Another week of lock down and the death toll in the UK is now over 33,600. Well, when I say another week of lock down, it has been here in Scotland (and Wales and Northern Ireland), but not in England where some restrictions have been lifted.
Last week I, along with millions of others watched the UK Prime Minister give what can only be described as confusing address to the nation. In his haste to give give some “good news” he seemed to forget that the measures he was describing only applied to England and not the rest of the “great nation” he claims to love so much.
The confusion, derision this statement caused compares so starkly with other countries such as New Zealand who not only have keep their death toll and infection rates low, but have also manage to provide clear, consistent messaging to their citizens and even more excitingly have allowed hairdressers to re-open. The clumsiness of the change of messaging to “stay alert” has exposed the rising challenges within our political system around the importance of people over profit. We all need to “get back to work” and stop enjoy this self enforced holiday!
This week I had a bit of a break, not quite a holiday, but I did enjoy a few email and twitter free days. At the start of this year I promised myself I would be better at taking “proper” holidays. When you work for yourself, there is a temptation to work as much as you can and never be too far from your email, just in case something pops up. I was a good decision and I feel much better for it. I even managed to get a bit of painting done. This is my reaction to the tracking app I wrote about 2 weeks ago. The beauty of the tulip representing the apparent beautiful ease and simplicity of using an app to track and trace people, without enough attention being applied to the wider implications of data gathering and civil liberties.
Track, trace, tulip, acrylic on canvas, Sheila MacNeill, 2020
So my week of online conferences were pretty much all social. Apart from Friday morning when I joined the Service Design in Education webinar.
I have an awareness of service design from a quite a few years ago when I was at CETIS and we were staring to look at learning analytics. I wrote a couple of briefing papers with Jean Mutton (who at that point was working at the University of Derby) and her developing use of service design approaches. It was lovey to catch up with Jean again too on Friday.
There is now an emerging service design community across the education sector, and it was really interesting to get an overview of some of the work that is being done, Katie Murrie and the team at the Service Design Academy in Dundee and August college have been doing some really fabulous work across all education sectors through service design approaches. I need to find out more about the differences an similarities between service design and universal design at some point too. I think my natural instincts for educational/learning design is a mish-mash of both!
I have to say it was also a really well designed and delivered session which added to the overall high levels of engagement from all the delegates – design really does matter! It was the first time I have actually been in a zoom session using breakout rooms and that all worked well. I’m certainly going to keep an eye on developments in this community. You can find out more about the emerging community here.
During the week I became even more convinced that we need to be using the term physical distancing more than social distancing. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but just now I think it’s really not getting through to people that the physical distance between us is really important. Wearing a mask doesn’t mean you can ignore that 2 meter guidance. But I know it’s hard.
Like everyone I miss people, I really do. So when I heard an interview with the wonderful Benjamin Zephaniah, this poem really resonated with what we are experiencing right now. So I’ll leave you with this version of it, dear reader. Until next week stay safe.
In this post I’m going to try and encapsulate some of my thoughts around what is happening just now in terms of tertiary education, the impact of #lockdown and the apparently all consuming online pivot. This post will hopefully augment and complement a webinar keynote I gave on 6th May for GMIT and their DigitalEd Discovery Series. Many thanks to Carina McGinty for inviting me and allowing me to share a virtual platform with the wonderful Sue Beckingham.
Some of these ideas come from conversations I’ve been having with colleagues across the sector and special thanks to Simon Horrocks, Kerr Gardiner and Louise Drumm for the conversations we’ve had recently.
When I hear or read the words online pivot, I can’t help but think of the Friends episode where “the gang’ are trying to move a sofa up a flight of stairs. Of course, all sorts of hilarity ensues as they try and turn a corner, leading to Ross yelling “pivot”, and no-one actually knowing where they have to pivot to. I think it ends with most of the gang walking away and leaving Ross and the sofa. I don’t think we ever really find out just how the sofa actually ends up in Ross’s apartment -but as this is just a TV show it doesn’t really matter. If it were real life, the sofa would either have got damaged/broken or Ross would have maybe hired some professional movers to get the job done.
