Psychomotor skills should be at the core of all learning

Any learning design framework that does not address the psychomotor skills is not worth exploring.

There is not a single discipline taught in any formal, non-formal or informal way that does not make use of some tool or technology, instrument or mechanism (aka media), at some point in the process. It makes sense that any curriculum development process needs to put the media at the forefront of its planning. Curricula need to developed around intended learning outcomes that are clearly articulated around the development of psychomotor skills.

Rather than have intellectual (cognitive) outcomes such as, (students will be able to:)

“Apply transformations and use symmetry to analyze mathematical situations”
Would it not be better to say
“Utilise graphical representation software in order to analyse mathematical transformations and symmetry”

That way the student requires the practical ability to evidence their ability to meet an intellectual skill.

Another example in a disparate discipline, let’s take theatre studies. Rather than say,

“Demonstrate an understanding of all aspects of theatrical production including design and technical functions” [a real, but poorly written outcome]
Would it not be better say:
“Produce design and technical specifications for a theatrical production”

The learner cannot provide evidence of their ability to meet that outcome without fulfilling the weaker intellectual outcome.

The course design process then become skills focussed rather than knowledge orientated. Knowledge is acquired within a practical context. The psychomotor outcomes are not overly specific, they do not say ‘using Algosim to generate mathematical visualisations….” Or “Manage stage plans using ShowNotes….”, because in both cases stating a particular technology does not allow for future evolution of those technologies (renaming, rebranding, etc). The focus is on developing the skills, always with a light to their transferability across other tools. We should always ensure that we teach the ‘paper and pencil’ version alongside too, so the increments between origination and implementation are also evident.

The 8-Stage Learning Design Framework has as its third step the ‘Media Choices’, which requires programme and course designers to review the current (and evolving) environment into which graduates will emerge. This should incorporate a review of the tools and technologies that students are expected to use ‘on the job’. Only after this stage is complete is it appropriate to draft Intended Learning Outcomes, then assessment, and then learning & teaching activities.

See Courses on both Designing Effective Intended Learning Outcomes and the Introduction to Five Educational Taxonomies, which includes the Psychomotor domain.

do-not-reply@: the inefficiencies of email use demonstrated by graduates

Graduates, and their colleagues, born after 1970 are unlikely to have worked in a context in which email was not a primary communication tool. Its inefficiency is manifest but often overlooked.

I went from my undergraduate degree in 1988 into a role as a Logistics Manager for Vichy L’Oreal. The job involved using a stand-alone PC, a telephone to the factory in France, and a weekly Telex to Paris. I was appointed on the basis that I spoke French. I couldn’t write French for caramel au beurre (toffee), but I could speak it. No one asked me at my interview whether I had any computer skills or indeed whether I was numerate. I didn’t have email.

Today employers make similar assumptions about digital competence. I have just finished a consultancy project looking at embedding real-world practices and assessment in a business degree. The external reviews had been good, but the feedback from the destination surveys with employers less so. Their recent recruits could not communicate appropriately using email.

This challenge was described by Cal Newport in his Harvard Business Report piece “A Modest Proposal.”(2016). Outlining IBM’s early experience of corporate email in the 1980s, he explains that while the first few days showed positive signs of increased productivity but quickly employees simply adopting the system for their routine offline communication, and notably communicated ‘vastly more’ than they had before. “Thus — in a mere week or so — was gained and blown the potential productivity gain of email,” Newport cites an IBM manager. Email is now a source of inefficiency. Email use is so ubiquitous it becomes difficult to imagine running an organisation without it.

The review of this particular business degree demonstrated much like that was positive. Lots of collaborative project type activities and group assessments. Business simulations using software, embedded in the institutional learning management system, form the basis of the second year and a ‘new’ business project provided the foundation for the third year. In many ways it is a progressive design, sharing characteristics of many medical school’s approaches to ‘problem based learning’. So, why weren’t the employers recruiting from this degree happy?

It turns out that the employers biggest complaint was the inability of graduates to use email effectively. Their complaints mirror closely many of my own with the way colleagues routinely use email, so let’s unpack them.

Saying enough, but not too much. Writing a handwritten email requires thought before you write and a conscious decision whether to ‘go over the page’. It leads to shorter, more direct forms of asking questions or answering them. Students who do not use email (preferring messaging apps) are not practiced at measuring their message.

Treating email like chat. Students who are invested in the immediacy of communication, and the transient nature of the message, are prone to not invest sufficient thought in the enduring nature of business communication. Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and other messaging apps simply reinforce this behaviour. Communications may be immediate, but it’s it also ‘cheap’.

Inappropriate use of reply-all. Senior managers expressed some frustration with receiving emails with ‘thanks’ as the body of the email, sent to everyone, sometimes dozens of people, simply because the person hit ‘reply-all’. The question one might ask is if you received a paper memo from the same person, with the same information, would you go to the trouble of writing a memo back that says ‘thanks’?

Lazy addressing of email. Dragging out an old email in order to identify a sender and then hitting reply fails on two counts. Firstly, it may be that without changing the subject heading, the email may be filed with a conversation thread that is otherwise closed. It may get lost, and prove difficult to retrieve if the subject is different from that of the header. Secondly, the dreaded ‘reply-all’ means that one risks sending an appropriate message to people you did not mean to contact. Human Resource departments often have stories of ‘misunderstandings’ borne merely as the result of inappropriately sending email to the ‘wrong’ people.

Some larger commercial organisations are templating emails, turning them more into ‘digital memos’, using mailing aliases, using more BCC, and originating emails from ‘do-not-reply@‘ addresses. I came across one company that has banned all internal email, using Teams for anything internal, and using email for external communications. There are moves for organisations to reimpose a degree of structure around workflow and issuing mandates (as French legislation does) protecting the right for employees to ‘un-plug’. Organisations are embracing the limitations imposed through tools like Slack, imposing different internal and external channels. Others are simply exploring internal training courses on how to write emails efficiently. Some have even chosen to embrace the paper memo to replace some internal communication. Somewhere I am sure someone is ‘reinventing’ Lotus Notes as I write.

There is a growing problem, not just for the younger generations now graduating who have no experience of email efficiency, but for businesses worldwide. My advice to the leadership of the degree that I was consulting on was to make the second and third year projects less ‘clinical’, more chaotic in terms of the technology platforms that were available to students. Students need to learn to communicate using email in its wild and untamed form. That would require students to be educated as to write digital memos.Then any restricted workflow they may encounter will be a bonus.

I had actually used a PC before I joined Vichy in 1988, but certainly not the way the role required of me. Fortunately I seemed to have the ‘knack’. As well as the weekly telex and making daily phonecalls, I wrote a handful of internal memos (on paper) each week. I was managing a monthly budget of millions of pounds worth of stock flows with just that level of communication. I can imagine there are at least three people doing the same job now, engaged in a sisyphean effort just to manage the email traffic.

Newport, Cal. “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.” Harvard Business Review, February 18, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/02/a-modest-proposal-eliminate-email.

Image by Sara Kurfeß @stereo.prototype at unsplash.com

 

How do you define hybrid, or hyflex, learning?

I struggled recently to define hybrid learning to a client. They asked how they could go about creating ‘hybrid learning’ for their learners. A reasonable question?

There appears to be some confusion, in practice and in the literature, as to the differences between hybrid, hyflex (hiflex, hi-flex, etc), and blended learning. So, I would like to take a minute to propose some definitional parameters, and wait to see if you agree or disagree.

The terms hybrid and hyflex are, in my mind, essentially the same thing, but they differ from ‘mainstream’ blended approaches. Blended learning, as curricula and teaching practice, determines where a learner studies, and what they are doing in each space. The blend is anticipated and written into the curriculum. The teacher knows what the student will be doing in-person or as a distance learner. Indeed the course is most probably designed ‘flipped-classroom’ style, to optimise the precious time in face-to-face-face contexts, whether in-person or virtually. There are a few flavours of blended learning but they are all pre-determined by the course creator.

Hybrid, or hyflex, approaches attempt to give some agency, some control, to the learner as to the nature of their learning experience, the when, where and how. Both aim to empower the student to choose what learning should be studied face-to-face and that which should be studied online, and how to go about engaging with that learning. The only apparent difference, largely in US practice, appears to be the unpacking of the the distance participation element as asynchronous or synchronous online engagement. To me it’s a definition without a difference.

