I have got a contract to write a book, current title ‘Designing for learning in an open world’. It’s really a chance for me to consolidate the learning design work that I have been involved in over the last eight years or so, to try and articulate my take on this, locate it to other learning design research and also related fields (such as pedagogical patterns work, instructional design and learning sciences). So far I have been working on it in the background, refining the focus, deciding on the structure and content, doing the necessary broader literature reading to locate the content alongside other work. However I think it’s now time to go a bit more ‘open’ – seems appropriate given the focus of the book! So I am planning to post thoughts, rough drafts, ideas etc. here as I go along. I’ve not done this so explicitly before with a piece of research, certainly not for a relatively large enterprise that is likely to go over a fairly extended amount of time. Sure I have put up ‘ideas in the making’ as blog posts and even drafts of papers, but it will be interesting to see how the articulation of a more substantive set of ideas pans out over time. Goodness only knows what I will make of early postings and drafts and/or even worse what if I end up abandoning the whole enterprise?

I’m not sure yet what format this will take, but my thinking at the moment is to post here reflective thoughts, ideas about structure and order, drafts of writing, emergent questions the work raises, pointers to interesting readings and how I am using them, plus maybe some more general reflections on the process. The reflective blog posts are being aggregated in a Cloudscape on Cloudworks, which will also be a space for discussion and aggregation of related relevant references.  

Have others come across similar open approaches in our field and if so how effective are they? I know that some books have been produced and then ‘opened’ as wikis to invite broader contributions and of course that some commercial writings do keep reflective blogs, although I wonder to what extent these are marketing ploys rather than genuine invites to open up the process and invited broader comment? Of course, dare I say it, there is also the old chestnut about whether we should be publishing in traditional channels at all or simply going straight for completely open publishing routes, I know this is something my colleague Martin Weller feels passionate about.

So I post this first entry on this topic with some trepidation, feels like going into the unknown and a little out of my comfort zone… but hey if we don’t push the boat out occasionally life would be a lot less interesting

We are running a Course Business Models workshop tomorrow at the OU to share with staff from across the university the work we have done to date in terms of representing courses. The Course Business Models (CBM) and the Learning Design work complement each other in the sense that the LD work provides the broader perspective and theoretical basis for the work and the CBM work a specific local implementation.

One of the things I will argue tomorrow will be about the benefits of adopting a Learning Design approach. In particular I will argue that it offers a design-based approach to the creation and delivery of courses, along with a set of resources, tools and activities to support this. It enables practitioners (and potentially learners) to shift from learning and teaching practices that are essentially ‘belief’ based (i.e. this is what I have always done, this is my experience of learning and teaching) and implicit to ones based on design principles derived from good pedagogy and mechanisms that enable the design to be made more explicit. Adopting a design-based approach promotes a reflective and scholarly approach and facilitates the sharing and discussion of learning and teaching ideas and designs.

In our Design-Practice project (with Cyprus and Greece) we are identifying what innovations from our Learning Design work we can transfer to be applied in their local contexts. This has enabled us to take stock of the range of tools, resources and activities we have produced and put them into a more logical and meaningful framework. Rebecca Galley, Paul Mundin and I had a great brainstorm about this earlier this week and I think we have come up with a nice way of capturing and representing what we have developed. The LD-wheel shown provides a higher level picture; i.e. that our Learning Design methodology is composed of three parts: theoretical perspectives, collaboration and visualisation. For each of these we have developed a set of tools, resources and activities. So for example the CBM Excel templates we have produced for the views are examples of visualisation resources. CompendiumLD is an example of a visualisation tool and Cloudworks an example of a collaboration tool.

At the end of this blog post the full Learning Design Taxonomy underneath this that we have developed is presented.

 

It is possible to take a number of guided pathways through the LD-wheel:

• CBM awareness events (such as the workshop we are running tomorrow) – where the focus is on looking at and discussing the five CBM views.
• An LD-lite workshop (for example ‘Using technology to support learning and teaching’) – where a selection of tools, resources and activities are used but there is no explicit mention of Learning Design. We are planning to run something like this with our Design-Practice colleagues.
• Design challenges – using a range of the tools, resources and activities to support teams as they work through creating a course in a day. We have run a number of these both within the OU and externally with our partners on the JISC OULDI project.
• A masters level unit – such as the one I authored for the H800 course.
• A free format – where the user choose what they want to use and in what order.

I’m looking forward to the workshop tomorrow and getting feedback on aspects of this work and to seeing in the coming months how this work might be rolled out across the university.

 

A number of things appear to becoming together - at least in my mind! - in terms of working towards a coherent set of conceptual learning design tools. I’ve blogged about lots of this before, but thought this post would be useful in terms of bringing some of this up to date. Interesting these ideas are currently spanning a number of projects/research work I am involved with. Clearly this work fits in terms of the overall ideas about adopting a learning design-based methodology and the associated tools/resources/activities to support this. Institutionally this work is currently being driven through our Course Business Models work. Externally aspects of this are feeding into the Design-Practice project we have with Cyprus and Greece and the X-Delia project on financial decision making. Below is a powerpoint presentation showing five conceptual design views of a ‘learning intervention’ - this could be something like an informal learning iphone app (as in this example) or a formal educational course or programme.

The five views are:

• Learning intervention overview (or Course map view)
• Pedagogy profile
• Course dimensions
• Task swimlane
• Learning outcomes map

I talked about some of this in detail in a recent networked learning paper and associated powerpoint presentation (Cloud on Cloudworks on the seminar this was part of is here). I think what is exciting about this is that the five ‘views’ give you a means of thinking about a learning intevention at different levels of granalarity and different aspects.

We have particularly made significant progress in the last few weeks I feel on the course dimensions view. I had an excellent brainstorming session on this last week with Mick Jones (who is leading the next phase of our Course Business Models work), Barbara Poniatowska and Kevin Mayles (who are involved in a related project on e-learning data. We have an internal workshop with staff from across the faculty on Friday to get their views on the work to date, how it might be used/improved and how it can be taken forward.

I used the views this week in a brainstorming session with Gill Clough (who is the lead reseacher on our part of the X-Delia project)  in terms of trying to map a learning intervention for an i-phone games app about financial decision making. The views worked surprisingly well. The powerpoint presentation with the five views is below, thoughts welcome!

Health check game

View more presentations from grainne.

