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Accessible e-learning – identefying issues, actions and problems using an Activity System
Fig.1 Annotations to an Activity System from Open University module H810 : Accessible Online Learning
Activity Systems are particularly good at showing how a collection of problems can together be instrumental in stagnation when it comes to bringing down barriers to online learning. Engestrom how one weakness can jeopardise the desired outcome – the reality is that there are many ‘ruptures’ and ‘conflicts’.
Here’s how to improve retention in e-learning – scaffolding, mentors, interaction and community
Fig.1. For online learning to work you need scaffolding – Drawing by Simon Fieldhouse
Levels of interaction and support
- Drop out rates from 20-50% for online courses … more than for traditional courses.
A full breakdown of the figures, how prepared, representing which institutions and student groups would be helpful. Anyone can use a statistic if they don’t identify its source.
Really this bad?
But if they’ve paid their fees the college has its cash and can free up resources. Do the bean counters recognise the contribution those quitting to make a course viable, let alone profitable?
Educational Institutions should go to extraordinary lengths to attract and retain the right people to courses and to keep them on board and fully engaged.
A major issue is the degree of academic integration.
- Performance
- Academic self-esteem
- Identity as a student
Against sticking with a course are :
- isolation
- instructional ineffectiveness
- failing academic achievement
- negative attitudes
- overall dissatisfaction with the learning experience
Self-directed skill set:
- self-discipline
- the ability to work alone
- time management
- learning independence
- a plan for completing
Especially
Self-directed learning skills … that are developed in a social context through a variety of human-oriented interactions with peers and colleagues, teams, informal social networks, and communities of practice.
‘These challenges to the retention of distance learners, interestingly enough, have something in common, they seem to hinge on learners’ need for significant support in the distance learning environment through interaction with others (e.g. peers, instructors, and learner support services personnel).’ Tait (2000)
The central functions of learner support services for students in distance education settings are:
- cognitive
- affective
- systemic
Scaffolding – ZPD (Vygotsky, 1934)
Scaffolding involves providing learners with more structure during the early stages of a learning activity and gradually turning responsibility over to learners as they internalize and master the skills needed to engage in higher cognitive functioning. (Palinscar, 1986; Rosenshine and Meister, 1992).
Scaffolding has a number of important characteristics to consider when determining the types of learner support services distance students may need:
Academic course ‘scaffolding’:
- Provides structure
- Functions as a tool
- Extends the range of the learner
- Allows the learner to accomplish a task that would otherwise not be possible
- Helps to ensure the learner’s success
- Motivates the learner
- Reduces learner frustration
- Is used, when needed, to help the learner, and can be removed when the learner can take on more responsibility.
(Greenfield, 1984; McLoughlin and Mitchell, 2000; Wood et al., 1976)
‘Scaffolding is an inherently social process in which the interaction takes places in a collaborative context.’
In relation to learning with the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA)
- Are people coming onto the Level II course who are not yet suitable? Do they submit a learning orientation questionnaire?
- Is the candidate’s club or pool operator giving them ample assistant teaching opportunities and support?
Mentors utilise the items gathered during the admissions process – data from the intake interview, self-assessment, diagnostic pre-assessment, and Learning Orientation Questionnaire – to develop to Academic Action Plan, that provides a roadmap for the learner’s academic progress including information about learning resources and assessment dates.’ At WGU.
Learning is a function of the activity, context, and culture in which it occurs – i.e., it is situated (Wenger, 1998).
Successful completion of and satisfaction with an academic experience is directly related to students’ sense of belonging and connection to the program and courses (Tinto, 1975).
Social learning experiences, such as peer teaching, group projects, debates, discussion, and other activities that promote knowledge construction in a social context, allow learners to observe and subsequently emulate other students’ models of successful learning.’
‘A learning community can be defined as a group of people, connected via technology mediated communications, who actively engage one another in collaborative learner-centred activities to intentionally foster the creation of knowledge, while sharing a number of values and practices, including diversity, mutual appropriation, and progressive discourse.’
N.B. ‘Creating a positive psychological climate built upon trusting human relationships.’
REFERENCE
Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaserm, 453-494.
Duguid, Paul (2005). “The Art of Knowing: Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the Limits of the Community of Practice”. The Information Society (Taylor & Francis Inc.): 109–118.
Ludwig-Hardman & Dunlap. (2003) Learner Support Services for Online Students: Scaffolding for success in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 4, 10, 1 (2003)
Palincsar, A.S. (1986). Reciprocal teaching. In Teaching reading as thinking. Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.
Rosenshine, B. & Meister, C. (1992) The use of scaffolds for teaching higher-level cognitive strategies. Educational leadership, 49(7), 26-33.
