Collaboration online

Many online courses now require students to collaborate, but we know that just putting people together in the same space isn’t enough? What should a tutor do to prepare students for collaborative tasks?

Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage model provides very good guidelines on how to prepare for collaborative tasks online. These are usually designed into Stage 4 of the model after it has been established that everyone has successfully accessed the learning environment (Stage 1), participants are socialising easily and the learning community norms have become apparent (Stage 2) and  information is being freely exchanged and a culture of open sharing exists (Stage 3).

Up to Stage 3 activities centre around helping participants to feel stimulated by and comfortable in the learning environment. Relationships are beginning to be established. Students who are not comfortable with each other and the learning environment will not be able to collaborate effectively, so it is worth spending time on the early stages of accessibility, socialisation and information exchange.

Tutors also need to decide whether the collaborative groups will be self-selected or whether students will be put into groups by the tutor. My personal view on this is that it depends on whether the collaborative group tasks are to be assessed and assessed for what, and whether it is a short course or a longer course. If the task is to be assessed, then if I was a student I would want to be in control of the outcome of that assessment as much as possible and therefore choose my own group. If it is the ability to work in a group that is being assessed then maybe random mixing of students is appropriate.

Nowadays I often work on online non-assessed short post-graduate professional development courses. In these courses there isn’t a lot of time for students to get to know each other, but as a tutor, having done quite a bit of ‘back channelling’ and being able to see the student log in statistics, its fairly easy to create groups made up of a mix of very active participants and lurkers – so that these student characteristics are evenly distributed across groups. Even then a tutor only knows what s/he has been told by the students, so there’s no way of knowing whether a very active student who you are relying on to get a collaborative group going, is, for example,  going to be on holiday or away from the course at the time of the collaborative task, unless that student tells you. So your carefully planned groups can still go awry.

Once the students have started the collaborative task, a tutor can do a lot to help them be successful by making the norms of online group collaboration explicit – so ask the students to inform each other about when they will/will not be online, when they will/will not be able to work on the task, what roles they would each like to volunteer for and so on. Encourage them not to be ‘backward in coming forward’ and not to be shy of taking the lead.

Having worked on online collaborative tasks myself as a student in the past, I know what powerful experiences these can be. It’s surprising how well you get to know each other in these circumstances, even though you are only meeting online and have never met each other face-to-face  - but often these collaborative activities do lead to long-term working relationships.

But I also know from personal experience that group work can be a ‘nightmare’. On my face-to-face Masters degree we had to do a group presentation and I remember having to argue for an educational philosophy to which I was  opposed simply because I was the only person in the group to hold the opposite view (this was about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and the use of rewards) – and everyone else wanted to do a presentation on something I didn’t believe in - so groups do require a lot of compromise.

This raises an interesting question for tutors about whether you would allow a student to opt out of a groupwork assignment and do an individual assignment instead, if they could make a sufficiently persuasive case, or should we insist that all students engage in collaborative group work.

I once heard Stephen Downes – at the 2005 ALT conference, describe collaboration as – “the joining up of things that do not naturally want to be joined up”, which challenges the whole notion of collaborative learning. But then David Jacques and Gilly Salmon’s have published a quite substantial text on Learning in Groups: A Handbook for face-to-face and online environments which really promotes groupwork.

So is it possible to collaborate online – Yes, of course and very definitely. Can tutors prepare students for this – Yes, of course – good teaching doesn’t change just because it’s online. Obviously there are things that you can do face-to-face (like a science field trip to study rock pools on a Northumberland beach) that would not be possible to capture in exactly the same way online, but an awful lot of what we do face-t0-face can now be done online.

The question is not whether we can get students to collaborate online – the question is whether we should. Are we asking them to do something that is worthwhile and that will enhance their learning.  Are we offereing them opportunities that they would otherwise not have? What is it that students can get from collaborative learning that they can’t get from individual learning? What specific challenges does online collaboration bring?

I don’t think there are necessarily any right or wrong answers here. If you want students to collaborate online, then there are tried and tested ways of making this a successful learning experience, but if you don’t then there will be equally effective alternatives that might suit the situation, context and culture better.

Teaching with technology: changes in daily routines

Here is the next set of questions (following on from previous posts which have raised questions about teaching with technology – for me teaching with technology means teaching online).

How has your daily routine changed?  What changes have you had to make to how you organise and manage your time?

I have to say that I hate routine and resist it as much as I can! So I prefer to think about how the patterns of my work have changed rather than the routines. This question is a little difficult to answer objectively as my work now is almost entirely online – I read online, I write online, I have meetings online, I attend conferences online, I research online and I socialise online. I don’t think I would be this much online if I wasn’t working as an independent consultant.

