Technology and Education Research Group

On December 11th, the OU eLearning Community (eLC) held an event co-hosted with the Arts and Social Sciences e-learning Seminar Series. This event, titled Peer Collaboration and Group Work, was jointly organised by Karen Kear (MCT) and Jane Barrett (Social Sciences).

A summary of the programme is below. Details, and a video recording of the whole event, can be found via the link above. The event was well received, and was attended by 40 people from across the Open University   

Working together: the student perspective.
Helen Kaye, Jane Barrett and Madeleine Knightley (Social Sciences)

Do students give useful peer feedback?
Mirabelle Walker and Karen Kear (MCT)

A framework to support student collaboration
Nicky Harlow (Arts)

Andy Lane has a number of recent publications and presentations, including:

Bateman, P., Lane, A. and Moon, R. (2012)  ’Out of Africa: A typology for analysing open educational resources initiatives’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education  (in press).

Lane, A. (2012) ‘A review of diagramming in systems practice and how technologies have supported the teaching and learning of diagramming for systems thinking in practice’, Systemic Practice and Action Research, 11pp, 2012 doi 10.1007/s11213-012-9254-8

Lane, A. (2012) ‘A review of the role of national policy and institutional mission in European Distance Teaching Universities with respect to widening participation in higher education study through OER’, Distance Education, 33(2), pp 135-150, 2012, DOI: 10.1080/01587919.2012.692067  

Lane, A. and Darby, J. (2012) ‘Fostering communities of open educational practice: lessons from the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education’, EADTU 25^th Annual Conference, 27-28 September 2012, Paphos, Cyprus.

Lane A. (2012) ‘OER Projects, Programmes and Users – Where does Video fit in?’ A ViTAL – video in education HEA/ALT Special Interest Group webinar, 6^th June 2012.

Lane, A., Caird, S. and Swithenby, E. (2012) ‘How green is your course? Understanding the impacts of ICTs’, presentation at Greening the FE and HE sectors: promoting environmental, economic and social sustainability, 30 May 2012, London.

John Woodthorpe and Associate Lecturer Anna Peachey spent two weeks in Kathmandu in November working on several potential projects on behalf of the OU’s International Development Office. Details can be found on the Digital Heart Nepal Facebook page.

The most highly-developed proposal concerns ways to support training activities for health workers in remote villages by providing and delivering teaching and training materials. The project idea came from an interview with Dr Saroj Dhital, head of surgery at the Kathmandu Model Hospital. During  filming for the ‘My Digital Life’ module (TU100) he was asked to look into the future at new developments that would help Nepal. He said:

 ‘Actually, we’re dreaming of an explosion of education and health in this country by the use of ICT. Our plan of virtual classrooms scattered in the remotest northern areas at high altitudes where people can listen to a very good teacher from Kathmandu or Pokhara or any other city while they are in the very, very local stone and mud houses.’

This quote has become the driving force for the main project which plans to provide exactly this support and training for health workers in remote parts of Nepal.

Other discussions were with the Nick Simons Institute, Save The Children, workers on a range of health information projects and the OU in Nepal. This last one culminated in discussions with the Minister of Education for Nepal and three under-secretaries for Education to look at how the OU in the UK could work with the embryonic OU in Nepal.

Jon, Karen and Keith are nearing the end of the EU-funded E-xcellence Next project. The new version of the E-xcellence manual Quality Assessment for E-learning: a Benchmarking Approach was launched in September at the EADTU conference in Paphos, Cyprus.

Jon presented two papers at this conference. One, with Karen and Keith, was about E-xcellence Next: Social networking and open educational resources: updating quality assurance for e-learning excellence.

The other, authored by Jon, was about badges: A speculation on the possible use of badges for learning at the UK Open University.  

Also in September, Jon presented two papers at the ALT annual conference in Manchester. One paper, was again with Karen and Keith and was about E-xcellence Next: Next steps for excellence in the quality of e-learning.

The other, by Jon, was about computer-marked assessment: Can a computer marked exam improve retention?

Following on from these events, Jon was invited to join the steering group of the Quality Assurance and Enhancement SIG. This group is concerned with enhancing the quality of learning using technology.

