Why, Blackboard, why?

Our institution (as I suspect do many others) has a love/hate relationship with Blackboard. Two years ago we had almost no engagement, now we have over 75% of courses using it to some degree to support student learning. Tutors have begun to love it a bit more, students have begun hating it a bit less. And just when it's starting to get better the management announce a review of the university's online learning provision which could well end in a move to Moodle.

Life, as they say, is never easy.

But the looming review of Blackboard has obliged me to consider the available technologies for supporting student learning, and I found myself asking the question 'why hasn't Blackboard embraced social learning'? Having participated in the recent change11 MOOC, and as a regular participant in Jane Hart's excellent Social Learning community it is clearly evident that undergraduate students are researching, obtaining and sharing information in a way that has changed significantly in even the last 2 - 3 years. To me, incorporating a social element into any online learning experience appears to be a no-brainer, so why isn't Blackboard evolving to incorporate such features as activity streams to facilitate communication and information-sharing on a university course?

To add insult to injury I recently discovered that their Facebook Sync application is no longer supported. Why? I can only assume one of the following is true:

1. They are so removed from their user base that they genuinely have no idea of the importance of social learning
2. They genuinely believe that social learning is a fad that will pass and the one-way transmission of information between student and tutor will soon make a comeback
3. They are so enormously wealthy that they genuinely don't care about the changing nature of online learning 

So in addition to managing a Blackboard upgrade I'm now faced with the prospect of investigating the potential for a Wordpress/Buddypress VLE to enable tutors and students to explore more collaborative ways of learning.

It's not as if I had any plans for the summer anyway...

Collaboration by Difference - avoiding 'groupthink'

I just came across an interesting post on collaboration by Duke professor Cathy Davidson:

Collaboration by Difference - Video - Harvard Business Review

In this short video, Prof. Davidson suggests that in a collaborative group it is very often the non-expert or the person who is not in charge who has the most interesting thing to say. It is therefore important to structure ways to hear that person to avoid them being drowned out by the more vocal members of the group. She calls this 'collaboration by difference', a way of hearing the disrputive or dissident voice.

Prof. Davidson presents three useful strategies for avoiding what she terms 'groupthink' when working in groups:

1. Air out differences democratically. When working with two international groups, this can be done by giving each member of each group two cards. On the first they are asked to write a perceived opportunity and challenge of working with the other group. On the second they write a perceived opportunity and challenge about what they themselves can offer. All cards are collected, shuffled and then read out by a facilitator without identifying who wrote which card. This often helps reveal that all participants are worried and excited about the same things. Rather than focusing on the differences, this helps participants focus on the opportunities nd challenges of working together.
2. Let non-experts talk first. For example, staff and students are participating in a two-hour workshop on Learning in the Digital Age. By asking staff to sit and listen to the students for the first hour, this helps them to understand and appreciate that the students know much more than staff might think. By flipping the relationship between the expert and the novice it enables everyone to hear suggestions and ideas that might otherwise have been suppressed.
3. Ask what you're missing. One person will have the responsibility of identifying what has been missed in the discussion, but no-one knows who that person will be. The person running the meeting will choose a participant at random - this makes everyone pay attention because they don't know if they will be chosen. Doing this helps indicate that participants might not be as clear on something as they thought they were. This often derails the conversation, but it also often turns out that participants were heading in the wrong direction and it was therefore beneficial for the conversation to be derailed.

What should I do today?

What is important?
People
Relationships
Happiness

What should I do today?
Talk to people
Strengthen relationships and build new ones
Encourage and foster happiness

What about me?
What do you want?

To feel like I'm making a difference. To be amazing!
How can you do that?

By making sure that my work makes sense and I'm working towards clear goals.
What does that mean?

Don't waste time. Time is precious. Use time wisely. Stick to a plan. Change and adapt the plan if necessary. But stick to a plan.

So what do you need to do now?

List my projects. What am I working on? Break each down into clear steps. Allocate time to each step. Follow the steps.

Sounds like a plan.

Khan Academy and flipping the classroom

An interesting interview with Khan Academy founder, Salman Khan.

And some great examples of flipping the classroom using video.

Death of the lecture

A recent article in The Chronicle picked up on Harvard's recent financial splurge on new approaches to teaching. The motivation for the splurge was the growing that the traditional teaching method in Higher Education - the lecture - was failing to achieve its goals of "prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context".

One would hope that Harvard has not just woken up to the scholarship of Teaching and Learning and its potential to enhance student learning. But the article does highlight the problem that tutors, usually highly qualified and with many years' experience, often lack the confidence to experiment with new approaches to classroom teaching. Add the use of new technologies into the mix and these tutors are even more likely to retreat to the safety of 'doing what they have always done'.

As a Learning Technologist I have always strived to focus on the pedagogy of e-Learning when recommending activities to tutors. Another article in the Chronicle illustrated that technology for technology's sake is unlikely to yield a better learning experience for students and while this approach may succeed, it is also just as likely to fail. The article spoke of a technophile tutor who after many years of extolling the virtues of new technologies to his colleagues is now focusing on what he believes to be even more important: the bond between tutor and student, and the need for the former to nurture the latter rather than talking down to them. Above all, the article highlighted the need for learning to be a participatory experience.

If tutors do decide to experiment with new participatory technologies there is a significant risk that their attempts will fail due to inexperience. And for those who have always simply 'given lectures' the idea of using new technologies to increase participation is often perceived as either irrelevant or terrifying. Providing tutors with practical templates that explain how this can be achieved through the use of technologies such as social media, video and interactive activities would therefore help give them the confidence to try new approaches to supporting their students. I've been searching for a while now and haven't found any such templates - if anybody has come across something similar please feel free to share. Otherwise I think I've found what I'm going to be doing for the next few months...

What would a disrupted education system look like?

Great presentation as ever from George Siemens considering the ways in which technology is disrupting education:

Edgex Disruption

View more PowerPoint from gsiemens

"Deliberate practice" - another way of "flipping the classroom"?

I came across an article suggesting that "deliberate practice" is a more effective way of teaching students than the traditional lecture. I've not heard of deliberate practice so I decided to investigate.

According to the article, the deliberate practice method involves the tutor providing students with a multiple-choice question on a given topic. The students then discuss the question in small groups before providing their answer electronically, presumably using a clicker tool or polling application. The tutor can then see their level of understanding about the topic; he answers the question by way of a short discussion before moving on to the next topic.

This sounds great, and it's certainly something I'm going to try myself, but isn't this similar to the concept of 'flipping the classroom' as suggested by Salman Khan in his seminal TED talk? Khan's method of using video to deliver core content as a means to free up the face-to-face time for more constructive discussion is a powerful new way to enhance student learning. The article on deliberate practice indicated that students exposed to this method of teaching did more than twice as well in a test than those in the traditional lecture setting. The phenomenal impact of the Khan Academy's approach to teaching also suggests that technology now provides a legitimate way to challenge the centuries-old method of teaching that is the lecture.

Educators such as George Siemens and Stephen Downes are also challenging Higher Education to with their concept of Massive Open Online Courses. With students able to access unlimited content online, universities are increasingly under pressure to justify the very nature of their existence. Maybe changing the dynamic of the traditional lecture using 'deliberate practice' or by 'flipping the classroom' will be enough to quell the unrest.

Let's hope that more research is conducted in this area.