The Role Of The Online Tutor

When working with academic colleagues to develop  approaches to teaching online learners one of the most common changes in thinking about delivering knowledge to students is a change in mindset, this change involves rethinking previous teaching methods and rethinking what the role of the lecturer should look like.

Just as the way that our students learning styles are evolving, we have to think about how the teaching approach might change.

I made this lego figurine at a non-digital gaming workshop I went to earlier in the year where I was asked to create my representation of a teacher. I decided to go for an online tutor and here's what I came up with. You'll have to excuse my creative flare when it comes to leg building!

So here's my teacher, i've placed her on a raised platform looking over her online environment, the additional eyes represent her insight and watchful eye across the online environment and the weird flag/ propellor type accessory represents her expertise and knowledge in her subject area.

Being an online tutor means taking on a different role, not just using the online tools available to deliver information but using online tools to encourage sharing, collaboration, the co- construction of knowledge, providing extended learning opportunities through online networks and social media and equally as important being able to facilitate, motivate and encourage learners through the technologies that you have access to. Sometimes taking a step back is taking a step forward.

Teach Online

Sometime ago I mentioned the Teach Online programme that I've been delivering. As it's come to an end I thought I'd take the opportunity to feedback on the outcomes of the course. Safe to say the course was successful. We were astounded by the amount of discussion  through the Google Community we set up. The course ran over 4 weeks (including a week 0) and although the primary content was delivered via Blackboard, the Google community was really a hub of activity and discussion! We directed some of our activities through the community which acted as a starting point for discussion. Our delivery method also included a lunch time webinar at the half way point which was optional. From the feedback we know the flexibility of the course was a real win as was the opportunity to share and gain ideas from colleagues. The real eye opener for everyone (including me as a tutor) was being in the position of the learner and undertaking a course that was fully blended/distance. This had a lot to do with our colleagues being bogged down with marking but they certainly got a sense of how difficult it is to carve our 2 hours of time in-between working, research, family and everyday life! We rounded up the final session with a Q&A from our PVC in Learning and Teaching (see picture above) about the future of online learning here at the university. The course will run again later on this year and I plan to tweak it slightly based on feedback, it will still run as an online programme but I'll be adding in an aspect of hands on at the beginning for those colleagues who feel they require a bit of extra support.


We'll be sharing our outcomes and some tops tips at this years TEL Fest at a session titled 'Bringing Distance Learners Closer Together'

The Digital Student

This week on Teach Online we are looking at areas relating to Cloud, Collaboration and Connectivity. As part of that we're looking at the Digital Student. As I was putting this section together I thought it'd be a good idea to write a blog post as a summary of some of the main arguments/ viewpoints around Prensky's idea of 'digital natives V's digital immigrants' for those who maybe new to the notion.


Prensky (2001) states that times have changed so rapidly that we are no longer teaching the students that we were designed to teach, this is due to the rapid growth of digital technologies in the 20th century. He refers to young students as native speakers of the digital language, coining them 'digital natives' and those that have not been brought up using technology and computers daily, namely our educators, he refers to as 'digital immigrants'. Prensky's classification has been subject some criticism, some have disagreed with his analogy of young students being natives and teachers being immigrants due to the classifications seeming to rigid based on age. Is that what our students think? Are we really dealing with digital natives and are our academic staff the digital immigrants? 


Whilst Prensky makes some interesting points, some have not agreed with his thinking, Bennet et al (2008) and similarly, Margaryan and Littlejohn (2008) all believe that not all of our students are as 'digitally speaking' as Prensky suggests. And such generalisations cannot be applied to all.


White and Le Cornu (2011) offer an alternative to Prensky's classification of native and immigrant, and offer a different metaphor centered on the uptake of social media. This metaphor is based on 'place' referring to the social dimensions and spaces in which people meet and hold common ground, and 'tool' which can be used a as metaphor of how and why people use technology. This leads them to the alternative classification of 'resident and visitor'. Visitors are more functional, they turn to the web solely to in order to carry out a task. Resident's on the other hand are heavy users of social media, they are comfortable in communicating online, blogging, shopping online and expressing themselves as part of a community in a virtual place. Others such as Helpser and Eynon (2010) align with White and Le Cornu's view that it is not a simple case of generational gap defining the gap between teacher and student. 




Working within the field of educational technology I can relate to Prensky's view. However from personal experience in supporting academic staff and in particular during the current economic climate I have seen a growing number of what White and Le Cornu have coined as 'visitors' seeking advice in utilising technology in their teaching. As White and Le Cornu have set out, these visitors arrive with a specific task in mind and often hold fears that the 'residents' or 'natives' are ahead of the game in terms of both technical skills and knowledge. For example, a member of staff coming to me with a specific teaching problem that they would lie to improve using technology. 
  

This year we are asking our SALT team (Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching) to talk to students about the use of technology in their teaching. Although there will be a focus on mobile, it'll be interesting to see what kind of information they gather from students in our faculty and in particular we may well uncover indicators as to whether or not this notion of ‘digital native’ exists or if students feel the need for additional support in utilising tools and technologies.

References 

BENNET, S., MATON, .K and KERVIN, L. (2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology. Volume 39 (5) pp775–786.

HELSPER, .E., & EYNON, .R. (2010) Digital natives: Where is the evidence? British Educational Research Journal. Volume 36(3) pp503–520. Available from:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/communia2010/sites/communia2010/images/Helsper_Enyon_Digital_Natives.pdf 

MARGARYAN, .A. & LITTLEJOHN, A. (2008) Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning. Available from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.172.7940&rep=rep1&type=pdf 

PRENSKY, M (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, On the Horizon. Volume 9(5). MCB University Press. Available at: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf

WHITE, D., & LE CORNU, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: Towards a new typology for online engagement. First Monday 16(9). Available from: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3171/3049

Achieving Our Potential #2

Wow, is it June already? Time certainly does fly when you're looking at ways in which we can reach our potential! This is the second part of a blog post that I started  a couple of months ago in looking at some of the factors that impact on us unlocking our potential to support  and develop quality teaching in particlaur I'm looking at this from a TEL perceptive (for quite obvious reasons). To recap, please read my previous post Achieving Our Potential #1 or if you'd prefer you'll get the jist from looking at the 3 questions I'm exploring in relation to faculty work.

1. How do we support our academic staff in harnessing the potential of tools and technologies to draw out the student attributes that we would associate with quality learning and teaching? (critical thinking, curiosity, analytical, creativity etc)

2. How do we develop quality blended learning that provides extended learning opportunities for those students that want to engage above the 'baseline'. 

3. Are we doing enough?  

It's been a busy coupe of months  since I last wrote on this subject and I've been thinking about some of the initiatives going on at present that serve to the above questions. One project I want to talk about in this post is some work I've been doing with my colleague over in Social Science, Ros Walker who is also a Learning Technologist which is a new staff development course called Teach Online that we have developed.

 

 

The main aim of the programme is to discover how distance and blended learning courses can be supported by technology to engage students online. Through out the 3 weeks we'll be looking at a range of tools and methods used to engage learners online, explore a range of e-learning pedagogy and models which underpin these methods and approaches and exploring the ways in which students learn online  and how that differs from face-to-face teaching.

What makes this programme any different from the rest you may ask? Both Ros and I identified a need for a academic development in the area, more crucially we recognised a need for development in relation to not only the technical side of things which is something that is already available but there seemed to be lack of opportunity to discover some of the theory and reasoning around why we'd want to take an online approach with our students. 

ADDED BONUS- As this is a cross disciplinary programme (open to colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health AND the Faculty of Social Sciences we've got a brilliant blend of disciplines, backgrounds and experiences amongst the co-hort. Today was the first contact session and we had lots of opportunities to for colleagues to discuss issues around blended learning approaches.

We won't see our group of 34 now until the very end of June, in the mean time we'll be be able to communicate with them via our G+ Community, the VLE, via our online activities and our webinar next week. The next couple of weeks we'll work through the themes Online Engagement & Facilitation, Cloud, Collaboration & Connectivity and we'll be asking participants to work towards a self analysis and action plan.

So, going back to the questions above in particular questions 1 & 2. This is just one of the initiatives I've been working on to serve the development of quality online teaching, we hope that our academic colleagues will gain an insight into how they can design online teaching to engage students beyond the baseline using a range of tools and sharing top tips. This is by no means the only staff development available in this area, I tend to run workshops in my Faculty and there are other options available centrally but this is the first one of this slightly lengthier format encompassing technology, theories and discussion with colleagues looking at hot topics around online teaching and beyond just the 'how to' aspect of teaching online. We hope to build a real sense of community on the course and the outcomes will not only be of benefit to the colleagues taking part but also to us to shape future staff development and gain further insight into what support is required by academic colleges in this area.

The Future of Mobile and Technology Enhanced Learning in Higher and Further Education Conference

Yesterday I popped along to Salford University for a conference called 'The Future of Mobile and Technology Enhanced Learning'. There is a full list of speakers here if you're interested in who presented but I thought I'd share a summary of the highlights of the day for me and my thoughts on some of the presentations given.

