In late October an annual eLearning conference dedicated to training within companies - DevLearn 2013 - was held in Las Vegas. The conference and the exhibition were organized by the eLearning Guild, which is one of the most active and dominant elearning communities (The second one being ASTD). In this article, I would like to share with you some highlights and observations from the DevLearn 2013. Let’s start from a well-known vendor - Articulate, which continues to develop tools for tests. Articulate has recently made an attempt to introduce elements of content-authoring tools into their assessment editor. This is reflected, for example, in the following functions: - using uploaded images for creating drag'n'drop exercises (sorted by type, finding a matching pair)- using characters in assessments- creating additional effects and movements of objects This year Adobe places emphasis on video tools. At the Adobe booth was demonstrated a product, which allows making simultaneous records from camera and from desktop, to mix them together and overlay one on another. Immediately after recording a course developer can mark on the timeline when he would like to display video from the camera and when he would like to display video from the desktop. He can also chose the option of combining video from the camera with one from the desktop and then decide which of them is the dominant. One of the most popular booths at the exhibition was the eLearning Brothers’ booth, a company providing template packages, themes and characters for course editors. The company is a leader in this field and provides services to both individuals and eLearning vendors. Articulate Storyline also uses ready-made solutions provided by eLearning Brothers, to offer its users graphical objects. The eLearning Brothers’ products have become the model product in the market. One can buy eLearning Brothers’ graphical objects packages and use them in many popular course editors. A new supplier in the market eLearning services - Geenio - was introduced at the conference. In fact, Geenio is LMS with a built-in course editor and tools for test developing. The system is designed to work through web browser without any additional installation on client’s computer. Geenio - Content Authoring Tool Geenio focuses on user-friendly and easy-to-use interface, one we are used to see in modern Internet services. Most extraordinary fact about Geenio is that it is able to work on tablets directly out of the box. Moreover, on iPad you can not only view completed courses, but also create new ones or edit existing ones. Perhaps this is what most surprised guests at the Geenio both in DevLearn. Geenio also allows creating non-linear courses with Pathboard, this tool appears to be innovative and has high usability. Geenio - Pahtboard Geenio also plans to add gamification elements. Not just for learning about the product, but also for providing course authors with such tool. There are many other interesting ideas in this project, some of which have already been implemented. Closed beta testing will start soon, but so far only for those who have signed up to participate during DevLearn. Pathgather is another new product on the market. Visually, it resembles Geenio a lot, but the goal is different and less global. The basic idea is social learning as a basic tool for collaborative work in the corporate sector. It is a modern, visually-attracting LMS with an emphasis on social interaction. Pathgather - Learning Path Pathgather offers a tool for convenient storage and cataloging of thousands of online courses and other different sources in one handy place. With a help of Pathgather each employee can compile a "learning path". In other words, he can share his own methods of learning new stuff, making a "path" of successive resources. The Pathgather’s designers also promise to present a rich set of statistics and a tool for analysis of trends and employees’ activity within the organization. Now Pathgather is undergoing a recording on early access to the product. However, one can preview the product right now and see how attractive it is and how smoothly it works. HapYak has been also presented at DevLearn 2013. Their slogan is "No matter how you use video, interactive video is more effective. We make it easy". HapYak knows to create link on a specific moment in video. You say, it is not surprising, YouTube has long been able to do it. However, HapYak take it further by creating a simple navigation interface inside video, wh ere one can click on the link in the navigation menu and get transferred to the right place. HapYak - Navigation Panel There is also an ability to embed questions into video, known as Videoquiz. It supports both multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions allowing one to enter any text he would like to. There is a possibility of integration of HapYak with Pearson eCollege and other LMS. HapYak - Video Quiz In addition, it is possible to make marks directly inside the video in order to highlight something important or to share an expert opinion in an easy way. HapYak - Drawing This year HapYak also promises to provide detailed statistical reports. What links do users click on? What makes them watch videos longer than usual? What users are the most involved? Reports at the user level, and integration with popular statistics tracking tools, apparently with Google Analytics.

The annual e-learning conference eLearning Elements 2014 was held in Moscow, May 28th - 29th. The conference hosted by E-Learning Center, one of the biggest players at Russian e-learning market gathered together best education professionals, specialised software vendors and companies that looked for improvement in their learning processes. The conference had the round table format where attendees could discuss the broad range of industry issues starting from "Selling the idea of e-learning to top managers" and ending with "Freud’s Elearning". A distinguished part of all conversations was dedicated to gamification, the motive of which sounded in discussions that were not related to it even remotely. A new product - Geenio - was presented to the Russian market. The Geenio’s booth was very popular among attendees who demonstrated a live interest in the product and provided a lot of valuable feedback.Guests of Geenio’s booth were impressed by the lightweight and intuitive user interface, that allowed to create non-linear interactive courses with several drag-n-drops. No one could believe that it was really possible to create a branched course right in the browser without a single line of code. It is safe to say that Russian market needs an easy to use and still fully functional software. Moreover, many attendees said they needed a competence management mechanism built in the LMS. This would help to standardise employees’ education and guarantee the consistent result of trainings. Geenio team plans to participate other e-learning events and communicate with companies that run the e-learning project to understand their needs and demonstrate the newest industry trends implemented in the product.

by Michael TreserThe last few years have drastically changed the approach to how people interact with e-learning courses and how those courses are created. Modern trends supported by public opinion push e-learning authors towards producing something that is absolutely beyond our understanding about regular online courses.Many innovations are fleeting, unable to stand the test of time. Some new ideas, however, not only continue to grow into real life examples, but also find applications in day-to-day operations of many industries. We started crafting Geenio because we urgently needed a convenient, easy-to-use solution to create our own courseware. But, we could not find software that would satisfy those requirements. At that time, half of our team worked as instructional designers and trainers, and the need to produce competitive learning materials and run education within the company at affordable costs and minimal efforts was a real driver for making yet another e-learning application. It was an alternative to lowering our requirements and working with the solutions available, and the fun fact is that the members of our team came to that conclusion at the same time independently of one another.  That said, we decided to build our own tool with blackjack and gamification: a tool that would allow us to benefit from the latest achievements of the industry and cover our usage scenarios. The one requirement was that the tool adhered to modern web application standards - we were all tired of the mid-90s-like software interfaces that we used at that time.  We developed the idea, and it gradually turned into a product model with software requirements. By that time, we already had our team, in which each person had a very clearly defined role and mission in the project. Software developers and designers jumped in and brought a lot of fancy and outstanding features to the product. Initially, we were obsessed with the desire to add as many modules and functions into the product as possible. The reality, however, proved that it was not possible to do everything in the first version of the product. So, we decided to create functions to address only the main issues in the initial version of the product: -    Course authoring tool (The Editor) -    Assessment engine -    Learning management system  What are non-linear courses and what do we need those for?  We had a very special set of requirements for the course editor because we wanted to build non-linear courses that would adjust in complexity depending on the student’s abilities and change the way the student would go through the course. Our observations revealed that each student’s attitude and comfort were the cornerstones for a successful learning experience. Positive emotions helped the students to digest new information and later turn it into skills. An overly complicated course would demotivate students and the only result will be tiredness and dissatisfaction. An overly simplistic course, on the contrary, would make a learner bored. Such a learner would simply be clicking through the course, instead of gaining new skills. The main conclusion from these observations was the need to adapt the complexity of a course to the student’s level of knowledge. The purpose of non-linear courses is to enable course authors to build varied complexity courses by modifying the presentation of materials in response to student performance and demonstrated level of knowledge. That’s why we built the Pathboard. The Pathboard is the special course-authoring mode which can be used to add new pages, sets of pages (lessons), questions and sets of questions (tests) to your course, and interconnect those in any combination.  A course author always sees all possible learning paths and course branches because the Pathboard represents non-linear courses in an intuitive and easy-to-use visual manner. The main idea behind the Pathboard is that there may be several parallel ways to go through the course. Initially, a student may start at the medium level of complexity and after few pages takes an assessment that gauges the current level of knowledge. As a result, we may redirect the user to a more advanced path, stay at the same level or even go to a more detailed explanation of basic things, depending on what the course author decides.  There is no limitation for your creativity while crafting a course - you may make knowledge checkpoints throughout the course and direct your audience to appropriate learning paths. Just be careful to avoid creating excessive entities.  Gamification. The downfall of many.  At the very beginning of our project we decided that gamification would be a mandatory component of our product. Game mechanics built into the learning process appear to be one of a few elements that make courses really engaging. That, in turn, helps students make a breakthrough in gaining new skills and knowledge. A fascinating course by Kevin Werbach made our desire to implement gamification in Geenio even stronger.  Despite the popularity of gamification and the plenty of available materials, it appeared to be the most difficult part of the product engineering.   Not everyone knows that game elements provided by a service may not only be useless, but may also harm the learning process. There is a range of problems in gamification that are hidden or just ignored by many people. The most critical of those include: -    Game elements are not the same as the game itself. If you cross the thin red line, your learner may follow a mechanical game process and forget about the main purpose of the course - the learning. Even big companies face this issue, not to mention beginners in the industry. Moreover, it was specifically the wayward implementation of gamification by some software vendors that led to gamification not being taken seriously.  -    Gamification must not be a self-contained module. It has to be an enhancement of the main product functions, an auxiliary facility for making the learning process a bit more entertaining and engaging, but not for replacing it. -    It is not sufficient to simply add dozens of different badges, scores and levels. All these components must have vivid logic that makes sense to students. The process of getting the recognition and its further transformation into something else must be carefully designed and well-justified to users. -    Badges, rewards and any other distinct credentials should be limited in availability; otherwise, those will lose value for students. We tried to improve the gamification component several times using different approaches, but every time we crashed into one of the issues described above. Everything seemed just perfect in an SRS, but when applied to practice some implementations proved to be far-fetched, unnecessary and complicating the product. The gamification SRS was the most arguable document in the company. We completely rewrote it five times! Eventually, we found the golden mean and decided to start off with basic and yet useful functions that we expected to develop further using feedback from our customers.  Our main conclusion about gamification is that one shouldn’t completely pass control over it to a course author. Who knows the required skill set and competence level of employees better than their manager? So, we decided to grant a privilege of creating badges to Geenio users who have the role of Manager. All the manager needs to do is to set the rule that would reward a badge to a user after completing a learning plan. For example, if an employee successfully completes courses on PHP, MySQL and HTML with positive results, then the system will assign a badge "Web programming specialist" to such a user. Or give a badge "Thorough Learner" to a person who completed the largest number of courses among the department.  With that said, a the manager now becomes a part of the learning process too, and the main role of the manager is to set the goal of education. In turn, users can see the badges available and this helps to motivate them to perform bette. Moreover, the course author also has access to ramification elements and may reward students with a more or less prestigious prize depending on the results demonstrated. No one is missed; Everyone participates in the learning process. Cloud Solutions in E-Learning The cloud approach (SaaS) is still trending and these days it already dominates over the "traditional" on-premises software. Even such giants as SAP and Adobe participate in the great race of cloud solutions and they actively develop their own applications. Most experts predict the trend will remain unchanged and companies will continue moving to the cloud, because it’s easier, cheaper and requires less efforts from customers.  We evaluated available cloud solutions for e-learning and were impressed by the resulting picture. We were attracted immediately to the solutions and the overall experience was promising. However, once we tried to create a complete course, we faced many issues, such as unexpected behaviours or simply non-working controls. So, we understood that there is a demand for online course authoring software and new solutions of this kind are still required because existing apps cannot completely satisfy customers.  We decided not to reinvent the wheel or compete with such applications as Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline that were already the de-facto standard in the market, especially considering the existing market of SaaS education software. We, the Internet Generation, could not imagine another way to deliver our product because of the following reasons:  -    We needed a lightweight and fast service that is available from anywhere. -    With a broad audience to publish the course to, we didn’t want to worry about place or platform - it had to be a one-click action. -    We wanted to continue editing the course with a tablet, while sitting at the airport or on the train. -    We were attracted by the idea of collaboration within the software, with the author getting feedback right in the course and improving it on the fly.  All these concerns made the decision very simple - just provide the product via SaaS. As a result, we were able to address all the issues listed above and even more than that, we added some other functions that became possible. For example, we added a useful feature that allows you to insert a picture not only from your local computer, but also from the Internet using the Google Images service, right in your Geenio editor. The same thing with videos - why not drag and drop a Youtube file into your course you find it in the built-in search menu? One can hardly determine the real value of a trend unless the trend is applied in real life. And that is what we did while developing Geenio. Some trends turned out to be ineffective, and we rejected those without any regrets. Others proved to be so useful and natural that we wondered how those hadn’t become a standard in the industry. We want to advise our readers not to swear by new trends and test them out to going to production. Many trends are soap bubbles and if you cannot justify the use of a trendy and fancy feature, then you probably don’t really need it. At least it may not be completely applicable for your company and its business needs. Try and make your own decisions, and don’t be afraid to stand out from the crowd while defending your choices.  Remember that the goal of e-learning is still the same - help your students gain new knowledge.

