On the importance of place

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Distance learners and teachers in different kinds of spaceI had the great pleasure of being invited to the Open University of the Netherlands and, later in the day, to EdLab, Maastricht University a few weeks ago, giving a slightly different talk in each place based on some of the main themes in my most recent book, How Education Works. Although I adapted my slides a little for each audience, with different titles and a few different slides adjusted to the contexts, I could probably have used either presentation interchangeably. In fact, I could as easily have used the slides from my SITE keynote on which both were quite closely based (which is why I am not sharing them here). As well as most of the same slides, I used some of the same words, many of the same examples, and several of the same anecdotes. For the most part, this was essentially the same presentation given twice. Except, of course, it really, really wasn’t. In fact, the two events could barely have been more different, and what everyone (including me) learned was significantly different in each session.

This is highly self-referential. One of the big points of the book is that it only ever makes sense to consider the entire orchestration, including the roles that learners play in making sense of it all the many components of the assembly, designed for the purpose and otherwise. The slides, structure, and content did provide the theme and a certain amount of hardness, but what we (collectively) did with them led to two very different learning experiences. They shared some components and purposes, just as a car, a truck, and a bicycle share some of the same components and purposes, but the assemblies and orchestrations were quite different, leading to very different outcomes. Some of the variation was planned in advance, including an hour of conversation at the end of each presentation and a structure that encouraged dialogue at various points along the way: these were as much workshops as presentations. However, much of the variance occurred not due to any planning but because of the locations themselves. One of the rooms was a well-appointed conventional lecture theatre, the other an airy space with grouped tables, and with huge windows looking out on a busy and attractive campus. In the lecture theatre I essentially gave a lecture: the interactive parts were very much staged, and I had to devise ways to make them work. In the airy room, I had a conversation and had to devise ways to maintain some structure to the process, that was delightfully disrupted by the occasional passing road train and the very tangible lives of others going on outside, as well as an innately more intimate and conversational atmosphere enabled (not entailed) by the layout. Other parts of the context mattered too: the time of day, the temperature, the different needs and interests of the audience, the fact that one occurred in the midst of planning for a major annual event, and so on. All of this had a big effect on how I and others behaved, and on what and how people learned. From one perspective, in both talks, I was sculpting the available affordances and constraints to achieve my intended ends but, from another equally valid point of view, I was being sculpted by them. The creators and maintainers of the rooms and I were teaching partners, coparticipants in the learning process. Pedagogically, and despite the various things I did to assemble the missing parts in each, they were significantly different learning technologies.

The complexity of distance teaching

Train journeys are great contexts for uninterrupted reflection (trains teach too) so, sitting on the train on my journey back the next day, I began to reflect on what all of this means for my usual teaching practice, and made some notes on which this post is based (notebooks teach, too).  I am a distance educator by trade and, as a rule, with exceptions for work-based learning, practicums, co-ops, placements, and a few other limited contexts, distance educators rarely even acknowledge that students occupy a physical space, let alone do we adapt to it. We might sometimes encourage students to use things in their environments as part of a learning activity, but we rarely change our teaching on the fly as a result of the differences between those environments. As I have previously observed, the problem is exacerbated by the illusion that online systems are environments (in the sense of being providers of the context in which we learn) and that we believe we can observe what happens in them. They are not, and we cannot. They are parts of the learners’ own environments, and all we can (ethically) observe are interactions with our designed systems, not the behaviour of the learners within the spaces that they occupy. It is as hard for students to understand our context as it is for us to understand theirs, and that matters too. It makes it trickier to model ways of thinking and approaches to problem solving, for example, if the teacher occupies a different context.

This matters little for some of the harder elements of the teaching process. Information provision, resource design, planning, and at least some forms of assessment and feedback are at least as easy to do at a distance as not. We can certainly do those and make a point of doing them well, thereby providing a little counterbalance. However, facilitation, role modelling, guidance, supporting motivation, fostering networks, monitoring of learning, responsive adaptation, and many other significant teaching roles are more complex to perform because of how little is known about learning activities within an environment. As Peter Goodyear has put it, matter matters. The more that the designated teacher can understand that, the more effective they can be in helping learners to succeed.

