Author Archives: Marion Manton

About Marion Manton

I amSenior Manager: Learning Design and co-manager of TALL with David White. Previous to that I was eLearning Research Project Manager. As well as the day to day running of TALL I am responsible for the ensuring that all TALL programmes are best practice examples of learning online for their audience. I work closely with course teams to specify the learning they want to achieve with their programme and to identify the best uses of technology to do this. I also maintain currency with the latest research in eLearning, to ensure that TALL is aware of and exploits the best current knowledge of what works in terms of effective eLearning. My particular interests are in effective pedagogical models for different learning scenarios and how best to facilitate these by the appropriate use of technology. As well as the development of effective tools and processes to help academics identify these and translate knowledge of their subject and teaching into high quality online learning.

New courses this term

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We are just in the middle of our termly  launch period for our online courses and it is looking like we are going to hit 700 students  this term, which is really amazing considering how recently we were pleased about having 100!

Most excitingly we are launching new courses in English Poetry of the First World War, Using the Victorian Census and Vikings: raiders, traders and settlers as well as the Postgraduate Diploma in Paediatric Infectious Diseases; developed in conjunction with the Medical Sciences Division here at Oxford.

The poetry course has been written by Sandie Byrne one of our most popular course authors and provides a great tie in with the exciting The Great War Archive project that our colleagues in OUCS are leading.

Developing the Victorian Census course has been an immense task, but I think we have created a great practical course to get people started with this amazing resource.  This course also provides access to Ancestry.com for the duration of the programme  which is probably worth the course fee on its own.

For the Vikings course we have done some really innovative work with Google Maps about which we will be writing some more about soon.

Lastly with the Paediatric Infectious Disease programme we have worked closely with the  learning technologies group in Medical sciences whose expertise in e-assessment has allowed us to include some great self assessment opportunities for the students.

I think our ability to launch four such varied new courses in the space of a month is a real testament to the work of the whole team and everyone at Continuing Education and the rest of the University who has made each course possible.

Find out about Phoebe

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In recent months we have been doing a lot more work with video content and as part of this we have recorded me giving an overview of the Phoebe tool.  This is basically the demonstration of Phoebe we usually give at the start of workshops – hopefully all you need to know to get stared using the tool.  I can’t vouch for the quality of the presenting, but if you want to get a 23 minute overview of Phoebe this is definitely the place to start. You can see me talking without the screen capture here, or the get the full version here.

Where are we up to with Mosaic

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I have just sent the interim report for the Mosaic project to JISC, which has provided a good chance to think about where we have got to so far. The main news is we have decided to delay the launch of the course “Voices from the Past: The Earliest English Literature” until January 2009. This is due to several different factors, but the main one is the fact that it is going to take us a while to clear all the copyright – the first spreadsheet is complete and currently contains 206 items, a daunting number.

The process of copyright clearance is still the big unknown for this project, as really we are just at the start of what is probably going to be a long slow process. However, what is gratifying has been discovering that the content was out there in the first place, if not in the repositories or as learning objects, and that there was enough to make a coherent academically rigorous course.

I think it is worth noting that the success of the project thus far is substantially down to the efforts of Sandie Byrne our main “author” or in this case “compiler” or “linker”? There is no doubt that working in this way uses skills that many academics do not have and even for those that do, there is definitely a need to think more deeply about the cost benefit of reuse as opposed to creation, stepping away from the theoretical stance that it ought to be more efficient and examining the reality.

Finding the useful in technology

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In Dave’s recent post he talked about the tentative categorizations we have made of our students as a result of our research for the Isthmus project, however I think it is worth emphasizing how much our students adoption of tools and technologies (or not) is driven by their perception of usefulness. For our students at least we have a group who use the internet to varying degrees based on a strong sense of personal need – they use what they find useful, but not for its own sake.

So they will engage in what might be considered quite sophisticated online behaviours in the cause of something they want to do, but be quite astoundingly incapable with things that they cannot see the point of, and actually you have to admire this pragmatism, they are extremely effective web users in their scope.

But how do our users find the things that they deem useful? What about all the tools that might change their (web) lives if only they knew they existed? From personal experience I knew RSS existed for years before actually getting set up with an aggregator, but when I finally did it changing the way I worked for ever. I have a colleague who still regularly thanks me for telling them about delicious, they knew it was out there, but until I gave them my take on social bookmarking they had never quite realised it fixed exactly the thing that had been bugging them about bookmarking for years. They have since passed it on to several other people.

I have a strong appreciation of how random these moments can be, but also how transformative, and I am sure there are things we can do to bring the things most likely to be of use to them, to the attention of our students. We will be working on this as part of the Isthmus project over the next few months. The plan is to keep it simple, as much as possible to use what is already out there, but to help them find what can help them, and what will really be useful.

European LAMS conference

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Like Martin Weller, Grainne Conole and Sheila MacNeill I was at the European LAMS conference in Cadiz last week. This proved a great chance to talk to people who are doing interesting things in pedagogical planners specifically and Learning Design more generally.

For me the most gratifying thing was that we all seem to be moving in the same direction, despite not having necessarily having talked to each other as much as we probably should have done over the last year. I think the key will be in maintaining this dialogue and ensuring we all move forward in a way which allows us to get the most benefit from each others work. Between the commitment at the OU to their learning design work, the LDSE and the projects JISC are funding in the curriculum design and delivery calls I think a lot will happen in the next couple of years, the trick will definitely be in trying to make this all join up.

It is also worth commenting that all of that is only what is happening in the UK, the LAMS group now have funding for their Activity Planner project and Ten Competance continue to do really interesting things.