I chose to work independently because I knew that I could maintain my contacts and work through the affordances of technology. I could not do what I am doing now without technology.

So do I have any routines? Not many – but I do check my email consistently throughout the day – unless I am travelling or on holiday.  I haven’t yet succumbed to being accessible wherever I am and whatever I am doing and despite my love of working online, I hate phones, both landline and mobile. I’m in the dark ages as far as mobile phones go, although I do possess one – for emergencies!  I also check my social networking sites and RSS feeds most days – so I suppose these are almost daily routines.

I think technology has had more effect on how I organise and manage my time than on my daily routines. I am probably at my laptop for at least 8 hours each day and so I am very conscious of the sedentary nature of this existence. As such I make sure that I go to the gym at least twice a week and get out for walks as much as possible. Because my work is online – the eight hours don’t have to be consecutive – I can work at any time in the 24 hour cycle and if I work between 4.00 and 8.00 in the morning,  then I can take some time out during the day! So technology offers me a lot of flexibility and freedom in organising my time.

I have to be quite disciplined about managing my time to avoid procrastination – it’s very easy to go off task when online - and I have to be even more disciplined (as mentioned above) about taking regular breaks and making sure I am sitting correctly, maintaining a healthy diet, keeping my fluid intake up etc.

So I suppose the main change for me in relation to daily routines is that I no longer have a work/life balance issue, unlike when I worked for an institution. I am in control of how much I work, when I work and where I work and the boundaries between leisure and work are much more blurred as some of the things that I really enjoy - such as digital photography – require technology and can be used in my work.

It’s interesting attempting to answer these questions as it is becoming increasingly evident that the answers to them are very context dependent. My working context is quite specific. Although I work with post-graduate students, my days working from home 100% online and my uses of technology are, I know, very different from how I used to use technology when working face-to-face. But I do like the flexibility that technology offers me.

Teaching with technology: changing roles

My third question in this series (from the list I posted) is: How has your role changed as a result of working with technology?

Recently – it hasn’t changed a lot, since I have been working and teaching online for a number of years now. Just writing this has made me wonder whether I am in a rut. Could I be in a rut when technology is changing so fast?

When I first started to work online (a number of years ago now), there was a marked and startling change in my role as a teacher. It crept up on me – but was none-the-less powerful in  its effect. At the time I was a face-to-face teacher trainer, teaching students how to teach science to school children. We had a heavily content-laden curriculum, where we crammed in as much content to our face-to-face science sessions as possible. The only relieving factor was that science is a very practical subject, so there was always a lot of hands-on practical activity in the sessions – but even so, we felt we had to cover the content of the curriculum – facts, facts and more facts. The introduction of a VLE into our institution released me from this heavily content driven teaching. I quickly realised that I could put as much information as I wanted up onto the website, and I could add as many links to as many websites as I wanted to, which meant that I was freed from covering this content in teaching sessions. What an amazing release. This changed my approach to teaching. I no longer worried about whether I had covered the curriculum, but focussed instead on eliciting and discussing students’ misconceptions. We were no longer learning facts, we were learning how to learn. So technology completely changed my approach to face-to-face teaching.

When I began to teach online, my approach changed even more. There was a lot of talk at the time of changing from a ‘Sage on the Stage’ to a ‘Guide on the Side’, to a point where people began to say ‘never let me hear that expression again’. Whilst the expression became a bit of a cliche, it did make people think about their role as teachers and whether or not we should be centre stage. It suited me very well not to be centre stage as I was never a ‘performer’ type of teacher (as I mentioned in a previous post). It was such a relief to me that I no longer had to be ‘the font of all knowledge’. In online classrooms it is so much more possible to access each individual classoom participant’s knowledge than it is in a face-to-face classroom. As an online  teacher I have far more contact with each of my students than I ever did face-to-face and it was a complete revelation to me, when I participated in my first online course as a student, how much I could learn from my fellow participants rather than from the teacher.

All this made me rethink my teaching role. There are still times when I might need to be ‘Sage on the Stage’, but not very often, because there are so many more qualified easily accessible (through technology) ‘Sages’ out there than I could ever be. I am much more likely to be a ‘Guide on the Side’ and even more likely to be a learner in a learning community with responsibility for ensuring that my fellow participants learn to their full potential.

Viewing myself more as a learner than a teacher means that I now have much greater respect for learner autonomy, that I like wherever possible to negotiate how the learning will take place with my students and offer lots of choice, that I try to listen more than speak and to ask questions rather than influence my students’ thinking with my opinions.

