Twitter story from the 11 May JISC Curriculum Design Programme Meeting.
[View the story “Talking about challenge and change” on Storify]
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Technologies update from the Curriculum Design Programme
We recently completed another round of PROD calls with the current JISC Curriculum Design projects. So, what developments are we seeing this time around?
Wordle of techs & standards used in Curriculum Design Prog, April 11
Well, in terms of baseline technologies, integrations and approaches the majority of projects haven’t made any major deviations from what they originally planned. The range of technologies in use has grown slighty, mainly due to in parts to the addition of software being used for video capture (see my previous post on the use of video for capturing evidence and reflection).
The bubblegram below gives a view of the number of projects using a particular standard and/or technology.
XCRI is our front runner, with all 12 projects looking at it to a greater or lesser extent. But, we are still some way off all 12 projects actually implementing the specification. From our discussions with the projects, there isn’t really a specific reason for them not implementing XCRI, it’s more that it isn’t a priority for them at the moment. Whilst for others (SRC, Predict, Co-educate) it is firmly embedded in their processes. Some projects would like the spec to be more extensive than it stands which we have know for a while and the XCRI team are making inroads into further development particularly with its inclusion into the European MLO (Metadata for Learning Opportunities) developments. As with many education specific standards/specifications, unless there is a very big carrot (or stick) widespread adoption and uptake is sporadic however logical the argument for using the spec/standard is. On the plus side, most are confident that they could implement the spec, and we know from the XCRI mini-projects that there are no major technical difficulties in implementation.
Modelling course approval processes has been central to the programme and unsurprisingly there has been much interest and use of formal modelling languages such as BPMN and Archimate. Indeed nearly all the projects commented on how useful having models, however complex, has been to engage stakeholders at all levels within institutions. The “myth busting” power of models i.e. this shows what actually what happens and it’s not necessarily how you believe things happen, was one anecdote that made me smile and I’m sure resonates in many institutions/projects. There is also a growing use of the Archi tool for modelling and growing sharing of experience between a number of projects and the EA (Enterprise Architecture) group. As Gill has written, there are a number of parallels between EA and Curriculum Design.
Unsurprisingly for projects of this length (4 years) and perhaps heightened by “the current climate”, a number of the projects have (or are still) in the process of fairly major institutional senior staff changes. This has had some impact relating to purchasing decisions re potential institution wide systems, which are generally out of the control of the projects. There is also the issue of loss of academic champions for projects. This is generally manifesting itself in the projects by working on other areas, and lots of juggling by project managers. In this respect the programme clusters have also been effective with representatives from projects presenting to senior management teams in other institutions. Some of the more agile development processes teams have been using has also helped to allow teams to be more flexible in their approaches to development work.
One very practical development which is starting to emerge from work on rationalizing course databases is the automatic creation of course instances in VLEs. A common issue in many institutions is that there are no version controls for course within VLEs and it’s very common for staff to just create a new instance of a course every year and not delete older instances which apart from anything else can add up to quite a bit of server space. Projects such as SRC are now at the stage where there new (and approved) course templates are populating the course database which then triggers an automatic creation of a course in the VLE. Predict, and UG-Flex have similar systems. The UG-Flex team have also done some additional integration with their admissions systems so that students can only register for courses which are actually running during their enrollment dates.
Sharepoint is continuing to show a presence. Again there are a number of different approaches to using it. For example in the T-Spark project, their major work flow developments will be facilitated through Sharepoint. They now have a part time Sharepoint developer in place who is working with the team and central IT support. You can find out more at their development blog. Sharepoint also plays a significant role in the PiP project, however the team are also looking at integrations with “bigger” systems such as Oracle, and are developing a number of UI interfaces and forms which integrate with Sharepoint (and potentially Oracle). As most institutions in the UK have some flavour of Sharepoint deployed, there is significant interest in approaches to utilising it most effectively. There are some justifiable concerns relating to its use for document and data management, the later being seen as not one of its strengths.
As ever it is difficult to give a concise and comprehensive view from such a complex set of projects, who are all taking a slightly different approach to their use of technology and the methods they use for system integration. However many projects have said that the umbrella of course design has allowed them to discuss, develop the use of institutional administration and teaching and learning systems far more effectively than they have been able to previously. A growing number of resources from the projects is available from The Design Studio and you can view all the information we have gathered from the projects from our PROD database.
The Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) and Curriculum Design
This morning I spent an hour catching up with seminar given last week by the LDSE team gave as part of a series of online seminars being run by the Curriculum Design and Delivery support project. You can view the session by following the link at the bottom of this page.
The LDSE (Learning Design Support Environment) is an ESRC/EPSRC TEL funded project involving the Institute of Education, Birkbeck College, University of Oxford, London Metropolitan University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Royal Veterinary College and ALT. The project builds on the work of previously JISC funded projects Phoebe and LPP and aims to discover how to use digital technologies to support teachers in designing effective technology-enhanced learning (you can read more on the project summary page or watch this video).
The are a number of overlapping interests with the LDSE and the current JISC funded Curriculum Design programme and the session was designed to give an overview of the system and an opportunity to discuss some common areas such as: how to model principles in educational design, guidelines and toolkits for staff, joining up systems and how do we join up institution-level business processes with learning-level design?
During the tour of the system Marion Manton explained how the system underpinned by an learning design ontology to help enhance the user experience. So the system is able to “understand” relationships of learning design properties (such as teaching styles) and provide the user with analysis of and different views of the pedagogical make-up of their design/learning experience.
LDSE pedagogy pie chart
The system also allows for a timeline view of designs and which again is something practitioners find very useful. There is some pre-population of fields (based on the ontology) but these are customizable. Each of the fields also links to further guidance and advice based on the Phoebe wiki based approach.
The ontology was created using Protégé and the team will be making the latest version of the ontology publicly available through the Protege sharing site.
I think the ontology based approach, the different views it provides, and the guidance the system gives are all major steps forward in terms of developing useful tools to aid practitioners in the design process. I know when I gave a very short demo of the LDSE at a seminar in my department a couple of weeks ago, there was real sense of engagement from staff. However in terms of joining up systems and integrating a tool like the LDSE into wider institutional systems and processes I did feel that there was something missing.
The team did point out that the system can import and export xml, but I’m still unclear exactly how/where/what a system would do with the xml from LDSE. How could you make it into either a runnable design in your VLE or indeed be able to be used as an “official” course document either in a course approval process or in a course handbook or both? One of the final outputs CETIS produced for the Design for Learning Programme was a mapping of programme outputs to IMS LD, and we were able to come up with a number of common field, this could be a starting point for the team.
There was some discussion about perhaps integrating XCRI, however the developers in the session didn’t seem to be familiar with it. And to be fair, why should computer scientists know about a course advertising spec? Probably most teachers and a fair few institutional marketing departments don’t know about it either. This is one area where hopefully the Design Programme and LDSE can share experiences. Most of the design projects are in the process of rolling out new course approval documents so maybe a list of common fields from them could be shared with the LDSE team to help build a generic template. We already know that the XCRI CAP profile doesn’t include the depth of educational information most of the design projects would like to gather. However this is starting to be addressed with XCRI being integrated into the CEN MLO work.
Hopefully the LDSE team will be able to make some in-roads now into allowing the system to produce outputs which people can start to re-use and share effectively with a number of systems. And this has got me thinking about the possibility of the next CETIS Design Bash being based around a number of challenges for import/exporting course approval documents into systems such as LDSE and the systems being used by the Design projects. I’d be really interested in hearing any more thoughts around this.
Using video to capture reflection and evidence
An emerging trend coming through from the JISC Curriculum Design programme is the use of video, particularly for capturing evidence and and reflection of processes and systems. Three of the projects (T-Sparc, SRC, OULDI) took part in an online session yesterday to share their experiences to-date.
T-Sparc at Birmingham City University have been using video extensively with both staff and students as part of their baselining activities around the curriculum design process. As part of their evaluation processes, the SRC project at MMU have been using video (flipcams) to get student feedback on their experiences of using e-portfolios to help develop competencies. And the OULDI project at the OU have been using video in a number of ways to get feedback from their user community around their experiences of course design and the tools that are being developed as part of the project.
There were a number of commonalities identified by each of the projects. On the plus side the immediacy and authenticity of video was seen as a strength, allowing in the case of SRC the team to integrate student feedback much earlier. The students themselves also liked the ease of use of video for providing feedback. Andrew Charlton-Perez (a lecturer who is participating in one of the OULDI pilots) has been keeping a reflective diary of his experiences. This is not only a really useful, shareable resource in its own right, but Andrew himself pointed out that he has found it really useful as self-reflective tool and in helping to him to re-engage with the project after periods of non-involvement. The T-Sparc team have been particularly creative in using the video clips as part of their reporting process both internally and with JISC. Hearing things straight from the horses mouth so to speak, is very powerful and engaging. Speaking as someone who has to read quite a few reports, this type of multi-media reporting makes for a refreshing change from text based reports.
Although hosting of video is becoming relatively straightforward and commonplace through services such as YouTube and Vimeo, the projects have faced some perhaps unforeseen challenges around consistency of file formats which can work both in external hosting sites, and internally. For example the version of Windows streaming used institutionally at BCU doesn’t support the native MP3 file formats from the flip-cams the team were using. The team are currently working on getting a codec update and they have also invested in additional storage capacity. At the OU the team are working with a number of pilot institutions who are supplying video and audio feedback in a range of formats from AVI to MP3 and almost everything in the middle, some which of need considerable time to encode into the systems the OU team are using for evaluation. So the teams have found that there have been some additional unforeseen resources implications (both human and hardware) when using video.
Another common issue to come through from the presentations and discussion was around data storage. The teams are generating considerable amounts of data, much of which they want to store permanently – particularly if it is being incorporated into project reports etc. How long should a project be expected to keep evaluative video evidence?
However despite these issues there seemed to be a general consensus that the strengths of using video did make up for some of the difficulties it brought with it. The teams area also developing experience and knowledge in using software such as Xtranormal and Overstream for creating anonymous content and subtitles. They are also creating a range of documentation around permissions of use for video too which will be shared with the wider community.
A recording of the session is available from The Design Studio.
What technologies have been used to transform curriculum delivery?
The Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology (aka Curriculum Delivery) Programme is now finished. Over the past two years, the 15 funded projects have all been on quite a journey and have between them explored the use of an array of technologies (over 60) from excel to skype to moodle to google wave.
The bubblegram and treegraph below give a couple of different visual overviews of the range technologies used.
As has been reported before, there’s not been anything particularly revolutionary or cutting edge about the technologies being used. The programme did not mandate any particular standards or technical approaches. Rather, the projects have concentrated on staff and student engagement with technology. Which of course is the key to having real impact in teaching and learning. The technologies themselves can’t do it alone.
The sheer numbers of technologies being used does, I think, show an increasing confidence and flexibility not only from staff and students but also in developing institutional systems. People are no longer looking for the magic out of the box solution and are more willing to develop their own integrations based on their real needs. The ubiquity of the VLE does come through loud and clear.
There are still some key lessons coming through.
* Simple is best – don’t try and get staff (and students) to use too many new things at once.
* Have support in place for users – if you are trying something new, make sure you have the appropriate levels of support in place for users.
*Tell people what you are doing – talk about your project, wherever you can and share your objectives as widely as possible. Show people the benefits of what you are doing. Encourage others to share too.
*Talk to institutional IT support teams about what you are planning – before trying to use a new piece of software, make sure it does work within your institutional network. IT teams can provide invaluable information and advice about will/won’t work. They can also provide insights into scalability issues for future developments. A number of the projects have found that although web 2.0 technologies can be implemented relatively quickly, there are issues when trying to increase the scale of trial projects.
A full record of the technologies in use for the projects is available from our PROD project database. More information on the projects and a selection of very useful shareable outputs (including case studies and resources) is available from the Design Studio.
Design Studio video walkthrough
Finding resources from JISC programmes is an perennial problem. Websites wither and die once funding ends, people move on, we forget project names and resources become increasingly difficult to track down. The current JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery Programmes are trying to help solve this problem through the development of the Design Studio.
The Design Studio is a wiki-based resource which links and contextualizes resources created by the projects in both programmes, and other related resources from previous JISC and HEA funded activities. As part of a session for the upcoming JISC Online conference, Marianne Sheppard (JISC Infonet) has created a short introductory video to the Design Studio – if you are interested in tracking down resources related to innovative teaching and learning practice then this is a great place to start and the video is a great introduction to the resource.
