ICDE 2006

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ICDE 2006

• Quality, enhancement and on-line distance
  education courses and programmes
• Peter Knight, Institute of Educational
  Technology, The Open University, UK

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Peter Knight, The Open University
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The argument

• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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Two forces for change

• Employability (Mode 2 programmes)
• Leads to fresh interest in complex achievements
• New communication technologies
• Students need to be adept at using them
• Potential to transform our business
• By cherry picking, leaving traditional
  universities with high-cost business

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Structure

• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Quality enhancement

• Quality assurance ? enhanced quality
• Quality enhancement ? quality assured

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Notions of quality

• Lee Harvey five concepts of quality in higher
  education
• Product quality ? quality of course materials
• Service quality ? a good experience registering
  and doing the course
• Support quality ? Pro-active personalised advice
  guidance about options development

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Areas of research knowledge

• Based on student evaluations
• Pascarella and Terenzini (2005)
• On line de Laat (2005) Mason Rennie, 2006
• Fitness for purpose

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Can there be good pedagogies

• ... Without use of ICT?
• A social necessity
• Therefore a curriculum necessity

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unlimbering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Complex achievements
Peter Knight, The Open University
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Also known as

• Graduate attributes
• Employability skills
• Wicked competences
• Hi-level skills or competences
• Practical intelligence

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Complex achievements

• Mix of dispositions, understandings attributes.
• Non-determinate ? not possible to specify fully
  competence in, say, emotional intelligence.
• No simple cause ? competence
• Slow growing
• Need to understand criteria, context and
  conditions under which the performance was
  achieved.
• Nominal or ordinal data about achievement.

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Promoting complex achievements

• To foster complex achievements
• Create affordances
• Promote cultures and expectations
• Design environments
• Concentrate on entitlements
• In short, increase probabilities of achievement
  by cohorts of students

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Quality and complex achievements

• Quality courses foster complex achievements
• Quality programmes foster complex achievements
• Quality programmes and courses foster complex
  achievements in on-line environments

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Changing notions of quality

• OU 1st in UK national student satisfaction
  surveys 2005, 2006 established ideas of quality
  valued ? materials, tutorial service and on-line
  guidance
• Note emerging notions of quality
• Pedagogies for complex achievements
  employability
• Mode 2 and professional courses practice-based
  learning?
• Tools and customisation

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Quality in daily on-line life
Peter Knight, The Open University
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• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice

• Modified learning object approach
• Priority to concepts and capabilities for
  re-creating own competence
• No printed materials. Participants expected to
  search for information relevant to their own
  professional practice
• Web-based and search-driven, conferencing, blogs,
  podcasts, RSS feeds
• Re-versioning for other professions
• Perpetual beta?
• Assumes networked learner, interacting with
  different groupings of participants and others.
  On-line instant feedback assessment tasks
• APEL variants to be introduced
• Lower overheads for course team

Peter Knight, The Open University
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PCAP assessment
Peter Knight, The Open University
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PCAP assessment
Peter Knight, The Open University
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PCAP assessment
Peter Knight, The Open University
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PCAP assessment
Peter Knight, The Open University
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OpenMark
Peter Knight, The Open University
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OpenMark
Peter Knight, The Open University
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OpenMark
Peter Knight, The Open University
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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OpenLearn goals

• To make some of The Open Universitys distance
  learning materials freely accessible in an
  international web-based open content environment.
  
• To advance open content delivery method
  technologies by
• deploying leading-edge learning management tools
  for learner support
• encouraging the creation of non-formal
  collaborative learning communities
• enhancing international research-based knowledge
  about modern pedagogies for higher education

Peter Knight, The Open University
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OpenLearn Intentions

• Enhanced learning experiences for users of open
  content delivery
• Greater involvement in higher education by
  under-represented groups and empowerment for
  various support networks that work with them
• Enhanced knowledge and understanding of open
  content delivery, how it can be effective, and
  the contribution it can make to further
  development of e-learning
• Enhanced understanding of sustainable and
  scaleable models of open content delivery
• See also Open Content projects (http//oci.open.ac
  .uk/related.html)

Peter Knight, The Open University
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OpenLearn
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OpenLearn
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OpenLearn
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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Quality

• Search
• Social (community of learning plagiarism)
• Responsivensss
• Empathy
• Personalisation
• Pro-activeness
• Blends
• Ubiquity (??)

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Quality metaphors

• The change from knowledge to knowing
• Nor is it a thing, or a system, but an
  ephemeral, active process of relating and we
  go beyond managing knowledge as a thing to also
  managing knowledge as a flow. To do this we will
  need to focus more on context and narrative, than
  on content. (Snowden, 2002 3, 5).
• The change from knowledge as a personal
  possession to an activity systems view
• Nonaka and Takauchi,1996 Engeström, 1999, 2004
• The change from formal to non-formal views of
  learning
• Snowden (2002 20) says that In one study within
  IBM Global Services the ratio between informal
  and formal communities was in excess of 10001.

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Quality metaphors (Method has been replaced by
quality)

• The argument has been that quality in social
  science (and in natural science too) is enacted
  as a set of nineteenth- or even
  seventeenth-century Euro-American blinkers. This
  means that it misunderstands and misrepresents
  itself. quality is not, I have argued, a more or
  less set of procedures for reporting on a given
  reality. Rather it is performative. Quality helps
  to produce realities. It does not do so freely
  and at whim. There is a hinterlands of realities,
  of manifest absences and Otherness, resonances
  and patterns of one kind and another already
  being enacted and it cannot ignore these. At the
  same time, however, it is also creative. It makes
  new signals and new resonances, new
  manifestations and concealments, and it does so
  continuously (Law, 2004 143)

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Peter Knight, The Open University
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• Quality and on-line learning
• Pedagogies
• Complex achievements
• Changing concepts of quality
• New courses in the OU
• Openness and new partnerships
• Unblinkering quality

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Complementary or contradictory?

• Different learning needs by subject and level
• Some variation in learning needs associated with
  age, race, sex, religion
• Variation in pedagogy by learning outcomes,
  subject, level and educational expectations The
  phenomenon of student conservatism.

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Lo-fi as quality?

• JITOL
• (Video) podcasting
• On-the-fly versioning
• Structures and enablers, not content?
• A life-long learning approach professional
  obsolescence

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Six groups of university

• Protected Protected national market
• Recruits by academic reputation, charges premium
  fees
• Recruits on basis of quality of undergraduate
  experience
• On-line universities
• Established ? The Open University
• 21st Century ? Amazon.ac.uk Skype.ac.za
  YouTube.edu.ca?
• Struggling providers of last resort

Peter Knight, The Open University
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Contact

• Peter Knight,
• The Institute of Educational Technology,
• The Open University,
• Milton Keynes,
• MK7 6AA
• peter.knight_at_open.ac.uk
  http//iet.open.ac.uk/pp/peter.knight
• http//web.mac.com/knightpeter/iweb/site/blog/blog
  .html

Peter Knight, The Open University