random musings – Heriot-Watt Semantic Web Lab

Thoughts on Support for Technology Enhanced Learning in HE

I was asked to put forward my thoughts on how I thought the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning should be supported where I work. I work in a UK University that has campuses overseas, and which is organised into Schools (Computer Science is in a School with Maths, to form one of the smaller schools). … Continue reading Thoughts on Support for Technology Enhanced Learning in HE →

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I was asked to put forward my thoughts on how I thought the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning should be supported where I work. I work in a UK University that has campuses overseas, and which is organised into Schools (Computer Science is in a School with Maths, to form one of the smaller schools). This was my first round brain dump on the matter. It looks like something might come of it, so I’m posting it here asking for comments.

Does any of this look wrong?

Do you/ have you worked in a similar or dissimilar unit and have any suggestions for how well that worked?

What would be the details that need more careful thought?

Get in touch directly by email or use the form below (if the latter let me know if you don’t want your reply publishing).

Why support Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL)?

Why would you not? This isn’t about learning technology for its own sake, it’s about enhancing learning and teaching with technology. Unless you deny that technology can in any way enhance teaching and learning, the questions remaining centre on how can technology help and how much is that worth. Advances in technology and in our understanding of how to use it in teaching and learning create a “zone of possibility,” the extent of which and success of how it is exploited depend on the intersection of teacher’s understanding of the technologies being offered and the pedagogies suitable for their subject (Dirkin & Mishra, 2010 [paywalled ]).

Current examples of potential enhancement which is largely unsupported (or supported only by ad hoc provision) include

Online exams in computer science
Formative assessment and other formative exercises across the school
Providing resources for students learning off-campus
Supporting the delivery of course material when students won’t attend lectures
Providing course information to students

Location of support: in School, by campus, or central services?

There are clearly some services that apply institution wide (VLE), or need to be supported at each campus (computer labs), however there are dangers to centralising too much. Centralisation creates a division between the support and the people who need it, a division which is reinforced by separation of funding and management lines for the service and the academic provision. This division makes it difficult for those who understand the technology and those who understand the pedagogy of the subject being taught to engage around the problems to be solved. Instead they interact but stay within the remits laid down by their management structures.

There should of course be strong links between the support in my School and others, central support and campus specific support, but an arrangement where these links are prioritised over the link between support for TEL in maths and computing and the provision of teaching and learning in maths and computer science seems wrong.

What support?

This is something of a brain dump based on current activity, in no particular order.

Seminar series and other regular meetings to gather and spread new ideas.
Developing resources for off-campus learning (currently we need in CS to provide support materials based on existing courses for a specific programme) these and similar materials could also be used to support students on conventional courses who don’t attend lectures.
Managing tools and systems for formative assessment and other formative experiences, e.g. mathematical and programming practice.
Developing resources and systems for working with partner institutions who deliver courses we accredit, some of which may be applicable to mainstream teaching.
Student course information website: maintenance and updating information, liaison with central student portal.
Online exams, advice on question design and managing workflow from question authoring to test delivery.
Evaluation of innovative teaching (where innovative is defined as something for which we are unsure enough of the benefits for it to be worth evaluating).[*]
Maintain links with development organisations in Learning Technology, e.g. ALT and Jisc and scholarship in areas such as digital pedagogy and open education which underpin technology enhanced learning.
Liaise with central & campus services, e.g. VLE management group
Advise staff in school on use of central facilities e.g. BlackBoard
Liaise with other schools. There is potential to provide some of these services to other schools (or vice versa), assuming financial recompense can be arranged.

[*Note: this raises the question of whether the support should be limited to technology to enhance learning, should address other innovations too.]

Who?

This needs to be provided by a core of people with substantial knowledge of learning technology, who might also contribute to other activities in the school. We have a group of three or four people who can do this. It is a little biased to Computer Science and to one campus so there should be thought given to how to bring in other subjects and locations.

We would involve project students and interns provided this was done in such a way as to contribute sustainable enhancement of a service or creation of new resources. For example, we would use of tools such as git so that each student left work that could be picked up by others. As well as supervising project students within the group we could co-supervise with academic staff who had their own ideas for learning-related student projects. This would help keep tight contacts with day-to-day teaching.

Funding and management

This support needs an allocated budget and well controlled project management. Funding for core staff should be long term on a par with commitment to teaching within the School. Management and reporting should be through the Director of Learning and Teaching and the Learning and Teaching Committee with information and discussion at the subject Boards of Studies as appropriate.

Reference

Dirkin, K., & Mishra, P. (2010). Values, Beliefs, and Perspectives: Teaching Online within the Zone of Possibility Created by Technology Retrieved from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/33974/

Comments Please

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Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility

Where’s my flying car? I was promised one in countless SF films from Metropolis through to Fifth Element. Well, they exist. Thirty seconds on the search engine of your choice will find you a dozen of so working prototypes (here’s a YouTube video with five). They have existed for some time. Come to think about it, … Continue reading Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility →

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A fine and upright gentle man flying in a small helicopter like vehicle. — Jess Dixon’s flying automobile c. 1940. Public Domain, held by State Library and Archives of Florida, via Flickr.

