Learning - from magic solutions to meaningful processes

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Learning cannot be forced or planned. We can create the right conditions for learning and offer a variety of strategies but the learning comes from within. You have to want to learn and you have to learn how to learn. So in education we work on helping learners to work out how they learn best and then apply those principles to the things they want to learn. We can nudge, guide, support, motivate, challenge and applaud but in the end it is up to the learners. Learning is individual and subject to so many variables but still we search for ways to measure efficiency and upscale process that are simply not scaleable.  

These themes emerge in an interview article from the Centre for Public Impact, 5 Lessons from Olli-Pekka Heinonen and the Finnish National Agency for Education. Please watch the interview on the above link to hear the full details of his proposals. Olli-Pekka Heinonen is the Director General of the Finnish National Agency for Education and in a longer interview he discusses how the Finnish education system has tried to avoid falling into the trap of performance ratings, checkboxes and national solutions. He claims that scaling is failing because it assumes that what works for some will work for all - rather obvious it would seem but so often forgotten. There is no right answer, it all depends on the situation, circumstances and the learning context. Instead of national initiatives in terms of methods and structure we need to empower local initiatives and encourage teachers to compare and adapt from each other.

The alternative vision for scaling developed in EDUFI’s work moves from seeking to scale the innovation(s) that worked in one place, and implementing those in other places, to scaling the capacity for learning and innovation itself. “What works” is actually the capacity for learning and experimentation in each place, so that is what must be scaled.

We need to develop the preconditions for innovation and allow for collaborative communities to share and adapt new methods. As with the students, help teachers to learn how to innovate and experiment, offer spaces for collaboration and exchange of experience and support their processes. From magic solutions to meaningful processes. 

Another area that he discusses is the prevailing obsession with accountability with all the efficiency reviews and checklists that so many institutions and individuals feel trapped in. This box-ticking mentality leads to a fear of falling lower in the various rankings that seem to define today's education systems. Self assessment can easily lead to self deception as you become increasingly under pressure to tick the right boxes in your quality review.

The research evidence, together with vivid personal accounts, show that target-based performance management approaches undermine real-world performance by creating the conditions in which people systematically lie to one another. Olli-Pekka's experience is that “payment by results” and other forms of results based management undermine the capacity to do effective work and gets in the way of learning. “We should rebuild the performance management system entirely”, says Olli-Pekka.

Once again he advocates helping institutions to build capacity and focus on development than imposing criteria from above. It sounds so obvious but sadly so few governments seem to understand and instead treat education like an industry that can be planned and controlled. We can do so much better.

Post-pandemic university - real or cosmetic change?

Photo by Loïc Fürhoff on Unsplash

Educational technology enables us to rethink teaching and learning. It offers us the opportunity to widen participation in education, create more accessible and inclusive learning spaces and to offer greater levels of flexibility and collaboration. That sounds great but why haven't we seen this revolution yet, even after the pandemic? There seems instead to be a backlash against online education now that campuses are "back to normal".  The trouble is that changing the way that universities teach is not simply in the hands of digitally skilled teachers and support staff. The whole system needs to change and that has not happened yet.

This is discussed in an excellent article by Neil Mosely, Is the university education model forever changed?. Teachers can experiment and redesign their courses to a certain extent but there are many constraints against radical change. Changing a course syllabus can take months if not years. Teachers are allotted a set number of lecture hours during which they are expected to lecture. Facilitating collaborative problem-based learning based mostly on asynchronous activities does not fit into the administrative system. Even if the teachers get support and inspiration it's not easy to challenge these principles.

As well as that they didn’t realise that changing the mode of teaching and study needs a change of the way you operate. It’s not simply a case of providing the technologies, some workshops, some inspirational “innovative” teachers...it requires something much more fundamental than that.

The university model is what it is because of the many parameters that make it and define it as a model. If you want to change the model then it’s not simply a case of imploring staff to do something different within the confines of the old model, but rather orchestrating the organisational change necessary to move to a new model.  

This rings true for so many educational technologists who offer inspirational workshops, seminars and consultation to teachers but discover that the uptake is low or the effects marginal beyond the dedicated band of true believers. True the university is much more digital today than before the pandemic but the fundamental principles remain untouched. Hybrid teaching or lecture capture would seem to be typical compromises where we can basically continue as usual but with an optional digital add-on.. Is digital an integrated part of the whole university experience? Are online students equally treated and equally welcome? The hybrid classroom looks promising but is it really breaking any barriers of simply preserving hierarchies?

