Putting e-Learning on a Strong Disciplinary Foundation

It is easy to get the faculty to use a learning management system to post syllabi and texts, store materials in a database, or hire students to build websites that collect materials and develop flashy interactive “modules”. All you have to do is offer them grants of 10-20,000 Euros to prepare short-term projects and pressure departments to come up with a couple of these things for the annual budget review … AND not require that they do anything difficult, like redesign teaching and learning to achieve measurable cost savings, or increased achievement in student learning, or require that they open up their work, like they do with their disciplinary research, to the critical scrutiny of their peers.

As always in this blog, I am trying to develop some constructive criticism of the Freie Universität Berlin and its management of academic computing services through its Center for Digital Systems that I know best, where the learning management system program goal is some vague, abstract notion of replacing and not strengthening teaching and learning, where the program criteria for e-learning furthering grants is limited to status categories (professors, departments) and technical specifications (databases, communications tools) and examinations and not teaching and learning, where advice on implementation is limited to manipulation of the user interface where the “expert group” includes not a single instructor with teaching experience, descriptions of sponsored projects are no more than summaries from grant applications, where evaluation of student use is limited to customer satisfaction surveys designed to support the university’s choice of a single, central learning management system to the exclusion of alternatives, presentation of good practices or “helping hands is limited to normative descriptions of what might one do with the technology but not what people are in fact successfully doing with it, and where a list of project results by department leads to no links, blank pages, project posters, or the learning management system’s firewall, which is to say, for all practical purposes, nowhere at all.

The alternative policies I’ve outlined in this series thus far include those aiming to integrate academic computing into faculty continuing education programs at the ETH Zurich, achieving significant cost savings through large course redesign led by the National Center for Academic Transformation, and evaluating e-learning programs by involving outside consultants charged with examining improvements in student learning and achievement, as in MIT’s iCampus program — a program which also sets as its criteria of success the successful adoption of whatever MIT develops by others: that colleagues elsewhere think highly enough of a method that they adopt it for themselves. Such universities are setting the competitive standard for research universities, and in my three years on the staff I not only never heard of our evaluating our e-learning support strategies against such standards, but I found little evidence that such standards and examples had been taken into account in the formulation of the present policies nor, since CeDiS is a service and not a research organization, did we have the authority or resources or orientation, as a proper e-learning research operation would, to do so. An odd setup: “e-learning” without learning.

In the hopes that I might help inform a future debate, I will offer yet another compelling alternative: that we aim for the scholarship of teaching and learning whereby the faculty add e-learning to their research program, conduct research, publish results in peer-reviewed journals, list this research in their applications for promotion and tenure: to put e-learning on the strongest academic foundation, on par with the disciplines themselves and not, as at the FU at present, by aiming simply (and I do mean ’simply’) for statistics of course and student enrollments on Blackboard, mere confirmation of the present technology choices and bureaucratic arrangements, and a few photos of sheepish-looking prize-winners: that we instead evaluate e-learning for the disciplinary work that can be made out of it. I’ll explore how e-learning support units might better be grounded in the disciplines, held to disciplinary standards for quality, and support the disciplines as they make the turn to the modern technologies — and not assume, as here, that they are incapable of it themselves and that someone else must lead them. I know this first hand as I had little trouble in 2003, before the FU bought into Blackboard, finding instructors in three departments eager to explore classroom communications following the protocols of Classroom Assessment Techniques and using the open source learning management system, dotLRN, which I myself installed (this is not rocket science) on a linux box at the JFKI: when left to their own devices, early adopters among the faculty pick things up fast: the problem, if it is one, is getting the early and late majority to go along with it.

Faculty go along with new ideas when they have been vetted by their peers, through scholarship and practice, and when they learn about it at conferences, from journals, or over coffee. This is not rocket science either, but it is not trivial, is typically led by early adapters, and is dependent on functional communities of learning — something not all disciplines or departments or universities share to the same degree. But here we have a good example. Consider the scholarship of teaching and learning presented every year in the Textbooks and Teaching Journal of American History, and especially the “Beyond Best Practices”: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning issue of 2006, including essays based on work in the Visible Knowledge Project (2002-6), a project involving 22 institutions and 70 scholars in the field of history. In the introduction, the editors say that the use of technology in instruction reflects three significant and inter-related changes in the way research is being done in their discipline –three “turns” in historical scholarship:

-The pedagical turn, whereby historians are increasingly thinking about how students learn to think historically and use discipline-specific research methods to evaluate them.

