Guidance to Educators: Developing professional relationships

Transcript:

Welcome all, please feel free to share this video with colleagues if you think they would find it of interest. 

Let’s talk today about building professional relationships. Teaching can be quite a lonely experience. Depends a little bit on the organization that you teach in. You might be teaching in a very isolated part of the world, or you might be teaching a very specialist discipline. You might be the only person teaching that particular subject in your school, even in your area. 

And having good connections with other practitioners that understand you, understand your context, definitely do serve to lower the level of anxiety that you might feel. There’s evidence to suggest that well- connected educators do suffer less anxiety.

So reaching out now is much easier. There are any number of digital platforms that you can engage with and connect with other people. And in doing so you benefit not just that level of human connectivity, but you’re also using them as a source of new ideas, new sources, new perspectives. 

It’s very important if you do get involved in any of these platforms that you do become a contributor, as well as a consumer. That’s not just because that’s fair. It’s just, it’s also that echoing your voice is really important, using your voice to mirror the practice of others is part of the process of building those relationships.

Even if it’s just to go back to someone who’s posted something, you found a value to just say “I’ve used what you suggested. It worked very well for me” or it didn’t and I made this adjustment, and I did it this way. Having that level of feedback is really important. 

So, I’m on a number of different platforms. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Instagram. I’m on Tik Tok. I’m on YouTube and I’ve got my own website, but I think the two that everyone needs to start with are Twitter and LinkedIn. Build a profile on LinkedIn, doesn’t have to be expansive, but at least something that gives people a sense of who you are as a person.

And then Twitter is a great way of just picking up ideas, sources, perspectives, re-tweeting things that you think are of interest, identifying things more widely, and posting them and share that community experience. You’d be surprised how quickly it does build and giving you a solid network to lean on will undoubtedly reduce your anxiety. 

So you might want to try some of those platforms for yourself. See how it goes. 

Let me know. Be well.

Guidance for Educators: Finding the Passion

Transcript:

Welcome, all. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues, if you think it would be of value to them.

I want to talk today about passion. It’s really important that your passion for your subject is conveyed to your students. Even if there is something about your subject that you don’t particularly find interesting, you might find it a little bit dull, even, it’s really important that you look deep inside and find the nugget of passion for that particular topic or that particular lesson because if you don’t, you risk losing your students’ engagement with you.

So, think back to a situation where you have yourself had a teacher tutor, or lecturer, that you thought was exceptional. You may remember everything that happened in this session. You may have looked forward to going to those particular sessions. What was it about that particular lecturer, or tutor, sis that proved so effective? When I’ve done this exercise with, academics as part of academic professional development, almost without exception, they would say, actually it was the passion. It was the passion of the teacher for that particular discipline. Sometimes that specific lecture, sometimes that series of lectures, that course.

And so I think it’s really important that you do look to find that moment of passion within anything that you’re teaching. So, sometimes that can be quite difficult, and you may need to about, sometimes a very small, aspect of the entire topic that you think is a point of passion, and you build from that. Because it’s your passion for the subject that will allow you to get your students engaged. It will allow them to be more receptive to the enlightenment that you are going to share with them, and it’s also going to mean that you are more likely to be able to give them the empowerment, to go forward, to think about what they’re going to do with that learning later.

So your learning needs to engage, enlighten and empower. And, I personally found it quite hard on occasion to find that point of passion and it’s worth literally thinking, just before the session, “what’s the one thing that I’m going to share with my students in this session?” That sparks other people’s passions. What other researchers, other academics, whatever thinkers have spun off that particular point?. And if you don’t have anything, particularly that, you find passionate, you can convey the passion of others, but it’s really important that there is passion in any teaching session.

So you might want to try that. Let me know how it goes.

Please share, like, and follow.

Be well.

The student is at the centre of the educational process (Interview)

I have been rather busy of late, so this is a rather delayed post from an interview done in June 2020 with SRCE, the Croatian National e-Learning Centre. The Interview appears under the title “Student je središte obrazovnoga procesa”, which translates as ‘The student is at the centre of the educational process’. Below is an English version of the extended interview.

SK: How does one transfer face-to-face (f2f) courses to an online environment? 

Carefully! The difficulty is that the honest answer is “it depends”. It depends on several factors. Whether your institution already has a robust infrastructure to support learning online, is there already a virtual learning environment in place, and how well is it being used and supported? What are the relative skill sets of the technologists, educational technologists and academics? Has the institution already predetermined a learning and teaching strategy that defines the nature of the blend of online and face-to-face provision, or has it just been left to develop organically as the technologies have become more and more widespread? 

There a strategic challenge for institutions, beyond the influence of most front line teachers. I think the challenge is that language, certainly in English, is very changeable and often misused. Managers mix up phrases like the ‘flipped classroom’ and ‘blended’, or they associate ‘online’ with ‘remote’ learning. I think it is worth investing some time at an institutional level to agree on what you mean by the terms you use. Otherwise, people can talk across each other and misunderstand both each other’s context and meaning.

Institutionally, we need to think about the human element. Recognising that the skills to design learning and teaching online, whether to overcome the short-term lack of classroom contact or for longer-term distance learning purposes, are not the same skills required of face-to-face teachers. Most online distance and flexible learning organisations (ODFL) have created many specialisms within their workforce. Many traditional institutions still expect individuals to play a range of unique roles and so moving these online is increasingly challenging. We need to confront the fact that the change of environment means a dramatic change in roles, and that won’t fit everyone’s personal or career aspirations.

SK: And for an individual teacher’s perspective, what should they be thinking about?

I would suggest that the first thing anyone should do when moving a course from face-to-face to online is to be honest with themselves. It’s an opportunity to look for quality enhancement. In the short term you may be compelled to move existing presentation material online, the resources you might have delivered in a lecture, and wrap around that some discussion forum to substitute what you might have done in a seminar. Readings are less of an issue. But in the medium term, and in the long term, we need to recognise that designing learning for online delivery is an entirely different experience from face-to-face. So I think there is a perfect opportunity to dismantle your existing course, challenge your assumptions, and go right back to the basic design elements within your courses.

I think it is also important to avoid taking a deficit mindset around online, by which I mean to think that online or distance learning is ‘worth’ less than traditional face-to-face learning. The evidence suggests the opposite but what is true is that they are significantly different experiences from a student’s perspective.

Most courses have been designed around course outcome statements. Ordinarily, these are written statements as to what the student will be able to ‘do’ once they’ve completed the course and these guide both assessment, learning activities and content. If your institution doesn’t follow this approach, it’s not too late to do it for yourself. Writing good learning outcomes provides a structure for both the learner and the tutor. If you’ve got learning outcomes already in place for your course, go right back to them and re-conceptualise your learning approach, knowing the context in which your students are now learning.

There is an assumption that when the student is on campus and sitting in the classroom, they are a captive audience, you can monopolise their time for the one or two hours that they are timetabled. In an ODFL context, students’ time is out of your reach. That means the learning itself needs a degree of motivation and structure built into it. The consequence of this is that you design learning that requires the learner to build on their own experience, to situate their learning wherever they are, and seek out authentic learning opportunities. I believe as a result, ODFL can produce much better learning than many face-to-face instances where there is the danger that given the captive nature of the student, they can be subjected to content lead learning design. So my key message is to be as honest as you can be about the quality of the learning experience rather than being overly concerned with the quality of your content. Focus on the learner experience.

SK: So what practical steps can teachers do to achieve that?

First, I think the best teachers are reflective practitioners. They are continuously asking themselves whether they are serving the best interests of the learners from a learning perspective, not from a subject content perspective. The reality is the vast majority of factual knowledge delivered through our courseware is available to students free if they know how to find it. What we do as educators is we synthesise, organise and order this knowledge into meaningful experiences. Some of our colleagues may have been teaching for 30 years in a face-to-face environment and now teach online for the first time, some of them I know feel like they’re teaching for the first time! The COVID-19 pandemic is a significant opportunity, despite unfortunate circumstances, to confront everything about what we do. Teachers need to be aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. So keep a journal, reflective notes, annotate your presentations, make quick observations after each teaching encounter. Get into the habit of challenging yourself as to what you could have done differently and what you plan to try differently next time. 

