Welcome to my website. It’s about digital education.
I recently ran a workshop on tools and activities for engaging students in class, and I particularly enjoyed the discussion on ways of working with large groups, i.e. moving from the traditional ‘transmissional’ mode of delivery to a more interactive student-oriented one where the main challenge is the size of the group.
Continue reading “Interactive teaching and active involvement in large groups”
Ok, I’ll admit it. Before I actually gave them a try, I didn’t see much use for classroom response or polling systems in my teaching. Now I truly regret I didn’t use them more often. Continue reading “To vote or not to vote?”
It’s interesting how certain industries love buzz words. Since instructional design is often, rightly or wrongly, seen as related to software development, the word that has caught on in the past few years is “agile“. Continue reading “Are you an agile learner?”
My post on supporting diverse learners has been posted on LondonMet’s eMatrix site. eMatrix is an excellent resource for HE staff as it gathers tutorials, articles and educational advice on online teaching, learning, assessment, feedback and facilitation. Worth to have a look!
This post includes my reflections after listening to Sir Ken Robinson’s talk “How to Change Education”. In particular, I’ll focus on two ideas that I believe will have a growing impact on education, including learning and collaborating online. They’re spontaneous learning and collaborative learning. (NB. I’m focusing here on adult education as different principles may apply to children’s education.)
As usual in his talks, Sir Ken notes that much of current alienation of teachers and learners in educational systems is the result of top-down governance where educational authorities issue rules and regulations which the rest of the system is supposed to implement and follow. He advocates a bottom-up approach focused on the teacher-learner relationship, which he believes is the cornerstone of education. As he shows using a theatre analogy, when we strip education of all that has been built around it throughout centuries and go back to the basics, we are left with the teacher-learner relationship, which should be the focus of any reforming efforts.
This bottom-up approach should be based on two concepts: spontaneous learning and collaborative learning. I take spontaneous learning to mean learning that is not forced in any way but emerges as a result of an individual’s intrinsic motivation to acquire new knowledge and skills. Adult learning is a goal-oriented activity: people engage in an activity when they clearly see its purpose and this purpose is linked to how they see themselves at the end of the learning process. It is hardly possible to teach somebody something they don’t want to know or they don’t see the relevance of, which university lecturers are often reminded of when students seem to forget everything they’ve learnt a day after their exam.
In other words, spontaneous learning is about an individual’s active engagement with the learning content, which is the result of individual motivation. Therefore it is important to establish what learners’ needs and motivations are at the start of the learning process, which gives the teacher the flexibility to (a) dynamically adapt the content to these needs, (b) develop ways of finding a common ground between learners’ expressed needs and the content the teacher believes learners should master before continuing to the next step in their education process.
How are the two concepts linked to learning and collaborating online? On one hand, online modes of delivery provide flexibility that can enhance access to learning for various groups of learners, allowing them to pursue knowledge they see as most relevant and therefore increasing their motivation. As exemplified by e.g. the recent success of MOOCs as a learning concept, such flexible modes of delivery appeal to large numbers of people and feed on their intrinsic motivation to learn. At the same time, the teacher’s role as a facilitator becomes extremely important in online settings in order to sustain learners’ motivation and encourage them to work collaboratively. Neither spontaneous and collaborative learning nor online delivery play down the role of the teacher – quite the contrary, although no longer in the foreground, at the lectern in the middle of a lecture theatre, the teacher as facilitator becomes a crucial element of a successful learning process.
One of my main areas of interest with regard to learning technologies is student motivation with relation to blended learning and the use of learning technologies. Quite a lot of research has been done so far in the field of student motivation in general, and some of these observations can be transferred onto the field of blended learning.
For example, Ellis, Ginns and Piggott, in their article “E-learning in higher education: some key aspects and their relationships to approaches to study” note that previous scholarship has identified four main factors that may affect student motivation:
In other words, a good blended learning module should be built around interactive activities (which, in turn, should be closely aligned with the aims and learning outcomes of the module) which give students at least some control over their learning. The teacher’s role in this context is discussed mainly with regard to feedback and e-moderating in order to help learners reflect on issues under consideration.
The overall course/module design should follow the principles of constructive alignment, and should take into consideration workload requirements placed on students, since research shows that learner motivation and perception of the quality of the e-learning experience are significantly associated with perceptions of appropriate workload (i.e. the amount of online work on top of in-class activities).
The authors present a case study of over 200 undergraduate business students who were required to participate in online activities as part of a module they took. The study showed that students were particularly positive about learning from their peers’ contributions. In this sense, online activities (in this case sharing resources and opinions on a discussion board) prove to be well-suited for sharing of alternative perspectives.
Interestingly, students were largely neutral about the impact of the module website design on their experience. At the same time, their responses often revealed concern about the amount of additional workload related to adding e-learning activities to existing face-to-face activities without allowing for the additional time needed to complete them.
The researchers interpret their findings as an evidence of “the importance of careful structuring and design of e-learning activities and resources, especially in relation to the broader student experience” (Ellis et al. 2009: 316). This confirms the importance of careful design of online learning experiences so that the purpose behind using the electronic medium as well as the aims and objectives of the learning event are clear to the learners. This will hopefully result in enhancing their motivation, which should be our main focus in instructional design.
So the take-home point is as follows:
We cannot assume that the mere presence of e-learning activities and materials supporting a face-to-face experience of learning will improve the quality of the experience. How students perceive and use the activities and materials represent one of the keys to unlocking the full value of e-learning in the student learning experience at university.
Here are a few guidelines which may help with designing online learning experiences. As I mentioned elsewhere, they do not differ that much from the principles for designing off-line, traditional learning events. However, while learners are generally used to traditional methods of instruction, therefore tend to accept them regardless of whether they find them effective for them individually or not, they are less willing to engage with technology-based experiences if they do not see as resulting in successful learning.
So, for a successful online learning experience:
What motivates learners? What actually works? How to achieve worthwhile learning? These questions have challenged online educators and instructional designers for ever. And it would be a huge mistake to think that a new technology is sufficient for raising students’ interest and involving them with the content and activities. The technology itself is never enough, just as much as the presence of a flipchart and a marker in a traditional classroom does not immediately turn students into the most motivated and efficient of learners.
Existing literature on learning technologies mentions a number of strategies that can increase learner motivation. What most of them have in common is that, on conceptual level, they often boil down to transferring the strategies that have been found to be efficient in conventional classrooms into online learning scenarios.