e-learning, engagement and retention

e-learning, engagement and retention Martin OliverLondon Knowledge Lab With Debbie Holley (in absentia) London Metropolitan University

Retention, engagement and standards • A familiar setting • Widening participation • Massification • Internationalisation • Diverse student body • Raising familiar concerns…

In a mass system, students are no longer constructed as scholars to be handcrafted, but as entities in an industrial process. Access policies have created a moral panic over standards and ‘dumbing down’. There are contamination fears expressed in the idea that massification and the entry of ‘non-traditional’ learners presents a threat to academic standards. (Morley, 2003, p. 130)

Plenty of causes Inequalities in participation in all forms of post-compulsory education have endured over the past 50 years in the UK with significant minorities routinely excluded […]. Those individuals who do participate in post-compulsory education are heavily patterned by pre-adult social, geographical and historical factors such as socio-economic status, year of birth and type of school attended. (Gorard et al, 2007:2)

Gorard et al identify, for example: • Early school performance • Social class (‘background’; parental profession) • Notes that the proportional participation is rising far faster for lower socio-economic groups than higher • Gender (males under-represented) • Reported disabilities (excluding dyslexia) • Questions ethnicity, but arguably an issue • Dandridge et al, 2008, arguing need to be “demonstratively inclusive and free of discriminatory practices”, p27

What has been done about this? • Tinto’s advocacy of learning community • Involvement, contact, learning, high expectations, support • A predictive theory of drop out(…albeit one based on a theory of suicide…) “The model argues that it is the individual’s integration into the academic and social systems of the college that most directly relates to his continuance” (Tinto, 1975, p96)

Where does e-learning come in? • Web 2.0, ‘social software’ and the hope that technology will support socialisation • Advocacy of new approaches to learning and teaching in Higher Education (e.g. Franklin & van Harmelen, 2007)

Are we nearly there yet? The new interactive media, offering adaptive feedback and student control have the potential to support independent study, but only if fully developed, tested and maintained. […] Many staff would seek to spend some of their time on development of learning materials, because these will enshrine the core of their teaching. […] IT methods must achieve their promise of greater efficiency both by improving the quality of student learning, and by amortising the cost of development over large student numbers. (Dearing report, Appendix 2)

Analysis of technology-related excerpts from Dearing • Students portrayed as passive, apart from when choosing a course (described in terms of costs and outcomes), then ‘developed’ • Lecturers not talked about as teachers; expectation of giving up teaching to focus on materials development • Technology described in terms of access to information

The e-University As the learner progresses through the courseware, there is the opportunity to ask questions by selecting the associated ‘chat’ channel in the toolbar. In response, a chat window opens and the learner is greeted and invited to describe the assistance sought, in text form. The person who answers the questions is part of a call centre and is specifically trained to answer questions about the courseware. […] If the mentor is unable to answer a question, it is referred to a tutor with superior subject expertise, who returns a full answer to the learner by e-mail within a set period.

So how do we get from here to there? • Projects exploring the relationship between e-learning, access and retention • Making Connections: using e-learning data to improve retention rates in higher education (Middlesex) • Evaluating Systematic Transition Support into HE (Bradford and Bournmouth) • The alignment between design, implementation and affordances in formal and informal learning (Portsmouth)

So how do we get from here to there? • And this year: • Online Community-based Support for Student Transitions into HE (Central Lancashire) • Connecting Transitions and Independent Learning: an evaluation of read/write web approaches (De Montfort) • Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation for Transition (Leicester)

So how do we get from here to there? • Supporting transition into Higher Education:comparing Level 3 and Level 4 vocational students' experiences of technology enhanced learning (Writtle College) http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/learning/elearning/elro

So how do we get from here to there? • JISC’s distributed e-learning programme • Lifelong Learning in London for All (L4All)Supporting learners’ choice to enter Higher Education (and beyond) with automatic recommendations, personal advice and role models • http://www.lkl.ac.uk/research/l4all.html • Etc.

However… • There is no magic bullet, because life is never that simple • The projects mentioned grapple with this complexity, and some aspects illustrated here

So what’s a “learning community” anyhow? • Draper’s critique of use of the phrase • Ignores negative aspects of community: control, exclusion, policing, hostility “What is not a good idea is to take "learning community" as new knowledgable-sounding jargon for "a cohort of students", plus a cozy view of them as "a community". This is neither warranted nor likely to improve learning.”