Following on from my previous post I have done some more thinking about course dimensions and how they can be represented and used. To recap; there are four categories associated with a course and each can have a number of dimensions:

• Content and Activity

• Interactivity
• Student-generated content
• Open Educational Resources
• Multimedia

• Communication and Collaboration

• Web2.0 interaction
• Collaboration
• Peer communication

• Reflection and demonstration

• Reflection
• Diagnostic
• Formative
• Summative

• Guidance and Support

• Student-centred
• Peer supported
• Tutor-guided

It is possible then to consider the degree to which each of these dimensions is present in a course, using a percentage scale. This can be done at course level, at block level (where a block might present a semester) or for individual weeks. So in the example below the course is divided into three blocks. Block one has 65% interactivity (35% non-interactive), 10% of the materials generated by students (90% made available via the tutor), 20% of the materials are OER (80% from the tutor) and 75% multi-media (25% print-based). The table can then be represented either as a bar chart or a spider diagram.

 

Alternatively these dimensions can also be used to give a balance across the categories. So in the figure below for example; in terms the Content and Activity category breakdown as 25% interactive material, 10% Student-generated content, 40% OER and 25% multimedia. This can then be represented as a bar chart.

As part of our Course Business Models and Learning Design work we have been developing a range of representations (or views) for courses. I blogged about aspects of this back in June (http://e4innovation.com/?p=328) and there is also a cloudscape (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/1486). More recently I have had a paper accepted as part of a symposium at the Networked Learning conference that details some of the conceptual thinking. The representations range from views that are useful at the micro-level (such as individual learning activities), through meso-level (i.e. looking at a block of learning) up to whole course or programme level (macro-level).

As part of this work Mick Jones and I had come up with a course map view some time back, which was based around 5 facets of a course. The categories were Guidance and Support, Information and Experience, Communication and Interaction, Thinking and Reflection and Evidence and Demonstration. It seemed to work reasonably well but wasn’t perfect…. In parallel Niall Sclater, Barabara Poniatowska, Liz Burton-Pye and others in the Learning Innovation Office, as part of their development of a learning systems roadmap, had come up with a set of categories, which were tantalising close but not quite the same. For a long time we couldn’t see a way of reconciling this, but this week we had a breakthrough and I feel we now have a much better course view. Essentially we have distilled our five categories into four: Guidance and Support, Content and Activity, Communication and Collaboration, and Reflection and Demonstration. For Niall and his team there are two additional categories needed when taking a broader systems approach, namely Experience (i.e. all the factors that impinge on the students experience of taking their course and using the learning systems – i.e. accessibility, usability, personalisation, etc.) and Management (i.e. all the factors around managing and monitoring the learning process).

The course view can also be used to generate a type of ‘spider diagram’ of the course. For each of the four categories it is possible to think of a set of dimensions and for each of these to consider them as a sliding scale from 0 – 100%. For example for Content and Activities there are four obvious dimensions – the degree of interactivity, the balance of course-team generated vs. student-generated content, the amount of Open Educational Resources included and the balance of paper-based vs. multimedia content. This spider diagram can be used when designing a course to make decisions about these different aspects or as a way of checking and comparing existing courses. The nice thing about this view is that it is also possible to have user-generated dimensions – for example you might imagine a Science course wanting to put in something to indicate the balance of theoretical versus practical lab work, or a professional course wanting a dimension on the amount of work-based activities there are in the course. So we are beginning to think about refining a set of core generic dimensions, along with some faculty-specific ones. This is very much fresh off the page thinking, so would really welcome thoughts!

One of the things I talked about at the CODE International Symposium in Japan last week was a framework for locating educational practices. The framework has two dimensions: teacher-centered vs. student-centred learning (i.e. where the locus of control is for the learning process) and content-based vs. activity-based learning. I then showed how this could be used to map different types of learning across formal, non-formal and informal learning context. So in the lower left hand side fairly didactic approaches, such as a traditional lecture presentation are located. Here the control is very much teacher-centred and the main learning is via delivery of content. Adopting more activity-based approaches, but still within formal educational contexts, shifts to the upper left hand quadrant – i.e. approaches such as problem-based, case-based, scenario-based or inquiry learning. The teacher is usually still controlling the learning process and here the focus is around some specific context and is primarily activity-based in nature. The bottom right hand quadrant considers approaches that are content focused but student controlled. A lot of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) or skills-based vocational learning fit within this space. Finally, informal learning approaches which are based around activities and engagement with others such as for example amateur photography, just-in-time language learning, gardening etc. fit in the top right hand quadrant.Of course these are extremes, specific instantiations of these different approaches to learning will shift – a lecture might actually have some degree of activity or might be more student focussed, nonetheless it is useful I think to consider these different approaches along these two dimensions, particularly as much of the rhetoric around the use of new technologies suggests a shift towards learner,-centred/activity-based learning - would welcome thoughts!

Stephen has written some valuable comments on my ‘Defining OEP’ blog post. Couple of minor things in my defence and then some more subtaintive points to discuss!  Clearly my choice of picture to show the meeting was not a good one given Stephen’s reaction!

…but a conference session consisting of standing in a circle around flip-chart sheets would send me running and screaming into the nearest woods, never to be found again. So, please, let’s not make that an open education practice

 Ooops!

Actually the meeting was excellent with a nice mix of different types of group work, use of flip charts, illustrative art drawings to capture key points, images on flckr etc. I found this a great mix and much better than the usual sit round in boardroom style meetings with one person dominating the meeting. Maybe we could have used more technology during the meeting but actually I think the face to face interactions were a key part of us connecting as a consortium at this point in the project.

Stephen critiques my initial starter for ten diagram which articulates the 4 different types of stakeholders involved in OER/OEP arguing that

…so, I’m not sure I like a model where ‘policy-makers’ (also called ’stakeholders’) are distinct from ‘creators’ and ‘users’ - people who create and use should make the policy, in my view.

Clearly the diagram isn’t quite right yet, my intention was never to suggest that the four roles were distinct and separate, rather that they are four aspects which have different agendas and interests. A ‘learner’ could very easily be involved in all four, but at each stage – when they are looking at creating, using, managing or ‘policy-making’ OER they will have a different focus of attention and it was this that I really wanted to bring out and explore.

Good to have some early feedback on this – I think there is a lot to trash out in terms of exactly what OEP is. I am reminded of some work I did a few years ago as part of the NSF/JISC DIalogPlus project. The aim (a naïve one now I admit) was to create a learning design guidance toolkit that would take practitioners through the process of creating learning activities. It would provide guidance and advice on pedagogical approaches, what technologies can be used when and why and a process of mapping learning outcomes, topics, activities and assessment tasks. The toolkit is still around if you want to play. Near the beginning of the work I thought ‘hang on a minute – what exactly do we mean by a learning activity anyway?’ A seemingly simple question… which turned into a mammoth amount of work and a very detailed taxonomy articulating the different components that make up a learning activity! More on the details of this are available in a chapter on the Handbook of Learning Design and Learning Objects by Lockyer et al. (Conole, G. 2008). I have a funny feeling something similar might happen with OEP – i.e. it seems obvious what it is, and easy to articulate it, but I suspect in reality the task will be much more complex.

