Personal Blogs

Technology

How long has this technology been used

By an organisation that employs me

By me

Flipped classroom

This is not a category I recognize as having been used within my own student career with the OU, where the emphasis from 1993 up to PG courses taken up to this year and including one taken this year has been on hard copy Study Guides and textbooks with optional face-to-face tuition attached to TMAs or asynchronous forums, with very defined dates at which they are active and when they are not. In H800 & H817, from 2004, I have experienced classes that use a kind of blending of instructional modes that seems equivalent to the definition of FC in Johnson et. al. (2015:38). These were entirely new to me.

Moreover as a tutor, I find that changes to teaching and learning that are current are not popular with Associate Lecturers I encounter in Tutor Forum or at meetings. They appear not to be widely used with even practices like provision of materials from face-to-face events being highly variable. Some changes appear to be occurring in this current teaching year but to a new teacher seem shrouded in mystery, with many people expressing uncertainty about what the future direction of the OU is or whether they will have a role in it. My first year of teaching in the OU felt like exposure to a great deal of vocal pain and resistance to change, often expressed in a very idealistic nostalgia for the OU of the past.

Having said this, there appears to be great variability between regions, disciplines and faculties that means this question is unanswerable to me.

Clearly the OU is at the forefront of change in many respects but this appears to be a forefront represented by pockets of innovation (sometimes in ‘pilot’ trials) or even by singular champions and / or publications.

H800 (2004 – 5) for me was the source of most of both my desire and capacity to begin changes in my own practice (very much at the micro level). In my first year I worked within a cluster that was deeply antagonistic to change and this reflected not only on what was possible but what I could easily share with others.

In a Level 2 Psychology Course I teach this year in a well-organised cluster group, work on a particular topic is often flipped between optional tasks I or others set on the Cluster Forum, their follow up in face-to-face or OU Live alternative events and an OU drop-in I run after OU Live. All events F2F and Ou Live are then represented in some way in the Cluster Forum and through email – even if only in the form of a PowerPoint, although recorded versions of OU Live are popular.

I also run tutorials in OU Live (about half of my TG live in Continental Europe.

The weakness here is that optional nature of the tasks soon renders them considered to be unneeded, even by those who claim they are a good way of learning. They allow me to explore multimodal stimuli for learning and / or the stimulus of creative and analytic thought – such as asking a group to explain why a cartoon is funny by using theory they have just been exploring.

Collaborative Forums in my Year 1 course have poor attendance, apart from a few stalwarts (out of a cluster of 60 learners). When asked to explain this in TMAs learners speak of being overwhelmed by other things in a way that makes it attractive not to take part, other than in ‘lurking’ (but again for a minority) in these because they do not contribute to final assessment.

I feel that FC still need to have shared definition in each cluster. That they have not seems to result from poor provision for paid planning space for ALs, or, at least, a perception that this is the case.

Learning Analytics

This is explored with a short video and articles in a specialised OU page: http://www.open.ac.uk/iet/main/research-innovation/learning-analytics . I cannot differentiate OU and my use because I feel I have no ownership of that use as yet. I read from that page Clow (2013).

The earliest paper listed on the LA web page is 2012, but much of this work appears to focus on macro changes. The question asks me to pick an area my organisation does not use but Johnson et.al. (2015:12) picks out the OU as a world leader in the area.

I choose it because these issues are certainly not openly applied in many of the courses I teach or have taught in other than in MAODE (not to my knowledge anyway). This raises the other bugbear – issues of intrusion and privacy. In H800, this topic was raised in the student group and our tutor began to share some of the analytic data about contributions, site- visits and so on held about us on the system.

This turn to openness (initiated from within the learner group) began to improve appreciation of its potential value, but it is nevertheless true that most participants did not know and were surprised about the existence of this collated data (see Clow 2013). This is a reaction I get from my own learners in Psychology sometimes.

Sometimes I find the issues around teaching essay structure tiresome and one article in the set on the web page cited above shows that an ‘automated feedback system’ can produce feedback and linked instruction on this very topic which correlates with live teacher marking processes and raises very interesting food for thought (Alden et. al. 2014).

Social media

This is a hot potato currently in the OU with many ALs in their Forums expressing dislike and distrust of closed student groups on Facebook, although I have nowhere confronted this attitude in MAODE courses (well except in the one I do from Education and Linguistics).

Public expressions of the certainty that such groups polarised learners against ALs was widely expressed in Tutor Forums – so much so that I no longer use the latter.

My students tell me that Facebook pages vary. Last year, my Level 1 TG informed me that many tutors were openly criticised there (for issues like slow return of TMAs, lack of availability and so on), although this year the only report has been that the Fb group is just a ‘moaning’ shop’.

Twitter is not widely used by Level 1 learners in my groups but is by some at Level 2.

I can see nothing but good coming of blending use of Twitter with both blogging and open and closed groups (learner-made niches). Surely multiplicity in the way issues are discussed is necessarily good for learning.