This hybrid/hyflex nature very often means courses spawn new hybrid ‘spaces’ in which there is an attempt at seamless integration between real-world in-person and virtual learning experiences. This means that designers of courses that aspire to be hybrid/hyflex learning may be required to enable the same (or equivalent) learning experiences to be modelled in multiple forms or alternative spaces (Bennett et al., 2020; Goodyear, 2020). This could be significant burden. Think about it as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) on drugs.

Blended, hybrid/hyflex are in fact all flexible learning models of delivery. They all make use of different combinations of the two modes of learning, in-person and distance. And they all fall within a regulatory and validation authority that determines the relative openness of programmes of study. Flexible is anything that is less than fixed. Its merely a question of degree. It’s clearly a spectrum. Courses are on a spectrum of curriculum delivery between rigid and flexible.

I persuaded this particular client that they did not need to go ‘all-in’ and design courses for hybrid delivery. Rather, they simply needed to consider what learning and teaching activities were best suited for ‘away-from-the-classroom’ study and to determine whether these required independent study or collaboration with others. To be a bit more… flexible.

It wasn’t the answer they wanted. After all, being ‘hybrid’ is so very much, you know, ‘now’. But it’s the answer they got.

Dr Simon Paul Atkinson

15 July 2022

Bennett, Dawn, Elizabeth Knight, and Jennifer Rowley. “The Role of Hybrid Learning Spaces in Enhancing Higher Education Students’ Employability.” British Journal of Educational Technology 51, no. 4 (2020): 1188–1202. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12931.

Goodyear, Peter. “Design and Co‐configuration for Hybrid Learning: Theorising the Practices of Learning Space Design.” British Journal of Educational Technology 51, no. 4 (2020): 1045–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12925.

Image generated using OpenAI DALL-E

Very Brief Overview of ‘Innovating Pedagogy 2022’

This very brief summary is in no way to be taken as a substitute for reading the full report, or indeed the Executive Summary, which is available here: Innovating Pedagogy 2022

Cover of Innovating Pedagogy 2022This is the 10th annual report exploring new forms in interactive and innovative practice of teaching, learning and assessment. These innovations already exist in pockets of practice but are not considered mainstream. This report, a collaboration between the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University, UK, and the Open University of Catalonia, Spain, is the result of a filtering process and is compiled, based on a review of published studies and other sources.

Hybrid models
Maximising learning flexibility and opportunities. Beyond the strict curriculum delineations in Blended Learning models, Hybrid forms aim to empower the learner to optimise their own learner choices at to where, when and how to learn. Providing flexible choices requires teachers and institutions to adjust their systemic approaches.		 Influencer-led education
 Learning from education influencers on social media platforms. Acknowledging the growth of edu-influencers, who optimise their use of social media tools to share their knowledge, experience, and passion for a range of subjects from the highly specialised to the generic. Evaluating the veracity of the message is a challenge for the learner.
Dual learning scenarios
Connecting learning in classrooms and industry workplaces. A step on from work-integrated learning models, the expectation is that course designers fully meld both formal classroom and work spaces into a coherent experience.		 Pedagogies of the home
Understanding the home as a place for cultural learning. Not the same as home-schooling. Rather, it seeks to leverage the wider socio-cultural environment that the learner inhabits. Also recognises the burden on marginalised communities to fully participate.
Pedagogies of microcredentials
Accredited short courses to develop workplace skills. Existing approaches, snippets taken from existing programmes, fail to create an effective learning ecosystem for learners who require support to develop a patchwork portfolio meshing formal, non-formal and informal experiences together.		 Pedagogy of discomfort  
Emotions as powerful tools for learning and for promoting social justice. A process
of self-examination that requires students to critically engage with their ideological traditions and ways of thinking about issues such as racism, oppression and social injustice.
Pedagogy of autonomy
Building capacity for freedom and independent learning. Explores notion of incorporating informal, non-formal and formal learning patterns into the learner’s experience, creating self-regulated learners with an emphasis on their metacognitive development and allowing them to reflect their true selves..		 Wellbeing education
Promoting wellbeing across all aspects of teaching and learning. Wellbeing education helps students to develop mental health ‘literacy’ by teaching them how to manage their own mental health, recognise possible disorders, and learn how, where and when to seek help.
Watch parties
Watching videos together, whatever the time or place. Leveraging the increased connectivity prompted in response to covid-19, and the move of  media providers to provide educational tools, this is the notion of structured engagement around a shared viewing (or listening) experience.		 Walk-and-talk
Combining movement and conversation to enhance learning. Not just used in service of for those in need of emotional support, where the therapeutic benefits have been proven, but across a wide range of learning activities where reflection and thought would be best served by being away from the classroom and being outside and mobile.
10 Themes from the 2022 Innovating Pedagogy report

 

Kukulska-Hulme, A., et.al. (2022). Innovating Pedagogy 2022: Open University Innovation (No. 10). Open University.
 

