Conversation Piece

This week, the Australian Federal Government has outlined devastating cuts to the higher education sector. Many of our Vice Chancellors appear to have accepted these cuts as valid. I’m not sure what is worse: the fact that universities won’t be able to do their jobs as well as they should, or the wilful misrepresentation of the role of the sector which underpins the government’s position. Increases in fees have been presented to the Australian people as acceptable because a university-educated individual benefits from higher earnings over his or her lifetime. For many graduates this is true, but it does not justify higher fees.

The purpose of a university is not and never has been to produce flawless worker bees. Our best universities do not exist to graduate students who are perfectly work-ready, nor do we exist to deal with “clients” who purchase from us an experience that changes them into people that industry moguls rush to hire (because they will be the ones most easily slotted into the gaps in the workforce). We ought not to be basing the price of a university education on how well we are able to convince our students that we will make them irresistible in the job market. Individual gain is not the sole purpose of our endeavour.

Universities don’t enrol “clients”. We don't have "customers". University students, either future or current, have a right to excellent, timely customer service when it comes to administrative matters like admissions, notification of results, assistance with disabilities and so on. They do not have a right to expect to graduate as a result of turning up. Our students are buying an opportunity to learn; the best of them make the most of that. Universities have a responsibility to give students the best possible learning experience and the best possible learning environments, face-to-face, online, and in every other of the modes in which we deliver our programs. Graduation is our warrant that they have learnt the expected amount during their time with us. Industry and government are not our “clients” either. Universities don’t have “clients”. We serve our communities and our society in a different way.

Universities exist to ensure that the nation has the knowledge necessary to solve the problems of society.

Universities are umbrella organizations for communities of disciplinary scholars ranging from novices (students) to experts (the best of our professors). Some of these scholars stay within the world of academia for their entire working lives, where they become custodians of the knowledge of their discipline, adding to it through research, disseminating it through publication and outreach (and occasionally commercialization), and inducting new novices to it through teaching. Others leave academia after a period, taking their disciplinary knowledge with them into jobs in industry or government where they use it to solve the problems of society (for which they are paid salaries and fees). University scholars are assisted in achieving these goals by administrative, specialist, and technical staff members, who provide and support systems, tools, technologies, and co-curricular and professional development programs. Their job is to assist all scholars of the institution to play their roles as well as they can, whether they be novices (students) or experts of varying experience and ability (academics). We are all working for a learned, more informed, more reflective world. That's the frame of our working lives.

Research and teaching are not different activities. They are equally important aspects of the same thing: our disciplines. The disciplines – the bodies of knowledge at the core of university activity – are shaped and nurtured by human experience. Communities of disciplinary scholars working in universities spend their lives involved in very pragmatic activity. They haven’t retreated from the world or abdicated their roles in wider society. They aren’t a luxury to be shed in hard times.

University scholars identify valid research questions (for the disciplines, for society) and they use the tools of the disciplines (methods and theories) to solve problems and to answer those questions. Novices (students) entering the community come to us to learn these things. Our graduates take these skills, along with the ability to understand, consume, and make use of disciplinary knowledge, into the workforce, where they are implemented by industry and government. Our academics are funded by the community (through funds administered by governments, for the most part) to continue to expand the knowledge available to humanity and to share that knowledge with the rest of the world.

It’s as simple and as complex – and as valuable – as that.

Our government is doing the country a great disservice by reducing funding for these activities. The value of a university simply cannot be calculated by dividing the amount of funding by the number of work-ready graduates in a given period. The contributions that universities make are far too valuable to be treated so cavalierly. 

Students reflecting on research-led teaching

Today I attended a colloquium organized by the ANU Centre for Teaching and Learning where some of the most interesting presentations were from students working as tutors and students trying to figure out how to be better discipline experts. One of the best of these presentations was from a student of mathematics who has been thinking and writing about "mathematical skills, thought processes and mind sets and how we could introduce these to students earlier in their education". This is a student who wants to understand not only the content of her chosen discipline, but also the epistemology of the discipline. She has come to understand that the more she knows about the discipline, the better she will be as a practitioner and a researcher in the discipline.

This one presentation alone was worth the trip ... But there was more!

Why do we need universities?

Last weekend, the federal government announced plans to slash $2.3 billion from its spending on higher education in order to fund the Gonski school reforms, the biggest cut to the sector since John Howard's 1996 budget. The short-sightedness of this decision leaves me in despair.

I've taken advantage of my democratic right to express my opinion and have written to the Prime Minister and to the Federal Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research.

 

This is the text of my letter:   "I am writing to you to express my anger and dismay at your decision to cut $2.3 billion from higher education announced last Saturday 13 April 2013. Whilst I support increased levels of public investment in our schools, one sector of education should not be cut to finance initiatives in another.   It is my great concern that in making this decision, you have demonstrated a heartbreaking lack of understanding about the purpose and the real value of universities.   Universities exist to:

• extend the boundaries of the known, to create knowledge new to humanity using the tools and techniques of the disciplines,
• make discipline-specific bodies of knowledge (including newly discovered knowledge) available to all humanity, through scholarly publications and other media,
• provide discipline-specific programs of education, and thereby to induct novices into the role of custodian-expert-researcher of the knowledge of the discipline, and
• educate and graduate specialists to work in industry and government who have the skills and expertise to seek out, commission, contribute to, assess, and use this discipline-specific knowledge to solve the day-to-day problems of society and the greater problems of humanity.

A pragmatist would say that a university (also, or perhaps even only) exists to provide accreditation and certification: to warrant that its graduates are competent and have demonstrated suitable achievement in their chosen area of expertise. There is no doubt that for a significant number of university students, the main objective is the testamur – the piece of paper confirming that a graduate has earned a degree – because without a degree, many employment opportunities evaporate. This pragmatic casting of the institution, with its focus on credentials and warrants, does a grave disservice to the traditions and cultures of the university. Creators, curators, and custodians of the knowledge and expertise that underpins humanity’s capabilities are deeply embedded in their disciplines. They have known for centuries that an education is more than a qualification and that a university education differs in significant ways from educational programs developed for delivery by other educational institutions. Specifically, universities bring together the tasks of research and teaching, and it is when these are woven together elegantly that profound and invaluable discoveries are made for humanity, by individual scholars of all ages. It is important that those who provide our funding also take the time to understand this as well.

