Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

Chapter 5: Evaluation

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

Sustained Faculty Development in Learning Communities

While it is common for learning community programs to provide professional development to support their faculty, such support may not be sustained. This article reports on a professional development framework instituted at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, that includes activities for faculty teams before, during, and after the semester. This cyclical practice grew out of administrators’ recognition of the need for faculty not only to create shared assignments for students, but also to assess their students’ work in response. Based on the principles of: (1) supporting collaboration, (2) promoting reflective teaching to encourage integrative thinking and learning, and (3) respecting faculty members’ agency, we present a professional development model that aims to equip learning community faculty with tools to transform their teaching and their students’ learning. Janine Graziano is a Professor of English, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, and an instructor and the faculty coordinator of the Integrative Studies Learning Community Program at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. Gabrielle Kahn is an Assistant Professor of English and is an instructor and the faculty coordinator of the Intensive ESL Learning Community Program at Kingsborough Community College

Opportunity-Rich Schools and Sustainable Communities: Seven Steps to Align High-Quality Education With Innovations in City and Metropolitan Planning and Development

Details challenges and steps for linking quality education and community and economic vitality, including establishing a shared vision and metrics, aligning investments for prosperity, and expanding access via transportation. Lists promising practices

Teaching Workplace Skills Through Integrative Exercises

This paper presents a set of three integrative exercises created to help college students develop workplace skills through simulation. Interviewing, listening, providing feedback, setting goals, empowering, coaching, managing change, handling conflict, and making decisions are clustered and modeled at intervals that synthesize course learning

Fostering Dental Faculty Collaboration with an Evidence-Based Decision Making Model Designed for Curricular Change

This article introduces an innovative decision making model for adapting evidence-based practice to the specific needs of a department in a dental school. The design encourages suggestions for curricular change directly from the faculty members, while providing a mechanism that allows them to actively participate in the process through the use of evidence-based principles and practice. The nucleus of this model is an Advisory Council comprised of nine full-time departmental faculty members who, when charged, act as independent task force leaders who recruit other faculty members and lead small teams that investigate suggestions for curricular change. Following an accelerated investigative process, recommendations to the Advisory Council are made; if approved, these changes are integrated into the curriculum. The incorporation of an interdisciplinary Advisory Council of key departmental faculty members structured to investigate questions or concerns posed by students, administrators, or other faculty members through the use of evidence-based methodologies has proved to be a successful management tool. Well received by the participants, this model has the potential to further develop and calibrate the school’s faculty, increase the timeliness of the decision making process, and lessen the time required to incorporate a proposed change into the curriculum

Psychometrics in Practice at RCEC

A broad range of topics is dealt with in this volume: from combining the psychometric generalizability and item response theories to the ideas for an integrated formative use of data-driven decision making, assessment for learning and diagnostic testing. A number of chapters pay attention to computerized (adaptive) and classification testing. Other chapters treat the quality of testing in a general sense, but for topics like maintaining standards or the testing of writing ability, the quality of testing is dealt with more specifically.\ud All authors are connected to RCEC as researchers. They present one of their current research topics and provide some insight into the focus of RCEC. The selection of the topics and the editing intends that the book should be of special interest to educational researchers, psychometricians and practitioners in educational assessment

Transformative Pedagogy and Science Identity in Undergraduate Anatomy and Physiology

Anatomy and Physiology (A&P) courses are undergraduate biology prerequisite courses that cover many topics about human biology, including anatomy, histology, organ systems, and homeostasis. The purpose of the course is to equip students aiming to enter nursing and allied health education programs with an understanding of basic biological principles relevant to human biology and pharmacology. However, these courses have a high incidence of failure, and many students need to retake the course to progress in their competitive academic programs. Students tend to rely on memorization techniques to learn the course content, and given the nature of A&P as a discipline, this can be insufficient to achieve desired learning (i.e., mastery over the course content) and academic (i.e., course grades) outcomes in these courses. Thus, it is vital to identify evidence-based teaching practices and student factors that contribute to academic outcomes in this course. The three projects that compose the scholastic contribution of this dissertation collectively synthesize evidence-based teaching practices in A&P contexts, test how student affect factors (e.g., self-efficacy, science identity, and situational interest) impact student outcomes, and explore the experiences of students taking the class. The first project (Chapter II) is a systematic review that summarizes pedagogical interventions from 111 research articles about how A&P instruction impacts students’ learning outcomes and satisfaction. The second project (Chapter III) uses mixed methods and found that in a sample of 83 introductory A&P iv students, scores on a science identity metric predicted final grade in the course. The qualitative component of Chapter III also identifies emerging allied health identities alongside science identity as driving motivators for students repeating the course. The third project (Chapter IV) examines student experiences with A&P through the lens of transformative experience theory. This exploratory project examines student writing for evidence of students making connections between course content and their everyday lives using a mixed methods approach. Qualitative content analysis and epistemic network analysis reveal that students make salient connections between their interest in the course content, expansion of perception of the course content as relevant to their everyday lives, learning about A&P, and viewing the course content as relevant to their personal lives. In sum, these projects benefit A&P instructors and biology education researchers working to support student outcomes in A&P