Challenging times, challenging curriculum(s)
The fact that we are living in increasingly challenging times is becoming ever more apparent. With the release of the Browne Report on HE funding and student finance, and the results of the Comprehensive Spending Review imminent; we are faced with radical changes to the current models of funding for our Universities. This is raising fundamental questions about the nature of teaching and learning provision, the role and relationship of students to institutions, the role and relationship of institutions and government and how institutions work with industry (in the widest sense of the word). It was in the wake of this complex backdrop, the current JISC funded Curriculum Delivery and Design programmes held a joint programme meeting last week Nottingham. The projects in these programmes are all grappling with issues around effective use of technology to enhance curriculum design and delivery process and provide a range of more flexible, adaptable curricula.
The meeting began with a very timely keynote from Peter Finlay from the QAA. Dispelling some of the current myths around the point and processes involved in QAA audits, Peter illustrated how inter-dependencies of what he described as the “triad” forces (State, Institutions and National Agencies) influence the quality assurance processes. The triad tends to work in a cyclical fashion with the interactions and developments of each stakeholder oscillating between extremes of autonomy within institutions to extremes of regulation from the State. The later most noticeably enforced by QA procedures. Peter highlighted how forward thinking institutions can use the QA process to create and foster institutional cultures of enquiry, based on informed reflection which should allow planned enhancement strategies.
The work of both the curriculum design and delivery programmes is already helping the institutions involved to take this approach as the projects are fundamentally about transforming course delivery and the course design and validation processes. Peter encouraged projects to promote and enhance the work they are doing. The current political context is unpredictable. However, by being proactive, institutions can influence the practice of QA. Peter finished by restating that he felt the programmes, and the work already highlighted within the Design Studio, is of great relevance and a major asset to the wider community.
The rest of the first day was then divided into a number of breakout session centred around some barriers/drivers to institutional change. Notes from each of the sessions will be available from the Circle website later this week. The day culminated with the Great Exhibition Awards Ceremony. Each of the Delivery projects set up their stall (you can get a feel for the stands from the pre event adverts for each project in the Design Studio ). Delegates had time to visit each stand then vote. The two runaway winners were Springboard TV (College of West Anglia) and Integrate (University of Exeter). Both teams thoroughly deserved the thoroughly outrageous chocolate prizes.
The second day started with another timely keynote, this time from Professor Betty Collis. Betty’s talk focused on her experiences learning from a workplace perspective -in particular through some of the key trends from her experiences of working with Shell. Taking us on a journey through some of the stages in the development of task orientated, work-based learning activities, Betty explained how they had developed a culture change from “I learn from myself, through to I learn with my group, to I learning in order to contribute to the learning of others throughout the enterprise.” Quite a leap – even for highly qualified, professionals. Shell had identified that their new graduate staff (even those at PhD level) had little experience of multidisciplinary, high pressured team working situations. By introducing a framework encapsulated by three verbs “ask, share, learn”, Betty and her team fostered the notion of coaching and effective organisational knowledge sharing. The use of a wiki as a common platform for knowledge sharing was fundamental to this process.
Betty encouraged the audience to think about formal education settings in a similar way by designing more cross discipline activities to help develop sharing/coaching and team working skills and to start thinking of e-portfolios not just as individual collation tools but as shared learning resources. She also challenged the programmes definition of design for learning which “refers to the complex processes by which practitioners devise, structure and realise learning for others” and reframe thinking to ask is it ultimately the task of formal education to fosters methods for learners (and teachers) to work with others to become more mature members of a learning organisation?
A number of the breakout sessions again highlighted some of the inroads projects are making in a number of these areas. Student engagement was high on the agenda and Integrate project from the University of Exeter has some excellent examples of students acting as real change agents.
The meeting finished was a panel session, which unsurprisingly focused on many of the issues the Brown report highlighted – particularly around fees and contact hours. Today’s education space is more complicated than ever. At a sectoral level we need to get politicians to understand the complexities, and we be able to provide accurate, update information about courses at a range of levels for a range of stakeholders. We are of course making good inroads with the work of XCRI in particular, but we need to do more and think more about how we can harness the principles of linked data to share information internally and externally. Peter Finlay also highlighted the need for greater clarity about when students are part of the learning partnership and when they are more service based customers i.e. paying for halls of residence as opposed to choosing a course of study. We need to ensure that students are able to commit to a learning partnership, as co-creators of knowledge and not just passive recipients.
