Mr B’s Masterful Space

Lucky this course is all about flexible learning, because lately it has needed to be about as flexible as a very flexible thing!

There are sayings that have been popping into my head lately in relation to my Masters coursework, like the-world-has-conspired-against-me type sayings. Like what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this type sayings. Like “there is a light at the end of the tunnel (but no-one has turned it on)” type sayings.

But to succumb to these would be melodramatic, so plough on I have, into the spine tingling realisation that I have 10 days!

But it is not the ten days on which I would like to focus, rather the struggles I am having with another USQ subject I am studying at the same time as FET5601. And flexible it is not – like Nelson’s Column – not flexible. MGT8038! The Nelson’s Column of USQ!

My working and personal life over the past month has been unlike any of the 36 months preceding it, and as such, time for being Masterful has been very, very limited and as a result I submitted my first MGT8038 assignment late – I worked hard to get it finished, learnt quite a bit in the process but submitted it late. My bad. I’ll live with the consequences. I went searching for them.

I found them… in the Assessment section of the course notes…

“Any assignment work received after the due date without prior approval (yep, that’s me) in accordance with the above may be penalised by deducting 20% of the total marks available for the assignment for each working day late. If an assignment is more than one week (5 days) late (yep, that’s me) without having made appropriate arrangements as spelled out above, the grade of F (i.e. fail) will hence generally be recorded for that assignment.

To be fair to all students, this policy will be consistently applied in this course.”

So, I get “fero” (that’s Zero spelt with an F). I can live with that. I can hear the lecturers… and I know (I’m a teacher for goodness sake!) I should have read all the assessment details! I should have been more organised! I should have planned! I should have this, that, and the other, etc, etc, etc. Oops, was that life interrupting? I should have ignored life! Nelso… (enough!)

So I read on, through the rest of the assessment guff to determine if I still had a chance to pass the course with 40% of my marks down the tube due to fairness (and my lack of organisation and dogged reluctance to ignore life!), and there it was… POW! A word that stumped me.

Andragogy!

[Context]… “This course (MGT8038) as you know is built around the principles of andragogy rather than pedagogy.” (again, from the MGT8038 Assessment notes).

No, I didn’t know this! How was I supposed to know this? Was I supposed to have picked it up during my reading of the first module? “Ah-ha, I am sensing some andragogy in the principles surrounding the construction of this course!” I did not know. This required some research.

Was this some instructional design homage to David Bowie? Was this a course churned out by robots? Was this a cop-out to excuse the fact that there was very little structure to the course? What was this ‘Andragogy’?

So I sat researching andragogy for one of my precious Masters hours. What a revelation. It suddenly put into perspective the niggling doubts I had about the way MGT8038 was designed, or rather wasn’t designed. This next copy and paste follows directly from the “As you know…” reference above.

“You are adult learners. You are studying a course that is aimed at equipping you with a better ability to face ‘real-world’ challenges of business and organisational life. In that world there are no such luxuries as having detailed guidelines and criteria for exactly how to approach and what to do in respect of all the challenges out there. That world can be very complex, uncertain, confusing, ‘messy’ and some even refer to ‘chaos’.

As we have said at the outset of this course – it is your responsibility to do good work and to submit a good assignment.

We assess whether work is good and you’ll get the feedback as we go.”

I don’t know about you, but this, as a rationale for the design of a course, does not inspire confidence. Reading, “you are adult learners… no luxuries…chaos” is not inspiring much confidence in this too-oft-life-interrupted-Masters-masochist! I read wider.

From my very surface reading of articles related to Andragogy I have gathered it is a theory of adult education and learning made popular by Malcolm Knowles, that has gathered its share of supporters and detractors in recent years. It distinguishes itself from ‘Pedagogy’ on a number of levels.

I won’t go into it here (check out this link and this link for more info), but it has certainly made me think very seriously about the instructional design of MGT8038 and FET5601 and the impact that the underlying theoretical precepts can have on the design of, and subsequent participant satisfaction levels within a course. I am also starting to wonder what effect these theoretical foundations have on learning, assessment and results.

As I am learning, I am an adult learner. Fairness equals consistency in the application of the rule. Late is spelt with an F, in block capitals! There are no luxuries.

So as I sip the last mouthful of my ‘97 Coonawarra Shiraz and stub out my Montecristo (made in Tabacalera, Spain!) cigar to the strains of Suffragette City, I can’t help thinking something is amiss.

I think it is very important for the instructional designer to be aware that learners have preferred ways of learning that are possibly different from one another. This awareness should lead to considerations during the design phase of a variety of delivery methods, range of activities, alternate assessment options, etc.

One of the challenges for the designer is deciding whether to structure the program with the entire program offered in a variety of manners (to be truly flexible) or to offer a variety of structures across the duration of the course.

One of the questions I would pose is related to offering the learning in a variety of manners but then forcing all learners to communicate their learning in one format only. In my experience, it is in the communication of the learning that the most flexibility should be offered. Rather than force everyone to submit a written assignment (which automatically disadvantages those students with English as an acquired language), offer a choice of a written assignment, video presentation, recorded discussion on the topic, annotated flow chart, etc, etc. This allows students to reflect their learning in their preferred learning style.

This creates some interesting questions for the designer of a program that is being delivered online, and even some questions for this course.

I spent last night reading through all the suggested and optional readings for Module 2 of the course and found myself underlining, highlighting and doing a lot of general nodding. Analyse the ‘who’ – absolutely. Examine the ‘what’ – yep, no news there! Consider the ‘when’ – of course. Analyse the ‘where’ – for sure. Determine the ‘performance gap’ – most definitely.

