One of the common concerns raised (or benefits posited) around online and technology enhanced learning is that it is cheaper than face-to-face teaching and is introduced to cut costs rather than raise standards. People working in the space have argued for years that this isn’t the case (in either instance) but there has been something of a dearth of reliable data about the costs of teaching in HE. This working paper from UniMelb’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, in partnership with the Pilbara Group, suggests in proud academic tradition that ‘it depends’ – based on degree level and mode. The paper also delves into a range of other factors including discipline, campus location and funding clusters.
When I started working in the learning design space, the ADDIE model (Analysis – Design – Development – Implementation – Evaluation) was somewhat considered the be-all and end-all. It offers a useful set of steps for thinking about the creation of a learning resource or activity but also seemed as much a linear project management system as anything else. This article outlines the history of this model and what has come to replace it as development has moved to more iterative AGILE-oriented approaches like SAM (Successive Approximation Model). As with many things, it still has its place.
This article examines the use of education technologies starting out from a position that vendors overhype their products but it eventually comes to the conclusion commonly held by people working in the sector that this doesn’t actually matter and a judicious combination of technology, pedagogy and capability building can in fact make a difference in education. Laufer et al. interview and survey Higher Ed leaders from 24 countries for their perspectives on the impact of education technologies in the last two years, covering opportunities and barriers for both individuals and institutions. Well worth a read for the big picture overview.
ASCILITE’s TELedvisors Network wraps up the 2021 webinar series with a bang, with Prof. Michael Sankey (CDU) and Jack Sage (JCU) sharing the findings of research they undertook this year into what it takes for people to enter the growing profession of Learning Design (and adjacent roles) in Australian Higher Ed and what the future looks like for these kinds of roles.
Respected author in the tech ethics and society space, Cory Doctorow, makes some valuable connections between the Luddite movement of the early 1800s and some key tenets of science fiction – namely that it is generally all about the meaning of the impact of technology on the world than the tools themselves.
One thing commonly discussed about education technology companies is how well they understand the experiences and needs of teachers and students. One thing commonly asked of academics is how applicable their skills and knowledge are to ‘the real world’. This quick read from Roostervane, a Higher Ed oriented careers site talks through some of the experiences of someone that moved from academia to ed tech and offers suggestions for those interested in this path.
Ideas of ‘academic freedom’ in terms of how courses should be designed and taught often butt heads with usability principles and institutional priorities when it comes to online learning. This debate is well captured in a tweet from @neilmosley5 and the subsequent string of responses that cover ground include standardisation of courses, Geocities, cognitive load, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and some rather tortured analogies. Well worth a read to tour the many perspectives.
Starting tertiary study can be a confusing experience for students, particular those who are first in family. There are labyrinthine systems to navigate and new terminology and concepts that are often treated as assumed knowledge. What is a PhD, a journal article, peer review? This guide, while UK-centric, offers clear and well-written explanations designed to support new students in this new world. I absolutely wish I’d had something similar when I started uni. (Thanks Thao for sharing)
The Journal of University Learning and Teaching Practice is an open publication hosted by the University of Wollongong. They are currently calling for contributions to an upcoming issue relating to innovation in assessment in the time of COVID19. Abstracts are due by Nov 1.
The Dreambank from University of California, Santa Cruz
Most of the time, hearing people recount their dreams can be a little tedious. They don’t fit conventional story structures and the details can be somewhat liminal. This site however, from psychology researchers at UCSC, captures brief (~100 words) retellings of more than 20,000 dreams from people aged between 7 and 74 over decades. It also includes discussions between the researchers and dreamers about the dreams. I spent way too long trawling through these one evening but it is a marvellous window into the minds of people we’d never otherwise hear.
The One Laptop Per Child initiative is a cautionary tale about what happens when well-meaning thought leaders with compelling pitches for ed tech don’t do due diligence and actually ask the people on the ground if their idea will work. OLPC was a project to manufacture and give robust, crank powered laptops to young learners in the Global South to help them eLearn out of poverty. This Twitter thread from @gauravsingh961 forensically works through the details of the failure of this project as a case study against the ‘tech as silver bullet’ mentality.
