Technology

JISC innovation forum, Keele University (part 4)

Julian Beckton Technology, Uncategorized , , ,

More liveblogging. The  final Keynote  is from Jason Da Ponte, managing editor, BBC Mobile Platforms, who is talking to us about the BBC and its use of mobile technology.

BBc define mobile as any interaction between the BBC and its audience over a portable device and within a mobile situation

Mobile devices are:-

Personal, immediate and location aware.  Jason thought that there was a lot of untapped potential. He asked how many of us had more than one mobile and how many had used the BBC’s mobile provision.

The BBC are interested in streaming live television to mobiles – technology already available. Should be here in about 2010

But already things like mobile browser service – BBC have recently relaunched their mobile platform making their services more geo-aware. They have over 3 million users

Mobile Rich Media and Broadcasting. This is where they see their future. BBC iPlayer on iPhone and IPod Touch. They’re also doing 3G TV (Whatever that might be!) trials with network operators, and they are really looking forward to a mobile broadcasting future.

Messaging – Admitted that this was a bit rich after the scandals of the previous year, and they’re setting up a new compliance unit. They working on new programme formats, more than just voting, for example, offering alert services which they’re planning to try at the Olympics this year so people will know when events will be taking place

The final platform is the “Out of Home”. This includes the Big screens in cities like Hull and Manchester. They were talking about Bluetooth and wi-fi and QR codes to promote interactivity (although he called QR codes “semacodes” – apologies if this is something different)

Then he raised the matter of web 2.0. He sees this as a way of thinking about how you can build services that get taken up. They identified some fundamental principles between FlickR, You Tube and so on. These are basically –  Straightforward, Functional, Gregarious, Open, Evolving. Web 2.0 apps “invite you in” – which is not how we usually build technology.  How can we apply these principles to what we do in edudcation?

Also, what do we need to have in there? Participation seems important. We want to get people to participate. So is distinctive. If there’s something else that does a similar thing why should they use ours? (Plethora of Blackboard sites, anyone?) Does it do what it says it is going to do? and How personal is the experience.  And if you are part of the web, why do you need to bring things in. Why not just link out to what’s there. Jason thinks this it the most important barrier to innovation that the BBC has faced – people are reluctant to cross this boundaryFinally he’s referring us to this paper about co design http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/makingthemostofcollaboration

The UK education sector doesn’t score well in collaborating with its users in design. (There’s a theme that is emerging from all these sessions) Co-design is a trial and error style of working, a collaboration, a developmental process, and outcome based. Only the last one of these is particularly comfortable sitting in an institutional context though. (Blackboard, and VLEs generally ring a few bells here). But if there’s any message here it’s “Please Remember Your Users”). His contact details are: – Jason.daponte@bbc.co.uk  

One questioner invited Jason to speculate where we might be in 2020. He thought there might be some application specific devices. Apparently every taxi in New York now has a touch screen (although I’m not clear what for, something taxi related no doubt!) and he speculated about things like umbrellas which could deliver weather reports (Again, though, I couldn’t help thinking you’d probably notice if it was raining!) The point is your interaction with this technology would be fleeting. I suppose I could imagine a library shelf end that indicated where related material might be stored for example.

Final question was about whether the BBC had any plans to get involved in mobile learning.  Unfortunately the BBC is in the middle of revising its e-learning strategy and Jason wasn’t really able to answer this. But GCSE Bitesize is available on mobile

Jisc Innovation Forum, Keele (Part 3) – Liveblog

Julian Beckton Technology

This may not make much sense as I’m writing it as people talk. So it’ll have a rather bitty structure. – But I thought it worth a try…

Session 3C
Bridging the gap – Learner Experience

Each panel member to give 10 mins on their area of research or practice
Rob Howe described the E 4 L project being run by Northampton
Nicola Whitton described the Agosi project – alternate reality games
Malcolm Ryan from Greenwich will talk about the SEEL project and
Mabel Agbenoto, a Student from Hertfordshire is giving a student perspective on the Stroll project 

Rob was up first. The E4L project is about the experiences of effective e-learners and was one of 7 projects that were actually funded in that strand.

Focus on 3 key areas
1) Student transitions
2) Student “light bulb” moments – crossover with threshold concepts
3) Shadow technologies – those used alongside institutional technologies and at underground technologies – those banned by institutions
They  looked at HE, FE, and adult and community learning and spoke to a number of learners in each of these sectors (although need to do a bit more work with FE)
They’re also calling them proficient e-communicators. Defined as those students that are meeting the first three levels of a slightly altered “5 step model”
Creating interactive case studies – posted on web site and make comments upon them. 
For today’s session we’re looking at institutional practices. In HE there were very few boundaries, in FE there was a lot more looking down of technology and access.
Look at institutional planning processes from the perspective of the learner – put yourself in their shoes and then design your courses from that perspective.
How do you meet the needs of shadow technologies? Students tending to use web 2.0 and want a divide between the two. Facebook a shadow technology – some students do want this. Institutions need to recognise that students will use tool and then educate them to use them effectively. Student voice a very powerful way of overcoming resistance to change – going into committees and presenting student findings.Project will produce some guidelines about how to incorporate projects into the life of institutions.

Alternate Reality Games for Orientation Socialisation and induction -Nicola Whitton from MMU

 Traditional initial experience doesn’t meed all students needs.
Orientation not a high consideration. Apart from giving students a map!Socialisation – not changed much despite changes in student demographics – very oriented to 18 year old skills
Induction (core learning skills) Problem with this is it’s shoved into one week at the start of the semester.

