Report from day 1 of #relive08 – Researching Learning in Virtual Learning Environments

There can’t have been many conferences in the World yet where people’s name badges include images of their avatars. This sometimes weird crossover between real and virtual worlds began with comments such as “Hi there! I expected to see your name hovering above your head” and an introduction by conference organiser Anna Peachey resplendent in a pair of wings.

As usual I’m scouting for interesting educational applications and after sitting through a lot of presentations on day 1 of the conference the overwhelming answer to the question above (for me anyway) is “How do you improve the social element for distance learners?” A quote from one student (relayed by Anna) sums it up nicely:

it’s amazing how included you feel…I would never have been able to take part in the activities offered by the OU if they hadn’t been in Second Life…everyone joins in and really helps me learn

In another session Shailey Minocha and Rita Tingle discussed the importance of a sense of presence and a sense of place which are harder to achieve in a 2D environment. They also suggest from their research that activities in Second Life don’t actually enhance learning in themselves but by creating a sense of community and common purpose they can build motivation in learners which then leads to better learning.

Another theme which cropped up in several talks was the role of “play” in learning. Edward Castranova in his keynote pointed out that most online gamers are middle-aged females (rather than spotty teenage male geeks). Meanwhile Maggie Savin-Baden from Coventry reports that students think play is important but perceive that staff think it’s a distraction from learning. And Kath Trinder from Glasgow Caledonian has noticed that staff feel guilty about being in Second Life when they’re at work; they feel that somehow it can’t be real work.

Many of the talks also covered issues of identity. When Kath discusses Second Life with students they tend to refer to their avatars as “it” but after a while they begin to call them “me” and use phrases such as “I’m doing this”. The avatar becomes an extension of the self and people in her Glasgow evening classes call each other by their avatar names. Kath feels that people’s identity is more real in Second Life somehow than in their Facebook presence.

Other people I’ve talked to describe how they’ve experimented with changing the appearance of their avatars until they find something they’re happy with. After a while the sense of identity with their virtual representation becomes so strong that changing its look in any significant way becomes inconceivable.

There is no doubt that virtual worlds are enhancing social contact and quickly become as real to their participants as “real” communication. If you don’t believe this think how much we believe we’re hearing someone’s voice when we pick up the telephone. It’s just a reproduction of their voice transported in multiple ways through complex communication networks but we con ourselves into thinking we’re actually hearing their voice.

Edward Castranova quotes Gartner’s prediction that by 2011 80% of web users will use an avatar and have a “second life”. Social contact in virtual worlds has many advantages for distance learners but Edward also predicts that it’s going to contribute to a collapse in population. For obvious reasons.

I’ve been attending the Elluminati Community Conference today which gave me the opportunity to be both a speaker and a delegate, very similar roles to those of teacher and student. During one of the other presentations by Kimberly Gates, I realised that my use of Elluminate for my “class” left something to be desired.

Kimberly’s presentation was about reaching students who have poor levels of reading and numeracy but her tips were equally relevant to students of all levels. When she asked the participants how they would describe the session she’d been running so far they sent in the following comments (extremely rapidly):

Lots of polls
In easy to digest bits
yes, simple words
Interaction
v. interactive - good
very clear slide content - not too cluttered
Lots of QA
Slide builds
appropriately chunked
Audio paired with text
lots of active learning
typing as you are speaking
lots of polls require interaction
revealing content 1 point at a time
You say and also we can read it
minimal slide text content
slower and lots of white space and large font on slides
you are speaking slowly and clearly
making sure that everyone understands
need to ensure color text can be read by students who are not color blind for red
PLAN

Kimberly continually posed questions and asked people to type in the responses. She was multitasking by typing one thing while she said another (how did she do that?) Meanwhile I had basically just delivered a tedious traditional-style lecture; I could barely keep up with reading and advancing my slides, watching the countdown timer to ensure I didn’t overrun, referring to my notes and trying to look at the camera at the same time. I certainly did not manage to keep on top of the dialogue taking place in the chat window or monitor whether people were sticking up their hands, clapping or otherwise gesticulating at me…

Online synchronous teaching is not about lecturing at people - it’s about involving your class continuously in a whole host of different ways. I saw how you can bring video clips easily into your presentations to provide illustration; I saw great question and answer sessions with people either speaking their questions or typing them; I saw how students can interact between each other individually during the class as well as interacting with the whole class; I saw wonderful use of polls with instant feedback to the whole group, pointing devices which highlight particular parts of your slides… I have a lot to learn.

On a lunchtime stroll along the riverside today, Gráinne Conole was bombarding me with her latest thoughts on Cloudworks, her JISC-funded project which enables you “to find other people’s learning and teaching ideas, designs and experiences as well as sharing your own”. She is planning to extend the system to allow course teams to carry out the various processes around designing courses, including sharing and discussing the content as it’s being developed. Is this just a natural extension of the philosophy of openness as recently expounded by Martin Weller or is this taking openness a step too far?

Carrying out course design in an open arena where anyone can see what you’re up to is going to involve the same worries and vulnerabilities as making the source code of your programs or the content of your courses open. It struck me that open course designers would have two questions:

• Am I happy for people to see early versions of my work which may be far from perfect?
• Will competitors steal our ideas and exploit them commercially first?

If the dialogue around course design is also in the public arena then you’re exposing yourself further:

• What if I demonstrate my ignorance somehow through the comments I’m making?

Well it can be worrying to have early versions of your work visible publicly, particularly when you’re unsure of the validity of your ideas. However people are increasingly doing this through media such as blogs. Those prepared to expose themselves in this way obviously seem to think it’s worthwhile or they wouldn’t keep blogging. Getting feedback from others who have read your thoughts can be helpful and motivating. Confident open course designers may not mind their designs and discussions being in the public arena at all.

What about the commercial aspects? Should an organisation advertise in a very public way the course curriculum as it’s being developed, allowing other institutions to take their ideas and build even better courses? There may be something in this. I’ve heard people say that when they’re building a distance course the first thing they do is get hold of the Open University materials in that subject area.

Again the advantages of openness probably outweigh the disadvantages. Your course is likely to be complete before anyone else has had a chance to copy it and market it successfully. An open course design process may add visibility to your courses and even attract potential students. And a course, of course, is far more than its design and content – students also want the qualification and the tuition.

I don’t think all course teams will wish the processes and deliberations surrounding their course designs to be made available publicly, but some may be very happy to give it a try. I suspect they’ll find it enlightening and beneficial. Others may wish to restrict the openness to designs they’re happy with, keeping their dialogue to themselves. The hope is that Cloudworks will reach a critical mass, becoming a lively platform for people in different institutions to share course designs, ultimately benefitting students everywhere with better-designed courses.

You see I do listen.

Blogs, reflective journals, e-portfolios and other technologies are often claimed to enhance reflection which in turn is seen as having a positive impact on learning. Many assignment questions in subjects such as management and nursing are designed to encourage students to reflect on their learning and how it relates to their practice. But while there’s a growing body of literature around reflection and most of us recognise that it’s important, there’s a great deal of uncertainty as to exactly what reflection is, how to design reflective questions and how to assess students’ responses to them.

These were the issues in the minds of Shailey Minocha, my co-investigator, and me when we initiated a project on reflective learning in 2006, funded by the PBPL CETL. Today we presented the project’s findings at a poster session organised by the PBPL CETL. I was encouraged by the high degree of interest expressed by many of the people visiting our stall.

Our project kicked off (after a literature review) with a workshop with tutors and academics at the Open University to discover what they considered the most important attributes of reflection. Many of them had been involved in assessing reflective responses to assignment questions and had found this hard to do.

We developed a model for reflection, derived from exercises with the workshop participants and systematically enhanced by our tutor consultants. This can be used to help design reflective questions, and to mark them. Reflection can be an iterative process involving different stages which can be at a basic level or deeper. It normally starts with a basic observation of an incident, you might then notice the effects, report how that impacts on you, identify your own position and look at how you can improve.

Some questions are designed to address only one or more of these basic levels of reflection. That may be fine at earlier levels of study, and when students are not used to having to reflect. We believe though that reflection becomes more valuable when some of the deeper aspects are applied, such as contextualising, identifying causes, relating your learning to your practice, connecting it to theory and justifying changes in your behaviour or thinking as a result of the reflection.

Key findings from the project include:

1. Reflection is hard. Guidance is required in the design of reflective questions (by course teams), the writing of reflective accounts (by students) and the marking of assessments (by tutors).
2. Reflective skills need to be built up gradually. It takes time to get used to the new ways of thinking required.
3. It is necessary to situate reflection in the course and relate it to the students’ practice. Reasons for introducing reflection to students must be made clear up front.
4. How the questions are worded is very important in encouraging appropriate reflective responses.
5. Models of reflection have to be adapted according to the subject area or educational level. The model may require to be less self-centred for example if the subject is nursing – practice-based reflection may be quite different from self-reflection.
6. Tutors find it difficult to mark reflective answers fairly and students can feel it can be hit and miss.
7. The model developed is a long term project or process model; the others tend to be more incident-based - our wording is not related to incidents. However our model could be applied to incidents as well as processes.
8. Reflection is cyclical – and the aspects of reflection can be applied cyclically.

Now critically reflect on the learning you have achieved while reading the above blog entry and how it might relate to your practice (10 marks)…

Warning: do not read this unless you are obsessively interested in twitter and have nothing better to do with your time.

I’ve been stimulated into thinking about this by various sites I’ve seen recently which measure your online connectedness - plus some tweets and blog postings by Tony Hirst. Some of these measures are pretty crude - for instance measuring how connected you are on twitter by adding the number of people you follow to the number of people who follow you. What if you hardly ever go into Twitter? Or if most of your followers just registered for Twitter once and then gave up? In that case you’re not as connected as you might seem.

Taking your followers first, can we find a way to measure the “quality” of your connectedness to those people ie to know if they’re actually viewing your tweets? The more often they go into twitter the more likely they are to be reading what you’re writing. The easiest way to measure how often they’re going into twitter is to see how often they’re tweeting themselves. That person has a twit value which could be based on their average daily number of tweets sent, perhaps calculated over the last month.

Say you have 3 followers: Martin who tweets on average 5 times per day, Gráinne 7.5 and Mary 0. Adding your followers’ twit values together gives 12.5 which we can call your tweet impact. If your average number of tweets sent is 2 then you have a daily tweet impact of 25. So that’s one part of our measurement for connectedness.

If you only send tweets and never read others then you’re only connected in one direction which is not very connected… So we also need to measure the number of tweets you read. We can’t know how many you bother reading of course but we can calculate how many you receive. Of course if you never go into twitter then receiving 1000 a day is pointless. But the more you tweet the more likely you are to be reading your tweets so we can base your own twit value on your average daily number of tweets sent.

So if you follow 4 people, Martin, Gráinne, Mary and Tony (who tweets 11 times per day) you can add up their scores to get 23.5. As your average daily tweets are 2 you can multiple 23.5 by that to get 47. This is a measure of the impact on you from the tweets you receive.

That would be quite a good place to stop but unfortunately my brain keeps ticking over here and there are other factors which can be considered. Direct tweets I propose should be discounted because they’re equivalent to emails (and it’s impossible to find out automatically who those direct tweets are to).

What about @tweets then? These are likely to have a much higher impact on the person you’re sending them to than one sent to all your followers. @tweets should contribute to your interconnectedness score in a different way to normal tweets. They should get a score higher than just the twit value of the person they’re aimed at, say five times the twit value. And for everyone who’s following you and that person, they are also likely to be impacted more than just with a general tweet because they’ll be interested in what that says about the relationship between the two of you. Perhaps your score should be double their normal twit values to indicate the higher level of tweet impact.

Thus if you send an @tweet to Martin, who’s twit value is 5, the tweet impact on him is actually 25. But Gráinne also sees that tweet because she’s following both of you. Her twit value is 7.5 but the tweet has greater than usual impact on her because she takes more interest in it so it doubles to 15. The total tweet impact then is 25 + 15 = 40.

@tweets received by you could be scored similarly.

One final factor which occurs to me is the relative value of tweets you read from people who are also following you. There’s a good chance you’ll know that they’re your followers therefore you’re more likely to take note of the tweets they’re sending you. The tweet impact could therefore be increased, say by a half.

Now that I’ve got this rubbish out of my head, I should now be able to get to sleep.

This is the sort of thing which would have some of the free spirits who thrive in the relatively anarchic and regulation-free virtual worlds emerging on the Internet up in arms. However as our institution puts more of its learning activities into environments such as Second Life there are many policy issues emerging to which we’re having to find solutions.

I had an interesting conversation earlier today with Anna Peachey, our resident Second Life guru about some of these issues. I had only encountered her before in Second Life so it was great to meet Elsa Dickins’ real life avatar.

One of the most fundamental issues is whether Second Life is the best environment for us to base our activities in - with substantial investment going into a platform we don’t control. If Woodbury University could have its site removed by Linden Labs then it could happen to us for a variety of reasons. There are alternative environments such as OpenSim which can be hosted and managed in-house and avoid the problem of the site being withdrawn.

This parallels the arguments surrounding the use of free Web 2.0 tools on the internet versus in-house VLEs/LMSs, some of which I’ve detailed before. Trying to replicate the success of Second Life in a locally-hosted “walled garden” would have a number of drawbacks. By restricting the space to students and staff of a single university it would miss that element of spontanaeity and unpredictability that having strangers wander into your tutorials brings! But would students take to a neater, more sanitised version of Second Life? On the other hand the Open University has enough critical mass with its 200,000 learners that it could potentially attract thousands of them to an environment restricted to its own community where genuinely useful learning activities were taking place.

Another issue to get to grips with is the basic architecture of the University’s islands. Schomebase is where students tend to hang out and can create their own objects whereas OpenLife’s spaces are developed and controlled by University staff. We’re not convinced we’ve got this balance right yet and there are various sections of the islands which need to be restricted at times or permanently for particular purposes (eg meeting rooms where there are good reasons for keeping the discussions private).

As more activities take place on Second Life there will no doubt be great controversies about where they should be located relative to each other. Deciding whether an entirely new area of activity such as study skills should have its own island or say a building within an existing island is something that will have to be worked out. I remember similar discussions a decade ago when universities were trying to decide on the optimum architectures for their new institutional websites.

There are of course various legal issues to deal with such as copyright. Another one is ensuring that we don’t breach access restrictions to any library content we make available there. Then there will inevitably be complaints from students about the behaviour of other students - we need to work out ways of dealing with those.

Training is an issue too. If we’re going to be hosting core parts of our courses in virtual worlds, we need to provide training for students and tutors in technical and navigational issues - and also guidance to staff and learners in how to carry out effective teaching and learning activities “in world”. I heard about a student the other day who fell down into the tunnel at the edge of one of our common areas and spent the whole tutorial trying to find his away out of it to join the other students…

There are all sorts of logistical issues too such as the connections between the virtual world and the virtual learning environment, single sign-on, automated population of tutor groups with the right students and booking systems for teaching spaces within Second Life, integration of your avatar into your student profile, bespoke sign-ups which allow you to enter the virtual world immediately… Thank you Anna/Elsa for giving me a lot more very interesting things to think about!

Socialisation is generally considered to be a necessary or at least useful precursor to effective participation in online classes. It forms stage 2 in Gilly Salmon’s widely applied five-stage model. I’ve been thinking about this since I asked her in, I think, 2000 if she thought online classes ran better if the people had met physically beforehand. A lot of educators assume that to be the case. Gilly was adamant that it was better that students who would be working with each other online did not meet up in advance; any negative impressions gained face to face could harm later online interaction.

I’ve never been entirely convinced of this, and have been reflecting on the vital role of socialisation for many of our students after spending a week in August at the OU Residential School in Santiago de Compostela (students pictured here are on a fact-finding mission around the city, where socialising is a by-product of the learning activity). The intense interactions between students and with staff over the week, let alone the huge amount of learning that took place, were clearly very beneficial for the great majority of participants. I had the impression that because contact with other students was so rare, the experience meant much more to them than it would have for campus-based students.

Of course the World has changed hugely since 2000 and most of us are much more comfortable now with online socialising, developing varying degrees of addiction to email, Facebook or Twitter. That socialisation phase may be less necessary for students now much more comfortable with the technologies. Shailey Minocha has been researching education in Second Life and told me this morning that she finds students resent online socialisation activities unless they are clearly connected to the course content or learning outcomes. She reported on a tutor who found the same in face-to-face settings: busy students who have travelled to a tutorial want to get stuck into the content immediately. They’re more inclined to socialise at the end of the class when they feel they’ve got what they wanted out of it.

Perhaps the conclusion from all this is that we’re all so short of time that we don’t necessarily realise how important the social element is to working or studying effectively with others. If we want our students to have opportunities for socialisation so that their relationships are more productive, we have to be clever about the way we design those experiences. Many take up the chance for unstructured social contact with others anyway and benefit immensely from chatting to others in residential schools, tutorials, online forums, videoconferencing and Second Life.

Physical presence may result in better long-term relationships with a positive impact on learning, motivation and progression; some students may be able to achieve the same through online interaction. What is becoming clear is that any socialisation activities perceived as having no direct learning outcomes relevant to the assessment are likely to be considered by students a waste of time!

Cath Wilkins, an Open University Associate Lecturer among her other jobs, gave an interesting presentation this morning at the Teaching Mathematics with Online Tutorials conference. I’ve reported before on the Elluminate maths trials at the OU. She teaches on the OU MSc Programme which has 500 students actively studying on it and is probably the biggest online maths masters in the World.

Cath books two hour slots for online maths tutorials using Elluminate - the first half hour to get people familiarised with the system and to chat followed by an hour’s lecture during which she makes heavy use of the whiteboard to explain the maths. In the last few minutes students carry on chatting or trying out the whiteboard. Most students don’t use their microphones but find the chat very helpful. Cath describes her six steps for a successful e-tutorial:

1. Book the room and brief the students - she sends them a link to the Elluminate support page, and that seems sufficient.
2. Write the talk and save it as an overlaid pdf file - not being used to preparing powerpoint presentations this took her a lot of time. The presentations were saved as pdfs and converted into jpgs to place in Elluminate.
3. Practice in the vRoom - this is the free area Elluminate provides for people to try the product out with a maximum of three participants.
4. Do the tutorial - including using the file transfer facility at the end to send through files.
5. Get feedback from students via an online questionnaire.
6. Make the URL of the recording available for students who didn’t attend or want to experience aspects of the tutorial again.

So how did the thirty out of her sixty students who took up the offer of an online tutorial find the experience. Cath received the following comments from students:

“The OU MSc lacks any ‘communal’ element and this goes some way towards providing that.” - nearly all the students mentioned the community aspects which these etutorials help to facilitate.

“Mathematics comes alive when you hear it being spoken out loud, and the process on Elluminate is just as clear as in a face-to-face tutorial.” - Cath thought this was going a bit far but clearly here was one satisfied customer.

“Not having a microphone wasn’t a problem as I could type any questions I had.” - even those students who had microphones tended to use chat to communicate instead.

“It was nice to send little messages to each other.” - they really enjoyed this aspect, didn’t abuse it, or seem to get too distracted by it.

“The system was easy to use, although a bit cumbersome to set up.” - this comment came from someone whose version of Java was incompatible initially. No-one else out of the 30 students (divided into two sub-groups) had installation problems.

“The eTutorials focussed my studies and my mind on the important aspects of the course” - clearly another satisfied customer, and maybe a key reason for having tutorials: helping students to see the wood for the trees.

Cath concluded by listing her pros and cons of teaching using Elluminate:

1. It’s an effective way to teach
2. It’s recorded for later use
3. Very little training is needed for tutor or students
4. It’s a good solution if students are geographically spread out
5. There are few technical glitches - though she got logged out a few times
6. It’s better than nothing - there were no opportunities to interact with the students before Elluminate started being used

On the downside she finds that there is a lower level of feedback from students compared to f2f teaching, despite the use of questions, ticks, crosses and emoticons. And she had to think on her feet a lot - it was not easy to put up detailed maths at short notice. Final verdict: “Exhausting but exhilarating”.

At the Cottenham event last week there was a talk by Andrew Field who achieved the most amazing level of audience engagement I’ve seen in years. His philosophy is to trick students into learning by getting them to play online games, improving their minds in the process without even realising it’s happening.

Field certainly achieved this with an adult audience by having us answer multiple choice questions in teams. If you got the answer right you got the chance to try to score a goal in a flash animation against a goalie with the face of a famous figure such as Thatcher or Mandela.

Field thinks Moodle and VLEs are fundamentally boring. He’s right - they’re just tedious empty shells until interesting content and activities are included in them. One online activity his schoolkids love is to get an animation of the teacher to walk the plank by answering questions correctly. Every correct question means a walk further forward until the teacher falls into the sea - to the delight of the pupils.

He also showed a version of space invaders called “teacher invaders” where you have 30 seconds to try to get the question right and prove that the evil teachers who say you haven’t got any knowledge are wrong…

Infectiously enthusiastic though he is, Field acknowledges that this is really quite low-level learning. Getting the kids to create games themselves is more effective. The most useful aspect of what he was doing was a clever combination of Flash, SCORM and Moodle to track usage. The students think they’re trying to get maximum goals scored in a football animation. In the process their teacher gets to monitor their level of understanding via the mark they’ve got in the Moodle gradebook.

Field maintains a site called ReviseIT where many of these games can be found. What’s really clever is his authoring tools site, where you can adapt the games with your own content and save them as flash files for incorporation within your VLE.

Dan Leighton was waxing lyrical about the benefits of elearning this morning at a Moodle event for schools near Cambridge. He finds it particularly useful for seeing when his pupils have uploaded assignments.

He demonstrated a neat use of Jing to record his voice and his mouse clicks while producing feedback for students on spreadsheet assignments. He also uses video recordings of himself and finds this quicker and more effective than producing written feedback where the lack of a tone of voice can lead to misunderstandings.

What is impressive is that Leighton has rolled out Moodle at Cottonham Village College with hundreds of students at virtually no additional cost to his institution. Using a cheap hosting service like the one I use for this blog to run Moodle, he believes he has engaged his students much more by using elearning and attributes their achievement of significantly enhanced results primarily to the use of Moodle.

Extensive use of video is now using up the college’s bandwidth limit and they’re examining different hosting options but Leighton recommends this lightweight option for any institution wishing to carry out piloting of Moodle.