Those universities offering research-led education (and almost all Australian universities provide research-led education in one form or another) are preparing two kinds of graduates. The first category (by and large, those who stay within the walls of the university) includes those who take on responsibilities as custodians of the body of disciplinary knowledge. These are the researchers, the teachers, the writers, and the academics operating from within the discipline. They have a responsibility to maintain and develop the body of knowledge, to disseminate existing and new disciplinary knowledge, and to set the standards for those entering and operating within the discipline. These graduates go on to careers in academia, as teachers, theorists, and researchers. The second category (those who will have careers outside the walls of the university) includes those who use their disciplinary knowledge to solve the problems of society and perhaps of humanity. These are policy advisers, technical officers, managers, and practitioners whose jobs in industry and government are informed by their disciplinary expertise. They use the content knowledge of the discipline, along with the methodologies, theories, tools of analysis and problem-solving, techniques, skills, language, and forms of communication of the discipline. Both groups see the world through the lens of the discipline, and approach their work from the perspective of a discipline expert. Both groups have a responsibility to extend their disciplinary expertise over time. They are more than competent technicians; they are disciplinary pioneers.

The best of our disciplinary experts have a foot in both worlds.

Therefore, on behalf of my colleagues, all Australian university students, and every single Australian, I ask you to reconsider these cuts."

I can only hope that good sense will prevail, but I foresee a long, hard battle ahead of us.

2013: starting out

In Australian universities, for the educational design and development community, January is the month of reflection. Our academic colleagues aren't usually back on campus, and we get to spend some time planning for the rest of the year. This year is going to be busy for me and my colleagues - but that makes it no different from all the other years I've worked in universities.

Among other things, I'm excited about changes to the techologies we'll be using to create our online learning environment and about the arrival of some new colleagues in the central support team that keeps the online learning environment functioning. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that "reliability" will be their guiding principle in 2013.

As always, the work of my colleagues here at the University and beyond is keeping me interested - and nudging me towards new approaches and ways of thinking about my practice.

Tony Bates, truly an elder of my tribe, is also reflecting this week. Tony's been working in the field for 44 years, and his posting on seven "aha" moments is worth reading.

The very excellent Megan Poore has just published a new book, Using Social Media in the classroom: a best practice guide, which comes with a companion website. This is one for your back pocket, whether you are a whizz yourself or not. Meg's expertise in the practical application of the tools is informed by a deep understanding of why we use them, which comes from her original training as a cultural anthropologist.

It's going to be a fantastic year!

MOOCs: the next Big Thing? or What about the teachers?

Ahh, yes … the next Big Thing.

Let’s have a definition first. According to Wikipedia (today at least), a MOOC – a massive open online course – is “a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web”, a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources. Typically, such courses are non-award courses, although some institutions are starting to offer credit for such courses and to certify those who complete them, if participants successfully complete some form of associated assessment.

So, what does a MOOC look like?

The first MOOCs were offered by enthusiasts very familiar with web tools and excited about the possibilities they open up for wide-scale participation and collaboration. Notions of constructivist learning were strong drivers for these early MOOCers. In 2005, George Siemens listed these:

1. Learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions. 
2. Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources. 
3. Learning may reside in non-human appliances. 
4. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. 
5. Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. 
6. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. 
7. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. 
8. Decision making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

More recently a number of “MOOC-like projects” have developed – Coursera, Udacity, and edX. These are driven in part, I suspect, by American notions of benevolence (or possibly American notions of entrepreneurship if we are to accept Greg Graham's recent comments in the Chronicle of Higher Education*). These “MOOC-like” courses rely less on constructivist principles, and more on a belief that it’s a good thing to give the poverty-stricken masses access to the vast bodies of knowledge available to the well-educated. They tend to be associated with respectable US universities. In the case of the first two, this is because the founders are or were employed by Stanford University, and the last because it has grown out of MIT’s open courseware project and now involves Harvard University.

Characteristics of MOOCs:

1. Courses have many, many participants, only a small proportion of whom will be active contributors or even complete the course.
2. MOOCs of all flavours provide participants with access to content selected and arranged into coherent topics by course designers who may or may not be involved in the delivery of the course.
3. Some MOOCs, particularly those designed on constructivist principles, include opportunities for conversation, collaboration, and communication between participants. There may be some light facilitation or moderation, but this is not an essential element of the design of the course.
4. Some MOOCs offer opportunities for assessment and some do not.
5. MOOCs designed with a constructivist model in mind rely on peer review and group collaboration to leverage learning (rather than formative and summative feedback from a teacher).
6. MOOCs designed with a more traditional mode of learning in mind replace teacher feedback with automated “pre-made” feedback provided via automatically marked, objective, online quizzes and examinations.
7. And finally … and for me, this is the defining characteristic of a MOOC:
   
   While learning may occur in MOOCs (and apart from those that offer some form of assessment, the only people who will be able to attest to this are those who participate), teaching is practically non-existent.

By teaching, I mean proper, old-fashioned interaction between lecturer and student, where the lecturer gives the student information (tells, models, or shows course-related content) and goes on to provide learning experiences, monitor student learning, provide formative feedback, and judge how well students have achieved the learning outcomes for the course as a result of participating in structured learning activities. This sort of old-fashioned teaching may happen in a face-to-face context, but it could happen equally well in an online environment. Wherever it happens, the teacher is essential; it is the teacher who guides, nudges, demonstrates, models, tailors the learning experience to suit the students in this particular class, and provides personalised formative feedback just in time to ensure that students are provided with the bespoke designed experiences that they need to achieve course learning outcomes. Just as each class is distinctive, a good teacher will ensure that each version of the course is customized to suit that unique class. Each class will need something slightly different; a good teacher understands and provides that.

