Ensuring quality teaching in a digital age: key takeaways

Building the foundations of quality teaching and learning

I have now completed and published Chapter 11, ‘Ensuring quality teaching in a digital age‘, for my online open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age.’

Unlike earlier chapters, I have not published this as a series of blog posts, as it is based on an earlier set of blog posts called: ‘Nine steps to quality online learning.’

However, there are some substantial changes. The focus here is as much on applying basic principles of course design to face-to-face and blended/hybrid learning as to fully online course design.

More importantly, this chapter attempts to pull together all the principles from all previous ten chapters into a set of practical steps towards the design of quality teaching in a digital age.

When you have read this chapter, and in conjunction with what has been learned in previous chapters, you should be able to:

define quality in terms of teaching in a digital agedetermine what your preferred approaches are to teaching and learningdecide what mode of delivery is most appropriate for any course you are responsible forunderstand why teamwork is essential for effective teaching in a digital agemake best use of existing resources for any coursechoose and use the right technology and tools to support your learningset appropriate learning goals for teaching in a digital agedesign an appropriate course structure and set of learning activitiesknow when and how to communicate with learnersevaluate your teaching, make necessary improvements, and improve your teaching through further innovation.

1. For the purposes of this book, quality is defined as: teaching methods that successfully help learners develop the knowledge and skills they will require in a digital age.

2. Formal national and institutional quality assurance processes do not guarantee quality teaching and learning. In particular, they focus on past ‘best’ practices, processes to be done before actual teaching, and often ignore the affective, emotional or personal aspects of learning. Nor do they focus particularly on the needs of learners in a digital age.

3. New technologies and the needs of learners in a digital age require a re-thinking of traditional campus-based teaching, especially where it is has been based mainly on the transmission of knowledge. This means re-assessing the way you teach and determining how you would really like to teach in a digital age. This requires imagination and vision rather than technical expertise.

4. It is important to determine the most appropriate mode of delivery, based on teaching philosophy, the needs of students, the demands of the discipline, and the resources available.

5. It is best to work in a team. Blended and especially fully online learning require a range of skills that most instructors are unlikely to have. Good course design not only enables students to learn better but also controls teacher and instructor workload. Courses look better with good graphic and web design and professional video production. Specialist technical help frees up teachers and instructors to concentrate on the knowledge and skills that students need to develop.

6. Full use should be made of existing resources, including institutionally-supported learning technologies, open educational resources, learning technology staff, and the experience of your colleagues.

7. The main technologies you will be using should be mastered, so you are professional and knowledgeable about their strengths and weaknesses for teaching.

8. Learning goals that are appropriate for learners in a digital age need to be clearly defined. The skills students need should be embedded within their subject domain, and these skills should be formally assessed.

9. A coherent and clearly communicable structure, and learning activities for a course, should be developed that are manageable in terms of workload for both students and instructor.

10. Regular and on-going instructor/teacher presence, especially when students are studying partly or wholly online, is essential for student success. This means effective communication between teacher/instructor and students. It is particularly important to encourage inter-student communication, either face-to-face or online.

11. The extent to which the new learning goals of re-designed courses aimed at developing the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age have been achieved should be carefully evaluated and ways in which the course could be improved should be identified.

Although the previous blog posts on nine steps to quality online learning were well received (they have been used in some post-secondary education courses) feedback on this revised book version will be much appreciated.  I haven’t seen anything similar that tries to integrate basic principles across all three modes of delivery, so I am especially interested to see how these are perceived in terms of regular classroom and blended learning.

The final chapter, which will take a brief look at the institutional policies and strategies needed to support teachers and instructors wanting to teach well in a digital age. It will deal explicitly with what we should expect (and more importantly, not expect) of teachers and instructors, issues around faculty development and teacher training, working methods for teachers and instructors, and learning technology support.

I aim to finish this (and the whole book, at least in first draft form) by March 14. French and Spanish translations are already under way.

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Last chapter of Teaching in a Digital Age now published

Section 12.7 is really a summary of the main points in the book, which I reproduce below as the key takeaways from the book.

