Last week we had a very productive teaching and learning away day. The aim was to reflect on the current ways in which we design and support our DCU Connected students. A background document was circulated prior to the meeting, which collated various Learning Design frameworks. We identified two overarching themes to improving our teaching and learning:
- New and more systematic design of online, open distance teaching and learning. In terms of thoughtful and explicit design, we need to
- Ensure the workload across modules in consistent
- Set up either a week by week or month by month schedule
- Indicate the indicative time needed to complete activities and content and assignments
- Split content into core and additional (extension)
- Supporting, and working with, online, open distance learners and teachers (learning students)
In addition, we identified 10 principles for online teaching and learning:
- Flexible learning: An accessible learning experience to transform lives and societies and enable widening access
- Teacher presence: Expert academic teaching, guidance and facilitation from specialist, passionate educators
- Foster belonging: Fostering a sense of belonging
- Meaningful interaction: Commitment to a deep level of meaningful interaction, where self-regulated learning is active, collaborative and participatory
- Students as partners: Surfacing the student voice and involving them to design decisions
- Rich learning resources: Universal design (accessibility standards); any device;
- Authentic and reflective assessment: Use a variety of assessment (and feedback) mechanisms to ensure that learning is: active, authentic and meaningful
- Personalised support: Student support personalised to the online distance learner: academic, pastoral, technical, and administrative
- Research informed teaching and learning: Commitment to cutting-edge, research-led approaches to Learning Design
- Open education practices: Practices, philosophy and co-creation
We then brainstormed how each of these principles might be realised.
Flexible learning
- We have flexibility in terms of assessment submission and attendance
- Consider moving away from synchronous contact (exams and tutorials), as this limits flexibility or mirror face-to-face with online
- Encourage students to have regional, informal meet ups
Teacher presence
- Teacher presence is evident in the following ways
- Tutorials (both face-to-face and online)
- Having photos of the programme team, subject experts and tutors on all modules on Loop
- Learning materials (as these are created by authors and hence embody their ‘presence’, and indicate explicitly how we teach)
- Create short video introductions welcoming the students to the course and giving an overview of the module, these could be from the programme team and the tutors
- Provide skills for using Loop and in particular Loop forums to encourage discussion
- Encouraging students to attend the welcome day and live stream the event
- Participation in forums
- Create tutor bios indicating their background and expertise
- Provide audio/video for assignment feedback and/or feed forward, or to explain an assignment
- Provide audio/video on content students typically find difficult
Foster a sense of belonging
- Provide opportunities for students to socialise with each other
- Include group work in the first assignment
- Have second-year student acting as mentors to the first-year students
- Create videos of current students, testimonials about the modules
- Early opening of courses
- Link to useful university services, including study skills
Meaningful interaction
- List of useful tools (both Loop based and external ones) and indication of how they can be used
- Ensure authentic and reflective assessment
- Encourage students talk to each other, include an icebreaker activity where students introduce themselves and indicate what they hope to get out of the course
- Encourage students to set up study groups
- Articulate elements of learning: communicate, reflect, articulate, practice and apply to real-world contexts, and evaluate
- Provide training for new tutors on how to support online learning
- Provide skills for moderating forums
- Provide a scaffolded learning approach, where a tight structure is provided to begin with and as students become more confident remove scaffolding and move towards more of a learning-centred approach
Students as partners
- Enable students to indicate errors in text
- Involvement students in programme boards and in the design of courses
- Include student-led presentations
- Create testimonials from past students
- Enable students to find, share and discuss relevant resources
- Set up opportunities for peer mentoring
- Clarify the types of activities students can engage with
- Include graduates as tutors
Rich learning resources
- This links to meaningful interactions and Learning Design
- Training for all staff to facilitate the Learning Design process
- Clarify technologies and how they can be used
- Create interactive resources
- Use a variety of media (audio, video, text) and indicate the purpose of each
- Create Moodle templates
- Ensure courses are designed for any device
- Ensure there is cohesion across modules
- Include a variety of activities and interactions
Authentic assessment
- Programme-focussed assessment
- List different types of assessment and indicate the value/purpose of each
- Develop a bank of rubrics to share
- Personalised support
- Ensure learning adopts UDL principles/processes
- Provide assignment and module choice
- Provide pastoral care (student mentors, Alumni mentors, links to central support services)
- Provide personnel support via tutors, admin staff, programme team
- Monitor retention rates and be proactive in follow up
Research-informed teaching
- Ensure that research informs teaching and vice versa
- Present at relevant teaching and learning conferences
- Publish our research findings
- Do research on our own practice and feed this back into our teaching
- Staying current through reading, CPD, sipping point events and use of social media
Open education practices: Practices, philosophy and co-creation
- Adopt an open pedagogy approach
- Ensure that all resources are openly licensed
What really helped was that the away day was held in the Lego Lab on St. Patrick’s campus, a really fantastic space! It was a very creative and productive day, the challenge is now to translate this info practice.
