Tag: SOLE

Version 3.0 of SOLE Toolkit released.

Version 3.0 of the SOLE Toolkit has been released on the solemodel.org website today.

The toolkit is an integrated spreadsheet workbook that supports implementation a learning design based on the SOLE Model. The SOLE model advocates a holistic approach to learning that encourages designers to recognise that the student spends significant time away from formal learning contexts and that they bring experience and context to any learning situation.

The changes in Version 3.0 reflect a desire to strengthen the student’s use of the toolkit as an advanced organiser. These changes include:

  • Active Verbs – the terms used to describe the elements of the SOLE Model now uses active verbs to describe each of the elements.
  • Predicated Workload – the amount of time the designer anticipates students will spend is now charted.
  • Sequencing activities – the ability to suggest the order in which activities should be tackled.
  • Completion Record – allow students to record whether an activity has been completed alongside indicating the amount of time was actually spent.
  • Objectives Met Record – allow students to indicate that they believe they have met the objectives for each individual topic/week.

You can download the toolkit from this website here. As always this work is free to use but as always I would appreciate feedback from users as to changes they make and the usage they make of the work.

Intended Learning Outcomes matter

MOOCs, self generated OER based curricula, kite-marking schemes, and elaborate credit transfer schemes are a reality in increasingly complex higher education sector. Students often pursuing studies from within the world of work where physical mobility of employable precludes commitment to a single campus based programme over four years require well defined, constructively aligned, module designs. Clever module design means clever programme design, clever portfolios and successful institutions. Learning design is no longer just an issue for the Quality Office; the Strategy people are beginning to care too.

The vast majority of UK Universities now are able to produce detailed module and programme specifications for their teaching programmes. Specification templates usually detail the aims and objectives, resources, indicative scheme of work, staffing and mode of delivery. They also routinely use a template to generate the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO) for the module or programme. Frequently divided into three or four sections covering, knowledge and understanding, intellectual skills (cognitive domain), professional and practical skills (affective domain) and general transferable skills (psychomotor skills), these templates are completed with varying degrees of comprehension as module validation panels will attest.

The logic is that to achieve a well-structured and constructively aligned curricula, the module team should determine what the ILOs for the module are to be (Biggs & Tang, 2007). What will the learner be able to do at the end of the module? Having determined the ILOs the team would then determine how they would enable the student to demonstrate achievement of the outcomes and draft an appropriate assessment strategy. Then, and only then, the module design team would look at what the student needed to be able to demonstrate and work out what was needed as input. Outcomes first, assessment second, teaching inputs third.

It’s not an easy thing to do. As teachers we’re passionate about our subjects, anxious to impart what we know is important, what ‘did it for us’, and at some point in this process many faculty will ‘go native’, reach for the seminal text (or the nearest thing to it, their own book), and start thinking about what the students need to know. This can of course produce fantastic learning experiences and there are a great many exciting modules drafted on the backs of envelopes without specification templates. They don’t make for effective records of achievement however.

Accreditation of prior accredited learning has always been a challenge. An effective template for module and programme design makes a significant difference. Students should be able to identify from their transcript exactly what it is they can evidence as intended learning outcomes. I would argue further that phases in learning and teaching activity should also have notable objectives that map directly to the ILOs (See the SOLE model described in Atkinson, 2011).

So how many intended learning outcomes, how many affective, how many cognitive, how many is too many? My next post will be my reasoning on that issue.

Atkinson, S. (2011). Developing faculty to integrate innovative learning in their practice with the SOLE model. In S. Ferris (Ed.), Teaching, Learning and the Net Generation: Concepts and Tools for Reaching Digital Learners. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Biggs, J., & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student does (3rd ed.). Buckingham. GB: Open University Press.

Ending the year as a non-Cartesian?

There is something slightly disturbing about checking the web for uses of your work. One finds the odd undergraduate presentation that has ‘borrowed’ a graphic, or quoted your quotes as notes, and other lyrical misdemeanours. One even risks finding oneself renamed, although I have to say I find ‘Simorn’ a little too contemporary for my tastes. What is particularly interesting is to find oneself cited in such a way that one is ‘designated’, purposed as a standard bearer for a position one didn’t know one held. I’m intrigued to find that my IRRODL article on the SOLE model from February 2011 served as an illustration of ‘applied non-cartesian concepts‘ by psychologydegree.net (20.03.13 Page now removed). Fascinating.

Version 2.4: Weekly Objectives

Version 2.3 of the SOLE toolkit (August 2011) introduced a ‘dashboard’ allowing the course designer to see the distribution of student workload across all the weeks, or learning units. Version 2.4 (October 2011) sees the incorporation of a ‘Weekly Objectives’ view, drawing together the weekly objectives set against the module outcomes for the first time. Each iteration is designed to provide staff and student with a greater transparency to the learning design intention.  Version 2.4 is also distributed as a fully populated exemplar, rather than a blank template to aid its deconstruction and usage.

Sorry to have missed JISC Design Bash

It was a real shame (I’m rarely disappointed) to have had to miss the JISC/CETIS Design Bash in Oxford today. I was very much looking forward to catching up with progress on the LDSE and sharing the SOLE model iteration described in Madison-Wisconsin in August. In the end the meeting I had to attend would have done fine without me, but that’s the way things fall and “beggars can’t be choosers” (or as we say in modern parlance, “the salaried do as they’re told”).

