Declan Patton, UCD College of Life Sciences
A recent UCD College of Life Sciences Teaching and Learning Symposium focused on the world beyond university. It was chaired by Declan Patton, Vice Principal for Teaching & Learning, UCD College of Life Sciences. The first two speakers discussed the attributes required for graduates to make a successful transition to the world of work and to participate fully in society. This was followed by two case studies showing how the College is designing and delivering ‘lifelong’ learning or Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to its graduates and others in the workforce. Both speakers looked at wider issues such as offering non-accredited courses and accreditation for learning situated in the workplace.
Diane Cashman, Veterinary Science Centre
Diane Cashman presented a case study outlining Veterinary Medicine’s approach to delivering lifelong learning opportunities to veterinary profession. The Graduate Certificate in Canine Sports Medicine is a part-time course delivered primarily online through a combination of distance learning and practical sessions in the Veterinary Sciences Centre. This format was developed to support students who are unable to commit to full-time on campus tuition. Another programme in the School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine is the Graduate Certificate in Food Regulatory Affairs, which is taught entirely online.
Looking to the wider workforce, Anne Drummond of the UCD Centre for Safety and Health at Work (CSHW) has designed workplace learning for safety and health practitioners. In their certificate, classes take place in a local centre where participants watch a lecture given by an expert and delivered over a satellite link from UCD. At the end of the lecture, participants can speak to the presenter by phone and the local tutor leads classroom discussion. This has been the practice for some time but with the increasing availability of broadband, support materials are now available online by ‘vodcast’ (video podcast).
Anne Drummond, Niall Sclater & audience
The guest speaker at the symposium was Niall Sclater, Director of Learning Innovation, at the Open University (OU), Europe’s (EU) largest university with about 200,000 students. The OU is a pioneer of distance learning and today makes extensive use of online learning. Niall stressed that online learning (or elearning) can easily get a negative image – too much text, downloading slides and lecture recordings with very little in the way of interaction. He emphasised that technologies should be used where they add educational value, for example, to encourage student and tutor interaction, for collaboration among students or to simulate complex processes.
Niall detailed a list of the 12 key issues facing universities who want to develop online learning. I was particularly interested that he started with the students and raised the question
Are your students ready for online education?
Not all students are ‘at home’ with technology. Although most of UCD’s undergraduates have grown up with the web, some lecturers find that students have little experience of using web tools for education and are uncritical consumers of web-based content and resources. His second issue was student location. While OU students can study from anywhere, most UCD courses are taught on campus. OU courses have always been designed with this in mind. It is both a challenge and an opportunity for UCD to further develop distance and online education.
Photographs by Aleksandra Cranny
March 11th, 2010
Education may be free with online courses from Apple’s iTunes U and MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW) but who are these courses for? Casual learners or students? Students are at least partially motivated by certification and a social life with their peers. An article in the Higher Education Chronicle illustrates this point with a story about Steve (USA) who spent lots of time studying online courses but is about to lose his job through lack of certification.
The quality of the resources in MIT’s OCW and iTunesU is high but they cost time and money to produce and maintain – particularly in the case of multimedia materials. These materials do not allow for any interaction with professors or peers or include assessment. So they cannot on their own be used for certification purposes. If they were to be used for accreditation, what fees would be charged? What would their impact be on their traditional campus-based courses? Perhaps they could be combined with online tutoring and assessment for accreditation purposes, but, if so how will MIT and others differentiate their their online degrees from their conventional campus-based offerings. Many US universities have similar online courses, whether they will continue to be developed and funded depends in many cases on the answers to these questions.
The University of the People is a new, ambitious project, offering free degrees online. It is based in the USA but offering education to the world. Course materials are available online and students support each other through peer to peer teaching. Each module is supported by a volunteer professional educator who selects and edits the materials and facilitates learning in the student forums. University of the People intends to have its degrees accredited by a recognised university.
The Open University (UK) is a pioneer of distance learning. They are publishing many of their materials free on the web through OpenLearn. However, to gain a degree students must register and pay for a course where they are supported by a tutor or e-moderator. The term e-moderator was coined by Gilly Salmon, then a professor in the Open University (OU) Business School. An e-moderator leads students through structured activities and manages discussion in an online environment. As part of the learning process the students are encouraged to get to know each other online.
Taking a different tack, universities in Ireland and the UK have set up national repositories for the sharing of learning resources. The National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) in Ireland and JORUM (UK) are building collections of resources created by academics to be shared with their peers. The NDLR is developing communities of practice to encourage reuse and sharing among its members as part of their current educational practice. In a similar vein, спални комплектиMerlot is an international, open repository for the sharing of peer-reviewed learning resources. There are many other free, online educational resources but their quality varies, including those published by universities.
November 11th, 2009
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EdTech 2009 kicked off with a keynote address by Niall Sclater, Director of Learning Innovation at The Open University. The distance learning provided by the OU has always helped the house-bound, prison inmates and others disadvantaged by time and space to participate in higher education. |
Niall’s talk “Does Location Matter?” showed how the free dissemination of quality-audited, course materials in programmes such as the OU’s OpenLearn and MIT’s Open Courseware have brought the resources used by their registered students to a global audience. Of course, teaching materials are not everything… physical presence on campus gives students all the social and networking benefits of university life which a virtual presence cannot really replicate, at least at present, … and without registering and paying fees the students won’t get a qualification.
Moving beyond the provision of content, Niall looked at how virtual worlds could help deliver a richer and more social experience to students. However, we start with what we know and virtual worlds can end up replicating the structures and limitations of the physical world. In the mid 1990s, Niall and colleagues developed the Clyde Virtual University. It welcomed students with images of a lecture theatre, a library, a café and an examination hall. The library contained links to resources, the café links to discussion boards and the exam hall to online assessment. This imagery recreated the boundaries of the physical university and did nothing to foster collaborative learning. Today, virtual worlds can be created with tools like Second Life and OpenSimulator but our avatars still sit in virtual lecture theatres and search for resources in the virtual library. We can even buy land and build our own home. Perhaps with time virtual worlds will dispense with these metaphors and allow new forms of interaction. Perhaps at that point new ways of teaching and learning to harness these new ways of interacting will emerge.
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About 150 delegates attended EdTech 2009 in the National College of Ireland. Others participated virtually by watching live streams of the keynotes and exchanging comments using Twitter.
Thanks to the NCI photographers for permitting the use of these images. |
May 28th, 2009
Back at work after ALT-C and reviewing the conference…
I had some time free at the end to walk around the beautiful campus in Nottingham and admire the Millennium Garden and Lake. Spotted the coat of arms on the gates beside the lake – Knowledge Leads the City?.
I also had a quick look round the not so beautiful city. Unlike Marc I did not make it to Sherwood Forest.
The most interesting short paper was definitely “Digital Story Telling” by John Sandars . It was novel and gave me some ideas and reflect on and maybe apply in UCD. I enjoyed presentations on blogging particularly those from the Open University – Gill Kirkup’s survey revealed the gap (chasm?) between the plans of learning technologists and the understanding of most distance learners. The Learning Objects competition brought me back to my roots in content development. I’m glad to see that there is still a role for “professionally- generated content”.
Perhaps the best part was to meet and talk to colleagues, many of whom I met for the first time. Also meeting a Facebook friend in the real world. We, humans, are social creatures and it is hard to beat face to face contact for getting to know people.
I hope to get to ALT-C again but it probably will not be in 2008.
September 7th, 2007
The subject of blogging for reflective learning was addressed in different ways by several presentations. After five years of working on a masters with the Open University without meeting either peers or profs, it was particularly interesting to meet OU postgrads and researchers with an interest in blogging, who are themselves keen bloggers.
Gill Kirkup reported on the results of a survey which showed that many OU students did not appreciate the potential of blogging! Concerns were expressed about the value of blogging and the subjectivity of bloggers. Based on the survey the OU have developed a framework for the use of blogs among other learning tools. Gill Clough and Rebecca Ferguson are exploring how researchers keep research journals as blogs.
My own presentation was part of a series of three related talks. Jason Truscott of Plymouth University described how blogs and email were used to investigate student learning experiences in field and lab work in Environmental Sciences while Peter Maloney described how graphic design students used blogs to reflect on and develop their work
September 4th, 2007