Because we are not so able to adapt our teaching to the context, distance learning (more accurately, distance teaching) mostly works because students are the most important teachers, and the pedagogies they add to the raw materials we provide do most of the heavy lifting. Given some shared resources and guided interactions, they are the ones who perform most of the kinds of orchestration and assembly that I added to my two talks in the Netherlands; they are the ones who both adapt and adapt to their spaces for learning. Those better able to do this in the first place tend to do better in the long run, regardless of subject interest or innate ability. This is reflected in the results. In my faculty and on average, more than 95% of our graduate students – who have already proven themselves to be successful learners and so are better able to teach themselves – succeed on any given course, in the sense of reaching the end and achieving a passing grade.  70% of our undergraduates, on the other hand, are the first in their family to take a degree. Many have taken years or even decades out of formal education, and many had poor experiences in school. On average, therefore, they typically have fewer skills in teaching themselves in an academic context (which is a big thing to learn about in and of itself) and we are not able to adapt our teaching to what we cannot perceive, so we are of little assistance either. Without the shared physical context, we can only guess and anticipate when and where they might be learning, and we seldom have the faintest idea how it occurs, save through sparse digital signals that they leave in discussion forums or submitted assignments, or coarse statistics based on web page views. In a few undergraduate core courses within my faculty it is therefore no surprise that the success rates are less than 30%, and (on average) only about half of all our students are successful, with rates that improve dramatically in more senior level courses. The vast majority of those who get to the end pass. Most who don’t succeed drop out. It doesn’t take many core courses with success rates of 30% to eliminate nearly 95% of students by the end of a program.

Teaching with a context

We can better deal with this if we let go of the illusion that we can be in control and, at the same time, find better ways to stay close: to make the learning process including the environment in which it occurs, as visible as possible. It is emphatically not about capturing digital traces and using analytics to reveal patterns. Though such techniques can have a place in helping to build a picture of how learners are responding to our deliberate acts of teaching, they are not even close to a solution for understanding learners in context. Most learning analytics and adaptive systems are McNamara Machines, blind to most of what matters.  There’s a huge risk that we start by measuring the easily measurable then wind up not just ignoring but implicitly denying that the things we cannot measure are important. Yes, it might help us to help students who are going to get to the end anyway to get better grades, but it tells us very little about (for instance) how they are learning, what obstacles they face, or how we could help them orchestrate their learning in the contexts in which they live.  Could generative AI help with that? I think it might. In conversation, an AI agent could ask leading questions, could recommend things to do with the space, could aggregate and report back on how and where students seem to be learning. Unlike traditional adaptive systems, generative AI can play an active discovery role and make broader connections that have not been scripted. However, this is not and should not be a substitute for an actual teacher: rather, it should mediate between humans, amplifying and feeding back, not guiding or informing.

For the most part, though, I think the trick is to use pedagogical designs that are made to support flexibility, that encourage learners to connect with the spaces live and people they share them with, that support them in understanding the impact of the environments they are in, and, as much as possible, to incorporate conduits that make it likely that participants will share information about their contexts and what they are doing in them, such as through reflective learning diaries, shared videos or audio, or introductory discussions intended to elicit that information. A good trick that I’ve used in the past, for example, is to ask students to send virtual postcards showing where they are and what they have been doing (nowadays a microblog post might serve a similar role). Similarly, it can be useful to start discussions that seek ideas about how to configure time and space for learning, sharing problems and solutions from the students themselves. Modelling behaviours can help: in my own communications, I try to reveal things about where I am and what I have been doing that provide some context and background story, especially when it relates to how I am changing as a result of our shared endeavours. Building social interaction opportunities into every inhabited virtual space would help a lot, making it more likely that students will share more of what they are doing and increasing awareness of both the presence and the non-presence (the difference in context) of others. Learning management systems are almost universally utter rubbish for that, typically relegating interactions to controlled areas of course sites and encouraging instrumental and ephemeral discussions that largely ignore context. We need more, more pervasively, and we need better.

None of this will replicate the rich, shared environments of in-person learning, and that is not the point. This is about acknowledging the differences in online and distance learning and building different orchestrations around them. On the whole, the independence of distance students is an extremely good thing, with great motivational benefits, not to mention convenience, much lower environmental harm, exploitable diversity, and many other valuable features that are hard to reproduce in person. When it works, it works very well. We just need to make it work better for those for whom that is not enough. To do that, we need to understand the whole assembly, not just the pieces we provide.

