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

Learning in the 21st Century: A 5 Year Retrospective on the Growth in Online Learning

English: Diagram of technology-empowered professional development for teachers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is report you may be interested in (recommended by John S Oliver). It is from a USA-based study (but the tends are likely to have some relevance to you) that analyses and reports key findings from 416,758 K-12 students, parents, teachers and administrators. The Speak Up team mention that by "comparing the issues we reported on in 2007 with the online learning headlines of 2012 we can easily see an increased experiential sophistication around different implementations of online learning as well as a new blending of emerging technologies such as mobile learning and digital textbooks into our online learning discussion" (source).

Key trends highlighted by the Speak up team from the report include (source):

• A majority of teachers, school site administrators and district level administrators now report participating in an online class for their own professional development. For teachers, this represents a 148 percent increase since 2007.
• Teachers’ value proposition on online learning for their own professional development is directly related to their previous online learning experiences as a teacher or in an online training class. 30 percent of teachers say that online PD is now their preferred approach for continuing education.
• A new, positive correlation exists between educators’ experiences with online learning and their interest in mobile learning in school.
• The profile of a typical student interested in taking an online class today is a middle school girl who values the use of a mobile device in school and sees online learning as her ticket to a more personalized learning environment where she is in control of the learning process.
• One-third of parents now support increased investments in online learning.

You can download a free copy of this report via these links.

• http://whitepapers.blackboard.com/LP=1428
• http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/learning21Report_2012_Update.html

Should we be aiming for our Learning Management Systems to be 'next gen'?

I've just finished reading a blog post by Tom Vander Ark entitled "Why Aren't There Any Next Gen Learning Platforms?". As Joyce indicated in her blog post (source):

Well, I'm starting to think that most LMSs are simply not very good social learning environments. They're not even middling. They're great at administrative tasks. Most are ok to good on content management. But despite course pages, discussion forums,Jowikis and glossaries, they are just not great social environments, requiring too many hoops to jump through to create a convenient, natural, social learning experience that fits in with our information consuming, active, diverse and increasingly mobile lives.

Joyce suggests that LMSs are great for administrative tasks, and, to a certain extent, management of content. However, "LMSs should not try to emulate all of those social media, but instead become better at integrating with them" - and this requires educators to be aware of the importance of design, as well as up to speed with the many options that will make it simple for learners to collaborate and communicate.
Returning to Tom's post, he indicates that learning platforms of the future will include 6 core elements, underpinned by 4 central services (student services, teacher services, back-office services, and school services):

1. Standards-aligned libraries of open and proprietary content with search and content management tools
2. Social, collaborative, and productivity tools
3. Assessment tools and achievement analytics
4. Learner profiles and portfolios
5. Recommendation engines smart enough to build custom playlists
6. Assignment, matriculation, management, and motivational tools (e.g. achievement recognition systems, badges or other data visualization strategies) (source)

My question is why? With younger learners the obvious benefit is the provision of a 'walled garden', although that often has the effect of also shutting out parents and whanau who could and should play an important part in the learning experience. With students over the age of 13, what are the benefits of having an LMS with everything built in? It might indicate an attachment to a model of teacher-centred, institution 'owned', model of learning, which will only be addressed by initiatives such as Open Education Resources, along with a real understanding of learning as a social undertaking. Also, the notion that students are likely to create resources and records of their learning that they will want to take with them and access once they have left an institution (and I'm not going to jump into the conversation of who 'owns' these artefacts), often seems to be neglected by administrators.

So - do we really need a learning platform that has all the elements that Tom identifies, and, if developed, whose needs will it really be serving the best?
Image
Elements for constructing social learning environments by jrhode

Thoughts on design: The 100,000-student classroom

This video was shared by Peter Allen, and a few things caught my attention. The first was the use of written notes captured by a camera...it feels counter-intuitive, but they had good feedback about the sense it created a more knowledgeable friend explaining something. The second thing to jump out is that everyone was working on the same thing at the same time; again, this seems to go against notions of personalisation and differentiation, but I can see how it would lead to a 'critical mass' in the subject associated forums. And the final thing was making some of the material available for a limited time to help with motivation and work to deadlines. Hmmm.

While I really 'get' some of this, and for sure deadlines for example, can be a great motivator. But to remove the material completely seems to negate the notion of being able to review, recycle, and reflect. Also, with the handwritten notes - are there issues of accessibilty here (low vision learners for example)? And finally, everyone learning at the same time at the same pace...Peter Norvig mentioned Sal Khan as a source of knowledge, but something that Khan's research is indicating is (no surprise here) everyone learns at a different pace and in a different way.

What are your thoughts?

The description from the site reads: http://www.ted.com In the fall of 2011 Peter Norvig taught a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford attended by 175 students in situ -- and over 100,000 via an interactive webcast. He shares what he learned about teaching to a global classroom. Image There is currently no consensus on how closely the brain should be simulated. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)