Reference

Conole, G., 2008. Capturing practice, the role of mediating artefacts in learning design. In In L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinhi and B. Harper Handbook of learning designs and learning objects.  IGI Global.

 

 

This blog post is a draft of a paper I am working on following on from a keynote I did at the University of Limerick in May. It focuses on new ideas around the design and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER). My initial thinking around this can be found in an earlier blog post.

The technology paradox

A paradox exists in terms of harnessing new technologies in education.  Despite the fact that there is now a wealth of free tools and resources available that could be used to support learning and teaching, in reality technologies are not used extensively in education. Indeed teachers and learners are bewildered by the variety and lack the time and necessary skills to harness them effectively. The focus of this paper is to present Learning Design as a potential solution and in particular to describe the work we are doing as part of the Open University Learning Design Initiative (OULDI), which is developing a suite of tools and resources to support teachers to make more effective design decisions and better use of technologies in the creation of learning activities and resources for their students. The paper will highlight current research on Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and Open Educational Resources (OER) and will suggest that together these three areas provide a possible solution to the mismatch between the potential of new technologies and use in practice. It will conclude with an illustrative example being developed as part of a new initiative, Olnet, which is a global network to support users and researchers of OER.

Redefining openness

I argue in this paper that we need to expand the notion of openness, to take account of the affordances of new technologies and the new patterns of user behaviour we are seeing emerge. There has been a growth in recent years in activities around the Open source movement and the development of open tools and services, also the open educational resource movement (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). These have a common set of principles and practices: free, shared, collaborative, cumulatively better. The next logical step is a more “open” approach to design (Open Design) – where the inherent designs within learning activities and resources are made more explicit to learners and to other teachers; so that they can be picked up discussed and adapted.

 I argue in this paper that education is now facing a number of new challenges, precipitating by new technologies. Education today, operates in a context that is increasingly open and abundant:

·      Open – In terms of free resources and in terms of public gauze/scrutiny and can no longer ignore this.

·      Abundant - There are now a wealth of tools, services and resources available to support education. If tools and resources are freely available, what is the purpose of formal educational institutions?

Examples of openness include the growth of the open source moment in general and, more specifically in education, the phenomenal success of the open source Moodle tool. Moodle is now a major Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learner Management System (LMS) around the world, with a large community of active developers collectively improving the core code and adding extensions and plug-ins. There are increasingly sophisticated free generic tools available - Google apps, Gmail, free blog and wiki services, communication tools such as Skype to Twitter. New products are emerging all the time, introducing new concepts and patters of user behaviour – the latest being Google Wave, which is being hyped as the next generation communication tool, a combination of email, discussion forums and wikis – enabling both synchronous and asynchronous communication.

There has been a noticeable shift in the last few years in terms of the use of technologies. We now have near ubiquitous access with wifi-enabled Internet on demand. New generation phones such as iPhone make mobile learning genuinely feasible. The number and variety of applications for the iphone is truly mind blowing; the variety of applications for learning staggering, from mindmapping tools, through digital books and dictionaries to interactive learning tutorials. More and more material for learning is available for free on the Internet. This has been accelerated by the growth of the OER movement, which believes that education should be free and is a basic right. The OER movement has powerful supporters, especially the Hewlett foundation and UNESCO and include big international players such as MIT. The OpenCourseWare consortium has over 200 worldwide members. A range of different types of OERs and models are available which differ in terms of level of granularity, format and media richness, and type of pedagogy. The Open University launched Openlearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) in 2006 with funded from the William and Flora Hewlett foundation.

Today’s students have grown up surrounded by a technologically mediated world. Clearly new technologies offer much in an educational context, with the promise of flexible, personalised and student-centred learning. Indeed research over the past few years, looking at learners’ use of technologies, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for finding/managing information and for communicating with others (Sharpe and Beetham, forthcoming). They provide a summary of recent research looking at the learner perspective and in particular how learners are using technologies (Sharpe & Beetham 2010). It is evident that today’s learners are immersed in a technologically rich learning environment. They see technologies as an essential part of their tools for learning. They appropriate technologies to suit their own learning styles and use them to support all aspects of their learning. However despite having grown up in a technological environment, not all students are able to use technologies effectively in an academic context. For example they may be comfortable using Google, but not competent at critically evaluating different resources and using them for their learning. Indeed for the weaker students the complexity of the range of digital tools and resources available to them means they are more likely to get confused and lost.

Good sources of further information on current technology trends and the ways in which technologies are being used in education include: Review of learning 2.0 (Ala-Mutka, 2009), Learner experience work (Conole, De Laat et al., 2008), NSF cyberlearning task force report (NSF, 2008), and a review of OER movement (Atkins et al., 2007)

Education for free

Theoretically one can now put together totally free course offerings using free tools and resources. George Siemens and Stephen Downes created an ambitious course and delivered it for the first time in 2009 – not only were the tools and resources they used in the course free, but so was the expertise! See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=182 for a reflection on the experiment by George Siemens. The twelve-week course was called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course’.[1]  They described the course as a MOOG (Massive Open Online Course). The content, delivery and support for the course was totally free, anyone could join and an impressive 2400 did, although the actual number of very active participants was smaller (ca. 200). The course provides a nice example of an extension of the open movement, moving a step beyond the Open Educational Resource movement to providing a totally free course. Siemens reflecting on the course said the follow:

Did we change the world? No. Not yet. But we (and I mean all course participants, not just Stephen and I) managed to explore what is possible online. People self-organized in their preferred spaces. They etched away at the hallowed plaque of “what it means to be an expert”. They learned in transparent environments, and in the process, became teachers to others. Those that observed (or lurked as is the more common term), hopefully found value in the course as well. Perhaps life circumstances, personal schedule, motivation for participating, confidence, familiarity with the online environment, or numerous other factors, impacted their ability to contribute. While we can’t “measure them” the way I’ve tried to do with blog and moodle participants, their continued subscription to The Daily and the comments encountered in F2F conferences suggest they also found some value in the course.

 

 George Siemens and Martin Weller delivered something similar in the form of an ‘un-course’ conference (“From Courses to Dis-Course (yes/no? Am I being too cute-sy?”). See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/futurecourse/ for further information. Such courses are becoming more commonplace, the immediacy of the Internet and the variety of free tools for creating content and for communicating with others, means these courses can be set up very quickly with an international team designing and delivering. What kind of impact will such courses have on traditional educational offerings? Will they sit alongside them or ultimately replace them?

