"Chance favours the connected mind"

In between working on the projects on my desk and attending the meetings in my diary for today, I've been listening to Steven Johnson talk about Where Good Ideas Come From on TED, and reading the latest ECAR Research Bulletin: Strategic Directives for Learning Management System Planning.

Johnson is the kind of speaker that we expect from the TED presentations. He is slick, entertaining, and makes a couple of points well, by telling stories to illustrate his argument. His point in this presentation is that innovation happens when the unplanned, emergent, unpredictable power of open, innovative systems is allowed to take us in unexpected directions. The stories he tells in this presentation are about the value of cross-fertilization of ideas, particularly amongst unexpected collaborators. He says that we frequently present new ideas as bolts from the blue, epiphanies that occur without warning. In fact, he says, more often than not, ideas "fade into view". They arrive after a long incubation period, often after a hunch has been cultivated. I'm coming pretty close here to mixed metaphors, so I'll step back from reporting on Johnson's presentation. In any case, you can see the whole thing for yourself – it's only about 20 minutes long.

In the ECAR Bulletin, White & Larusson address an issue that has been up for discussion among my colleagues recently – a classification system for websites created using a Learning Management System.

I am currently using three categories: Campus, Blended, and Distance. These are based on where the students are, and how their course is delivered. My definitions are not dissimilar to those used by many institutions in Australia. They should not be read as hierarchical. Those who are designing learning environments would, I hope, use these definitions to help them decide which kind of site would be the best for the purpose at hand.

1. Campus: The course is designed to be delivered face-to-face. The LMS site provides back-up copies of course materials, i.e. the Course Outline, recordings of lectures, lecture handouts. Student-student interaction is non-existent or minimal (e.g. a social forum may be the only online contact students have with each other). The only online assessment activity, if there is any, is use of the quiz tool, or online submission of assignments.

2. Blended: The course is designed to be delivered partly face-to-face and partly online. LMS-based activities, e.g. discussions, simulations, or quizzes, are core activities designed to enhance learning. They count towards the final mark. Web-conferencing may be used.

3. Distance: The course is designed for students who do not attend any campus-based events, i.e. students who study at a distance from the university campus and are not visited by the lecturer. The full range of online teaching tools is considered in the design of the site, and many are used to their full advantage.

I also talk, in some of my training sessions, about the three sets of tools that an LMS provides – tools of:

• Administration,

• Dissemination, and

• Collaboration and Co-operation.

White & Larusson's categores are Transmission, Evaluation, and Interaction. In their paper, they bring together the ideas that gave me my categories for delivery modes and tool classification options. Their Transmission category matches my Campus category fairly closely, and uses the tools I group together under Dissemination. Their description of their Evaluation category draws on some but not all of the tools I classify as Administration. Specifically, they write of the value of the tracking tools, which allow the lecturer to monitor patterns of access by students. They suggest that information collected in this way about how the group is learning can be used by the lecturer to modify and evolve learning activities over several iterations of a course. Their Interaction category uses the tools I classify as Collaboration and Co-operation. Then, they go on to give us nine points to guide thinking about how an LMS ought to be implemented.

So – to bring these ideas together – I suspect that I am harbouring one of Johnson's "slow hunches". The idea hasn't yet faded into view, so I need to write about it, to put it out there in the world for discussion.

How much learning in a university ought to happen behind the walls of the institution, and how much ought to happen in public? How much student effort (in the form of completed assignments) ought to be made public? If ideas are "networks", as Johnson says, and not "single things", what are the implications for the way we build online learning environments, the way we train our students to think about things and solve problems, and the ways we assess student achievement? If we value innovation, and true innovation comes from collaboration, and ideas are not single things but networks that fade into view as the collective creates them ... what then?

Hmm-mm – I think I need to let this one simmer for a good while longer.

Thoughts of the day

David Jones posted an entry to his blog today in which he refers to a 2003 interview with Alan Kay.

Kay says, in the interview:

"But I think the big problem is that schools have very few ideas about what to do with the computers once the kids have them. It's basically just tokenism, and schools just won't face up to what the actual problems of education are, whether you have technology or not.

Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It's like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won't give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.

On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don't need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don't have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.

The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Educators have to face up to what 21st-century education needs to be about, and start thinking about solving that problem long before they bring the computer on the scene."

Not unexpectedly (to those of you familiar with my opinions on such matters, at least), I find myself immediately attracted to this idea. We all know that giving people hammers and chisels won't turn them into master carpenters any more than putting pianos in classrooms will turn students into musicians. Why then do so many of my tribe* persist in the belief that merely giving university teachers and students access to an LMS will either change teaching practice or improve the learning experience?

Of course, it won't – not without many other changes, most of which can be traced back to the need to ensure that all university teachers are expert in both the body of knowledge that comes from their discipline and also in the practice of teaching.

