Stephen Powell :: Blog

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/11/14/uvac-conference-york-13th-14

This has been a well run conference: 11am - 6pm Thursday & 9am Friday until 12.30pm - a sensible schedule that allows for people to attend the whole event.

Richard and I did a presentation slot that wnt down well, lots of commanality with the Middlesex Work-based learning approach as described by Alan Durrant Head of Work Based Learning, School of Arts & Education.

The biggest impression that I am taking away is of the development of a two tier market growing up. Numerous examples of large employers working with Universities to develop bespoke courses - lots of resource required for this not to mention the challenge of curriculum set in aspic.

I suppose it takes us back to one of the core ideas behind Ultraversity & now IDIBL and that is trusting in the ability of the learner to negotiate the curriculum (focus of their inquiry) with the University in line with their needs and the needs of their employer.

Perhaps this is the clear blue water between us and other work-based approaches:

- one is high overhead negotiations with individual employers for particular groups of workers developing a prescribed curriculum that matches exactly what an employer defines;

- the other is a generically defined process curriculum that allows for personalisation through the design of individual inquiries focused on improving work-practice.

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/11/12/universities-should-offer-pi

Universities should offer ‘pick and mix’ degrees, says report:

Some good suggestions in this report by Paul Ramsden, the chief executive of the Higher Education Academy published by the government today:

- build up qualifications from modules taken at different times in several universities

- make it easier to switch between full-time and part-time study, possibly by making students pay for each module they complete rather than a whole programme of study

- the curriculum they offer must become more flexible and treat part-time students more fairly

- The system as it is at the moment does not give proper credit to people who do part of a degree

- Ramsden recommends more general undergraduate degrees, such as those in the US and Australia, that would help graduates “contribute to the world of the future” rather than prepare them for academia

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/11/12/uk-universities-should-take-

UK universities should take online lead:

“UK universities should push to become world leaders in online higher education, ministers will say tomorrow, despite the failure of the UK e-University four years ago.

The universities secretary, John Denham, is likely to call not for a revival of the UKeU, which collapsed in 2004, but to develop a “global Open University in the UK”.”

That seems like an ambitious proposal, however when you read more detail…

“But it lags behind in generating and making available high-quality modern online learning and teaching resources.

The report by Prof Sir Ron Cooke, chairman of the UK universities’ Joint Information Systems Committee, suggests creating centres of expertise in educational technology and e-teaching through clusters of institutions, with comprehensive staff and student training.

Learning resources should be grouped together, coordinated nationally and provided freely, he will say.”

I can’t help but think that it is another naive proposal to spend money (through Sir Ron’s JISC of course) and see no reason why it would work better than the UK e-University, the 74 CETLs, or the Lifelong Learning Networks at making a significant positive sector wide impact.

I thought that the false division between those working in “educational technology and e-teaching” and ‘other’ teaching was a thing of the past. Instead, this proposal appears to further entrench an unhelpful divide rather than see learners as having diverse and changing needs that can’t be pigeonholed simply to meet the world views of others.

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/10/31/universities-review-plagiari

Rather than fund a whole army of ‘Plagiarism Consultants’ and associated conferences why not re-engineer towards authentic forms of assessment - deal with the root of the problem rather than tinker with the flawed approach of the essay!

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Universities review plagiarism policies to catch Facebook cheats:

Universities are reviewing their plagiarism policies to clamp down on students who use Facebook to cheat.

Plagiarism experts have warned universities and colleges to be aware of students copying from each other when discussing coursework on social networking sites.

Gill Rowell, from the consultancy Plagiarism Advice, said universities needed to rework their plagiarism policies with “internet working in mind” but insisted institutions were taking cheating seriously enough.

The warning comes after almost one in two Cambridge University students in a poll of 1,000 admitted to cheating in their studies.

Student newspaper, Varsity, found 49% of undergraduates who anonymously took part in their poll confessed to passing off other people’s work as their own.

One anonymous student said: “Sometimes, when I am really fed up, I Google the essay title, copy and throw everything on to a blank word document and jiggle the order a bit. They usually end up being the best essays.”

Just 5% of the students admitted they had been caught.

“It is a depressing set of statistics,” Robert Foley, a professor in Biological Anthropology at King’s College, Cambridge, said.

University plagiarism experts will discuss cheating with Universities UK, the umbrella group for vice-chancellors, on November 19.”

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/10/19/masters-in-learning-with-tec

Should e-learning policies be written to empower staff and students to abandon institutional provision?

Two weeks into the semester proper the 7 student researchers recruited for the first cohort are all engaging with the first module.

Forced to work outside of the UoB learning platforms (administrative issues), we have concentrated our communications around our Wordpress.com site and Google Docs for formal support (negotiation of learning contracts), with the more informal aspects catered for by blog aggregation through YahooPipes, synchronous text chats & oral communication through skype, and some exploration of twitter and a beta beta IEC Statusometer (developed by Sam) - there are probably also things happening that I don’t know about.

