Reflections from Day 2 (pm) EISTA 2010

Academic Integrity was something discussed over lunch as it was the last presentation of the morning, this was done by Greg Williams who linked reducing cheating to strong instructional design (ID) (a systematic approach to curriculum development, using ADDIE - Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation). He believes that ID staff need to work closely with subject matter experts to get the best out of it. Sounds very similar to the work of the LDI team at Staffordshire University! We discussed the technologies that are supposed to help with cheating such as turnitin and a colleague mentioned a YouTube video can be found showing students how to get around this (and other) technologies. Greg spoke about the fact that a lot of elearning assessment is low level (true/false, multiple choice etc) and this assessment needs to be reviewed to support strong learning objectives that are more specific to learners and using world examples, and that the tutor needs to be involved further to the start of the assessment, reviewing drafts and feeding back on work already taking place.

The afternoon covered the session I was participating in. The presentation was kindly recorded by Nasir Butrous who also did a presentation in the session and I will be editing and publishing this soon, but have a video back log at the moment from the workshop in Stafford too. We had some good discussions around the role of a trusted individual in managing change in an institution, which was very useful. In the same session we had a presentation around Industry based assessment (ERP), which looked at supporting learners using relevant software in the classroom and getting employers engaged in developing the assessment so that they have real world examples to work with. Hiram Bollaert spoke about learning objects and I was surprised that this seemed a new term for a lot of the audience, along with IMS and SCORM. Hiram and I had an interesting discussion after his presentation around finding a SCORM player that does more than show SCORM packages but does all the tracking you want, that is also open/free/cheap and can be multilingual . Hiram discussed how the learners were the creators of the learning objects, helping them reflect, develop their ICT skills and encourages them to manage their knowledge. As they are displayed to a wider audience it also gives them recognision beyond their tutor.

Nasir spoke about how he had analysed online access patterns against student performance, by looking at learners accessing content online, and their performance at the end of the course he could see when the best time would be for tutor intervention on the course to improve performance.

Reflections from Day 2 (am) EISTA 2010

The first day was very focused on curriculum change, the next day focused more on supporting blended learning using online tools and different approaches. A number of presentation looked at how "e" can replace paper, and whether "e" was in fact better. I noticed that in some cases there was an assumption that it would be better, and in others, where stakeholders were engaged from the beginning there was a recognition of the fact that user perceptions were that in fact it would be much harder, more time consuming and require extra resources not necessarily available to the tutor. Project that captured those perceptions at the start of their work were able to demonstrate better the success of their work when at the end those same stakeholders said that the "e" approach (for example to learner evaluation to teaching) actually improved the process and made them think more about the questions and the approach they had previously used. This relates to Enable nicely, we need to be able to show how people feel now, and how things are better due to intervention, support and adaption of new approaches. It also highlights issues with some initiatives and how they haven't captured that information which has made it harder for them to measure the impact of their work.
A particular paper that caught my attention focused on studies around software and if learnability of a particular tool impacted on its adoption to the mainstream. Interestingly the work demonstrated if the need/ motivation was high enough to use the technology even with negative learnability it will become adapted. This has come as no real surprise as it reflects my own experience of using technology, and those of people I talk to in the university with regards to some of our internal systems. It raises the question - should we (as a university) be looking at replacing these systems as the motivation is there from staff to use them regardless? It's a sticky one as surely with more positive learnability then tools may be used in more intuitive ways and information used to support learning more than what can be seen as a "chore" at the moment?
More reflections from EISTA coming soon!

EISTA 2010 Day One - Managing the curriculum

This is a quick summary of the first day of the EISTA 2010 conference. The main focus of the day, for me, was around presentations on transforming curriculum. The first thing I noticed was although the speakers (USA: Drexel University, and University of Texas, along with AEFIS) talked about Assessment, they were discussing what we would call curriculum review and that their award programme structures were very similar to ours and they are experiencing the same problems with how they managed their curriculum. The presentations didn't address this from an institutional perspective, but rather a faculty. They were also presenting the benefits of using AEFIS who also presented, and mentioned that they were looking for academic partners from across the world.

The first presentation talked about creating & sustaining change, linking reviews to student outcomes. They note the same issues with change that has been encountered by Enable, culture, hierarchy, communication, lack of understanding of reason for change. They discuss a faculty top down approach to change and how they managed communication to set up a new review process (the old one did not work, people never did it as they felt it was too much effort, and that the one size fits all approach does not work). They they talked about their implementation of the AEFIS to track development and review of course curriculum to improve the student experience. They now use the system as a central point to deliver resources to faculties.

The second presentation focused on how curriculum mapping with, at first Excel, and then AEFIS, helped them recognise that often course units where not being assessed in the best way to promote student experience, that they had too many units at an introduction level (14 programming units at introduction level and none at emphasis, reinforce or applies level so the students could say "hello" but not hold a conversation in any of them). The mapping exercise involved looking at 14 different learning outcomes and then breaking them down to 70 performance criteria (this break down took a couple of months of research as they did not start from scratch - nor would they recommend that anyone tried it from scratch). They said that the entire process of mapping took them 16 months in Excel but with AEFIS a lot of the work is automated and could be done in a day! We then did a nice paper exercise around curriculum mapping outcomes against level of learning and means of assessment, manually identifying issues with the curriculum - the presenter pointed out that the software helps but can't do everything.