So ... can we please stop talking about e-learning and focus our attention on good curriculum design and excellence in teaching?

But that's enough of that old groove.

Here's something much more interesting ...

This afternoon I am playing in the background a presentation by the very excellent Michael Feldstein. Feldstein works for Oracle as "software strategist and product manager", and maintains the e-Literate blog. He knows more about Learning Management Systems than most – the culture and the history as well as the architecture and the coding. His presentation – W(h)ither the LMS? – explains why the world is ready for the next generation of LMSs, what they might look like, and how they will be designed and built. Forget discussions about mythical PLEs – listen to Feldstein and imagine a future where online learning environments are properly integrated and truly permeable.

Ahh-hhhh ....



------
* ... and by "so many", I mean "any".

Issues of the day: quality, compliance, and English language fluency

Two articles in the online edition of The Australian's Higher Education supplement caught my attention today.

The first reports on comments from academics teaching in the business disciplines in Australian universities (along with others who have an opinion about TEQSA and the ALTC disciplines setting standards project). I won't repeat the content of the article – you can read it for yourself.

A number of issues are highlighted by the article: the challenges ahead for TEQSA, the tussle between RTOs and the higher education sector (particularly universities and especially the Group of Eight), the question of an agreed definition of quality and how this might be measured, and the seeming disconnect between the implementation of recommendations from the Bradley and Cutler Reports.

Universities don't come out of this one looking good. The RTOs and the VET sector seem to be very willing to demonstrate that they have carefully aligned curricula with assessment strategies that test how well students have achieved clearly articulated learning outcomes. Universities, and in particular the Group of Eight universities, seem to be inclined towards the view that no one has any right to ask them to demonstrate how they measure academic achievement. If TEQSA is funded appropriately, and universities are required to participate in its compliance checks, many academic staff will be running to catch up with their colleagues teaching in other parts of the sector. In some ways, that is a bit unfair. Australian university lecturers, by and large, don't know much about teaching. They know about giving lectures, about running tutorial-based discussion groups, and about assessing how well students know the knowledge of the discipline, but most of them have no theoretical foundation to their teaching practice. Not their fault – they were hired because they know lots about their disciplines.

Maybe we should start by making it compulsory for all universities to enrol their teaching academics in proper teacher education programs – except, of course, those who already have a teaching qualification. At least then they would have the knowledge necessary to engage in a conversation about curriculum design and teaching strategies other than those invented in medieval Europe. We would, of course, have to acknowledge that this would take time away from research and current teaching activities – so we'll need to hire more academics to help with workloads, especially if we want the country to maintain research outputs and we intend to send more Australians to university. (And before you say anything, let me tell you that it's no good suggesting that Australian academics work harder or longer hours ... most of the good ones already put in 50, 60, or 70 hour weeks.)

Oh, yes, I suppose we could create two categories of university academic – the research academic and the teaching only academic. This, in my view, is a dreadful idea. It's the research that gives depth to teaching in universities. Many of the very best of our teachers are outstanding researchers as well.

So it's all a bit tricky.

The second article reports on moves by professions to require international students to pass English language tests upon graduation. Here's the thing: most Australian universities will enrol international students for whom English is a second (third, fourth) language if they achieve 6.5 on the IELTS test – somewhere between competent and good. This score does not guarantee that students are fluent in the language. That puts lecturers in a difficult position. It would be wrong to penalise students for poor English language skills unless fluency is a designated learning outcome for their chosen program of study – and because language skills are rarely articulated among program learning outcomes, they don't. That means that students who learn the declarative (foundational knowledge; knowing what or knowing about stuff in the discipline) and functioning knowledge (skills; knowing how to apply declarative knowledge to complete discipline-specific tasks) required by their course, and have sufficiently good English language skills to convey their understanding to the lecturer, pass the course. That gives us graduates – in accounting or nursing, for example – who can't get jobs because the employers expect a higher standard of English language skills.

That's all a bit tricky too.

Maybe the new government will have the answers.

Dependability and reliability: are they important?

This post originally started out as a slightly bad-tempered comment on the lack of reliability in the Learning Management System (LMS) used by my current employer. The detail of the current problem is indicative of the larger issue.

In my first draft, I wrote: "Here's the thing about educational technologies. They must be robust and reliable."

Is this true, though? Some parts of the system have to be utterly reliable – and making sure that enrolled students have dependable access to the online environment is one aspect that must be taken seriously. There are some other tools that need to be equally trustworthy. My list, based on current online teaching practice in this university, would include the tools that manage content (documents, video clips, audio clips, and images, for example), the discussion tool, the gradebook, and the assignment submission tool. Other tools are less-widely used, or support activity that isn't essential to course completion, or are being used experimentally. It may be acceptable to provide less reliable tools that fall into these categories, although I'm not convinced that this is true.

