Diana Laurillard: A collaborative academic programme to improve higher and professional education

Editor's Notes

• #3: Good morning, and thank you for this opportunity to celebrate with you on your 30th anniversary. Over those 30 years we’ve seen a lot of changes to the field of digital methods in education. But the changes have never been so rapid as the ones we seen over the past year. One lesson of the pandemic is that the already appalling inequalities in our societies have increased. There’s a broad consensus now that we have to use the experiences of the pandemic to reverse that shameful trend to increasing inequalities. What role can universities play in this? We all have ambitious social aims in our mission statements, but what should we DO to change the world for the better on the basis of what the pandemic has taught us? Given the longevity of this network, EDEN members are in a good position to reflect on what we can learn from the pandemic, so I want to discuss with you how we might move forward on the basis of that learning.
• #4: The mission statements of universities are already ambitious, such as those from two key British universities: “world-class research and education... which benefit society on a local, regional, national and global scale... [from the University of Oxford vision] “engaged with the wider world and committed to changing it for the better... for the long-term benefit of humanity” [from the UCL mission] Higher education does have a critical impact on the world and the pandemic has certainly shown that. But it’s also shown us how the already huge inequalities in our societies have been greatly increased in the face of disaster. - I’m offering just one simple contribution HE can make to reducing inequalities. That is, to scale up the value and reach of our professional development activities.
• #5: Scaling up is essential because the challenges are so great. We all work to the UN SDGs, and it’s an explicit aim for many of us here to work on SDG4 - ‘to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. For just education alone, HE shoulders the responsibility for educating another 68m teachers by 2030 to achieve that goal of ‘education for all’. But education underpins every single one of the other 16 SDGs as well. The professionals in those areas all need to know the latest research results, and need help in developing their own teams and employees in ways that reduce inequalities. We need those ambitious aims, because universities have the significant responsibility for developing the professionals who will be initiating the changes needed for all 17 SDGs. This is a huge task for EDEN to address, as one of the enduring organisations that's been investigating how to do online learning for 3 decades now.
• #6: The problem is, there’s very little help available for academics wanting innovate with online methods. We all need support in moving to online and blended learning. So we developed the Learning Designer: a free online design tool, available to all. It turns the theory-based Conversational Framework, which I developed some years ago, into action. It does this by providing a structure for developing a sequence of learning activities to achieve the outcomes you define. So lets go through what we could do with this. Laurillard, D., et al. (2018). "Using technology to develop teachers as designers of TEL: evaluating the Learning Designer." British Journal of Educational Technology. Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York and London, Routledge.
• #7: On the website you can see how to Adapt or Create a design, Analyse or Review your own or someone else's design, and share or publish designs. So it's modelled on what we do as academics in science and scholarship, in contributing to journals, except that here we're sharing ideas about how to teach. You can go to the - Browser screen to explore existing designs from teachers to see if any might be useful for you to borrow as a starting point. Here I’ve chosen those categorised as Vocational Education And from those I’ve selected one called ‘Understanding the Topic’, which has been generalised from a learning design for understanding a specific topic. Looking at this on the Designer screen, I can see it might work for my topic, lets say Risk Assessment, so I hit Turn Editing On, and now in edit mode I can edit everything in my own copy of the design. So I changed all the Topic words to ‘Risk Assessment’. Flip back to see the similarity... Everything is editable.
• #8: To get a better idea of how you generate your learning design, I’m going to expand the detail of this central Teaching-Learning Activity, - on Applying Risk Assessment. There are three of the six different learning types from the CF here, which you can select using the dropdown menu, in this case Produce, Discuss and Collaborate, and express the detail of your learning design. So you’re encouraged to build in these active learning types. And each activity has been assigned its unique set of pedagogical features, which you can change, The colour coding for the learning types matches those of the Conversational Framework. And because the software knows how much time you have assigned to each type of learning, it can provide - the pie-chart as feedback on the overall distribution of learning types for this session. And this dynamically updates as you develop the design.
• #9: Now I’ve clicked on the Analysis tab to see what kind of learning experience I’ve designed for the learners. The Pie chart shows I’ve mostly used learning through discussion, both in groups and with the trainer, but there are other kinds of activity as well. And not too much learning through Acquisition. From the smaller pie charts I can see it’s entirely online (pale blue), with the teacher present for about a third of the learning (the dark brown), and more than half is synchronous (the dark pink). And from the bar chart I can see that it’s mostly individual work (pale green), then groupwork, then whole class. There are no rules about what these distributions should be, but now, as designer, you have the opportunity to consider if that looks appropriate for what you’re trying to do.
• #10: But for learning design to be part of a knowledge-building process among academics, it’s important to put it through some form of independent evaluation. That could be from a peer or a student. For the Peer review here, the simplest way is to add it to this design as another panel, with the criteria in the rubric listed, and the reviewer’s text typed into each section. As you do a review for a colleague, of course, this makes you think in more detail about your own design as you reflect on theirs in relation to the rubric. Then you can return to revising your own design with the benefit of that reflection, and also your colleague’s review of your design. - For the student evaluation it’s useful to suggest they comment on each panel. Here both panels are part of the design, and the student feedback is in the Notes at the bottom. This is a design intended to help sports science students in learning to observe the actions of batsmen. The Investigate activity in the first panel asks them to watch the detail of the stroke in the video. The student comments that they spent much longer than the allotted 10 mins, and also that the Collaborate activity did not have the full group attending. From this quite detailed feedback on the nature of students’ learning experience, academics begin to develop clear ideas of what students need, expressed as continually developing pedagogic strategies in these learning designs.
• #11: How do we best plan the mix of conventional and digital methods, for blended and online learning? We need a collaborative approach to this kind of problem-solving. University teachers can’t do all this on their own. So, in our TPD courses we try to organize not just ideas from experienced teachers, which we can show in the course videos, but the sharing of ideas among the participants themselves.
• #12: This is a course that’s running now on the FL platform. It’s on ‘Blended and Online Learning Design’, and is free and open to all teachers, in all sectors and subject areas. This is one way of doing this large scale orchestration of knowledge development about online learning by academics. This is the link to enrol. The 17 May run is still open until the next run starts on 28 June. The course exercises are based on using the learning designer, for teachers to explore and exchange ideas for good ways of supporting their learners. this is the link to the Learning Designer tool. Here is a taste of what we can do together.
• #13: In Week 1 the participants go through the basics of the CF, then work through exercises to use the theory to decide on how to take a f2f classroom session online. It introduces the LDer and shows how this can be used for both designing new blended learning sessions, and how the teaching community can work together to collaborate on discovering these new methods.
• #14: In this Step in Week 2 they look at the principles for good design, and then at a learning design aiming to help students learn to explain a complex concept. The example is the concept in physics of the water cycle. And they then have to adapt that design to their own topic, and share it on a Padlet wall. - And look at the range of concepts they adapt it to... And naturally they adapt the pedagogy too - as you can see form the different pie-charts. - This is the beginning of sharing to collaborate.
• #15: They continue by exploring different solutions to creating motivation, and to engaging students in active learning. Many of the examples in the videos were contributed by teachers from the different sectors, such as This video step, for example, shows how students peer review each others’ designs for a religious building, and then invites participants to adapt that idea for their own context.
• #16: And in the final week they start exploring blended methods for formative assessment. The video shows teachers’ ways of providing peer, blended and automated assessment Then participants create their own, using the Learning Designer.
• #17: Then they go on to use a peer review exercise to share and critique each other’s designs - beginning now to build a collaborative community of teaching and learning innovation.
• #20: This is the bold future we can now envisage. Teachers sharing innovative ideas in a collaborative community. Do they think this would be valuable? - This comment is quite typical of what they say in this discussion:.... So the idea of sharing and building on each other's designs is understood and accepted by a lot of the teachers, from all sectors, taking this course.
• #21: This is my claim: If we work together, we can share the great innovations needed to guide the transformation to a bold new future for teaching, and not allow others to guide it for us. If we do this, it will also empower the teaching profession to be more influential consumers of the way technology is used in education. Does it work? well many of the discussion posts were enthusiastic for this. And yes, some did submit their designs to be evaluated for publication in the curated designs section of the Browser. Across quite a range of subject areas. so yes it could work, although this is early days as yet of course. Laurillard, D. (2016). "The educational problem that MOOCs could solve: Professional development for teachers of disadvantaged students." Research on Learning Technology 24(1).
• #22: So at UCL we’re experimenting with these new ways of extending the impact of HE research outputs on the professionals who need them, testing the feasibility of this model of collaborative professional development. And it does begin to show large-scale effects. In April 2020 we launched a MOOC on ‘Teaching Online’ in Arabic, which has attracted >46,000 enrolments across the MENA region, where teachers who once rejected the idea of online learning have now discovered its value and the part it can play alongside conventional methods.
• #23: Here are some of their comments in a post-course survey to evaluate how well it worked: How has it has changed your future planning for online learning? I made many adjustments to the study plans and innovated new ideas and methods We were using a traditional education method and it became a transformation in life God willing, when returning to face2face learning, I will try to do blended learning Have your students benefitted? The level of evaluation was very good to excellent Everyone was ready and waiting for the next day’s tasks They have the ability to interact better So there is evidence of fairly immediate local impact beyond the participants in the course.
• #24: To document the impact of this approach we use Etienne Wenger’s Value Creation Framework, and its definition of these five types of value creation for an intervention. The intervention could be anything: a community project, a citizen’s assembly, a new teaching method, a course… anything that brings people together to make a positive change in the world. - In our case we categorised the survey comments in terms of the kind of value creation they evidenced. For example, the immediate value of debates enriching information and giving you new dimensions, to the Applied value of ‘Moving from traditional methods to innovative methods of introducing student and parent in educational process’. Including the parent” is significant. This is one of the very important developments made more possible by the online communications during the pandemic. Then we found comments all the way to reframing their whole approach to education, such as ‘Expanding horizons and realizing the importance of distance education' Even in this short course lasting 8 hours over 2 weeks, this kind of interaction was having a demonstrable impact on many of these participants and their work and colleagues and students. Wenger, E., et al. (2011). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework. J. Arkenbout. Rapport 18, Ruud de Moor Centrum, Open Universiteit, Heerlen, NL.
• #25: In the very different field of renewable energy, we collaborated with colleagues in the UCL’s Engineering for International Development Centre, and researchers in Lebanon to create a course on Energy and the SDGs, especially SDG11 ‘Sustainable cities and communities’. This course showcases the stories and the solutions found in some of the most challenging local communities. In this case on ‘cooking with renewable energy’. - the participants, mostly community leaders and energy professionals are then able to share their experiences and solutions with others. - exchanging these experiences and useful advice is all part of this collaborative learning process.
• #26: Padlets and Word Clouds are another way to share ideas and solutions. And then they were trying to run a mini energy grid supply - in this decision-making game. The experience and lessons learned from that activity can then be reflected on and shared with others in the course.
• #27: Another exercise is using Padlet. Participants were asked to: Create a post underneath the geographical areas mentioned and tell us what energy access is like where they live and how that impacts work and home life. This participant from Iraq related the effects of power outages on mental health… The point is that just as in the education examples, these are knowledgeable professionals, sharing their ideas, experiences and solutions, and with the help of this kind of collaborative learning platform, gradually building new knowledge and practices that will take university research across the world reaching into all those localities where that understanding is needed.
• #28: So the early results we have from these trials is that yes we can scale up the value and reach of university research through professional development activities
• #29: To summarise, I’d like to relate the implications of these approaches to some of the conference themes. First, the evolution of online and distance learning. Well, over the last year the evolution has been something of a Cambrian explosion! A great outpouring of experimentation and discovery by teaching communities all over the world, that online learning actually has some significant advantages over conventional methods. Students have also woken up to this and are now demanding more blended learning in their courses. Good, but now the downside is that any move to online is expensive of teacher time. - We must beware of over-enthusiastic HE managers who want to switch to hybrid, hyflex options and dual modes. These increase the workload even further. Academics are very aware of the additional upfront workload involved in online teaching, at the same time as learning about it, and at the same time as continuing to teach. Every strategy for moving forward must focus on the wellbeing of both teachers and students, and the best way to do that - is to listen to them. Do nothing without consulting them. Give them the means to develop this new community knowledge of how to teach using digital methods. And to effect this transformation I think we must focus on the scale of the innovation needed – so use collaboration to innovate, as we do in science, but almost never do in teaching. And because we’ve never done that, we don’t have the mechanisms for spreading that load of innovation. But we could – I’ve shown how developing a collaborative community of professionals online is possible. We have the technology to scale up professional development – we have MOOC platforms, so use them. Not for direct undergraduate education, as personal tuition does not scale, but we can embed MOOCs in our undergraduate courses, again to lessen the load of innovation. - And work through the professionals. Universities must do more to put professional education online, and those professionals will in turn benefit their students, or colleagues or employees, to work towards those high ambitions I started with. Educating the professionals who will learn how to meet the requirements of the UN SDGs. Nothing less than that. - With your 30-year pedigree, the EDEN Network is very well placed to influence these new directions! This is what I look forward to discussing with you now. Thank you.