Entry 52 IDT1415 - OERs Evaluation Criteria

TASK - Think about evaluation criteria as providing you with the questions you should be able to answer before you decide that a source of information is worth using. The criteria should be simple, easily answered and not too long – no more than ten different headings and no more than six questions under each one.

Thanks for your very visual mind map Barb! I must confess that I initially felt a little bit at a loss as I couldn't find the examples given for the task and so your mind map helped me see light and get started. I like how you distributed your ideas and develop them inside the bubbles. Here's my contribution which is not as visual, but which works for me and hope you and the others will also find something useful. As usual, I thought of my criteria from the point of view of applicability to my own context.

When I started thinking about the evaluation criteria which would help me discern between the good and the bad OERs, Entry 10 Are you driven by technology or pedagogy in your teaching? in my Reflective Blog immediately came to mind as I offered a list of questions which I often ask myself when deciding whether a tool is to be integrated into a lesson or session and which have become a sort of self assessment criteria. I believe these questions could also be implemented, adapted and reformulated in addition to others as shown below and with an in-class implementation approach part of courses delivered F2F or in a blended format as these are the only options currently available. 

This is by no means a comprehensive list and will be revisited and integrated through more reading and contributions from the others in the forum. It is simply one possible list which outlines the main criteria I believe to be relevant for my context.

Learning Outcomes

• What is/are the stated outcomes for OER?
• What part of my lesson would be more engaging and cognitively challenging if I added OERs?

Usability

• Once the above is clear, what tools are required by the OERs?
• Do I know them already or remember seeing them somewhere which can help me enhance my lesson? Once there is an answer to this question, try and test the tool.

• Will the lesson be the same without OERs? If yes, discard it. If not, ensure it is recyclable.
• Will my students need training? If yes, then how am I going to give it e.g. a quick screen cast? In or outside class? With lower levels usually in class to 'show' them what I mean. If not, what do they need to know to be independent enough to complete the self training stage before the next lesson?
• What are the technical requirements of the OERs? Will all my students have access to it?

Language Learning

• How is the students' use of the language and learning experience enhanced by these OERs? Identify this before moving on otherwise it'll be infotaiment!
• Is the TL for this specific lesson clearly identifiable? Will the students be able to see it and use it?

Learning & Pedagogy

• Remember Confucius: The more they 'do', the more they will 'understand'.
• Is the OER cognitively engaging or physically involving (mechanical)?
• Is the pedagogical approach behind the OERs identifiable?

Authority

• Is it 'little' OERs or 'big' OERs? If little is a profile of the author available and reliable? If big, what kind of institution is it e.g. educational, commercial, governmental?
• How visible are the OERs in the field of education?
• Are they part of a network? Is it 'alive'? Dated?

Entry 51 IDT1415 - Priorities of Openness (A self reflection)

For this specific activity I would like to imagine that I am advising my current organisation.

The way I would go about it would be by inviting stake holders to a 60min presentation which would give an overview of what Openness Education is (25min with a 5min slot per topic), the 3 priorities for this exercise (10min), what there may be in it for us as a private sector organisation (10min slot) and a Q&A 5min session at the end.

I would establish from the beginning that the project would be considered a 'big' OER Project by offering examples of my own 'little' OER personal ongoing project as a way of comparison for an understanding that big OERs are institutionally generated (Weller 2011) as opposed to individual. Subsequently, I would address the areas included in the many interpretations made of Open Education as suggested in the OU course and shown below:

• Open educational resources
• Open licences
• Open courses or MOOCs
• Pedagogy for open education
• Literacies and technology for openness.
• Potential for a Private Sector Institution like ours

Now, the three main priorities which I believe my institution should address have been chosen in relation to our context and as demonstrated by Weller (2011) in his Joshua Bell story, it plays a significant role in terms of audience reception and content reception. Our context is defined by a 15 years old, private sector language school, examinations centre and teacher training centre member of national and international organisations working closely with local state schools.

The three main priorities to be considered in order of importance would be: Sustainability, Pedagogy and Technology. Sustainability is directly related to cost so this would be at the top of the agenda for most institutions and even more so for private sector language schools were resources come from direct rendering of services and thus allocation and investment of funds would be expected to have a return in order to be guaranteed. Weller (2011) mentions three models for sustainability as suggested by Wiley (2007): a centralised team of donors and grants which is highly unlikely an option for my current context as setting up a donor-hunting scheme would in itself be a project on its own which would prevent a small scale institution like ours to allocate staff and resources to more than one project. The second model regards linking sustainability to teaching responsibilities and this would seem actionable in the light of our current contractual conditions, but which would need careful attention because of the impact on the teaching staff. Thirdly, the last model, a decentralised collaborative authoring approach would not really be an option in our context because of the implications and requirements for both the staff and institution. Now, linking sustainability to teaching responsibility would be actionable as long as certain conditions are met. For instance, any time allocation to OERs development would have to be within the 23+2 contractual hours our teaching staff are bound by, where 23 are contact hours and 2 are admin hours. This means the institution would have to be ready to reduce the number of contact hours to, let's say, 21 to be able to dedicate 2 hours to OERS and this represents an 8.7% reduction in production terms. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, success in highlighting the possible returns on investment would have a big impact on the sustainability of the project as for the following reasons. Upon my arrival 4 years ago and the subsequent systematic introduction and integration of technology the school has seen an increase in enrollments as we are seen as a point of reference for innovation in our community. For this same reason, this gradual increase in numbers and feedback from customers on their appreciation of this innovation has led to measured but sustained investment in IT resources.

The second priority would be that of Pedagogy and in this sense I see it from two different perspectives: required and implementable. The former represented by teaching staff's lack of skills to make informed decisions about the technology to be chosen and used (Conole 2010b in Beaven 2013:62) when implementing the OERS project, but with a positive outset as the school's educational policy embraces the integration of technology and as such teaching staff receive regular training as part of their In-Service Teacher Training programme having reached for the most part a confident stage 6 of normalisation in Bax's terms (2003). The latter concerned with those pedagogies suggested by Conole (2010 in Weller 2011) namely: resource-based learning (RBL), problem-based learning (PBL), constructivism, communities of practice and connectivism. For the sake of brevity, I would argue that because of school ethos and educational policy which encourages a guided discovery approach, the easiest pedagogy to be adopted would be that of PBL. This, in turn, does not mean that the other pedagogies would be self excluding, but rather integrative.

The third and last priority would be that of Technology in terms of what technologies are best suited to an open approach. Unfortunately, this question although valid, it would not be applicable to my current context where a more suitable posit would be: what technology we have already available and whether it can be used for the project. I fear that a negative answer would almost automatically translate into the rejection or at best postponement of the project for the financial implications which augmented proportionally to the context and sector. This is specially so for a small scale school that has been willing to invest into the exploration and adoption of technology.

In short, I believe that a clear and informed presentation about Openness in Education and OERs along with what these are, what the potential benefits are, what the options and possible implementation routes are may lead my institution to seriously consider moving one step forward and decide to try the deployment of an OERs Implementation Project while taking my own 'little' OERs as an example to follow at a larger scale.

References

Bax, S., 2003. CALL—past, present and future. System, 31(1), pp.13–28. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0346251X02000714.

Beaven, T., 2013. Use and reuse of OER: Professional conversations with language teachers. Journal of E-Learning and Knowledge Society, 9(1), pp.59–71.

Weller, M., 2011. Openness in Education. In The Digital Scholar. How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice. London: Bloomsbury Aacademic, pp. 96–113. Available at: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-digital-scholar-how-technology-is-transforming-scholarly-practice/.

Entry 50 IDT1415 - A Visual representation of Openness in Education

After reading Weller 2011 and Anderson 2009 as well as looking at the Open University open course on Open Education, I came up with the following visual representations of Openness in Education as a response to the forum task.

Here are my visual representations of Openness in Education :-).

A Tagxedo word cloud - I deliberately chose a hand as I believe Openness in Education is in our hands. If we don't share then there is no openness as Wiley points out in his slide show.

Entry 49 IDT1415 The Flipped Classroom

Hello everybody,

I would like to share an input session I designed called: Planning Receptive Skills Lessons which is part of a series I called Methodology Pills for Induced Reflection for language teachers both on and off CELTA courses. I can say that, in retrospect, I created the materials while unknowingly implementing Wiley's (2014) 5Rs: I initially came into contact with materials regarding lesson planning upon training as a CELTA tutor a decade ago and through the years the materials were 'Retained', 'Reused', and more than anything 'Revised' and 'Remixed' as my own beliefs, understanding and learning grew and changed shape via my own experience, peers and Continued Professional Development. I can confirm that the process followed this sequence and upon reflection this answers the question I posed at the tutorial regarding whether the order in which they were presented reflected the order in which the process of implementation was enacted. The last stage of 'Redistribution' only effectively started in 2009 when I started sharing my materials initially with my trainees via Dropbox, then COPY and subsequently with the public at large via my YouTube channel and my blog. I believe the reasons for this gradual sharing is reflected in Conole's words (2010b in Beaven 2013:62): “teachers lack the necessary skills to make informed judgements about how to use technologies and are bewildered by the possibilities”. Up until 2008 I was only a peripheral user of technology lacking those skills that would allow me to move from a print literacy to a texting, hypertexting and multimedia literacy respectively within the language focus realm before progressing towards the different stages of the information, connections and (re)-design foci as described by Dudeney et al. (2013:6).

