Institutional E-learning Strategy

I've been thinking about the basic strategy for an individual, group or institutional with their online learning design.  Trying to draw together all the principles, processes and techniques I recommend.  To plan strategically, think about the following.

Essentially, what you want to do is:

1. raise knowledge/understanding of the various online learning activity tools

2. educate staff about the design process itself

3. illuminate for them the strategic issues that need addressing in their context

And then:

4. work with them, guide them through a real learning design process.

What you often get is just the first of these points together with offers to help with the last point. The other points might be addressed in passing but often don't get enough attention. It's about educating before direct assistance in an actual process.
Now more on each of these points.

1. Knowledge of tools

This is knowing about how to use any online tool.  For a learning technologist, you want to do more than just demonstrating navigation. You want to help them understand how they can be used, how they are commonly used, show working examples, decontextualised templates, pedagogical affordances etc.

2. The design process

Educating about the design process is about:

• getting people to think in terms of time periods
• making judgements of teaching hours and learning hours
• ensuring understanding of asynchronous/synchronous and how to handle the different types of activities
• promotion of a scaffolded learning process
• Establish the basic building blocks of bespoke content and learning activities
• For content, raise awareness of the various types of media they can use for content
• For activities, explain what the tools are (this could include 1)
• Explain how assessment can be linked.

3. Strategy

• You want to think clearly about the rationale for altering your mode of delivery. Are you looking to open out into new markets? Are you looking to improve engagement through more flexible access? Whatever the rationale makes sure it’s clearly understood by everyone.
• Articulate your timeframes both for the design process and the course itself
• Identify and involve people that will teach on the course. Large-scale you need to organise a tutor training programme. This would involve raising knowledge/understanding of any online tools used and information about the learning design.
• It’s at this point you broach contextual cans of worms that needs talking about so they don't become elephants in the room. You would work hard in advance to talk about ways through these issues. The difficulty in HE is opening cans of worms that often fall across departments or even between departmental responsibilities. Engaging with marketing, engaging with IT, engaging with registration, engaging with assessment/exam boards, broaching issues such as academics time and space to design learning. A consultation role would highlight potential areas for scrutiny.

4. Doing the design

This is best done in face-to-face meetings with the individual or group designing the course.  Having the knowledge/understanding from 1-3 could mean they can undertake this alone but it's preferable for a learning technology type person to be present.

So how are 1-3 realised?

Face-to-face sessions

Common are events about particular tools, technologies explaining how, why and, if you're lucky, in what way you can use it. Now you need these. But be careful that this isn't all you do. Just doing this reinforces misconceptions about it just being about the technology. Sessions about 2 and 3 are desirable but rare (I do these). Pedagogically, I favour hands on workshop, and collaborate teaching involving activities and discussions.

Artifacts

It's common for institutional initiatives promoting blended/purely online learning to make stuff/make artifacts for people to engage with on their own: Stuff like advice documents, templates, case studies, videos, screencasts etc. I could talk about which ones I favour and the work I've done in this area. I worry about Institutional strategies which just do this and move on. Just as you would in an online learning activity, you need to support the process by helping staff one on one and in groups engage with any artifacts created.  This is to help them contextualise the artifact.  Without this process they are meaningless.

In an ideal world you would have an:

All emcompassing face-to-face event

If you're lucky, you can get design teams in a room at the same time with time and space to first learn and then to practice or actually do their own learning design. Effective strategies from the research include Leicester's carpe diem initiative which involved having a captive audience for multiple days. Essentially, this allows you to take people through a learning journey from start to finish then do so on this subject. Within such events you could engage in a variety of teaching methods to iteratively teach or facilitate the learning of the 3 main points. You could introduce and facilitate engagement with any artifacts you've created. All this before guiding teams of people of people through a design process whilst the learning is still fresh in their memories.

Finally a point about motivation.  A lot depends on the backing of the senior management. Not just hollow words, but financial commitment and resources. It's difficult to engage the majority of academics in blended/distance learning in their teaching and learning help of this kind would show that they are putting their money where their mouth is. It’s also important to utilize the trailblazers, peers who can show what they are doing and give validity to what’s new to others.

The difference between asynchronous and synchronous learning activities

A few points on this subject as I return from holiday.

