Personal Blogs

It's been very interesting reading all the posts.  I've followed people who are either in the same job as me, or whose posts have been interesting.  I can then focus on a narrower range of posts.  I look at recent posts on a thread when I add my thoughts and reply to as many as a I can.  Managing interaction in a MOOC is quite hard and I'm sure I'm missing a lot more interesting comments.  I've been introduced to some additional tools that I have passed onto others to evaluate at college.  Some have interesting possibilities.  I felt there was a little too much technological determination at times and wondered if pedagogy might have been tackled earlier and given more emphasis.  The pedagogy part was quite basic.  Developing digital literacy is another area that needs more investigation.

Some of the tools used in the course are interesting and have demonstrated how they can be integrated into learning.  The survey tool is good, particularly the feature to email the responses. I've been using Quizlet in the Dutch MOOC, which is really fun and I think it would be ideal for a lot of our teachers at college.  I am hoping to plan a training day so that we can share good practice with technology.     

Interesting points to consider:

• The issue of cost, both in the UK and in developing countries. How can we implement blended learning at low cost?  What are the simple things that we can do? BYOD is one way, but risks excluding poorer students who have no technology. 

• How can be make sure that blended learning is inclusive? Technology has the potential to exclude poor students and students with disabilities if not introduced well.

• How can we develop a culture of Technology Enhanced Learning?  We need to be aware that teachers and students can be resistant to new ways and we have to find ways to change their views.  Change has to be managed carefully to ensure success.  There needs to be more research into managing change. 

The arguments for using technology were good and I liked the way they stemmed from the features of technology:  Storage, Access, Multimedia, Personalisation.  I am still of the view that blended learning has massive benefits for learners and teachers. 

Please use the comments to reflect on the responses highlighted in the video. And what are your thoughts? How is digital technology changing teaching and learning for you and your learners? And maybe more importantly, how would you like it to change in the future?

There were several ways highlighted in the case studies:

• Fosters independent learning
• Student-centred learning
• Widens range of resources available
• Uses devices that students already use
• Anytime-anywhere learning
• Makes learning more interesting

I would also add that it can contribute to more authentic learning.  Students can work with a wider community of practice within their subject areas.  They can link with practitioners to see how what they are learning makes sense in the real world.  Abstract ideas can then be grounded and made more accessible.  Also, technology enables new and novel ways of teaching and learning that can't be achieved face-to-face in the classroom.  For example, engaging with practitioners through twitter, or collaborative work with peers through shared documents.  Collaborative and curating tools available online allow students to engage with higher thinking skills much more easily.

Anytime and anywhere learning also changes the culture of learning, making it something more than what happens within the physical and temporal confines of the classroom.

In the future I would like to see much more opportunity for all students to experience a blended learning approach from their early education onwards.  It is still patchy, in spite of the rhetoric, in schools, colleges and universities.  Adopting a blended learning strategy is a collective action problem as it requires everyone to be involved in order to change the culture of teaching and learning away from the acquisition model towards the participation model.

Eric Mazur’s talk was based on the flipped classroom idea that students get the information in their own time via readings and recorded lectures and then the hardest part of the process, assimilation of that knowledge, in undertaken in the classroom with the teacher via questioning and working together to discuss ideas and construct meaning.  Students defend their answers by pair discussion.

Sugata Mitra, who pioneered the hole in the wall experiments in India, argues that small groups of children can teach themselves.  The optimum group size, he suggests is  4-6.  Any bigger and it becomes chaotic.  Everyone adds their idea and through discussion and experimentation they develop understanding.  He ran an experiment with school children getting 10 years olds to do GCSE questions, where they worked towards the answer and achieved a high average score .  Several weeks later they were retested and had retained much of the information.  This suggests there is power in discussion and working together to assimilate knowledge.  However, he argues there is still a place for the teacher to set the rules and pose the questions.

George Siemens talks about the importance of building social networks in learning so that it is an ongoing process.  He argued the course material in the MOOC they developed was a conduit for developing a community of practice.  He also stressed the importance of PLEs - people building their own suite of tools on the internet to suit them.  Their course encouraged use of a variety of methods to interact beyond the module tools. The internet globalises knowledge and creates opportunities for distributed learning unlinking people from single institutions and allowing engagement with the global knowledge base using experts from all over the world.   It allows a global discussion and pooling of ideas - eg the development of understanding of the SARS virus with data passed on across the world so that work continued 24/7 and pooled different expertise.