Looked at alternate reality games
Challenges underpinned by narrative – different for different disciplines

Unfolds over several weeks
Blends the online world and the real world (nothing whatsoever to do with Second Life!)
Gives students a purpose.  Rather than saying “this is a reading list” there’d be two characters in a story who are swapping messages about a book.
At present they’re going through a series of iterative student tests. It’s a gaming environment which provides challenge, context and purpose They create engagement and mystery, they’re essentially collaborative, they’re lo-fidelity in that they encourage a use of range of technologies, and there’s quite a low development effort to produce – story is being fed to players via a couple of blogs. They use actual reality – they enable orientation in the real world, they use the best of each medium, link to community and other organisations

 Some questions

How many people need to take part for ARGs to be effective as games?
Are they effective for learning?
We know ARGs won’t appeal to everyone…how niche are they?
Is there a tension between the underground and the mainstream?

http://playthinklearn.net/argosi.htm

Malcom Ryan – Greenwich

Student Experience of E-learning Laboratory (SEEL)

HEA pathfinder project

Bridging the gap assumes that somebody think there is a gap. If there is, where is it, how big is it, and how are we going to plug it. They found a widely held view that e-learning was being used to enhance the student experience of learning, but they discovered that there was no systematic evaluation of the impact of technology on students. Nobody could tell whether it was making a difference?

Less than 50% of students regularly use their university e-mail account so you can’t assume you’ve communicated with them! Email was the predominant tool used for every conceivable type of learning and teaching experience – gaining comments on draft assignments, organising meetings (and staff were encouraging this)
Research for assigments was mainly conducted through Google and Wikipedia (The students said that tutors told them to. Which is very interesting when you consider how much institutions spend on e-journal subscriptions)

Clear separation of technolgies used for learning and communicating with teachers and the institution, from those used for socialising, contacting family and friends and reluctance amongst some students to use these within formal contexts. But some students did want to know the person behind the lecturer and so would welcome them on Facebook in that sense.

Not every student knows what they are doing on computers. One of the students in the Greenwich study actually said “It took me a while to learn how to do it”. Malcolm also suggested that dinosaurs (like us – i.e. not the google generation) may be more sophisticated in their use of technology in different contexts.

Interestingly some students gave some interesting and surprising responses. Well, surprising if you generalise about students I suppose  “You can ask questions in lectures and you can’t on the internet. “Turnitin helps me check I haven’t plagiarised by accident” and, perhaps most tellingly “Books don’t crash” 

We are having an intersting discussion about Facebook. If tutors get a question about their course posted on their wall, is it appropriate to answer it publicly. Probably not, but should you keep it on the wall? 

Worth remembering that every student is different – which does raise questions about how valuable evaluation is?

Mabel, from Hertfordshire university. Just completed her degree in Computing and Business

Talking about her experiences as student e-learner. She did a foundation course, which enabled her to go straight into the 2nd year. When she came in she noticed a massive difference between FE and HE. Felt there was a bit of a gap between those students who had done the 1st year in HE and her own ex-FE cohort. They discussed this with lecturers. Her expectations were that there would be more students and less help available, and that they would need to book time with tutors.

They were also warned that the workload would be heavier. And it was. For example they were charged with doing some research in different ways, using podcasts, digitial cameras, basically having the freedom to choose which technology they wanted. They could also post all their findings on the wiki- which was closed, to all but their own tutor. They also posted some information about themselves. Contact details, e-mail addresses and so on.  Instead of having meetings they held meetings online using MSN which was thought to be quite cool. They submitted the transcripts as an appendix to the final report. Most of their groups used their own technology rather than that provided by the university, because it was easier.

On the business side of her course, she reported that there was much less interaction and that students tended to get much lower grade. She thought that this was because it was much harder to contact other students and teachers. In year 3, they still found that there was little interaction. Still very low use of e-mail reported although Mabel said she really didn’t understand why. One thing they are doing at Hertfordshire is using something called personal messaging which notifies you when you have an e-mail. She also said she preferred lecturers to keep out of facebook because she had pictures of her family and her holidays that she was happy to share with her friends. but not with tutors. She did think there was a role though and  suggested having two Facebook accounts, one for work and one for “work”

Discussion: Where are the gaps and how do we find and fill them?

Need to be able to tie different technologies together. What we need to do is get our infrastructure people to faciliate this – you send out an e-mail message, but we need to make it possible for students to recieve them in whatever way they like. (David Miller, Southampton)

But students do tend to change their e-mail addresses, and the only one the University can guarantee is working is the official one,

Peter Bird (MMU) asked about the “staff” experience of technology. Students are better informed than teachers about the new technologies.  What can we do about this?

Staff development – we can feed in the student experience to staff development. Provide case studies in different disciplinary areas.  Nicola wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a terribly helpful distinction because some students don’t want to engage with technology, and some staff, irrespective of age, really do want to engage with it.

Malcolm thought that the problem was that there is still an enormous untrained and unqualified workforce in terms of learning and teaching in Higher Education, and what the technology does is expose that incompetence, very brutally (Nothing like a bit of a controversy!).

Carol Higgison from Bradford pointed out that technology is not infallible (Hotmail apparently has decided that the University of Bradford is a spammer, so their students can’t get e-mail from it)  Also If you’ve got 4-600 students you can’t deliver personalisation on your own. Mabel confirmed that this was perhaps why she had a less satisfactory experience in the business part of her course.