Seely Brown, John; Duguid, Paul (1991). “Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation”. Organization Science 2 (1).JSTOR 2634938.
Tait, J (2004) The tutor/facilitator role in retention. Open Learning, Volume 19, Number 1, February 2004 , pp. 97-109(13)
Tinto, V (1975) Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research. Review of
Educational Research Vol.45, No1, pp.89-125.
Vygotsky. L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of the higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press
Vygotsky, L. S. (1998a). Infancy (M. Hall, Trans.). In R. W. Rieber (Ed.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 5. Child psychology (pp. 207-241). New York: Plenum Press. (Original work written 1933-1934)
Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66363-2.
Related articles
- Personal Learning Environments and the revolution of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (downes.ca)
- RR: Mcleod, Week 8 (mathloverturnedwriter.wordpress.com)
- Myths, Truths and Futures of online learning (slideshare.net)
- Book of the Day: Peeragogy Handbook (p2pfoundation.net)
- How do you stop online students cheating? (bbc.co.uk)
- What Are the Advantages of Distance Learning? (tutoringtoexcellence.blogspot.com)
To plan social learning we need to know who learners become if we prime them in certain ways
Understanding what primes us to behave in a certain way must have impacts on social behaviour, from the London Riots of 2011 and police behaviour at Hillsborough in 1989, through to schooling, training, coaching and e-learning – and of course, how hypnotists play their tricks.
Are we so vulnerable and easily led because we cannot think about too much at the same time? How must this influence the savvy learning designer? Surely the context of any learning environment must be highly significant, from the buildings and resources, to your peers? Do Ivy League and Oxbridge Colleges have a centuries old model that works still in the 21st century? Why do some libraries work better than others and why do we like to meet for coffee or for a drink? Are we primed to open up, to be more or less receptive to ideas? What therefore does the loan learner do studying at a distance, even if they are online? What makes the experience immersive? Synchronous learning in a webinar or seminar? Active engagement in a discussion, multi-choice quiz or virtual world? And how might they prep their context? Close the curtains, dress to study?
Link
Click to access bargh_chen_burrows_1996.pdf
I was introduced to this concept by Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book 'Thinking, Fast and Slowly' in the Linkedin Group for alumni of the Open University MBA Module 'Creativity, Innovation and Change'.
Ideas on ‘learning in extremis’
My mother has had a stroke – she’d said she’d not been feeling right the day before after one of our regular weekly catch-ups. She’d had a mini stroke six months previously and was booked in to see a specialist the following week. That was six weeks ago – a second stroke and the prognosis is, to put it bluntly, dire.
Beyond the obvious sorrow and challenges my siblings and I are settling into a pattern of communicating with and responding to whatever we can reach – my interest in learning, human development and even accessibility is playing a part.
I would only be writing this if there were some extraordinarily glimmers of hope sparked by seeking out ways to ‘bring her back’ – this includes childhood anecdotes, images of paintings (she has an MA in Fine Art) and familiar tastes- so a spoonful of creme brulle rather than the hospital yoghurt. Hope lost, it was remarkable to make out words that gave a name of an artist or where the painting was held and when I last spoke to my sister they were managing a game of dominos. There is no other communication beyond hand gripping and trying to interpret facial expressions, though she is finding a way to get her message across, at least at time we are getting a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from a gesture.
Sixteen years ago I read a book by a neuroscientist called ‘What’s going on in there?’ that explained infant development, two years with the OU has allowed me to explore further what ‘goes on in there’ to qualify as learning – today I have to consider how the mind can degenerate or be damaged and how in this instance learning is just as relevant, finding connections that have been weakened, damaged and destroyed and remembering my lessons from coaching disabled athletes too – play to their strengths, not their weaknesses.
On Thursday the doors open on my FINAL module of the Masters in Open and Distance Education – H810 Accessibile Online Learning: supoorting disabled students.
I know friends here will have their own personal experiences of strokes – do share thoughts, advice and experience please.
Before I forget – the iPad had been CRUCIAL. I loaded family photos, but also images from the Van Gogh exhibition that was on at the RA a year or so ago, as well as dozens of 20th century artists and loads of images from a hefty book on Leornado da Vinci. Next week it’ll be Dutch painters. I should go in with Holbein too and much of the National Portrait Gallery.
Learning in extremis? You research online, speak to someone who has been through this, then ask questions and see for yourself. You talk at length until you come to some joint understanding, which has included a gathering of family, specialists and nursing staff. I do wonder who is in charge – we know who isn’t, though if she could say it my mother would say it was up to God.
