To be or not to be...student engagement?

Norm Vaughan was one of the key note speakers on the second day of the ASCILITE 2012 conference. The 3 Rs of engagement are relevance, rigour, and relationships (Dennis Littky, 2004 http://bigpicture.org). The student sense of wonder and inquiry are key to engagement, but with depth, and built around relationships and communities.

Optimal flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus. Taken along side Daniel Pink's notions of autonomy, mastery and purpose, this can provide a powerful foundation for creating a series of instruments about what flow looks like. Social engagement, academic engagement and intellectual engagement are key - the move away from a sense of 'jumping through the hoops'.

Blended learning is the organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face-to-face and online approaches and technologies...and this is closely links to fundamental re-design. Blended learning in a weak sense is simply an additional layer to current teaching practices. Putting together various technologies, there are some great examples of the use of non-institutional social platforms, where the focus is on empowerment, collaboration and co-construction of knowledge.

Local mentors are paramount to support people on the ground when implementing blended learning to help address challenges. It is also about the networks that you develop. The five clusters to help shape blended learning are:

• Active and collaborative learning,
• student interactions with faculty members,
• level of academic challenge,
• enriching educational experiences 
• supportive campus environment.

Workload (overwhelming), out of class time and inquiry based learning are linked to the least effective aspects of courses.

Blended learning using the guidelines that were introduced in this session, Norm advises, can provide the scaffolding that can support students in a move toward more autonomous  collaborative learning experience and skill-set.

Image: Image: 'February Dawn' http://www.flickr.com/photos/16772638@N00/2262492872. Found on flickrcc.net

Using reward contingencies in online activities to facilitate engagement in a statistics class

This presentation was by Xochitl de la Piedad Garcia opened by introducing a definition for engagement which is the time, energy and resources that students devote to activities designed to enhance learning at university.

With statistics, the course and the knowledge-base is cumulative, so the question is how to facilitate students engagement in a first year statistics unit? Using behaviourism as a framework, the idea was to encourage those behaviours that was going to increase the likelihood of students developing specific bhaviours that are related to improved performance. The relationship is mediated by behavioural and emotional factors.

The aim was to use an online learning management system to deliver weekly online exercises to facilitate engagement in the unit, while also opening up opportunities for providing detailed feedback on performance so that students can track their progress and understanding. Two-hundred and thirty-two students enrolled and they had 10 weekly online exercises from week 3 to week 10 to complete - while they had their notes and text books beside them, and there was no time limit to the completion. After answering each question students were given detailed feedback. If students did not complete an exercise they could not complete the other exercises (this was not well-received by some people in the university).

The feedback from students (from 50) - 31 students provided positive comments, 19 were negative. The negative comments always made reference to the fact that this was an unfair system.

This felt like we weren't just staying still, but we were sliding backward into a time where learners were punished for not doing something that the teacher mandated was important. It was quite depressing...I had to ask 'why'? If students weren't engaging maybe the faculty needs to look at the design of their course design, and the form of assessments...just a thought.

Unsupervised online constructed-response tests

Genevieve Johnson started by looking at how new technologies are often used in the same way as the old technologies (horse-less carriage = car). Therefore the 'e' in assessment is just that - old assessments shifted online.

Diagnostic testing plays an important part in shaping a course, and formative assessment shapes the teaching. It is a way of enabling learners to see if they are ready to go on to the next step (although this worries me as it means that all the students in a class have to be at a specific point at a common time before they can move on).

In HE Johnson purports that technology is changing teaching, but the patterns are still really familiar.The grade that appears on a certificate has 'consequences' - for now that's what we're stuck with. Even when a course is online we need a grade. One of the re-occurring criticisms of technology and e-assessment is 'how do we know it's the student's work?' What are we to say? With the first cars there was no infrastructure, and people using the horse and buggy trotted past when cars broke down. There are some challenges.

E-assessment is fully online and there are all sorts of mechanisms of proctored exams - but is this just an assumption that we've carried over from the face-to-face environment. At the moment we take the tools we have and try to satisfy the requirements of the critics.

In this particular case-study, the students enrolled on an online course where they were required to complete 3 unsupervised constructed-response tests in Blackboard. The course was organised into weekly modules that included Elluminate Live, readings, discussion and activities. Each modules contained study questions which helped students focus on their learning efforts.

Test items were randomly drawn for a subset of questions corresponding with content covered during specified weeks. Test times were reduced across the three assessments.

Designing evaluation and research into edcational initiatives

College of Health Sciences Summer Research Program (Photo credit: Marquette University)

Jo-Anne Kelder, Juliette Sondermyer, Rob Phillips and Anne Rothwell presented this session where they introduced the Global Perspectives programme and the associated case study design and findings. The project was based around developing a programme that would be embedded into the first year units offered by the Faculty of Health Science.

The pilot programme was used to inform the research design. The programme is not yet online, and the first 2 phases have provided quite a lot of data, and they are ready with phase 3 where they will be working with 2013 students.

One of the recommendations was to have a supportive system in place when designing research, especially when using an existing framework. In this case, the author mentored the researchers through the process. There were some issues about applying the framework from a book, including an alternative focus, and idealised versus actual phases of research. The mentoring role was extremely important.

It was an interesting paper, especially the way that the presenters identified some of the positives and issues around their approach, but the real bonus about having the author as a mentor. I would have really liked to have seem some of the emerging themes and findings, and will watch with interest.

The future is new - the future is now!

Wikisource logo, no text variant (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the opening of the Ascilite conference 2012 (Te Papa, Wellington), Neil Selwyn opened by explaining that his aim was to make the audience feel uncomfortable - to ask questions about some of our assumptions. Ed-tech is often seen as a positive project. There is little doubt between the inherent connection between learning and technology. The default role of the ed-tech person is making decisions and trialling things that will make things better. There is also the issue of the 'allure of the new'. We are desperate to find out what the new, and this is closely allied to the allure of speed. Technology promises speed, as well as the promise of substantial change - social, political and economic.

Neil is concerned that we are continually looking toward the future, The stuff at the moment really isn't working very well- we are just stuck in a cycle of hype and hope, and then things don't work out. Why are we stuck in this cheerleading cycle. The future and the new have become a weakness in this area of academic research. This focus limits our questions and what we have done so far. We have a tendency to be limited to small case studies. We are interested in 'what if scenarios', looking for a way to support the statement that ed-tech makes things better.

The idea of history is one of the most important things we should be looking at was posed - the historical perspective can give us a long view for the technologies we currently have. There is a tendency to over-estimate the short-term impacts of ed-tech. The future is incredibly difficult to predict, and we often get it wrong. Both pessimists and the optimist have got the future wrong. There are lots of examples of this. Even when we get the technology 'right' we often get the 'education' wrong.

We pretty much know what the technology is going to be, but how can we do better around how they are used. We need to tell the stories around these that have depth and richness. Nick Zepke (2008) talks about the science of the probably, the art of the possible, and the politics of the preferable. And Nick argues that ed-technologists tend to focus on the third one, but should rather be looking at the first two. "The basic premise is that what happened in the past is no longer a highly reliable guide to the future - Nick however, believes that this should be turned on its head. He is not sure how disruptive or tranformative the technology and approaches in the conference actually are.Is technology just doing old things in different ways...has it been used to re-enforce old practice? There is a big concern that formal education is being made ubiquitous, with its focus on assessments and qualifications. Technology is also exacerbating the provision of education via corporations and big business.George Simens and Stephen Downes' connectivism ideas that captured in the MOOC focus, have now been adopted by big business to make a profit.

Digital divides remain. There are big disparities in terms of social class and backgrounds, and there are big gaps.

Technology is likely to make individual much more responsible for their own education, and whether they succeed or fail. Where does education as a collective 'good' then become placed?

Beware anyone who says they are certain about the future. Deep down, we are not looking at things being really different, but things staying the same. The question to ask is 'what is technology doing that is making things truly different' here?