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.

Web2rights, IPR and Phoebe

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A few months ago I spent a frustrating few days trying to get to the bottom of IPR and Phoebe. This is a question operating on quite a few levels as indicated below.

  1. IPR around the tool itself and how we release it to users – ok a pretty straight forward open source software issue, I think we are going to use GPL2 which seems to be fairly standard for JISC projects.
  2. IPR in the guidance within Phoebe – again not too bad, all the usual plagiarism and copyright issues, but as we produce online content all the time we know what we are doing here so not a problem
  3. IPR on the designs or templates an individual creates in Phoebe and opts to share – much more confusing. It seems obvious that creative commons or something like it is the way to go, but which one exactly?

Anyway after much trolling around it seemed there were a lot of people out there who were happy to explain all the problems in this space but not many who would suggest concrete solutions.

Hopefully this has started to change, at the pedagogic planners review meeting earlier this month Lawrie Phipps suggested I look at the Web2Rights project JISC has funded which at a first pass seems to be offering all that practical advice that was missing before.

Now all I have to do is read this all and decide what license to use and how to use it. I will try and remember to blog our final decision – or in the next month or so of course you should be able to go to Phoebe and see it in action!

Learning designs, representation and reuse (1)

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As part of the Phoebe project we have been doing a lot of thinking about how to represent learning designs, and certainly the outputs of the Mod4L project in the D4L programme, did a lot to unpack how complicated this can be. There is no question to that we are a lot clearer about the challenges in this area than we were before the D4L work started, and some interesting ways of thinking about the problem have emerged. In particular the distinction between designs for inspiration versus designs for implementation, or anything else, which seems obvious now, certainly helped me think about this all a lot more clearly. Also I think we are better able to articulate the levels of granularity at which design operates and are starting to explore what is the same and what is different when thinking about design at the level of a course, module, unit, or activity.

Taking a step back from considering this in theory I am also interested in this on a more practical note for the Mosaic project. The main requirement for this project is to reuse as much as possible to create a course. As a committed D4L alumni I really want to see if we can reuse learning designs as well as content, but what does this really mean in practice?

Ignoring for now the possibility of reusing external designs I want to try and work out how we can reuse what we have internally. We now have about 50 online courses and 8 in English literature alone – clearly in all of this there are some learning designs that we could reuse, but how to get at them? All our courses have specifications which act as one sort of learning design at the course level – and there is no question that our authors look at existing specs and get inspiration for their course, I don’t think this is perfect but at this level I think reuse at an inspirational level is working quite well. However there are also other levels where this sort of design inspiration would be valuable, where the way forward is a lot less straight forward. In our case I think design has a part to play most importantly at unit level (1 weeks online study) and activity level.

In the case of unit level design along the way we have actually developed a very clear model across all our English literature courses – much more so here than in any of the other disciplines. However this is not encapsulated anywhere in an easy digestible format – essentially each new author has looked at previous courses and thought, hmm I think I’ll do my course a bit like that. This works up to a point but is actually becoming less scalable the more courses we have.

To take a step sideways I have tried to put the structure with the content stripped out in a word document – perhaps with the idea of using it as a unit template for authors, but I am not sure that it makes sense anymore – partly because it is too abstract but also perhaps because as soon as you start to think of it as a template for a unit you want to start thinking about the next level of design mentioned above, the activities – and that is a whole additional level of multiplying possibilities.

And of course if we have done our job right with Phoebe, anything I am trying here should be possible to model in Phoebe. I have done this with the course spec level already, and there is a sharable template for anyone who is interested (note you will need a login to Phoebe for this link to work). I think I am going to have to think harder before coming up with a unit level template, but it should be do-able. At an activity level I am not sure we if we are entering the place where Phoebe stops being the right tool for the job – although in theory it could work?

Well that is where I have got to today. Clearly I need to explore this more but I am going to put this out there anyway as if I don’t do this now it will remain in my drafts folder for ever more.

So more thinking to be done – better representation for unit level design – how to capture activity level design and how to do any of this in tools like Phoebe.

