The digital divide amongst academic staff

Charles Knight


UK Higher Education is spending a lot of time thinking about the ‘digital divide’ and the impact on progressing and new students. Most UK universities are settling around blended delivery and are carefully planning for that mode of delivery.

In my home set-up, I have two large desks (see below) both with desktop PCs so myself and my wife Andrea can both work. The *slowest* machine in the house is a laptop with a brand new 10th Generation i7 processor and 16GB of ram. Each machine is equipped with a HD webcam and professional headset. The smallest screen in the office is 25″ and I use a 34″ ultra-wide. Oh and my broadband connection is gigabit (well 910mps).

I do not mention this to brag but to acknowledge that I exist in a bubble. As a manager, rather than an educator, I need to think very carefully about how this influences both my own practice but also any policy discussions I am party to. Higher Education managers tend to be older, wealthier, more settled and therefore be able to mitigate issues at home.

The physical campus environment, regardless of my own home set-up, was shared by other staff. Therefore the limitations and opportunities were shared, regardless of our individual ability we felt the same frustrations. If I taught in a lecture space with a dodgy projector, it was a problem for all of us. This provided a level of collective understanding when the photocopy was yet again jammed.

We are in a period where gaps have opened up between staff because of the individualised nature of producing content from home (I am discussing the technical and avoiding problems such as the gendered research gap that is opening up or the nature of caring responsibilities). The challenge for managers is to think about the tension between creating a high quality experience for students and the technical limitations faced by staff.

It would be easy to think this could be solved by providing kit. However kit is no good without training and also a systematic pedagogical framework to operate within. Therefore as a minimum (remember I’m only looking at the technical) you need:

  1. Kit (a machine capable of what you need to do)
  2. Infrastructure (a connection fast enough to benefit from 1)
  3. Training (an idea of what to do with 1 and 2)
  4. Time (Space to work out what to do in the context of 1, 2 and 3).

Universities have control over 1, 3 and 4 but for many academics, 2 is likely to be a bottleneck and a difficult one to solve. Some Universities are looking to solve this by providing 4G hotspots to staff or other means. However it will be a problem come September for staff who never settled in geographical locations based on an assumption that they could deliver online….

The other part of the digital divide we need to consider is in recruitment. All employment interviews are being conducted online and we have to take care not to confuse the production quality with the professional quality. In *theory*, we should treat all candidates the same but how do we mitigate for the fact that one candidate is streaming in HD with high quality audio while another keeps cutting out and sounds like a dalek due to the low quality of their equipment and their broadband connection.

It should not influence our decisions but I think it will and we need to think systematically how we avoid this as a sector. Answers on how we deal with this gratefully received.


Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash. This was originally published on Charles Knight’s blog.

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