Learning Journeys: the road from informal to formal learning more

Learning Journeys: the road from informal to formal learning The UK Open University’s Approach Josie Taylor Director Institute of Educational Technology The Open University Milton Keynes, UK “Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.” Jenkins, 1.0 Introduction and background The first remarkable thing about the British Open University is that students do not need qualifications in order to gain entry. People can join The Open University, begin studying courses, and graduate with a bachelor’s degree, without having any entry qualifications at all. Access to higher education is thereby available in the UK to any adult no matter where they are in the life course. The second remarkable thing about the Open University is that this does not involve a compromise of quality in comparison with other universities. In every other respect, The Open University functions exactly like any other Higher Education Institution in the UK – the range and depth of our teaching programmes is comparable with any other University, and we are subject to the same processes and procedures that ensure quality as everywhere else in the UK. We are third in the national rankings for student satisfaction with our teaching. We are also a highly rated research active University, ranking 43rd (out of about 130 universities), with more than half of our research labeled internationally excellent, and a significant proportion identified as ‘world leading’. The third remarkable thing about The Open University is that it makes many of its materials available free, over the internet, for people anywhere in the world to look at, read and enjoy, but also to download, to take it away from us, to modify and to make their own. We even provide them with the tools to do this, and we support communities as they engage in it. 1 The fourth remarkable thing about The Open University is that our charter commits us to contributing to the educational well-being of the nation – it is not enough for us to serve a student population that ensures our economic survival in a competitive environment, no matter how important that is. We are committed to educating the general public, and we take that obligation very seriously indeed. Thus the OU operates in the public domain, and engages ordinary people in learning in a variety of ways, showing them how it is possible to develop themselves, and to gain more qualifications, whether vocational or academic. We take them on a journey from informal to formal learning, from watching television to registering for a degree course. Our teaching must therefore be effective, easy to access, and appealing to a large body of potential students who may not be familiar with academic work, or formal learning. In this paper, I describe how the University deploys various platforms and media to achieve its mission, and how those technologies are being developed to support a much broader conception of social learning than has been possible in the past. I argue that, whilst on one hand, the University has to fulfil pragmatically its function as Higher Education Institution, on the other it has achieved success because it has taken an ecological approach similar to that identified by Jenkins in the quote at the beginning of this paper. Over 40 years we have considered the relationship between the different technologies available to us, and have developed a robust way of leading people from informal to formal learning through a deep understanding of how technology relates to pedagogy, and how different communities of learners can be brought together in common endeavor. We also have a thorough knowledge of the communities who gather around these activities, and what they might be prepared to engage in. Thus, the question to we know to ask is not ‘what technology should we be using?’, but the much more subtle question: ‘what do we want to do, and which technology will allow us to do it best, given the communities we are serving?’. 1.1 The Open University Teaching Model Colleagues in China and the Far East may not be familiar with the teaching model of The Open University, so I will briefly describe it in essence (there are many variations on this basic theme!). The University is organised around familiar academic disciplines and faculties - i.e. Social Sciences, Arts, Science, Mathematics, Computing and Technology, Health and Social Care, Education and Languages and a Business School . All our distance education courses are designed centrally by course teams, typically consisting of academic staff, media designers and editors. A course may have various components that are (i) delivered via our open source VLE, based on Moodle; (ii) web-based (audiovisual and textual); (iii) disk-based (DVD-ROM) and (iv) paper-based (books, study guides, supplementary material). So, typically, each student receives a pack of materials and instructions through the post, and is assigned to a local group of other students studying the same course. This group is tutored by an Associate Lecturer of The Open University. The tutor network spans the United Kingdom and is a strong element of Supported Open Learning teaching model described below. Having no necessary prior qualifications, then, students from all over the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) may register for a module, which runs for 9-months. It takes 3 modules (at the appropriate levels) to graduate with a degree. We run many other shorter programmes which enable students to obtain certificates, diplomas and sub-degree qualifications. We also run many distance Masters programmes across the curriculum, and some of those run globally, in partnership 2 with other organisations. The Post-Graduate Research teaching programme functions in exactly the same way as any other university, with students researching on campus. Our experience has taught us that the technology we use to teach at a distance must be truly harnessed to serve the learner – what really matters is not how fashionable the technology is, but what the teacher, or the designer of the materials, is trying to