no e-learning anyone?

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A new Ofstead report tells us what we knew already! i.e. best practice on the deployment and use of College ( and Universities) VLEs is very patchy and contained in pockets nationally. This is often the result of the lone enthusiast (Fred in the shed), attempting to bring others along the e-learning road. Large scale organisational effective use of VLEs is woefully absent from the report. The BBC and Seb Schmoller summarises the report & reccomendations in his blog. This latest report confirms findings from a previous Becta report released in March 2008.

Oh very dear - perhaps the VLE is dead and we should all move to e-portfolios then? Or maybe stictch together a few web 2.0 apps to make a pseudo VLE (like Mike Wesch has done)? Or spend some money on staff development - fora change.

On a more positive note, there is a new initiative to "train the trainers" along the lines of the adult and community learning e-guides. These PDA's are going to help champion e-learning inside organisations.

read on >>

Programme launch conference - 5/2/2009

[Deadline 29/1/2009]

National launch conference – Thursday 5 February 2009

Russell Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1N 1DB

With a choice of 20 workshops, and with keynote speeches from Roger McClure, Chief Executive of the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS), and from Toni Fazaeli, Chief Executive of the Institute for Learning (IfL).

Organised by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and BDP Learning, with a consortium of FE partners, and building on QIA and ALT’s outstandingly successful "e-learning practitioner" conferences held in 2005 and 2007.

Book for this free event from http://www.alt.ac.uk/ by no later than 17.00 on Thursday 29 January 2009.

Open learning anyone?

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I just stumbled across the call to bid for the OER programme > Please read on.

If you would like to know what others have done in the past to create "open resources", then please browse through the high quality resources (entire courses) created by a consortia of top USA Universities. Theirs are called"Open Courseware." Or more recently in the UK the OU also decided to give away their resources in the shape of "Open Learn." This approach has been discussed in great depth in the last two years. The OU even encourage you to download their course materials and repurpose them using their Lab. Also a couple of wiki sites also discuss the terminology Open content and offer resources to reuse.

This is in part a response to one of those DIUS 9 strands to improve UK HE to compete in an ever shrinking global market. But what I find slightly sad is that the general consensus of opinion seems to concur that to improve our (HE) standing globally, all we need to do is to produce top quality resources? What about altering the pedagogy first, to exploit new ways of communicating & learning?



Bidding for the Open Educational Resources (OER) programme is now open.


In partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), we (HEA) will be running a pilot programme to support the release of existing educational resources. The goal of the programme is to make a wide range of learning resources freely available and easily discoverable so that they may be routinely re-used by both educators and learners. There will be three separate project strands to the pilot programme:

• Institutional: resources released across an entire institution

(Total funding of £1.50 million available, up to £250,000 per project)

• Individual: resources released by individual academic staff

(Total funding of £200,000 available, up to £20,000 per project)

• Subject: resources released by departments, faculties and schools within a variety of institutions, supported by Academy Subject Centres and Professional Bodies or subject associations

(Total funding of £3 million available, up to £250,000 per project)


A community briefing event will be held on 26 January 2009 at Aston University in Birmingham, which will enable potential bidders to find out more about the funding opportunities associated with this call.

The deadline for proposals in response to this call is 12:00 noon on 4 March 2009.

For further information and the bidding documentation, please visit the following link: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/learning/opencontent.

Self evaluation!

Dr Simon Ball from Techdis gave us another short and informative webcast last week on the latest offerings to improve accessibiltiy and inclusion for the HE community. Those inlcude;

• A new accessibility self evalauation service run online: http://www.techdis.ac.uk/getevaluated.
  

This service is open to all HE departments . It's a tool thats been proven and can really make a difference to your disability provision. Rememeber the latest SENDA regualtions put responsibility for A&I at indivual level. You can't hide behind ignorance any more. If a student feels that they are being excluded for any reason, any resulting litigation could fall on the lecturer delivering the learning - not the organisation!

