Month: September 2016

Some colleagues and I are embarking on a project exploring how teacher education might move toward adoption Open Educational Practices (OEP). A project that is currently being driven by a funding from one University, and which might lead to an application for funding from another institution. In part, we’re thinking about how teacher education in each of these two institutions can adopt OEP, what that might look like, what the barriers be, and how might we go about moving toward something like this that won’t fade away once the money runs out or we move on.

As it happens, over the last week or so there’s been an on-going discussion about the role of institutions and/or culture in OER. A discussion that started with Mike Caufield’s reflections and were then picked up by many, including Jim Groom, Stephen Downes and Tim Klapdor. A discussion that provides an interesting way of looking at what we’re thinking about. In the end, I think we may need to draw upon the following from David Wiley and Cable Green, which echoes a discussion Leigh Blackall and I had back in 2010.

@opencontent @jimgroom @Downes @holden I propose it’s not an either / or … it’s a both / and.

— Cable Green (@cgreen) September 17, 2016

Making stuff last – institutions

One of the first posts in this discussion by Mike arose out of a debate around the value of Open Educational Resources as a stepping stone to Open Pedagogy. The idea being that increasingly universities are creating policies etc that are embedding OERs (typically in the form of open textbooks) into organisational practice. However, while all this has been happening open pedagogy (I’ll label this OEP here) has been waiting, waiting for its turn. That waiting has made the people more interested in OEP a touch cranky with the focus on OER and they’re heading off to do their own thing.

The problem Mike identifies comes from his personal experience

But here’s what I know. The death of the Persona Project was the norm, not the exception. It happens all the time. Where I work right now had a great student and teacher wiki up in 2008. But it got nuked in a transition. The Homelessness Awareness wiki I worked on with Sociology students (and demo’d with Jim Groom in 2011) is ghost-towned. The disability research one has been slammed by spam. And even more than that, each time I work with a professor on these things (most recently on a Colonial Theory wiki) we spin up from scratch, and leave it to rot afterwards.

And leads to the following

People make things possible. And we have such great, great people in Open Pedagogy….But institutions, they are what make these things last.

And in a another post, to the question

How can we re-architect our institutions to bring open practice into the center of them, rather see it as a bolt-on?

Making stuff last – culture

Stephen Downes response is

You can’t depend on institutions. And in a sense, you don’t need them. Institutions aren’t what make tests and exams happen year after year. Institutions aren’t what guarantee there will be course outlines and reading lists. What makes this last – the only thing that makes this last – is culture.

And in a more detailed post he adds

I’m not saying we should never build things. What I am saying is that we cannot count on institutions – organized economic and political units – to ensure the lasting value of these things is preserved…Because sooner or later someone is going to object (or forget, or simply retire), and the good work goes down the drain.

Local institutional experience

So how does local institutional experience match up with this discussion.

Institutional moves to be open

Peter brings up the experience of our local institution. An institutional early adopter of open within an Australian context. Peter sums up the situation as

In principle being open is acknowledged as a good thing but in practice it seems not to happen much and to be not easy to accomplish within the institutional processes.

And suggests that at least part of the problem is

It seems likely that is linked to concerns about reputational effects….Thus the interests of the institution seem to be best served by ensuring that what is made open is carefully managed and quality assured to present the best possible impression.

Perhaps indicating that our institution hasn’t yet been successful at achieving what Mike observes

is that OER has done the hard work of bringing OER work to the center of the institution, rooting it in institutional policy and practice in a way that Open Pedagogy hasn’t been able to do

But also highlighting Downes point in that these moves for the institution to be open have been driven by people at the senior levels of the institution. However, that high level interest has resulted in a number of different bolt-on projects, but have yet to translate into changes into organisational policy or practice.

For example, institutional policy still does not make it easy (or even possible) for an academic to place a Creative Commons license on their teaching materials and release it. Institutional policy is such that the university retains copyright. In addition, any such sharing seems to require using the institutional version of Equella. A system not conducive to easy, widespread sharing and discoverability.

My moves within institutions to be open

The 2010 discussion around open and how to get there between Leigh Blackall and I arose out of my work on BIM. A Moodle module that aids teachers manage use of individual student blogs. BIM is perhaps the ed tech equivalent of an Archisuit. An example of a response to a hostile architecture. An example that Mike uses as an example of the sort of workarounds that open pedagogy people have been working on for ages. But then argues that

Being against the institution may be necessary, but it is not where you ultimately want to be. If you want real change, styrofoam padding isn’t going to cut it. Eventually you have to remove the damn bars from the bench.

