Technology and Education Research Group

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.

Keynote speakers

The second keynote, Engaging and Supporting Students: is technology an answer?, was by Becka Colley, Dean of Students at the University of Bradford and a committed technophile.  Becka talked about the challenges ahead for universities to attract, retain and satisfy students in the post £9,000 per annum fees era, and how ‘technology focused solutions could help enhance the experience for all’. This was a fast and vibtrant ‘no holds barred’ presentation that Nick Clegg would not have enjoyed.

Presentations

There were five groups of six or seven parallel sessions throughout the day. I tended to focus on those that were looking at some element of assessment.

Most interesting (pedagogically) presentations

Demanding Feedback: Supporting the few not supplying the many, Ollie Jones and Dr. Andrea Gorra, Leeds Metropolitan University.

This talk described an experiement in providing assessment feedback to 260 L2 students on an Operations Management module. The background to the research was the well known problem of students not accessing and reading the feedback given. In this experment, all students were given some generic feedback two weeks after the assessment deadline followed a week later by some individual feedback (about a sentence) and their marks on each criteria . Students then had the option of requesting additional feedback, given as recorded audio, written comments or f2f. 23% of students accessed the generic feedback; 45% accesed their individual feedback with marks; 22% requested the additional feedback, but only half of these subsequently accessed it. Those engaging most actively with the feedback were the high achievers and those at the fail or near-fail end. The majority of students in the middle appeared to be uninterested. Conclusions: focus feedback where required, reallocating time saved to formative feedback.

Most engaging presentation

Karen and Judith have each recently run workshops on social networking for learning. The workshops formed part of staff development days for Open University Associate Lecturers. Karen ran a workshop near Reading, attended by about 25 staff and Judith ran two in Ireland, each attended by about 40 staff.

The workshops were based on selected case studies in Karen’s recent book Online and Social Networking Communities including a case study on wikis written by Judith and Helen.  The other case studies - some from the Open University and some from other institutions – covered topics such as web conferencing, social bookmarking and photo-sharing.

Workshop participants discussed, in small groups:

The benefits of the initiative described in the case study

Problems which could arise

How the problems could be overcome. 

TERG members would be happy to run other such workshops in the future. Please contact K.L.Kear@open.ac.uk

Several members of TERG were on duty at the OU Learn About Fair yesterday.

This is an annual event with stalls on a range of topics related to technology for learning.

Judith was on the wikis stall. Jon was on Forums (with input from the iSpot project). Karen was on Social Networking.

The event, which lasted from 11.30 am to 2.30 pm, was very popular, and had a good ‘buzz’!

Leuven town hall

The E-xcellence project on quality in e-learning started on January 1st 2011. The OU contribution is led by Keith W, with Karen, Jon, Giselle and Wendy forming the rest of the team.

Keith and Karen went to Leuven, in Belgium, for the project start-up meeting on 17th and 18th January.

Leuven is a lovely old university town with ornate buildings and cobbled streets. The meeting was at the Irish College which was founded by Irish monks - this was also a lovely building.

The project meeting was attended by representatives from the many project partners and associates. There were attendees from Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Equador … The project partners gave presentations on their particular workpackages. Keith presented for the OU, and included a great whistle-stop tour of ideas and new developments in e-learning.

The project dinner

On the evening of the first day there was a project dinner in a Leuven restaurant. This was a very pleasant event and good for getting to know the other people, and finding out about education, and other aspects of life,  in the different countries represented. 

The OU team will be developing a set of self-assessment guidelines and benchmarks for quality in e-learning. The project will also run a number of local workshops where an institution can carry out a supported review of their e-learning.

International Conference Villach/Austria Sept. 23-35 2009 ICL (Interactive Computer Aided Learning) http://www.icl-conference.org/
Workshop: Exploring Web 2.0 to support online learning communities: where technology meets pedagogy

Giselle, Wendy, Jon and Karen, recently presented a workshop at the ICL2009 conference, currently in its twelfth year, at Villach in Austria.  The aim of the workshop was to raise awareness of how Web 2.0 tools can support collaborative learning.

The three-hour, interactive workshop was facilitated by Jon and Wendy in Austria, with Giselle and Karen making real-time presentations and contributions to the workshop via Flashmeeting and other online tools. Twenty three international participants took part in the workshop, which was a mix of discussion and hands-on activities via participants’ WiFi enabled laptops. The participants really valued the opportunity to work together in a face to face environment and at the same time work through online activities.

Two weeks prior to the event, the organisers of ICL 2009 provided the names and e-mail addresses of the twenty eight participants who had registered for the event. On the same day they were invited via email  to join a ‘Ning’ social network set up by Wendy. Using three profile questions, the organisers of the workshop were able to find out where people worked, what their interests were in Web 2.0 and what they hoped to get out of the workshop. This meant that the activities could be personalised for the participants prior to the workshop.

The workshop started with brief presentations from Jon and Wendy about the Open University and their own research interests, punctuated by a ‘speed-dating’ ice-breaker, to help everyone get to know each other. Giselle and Karen then joined the workshop via Flashmeeting and gave presentations from Milton Keynes on their research interests.

In the next activity, participants were invited to join the Ning social network (if they had not already done so) and explore its features, contributing their thoughts as blog postings within the Ning environment. (This ‘Ning’ activity was built on previous experience of its successful use at the 4th Blended Learning Conference at the University of Hertfordshire by Mark Russell.)

In the final activity, participants worked in small groups using a wiki. They were invited to choose from eight scenarios which each described a Web 2.0 tool used in an educational context.  The groups were asked to consider the scenario in relation to issues chosen from a list provided in the wiki.   They were asked to write a short commentary, in the wiki, on how these issues related to their chosen scenario. The issues and scenarios were then discussed in the final plenary. 

Feedback from participants at the workshop was very positive, showing that people value the chance to try web 2.0 tools and discuss their use in education. These are just some of the participants’ feedback comments from the evaluation of the event.

• “Very interesting and useful to get to know these tools.”
• “Very good to use the tools that you talked about, direct in the workshop.”
• “Very interesting, great to discuss the use of these tools in ODL environment.”
• “Just what we expected.”
• “To be made online : )”
Links

Link to the workshop’s ‘Ning’ social network http://tergou.ning.com – if interested then e-mail w.a.fisher@open.ac.uk for an invite.
 
Link to the workshop’s wiki http://icl2009web2.pbworks.com – if interested then e-mail J.P.Rosewell@open.ac.uk for a password.

Link to workshop’s presentations http://www.slideshare.net/J.P.Rosewell/exploring-web-20-to-support-online-learning-communities-where-technology-meets-pedagogy

Technology and Education Research Group (TERG) blog http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/terg/

The organisers would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of: COLMSCT, the ATELIER-D project, Regional Director Nick Berry, TERG and the Department of Communication and Systems for their sponsorship and financial support.

Whilst a little more subject and discipline specific the Cisco Learning Institute the educational research charity, autonomous from Cisco Systems and the Cisco Academy programme has been working with the Cisco Networking Course Team at the Open University amongst many others to develop end deploy the Networking Education Research Collaborative which can be found at https://research.ciscolearning.org

This research community is still in its infancy, work has already begun to share thoughts, ideas and research, with the site supporting an independent repository for papers as well as work spaces for projects.

As a member of TERG and an academic within MCT at the Open University you are more than welcome to sign up, submit papers and create potential links to international academics with a similar mindset and background.

With over 37000 educators in the international programme, many who work in research as well as teaching we are in the the unique position of being able to support the development of this initiative.