Ascilite 2010 Report:

This year’s ascilite conference was held in Sydney, at the Novatel Brighton Beach where two papers were presented, one by Colin, and one by myself, and I am sorry that David was not there, but I think finishing his PhD is enough for anyone.

Beer, C. Clark, K., & Jones, D. (2010). Indicators of engagement. In C.H. Steel, M.J. Keppell, P. Gerbic & S. Housego (Eds.), Curriculum, technology & transformation for an unknown future. Proceedings ascilite Sydney 2010 (pp.75-86). http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/Ascilite conference proceedings 2010/Beer-full.pdf

Clark, K., Beer, C. & Jones, D. (2010). Academic involvement with the LMS: An exploratory study. In C.H. Steel, M.J. Keppell, P. Gerbic & S. Housego (Eds.), Curriculum, technology & transformation for an unknown future. Proceedings ascilite Sydney 2010 (pp.487-496). http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/Ascilite conference proceedings 2010/Kenclark-full.pdf

Monday 6th December 2010.

The conference was opened with a keynote from Professor Jan Herrington (UTS) on Authentic Learning and emerging technologies, followed by a plenary session on Blackboard.

After the plenary session I listened to some fascinating papers on LMS system analysis and Blended Learning environments. The afternoon session was spent finalizing the first of the papers to be delivered on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday 7th December 2009.

The morning keynote was by Dr Lev Gonick who spoke of a very high speed interconnectedness in downtown Cleveland, and the difficulties that surround that project, but he also spoke of the possibilities of these developments.

This followed by the invited speaker, Prof Tom Reeves, who spoke on the challenges of online education, and blended learning environments.

Our first paper, presented by Col, was after the lunch session and was on indicators of engagement, which was well received, and originated some useful discussion.

The rest of the day was spent going to other presentations, and we broke early so that we could get ready for the conference dinner.

Wednesday 8th December 2009.

Whilst somewhat dry from the night before, the morning sessions in my breakout group were interesting and the morning was spent getting ready for the second presentation, due after the morning tea break. At this session I spoke on the opportunities for reflective practice that exists in academic analytics.

The conference was interesting, though there is still a lot of work to do with academic analytics, and it was very good to catch up once again with Shane Dawson who has agreed to be a supervisor for my PhD.  And as Shane said, I need to read, “what is your research question”, and basically write, even if it is crap.  I agree with this, it is the art of writing, nit looking for the ‘gems’ that make a successful writer.

Overall, it was a good conference but I was glad to get home

cheers

Ken

Filed under: ascilite, Indicators Project, self-reflection

Moodlemoot 2010 slides

The presentation at Moodlemoot went well. Col presented his paper before mine, and we have a few contacts interested in the Indicator’s Project. I spoke on my own experience as an academic, and the dichotomy between what an academic says he does, and what the stats actually demonstrate what he does. This created some interest in data mining, though the concept in examining one’s own practice was talked about as a possible instance of self-reflective practice and a future way forward in aligning academic practice to engagement.

Filed under: Indicators Project, self-reflection, Indicators Project, self-reflection, Teaching

Moodle Moot

Just finalising a paper for Moodle Moot this year and looking at what an academic does in their site, adding features adopted over time, then adding use of those features by staff and students to see if this creates involvement/engagement. While the paper is only looking at the old LMS, as CQUniversity has only (Term 1 2010) finalised its move to Moodle, the research is guiding my thinking in the move. It will be interesting, for instance, to replicate the study using Moodle, doing a comparison to Blackboard to see if there are any glaring differences in the data. From the synopsis – Learning Management Systems (LMS) are important tools in the university context. LMS data, whatever LMS a specific university uses, can potentially be used to inform aspects of academic practice to engage students by utilising some common features of the LMS in a way that supports student engagement. Educational research in this study focussed on how an academic interacts with the LMS, how the LMS is used by students, and how these interactions create involvement. Staff interaction with students seems to be one of the key factors in student engagement. This study uses an academic’s approach to teaching + feature adoption + use as an indicator of involvement.

I think this is interesting as it will start to fill in some of the gaps between what an academic states that they do in the LMS, their conception of teaching, and what they actually do, their approach to teaching. While there may be dissonance between what they say they do, and what they actually do, this has to be linked to involvement and engagement. Feature adoption changes over time and some academics have a discussion forum, but they do not use it to contact students then the forum is not an engaged space. Col in this blog post stated, “The participation rate is higher and failure rate is 5% lower for courses where the teaching staff participated in course discussion forums.” This is an important point, if the academic does not approach teaching, adopt features, and get both staff and students using those features then engagement will not happen.

Look at the following figure (Figure 1) detailing academic postings to forums. Why would/should students get engaged?

Figure 1: Course Coordinators posting to forums

Filed under: Indicators Project, self-reflection

Academic Indicators: data mining as reflective practice

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are important tools in the university context and much money, time and resources have been spent in developing, utilizing and maintaining the LMS. These systems assist instructors to administer courses by providing access to content, discussion forums, assignment uploads, grade entry, and other features. Staff facilitating teaching and learning currently use Blackboard for their teaching though there seems to be little use of the LMS to aid in the improvement of pedagogy, or any future planning for teaching and learning. Data, like hit counts, resource utilization, discussion participation, and LMS features that support student engagement, is obtained by applying some simple scripts, data mining, to the LMS backend database. This data is utilized to aid in the reflection of pedagogical practices in alignment with usage statistics. At CQUniversity data could potentially be used to inform aspects of academic practice to engage students by utilising some common features of the LMS in a way that supports student engagement.

There is some evidence (Beer, Jones & Clark, 2009; Malikowski, Thompson & Theis, 2007; Gonzales, 2009) that LMS systems are not being used to their best advantage. They are, in the vast majority of cases, used only as a data repository. Academics use the LMS as a convenient mode of delivering lectures in digital form and then disseminating this to their respective students to make hard copies. If academics had to be categorized in terms of LMS usage, it would be that they are very much content centred though this may be a limitation of the current LMS. Yet, the supposition is, that academics put time and effort into the delivery of their courses, aiming to get the best possible outcome for their students that they can, given the limitations of the management systems we are currently using. Linking LMS usage to engagement, “the time, energy and resources student devote to activities designed to enhance learning at university” (Krause, 2005, p. 3), will aid in reflecting on academic practice and could potentially facilitate engaged teaching, moving the academic from the centre, incorporating real world examples, incorporating reflective methodologies, and shifting the emphasis in teaching from content to dialogue (Hollander, Saltmarsh, & Zlotkowski, 2002).

Researchers seem to look at inherent student qualities that tell part of the story about how students become engaged with the LMS, and with the academic (Ainley, 2004) though there has been research into involvement (Krause, 2005; Goldspink, Winter & Foster, 2008). This study focussed on how an academic interacts with the LMS, how the LMS is used by students, and how these interactions create involvement. Fresen (2007) in researching web-based learning identified staff interaction with students as one of the key factors in student engagement. Dawson and McWilliam (2008, p. 27) also point out that it is not only staff interaction that is crucial, “the quantity of ‘teacher presence’ and quality of ‘teacher presence’ are influencing factors in developing and maintaining student online engagement.”

Reflecting on staff interaction, examining an academic’s approach to teaching and what features they adopt within the LMS will be of some benefit, though these two need to be allied to ‘use’ of the features within the LMS to give some idea of interaction that may explain in some small way staff/student interaction and engagement. In summary, the method taken in this study is that, an academic’s approach to teaching + Feature adoption + Use = involvement (a key factor in student engagement according to Krause, 2005)
Read More (opens as a PDF).

Filed under: Indicators Project, self-reflection, indicators, Indicators Project, Masters, self-reflection