Days leading up to Halloween 2014, a conference took place in fabulous Las Vegas called "DevLearn", the world’s biggest e-learning event produced by the eLearning Guild.  The Geenio team was on board for the conference as well as the expo for the third consecutive year and the second time as an exhibitor and a sponsor. It was an honor to participate in DevLearn to connect with the community and learn the newest trends and challenges of the industry. It was also a chance for us to talk to our customers directly and receive direct feedback firsthand. In addition, we offered a free trial account of Geenio to all attendees. "Full Cycle Learning Tool" - What does that exactly mean? This short phrase formulated for Geenio’s key target immediately raised questions for many visitors to our booth. But the answer is not hard to figure out: with Geenio you can implement online training within your company from scratch without requiring any other tools. Geenio allows you to create non-linear courses that adjust to a user experience right in your browser: These courses may have various multimedia pages or lessons to facilitate sharing author’s knowledge: Tests and questions are also the part of your course that help to control the results of knowledge transfer throughout the course:  The LMS part of Geenio provides the capabilities for transparent course assignments:  As a result, you can find an employee’s strengths and knowledge gaps and help your employees to achieve a level of competence and be successful in their jobs:    A demonstration of these capabilities convinced our visitors to go ahead and try the full Geenio version available at our website.  Dev Learn 2014 Results  With that said, we succeeded in our goal to introduce our product to a broad audience. Additionally -  as a bonus - we found several potential businesses and technology partners with the idea that we’d work together to help our customers be successful in the e-learning industry, whether or not they are Instructional Designers or SMEs.  Does what happen in Vegas stay in Vegas? OK, well, we broke the rules and remembered all those productive conversations and interesting interlocutors. And we’ll be back in 2015 with more features that our customers want.  But, you don’t need to wait till 2015 to check out our free trial version and watch the short video.  Kudos to Dev Learn 2014! See you soon!  

Not long ago Geenio LMS and Authoring Tool was updated. In the new version some very useful and important features were added. Some of the new features were requested by users and others were added just to make Geenio even better. Here is the short list of the changes. Check the details below. Created a Background Tool Introduced Color Schemes Added Typography Options Improved Page Connections Fixed Various Bugs Background Tool Adding backgrounds to course pages is a repetitive task when developing a course.  We understand that users want to save time on this routine process, and this is one of the reasons why we decided to create a new user-friendly tool for working with backgrounds. Now we have a special tool for backgrounds that allows users to add background images from their hard drive or from Google Image Search and automatically formats the image to fit the page. This tool also allows users to choose the color of the background from the color palette. Typography We have added an option to choose fonts for the texts on your pages. There are 16 beautiful fonts that can make your course look unique. The new typography feature allows you to see the changes before applying them to your course. Color Schemes Color Schemes is another new feature in our content authoring tools. Color schemes lets you choose a set of colors for the course that will apply to the pages. It’s very user-friendly and intuitive. Improved Page Connections We improved the interactions between course pages. Our team of developers made it so easy and aesthetic that there is no need to explain how it works. You just have to try. I think this is the best implementation of this feature I have ever seen in this kind of services. Take my money and give me three!   Fixed Various Bugs When you are adding and improving existing features as much as we were, you also get to fix a lot of things along the way. In the last few months we fixed various bugs. There is a lot in stability improvement and the new version will bring you a much more positive user experience than before. A lot of small but important things now work better and make us happy. Now, course authors can focus on content creation without wasting time on disturbing issues and bugs. The latest version of Geenio is available for a free trial on our web-site. If you have some ideas about how to improve our product or features that you desire to see in Geenio, feel free to contact us.

Learning path can be adjusted in three ways:The right or wrong answer to the questionSuccessful completion or failure of the testAdding interactive transmissions to the objects on the pageAll learning paths can be adjusted on the Pathboard screen. Below I will describe in detail how to create different learning paths for each of the ways.1. The right or wrong answer to the question     a. Add a new Question object to your course pathboard.     b. Write the question and choose the right answer.     c. Click on the created question on the pathboard and you will see two different colored icons.         d. Drag the correct and incorrect icons and drop them on the page where that student should go after answering the question.     e. Now it’s ready. You created two different paths for learners to take depending on their answers to specific questions in the course. .2. Successful completion or failure of the test     a. Add a new Test object to the pathboard.     b. Add a set of questions for your test and set the pass threshold in the test settings.     c. From here, just repeat steps C to E from the previous paragraph and enjoy the alternative learning paths in your course.3. Adding interactive transmissions to the objects on the pageThis way is little bit different from the previous two, but it is still easy and intuitive to understand.     a. Add a few objects on one of your pages. They can be images, texts or shapes.     b. Go to the pathboard of your course.     c. Click on the page you have created.     c. You will see a blue icon with a hand on it.     d. Drag this icon and drop it on one of the other existing pages.     e. You will be asked to choose one of the objects on the page. Clicking on the object will take the student to the predefined page. Please note that you can trigger only one action on each object. If you already defined an action on some object and want redefine it you will need first to remove the old connection from the object.     f. Click on the "Create" button and you will see a new connection between the object and the chosen page.

We just wanted to let you know that Geenio got a big update last week. We are always carefully gathering feedback to improve our product. This update included several bright ideas suggested by our users.New friendly design for account managementWe’ve improved the first page that you see after creating a Geenio account - the site management page. Now it’s really simple to take the next step to start using Geenio and to extend the limits of your subscription as you need.Simple Editing ModeWith the new simple editing mode you can start creating your course with even less effort than in the previous version. You can start authoring every new course with a clear linear structure, where all course components go one after another.When you need to go beyond the simple narrative mode, you can switch your course to the advanced mode in just one click and get all the capabilities of non-linear courses.The simple mode offers you Page, Lesson and Test as your course components, while the advanced mode also includes Question and feedback connections. Moreover, you can switch back and forth between these modes when the course has only linear elements.User and Group ManagementNow it is even easier to manage course assignments for users and groups. When you add a user to a group, all courses assigned to the group automatically become mandatory for the user.On the other hand, when you remove a user from a group, there is a choice whether to leave courses assigned to the user, or remove those that were pushed from the group assignments.More stability and user experience improvementsWe created a unified user interface and overall user experience in the Simple and Advanced modes. We improved user experience by editing text elements of the course in various browsers. In addition, we improved license configuration handling, implemented more than 300 other enhancements and fixed some other issues.Till we meet again!Geenio Team.

It is no big secret that most professionals, regardless of occupation, have a set of favorite tools that save them time and help them do their job better. A well-crafted toolbox saves you time, makes routine tasks easier, and helps you do your job with a smile. E-learning professionals are no different. Let me introduce five free Mac apps I cannot imagine doing without.I will not waste your time talking about Evernote or Dropbox - those are well-known and widely used. Instead, I would like to bring your attention to a few apps you may not have heard about, but that are no less useful, and can really help you out in your day-to-day tasks.SipWhen creating a course, having to strictly adhere to the customer’s design means you have to keep to the specified styles and measurements, and it is usually required that you use the provided color palette as well.In such situations, Sip is a life-saver. It enables you to pick colors from photos, pictures, web pages, or running applications with a single click. Just hover the cursor over the object, click left mouse button, and the HEX color code is saved to the clipboard, to be inserted in your course authoring tool. If HEX is unsuitable for you, choose among RGBA, HSL, HSLA, CMYK, or one of the many other formats the app supports. By default, Sip remembers the last five colors you picked. It also gives you its best guess at the names of picked colors.The app is free and takes up little disk space. A paid upgrade to the professional version is available, bringing with it a number of additional features. The ones I found to be the most useful are the ability to automatically create a palette complementing a color of your choice, and to edit the selected colors right from the quick access panel in the Mac menu bar .Sip could be very useful for case scenario when the client showing you an image they found somewhere on the Internet and asking to "just make it look like this".http://theolabrothers.com/PixelPerfectOkay, we have got the colors covered. However, when using a mockup provided by the client, getting the measurements right is every bit as important. This is where PixelPerfect comes to the rescue. It gives you the ability to make a mockup semitransparent and overlay it upon the image produced by a different application - for example, your course authoring tool. This makes it really easy to notice even minor differences between what you have got so far and what your client or boss want to see. When adhering to the mockup is essential, PixelPerfect becomes an indispensable tool.https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixel-perfect/id916097243?mt=12LigthshotNo course is complete without images. Besides the purely illustrative pictures meant to set the tone for the course, it is often necessary to add screenshots with the requisite callouts. For example, there is no getting around it if your course teaches the use of a software product. Now, there are literally hundreds of apps out there that make screenshots, but I recommend Lightshot, for a number of reasons. First, it is free. Second, there is both a Mac and PC version. Third, unlike many of its counterparts, it does not attempt to make screenshots, capture video, and brew you a mean cuppa tea, all at once. It knows exactly what it sets out to do, and its minimalism is admirable. And finally, Lightshot gives you the ability to add callouts to the screenshot without the need to use an image editor - very handy.If this was not enough, Lightshot also enables you to share your screenshots with a single click. Alternatively, you can upload them to the Lightshot cloud by logging in with your Google or Facebook account - this will also let you access your screenshots from any computer. All in all, Lightshot is a fantastic little piece of software that I cannot recommend enough. I will let you in on a little secret - for me it replaced a different screenshot-making tool I had happily used for seven years prior to trying Lightshot, and that is saying something.https://app.prntscr.comRecorditWhen you are trying to explain a particularly tricky concept or scenario, a single screenshot might not get the job done. You are presented with the ugly choice of either stringing together four or five of those, complete with the requisite callouts and explanations, or, figuratively speaking, calling in the artillery and making a video. However, both options fail miserably when you need to provide instructions at a moment’s notice and send them by email. This is where Recordit shines.Do you remember GIFs? Animated images from the dawn of the Internet that nobody could agree on how to pronounce correctly? Yeah, the Imgur people are still obsessed with them. More to the point, Recordit operates on a similar principle. It captures a portion of the screen, including the movements of the mouse cursor and any clicks you make, and makes a .gif image file out of it. The resulting image is uploaded to the Internet, and you are given a link to access it. That is all Recordit does. One trick pony? Sure, but the one trick it does, it does ever so well. Click a button, select the portion of the screen to capture, start recording, done. Simple as that.You can see Recordit as a pared down screen capture or video editing tool, one that produces not courses, but .gifs. On the upside, it is completely free. It is a real life-saver when you need to quickly demonstrate something to a client or a colleague. Because the resulting screencast is a .gif and not a video, it is much easier to send it in an email. GIFs take little disk space and require neither the Flash plugin nor a video player or codecs for playback.Recordit comes in especially handy when you need to quickly demonstrate an issue that the other party cannot reproduce on their side. But enough with the talking. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is one to let Recordit show off its chops:LittleIpsumWhen the burden of creating a mockup for the course rests upon your shoulders, you are usually required to show the client the work in progress every now and then. Until the course is ready, there is usually no content, so text blocks are filled with nonsense text - most usually Lorem Ipsum. LittleIpsum is a handy little program that generates its namesake on demand, saving you the trouble of visiting websites of similar function. It can generate the requisite number of words, lines, or paragraphs of text and save them to the clipboard - all it takes is literally two clicks of the mouse. Like all the other programs presented here, LittleIpsum is lightweight and free, as well as convenient and easy to use.http://littleipsum.com/