The difference with BIM is that it is part of the LMS. It’s an accepted part of the institution. Perhaps indicative of how while my current institution hasn’t yet succeeded with embedding open into the policy of the institution. There are glimmers of it within the infrastructure.

However, that still hasn’t encouraged vast swaths of adoption. 8 of the 10 course offerings that have used by BIM in 2014/2015 were courses I taught. On the plus side, I was surprised to find the other two courses and I believe they have continued using BIM this year.

The Moodle Open Book project is another “archisuit” example. The aim is to connect the Moodle Book module (used to manage/display collections of web pages within Moodle) to GitHub and thus enable production of OER and more interestingly OEP. There’s even some “working” code.

But as I talk about both of these workarounds, what I’m struck by is the huge “cultural” leap required to go from not using blogs/github to thinking about how blogs/github might be leveraged in an interesting OEP way. Even the initial development and application of BAM (the non-Moodle predecessor) of BIM was driven by a fairly uninspired pedagogical application – address the student corruption of a “reflective journal” assignment using Word documents.

The impact of culture

That said, I think the adoption of BIM in two other courses at my institution is potentially largely down to a change in broader culture. In this case, not the idea of open, but instead the movement of blogs into a common (even passe) part of contemporary culture. My understanding is that the person who has adopted BIM in their teaching has embarked on projects that have used blogs.

Blogs in 2016 aren’t as strange and unknown as they were in 2007 when the ELI Guide to Blogging came out. In 2006, when I tried to explain BAM, most of the time was spent trying to get people’s head about blogs, blogging, and RSS feeds. In 2016, most people are familiar with the idea of a blog and blog posts. Though I’m guessing they are probably still a bit uncertain about RSS feeds.

If blogs hadn’t caught on like they did, BIM would be dead. Culture plays a part.

Removing the bars from the bench: easy for OER, harder for OEP

As Mike points out “the assumption of the textbook is baked into every nook and cranny of our institutions”. A bit earlier he identifies the proprietary textbook as “the largest structural barrier to open pedagogy”. He congratulates the Open Textbook folk for having “willing to engage on the fronts of policy and practice at once” and suggests that the open pedagogy folk need to engage more in “issues of policy, law, funding, architecture, institutional support” in order to “remove the bars from the bench”. I think it’s going to be much harder for OEP to do this, perhaps even leaning more towards the impossible end.

Textbooks are a core part of universities. Everyone is familiar with them. The institution can talk and deal with textbooks at a general level. Whether they be proprietary or open. They have a collection of pages, making up chapters, making up the book. There are headings, images, activities, etc. They are a model that is understood across all parts of the institution. Hence textbooks are something that can be easily discussed at an institutional level. Sure those strange folk in the Arts will have different content than the Engineers, but the notion of a book is general.

OEP on the other hand is – I think – incredibly more diverse and contextual. My initial experiments with BAM took place almost 10 years ago in another institution in a different discipline. Today I use BIM – the functionality of which is a direct translation of BAM into Moodle (hence the acronym BIM) – at a different institution in a different discipline. I don’t use the BIM functionality. I have a army of kludges that I employ to support the OEP I think works better for my current students. ds106 makes perfect sense in it’s context and purpose, but engineers at my institution are not likely to understand it at all. The type of OEP we might engage in with pre-service teachers is likely to be very different from nursing students. In particular, if our aim with OEP is for the pre-service teachers to engage more with the teaching profession.

The novelty and diversity of OEP would appear to be in stark contrast to the familiarity and standardisation of textbooks and OER. I don’t think institutions (or many people) will deal well with that combination. I’m not sure continuing to ride in the back seat will be sufficient.

That said, if we’re going to do anything around OEP within an institution, we’re going to have to consider Mike’s question, if we want that work to have a chance of surviving.

How can we re-architect our institutions to bring open practice into the center of them, rather see it as a bolt-on?

Both/and, not either/or

But at the same time, I think we also need to ask ourselves a similar question about the culture of teachers and teacher education. While there’s been a significant increase in sharing online amongst edubloggers, Twitter, online resource sharing etc. This still seems to be the minority. There are still schools that constrain the use of online technologies and sharing. There are schools where it is assumed that the school retains copyright of teacher-produced material. In an era of standardised testing and concerns about teacher quality, there are issues around sharing resources, and especially sharing the messy processes involved figuring out how to teach these learners effectively.

Even if (and a big if) we’re able to embed OEP into our courses within our institutions, unless we can connect that work sustainably into teacher practice the full benefits won’t flow.

Which has me wondering, where are the sweet spots in teacher practice and our courses where it would be easier to introduce OEP and make the connection between practice and ivory tower?  What about in your teaching, where are those sweet spots? Is there any overlap?

What is your experience of the digital technologies provided by the organisations for which you work?

If you’d like to share, please complete the poll below, more detail below.

About the poll

The poll is a semi-serious attempt to gather the perceptions of how people perceive organisational digital technologies. The idea (and the text from the two poll options) comes from this conference paper. The presentation will be on Friday 30th September with additional presentation resources coming to this blog soon.

The level of support provided by digital technologies to broad learning and teaching tasks within my little part of my current institution is extremely limited. The following is one explanation why this is the case, and one set of suggestions for what might be done, both immediately and longer term.

The problems and a cause

There are lots of possible explanations for poor level of support offered by institutional digital technologies. The one I’m using here goes like this

1. Activities that are easy to do get done, activities that are hard to do are not apt to get done.
2. Learning, teaching and the activities that support learning and teaching are situated – context matters.
   For example, the most effective ways for 3rd year pre-service teachers to develop their abilities as teachers, are not likely to work effectively for 1st year mechanical engineers. The activities that someone teaching pre-service teachers wants to engage in, will not be entirely the same as someone teaching engineers, nurses, accountants, musicians etc.
3. The implementation of institutional digital technologies explicitly de-values context and specificity.
   For example, a fundamental principle of Enterprise information technology architecture is (emphasis added) “provide maximum benefit to the enterprise as a whole“. Here’s that principle expressed by a UK university, and where it is (see principle #2) mentioned in “The Open Group Architecture Framework”. Principle #5 adds this “Development of applications used across the enterprise is preferred over the development of similar or duplicative applications which are only provided to a particular organization”. Check your organisation’s enterprise architecture framework, you may well see a copy and paste of those principles.

While there is a logic behind those principles, these principles also create at least two problems:

• Lowest common denominator, or the if all you have is hammer problem; and,
• Starvation.

Lowest common denominator

“Making Omelettes” (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
by  PhotoGraham 

If you work for my institution and you need to create a website for some purpose then you have two options: Moodle or Sitecore. Moodle is the LMS and Sitecore is the content experience (really sitecore, experience?) management system used by marketing to manage the corporate website. This is what we have, so every request to have a website must use one of these.

This has lead to a huge number of Moodle courses sites being created for purposes that are so far removed from the intent of Moodle (or sitecore). Not surprisingly these sites tend to be largely inactive, largely because Moodle (or sitecore) does not make it easy to complete the sort of activities that the purpose required. Those activities become too hard, so they don’t get done. They work as well as using a hammer to open a boiled egg.

The focus on the whole organisation means that enterprise IT suffers from a version of the reusability paradox. As they focus more and more on making a digital technology reusable across the entire organisation, they must remove from that digital technology anything that provides value within specific contexts. Anything that helps pre-service teachers learn, gets removed because they don’t represent the whole organisation.

Starvation

Any attempt to develop/adopt/use a digital technology that is not common across the whole organisation (i.e. a digital technology that actually provides value) suffers from starvation. The resources to develop/approve a digital technology within an organisation are limited. Priorities have to applied. A digital technology of value to a subset of the organisation is always going to be placed at a lower priority than a digital technology of value to the entire organisation. It will always be starved of resources.

This starvation is made worse by the observation that the people charged with supporting the use of digital technology within organisations tend to become experts in, and even employed explicitly to support specific digital technologies.  Whenever a requirement is raised, it can only ever be understood/responded to within the context of existing organisational digital technologies and thus returning to the “hammer” problem.

Enterprise IT has become too much about how “we can help you use the digital technologies we already have” and not enough about “what is important to you and how can we make it easier for you to do it well”.

Context specific solutions

Based on the above, if we want to actually add real value to what we do, then we have to figure out how to adopt/develop/use digital technologies that make it easy for us to do what is important. We have to figure out how to adopt/develop/use digital technologies that are more contextually specific.

The following suggestions a “simple” two-step process

1. Identify the activities that are important to use and are currently too hard.
2. Figure out how we can adopt/develop/user digital technologies that will help make those activities easy.

