Tag Archives: first class

What was your first experience of learning technology in a work setting?

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q1 What was your first experience of learning technology in a work setting?

This was a bit of a challenge to answer as I have been working in this field for over twenty years, and before that I was an academic using learning technology, and before that I was working in schools supporting teachers.

I wrote this on the Twitter.

How do you define learning technology? I used a laptop in 1992 to create learning materials using Aldus PageMaker. Does that count? I also remember the solitary 286 PC and dot matrix printer we had for the whole department in 1994.

I had been working in a school creating resources and I borrowed the headteacher’s laptop to create content. Eventually I was given my own laptop. In the main I used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but also did content using Aldus Pagemaker.

I remember how powerful WordPerfect 5.1 was, of course being a DOS based piece of software, it wasn’t WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and I remember pressing the keystrokes for the print preview quite a bit to check the page was looking as I needed it.

There were plenty of keyboard shortcuts that you had to use (no mouse or button bars here).

I also used WordPerfect at (what was then) Brunel College. I was in the Faculty of Business, Food and Hairdressing and initially we had a single 286 PC that we all had to share. It did’t really help that the only printer we had was a dot matrix printer that didn’t really do the job.

So, like many academics of the time, I used my home PC and also bought a budget laser printer to print things off.

I did add another post to the Twitter thread.

Later that decade we had a luggable projector and screen, which I remember heaving to my classroom and connecting my home PC tower, so I could show video using a Rainbow Runner video card embedded into a presentation.

I would on a regular basis bring my home PC into work to show off presentations.

I was reminded writing this blog post that I did this back in 2021, my edtech journey.

One of the most influential pieces of software I used back in the 1990s was PagePlus, a budget DTP software for Windows.

I was using technology to support learning, was this a learning technology? Is using standard business hardware and software something different to hardware and software for learning?

If this was technology that was specific to education was probably the FirstClass LMS in the late 1990s. That was my first introduction to a virtual learning environment.

Day 1: The VLE in my life…

graveyard
Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

This post is part of the #JuneEdTechChallenge series.

ALT set a challenge.

Today we are asked about the VLE in my life…

Well it’s dead isn’t it…

At ALT-C 2009 we did a debate called The VLE is Dead.

It was Tuesday 8th September 2009 at 13:40 at Manchester University that The VLE is Dead symposium was kicked off by Josie Frasier.

2009 was also the year that delegates at ALT-C discovered the Twitter! In 2008 there were roughly 300 tweets and about forty people tweeting, in 2009 the amount of tweeting went through the roof!

Most people though remember that year as the year I allegedly said the VLE was dead! We had certainly over the months leading up to the conference trailed the debate with blog posts, tweets and even a trailer.

The debate was huge, with hundreds of people in the room, sitting on the floor, standing by the walls and we also live streamed the debate over the internet (which was quite revolutionary at the time). Overall an amazing experience and an interesting debate that still goes on today.

If you watch the video of the debate and discussion you will see that my view was that the VLE was more of a concept a place where a learner starts their journey and other technologies could be plugged into the institutional VLE to enhance and enrich it.

I still hold that viewpoint that the VLE is a construction of different tools and services. Back in 2009 I thought the VLE would evolve into something at the heart of a student online experience. 

Reality was everyone thought I said the VLE was dead…

My first experience of a VLE, well more of a Learning Management System was First Class back in the late 1990s. I remember the number of red flags that said you had unread messages in the text based discussion forums. I did think it had huge potential.

In 2001 I got a job as Director of the Western Colleges Consortium and part of the role was leading and supporting the use of a shared VLE, TekniCAL’s Virtual Campus. This was an interesting platform, though the best thing that TekniCAL did was create a SCORM authoring tool based on Word. A simple tool which used styles and then you could create interactive and engaging learning content. The challenge with the platform was that the focus of technical development was on the administrator experience and not the student experience, so there was a lot of dissatisfaction from the end users on their user experience.

I then moved jobs and moved VLEs.