Great news everyone! Last week we published a new Geenio release. We delivered a number of improvements to the look and feel of the product, as well as implemented new functionality we are sure you all will love. Curious about the details? Read on!Hybrid Courses With SCORM SupportThe ability to create hybrid courses is the most important feature added in this release. We received a lot of feedback requesting the ability to import courses created with the help of other authoring tools. The importance of this feature for those who had dozens - or hundreds - of courses already created in a variety of other course building applications was fully understood. Well, you asked and we delivered.In fact, we decided to do you one better. Besides merely importing SCORM-based courses, Geenio now enables you to add new learning objects to those courses with the help of our authoring tool. In other words, you you can now import an existing course to Geenio, and then expand it by adding pages, lessons, or tests, thus creating a hybrid course, consisting of both SCORM packages and Geenio objects. Enjoy!Statistics ExpandedWe added a summary page at the end of every test. When a user completes a test, they are shown their result, as well as the number of errors they made, the date they took the test, and how much time they spent on it. They can also see the list of all answers they provided, with each one marked as either correct or false. This information is available independently for every attempt the user makes, enabling them to accurately track their progress.In addition, we implemented global site statistics. Those provide such information as the number of published courses for a given period and the number of created users, as well as data pertaining to their levels of activity within the system and average test result values.Course CopyingSimplifying workflows to save your time is one of our top priorities, and with that in mind, we added the ability to copy existing courses in Geenio update 1.3. This functionality saves you time by enabling you to simply copy an existing course and make changes to it instead of building a new one from scratch.New Course Management OptionsWe added a handy navigation tool letting the user go to any page of the course they have already seen. We also implemented the ability to limit the time allowed for completing a course - whenever a course is assigned to a user, you can set a due date, by which the course must be completed. If the course is not completed by the due date, the user can no longer take it.Authoring Tool ImprovementsNeedless to say, we could not have rolled out the update without a few tweaks to our indispensable authoring tool. Our developers improved working with text and headers, and fixed many bugs that got in the way of the creative process of making courses. We also reviewed and expanded the list of possible font sizes. But the most pleasant surprise, no doubt, is the newly introduced ability to align different objects with each other, as well as aligning objects to grid. We know that you want your courses to look nice and orderly, and this new functionality enables you to make sure every object is in its place quickly and easily. Give ‘er a try - we are sure you will love it.Despite the number of improvements we have delivered in this update, here at Geenio we never stop innovating. You can look forward to many new and exciting features in the future. Is there anything in particular you would like to see implemented in Geenio? Let us know, and we will be happy to discuss it with you.All the best, and stay tuned. :)The Geenio team

I have been a blogger now for a few years and although I go through phases of inactivity on the whole I think blogging has become an important and fundamental part of my practice. I was prompted to begin in part because I realised I didn’t really understand blogging as a practice and wanted to explore whether or not it could be of value for me. To be honest I was pretty sceptical but once I started was amazed at how valuable I found it. For me blogging performs a number of functions: It acts as a reflective outlet, helps me develop and articulate ideas, in a fairly informal and quick fashion It acts as a repository of my ideas and resources It provides a mechanism for promoting project work and the work of others I respect in the community It enables me to be part of the wider network, to connect with other researchers. This link lists some of my previous musing on the topic. Twitter has changed how I blog and how frequently, but it hasn’t replaced it. I, like others (see the twitter vs. blogging flash debate), think the two are complementary. For me Cloudworks is increasingly becoming a third dimension = as a means of collective live blogging, discussion and aggregation of resources around a particular topic or theme. But then I guess I would say that wouldn’t I!

This is my third blog post associated with my recent talk at the Italian e-learning society conference in Salerno. The previous posts reviewed e-learning policy to date and argued that despite the potential of technologies, the impact on practice has not been as extensive as might have been hoped. There is a gap between the rhetoric of policy and actual practice. Why is it that great policy initiatives still fail? I think there are three main reasons: Common reasons for not engaging "I haven’t got time" "My research is more important" "What’s in it for me?" "Where is my reward?" "I don’t have the skills to do this" "I don’t believe in this, it won’t work" Common resistance strategies I’ll say yes (and do nothing) Undermine the initiative Undermine the person involved Classic mistakes Emphasis on the technologies, not the people and processes Funding for technology developments In this post I want to put forward a framework designed to help bridge that gap and ensure that policy is more effective. To my mind policy needs to be considered in relation to three other inter-related aspects of e-learning: research and development, teacher practice and the learner experience. Only by taking account of these can we ensure that policy is effective. In order to maximise each of these we need to do the following: Policy: Align with institutional and national initiatives and funding opportunities, ensure it is firmly embedded in relevant strategy, and align with broader technological trends. Research and development: R&D enables us to explore what is possible with technologies, however it is important that we put in place effective formative evaluation strategies to observe changing user behaviour as they interact with the tools, as well as identification of drivers and challenges. Teacher practice: We need to start from where teachers currently are, their motivations and fears, their skills levels. Upper most in our minds must be the question "What’s in it for them?" We need to observe and learn from actual practice, how the teachers are interacting with the tools, what is working and what isn’t. The learner experience: Perhaps most importantly of all we need to identify what impact all of this is actually having on the learner experience, is there evidence of improvement? Because ultimately surely this is the overarching goal - pedagogically effective and innovative use of technologies to improve the learner experience. All four aspects are inter-related: the research can inform future policy directives and help guide practice. The teacher and student voices can in term help shape policy and steer R&D activities. I concluded the talk by posing a series of questions and reflections: What is the relationship between Government rhetoric and actual practice? How can technologies support new forms of pedagogy? What is the relationship between technologies, physical and virtual spaces and pedagogy? How do we take account of a digital divide that is ever narrower but deeper? What new digital literacy skills will learners and teachers need ? E-learning innovation will require a radical rethinking of the curriculum, E-learning challenges existing norms about assessment Too often policy is developed in isolation from the other components of e-learning and as a consequence too often it fails. By articulating the explicit relationship to these other components there is a chance that policy can begin to have a greater impact. Link to the other blog posts, resources, references and the slides are available on cloudworks.  

Today is the final day of the Italian e-learning society conference in Salerno. It’s always interesting to get an insight into e-learning research and development activities in other countries - to compare similarities and notice differences. Mine was the only talk in English, so my host Maria Rosaria D’Esposito had very kindly arranged for me to have two interpreters. I was amazed by how they were able to keep up with the complex range of technical discussions and the speed of the presentation. It made a big difference to feel more directly connected with the conference - so my thanks to Gabriella Rammairone and Maria Graziani. The talk enabled me to work up some ideas I have been mulling over in terms of the relationship between policy and practice, and to put forward an e-learning policy framework as described in the previous post. I used our own work on Cloudworks and Olnet as illustrative case studies of how policy, practice and research can be more closely aligned.  As always having attended the conference I go away, having had the change to reconnect with colleagues - it was great to see Lorenzo Cantoni from Lugano again, make new friends, and gain a few new ideas and insights. And it has to be said Salerno is a pretty nice location to boot. Only problem is I have my Spanish oral exam next week, so four days immersion in Italian is maybe not such a good idea from that respect…. The image is a view of the bay of Salerno, which is a lovely town about an hour south of Naples. On the last evening I went out with Maria and a couple of her colleagues and had one of the best Pastas I have ever had! "Foglie D’Ulivo" - yum! Cooked some last night at home with a fresh pesto sauce which seemed to go down well!

Juliette Culver and I are currently reworking the paper I presented at the Ascilite conferencelast year into a journal article. Whereas the Computers and Education paper we have just published concentrated on the design decisions we have made to date, this paper describes the theoretical underpinnings to the development of the site. It has been interesting reworking the Ascilite conference paper in the light of all the major changes we have made to the site. I am pleased (and relieved!) to see that our theoretical basis still stands and is proving to be a really useful guide for ongoing activities around the site - both in terms of technical developments and actual use and evaluation of the site. A draft of the paper can be found here.

Juliette Culver, Paul Clark and I recently attended the kick off meeting for a new EU-funded Leonardo project. We haven’t got a catchy title for it yet.  The project is led by Charalambos Vrasida from CARDET, Nicosia, Cyprus. The project involves Cyprus, Greece, the UK and Austria. Others involved at this stage include Anastasia Oikonomou, Christiana Aravi,  Demetris Hadjisofocli, Ray Laverty, Simos Retalis and Martha Vasiliadou. We had an excellent kick off meeting, one of the exciting things discussed was the idea of creating a Greek version of Cloudworks. Once we have that in place we can of course make it available in other languages. Spanish is definitely top of my list! Picture is of Juliette and me working hard at the seaside Here is a summary of the project There is a strong need for flexible and evidence-based teacher professional development programs on integrating ICT in their teaching that will enable them to grow and improve the quality of education they offer to EU citizens. Recent evaluations of the technology related professional development of K-12 teachers in Cyprus and the EU showed the need for more emphasis on ongoing, flexible professional development for teachers. The purpose of this project is to advance teachers’ skills and competencies to better prepare them in integrating ICT in teaching and learning. Specifically, the training aims at: 1) preparing teachers to teach with ICT, and 2) advancing teachers’ lifelong learning skills by building a community of teachers for sharing, discussing/debating, and improving instructional activities and learning designs. Partner organizations include CARDET (Centre for the Advancement of Research and Development in Educational Technology), the Open University UK, the University of Piraeus, the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute, the International Council for Educational Media, and INNOVADE LI Ltd. The partnership is key to this project, as it brings together collective knowledge and expertise from previous projects on teacher training and professional development, online education, blended learning, and learning designs, and ensure that outcomes comply with international standards for ICT and professional development. Project outcomes include: transfer of innovation from the world leading institution on e-learning (The Open UK); a teacher training and learning framework that will guide the design and development of training modules; face-to-face and online teacher training modules; an online portal with a community of teachers. The modules will include curriculum development, instructional materials, online portals, learning environments and tools, and teacher handbook. Reports will also be produced on the evaluation of the training implementation, as well as on the dissemination and exploitation of the results. The short-term impact of these outcomes includes reaching out to at least 500 teachers through workshops, trainings, and conferences. The long-term impact will be to advance the training and education offered by partner countries to various groups and serve as a project that will better address the needs of EU citizens. Furthermore, the integration and extension of the transfer of innovation from partners’ previous projects will enable us to create a dynamic and robust framework that will empower Europe to become a leader in teacher training, as well as online and blended learning, with an emphasis on lifelong learning.