Dr Simon Paul Atkinson PFHEA / 13 July 2022

Image is generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E2

Teaching about existential threats: why we need to teach concepts, not just facts.

It has now been more than four months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and I have been thinking how badly we need to be teaching about existential threats. I think we need to develop a curriculum that is open to contemporary real world challenges.

It has now been more than four months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like many, I have been ruminating. This post it’s about that. Or at least not directly. I have been thinking about how badly we need to be teaching about existential threats. I think we need to develop a curriculum that is open to contemporary real world challenges.

I think global education needs to adjust to new realities. The First World War, the Great War, wasn’t a World war in July 1914. It became one later. The Second World War likewise was not a world war in September 1939, although it engulfed the globe in due course. We are yet to see whether the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine will prove to have been the start of the Third World War. Hopefully it will not become that kind of milestone, but i think we owe it to students to prepare them for that possibility.

Education is different now than it was in 1914 or 1939. Now we have wall to wall coverage, ubiquitous social media and real-time battlefield insights piped into childrens’, adolescents’ and adults’ television screens, tablets and smartphones. There is almost as much misinformation as there are facts on many platforms; as many well-meaning transmitters of misleading (sometimes factually inaccurate) news, as there are respectable and accredited voices. The democratisation of information is a good idea, but it assumes individual generators of that information are well-informed, critical and, if opinionated (or biased), state that upfront.

I have learnt a great deal about Ukraine in recent months. Some of it from listening to TikTokers and YouTubers. Some summarise Ukrainian news sources for us. and others share their daily lives from war torn cities. Some review Russian media sources. Some provide valuable daily summaries. Others share emotive responses to news as it happens. I am aware that I am, I believe, relatively digitally literate. I’m critical of the sources, often look up the individual commentators on other social media, check their LinkedIn profile and review past output. This last element is particularly interesting. I have been suspicious, though not dismissive, of social media account that started in late February 2022. Some are clearly chasing followers, clicks and likes. Some are clearly trying to provide what they see as a genuine information service. Being able to identify the difference is not always easy. Our students need to learn these skills.

Risk evaluation is a very difficult thing to teach. Each student will have different life experiences to make them more or less fearful of uncertainty. Those who lived through the Cuban missed crisis or the nuclear standoffs in the early 1980s may say they’ve seen it all before. What is different now is the ubiquitous nature of information, and misinformation, which is in danger of confusing students’ ability to make their own judgements.

Educators are morally obliged to teach the unseen. That includes climate change and the risk of nuclear war. There is not a discipline that cannot leverage the moment. Social sciences and humanities obviously have an edge. Physical sciences are often less flexible in terms of the curriculum. But I think it’s important that anyone teaching today pauses before delivering any concept, any idea or thought, and consider whether there is a contemporary example amongst the unseen existential threats that exist. It means sometimes abandoning our own safe assumptions, our own safe havens, and exploring things that we ourselves may see as uncertainties.

There any number of examples of elements within any curriculum that can leverage the Russia-Ukraine war. Political scientists can explore the notion of the Eurasian multipolar world view. Geographers can explore the three seas project, and Sociologists can explore the religious realignment we are now seeing amongst the Orthodox churches. Examples are endless if we focus on the concept rather than the content. Beyond any obvious historical comparisons there are lessons to be learnt across all the disciplines using contemporary examples. The learning of concepts, geopolitical perspectives, resource management and cultural power, are all more useful to the students that any specific set of facts.

How relevant the current Russian invasion of Ukraine may be perceived by faculty and their students alike will depend largely on geography. While the conflict itself is seen as a largely European ‘problem’, and it’s global economic implications are yet to be clearly felt, I would understand that these reflections are probably more relevant to my European colleagues than to many others. But the principle still stands. All concepts that form any part of the curriculum need to be based within a contemporary world context. We need to leverage the current crisis that is being seen and witnessed by students through the prism social media. In doing so we can both serve the curriculum and educate students with critical judgement about their sources of information.