The aspects of community that have a positive effect on learning may not be about being accepting, or respecting privacy and individual choice. Just as real communities are by no means uniformly benign, and perhaps could never be if they are to maintain cohesion and discipline, so learning communities are not entertainment services, whose only purpose is to give pleasure, comfort and a feeling of consumer control. The ways in which learners are aided by other people are extremely diverse, and uncritical acceptance and lack of challenge are not always best for learning. (Draper, 2008)

We need more than a shot in the arm By leaving the freshman seminar at the margins of institutional life, by treating it as an add-on to the real business of the college, institutions implicitly assume that they can “cure” attrition by “inoculating” students with a dose of educational assistance without changing the rest of the curriculum and the ways students experience that curriculum. Unfortunately, like other addons, such strategies do little to reshape student academic experience (Tinto, p7)

Students’ academic groupwork • Trotter & Roberts’ analysis of features of courses with higher retention • Marketing, induction, personal tutors… • Teaching and learning activities that involve students actively in class; ethos of required attendance • Similarly, Holley & Dobson (2008) • Academic task with a social element (gallery) • ‘Admin lite’, with social supported online

But new spaces create new barriers • Holley’s Biographic Narrative studies • Exploring students’ accounts of learning to identify where they struggle, why, and how they overcome this • A key issue: how they colonise spaces that they want to use for learning • Easier to do if they control some spaces already

Charles • Power, privilege and personal space • “No disrespect, I can’t even remember his name…” • “You get home, you just get down and focus and you can block the rest of the world out” • You can spread your notes out “as far as you can see”

Nyela • Negotiation and accommodation • Refuge, struggling but persevering • “I always wanted something that was mine and you know when you’re working and you buy something with your first pay check, that computer, I felt kind of good. […] I’d bought something to the family, so it was something that I also did for them, as well as for me.” • “We don’t have much room at home”; computer is in her room, so schedule for family use

A framework for understanding experiences • Expectations of education • Matched or mismatched to the course? • Control of technology for learning • Skills (can they use it?), time (when do they get access?) and space (where can they get access?) • Space • Preference for private or social settings for learning …and of course, all of these interact…

But what makes it more than just social? • As mentioned, academic tasks were important • Academic tasks linked to disciplinary knowledge • Well established that disciplines have their own criteria, or combinations of criteria, for what ‘counts’ as knowledge • E.g. Hirst & Peters, 1970 • By implication, other things won’t count

Rowlands (2000): we learn to be better teachers from the starting point of our disciplinary research • Brookfield (2007): diversification as ‘repressive tolerance’, emphasising the normal by juxtaposing it with ‘diversity’

A tension to live with • Not one answer; an ongoing consideration of different possibilities • We have to consider: • What is the purpose of students’ participation? • How can we balance openness and inclusivity with a commitment to disciplined enquiry?

And that includes the means of production… • Some kinds of knowledge work are excluded from formal education • ‘Remixing’ and “copy and paste literacy” or plagiarism? • Disconnections between home and school use of technology • ‘Wisdom of the crowd’ and Web2.0 participation • And sometimes that’s ok • See, e.g. Lankshear & Knobel (2004) for a discussion of appropriate distinctions between school and non-school practices

Them and us? Focusing on ‘the learner’, and on ideas such as ‘learner needs’ or ‘student responsibility’, can become a means not only of shifting responsibility, but also of pathologising, labelling and containing people in relation to different constructions of ‘difference’. (Haggis, 2006)

A trajectory of participation • An inward-bound trajectory; not a finished act of participation • A journey we share with students • A way of being more sympathetic to their positions?

The alternative seems to be that the embedded, processual complexities of thinking, understanding, and acting in specific disciplinary contexts need to be explored as an integral part of academic content teaching within the disciplines themselves. Part of the complexity of disciplinary processes is their contested nature; it is unlikely that two academics even in the same field would articulate and model such processes in exactly the same way. (Haggis, 2006)

Conclusions • Yes, there are challenges • Yes, technology is implicated • For all its promise, there are also many problems • Yes, work is being done to address these • But…

Conclusions • Challenges remain • Accounting for students’ diverse experiences • Understanding how these influence choices • The risk of making new barriers with new technologies, versus their potential to help • The need to create a position as educators that is sympathetic and inclusive, yet maintains integrity

e-learning, engagement and retention