But back to our current online pivot. I think that this episode or meme does help us think through some of the big questions around the so call online pivot in education. Crucially in terms of these questions: what is it that is being pivoted? Is it the curriculum, the institution? Our learning environments, our approaches to teaching and assessment? Our learning spaces? And, who is being pivoted? Our teaching staff? Our support staff? Our senior management? our students? Our communities? And does everyone know what their role is in this pivot? Or are they just hearing (seeing) someone constantly yelling “PIVOT” and not being actually sure of where they (or how) they are supposed to be pivoting they just end up walking away or in our cases not applying to uni/college this year or ever.
If all of the above are being pivoted then there needs to be some really consistent, clearly understood, accessible, inclusive, instructions for the start of the new “old” academic year for all students and staff. Although “the pivot” got the sector through the initial chaos of #lockdown, that just in time approach isn’t sustainable.
There a number of models out there. This article in Inside Higher Ed presents 15. These are very much based on the American model so a couple of them aren’t really that viable in Ireland and the UK. This article from Laura Czerniewicz also provides an very thoughtful, accessible overview of some of the wider pressures on the sector right now.
I’ve also been discussing various options with colleagues that I’m working with, as well as keeping half an eye on other things that people are sharing but it does seem to me that there is something missing, or perhaps just a bit too hidden, in the current discourse, particularly around our students. The pivot does seem to have been done to them and not with them. This is where why I think we need to start thinking more the about “the pivot” in terms of students.
Already we have 10s of thousands of our current students whose “student experience” has been totally disrupted. Exams in some cases have been cancelled, changed to perhaps open book exams which could be a very different experience, particularly when all submission is online. Access to stable wifi, labs, laptops, quiet and collaborative spaces on-campus has been abruptly ended, with no clear indication of when or if that will resume.
Whilst the vast majority of students do have some kind of mobile phone, they don’t all have access to their own laptops at home and with the wider context of lockdown they may very well be negotiating use of a family computer with multiple others – all of whom will have their own priorities. The what and how of student engagement is fundamentally changing and any model we adopt for future delivery has to be cognisant of that.
This week in the UK there has been raft of commentary in the media around the injustice of students in England being charged full fees, but not getting an “real” aka face to face teaching. Of course this highlights a general lack of understanding of what online learning is and the very real role of the teacher and wider development teams in successful online learning. That urban myth of online being second best is something that needs to busted – that conception that “good” tertiary education is exemplified by the lecture at the front of a large lecture theatre really does need to change, and we all have a role to play in doing that.
So I am proposing that one way to do that would be to develop some extended discourse around participation. Let’s talk stop talking about the as much about the online pivot and start talking about the participation pivot.
Let’s look at participation and what that means for our students and staff and see if we can use what is happening just now to gain back some time and breathing space for everyone. To do this, I think we really need to be starting by revisiting the notion of the student experience. It’s not going to be what it was for quite some time. The social aspect of college/university is gone for at least the rest of this year if not longer.
This is my starter for 10 on developing a model that allows us to work with students and allows our current context to be a key driver for our curriculum development.
revisiting the student experience
For a starting point I’m suggesting we need to really look at the 1st year experience. We have a large group of young adults whose lives have been turned upside down. I’m sure many of you are living with that right now. Their exams have been cancelled, they’re dealing with “unusual” marking of class work to get their grades, the whole end of school rites of passage things have been cancelled – not trips away, no house parties, no opportunities to really become yourself, which is key aspect of growing up.
The research from about a decade ago now around the first year experience was about keeping students in first year. Just now it is more about getting students into first year. Why would you go to uni this year when things are so unsettled, you haven’t been able to complete the exams you thought you would ,when you might have to do that “online learning” and all the additional challenges that brings.
So we really need to have a major rethink about induction. It can’t be just one packed week of online webinars just showing how systems work, there’s not going to be a huge queue of students trying to get their library card, but we need to make sure that there getting user names and passwords is really easy and support is in place for that.
I think the whole induction notion needs to be extended into a wider change of focus take a more integrated long thin approach rather than the short fat model we are used to. I see this a part of a wider flipping of the curriculum and rethinking of digital and physical spaces and how, when and who interacts in them.
We need to start redefining and articulating what engagement looks like/is for between staff and students, between students and students and between staff and staff – research, teaching, support, management – everyone. For this to really happen I think there needs to be a refocus away initially for subject/discipline content to the development of digital capabilities. Of course there could a discipline focus here but really I think going back to induction the first term/semester should really be about getting students (and staff) comfortable and familiar with institutionally provided learning and teaching technology and their own “new” learning spaces.