• The Academy are funding organisations to the tune of £500.00 to run a seminar in 2009 focussing on the following thre strands: ethnicity, disabiliy, and widening participation. Contact inclusion@heacademy.ac.uk

• Latest accessiblity tools from Simons update:

• scan text using you mobile phone : www.scanr.com
• change your voice with morphVox
• highlight you mouse with Sonar
• The Sage dictionary & Thesaurus
• Create QR codes
• Virtual Magnifying Glass

• A free course covering Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. The course has been written by a Psychiatrist who has many years of experience using a Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) approach and also in helping people use these skills in everday life.

• Simon is due to write a book chapter covering the use of Second Life to assist learners with disabilities. Academics have already used Second Life to simulate hallucinations associated with extreme schizophrenia. See also http://previewpsych.org/ . See also my previosu posting on serious fun, which covers education use of SL.
  

• Next HE TECHDIS updates (run online - all you need is a browser) - Feb 12th -11:30 - 12 pm. Feb 17th 14:00 - 14:30. Contact: help@techdis.ac.uk

LEX

LEX = Learner experiences (of technology)

JISC has recently been commissioning research studies/pilot projects that try to uncover what our netgenners really want from us (the gatekeepers of their education). The plethora of projects were synthesised into a glossy publication and a web resource last year entitled "the learner experiences". There are ressources, videos, case studies to help educators work with student expectations.

Now there is a phase 2 of this programme which has the following outputs thus far:


1. Usable materials, activities and resources for those engaged in staff

development (and links to RSC booking forms for the dissemination workshops for the Learner Experience projects) on
https://mw.brookes.ac.uk/display/JISCle2/National+workshops.

2. Learner video clips from the E4L project with a variety of learners from different educational backgrounds in an interactive case study
form: http://www.northampton.ac.uk/e4l/ics "These clips last anything from 20 seconds to 3 minutes and provide short, sharp and sweet experiences and opinions from the learners that
can be used to educate and inspire other learners, tutors, developers,managers,etc.


3. LexDis student strategies database - http://www.lexdis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ - a searchable database of strategies
from the learners involved with this project. " All the strategies have been provided by students who have first hand experience of e-learning.


4. national workshops. The B'ham next week is full but there are 3 more in 2009.

This work by JISC is complimented by a new research website by the The Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience , who has issued a report outlining their studies into what the google generation want/expect! Surprisingly amongst other recommendations, they were skeptical about the surface level learning afforded by the use of web 2.0 tools! But they still want organisations to promote them (looks like forums are old hat)? Students want to use technology, but not necessarily what their organisations are pushing (VLEs). Therefore a common ground needs to be found. A mix of web 2.0 and institutional tools is the order of the day! Sounds like Professor Mark Stiles' recent paper " the death of the VLE" was somehow quite accurate.


But lets not forget the other JISC report earlier this year, that concluded that the digital natives lacked certain key critical thinking/searching/evaluation skills. Yes. "they" were born into the age of ubiquitous technology, but not all choose to use it. And not all know how to, and a fair proportion like the option to multi-task when communicating. Second life, face book, and email are routinely viewed as things that old people do. Note to self.. must get my twitter account up and running :O) .. and drop the "old skool" blogging!

On Tuesday of this week The Guardian issued a special supplement on the JISC Student
Experiences campaign. The web URL for this is
http://www.guardian.co.uk/digitalstudent  It  has a good mix of short features from podcasting to the need for new methods of assessment. 

Dr Paul Brett from Wolverhampton University comments on how their TXTing project opened up alternative communication channels to reach new undergraduates. All of this linkes with the previous post where Paul Ramsden comments on the DIUS HE debate & need for student input to HE Quality assurance!

And, to finally link with another project to gives us something to work with whn designing new web 2.0'yfied curriculum:

This information from a related LEX project on web 2.0 & pedagogy

"Many development projects have explored the potential of web 2.0 technologies to enhance the experience of higher level study. There is now a considerably body of evidence linking the social affordances of web 2.0 with academic practices, such as":

• Shared knowledge building (wikis, social book-marking, folksonomies)
• Peer review (tagging, recommending and rating)
• Freedom of ideas (open content, open source software, blogs and discussion sites)
• Personal research (new tools for navigating and analysing information spaces)
• Specialist communities of interest (community sites)

• My colleague Martin Hawksey also alerted me to this paper from the LEAD project covering their research on student expectations. The digital divide is mentioned in here!

