The Learning Technologies Unit website

Context

During the academic year 2010/11, the Institute of Education, University of London, ran a Strategic Review Implementation Project under the title 'Open Mode', with the aim to improve the blended and online learning provision strategically.

Challenge

One work package of this project addressed staff training and development. We were confident that our tutors deliver excellent teaching practice in face-to-face scenarios, based on a solid understanding of pedagogy and years of experience, but we found that many tutors did not quite know how to transfer these skills to the online domain.

As the communication in the online domain is quite different, predominantly text-based and in most cases less spontaneous compared to face-to-face contexts, tutors often had a perception of online learning as being inferior, second-rate, and bland. Experienced online learners and teachers know that this is not the case (and they can point to a strong body of research evidence to strengthen their argument), yet supporting tutors with little experience of online education to design and implement high quality online learning experiences remains a struggle.

A significant part of the challenge is that many tutors do not know how online education works, and how their proved and tested teaching methods can possibly be exploited in online teaching contexts. We therefore wanted to help tutors by providing inspirations and suggestions for online learning activities.

One problem with a collection of online learning activities is that they might be too subject-specific: Case studies and direct examples might not be easily transferable to other contexts. Ideally, we would have examples for activities that demonstrate the structure of an activity, but without any reference to a particular subject - this approach, however, might make the activity description too abstract to be of any value. We therefore tried to find a middle ground.

Approach

In 2010/11, we analysed existing online teaching practice across the IOE in an attempt to collate transferable online learning activity 'patterns', for a lack of a better word (you might prefer 'blueprint' or 'template'). Some examples were directly taken over, others were abstracted from their subject domain, and some started as abstracted ideas in the first place.

Trying to standardise different practices is a complex task. While we developed a standardised format for describing online activities, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot possibly address all the different options and approaches that an online tutor might use or take. The use of the format therefore was not enforced.

Categorising activities is another difficult task: There are a number of established approaches to classify different activities, but which approach would be best for our needs? We wanted to clearly link to technologies to show how they can be used to facilitate teaching and learning, but incorporating such parameters into a classification scheme blows up the complexity of the task significantly, with the additional challenge of creating usable access or navigation pathways for the end use: Appropriate patterns should be easy to find.

Similar challenges were identified in Diana Laurillard's LDSE project, but as our project team did not have any comparable resources, we had to leave the construction of an appropriate classification system to a future project.

The following IOE staff members contributed to the online activity patterns:

• Diana Laurillard
• Gwyneth Hughes
• Harvey Mellar
• Tim Neumann
• Tom Preskett