Terry Wassall :: Blog

http://TerryWassall.jiscinvolve.org/2009/01/23/internationalisation-compete

Prof Drummond Bone recent report on changes in the market for international students, International issues in Higher Education, predicts that the current market model UK HEIs operate with is unsustainable and we will have increasing difficulty attracting international students to study here. The report identifies two main reasons for this. Firstly, Universities in the less developed countries that currently provide us with a large proportion of our overseas student are modernising fast and are becoming more attractive to their home students and employers. Secondly, non-english speaking countries are beginning to put on programmes and schemes taught entirely in English including Germany, Sweden, even France! And these will start competing for our home students. There are is an interesting article and leader on this in the THES today: The language of competition by Matthew Reisz and Everyone is talking the talk, a leader by Ann Mroz.

The DIUS report is is worth looking at for its recommendations on how we should approach the recruitment of international students in the future - teaching and supervising in partnership with overseas institutions and internationalising our curriculum and programmes to make them more relevant to overseas and our home students.

http://TerryWassall.jiscinvolve.org/2008/12/31/part-time-students-and-part-

Having read Part-time Study in Higher Education by Prof. Christine King it seems that most students, enrolled as full-time or part-time, are actually engaged in part-time study to some degree or other. The distinction between full-time and part-time study, in practice, is breaking down. FT students are increasingly working part-time to fund their studies (66% in term time, 82% in vacations) compared with 83% of PT students who work. A key difference is that FT students fit work around their study and PT students fit study around their work. And of course PT students do not get their fees paid up front.

The report makes it clear that more flexible organisation and curricula would benefit full-time students as well as part-time students. Perhaps HEIs that do not see part-time students as a key area for growth over the next 10 years or so may well find they are in a position to do so anyway on the back of developments aimed to improve provision for their full-time students. As the report says, quoting UniversitiesUK, ‘the high level of flexibility and personalisation in part-time study mode provides a template for the future of the learning experience in higher education’. The report also identifies the need for a flexible HE workforce to support diverse patterns of student needs and expectations, enhance staff scholarship (perhaps to produce open learning content and to develop the skills required to facilitate the use of  OLC and blended learning techniques?), and practice based learning. This may provide a variety of different employment possibilities for PGs and even ‘retired’ staff. I hope so!

It also looks like the part-time route to a degree is becoming increasingly attractive to school leavers. 10% of PT students are under 21 and this proportion is growing. If PT students had the same funding model as FT this would expand dramatically I suspect, in which case HEIs that have mainly full-time students may well get far more applications to study part-time and may find they are in a good position to accommodate these due to initiatives already in place to offer flexible, blended and personalised learning.

The development of a flexible curriculum could also benefit strategies designed to respond to other significant opportunities and threats for UK HE, for instance internationalisation, recruiting overseas students and constructing partnerships with other universities. It seems that flexibility in organisation, curriculum and teaching will be the answer to all our problems!

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/12/29/knowledge-in-an-inform

I have been wrestling lately to understand the difference between knowledge and information. I am finding this very difficult. What adds to the difficulty is that, of course, both terms are social constructs. There is nothing in the world that is either knowledge or information outside of what individuals or groups so label.This doesn’t make them unreal of course. The prompt for this is a couple of observations on the nature of the so-called Google generation. One in particular is by Sir Ron Cooke.

3.14 But there is reason to believe this ready access to content is not matched by training in the traditional skills of finding and using information and in “learning how to learn” in a technology, information and network-rich world. This is reducing the level of scholarship (e.g. the increase in plagiarism, and lack of critical judgement in assessing the quality of online material). The Google and Facebook generation are at ease with the Internet and the world wide web, but they do not use it well: they search shallowly and are easily content with their “finds”. It is also the case that many staff are not well skilled in using the Internet, are pushed beyond their comfort zones and do not fully exploit the potential of Virtual Learning Environments; and they are often not able to impart new skills to students. (On-line Innovation in Higher Education Professor Sir Ron Cooke).

