The Aims and Methods of Liberal Education: Notes from a Nineteenth Century Pan-Africanist

Liberal education is in crisis as neoliberal logics continue to shape the purpose and practice of higher education. But despite invocations of its contemporary ‘global’ context, very few commentators engage the current crisis through the provocations of postcolonial studies. A key element of postcolonial critique draws attention to the ways in which the modern humanities and social sciences are colonially inflected traditions of knowledge production. Taking this critique as a point of departure, I aim to show that the critical response to the crisis prompted by the neoliberal agenda is inadequate in so far as there has been insufficient acknowledgement that modern liberal education wishes to suture and save a public culture that is racially exclusionary. To open up this space of inquiry, I focus on the thought and practice of Edward Blyden. Born in St Thomas, Danish West Indies, Blyden migrates to Liberia. A prolific writer and educator, Blyden delivers, in 1881, his inaugural address as President of Liberia College entitled ‘The Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education for Africans’. What lessons for the present crisis might we draw from a nineteenth century Pan-Africanist advocate of liberal education?

1
Thanks to Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood for critical comments; thanks to anonymous reviewers for advice; and thanks to Alf Nilsen for the gracious invitation to contribute to this issue. My interest in Blyden's pedagogy was first piqued in a summer school seminar led by Erna Brodber. as to become fully human by cultivating an inquiring mind and a virtuous character committed to pursuing the public good (Axelrod 2002, pp. 11-13;Cronon 1998). But for some while now, observers have bemoaned the progressive loss of the spaces within the Western academy that would serve such a pedagogy. Many point to a relentlessly creeping neoliberal logic that disaggregates society into interest-maximizing individuals and that responds only to the demands and interests of capital. The force of such logic upon the academy, critics argue, has led to a progressive displacement of the ethos of liberal education that links critical inquiry and edification to the public good (see for example Harris 2005;Nussbaum 2010;Shore 2010). This shift is especially pronounced and contested in UK academia, as what has historically been a thoroughly public higher education system is now experiencing a game-changing withdrawal of government funding (see Holmwood 2011).
Despite invocations of its contemporary 'global' context (Nussbaum 2004), most scholars make sense of the crisis by reference to the standard canons of European thought that, in one way or another, pay homage to eleutherios paideia. Very few critics engage liberal education through the provocations of postcolonial studies, even though that, too, has become somewhat of a standard in the Western academy (for various exceptions, see Giroux 1992;Mohanty 1989). A key element of postcolonial critique draws attention to the ways in which the modern humanities and social sciences are colonially inflected traditions of knowledge production (see for example Seth 2007). Taking this critique as a point of departure, I aim to show that the critical response to the crisis of liberal education prompted by the neoliberal agenda is inadequate in so far as there has been insufficient acknowledgement that modern liberal education wishes to suture and save a public culture that is racially exclusionary.
More than simply a disclosure of discrimination, my article draws attention to the ways in which modern liberal education is complicit in committing epistemic injustice. Such an injustice refers to the ways in which some racialized groups are deemed competent to cultivate the public sphere while others are deemed incompetent to do so. The main purpose of my article is to retrieve a Black tradition of liberal education that is of relevance to the contemporary context precisely because it treats epistemic injustice, rather than neoliberal logic, as a problem of the first order. To my mind, Edward Blyden is the intellectual exemplar of this tradition. Blyden, born to free parents of Igbo descent in the Danish West Indies, migrates to Liberia in 1851 and there crafts a turbulent and contentious career as a politician and educator (for biographical notes, see Lynch 1978). In 1881, after being elected as President of Liberia College, he gives an inaugural address entitled 'The Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education'. His aims and methods directly address the question of epistemic injustice in the colonial context. It is my contention that, while its provenance is the Global South, Blyden's pedagogy might also help to more adequately address the crisis of liberal education in the Global North.
I proceed in three steps. First, I provide an argument as to why the defence of modern liberal education must reference epistemic justice, and I do so specifically by historical reference to the UK context of higher education and the struggles of peoples of African heritage against racism in the British public sphere. Second, I turn to Liberia in the late nineteenth century. I explicate Blyden's aims and methods of liberal education as a direct response to the republic's colonial project that conceived a public culture by pitting a (relatively) 'civilized' African-American settler population against the indigenous peoples of those lands and their 'primitive' practices. Finally, in a conclusion, I return to the UK context in order to suggest the difference that Blyden's pan-African pedagogy might make to the current defence of liberal education. The North can learn from the South-and the South in the North.

