ANU First Year Teaching Good Practice Guide

Greetings from the Australian National University Center for Learning and Teaching, where Professor Maryanne Dever, ro Vice-Chancellor (Education & Digital) is launching the "ANU First Year Teaching Good Practice Guide". This complements the ANU Learning and Teaching Strategy. 

The Guide focuses on young people, but is applicable to helping those new to university of any age, and not so new. As a young, first in generation, low SES student, I experienced difficulties. But what surprised me was still having difficulties as a mature age student, decades later. I found study an exhausting, frustrating, and at times terrifying experience. This was particularly so for the three years I spent as an international online student. 

Some of what stresses students may seem silly to teaching staff, but is very stressful at the time. As an example, not knowing what size page to submit my assignments on: my US professors assumed everyone knows you use Letter size paper, whereas my Canadian professors (at the same university), assumed everyone knows you use A4. I spent days agonizing over what to do, and ended up using P4: a Canadian paper size which is a compromise between Letter & A4, but which unfortunately no one actually uses. ;-)

The Guide doesn't contain any revolutionary new insights. But is a good summary of conventional wisdom, and are tips every academic should learn during their basic teacher training.

One good point of the guide is that it doesn't distinguish between face to face and online teaching. What a decade learning to teach, teaching online, and setting education standards for my profession, has shown me is that there is very little difference teaching roomies and zoomies.

Contents

1. Preface
2. Transition
3. Diversity
4. Design
5. Engagement
6. Assessment
7. Evaluation and monitoring
8. Checklist
9. References and further reading

Asynchronous vs Synchronous Delivery

One of the rewards for the effort of having peer reviewed papers published, is the delight in finding you have been being cited. Usually the papers I have written on teaching computing are cited in IT or education journals.  But the latest citation is in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. I did not even know there was such as thing as lifestyle medicine. ;-)

As it is not my field I can be entirely sure what Munroe, Moore, Bonnet, Rastorguieva, Mascaro, Craighead, Haack, Quave, and Bergquist (2021) are writing about. But it appears they have designed a course to promoting healthier eating, by teaching how to cook. One section of their paper is "Asynchronous vs Synchronous Delivery", where I get a brief mention (Worthington,  2013). A little worryingly the location of the conference I presented at has been incorrectly given as "Columbia", when it was Colombo (Sri Lanka). 

As the authors note, asynchronous delivery depends more on the student. As many students and teachers have found during the pandemic induced lock-downs over the last 18 months, this can be stressful with students feeling lost and alone. My experience of being a student and teaching this way, suggests that students need frequent feedback on how they are doing. It helps to be rewarded with a few marks for completing each small task in the course.

As the authors note, the alternative synchronous mode of teaching, where the students and teacher interact in real time is something many students expect. But one mode is not better than the other and they can be combined in the “flipped classroom”. This has the student studying alone in preparation for a teacher lead class. However, I suggest a small inducement, such as a mark, is still useful for keeping students working.

An emergency move to online teaching has seen many instructors providing long hours of synchronous teaching. This direct translation of the traditional classroom experience, I suggest, is not the best approach. A flipped approach, with shorter synchronous sessions, is a better use of student and staff time, but requires careful design and new skills of everyone. Teachers need to learn to provide quick feedback to students & anticipate their questions, or be overwhelmed with student queries. Students need to learn to plan their study.

Until last week, I was helping teach 200 students in a flipped hybrid mode. Students were provided with text and videos online to study in advance of class. Those who could get to the campus could take part there and others via video. But Canberra was locked down at 5pm last Thursday, due to a COVID-19 outbreak, so this week all students will be attending via video. However, other than the lack of a physical classroom, nothing about the teaching changes: the exercises and interaction are the same, just via a digital medium.

References

Munroe, D., Moore, M. A., Bonnet, J. P., Rastorguieva, K., Mascaro, J. S., Craighead, L. W., Haack, C. I., Quave, C. L., & Bergquist, S. H. (2021). Development of Culinary and Self-Care Programs in Diverse Settings: Theoretical Considerations and Available Evidence. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1177/15598276211031493

Worthington, T . Synchronizing asynchronous learning. Combining synchronous and asynchronous techniques. 2013 8th International Conference on Computer Science Education; 26-28 April 2013; Columbia, Srilanka, 618-621, doi:10.1109/ICCSE.2013.6553983.
Google Scholar

American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine

What learning designers should learn

Keith Heggart

Camille Dickson-Deane

Keith Heggart and Camille Dickson-Deane have published an important paper on the rationale behind the UTS Graduate Certificate in Learning Design (Heggart & Dickson-Deane, 2021). This is valuable, as the authors not only make the case for there being a need for a course in learning design, but also show they applied a rigorous, systematic process to design it. This is not one of those depressingly common examples of academics telling others to do something, these are practitioners actually doing what they say: an excellent example of dogfooding (Harrison, 2006).

The authors point out that while learning designers are in demand worldwide and in Australia, it would help to clarify what they actually do. Also they point out that COVID-19 has promoted universities to make their teaching more efficient. However, I question if this result in a demand for staff who have specific digital and learning design qualifications. While the vocational sector routinely requires formal educational qualifications of staff, Australian universities have not.

The authors discuss the differences between a learning designer and a teacher. It seems to me that teachers and learning designers are both educators. It is likely a typical learning designer will have some teaching experience and qualifications. It terms of design skills, I have found that learning design has much in common with the design of computer software. There is the same need to collect user requirements, undertake a systematic process, do tests and provide maintenance.

The authors claim there were no programs explicitly addressing learning design before theirs. That is perhaps overstating the situation, as there have been many graduate certificates and masters programs in education, which offered learning design as a component (I did one at ANU including content from USQ). 

The authors also suggest universities could not quickly train learning designers. However, while they may not have programs called "learning design", they could easily assemble one, if needed, from existing components. Australian universities could follow Athabasca University's example, and  re-badge their existing education qualifications. In 2017 I completed a MEd in Distance Education at AU. This year they decided to add "Open, Online and Distance Education" and I paid a few dollars for a new certificate. Australian universities could similarly add learning design, to their Grad Certs and MEds.

The authors have detailed an approach to designing a program for learning designers which I suggest could be a good model for other Australian qualifications. In particular an emphasis on "Flexibility in delivery and progression". Unfortunately Australian universities have offered program mostly on the assumption the typical student is studying full time, with no other commitments. Part time students are treated as a special case. As the authors suggest students "have a number of competing life commitments, (e.g., work and caring responsibilities).". Even with COVID-19 forcing learning online, and students to extend their studies, many academics and administrators appear to be longing to return to a simpler time, when they did not need to bother worrying about the messy details of student's lives.

Another point the authors make is the importance of "communication and collaboration skills". As a student of education I feared communication exercises and especially group work (my students also don't like it),  but these are necessary skills which you can only get through practice. 

The authors also have tacked the difficult issue of microcredentials. In this case a program has been assembled from components half the usual size, each badged as a microcredential of  60 to 75 hours  learning. This I suggest is a very workable strategy. It should be noted that this is not a case of saying that students can just do any random collection of micro-credentials and that makes up a program. The students have to choose from a specific set, designed to form a coherent whole.

One point I disagree with is the authors assertion that the reflective portfolio undertaken could be presented to employers. As a student I have had to undertake reflective portfolio exercises several times (using Lego, as well as portfolio software). But these portfolios have never been of use for employment. I still have a large physical folder with examples of my work, from a pre-computer portfolio exercise. I now teach students using portfolios and also assess portfolios for one of the international recognition schemes, but these portfolios are no of use for more than this assessment task. The one exception is the ANU Techlauncher program, where the student is explicitly instructed to choose a a real job advertisement and then write their portfolio in the form of an application for that job.

References

Harrison, W. (2006). Eating your own dog food. IEEE Software, 23(3), 5-7. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MS.2006.72

Heggart, K., Dickson-Deane, C. What should learning designers learn?. J Comput High Educ (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-021-09286-y