Mabel was asked what the two most significant advantages that technology had given her in her course

1) More choice in presenting work. She didn’t enjoy writing essays

2) learning how to use the different technologies themselves, which provided her with a foundation for developing further skills

 And, there is the trouble with liveblogging – the laptop battery is fading fast, so I’ll have to sign off now. THere’s about 5 minutes of the session left, so I’ll go in search of a power socket for the afternoon session. If it doesn’t appear here, you’ll know I didn’t succeed!

HEFCE E-Learning Benchmarking

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology , ,

E-learning Benchmarking evaluation day
26/06/08
Programme contexts and outcomes

The day started with a brief outline of the programme from Derek Morrison & Terry Mayes, who have been very active in managing the programme. Derek started by giving us a bit of history. The benchmarking programme started in 2005 amid some concern, and even anger about about centralised initiatives. HEFCE attempted to listen to this and the programme was one result and the feeling was that the programme had made something of a difference since 2005. The irony in the fact that the UKEU collapse had facilitated the pathfinder processes did not go unnoticed
77 institutions participated
37 pathfinder projects
27 in phase 2

The aim had been to make available opportunities for participation across the wider sector, and that was still going on. We want to move away from the idea that HEFCE does things for us – we are the people who do it. The sector offers itself advice and support. A key part of the programme had been the idea of critical friends, for example offering consultancy on the bemchmarking process, or in the projects They had been a little nervous about the idea of critical friends but in fact this had gone down extremely well in general. There had been rigorous institutional reflection and analysis of e-learning provision and practice across the sector and the emphasis on ownership by the institutions rather than prescription by the centre had guaranteed confidentiality and trust . A drawback though is that this makes it rather difficult to extract sector level messages that national bodies such as HEFCE and QAA can take on

Outcomes?

Reports will be published on the Pathfinder web site. Terry didn’t tell us where this was, and an admittedly superficial Google search didn’t find it either. (Nor could I find it by searching the HEFCE site!) He did say that reading them you could not help but be struck by how different they seem from ordinary project reports. They seemed to be genuinely about capacity building abd often built on weaknesses as strengths. Derek had noted that they had found the model of using critical friends for projects a bit worrying, but they had been able to bring a lot of critical support to the projects – and this is one of the most important outcomes

Finally a model of collaboration between institutions (like CAMEL – http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/camel ) was another output and this too emerges from the reports.
Institutional Perspectives

Next up we had brief presentations from six of the institutions who did get pathfinder funding on the theme of how benchmarking helped in the preparation for subsequent institutional developments?
University of Chester – Jethro Newton

The approach at Chester was that they took quite a strategic approach. In 2005 at the start of the programme there was a low level of embededness. Some engagement with technology but not much on pedagogy. Jethro pointed out, quite rightly I think that context is important – you never start from a blank sheet. And you’ve got to remember that content and pedagogy more important than technology. Interestingly one of their outcomes was that they developed a learning technology unit, along with a group of E-learning coordinators. I wasn’t quite clear whether these were based in faculties or in the unit itself, and unfortunately there was very little time for questions at the end. Their actual project was around podcasting and rather than talk about it, here’s the web link. http://podcastingforpp.pbwiki.com

They felt that their outcomes were that they had achieve clearer targets in faculty business planning, and they were managing to offer better staff development through the Learning Technology Unit.

University of Glamorgan – Virendra Mistry

This project seemed to be at quite a strategic level too. They started with a statement from their vice chancellor that the university aimed for highest standard of e-learning, tutor facilitation and cutting edge learning facilities.

Their outcomes were based around engendering design, Measurement, data collection, collegial spirit, mapping, changing practice, informing policy and they now have a statement about what students can expect in terms of e-learning. They now have much more of a focus on learning and teaching, and are conducting an institutional review. Interestingly they were the only university who is talking about developing the scholarship of Benchmarking. For example they planned to take some of the data collection into journals

Barbara Newland
Bournemouth University

Bournemouth had produced an institutional Review document, which had helped them focus on where they were at that point in time, and this had helped them to produce actions , provided an opportunity to Benchmark with other institutions, developed and understanding of how they were using Blackboard and helped them understand senior management perspectives. They had found the timescale a bit of a challenge as well as the need to develop a single response.

The programme helped develop staff support and e-resources. They’d developed something called E-res. It was about E-learning with quality e-resources – using web 2.0

They felt that it would be useful to revisit pathfinder although a little bit of extra funding would be nice. One of their aims was to recognise the experience of implementing, supporting and researching e-learning within their central services

Maria Lee – Queens University Belfast

Pretty much what Barbara said. Their pathfinder had been mainly used to support campus based learning. Participation was timely for them, coinciding with development of new education strategy and assessment policy. It had confirmed the approach of embedding e-learning and provided an emerging vision of how e-learning will support their goals. Having said that blurring boundaries between campus based e-learning and distance learning are changing the concept of blended learning and they are planning to develop an e-learning policy in 2008-9