• A recent talk given by Professor Sir David Watson to QAA's subscribing institutions, oultines some of these tensions between University Stakeholders and asks who are the true owners of the "University"
  

The Great HE Debate

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The DIUS HE debate moves into it’s next phase with the publication of 9 strands. These nine contributions to the continuing HE debate were published unaltered recently both on the HE Debate blog (http://hedebate.jiscinvolve.org/) and on the DIUS corporate site (http://www.dius.gov.uk/policy/HE-debate.html).

Professor Paul Ramsden (head of the Academy) has responded to this DIUS debate on the Academy website, in a short report entitled: “Students should have bigger say on quality”

And, other leading UK educators have been commissioned by the DIUS to respond this HE debate . Read their reports here : http://www.dius.gov.uk/policy/users_perspective.html

What does it mean to us? Well, quite a lot in the West Midlands specifically! Apparently the lack of higher skills in the West Midlands costs us approximately £10 Billion in lost productivity! This is part of a stark set of statistics delivered to us by AWM in a short presentation last week. So this represents a real challenge if we will ever meet government targets and fulfil the Leitch agenda. In the meantime HEFCE have been holding consultation events across the UK to move the new Universities programme to the next phase. A new set of colour coded maps indicate areas of possible HE candidates :

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/events/2008/challenge/

To help SMT understand and implement the HE strategy, HEFCE and its leadership foundation are running a set of 4 UK workshops (spring 2009) for College principals and invited staff. This is hot off HEFCE approval board this week. Email project administrator Karen Kitchen: K.kitchen@sheffield.ac.uk

UPDATE

The 9 strands summarised by Steve Besley of Edexcel

International Issues in HE

Key Issue: How best to take advantage, as well as understand the risks, of the international student market

Key Messages:

• “Need to focus on a long – term programme of internationalisation and avoid the temptation of short – term mass recruitment to traditional study”
• “The main problem with the UK is a perception that our universities are solely interested in international students as a source of revenue”

Key Recommendations:

• Need to “broaden our perspectives” using networking, partnerships, distance learning options
• Need to target financial resources and incentives better
• Need to promote the brand as an “exciting and reliable partner”

Understanding Institutional Performance

Key Issue: How to understand institutional performance in different dimensions

Key Messages:

• We start from a position of strength, a mass of data already collected, but need to refine this to meet new demands
• Some users, notably employers, mature learners, need clearer information

Key Recommendations:

• Need to create a web – based ‘spidergram’ to allow drilling down
• Need to look at how far value added measures might work
• Develop a code of practice for using performance and funding measures

Part – Time Study in HE

Key Issue: How can HE respond to demand and challenges from p/t students?

Key Messages:

• P/T students are “consistently disadvantaged” by the current system
• 40% of HE students currently on accredited p/t courses
• Significant system changes needed to be able to accommodate p/t study

Key Recommendations:

• Develop a ‘holistic’ system of student finance and support which is mode free. Co – funding should not replace mainstream funding
• Reward those institutions that develop diverse missions

Teaching and The Student Experience

Key Issue: How to respond to evolving student experiences and demands

Key Messages:

• The idea of a single experience or single set of expectations has no meaning
• No great evidence that student ‘average’ expectations have changed drastically over the last 10 years, most still “breezily self – confident”
• Need to see students as ‘engaged collaborators’ not ‘inferior partners’

Key Recommendations:

• Need to reform curriculum and assessment especially degree classification
• Need to develop a more flexible workforce
• Need to rethink quality and engage students in a responsible partnership

The Demographic Challenge Facing Our Universities

Key Issue: How to understand and prepare for demographic change

Key Messages:

• Can’t isolate demographic factors from other factors such as class
• 2006 data suggests decline in 18 – 21 yr olds between 2010 and 2019, then recover by 2027, increases in 20 – 29 age group up to 2019, 30 – 39 group will initially decline then increase substantially

Key Recommendations:

• Continue to widen participation
• Clarify the objectives of public funding for HE

E – Learning and ICT

Key Issue: How can we become a world – leader in education e- learning?

Key Messages:

• “We lag behind in generating quality modern teaching/learning resources”

Key Recommendations:

• The UK needs to develop a core of open access learning resources