Rolling out a learning technology is only part of many when it comes to good digital education. The Scottish pivot to online learning in Higher Ed due to COVID19 was the focus of a recent government taskforce there, and Chris Kennedy discusses the vital support component of it in this blog post. While there was a sensible decision to lean heavily on JISC resources, he notes the virtual absence of input from expert professional support staff, subsequent proposed cuts in support to achieve efficiencies, and an expectation that educators will add a suite of digital learning capabilities to their quiver in their free time. In terms of understanding how some of the powers-that-be understand 21st century education, this post is eye opening.
User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) has come into its own as a discipline in the last decade or so in helping us to understand how we use the web and how to design better and easier interactions. The shadow side of this – “Dark Patterns” – sees business and designers exploiting these principles to make users do things that they didn’t mean to using design tricks and cognitive science. This video explains some of these common tricks and the site overall offers some valuable tips to deepen our digital literacy.
While the title of this article veers toward the dramatic, the recent merger of the Blackboard LMS company and Anthology, a company with products on the student management, enrolment and retention side of things is kind of a big deal. This article walks through the details of this merger with somewhat of a business focus but it also discusses possible implications for particular platforms and institutional users. Given that Blackboard still has approximately a third of Australian LMS market, this is something useful to stay on top of.
On a slightly more cheerful note, the expanded Games for Change festival is coming up in early October. This free online event offers more than 80 speakers talking about different ways serious games, game-based learning and other associated technologies are being used in tertiary education and beyond to help build a better world. It includes a mix of presentations and interactive workshops.
Hybrid or hyflex is one of those new modes of teaching that have seemingly materialised fully-formed in the last 18 months. It involves concurrently teaching face-to-face and online students, creating opportunities for them to learn and work together synchronously. This short thread from Dr. Jenae Cohn on Twitter offers some useful practical tips for teachers newly working in this space, including not referring to online participants as “people who are not here”.
Audio offers an accessible and oftentimes more intimate way to connect with information. With lower technical barriers to entry for podcast creators than video, educators are embracing this format as a way to share and discuss ideas in a range of disciplines. The free Australian Educational Podcasting Conference returns on October 6th and 7th, with discussions about how people are using podcasts in teaching and practical workshops.
CAUDIT is the Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology. If you work at a member university, you can login to access a number of standard models that show how IT departments understand the many business and data aspects of a university ecosystem. At first glance this may seem a little niche, but for anyone with an interest in truly understanding how all the pieces fit together in a university, this is an invaluable resource.
A couple of months ago, the open Harvard/MIT led MOOC platform edX announced that it was merging with the giant OPM (Online Program Management) business 2U. This represented a fairly significant swing to a more commercial orientation for a platform with lofty aims. Michael Feldstein from eLiterate has some strong feelings about this, in this informative article taking us through what has happened in the MOOC space since the big hype MOOC hype cycle of the early 2010s, and discussing what the next moves could and should be.
Good breakout group activities online are far less common that we might hope. Often students find themselves sitting quietly in a small Zoom room, unsure what to do, until one brave soul hazards a guess and starts the conversation. This 7 min YouTube video from the Office of Open Learning at the University of Windsor (Canada) offers some valuable ideas to ensure that the time spent in these sessions is productive and that help teachers track activity across all rooms at once. It is demonstrated in Blackboard Collaborate but the principles are universal.
This site provides links to more than a hundred Australian businesses working in education technology and adjacent spaces. It appears to be focused more on the business and investment side of things as there is an option to filter by sector and export market but not by the kinds of tools or services they provide. All the same, it is an interesting way to get an overview of how the market perceives the needs and priorities of the education sector.
Neil Mosley succinctly outlines the complexities of modern tertiary teaching practice, with ‘the new normal’, ever increasing accountability requirements, and a constantly evolving technology landscape making it hard for time poor educators to keep up. Institutions have skilled and experienced teaching and learning support teams ready to assist, yet many lecturers still choose to go it alone. Mosley explores why this might be and shares some new ways to resolve this. The article offers an informed, practical counter to some of the sadly ignorant takes on these support systems and professionals that we still see in the discourse far too often.
CRADLE at Deakin is one of the foremost research centres in Australia in the digital learning space, and the University of Edinburgh is also a heavy hitter. This webinar today brings them together, with Professor Sian Bayne discussing Edinburgh’s updated Manifesto for teaching online, which advocates for “strongly reseach-based, critical and creative practice” in modern teaching.
