Pedagogic Planning Tools: promises and challenges

1. Pedagogic Planning Tools: promises and challenges Helen Beetham e-learning consultant

2. The premise • Teaching is a human skill that can be enhanced by technology • Teaching is a different skill to learning, though in close dialogue with it • Teachers’ intentions can be articulated and enacted with the support of technology • Those articulations can be shared with other actors: • Teachers (case studies, exemplars, models) • Learners (designs, sequences, activities) • Other systems involved in the learning process (e.g. run-time systems, repositories of learning content, learner data, institutional administrative systems)

3. Planning, design and intentionality • A design should be generalisable across different situations • A plan should ‘work’ in one situation (for one institution, one cohort etc) • Different decisions are taken in practice: • Before real learners are enrolled (focus on what is to be learned and how) • After real learners are enrolled (focus on group management) • As learners are actually engaged in learning (focus on individual learning) • BUT these differences are products of the mass higher education system • Plans and designs must in practice both be contingent and flexible • Because learning is a contingent, responsive and personal activity • So there is a spectrum of educational design/planning, or ‘educational intentionality’, within which we need to ask…

4. Planning, design and intentionality • How do designers’ and teachers’ intentions (curriculum) accommodate learners’ intentions (my goals, my learning journey)? • What balance of scaffolding (design for learning) and flexibility (emergent intentions as learning), are productive: • For different kinds of learner? • For different kinds of curriculum? • When and how should teachers/designers intentions be made explicit? • (How) should they be represented to learners? To other educators? In the learning systems which support learners? • Which of our (design/planning) decisions are significant to learners? • i.e. what should we focus on when we ‘design for learning’? • What are the relationships among different decisions? • Logistical, technical or administrative constraints • Educationally meaningful relationships

5. course design session planning activity design realisation design LO development Design for learning 2006-08 • Exploring the use of existing tools (LAMS, Moodle) in different contexts • Adding functionality to existing tools (LAMS, ReLoad) • Building shareable outcomes of the design process (‘designs’, sequences, GLOs, exemplars) • Developing shareable representations of the design process (Phoebe wiki, LPP decision tree, DialogPlus toolkit) • Building an integrated planning tool to support design at the course and session level (LPP, Phoebe planning component)

6. LEARNING DESIGN MODULE 1 MODULE 1 MODULE 1 Allocate The JISC pedagogy planning tools • proof of concept(s) • testable prototypes • evaluation data from pilots • expose challenges - developmental and conceptual • gather requirements • explore with partnersthe feasibility of future development and usage

7. Two planners

8. The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing and sharing learning designs. • “we are trying to fashion a support tool that helps lecturers take a self-managed approach to innovation, and in a way that makes it easy for them to collaborate and build on the work of others.” Diana Laurillard, personal email Sept 2007 http://www.wle.org.uk/d4l/

9. Add in Learner need Add in a Learning design LEARNING DESIGN MODULE 3 MODULE 2 MODULE 4 WEEK 2 WEEK 1 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 Critique design Attributes Sequence Learners’ needs Critique Learning theory Select Learning Designs (Link to examples, cases) Given your analysis of your learners’ likely needs, please select from the list below those that correspond most closely to your analysis Understanding meaning of terms, special words Understanding, explaining processes within a system Motivation to do thorough research Understanding how properties of elements in a system relate to each other Justifications for key principles or relationships Seeing the familiar as problematic Understanding the value of new concepts At the session level, the decisions made at Module level for that Week are carried through, and a similar analysis begins at the next level. Then the user is conducted through their own ideas of learner needs, then is asked to select from a given list, to continue the scaffolded design.

10. Phoebe is a wiki-based pedagogic planner to promote innovative practice in Design for Learning • Phoebe is being seen (at staff development events) as a complement to LAMS… providing the up-front and contextual planning that it currently doesn’t support Liz Masterman, personal email Sept 2007 http://phoebe-project.conted.ox.ac.uk/

12. Challenges exposed • Development challenges • Lead to more refined understanding of requirements • Many of which are already being addressed by tools in development • More fundamental challenges • Require us to question where we are going

13. Development challenges Diversity of existing approaches to design

14. Development challenges Complexity and non-linearity of educational decision-making

15. Development challenges The need for contingent, emergent and flexible designs, giving teachers and learners scope to adapt the curriculum as they engage with it

16. Development challenges Diversity of educational activities and tools (and rapid change)

17. Development challenges Admission Stats E-Admission Learner Trails Pathways Advice Applicant Feedback Course Details Course Search Entry Requirements Course Advertising Learner Goals E-Application Entry Profiles Personal Statements References Evidence of Achievement Portfolio Acquired/Required Competence Curriculum Management Transcripts Personal Development Planning Course Approval Student Records Course Modification Assessment Results Range of institutional processes involved Course Reporting Course Provisioning LMS 15/10/2014| XCRI Briefing | Slide 17

18. Requirements (i) • Customisability for different users and contexts of use • Planning/design at the different levels of (e.g.) course, module, session, activity, learning object • Flexibility to take different paths and iterate between levels • Alternative interfaces for different tasks • To make explicit the underlying educational rationale for design decisions • To make explicit the consequences of design decisions in terms of the learner experience • To represent the context in a way can be shared • To support constructive alignment among the components of the curriculum such as topics, outcomes, methods, tools, staff resource and student workload

19. Requirements (ii) • Support for collaboration on and sharing of designs • Outputs of different types for learners, teachers, and institutional systems: • runnable instantiation of a design as a sequence of learning activities in a virtual learning environment (IMS LD) • outputs that can be consumed by institutional processes such as module validation and publication, module selection, assessment, timetabling, LR management (XCRI) • Ability to link with repositories of exemplary designs and curriculum resources • Ability to link with context-relevant advice and guidance • Ability to link with learner-related information systems to allow adaptation and instantiation of designs for specific cohorts and even individuals

20. Challenges: the fundamental questions • What do pedagogic planning tools add to existing (non-education-specific) planning tools, such as mind-mapping, decision-support software, even basic web authoring tools? • What do pedagogic planning tools add to existing educational tools (e.g. VLEs and CMSs) which increasingly have design/planning capabilities and viewpoints built in? • What do pedagogic planning tools add to social software solutions to sharing good practice?

21. Fundamental challenge: semantic interoperability i.e. how can educational intentions be meaningfully represented and shared?

22. Fundamental challenge: the rise of learner-owned technologies and content sharing services: do educators’ intentions actually matter any more?

23. Conclusions? Pedagogic planners could provide a focal point for drawing down teaching-centred services around the process of educational planning, as e-portfolios are becoming a focal point for drawing down learner-centred services around the process of personal development planning (and yes, the two need to interoperate!) Re-usable educational ‘memes’ or design elements can be shared using existing standards (e.g. IMS LD, XCRI): sharing educational purposes and contexts in a meaningful way is beyond the scope of existing standards

25. Design for Learning Programme 2004-2006 • ‘a set of practices carried out by learning professionals… defined as designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities which involve the use of technology, as part of a learning session or programme’ • The idea of ‘design’ embraced: • New educational roles • New modes of learning, and therefore of teaching • The need to represent and share educational ideas more explicitly • Design-type professional practices: innovation, user orientation, (re)interpretation in new contexts, iterative evaluation • Design-based systems to support practice

26. Lessons learned: phase 1 • Existing design practice is very varied, depending on departmental and personal preferences and historical precedents • Educational design tools are rarely experienced by practitioners as pedagogically neutral or as flexible enough to accommodate their existing practice • There is a need for tools that support collaborative design, contingent/responsive design, and effective sharing of design processes and outcomes • Practitioners want rich expressions of pedagogical purpose and context, but also bite-sized curriculum elements that can easily be re-purposed and re-used • Design processes need to be integrated with other processes and resources (e.g. LORs, VLEs, learner-related data) if design practice is to be transformed

29. Models of learning and teaching • All approaches emphasise: • Constructivealignment of curriculum elements e.g. activities with outcomes and assessment tasks • The importance of feedback (intrinsic or extrinsic) • Integration across activities, e.g. • Associatively (building component skills and knowledges into extended performance) • Constructively (integrating skills and knowledges, planning, reflecting) • Situatively (developing identities and roles) • They differ in: • The role and importance of other people in mediating activity • The authenticity of the activity • The balance of scaffolding (routines, structures and protocols) with flexibility (exploration and responsive support) • The locus of control

30. ‘Real-world’ challenges • Staff time and motivation to engage • Lack of relevant expertise • Institutional support tends to be focused on VLE use and other centrally mandated technologies • Unhelpful QA processes: also perceptions of design tools as controlling quality rather than enabling innovation • Curriculum documentation tends to be determined by institutional requirements and traditional practices: may not be best suited to expressing educational rationales • Cultural reluctance to share learning designs and resources • Design tools can fundamentally change learning and teaching roles, creating natural resistance

31. Conclusions? • The design processes we have explored involve a wide range of different actors with different roles, responsibilities and preferences • Different approaches to student learning may require different approaches to design: there is no one technology that can support all of these activities effectively • Educational design may need to be conceptualised as a set of teacher- or teaching-centred tools and services • LD – or a version of LD (‘lite’?) – may provide the ‘glue’ to stick such services together • These ‘teaching-centred’ tools/services, aggregated at different points and for different purposes in the curriculum lifecycle, have to intersect with learner-centred tools/services, aggregated at different points and for different purposes in the learning lifecycle (HOW???)