Universities and the Domino's Effect

How can the university sector best respond to the rise of online learning, and what will be the impact on teaching, learning, the student experience and the physical infrastructure of university campuses?

By and large, the rise of online learning has caught universities woefully unprepared. The "flipped" classroom, massive online courses, open educational resources, private-sector online commercial providers - at an institutional level these are all seen as recent threats to a university sector struggling to respond to a new reality. At the individual level, lecturers often seem to be fighting a losing battle for the hearts and minds of their students - dropping attendances at lectures, a reliance on recordings and online notes in lieu of face-to-face engagement; I have more than once seen lecturers vainly request for the university wireless network to be turned off during lectures to prevent the students logging into Facebook when they should be attending to the sage on the stage.

But this is curious. As research-intensive instituions, universities typically are among the first to embrace new technologies that support academic work - from the first electronic library catalogues, through discipline-based newsgroups and email lists, to online journals, new technologies have happily and quickly been embraced by the research community. So why have we as a sector so clumsily and cantankerously engaged with new technologies for teaching and learning?

The answer is simple: it's because education is not pizza.

Since the 1980s we have seen four factors working together to fundamentally shift the way we think about and organise higher education. A rapid increase in the percentage of the population which attends university has led to a "mass-production" model of teaching. University managers can now talk about "efficient mechanisms for content delivery" with straight faces - ignoring the fact that there is nothing actually delivered during learning; nothing changes hands. Second, the increasing cost to the student since the introduction of HECS has resulted in a far more transactional model of education: what do students "get" for their money? Thirdly, partly as a consequence of both students and the Government wanting to know exactly what they are paying for, we have seen increasingly prescriptive requirement for univesities and teachers to spell out exactly what students need to do, what they will learn, and how this will be assessed. Opportunities for learning to be subjective, to be about personal growth and the serendipity of epiphany, are squeezed out in favour mundane learning outcomes that can be measurably demonstrated by the majority of a student cohort. Finally, a much larger university population, with very diverse aspirations and equally diverse levels of ability, all of whom are paying substantial sums for their courses, has led to degree structures and options dominated by the market: students choose their courses from a menu available, and only popular choices are sustainable within an increasingly tight resource environment.

Attending a modern university is uncomfortably like placing an order with Domino's: choose your options online from what's available and affordable, and the university will attempt to deliver your educational content as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rarely will you have your content delivered by a pimply-faced youth on a motor scooter; more usually you will be placed in a lecture theatre with 400 other people and have your content delivered by a lecturer who for two hours bravely wades upstream through a river of facts. But the business model is the same.

Now, before you write me off as an old fogey pining for the bygone golden age of education (i.e. whenever I happened to do my own undergraduate degree), let me say that I am in complete support of the four factors I have identified. I believe Australia needs mass participation in higher education, which therefore needs to be sustainable, accountable, and demonstrate value for money. I also am in favour of student choice, as the research evidence suggests (unsurprisingly) that students learn better if they are studying a subject that interests them. However I believe that the factors dominating recent trends in HE have led universities to a model of education that is wrong-headed: one that sees education as about the "delivery" of "content".

Early misadventures in online learning enthusiastically embraced the notion of "content delivery". Put the content online for the students to download themselves and you don't even need to pay for the lecturer! How efficient a mechanism for delivery. But the experience of the last decade as shown us how educationally undernourished this leaves the students. Learning by absorbing content simply doesn't work very well, and the new online environments merely reinforce this point. Interestingly, the history of the internet parallels the history of online learning. The late 1990s and early 200s was the era of Web 1.0 - static online content: company web pages and large slabs of course content. The commercial and social web has moved on to 2.0 and beyond. The educational web hasn't, quite.

Educational theory and research-based practice is at odds with the "content delivery" model. Learning is fundamentally a social activity - it happens when your ideas are challenged or put to the test by others: teachers, tutors, authors, peers, even your own students. Ultimately we can never measure how much "content" has been absorbed by a student; we can't know what they know. We can only watch what they do - what they say, write, paint, play ... The origin of universities themselves stems from this recognition that learning comes through interaction, challenge and debate. Plato's Academy was founded on this principle that one learns though dialogue. The "colleges" of mediaeval Oxford and Cambridge were spaces in which intellectual fellow-travellers, "colleagues", came to learn from each other. Curricula are all well and good, but a good deal of research shows that a great deal of learning - perhaps the majority - occurs in the extra- and intra-curricular spaces where students, teachers and colleagues interact spontaneously and creatively.