There is a huge co-production opportunity here to work with students and getting their active input into how and when activities are best delivered. This could be done through a range of activities that focused on the reality of life for us all just now.
COVID 19 relates to every discipline, and every aspect of our life. We could use this time to develop critical thinking and research skills. Looking to critical pedagogy we could encourage our students (and staff) to critically engage with the current context of our society and education right now. What about some kind of communal, inter-disciplinary digital research methods module for 1st years? Encourage the development of data literacy skills in the context of the daily government briefings, to ensure students know how to interpret data and question and critique how data is presented to the public. In this scenario,
Library staff could be far better integrated into course/module development and delivery along with other support service staff. Get students to develop their digital scholarship capabilities much earlier, and encourage them to develop digital stories using a range of media, and really develop more reflective approaches to learning and assessment.
Also going back to physical spaces, there are going to be challenges in any return to campus, and use of our spaces in relation to social distancing. There may be opportunities for sharing of space between universities, but I think that there might be an opportunity for universities/colleges to work with the community a bit more here too and students should have a role in this too.
Our campuses are technology rich spaces with wifi (and a superfast network that isn’t being used to capacity right now). Given the inequalities that are being so clearly highlighted just now and the ever increasing reliance on digital interactions for every type of service, would it be possible to open some of our spaces to the community (with safe social distancing measures of course). I ca see some great student project opportunities here . . .working across disciplines, across years . . .
What about some of the huge ethical challenges we are facing around contact tracing and the using mobile apps or fast tracking vaccination research and human testing? I know I feel a sense of powerlessness around these issues and to be honest at times I feel just too overwhelmed, tired and scared to explore and critique more. But that’s what education is for. We need to be providing opportunities for our students to gain a sense of agency around these issues and the world we are all living in right now. To investigate, research, perhaps be part of research teams, to question to critique to develop alternative approaches, that kind of “real world” learning that in anytime is crucial. Let’s explore and develop our design approaches with our students and really learn together about what does and doesn’t work in terms of meaningful participation and engagement.
In terms of evaluation, our current module evaluation questions could now be next to useless. So why don’t we use students to actively evaluate the tech we are using? Work out together the affordances of each and combine with data/analytics, think about time online – how long do students want to be in live lecture? The balance of sync/async activities. We’re all experiencing zoom fatigue now so lets ensure the education sector is leading in developing and sharing best practice for new ways of working. Let our students go to employers with really effective, innovative was of working and communication effectively online and offline.
Taking this approach of course wouldn’t be comfortable or easy. But we can’t go back to business as usual – everything has fundamental changed. Why are we trying to replicate a system that is no long fit for purpose?
However what it might do would be to give us the time to develop a more nuanced understanding of what the student experience is now. Critique, evaluate that with our students, come to common, shared understandings of what participation means now, and how to ensure that we are supporting delivery relevant educational experiences to what could very well be a lost generation. Allowing them to be as fully equipped in terms of digital capabilities, reflective and critical thinking skills as they can be so that they can take the lead in how their society/ies develop in the (hopefully) post covid-19 world.
I was glad to see last week the 2019 Educase Horizon Report published. Like many others I had a bit of a “love/hate” or perhaps more accurately “read/groan” attitude towards the now defunct NMC Horizon reports. After wondering for many a year how the expert panel was chosen and how one c/would be part of it, I found out (you just ask), and I finally managed to get on the panel just before the NMC went bust.
However, having made it to the panel and done a bit of earlier work I was happy to continue being part of the work as its new home was found. I think this year the report has moved on a bit. I particularly like the way that the panel discussion and debate is reflected in the report. It really does add value. The highlighting of significant challenges impeding HE tech adoption also appeals to my inner cynic.
I think this year does reflect my own experience more, particularly in areas like developing approaches to blended learning and staff development. The later is so often forgotten as institutional plans are drawn up. If you don’t actively and genuinely involve staff (and students, though that is harder due to their natural turn over) in your plans for changing your “value system” or introducing new technology, then you won’t get the kind of change that a vision statement may allude to. Again it is good to see the discussion around the need for more instructional designers and for teaching staff to develop their design skills. This is closely linked to digital capabilities and what the report is referring to as digital fluency. Still not quite sure about that term . . . There’s also a more nuanced approach to data and analytics.
