Rethinking Learner Support: the challenge of collaborative online learning
Comments on Mary Thorpe
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This paper may be cited as: Comments on Mary Thorpe, 'Rethinking Learner Support: the challenge of collaborative online learning,' SCROLLA Symposium on Informing Practice in Networked Learning, Glasgow, 14 November 2001, http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/dice/scrolla/resources/s1/thorpe_panel.html
Questions and comments from the panel on Mary Thorpe's paper
John Bruce, Highland Council Education Service
The Authority has gone in the last 5-6 years from having CMC bolt-ons in most of its courses to venturing into online learning in a few beta-stage courses. John endorsed a lot of what was said, adding that at the course design stage we cannot look at this in a conventional way, but have to plan carefully at the outset.
We must plan things like: how a course will be evaluated with the medium in mind; technical support issues, which are huge; help-desk issues; a clear definition of roles of tutors and mentors for each particular course; induction materials, which must be in place from the beginning; cost-analysis, which is crucial — variable costs, levels of tutor/mentor support at any one time; the appropriate learning interface, whether WebCT or FirstClass (another crucial early decision); the virtual learning community — whether it is an adjunct to the course, or central to it — can't just hope that it happens, but must work out how much is crucial to success; and complaints procedures, which we can't just take off the shelf.
Gerry Graham, Learning Teaching Scotland
Gerry felt that this had a lot of resonance to his work. He quoted from a paper by Steven Downes about how we develop 'courses' at the moment when developing online content, when what we should focus on is the interaction between learner and tutor. We can't just put a course online and expect it to work well; what is really required is the interaction.
Learning Teaching Scotland has a product called Pioneer, which it gives away. Its power is in its simplicity: the interface is simple, with different 'skins' available depending on the circumstances of the course. The environment is kept simple so that the learner interacts with the content, fellow students and the tutor, rather than focussing on the learning environment itself.
Richard Pietrasik, BECTA
One of BECTA's big interests is to know what features of an online environment are conducive to good learning and teaching. Pioneer is actually quite effective. Richard didn't think that selling these environments is a way of making money, but was interested in the subtle differences in learning environments and their underlying pedagogy. BECTA's experience is that if you set up online-learning environments, get people interested, and then sit back, they usually die; it requires positive intervention to keep them alive. Some people are skilled at keeping them going, some aren't; but there is no body of knowledge around it. Online community is a small element of what we're trying to do in an online learning, and we still don't know even how online communities work. There's a lot of work to be done.
We also need to watch how technology enables things to happen in terms of its development. A few years ago we would have said that sending text messages on mobile phones wouldn't have taken off, yet it's very popular with particular age groups. Eventually we won't have to type messages online — the question is, is that better or worse, and when will it be used or not?
Ian Heywood, BusinessLab
Ian had recently had an interesting debate with Scottish Enterprise about how they were going to stimulate a new economy in Scotland based on e-learning. He feels excited and frightened. Excited because technology is doing more to drive learning at the moment than any of the things he has seen in relation to pedagogy. The way people are using the Internet to seek out and engage with knowledge in an informal context is fantastic. Equally, scared because he hears a lot of people in the education sector say that we mustn't be technology-led. The trouble is that the technology is moving a lot faster than the pedagogy. Ian is frightened that we will get hung up on this term 'support', learner support. It sounds like a medical thing, like the learner is in need of a life-support system, with tubes stuck into him so that he can engage with learning in this new environment.
We get locked into focussing on technology and bureaucracy at the expense of the content, what we actually teach about. The real support the learner needs, though, is around social capital; how to work as a learner in a networked environment, where much more of your learning is peer-to-peer. That's quite frightening, particularly to the more mature generation brought up in a traditional education system: listen, hear, try and chip in a bit. The new world is not like that: go out, find out, try and make sense of it — a lot of it's garbage, but some of it's not — bring it together, and then share it with friends. What we're asking people to do is interact in a social way, which Ian is not so sure that people are readily conditioned to do.
The saving grace is that the work environment is going absolutely the same way at the moment. We need as educators to focus on what our skills are in terms of helping people to work around the social side of it. Imagine that he is sitting there as Dr Heywood, recruitment consultant for EasyTutor, looking to recruit tutors, and will pay them based on what they believe their premium skills are. What would the skill-sets be that you would stand up and say look, my skills are these, and I want to work for EasyTutor?
Questions and comments from the audience
Unknown
A challenge to the terminology: learning doesn't happen online, it happens in students' heads. What you're discussing are actually communication environments.
Rachel Ellaway, University of Edinburgh
Will this create a gulf between pure academic education and vocational education?
Stuart Robertson, New Educational Developments, Scottish Executive Education Department (SEED)
If a group is constructing its own knowledge, what would you actually assess?
Erica McAteer's response
A lot of the assessment of an online course involves an assessment of what the course experience has been; it's harder than traditional examinations, in a sense. It's assessing vastly different kinds of things that people do. The criteria have to be generic and cover sufficient different aspects of what you see as learning outcomes.
Unknown
There's a quality issue about the extreme model where students form the course and the content: an individual student's experience is dependent on the cohort they're in; how much do you let them sink or swim accordingly?
Erica McAteer's response
This is incredibly hard; research on this is crucial. Yes, it does depend on the cohort; with all the tutoring skills in the world, you're still using them amongst this group of people. Similar issues arise in traditional classrooms — it's different, but not peculiar to online learning.
Unknown
Do you see an online learning tutor as taking more responsibility to ensure that material is presented in an accessible way to all students?
Erica McAteer's response
The community as a whole is becoming more wary about making websites Bobby-approved etc. We at Glasgow have nothing to boast about: student support exists, but it's a needle in a haystack. There are understandable walls, not so much of disinterest, but it just isn't possible to take it all up. Accessibility regulations are playing a role; we have to build it into staff development.
Ian Heywood, BusinessLab
This is a crucial issue. When you're engaging people in an online environment you have to support them. Consider the analogy of a guide in the mountaineering world, who takes people through an interesting environment, but has a duty to bring them through unscathed. That person has to teach, guide, train, educate them in a host of thing: technology to help them get through that environment, but also the context of how they engage with it, and how to treat the other people in the party, because there will be stronger and weaker members. This idea of coming out at the higher education end with some people who might fail: in the mountaineering world it would be unacceptable for a guide to come back with one person missing.