They have existed for some time. Come to think about it, the driving around on the road bit isn’t really the point. I mean, why would you drive when you could fly. I guess a small helicopter and somewhere to park would do.

So it’s not lack of technology that’s stopping me from flying to work. What’s more of an issue (apart from cost and environmental damage) is that flying is difficult. The slightest problem like an engine stall or bump with another vehicle tends to be fatal. So the reason I don’t fly to work is largely down to me not having learnt how to fly.

The zone of possibility

In 2010 Kathryn Dirkin studied how three professors taught using the same online learning environment, and found that they were very different. Not something that will surprise many people, but the paper (which unfortunately is still behind a paywall) is worth a read for the details of the analysis. What I liked from her conclusions was that how someone teaches online depends on the intersection of their knowledge of the content, beliefs about how it should be taught and understanding technology. She calls this intersection the zone of possibility. As with the flying car the online learning experience we want may already be technologically possible, we just need to learn how to fly it (and consider the cost and effect on the environment).

I have been thinking about Dirkin’s zone of possibility over the last few weeks. How can it be increased? Should it be increased? On the latter, let’s just say that if technology can enhance education, then yes it should (but let’s also be mindful about the costs and impact on the environment).

So how, as a learning technologist, to increase this intersection of content knowledge, pedagogy and understanding of technology? Teachers’ content knowledge I guess is a given, nothing that a learning technologist can do to change that. Also, I have come to the conclusion that pedagogy is off limits. No technology-as-a-Trojan-horse for improving pedagogy, please, that just doesn’t work. It’s not that pedagogic approaches can’t or don’t need to be improved, but conflating that with technology seems counter productive. So that’s left me thinking about teachers’ (and learners’) understanding of technology. Certainly, the other week when I was playing with audio & video codecs and packaging formats that would work with HTML5 (keep repeating H264 and AAC in MPEG-4) I was aware of this. There seems to be three viable approaches: increase digital literacy, tools to simplify the technology and use learning technologists as intermediaries between teachers and technology. I leave it at that because it is not a choice of which, but of how much of each can be applied.

Does technology or pedagogy lead?

In terms of defining the”zone of possibility” I think that it is pretty clear that technology leads. Content knowledge and pedagogy change slowly compared to technology. I think that rate of change is reflected in most teachers understanding of those three factors. I would go as far as to say that it is counterfactual to suggest that our use of technology in HE has been led by anything other than technology. Innovation in educational technology usually involves exploration of new possibilities opened up by technological advances, not other factors. But having acknowledged this, it should also be clear that having explored the possibilities, a sensible choice of what to use when teaching will be based on pedagogy (as well as cost and the effect on the environment).

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Three resources about gender bias

These are three resources that look like they might be useful in understanding and avoiding gender bias. They caught my attention because I cover some cognitive biases in the Critical Thinking course I teach. I also cover the advantages of having diverse teams working on problems (the latter based on discussion of How Diversity Makes … Continue reading Three resources about gender bias →

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These are three resources that look like they might be useful in understanding and avoiding gender bias. They caught my attention because I cover some cognitive biases in the Critical Thinking course I teach. I also cover the advantages of having diverse teams working on problems (the latter based on discussion of How Diversity Makes Us Smarter in SciAm). Finally, like any responsible teacher in information systems & computer science I am keen to see more women in my classes.

Iris Bohnet on BBC Radio 4 Today programme 3 January. If you have access via a UK education institution with an ERA licence you can listen to the clip via the BUFVC Box of Broadcasts. Otherwise here’s a quick summary. Bohnet stresses that much gender bias is unconscious, individuals may not be aware that they act in biased ways. Awareness of the issue and diversity training is not enough on its own to ensure fairness. She stresses that organisational practise and procedures are the easiest effective way to remove bias. One example she quotes is that to recruit more male teachers job adverts should not “use adjectives that in our minds stereotypically are associated with women such as compassionate, warm, supportive, caring.” This is not because teachers should not have these attributes or that men cannot be any of these, but because research shows[*] that these attributes are associated with women and may subconsciously deter male applicants.

[*I don’t like my critical thinking students saying broad and vague things like ‘research shows that…’. It’s ok for 3 minute slot on a breakfast news show but I’ll have to do better. I hope the details are somewhere in Iris Bohnet, (2016). What Works: Gender Equality by Design]

This raised a couple of questions in my mind. If gender bias is unconscious, how do you know you do it? And, what can you do about it? That reminded me of two other things I had seen on bias over the last year.

An Implicit Association Test (IAT) on Gender-Career associations, which I took a while back. It’s a clever little test based on how quickly you can classify names and career attributes. You can read more information about them on the Project Implicit website or try the same test that I did (after a few disclaimers and some other information gathering, it’s currently the first one on their list).

