digital behind design, reflections on #LD-CIN event

Loved the quirky knitted fish!

In the post Anyone for T I asked if T for Technology and T for Teaching have merged?  The question came about following a restructure. My role changed from Academic Technology Enhanced Learning Advisor to Teaching Enhancement Advisor. What’s the difference?

In both roles I’m working towards putting the digital behind the design. Learning and teaching enhancement for me is about learning activities, with or without technology but – in 2017 – most probably with.

For many staff, technology is not the driving force. TEL people are too often seen as techies, fixers of computers and data analysts. This fixed identify is hard to break especially as many of us can fix a PC (or at least check the wires and plugs!) and know something about data from a dashboard, spreadsheet or research perspective. Truth is, many of us are education developers with a range of skills and experience around curriculum and programme design. We might not have all the answers but we know where to get them and when it comes to technology – it goes wrong for us too. Well, for me at least as colleagues will testify!

Last week Patrick Lynch and I attended the Learning Design Cross Institutional Network event at the University of Oxford. It was the networks 7th meetup, our first and hopefully not the last. The next is at Leeds, literally down the road. We might take a team. Reinvent the awayday. Back to the times when it meant being off campus –  not in a room in a building you don’t often go to.

Learning design is the enhancement of learning and teaching in the way I understand it. Not technology first but pedagogy first and foremost all the way home.

These are my key takeaways from the event. If you’re a learning technologist who finds them familiar you might also be a learning designer too.

• LD focuses on the activity the learner does rather than the delivery of content
• LD is about optimising the environment for learning to take place
• LD is about changing thinking more than changing tools
• LD requirements vary across disciplines so there’s no one-size-fits-all model
• LD builds in feedback loops to assess effectiveness during rather than the end
• LD is scholarly i.e. research informs practice and practice informs research
• LD visualisations have been shown to influence teaching practice (see Toetenel and Rientes (2016) below*)

We all arrive at learning design from different directions (the topic of a future blogpost). Neither Patrick nor I have worked in content development teams but we’ve both  have had roles working directly with staff to support and scaffold their own pedagogic practice.

Gill Ferrell from Jisc presented an overview of their work in this area. All familiar. A reminder we’ve worked in the sector for some time and there are great and free resources here Jisc Design Studio

• Design for Learning (D4L) Programme 2006-2008
• Curriculum Design Programme 2008-2012
• Curriculum Delivery Programme 2008-2010
• Assessment and Feedback Programme 2011 -2014

Gill reinforced how the resurgence of interest in learning design demonstrates a shift of emphasis in a number of ways:

• shift away from learning design as the delivery of content and what teachers do, to the designing of learning activities and focus on what students do.
• shift away from seeing assessment of learning to assessment for learning as a future driver with greater emphasis on the role of feedback and timely dialogue with students.
• learning analytics used to map assessment to prevent bunching and identify places where feedback loops take place.
• Appreciative Inquiry as a methodology to focus less on problems and more on what works well and how to build on it.

HE is changing. My last blog post Perfect Academic Storm was about Degree Apprenticeships. Aimed at those in full-time employment and paid for by employees, these ‘new for some – less new for others’ programmes are 2017 equivalent of work based distance learning. More importantly – they have the potential to put learning design in the spotlight. To be relevant to the work place activities will need to apply theory to practice which is both experiential and problem based. Students will need to become independent learners not only managing their time effectively but also co-constructing negotiated modules and assessments. Learning design practitioners can make this happen. With or without technology but most probably with,

image from https://pixabay.com/en/lego-colors-toys-build-up-disorder-688154/

Learning gain is another new layer of HE and also has implications for learning design. Helen King from HEFCE defined learning gain as the improvement in knowledge, skills, work-readiness and personal development made by students during their time spent in higher education.  There are a number of current projects exploring what this means and how to measure it. Outputs will drive an exploration of how learning design can embed learning gain in the student experience.  Definitely a space to watch.

The sense of learning design déjà vu was reinforced with Katharine Reedy’s overview of learning design at the OU. Their taxonomy describes learning design as ‘a methodology for enabling teachers/designers to make more informed decisions in how they go about designing learning activities and interventions, which is pedagogically informed and makes effective use of appropriate resources and technologies’. (Conole, 2012: 121) Sounds obvious yet still a new concept for many. Katharine bought some  Activity Planners and a reminder of the Word Wheel Again, so many great free resources available online. You almost never need to make anything ever again!