Karen and Associate Lecturers Frances Chetwynd and Helen Jefferis have submitted a paper to the ALT’s journal Research in Learning Technology. The paper is titled ‘Social presence in online learning communities: the role of personal profiles’. It is based on work for an eSTEeM project investigating students’ use of online profile facilities, which will be completed in a few months time.

In July Karen attended the MIT AppInventor Summit in Boston. This was an event where educators shared their experiences of working with students (of all ages) to develop Android mobile apps using the AppInventor drag-and-drop programming interface. Karen gave a short talk about the use of AppInventor in the new OU module TT284 Web Technologies.

The next few postings contain news about TERG members’ activities and achievements over the past few months. We’ll start with news from Mirabelle Walker and Judith Williams.

A paper resulting from the collaborative research into feedback that Mirabelle carried out with Maria Fernandez-Toro and Mike Truman, in the Department of Languages, will appear in print in Assesssment and Evaluation in Higher Education in 2013. At present it is available online via their ‘Latest articles’ facility:

Fernandez-Toro, M., Truman, M. & Walker, M. (2012) ‘Are the principles of effective feedback transferable across disciplines? A comparative study of written assignment feedback in Languages and Technology’ Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.
[online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2012.724381

Mirabelle is currently analysing the peer feedback given in an assignment in T215 Communication and Information Technologies. Together with Karen, Mirabelle will be giving a talk about her findings to date at the next OU e-Learning Community meeting on December 11th 2012 Peer Collaboration and Group Work.

In August Mirabelle and Judith submitted a paper titled ‘Critical evaluation as an aid to improved report writing: A case study’ to the European Journal of Engineering Education.

Soraya and Judith presented their paper ‘Harnessing the creativity of digital multimedia tools in distance learning’ at the Solstice conference in June of this year. The talk was well-attended and resulted in a useful contact relevant to future work regarding the framework used.

Judith, supported by Karen and Jon, is leading a short Knowledge Transfer Partnership (sKTP) with the Cooperative College in Manchester, to implement and evaluate eLearning at the College. The sKTP Associate, Chris Miller, has been in post for just over nine weeks. Chris has been investigating candidate platforms for the College’s VLE pilot.

Over the last month, Karen, Helen and Judith have been holding short weekly meetings to develop a journal paper. The paper is based on applying the Technology Acceptance Model to an initiative where wikis were used for group projects.

A walk along the Cyprus coast

As part of the E-xcellent project, I recently visited the Cyprus Open University. I was one of two assessors from the project team supporting the university in carrying out a quality assurance evaluation of its e-learning. 

In comparison with the UK OU, the Cyprus Open University is very small. But the local seminar demonstrated that its staff are dedicated and imaginative in supporting students through online and distance learning. Both educationally and technically, the university’s e-learning seems to be of a very high standard.

I very much enjoyed meeting the university staff in Nicosia, and afterwards I had a short holiday to explore parts of the southern coast of Cyprus – villages and coast.

A church in Tochni village

Well, the good news first — I went to San Francisco to make the pitch for our ‘Badges for Natural History’ proposal. We went as a family and met up with an old college friend (first time for about 30 years!) and her family who showed us the sights.

After that it was down to work with other members of our badges team: Jeff Homes from Encyclopedia for Life (EOL), based at Harvard (apparently in Stephen J Gould’s old lab — that’s cool);Jeremy Rice, programmer for EOL, who works from home in Alberquerque,  and Scott Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda from iNaturalist who are based in the Bay area. We spent a productive day together working on the final pitch (although constrained by having to submit the budget with a detailed commentary in advance) and starting to think about what work would need doing to make it all happen. The next day was the pitch itself — a nerve-wracking wait until our turn, but the presentation went well and I though we had done a good job.

Now for the bad news — we didn’t get the funding.

Unfortunately the funders have said they can’t give feedback so I have no idea why we weren’t successful. I really felt we had a strong and credible proposal so it was very disappointing to fail at the last hurdle, and depressing to feel one has let down our collaborators.

I guess there is a chance that we could take the same proposal to other funders, but I really don’t know of an appropriate source. Any suggestions welcome

I’ve recently been working on a bid to the MacArthur / HASTAC Digital Media Learning Competition Badges for Lifelong Learning. This is intended to promote the use of badges to acknowledge and reward informal learning and the softer skills that are not captured so well in exams and formal assessment.