Sue Timmis
University of Bristol

This was a very interesting presentation in that Bristol was a university that had Very strong disciplnary cultures. They had had a central e-learning unit since early 1990s, a strong tradition of innovation ,and were an early adopter of Blackboard (Since 2000). But, they didn’t have an educational development unit. E-learning requires differentiated strategies based on cultural contexts and knowledge fields. They wanted to find a way of giving faculties more say in how e-learning is embedded and already had a framework called ELTI – Embedding learning technologies institutionally. They adapted this framework to look specifically about what was happening in each of their departments which provided a real drive towards faculty based support for e-learning, although it was probably true to say that faculties were not thinking about e-learning or teaching and learning in any strategic way. So their project was to support faculties in embedding e-learning. They had created a distributed model by providing satellite areas of expertise in all the faculties. Their pathfinder project had been based around a set of faculty focussed strategic projects? One, for example was using Tablet PCs and evaluating their use, another around maths support in the science faculty. Students were coming in with poor level of maths – so e-learning materials being developed to deal with this. The Faculty of Arts had been looking at use of Turnitin/Blackboard plug in at a strategic level. They had also just formed an Education Support Unit – includes e-learning. (This is something that may be worth following up for my own research)

Brian Sayer,
University of London External

They took a structured approach to reviewing teaching and learning in a research led institute. Already quite deeply immersed in mainstream e-learning. Rather than take an institutional perspective they went straight in at programme level. Interestingly they said they wanted to take an Open Source approach. They provided the opportunity for programmes to take a wholly owned perspective of their teaching and learning activity. Institutionally the exercise provided a useful reminder of their strengths in this area, and areas for improvement, helped them to clarify institutional responsibility for policy and processes, and to actively collaborate in dissemination of best practice, and to improve awareness and understanding of their e-learning strategy, planning and infrastructure. They were also considering minimum standards for eLearning.
HEFCE Perspectives

Next up we had a talk from Dr. John Selby from HEFCE. I couldn’t help noticing the onteresting equation of “Educational developer” with “people who do the technical development” at the beginning of the talk. Anyway he felt that the challenge is to get those people who were reaching out to academic staff (i.e. educational developers) realise that they had new ways to do it. But also there is a need for the developers to ask what their target audience needed and why.

He also had some reservations about the programme’s title. They were not pathfinders but trailblazers. However, they had had an important impact on HEFCE ‘s thinking. But that thinking is also influenced by the external context, with issues like differential fees, questions about value for money and different modes of delivery being important. It’s important to assess how the work that is going on in e-learning connects to the wider environment, and how what we are doing is perceived outside higher education. There is a risk that eLearning seen by outsiders as a way of cutting costs (and reducing contact hours)

He reminded us that we are a very diverse sector and suggested that benchmarking was one way of addressing this. There remains a need for a comprehensive view of the e-learning landscape in the sector with markers that enable institutions to position themselves and plan their development in particular directions. He qualified this by pointing out that HEFCE needs to be careful what it says and bear in mind how it will be heard. And the sector should not read too much into what they say. (In some circumstances anyway)

He then made an interesting observation about students use of technology. For all we talk about the Google Generation, there is actually quite a limited use of anything beyond the basic technology Virtually all students use Word processing and the Internet, but for other important technologies, the figures were something like Presentation development 65%, Spreadsheets 63%, Graphics 49%, Creating web pages 25%. Which raises the questions of whether investment yields interest and if it does what kind of return does it produce. The most fundamental point to come out of all the case studies is that the appropriate use of technology is leading to improved satisfaction, retention and achievement. It facilitate increases in the size of the operation without corresponding increases in the estate. He also pointed out that in fact we are e-mature in the sense that it is no longer possible to work as we do without technology. In a while we’ll be able to stop talking about e-learning (Arguably we’re already there) Technologies are embedded in social structures and systems and the technology needs to take account of them.

How do we connect the work we do into the senior management of institutions? Many quite senior people who don’t know what we do, and think of us as a cost rather than a benefit.
The afternoon consisted of breakout sessions and a panel discussion. The first one I attended was entitled “Learner experience and the student voice.”

First there was a presentation from the University of Bradford, who started from the premise that there are high levels of technology ownership and concomitant social expectations of technology. This raises all sorts of issues about for example staff training, rules and regulations, security, communication, establishing contacts, networking and student perceptions of e-assessment

Their project was about developing the extended student, and based around social networking, skills development activities. links with academic programmes and providing integrated support, around a social site called “Ning”. – you can see the site at http://Developme.ning.com and there is background information http://www.brad.ac.uk/development. Outcomes of this is that they have created a social network, improved their PDP processes, embedded student voice into their institutional Strategy. They’ve also provided a sort of digital storytelling area, building on current you tube content – Bradford students will be telling their story – what’s it like to be a student in the C21

Next we heard about Pathfinder at Wolverhampton

This was about embedding the concept of the e-portfolio at level 1. They were using PebblePad, to do this, but their challenge was how to move past “champions” and getting staff to support e-learning and specifically e-portfolios. They created teams of mentors, and used the e-portfolio through the system. But they did acknowledge that it was important to assess the question of whether PDP was culturally desirable, or feasible? They built in 3 retreats for staff involved and used them to explain the desirability and feasibility but they also felt it was very important to get in with the students and talk to them.

Staff and students see things as chunks of learning – modularity tends to work against students and staff seeing a holistic experience. So modularity can be a bit of a problem

1) Change takes time.
2) Listen to the learner voice
3) Listen to the staff too.