Implications and the hidden conundrum

Clearly all this has profound implications for educational institutions and the provision of formal education (Grainne Conole 2009). For students in terms of the skills and experiences they come with and their expectations in terms of technologies (Sharpe & Beetham 2010)(G. Conole et al. 2008). For teachers in terms of how they design courses for students. For institutions in terms of how they support and assess students. New technologies give rise to a range of questions: To what extent have all these free tools and resources impacted on mainstream education? To what extent are the majority of teachers capitalising on these? How much are mainstream courses changing as a result?

The reality is that despite the enormous potential new technologies seem to offer for learning, uptake of them and utilisation of free resources has been slow.  Indeed there has been very little impact on mainstream education. Where technolgoies are used a lot of the use mirrors existing face-to-face practice, rather than harnessing the powerful affordances associated with them. There is little evidence of major innovations or new forms of pedagogy.

The reasons for the lack of impact of these new technologies are complex and multifaceted. But one of the key ones is that teachers lack the time and expertise to make best use of new tools and resources. Faced with a new tool – say a wiki or twitter - there are a number of questions a teacher (or indeed a learner) needs to consider: What are the special features of the tool? How can it be used to support learning? How have others used the tool? What are the implications in terms of designing and delivering a learning activity using this tool – for the teacher, for the student? Similarly just having freely available OERs is not enough, a series of similar questions arise: What is the quality of the resource? How has it been used elsewhere? How can it be incorporated into my teaching context? Am I able to adapt it; how much do I need to change to suit my teaching context? All of these are non-trivial and time-consuming questions.

Mediating artefacts to support design

Teachers need guidance in understanding how they can appropriate technologies in their teaching. This guidance can be in the form of a range of ‘Mediating Artefacts’ (MAs). I draw on socio-cultural perspectives (Vygotsky 1978;  Cole et al. 1997; Engeström et al. 1999; Daniels et al. 2007), in terms of the use of the term ‘Mediating Artefacts’ (MAs). I believe the concept of mediating artefacts can help us describe and understand how technologies are being used in mediating our practice. A user intent on achieve a particular goal has a range of mediating artefacts they can draw on; both in terms of ‘information’ and mechanisms for ‘communication’. Alongside the established communication channels of the telephone, email, forums and texting, the emergence of web 2.0 technologies in recent years has added blogging (and microblogging), wikis, social networking sites and virtual worlds but also free internet-based Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and in particular popular tools such as Skype which enable virtually free, internet-based communication. Similarly information can now be distributed in multiple locations, and packaged and presented using a range of different multimedia and visual representations. Sophisticated repositories now exist for everything from shopping categories to repositories of good practice and free resources. RSS feeds and email alerts enable users to filter and personalise the information they receive. Social bookmarking and tagging means that collective value can be added to digital objects, concept and mind mapping, tag clouds and data-derived maps are only some of the ways in which information can be presented in rich and multifaceted ways.

I argue in this paper that there is a need for new mediating artefacts to support teachers and learners in making best use of these tools and resources.  See Conole (2008a) for a description of the use of the term mediating artefacts specifically for learning design. These mediating artefacts can guide and support the teacher in making design decisions. They can provide mechanisms to help teachers answer questions like those posed above, to help them make decisions on which tools and resources to use and in what ways. For example mechanisms to provide them with access to help and advice, expertise and peer support. Mechanisms to enable them to become part of an evolving peer community committed to discussing and sharing learning and teaching ideas.

I argue that this mediation is through more explicit articulation of the inherent designs associated with a particular learning activity and the way in which tools and resources are used in that particular learning activity. If we can abstract these designs and represent them in a meaningful and understandable way there is a greater chance of them being picked up, used and adapted by others, which, in turn, over time is likely to lead to an evolving understanding of how new tools and resources can be used.

Converging schools of thought

I want to focus on three types of Mediating Artefacts and look at how together they can be used to help guide the teacher’s design practice; learning design, pedagogical patterns and OER Mediating Artefacts. A brief introduction to these areas will be provided, followed by a description of how they can be used together to provide a holistic approach to designing for learning.

Pedagogical patterns

The concept of Pedagogical Patterns derives from Alexander’s work in Architecture, towards pattern languages for buildings.  Applied to an educational context, it is concerned with exploring how we generate a set of ‘patterns for good practice’; i.e. here is a problem and here is a tried and tested solution. There is now a considerable body of research on Pedagogical Patterns, such as the work of Yannis Dimitriadis and colleagues in Spain, Peter Goodyear in Australia and the Planet project in the UK. There are a number of repositories of patterns with surrounding communities of interest, see for example http://lp.noe-kaleidoscope.org/ and http://patternlanguagenetwork.org/partners/. Two well-known examples of patterns for collaborative learning are: “Think, Pair, Share” and “Jigsaw”.

The benefits of the pedagogical patterns approach is that the ‘patterns’ are derived from known, tried and tested examples, building on existing good practice. They all have the same format of representation – here is a problem and a potential solution, along with a powerful visual metaphors.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

The OER movement has concentrated on developing open educational resources and studying the ways in which they are used and/or adapted by learners and teachers (See for example McAndrew and Santos, 2008). The benefits of the OER movement is that it is building a word wide set of high quality free educational resources, along with opportunities to build a community around these resources - to share and critically discuss good practice in learning and teaching.

Learning design

In our own work as part of the OU Learning Design Initiative (OUDLI) we are developing a suite of tools and methods to help teachers with the design process and in particular to enable them to create more pedagogical informed learning activities and make better use of new technologies. Our work is focusing on three aspects of the design process: ways of representing pedagogy (and in particular visualising it), providing guidance and advice, and mechanisms to enable teachers to share and discuss learning and teaching ideas. In particular we have developed two tools – CompendiumLD for visualising and guiding the design process (G. Conole et al. 2008) and Cloudworks a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas (Conole & Culver 2009b; Conole & Culver 2009a) In addition we have been developed new schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies (Conole 2008)

The benefits of the Learning Design approach are that it provides a range of tools, methods and approaches to help teachers think differently, making the design process more explicit, means of sharing good practice.

A new understanding of design: an illustrative example

What we can see across these three areas of research are different types of designs. Can we combine these learning design tools with the documented good practice, which has been developed in the pedagogical pattern community, with the real exemplars available in the OER world? The pedagogical patterns describe a learning and teaching activity or strategy according to a predefined template. Whereas the OERs might be considered as ‘designs in action’ and provide actual learning content. Finally, Learning Designs help give us a better understanding of the broad ways in which learning and teaching activities or strategies can be represented from narrative case studies or descriptions through to visual designs.

