Crafting a Rich and Personal Blending Learning Environment

An Institutional Case Study from a STEM Perspective

Su White

, Hugh Davis

, Kate Dickens

and Sarah Fielding

Web and Internet Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, U.K.

Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, U.K.

Keywords: Institutional Initiative, Design Patterns, Disciplinary Differences, TEL, E-Learning, PLEs, Co-Design,

Participatory Design.

Abstract: Institutional pressures to make optimal use of space can be powerful drivers to develop technology

enhanced learning approaches to traditional curricula. Engaging students in active learning and reducing the

academic workload are important and complementary drivers. This paper presents a case study of

curriculum development in a STEM area at a research-intensive UK university. A team of academics and

learning designers have worked collaboratively to build this module as a mix of online and face-to-face

activities. The module addresses professional issues, so a strong emphasis is being placed on establishing

authentic activities and realistic use of social tools. It is important to the university to carefully document

the development process and identify reusable design patterns that can be explained to other academics.

1 INTRODUCTION

This case study provides a reflective account of the

processes needed by a multi-skilled team to develop

a blended learning module. A number of target

curriculum areas have been identified as candidates

to establish or demonstrate educational design

patterns (Goodyear and Retalis 2010). The intention

is to use design patterns to explain workable and

pedagogically clear responses to recurrent

educational problems which will be exposed in a

clear and systematic manner enabling them to be

more widely understood and then reused by

colleagues across the wider university.

The selection of target areas has sought to take

into account disciplinary differences (Biglan, 1973)

and the consequent variability in prefered practice

and effective strategies across different cognate

disciplines (White and Liccardi 2006). The changes

enacted, and specific modules identified as

exemplars typically incorporate responses to local

drivers for change which can be widely recognised.

These encompass imperatives beneficial to learners,

the institution and to teaching academics:

This case concerns the design of a ‘professional

issues’ module which equates with 150 total

teaching + study hours taken by a mixed cohort of

Software Engineering, Computer Science and

Information Technology students. Typical cohort

size is 150 students, with the module being taught

during one twelve week semester. The module will

be led by two experienced academics who have

designed and taught the two 100 hour predecessor

modules on which the revised module is based.

Some of the content and philosophy of the existing

modules are being incorporated into the new design.

Both academics have a had extensive prior

involvement in curriculum design and establishing

teaching innovations plus a practical and research

experience in technology enhanced learning. The

academics are keen to preserve, yet transpose, the

activities which they have observed to be effective

during the predecessor modules. They are also

seeking to alleviate pressure points generated by

trying to manually organise the workflow generated

by activities which have evolved and now

incorporate a high degree of complexity. The

academic expertise of the multi-disciplinary design

and development team is a particular strength.

Experienced teachers and researchers are working

alongside learning designers have extensive practical

experience. They are already skilled at specifying,

designing and deploying a broad range of

educational resources and online learning activities.

In addition they understand the potential benefit of

participatory design and co-creation which enables

142

White S., Davis H., Dickens K. and Fielding S..

Crafting a Rich and Personal Blending Learning Environment - An Institutional Case Study from a STEM Perspective.

DOI: 10.5220/0004388901420147

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 142-147

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

them to gain insights to academics' educational

motivations. For this reason, they particularly value

the collaborative nature of this work.

The remainder of this paper provides a structured

account of the technical and pedagogic balance

which has been established during this design

activity. It addresses the four themes of:

i) Information technologies supporting learning; ii)

Learning and teaching methodologies and

assessment; iii) Social context and learning

environments; iv) Technology enhanced learning in

STEM disciplines. It provides an account of the

working methods employed and presents an interim

reflective evaluation of the activity.

2 BACKGROUND

The two professional issues modules which this

design is seeking to replace are both taught in a

predominantly face-to-face manner. They aim to

develop soft skills using authentic activities to create

opportunities for situated learning. All the degrees to

which this module contributes are accredited by the

British Computer Society, which to some extent

determines and constrains the content which is

addressed and the assessment methods used Students

who successfully complete the modules will have

demonstrated broadly:

 An understanding of the legal, ethical and

professional issues relevant to an IT specialist

during their working life;

 An understanding of their personal learning

preferences;

 An ability to research and communicate

technical information;

 Incorporating in their routine learning

practices an ability to reflect objectively and

critically evaluate their own and other’s work.

The teaching methods employed in the predecessor

classes are a mix of large lecture classes and small

group sessions. The lectures incorporate individual

and group student activities and are complemented

by a number of assessments including, individually:

Preparing a CV; Researching and writing a technical

report; Preparing an annotated bibliography;

Demonstrating basic legal understanding via an

online test; Undertaking an open book exam

evaluating professional issues in a seen case study.

As a group: Researching and making a group

presentation on a technical topic; Building and

creating an information resource; Creating and

presenting a group poster.

The design generates some key challenges. One

obvious challenge is how to consolidate the

assessments for the new module. This requires

careful consideration. The new module has a

nominal education study and contact time which is

25% less than the two established modules.

Clearly cuts and changes have to be made. The

academics have a clear sense that students’

behaviours, learning and perceptions of priorities are

shaped by their experience of assessment. As Boud

argues: assessment shapes learning, in addition,

there is a clear need in this case to craft assessments

which develop “the kinds of highly contextualised

learning faced in life and work” (Boud and

Falchikov, 2005). This argument is consonant with

Bigg’s emphasis on the value and importance of

ensuring that the assessments are constructively

aligned with the curriculum. Furthermore it may

well be possible to gain mutual benefit for students

and academics. Although it is front heavy to

undertake the process of structuring and framing

peer reflection and evaluation to be embedded in the

teaching, this process may well reward academics

with long term time saving, whilst the student

experience is also enhanced.

There is a particular challenge in teaching

professional issues to students from the computing

disciplines. Such students typically have specialised

in technical subject early in their academic career; as

is typical in the UK education system. Many

students acknowledge they purposefully selected

study options which avoid any volume of writing. In

disciplinary terms, their preferences, and the bulk of

the topics, knowledge organisation and study

practices are those of Biglan’s Hard Soft fields of

study, with some overlap into Hard Pure activities

(Biglan, 1973). By contrast the topics of professional

issues are more closely identified with the Soft

Applied fields of study. The specific challenge is

identifying and using teaching methods and

associated study activities which are compelling and

aligned with the soft applied. In order to address the

challenge consequent of disciplinary differences in

the existing predecessor modules, much care has

been taken in the way in which the motivation for

the study area is explained to the students. The

modules are presented as providing an opportunity

which will enable students with an acknowledged

preference for the technical focus of their chosen

degrees to:

 Demonstrate a broader understanding of the

professional legal and ethical issues which

complements their technical expertise;

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 Individually tailor a high degree of matching

knowledge and understanding for topics which

relate to their personal technical preferences

and specialisms

 Acquire expertise in knowledge and processes

which will offer them opportunities for

success in the job market and during future

careers.

Activities and assessments are designed to meet

the ambitions of the expressed motivations.

Throughout the predecessor modules, emphasis is

placed on working collaboratively with fellow

students and actively engaging as a part of a team;

both for formal assessments and as a routine part of

developing a successful approach to learning.

Although the new module will be taught in the

second semester of the first year of study, it is

essential that the educational resources remain

accessible to the students throughout their degree. Its

role in professional development also requires that to

some extent resources will be available after the

students have graduated. The large cohort size and a

requirement for rapid feedback on assessment tasks

means that significant effort needs to be addressed to

the assessment component of the final system.

3 DESIGN APPROACHES

The overarching objective for the design team is to

make effective use of information technologies

blended with face-to-face activities to support these

broad educational, organisational and administrative

aims.

Building on existing experience the design team

is basing their approach on an adapted version of a

co-design and co-deployment methodology which

has been successfully used in previous projects at

the University (Millard et al, 2009). An interim

model of the learning design phase of this activity is

being mapped. From this, the design team are:

Developing use cases which directly align with the

module learning outcomes. Learner contexts

include: personal characteristics of the learner;

cohort cultures; time available to the learner for

learning; extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for

learning; pedagogical practices of instructors.

The design team are keenly aware of the

importance of recognising the technology

affordances of the tools which are used to realise the

design. The constraints of the existing institutional

meta-level technologies is as follows. Commercial

products - Blackboard: Virtual Learning

Environment; Turnitin; Plagiarism, grading and peer

review; QuestionMark; High Stakes Assessment

Engine. Local tools - EdShare: Open educational

repository; ECS Notes: Linked data driven module

information pages; eFolio: persistent online

Portfolio: Mobile Lecture: feedback and learning

analytic tool.

Whilst readers may be familiar with the

functionality of the commercial tools, it may be

helpful to provide a little more detail of the local

ones. Computer Scientists at the University of

Southampton have a history of working on

hypertext, technology enhanced learning, the web,

linked and open data and the semantic web.

ECSnotes, an open data driven information suite

and EdShare, the institutional educational repository

http:// http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk are examples

of local infrastructure tools which have been

developed in association with research projects in

these areas. The design team includes colleagues

with a broad experience and understanding of the

implementation and user interface factors of

establishing repository use (Davis et al 2010). The

academic team routinely use EdShare to organise

and share educational resources. Resources stored in

EdShare are tagged with course codes and then

automatically populate the relevant ECS notes

module page. Linked data, for example syllabus

information, tutor profiles, student profiles, and

handin specification; are automatically aggregated to

a single location. Content can also be rapidly edited

through wiki’s embedded in the module page

structure.

eFolio (http://www.efolio.soton.ac.uk) is a well-

tested tool which was originally developed to

support psychology students at the university and is

also extensively used by undergraduates in medicine

and health sciences. A further advantage of this

solution is that the resultant portfolio can be

accessed or exported after the student has graduated

from the university (Furr et al, 2010). Since this

module focuses on professional issues, the

affordances of eFolio are being used to promote

behaviours aligned with good professional practice

from the start of the module e.g. reflection, digital

literacy, online identity and portfolio development.

Students will be guided into assembling a portfolio

for self-assessment: auditing; evaluating; and

critically reflecting upon their strengths and

weaknesses in knowledge, skills and understanding

within eFolio.

Mobile Lecture is a rapid feedback tool which

has been developed as part of a current research

project. It can be used to prompt reflection and self-

evaluation of learning at the end of face-to-face

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sessions. It also provides learning analytic

information (Aljohani & Davis, 2012). The

university does not currently have any particular

specialist tool in use for peer assessment. After

extensive evaluation, it was decided to use mix the

peer evaluation features of Turnitin for more formal

peer evaluation, and WebPA as the tool to support

simple developmental peer assessment.

As a matter of principle, the design incorporates

the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs)

where possible. The cost of developing resources

from the ground up is expensive, and there is an

additional objective of ensuring students become

familiar with the value and abundance of OERs. The

affordances of EdShare in conjunction with

Blackboard are being utilised. The implementation

stores and catalogues discoverable resources

(including links to OERs) in EdShare. Blackboard’s

role is as a tool to manage the workflow. A

particular strength of Blackboard and EdShare is that

both tools are capable of providing learning analytic

information which may be useful in the short and

long term. It is intended that such information will

be used by the module team and where appropriate

be presented to learners to enable them to calibrate

their achievements and progress. QuestionMark and

Turnitin are the two remaining commercially

available institutional tools. QuestionMark is used as

a standalone tool for high stakes assessments. In this

module, student achievement will be demonstrated

by a mixture of interim courseworks and a final

summative examination. Turnitin is routinely used

for all submitted courseworks to check the academic

integrity of students’ work. However its additional

affordance is also being used in the context of peer

assessment.

CITE is perhaps unusual for an institutional

centre for educational innovation in that its co-

location with an active computer science research

group ensures that there is active participation in the

design process by researchers who are also highly

experienced in software engineering and user design.

The learning design team have experienced a

crash course in this particular aspect of computing,

and have responded to the challenge. Whilst the

learning curve on heavyweight design tools is

significant, pragmatic modifications has enabled the

team to capture and communicate their designs in a

well structured and ordered manner. This resulted in

a set of formal specifications articulating the

workflow created following discussions and

negotiations with the academic members of the team

who will be responsible for the teaching.

Mock ups and walk through are used to

communicate work in progress, and to validate with

the academics whether the online realisation

matches (or even exceeds) their specification. Since

the team is relatively new, some aspects of the

workflow implementation are necessarily forcing

them to explore new territory. In this respect the

ambition to capture design patterns has an additional

strength in that it forces the team to examine and

articulate implicit understandings and reflect on the

replicable and compelling aspects of their

experience of the design and its process.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The endeavour which the design team have

undertaken is an ambitious one. The two modules

which we are seeking to transpose into a blended

format are both already pedagogically complex.

Where the design of the existing face-to-face

predecessor modules is predominantly constructivist,

the realisation of the new blended module is

necessarily connectivist (Siemens and Page, 2005).

When considering information technologies

supporting learning the area in which we expect to

experience the greatest learning is in relation to

disciplinary differences and technology affordances.

The students will routinely make use of a wide range

of information technologies. The blended approach

presents web-based learning in a formal and

informal context. Students will make use of wiki’s

and blogs. In ECS, it is unusual to use Blackboard,

even though it is the university’s adopted VLE. Our

students will be much more familiar with the ECS

notes system. We will be closely monitoring usage

of both routes into the systems. Further insights need

to be gained.

Use is being made of student generated content,

and we anticipate a full interim review of the system

after its first instantiation. Student interns will be

working to analyse the evaluation data and also to

provide individual analysis and input for the

inevitable tweaking and modifications and redesign.

Current experience in ECS suggests that the use of

linked and open data is a powerful timesaver which

facilitates simple integration of diverse learning

materials. The first implementation will provide an

opportunity to objectively evaluate the comparative

benefits of data driven consolidation with

handcrafted creation.

Reflecting on learning and teaching

methodologies and assessment it is believed that the

higher level objective of recording, analysing and

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capturing design patterns will make a valuable

contribution to fuelling a more informed discussion

of these agendas across the university campus. It is

interesting to observe the ways in which the team’s

working methods have evolved, and to compare

them with similar, but different experiences – for

example the collaborative creation of educational

repositories in modern languages and the

humanities.

The blended learning approach has also acted as

a vehicle to purposefully design a ‘flipped

classroom’ approach to the teaching. The design

pattern and the evaluation of the experience will be

valuable.

Turnitin for large-scale peer assessments has

been implemented in Computer Science (Hamer et

al, 2011), but is a novel departure for our university.

The Southampton implementation is lighter weight

than the earlier accounts and it will be interesting to

compare the outcomes.

Students continue to exhibit a preference of

default social software when left free to establish

this social context and learning environment.

However it would be possible to view this behaviour

as a manifestation of the use of ‘worldware’ (Morris

et al 1994) taken into the twenty-first century. The

value of a purposeful requirement to make use of a

wide range of authentic social tools, and to reflect on

the viability and effectiveness of the methods

chosen, remains to be evaluated.

In our local experience, the use of technology

enhanced learning in STEM disciplines is not

widespread. The model chosen by this initiative is to

use technology as a workflow manager in

conjunction with authentic tools and authentic tasks.

