Reflections on E-learning Development

So… I’m in the middle of an exciting project that aims to bring together the two teams for the ICM and EPS programmes. It’s going to be based around an online area where all the tutors, administrators and other staff involved in the programme are invited to join in a fortnightly discussion related to teaching and learning. Feeding in to this will be images and sound recordings from face-to-face discussions with the EPS tutors, who are based on-campus. I’ll be trying to weave together the discussions and glean some group conclusions. It’s going to be positive, it’s going to be collaborative, and I’m rather looking forward to it!

I’ve just been looking over the notes I made when Steve Wheeler came to talk to us on Monday (I love the name of his blog btw). I wrote down a couple of quotes:

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school – Einstein

I can’t teach anyone anything – I can only make them think – Socrates

I don’t think I’ve forgotten everything I learned in school yet. We must have covered Plate Tectonics at least every term, in a number of subjects - ditto burning peanuts on a skewer - it’ll all remain imprinted until they give me a full frontal lobotomy - but, looking beyond the literal, I think I can see what’s behind these two quotes; that real learning is about developing the processes of reflection and critical thought, and constructing meaning, rather than absorbing facts.

Being a biologist by trade, I got all excited by Steve’s botanical metaphors. I liked the idea of rhizomatic learning - Dave Cormier’s paper on the subject looks like a great read so I intend to digest it shortly. It got me thinking about real rhizomes where the vertical stems spring up from pre-formed nodes when there are sufficient resources for growth. I particularly liked the parallels between the positioning of the nodes within the network of rhizomes - which is to a certain extent predetermined in the genes of the plant - and the concept of ’scaffolding’ of ideas and concepts.

One more random thought to finish - something that was mentioned quite a lot in Steve’s session was the concept of ‘just in time’ learning. It got me thinking - what about those of us who just love to digest theory (of any flavour)? Those of us who enjoyed school maths lessons because they simply liked feeling their own brain ticking? Is there still a place for these people in education, or is it all going to become work-focused and forcibly related to our own professional practice? Saying that, I just realised I didn’t actually make many notes about wikis, which is what Steve came to talk to us about.

I spent two days at the Third International Blended Learning Conference last week – here’s a digest of what I picked up:

1. …an exciting picture of what distance learning could look like. Two of the sessions I attended used Elluminate, a web-based ‘live e-learning solution’ that allows participants to log in, view a speaker, listen, comment, ask questions, and – most excitingly – have a sneaky conversation among themselves (about what the speaker was saying, I assure you) while still keeping an eye on the presentation and without disturbing any other participants. I could even communicate laughter, applause or a ‘confused’ face at the click of an icon. It was so engaging – there was certainly no risk of falling asleep – I actually had questions I wanted to ask at the end, which I was much more willing to ask through Elluminate than I would have been if I were required to speak into a microphone in front of a hundred strangers. Did I also mention that both these sessions were jointly facilitated by speakers in two different continents?! Great stuff.

2. …an interesting keynote from Professor Betty Collis with an emphasis on learning in the workplace, drawing on her experience assisting Shell with their organisational learning strategy. She highlighted the importance of integrating the many forms of learning that take place within an organisation, and emphasising learning that benefits the organisation as a whole. I agreed with her view that one of our key objectives is to prepare the learner for lifelong learning that is orientated towards the workplace – this is the driving force behind our move to problem-based learning, collaborative content construction, transparent feedback and reflective work with the ICM programme - but Professor Collis’ speech made me think about the links we have with our students’ employers and whether we should be working towards a more collaborative approach to supervising/mentoring on our programmes, and a greater emphasis on improving professional performance rather than on examinations. Wow, that was a long sentence.

3. …a example of self-directed learning through video blogging (vlogging) from Myles Dyer, a second year Psychology student at the University of Hertfordshire. Myles’ presentation skills were impressive as he showed us his progression from shy sixth-form student to confident media performer, achieved through posting regularly on Youtube with opinions, thoughts and questions on a variety of topics and engaging in dialogue with his audience.

4. …a reminder of several good reasons to introduce peer assessment of group work from Steve Loddington of Loughborough University and the WebPA project. Some important findings from Steve’s research were:
   a) Although students preferred to select their own working groups, they felt richer learning experiences were gained from random group selection;
   b) 40% of students admitted that friendship loyalties affected the marks they gave;
   c) It is important to explain the point of peer assessment to students at the outset.

5. …inspiration to get our students to write the assessment criteria for their online negotiation exercise (from David Nicol’s keynote).

6. …a very interesting workshop with Mark Russell on curriculum design for blended learning that asked the question ‘what constitutes a good learning experience?’. Drawing on Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles for good practice in UG Education (1987), Mark suggests examining educators’ frustrations and turning them around into productive action using one of the seven principles. This could be a useful tool for working with e-tutors on future course development.

I’m attending a course on leadership and team-building on Tuesday. Before then I want to reflect on my own fledgling team of part-time distance learning e-tutors, and where we are now in terms of our effectiveness as a team.

The blurb I’ve been given on the ‘characteristics of effective teams’ lists them as having:

• Clear objectives
• Good decision-making processes
• Trust, co-operation and constructive dissent
• Clear roles, responsibilities and leadership
• Sound relationships with other groups
• Analysis of the team’s performance

There are three questions I’m going to reflect on:

1. Which of these characteristics are present in my team of e-tutors?
2. If some of these characteristics are not in place, what are the consequences for our performance?
3. What can I do to introduce or strengthen the characteristics?

Well, objectives certainly exist. The tutors’ area in Moodle states that our No. 1 objective is to ‘facilitate the sharing of students’ knowledge and professonal experience in ways that genuinely deepen their learning’ - which sounds pretty clear, and there are also short video clips and text pages that clarify the activities that need to take place in order to fulfil these objectives. However, looking at the area logs, only two out of the fourteen tutors have actually accessed the tutors’ area (oops). The objectives and related tasks emerged from a needs analysis completed individually by the seven original tutors. In their current form they’ve been approved by the e-tutors through e-mail discussions and Skype chats. The full team of 14 includes three Canadian tutors and at least four new e-tutors, and most of the team members are almost totally isolated from each other. To conclude - I’m not sure if our objectives are clear to everyone. I need to make a priority of establishing preferred methods of contact with all the team members and contacting them all on a regular basis until they have all found their way onto Moodle, begun to use the tutor forums and established contact with each other. Until this happens, it will be very difficult for us to establish a consensus on our objectives.

Taking a glace down the list, the problem I’ve highlighted above also appears to be the rate-determining step for the further development of the other team characteristics. If most of the tutors are out of regular contact with each other, the speed and effectiveness of our decision-making is going to be seriously limited. Our number one priority has to be getting the tutors in the same virtual space, not necessarily at the same time, but with the tools available to communicate and collaborate asynchoronously. At the moment I am making the vast majority of the decisions simply based on the initial analysis of the tutors’ and students’ needs. For our team maturity to improve, so does our level of formal and informal communication.

At least I feel that we’ve been successful in establishing an environment conducive to constructive dissent. This is where I feel the online environment has massive advantages over face-to-face, synchronous communication. If a tutor posts some frustrations they’re experiencing to the tutors’ forum, I can pause to consider their situation, understand their point of view, think up possible solutions to any problems, and take my time to frame a positive, constructive response. If they’d raised those issues in a f2f meeting it would have been difficult to provide useful guidance on the spot and my response may have leaned towards the defensive rather than the progressive - not very helpful in establishing a trusting and co-operative environment.

The establishment of clear roles, responsibilities and leadership is an intended outcome of improving communication within our team. Once we have these issues established within the team, we will hopefully be able to start building relationships with other teams. Due to the nature of our team, a major element of this will have to take place online in order for the entire team to benefit from the relationship. In the first instance this could be with other similar teams within Bath and BCIT, or in other institutions that our team members have connections with. Input from and comparisons with these other groups might also contribute towards future analysis of our teams performance. I’m excited

We’ve just had the opportunity to take part in a Pathfinder project funded by the HEA that involves getting a group of teaching staff and e-learning specialists together to redesign a module of study into a student-centred blended format - in just two days.

My colleague Roger Gardner has posted a summary of what took place, and his reflections, on his blog. There’s nothing there I’d disagree with (great minds think alike), so I’ll just add a few further reflections…

The part of the process I found most interesting was the emergence of various conflicts and frustrations over the two days. It’s often said that implementing a blended learning strategy, and shifting the focus towards student-centred learning, forces a deep examination of underlying pedagogy and objectives (e.g. Beetham 2007). From the first morning, a sense that the foundations of the module were becoming unsteady, and a subsequent feeling of becoming overwhelmed, was communicated by some of the teaching staff through open and emotive speech and body language. I hadn’t experienced this level of emotional honesty in the staff I’ve worked with before (it was quite refreshing). Although the facilitator dealt with these expressions of frustration quite well as they emerged, I wonder whether it would have helped to warn the teaching staff at the start that these feelings were very likely to arise. Perhaps having this forewarning would have helped them to observe their feelings in a more objective way.

Another frustration I observed was the participants’ reaction to forced creativity. Some people are happy to churn out ideas and solutions on the spot, and in front of others, when asked to do so. Many are not, and prefer to have time and space to chew a problem over by themselves. I definitely belong in the latter category but my job often forces me into on-the-spot creativity. Becoming acclimatised to this didn’t happen overnight, and I empathised as I observed other participants struggling with the requirement to think of a solution NOW. The danger here is that if participants feel too overwhelmed then they are likely to completely withdraw from the experience. This blocks their input into the process, which is not only bad for the process itself but also for the participant, who may end up feeling that they’ve let the team down.