So whilst there may still be a few read/groan moments, overall I think this year’s report is really worth a read and well done the the editorial team for pulling all the discussions together in such a coherent and useful way.
As I’ve written about here and here, I’m leading a consultation exercise with staff and students here at GCU around the potential for learning (as opposed to lecture) capture. As we’ve been meeting with students and staff we have been capturing their feedback, thoughts and suggestions in a variety of ways. Post it notes have featured quite heavily in this processJ You can see collated feedback from sessions so far in this padlet wall.
Students and staff both seemed to be enthused by the notion
of learning capture and dare I say even excited at the prospect of developing
an approach to capturing and sharing key elements of learning – not just
recordings of lectures.
At a session with staff last week, I wanted to try and delve
a bit more deeply t into some of the practicalities and challenges of
capturing, sharing and curating. So, adapting the trusty who, what,
where, why and when methodology I came up with a model for participants to work
through the life cycle of a potential “learning capture”.
From our previous sessions we were easily able to share a list of things that are common place that staff/students had identified as learning capture. The idea was for groups to take one (or two or seven) of these and work through the model – critiquing it and what was involved at each stage.
the basic model
Starting with what, which would be the what are students actually doing e.g. a Q&A session or a group discussion, how – how is this instantiated e.g a padlet board, who sets up the board e.g. staff or students?, when does the activity take place e.g. sync/async activity, where does it take place e.g in live session on campus, on the web, in the VLE, and share – where is the output shared, who shares it (again staff or students) and how long is it accessible for?
The 2 pictures below give an indication of 2 possible
scenarios.
Q&A using padlet set up by member of staffStudent recording of in class group discussion
During the session it became apparent that quite a few
members of staff really hadn’t considered how (or where) they share the outputs
of learning activities, A couple of staff members said they really hadn’t
thought about reusing any student generated outputs with future cohorts, or
about saving outputs anywhere else but the VLE and on their own PCs. The
discussion had made them realise that it might be useful to share the learning
capture of, for example an in-class quiz to test core knowledge and
understandings with other colleagues teaching on the same module.
Now, dear reader, you are probably thinking where is the
why? And quite rightly so. I was torn between what and why and decided to
opt for the former as the later is really a key part of this whole exercise.
The share aspect was to explicitly get participants to think about where,
how and for how long outputs were shared/available to both students and other
staff.
Of course, one of the groups did bring it back into to their
discussions (which was great).
Their discussion, based on one of the groups regular
teaching activities, really evolved in the importance of the process of
learning rather than the final output itself, which has limited value if you
didn’t experience the actual learning. So they were then taken back to a
wider discussion around activity (or learning) design.
Photo of group output
As ever the discussions probably raised more questions than answers. However, I think using the model has helped to unpack some of the key issues particularly around the importance of understanding and making explicit the process of learning. So I’m now thinking could developing and sharing a process where students had more of an input into the decision of where and what was to be captured actually be beneficial in them understanding the learning process and develop greater understanding and agency of their experiences of learning. That might be far more beneficial than thinking about any kind of product.
This week I have had to contrasting but equally inspiring (in different ways) experiences which I just want to share a quick reflection on.
On Monday I crossed off something from, which if I had one, might well be on my bucket list. It’s something had a negative experience a long time ago that tainted me, but over time I have come back to and seen the real value of both personally and professionally. What could that be I hear you ask, dear reader? Well, on Monday (along with colleagues from our library) I helped to create a new Wikipedia article as part of a #1lib event organised by my colleague Marion Kelt.
Sara Thomas, currently a Wikimedian in residence at SLIC, facilitated an really excellent workshop on using wikimedia for education. I have watched with great interest how a growing number of institutions are working with the wikimedia foundation. Ewan McAndrew, the current Wikimedian in residence at the University of Edinburgh spent some time with Marion and myself last year sharing some of the fabulous work he is supporting there. Ewan has also kindly extended invitations to a number of editathons, but for one reason or another I have never quite got there, or got there too late to actually do anything.
So it was great to actually go through the process of setting up, researching and starting to create a page and also get a really useful overview of the validity, reporting and general overview of wikipedia processes and growing number of support resources for education. I also found out a lot about Orkney Library and hope that others will contribute to the page.