If an academic is toying with curriculum innovation, is it good enough for him (or her) to be using a technically unpredictable tool for that innovation? I argue that when the institution provides an inadequate tool, it puts curriculum innovation is at risk. If I'm using a faulty tool to implement a teaching innovation which doesn't work, do I blame the design of the innovation or the tool I used? What if I can't tell which is to blame? The difficulty is that the development of reliable online teaching tools is expensive, and too often, we don't get past the "proof-of-concept" stage.

In order to move curriculum innovation beyond experimentation, the institution must provide the right instruments – highly robust and utterly reliable applications. If we are to encourage curriculum innovation, we have to place before our teaching academics an array of tried and tested tools that gives them options for variety in the way they design their teaching innovations. Exploration of new tools should not need to include any time working out how to ensure that they function properly. If I want someone to find the joy in working with wood, providing them with a faulty hammer or a blunt chisel isn't a good idea. If I want them to be creative and construct amazing wooden things, I need to make sure they have the best tools available.

The range of tools provided should, ideally, exceed the range used by any one academic and certainly surpass the assortment used by the majority. All of them must work properly, almost all of the time.

Imagine my frustration, then, when even basic system functionality is flawed. The university I work at currently has chosen Moodle as the LMS (a replacement for WebCT, which was turned off a couple of months ago). In moving to Moodle, those maintaining the backend, including the data feed from the Student Records System (SRS), have discovered that they need to rebuild the mechanisms that populate the class lists. With me so far? Describing in detail the systems that ensure that currently enrolled students have access to the relevant Moodle sites is beyond my technical knowledge – and interest, to be frank.

I know that there is a difference between a true integration between the SRS and LMS and the LDAP-data transfer currently in place, but that's about the extent of my knowledge – and well beyond my sphere of interest. However, it is clear even to me that students are dropping into some kind of chasm between the SRS and the LMS. Who are these students? How many are there? How do we retrieve them?

Most importantly, how many staff and students will decide not to devote time to online teaching and learning because their initial experience is of faulty or badly implemented technology? Once they move away from online learning, how do we get them back? What needs to be in place to make sure we don't lose them in the first place?

On the other hand, there are the real risk takers – those who are happy to experiment with newly developed and not fully formed tools. This group would be frustrated if they were restricted only to the tried and tested. It seems, then, that we need an online learning system that provides for three clearly labelled sets of tools.

1. the essentials: The tools in this category will depend on they way the institution uses on the online learning environment, e.g. to deliver distance courses or support a blended model of teaching. Functionality for the tools in this category must be the most reliable, with a very, very low fail rate.

2. the exploratory: Reliability for this set of tools is slightly less important than for those in the first category, but is still pretty high.

3. the experimental: Control of this set of tools should sit with the technology innovators and risk-takers on staff, and students required to use them should be warned to expect problems.

That way, the people who sit in the bulge – the pragmatists and the conservatives – don't have to spend too much time thinking about the technology and are able to focus on ways to use it. The enthusiasts can play with the experimental, and the visionaries can show us the way forward with the exploratory – and we all know what to expect from the system and the tools in play.

Innovation is risky. An institution that manages innovation well will also be managing expectations and perceptions – and putting enough money into ICT to ensure that at least the essentials are utterly reliable.

Once that happens, I, for one, will be slightly less grumpy.

Great teaching techniques

Every now and then, I'm going to post links to good ideas I've encountered. This week, I have two to pass on.

This week, I came across a link to one Canadian academic's approach to teaching his students to read crtically - something students are often left to work out for themselves. Roland Paris, an academic from the University of Ottawa, uses a simple technique to introduce his students to the idea. His site is worth a visit.

The team behind the Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe) team at Oxford Brookes has a fantastic approach to teaching students about assessment standards. It's simple, it's easy ... and the short workshop early in a student's studies seems to result in better marks over the long-term.

If you do try either of these techniques, let me know how you go.

The Australian National University's YouTube channel

I've just subscribed to The Australian National University's YouTube channel, which gives me access to a whole range of presentations by amazing speakers. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

You can too: http://www.youtube.com/user/ANUchannel#p/a

Videoconferencing on AARNet

This from Campus Review (22 June 2010), p 12 ...

"By the end of this year, Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet) plans to launch a free videoconferencing service for students, researchers and academics in Australian universities. Called AARNet Anywhere, it will let users link up to as many as eight people on the AARNet network."

According to the article, AARNet is partnering with ViVu, a US-based company whose system piggybacks on Skype to allow multi-party videonconferencing, allowing up to eight people to participate at a time. They can share slides or other information in a collaboration window.

Sounds fantastic, even it the service will be limited to those of us with access to AARNet.