If we are going to run similar projects internally, then these two issues are the ones I feel are most important to address. We could try to address them through variables such as timescale and format, for example by allowing for participants to take some time out by themselves to work on ideas and solutions. However, I agree with Roger that the intensive 2-day schedule was quite powerful in fostering an efficient & effective working group. It might also be the case that experiencing these frustrations and stresses together can help to form a strong bond between the participants. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend the final hours of the project so I haven’t got a final impression of how the participants felt at its conclusion - but I’m sure this will emerge

Beetham, H: Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing and delivering e-learning, 2007, Routledge

The idea that today’s students lack critical thinking skills isn’t a new one – but the growing abundance of poor quality and unreliable information on the web means that actively teaching these skills within our courses has become a priority (Ron Cooke, JISC Chair). I’ve recently been involved in the design of an online study skills module to support our distance learning students. It’s designed to help students to learn about all aspects of effective studying, from the basics through to higher order skills including critical analysis. I’m looking forward to finding out how the latest cohort of students used this resource, and how effective it’s been.

Today’s students are ‘digital natives’, but they’re using the available technology in an unsophisticated way, and they often lack the ability to articulate how they are learning (David Melville). The key to engaging today’s learners is tapping into what they really value in higher education that they don’t already get from tools such as facebook (Helen Beetham).

The clearest return on investment in e-learning is found for projects that aim to solve a simple, well-defined problem, and for those geared towards automating systems rather than totally transforming the learning experience. This doesn’t mean complex, transformational projects aren’t worth the effort – but benefits may take longer to be realised, and evidence may be largely anecdotal at first. Although such projects involve a higher risk, they are essential in order to keep the sector moving forward (Gill Ferrell, JISC infoNet).

The clearest evidence of improved student retention due to improvements in supportive communication offered by e-learning applications is in areas with a high proportion of non-traditional learners (e.g. mature and part-time students) – probably because they have the highest drop-out rates to start with (Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning; JISC infoNet publication). This is good news for us in our work with part-time distance learners – as it means we’re not only making a big difference to the student experience, but also very likely to recoup our investment into development of the programmes. Evidence of improvements in student achievement have also been identified in the Tangible Benefits project - “those who have provided figures for student achievement appear to be recording improvements of around 10% in pass rates as a result of the e-learning they have implemented”. According to students, a key factor in this appears to be the increased opportunities for formative assessment and regular feedback.

What, or who, is shaping the market for continued innovation? The increasing number of part-government funded knowledge transfer partnerships (KTPs) that are springing up between universities and industry may be a significant factor (Ron Cooke, JISC Chair). This was good to hear as we’re hoping to develop a KTP programme as an extension of the development work we’re currently doing with the distance learning masters programmes in Engineering at the University of Bath. A KTP programme could transform the relationship between the university, the students and their employers, and would be a driving force for continued development in technology-enabled learning, communication and stakeholder collaboration.

Future-gazing beyond the boundaries of HE, it seems likely that more websites will take on a tiered access structure as adopted by the Financial Times, where subscriptions are offered for access to deeper content (Lord Puttnam, OU Chancellor) The demand for more reliable information is causing user-generated content sites such as wikipedia to target their energies towards the peer-review process, and static, ‘approved’ versions of the online encyclopaedia will become available (Angela Beesley, Wikimedia Foundation)

And finally… visual aids such as media projectors are still not allowed in the House of Lords. I envy the lords and ladies for never having to endure a speaker reading word-for-word from a powerpoint slide. However, I do feel a little concerned that the people deciding on the Climate Change Bill have to do so by drawing graphs in the air with their hands. Luckily Lord Puttnam is trying to persuade them of the potential benefits of allowing a little technology into the room.

John Heron developed the six-category intervention analysis model for interpersonal skills training in 1973. Although it was initially developed for the medical profession, it’s actually applicable to a wide range of settings, including education. In Learning in Groups (4th ed, Routledge 2007), David Jaques and Gilly Salmon explain how it can be used to analyse the role of the online tutor.

The model places positive interventions from the tutor into one of six categories. Analysing the incidence of these different types of interventions will reveal when the tutor is taking an authoritative or a more facilitative role. An imbalance in the types of interventions taking place might indicate where changes could be made.

The mode of use proposed by Jacques and Salmon deals with only positive interventions. Other reports also define negative or ‘degenerative’ interactions - here’s an example - but I can see how simply highlighting and categorising the positive interventions will enable a constructive and helpful analysis of how a tutor communicates with their students. Other descriptions of Heron’s model tell us that it is the intention behind the tutor’s intervention that counts, rather than the actual outcome, but Jacques and Salmon don’t allude to this.