Hopefully over the coming year, we can get some more Wikipedia activity going in the University.
On Thursday morning I had a different, more virtual, international experience through #DigitalGuardiansEg. This was a twitter scavenger hunt, designed by Maha Bali as part of a digital identities and literacies and intercultural learning course. You can read an overview of the design of the activity here. This post is just such a great example of open educational practice. I really love and admire the way Maha shares her learning designs and the resources she recommends.
It was great fun, way to start the day connecting with the class in Egypt, and with many others from around the world on twitter, join in the mystery object photo challenge.
Another part of the activity for the class was to create an “alternative CV” and publish it (again see Maha’s post for more details). This activity was so interesting to interact with on so many levels. I was really moved by the way a number of the students engaged with the activity and the empathy and reflections they shared. Breaking out of the traditional CV format is really powerful. If you have time I would encourage you to explore #digitalguardianseg.
Like the majority of people living and working in a predominately white, middle class, privileged, global North bubble, I don’t spend enough time reflecting on post colonalism, and intercultural issues. I was again moved by the generosity of Maha’s poem, I’m Not Angry at You. I really hope you aren’t angry at me Maha! But it made me angry at them, and myself for my own complacency.
Like others in the sector, we are increasingly using digital storytelling as a method for students to develop self reflection and digital capabilities. I’m am going to share the video below a lot now. We need to hear/see/ read so many more stories.
It was an absolute privilege and pleasure to be able to interact with Maha’s students this week and experience some of their stories.
This post is an attempt to try and sort our a stream of thoughts currently running around my brain after last week’s #BYOD4L event; after hearing Chrissi talking about open practice at this event also last week; and some quick chats with my fellow #BYOD4L facilitators. I’m also following Laura Pasquani’s current work in networked, digital academic life in HE.
I’m trying to make sense of what it is about #BYOD4l that motivates me, my fellow facilitators and the wider community to continue to participate. There are many unique things about #BYOD4L, but at its heart is an open and flexible design based on open educational practice – the 5 C framework.
This year we extend the model slightly to add 5 more Cs to the mix to reflect some changes in practice and to extend the conversations particularly in the nightly tweet chats. Every year we have a quick review meeting to see what we should update, but we haven’t (so far) felt the need to update the original content and resources. That might be down to lack of time, perhaps a bit of laziness? But also the fact that it all seems OK. That might change next year. However I think we are probably less concerned with the content as we know it is the community interaction that is at the heart of the week. So we tend to focus our attention on making sure that the synchronous bits are fully supported.
As #BYOD4L has evolved, it seems to me that the nightly tweet chats have become increasingly important. In fact, based on no real evidence whatsoever apart from my observed interaction, I think that for many this is their main contact with the event.
The community engagement is (perhaps) more important than the content/design of the day. Also the chats aren’t really so much about BYOD anymore, they seem to me (again without any empirical evidence) to be about practice and how we are all dealing with the many boundaries we have to deal with in (higher) education between personal/professional everyday practice, personal/institutional technology provision, formal and informal academic development. Hence the link with Laura’s work.
How does being part of a digital learning network support learning and development for higher ed professionals?
How are faculty and staff shaping their online identity and presence to share professional values, work, etc.?
How can does a networked community expand knowledge to enhance our roles on campus and the work we do?
Why might others higher ed professionals want to network with peers to scaffold their own career goals?
I really hope that I can participate in at least one of the slow tweetchats she has planned over the coming months. Not least to compare that experience with the somewhat frenetic hour long #BYOD4L ones.
We have 5 years worth of archived tweets now and it would be fascinating and probably quite illuminating to do some proper SNA, textual analysis of the tweet chats – another one day job . . .
However back to motivation. There is definitely something about the open, collaborative element of the event that provides my motivation to continue to be involved in the facilitation team. It also provides really accessible routes in and out of my daily professional development and the support I provide from others within and outwith my institution. This is first year I haven’t actually organised some kind of CPD event in my institution around #BYOD4L. That was largely down to other work commitments during the week, and tbh lack of headspace for me to do that.