So I think I might describe my change in role as having become a ‘backseat driver’

Engaging learners with technology

How do you ensure that learners engage with the technology?

This is the second question from my list and my immediate response is similar to my initial thoughts about the last question. My primary concern, as a teacher, is to engage learners with learning. Technology is only a tool – a means to an end.

Most of my career has been spent in teaching face-to-face and I have taught all ages from four year olds to fifty-four year olds and older. I like to think that I have been a successful teacher, although teachers are never satisfied with their work. But I was never a ‘performer’ type of teacher – so I didn’t engage students through the sheer weight of my personality. So how do I engage my students with learning?

Sometimes we just can’t engage our students – we and they for some reason are together in the wrong place at the wrong time. But mostly I think teachers can engage students through their own passion and enthusiasm for and expertise in the subject, through always having the students’ learning interests at the forefront of everything we do, through recognising learners as individuals and building mutually respectful relationships (although this is tough with large numbers of students, it is not impossible) and through ensuring that the activities we plan for them are worthwhile. Humour, or a sense of fun is also very useful!

So how do we do this, if we can only meet our students online? First we need to establish an online presence and obvious though it may sound, we can only do this by being online. It still surprises me how many tutors will set up online courses and then disappear, leaving the students to get on with it. These tutors then complain that their students won’t engage online. I think it is possible for tutors to take a back seat once the course has become established but not at the beginning!

Overall we have  to be there as much as we would in a face-to-face situation. I always think that the beginning of an online course is critical – that’s the time when I work the hardest to engage the learners – I model and demonstrate (Stephen Downes’ definition of teaching - see Slide 36); I ensure that students get all the technical and ‘wayfinding’  (Darken and Sibert) support that they need (100% access throughout the course is paramount to a good learning experience), both through my actions and through the information I provide; I negotiate and so make explicit the norms of the online learning community; I socialise and build relationships and encourage students to socialise and build relationships with each other; I do a lot of ‘back channelling’, checking on students who haven’t come on line, asking if there is anything I can do to help; and I recognise that for some students they will be doing two things – getting to grips with the subject matter at the same time as becoming comfortable with an unfamiliar environment. I also have to ensure that all this happens within worthwhile and meaningful activities, so that students don’t think – this is a waste of time – and go away never to return!

Writing this has reminded me that when I used to teach school children, I would allow at least one week and sometimes two at the beginning of a new term for this process of familiarisation with my expectations – introducing the classroom norms, my expectations of how we would interact, negotiating classroom rules and learning about their expecations. When I moved on to teaching undergraduates, I would spend  the first session doing this – although sometimes their initial behaviour wasn’t a lot different to that of school children and I would need to spend more time establishing norms!

Engaging students with technology is similar to engaging them with the library, or introducing them to the students union activities, taking them on a campus tour and so on. We need to do the same things online, because without time spent on this famialiarisation process students will not feel safe enough or sufficiently comfortable to engage fully with the learning process.

So have I answered the question? To summarise - the key points for me are:

• focus on learning before technology
• use all the strategies that you would in a face-to-face situation

But a final additional point is  that I wouldn’t dream of using a technology that I wasn’t familiar with myself, unless I had negotiated with the students first that we needed to learn about it together – and for that to happen, the technology would need to be at least as important as the subject being taught, or enable the learning of the subject to be enhanced.

I think I have rambled a bit. Hopefully I will be more concise and succinct when I am actually asked this question!

Using technology in teaching

How do you use technology in your teaching? Why do you use particular technologies? Which technologies do you dismiss? What are the drivers for using technology in your course design?

Thinking about these questions I am struck by the emphasis on technology and teaching as a starting point, whereas I have always thought that learning should be the starting point. What do we hope that learners will learn? As teachers we are first and foremost concerned with learning. So the first question is not ‘how’ do you use technologies, but ‘why’.

Quite a few years back the answer to this was quite straightforward from my position as the leader of a post-graduate distance learning progamme, which at the time we were running like a correspondence course supported by email communication. At that time the use of technology (notably the introduction of a VLE) significantly improved communication and ensured that all the information about the course was located in one place, which meant that we were able to avoid the mixed messages that were a characteristic of communication by email. Technology not only improved communication, but it also enabled a whole host of people who could never have accessed a full-time face-to-face course, to study at times and in locations of their choice. This not only increased our student numbers, but also led to great diversity in the student group – a really rich mix of students from widely different backgrounds, of different ages and ethnic backgrounds and with a huge range of life and work experience. It was very exciting! That was the starting point. Technology opened the door.

But that was nearly ten years ago. Nowadays students come to courses with greater expectations of the flexibility and diversity offered by web 2.0 technologies, but there are still many students who are not confident with technology. For the past few years I have only worked with post-graduate students, so my choice of technologies to use in my teaching is influenced by this. It is also influenced by the fact that I work 100% online – 100% e-learning – so I don’t meet my students face-to-face. In addition, I work with international groups, some of whom (for example those from Africa) have access difficulties. So I think very carefully about about the technologies I was use and try not to use them for the sake of it, and only if I think they will promote learning.

I don’t dismiss technologies, but I am cautious about what I use. For my post-graduate international learners I tend to use a set of technologies that includes

• a VLE (my preference is Moodle, but I also work on Blackboard and WebCT),
• Email,
• discussion forums,
• WordPress and Blogger,
• a wiki (my preference is pbworks, but I have also used wikispaces and the VLE wikis),
• Word,
• Powerpoint (I only use this infrequently these days),
• Wimbacreate (to convert Word documents into webpages),
• Flickr for photo sharing,
• Youtube (I haven’t yet created a video, but use video created by others in my teaching)
• Audio files (I use an mp3 player to record these) 

For myself I also use

• RSS feeds,
• Delicious,
• Googledocs,
• Skype,
• Internet Explorer and Firefox,
• Adobe photoshop,
• Facebook,
• Elluminate,
• Dimdim,
• Survey Monkey,
• Winzip,
• Ning.

I’m sure there must be other things too, but these are the technologies that I use consistently.When I say use, I don’t necessarily mean that I lead the use of them - for example I am a member of a number of Ning sites, but I haven’t yet created one for myself.

I notice that on Jane Hart’s Top Tools for Learning, Twitter is at the top of the list. I haven’t dismissed Twitter, but as yet I haven’t needed to use it, just as I haven’t needed to use Second Life, Slideshare and many other tools that I am aware of and see others using quite regularly.

So the main driver for using technology in my courses is the needs of the learners I work with. If the technology can meet those needs and enhance the learning then I use it – if I can’t see the potential for this, then I don’t. 

I could never be a learning technologist – the use of new technologies does not come easily to me – but this means that I am cautious about what I expect from learners in relation to technology and I don’t make assumptions about what they will be able to cope with.

Reflecting on practice

I have recently been asked a series of questions about my work as an online education consultant.

• Tell me how and why you use technology in your teaching.
• How do you ensure that learners engage with the technology?
• How has your role changed as a result of working with technology?
• How has your daily routine changed?
• How do you encourage students to collaborate online?
• What difficulties do you have and how do you avoid them happening?

I have started to think about these questions and thought I would write a post in response to each one to help me clarify my thinking. I have now been teaching online for eight years – just a snip compared to some people’s experience, but long enough for some of my ways of working to become implicit. I think it’s helpful once in a while to make our implicit ways of working explicit both for ourselves and for others. As teachers, it can prevent us from making assumptions – a problem that was highlighted all those years ago by Stephen Brookfield.

Brookfield S D (1995) The Getting of Wisdom. What Critically Reflective Teaching is and Why It’s Important. http://www.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/facultypapers/StephenBrookfield_Wisdom.cfm

For me its also helpful to write down my thinking – to recognise the importance of what John Mason calls Noticing – Marking – Recording, in his wonderful book Researching Your Own Practice – The Discipline of Noticing. He claims that by noticing, marking and recording, we develop our sensitivies so that we are more aware of incidents, issues and our resulting actions.

So I’ll start thinking about the first question – Tell me how and why you use technology in your teaching- and come back to it in my next post. It looks straightforward, doesn’t it, but I suspect that it might not be that straightforward.

CCK08 revisited

George Siemens is reflecting on the CCK08 experience with a very interesting blog post. There is lots in this post to think about – not least because a CCK09 will be offered. I responded to George’s post and am copying my response here for my own records.

George asks – What concerns do we have with the model he presents. This is my current thinking, which I posted as a response on George’s blog.

I have recently (with a colleague) submitted a research paper which highlights how difficult it is for participants to learn effectively in a course which simulates an experience rather than offer the ‘true’ experience. I think this was also the case in CCK08 and I blogged about it at the time.

It seems to me that there is a tension between the nature of an accredited course and the type of learning environment, that CCK08 aspires to – one of openness, diversity, autonomy and interaction/connectedness. To be true to these four characteristics of connectivism, the course ‘tutors’/facilitators (whatever you wish to call them) need to take a ‘hands off’ approach, and that is where I think CCKO8 experienced the most problems. These problems were related to the fact that

- some people were seeking accreditation and therefore needed a ‘tutor’ at the very least to assess their work
- many people still have very traditional views of what we mean by course and the role of a tutor within a course
- the tutors were sometimes inconsistent in their approach – so we could view the lack of intervention in ’sparring’ that went on in the forums as a ‘hands-off’ approach, but then the choice of exemplary posts to be included in the ‘Daily’ is a very ‘hands-on’ approach.

I’m not sure that there is a straightforward answer to this dilemma. A ’simulated’ experience is not the same thing as a ‘real’ experience and I’m not sure how you can reproduce a ‘real’ experience of autonomy, diversity, openness and connectivity in an accredited course.

The course continues to stimulate my thinking – so thanks for that!

Blogs: Resonance and online relations

Lilia Efimova on her blog – http://blog.mathemagenic.com/ - seems also to be asking questions about how and why some relationships can be formed, developed and sustained in  blogs. She asks the question: What exactly helps to establish and maintain personal relations via blogging? and suggests that one answer to this question might be in the frequency of communication and in the use of multi-channels of communication.

Some research that I’ve recently been involved in suggests that it’s a bit more than this – and that the strongest ties are formed between people who not only communicate frequently via different channels, but also are engaged in collaboration around a joint activity. My experience is that once this activity stops, then the ties weaken.

Lilia suggests that the relation between a pair of people includes three dimensions of connection: affinity, commitment and attention. I am intrigued at her point that affinity is achieved through activities of social bonding – touching, eating and drinking together. This has come at a time when I have increasingly noticed how many people on Facebook, in their blogs etc. tell us about their recent meal. But I wonder if this is a spill over from forum online socialisation activities (designed by tutors) which are often used to encourage participants to get to know each other through describing their favourite meal or retiring to the virtual cafe to socialise. It’s difficult to know whether this is really a characteristic of affinity or a norm of online socialisation.

Commitment is described by Lilia as being  manifested through the effort of reading others’ weblogs, repeated interaction and maintaining your own presence via weblogs and other channels. I see commitment as something a bit larger than this – I prefer the word ‘reciprocity’, which also takes commitment, but requires some ‘giving back’. I’m not sure though whether most bloggers would agree. My feeling is that blogging can often be a one-way form of communication – from blogger to ‘out there’.

What I’m interested in is how blog relationships might be different to relationships formed through other media – how and why these blogging connections are made, and whether bloggers have specific characteristics that enable them to make these relationships via their blogs.

Thanks to Lilia for her post.

Resonance in blogging

This idea – raised in our research team – has grabbed my attention. Why is it that when communicating online we are immediately drawn to certain people’s posts/blogs and not to others? We resonate with certain people and ideas and not with others,  just as I was immediately attracted to the idea of resonance in online communication. I have spent a little time checking on my understanding of resonance and these are some of the explanations that for me relate to blogging as a means of online communication.

• Resonance is the amplifaction of sound through sympathetic vibrations.
• To resonate means to correspond closely or harmoniously.
• Resonance occurs when the vibrations of one object come into alignment with another.
• Resonance evokes a feeling of shared emotion or belief.

These explanations make sense to me in relation to blogging. I can recognise them in my own blogging behaviour. I am drawn to blogs where these ideas come into play. The content of a blog post on its own is not enough to draw me in. I might be attracted by the idea/s but I will soon lose interest if there are no feelings of resonance. But I have no idea why one blog will set off this resonance and another won’t and I don’t think I explicitly recognise this resonance when it is happening – it is more intuitive – a ‘gut’ feeling.  Still thinking…..

Technology affordances

Yesterday I spent 6 hours on a train, getting to and from a 45 minute meeting in London, at huge expense. There was the cost of the train fare, my journey to the station to catch the train (24 mile round trip), my station parking, my food/drinks during the day and London taxis, which I had to get because the Victoria tube line was closed. The taxis cost almost as much as the train fare!

This meeting was an interview for a bid which a team of us were tendering for. Four of us went to the interview, so think of my costs roughly times four.  Then there’s the cost of our time. I managed to do some work on the train, but what I gained on the train, I have probably lost today from feeling jaded and not up to much hard work.

I’m wondering why, in this day and age, we all had to go to London for this interview. Couldn’t we have done it via video conferencing or similar? Would the interview panel (5 of them) have learned what they needed to know if it had been done virtually? I can’t see why not because it was a formal interview, in the sense that we first gave a 15 minute presentation and this was followed by 3 set questions from each of the panel, which lasted 30 minutes.

I’m trying to work out what would have been lost if we had done this via video conferencing. I enjoyed the trip and the interview, but given that we are all in education, our team and the interview panel, it does make you wonder why things are so slow to change.