Liberal Education and Epistemic Injustice
The current articulation of liberal education emerged as a response from Oxford dons to a challenge mounted by the Edinburgh Review in 1808. The Review argued that Oxford University was unable to engage with the challenges to the traditional order now presented by the growth of what the Scots had termed 'commercial society'. The Oxford curriculum, charged the Review, still focused upon the classics, divinity and mathematics at the expense of meaningfully incorporating subjects that engaged with and arose out of the growth of industry and the world market-e.g. natural science, political economy, commerce and law (Slee 1986, pp. 9-10). Edward Copleston, then Dean of Oriel College, Oxford, replied defensively that, indeed, students could take instruction in political economy; however, 'it is never forgotten … to lay a foundation of liberal literature, ancient and modern, before any particular pursuit absorbs the mind'. (Copleston 1810, p. 154). Soon afterwards, John Henry Newman drew upon the Oriel environment and Copleston's response to provide a positive manifesto of liberal education (see Higton 2012:, p. 81). The 'habit of mind' that such an education formed, argued Newman, was not to be valued in terms of its direct usefulness to modern industry or administration but rather in its cultivation of a virtuous character (Newman 2008, p. 114).
More than hierarchies of subject matter are at stake here. This tradition of liberal education, as it has been transmitted into the present day, seeks to suture the divisive, instrumentalizing and individualizing effects of modernity with a classical tradition of pedagogy that cultivates a virtuous intellect committed to the public good (Carnochan 1993, p. 29). Such contentions have returned regularly in debates over the purpose of British higher education at various moments in the development of the public university system (see for example Oakeshott 2004). The Robbins report of 1963 marks one such crucial intervention.
The Robbins report is famous for marking an era of significant expansion in the publicly financed higher education sector. What is important for our purposes is the fourth aim of higher education that the report stipulated: once the reserve of the privileged few, higher education would now have to perform a role in ameliorating social inequalities in an age that had set for itself 'the ideal of equality of opportunity' (Committee on Education 1963, p. 7). Specifically, higher education would be tasked with introducing 'that background of culture and social habit upon which a health society depends' to students whose 'home background' might have ill-prepared them for public life. In this respect, universities and colleges had 'an important role to play in the general cultural life of the communities in which they are situated' (Committee on Education 1963, p. 7). Through point four, then, the report articulated the aims of liberal education as an amelioration of social inequality, with the method of this education being 'the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship' (Committee on Education 1963, p. 7).
Curiously, in arguing for the transmission of a common culture as a method of liberal education, the Robbins Report made no reference to one of the most fundamental demographic transformations of the time: the steady arrival into the 'mother country' of peoples from Britain's old or ex colonies. Crucially, these arrivants quickly experienced racialized discriminations and exclusions that defined much of their engagement with public institutions, even though many of them were public sector workers. Indeed, the infamous Smethwick election campaign, fought upon a racist anti-immigration platform, took place just 1 year after the Robbins report was published. There is, then, a curious evasion in the report's engagement with liberal education of the wider postcolonial challenges to the 'transmission of a common culture' that were evidently gathering pace.
At this point, I want to offer a reason for this evasion. As I have mentioned, the inherited framework through which to defend the aims of liberal education references a standard dialectic of modernity, i.e. the preservation and progression of virtue and the public good in a social context racked by the anoymizing and instrumentalizing forces of capitalism and bureaucracy. However, this dialectic does not constitutively reference the colonial projects of many European polities, which, a number of scholars have argued, are congenital to the very birth and logic not just of modernity per se but of the way in which modernity is conjoined with the nation-state (see Bhambra 2013;Mignolo 2011). Contextualizing the defence of liberal education within a global colonial-modernity-and not just a European/national modernity-leads us to question which divisions liberal education is supposed to suture and whose public good it is supposed to serve.
Here, we must turn to the influence of Matthew Arnold, the pre-eminent English cultural theorist of the nineteenth century (Carnochan 1993, pp. 24-25). Arnold's work, as he saw it (2003, pp. 35-37), was in part a contribution to the historical debate over the Oxford curriculum and Newman's manifesto for a liberal education. Arnold emphasized the use of 'culture' as the method by which the 'best knowledge' could be mobilized for 'the moral and social passion for doing good' (Arnold 2003, p. 8). This function of culture was especially important in a 'modern world' that had become more and more 'mechanical and external' (Arnold 2003, p. 15). Arnold conceived of this cultivation of knowledge as a paternalistic method to pursue what had previously been called the 'improvement' of the lower classes. As Arnold (2003, pp. 17-18) put it, through culture the 'raw person' ceased to follow the 'rule by which he fashions himself' and drew 'ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming'. The influence of Arnold on the subsequent debates over liberal education is clear. The same sentiments that affirm an epistemological distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture are easily identifiable in the strong paternalism of the Robbins Report wherein liberal education is tasked to cultivate those whose home background had made them 'ill prepared' for public life.
Paternalistic, yes. But Arnold's schema is also influential in its racializing of the social parts that made up the nation including the dissonance between parts that provided for the growth of culture (Leerssen 2006;Young 1995, p. 56). As Robert Young (1995, p. 54) notes, Arnold derived his high/low culture distinction from the colonial anthropological/sociological frameworks of the time. Hence the bearers of low culture, 'raw' in reference to those frameworks that racialized non-European peoples as 'primitive', had no competencies through which to contribute to culture, that is, the method by which the 'best knowledge' cultivated the public good. This is why Arnold believed that 'primitive' cultures internal to the British nation-for example, Celtic-should be publicly represented only as dead traditions, that is, objects of antiquarian interest (Leerssen 2006, p. 68). In this way culture, as Arnold paternalistically framed it, could be racially exclusionary at the same time as it professed to be socially ameliorative.
Let us remember that the transmission of this public culture was precisely the method of liberal education, as Robbins defined it, in his era where real-and not metaphorical-'primitives' now intimately constituted one part of the British nation. I submit, therefore, that the oft-vaunted dialectic of liberal education-virtuous public good as a salve for the instrumentalizing and alienating machinery of modernityobfuscates the racializing and exclusionary logics of colonial-modernity, exclusionary logics that liberal education reproduces even as it works to salve the divisions of modernity. And in order to draw out the political significance of this obfuscation, I would now like to properly introduce the notion of 'epistemic justice'.
Epistemic justice calls for a reckoning with the racialized inequalities of knowledge cultivation that have historically accompanied the European colonial project. Complicit in this form of injustice is the cognitive framework of colonial-modernity itself, which categorically segregates humanity into different meta-groups: the moderns, who deem themselves competent to rule themselves and others, and the sub-modern or traditionals whom moderns deem incompetent to rule themselves (de Sousa Santos 2007). Epistemologically, and as we have seen with Arnold's conception of public culture, this segregation creates the knowers and the known, that is, those groups who are racialized as competent to produce adequate and universalisable knowledge of the modern world and those who are racialized as incompetent to do so. Epistemic justice rejects this cognitive framework of colonial-modernity when it comes to deciding what counts as adequate knowledge and who counts as adequate knowers (Keet 2014;Restrepo 2014). This is where epistemology and politics connect. In colonial-modern frameworks, colonized communities and/or their postcolonial descendants living in the Global North are represented as collective entities whose cultures lack epistemic authority in contrast to the norms and procedures of the civilized colonizers and their descendent institutions. In other words, public culture delineated along colonial-modern lines objectifies postcolonial communities as exogenous problems that confront national institutions and then require, at best, a paternalistic assimilative response and at worst a violent disavowal. In contrast, epistemic justice affirms that the knowledge systems of such communities (including their fault-lines) are resources that, in principle, hold epistemic authority when it comes to identifying what counts as a problem, what constitutes the problem and what are the means of redress. Epistemic justice is therefore a crucial dimension of the wider struggle for reparation of colonial injustice (see Grosfoguel 2007;Icaza and Vázquez 2013).
Such a critique has significant implications for liberal education, especially of the kind promoted in the Robbins report and inflected through Arnold's racialized framing of public culture. For if liberal education is not sensitive to epistemic injustice then it runs the risk of being (paternalistically) ameliorative in its aims but racially exclusionary in its methods and thus unfit for its own purpose. In what now follows, I chart the shifting terrain in UK higher education whereby struggles for epistemic justice briefly confronted the exclusions of liberal education before being sidelined at the same time as liberal education itself became increazingly displaced by neoliberal agendas.
The 1997 Dearing Report, the next major review of higher education following Robbins, was clearly influenced by neoliberal logic in so far as it articulated a valuation of higher education in terms of its prospective contribution to national economic competitiveness (Bell and Stevenson 2009, p. 7). Specifically, one of the report's key recommendations, to replace maintenance grants with student fees, signalled a change in the valuation of higher education away from a public good and towards privatized capital. Nevertheless, the report still referenced the aims of liberal education in so far as higher education was tasked with playing 'a major role in shaping a democratic, civilized, inclusive society' (The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education 1997, pp. 72, 81). The report also explicitly referenced Robbins' method of liberal education-the 'transmission of a common culture' (The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education 1997, p. 64). However, the Dearing report admitted that the notion of a common culture was now far more problematic than Robbins had assumed, and this was due at least in part to the iniquitous position of 'ethnic minorities' in UK society (The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education 1997, pp. 22, 80, 105, 223).
In fact, in the era spanning Robbins and Dearing, many 'ethnic minority' communities had made it known only too clearly that they would not accept the racialized inequalities and discriminations that had accompanied their insertion into and residency within the 'mother' country. What I want to briefly draw attention to here, focusing on communities of African heritage (which for the purposes of this article I term as Black), is the epistemic dimension of these struggles for justice. For instance, in response to the formal designating of many African-Caribbean school children as educationally subnormal (Coard and Caribbean Education and Community Workers' Association 1971), mothers as/and community activists began Saturday supplementary schools. There, maths and English were often taught alongside Black history, a discipline that had been established and spread by community intellectuals. Black intellectuals were active further afield too, for example, radicalizing the Institute of Race Relations. Epistemic justice was also pursued through various artistic endeavours-from the Black agitprop of the Keskidee theatre troupe to Rastafari sound systems, all of which cultivated collective self-understandings of and remedies for living in the heart of 'Babylon' (see variously Alleyne 2002;Gutzmore 1982;Henry 2006;Mirza and Reay 2000;Shilliam 2015, Chapter 4).
At the same time, and enabled by the expansion of higher education legitimized by Robbins, increasing numbers of 'non-traditional' students (including Black peoples) entered into the public education system and unavoidably brought with them 'non-traditional' concerns of race and gender (Bhambra 2015). In this context, the wider movements for epistemic justice in Black communities even influenced academia, although the link between university and community-based intellectuals was usually tenuous. Nonetheless, the research agenda of Stuart Hall and others made an incisive intervention into the Arnoldian legacy by investigating the ways in which national culture, the supposed transmitter of a common culture and standard of citizenship, was oblivious to its colonial articulation and racialized exclusions (Hall 1990;Solomos 2001). The new cultural studies influenced many Black students who were entering higher education in increasing numbers, with some following through to doctorate work (see in general Baker et al. 1996;Owosu 2000). The institutional hostility that met this Black intervention into academic life in the UK has yet to be sufficiently detailed and fully reckoned with. Some key Black cultural studies intellectuals found the USA far more conducive to career prospects than their domestic British academy. And anecdotal evidence that I have heard suggests that those who remained in the UK as Black scholars undertaking research on race and racism (often with community commitments) tended to be devalued and marginalized by the rise of managerial performance indicators wedded to neoliberal logics such as the Research Assessment Exercise.
Meanwhile, a key concern of the Dearing report, and one re-stated in subsequent policy papers, was to make Britain more competitive in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy (Bell and Stevenson 2009, pp. 8, 11). Many critics have argued that the activities that constitute internationalization-student exchanges, research collaboration, etc.-have been increasingly hijacked for neoliberal purposes, most of all, to gain a larger share of the global market in higher education (for example Kim 2009;Stromquist 2007). True, sectoral reports in the UK raise aspirations to ensure that the curricula of international programmes engage with ethical issues associated with inter-cultural knowledge production (The Higher Education Academy 2014). But in practice, these programmes usually focus on individualized investment and the provision of what De Vita and Case (2003) term a 'mono cultural model of internationalization for financial gain'.
There has been, though, another consequence to the internationalization agenda beyond the usurpation of a pedagogical space to cultivate the (global) public good. Bound up with the struggle against racism that I glossed above, the 1976 Race Relations act was amended in 2000 to place statutory duties on public institutions-which in the UK still includes universities-to ensure that their policies and procedures are not racially discriminative. However, what was once a concern to address racialized inequalities in higher education has become obfuscated by the desire for ethnic diversity, a desire that is in good part related to competing in a global market for international students (Ahmed 2007, p. 242;Equality Challenge Unit 2010, p. 9). (This obfuscation is embedded in wider shifts in race talk towards a language of 'multiculturalism' (see Lentin 2005)). Additionally, as university functions have increasingly become monetized, income-generating functions (such as internationalization/diversity) are being maximized while other non-monetized functions, especially equality issues, have been given, in comparison, cursory and procedural attention. In this respect, diversity achieved through the recruitment of international (often-but not always-elite) students has displaced the historical pursuit of epistemic justice for resident and structurally marginalized ethnic minority communities (see Ahmed 2007, pp. 237, 240).
There is one more chapter to this story. In 2010, Lord Browne delivered an extremely controversial report on the future financing of higher education. Unlike Dearing, Browne's report did not even mention Robbins fourth principle of higher education in Britain, i.e. the aims and methods of liberal education. Subsequent to the report, the coalition government withdrew government funding for social science, arts and humanities degrees. This radical departure from the very notion of a publicly funded higher education system drew a series of demonstrations as well as a concerted campaign in defence of the public university system (http://publicuniversity.org.uk/). A critique of the Browne Report by Stefan Collini (2010) has become oft cited in which he identifies the stakes at play: whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards redefining them in terms of a purely economistic calculation of value and a wholly individualistic conception of 'consumer satisfaction'. I am not opposed to Collini's critique of neoliberalism. I would defend the continued existence of a system of public higher education, but I do worry specifically about the silences that are activated in the defence of a public cultural role for universities which references only the traditional problematique of modernity. 2 It is not good enough to claim that the defence of the public good is a prerequisite for the pursuit of social justice per se. For what in the first place is just about the 'transmission of a common culture and standard of citizenship' that is colonial-modern in its constitution? What are the limits of restitution when the very constitution of public culture has been not just paternalistic but epistemically exclusionary? There is, in short, a curious silence here on the provocations of the postcolonial critique, very similar to that of the Robbins report, almost 50 years prior.
And so I want to inquire into a defence of liberal education that confronts colonial-modern exclusion as a first order problem, one that is mindful of the challenge of epistemic justice as a problem of the first order. Let us remember that there are alternative genealogies of liberal education. I am thinking not so much of the ways in which Matthew Arnold was taught to the 'native intellectuals' of British colonies, although that is important (Gikandi 2007). Rather, I am thinking of the work of intellectuals from the colonies who, despite being racialized as epistemically incompetent to undertake such a high-minded task, nevertheless proceeded to espouse aims and methods of liberal education that exceeded the imagination and reach of Oxford dons and those who share with them a common culture. In this respect, the writings of Edward Blyden demand especial attention.

The Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education for Africans
January 5th, 1881. Blyden uses his inaugural address as President of Liberia College to promote a liberal education informed by a pan-African pedagogy that he has crafted over the decades. (In what follows, I augment his 1881 speech with a number of his writings that precede and succeed this moment). The paramount aim of liberal education, Blyden announces, is to enable the returning descendants of enslaved Africans trafficked across the Atlantic to 'become one with the great tribes on the continent' (Blyden 1882, p. 3), and in this respect, Blyden is obsessed with the relocation of Liberia College from Monrovia to the 'interior'. The key method of liberal education, Blyden argues, is the teaching of a curriculum that excludes European conceptions of the worth of African peoples. Blyden's aims and methods are intended to address the specific paradoxes of the colonizing project that has eventuated in the republic of Liberia.
At its inception, the emigration of African-Americans to the colony of Liberia is perceived by the diverse constituencies of the American Colonization Society (ACS) as a pressure release valve for the energies released through the struggle over the South's 'peculiar institution' of slavery (see Moses 1998, pp. xvi-xvii;Tyler-McGraw 2007): here the question of what to do with 'freed Blacks' is foremost. To the religious-minded members of the ACS, African-American settlers in Liberia are perceived as a force that might create a beachhead for the (colonial) Christian evangelization of the African continent (Gershoni 1985, p. 9). African-American settlers are not a homogeneous mass nor necessarily all evangelical (Tyler-McGraw 2007, pp. 179-180). Nonetheless, the Liberia project carries within its very blueprint the same fundamental animosity and exclusionary practices towards indigenous peoples that is one of the original sins of the colonization of the Americas (Akpan 1973, pp. 220-221;Gershoni 1985, p. 24). Although in situ Black, the settler status of African-Americans still relies upon the racializing logics of European colonialism to render them relatively civilized in comparison to the 'primitive' indigens. And so, post-independence, Liberia's Black governors consider their new republic to be a 'true' America where its laws and religion will be practised absent of the evils of slavery and racism-but not colonialism. Hence the settler elites cleave aesthetically and ideologically to their 'civilized' American identity (see Akpan 1973, pp. 219-225).
Meanwhile in 1828, Yale College responds similarly to Oxford University to the challenges presented by a rapidly industrializing continental economy. However, in defending liberal education, the dons of Yale must also address the challenge of integrating a set of somewhat distinct American colonies into a postcolonial-but still slave-holding-republic (Herbst 2004). The plan to build Liberia College is conceived in 1851 by members of the Massachusetts Colonization Society and, funded by two other societies, is inaugurated in 1862. Designed along the lines of a quintessentially American college, Liberia college professes the colonial-republican ethos of a liberal education championed by Yale: to promote public works and the public good and to disarm divisive social elements. Despite being the first of its kind to boast a specific remit to educate Black students, the college also professed a strong intention to civilize-that is, Christianize-the indigenous peoples in Liberia, who present one of the foremost threats to the integrity of the settler-colony/republic (see in general Livingston 1972).
Blyden develops his pan-African pedagogy in direct confrontation with the Liberian republican ethos wherein the 'public', at its inception, excludes indigenous peoples racialized as primitives. Against this ethos, Blyden argues that the character of the African-American settler has already been mal-developed by the racist environment of the USA-although the 'body has been set free', 'the soul remain[s] in bondage' (Blyden 1908(Blyden , p. 5, 1976a). Blyden's argument is an implicit critique of Arnold's epistemic division of high and low culture in so far as Blyden identifies the brutality and deracination that this division requires. Hence, Blyden refutes the paternalism of the 'highly cultured' and makes the racially exclusionary effects of the 'transmission' of their 'common culture' the foundational concern for liberal education.
At this point, I need to acknowledge the contradictory colonial registers and rhetorics deployed in Blyden's written work, as detailed in Teshale Tibebu's (2012) insightful commentary. Nonetheless, it is clear to me that, behind the registers and rhetorics, Blyden's Pan-African pedagogy seeks primarily to dismantle the colonial-modern framework that makes of indigenous peoples objects to be known and manipulated-or destroyed-and settlers the knowing subjects destined to govern themselves and others. Crucial, here, is Blyden's acknowledgement and assertion that indigenous peoples have valid knowledge of the geo-cultural context in which settlers find themselves (1882, p. 11). Blyden even considers it a great error that settlers should perpetuate 'race antagonism' towards indigenous peoples who are, in fact, 'more industrious, more intelligent, and better organized' (Blyden 1882(Blyden , p. 27, 1978d. In other words, Blyden charges the public culture of Liberia with an original epistemic injustice.
It is in this light that we must approach the key aim of Blyden's liberal education: the relocation of Liberia College to the interior. Blyden often conjures the cartographic image of a colonized seaboard with its 'physical and moral malaria' in opposition to the healthy interior where the race still holds its 'integrity', 'untouched by foreign influence, nor yet affected by European habits' (Blyden 1882(Blyden , p. 4, 1908(Blyden , p. 29, 1976b. It is important to note that Blyden does not cease to complain of the resistance to any relocation of Liberia College by the settler elite (see for example Blyden 1978a, pp. 315-316). His abiding concern is to divert any influx of African-American settlers who might wish to violently 'push inwards', sanctioned by the predicates of 'race hierarchy' (Blyden 1882(Blyden , p. 13, 1976a. It is almost as if Blyden sees Liberia College as racing ahead of these forces in order to set the terms of engagement through epistemic justice rather than colonial injustice. Such concerns are clear in his inaugural address: that is why we want the College away from the seaboard with its constant intercourse with foreign manners and low foreign ideas-that we may have free and uninterrupted intercourse with the intelligent among the tribes of the interior; that the students, even from the books to which they will be allowed access, may conveniently flee to the forests and fields of Manding and the Niger, and mingle with our brethren and gather fresh inspiration and fresh and living ideas. (Blyden 1882, p. 28) How does Blyden conceive of the positive effect that this physical movement might have upon a liberal education for Africans?
We must first note that Blyden roots his critique of epistemic injustice in the very environment through-and about which-knowledge is produced. As the relatively civilized 'knowers', African-American settlers conceive of indigenous practices of agriculture, land tenure, and living arrangements as epistemically invalid (Blyden 1908, p. 3). Instead, Blyden charges settlers with deploying ill-fitting Euro-centric frameworks that are predicated upon premises of scarcity, industriousness and laws of private property, i.e. the fundamental structuring principles of modernity (Blyden 1908, pp. 17, 26). Blyden goes so far as to call this importation 'a transgression of natural law' (Blyden 1908, p. 15).
The natural law that Blyden references here-he also glosses it as the 'laws of growth for the [African] race' (1882, p. 11)-is cultivated from the clues and cues for pursuing the public good that God has left in the specific environment that surrounds and works through the traditions of indigenous peoples. In this respect, the committing of epistemic injustice by settlers upon indigenous peoples outlaws for the former any substantive education in the natural laws of Liberia. Instead, structurally predisposed to importing colonial-American practices wholesale, settlers, as Blyden (1908, p. 15) notes, have 'always in the long run create[d] wildernesses instead of farms and cities'. Alternatively, Blyden is convinced that Indigenous peoples must, in principle, be acknowledged as the most sophisticated practitioners of the natural law of their land. Therefore, their thought systems and cultural practices must be granted an epistemic authority: we must learn to occupy the standpoint of our aboriginal brother [sic], and to believe that in his place there is no man under the sun better than or equal to him' (Blyden 1908(Blyden , p. 29, see also 1976a).
Concerned to pursue natural law in context, Blyden departs from Arnold's racially exclusivist conception of public culture by redeeming those supposedly 'non-modern' cultural parts of the Liberian republic as epistemically valid material for the edification of public virtue. And this claim upon epistemic justice is precisely what will ensure the fulfilment of liberal education's classical purpose: to free the (African) person from (colonial) habit so as to become (once more) fully human (see also Blyden 1908Blyden , p. 9, 1971b. This is why Blyden argues in his inaugural address that when following the laws of the white man Africans 'can never attain to that essence of progress which Mr Herbert Spencer describes as difference' (Blyden 1882, p. 10). Spencer proposes an easily racialized/racializable conception of progress as an advanced industrial society differentiating itself from backward communities (internal and external). But Blyden understands difference differently, as an outcome of self-cultivation, as living otherwise to the racialized expectations of Europe: In the course of our development laws will have to be made not known to Greek or Roman legislators; unheard of by [William] Blackstone … which Napoleon never conceived … The world would gain nothing by having the European reproduced in Africa'. (Blyden 1976a, pp. 118-119) Indeed, Blyden is supremely confident that, so long as they follow the laws of the race in context, African peoples will be able to 'acquire the self-respect or self-reliance of an independent contributor [to humanity]' (Blyden 1882, p. 10).
I would now like to turn to the means, proposed by Blyden in his inaugural address, through which liberal education at Liberia College will be provided. Blyden envisages a curriculum that will rehumanize the African student so that she may proceed to cultivate the (natural) laws of the race. 3 However, it is precisely at this point that Blyden proposes a puzzling return to putatively European sources which, on the face of it, transgresses natural law in Liberia. Blyden is convinced that the Classics-that is, Greek and Roman literatureencourage the 'strengthening and disciplining of the mind' without 'unfavourably affecting our sense of race individuality or our own self-respect' (Blyden 1882, pp. 20-22) Indeed, a proper study of Greek and Latin, argues Blyden, provides an 'acquaintance with the best models of reasoning and eloquence, unequalled by anything to be found in modern European literature' (Blyden 1971c, p. 258). Is Blyden blindly following the prescriptions of Oxford and Yale dons? Or is there a subtle anti-colonial claim being made upon the Greeks and Romans?
To answer, we need to engage with the historical struggle for epistemic justice mounted by Black students in American higher education, which effectively confounds Yale College's defence of a colonial-republican liberal education. Colleges dedicated to the teaching of African-American students (of which Liberia College, although not in the USA, is nevertheless a leading centre) start to emerge prior to the American civil war but are bolstered greatly in its aftermath through the land grant system. A key contention of these Black colleges, famously expressed in the argument between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, is the purpose and extent of college education: should it be predominantly technical or also liberal? Washington's 'Atlanta compromise' accepts the continued disenfranchisement of southern Black peoples while allowing them access to further education only in the artisanal vocations. For Du Bois (1961, pp. 48-49), such a compromise reproduces the sub-humanity of African-Americans in so far as it tacitly accepts that only white minds are competent to engage in the higher cultural realms of logos and mimesis. Contra Washington, Dubois argues that the souls of Black folk, once expressed only in the spirituals, now also require expression in these public realms (Du Bois 1961, p. 185). This is why the opportunity to learn Classics is so valued by Black students and scholars in Blyden's era because these texts are perceived to be the vaunted repository of humanity. Hence, fluency in them for the descendants of enslaved Africans is perhaps less a case of embracing one's own racial incompetency and more a political statement on the equality of the faculties between races (see especially Goings and O'Connor 2011;Jarratt 2009). This statement, as Dubois suggests, is also a claim for an equitable presence within public culture. Blyden pre-empts Dubois when he argues, with regards to the Classics, that 'mind is everywhere the same; and every where it receives its character and formation from the same elementary principles' (Blyden 1971a, p. 220). And in his inaugural address, Blyden argues specifically that the Classics provide for a rehumanization of African intellect in so far as their study cultivates 'mental discipline without unfavourably affecting our sense of race individuality or our own self-respect' (Blyden 1882, p. 20).
Oxford and Yale dons seek to reposition the legacy of Greece within a dialectic of modernity that elides its colonial dimension: i.e. the (European) Greeks will provide the virtuous salve to European and American industrialization. But Blyden must re-situate the legacy of Greece within a broader struggle over colonial-modernity: virtue, if it is to mean anything, must also address epistemic injustice. Nonetheless, if the Classics are to be the instrument of rehumanization then a pedagogical challenge confronts Blyden: how to separate and quarantine modern racist European literature from its putatively 'European' classical tradition. For this purpose, Blyden divides European history into five or six epochs. The last two epochs are congenitally linked to Atlantic slavery and colonialism and roughly coincide with the European enlightenment and subsequent emergence of the science of modernity. The intellectual works created in these epochs will not be taught, regardless of their worth, as they either degrade African peoples or their defences of African peoples are 'patronizing or apologetic' (Blyden 1882, pp. 17-18). Literature from the preceding epochs-chief amongst these being the Classics-will be taught.
In this respect, Blyden sidesteps the appropriation of the Greeks as a dialectical force for suturing the alienations of modernity, and rather resituates the Greeks so that they might be used to confront the colonial-modern-and racially exclusionaryframing of knowledge and public culture. In fact, pre-empting the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena, Blyden Africanizes the Classics by claiming that 'Greece sat at the feet of Egypt-Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, all drank at the Egyptian fountain-and Egypt is in Africa' (Blyden 1976a, p. 117). There is also a sense in which (and perhaps it becomes stronger in his pedagogy in the years following 1881) Blyden apprehends the inclusion of the Classics as crucial only in so far as being a transitional state of affairs: as we learn more and more of African customs and study more and more the kingdom of god within us, we shall find that the political economy of the white man is not our political economy, his moral philosophy is not our moral philosophy, and far less is his theology our theology (Blyden 1908, p. 20).
Perhaps, then, Blyden ultimately considers the Classics as a catalyst for the cultivation of Africa's own classical traditions, rather than as the global standard of intellectual measurement and cultural competency.
Finally, it is instructive to note that Blyden intends to teach Arabic and some of the 'principal native languages' in the College curriculum (Blyden 1882, p. 23). Despite its foreign provenance, Blyden finds Arabic more conducive to the demands of epistemic justice than English in terms of the mode of its acculturation by indigenous peoples. Although it is certainly a contentious argument, Blyden argues that, rather than being introduced through slavery, Islam came to Africans in their homes where they lived in 'a state of freedom and independence' and so were 'free to choose' (Blyden 1994, pp. 31-32). Therefore, in marked contrast to Africans living in Christian colonies (including in the Americas), African-Muslim communities and polities remain, in Blyden's opinion, 'self-reliant, productive, independent and dominant … without the countenance or patronage of the parent country, Arabia' (Blyden 1994, p. 30). Thus, by including the teaching of Arabic and 'native languages'-and their cultural material-alongside and not below Greek and Latin, Blyden proposes a method by which a liberal education can serve epistemic justice in the face of colonial-modernity.
In summary, the problematique that Blyden forces the defenders of liberal education to address is the formation of a public culture that, being colonial-modern in its constitution, excludes the living knowledge traditions of peoples racialized as outsiders but who have in fact always been constitutive of the formation of the polity. Blyden's critique of epistemic justice speaks to the colonial intrusion of Black peoples from the North back into the lives of Black peoples in the South. But, as I shall now conclude, his critique also speaks to the colonial exclusions of Black peoples who remain in the North. For if Lord Robbins had read Edward Blyden, he would have perhaps realized that there can be no public service in the cause of equality of opportunity without the pursuit, at the same time, of epistemic justice.

