TMA4 Completed and onward to the ECA August 24, 2009

Got TMA done and quite happy with it. I’m pretty sure it’s well proof read this time but to be honest I simply couldn’t read it again. This is the problem with proof reading.

I think I’ve learnt more about writing conclusions thanks to feedback on previous TMAs and feedback from Lesley in the tutor group forum so I hope I’ve done that better this time. Also from reading the many papers we’ve had to read in H800 I’ve learnt the benefits of reading conclusions is that you can get a good summary of the paper without having to read it all. Reading the intro and conclusion should give you enough about the main message and if you want to read the evidence behind it, then you read the middle bit. I hope my TMA has done that.

I focused on Learner Ownership with reference to Anderson’s interaction framework and Milner-Bolotin’s venn diagram showing 3 things that contribute to learner ownership. Learning activities should have personal value, give the learning a feeling of being in control and the ability to take responsibility.

We were asked whether or not we agreed with the statment ‘Learners have ownership of technology-enhanced learning.’. I did agree with this.

It was a mammoth TMA but now I feel ready to tackle the ECA.  We’ve got 5 weeks (or about that) to get it done and I feel on a roll, we have no other activities to do that are worth noting. I really want to get as much of it done this week as I can. I don’t want to be panicing this time in 4 weeks no knowing what I’m going to be writing.

TMA 3 was a planning exercise for the ECA so will revisit that and maybe even review the whole thing. TMA3 came at a time, for me, which was not good. I was quite stressed out about the whole course, work and life balance issues and did not have enough hours in the day and I was full of self doubt. I feel better now having made some changes to my routine which has helped and taking the pressure off myself a bit. I’m wondering whether the ECA will actually end up looking quite different to the first version of the plan.

VLE, ownership and interaction August 17, 2009

I had an interesting discussion at work this morning,. I was explaining what I had been reading/writing in my course recently and we ended up talking about a group of students who are setting up a study group outside our VLE, although our VLE provides private areas for students with discussion forums, notice boards and a live classroom facility. My first reaction was, why?

My second reaction was why not? If students want to co-exist outside our VLE then fine; let them do what they like. The fear or “losing” students to the outside world is there – why do we insist on trying to increase interaction on our systems.

The VLE is like the Business School’s physical building, students only come there for teaching, to find people, ask questions and get information. Students do, however, use the building for social meetings/student only meetings but that’s because they have a comfortable student lounge and the availability of computer rooms and syndicate rooms. But distance learning students don’t need this do they – they’re at home/work or where ever and they don’t need a physical environment to work in.

This took me back to the essay I’m writing at the moment about the ownership  of  learning provided by technology for students and I just wanted to make a note about the issues of control. Control from the centre or control from the students. the VLE is control from the centre and students don’t feel they own this area, they are curtailed by it and want to use their own areas (like the Student Union or Library) for their support networks.

However, institutios  fear this loss of control – what do they think is going to happen? We’ve never been able to control where campus based students talk; so why should we think we can control where distance learning students talk. If anything, DL students should by their nature, be allowed more freedom to communicate where ever they like.

I’m really sold on the article read by Anderson, see further back in my blog and the three types of interaction – interaction between student and content, student and student , student and tutor.

Our programme is very much focused on student-content with some online interaction with peers and tutors as required and optional.

There is an mandatory f2f teaching week on the programme – 1 week for each 12 months of the course; this morning we referred to this as binge teaching. Like binge drinking. The students get 1.5 days on each module over an 8 day period, going straight from one module to the next, no time to reflect, consolidate, reinforce. The model is fine as long as the content reflects this notion.

Could we instead of having each subject separately, use the 8 days for consolidation and a holistic view of the modules rather than keeping them in their little silos.

Week 25 – Woolgar’s 5 themes of virtuality August 11, 2009

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Wk 25 A3 Learner Support and Effectiveness

Learner support is the interpersonal interaction that needs to be present – learners do not IT communications to completely replace f2f/real interaction with educators and other knowledgeable peers.  It is this form of interaction that is most strongly linked to retaining students so should not be ignored.  Practitioners need ways to see when students are having difficulties. Offering relevant support has been found essential to retaining effective study.

