Traditionally, higher education institutions (HEIs) have maintained a high degree of autonomy in educational policy and practice. While UK and Scottish governments have expressed broad Information & Communication Technology (ICT) policy aims and goals at the national level, the specific measures carried out within an individual HEI have largely been left to the institutions themselves. Yet, the HE landscape of the 1990s and beyond is marked by increasing competition, which has worked against the collaborative spirit that informs much ICT effort in HE.
Against this background, ScotCIT [1] provided the opportunity for institutions within Scotland to collaborate on funded projects that aimed to establish appropriate use of ICT as part of normal working practice. This paper will discuss one of these projects, the Virtual Learning Space, a collaborative online environment where communities of interest can meet to share experience and understanding of ICT in relation to learning and teaching.
Staff development, peer learning, community of practice, change management
Scottish higher education institutions (HEIs) range from some of Britain's oldest to some of its newest. Traditionally, they have maintained a high degree of autonomy in educational policy and practice. While UK and Scottish governments have expressed broad Information & Communication Technology (ICT) policy aims and goals at the national level, and have initiated such programmes as JISC and JANET to advance those aims, the specific measures carried out within an individual HEI have largely been left to the institutions themselves. So, too, has most of the fine detail of ICT policy.
The higher education landscape of the 1990s and beyond, marked by increasing competition and the need to stress differences in institutional identity and aims in order to attract students and research funding, has worked against the collaborative spirit that informs much ICT effort in higher education. This has led to unnecessary duplication of effort. In addition, although ICT officers and online teaching specialists have the opportunity to meet and compare experiences in conferences and mailing lists, opportunities for more formal collaboration between institutions in the use of ICT are less common.
Against this background, ScotCIT [1] provided the opportunity for institutions within Scotland to collaborate on funded projects that aimed to establish appropriate use of ICT as part of normal working practice. ScotCIT ran from late 1998 until December 2001. This paper will discuss one of these projects, the Virtual Learning Space (VLS), a collaborative online environment where communities of interest can meet to share experience and understanding of ICT in relation to learning and teaching. The initial scope of the project was very much based in Scotland, and aimed to establish the use of the VLS in three institutions in the Aberdeen area ö The Robert Gordon University, University of Aberdeen, and Aberdeen College. The project partners thus included a Înewâ and Îoldâ university, as well as a further education college. It therefore seemed likely that the kinds of challenges facing different kinds of institutions would be represented in this project. (Although the partner institutions were all based in one city, which may have presented its own particular conditions.)Ê
ãIn a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.ä Eric Hoffer
Many people have highlighted the need for staff development in relation to networked learning (Alexander, 1999, Anstey, 2000, Dearing, 1997), and addressing this need was one of the central aims of the ScotCIT programme. Yet the need is perhaps more striking now, given the widely held perception that undergraduates entering universities are part of the digital generation, whereas staff are not. Institutions moving towards or in the process of implementing networked learning have many issues to consider, staff development being only one of these (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1 ö Outline overview of issues facing institutions implementing networked learning. Issues adapted from Harris and Higgison (2002) model adapted from Pereira (2000).
In this context of multiple needs, formal staff development is a feature in most, if not all, institutionsâ approaches to networked learning. Staff development for networked learning does, however, have its own inherent problems. Significant among these are the time commitment required of academic and support staff, the pace of change of technology and its application to learning and teaching, and the difficulty of matching staff development provision to staff skill levels, particularly at an intermediate or advanced level. A further potential mismatch is that ãthe bureaucratic elements of conventional tertiary education are pre-eminent and also in constant conflict to the self-management ideals and processes of academic staffä (Uys, 2002).
Thus, the diffuse, collegiate nature of many higher education institutions, although a strength in many respects, creates problems for staff development in ICT and networked learning. Unlike commercial organisations or government departments that can adopt standard operating systems and applications for all of their staff, universities are often host to a wide variety of software environments. Users in different university departments often work with different software and develop their skills in different ways. As that software evolves, those environments and skill levels also change, but at a different pace in different parts of a campus. This ad hoc development can work against structured staff training in ICT.
Individual staff members can find themselves caught in a mismatch between their own readiness and availability for ICT training at a particular time, and the official or unofficial training on offer at that time. Arranging appropriate and timely support and training when it is needed ö not so far in advance that it is forgotten before it is useful, or so late that it is already out-of-date by the time it arrives ö is one of the main challenges facing universities in the quest to maintain staff ICT skills.
Current thinking might suggest that provision of networked learning should move towards a collaborative model. (Initiatives such as the UK eUniversity [2] may be one example of this.) Indeed, Uys (2002) notes that the ãglobalisation of education may furthermore necessitate collaboration and partnerships · to ensure the local support of distance students in networked education, to address accreditation and certification issues or for more effective participation in networked education.ä Yet the opportunities provided by collaboration also extend to staff development. Furthermore, this collaborative approach has the potential to address some of the highlighted difficulties for staff development in networked education. This essentially was the driver behind the VLS project.Ê
Virtual support communities, whether hosted on mailing lists, Usenet or the Web, offer a way to address the time-lag between when support is required and when it is available, and to address the wide range of problems and requirements that arise in diverse software and online teaching environments. By creating a wide community of higher education staff, facing similar types of problems, in many different specific contexts, across multiple institutions, virtual environments such as the VLS ideally foster not only collaboration across institutional boundaries but also a self-supporting culture. Every member of the community is potentially supporting every other member, encouraging all of them to ask questions as required in the knowledge that an answer will arrive from somebody, somewhere.
The overall aims for the VLS project were to gather an online pool of resources and expertise relating to ICT skills.Ê Crucially, this would feed into and from an online community where experiences of using ICT could be shared. The context in which learning could take place thus directly related to the focus of learning. The creation of an online or virtual space where staff could come together to share best practice, exchange ideas and establish self-help groups was seen as the way forward in developing inter- and intra-institutional cooperative learning. Thus, the VLS was intended to be an online cooperative learning community.
Another underlying aim related to the process of managing the change towards networked learning by encouraging the current shift in pedagogy to a more student-centred, constructivist approach. The underlying philosophy adopted for the learning environment in the VLS was and is one of cooperation and collaboration; learning requirements are defined by individuals who enter the space, and constructed from the experiences that are shared by others. Thus, in providing an environment that aims to enhance ICT skills, the VLS itself acts as a working exemplar of constructivism.
This latter point raises its own issues regarding the potential conflict of explicitly promoting the acquisition of ICT skills and the application of ICT in learning and teaching, while implicitly using this as a means of changing pedagogic practices.
To establish a project based on cooperation and collaboration, steps were taken to encourage the involvement of staff from the partner institutions, recognising the expertise of key members of the prospective community of learners. The initial stages of the project included identifying the ICT skills needs of staff within the three partner institutions as well as the qualities required of the VLS. The project team developed a conceptual framework based on an outline framework by Pereira (2000), which was extended in consultation with members of staff during focus groups. This provided the opportunity for institutional staff to collaborative in modelling the space. Additionally, staff were surveyed to gain a profile of their needs and expectations in terms of the development of ICT skills.Ê
The initial focus group programme started with an overview of the VLS project, and moved on to review the conceptual framework. This was used as the basis for discussions on issues that focus group members thought the project should address. The focus groups included ICT trainers, staff developers and academic staff. The latter also discussed their ICT needs, and considered whether the greatest need was for training, the ability to share experiences, a helpdesk-type consultancy, or some other form of support. The focus groups thus identified issues relating to ICT skills needs in the context of the project partner institutions and the online learning environment.Ê These are summarised in Figure 2.
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Figure 2 - Summarised issues from the initial focus groups, clustered within the conceptual framework.
As this demonstrates, the pedagogical, organisational and technical issues are interlinked. It also highlights the importance of considering all clusters during the development process, while maintaining a balance over the emphasis given to each. The following will concentrate on the issues raised within the pedagogical and organisational clusters.
The focus groups also explored attitudes towards and potential motivations to participate in the VLS, providing the project team with an insight into how to ensure effective implementation. To this end, an online Delphi type tool was used as one of the last activities of the focus group meetings. Using this tool, participants submitted their opinions on what would motivate their participation in an online learning environment such as the VLS. They then rated their own and others' opinions online, and immediately saw a ranked list of results. This was used not just to collect their feedback, but also to demonstrate how ICT could be used. Discussions concluded with consideration of the results from the Delphi tool regarding the motivating factors.
The results of the focus groups were supplemented with reviews of the literature including: frameworks for online learning, particularly networked, cooperative and collaborative learning; building online learning communities, with the associated work on the pedagogical aspects of using C&IT for teaching and learning; and online knowledge management.Ê
The overall development process is outlined as a flow chart in Figure 3.Ê The development process consists of a series of stages that are broken down into questions and approaches used to address them.Ê The methods used in the needs identification stage are described above, although that part of the process has been explained in more detail previously, along with outcomes of the survey of ICT skills (Harris et al., 2000).
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Figure 3 - Flow chart of the overall development process for the Virtual Learning Space.
As Figure 3 shows, the outcomes of the needs identification processes were combined, and the results used to define the required characteristics of the VLS design. These characteristics could be placed at the centre of Figure 2, as they represent the qualities required to address the issues in the surrounding sectors of the framework.
The initial version of the VLS environment was piloted during an international online workshop with a group of 100 who were particularly interested in the implications of online teaching (Higgison, Harris & Templeton, 2000).Ê The online or e-Workshop served a dual purpose by enabling the VLS environment to be tested at the same time as piloting a potential model of use.Ê The latter included drawing out the knowledge within the participants, by incorporating within the workshop asynchronous and synchronous discussion based around case studies, and a number of core themes relating to online learning and teaching.Ê As the workshop took place online, all of the discussions were recorded.Ê This also meant that the topic of discussion was also the means of discussion for participants.
The project has progressed such that initial implementation, as described above, evaluation and second stage implementation have been completed. The VLS is now an active collection of almost 1900 individuals who share experiences within an online learning community. The scope of the project has widened considerably, with people joining the VLS from over 800 organisations. The majority of the membership is drawn from the UK (1300), with the three partner institutions being represented by almost 300 members. Examples of the benefits of this kind of collaborative online approach to networked learning staff development will be given during the conference paper.
During the conference paper, discussions will also include reflection on some of the strategic developments being undertaken within the partner institutions at the time of the project, and the impact that these may have had on the development of this project. Differences in the approach and requirements of the partner institutions were encountered and discussion will consider whether these were purely linked to the type of institution, and the significance of these for such cross-institutional projects.
This paper has described a change process that has emphasised collaboration. It has worked to involve the target community wherever possible, thereby building a sense of ownership and linking needs to outcome. Linking users' needs to the VLS design and development has served to authenticate the VLS within the context of the partner institutions and online learning. The intention has been to encourage cooperative learning of advanced ICT skills within an environment built using ICT and based on a model of cooperation and collaboration. The creation of such a learning opportunity across the three partner institutions was only possible because the VLS is online.
Issues that the project has confronted include:
á how to establish an online learning community from a local population of tertiary education staff;
á how best to identify the community's needs, and how these needs can be incorporated within the design of the VLS;
á how to sustain the learning community; and
á how the online environment can be designed to optimise learner achievement.Ê
Perhaps the central issue for the success of this kind of project relates to motivation. This can be expanded to consider what motivates individuals to join an online learning community, and to participate once they are part of the community. Indeed, one might consider the wider question of why individuals engage in learning online. From this project, we can see reasons relating to time constraints, ease of access and anytime, anywhere availability. Yet ultimately, the VLS is based on sharing experience rather than receiving wisdom, so the community aspect is central.
Alexander, W. (1999) TALISMAN C&IT Review. http://www.talisman.hw.ac.uk/CITreview Accessed 26/02/02
Anstey, P. (2000) Developing staff C&IT capability in higher education. A JCALT Report Available at http://www.uea.ac.uk/~k130/scaitsfinalreport.pdf Accessed 26/02/02
Dearing, R. and The National Commission for Investigation in Higher Education (1997) Higher Education in the learning society. http://www.ex.ac.uk/dearing.html Accessed 26/02/02
Harris, R.A. & Higgison, C.A. (2002) Institutional Readiness for Online Teaching and Learning. A JISC Senior Management Briefing Paper.
Harris, R.A., Pereira, M.A. & Davidson, D. (2000) Identifying the qualities needed for a virtual learning space in communication and information technology skills.Ê Paper presented at the 2000 International Networked Learning Conference University of Lancaster, April 17th-19th 2000.
Higgison, C., Harris, R.A., & Templeton, E. (2000) Online Tutoring Skills: Current practice to future policy.Ê Paper presented at ALT-C 2000, UMIST, Manchester, September 11th - 13th 2000.
Pereira, M.A. (2000) ArchCAL: a conceptual basis for the application of information technology into learning and teaching technical subjects in architectural education.Ê Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield
Uys, P. (2002) Managing tertiary education in a global virtual environment: Networked education management. In Hazemi, R. & Hailes, S, (Eds) The Digital University ö Building a Learning Community. London, Springer. pp 57-70
[1] ScotCIT is the Communication and Information Technology (C&IT) Programme of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.