I probably should have written this before some of my other musings, but a backwards step is fine, and it means all the notes in my notebook have a home. (Even in this technological age, I have a little black book that I write my notes in!)
Thorpe’s paper takes another step, probably one that I agree with, that the course design should include learner support within it. Traditionally support is thought about after the design as the support depends on the learner. Learning support developed as a technical term for all the practices and administration that students need to go through, but Thorpe suggests that it is more than it.
Learner support therefore needs to be dynamic. It contains three elements – identity, interaction and time/duration, and is about roles, structures and environments. Not all tutors can transfer these skills into an online environment, which is why it is important to find the right people for these roles, as everyone shouldn’t be expected to be able to pick up these new skills, as others in our tutor group and many of our reading shave given testimony to.
Once again this highlights that online learning is about facilitation as much as content production.
Biggs - The reflective institution: Assuring and enhancing the quality of teaching and learning.
Biggs looks at the role that quality plays. Traditionally quality, as with any business case for project deliverable, equates to value for money, whether something is fit for purpose and how it transforms the environment in which it exists. Quality assurance focuses on business aims rather than educational goals, which are often harder to measure. If we are therefore to measure the quality of our teaching and learning, we need to have a clear idea as to what the quality outcomes are. Now often this is hard, as we are not talking about outputs, but about people. We have struggled with this issue ourselves – how do we measure what is good? Is it about numbers or developing people. And thus how do we measure it? In fact this is an issue for much of youth work as the outcomes are subjective rather than objective. You cannot measure the way that someones attitiudes or experience had changed them – very easily.
Of course, the activities that learners undertake should support the outcomes, else what is the point of doing them. However if we go back to the idea of student support and supporting learners to learn, and develop their study habits, sometime the learners may not be clear what those aims are. In the past, when we run train the trainer courses, we have a de-brief on the day, and tell the learners what the objectives for the sessions were, why we used the approach we did, and ask them whether they they think it worked.The idea is to get people to evaluate, and to feel comfortable within an environment of feedback. But this is about preparing them to be in the trainer role. The difficulty comes in getting bad trainers to develop themselves – after all, as Biggs points out, the good ones normally foster their own development anyway. Quality enhancement, as Biggs calls it, is about getting teachers to teach better.
Biggs also talks about a wholehearted change though, in thinking about assessment practices and institutional approach when considering quality review.It should not just be about numbers and percentages on a spreadsheet, but the qualitative review of teaching and underlying principles. Easier said than done!
So what does this mean for me? Thought needs to go into the assessment methods. How do I know that I have achieved my goal? What will be the quality criteria?
Biggs, J. (2001) ‘The reflective institution: assuring and enhancing the quality of teaching and learning’, Higher Education, vol.41, no.3, pp.221–38.
Thorpe, M. (2002) ‘Rethinking learner support: the challenge of collaborative online learning’, Open Learning, vol.17, no.2, pp.105–19.
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