Technology and Education Research Group

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.

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.

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.

Attendees: Karen, Judith, Mirabelle, John, Giselle, Richard

As usual, we started with news and updates:

• Richard is giving a conference paper at an IEEE conference in Venice in May.
• Mirabelle and colleagues are to write a book chapter on feedback in the book Reconceptualising feedback in higher education: towards an agenda for effective change, to be published by Routledge.
• Judith, Giselle and their colleague Soraya have submitted a paper to the European Journal of Open Distance and eLearning (EURODL) for a special themed issue on creativity and open educational resources. Their paper is a case study of the video creation work in Block 5 of T215.
• Giselle, with Tina Wilson, is writing a book chapter on Web 2.0 and OER.
• Jon will be trialing his eSTEeM confidence-based marking project through T216, and is also intending to work on converting the T184 ECA into a part computer-marked exam with the objective of improving retention.
• Karen mentioned a possible new part-time PhD student, who has proposed a project about VLEs in schools.

 The meeting then moved to general discussions. First, stimulated by Jon’s discussion of his T184 project, we talked generally about examinations in OU modules. Giselle talked about the new VMware course for presentation in 2012B that she is currently chairing.

 We finished the meeting with a discussion on finance. It was agreed that Mirabelle’s Survey Monkey licence should be extended for a further year and that Karen’s licence should also be extended and made available for other TERG members to use. Karen asked members to identify whether there were any conferences they would like to attend.