The educational culture permits or constrains particular ways of learning. A move towards student-centred learning is supported or constrained by the general educational culture, largely composed of the personal experiences of students and teachers, but also formed by technology and institutional policies and constraints.
Initial questions
How do teachers and students perceive tasks based on new approaches such as problem-based learning? What are the ways they make sense of what they are asked to do and how do they negotiate new roles?
How are students enabled as designers of learning?
In designing learning beyond performing for exams, how do students and teachers receive the measurement of 'soft skills' or graduate attributes?
Both practical application of ideas and an extensive literature review will refine these initial questions, but the core idea is how to support students as co-designers (Collis & Moonen, 2008) of their learning environment. A major aim is to produce a sustainable framework for reflection on learning design. I expect that grounding theory within practice will profoundly affect what questions guide the final research.
Methodology
Employed as an online educational designer at a university, I want to integrate study with work. The process of acquiring a PhD will provide a framework for reflection on projects that apply educational technology to student-centred learning.
In my Masters research project, I used an ethnographic approach, using observation and interviews to investigate how students made sense of a social network site. I want to continue to use this approach, further expanding on the ideas of sense-making and affordances - how they can shed light on teachers' and students' interpretation and negotiation of novel tasks. Dervin's sense-making methodology, in retrospectively focusing on users' expectations and gaps in understanding (Naumer, Fisher & Dervin, 2008), is a promising way of bringing student perspectives to design.
The research will be based on student-centred projects I work on, or have access to, as an online educational designer, over a number of university faculties, courses and activities. This will include where possible case studies from other institutions, focusing on innovations that are iteratively improved. The research will supplement the qualitative approach with quantitative data in the form of surveys and possibly assessment results. While including a good number of varied examples, I hope to include a longitudinal view of two or three units as they develop over several years and iterations. Based in the practicalities of learning design and delivery, the research will relate each example and case study to student design and environmental conditions conducive to student-centred learning.
Examples of projects that might be used in the research include:
- student use of concept mapping in an introductory course in astronomy
- problem based learning activities in groups
- a first year computer science course that removes most assessment items, using a collaborative wiki and reward points for student-curated notes and task and project feedback
- student-generated quizzes, using a tool such as PeerWise (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz).
Increasingly, tertiary education is seeking to apply more student-centred approaches to learning design and scholars call for students to be represented at all levels of development of tertiary learning environments (Ellis & Goodyear, 2010). This research aims to bring together numerous experiences and designs to form a picture of how initiatives are developed, received and improved.
Classes in tertiary education are growing in size. Academic staff are under pressure to both maintain research output as well as cope with more students, leaving little energy for learning design. Students are often dissatisfied with levels of access to staff and frequency and timeliness of feedback (Webster, 2011). How can student-centred learning, and learning design support staff, respond to these pressures and demands? How do we achieve 'sustainable innovation' (Ellis & Goodyear, 2010)?
Ethical considerations:
As the research is both observational and interview-based, it will need to pass an ethics approval process in each institution involved and gain permission from subjects.
Timetable for the research:
The research will be conducted within part-time study, so it will be possible to cover at least four years of course design, application and re-design.
Anticipated problems and limitations:
While it is anticipated that an adequate number of projects will be accessible, the research will be necessarily limited by the needs and inclinations of academic teacher partners: it will not be successful without access to a number of innovative, student-centred designs. Continuing employment by the researcher in online educational design is assumed. To reduce risk and expand the pool of initiatives, I will also approach student-centred projects beyond my institution to be part of the research.
Resources required for the research:
There are no major resource requirements anticipated for the study. The research will be conducted alongside professional activities.
References
Boyd, D. (2009). A Response to Christine Hine. In A. Markham & N. Baym (Ed.s) Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. (pp. 26-32) Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.
Collis, B. & Moonen, J. (2008). Web 2.0 tools and process in higher education: quality perspectives. Educational Media International, 45(2), 93-106.
Ellis, R. & Goodyear, P. (2010) Students’ Experiences of E-Learning in Higher Education: The Ecology of Sustainable Innovation. New York: Routledge.
Naumer, C., Fisher, K. & Dervin, B. (2008, April) Sense-Making: A Methodological Perspective. Sensemaking Workshop, CHI'08. Florence, Italy. Accessed May 1, 2010 from http://dmrussell.googlepages.com/Naumer-final.pdf
Webster, L. (2011, September). Quality assurance for distance education, eLearning and face-to-face teaching in higher education: Are there really any differences? Keynote presented at Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Week. Accessed January 7, 2012 from http://ilecture.mq.edu.au/lectopia/lectopia.lasso?ut=1256&id=87705
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