). Academic Freedom, Critical Thinking and Teaching Ethics. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 5(2), 199–208. http://doi.org/10.1177/1474022206064037
• Mayer, R.E. (1998). Cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational aspects of problem solving. Instructional Science, 26(1-2), 49–63. http://doi.org/10.1023/A:1003088013286
• Welzer, H. (2007, January 25). Schluss mit nutzlos. Die Zeit, Hamburg.
• Whetten, D. A., & Clark, S. C. (1996). An integrated model for teaching management skills. Journal of Management Education, 20(2), 152–181. http://doi.org/10.1177/105256299602000202

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Chapters

1. Higher education and development in fragile contexts
2. Shaping a higher education intervention
3. Supporting individual learning outcomes
4. Cycling and re-cycling hypotheses
5. Balancing stakeholder relationships
6. Mapping learning paths
7. Translating and buffering workstreams
8. Negotiating innovation and compliance

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