The heart of our session was a call to bring together learning analytics and learning design. To reimagine data as feedback and create designs with feedback points throughout rather than a single evaluation at the end. To be agile enough to respond to data which suggests students are doing well or less well than expected. One of Patricks favourite images is one saying the next big thing will be lots of small things.

This is right – we have all the pieces of the jigsaw but need a different way to put them together.  The approach to enhancement PAtrick and I are developing is called Design for Active Learning (D4AL). It’s like a baseline jigsaw which can then be adapted to make a range of different activity images. More about this in the next blog post next week.

Thanks to everyone at LD-CIN for a great day and we’re looking forward to meeting up again next year.

LDCIN meeting #8 is 16th February 2018 at the NHS Leadership Academy, 3 Sovereign Street, Leeds, LS1 4GP.

Jiscmail list LEARNINGDESIGN@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

LD-CIN website  https://sites.google.com/site/learningdesignsig/home 

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*OU research on connecting big data sets to learning design

• Toetenel, L. and Rientes, B. (2016) Learning Design – creative design to visualise learning activities. Open Learning. The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 31:3, 233-244.
• Toetenel, L. and Rientes, B. (2016) Analysing 157 Learning Designs using Learning Analytic approaches as a means to evaluate the impact of pedagogical decision-making. British Journal of Educational Technology 47(5) pp. 981–992.

perfect academic storm

Last week I wrote about the broken part time market in higher education.  The post referred to the new Degree Apprenticeship being developed at the University of Hull. Drawing on the experience of myself and colleagues it included this:

Without support from your employer, part time study risks being an unachievable goal. The new Degree Apprenticeships have to acknowledge the challenge of full time work/part time study.

This week we met again with the Degree Apprenticeship programme and module leaders. Initially these sessions were planned as CAIeRO at Hull. We were putting into practice the CAIeRO at Northampton model, alongside our own Design for Active Learning (D4AL) approach. Learning as we go, we’re realising CAIeRO at Hull is going to be more agile, more responsive and possibly different every time we run it.

It’s clear Degree Apprenticeships are great opportunities for D4AL conversations. Where else do you get a combination of university, employers and mature students all involved with a mix of on-campus/off-campus learning and teaching.

Full time work. Part time study. Distance learning. Virtual environments. Digital literacies. Add to the mix a non-traditional student base, many out of formal education for some time with multiple commitments in the workplace and home. It has all the makings of a perfect academic storm.

With Degree Apprenticeships local employers are footing the bill for three years of part-time study. They’ve asked for a fast, focused, blended route. The programme includes negotiable modules where students choose what they study alongside traditional business disciplines topics which will need applying to workplace practices.

Last week we ran the first two stages of a CAIeRO; writing a mission statement and deciding the look and feel of the course. This week we were faced with a room full of different faces. Of necessity the first half of the session was  informational. It was the first time all the module leaders from Year One had come together. Ao also the first time it was possible to create an overview of the course with the people who were going to be teaching it. The most powerful tool on the room was the table they all sat around. Closely followed by the flip chart paper and pens used to outline their modules and how they fit together but before moving onto storyboarding the activities students would do it was time to step back and consider the bigger issues.

Too often the programme validation process is like a jigsaw. Still in its box, picture in pieces. A learning design session – be it Carpe Diem, CAIeRO, D4AL – should create an opportunity to take the pieces out of the box, turn them over, find the straight edges, start to put them together. Too often we have our own pieces or a few clusters of similar shapes and colours but not the whole story. Mapping out the design of the curriculum,  and ensuring alignment along vertical as well as horizontal axes, ensures consistent and coherent  learning expectations, modules appropriately sequenced and assessments spread out rather than bunched together. Having all the module leaders for Year one together meant these conversations could happen and reinforces the value of beginning the learning design process before validation rather than afterwards.

Learning doesn’t just happen. Put students in a room – be it a traditional teaching room or a 21st century redesigned educational  landscape – and learning is unlikely to take place without intervention. Multiple myths abound such as ‘build it and they will come’. Well, they might arrive but what happens next? It’s like online discussion.  How often do you hear the line ‘I set up a forum but no one used it – so I didn’t bother again’. We should collect and debunk these and other myths such as:

• All students are digital natives
• They won’t do it if it’s not assessed
• Face to face is best

The Degree Apprenticeship has been a great opportunity to look at a programme in its entirety. It’s put together those who don’t often meet. TEL people talk to other TEL people. Academics stay in their subject tribes and territories.  East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.* It takes something new to break down the barriers. We need to talk. We like to talk. We want to talk about learning design. It’s the foundation of the student experience.

