I could only stay for the morning, I caught Diana Laurillard’s keynote presentation and then one of the break out sessions
Teaching as a Design Science in Learning and Technology
To start, Diana set elearning in the context of recent times. The context of elearning, The policy context influenced by Professional educators connected by technology (US Plan 2010, UNESCO, 2011, HEFCE OLTF 2011). Therefor teachers must be regarded as an ‘Innovative Professional learning Community. We can not think of teachers in the old way. They need to articulate their pedagogy and see what others have done. Teaching is therefore not an art but more like a science.
Can learning design be supported computationally? Yes but its immensely complicated process, but is possible if teachers work collaboratively building on others experience. We need a learning design support tool., which is done with the The learning Designer (A TLRP-TEL Project) and a pedogolocial patterns collector.
How do we capture pedagogy? (between the way it was and is now) This can be done by identifying different things that teachers do: Short description – Learning outcome – Categorised teacher – learning activity. Therefore we can analyse different types of learning activities. And make a comparison of different types of pedagogy ( eg comparing traditional with Blended learning to show the advantages of the latter).
Therefore we can adopt or adapt a teaching pattern to a specific learning context.
The learning designer: Give reflections on different types of activities. Enables the teacher keep records of the teacher’s workload. This is based on Laurillard’s ‘Conversational framework’. Learning through acquisition and instruction, plus learning through inquiring. The teacher also sets up the learning environment. (learning through practice and intrinsic feedback) . This is further linked to the peer review process.
Therefore, no technology embraces all of the educational process as expressed in the conversational framework. As a result of this we need to analyse the learning design of a certain type of learning technology.
Modelling the learning experience and teacher workload; Very difficult to measure the costs and benefits of traditional learning design. We can work out the teacher costs with conventional teaching (lecturers, seminars etc). But when we are looking at blended learning its not so easy to manage. There will be a bigger up front cost, but this should be cheaper than conventional teaching methods. The per-student support costs NEVER improves through economies of scales. This has implications for MOOCs where there is NO ‘variable’ (per student) cost.
Features of teaching as a design science:
- Teachers adopting adapting testing improving Sharing learning designs
- Teaching as Collaborative learning, suppoted by online collaborative design tools and repositories
- A theory-based computational representation of Pedogogic design that migrates across subjects and clarifys learning benefits and teachibg costs
Peer learning and knowledge sharing for distance learning students in a majority world.. Niall Winters (IOE)
Background. Katito health centre in Kenya (geographically very remote) had desktop installed and nurses did online courses to up skill themselves. Focus was on the Nurse Care Plan, initially based on pen and paper, reflecting on their on job. Mentor support was provided on the phone from Nairobi. Project built a mobile app that connected the learner(Nurse) to their mentor and tutor.
On the app the students can fill in their Nurse care plan and then share it with their student. The tutor then could easily identify any learners who were having problems (an obvious advantage over the paper based form).
How did they do it?
Participatory design was done by the staff coming together (conversational framework) bottom up method. Mobile design should support; Access theory, ask questions to mentors, tutors peers, offer their own ideas, use their understading ti achieve goals, repeat their practice and improve via feedback, share and debate their practice and inputs,
What kind of mobile devices? Smart phones cost about £45-50 pounds in Kenya (imported from China) relatively cheap. Can support HTML 5, works offline and saves data, fairly rich graphics, use the phone,. Ongoing support and sustainability; trainees and tutors need access to use the technology and can be easily updated.
The project has not got to the stage of evaluating its effectiveness.
OER’s in Distance Education: Adapting a model of open learning in academic practice. Stylianos Hatzipanagos
OER was a term first used in 2001. They are licenced under the creative commons licence. Advatages of OER’s: not reinventing the wheel, sharing good practice, capacity building, breaking down barriers to learning, networking between teaching practitioners, cross fertilisation of ideas between disciplines, Cost effective ways of operating and cost saving potential.
Noteable OER initiatives; MIT’s open coursework initiative (2001), OU’s Open Learn, Jorum is the UK national repository for T amd L.
Distanced from proprietary silos eg vle’s, Copyright free, as contrbutions to collective knowledge. However, most often come against recent improvements in creation of Tel content. Lack of interactivity, content is separated.
Aims and purpose of the project were quite challenging eg develop and evaluate a set of OER’s and fully evaluate them. What they did; Audited OER’s at Kings, selected content and produced OER’s. 3 phases to the project; indentified existing resources, developed them, thirdly linked them to polices, guidelines and documentations as a online resource to practitioners. .Fourthly, evaluated the OER’s, accuracy, reputation of the author, statndard of technical production, accessibility, fit for purpose, clear rights etc
Most practitioners not used to OER’s, preference for useful, specific and practical OERS’s, ‘Content often missing@ preference for reuseable rather than repurposable, main benefits – improved learning, and less saving on academic time.
Designers OER’s requires different design purposes, MOOC’s as a new OER design patradign
Was it a good thing ‘pushing’ practitioners to using OER’s in their practice?
http://keats.kcl.ac.uk/