Conclusion: Liberal Education and Epistemic Justice
There is a Black tradition of liberal education the cardinal coordinates of which can be found in Blyden's pan-African pedagogy. Expressed broadly, Blyden's key aim of liberal education is to redirect the intellectual activities of (relatively) privileged Africans towards an equitable and intimate engagement with the collective thoughts and practices of their excluded and oppressed brethren and sistren; his key method is to provide a worldly curriculum that does not promote, assume or simply remain silent on the dehumanization of Africans. One can identify these cardinal coordinates of pedagogy in, for instance, the Black Studies tradition as expressed by Nathan Hare (1969) at San Francisco State University in 1968. While in the UK, these coordinates have historically found expression outside of university in the supplementary school movement as well as in community-based genealogies of Black history, and inside the university (albeit more problematically) with the rise of Black cultural studies.
So in conclusion I want to briefly consider what lessons can be learned from Blyden's pedagogy for those peoples genealogically of the South but resident as postcolonial populations in the North. How might Blyden's aims and methods of liberal education inform present day struggles for epistemic justice for Black peoples in the UK context, one marked by the increasing supremacy of neoliberal logic in higher education?
Using Blyden's method would require (relatively) privileged Black academics in the humanities, arts and social sciences-with support from allies-to develop a curriculum that speaks to the 'laws of growth for the race' as they might be contextualized presently in the UK. That is, such a curriculum would enable and support Black peoples, as postcolonial communities, in the cultivation of 'indigenous' resources through which to address the deep effects of their dehumanization. For this purpose, I would not want to rule out the use of critical thought that references, for example, Foucault, Derrida, Marx or even Spivak; after all, Blyden promoted the teaching of Greek and Arabic to Africans in so far as he judged these classical languages and their cultural reference points to be supportive-or at least not undermining-of African self-edification. But we must ask a question that Blyden did not answer (in his inaugural address at least) regarding the edification of Black lives: when is it that the use of these critical traditions, which are institutionally accepted in the Western academy, become a substitute for the pursuit of epistemic justice for Black peoples? For example, how many of us who research on cognate issues write and (non)reference as if Black Studies is epistemically inferior to postcolonial or post-structural studies (Christian 2006)?
And yet neither can we be satisfied with an all-too-easy importation of Black Studies from the USA. As I have argued, Blyden's natural laws are not, in fact, ontologically racial: they are contextually defined. Our work, then, would be to weave together the various and sometimes competing strands of the living knowledge traditions of African peoples resident in the heart of British empire: yes, by receiving Black studies; but also, by retrieving the Pan-African legacies in the UK (of which Blyden is a part) that precede the second world war, the diverse African-Caribbean politics, arts and philosophies that follow the arrival of the Windrush, the more recent arrival (again) of African-continental lineages of thought and practice, and all the wider conversations between diverse postcolonial peoples and even white allies (but not on white terms) which have taken place through these movements. Such a curriculum would be generally edifying: it would tell us something fundamental about struggles over public culture in the UK in and for the world, just as Blyden believed that indigenous traditions of thought would tell us something fundamental about struggles over public culture in Liberia in and for the world.
Meanwhile, Blyden's aim speaks to the current UK context that follows the effective sidelining of the academic movement for epistemic justice by the neoliberal internationalization agenda. Let us remember that Blyden's method of liberal education-the writing of a curriculum that humanizes Africans-must work in conjunction with his aim-to relocate Liberia College to the interior in an equitable fashion. Similarly, we cannot concern ourselves solely with the curriculum. We too must seek to practically co-write this curriculum with the intellectuals and intellectual traditions of our 'interiors', that is, principally, our historically marginalized Black communities. This would impel us to agitate for a redirection of the internationalization agenda-and its concerns for diversity-so that it might work through instead of over the equalities agenda and the resident communities that this latter agenda concretely references.
Once more, such a project would be of general import. For there lies a small opportunity for the redemption of liberal education in the fact that, under neoliberal logic, universities are increasingly expected to instrumentally 'prove' their 'value added' by reference to their 'impact' on either the economy via wealth creation or, perhaps more usefully, on society via social cohesion. However, social cohesion has increasingly become deployed as part of a public discourse of resentment wherein racialized others, rather than neoliberal policies, are blamed for the disintegration of the social compact (see in general Crowley and Hickman 2008). In this respect, public culture, historically racialized, has not been destroyed by neoliberal logics-as some critics think-but has rather become re-racialized through this logic. This is why I am adamant that those who would defend liberal education merely by reference to a dialectic of modernity will struggle to find an adequate language and ethics to defend their liberal education in this new era. They might even consider, paternalistically, that race equality is a distraction from or derivative problem to the destruction of public culture by neoliberal logics. But they are missing the contemporary connection between epistemology and politics, which is race. Not so, in principle, those who have engaged with colonialmodernity and the fundamentally exclusionary constitution of public culture, including its racialized division of communities into those with 'high' and 'low' competencies.
I am arguing that an effective resistance to the neoliberal transformation of universities in defence of liberal education compels a first-order confrontation with epistemic justice. Academics might want to take the lead from a number of mainly student-led movements in the UK, who, inspired by cognate movements in the Global South, are demanding changes to the White curriculum and mono-cultural disposition of the university environment. 4 They might also choose to be edified by traditions of liberal education that speak more directly and incisively to our current postcolonial conjuncture than those emanating from Oxford and Yale, and Robbins. In this article I have retrieved Blyden's liberal education for Africans. There are others too. 5 They live, just behind the veil of epistemic ignorance.