So I started to think in a bit more detail about the learner and was given plenty of food for thought by Donald Clark (1995) and Regina Daigre (n.d.) and her contributors. Design around the participant – which I took as meaning with the participant as the focus rather than avoiding the participant in the design! Consider the ’stable same things’, ’stable different things’, ’samey changing things’, and ‘different changey things’ – all excellent stuff (even though I had never considered them in such a same, different, stable, changing sort of context). There was so much about discovering the interests, motivational level, attitudes, perceptions, self-concept, anxieties, beliefs and attributions of the learner. And there was this one sentence.

“Learner styles are key in developing effective instructional design materials.” Ah ha! (I thought to myself) Finally! Learner Styles! … but then there was … or Characteristics! So, I thought to myself, does she mean learner styles or learner characteristics? Because these are different are they not?

Different?

Not!

Aaah… (as opposed to an Ah ha!), I thought to myself. I’ve muddled things up. She is talking about learn-er styles, not learn-ing styles. So I continued looking for the ‘ing’ in amongst all the ‘ers’ and found… noth-ing! Now at this stage, please forgive me if I overlooked something, missed a page, fell asleep at the wheel or just plain ignored someone else’s post or the most important reading of the whole module, but I did not find anything relating to analysing the learn-ING styles of the learn-ERs.

Dr. Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory suggests that;

“…suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited. Instead, he proposes eight different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults…One of the most remarkable features of the theory of multiple intelligences is how it provides eight different potential pathways to learning. If a teacher is having difficulty reaching a student in the more traditional linguistic or logical ways of instruction, the theory of multiple intelligences suggests several other ways in which the material might be presented to facilitate effective learning.” (Armstrong, 2000)

So at the risk of err-ing, I would propose that there is much to be gained by carefully analysing the learn-ing styles of the participants in any course one is designing.

References:

Armstrong, T. (2000). “Multiple Intelligences.” Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://www.thomasarmstrong.com/multiple_intelligences.htm.

Clark, D. (1995, January 20, 2008). “Big Dog ISD Page.” Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/sat2.html.

Daigre, R. M. (n.d). “Chapter 4 – Instructional Analysis: Analysing the Learners.” Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.angelfire.com/la2/learners/learners.html.

It is week 4 and I have been enjoying (!) the readings so far – cause for pausing and chewing over what I am teaching at the moment and how much thought that has gone into the how and the why of the how. I am arriving at the same point in my chewing – choking on the lump of not-much-thought!

But then I swallow the lump down and tell myself that I do the things I do because of my years of experience telling me that they are effective ways to do things. But then the lump comes back up and I have to acknowledge that a re-evaluation, a closer look is due, which leads me to the major project and the three days between me and the due date for the proposal.

Will a coaching plan for a junior boys basketball team fit? I will have to carefully analyse the players to see what skills are needed, I will need to carefully structure that skill development to allow for improvements in fitness and ability and I will need to choose carefully how best to introduce the new skill. The win/loss record at the end of the season might even figure in my evaluation.

In terms of the ibstpi ID Competencies I can see elements of my program design fitting into the four sections. As for the ADDIE model, I definitely have analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation needs as a part of the coaching plan.

There, enough chewing! Only three days…

I have been teaching for 15 years and have taught students ranging in ages from 5 – 50, in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions in three countries. I love teaching but sometimes vehemently dislike being a teacher. As I read more and more about Instructional Design, I find myself thinking quite critically about the courses I am teaching at the moment, about the students I am teaching, about where they are from, what they already know, what they need to know, what they respond to best as they take that journey and how this all falls back to me.

The models of Instructional Design describe for me these areas that I have begun to critically consider and fill me with inspiration and desperation at the same time. The perfectionist in me acknowledges that in my teaching there is enough improvement room to moor the titanic. The realist in me knows that there just isn’t enough time to follow a comprehensive ID model to develop all my classes. The pragmatist in me is asking for the ‘cheat’ – what is the shortcut? What is the ‘easy’ way to incorporate and develop?

Maybe it is a matter of prioritising one of the letters in the ADDIE model. In this course the model I will observe is ‘adDie’, or ‘aDdie’ or ‘addIe’.

Maybe just the process of deciding which letter to capitalise, to focus on, is enough.

Amidst my uncertainty, I do know that with an awareness comes a responsibility and that come Monday, as I step in front of 24 hormone-riddled-ninth-graders to continue their stop-motion animation unit I will be reconsidering what comes next.

In fact, as I click ’save’ on this blog post, I have already begun.

Laurillard raises some interesting points, precipitating the flourish of the highlighter on more than a few occasions. One that received a particularly generous splash of iridescent orange is to be found in the last paragraph of page 25, “The technology can do only so much. On its own, it cannot offer academics what they need to adapt their teaching to the needs of the digital age.”

This I find to be a little “front backwards” as it were. Let me rewind momentarily…

The article paints a very vivid picture of the challenges faced by today’s academics – research vs teaching – and hints at time as being a feature of that vivid picture. So, caught between these two possibly opposing pressures, the academic tends to lean towards the perceived area of most reward and, as discussed by Laurillard, the teaching ends up as the bridesmaid.

If we now take a moment to focus on that teaching, it would occur to me that the “caught in the middle” academic would be looking to methodologies that are the most effective in terms of covering the course content and producing results (successful students), hence the tried and true transmission model.

So, coming back to the recently orange-ified couple of sentences on page 25, it would seem to me that technology, or more specifically, the technologists, need to do so much more. Technology needs to adapt to the needs of the teaching, teacher and students.

With a clear understanding of what teachers and students need and what real learning is and how it takes place, the technology can adapt and do so much.