The point many universities still miss is that online technologies are radical in that they connect people dialogically like never before. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have allowed virtual colleges - communities of like-minded individuals - to spring up regardless of geographic and institutional borders. If I want to find something out, nowadays I'll go online and ask an expert. If I say something stupid, chances are I'll say it online and get called on it by a collegue in Newcaste-on-Tyne or Accra or Alaska (to think of three examples from last week). And I'll probably learn something as a result. As a music and education academic, I have two distinct professional and disciplinary spaces online. Even more interesting, the social community from which I learned the most - a multi-disiplinary gaggle of individuals who were my student colleagues at Magdalen College, Oxford, twenty years ago - has reconstituted itself online in recent years, and has resumed being one of the (now virtual) places where I learn. Not formally; but very deeply.

The pianist Arthur Schnabel once said this of his ability to perform profound and moving music: "I don't think I handle the notes much differently from other pianists. But the spaces between the notes - ah, there is where the artistry lies!". I could paraphrase this for education - "The content of university degrees is nowadays much of a muchness. But the spaces between the content - ah, that's where the learning happens!". Those spaces are increasingly online. And unless universities are able to rethink the fundamental paradigm and business model they use to manage education, from one predicated on "content delivery" back to one predicated on dialogue and communication, they will find that they will be increasingly on the margins of where the educational action is in the twenty-first century.

Online learning - why bother?

So this is a blogpost as rant/cry for help. I have read plenty of these before, but never written one.

I'm Head of Musicology at ANU School of Music, and Chair of the Education Committee there.

My main responsibilities in the first job are to coordinate the academic areas of music students' study - music history, cultural inquiry, music theory and analysis, non-western musics - and to teach the first-year course in same (of course the most important course the students take!). I'm just coming off a hugely successful blended course in first semester, about which I am presenting at Moodle Moot AU in a month.

In the second part of my job (Chair of Education Committee) I'm responsible for coordinating the introduction of a wholly new BMus degree by 2013, one that is built upon principles of flexibility, student-centered learning, and makes full use of current and future learning technologies.

Just now, I have had to make a change in staffing for music theory teaching in semester 2: the person scheduled to teach it now won't be. So, looking to make an opportunity out of adversity, I decided to teach the course myself, online.

Now, this makes excellent pedagogic sense. Learning music theory requires students to learn a set of skills and concepts that are essentially compositional: how to put notes together to make coherent structures of pitch and voice. They do this individually - while I am a big fan of group learning, music theory is probably one thing that needs an individual focus. But the plus side of this is that students can work at their own pace - theory is probably best taught asynchronously, with the students having as much (or as little) time as they need to tinker, to get it right. There is minimal "content" - the notion of a music theory lecture is almost absurd. The students need to practise these skills, sometimes many times (thus whetting my appetite for a gaming-based course progression). They need individual feedback on their attempts - an individual dialogue with me the tutor. They above all need to hear their work, see it written down, and make corrections - music theory is an ideal instance for multimedia learning.

For all these reasons, music theory is just made for online learning, if it's put together well. I intend to put together 16 or so 15-minute podcasts - all of which can be accessed from the beginning of the course - with me talking through some concepts and examples while the student see them unfold on the score. The students will then work through some examples themselves, which I'll post as MusicXML files; they can upload their attempts, with questions, and I'll give them feedback.  As they successfully complete the exercises, this will unlock new pathways and concepts.  I'll stream the students into groups on Moodle so they can see the questions and feedback of students at about their level. I'll give extension/creative work for the students who really have a flair, and who want to extend the slightly artificial world of the harmony exercise into full-blown composition. Finally, I'll offer a two-hour "drop in" face-to-face opportunity each week, if the students really and literally need me to hold their hands as they complete these exercises. Summative assessment will by the submission of a folio of sixteen completed exercises. They can do all these in week one, or in week twelve, or do one or two a week - whatever suits them.

Now the rant part.

So, I explain all this to my colleagues who I am supposedly leading to a bold new educational future, expecting at the very least some thanks for bailing them out of a difficult staffing situation. But what do I get? Sheer, unadulterated horror at the idea of the students not getting "face-to-face support". An automatic assumption that online learning is to save time and cut corners. That is is second-rate. One colleague, a very nice guy, even offered to take some tutorials himself, if I didn't have time, so "the students weren't disadvantaged".

I patiently explained that the students were going to be better supported this way than if I had crammed them into tutorial groups of twenty and spent two hours wandering about looking over their shoulders correcting consecutive fifths; that in fact, doing it online was going to take considerably more of my time than doing it face-to-face (LOTS of preparation time and LOTS of feedback time, whereas face to face I could literally do with no preparation, half asleep); but that the reason why I'd teach it online was to give the students a better-quality learning experience.

No dice. The colleagues offered sheer, blank incomprehension of this argument; worse, a smug certainty that, whatever I said, they were never going to question their own assumption that being in the holy physical presence of the divine lecturer was going to be a superior learning experience, come what may.

Must be something in the deodorant they wear, I guess.

So, frankly, I'm wondering why I should even bother. I'm going to be putting myself out doing something innovative (but not all that innovative!), something better - but I'll have several vultures looking over my shoulder waiting for something to go wrong. I feel like binning the whole idea, and hiring some matronly back-room piano teacher to drill the poor buggers in cadences, Dulcie Holland style, for two hours a week for thirteen weeks.