We might rename D4AL as SATT – Sit Around the Table and Talk!

On Friday (24/11/17) colleague Patrick Lynch and myself will be in Oxford for a meeting of the Learning Design – Cross Institutional Network (LD-CIN). Set up in 2015, this open network shares learning design shaped information, tools and ideas, is an international community of learning design practice. Presenting on learning analytics to inform learning design, Patrick will explore the statement

“Arguably then learning design needs learning analytics in order to validate itself. However it also works the other way: learning  analytics cannot be used effectively without an understanding of the underlying learning design, including why the particular tools, activities and content were selected and how they were deployed.” Sclater (2017).

We’re demonstrating an agile responsive approach so I’ll be collecting live data in the form of feedback throughout our session as well as making notes during the day and possibly some live blogging as well. Follow the hashtag #LDCIN and check out the LD-CIN site for further information.

Next week, the story of the Degree Apprenticeship development continues with more of the big programme-wide questions. In particular how technology might enhance or increase the challenges of part-time blended learning.

• What can be done online which can’t be done face to face?
• Vice versa
• Where can technology provide value?
• Where will the on-campus experience have most value?
• How can student community be achieved?

See you 1st December.

24 shopping days to Christmas…

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Rudyard Kipling Barrack-room ballads, 1892  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrack-Room_Ballads 

Niall Sclater (2017) Learning Analytics Explained Routledge

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Let’s…

Stumbled onto a video of Gardener Campbell talking about educating the whole person.  Sidetracked through the serendipity which characterises the internet. Start at A and find yourself at Q and R without being too sure how.

On the way I bumped into teaching scholarship – as you do – and an interesting analogy from the late 1990’s by Randy Bass in The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem? Citing Boyer, Bass claims problems in research are welcomed while problems in teaching are seen as failures of practice. Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) is remains a seminal work on SoTL (less than Scholarship Reassessed (1997) by Glassick, Huber, Maeroff) and its principles of scholarly approaches to teaching still hold i.e. ‘It should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one’s scholarly community.’ (Bass, 1999:2)

The HEA report Defining and supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) a sector wide study suggests SoTL themes hve expanded. They may now involve peer review, CoP and more interdisciplinary approaches. It also involves student engagement through redesign of curricula which encourage undergraduates to be research informed and engaged. The HEA report claims continued confusion around the definition and practice of SoTL. It recommends linking SoTL to the TEF, adding CPD to workload models, making SoTL more explicit in the UKPSF and greater recognition  of SoTL across all REF units of measurement.

The value of SoTL is in the L. How students Learn. Few benefit from lecture style transmission of content unless it’s recorded so they can revisit and review. I’m unlikely to meet Gardener Campbell but have watched and listened, paused to revisit, shared (seen it reshared) and stored the link for future reference.

Any HEI with a policy for recording timetabled teaching sessions supports their students learning. They can catch up on what they’ve missed through illness or unforeseen circumstances and have meaningful discussions; the benefit of so called flipped learning i.e. access to transmitted content at a time and place which suits then get together – face to face or online – for discussion with the benefit of time to reflect and craft comments. A deeper  approach which – if linked to a collaborative document – presents opportunities to extend learning by searching and sharing associated links, commenting on the contributions of others and summarising the whole learning experience. What’s not to like?

Using audio and video is a no-brainer. So much content is freely available (eg British Film Institute, Film Education,  Vimeo, YouTube, Teacher Tube, Ted Talks, Khan Academy, MIT) or licenced for use within UK HE like the excellent Box of Broadcasts (BoB). You can make your own audio/video with webcams and mobile devices although this raises the DC (digital capabilities) issue. Not  problem. Lets link it to scholarly practice and persuade institutions to invest in the digital skills of their staff as professional development. It also raises issues of IP which can be complex and opening the copyright box will be the topic of a follow-on blog (brave, stupid or what?!)  😉

Back to Gardener Campbell and Educating the Whole Person. Gardener says granular analytics does not represent the whole person yet the current push towards big data claims it can be used to design personalised learning. How? Footfalls and logins give little meaningful information about learning. Counting the number of VLE sites is irrelevant compared to what goes on there. Ditto forum posts. The data tells us nothing about content quality. We need more critical thinking around the types of data collected and why.

