Assignment One: Appendixes

Appendix A: Course Genie Movies

Beaumont, P. (2006), Online Training 2: Course Genie 2.0, Edge Hill University, http://ltd-edgehill.blogspot.com/2006/03/online-training-2-course-genie-20-61.html [accessed 07 June 2006].


Appendix B: Action plan

Following on from the analysis of my experiences of teaching discussed in part one of this assignment; I will now put forward an action plan. This will state the developments and changes that I have identified to improve student learning and better achieve the aims of my teaching, next time the teaching covered or similar teaching is repeated.

In the case of screencasts movies used to teach users to use the Course Genie software and other pieces of software, I wanted to add possibilities for social negotiation in the learning. This would affect many things from adding learning objectives that could be socially negotiated, because for example objectives already there, such as adding an image can only be done one way. The teaching would have to be more in depth looking perhaps at why you might want to add an image, graphic design issues and where is the best place to find the images in the first place. The students’ learning around these things could incorporate the use of discussion boards in developing relevant answers to the questions around using images, while still including the instructions about how to then add the image.

To help make sure the content of the videos is relevant to users who are watching them, I want to make sure the desired learning outcomes are explicitly noted at the start of each movie, rather than at the start of the series of videos. This lets the user know more easily and quickly if the movie is covering what they need to know, so they can make the decision themselves about whether their prior knowledge means that there is no point in watching further. This also is a step towards asking the students to be self regulated learners, which is something that Doolittle in ‘Constructivism and Online Education’ argues should be a learning objective.

Further steps to encouraging the learner to be independent and the teacher a facilitator not instructor is to include fewer sections saying how to do an action, and instead explain how to use the software’s help files. This would mean that the student would be able to look for help in this and other pieces of software which will all have help files. The Course Genie training though, is meant as an alternative to using the help files, partly for those who find it easier to learn from videos than textual instructions.

Finally regarding the Course Genie training, there is a need for adjustments for accessibility. Captions should be added to improve the experience for users who are Deaf or hard of hearing.


Now I’ll move onto looking at those sessions designed for teaching students to use Dreamweaver web development software to create simple web sites, and how I would like to develop that.

Allowing the opportunities for social negotiation would be more straightforward as the students are in the same place at the same time. There could be a section near the beginning of the first session where students discuss in small groups what situations they might want to use a web site to communicate information. This might help make the whole exercise more relevant to them by putting it in a real world context.

Following on from asking the students to explore together the relevance of the sessions, it would be then good for the teachers to present the learning objectives to the students so that they see what they are aiming at and why. This could lead into further group discussion about how the learning objectives are relevant to the students. I think that this would be challenging for the teacher as the students might decide that some sections are not relevant to them.

Up until now we had not considered assessing the students in these sessions as the web sites that are created are assessed by a subject teacher. Formative assessment is important to encourage and we could include this after the first session perhaps. Students could be given a set of questions or tasks to complete between the first and the second session, which would be self assessed and show the students if they remembered how to do important tasks using the Dreamweaver software.

It is possible in these three sessions that, perhaps encouraged by the technical nature of the subject matter, the teachers are acting as instructors rather than guides and facilitators. We could explain to the students the basic concepts involved in using the software, and how to use the help files. When they ask for help, rather than telling them step by step how to, we could remind them to use the help files, perhaps giving hints here and there while they try and work out how to do different things. As the teacher works with the student, they would have the opportunity to explain concepts in different ways and from different perspectives if required. However this method of working as a guide rather than an instructor takes a lot more teacher time and it would be difficult to know if two teachers can do this to the full extent we have talked about here.


In conclusion there are several ways in which both of the teaching experiences could be developed and improved next time that they take place. However if all of the improvements mentioned above were put into place the lessons could become over long. It would require looking at priorities of what we thought was most important in each case to student learning, updating the learning objectives perhaps and then aligning the teaching with them.

Assignment One: Conclusion and Bibliography

Conclusion

This piece has explored two of my teaching experiences, using Gibbs reflective cycle as an overall structure and Doolittle’s eight constructivist design principles as a structure for the actual analysis of the experiences.

The analysis brought up several ways in which the teaching could be developed to improve student learning and also to align better with my philosophy of teaching and what I want to achieve though teaching. For example a theme that emerged in the analysis which related to my philosophy of teaching was the need for the reasons for the learning experiences, which includes the learning outcomes, to be more explicit and understood by students. This and the other ways that the teaching could be improved will be included in an action plan (Appendix B).


Bibliography:

Siemens, G. (2005) ‘Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age’ International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, Vol. 2(No. 1), http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm [accessed 07 June 2006].

Waters, M. (2005) ‘Pedagogy in VET: a background paper’
TAFE Development Centre, http://www.tafecentre.vic.edu.au/documents/PedagogyinVET.pdf [accessed 07 June 2006].

Ghayle and Lillyman (1997) Learning journals and critical incidents : reflective practice for health care professionals, Quay Books.

Honey, P. and Mumford, A. (1992), The Manual Of Learning Styles, Peter Honey Publications.

Doolittle, P. (1999) ‘Constructivism and Online Education’, http://edpsychserver.ed.vt.edu/workshops/tohe1999/online.html [accessed 07 June 2006].

Doolittle, P. (2001) Multimedia Learning: Empirical Results and Practical Applications, Teaching Online in Higher Education Online Conference, http://www.ipfw.edu/as/tohe/2001/Papers/doo.htm [accessed 07 June 2006].

Assignment One: Section Two - Face to Face Experiences

Next some experiences of face to face teaching will be analysed. The experiences will be explored and analysed in the same way as in the last section.

Creating Web Sites with Dreamweaver Software Sessions

The first experience analysed will be a three-part teaching session for geography students using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver web development software to complete an assignment. I developed and delivered this teaching alongside my colleague Mark Roche, after being asked by a geography lecturer. We were given a list of objectives that the students’ assignments had to meet, and were asked to teach a group of about 10 students how to use the software to complete an assignment meeting those objectives. I consider this a critical incident because this has been the only time that I have been so involved in helping the students learn something they directly need to do properly to pass an assignment.

Mark and I met to create a lesson plan, identifying what we would have to make sure the students knew, including using the software and other basic IT literacy skills such as file management. This was split into three two-hour sections to be delivered over three weeks, which allowed time to make sure the students could approach us with any questions and problems at the end of the last session. The main sections of the sessions were to be:
Introduce ourselves to the students.
Find out about the students and their previous experience of web site design.
Introduce the aims of the session.
Show examples of previous work that met and exceeded the pass mark.
Described the process that is required to create a web site.
Ask the student to design a site layout, a supporting file structure and basic page templates.
Show the student how to take the first steps using the Dreamweaver software.
Support the students on a more individual basis as they develop their projects and need support and guidance.

Before the training I was concerned that the students would not respond well to being asked to plan before they got on with creating their web sites. In reality, the students accepted this and I felt that they took the need for planning seriously enough for it to have been a useful foundation to their projects.

I think that doing the teaching the way we did worked well from the perspective of getting the students through the assignment. Because they knew that they would see us over a few weeks, they could bring any issues and ideas knowing that we would be there to advise and help.

From a classroom management point of view, completing all the front of class instruction that everyone needed to follow at first made things simpler and easier because we didn’t need to ask for everyone’s attention as had occurred in other classes that I have taught.

Finally and most importantly, from a student’s learning perspective, it seemed to me that we could see some students understanding important concepts to do with creating Web Sites. One time for example, a student was stuck trying to add links and had to ask for help more than once. The final time they asked for help they said that they understood what we meant and were able to add the rest of the links themselves. From what I could see, many of the students’ problems were solved by fellow students sitting near them, before the students had to ask us for help. This fits in with ideas of social learning and the social constructivist ideas about learning, and is an example of students who are able to communicate, in this case because they are in the same room, supporting each others’ learning.
Things in the training that might not have helped student learning as well as we would have liked, were the reliance of some students on our help. I have referred to this with a positive spin, and I believe that knowing that a session with ourselves, who the students see as experts, encouraged some of the students to keep working on what they could do outside the lesson, knowing that their problems would be solvable in the next lesson. What I’m referring to here is the fact that in the lesson, a certain student asked for help more regularly than others. Perhaps this was an over reliance on the teachers meaning the student was not being forced to fully engage with learning the software.

We will use Doolittle’s eight design principles again to analyse the learning in detail and decide what could have been done differently to improve learning.

The first principle asks for real world environments and sitting at computers using the software to create real Web Sites on topics is as real as could be hoped for. It was a very similar process to the process they would go through to create any web site in any situation. In the future they may have web site creation software tools that work slightly differently, but the design process that they went through will be the same.

The social negotiation asked for by the second principle may be in evidence although there are certain sections of the teaching that do not require social negotiation and mediation, such as how to add a link to the web page, because you must do it a certain way. There are other things that can and should be, such as how you allow your site’s users to navigate the site. Because students were spending the six hours in the classroom together, they had chance to talk to each other and discuss possibilities with each other and the teachers. We as teachers moved round the room talking to students who we thought required assistance but apart from that, discussion over different possibilities was not actively encouraged as part of the learning experience.,

The third principle focuses on relevance and this learning experience makes the creation of web sites relevant to the students by asking them to complete a geography assignment and present the information in the non-linear form that a web site encourages. There is no discussion in the training though about how this is relevant to the students’ interests and future needs, so the relevance is not explicit.

The fourth principle was met to an extent by asking the group as a whole who had experience of creating web sites. One student said that he had which meant we could tell him what he needed to go through with the group and where he could work independently. Of course this question does not retrieve much detailed information from the students, but I think that it is enough for our purposes in these sessions because we are only using and teaching basic web design knowledge and skills, so students either know it through previous learning or they don’t.

Regarding principle five, in the case of these sessions, I was not involved in the formal assessment at all, and it could be said that we do not need consider this. However it is worth looking at if formative assessment could be built in between the sessions. For example if we have covered how to do certain things in a session we could create online resources such as a quiz to see if the students can remember certain things. If they haven’t they can be linked to online resources that go over things again for them.

Relating this experience to principle six, in this experience the students had to create something themselves, which means that they must make sure that they are doing the work over a period of time, and must be engaged with what they are doing. Could we as teachers encourage this any more? Perhaps by encouraging those who are struggling to get their assignment finished to create a plan of what they need to do and when they will do it. Not all students might want to or need to do this, but we could offer it as an option.

Because of the short term nature and the majority of the learning outcomes being technical, like the screencasting teaching mentioned above there can be an assumption on our part that we need to instruct, as is argued against by principle seven. We can move away from that by perhaps giving basic information on how to use the Dreamweaver software and encouraging students to use the software’s help files rather than us telling them the answers.

Regarding principle eight, as teachers in this context we are standing at the front of a class and then talking to the students one-to-one later, which allows us to discuss what was said at the front in different ways until we feel that the student has understood. This occurs very naturally, and we could say to the students that if they do not understand fully what we are saying at the front, they should ask us to explain again one-to-one.

Assignment One: Section One - Online Resources

The first experience that will be explored here is related to designing, creating and distributing online resources. The examples of online resources that will be explored are screencast videos, which are designed to guide students through learning to use certain pieces of computer software. These screencasts are videos showing what would be seen on a computer monitor alongside an audio commentary.

Screencast: Using Course Genie 2.0

These resources were considered necessary because students and staff at Edge Hill are required to have certain levels of IT skills to do tasks related to teaching and learning that are expected of them. There are also situations where the technology will enable them to do useful things to improve what they are doing or to save them time. Because our team's role is to develop the use of technology at the institution further, our activities can add to the amount of skills and knowledge the staff and students require, and over the last few years we have tried to respond to the amount of training required through face-to-face sessions and we will discuss examples of these later. It was noticed that our team could not meet all the increasing demand from staff and students through face-to-face sessions, and some sort of help online that people could access whenever they needed it was required.

The first experience to explore will be the ‘Using Course Genie 2.0’ course which is made up of 25 lessons and lasts about 70 minutes (Appendix A). The ‘Using Course Genie 2.0’ course was designed for Edge Hill staff that are developing resources for use on our Virtual Learning Environment, and its purpose is to allow then to develop online resources using the ‘Course Genie’ software, while using mainly the skills they need to know to use Microsoft Word. Firstly the sections required to train the member of staff to develop resources were listed, and important things to include in each session were noted. The training was recorded 'live' with the recording of actions on the computer and voice being done at the same time. An intention with the creation of the training was that the staff would be able to work alongside the training to create an example piece of work. When the training was completed it was made available online and people who might want to use it were informed. My feeling when watching the complete training was that the training was complete enough to help the staff become reasonably independent with as we hoped.

When deciding if the teaching went well or not, we notice a major difference between this type of teaching and face-to-face types, the fact that we cannot see a user's reaction to the training. This training was made accessible via a ‘weblog’ web page, meaning people could put comments about the training on the website, but up until now no-one has. Because I have had no feedback yet, analysis of the success of and possibilities for future development of will rely on looking at how what I created relates to learning theory, my philosophy of teaching, user needs such as accessibility and the literature about teaching methods.

The training intends to enable the user to learn in different ways. I am going to use Doolittle’s eight core design principles that are valid whatever type of constructivist approach you subscribe to (Doolittle, 1999) as these will help me to analyse my teaching by comparing it with a model.

These eight principles are:
1. Learning should take place in authentic and real-world environments.
2. Learning should involve social negotiation and mediation.
3. Content and skills should be made relevant to the learner.
4. Content and skills should be understood within the framework of the learner's prior knowledge.
5. Students should be assessed formatively, serving to inform future learning experiences.
6. Students should be encouraged to become self-regulatory, self-mediated, and self-aware.
7. Teachers serve primarily as guides and facilitators of learning, not instructors.
8. Teachers should provide for and encourage multiple perspectives and representations of content.

Firstly Doolittle argues that experience needs to be in real world environments. I would argue that screencasting training lends itself to this because you are recording what is happening. This training was going through a project step by step to help the user relate it to a real world situation more easily.

The second principle involves social negotiation. Doolittle notes that online education is ideal for the promotion of this, but the one way nature of screencasting in itself prevents this if it is not included in a wider range of tools. In this situation email addresses are supplied in case the user needs help or wants to know more. A link to an online discussion board, visited by the teacher would perhaps encourage further interaction and discussion. It might also be a source of feedback on the course that could feed into future versions. As well as this, the teacher could talk about their thought processes and reasons for what they are doing during the training. While again this is one way communication, it allows the user to see a little more how others see things.

Regarding the third principle, while the training videos are designed in a linear format, the user can choose from the titles to decide which episodes might be useful for them to watch. These screencast courses are also designed to be included in a larger library of courses, allowing the user much more choice of what training might help them. To better show the users how these Course Genie learning materials are relevant to them, each episode could have been started by stating openly what the user is intended to learn from it. This would mean that users watching some rather than all of the episodes would have the aims of the training made explicit to them, which also fits in with what I noted that I thought important in my philosophy of teaching section earlier in this piece.

Doolittle notes when talking about the fourth principle, that this is difficult to do in online education, because it requires some sort of discussion between the teacher and the learner. Screencast learning objects themselves have no facility to allow this discussion, however the way that they are distributed and presented to the user online can allow this to an extent. In the case of this project the various movies are available to watch independently so that the user can read the titles and decide which they need to watch, and which their prior knowledge means that they do not need to watch. When accessing the resources, users could be required to go through a set of questions about current knowledge and experience. The outcome of this ‘skills audit’ could be a list of links that is useful to them.

The current teaching has little that meets the demands of the fifth principle, because the users watch it without the teacher even knowing that they have. Because much of the teaching aims to show the user how to do certain things the user will to an extent have to assess them selves, that is if they cannot do what the video aimed to help them learn they have not learned it and might benefit from watching the video again. However this does not inform the teacher so that future learning resources can be developed and improved. Users could have been given a self assessment quiz at the end, or could be given some sort of quiz or essay that is assessed by a teacher. This would allow the learner to be given formative assessment and the teacher to look at developing the learning materials.

Regarding the sixth principle, the self-motivation required to start a learning experience such as this course points to the fact that the users of this and similar courses are already responsible for their own learning. The course however is not asking the user to develop these qualities in any explicit way, and therefore should have included this as a learning aim, and embedded this into the learning materials.

Regarding the seventh principle in these learning materials, I would have to say the teacher is at times acting as an instructor, especially when the learning aim is for the user to learn to do something using the software. At other times the teacher will be guiding the user towards perhaps thinking how a certain function of the software might enable them to do something that they want to. While I think that teaching this subject requires a certain amount of direct instruction, especially to get those with few skills and little experience of using computers started, the amount of guidance and asking the user to do things on their own could have been greater.

The eighth principle is partly about designing learning materials for a variety of students. Screencasting innately does this to a certain extent, because you are presenting audio and visual learning materials at the same time. Doolittle summarises the work of Mayer et al (cited in Doolittle, 2001) on the subject of using multiple media in learning, noting that when images and audio are working together learning is improved over just one or the other being used. This course also aims to enable to user to do what has been talked about, meaning that learning can also be active. As for accessibility for students with disabilities, the course is not fully accessible to users who are Deaf or hard of hearing. These users would need the course to contain captions to be able to fully make use of the training. As for blind and partially sighted students, the training intends to be useable with the user just listening, but this has not been tested yet.

Assignment One: Introduction

Introduction

This piece is an analysis of my experiences of teaching and supporting learning in Higher Education. These experiences have come out of my role as a Learning Technologist and have therefore involved designing and developing resources for use in meeting learning aims, delivering face-to-face teaching sessions, researching the uses of new and especially online technologies, and advising colleagues on the use of these technologies in their own teaching and supporting learning.

My role

It may be worth explaining role of a Learning Technologist further, so that the reader understands how these experiences fit in the wider higher education context. An academic member of staff might be expected to get involved with teaching, researching and writing on their subject. In comparison a Learning Technologist might be asked to be involved in advising and supporting the academic staff in their use of technologies in teaching and learning, and would be involved in researching and experimenting with the use of technologies generally.

The work with academic staff would include discussing if online and other technologies would help teaching and learning and choosing which technologies to use. It would also involve designing and creating resources, making the resources accessible to all students, supporting the staff and student use of the technologies through teaching them how and when to use them, and finally troubleshooting any related problems.

My philosophy of teaching

My philosophy of teaching relates to each of the situations and incidents that are explored and analysed here. It will therefore be introduced at this point so that in the evaluation, whether or not I'm achieving what I intend to achieve can be included.

The experience of Higher Education should allow and require the student to develop a wide variety of skills, abilities, knowledge and appropriate attitudes relating to their subject area. These should be developed to an appropriate level of complexity for the level of study, such as HE1, HE2, HE3 or M level. The reason or reasons for developing these skills, abilities and knowledge might be one or a combination of items such as to make the student more employable, to give the student the ability and motivation to learn throughout their life or because of the student's interest in the subject. The purpose of teaching is to help focus and guide the student so that the desired learning occurs through the student's activities and study. A teacher’s relationship with a student is to work in partnership with them. This involves the students working independently, to the extent described in the institution’s level descriptors.


Where technologies are introduced, the aim of these should be embedded into the curriculum, and should be to either prepare the student with skills that might help them in their later life and learning or make certain activities easier without removing important learning experiences. Technologies should also enable the students to do things (access materials, take part in experiences) that they would not otherwise be able to do, but which are in line with the learning outcomes of the course. While we have learning outcomes that we focus on, technology especially hyperlinked technologies encourage learning to be more chaotic and curriculum more difficult to keep students focussed on. Networks of people and knowledge develop more easily in this context and are easier to access. This means learning outcomes and curriculum need to focus on metacognitive skills rather than only specific knowledge which restricts the student to a certain learning path and is generally becoming out of date at a faster rate than in the past (Siemens, 2005).

Teaching should take into account different students’ needs, using a learner centred approach, which makes sure that learners are all valued and involved and that learning itself is valued (Waters, 2005). This taking account of needs and valuing learners requires flexibility of teaching so that it can suit different learners, and could be related to a student’s disability, which might require the course, or resources used in the course, to be presented in a way that he/she is able to access. The teaching strategy also needs to take into account the way students learn best, which will vary from student to student (Honey and Mumford, 1992). Therefore a wide variety of learning styles should be catered for where possible, to help different students access and connect with the learning resources.

The student needs to be aware of the learning outcomes of their course and elements within it, as well as why the learning outcomes are important. This motivates the student to get involved in learning activities, partly by showing them that each activity they are asked to undertake is part of the bigger learning experience.

The students should be able to reflect on their development through their course, as this helps them to appreciate, and take charge of, their own learning. The student should be encouraged to learn to identify which skills and what knowledge has been developed at different stages of their course. They can then see what their efforts so far have achieved, and take steps to work on skills and knowledge that still require development.

How this analysis will be organised

Some of the examples presented and analysed here will be critical incidents, by which I mean when there have been challenges where I was unsure of the best decision to make, or where there was a notable success for a student or group in relation to their learning.

When exploring experiences with the aim of analysing them and developing understanding, I find a structure helpful to guide me through the process. In this piece I have chosen the reflective cycle that Gibbs (cited in Ghaye and Lillyman, 1997) put forward. Gibbs broke the process of reflection and analysis down into the following 6 sections:

1. Describe what happened
2. Describe what you felt and thought
3. Evaluate whether it was good or bad
4. Analyse
5. Conclude what else you could have done
6. Create an action plan for next time

The final section will be left out of this particular piece and included in part 2 of the assessment, which is an oral presentation.