That said, despite it being a really busy week for me, participating and facilitating the week has really provided me with a much needed networked, community boost – another key motivation factor for continuing to be involved. The community interaction makes me think about “stuff” – particularly my own CPD and in turn the wider CPD provision I am involved in my institution, in a different way. It’s also giving my blog a bit of an injection which is always good. (Well for me anyway, hopefully it is for you too, dear reader). #BYOD4l allows me to cross many boundaries, which links to Chrissi’s PhD research which specially investigated the:
benefits of crossing boundaries (i.e. open learning) in an academic development contextand proposes an alternative model to traditional academic Continuing Professional Development (CPD). It engages academic staff in experiencing novel approaches to learning and teaching and developing as practitioners through engagement in academic CPD that stretches beyond institutionalboundaries, characterised by diversity and based on collaboration and openness.”
I’m really hoping that with the rest of my facilitation team we can explore this more and write up our experiences of not just open learning but the motivations, benefits and challenges of open facilitation using Chriss’s PhD (which I am really enjoying reading just now) as our theoretical underpinning.
This is probably going to be an even more incoherent ramble than normal but I have been trying to write posts around a number of things for the last couple of weeks I’m going to try and merge them.
A couple of weeks ago, I read this post by David Wiley. At the time I tweeted:
need to consider this post more but I am still uneasy about focus on platforms https://t.co/ldfOeEFFm2
I confess to a more than a bit of this sentiment, and not just in relation to OER, “Much of the OER movement has a bad attitude about platforms.” I am always wary when the focus is on developing platforms and not developing the people who will use these platforms.
I was once in a meeting where I put forward the “people and process not platforms and products” case. I was told that what was being discussed was platform “in the Californian sense of platform”. . . I’m sure a classic WTF look must have passed over my face, but it was explained that this meant people as well as technology. Geography aside, three years later this sense of platform doesn’t seem to be that wide spread or acknowledged. Maybe I need to go to California. But I digress.
Not long before the Wiley post I was reading the Pearson White Paper on learning design. It caused me a bit of unease too. Part of me was delighted to see learning design being recognised by, whatever might happen to them, a significant player in the education technology provider field. Using learning design to help product design is a bit of a no brainer. Technology should be driven by educational need or as Pearson put it :
“Products and systems that effectively leverage learning design can deliver superior learning outcomes.”
One example in the paper referred to work they had done in social science classes
“we quickly recognized that students were easily distracted by conventional textbooks. This told us we needed to eliminate distractions: any extraneous cognitive load that doesn’t promote learning. Fortunately, our learning design work reveals many proven techniques for accomplishing this. REVEL segments all content into manageable pieces and presents it via a consistent structure. It provides strong signaling cues to highlight key material and places all relevant content on screen simultaneously to offer a continuous, uninterrupted experience”
Which kind of related to this point from the Wiley post:
“Our fixation on discovery and assembly also distracts us from other serious platform needs – like platforms for the collaborative development of OER and open assessments (assessments are the lifeblood of this new generation of platforms), where faculty and students can work together to create and update the core materials that support learning in our institutions. Our work in OER will never be truly sustainable until faculty and students jointly own this process, and that can’t happen until a new category of tools emerges that enables and supports this critical work. (Grant money for OER creation won’t last forever.)
And don’t even start trying to explain how the LMS is the answer. Just don’t. “
Well of course Pearson do try to explain that:
“As testing progresses, we can overcome problems that compromise outcomes and build a strong case that our design will support learning. The very same work also helps us tightly define assessments to find out if the product works in real classrooms”
Of course they don’t really touch on the OER aspect (all their learning design stuff has been made available with CC goodness) but I’ll come back to that.
That phrase “if the product works”, I keep coming back to that. So on the one hand I have to be pleased that Pearson are recognising learning design. I have no argument with their core principles . I agree with them all. But I am still left with the niggle around the assumption that the platform will “do” all the learning design for both staff and students. That underlying assumption that if only we had the right platform all would be well, everything could be personalised, through data and analytics and we’d have no retention issues. That niggles me.
