Peter Goodyear

Professor of Education & Co-Director, CoCo Research CentreFaculty of Education & Social WorkUniversity of Sydney

Senior Fellow, Australian Learning & Teaching CouncilARC Laureate Fellow

Blended Learning SummitSydney, Sept 18th 2013

Learning, technology and design defining architectures for productive networked learning

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OverviewDeveloping educational design for learner autonomy and life-long learning

Blended learning: what are we talking about?

The importance of helping students make connections: avoiding fragmented and inert knowledge

Fostering the designerly aspects of teachers’ work Teaching-as-design and why it’s becoming more necessary

Architectural approaches for tackling complex design problems

Activity-centered analysis and design: focusing on what students actually do

Approaches to capturing and sharing good design ideas

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OverviewDeveloping educational design for learner autonomy and life-long learning

Blended learning: what are we talking about?

The importance of helping students make connections: avoiding fragmented and inert knowledge

Fostering the designerly aspects of teachers’ work Teaching-as-design and why it’s becoming more necessary

Architectural approaches for tackling complex design problems

Activity-centered analysis and design: focus on what students do

Approaches to capturing and sharing good design ideas

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“The term ‘blended learning’ is ill-defined and inconsistently used. Whilst its popularity is increasing, its clarity is not. Under any current definition, it is either incoherent or redundant as a concept.”

(Oliver & Trigwell, 2005, p24)

Oliver, M. & Trigwell, K. (2005) Can 'blended learning' be redeemed? E-Learning, 2.

Blended learning: what are we talking about?

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Definitions: for systematic review

“Learning through a combination of online and face-to-face experiences. In this study, cases where students learned 25% or more but not all of the assessed content over the Internet were categorized as blended learning”

(Means et al, 2013; emphasis added)

Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R. F. & Baki, M. (2013) The effectiveness of online and blended learning: A meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Teachers College Record, 115, 1-47.

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Systematic reviews of research on blended learning

Online learning x F2F/traditional – on average, no significant difference

Blended learning often comes out better than either pure online or pure F2F/traditional

Confounded (?) by the fact that, in some/many blended learning situations, students spend more time on task, consult more resources and work with each other more

Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R. F. & Baki, M. (2013) The effectiveness of online and blended learning: A meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Teachers College Record, 115, 1-47.

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A design-oriented, learning-centered view

‘Blended learning’ describes learning activities that involve a systematic combination of co-present (face-to-face) interactions and technologically-mediated interactions between students, teachers and learning resources.

Bliuc, A.-M., Ellis, R. & Goodyear, P. (2007) Research focus and methodological choices in studies into students' experiences of blended learning in higher education The Internet and Higher Education, 10, 231-244.

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Design for blended learning

Design for learning situations in which:

1. What the learner does involves an integrated combination of technology-mediated and ‘other’ activities

2. Integrated – includes helping connect learning activities, episodes, experiences & outcomes across time, space & media

3. There is significant complexity in designing and/or understanding the learning situation

4. In part because of multiple, sometimes competing, learning objectives – including helping students become more autonomous, better at managing their own learning, skilled at reconfiguring their environment to make learning (and other kinds of knowledge work) more effective

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Students’ experiences of blended learning….

Headline: students are rapidly becoming better at using technology to improve the efficiency of strategic and surface approaches to learning

Ellis, R. & Goodyear, P. (2010) Students' experiences of e-learning in higher education: The ecology of sustainable innovation, New York, RoutledgeFalmer.

Kennedy, G., Dalgarno, B., Bennett, S., Gray, K., Waycott, J., Judd, T., Bishop, A., Maton, K., Krause, K.-L. & Chang, R. (2009) Educating the net generation. Melbourne, University of Melbourne.

But surely digital natives can get on with this without us fussing over them?

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HE Students’ experiences of blended learning (UK & Australian data, 2005-10): Headlines

1. Over time, steadily increasing fluency with use of various ICT tools & resources (email, IM, Google, social networking, ejournals), though still some significant variation in abilities, confidence, practices within years

2. High value being placed on: flexibility (time-space), bite-sizing, fast task-orientation; podcasts for revision

3. Little or no data connecting practices with learning outcomes. Little/nothing on new or more ambitious learning outcomes.

4. Some evidence of students captured by their media habits; little or no data telling us that students are making well-informed strategic/reflective decisions about how to tackle tasks, how to make best use of various combinations of ICT-based and other study activities, or links between these and learning outcomes.