We live in challenging times. However, there is a huge amount of experience within these two programmes (and across a range of JISC funded projects and beyond). We need to ensure that the lessons learned about the effective use of technology throughout the curriculum design and delivery process are being used as positive change agents to help us ensure the quality of our sector.
More information about the programme meeting is available from the Circle website and resources from the projects are available from the Design Studio. A timeline of the events twitter activity is also available online.
Design Bash update
Due to holidays etc I’ve been a bit late in reporting back on the Design Bash we held in conjunction with the 2010 European LAMS conference last month at the University of Oxford.
This is the third design bash I’ve been involved in organising, and they’re probably closest in style and structure to an un-conference. There is no pre-set agenda and the main aim of the day is to foster meaningful extended dialogue between delegates. In other words, just allowing people to speak to each other. This year, the groups divided along a number of lines. One group spent most of the day discussing the ” critical success factors for curriculum design”. Paul Bartholomew from the T-SPARC project at BCU, helpfully created a mindmap of the discussion.
In contrast to these more cerebral discussions, there were a number of mini-demonstrations of tools and systems including the GLO tool, ldshake, and compendium LD, and wookie. Again links to all the tools are in the available online from the Design Bash Cloudworks site.
James Dalziel demoed a number of new features of the LAMS system such as embedding which many of the delegates were interested in. At last year’s design bash, embedding and previewing of designs was a key theme of many of the discussions, so it was great to see how over the year the discussion has developed into an actual implementation.
Members of the LDSE project team attended and the day provided a great opportunity for the team to discuss and develop potential integrations from others. For example, Bill Olivier and Diana Laurillard had a very fruitful discussion about LDSE using the IDIBL framework that the University of Bolton have developed.
Unlike last year’s event there wasn’t very much activity around sharing of designs, and I’m not sure if that was due to the size of this year’s event – there were quite a few more people in attendance. Or, if it was simply down the the overriding interests of participants this year. If we run the event again next year, we may have a slightly more structured agenda and dedicated demo slots and a slightly more structured technical stream. We did also discuss the possibility of running a similar event online. This is something we may well investigate further, and certainly it has possibilities. The cloudworks site itself does allow for a level of interactivity, however I did notice that there wasn’t as much external contribution this year compared with last. However, again this just maybe down to fact that we had more people there in person.
Overall though, there was very positive feedback from delegates on the day. You can view (comment and contribute too) all the resources from the day from Cloudworks.
Making assessment count, e-Reflect SUM released
Gunter Saunders and his team on the Making Assessment Count project (part of the current JISC Curriculum Delivery programme), have just released a SUM (service useage model) describing the process they have introduced to engage students (and staff) in the assessment process.
“The SUM presents a three stage framework for feedback to students on coursework. The SUM can act to guide both students and staff in the feedback process, potentially helping to ensure that both groups of stakeholders view feedback and its use as a structured process centred around reflection and discussion and leading to action and development.”
You can access the e-Reflect SUM here.
Use of repositories and data mash-ups in the Curriculum Delivery Programme
Formal repositories didn’t feature to highly in the programme with only one project (COWL) really integrating content into an institutional repository. Learning materials tended to be stored in the VLE. However a number of projects have been using of more online sharing or “fauxpository” services. Photosharing services such as Flickr proved to have multidisciplinary appeal being used in this programme in design and geography courses.
Institutional Repository
* Cowl – Curve, University of Coventry repository
Flickr
*Atelier-D (this project also developed its own flickr like sharing, Open Studio)
*Morse
*Middlesex
Diigo
*Morse
In terms of data mash-ups, the MORSE project used a number of audio, photographic and geo-location services on geography field trips feeding back to their VLE. However the project did also note that lectures felt that in enabling these approaches, students were losing some traditional field work skills particularly field sketches.
Qik
*Morse
Instamapper
*Morse
Gabcast
*Morse
Morse also explored the the use of AR technologies, in particular Layar and Wikitude.
The Design Studio is also perhaps turning into another fauxpository where selected resources created by the programme are showcased.