It is a running joke in our team that I am always behind the times, and I’ve certainly been slow to adopt blogging as a daily activity.

But recently I set up a WordPress blog for a long distance walk I’m doing so that we could take pictures and give updates as the walk progressed. WordPress is a bit of a beast to set up for the first time, but once that was done we looked for easy ways to blog on the move.

Unlike its server counterpart, the WordPress app is a joy to use. Very simple to link to the blog (just need URL and credentials) then easy to post, review, add pictures and approve comments.

I’ve been doing something very similar using the Pebblepad app for a while, and it works really well for capturing ideas or reflections to sort and sift later. But that relies on a personal Pebblepad account, which costs a little bit each year and not so easy to extend to a group of friends from different places as a self hosted WordPress system.

Being able to blog easily on the move means I can turn empty time (like my bus journey home on a rainy day) into useful time. Maybe I’ll even start to do this a bit more often…

Uniqurate is an easy to use QTI quiz question authoring tool that is currently being developed as part of a JISC funded project. IMS QTI is the Quiz and Test Interoperability standard, an XML based format that allows assessments to be shared between different e-assessment platforms.

The Uniqurate editor comes with a  “friendly” mode and advanced modes (intermediate and expert). The “friendly” drag and drop mode is shown below.

Some features include

• compatible with popular Virtual Learning Environments (including Moodle via the Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) plugin)
• randomisation of questions and answers
• multiple-part questions
• regular expressions
• compatible with Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Chrome
• compatible with iPads, iPhones and Androids (without drag-and-drop functionality)
• requires you to enter feedback for every answer (both correct answers and distractors)

Uniqurate is being used by the following universities:

• Harper Adams University College
• Strathclyde University
• Kingston University

You can try Uniqurate for yourself here: http://uniqurate.kingston.ac.uk/demo

The project team are looking for people to offer suggestions for new features and improvements. If you are interested in contributing to the project please contact the Learning Technology Research Group at Kingston University.

Other QTI tools are available from here: http://qti-support.gla.ac.uk

From Dr Jenny Bunn

In receipt of an E-Learning Development Grant, Jenny has created DiSARM: Digital Scenarios for Archives and Records Management. Her project aimed to develop a number of digital scenarios to enhance the e-learning opportunities for students on the Department of Information Studies’ (DIS) archives and records management programmes. Below is her report, as a guest blog post:

This post sets out a question that has arisen as the result of work within the Department of Information Studies to incorporate more e-learning tools and techniques within its teaching. Last year the department was fortunate enough to win an e-learning development grant to undertake a project entitled Digital Scenarios for Archives and Records Management (DiSARM). As the name suggests the project was focussed around the department’s archives and records management programmes and involved the development of scenarios which would enhance both the digital content and context of these programmes. Content, because it is increasingly important for our students to be familiar with a wide range of processes and products employed to ensure the preservation of born digital records, and context, because it is equally important that they should be exposed to methods of teaching and (e-)learning that will enable them to gain confidence and experience of working in an online and collaborative way as part of a global community.

It is not my intention to describe the project in detail here. Those who are interested in reading more may download the full report. Rather I wish to highlight a question that emerged from the project and which seems to encompass many of the issues raised by e-learning.

‘How far can institutions put a boundary around a learning experience?’

This question is raised, in this form, by Mayes and de Freitas (2007) who also comment that new technologies mean that ‘learning can be socially situated in a way never previously possible’. With the DiSARM project an issue arose in the form of the negotiation of the boundary between the safe controlled environment of UCL’s VLE Moodle and the wider community beyond. Digital preservation is still in an embryonic state so should the students’ messy and often unsuccessful experimentation with it be contained within the walls of the Moodle or out there on the internet for the benefit of the professional community at large?