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Teaching (F2F)

Pre-activee.g. Lesson-planning

Interactivee.g. Exposition

Facilitation

Post-activee.g. Self-assessment/reflection

Marking/feedback

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Teaching (for blended learning)

Pre-activee.g. Lesson-planning

Unsupervisedonline or who knows where

Post-activee.g. Self-assessment/reflection

Marking/feedback

Interactive in-class/F2Fe.g. Exposition

Facilitation

Interactiveonline

e.g. ExpositionFacilitation

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Teaching as design

Pre-activeDesign: tasks, tools, people

Pre-active (Design)

Pre-active (Design)

Interactive

Interactive

Post-active

Post-active

Staff time - to discuss: overall quantity, quality & flexibility

Student preferences - to discuss: F2F contact with staff & flexibility

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Traditional teaching practices under increasing stress

Accumulating research evidence about successful learning and teaching

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Organisational forms

Social Relations SpacePlace

“People, community”“People, community” “Tools, resources, infrastructure”“Tools, resources, infrastructure”

Task(s)Task(s)

ActivityActivity

(Multiple, often competing) Intended learning outcomes(Multiple, often competing) Intended learning outcomes

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Architectures for productive learning

Paradigm shift: from comparing the effectiveness of simple treatments to designing and managing complex systems (assemblages, environments, ecologies, networks …. )

Research-based evidence on learning, and (re)usable design guidance, is very context-dependent

Not: X is better than Y. Rather: If you want to help achieve A, B and C in situation S, then try X then Z

Integration of a complex of elements, with a good internal logic, but recognising students will reconfigure what is offered

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Shareable knowledge for teaching-as-design: design patterns and pattern languages

A pattern is a solution to a recurrent problem in a context.

A pattern "describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice” (Alexander et al., 1977, p.x).

Goodyear, P. & Retalis, S. (Eds.) (2010) Technology-enhanced learning: Design patterns and pattern languages, Rotterdam, Sense Publishers.

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Collaboration scripts

“Scripts aim at structuring collaborative processes by defining sequences of activities, by creating roles within groups and by constraining the mode of interaction among peers or between groups.

Scripts originate from the fact that it is difficult to predict the effects of collaborative learning by controlling external conditions such as group composition or task features.

… the effects of collaborative learning depend on the quality of interactions that take place among group members.”

Dillenbourg, P. & Tchounikine, P. (2007) Flexibility in macro-scripts for computer-supported collaborative learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23, 1-13.

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Collaboration scripts, external to internal

(Internal) knowledge of how to engage in a specific kind of collaborative task

Examples

Knowledge of the kind of task this is (including the typical sequence of scenes & roles)

Play Debate

Knowledge of a typical subtask/sub-subtasks

Scene(s); Scriplet(s)

Oppose the motion; Refute an argument

Knowledge of the different ways in which participants can contribute

Roles Proposer, seconder, opposer, chairperson

Fischer, F., Kollar, I., Stegmann, K. & Wecker, C. (2013) Toward a script theory of guidance in computer-supported collaborative learning. Educational Psychologist, 48, 56-66.

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Pattern languages

Tasks: hierarchy of tasks & subtasks + sequence of tasks …Roles, divisions of labour etc

e.g. Jigsaw groups; brainstorm; pyramids

Learnplace characteristics, tools, artefacts & other resourcesneeded to support the activities that are expected to flow

Threshold below which implementation details do not need to be of concern to the teacher-designer (eg automatic allocation of students to working groups on some easily definable basis)

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Summing up

1. Innovations in digital technology + accelerating interpenetration of the ‘material’ and ‘digital’ worlds mean that learning activity will become spread more broadly across heterogeneous places, tools, artefacts etc

2. Understanding learning activity; analysing learning environments become much more complex

3. Design for blended learning: helping students manage & integrate – connected learning; focus on what students do

4. Research: richer understanding of socio-technical, materiality, affordance, etc; shifting the unit of analysis from the individual to the extended mind

Clark, A. (2008) Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging approaches to educational research: Tracing the sociomaterial, Abingdon, Routledge.

Hodder, I. (2012) Entangled: An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things, Wiley-Blackwell.

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If you have been, thanks for listening…

peter.goodyear@sydney.edu.auhttp://coco.edfac.usyd.edu.au

http://sydney.edu.au/research/stl/

Is it F2F if no-one is making eye-contact?

Is this a ‘traditional’ classroom?

Are they online?