In a new project, OLnet, we are attempting to put these three areas together, specifically to enable better use of OER. OLnet is creating a global network to help researchers and users of OER to work together – so that research outputs inform practice and vice versa. See Conole and McAndrew (Conole & McAndrew 2010). We are interested in exploring how explicit designs might be used to help learners and teachers and how the different tools and resources from across OER, Learning Design and Pedagogical Patterns research would might be used together.  In a recent book chapter we identify four types of Mediating Artefacts from across these research domains: Learning Design visualisation tools, Learning Design methods, Pedagogical Patterns and Web 2.0 sharing and discussion tools (Figure 1).

 

Figure 1: Types of mediating artefacts

The following scenario provides an example of how this might work (Figure 2). It describes the creation of an OER and an associated design for the OER and shows how this can be repurposed in three different ways. Tools and resources from OER, Learning Deign and Pedagogical Patterns research are used to help design the original OER and then to share and repurpose it.

Figure 2: Initial creation of OER+design and subsequent use and repurposing

 

Teacher A: The design phase

The scenario begins with ‘Teacher A’. The context is that Teacher A is putting her beginners’ level Spanish material for the OU course L194. She makes the material available as an OER online in the Openlearn repository (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk). She uses the CompendiumLD tool for visualising to articulate different ways in which she thinks the materials can be used. Figure 3 shows part of the visual design, including the branching sequence to enable a beginner and more advanced route through the learning materials. In particular she is interested in showing how the materials can be used as both a revision exercise for an individual student and at a more advanced level for a group of students working collaboratively. Whilst developing her design in CompendiumLD she has access to ideas and tips and hints from the Cloudworks social networking site for learning and teaching site, as well as from a range of OER and Pedagogical Pattern repositories. These help her to refine her design thinking, to get ideas about how to structure activities in the sequences and suggestions of tools that be used for example for supporting a diagnostic e-assessment test or to enable students to communicate synchronously.

Learner A: Use Scenario 1 – beginners’ route

‘Learner A’ is doing Spanish.  She is a few weeks into the intermediate level Spanish course. The topic she is currently working on is ‘describing places’, she is looking for freely available tools or resources that might help her, she is also interested in finding study buddies to work with, who are at a similar level.

1.      She explores the openlearn site

2.      She finds the set of OERs for a beginners’ Spanish course – L194 – Portales from the Open University, UK, developed by Teacher A.

3.      She finds alongside these resources a visual design – which provides an example of how these resources might be used. The design consists of the following aspects:

a.       A diagnostic e-assessment test to assess her level of understanding of the topics covered in the course

b.       Two potential pathways: a) a beginners route where the learner works individually through the L194 OER material, b) an advanced route where the learner is assigned to a study group to work collaboratively around 1 aspects of the L194 OER material, Activity 2.1. In this advanced route, the existing activity (categorise 3 pictures of buildings as Latin American or Spanish) is replaced with one where the learner has to describe and compare the buildings, working collaboratively with other students and interrogating an expert for information. The activity exploits the jigsaw pedagogical pattern and also uses a free video conferencing tool to enable the study group to speak with a Spanish cultural expert. 

4.      She takes the diagnostic tests and the advice is that she takes the beginners’ route and completes the L194 OER material.

Learner B: Use Scenario 2 – advanced route

Learner B is also a student a few weeks into an intermediate level Spanish course. She works through a similar set of activities to Learner A but in this case after taking the diagnostic test the advice is that he takes the advanced route and focuses in on the adapted activity 2.1 as a collaborative exercise with other students.

Teacher B: Use Scenario 3 – repurposes

Teacher B is an Associate Lecturer teaching on the intermediate level Spanish course at the Open University, En Rumbo – L140, preparing for a face-to-face tutorial with his students. The topic is describing places. Finds the design described above and adapts it to produce two new variants of the design 1. a classroom-based activity where the students describe the pictures using the Think-Pair-Share pattern and provides, 2. A similar exercise in terms of comparing three buildings but the students are asked to describe buildings from their town and then talk with an expert (a student in Spain) who then describes their home town. The activity is set as a precursor to the first assignment exercise for the course.

The design of this scenario represented in CompendiumLD was drawn by Andrew Brasher and an interactive version of it is available here. Figure 4 provides a conceptual overview and generalisation of this scenario – showing how an initial design can query existing resources such as Cloudworks and Openlearn, use these to help create and populate an OER, along with an associated design, both of which can then be deposited back into sites such as Cloudworks and OpenLearn for reuse.

Conclusion

The mismatch between the potential of technologies and actual use in practice is I would argue one of the most important key challenges facing modern education. The areas of Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and OER research have developed a range of valuable tools and resources which have proved effective in supporting teachers and learners and enabling them to decide and use educational resources more effectively. The next stage in the challenge is how to build on this; how to make more effective connections across these three areas of research.

Acknowledgements

Many people are involved in this work but want to thank in particular:

§   Olnet/Openlearn: Patrick McAndrew, Yannis Demitriadis (who is currently working with us as a visiting Olnet professor), Tina Wilson, Niall Sclater

§   OULDI: Andrew Brasher, Juliette Culver, Simon Cross, Paul Clark, Martin Weller

§   Funders: The William and Flora Hewlett foundation, the JISC, the Open University for strategic funding

References

Ala-Mutka, K., Bacigalupo, M., Kluzer, S., Pascu, C., Punie, Y. and Redecker, C. (2009). Review of Learning 2.0 Practices. IPTS technical report prepared for publication, IPTS: Seville, available online at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2139 [18/4/09].

Atkins, D., Seely Brown, J. and Hammond, A.L. (2007), A review of the Open Educational Resource movement: achievements, challenges and new opportunities, report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, available online at http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf, last accessed 5/2/09.

Cole, M., Engeström, Y. & Vasquez, O.A., 1997. Mind, culture, and activity: Seminal papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, Cambridge Univ Pr.

 

Conole, G. (2008a) ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design’, in Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, in L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinho, and B Harper (Eds), 187-207, Hersey PA: IGI Global.

 

Conole, G. et al., 2008. Visualising learning design to foster and support good practice and creativity. Educational Media International, 45(3), 177-194.

 

Conole, G. & Culver, J., 2009a. Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(5). Available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet25/conole.html [Accessed November 24, 2009].

 

Conole, G. & Culver, J., 2009b. The design of Cloudworks: Applying social networking practice to foster the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs. Computers & Education. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VCJ-4XH5640-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1107889889&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=11e571c11f3d1bee54dd010e40090093 [Accessed November 24, 2009].

 

Conole, G. et al., 2008. ‘Disruptive technologies’, ‘pedagogical innovation’: What’s new Findings from an in-depth study of students’ use and perception of technology. Computers & Education, 50(2), 511-524.

 

Conole, G. & McAndrew, P., 2010. A new approach to supporting the design and use of OER: Harnessing the power of web 2.0. In In M. Edner and M. Schiefner (Eds) Looking toward the future of technology enhanced education: ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.

