Widening access, student retention and success national programmes

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Another recommendation from a recent conference presentation that I attended in the UK. The Higher Education Academy of the UK commissioned this large-scale study and intervention to explore factors affecting retention and engagement in UK universities. The full report is at Building student engagement and belonging in higher Education at a time of change: Final report from the What Works? Student Retention & Success programme but this page leads to a useful set of summaries and recommendations that are a bit more easily digested. The summary report is great.

Amongst the key issues that impressed me are (original emphases):

“At the heart of successful retention and success is a strong sense of belonging in HE for all students. This is most effectively nurtured through mainstream activities that all students participate in. “

“Specific interventions cannot be recommended over and above each other. Rather the institution, department, programme and module should all nurture a culture of belonging through the way they function and relate to people. “

“Student belonging is achieved through:

  • Supportive peer relations

  • Meaningful interaction between staff and students

  • Developing knowledge, confidence and identity as successful HE learners

  • An HE experience relevant to students’ interests and future goals “

     

I really like the notion of a ‘culture of belonging’ and the holistic approach recommended in this report. At Athabasca University we do well in some of these areas but less well in others. I think we are often over-focused on subjects and specific competences, especially in undergraduate programs, to the exclusion of other vital pieces of the educational machine, which greatly inhibits the sense of belonging that the HEA project identifies as so central. We lose too many students before they even start. Though we tend to be at least on par with other institutions for keeping them on specific courses once they have submitted their first assignments, we don’t have as many moving on through programs as we might. But this is just symptomatic of a broader malaise, that it is very hard to feel a part of a learning community in our isolated online spaces. Interactions tend to be limited to tutor-student communication much of the time, and the various tools (notably Moodle) that we use for teaching are intentionally isolated from one another. There’s little cohesion or sense of the broader community, and not much that is obvious that we can feel we can belong to.  

All of this helps to explain some of the key motivations behind why we created the Landing. It is meant as a space where academic identities can be explored, reflected upon and discovered, where we can feel that we belong to a real and vibrant community, where we can meet peers, see how others think and learn, and engage in meaningful interactions with them. It’s kind of like a virtual campus or learning commons, a space where many things happen, people meet, post information, engage in dialogue.

The Landing has been a success in very many ways and has helped many (including me) to achieve a greater sense of belonging. In retrospect, though, it would have been better to have seamlessly built its social richness and conrollable engagement into all of our other systems rather than as yet another loosely linked monolith. This is not impossible to retrofit. Since earlier this year it has been possible to integrate the Landing fairly well with other pages, such as those provided via Moodle, through its embedding functionality (simply make an iframe and add ‘?view=embed’ to most Landing URLs to separate a post from the surrounding site). This is, however, still not as seamless as it should be and requires some skill and deliberate intent on the part of people embedding it. We’ve not seen much uptake yet, though we have not promoted it at all actively, and we probably should. The Elgg technology behind the Landing does, however, have the capability of being embedded far more deeply as a web service to other applications, so that it can appear to be part of a quite different site (Moodle, say, or the main website, or MyAU, or pretty much anything). To make this happen needs a lot of carefully coordinated effort and clear communication between developers and managers of disparate systems that might use such a service, and plenty of planning, so it is not trivial to do. I’d be interested in doing such a project that either built on the Landing (makes sense, especially as it has other roles too) or started afresh to embed cross-cutting social engagement, sharing, connection and communication into all our student-facing sites, with all the same features and strengths (like discretionary access control, persistence, ownership, etc) of the Landing but without the need to go out of your way to visit it. I think I feel a research proposal coming on.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/what-works-retention

"Future time orientation predicts academic engagement among first-year " by Louise Horstmanshof and Craig Zimitat

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A study recommended during a recent conference that I attended that looks into student retention and engagement as a function of temporal orientation. In brief, Time Perspective (TP) theory predicts that

“students who are confident of their abilities (Past Positive) and who believe that their efforts produce results (low Present Hedonistic) are more likely than those who do not, to work towards a future goal (Future) to which they are committed and with which they can identify. Thus, by harnessing their time perspectives, they are able to regulate their behaviour to persist with their studies to achieve their educational goals”

The well-conducted study confirms the hypothesis but goes into a lot more detail, differentiates issues much further, and comes to some sophisticated conclusions that show that it is interestingly complicated. There is no silver bullet, behaviours are hugely interdependent and contextually situated, and multiple and diverse intervention strategies are needed to support students on their learning journeys through a university. It also provides some useful hints about how to help students improve their chances. It’s worth reading if you have any involvement with education, whether as a teacher or a learner. If you get overwhelmed by the tabular representations of the results of the study (thorough but turgid), after reading the theoretical background, skip to the discussion and implications sections.

