A long time ago and in a galaxy far away, my first degree was in electrical engineering.
This was over fifty years ago, at a time when many people believe that technology-based
learning had not been invented. This of course, is not true and is a consequence of amnesia
in the education technology community (Rushby, 1983; Romiszowski & Rushby, 2015).
However, it was not until the 1970s that viable systems to manage the learning process
became available. By the late 1970s, Plato (developed by the University of Illinois) was
supporting several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly
a dozen different networked mainframe computers (Smith & Sherwood, 1976). So, my
undergraduate course was wholly class-room (and laboratory) based. To be honest, the
quality of the teaching was not good: I recall one lecturer who spent each lecture copying
the course textbook onto the chalkboard with chalk in one hand and an eraser in the other
to make space for the next paragraph , while another talked in an impenetrable accent
that none of us could decipher. Of the 100 students who started the course, only 60 made
it to the second year and fewer than 30 sat the final examinations . On average , each
year two students on this undergraduate course attempted suicide.
This was one of the factors that started my interest in ways of improving the quality
of university teaching.