ALTC 2011 - Strategy

Nearly 2 weeks late but not forgotten, my feedback on ALTC-2011 . I thought I would organise my blog according to specific categories that relate to my interests and what I was looking for at the conference. Before I go any further I would like to congratulate ALT for their excellent arrangements and hospitality. This conference goes from strength to strength, it attracts a very warm crowd of practitioners from various parts of the elearning world, who are willing to openly discuss and share best practice in a non-intimidating manner, which I think is really important.

Strategy:

Leadership in a cold climate. Leading where the past is no reliable guide to the future. A reflection on the strategic leadership of people, technology and institutions in UK HE. Ewart Wooldridge:
This presentation held back no punches with respect to how leadership should change to understand the potential of learning technologies. Wooldridge argued that institutions should move away from focusing on the operational aspects of technologies, to focusing on the strategic use, illustrating the shortcomings with respect to management and the exploitation of technology..He stated that leadership within universities should take a less adversarial and more collaborative approach. The great hoorah of the presentation for people based professional services was that Wooldridge said that he had banned the terms non-academic and back office, he could also clearly articulate the need for professional services in today's universities a contrast to this recent discussion in the THES with respect to changes at Northampton.



Not future-proofed but future-focused: graduate attributes and the digital universityNeil Witt, Helen Beetham

 Works at the University of Plymouth found that:


'while students have diverse preferences and expectations around technology use, there is a common need for consistency and clarity about digital practices at course level. Students want 24/7 access to course information and learning materials, but they also need opportunities for reflection and review of their own strategies for study. They value e-learning experiences where these are clearly relevant to their long-term goals, and they recognise the need for teaching staff whose own confidence and competence are high.' (from abstract)

They also, found that by improving admin processes they could improve student experience. The project, also, investigated the opportunities for e-submission. Successful initiatives, were online course payment, producing generic content and providing support via the VLE.

Improving Student Employability using Active Portfolio – the GWizards ApproachLachlan MacKinnon, Liz Bacon, Elaine Major

Mackinnon began with a challenging statement that the HE sector can only afford 4 research intensive universities. In this climate the University of Greenwich School of Computing and Mathematical sciences has initiated a project called GWizards that addresses the issue of student employability giving them the opportunity to be involved in real world projects. The project:

'seeks to re-engage the university with the local community. In particular, this involves working directly with all types of organisation to identify project activities of mutual benefit. This mutual benefit is determined by opportunities for students to gain experience in the workplace, organisations to gain practical technical help for little or no cost, and academic staff to gain project experience and publishing opportunities. To facilitate this process, CMS has developed credit bearing modules on its programmes that link to these employability opportunities, so students have the chance to follow directly relevant project work within their academic studies to earn academic credits for practical work, and also to be engaged in the management and control of these activities both internally and externally to the university within a student-run company structure.' (from abstract) 

It would be interesting to see if this could work in other disciplines.

Understanding the Development of Learning Technology Support Staff to Push Beyond MaturityJebar Ahmed 

This 5 year longitudinal study at the University of Huddersfield analysing VLE data and data from interviews found that:

'support strategies were initially capable of targeting large groups of teachers effectively via staff development workshops which led to an increase in the use of the VLE. Pushing beyond a level of maturity meant that LT support staff required additional skills to provide course teams with bespoke and specialised advice, an aspect often overlooked in strategic models. Once adoption of the VLE across the school had reached its peak' (Ahmed 2011)


Again emphasising the importance of strategic integrated approach to staff development when engaging academics in technology enhanced learning. The study found that support staff require technical and pedagogic skills. It argued that support staff personal development should include:


a) research on tools, techniques and trends; b) teaching and learning through courses such as a PGCE – Teaching Certificate and additional higher qualification' (Ahmed 2011)


I think the challenge with respect to PGCHE courses is making them flexible enough so that support staff can meet the assessment criteria if they are not full time teachers.

Students overwhelmed by surveys on feedback

I was interested in the overview in the THES in its article Efforts to secure feedback 'missing the mark' of the "Effective Course Evaluation Report" - The report found that:

• Many universities seeking feedback on courses and lecturers via surveys struggle to achieve a meaningful response from students.
• Student representatives have indicated that students are not effectively engaged in the feedback process and, for some, providing feedback can even be intimidating.
• Universities need to work harder at feeding back to students the actions they will
  be taking as a result of input provided for course and lecturer evaluation surveys.
• End-of-module evaluation is a particular stumbling block in the provision of feedback to students - and feedback can be slow - but moving to mid-module evaluation can help to improve the process.
• Ideally students want the opportunity to express their views on course improvements at a time that their feedback benefits them directly.
• Universities need to embrace new technologies to improve turnaround time - but effective feedback can be gained via a combination of paper and online surveys.
• Universities should establish a more consistent (centralised) approach to survey administration - including a standard set of survey questions - to enable effective benchmarking at course and institutional level.
• In-class student involvement in survey administration can increase commitment as they are stakeholders in the process.

Looking at these observations, I think the following are particularly important:

• the move to mid module evaluation 
• the involvement of students in survey administration
• more effective feedback on feedback  
• the need to embrace new technologies 

I think technology enhanced learning has something to offer here, with respect to course design and digital literacies. If evaluation feedback was integrated into course design this would establish a more proactive approach to gathering students's thoughts, if student's were involved in designing and delivering this process there is an opportunity here to develop their digital literacies, with respect to designing evaluative activities in an online environment whether this be surveys or qualitative approaches. However, my only concern is that focusing on a more centralised approach to survey administration may create a tension and may be slightly incongruous with this personalised approach, may be we need to be more creative with respect to coding feedback and establishing benchmarks.