Plagiarism is as much a known problem in research as it is in learning and teaching, but the use of AI as a writing tool to bypass ‘traditional’ similarity matching systems is starting to result in some bizarrely humorous language in published papers. This quick TikTok video discusses a recent research paper about this phenomenon, which sees established terms like Artificial Intelligence morphing into ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead.
The most common questions/complaints that I hear as an education technologist from academics wanting to use a new tool in their teaching revolve around the time it takes to add them to institutional systems. “But the nice salesperson told me that it only takes 30 mins to install – why has it been 6 weeks already?” This article from Pat Reid draws back the curtain on many of the things that need to happen behind the scenes to ensure that an education technology is fit for purpose, supportable and will work with an institution’s many needs. It offers some useful insights into the practical realities that are frequently overlooked in most discussions of learning technologies.
Multi-choice quizzes are a mainstay of online learning because they provide opportunities for learners to check their understanding of course material without the workload overhead to teachers of manually grading hundreds of responses. Legitimate concerns are raised though about whether MCQs test recall vs understanding and how authentic they are in relation to use of knowledge in practice. This post draws on research in the cognitive sciences to suggest an alternative approach to MCQs, asking students to explain why they think the options are right or wrong. There are clearly workload implications but it’s thought provoking.
Captioning and transcription of video for accessibility and also as a learning resource has come to the fore in recent years. Tveeder is a Melbourne based tool that aggregates the captioning feeds from Australian free-to-air TV in real time, for free. Given that many people parse text more quickly than video, and prefer to do so, this offers a handy resource for capturing relevant, real-world information that could be used in many teaching scenarios
This email exchange between a student and a contract cheating service, shared by academic integrity newsletter The Cheat Sheet, highlights the real risks students choose.
The new Netflix series The Chair, a six episode dramedy about wheelings and dealings in an English department in a mid-level American university has unsurprisingly sparked much discussion in academia. Local Higher Ed notables Inger Mewburn, Narelle Lemon, Megan McPherson and Anitra Nottingham forensically and amusingly dissect the show episode by episode – definitely worth a listen.
The Australasian TEL world’s Mr Everywhere, Prof Michael Sankey, recently presented the findings of several ACODE surveys of HE institutions to the Blackboard APAC conference. Unsurprisingly, it shows the sector in the midst of significant change – not entirely brought on by the pandemic but certainly accelerated by it. This wide-ranging slide deck covers the variety of approaches to online exam proctoring, intentions for the lecture, micro-credentials and the kinds of communication and collaboration tools that institutions are using to support student learning.
After moving from Disney (home of streaming platform Disney+), new Pearson publishing CEO Andy Bird has launched Pearson+, a subscription service for textbooks for US college students. They can either rent a single digital textbook for $9.99 per month or 1500 books for $15.99. What implications could this Brave new direction have for students? Might they find themselves losing access to books if authors get Tangled up in legal actions with the publisher? Will Pearson turn the textbook landscape Inside Out? Time will tell but either way, it’s good to see an organisation not Frozen in place.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic in many spaces and education isn’t spared. University of Edinburgh ed tech research Ben Williamson examines a hefty report published last week by Stanford University about work underway to train computer models to ‘understand’ teachers, students and more in this deep twitter thread. Will an algorithm one day be able to meaningfully replicate the interactions at the heart of good learning and teaching?
This year’s HERDSA conference was sadly cancelled but planned presentations keep popping up anyway. The ASCILITE TELedvisors Network hosts two of these on Thursday, with Deakin’s Ameena Payne showcasing the benefits and challenges of audio/video feedback and Griffith’s Diana Tolmie discussing the use of ePortfolios among music students. These webinars are always free and recordings are posted to the TELedvisors’ YouTube channel.
On the less daunting side of AI, there are many new tools that let creators work with the bizarre imagination of computers to create beautiful and surreal images. The @GallerAi account on Twitter, feeds the VQGAN+CLIP algorithm random poetic phrases like “Deep space dive bar” or “Golden Trojan Horse love bomb” and shares the resulting otherworldly images.
Back in the early days of blogging, content was largely an annotated record of the sites someone had been visiting and wanted to share, a web log. A couple of months ago, I started a weekly ed tech column in this tradition in Campus Morning Mail, an Australian tertiary education focused daily email newsletter run by the former Higher Ed reporter for The Australian, Stephen Matchett. It gets a few thousand views a day and I get to write what I like and people have been teasing me for being famous so it seems like a win.