 

Conole, G., McAndrew, P. & Dimitriadis, Y., The role of CSCL pedagogical patterns as mediating artefacts for repurposing Open Educational Resources’. In in F. Pozzi and D. Persico (Eds), Techniques for Fostering Collaboration in Online Learning Communities: Theoretical and Practical.  2010.

 

Conole, G., 2009. Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/13175/ [Accessed November 24, 2009].

 

Conole, G., 2008. New Schemas for mapping pedagogies and technologies. Ariadne magazine, (56). Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/ [Accessed November 24, 2009].

 

Daniels, H., Cole, M. & Wertsch, J., 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky 1st ed., Cambridge University Press.

 

Dimitriadis, Y. et al., 2009. New design approaches to repurposing Open Educational Resources for collaborative learning using mediating artefacts. In  Auckland: ASCILITE.

 

Engeström, Y., Punamäki-Gitai, R.L. & Miettinen, R., 1999. Perspectives on activity theory, Cambridge University Press.

 

Iiyoshi, T. & Kumar, M.S.V., 2008. Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, The MIT Press.

 

McAndrew, P. and A. I. Santos (Eds.) (2009). Learning from OpenLearn: Research Report 2006-2008. Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University.

NSF (2008), Fostering learning in the networked world: learning opportunity and challenge. A 21^st Century agenda for the National Science Foundation, report of the NSF task force on cyberlearning, available online at http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204, last accessed 8/2/09.

 

Sharpe, R. & Beetham, H., 2010. Rethinking learning for the digital age: how learnes shape their own experiences, London: Routledge.

 

Vygotsky, L.S., 1978. Mind in society.

 

 

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[1] http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism

As part of a working group at the Open University (James Fleck, Mick Jones, Tony Walton, Andrew Russell and Paul Mundin) we are trying to devise a series of course representations. We have come up with five:
•    At a glance
•    Pedagogy profile
•    Financial
•    Course performance
•    Success checklist
I’ve mainly being involved with the representations that particularly foreground the learning aspects of the course.

Figure 1 Pedagogy Profile

The pedagogy profile is a worked up version of the media advisor toolkit Martin Oliver and I developed years ago (link to download the toolkit below), modernised against task types developed as part of a learning activity taxonomy I developed a few years ago (Conole, 2008). In essence there are six types of tasks learners do:
•    Assimilative – reading, listening, viewing
•    Information handling – manipulating data or text
•    Communicative – discussing, critiqueing, etc
•    Productive – production of an essay, architectural model, etc
•    Experiential – practising, mimicking, applying, etc
•    Adaptive – modelling or simulation
In addition, learners undertake some form of assessment activities
You can then use these to create a pedagogy profile for a course – indicating the proportion of each type of tasks (Figure 1).

Figure 2: The “at a glance” representation

The ‘at a glance’ representation gives an overview of the course. It’s an adaption of an earlier pedagogy representation (see for example an earlier blog post), but Mick Jones pointed out that it was important to also emphase the instruction and guidance provided to the student. The representation now includes both guidance and support as well as evidence and demonstration (Figure 2). The representation enables you to describe the course in terms of the types of learning activities the learner is undertaking as well as the guidance and support provided and the nature of any assessment. Table 1 describes the five facets of the representation in more detail. Would welcome thoughts on these representations.

Table 1

Finally, the success checklist is intended to be an evolving list of  success criteria or ‘dos and don’ts’ for course. There are four facts considered:

• Good pedagogy
• Innovation
• Cost effectiveness
• Fitness for purpose

Table 2 shows some suggested examples.

Table 2

References

Conole, G. (2008) ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design’, in Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, in L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinho, and B Harper (Eds), 187-207, Hersey PA: IGI Global.

Media Advisor available to download from  http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/ltri/demos/media_adviser_files/media_adviser.htm

I’m doing a keynote today at the University of Limerick, Maggie McPherson from Leeds University is doing the first keynote. It’s timely as preparation for it has enabled me to write down some thoughts following on from a number of really excellent discussions over the last couple of weeks with Patrick McAndrew, Yannis Dimitriadis, Andrew Brasher, Juliette Culver, Martin Weller, Niall Sclater and Niall Winters. Here are my notes for the presentation, the powerpoint is on slideshare.

Blues skies thinking for design and Open Educational Resources 

Gráinne Conole, The Open University, UK (g.c.conole@open.ac.uk)

Keynote

Technology and Learning: Defining Quality in Research, Theory and Practice

Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society Symposium, 2009

University of Limerick, 11^th May 2009

Focus

·        The focus of the talk is at the intersection of Design and Open Educational Resources (OER).

·        It will consider why the wealth of free tools and resources now available, that could be used to support learning and teaching, are not being used more extensively and will suggest that teachers and learners lack the time and necessary skills to harness them effectively.

·        It will highlight current research on Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and OER and will suggest that together these three areas provide a possible solution to the mismatch between the potential of new technologies and use in practice.

·        It will conclude with an illustrative example being developed as part of a new initiative, Olnet (http://olnet.org) (See Conole and McAndrew (submitted) for an overview of the background to OLNet).

Redefining openness

·        I will argue that we need to expand the notion of openness…

o    There has been a growth in recent years in activities around the Open source movement and the development of open tools and services, also the open educational resource movement.

o    These have a common set of principles and practices: free, shared, collaborative, cumulatively better…

o    The next logical step is a more “open” approach to design (Open Design) – where the inherent designs within learning activities and resources are made more explicit to learners and to other teachers; so that they can be picked up discussed and adapted.

·        I will argue that education is now faced with a challenge… We are operating in a context that is increasingly:

o    Open – In terms of free resources and in terms of public gauze/scrutiny and can no longer ignore this.

o    Abundant - There are now a wealth of tools, services and resources available to support education. If tools and resources are freely available, what is the purpose of formal educational institutions?

·        Examples include

o    The open source moment in general and the phenomenal success of Moodle as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learner Management System (LMS).

o    There are increasingly sophisticated free generic tools available - Google apps, Gmail, free blog and wiki services, communication tools from Skype to Twitter.

o    There has been a noticeable shift in the last few years in terms of the use of technologies

§   Now have near ubiquitous access – internet and mobile technologies

§   New generation phones such as iPhone – the world in your pocket

§   Today’s students have grown up surrounded by a technologically mediated world.

