Category: Distributed and Open Learning (Page 1 of 2)

I did not really know what I wanted to discuss so I hoped that others would have ideas. Turned out people had really good ideas and there were a few rooms of interest to me: data and privacy, using social media in classrooms, student engagement through blended learning, and building learning communities between remote classrooms using synchronous and asynchronous technology. I attended the last.

We had some sharing of individual experiences of online learning, both synchronous and asynchronous and chatted about our experience with our current program. The two big takeaways for me were that discussing or interacting in some way in a small group is really important to build enough trust to interact, and that a backchannel is valuable to build on this and to incorporate new members into your trusted group. It gave me practical examples of how the C of Communication in learning design that I had been reading about in Conole, Baran and Conole and Brown’s articles could be actually be incorporated into a resource as opposed to a course.

So What?

Reflecting on my own experiences in asynchronous online learning and correspondence courses (where there was absolutely no community), I can recognize how implementing small group work and backchannels affected my learning. In the correspondence course, feedback was extremely slow to arrive (yes, back in the day of snail mail). There was no connection at all to other students and you regularly received feedback on an assignment after you had already submitted one or two more assignments. If there had been some community, there would have been more learning from other people’s comments. Eight years after my Philosophy course (in which I received a paltry 68%) a friend took the same correspondence course and it wound up being the same teacher. For the major paper, he was now handing out an exemplar, WHICH WAS MY PAPER THAT EARNED A 68%!!!! Had I given my consent? No. Was my name still on it YES!! Did I have any recourse to complain about it? At the time, no. But I was sort of proud, although I questioned it being an exemplar when I did not receive a great mark on the essay. If there had been some sort of community, I would have found out about this long before AND realized that this professor thought a 68% to be an exemplary mark in an introductory philosophy course. How did the university not recognize that none of his students performed well and that possibly the problem was his marking was extremely stingy?

For my asynchronous courses, the early ones had only a virtual bulletin board/forum system to connect with others. The posts were meant for clarifying questions for the teacher, not community building. It did not feel much different than the old snail mail correspondence course, though you could get responses more easily if the teacher looked at the board more than once every week or two. More recently, courses I have taken (other than for my masters) include separate forums for personal introductions (required) and sharing of thoughts as well as questions. There are group assignments to encourage community building. These courses also provided an opportunity to reach out to others in a backchannel by directly contacting other participants through the course site. If you want to continue communication after the course, some of the platforms allow access to the real emails (as opposed to communication only through the platform), some allow you back in to email through the platform so it goes to the real email and the person can choose to share their real email with you, and some of the platforms require you to set up real communication before you complete the course. As the asynchronous courses have developed, the design has recognized the value of student to student communication and made it possible to continue connecting during and after the course.

Now What?

So, how will this affect my math resource? That is a good question. Originally, I had planned a static type of resource, but I can see that the motivation and self-regulation components would benefit hugely from communication with a teacher and a community of students. Why I did not recognize this before is a shear lack of connecting the dots – any students I gave summer work to always had the opportunity to connect with me, and the successful ones usually did. Having an anonymous board could be the solution so that current and past users of the resources could connect. I would need to monitor the board so that it does not get abused, but I think I can manage that as part of my volunteer work in my retirement. As the users of the board will (should) be underage students, I am not comfortable setting up something where they can interact without observation when I am the person monitoring the entire resource.

Will my website skills be up to this? Well, hopefully I can get my literature review close to done ahead of time so that I can concentrate on the development of the elements. If I start at only one area/topic of the mathematics curriculum, that will likely be sufficient for my project.

As for hosting, I currently maintain a simple website on HostPapa. Years ago, we chose them as their servers were in Canada (and remain in Canada) and they support green energy. I will be doing research again on various hosts, with the aim to find hosts with servers in British Columbia whose privacy policy takes into consideration our province’s privacy requirements.

Readings

Baran, E., Correia, A.-P., and Thompson, A. (2011). Transforming online teaching practice: Critical analysis of the literature on the roles and competencies of online teachers. Distance Education, 32(3), 421–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2011.610293.

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/

Conole, G., and Brown, M. (2018). Reflecting on the Impact of the Open Education Movement. Journal of Learning for Development – JL4D, 5(3). Retrieved from http://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/314.

Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. (n.d.). Retrieved November 11, 2019, from http://www.bclaws.ca/EPLibraries/bclaws_new/document/ID/freeside/96165_03#section30.1.

Video licensed to YouTube by SME (on behalf of Bulletproof); Audiam (Publishing), Warner Chappell, PEDL, LatinAutor, Kobalt Music Publishing, AMRA, and 15 Music Rights Societies.

