At the beginning, I was thinking to use “online education” in the post title rather than “education”. However nowadays in HE, how many courses/programmes without online activities? Do I need to specifically say “online”? Cardiff University CESI colleagues have put great effort on making the Teaching and Learning Conference 2021 happen online. A big thumb up to them. I have managed to attend some sessions today. Here to jot down my takeaways.
To discuss the online education, two hours were not enough. Considering the wonderful keynote talk from Dr Tim Fawns, I’d like to reflect on three things particularly.
Self-directed learning
Self-directed learning (also self-regulated learning) is one of the theories I like to use in my practice, especially when I generate support materials. Tim mentioned it in the teaching context. Although I don’t teach, I embed this idea into my design and often explain to people why I designed it in such way. I expect learning materials that learners visit are latest, accessible, easy to follow, and mostly relevant to their context. This may not be related to their specific discipline/study, but absolutely about the feature/functionality that they use, for instance, it helps them to learn what could happen if they do not click the “Submit” button after uploading their Turnitin assessment. Tim pointed out that we should not leave the teaching materials for students to self learn, rather we need to tell students what it is, what they could do and how they may go through the materials in line with the topics. I nodded indeed. I often provide feedback channel with support materials and track the usage data regularly to see how users have interacted with the materials. However, unlike teaching and learning, the challenge for us is that most users are unwilling to spend time on telling us the details of their experience and what exactly are the barriers for their use. Apart from I take the ownership of this process and make it as a research project, then I could go to collect such data from users. Otherwise there is little opportunity for us to really look into the outcome of self-directed learning in our practice. This is also an ongoing challenge for IT – how much research we would have time to do when evaluating our delivery design in supporting teaching and learning.
Technology & pedagogy
Over the years, people criticise that technology drives pedagogy. Although I work in IT, I never felt so. With working experience in software development, we always take users’ requirements the first. So from my bias view of supporting users, the software is formed by users. Therefore systems we support are largely shaped and improved by what users wanted it to be. On another hand, I do see the impact of technology on people (education), such as who don’t need mobile phone and the Internet over last year? Technology impacts our methods. I see them interplay. I guess the view of “Tech drives pedagogy” was related to how much control/administration that users have and who have the ownership of evaluating, purchasing and supporting technology. I like Tim’s model of technology and pedagogy (see below tweet).
Honesty
I agree Tim’s viewpoint of honesty. I think no matter it’s teaching or supporting teaching, honesty is a necessary rule if we really want to engage the learners. I mean the teacher and the student are both human. Honesty is the invaluable trait in building human relationships. The purpose of education is to gain knowledge, to learn skills, to grow, and to explore unknown. When I was a child, I had a mindset that a teacher is not for questing how much they know, a professor knows everything of the subject; a doctor knows everything of their field. Questioning a teacher in classroom is strange. I think I started to learn critical thinking and understand why professors encouraged us to inquire when I took my Masters programme. I wish I had been led to see honesty of whom a teacher is in an early age.
More
In addition, I have enjoyed a lot of Allan Theophanides‘ “Pecha Kucha” presentation of A-Z of LT. May be because the topic is so close to my daily work. I like the little timer on each page and the simplicity of how he explained the technologies.
Check the @CESICardiffUni and #LTCU2021 to see tweets and news of session recordings.
Web n' Circle 