Anyway, I thought I might as well share my work here too.
Martin Weller is one of the more interesting practitioners in the ed tech space and this thoughtful post breaks down recent discussion in the UK (but, arguably everywhere) about where we need to go with technology enhanced learning when we (eventually) emerge from the pandemic.
What is an Education Technologist? What do they do, what do they know, how do they help educators to navigate the digital age of learning and teaching? This article from Sonnenberg et al. outlines recent work to describe their practices and proposes some useful ways forward for edtech teams in transforming “the academic experience for learners and teaching faculty”. While the focus is on the Canadian experience, the ideas translate very well to Australia.
Twitter can be a goldmine for ideas for educators and this recent tweet from Kevin Gannon (@TheTattooedProf) and the subsequent replies offers some invaluable practical suggestions for new lecturers (faculty). Among them, capture students’ attention early with a wicked problem that the unit will equip them with the skills to solve in time.
The Melbourne EdTech Summit is a free four-day education technology and innovation showcase beginning on Tuesday 17th August. The first two days are K-12 focused and the Thursday/Friday relate more to Higher Education, VET and Industry. It offers an opportunity to explore new technologies from Australian EdTech vendors and engage in broader discussions about the emerging future of learning and teaching. EduGrowth is an umbrella body of education institutions, industry and edtech entrepreneurs. Speaker highlights include Martin Dougiamas (Moodle) on the Wednesday, Liz Johnston (Deakin) and Chris Campbell (Griffith/ASCILITE) on Thursday, and Belinda Tynan (ACU) and CMM’s own Claire Field on the Friday.
Branching scenarios and decision tree type activities are becoming increasingly popular in learning and teaching due to the ease of creation via user-friendly tools such as H5P and Twine. Some of us got our first taste for these through the popular Choose Your Own Adventure book series in the 80s and 90s. This article from Sarah Laskow describes some of the ways these branching stories are mapped, offering insights for our own work in designing them.
Given my job and my interests, I probably spend more time than most people thinking about how educational institutions implement educational technologies. This is not something that gets much coverage at all in research literature about technology enhanced learning or ed tech, most likely because it is big and messy and complex. Most things I have seen about ed tech relate to specific interventions to see what impact a tool has on learning and teaching – which is, you know, pretty important. Alternatively another major strand seems to consist of feelings about ed tech – either at scale or individual wailing about the (sometimes legitimate) failings and ethical/moral problems of certain tools and approaches. Again, these can be important discussions to have.
I was excited to see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education crop up in my Twitter feed today though from Dr Jenae Cohn, the director of academic technology at California State University at Sacramento. These are certainly questions and concerns that I’ve heard before but it was nice to see them articulated so clearly and evenhandedly.
Recognising that there are, of course, cultural/operational/organisational differences between HE institutions in the US and Australia and definitely different terminology, hopefully I read and understood it as intended. My biggest response was – where are your educational technologists? These challenges sound a lot like what we work to address every day (with varying degrees of success, sure). There is a reference to ed tech professionals at the end but I do wonder what differences there are in how we work and what we do.
Anyway, from here, this is largely going to be my direct responses to some of the key points. Apologies if I’m overdoing the quotes.
“Decisions about educational technology can appear opaque to academics. On the flip side, the IT staff in charge of acquiring the technology may find faculty preferences in the classroom to be similarly hazy and ill-defined.” – This is literally why we have educational technologists (and also do reasonable business analysis), to be the bridge between educators and IT.
“Yet decisions surrounding digital tools — and the professional development necessary to use them effectively — seem to have no clear catalyzing origin for either faculty or staff members.”Agreed there is definitely a need for better communication, but at the same time, I’ve tried to explain the complexities of these processes only to see people’s eyes glaze over.
“Staff members and administrators often do not know why or how instructors intend to use certain ed-tech tools. The staff and administrative role is just to facilitate their purchasing and support.”So this is possibly a US/Australia thing – by administrators do you mean institutional managers/leaders (many of which are academics) or IT dept leaders? Here at least, IT dept leaders seldom make these kinds of calls without direction from the senior academic leaders in the institution. And, again, this is why we have educational technologists.