I’m just at the end of a two-week trip to North America, so I thought it would be useful to write a quick blog post to reflect on the various events I have been attending. It’s been a great opportunity to share some of our latest learning design work and to get feedback on the different aspects. I started in Vancouver where I participated in a two-day event for the British Columbia Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG). The first day was a workshop where participants played with our various tools and resources, and in particular CompendiumLD. Cloudworks proved to be a useful tool to support the workshop; as a place to share resources, live blog workshop activities, aggregate other relevant resources and participate in discussions. On the second day I began with a talk given an overview of the Open University Learning Design Initiative. This was followed by a series of talks from members of the ETUG community. Sylvia Currie and I jointly live blogged all the sessions. A very rich cloudscape emerged which has now had over 400 unique views! I then attend the TechItUp conference in Kamloops. There were four excellent keynotes and I gave a talk and a workshop. Again a cloudscape with relevant resources and live blogs has been set up. Finally I attended the AECT conference in Louisville, Kentucky. I had been invited by Mike Spector to give a presidential address at the conference. The cloud for the talk is here and a cloudscape with a few live blog clouds is here. It was particularly useful to get feedback from people on Cloudworks and hence to get some new recruits involved in using the site. A number of people I spoke to could see a real use for the site to foster debate in communities they were involved with, but also that it had potential in terms of being used with students. It will be interesting to see what emerges as a result. When I was preparing for my talk at AECT I got hold of the latest stats we are collecting for the site. We now have 1365 registered users,  but there are nearly 17,000 unique visits to the site from over 130 countries. There are 1394 clouds and 117 cloudscapes. It’s great to see Cloudworks really starting to take off and to see that it is becoming a truly international community space.

This coming week, it’s the JISC’s 6th CETIS conference. Entitled "A brave new world?’, the programme for the event is here. Keynotes by Chris Cobb, Oleg Liber and the technology critic Bill Thompson. We have set up a cloudscape for the conference with clouds for each of the session, so if you are going to the conference join in live blogging sessions and adding relevant links or references. The hashtag is #cetis09, we have embedded the twitter stream for the conference into the cloudscape and a twapperkeeper archive has been set up for these tweets.

Here is a draft of some ideas I am currently thinking of it terms of working up the framework for technological intervention I mentioned in a previous post. I would welcome thoughts. Introduction It appears as if e-learning is now embedded in most educational institutions; from the provision of an appropriate technological infrastructure to support teaching, research and administrative activities through to the innovative use of technologies for learning. National and international policies in the area reflect this and are filled with rhetoric about the potential technologies offer for education - personalisation, flexibility, adaptively, and engaging, authentic environments. However, closer inspection suggests that there is a gap between the promises inherent in the policy rhetoric and actual use in practice. This post will focus on a retrospective e-learning timeline, mapping the shifting directions of policy perspectives and their subsequent impact on practice. It will extrapolate the timeline to consider the implications of technologies for education in the future. It will then present a framework for ensuring that e-learning interventions are effective, that emphasises the relationship between e-learning policy, research and practice. I argue that use of such a framework can help ensure that e-learning research informs and helps shape both policy and practice and vice versa - that activities in practice can in turn inform further policy directions and suggestions for areas which need further research investigation. Scrutinising the e-learning history line There is evidence to suggest that e-learning is beginning to mature as an area (Marshall & Mitchell 2004, Jones & O’Shea 2004,  Conole & Oliver 2007,  Zhang & Nunamaker 2003). Technologies are now an integral part of educational institutions’ infrastructures and core strategies and policies. The promise of e-learning infiltrate national and international policy perspectives; purporting that e-learning offers new exciting possibilities for learning - for personalisation, for student-centred learning, to support new forms of communication and dialogical learning and enriched multi-model forms of representation (DCSF 2009, M. Brown et al. 2007, Hodgson 2002, Andrews & Haythornthwaite 2007). Nonetheless the promise behind the rhetoric of e-learning has yet to be realised (Hedberg 2006). Zemsky and Massy in their ‘Thwarted innovation’ report (Zemsky & Massy 2004) argue that there are three naïve assumptions associated with e-learning: ‘If we built it they will come’, ‘The kids will take to e-learning like ducks to water’ and ‘E-learning will force a change in the way we teach’. One of their key conclusions was that ‘The hard fact is that e-learning took off before people really knew how to use it’. Many others have written about ‘what went wrong’ with e-learning (Davis et al. 2007), the gap between the rhetoric and reality (Conole 2007) and the ‘no significant difference’ (between e-learning and traditional teaching) argument (Ramage 2001, Russell 2001).  So what is the reality? The reasons for the lack of impact of technologies in education to date are complex and multifaceted. In truth successful implementation of e-learning is dependent on a range of inter-connected factors - which are as much to do with pedagogical and organisational issues as with purely technical ones. To explore these issues, this section will provide a brief summary of some of the key technological developments of the last few decades, focusing in particular on the relationship between technological developments, policy directions and actual impact on practice. Conole, Smith and White provided a chronological reflection of the development of e-learning in a UK tertiary educational context spanning the period 1965-2000 (Conole, Smith et al. 2007). They argue that whilst technologies change rapidly, the management of them change much more slowly. I would add that the impact on change in practice is also much slower. This lag between technological developments and impact on policy and practice is one of the factors hindering radical change. They divide technological change into four main phases: 1965-1979: Mainframe systems. In the sixties, use of computing in education was dominated by mainframe computers and mainly focused around use for high-end scientific research. Nonetheless the potential for education was evident. In the seventies policy reports considering the use of technological for educational purposes began to emerge and subsequently associated funding initiatives and professional bodies. The focus in this phase was very much on the application of computers in a scientific context primarily for research purposes; mainframes operated by computer specialists dominated the discourse although there were hints of the potential wider application of computers across institutions. 1980-1989: Stand-alone systems. The emergence of the personal computer was the first major shift in terms of technologies having a broader impact on education. Initial application focused around the use of PCs in a business context, with the consequently emergence of basic office tools such as word processing applications and spreadsheets, but as educators began to use these tools to support their general administrative duties they also began to experiment with how they could be used in a teaching context. In the UK and in mainland Europe funding initiatives explicitly exploring the potential of new technologies for education emerged, including the TLTP programme in the UK (Gilbert 1999, Stern & Impact 1997) and the EU Framework Progammes for research and technological developments (Berleur & Galand 2005, Muldur et al. 2007). Significant funding was made available via these programmes that enabled educators to explore the different affordances of new technologies and to gather empirical evidence of their impact on practice. Many of the technological artefacts produced though these initiatives (interactive computer-based tutorials, laser disks, etc.) became obsolete with the emergence of the Internet, nonetheless this period of technological experimentation marked the emergence of e-learning as a new research field (Conole & M. Oliver 2007). What is evident from initiatives in this phase is that they were characterised by two things: the exploration of the potential of technologies through the ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach and the emergences of associated new professional roles (e-learning researchers, learning technologies, managers of learning systems) (Conole, White et al. 2007). 1990-2000 Networked technologies: The emergence of networked technologies, and in particular the Internet, marked the next major phase of technological developments. Email became the main communication tool within institutions, replacing the paper-based memo; word processors replaced the traditional role of secretaries and institutions began to exploit the communicative affordances of the web for disseminating information both internally and externally. This indicated that technologies were moving from being peripheral innovations to affecting all aspects of learning and teaching. Institutions were beginning to understand that technologies were a core aspect of their business and hence needed to be incorporated into institutional strategies and policies. Beyond 2000: Politicisation and systematisation. Conole et al. were optimistic that post-2000 there was evidence of more coherent policy perspectives at a national level in the UK, with an increasing emphasis on the importance of technologies to support learning. They argued that the various e-learning funding initiatives were not only providing opportunities to gather evidence on how technologies might be used in education, but also resulting in the growth of new professionals with specialised expertise in this area. They highlighted the grow of associated research centres specifically focusing on e-learning and the consequential increase in publications and conferences discussing the field.  They argued that the web in particular was a significant trigger during this time, singling out Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)/Learner Management Systems (LMS) which they argues acted as important catalysts for shifting the use of technologies beyond early adopters by providing easy to use, all in one environments for supporting web-based teaching. The chapter was written before the impact of the current wave of new technologies, in particular web 2.0 tools and services, virtual learning environments and new generations of mobile technologies. These new technologies bring with them a variety of additional affordances; new means of communicating and representing information. E-Learning research has matured over this period of time and is providing valuable insights into how these technologies are being used and their impact (and in some cases lack of impact) on practice. However, despite this increased variety of technologies, it is arguable whether the optimistic coherence in policy and systematic use of technologies indicated by Conole et al. has actual been realised. The gap between rhetoric and reality is still evident. In a related international review of e-learning policy and practice, Conole compared e-learning directives in six international contexts: Europe, the United States, Australia, China and Africa (Conole 2007). The review shows the influence of the different cultural contexts on how e-learning policies for each country were focussed and the consequential impact on actual practice. Conole then considered the way in which e-learning developments (as instantiated in practice driven by policy directives) have had an impact on higher education, classifying these into ten types: * The degree of hegemony: the balance between local and global perspectives. * The degree of urban vs. rural developments. * The balance of commercial imperatives vs. government directions. * The types of funding models available. * The organisational and managerial structures to support e-learning. * The changing nature of roles as a result of e-learning implementation. * The increased drive for academics on focus more on research than teaching. * The unintended consequences arising from e-learning interventions. * The types and impact of communicative mechanisms used to disseminate e-learning initiatives. * The degree of self-reflective and evaluation.  Figure 1 provides a summary of these factors considering them in relation to wider contextual factors, specific policy and practice directives in different regions, and consequential impact in practice. It illustrates how the macro contextual factors influencing society generally (i.e. globalization, an increasingly network society, changing societal norms and values and technological advances) provide a contextual force and influence local policy and associated practices and how these in turn result in the ten types of impacts on practices listed above.     A glimpse into the future The previous section took a retrospective look at e-learning developments in the last three decades and considered the relationship between different waves of technological development and policy/practice.  Can we get any indication of what future developments might be and hence use this as a basis to help steer decisions about future directions for policy and practice? This section will consider four sources of data that provide a glimpse into the future. The next section will then discuss emergent themes that are evident from this research and associated challenges for education.  Four sets of research are drawn on: the annual series of Horizon reports, reviews of web 2.0 technologies and their use in education, a report on the future of cyberlearning and an edited collection exploring the increasingly prevalent trend towards ‘openness’ in education (for example - open source tools, open educational resources). The annual Horizon reports1 provide a valuable glimpse into the future by predicting which technologies are going to have the most significant impact in one, three and five years time. The preview report for 2010 lists mobile computing and open content as being within the one-year timeframe, electronic books and simple augmented reality within two-three years and gesture-based computing and visual data analysis within four-five years.2 In each case the report indicates the advantage of each technology within an educational context and provides illustrative examples. Certainly the increased sophistication of the current generation of mobile phones, like the iPhone and new tablet computers mean mobile learning is now becoming genuinely viable. Similarly the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement one could argue has now reached critical mass with institutions worldwide engaged in the creation of OER (Atkins et al. 2007), but despite the opportunities, OER developments also have associated challenges (Hylén 2006). For example, despite the success of the Open University UK’s OpenLearn initiative, there was little evidence of actual repurposing of OER (McAndrew et al. 2009). Conole et al. have argued that this is in part a design issue, arguing that there is still significant work to do in terms of development effective design strategies for the use and repurposing of OER (Conole et al. 2010). With augmented reality (where location-based data is combined with what we see in the real world) and gesture-based computing  (which can accept multiple simultaneous inputs such as gesture-based inputs used in the Nintendo Wii) there are indications of yet more fundamental shifts in store in terms of the way we interaction with and use technologies. Two recent reports from the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies provide a rich database of case studies showing how web 2.0 technologies are being used to support both formal and informal learning (Redecker et al. 2009, Ala-Mutka 2009). In the States a task force considered the implications of new technologies (which they term the cyberinfrastructure) for learning (Borgman et al. 2009). They identified five recommendations including the need to emphasize the ‘transformative power of information and communications technologies for learning, from K to grey’. All of these reports indicate that technologies have the potential to radically transform education. An edited collection by Iijoshi and Kumar explores one particular aspect of technological impact - namely the growth of open approaches to the development and distribution of tools and resources (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). The case studies described in the book suggest radically new forms of practice and approaches to education, which if taken up more broadly would have an impact on both teaching practice and overarching educational business models. In the forward to the book John Seely-Brown sums up some of the key issues associated with trying to make better use of technologies in education: …the challenges we face in education today are daunting,… The world becomes more complex and interconnected at a lightning-face pace, and almost every serious social issues requires an engaged public that is not only traditionally literature, but adept in a new, systemic literacy (Seely-Brown cited in (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). Emergent themes and challenges A number of trends are evident with emergent technologies and the way they are being appropriated: * There has been a shift in the last five years or so from the web as a content repository and information mechanism to a web that enables more social mediation and user generation of content. * New practices of viewing and sharing are emerging, for example sharing of images on sites like Flckr, bite-size, amateur videos via sites such as YouTube and the use of presentation sites like Slideshare for Powerpoint presentations.3 In addition there are a host of new mechanisms for content production, communication and collaboration (through blogs, wikis and micro-blogging services such as Twitter). Social networking sites have become increasingly important as a means of connecting people and supporting different communities of practice (such as Facebook, Elgg and Ning); not just socially, but within professional contexts as well. * A network effect is emerging as a result of the quantity of information available on the web, i.e a multiplicity of connectivity due to the scale of user participation. In a related paper I consider these emergent themes and the associated challenges they bring to an educational context in more depth.4 Table 1 summarises these - focusing on five challenges and their impact on education. Firstly, the expansion of the knowledge domain and the consequential ‘death of the expert’ naturally challenges the traditional role of a teacher. It can no longer be assumed that the teacher is expert or that the focus should be on transmission of knowledge. Whilst such a shift away from didactic to constructivist approaches has been a dominant discourse in education for many years, the Internet as amplifier of this cannot be underestimated. Secondly, multi-located/fragmented content and the potential for multiple pathways through content have an impact on how educational interventions are designed.  And although such multiplicity offers increased choice, in an educational context this also has the potential to lead to confusion. Hence there is an opportunity for teachers to play an important new role in terms of providing pedagogically grounded learning pathways, to help learners navigate their way through this complexity. Thirdly, with the increasing complexity of the digital landscape the gap between the ‘tech savvy’ teachers and students and those who are not engaged is ever deeper; the digital divide is very much still in evidence (Norris 2001, Warschauer 2004). This is exacerbated because to understand web 2.0 technologies you have to personally engage with them; a a hands-on demonstration of Twitter does not really help you fully understand the power of the tool. Technically it is simple; type in 140 characters and press return, but in reality practical application of Twitter requires you to understand how to appropriate it for your own use, to adapt it to your own style or ’digital voice’. Twitter is also about being part of a wider network, so is only any use if you are connected to (i.e. ‘following’ and ‘being followed’ by) people you are interested in. Fourthly, the power of the collective has clear potential in a learning context. The user-focussed, participatory nature of web 2.0 practices has immense potential educationally, for shifting the locus of control from the teacher to the learner, and for enabling constructivist pedagogical approaches. The ability to connect with others opens up the potential for dialogic, situated and inquiry-based learning. Social networking sites for example enables you to have ‘just-in-time’ learning moments; posing learning queries that can be answered within moments providing a number of different explanations to aid understanding. Similarly, a student cohort can gather and comment on course-related resources in new ways using social bookmarking tools. Finally; as discussed earlier, despite the wealth of free educational resources and tools that are now available it is sobering to note that in reality these are not used extensively (McAndrew et al. 2009). The reasons for this lack of uptake are complex and multi-faceted but to a large extent are because teachers do not have the necessary skills to take advantage of the affordances of new technologies  This section has argued that each new technology brings with it a set of associated affordances that have the potential to influence the way we design courses and the way students learn. However, for every opportunity new technologies provide there is an associated set of challenges that need to be addressed. Avoiding the failures of the past As the previous section has demonstrated new technologies offer much to an educational context but also bring with them an associated set of challenges. I want now to return to the core question posed at this beginning of this post: Why is it that despite the evident potential of technologies they have had so little impact in practice? Resistance to change is a well-studied phenomenon; Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) identify four basic causes of resistance to change: 1. Individuals are more concerned with the implications for themselves. 2. Misunderstandings - communication problems, inadequate information. 3. Low tolerance of change - a sense of insecurity, different assessment of the situation. 4. Disagreement over the need for change. All of these are evident in the literature on e-learning failures; barriers are organisational and pedagogical as well as purely technical. Common reactions against change include: ‘I haven’t got time’, ‘My research is more important’, ‘What’s in it for me?’, ‘Where is my reward?’, ‘I don’t have the skills to do this’,  and ‘I don’t believe in this, it won’t work’. Common resistance strategies include saying yes (and doing nothing) or undermining the initiative and/or the people involved. Depressingly classic mistakes are repeated over and over again: an over emphasis on the technologies and not the people and processes; funding for the technology developments but not use and support. A framework for technological intervention The importance of connecting e-learning policy with practice is now recognised (DCSF 2009, Borgman et al. 2009, Culp et al. 2005, Attwell 2009, Guri-Rosenblit 2006,  Conole 2007). Nonetheless making this connection meaningful and effective is far from trivial. De Freitas and Oliver consider five prominent models of organisational change (Fordist, evolutionary, ecological, community of practice and discourse-orientated) in terms of a case study of a UK university (de Freitas & Oliver 2005).  They conclude that each model has inherent problems, but surmise that whether the change is evolutionary or ecological flexibility and fluidity are key elements of success. Blin and Munro argue that despite the fact that most institutions now have easy-to-use Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)/Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in place with a range of tools to support the delivery and management of student learning, there is still significant resistance to adoption of technologies by academics (Blin & Munro 2008). Clegg et al. take a critical stance to the rhetoric on ICT-policy (Clegg et al. 2003); arguing against: ‘technological determinism… No technologies are neutral. They are always the products of real historical social relations as well as the emergent technical capacities they provide.’ Haynes puts forward a three-part strategy for overcoming technological resistance: a technology should make a user’s life easier (or more enjoyable), it must be easy to use and ultimately should become essential to their practice. He concludes that it is important to make the users aware of the benefits of effective use of technologies. Similarly approaches are suggested in other strategies for supporting the uptake and use of technologies in education.5 A number of factors are evident across the literature: * The importance of demonstrating the added value of technologies * The need to understand and take account of existing practice and culture * The complexity of the relationship between models for change and their impact on practice * Recognition that technologies will continue to change/to have new impacts and hence flexibility needs to be a cornerstone of any policy perspectives. Figure 2 outlines a framework for technology intervention, which captures these factors. The framework illustrates how effective implementation of technologies can only be achieved if policy, research and practice are considered in conjunction. Practice is further sub-divided into teacher- and student-practice. Each node of the pyramid needs to inform the other three nodes and vice versa. So e-learning research and theory should be used as a guidance to inform policy and influence practice. Teacher and student perspectives and their actual practice should also inform policy, but also help to guide future research directions. And policy itself should in turn impact on both research and practice.   Figure 2: A framework for technological intervention The framework is being used within the Open University as part of our OU Learning Design Initiative6 and see related research papers (Conole 2009,  Conole, Culver et al. 2008, Conole, Brasher et al. 2008). The work is strategically supported and learning design is embedded into the institution’s learning and teaching strategy. A strong body of empirical evidence to understanding current practice underpins the work and this is used to inform the development of a set of tools and resources to enable teachers to make more effective use of technologies in their practice. Evaluation of the tools and resources in turn drives ongoing research activities. We believe that application of the framework has helped lead to more effective use and uptake of technology. The framework acts both as a guide to direct developments and as an evaluative tool to monitor impact. Conclusion This blog post has focused on the reasons behind the gap between the rhetoric around the potential of technology and its actual impact on practice. It is evident that the reasons for this gap are complex and multifaceted, involving pedagogical and organisational issues as well as purely technological ones. The general resistance strategies associated with any change management context are evident, but are further compounded in an e-learning context by the speed and complexity of technological change. I have put forward a framework for successful technological intervention, articulating the co-dependence between policy, research and practice. Only by taking account of all three at once and their impact on each other can effective technological intervention be achieved. Many questions still need resolving before true technological innovation can be realised. Some of the issues arising from this blog post include: * What models and frameworks can help bridge the gap between e-learning policy and practice? * How can technologies support new forms of pedagogy? * What is the relationship between technologies and the delivery of teaching (i.e. how are physical and virtual spaces now being blended to support learning)? * How do we take account of a digital divide that is narrower but deeper? * What new digital literacy skills will learners and teachers need in the future? It is evident that technologies are now an inherent part of educational systems. We need to harness them effectively both in our overarching institutional strategies and policies and in what we do in actual practice. Research into the use of technologies is showing the ways in which it can transform education, providing support for more personalised, flexible and learner-centred pedagogies and new means of communicating and collaborating with peers and tutors. Technological change will inevitably continue, bringing additional opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning. True e-learning innovation is likely to need a radical rethink of the curriculum. Are we ready to meet the challenge? References Ala-Mutka, K., 2009. Learning in and from ICT-enabled Networks and Communities. Final report of the study on Innovations in New ICT-enabled Learning Communities, Seville: IPTS. Andrews, R. & Haythornthwaite, C., 2007. The Sage handbook of e-learning research, Sage Publications Ltd. Atkins, D.E., Brown, J.S. & Hammond, A.L., 2007. A review of the open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities. Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Attwell, G., 2009. The challenge of e-learning in small enterprises: issues for policy and practice in Europe, National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). Bates, T., 2005. Technology, e-learning and distance education, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Berleur, J. & Galand, J.M., 2005. ICT policies of the European Union: From an information society to eEurope. Trends and visions. Perspectives and policies on ICT in society: An IFIP TC9 (Computers and Society) handbook, New York: Springer, 60. Blin, F. & Munro, M., 2008. Why hasn’t technology disrupted academics’ teaching practices? Understanding resistance to change through the lens of activity theory. Computers & Education, 50(2), 475-490. Borgman, C. et al., 2009. Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge, US National Science Foundation (NSF) publication, National Science Foundation (NSF). Available at: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204 [Accessed November 24, 2009]. Brown, M., Anderson, B. & Murray, F., 2007. E-learning policy issues: Global trends, themes and tensions. In ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007. Chickering, A.W. & Ehrmann, S.C., 1996. Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. AAHE bulletin, 49, 3-6. Clegg, S., Alison Hudson & Steel, J., 2003. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Globalisation and e-Learning in Higher Education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(1), 39-53. Conole, G., 2007. An International Comparison of the Relationship between Policy and Practice in E-learning. The Sage handbook of e-learning research, 286. Conole, G., 2009. Capturing and representing practice. In In A. Tait, M. Vidal,  U. Bernath and A. Szucs (Eds.) Distance and E-learning in Transition: Learning Innovation, Technology and Social Challenges.  London: John Wiley and Sons. 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Available at: http://publications.dcsf.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=productdetails&PageMode=publications&ProductId=DFES-1296-2005 [Accessed January 11, 2010]. de Freitas, S. & Oliver, M., 2005. Does E-learning Policy Drive Change in Higher Education?: A case study relating models of organisational change to e-learning implementation. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 27(1), 81-96. Gilbert, L., 1999. Some valuable lessons from the teaching and learning technology programme in the UK. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 10(1), 67-85. Guri-Rosenblit, S., 2006. Eight paradoxes in the implementation process of e-learning in higher education. Distances et savoirs, 4(2), 155-179. Hedberg, J., 2006. E-learning futures? Speculations for a time yet to come. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 171-183. Hodgson, V.E., 2002. The European Union and e-learning: an examination of rhetoric, theory and practice. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 18(3), 240-252. 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Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=979968.979993 [Accessed January 11, 2010]. McAndrew, P. et al., 2009. OpenLearn Research Report 2006-2008. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/17513/ [Accessed January 11, 2010]. Muldur, U. et al., 2007. A New Deal for an Effective European Research Policy: The Design and Impacts of the 7th Framework Programme, Springer Verlag. Norris, P., 2001. Digital divide: Civic engagement, information Poverty, and the Internet worldwide, Cambridge Univ Pr. Ramage, T., 2001. The ‘no significant difference’ phenomenon - a literature review. Journal of Instructional Science and Technology, 5(1). Redecker, C. et al., 2009. Learning 2.0: The impact of web 2.0 innovations in education and training in Europe, Seville: Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. Available at: http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2899. Rosenberg, M., 2001. E-Learning: Strategies for delivering knowledge in the digital age, Columbus, Ohio: McGraw Hill. Russell, T., 2001. The no significant difference phenonmenon 5th ed., Montgomery, AL: International Distance Education Certification Center (IDECC). Stern, E. & Impact, I., 1997. The evaluation of the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme of the UK Higher Education Funding Council. European Journal in Open and Distance Learning, http://kurs. nks. no/eurodl/eurodlen/index. html. Warschauer, M., 2004. Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide, the MIT Press. Zemsky, R. & Massy, W.F., 2004. Thwarted innovation. What happened to e-learning and why. The University of Pennsylvania, PN: The Learning Alliance. Zhang, D. & Nunamaker, J.F., 2003. Powering E-Learning In the New Millennium: An Overview of E-Learning and Enabling Technology. Information Systems Frontiers, 5(2), 207-218.         1 http://www.nmc.org/horizon 2 See http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2799 for a current debate on the report. 3 http://www.flickr.com/, http://www.youtube.com and http://www.slideshare.net 4 http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2735 5 See for example (Rosenberg 2001, Laurillard 2002, Bates 2005, Chickering & Ehrmann 1996, Lepori et al. 2003). 6 http://ouldi.open.ac.uk ??   ??   ??   ??         12    

