Isobel Falconer

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MOD4L models of practice project

• Isobel Falconer
• Allison Littlejohn
• Caledonian Academy,
• Glasgow Caledonian University
• http//mod4l.com/tiki-index.php
• JISC Design4Learning Programme

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Working with

• Practitioner Focus Group
• Ron Oliver, Edith Cowan University, NSW
• Lori Lockyer, University of Wollongon, NSW
• Helen Beetham, JISC
• Heather Sanderson, TESEP

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Aims

• To develop a range of practice models that can be
  used by practitioners in real life contexts to
  improve general teaching practice.
• (and support sharing and reuse)

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What are practice models?

• Generic approach to the structuring and
  orchestration of learning activities. They
  express elements of pedagogic principle and allow
  practitioners to make informed choices. (JISC
  funding call)
• Common, but decontextualised, learning designs
  that are represented in a way that is usable by
  practitioners (teachers, managers, etc). (Mod4L
  working definition)

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To be effective

• Practice models need to be
• representations of effective practice (signify
  successful instances of good practice),
• effective representations of practice (have high
  impact on practice)

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Representing effective practice

• Grounded in authentic practice
• Case studies from practitioners and existing
  collections, eg. JISC effective practice, JISC
  innovative practice, LADIE
• Learning designs from practitioners and
  existing collections, eg. LAMS, IMS, AUTC
  Learning Designs

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Effective representation of practice

• a learning design can only be shared with others
  through a representation.
• representations must convey the information that
  teachers need in a form that the teachers can
  understand.

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Three representations of learning designs
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Types of representation

• Case studies
• Matrices/templates
• Flow diagrams
• Concept maps
• LAMS
• Taxonomies
• Videos
• Temporal sequences
• Patterns

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An issue for practice models

• The definition Common, but decontextualised,
  learning designs that are represented in a way
  that is usable by practitioners (teachers,
  managers, etc). (Mod4L working definition)
• ( that will support sharing and reuse and
  improve teaching practice)
• The problem generic or decontextualised learning
  designs do not appear to be very useful to
  teachers

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Implications for Mod4L?

• What are the (contextualised) representations
  useful for?
• Browsing
• Choosing
• Adapting
• Implementing
• How can generic designs be used?
• Taxonomies
• Temporal sequences

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What is useful to teachers?

• An insight into the wiggling around that
  constitutes teaching
• Evidence of student engagement
• Contextualised representations
• A variety of representations of the same design
• Representations as a focus for discussion a
  community of practice
• http//mod4l.com/tiki-index.php

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The runnable design?

• For me, there are two fundamental problems (i)
  education is more than just content, so any
  attempt to share good practice requires
  e-learning systems capable of replicating the
  pedagogy of a typical classroom that is, a
  structured flow of content and collaborative
  tasks and (ii) the sharing of good practice
  requires a community of educators to discuss
  ideas and practice a searchable content dump is
  not sufficient. (James Dalziel)

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What is the role of the teacher in design for
learning?

• the dialogues between learners and teachers are
  what I most value in learning (Burgos)
• When the role of the teacher is reduced in
  online learning the strategies available to
  overcome breakdowns in the learning process, are
  radically reduced (Griffiths Garcia)
• The design tradition is very poor in education.
  In education it is mostly ad hoc (Koper)

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Is a learning design still effective if
transferred to a new context?

• My role is to evaluate resources for a repository
  and some of them are very good, but I find it
  extremely difficult to work out how to use them
  within my own teaching context and have never
  actually done so (Mod4L focus group member)
• I stuck closely to the planned programme as the
  safest way to ensure that the session went
  smoothly . The mixed student reaction to a
  suggestion of altering the programme knocked my
  confidence in what I was trying to achieve (Mod4L
  focus group member)

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Design an environment, not a machine?

• A route plus a train?
• A transport system plus a navigation aid?
• Snakes and Ladders plus a set of dice?
• A play plus a troop of actors?
• An environment plus a life-form?

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Implications

• Ownership?
• Granularity?
• SOA?

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MOD4L models of practice project

• Isobel Falconer
• Allison Littlejohn
• Caledonian Academy,
• Glasgow Caledonian University
• www.academy.gcal.ac.uk
• JISC Design4Learning Programme