I'm not going to, of course. I'm going to go ahead with my plans. But I'd really appreciate some moral support from the eLearning crowd who might have been here before.

Knowledge and Learning: Our Imaginary Friends

I have just now returned from giving a paper in part about the metaphorical narratives we use to describe education. Like my Implementing VC 2.0 talk, it depended in part on a body of theoretical, indeed epistemological concepts which the audience had neither the time nor the interest to engage with. I therefore glossed over them. But maybe it's worth jotting down a few ideas here.

Knowledge is an imaginary construct. It has no physical reality.

This is a fundamental fact over which we gloss so easily when we construct metaphors for education that involve pouring quantities of knowledge into the heads of students. Educationally-informed academics nowadays know to pay lip service to the idea that education conceived as the transmission of information from teacher to student is a Bad Thing. "Puts students in a passive role and contributes to student disengagement!" they chant. "Symptomatic of surface rather than deep learning" goes the hymn.

But how many realize that the notion that information is a commodity that can be transported from one head to another is simply an epistemological and semiotic impossibility? Knowledge doesn't exist. Or rather, it exists only in the same way as unicorns exist. Or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

There is a quantity of secondary textual evidence pointing, rather messily, ambiguously, and contingently, to certain possibilities ("The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Centigrade" is not in itself a fact, merely a reference to an imaginary "fact" seemingly simple, but easily messed about with. Just go up a mountain). There are real and observable behaviors which we take as evidence of "facts" (when I cook peppercorn sauce I put the brandy in before the cream as I "know" the boiling point of alcohol is lower than that of water. Actually, this is a huge leap of faith based on secondary texts and my repeated testing of the hypothesis, not knowledge at all). There is no "naked" fact: discrete, bounded, true.

If you think this sounds like a simplistic mish-mash of basic scientific method and undergraduate poststructuralism, you are right. It is elementary. So why on earth is it that so much educational theory and practice is predicated on the idea (or at least shorthand) that knowledge has an independent reification to the extent that it can be "generated" or "transferred"? Like electricity?

The misconception then infects our concept of "learning", if conceived as the acquisition of knowledge, the level and completeness of which acquisition can then be measured, validly and reliably, through assessment. But it's not that at all. Because knowledge isn't real, we can't measure it: instead we purport to use the proxy measures reflecting knowledge acquired (what the students say, write, think and do after having been 'educated'). But this misses the essential point that Dewey tried to tell us so long ago: what the students say, write, think and do is the learning: learning is the progress of the indissoluble transaction between "self", "society" and "world", all three of which are inseparable and labels for relationships of power and meaning, not things in and of themselves.

This is why I am instinctively drawn to online learning. The ability to more completely capture the "trace" of this transaction - debris of text, speech, images, music and whatever else that the learners leave as the process of learning unfolds is greater online than face to face.

This Christmas will be the first in which my seven-year-old son no longer believes in Santa. A beloved "fact" has bitten the dust. I can tell that by the trace, what he says and does. He no longer will lie in bed listening for bells and the sound of reindeer hooves, craning for a glimpse of Rudolph's growing nose.

Knowledge has been gained? No, in this case, lost: knowledge of a cheerful, unconditional magical gift-giver having been replaced by a complex, insecure, anxiety-filled understanding that what was previously a certainty is now contingent on (in his case) less-than-dependable parental relationships. Bittersweet, at best. Knowledge has proven to be an undependable entity.

But yes, Virginia, learning has occurred.

Location:ANU

A Tale of Two Releases

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of evidence-based quantitative-meta-analysis-driven value-free decision-making.

I am incredulous.

Two releases announced today have confirmed my bifurcated faith and despair in the times in which we live.  One was the release of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi after nearly two decades of house arrest.  The other was the release of Investing in Our Teachers, Investing in Our Economy, a report on school education from the Grattan Institute.   The report outlined evidence for the proposition that "“improving teacher effectiveness benefits our children. ... [but] ... the drive to reduce class sizes, whilst well intentioned and politically popular, is found to be without impact in producing better education outcomes for students."

These two releases might seem entirely unconnected.  Indeed, that is part of the problem.  What they throw into stark relief is the confusion that reigns in our public discourse about how we measure value.

In any quantitative terms, the impact of Suu Kyi's release is miniscule.  Nothing has changed in the Burmese regime; no material, constitutional or even spiritual benefit will flow to the Burmese people as a direct result of the release of a single individual.  She holds no office, has no authority, and her now being free to go about her work will make no appreciable impact on the Burmese GDP.

But the symbolic power of the event - its capacity to touch hearts and minds, to shape attitudes and behaviours - is immense.  "The symbolic importance of Aung San Suu Kyi, the only prisoner of conscience in Burma who is a truly global figure, is not lost on anyone" wrote the Asian Human Rights Commission on Friday.  "Her captivity symbolizes the captivity of her country: the captivity of over 50 million others to the whims and dictates of army officers who have shown manifestly, time and again, that they hold office to serve only themselves and theirs."

This is a game-changing event.  Though it has no measurable outcomes, its value is literally inestimable.  I do not use this word as a cliched alternative for "very, very big", or as an excuse for poor economics.  I mean precisely that the release of Aung San Suu Kyi has an impact and significance in an area of human behaviour in which quanitative measurements, or estimates, are simply not relevant.  She stands as lightning rod for the energy of freedom, in Burma and in the wider world.  Lightning may strike next week, or next year, or never - it is impossible to predict - but her power as a symbolic catalyst for change is palpable.

Heady stuff.  

By contrast, to open and begin to read Investing in Our Teachers, Investing in Our Economy is like sliding into a bath of lukewarm jello.  It puts together a case carefully constructed from a number of existing studies and evidence (there is no new or original research).   It finds a correlation between educational outcomes of students, educational performance of teachers, and national economic benefit.  Seemingly there has been negligible benefit from reduction in class sizes. "Teacher effectiveness is the key: not class sizes. This is the best policy lever for improving schooling for students and giving parents what they want. It will provide more bang for our education buck."

And here is where I am tempted to despair.  I have no quibble with the research methodology: the report measures what can be measured, quite well.  But it ignores what cannot be measured, and this is its problem.  There is a myriad of statistics proving that "a 10% increase in teacher effectiveness would improve test scores by 19 PISA points and put Australia amongst the best performing education systems in the world" or that "the impact of a one standard deviation increase in test scores [would be] GDP growth between 0.8%-1.2%".

But amid the statictics, I looked in vain for a description of any sort of "teacher effectiveness" I recognised.
Where were the effective (and beloved) teachers of my childhood?

Where was Mrs Oakland, my Year 2 teacher, who taught me that with achievement should come humility?  Where was my only openly gay teacher who in year 11 taught me that it was braver to be tolerant than to be closed-minded?  Where was Mr Fergusson, who taught me that words have real power, to shape our thoughts and values?

Making something into a number does not make it a fact.  It sounds scientific to say "for Australian school education systems to be amongst the best in the world, students would need to learn 5% more in each year of their schooling.  We estimate that this improvement would occur if all Australian teachers were 10% more effective, or if the least effective 14% of Australian teachers improved to the level of teachers at the 14th percentile".  But actually, that is supposition wrapped up as mumbo-jumbo.  What does it actually mean "to learn 5% more in each year of schooling"?  What sort of qualities does a teacher have who is "the level of teachers at the 14th percentile"?   These aren't facts, these are aspirations wrapped in numbers to give them a veneer of objectivity.

If I want aspirations, thank you very much, I'd prefer the symbol of Aung San Suu Ky.  Or my high school teacher Mrs Moulton, who taught me that, with enough courage, effort and compassion, the boy I was could actually become the man I dreamed to be.

Investing in Our Teachers, Investing in Our Economy measures what can be measured: numeracy and litercy scores. Like the MySchools website, it is silent on the rest: on values, community, role models, symbols.  These things can't be tested, and can't be quantified.  But they are important.  Immeasurably important.

Inestimably important.

In classrooms across the country, every school day, teachers are teaching our children maths and reading.  But they are also teaching them how to cooperate, how to value the things our society values, how to lead full and happy and profitable lives.  Very often they teach these qualities not by lecturing on the topic, but simply by being the sort of people our children can admire, respect, and aspire to be like. 

Just like Aung San Suu Ky.

Implementing VC 2.0 in a Moodle-Intensive University

Abstract

The evolution of Moodle towards Moodle 2.0 is not merely a technological development.  To get the most out of the new LMS, there are of course pedagogical issues and opportunities; but there are also institutional and managerial issues and opportunities.  The defining characteristic of Web 2.0 is not technological, but  conceptual: the envisioning of the web as a collaborative space,  flexible, interactive, and driven by the people, for the web is ultimately not a web of information but a web of people (learners and teachers, users and abusers, twits and facebookworms and whomever else).  This is a fundamental paradigm shift which Moodle has always embraced and which, arguably, accounts for Moodle's increasing popularity over other more transmission-based elearning platforms. Conveniently for eLearning enthusiasts, this conceptual change from transmission to interactivity precisely parallels a similar change in the quality and qualities of learning, away from passive "stand and deliver" teaching-centered pedagogical models to those which place the student at the centre of the educational experience.  Thus "Learning 2.0" became a wry catchphrase at the recent Moodle Moot in Melbourne; Moodle 2.0 straddles both these shifts in education and web communication.

University managements are also centrally preoccupied with envisioning  the imminent future of both education and the technologies that support it.  They carry the responsibility to determine policy, allocate resources, and advocate to Government in the interests of teachers, learners, and the people and systems who support teaching and learning.  However, understanding of the conceptual and paradigm shifts occurring within education, the web, and the relation between the two is at best uneven across the executive management levels in Australian Universities.  Consequently, those who are responsible for operating at the Moodle coalface have often also to advise, negotiate and wrestle with managerial issues in a decision-making environment problematised by widely different and conflicting paradigms of education, and of Moodle's role in the educational process.

This paper makes a case for the need to implement a new model of university manager; a Dean, PVC or VC 2.0 who is comfortable and articulate within the new conceptual, technological and pedagogical spaces.

Assessment, achievement, and the archaeology of university politics.

Robert Burgess, VC of the University of Leicester, gave the keynote at the second day of the iPed 2010 Conference in Coventry. He has for seven years been steering a process that seeks to revise assessment, degree classification and academic credit.

His overview of this seven-year process betrayed his evident weariness with the propensity of the Government, the media, and the sector to reduce the complexity of some of the issues into simplistic terms (such as the abolition of the Honours Degree Classification).

First, he outlined a familiar story; the nature of change in Higher Education over the last two decades. Key issues for assessment that arise from these changes include:

- move from elite to mass Higher Education system;
- changes in the sector, students, pedagogy, curriculum;
- robust international reputation of the Honours degree;
- increased personal investment in education from students (fees) requires a more transparent, robust and detailed record of what the student has a tautly achieved.

To respond to these and other imperatives, Burgess' review recommended the replacement of the Honours Classification System with a portfolio-like Higher Education Achievement Record. This would provide a more detailed record of student activities and strengths, down to the level of the type and nature of the individual assessment tasks completed. All very sensible stuff, if not rocket science.

However, as is typical in the political game of university education, Burgess was unable to persuade the sector to abolish the Honours classification system, thus the HEAR will be introduced in parallel with the existing classifications. Thus another archaeological stratum of practice is laid down on top of, but not replacing, the previous concepts and practices.

Why are universities so unable to clear away the artifacts and relics of previous practice to respond to changed circumstance? What has for decades seemed like a quaint and decorative fascination with tradition now threatens to make the relevance of many still-current university approaches to education genuinely questionable. Times have actually changed.

A new ethics for Web 2.0? I'll drink to that

Time to get personal!

The boundary between the personal and the professional was a thread that wound its way through this morning's debate on ethics.

Steve Wheeler traversed the territory of the ethics of Web 2.0 engagingly. He started by taking a photo of us all and threatening to post it to Facebook. How would we feel? What are the issues? What if the photo were of us reeling out of the conference bar at 11.00 pm? Steve argued that the new issue introduced by social media is their persistence. Existing paradigms no longer obtain: we need new bottles for new wine.

In one sense this is true. Our behaviour is governed and limited by codes, laws, guidelines and professional expectations that are derived, ultimately, from ethical considerations. These codes no longer fit comfortably to regulate our online behaviour for many of the reasons Wheeler observed. John Traxler had earlier made the distinction between ethics as regulatory practice, and a "lighter, informal ethics" that is about our individual non-professional behaviour. But how easy is it now to separate the two?

However, are the underlying ethical issues all that different? Privacy, respect, obscenity, tolerance, freedom - all the value-laden ethical signifiers are as relevant as ever. Or are they?

Frances Bell examined one aspect of this question in detail. She explored the fuzzification of the "public/private" binary opposition that occurs in the digital world, and called on educators to exercise a responsibility to model and make explicit ethical behaviors for our students. But for me, this begs the question as to what constitutes ethical behaviour in a world of public/private confusion.

Andy Black seemed to relish the confusion. He cited the tangled timelines of his Twitter feed, wi running, canoeing, general observation and educational reflection interweaving. This is my personal enthusiasm, I will admit. In Andy's Twitter feed, we cannot escape the human being, separate it off from the professional identity. Sure, Web 2.0 makes it necessary to do this more explicitly and overtly. If we want to! Surely this is a key ethical point; that we can now actively destroy the boundary not so much between public and private, but between personal and impersonal? Our learning and teaching (among other online behaviors) can be now more personal and intimate. This almost certainly allows it to be more powerful: and this ups the ante, increase the risk of success or disaster.

This is the point that engages me. Are these technologies in fact redefining the underlying concepts which determine our ethics (concepts like "privacy" and "freedom")?

Karl Royle's slightly oblique presentation on ethics and gaming was neatly complemented by Mark Childs, who immediately raised the issue of "seriousness" in how various online experiences ( for example, Second Life) are treated by students and observers. Students sometimes reject participation, and their reasons and reasoning are illuminating. This notion of seriousness was one of the points he has observed (students not taking online social media learning opportunities as serious); others were new ways of attachment to online environments, the potential for deception, the potential for disturbing or unfamiliar social (or anti-social) behaviors. His most telling example was to do with offense. Some students refused to or worried about participation because of the potential for them to be offended.

