The term Active Learning Classroom seems to be quite well established in the US and Canada but I have to say isn’t something I’ve consciously encountered at home. I attended a great workshop at the Educause conference on active learning classrooms – and specifically on the kinds of activities that can take place in them – led by the very energetic Adam Finkelstein of McGill University in Montreal.

What are they? 
Simply spaces designed for students to learn together in groups – with or without technology. Typically there are tables for 6-9 students, with one or two (or no) screens per table for them to use with their own devices,  writable surfaces around the room, acoustics that can cope with multiple conversations, and  space for the teacher to move freely amongst the students.  There is no front podium for the teachers – they are normally in the middle of the room. The idea is that they promote collaborative learning experiences and provide more interaction between students and staff. There are some terrific videos from McGill showing classes and academics’ perspectives on them.

Some examples:

• MIT technology enhanced active learning classrooms (TEAL) classrooms
• University of Queensland Axon learning lab
• University of Minnesota ALCs
• McGill ALCs –
• Berkeley  ALCs

Learning in an ALC
A strength of the session was that it employed active learning strategies in an ALC – the workshop was in a space with all of the main ingredients of an ALC, and Adam modelled an active learning approach in which we had no option but to collaborate and learn together.

We were given a brief presentation on active learning and classroom designs, and then set to work with a short paper to read individually and a warning that we’d be tested on it – this definitely focused the mind.  After the test (multiple choice & short answer) on paper which we had to hand in (quite unnerving) we had to discuss our answers with our table mates and come to an agreement. This activity was a ‘readiness assurance process’, so called because it checks that participants are ready to move on in their learning.

Apparently we passed as Adam then moved on.  He outlined a framework for an active learning class which has four elements:

1. You start by introducing the approach and orienting the learners
2. There will be some informing or instruction – whether through presentation, reading, watching a video – whatever is most appropriate
3. Next comes the active learning bit – time for learners to work
4. The closing part involves reflection on what was learned and next steps.

He then set us off on another activity – this time a ‘four corners’ activity – in which we were split into four groups and given a couple of minutes to fill each of four whiteboards in turn on each of the four elements we’d heard about; each group built on the ideas of the previous one.  At the end of this he closed this activity by visiting each board and summarising – and challenging where necessary – our work.

Adam circulated a comprehensive list of 26 active learning strategies from brainstorming and buzz groups to interviews, simulations and one minute papers.

The session was backed up by other good online resources which I’d recommend a close look at – start at the resources section for each of the following:

• Active learning classroom resources
• Active learning strategies resources

Lots of food for thought and ideas for supporting learning in different sorts of learning spaces. Now we just need those spaces…

There are lots of theories about learning and e-learning, and some are quite good, but most people don’t have time to explore them. So here is a ‘mashup’ to try to link some I find the most useful.

I made it earlier this year as part of my OU MA in Online and Distance Education …and have just found it languishing half-forgotten on my OU blog.

So here goes, bearing in mind in the words of Anna Sfard (1988) this is a “patchwork of metaphors rather than a homogenous theory of learning“.

According to Sfard the aim of a higher education is mainly

“a process of becoming a member of a certain [discipline] community…the ability to communicate…to act according to its particular norms“.

However to give awards universities – in their role as gatekeepers of the discipline community – have to assess something more concrete i.e. the acquisition of knowledge. So there is a tension, but both are actually linked (Sfard again);

“the act of acquisition is often tantamount to the act of becoming a participant…competence means being able to repeat what can be repeated while changing what needs to be changed“.

So to go from novice to discipline expert therefore the student needs to go through a process, a number of steps or components. This may be partially sequential, as a student moves from basic understanding towards community-sanctioned competence, but not necessarily so.

The components below are based on the classification Mayes and de Freitas did for JISC in 2004  but renamed. This classification formed the pedagogical underpinning of JISC’s Effective practice in a digital age: A guide to technology-enhanced learning and teaching (2009), a significant expression of the ‘official’ UK approach to e-learning pedagogy. The Mayes and de Freitas framework can also – in my view – be readily mapped on to other frameworks such as the well known Bloom’s Taxonomy or the nowadays more respected (but more complex) Laurillard ‘conversational framework’ or Gilly Salmon’s influential e-tivities.  I have also tried to link the theory to ‘practice’, inspired by Bonk and Zhang’s (2008) Empowering online learning.

Four ways students learn:

1. Knowledge acquisition

1.1 Content – student acquires knowledge of subject area vicariously from experts.

• Ideas: behaviourism, instructional design (easy to difficult), memorisation.
• Bloom: remember, understand.
• Practice: expert lecture (capture), web resource libraries, lab training, guided readings, language study, FAQs, expert tutorials, handouts, videos, podcasts, self-assessment quizzes and diagnostics, e-books, classroom clickers, literature reviews/critiques, concept maps, news feeds, timelines, image libraries, diagrams, maps, virtual tours, animations .