Countering Technological Determinism (TD)

TD – when technology is seen to impact directly on social relations and activities. However, as Thorpe, 2009, said “it is through practices with technology, rather than the direct effect of the tools themselves, that we create learning contexts.”

It is a combination of the tool and the human activity that technology delivers its effects. The tools simply mediate activity. Their effects depend on the activities being designed for its use.

Steve Woolgar – research programme called “Virtual Society?”. The ? being significant as it questions the impact of technology on society that TD’tic viewpoints advocate.

The discource of Technology Impact

Rationales for the impact of technology tend to the TDeterministic, making assumptions of the effects across society.

Woolgar offered “five rules of virtuality” which are THEMES to stimulate thought about the relevance to Technological impact on, in our context, learning and teaching.

Theme 1: The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local social context: The importance of “third place” settings to engage people with technology, such as museums.

Theme 2: The fears and risks, anticipations and enthusiasms associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed …acceptance was undermined by the failures of the technology to meet design specifications. This led to extra work and sometimes the technology had to be scaled back (Mason et al., 2002).  There are differences, for example, between staff and students in universities, in terms of perception and usage of ICT.

Theme 3: Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities

At WBS it is a struggle to get academics to integrate TEL into their courses, we want them to find parts of the printed materials that could be learned in other ways using technology, but mostly we find that the elearning resources are add-ons not integral to the learning process and that the course notes cover everything so we are still providing both. The web-conferences we now offer are not replacing content, but revising the content that already exists. We want the web-conferences to take away some of the teaching that is done at the short residential schools so they have more time for face to face group work in their 1 day of interaction a year.  It’s a change process, so it will be slow.

Theme 4: The more virtual the more real The more e-communication/technology use, the more work it created. But at the OU perception of attendance at face-to-face tutorials is that it is lower now than a decade or more ago. CMC is being used, partly because it offers benefits for learning and partly because students seem less able to, or to have less time available for, travel to study centres to attend tutorials.

We hope that with increased interaction between students and tutors, students will complete more of the optional formative assessments.  After a recent web-seminar a student commented that she was not looking forward to completing the formative assessment but after this interaction she was now prepared to attempt it.

Theme 5: The more global the more local

After our web-seminars students always comment on how these events make them feel less isolated, more in touch with Warwick and more in touch with other people on the course; reducing the “distance” they feel from the institution.

Week 25 Activity 2 Interaction- student, teacher, content August 10, 2009

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Read Anderson (2003) ‘Getting the mix right again: an updated and theoretical rationale for interaction’.

1              On page 2 of this article, Anderson (drawing on Sims, 1999) lists the functions of interaction… In what ways have you found that H800 incorporates each of these functions of interaction and through what means?

Learner control

Student-student and Student to peer: H800 lets the student decide if they want to interact with peers/tutors through forums, blogs, wikis, web-based conferencing and so on. There are some Marks available for forum contributions but only a small amount.  Student – content H800 is assessed by written assignments, which lets students decide which activities to focus more or less on; the lack of weekly “lectures” means students can interact with the content at their own pace. Material being withheld for each block, however, restricted learning control.

Facilitating programme adaptation based on learner input

Student – tutor: interaction with the tutor meant that the programme could be adapted during the module and for future iterations; interaction with the content gives students the opportunity to give this feedback. Interaction with others lets the feedback be supported or not. Learners could share additional resources outside the core programme via social bookmarking and forums and blogs.

Varied forms of participation and communication
H800 enabled you to participate more or less and in different ways using different technologies, and at different times of the course. Communication methods were varied. Participation with content was varied but mostly supported by the printed word. Activity tasks enabled communication with tutor and peers.

Aiding the development of meaningful learning
Interaction with at least the peers and the content made the learning more meaningful, you could not interact with peers if you had not interacted with the content.