Address of the bookmark: http://epubs.scu.edu.au/tlc_pubs/194/

There's a fitness tracker for your vagina. Quantifying your life has gone too far

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A Guardian article from  Jess Zimmerman. The arguments are inelligent and Zimmerman recognizes the value as well as the dangers of socially-enabled biofeedback devices. The kGoal (tagline ‘Fitbit for your vagina’) actually sounds like rather a good idea, but the cons are significant. I particularly like “But the pitfall of data devices … is that they hijack your reward pathways” and “The quantified self … takes theaggregate self out of the equation”. Good food for thought, and some important lessons for those seeking to gamify many things, including learning and teaching.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/14/fitness-tracker-vagina-quantified-life

The Distant Crowd: Transactional Distance and New Social Media Literacies

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This is a paper for IJLM that I wrote with Terry Anderson, exploring how the distributed nature of teaching and learning in social technologies significantly messes with Michael Moore’s theory of transactional distance in all sorts of interesting ways. In it, we ponder on the literacies learners need in order to take best advantage of social media; we describe the different social forms of groups, nets and sets, and the emergent collectives that develop around them, that together form the backbone of our forthcoming book;  and we discuss different kinds of teaching presence that emerge in each form, suggesting ways of addressing the potential lack of reliability and credibility when the teacher (and thus transactional distance) is distributed (in a net), anonymous (in a set), or emergent (in a collective).

According to the date of the special issue of which it is a part, MIT Press impressively managed to publish this paper nearly two years before we finished writing it. It is true that we sent them the first draft in 2012 but it was not actually published till this month. Hard to know how to cite this.

One of the things that the paper mentions is that learning through networks can, under the right conditions, be more effective, timely and relevant than traditional group-oriented methods. This was rather delightfully and self-referentially brought home to me by the fact that I learned of the paper’s actual publication (as opposed to predicted date) via Twitter. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/IJLM_a_00104#.U7Hmexb07EJ

LearningLocker LRS – version 1.0 now available

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Learning Locker has left beta and is now at version 1.0. This may be a significant milestone in a series of developments that could profoundly affect the future of online learning and perhaps the whole educational system.  

Learning Locker is an open source implementation of a TinCan (xAPI) learning record store (LRS). It provides a repository to record information about learning activities and outcomes, using open standards for import and export. That’s about it: some sorting and search tools, some export facilities, and the means to store information about learning from other applications. While other xAPI LRSs already exist, this open source implementation seems the most promising so far, the most feature-complete, and the most likely to see widespread adoption. OK, unless you are a learning technology geek I realise that this might sound rather dull and arcane, but the potential for disruption, especially given widespread support for the experience API (xAPI) standard in a wide range of applications, is quite high. Amongst other things:

  • it is a critical part of the infrastructure to free us from the mediocre monolithic silos of learning management systems which, in educational systems till now, have typically been the place where learning activities occur, content is produced, and progress is recorded. By separating the function of recording progress from the means of delivery, it massively increases the range of information and applications that can be used in an integrated way for education, from games to social media systems, MOOCs to traditional classroom activities, and everything between. It allows a great many more forms of progress to be recorded at any level of granularity, from solving a puzzle in a game to looking at a web page, from doing an exam to writing a thesis. It makes it significantly easier to switch between platforms.
  •  it allows any and every kind of evidence of learning to be recorded, of great benefit to lifelong learners wishing to provide evidence of,  and to reflect on and to plan a learning journey. Freeing such data from guarded silos means learners can control their own learning records, keeping them in a cloud, on their own servers or their own computers, transferring them as and when they wish. This goes far beyond the basic functionality of an e-portfolio system, but integrates beautifully with one. It, or something very like it, is a vital piece in the move towards truly open learning at a level that has the potential to disrupt the traditional education and training system.
  •  it makes possible a wide range of analytics for the benefit of learners (and, potentially, for the benefit of teachers and organizations) that go far beyond the structured assessment and activity records that can be captured by an LMS. From finding people with a particular set of skills to analyzing holes in your own learning to organizational learning profiling, the possibilities are huge.

This just scratches the surface of the potential of this technology and standard, and it is just going to get better. More information about Learning Locker is available at http://learninglocker.net

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/learninglocker/learninglocker

Enough with the lecturing – US National Science Foundation (NSF)

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Here is a brief report on a somewhat less brief meta-study that claims to show lectures are less effective than active learning approaches in STEM subjects. The report makes a claim that this is an important study. Well, kind of – it will no doubt be cited a lot. This is one of those studies that most educational researchers, including me, would very much like to be correct. Most of our theories and models suggest that lecturing is a truly dumb way to teach. Unfortunately, however, this study does not really show that. We know, and this study confirms in its data, that some lectures work really well some of the time for some students. We also know that active learning approaches do not always work better and sometimes work worse. The study makes the claim that, on average, more active trumps more passive (there are very few blacks and whites in this, it is all on a spectrum, which the study does not very effectively cater for). Sadly, however, it uses a skewed sample because (as this perceptive article highlights very nicely) active approaches typically rely on great, passionate teachers who know how to educate in order to implement them well. And guess who gets to write studies comparing active learning and lecture approaches. Even comparative studies, such as the sort that typically compare a previous run of a course with a newly minted active version, are bound to show this bias. Compare what it is like to teach a course that feels stale with one that is not only new, based on ideas you believe in (which the study, to its credit, attempts to control for) but also (as active learning approaches do) allows your own skill as a teacher to shine. This is systemically biased data.