Concepts not Content

I am passionate about privileging the teaching and learning of concepts rather than content. Concepts are instruments that serve to identify, define, explain, illustrate and analyse real-life elements and events, past, present or future. These are usually within the confines of a particular geography, social context and within discipline conventions, but when defined well, reach across all cultural boundaries.

There are essentially two kinds of concepts: sensory and abstract. Sensory concepts are tangible, they can be experienced through our senses. Abstract concepts are not directly experienced, they are often not visible and need to be imagined. There is a simple three step process for you to consider as you build learning with concepts: define, illustrate, and imagine.

Define:

It’s important to keep the definition of a concept at its simplest. It should be a self contained concept.

Let’s take for example the statement that Regional wars have global consequences.

We could then unpack what we means by regions, wars and global consequences. The easiest way to validate your concepts’ definition is to see how easy it is to state its opposite. Regional wars do not have global consequences.

I can already envisage an assessment task that asks students to identify regional conflicts that did not have global consequences, and then have their peers challenge them subsequently as alternative perceptions of those consequences (after some enquiry-based learning).

Illustrate:

Illustrating a concept helps learners to catagorize new knowledge, to cement that new learning in a hierarchy or order of reality. Illustrations can be examples that demonstrate the truth of the definition, or it’s opposite. An illustration that does not match the definition also serves to help learners make sense of the definition. So in this example “Regional wars can have global consequences”, I could describe the key protagonists and events that led to the war in the Middle East between Israel and Arab powers in 1956, which had profound long term implications for European loss of influence and the rise of the United States as a regional power broker.

For its opposite I could take the regional war fought between the Sahrawi Indigenous Polisario Front and Morocco from 1975 to 1991 (and involving Mauritania between 1975 to 1979), for control of Western Sahara which has had minimal global impact. Although it is still a live issue in that region.

Neither world wars, both clearly regional conflicts but with different impacts. A useful conceptual space to unpack thoughts and idea with students. Learners do not need to have detailed knowledge about the background histories of the parties to be able to develop and understanding why these two different conflicts result in different implications. The challenge for them to unpack the factors that make up the definition of the concept shared earlier, that regional wars do not have global consequences.

I am not teaching my students about the 1956 Israel-Arab war or the war in Western Sahara, I am illustrating the factors that go into making the truth of my definition self evident. Examples and non-examples both support the interpretation of concepts.

Imagine:

Imagining scenarios in which the concept might be illustrated, perhaps using analogies, can prove very effective. Interpreting analogies requires the learner to deconstruct and reconstruct the element of the concept, it supports deeper comprehension, improves retention and allows the learner to adapt then meaning of a concept into their own sociology-cultural context.

It’s important that as you construct your imagined scenario or your analogy, that you ground it in the existing, or at least conceivable, experience that your learners already have or could have. There is a danger that we forget just how culturally diverse our student cohorts are. References to popular culture, national habits and pastimes may mean something to you but are not going to be generally understood.

You could for example ask students to imagine a conflict between whichever country you are teaching in and ask how a conflict with a neighbour state might, or might not, have global consequences. I acknowledge for too many in the world this is not merely an intellectual exercise.

Changing Practice

Concepts are foundational to all new learning but we, in tertiary education, are in the habit of burying or obscuring the key concepts amidst the weight of information, and then expecting the learner to be able to think in abstract terms.

I had a lecturer recently tell me that they didn’t have time to change the example that they were using to teach supply and demand, a well developed scenario based on the oil price during the Second Gulf War. I found it very hard to believe, given that the current Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a direct impact on oil and commodity prices globally. Why, I suggested, why didn’t they ask the students to fill in the details of his scenario so that they would understand better the duplications of each factor rather than sharing a preprepared example. I suggested that might also provide an opportunity for students to talk more openly about the current threats that they may perceive impact on them personally as result of this particular war.

Strange as it may seem I think that the current war provides an important catalyst for the re-evaluation and revitalisation of much of our social science and humanities curriculum. It reminds us that there are existential threats around us, and that these should service as pivotal points of reference as we explore concepts with our students enabling them to make meaningful connections.

Students need to be encouraged to seek out sources of information with a critical eye in order to be better prepared for the unforeseen.

