What I saw at ALTC 2017

Helen Walmsley-Smith introduced eDAT, a tool for analysing the content of online learning activity design. The data  could then be analysed with feedback and retention data to allow a learning design to be evaluated, and successful types in different contexts to be identified. eDAT is freely available. There are early signs that interactivity is related to improved retention.

Emma Mayhew and Vicki Holmes from Reading described the shift from paper-based to digital assessment processes. Part of a major programme of EMA funding. With eight academic and student secondees, they aim to improve each part of cycle, from better awareness at the ‘Setting’ stage to better monitoring of progress at the ‘Reflection’ stage. They found that the idea of ‘consistency’ was problematic and might refer to satisfaction rather than practices. Their review of other institutions found that the most successful outcomes were in institutions which consulted carefully.

Peter Alston (Liverpool) discussed how ‘the academy’ does not mean the same thing when it discusses e-assessment. This highlighted the differences between professional services and academic perspectives. Adopting Whitchurch’s (2008) ‘third space’ approach, and the contestation, reconciliation and reconstruction (Whitchurch 2010) around practices, rules, regulations and language.

Why are the rates of e-submission and feedback at the University of Essex so high? Ben Steeples looked back at a decade of electronic submission and feedback on a platform built in-house, which designed out a number of problems affecting other platforms. Maintaining the in-house system costs £75k a year, but the integrations with e.g. calendar and student records are excellent and the service is very reliable. They expect to develop analytics. I love hearing from in-house developers making large strategically important institutional systems which work well.

Daniel Roberts and Tunde Varga-Atkins #1637 discussed the minimum standards (‘hygiene factors’) for Liverpool’s VLE, and the development of an evaluation model involving students which could be used with other initiatives. Students are a transient presence who can be hard to reach; different evaluation approaches to involving them included as auditors and in focus groups. Between staff and students at Liverpool there was little mutual recognition of the respective effort which goes into using the VLE.

One of the stand-out sessions for me, Simon Thomson and Lawrie Phipps summarised Jisc’s #Codesign16 consultation on needs for a next-generation digital learning environment. There was a sense that the tools drive the pedagogy, that they exist to control the academy, and that administration processes were de facto more important than education. Jisc found that students were using laptops and phones had almost equally (only 40% used a tablet). Students arrive at university networked, but the VLE currently stands alone without interfacing with those networks. At Leeds Beckett PULSE (Personalised User Learning and Social Environment) set out to address this by letting individuals connect spaces where they had existing relationships, allowing them to post once and selectively release to multiple places. The data within PULSE is entirely owned by students. When they leave, they can take it with them. Unsurprisingly, student’s expressed no strong desire to integrate personal tools with uni platforms – as ever, educators needs to design use of PULSE into the curriculum. However, the VLE vendor would not give access to the APIs to allow the kind of integration this would require.

Helen Beetham and Ellen Lessner introduced video accounts of learning digitally from 12 students not all of whom loved technology. The institutional technologies do not come out well in Jisc’s ‘Student digital experience tracker 2017’, but we have no idea whether that is to do with the task design, the support for new ways of learning, or the technologies themselves. Find resources at bit.ly/ALTC17digijourneys.

Carina Dolch asked whether students are getting used to learning technology. She described the massification and diversification of Germany’s higher education system, and how students’ media usage was changing over time. A survey of 3666 students confirmed that while there was an increase in time spent online since 2012. However – which is hard to explain – the frequency of text media use has been decreasing, as did the use of both general tools (search engines, Skype, etc) and e-learning tools and services (Moocs, lecture recordings, etc). Non-traditional students tend to use technologies functionally tied to their institution, whereas traditional students tended to use technologies more recreationally. Students expressed reluctance to be at the forefront of innovations, and there were more active decisions to be offline.

I loved Sian Bayne’s keynote about anonymity. She used the demise of Yik Yak the anonymous hyperlocal networking app, to talk about campus networks and privacy. Yik Yak’s high point in the download chart was 2014. In 2016 they withdrew anonymity, which is reflected by a plunge in usage at Edinburgh. Yik Yak restored anonymity shortly before closing in 2017 to no particular regret in the media. It had not been able to use personal data to finance itself. Moral panics about anonymous social media served platform capitalism by demanding that everyone be reachable and accountable. Edinburgh students discussed student life (including mental health), sex and dating, with some academic and political issues. Most students found it a kind and supportive network. Anonymity studies notes the ‘psychic numbing’ which allows most social media users to join up their accounts in the interests of living an “effective life”, inuring them to the risks of surveillance capitalism. Some users resist surveillance by cloaking one’s identity – however this seems over-reliant on other users not cloaking theirs, otherwise the enterprise, relying as it does on personal data, inevitably folds. I can’t see any other way to escape platform capitalism than to organise sustainable resourcing for open platforms such as Mastodon and Diaspora.