Interaction is also ‘fundamental to the creation of learning communities’ (Anderson, 2003, p.2).

Without interaction with other people and knowledge about the subject, you could not have a community. Communities need a shared interest and things to say to each other and do together.

The value of another person’s perspective is key to learning in constructivist theories.
Learners needed to know that other people had useful things to contribute to their learning (peers and tutors). The tutor role comes with an automatic respect, but peers need to show the value they can add.  Putting your learning in the context of others through peer-peer interaction, and student-content interaction is important for your career as you won’t always be working in the same context.

2.            Based on your experience of H800, would you agree with the first claim in Anderson’s equivalency theorem?

‘Deep and meaningful formal learning is supported as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student–teacher; student–student; student–content) is at a high level. The other two may be offered at minimal levels, or even eliminated, without degrading the educational experience.’ (Anderson, 2003, p.4)

Why? Why not?

In terms of H800 the student-content interaction has always been high, the student-student has varied both by the activity, the timing and the choices made by individuals, and the student-tutor interaction has also been minimal and increased to high levels around the times of assessment. I believe I have still had a deep and meaningful and satisfying learning experience being able to dip into the peer and tutor interaction opportunities when required.

Could the student-tutor interaction have been eliminated- I feel connected to the institution by this role, I feel I have some interaction with the “lecturers” via this “teaching agent” someone on your side, there to keep you going but if you look at what the tutor role – it’s added to satisfaction levels, but has it added to learning?

Could you drop the student-student contact – for me no, but for others this is fine as they have studied the course with very little in fact no interaction with other students – well no explicit interaction that is. What about just lurking, is this interaction?

3.            Drawing on the points from Anderson outlined in question 2 above, and the other examples later in Anderson’s paper, make notes on the circumstances in which you would economise on student–teacher interaction and seek to increase the use of student–content interaction. For what purposes, using which tools? Is there a danger that this could, eventually, lead to an online “correspondence” course where the “teacher” is redundant?

You could be persuaded to drop student-teacher interaction in favour of student-content interaction where the numbers of students are large and where effective student-teacher interaction is unfeasible due to cost or availability of labour.  Using quizzes that give you feedback, for example, enable students to test themselves and get feedback with the tutor only having to create the quiz and feedback once rather than for each student. Short videos help teachers to deal with the problems they face with dealing with questions after lectures if, like at Warwick there are over 400 UG’s to deal with.  An Operations Management lecturer at WBS has created videos using screen-grabbing software and audio narration to help students answer these common questions which has solved the problems of their confusion and his lack of time to support them.

Our less elearning enthusiastic lecturers do feel that elearning will make the teacher redundant; but in our current distance learning model, there is only 1 day of teaching anyway and contracted tutors have the student support/feedback role and the “teaching” is all done by printed and online resources and some interactive content. I think there is a fear of the danger of making teachers redundant but in my own experiences on H800, I feel a sense of connectedness with the institution by having a tutor and involvement in the discussion forums by the course chair that I would not have if there the teacher-student interaction was eliminated.

4.            Anderson does not limit his account to distance education, and briefly discusses classroom delivery, audio and video conferencing and web-based courses. He also sets out an interaction-based model of online learning in figure 2 on page 9, based on the three major elements of student/learner, teacher and content.

• • To what extent does this model apply to your own practitioner context?

This relates to my experience supporting learning and as a learner, where learners choose which route to take – independent study or paced, collaborative learning. I have used a combination of these approaches on H800 alone. I like the pacing of the course calendar to keep me to schedule and also means that I get to collaborate with my peers at the same time in the forums. I also like the independence and flexibility afforded to me when I can choose to engage with the different forms of interaction and differing levels myself and be more independent. In the independent route I have taken advantage of all of the learning objects, but also my supporting actors (co-workers, peers and family support) when required.  As a practitioner, I see our learners doing the same thing, we have many students we do not “know” much about, they do not call for support, they do not interact with the support staff and do not use the tutor support or do any of the formative assessments – they still pass the course, but I would question how meaningful the experience has been for them. We have others who adopt every interaction opportunity possible with Tutors, each other and with content.