It all comes back to scholarship. Inquiry into what you do and why you do it. How do you know it works? Where is the evidence of impact? SoTL provides a framework for taking this forward.

Lets be more joined up about linking CPD with Academic Practice. Encourage action research, action learning sets, appreciative inquiry, critical reflection and loops of experiential learning.

Let’s make opportunities to get people around a table to talk about teaching, underpinned with research into how students learn, and how best to design learning experiences which can be personalised to encourage motivation, enthusiasm and ownership.

Lets start investing as much into learning and teaching as we do research and technologies.

Let’s bring in the student voice and build mechanisms for recognising and rewarding evaluated learning design.

Let’s do all this. Now! We’re all here to support the student experience so let’s have some exciting thoughts about how to go forward into the future.

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images from pixabay except BoB from http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/help-consultancy/ucreate/facilities/box-of-broadcasts/introduction

#digifest17 asks if digital technology is changing learning and teaching

We all know determinists. Excited about the new. Putting tech in place. Waiting for transformation. Any failure is blamed on it being the wrong time, place or connections, but there’s much more than this to digital education. We have to go deeper.

Enthusiasm for education technology comes in waves. Last century it was CBA, CMC, VLE, then web 2.0 and social media, followed by oer and mooc, mobile devices, big data and dashboards. There were the go-to reports. Paul Anderson’s What is Web 2.0? (2007), or Peter Bradshaw’s Edgeless University (2009). Back further to Oleg Liber’s framework for pedagogical evaluation of vle (2004), Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design by Conole et al (004) or Death of the VLE by Mark Styles (2007). These are just a few and how many more predictions  from these times remain more promise and potential than fact?

I didn’t go to Digifest17 but followed as much as I could online. For me the star of the show was Amber Thomas from the University of Warwick. In conversation with Neil Morris from the University of Leeds, Amber dared to refer to digital technology as pixie dust and snake oil, suggesting what matters more are the non-digital aspects of education, namely the design of learning experiences.

There’s more than a little synchronicity here. My ex Lincoln colleague Andy Hagyard is now Academic Development Consultant at Leeds while Kerry Pinny is Academic Technologist at Warwick. Spot the similarities. We should form our own SIG. In the meantime, we’re under review at Hull and top running for our new job titles is learning enhancement rather than TEL. Amber was spot on. The future is less with the technology and more for the people.

Predictions of tech-adoption are rarely realised in the way we expect. We look in the wrong places. It’s not the tech innovators or early adopters (who can be pedagogically astute but remain a minority), it’s those who self-exclude from technology events and opportunities. Who – dare I say – care more for the EL in TEL than the T itself. The solution to learning enhancement is not rocket science. It’s as simple as this. We need to talk more across our different sides of the fence.

Make the conversations less driven by technology and more about evidence of success. How do we know what works and why? Where is the scholarship of learning technology? The research informed practice? I’ve referred to existing literature critiques before in TEL-ing Tales, Evidence of Impact and Learning Design+TEL=the Future. These critiques can be powerful drivers and all the more reason for change. The brave new world of TEF and learning analytics is an optimum time to review the design of learning and how to evaluate its impact. Not just at the end, when students are moving on and it’s too late to change their experience, but by building iterative loops of feedback throughout modules and courses which tell everyone how they are doing when it most matters.

Digifest17 was bold. …we’ll be celebrating the power of digital, its potential to transform and its capacity to revolutionise learning and teaching.

Transformation and revolution is the early language of BECTA  – remember the internet super highway? It’s worth revisiting HEFCE’s 2005 and revised 2009 elearning strategies, the Towards a Unified eLearning Strategy Consultation Document (2003) and the National Committee of Inquiry into the Future of Higher Education, otherwise known as the Dearing Report (1997). The text from the past is scarily similar to the text of the present.

We’re still talking transformation and revolution, yet as Diana Laurillard said nearly ten years ago – ‘Education is on the brink of being transformed through learning technologies; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now.’ (2008: 1)

Maybe technology isn’t the answer. The literature around Inquiry based learning stresses the need for fallibility so I have to admit I could be wrong. However, if technology is the answer then I’d suggest a more critical approach is needed. Here’s some suggestions. Andrew Feenburg’s Ten Paradoxes of Technology or Questioning Technology, Norm Friesen’s Critical Theory: Ideology Critique and the Myths of E-Learning, Neil Selwyn’s Looking beyond learning: notes towards the critical study of educational technology or Distrusting Educational Technology for starters. Then lets have conversations. Let’s start reading groups which discuss the pros and cons from wider social and cultural perspectives. Let’s ask questions like why are we investing in technology in the first place? How useful is data counting footfall and logins? Where is the evidence of enhancement?

