Brian McDonough

Course Leader BA Sociology, Solent University, United Kingdom

Interviewed August 2020 by Mac McGinn

MM Brian, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about what you do?

BM I’m course lead of sociology at Solent University in the UK. It’s a sociology BA course and I lead a number of modules, such as the social inequalities module, sociological imagination, and research in the social world. I’m also an active researcher. I’ve published two books this year, one called Universal Basic Income, which was a co-authored text published by Routledge, and another sociology and research methods text called Flying Aeroplanes and Other Sociological Tales, also published by Routledge.

MM I’d like to understand a little bit more about your research on the differences between online versus face-to-face communication.

BM Actually, this distinction between online versus face-to-face was a key feature of my doctoral research, and it was based around my interviews with a number of experts in various fields—from schoolteachers to doctors to bankers to aeroplane pilots. There was a key theme that emerged from my qualitative data, and the key theme was that some people just hated talking via a screen and some people absolutely loved it. It was really quite difficult writing my thesis to try and work out what “online”’ or, as I call it, “mediating technology” was about. Why do some people absolutely love mediating technology and why do some people absolutely hate it?

At the time I was reading a book called A History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the phenomenologist. And Heidegger actually gave me the answer. It was a short section in Heidegger’s book, where he talked about the Weidenhäuser Bridge, which was down the road from Marburg University. Heidegger said, there’s two ways of understanding the bridge. You can go down to the bridge, in which the bridge is bodily present, or you can go down to the local shop and you can get a picture postcard of the bridge, and the bridge is represented via a representation—he said that there was a layered structure to picturing things.

Now, obviously, in Heidegger’s time, there was no Internet and there was no online distance learning, but there were representations of things. There were picture postcards. You could go on holiday to Paris, and you could send picture postcards of yourself. Okay, they’d take a few weeks to arrive. But some people would say this is the same thing. Seeing the picture of the Eiffel Tower in Paris is the same as me going to Paris. Why do I need to go to the Eiffel Tower?

That same idea was coming through with my research participants. The doctor was saying, look, I don’t need to see my patients to know what’s wrong with them. I can just do a video call. But then there were other people in the banking sector saying, look, I need to go to the other side of the world to shake hands with someone. That’s how important bodily presence is.

This is a really interesting discussion. And that question that you asked I think is a really important question. What is better out of online and face-to-face or bodily presence? I use the term, following Heidegger. I think that these two things are completely different. Heidegger said they were ontologically different, and we might experience things ontically. So, the ontic is what you like and what you don’t like. That’s one aspect. Some people like it, and some people don’t like it. But Heidegger’s point was that these things are ontologically different. They’re completely different in terms of human existence and in terms of human experience. They’re very, very different.

I think that’s quite key. Because there’s a lot of researchers out there who are saying there’s no difference between being face-to-face and being online. And, of course, if you follow that small section in The History of Concept of Time, which I did, you can pursue the argument that there is a difference. It’s a very clear difference and it’s an ontological difference.

MM You mentioned that you’re also a teaching and learning champion. Could you explain a little bit more about that and about overcoming different problems and barriers for online learning?

BM I’m a senior fellow in a higher education academy, and to achieve that I had to demonstrate various forms of teaching. One form was using distance learning, and also using a blended learning approach. Obviously, right now, during COVID, it’s not so much blended, it’s more online. That’s really been a key part of my teaching strategy for some years, engaging students with online materials. But some people prefer a hard copy set of notes. Some people just like you to e-mail it via online. I used to do both. I used to actually produce hard copy reading materials and give them out to all of my students at the beginning of term. And I also used to send them out to them via e-mail, so they had them both ways.

I’m aware that, again ontically, some people just prefer to physically have a book. With the Kindle and book technologies where you can buy a book online, people expected to see books disappear overnight, but they haven’t. One of the reasons they haven’t is because people like to sit on trains and sit on buses and actually physically hold a book. I think that’s quite key to understanding what people actually want, and how people perceive the difference between online learning and learning in more physical spaces.

You get some students who physically turn up, but they just don’t want to switch on their screens. And then you get the opposite. You get students who are happy to switch on, but they don’t want to physically turn up. These are preferences, and beneath that preference there is something very human about being face-to-face with people and having a special kind of relationship with them.

I think that it’s superlative, being face-to-face. That, again, ontologically speaking, it’s superlative and the online stuff is deficient. Why is it deficient? It’s deficient because it lacks bodily presence. So again, I’m talking about deficiency in an ontological sense. It’s not deficient in the sense that some people actually prefer online tutorials, while other people prefer face-to-face tutorials. It’s understanding those dynamics, I think that is really important to delivering high-quality teaching and learning.

MM What types of opportunities do you think are created through online learning?

BM I think the switch to online has actually benefited lots of people in lots of different ways. My 25-minute drive, which can sometimes be 45 minutes in bad traffic, was instantly just done away with. Turning up late at my parking lot and finding that there were no spaces available. Turning up, forgetting my office card to get into my office and having to go and speak to Estates to let me in. That’s a problem I can forget. A lot of problems that were resolved. I’ve also got a one-year-old baby boy, Huxley. So, looking after Huxley is obviously really important, and obviously having more space to actually work from home is a huge advantage.

But obviously there’s disadvantages too. Mental health is a big issue right across the globe. People have just been locked in the house, 24/7, not doing their usual thing. Sometimes when you just walk to the shops, you meet people along the way, and that can make a huge difference to your mental health. I think it surprised me actually. Because when COVID first happened, I thought, oh, this is great. We all sit home. When I say, “great,” I obviously do not mean in terms of the deadly disease, but in terms of affecting how you work, and your teaching and learning. I thought, well, this is all right. Loads of advantages here. But quickly I realized that I wanted to go back to how things were before. People will have different preferences to this, and it will depend on their circumstances, but I think there are lots of opportunities.

I would say before, I was using probably about ten per cent of the IT tools on our online—we call it SOL at Solent University—Solent Online Learning platform. I was probably using about ten per cent of SOL last year, and now I’m probably using about 85 per cent of SOL. I’m using far more online games, online checklists, and online tabs for opening up videos and readings. I’m using a lot more and it made me question why wasn’t I using this before? Why wasn’t I doing this just six months ago? It has opened up opportunities.

MM Is there a favourite resource, tool, or software that you have discovered recently that’s helping with online learning and teaching your students?

BM There’s one called VideoScribe, which is really just very basic. You can download the app and you can write, and basically it plays music. It’s a bit like an intro. It can be used as an intro to a module or course. Or it can be an intro to an assessment or a set of ideas. And I think it’s really good because it’s focused on words. Students will read what it says, but the music also is really engaging, and it also brings some excitement to the course when you see a video that’s got music and it’s makes it sound exciting. So, VideoScribe is something I’ve used recently, which I think is really useful. I’m using things a lot more like YouTube and some of the most common platforms that maybe I didn’t use a great deal before.

We’ve also got some lecture apps. Panopto is one. My university is well adapted to the use of it. So as soon as I upload the video, Panopto recognizes who I am. And it’s quite easy to use. Those are just some of the technologies that I’ve been using—some of them for the first time.

What’s really interesting is that I teach a module called Research in the Social World, and my students are doing some research for a real research organization. But the research organizations, because of COVID, are actually doing online interviews. My modules are all set up for teaching how to do online interviews, and I’m also teaching online. So, you’ve got this really interesting experience from the students’ perspective where they’re getting real-life work experience working for an organization, and they’re doing that in a pandemic. They’re using the software that the organization is using and they’re carrying out some research interviews for that organization. Absolutely, it’s a learning curve, but not just for me, for the students and the other organizations as well.

MM What do you think higher education will look like in the future, for example, in ten years or so?

BM That’s a really interesting question because, as someone who has carried out research on technology, some writers and authors have noted that people believe that when you create a new bit of technology that it’s going to change the world. And like when we were talking about the Kindle, people said books would be dead, but they aren’t.

When the computer was introduced, people were talking about having a paperless office. Everything’s going to be online. But the questions you’re asking me are on a piece of paper, right? So, this idea of the paperless office just never happened. Some people make predictions now and say in ten years’ time, higher education is all going to be online. We have a university in the UK, the Open University, which is very famous for doing online courses. And people say, oh, but we’re all going to be like the Open University. Everything’s going to be online. But actually, I don’t think that’s the case.

There needs to be more to make sure it’s a shift and social change in society, there need to be other factors. COVID is a big factor. It’s played an enormous role in changing what people do, and I do think that, because of the pandemic, higher education has changed. That’s not because of the technology. That’s largely because there’s been this huge social shift, where working from home has become more culturally acceptable. Learning from home has become more culturally acceptable.

I do think in ten years’ time things will be different, different to what they were six months ago. But is technology going to keep changing things? Not on its own. Technology doesn’t work like that. There need to be other factors, human factors that work too.

Reflection

The discussion about online teaching and learning draws on a number of theoretical concepts from the philosophy of Heidegger. In this interview I, a sociologist at Solent University (United Kingdom), draw on The History of Concept of Time (1992). I developed these Heideggerian concepts in my doctoral thesis and I described my use of them in this interview. Heidegger himself draws on his own teaching at Marburg University in Germany. Down the road is a river and the Weidenhäuser Bridge. The bridge can be viewed from the picture postcard, bought from the local souvenir store. Or the bridge can be perceived by placing oneself before the bridge, in which it is bodily present. Heidegger says that the bridge, perceived via the picture postcard, has a layered structure because there are such layers in picture things.

I draw on these ideas in my research on mediating technologies, and in this interview I stated that teaching online has a layered structure to it. When we see students, we see them via a screen, not with their bodily presence. Heidegger says that bodily presence is superlative in an ontological sense. Online teaching is ontologically deficient because it is deficient of bodily presence. It’s simply “not the same” to teach students online as it is to teach them face-to-face. Of course, some people prefer the superlative mode of teaching and others prefer the deficient mode. This is an ontological distinction, and we should not confuse this with what we prefer or like, in the purely ontic sense.

The pandemic has brought these ideas to light because it has changed the ways in which teaching and learning are delivered in higher education. There is so much debate over what is better or worse (online or face-to-face) and we can cut through these debates by using Heidegger’s philosophy to examine how these distinctions can be better understood. One mistake is that computer designers (ICT experts) are often trying to make online teaching “just like” face-to-face teaching. But drawing on Heidegger, this is impossible. Because these are different modes (ways) of being with our students—they are distinctly, qualitatively, different. The “close” between online learning and face-to-face learning cannot be rescued because it is incorrect to think of these as being on one continuum. They are ontologically different—it is as simple as that.

About

Brian McDonough is the course leader of the sociology BA at Solent University, United Kingdom. He leads a number of modules, including social inequalities, the sociological imagination, and researching the social world. Brian has published work on expertise and the use of technology at work, including an article and book on flying aeroplanes and using autopilot technology, as well as a book on universal basic income. In the UK, Brian is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy, having supported his course team in the use of new learning and teaching methods and technologies, and he is also a member of the British Sociological Association.