“Meanwhile, faculty members seem to think that some amorphous administrative body just decides to buy random ed tech purely for the sake of buying the latest fancy technology. Sometimes that perception aligns with reality; sometimes it doesn’t.”Again, these top end decisions here are frequently driven by senior academic leaders but the point about an amorphous admin body is well taken and sometimes decisions can even surprise the ed tech units too.
“Poor channels of communication. Because the faculty and the staff operate in separate spheres on most campuses, whether communication about teaching technology is clear and consistent often depends on where, and how, the ed-tech staff members are housed in an institution. On a single campus, you might find some ed-tech staff members in an IT department. Others are in campus teaching centres. Still others may be housed in an academic-affairs office or as part of a distinct online-learning division.”Certainly a challenge – in Australia at least, most ed tech units with the power to roll out ed tech uni wide sit in a central Learning and Teaching division and work with uni IT. There are often local ed techs in discipline based teaching centres (which we call faculties or colleges). There can also be a cultural component in HE institutions where academics tend not to talk that much to professional staff about these kinds of issues.
“Lack of representation. While faculty perspectives often shape campus technology choices, the mechanisms for collecting those perspectives may not always be representative. Some institutions have designated faculty-senate groups to discuss the choice and implementation of educational technology. But those committees may not be representative of the full range of faculty and staff voices and needs. In addition, those governance committees may not always consistently communicate with the staff members who are directly responsible for getting the technology up and running.”Any decent tech implementation project should first examine the business (learning and teaching) needs – which necessarily involves understanding what educators need (and want). An education technology will usually also need to address other institutional needs however (technical, security, financial, policy, etc), so educator input can’t be the only consideration. The question of how representative these representative groups is a fair one, with the potential for more senior educators who teach less to fill their ranks. One thing I’ve seen in Australia is that we will often seek out known ‘power-users’ or innovators in a faculty to inform decision making – which may still offer a skewed understanding of the needs of ‘average’ educators.
“Instructors going rogue. Faculty members may opt to use online teaching tools without the explicit support or licensing of their institution — turning the ed-tech environment on any campus into an idiosyncratic jumble that differs from one course to the next.”Certainly presents some challenges – ed technologists and central units actually don’t want to discourage innovative teaching practices and frequently do whatever they can to support localised implementations. Where value is demonstrated, with potential to be used more widely, they will even work to embed these new tools in the enterprise/institutional ed tech ecosystem. BUT there can be problems with integrating with existing systems (the LMS, student management etc), problems with support, accessibility, security and privacy and often problems when the person who was a big driver of using a tool moves on, leaving their colleagues abandoned.
Two suggestions:
“1) Give faculty members with expertise in college teaching a joint appointment in administrative units where they can directly influence campus decision-making about teaching — especially around purchases of educational technology.“
Decision making in this space rarely happens quickly so there would likely be long periods where this person/people may have little to do. Developing stronger models for input (which many ed tech units are at least mindful of) might be more valuable. Also revisiting the weighting of priorities in the evaluation and procurement of new tools, while recognising that learning and teaching aren’t the only factors at play. Also, how would such people be found and, more pragmatically, how would we deal with institutional politics of it all? Would STEM academics accept someone from the humanities? How many would we need then?Some kind of embedding sounds useful but…
“2) Rethink the role of educational-technology professionals on campus and allow them to engage in a mix of scholarship, teaching, and administration. That way new research on college teaching directly influences technology procurement, testing, and implementation”.
Well, as an education technologist, clearly, I think this is ingenious. I have actually been advocating for this for a while but breaking down some of these perceived barriers between academics and professional staff and giving ed techs this richer experience of an academic’s work and needs can only help everyone.
This article is timely for another reason in that I’ve recently been looking at revising a Twine branching scenario game that I built with some colleagues (Wendy Taleo, Stephanie Luo and Kate Mitchell) in 2019 about choosing and implementing ed technologies. Bear in mind that it is a work in progress but enough is done to play through the process in around 20 mins. bit.ly/EdTechGame
This is a big post because it is about a journal article that covers some of the core issues of my thesis in progress. I’ve spent far longer looking over, dissecting and running off on a dozen tangents with it than I had expected. My highlights and scrawled notes are testament to that.