Design Bash

I imagine there was a great deal of interest in Oxford today. The pressure on organisations to share learning designs, share practice, and share efficacies shows no sign of abating. I look forward very much to catching up as best I can with what’s on Cloudworks for this year’s event.

Changing Faculty Roles in Changing Learning Spaces

It’s a long way from the staff workload issue that the SOLE model and toolkit sought to answer, but perhaps a model can serve as a central conceptual pattern through which institutions can challenge, their own conceptions of learning, teaching, and learning spaces.

The extent to which a model of the learner’s world can represent the learning process itself has been an interesting facet of the SOLE model’s development. To what extent does a model designed to represent the elements of engagement the learner is required to recognise, and take ownership of, come to represent the ‘world of learning’ itself?

I’ve started two new chapters of the SOLE manuscript to explore this. The first asks whether the changing nature of faculty roles, of what it means to be a ‘professional practitioner’, can be usefully supported by the SOLE model. Does it make sense to use this model of learning to ask what roles engage learners under each of the model’s elements and look at our institutional responses through this lens? Could the SOLE model become a structure for faculty development and workforce planning?

Changing Roles through the lens of the SOLE model

The second chapter under development looks not at faculty or students but at spaces. With student fees being a live issue in the UK at present, and lots of press attention on what students’ expectations are of their University experience, most institutions are thinking hard about ‘what they offer’. How do they turn their campuses from liabilities into significant assets? As the learner changes, as we give them a more central role in the learning process, should we be exploring spaces through the SOLE model, or something like it? Should we be asking what spaces we need to engineer for students to help them fulfil the holistic experience the SOLE model represents? I think a conceptual model of learning provides a useful mechanism for these conversations.

Learning Spaces through the SOLE lens

Dashboard: Recognising Faculty-Student Contact Time

Dashboard in Version 2.3 Beta

Following the presentation of the SOLE model and toolkit at Madison-Wisconsin in August 2011, a number of conversations about the ‘diagnostic’ function of the SOLE  toolkit have taken place.

One of the concerns of faculty and students is contact time. How much contact time am I being offered (versus how much I take advantage of), what other opportunities for facilitated guidance do I have. Why indeed, do I as the student not recognise the ‘directed’ learning I have been pointed to, and in the case of the SOLE approach, the entire toolkit forms an advanced organiser that demonstrates the consideration faculty have given to my learning time as a student.

The version of the Toolkit presented at the 27th Distance Education Conference at Madison Wisconsin broke down the learning engagements students were being asked to complete under the 9 elements of the model into 5 areas, or modes, of engagement. These are exploring the notions of learning engagement as reflective, introspective, social, facilitated and directed. In the next version of the toolkit I’m exploring a ‘dashboard’.

The Dashboard is a separate sheet that simply presents an overview, to faculty and potentially students, of the modes of learning being designed for the student. It shows at a glance, alongside the full profile of activities for each week or unit, a schematic that illustrates how much of the activity is facilitated, directed, and so on.

 

MW Distance Education Conference Student-Owned Learning-Engagement Model Videoshare

Student-Owned Learning-Engagement Model

Wednesday 3rd afternoon Videoshare session had some 60-70 people present for 5 short videoshare presentations. The session was intended to be 5 minutes pre-prepared video and 10 minutes of questions each. A fun and interesting session. The 5 minute SOLE video is shared here:

SOLE Model Poster at ALDinHE 2011

This year the ALDinHE conference had as its theme – “Engaging Students – Engaging Learning” and was a series of small, diverse but very practical sessions ranging from identifying successful work-based learning models to the effective induction of non-traditional learners. In amongst all of that I ran a small workshop on Wednesday 20th April using a single webpage on the wordpress site for the DiAL-e Project.

I had two posters at the conference, a solo effort with the SOLE model and a joint effort with Kevin Burden from the University of Hull featuring the DiAL-e framework work we have been doing since 2006. There was an excellent response to the SOLE poster and considerable interest in its potential use as a staff development stimulus. I was particularly keen to suggest it form a useful tool for course team development in the broader context of course design, but every conversation helps me refine my own ideas, which is after all why we go to these conferences!

The ALDinHE Poster (as a PDF: SOLE Poster)

SOLE Model and DiAl-e Framework Presented at ALDinHE 2011

Simon and Russell
Simon Atkinson and Russel Gurbutt (University of Leeds) discussing e-learning adoption strategies

ALDinHE 2011 was a relatively small professional conference with some 120 colleagues from across a diverse range of UK Higher Education institutions. The theme was “Engaging Students – Engaging Learning” although, with some noticeable exceptions, much of the conference was concerned primarily with the challenges we face as educational (or academic) developers.

There was a lot of discussion about ‘teaching’ to engage students but too little emphasis for me on the designing in the learning the engagement we say we expect. Still, it was a useful and interesting opportunity to get reacquainted with some former colleagues from the Open University and from the University of Hull.

I had two posters at the conference, a solo effort with the SOLE model (see and download the poster) and a joint effort with Kevin Burden from the University of Hull featuring the DiAL-e framework work we have been doing since 2006.  The workshop ran using a single webpage on the wordpress site so you are welcome to access the workshop resources. The post-conference requests for “your PowerPoint” leave me frustrated!

Accessibility by WAH
%d bloggers like this: