Activity 5.2 and 5.3

Activity 5.2: Practicals

• What is your current virtual learning environment or the main technology you use? 
• Blackboard Learn 9.1.9 moving soon to SP11.
• How does it differ from the ocTEL platform? 
• It is a closed environment where the institution validates membership and access. The Course team decide on the look and feel of the course instance and use tools to create content. Students and staff are constrained by the LMS/VLE. In ocTEL there is more openness, the forum can be read by anyone without log in, blog pages are also public. This may be a concern for those students who are still feeling their way around the subject and may not want their learning experience broadcast publicly. 
• Our LMS/VLE environment is not available to the student after they leave the institution :-( Students creating a personal portfolio of their digital learning would need to export course resources and contributions from course into another environment to save for posterity. I am also doing this for ocTEL so I have my own personal archive. 
• What learning styles does it afford that ocTEL cannot? Where is it restrictive? 
• Blackboard provides style sets for various teaching styles These can be used to structure the course to focus on different learning styles. The challenge however, is when schools create standard templates to provide a common visual presence for their students then the teaching style templates get forgotten so everyone is presented with the same top level options. 
• The tool settings are restrictive. The limitation is that the content and interactions are within Blackboard and, anecdotally, some students find the steps for logging in to the environment and navigating to the activity too tedious to bother! The desired route would be a unique url for the tool activity with direct login so you can just click and post. 
• The visual presentation is restrictive, our design and artistically driven staff find the visual layout uninspiring and constraining. 
• Is it ‘open’ in the sense that you can develop or configure tools that fit your pedagogy (e.g. the learning styles above), or does it command a certain pedagogy? 
• It is not fully 'open' you are constrained by the tools within the environment and limited to their configuration. However, anecdotally, that is probably a blessing for some as they still just about manage the basics. Too many options and people start getting lost in the set up. 
• The limitation is that the content and interactions are within Blackboard and, anecdotally, some students find the steps for logging in to the environment and navigating to the activity too tedious to bother! The desired route would be a unique url for the tool activity with direct login so you can just click and post. 
• To increase functionality and provide 
• What are the wider implications of enforced platforms and technologies for higher education? 
• I struggle with the term enforced, my assumption is that technologies have been piloted and selected by institutions as being the best thing at the price they can afford at the time. They seek something which they can handle, maintain and have a support and archive package. It takes a brave HE institution to say we do not provide a technology environment to support your learning you can use what you, like when you like, how you like, and fix it yourself when it goes wonky. And for the academics choose what you like to create and deliver your content, we will not provide any platforms or technologies. 
• I think the challenge is the middle ground, better response from the product vendors, more customisation/personalisation/flexibility in the tools. Greater institutional support for students who want to build their own personalised learning environment which is joined seamlessly with anything the institution provides. Free access to a portfolio for alumni. 
• How can your learning platform promote inclusion? 
• The learning platform is the tool, it is what the academic does with it which counts. 
• Accessibility needs to ensure the resources./ tools can be used by all students regardless of ability or technical skill. It needs to be accessible across all platforms and devices so students can engage with their own devices (if they have them). 
• Resource needs to be made for students to access and engage where they do not have their own personal device. 
• Activities need to be designed to bring students together, discussion, reflections, group work, in a respectful and valuing way. 
• Most importantly the student must feel safe and a valued member of the class when using the learning platform. It is an extension of the real classroom, it is ok to ask questions and challenge each other and the academic must nurture and support this interaction to 'include' all the students equally. 

How I use Google apps - link to document here (Timestamp 14/06/2013 01:15:31)

My thoughts on synchronous delivery - view my forum enty here

Activity 5.3: What does Open Source mean to you?

For me OpenSource means, the creator has given the user (co-creatoe) free rein to adapt, modify, enhance their code. I have been a long time visitor to SourceForge to try things out for my own use.

• Do they force a certain pedagogical approach? If so, what are the benefits or drawbacks of that? 
• Depending on the design and architecture, the level of collaborative learning varies significantly from MOOC to MOOC. MOOCs have the potential to be flexible for the learner.
• Each MOOC requires the learner to engage with different software and applications and learning object file types. 
• I think that those learners who are less experienced or less confident with technology then the MOOC may not be their first choice, and there will always be the fun and need for face to face learning and skill development with the real object in real time, learning a craft, and art, etc.
• What difference would it make if the platform were Open Source?
• If we had sufficient expertise and resource we could have a platform with the look, feel functionality of 'what we want' rather than what it does out of the box.
• How does it differ from past initiatives for open content such as iTunes U or Khan Academy (mentioned in Week 4)? I see these as OpenResources not Open Source.You use these rather than manipulate it entirely.
• How does open content differ from open education?
• Opencontent is the content is freely available, usually open license for reuse, repurpose (Creative Commons  CC BY) for learning and teaching activities. 
• Open education is where the person creats their own learning pathway to meet their personal learning need, using existing resources, outside an 'educational' establishment. They set their learning goal and only they know when they have reached their goal. They may 'validate' their learning through communities, online reputation and badges, or through 'reputation'.
• I have added a comment to this weeks forum on this - read it here.

Activity 5.1: Course dimensions

Read the Methodology and Pedagogical Dimensions sections of Hill et al (2012) paper and think about the four dimensions mentioned (logistical, practice based, pedagogical, participation).