So to start we were introduced to an app called MeeToo by a company called Lumiinisight which we used throughout the day to post questions about the presentations and to carry out voting/ polling. You can ask questions via the instant messaging feature which is pretty neat.  I quite liked this app although there are similar alternatives out on the market which I suspect are free although not sure about the pricing for it. Never the less I thought it was a neat little app and if you'd like to find out more about it then check out the website.

I'm going to focus my attentions on two presenters. Firstly Jonny Driscoll who is the CEO of Unipin. A new 'social learning environment' on the market. The focus for the platform is around student engagement and social learning built upon real time social media interactions. The concept hangs of the idea of drawing in 3 aspects of university life into one well presented interface. These 3 (if memory serves) are academic, personal and extra curricular activities. It looked like a mix of Pinterest, Google + and Facebook smashed together with a sprinkle Evernote. Jonny graduated only a couple of years ago so he's managed to bring his own experiences of a recent graduate into this platform and into the vision of Unipin. Questions raised about the product were around privacy and encroaching into the social space of a student. There are options to adjust privacy settings so you're not divulging too much of your personal profile. As an academic you can timetable in lectures and allow note taking. The algorithms mean that students are seeing the most important and relevant information to them  each day, be that a social event or a seminar.

Personally, I liked the concept and the way it looked but I think there would still be a need for managing some teaching and learning process such as assignment submission and feedback elsewhere depending on what the platforms being used for. Rolled out on a wider scale I think the product has potential for some FE and HE environments and it'd be interesting to see what feedback they get from students in terms of it pulling in the 3 aspects of university life.


Secondly and finally, Prof Neil Morris Director of Digital Learning at the University of Leeds delivered a presentation on digital technology and higher education - delivering benefits for a student education. Neil talked about their approach and strategy to address some of the issues surrounding student learning, online environments, the digital age and learning technologies. What sprung out to me was the similarity between what they had already done and what we as an institution are also starting. Some key areas such as MOOCs, OERs, lecture recording and blended learning were under their digital strategy for student education. Here at the University of Sheffield we are also looking to take a similar approach and look at these themes institutionally through an digital engagement group. It would appear that taking this holistic view of a 'digital offering' and looking at each aspect of it with a clear strategy for support and implementation is a worthwhile approach. That cohesion amongst 'all things digital' across an institution is often overlooked when introducing just the tech and process as opposed to firstly thinking about the digital pedagogies that command the tools in the first place.

Achieving Our Potential #1

This is the first in a series of blog posts on a few topics which are still unravelling in my mind.

During the last couple of weeks I've had various interactions including conversations with academic colleagues, discussions within our Teaching Circle, listening to debate from the JISC Digital Festival (#digifest15) and talking to colleagues about future developments. All of which have me thinking about various aspects of how technology enhanced learning is embedded within our faculty (and or institution) and more importantly what approach do we take in supporting our staff and students.

Last week I attended our faculty Teaching Circle. The theme of which was What is Quality in Learning and Teaching? This led to some interesting discussion around the various fundamentals of quality teaching, areas for focus and problems. My group consisted of three academics, two of which teach on distance learning programmes so naturally conversations led to support for embedding technology into teaching, developing blended learning and some of the barriers in providing quality teaching. It will be of no surprise those barriers include academic digital skills and confidence in using technology to deliver teaching. Other areas that emerged were:

• What are our student's expectations/ perceptions of quality teaching?
• How do we measure quality?
• Variation in teaching experience can impact quality, as can personal traits and motivations
• Organisational factors influence quality i.e. strategy, leadership and support

Personally I took away two questions from the morning,

1. How do we support our academic staff in harnessing the potential of tools and technologies to draw out the student attributes that we would associate with quality learning and teaching? (critical thinking, curiosity, analytical, creativity etc)

2. How do we develop quality blended learning that provides extended learning opportunities for those students that want to engage above the 'baseline'. 

My mind's screaming open web, open education resources, opportunities for learning networks and social learning. But in reality, it's not quite so straightforward.

During this weeks DigiFest, David White and Donna Lanclos took part in a healthy debate on 'are learning technologies fit for purpose?' A really interesting debate and both had valid arguments. Donna's main argument was that learning technologies aren't fit for purpose and tools such as VLEs are too locked down and we are forcing staff to use systems that are content driven and not education driven. And we should be directing students to open resources for their learning.