A message I have been trying to hammer home for some time is that it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results. The softer, more malleable, more student-led a course becomes, the more that is required of the skill and passion of the teacher to be responsive and helpful, which means that such courses can be truly awesome or terrifically awful, depending on the people involved. Published research tends to come from those who are more skillful and interested in teaching because those that are not do not normally publish papers about it, so the results available to meta-studies are inevitably skewed.

Lectures are hard, rigid teaching technologies that, together with technologies like textbooks, exams, designed outcomes and timetables, are built to cater for mediocrity in teachers. Great teachers can surpass the limitations an educational system imposes, but some learning happens as a result of process design even when the teacher is truly dire. A dire teacher in an active learning context will leave students confused, lacking direction and demotivated even more than one who just lectures badly.  Furthermore, lectures can have genuine value. I have no great objections in principle to occasional lectures as long as they take up no more than a few minutes of a learner’s day, and as long as lecturers start with the assumption that no direct learning will result from them. Lectures can be good catalysts, a reason to get together, and can help structure studies and thinking, even if they are almost useless for directly learning facts or skills. Just occasionally, not enough to justify their use, they can even inspire and motivate. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Address of the bookmark: http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131403&org=NSF&from=news

Journal of Interactive Media in Education – Open for Learning Special Issue

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A special issue of JIME on open learning with 5 chapters (full disclaimer: including one by me and Terry Anderson) from a forthcoming book edited by Chris Pegler and Allison Littlejohn, ‘Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education’.

I’ve skimmed through the pre-publication draft of the book from which these articles are taken and (not counting our own chapter, about which I may be a little biased) I’m impressed. It has some very important topics, some excellent authors, and a great pair of editors. Deserves to do well.

Terry and I were concerned when responding to the call for chapters about the irony of a book on openness appearing as a closed publication. It is therefore very pleasing that, at least for these five chapters, it is walking the talk. JIME is a fine journal and has been open since it was unfashionable to be so, so I am delighted to at last have an article appear there and congratulate Chris and Allison on a job very well done.

Address of the bookmark: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/issue/view/2014-ReusingResources-OpenforLearning

Americans' Trust in Online Higher Ed Rising

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Thanks to Larbi for this one –

In the US, it seems that a steadily rising number of people believe in the quality of online education. This is despite the fact that, in the US, online education is all too often equated with somewhat tarnished institutions like Phoenix and a range of smaller shady or worse private providers (apparently I can get another doctorate in the US for a mere $25, according to spam I have received) that have not done wonders for the cause. It would be interesting to know what the results might be in countries that have a more visible tradition of high quality distance education provision, like Canada, the UK, India, Turkey, the Netherlands, etc.

In my (very direct) experience, students with distance taught qualifications are, on average, more self-starting, highly motivated and skilled when compared with students taught more conventionally. I’d definitely be one of the employers who would favour an online qualification over a traditionally taught one, all things being equal. But, as for any qualification, I’d look very closely at which institution it came from.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.gallup.com/poll/168416/americans-trust-online-higher-education-rising.aspx

Online proctoring raises privacy concerns « Spartan Daily Spartan Daily

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Interesting commentary on privacy concerns using ProctorU, a third-party monitoring service for online exam taking. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it is indeed highly invasive and suggests some notable privacy concerns, but is not too far removed from what we already do for face-to-face exams. The biggest problem for me is the notion that an exam itself is a solution to the accreditation problem, not that there is yet another sophisticated and somewhat dubious weapon in an unwinnable arms race. In all its summative guises, the exam is a technology that is well past its sell-by date. We need better, more authentic, less-invasive, less expensive, less easily corruptable methods of accreditation. 

Address of the bookmark: http://spartandaily.com/119401/online-proctoring-raises-privacy-concerns

Good chapter on getting rid of grades

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From Joe Bower, a good, straightforward summary of most of the reasons not to grade learners, and some sensible suggestions about how to largely avoid using grades etc within a system that requires them. Though situated in a face-to-face school context, this very closely matches my own views on the subject and the methods I use to get around a system that is built on grading.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.joebower.org/2014/03/heres-my-chapter-from-book-de-testing.html