Synchronous is what we are used to, it's what learners know and expect. For learners with a history of success in the formal education system, it works just fine. To articulate how asynchronous learning activities can work well, you need to highlight the breathing space such activities afford the learner when gathering their thoughts before they express themselves. Asynchronous is about time periods lasting days not hours.  This could be exemplified using online discussion where you are engaging with the content and other participants.  Through a dialogue, the learner's views are challenged and their own views get refined.  This is learning and learning is hard.  For me, an asynchronous context gives this process more chance of success. This is because the learner can engage in an iterative process of thinking, articulating (usually through writing text) and refining their views.  Thinking about a journal, blog type of asynchronous tool, you have more engagement with the content/own experiences than other participants.

It's important when thinking about asynchronous/synchronous learning activities to acknowledge the importance of being comfortable in the mode of learning the learner's find themselves in. Of course, I am well disposed and well used to learning asynchronous online. Many are not for various reasons. Whatever the reason, good practice involves process/navigation support where process support means how a learner should engage with the activity. You could also call this pedagogical support - how to engage pedagogically in what is usually a collaborative ethos. In a sweep of research I did earlier this year, a theme that came through strongly was the importance of learning how to learn. Online, its a misconception that the technology is the main stumbling block. This is wrong, it's the collaborative pedagogical design learners can't handle. This is because they don't know how to learn this way as they are not used to it.

Social Media: Personal Learning: Practical guidance on how to do this - Planning/Brainstorming a session idea

In the post Social Media Supporting teacher CPD - 2 I talked about an idea for a session designed to give educators practical guidance on how to use social media for their learning. It would sit alongside 21st century tools for teaching and learning which I run about internet-based tools for use in teaching and learning. The rationale is that if educators start using social media for themselves and find value in this process they will naturally start thinking about how to use it within their teaching. It's a logical train of thought. It's difficult for educators to use tools in their teaching which have no relation to everyday practice. Part of this is to do with the dominance of sterile VLE features which look like they belong in 1995. But it's more about the concept of communicating in a fashion alien to them.

I've fleshed this out a bit more in the above mindmap and divided it into personal and collaborative. The key with this type of session is making sense of these tools, stating clearly what they offer in their context and talking about it in types of activity rather than tool names. The aim is to reach those who don't have a clue, don't know where to start. The great mass of educators who are left behind and annoyed that no one is telling how to make sense of it all in easy to understand terms. Papers like tweeting for teachers won't have an impact without sustained initiatives of this type. I guess I'm trying to fill this gap albeit in a very small way.
Under personal I've got:

Aggregation
• Knowledge seeking - micro-blog searching, browsing, slideshare - this is about the process of finding relevant information. Once you have your twitter people nicely followed and RSS feeds set up, it's just a matter of tweaking. However, if you start from scratch it's difficult to know where to start. I'll have to think about how best to advice on this because learning technology information flies out and grabs you. Other subject matter might well be different. There'll be information here on browsing too.
• Knowledge storing - rss, twitter, social bookmarking - about storing the stuff you find by twitter following, rss and bookmarking. I could also talk about cloud storage here but this might not fit very well.

Sense-making/learning
• Note taking and highlighting - the various social media options for this activity which many would do by pen or word processing. So this would include tools like evernote, bounce, diigo, also I'll need to check out stand alone highligher tools. I used to use awesome highlighter but I'm sure there are better examples. I'm looking at website notetaking and dedicated notes tools like evernote which I use and like.
• Brainstorming - This one's easy - mindmapping tools principally but I could also do drawing tools and things like thoughtbox and other task management tools.
• Written Reflection - The culmination of everything for me is to blog and reflect.

I could take participants on a journey by creating an account in google and then proceed to create and practice using areas for all the aggregation and sense making areas. It might be that a half day session on the personal side of things would be enough for one learning experience.

However, if I wanted to go further and teach about collaborative learning in relationship to educator peer communication/collaboration, I would cover:

• Synchronous Discussion: chat tools like titanpad or sync.in
• Aynchronous Discussion: I'm not clear yet how this could run. I want to teach educators that, by engaging in discussion with peers they can learn lots. So it's about finding peer networks and having those discussions. More thinking to be done here on how best to teach this.
• Collaborative document/text creation: Wikis and tools like google docs. Combination tools like google hangout need to be investigated.
• Sharing: Sharing is one of those activities which don't seem valuable until you do it. So talking about the sharing ethos via twitter/slideshare/blogging with focus on twitter.
• Group creation: Covering the ability to create private social network for groups using tools like google sites, ning, grouply etc.

That's enough detail for talking about it to my colleagues (and specifically my boss). I would only need to prepare properly if it were to run. No doubt I'll reflect on it here if that's occurs.

Social Media Supporting teacher CPD - 3

More on Tweeting for Teachers although it's more using it as a launchpad for my own reflections.

National and local policymakers should:

1.  publish guidelines and support for teachers and leaders to help them use social 
media in schools;
There are various social media strategies out there.  The emphasis should be on the potential for teaching and learning.  Most guidelines I've seen are about control and read like rules and regulations which put teachers off and fit with the "danger" ethos as its mantra.  It's true that to write informed guidelines about potential for the various types of tools but it doesn't have to be detailed just give encouragement and a green light to this area.  I drafted some guidelines myself which hopefully will be used by my institution in the future.  I share them here for anyone to look at.

2. consider how they will begin to unfilter social media sites for use in schools;
Consider!  Just do it.  It highlights a contradiction in the way we educate.  In formal education it's necessary to control communication - quiet in class, no chatting, pay attention.  Social media is extra communication channels.  So we control it.  The problem is we need to use them for teaching and learning.  Banning social media is like banning talking in schools.  Sure you have to control inappropriate use but we cut off all that learning potential by banning it.

3.  recognise and celebrate self-directed professional learning by teachers using 
online tools, and the role of social media in this learning;
Building a culture where this is valued is important.  There are lots out there but they are isolated and poorly known in the mainstream.

4. create a common online space where the whole education community can find each other;
This is a bit vague and I have visions of a controlled, unwielding space with poor usability if something is done at a national level.  In the case study about Edubuzz, I was hoping for some information about how to do this for myself because it's this kind of purposeful initiative that I could see working for groups of schools.


5. ensure that all Initial Teacher Training courses demonstrate a strong focus on the use of social media tools for ongoing professional development.
Yes, make this law.  Can't see this happening any time soon.

Social Media Supporting teacher CPD - 2

This post continues discussing the newly released report Tweeting for teachers.  They list 5 recommendations for school leaders and 5 for policy makers.  My first thought is how many school leaders will read this?  Probably very few unless they have a strategy for promoting it beyond a website.  I'll discuss each recommendation which you can read about on p30-33:


1.  School leaders should learn about and engage with the social platforms that their teachers, parents and pupils are using every day;
Yes, indeed.  The idea that springs into my mind is that what we need to do is get teachers in general using social media for themselves.  By using it for themselves ideas will spark about how they can use it in their teaching.  Trying to teach using something alien to the rest of their lives isn't easy but this is what we are often asking them to do.  Social media are ways of communicating, they are new communication channels.  Ways of communicating SHOULD be of interest to us in education.
The logical next step for me is to try and conceive of a training event which caters for this need.  This could be a sister session to my 21st century tools for teaching and learning session and would concentrate on how educators can use social media for themselves, in their own learning.  This would also fit nicely with the sentiment of this report.
As a bullet point to this recommendation, there is the old chestnut of justifying them using these tools themselves to understand the kids' world.  I remember saying this to National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) participants 10 years ago.  It's true enough but many argue against it.  Practicing what you preach applies and it all comes down to a human beings unwillingness to learn after a certain age.  It's incredible how many resist it.

2. School leaders should use a social media tool as part of their communications with the school
community;
This would be a good way of establishing it's validity.  The problem is that the only relationship much of social media has with formal education is to be banned, it's associated with negative things.
  You have to stick your head above the paraphet to alter this.

3. validate and support their staff in using social media tools for ongoing professional development;
This is a positive strategic move which also give the mode validity for learning.  This could start with one tool that some people have good experiences and understanding of within the school or institution.

4. turn online activity into offline actions, in order to harness the benefits of face-to-face interaction alongside those of online interaction;
This is about using technology within the classroom.  Tablets will impact on this in the future.  However, this is whole new area in itself.  In the classroom or for homework there is scope for both but shouldn't be blurred together as both need carefully planned learning design.

5. implement robust systems for evaluating the impact of CPD on teacher effectiveness and student outcomes
No comment on this one.

The next post will consider the recommendations for policy makers.