The gist of the argument I am following up is that the new ‘free market’ in information offered by the web does not translate unproblematically into a free education or to the process of building knowledge. Access to information is one thing. Having the information literacy skills to turn the information into knowledge is quite another. Information needs a context to inform what counts as information and a context for evaluating available information.  That context is provided by knowledge. So I’m getting a picture of the relationship between information and knowledge that sees information as feeding the knowledge construction process. There seems to be a movement from existing knowledge to the setting of a problem or defining an objective that requires information. The information is specified and evaluated on the basis of knowledge and integrated into the knowledge building process accordingly.

Of course the distinction between information and knowledge (where does data fit in?) may be too crude. And as was noted at the beginning, they are both social constructs of one sort or another. There is nothing in ‘nature’ that is prelabeled as one or the other. It’s ‘us’ constructing the concepts and looking for the demarcation criteria. If this is the case then perhaps an analysis of common usage would be a clue. What distinguishes the terms in actual use? As a preliminary contribution to this, it seems to make sense to talk of information processing but the notion of knowledge processing doesn’t sound quite right. Perhaps knowledge is the outcome of information processing. But this would suggest a dialectical relationship between information and knowledge not dissimilar as that between facts and theory. Information is only information to the extent it is pre-specified in some way by a knowledge context. Knowledge is the outcome of information processing but not just information processing.

Another approach would be to think of the current focus in Higher Education on knowledge transfer. We don’t advertise these endeavors as information transfer. What is it that the notion of ‘knowledge transfer’ captures and promises that ‘information transfer’ doesn’t?

My main interest in this is what it implies for how we understand learning and the role of professional educators. If knowledge is simply information we have it in abundance and its out there for any one that wants it. But I wouldn’t want surgery conducted on the basis of Googled information or social policy made on the basis of Googled undergraduate essays. Clearly information is a precondition for knowledge but knowledge is required to make judgments and build on experience, our own and others. Knowledge provides the context for giving significance to information and for connecting it to decision making processes and action. The model that seems to be emerging here is that of students + information + teachers = knowledge creation. This sounds like a community of learners and learning objects. The specific role for teachers seems to be a combination of a model of professional learning (i.e. an expert learner), a learning mentor and a knowledge broker. This doesn’t seem to be far away from the model of apprentices and master practitioner. A key characteristic of an apprenticeship is membership of a community of practice where formal, informal and vicarious forms of learning are available. What would the process of module design, learning and teaching and assessment look like on this model?

http://TerryWassall.jiscinvolve.org/2008/12/22/education-20-designing-the-w

The Teaching and Learning Research Programme TLRP has just published its commentary on education and Web 2.0 technologies Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning.

Despite valuable early contributions to the web 2.0, much of the discussion within the education community has been speculative. This Commentary sets out to challenge the confident portrayal of web 2.0 by many educationalists in terms of an imminent transformation of learning and teaching. Careful thought has therefore been given to how technologists, educators and learners can best shape the fast-changing internet in the near future. It aims to explore how education can change the web, as well as how the web can change education. 

“Web 2.0 is a reality. Education 2.0 is an aspiration. I hope this Commentary will play its part in transforming the web into a technology that can shape a radically new vision of teaching and learning in the 21st century” Richard Noss, Director, TLRP-TEL. London Knowledge Lab. University of London.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but the content page looks interesting!

What are web 2.0 technologies and why do they matter?
Educational hopes and fears for web 2.0
Learning and virtual worlds
Learning and social networking
Web 2.0 - future issues and technologies
Education 2.0?

