Month: December 2019

This week’s readings were good sources of research for my project, which is to develop an online resource for students working on BC’s Mathematics 10 and 11 courses. There were explanations of theories of learning, lots of pedagogical models for e-learning design and an extensive set of lists of elements of an effective online learning course. Dabbagh’s article focused on the importance of authentic problem-solving learning activities.

I am definitely an ‘approach it from as many different ways as you can’ type of maths teacher. Definitely inquiry-based with some behaviourism, a focus on cognitive pedagogy, leading towards a constructivist task, with some experiential if possible thrown in. I know that some maths skills need to be practiced in a boring way, but if gamification can be included, that is a wonderful way to make the practice more tolerable, with the goal of being able to complete an interesting authentic real-life task at the end of the learning period.

I have just finished participating in another online course through the International Baccalaureate. Our initial course roster included 24 people from around the world and by the time we finished with introductions, we were down to 14, with 10 finishing. Not even a 43% completion rate, unless some of those original 24 were moved to another class. Granted, we were only notified about the requirement 5 days before the course began, and we had to follow a strict weekly completion for the 3 modules, but still, I would expect more than a 43% completion rate from a group of educators that need this upskilling course in order to continue working for the International Baccalaureate Educator Network (IBEN) in the new year. As this course has refreshed my memory on best practices when planning or facilitating this type of course, I am going to compare it to Shé Ní et al’s Table 10 of key factors than impact on professional development. This course was a significant improvement over the first course I had to take with them online. That one was a quick conversion from a face-to-face workshop to online when no one was able to fly due to the April 2010 Iceland volcano eruption. Needless to say, it was not a stellar experience, but IB has significantly improved their online trainings over the years.

Use of model or framework for PD
The model/framework used was similar to other moodle courses I have done with IB. They have improved their use of videos, slides, and online formative quizzes. The work included group work, forums, small groups for discussion and allowed for different timing in the exercises as long as you completed within the week.

They had a very good ten minute introductory workshop to work through that made some excellent points about etiquette in an online environment, including how to create community by giving people positive reasons to join: using people’s names, replying to posts that you connect with, asking questions to encourage responses, keeping contributions concise by using bullet points and blank lines to separate points, focusing on only a few key points to start with (you don’t have to say everything you know in one post), and if you find too many opinions in the forum you can summarize them and post a question.

Institutional support
Obviously this is enabled and valued by IB and the educators in their network as it is a requirement for continued involvement in their educator network.

Communities
Building community takes more time and effort than the single activity posting what you teach, where you teach, and what is important to you as an IBEN educator. Some community was built through posting the required replies, but certain people were more active than others as those with more experience in this type of training tried to engage the others. Our facilitator posted only a couple of times a week, and could have been more active, but she was in the same boat – asked at the last minute to facilitate a workshop while taking a workshop and doing an evaluation visit over the 3-week time period.

Role of the educator
Our facilitator definitely saw herself as a guide and interacted with us publicly on the forums as well as sending us individual emails when we completed a formal formative assessment or if we were not quite on the expected timeline.

Educator type
All of use in the course were experienced educators, but our experience in the online moodle format was varied. Some needed help on how to get documents posted properly or help in how to find provided items. Assistance was given by the instructor and by participants in the forum and through private email exchanges.

Integration of pedagogy and technology
There was some understanding of how technology and pedagogy should be integrated, but as little attention was given to timing or notice of timing of the workshop, this area was compromised.

Situated learning
Our educator was involved in an upskilling of her own while leading our upskilling, so she would have been very aware of the platform. In order to lead this particular workshop, she would have been experienced in leading many previous online seminars.

Modelling best practice
The instructor noticed some lack of clarity in the provided assignments and made sure she clarified the information either before or shortly after we started on the assignment. In one case, where it appeared it should be group work but it was supposed to be individual work, but one group had already finished creating one activity, she suggested the group create 4 different activities instead of the expected 4 individually created activities. She definitely modelled best practice.

Mix of synchronous and asynchronous
There was no synchronous time (not a surprise since we are spread over the world), but yet I think it would have been helpful to build community, even if it had a few short synchronous times for whoever could drop in. I tried to set up a time with my group of 3 for Module 2, but one was in the middle of a hospitalized family member situation and the other just never responded till our project was almost due.

Sharing of practice/Learning from others
There was plenty of opportunity and encouragement to share practices and experiences through the forums. There were some requirements in how to share on some of the topics (statement/phrase/word, circle of viewpoints, etc.), but responses were always in whatever format you wanted.

Online delivery
Yes, and planned for online delivery.

