On 16 April, I went to the first day of the Open University’s eSTEeM conference. eSTEeM is an Open University initiative to bring ‘together academics in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to promote innovation, scholarship and enterprise in open and distance learning’. The eSTEeM website offers loads of information about the different projects that are funded through the initiative. Before trying to summarise my ‘take’ on the whole event, I should also add that TEL (which is in the title of the event) is an abbreviation for Technology Enhanced Learning.
Opening keynote
Due to travel timing, I missed the opening address, but I managed to get to the opening keynote, which had the title ‘Using technology in teaching and learning: it is scholarly?’ by Linda Price from the Institute of Educational Technology. My immediate instinct to this question was to say ‘yes’, but the point to Linda’s talk was to encourage us all to think about what scholarship means when it comes to TEL.
An interesting point was that educators and institutions used to be the gatekeepers of knowledge, but technology has enabled some information (and knowledge) to become open. Two examples of this is with the availability of Open Educational Resources (or OERs), and the increase in the number of open access journals.
Linda’s talk offered us a useful caution, that ‘technology will never save us from poor teaching, it will make things worse’. Another point was about the importance of learner motivation, and that if technology is not properly integrated into a module then there’s a likelihood that it isn’t to be used (or, used poorly).
Another thought is that technology might not be the problem, but pedagogy might be. Or, in other words, we need to develop our understanding about how best to use new. Three important questions are: How do we make choices (of what technology to use)? What evidence is there? Are we looking at opinion based practice or evidence informed practice?
Connecting to the ‘scholarly’ part of her title, we were told about a number of scholarly principles. These were: the importance of goals, preparation, methods, results, presentation and critique. These can also be connected with different scholarly approaches, such as the need to thoroughly analyse a problem, understand the context, review the literature, setting aims and objectives, designing of teaching and learning interventions, evaluation methods, and sharing of findings.
A final point that I have made a note of was that we need to think about how theory can relate to and drive our research. This left me with a question: which theories are important and relevant? This, of course, connects back to the importance of being aware of current debates, issues and, of course, the literature that relates to a particular area of research.
Workshop: what do you mean by tuition?
The university is introducing something called the Group Tuition Policy which is to affect both on-line and face to face tuition. The aim of this workshop (which was one of many different events I could have chosen) was to facilitate discussions about how we might begin to plan and implement the policy (which is something that I’ll have to do as a part of my day job).
The workshop was split into two different activities and related to two different perspectives. The first was to discuss what is meant by the term tuition, from the tutor’s perspective. The second activity was all about what students should expect from tuition. For this second activity we were encouraged to draw a ‘rich picture’.
At the end of each section, we shared different perspectives. Points that I noted down were, ‘we need to up our game when it comes to on-line [tuition]’, ‘you can’t describe on-line as tutorials’ (which was an interesting perspective), and that there is ‘no difference between watching a recording and being on-line (or, participating in an on-line tutorial)’. It was obvious there were a number of interesting, slightly conflicting, views.
How students learn in Massive Open Online Courses
The third session that I went to was all about MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. Allison Littlejohn, from the Centre for Learning and Teaching (and the Institute of Educational Technology) began by asking everyone how many had taught or learnt through a MOOC. A good number of members of the audience put up their hands.
Allison spoke about a topology of learning. This included dimensions of formal/informal, intentional/unintentional and recognised/unacknowledged. She then went onto mention a study at Duke University which analysed 75 different MOOCs in terms of whether they adhered to good instructional design. If I remember correctly, the results were not very positive.
A key research question that was asked was: how do students learn in MOOCs? A related question is: do people who are highly motivated behave differently? To answer his question, a researcher called Barry Zimmermann was mentioned (with regards to his work on self-directed learning), and three case studies.
The first case study was about a ‘connectivist MOOC’ called SRL-MOOC (Glasgow Caledonian University) (I’m not sure what connectivist in this context means – I think I’ve made a note of the term correctly!)
The second case study was an introduction to the data sciences, and was from the University of Washington. It ran using the Coursera platform, and had forty thousand learners. We were introduced to an instrument called SQLMQ which was used to analyse learner behaviour, and could connect with factors such as student motivation. (There was a lot of detail here that didn’t make a note of since this was all new to me!)
After this second case study there was an opportunity to discuss a question: how would we create a MOOC that could help self-regulated learners? This was an interesting question that led onto quite a bit of debate, about the business models of MOOCs, how you might engage learners that were not ‘self-regulated’, and worries about their terrible completion rates.
Allison found something interesting about self-regulated learners. Low self-regulated learners sometimes engaged with MOOCs with the objective of getting a certificate, whereas high self-regulated learners took a more strategic approach, choosing to carry out learning that relates to a job, role or task. Simplistically put, some high regulated learners tended to dip in and out of a MOOC, gain what they need, and then move on.