I will do a separate post on Scenario G, which provides a possible future scenario for teaching in a digital age.

The book is by no means finished. I need to do some serious editing, but the book now exists in a form that can be used immediately for supporting faculty development, or for teachers and instructors interested in improving their teaching.

1. There is increasing pressure from employers, the business community, learners themselves, and also from  a significant number of educators, for learners to develop the type of knowledge and the kinds of skills that they will need in a digital age.

2. The knowledge and skills needed in a digital age, where all ‘content’ will be increasingly and freely available over the Internet, requires graduates with expertise in:

knowledge management (the ability to find, evaluate and appropriately apply knowledge),IT knowledge and skills,inter-personal communication skills, including the appropriate use of social mediaindependent and lifelong learning skillsa range of intellectual skills, including knowledge constructionreasoningcritical analysis,problem-solving,creativitycollaborative learning and teamworkmulti-tasking and flexibility.

These are all skills that are relevant to any subject domain, and need to be embedded within that domain. With such skills, graduates will be better prepared for a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

3. To develop such knowledge and skills, teachers and instructors need to set clear learning outcomes and select teaching methods  that will support the development of such knowledge and skills, and, since all skills require practice and feedback to develop, learners must be given ample opportunity to practice such skills. This requires moving away from a model of information transmission to greater student engagement, more learner-centred teaching, and new methods of assessment that measure skills as well as mastery of content.

4. Because of the increased diversity of students, from full-time campus-based learners to lifelong learners already with high levels of post-secondary education to learners who have slipped through the formal school system and need second-chance opportunities, and because of the capacity of new information technologies to provide learning at any time and any place, a much wider range of modes of delivery are needed, such as campus-based teaching, blended or hybrid learning and fully online courses and programs, both in formal and in non-formal settings.

5. The move to blended, hybrid and online learning and a greater use of learning technologies offers more options and choices for teachers and instructors. In order to use these technologies well, teachers and instructors require not only to know the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of technology, but also need to have a good grasp of how students learn best. This requires knowing about

the research into teaching and learning,different theories of learning related to different concepts of knowledge (epistemology),different methods of teaching and their strengths and weaknesses.

Without this basic foundation, it is difficult for teachers and instructors to move away from the only model that many are familiar with, namely the lecture and discussion model, which is limited in terms of developing the knowledge and skills required in a digital age.

6. The challenge is particularly acute in universities. There is no requirement to have any training or qualification in teaching to work in a university in most Western countries. Nevertheless teaching will take up a minimum of 40 per cent of a faculty member’s time, and much more for many adjunct or contract faculty or full time college instructors. However, the same challenge remains, to a lesser degree, for school teachers and college instructors: how to ensure that already experienced professionals have the knowledge and skills required to teach well in a digital age.

7. Institutions can do much to facilitate or impede the development of the knowledge and skills required in a digital age. They need to

ensure that all levels of teaching and instructional staff have adequate training in the new technologies and methods of teaching necessary for the development of the knowledge and skills required in a digital ageensure that there is adequate learning technology support for teachers and instructorsensure that conditions of employment and in particular class size enable teaching and instructional staff to teach in the ways that will develop the knowledge and skills needed in a digital agedevelop a practical and coherent institutional strategy to support he kind of teaching needed in a digital age.

8. Although governments, institutions and learners themselves can do a great deal to ensure success in teaching and learning, in the end the responsibility and to some extent the power to change lies within teachers and instructors themselves.

9. It will be the imagination of teachers inventing new ways of teaching that will eventually result in the kinds of graduates the world will need in the future

I’m now in the final editing stages. The book will be available for review and I will be approaching some of the leading experts in this area to do a full critique and suggestions for improvement. But now is your chance. If you have:

about the whole book, please let me know.

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MOOCs, Norway, and the ecology of digital learning

© Ron Niebrugge, 2013 MOOCs are just one species in the online digital forest – and a big and clumsy one

Earlier this week I was in Washington DC, at a conference called Transatlantic Science Week, aimed at promoting collaboration between research, innovation and educational institutions and organizations in the U.S.A, Canada and Norway. The main themes for the conference were International Security, Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Cyber Security and Education Policy/Education Research. (No prizes for guessing which theme I was invited to contribute to, although I have to say the others looked more interesting.) This year’s conference was organized by the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, with guidance from the Research Council of Norway.

The focus in the education theme is the digitalization of higher education, although in practice the focus is almost entirely on MOOCs. One reason for this is that Norway has set up a public commission ‘to inquire into the possibilities and challenges that accompany the development of MOOCs and similar offers.‘ The conference provides an interesting way to examine the current thinking on MOOCs of policy makers both in the U.S.A. and in Norway.

Because this is a rather long post, I’m posting the conclusions first, with more details about the conference which I hope will justify my conclusions.

Main take-aways

The value of this conference is that it brought together politicians, policy wonks, researchers and educational practitioners to share ideas and experiences. In particular, it gave me an insight into why MOOCs have resonated so much with policy-makers and others who are not embedded within the higher education system. It was clear from questions and discussions outside the sessions that policy makers remain convinced that MOOCs do offer the possibilities of lowering the cost of post-secondary education. At the same time, I find myself at conferences about MOOCs like the small boy running around shouting ‘The emperor has no clothes’ – and about as effectively.

So here are my main take-aways from the conference.

Houston, we have a problem – ‘we’ being universities and colleges. Publicly funded post-secondary institutions are perceived by important policy-makers as being unnecessarily expensive and perhaps even more importantly, not adapting fast enough to meet the demands of the 21st centuryas a result, politicians and policy-makers are only too willing to grasp at anything that might disrupt the perceived complacency within the system. MOOCs fit this requirement to perfectionthere is a growing tendency to conflate MOOCs with online learning in general. This suits of course the elite universities who have come 20 years late to the party – they are re-defining online learning according to their own interestseven re-designing a large class in a highly selective institution is now considered to be a MOOC, so as well as the conflation with online learning, MOOCs are now being equated with any large class delivered online. The concept of open-ness runs the risk of being lost, with the focus switching to free or cheapif they can get past the hubris, Ivy League universities have a lot to offer online learning. There were several examples in the conference of innovative approaches to online learning from some of the top universities in the USA, but they weren’t MOOCs as most of us would understand the term. We need to bridge the gap between the Ivy League newcomers and those who have been working in online learning elsewhere. We will all benefit from thisas a profession we have failed miserably to disseminate best practices in online learning to busy practitioners/instructors. This is not entirely our fault. If there is no requirement for pre-service training to teach in a university, there is no opportunity to bring these best practices to the attention of all faculty. Training new faculty in modern teaching methods, including online learning, based on good pedagogy and cognitive science, is the best way to address the perception that universities and colleges are failing to adapt to the 21st century.

Above all, universities need to be more cost-effective, and if they aren’t, they are going to have methods forced on them that may not have the best outcomes, either for the institutions, or for the rest of us. How each country responds to MOOCs could well define which countries will end up more equal than others, and which will succeed or fail economically and socially in the latter part of this century.

The digital democratization of universities

This was the topic of the first parallel session in the education theme . The first speaker was Norway’s new Minister of Education and Research, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, who has been in the job for less than one month, and is the youngest member of the cabinet, at 35. In his speech he demonstrated that he was well briefed on MOOCs and their potential, and is therefore looking forward to the Commission’s report (even though the commission was set up by the previous government). He raised some thoughtful questions about MOOCs, which makes me think he is keeping an open mind on the issue, in the best sense of the word.

The Rector of the University of Bergen gave a straightforward talk about the pros and cons of MOOCs, which would come as no surprise for anyone familiar with MOOCs, but was essential for providing a common understanding among all participants. There was the usual American hyperbole about MOOCs from no less than a representative from the American Science Foundation, e.g. ‘the important thing about MOOCs is they allow for the quantifiable measurement of learning on a massive scale‘. This from an electrical engineer, the world experts on educational measurement. I’m sorry, but qualitative assessment is not ‘bad’ but essential in many areas of higher education. There is more than one epistemology.

The most interesting presentation in this session came from Cathy Sandeen, the VP, Education Attainment and Innovation, at the American Council of Education. She reported that currently 18-24 year olds constitute less than 25% of all post-secondary students in the USA. Students aged 24-34 constitute 65% of all students now, most of whom are working at least part-time, and many of whom have children. Even more importantly, the U.S.A. participation rate in post-secondary education is now only 42%, putting it in the bottom quartile of OECD countries, whereas 20 years ago it was top. To catch up, it would need to add another one million places. She ended with a brief account of ACE’s efforts at accrediting MOOCs (for my take on this, see an earlier post.)

In short, I didn’t hear anything in this section that suggested that MOOCs or online learning were doing anything to ‘democratize’ higher education – they may be, but no evidence came out of this session.

MOOCs and the re-inventing of higher education

I was on a great panel, with Chris Dede, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and one of the best researchers in educational technology, taking the lead. The other panelists were Berit Kjelstadt, the chair of Norway’s public commission on MOOCs, and Wendy Newstetter, a cognitive scientist/engineer from Georgia Institute of Technology. Wendy got our panel organized. The whole day to date had been wall-to-wall presentations with no time for questions even, so we organized the session with plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Chris Dede was the lead speaker. He argued that high quality teaching required at least three conditions: cognitive knowledge, situated learning (learning embedded in context), and a community of learners (social learning). He pointed out that most MOOCs were able to scale only the cognitive knowledge element effectively (as he put it ‘old wine in new bottles’). He argued that virtual immersive environments or virtual worlds allowed for the other two elements to be scaled, and showed a video of EcoMUVE, a virtual reality eco pond,  a multi-user virtual environment in which students are immersed in a virtual environment and interact with avatar-based identities to investigate an ecosystem. More can be found on this approach here.

In my presentation I thought it important to place MOOCs within the broader framework of online learning, because it was clear that many participants seemed to be equating MOOCs with all online learning. I briefly summarized what was happening in credit-based online learning (high completion rates when best practice is used), hybrid learning, mobile learning, OERs, virtual worlds, remote labs, social media and learning, etc., and then argued that xMOOCs were re-inventing the wheel, and so far the wheel is square. Conclusion: MOOCs are just one species in the online learning forest, and a big and clumsy one at that.

More provocatively, I also argued that xMOOCs are more likely to increase inequality, by undermining publicly funded education, leaving an elite of campus-based universities for the very rich, resulting in high paid knowledge-worker employment for them, and massive information transmission delivered to the rest, who will be confined to low-wage service jobs because of their lack of high-level critical thinking skills. (For a copy of the slides, send me an e-mail (tony.bates@ubc.ca) and I will send an invitation to download them via Dropbox).

Berit Kjelstadt gave a brief summary of her commission’s mandate, then Wendy responded to the three presentations, with a particular emphasis on the need for problem-based approaches to education, particularly in science and engineering. The following questions and responses were lively, with a focus on the high costs of post-secondary education, and whether MOOCs will be a means by which to drive down costs.

The Gatsby curve – will MOOCs increase or reduce inequality? (© Globe and Mail, 2013)

Is blended learning the future in academia?

The program framed ‘blended learning’ as follows: ‘MOOCs provide an opportunity to …combine different learning practices, for instance, classroom instruction in Oslo, supplemented with streamed lectures from Stanford and online interaction with other students on and off campus.’ However, the speakers in this session didn’t quite see it this way.

Glynda Hull, of the University of California, Berkeley, described a really neat multimedia platform for collaborative learning designed and developed at UC Berkeley, linked to a Canvas LMS. This enables students to create and share multimedia objects and work collaboratively on projects. This looked a nice software development based on sound educational principles (although I suspect the same could be done, perhaps less elegantly, with a combination of WordPress, Mahara and Moodle), and the presentation was marred only by the usual hubris from faculty from elite universities and their re-writing of online learning history (‘Online learning to date has failed to enable effective collaborative learning…‘. Roll over Turoff, Hiltz, Scardamalia, Harasim, Pratt and Paloff, Salmon, etc. – and of course cMOOCs never existed. I was too transfixed with absorbing this to ask whether this tool was an open educational resource.