Siemens, one of the earliest MOOC authors, tells us that MOOCs based on a constructivist pedagogy draw on the following principles:

• Aggregation: A MOOC provides a starting point for a massive amount of content to be produced in different places online, which is later aggregated as a newsletter or a web page accessible to participants on a regular basis.
• Remixing: The second principle is remixing, that is, associating materials created within the course with each other and with materials elsewhere.
• Re-purposing: Aggregated and remixed materials are re-purposed to suit the goals of each participant.
• Feeding forward: This material is shared with other participants and the rest of the world.

Participants construct new knowledge by building on and discussing the content initially presented in the course. This new knowledge is then in turn built on and discussed and woven into the fabric of human wisdom.

These are all very good things, and teachers in traditional institutions can learn a great deal from George’s take on constructivist pedagogies – but if any teaching occurs in George’s MOOCs, it is probably peer-to-peer.

In the end, for me, MOOCs are a great idea, just as libraries are a great idea. They provide opportunities for people to read and talk about ideas new to them, to learn about any number of things. They do not threaten traditional universities, even those that offer an online experience, because the thing that defines an educational institution – even a research-intensive university like my own – is teaching.

***

* 1 October 2012, Greg Graham, "How the embrace of MOOCs could hurt middle America", Chronicle of Higher Education, found at http://chronicle.com/article/A-Pioneer-in-Online-Education/134654/ if you are a subscriber.

Pondering things technological

When I was a very young teacher in training, I was strongly influenced by the work of the Canadian Marshall McLuhan and by Neil Postman’s book Teaching as a subversive activity. I’ve been prompted to buy Postman’s book again. This time, it will be delivered instantaneously to my e-book reader, which is perhaps ironic, given Postman’s warnings that contemporary mass communications media make it impossible to share serious ideas.


Postman died in 2003, and while much of his work has a slightly old-fashioned tone because of his focus on television, his message is highly relevant. For example, Postman concluded a presentation he delivered in 1998 with these words:

"And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

If we had more time, I could supply some additional important things about technological change but I will stand by these for the moment, and will close with this thought. In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been “technology über alles,” and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we many use technology rather than be used by it."

The full text is available at Wikiversity: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Neil_Postman:_Five_Things_We_Need_to_Know_About_Technological_Change. It's only a few pages long ... you could read it in your coffee break. It might give you as much to ponder as it did me.

My Other blog

In my last posting, I invited you to subscribe to a Moodle site I had set up, called Teaching Techniques. This site was to be a password-protected site where I collected ideas about teaching strategies and techniques, tailored for those teaching face-to-face and online in universities and other tertiary institutions. I had made a good start, with 16-17 good ideas for content-independent ideas that could be implemented in tutorials and lecture theatres.

In the last couple of days, however, I have transferred that material to a new blog, called University Teaching: strategies and techniques. I've done this for two reasons. The first is to do with my time: I realised that I didn't want to spend time creating Moodle accounts for people. The second is to do with the acquisition of NetSpot (my Moodle host) by Blackboard. I'm just not sure what will happen to the DeborahVenessAssociates Moodle sites in the long-term.

So - the good news is that you can sign up for the new blog all on your own.

Building the Teaching Techniques site

I’ve been having great fun this week, in between doing the tasks associated with my day job. I’ve been building a password-protected website (a Moodle site hosted by the excellent company NetSpot) where I’ve started to gather together an annotated list of the skills that might be selected to go into the kitbag of a very good teacher. Some of them are obvious – questioning technique, for example; others are old favourites revisited – the ERICA technique for teaching students to read content-laden, discipline material; and some are just fun – a web-based app to create make-believe newspaper clippings (already mentioned in an earlier post in this blog).

I expect that this will grow quite quickly. I’ve identified the next three topics already.

Some of the entries are very personal, while others direct readers to further resources. It’s not public, so if any of you, my dear readers, would like to get access, you’ll have to ask for a password. You can do that by emailing me at the address provided in my profile.

Here’s a taster …

***

Questioning students

Too often, teachers rely heavily on the kinds of questions known as display questions. I call them “guess-what’s-in-my-head” questions. Technically, these are questions designed to elicit learners’ prior knowledge and to check comprehension. They focus on declarative knowledge, and they look like this:

• What does … mean?
• When do we use …?
• What comes after …?
• … is [said with a rising intonation and followed by a long pause]? (This one is particularly irritating, I think.)
• What’s the opposite of …?

Equally irritating and equally useless – at least for purposes of engaging learners – are convergent or closed questions. Correct answers to these kinds of questions are narrowly defined and require little reflection or originality. They usually simply require students to remember stuff. They look like this:

• What do we call …?
• When did … do …?
• Where did … happen?

Of course, convergent and closed questions do serve a useful purposes. For example, they can be used to check that students have understood your instructions (“Are you working alone or in pairs? Have you finished? Are you going to write something now?”), to manage the class (“Are you discussing the topic? Can you see the board? Why are you sitting on your own?”), or to check on progress (“Are you ready to move on to the next topic? Do you have any questions?”).

The thing to remember about them, though, as that they are information-gathering; they provide the teacher with information about what the students know (or don’t know). They aren’t very interesting for the students.

The best questions for learning – and you have to teach students to be ready for them – are divergent or open-ended questions. These questions are broad and challenging and they often generate multiple answers. They require a level of thinking that is more demanding. They encourage students to offer opinions, to elaborate, to explain their conclusions, their reasoning, and their evidence, and to engage in discussion. Teachers who use these types of questions are engaging in conversations with students designed to stimulate learning rather than interrogating them about what they don’t know.

These questions look like this:

• What is the nature of [a concept … justice, truth, beauty]?
• How do we know what we know?
• How did you come to [a particular] conclusion?
• Why is it so?
• What else led you to this conclusion?

