Academic Development Centre

Last week I attended the Kingston University / St Georges, University of London’s joint Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences annual Learning and Teaching conference. The focus of the event was ‘Enhancing the Educational Experience through Technology’ and I gave a a presentation (see below) on what what I saw as current issues in technology enhanced learning (TEL) and attempted to identify some possible trends.

I started by talking about changing terminologies and how I perceive sometimes that debates in this area, no matter how valid, can leave the wider community  cold and sometimes confused. I think that this wider feeling was amplified by the fact that the introduction of learning technologies on institutional scales were sometimes linked to many agendas, and that TEL was never going to be the only approach to addressing perceived weaknesses in underlying pedagogic practices / enhancing student learning.  Later in the presentation I moved on to staff and student digital literacies referring to the MoRSE project, Beetham et. al.’s (2009) LLiDA Project report ‘Thriving in the 21st Century‘ and David White’s accessible video discussing his concept of digital visitors and residents. Based on comments made later through the day I think this concept of visitors and residents resonated with the audience and in a way was seen to be reassuring.  I moved onto the theme of staff concerns and tried to address issues of technology confidence, perceived student resistance to change, and the changing role of the academic, and in the case of the latter it was useful to be able to quote the JISC resource ‘Effective Practice in a Digital Age (2009):

“Rather than replacing the teacher, technology has in many ways increased the focus on pedagogic skills. The art of the practitioner as instigator, designer and animateur remains key to the process of learning”

The issue of staff confidence with technologies was a theme that reoccurred later in the day in both informal discussion and as part of Elaine Gaskell-Mew’s presentation entitled “Why don’t I have these skills? – a reflective exploration of e-learning and teaching skills development amongst teaching staff”. Comments including ‘many staff not willing to admit their concerns’,  ’students exceed my technology expertise’, threat, value etc.  This underlines the importance of addressing both staff and student digital literacies, but is also why I followed up with a slide entitled ‘Led by Learning’ to make 3 points: don’t worry about the terminology; there is no one ‘right’ way with TEL and; remain grounded in learning and teaching practice – start with the learning not the technology. This was developed into a brief overview of support available institutionally along with raising awareness of freely available pedagogic design / planning tools, which even if not used formally can be a good source of ideas, with particular reference given to the Learning Design Support Environment and the slightly older but still useful Phoebe tool.

In terms of future trends the focus was on Mobile and OER developments, and although already on us, I feel we are a long way from realising their true impact. As one example of a specific technology I gave brief mention to Augmented Reality as an application that has bumped around for a couple of years with the advent of smartphones but with a sense that this technology is starting to enter into the mainstream (e.g. see The Guardian’s use of Blippar.com last week – 16/4/2012). It is perhaps a step behind QR code technology  in application to learning & teaching, though we have certainly looked at its role in supporting fieldwork.

Other resources mentioned in the presentation:

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

JISC Responding to Learners Pack

2012 Horizon Report

J. Traxler & J Wishart (eds) 2011 Making mobile learning work: case studies of practice, ESCalate.

OER:

OU Openlearn

JORUM Repository

XPert OER search tool

Folksemantic OER search tool

In Standards and Openness  I described the role of standards including trials run using OU OpenLearn units and eXe generated resources.  Following this and taking the opportunity of a request from a colleague I explored the availability of OER resources in specific topic areas including the formats that they were provided in and the ability to import and edit.

The first stage was to undertake a key word search of OpenLearn units.  My reasoning for starting with OpenLearn units was partly due to the breadth available but also because of the availability of Common Cartridge packaged resources (ease of importing / editing within a VLE) and metadata including level. This search identified a number of potentially relevant units, supplemented with suggestions made by OER Recommender (The OpenLearn pages use the OER Recommender widget providing automated suggestions to other related resources). 
The second stage was a keyword search of JORUM (specifying open resources) which identified further relevant resources including those in other repositories such as Humbox.  The last stage was to perform a search using Xpert.

These searches identified a wealth of resources, both single item and packaged multiple resources, related to the search topics. Although perhaps not all usable it allowed more focus to be given to addressing gaps and editing and mixing as per the specific context. As part of the exercise the resources were all imported into the institutional VLE.

This exercise identified a number of issues as outlined below:

1. Multiple Formats providing varying ability to edit.  In the case of packaged resources it was not always clear which packaging standard was being used though mostly SCORM and HTML. Formats  included:

• Common Cartridge package. Flexible in terms of editing and mixing within the VLE, though resources not always optimally designed for the navigation tools provided by the VLE. The naming convention of resources could be problematic, e.g. constituent files named with a alphanumeric code which added time in identifying the relevant file for editing.
• SCORM package. Not directly editable but with the advantage of inbuilt navigation between the elements of the resource.
• HTML package.
• URL to web resource. Not possible to edit and the risk of the resource becoming unavailable.
• Documents including MS Word and PDF which may or may not be locked.

2. User generated metadata tags. Flexible but maybe not always consistent.

3. Licence.  Not always declared though commonly Creative Commons.  However there are many types of Creative Commons licences with different levels of restriction which may include “No derivative works”.

4. Quality. Beyond the reputation of the institution and the individual some repositories such as Humbox provide the ability for registered users to add comments and notes to resources.

Summary of Resources Used

• Humbox – Humanities learning resources repository
• JORUM – JISC funded UK Learning & Teaching resources repository
• OER Recommender / Folksemantic - US National Science Foundation funded OER search tool and also provide a recommender widget for embedding in learning resource sites etc.
• OpenLearn – Open Universityopen learning resources
• Xpert – JISC funded Nottingham University tool for searching for open resources in learning and teaching.

University of Hertfordshire

The Fifth International Blended Learning Conference held at The University of Hertfordshire was well attended with a range of speakers on the subject of ‘Developing Blended Learning Communities’. The keynote speakers were from Calgary in Canada and The University of Queensland Australia.

Apart from a particularly inspirational paper entitled ‘Dreaming about Collaboration’ given by someone from Kingston University whose name escapes me for the moment…. the one that fired my imagination was a presentation by Alun Edwards from University of Oxford, ‘Community Collections: Of the people, for the people, by the people’.

This was a project that invited the general public to submit letters, poems and memorabilia from the First World War to the University of Oxford collection. Employing a combination of ‘road-show’ events and an online facility, for collecting: scans of original documents, photographs of objects, and audio of the soldiers or their relatives reading the letters and poetry. Using an open source piece of software called ‘CoCoCo‘, they curated over 6500 items for their collection, along with the provenance and the human interest stories to go with them.

One such story is of a soldier who had been training in Scotland and was on a train going down through England and passing through his hometown, but not stopping. He wrote a letter to his family put it in a matchbox and threw it out of the window as his train passed through the town. He was killed in France a few days later, but the matchbox and letter found their way to his family and now forms part of the Oxford collection.

Academically, the Collection and the Second Life site are being used in research and teaching literature. For those unfamiliar with Second Life it’s a ‘virtual world’ that you log into online, create an avatar and explore the environment. You can listen to audio and watch video clips by clicking on various objects. Oxford have turned their Second Life site into a First World War trench with a low light atmosphere, rain and explosions going off in the distance, you can click on objects to hear poems being read while looking at the accompanying photographs and biographical information. I confess to not being a huge fan of Second Life, but this is an effulgent use of the medium and if you immerse yourself in it, an incredibly moving experience.

Other highlights of the conference were the not soon forgotten sight of academics dancing at the ceilidh and an interesting paper on Simshare , UKCLE’s open educational resources (OER) project, aimed at creating a repository of simulation resources. Subject areas currently include: Law, Medicine, Architecture and Blended Learning.

Colin Loughlin