Bent Kure from the University of Oslo described how they have redesigned a first year philosophy class (mandatory for all students) into a MOOC-like course for the 2,000+ students a year who had previously studied this as self-directed learning ( ‘Here’s the textbook – turn up at the exam.’), because there was no way to fit them all into a lecture hall. The new version consisted of 8-10 minute videos+textbook+online discussion+mobile app+online tests. Well, ANYTHING would be better than the previous arrangement, wouldn’t it? And surprise, the other students who were privileged to attend the lectures also were using the stuff. But is this a MOOC? (and does it matter?).

The last session was about how George Washington University was designing its MOOC on the history of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, and especially how they were using professional-standard video rather than talking heads (probably wise since the participants include Bernanke, Greenspan and Volker). It seems to me that this will be one of the new generation of MOOCs in that it has involved instructional designers and a team approach that is often found in credit-based online courses.

Yes, blended learning is the future in academia, especially for very large first and second year classes. However, the external MOOC integrated into local teaching is probably not the model that will dominate. I suspect experience will show that better results can be obtained by careful re-design, including the flexible incorporation of a wide range of OERs, not only MOOCs. In particular, copyright issues need to be recognized, since Coursera and Udacity MOOC materials are not open for re-use without permission.

Technology-enhanced learning: what do we know and what is yet to be learned

The Research Council of Norway issued a contract for a complete review of the literature on technology-enhanced learning (the European term for information and communications technologies in education) over the last 20 years, covering the whole range from pre-school to post-secondary education to lifelong learning. This involved a trawl of over 1,000 journals (an example of how scattered the research is in this area), using the Thomson Reuters and Google Scholar indexing databases. The aim was to do an objective review of the research, based on a quantitative count of citations used.

Barbara Wasson and Konrad Morgan, the two contractors, gave a detailed presentation of the methodology and preliminary findings. This report when published will be extremely useful, but because of their desire to be totally objective, they were reluctant to ‘editorialize’. However, it is clear that a number of conclusions can be drawn already from this study:

there is a long history of research in this field, dating back over sixty yearssome themes, such as computer aided instruction/CBL, collaborative learning, and robotic intelligent tutoring, have continued right through to todayjust counting citations has its limits: for instance an ‘in-group’ can boost its count by cross-referencing each others’ work, without really impacting on practice or even the dissemination of knowledge to a wider groupthe great majority of research is extremely short-term, with low samples: funding agencies should concentrate on more longitudinal studies and bigger samplesresearchers are often isolated, working alone or in small groups, and therefore have little overall impacta great majority of research is tool-based which goes quickly out of date as new tools arrive; researchers fail often to learn from earlier research on similar toolsthere is a huge problem with aggregating, summarizing and disseminating the often very useful research to practitioners: it is largely inaccessible

As readers will know, I am not afraid to editorialize, summarize or disseminate, so I ended the session with my take on how prior online learning research could inform and improve the design of MOOCs (the same presentation I made to the MIT LINC conference.)

Where was Canada?

The conference attracted over 300 participants, two government ministers from Norway, including the Minister of Education and Research, one congressman from the USA, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Education, and leading academics from some of the USA’s most prestigious universities and higher education organizations, with of course heavy representation from the Ministry of Education and Research, the Research Council, and universities in Norway.

By contrast, Canada was virtually unrepresented. From the participants list, it appears that only two Canadians attended, myself (invited by the Research Council of Norway), and Barbara Wasson, a Canadian researcher living and working in Norway. Where has the Canadian Embassy in Washington been on this event? There were as many representatives listed from the  Macedonian and Serbian embassies as from Canada, and I never found the Canadian Embassy person. No doubt Washington Canadian Embassy staff have been working to rule, as part of a widespread industrial dispute in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, but since the conference next year is scheduled to be held in Toronto, the lack of Canadian representation at this conference was shocking, especially since Canada has some of the most knowledgeable people on MOOCs (and I’m not one of them), cyber security and emergency preparedness. It is Canada’s loss that we were not better represented at this most valuable conference, which is why I have spent so much effort on this post.

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