I was part of a plenary panel at the HESPA conference last week called “the future of learner analytics” where a number of these issues came up again. The questions asked by this group of educational planners really stimulated a lot of debate. On reflection I was maybe a bit of a broken record. I kept coming back not to platforms but people and more importantly time. We really need to give our staff and students (but particularly our staff) time to engage with learning analytics. Alongside the technical infrastructure for learning analytics we need to asking where’s the CPD planning for analytics? They need to go hand in hand. Cathy Gunn, Jenny McDonald and John Milne’s excellent paper “the missing link for learning from analytics” sums this up perfectly:
“there is a pressing need to add professional development and strategies to engage teachers to growing range of learning analytics initiatives If these areas are not addressed, adoption of the quality systems and tools that are currently available or underdevelopment may remain in the domain of the researchers and data analysis experts”
There seems to be an assumption that personalisation of learning is a “good thing” but is it? Going back to learning design, designing engaging learning activities is probably more worthwhile and ultimately more useful to students and society than trying to create homogenised, personalised chunked up content and assessments. Designing to create more effective engagement with assessment and feedback is, imho, always going to be more effective than trying to design the perfect assessment platform.
In terms of assessment, early last week I was also at a Scotbug (our regional Blackboard user group) meeting, where I was in a group where we had to design an assessment system. This is what we came up with – the flipped assessment – aka student generated assessments.
Not new, but based on pedagogy and technology that is already in use ( NB there’s been a really great discussion around some of this in the ALT list this weekend). I don’t think we need any new platforms for this type of approach to assessment and feedback – but we do need to think about learning design (which encapsulates assessment design) more, and give more time for CPD for staff to engage more with the design process and the technologies they either have to, use or want to use. This of course all relates to digital capability and capacity building.
So whilst we’re thinking about next gen platforms, learning environments, please let’s not forget people. Let’s keep pressing for time for staff CPD to allow the culture shifts to happen around understand the value of OER, of sharing, of taking time to engage with learning design and not just having to tweak modules when there’s a bit of down time.
People are the most important part of any learning environment – next gen, this gen, past gen. But people need time to evolve too, we can’t forget them or try to design out the need for them for successful learning and teaching to take place. Ultimately it’s people that will make the product work.
As promised this post shares the summary findings from our recent online event, GCU Games On. As I’ve written about before we developed this very quickly (in a month from idea to online) so we were very aware of some of the pedagogic shortcomings of our overall design. However given the rapid development time during the start of summer holidays when most of our subject experts were on holiday we had to make some very pragmatic design decisions.
Overall the feedback was pretty positive and the whole experience is helping to shape our developing strategy to open, online courses. (Nb the text below has been adapted from an internal report).
Background
GCU Games On was an open online event designed to celebrate, explore and share experiences during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. It ran between 16 July and 8 August 2014.
Instigated by the PVC Learning and Student Experience, it was developed in little over a month. Due to the time constraints (one month from idea to being available openly online) a simple design was developed which included: background and contextual information with relevant links, making a wish on our digital wishing trees, at least one twitter based activity and a medal quiz challenge each week. Sharing experiences of Glasgow 2014 via twitter was encouraged each week. Daily email updates were sent to all registered participants.
The event was delivered via the new Blackboard Open Education platform.
Participation
Registrations: 211
Countries: 12 excluding the UK
Digital Badges issued: 174
Tweets: 424
Digital wishes: 107
Evaluation
Of the 211 registrations, 22 completed the survey giving a 10.4% response rate. In addition, due to the use of social media (and in particular, twitter) a number of informal responses to the event were shared.
Summary Findings
The majority of respondents to the survey were female, aged between 25 to 65, based in the UK with no connection to GCU. The majority of participants were based in the UK, with 36% based in both Glasgow and Scotland respectively. 18% of respondents were from the rest of the UK, and there were equal numbers (4.5%) of respondents from other Commonwealth countries and non Commonwealth countries. From registration information we know we had registrations from Australia, India, Trinidad & Tobago, Ireland, Israel, Denmark, Canada Italy, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and South Korea.
59% of respondents had no connection with GCU and 45% of respondents cited wanting to experience online learning at GCU as their main reason for participating. The vast majority of respondents had some form of formal educational qualification, 45% up to Masters level. This correlates to general trends in open online courses, but may also reflect a network effect from the Blended Learning Team’s network and promotion of the event. 95% of respondents found the site easy or partially easy to use. 54% of respondents completed all of the activities.
Open feedback was generally positive about the experience.
“I really enjoyed this as a bit of fun. What I got out of it most was seeing new blackboard system in operation and it looks and feels very impressive.”
“I think looking at the Twitter feed this was spot on for what it was trying to achieve. Much fun was had by all it seems and the course gave a great scaffold to talk about their experiences at the games.”
