Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Education: It's About the Students

I see that I have some pent-up notes on education and these will go alongside the ones on peer-to-peer technology.  There are other gleanings on elements of distributed computing and tools for collaboration and coordinated activities.  I'll organize those later.  This one has enough mass to post now.

What A Student Wants

Joho the Blog: [foo] Designing shared ontologies.  I continue to be bemused about the bottom-up flavor of the creations at Foo (and of the comments triggered by this David Weinberger post), while I also marvel at the vitality and creativity that emerges with it.

Although I snort about technical ontologies altogether, the meta-context here is heart-warming:

"Jason Cole [led] a session on how to design a tool he wants to build.  He says most academic technology is aimed at teachers.  How do we build tools that support learning?  His wife just started grad school and wants a tool that will build a personal knowledge base.  But it should work with her friends' bases.  And you'd like to find others working on the same issues.  That means merging disparate ontologies."

Well no, that means just what it says.  Man, we dive into solution space at the drop of a requirement.  Maybe we should live in the problem space just a little longer.

This reminds me of the degree to which education in the U.S. seems to be all about the teachers, starting around kindergarten.  If you look at how distance-learning software is chosen to facilitate on-line programs, you'll see that the packages are organized for the delivery organization -- teachers and administration -- not the students, and that the package-selection (and -marketing) decision process is fundamentally based around administrative and faculty concerns.  Some of these are also about academic integrity, but there is a lot of magical thinking about how the students will be served.

I suppose it is not much different than software generally, since a lot of of it is designed by geeks and UI-fascisti pretending badly to be users.  (I am a card-carrying member of both organizations.)

As an adult (dare I say "mature learner") in an M.Sc in IT program that is delivered entirely on-line, I find it quite remarkable how well it works and how much the delivery of the program is accomplished by the interactions of the students, with near-invisible instructors and faculty.  And there is a highly-structured delivery process, with tight, disciplined weekly progressions.  For example, in my last module, the seminar-week ended on Wednesday at local midnight and I found my marks waiting for me Thursday morning, with feedback that I could apply in the just-begun week.  (This is extraordinary even for this program, my best previous experience being marks by Saturday afternoon, but I gather it is the benchmark and I have seen the existence proof for its achievability.)  In the post-course feedback surveys, I always go back and read the learning-outcomes of the syllabus so I can affirm whether they were achieved.  It is startling to see how rare it is for there to be any deviation, and I am beginning to think this aspect of academic regimentation around learning outcomes has a lot going for it.  When I commence my final module in mid-October there will be two new practices in place:

1. There are going to be more-detailed course descriptions so that students can be more informed about what to expect and what the approach will be in a given module, week-by-week.  I know about this because as a recent student in two of the M.ScIT modules I was invited to review the new descriptions for accuracy based on my own experience.
2. At the commencement of each module, students are required to attest to their reading and acceptance of the student charter and the rules of conduct and academic honesty, with attention to the virtual nature of our classrooms.  This last is to remind us how to avoid plagiarism and inappropriate collaboration while encouraging development of our own voices, something that the students are concerned about in assuring the integrity of this novel form of collegiate achievement.

Also in October, the program will be conducting its second semi-annual staff-student forum.  Students here are as preoccupied with the immediate as elsewhere, and few take the time to step up and examine meta-issues.  Just the same, the faculty and staff are amazingly responsive, compiling a report to the academic board on the student recommendations and reporting to the students on the actions that will be taken based on their recommendations and requests.  In other efforts to cultivate transparency and accountability, there have been published summaries of the student feedback on courses along with explanations of questioned practices as well as initiatives taken in response to the feedback.  This is all public, and we can be as plugged into the discussions and recommendations as we can stand.

The current delivery system is not as student-centric as Jason Cole and his wife would like to have it.  I expect to see that, although not in a way that destabilizes the fundamentals that seem to make these systems work from the institution's perspective.  It is also important not to jerk around the students who, where I study, are clearly valued as customers.  That shows up in the attitude of the organization and of the program faculty:

Paul Leng, Professor of elearning at the University of Liverpool, says elearning course developers need to stop concentrating on IT and start thinking about their users.