My current state of affairs reflects then a continued adaptation and struggle to make informed decisions so as to implement the right 'active, problem-based learning activities' that provide the learners with more than a video to watch before the session (Lowell et al. 2013) through my 'little' Open Educational Resources (OERs) as defined by Cormier & Siemens (2010).
 

Flipping the Session

Session: Planning Receptive Skills Lessons

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this session, you will...

• Understand the stages and procedure for exploiting reading and listening texts.
• Have practised devising tasks based on reading and listening texts.
• Understand the rationale behind receptive and productive skills lesson frameworks.
• Have explored practical receptive skills tasks which can be transferred to your classroom.

Before the session...

The video is made available before the session and trainees are asked to:

1. Watch the video and come up with 3 questions they want answered during the session.

2. Answer the following questions while watching the video:

·         What stages are common to both receptive skills and language focused lessons following a Guided Discovery framework?

·         How many stages are there? Which are they?

·         What's the difference between the skimming and scanning stages?

·         Does the order in which of the above stages come in a lesson matter?

·         Make a mind map of the session and be ready to share it with the class. (This is part of your portfolio).

During the lesson...

Step 1 - Trainees are assigned to groups and given 3 min to briefly discuss their answers to the questions.

Step 2 - Group plenary addresses questions and issues. Questions are acknowledged and set to be answered during the session.

Step 3 - Following a Guided Discovery approach, trainees' attention is focused on the first part of the presentation (up to slide 2) and then given sample lesson plans for them to identify the different parts.

Step 4 - Q&A mini stage to see if trainee questions match input at this stage.

Step 5 - Adopting a trainee-centred presentation the remaining part of the presentation continues while focusing on the different stages for receptive skills and requiring groups to add ideas to the ones already suggested in the video.

Step 6 - Q&A mini stage to see if trainee questions match input.

Step 7 - Sample Lesson Plan Analysis - trainees finish identifying lesson stages in sample lesson plans and complete HOs.

Step 8 - Reflection and Wrap up: pair work reflection task on a. content of the lesson, b. 3 things new to them, c. 3 things they still find challenging, d. discussion of how they plan to address lesson planning.

Step 9 - Setting HW: 1. Write a general set of guidelines which they would recommend other trainees to follow when planning a Receptive Skills Lesson and then check against the video below how similar or different the suggested ones are. 2. Pay attention to the Language-focused Lesson Frameworks mentioned for the following session and write 3 questions as to re-start the cycle.

Watch Methodology Pill no. 18 Language & Skills Lesson Planning Guidelines.

References

Beaven, T., 2013. Use and reuse of OER: Professional conversations with language teachers. Journal of E-Learning and Knowledge Society, 9(1), pp.59–71.

Cormier, D. & Siemens, G., 2010. “Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement.” Educause Review, 45(4), pp.30–39. Available at: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume45/ThroughtheOpenDoorOpenCoursesa/209320.

Lowell, J. et al., 2013. The Flipped Classroom : A Survey of the Research. Proccedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education, p.6219. Available at: http://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6219/view.

Wiley, D., 2014. The Power of Open Educational Resources. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/opencontent/the-power-of-open-educational-resources-32336823?qid=ff3f974a-5ada-4c14-9660-9ec677cd6838&v=qf1&b=&from_search=1.

Entry 48 IDT1415 - Aims and Objectives

TASK - Consider the "aims and objectives" of a language module/course/learning event with which you are familiar. Reflect on their strength and weaknesses and propose a revision. Justify your proposal on the basis of this week's readings or any other resource you have found particularly useful. Your reflection can be in any format you like.

For this task I would like to examine The University of Cambridge CELTA Syllabus as I am familiar with it because of my work as a tutor on these courses both F2F and online versions.

First of all, I would agree with Victoria and Jen in that it's not fully clear whether using the term 'objectives' or 'aims' should be abandoned so I'll also opt for 'learning outcomes' (LO) here so as to be in line with Moon's suggestion (2002:63) even if aims, objectives and learning outcomes seem to be used interchangeably in the literature (apart from Moon's 2002 where aims are said to be related to teaching and learning outcomes to learning) as shown in the example given below. In my personal experience as a teacher and teacher educator, I think the difference between the different terms lie more in the actual writing and perspective given of these e.g. using an infinitive (To learn the present simple tense) or the future (Students will learn how to use the present simple tense) or future perfect to give a sense of accomplishment (By the end of the lesson the students will have a. been able to do x, y and z; b. used the present simple; c. practised the present simple, etc.) which are in lines with Moon's (2002:53,64)  prospective and retrospective terms, and a focus on what the students do not the teacher rather than in the terms themselves. The Cambridge dictionary online defines aims and objectives as follows:

Aims: a result that your plans or actions are intended to achieve.

