Worth Reading

Mark Nichols of the Open Polytechnic in New Zealand (formerly of the Open University UK) has been engaged in transformation projects for a large part of his professional career. This thoughtful, engaging and well-informed book captures the key components of the system and organizational level changes needed to effectively implement online learning as a strategy. Beyond incrementalism, the book challenges all engaged in thinking about the future to understand the current dysfunction of universities (and colleges) and to get to the systemic features that need to change. An excellent book that will challenge administrators, policy makes and instructors to ask some basic questions about mission, purpose and action.

This new book (due next month) is an edited collection of quality materials, which explores what a variety of faculty have done across a number of disciplines – music, literature, biosciences, engineering, social work – to engage their students in creative and imaginative ways. While the focus is on online learning, there are also relevant materials related to blended learning here. A truly global collection, it is full of surprises and insights.

We have been hearing about the transformation of colleges and universities for close to one hundred years, but what is happening now as a result of COVID-19 is the exploration of the ways in which technology can transform teaching and the experience of learning within our existing structures and arrangements. The shift from content curation to constructivism. This book – published well before COVID-19 – explores some of the challenges of these shifts, in particular issues of equity, quality, ethics and the pervasive influence of private interests on public spaces. A well written book (available as an e-book from Taylor-Francis), these Norwegian writers hit many nails on the head.

This is a very practical resource, full of examples of how the evidence-based research on learning can shape the design of online learning so as to strengthen student engagement, increase completion and make the learning “stick”. American authors – so still a heavy bias towards content mastery as opposed to learning through constructed experiences and communities of inquiry – but nonetheless very helpful.

This interesting collection of material will help faculty explore the question – how can we learn from our experience of online learning and remote teaching in ways that can improve our pedagogy? What is it about the new experience of content, technology, teaching and services that we should keep and build on and what can we learn from our failures and hiccups? A wide range of contributors (a strong contingent from Asia and India) help explore this question, based on their pre-COVID-19 experience. Each chapter is distinct and downloadable for a price – you can mix and match the pieces of the puzzle that interest you.

It is likely that, as an instructional designer, you have been exceptionally busy of late and that, in the future, you will be kept busy. How do you manage all of the projects on your desk and the pile of projects about to arrive? Agile systems – developed originally in manufacturing – is an approach to effective management of multiple projects. As an introduction of agile, this 200-page book is excellent – clear, full of practical resources and examples. Megan knowns what she is talking about, having done this exact thing for over two decades and done it well. If you think you’re going to be overwhelmed, you need this book.

Questions, the author assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. A bold, creative and well-written book will make all of us who think about “what’s next” think differently.

This book has a focus on schools rather than colleges and universities, but the issues it addresses are the same: what will teaching and learning look like in the age of the intelligent (smart) machine? One of the authors – Wayne Holmes – works at the Open University in the UK. The book comes from The Centre for Curriculum Redesign in Boston and is informed by an in depth understanding of both teaching and learning sciences and the emerging applications of AI. A must-read book for those interesting in embracing this emerging future and a valuable one for those intent on resisting it.

As faculty members struggled with the lack of access to proctored exams and started to think about assessment differently, questions were asked about “what’s next for assessment” – especially about competency-based assessment, lab work, fieldwork and practicums. One thing that is next is a shift in how we think about the purpose of assessment. But the other is how we design, develop, deploy and make use of assessment instruments. This collection of papers – there is a lot here – will help designers think about how they can start to use the AI tools (including open source tools) to improve and expand assessment beyond current practice.

The term “unit” tells us that this book in not Canadian – but is from British and Australian authors. It is practical guide to creating effective, engaging and active online learning – based on instructional design principles. It helps instructors focus on what they want to teach, how they can create active and engaging activities and how they can assess students they may never have met. It also focuses on feedback – both how to give effective, authentic feedback and how to do it quickly.

This is not a new book, but it remains a constant source of inspiration when faculty need to find creative ways of assessing learning for online students. Practical and full of case studies and examples, the book focuses on the design and use of authentic assessment, including peer assessment, project based work and collaborative task-based assessment. Given that assessment times are fast approaching, it is a helpful reminder of what you can do that will help students see assessment as learning and for learning.