This blog post is a draft of a paper I am working on following on from a keynote I did at the University of Limerick in May. It focuses on new ideas around the design and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER). My initial thinking around this can be found in an earlier blog post. The technology paradox A paradox exists in terms of harnessing new technologies in education.  Despite the fact that there is now a wealth of free tools and resources available that could be used to support learning and teaching, in reality technologies are not used extensively in education. Indeed teachers and learners are bewildered by the variety and lack the time and necessary skills to harness them effectively. The focus of this paper is to present Learning Design as a potential solution and in particular to describe the work we are doing as part of the Open University Learning Design Initiative (OULDI), which is developing a suite of tools and resources to support teachers to make more effective design decisions and better use of technologies in the creation of learning activities and resources for their students. The paper will highlight current research on Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and Open Educational Resources (OER) and will suggest that together these three areas provide a possible solution to the mismatch between the potential of new technologies and use in practice. It will conclude with an illustrative example being developed as part of a new initiative, Olnet, which is a global network to support users and researchers of OER. Redefining openness I argue in this paper that we need to expand the notion of openness, to take account of the affordances of new technologies and the new patterns of user behaviour we are seeing emerge. There has been a growth in recent years in activities around the Open source movement and the development of open tools and services, also the open educational resource movement (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). These have a common set of principles and practices: free, shared, collaborative, cumulatively better. The next logical step is a more "open" approach to design (Open Design) - where the inherent designs within learning activities and resources are made more explicit to learners and to other teachers; so that they can be picked up discussed and adapted.  I argue in this paper that education is now facing a number of new challenges, precipitating by new technologies. Education today, operates in a context that is increasingly open and abundant: ·      Open - In terms of free resources and in terms of public gauze/scrutiny and can no longer ignore this. ·      Abundant - There are now a wealth of tools, services and resources available to support education. If tools and resources are freely available, what is the purpose of formal educational institutions? Examples of openness include the growth of the open source moment in general and, more specifically in education, the phenomenal success of the open source Moodle tool. Moodle is now a major Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learner Management System (LMS) around the world, with a large community of active developers collectively improving the core code and adding extensions and plug-ins. There are increasingly sophisticated free generic tools available - Google apps, Gmail, free blog and wiki services, communication tools such as Skype to Twitter. New products are emerging all the time, introducing new concepts and patters of user behaviour - the latest being Google Wave, which is being hyped as the next generation communication tool, a combination of email, discussion forums and wikis - enabling both synchronous and asynchronous communication. There has been a noticeable shift in the last few years in terms of the use of technologies. We now have near ubiquitous access with wifi-enabled Internet on demand. New generation phones such as iPhone make mobile learning genuinely feasible. The number and variety of applications for the iphone is truly mind blowing; the variety of applications for learning staggering, from mindmapping tools, through digital books and dictionaries to interactive learning tutorials. More and more material for learning is available for free on the Internet. This has been accelerated by the growth of the OER movement, which believes that education should be free and is a basic right. The OER movement has powerful supporters, especially the Hewlett foundation and UNESCO and include big international players such as MIT. The OpenCourseWare consortium has over 200 worldwide members. A range of different types of OERs and models are available which differ in terms of level of granularity, format and media richness, and type of pedagogy. The Open University launched Openlearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) in 2006 with funded from the William and Flora Hewlett foundation. Today’s students have grown up surrounded by a technologically mediated world. Clearly new technologies offer much in an educational context, with the promise of flexible, personalised and student-centred learning. Indeed research over the past few years, looking at learners’ use of technologies, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for finding/managing information and for communicating with others (Sharpe and Beetham, forthcoming). They provide a summary of recent research looking at the learner perspective and in particular how learners are using technologies (Sharpe & Beetham 2010). It is evident that today’s learners are immersed in a technologically rich learning environment. They see technologies as an essential part of their tools for learning. They appropriate technologies to suit their own learning styles and use them to support all aspects of their learning. However despite having grown up in a technological environment, not all students are able to use technologies effectively in an academic context. For example they may be comfortable using Google, but not competent at critically evaluating different resources and using them for their learning. Indeed for the weaker students the complexity of the range of digital tools and resources available to them means they are more likely to get confused and lost. Good sources of further information on current technology trends and the ways in which technologies are being used in education include: Review of learning 2.0 (Ala-Mutka, 2009), Learner experience work (Conole, De Laat et al., 2008), NSF cyberlearning task force report (NSF, 2008), and a review of OER movement (Atkins et al., 2007) Education for free Theoretically one can now put together totally free course offerings using free tools and resources. George Siemens and Stephen Downes created an ambitious course and delivered it for the first time in 2009 - not only were the tools and resources they used in the course free, but so was the expertise! See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=182 for a reflection on the experiment by George Siemens. The twelve-week course was called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course’.[1]  They described the course as a MOOG (Massive Open Online Course). The content, delivery and support for the course was totally free, anyone could join and an impressive 2400 did, although the actual number of very active participants was smaller (ca. 200). The course provides a nice example of an extension of the open movement, moving a step beyond the Open Educational Resource movement to providing a totally free course. Siemens reflecting on the course said the follow: Did we change the world? No. Not yet. But we (and I mean all course participants, not just Stephen and I) managed to explore what is possible online. People self-organized in their preferred spaces. They etched away at the hallowed plaque of "what it means to be an expert". They learned in transparent environments, and in the process, became teachers to others. Those that observed (or lurked as is the more common term), hopefully found value in the course as well. Perhaps life circumstances, personal schedule, motivation for participating, confidence, familiarity with the online environment, or numerous other factors, impacted their ability to contribute. While we can’t "measure them" the way I’ve tried to do with blog and moodle participants, their continued subscription to The Daily and the comments encountered in F2F conferences suggest they also found some value in the course.    George Siemens and Martin Weller delivered something similar in the form of an ‘un-course’ conference ("From Courses to Dis-Course (yes/no? Am I being too cute-sy?"). See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/futurecourse/ for further information. Such courses are becoming more commonplace, the immediacy of the Internet and the variety of free tools for creating content and for communicating with others, means these courses can be set up very quickly with an international team designing and delivering. What kind of impact will such courses have on traditional educational offerings? Will they sit alongside them or ultimately replace them? Implications and the hidden conundrum Clearly all this has profound implications for educational institutions and the provision of formal education (Grainne Conole 2009). For students in terms of the skills and experiences they come with and their expectations in terms of technologies (Sharpe & Beetham 2010)(G. Conole et al. 2008). For teachers in terms of how they design courses for students. For institutions in terms of how they support and assess students. New technologies give rise to a range of questions: To what extent have all these free tools and resources impacted on mainstream education? To what extent are the majority of teachers capitalising on these? How much are mainstream courses changing as a result? The reality is that despite the enormous potential new technologies seem to offer for learning, uptake of them and utilisation of free resources has been slow.  Indeed there has been very little impact on mainstream education. Where technolgoies are used a lot of the use mirrors existing face-to-face practice, rather than harnessing the powerful affordances associated with them. There is little evidence of major innovations or new forms of pedagogy. The reasons for the lack of impact of these new technologies are complex and multifaceted. But one of the key ones is that teachers lack the time and expertise to make best use of new tools and resources. Faced with a new tool - say a wiki or twitter - there are a number of questions a teacher (or indeed a learner) needs to consider: What are the special features of the tool? How can it be used to support learning? How have others used the tool? What are the implications in terms of designing and delivering a learning activity using this tool - for the teacher, for the student? Similarly just having freely available OERs is not enough, a series of similar questions arise: What is the quality of the resource? How has it been used elsewhere? How can it be incorporated into my teaching context? Am I able to adapt it; how much do I need to change to suit my teaching context? All of these are non-trivial and time-consuming questions. Mediating artefacts to support design Teachers need guidance in understanding how they can appropriate technologies in their teaching. This guidance can be in the form of a range of ‘Mediating Artefacts’ (MAs). I draw on socio-cultural perspectives (Vygotsky 1978;  Cole et al. 1997; Engeström et al. 1999; Daniels et al. 2007), in terms of the use of the term ‘Mediating Artefacts’ (MAs). I believe the concept of mediating artefacts can help us describe and understand how technologies are being used in mediating our practice. A user intent on achieve a particular goal has a range of mediating artefacts they can draw on; both in terms of ‘information’ and mechanisms for ‘communication’. Alongside the established communication channels of the telephone, email, forums and texting, the emergence of web 2.0 technologies in recent years has added blogging (and microblogging), wikis, social networking sites and virtual worlds but also free internet-based Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and in particular popular tools such as Skype which enable virtually free, internet-based communication. Similarly information can now be distributed in multiple locations, and packaged and presented using a range of different multimedia and visual representations. Sophisticated repositories now exist for everything from shopping categories to repositories of good practice and free resources. RSS feeds and email alerts enable users to filter and personalise the information they receive. Social bookmarking and tagging means that collective value can be added to digital objects, concept and mind mapping, tag clouds and data-derived maps are only some of the ways in which information can be presented in rich and multifaceted ways. I argue in this paper that there is a need for new mediating artefacts to support teachers and learners in making best use of these tools and resources.  See Conole (2008a) for a description of the use of the term mediating artefacts specifically for learning design. These mediating artefacts can guide and support the teacher in making design decisions. They can provide mechanisms to help teachers answer questions like those posed above, to help them make decisions on which tools and resources to use and in what ways. For example mechanisms to provide them with access to help and advice, expertise and peer support. Mechanisms to enable them to become part of an evolving peer community committed to discussing and sharing learning and teaching ideas. I argue that this mediation is through more explicit articulation of the inherent designs associated with a particular learning activity and the way in which tools and resources are used in that particular learning activity. If we can abstract these designs and represent them in a meaningful and understandable way there is a greater chance of them being picked up, used and adapted by others, which, in turn, over time is likely to lead to an evolving understanding of how new tools and resources can be used. Converging schools of thought I want to focus on three types of Mediating Artefacts and look at how together they can be used to help guide the teacher’s design practice; learning design, pedagogical patterns and OER Mediating Artefacts. A brief introduction to these areas will be provided, followed by a description of how they can be used together to provide a holistic approach to designing for learning. Pedagogical patterns The concept of Pedagogical Patterns derives from Alexander’s work in Architecture, towards pattern languages for buildings.  Applied to an educational context, it is concerned with exploring how we generate a set of ‘patterns for good practice’; i.e. here is a problem and here is a tried and tested solution. There is now a considerable body of research on Pedagogical Patterns, such as the work of Yannis Dimitriadis and colleagues in Spain, Peter Goodyear in Australia and the Planet project in the UK. There are a number of repositories of patterns with surrounding communities of interest, see for example http://lp.noe-kaleidoscope.org/ and http://patternlanguagenetwork.org/partners/. Two well-known examples of patterns for collaborative learning are: "Think, Pair, Share" and "Jigsaw". The benefits of the pedagogical patterns approach is that the ‘patterns’ are derived from known, tried and tested examples, building on existing good practice. They all have the same format of representation - here is a problem and a potential solution, along with a powerful visual metaphors. Open Educational Resources (OER) The OER movement has concentrated on developing open educational resources and studying the ways in which they are used and/or adapted by learners and teachers (See for example McAndrew and Santos, 2008). The benefits of the OER movement is that it is building a word wide set of high quality free educational resources, along with opportunities to build a community around these resources - to share and critically discuss good practice in learning and teaching. Learning design In our own work as part of the OU Learning Design Initiative (OUDLI) we are developing a suite of tools and methods to help teachers with the design process and in particular to enable them to create more pedagogical informed learning activities and make better use of new technologies. Our work is focusing on three aspects of the design process: ways of representing pedagogy (and in particular visualising it), providing guidance and advice, and mechanisms to enable teachers to share and discuss learning and teaching ideas. In particular we have developed two tools - CompendiumLD for visualising and guiding the design process (G. Conole et al. 2008) and Cloudworks a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas (Conole & Culver 2009b; Conole & Culver 2009a) In addition we have been developed new schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies (Conole 2008) The benefits of the Learning Design approach are that it provides a range of tools, methods and approaches to help teachers think differently, making the design process more explicit, means of sharing good practice. A new understanding of design: an illustrative example What we can see across these three areas of research are different types of designs. Can we combine these learning design tools with the documented good practice, which has been developed in the pedagogical pattern community, with the real exemplars available in the OER world? The pedagogical patterns describe a learning and teaching activity or strategy according to a predefined template. Whereas the OERs might be considered as ‘designs in action’ and provide actual learning content. Finally, Learning Designs help give us a better understanding of the broad ways in which learning and teaching activities or strategies can be represented from narrative case studies or descriptions through to visual designs. In a new project, OLnet, we are attempting to put these three areas together, specifically to enable better use of OER. OLnet is creating a global network to help researchers and users of OER to work together - so that research outputs inform practice and vice versa. See Conole and McAndrew (Conole & McAndrew 2010). We are interested in exploring how explicit designs might be used to help learners and teachers and how the different tools and resources from across OER, Learning Design and Pedagogical Patterns research would might be used together.  In a recent book chapter we identify four types of Mediating Artefacts from across these research domains: Learning Design visualisation tools, Learning Design methods, Pedagogical Patterns and Web 2.0 sharing and discussion tools (Figure 1).   Figure 1: Types of mediating artefacts The following scenario provides an example of how this might work (Figure 2). It describes the creation of an OER and an associated design for the OER and shows how this can be repurposed in three different ways. Tools and resources from OER, Learning Deign and Pedagogical Patterns research are used to help design the original OER and then to share and repurpose it. Figure 2: Initial creation of OER+design and subsequent use and repurposing   Teacher A: The design phase The scenario begins with ‘Teacher A’. The context is that Teacher A is putting her beginners’ level Spanish material for the OU course L194. She makes the material available as an OER online in the Openlearn repository (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk). She uses the CompendiumLD tool for visualising to articulate different ways in which she thinks the materials can be used. Figure 3 shows part of the visual design, including the branching sequence to enable a beginner and more advanced route through the learning materials. In particular she is interested in showing how the materials can be used as both a revision exercise for an individual student and at a more advanced level for a group of students working collaboratively. Whilst developing her design in CompendiumLD she has access to ideas and tips and hints from the Cloudworks social networking site for learning and teaching site, as well as from a range of OER and Pedagogical Pattern repositories. These help her to refine her design thinking, to get ideas about how to structure activities in the sequences and suggestions of tools that be used for example for supporting a diagnostic e-assessment test or to enable students to communicate synchronously. Learner A: Use Scenario 1 - beginners’ route ‘Learner A’ is doing Spanish.  She is a few weeks into the intermediate level Spanish course. The topic she is currently working on is ‘describing places’, she is looking for freely available tools or resources that might help her, she is also interested in finding study buddies to work with, who are at a similar level. 1.      She explores the openlearn site 2.      She finds the set of OERs for a beginners’ Spanish course - L194 - Portales from the Open University, UK, developed by Teacher A. 3.      She finds alongside these resources a visual design - which provides an example of how these resources might be used. The design consists of the following aspects: a.       A diagnostic e-assessment test to assess her level of understanding of the topics covered in the course b.       Two potential pathways: a) a beginners route where the learner works individually through the L194 OER material, b) an advanced route where the learner is assigned to a study group to work collaboratively around 1 aspects of the L194 OER material, Activity 2.1. In this advanced route, the existing activity (categorise 3 pictures of buildings as Latin American or Spanish) is replaced with one where the learner has to describe and compare the buildings, working collaboratively with other students and interrogating an expert for information. The activity exploits the jigsaw pedagogical pattern and also uses a free video conferencing tool to enable the study group to speak with a Spanish cultural expert.  4.      She takes the diagnostic tests and the advice is that she takes the beginners’ route and completes the L194 OER material. Learner B: Use Scenario 2 - advanced route Learner B is also a student a few weeks into an intermediate level Spanish course. She works through a similar set of activities to Learner A but in this case after taking the diagnostic test the advice is that he takes the advanced route and focuses in on the adapted activity 2.1 as a collaborative exercise with other students. Teacher B: Use Scenario 3 - repurposes Teacher B is an Associate Lecturer teaching on the intermediate level Spanish course at the Open University, En Rumbo - L140, preparing for a face-to-face tutorial with his students. The topic is describing places. Finds the design described above and adapts it to produce two new variants of the design 1. a classroom-based activity where the students describe the pictures using the Think-Pair-Share pattern and provides, 2. A similar exercise in terms of comparing three buildings but the students are asked to describe buildings from their town and then talk with an expert (a student in Spain) who then describes their home town. The activity is set as a precursor to the first assignment exercise for the course. The design of this scenario represented in CompendiumLD was drawn by Andrew Brasher and an interactive version of it is available here. Figure 4 provides a conceptual overview and generalisation of this scenario - showing how an initial design can query existing resources such as Cloudworks and Openlearn, use these to help create and populate an OER, along with an associated design, both of which can then be deposited back into sites such as Cloudworks and OpenLearn for reuse. Conclusion The mismatch between the potential of technologies and actual use in practice is I would argue one of the most important key challenges facing modern education. The areas of Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and OER research have developed a range of valuable tools and resources which have proved effective in supporting teachers and learners and enabling them to decide and use educational resources more effectively. The next stage in the challenge is how to build on this; how to make more effective connections across these three areas of research. Acknowledgements Many people are involved in this work but want to thank in particular: §   Olnet/Openlearn: Patrick McAndrew, Yannis Demitriadis (who is currently working with us as a visiting Olnet professor), Tina Wilson, Niall Sclater §   OULDI: Andrew Brasher, Juliette Culver, Simon Cross, Paul Clark, Martin Weller §   Funders: The William and Flora Hewlett foundation, the JISC, the Open University for strategic funding References Ala-Mutka, K., Bacigalupo, M., Kluzer, S., Pascu, C., Punie, Y. and Redecker, C. (2009). Review of Learning 2.0 Practices. IPTS technical report prepared for publication, IPTS: Seville, available online at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2139 [18/4/09]. Atkins, D., Seely Brown, J. and Hammond, A.L. (2007), A review of the Open Educational Resource movement: achievements, challenges and new opportunities, report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, available online at http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf, last accessed 5/2/09. Cole, M., Engeström, Y. & Vasquez, O.A., 1997. Mind, culture, and activity: Seminal papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, Cambridge Univ Pr.   Conole, G. (2008a) ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design’, in Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, in L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinho, and B Harper (Eds), 187-207, Hersey PA: IGI Global.   Conole, G. et al., 2008. Visualising learning design to foster and support good practice and creativity. Educational Media International, 45(3), 177-194.   Conole, G. & Culver, J., 2009a. Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(5). Available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet25/conole.html [Accessed November 24, 2009].   Conole, G. & Culver, J., 2009b. The design of Cloudworks: Applying social networking practice to foster the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs. Computers & Education. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VCJ-4XH5640-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1107889889&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=11e571c11f3d1bee54dd010e40090093 [Accessed November 24, 2009].   Conole, G. et al., 2008. ‘Disruptive technologies’, ‘pedagogical innovation’: What’s new Findings from an in-depth study of students’ use and perception of technology. Computers & Education, 50(2), 511-524.   Conole, G. & McAndrew, P., 2010. A new approach to supporting the design and use of OER: Harnessing the power of web 2.0. In In M. Edner and M. Schiefner (Eds) Looking toward the future of technology enhanced education: ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.   Conole, G., McAndrew, P. & Dimitriadis, Y., The role of CSCL pedagogical patterns as mediating artefacts for repurposing Open Educational Resources’. In in F. Pozzi and D. Persico (Eds), Techniques for Fostering Collaboration in Online Learning Communities: Theoretical and Practical.  2010.   Conole, G., 2009. Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/13175/ [Accessed November 24, 2009].   Conole, G., 2008. New Schemas for mapping pedagogies and technologies. Ariadne magazine, (56). Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/ [Accessed November 24, 2009].   Daniels, H., Cole, M. & Wertsch, J., 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky 1st ed., Cambridge University Press.   Dimitriadis, Y. et al., 2009. New design approaches to repurposing Open Educational Resources for collaborative learning using mediating artefacts. In  Auckland: ASCILITE.   Engeström, Y., Punamäki-Gitai, R.L. & Miettinen, R., 1999. Perspectives on activity theory, Cambridge University Press.   Iiyoshi, T. & Kumar, M.S.V., 2008. Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, The MIT Press.   McAndrew, P. and A. I. Santos (Eds.) (2009). Learning from OpenLearn: Research Report 2006-2008. Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University. NSF (2008), Fostering learning in the networked world: learning opportunity and challenge. A 21st Century agenda for the National Science Foundation, report of the NSF task force on cyberlearning, available online at http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204, last accessed 8/2/09.   Sharpe, R. & Beetham, H., 2010. Rethinking learning for the digital age: how learnes shape their own experiences, London: Routledge.   Vygotsky, L.S., 1978. Mind in society.       [1] http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism

Last week I attended the kick off meeting for an exciting new EU-funded project, OPAL, from the website: The Open Educational Quality Initiative will focus on provision of innovative open educational practices and promote quality, innovation and transparency in higher and adult education. Beginning in January 2010, the two-year OPAL Initiative is a partnership between seven organizations including ICDE, UNESCO and ICDE member institution, the Open University UK, and will be coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The project is part funded by the European Commission Education and Training Lifelong Learning Programme. As you can see the project has a strong consortium with some significant players/representatives from across the EU. It is also an important and timely project given the increasing focus and interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). For us at the OU it builds nicely on two stands of related work - our work on OER (through the development of the OpenLearn site and more recently the Olnet initiative) and the OU Learning Design Initiative. At the kick off meeting we trashed out the details of the vision behind the project, with its focus on enhancing quality and innovation through clearer articulation and support of Open Educational Practices (OEP). For me a key first task in the coming months is going to be to try and really unpack what we actually mean by OEP, what are its dimensions, how can we expose existing OEP and from this translate this into a set of useful guidelines to help facilitate better OEP? These are important questions that we will be addressing in work packages 3 and 4 of the project.  We will begin by undertaking a state of the art review of the field and then a more extensive quantitative survey. This will be followed by four in-depth studies exploring how recognised leading institutions in the development and use of OER have instantiated good practice in OEP. These findings will then translate into four guidelines - for learners, educational professionals, managers and policy makers. So what do we mean by Open Educational Practices (OEP)? The detailed discussions from the kick off meeting are currently being written up and distilled but here is my started for ten to stimulate debate: Open Educational Practices (OEP) are the set of activities and support around the creation, use and repurposing of Open Educational Resources. It also includes the contextual settings within which these practices occur. Therefore there are three importance dimensions to this: The stakeholders engaged with creating, using or supporting the use of OER. These can be further sub-divided into two types: those involved in ‘creation and use’ of OER and those involved in ‘policy and management’ aspects of OER. Creators: create the OER, and could be either ‘teachers’ or ‘learners’. Users: Use the OER, and could be either ‘teachers or ‘learners’. Managers: Provide the infrastructure to support the OER (technical and organisational) and the tools/support to create/use OER. Policy makers: embed OER into relevant policy. The range of mediating artefacts that can be used to create and support the use of OER. These include tools and resources to help guide the creation and use of OER, as well as the technologies to support the hosting and management of them. The contextual factors which impact on the creation, use or support of OER. Does this definition make sense? Can we provide a finer grained set of indicators for each of these three dimensions? What existing research and development work in this area should we be looking at to develop these concepts further? This is going to be an exciting and challenging project, I look forward to working more with other members of the consortium on this over the next two years. A number of people will be involved from the OU - in particular researchers from the Olnet team (led by Patrick McAndrew), but also drawing on expertise from the OULDI team. Paul Mundin has taken on the role of project manager for the OU aspects of the work.

