Tuesday 22 March 2016

Association of Learning Technology Conference 2015

I attended the Association of Learning Technology Conference 2015 in Manchester, 8-10th September 2015. Here are some reflections I recorded at the time.

Overall Impressions:
I hadn’t been to a conference before so this was all new to me. I think I probably over did it with 3 days as it was exhausting! Many of the talks were quite academic, operating at an institutional level. I tend to think more direct and practical so sometimes it was very interesting but likely beyond my “sphere of influence”.

Themes:
All the talks were linked to a different theme.

Keynotes:
Keynote: Steve Wheeler – Meet Learner 2.0

Basically: a whistle-stop tour of recent technology innovations, their impact on education / learning, how students might be using digital technologies, how being “digital natives” may mean that they absorb and use technologies differently from teachers. But that that use / knowledge is set within the context that they are living.



  • Teacher-led >> Learner-led
  • Recursive (reproducing knowledge) >> Discursive (develop new knowledge)
Steve brought 2 students with him and invited the audience to ask them questions. They were trainee teachers. They felt different when using technology as students as opposed to when they had to deliver it in class.

  • Expectations (student) vs Responsibility (teacher)
  • Consumer vs Provider


Keynote: Jonathan Worth

Jonathan is professional photographer. He started by talking about how the development of the internet has impacted his business as a photographer and how he tried to control the use of his images.
Internet changing interpretation of images:

  • a photograph is evidence :: an image is an experience
  • Images shared on the Internet by users - What is the story behind the experience?
He then moved on to talk about an online photography course that he developed and ran and how this led him to think about how much information / data we give out about ourselves online. What responsibilities as educational providers do we have?
Phonar Nation http://phonarnation.org/

Keynote: Laura Czerniewicz – Considering Inequality as Higher Education Goes Online

Laura is from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She talked about the global North and the global South; global education (MOOCs), the inequalities of society and education.
Emergence of MOOCs (Mass Open Online Courses); now moving into the mainstream

  • Conventional >> Flexible
  • Fees, complete package >> free / paid, individual elements
Increase in diversity of providers eg non-education institutions like digital media companies, publishers.
Education viewed as an export; increasingly global orientation
“Colonisation” of the online educational space by elite, global north, western-orientated institutions
Institutions not considering widening participation nor addressing inequality

Keynote: Phillip Long – Learning Sciences: Impact on Learning Technologies & Learning Activities

Phillip talked about the difference between learning and performance (ie achievement in assessment); how the 2 are different; these are different aims for teaching activities. He discussed a number of studies that looked at different activities that impacted on knowledge retention and learning.

Invited Speakers:
Speaker: Rebecca Ferguson – Scaling Up Learning Analytics

Learning Analytics – “collection & analysis of data about learners and their contexts for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs”
Learners may also want access to their own analytics
Organisation records analytics aligned to their objectives
Is what learners need to know the same as what the organisation may need to know?

Discussion of what the OU is doing – development of a dashboard so that data can be presented to users (academics); allow action and intervention to support learners


Speaker: Don Chapman – Brockenhurst College – Exceptional Student Experience (ESE) technology

Discussing the development and implementation of the ESE social learning platform, at Brockenhurst College. Collecting what appears to be a massive amount of data to identify students at risk of struggling and dropping out. Using historical data they believe that they can identify students at risk with 87% accuracy and prevent drop-out by early intervention.

Harnessing the power of the crowd – collaboration and connectivist learning (HC)

Peer-to-peer learning using student-generated MCQs with Peerwise

The author presented his experience using a (free) product called Peerwise (see http://www.peerwise-community.org/)
This tool allows students to:

  • create MCQs
  • share questions
  • complete
  • rate
  • comment on
  • provide each other with feedback
This was tried with veterinarian students. There was no monitoring by staff members. No extra credit was given to students for using it but the author reported that it was well-used. The project is on-going but the author believes that they have seen some positive impact on students’ exam marks.

How should we measure and show online learning activity?