Moments that define Dr Zbigniew Pelczynski OBE
Fig 1. Chapter Three: A Life Remembered
For all the technology – I am writing on an iPad – the book I am reading (‘A Life Remembered’ is only available in print) is on a rather rusty, heavy-duty iron book stand. Out of shot I have a lamp on an upturned waste-paper bin – an eBook would be the light, the stand and the content. It allows me to take notes, picking out moments and ideas from mini PostIts.
In some respects I feel like a Talk Show Host preparing for an interview, though many of these stories and their significance to Zbigniew Pelczynski I have heard before – I’ll be in his company this weekend so can ask questions, record the interview highlights and post the results here.
What defines him as an academic, inspirational educator and Polish patriot? How might others have behaved given the extraordinary life choices he had to make as the Second World War came to a close?
What is it about Oxford University that held him in its spell and kept him from the opportunities and temptations of other universities in the UK and abroad?
How can the oath he made to God that defines his life come from someone with no faith in religion?
Is it not ironic that despite being alive and well and mentally alert and agile in his 86th year that publication of his life story isn’t the end at all, but another mile stone as he drives on to yet more commitments and projects later this year and next including a two-day conference on Rousseau, Hobbes and Machiavelli, the book launch at the Polish Embassy then Meetings at his School fo Leaders in Warsaw.
With Zbszyek it isn’t even a case of ‘what next?’ rather it is a case of what he plans to do still beyond that.
My Notes So far :
Learning in extremis
Three Reformers Jacques Maritain
– an exegesis of the works of Luther, Calvin and Rousseau.
Zbig studied while part of the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, developing early ideas and an interest in:
- man
- society
- state
McAvoy (2012:19)
KEY MOMENTS: Events that make the person
Saying good-bye to his mother Irena in August 1944 age 18 and lying about what he was up to as he went off to join his company B1 of the Basta Regiment. He saw his mother again in December 1956. (p 24)
PERSONALITIES
Jerzy Kloczowski, known as Piotrus
HORROR
The German campaign of mass murder in Warsaw in response to the foolhardy uprising killing, between 5th and 7th August 1944 more than 50,000 men, women and children. Perhaps 200,000 killed over the next two months.
KEY MOMENT
The life defining oath Zbigniew made when rubble pinned the 19-year-old in a cellar after an attack by a Stuka.
He made a pack with God: if he got out alive, then somehow, someday, he would do something for Poland in return. McAvoy (2012:27)
DEFINING MOMENT – Traumatised
Appearance of political prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp who fought over every scrap of food. McAvoy (2012:36)
HORROR – POLISH FARMHAND – what people will do to survive and for love.
Condemned for a ‘race crime’ with a German girl and put in a forced labour camp on starvation rations he joined the Offen Kommando whose job it was to collect and burn the bodies of dead inmates. McAvoy (2012:39) There they had witnessed systematic cannibalism.
(Though I suspect hours of cooking rather than 15 minutes would have been required).
DEFINING MOMENT
Two lessons: the story itself and from the way it was told. Cured of social snobbery for life. McAvoy (2012:39)
A very different war defined a quite different man – my grandfather, working class and a machine-gunner in the First War, humble, conscientious and hardworking, dedicated his life to his wife and child.
What is of greater significance?
Our genetic make-up or the events in our life? People respond very differently to events and circumstances, yet the decisions they take define them. We cannot all be the same.
What am I coming to understand about education and the motivation to learn?
What bearing does this have on the struggles and wars that continue around the world and the politics that are both the cause and cure of the mess in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond to Korea and elsewhere?
REFERENCE
McAvoy, D (2012) Zbigwniew Pelczynski: A life remembered. Grosvenor House Publishing.
Why learning in business is becoming fluid and lively – the relationship between the academic and the student has flipped.
Henry Mintzberg_1238926097279 (Photo credit: Personeelsnet)
Fig.1. Henry Mintzberg
Drawing on a business model, the development of a more organic structure that is less hierarchical, as envisaged by Mintzberg (1994), seems appropriate; it complements what authors such as John Seely Brown say about ‘learning from the periphery’ too.
Fig.2. Part of a mind-map created while preparing for a written exam on ‘Creativitiy, Innovation and Change’
Characteristics of an adhocracy (Waterman, 1990; Mintzberg, 1994; Travica, 1999):
- highly organic structure
- little formalization of behavior
- job specialization based on formal training
- a tendency to group the specialists in functional units for housekeeping purposes but to deploy them in small, market-based project teams to do their work
- a reliance on liaison devices to encourage mutual adjustment within and between these teams
- low standardization of procedures
- roles not clearly defined
- selective decentralization
- work organization rests on specialized teams
- power-shifts to specialized teams
- horizontal job specialization
- high cost of communication (dramatically reduced in the networked age)
- culture based on non-bureaucratic work
Fig. 3. Handy’s Shamrock (1989)
The advantage of a flexible organisation is that it can react quickly to a change in its external environment.