Do students have the the right not to be offended? Can education take place in a "walled garden" in which individuals can be protected from challenge? Not intellectual challenge, obviously - but Mark was essentially asking us the question "do we have a responsibility to protect students from ethical or moral challenge, or indeed do we have a responsibility to challenge students ethically?"

It probably is clear already that I would favor the second approach. Much of the experience that social media provides can be deeply confronting. But confrontation, I would argue, is a central part of education. I think we have a tendency to cocoon students in tailored learning environments, when we think about "meeting student needs". But what a student needs is not always what makes them comfortable. Sometimes, students need to be challenged and confronted, and sometimes even offended.

(As do conference plenary audiences! The ethics of this are not always simple, as we found yesterday morning.)

Finally, James Clay asked the question that had been the elephant in the room. "Who determines the framework of right and wrong behavior in our (online) lives?". The clearest answer from the panel was "the Ethics committee". Which just missed the point, of course.

Location:Nottingham,United Kingdom

Waiting for the sea-change

Richard Noss, in his initial introduction to the conference as a whole, answered my first key question, as an Australian coming (back) to the UK to think about teaching and learning. By and large, the awaited radical transformation - the sea-change, if you will - has yet to occur in the ways in which technology and new paradigms of social communication fundamentally shift the way we teach and learn.

This is clearly true of Australia, but my question had been to what extent the much more overtly policy-driven agenda towards e-Learning in the UK had been effective. What I am hearing initially is: not all that much. As Noss pointed out, the transformation in other parts of our lives (social, financial; who doesn't bank online nowadays?) has been rapid and pervasive. Likewise in both Australia and the UK, dramatic shifts in the nature and culture in HE have taken place as a result of other external drivers (student fees, internationalization, widening access).





So why do we sit here, waiting for the sea-change? Even those who avowedly rally to turn back the tide, fighting a rear-guard action against the evils of technology in the classroom, appear to be fighting phony war. When will come the large scale institutional commitment to drive whole universities into the forward into the utopia or dystopia of the future.

Saul Tendler, somewhat perfunctorily, took a contrary view, and talked about the transformation he had seen over the past twenty years. However in his passing reference to "new ways to deliver material", he revealed that while the available gadgets, bells and whistles may have changed, his paradigms of learning had, maybe, not. "Deliver material": the junk mail paradigm of teaching and learning.

But Donald Clark returned to the theme that "nothing much changed". The ways in which physics, for instance, is being taught now remains the same as it was when Clark was a student thirty years ago. Clark used the lecture as a metonym for the intractability of higher education practice, and observed teachers' unwillingness, in the main, to adopt a research-informed, scientific or reflective attitude to their own practice or to the nature of learning as causal.

Systematically, Clark destroyed the rationale for the lecture as a teaching method. "It's not just that that the great majority of lectures are shit ... The method itself is flawed ... it's a fossil, a mediaeval relic. ... We have to have a more sophisticated view of the solution to this problem than just to shove them down on tape.". The passivity; the lack of critical reflection or collaboration; the lack of practice or repetition; the lack of collaboration; the cognitive overload: these are all persuasive arguments as to why the lecture is an unsuitable learning experience.




Clark's review of the history, philosophy and etymology of the lecture was an entertaining tour-de-force. But by and large, he was preaching to the converted. The talk was more motivational than informative - and that was no bad thing. Those of us committed to transforming education for the better could deal with a morale boost.

Yes, we are convinced. The lecture is bunk. So WHY, Donald, WHY do we continue to subject our students to an uninteresting and unedifying diet of second- and third-rate lecture experiences? This is the question, which was left haning.

Which brings us back to my original question. Why - given the technologies available to us, the prevalence of leadership committee to transformation in at least some parts of many of our institutions, and the decade or more that has passed since we have been trying - why are we still waiting for the sea change?

That sad truth about most contemporary higher education is that it is not rich or strange. On the contrary: it is poor and ordinary.

Poster presentation uploaded

My poster presentation "'Open the Pod-Bay doors, please, HAL': narratives of crisis in e-learning in HE" has been uploaded to the conference website.  You can view the whole thing here

I didn't get to post all the individual narratives as discussion topics here - ran out of time.  However I really am interested in whether certain observations or assertions I make obtain more widely.  For instance, how relevant is this twelve-year-old conceptualisation of the "Lone Ranger"?  In my experience at my institution, very relevant.  But perhaps ANU is unusually archaic?

The Lone Ranger is a familiar figure on the e-learning landscape. The innovative individualist, pursuing his or her own idiosyncratic change agenda, is perhaps the most ubiquitous practitioner of e-learning, and as a strategy for establishing identity as a practitioner is arguably the only successful one at universities where the dominant paradigm for academic work is the traditional collegial model of an individual academic taking virtual sole responsibility for a course. Such a model still obtains most prevalently at research-intensive universities.

Peter Taylor's (1998) description of the Lone Ranger is still very much to the point:

"The overwhelming evidence is that the development of more flexible learning environments through the use of CITs has been energised and enacted primarily by lone rangers—individual staff members who are energetic, early adopters of innovation, and who are motivated by a desire to improve the accessibility and quality of their teaching. This phenomenon ... is consistent with the commitment of academics to the principle of professional autonomy. This is an innovation-driven approach to the development of new practices. But what are the outcomes?

There are some positives, and some negatives. The positives tend to cluster around the achievement of intentions--improvement in access, in retention rates, in the quality of teaching and learning. Some individuals even gain promotion. But the most important outcome is that these lone rangers have laid a foundation for new teaching methods based on the available CITs. In this sense, they have done much to create the potential to catch the CIT wave, and to make it pay off for students in substantive ways. These are extremely important outcomes, and should be celebrated and protected.

But there is also a downside. This approach has tended to produce innovation at the level of particular course offerings, but there has been a lack of institutional support and a failure to institutionalise the outcomes …In fact innovation often occurred in spite of this lack of institutional interest. ... Well-developed evaluations of such initiatives are rare. Where evaluations have been conducted, and reports written, little notice was or is taken of their findings or recommendations. …The lone ranger approach emphasises the importance of investing creative energy, but has done little to articulate that investment with the broader institutional context. This is a high cost, low return strategy."

The fascinating thing about this description of e-learning innovation in the mid-1990s is perhaps how relevant it remains. In the context of this paper, the lone ranger identity or narrative can be seen as a way of explicitly avoiding institutional engagement with change issues. Innovators can be characterised as individualists and thus functionally excluded from the educational decision-making process.

Competing narratives and eLearning

This diagram is more convincing in German, Ja?

In a couple of weeks, I'm presenting a paper at an eLearning conference.  It's about 'competing narratives' (used in a metaphorical sense, but also in a technical sense from the change management literature) at play in the implementation of new eLearning strategies in Higher Education.

If you're already bored, read no further; I'll post something sexy about music or politics in a while.

I'm going to use this blog to post segments of the paper for feedback from interested parties.

The idea of ‘competing narratives’ is a central one in the contemporary literature on change management. Before embarking on any major project or initiative within an organization there is likely to be significantly differing views on how to change, why to change, and, of course, whether to change at all. During the often turbulent process of change itself, individuals and discrete groups within the organization report quite different perceptions even of what it is that is, in fact, occurring. And after the project is complete, competing perceptions remain as to what, if anything, has changed; and if it has, whether for better or for worse (Ogbonna and Harris, 1998; Boddy and Paton, 2003). 

These competing narratives pose a challenge for managers.  While differences of perspective, priority and interpretation are an inevitable fact of organizational behavior, they nevertheless need to be incorporated within a structure or context that allows effective organizational operation.  For instance, structures that permit dissonant world views and competing narratives to paralyze decision-making lead to ineffectiveness and entrenched conflict. On the other hand, “structures which enable those with alternative views, based on detailed local knowledge, to articulate their interpretations of the project and its context … may at first be uncomfortable to those whose interpretations are thus challenged” but can nevertheless lead to successful outcomes for the project as a whole (Boddy and Paton, 2003).  Critical to such success is the centrality of trust in the process of management communication: trust that competing narratives are allowed to be heard, and valued as sincere.  The classic managerial mistake is to marginalize, discount, and therefore demonstrably distrust narratives and perspectives that differ from overarching institutional aims (Paton and McCalman, 2008).

This idea of competing narratives in the organizational change process has immediate resonance for those working to introduce educational innovation in contemporary universities. In particular, the narratives that surround the adoption or rejection of e-learning are distinctive, powerful and emotive.  If it is crucial to the establishment of relationships of trust that “those with alternative views … [can] articulate their interpretations”, and we take as read that academic communities are, in general, sites of confident and articulate verbal communication, one might naively assume that contemporary universities would handle competing narratives in the change management process relatively effectively. This is a questionable assumption.

Succeeding posts will identify several of these (perhaps fictional) narratives:

• 'Barbarians at the gates': the massifiaction of HE through technology
• 'o tempora! o mores!': the decline in standards caused by technology
• 'Open the pod-bay doors please, HAL': the dangers of technology
• 'The altar of efficiency': technology will make teaching cheaper. Oh, and produce a paperless office
• 'Into something rich and strange': if it's online, it's automatically better

Some Deep thinking about music and kids

Last Friday I attended the latest Canberra performance of the DeepBlue orchestra. http://deepblueorchestra.com/

Emerging out of QUT's Creative Industries area, DeepBlue seeks to redefine the idea of "orchestra" for the contemporary world. Essentially a small string band with a rhythm section, mixing desk and multimedia backdrop, the group performs music ranging from "straight" classical (Barber's Adagio for Strings) through contemporary compositions by Australian composers and members of the orchestra, to arrangements of pop songs. The performances themselves are choreographed and full of energy, visual excitement and, overwhelmingly, just good fun.