I think there is a lot of willingness to keep talking, now all we have to do is to find the time….

Award winning Phoebe

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Today we found out that Phoebe won an award at Oxford’s IT in Teaching and Learning Awards awards, OxTALENT.

This is particularly gratifying as for a long time, while awareness of Phoebe outside Oxford has been high, it has been a real challenge to get the word out in Oxford itself. There was a lot of interest in Phoebe and it was good to see many new faces at the event.

Visions of reuse

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Tony Hirst has produced an great movie which presents an edupunk vision for content use. I do find it very seductive, but it is so different from what we are actually experiencing on the MOSAIC project, or is it? I think there has to ways to reconcile these too but I am not yet totally sure how – well I suppose that is what we are researching!

So how do we actually re-use content in practice?

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Sandie has just submitted her first attempt at pulling together all the content for MOSAIC and has done an amazing job. However it is something to be reckoned with. As a starting point she has included the text from all the sources we want to use, so that a course which would normally be about 100-150 pages long, is 527 pages. It is a lot to review but this is really the only way to move this forward.

Once you have got over the sheer scale factor, you very quickly realise that there are a lot of questions that you have never really properly thought through before.

  • For now working on the assumption that we can clear copyright for everything we want…do we actually want to have all of this “in” the course? Some things work best as external websites, yes they might change but for many of the activities we want the students to engage in, dealing with this change is part of the process.
  • What do we do in using content that is valuable in the main but with small faults, spelling mistakes or even minor factual errors?
  • Or when content is not wrong as such but our author is itching to just slightly rewrite it for style/clarity….?
  • How do we decide when to include materials as a quote, as a pop up or as a document?
  • If we do include it as a pop up do we keep their page design or try and make it look like our course?
  • How do we most elegantly reference this stuff?
  • Mash-ups ….do we even want to go here? There is definitely stuff in our course which we could start mixing up – but can we get the right permissions?

Well these are the ones we are grappling with for now, and I am sure there will be more as we progress, I’ll post any more questions and our answers up here as we decide them.

Where are planners now?

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Much of the last little while has been spent writing our final documentation for this phase of the Phoebe project. Although report writing is not my favorite task it has been a really valuable experience to take the time to reflect on what we have a achieved with Phoebe specifically and how our understanding of design for learning has progressed over the last few years. It feels like a very long time ago that IMS LD came out and seemed to capture something about e-learning focussed on activities rather than content, making it the first standard to address the real issues….and depending on your interpretation acted as the catalyst for a lot of the work that has come since.

Over the next few weeks, I will try and blog about some of the conclusions we have reached as a result of Phoebe, but as a very good place to start I am going to point to what other people are saying about this area.

I think the first people to mention are the team working on Compendium LD at the OU. Grainne Conole has several presentations on this subject at Slideshare, although perhaps the best place to find out what she is saying is though her blog, and more specifically her posts on learning desgin. Martin Weller, has also blogged a fair bit on this, with lots worth checking out.

There is also a lot of useful information available on the site CETIS created after our planner review day. You can access all the presentations and I would really recommend reading Helen Beethams Breifing paper, an excellent summary of a complicated space.

Lastly a lot of us will be presenting at the European LAMS conference in late June. It is worth noting while a lot of the papers are focusing on LAMS (as you might expect) many explore learning design more widely. Finally there is a whole day on pedagogical planners which if it is anything as good as last year will be a great chance to find out more about state of the art thinking in this space.

Learning designs, representation and reuse (2)

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In the Mosaic project we are moving on from looking at the course as a whole, to writing specific screens of content, and it is providing a good way of unpicking our assumptions about what Phoebe means for planning at the activity level in the context of a specific course. In our earliest thinking about Phoebe we always intended to have a “mind map” interface. We never did manage to implement this as we had enough other fundamental issues to address, but for me there is no doubt that it is at the more granular levels of learning where these sorts of representation have the most to offer.

As we have looked into how people design learning, both the the earlier LD Tools project that was done at OUCS, and our evaluations for Phoebe, it is clear that unless mandated externally, preferences in terms of representation are extremely diverse. A significant number of people do really want spacial map like plans, but an equal number would never plan that way, and prefer liner or tabular representations – all of which ignores those who use PowerPoint, paper, the back of a napkin….and the whole area of when designs move from just design into something you can instantiate.

So while we are working towards a tool that can cope with all the things outlined above….one day…. what does any of this mean in the shorter term? One thing that has served us well as Phoebe has progressed is acknowledging complexity, but trying to find simple solutions to the aspects of this space that can be tackled here and now.

Then chipping away at the larger more complex issues as we go….

So to take a simplifying step sideways when it comes to designing activities, in the sort of distance learning context we are designing for in Mosaic, this basically means writing instructions for students about undertaking activities that link to the tools they will need to use to accomplish them. Most of the time all you need to describe an activity is some words. So for Phoebe, just a box to write them in?

Although in the Phoebe team, we are resistant when people suggest that Phoebe is all about the guidance, I am starting to think that until we can really unpick the representation issues the most value to be found in Phoebe at the activity level is all about the right guidance. We also know that this guidance is the most powerful when it is very precisely targeted.  Coming back to the reuse observations I made at a course level, our authors definitely write better activities when they start with examples of similar activities used in other course, and they write the best activities when those examples are from courses in their own discipline.

So, ok this works  fine in a relatively small department such as ours –  look at the other courses we have built, get some ideas – but how do you scale this for national contexts, how do you find these “just right” examples? OK now we’re back at the more complex issues  – but certainly something that the wider D4L strand and other work at JISC and elsewhere has things to say about.

But blog posts shoudn’t be too long should they, and it is a Friday.