Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Conference - Day 1 #altc

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Conference 2014 took place at the University of Warwick 1st - 3rd September
https://www.alt.ac.uk/alt-conference/altc2014
The first day started with a welcome from the conference chairs - Sarah Cornelius, Linda Creanor and Joe Wilson - the 21st ALT Conference has arrived.  They encouraged everyone to engage and interact with ideas and with other delegates and use the conference hashtag #altc plus #innovate #educate #community to share experiences.

Christina Hughes PVC T&L at Warwick University gave a welcome address describing the conference as a 

'Smorgasbord of creative engagement'.  She talked about the global power of MOOCs and open educational models.

The first keynote speech was by Jeff Haywood from the University of Edinburgh and entitled Designing University Education for 2025: Balancing competing priorities.  He started with a quote from Terry Mayes 1995 'Learning Technology and Groundhog Day'.  It takes patience and persistence to make progress and move forward - has learning technology changed in the last 20 years or is it a series of new and exciting initiatives which appear and then disappear? Since 2004 there has been an explosion in online identities and range of tools and technologies.  These tools and technologies are not educational but social consumables - they are part of the user not the institution.  It is the changes in those sort of things that will have an impact on education and learning.  There is now a realisation that it is a certainty that wholly online courses are possible and can be of high quality.  

We may laugh at the 'trough of despondency' but often those technologies do come through, a steady maturity.  

Students do have positive feelings about online courses but do employers trust online education and qualifications?  There are a vast technologies, tools, applications - the conversation prism.  90% of technology in universities is brought in by and used by the students in creative ways - they are student oriented rather than institution oriented.

He then talked about MOOCs at the University of Edinburgh.  You've 'got to brag about MOOCs', everyone does and the slickness of marketing is apparent much more than for traditional courses. Moocs have reopened a debate at policy level about digital education. Courses can be run at large scale, charismatic lecturers can touch learners. Technological innovation is coming out of MOOCs - tools and applications - we need to capitalise on this as an opportunity.

How can we use the technology? Throughput of curriculum - learn at own pace, don't have to wait. How do we increase the productivity of education system?  However productivity is not the vision of many as their driver is to increase the quality of the content and experience.

So what of the future - 2025 - he predicts that, education will be on demand, self paced, location flexible, relevant to your life/ career, affordable, personalised, global and local, high value added.  Without technology then this would be undoable.  A vision is needed at policy level otherwise nothing will transform  - there needs to be a roadmap and investment.  The 'M' will be dropped from MOOCs to OOCs  meaning that students will take at least one core module wholly online and universities will offer most courses as open online courses.  

The technology of the future that will most impact on education is in the areas of security and the internet of things.  Students (and staff and courses) will have a Digital / |Physical co-presence.

 During the Q&A session he was asked about how support will be offered on an individual / small group basis? The answer was that offering support to small groups is not feasible are not at this stage or at least shouldn't be the focus.

What 'leaps' should be taken?

Invest in learning and instructional design, online assessment and learning analytics

It was an interesting talk - it shows that educational technology is higher up the list of priorities in Universities but presumably this because of financial considerations....and productivity....and globalisation

The other presentations I went to were:

Riding the unstoppable WordPress wave - ePortfolios - Alex Furr - University of Southampton

Different themes for different groups of students and different purposes eg medical students and language students. Promote employability - badges. To be successful they need to be embedded in the core content of modules.

Linking the real world to the digital world: QR codes in non-standard teaching spaces
Dan Jagger - University of Manchester

The presentation was about creating video tutorials for use in sewing labs.

Instructions were created in a simple web page for each sewing machine and then these were linked to via QR codes.  

Then two invited speaker sessions:

Bryan Mathers gave an interesting presentation and the slides were engaging with sketches and images

Performance or innovation - which culture for education?

Bucket or fire

Leadership - create a belief system

Make something awesome

Use images to explain ideas - a picture speaks a thousand words
He also said that if you're running a business,  don't run it as a democracy

Fiona Harvey talking about the Watching the Moocs go by - and the ALTMOOCSIG

There are 43+ UK MOOCs plus others not on platforms, The  Future Learn launch had a big impact on MOOCs in the UK. Should QAA have a say on the quality of a MOOC?

People are looking at the technology and seeing what they can use to offer courses?

Are you a teacher on a MOOC?

Participation rates are NOT a measure of success Massive is about reach, how far your knowledge spreads

Pick and mix modules - Change the model for education.

Again a great presentation with images of hands presenting information.

Next the drinks reception and dinner and tomorrow's another day...

Moocs, Music Festivals and Cricket Matches

In July I spent the weekend at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk.  It was the first time I had been to a music festival as opposed to concerts and also the first time I had been camping in a long time.

I blogged about the weekend http://bit.ly/1fuC8tl and very much enjoyed it.

We arrived on the Thursday night and so started to explore on the Friday.  We set off from our small campsite, through a bigger campsite, through the 'village' of shops and facilities and headed towards the arenas.

Then I was struck by the thought 'wow, this is a much bigger place than I expected' and 'I have no idea what to expect or where to find anything' and then realised that I had had this feeling before, in fact very recently.

It was the same sort of feeling as starting a MOOC……

My next thought was ok, what sort of filtering system do I have to put in place in order to make sense of this? 
This has been my immediate response to participating in MOOCs and I thought that although it wasn't exactly the same situation,  there might be some common strategies that could be used?

The similarities were that:

I was in an environment that was massive, there were thousands of people and I didn't know anyone (apart from the person I was with). Thousands of participants and no way of knowing how many or who they were.

I was in an environment that I had signed up to, entered (either physically or virtually) but didn't know what it consisted of – I didn't know the lie of the land.  I could see that the people were in the environment and interacting but didn't have an overview of the whole place.

I could see that the people involved had a purpose, they were individuals or groups and they were there to see/ hear someone or something.  There was an itinerary – i.e. it was possible to find a list of performers (lectures) and there was a list of tents / arenas (rooms) in which you could enter to see the performance.

Most importantly, there was a lot  happening, too many events for one individual to see or participate in them all – it was necessary to dip in and dip out of events and 'go with the flow'.

So that is what we did at the music festival – we picked a couple of performances each day that we wanted to see and then just wandered around and stopped to see or listen to whatever was happening – sometimes we followed the crowd to the popular arenas, sometimes we chose a less busy place in order to interact more and sometimes we went back to the campsite to get away from it all.

Obviously there were differences, one is mainly a physical environment and was entertainment (the music festival) – there were no learning outcomes that I was trying to achieve. 

I could actually see (hear and touch) the other participants, I knew they existed and we were all in the same place. It was real but I was surprised by the similarities in the experience.

Last weekend we went to the Twenty20 cricket match at Chester le Street, Durham.  It was a great day – England v Australia and England won – women's match in the morning and men's in the afternoon.

Again there were a large number of people participating in an event but this time it didn't have any of those moocish overwhelming feelings nor music festival feelings.

I think this is because everyone had a seat – there was a defined space where each individual was placed – there was no choice and no decision to make about where you would place yourself.

There was only one performance at a time, one match, everyone was watching and listening to the same thing at the same time.  There was a start and finish time and it was a performance with rules that those playing and those watching knew about and adhered to.   You could interact with other participants but only the other members of the audience not the players although I suppose by cheering (especially the barmy army) you could influence the performance.  

I don't know whether to feel 'moocish' is good or bad – I don't think it matters as long as you recognise it when it overwhelms you.

Embracing the challenge #ocTEL

The challenge is not the course, the course is fine - in fact as far as MOOCs and online courses are concerned, it's great.  It's my engagement and progress that is the challenge because I am ticking all the boxes of a falling behind MOOC participant at the moment:
1. I have no idea where I'm up to with the course - Week 0 and Week 1 were ok - I managed to do some of the activities.
2. While saying that I have no idea, this is not strictly true as I know that I am not up to date, that I am definitely behind. 
3. While knowing that the idea is to pick and choose activities, dip in and out and even to the extent that I have developed my own 'filtering system' to tackle MOOCs - I still feel slightly worried about my progress and not being up to date (years of conditioning presumably)
4. Struck by indecision - do I try to catch up or do I just forget it and start from what seems like this weeks 'only do one thing' activity?
5. Not only have I not done complete activities, I have done part activities i.e. I joined in the webinar  last Wednesday for part of the time, have made some notes for a blog posting and not even finished writing up the blog.
In summary I have done a random number of incomplete activities
(due to too much work and too much socialising)
Luckily I am not entirely disheartened by this and am now going to go to the ocTEL website and do something - I think I will just pick something I like the look of.
There is very good advice by ocTEL to not worry about being behind but to "keep moving (and skipping, if necessary)".  It is essential advice I would say for MOOCs because unless you are able to spend 24/7 participating then you are never going to be on top of everything.
But how do I and the millions of other people participating in MOOCs and online courses learn how to have the sort of mindset that copes effectively with never finishing, with never completing everything and with swirling around in a slightly bizarre world of information sharing?

Big ?'s about Technology Enhanced Learning #ocTEL

One of the activities for week 0 of ocTEL, in addition to writing an introduction about yourself,  is what is the most important question about TEL for you?  I'm not sure what my big question is.  Does technology enhance learning? Yes. Does technology enhance life? Yes. With the condition for both that it is used effectively and with consideration and 'for the greater good'. But that's true about everything.  So maybe the question is 'how can I/we use technology to the best effect to enable students/people to learn?'
I decided to have a look at what other people are saying about their big questions.
I looked on the ocTEL website first intending to go to the forums but got distracted by the Twitter Conversations Visualised which is 'a graph of the Twitter interactions using the #ocTEL hashtag' created by Martin Hawksey @mhawksey.  It's brilliant.
I looked through the various forum posts and picked out words and phrases that summarised the subjects that people were asking their questions about.
I then went to the jiscmail list and discovered that Tom Franklin had posted a table which summarised the recent posts of big questions and put them into categories.  Very helpful and another quick win for me.  
So here are a list of words that are the most popular big questions in alphabetical order.
It's interesting and reassuring to see that the most popular, apart from the directly relating to Moocs ones, are about engaging people either students or staff and ensuring that the engagement is effective and has impact.  
My big question is still how can we use technology enhanced learning to engage learners and enhance the student experience and this is a question shared by many other participants of this course and those involved in TEL.

TEL and Me

This post started off as the introductory activity for #ocTEL but ended up being too wordy so it's here instead.

I'm not great at drawing a distinction between TEL, eLearning, ICT, computing, technology etc. so  this post has aspects of them all - and the fact that they are all endlessly fascinating and useful.  When I first start using computers the thing that appealed most was that they could automatically work out codes and do something with a series of letters or numbers - that you could input an instruction and a task would be carried out - wow, how clever is that.  Also that you could create things that look or sound beautiful - again by inputting a series of instructions.

And, if that was not enough, you could find out about practically anything in the whole world and see a picture of it just by typing in a few letters!! Ok, so you've probably got the message by now - technology is a learning experience and learning is a better experience by using technology.

I first started using ICT when I completed my PGCE ICT and then went to teach ICT in a secondary school and sixth form college.  It was really good fun as well as lots of hard work teaching ICT even though it was mainly PC based before mobile and gadgets.  Despite the bad press lately, some of it justified, about the boringness of ICT in schools there is a lot to be learnt and gained from knowing the basics and building on those basics so that everyone has the know how and the problem solving / thinking skills to be successful.  TEL is an enabler - a way of learning that engages students and it's great to help people find out how it can work for them.  ICT / computing should have a broad scope so that it appeals to everyone from making video clips of performances to writing code to control robots - it all has value.  I still have mixed feelings as to whether it should be taught as a discrete subject. 

I then became interested in VLEs and staff training in ICT so moved onto an FE college and worked as an eLearning Manager.  The interesting aspect was seeing how the VLE could be used to provide access to learning from a variety of places and times - the 'anytime anyplace' idea.  But also how learning resources can be a variety of formats, that it didn't have to be text based in the form of a worksheet, that there could be images and sounds, that it could be dynamic and changing.  The VLE developed to include assessment and feedback and a platform for communication through discussion boards and forums and messages and texts and virtual classrooms.  My role developed to be Head of Learning Resources (eLearning and Library Services).  This opened up lots of opportunities for interacting with students and ensuring that they had access to high quality online learning resources.  The major development was the use of mobile technologies - resources that can be accessed in mobile formats and also mobile devices.

The Student Experience is the aspect of learning and student life that interests me the most and I currently work as Student Information Points Manager at a University.  The important thing is how information is communicated effectively - how can students access the relevant information in a timely manner in a suitable format?

Personally, I still think ICT/TEL/technology is fascinating and interesting and will continue to be so as it changes and develops.  Communication and collaboration using mobile devices is convenient and effective.  Learning should take place in formal and informal environments and should be accessible wherever and whenever it is needed or wanted.  

Moocs are a mixture, and reflect the advantages and disadvantages of online learning and the the use of TEL - they are easy to access but difficult to understand, they provide an environment for learning but it's sometimes difficult to work out what that learning is, there are numerous opportunities for communications but who are you communicating with and which is the best way to communicate, you can share but is there so much information it is sometimes too much to absorb or even acknowledge.  But it offers a place and an opportunity to experiment and reflect.