• Which of the four different forms of interactive learning is most appropriate for your context? Why?
• Paced, collaborative learning – this is useful for students who particularly like to learn with others and need the motivation of a study schedule to complete their work.
• Independent study – this is useful on the DLMBA programme , students can choose to pace their work how they fit and to dip in and out of as much of the interactivity with others/tutors as much or as little as they like.
• Structured learning resources – We have a variety of structured learning resources but probably not enough, and as Anderson points out, when we use web based conferencing tools the teachers are tending to use them in the lecture format and not exploiting their interactive elements enough but it is early days.
• Community of inquiry – students can set up their own online support groups and therefore, to an extent, create a community of inquiry that interacts both synchronously and asynchronously.

5.            Anderson implies that interaction often involves a trade off, in terms of cost, available technology and preferences of learners.

• How satisfactory would you judge the mixture of interaction in your own practice setting? And in H800?

The difficulty we face at WBS is a drive to cut costs and increase student numbers on the DL programme. It is unlikely that we’ll get extra staff for delivering synchronous s-t interaction in the near future so we need to find ways to substitute this with S-C interaction. S-S interaction is difficult due to the students being based all over the world (a minimum of 100 countries covered in any one cohort) all with different time zones and time commitments and study routines and schedules. The flexibility of our programme is one of its key selling points so to add more structure into the programme would be detrimental. However, we do believe that there may be a market for a DL programme delivered by a highly ranked and highly reputed business school like WBS that is structured and does have a high degree of S-S and S-T interaction. It may be true that there are enough students who want to commit the time to do this such as the Global MBA programme offered by IE University in Spain.

The mixture of interaction on the DLMBA programme is High S-C, low T-S, low to medium S-S depending on the student and choice of modules. The mixture on the IBM MBA programme is High S-C, Medium T-S and high S-S.

I fear that the teaching style of many of our lecturers means that lectures and online classes are in the lecture style described by Anderson and although they have CONTACT with the students, there is little interaction. I think we could substitute the S-T interaction which will be difficult to achieve high levels of with more S-S and S-C interaction, but not more print based C!

• What are the reasons for its strengths and weaknesses? And in H800?

Taking the functions of interactivity outlined on p2, the strengths of the current structure are that it gives students control over their learning experience and it allows choices participation/communication levels. However I question how the programme is adapted by learner feedback. We make administrative changes all the time, but content changes are rare. I also think that student choice in interaction levels is a problem as what happens when some students want lots of interaction, but hardly anyone is interacting with them and therefore their satisfaction levels decline.

More notes on the Anderson article follow:

Week 25 Interaction and Learning Support August 10, 2009

Good resources are enough for most informal learning contexts, but in formal learning there are expectations of support to achieve learner goals.

Thorpe, 2002, defines learner support in terms of distance education as “all those elements able to respond to [learners]…before, during and after the learning process.”

3 types of interaction

• between learner and their peers;
• between learner and their tutor; and
• between learner and the course content (Moore, 1989).

Engagement between learners and an entity outside oneself is core to the learning process (Laurillard 1993).

In Distance Education, Learner Support services have been set up to respond to the needs of the learner groups.  Where learners meet their teachers in a traditional educational setting learner support is a conventional part of the teacher/student relationship. But in TEL, support needs do not sit within conventional working hours, time zones and students working in unsocial hours.  To maintain high retention rates we need to find ways to support learners flexibly during evenings, weekends and during the day.

Mediated forms of interaction and support

Technology provides an answer to the problems through forums, conferences and email – to initiate and respond to learners outside the “open hours”, however forums are being used in a labour intensive way (Anderson 2005) – reading and responding to messages takes too much time. An alternative proposed by Anderson is a combination of independent study with interaction using educational social software.

Related to my practice.