Objectives: something you plan to do or achieve.

Learning Outcomes are listed as separate entries so after a web search one of the definitions given by the University of Illinois is that they 'are statements of what students will learn in a class or in a class session'.  

In general, I would argue that aims, objectives, goals or learning outcomes are all synonyms in light of their dictionary definitions and that their format or structure is what determines their clarity or I dare say perspective (Teaching vs Learning) as mentioned above and argued by Moon (2002). For instance, course books and syllabi often phrase aims or objectives using infinitives as shown below in the CELTA Syllabus:

 

Further on in the document the term Learning Outcomes is used interchangeably:

Other materials such as NEFE do not state them altogether as seen in the different screen shots of some units below:

Or are simply missing from the Teacher's Book, which is supposed to be of support for novice teachers, as shown in the screen shot below:

I would also argue that this dismissal of aims and learning outcomes by NEFE is both their biggest weakness and a potential strength depending on the context in which the materials are used. The former as this means that teachers are left to their own devices and without any guidance thus making it impossible for anyone without enough training and understanding of pedagogical principles to align their teaching so as to provide opportunities for learners to construct meaning as suggested by (Biggs 2003:2). The latter because in my own context this allows teacher trainers to focus on the development of learning outcomes writing skills giving trainee teachers space for reflection and awareness raising so as to 'have a clear idea of what we want our students to learn' (op.cit. p2). The student-centred approach emphasised by the methodology of the CELTA course could be argued to be a fertile ground for Bigg's constructive alignment as there is a strong emphasis on fostering lesson planning skills which dwell in the teacher's understanding of the Guided Discovery framework (this is specifically true of my centre as it is the preferred - not only - framework trainees are exposed to) and are not dependent on pre established course book objectives. This in turn allows for Bigg's (op.cit. p4) qualities of performance in terms of assessment of trainee teacher's ability to define clear 'Intended Learning Outcomes' (ILOs).

Proposed Revision of Aims and Objectives

As far as the CELTA Syllabus is concerned, I would argue that the current wording (Successful candidates are able to understand the range of...) and focus on the student (candidates) requires minimal revision as they seem to be in line with Bigg's (2003) constructive alignment and Moon's (2002) LOs based on a behaviourist approach which places the onus on the individual's learning process.

In relation to NEFE, I would argue that such revision may be determined and required by the context. For instance, if the course is used at a language school where a mix of novice and experienced teachers are employed (a typical scenario in many private language schools), then clear definition of learning outcomes should be implemented to provide clear guidance. Conversely, in a Teacher Training context like mine and as argued before, the very fact that ILOs are missing provides a positive opportunity to inform, train and shape trainee's awareness of the importance of ILOs.

Finally, Bigg's SOLO Levels (2011) are already recognisable to some extent in the CELTA scheme in terms of assessment as all four assignments incorporate different SOLO levels to some extent so further application of the same may be unnecessary. For instance, Assignment 1 Focus on the Learner poses questions which require responses that range from multi-structural (several aspects of the chosen learner's learning experiences must be discussed and not only listed) to extended abstract (discussion of the learner's strengths and weaknesses in language learning based on the theory and observation of the same in class must be generalised to diagnose the source of specific linguistic problems and their treatment). These SOLO Levels also allow for work on metacognition and strategy training (Oxford 2011) as an understanding of the different levels by trainee teachers can enhance their understanding of their own learning, how it takes place and what is required of them.

References

Biggs, J., 2003. Aligning teaching for constructing learning. , pp.1–4.

Biggs, J., 2011. Biggs’ structure of the observed learning outcome (SOLO) taxonomy. Teaching and Educational Development Institute., pp.1–5. Available at: www.tedi.uq.edu.au/downloads/biggs_solo.pdf.

Moon, J., 2002. Writing and using learning outcomes. The Module and Programme Development Handbook: A Practical Guide to Linking Levels, Outcomes and Assessment Criteria, pp.50–78.

 Oxford, R., L. (2011). Teaching and Researching Language Learning Strategies. Applied Linguistics in Action Series. Eds. C.N. Candlin and D.R. Hall. Oxford University Press, Oxford.