1.2 Construction – student develops own understanding of the subject through reflection on own hypothesis and testing.

• Ideas: constructivism, experimental learning, scaffolding, Kolb cycle, reflective learning, Laurillard’s ‘internal dialogue’.
• Bloom: apply, analyse.
• Practice: case studies, ‘fuzzy’ problems, individual projects, model answers, placements, fieldwork, personal blogs, portfolios, simulations and models, web research, digital storytelling, data analysis, critique, ranking and rating.

1.3 Collaboration – student develops understanding of the subject further through dialogue (articulation, dealing with alternative views) and collaborative activities (testing understanding through persuasion and practice).

• Ideas: learning as conversation (Laurillard), Salmon’s higher e-tivities, problem-based learning (PBL).
• Bloom: evaluate, create.
• Practice: brainstorming, discussion,  ‘apprenticeship’ with experts, PBL and group projects, online discussion, wikis, collaborative blogs, resource gathering and sharing, social networking, role play, team writing, position papers, creating a video, action research, collaborative glossary, games, tutoring/mentoring.

2. Participation

2.1 Contribution – student develops professional identity through ‘social practices’, becoming part of disciplinary communities of enquiry. This pre-professional learning is challenging in a university contexts.

• Ideas: Wenger ‘communities of practice’
• Bloom: create (and I would add, contribute).
• Practice: communities of practice, communities of enquiry, learning groups, networked learning, professional blogging, tweeting, proposals, reviews, projects, papers and publications, presentations at discipline events.

Ok, maybe a bit reductionist but in my mind this all fits together. Of course there is more to learning theory, so as a bonus…

Three other influential factors on student learning worth investigating

• Deep and surface approaches (Marton etc,19 70s) – students engage at different levels depending on personal priorities and motivations.
• Educational environment (Engestrom, 1990s) Learners influenced in their engagement by various elements of the educational system such as culture, aims (explicit and hidden), tools, environment etc
• Constructive alignment (Biggs, 1990s) – students approaches can be modified by designing the learning context). ‘Constructive alignment’ is congruence between what the teacher intends learners to be able to do, know or understand (can be described as outcomes), how they teach i.e. the activities and above all how they assess.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcmom/63762918/

“There are only two things wrong with the education system – what we teach and how we teach it.” Prof Roger Schank, CEO Socratic Arts

At the London Knowledge Lab last week, Lab Roger Schank a global guru in artificial intelligence (AI), learning theory, cognitive science and virtual learning presented a powerful vision of how a story-centred curriculum could and should drive education. A self-confessed ‘radical’, he challenged the hold content-packed ‘subjects’ have in schools, colleges and universities. If students couldn’t pass last year’s exams – as was usually the case, he claimed – memorisation of content rather than deep learning had always taken place.  We were still locked into a mode of educational delivery derived from early religious studies where learning was about memorising, not challenging, a ‘revealed wisdom’. Even where subjects had developed more engaging forms of learning, the aim was still often geared to turning students into academics.   This elitist, subject driven focus cast a long shadow into schools where children, 99% of which would never become academics, were forced to study irrelevant topics which actually put them off formal education.

Yet humans were natural informal learners. Informal learning however was rarely about acquiring facts but rather comprised endless loops of goals, active experimentation, failure and consequent explanations, interpretations or adaptations. These explanations, in the form of internal or external ‘stories’ were linked – ‘indexed’ in AI terms – to the context of the activities that spawned them.

We were shown two ways in a activity and story-led approach could work.

• The first was as a way of eliciting otherwise hidden corporate knowledge by videoing employees anecdotes, for example how a problem had been solved, and providing a descriptive context (derived from AI classifications of story types) to create a ‘just in time’ resource. These could be used to support staff responding to a new but related activity.
• The second was as a radical approach to curriculum design. AI research had suggested 12 fundamental cognitive processes humans engaged in when going through the “goal, plan, experiment, explain, retry” learning cycle. The three most important are description, diagnosis and planning (the others are prediction, modelling, experimentation, evaluation, causation, judgment, negotiation, influence and teamwork). These need to be practiced, and best way to do this is via a form of case-based learning called the story-centred curriculum. He had developed an innovative MBA programme in Spain in which students explore seven cases in which all 12 cognitive processes are developed as an integrating theme, and are assessed on authentic outcomes such as business plans.

Prof Schank unveiled his idea of an online Global Masters University which would use the story-centred curriculum as a way of developing innovative distance learning programmes. He believed there could be major commercial interest in such a practical ‘learn by doing’ programme and was currently looking for significant academic partners.