So - here are the categories (adapted from Jacques & Salmon 2007):

Under the authoritative mode the tutor can be:

1. Directing, e.g. raising an issue for discussion, suggesting further work to be done.
2. Informing, e.g. summarising, interrelating, presenting knowledge and information.
3. Confronting, e.g. challenging by direct question, disagreeing with/correcting/critically evaluating student statements, giving direct feedback.

Under the facilitative mode the tutor can be:

1. Releasing tension, e.g. arousing laughter, allowing students to discharge unpleasant emotions, e.g. embarrassment, irritation, confusion.
2. Eliciting, e.g. drawing out student opinions/knowledge/ability to solve problems, facilitating student interaction, enabling students to learn and develop by self-discovery and personal insight.
3. Supporting, e.g. approving/reinforcing/affirming the value of student contributions.

Jacques and Salmon feel that the second sub-category in each mode  - Informing and Eliciting - are of particular importance for group work, and that they form a spectrum from tutor-centred to student-centred learning, with ‘informing’ skills such as presenting information, paraphrasing & interrelating and directive questioning at the tutor-centred end of the spectrum, and ‘eliciting’ skills such as selective echoing and open-ended questioning at the student-centred end.

I guess particular points to look out for when carrying out a six-category intervention analysis would be…

1. Can the majority of a tutor’s interventions be categorised as positive? Which interventions aren’t - and could they be?
2. What is the balance of authoritative to facilitative intervention? Is this supported by the needs of the student cohort - for example - is the tutor continuously authoritative? Would the students benefit from more encouragement to develop greater responsibility for their learning?
   (At the start of a course it may be appropriate to gradually swing the balance more towards the faciliative mode as the students increase in competence and confidence.)
3. Is there an appropriate balance between the three sub-types of intervention in each mode? For example, a tutor may be very energetic when it comes to thanking students for, and agreeing with, their contributions, but if they don’t also take the time, or are unable, to draw out these contributions, they may not get much activity to comment on.

This last point is particularly relevant to my role as an e-learning officer, designing and helping to run courses in a subject area in which I am not an expert. I can provide some types of positive intervention, but not all - as many eliciting skills rely on a high level of subject-specific knowledge. I’m hoping it’s possible to manage a successful learning experience with both the module tutor and an e-learning specialist providing interventions…?

I’ve been checking out Twitter on Andy(Ramsden)’s suggestion in order to get ideas for its possible use in HE. I’ve found a couple of Twitter buddies who’ve been helping me out - a guy I met when working for the Judo Foundation Degree (hi Lance) and Dave Parry, who is a bit of an expert on academic use of Twitter.

Dave Parry describes several ideas for using Twitter with students, and the resulting blurring of academic and social communication that he describes has similarities with the results Gabriele (Edwards) and Geraldine (Jones) reported recently with their Edutext study at Bath. Is this a good thing? There are positive and negative aspects - on one hand, one deals with a considerable amount of ‘noise’, but on the other, this additional insight can have a positive effect on the tutor-student relationship, and improve classroom dynamics. I know how excited I felt the first time one of my online distance learning students cracked a joke.

Tracking words does seem to be an interesting way of exploring a topic - there’s the potential of finding something that (or someone who) can really open up your world. I’d never really explored the work of Jacques Derrida before today (Dave Parry is doing some work on Derrida with his students).

Following professionals might be a worthwhile activity to try out, too - although Twitter’s Search facility appears to be broken, so my attempts to follow Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have been temporarily thwarted. They’re probably not on Twitter anyway (but I hope they are). I’ve asked Dave for any suggestions he has of good examples of academic twitterers. In the meantime I’ll check out the two examples he gives in his article.

The comments left at the bottom of Dave’s article contain some more useful links from eminent academic twitterers. Alan Lew and ‘Chris L’ both mention the need for separate accounts to address the lack of group capability in Twitter.

The grammar issue is an interesting one. I’m a bit of a stickler for correct grammar in formal and semi-formal contexts - to the point where I go catatonic if someone claims that ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ are interchangeable (I know it’s recently been made official, but I refuse to accept it) . However, I think it’s unfortunate that some people can’t differentiate between formal written communication and informal, technology-enabled communication such as SMS, IM, Twitter and so on. The objectives and priorities attached to them are very different. Yes, they all make use of visual characters, but I don’t hear anyone claiming a parliamentary speech is a more valid form of communication than a phone call to one’s grandmother. All communication should aim to be a) unambiguous and b) efficient, and that’s pretty much the sum of it (in my opinion).

Oh - and Clive Thomson’s article on the sixth sense of Twitter is interesting (and brief - hooray). He says: “Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn’t have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It’s practically collectivist — you’re creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.”…

…which is why I’m going to carry on trying it out. More later!