Isobel Falconer & Allison Littlejohn Caledonian Academy,

1. MOD4Lmodels of practice project Isobel Falconer & Allison Littlejohn Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University http://mod4l.com/tiki-index.php JISC Design4Learning Programme

2. Working with: • Practitioner Focus Group • Ron Oliver, Edith Cowan University, NSW • Lori Lockyer, University of Wollongon, NSW • Helen Beetham, JISC • Heather Sanderson, TESEP

3. Aims • To develop a range of practice models that can be used by practitioners in real life contexts to improve general teaching practice…. • …(and support sharing and reuse)

4. What are practice models? • Generic approach to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices. (JISC funding call) • Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc). (Mod4L working definition)

5. To be effective Practice models need to be: • representations of effective practice (signify successful instances of good practice), • effective representations of practice (have high impact on practice)

6. Representing effective practice • Grounded in authentic practice: • Case studies – from practitioners and existing collections, eg. JISC effective practice, JISC innovative practice, LADIE • Learning designs – from practitioners and existing collections, eg. LAMS, IMS, AUTC Learning Designs

7. Effective representation of practice • a learning design can only be shared with others through a representation. • representations must convey the information that teachers need in a form that the teachers can understand.

8. Three representations of learning designs

9. Types of representation • Case studies • Matrices/templates • Flow diagrams • Concept maps • LAMS • Taxonomies • Videos • Temporal sequences • Patterns

10. An issue for practice models • The definition: Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc). (Mod4L working definition) • (… that will support sharing and reuse and improve teaching practice) • The problem: generic or decontextualised learning designs do not appear to be very useful to teachers

11. Implications for Mod4L? • What are the (contextualised) representations useful for? • Browsing • Choosing • Adapting • Implementing • How can generic designs be used? • Taxonomies • Temporal sequences

12. What is useful to teachers? • An insight into the “wiggling around” that constitutes teaching • Evidence of student engagement • Contextualised representations • A variety of representations of the same design • Representations as a focus for discussion – a community of practice • http://mod4l.com/tiki-index.php

13. The runnable design? • For me, there are two fundamental problems: (i) education is more than just content, so any attempt to share good practice requires e-learning systems capable of replicating the pedagogy of a typical classroom – that is, a structured flow of content and collaborative tasks; and (ii) the sharing of good practice requires a community of educators to discuss ideas and practice – a searchable content dump is not sufficient. (James Dalziel)

14. What is the role of the teacher in design for learning? • the dialogues between learners and teachers [are] what I most value in learning (Burgos) • When the role of the teacher is reduced [in online learning] the strategies available … to overcome breakdowns in the learning process, are radically reduced (Griffiths & Garcia) • The design tradition is very poor in education.… In education it is mostly ad hoc (Koper)

15. Is a learning design still effective if transferred to a new context? • My role is to evaluate resources for a repository and some of them are very good, but I find it extremely difficult to work out how to use them within my own teaching context and have never actually done so (Mod4L focus group member) • I stuck closely to the planned programme as the safest way to ensure that the session went smoothly …. The mixed student reaction to a suggestion of altering the programme … knocked my confidence in what I was trying to achieve (Mod4L focus group member)

16. Design an environment, not a machine? • A route plus a train? • A transport system plus a navigation aid? • Snakes and Ladders plus a set of dice? • A play plus a troop of actors? • An environment plus a life-form?

17. Implications • Ownership? • Granularity? • SOA?

18. MOD4Lmodels of practice project Isobel Falconer & Allison Littlejohn Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University www.academy.gcal.ac.uk JISC Design4Learning Programme