Consider the following series of questions:

1. Was Napoleon defeated at Waterloo?
2. Who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo?
3. How was Napoleon defeated at Waterloo?
4. Why was Napoleon at Waterloo? How do you know?
5. What would have happened if Napoleon hadn’t lost the Battle of Waterloo? Why?

We can be sure that students who can answer the last two question sets, outlining their evidence and explaining how they came to their conclusions, are going to do a lot better on any test about the Battle of Waterloo than students who can answer only the first three questions.

Once your students have become comfortable with divergent questions, you can introduce a structured questioning activity in each class or lecture.

Try the Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce technique. It goes like this.

1. Explain the technique.
2. Pose: Pose the question/s, reminding students that you don’t want them to answer immediately.
3. Pause: Tell the students to hold the thought, to think, and to think again. Be clear: no one is to speak until invited. (At this stage, you may wish to introduce small group discussions, or give students opportunity to write about the topic. Once they have an answer, have them sit and wait, reflecting on their answer, until you are ready to select someone to provide an answer.)
4. Pounce: Identify the student who is to answer; name the student (A). Wait for A’s answer. Don’t give the students any idea about your opinion of the answer.
5. Bounce: Once you have student A’s answer, bounce to student B and ask B to give his or her opinion of A’s answer. Bounce to student C: what does he or she think of B’s comment? Use reflective listening techniques: “A has told us that …; B thinks that …; C has thrown in the idea that …”.

6. Finally, sum up the conversation and clear up any remaining misconceptions.

***

Feedback is very welcome.

Augmented Reality and my friend Matt

Today I had lunch with a friend, who is working on an amazing project with the InSPIRE Centre at the University of Canberra.  Matt Bacon is working on a project to investigate the educational value of augmented reality (a-r) technologies with a group of equally talented people - Robert Fitzgerald, Anna Wilson, and Danny Munnerly.  Wow.

He's already planted an a-r forest in the foyer of Parliament House in Canberra, and has promised to put something in the corridor outside my office. Augmented reality gives anyone with a viewing device access to information overlays of the world around them. These overlays contain information in the form of images or video or text, e.g. newly created objects or tags made up of data pulled from the Web. The overlays are being created willy-nilly by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.

So, say you are sitting at a cafe on the campus of the Australian National University, and you want to know if anyone nearby is tweeting. Using the augmented reality viewers on your iPad, you can see where the tweeters are. If anyone has taken photos nearby and made them public using something like Instagram, you can see them using the a-r viewer.

Or ... say you are viewing Canberra from the Mt Ainslie lookout and you are wondering what it looked like before Lake Burley Griffin was full. If someone had built the 3-D image and uploaded it, you could hold your smart phone up, and see this alternate view.

I'm pretty sure we are going to hear more about this.

Oh ... and if you are in the foyer of the Australian Parliament House, and you want to see Matt's forest, you will need a smart phone or a tablet loaded up with the appropriate viewer (Junaio or Layar). Once you have opened the app on your device, search for AR Studio. Let me know what happens if you get there before me.

The scholarship of teaching (as research)

I've long admired Rick Reis's newsletter from Stanford, Tomorrow's Professor. He is alert to important trends, drawing our attention to and providing brief but powerful analyses of key issues. His recent post on "the scholarship of teaching and learning as 'research' " is no different. This issue has been of concern to academic and educational developers for some time, and it is good to see the evidence Reis provides that this concern is seeping into the disciplines.

His latest post draws heavily on the work of Mary Taylor Huber, one of the best-known Americans writing on the topic, but his comments will resonate with Australians who have engaged with the conversations here about the implications of TEQSA and discipline-based standards documents, as well as those who have ever put together portfolios for promotion that include evidence of excellence in teaching, or prepared paperwork that includes written learning outcomes for courses or programs.

Read the full posting at http://derekbruff.com/site/tomprof/. Reis introduces the posting with this:

The good news is that disciplinary cultures themselves have become friendlier to pedagogical concerns over the past twenty years, with scholarly societies devoting more air-, column-, and cyberspace to teaching and learning in their conferences, journals, and web sites. The sciences, especially, have been encouraged by National Science Foundation programs to strengthen science education. But other fields too—sometimes spurred by the drive from accrediting bodies to articulate student learning outcomes—have stepped up to the plate.

In the next 12-18 months, every Australian university will be paying much closer attention to the aligned curriculum, learning outcomes, statements of academic achievement, and every related issue. Will we also see a greater recognition of the time and attention these require when it comes time for promotion?  If not, I can see no way forward except a complete bifurcation of the academic life, with teachers on the one side and researchers on the other. This would, in my opinion, come at the expense of the richness and depth of academic work and of the learning experience Australia provides for its university students.  (That's not to say that at any one point in a person's career there might be a greater focus on one or the other - for example, PhD theses rarely get written by those who are focussing all their attention on teaching.) However, the truly interesting academics (substitute "lecturers" or "faculty" here, depending on your preferred country of residence), in my experience, are those who are equally interested in creating knowledge through their research, and in sharing the impetus for their research, their methods for creating that new knowledge, and the new knowledge itself, with both their peers and their students through both their writing and their teaching.

I think we at risk of losing something very important, so I hope posts like Reis's are being discussed across the country. Fingers crossed, eh?

Reflections on ASCILITE 2011 Hobart

 

Hobart from Mt Wellington



This year’s ASCILITE conference in Hobart was very well attended, with nearly 500 participants from 90+ institutions. I certainly took away at least two new ideas and several other things to think about.

The keynote speakers were:

• Gilly Salmon, who reprised her books on “e-moderating”

• Simon Buckingham Shum, who delivered an extremely important presentation on learning analytics by videoconference from the UK, suggesting that we need to move on from counting clicks to looking at data that will actually inform – evidence of critical curiosity, meaning making, changing and learning, learning relationships, strategic awareness amongst the students, resilience, and creativity



Mt Wellington viewing shelter doors



• Sharon Kerr, who spoke on the way new technologies and easy-to-use devices like the iPad are reshaping our view of assistive technologies for students with disabilities, and may actually be re-defining our concept of “disability” in the learning context

 

Tasmanian wildflowers



The paper co-authored by our colleagues from CECS – Lauren Thompson, Kim Blackmore and Malcolm Pettigrove – was one of two papers selected as Best of Conference. The paper – Leading change: applying change management approaches to engage students in blended learning – reports on one aspect of the ANU-UniSA Hubs and Spokes Project. The other Best of Conference paper was Linda Corrin’s paper entitled Exploring medical students’ use of technology. The refereed conference proceedings are available online. In the pre-conference workshop I attended, there was considerable discussion about TEQSA, assessment strategies and practices, and issues of curriculum alignment.

Among the other presentations of interest (to me, at least) were these:

1. Kennedy, Jones, Chambers & Peacock’s study examining the reasons academics use – or don’t use – university-endorsed (and unendorsed) learning technologies

2. Ryan, Hinton & Lamont Mills’ presentation of the finding of their investigation into the impact of learning technologies on academic workload, where they found



Yoni Ryan, Leone Hinton and Andrea Lamont-Mills



a. that a distance education model of curriculum design brings with it an increase in academic workload before the beginning of the study session, but often a reduced workload during the semester,

b. that there isn't a clear workload model in the universities they visited that takes account of changing practice in the light of increased use across the sector of learning technologies, and



c. that while academic staff understand that teaching online has become a requirement, they are often unwilling to reduce face-to-face contact because they believe that to reduce face-to-face contact, even when they have increased online contact, they would adversely affect the quality of teaching and learning

3. Karanicolas, Green, Willis & Snelling’s reflections on the relative value added by their own curriculum innovations, including those supported by learning technologies

4. Allen & Coleman’s paper on the ways they are cultivating and assessing creativity with the help of an e-portfolio tool

5. Palmer’s confronting findings that demonstrate that without thoughtful curriculum re-design, when courses are taught online, student satisfaction scores drop significantly; that is, it’s not enough merely to add some online aspect to a traditionally-designed course, the lecturer has to re-think and re-design

6. Lever, Gluga & Kay’s presentation about a University of Sydney curriculum documentation database that will provide reports on curriculum alignment, and the issues that arose during the building of the database

7. Dolan’s moving presentation about the impact of the earthquake on the use of online learning technologies in the short-term and in the long-term at the University of Canterbury, where higher usage – driven by necessity in the early days – has persisted even as the buildings and face-to-face systems have been rebuilt

There were many other valuable papers, I am sure, but of the sessions I attended, these were the speakers who caught my attention.

Shane Evans and Kathy Savige from UNSW@ADFA

This annual conference is increasingly providing a forum for those who are interested in more than online tools. Those who attend are examining changing practice in among university teachers, looking at the ways institutions are dealing with these changes through policies, institutional policies and procedures, and the implications of these changes for the kinds of teacher education preparation, professional development programs, and professional support that universities need to be putting in place to ensure that their teaching staff have not only the discipline knowledge required of a university teacher, but also a thoughtful, informed, reflective approach to their teaching practice.



Alex Knight, Marina Lobastov and Yvonne Wisby
nearly at the top of the University of Tasmania



After the conference, Marina Lobastov from the University of Tasmania gave a small group of us a private tour of some of their new teaching facilities, where some of the more recent ideas about learning spaces are being put into practice.

Then I explored the Huon Valley - what an amazing place that is ...

The backyard for my Huon Valley forest dwelling friends

Dale the Dog decides that swimming isn't for him

Teaching the language of the disciplines

Earlier this week, I attended the launch of a book. The people around me are constantly publishing monographs and scholarly articles. Some of them are good, some of them are mind-boggling boring (to me ... not to everyone). Some of them deal with narrow academic studies, some are the result of years of focused attention on a PhD topic, and some of them emerge from wide, cross-disciplinary thinking. Many are predictable, if worthy. Few are unexpected, if you know the people involved.

This one took me by surprise, perhaps because I didn't really think about what would be likely to emerge from a meeting between an energetic teacher of Chinese and a thoughtful, quiet scientist with research interests in virology, innate immunity and bio-statistics over a cup of coffee in a seminar about university teaching.

This pair are both committed teachers. Their book came about because of a discussion about how the scientist might best teach the language of his discipline to his students, and because there was a very practical problem to solve. Brett knows the language of his discipline, but was having trouble teaching it to his students. Felicia knows how to teach languages, but didn't know the language of Brett's discipline. They set about learning about each other's areas of expertise. Felicia attended every class Brett taught for a whole semester. Brett spent hours learning about the language teaching techniques that Felicia uses.

Dr Felicia Zhang, the teacher of Chinese, suggested to Dr Brett Lidbury, the scientist, that he incorporate language teaching techniques and practices in his biology classes. Then they brought in Dr Alice Richardson, a statistician, to check the results. They invited a whole raft of other people to think about the issues and to contribute their tips and tricks ... and came up with the script for the book.

It seems like a pretty good idea to me. After all, one of the first things that discipline novices have to conquer is the language of their new discipline.  If you don't sound like a physicist or a biologist when you talk about physics or biology, you probably aren't one, right?

from left to right: Dr Brett Lidbury, Dr Felicia Zhang, and Dr Alice Richardson

Take a look. The book is full of concrete suggestions about how to teach the language of science. I'm pretty sure most of the ideas could be adapted to other other disciplines as well.

Zhang, F., Lidbury, B., Richardson, A., Yates, B., Gardiner, M., Bridgeman A., Schutte, J., Rodger, C., and Mate, K. (2011). Sustainable Language Support Practices in Science Education: technologies and solutions. US: Business Science Reference. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sustainable-Language-Support-Practices-Education/dp/1613500629. 

Isn't it great when the people you know teach you something unexpected, unexpectedly?

Pessimist or realist?

Maybe it's just because it's the festive season, and maybe there's a change in the air, but this week I have come across two articles dealing with similar issues - one serious, one very silly. Both gave me comfort.