Photo by Антон Дмитриев on Unsplash

Flexible Learning requires portfolio-centred course design.

ePortfolios, and indeed their analogue counterparts, allow learners to make selections of educational evidence, bring them together so that the learner self-manages their reflections, progress and learning journey. They can also be used as tools for storing and sharing assessment, academic records and certifications.

I recently had a discussion with a colleague who advocated LinkedIn as a portfolio platform for vocational tertiary learners. That assumes that learners are ready to share the results of their endeavours, to present themselves to the world. A networking portfolio. That is one facet of a good portfolio tool. The process of selecting artefacts to share, writing articles and posts for LinkedIn is certainly advantageous for established and confident learners, but it is not suitable for the vast majority. LinkedIn is a professional social networking platform first and foremost, and an effective one, but it is not an ePortfolio for learners.

An effective ePortfolio tool is essential for contemporary learners in an environment in which digital forms of learning are ubiquitous. The ability to bring together, to aggregate, all forms of informal, non-formal and formal learning is something any serious educational provider needs to consider now.

An ePortfolio tool could provide the backbone of all the diverse provision across work-based, distance and flexible forms of learning. It diminishes the importance of where specific learning experiences are sought, which platforms students are required to logon to access their learning content, and instead provides a single reference point. ePortfolio tools that can be linked to any number of different virtual learning platforms and commercial storage options (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc), that enables artefacts to be selectively shared or kept private already exist.

The Mahara ePortfolio ( https://mahara.org ) environment is one of those New Zealand government funded initiatives that, despite a lack of ongoing investment, has continued to exist simply because it is fundamentally sound. I am merely a user of Mahara and have no commercial or other vested interest in the platform. But I am beginning to anticipate how useful, and central, it could be to the mission of all educational providers if serious attention and investment was made into the Mahara platform. Learners would be able to logon to their ePortfolio, in effect as their personal portal, and be able to search across all provision, from micro-credentials to full degrees, across all modes of delivery. Learners would be able to add options to their ‘wishlist’ and could submit it for career advice. Learners would be able to move across different modes and locations as life intervenes. With some further integrations and a bit more UX development, learners would be able to upload images and video from the construction site, kitchen or orchard. Learners would be able to talk to other learners outside of their cohorts or courses, across providers and their platforms. With some additional investment Mahara can be used across all forms of ePortfolio use in vocational learning.

Portfolios can provide a personal profile, serve as a capstone portfolio for a qualification, a reflective space and a store for artefacts. It could also be used as a portal for other assessment and learning resources.

Flexible learning requires a portfolio-centred approach to learning.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Taxonomies of Educational Outcomes

Delighted to share an interactive walk-through of the recently updated poster (available here). Click in the top right-hand corner to make the interactive fullscreen. There is also a video walk-through of the same poster below. Note the title of the poster has changed from using ‘objectives’ to ‘outcomes’.

In-Class Evaluation (Guidance for Educators)

Transcript:

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues, if you think they’ll find this of interest. 

I want to talk today about why it’s important that we listen to our students during our teaching practice. I think, first of all, just want to clarify the distinction between providing feedback to students and taking evaluative comments from students.

I think sometimes the language we use is a little bit loose and that complicates things. It also devalues the sense of feedback that students are actually receiving during the course of their learning experience. I think we should always label anything we provide to students for feedback on their learning or in their learning, as feedback, and then anything we receive from them is evaluation at an institutional level of national surveys and in our individual practice. So I want to talk about the way we elicit evaluation from our students. So obviously the easiest way of doing that is to read the room. You’re looking for individual responses. You may be need to avoid focusing on that one very negative, grumpy, miserable looking student and read the room on that basis. You don’t want to imply that that is the common feeling, but if you scan the room, you’ll be able to see whether or not there is a good degree of engagement. I think we need to distinguish between that kind of very informal in session evaluation and more formal mechanisms for evaluation.

And I want to talk about an, an in session evaluation, and then I’ll talk about end of course, or end of module evaluation, in just a moment. Want to focus in this conversation about the way in which we use in class evaluation and the model that I personally prefer, and it works best in a face-to-face environment if you are teaching a series of courses, but it also works in an online environment as well.

Something called small group instructional diagnostics, S.G.I.D., which is essentially a way of eliciting from the students, some evaluative comments on what they’re learning, how they’re learning in your classroom, the structure of the questions that you ask are very important, they’re more important than how you actually ask them. Formal SGID is actually you leaving the classroom and having a colleague coming and running a session with your students for 15, 20 minutes.