If you want to change the teaching and study model then you have to change the organisational model that buttresses it. This is hard, and the pandemic hasn’t necessarily helped as it has led to a conceited sense of organisational agility. When thinking about where universities are at due to the pandemic and gauging this against where they might like to be, we would all do well to heed the words of Irene Peter:

“Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.”

We still have a long way to go.

Waiting for the storm to pass is not a solution - dealing with uncertainty

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

We used to believe that we could plan for a relatively predictable future, a clear linear pathway for our medium and even long-term strategies. Today however the future is wildly unpredictable and just about anything can happen, as the pandemic has clearly shown. We continue to plan for the day when the pandemic disappears and we can get back to normal, but how realistic is this, especially given the increasingly serious effects of the climate crisis and the growth of political instability around the world? This pandemic could continue for years, returning in new variants and, if that is not enough, climate and political instability will lead to further crises. The only way forward is to plan for dealing with constant uncertainty. We cannot put changes on hold until the pandemic dies down. 

This theme turned up in two articles I read this week. The first is by Debbie McVitty in the journal Wonkhe, Making peace with uncertainty in 2022. Many people in education leadership are trying to revert to normality and restore order in the disorder of the last two years. Universities look to the government to lead the way back to normality and unpredictability but what if that state never returns? One positive side to the present crisis is that it has forced us to rethink processes and practices that we have always taken for granted.

When things are uncertain, it becomes necessary to ask more searching questions about the various things that might happen – and in doing so gain an insight into the way things work and how they might work differently or better – like the many teaching and learning innovations that arose from the uncertain environment of online and hybrid learning. Uncertainty also means learning to deal with unexpected consequences – like student over-recruitment – a nice problem to have certainly, but also one that requires serious creative thinking to ensure students get what they’ve been offered in an acceptable way.

In fact there is a great danger in pretending that we can manage and control the future, ... the illusion of certainty may be more dangerous than confronting the reality of ambiguity. When the virus died down last year many universities joyfully reverted to the old order as soon as possible. For example, experiments with online examination were put aside as we reopened the examination halls again. We need to continue developing alternative methods rather than putting them back on the shelf because we simply don't know when we will have to handle the next crisis.

One area that needs to be developed is that of risk analysis and contingency planning and it's time to employ people to lead this work. This is highlighted in an article by Javeria Salman in The Hechinger Report, How to plan for a future of education where disruption is the norm, describing the work of one such person, Andrew Smith, chief administrative and strategic planning officer for the Rowan-Salisbury School District in North Carolina. He gets management to develop plans for a variety of scenarios so that the organisation develops a certain crisis resilience. 

The leaders asked: What is the worst that could happen? What is the risk to schools, teachers and students? Then they asked whether the district was prepared to handle each scenario. Smith said they considered questions like: “What happens if kids never come back? Or if staff aren’t allowed in the buildings?” They even asked seniors for ideas in planning for socially distant graduation ceremonies.

We have been able to test many alternative solutions for teaching and learning over the last two years and we need to continue with this rather than waiting for the storm to pass.

Schools can’t keep waiting for an end to the pandemic for problems to go away, the solution “has to be now, not later,” Smith said. “Because every time you keep waiting for the end … how many hours kids are waiting for you?”

Underestimated barriers to change

"CLASH OF CULTURES" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Walter A. Aue

Change is often seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. It demands that I have to rethink the way I work, it will require considerable effort and there's always the risk that I somehow won't manage to adapt or may even lose my job. Those who advocate change already see a clear place for themselves in the new order and an opportunity to succeed. Others aren't so sure there's a place for them and therefore are skeptical. In education we see how difficult it is to change whether that change is about the integration of educational technology, internationalisation or learner-centred pedagogies. There are often lots of inspirational grassroots projects, training initiatives, policy and strategy documents as well as support from top management. Campus buidlings and facilities can be redesigned to foster and support the desired changes but somehow, despite all this, the changes never really take root. Are there hidden forces at work here?