What follows is an attempt to illustrate what this might look like. It will have limitations due to my limited knowledge of both the activities and the digital technologies.

This two-step process and the suggestions below open up all sorts of research opportunities.

Important, but difficult activities

What follows is a list of potentially important, but currently difficult to accomplish activities around Initial Teacher Education (ITE) at my institution. Some or all of them could be arguable, and there are likely far more important activities.

1. Program-level activities: Ensuring that students in our ITE programs
   • successfully complete specific tasks (e.g. have a valid Blue Card);
   • have a space to socialise with others within the programs;
   • start to develop their sense of professional identity as a teacher;
   • identify information about learners, courses etc at program level.
2. Professional Experience: All aspects of organising and supporting the placement of pre-service teachers on Professional Experience.
3. Know thy students: Have some idea about how and what are students are doing during semester in our own courses and beyond, and be able to respond appropriately based on  what we know.
4. Learning and teaching: Like most university e-learning our courses do not include widespread effective use of digital technology to amplify and transform student learning (not at all surprising if we’re using generic tools).
5. Standards, portfolios and outcomes: Understand how well our students and the students learning maps against the APSTs.
6. Program and course development: Plan and manage the development of the proposed new programs and the raft of new courses those programs will require. Support the on-going evolution and management of those courses. For example, being able to see and query due dates or other details across the program.
7. Teacher specific activities: Teachers (and thus our pre-service teachers) have to develop and demonstrate capabilities around teacher specific activities (e.g. lesson and unit planning). Increasingly these activities should (but generally aren’t) actively supported by digital technologies (a Word template for lesson planning is not active support by digital technologies).

Below there are some initial suggestions about how each of the above might be addressed.

How we might support these activities

Important: The addition of digital technology will not magically help make these activities easier. It’s only when the digital technology is integrated effectively into how we do things, that the magic will happen. Achieving that goal is not easy. The following are not magic silver bullets.

There are three broad strategies that can be used

1. Make use of existing organisational processes and technologies and push them further.
   e.g. the ICT Technology Demonstrators project, digging deeper into the capabilities of Moodle for learning and teaching.
2. Complement, workaround, or replace existing organisational processes and technologies.
   e.g. existing use of cloud-based technologies (Google docs etc) and other forms of digital technology modification. (Jones, Albion & Heffernan, 2016).
3. Explore how and if digital technologies used by teachers, related organisations, and beyond can be leveraged.
   20 years ago Universities provided banks of dial-up modems to provide Internet access to staff and students. We don’t need to do this anymore. Increasingly there are more and better digital technology in society, than in universities. Not only in broader society, also in teaching. For example, Scootle, the Australian Curriculum site, AITSL, and The Learning Place are used to varying levels. If we wish to better prepare our pre-service teachers within the profession, then using the technologies used by teachers and broader society is important.

Personally, I believe the best outcomes will arise if we’re able to creatively intermingle all three of these strategies. The problems will arise if we try to follow one or the other.

Existing processes and technologies and push it further

Moodle now has support for outcomes. It is possible that these could be used to map student activities and assessment against APSTs and contribute toward Standards, portfolios and outcomes. If the program(s) wanted to take a more coordinated approach, there might be some value in this.

In terms of Program-level activities and, in particular, students one solution might be to request BEdu/BECH specific functionality in UConnect. UConnect is the portal which students use to gain access to USQ and its various other systems. UConnect is implemented using Drupal. Drupal is a content management system and thus it should be technically possible for it to be modified to present a BEdu/BECH specific view. Such a specific view could be used to present specific information (e.g. expiry date of the Blue card etc) and other functionality.

There are a lot of smart people in institutional IT (and elsewhere). Bringing that knowledge closer to use and our needs could result in lots of interesting ideas. Hence, something like a hackathon could be useful.

The current ICT Technology Demonstrators project is one existing process that can be leveraged to produce more specific outcomes.We should be looking being more aware of and leveraging existing work from this project, and also more actively identifying work that would be important for our part of the organisation.

For example (know thy students), I’m currently involved in a demonstrator project that should be bringing MAV to USQ for at least a short time. Using MAV to explore how students are engaging with course Study Desks could be beneficial. This use of MAV is connected to the Digital QILTers project, which arose out of the school 2015 planning day.

Related to this would be engagement with Hazel’s PhD study, which would help leverage existing capabilities within Moodle to know thy students.