Something I know about myself – I do not like theorizing and not getting to the actual work. I am all for discussing and research, but once there is ample discussion and research and all you are doing is regurgitating, it is time to move on and try something. If it is not successful, then at least you have something new to add to your discussion/research instead of the same old same old that was not getting the result you were hoping for. This is why two of the articles we read this week were so enjoyable for me – they were suggesting actions as opposed to just summarizing what is known and posing questions.

The portion of Siemens, Gašević, and Dawson’s article assigned supplied new information and as well as programs and people to research that will be helpful in my project. Yes, everything leads to my project, and I do not think that is a bad focus to my Masters. Realizing that George Siemens was one of the originators of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) also sent me down a path of checking to see nationality and the potential for his work to take into consideration Canada and British Columbia’s (BC’s) strict privacy laws. I will be watching Stephen Downes’ gRSShopper and Learning and Performance Support Systems as well checking out the authors’ ProSolo. I followed all four of these researchers on Twitter and subscribed to Stephen Downes OLDaily as they appear to have information I may find useful, if I can understand it. Some of their information requires much more knowledge of programming and use of online systems than I currently have.

The article by Stephen Downes also had some good resources, but as they were all American based, I am not going to research them further at this time. His points on what is needed in both the development of technology as well as the development of online education resonated with me:

1. “We need to change our framing, and in particular, we need to start thinking in terms of data and networks rather the documents, to get away from the idea that we’re publishing course packages, chapters, and modules.The existing system of learning and publishing is designed around static and unchanging resources, however, in this future, resources will need to be created as-needed to address current data and current contexts.” “Instructional designers should be thinking in terms of environments and experiences”
2. “ GitHub, for example, requires a huge learning curve(GitLab, 2017). There is a change of perspective required in order to see works (whether software or content or other media) as dynamic, as branched, as modular, and as interoperating. Instructors and designers will require user-friendly interfaces that assist in this change of perspective.” “Again, it’s a shift in focus from the content to the interactions and operations. It’s about how to merge this data with this application or this capacity or this bit of artificial intelligence to create a learning experience for a person. This is a very different way of thinking about instruction and instructional design than what instructors and designers may be used to, and it will require practice and application on new leading design systems in order to support this transition.”
3. “designers and developers will need to learn to co-create cooperatively.”

I found it interesting that Downes did not push his own developments in the article. Is it because he is doing the Canadian humble thing? I am hoping his developments are all based on Canadian privacy requirements and therefore very usable for our education systems.

References:

Downes, S. (2019). A Look at the Future of Open Educational Resources. International Journal of Open Educational Resources, 1(2). Retrieved from https://www.ijoer.org/a-look-at-the-future-of-open-educational-resources/

Siemens, G., Gašević, D., & Dawson, S. (2015). Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and Online Learning. Retrieved from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation website: http://linkresearchlab.org/PreparingDigitalUniversity.pdf

I am at that “I don’t want to read anything other than for pleasure” and “don’t make me write anything original” point. I was really good over the holidays, reading academic articles daily, but I have hit my saturation point. So now I am setting myself a firm schedule of what I have to do and when to get myself back on track. If I don’t fulfill my obligation, I can’t eat or drink anything. Yup, it’s weird, but it works for me! And I could stand to lose a little weight. 😀

What I did find an enjoyable read  this week were two articles gleaned from other sources. One was written on January 10^th by Kia Lang: https://www.techlearning.com/opinion/is-virtual-reality-vr-a-reality-in-the-classroom. Google is pulling out of VR because their funding has expired. They do not see a future for smartphone-based VR in a box. “The current uptake of VR in schools is gaining good speed, but this is simply NOT comparable to the quantity of business Google expects in the consumer space.” “the strength of education content developers such as MEL Science is based on their starting out as science education companies, not VR developers. It’s not about VR, it’s about using the technology for education to enable students to learn knowledge points better by interacting with otherwise invisible micro-level processes”.

The other was Leanne’s suggestion of reading https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/30/thinking-about-the-social-cost-of-technology/. Basically, people need to keep upgrading and learning or they get behind on tech. It has interesting opportunities for those working with older people. I have friends who are not keeping up on tech and therefore cannot exploit their phone’s usability. It isn’t about open digital online education at this point, because these people are not willing to spend the screen time to learn, but they will spend time talking with someone to figure it out/learn how to do it. An interesting conundrum to ruminate upon.