But be careful “I don’t like Pebble Pad” might actually mean that “The member of staff didn’t tell me what to do” Big measure of success was an “improved student experience” I asked how they knew how they’d improved the student experience and they said that they had conducted a variety of evaluations which had had very positive feedback, but that they also had quantitative data that suggested a considerable improvement in student grades.
Then we heard from Rhona Sharpe from Oxford Brookes whose project was also based around evaluation of the learner experience, looking particularly at patterns and preferences in online media use and at experiences of social software as part of the curriculum. They found that local data was much more powerful in communicating with colleagues (Interesting that most on-campus students study at home with their own laptops and that there was a relatively low use of VLEs at Oxford Brookes.) Their findings had led them to shift their course design to a much more learner centred view. – From VLE to PLE (personal learning environment) – they had a nice graphic of a dashboard for the student – although I suppose if you think about it the concept isn’t all that different from Blackboard’s “My sites” “My PDP” and “My timetable” They’re also using Ning. http://elesig.ning.com

The second breakout session was about the in class use of mobile technologies to support formative assessment and feedback

Tim Linsey from Kingston University described how they had used a variety of mobile technologies in the classroom, supporting members of staff with mentors to discuss how to use it. The staff and mentors met up every few weeks to exchange experience and both parties found this useful. Among the technologies used were electronic voting systems, inbound text messages, (to a mobile phone). Tablet PCs & wireless data projectors (This was effectively taking the interactive whiteboard a bit further as the lecturer could move around and students could interact with the presentation. They also tried to use interactive pads (whatever they might be!) But they found them too finicky and no-one used them in anger.

Students reported that they were able to focus their learning on areas of weakness, and diminish misunderstandings, that it was easier to give responses, and it was possible to discuss a wider range of interactions. They also felt a greater sense of involvement from because they could see group feedback in real time.

Staff, found the process useful for identifying misconceptions and challenges, adapting their teaching practices, enhanced and assessment and feedback, and delivering enhanced teaching.

The project also provided information about the most appropriate conditions in which can each technology be used, the impact they have on learning and on teaching practices. Curiously only 1 person used the text messaging which surprised the project team as this was the simplest to set up

Some of the other findings were that the time to set up this kind of technology can be an issue
Very positive about the role of mentors. But students also responded very positively. 84% would like other lecturers to use it. 89.3% wanted their current lecturer to continue to use it and the general feedback from students was that they wanted even more of this kind interaction.
Then we heard from Phil Gravestock – University of Worcestershire whose project was about digital storytelling. They don’t hang about with this, getting their students to start three days after arrival! The benefits were that it was low tech, easy to learn, accessible. Students don’t have to work at learning technology to get started. There was a nice quote from one of the students “Story without digital works, but digital without story doesn’t”. The point is that technology not important, narrative is

We were then shown a couple of the stories – they were very simple audio-visual presentations in which the students told us something about themselves. The images were often crude and the text hard to read, but the narratives were quite powerful.

But the point here is that students need help with the story not the technology. They can do the technology anyway.

Finally we heard from Richard Hall of De Montfort University
Their project was about making institutional sense of web 2.0. But they too were clear that this was not about technology, but about empowerment. They had developed podcasts that move face to face sessions forward, and provided synchronous classrooms related to social networking tools, and were using wikis for variouys activities. Their philosophy seemed to be based on the premise that we’re using 21st century technology in a 19th century pedagogical context. I think they may have a point, even if there’s some hyperbole in that remark

He also raised an interesting question “Do we assess the affective side of education, do we even engage with it?” He used sound clips too in his presentation and s one of the students said (sounding quite surprised) “I was doing more, getting more involved in it, and actually started enjoying it”

Students seemed to enjoy the flexibility. They want academic staff to make savvy decisions For example if you do use web 2.0 what’s your strategy if it stops being available.

 

 

Blackboard, Midlands User Group, Northampton

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Technology , ,

Being fairly recent converts  to Blackboard, I’ve always thought that it would be useful to get involved with  the local user groups, and I have been to a couple of Midlands User Groups meetings.  So, I hired a car and took a couple of colleagues to Northampton University (Evidently, “local” these days is a fairly relative term!)

The usual format of the meetings is that there is usually a brief update from members on issues that are currently of interest, so the proceedings started with me being put on the spot! I discussed our experience of lumpers and splitters, which seemed to generate some interest – well,  some nods of recognition anyway! There were some questions about what our largest lumped course was, which I can’t answer yet, because we haven’t enrolled any students. But it seems that, based on other institutions’ experiences there are performance issues with large courses, specifically relating to archiving, copying, assessment and gathering course statistics.

There was a lot of interest from other presenters in Safe Assign  in particular as a competitor to Turnitin. The Blackboard representatives there were very cagey about what exactly Safe Assign could search. One reason given was that if students knew this they would know where not to copy from. Reflecting on this in the car on the journey home we thought that this was a bit odd – if students are that sophisticated in their plagiarism, that is, choosing and synthesising sources and rewriting them, they weren’t that far from doing proper academic work!  More pragmatically there was some criticism of Safe assign  on the grounds that it was a one-shot process, i.e. it doesn’t let you resubmit the same assignment

Northampton demonstrated  a blended learning course based on the e-tivities idea. Essentially it appears that they’re using wikis, blogs syllabuses and Scholar,  (Students upload their own work to this and link to each others’ projects). They’ve provided course material on how to use wikis and blogs (Students use the blog as a reflective diary)  There has been considerable interest in using this type of approach from other schools in the University.

It was also interesting to note that we have been comparatively fortunate in that we have been able to invest in a comprehensive package with Blackboard. One colleague reported that they were just piloting  the learning objects LX pack for distance learners for example, and another reported on their recent acquisition of the Content System.

