Making it Rich and Personal: crafting an institutional personal learning environment

Many of the communities interested in learning and teaching technologies within higher education now accept the view that a conception of personal learning environments provides a the most realistic and workable perspective of learners’ interactions with and use of technology. This view may not be reflected in the behaviour of those parts of a university which normally purchase and deploy technology infrastructure. These departments or services are slow to change because they are typically, and understandably, risk-averse; the more so, because the consequences of expensive decisions about infrastructure will stay with the organisation for many years. Furthermore across the broader (less technically or educationally informed) academic community, the awareness of and familiarity with technologies in support of learning may be varied. In this context, work to innovate the learning environment will require considerable team effort and collective commitment. This paper presents a case study account of institutional processes harnessed to establish a universal personal learning environment fit for the 21st century. The challenges encountered were consequential of our working definition of a learning environment, which went beyond simple implementation. In our experience the requirements became summarised as “its more than a system, it’s a mindset”. As well as deploying technology ‘fit for purpose’ we were seeking to create an environment that could play an integral and catalytic part in the university’s role of enabling transformative education. Our ambitions and aspirations were derived from evidence in the literature. We also drew on evidence of recent and current performance in the university; gauged by institutional benchmarking and an extensive student survey. The paper presents and analyses this qualitative and quantitative data. We provide an account and analysis of our progress to achieve change, the methods we used, problems encountered and the decisions we made on the way

Embedding blended learning in a university’s teaching culture: experiences and reflections

Blended learning, the combination of traditional face-to-face teaching methods with authentic on-line learning activities, has the potential to transform student learning experiences and outcomes. In spite of this advantage, university teachers often find it difficult to adopt new on-line techniques, in part because institutional practices are still geared to support more traditional approaches. This paper describes how a project, funded to support international collaboration to enhance learning and teaching in Geography, has allowed a university to explore models for change. It briefly examines the associated issues of sharing and repurposing resources; it reflects on the impact of the project on local strategy, and the importance of sustaining the collaborations and approaches to learning and teaching after the funding is completed

QuestionBuddy – A collaborative question search and play portal.

Generally itembanks are inaccessible to students. Current use of itembanks focus on the teacher as having responsibility to organise questions (place them in pools, associate them with course content) and make them available/deliver them to students. This limits students to the teachers perspective and to the questions that the teacher has made available. As the practice of itembanking increases it may be appropriate to encourage students to use questions from pools not directly prepared by their teacher. A mechanism for searching across itembanks and sharing recommendations with peers would be of help in facilitating this. We describe QuestionBuddy, a collaborative filter based question portal for students, built to study student usage of, and attitudes to, such a system

Computer scientists meet professional issues: blended learning for a persistent challenge

Teaching professional issues to computer scientists presents academics with the two challenges. Firstly there is the issue of motivating students whose primary driver is their technical specialism. Secondly; how to persuade learners who may have chosen their field of studies with the explicit preference to avoid anything which is textual or discursive. Biglan’s extensive study of disciplinary differences, work has been sustained and developed by a number of authors from a disciplinary and technology in learning perspective. He would have classified the approaches, content and epistemology of computer science as belonging predominantly to the ‘hard applied’ field of study, with a component of ‘hard pure’ which varies according to the particular specialism. By contrast, the curriculum of professional issues modules sit squarely in the ‘soft applied’ area. Understanding these differences, is, we believe, a powerful aid to integrating professional issues into the wider computing and technology curriculum. This challenge is not confined to computer science and is one which might find resonance with many involved in education in the STEM disciplines.This oral presentation will recount experiences from the first iteration of a newly redesigned first year professional issues module which has been radically redesigned to incorporate a mixture of face to face and online educational activities. The design seeks to preserve the active participative student-centred nature of the existing module which it replaces, and at the same time provide a sustainable and compelling resource-set to which students will be able and willing to use throughout their degree studies. The presentation will provide a detailed explanation of the rationale for these changes, alongside a discussion of the impact and implications of this type of change. It will also include analysis and interim evaluation of the impact and reception of the module by students. <br/

Rich and personal revisited: translating ambitions for an institutional personal learning environment into a reality

