Flexible Learning Support in an Inflexible Society

In this paper the author describes an approach to improving staff-student communications in order to better support full-time students in Higher Education. The paper proposes that a suitable method to support modern learners might be to adopt a blended approach to post lecture support using technology to promote staff student interaction on an individual basis. To this end a qualitative trial was conducted to test the concept. The trial had three main practical objectives, 1) to investigate document sharing tools for use in Higher Education, 2) to use such tools to enable an individual and accountable dialogue with students and 3) to examine whether improving dialog was seen as a positive improvement to quality in teaching. The results of the work indicate that the relationship with students is improved when communication is individually focused and that students can better manage their academic workload, but at the same time raises issues around staff workload and practices.