The next presentations I attended focused on managing the curriculum using analytics to improve and inform learning. The first stressed the importance of being able to use good quality data, and that the most important needs to be selected from the avalanche of data that faculties and institutions collect. We were shown a model of developing learning analytics, with the focus on the individual student learning experience, to support optimising the student path through the course - this seemed to link to APEL and allowing students to use what they already know to skip units.

The second discussed the development of an Instructional Decision Support System. This system is designed to link student characteristics (learning styles etc), student performance, instructor characteristics, learning outcomes and instructional methods to inform faculty decisions (yes that was straight off the handout!). After collecting data on students in different courses they were able to show, for example, that on one course students were sequential learners but the teacher was using global learning and as such the feedback from the course was not positive, by adjusting her teaching to fit sequential learners over two years feedback from the students was much more positive.

The final presentation for this area was around creating EduApps - creating support documentation and applications for faculty staff so that they can focus on innovative teaching, these "apps" are not necessarily technological solutions, but can be guidance notes on using different technologies. They are developed based on faculty issues, and those faculties that raise the issues become owners of the solution. The main criteria of the apps is that they should be focused on a particular problem, pose low risk for faculty adoption, the tools should not require a learning curve or a significant investing of time or resources to use it.

Despite the great promotional work done by the universities and AEFIS themselves I did have a concern that they spoke about being the one system for university's fitting into different areas, rather than looking at how to support universities with different systems (along the lines of the work already happening in the UK around FSD and SOA). Although this could just be me and unfortunately I could not follow up on this during lunch as they did not provide any and I really need to eat at the moment!

Taking a step back

I have been to two very different, and interesting, conferences over the last two weeks. The first was in Plymouth, a general elearning conference covering schools, FE and HE (http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/e-learning/). This was a packed two day event and it was difficult to see everything, however those sessions I attended were very good. The keynote speech by Josie Fraser discussed the web and privacy, the one by Dave White discussed how do we support what learners need and balance that against what they want, and has some interesting blogs on the subject (http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/author/whited/).

I also did a presentation at the conference to a slightly smaller audience around supporting innovative curriculum in a traditional HE environment. This was a trail for Florida in June and was very successful, the discussions lasting 30mins after the presentation. There is a clearly recognised need by institutions to take a step back and look at what they are doing and why, without the caveat “we’ve always done it this way”. It was also acknowledged that some of the big barriers to institutional change that takes time and effort is engaging support from senior management, and getting them to understand that often quick wins are quick draws reinforcing the quid pro quo. The leaflet that went with my presentation is available from the project website (http://www.projects.staffs.ac.uk/enable/p3m3.html) although the slides are also available on the same page, my talk was slightly different to the one recorded. It is a shame I forgot to record the new presentation as some interesting points were raised.

The second conference was the JISC annual conference in London (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10.aspx). This one day event was also jam packed with good information. Martin Bean (VC Open University) did a great keynote to open the conference and I attended two useful sessions that support the work of Enable, including presenting our poster to the community.

Dissemination and promotion

The project has being focused on producing a Project Initiation Document to support the work it is doing around modelling course related information within CDD (Course Design and Development). It has also started working towards creating the “to be” view of CDD. The team has pulled out all the interview notes from different faculties about issues around CDD and also a list of issues from its interviews with the staff involved in the different initiatives at the university. I will be recording our next stage with some photos as we try and group together all the different suggestions and issues we have collated using post it notes.

Along with the work Sam has been leading we have also been meeting with deans in each Faculty to talk about their plans for the next year and to keep them up to date with the progress of the Enable project. This has been very useful and Mark will be writing up a summary sheet of our conversations, and about some of the issues that the deans see as needing to be addressed in CDD.

We have also been supporting the SURF Review, although we were unable to attend one of the meetings we have been able to pass on the issues highlighted by the project partners. There was some interesting discussions during this meeting between perception of progress from colleges, the university, and employers. Enable is supporting this work and has provided a lot of information from the partners experiences based not just on the annual report but on the spreadsheets we ask them to complete during the design and development process of a new idea.

Seeing as I called this a dissemination and promotion post I better say a bit about the dissemination we are planning to do outside of the university. We have had our abstract approved for the  Plymouth e-Learning Conference which is in April, and we are also presenting with the rest of our programme at the next JISC eLearning experts meeting in Birmingham in March, and the JISC Conference 2010 in London in April.

CETIS, Modelling and creating life

We have had a busy week, with three of us attending the CETIS Conference in Birmingham. This was a very useful event, mainly for the networking opportunities it gave, but also due to the great opening keynote from Roehampton University on the usefulness of Enterprise Architecture for institutions and the end Keynote from Bill Thompson (@BillT) about the concerns for where England will be with countries overtaking us with their technology backbones. Bill also covered whether we are ready for the big changes that could occur in the future with developments no longer in the realms of sci-fi (microchipped contact lenses, e-ink, next gen communication devices etc).
I participated in the Technology change in education - involving Senior Management at last? discussions on the first day where we covered areas such as who should be setting priorities agendas? How do we manage between the university and the staff cultures? We found out that JISC have a network set up to support those of us engaging in EA so we have great hopes for some useful connections from this group. We found a number of institutions were interested in the work we have already taken in this area, and we found an institution with a programme office which is very nice so we have agreed to talk soon about their experiences. It is clear that as I went through this conference the human element is the most important part of the programme office and supporting the EA at the university, so no pressure there!
These thoughts followed me back to the office as I have continued my research on Programme Management Offices, a big thing is that they can be different things to different people. We are trying to get to grips with what a PMO should be for us and how it can fit within the existing structure of the institution. Just like Frankenstein, we are wary of creating a monster office that tries to do too much at once, we don't want to see it crash through walls, but to be able to suggest and guide the university with incremental changes.

ALTC Presentation

As promised here is the conference presentation we did at ALTC, it is approx 14 mins long

Back from ALTC

Well what a three days! One of the first sessions after the keynote was the one done by Sam and myself (http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/talks/show/6792), which I recorded and will try and post either later today or at the start of next week. It was a very busy session which was very positive. Sam, Mark and myself attended a number of different sessions looking at different aspects of Curriculum Design and a number of symposiums where done by the different programme clusters.

The experience of ALTC can be broken into three areas – shared experiences, suggestions in supporting Enable and questions that need asking. A lot of my thoughts have been captured in my Twitter, and need collecting along with the fuller notes I made in the sessions. Some of these include:

• can we be more flexible with tasks in CDD and delivery?
• Getting academic trust in information from central services is difficult
• Need to keep in touch with other JISC projects to ensure not reinventing the wheel
• Learner built curriculum is now a big theme for lots of institutions
• How do we embrace the informal processes and feral systems?

ALT-C 2009

The main work for this week has been at getting ready for ALT-C and finishing off the baseline report for JISC. Sam has done a lot of model work to get the baseline together and done a great job. I was very lucky in the sections on programme management and change management in the university related to work I have already written for the executive and the senior management team. The presentation is something we have had to work on to ensure that Sam and I don't find ourselves repeating the same points, and to ensure that it relates to the baseline report now that is finished. Sam has taken time out to be able to make sure that both the presentation and the leaflet we are taking with us looks nice and professional. I have also been sorting out the final preparations for the cluster meeting at Stafford on the 23rd.

Enable Workshop

Yesterday I ran my first workshop at the Staffordshire University TSL conference focusing on the work that the Enable project is doing at trying to bring together the individual projects within the university. I did a few slides based around previous presentations on the background and what we were doing which led to some interesting discussions from the group around a few points that are worth noting:

• Tutors can feel disengaged from an institution, there was a feeling that tutors that don't feel included in strategy will pick their courses up and move to other institutions. It is important to have a strategy that does not appear to exclude a particular group of stakeholders that you are trying to engage (for example excluding post graduate awards etc)
• It is important for any programme team to be outside of any particular service (this reflected conversations at previous meetings such as at Bolton last week)
• It is equally important that senior management and executive are supportive and involved in the work taken on by the programme team - they felt that the Executive office was the best place for this type of work as easier to get attention of the right people at the right time.
  
• It was seen as beneficial that the Enable project team was small, with an innovative and familiar character (Mark Stiles) leading it.
  
• Any programme office/team should be seen as helping projects rather than reporting back to senior management, or enforcing views from top down.

I will post the video of Mark Stiles talking about Enable as part of his key speech later on.

Week of perspectives

This week has been very interesting, with the start of it at Warwick University for the HE in FE conference. Although I have not got a direct link with Staffordshire University partners, obviously partner input is vital for the project and the university as a whole. I found the different partnership methods used very interesting, plus the attitudes of some of the partner insitutions. I was surprised to hear that some partnerships are more competitive with others in the partnership than I would expect. I heard a fair bit around how universities should adapt to fit more of the FE environment (use their quality assurance rather than imposing second ones being the main issue), and when asked about adapting to a private, business, model they realised that they hadn't considered the impact of requirements of employers and the changing nature of HE in FE with the Fds as they perhaps aught. This then goes back to how flexible do institutions need to be to continue delivering learning in the emerging environment? Do we need to ensure that assessment boards etc run throughout the year? Should we be delivering learning throughout the year? Should we be matching private providers delivery of courses over a business 37 hour week? Is it even possible? Do changes need to be driven by government or can insititutions drive the change? A lot of questions, and not many answers. I am interested on how these questions get answered here at Staffordshire Uni, do they fit with the development of partnerships that we have in the University strategy? I would say yes, and a big part is the Enable project in enabling (sorry) these changes to happen. It is important not just for the partners but also for the university.