Fotios Mispoulos took a University of Liverpool instructor’s perspective on the effectiveness of learner-to-learner interactions. Most of the research into learner-to-learner interactions happened in the 1990s and found improved satisfaction and outcomes, though there are some counter findings. As usual the particulars of the task design, year group etc were glossed so we may be trying to compare apples and bananas.

Vicki Holmes and Adam Bailey talked about introducing Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (which we have at UCL) for web meeting at Reading. I thought their approach was very good – to clarify purposes and promote commitment hey asked for formal expressions of interest, they then ran workshops with selected colleagues to build confidence and technical readiness (headphones, the right web browser). These refined designs for meetings around placement support, sessions between campuses, assessment support tutorials, and pre-session workshops, among other purposes. Participants from Politics, Finance, Careers observed positive outcomes. Recommendations include avoiding simply lecturing since students disengage quickly,  designing interactions carefully (rather than expecting them to happen), to develop the distinct presentation techniques, and to prepare students (again around technical readiness and role). 87% of students felt it was appropriate to their learning.

Beth Snowden and Bronwen Swinnerton presented on rethinking lectures in three redesigned tiered theatres at the University of Leeds. Each ‘pod’ has a mic, top-lighting, and a wired-in thinkpad device which can be used to send responses and also to present via the data projector. Lecturers observed how students who had chatted to each other were more likely to chat with him and to ask questions. Another doubted he could continue referring to the session as a ‘lecture’. Responses to the evaluation survey found that the average time listening to the lecturer was 49%, which was assumed to be less than in the other lecture theatres. Just over half of staff felt that the new lecture theatres created extra work, but more felt they were a positive development. Future evaluation will focus on educational uses.

[See YouTube University of Leeds “upgrade of teaching spaces”]

Catherine Naamani looked at the impact of space design on collaborative approaches at the University of South Wales. The flexible spaces had colour coded chairs round triangular tables with their own screen which students could present to using an app, and which the tutor could access. The more confident groups gained more tutor attention while the least engaged groups tended to be international students, so more group-to-group activity needed to be designed. Staff tended to identify training needs with the technology, but not developmental needs around educational approach using that technology.

Another stand-out session – as digital education strategists and academics at their respective institutions, Kyriaki Agnostopoulou, Don Passey, Neil Morris and Amber Thomas looked at the evidence bases and business cases for digital education. Amber noted academic, administrative and technical don’t speak to each other until the top of the organisation. How do digital education workers influence their organisations strategies? There are four distinct origins of evidence: technology affordances, uses, outcomes and impact. The former kinds of evidence can be provided through qualitative case studies while the latter through quantitative independent control group studies. Case studies are abundant, but far rarer are studies which show evidence of impact over time. Amber urged us to learn the language of ITIL and Prince 2 to “understand them as much as you want them to understand you”. Return on investment, laying out true costs (staff time, supply costs, simultaneous users), use cases (and edge cases), capital spend and recurrent spend) strategic alignment, gains (educational, efficiency and PR), options appraisals, sustainability and scalability, and risk analyses are a way to be ready for management critique of any idea. Neil Morris (Leeds) took the view that using evidence is the most powerful way of making change. Making the academic case first gets the idea talked about.

Online submission continues to outstrip e-marking at the University of Nottingham. Helen Whitehead introduced ‘Escape from paper mountain‘, an educational development escape game through which staff would understand how to use an online marking environment [see ALT Winter Conference]. The scenario is an assessor who has completed his marking but then disappeared; the mission is to find his marking and get it to the Exam Board in 60 minutes. The puzzles, to be solved in groups, are all localised, sometimes even at the subject-specific level. There are plenty of materials at yammer.com/escapehe.

Kamakshi Rajagopal from the Open University of The Netherland ran a workshop on practical measures to break out of online echo chambers aka filter bubbles – people from similar backgrounds and strata of societies in the context of an egocentric, personally and intentionally created personal learning network. One group came up with the idea of a ‘Challenge me’ or ‘Forget me’ button to be able to serve yourself different feeds

(The amount of notes reflects the amount of sleep).