One of the themes for this blog is that the majority of current approaches to improving learning and teaching within universities simply don't work. At least not in terms of enabling improvement in a majority of the learning and teaching at an institution. Recently I finally completed reading the last bits of the book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. Chapter 18 is titled "The Real Third Way". This post explores how that metaphor connects with some of the thinking expressed here....more...
I've been back working at the PhD thesis, hopefully down to months before submission. At this stage, I need to work on the 2 chapters that are reflecting on the usage of Webfuse during two periods: 1996 through 1999 and 1999 through 2004 (and a bit later). In doing some, the main tasks I need to achieve are:...more...
This post follows on from a previous post and continues an examination of some papers written by Malikowski and colleagues examining the adoption of features of an LMS/VLE/CMS. This one focuses on the 2006 paper....more...
As a step towards thinking about how you judge the success of an LMS/VLE, this post looks at some work done by Steven Malikowski. Why his work? Well he is co-author on three journal papers that provide one perspective on the usage of features of an LMS, including one that proposes a model for research into course management systems. A list of the papers in the references section....more...
My PhD is essentially arguing that most institutional approaches to e-learning within higher education (i.e. the adoption and long term use of an LMS) has some significant flaws. The thesis will/does describe one attempt to formulate an approach that is better. (Aside: I will not claim that the approach is the best, in fact I'll argue that the notion of there being "one best way" to support e-learning within a university is false.) The idea of "better" raises an interesting/important question, "How do you measure success with institutional use of an LMS?" How do you know if one approach is better than another?...more...
I've fallen a bit short of what I wanted to achieve this week, however, overall I'm feeling pretty good about progress. In particular, because some of the initial evaluation results point to the "Webfuse way" having some quantitative benefits. Also, if the work in the last week get's the okay from the esteemed supervisor it should make completing chapter 5 pretty straight forward....more...
The following contains some early results from the evaluation of Webfuse course sites as mentioned in the last post. The aim is to get a rough initial feel for how the course sites created for Webfuse in the late 90s and early 00s stack up using the framework produced by Malikowski et al (2007). As opposed to other PhD work, this is a case of "showing the working"....more...
For the last couple of weeks I've been working on chapter 4 of my thesis. I've worked my way through explaining the context (general context and (use of e-learning), the design guidelines and the implementation (parts 1, 2 and 3). I've now reached the evaluation section, where I'm meant to describe what happened with the use of Webfuse and make some judgement calls about how it went....more...
The following is the last of, what is now, a three part series of blog posts outlining the design and implementation of the Webfuse system. These are part of chapter four of my thesis. The previous two parts are here and here....more...
This post continues the description of the design and implementation of Webfuse started with this post....more...
This continues the collection of content that goes into Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis. Chapter 4 is meant to tell the story of the first iteration of Webfuse from 1996 through 1999. The last section I posted describes the design guidelines that informed the implementation of Webfuse. This post and at least one following post seeks to describe the details of the design and implementation of Webfuse....more...
This post adds another perspective borrowed from Gonzalez (2009) as a framework to report or evaluate findings from Col and Ken's indicators project. Col added an update on his work recently. Like previous post this one borrows a table of dimensions around conceptions of online learning because it may be helpful....more...