s2fieldsofstudy: Education Medicine

text:
Designing and assessing fixed dental prostheses 2 multimedia-based education in dentistry students.

Background: Above all methods effective learning results from decent training, acquired in the proper environment and encouraging creative methods. Computer-assisted training by educational software is considered a fundamental measure to improve medical and dentistry education systems. This study aims to design and assess fixed dental prostheses via 2 multimedia instructional contents at the Guilan dentistry school. Methods: This is a descriptive and cross-sectional study. First off, the instructional content was analyzed. The software used to produce multimedia was the iSpring suite Ver.7.0. After designing the instructional multimedia, this software was loaded by LMS. Sixty-nine dentistry students in the 5th semester at Guilan Dentistry School were selected via convenience sampling. At the end of the course, a structured questionnaire containing 26 items were handed to the students to evaluate the instructional multimedia quality. Results: Mean ±SD age was 24.68±3.24 years, 43 were women (62.4%) and 26 were men (37.6%) –the majority of 76.8% used the internet at home. A portion of 33.3% were inclined to use multimedia and the internet with in-person training. About 60% declared that multimedia quality as being good. Conclusion: the instructional multimedia designs which are compatible with lesson objectives and audiovisual facilities can have a great effect on the student's satisfaction. Preparing instructional multimedia makes the instructional content easily accessible for students to be able to review it several times at the proper opportunity and if presented through LMS they would be able to study the lesson subject wherever and whenever accessing the internet.

Introduction
In the past, teaching medical courses was commonly performed via scientific and theoretical classes via teaching aids including textbooks and journals (1). However, today changing health care and medical curriculum has made computer-assisted learning more valuable than before (2). In fact, currently the increasing availability of accessing suitable hardware and software for Electronic-learning has provided a new horizon for educational institutes (3). Thus integrating it into the current educational curriculum of universities seems inevitable. On the one hand, the necessity behind this approach is the scientific view about various dimensions of E-learning and the changing process of design based on the existing conditions and logical goals on the country's medical training (4). Effective learning above all methods results from decent training, acquired in the proper environment and encouraging creative methods (5). Computer-assisted training by educational software such as CD or DVD is considered a fundamental measure to improve http://mjiri.iums.ac.ir medical and dentistry education systems. According to the results derived from some other studies that have used a computerassisted method training concurrently has been a reliable and useful method in learning clinical skills and its results have been compared with regular methods (6). A very critical role of the computer is organizing and presenting data making the user's data accessible, control easy and facilitating knowledge acquisition (2). Actually, using multimedia boosts the learning process and also applies the learners' senses; stimulating their motivation to actively participate besides the training process, making the learners self-organized and self-directed (7). Furthermore, it provides the student with an opportunity to fully control the educational content, time and place (2). Generally speaking, multimedia facilitates the growth of data-based knowledge spreading (5).It seems that the application of multimedia in educational settings has diverse advantages, some of which include using five senses for learning, further practice to become competent, facilitating participation to create inter-conceptual links, facilitating lesson repetition for re-use & costeffectiveness and the program flexibility versus the learners' need. Computerassisted training has its own limitations such as the inability to substitute for teacher, emotional and human interactions, and face-to-face communication occurring in classrooms (3). Moreover some critics assume that personal and computerized educational approaches create monotonous and dull educational conditions where there is no spontaneous interaction and communication between the teacher and students or even among the learners (4).
Various studies have presented different results regarding the use of multimedia for students' learning. The study by Amanloo aimed to assess and discover Web-based instruction strengths and weaknesses in mycology training, showing that in the final test of the course, no meaningful difference to be found between the E-learning and control groups' students in terms of learn-ing and achievement (4).While in the research by Aly et al. (2003) which targeted to compare two multimedia methods and a traditional lecture in training orthodontics (orthodontia) among dentistry students, it was declared that although the individuals in multimedia group got a better score, this difference wasn't statistically significant (2). In addition, the results by Naseri et al. (2013) aiming to study the effectiveness of using endodontics training on medical students' knowledge and skill indicated that this educational program application has been useful in terms of scientific endodontics skills learning and or the learners' knowledge promotion in this field as much as regular demonstration method (6). Since no study has been performed with the mentioned goal among the Dentistry Students of Guilan Medical University so far, in this study, instructional design and assessment of using fixed dental prostheses 2 multimedia in Guilan Medical University dentistry students of the year 2010 semester has been studied.