David's argument was that VLEs provide a structure for students and to throw them out into the open web we wouldn't be providing them with a pedagogical structure.  I'm not going to summarise this to much detail because you can watch the debate online, but if I'm going to chip my two pennies worth in I think we as educators need to be in a position where we prepare and educate our learners in using the open web. However if our educators aren't comfortable in this area then we are going to face a bit of a brick wall. In addition to this I can see Donna's point of view, sometimes we're faced with rather restrictive system that we buy into institutionally and then we find ourselves fudging our way around them and tweaking them to fit with other systems and and teaching. I can see the need from an organisational point of view but VLEs are often used as content repositories which is why we're seeing this move away to other open tools, new platforms and new ways of learning which offer more flexibility and creativity. At the University of Sheffield we use Google and we're seeing an increase in the use of Google apps for education. If i'm honest I don't think institutionally people are ready to do away with the VLE just yet and one of the reasons for that is that there is a varying degree of skills  and knowledge in using other technologies for teaching, using the web for researching, using open apps and social media.  So some structure seems to be needed it's just a case of how flexible you can be within that structure.

To take a step back, we also need to understand our learners. As David White highlighted, just because students are comfortable in using the web socially doesn't mean they have the digital skills or knowledge to use it appropriately for learning. I think without understanding this we're really not in a position to make assumptions about our learners or to design learning. This is an area we'll be exploring more this year within my faculty. So, thinking about questions 1 & 2 this brings me to a third question:

3. Are we doing enough? 

I'll leave you on that note because this area is huge. But I am going to come back to these questions and pick at them a little further in my next post.

The Art of Communication - CMALT

OK, I'm not actually going to write a guide on the art of communication, but I did want to talk about the importance of 'effective' communication within our roles. Last week I was asked to join the Faculty of Social Sciences at one of their regular CMALT sessions to discuss my 'journey' as a learning technologists and the factors that led me complete my CMALT. The Faculty of Social Sciences have around 12 members of staff that are currently in the midst of compiling their CMALT portfolio. Organised by their faculty learning technologist, Ros Walker they have been coming together regularly looking at each aspect of the CMALT portfolio with an invited speaker for each session. An approach that I think has worked very well!

The last session looked at 'communication'. I shared my own experiences interfacing between many different colleagues as this hybrid technological and pedagogical communicator. This got me thinking about the various teams I've been alined to as a learning technologist. In my time as an LT I've sat within:

• a multimedia team within technical services (Business School at Sheffield Hallam)
• a Unit for Enhancement in Learning and Teaching as part of curriculum development team (UeLT at University of Kent)
• a Centre for Learning and Teaching (CeLT at Manchester Metropolitan University)
• a strand of Learning and Research Technologies (LRT) called Learning Innovation (Manchester Metropolitan University)
• and now a Faculty role withing The University of Sheffield's Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health

During my time I've worked on a varying scale of projects including small scale innovations through to large institutional change through out all of which I've been required to adapt my communication skills to the appropriate audience. It really is incredible when you think about the different kinds of roles that a learning technologist has to communicate with, last week alone I met with/or had contact with fellow learning technologists, central IT, faculty IT, administrators, academics, students, members of senior exec and learning and teaching services. Some of those interactions involved an informal coffee, attending and feeding back at an event, a presentation and using social media!

Working in such a dynamic field requires the skill to adapt communications methods and techniques to the right setting and colleague. As communicators of sometimes seemingly complex technological ideas to teaching problems it's really important that we can do so in a way that is clear to our audience. It's also really important that we listen, sounds obvious right? I'll draw upon an example from a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to attend a programme committee to talk about e-learning. Now, I can chew the e-learning fat till the cows come home but what we see time and time again are colleagues jumping on top of learning technology as an answer to their prayers. After some questioning and listening it became obvious there was no issue for me to address as such so a different approach on my part was needed in this case but it's sometimes this kind of dialogue and the approach that is important with colleagues when being asked to address certain problems.

We are exposed to many different situations which require a variety of communicative skills, this can range from written reports, presentations, staff development sessions, presenting at conferences, reporting to strategic groups, communicating institutionally, dealing with students and primarily being the connection between technology and pedagogy.

Quite often we can find ourselves in the firing line as the 'bringers of change' when it comes to implementation of new new learning technologies and approaches. This can always be tricky and the wrong approach here can lead to upset and frustrated staff and really set things back. In this case I always flip things the other way and start with the pedagogy, the students and the approach and leave the technology to one side. But it's very hard sometimes to control the way in which colleagues perceive our roles which of course will impact on the way in which they choose to communicate back.... or not communicate back! This means we have to be adaptable, confident and above all think on our feet.

What I've also found in my time is that in many situations we seem to be the missing connection between many streams of broken communication between various pockets of the institution. I think this comes down to the wide spanning nature of our roles and quite often I find myself informing colleagues such as academics, IT and professional services of the latest goings on. I guess this comes down to the nature of our role being plugged into so many areas of the systems, the student cycle and teaching and learning.

Although Ros had asked me to share my own journey at this particular session, I have been attending some of them already as an exisiting CMALT holder, a great opportunity to hear from other LT professionals and share experiences. Looking forward to the next!