During the last couple of weeks I've had various interactions including conversations with academic colleagues, discussions within our Teaching Circle, listening to debate from the JISC Digital Festival (#digifest15) and talking to colleagues about future developments. All of which have me thinking about various aspects of how technology enhanced learning is embedded within our faculty (and or institution) and more importantly what approach do we take in supporting our staff and students.
Last week I attended our faculty Teaching Circle. The theme of which was What is Quality in Learning and Teaching? This led to some interesting discussion around the various fundamentals of quality teaching, areas for focus and problems. My group consisted of three academics, two of which teach on distance learning programmes so naturally conversations led to support for embedding technology into teaching, developing blended learning and some of the barriers in providing quality teaching. It will be of no surprise those barriers include academic digital skills and confidence in using technology to deliver teaching. Other areas that emerged were:
- What are our student's expectations/ perceptions of quality teaching?
- How do we measure quality?
- Variation in teaching experience can impact quality, as can personal traits and motivations
- Organisational factors influence quality i.e. strategy, leadership and support
Personally I took away two questions from the morning,
1. How do we support our academic staff in harnessing the potential of tools and technologies to draw out the student attributes that we would associate with quality learning and teaching? (critical thinking, curiosity, analytical, creativity etc)
2. How do we develop quality blended learning that provides extended learning opportunities for those students that want to engage above the 'baseline'.
My mind's screaming open web, open education resources, opportunities for learning networks and social learning. But in reality, it's not quite so straightforward.
During this weeks DigiFest, David White and Donna Lanclos took part in a healthy debate on 'are learning technologies fit for purpose?' A really interesting debate and both had valid arguments. Donna's main argument was that learning technologies aren't fit for purpose and tools such as VLEs are too locked down and we are forcing staff to use systems that are content driven and not education driven. And we should be directing students to open resources for their learning.
David's argument was that VLEs provide a structure for students and to throw them out into the open web we wouldn't be providing them with a pedagogical structure. I'm not going to summarise this to much detail because you can watch the debate online, but if I'm going to chip my two pennies worth in I think we as educators need to be in a position where we prepare and educate our learners in using the open web. However if our educators aren't comfortable in this area then we are going to face a bit of a brick wall. In addition to this I can see Donna's point of view, sometimes we're faced with rather restrictive system that we buy into institutionally and then we find ourselves fudging our way around them and tweaking them to fit with other systems and and teaching. I can see the need from an organisational point of view but VLEs are often used as content repositories which is why we're seeing this move away to other open tools, new platforms and new ways of learning which offer more flexibility and creativity. At the University of Sheffield we use Google and we're seeing an increase in the use of Google apps for education. If i'm honest I don't think institutionally people are ready to do away with the VLE just yet and one of the reasons for that is that there is a varying degree of skills and knowledge in using other technologies for teaching, using the web for researching, using open apps and social media. So some structure seems to be needed it's just a case of how flexible you can be within that structure.
To take a step back, we also need to understand our learners. As David White highlighted, just because students are comfortable in using the web socially doesn't mean they have the digital skills or knowledge to use it appropriately for learning. I think without understanding this we're really not in a position to make assumptions about our learners or to design learning. This is an area we'll be exploring more this year within my faculty. So, thinking about questions 1 & 2 this brings me to a third question:
3. Are we doing enough?
I'll leave you on that note because this area is huge. But I am going to come back to these questions and pick at them a little further in my next post.
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