Two such forces I'd like to propose are culture and administrative structures (maybe two aspects of the same thing actually). Culture is often about hidden unwritten codes of how things are done at this institution. It's about unofficial, alternative hierarchies, understandings and traditions. These are extremely hard to even identify never mind change but I think they often explain why many change initiatives never really progress beyond the enthusiasts. It can be a culture of academic freedom, a concept open for a wide range of interpretations, that gives every member of staff an opt-out clause for any change they don't really like. This can derail even initiatives that have the full support of the management. No-one opposes the change directly but simply reserve the right to opt out.

This is expressed in a short article in EdTech, On Campus, Change is Constant, and That’s Good, which identifies culture as the hardest nut to crack in any change process. Culture is often engrained in the walls of the institution and is extremely hard to identify. Many don't even realise that there is such a culture, it's simply the way we do things round here.

Every stage matters, but I believe culture may matter most. It’s also surprisingly easy to overlook. Ruben and Gigliotti define culture as “the organization’s language, history, norms, rules and traditions that may influence the dynamics of change.” In any community, these are the factors that shape individuals’ day-to-day experiences, perceptions and expectations. Tuned-in leaders craft strategies that take culture into account; out-of-touch leaders fail to do so, and as a result they risk sabotaging new initiatives.

The second factor, administrative structures, is much more obvious and can stifle innovation before it has a chance to succeed. Often an institution is limited by structures imposed from government levels; statistics, accountability, box-ticking. For example teachers are assigned a limited number of contact hours with students and these are often categorised as "lecture hours" or "tutoring hours" with the former tending to have a higher price tag than the latter. If you still call them lecture hours it is hardly any suprise that teachers will continue to lecture. If you flip the classroom the reporting structure has difficulties. More flexible course forms and new styles of teaching are generally not supported by these structures and with most countries judging universities on a narrow range of performace indicators the risk of failure is greater than the potential benefits of innovation.

Cultural change is a long-term process and it involves much more than new technology, new buildings, new strategies, new training programmes and so on. It's about changing the default attitude to innovation from skepticism to curiosity. Structural change should be easier since it involves changing the ways we administer and report education. However, any changes must come from a higher level where the culture may be very different to that at institutional level. So even if institutions can change they may be restricted by structural restrictions from above.

Catch 22?

Evolution not revolution

  by j0sh (www.pixael.com)

Many of us who work with the use of technology in education get frustrated at the slow uptake of seemingly excellent tools and methods. We see the potential of open networked learning to empower and engage students as well as increasing collaboration, widening participation and fostering creativity and can't understand why our institutions are so slow to acknowledge and absorb these exciting developments.

A common complaint is that whilst so much of society has been changed radically by digital technology, universities look pretty well the same as they did ten/twenty/a hundred years ago (select time scale according to desired shock effect). I confess to having used this argument myself but it's worth taking a few moments to question our rhetoric now and then. Martin Weller does just this in a new post, The hidden tech shift in higher ed, describing how universities actually have changed over the last ten years. The student demographics have changed with many more older students who are studying online, part-time or not living on campus. Technology has actually become ubiquitous though maybe not as much as we would have hoped. Most courses today use learning management systems like Moodle, Blackboard etc and most students use their own devices to access their courses making the old computer labs almost extinct. Administrative procedures are now almost completely digital in many countries and even if the traditional written examination would seem to be the final bastion against digitalisation there are also many examples of digital examination as well as new methods for peer assessment and problem-based learning.

I still believe that there is a suspicion of technology in higher education and a reluctance to experiment but there are also significant structural barriers that we sometimes forget. Weller points to the barrier our classrooms and lecture halls place in the way of pedagogical innovation. Most universities are stuck with legacy architecture.

I think a real problem for higher ed is the legacy of the physical environment for example. We do lectures because we have lecture theatres. More significantly we can’t conceive of doing anything else because the lecture theatres says “do lectures”. It would be very difficult, for instance, to implement a flipped approach in many university courses because the face to face space is built for lecturing and not doing the other things you might want to utilize that time for.

Rebuilding and redesigning our learning spaces is an expensive business and not something that will happen overnight. However many universities are busy doing just that (my own university included) and there are many inspiring examples of new campuses and redesigned buildings that offer flexible, stimulating and technology-friendly learning environments.