In a nutshell, King and Boyatt attribute the success (or otherwise) of adoption of e-learning in their university to three key factors. Institutional infrastructure, teacher attitudes and knowledge and perceived student expectations. This seems like a reasonable argument to make and they back it up with some fairly compelling arguments that I’ll expand on and provide my own responses to shortly.
They use this to generate a proposed action plan which includes a coherent and detailed university level e-learning strategy – which includes adequate resourcing for technological and pedagogical support, academic development training, leadership, guidance, flexibility and local autonomy. Everything that they propose seems reasonable and sane yet (sadly) quite optimistic and ambitious. From their bios, I think that the authors aren’t teachers themselves but education advisors like myself but the perspective put forward in the article is very clearly from an academic’s perspective. (Well, 48 academics from a range of discplines, ages and years of teaching experience.) All the same, there were more than a few occasions when I read the paper and thought – “well it’s fine to suggest communities of practice (or whatever) but even when we do set them up, nobody comes more than once or twice”.
I guess the main difference between this paper and my line of thinking in my research is that I want to know what gets in the way, and I didn’t get enough of that here. I also found myself thinking a few times that this kind of research needs to avoid falling into the trap of forgetting that teaching is only one (often de-prioritised, depending on the uni culture) part of an academic’s practice and we need to factor in the impact that their research and service obligations have on their ability to find time to do this extra training. To be completely fair though, the authors did recognise and note this later in the paper, as well as the fact that the section on perceived student expectations was only that – perceptions – and not necessarily a true representation of what students think or want. So they propose extending the study to include students and the university leadership, which seems pretty solid to me and helps to strengthen my personal view that this is probably a thing I’ll need to do when I start my own research. (I’m still in proposal/literature review/exploration swampland for now). To this I would probably add the affordances of the technology itself and also the Education Advisor/Support staff that can and would help drive much of this.
This paper sparked a number of ideas for me but perhaps the most striking was the question of what are the real or main reasons for implementing e-learning and TELT? Is it simply because it can offer the students a richer and more flexible learning experience or is it because it makes a teacher’s life easier or brings some prestige to a university (e.g. MOOCs) or (in the worst and wrongest case) is perceived as a cost-saving measure. There is no reason that it can’t be all of these things (and more) and that makes a lot of sense but some of the quotes from teachers in the article do indicate that they are more motivated to adopt new tools and teaching approaches if they can see an immediate, basically cost-free benefit to themselves. Again, I’m not unsympathetic to this – everyone is busy and if you’re under pressure to output research above all else, it’s perfectly human to do this. But it speaks volumes firstly about the larger cultural questions that we must factor in to explorations of this nature and secondly about the strategic approaches that we might want to take in achieving the best buy in.
From here, I’ll include the notes that I took that go into more specifics and also include some quotes. They’re a little dot pointy but I think still valuable. This is most definitely a paper worth checking out though and I have found it incredibly useful, even if I was occasionally frustrated by the lack of practical detail about successfully implementing the strategies.
“In addition, the results suggest that underpinning staff motivation to adopt e-learning is their broader interest in teaching and learning. This implies a bigger challenge for the institution, balancing the priorities of research and teaching, which may require much more detailed exploration” (p.1278)
Glad to see this acknowledged.
This paper focuses on Adoption. What are the other two phases in the Ako paper?
Initiation (a.k.a adoption), Implementation and Institutionalisation
Getting people to start using something is a good start but without a long term plan and support structure, it’s easy for a project to collapse. The more projects collapse, the more dubious people will be when a new one comes along.
Feel like there are significant contradictions in this paper – need for central direction/strategy as well as academic autonomy. Providing people with a menu of options is good and makes sense but that makes for huge and disparate strategy.
The three core influencing factors identified. (How well are they defined?)
Institutional infrastructure
Definition:
Includes: institutional strategy, sufficient resources (to do what?), guidance for effective implementation.
Question of academic development training is framed with limited understanding of the practicalities of implementation. Assumption that more resources can simply be found and allocated with no reciprocal responsibilities to participate.
Support needs identified:
Exploration of available tools and the development of the skills to use them
Creating resources/activities and piloting them
Developing student skills in using the tools
Engaging with students in synchronous and asynchronous activities
Monitoring and updating resources
Unclear over what time frame this support is envisioned. Presumably it should be ongoing, which would necessitate a reconsideration of current support practices.