Also related to analytics and MAV is the potential introduction of CQUni’s EASI system at USQ. EASI would help both know thy students and program-level activities.

Existing enterprise IT have yet to fully grasp, let alone respond to, the changing nature of digital technologies. Yoo et al (2012) give one view of the changing nature of digital technologies, which they label as pervasive digital technologies. Organisations and their IT departements are still operating from the perspective of digital technologies being scarce, not pervasive.  Yoo et al (2012) identify three traits of pervasive digital technologies

1. the importance of digital technology platforms;
   i.e. “the proliferation of dig- ital tools or digital components allows firms to build a platform not just of products but of digital capabilities used throughout the organization to support its different functions” (p. 1400)
2. the emergence of distributed innovations; and,
   i.e. “Not only are innovations increasingly moving toward the periphery of an organization, but the distributed innovation spurred by pervasive digital technology increases the heterogeneity of knowledge resources needed in order to innovate” (p. 1401)
3. the prevalence of combinatorial innovation.
   i.e. “Increasingly, firms are creating new products or services by combining existing modules with embedded digital capabilities. Arthur (2009) notes that the nearly limitless recombination of digital artifacts has become a new source of innovation” (p. 1402)

Our institution has yet to even think of developing a university platform that would support distributed innovations and combinatorial innovation. It is distributed innovations that offer the potential to solve the dual problems of lowest common denominator and starvation.

The MAV and “more student details” projects mentioned below are primitive first steps in developing an institutional (perhaps even teacher education) digital platform upon which to build truly interesting ideas. For a number of years Universities have been developing applications programming interfaces (APIs) that are made available to students, teachers and others. This is one list of related resources. Here’s a description from a US student titled “How personal APIs let students design their universities”.

Pushing the institution out of its comfort zone into this area is important longer term and might actually allow the institution that it has the digital acumen that is seen as “a critical enabler” (CAUDIT, 2016).

Complement, workaround, replace org systems

In terms of Program and course development, which at some level is a project management task, then a tool like Trello might be a good match. It allows groups of people to collaboratively visualise and manage tasks and progress. Using it conjunction with Google Drive or similar could offer a way to manage the development of the new programs.  Not to mention, Trello is also being used in education (schools) in a variety of different ways.

In terms of Program-level activities and  promoting social connections amongst students a system like UCROO potentially offers functionality more in line with social media (think Facebook) than current approaches that rely on using the LMS.

In this paper (Jones et al, 2016), Peter, Amanda and I share a range of different digital modification strategies we’ve undertaken to make it easier to do what we need to do as teachers. A project that actively identifies what others are doing, shares that work, and then seeks how we can distribute those practices across the school’s courses would be interesting.

The “more student details” workarounds I use could potentially be expanded and customised to other courses.  Especially if MAV sticks around (it’s based on the same technology and infrastructure).

As mentioned above, MAV and “more student details” are primitive steps toward providing a platform that enables distributed innovation. The platform offers the chance to move beyond generic tools to specific tools. Pedagogical skins are an idea that seek to put the context and the value back into the LMS to increase the pedagogical value and thus improve the quality of Learning and teaching.

Integrate with teacher digital technologies and beyond

Perhaps the most immediate example of this from the Standards, portfolios and outcomes activity. Currently students are encouraged to have a USQ-hosted e-portfolio.  This is such a hackneyed approach of which I’ve long been critical. A more contemporary approach is offered by the Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) project from UMW – (see here for some background or here for a broader view). It’s an approach that is spreading across multiple institutions in the US and Charles Sturt has been starting to play.

Beyond more general technologies, there is the idea of working more closely with teacher specific digital technologies such as Scootle etc. One possibility might be to develop processes by which our students are engaging with renewable assessments (more here).

It might mean integrating a lesson/unit planning tool that actively integrates with the Australian Curriculum.

References

CAUDIT. (2016). CAUDIT 2016 Top Ten Issues. Retrieved from https://www.caudit.edu.au/system/files/Media library/Resources and Files/Strategic Initiatives/CAUDIT Top Ten Report 2016 WEB.pdf

Jones, D., Albion, P., & Heffernan, A. (2016). Mapping the digital practices of teacher educators: Implications for teacher education in changing digital landscapes. In Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2016 (pp. 2878–2886). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Yoo, Y., Boland, R. J., Lyytinen, K., & Majchrzak, A. (2012). Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World. Organization Science, 23(5), 1398–1408.