On the MBA at Warwick we provide support by administrative teams to replace the face to face support Mon-Fri working hours, tutors support this by monitoring the module based forums all the time (in their chosen working hours which can be evenings and weekends) and are sometimes international hours. By using asynchronous forums and email students can reach support teams and staff. WIMBA web-based conferencing is timed after normal UK working hours and at other times of day to meet the needs of different time-zones, and they are also recorded but this means that the students don’t get any interaction with people but with content only. The student website on the DLMBA programme provides students with 24/7 support in terms of handbook information and  a comprehensive FAQ which is always updated, video and textual instructional guides help students to use the services on the websites. Students are encouraged to use each other as resources via the forums and virtual study group features; this also enables interaction with tutors.

Using tutors to read and respond to forum postings is time consuming, and as a student on H800 I find this too. H800 has a particularly active forum due to the subject being studied so I would say it’s an anomaly but it is very difficult keeping up with it and having to read all messages to find one or two pieces of value. In my informal learning too, forums are very busy and very time consuming especially if you don’t check for a day.

Week 25 Activity 1- Changing Roles of practitioners July 31, 2009

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The Concept of Practice

Technologies do not float freely in their social context; they are part of what constitutes up a social context and they are changed and have different effects when taken up and used within different social structures.

The concept of practice reflects the combined effect of the individual and the social  on each other. Practice is the interface between human skills and capabilities, human action and shared, practical understanding.

Practitioners align themselves with their practice

Practitioners draw on shared understandings and ways of doing things. There are individual choices but action is set within shared understandings.

The impact of technology is not just on the increased number of tools and activities that can be used for T&L but the way that the use of these tools changes patterns of activity.

The challenge for practitioners is not just to choose the right tool but to see how to change their own and their learners’ expectations and patterns of activity within practices that are often taken for granted.

Activity 1: Read Ubiquitous Transformations, Haythornwaite 2008, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Networked Learning

There are some transformations in the learning roles and relationships emgering from social and technical practices surrounding networked learning. These change are less regulated information content and retrieval, changing roles in who leads and who follows as authorities and consumers/learners, a greater role for individual in information management, contribution and participatory citizenship. Changes are also occurring in who learns from whom, and where we learn and engage with others. OL learning not only creates new virtual networks but also changes relationships with a local community.

In the light of your own responses and experience, does this ‘new paradigm’ indicate the redundancy of the practitioner? Or, on the contrary, does it indicate the need for a practitioner with in-depth knowledge of how new technologies can be harnessed and with the time to provide facilitation and support to students as they take on these new responsibilities?

I think that there is still a role for the practitioner in formal learning of course, but as she says, whilst people still want individuals to have degrees that’s fine, but what happens when they is no demand for people with degrees and that informal learning becomes enough. We do not teach people how to be online citizens, how to participate and neither do we know much about how to engage them with regular online participation – both giving and taking. Should we be doing this and if so, how?

More notes from Haythornwaite below

A good question… July 30, 2009

To what extent do participants in joint activities experience a sense of community?

Week 24 A8 – How practitioners use learning design models. July 30, 2009

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There are many implications of TEL of how crossing the boundaries of course experience, social and work experiences of learners for practitioners.

For example, Conole suggests that using new technologies requires a co-ordinated approach to design and that practice should be represented to better scaffold the sharing of good practice. This has involved developing tools for visualising and guiding design (see weeks 8/9).

These tools seek to “make explicit the pedagogical approaches and models that are implicit in practice.”

de Freitas el al (2007) “The Practitioner perspective on the modelling of pedagogy and practice” took 3 different groups of teachers and asked them to use the BECTA tool called MEEL to depict their practice; they also looked at how Wenger’s Communities of Practice concepts were relevant in the adoption/use of the tool.

The authors say that these attempts to model practice, is done to improve practice – which will lead to either 1. an idealised practice (Laurillard, 2001) or 2. it can be used by a teacher to represent their own ideas for sharing, negotiation and revision (Conole and Oliver, 2002).