Slowly but surely places are emerging where education technology is aligning with academic practice. It seems a promising way forward. Why wouldn’t we want to introduce scholarship and pedagogy, build learning design around experiential loops of action research and appreciative inquiry? Lets shift the emphasis and make the future for higher education one which is more shaped by people rather than by machines.

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Images from Learning Analytics & Learning Design Digifest17 presentation by Patrick Lynch (p.lynch@hull.ac.uk) and pixabay.com. Jisc image from Jisc

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The problem is not ignorance, it’s preconceived ideas

https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

Data is never neutral.  This is my social science background talking. It’s made me suspicious! Or should that be critical?  Not everyone agrees but I’ve always distrusted the ability of stats to tell the full story.

This week it was announced Hans Rosling has died. A sign of the internet age is the videos we leave behind. This link to a TED Talk (2006) The best stats you’ve ever seen begins with his trademark introduction ‘I’m a statistician – No – don’t switch off!’

Rosling set out to show the changing world through the visualisation of data.  The concept was simple. Most good ideas are. Publically funded statistics exist but are not presented in ways which are educational and accessible. Rosling founded the Gapminder organisation to create software linking data with presentation tools, thereby making it visible and searchable or in this own words – liberated. Helped more than a little by a narration owing more to a sports commentary than traditional academia, graphs have never been so entertaining or eye-opening. Mission accomplished.

Over the years Rosling moved from overhead projector, with his trademark stepladder for reaching the high parts, to more sophisticated forms of digital touch screen representation. The technology was wizzy but somehow wasn’t the same.

I saw Rosling present a couple of times. Mostly on the international health and social care arena where he spoke about the world and what really matters;  fertility rates, child mortality, family planning, distribution of income and the power of social change. There were always a number of key messages. Data is better than you think; there may be  an uncertainty margin but the differences revealed are larger than any weakness. Data can be structured e.g. revealing the importance of context an highlighting diversity, sometimes within single countries. Most relevant to educationalists, Rosling maintained problems are not caused by ignorance but through preconceived ideas.

https://pixabay.com/en/network-connector-network-cables-494651/

Data is big business and higher education has not escaped from the lure of using stats to review and refine the student experience. Within  institutions the VLE dashboard and NSS (National Student Survey) have been used for some time to wave red flags. Now the TEF is bringing data analytics to the forefront. The relationship between NSS scores, figures from HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) and DELI  (Destination of Leavers from Higher Education) and teaching excellence is still open for debate but there’s no denying how ‘Learning Analytics’ is now positioned centre-stage.

All my initial reservations about statistical data have come back. It’s one thing to collect and group figures into charts and tables but useful interpretation depends on wider issues such as identifying what you want to know and why you want to know it. Counting the times a student logs onto a VLE or walks into the library tells us little about the nature of their activity or quality of engagement.

https://pixabay.com/en/nixie-tube-electronics-voltage-1501592/

The biggest concern is the rhetoric. The Bricks to Clicks report tells us data has “enormous potential to improve the student experience at university” while the Jisc report Learning Analytics in Higher Education offers analytics as a tool with many functions. These include quality assurance and quality improvement, boosting retention rates and assessing and acting upon differential students outcomes – to mention a few.

We’ve been here before in the early days of education technology which promised much with regard to enhancement but with little evidence of improvement. Deterministic approaches see technology as the agent of change rather than focusing on the cultural context in which it’s positioned. Today it seems there’s an increasing risk of data being seen through a similar determinist lens.

https://pixabay.com/en/magnifying-glass-hand-glass-magnify-29398/

Education developers and researchers want teaching interventions which produce the most effective learning environments. As it stands, I’m not convinced the collection, measurement and interpretation of all this data for the TEF will produce any meaningful information about what we really want to know. The Learning Analytics movement needs someone like Hans Rosling to challenge preconceived ideas and find ways to interpret data which are innovative, useful and accessible.

It would also be worth asking if the data we have is from the most appropriate sources in the first place.