Online presence
Yes, but with the very short timeline, it was difficult to start informal social interactions.

Situated at the point of need
Well, the new documents are being rolled out in January. Workshop leaders need to be evaluated on whether we know them before they are released and we can only have access to the drafts through the workshop. This workshop is definitely situated at the point of need.

Practice based
The training definitely focused on the changes needed in the workshops we lead. The forum formative assignments were sharing ideas on activities we could do in our workshops so participants could inquire into the new documents.

Discipline specific/generic
My workshop was discipline specific as a new Mathematics Guide was being rolled out as well as the new general document on IB Standards and Practices.

So overall, the course rated fairly well. The area really lacking was community and that was compounded by the lack of synchronicity. This is an interesting point for me as the resource I was going to create did not have any planning for community building. I need to do some thinking on this.

Readings

Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M., & Seale, J. (2004). Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design. Computers & Education, 43(1–2), 17–33. http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2003.12.018

Dabbagh, N. (2005). Pedagogical Models for E-Learning: A Theory-Based Design Framework. International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning, 1(1), 25–44. http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475.4593&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Conole, G. (2018). Learning Design and Open Education. International Journal of Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://www.ijoer.org/learning-design-and-open-education_doi-10-18278-ijoer-1-1-6/

Shé Ní, C., Farrell, O., Brunton, J., Costello, E., Donlon, E., Trevaskis, S., & Eccles, S. (2019). Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature. Retrieved from Dublin City University website: https://openteach.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Teaching-online-is-different.pdf

Listen to this as you read. (Thanks to Pink Floyd for allowing this official version of their music video to be embedded free of charge.)

All I could think of as I was reading our two articles for this week was how it all comes down to money. As Friesen stated in his article of open educational resources, “the clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. . .  Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects.” Even some of the ‘long-lasting’ projects he had listed were now defunct. MIT’s project has been successful as it fits Friesen’s criteria. The school itself has benefitted from enrolments from students who upgraded or became involved in the school because of their OER resources. I found it interesting that faculty also said they benefitted from creating the online resources as it made them update their practice. But they were staff and expected to create these resources as part of their job, therefore they were paid for their work AND the larger entity, the school, benefitted from their OER.

Harvard’s Project Zero was also successful and obviously underwritten by a post-secondary institution. It was “founded by philosopher Nelson Goodman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967, Project Zero began with a focus on understanding learning in and through the arts. . . . we continue to work towards a more enlightened educational process and system that prepares learners well for the world that they will live, work and develop in.” Yet other universities struggle.  Almost ten years after the Friesen article, Canole and Brown stated in their 2018 article,  “firstly, incentives and rewards (should) be put in place both nationally and institutionally to celebrate the development of open practice innovations and technology-enhanced learning interventions.” So how do we expect underfunded public JK-12 education to embed open education?

An interesting associated read was noted by someone in my twitter feed: a blog written by David Wiley, “the Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, and adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University’s graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where he is part of the Open Education Group (and was previously a tenured Associate Professor).” It was on the UNESCO OER recommendation. The highlights of the article were:

The public draft included a definition of OER as follows:  Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license… Open copyright licenses provide the public with free and perpetual permissions to:

• • Retain – the right to create, own, and control copies of the content;
  • Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways;
  • Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself;
  • Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new;
  • Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others. . . .

The final version includes this definition of OER:  Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license… Open license refers to a license that respects the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner and provides permissions granting the public the rights to access, re-use, re-purpose, adapt and redistribute educational materials.

OER are still defined in terms of copyright – either (1) in the public domain or (2) released under an open license. But the characteristics required to make a license an “open license” have been absolutely eviscerated.

The strong requirement that the public be permitted to retain OER – that is, “the right to create, own, and control copies of the content” as per the public draft – has been replaced in the final version with the indescribably impoverished requirement that the public be allowed “access” to OER. . . (This) . . . creates a policy loophole large enough to drive a multi-national publisher through, . . . (while also) . . . creating the possibility that an author could potentially charge an annual fee for a license to materials and still call them OER. . . (A final concern is that) . . . if money becomes available under a funding program based on the Recommendation, many of the organizations who apply for that money will absolutely be asking themselves “how much can I get away with and still comply with these rules?”

Disappointing. There is always some company willing to capitalize on education while those developing the resources and aiming to help their students get paid a paltry amount in comparison to Big Business.

So now what? Well, we teachers keep on doing as we are doing, and encourage our governments to put the costs of educating its population above the self-interested pockets of the businesses that want to make money off of education—let them wait and make money off properly educated people that they employ.