The bells are tolling for the demise of the university classroom – at least its physical manifestation. Administrative barbarians are readying their knives and brandishing their drivel-fed visions about pedagogy, a word they scant define, let alone spell. They find it unseemly that an academic could turn up, in person, to teach students who, likewise, turn up in person, to engage in that rich process known as the acquiring of knowledge.
The acuity of this state of affairs has been notable in Australia. This month, the University of Adelaide gassed unsuspecting believers of such traditional forms of learning with a lethal statement. As of 2026, when a new amalgamated behemoth in South Australia, combining the University of Adelaide and University of South Australia, will emerge, students will no longer be turning up, in person, to classes. This would have hardly shocked those familiar with the University of Adelaide’s effort to do the very same thing in 2015. For years, the university managers have hated the physical classroom.
As is always the case with these pronouncements, a fictional body of evidence, opinion and sentiment is referred to by way of justification. “Universities,” claimed a spokesman for Adelaide University, “have been increasingly responding to student needs for a flexible delivery over the years, and the shift away from face-to-face lectures is not new.” Who are these remarkable, absentee students? What, pray, is the sample size? Answer: there was none.
Then comes the elaborate ground cover masking the undemocratic nature of the decision. The domain lead for curriculum (such positions multiply like fungi) at Adelaide University, Joanne Cys, seemed under the impression that staff had been “comprehensively engaged” in developing the new curriculum. “This collaboration is ongoing … with more than 1,500 staff set to develop the content for Adelaide’s University courses and programs between now and 2026.” Content, in these settings, is a very loose concept, not to mention staff qualifications.
The culling of lectures is part of the “Adelaide Attainment Model,” a slimming program that will see trimesters introduced by 2028. It satisfies a “modular” fetish – the world of learning envisaged as starved catwalk models moving across the stage rather than well fed samples of learning buried in books. As such, these modules can be undertaken in the form of online courses, which offer fleeting flexibility and shallow taste. This is education thinned and skinned, fatless and deprived.
To give a sense of this, the Adelaide document is full of anaemic terms. “These activities will deliver an equivalent learning volume to traditional lectures and will form a common baseline for digital learning across courses, providing a consistent experience for students.” The claims to consistency are certainly accurate, in so far as such an experience will be numbingly mediocre.
The document expresses the view that such “asynchronous activities will be self-paced and self-directed, utilising high-quality digital resources that students can engage with anytime and anywhere.”
Within the temple of desecration, certain devotees are expressing concern. “The best assurance we have is there can still be practicals, tutorials or workshops, yet we cannot really teach content in these,” suggested one lecturer to In Daily. Activities might involve quizzes, readings and “short videos” as substitutes for lectures. “This mode of teaching is almost impossible for STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], health and medicine degrees.”
Every haughty contrarian will find a cowardly sycophant justifying such decay as the heralding of progress. “We sort of already do what is suggested anyway,” claims one unnamed apologist academic, also quoted by In Daily. Students already see “recordings” to begin with, and only then do they go into “face-to-face sessions that are more interactive”. It might be worth asking the obvious point here: why have the recordings in the first place to excuse your reason to teach?
This unnamed individual adopts a very casual attitude towards the modern mutilations of education. “The silly thing about it all is that’s what we do anyway, and the reality is students often don’t watch the recording before coming to the class winds up a bit like being a lecture anyway to make sure they get through the material.” These are comments that remind any reformer that the last bastion of change will always be the academy.
The move towards abolishing such teaching also suggests that the rotting foundations were already offering much for this change. Funded, slothful ignoramuses were already advancing the idea for some years that the classroom be “flipped”, a convenient way which ignores the rigours of instruction and disciplined learning in favour of convenient schedules best done at home. The flipped classroom became the precursor for extinguishing coherent, disciplined learning, linked to space, people and experiences.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided an accelerant for money–pinching administrative juntas to experiment with eliminating student-teacher classes without providing the experience that supposedly accompanies it. Savings were there to be made, student welfare to be manipulated. Here was a chance to extract the pith from the student orchard without providing an ounce of nourishment. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is merely the next step in retiring, forever, the human in the classroom, a process that, disturbingly enough, will seek to retire the student as well.
In a stingingly sharp piece, scientist Geoff Davies describes the ball wreckers of university teaching as “managerial digital infidels” who treat education as a matter of harvesting knowledge, a body comprising “a big collection of pieces, factoids that can be served in small bowls for the student to consume.” A bleak, apocalyptic interpretation is offered. “Thus, the neoliberal mindset of isolated, asocial individuals competing through a series of fragmented transactions is carried down to its ultimate subversion of the very knowledge on which our culture and civilisation are built.”