http://TerryWassall.jiscinvolve.org/2008/12/21/responding-to-diverse-groups

Reading the Universities UK paper on demographic changes helped clarify for me the choices available to Russell Group universities to the threats and challenges it identifies. One of the possible consequences of the increasing diversity of student groups and needs - adult work-based, returning learners, part-time, individual life long learners, employer funded and so on - is that the expanding HE sector and its public could become even more confused than it is already about what HE is and what it is for. The diversity of student groups and their needs and expectations will provide numerous opportunities for existing HEIs and for other bodies and institutions, existing or newly created in response to demand. Existing HEIs will need to be clear what is distinctive about their provision and what student sectors they are best fitted to serve. As the report says, higher education delivered by a university (emphasis in the report) “offers a unique opportunity to learn in an environment informed by current research”. What many HEIs offer students is the opportunity to join and be partners in a research and scholarship led community of learners.  The excellence of their research and the way this informs the curriculum and the learning/teaching processes, resources and facilities is the key differentiator with respect to other and emerging providers of, in its increasingly indeterminate conception, higher education. Direct engagement with the secondary and FE sectors and with employers will be beneficial to all concerned but HEIs should maintain a clear distinction and concentrate on their core missions of research and knowledge creation coupled to a commitment to preparing graduates for a career and life and not, in the words of the report, “a single job”.  It may be that the best way forward for many HEIs is to concentrate without compromise on their current student constituencies, UG and PG, and the excellence of their provision for them but at the same time develop the curriculum, learning materials, resources and learning and teaching processes and support so that they can be packaged and made available more flexibly to part-time and non-traditional students via mixed delivery modes. This could be achieved over a period of years in a way that allows for the required development of systems and staff. This would fall a long way short of providing an extensive distance learning offering or becoming specialists in bespoke programmes, something other institutions and bodies may choose to become. However it would allow selective engagement with the growth areas in the student ‘market’ most aligned to fundamental core missions by developing and exploiting our traditional strengths in research, knowledge creation and the development of the graduate skills suited to work, well-being and citizenship for life in a fast changing knowledge based society.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/07/11/the-future-size-and-sh

The future size and shape of the higher education sector in the UK: threats and opportunities is a report just released by Universities UK that assesses the impact of projected demographic changes for universities, as described in their press release.

The demographic changes forecast say that the majority age group - 18 to 20 - UK universities recruit from will diminish sharply over the next 10 years and, according to one of the 3 scenarios offered, a smaller number of HE institutions will survive to enjoy a renewed growth of this age group from 2019 to 2027. Increased competition for students may lead to a privatised cherry-picking sector emerging and increased involvement of corporate sector initiatives. Competition is likely to focus on over-seas and non-traditional work-based students. There is much to ponder on in the report and hopefully our top bananas and grandes fromages are on la case. The general position is a distinction between two possible impacts of technology in teaching and learning. The revolutionary potential is for the growth of global, online independent study with little or variable institutional affiliation. The evolutionary trajectory would lead to the increased use of information and communications technology (ICT) in delivery and learning management but without threatening institutional patterns. The report offers 3 possible scenarios and I have just picked out the implications and possible role for e-learning.

The first scenario, ’slow adaptation to change’ states that “There is only modest investment in e-learning so that it remains a relatively small part of the total learning experience for most students”.

The second scenario, ‘market driven and competitive; is where “non-traditional providers identify market opportunities and essentially cherry pick in those areas with low entry costs, sometimes in partnership with established HEIs”. Here there may be “more widespread investment in e-learning particularly by larger institutions in partnership with private sector organisations with a much increased requirement on staff to provide academic support for students on a flexible basis”.

The third scenario, ‘employer-driven flexible learning’ is characterised by “the coming together of a serious squeeze on funding for higher education with increased regulation of the purposes of the public funding element; the full development of technologically based learning through significant public and private investment; and the triumph of employer-led demand for part qualifications”. In this scenario “HE institutions develop partnerships with major commercial players to become leaders in the technologically-based learning field”.