Methods
This is a descriptive and cross-sectional research. First off, instructional content based on a 5-step guide of the Virtual Labs Project at Stanford University (VLPSD) has been analyzed (8).
First step: (Understand): to identify the target group, instructional needs and learning objectives.
Second step: (Design): to design instructional content, identify common mistakes of the student, define educational resources, surf the Internet, select proper software for producing content, choose motivations to make students participate in learning, and estimate the effectiveness of this method to a traditional one Third step: (Building): to build an interactive instructional multimedia Fourth step: (User testing): to achieve learning objectives, being applicable and have content resolution.
Fifth step: (Improve): to assess multimedia effectiveness through polling the stu-dents' opinion and getting their feedback.
The software used to produce multimedia was iSpring Suite ver.7.O with audio and visual facilities. To produce multimedia, at first, the fixed dental prostheses 2 educational clip and images were imported to the software, thereafter via using the audio and visual facilities, the teacher explained the lesson subjects and simultaneously, the slide demonstration together with the teacher's sound and image were presented ( Figs. 1-3

). Content output in Sharable Content
Object Reference Model (SCORM) format was saved to make Learning Management System (LMS) loading possible. SCORM is a standard for edu- http://mjiri.iums.ac.ir cational content that builds upon existing standards for e-learning. It specifies a framework with which e-learning content is made durable, portable, reusable, interoperable, and accessible (9). The primary objective of the LMS is to manage learners, keeping track of their progress and performance across all types of training activities. The LMS manages and allocates learning resources such as registration, classroom and instructor availability, instructional material fulfillment, and online learning delivery (10).
After designing the instructional multimedia and obtaining the necessary permits, this software was loaded by LMS and 69 students in their 5 th semester of Guilan Dentistry School, who were selected via convenience sampling. The instructional content could be accessed by LMS system. Study course lasted 20h. Two sessions (4h out of 20h) of fixed dental prostheses 2 lesson were assigned for virtual training and applying multimedia. At the end of the course, a researcher-built questionnaire whose validity was determined by 10 authorities' comments and whose reliability was defined by alpha-Cronbach (α=0.82), containing 26 items in two parts: 1) demo-graphic information (9 items) and multimedia quality assessment items (17 items) were handed to the students to evaluate the instructional multimedia quality. Statistical comparisons were performed using the Ttest for independent samples and the ANOVA test.

Results
Mean±SD age was 24.68±3.24 years, 43 were women (62.4%) and 26 men (37.6%) -the majority of 76.8% (n=53) used the internet at home. A portion of 33.3% (n=23) were inclined to use multimedia and the internet with an in-person training. About 60% (n=35) announced multimedia quality as good. Based on the ANOVA and independent t-test, there was no significant relationship between age groups, gender and satisfaction of multimedia quality. The students' opinions about the instructional multimedia quality have been given in Table 1.

Discussion
This study has been conducted with the aim to design and assess fixed dental prostheses 2 multimedia instructional content. Computer-assisted training by software as CD or DVD has been viewed as a funda- mental measure to improve medical and dentistry systems. This method is a powerful tool and the integration of audio and visual data in a multimedia tool format is considered as one of its remarkable advantages (6).Considering the necessity behind designing multimedia for training dentistry students, Fakhry et al. (2007) stated: due to the limitation of surgery space, oral cavity being small and the nature of the dental procedure, the majority of the students in the clinical situation don't have the correct view of the procedure details and this impedes learning opportunities. Applying the multimedia procures training through magnified images improving students' learning (11). Learning happens better by the spoken text and images than the written form (12,13).In addition, another research, that concluded that it isn't possible to train the practical procedures by the traditional method well and due to this, and in order to make students familiar with practical work and utilizing its results and interpretation, and motivate the students, multimedia based method (preparing practical lesson plan, practical program plan, practical educational software, using Pow-erPoint and computer) has been employed (14). Besides boosting the instructional content quality, designing an instructional multimedia can also promote the students' independent learning. As stated in the methods, in this study, instructional content has been designed for reuse in LMS in SCORM format. Bradley & Boyle (2004) have also designed instructional multimedia for computer courses. In their research, they emphasized on two key goals, namely, designing pedagogic-based instructional multimedia and the potential of reusing multimedia in other universities (15), both of which have been observed in this study. In order to follow the schools' pedagogical principles and taking into consideration the learning objectives, the iSpring software was employed to produce the multimedia via; blending the textual, audio and visual facilities using authentic scientific references of dentistry; so that students achieve maximum learning objectives. In order to reuse the multimedia, a SCORM output has been applied so that it is possible to use and apply in LMS. In other studies, employing SCORM in addition to reusing, the instructional content has been shared in various disciplines; in a way that students could access the instructional content at any a time and place (16,17). Besides the students accessing the multimedia content at any time and place, adjusting the learning speed is of the cases studied in the use of multimedia. In multimedia based training, two general states about speed control are taken into account: 1) systempaced education where the instructional content presentation time is carried out by the system and the learners don't interfere in controlling and adjusting the training speed; 2) self-paced learner education where the training time is determined by the learners. The studies have suggested that when the self-paced learners control their training presentation speed, their learning is improved (18,19). Moreno et al. (2001) asserted that the learners could control the speed animated presentation (the principle as self-paced), compared with the learners receiving the same animation at normal speed and with no control, they had better performance in learning tasks (20). In the current research, the latter method, i.e., self-paced learner has been used and learning speed control was done by the learner, which itself is one of the merits behind using instructional multimedia and through that influences learner's learning promotion. Despite this, some studies have reported conflicting results, for instance, Chung (2006) drew this conclusion after his research that the material presentation speed control by the learner had no effect on learning improvement (21). It seems that in addition to speed control, some other cases such as the learner's prior knowledge, ability to recognize words and understand the material, the instructional content complexity and difficulty also affect learning (22).
The results of this study showed no sig-nificant relationship between age, gender and student's satisfaction of multimedia quality. While other studies revealed that men's perception of usefulness was the more significantly direct and more salient than women's in determining behavioral intention to use e-learning. This finding suggests that men tend to concentrate on the usefulness of a new technology, and that they appear to be fairly ''pragmatic'', considering productivity-related factors when using this new technology. Useful content is an important pragmatic factor attracting male users to use e-learning. Pedagogical principles, including principles of developing and packaging content, could be employed in the development and evaluation of e-learning content (23,24). Also other studies revealed no significant relationship between various ages and elearning (25), while other studies showed significant relationship between different ages and e-learning (26,27). This study extracted revealed that the majority of students have been satisfied with the instructional multimedia. Brett stressed that when using multimedia technology, the students play the leading role since they independently use the multimedia and for this reason, polling the students' opinions is essential in order to decide about continuing using this method and or including it in the instructional curriculum (28). Ozuah (2002) assumes that the recent advances in ICT, genome, supplementary medicine and other cases in medical science and transformation in the instructional curriculum seems inevitable (29). In other studies, the requirement to change the instructional curriculum due to moving from traditional teacher-oriented method to applying novel student-oriented method has been stressed (30,31). Before anything else, when implementing every program, it is critical to evaluate the students' opinions about educational design and content and quality to be assured that the students have the necessary motivation and interest to implement the program (31). Brett (1996) discovered in his study that being satisfied with using the multimedia can be studied from diverse dimensions in different students such as the students' learning styles, being interested in using technology and computer and it can be assumed that the students learning independently and being highly interested in technology view instructional multimedia as an appropriate method for training (28). This study derived results implying that the majority of students are in agreement with instructional program running through multimedia accompanied with in person training. The study results by Banados (2013) have also revealed that the students prefer face-to-face instruction and believe that applying online training can lead to the students feeling isolated (32). In another research, despite being satisfied with the instructional multimedia, the majority of the students asserted that it is better not to consider using multimedia as a compulsive method in the instructional curriculum rather than applying it along with the conventional method (28). Here the issue known as blended learning is set forth. Blended learning refers to integrating face-to-face learning in technology based facilities; combining these two types of learning results in traditional learning promotion (33). In other studies, the importance of blended learning and its impact on learning has been emphasized (38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44). It's worth mentioning that face-to-face learning and elearning each has its own merits and disadvantages and if they are used with each other, they can be highly effective in the students' learning. In this respect, Hoic et al. (2009) emphasized in their research, that despite having lots of advantages including individual learning, interaction, immediate feedback and online evaluation that computer-assisted learning has, one of the main disadvantages is its inability to keep the student; in other words, the students' dropout percentage (34).
This matter is of the main reasons behind the bilateral communication importance of e-learning and face-to-face training in order to raise interaction, communication and participation in learning (34). In another study, the students' satisfaction with Elearning was lower and they preferred the traditional method. The students are still inclined to the traditional method and believe that the material presentation and tracking, learning the principles and concepts and clarifying the complicated lesson subjects in the traditional method are more than the blended and internet based method. This group of students preferred to reapply the traditional method in the following training course. The reason for their dissatisfaction was their unfamiliarity with technology and lacking motivation at using novel methods (39). However, in another study, no meaningful relationship has been discovered between the students' dissatisfaction and familiarity with computer science (40).
Moreover, in the current study, the instructional multimedia quality was assessed by the students. The results demonstrated that the majority of the students have announced the produced multimedia quality as good. In other studies, similar results were also stated, too (41,42). On the other hand, in another research, students had announced the quality of the produced multimedia as average (43). Of the cases investigated in this study is the ability of the instructional multimedia at being interactive. The study results denoted that the majority of the students were satisfied with the produced multimedia being interactive: Student-student and student-content (44); the latter mentioned case is among those not analyzed upon. The students' opinion poll about the electronic instructional content being interactive is critical. Most of the studies have shown that the inter-activeness of the content plays a significant role in the students being satisfied with E-learning, their engagement in learning, achieving high learning levels and positive attitude towards distance learning (45,46).
Another feature assessed in the instructional multimedia is the audio-visual facility and the quality of the images and films in terms of color, graphics, resolution and sound. The study results revealed that the students were satisfied with all stated cases and these specifications have been exactly observed in the produced software. Other studies results' about instructional content has suggested that the images presented by the teacher can't alone promote the students' learning. In this study, the conclusion has been drawn that lack of images by the teacher has had no effect on the students' learning (20); while the teacher's mouth, lips, eyebrows, nose movements and expressions like laughing and frowning: each has its own meaning, providing additional information for transferring the teacher's tendencies, emotions and knowledge (47,48).
Among the specifications of the designed multimedia assessed are the material's logical order, the material matching the learning objectives and the instructional content accuracy. The noted cases are of the instructional content design principles which the multimedia format instructional content wasn't separated from and these cases have to be considered and observed in multimedia design. The current study results imply the students' satisfaction with observing the above cases in the designed multimedia. Other studies' results also verify this issue (49).

Conclusion
The results derived from this study demonstrated that the instructional multimedia design was compatible with lesson objectives and also that audio-visual facilities can have a great effect on meeting the student's satisfaction. Preparing instructional multimedia makes it easy for the students to access the instructional content and study the classroom instructional content. Allowing them to review it several times at the proper opportunity. Furthermore, if it is presented through LMS, they will be able to study the lesson subject wherever and whenever by just accessing the internet. Using instructional multimedia such as training the procedures via magnified images leads to the students' learning improvement. This is especially significant for dentistry students because the limited oral cavity doesn't allow them to see all the procedure' details and via magnified images and films, the necessary training can be presented to them. Besides this, other multimedia facilities such as providing the appropriate questions while presenting the content and giving immediate feedback to the student can promote student-content interaction and increase their learning.


Experiences from the Series of International Robotics Workshops

In this paper we summarize our experiences with the series of educational robotics workshops organized for a group of students from four schools in four countries. Brief description of the activities, their results and evaluation are presented.

Introduction
Robotics became recently one of the best tools for training students at various engineering courses. Why is robotics so popular in the educational environment?
One of the main reasons is its multidisciplinary approach. Robotics fits to a wide range of disciplines starting from mechanics, electronics, control engineering and programming to mathematics, physics and even the biology. Robotics also offers a concrete, visible results and attractive modern applications. It uses intelligent algorithms, which may be tested on very complex robotic systems.
As Mataric [1] points out, although robotics seems to be an excellent educational tool, the pedagogy of teaching with robotics is still in its infancy. The main learning theory, which has been perceived as useful for robotics education, was termed constructionism by Papert [2] and it is often used and mentioned [3], [4]. Several attempts have been made to introduce robotics not only at the university level, but also in lower levels, even from kindergartens [5] up to secondary schools [6]. Robotics education steps out of the schools and it is trying to attract children in a free-time clubs, summer camps or museums [7]. An in-depth overview of European educational activities in the robotics field can be found in [8].
Although robotics is suitable education tool for every age group [1], methods used to employ robotics in education are very different -they depend not only on the discipline but also on the country.
Visegrad Robotics Workshop (VRW) was a one-year project devoted to identify and present these differences, to share some methods we are using to teach and some ideas we are using to popularize robotics in four countries: Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, and Czech Republic. Universities involved in this project organized seminars or conferences, showed some specific features in teaching and laboratory work. Exchanging knowledge, experience, problems, and even missions was very important and inspiring. International group stimulated new solutions during workshops based on various backgrounds of participants. In addition, each organization conducted its own robotics competition. To implement the idea of VRW, the authors have joined forces in a standard grant at the International Visegrad Fund [9].
The Visegrad Group, also called the Visegrad Four, or V4 is an alliance of four Central European states-Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia -for the purposes of furthering their European integration as well as advancing their military, economic and energy cooperation with one another. The purpose of the International Visegrad Fund is to facilitate and promote the development of closer cooperation among citizens and institutions in the region and other countries, especially in the Eastern Partnership regions [9].

Goals of Visegrad Robotics Workshops
Visegrad Robotics Workshop [10]

Four Cities -Four Experiences
Mixed group of students from all four participating universities (4 students from Belarus, 4 from Czech Republic, 3 from Slovakia and 4 from Poland) was created. The students already attended basic courses at their home universities, but they lack of any practical experiences. We assumed not to repeat the basic courses but to build some additional knowledge and necessary skills based on hands-on experiences.

Workshop in Bratislava
The 13th annual international robotic contest Istrobot [11] organized by Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STU) and Robotika.SK was the first event of VRW. This dynamic competition lasted whole day and was located in the premises of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. Visitors could see over 60 robots in four official categories and on display in the corridors of the faculty. More than 500 spectators came to see various robots competing on the scene and presented all around. The competition was a great start and motivation for students in our mixed group. They were expecting to do something similar in following days. Besides the lectures, students had the laboratory tour and hands-on workshop with Acrob robots [12]. The detailed explanations on the objectives and experiments were provided. Part of the workshop was also an excursion to the ME-Inspection Company. Company sensors production and live inspection systems were presented. Evaluation of the activities based on questionnaires from the participants is summarized in Tab 1. Students were highly motivated and were able to grasp concepts very quickly. Within an hour they were able to program the Acrob robots within the Arduino environment. Robots were able to perform a simple line-following with an obstacle avoidance.

Workshop in Prague
The next visit within the Visegrad Robotics Workshop began with the jubilee 10th robotics competition Czech Robotic Day [13]. It was co-organized by the Robonika association and Charles University in Prague and brought over 120 robots from six countries. Over 500 spectators visited this event and observed seven categories of competitions. Since the start in 2004, Charles University supports the event recognizing the values of joint theoretical and practical education. Therefore, the special workshop is an indivisible part of the event both for teams and public. It is dedicated to the exchange of experiences related to the construction of the robots starting in the competition. Intentionally, this workshop is organized always one day after the competition when the participants are still well aware of everything concerning their robots but they are already past the competition stress. The basic layout of the workshop is set as a series of presentations by individual teams participating in the contest with sufficient time margins for discussions.
At the workshop, teams discuss deep technical details and willingly answer many questions both from other participants, visiting students as well as public attending the workshop.
It has proven over the years that the impact of this workshop is manifold; participants share knowledge about all topics concerned (hardware, software, theory, algorithms, team management etc.) and set new contacts both on professional as well as social level. The presence of VRW participants was well accepted especially for the opportunity to discuss different curricula styles in their home institutions and possible future cooperation between them.
On the following days, the program consisted of lectures and hands-on exercises (see the Fig. 2 and the list in Tab. 2).
Every day the morning was devoted to the lectures and the afternoons were reserved for practical hands-on robotic lab experience. These were implemented using a mobile robot MOB-2 (see Fig. 3) designed by David Obdržálek [14] for his curricula on software engineering and allowed for efficient testing of control algorithms. Although the participants did not have any experience with this particular platform, they were quickly able to exploit it and perform basic tasks in localization and control.

Workshop in Łódź
Robotix Week in Łódź started on 17. 11. 2013 with workshop about human-robot interfaces based on Android devices or other computers communicating via Bluetooth. The latest gadgets like smartphones, tablets or laptops are perfect for intuitive driving of the mobile robot, and if the robot is additionally equipped with a camera we can see on the screen images from the remote places where we had sent our scout to. Students have proposed different scenarios for small micromouse robots being controlled from mobile devices 1 . This Interactive Robotics Workshop was following five simple points: 1. Teacher explains how Processing and Arduino works. 2. Students work in groups, creating interface for human-robot interaction that solves some problem. 3. Students start with a prototype, then test, then make better prototype. 4. Students have to test their projects with different people (from same group and from other groups). 5. Successful project is the one in which no explanation is needed (and is fun).
The detailed description of this workshop and the whole philosophy behind it can be found in [15]. The next day brought a new experience -working with sets of LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit [16] utilizing hardware and software from National Instruments -project partner of the Robotix Week. Students got familiar with LabVIEW graphical programming environment; worked with RealTime and FPGA based systems being brains of the mobile robots. Sixteen people participated in this workshop, most of them using LabVIEW for the very first time. During 5 hours of hand-on experience they have learned the general idea of graphical programming, the structure of the hierarchical control system of DaNI mobile robot (i.e. low level control of two motors, encoders and sonar, mid-level control of trajectory following, kinematics of unicycle, obstacle avoidance, and the user interface), and they made simple programs. Students started with direct control of motors from simple user interface, and then used relation between sensor and motors to safely stop the robot in the front of an obstacle. Then the students continue with the application to control mobile robot in the XY coordinate frame.
Next two days the students were involved in the 4 th International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE 2013) [17] which hosted over 50 participants from 17 countries. Twenty two regular papers were presented in the sessions and we could see robot exhibition with LabVIEW Robotics, Kuka Agilus and the NAO Robot. Students were listening the presentations and even that some talks were too theoretical for them, interesting and useful facts were learned. For most of students, it was a first real scientific conference visited, so they consider it as a valuable experience. On Saturday the sun came out and the inhabitants of Łódź (a few hundred people, mostly with kids) were able, for the first time in Poland, to see the struggles of autonomous mobile robots in the Poniatowski Park. Autonomous mobile robots had to travel from the ordered starting location to the ordered destination location using only paved routes available on the openstreet map of the area. There were four rounds during the contest with different start-end locations. Robots were starting simultaneously (Fig. 5) and should avoid obstacles (e.g. other robots) in front of them, and never stride to the grass area of park. Routing between start and final location had to be made autonomously, too. Robots had one hour to reach the goal. Robots were struggled not only with technical problems but also with environmental conditions: there was not much difference between paved and green parts of routs in the park, the sun shining through the trees confused vision systems, and leaves lying all over the places were nightmare for laser and vision sensors. Results of the Robotour competitions are shown in the Tab. 3.  The Robotour contest [18] was brought to Łódź from the Czech Republic by Martin Dlouhý from the non-profit association Robonika. Eight robots of various sizes and constructions were designed to independently drive the distance of over 500 meters from the starting point to the target location determined by GPS coordinates. Although the participants of our workshop were not parts of the competing teams (but their teachers did), they were very curious and we found them often immersed in discussions with authors of the robots.

Workshop in Brest
The last meeting of the project took place in Brest and included the International Conference Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Problems and Perspective (RAIPAP) [19], workshops and robot competition Roborace [20], all of them were organized by the Brest State Technical University. Practical part of the workshop consisted of the workshop on robots programming using the machine learning tools (reinforced learning). Programs were tested on mobile robots Pop-Bot 2 and using the RL-Glue environment [21]. Second workshop was devoted to the preparation of robots to compete in a special run during competition Roborace (see workshops voting in tables 4 and 5).
It is quite natural, that the conference, which was held for the first time, received the smallest evaluation. In the Belarus the robotics is still too young to organize serious conference.
Let us describe the Roborace competition in more details. The competition idea originates from the Formula One competition. It is very famous and hi-tech race and the Roborace competition took the best from it. The main challenge of the Roborace is to prepare the robot for dynamically changing environment on the track. Not only the track following is necessary, but also the other competing robots are part of the environment. The winner is the robot, which can pass the 25 laps in shortest time. Length of the single lap varies, but usually its length is 25 -30 meters, giving the total length of circa 625 meters. Students can build their own robots or they can use a pre-made platform. They are working in teams, usually consisting of two or three students: programmer, mechanic and electronic engineers. The competitions start with qualifications selecting the fastest robots for semifinals, where the 15 laps is required to race. Three best robots from each semifinal compete in finals. Winners usually drive total length up to 1000 m. Every track (see Fig.) has the walls and black lines which makes possible to use the various approaches to robot control. Beginners can use the strategy based on simple black line following algorithm, which is slow, but reliable. Advanced competitors are using infrared or ultrasonic range finders for adaptive and more complicated strategies. Six robots on the track create unpredictable dynamic environment, and the control algorithms has to cope with it.
2 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/9501 During the race, the robots can overtake one another, but also to flip over, or to be stuck. It is allowed to pick the robot and move it to the pit stop and after repair put it to the start point again.
Power efficiency, strategies for overtaking, pit stops and sensor placement make Roborace a very good sandbox for experiments. Students and teachers are usually spending up to the 2-3 weeks per month for basic experiments and programming, to be prepared for real tests of their ideas on the track. Using the Roborace as a robotics teaching tool is very efficient, but it requires a really large amount of students' time. This is sometimes very difficult if not impossible to achieve. Often the additional problem with the teamwork appears and the teams have to learn it for the success in races.  During the of Brest VRW we want to see how good will be the mixed students teams from Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland without preliminary experiences with this type of competition. With this question in mind, we organized the special mini-race with the three laps only and for the pre-made POP-BOT platforms. Results are summarized in the Tab 6. We can see that four out of the six teams (66.6%) were able to successfully finish all the three laps. Comparing the times achieved, we can see the very small difference between the first and second pairs of robots. This shows that even beginners coped with the task successfully and demonstrate very good motivation for the problem solving. For comparison, we provide also the results of both beginners and "professionals" (see Fig. 7). The main difference is in the higher time variations in beginners' class.
These results proved the idea that the Roborace is a very good robotics training method. In the future, we plan further improvements of the Roborace competition.

Results of Workshops
The main output of the project was a series of workshops that could help to launch new internationally connected activities. During four events we shared our knowledge and experience in teaching robotics and other high-tech related subjects (control theory, computer graphics, Android programming, artificial intelligence) and therefor e we have strengthened the scientific potential in participating organizations. Our face-to-face meetings proved to be much more effective than any kind of distant conversation and learning. Being in one place for a few days, faculty and students became aware of the local problems and learned new methods of teaching. We have continuously exchanged ideas, discussed new opportunities and further plans. We have prepared extended version of VRW involving more organizations from Eastern Partnership countries (Belarus and Ukraine), but unfortunately, mostly due to the safety issues, was not realized yet.
One of the examples how ideas were spread is the Ketchup House tournament. Until 2013 it was known only in Bratislava, during the VRW the Czech group was able to observe it and later bring all equipment necessary to organize the same competitions during event in Prague (see Fig. 8). This project was also the main motivation to organize International Conference on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Problems and perspective (RAIPAP) in Brest where we had the opportunity to listen to guests from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
New knowledge came also with the Roborace competition (see Fig. 6) -contest unknown in Visegrad countries, while extremely popular in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. It was a very spectacular event with a dynamic course, which possibly will be adopted in other countries next year.
Brest Workshop had immediate results -participation in Roborace run -all students worked on the same robots and, therefore, control programs were the main issue showing seamless cooperation in mixed teams. As we expected, events in different countries encouraged students for mobility and gave positive results on social and personal level.
In total, almost 40 different persons from partner organizations attended workshops expanding their knowledge and experience; several hundred took part in conferences and competitions within the project.

Discussion and Conclusion
All four workshops brought new experiences and besides the immediate positive impact on the participants, also some new challenges and questions. All participants, teachers and students appreciated the work in international teams, practical workshops and contests. For the future there is a question how to include such method of education into the standard curricula at the host universities. It would be beneficial if such workshops are not occasional but standard part of the regular engineering education. Financial support is crucial; without it, probably no one would take part in this venture. Especially travel and accommodation costs are too high to be covered by students themselves.
Involving students into the standard scientific conference should be recommended. Whenever possible, conference organizers should open access to such events at least to the students of the hosting institution. Also the showing the best of the standard lectures should be at least time-to-time presented outside of the standard curricula.
Partners explored possibilities and resources of each university and organization, they also observed robotics contests not known before. Some of them are now used in the robotics competitions in the other countries, e.g. Bear Rescue, Ketchup House, and Roborace are present in Poland at Sumo Challenge Robotics Competitions since 2014 and are getting more and more interest.

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Experiences from the Series of International Robotics Workshops The other concept worth to be implemented in the future is an idea of a single study/research project being realized during several interconnected workshops performed in different countries.