“I do know it is hard to pull together a learning experience around an event like this and I guess that was weakness of this approach. At times I think really perhaps due to lack of substance or clear learning outcomes – the learning design was a bit hit or miss – but I think you did achieve outcome of getting folks to engage with learning platform which was I think what it was about rather than the content”
This week started with the 2nd Open Data Glasgow meet-up on Monday night. There were a fascinating range of presentations which Lorna Campbell has helpfully summarised in this blog post.
Duncan Bain’s presentation on open approaches to architecture provoke a lot of discussion around the cultural barriers in adopting openness. In particular there were comparisons made between software development and the common sharing of code and the lack of similar sharing in architecture. Given the impact buildings have on all our lives, having more collaborative, open approaches does seem to make perfect sense – but when did that make a difference anywhere 🙂
Hearing an architect talking about design patterns and co-design approaches was also quite a change for me, as my introduction to these concepts has been through research around learning design where these concepts of design language and approaches have been “appropriated” or should I say re-used? and are being used fairly successfully. The overall concepts certainly cross over well.
@sheilmcn hehe you've had some bad influences! we (LD ppl) had commandeered the idea of design patterns from architecture via software.
On Monday I also came across the QAA report on Students Expectations and Perceptions of HE report, and I’ve been having some great twitter conversations with Peter Reed and Mark Stubbs about what Mark calls technology “hygiene factors”, which are all too often not given the recognition they need. Peter has been sharing the findings of surveys he’s conducted with staff and students around their use of TEL and he helpfully produced this post contexualising the hygiene issues too.
I found Peter’s findings around students expectations of lecture capture particularly revealing
“the most striking thing for me is that so many HEIs appear to buying into incredibly expensive, sophisticated lecture capture systems. Internal work at Liverpool costed out what it would take to rig out all our lecture rooms – the cost was around £4 million. In actual fact, the majority of students would just prefer simple audio sync’ed with the slides, which can be achieved for about £30k (I think)”
Lecture capture is something that is on our agenda here at GCU, like most we’ve had/are having mixed responses. The University of Leicester held a “great debate” on the issue this week too. Grainne Connole’s post summarises the outcome. It’s also worth checking out Alan Cann’s What’s wrong with lecture capture post, summarising his experiences and contribution to the debate.
One of the problems with being part of an innovation centre like CETIS is that we suffer a bit from the Dory complex. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, it is based on the character Dory in the movie Finding Nemo who is rather easily distracted by new things. Sometimes we find that “stuff” drops off our radar as we have moved on to the next shiny thing. So it is always great when we get a chance to be involved in development for a sustained period of time. An example of this for me is the WIDGaT widget authoring tool and its development team at the University of Teesside.
The WIDE project was part of the Jisc DVLE programme which I supported, and developed a number of fully accessible widgets. The team then got further funding and were able to develop their methodology and practice into an authoring tool for widgets.
Earlier this week I joined the team and about 25 others for a “WIDGaT in Practice” workshop. We had a chance to see some examples of widget from both the HE and FE sectors and were able to get hands on and create our own widgets. Having taken part in their design bash day about 18months ago to help the team scope the design for the authoring tool, it was great to see and have a play with a useable tool which pretty much covered all the design elements the “expert” group came up with.
There are a number of pre-built templates to chose from or you can start with a blank canvas. One of the common designs for widgets from practitioners has time/task management widgets to help students be more independent in their studies/life. We were shown a number of examples including a really nice simple visual reminder of key steps for each day for a student with autism and another with key stages for final year projects. The editor also includes a number of components such as embedding youtube videos and images, and social network components such as Facebook likes and comments. Examples of using these features included a widget which embedded a number of videos with a Facebook comment link so that students could share comments on content directly into their course Facebook group. There is also a simple quiz component which is proving also proving popular.
WIDGaT authoring stage
The interface is pretty straightforward but I did find manipulation things a bit tricky and the team are working at improving layout options. However as a quick and easy way to develop and share resources online it does have a lot going for it. It also has a lot of design support functionality built in to help users think about what they are creating and who they are creating it for.
WIDGaT Personna description function
At #cetis13 next month the team are also running a workshop at the end of day 1 where they will be actively looking for new components to add to the tool as well as any other ideas for enhancements. As the tool is open source, it is a great example for the Open Innovation and Open Development session on day 2 .
