Understanding your Target Learners

My target learners are educators and administrative staff in further and higher education, but supporting students in achieving their potential is our common goal. Embodying the change that I want to promote is an important element in communicating and disseminating resource materials and when delivering training I always show the tool in practice before explaining the workings – this motivates learners to commit to the extra effort required to learn how to use the tool. I apply this principle when creating Moodle pages for training, creating mock courses that demonstrate the tools in practice ('Moodle Formatting Demo course - Selected Examples' - below).

I have mentioned previously how I used a survey to learn more training needs for staff in my current college, but this section uses as an example an experience I had developing an innovative class in university and more recent work I did on redesigning Moodle courses.

Description

Lecturing

When I started a new class on social media literacy in 2015, I decided to use experiential learning to generate reflection of technological influences on communication by disallowing the use of PowerPoint, including for myself. Students had to contribute lecture summaries to a wiki, Google drive was used for group work collaboration, and I made extensive use of other software such as mind map programs (Creately, XMind), presentation software (emaze, Prezi, etc.), and line.do. Students were encouraged to use a variety of communication tools to submit their assignments, the largest of which was a report on their research into social media using Google Sites.

However, the student feedback was not positive, and I failed to meet the university’s targets as expressed in the student satisfaction survey. The qualitative feedback highlighted a perception of lack of structure, a dissatisfaction with the range of digital tools used, and unfair relative weighting of the assignments.

Redesigning Moodle Courses

Part of our remit is to assist lecturers in redesigning their Moodle courses, and I am including two examples of this. After they approached us, and I took the lead in these cases, my first task was to have an open dialogue with the lecturers in order to understand their objectives and to assess their level of digital skills. By doing this, I was able to propose solutions that they could learn to manage themselves and which fitted in with their teaching style. The presentations on Moodle Redesign (below) summarise the changes.

Reflection

Lecturing

I learnt from this experience that not only can it be difficult to stimulate the enthusiasm I feel for experimenting with new learning tools, but also that students have legitimate concerns with regard to the increased workload associated with using new software. Some also have anxieties that occur when there is too much change to the conventional teaching and learning formats. I also learnt that it is important not to assume that students are able to easily use all of the software tools, and that more training in their use needs to be incorporated into the class design.

Based on the feedback from students, and suggestions from a staff peer review, the 2016 iteration was extensively reorganised to improve clarity of structure, redistributing assignment loads and weighting, and deployed a biweekly summary of ongoing learning outcomes supported by an anonymous survey on students’ self-assessed ability to meet them. I used the Kahoot! mobile application for in-class responses to the learning outcomes survey and to stimulate discussion during lectures.

The overall satisfaction increased to 3.5, seven of the other indices were above 3.9, and the ‘Teacher Evaluation’ results showed preparedness, providing useful feedback, and opportunities for interaction scoring above 4.

Redesigning Moodle Courses

In my university the administration of Moodle courses is carried out by programme administrators who create the courses, enrol students, set up assignments and manage the grades, while the academic staff are responsible for the content. I have learnt to engage with them differently and provide relevant support, and since each administrator is responsible for a number of courses they are key to influencing wider changes in basic functionality and design.

These activities require a range of digital capabilities and support needs and the Jisc digital capabilities model can inform efforts to build capability and confidence. Of the six Jisc dimensions, those most relevant from a learning technology perspective are digital creation, digital teaching, and digital communication. My colleague and I are planning ways to structure and adapt our service delivery and by building upon the work done by Jisc in mapping digital capabilities and developing ‘role profiles’ of different types of learners – especially Teacher (HE) and Professional services staff in education.