Our readings this week were on various types of Opens: scholarship, data, online courses, and research. Veletsianos & Shaw’s article focused on information about the imagined audience and research on how those who post edit their posts based on the type of social media used and who they imagine their readers to be. The point of article was that educational institutions could create more effective policies to support networked participation of their constituents and therefore the increase in openness of information sharing. Atenas, Havemann, & Priego’s article focused on how using open data can be great for teaching. Skills developed included critical thinking and research, as well as mathematical skills in statistics and data information management and curation as well as data visualisation skills. Rohs & Ganz’s article discussed how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are not the leveler or answer for inequalities in education. Even in our nation, electricity access, internet access, computer access, contextual information (not all are native English speakers or have the background to understand contexts provided), and capacity of cheaper computers to run programs or apps affect access to MOOCs. On top of these concerns is the level of media competence and self-regulation skills required by any user, which are difficult to overcome in weaker learners, even if the course design attempts to overcome weak media or self-regulation skills. Couture’s article emphasized the need for publishers not to be in control of open access journals.

So What?

As part of our Hypothes.is comments, Ben posted an article about the value for a back channel for learners. This is equivalent to the chatter that takes place in and outside a regular classroom environment, and although instructors may not like being excluded and some students may not be included, this is a valuable part of any educational experience.

In our breakout group, it was noted, not just by me, how everything comes down to money. As knowledge and educational resources move towards open access, the companies that made money from them need to find a different method of making money. A couple of journal publishing companies have started open journals to, in my opinion, experiment with how they can continue to find a money-making solution. As teachers, open scholarship and journals are both a blessing and a curse. Now, our schools can subscribe to particular journals and we know our students are accessing information that has been vetted by knowledgeable people. Once this information is openly available, how can we ensure our students are accessing valid information? Yes, access to the information costs less and we have more information available, but how reliable is that information? How can we find the time to check the authenticity of the information that our students find? The data on most government sites, can be useful in some courses but may be too complicated for the average secondary student to decipher. How will all these resources be made age-appropriate in language and relevancy for elementary students? How will the copyright and work attribution be affected when there is so much available that is similar? I don’t question that openness is a positive movement, but there are many hurdles to overcome before it becomes the norm.

Now what?

For my project, I have identified some areas of significance. As I am planning to embark upon an online open resource for high school math students, there are many considerations that these readings have identified.

1. Veletsianos & Shaw’s article – I must remember that my imagined audience is not knowledgeable but also does not need talking down to. Some of the BCEd videos for online math courses that I saw about five years ago were embarrassing – they made students felt like they were morons as they were watching the instruction. Plus, students do not need artificial cheeriness. Also, I need to be sensitive that the resource is for a varied audience – not just already motivated students but language learners and math Learning Disorders (LDs). I wonder if a more “choose your own adventure” approach is needed rather than listening to a long discourse which students can tune out: ask a question, students have a choice for answer which leads them through the inquiry at a pace appropriate for them. Possibly add a screen capture tool so they can make their own instructional video? Or a summary video that is accessible once the inquiry is done? Or should it be always available? Hmmm. So many questions and too big a project. I will need to narrow it down to a smaller amount at a later point in time.
2. Atenas, Havemann, & Priego’s article – I need to use some open data sources and ensure students understand how to find reliable and valid data, how to interpret the data, and how to display and make use of the data.
3. Rohs & Ganz’s article – I need some tools that address less computer literate students – possibly a set of screenshots downloadable to print, use of clear simple language with possibly diagrams/images for clarity, and self-regulation help. I also need to address auditory LDs and reading LDs. Yikes.
4. Couture’s article – not much relevancy for me at this time.
5. Back Channel for learners – whether this is for learners to contact each other or just for a private line to me is yet to be figured out. How much will I actually be available? How useful will learners contacting each other be if it is not a synchronous course? Is this going to be my retirement volunteer work focus?

Resources

Atenas, J., Havemann, L., & Priego, E. (2015). Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Towards Transversal Skills and Global Citizenship. Open Praxis, 7(4). https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.7.4.233

Couture, M. (2017, July 12). Academic Publishing at a Crossroads. University Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/academic-publishing-crossroads/

Koenig, Rebecca. (2019, October 19). ‘Backchannel’ tools let students ask questions anonymously. And that brings more voices. Retrieved from  https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-10-24-backchannel-tools-let-students-ask-questions-anonymously-and-that-brings-more-voices

Rohs, M., & Ganz, M. (2015). MOOCs and the Claim of Education for All: A Disillusion by Empirical Data. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(6). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2033/3527

Veletsianos, G., & Shaw, A. (2018). Scholars in an increasingly open and digital world: Imagined audiences and their impact on scholars’ online participation. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(1), 17–30. http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2017.1305966

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.