Stephen has written some valuable comments on my ‘Defining OEP’ blog post. Couple of minor things in my defence and then some more subtaintive points to discuss!  Clearly my choice of picture to show the meeting was not a good one given Stephen’s reaction! …but a conference session consisting of standing in a circle around flip-chart sheets would send me running and screaming into the nearest woods, never to be found again. So, please, let’s not make that an open education practice  Ooops! Actually the meeting was excellent with a nice mix of different types of group work, use of flip charts, illustrative art drawings to capture key points, images on flckr etc. I found this a great mix and much better than the usual sit round in boardroom style meetings with one person dominating the meeting. Maybe we could have used more technology during the meeting but actually I think the face to face interactions were a key part of us connecting as a consortium at this point in the project. Stephen critiques my initial starter for ten diagram which articulates the 4 different types of stakeholders involved in OER/OEP arguing that …so, I’m not sure I like a model where ‘policy-makers’ (also called ’stakeholders’) are distinct from ‘creators’ and ‘users’ - people who create and use should make the policy, in my view. Clearly the diagram isn’t quite right yet, my intention was never to suggest that the four roles were distinct and separate, rather that they are four aspects which have different agendas and interests. A ‘learner’ could very easily be involved in all four, but at each stage - when they are looking at creating, using, managing or ‘policy-making’ OER they will have a different focus of attention and it was this that I really wanted to bring out and explore. Good to have some early feedback on this - I think there is a lot to trash out in terms of exactly what OEP is. I am reminded of some work I did a few years ago as part of the NSF/JISC DIalogPlus project. The aim (a naïve one now I admit) was to create a learning design guidance toolkit that would take practitioners through the process of creating learning activities. It would provide guidance and advice on pedagogical approaches, what technologies can be used when and why and a process of mapping learning outcomes, topics, activities and assessment tasks. The toolkit is still around if you want to play. Near the beginning of the work I thought ‘hang on a minute - what exactly do we mean by a learning activity anyway?’ A seemingly simple question… which turned into a mammoth amount of work and a very detailed taxonomy articulating the different components that make up a learning activity! More on the details of this are available in a chapter on the Handbook of Learning Design and Learning Objects by Lockyer et al. (Conole, G. 2008). I have a funny feeling something similar might happen with OEP - i.e. it seems obvious what it is, and easy to articulate it, but I suspect in reality the task will be much more complex. Reference Conole, G., 2008. Capturing practice, the role of mediating artefacts in learning design. In In L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinhi and B. Harper Handbook of learning designs and learning objects.  IGI Global.    

One of the things I talked about at the CODE International Symposium in Japan last week was a framework for locating educational practices. The framework has two dimensions: teacher-centered vs. student-centred learning (i.e. where the locus of control is for the learning process) and content-based vs. activity-based learning. I then showed how this could be used to map different types of learning across formal, non-formal and informal learning context. So in the lower left hand side fairly didactic approaches, such as a traditional lecture presentation are located. Here the control is very much teacher-centred and the main learning is via delivery of content. Adopting more activity-based approaches, but still within formal educational contexts, shifts to the upper left hand quadrant - i.e. approaches such as problem-based, case-based, scenario-based or inquiry learning. The teacher is usually still controlling the learning process and here the focus is around some specific context and is primarily activity-based in nature. The bottom right hand quadrant considers approaches that are content focused but student controlled. A lot of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) or skills-based vocational learning fit within this space. Finally, informal learning approaches which are based around activities and engagement with others such as for example amateur photography, just-in-time language learning, gardening etc. fit in the top right hand quadrant.Of course these are extremes, specific instantiations of these different approaches to learning will shift - a lecture might actually have some degree of activity or might be more student focussed, nonetheless it is useful I think to consider these different approaches along these two dimensions, particularly as much of the rhetoric around the use of new technologies suggests a shift towards learner,-centred/activity-based learning - would welcome thoughts!

Following on from my previous post I have done some more thinking about course dimensions and how they can be represented and used. To recap; there are four categories associated with a course and each can have a number of dimensions: Content and Activity Interactivity Student-generated content Open Educational Resources Multimedia Communication and Collaboration Web2.0 interaction Collaboration Peer communication Reflection and demonstration Reflection Diagnostic Formative Summative Guidance and Support Student-centred Peer supported Tutor-guided It is possible then to consider the degree to which each of these dimensions is present in a course, using a percentage scale. This can be done at course level, at block level (where a block might present a semester) or for individual weeks. So in the example below the course is divided into three blocks. Block one has 65% interactivity (35% non-interactive), 10% of the materials generated by students (90% made available via the tutor), 20% of the materials are OER (80% from the tutor) and 75% multi-media (25% print-based). The table can then be represented either as a bar chart or a spider diagram.   Alternatively these dimensions can also be used to give a balance across the categories. So in the figure below for example; in terms the Content and Activity category breakdown as 25% interactive material, 10% Student-generated content, 40% OER and 25% multimedia. This can then be represented as a bar chart.

A number of things appear to becoming together - at least in my mind! - in terms of working towards a coherent set of conceptual learning design tools. I’ve blogged about lots of this before, but thought this post would be useful in terms of bringing some of this up to date. Interesting these ideas are currently spanning a number of projects/research work I am involved with. Clearly this work fits in terms of the overall ideas about adopting a learning design-based methodology and the associated tools/resources/activities to support this. Institutionally this work is currently being driven through our Course Business Models work. Externally aspects of this are feeding into the Design-Practice project we have with Cyprus and Greece and the X-Delia project on financial decision making. Below is a powerpoint presentation showing five conceptual design views of a ‘learning intervention’ - this could be something like an informal learning iphone app (as in this example) or a formal educational course or programme. The five views are: Learning intervention overview (or Course map view) Pedagogy profile Course dimensions Task swimlane Learning outcomes map I talked about some of this in detail in a recent networked learning paper and associated powerpoint presentation (Cloud on Cloudworks on the seminar this was part of is here). I think what is exciting about this is that the five ‘views’ give you a means of thinking about a learning intevention at different levels of granalarity and different aspects. We have particularly made significant progress in the last few weeks I feel on the course dimensions view. I had an excellent brainstorming session on this last week with Mick Jones (who is leading the next phase of our Course Business Models work), Barbara Poniatowska and Kevin Mayles (who are involved in a related project on e-learning data. We have an internal workshop with staff from across the faculty on Friday to get their views on the work to date, how it might be used/improved and how it can be taken forward. I used the views this week in a brainstorming session with Gill Clough (who is the lead reseacher on our part of the X-Delia project)  in terms of trying to map a learning intervention for an i-phone games app about financial decision making. The views worked surprisingly well. The powerpoint presentation with the five views is below, thoughts welcome! Health check game View more presentations from grainne.

We are running a Course Business Models workshop tomorrow at the OU to share with staff from across the university the work we have done to date in terms of representing courses. The Course Business Models (CBM) and the Learning Design work complement each other in the sense that the LD work provides the broader perspective and theoretical basis for the work and the CBM work a specific local implementation. One of the things I will argue tomorrow will be about the benefits of adopting a Learning Design approach. In particular I will argue that it offers a design-based approach to the creation and delivery of courses, along with a set of resources, tools and activities to support this. It enables practitioners (and potentially learners) to shift from learning and teaching practices that are essentially ‘belief’ based (i.e. this is what I have always done, this is my experience of learning and teaching) and implicit to ones based on design principles derived from good pedagogy and mechanisms that enable the design to be made more explicit. Adopting a design-based approach promotes a reflective and scholarly approach and facilitates the sharing and discussion of learning and teaching ideas and designs. In our Design-Practice project (with Cyprus and Greece) we are identifying what innovations from our Learning Design work we can transfer to be applied in their local contexts. This has enabled us to take stock of the range of tools, resources and activities we have produced and put them into a more logical and meaningful framework. Rebecca Galley, Paul Mundin and I had a great brainstorm about this earlier this week and I think we have come up with a nice way of capturing and representing what we have developed. The LD-wheel shown provides a higher level picture; i.e. that our Learning Design methodology is composed of three parts: theoretical perspectives, collaboration and visualisation. For each of these we have developed a set of tools, resources and activities. So for example the CBM Excel templates we have produced for the views are examples of visualisation resources. CompendiumLD is an example of a visualisation tool and Cloudworks an example of a collaboration tool. At the end of this blog post the full Learning Design Taxonomy underneath this that we have developed is presented.   It is possible to take a number of guided pathways through the LD-wheel: CBM awareness events (such as the workshop we are running tomorrow) - where the focus is on looking at and discussing the five CBM views. An LD-lite workshop (for example ‘Using technology to support learning and teaching’) - where a selection of tools, resources and activities are used but there is no explicit mention of Learning Design. We are planning to run something like this with our Design-Practice colleagues. Design challenges - using a range of the tools, resources and activities to support teams as they work through creating a course in a day. We have run a number of these both within the OU and externally with our partners on the JISC OULDI project. A masters level unit - such as the one I authored for the H800 course. A free format - where the user choose what they want to use and in what order. I’m looking forward to the workshop tomorrow and getting feedback on aspects of this work and to seeing in the coming months how this work might be rolled out across the university.