Another interesting issue came from Cranfield University who had similar problems to us in some respects –  at least in terms of the splitters. All their taught courses are 12 months – teaching tends to all happen early on,  and then students go away to work on dissertations. It is obviously very difficult to integrate the gradebook in this context. So they were looking for a way to make gradebook easier to use for academic staff. They employed a graduate from a previous year to redesign the course with quite interesting results stripped down the navigation for example – quite dramatically in many cases. The view was taken that students did not need all the links that a typical course provided, which bears out my own view that we do tend to overengineer learning technology.  (Having multiple ways to do the same thing makes it a bit like those adverts that say “more information on our web site, and when you go there it’s exactly the same information)  They ended up merging courses into single sites (not unlike our lumping) One interesting comment was that many academic staff had no idea where in Bb to load content! They had a publicity drive on this but it had had very little effect. Although, I’m not quite clear what if any changes they made to the gradebook as a result of this.

Another theme that came out of the discussions was the extensive interest shown in the e-portfolio tools, for assessment, rather than for PDP purposes. We’ve hidden these because we want to emphasise Pebble Pad for personal development planning. I think PebblePad remains a much stronger product, for PDP but I wonder if we shouldn’t spend a bit more time looking at portfolios as an alternative assessment tool.

One of the strengths of these meetings is that they are attended by representatives from Blackboard and we were presented with a Blackboard Road Map. In truth I’d seen quite a lot of this before (at the Blackboard Users Conference at Durham) but there do appear to be some quite convincing reasons for moving to Blackboard v8.0 , not least because Safe Assign and Scholar, Blackboard’s social bookmarking tool are integrated into it.  We could have the latter as a plug in but it would seem more sensible to have a complete product rather than a loose association of tools. Of course, the counter argument is that we’ve hardly tested our current version of Bb in anger yet, so there’s a risk in upgrading. Having said that Blackboard 8.0 is largely a back end upgrade, so there shouldn’t be many customer facing issues.

Beyond that it was quite interesting to get a corporate perspective on higher education.  Some of the slides were quite interesting  one interesting phrase I noticed was “Education= Economic and social health”, which suggested a rather instrumental approach to education. (Nothing about the discovery or  production of knowledge, for example)

 Blackboard say that they’re “not so much about the technology but about how the technology is used” and their strategy is to focus on student achievement. So they don’t see themselves as just a software company. They focus on three strands, “learn”, “transact”, and “connect”. (Learn is our area) – but  Bb claim to be 100% focussed on education and about moving from e-learning to e-culture. An informed e-culture to boot! (That wouldn’t be 100% on education then!)  Which made me think that the leadership awareness of e-culture could be an issue for many insitutions.  How far are senior management realistically able to keep up with the cultural change that technological affordances bring about? Blackboard do seem to be aware of this and are working towards assessment methodologies, not only of individuals,  but also of institutions, programmes, and courses, and that this requires academic and administrative levels of engagement and assessment. They also showed an awareness of web 2.0 with a tool for integration with Facebook (although we tested this, and it didn’t work – In fairness that maybe because our firewalls are blocking it.)

They also mentioned EduGarage, which is their developer network. This seems to work on open source principles, which I’m all in favour of although I’m not entirely clear about the exact nature of licensing model. But if we have people who are involved in development work, we should probably get involved.

We then returned to the member’s upgrades. Alot of this was about institutional contexts. Leicester had merged MIS/CS into a single IT services department and had also had to merge their two VLEs into Blackboard. This was problematic because they had to integrate Question Mark into Blackboard – but  it transpired QM have no commitment to upgrading their connector to Blackboard. There’s maybe a lesson for us about tying into 3rd party tools there. Having said that Leicester have bought Wimba, (which gives inter alia voice discussion boards .) Turnitin and others. They’re also planning to integrate with Facebook – initially using the Bb plug in.

Blackboard pointed out that they can keep 3rd party tools up to date if need be, although this would inevitably come at a price.

There followed a bit of a debate about how VLE’s are being used and supported. One telling point was made about how Resource Allocation Models tend to see teaching as “standing in front of a class” Preparing a wiki for example, is not seen as valuable an activity in terms of resourcing. (Neither for that matter is preparing a Blackboard Course)

There then followed another useful update from Dudley College. They’re running  WebCT and have been for a while. They appeared to be more interested in e-portfolios, again, more for assessment than for PDP type activities. But of particular interest to us I think, was their model of staff development. They’re running a 2 week on-line course for academic staff – to showcase what sort of things can be done with the software. This will count  towards staff CPD – they have to log in for a couple of hours each day. They’re also producing a CD-ROM for staff  with video guides on how to do stuff and have also produced a selection of flash games, which can be edited by the simple expedient of editing a text file. THe intention is that staff can customise the games to the needs of their own discipline.

In the afternoon (after an excellent lunch!) an “award winning” Blackboard course on Plagiarism that had been developed by Northampton was demonstrated. (The award was a “Blackboard Exemplary Award” whatever that might be. I’m a little bit sceptical when I see the phrase award winning these days, because there appear to be awards for just about everything. – I’m waiting for the first “award winning awards ceremony”)

Anyway. The aim of the course was to to ensure that every student gets the same message about plagiarism which can then be refned and dealt with in a specific way and present plagiarism in a positive light (Is it a Development issue or is it a Disciplinary issue). They used the metaphor of a degree course as an academic journey with hazards being littered along the route – successful study is about knowing how to avoid them. The destination is related to the type of skills you need for a particular degree. There are also links to personal development planning.It’s essentially a linear course – students work down the buttons on the left hand side. Rightly I think they tried not to just focus on plagiarism – shouldn’t be too threatening – instead the focus is on academic integrity and why it’s important. Of course you can’t avoid talking about academic misconduct but this is introduced later on and is talked about in the sense of not being fair, or in terms of gaining an unfair advantage. Issues like helping a friend in a crisis were also covered. Is this collusion?   The course also includes interactive demonstrations of what plagiarism might look like and the course finishes with a chance for students to submit to Turnitin at the end.  But no tutor sees the originality report- which made me wonder how  feedback was given. The course was quite well received by students who have suggested that it be made compulsory.