Challenges of the Physical: slides from my keynote at XII Conferência Internacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação, September 2021

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Here are the slides from my opening keynote today for the XII Conferência Internacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação in Portugal. first slide of the presentation

The conference theme was ‘challenges of the digital’ so I thought it might be fun to reverse the problem, and to think instead about the challenges of in-person education. In this presentation I imagined a world in which in-person teaching had never been invented, and presented a case for doing so. In fairness, it was not a very good case! But I did have fun using some of the more exotic voice changing features of my Voicelive Play vocal processor (which I normally use for performing music), presenting some of the arguments against my suggestions in different voices using a much better mic than my usual (pretty good) Blue Yeti. I might not use the special effects again that often, but I was quite impressed with the difference the better microphone made.

My central points (mostly implicit until the end) were:

  • That the biggest challenge of the digital is all the baggage that we have inherited from in-person teaching, and our continuing need to interoperate with in-person institutions.
  • That pedagogies are neither universal nor neutral. They are solutions to problems of learning in a particular context, in assembly with countless constraints and possibilities provided by that context: people, tools, structures, methods, systems, and so on.
  • That solutions to learning in a physical context – at least in the one-to-many model of traditional education systems – inevitably lead to a very strong power imbalance between teacher and learner, where the teacher is in control of every moment that the teaching event occurs. This has many repercussions, not least of which being that needs for autonomy and competence support are very poorly addressed (though relatedness comes for free), so it is really bad for intrinsic motivation.
  • Thus, the pedagogies of physical spaces have to compensate for the loss of control and achievable challenge that they naturally entail.
  • That the most common approach – and, again, an almost inevitable (i.e. the shortest path) follow-on from teaching a lot of people at once – involves rewards and punishments, that massively impair or destroy intrinsic motivation to learn and, in most cases, actively militate against effective learning.
  • That the affordances of teaching everyone the same thing at once lead fairly naturally to credentials for having learned it, often achieved in ‘efficient’ ways like proctored exams that are incredibly bad for learning, and that greatly reinforce the extrinsic motivation that is already highly problematic in the in-person modality. The credentials, not the learning, become the primary focus.
  • That support for autonomy and competence are naturally high in online learning, though support for relatedness is a mix of good and bad. There is no need for teachers being in control and, lacking most of the means of control available to in-person teachers, the only reliable way to regain it is through rewards and punishments which, as previously mentioned, are fatal to intrinsic motivation.
  • That the almost ubiquitous ways that distance educators inherit and use the pedagogies, methods, and structures of in-person learning – especially in the use of coercion through rewards and punishments (grades, credentials, etc) but also in schedules, fixed-length courses, inflexible learning outcomes, etc – are almost exactly the opposite of what its technologies can best support.

Towards the end, acknowledging that it is difficult to change such complex and deeply entangled systems (much though it is to be desired) I presented some ways of reducing the challenges of the physical in online teaching, and regaining that lost intrinsic motivation, that I summarized thus:

  • Let go (you cannot and should not control learning unless asked to do so), but stay close;
  • Make learning (not just its products) visible (and, in the process, better understand your teaching);
  • Make learning shared (cooperation and, where possible, collaboration built in from the ground up);
  • Don’t ever coerce (especially not through grades);
  • Care (for learners, for learning, for the subject).

It’s a theme that I have spoken and written of many, many times, but (apart from the last few slides) the way I presented it this time was new for me. I had fun pretending to be different people, and the audience seemed to like it, in a challenging kind of a way. There were some great questions at the end, not all of which I had time to answer, though I’m happy to continue the conversation here, or via Twitter.

Why do we work from home but learn remotely?

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I am slowly getting used to the ugly abbreviation WFH that has emerged during the pandemic, though I don’t much like it because it’s not always accurate. Even in pandemic times I often work from my boat (WFB). In non-pandemic times I’ve worked from a tent (WFT), a library (WFL), a hotel room (WFHR), a park bench (WFPB), a conference (WFC), a plane (WFP), a bus (WF… OK, you get the picture), and much, much more. I have even worked at Athabasca University’s own buildings (Working from Work?) on rare occasions. But why do most of us in the trade so rarely use terms like learning from home when working from home (WFH) is so ubiquitous?

Terms like e-learning, online learning, distance learning, remote learning, and so on, are weird. Learning is never remote, electronic, online, or at a distance.  There is more sense to terms like distance education, online education, remote teaching, and so on, because education and teaching describe relationships between people, and there are different ways that those relationships can be mediated, that do (or should) deeply affect the process. There is also a whole slew of intentional and implicit structures, systems, methods, and toolsets that are assumed when we prefix education with terms like distance or online. But why online or distance learning?

As teachers we are (rightly) taught that it’s not about the teaching, it’s about the learning. For at least the last 30 years or more we have, for instance, therefore been strongly encouraged to use the term ‘learning & teaching’ instead of ‘teaching & learning’ because learning must come first. I’ve corrected people myself for getting the order wrong, many times. Charitably, therefore, it might be that we are trying to draw attention to the fact that it’s about learning. But, if so, why distance or online?

Ricardo Liberato, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons I think something nasty has happened to the term ‘learning’ when it is used this way, because I think that what we actually mean by it is ‘teaching’.  Some British English dialects take that dubious elision fully on board. When something nasty happens to someone as a consequence of something they have done that is perceived to be wrong, or even when some punishment is inflicted on them by someone else, it is common in some circles to say ‘that’ll learn yer’ (the ‘yer’ is important – don’t imagine the Queen saying in received pronunciation ‘that will learn you’ because it would be wrong). When I hear the phrase I imagine it being said with a snarl. It’s a cruel thing to say, though it can be used kind-of humorously, at least if, as many of my compatriots do, you appreciate a particularly crude form of Benny-Hillish shadenfreude (‘Ha ha, you fell flat on your face and hurt yourself. That’ll learn yer’).

Outside a subset of British and perhaps some other minor English vernaculars, learning is never something that we do to people. It’s something done by people, with what and with whom is around them (and that might include a teaching website, textbook, or course pack). So let’s stop calling people distance or online learners because it devalues and obscures what they are actually doing. They are not being learned at. They are being taught at a distance, and learning from home (or wherever they happen to be).

How distance changes everything: slides from my keynote at the University of Ottawa

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These are the slides from my keynote at the University of Ottawa’s “Scaffolding a Transformative Transition to Distance and Online Learning” symposium today. In the presentation I discussed why distance learning really is different from in-person learning, focusing primarily on the fact that they are the motivational inverse of one another. In-person teaching methods evolved in response to the particular constraints and boundaries imposed by physics, and consist of many inventions – pedagogical and otherwise – that are counter-technologies designed to cope with the consequences of teaching in a classroom, a lot of which are not altogether wise. Many of those constraints do not exist online, and yet we continue to do very similar things, especially those that control and dictate what students should do, as well as when, and how they should do it. This makes no sense, and is actually antagonistic to the natural flow of online learning. I provided a few simple ideas and prompts for thinking about how to go more with the flow.

The presentation was only 20 minutes of a lively and inspiring hour-long session, which was fantastic fun and provided me with many interesting questions and a chance to expand further on the ideas.

uottawa2020HowDistanceChangesEverything

Beyond learning outcomes

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What we teach, what a student learns, what we assess This is a slide deck for a talk I’m giving today, at a faculty workshop, on the subject of learning outcomes.

I think that well-considered learning outcomes can be really helpful when planning and designing learning activities, especially where there is a need to assess learning. They can help keep a learning designer focused, and to remember to ensure that assessment activities actually make a positive contribution to learning. They can also be helpful to teachers while teaching, as a framework to keep them on track (if they wish to remain on track).  However, that’s about it. Learning outcomes are not useful when applied to bureaucratic ends, they are very poor descriptors of what learning actually happens, as a rule, and they are of very little (if any) use to students under most circumstances (there are exceptions – it’s a design issue, not a logical flaw).

The big point of my talk, though, is that we should be measuring what students have actually learned, not whether they have learned what we think we have taught, and that the purpose of everything we do should be to support learning, not to support bureaucracy.

I frame this in terms of the relationships between:

  • what we teach (what we actually teach, not just what we think we are teaching, including stuff like attitudes, beliefs, methods of teaching, etc),
  • what a student learns in the process (an individual student, not students as a whole), and
  • what we assess (formally and summatively, not necessarily as part of the learning process).