I have long lamented the tendency among those of my tribe who proselytize, touting the bright-shiny things in a firm belief, unquestioned and unqualified, that more technology in education is the thing. These colleagues are people I love dearly for their passion and their knowledge about the detail of the code and the finickity specifications of the widgets. These colleagues know, deep in their hearts and in every atom of their being, that they hold the key to better student engagement and much higher quality learning - and that the key is digital technologies in teaching and learning.

I'm not so sure. I'm the one on the side, asking questions like "Is there another, simpler way to achieve the end? Is this new bright-shiny absolutely robust and reliable? Where do the less confident go if they can't figure out how to work it?" and "Which is the best tool for the task I have on the table right now?".

Now I have a label for myself.  Neil Selwyn calls me 'pessimistic'. In defining the term, he writes: "... pessimism ... is not "a dogmatic blanket negativity towards education and technology", but while it "allows room for an acceptance that specific things are getting better", the "pessimistic educational technologist ... accepts that digital technology is not bringing about the changes and transformations that many people would like to believe".

And so it is, here in the world I live in, embedded as I am in an academic organizational unit that is responsible for teaching the business disciplines in a research-intensive university. That is why I am sometimes perceived to be anti-technology: I do not adhere to the belief that increased use of digital technologies in education is automatically followed by an improvement in quality in teaching and learning, even if the technologies are wielded expertly. I would call myself cynical rather than pessimistic, but the idea is the same.

Selwyn writes:

"Surely, there is nothing wrong with attempting to develop realistic and honest ways of working with digital technologies in education that involve thinking the worst (rather than the best) of them. Of course, that would mean reorienting the educational technology mindset so that it is accepting the social world as it is and is comfortable in its inability to offer definite technological answers to what are indefinite problems. This would therefore mean refocusing the imaginations of educational technologists away from some of the wilder 'science fictions' of their particular areas of education, technology and society."

Fabulous thinking. His editorial is in the latest edition of the British Journal of Educational Technology (see below for the full citation).

The other academic piece that has made my day is Jon Baggaley's article in Distance Education: "Flexible learning: a Luddite view" (full reference below). Tongue in cheek, he writes:

"... I confidently look forward to the day when inflexibility, and its by-products IL [inflexible learning] and OM [obduracy maintenance], will be lauded as redeeming educational solutions. In anticipating that future, it is recommended that educators should celebrate the inherent inflexibility of their colleagues rather than lamenting it, and should stimulate inflexibility in teaching and learning by the development of IL centres, intervention programmes, journals, profeissional associations, and events."

He goes on to remind us of the motto for the new Society for Inflexible Learning: non inflexibilitas sed constantia ("not inflexibility but regularity").

I like it. I plan to order a badge for Christmas.

References
Baggaley, J (2011). Flexible learning: a Luddite view. Distance Education, 32(3), 457-462.
(Thanks to Tony Bates for mentioning this one in his regular blog at http://www.tonybates.ca/.)

Selwyn, N. (2011). Editorial: In praise of pessimism - the need for negativity in educational technology. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(5), 713-718.
(Thanks to my colleague James M. for bringing this one to my attention.)

As 2011 comes to a close

Well, here I am at the end of November, and I really don't know where the second half of this year went.  Still, the year has gone well. Back on the home farm (in the university that buys most of my time), we've made some useful progress, tidying up our curriculum documentation and spreading ideas of clear learning outcomes and alignment with assessment. Some of my academic colleagues have been lucky enough to work on their lecturing skills in the lecturing as performance courses run by the wonderful Amanda Burrell of Captivus. It looks as if she will be working with a couple of new groups next year, which is fabulous news. I had some success in introducing blended and flexible ways of teaching to the academic community in my hometown in a range of different ways, sometimes by pretending I'm going to run a training session on Moodle and surreptitiously sneaking in ideas of learning design and task sequency, and sometimes by focussing on the bright-shiny things that come labelled "Technology".

This three-pronged approach to the support of university teachers in my part of the University has prompted me to think about the current divides that exist, at least operationally, in most Australian universities: the divides between those who teach face-to-face and those who teach online, between the academic developers (often employed as academics) and the educational designers / developers (often employed as general staff), between those who attend the ASCILITE conference and those who attend the HERDSA conference ... and between - well, fill in the gap with your own example here.

This divide, it seems to me, is particularly obvious - and damaging to progress - in the Australian research-intensive universities. I haven't yet been able to think of a way to break down those barriers, but perhaps tomorrow, when the world has evolved, someone will find a way.

Most of the university teachers I encounter are so flat out working on their research that they barely get time to think about their teaching. If they do find time to think about their teaching, they don't know if they should be interested or good at it; if they are good at it, they don't know if they should be proud of the fact; if they are proud of their expertise, they don't know whether they should tell anyone or keep quiet about it for fear they'll be perceived as dilettante researchers.

That's a great shame ... and I suspect would come as a considerable shock to most parents of undergraduate students.

In the meantime, in the interests of getting on, I've prepared my draft operational plan for 2012, which is looking good.

I'm off to the ASCILITE conference in Hobart next week, so should have some new and exciting ideas to report from there - at least one or two, anyway.

I've started to build a Moodle site with some very practical ideas for unviersity teachers, but that hasn't progressed very far, so I have little to report on that. That should be available quite soon, but not just yet.  Access will be available on request, as I will need to create the user accounts and send interested parties a password. There's something very empowering about being Queen of my own Moodle nation, with the power to issue passports / passwords. If you want one, just ask.

I have a half-written paper on university teachers and professional judgement ... that will have to be finished next year now.

There are a few other things in the oven, too. More of those later.

A new project

This week I’ve started working with a new group of Australian academics. As always, the first couple of days has been spent learning who they are, what their research interests are, what they think about teaching, and why they do the work they do.

As always, the group is fascinating.

This particular group is working on moving one of their face-to-face graduate programs online. They are working through the issues associated with changing the mode of delivery from a traditionally delivered blended model to an almost-completely online model.  To make things really interesting, they are doing this in the middle of a change of institutional Learning Management System. They have been using a vendor-supported, fairly mainstream LMS, and are in the process of moving across to one of the open source applications.

So … the group is learning how to use the new LMS, working out how to move their teaching artefacts from the old LMS to the new one in the most efficient way, and at the same time exploring the advantages and constraints of a new mode of teaching.

Fortunately for all of us, they are – by and large – open to new ideas, willing to discuss their concerns and expectations openly, and very intelligent.

The real reason I work with teachers, particularly in the higher education sector, is because the brains come in one size – hefty. Of course, along with the immense thinking power often comes the outsize egos … but that just makes life more interesting.

This project will give me an opportunity to try out some of my new ideas on a new audience – and a chance to refine my approach and my own teaching materials. I’m looking forward to it.

Turnitin and cheats: what one lecturer did at the Stern School of Business of New York University

Stephen Downes wrote today about one lecturer's experience with plagiarism detection software.

The link, to a blog posting by Panos Ipeirotis, may not work because he has been asked to remove the entry by his employer for legal reasons. However, even if you can't get to his original posting, read the comments from others about his posting (on his blog). Also of interest are the remarks he posted on the Business Insider website. This lecturer has chosen to implement assessment strategies that make it difficult for his students to cheat, rather than relying on Turnitin to identify plagiarised assignments.

He wrote:

I doubt that I will be checking again for cheaters. This is a losing battle: as I use more advanced cheating detection schemes, the cheaters will adapt. I am not a policeman fighting crime. My role is to educate and teach, not to enforce honest behavior. This is a university, not a kindergarten.

Instead, I plan to use assignments that are inherently not amenable to cheating:

Public projects: The database projects that use the NYC Data Mine data is one type of an approach: the projects are public and it would be meaningless to copy a project from a past semester. The risk of public embarrassment is a significant deterrent.

Peer reviewing: The other successful project is one in which students research a new technology, and present their findings in class; the only grade they receive is from their peers in the class. The social pressure is so high that most of the presentations are of excellent quality. This year, the student presentation on augmented reality was so amazing that for an MBA class we decided to simply show to the MBA students the recorded presentation.

Competitions: In order to teach students how the web works, I ask them to create a web site and get at least 100 unique visitors. The student with the most visitors at the end of the semester gets an award (most often an iPod). I had some great results with this project (e.g., one student created a web site on "How to Kill Nefarian" and got 150,000 visitors over 8 weeks) and some highly entertaining incidents.

In other words, my theory is: Cheating (on a systematic level) happens because students try to get an edge over their peers/competitors. Even top-notch students cheat, in order to ensure a perfect grade. Fighting cheating is not something that professors can do well in the long run, and it is counterproductive by itself. By channeling this competitive energy into creative activities, in which you cannot cheat, everyone is better off.

I like his solutions.

URLs

• The link to the Panos Ipeirotis blog entry: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gB36-9SVgOoJ:behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html+site:http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/+Why+I+will+never+pursue+cheating+again&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com
• Ipeirotis on the Business Insider website: http://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-class-cheating-2011-7#comment-4e273a85cadcbb434e020000
• His blog: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/ 

Thwarting the Shadow Scholar

Many of the academics I work with are very concerned about issues of plagiarism and academic dishonesty amongst their students. Many of their students speak English as a second or foreign language. These international students often struggle with everyday conversational interaction, let alone the difficulties associated with studying at a tertiary level in a borrowed language. The standard of English required by the institution of foreign students is quite low (an IELTS score of 6.5). Then there are the native speakers who just don’t know how to write, or to argue a case, or are apparently unfamiliar with academic discourse.

My academic colleagues know that at least some of these students submit work that isn't their own. They are concerned about the issue, and struggle - at times - to find a solution.

These academics fear most the paper mills manned by people like the Shadow Scholar, who took the time recently to outline his life and his contribution to higher education. For me, though, he isn’t the biggest threat to higher education. As I see it, the biggest threats are all the factors that prevent committed university teachers from implementing the solutions outlined by Mark Bauerlein – problems like under-funding, a high student:teacher ratio, poor teaching skills amongst university academics, a focus on disciplinary content at the expense of generic skills of communication, argument, synthesis, evaluation, and judgement, lack of institutional recognition of good teaching in the academic promotion game – those kinds of things.

“It’s simple, really,” Bauerlein says, “but laborious.”

Hmm-mm – sounds like good, solid, well-resourced, committed teaching to me. Now, if only there were more respect for that ...

Digital Natives or Digital Learners?

One of my favourite Net  Gen Skeptic bloggers, Mark Bullen, has been in Lisbon at the 2011 ED-MEDIA conference. He has reported on some of the papers that support his view that takeup of digital technologies is not generational, but criticized the authors for using Prensky's terminology. Among the papers he references is one from the excellent team at Wollongong (this one authored by Corrin, Bennett and Lockyer).

Bullen argues that we shouldn't be talking about digital natives, but rather digital learners.

I'm looking forward to hearing about the rest of the conference from some of the other Australians who attended - just as soon as they stop riding Segways around the cathedrals of Lisbon and come home (that would be Jenn Jones, Robert Fitzgerald, Mike Keppell, and several others).

Why writing good learning outcomes isn't rocket science

I was recently asked to put together a one-page cheat sheet for highly intelligent university lecturers unused to writing learning outcomes for university courses (subjects).  Here's what I wrote.

Guidelines for those writing learning outcomes

Principles

1. The assessment strategy for a course is designed to provide evidence of how well students have achieved the learning outcomes.

2. The stated learning outcomes of a course align not only with the assessment design but also with the stated purpose and goals of the program/s into which the course fits.

3. Learning outcomes describe what students will be able to do once they have completed the course; they deal with functioning rather than declarative knowledge*.

4. Learning outcomes describe what all students will be able to do if they have passed the course; the assessment strategy will provide the evidence that allows the marker to differentiate between levels of performance.

5. Statements of learning outcomes include descriptions of how students will demonstrate both lower and higher order skills, with a focus on the latter**.

Form

1. Each course needs 3-5 learning outcomes.

2. The statement about learning outcomes begins with the stem “Upon successful completion of the requirements for this course, students will be able to”.

3. Each learning outcome will describe a performance. Learning outcomes typically relate an action to the content taught in the course, describing how a student will demonstrate that he or she is able to apply the knowledge gained in the course, e.g. in solving a problem, completing a task, or analyzing or critiquing an issue or situation relevant to the course, the discipline and/or the profession.

Example

Upon successful completion of the requirements for this course, students will be able to:

• Critique the notion of “alignment”,
• Compose statements of learning outcomes appropriate to the course, and
• Design an assessment strategy to collect evidence of how well students have achieved course learning outcomes.

~

* Declarative knowledge: "... propositional ... knowledge refers to knowing about things, or 'knowing-what': knowing what Freud said, knowing what the terms of an equation refer to, knowing what kinds of cloud formation can be distinguished, knowing what were the important events in Shakespeare's life. Such content knowledge accrues from research, not from personal experience. It is public knowledge, subject to rules of evidence that make it verifiable, replicable and logically consistent. It is what is in the libraries and textbooks and is what teachers 'declare' in lectures." Functioning knowledge: " ... based on the idea of performances of various kinds underpinned by understanding. This knowledge is within the experience of the learner, who can now put declarative knowledge to work by solving problems, designing buildings, planning teaching or performing surgery. Functioning knowledge requires a solid foundation of declarative knowledge." (Biggs & Tang, 2007, p 72)


**Lower order skills include those of knowing and understanding; higher order skills include those of applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. (cf Bloom's Taxonomy - for an interesting take on the Taxonomy, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blooms_rose.svg)

Reference

Biggs, J & Tang, C 2007, Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does, 3rd edn, McGrawHill, Maidenhead UK & New York USA.

Conversations about technology in teaching

Many of the learning support people and technologists I work with are highly knowledgeable about the use of technology in education. They are amazed at the possibilities and very keen to share their interests. I learn from them all the time and I am inspired by their passion and enthusiasm – but they drive me nuts, too.

They know that our students all have multiple devices to access the web, and that they probably do their banking online, interact with their friends online, time-shift the television programs they watch, and do much of their research online. My technologist colleagues can’t understand why all academics teaching in modern Australian universities aren’t using these tools extensively; why they aren’t modifying their curriculum to deliver their course online; why they aren’t passionate and excited about the possibilities of the technology. Many of them think that the more our academic colleagues use technology in their teaching, the better they will be as teachers.

These learning support colleagues run proselytizing sessions where they demonstrate the new tools they have discovered or give the more adventurous of our academic colleagues opportunities to show off interesting innovations in their teaching practice. They have passionate conversations about the future of technology-enhanced teaching and learning.

Almost none of the academics from my side of the University – the business disciplines – have ever attended one of these sessions. They rarely attend formal training sessions run in their own Faculty. Nevertheless, my academic colleagues are also passionate and enthusiastic – about their discipline and their research. They, too, inspire me.

So, this is the context. Here’s my dilemma. Last week, I was invited to host one of these show-and-tell sessions in my own Faculty, where my technology-focussed colleagues hope to see my most adventurous academic colleagues demonstrating the amazing and interesting things they are doing with technology in the classroom.

The thing is – no one in my Faculty is using the technology in ground-breaking ways. Of course they use their LMS sites, and they record their lectures, and they run online quizzes (both those they have written themselves and those they have acquired from publishers). They pick the tools that assist them in their teaching.

They do this because they too are doing their banking online, and posting to social networking sites, and watching recorded television programs. Some of them even blog. They struggle to work the unreliable tools provided by the University especially when they have planned something that will add value to the learning experience for their students – but they aren’t focussed on the technology. They look past the technology to the reason for the learning activities.

I sit in the middle of this. My academic colleagues see me as the “technology” person; my learning support colleagues see me as recalcitrant, perhaps even Luddite in my approach to technologies in education.

Actually, I am neither. I use the technologies myself. I sit here typing on my laptop, connected to the Internet via my mobile phone connection, playing with my iPod, checking my Facebook page, typing a blog entry, tracking the delivery of my birthday present Kindle from Amazon. At work, I host a Sakai site, assist my academic colleagues to use their Moodle sites in more sophisticated ways, show people the possibilities of desktop conferencing software, and keep my supervisors informed about trends in the field. I don’t try to persuade my academic colleagues to spend more time using the educational technology, though. Rather, I assist those who have made up their own minds to move in that direction.

So, where amongst my very busy academic colleagues do I start to identify some who would be willing to put their technology-enhanced teaching practice on show? What benefit will they gain from participating in one of these sessions? What will my learning support colleagues learn beyond what I can already tell them about the way we use the technologies in the Faculty? Why should I convince them to spend time preparing a talk about the use of technology in teaching rather than on their latest research project?

I am passionate about education and hope for change in the way my academic colleagues go about that part of their job. This year, that means that I hope they will begin to think more creatively about the kinds of learning tasks they put in place, and shift the emphasis in their curriculum from declarative knowledge to functioning knowledge. With some - a very few - of them, I discuss my emerging qualms about the value of highly explicit marking criteria and the recent rejection by Bradley of the published ALTC-sponsored standards descriptors documents. These are the things I talk about rather than the LMS or lecture recording.

I do this because I do not think that technology answers any question of any worth in the context of learning. I do not adhere to the view that technology can be used as a Trojan Horse to bring about change in teaching practice. It bothers me that the online tools I am recommending to my academic colleagues are not as reliable as they could be.

That does not mean that I don’t think that technology is an essential part of the scene, that I think it is possible to teach in the higher education sector without using all kinds of technologies. I’m just not prepared to spend all that much time talking to academics about it. I’d rather be discussing learning.