With its considerable investment in the new VLE and a commitment to blended learning that fits very well with markets for part-time, flexible, work-based and non-traditional students, several leading UK universites seems to be positioning themselves for the second and third scenarios. If considering developing partnerships with the corporate sector we will need to look carefully at the staff development and training strategies they are already developing, often well in advance of anything that is going on in the UK HE sector, and what technology platforms and applications they are using. It is unlikely they will be the standard fair of VLEs and MLEs favoured currently by Universities. Interoperability and universal standards will be key and the ability to integrate different systems seamlessly. Many current and developing web 2.0 technologies are well ahead of what is offered by most conventional and proprietary VLE and MLE offerings.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/06/23/amateur-enthusiast-cap

True, I had had a couple of glasses of Rioja but this news video brought a tear to my eye. What’s that all about then?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468832.stm

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/06/21/challenging-or-conform

Last Tuesday I went to the latest event in the excellent Talking about Teaching series put on by SDDU at the University of Leeds - Challenging or conforming: the art of blended learning presented by Allison Littlejohn, Chair of Learning Technology at Glasgow Caledonian University. I found this extremely useful and got a number of ideas to follow up in my own teaching and to develop further in discussion with colleagues. The presentation and supporting materials are all available on-line now and the session was videoed but I’m not sure if or when that will be available.

A particularly useful aspect of the 3 hour session was the way it alternated between presentation to introduce both the more conceptual and pedagogical aspects of blended e-learning and concrete examples of blended learning activities. This included an introduction to a number of tools for designing and planning activities, from a simple proforma to specify the problem the proposed activity will address, a brief and general description of the solution, i.e. the activity itself, and the aims and objectives, to much more detailed and concrete specification of the activity - its timings, specification of tutor and student activity, the activities themselves and assessment. We then had an opportunity to work in pairs to propose problems in our own teaching and activities that could provide solutions and begin to construct the more detailed designs. The sharing of these problems and the discussion of the activities suggested was very interesting - from dentistry, the Business School and others.  Allison also pointed us to a number of repositories of blended learning designs and activities that have been constructed in such a way that they can conveniently be repurposed for a variety of different subject areas.

A few points came out of the afternoon that I found particularly thought provoking. Allison is involved in researching and advising on e-learning for large corporations including Shell. Self-paced, self-initiated and self motivated continuous professional learning is becoming a common requirement of employees in the corporate world that many of our graduates will be joining. Employers now claim that it takes approximately 5 years in the job for new graduate employees to bridge the skills deficit for operating in this way and that this deficit is growing. It has also been observed that the massification of HE has led to less student learner independence and self direction than was previously the case. What is required was described as helping the students develop their ’social capital’, in the sense of developing the networks of resources and people that will provide them with the social learning contexts that underpin much personal and professional development and becoming an expert life-long learner. The recommendation is that we look hard and critically at and learn from the parallel developments in e-learning in the corporate sector.

The opportunities to address these general problems by exploiting blended e-learning are compromised by a lack of understanding of the affordances and possibilities the new technology has by staff and by the difficulty of motivating students to work in this way. This suggests students need to be much better informed of why this is important and why it is to their advantage. This is not the first time I have heard a presenter point to the paradox that students are often very familiar with some of the e-tools and aspects of social networking and often operate in vicarious virtual learning processes without being able to consciously bring that knowledge and facility to the more formal learning arena. I think there are a number of interesting questions raised here about students’ prior experience of formal education and the expectations they come to us with. This ties in with the very revealing account about contemporary secondary education given to us by a ’super head’ at last January’s L&T Conference. On the issue of motivating and engaging students in blended e-learning activities, Allison said the chief driver of student learning behaviour is still assessment and changing assessment tasks and strategies will be key to our success. Although this is probably true it is a little dispiriting, that we will need to manipulate students’ satisficing tendencies to make progress. This is not quite what I would like to see - students and staff working together in a community and culture of enquiry and knowledge construction in a spirit of collaboration and sharing. But then I am a child of the sixties!

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/04/26/online-conferences/

Over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week I attended the Emerge online conference Digital Communities & Digital Identities. (Josie Fraser, who did a great job organising it, has posted on this in more detail). I  contributed as a presenter some time ago to a JISC Webinar on Web 2.0 applications for HE but this was the first full-on on-line conference I have attended and it worked very well. The sessions were run in Elluminate and all the features were used, breakout group sessions, whiteboard, slides, video etc. The audio quality was pretty good (once speakers got their levels right and everyone turned their speaker off in open mic sessions!).

