Rather than letting my draft vanish, I thought I'd put it on my blog so it might at least help others formulate strategies. It is an incomplete draft, but quite a bit of effort went into it.
If you do make use of this, please remember to cite it properly, and give me credit where appropriate.
Barr, N. S. F. (2017). Suggestions for a Digital Learning Environment Strategy. [Blog] Niall B's Blog. Available at: http://niallb.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/suggestions-for-digital-learning.html [Accessed dd Mon. yyyy].
Suggestions for a Digital Learning Environment Strategy
Niall S F Barr
Background
In the last 30 years or so there has been a
dramatic change in the technology available for teaching, with
blackboards being replaced by digital projectors, the Internet
providing rapid access to large amounts of information, and students
carrying their own personal devices for accessing the Internet. One
of the key parts of this change has been the Virtual Learning
Environment (VLE), a web application that combines a variety of
resources and interactive activities in a structure relating to
courses. The University of Glasgow was an early adopter of web-based
learning as a partner in the Clyde Virtual University (CVU) project
(Whittington and Sclater, 1998) which included the development of a
web based learning platform that was arguably the first modern VLE.
The introduction and take-up of the VLE was
extremely rapid. CVU was created in 1996, and just five years later
over 80% of UK universities and colleges had some form of VLE; by
2005 this figure had risen to 95% (Farmer and Tilton, 2005). At that
time there were a large number of different platforms available –
Farmer and Tilton list over 40; however, the majority of these have
now vanished with the majority of universities using one of a handful
of conceptually very similar commercial and open source platforms. Of
the 24 Russell Group Universities, 12 use Blackboard, 9 use Moodle,
and Sakai, Sharepoint and Canvas have one University each.
The conventional VLE has become a "Dominant
Design" in higher education, that is a broadly accepted general
design to which all variants conform (Wilson et al., 2007). In spite
of this there is a paucity of research on both the benefits and the
design of the VLE. The general approach and design seems to have been
largely driven by what was available and understood, as well as being
constrained by the limitations of the technology that was available
when the dominant design was emerging.
While the VLE has become an integral part of the
education process, it is far from the only technological innovation
which is enabling change in the education process. The smart phone,
effectively a pocket sized Internet enabled computer, has become
ubiquitous with over 95% of University of Glasgow first year students
carrying them at all times (Honeychurch and McCluckie, 2014), and the
technology available to teachers in the classroom may include smart
boards, visualisers and shared digital activities such as messaging
feeds, classroom voting and collaborative document editing.
Current position
2.1.
Moodle
2.2.
Mahara
Medial
2.3.
Urkund/Turnitin
2.4.
Lecture theatre equipment
Interactive questions during lectures are
supported by YACRS (classresponse.gla.ac.uk), a relatively simple
in-house web application which allows students to interact using
their own mobile devices. Previously clicker systems which involved
handing out handsets to the students were used for this purpose,
however the logistics of these systems meant they were not as widely
used as the new web application.
In addition to the core functionality of Moodle,
it is possible to link Moodle to external tools that conform to the
IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification (McFall et
al., 2012). QTIWorks, an assessment system developed in collaboration
with several other British universities including Edinburgh,
Strathclyde, Liverpool Hope and Southampton provides a way of
launching more advanced quizzes than those supported by Moodle's
internal quiz system is the only current centrally supported LTI
tool, however LTI is not limited to currebt tools, and Aropa, a peer
review system similar to Moodle workshop is hosted within the School
of Computing Science. Tools that can be launched from Moodle using
LTI or used as a stand-alone tool and is used by a number of courses
across all four colleges. A completely different approach to
peer-review, and also potentially grading, is provided by an
experimental Adaptive Comparative Judgement tool ACJ-LTI, which is at
an early pilot stage.
Tools which are not integrated into the University
systems, but which are used by many lecturers, include Peerwise: a
system hosted at Auckland University in which students create their
own multiple-choice questions, and answer and comment on their
classmates questions. TodaysMeet.com is a free website that allows
teachers to create a closed Twitter like chat environment for their
students. It is likely that many other free or freemium web tools are
made use of by teachers at the University. It is also very likely
that many of these tools do not comply with European data protection
requirements, however teachers are using them without being aware of
this.
Issues with the current model
Modern VLEs such as Moodle combine a large number
of tools that can be used to support education, but which are not
inherently related, into a single large software package. The
bringing these tools together into the VLE they have become clear
unified package where teachers can pick and mix which tools they need
to use, however at the same time they have become part of a much
larger and more complex software system. By making simple tools part
of a large complex system, they become significantly harder to
maintain with the consequence that they rapidly become outdated. A
clear example of this within Moodle is the wiki software which is
very much more primitive than other stand-alone wikis. From a
software engineering viewpoint this would be described as system
which has excessive coupling. As Bell et al., (1997) point out: "a
piece of software should be divided into modules in such a way that
there is a minimum of interaction between modules (low coupling) and,
conversely, a high degree of interaction within a module (high
cohesion)".
Although
the individual activity modules within Moodle suffer from this tight
integration, it is important to recognise that the main purpose of
Moodle is to provide an extremely comprehensive authorisation system
which ensures that each user has access to the right tools. Having
fully separate tools would lose this valuable feature. IMS LTI works
well with Moodle’s authorisation features as it provides a simple
single sign-on into third-party tools which includes a context (i.e.
course), one or more roles such as “Learner” or “Instructor”,
and user information which can be just an anonymous identifier, or
can include name and e-mail address.
Third-party tools that are used on an ad-hoc
basis, such as TodaysMeet.com, may pose an additional problem as the
University has no control of the data collected by these tools. There
has recently been an issue in the United States where the provider of
a free hosted tool was found to be collecting student data and
selling it to third parties2 . Tools which are currently
free or low-cost may also be part of a bait and switch strategy, and
become significantly more expensive to make use of later. An example
of this dubious business practice is Turnitin's grademark software,
which was initially offered as a free extra, but then was used to
justify large price increases. Software developed using venture
capital funding frequently has significant price increases once users
are relying on it, and there has been significant venture capital
funding for education related software in recent years.
Alternatively, tools may vanish with no warning when their funding
runs out.
Changing landscape
The underlying technology that supports the
digital learning environment continues to evolve, and there are a
number of imminent innovations that may lead to further change. One
innovation which is definitely about to appear is web assembly, a
virtual machine in the browser compatible with the output of GNU C++
and other high-performance compilers, which is currently undergoing
testing with all the major browser providers. Web assembly will allow
the possibility of running the types of interactive simulation that
been shown to be very beneficial for education (McAteer et al.,
1996), and which were also advocated in the Dearing Report, within
the browser. It will also allow significant changes to the user
interface of web applications, although with the major caveat that
accessibility may suffer it is used inappropriately.
Interactive whiteboards continue to improve, and
the latest generation may provide the extra features that will make
them an essential part of the classroom rather than an optional
extra. As network infrastructure speeds improve, the possibility of
directly sharing images on whiteboard with a students' personal
devices, and allowing two-way interaction becomes a real possibility.
The Internet has already dramatically changed the
way we deal with information, by providing very rapid ways to search
for and find information. As Hugh Davis pointed out in his keynote at
the 2015 University of Glasgow Learning and Teaching Conference, this
has led to a different requirement for learning. The emphasis has
moved away from knowing information towards knowing how to find the
information and discriminate between good and bad sources. The
Internet has also given a voice to many dubious sources would
previously have struggled to be published so the emphasis on
discrimination between good and bad sources is becoming increasingly
important.
With these changes in technology it is also likely
that there will be significant changes in how teaching is done. The
traditional lecture with one-way communication from the teacher to
the student is already being challenged with techniques such as the
Jigsaw Classroom (Aronson, 1978), flip teaching and just-in-time
teaching (Mazur, 1996) and the use of interactive technology. Further
technology improvements are likely to enhance these techniques. The
TEAL spaces currently being piloted at the University are designed to
facilitate these approaches to teaching, and are likely to become a
much more common type of space.
There are also changes in the expectations of what
skills will be developed and used in education. Just as the
introduction of affordable word processing in the 1980s led to an
expectation that students would be able to type and produce formatted
documents, current improvements in digital technology mean that being
able to produce audio and video productions is becoming a reasonable
expectation. Some courses at the University are already asking
students to submit short videos for assessment, and it is likely that
this type of assessment will increase.
There will also be major changes in the skills
required by teachers. It will no longer be acceptable for teachers to
have low levels of digital literacy, and it will be essential that
they continue to develop their skills as the technology changes.
Future requirements
Digital literacy
In future we will continue to need greater digital
literacy in both staff and students. The idea of new 'digital native'
(Prensky, 2001) generation has largely been debunked, and it is now
recognised that the apparent digital literacy of students is often
very superficial (Bennett et al., 2008). Genuine transferable digital
skills that can be applied to different situations is likely to be
one of the most valuable graduate attributes in future, and so
encouraging the development of digital literacy, both in staff and
students is essential. Teachers will need to take ownership of their
own digital skills, just as they take ownership of the maintenance of
their skills and knowledge in their own disciplines, however the
University has a role to play in providing or sourcing the
scaffolding for their development. (https://1minutecpd.wordpress.com/
could provide some inspiration for this.)
The interconnectedness of all things
When planning the future of the digital learning
environment, or any innovation in the technology to support teaching
it is essential to take technology, pedagogy and policy into account.
Data protection and accessibility considerations may also be
involved. Any attempt to make changes without fully taking into
account all these factors is likely to lead to poor decisions and
short-term or impractical solutions.
An example of a situation where the technology,
pedagogy and policy are all deeply interconnected is the process of
marking coursework. Online marking is made significantly more
difficult if the file format being used for submissions is not
intended for subsequent editing, however PDF, a format intended for
final printing, has become the de facto standard in spite of not
being an appropriate format for later editing. The switch to using a
format which can easily be annotated online and supports good
accessibility, i.e. HTML would make it very much simpler to create a
good quality online marking interface. The final grades from an
online assignment need to be stored in a secure place, so policy
decisions need to be made about where that should be. Moodle
gradebook is a possibility, however Moodle is not generally
considered to be a place for final grades. Pedagogical considerations
require timely and detailed feedback, which also must be accessible
to all students including those who make use of assistive technology
to read the computer screen.
