Technology and Education Research Group

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).

Last week Karen visited Kaunas in Lithuania as part of the E-xcellence Next project. The visit was one of a series of ‘local seminars’ at universities in different countries. These local seminars, which are a key part of the project,  are to facilitate  evaluation of the quality of the elearning offering.

The seminar was hosted by Kaunas University of Technology (KUT). Kaunas is the second city in Lithuania. The seminar also involved a visit to the capital Vilnius in order to meet representative from the Lithuanian national body for quality in higher education (equivalent to the QAA in the UK).

KUT was also hosting a conference on elearning at the same time: ALTA 2011. Karen and Allan wrote and presented a paper ‘Case studies of social networking for online learning’ for the conference. All the papers were webcast using KUT’s impressive in-house webcasting technologies, and the recordings are available via the conference website.

We held our first meeting for the Autumn on Thursday September 15th. Members present were:
Karen, Mirabelle, Judith, Jon and Roger.

The main focus of the meeting was a discussion of two articles on the concept of ‘transactional distance’:

• Michael Moore (1993) ‘Theory of transactional distance’. in Keegan, D., ed. Theoretical Principles of Distance Education, Routledge, pp. 22-38.
• Paul Gorsky and Avner Caspi (2005) ‘A critical analysis of transactional distance theory’, The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 6(1), pp. 1-11

The first of these is a chapter by the originator of the concept, explaining the elements it includes, and discussing the relationships between them. The second is a paper disputing the validity of these ideas.

Group members were of different opinions regarding these two articles. Some of us felt that the ideas included in the concept of transactional distance were useful, even though the reationships between them did not seem to be clearly specified. Others felt that Gorsky and Caspi were right in their claim that the theory did not hold up to close examination. We agreed that further background on transactional distance, and the associated debates, would be of interest.

We then went on to share our items of news from the summer period.

Mirabelle is in discussions regarding possible publication of a book on developing students’ writing and self-evaluation skills. She and Judith are planning a co-authored paper on this aspect of the OU course T215 Communication and Information Technologies.

Judith is awaiting feedback on a co-authored journal paper submitted earlier this year. She, Karen, Helen and Frances are working on post-review revisions to a further paper. Judith has also made a good start on her two eSTEeM projects.

Karen has been working on a paper about social presence and user profiles in social networking.  This will link into her eSTEeM project with Frances and Helen Jefferis (OU tutor and consultant). Karen and Jon have been working further with Keith on the E-xcellence Next project to further develop benchmarks and a manual on quality in elearning.

Karen and Judith have heard from Giselle, who is on study leave in Brazil until Christmas. Giselle is also working on the E-xcellence project.

Jon has been working on his iSPOT project, including dissemination. He has also presented a poster at a conference on computer-assisted assessment. This links with his eSTEeM project on confidence-based assessment. His second eSTEeM project related to a change in assessment methods is going well, with an increase in retention on the associated course.

Our next TERG meeting will be on Thursday November 17th at 2.30pm.

Back in June, Keith, Jon and Karen attended a 2-day meeting in Paris as part of the ‘E-xcellence Next’  EU-funded project.

The first day was a meeting of the cross-European E-xcellence next project team.

The second day was the  European Seminar on QA in E-learning, at which Keith gave a talk and Karen and Jon presented a workshop on social networking and Open Educational Resources.

As part of the visit, Keith was involved in meetings hosted by Unesco to establish a Global Task Force for QA in E-Learning. This initiative involved our ex-Vice Chancellor John Daniels (see photo below).

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Before getting into the swing of his PhD research, Andrew Smith has been working with Cisco Systems over the last three years on the pedagogical (and semi-technical) development of their Packet Tracer network simulator, which is used as a key teaching tool on T216: Cisco Networking.

One of the key outcomes of this work, which has been driving Andrew’s current PhD research, has been the development of a simulated internet. Packet Tracer, unlike any other simulated networking resource allows groups to work together, either in class or remotely on a diverse range of simulated networking activities.

In exploring the question of how a simulated internet could be developed, Andrew has been working with Dennis Frezzo (known affectionately by the Cisco community as the Godfather of Packet Tracer).  An aim of this work is to present the educational world with a powerful simulated environment, with many of the experiences of the real system, without any of the risks or issues.

The intention is to develop a mesh of ‘relay-servers’ hosting the Packet Tracer application, each interlinked and supporting a virtual internet where Open University students, amongst many others, will be able to engage in a range of learning experiences.

With work already underway, and papers presented at two previous conferences, Andrew has worked with remote and in-class groups to build small ‘Internets’ and explore the pedagogy. The work has been accepted as a paper at ALT-C in Leeds this September, where Andrew will present a full research paper.