“Participants suggested the need for a more coordinated approach. A starting point for this would be consideration of how available technologies might be effectively integrated with existing pedagogic practices and systems” (p.1275)
Issues basically boil down to leadership and time/resourcing. Teachers seem to want a lot in this space – “participants in this study reported the lack of a coherent institutional-wide approach offering the guidance, resources and recognition necessary to encourage and support staff.” At the same time, they expect “ongoing consultation and collaboration with staff to ensure a more coherent approach to meet institutional needs” (both p.1277).
If you want leadership but you also want to drive the process, what do you see leadership as providing? I do sympathise, this largely looks more like a reaction to not feeling adequately consulted with however my experience with many consultation attempts in this space is that very few people actually contribute or engage. (This could possibly be a good question to ask – phrased gently – what actions have you taken to participate in existing consultation and collaboration processes in ed tech)
“A further barrier to institutional adoption was the piecemeal approach to availability of technologies across the institution. Participants reported the need for a more coordinated approach to provision of technologies and their integration with existing systems and practices” (p.1277)
Probably right, clashes with their other requests for an approach that reflects the different disciplinary needs in the uni. How do we marry the two? How much flexibility is reasonable to ask of teachers?
Staff attitudes and skills
Definition:
Is this where “culture” lives?
Includes:
“including their skills and confidence in using the technology” (p.1275)
“A key step for broadening engagement is supporting staff to recognise the affordances of technology and how it might help them to maintain a high-quality learning experience for their students.
[teacher quote] There’s a lot of resistance to technology but if you can demonstrate something that’s going to reduce amount of time or genuinely going to make life easier then fine” (p.1275)
Want to know more about the tech can do – a question here is, for who. Making teaching easier or making learning better? Quote suggests the former.
What about their knowledge of ePedagogy? (I need to see what is in the Goodyear paper about competencies for teachers using eLearning. Be interesting to compare that to the Training Packages relating to eLearning too)
A big question I have, particularly when considering attitudes relating to insecurity and not knowing things – which some people will be reluctant to admit and instead find other excuses/reasons for avoiding Ed Tech (”it’s clunky” etc) – is how we can get past these and uncover peoples’ real reasons. It seems like a lot of this research is content to take what teachers say at face value and I suspect that this means that the genuine underlying issues are seldom addressed or resolved. There are also times when the attitudes can lead to poor behaviour – rudeness or abruptly dropping out of a discussion. (Most teachers are fine but it is a question of professionalism and entitlement, which can come back to culture)
In terms of addressing staff confidence, scaffolded academic dev training, with clear indicators of progress, might be valuable here. (Smart evidence – STELLAR eportfolios – Core competencies for e-teaching and some elective/specialisation units? This is basically rebuilding academic development at the ANU from the ground up)
“The findings highlighted the importance of a pedagogic-driven approach to implementation that supports staff in recognising the potential of technology to add value to students’ learning experiences. While staff recognised that support was available centrally, they suggested that it needed to be more closely tailored to the specific needs of staff and extended to include online guidance at point of need and communities of practice that facilitated sharing between colleagues” (p.1278)
These seems to strengthen the case for college/school level teams. I am well aware that teachers tend not to engage with academic development activities and resources outside their discipline area – which I think is partially tribal because the Bennett literature suggests that there are actually few differences in teaching design approaches from discipline to discipline. This seems like a good area for further investigation. What kind of research has been conducted into effectiveness (or desire for) centralised Academic Dev units vs those at a college level?
Perceived student expectations
Definition: Students expect their online learning world to match the rest of their online experiences.
“One student expectation reported was the availability of digital resources accessible anytime and anywhere: participants suggested that students expected to access all course materials online including resources used as part of face-to-face sessions and supplementary resources necessary to complete assignments.” (p.1276)
Seems like there are a lot of (admittedly informed) assumptions be made of what students actually want by the teachers in this section. Maybe it is reasonable to say that everyone wants everything to be easier. But when does it become too much easier? When they don’t need to learn how to research?
Student need to learn how to e-Learn
“These findings suggest that for successful implementation of e-learning, students need to be supported to develop realistic expectations, an understanding of the implications of learning with technology and skills for engaging in these new ways of learning and make the most out of the opportunities that they present” (p.1277)
Interestingly phrased outcome – DO students need to learn more about the challenges of teaching and/or the mechanisms behind it? Is this just about teachers avoiding responsibilities? It sounds a bit like being expected to study physics or road-building before going for a drive.