DeepBlue is strikingly successful in breaking through the customs and desiccated conventions of traditional classical performance. I could - and probably will - write about just how important I think this is from a purely artistic perspective. However, what really interests me here is the way in which they have rethought the educational side of their engagement with the public.

DeepBlue makes a point of collaborating with the young musicians in each town they play, with their YoungBlue program. Previously, a school or youth music string group would prepare in advance and then join the orchestra on stage for one of the items. This is a clever engagement strategy, but not all that new an idea.

For this tour, DeepBlue are using a different strategy. ANY young string players in the towns being played can sign up for this experience. They download the score and an mp3 of the piece, practise on their own (DeepBlue performs from memory and encourages the kids to do so too) and then get together for a single rehearsal and workshop (essentially choreographic) on the afternoon of the concert.

Kids on stage in the Canberra concert

This is new. This is actually educationally ground-breaking. It's more like a flash mob than a rehearsal, and works in a really positive way. The whole sense of "drilling" that characterizes SO MUCH of children's musical experience is absent: there is no martinet school music teacher hectoring the children into a technically polished (as if that is ever achieved) but emotionally lifeless version of the music. Instead, the children have to take responsibility for their own preparation, and with that responsibility comes confidence, and a sense that they "own" their own performance.

You can HEAR this confidence in the results. You can see it in their eyes. And it beautifully parallels the way in which the DeepBlue adult performers come across as a groups of individual personalities and diverse talents rather than a sort of orchestral music-making machine.  Interestingly, it is the technology that makes it possible: to download the scores and mp3s into one's own home is hardly ground-breaking technology, but it is only really now that it is the sort of second-nature technology for enough parents that such a scheme as this would be viable.

I saw a great performance last Friday: fresh, human, and in-your-face emotional. I'm not sure I saw the future of the orchestra - maybe it has many futures, or more likely none. But I think I saw the future of music education.

Indicators of Educational Quality

Finally, here's a reference to and abstract of a thoughtful paper which explores the competing notions of quality, and therefore its measurement, in Higher Education:

Tam, Maureen, "Measuring Quality and Performance in Higher Education" Quality in Higher Education 7/I, 2001, 47-54

The main argument of this paper emanates from an understanding that 'quality' is a highly contested concept and has multiple meanings to people who conceive higher education and quality differently. This paper attempts to analyse ways of thinking about higher education and quality; consider their relevance to the measurement of performance of universities and colleges; and explore their implications for the selection of criteria, approaches and methods for the assurance of quality in higher education. This paper also investigates various models of measuring quality in higher education, consider their value and discuss both their shortcomings and contributions to the assessment of higher education institutions. These models include the simple 'production model', which depicts a direct relationship between inputs and outputs; the 'value-added approach', which measures the gain by students before and after they receive higher education; and the 'total quality experience approach' which aims to capture the entire learning experience undergone by students during their years in universities or colleges.

MyParents

I'm proud to announce that my Government today has launched the MyParents website.

The My Parents website went live this morning and has had more than 1.5 million hits as Australian children have logged on to access comprehensive information about their own parents.

My Parents contains important information about each of Australia’s 3,120,000 parents including vital quantitative statistics such as the average amount of pocketmoney per child (normalized for parental income); average bedtime as a function of child age; how long per evening each parent spends reading with the child; and the relative severity of smacking.

Children and the wider community are also able to compare their parents' results with neighbouring families and up to 60 statistically similar families nationwide.

By comparing statistically similar parents, it will be clear which parents are doing well and which parents need an extra hand.

The Rudd Government is standing ready with new money and new targeted programs to help parents who are found to be struggling.  Only in the most extreme cases will families be closed down through underperformance.

However, the MyParents  website gives Australia children powerful new choices.  They will be able to bring transparency and evidence into their negotiations with parents.  Knowing that Little Johnny three doors down gets to go to bed twenty minutes later, or that children from households of similar levels of income receive $1.20 more pocketmoney per week, will empower Australian working children in their dialogue with parents as never before.

The Rudd Government is investing $550 million to improve the quality of parenting.  Children of underperforming parents will be able to apply for a SMARTEN-UP! Parental Intervention Grant,  with a comprehensive program of parental reinvigoration for designated families. The Rudd Government has also committed more than $2 billion to assist levels of pocketmoney in low socio-economic communities and marginal electorates.

The Rudd Government, together with child representatives, teachers and the Australian community, is working to ensure every Australian child in every family receives a world class experience.  Schools and other community organisations will be able to access the MyParents website to identify, and to provide positive feedback and advice to struggling parents.

The Rudd Government: helping Australian working families work harder.