We need to start thinking strategically about lifelong learning as a response to rapid change in the global economy and emerging demographic shifts. These changes are happening right in front of us, and our colleges and universities need to think about whether their current programs and modes of operation need to be re-imagined and redesigned. This book will help. With some case examples and insightful commentary, the collection of readings will inspire and encourage a healthy conversation about “what’s next?”. The title is important: will the learning students undertake at your institution prepare them for the turbulence they will experience in the next sixty years of their life? It is a good question.

Don’t be put off by the use of the term “training” in the title of this book. It is helpful for all sorts of learning design, especially at the college and first year undergraduate level. Covering techniques like interleaving and self-directed and self-regulated learning, as well as debunking myths and fallacies, which abound in the field, it covers how best to test, measure and reinforce learning in both online, offline and face-to-face situations. Clearly written and focused on effectiveness driven by an understanding of the psychology and neuropsychology of learning, it is practical and down to earth.

Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the UK Open University, writes well, is insightful and often uses his knowledge and experience – he’s as been around open and distance education for a long time – to challenge us to think differently about pedagogy. He is a constant source of inspiration and, as this open source book shows, a walking repository of the history of educational technologies for learning.

His long history and deep experience is why this book is important. As he points out, we are poor at documenting both what we did, why we did it in the way we did and what it meant for teaching and learning. This leads to many repeat attempts to invent things we already tried or others to make claims of newness when in fact many were there before.

The book is not intended as a complete history of educational technology since 1994. There are many things “missing” – for example, Athabasca’s pioneering of fully online graduate programs in 1993 and 1994 using proxies for learning management systems not yet invented. But Weller is clear – this is his account of both the broad picture and it is intended to be highly personal. The book is also United Kingdom and euro centric – there is little about developments in Asia, China, Latin America and only some reference to Canada and the United States (especially early on).

The book presents the educational technology in time by year, with each year used to identify a particular development. For example, 1998 is the year of the Wiki and 2000 the year of learning objects. Some of the dates are fuzzy, as Weller admits. Choosing 1999 as the year of e-learning, when many e-learning innovations happened in the five years before, may strike some as odd, but as Weller points out he is focusing on the patterns of change not the specifics.

The book speaks to the various moments when vendors or journalists or some specific practitioner made the claim a particular development involving educational technology – the learning management system (LMS), massive open online courses (MOOCs) and more recently artificial intelligence (AI) – will transform higher education, making many of the past ways of working redundant.

Gert Biesta, the educational philosopher based in Dublin, refers to these moments as “moments of capture” and to some of the underlying assumptions of such claims as the “learnification” and “datafication” of education. Weller is conscious of the critiques and, on many occasions within the book, shares them. As an inveterate innovator, Weller knows the real challenge is to intensify and make authentic the experience of both teaching and learning and his interest is in finding enabling technologies which can make this happen. Exaggerating the potential of a development – just look at how many positioned MOOCs – does not help to refine the application of a technology to a specific set of learning challenges related to particular domains of learning for culturally located groups of students.

One interesting aspect of this book is it helps us recognize the short life some technologies had – what might be termed the “half-shelf life”. Bulletin boards, broadcast television, wikis and personal learning environments are all still in use, but on the margins of pedagogy. As Weller notes, newness encourages others to innovate, but once newness becomes sameness, many revert to past practice.

We see this in MOOCs. The constructivist MOOCs, which is how MOOCs began, was replaced by instruction driven MOOCs (known as xMOOCs but perhaps better thought of as “instructionist” MOOCs) – a way of distributing traditional university courses and now degrees, certificates and diplomas on a mass scale. Weller warned about this in 2015 and does so again in the book. He points to the rhetoric of those who are convinced education (especially public education) is “broken” and the willingness of vendors (especially Silicon Valley) to suggest they have a “fix”. Both of these narratives are false.