Second, teachers need to know that they are not expected to do everything by themselves. Indeed, I don’t think anyone can do everything. There is a reason ODFL organisations have so many interwoven specialisms. I think it’s important to recognise that learning design, course design, is neither a science nor is it a dark art. If it were a science, big organisations would’ve already found a way of making an engine where you put in your requirements and of course comes out the other end, but despite their best efforts that appears not to be on the horizon. Likewise, good course design and good teaching, with some very rare exceptions, are best done in broad daylight, and with peer review, rather than behind the closed doors of a dark lecture theatre. One of the positive effects of the expansion, or massification, of higher education in Europe and globally is that it has compelled greater transparency in learning and teaching practices. So teachers need to know enough about themselves, so they know when to ask for help.

Third, and it’s a related point, is when there is no immediate support if your institution just doesn’t have the staff to guide you in developing good online learning, reach out. Look for support from many international organisations that have provided resources to support you and your colleagues. I’m aware of resources that are shared by EDEN, ICDE, UNESCO and others. I think it’s important that teachers know that they are not alone and that regardless of the discipline, whether its undergraduate dance or postgraduate chemistry, someone, somewhere will be trying to solve the same challenges you face. I, like many others, share resources openly on blogs and institutional websites. Use them.

SK: How can teachers ensure that an online course is not simply a repository of learning materials?

Good learning design would never result in a simple repository of learning materials. It just can’t happen, that’s a contradiction. It’s the equivalent of a face-to-face teacher handing out a reading list for their and doing nothing else. Good learning design puts the learner experience at the heart of its design; resources complement the experience; they don’t replace it. I think sometimes we associate with having students physically present in our classrooms means that they are engaged. We assume that they are listening and that they’re paying attention. We may have designed in-class activities, and the students may be actively engaged with them, but a lot of our teaching is still very passive. Sometimes when teachers move recorded lectures, presentations, PowerPoints and notes online but are not being ‘present’ to facilitate any engagement with these resources, they are left wondering whether they have any value. They may wrap a discussion forum around resources and engage the student in a meaningful dialogue amongst themselves and with the tutor, but when this dialogue fails to happen that can be very frustrating. Some students engage some don’t, and there is no immediate way of resolving that I’m afraid. We would have to explore questions of motivation, discipline-fit, literacies and a range of other things which I think is a bit beyond the scope of this conversation.

However, I will say that good learning design would suggest that rather than providing a resource and attempting to get the student to engage with it, it is better to envisage the learning experience and use resources only when it is appropriate. There is nothing wrong with students spending time reflecting, looking for other sources of information to validate what is being given to them or creating online resources collegially or individually. We need to get away from this myth that we, as teachers, are the source of all wisdom. Some students will experience poor learning during this COVID-19 emergency that we all face. But it’s important to recognise that that is not implicit in the ODFL experience, it is likely to result from several assumptions and presumptions that have informed less than ideal practices. Moving courses online is challenging many personal assumptions that we have.  

SK: Let’s talk a little more about assessment in an online environment. How it differs from f2f and how to do it? 

Gosh, that’s a huge question. In some ways, the design approach shouldn’t be any different. Every institution should have an assessment strategy, and arguably every programme and every course needs to have a refined version of that strategy written into it. Assessments, regardless of the mode in which they run, should be valid and reliable, but they should also be authentic, durable and situated. Just to explain my language here; valid in that they assess the outcomes and not content, reliable in that you could expect to repeat the assessment with future cohorts and get comparable results. Authentic because it is appropriate for discipline and level, durable because ideally, we wouldn’t want to keep re-writing assessments each time we deliver a course, and situated in that the assessment allows the student to personalise their evidence.