It remains to be this experience is undermined by the

acknowledged dissonance between the natural

methods of predominantly hard applied fields of

study compared to those which best match soft

applied disciplines. One thing is sure, this particular

design, and its design patterns may give us some

insight. One thing which remains unanswered is

whether the students will actually enjoy the

experience.

The task of redesigning any area of the

curriculum, whatever the discipline, is not one to be

taken lightly. This paper has provided a case study

of such an activity, where a specific objective of the

team engaged in the redesign was to identify the

pedagogic and learning design patterns inherent in

blended learning.

The importance of the learning which results

from producing systems, such as the one describe

here, are valuable because they demonstrate a

pragmatic solution to a real large scale problem

constrained by existing infrastructure and

established working patterns and practices. Whilst

more powerful tools may exist, and ideal practices

documented in the theory, transforming face-to-face

teaching into effective blended learning, requires

insights and understandings of the student

experience in the specific context of their university

studies.

The potential benefits of recording the steps

required in such activities are manifold. It remains to

report on a detailed evaluation of the experience;

and it will be important that such evaluation

considers the changes implemented and the

interactions generated from the perspective of each

one of the actors in the system. Perhaps most

importantly the systematic acquisition and

cataloguing of institutional or organisational

knowledge is an activity which every university

must surely value. Such knowledge can be of use to

achieve diverse objectives; financial stringency,

maximal student satisfaction or optimal use of all

available resources. This exercise has, this far,

yielded some valuable insights.

Information technologies supporting learning:

There is a strong case for arguing that information

technologies can be used to remove the barriers to

learning. Providing access to information at anytime

and anyplace makes a compelling argument.

From the academic’s viewpoint, systems which

manage workflow alleviate a major pressure point in

the day-to-day working life at university.

It remains to be seen whether learning analytical

information is as valuable to educationalists as

customer profiles and analytics are to commercial

organisations. It seems reasonable to assume that

students might benefit from learning about

successful practices (students who have a first class

mark so far are looking at these web pages…).

University teaching has sometimes been

described as the last cottage industry. Institutions

like the UK’s Open University have long established

practices of working with a mixed team formally

planning and creating learning resources to be

integrated with specific educational experiences.

Such an approach has provided a framework for

much more clearly identifying and utilising

preferred learning and teaching methodologies.

The systematic approach to learning design, has

provided an opportunity to methodically make use of

a wide range of approaches to assessment; a far

wider range than might typically be found in a

conventional face to face educational programme.

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Students in the department were already making

extensive independent use of technology for social

learning activities. It remains to be seen if this

structured approach will be acceptable, or be judged

a poor second to the ad hoc solutions crafted from

the preferred social network chosen and used by the

vast majority.

At the university department being studied, there

is a strong infrastructure of linked data driven

module pages, many coursework submissions are

electronic, and some examinations and tests take

place online. Much information is published online,

and some academics make wide use of the

institutional repository. None the less, it is possible

to argue that before this particular exercise

technology enhanced learning has not widely used.

The predominant philosophy here is that

technology is good for admin, but teaching and

learning is a process where people and face-to-face

interactions are prime. This detailed design activity

is providing an opportunity to open up from that

view, but it will only be more widely accepted if the

student learning experience is at least as good, if not

better than that afforded by conventional

approaches.

There remains, of course, much future work

which can be done. When the module is run it will

provide a large volume of detailed evaluation data

mapping student experience. Alongside routine and

systematic evaluations which can be compared to

previous years’ and previous methods a range of

different evaluation approaches are proposed.

Focus group discussions will be used to identify

key strengths and weaknesses. These will be

complemented by critical and reflective evaluation

by academics at the end of the module. It is also

intended to recruit students from the cohort to

become participative evaluators and co-designers to

help identify and create the inevitable and necessary

revisions which will emerge.

Equally important, the learning designers will

consolidate their knowledge, understanding and

reflection of the process. Initial drafts of the formal

design patterns will be circulated and subjected to

peer review, and the whole pattern of integrative

innovation will begin again.

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