Personal Blogs

Professor Bart Rienties of the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University

January 2018 > https://youtu.be/GIWrygqmOIs 

Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed)

45 minutes? This is how long 'Take Your Teaching Online' gives to undertake the activity. It is far, far too little time to do justice to it. 

That's 35 minutes viewing to begin with add taking notes and 10 minutes to construct a reply. I gave it two hours.

This is worth this amount of effort and more; I will be going back to it. 

There are two reasons why is essential viewing for anyone venturing into teachign online:

1) This is an excellent lesson in how to deliver a lecture

• The pace, variety, personal story telling, top and tailing (literally) with dogs and then heavy duty data expressed in tables and charts. All the while having the audience to feed in with a poll. 

2) The conclusions that Prof. Bart Rienties draws are profound 

• Just in the period since the OU changed its fee structure (much more expensive) what students look for has shifted increasingly towards the relevance of the materials and qualifications to their job

The data blows away past perceptions and methods while reinforcing what had been an indicator of excellence vs failure all along. 

• Student satisfaction surveys bear no relation at all to peformance. 
• Giving students nothing to do can result in the most activity - it becomes at chance for those 60% of more who are a little behind, or a long way behind, to catch up. 
• Those who are always leaving it to the last minute and think that they can catch up in a last minute splurge of activity are likely to be those who just pass or fail. 

The best approach all along, and an indicator of excellence, is to get ahead of the curve. 

Not least it gives you breathing space to go back to something when you've had time to think about it, or to hunt down and check through alternative insights. As well as engaging on the subject if you wish outside the class. 

I ask myself, 'these are adults, they are academics, they are Profs and PHDs, and yet some use their phones to give quiz answers answer before they've been given the question. What does this say about us humans? Is it the gambler's gambit?' 

Prof. Bart Rienties was using PollEV.com 

Bart gets our immediate attention with a puppy. We are introduced to Tabatha from Canine Partners > https://caninepartners.org.uk/ 

By way of engaging metaphors data is first provided on three assistant dogs 

and then from the speakers competitive cycling.

These metaphors are used to indicate different kinds of data, the kind that is useful, and the kind that is not. And the need to be measuring something in the first place 

The truth will out with the data

QQ: Can we use this data to give students what they want?

Ask them at the end of every module. 

Big data set

• 110,000 students
• 400 courses

QQ: What makes the course 'good' ? (As in getting results) is it: 

• Great reachers? 

• Links well to professional practice?

• Links well to their career intentions?

• Quality of the teaching materials?

• Quality of the teaching?

This is what 40 people from the audience concluded. (40 was the limit of the licence bought from PollEV). 

What makes an excellent course? 

• Really good teaching materials

• Student approval of the assessment method. 

There has been a subtle change over the last few years

• Perspectives changing to students expecting modules link to the qualification.

NOTE > 

There was NO correlation between student satisfaction and student performance

Students like constructivist learning designs

This is where there is lots of stuff, we take them by the hand … providing lots of content for them to explore.

They did not like when they had to work together with a group, or talk to the teacher. 

The number predictors of passing and continuing is how teachers design the learning and how they communicate during the course.

Starting to unpack the recipe what helps our students progress so using the social constructivist model.

• Should we give students what they want? 

• Students are different! 

• Most will benefit from knowing what is coming up.

What are students doing on a week by week basis.

Is there a link between how teachers design and how students engage?

Unpack what is really happening?

Why despite expectations of a lot of student engagement in week 20 was there not?

Start to map out what students are doing.

Week 4 time off to prepare … and becomes one of the highest peaks.

69% of what students do is determined by what teachers have designed for them to do.

Excellent students study more in advance.

Pass students start to get in the ‘catch up’ phase > they are going ‘off piste

Fail group > starting to catch up, or never catch up. So how do we give them a chance? A pause to catch up. 

What are our take home messages?

Not all data we collect is meaningful.

What matters is actual behaviour. Big data without context is meaningless.

NOTE > Listening to student feedback is not linked to what they are doing or how they are performing. 

Our students are following the learning design, but many are not. Some diligently stick to the road, others take different routes. 

NOTE > We need to provide alternative effective pathways.

End with Canine partners and foster parents.

Organ donation 

Read pp. 3–8 of Hammersley’s paper, up to the heading ‘Context as virtual’. Identify the ways in which Hammersley talks about context and, in particular, what he identifies as ethnographic understandings of context.

In Week 8 context was identified as an issue in research methods generally. How do you think Hammersley addresses the issues concerning context raised in Week 8?

The point made introducing Activity 8.3 is that ‘ Crook and Dymott (2005) adopt a different theoretical approach to learning and context. Hence their research adopts different methodologies compared to the studies discussed by Tolmie.

From Tolmie (2001). Surroundings mean different things to different people. It is naive and deterministic to think that people are so easily governed by their context. The individual over the surroundings. Unless we think students are like a uniform tribal grouping.

‘They are necessarily employed within pre-existing contexts of educational and social activity’. Tolmie (2001) But such ‘contexts’ are or have been radically overhauled, take ESSA in Manchester by way of example. Both how and where the students and teachers interact matters. Rather like product design - form and function. The two are complimentary.

Crook and Dymott (2005) seem focused on the interaction between the various media of life, in particular written texts, lectures and social interactions affect the manner in which we think and express that thinking. Writing to me is a function of the communicating clusters in our brain and will produce the similar ‘comprehension’ results whether cunieform on clay, hieroglyphys on stone, handwriting on papyrus, printing on paper, text on a screen or an annotated animation in a video. The way the brain interlinks with other parts of the brain, and does so in different ways every time a fact is remembered will differ. An item listed on clay will be associated with the act of tapping a hammer into the clay, or an idea expressed via a QWERTY keyboards and printed off might recall the smell of the printer ink .. but does the kernel of the thought differ? To what degree is context the wrapping and associations rather than the information itself?

