The university provides a structure for learning. Within it, learning situations arise, all of which are ambiguously related to structure. Indeed, the names we have for situations, like “class” or “task” or “exam,” are also names for the structures in which the situations arise. After all, a situation is a space of freedom within a structure. The structure of a class, which constructs the position of teacher and student, leaves open a space of possibilities, for both teachers and students, that are not determined in advance.

This space is not always easy to navigate successfully. If we define “success” here as an outcome wherein learning takes place, it is easy to see how fraught the situation within any given structure can be. The class, construed as a situation, becomes a predicament for the teacher; construed as structure, it affords opportunities for learning that the teacher must exploit. (The student can choose to engage actively in this endeavor, of course; and the teacher may see their own task as motivating such engagement.) Likewise, an exam is familiar predicament for the student when construed as a situation. To crib a line from Sartre, we can say the student is condemned to the “freedom” of an examination, but they must also acknowledge that the structure of the exam provides an orderly time and place to demonstrate what they have learned, usually within a predictable format for which they can prepare. They are given a task and a set of constraints and will be judged only on how well they exploit the freedom granted by the structure. The structure affords them an opportunity to shine.

“Homework” is a structure and a situation that we do well to think seriously about. How does homework afford learning opportunities? How can students exploit those opportunities? On the old model, homework was a learning opportunity when seen from the teacher’s point of view: you could make students do homework and presume that the doing yielded learning (even if the student wasn’t quite aware of this, or even a little resentful of it). From the student’s point of view, homework was a task, and even a test, the important thing was do it “correctly,” i.e., to the satisfaction of the teacher, so that it may received the desired grade, which was the counted toward the final grade. For obvious reasons, this will no longer work. The best way for students to satisfy their teachers with homework, will, in most cases, be to leave the work to artificial intelligence. And if they do this, they not learn anything by, literally, doing the homework. There will be no doing involved.

Here, I believe we must structure the homework as a task that practices a competence to be performed in an exam. That is, homework will be an exercise in establishing something like “exam conditions” at home. The only way to this, as far as I can tell, is not to grade homework assignments, or, at the least, not to grade them in a way that counts toward a final grade. (You can give students an indicative grade: a grade that tells them what the result would be, if it had been performed in an invigilated situation.) The idea will be to teach students to situate themselves at home in ways that affords them opportunities to demonstrate what they have learned in class. In doing homework, they will demonstrate to themselves what they are capable of.

Obviously, I’m here talking about homework assignments, not what we might more generally refer to as “studying”: which involves reading and drilling and thinking and talking to peers and many other things besides. These situations are also best faced within structures, often of the students own making, but always in some way related to the larger, overarching structure of “the university”.