{"id":4948,"date":"2015-07-09T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2015-07-09T15:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/?p=4948"},"modified":"2015-07-03T10:08:48","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T16:08:48","slug":"worth-a-read-as-learning-moves-online-trigger-warnings-must-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/2015\/07\/09\/worth-a-read-as-learning-moves-online-trigger-warnings-must-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Worth a Read: As learning moves online, trigger warnings must too"},"content":{"rendered":"Approximate Reading Time: <\/span> 4<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

As learning moves online, trigger warnings must too<\/h1>\n

\"As<\/a>Dana Ruggiero<\/a>, Bath Spa University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em>
\n Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was a first-year student at university, our class of 300 students watched Jodie Foster get gang raped in the film The Accused<\/a>. Our professor, an experienced teacher, told us before the movie that: \u201canyone not comfortable with scenes of violence against women could leave and complete an alternate assignment\u201d. Nobody left.<\/p>\n

Now, 15 years later I am a senior lecturer in a university and we are still having debates about these kind of trigger warnings that lecturers give their students before reading or watching graphic material. Since then, the pace of higher education has not changed but the way that we impart information has; from online learning to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and \u201cgamification\u201d \u2013 where students play a game as they learn, we are living in a world where as Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan put it<\/a> \u201cthe medium is the message\u201d.<\/p>\n

The nature of university study is changing, with one in four students<\/a> in the US taking at least one online class during 2012, and numbers climbing. Traditional undergraduate university students in lecture halls are now just one part of a market that includes working adults and others drawn in by the flexibility of online learning. However, with this flexibility comes ambiguity, and the lack of face-to-face communication can increase misconceptions about the purpose of covering graphic or explicit material.<\/p>\n

The grassroots movement of students asking for trigger warnings started as a<\/a> simple request from a literature major at the University of California, Santa Barbara: give students a heads-up before covering graphic material that could cause flashbacks of trauma. Like wildfire, the trigger warning issue has caught public attention around the world setting off debates between students, staff, and faculty from the internet to the ivory tower. For students and faculty that interact completely online, when the ivory tower is the internet, the trigger warning can look completely different.<\/p>\n

Open for discussion<\/h2>\n

I often give a guest lecture in education classes on videogames and learning. This includes an online section where students are asked to review games like Super Columbine Massacre RPG<\/a>, Decisions that Matter<\/a>, Choice Texas<\/a> and Darfur is Dying<\/a> among others. This leads to an online discussion about what players learn when they play these games.<\/p>\n

Prior to students participating in this activity I post an announcement that gets emailed to all of them simply stating that: \u201cWe are exploring different types of games freely available on the internet. Some of these games are on topics that you may find hard to deal with. Please post a response in the \u2018Ask the Instructor\u2019 if you would like to talk about the assignment.”<\/p>\n

By posting an announcement on the system there is a degree of certainty that all the students will at least receive the message; whether they read it or not cannot be controlled. The closed discussion forum where students can ask the instructor a question or set up a video chat gives the students the opportunity to voice concerns. In the five years I have been giving this lecture, both in the US and the UK, not one student out of thousands has posted in the \u201cAsk the Instructor\u201d section. In fact, this assignment which comes with the email announcement tends to have more participation then the assignments that do not come with email trigger warnings.<\/p>\n

Tonia Dousay, an educational technology professor at the University of Wyoming, teaches classes on message design where she uses in-line trigger messages where the video is embedded, such as this one about how to fly a jet which uses an analogy of a woman playing golf.<\/p>\n