I was surprised how useful the chat window was for sharing ideas, making comments and asking questions. There was some real brainstorming going on. It contributed significantly to the value of the presentations and is an aspect of on-line conference sessions that would be difficulty to replicate in a ‘real’ conference (unless everyone had a laptop and used a web service like Cover It Live - now there’s a thought). The chat really enhanced the sessions, made it easy for the presenter to see what was interesting the audience and helped give a focus to the audio and text discussion at the end and the summing up. It also was very sociable and entertaining! At times it was a bit like a group of naughty school kids chattering, swapping jokes, and winding up each other and the presenter. Personally I felt the sense of community grow throughout the 3 days and felt this made a significant contribution to ambience of the serious discussion too.

I felt pretty comfortable in the environment quite quickly once I got the hang of all the bells and whistles and there was quite a lot of spontaneous mutual support and advice as the community sorted itself out. One of the ‘old hands’ at this sort of thing remarked how better we had become operating in this sort of environment, not just the techical issues of knowing how the functions and tools work but how to make effective use of them in the presentations and the peripheral activities around them. I guess we will all be experts at this in a few years time, and hopefully our students will learn good and effective practice in these environments while they are with us.

I am attending the Next Generation Environments JISC conference next week as a member of a discussion panel but this is a normal face-to-face conference. Several people who were ‘at’ the Emerge on-line conference will be there and I am looking forward to comparing notes. I think on-line conferences will never replace f2f for many reasons but as additional and in-between events I think they are enormously valuable and effective. There can be more of them, they can be highly focussed (mini-conferences) with more targetted agendas, they are cheap (often free) and do not require travel and accommodation. And of course, the 2 modes can be merged when f2f conferences also run Elluminate (or another suitable system) and provide wikis, social networking and blogging. This opens up conferences to individuals who cannot other wise make it. And often the sessions can be recorded.

There is a growing understanding of the main differences and the main pros and cons of each conference mode. One disadvantage of the on-line mode is that I had to buy my own beer. On the otherhand I didn’t make a fool of myself at the disco. Actually the Emerge conference did have a very successful social event in Second Life with a DJ and fashion show. Sadly I couldn’t make it because I found my home PC was under spec for the new SL client and it wouldn’t install.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/04/19/the-worlds-a-twitter/

I overheard on the radio this morning, while scraping the toast, some mention of twitter and the fact that some person in Downing St. is twitting (tweeting?) regularly about what’s going on there. I made a mental note to look it up on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme listen again. Partly because I usually mislay mental notes and partly because my small group of twitter mates might be interested I posted a tweet (twit?) mentioning it. Within a short time someone posted a reply giving me the URL to the programme and how far to fast forward to find the relevant bit (14 mins 30 secs) and telling me that the Today programme  runs a twitter channel itself. Looking at this I see that most, perhaps all, BBC Regional news services have twitter channels too. A little later my original tweet got another reply with a link to the Downing St. twitter channel and to Bill Thompson who was being interviewed on the Today programme, from where I found the interviewer, Rory Cellan-Jones. This in turn led me to another tweet with links to a Guardian article about the Downing St. twitter-er.

I must say I find the twitter phenomenon fascinating. It is ripe for sociological analysis and I’m sure someone somewhere is already doing it. It exemplifies so many aspects of on-line social networking  - networks within networks, the power the ‘friends of a friend’ connections, the importance of reputation and status, the collective and collaborative evaluation and dissemination of information and resources, and much more. Who would have thought that a stream of short messages (max 14o characters), often about where people are, what they are eating, watching on TV, what mood they are in, what the weather is like where they are, that they are in a traffic jam eating chocolate, and so on could also be such a powerful research tool. And the seemingly trivial nature of many posts is not trivial at all in the context of groups of twitter-ers and the nature of their identities and relationships and the reality of their virtual community. I’m getting close to abandoning the notion of 'virtual' in these contexts. It just obscures more of the nature of these sorts of communities and their relations than it illuminates. The experience is real, the information is real, the people are real, their activities are real and, dare I say it, the feeling of attachment and even to some extent obligation are real. Or at least as real as in some networks and communities I am involved with off-line.