This is the kind of idea that we might take forward with Bb. The Virtual Campus had a set of generic skills support materials involved, and Blackboard seems to have the potential to support more of this kind of work. The question is how can it be slotted in to existing courses. I’m a little wary of having a huge list of skills courses on the front page.

There was then another presentation from Blackboard on what is rather pretentiously called “Project Next Generation”.
Release 8 not a big interface upgrade but includes Safe assign, Scholar, Self and peer assessment tools, and an enhanced gradebook. Next generation (or “Release 9” to mere mortals!) still has the familiar tabs, but has some extra functionality, such as drag & drop capability on modules making it easier to redesign the front page. It also integrates Sakai and Moodle courses into a module – so if you’ve been working in Moodle, you can simply import your Moodle course into BB)

There’s also an instructor Dashboard which  has a traffic light interface – e.g. Red might show alerts about students  who have problems, yellow shows you things you should be doing in the next couple of days (e.g. notifying students about due dates) and green just shows you standard announcements. There is also the ability to create role specific tabs, so you could, if you wanted have a tab just for external examiners, that showed them the courses that they were marking. You can also have modules that are specific to your course. It’s also integrated with Facebook so that you can get Blackboard alerts when you’re in Facebook It also appears that frames have been replaced with modules – so a course menu might appear in another module. (I wasn’t entirely clear how this would work to be quite honest.) I did like the fact that it had an explorer type view available, which shows the icons for all your files.  (Interestingly this is known as the “WebCT view”  by Blackboard staff, which says something about the history of VLEs and how features move from one to another.)

The portfolio tool also looked much improved containing employer information, educational journal, reflective blog and a gallery. But on being asked for further and better particulars the presenter rather sheepishly admitted that what was being presented on screen was just a mock up and not yet available.

They finished with a mention of the Blackboard Ideas exchange, which appears to be rather similar to the developer community – This needs further investigation on our part, as I suspect it could be quite useful. Although I dare say we’d need to take some ideas ourselves!

The meeting finished with an Open Session at which people presented their wish list.

There was some discussions about Wikis – former WebCT users can’t use the Learning Objects LX plug in

A question was raised about the use of the peer and self assessment tool in group assignments – Apparently you can’t assign an assessment to a specific group. (or student)

 There was a request for a batch unenroll tool. This can be done in snapshot, but that isn’t a convenient method for many users.

Course test generation is apparently problematic on large sites, as is archiving courses. It seems that Bb is not really  designed for large courses, but we’d like it to be better able to cope with them. One solution might be to schedule complex tasks such as archiving for quiet downtime. It was also suggested that it would be useful to have some sort of warning that embarking on such a task will have consequences for system performance.

A request was made for the provision of section breaks in Blackboard pages. I didn’t really see why the syllabus tool couldn’t be used to achieve that though. 

Finally another request was made for more group functionality. It would be useful to make the group tool a little bit easier to use. Bb representatives talked about the community system as one way of communicating with groups, but I don’t think that was quite the point. On the other hand the group tool is very powerful, and I can see users tying themselves in knots with it as it isn’t terribly intuitive.

All in all a very worthwhile meeting, with a great deal of food for thought. In some respects I was quite impressed with how far we’ve come in such a short time, but of course we’re not really using it in anger yet. I think it’s definitely worth keeping up with the group, and I think all of us were slightly disappointed that the next meeting isn’t until Easter 2009

 

Draw Project meeting, Worcester

Julian Beckton Repositories, Technology

I’m attending a meeting organised by the DRAW project, another of the JISC repository programmes. The main theme of the meeting is about the use of Repositories for learning and teaching materials, specifically discussing whether they’re different from research objects, how to increase the take up of repositories for storing such things and whether a different approach is required.

We started with a presentation from Andrew Rothery, Worcester’s project directory, outlining the differences between learning and teaching material (will update later)

Then I gave a brief account of our experiences, stressing the bottom up approach – we really have gone down the road of scratching a particular need, (i.e. architecture’s) and I think we’re going to have to do quite a lot of advocacy work with other faculties…

Then Steve Burholt from Oxford Brookes described the Circle project – http://mw.brookes.ac.uk/display/circle for more details. What was of particular interest here was the fact that they are using Intralibrary’s VLE plug in -This is the sort of thing we were hoping to have with E-prints, but haven’t been able to develop. Essentially you call up a repository resource and there’s an option to add it to the VLE. (although we actually wanted it to work the other way too.)

