This week and last we had two visiting speakers which focussed me in on quality again. John Milne from Massey university ran a workshop on eLearning Guidelines (an eLearning Collaborative development funded project). All NZ tertiary educators are invited to contribute to the guidelines and develop their own for practical use in their institutions through a wiki accessible from the eLearn website.

In response to a scenario we developed with a student who joined the workshop, we developed a couple of new and very important guidelines, and found several existing ones which were relevant. 

The scenario was:
An off-campus multimedia student is using blended methods (mainly eLearning)in a course. The student has a dial-up connection at home and has difficulty getting on-campus access to the computers and software. Not all computers have the necessary tools/software. The student also doesn\’t have them at home and no access from home. The students are given training in using some software in the first week, then no further training and little support from the lecturer. There is no after hours support.

Some people in the workshop found the session a bit wishy washy, but it was a collaborative and consultative exercise which doesn\’t suit everyone. Some people just want to be told. Guidelines are guidelines not standards and as such need ongoing discussion be dynamic and continually evolving.

The other speaker was Professor Fred Lockwood, a very experienced academic in the field of open and distacne learning. I went to hear his talk at the university about quality and distance education. I recorded part of the talk and had his permission to use it, though he did seem bemused that anyone would want to listen to it.

In his talk he made several interesting points in the way of questions about what we do in distance/flexible learning. Reading between the lines and through his humour it was clear to me that he thought the university was deficient in many areas – he had just conducted a review of their distance programmes and was helping them with a distance learning strategy.

The points which I identified with were:
1. Learner needs and how important it was to pay attention to them.
2. The need to conduct developmental testing with realstudents and reward them with free fees for such courses, with new flexibly offered courses. Even something as a textbook recommended by a lecturer can be unsuitable in the opinion of the students. This is rarely done at OP.
3. Too much information was a common problem so that students who were expecting to study for 5 hrs a week ended up getting increasingly more stuff to read and hand in until they could end up studying well over the 5 hrs per week. In Fred\’s words, \”good value for money getting 35 hrs a week of study…\”

I brought Fred back to OP to speak with a small group (in the Council room with tea) including some managers and people from EDC and other parts of OP which was good. We had an informal discussion and some good points came out e.g. open courseware. Looking out for the learners – part-time, lifelong learners etc. It was a useful session but I wish I\’d asked him to chat about developmental testing so the managers could have got the message.

Fred has also asked me to contact him about putting together a book proposal for something from NZ and across countries too for the Open and Flexible Learning series. Not sure whn I\’ll have time to do anything, but it would be good to coordinate something and collaborate to write a chapter.

Quality is very important in not only attracting students but also in helping with retention. Quality starts before students enrol (18% lost before they \”register\”) and should continue all the way through with the resources offered, access, teacher support/facilitation and should meet learners\’ needs. 

Unfortunately in the model we appear to be adopting, online and product is being pushed which is shoving us along the inflexible rather than the flexible path. If we were truly to meet learner needs, we would adopt a truly flexible model where learners negotiate their content and their assessments and the way they learn. We are trying this to some extent with the Design course.

All the teaching I am engaged in these days also requires me to have an online presence. I develop and use open educational resources, and I use a range of strategies for interacting with the class and facilitating their learning experience. By having an ePortfolio – this blog and a wiki user page – it is very easy to keep my profile and my achievements handy, and to update and contextualize them. Unfortunately, I don\’t spend enough time on the updating side of things, nor have I been that effective at keeping all the projects I have been involved in linked into my portfolio. I see the wiki as a more static porfolio resource, containing documentation of my achievements and also supporting evidence, whereas the blog is used as a way to convey my professional philosophy – attitudes, beliefs, and values – and evidence of critical reflection on my work.

So far I have not been very good at gathering all the evidence together in a common storage locker, e.g., Mahara or Pebble Pad. This is because I prefer to use a variety of web-based tools, so I tend to have stuff all over the place. What I do need to do is feed all my material from the social networking sites I use into one spot, and I can easily do this on my WikiEducator user page.

My online presence is all over the place – on a recent search on Google I found wads of material I had forgotten about. The impervious finger in many pies syndrome. So the octopus which is my PLE needs restraining somehow.  Therefore, my goal for an ePortfolio is to create a more organised online presence, one in which I can find myself easily.

Source: ASIDE 2016

The library makerspace was in full bloom this year, giving our students an amazing opportunity to learn by doing. They were encouraged to use a variety of applications to explore different ways to demonstrate their academic abilities as they related to curricula thematic units. The finished products were anything but projects; they combined informational, visual, and spatial literacies, and they actively pushed students to think critically and solve problems.

Source: ASIDE 2016

As with any project-based learning experience, it required collaboration. The nursery, Kindergarten, second-grade teachers, and librarians worked together to design an interactive, hands-on unit to engage students on multiple levels throughout the process. The following projects represent a symphony of parts, but most of all, they could not have culminated into this extraordinary learning experience for the students without an incredible group of dedicated friends and colleagues.

Source: ASIDE 2016

Teachers Elizabeth Wakhale and Lori Zwick described it this way: “The nursery children worked in the library makerspace with librarian, Stephanie Temple, to transform everyday materials into upcycled instruments. The inspiration came from the book entitled The Animal Boogie, by Debbie Harter, where they listened to the sounds of the rainforest. Tissue boxes became guitars, oatmeal containers became drums, paper towel rolls became rain sticks, and egg cartons became bell shakers. Their imaginations soared, and the sky was the limit.” The children will play their musical instruments in their outdoor celebration of Earth Day and the rainforest in the campus amphitheater at the end of the week.

Source: ASIDE 2016

The students in Kindergarten used engineering skills to create blue prints of world landmarks by deconstructing the shapes of buildings, finding the materials they needed to build them, and erecting the structures in three-dimensional forms. Geography was an integral part of the learning process. The students studied the continents and made map keys to mark where each of the landmarks was located.

The Kindergarteners learned about community helpers with their teachers Marybeth Horne and Jessica Shippos. This project was a way for them to see how community builders must have worked together to construct important cultural landmarks. “It was amazing to see how the students carefully deconstructed the different geometric shapes for their blueprints to figure out they materials they needed to build their own creations,” said librarian, Stephanie Temple.

Source: ASIDE 2016

Source: ASIDE 2016

The second graders became urban planners and architectural engineers to answer the question, “Where Do People Live?” They used a variety of visual tools such as sketchnotes and mapping to plan their physical urban, suburban, and rural communities. This involved visually transferring a two-dimensional map into a three-dimensional environment.

The second grade teachers, Stefani Rosenthal and Jessica Raffaele, had the students document the communities by taking photographs on their iPads. They imported the images into the Book Creator app in which they reflected in writing on the needs of a community and the type of community in which they would like to live. It was a perfect combination of “High Tech, High Touch.”

Source: ASIDE 2016

Our “Build It” after school program was also a big hit. The whimsical robots and imaginary landscapes captured the hearts and minds of everyone. It was an amazing experience for the students to see their handiwork on display. It was the school hot spot for the week, with lots of photo opportunities with their creations.

Most of all, nothing limited their creativity. When the exhibition opened, the students could not have been prouder, nor could we.