And that usually would happen around a third of the way through your course. This is to elicit whether or not the students are getting what you’re intending they get, whether they’re experiencing the learning as you intend it to be, to be experienced. There are a number of different ways that you can do this.

I think it works quite well to literally just hand out pieces of paper with four blocks on and ask them to fill out, put something in each of those blocks. But it’s really important the order in which the questions are asked. 

So you’re going to ask the students what’s happening on this course that is supporting their learning, not what am I doing to support your learning? What is supporting you in your learning? What is hindering you in your learning? What could I be doing differently to support you? And fourthly, what could you be doing differently to support your own learning? It’s very important that you end with them thinking about it as a reflective exercise.

Very often, students will say that last comment. What can I, what can you be doing for your own learning? Students will very often say, oh, I need to do the pre-reading or I need to prepare better for class or so, it encourages them to take some degree of ownership over their own. It’s really important that when you collate all of those responses that you do feed back.

So if you’re teaching face-to-face or online on a weekly or, or a regular basis, some scheduled basis, it’s really important that you then say to the students, I listened to you, you suggested this is what strengthening your learning collectively, I’m going to do more of that. This is what’s hindering, I’ll try and do less of that.

That gives students a sense of participation and a sense of ownership in the learning process. That’s a very important part of getting evaluation from students. 

The more formal aspect of end of course, or end of module evaluation. It’s usually structured around whatever institutional regional or national surveys are carried out.

Historically institutions used to just do their own end of course evaluations and tutors regarded that as almost a tick box exercise. It’s become much more significant in many countries to have institutional data that is then aggregated across the, the entire piece. And I think it’s important that you recognize that those questions are not necessarily questions that you have any direct control over, but it’s very important that you are aware of what those questions are because you can then signal answers to the students through the course of the course, through the course of the learning. 

So I think it’s really important to be aware of what the end of course evaluation looks like, which you’ll probably end up administering, although you may not be able to control the questions, but you do have complete control of the in-class evaluation that happens.

So please feel free to share this video with colleagues. If you think it’s interesting, like and follow. 

Be Well

Educational Posters for Sale

Colleagues have been asking me for some time whether they can have copies of the various visualisations that I have produced over the years. These were usually developed as posters, from A3 to A1 sizes, for workshops and events. I am happy to share high-quality originals for colleagues to include in publications but I think it appropriate to charge for the majority of them.

The updated 2022 version of my comprehensive taxonomies of educational objectives poster is available. This and future versions will be available as high-quality downloads to be printed locally. This saves a fortune in packaging and postage and allows you to decide whether you want it board-mounted, matte or gloss, and so on.

In the setting up phase of this new ‘storefront‘, here is a discount code for 20% off the price. Just put in the code G4G5EURM at checkout. Look out for more useful visualisations and resources being posted over the coming months.

Evaluation, Assessment and Feedback (Guidance to Educators)

Transcript

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this video if you think it would be of interest to your colleagues.

I want to talk today about some of the terminological differences that we have across the English language teaching world, particularly the terms, evaluation, assessment, and feedback. In North America, the word evaluation is very often used to describe the way we measure students’ performance. In United Kingdom, in Australia and New Zealand, we generally use the term assessment. So evaluation has a different meaning in parts of English-speaking world than it does in North America. Likewise, Assessment and evaluation are sometimes used more as synonyms in the North American context. And you need to be aware of that when you read literature, if you read any of the journals, you will find that sometimes those terms are used differently to perhaps your context. So, it’s worth being aware of that.

There’s also a distinction between evaluation and feedback, which is more conceptual rather than definitional. Which is that feedback is always what we give to the student. We should always be focusing on the feedback that’s given to students on their learning and evaluation in the UK, Canada, Canada, to some extent, but certainly in Australia and New Zealand, is used to describe what they tell us about our own performances tutors, or about the course or the institution. So, they provide evaluative comment, and we provide them with feedback.

I think it’s important that we try and stick to that use of language. If only because students need to value feedback in everything they do, and it’s much easier to label things as feedback for the benefit of your students if you’re consistent in the language that you use. So, feedback is given to students. Evaluation is provided by students, and evaluation in North America is sometimes synonymous with assessment. I hope that’s of interest.

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Be well.

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