§   The growth of the OER movement, supported by the Hewlett foundation and OECD and marked by the announcement by MIT that it was making its educational resources freely available. A range of different types of OERs and models are available which differ in terms of level of granularity, format and media richness, and type of pedagogy. The Open University launched Openlearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) in 2006 with funded from the William and Flora Hewlett foundation.

o    Good sources of further information on current technology trends and use in education include: Review of learning 2.0 (Ala-Mutka, 2009), Learner experience work (Conole, De Laat et al., 2008), NSF cyberlearning task force report (NSF, 2008), review of OER movement (Atkins et al., 2007)

Education for free

Theoretically one can now put together totally free course offerings using free tools and resources.

·        George Siemens and Stephen Downes ran an ambitious course last year – not only were the tools and resources they used in the course free, but so was the expertise!. See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=182 for a reflection on the experiment by George Siemens. The twelve-week course was called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course’.[1]  They described the course as a MOOG (Massive Open Online Course). The content, delivery and support for the course was totally free, anyone could join and an impressive 2400 did, although the actual number of very active participants was smaller (ca. 200). The course provides a nice example of an extension of the open movement, moving a step beyond the Open Educational Resource movement to providing a totally free course.

·        George Siemens and Martin Weller are delivering something similar this week, in the form of an ‘un-course’ conference (“From Courses to Dis-Course (yes/no? Am I being too cute-sy?”). See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/futurecourse/ for further information.

Implications

Clearly all this has profound implications for institutions (Conole, in press).

1.      For students in terms of the skills and experiences they come with and their expectations in terms of technologies (Conole, De Laat, 2008).

2.      For teachers in terms of how they design courses for students.

3.      For institutions in terms of how they support and assess students.

But there is a catch – the hidden conundrum

·        To what extent have all these free tools and resources impacted on mainstream education? To what extent are the majority of teachers capitalising on these? How much are mainstream courses changing as a result?

·        In reality uptake of new technologies and free resources had been slow. A lot of use of new tools mirrors existing face-to-face practice. There is little evidence of major innovations or new forms of pedagogy.

The complexity behind the simplicity

The reasons for the lack of impact of these new technologies are complex and multifaceted. But one of the key ones is that teachers lack the time and expertise to make best use of new tools and resources. Faced with a new tool – say a wiki or twitter - there are a number of questions a teacher (or indeed a learner) needs to consider:

·        What are the special features of the tool?

·        How can it be used to support learning?

·        How have others used the tool?

·        What are the implications in terms of designing and delivering a learning activity using this tool – for the teacher, for the student?

Similarly just having freely available OERs is not enough, a series of similar questions arise:

·        What is the quality of the resource?

·        How has it been used elsewhere?

·        How can it be incorporated into my teaching context?

·        Am I able to adapt it; how much do I need to change to suit my teaching context?

All of these are non-trivial and time-consuming questions.

The mediating layer

My argument in this talk is as follows:

·        Given this conundrum of a vast wealth of tools and resources, but teachers and learners lack the skills to make use of these, I will argue that there is a need for a mediating layer to support teachers and learners in making best use of these tools and resources.  See Conole (2008a) for a description of what is meant by a mediating layer and examples of mediating artefacts.

·        A mediating layer that provides mechanisms to help them answer questions like those posed above, to help them make decisions on which tools and resources to use and in what ways. For example mechanisms to provide them with access to help and advice, expertise and peer support. Mechanisms to enable them to become part of an evolving peer community committed to discussing and sharing learning and teaching ideas.

·        I will argue that this mediation is through more explicit articulation of the inherent designs associated with a particular learning activity and the way in which tools and resources are used in that particular learning activity. If we can abstract these designs and represent them in a meaningful and understandable way there is a greater chance of them being picked up, used and adapted by others, which, in turn, over time is likely to lead to an evolving understanding of how new tools and resources can be used.

Converging schools of thought

Three parallel areas of research have being working on aspects of this mediating layer – learning design, pedagogical patterns and OER research. There are signs that these areas are beginning to converge. In particular a clearer understanding of the different types of design representations is emerging.

Pedagogical patterns

·        The concept of Pedagogical Patterns derives from Alexander’s work in Architecture, towards pattern languages for buildings. 

·        Applied to an educational context – can we generate a set of ‘patterns for good practice’; i.e. here is a problem and here is a tried and tested solution.

·        There is now a considerable body of research on Pedagogical Patterns, such as the work of Yannis Dimitriadis and colleagues in Spain, Peter Goodyear in Australia and the Planet project in the UK. There are a number of repositories of patterns with surrounding communities of interest, see for example http://lp.noe-kaleidoscope.org/ and http://patternlanguagenetwork.org/partners/.

·        Two well-known examples of patterns for collaborative learning are: “Think, Pair, Share” and “Jigsaw”.

Benefits of the pedagogical patterns approach: derived from know, tried and tested examples, building on existing good practice, shared format of representation – problem + solution, and the power of visual metaphors.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

·        OER research has concentrated on developing open educational resources and studying the ways in which they are used and/or adapted by learners and teachers (See for example McAndrew and Santos, 2008).

·        Benefits: building a wordwide set of high quality free educational resources, opportunity to build a community around this to share and critically discuss good practice in learning and teaching.

Learning design

·        Learning design – in our own work as part of the OU Learning Design Initiative (OUDLI) we are developing a suite of tools and methods to help teachers with the design process and in particular to enable them to create more pedagogical informed learning activities and make better use of new technologies.

·        Our work is focusing on three aspects of the design process: ways of representing pedagogy (and in particular visualising it), providing guidance and advice, and mechanisms to enable teachers to share and discuss learning and teaching ideas.

·        In particular we have developed two tools – CompendiumLD for visualising and guiding the design process (Conole, Brasher et al., Submitted; Conole, Brasher et al., 2008), and Cloudworks a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas (Conole and Culver, submitted; Conole, Culver et al, 2008). In addition we have been developed new schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies (Conole, 2008b).

Benefits of the Learning Design approach: range of tools, methods and approaches to help teachers think differently, making the design process more explicit, means of sharing good practice.

A new understanding of design

What we can see across these three areas of research are different types of design

1.      Pedagogical patterns – describe a learning and teaching activity or strategy according to a predefined template – what’s the problem? Here’s a tried and tested solution.

2.      OERs – might be considered as ‘designs in action’ – with content.

3.      Learning design – better understanding of the broad ways in which learning and teaching activities or strategies can be represented from narrative case studies or descriptions through to visual designs.

Can we start to put these together?

·        Can we combine these learning design tools with the documented good practice, which has been developed in the pedagogical pattern community, with the real exemplars available in the OER world?

·        This is the focus of a new Hewlett funded project – Olnet which aims to create a global to help researchers and users of OER to work together – so that research outputs inform practice and vice versa.

·        We are interested in exploring how explicit designs might be used to help learners and teachers. How existing designs – available through sites like Cloudworks, via OER repositories such as Openlearn or via Pattern communities like Planet – might feed into an evolving network connected researchers and users of OERs.