In a review of frameworks and models and theoretical accounts they could be classified into 3 perspectives: Associative, Cognitive and Situative which suggest different pedagogical priorities.

Different types of tools: Frameworks – define concepts; Models – relate to concepts, process based or analytic; Tool kits – structured process for designers; Software Wizards.

Sharpe (2004) identified 5 factors as influencing the success of these interventions on improving practice:

1. Usability- known about, accessible and understandable
2. Contextualisation – customizing or adapting resources for intended audience
3. Professional learning qualities – a change in practice requires learning, involving changes in the conceptions of T&L.
4. Community – working with existing communities rather than trying to create new social structures.
5. Learning design – helping practitioners to based their practice on an understanding of student learning, designing to support this.

Research shows that however good a model is, just handing it over to practitioners will not lead to understanding, engagement or impact.  [this is what happened in Weeks 8/9). Practitioners need to be supported with engaging with the tool i order to understand it’s relationship to their own practice.

A nice little phrase about learning activities: Collaboration, Creativity and Enjoyment.

The authors found that the models were welcomed by practitioners but that there was a variation in how they were engaged with due to the “complexities of REIFICATION” – something that a community produces through its shared practice – an outcome of practice (eg a lesson plan) or a reflection of the process taken in practice (guidelines on how to...).  The models given to practitioners are reifications of the processes the people who made the model went through and the adaptations of the model produced by the 3 groups were representative of their own practice and highlight the situated nature of their work – ie situated within their contexts.

Reifications emerge from practice, they do not define it.

The artefacts which are the reifications enable BOUNDARY CROSSING – they can be given to others – members of the new community must work on it to make it meaningful to them by constructing a link between the reification and their own practice.

Communities may use reifications to influence the practice of others – to ALIGN their practice.

The models were adapted and enabled the new groups into reify their practices.  I would be concerned about how practitioners are introduced to different models as if they are the answer/only way. The key is in how you engage practitioner groups with the reification in order to use it as a catalyst to adapt their own processes.

A reflection on blogging July 30, 2009

In the tutor group discussion forum I’ve came round to thinking that the blogs enable us to know we are on track. If we are writing up our notes from readings we’ve done, we can read other people’s blogs to make sure we have interpreted it correctly and if they describe it in a different way we can pick up a different meaning or alternative view.

The tutor’s role isn’t to tell us if we’re wrong or right; we have each other for that…

Collaborative learning through blogs….hmmmmm

Make a note for this for the ECA!

Week 24 A6. Wenger’s Presentation July 29, 2009

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Drawing Informal Learning into  Education

The process of recognising the skills and experience learners possess in their social and work lives will benefit their performance in formal education. Teachers’ experiences in their own schools can be shared with their CoP to learn, Online interaction supports knowledge sharing and development of practice based learning.

We watched a presentation given by Etienne Wenger (see right) to the OU in 2007. Here are so key quotes I enjoyed:

• “if a university is going to engage in professional development or practice-based learning it’s going to have to fundamentally take these two premises as a point of departure: that knowledge is the property of communities and that meaningfulness, meaningful engagement in a communal enterprise of service has got to be the foundation of professional identity.”

• Online communities – “how can you call this a community? These people have never met. These people will never meet, probably. They are a community because they recognise each other as learning partners and co-practitioners. I can see it in what you say, and because I can recognise the practitioner in you, I can trust that what you’re saying is going to be meaningful to me in my own learning, in my own trajectory. So that connection of practitioner to practitioner that creates a learning partnership is actually very important even with a simple technology like a list serve. “

• F”or them it was like, you know, the first thing you do in the morning is go check the computer. What is my community doing and saying today? So, we should not even assume that in a community, if someone is not extremely active in posting a whole lot, that there is not a very meaningful connection to the process of learning that is directly talking to one’s identity as a practitioner.”

• “traditionally, at least, in many people’s minds, I think, distance learning is kind of second cousin to on-campus learning. But, if you start thinking about learning as engagement in a system of practices, then distance learning could be viewed as actually closer.”