More on SoTL

At the end of last month I wrote a short post on the scholarship of teaching-learning and my concerns about the idea that lecturers can easily publish a bit of research about their teaching. The past two days I have attended a workshop on blended learning and how one would do research about blended learning. I learned a few interesting things.

The workshop was presented by Anthony Picciano of CUNY (check out his blog here) and hosted by by a new research entity at the Vaal Triangle Campus called TELHE: Technology Enhanced Learning for Higher Education.

We covered some of the issues in doing education research, the grand debate on the medium vs the message, research paradigms, methodologies and methods. Tony also outlined some topics for research in education technology.

If you are interested mainly in the education technology part, he also has a nice SlideShare presentation called Blending with purpose.

For me the best part was the prescribed reading. He provided us with examples of different questions and different methods used in this line of research:

• Bowen et al. looks at interactive learning online at public universities. It is about the impact of interactive online learning on student outcomes. These are compared to more traditional face-to-face instruction using RCTs and speaks to an economist's post-positivism heart.
• Han & Hill examines online discussions, and uses discourse analysis. The idea of collaborative, co-creation of knowledge is something that economists would think about in terms of networks, or learning-by-doing, but putting it in the education context and using discourse analysis is something else.
• There were also two chapters from a book by Picciano et al. that I cannot link to. The one looked at student perspectives of engagement in a blended course and used a survey + a blog for some participatory action research. The other was about lecturers' perspectives of workload when they tackled online learning and used interviews and focus groups.

I still don't think that it will be easy for a regular economist to do research in this field. Just because you like to flip the class room, maybe blend face-to-face with online video's, quizzes or run a class blog, does not mean that you can easily publish papers about it. There will be lots of theories and new methods to learn. But it can definitely be interesting.

Lecturing in the digital age

Since I have returned to the office there is unfortunately less time to write blog posts than I had in May. However, I have been to some interesting meetings that inspire posts.

The past week two have been about lecturing in the digital age. If you are following this sort of thing you'll know that the internet is awash with posts on how Massive Online Open Courses is to bring about a revolution in higher education. In South Africa I have not met lots of people how worry about MOOCs, but everywhere there are academics moving towards the flipped classroom and more online learning. Administrators see distance learning (online) as a grow point.

In a meeting with a major publishing outfit, it was clear that not everyone is on the same page of the e-book. They want to "rethink textbook content delivery for the digital age". Many of my colleagues think about an e-textbook as the paper of the prescribed book, behind the gorilla glass of your tablet. It can be much more than that. It can be multimedia and interactive - even with specific feedback. This raises a bunch of questions. If you have multimedia and interactivity in the "book", what would be the point of those e-study guides that we hear we have to develop? Maybe you are already linking to videos or using the learning management system for electronic assessment - where would that fit into the story? If everything is going to be electronic, should it be in a "book", in different parts accessed through the LMS or packaged as a whole course at Udemy, iTunesU, or Coursera, or EdX? There is an interesting post on MOOCs as three kinds of LMS here. I suspect we will see lots of trail and error before we narrow this down to a few systems or products that work.

The publishers had an interesting answer to all this. They want to leverage all the book content that they have and add new digital content to create an ecosystem that we as academics (or our students) can subscribe to and then moderate and curate. They want to deliver this in a widget-based approach that can plug into your e-study guide or LMS or MOOC. You have to decide, do you want a core and then have all other resources available for students to explore (browser style)? Or do you want a core along with a defined path very specific advanced or remedial resources (app style)?

As cool as all this sounds I am worried that not enough lecturers are currently using a blended learning approach (a textbook, with a study guide, additional videos, or lecture capturing, along with pod casts, and on line tools, with some electronic assessment, in addition to lectures and class discussions) to know how to curate resources for the digital age. The technology mat be running far ahead of the pedagogy.