“However students confidence with online tools and resources was perceived to vary and the finding suggest that students need to be supported to develop skills to engage effectively with the opportunities that e-learning affords…
It is not clear whether this is an accurate portrayal of student views or whether staff attributed their own views to the students. It would be valuable to ascertain whether this perception is a true representation by repeating the study with students.” (p.1278)
Again, nice work by the authors in catching the difference between student perspectives and teacher assumptions. I guess the important part is that whether the students hold the views or not, the teachers believe they do and this motivates them to use the technology.
Students don’t want to lose F2F experiences and they don’t want eLearning forced upon them when it seems like a cost-cutting measure. They do want (and expect) resources to be available online.
Outcomes
Proposed elearning strategy
“Reflecting on the factors that influenced the adoption of e-learning, participants suggested the need for an institutional strategy that :
Defines e-learning
Provides a rationale for its use
Sets clear expectations for staff and students
Models the use of innovative teaching methods
Provides frameworks for implementation that recognise different disciplinary contexts
Demonstrates institutional investment for the development of e-learning
Offers staff appropriate support to develop their skills and understanding” (p.1277)
I’d add an additional item – Offers staff appropriate support to develop and deliver resources and learning activities in TELT systems.
I have a lot of questions about this strategy – what kinds of expectations are we talking about? Is this about the practical realities of implementing and supporting tools/systems which recognises limits to their affordances? Modelling the use of innovative teaching practices – just because something is new doesn’t mean that it is good. I’d avoid this term in favour of best practice and/or emerging. Is modelling really a valid part of a strategy or would it be more about including modelling/showcasing as one of the activities that will achieve the goals. The goals, incidentally, aren’t even referred to. (Other than the rationale but I suspect that isn’t the intent of that item)
Overall I think this strategy is an ok start but I would prefer a more holistic model that also factors in other areas of the academics responsibilities in research and service. The use of “e-learning” here is problematic and largely undefined. There’s just an assumption that everyone knows what it is and takes a common view. (Which is why TELT is perhaps a better term – though I still need to spend some time explaining what I – and the literature – see TELT as)
Support:
Face to face support complemented by online guidance (in what form?)
Facilitated CoPs to support academics sharing their experiences. (Can we anonymise these?? – visible only to teachers (not even exec). If one of our problems is that people don’t like to admit that they don’t know something, let them do it without people knowing. )
Wider marketing of support services in this space to academics. (I don’t buy this – I think that teachers get over marketed to now by all sections of the university and I’ve sent out a lot of info about training and support opportunities that get no response at all)
Faculty or departmental e-learning champion (Is that me or does it need to be an academic? Should we put the entire focus onto one person or have a community. Maybe a community with identifiable (and searchable) areas of expertise
Big question – how many people use the support that is currently available and why/why not?
My questions and ideas about the paper:
Demographics of the sample reasonably well spread – even genders, every faculty, wide distribution of age and teaching experience as well as use of TELT. No mention of whether any of the participants are casual staff members, which seems an important factor.
It’s fine to look at teaching practices but teaching doesn’t exist in a vacuum for academics. They also have research and service responsibilities and I think it would be valuable to factor the importance of these things in the research. The fact that nobody mentions them – or time constraints – suggests that they weren’t part of the focus group or interview discussions.
My overall take on this – the authors expand on previous work by Hardaker and Singh 2011 by adding student expectations to the mix. I’d think there is also a need to consider the affordances of existing technology (and pedagogy?) and perhaps also a more holistic view of the other pressure factors impacting teachers and the university.
“The findings highlighted the importance of a pedagogic-driven approach to implementation that supports staff in recognising the potential of technology to add value to students’ learning experiences.” (p.1278)
There are a lot of reasons that TELT is actually implemented in unis and while this might be the claim as the highest priority, I would be surprised if it made the top 5. Making life easier for the uni and for teachers, compliance, cost-cutting, prestige/keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and canny vendors all seem quite influential in this space as well. Understanding how the decisions driving TELT implementations are made seems really important.
King, E., & Boyatt, R. (2015). Exploring factors that influence adoption of e-learning within higher education: Factors that influence adoption of e-learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(6), 1272–1280. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12195