Learning is both an artefact and a process - the artefact exists as a potential in the brain and when stimulated can in part, through the complexity, be seen in a fMRI scan. The process of learning takes place as an interaction with the world around us, more people, but also the context and ours.

From the recorded memoirs of my late grandfather Jack Wilson, (Vernon, 2008) I wonder how, as an office boy age 14-18 he responded or changed to going from a ‘copy writer’ using 'copying ink' and using carbon paper to using the Blickenfurentstater typewriter that was brought round to the office one morning … and handed to him to master. It intrigues me that even a hundred years ago one generation might hand ‘new technology’ to the youngest member of the team or group … as if we expect the youthful mind and attitude to be more plastic? He lived through a period of extraordinary change - first motorcars, typewriters, telephones, aeroplanes … ‘total war’ … part and parcel (his expression) of these technological innovations were changes in society, not least caused by the First World War. Yet in all of this I can’t see how the context can be isolated from the far more significant influence of the person as an individual or in their community … that historically calamitous events and physical change to the environment fail to have a profound effect, collectively, on who or what we are as humans. Was it Prof. Robert Winston who said that Homo Sapiens doing Cave Paintings has more, not less, in common with a concert pianist in the 20th century? I do rather think that the capacity and scope of the human brain rather outweighs context.

Is context a red herring? Would it not be more interesting to understand what is going on in the brain of the person? That internal ‘context’ is surely where the ‘action’ i.e. the learning and memory formation, is taking place?

REFERENCE

Crook, C. and Dymott, R. (2005) ‘ICT and the literacy practices of student writing’ in Monteith, M. (ed.) Teaching Secondary School Literacies with ICT, Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Tolmie, A. (2001), Examining learning in relation to the contexts of use of ICT. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17: 235–241. doi: 10.1046/j.0266-4909.2001.00178.

Vernon, J.F (2008) That’s Nothing Compared to Passchendaele (accaessed 9th May 2013. http://machineguncorps.com/)

Fig.1. How you learn!

I set out with the idea of doing nothing more than making a face out of time, effort and motivation.

Then 28 months of the MAODE kicked in, as well as experience. How we learn is a rather complex affair. The influencing factors given above carry different weightings and change through time as events play out.

(This should be interactive so that you can adjust the size of each factor to suit your current circumstance, or circumstances you recall from past experience, at school say ... or that you hope for in the future. With this in mind I'll give the above a second shot in Bubbl.us)

Do we define 'success' as individual happiness or achievement through the education process and beyond?

SH1T happens.

To study learning we rock and roll between simplification and complication, in an effort to understand we create models, but the reality is always as messy as the individual, their mind and circumstances, when and where they were born and so on.

• An uncle takes the kids to a show, and one of them take as shine to performance.
• A child breaks an arm and goes to hospital and takes an interest in working in a hospital.
• A teacher makes and illustrates and interesting point about landforms and calls one an isthmus and another a peninsula and the idea of naming forms and understanding how they take place takes root.
• Then along comes World War 1, or you are hit by a bus and hospitalized or fall in love

And in all of this, some of us to respond to many of these external stimuli while other of us take a focus and lasting interested, whether as a hobby or career.

A work in progress!

I rather like the idea of trying to create the kinds of infographics produced by David Mcandless illustrated in 'Information is Beautiful'.

Please suggest factors and weightings!

If you are studying education or learning is there research on these factors, surveys that give weightings and importance to the different factors, or is everything a subset of something else?

H800-11B / EMA Tutor Group Forum / h800 overview framework Janet Gray Post 1. 26 August 2011, 16:01h800 overview framework (accessed 6SEPT2011) http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/forumng/discuss.php?d=624853

From E-LEARNING

E-portfolios from the student point of view.

I like what bubbl.us can do. Without fuss and with a sense of fun a few ideas on the back of the proverbial fag-packet (in my case in an A5 drawing pad) becomes something semi-permanent and easy to share. Commpendium takes this one step further, allowing each 'node' to contain layers of details as documents or attachments.

Here, after some weeks of this, I try to cover every corner, literally, on the topic of 'e-portfolios for learners.'

I read somewhere a hint of why students baulk at this - their perspective, for the most part, is short-lived. Several years working in the communication of graduate opportunities it was surprising how few could look beyond 'Day One' at their place of work, to their completing their first year ... unless, as in accountancy, law and some industries there was a longer-term career training period.

It isn't just as matter of context, it's a matter of perspective.

Anything 'sticky' can as easily become unstuck.

Remember how stuck we were on FriendsReunited, before MySpace and then Facebook came along?

On the one hand a software developer makes their platform 'interoperable,' but then you open the door to users switching platforms.

What is the commercial value of free software? What is the cost? Pop-up adverts inside your' virtual head.'

If someone can exploit it, they will.

Aalderink and Veugelers.

· Focus on competence-oriented education

· Emphasis on student development

· Fostering academic maturity

·Net generation oriented

REFERENCE

Aalderinck, W. and Veugelers, M. (2005) ‘E-portfolio’s [sic] in The Netherlands: stimulus for educational change and life long learning’ (online), paper presented at the EDEN 2005 conference in Helsinki, Finland, Portfolio Themasite. Available from http://www.icto.ic.uva.nl/surf/nl_portfolio/Publicaties/Downloads/aalderink_veugelers_2005.pdf- FOR ANALYSIS

I understood from the heading for TMA03 in H807 that 'it is permissible to use an extract from a very long message.' I therefore deleted the 900+ additional words that on two occasions occurred in a forum message.