In later jobs I had to use Moodle and Moodle was like a breath of fresh air in the VLE space when it was first around. I did get annoyed when people confused free (open source) software with free (as in no cost). Certain skills were required to manage and administer Moodle from a technical perspective. If you didn’t have those then there was potential for things going wrong. 

Over time though Moodle became somewhat clunky and needed a redesign. I did once take an in-depth look at Canvas.

I have never used Blackboard!

In my current role I don’t use a VLE.

So for me the VLE is now dead!

Though I didn’t post these posts each day in June (and to be honest I didn’t post it each day on the Twitter either) except the final day, I have decided to retrospectively post blog posts about each of the challenges and back date them accordingly. There is sometimes more I want to say on the challenge then you can fit into 140 characters (well 280 these days).

I am going to teach

What was City of Bristol College

Teaching is something you do, not somewhere you go…

Okay so teach and work aren’t as interchangeable as I would like to think, and I recently wrote a couple of pieces on the nature of work and working in this uncertain landscape. The first was a reflective piece on where I have worked and also how I worked, whilst the second was much more about the future of work and workplaces, as in work is still something you do, not somewhere you go.

Whilst writing both posts it got me thinking about how that, just as with the nature of work changing, teaching is also changing. Once this change has happened, people may not necessarily will want to return to how they use to teach.

When I was a teacher, I would often use the phrase I am going to teach which meant for much of my working life as teacher not only was I going to teach, but I was going to go to a specific space to teach as well. I use to remark (or was that joke) that I could teach anywhere, well I thought I could, but in reality I didn’t. I never took the students onto the field to teach, we never met up in a coffee shop. Okay I did field trips to the Bristol Docks, but that for me was more about learning than teaching.

Bristol Harbourside

I generally left the students to learn about urban regeneration in the docks by themselves, having taught them about what they needed to learn in the classroom the week before.

My career moved away from me teaching, to me supporting staff to teach, supported by the use of technology. I still considered myself a teacher and teaching, though most would have called it staff development. Most of that was still about going to a space and teaching. I did do other things that would be still called teaching, but didn’t require me to go to a specific space to teach. Some of this I did at home.

Back in 2008 I did a series of online webinars for the MoLeNET using a tool called instantpresenter.

InstantPresenter

I remember starting the software and staring at my computer screen. This wasn’t like the Teams or Zoom software of today. There was usually only one video feed, mine, partly down to bandwidth limitations, but also down to the fact that you would need a separate webcam for most computers of that era. I was lucky there was an iSight camera built into my iMac.

As I looked into the camera I realised that this was no classroom, this was me and a screen. There was going to be no visual or verbal cues from the people watching I felt I was literally on my own. I knew that as a teacher, someone who delivered training sessions and conference presentations, that I would be very responsive to the audience reaction. Knowing that I wouldn’t be getting that I knew I might get a little bit flat, so I decided to turn up my enthusiasm to eleven. I think I went a little too far and it all became Alan Partridge.

Going back ten years earlier in 1998, I was using a learning platform called First Class, where there was no video, it was all asynchronous text chat. Having participated in UseNet groups on the internet (remember those) I was quite familiar with and liked asynchronous text chat. However what I did find, was that many of my students on the First Class platform were not and didn’t quite get it. This was something that I also experienced in the early days of the Jisc e-learning conferences, which took place on an asynchronous platform. The presentations were not delivered, more they were uploaded. We would then discuss them using asynchronous text chat. The depth of discussion was always deeper than in a live physical conference, however as with my early experiences with First Class, not everyone got it, so didn’t get involved. When those Jisc e-learning conferences moved to a platform that enabled live online presentations, I think though we gained in one way, we lost an awful lot and much of the potential of asynchronous text chat was never achieved.

Just because you provide an asynchronous text chat platform, never assume people know how to use it effectively for teaching and learning, even if they know how to use iMessage and WhatsApp. As with any kind of technology, just because people use it for one thing, that doesn’t mean they know how to make the best use of it for learning and teaching. This is something I still refer to and think about when it comes to technology enabled learning.