There are many things that we teach that any given student will not learn, albeit that (arguably) we wouldn’t be teaching at all if learning were not happening for someone. Most students get a small subset of that. There are also many things that we teach without intentionally teaching, not all of them good or useful.

There are also very many things that students learn that we do not teach, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, it is normal for us to mandate this as part of a learning design: any mildly creative or problem-solving/inquiry-oriented activity will lead to different learning outcomes for every learner. Even in the most horribly regimented teaching contexts, students are the ones that connect everything together, and that’s always going to include a lot more than what their teachers teach.

Similarly, there are lots of things that we assess that we do not teach, even with great constructive alignment. For example, the students’ ability to string a sentence together tends to be not just a prerequisite but something that is actively graded in typical assessments.

My main points are that, though it is good to have a teaching plan (albeit that it should be flexible,  reponsive to student needs, and should accommodate serendipity)learning :

  • students should be participants in planning outcomes and
  • we should assess what students actually learn, not what we think we are teaching.

From a learning perspective, there’s less than no point in summatively judging what learners have not learned. However, that’s exactly what most institutions actually do. Assessment should be about how learners have positively changed, not whether they have met our demands.

This also implies that students should be participants in the planning and use of learning outcomes: they should be able to personalize their learning, and we should recognize their needs and interests. I use andragogy to frame this, because it is relatively uncontroversial, is easily understood, and doesn’t require people to change everything in their world view to become better teachers, but I could have equally used quite a large number of other models. Connectivism, Communities of Practice, and most constructivist theories, for instance, force us to similar conclusions.

I suggest that appreciative inquiry may be useful as an approach to assessment, inasmuch as the research methodology is purpose-built to bring about positive change, and its focus on success rather than failure makes sense in a learning context.

I also suggest the use of outcome mapping (and its close cousin, outcome harvesting) as a means of capturing unplanned as well as planned outcomes. I like these methods because they only look at changes, and then try to find out what led to those changes. Again, it’s about evaluation rather than judgment.

DT&L2018 spotlight presentation: The Teaching Gestalt

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The teaching gestalt  presentation slides (PDF, 9MB)

This is my Spotlight Session from the 34th Distance Teaching & Learning Conference, at Wisconsin Madison, August 8th, 2018. Appropriately enough, I did this online and at a distance thanks to my ineptitude at dealing with the bureaucracy of immigration. Unfortunately my audio died as we moved to the Q&A session so, if anyone who was there (or anyone else) has any questions or observations, do please post them here! Comments are moderated.

The talk was concerned with how online learning is fundamentally different from in-person learning, and what that means for how (or even whether) we teach, in the traditional formal sense of the word.

Teaching is always a gestalt process, an emergent consequence of the actions of many teachers, including most notably the learners themselves, which is always greater than (and notably different from) the sum of its parts. This deeply distributed process is often masked by the inevitable (thanks to physics in traditional classrooms) dominance of an individual teacher in the process. Online, the mask falls off. Learners invariably have both far greater control and far more connection with the distributed gestalt. This is great, unless institutional teachers fight against it with rewards and punishments, in a pointless and counter-productive effort to try to sustain the level of control that is almost effortlessly attained by traditional in-person teachers, and that is purely a consequence of solving problems caused by physical classroom needs, not of the needs of learners. I describe some of the ways that we deal with the inherent weaknesses of in-person teaching especially relating to autonomy and competence support, and observe how such pedagogical methods are a solution to problems caused by the contingent side effects of in person teaching, not to learning in general.

The talk concludes with some broad characterization of what is different when teachers choose to let go of that control.  I observe that what might have been Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest creation was his effective learning process, without which none of the rest of his creations could have happened. I am hopeful that now, thanks to the connected world that we live in, we can all learn like Leonardo, if and only if teachers can learn to let go.

