Some more unpacking of learning capture – process v product

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.  

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.

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.

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.