Is it possible to create an institutional personal learning environment? This question has triggered considerable debate amongst those concerned with implementing learning and teaching technologies within higher education, Rapid technological change is necessarily accompanied by matched evolution of individual practice amongst users. At universities, students arrive with a mix of sophisticated and naïve approaches to using technology in everyday life which can be shaped and harnessed to support learning. To respond to the changing capabilities and demands of available technology, the University of Southampton designed and is implementing a rich holistic learning environment radically different from the VLEs which gained widespread usage since the late 1990s. In the initial scoping of the environment, explanations of the proposed system were qualified: “its more than a system, it’s a mind-set”. The suggestion is that the power and value of the institutional personal learning environment resides in the ‘technology affordances’ which enable users to customise and personalise the system in a socially useful and educationally constructive manner. There are many different ways to remove the barriers to learning, some of which are not necessarily directly ‘educational’ or ‘instructional’. This paper considers the foundations and emergence of personal learning environments and the interplay of ambitions and requirements needed to support learning in a university context. It goes on to make a case for the creation of a seemingly paradoxical embodiment – an “Institutional Personal Learning Environment (iPLE). It considers emerging understandings of the role of ‘digital literacies’ and their associated challenges to universities - the role and challenges of ‘scholarly literacies in a digital age’. Presenting a case study of implementing the Southampton Learning Environment, this paper analyses the underlying rationale of the emerging system. It evaluates the architecture of the system to explain how it provides an institutional personal learning environment. It presents and reviews the first cycle implementation (due to go live in August 2011) from a pedagogic perspective assessing the technology affordances of the system. Finally it re-evaluates the evidence to consider whether it has indeed been possible to create an institutional learning environment that is also a personal learning environment

Capturing organisational knowledge from educational enhancement: identifying patterns for curriculum innovation

On-line and blended learning is much fêted, particularly by university management as part of the solution to many issues currently facing higher education. However, experienced academics lack examples of suitable pedagogically engaging on-line activities, and remain sceptical or resistant to change. This paper describes a case study of an initiative taken by a newly formed centre with responsibility for introducing such change within a university. It uses a single module to demonstrate a range of on-line activities blended with conventional face-to-face approaches which may then be presented to staff as reusable patterns with generic applicability. At the same time we show how these approaches can meet the requirements of the university management

Practice sharing paper: motivating computer scientists to engage with professional issues

Modules in professional issues sometimes sit a little awkwardly in the computer science curriculum. They can be seen as an island of discursive teaching coming from what Biglan might have termed the ‘soft applied’ field of study. In computer science the more usual context is of knowledge and skills based learning and activities of a ‘hard pure/hard applied’ fields of study. This gap may be particularly difficult in those countries where students arrive who have specialized early in subjects related to science, technology and mathematics. The authors of this practice sharing paper have had many years of experience teaching such modules to computer science cohorts, but have recently been faced with the challenge of consolidating two distinct courses previously taught in years one and two of the undergraduate curriculum. The resultant course was required to be one quarter smaller in terms of its notional hours, and there was a need to save on face-to-face contact time. There is a considerable challenge generated by the squeezing of content an contact while at the same time trying to motivate students with a strong technical motivation to spend time on a topic which is not, at first glance, directly relevant to their chosen specialisms. The paper will present a description of the motivations for designing the module and the approaches taken primarily from the perspective of the teachers and the small curriculum design support team. We will provide a detailed explanation of the rationale alongside a consideration of the impact and implications of this type of change. We will situate our rationale in the context of striving to motivate the learners’ to gain a deeper insight into their own learning and technological preferences in such a way that they can take ownership of the new approaches to which they have been introduced in a way which they will sustain during their future individual professional development

Towards a competency model for adaptive assessment to support lifelong learning

Adaptive assessment provides efficient and personalised routes to establishing the proficiencies of learners. We can envisage a future in which learners are able to maintain and expose their competency profile to multiple services, throughout their life, which will use the competency information in the model to personalise assessment. Current competency standards tend to over simplify the representation of competency and the knowledge domain. This paper presents a competency model for evaluating learned capability by considering achieved competencies to support adaptive assessment for lifelong learning. This model provides a multidimensional view of competencies and provides for interoperability between systems as the learner progresses through life. The proposed competency model is being developed and implemented in the JISC-funded Placement Learning and Assessment Toolkit (mPLAT) project at the University of Southampton. This project which takes a Service-Oriented approach will contribute to the JISC community by adding mobile assessment tools to the E-framework

Exploring The Value Of Folksonomies For Creating Semantic Metadata

Finding good keywords to describe resources is an on-going problem: typically we select such words manually from a thesaurus of terms, or they are created using automatic keyword extraction techniques. Folksonomies are an increasingly well populated source of unstructured tags describing web resources. This paper explores the value of the folksonomy tags as potential source of keyword metadata by examining the relationship between folksonomies, community produced annotations, and keywords extracted by machines. The experiment has been carried-out in two ways: subjectively, by asking two human indexers to evaluate the quality of the generated keywords from both systems; and automatically, by measuring the percentage of overlap between the folksonomy set and machine generated keywords set. The results of this experiment show that the folksonomy tags agree more closely with the human generated keywords than those automatically generated. The results also showed that the trained indexers preferred the semantics of folksonomy tags compared to keywords extracted automatically. These results can be considered as evidence for the strong relationship of folksonomies to the human indexer’s mindset, demonstrating that folksonomies used in the del.icio.us bookmarking service are a potential source for generating semantic metadata to annotate web resources