Next week we will finally start our Hotseat with Oleg Liber and that will also use wordpress.com.

Thus far there is no compelling reason to use institutional technology at all. A little more thought on my part on setting-up of the wordpress blogs would, however, have enhanced the experience for student researchers. For example, choosing at the point of making posts visible to allow comments or not as we currently have too many places where these can be left - turning this function off retrospectively hides comments already made.

Another issue is that of privacy as the model of learning we have developed requires the discussion of work issues that it may not be suitable to be aired publicly, but again with a little more thought up-front this could easily be catered for.

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/10/08/curriculum-design-in-he/

Chapter 2, Understanding the Curriculum in Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (2005, Barnett and Coate) is a useful starting point for considering curriculum design in HE.

This is complex area, and the slide below summarises seven notions of what might influence the development of curricula. Arguably an eigth dimension could now be added in the light of the Leitch Review (2006) and Foundation Degrees, namely that of ‘Employer Defined Curriculum’ whereby the government seeks to coerce employers into funding HE with the inducement of having a large say in the design of programmes.

Running through these notions Barnett & Coate identify three ideas that are essential in trying to understand contemporary curricula:

- the influence of the social context in the shaping of curricula

- hidden curricula processes

- the power of knowledge fields/discipline groups

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/10/06/university-administration-fo

A bit of a déjà vu feeling with this one. It is a racing certainty that institutions like mine will have to increasingly meet the needs of students who are not the ‘traditional’ 18 year undergraduate. They will want to study increasing amounts of CPD (short courses), will study entirely online and won’t wish to come to the institution at all, and will want to student when they need to or find the opportunity to do so - this may mean deciding they want to enrol one week and starting the next.

Institutional systems and practices cannot adequately cope with these demands (despite the good will of those trying to deliver) and will have to change. The experience of the new Masters course will inform the identification of what needs to change, but making those changes will require a systemic intervention - far more difficult to achieve.

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/10/01/a-pattern-language-for-actio

I started this Pattern Language project last February with Ian Tindal and Richard Millwood and have been making intermittent progress since then. It is based upon the Ultraversity project and aims to capture the key elements of the approach developed for a degree programme based on action research methodology supported entirely through online communities of inquiry.

An enthusiast when I started, I am now more circumspect about the approach has anything fundamental to offer other than as a presentation framework.

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/09/23/dipity-as-a-research-tool/

I am playing around with dipity recommended by Sam as part of a data collection exercise for Bolton’s Co-educate initiative a project I am managing as one of 12 Jisc funded Curriculum Design Projects.

One of the things we want to do is to run a series of focus groups both face-to-face and online to collect the history of the University of Bolton set in a context of UK HE policy, politics and technology. We believe that this is an important step in trying to understand the curriculum design process from inception through to delivery. If we want to find an agile and responsive way of doing this we first need to understand the complexity of impacting forces on this process.

On completion we may well produce a ‘posher’ timeline using the MIT Timeline Project software, but this looks like a good starting point as it will allow is to collaboratively ‘remember’ this history.

http://www.stephenp.net/2008/08/04/london-pedgagogic-planner/

I think I understand what the London Pedagogic Planner is trying to achieve and at the level of trying to get University teachers to explore their practice it is a useful intervention. However, as it stands I would be surprised if any teachers actually use it. On downloading and unzipping the compressed file users are then have to open the ReadMe.text to discover that the planner is launched by opening lpp.jar A bit of thought about making this a foolproof process would have been effort well spent.

Pressing on, I am faced with a set of fields to fill in (a bit like a spreadsheet) that use typical HE descriptions of modules (”Properties”). For some reason, I couldn’t fill in “start date, number of staff, duration”.

Next I used the planning grid to allocate time against different teaching methods which then generates suggested breakdown of ‘learning experience’ - personally I think that learning activities would be a better label - who can tell what the experience will be?

Lastly I tried the “Allocate” tab where it appears that learning outcomes are mapped against topics, but none of the fields were available for me to edit, not sure why (Firefox 3.0.1, Mac OSX10.5.4).

Beyond the problematic interface and unfriendly installation process and remembering it is a prototype there are several keyissues:

- can subject teachers be persuaded that the learning and teaching approaches are relevant enough to their discipline to warrant the considerable effort required to use the tool;

- the field labels and descriptors don’t adequately reflect the range of learning and teaching practice. For example, in work-based learning (the field I work in) I would say that inquiry is a “teaching method” not a “learning experience”. Also, what about ‘action learning sets’ or “Patchwork Text” for collaborative learning and formative assessment? The list is endless, and creative teachers will be constantly adding to it…;

- arguably, in trying to ‘atomise’ the description of learning and teaching (precise allocation of effort against topics, outcomes, teaching methods, learner experience) in support of a particular interpretation of “Learning Design”, in any practical or usable sense, all meaning is lost.