If you start on that basis, and you look at whatever the learning outcomes are for your course, re-conceptualising assessment becomes less daunting. It should be less about how you adapt your existing assessments to deliver them online; rather, it should be to take an online approach to assess your outcomes. I recognise that for some colleagues, the conventions within their disciplines are incredibly rigid. They may feel uncomfortable about even suggesting that the sacred cow that is the ‘final exam’ may not even be necessary. I understand that. But, there is a strong argument to be made where assessing learning outcomes differently represents a quality enhancement opportunity.

SK: So, how does a teacher decide on the assessment method for online? 

I would say first that people need to be thinking about ‘originating’ not ‘replicating’. Forget about trying to assess the same way online. The learning outcomes dictate the assessment method. Without them, I suspect it’s just about what’s realistic within your institution. If your outcomes require factual recall and memorisation, then the assessment method might be as straightforward as a multiple-choice questionnaire embedded inside the virtual learning environment. Any higher-order thinking skills, to discuss, to debate, to analyse, to evaluate or to critique, are likely to require long answer text forms. The question is how authentic that assessment can be. Many institutions still have a tendency to run exams, I think often just because they’re configured to do so rather than because it is actually assessing any defined outcomes. Unless you’re assessing someone in policy studies or journalism who is required to show an ability to write under pressure, exams risk assessing merely the ability to sit exams or memory rather than any higher cognitive functions. I think it’s important to think about what it is the students actually providing evidence of.

One of my biggest professional frustrations has always been with teachers who say they want their students to be able to identify, research and critically evaluate a range of complex sources in order to synthesis or analyse a situation, and then they set a three-hour exam based around the content in the course. Assessment is undoubtedly one of the most challenging areas of learning design but incredibly satisfying when you get it right!

Clearly, outside of the social sciences, there are other assessment challenges. In the performing arts one may have inferred, but not written into an outcome, the ability to perform in front of an audience for example. In the long run, one may need to rethink the way those outcomes are written, but in the short term, it is entirely possible for students to provide recordings of performances in their own time, in their own space. Some might object to allowing students to perform something multiple times and submit their best effort. I don’t see that as a problem unless the learning outcome suggests that the student only gets one high-pressure opportunity. Again, I think it depends on what it is you’re assessing.

I think it’s important that we try to avoid thinking about how to replicate what we do face-to-face online and go back to the fundamentals of our learning design. We can arguably make adjustments to most of our face-to-face intentions by adopting an ODFL mindset.

SK: In your view does online assessment provide an equally relevant assessment as that in f2f? 

Relevant is an interesting choice of word. I suspect what you are alluding to is the fear that many colleagues have about plagiarism or academic misconduct away from the exam context. You cannot just post a ‘standard’ exam online and not expect students to go into their social media groups and exchange information, download answers from the Internet, or even buy a response. The alternative might be running online proctored exams, but I’m not in favour of that. Unless writing within strict time limits like a journalist is an outcome, I think it’s unnecessary. Instead, I think we are better to be thinking about the assessment from where the student is standing. We need to conceive of the learner, online and distant, living away from campus, and having access all the course content. They don’t live on the moon! They are part of society, so we need to design learning, and assessment, that encourages them to personalise their own context.

I want to unpack the word relevance. Whether the assessment is valid and reliable is about whether the skills you want the students to provide evidence of is captured through your assessment design, and if you repeat the assessment, the results are likely to be equivalent. So designing valid assessment determines its relevance. I think it’s important wherever possible to design assessment that is authentic and situated. Authentic means that the evidence the student is expecting to provide of their learning should be as close to real-world experiences as possible. It always surprises me that institutions go to substantial lengths to create scenarios and case studies when the real-world is just outside the students’ windows! Situated means that the learner should be required wherever practicable, to draw on experiences and realities in their own context. This means they could be asked to create a case-study based on something within their social context. What could be more relevant?