Each chapter offers insights, based on both a depth of understanding of learning as a complex process but also of the limitations of what teachers and technology can do to enable learning to occur. The chapter on learning analytics, which really did start to be taken seriously in 2014 but was emerging for some time, shows a real depth of understanding of both the challenge of making analytics a helpful tool in the armoury available to educators given the ethical, legal and moral challenges the use of data gives rise to. This chapter is also a good example of Weller’s skill in taking a technology and showing the way it is used versus what could be its use creates challenges.

The chapter on AI – correctly titled ‘The Return of Artificial Intelligence’ – points out AI-enabled tutoring has been with us for some time but found little traction. The new excitement, shown in new uses such as virtual co-operatives and AI-enabled and -supported simulations, mirrors the old excitement early adopters had in the mid 1980s. Weller points out one reason for this is the difference between vendor-created excitement and that found amongst those who are engaged in teaching and learning. This is now a common complaint: many of the innovations in educational technology are developed by teams who do not teach and have never done so.

When educators are engaged in the design, development and deployment of technology adoption looks different and has different outcomes. Weller explores these themes in some depth in his 2018 chapter in which he explores the dystopian view of educational technology and its implications.

The book ends with a reflective chapter, well worth reading. Weller suggests a key challenge for educators is to get into the driving seat for the development of educational technology rather than being the passengers. He also suggests building on past successes and learning from failure may be more helpful than the constant reinvention of educational technology, which repeats past mistakes. While this requires a real sense of history and an understanding of past practices, it also requires access to an evidence base of interventions and their impacts which we do not really have.

Part of his conclusion is:

When we look back over the last 25 years, the picture that emerges is a mixed one. Clearly, a considerable shift in higher education prac­tice has taken place, driven by technology adoption. Yet, at the same time, nothing much has changed, and many ed tech developments have failed to have a significant impact. “Everything changes while simultaneously remaining the same,” is perhaps the rather paradox­ical conclusion.

Weller sees the future in much the same way as many now describe the future of work: a relationship between people, technology and a body of knowledge and skills which leads to learning. We are learning to dance with machines to enable learning to occur. One day, all learning will be technologically-enabled, but universities, colleges, schools and teachers will be still be there. What and how they do things will continue to evolve. Weller cautions us not to be believe those who say “X technology” will be the end of universities and colleges as we know them. That is what they said about, well, lots of things.

A good read. A quick read. Well worth reading.

The original edition of this book (2013) was a helpful touch-point for connecting the work that faculty do every day to what we knew then about best practice for student success. This new edition, to be published in May, addresses new research on how people learn, active learning, and student engagement; includes illustrative examples from online teaching; and reports on the effectiveness of Fink's model. The author also explores recent changes in higher education nationally (Fink is based in the US but works around the world) and internationally and offers more proven strategies for dealing with student resistance to innovative teaching – a very real problem as all of us who teach know only too well.

Colleges and universities across Canada are increasingly reliant on international students for a key component of their revenue. But what impact does a significant number of such students have on the nature of teaching and learning and on the culture of the organization?  What are the management and administrative challenges associated with both recruitment, retention and enabling integration of these students? This collection of papers explores a range of practical issues. Though strongly UK focused, the issues and strategies explored are relevant to the Canadian college or university. This is one of a series of Routledge books focused on the question: how do we best manage the growth of this category of learners and how do we ensure that international students have a positive experience while engaged with learning with our institution.

As 5G begins to appear and games and simulations become ever more present in a range of courses in both colleges and universities, this helpful well-written book focuses on the design and pedagogical considerations in the creation of effective, engaging and focused simulations. There is a strong emphasis on understanding simulations from the learner perspective as well as helpful suggestions for design.

Joshua Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry into the experience of learning - curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure - devoting a chapter to each in this book and providing practical takeaways for busy faculty members and instructors. He also interviews and observes college and university instructors across the US, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience. A very practical and helpful book full of insights that even the experienced faculty member will find helpful.

The main argument of the book centers around the idea that we live in a changing, unpredictable world where the demands and expectations placed on graduates are constantly changing. According to Hanstedt, “we need wicked graduates with wicked competencies”, which he argues are developed when students are provided with opportunities to apply and use information instead of just receiving it. In a highly accessible and reader-friendly way, the author explains how this can done from a design perspective. He innovatively illustrates how to build such measurable, clear, and meaningful goals for learning outcomes. He pushes the idea of moving beyond content and skills mastery into co-creation, problem-solving and authentic learning. It’s a good read.

Technology in blended and online learning is ubiquitous and has changed the relationship between teacher, student and knowledge. But just what are these changed relationships and what do the changes mean for the nature of pedagogy? That is the core question explored in this book. Written by colleagues from Norway, the book explores the ethical and human concerns associated with the current and emerging technologies and raises important questions about teaching which are well worth reflecting on.

These two experienced scholars have collected a very interesting and insightful collection of papers looking at the nature and thinking related to access to quality education worldwide. They explore both the limits and opportunities which open education strategies have enabled and what might be in the wings in the near to medium term. They explore issues about inclusion, diversity, sustainability and the future. It will challenge its readers to explore what is possible both now and in the future.

 This interesting book explores different patterns of learning – individual, peer-to-peer, supervised, project-based and mentored – and links these patterns to known science of design and learning. New thinking for a new age.

Open education resources (OER) present a major opportunity to think differently about design, deployment and delivery of an online course. Not only do these lower the cost of learning for the student (something we should be especially conscious of at this time), but they increase the flexibility of design and enable a stronger and more authentic learning experience than is often possible when using a standard textbook. This is a very practical book and will help faculty find, adapt and shape their use of OER. Full of best practice examples, it is well written, clear and practical.

Scheduled for publication in January 2020, this book is available now. It is a collection of chapters from around the world – United States, Germany, Egypt, Mexico, Australia, Philippines, India – looking at AI, robotics and related developments and their impact on teaching and learning.

Covering topics such as chatbots and intelligent tutoring systems, analytics, virtual labs and simulations, robots in learning and the role of AI support systems in changing student behaviour, the book provides critical-reflective case studies of current specific developments. In doing so, it helps make the talk about these technologies real. While there are still some “ra-ra” elements in some chapters, the book helps readers think about possibilities while also recognizing challenges.

Most faculty members have some connection to cognitive theories of learning – how the brain processes ideas, experiences, inputs. The trouble is that it all sounds very complicated. This book gets past this and looks at what you can do both in class and online to improve learning and learning outcomes by small tweaks to teaching. It looks at the idea that less is more, that small but focused interventions can be much more effective than substantial and disruptive inputs and at the small design changes you can make in an online course to make it work better. Clearly written, focused material from someone who knows.

Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large of the Chronicle of Higher Education, so he has seen a thing or two about the US college and university system. When this was published – it was not new, but it is worth your time to read it – digital technologies were still being positioned as “poised to disrupt and transform”, something that is happening at the same pace as Brexit – slowly and painfully, especially in the US where enrolments are falling and higher education is in crisis. Our theme is innovations in teaching and learning and this is also Selingo’s theme – he is asking “what innovations are needed (urgently in his view) to ensure the survival of higher education?”. It will make you think.

This book follows Small Teaching – Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, but is focused exclusively on online learning (well, there are a great many blended learning observations here too). It is an American book – so the understanding of “online learning” is narrow, but they do focus on communities of inquiry, insightful suggestions for supporting struggling learners and how to increase student engagement.

This is a very refreshed new edition with strong chapters on cognitive neuroscience, self-directed learners and humanistic psychology, group learning and transformative learning. Clearly written and focused, reflecting the strong experience of the author in teaching and learning for many years in Australia, it is worth reading to remind ourselves of first principles.

Though directed at K-12, the paper provides some valuable insights to how analytics might be used in support of effective teaching and learning. If you ignore the K-12 context, this report is insightful, thorough and well worth a read. It was written in 2012, but has stood the test of time well. All that has happened since is that the data sets have got bigger, systems faster and we are far more aware of privacy, ethics and security than we were then.