Since the 1990s, firms have examined their value chain and tried to reduce their workforce to a multi-skilled core, which is concerned with the creation or delivery of a product or service. All other supporting, non-central functions are outsourced wherever possible to the periphery.
Charles Handy suggested, however, that organisations do not consist of just the Core and the Periphery, since the periphery can be subdivided.
He calls this a shamrock organisation:
The first leaf of the shamrock represents the multi-skilled core of professional technicians and managers, essential to the continuity of the business
The second leaf Handy calls the contractual fringe, because non central activities are contracted out to firms specialising in activities such as marketing, computing, communications and research
The third leaf consists of a flexible workforce made up of part-time, temporary and seasonal workers.
REFERENCE
Brown, John Seely (2007) Exploring the potential of Web 2.0 techniques and applications in higher and distance education, informal and lifelong learning
Handy, C (1989) The Age of Unreason
Mintzberg, H (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving the Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners, Free Press, pp. 458, ISBN 0-02-921605-2
Travica, B (1999) New Organizational Designs: Information Aspects, Ablex/Greenwood, ISBN 1-56750-403-5, Google Print, p.7
Waterman, R. H. (1990). Adhocracy: The power to change. The Larger agenda series. Knoxville, Tenn: Whittle Direct Books.
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- Thesis Chapter 1 – Organizational Change On managerial Roles In Petroleum Development Of Oman (PDO). (thinkingbookworm.typepad.com)
- “The Structure of ‘Unstructured’ Decision Processes” is a fascinating 1976 paper by Henry Mintzberg,…” (caterpillarcowboy.com)
- Characteristics of Work Organisations (prmarketingcommunication.com)
From a team perspective Bill Gates is an adaptor and Steve Jobs an innovator
Re-reading the Steve Jobs biography with four months in hand before another MAODE module I am struck by what it tells you about Gates and Jobs and how self-evidently one is an adaptor ‘doing things better’ while the other is an innovator ‘doing things differently’.
This drawn from doing a KAI personality innoventory and all the reading around these tests for B822.
I came out at 144 on a scale of 160; I’d envisage Jobs as somwhere on the outer edges of 150 while Gates gets a 20 or 30, neither would be in the 60-130 zone for two thirds of respondents.
If they ever did one ofthese are the results known?
As most managers do observation and experience of a person’s behaviour and responses must suffice.
I feel a desire to revisit H807 ‘Innovations in E-learning’ while mixing it up with B822 ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’.
I can do this through the 1000+ entries I have here and by refreshing my mind from the current and archived blogs of others blogging here currently (though few if any blog there way through the MBA programme and I am yet to find anyone blogging about B822).
B822 Techniques : Human Sculpture & Timeline
‘Human Sculpture’ isn’t one of the 168 techniques in the ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’ Handbook, though it could be. Indeed the facilitator/tutor said he had 200 activities in his toolkit (or was it 500). I saw this as representing what could be achieved with ‘Timeline’ and related it to an activity I did with 40 Youth Theatre actors age 11-16 trying to plot and thinking out a careers advice video.
(These are not the original participants though it may be interesting to introduce a fun version of ‘human sculpture’ as a Christmas Entertainment. As a team creating a tableau from a movie or some such?)
The Human Sculpture
We were invited to offer a personal problem; it was made quite clear that we had to be comfortable with this. Without saying what the problem was and with the facilitator’s help a ‘human sculpture’ was made to represent the problem. In this instance there were forces pulling him in two directions (partner and ego) with this person’s current/former employer behind and his future employment/employer in front.
There were therefore FIVE participants who made up the ‘sculpture’.
It was fascinating to have each factor comment on how they felt, even if this ‘factor’ was an entity, psyche or ‘unknown’ future.
This was recognised as a way to see the problem for what it is, for the problem owner to see it as others see it, to get the sentence that an entity, played out as a person, can have feelings.
I particularly liked the idea of being able to talk to the desired or possible outcome in a kind of role play.
The technique from the B822 Technique Library where you do something similar is with ‘Timeline’ placing people at points now and in the future. In a way I did this years ago to visualise a careers advice video using members of a Youth Theatre who had to be someone 1, 5 and 10 years along a career path based on different decisions they took at 14/16 about school, a job, training or university.
From the B822 ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’ Residential School
P.S. The image above might offer part of our conclusion, that all the factors should be brought into consideration. What is more, where the problem isn’t too sensitive or the individual/participants want an aide memoire then a series of pictures could be taken.
Mind Bursts 