References: rogerschank.com has more information on most of the above and The cognitive science behind learning by doing is a recent slide set similar to the presentation above. Prof Schank’s latest book Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools is out in the autumn.

Should you really talk about ‘love’ and ‘passion’ at an e-learning conference? The terms certainly seemed to unnerve some members of the audience at Jack Whitehead’s closing keynote at the Diverse conference last week. Under the title “Creativity: enhancing our vision of the future with multimedia representations of learning“, Prof Whitehead from Liverpool Hope University outlined his attempt to bring emotionally-rich terms such as passion, contribution and love into mainstream educational research.

He was I think making the reasonable claim that emotional engagement with a subject and personal educational values hugely influence an individual’s attitudes to teaching, academic leadership and professional learning. If a teacher asks herself; “How can I improve what I am doing?“, a focus on values, personal purpose and so on is actually a good place to start.  In his website ActionResearch.net he calls his values-led approach a “living educational theory” in which “individuals hold their lives to account by producing explanations of their educational influences in their own learning“. If this still sounds a little abstract, or according to some skeptics in the Diverse audience ‘spiritual’, I can suggest two practical applications of values-driven approaches from my recent experience.

Video: Prof Whitehead noted that emotion, enthusiasm and personal anecdote were very hard to portray in formal academic writing and had used video in PhD theses, to capture these personal theories and approaches. In a teaching context video has the same purpose.  Our students at UCL expect our academics to be not only knowledgeable but passionate about their subject, indeed many come here just for that. This is why Lecturecast can be surprisingly powerful when it captures the personality and the passion of the presenter.

Distance learning:  Peter Goodyear (1999) in Pedagogical frameworks and action research in open and distance learning wrote that core or ‘philosophic’ values are rarely discussed in distance learning but observed “deep and unexplored philosophical differences within a team can lead to fatal divergence in the day-to-day operational work… The sooner such discrepancies are found, discussed and reconciled, the less likely is catastrophic failure“.  This is absolutely true, but ignoring underlying ‘philosophy’ can equally result in a failure to capture the original enthusiasm and deep values of the designers.

So should we really talk about ‘love’ and ‘passion’ at an e-learning conference? If it can make our e-learning materials and designs more powerful and educationally effective, absolutely.

Pop culture reference: Nick Lowe’s What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love & Understanding, also covered by Elvis Costello.

Prof Michael Wesch, US anthropologist and author of the influential Youtube videos A Vision of Students Today, The Machine is Us/ing Us and An anthropological introduction to YouTube gave an inspirational keynote  at Diverse 2011 last week entitled “The case for creative video literacy: what’s at stake?”.

He started with something we know instinctively: when students over-focus on exams it is essentially because they are not engaged with the learning. The problem is that in the modern media-rich world there are plenty of opportunities for academic disengagement from traditional models often resulting in a superficial, pedestrian approach to learning. Yet paradoxically it is also ‘ridiculously easy’ to connect to a world of information and ideas. In this new world the role of the educator is to help the students not just to acquire knowledge, to become knowledgeable but to be able to construct and critique meaning for themselves, become knowledge-ABLE.

Media has changed the relationship between the teacher and the learner, but does not undermine the importance of the educator. As students search the overwhelming and disorientating modern cultural matrix for meaning, personal identity and recognition, media-savvy teachers have key role. However this is now beyond ‘informational literacy’ but about how students themselves can creatively interact with the world.  In other words knowledge-ability is a cultural practice, and the focus should be on tackling real-world problems (…maybe such as UCL’s Grand Challenges?…) in which the students can use the technology to collaborate and find solutions. Real world engagement turns our students from unfocused meaning-seekers to value-driven meaning makers.

Inspiring stuff. Some of the background ideas and references can be found in the Slideshare The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity and try his Visions of Students (see the image above) for a fascinating new multimedia insight into the mindset of modern students.

At last Month’s MoodleMoot Gergely Rakoczi from Vienna University of Technology showed how eye-tracking technology can provide hints to make Moodle more usable and visually engaging to students .

What was even more interesting was how his recommendations tallied with the excellent session on “Best Practices in Course Design” from Michelle Moore of Moodle provider remote-learner.  Some of their combined suggestions are:

1. Maintain consistency – this is really important to help users navigate, but don’t use too many font styles. Michelle recommends just three per page.
2. Break up text into smaller bites e.g by using lists, colours and text boxes to emphasise important information. This helps visual perception and processing of information.
3. Use images to encourage interpretation and engagement.
4. Make students curious to increase their involvement i.e.  let students participate and collaborate.
5. One problem in Moodle is the potential for visual overload and Michelle advised don’t use the course home page for content. Although it is possible by adding files etc and indeed very common the course home page is really intended as a launch pad to web pages, Moodle books  and various activities.
6. And of course make sure all your content ‘fits’ with minimal scrolling