This though would seem to be only one of the frames in which it is possible to see the question of a boundary around the learning experience. For example, it would also seem to encompass current debates about Open Educational Resources and increases in university fees, as well as old ones such as that of the relationship between theory and practice. Sadly I have no easy answers to offer, but one avenue that I think might be worth exploring is a way to combine ideas about ‘authenticity and presence’ (Land and Bayne 2006) with those about e-moderation. E-moderation is a subject of much debate (e.g. Salmon 2000) and there is some evidence (Hewings, Coffin & North 2006) of anxiety amongst teachers, in the context of new e-learning technologies, with regards to their ability to achieve the proper balance between not interfering too much so as to stifle learners learning, and yet not interfering too little so as to allow dominant voices to drown out weaker ones.

One hypothesis would be then that, what was previously a passive and unacknowledged ‘presence’ has now become an active process of, yes moderation, but perhaps something else as well? Perhaps the role of the teacher has always been to make learning visible, to provide the definition or boundary that allows students to see the ‘something’ they are learning, the frame against which to set and assess it?

References

Hewings, A., Coffin, C. & North, S. (2006) Supporting undergraduate students’ acquisition of academic argumentation strategies through computer conferencing, Higher Education Academy report. http://bit.ly/N2G2OU [Accessed June 2012]

Land, R. and Bayne, S. (2006) Issues in Cyberspace Education. In Savin-Baden, M. & Wilkie, K. (eds) (2006) Problem-based learning online Open University Press.

Mayes, Y. and de Freitas, S. (2007) Learning and e-learning: the role of theory. In Beetham, H. & Sharpe, R. (Eds) (2007) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: designing and delivering e-learning London, Routledge.

Salmon, G. (2000) E-moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online London, Kogan Page.

Find out how iPads can be used in education by attending the “Padagogy Workshop” at UCL. Dr Ian Green and Allan Carrington, from Adelaide University, will demonstrate how iPads can be used to enhance the student learning experience. If you have an iPad (or other mobile device) please bring it along with you.

Ian and Allan are Apple Distinguished Educators who run PADAGOGY events across Australia and beyond. Allan is a Learning Designer with the Centre for Learning and Professional Development (CLPD) and Ian is responsible for Researcher education. They have run PADAGOGY seminars to over 600 people.

Please register here* for this event

*Non-UCL staff and students can register as external candidates on the login page.

In the previous post I suggested we can think of technology-driven change as progressing through a number of distinct stages as described  for example by the MIT90s model. From the Rogers curve we can also think of each stage addressing the needs of quite distinct core groups and we should address our message and support approach accordingly.

This is of course a far from original observation; McKenzie (1999) demanded a “mammoth campaign”  to reach these not-early-adopters who are more pragmatic and risk-adverse than pioneers. They want proof of results, he said, (often termed ‘evidence’) before they invest their effort. To cross the ‘chasm’ institutions must therefore develop “a complete package, a total solution that is user friendly, complete and well supported”.

It could be argued that to at least some extent the ‘chasm’ has now been crossed at UCL, for example nearly all taught modules have Moodle courses and there is widespread use of technologies such as Turnitin and LectureCast. And of course this is the result of exactly the “mammoth campaign” McKenzie envisaged which has established UCL Moodle as a well-supported low-risk environment.

Part of that campaign has been to work not only with UCL’s academic community but also our teaching administrators who we find often support the Moodle environment often quite extensively at a departmental level. This UCL-specific approach of ‘supporting the supporters’ has helped our late adopters ‘cross the chasm’ by providing them support at the local as well as central level.

Nevertheless this approach may have its limitations. The campaign was indeed ‘mammoth’ and the UCL baseline level of Moodle use is actually quite modest in its aim – it uses a tiny fraction of the capacity of the system to enhance teaching and learning. We seem to have crossed the chasm only to now face a steep uphill climb to get technology-enabled teaching and learning innovation embedded into mainstream processes.

This has led to a re-think of how we can use the MIT90s model to provide another way to ‘cross the chasm’ . I’ll start with an anecdote I only re-analysed last week!