A gender bias calculator for recommendation letters based on the words that might be associated with stereotypically male or female attributes. I came across this via Athene Donald’s blog post Do You Want to be Described as Hard Working? which describes the issue of subconscious bias in letters of reference. I guess this is the flip side of the job advert example given by Bohnet. There is lots of other useful and actionable advice in that blog post, so if you haven’t read it yet do so now.

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XKCD or OER for critical thinking

I teach half a course on Critical Thinking to 3rd year Information Systems students. A colleague takes the first half which covers statistics. I cover how science works including the scientific method, experimental design, how to read a research papers, how to spot dodgy media reports of science and pseudoscience, and reproducibility in science; how to argue, which is mostly how to spot logical fallacies; and a little on cognitive development. One the better things about teaching on this course is that a lot of it is covered by XKCD, and that XKCD is CC licensed. Open Education Resources can be fun.

how scientists think

[explain]

hypothesis testing

Hell, my eighth grade science class managed to conclusively reject it just based on a classroom experiment. It's pretty sad to hear about million-dollar research teams who can't even manage that.

[explain]

Blind trials

[explain]

Interpreting statistics

[explain]

p hacking

[explain]

Confounding variables

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers

[explain]

Extrapolation

[explain]

Confirmation bias in information seeking

[explain]

undistributed middle

[explain]

post hoc ergo propter hoc

Or correlation =/= causation.

He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.

[explain]

Bandwagon Fallacy…

…and fallacy fallacy

[explain]

Diversity and inclusion

[explain]

On the first day of Christmas

Prompted by On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Anscombe’s quartet https://t.co/0olyAiVaBY — Judy Robertson (@JudyRobertsonUK) December 2, 2015 and with apologies: On the first day of Christmas My true love gave to me A testable hypoth-e-sis On the second day of Christmas My truelove gave to me Two sample … Continue reading On the first day of Christmas →

Prompted by

On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Anscombe’s quartet https://t.co/0olyAiVaBY

— Judy Robertson (@JudyRobertsonUK) December 2, 2015

and with apologies:

On the first day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
A testable hypoth-e-sis

On the second day of Christmas
My truelove gave to me
Two sample means
And a testable hypothesis

On the third day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
Three peer reviews
Two sample means
And a testable hypothesis

On the fourth day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
Four scatter plots
Three peer reviews
Two sample means
And a testable hypothesis

On the fifth day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
FIIIVE SIGMAA RuuuuLE
…

(I always thought the carol went down hill from there)

New projects for me at Heriot-Watt

I’ve been at Heriot-Watt University for many years now but haven’t really had much to do with the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning here. A couple of new projects might change that. The Learning and Teaching Strategy for the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences mentions using technology to create a more student centred … Continue reading New projects for me at Heriot-Watt →

The Learning and Teaching Strategy for the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences mentions using technology to create a more student centred approach to learning, and also reshaping the soft learning environment to meet challenges raised by things like delivering courses across campuses in Edinburgh, Dubai, Malaysia, and with learning partners around the world. So it references ideas like the use of khan-academy style videos where appropriate, effective use of formative assessment and feedback and use of the virtual learning environment to facilitate student interaction and collaboration across those different campuses.

To put this strategy into action the School has set up a working group, which I am convening. The approach will not to be prescriptive and dictatorial, that wouldn’t work; we want to focus on identifying, nurturing and disseminating within the School the existing practice that aligns with those strategic aims. We also want to bring in ideas from outwith the School that can be realised in our contexts, they will have to be practical ideas with demonstrable benefits (I’ll still do explorative researchy things, but through other work). We started work a couple of weeks ago, with two initial tasks: 1, a survey to identify what people are already doing that might be worth sharing and to identify what ideas they would like help progressing; and, 2, an internal show-and-tell event to discuss such ideas. I rather hope that the event isn’t a one-off, that it leads to other similar events, and also that the practice we find through it and the survey can be made open so that we can interact with all the other people doing similar at their own institutions.

Coincidently, I have also been asked to look at automated assessment, especially in exam scenarios in Computer Science. We have run electronic exams in the past, and many staff appreciated the automatic marking, but the system that we used until now is no longer available. So I shall be working with colleagues to try to find a replacement. I haven’t worked much with online assessment before, but I think there are three related but separate strands that will need following: 1, the software system, its functionality and usability; 2, policy issues such as security for high stakes assessment; 3, pedagogic issues. Clearly they are interdependent, for example if your pedagogic considerations lead you to decide that students should have access to the web during exams, then the security issues you need to consider change. My feeling is that only an off-the-shelf system will be sustainable for us, so I’m looking at commercial and open source systems that have already been developed. However, Computer Science obviously has a very particular relationship with the use of computers in teaching and assessment that may not be exploited by general purpose computer aided assessment.