An illustrative example

The following scenario provides an example of how this might work. (Figure 1).

 

Teacher A: The design phase

Context: A teacher is putting her beginners’ level Spanish material for the OU course L194 online in the Openlearn repository. She uses the CompendiumLD tool to articulate different ways in which she thinks the materials can be used. In particular she is interested in showing how the materials can be used as both a revision exercise for an individual student and at a more advanced level for a group of students working collaboratively. Whilst developing her design in CompendiumLD she has access to ideas and tips and hints from the Cloudworks site, as well as from a range of OER and Pedagogical Pattern repositories. These help her to refine her design thinking, to get ideas about how to structure activities in the sequences and suggestions of tools that be used for example for supporting a diagnostic e-assessment test or to enable students to communicate synchronously.

Learner A: Use Scenario 1 – beginners’ route

Context: A Learner doing Spanish.  She is a few weeks into the intermediate level Spanish course. The topic she is currently working on is ‘describing places’, she is looking for freely available tools or resources that might help her, she is also interested in finding study buddies to work with, who are at a similar level.

1.      Explores the openlearn site

2.      Finds a set of OERs for a beginners’ Spanish course – L194 – Portales from the Open University, UK.

3.      Finds alongside these resources a visual design – which provides an example of how these resources might be used. The design consists of the following aspects:

a.       A diagnostic e-assessment test to assess her level of understanding of the topics covered in the course

b.       Two potential pathways: a) a beginners route where the learner works individually through the L194 OER material, b) an advanced route where the learner is assigned to a study group to work collaboratively around 1 aspects of the L194 OER material, Activity 2.1. In this advanced route, the existing activity (categorise 3 pictures of buildings as Latin American or Spanish) is replaced with one where the learner has to describe and compare the buildings, working collaboratively with other students and interrogating an expert for information. The activity exploits the jigsaw pedagogical pattern and also uses a free video conferencing tool to enable the study group to speak with a Spanish cultural expert. 

4.      She takes the diagnostic tests and the advice is that she takes the beginners’ route and completes the L194 OER material.

Learner B: Use Scenario 2 – advanced route

Context: Same context as above, but in this case after taking the diagnostic test the advice is that he takes the advanced route and focuses in on the adapted activity 2.1 as a collaborative exercise with other students.

Teacher BL Use Scenario 3 – repurposes

Context: an associated lecturer teaching on the intermediate level Spanish course at the Open University, En Rumbo – L140, preparing for a face-to-face tutorial with his students. The topic is describing places. Finds the design described above and adapts it to produce two new variants of the design 1. a classroom-based activity where the students describe the pictures using the Think-Pair-Share pattern and provides, 2. A similar exercise in terms of comparing three buildings but the students are asked to describe buildings from their town and then talk with an expert (a student in Spain) who then describes their home town. The activity is set as a precursor to the first assignment exercise for the course.

Figure 2 provides a conceptual overview and generalisation of this scenario – showing how an initial design can query existing resources such as Cloudworks and Openlearn, use these to help create and populate an OER, along with an associated design, both of which can then be deposited back into sites such as Cloudworks and OpenLearn for reuse.

 

Conclusion

The mismatch between the potential of technologies and actual use in practice is I would argue one of the most important key challenges facing e-learning researchers today. The areas of Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and OER research have developed a range of valuable tools and resources which have proved effective in supporting teachers and learners and enabling them to decide and use educational resources more effectively. The next stage in the challenge is how to build on this; how to make more effective connections across these three areas of research.

Acknowledgements

Many people are involved in this work but want to thank in particular:

§   Olnet/Openlearn: Patrick McAndrew, Yannis Demitriadis (who is currently working with us as a visiting Olnet professor), Tina Wilson, Niall Sclater

§   OULDI: Andrew Brasher, Juliette Culver, Simon Cross, Paul Clark, Martin Weller

§   Funders: The William and Flora Hewlett foundation, the JISC, the Open University for strategic funding

Websites

·        The Open University Learning Design (OULDI), http://ouldi.open.ac.uk

·        Cloudworks, http://cloudworks.ac.uk

·        CompendiumLD, http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk

·        Olnet, http://olnet.org

·        Personal blog, www.e4innovation.com

·        Slideshare, http://www.slideshare.net/grainne

References

Ala-Mutka, K., Bacigalupo, M., Kluzer, S., Pascu, C., Punie, Y. and Redecker, C. (2009). Review of Learning 2.0 Practices. IPTS technical report prepared for publication, IPTS: Seville, available online at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2139 [18/4/09].

Atkins, D., Seely Brown, J. and Hammond, A.L. (2007), A review of the Open Educational Resource movement: achievements, challenges and new opportunities, report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, available online at http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf, last accessed 5/2/09.

Conole and Culver (submitted), Cloudworks: applying social networking practice for the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs, special issue of CAL09, Computers and Education, submitted April 09.

Conole, Brasher et al (submitted), CompendiumLD paper, adaptation of paper presented at Edmedia 08, submitted April 09.

Conole, G. (2008a) ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design’, in Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, in L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinho, and B Harper (Eds), 187-207, Hersey PA: IGI Global.

Conole, G. (2008b), New schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/

Conole, G. (in press), Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education in M. Lee and C. McLouglin (forthcoming), Web 2.0-based e-learning: applying social informatics for tertiary teaching, ICI Global: Hersey, PA

Conole, G. and McAndrew, P. (submitted), A new approach to supporting the design and use of OER: Harnessing the power of web 2.0, M. Edner and M. Schiefner (eds), Looking toward the future of technology enhanced education: ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.

Conole, G., Brasher, A., Cross, S., Weller, M., Clark, P. and White, J. (2008), Visualising learning design to foster and support good practice and creativity, Educational Media International, Volume 54, Issue 3, 177-194.

Conole, G., Culver, J., Well, M., Williams, P., Cross, S., Clark, P. and Brasher, A. (2008), Cloudworks: social networking for learning design, Ascilite Conference, 30^th Nov – 3^rd Dec 2008, Melbourne.

Conole, G., De Laat, M., Dillon, T. and Darby, J. (2008), ‘Disruptive technologies’, ‘pedagogical innovation’: What’s new? Findings from an in-depth study of students’ use and perception of technology’, Computers and Education, Volume 50, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 511-524.

McAndrew, P. and A. I. Santos (Eds.) (2009). Learning from OpenLearn: Research Report 2006-2008. Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University.

NSF (2008), Fostering learning in the networked world: learning opportunity and challenge. A 21^st Century agenda for the National Science Foundation, report of the NSF task force on cyberlearning, available online at http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204, last accessed 8/2/09.

 

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[1] http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism