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!

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!

I have spent some time today thinking about this, reading and trying to ‘get a handle’ on the differences. Having written this I can also see that it would be good to ‘get a handle’ on the similarities but I haven’t done that yet.

Anyhow – here are my first thoughts, which I will continue to think through.

I’m sure there will be many different perspectives on this, which I’m looking forward to exploring. It’s not a new topic, but the answers still don’t seem that clear and for me, more clarity around the similarities and differences would help me with online course design.

I have just read Renata Phelps’ article – Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning.

It is interesting from a variety of perspectives and has certainly made me think.

1. I don’t find all aspects of the article very clear. The development of a non-linear course structure is described. The author presents a non-linear curriculum as one that is not presented in a linear format, that can be accessed in a non-linear way by the learners and that is open to choice about how much and what is studied.

2. The article describes the development of a teacher training course – ICT in primary and secondary education. I don’t think enough is made of the fact that the context is ICT education, as I do think that when talking about non-linear learning, going with the flow and that the ‘curriculum becomes a process of development rather than body of knowledge to be covered and learned’, the context is important. I suspect that some subjects can have a more flexible curriculum and course structure than others. I’m not so sure how selective a trainee medic can be about curriculum. 

3. The article doesn’t really evaluate the success of changing the curriculum from a linear to a more complexity-based model, other than to quote two positive remarks from students. In the 60s it was very fashionable to ‘go with the flow’ in school classrooms in the UK. I remember on being appointed to a new job and asking for the maths syllabus (so that I would have some idea of what we should cover in the term), being told by the headteacher that they didn’t teach in that way in his school – they followed the children’s interests, so if the children wanted to talk about birds’ nests all week,  they could.  The very strictly linear National Curriculum was introduced in the UK to combat the massive gaps that were becoming in apparent in children’s knowledge as a result of ‘going with the flow’ and ‘discussing birds’ nests for a week’ at the expense of time spent on the 3 Rs. My experience suggests that a curriculum is actually a good thing, so long as you don’t expect learners to learn in a linear way. You only have to observe young children learning mathematics to know that they don’t and won’t.

3. The article then equates learning objectives with domination, control, reductionism and an undermining of emergent learning. I have always thought about learning objectives as being about clarity of forward thinking and about knowing what to assess. I don’t see that learning objectives need to control or undermine emergent learning.  Assessment isn’t mentioned in the article and that seems to me to be a big omission.

4. There is a lot in the article about ‘authentic’ and ‘problem-based’ learning that encourages reflective and self-directed learners. This is not new. Donald Schon’s book on the reflective practitioner was published at least 10 years before this article was written and my teaching colleagues have been discussing how to encourage learners to become independent, motivated, self-directed and reflective since the 60s and I’m sure previous generations of teachers have done the same.

So although any article which promotes this way of working is welcome, I don’t think the ideas presented in terms of learning are particularly new. However, it is interesting to think about to what extent you want your curriculum to be ‘flexible, open, disruptive, uncertain and unpredictable ….accepting …tension, anxiety and problem creating as the norm’.

I would be interested in knowing whether a course structure such as the one described in the article would work for a curriculum such as medicine.

I have just read Steve Sorden’s post about the difficulty of keeping the balance right in relation to how much time we spend on this course.

This reminded me that I wanted to make a note of Stephen’s post (or was it George?) on how many hours we should be spending on this course. 8 hours a week.

From what I have read I expect people have spent more than I hour on their assignment – probably much more. 

Some additional time that might be needed depending on your prior experience would be for setting up your blog, or other aspects of your personal learning environment. This could take quite a lot of time

Beyond this, what is needed are the skills to save time – so multi-tasking skills, ability to skim read and so on will all save time. I think Stephen or George said on the Ustream call that it was expected that people signing up for this course would have the basic technical skills, but as Stephen also said, typical internet behaviour is to sign up and then wonder if it’s the right course for you after signing up. A pre-course skills/technical skills/computer spec type of checklist might help to prevent people just jumping on the bandwagon – but on the other hand if I’d completed a checklist I probably wouldn’t be here now

The course does seem to be all consuming though. If I’m not actually online, I am thinking about it and relating it all the time to other areas of my work. I can see that it will leave a hug gap once it is ended, but I think this is a common experience with online courses.

I wasn’t able to attend the Ustream session on Friday – so I’ve just listened to the recording. These sessions are really valuable in providing an overview of the week and Dave Cormier does a great job in hosting them.

The session started with Stephen talking about his view of what this course is offering. ‘This is not an instructor led course. The point is that people learn to manage their own learning.’  Dave doesn’t disagree with this and neither do I – but Dave follows this up by asking – ‘At what point does this mean, just go to the internet to learn?’ This was a good question.

Stephen answers that this obviously is a course  (more than just going to the internet to learn)- but not the sort of course that many of us are used to. It’s very easy to see the structure – and Stephen was able to point this out very clearly when talking about The Daily, Moodle, the wiki, the readings and so on. I don’t think either Stephen or George need to justify the structure. It’s very obvious. Stephen pointed out that it ’s also a course because the University of Mannitoba says its a course with associated accreditation and assessement criteria.

I think that possibly some people’s problems have not been with the structure, but with understanding the norms. Stephen feels that we have a culture of learned helplessness, where many expect to be led to the learning and told what the learning is. I don’t think that people necessarily want to be led. What is most important is finding the conversations and feeling connected. For me this has been particularly difficult on this course and I think its because I didn’t understand the norms quickly enough. I am used to traditional online courses with a facilitator, and to online communities with community leaders and mentors. I have for a long time known that I can find out whatever I need to know from the internet. I suppose what is new for me, is the degree of autonomy that is offered by this course – not just offered, but expected. This is a norm on this course which I have needed to understand.

Understanding norms is a critical part of the learning experience. It’s interesting that one of the norms here is that you would have an understanding of the norms associated with open courses before starting the course. Isn’t this a bit of a tall order, given that the whole concept of open courses is new?

Thinking aloud again. If these posts are coming across as criticisms, I’m sorry – they are not intended to be. I am fascinated by how this amazing course is working – what makes it successful, where people are struggling and so on. By the end of the course, I hope to be clear in my own mind about how education in the future might change and how I might change my existing practice.

I have just closed down the Elluminate session. This was the most interesting for me so far as it centred around what participants think of the course so far – what do we think works and what do we think doesn’t work so well. Fascinating and very relevant to me.

I’m going to try and get my thoughts down straight away before I forget. It seems to me that the real problem is that this is called a course but that Stephen and George are trying to introduce a new view of what a course should be, based on principles of connectivism. So it is not only a course about connectivism – it is also trying to enable connectivism practice.

I suspect that the majority of us have a fairly traditional view of what a course should be - so many of us here will not only be learning about connectivism, we will be learning how to learn about connectivism in a networked environment.

I have tried to summarise my thoughts in this table: