Open University’s CALRG Conference 2015 – Notes Day 3Findings: #calrg2015

CALRG Annual Conference   17 June 2013 Day 3: Paper Presentations Jennie Lee Building, Ambient Lab
9:30-9:45	Opening remarks – Canan Blake
	Session V– Chair: Ann Jones
9:45-10:15	Helen Farley Making the Connection: eLearning and mobile learning for prisoners Project working on for the last 18 months Prisons are overcrowded Education reduced recidivism When  back in the work released prisoners will have to deal with the digital world Australia all time prison population high 34,000 Increasing number from non-English speaking backgrounds Asylum seeker Aboriginal prisoners 4% population but about 27% prison populations So project puts emphasis on Aboriginals Prisoners have no access to the internet and limited access to computers Have been offering education into prisons for about 25 years Use a Moodle based Learning Management System and eBook readers Restricted devices because of security concerns – leads to time consuming systems support etc. The prisoners like the dictionaries on the LMS for their Scrabble contests Can now send 2-3 DVDs to the prison educational centre to update server software EEE – eLearning, Empowerment and ??? Reverted to hard-book copy because not allowed to use eBook readers but then prison authorities suggested using tablets In 2012 44% tertiary students could not access the internet Project Scope – Also now in Victoria and Western Australia (with interest from other states) – Funded by Australian Government – Aboriginals half as like to finish year 12 school education – Now can been invited into a women’s prison Technology designed to be robust and easily maintainable Important after the project that everything does not just fall over Self marking quizzes, games, etc. but not blogs Now narrowed spec down to one laptop, one tablet and 1 notebook Moodle does not run well on the notebooks to introduced a HTML layer It’s not easy – system and processes are complex to ensure life after the project Now have an off-line authoring environment Course development environment deposits content into a repository – developed a compiler for this so isolation from internet maintained Educational officer can download courses for their institution It’s not just about the technology Looking at English for academic purposes courses – just a 10 week course so ok for prisioners with short sentences  Diplomas: – Arts – Business – Science Looking at incorporating OpenLearn courses Problems: – copyright – prejudice High level endorsement from the University and the Government Authorities Issues of getting funding for prisoner related work – so style it as not internet users on funding bids Brief question time
10:15-10:40	Anne Pike What makes the difference? Understanding the interactions and experiences of ‘at risk’ learner [This presentation not blogged]
10:40-11:05	Annie Bryan and Lisette Toetenel Designing for inclusion: Supporting disabled students at the OU Why design for inclusion? – OU’s mission – Equality Act (2010) Increasing number and proportion of disabled students (> 18,000, 14% in 2014) Legislation is a limited driver Beginning of a journey Increasing online curriculum Online deliver may or may not be more accessible – e.g. OU Live is problematic for many disabled students Satisfaction and pass rates are lower for disabled students Learning Design – should have a big impact if takes into account accessibility (provides visualisations that help analysis for access issues) SeGA (Securing Greater Accessibility)  – a cross university programme to embed good practice for inclusion in business as usual processes Method: – looked at all modules (200+) will accessibility information Analysed SeAM (end of module survey) data Findings: – modules in development might not yet have considered the accessibility issues 49 modules had Accessibility Guides – only 29 Accessibility Guides had specific information for the module concerned SeAM analysis – students value several key things: a supportive tutor special exam arrangements comb bound books … Module materials need to be provided in a wide range of formats Learner needs must be anticipated in the learning design – This aligns to the (mostly American) term of Universal Design It is difficult to measure how increasing number of disabled students is impacting on practice [Seale 1996] Brief question time
11:05-11:30	TEA/COFFEE
	Session VI – Chair: Doug Clow
11:30-11:55	Martyn Cooper Learning Analytics and Accessibility – what can be done and pragmatic considerations [I can’t live blog my own presentation but here is a link to the slides instead] Learning Analytics and Accessibility: http://www.slideshare.net/martyncooper/learning-analytics-and-accessibility-calrg-2015-mc
11:55-12:20	Jenna Mittelmeier, Bart Rienties, Denise Whitelock The Role of Culture in Student Contributions to an Online Group Learning Activity [This presentation was not blogged as I had to be elsewhere on campus]
12:20-12:45	Ann Jones Informal language learning with mobile technologies: reflections on three recent studies [This presentation was not blogged as I had to be elsewhere on campus]
12:45-13:10	Ann Grand, Richard Holliman, Helen Donelan, Peter Devine Linking research and practice: the evolution of “the snakes and ladders of social media” Defining the problem – what do we mean by engaged research? What does “public” mean? A definition that applies across the institution. Used the EDGE tool to identify the issues (a categorization of levels of engagement) Idea of an Open Research University (Profs. Eileen Scanlon and Martin Weller in IET) People start with a blank piece of paper Open/Digital/Engaged – Venn Diagram Are social media work for researchers? Should they work for researchers? The answers to these differ across the university – some parts have no digital presence at all!!! There are so many social media tools Describe an activity a public engagement with research – Very few units identified social-media as part of this Ideal types: – The fully wired – The unconvinced – The experimenter Throw away remark – “Let’s do a board game” -> The snakes and ladders of social-media You sit around, facing each other and talk and play Did a blog post about the game and then other’s got interested in it Used in PhD student workshops; public engagement ambassadors workshop; research Councils The game is a conversation tool Also work across a team to produce online resources – e.g. what is a a digital identity? Research and Scholarship Unit were not on the Web! Brief question time
13:10-14:00	LUNCH
	Session VII – Chair: Simon Cross
14:00-14:25	Katy Jordan Characterising the structure of academics’ personal networks on academic social networking sites and Twitter [This presentation was not blogged because it is not possible to convey the social-network diagrams in text.]
14:25-14:50	Anne Adams and Gill Clough The E-assessment burger:  Supporting the before and after in e-assessment systems [I was not present for this presentation.]
14:50-15:15	Tim Coughlan Creating Structures for Engagement with Open Knowledge: Interpreting the links between art and location in the ArtMaps project [I was not present for this presentation.]
15:15-15:40	Lucia Rapanotti, Canan Blake​, Jon Hall Enriched student context in online professional learning Not a research project but a perspective on evaluating a pedagogical approach Context: – Postgraduate professional computing courses – Students already in a rich context – let’s make use of it – Part of the evaluation of the learning occurs within their professional context – Module on Software Development M813 (there are two other modules as well) – Wide range of learning theories, principles, techniques for software development – Learning organised around fundamental software lifecycle [Diagrammatic overview of the course] M813 Evaluation Questions:  – To what extent does the rich context matter? Use specialised forums Data from formal assessment Tracking the leading-edge Organisation and Scope of the Forum: – Students discus privately with their tutor the sort of context they are in – Determine if their proposed project is suitable – Narrative ideas Analysis of the narratives: – We now know the sort of enterprises the students come from (not previously collected this data) – Many diverse sectors covered – 90% use real organisations with 80% being private – Usually students choose their own projects – 62% pass but completion rate high – pass rate not as high as wished for but consitant with similar modules Qualitative data: “Loved the project”; “Helped me to identify sloppy practices”; … One negative one: “Useless for me” “This is good in theory but it does not work in practice” – useful feedback to revise the course Does the new assessment model work? How is online learning working in this context? Consider the collaborative learning aspects of the course 100s of messages in dozens of threads Looking for evidence that they are making use of their professional learning in their group forum interactions Labour intensive research but no better (automated) way [Examples from the forums given] “Are real programmers a dying breed?” Initial categories of interactions: Greetings Like or don’t like Links Professional experience or work context Discussion of justified opinions … Going to follow Kerchner’s framework to look at affordances and other aspects in future work Big data but qualitative Much more to do! – But need to provide evidence that the modules are effective. Appeal for help from the “experts” in the audience Discussion – Could you use NLP methods to code the forums Coding (of forum posts) is a negotiated discourse A programme can go wrong very quickly Forum threads evolve Even in human coding need to work with more than one person doing the coding to get accurate/consistent coding Identify critical incidents (automatically?) then analyse in depth by human assessment [End of conference presentations]
15:40-16:00	TEA/COFFEE and Close of the Conference

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