As I’ve said, I think it is arguably easier to provide situated and authentic learning to students who are studying away from the campus and away from an existing cohort. If a student has to situate their learning, and therefore their assessment, it is often easier for teachers to become familiar with an individual’s student’s pattern of learning. Where a teacher is aware of their students’ strengths and weaknesses, they will recognise evidence of academic misconduct more readily. Many institutions now teach at a scale that means individual teachers are not assessing their own students directly. I think if we design assessments to be authentic and situated; it is possible to design out plagiarism. I suspect that is the holy grail in assessment design. Ensuring that students can make the learning, and therefore also their assessment, as meaningful to their own lives as possible. Forcing students to provide context for their learning means cutting and pasting from the Internet becomes more of a chore than it is an advantage.

SK: What final words would you like to share with colleagues here in Croatia?

To say that I respect the commitment and tenacity of teachers, and I admire how they have coped under extreme pressure to do what’s best for their students. To say that I think being reflective, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, asking for help when required. Thinking from the Online Distance Flexible Learning (ODFL) position back towards the campus, rather than the other way around, is the way to tackle the personal challenges ahead. Also, if I might add I have fond memories of my visits to Zagreb and hope to visit Croatia again.

Guiding and Motivating Students Online (6’15”)

 

This brief presentation (6’15”) introduces some themes around guiding and motivating students online. These different facets are mentioned; being clear in instructions, avoid confusion, modelling behaviours, motivating, congratulating, anticipating motivational hurdles. This presentation was the basis for online webinar discussions with educators. It will hopefully prompt you to check your own practices against these fundamental principles.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consultancy for International Higher Education from Simon Paul Atkinson

Peer Observation Online (9’33”)

As so many new faculty are being compelled to teach online for the first time, many heads of department, quality assurance colleagues and academic developers are unprepared for the support the needs of faculty. Developmental peer observation is a frequently used approach to provide a reflection on an individual’s practise. Most of us will be familiar with Peer Observation in a classroom context, here is documentation that supports the process in the online world.

This is a brief walkthrough of the documentation designed to provide supportive peer observation online. The documentation, available as an unrestricted Microsoft Word document (see below), can be amended to your context. It is designed for developmental, rather than managerial, observations but could be easily adapted to serve both purposes. It follows a three-stage process, pre-observation, observation, and post-observation templates are provided.

Word Document: Peer Observation Online

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

 

Preparing for Webinar Teaching (6’18”)

This six-minute video (6’18”) is entitled ‘Best Practices in Preparing Online Materials for Webinar facilitation.” It is essential guidance for novice webinar teachers. There are 8 tips for preparing your webinar so you do not end up asking questions into the dark abyss and hear nothing back from your students. This screencast was generated for colleagues using AdobeConnect but it is suitable regardless of whether you are using this, or Blackboards Collaborate, ZOOM or any webinar context. Originally recorded in 2015. #elearning #AdobeConnect #webinar #higher #teaching

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Categories not Levels: HEA Fellowship

Whether the four categories of Fellowship, professional recognition from the Higher Education Academy (AdvanceHE), represent a progression framework appears to be one of those perennial discussions. At first glance, it is understandable that we might interpret it as though individuals must first achieve a D1 (descriptor1) ‘level’ before moving on the D2 and so on. The truth is slightly more confusing. I believe we should all we use carefully chosen language in identifying the differences between categories of Fellowship by avoiding the implication of levels in D1, D2…. and instead have an active discussion with Faculty about the descriptors and potential labels. In my practice, I insist on discussing the differences between a Teaching Fellowship (D1) and an Academic Fellowship (D2), between that and a Leadership Fellowship (D2) and a Strategic Fellowship (D4).

I believe an accurate interpretation of the UKPSF and its relationship to Fellowship Descriptors across all four categories makes it incompatible with any institutional promotional structure. Certainly achieving recognition within a category can, and should, generate evidence that can be used as part of an evidence base towards promotion, but tying Fellowship to internal promotion distorts individuals understanding of Fellowship and undermines their active engagement with the Professional Standards Framework.