Strategies for successful learning at AU

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Earlier today I responded to a prospective student who was, amongst other things, seeking advice on strategies for success on a couple of our self-paced programming courses. My response was just a stream of consciousness off the top of my head but I think it might be useful to others. Here, then, with some very light editing to remove references to specific courses, are a few fairly random thoughts on how to succeed on a self-paced online programming course (and, for the most part, other courses) at Athabasca University. In no particular order:

  • Try to make sure that people close to you know what you are doing and, ideally, are supportive. Other people can really help, not just for the mechanical stuff but for the emotional support. Online learning, especially the self-paced form we use, can feel a bit isolating at times, but there are lots of ways to close the gap and they aren’t all found in the course materials and processes. Find support wherever you can.
  • Make a schedule and try to keep to it, but don’t blame yourself if your deadlines slip a bit here and there – just adjust the plan. The really important thing is that you should feel in control of the process. Having such control is one of the huge benefits of our way of teaching, but you need to take ownership of the process yourself in order to experience the benefits.
  • If the course provides forums or other social engagement try to proactively engage in them. Again, other people really help.
  • You will have way more freedom than those in traditional classrooms, who have to follow a teacher simply because of the nature of physics. However, that freedom is a two-edged sword as you can sometimes be swamped with choices and not know which way to go. If you are unsure, don’t be afraid to ask for help. But do take advantage of the freedom. Set your own goals. Look for the things that excite you and explore further. Take breaks if you are getting tired. Play. Take control of the learning process and enjoy the ride.
  • Enjoy the challenges. Sometimes it will be hard, and you should expect that, especially in programming courses like these. Programming can be very frustrating at times – after 35 years of programming I can still spend days on a problem that turns out to involve a misplaced semi-colon! Accept that, and accept that even the most intractable problems will eventually be solved (and it is a wonderful feeling when you do finally get it to work). Make time to sleep on it. If you’re stuck, ask for help.
  • Get your work/life/learning balance right. Be realistic in your aspirations and expect to spend many hours a week on this, but make sure you make time to get away from it.
  • Keep a learning journal, a reflective diary of what you have done and how you have addressed the struggles, even if the course itself doesn’t ask for one. There are few more effective ways to consolidate and connect your learning than to reflect on it, and it can help to mark your progress: good to read when your motivation is flagging.
  • Get used to waiting for responses and find other things to learn in the meantime. Don’t stop learning because you are waiting – move on to something else, practice something you have already done, or reflect on what you have been doing so far.
  • Programming is a performance skill that demands constant and repeated practice. You just need to do it, get it wrong, do it again, and again, and again, until it feels like second nature. In many ways it is like learning a musical instrument or maybe even driving. It’s not something you can learn simply by reading or by being told, you really have to immerse yourself in doing it. Make up your own challenges if you run out of things to do.
  • Don’t just limit yourself to what we provide. Find forums and communities with appropriate interests. I am a big fan of StackOverflow.com for help and inspiration from others, though relevant subreddits can be useful and there are many other sites and systems dedicated to programming. Find one or two that make sense to you. Again, other people can really help.

Online learning can be great fun as long as you are aware of the big differences, primarily relating to control and personal agency. Our role is to provide a bit of structure and a supportive environment to enable you to learn, rather than to tell you stuff and make you do things, which can be disconcerting at first if you are used to traditional classroom learning. This puts more pressure on you, and more onus on you to organize and manage your own learning, but don’t ever forget that you are not ever really alone – we are here to help.

In summary, I think it really comes down to three big things, all of which are really about motivation, and all of which are quite different when learning online compared to face-to-face:

  1. Autonomy – you are in control, but you must take responsibility for your own learning. You can always delegate control to us (or others) when the going gets hard or choices are hard to make, but you are always free to take it back again, and there will be no one standing over you making you do stuff apart from yourself.
  2. Competence – there are few things more satisfying than being able to do more today than you could do yesterday. We provide some challenges and we try to keep them difficult-but-achievable at every stage along the way, but it is a great idea for you to also seek your own challenges, to play, to explore, to discover, especially if the challenges we offer are too difficult or too boring. Reflection can help a lot with this, as a means to recognize what, how, and why you have learned.
  3. Relatedness – never forget the importance of other people. You don’t have to interact with them if you don’t want to do so (that’s another freedom we offer), but it is at the very least helpful to think about how you belong in our community, your own community, and the broader community of learners and programmers, and how what and how you are learning can affect others (directly or indirectly).

This advice is by no means comprehensive! If you have other ideas or advice, or things that have worked for you, or things that you disagree with, do feel free to share them in the comments.