Campus - On-line: A Hybrid Model for PhD Studies ICT-pedagogy combining face-to-face seminars and web seminars

Abstract

The project idea is grounded in experiences from a project sponsored by Distum, Distance models for national PhD courses in Comparative Literature. We created a hybrid course design combining on-line seminars and boarding-house seminars and tested it with very good results by a pilot course for doctorate candidates from eight universities in Sweden. We now find it urgent to implement a hybridity model also in the regular PhD education on campus. It is evident that on-line seminars have intrinsic values that in some respects make them superior to face-to-face seminars: increased activity of the participants, more individual feedback, documentation of all discussions. The hybrid form unites the advantages of on-line seminars with those of ordinary campus seminars (spontaneity and warmth of the direct contact, body language, training of rhetoric competence). Moreover, by the integration of the web and other forms of ICT in PhD education on campus the doctorate candidates will get used to new facilities for research and presentation, a benefit in their future carriers as academic teachers. The integration of internet and campus seminars is to be implemented by a course for doctorate candidates in literature, belonging to the Departments of Comparative Literature, Languages and Theology at Lund University, all having the same basic need for theoretical knowledge and methodological training. Thus the Department of Comparative Literature will be a service centre for all doctorate candidates in literature at the university. This departmental co-operation together with the hybridity model of learning gives every prospect of a new departure for PhD learning in the field of literature. Our basic model should have good chances to be adopted by our colleagues at the different universities in Scandinavia, giving doctorate courses in literary theory and method. We have the ambition of practising our concept in order to export it.