My notes from Thursday’s sessions are less coordinated as the three sessions I attended were structured differently and covered very diverse aspects of the relationship between in-class and out-of-class learning. So this will be more of a report than a reflection or attempt at applying insights.

1. The Flip Is In

This session followed the traditional panel structure with three presenters each discussion their own perspective on e-learning. Estie Lubbe’s reflections on experiments with e-learning and changing the role of in-class teaching delivered some profound insights into the sequencing of preparation, input and application. In her case the “flip” was mainly in substituting reading and excercises as (individual) preparation and lectures/exposition in class as (group) input with videos as (individual, asynchronous) preparation and group excercises in class as (group, synchronous) application.

Similarly Pierre Mora in his presentation emphasised the shift from lecturing to work on case studies, role play etc in class. Again, a topic would be a shift from input to application in classes. One issue addressed by Mora was the question of scalability of a pilot project with a handfull of students to full-scale production, especially as the pilot project had used some advanced – and expensive – technology.

One caveat to consider from Carlos Turro’s presentation of a large scale initiative to introduce and implement different kinds of e-learning at a university level was that while the rate of student satisfaction increased in courses under the initiative, it was not possible to see any improvement in academic performance.

2. Making It Real: Can Personalisation Fix Education?

One recurrent theme in Anette Q Petersen and Nick Kearney’s workshop was the question of creating room for student autonomy in learning and the conflict between the test paradigm dominating nearly all formalised education on the one hand and personal learning on the other. Another issue was the difference between personal and personalised learning (the latter involves design by the teacher, the former is controlled by the student). As the workshop was dominated by discussions in smaller groups, it is difficult to formulate a general conclusion but some questions to myself could include: How much space should we give to personal learning, what elements of a course should deliberately be left unplanned (a possible answer could be that preparation and to some degree follow-up will have a major personal component).

Another insight from the workshop could be that it is very hard for teachers and administrators not to think in terms of a formal framework in terms of tools, tasks and deadlines.

3. Framing ICT Competences of Teachers in Higher Education

The late-afternoon slot is always difficult and this workshop did leave me a bit confused about the aims and subject. Some thoughts from group discussions (and a big thank you to the organisers for not just relying on presentations) could be that HE teachers are insecure about both the technological and the didactic elements of e-learning, that most participants saw the line between HE management on the one hand and students and teachers on the other as broken, and that the adoption of e-learning strategies much rests on e-learning providing teachers with a sense of added value in their own daily work.