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it went from exam selected human minds in the class, to as many bums on seats as can fit, to screens somewhere.Who gives a rat’s arse as long as the cash rolls in.
When I was at university, I knew a woman in my class who claimed that she didn’t go to her accounting lectures or others because she could learn it by herself. Surprise, surprise, her GPA fell. She would say in the classes she shared with me, “I just didn’t feel like going to the lecture today,” and then pick other people’s brains.
One thing that needs to be asked is this. Some courses require that you have an attendance rating, and students receiving Austudy or Youth Allowance need to demonstrate this to receive payments. Unless they say, “Okay, you logged in to this lecture or that,” how will they know?
What?????? a travesty!!@!! How will nurses and doctors be educated with this model or anyone else for that matter. What about the exchange of ideas. Education is seen by the elite university managers as $$$$$ for them. Maybe there needs to be a total student boycott from 2026. No way would I pay my hard earned money to do self directed learning. I have seen the outcome of this approach with nursing students. Management should be sacked. Why should the federal government provide HELP/ HECS funding to the university with no lecturers. Students will end up with huge debt and substandard education. University greed has no shame.
Cool Pete, I wouldn’t have attended the accounting lectures either. They were about as exciting as getting caught in a dust storm.
Universities have become businesses aimed at profit just like any other. They are destroying the value of their education and degrees, while at the same time removing the social component of learning. One of the best parts of university was engaging with new friends, sharing experiences, and as a result getting real face-to-face and friendly help when I couldn’t understand something. Universities are now populated and run by far too many overpaid MBA’s (Masters of Bugger All).
I commenced my career from the bottom up. Firstly as an apprentice, leaping and bounding, because of my constant quest for info. Learning on the job had the benefits of witnessing best practice as determined by the mandatory application of the endlessly developing industry standards and best practice, all driven by reputation and the profit motive.
Several times over the years I ventured into tertiary education, on occasion delighted by association with inspiring types teaching as required, but also pushing at the boundaries to provoke forward thinking, only to then to be disappointed by time wasting crusty old teachers who dwelt in dated standards and olde worlde concepts. Challenging the bureaucracy as a part-time student was draining, and met with weasel words hiding warnings that I might upset the status quo and their business model.
So, I continued my acquisition of skill and knowledge on the job, and through the hard competitive metres as an independent making my way. Working in collaboration with industry experts, with ears wide open, brought its rewards. Until, around the end of the end of the cold war and onset of neoliberalism, and the new mandated necessity of ‘being on their programme’.
I experienced my skill and reputation being acquired on an ‘independent advice’ basis, only soon to be facing pressures to cover the arses of deficient and sometimes corrupt practices. For me, of course, evidence based truth was essential to my ethos. But to them, it appeared increasingly important to ‘be on the programme’, regardless of any long-term consequences, and that I was a mere convenience that could be disappeared at whim.
After neo-labourism, cringing dickheads took to government, neoliberism’s privatizations skyrocketed, the mad-dogs of private capital came to town, hiding behind a conga-line of feckless HR types from Britain, and dragging in the likes of Chainsaw Al Dunlap to do us over whilst they siphoned their profits out of the soul of Oz.
industry and service was stunned and stuffed. Tall poppy syndrome was blown into the stratosphere, we had never seen the likes of this sinister and dark superior Rum Corps before, and most were convinced they had to ‘be on the programme’ of mindless aspiration. So, now that my services were seen as irrelevant, I decided to take time out to to study, this time a masters degree.
Wow! What a shock! By the wiles of neoliberalism, everything has been commodified to its max. The university was on ‘the programme’ at hypersonic speed. In fact it could have been seen as being the new Oz seat of ‘the programme”. The ivory tower was like a siege, the coursework was significantly dumbed down, the bean counters were rife, the teaching staff stressed, losing tenure and press-ganged into international travels to sell attractions to budding professorial types and to bring hordes of student hopefuls to the Oz mill.
It’s been fast to do deals with the merchants of the international death cult, and now it’s the race at AI, regardless of all the traps extant. OMG, WTF. All whilst, but for a few govt sponsored programmes, egalitarianim struggles towards doom. It’s a complete mess, and everything below the maddened ivory tower and management, especially the teachers and learners have been made losers.