This presentation seemed rather rushed and my notes are unclear about any key points. It seemed to be about the lack of information about actual learning as opposed to online interaction (eg page views, session length). I was looking for information about learning analytics but failing to find it.
Author offered this link after the presentation: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/376609/

Who’s the expert? Transforming knowledge and understanding through community collection

This session introduced the Oxford Community Collection Model, see http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/ , “a method of crowdsourcing that blends online and offline activities that engages the public in building datasets of memories and objects (transformed into digital surrogates and made available online) relating to particular historical events or experiences” – in this case WW1 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/
The author described how they engaged with people across the country to collect artefacts relating to WW1. Artefacts were classified, digitised and made available through a website. “Antiques Roadshow” type events were held and members of the general public turned up with items and stories.
Once the collection was made available online it allowed people to make connections between the objects and their own stories. “Amateur” experts were often more knowledgeable than the academics.
[Echoes from Joanathan Worth’s keynote speech – online presence of people now deceased – do we have a right to do that? People were keen to tell and share their own stories]

Enhancing Lectures with Interactive Teaching Tools

The authors talked about the use of, amongst other things, Articulate Storyline in developing digital interactive learning objects to replace static teaching slides. The objects were hosted on Blackboard. They were used before, during and after class – the Flipped Classroom.

I liked the idea of the Flipped Classroom.
They used google analytics to assess the use of the learning objects and found that there was a peak use before, during and after the lectures, and a large peak in usage during exam time suggesting that students referred back to the objects for revision.

Quizit – crowdsourcing personalised formative assessments

The authors presented the QuizIt tool – a mobile gaming app. Students can quiz themselves and each other on key aspects of their learning, also create quizzes and interact with each other eg ratings, comments. Leader boards are created based on interactions of the student.
The app will be launched in October – freely available to HE institutions.

Connecting students, staff and employers together for shaping the future of learning

Presentation of a number of Jisc funded projects, looking at the involvement of businesses in the development of learning materials to support “employability skills” and how technology can be used to do this – elearning portals developed with input from both academia and businesses.

  • What are “employability skills”? Are they different for different employers? Do they change over time?
  • Can education be extended beyond the education institution into the workplace? Placements, mentors, using alumni?
  • Barriers to involvement of businesses?
[is this something that will impact on us as nursing education continues throughout their career?]

Learners as agents of change (LA)

We are the Champions! Students as partners at the University of Southampton (LA)

This project involved recruiting students as digital literacy champions. The students were recommended by their tutors, and worked with the academic and the digital literacy team/technologist to enhance teaching and learning. It was considered a partnership. Students were paid, although the authors seemed confident that students would have done it voluntarily (work was completed without timesheets being submitted for example). Payment was deemed to have “professionalised” the role.
Champions were recruited across disciplines and the idea has been extended to for example sustainability champions, enterprise champions.
Evaluation is on-going with feedback from the champions as well as the student body. An Agile methodology (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/agile-project-management.htm ) was used to project manage activities.

Delivering a simulated games industry placement to enhance the employability of graduates

The authors described setting up a simulated project to help students prepare for work in the computer games industry (where placements have been difficult to set up). Activities included building teams, dealing with a client, presenting ideas, completing worksheets(?), delivering a product.
Very interesting though I don’t think relevant to our particular student set.

The Innovation Game: How students are informing our digital journey

The authors recruited students to act as student innovators to promote the use of digital technology within the college. Students reviewed apps, wrote up blog entries, were also part of their class review process providing feedback on lessons and how digital technology could be used to enhance them. Initially driven by the academic team, the students soon started to make suggested about what interested them and other students.
Students volunteered and gained confidence from the experience.
Suggested apps RefMe – reference generating app, Grammarly – grammar checking tool

Professional development with a cup of tea

Author discussed the process and project to replace current face to face CPD activities with online learning within a pharmacy company.
Learning objects were developed in Articulate Storyline and made available via Moodle (VLE). Agile methodology was used. The aim was to provide short (have a cup of tea) interesting learning opportunities.

Development of learning objects: Replace >> Enhance >> Transform

The project was deemed successful with good feedback from staff.

Open educational practice (OE)

Why Institutions Adopt MOOCs: Breaking Down Traditional Boundaries or Reproducing Privilege?

The presenters looked at some of the driving forces for the development of MOOCs by institutions:

  • Institutional visability / profile
  • Student recruitment
  • Flexible Learning
  • Reaching new students
  • Some case studies also considered:
  • Opportunity for curriculum redesign / reform
  • Promotional opportunities
There appeared to be little concern about widening access or participation.
At Dublin City University (authors) they are developing their own MOOCs. They have decided to phrase things as “connected” and avoid the use of “online”.
They suggest that providers of moocs should consider what their drivers are, what their mission is.
[aspects of this were echoed in Laura Czerniewicz’s keynote talk about inequalities.]
Open learning at the workplace: scaffolding user’s digital competences

The authors presented details about their Eagle project:

  • cross-european
  • public administration employees in rural communities
  • enhanced CPD
  • delivered in the workplace
  • using open education resources
This project uses “gamification” and badges to promote learner activity (more like “online socialisation”). Learners:

  • can set up profiles
  • socially interact with others
  • develop skills / competencies
  • contribute their own learning activities eg worksheets, videos
  • gain status eg creator, adapter
  • users gain credit from interacting with the system
  • metrics will determine learner status based on activity
Do we need instructional designers?

Basically this guy told a room full of “instructional designers” and “learning technologists” that they were useless middlemen as redundant as the liberal democrats and that academics needed a slap to make them step up to plate and do stuff themselves. I couldn’t decide if he was taking the pee or not.

Participatory approaches to the development of learning technologies (PD)

Pixellation: The Key for Collaborative Online Education

“By pixellation we mean the delivery of notions in the most concise and self-contained format possible: a pixel of knowledge”
The author talked about how he and his team of academics developed a range of small, essentially bite-sized, elearning content that could support users ongoing learning of self-contained, mostly maths / science based, concepts.
He reported that this project was well-received by both students and academics.

Are we ready to learn from learning analytics?

The authors were hoping to present a taxonomy of learning analytics however they had not got to this point yet which was disappointing. Their project aims to help identify and classify the learning data which will help non-technical academic staff to use it to drive learning design and learning outcomes.

Building an e-learning platform in WordPress

Manchester Medical School discussed how they developed a learning platform in Wordpress. This acts as a learning portal for the medical school online content. Blackboard is the institutional VLE but was deemed not fit for purpose. Contract programmer was used to do a lot of the work. Relevant “plugins” were developed to provide some functionality.
Features of the new system:

  • Single sign-on
  • Search facility
  • Development of taxonomy to tag content and so link related content
  • Links to a curriculum mapping tool
  • Student can add and retain their own notes
  • Video content can be added to videopress and downloaded by student for offline viewing
Social media in learning and teaching (SM)
Didn’t attend anything in this strand.

Reflections
Here are a few of the key points that I picked up.

We’re “pixelated”!
Well, I think we can stand up quite well compared to others. Our offering of short learning objects offers students an opportunity to learn in bite-size (pixelated) bits (with or without a cup of tea); they can be utilised outside of or within training / teaching (flipped classroom). It was comforting to see that other people were also using Articulate Storyline and videos to deliver learning content.

Looking forward:
We perhaps need to think more about how we design our etutorials so that we don’t just reproduce off-line content, but include more interactivity and relate to the real world the learners operate in. The features available within Articulate Storyline may be able to help us with this.

Learning Portal
The idea of a learning portal sounds really good. Since we don’t get any exposure on Blackboard and we need to appeal to non-keele users the idea presented by the team from Manchester using Wordpress seemed very appealing, although clearly very technical.

Looking forward
A learning portal could offer us the ability to:
  • Present learning content in an institution-dependent space (ie not Keele-branded)
  • Allow use of taxonomy and tags to link learning resources
  • Provide search facility
  • Allow users to comment / rate content
Learning about Learners Learning
I was really hoping for some practical solutions as to how to collect  and use learning analytics – what to collect, how to collect it, what can it tell you, how you apply the knowledge to improving the product. However I didn’t really find this in the sessions I attended.
Discussions were really about the institution level policy and procedures to develop or they talked about large data gathering exercises at a higher level.
Note that one of the keynote speakers (Jonathan Worth) raised the issue of recording data about learners – what are we collecting, have we asked them, do they have a right to be forgotten? What are our responsibilities to learners?

Looking forward:
I think that this is an area we need to improve to order to gain information about what students find useful / not useful, in order to improve our elearning offering.

Stealth Learners
Two presenters talked about students being used as “agents of change” – champions or innovators. These sounded like really good projects where students are used to educate both academics and their student peers. In both these cases they started off as proponents of the use of digital technologies in teaching / learning. These ideas were extended to other disciplines at the institutions.

Looking forward:
This seemed like the type of thing that could also be applied to library services and students - using students to spread the knowledge, use of library resources and development of information skills.

Gamification or Social Learning
A number of presenters talked about the “gamification” of learning objects; either literally producing game-type quizzes or using the ideas of leaderboards, status, ratings, contribution, social interaction etc used within social media elements to drive learning activity.

Looking forward:
Given that the library service now operates over 3 sites – Keele Campus, Royal Stoke and County (Stafford) – a platform where staff are encouraged to collaborate, share practices and learning, develop social interaction etc might be something to investigate.






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