In my own field of teaching with the OU these ideas resonate.  Students with the OU work through course material in their own time and we encourage discussion between students through forums and in online and face-to-face tutorials to help them develop meaning and understanding.  Online and face to face tutorials are used to help students understand the material rather than deliver material.  My preferred method of conducting tutorials is to use stimulus material to pose questions which small groups discuss to come to a group answer which is fed back to a class discussion.  It is amazing what students find and how often I see the ‘aha’ moment, as Mazur calls it.  Redistributing groups between activities also helps to create new learning as different combinations of people create new ways of working.  Siemens ideas are interesting from the point of view of the freedom that the internet creates for education.  The fact that students can now develop their own suite of tools, or Personal Learning Environment separate from any institution frees up their learning and puts the power back to the learner.  The idea that learning becomes a global process without institutional boundaries is quite liberating.  However, as Siemans suggests how we change the existing structures to incorporate this and break down the barriers created by competition is another topic for discussion.

·         What characteristics do you think the participants in this course have in common?

There is a wide range of participants and not only from HE.  There is a growing number of FE participants and people involved in professional training, such as nursing.  People are from both educational institutions and commercial companies.  There are people across the world.  However, we are all involved in TEL in some way and we all have an interest in elearning, sharing our ideas and learning more. We are a community of practice, albeit a very large one.

·         In what ways might they be different or atypical of other groups of learners that might be important or relevant to you?  

The reasons for doing this course are diverse, but I suspect that many are here because they want to learn more about TEL or they want to see what it’s like to participate in a MOOC.  I’m doing this for both reasons. My typical learners are OU students and in the main they also want to be involved in a course to learn more about their subject.  As with OU students we are also fitting this in around other commitments.  As with OU students there is a certain amount of independence expected.  However unlike the typical OU student the level of support of much less and so the level of independence is much more.  The course material is easily found and we know what to do, but the communication aspect is much more chaotic, at the moment.  Not for us the structured forums in tutor groups and a friendly supportive tutor presence.  I suspect moderation of the ocTEL forums is a full time job for several people, if moderation is undertaken.  This course possibly represents a community of practice better than an OU course as it has attracted people from within a particular set of field from education.  Students on OU courses are often following different qualification pathways. Some courses are undertaken because they are mandatory, which can mean interest is much lower. The ocTEL participants have gradually divided themselves into sub-groups of specific interest, such as the distance learning group and the FE group, which will be interesting to watch to see if distinct groups do develop and good discussion takes place.  At the moment there’s little discussion, few replies to posts.  People are still testing the water no doubt.

I've signed up to do this MOOC on Technology Enhanced Learning.  Firstly to see what it's like to do one of these course and secondly to get involved in the discussions with like-minded people and share experiences.

My first impression was the shear number of emails of introductions from what could be 1000 participants.  I quickly switched to digest view so it is more manageable.  Secondly, I checked out the LOs and activities for this week.  It is not unlike some of the MAODE modules I have done, though without the tutor group.  I signed up to a couple of small groups in my areas of interest which will hopefully replicate the tutor group feel. 

Anyway the first activity is to think about the big question in TEL.

The biggest question is in what ways does technology enhance learning?  Does it improve understanding of a subject? Does it make learning more authentic?  Does it improve motivation?  Does it make learning more interesting?

I’ve worked for the OU as a tutor for 12 years now and used several different technologies to help learners, from telephones when I first started to plethora of online tools developed over the past 5 years including forums, blogs, online tutorials, Google apps, Moodle, email, Twitter, internet and still not forgetting the telephone.  I would argue that it has changed the way OU students learn and made them less isolated.  The old image of an OU student alone with his/her books in the attic is shifting to a more social form.  This does actually pose some problems as some students still wish to study in this way and eschew contact with their peers.  Technology has made it easier to support students and quicker to help them when they have problems.  Electronic submission of assignments means richer feedback and faster feedback. Technology has also made sharing resources easier now that students can post links to items of news to discuss with others.  For those that want to get involved, learning is a richer experience.

More lately TEL has come to FE.  In what ways has it enhanced learning?  This is trickier as it has had to be integrated into a traditional system of f2f teaching and, arguably, a more teacher-centred system. However, the students themselves have involved technology with the use of computers and the internet and computer use at FE is ubiquitous now.  There are pockets of innovation where teachers are involving their students in forum discussions and encouraging reflection through blogging.  Teachers are gradually making more use of the VLE so that students can access materials and learn outside of the classroom.  However, use of technology is developing slower here, though I know some FE colleges are much further advanced.

I think both experiences have demonstrated that it is both the attitude of the institution and the students as to how far technology is used in teaching and learning and how far it is then able to enhance learning.  I would be interested to hear others thoughts and experiences.