An international perspective of technology in education

9th March 2016

eSTEeM project leaders Linda Robson, Lynda Cook and Nicolette Habgood, share their experiences from the International Technology, Education and Development (INTED) Conference which took place on the 7-9 March 2016 in Valencia.

Over 600 delegates from over 80 countries attended this international conference which provided an excellent opportunity to share experiences and learn about technology in education and educational research. We presented the results of our eSTEeM sponsored research project as a poster presentation on Student experience of University email communications; a collaborative project by MCT and Science.

The conference opened with two keynote speakers. Firstly, Safeena Husain provided a thought provoking insight into ‘Educate Girls’ – a non-profit making organisation which aims to increase the numbers of girls entering into the education system in parts of India. Educate Girls (http://www.educategirls.in/) aims to support the enrolment and continued education of girls using young (teenage) girls as mentors to overcome the gender inequality. By 2017 Educate girls will have supported the education of over half a million girls since it began in 2007.

The second keynote speaker was Professor Alan November who focused on the ‘Transformational Six’ – six questions educators can use to establish if technology is adding value to teaching and learning or simply being used as no more than a ‘$10000 pencil’. Alan’s talk used a series of demonstrations to show how easy it is to use search engines, such as Google inappropriately, outlining the challenges presented to students in preparing and answering assignments. We were also introduced to Prism, a free web tool which allows educators to view the way a group of students have used a resource (http://prism.scholarslab.org/).

The two day conference consisted of eight themed parallel oral presentation sessions and two poster sessions per day.  We attended a range of sessions summarised below:

Nicolette Habgood

"I attended collaborative learning, virtual and augmented reality, flipped, blended, mobile learning and elearning, learning analytics and big data and educational software and student response systems. I found the sessions to be variable in terms of content and direct relevance to the Open University as the majority of presentations were about institutions delivering education in a traditional manner but supplementing the traditional face to face environment with elearning in various ways. However I have learnt a considerable amount about the opportunities which are now possible in terms of delivering elearning such as virtual and augmented reality and the use of holograms for delivering online tuition. In addition the ability to use crowd sourcing as a method of collaborative working for students is something I feel could be incorporated more into our science online modules."

Lynda Cook

"I attended sessions on tutoring & coaching, using online tuition, using technology for visualization, enhancing student learning and evaluation of assessment. I gained an insight into a range of technologies that are available (such as 3D anatomy tools). Some key points identified the value of personal tutoring for aiding student retention, coaching for teachers, essentials for online tuition and online student support.  Many of the issues are already used by the Open University and we could ensure we are making the most of what we already use. Other sessions looked at supporting students for assessment when using online resources, using badges, peer review and clickers (instant feedback) to engage students."

Linda Robson

"I attended sessions on tutoring and coaching, learning spaces, mobile learning, professional development and e-learning. There was some interesting work on study support. Students focus on different aspects of their work when in one to one support sessions compared to paired support sessions.The tension between institutional desire to use a VLE and student preference for Facebook came up several times.  A Moodle block has been developed to allow management of Facebook groups from within Moodle. Allows analytics to be run on the Facebook activity and students prefer to interact in Facebook. Different HEIs have different patterns of usage on Facebook. We need to be clear what we are trying to achieve with our Facebook presence and how we will measure impact. Backing up a previous concern I had, an extensive literature review reported that most studies on online learning are flawed due to non-randomised by small sample sizes. We should be taking more advantage of our large cohort sizes to investigate some of the issues in online education. However, I did finish with two interesting studies on effectiveness of online teaching. One reported a study comparing delivery of the same course online and face to face showing poorer results for online students, particularly for weaker students. The other highlighted the need for students to learn the procedural norms when in an online environment. Linking the findings suggests that a thorough induction might improve retention in online modules as students may be dropping out as they struggle with how to interact online, which becomes even more difficult when they need to ask for help and support."

We presented our poster on Tuesday morning. We spoke in depth to 10 delegates who were interested in the poster, and they demonstrated the preconception that students do not respond well to email communication that our study disproved.

Overall, the conference provided two days of thought provoking ideas on using technology in education and educational practices. Our eSTEeM poster generated interest and pleasing positive feedback. We have really appreciated the opportunity to attend an international conference and to meet with other educators to share experiences and learn from others. It was inspiring to see some of the current opportunities available for online education, but also concerning that the OU is not at the forefront of the methods that can be used for online delivery.