achieve. Learners are only concerned that the learning outcomes they seek are well served both by the materials, and by the technology deployed to deliver them. This may seem obvious, but the tricky part is to decide what technology to use to support such a wide range of potential learners, and for what purpose – i.e. not everyone wants to study for a degree, and not everyone wants to commit to a formal programme of learning that makes heavy demands on their time and energy. A foundation stone for our formal approach to learning and teaching is what we call the Supported Open Learning model (SOL), which has 4 key elements: • • • • excellent learning materials individual academic support to each student effective administration and logistics teaching rooted in research I will focus mainly on the first to elaborate how we develop and use excellent learning materials. SOL is underpinned by a strong socio-constructivist approach to pedagogy (e.g. see Kim, 2000), deriving from the cybernetic models of Pask (1976) in the early days, and the conversational model developed by Laurillard (2002) later. There are two important factors that determine how we deploy pedagogy. First, because the majority of our students are in full-time employment and are time-poor, we operate a mainly asynchronous teaching model . Second, as pointed out earlier, many students have nontraditional backgrounds, and are without the study skills of typical school-leavers. They are going to be learning alone - they are not going to be mixing with and learning from peers, which is why such students need extra support from well-designed teaching materials. To address this problem, alongside the support from tutors and effective administrative support, we have learnt how to embed pedagogy in the structure of the materials and study guides we provide, cultivating good study habits as we go. In addition, we seek out the unique characteristics and affordances of each medium we use, and carefully design the media-mix in a blended learning situation to cover all aspects of teaching/learning interaction. As a socio-constructivist approach would dictate, we have always sought to exploit opportunities for interactivity and communication between students, using whatever technologies may be to hand to do so. We aim to create teaching opportunities that cover the subject knowledge, and associated cognitive, practical and professional skills, as well as to create ways of assessing the individual’s learning, to monitor progress and validate the achievement of the learning outcomes. It is the combination of factors that helps ensure success. 3 Finally, it has always been important to us to continually develop and test our materials. The Open University conducts a great deal of institutional research to ensure that innovation works, and that the student benefit from the use of technology in novel ways. The Ecological Approach In following sections, I describe the ways in which The Open University has developed an ecological approach to its use of technology, and how the issues of culture are now becoming increasingly salient for us at several different levels. 2.1 The Development of Pedagogy and Technology Technologies for teaching have made major advances over the 40 years of the University’s existence. There are some interesting cultural recapitulations in the move from broadcast to interactive learning over the past four decades that mimic the shift that takes place within individuals as they develop from dependent to independent learners. For example, Table 1 illustrates Tapscott’s (1998) analysis of the shift from ‘broadcast’ to ‘interactive’ learning for schoolchildren between the 1970’s – 1990’s . Shifts from Broadcast learning to Interactive Learning Broadcast Linear acquisition Instruction Teacher-centered Knowing facts School Teaching to the mean (one size fits all) School as a requirement Teacher as sage Interactive Hypermedia learning Construction Learner-Centered Learning to learn Lifelong Customized, individualized School as fun Teacher as guide Table 1: Shifts from Broadcast Learning to Interactive Learning (Tapscott, 1998, p. 143) The key points to note here are: (i) the shift in agency from the teacher-centred view to a learnercentred view and all that that entails, and (ii) the customisation and individualisation of the learning process, leading to a much more fulfilling learning experience that is likely to go on far beyond the formal setting, becoming a natural habit in people’s lives. In a complementary perspective, Table 2 illustrates the changing technologies that The Open University has used to embody supported open learning for adults since our founding in the 1960’s. Given that our teaching approach is based on socio-constructivist principles, we have always sought to promote active, independent learning, even when using print and broadcast media, which are often regarded as fairly transmissive in character. 4 For example, the development of in-text exercises for self-assessment was a key feature of Open University printed texts and study guides from the 1960’s. I also recollect developing guides for students advising them how to watch broadcast television in ‘active participation’ mode, sitting forward with notepad, rather than sitting back in relaxation mode. Table 2: OU Media Development to Support Open Learning from 1970 – 2010 Technology has developed rapidly over this 40 year period, and much has been written about how to deploy it in education. The calls for revolutionary change in learning and education based on such new developments have become commonplace in the literature, as each new wave of technological breakthrough crashes over us. But because we have strong principles underlying our approach to the use of media and technology, The Open University has managed to steadily co-evolve its pedagogy with developing technology in such a way that students benefit from innovations in technology with correspondingly sophisticated innovation in teaching. In this way, we use pedagogy as a way of stabilising technology, bringing it under control, and into the service of people (both teachers and learners), to communicate ideas. We understand the complex relations between people, technology and ideas (or knowledge, or content), and we have learned much about when technology is appropriate, and when it is not. Thus, our pedagogical principles help us hold in tension the people, the technology and the ideas or knowledge we are communicating or constructing with students (see Figure 1). 