A few years ago I was working in another institution trying to provide a focus for distance learning. This was a traditional research-focused university but there were a handful of localised distance learning programmes. As a first step to coordination I organised the enthusiasts as a ‘community of practice’, essentially holding a series of meetings where we identified and exchanged good practice.  From this emerged a short guidance document to help newcomers in the area.  At this stage the activity could be considered co-ordinated. To move it into the transformative stage, though, this document had to become part of the institutional processes, and ownership had to move from the community to the university. Through discussions with registry and their teaching and learning committee it eventually became part of the mainstream quality process. The practice we had identified months previously as a community had become embedded in the workflow.

One of the key aspects of this process is that the innovators and perhaps early adopters consolidate and streamline their practice so it can be re-presented for the early and late majority. Risky innovation is thus transformed into a low(er) risk, institutionally endorsed ‘package’.

To some extent we are following the same co-ordination process with our teaching administrators in The Digital Department. Pioneers are discussing and documenting their digital practices (through ‘case studies’, portfolios and a wiki, see right) to help later adopters. We are now even taking about ‘transformation’ of these into standard operating procedures, checklists and templates.

We are also considering this community-led approach for REC:all, a UCL Erasmus project on lecture capture and it might work too for ’emerging’ approaches such as social media and mobile learning, areas which are quite difficult for universities to respond to. It might even help us to move Moodle ‘beyond the baseline’.

There are a number of potential problems with this approach, though. Transformation and embedding of community-supported practices in mainstream institutional processes can be difficult and time-consuming unless all stakeholders are involved from the outset. Perhaps more concerning is that once embedded innovation may become ‘frozen’ and less adaptable if not reviewed periodically.

Credit: the Chasm

At the ICA Network conference: Educating the Net Generation in the Life Sciences at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano last week one of the main themes was how universities can support innovation in today’s fast moving and emerging educational environments characterised by social media and cloud services. This is undoubtedly a challenge. I gave a keynote on our The Digital Department (TDD) project and how we were beginning to uncover a complex pattern of digital literacies and identities that needed to be developed and supported to enable any significant change in this area. I admitted this could be overwhelming but TDD also points to a community-based model of change which might help us achieve our ambitions.

I started by reminding attendees of an older model of change the MIT90s transformational model which was used a few projects in UK HE in the early 00s both to describe and benchmark where universities were in a technology change process.

Basically this model any innovation always started with localised projects then became co-ordinated in some way before becoming integrated with mainstream workflows in a transformative stage and eventually were embedded in the processes of the university (review, quality, finance etc). Only then could innovative change really occur at an institutional level.

Like any reductionist model MIT90s has its limitations but it does highlight the problem of moving from local to institutional innovation. Essentially it emphasises there are a number of steps to go through (whatever you call them) to enable this to happen.

To understand the steps better we can now apply the familiar Rogers 1962 model of diffusion of innovations. Rogers provides the human perspective of change and you can usefully align MIT90s stages to Rogers to see which groups of staff might be involved in each stage. In short the innovators initiate localised projects and but it is only when change becomes coordinated  and then transformative that the majority of staff become engaged.

It is now well understood to ‘break out’ change from the innovators to even the early adopters (i.e. go from localised to co-ordinated) is challenging first identified by Greoffrey Moore (1991) as the ‘chasm‘. Over a decade ago Jamie McKenzie (1999) noted that the chasm occurs because  “the characteristics of late adopters are profoundly different from those of early adopters” and – after Moore – “crossing the chasm between these groups…requires a mammoth campaign that includes special attention to the vastly different needs, perspectives and demands of the late adopters. He concludes “what works for pioneers does not work for the later group“.

To me this begins to explains the ‘chasm’, why processes of change are slow in universities and the  persistent problem throughout the HE sector of why so many very good educational innovation projects fail to become mainstream and fade away as funding dries up.

In the next blog post I’ll suggest how these insights may be combined to provide a more sustainable, practical and perhaps productive approach of change drawing on what we have been  doing with TDD and other initiatives.

Credit: Rogers diagram