What is needed from our Digital Learning Environment
In future the Digital Learning Environment at the
University is likely to need to support a greater variety of
different teaching needs, including increased use of distance and
blended learning, and courses that are being taught on more than one
campus. An increase in distance learning may also lead to an increase
in the numbers of students with accessibility issues that have to be
accommodated by the Digital Learning Environment. Personalised
learning environments and portfolios are also likely to become more
important in the future.
Building on what we have
Even the most conservatively taught courses at the
University make use of Moodle as a repository for handouts, a gateway
to reading material and the point for submitting coursework, however
courses that make significantly more use of Moodle are less numerous.
As Moodle is the main computer system used for
education at the University, when teachers require a new facility
they often assume that Moodle is the right place for it to be
located. In addition, lecturers visiting conferences occasionally see
examples of new Moodle modules that have been created by student
projects, and which superficially looks very interesting, but
unfortunately lack both the coding quality and maintenance regime
that would allow them to be deployed in a major Moodle installation
such as the University's. This leads to further demands for changes
to Moodle, however these are not necessarily appropriate.
In many ways, Moodle can be considered to be an
authorisation system that controls access and rights for a variety of
resources depending on the user's role, course registration and
groups. While the individual tools in Moodle are simple, and often
dated, the authorisation management would be difficult to duplicate
in simpler more focused tools.
As mentioned earlier, marking interfaces and
feedback are an example where it seems natural to use Moodle because
from the teacher's viewpoint Moodle is the right place for
educationally related online activity, however in practice all that
is needed from Moodle is an authorisation for students and staff to
submit, grade and review work, and possibly an interim repository for
grades. A tool outside Moodle is also needed for originality
checking. IMS LTI provides a way for Moodle to provide authorisation
information to an external tool, and receive back a score, so in
practice there is no need for the marking interface to be part of
Moodle. Once we have accepted that there is no need for Moodle to
actually be tightly integrated with the marking interface, there are
many more options available.
This approach of using Moodle as an authorisation
system, with basic default activity modules and using external tools
launched by LTI from Moodle for more advanced or specialist
activities, is potentially a very good approach. The idea of
replacing the VLE with a set of loosely coupled and relatively simple
modules has been discussed for some time (JISC, 2004) (Honeychurch
and Barr, 2013), and Moodle with LTI provides suitable core for this.
By doing this it becomes possible to allow teachers to have different
modules available to suit their needs, and as the modules are
individually simple maintenance becomes more straightforward. Core
course material that is to be made available long-term should remain
in Moodle, as this will facilitate archiving.
With
this approach, Moodle will remain the core of our Digital Learning
Strategy, but where Moodle does not provide the features that are
required, rather than directly extending Moodle we will aim to add
external modules that the couple to Moodle using LTI to provide the
extra functionality required. It will be made clear to teachers that
LTI modules that are only used by a small number of people will have
limited support, and may be temporary facilities.
Enabling the users
-
Good practice resources that recognise the different requirements and cultures of different disciplines will be created to help guide teachers, and self paced online training will be found or created to help teachers develop the digital skills needed for their changing role.
-
It essential that this development is made part of the teachers core responsibilities - the attitude that learning technologists should create magic for them is unsustainable.
-
Building better tools to help teachers create content.
Improving use
-
Focus groups to find what staff and students need
-
Time taken to develop digital resources vs non digital
-
Cultural issues - developing online material takes time (Clark, 2015), so a sharing culture where we are added value for other peoples material rather than just creators is essential. We need to embrace OER, both as creators and consumers (The university is added value, think of digital content like text books ).
-
Probably should also discuss publisher stuff here.
-
This all links back to interoperability standards.
-
Need to recognise that different disciplines have different traditions, and different requirements.
-
Evidence driven - what actually works (Probably look at (Bates, 2015) (Daniel, 2016) (Clark and Mayer, 2016))
-
Assessment - Turnitin and Urkund only assess originality against published work and their own archives of past essays, they do not tackle the issue of essay writing services or the popular students getting more assistance from classmates.
-
Device compatibility - should mobiles use the same system, or a mobile feed (like Oxford)
-
Customizability of appearance vs consistency of user experience and accessibility - how much do we want teacher to be able to alter the appearance of their VLE?
Sustainability
-
Standards based - interoperability is essential for long term support (Barr et al., 2012)
-
Small modules with a standard interface are easier to change than monolithic software systems
Data protection
-
Current situation is that officially everything in IT Services, and reality is teacher wishing to experiment with other tools end up using tools elsewhere with no thought about data protection.
-
Trying to be too secure causes insecurity…
Analytics
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Barr, N., Milne, S., Neve, P., 2012. Contextualizing formative
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Bates, A.W., 2015. Teaching in a Digital Age. Tony Bates Associates
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Bell, D., Morrey, I., Pugh, J.R., 1997. The essence of program
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2http://mfeldstein.com/popular-discussion-platform-piazza-getting-pushback-selling-student-data/
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