Reviewing Pedagogy Planners

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On Wednesday JISC organized a meeting to look at the two D4L funded Pedagogy Planners, our Phoebe and the LPP. Liz at the Planners review

It was a really useful day, consolidating many of the themes that had come out of our other evaluation. If you want to know more about it you will be able access all the presentations here (as soon as they are posted).

Grainne has also blogged this here , here and here , and Sheila MacNeill here.

So many reasons to dislike Blackboard

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As everybody in the education blog world has commented in the last few days, Blackboard won their case against Desire2Learn and this is a bad thing for eLearning. As I was busy reading the excellent summaries of commentary across the board provided by Stephen Downes, here, here, and here , Dave forwarded the reaction on Slashdot here.

As the bloggers I was reading were lamenting this for issues around patent law, IPR, trust in vendors and wider philosophical perspectives, all the comments on Slashdot were busy criticizing Blackboard as a system, by tutors, students and sys admins. Personally I have not used Blackboard since 2001 so I cannot comment on the truth of these crisicisms, but it was an interesting jolt back to the practicalities of it all.

It also reminded me about one of the best things of working in TALL, and actually how unusual it is, that we are a big enough team to represent most points of view in eLearning, but small enough that we all talk to each other and (hopefully) manage to avoid getting too caught up in our own perspectives….although I don’t think there is anyone on the team who would defend Blackboard just at the moment.

Where to look for reusable content?

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As we kick off the Mosaic project (trying to develop a short course in early English literature using at a majority of preexisting content) I am trying to develop a list of places to start looking for this content that we want to re-use. I know that Sandie (our subject matter expert) has already identified lots of excellent resources using her knowledge of the discipline, but with the growth of OERs (Open Educational Resources) and portals and repositories to access them, I should hopefully not just be able to identify some likely looking content, but also content that will be easy for us to reuse – in terms of permission and copyright.

I have been clipping this area for about 3 years so had a list of about 65 things tagged free content and about 75 tagged OERs. A lot of these were the same thing tagged in different contexts or commentaries on the phenomenon more generally, rather than links to specific content, this got rid of a lot of links. A lot were very specifically K12 or focussed on a specific discipline that was not our course (at the moment it seems to me there is a lot more on the sciences and social sciences than on the humanities). There seemed to be a lot of initiatives that had a very impressive front page but very little behind it, or ones that did have a lot of content but clearly even I (as a non subject specialist) could tell there would be nothing appropriate for our course.

So now I have a list of things I want Sandie to check out and …..it consists of 12 things…..

To be fair some of these are VERY big portals to a lot of other content, but I am kind of disappointed. Also having had a quick search around I am already almost totally certain that it is sites that are not as explicitly focussed on reusable learning content that are going to be the most useful. Sandie will be doing more digging on this in the next few weeks, and will let us know what she finds. In the meantime here are the links i think it is worth Sandie following up:

 

  1. Intute –http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
  2. The OU –http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
  3. Jorum –http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
  4. Merlot –http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
  5. Rice Connexions –http://cnx.org/
  6. MIT OCW –http://ocw.mit.edu
  7. Open courseware consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org
  8. OER Commons – http://www.oercommons.org/
  9. Jisc Collections –http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/
  10. Directory of Open Access Journals –http://www.doaj.org/
  11. UNESCO List of Open Educational Resources –http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_useful_resources
  12. Google OCW search – http://opencontent.org/googleocw/

So if you know somewhere else we should be looking let us know.

 

Finding the real need for planning tools

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The concentration needed to develop our pedagogic planner tool Phoebe has necessarily brought our gaze inward during parts of the project. Over the last few weeks we have returned to looking outward, and have been talking to various people from other projects in the same space, particularly Jeff Earp from the ReMath project, Andrew Brasher from Compendium and Helen Walmsley from the Best practice models of e-learning project . It has been interesting to catch up and see where we all are, and to get a sense of how the themes that seem to be emerging from Phoebe resonate (or not) with other projects in this area. Added to this is an on going dialogue with our “sister” D4L funded Pedagogic Planner the LPP.

A key focus of all the current projects has been to develop tools that are fundamentally informed by the needs of our future users, rather than implementing a vision that is divorced from actual practice. Our current evaluations have been focusing on the practitioner level, but as our two projects come to the end of this phase of funding JISC are using this as a chance to address these questions more strategically.

As part of this Phoebe and the LPP will be at the centre of a review meeting that the JISC are organising in Birmingham on the 4th March. This will provide an opportunity to share and discuss our work with key stakeholders, and to explore how they might use the planner tools in their communities.

Mosaic

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We have recently heard that we have got funding for the Mosaic project which aims “to develop an online course, ‘An introduction to the earliest English literature’, and a standard induction unit to introduce students to learning online, from pre-existing content external to the University. The project will also develop guidelines and case studies, as appropriate, to disseminate the lessons learned both within the University and to the wider HE community.”

This is going to be a really exciting and challenging project for us – taking something we already do well, developing short courses in English literature but doing it using at least 50% content external to Oxford.

Anyone who has studied one of our online courses will know we already have a policy of using the best content on the web to support the learning process, so that will be nothing new, it is the extent to which we are going to try and do this, that will prove the real challenge. In our favour we are working with one of our most experienced academics ,Sandie Byrne, who has already written Critical Reading: an introduction to literary studies, Jane Austen, and many other excellent courses for us.

As well as producing a course which maintains the high standard of online learning we already have across all our offerings, we are also looking to explore the issues to be found around developing courses with reuse of content and to develop new approaches and best practice for ourselves and others in the University. At the moment I think key issues are going to be identification of content, the line between learning content and learning design and the ever present copyright and IPR. I am sure it will all become clear over the next few months and we will endeavor to keep you informed on what we learn.

Evaluating Phoebe

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Well after months of development and lots of talking to people in the design for learning community we finally started the process of evaluating the Phoebe pedagogic planner with practitioners, and at a first pass, gratifyingly seem to have created a tool that people want to use. Not that there weren’t lots of suggestions about how to make it better…..

As well as all the specific technical issues, a clear theme was the importance of the user community and how to support them. We had already given this some thought (and it is not as if there are not enough models out there to consider) but it is clear if Phoebe moves forward this is going to be one of the factors that most impacts on making Phoebe a tool that people want to use.

We are still in the early stages of our evaluation process at the moment, the session on Monday was mostly with practitioners from FE and ACL. We will be doing another two workshops in the next few weeks, the first with HE lecturers in Brighton and the second with student teachers in Swansea. We are also going to do a remote evaluation, so if you would be interested in taking part, letting us know what you think and shaping how we take the project forward, keep an eye on this blog for more information, or let me know by emailing me at marion.manton@conted.ox.ac.uk.

Keeping students on course

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Although I am very closely involved in the development of all our courses, we have so many now that I can no longer follow them as closely as I used to when they finally go live. The course stops being the thing that the author, project manager, web developers, and I (as learning technologist) have laboured over and becomes something that is owned by the tutor (often, but not always, the author) and the students.

As an external observer you can dip in and get a sense of how things are progressing but it is not the same as visiting a course every day, getting to know everyone, and really being part of the course experience.

Unsurprisingly it sometimes feels odd guiding people in creating effective online learning when my “hands on” involvement is so much less than it has been in the past, so I am reduced to getting my affirmation that we are on the right track in other ways. Evaluation forms are always interesting reading (and we do monitor these very closely) but recently we got some very gratifying hard statistics that I had not personally seen before.

In continuing education funding is often predicated on the mysterious completion rates – i.e. it is not just the students who start your course but those who finish who are important to HEFCE….especially hard for us in our fully online courses (an area where completion rates can be VERY low) .

So to the meat – we got the latest stats and we are averaging a 91% completion rate, even more amazing is that this is higher than the face to face rate of about 85%.

Designing courses to encourage completion is something we have given a lot of thought to over the years and we have devoted a lot of our learning design energy in creating learning and assessment in such a way to keep students on-board and motivated. It seems that in 91% of cases it is paying off….