Sarah Hayes from Worcester is currently talking about the difficulties they are having with populating their L&T repository (Google Analytics shows virtually no-one looked at it in the last month) They’re responding by investigating what staff find useful – one option is that staff can choose who can see their materials, on the grounds that there appears to be some evidence that staff are less comfortable about sharing their teaching resources with the wider world. Another approach is for repository staff to upload student dissertations, course handbooks, podcasts, and possibly even external collections to make a useful resource for staff. She also talked about Web 2.0 Ideas, but hasn’t expanded. http://www.worc.ac.uk/drawproject

Next up was Sarah Malone from Derby’s Pocket Project (which I have to confess I’d never heard of) who explained what the Pocket project was about and asked for interest from other institutions. The project is about converting existing materials into Open content, and sounds very much as though we should investigate it, given our interest in Open Source

Then there was quite an interesting presentation from Helen Westmancoat who is working on a repository for York St. John University. Their approach is interesting because they’re populating their repository with existing content – for example there’s a fascinating sounding oral history project on the memories of women in East Coast fishing communities and they’re storing all the transcripts and audio files collected by the researcher. That sounds like a fairly conventional research approach admittedly, but there are two points here – Firstly, the researcher is committed to the repository as a means of attracting further funding, and more importantly, there is something to show other potential users, and this, apparently, has some effect in raising the repository’s profile.

Helen was followed by Phil Barker from JISC CETIS who asked a few provocative questions about what are repositories for and argued that if they were to take off, there needed to be some sort of shared understanding of their purpose in the HE community. He introduced another topic that became important that of “sharing”. Repositories are often seen as a “safe place to put stuff” but in fact their role in sharing teaching resources was as, if not more, important because it enabled staff to help each other. One relevant issue that was raised here was the situation where staff in the same faculty have to enrol in each others courses if they want to know what material they’re using on Blackboard. (Sounds familiar?) The repository could help with this – after all all you would need would be a set of links from the Content Store to the repository.

Then we had David Millard from the Faroes project at Southampton (No expense had been spared!) The most telling  point he raised was that there was a serious mismatch between what repositories were offering and everyday teaching life. For example most users aren’t interested in metadata, but that’s the first thing they see in many repositories. They’re working on something called PuffinShare  (There’s no web site yet, but that’s a link to a slide show that explains the thinking behind it)  Equally most users don’t know (or care) what a manifest file is, they don’t have digital resources to share, or at least not immediately to hand, so the PuffinShare project attempts to simplify. Among the attractive features are

1) Previewing online (well, up to a point, we’ve done that with our multimedia abstract) But it takes it a bit further because there is no need to download a resource – it can just be used in the repository.

2) Web 2.0 Style tools – e.g. commenting.  But the comments are structured, along the lines of “I would improve this resource by…” rather than just allowing open comments

3) Users have a profile – a sort of self authenticating idea, not a million miles from the seller ratings on Ebay (WOuld you trust a repository item deposited by this person?)

4) There’s a “promiscuous” search engine. (i.e. it searches everything)

The point of all this is that users need to be provided with a working space that meets their needs rather than just being a “dusty old repository” to use David’s phrase. That doesn’t mean it’s not a repository – rather that we shouldn’t be too precious about the term. After all MIT’s release of all their teaching material is in effect simply opening their repository to the public.

Well, I’ve finally got back, and now I’ve had time to reflect on what was really a very useful meeting, I think it was one of those rare occasions where something was actually achieved. We spent the afternoon session discussing what advice we’d give to some one who was starting up a learning object repository, and came up with this initial list.

  1. Decide what its for
  2. Look at other implementations
  3. Make it as search engine friendly as possible (Because that is how most people will come to it)
  4. Don’t obsess about quality control. Use the repository to promote good stuff over bad, but don’t reject stuff you think is bad
  5. Seed the repository with high quality content (An idea we might usefully adopt with material from each faculty)
  6. Build into new staff induction from Day 1 (I’m not so sure about this one personally, but then I’m sceptical about overloaded inductions anyway)
  7. Be very clear about your IPR and other policies & Procedures
  8. Stress both the hosting and sharing capabilities
  9. Keep it simple. Decide what metadata is for.
  10. Use what teaching staff are already doing
  11. Know your audience
  12. Digitise paper archives (see 5)
  13. Make early access decisions (Who can get access to it, who can’t)
  14. Think about incentives/rewards
  15. Don’t separate teaching/learning materials from research materials
  16. Start with a small manageable collection
  17. Make sure you’re solving users’ problems
  18. Make sure it works!
  19. Ensure successful interface and integration with other systsme
  20. Make sureyou have adequate staff resource
  21. Business model for the whole enterprise
  22. Think about your position with regard to liability
  23. Be prepared for a lot of hard work

Essentially it’s not just a matter of installing software and claiming you have a repository. It’s a matter of installing the software and starting work.

All this is going to be revised by the Draw team and  circulated, with a view to becoming a rather more authoritative statement than I have been able to come up with here.

Sick!

Julian Beckton Assessment, Technology , , , ,

Well, I don’t know where all the text from this went…

 But here’s what I wanted to say anyway. (If this disappears I really am going back to bed)

I’m not now going to the Bbworld 08 conference in Manchester because I am simply too ill to drive there. Which is a pity because there appeared to be some interesting looking presentations about using Bb to support assessment. This is something that does come up from time to time in Faculty teaching and learning committees (e.g. Health Life & Social Sciences the other day). We do have Turnitin’s Grademark of course, but the drawback with that is that it doesn’t really support double marking. (i.e. anonymous marking). Or, if it does, I haven’t found out how yet. I did dream up a baroque routine where students’ work could be submitted to different tutors by admin staff, but technology is supposed to make life simpler, so I haven’t mentioned it yet.

Leads to an interesting reflection on technology in learning though – it very rarely seems to automate a practice in its entirety – certainly some aspects of a process are very well automated – but human beings being what they are, there’s always some other aspect that they want to cling to that the technology doesn’t cover. So our job is really about changing perspectives, not teaching which buttons to press.