I started the proposal specifically for iSpot. We already use badges extensively on iSpot, particularly as part of the reputation system which shows how an individual progresses on their ‘learning journey’ of increasing identification skills. We also use badges for other purposes: we accept experts from partner natural history societies who are given expert badges and affiliation badges, we give badges to OU students and alumni of ‘S159 Neighbourhood Nature’, and there are also ‘social’ badges which reflect activity in posting comments. 

There was an international meeting at the OU back in October jointly organised by iSpot and Encyclopedia for Life about citizen science for biodiversity. At that meeting we decided to go for a much broader collaborative bid which would see a coherent set of badges for natural history issued and accepted across eight different projects from around the world:

• Atlas of Living Australia (CSIRO, Australia),
• Encyclopedia of Life (Smithsonian & others, USA)
• iNaturalist (Carnegie Institution, Stanford, USA)
• El Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) (Costa Rica)
• India Biodiversity Portal (consortium in India)
• iSpot (Open University, UK)
• iSpot Southern Africa (South African National Biodiversity Institution, Pretoria, S Africa)
• Mushroom Observer (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, USA)

The technology underpinning these badges is the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure. This will allow an individual to earn badges on different sites and then collect and display them wherever they want, for example, on Facebook or LinkedIn. For our project, it means that a user will be able to show all their natural history badges on the profile pages of all the sites they use. More interestingly, there are possibilities for badge exchange: for example, having an expert badge on iSpot will give curator / editor privileges on Encyclopedia of Life, and it may be possible to share reputation or activity badges across sites so you don’t have to start from scratch. There are lots of issues to sort out here – coming up with a coherent set of badges for all the different sites with their different activities won’t be easy. There are also some thorny technical issues although hopefully the Mozilla folk will come up with the answers.

The DML competition has three stages. Our first and second stage proposals have both been successful and we are now in the final stage of the competition. The bad news is that it means delivering a 10 minute ‘pitch’ to a panel of judges; the good news is that I have to go to San Francisco to do it in person!

The winners of the funding competition will be announced at the Digital Media and Learning conference on 1^st March – watch this space!

Although if we are successful in this bid the work will be specifically aimed at use in iSpot, I’m sure the ideas and technology could be of much broader use within the OU, for example with light-touch assessment and peer-assessment around OER material such as OpenLearn.

Giselle Ferreira and Judith Williams are two of the four authors of an article called Using creative multimedia in teaching and learning ICTs: A case study that is in the current issue of the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (EURODL).

Jon Rosewell is a member of the iSpot project team that is one of the beneficiaries of the recent Wolfson Foundation grant of £1 million to set up a Wolfson Open Science Laboratory at The Open University.

Helen Donelan’s project proposal entitled ‘Enhancing professional networking and engagement using social media’ has been accepted for funding by the Open University’s eSTEeM initiative.
(For more details about eSTEeM, see:
http://www.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/esteem/)

Congratulations to everyone!

Mirabelle’s paper:

An investigation into written comments on assignments: do students find them usable?

has been highlighted by Routledge as one of their most highly cited articles on Higher Education in 2010.

The paper was published in the journal Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. The abstract is given below.

Many congratulations to Mirabelle.

Abstract

Students’ response to the feedback they receive on written assignments is an important but relatively under‐researched aspect of teaching and learning. This paper presents an analysis of over 3000 written comments made on 106 assignments in three course modules in a Technology faculty, and also the results of telephone interviews with 43 of the students whose commented assignment had been analysed. The interviews explored how usable students found the comments, including their response to specific comments that their tutor had made on the assignment. When the results from the interviews were matched to the types of comment found in the analysis, it became apparent that students find some types of comment considerably more usable. These findings are discussed in the light of the current state of assessment practice, and possible future avenues for research in this area are suggested.

Karen, Frances, Judith and Helen have had a paper accepted for publication in the journal Computers & Education. The paper is titled:

Web conferencing for synchronous online tutorials: perspectives of tutors using a new medium.

The paper discusses the experiences of a number of OU tutors when they first used  the Elluminate web conferencing tool for tutorials.

A version of the paper is available online (for those with access to the journal).