5 Fig 1: Simple Pedagogical Triangle This, then, is one element of the concept of ecology that Jenkins (op.cit) describes. It is what for us constitutes the activities and actions that we design to lead people towards learning. It is the ‘what’ that we do for people. 2.2 The Relationship of the Technologies and the Pedagogy Operating as it does in the public domain, without a ready-made supply route from secondary education, The Open University needs to develop in the wider population an awareness of the value of learning, of the benefits that flow from it, and, most importantly, of the ways in which they can be a part of it. We need to make people aware, and get them to engage with learning for their own good. But eventually, of course, we want to convert this interest to registration with us, and then we need to retain people as students to achieve their goals and emerge from the University with whatever qualification they were seeking. The first challenge for us, then, is to be sure that we are making our presence known where the mass of people are, with appropriate material that is designed to appeal to different audiences, making learning enjoyable, but always stimulating and sometimes puzzling and challenging. Our 40 year relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has certainly helped in the process of developing awareness in people of the world around them. The BBC/OU relationship was founded on the principles of education for the masses that is at the heart of the BBC’s mission, and is still the foundation stone for providing access to learning in people’s homes. For example, there were 210 million views of OU programmes in the UK last year across wide range of channels and subjects. Working with BBC internationally – especially with BBC World Service – on glossy, high production value programmes like ‘Digital Planet’ there have been in excess of 1 billion events where someone has sat down and watched or listened to an OU programme. This is an amazing statistic for any University. Whilst we can achieve fantastic reach with this kind of programme, the educators amongst us might point out that most of this material is ephemeral – it is broadcast and gone. With various media players (e.g. the BBC iPlayer) we can provide greater permanence and choice for users – with BBC/OU coproductions available to UK audiences for free for weeks on end. And of course viewers can record programmes if they really want to watch again and again. But pedagogically the programmes are meant 6 to be viewed once through – often strongly narratively driven, such programmes have a grammar that defines the experience, and it is not typically one which makes many demands on the viewer. The OU also is keen to find other ways to reach new learners in new ways on their terms. Hence, last year the OU was one of first UK universities to join iTunesU. Like iPlayer it’s free and provides high quality content – but unlike iPlayer it provides access to an international audience and all the content stays up permanently. We’ve now added many hours of materials– across subjects as diverse as the history of art, cosmology, Buddhism and quantum mechanics. We’re consistently in the top 3 or four download of most subject categories – and nearly always featured in their picks of the day – alongside Yale, Harvard and MIT. We’re just about to pass 10 million downloads – now running at about 376,000 downloads a week – or about one every two seconds. More than 80% of those users are coming to us from outside of the UK. This material is derived from our teaching material, and therefore has a more substantial pedagogic basis – it may be more dense, more challenging and more demanding on the reader/viewer. It is all still very high production value material, and unlike a lot of other suppliers to iTunesU, we’re not just recording the output of our lectures. This is extremely well designed, well crafted educational ‘TV’. But it’s not all video-based - we’re also developing a range of interactive applications. For years we sent out physical microscopes in boxes to students, but now we’re developing interactive microscopes which allow users to look at virtual slide samples on their computers. Our most recent development has been an i-Phone app to allow them to look at slides on their phones, while out on geology or botany field trips. These apps can be made available across the world. High on the pedagogy scale doesn’t have to mean dense and difficult, though. In addition to iTunes, we also have our own podcasting site and our own channel on UTube. We have been making some fascinating little tasters to tickle people’s interest. One of our 30 second clips has exceeded 0.5 million views and even made YouTube’s main site pick of the day. And the content is free – not just linear AV media – but text, and interactive materials like the microscope and data as well. And of course, all this is content is accessible across a series of devices – TV, computers, increasingly mobiles – but also novel devices – we currently working on several projects around new collaborative, multi-touch devices like the surface table. So one challenge is to get into spaces and places where the people already are browsing around. But we have also been aggregating free content into one learning space called OpenLearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/). This project, funded by the Hewlett Foundation, is one of largest free open educational portals for higher education anywhere in the world. Over the last three years we’ve delivered over 6000 hours of study materials from our existing course provision, and have had over 6 million visitors , 90% new to the OU , more than 50% international. This collaborative space is free - to use, to download, to register, to comment – for any users to download, to exploit and share in their own educational context. A follow-on project, OLNet (http://olnet.org/) has been funded by the Hewlett Foundation to gather evidence and methods about how we can research and understand ways to learn in a more open world, particularly linked to Open Educational Resources (OER) but also looking at other influences too. 7 2.3 The Development of Community All this technology and platform availability is very exciting in principle, but how do you actually get people to engage with it all who might, after all, just be watching a bit of TV for relaxation and fun? We key here is to find the ‘hook’ – the quantum, the smallest unit that can act as a stimulus, giving us a way to make impact in people’s busy lives. Sometimes it can be quite a small offering - for example, all of our BBC co-productions have a ‘call to action’ at the end, a trail that tells viewers about something they can send for, an activity pack, perhaps, or a full colour glossy wall chart; or gives them a url for an exhibition, or an activity they can engage in to follow up on the programme. The question here is not how many people take up the offer, but how many of those are now ‘hooked’? We have planted a seed, and if we make it very easy for people, a proportion of them will allow that seed to take root and grow. Now we need to consider more substantial activity. As described earlier, the organising role played by pedagogy has helped the OU to use media to increase levels of interaction, and stimulate participant autonomy. The rise of social media such as wikis, blogs, tagclouds, and Web 2.0 applications, has presented a great opportunity for engaging the general public in learning, and for leading them on through the learning journey. For example, in collaboration with a large scientific consortium in the UK (Open Air Laboratories - OPAL), funded by the National Lottery, we are encouraging people to look at biodiversity in their own back gardens and yards, and to identify what they can see using a system we have built called iSpot (http://www.ispot.org.uk/). Here you can upload your geo-tagged pictures, identify your ‘spots’, discuss what you have found and share the data, both at national level, and with others in your area. Experts are available on the site, and as you contribute more, and learn more, you can earn points. This builds your standing and reputation in the community, and you may find yourself advising others who are just starting out. In this way, ordinary folk can not only build up their own personal knowledge and expertise, but can also contribute to scientific knowledge in meaningful ways, as one little girl discovered when she found a moth on the window-sill. She photographed it, uploaded her photo and asked the experts on the site what it was. It turned out to be a major find - whilst it is a common species in North America, this moth had never been recorded in the British Isles before. So, at the same time as serving the people, we are also building up a scientific picture of biodiversity in the UK, and those who keep our national archives for biodiversity are deeply interested too. We have plans to re-develop the basic iSpot system to cover other areas such as climate change, and national heritage. The key point is that, in developing such applications, we take the notion of community very seriously indeed. The structure of the community is important, as are the markers for esteem and recognition. These cultural elements make the community work, and it then provides an enriching and valuable experience that people will come back to. Hoping that communities will spontaneously form around applications with no support, no seeding and no structures is misguided. 2. 4 Community at Scale We have taken the lessons we learnt from OpenLearn and from our understanding of pedagogy, and, supported by the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Trust, , we have deployed this approach in Africa at scale. Working with partners, we have developed TESSA (http://www.tessafrica.net/) which is a free open 8 educational resource project aimed at supporting in-service training for teachers across sub-Saharan Africa. An international consortium of 18 institutions, in 9 countries across Africa, has generated original OER (study units) to support school-based teacher learning, and now has over 1200 teacher educators now familiar with the materials, and over 350,000 students engaging with TESSA materials, being trained through partner institutions. Together we have jointly made over 2,250 activities to support teacher development and have nine country versions of that content translated across 5 languages (Arabic, English, French, isi-Xhosa and Kiswahili). But these materials not simply translated – they are also truly localized to reflect national and cultural contexts in style, examples and illustrations. We are delighted that the project has just won the Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2010. Building on this experience of partnership, but now in the field of health care, we are developing a project called HEAT (http://www.open.ac.uk/africa/HEAT_project.shtm). Ethiopia’s largely rural population of over 80 million has poor health status relative to other low-income countries. Maternal and infant mortality are among the highest in the world . Only 6% of births in Ethiopia are attended by a skilled professional – the lowest rate in the world, and about 12% of children die of curable and treatable diseases before they are 5-years old. Over the next few years we will be working closely with the Ethiopian Government, UNICEF and other health care professionals and partners in the region to develop a range of freely accessible health related training materials. The aim is to help Ethiopia meet the WHO’s Millennium Development Goals to reduce child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015. Perhaps one of the most pressing cases of a need for good access to quality learning anywhere in the world? In both these cases, again, we have learned that free access to free materials is not