Another structural barrier to digitalisation is the fact that teachers are paid for lecture hours in the classroom and when you're provided with lecture halls to meet the students it's no surprise that the lecture still dominates. Time spent on online support and tutoring is often not paid at the same rate as face-to-face lecturing. The administration has simply not adapted to seeing online teaching as being just as valid as classroom teaching and that helps to maintain the status quo. In addition many teachers feel over-stretched in terms of workload and there is simply no time for experimentation and learning new skills. When resources are limited as they often are in higher education there's little margin for experimentation and great pressure to simply effectivise existing activities.

Actually a lot has changed but maybe not as quickly as many of us would wish and maybe not in the right directions. Maybe we also need to realise that the issue of digitalisation is one of many intertwined issues facing education today and that there are no quick fixes. As I have written before it's about evolution not revolution.

Wisdom of the crowd or rage of the mob?

  by floodllama

A recurring theme in the media is the abusive tone of so many online arenas and the destructive power of trolls. We've all seen how online discussions can turn nasty and I have withdrawn from many when the trolls take over. A BBC article, Twitter and the poisoning of online debate, looks at recent abuses on Twitter and worries that real discussion is being forced away from the public arena.

And there is wider concern about the future of online debate. Where now are the places that reasonable people can go to find discussion that does not quickly descend into abuse and flame wars? Anonymity is undoubtedly a vital defence for vulnerable people under oppressive regimes - but it has also allowed others to express themselves in language they would never think of using face to face with their targets. This kind of behaviour rapidly has a kind of malign network effect - once forums become occupied by noisy sweary folks, more reasonable voices quietly depart.

I think the main issue here is management. There are many excellent discussions on the net completely free from insults and abuse but you need active managers as well as a community spirit to quickly extinguish any flames that may occur and this means warning and then removing abusive users whenever they overstep the mark. An online discussion must have a set of basic rules and by signing up you agree to abide by them. When an arena gets as massive as Twitter and is used for a myriad of purposes it becomes difficult to police effectively. What is blatantly offensive in one group may be quite normal in another. The more diverse the community the harder it is to administer. What is sad is that the trolls are forcing many people away from the public arena and into safer more exclusive discussion spaces. 

However I don't think this is solely an online issue. If you want to have a discussion and you sit in the middle of the town square where any passer-by can join in you would probably attract a few people who will try to disrupt the conversation. If you gather a group of friends in a room and close the door you will not be disturbed. A colleague of mine remarked in a seminar recently that the net is like an amplifier when it comes to education; a good course can be great online and a bad course can be really bad online. The same amplification effect can be applied to online discussions. In a well-managed environment we can harvest the wisdom of the crowds but without curation the trolls are loose.

Massive Open Online Whatever

 by revbean

There's a thickening alphabet soup brewing with variations on the three letters MOO. What we're seeing is the potential of massive communities or networks to solve certain problems or offer new opportunities. Exactly how open and massive they are varies considerably and we shouldn't focus on all these often misleading acronyms. Look instead at each concept on its own merits and see what it offers.

The idea presented a couple of weeks ago of using the MOOC concept to offer greater support to doctoral students and provide them with a greater sense of community and access to wider peer review makes a lot of sense, though the details are still to be fully worked out. Now comes an article by Benjamin Ginsberg, Forget MOOCs - Let's use MOOA, where he suggests massive open online administration to share the administrative load on universities. It's really a case of building a community around university administration and pooling resources rather than each institution reinventing the wheel every week, at an enormous cost. By working as a community and sharing smart ideas and best practices can spread more quickly and expensive mistakes could be avoided.

"Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars."

Ginsberg plans to launch an administrative community Administeria next year and it'll be interesting to see how it is received. There is nothing terribly new about this idea since large communities have been collaborating on the net for many years but the MOOC-hype has brought the power of massive communities to the forefront. 

On a related theme a meeting of global virtual universities has discussed the mainstream MOOC phenomenon: see article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Virtual Universities Abroad Say They Already Deliver ‘Massive’ Courses. There are many online universities in the world who have been running massive and relatively open online courses for years, such as the Virtual University of Pakistan (see their massive YouTube channel) or the African Virtual University, and providing education more suited to their target students than those of the mainstream MOOCs. MOOCs offer new opportunities for learning but it's worth remembering that they are variations on themes that have been present for some time now. Online education is so much more than MOO ....