Where I am trying to get to initially is to note that as we enter a new academic year which will require many staff to no longer go somewhere to teach, but they are still going to teach. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are able and comfortable to teach in these new online environments even with their recent direct experiences. We know that over the last six months we’ve been responding to the crisis by switching to remote teaching and I also think we are still in a crisis, but remote teaching doesn’t have to be a direct translation of physical teaching.

We also need to recognise that whereas before staff were teaching from home, in a landscape where students will be attending some face to face sessions and some online sessions, staff may need to deliver their online sessions from their desk. This is fine and dandy if they have their own office or dedicated quiet space, but less appropriate if they share an office, work in an open plan environment or even hotdesk! That is going to take some kind of logistical thinking and planning.

solitary
Photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash

Overall there is more to online learning then learning the technical mechanics of online learning. That equally applies to students as well as academics. Don’t assume people can do online learning, there are skills, techniques and possibilities that need to be thought about and taken onboard. As well as the mechanics of using the system, there is the how of online learning, the process of learning that also needs to be considered. Really it should be considered first and then deliver the technical training.

So how are you approaching the subject of online learning with your academics? What works? What challenges have you come across and how did you overcome them? What about the logistical requirements, how are you managing that?

So the next question is what happens next? Not this year, maybe not even next year? As we are starting to see a shift in work and workplaces, will something similar happen when (or even if) we manage to move through to the ending of the pandemic, in higher education? Will we want to return to the daily commute to the campus, or could we see more flexible working or teaching in the future?

The real question – ocTEL

Red Flags

Many years ago, in 1999, I facilitated and delivered an online course, using First Class on how to facilitate and deliver online.

The participants were college staff, many of whom had limited experience of using the internet. My own experience was quite limited, but I had since 1998 really immersed myself in the internet and the web.

What was interesting and relevant to the ocTEL MOOC I am currently undertaking was the type of things participants were saying back in 1998 were very similar to the things the ocTEL participants are saying now.

In the main having the time and technical skills to deal with the quantity of conversations and handling the “platform”. A lot of people have posted to the ocTEL JISCMail list saying that they can’t handle the amount of e-mail and to remove them from the mailing list, I recall similar conversations with staff back in 1998 about notifications coming from the First Class system. Likewise the “too much to read, too many e-mails” reminds me of the “too many red flags, too much to read” from First Class.

It’s true that a lot has changed, technically and culturally, in the last fifteen years, but I do find it interesting that in other areas we’ve not changed at all!

One question that does appear to resonate a lot with ocTEL participants is how do we get reluctant practitioners to engage with TEL? That’s one question we were also asking back in 1998. Back then a lot of the TEL we wanted practitioners to use was e-mail, word processing and Powerpoint.

Don’t you think it’s interesting that back in 1998 we were trying really hard to get people to use Powerpoint, and now that they are all using it really badly we are trying to stop them using it and stop them doing “death by Powerpoint”!

I wrote a few years ago a post called Well I think differently in which I explained how I had moved away from the “let’s convince people how good TEL is” to one of changing the culture of an organisation. That for me is the only way to move forward.

The question “how do we get reluctant practitioners to engage with TEL” is for me the wrong question. It’s hard to get individuals to change as they are individuals and have different personal needs. There is an assumption that “reluctancy” is a common trait that can be overcome. What I recognise when I meet a reluctant practitioner is that there is no commonality for the reasons behind the reluctancy. Sometimes it as simple as a training issue, for others it requires a complete overhaul of the way that they work. As a result you need different strategies that work with all the different individuals that work within an organisation.

Another aspect of this is that by “getting practitioners to engage with TEL” implies that TEL is a problem that needs to be solved, rather than do what most technologies actually do, which is solve problems.

We may talk about reluctancy in using TEL as though this is stopping things from changing, the reality is that though there is a undercurrent of reluctancy, and that there is consistent change and people are engaging and embracing technology all the time. The reasons they choose to use technology vary, but the main one is because it solves a problem and makes life easier.

As far as I am concerned question should be “how do we create a culture in which practitioners engage with TEL as a matter of course”. Practitioners will want to engage with TEL as they see it as part of the solution to their individual problems and not a problem in itself.