enough for local people to benefit from the education that is being presented on their doorstep, nor is simple translation into another language. It is essential to work with partners to ensure that translation includes localisation, and the embedding of the material in the local cultural context, otherwise, unfortunately, however well intentioned, it is a meaningless exercise that will not take root. 3.0 Participatory Culture As Web 2.0 technologies have developed so rapidly, it is easy to be dismissive and to suggest that they are the latest fad and will all come to nothing. But it seems to me that the OU, in driving forward in a principled way, is able to move fully into the participatory culture which Jenkins (op. cit.) defines as one: 1. with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement 2. with strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others 3. with some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices 4. where members believe that their contributions matter 5. where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). 6. where not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. 9 http://henryjenkins.org/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html (accessed Feb 28th 2010) But his key observation is that interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. In today’s technological milieu, this observation is very helpful. Many well-meaning educators have confused technology and pedagogy, and technology (as pertaining to machines) with media and people. In the OU we have, from our inception, taken the ecological approach to the use of various technologies, and latterly we have been looking at the cultural communities that grow around them, and observing the activities they support, of which iSpot is one. By moving people progressively through participation in a fairly relaxed and easy activity, we keep pressing them to go just a little bit further. If you’ve found one, can you find another? Look what everyone else has found – can you match that? Have you got any of these in your back garden? And, of course, somewhere along your learning journey you can take a little OU course which will act as an introduction to formal learning, and university level study. In similar vein, Gee (2004) develops his concept of informal ‘affinity spaces’, which are spaces sustained by common endeavors that bridge difference; which deploy peer-to-peer teaching models with participation according to skills and interests – participants are motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills; and which allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others . He contrasts affinity spaces with traditional formal education systems as follows: Formal Education System Conservative Static Structures to sustain are institutional Remains little changed over long periods of time Informal Affinity Space Experimental Innovative Structures to sustain are provisional Can respond to short-term needs and temporary interests Communities are bureaucratic and often national Communities are ad-hoc and localised Does not allow for easy movement in and out Allows for easy movement in and out Table 1: Gee’s concepts of Affinity Space (after Gee, 2004) What this table illustrates is that informal learning can potentially can create problems for learners too, if they have been brought up to think that the only learning that ‘counts’ is formal learning. If they are to achieve anything, they have to move from passive consumption to active participation, from taking what they are given to personalising, editing, modifying and creating. The ways of engaging in social learning these days may be very different from what older people are used to. The shift from closed to open learning and from solitary working to sharing may seem quite alien. But from being a learner to being a teacher – that’s a move that everyone can identify and be proud of! These kinds of approaches, or spaces, define the area that The Open University is moving into next with its SocialLearn project. This project takes as its starting point the pedagogy triangle (Figure 1), pulling together people, technology and ideas, but we are also interested in the emergent second order concepts – we are looking at communities that cohere around different platforms/media, and the related concepts of trust and openness, or sharing (see Figure 2). 10 Fig 4: Enhanced Pedagogical Triangle These concepts have very much come to the fore recently in the world of Web 2.0 and social networking. The OU is both well-placed to take advantage of these developments, and is in no doubt about how best to deploy them within these pedagogic frameworks. If you want people to participate, it is not enough to provide technology – you also need to provide an enriching culture. The SocialLearn project is therefore about: • • Understanding communities Understanding how to move people along through various culture shifts toward and through higher education Supporting people to achieve their short-term and long-term goals – at a national scale. • This is an ambitious new initiative for The Open University, and represents a new phase of development for us. In many ways, we are recapitulating our history – we always were innovators, and we still are. But we want to move forward in collaboration - we hope that people will join us in developing this approach to learning. Who knows where it will lead us? Acknowledgements Thanks to Martin Bean, Denise Kirkpatrick, Andrew Law, Peter Scott, Patrick McAndrew, Gráinne Conole, and to everyone at The Open University upon whose work this paper is based. References Henry Jenkins’ blog (accessed 28th Feb 2010) http://henryjenkins.org/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html Gee,J., (2004) Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2004. 11 Kim, A.J. (2000) Community Building on the Web, Berkeley, Ca.: Peachpit Press Laurillard (2002). Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd ed. London: Routledge Falmer. Pask, G. (1976). Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology.Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier. 12