1. This week's learning path

In response to student feedback this week's overview has been expanded in an attempt to provide an overview of the tasks and commitment required for this week's learning path. Please let us know if this approach is useful and if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Note: The following summarises the minimum expectation. It is hoped and expected that the following activities will open up other activities and resources with which you can usefully engage.

Experiencing

Defines emerging practice and asks you to read summarises for two different predictions about which emerging practices will impact higher education.  

This includes:

• Two Moodle books with a total of 5 pages.

• Reading 2 pages of the 2017 Horizon Report.

• Reading 1 page and 2 figures from the Next Generation Pedagogy report.

Examining

Asks you to think about your disciplinary learning and teaching experience and ponder what, if any emerging practices (including those from the Horizon and Next Generation Pedagogy reports) you’ve observed. Questions that are related the question “What is my conception of good teaching practice in my discipline?” (Assignment 1, Part B).

This includes:

• One Moodle book with 1 page.

• Writing a blog post with your thoughts and sharing it via a discussion forum.

Explaining

Asks you to read and ponder the abstract conceptualisations: CLEM, PKM, critical reflection, learning design and teaching design.

This includes:

• Two Moodle books with 15 pages

• Reading two blog posts about PKM and potentially starting development of  your own PKM routine.

• Potentially reading two blog posts as examples of a critical examination of emerging practices.

• Reading 7 pages from Goodyear (2015) and reflecting how that applies to your context

Applying

Asks you to apply what you’ve done throughout the learning path and start working on answering the question “How can I continue to develop my teaching practice?” (Assignment 1, Part C)

This includes:

• One Moodle book with 2 pages.

• Reading the description for Assignment 1, Part C.

• Writing a blog post or creating another artefact that maps what you’ve learned this week with Assignment 1, Part C.

2. This week’s references

The following references can also be found in the Week 3 section of the library of the course's Zotero group.

Reference list

Asked to read 2 pages. Adams Becker, S, Cummins, M, Davis, A, Freeman, A, Hall Giesinger, C, & Ananthanarayanan, V. (2017). NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2017-nmc-horizon-report-he-EN.pdf

Dalziel, J., Conole, G., Wills, S., Walker, S., Bennett, S., Dobozy, E., … Bower, M. (2016). The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2016(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.407

Dinham, S. M. (1989). Teaching as design: theory, research and implications for design teaching. Design Studies, 10(2), 80–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X(89)90040-9

Asked to read 7 pages. Goodyear, P. (2015). Teaching As Design. HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 2, 27–50.

Hum, G., Amundsen, C., & Emmioglu, E. (2015). Evaluating a teaching development grants program: Our framework, process, initial findings, and reflections. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 46, 29–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2015.02.004

Lockyer, L., Heathcote, E., & Dawson, S. (2013). Informing Pedagogical Action: Aligning Learning Analytics With Learning Design. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(10), 1439–1459. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213479367

Potential to read. Michael Morris, Sean, & Stommel, Jesse. (2017, June 15). A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin. Retrieved July 15, 2017, from http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/resisting-edtech/

Mor, Y., Ferguson, R., & Wasson, B. (2015). Editorial: Learning design, teacher inquiry into student learning and learning analytics: A call for action. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(2), 221–229. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12273

Shor, I. (2012). Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. University of Chicago Press.

Potential to read. Watters, A. (2016) The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release. (2016, November 2). Retrieved July 16, 2017, from http://hackeducation.com/2016/11/02/futures

Asked to read 3 pages (2 mostly images) Witthaus, Gabi, Rodriguez, Brenda, Guardia, Lourdes, & Campillo, Girona. (2016). Next Generation Pedagogy: IDEAS for Online and Blended Higher Education. Final report of the FUTURA (Future of University Teaching: Update and a Roadmap for Advancement) project. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Retrieved from http://cv.uoc.edu/webapps/dspace_rei/handle/10609/51441

1. Introduction

If you listen to any senior executive from a university, then it won’t take long for them to talk about change and not long after descend into cliche. There is broad acceptance that higher education and, in particular, learning and teaching within higher education, that change is the new normal. Last week you read Goodyear’s (2015) description of four of the sets of forces driving this change in higher education.

The driving question for this week’s learning path is

How will I find and evaluate emerging practices?

The assumption is that a master teacher looks to change not (just) because of external factors, but as part of what Common (1989) called the struggle to improve (perhaps in response to external changes, but also because of student learning). Master teachers look to improve, they look for emerging practices that will help them improve.

The focus for this week and next week is to help you start developing a plan (Assignment 1, Part C) for how you to find and evaluate emerging practices that are relevant to your struggle to improve. These two weeks will use two specific examples of emerging practice - design for learning; and learning analytics. Topics that were first introduced when you read Mor, Ferguson & Wasson (2015) in the Week 1 learning path.

Later in the course, as you think about your particular inquiry into student learning (Assignment 2, Part B), you will apply your plan for looking for and evaluating emerging practice relevant to your context and need (Assignment 2, Part A).

2. What is emerging practice?

Before we go any further, what is emerging practice?

In this course, we’ll use a definition of emerging practice that draws on Hum et al (2015) and what they describe as (emphasis added)

knowledge gained when an instructor systematically investigates questions they have about their own disciplinary teaching practice, most often in our case by studying the effectiveness of a ‘‘new’’ (to them) teaching approach (p. 30)

The practice itself might be quite old, but the focus here is on something new to your practice.

For example, Kolb’s reflective cycle has been around for a long time. Also, as shown in last week’s learning path the idea of a “learning path” is an idea that I (David) have been using since 2012. However, using Kolb’s reflective cycle to influence the design of the learning path for EDU8702 this semester is an example of “emerging practice”.  It is new to my teaching approach and has arisen out of an investigation.

Emerging practice doesn’t have to involve technology and it doesn’t have to be flashy or large scale. It’s something you haven’t tried before.

1. Introduction

The last book established that our definition of emerging practice is something new to your learning and teaching practice, whether it’s old or new. The last book also mentioned that “change is the new normal”. There are suggestions that tertiary education is (or should be) undergoing radical transformations driven largely by broader societal changes. Consequently, quite a bit of effort has been expended by a raft of people offering predictions about what emerging practices will (or should) influence tertiary education in the near and long-term future.

This book provides you with a brief taste of these predictions by asking you to read overviews from two different views of broader, looming emerging practice.

2. The Horizon Report

The 2017 Horizon Report (Adams et al., 2017) is the 14th iteration of a process that aims to understand what emerging technologies and other factors are likely to impact higher education over the next five years (the “horizon”).

3. The Next Generation Pedagogy report

The Next Generation Pedagogy report (Witthaus, G, Rodriguez, B, Guardia, L, & Campillo, G, 2016) from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya focuses more explicitly on learning and teaching. It has developed a framework that includes five signposts pointing to next generation pedagogy and has linked these to a number of example practices.

1. Reflection

By nature of being enrolled in this course, you will likely have been involved with formal education and higher education for quite some time. Possibly, more than sufficient time for new practices, approaches and technologies to have emerged.

1. Introduction

As previously mentioned, the driving question for this week’s learning path is

How will I find and evaluate emerging practices?

Having looked at some potential emerging practices, this book asks you to think about the two components of this driving question

How will I find emerging practices?
How will I evaluate emerging practices?

The section of the learning path introduces a set of abstract conceptualisations (models, frameworks, acronyms) that may help you develop answers to these questions.

This book introduces you (in some cases very briefly) to CLEM, PKM, critical pedagogy and the critical evaluation of educational technology. These are ideas that may help you answer the above questions.

To provide a concrete example of evaluating emerging practices, this book and the next introduce the related, overlapping and somewhat confusing emerging practices of learning design and design for learning. This book offers a perspective suggesting that learning design has not been as successful as some might have hoped, you’ll need to make an evaluation on whether or not this is an appropriate suggestion.

The next book offers a narrower abstract conceptualisation of design for learning (aka teaching as design) and suggests that it is an emerging practice worth of adoption, especially if you are engaged in teacher inquiry into student learning.

2. How will I find emerging practices? CLEM?

CLEM is an acronym - Community, Literature, Examples, and Models - intended to act as a simple mnemonic for some potentially useful sources of emerging practices for just about any topic. It’s not perfect, but it’s simple.

The following describes each component of CLEM and poses some relevant questions for each component. The next page is a very early example of a "CLEM analysis" of a particular emerging practice - learning design.

Community

Some emerging practices will have developed an online (or offline) community of people interested in and learning about and using the particular practice. These communities might be very tight knit and focused around a single website or place. Or, they might be spread out across various websites and face-to-face sessions. Either way, these communities have typically developed a lot of useful knowledge and resources about how to learn and engage in the practice. Joining the community can be an important part of learning.

Possible questions to ask

What, where and how active are the communities engaged with the emerging practice? Are there different communities? Is there a related disciplinary community? How do you engage with this community? How active are these communities? Where do you go to get help?

Literature

Some emerging practices will become the topic of practitioner and scholarly literature. That literature can (but not always) provide useful insights into what works and what doesn't. Literature may also help provide connections with broader educational theory, useful justification, and illustrate useful applications of the emerging practice. Literature can also offer critical examinations of emerging practice.

Possible questions to ask

What academic literature exists around a particular emerging practice? What does it reveal about this emerging practice? What does it say about how and when to use this emerging practice, and how and when not to? Why and what is this emerging practice good for when it comes to student learning? What are the common problems and limitations? How

Examples

Learning from example has a long tradition and significant value. It’s often easier to learn from example, especially examples from a similar context. The communities and literature around practices are likely to be contain numerous examples.

Exercise

What examples exist? What can you learn from those examples? What makes a good example? What makes a bad example? Are there examples applicable to your context?

Models

A model (aka schema, theory, framework) can be seen as an attempt to provide a useful abstraction or pattern of ideas and relationships. The abstraction aims to reduce the complexity of understanding a new practice by only focusing on the important aspects. Models provide a way to represent, organise, and perceive how something works and if it might work in your context.

We all implicitly build models/schema and use them to guide our decision making. There is also value in explicitly looking for, building, and testing models of new practices, especially if you’re able to integrate them into, or transform, your existing models.

Possible questions to ask

What models exist for the new practice? What relevant models do you currently use? What are the important elements of the new practice?

3. Learning design CLEM - v0.5

Design for learning (aka learning design) is an emerging practice that will be looked at explicitly this week. Back in the week 1 learning path you read Mor, Ferguson, & Wasson (2015). An article that started by looking at design for learning and then linked it to teacher inquiry into student learning. Work on learning design has been going on since the early 2000s. More than enough time for a lot of work to be done on tools, practices and research.

The following few pages uses learning design as an example of the potential benefits of using the CLEM acronym to guide a search for information about an emerging practice. It's not necessary for you to develop a deep insight into learning design from this CLEM.  Rather focus on whether or not it may be of use to you for finding and thinking about emerging practice.

As you read through the following CLEM analysis, consider the following exercises.

 

3.1. Community - learning design

Cloudworks

Cloudworks - arising out of a Learning Design project at the Open University, Cloudworks provides “a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences.” Or, this page describes it as “a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs”

More recent contributions appears to be spam.

LAMS

LAMS Community - a community site for users of LAMS. LAMS is perhaps the best known visual author environment for designing and reusing learning sequences through the use of learning designs.  The “What is LAMS?” lesson is an example of the learning experiences that LAMS can be used to produce.

The last update on the LAMS community initial page appears to be circa-2004. The forums have some activity from 2017 and apparently version 3.0 of LAMS was released in 2016.

3.2. Literature - learning design

A need to document & share examples of good educational practice combined with the the potential of the Internet Learning design contributed to the emergence of learning design in the early 2000s (Lockyer, Heathcote, & Dawson, 2013).

Learning design describes the sequence of learning tasks, resources, and supports that a teacher constructs for students over part of, or the entire, academic semester. A learning design captures the pedagogical intent of a unit of study. Learning designs provide a board picture of a series of planned pedagogical actions rather than detailed accounts of a particular instructional event (as might be described in a traditional lesson plan). (Lockyer, Heathcote, & Dawson, 2013, pp. 1441-1442)

Subsequent research into looked more deeply at learning design (Agostinho, Bennett, Lockyer, & Harper, 2013; Maina & Craft, 2015), the related idea of design for learning (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013; Goodyear, 2015; Goodyear & Dimitriadis, 2013), and the development of specifications and tools to support design (Bennett, Agostinho, & Lockyer, 2015).

However, little research that takes “a close look at how higher education teachers engage in design processes” (Goodyear, 2015, p. 43). Consequently, “little is known about the design work that university teachers actually do” (Bennett, Agostinho, & Lockyer, 2016, p. 1).

The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design (Dalziel et al., 2016) is an article generated at a 2012 meeting of learning design experts. It provides an example of a particular type of learning design; identifies some definitional problems with learning design; and offers a particular description of the learning design field

seeks to develop a descriptive framework for teaching and learning activities (“educational notation”), and to explore how this framework can assist educators to share and adopt great teaching ideas.

Potentially a very different understanding of learning design from that taken by the learning/teaching as design (Goodyear, 2015; Goodyear & Dimitriadis, 2013) literature.  Appears to be some confusion here.

3.3. Examples - learning design

The “What is LAMS?” lesson mentioned above provides an example of a simple learning design system in action.

Textual and visual description of an example learning design from Dalziel et al (2016) using LAMS (adapted from this). This section mentions other approaches to generating a descriptive framework for learning designs.

The Learning Design Grid project provides a Learning Designs page that points to a number of example learning designs from other projects, including: learning designs @ UoW; the LAMS public sequence repository; the Learning Designer tool from the London Knowledge Lab (listed as early release since 2013, and appears to be very slow); and, another collection of learning designs from the UoW.

3.4. Models

Learning design conceptual map

The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design (Dalziel et al., 2016) offers a Learning Design Conceptual Map that provides a potentially useful representation of the broader challenge of “creating learning experiences aligned to particular pedagogical approaches and learning objectives”. A map that includes a teaching cycle component that resonates with the idea of teacher inquiry into student learning.

Goodyear

Goodyear (2015) provides an activity-centered design model (p. 33) that is suggested to outline the essence of his view of teaching as design.

4. How will I evaluate emerging practices? PKM?

CLEM is mnemonic acronym that reminds you about different sources where you might find out about emerging practice. But how will you make use of those sources?  How will you develop your knowledge of emerging practices? How will you maintain currency in your teaching practice?

These are questions you will be asked to answer as part of Assignment 1, Part C. A major aim for this book and this learning path is to help you start developing answers to those questions.

In the following you will be introduced to Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM). One approach that might be used to answer the above questions. The intent of the following is not that you are required to use PKM, it is simply provided as one example of some of what you’ll need to consider.

 

5. How will you evaluate emerging practice? A critical eye?

Being able to undertake a critical examination of emerging practices is a useful and important skill. A skill related to the idea of critical reflection introduced last week, but there is much more. It’s beyond the scope of this course to delve to deeply into that. However, the following offers a taste.

The critical turn has been applied to pedagogy resulting in the following definition of critical pedagogy

Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. (Shor, 2012, p. 129)

The following two pages point to examples where a critical eye has been cast over emerging practices within higher education.

5.1. Critical evaluation of educational technology

A critical perspective has led Morris & Stommel (2017) developing the following rubric for critically evaluating digital tools. They then use this rubric to talk about TurnitIn, a widely used plagiarism detection tool.

1. Who owns the tool? What is the name of the company, the CEO? What are their politics? What does the tool say it does? What does it actually do?

2. What data are we required to provide in order to use the tool (login, e-mail, birthdate, etc.)? What flexibility do we have to be anonymous, or to protect our data? Where is data housed; who owns the data? What are the implications for in-class use? Will others be able to use/copy/own our work there?

3. How does this tool act or not act as a mediator for our pedagogies? Does the tool attempt to dictate our pedagogies? How is its design pedagogical? Or exactly not pedagogical? Does the tool offer a way that “learning can most deeply and intimately begin”?

The topics of academic integrity, plagiarism and assessment practices are topics wide open for critical evaluation. If you’re interested in these, please do read Moriss and Stommel (2017) and perhaps this article from the same site.

5.2. A critical examination of technology futures and the Horizon Report

In this blog post (based on the notes for a conference presentation) Audrey Watters casts a critical eye over the “history of the future of education”, including the Horizon Report mentioned at the start of this learning path. Watters critiques the method used by the Horizon Report and argues that the predictions are “almost wrong in someway or another”. Some are just plain wrong. For example, predicting Virtual Worlds in 2007, and we’re still waiting. Others are “not even wrong” because

how would you argue against “collaborative learning” as occurring – now or some day – in classrooms? As a prediction about the future, it is not even wrong.

But more importantly Watters argues that these acts of prediction have more negative impacts in the way they encourage society and its members to think and act around technology and change. For example, she cites historians who contend that we’re actually in an era of great technological stagnation, not innovation. She also warns that “these sorts of predictions, these assessments about the present and the future, frequently serve to define, disrupt, destabilize our institutions” and in particular understandings of education and educational institutions.

1. Introduction

The last book included a “learning design CLEM” that could potentially suggest that the field of learning design has some troubles. In part, this was intentional and designed to illustrate the potential benefit of a “CLEM” for evaluating an emerging practice. It was intended to encourage you to critical evaluate all of what is provided in this course and beyond.

As established in previous weeks the assumption in this course is that there is significant value in concepts such as design for learning and teaching as design that are related with learning design. Value that is based on the assumptions expressed by Dinham (1989) as

… the function of teaching is to arrange—to design and implement—a context in which learning can flourish (p. 80)

The teacher inquiry into student learning process assumes this focus. The following uses Goodyear (2015) to define in more detail this view of teaching as design and hopefully encourage you to think about how (and perhaps if) it may apply to your practice.

2. Why teaching as design?

Goodyear (2015) suggests that the argument for design for learning is

...both an economic and an educational argument...I show that teaching traditionally—in the literal sense of teaching as one was taught oneself—is unable to cope with the changes now besetting higher education. Shifting resources towards design for learning, and adopting more effective design practices, is a credible strategy for improving the quality of higher education while managing with tighter funding. This applies at all key levels within the university. I will argue that spending more time on design will allow individual teachers and teaching teams to cope with intensifying pressures on the quality of their work, and to create better learning opportunities for their students. As a corollary, universities that find better ways of supporting the design work of their teaching staff will be well placed to meet the changing needs of students. (p. 28)

 

3. Teaching "as it is" in higher education

The following reading from Goodyear (2015) offers various perspectives on teaching in higher education and closes with a paragraph that makes observations that are directly relevant to this course and teacher inquiry into student learning.

Rushing to implementation

Last week you were introduced to three lenses that might be useful to rethink your assumptions. This was sparked by the observation from Hansen and Wasson (2016) that teachers engaged in teacher inquiry into student learning tended to jump to the research question. An observation that resonates with Goodyear’s (2015) descriptions from Section 2 of

the framing of problems is not routinely questioned, and analysis all too often proceeds hastily to implementation…likely to jump straight to a solution...being submerged in the taken-for-granted assumptions of both a disciplinary tradition and a teaching tradition can make solutions look deceptively self-evident (p. 31)

Questioning of assumptions, critical reflection and to frame and reframe problems appear to be important contributors to the practice of design for learning.

4. Teaching as design

The following reading from Goodyear (2015) provides more detail about what Teaching as Design looks like

 

1. Introduction

As outlined at the start of the learning path, the driving question for this week is

How will I find and evaluate emerging practices?

Hopefully, this week’s learning path has provided a context that has helped you start developing some answers to that question.

To help with this, the learning path:

• Started by offering a definition of emerging practice, and asked you look at two different perspectives on what emerging practices may be looming for higher education.
• With those perspectives as potential inspiration, you were asked to reflect on how and if undergraduate learning in your discipline has changed since your early undergraduate days.
• Next, a number of different abstract conceptualisations: CLEM, PKM, learning design, teaching as design and very briefly critical pedagogy and critical evaluation of educational technology.

Teaching as design, and learning design were introduced for two reasons.

First, design for learning captures an important emerging practice within higher education to frame teaching as design. An abstract conceptualisation that resonates with the idea of teacher inquiry into student learning that underpins this course.

Secondly, the limited success of learning design (so far) and confusion over exactly what it means also offers a good example of the difficulty of making decisions about which emerging practice you should adopt.

CLEM and PKM are offered as abstract conceptualisations that may help you answer the driving question for this week.

What now?

Now it’s time to apply these abstract conceptualisations to develop your personal answers to this week’s driving question and the following related question

How can I continue to develop my teaching practice?

This is the question that Assignment 1, Part C asks you to answer.

2. How can I continue to develop my teaching practice?