ALTC Orientation

Just familiarising myself with the ALT-C site - and finally figured out how to load the short presentation I am doing with Anna Armstrong at Nottingham Trent University. For presenters who are still having difficulty finding the instructions on how to load your slides you may find the following extract from the guidelines useful:

A. Uploading your presentation to CrowdVine
CrowdVine is the networking site for ALT-C 2011. Its URL is http://altc2011.ac.uk/.
Some of you have already got accounts on CrowdVine, and, by mid to late July, all
conference delegates will be given active encouragement to create accounts.
There are two helpful things that you can do to help other delegates to get the most out of
your session and attract a wider audience.

Firstly, please use the “Calendar” tab to find your session on CrowdVine and sign up to
attend it. Please encourage fellow presenters to do likewise.

Secondly, if and when you have a PowerPoint or other presentation to share with
conference participants, please upload it to CrowdVine as a comment to the session in
which you are presenting. If you do this, please include in the covering note to the upload a
clear reference to the number of your presentation. This appears in bold font immediately
before the title of your presentation. It is typically a 2 or 3 digit number deriving from the four
digit unique ID by which your presentation has been identified throughout the submission,
reviewing and other processes.

For obvious reasons it is best to avoid uploading large files – say over 10 MB.
As an alternative you may wish to consider pointing instead to a URL elsewhere that
contains your presentation

If you want to attend our presentation it is on the last day 9-10 8th November 

0146 One Year On: Nottingham Trent University’s SHARE Project reflects on the challenge of engendering a digital sharing culture Vicki McGarvey, Anna Armstrong - It would be lovely to see you there. 

I will also put the slides on slide share. 

ALT - C 2011 Thriving in a colder and more challenging climate

So I have finally got on top of pulling all my ALT-C loose ends together, with respect to accommodation Crowdvine, profile etc. Just need to decide how to get to Leeds, plane, train, automobile etc. and to decide which events to attend. The dilemma of splitting time between presentations that link to my strategic professional roles and also, seeing new innovative developments. If I am lucky I may be able to catch both in one presentation!.

Research Methods and Open Activity Design

I know there has been quite a bit of exploratory work in the area of designing open activities, particularly by Diana Laurillard 

My team is currently investigating whether epistemological research methods approaches have specific learning activities or whether more general learning activities are used and the specificity sits with the integrated content and resources. The aim of this is to see if research methods need to have their own online activity sequences or whether we can reuse existing activity sequences. For example a common activity sequence for online research methods is:

• read article/overview etc.
• answer questions on the article/overview etc.
• share answers or reflect on what you have learnt

Now this activity sequence is very common in other subjects even though I still think it is quite a stretch for academics to acknowledge the generic nature of some of the learning and teaching they do. The only thing that differentiates the activity or defines it according to its discipline and level, is the embedded content and resources e.g. the article and questions. With respect to our research methods challenge we may need to dig further e.g. are probing questions structured in a particular way, are specific areas covered, what about activities for quantitative stuff e.g. statistics. Watch this space.

eLearning Developer Skills

As a manager in an eLearning development team I episodically review the skills required by colleagues in order for them to carry out their job confidently and competently. Googling this I was surprised how little there was out there to support managers in their task.  There were quite a few blogs out there asking the very question I am asking here - not much from professional organisations.  Maybe I should be turning this on its head and looking at eLearning skills in general rather than focusing on the role - or just take it after working 7 years in the area as a manager I pretty much know.

So here is my quick overview of the skills required:

A knowledge and understanding of:

• Learning and teaching approaches
• How to integrate learning technologies within learning and teaching
• Curriculum and course design
• Accessibility
• Copyright
• Current issues in learning and teaching and eLearning

Skills:

• Content creation and delivery e.g. VLEs; web skills; audio/video production social networking technologies; re-purposing content (I slipped this one in) -
• Training and support skills within context of learning and technology 
• Project management 
• Ability to work as part of a team as well as independently 
• Problem solving
• Proactive with respect to professional development  
• Articulate simply complex issues
• Presentation skills 
• Ability to communicate with individuals from different professional backgrounds
• Ability to work flexibly and to deadlines 
• Ability to prioritise work

And overall tenacity and enthusiasm.  There may be greater emphasis on some of the above depending on context, organisation's priorities and also the grade of the job - which is something managers need to bear in mind when writing a job description.

Is the VLE dead?

Well not at many institutions, including mine. I am presently taking an online course on preparing online courses and last week there has been robust discussion about learning environments. The main discussion was on the affordances of using discussions in VLEs and much was said about the additional tools that enable the management of discussions such as tracking, conditional release, summarising, archiving and the integration within learning and teaching. There were, also, some comments about VLE's being perceived as learning space where as other resources e.g. Facebook is seen as social space. I do think that these issues are worth of consideration but I do think that VLE vendors could do some work on interface design to make tools like discussions less clunky. The debate that was held on this course was done using a voicetool that was integrated into the discussion forum which was a new one for me and I really enjoyed using it, it was good to put a voice to a name. Although, I am aware that considerations with respect to accessibility have to be addressed and I did a whole masters course without to speaking to my fellow participants, it did help me to focus on my argument and the arguments of others.

Until we can fully integrate tools in the cloud with student management systems for large institutions I think the VLE will still remain a feature for some time. However, there are tools out there that can compliment the existing tools that are in institutional VLEs and will help to enhance the student experience, for example, we were referred to this site http://ltdufreeware.wordpress.com/ . Furthermore, institutions still have a challenge to skill-up staff using the most basic of tools in the average VLE and to get them thinking about new approaches to learning and teaching that can integrate technology, within the context of pressure to make full use of a system that has demanded a considerable amount of resources to maintain.