Below are four videos representing extracts from an institutional Fellowship Seminar recently. I present them in the order in which they were delivered although each should stand alone. They are:

  • Overview of the UKPSF (Professional Standards Framework)
  • Curating Evidence (putting a portfolio together)
  • Categories of Fellowship (an explanation of why they are NOT levels)
  • Good Standing (staying on top of your Fellowship)

Overview of the UKPSF (Professional Standards Framework)

I represent neither an authority on the UKPSF nor do I represent the views of the HEA or AdvanceHE. These are my personal views based on having overseen an institutional scheme and written an aligned PGCert, as well as providing some consulting services to a number of colleagues in recent years. Other than my publicly stated reservations about the lack of an epistemological referencing within the UKPSF I think it is an essential tool for reflective practice.

Curating Evidence (putting a portfolio together)

Everyone is busy! I suspect we need to do a better job of supporting new Faculty to develop a reflective portfolio from their first day on the job. It should be part of that first on-boarding conversation with their new line manager. Encouraging new staff to document even the most mundane professional observations is necessary but is rarely a skill most of have naturally. This segment makes a few suggestions.

Categories of Fellowship (an explanation of why they are NOT levels)

The Fellowships have four descriptors, one each, obviously. Of course, they are numbered 1 through 4, D1, D2…. So it is natural enough to assume that they are progressive, that they constitute a series of levels. This is not the case. Each descriptor describes the kind of role that someone in HE has and articulates this with reference to the UKPSF. Even if you are an extremely competent academic, engaged in all dimensions of the UKPSF with evidence of your on-going excellence in practice, you cannot assume to be made a Senior Fellow without exploring your practice against this new category’s descriptor, essentially the leadership and mentoring of others around learning and teaching. It is important to grasp the notion that longevity and ‘excellent in role’ is not sufficient to presume eligibility. In each category, there is a distinct focus. This segment explores the four distinct categories as teaching, academic, leadership and strategic roles. I think this makes it easier to unpack them.

Good Standing (staying on top of your Fellowship)

The Higher Education Academy (AdvanceHE) have not detailed any guidelines for what constitutes ‘remaining in good standing’ as a Fellow, in whichever category it is awarded. But, institutions are encouraged to support Fellows to document their practice and facilitate both reflection and sharing. In theory, an institution’s delegated authority to award fellowships through an accredited pathway could be at risk if the HEA chose to audit an institution and found them wanting. It need not be that difficult. Here are a few suggestions.

Learning & Teaching Activities (6/8-SLDF)

Designing Engaging Learning Opportunities

Workshop aligned to UKPSF A1-A2,  K1-K4, V1 

The third element in a constructively aligned course design and stage six of the 8-SLDF is the learning activities that allow students to prepare for the assessment of their learning outcomes. This is not about the content that we share with our students; it is about how we develop an appropriate strategy to do that. Some modules will require a good deal of knowledge to be acquired by novice learners and a set-text and discursive seminars may be the appropriate strategy. Could we use one-minute papers, ‘Pecha Kucha’, lightning talks, and other techniques to secure student engagement? Alternatively, we might be designing a more advanced module in which a discovery learning approach is more appropriate. Could we use enquiry based learning models here instead, asking our students to prepare to take a debate position, run a Moot or team-based discussion? The important thing is that we are developing a strategy and practical approaches that build on our design, not seeking innovation for innovation’s sake. The pages for this stage of the 8 Stage Learning Design Framework are summarised as:

      1. The content to be taught should serve the students ability to evidence the ILO
      2. The skills and attributes that are taught at a topic, week or session level should be designed to rehearse elements of the assessment
      3. Not everything that engages students is directly assessed but everything they are asked to do should be justifiable as informing the assessment and ILOs.

You might want to ask yourself as a course design team

        • How closely mapped are the  ILOs to each topic, week or session outline?
        • How confident are you that you cover the ILOs appropriately in terms of weighting and importance?
        • How much variation is there in the learning approaches taken throughout your module?
        • How are you enabling students to develop skills beyond knowledge acquisition?

    See 8-SLDF pages for a fuller explanation.

Coffee Notes: Personal Reflection and Evaluation (5’8″)

I thought I would share some cross-platform videos which reflect whatever is on my mind professionally each morning.  Shot in portrait for IGTV and then annotated for YouTube,  they represent unscripted notes on some aspect of learning design or educational enhancement.

