Overview
Dr Robbie Shilliam is the Director of Post Graduate Taught Studies within the School of Politics and International Relations at QMUL. He is also the co-convener of the British International Studies Association’s Colonial/Postcolonial/Decolonial working group and a member of the International Advisory Board of theTransnational Decolonial Institute.
He shared his experience of their new initiative in Distance Learning. They started their DL course in International Relations in 2015, at present they have 12 students but they hope that the numbers will double by next year. In his talk he highlights what needs to be done to launch and run a successful distance learning programme here at QMUL.
His research programme consists of -
Investigating “Atlantic modernity”: - to retrieve the archives and traditions of thought of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas in order to re-assess the various European canons of thought that have predominantly framed understandings of enlightenment, modernity and capitalist development.
Mapping global interconnections between (post-)colonised subjects: - exploring ways to theorise the global relationships between differentially situated (post) colonised subjects. I seek to map out the way in which these relations have inspired and engendered critiques of a colonially inflected global modernity.
Decolonising International Relations (IR) Theory: - with focus upon suffering, surviving and resisting a (neo-)colonial world order. Exploring the extent to which IR theory needs to be decolonised in terms of its accepted canon, broad assumptions, and central concepts.
Initial experience
There had been a significant growth in Post Graduate students in the past decade but the growth has flattened in the last few years. Robbie had to consider Distance Learning because of the declining domestic market and increasingly saturated international market. He hope that pluralising the modes of delivery will increase their student numbers rather than just increasing the number of Post Graduate courses. His International Relation course is both campus based and DL, the DL mirrors the campus based course. He also plan to start the DL version of their International Public Policy course that will be the second Distance Learning course.
He found that most of their Distacnce Learning students are from the UK and out of them majority of them are from London, thus they plan to promote their Distance Learning courses among London students. They also plan to start a hybrid programme in collaboration with the University of London in Paris. QMplus will be the main platform to deliver their DL courses, however they feel that QMplus is not very intuitive and it is overloaded with information.
Goals and suggestions
Their goals are to -
- make their QMplus courses more user friendly for DL students
- provide more lecture videos as DL students ask for it
- get a dedicated Distance Learning tutor as current tutors cannot dedicate sufficient time
- change the perception of DL not being the real Teaching and Learning experience
Other suggestions -
- Have a proper marketting strategy
- Initial investment of time and money
- Admission process should begin early