Jacob Christensen

At OEB 2014 I attended a workshop on Transferring face-to-face courses to online courses which included an introduction to what is known as storyboarding courses. The main idea is to make a fairly detailed plan for the sequence and content of student activities in the classroom as well as outside in order to create a logically coherent structure which will lead the students to the designed outcome of the course or module. Storyboarding differs from traditional course planning in that courses are planned backwards – teachers are required to consider if and how any given learning activity contributes to the learning goals. “Carpe Diem”, which was developed by Gilly Salmon, expands storyboarding by making a framework for groups of teachers or instructors for how to run the design process. Basically a “Carpe Diem” process is performed as a two-day intensive workshop beginning with a course blueprint and then adding storyboarding, the development of prototypes for course activities (especially those run outside of the classroom), a reality check with external participants reviewing the storyboard and the prototypes and finally a process of reviewing and adjustment.

If I go back to the 2014 workshop, I and a collegue who also participated in that workshop agreed that storyboarding would be relevant to implement in the revision of our distance programme but we failed to put this into practice. One obvious answer could be that our department hadn’t thought of making this an embedded practice in the review of course modules, so a “Carpe Diem” process for the Social Work programme might be the solution to the problem with introducing storyboarding.

Some sceptical perspectives on the “Carpe Diem” framwork could point to the fact that it is intrinsically linked with the learning goal-orientede way of running higher education. The storyboarding may on the one hand expand the domain of learning from the classroom to everything students do related to a specific course or programme while on the other hand limiting learning to a pre-set list of goals. The room for activities that are not initiated, controlled and assessed by a teacher may be so limited that students will learn how to encounter the unexpected and use their own curiosity in a learning process. In this way, the higher education institution and the formal education system takes – or at least aims to take – total control of students’ learning.

Another, very practical, issue might be that teachers are working on a number of course modules at the same time which may make it hard to run “Carpe Diems” on more that two or three course modules on the same time while planning also has to take the distributon of the work load of individual teachers into account. Similarly, the successful implementation of the “Carpe Diem” plan relies on the scheduling staff (and software) to respect the sequencing included in the plan.

For obvious reasons, the opening plenary with Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, Tricia Wang and Roger Schank concentrated on the marco perspective on educational policy.

To make a very crude summary, Schleicher represented the OECD standpoint that macroeconomic policies were useless in combatting social inequality while the pace of the technological evolution meant that large groups of the workforce – both in the developed world and the emerging economies – were being left behind as the digital economy is becoming the economy . The OECD’s solution to the problem is – as everyone who has followed the educational policy debate for the last couple of decades will already know – the introduction of lifelong learning, adapted to the demands of employers but with individual workers responsible for choosing the right education and training. The employer-oriented perspective also meant that Schleicher put the emphasis on skills rather than qualifications. (Here we might ask if skills and qualifications have been defined in a correct and useful way at all or if skills-oriented education is simply the latest in a series of policy buzzwords hitting the educational sector).

If I use OEB16’s official theme of owning education as a point of departure, we may ask who is to control access and delivery of education -during childhood and youth as well as during adulthood – as well as the relevance of different types of education if the educational sector is to be reoriented according to the OECD’s principles. I would argue that a picture emerges of governments and businesses controlling access and determing the relevance of specific programmes and courses with the responsibility of choosing the right programmes and courses being placed on the individual.

This also means that educational institutions are being faced with a dilemma: On the one hand governments and businesses demand narrowly skills-based lines of education which can be evaluated according to standardised tests and other criteria. On the other hand individualisation means that educational institutions are supposed to deliver products in the form of teaching, courses and programmes adapted to the needs and demands of individual students. This dilemma goes all the way down the educational sector right to the individual teacher or instructor.

Tricia Wang used the issue of automated learning and the application of algorithms in decision-making processes as her point of departure. Again a very crude summary, but a main point in her speech was that algorithms are only as good as the design and the data which go in to the computation. (Another aspect of this is that “big data” are never a given, unbiased set of information). AI and machine learning which do not take into account that humans are inherently biased – and even more importantly – that some positions hold a social and political privilege will only maintain or even deepen social inequalities and conflicts. This means that education will have to work actively with the development of empathy and the ability to identify different perspectives on any given issue, be it (seemingly) technical or political. On this point, I imagine that Wang and Scleicher would actually agree, even if the OECD point of view does not accept the effects of issues such as class or ethnicity in an economic context.

Roger Schanck’s rather rambling contribution was a bit hard to recapitulate but I suppose that a major theme was questioning the role of formal education and educational institutions in learning. The argument that “college is dead” may seem rather outlandish at a time when the wage premium in the US of a college degree is as high as it has ever been. Schanck may be right in thinking that the business model of US colleges is no longer sustainable as fees has exploded during the last decades limiting the value of thhe premium for individual graduates.

Just as on Thursday, I decided to skip the plenary debates in favour of presentations and discussions. On the whole, the two sessions I attended were somewhat disappointing even though they did deliver some insights into approaches to e-learning. Unfortunately, a session on mobile devices and the classroom was placed too late in the afternoon.

The Change: Collected and Collaborative for Quality Learning Outcomes

This was a panel which suffered from what I would call “Conference Desease”: Too many presenters having to little time to present anything of practical value. On the positive side, the panel did address some interesting problems facing e-learning and in particular distance learning.

Both Thanasis Hadzilakos and Mark Brown emphasised a number of risks with an unreflected focus on MOOCs and large-scale e-learning. Brown pointed at the conflict between policy makers’ (and vice-chancellors’) focus on performance indicators and economic efficience on the one hand and academic standards on the other while both Brown and Hadzilakos warned against the unreflected emphasis on English in e-learning programmes and MOOCS. (Perhaps Estie Lubbe’s reflections on the possiblities of deliberately using e-learning in a multilingual context could also be of value here). Hadzilakos also touched upon the issue of creating frameworks for collaboration across locations by using ICT but unfortunately didn’t have the time to elaborate on this subject.

Christine Appel’s presentation followed this lead by addressing the problem of getting students to engage in collaboration during their studies. Again the point is that e-learning in the traditional sense has been seen as a highly individual form of studying while today’s technology at least in principle gives students and teachers access to collaborative tools. Again this was a point which would have merited further elaboration.

Finally, Appel discussed the logistical aspect of distance learning by introducing experiments with students being placed in their future work environment. This meant that eg. student teachers were placed physically on local schools. In present-day circumstances there may be a number of problems facing similar experiments in Denmark, but in principle a structure with social work students being placed at local job centres, social offices etc also outside of their internships could be an interesting innovation.

Aspects of Loving e-Learning

This panel differed very much from the other panels and workshops I attended during this year’s conference. One reason was that it was based on technology rather than didactics (basically: “We have the tools, they will determine the way you work and study”-approach), another that it very much took the “big data”-approach to education, something which has an intuitive appeal to educational managers but perhaps less to teachers. Somehow the underlying message from the panelists was that students are motivated by extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors (hence: gamification) and that we are moving towards a metric society (hence: the systematic collection of data on the micro-level).

What definitively provoked me in this session was the image of the teacher or educator being reduced to a surveyor of data (or in fact being made redundant by computers surveying the performance of students). Similarly, the collaborative or social aspects of learning which had featured prominently in the other sessions I attended, were spectacularly absent from the debate. The attraction to policy makers in government ministries and the staffs of vice-chancellors, on the other hand, is obvious.