This one explores the value of an individual approach to personalizing reflection for academic practitioners. I urge faculty to make reflective journal notes immediately following any teaching event. This is invaluable, as is watching and listening back to your work. Combined with an SGID or in-class evaluation process you will find that any end-of-module evaluation of your teaching effectiveness should hold no surprises.

Models of Distance and ‘Blended’ Learning

It is always a privilege to be listed with others whose work one admires. I was pointed recently to a page produced by Laura Heap at the London Metropolitan University in May 2014 on their eLearning Matrix pages. On a page where Laura outlines possible answers to the question “What models are there for blended and distance online learning delivery?” she has chosen to include my work here on the SOLE Model alongside some people that I deeply admire.

LondonMet Reference
LondonMet elearning Website

Laura lists four different models (references on the London Met webpage) which each, in very different ways, seek to clarify dimensions of the challenge presented by distance and blended learning scenarios (something I have already written about on my personal blog). Professor Terry Anderson at Athabasca University (Canada), alongside Randy Garrison, whilst at the University of Calgary back in the late 1990s and 2000s, developed a “community of inquiry model” as an instructional design model for e-learning. It seeks to acknowledge the impact of the mutual interdependence of student and teacher through three overlapping ‘domains’ of the social presence, cognitive presence and the teaching presence.

Her second inclusion is the ‘5 stage model’ originated by Professor Gilly Salmon, now at Swinburne University (Australia). This model, from memory, originated from Gilly’s PhD work at the Open University Business School in the early 1990s and I have been a critic of its simplistic adoption by many others. The original premise was similar to that of Anderson and Garrison’s work that learners needed to be socialised into a learning ‘community’ in order to operate as effective learners. Originally somewhat limited by the world of CMC (Computer Mediated Conferencing) this model has been extended by others.

Laura Heap’s fourth ‘model’ (I’m third so will come back to that) is by Professor Diana Laurillard, now at the Institute of Education (London) referred to as the ‘Conversational Framework’. This work also dates from Diana’s time at the Open University late 1990s and early 2000s and has been adapted and developed by a great many others since. Essentially I would describe it as a reinterpretation of dialogic learning, notably in its form advocated by Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1981) who argued that meaning is a co-construction that results in processes of reflection, dialogue, between people. Laurillard builds a simple model that encourages teachers to structure, and plan, that dialogue into their teaching design.

The inclusion of the SOLE Model is flattering and does fit rather well. I tried to incorporate meta-theory into the development of a toolkit which would support learning designers and teachers to create ‘communities of inquiry’ whilst recognising the ‘social’ dimension and the cultural differences which students live through every day. Borrowing particularly from Professor John Biggs’s work on the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs and Collis, 1982). I also sought to encourage, after Bakhtin and Laurillard, to embed a conversation between the learner, learning activity and the learning objectives.

What is clear is that to have a theoretical framework for effective on-line learning design is essential. I may have deviated from Anderson and Garrison’s separation from the social and cognitive processes, and from Salmon’s stress for human socialisation but the SOLE Model does allow for the personal, communitarian and societal dimension to learning. In fact, I see the principle difference is the focus on the student’s immediate ‘campus’ environment and to place greater stress on the student’s real and diverse life ‘outside’ the control of the learning provider. I also differ from Laurillard’s sequenced activity designs that result from the conversational framework into a more ‘freeform’ learning design at the theoretical level, but the toolkit development will hopefully include further structural aspects in the near future. Learning and teaching online (distance or ‘blended’) presents unique challenges for teachers and students alike. Personally I advocate transparency to design for the student by sharing the design as an advanced organiser (SOLE Toolkit) in order to express clarity of the learning process (dialogue) and to encourage interaction and feedback leading to enhancement. Whichever way you look at it, it is a privilege to find the SOLE Model included in such illustrious company.

SOLE Model at London Met
SOLE Model at London Met

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Biggs, J., & Collis, K. F. (1982). Evaluating the Quality of Learning: Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome Taxonomy. New York: Academic Press Inc.

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