-The pictorial turn, based on the recognition that historical work increasingly involves the sophisticated use of imagery and that reading strategies for images ought to be as rigorous as those developed for textual sources.

-The digital turn, whereby the very language in which history is written and discussed is being transformed by the new media and professional and that sophistication in the use of the web, multi-media-based articles, etc.

There is plenty of evidence confirming similar changes in other fields, and my favorite is the research presented at the Harvard University Law Schools Berkman Center for Internet and Society conference, “Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship“, and especially, Paul L. Caron’s paper with the same title, “Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship“. But I choose the Georgetown example because one finds here a more direct relationship between the academic disciplines and institutional support such as I have known most recently and because this institutional support here more clearly shows evidence of having involved the professors and disciplines on their terms and on their turf and adaptation of e-learning tools to serve disciplinary, and not simply institutional, ends. Support for this approach involves support for discussion of methods and the building of a scholarly conversation and not simply, as the faculty have here for the most part been led, to see e-learning as a problem of individual instructors managing individual classrooms and simple presentations of courses of study and so for most little more, if the design of the CeDiS surveys is to be believed, than the storage of files behind a firewall.

What we do not have here are program priorities based on improving the quality of instruction as of one piece of changes in the disciplines more generally and support for talking about these changes openly. In contrast, at Georgetown one can see the translation from the research presented in the journal above to specific course syllabi reported on, in the form of posters, in lists after lists of case studies.

The poster above was produced by Randy Bass, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), and features a one-page overview of his course including the project summary, key findings, examples of student work, pedagogical design, and important sources, and as one follows the links one finds a number of truly sophisticated models, such as the “Learning Activity Breakdown.” It is based on extensive research in the fields of literature, the use of technology in instruction, and considerable experience working with colleagues and staff. It is designed not simply to reflect that scholarship, but to offer instructors seeking advice on how to integrate technology in the classroom an outline of teaching and learning goals and the methods used to achieve them.

E-learning at Georgetown sells methods to deliver effective teaching and learning, and not, as at CeDiS, mere technologies. Where the CeDiS service strategy is to create a monopoly over university-wide technologies, which puts it constantly into a defensive position as these technologies change, the Georgetown model is dedicated to effective teaching and learning, regardless of the technology. Where CeDiS is “locked in” to Blackboard — which of course is the Blackboard Corporation’s strategy — and where, in turn CeDiS must do everything to “lock-in” their customers, the Georgetown strategy is technology-independent: teaching and learning are what matters.

Even as Georgetown has moved on from its Poster Tool, it remains a compelling example for those committed to teaching and learning as the tool continues to provide access some 2,000 posters, designed to:

… capture(s) a vast array of materials in a succinct and accessible format, acting as a shared workspace for courses or groups, helps organize course or project data into an online snapshot, and facilitates the use of various types of content. The tool works as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, making it easier for users to create or edit online content. Depending on the needs of the instructor or group, a template controls the content format—a feature intended to help students structure their thinking, or at times, elicit certain types of thinking.

It is designed to help instructors and students present their work to others, and as we see here, and will see in more detail below, it is used to make course design and redesign transparent and support a culture of institutional learning — which is the far larger problem than simply making this or that technology available and offering instruction in the manipulation of the user interface. Solving problems of technological change with more instruction in technology is hardly a solution for problems that are social and institutional in nature, and for this we need fewer technicians, or if technicians, those skilled in inter-personal communications, group dynamics, and conflict resolution.

Many those of us at the FU who are excited about the use of such new technologies as blogging for teaching and learning are completely frustrated at the sorry state of the FU blogging initiative, after 18 months and a lot of resources, because it now stands, basically, dead in the water with but a handful of users and workshop participants from our university of 45,000+ students and faculty because, I believe, the strategy here is little more than simply offering what anyone can get cost-free on the web on their own when the problem is not access or manipulation of the user interface, but how to find and adapt or develop these new technology in meaningful ways to support our research and teaching. This might not even be something that technicians who have not taught in the classroom or had experience dealing with group dynamics might easily be able to do: as an instructor, I typically haven’t the least interest in bewildering technologies, but show me how to connect better to my fellow researchers and help me help my students understand the things that are so important to me, well, I’ll give you the afternoon. And the only people that can really make claims on such massive time are my peers: people of my age and training and who speak my language and in a context where I am comfortable — like a professional conference where I am jazzed to discover new and better ways or when one of my best colleagues comes back from on and shows me what he or she has learned.

CNDLS shows us how this might be done. On their “The Benefit of Blogs” website, they eschew entirely the technician’s concerns and language to address directly the instructor, his or her immediate concerns, and in the language of instructors who have written things up for their peers:

It is not that the advice of my former colleagues is not based on years of training, a strong understanding of the technologies, and a genuine desire to help others, but that their helpful hints for teachers are written at high levels of abstraction and do reflect the thinking or the language of instructors who have sat around coffee tables and conference tables sharing what they’ve learned with their peers. While I’m sure that such documents could be written by non-instructors, they would at least have to be based on classroom observation, consultation with faculty, and the application of the most basic principles of modern documentation — as illustrated very nicely in the introductions to the O’Reilly Head First series of computer programming books, and where one learns about the importance of conversational language, graphics, the emotions, and helping readers to think more deeply about things.

If you felt that the question of “Why should I Use a Blog in My Course?” was answered well, then you will likely click one of the attractive icons to view the case studies and where you will find another short summary, this time introducing you to a case study.

Instead of those long lists of abstractions, here one is being led through a well-designed, interactive website that is a model for brevity and attractiveness and so in itself educating its users to good web design. One is here being led from short introduction to icon to introduction to case study, one is being given options, being led from generalization to detail — and from the voice of story-tellers talking like instructors right up to what we imagine to be the voice of the instructor himself, which we get by clicking the “Faculty Poster (PDF)”.

These design of these posters is less fabulous and more functional than the website, but they remain attractive and follow the now familiar, problem/solution format and emphasis on addressing practical problems in the classroom. Where the typical CeDiS page and begins and ends with presentation of CeDiS technologies, the CNDLS pages begin with real world problems and solutions in the manner of, “to solve this … we did that …”, and where the solution is not so much a technology as a method.

The brevity of the presentation is deceiving: behind each sentence, experience instructors will recognize a sophisticated approach. Behind the method that would help students write frequently, is a behavioral psychology. Behind the debate method is a smart reference to the genre of the opinion editorial, student debating societies, and the riches of conversations in class, business, and professional life. And so forth.

In this post I have outlined how one university has developed support for academic computing by allowing technology-friendly professors play leading roles in e-learning policy formation and program management, and I think we see here how they came to do so on the terms of the disciplines that matter to them most: how, in the field of history, the turn to images, pedagogy, and use of the web has enriched the discipline, placed students more squarely in the field, and gotten them closer to what we ought to be happy to call “academic happiness”. In the process, they have learned how to transform dry academic writing into something that lives and breathes in the new languages of the web, also including strong visual, pedagogic, and web-specific elements such as the sophisticated use of imagery for icons and hypertext, sophisticated information architectures with dramatic transitions as one drills down into the site, and a communications approach that is warm, human, and decidedly non-technical: it’s about people, as one sees at the top of their web page, they put people first, before projects and support.

I conclude with an screenshot from the CNDLS page and were one sees a most definitely non “sheepish” colleague as one part of a very sophisticated modern support team and to contrast with the very flat, limited CeDiS offerings of simple training in the manipulation of this or that technology’s user interface and the notable lack of learning designers or specialists in group dynamics or teachers, outside of myself, with significant classroom experience. The argument here is that supporting the disciplines and institutional learning is every bit as demanding as the rigorous sciences and humanities themselves and involving highly trained and highly differentiated workforces. For the sake of illustration, I’ll call this learning designer the warrior, as I see it, in the CNDLS version of the primitive fighting group organized to help instructors use technology in the classroom and report on it to others: her job is to walk the faculty through student learning and problems of course redesign: not an easy thing to do with an academic tribe long used to the privileged, protected spaces of the seminar. CNDLS has apparently organized a number of these groups, for they are linked prominently next to every case study and they clearly play, in this complex organization and production involving the fields of pedagogy and learning, art and design, group dynamics and institutional learning, a vital role. The other roles, modernized, include the professor, surely playing the role of the chief and necessary to insure that the party keeps to the academic path. Then there is the philosopher of religion playing the role of the jester, excelling in the serious business of optimizing group dynamics and engaged in conflict resolution. And finally the photographer/graphic designer, the genius in my view, who made the picture above and designed this website, playing the role of the priest invoking the images of people who are not here but will serve as guardian spirits leading you to safer shores and organizing the symbols and sketching in the sand boundaries and pathways to heaven. I think the use of technology in the disciplines is every bit as sophisticated to manage, institutionally, as that primitive hunter band and that our support systems should be staffed accordingly.

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