TL;DR Recently there have been various suggestions that the biggest barrier to quality online learning in higher education is lack of knowledge held by teaching staff (Johnson, 2019; Mathes, 2019; Roberts, 2018). More or better training, faculty development and requirements for formal teaching qualifications are proposed as the solution. The following argues that this is just a symptom of the […]
Is training the barrier to quality online learning in higher ed?
Theory of workarounds
Introduction The following is a summary of the paper Theory of Workarounds. Alter, S. (2014). Theory of Workarounds. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 34(1). https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.03455 The paper provides “an integrated theory of workarounds that describes how and why” they are created. It is a process theory “driven by the interaction of key factors that determine whether possible workarounds […]
The conceptualisation of e-learning: Lessons and implications
The following is the content of my first solo journal article. Jones, D. (2004). The conceptualisation of e-learning: Lessons and implications. Best Practice in University Learning and Teaching: Learning from Our Challenges. Theme Issue of Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 1(1), 47–55. I’m posting this because: sadly the journal is no more; the only version I had on […]
It’s more than how you use the technology – authoring online content
At the recent ASCILITE’2019 there was a common refrain throughout the conference, which started with the original keynote as captured in the following tweet #ASCILITE2019 Keynote Speaker Professor Emeritus Mike Sharples – "focus on pedagogy not technology" as ""it's not what you use (technology) but how you use it (pedagogy)" pic.twitter.com/d2BFyAY5xK — Michael Volkov (@volkov_michael) December 3, 2019 While I […]
How to share design knowledge in design for digital learning?
Using Blackboard Learn to design and manage a quality learning environment is hard. Managing the web content alone is hard to do well. To do so requires significant HTML, CSS and related web design knowledge. Knowledge that not everyone has, or should have, or can have. That’s why there are so many ugly Blackboard sites. The difficulty of sharing this […]
Exploring knowledge reuse in design for digital learning: tweaks, H5P, constructive templates and CASA
The following has been accepted for presentation at ASCILITE’2019. It’s based on work described in earlier blog posts. Click on the images below to see full size. Abstract Higher education is being challenged to improve the quality of learning and teaching while at the same time dealing with challenges such as reduced funding and increasing complexity. Design for learning has […]
Testing out h5p interactives and tracking
Feel free to play around with the following h5p interactive (one of the examples provided on the h5p site). I’m testing out if and how it tracks people’s engagement with the interactive. What does it do when someone who doesn’t have an account on this blog (and/or doesn’t login) interacts? What data can I see? By default it appears that […]
Exploring knowledge reuse in design for digital learning
This post continues an on-going exploration of knowledge reuse in design for digital learning. Previous posts (one and two) started the exploration in the context of developing an assemblage to help designers of web-based learning environments create a card interface (see Figure 1). Implementing such a design from scratch requires a diverse collection of knowledge that is beyond most individuals. […]
Digital learning templates – adding context and configuration
My last post introduced some early steps in exploring how to increase the reuse of design knowledge in design for digital learning (i.e. designing course websites). That post outlined the specific problem, the solution and linked it to work on constructive templates and patterns from the Hypermedia Design literature (Nanard, Nanard and Kahn, 1998). It closed with observing how the […]
Improving reuse of design knowledge in a LMS
In October last year I started a new position at Griffith University. A role designed to help improve the quality and quantity of use of the institutional learning ecosystem. An ecosystem that includes Blackboard (both 9.1 and soon Ultra), Office365, PebblePad, Echo360 etc. Pretty early on it became apparent that there was some problems with reusing design knowledge. A problem […]
“Trying out” needs agency and control
This post is test of some technology and an opportunity to save the following quote from (Solomon and Black, 2008) In order to ‘try out’ new ways of thinking, we need to perceive ourselves as having some agency in or control over what we are doing. As long ago as 1976, Barnes identified a ‘performance climate’ in many classrooms (1976: […]
Meso-level practitioners and generative technologies?
Happy to see the end of 2018. Time to figure out what 2019 holds. This is a first step. I start 2019 as a meso-level practitioner in a new university. Hannon (2013) describes meso-level practitioners as the “teaching academics, learning technologists, and academic developers” (p. 175) working between the learning and teaching coal-face and the institutional context defined by an […]