I can relate this finding with my own experience. I have signed up to three different MOOCs, but I haven’t finished any of them. The first one was about the history of the internet. I completed the assessment, but then became a bit grumpy about the comments that were coming back from my ‘peer’. Plus, I was finding there was a bit more reading to do than I expected (so I dropped out!) My reasons to take the two other MOOCs were all about ‘checking to see what other institutions were up to’, and finding out whether I was missing anything in my teaching. I dropped out of the first interaction design MOOC when I realised that the content was solid, and offered me some reassurance that my teaching was ‘on target’ with the overall aims of the discipline. I dropped out of the final MOOC when I realised that the course was pretty baffling and didn’t seem to be teaching the subject in a very satisfactory way. This relates, in part, to Allison’s opening comment about the importance of effective learning design.
The third case study was a module about clinical trials, and was hosted in the Edx platform. I didn’t take any notes of this third case study, since I was probably still thinking about the distinction between ‘high self-directed learners’ and ‘low self-directed learners’.
A final activity of the day was to think about some form of recommendations about either MOOC design, or learning design. Our table chose, instead, to discuss other issues, including the role and importance of face to face tuition.
Short paper session
The next session contained three short ‘paper’ presentations.
The first was by Clem Herman, and her presentation was entitled ‘putting gender on the agenda: why gender should be a threshold concept for STEM educators’. Clem spoke about the university’s involvement with an initiative called Athena Swan (Equality Challenge Unit).
Two of the key objectives of the initiative is to ‘address gender inequalities requires commitment and action from everyone, at all levels of the organisation’ and ‘to tackle the unequal representation of women in science requires changing cultures and attitudes across the organisation’. To be recognised by the initiative, institutions have to go through an audit process, enabling the university to gain an understanding of the state of gender representation in individual departments.
It was interesting (and alarming) to hear that the number of women enrolling in the first level undergraduate computing module has been dropping (in comparison to Maths and Statistics, which was reported as being okay). Postgraduate registrations, apparently, have always been low.
During the question and answer session, questions were asked about engagement with external organisations (which have similar objectives), and there was a discussion about unconscious bias and the ‘stereotype threat’. I think what is means being aware of gender related expectations when it comes to subject specific performance.
The next presentation of the day was by ‘yours truly’. I briefly spoke about a university funded project that has been carrying out some research into the tutor experiences of teaching on a second level computing module called TT284 Web Technologies (Open University). I won’t go into the fine detail, but a description of the project is available on the eSTEeM website, with an accompanying project poster (PDF).
The final talk of the day was from Martin Reynolds, who gave a talk entitled, ‘Designing a learning system for postgraduate recruitment and retention based on systemic enquiry’ (I may or may not have made a proper note of his title). During his talk I remembered him telling us something about a university LinkedIn ‘systems thinking’ alumni forum, where students are continuing to share knowledge and experience beyond the boundaries of the postgraduate modules that they have been studying.
Closing keynote
The closing keynote, entitled ‘getting data into your eye: live in the field, life in the lab, and augmented reality’ was by Peter Scott, who was from The Open University Knowledge Media Institute (KMI).
Peter talked us through a series of EU funded projects that KMI had been involved with; I recognised the name of some projects, but not all, such as WeSpot (EU project website), The Open Science Laboratory (Open University website) and Engaging Science (EU project website) which might have been mentioned into an associate lecturer development event that I went to at the University of Sussex. Another project was called the Field Network System (Open University website), which was about creating a portable network infrastructure for scientific fieldwork.
A big part of Peter’s talk was about applications of something called ‘augmented reality’; a topic that is featured in a module that I tutor called M364 Fundamentals of Interaction Design (OU website). Augmented reality is where digital technologies can add additional information to a digital scene. An interesting point was made is that AR can become really useful if we use it in combination with people, which leads us to the term ‘socio-technical augmentation’.
An interesting example of this can be found in a project called TellMe (EU project), an abbreviation for Technology Enhanced Learning Living Lab for Manufacturing Environments. We were shown a demo where a computer tool offered engineers visual guidance about how to assemble and work with components. Another perspective is that you could potentially be guided by another engineer who is working at a distance. During these demonstrations I thought about my own interests in teaching computer programming, and wondered about how these tools might be used in this somewhat different context.
Towards the end of his talk, we were shown a demonstration of a virtual volcano (that was spewing lava) that popped out of a text book. We could only see the ‘virtual volcano’ is we viewed it through the screen of a smartphone, which hinted at the wide variety of different ways that technology can be used when it comes to teaching and learning.
Final thoughts
There was a lot going on during the day, and I felt that I missed out on quite a few things. I like days like these, since they force you to sit down, listen and learn. They are also opportunities to help you to understand what is going on, and to gather up gently clues as to how the teaching and learning of science and technology may be changing. A connected challenge is to try to find the time to investigate what happened in the other sessions and continue to keep up with the various developments that you are introduced to.
During conference I became involved in a couple of conversations about research about introductory programming, and there was even some talk about organising what might become a mini conference. The bulk of the talk was an objective for a couple of us (who were interested in similar topics) to try to get our heads together; to try to understand more about where the ‘state of the art’ was heading. In some respects, this was an outcome that was as just as useful as learning about new projects. The reason for this is that these new connections and discussions have given me a bit of much needed and welcome motivation.