'Developers are seduced by the potential of technology,' he said.

'Users want online learning because they want to study online.  They're not there because they want an exciting experience.'

I don't fear to predict that there can and will be blending of student-centric collaboration tools into future generations of the delivery technology, once the fundamentals are fully secured.  In line with my own assertions about the focus on students, I don't think these tools will show up so much as educational "technology" but as the way we become able to collaborate and coordinate, generally and informally, everywhere.

Is Learning Something to Manage?

ACM News Service: Learning Management Systems - Are We There Yet?.  Here's more on the OKI project and its successor, the Sakai project, to create a fully-functional learning-management system.  It is open-source and extensible.  One part of the effort is going to be around construction of learning objects and it may involve the MIT OpenCourseWare project and others.

I am curious about how this is positioned to be drivable by the recipients and participants more than the delivery angle.  I need to read deeper.  The Syllabus Magazine interview with Ira Fuchs is very helpful, with extensive links.

This August 16 blurb is about IT for Higher Education, so there is a strong academic-institution perspective.  I think this is a proper venue for blended technologies, too, and there may be a great opportunity in this space.  It would be interesting to see how much components with horizontal functions can be used to integrate around this vertical pillar, reducing the amount of unique content in learning management while expanding the ease of integration into the participating learner's kit of collaborative tools.

Course Management as Blended Collaboration?

Here's earlier distant thunder on learning-management and the imperatives that have led to sharing the development.

ACM Technews: Universities to Release Free Course-Management Software.  Course management systems and their employment in distance learning provide a rich case for blended collaborative components, and that fascinates me for several reasons.  One is for the opportunity to make a contribution in this area.  Another is because of the prominence of interoperability and coherence in this setting, especially when there are conflicting intentions and views for a course management system, depending on whether you are a student, instructor, author, or administrator (of courseware and of educational delivery and records keeping).

This blurb emphasizes the motivation of some major US universities to create an open, shared course management system that can be deployed by the next (2005-2006) academic year and mitigate the dependency on commercial delivery services that are becoming increasingly expensive.  The importance of making Sakai customizable and interoperable with commercial offerings also appears fruitful.  There may also be greater attention to accessibility in an institutionally-funded effort.

The 2004-07-15 Jeffrey R. Young article in The Chronicle of Higher Education expands considerably, providing insight to the naming of the Sakei Project and some related background links. The project web site is here.

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I avoid reposting just to clean up the odd typo and grammargoof unless I do it quickly before too many people (that's 2 out of the 3 subscribers) have downloaded the original.  But I draw the line at getting David Weinberger's name wrong and must put in the fix no matter what [; posted by orcmid at 9/12/2004 11:42:43 AM

Comments:

I'm probably going to be teaching a couple of university courses over the next few months. And I got quite interested at the beginning of this story by the idea of "student oriented courses".

But then I found I couldn't quite figure out what you meant.

Clearly there are practical reasons for organizing a lot of things around lecturers - limited lecturer time means all students need to be in the same room at the same time, read the same material and do exercises and exam questions drawn from the same group. I guess this constrains a lot of the "packages" you are talking about.

The other things I understand from your examples are faster feedback, and publishing more detailed descriptions of the aims and objectives of the course. But these seem to me to be more tightening up the execution of the existing way of organizing than really re-organizing.

So are there other things you were thinking of, or can you suggest anything else which could make a course better organized around students?

# posted by phil: 9/20/2004 08:52:32 PM

 

Thanks for your question, Phil.  I have responded in a new entry, "Education: What Does Student-Centric Look Like?"  I would love to know what you see that could have a student-centric feel in your on-the-ground courses.  Are you able to set up communication and electronic discussion between the physical class meetings?  One reason for my being in this program is so that I can qualify myself as an on-the-ground lecturer!  I would like to participate in on-line delivery too, but I think being directly with students has its own quality and I want to contribute that way too.

# posted by orcmid: 9/21/2004 04:28:11 PM

 

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