Personal Blogs

Well, the new month starts tomorrow and it may be just me that thinks of 1st September as the beginning of Autumn but I am just about to embark on a new course - H810:Accessible online learning - and we've been asked to say a bit about our context.

I've taught Level 1 interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities and Level 2 philosophy online for the OU, though I haven't been an AL for a couple of years now. My involvement with education is more likely to be related to developing HE teachers or other types of professional development but it's hard to say anything less vague at the moment as I'm in a transitional phase, moving from one career to another and I'm not sure what the new one holds.

In any case, I've had contact with students with a range of accessibility issues, both as an AL and as a Regional Faculty Manager, which involves organising and overseeing the teaching of 50 or so Arts courses. I'm interested in the individuality of both the problems students face and the solutions they adopt, and fascinated by the potential for innovative ways of improving accessibility offered by new technology. I like what I see as the implications of the term 'accessibility', namely that any difficulties lie not in the content of educational material, still less in the student, but in the gateways via which students access material - provide wide enough, high enough, approachable gateways and everyone can access what's inside.

The next project I’m reviewing is an elaborate one, which is directly comparable to the OU’s own MAODE.

University of Hull, On online MEd in e-Learning programme

Context and aim of project

To enable collaborative and independent study of the ‘design, development and implementation of elearning’ in the context of professional practice and across national and discipline borders. To exploit electronic mediation rather than replicate the classroom.

Level and nature of learners

This is a Master’s level course for practising teachers in any context, discipline or country.

Training and experience required of teachers of the course

Not discussed in the project report.

Learning design

Teaching via discussion focusing on comparison and contrast with the experiences of other professional, online activities, such as design of elearning activities and resources, collaborative projects and a supervised online teaching practice.

Collaborative and (I assume) individual tasks are assessed

Students produce an edossier of papers on a negotiated topic

Special equipment and/or facilities

Initially, a VLE providing a pathway tool, resource centre, email, text-conferencing, e-portfolio  and blogging.

Later also externally provided tools such as Skype, MSN, wikis and Googledocs

Key benefits

1. Flexibility resulting from asynchronous communication.
2. Many students have been promoted in their current job or secured a new job.
3. Student find the international nature of the student body brings new insights.
4. Opportunities to collaborate.
5. Study informing and being informed by professional practice.

 Key lessons learned

1. For a conventional university, promotion is problematic as it needs to appeal beyond the local market.
2. Students on the course are not integrated with the main student body and cannot select modules outside the elearning provision.
3. Collaboration in an asynchronous environment can lead to frustration amongst students caused by perceived or actual inequality of contribution by their colleagues.
4. Asynchronicity and flexibility can adversely affect students’ (and, I assume tutors’) work/life balance.
5. A personalized learning environment helps to establish group identity, conducive to collaborative work.

 Potential for further development

CPD for internal staff of the providing institution

Adoption of a new VLE makes possible further enhancements of provision

I’ve been looking at Swansea University ’s project on collaborative teaching and video-conferencing in Classics (http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/case-studies/tangible/swansea/index_html1)

I've evolved my own categories for comparing one project with another. The headings don't necessarily correspond to those on the JISC site.

Context and aim of project

Video conferencing is used to enable a lecturer at one university to teach students at their own and two other institutions. Thus modules could be pooled between the three institutions.

 Level and nature of learners

This is for MA students at traditional universities.

 Training and experience required of teachers

This form of teaching was undertaken mainly by teachers who were already comfortable with the technology, although some training was available.

 Learning design

The sessions were two-hour seminars, apparently fairly conventional in nature, using an interactive whiteboard

Special equipment and/or facilities

Rooms set up for video-conferencing (for lecturer and for students at 3 locations)

Interactive whiteboard

 Key benefits

1)      Greater collaboration and pooling of expertise between teaching staff at different institutions.

2)      Students see academics discussing, disagreeing and resolving scholarly disputes.

3)      Greater variety of modules available to students.

4)      Low resource and economical of staff time.

 Key lessons learned

1)      Training issues, especially for those lecturers only involved for a small number of classes and especially during the initial period of adjustment, need addressing.

2)      Excellent and timely technical support is essential.

3)      Students in small groups who are remote from the lecturer can feel isolated and need local academic support.

 Potential for further development

Involving ‘visiting’ lecturers from overseas and/or key researchers in particular discipline areas.

Just got going on my ECA (End of Course Assessment, or final project) today and have rewarded myself liberally with a highly unhealthy snack that I'm ashamed to describe.

Two paragraphs of my introduction completed. Writing intro's is wonderful: everything seems so clear and straightforward - I've outlined the picture, now all I need to do is colour it in.

This is, of course, a cruel illusion. Before I finish this work of devastating acuity, insight and creativity, I shall rub out the outlines countless times and re-draw them, having recklessly coloured over the edges, or found I don't have suitable colours to fill some areas in.

Once I actually settle down to write I always wonder why I've been procrastinating. It's actually fun, I rediscover; I'm going to enjoy this! About 1000 words in, I experience mild frustration, at 2000 words crushing boredom; self-hate at 3000 words becomes despair at 4000, and at 5000 words all emotions are subordinate to a grinding determination to reach the target of 6000.

Somehow it will be done!

Lots of interesting stuff in the ECAR study of undergraduate students and IT:

http://www.educause.edu/ECAR/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/163283

Most students, it concludes, only want 'moderate' IT on their courses, which seemed quite surprising for largely young (under 25) traditional students. Their reasons are interesting too [my numbering]:

1. The fact that it tends to mean they have to ‘teach themselves’
2. Lack of face-to-face interaction
3. In their eyes, it facilitates cheating
4. Tech problems

There is a quote from one student who said that nothing can replace a face-to-face lecture, though s/he couldn't articulate exactly why. I'm convinced that this difficult to articulate quality is what is behind factors 1 and 2 here. Maybe we just 'switch on' for f2f in a way that we are not wired to do for online? In a similar way it's been shown that reading online is much more likely to involve skimming than reading from hard copy. A bit of amateur evolutionary biology here would suggest that we are 'wired' to respond to human contact, rather than screens and texts. (It is worth noting that 1 and 2 are as much negatives of reading in hard copy as online learning.)

Factor 1 is interesting. Are they being lazy about participative learning (something that afflicts most of us now and agan perhaps)? Or is it a justified criticism? My own observation of students and my own learning suggests that, though it may be a surer route to learning, it's definitely a  much slower one.

3 and 4 may seems easier to solve but behind them, too, perhaps lies something deeper. They both indicate our lack of control of interactions which are technology mediated, and therefore a distancing that many find unmotivating.

Interestingly, it was older and part-time students who were more keen on more IT - a function of convenience, perhaps, but also maybe of the less central role that socialising might perform in their lives by that stage.

Once again, I resolve to pursue this further in the research!

• Why go to university for your learning?
• Why pay a university for your learning?
• What are learning institutions for?

These are the three questions which round off Week 10a of H800 and I think they are so fundamental it’s worth having a bit of a think about them before moving on. There follow some initial jottings, not at all a worked-out view!

I might consider first, why did I decide to do H800. It’s a course about Technology Enhanced Learning, and arguably, I’d be able to find about this by doing my own research, reading books and articles and asking people. One reason is that it’s a kind of short cut - other people are doing the research for you and pointing you in the right direction. Therefore a lot of time is saved and I can achieve more than would be possible on my own (the old ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ argument).

The opportunity to participate in a community of learners is a reason that might motivate some students. When I was studying Italian last year, we used a course book that could be purchased much more cheaply than the course but many students took the view that we just wouldn’t be motivated to get through it without the group ethos. If honest, we could probably add that being assessed, both formally and informally, is part of the motivation as well as conforming to a structured study plan.

However, all of these are reasons for doing any kind of course, not necessarily a university course. The extra value we get from a university is being taught by people who are paid to be scholars in their discipline – so people whom we can expect to be up-to-date, critical and active participants in their field. Whether this is important or not is bound to vary with an individual’s reasons for studying.

So, I think this kind of answers the third question, as far as universities are concerned anyway. As to why pay, this is really a political issue, isn’t it? If universities are institutions which consist of people critically engaging at the forefront of new developments in various fields, then someone has to pay their salaries. Whether this should be the student or society as a whole … well, I do have an opinion but this isn’t the place for it.

Hello to whoever is reading this. If you are an H800 student, you'll have a good idea what this blog is about but if not, you may like to read on.

H800 is an Open University (OU) course (part of the Masters in Online and Distance Education) entitled 'Technology Enhanced Learning: Practices and Debates'. I work for the OU, sometimes teaching but more often working with tutors, and getting involved formally and informally in the development of their teaching, and since the online and distance education is the OU's 'thing', I'm studying the course.

The course has a strong participative ethos and encourages us to try out as many online educational media as we can. Hence this blog!

I have blogged a bit before - again when little short of compelled (I mean 'encouraged' of course) to do so by an OU course. It was Beginners' Italian, so my posts were short and tedious. I'm afraid my posts here may be long and tedious, but I will try to avoid that. Some students and, especially, tutors wrote loads of useful stuff and provided fantastic links, holiday photos and everything - so I did enjoy reading other peoples'.

Mostly then, I'll be posting my thoughts on various things we do as part of H800, and, given time, some tips on useful things I've found.

It's a joy to receive comments, so do please browse through and let me know you're there.

Sue