1. Which of these considerations is the biggest driver towards your adoption and choice of technology?
2. How do these dimensions change each time you run the course and what effects does this have on technology choices (e.g. ‘scale/capacity’ of certain activities for class size, physical location of activity)?
3. How does this relate to the learning activity dimensions you may have identified in Activity 1.2?

1) I am not sure I can separate these out neatly so I will present my thoughts and reflections. Currently the course type activity features most strongly in my institution. The activities of students and staff are defined by the categories identified by Hill et al (2012), these are delivered according to the logistical categories they also identify. My observation of staff where I work is that many faculty members would identify themselves as researches who teach rather than teachers who research.
Contact environment is also key, VUW promotes itself as New Zealand's capital city University providing students with a unique Wellington experience. The focus towards an on-campus experience complemented by teaching technologies (LMS) and digital library collections.
Student 'attendance' in person on campus appears to be considered by many as 'compulsory'. Teaching technology is primarily used to provide student access to wider tailored resources for independent study outside the Lecture and Tutorial times. Courses vary from the web-supported through to web-dependent. Technology is in some instances used to deliver content for students to engage with before attending the face to face tutorials (flipped classroom).

Distance delivery is provided in a few subjects, rationale varies from widening access to geographically distant students and to offer choice to those who are local but may need to add further courses to their programme without the constraints of time for physical attendance on campus.

Recognition of the extent of web work in a given course remains an area which would benefit from greater clarity. Anecdotally staff have identified what they want to do on-line but seldom plan sufficient time within their workload to deliver. There is a reluctance to take time from elsewhere in the 'teaching activities' and utilise it for on-line facilitation/ moderation.

The decisions are shaped by the academic staff, their programme team and school as well as their faculty. My role is in essence to assist the academic to choose the right tool/technology for the teaching/learning activities they intend to undertake and to guide them to develop the skills to use the technology.

In my LMS workshops for academic and support staff my colleague and I have created a structure which presents the tools against heading for the tool type. This is to assist with orientation to the tool and activities. The institution has chosen not to provide a standard template encouraging the individual academics to work with their school to develop their own. Participants on the workshops are oriented to the Teaching style template options available within the LMS to gain ideas for their course layout and style.

We have a corporate colour scheme however this is not enforced so the individual academic or their school will decide on the look of the on-line course environment. I encourage each course instructor to attempt some uniformity across courses within their school/subject/programme to help student orient and navigate within and through the on-line courses. We also have on-line delivery outside the Institutionally supported LMS, which presents another 'experience' for the students and faculty members to master.

The most frequent layout used is based on the LMS 'traditional' layout with a home page, content areas for learning materials, collaborative activities and assessments with the use of course links to present activities beside content.

2) For the workshops I facilitate the size of the group may vary but the other components within the dimensions primarily remain unchanged. I teach in the same technology rooms, with the same hardware, software and IT infrastructure the main differences are updating resources and ensuring relevance and currency and the introducing ideas and alternative technologies in response to particular staff questions or response to staff challenges. 

On a previous course (when I worked at OBU)  I found the variables changed,  I would regularly re-purpose my resources for use in different student cohorts would adapt and/or reuse resources from other teaching colleagues. The room I taught f2f changed each delivery,but was usually on the same site. One winter, due to weather and travel challenges for the students, I changed delivery of two weeks to on-line only (WebCT VLE) and we used a flipped approach with students undertaking guided reading and watching video (professional YouTube channels) and reflecting on their practice experience, then engaging in synchronous discussion followed by asynchronous discussion. I have previously developed my own course template, which was adopted by my colleagues. I used a weekly theme approach presenting the introduction, learning activities, reflection activities, discussions and reference list on each weekly page. If I were to replicate this structure within Blackboard Learn I would probably use the 'Lesson Plan' content type. 

3) My learning dimensions in 1.2 I used these workshops as examples when I did activity 1.2 so no change but more explanation.... My current students are faculty and support staff in the University, the range of skill and experience with technology varies from those who require clear direction in its use to those who are autonomous and may also be innovators. I ask for individuals learning outcomes in advance of the workshop so I can anticipate and prepare for substantial variance from my lesson plan. I also start with an icebreaker which introduces the participants to each other and gives me more detailed information on what is expected and required from the workshop. 

Forum

Re: To what extent should learning design be supported computationally?

To what extent should learning design be supported computationally – A webinar discussion between Diana Laurillard and Stephen Downes http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2209/

Unintentionally Diana demonstrated the technical limitations of Illuminate :-(  lack of control for the presenter in jumping through slides and the inability to run animated slides.

Word of the day: Connectivate = activating connections.


The Learning Design tool  https://sites.google.com/a/lkl.ac.uk/ldse/Home  Technology to calculate teacher time in creating revising teaching technology.

This looks like a useful tool to provide evidence to support negotiations for recognised time for academic activities, currently this is not specified clearly and it is 'as much as it takes' even if there are not enough hours in the day/week/ academic year....

Pedagogical Patterns Collector -  http://web.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/PPC/live/ODC.html  "suite of tools enables teachers to share their good teaching ideas. It is intended to help a subject teacher see how a particular pedagogic approach can be migrated successfully across different topics".

This is valuable when reusing content or developing content for intentional reuse.

Useful to use in teaching development environment.

Action:

• Put some time aside to explore these two tools for my own teaching practice.
• Consider a project with staff using these tools and the perceived benefit from their use.