Supercomplexity and Technology-Enhanced Learning

1. The future of learning: addressing
supercomplexity and harnessing technologies
Gráinne Conole
EdTech Conference, Sligo, Ireland
1st June 2017
National
Teaching
Fellow 2012
Ascilite fellow 2012EDEN fellow 2013

3. Outline
• The future of learning
– Future education scenarios
– Refocusing teaching and learning
– Competencies
– Digital literacies
• Supercomplexity
• Related concepts and discourses
• Illustrative examples
– Open practices
– The flipped classroom
– Heutagogy
– Smart learning
– Seamless learning

4. Future educational scenarios
• Interaction with digital
technologies will be more
pervasive, seamless and invisible
– Personal devices
• Technology embedded and
distributed in most objects
– Intelligent environments
• Your environment adapts to you and
know everything about you
– The network
• Blanket wireless connectivity
– Significant storage capability
– Enhanced security
https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/FUTL54/FUTL54.pdf

5. Refocusing teaching and learning
• What counts is less what individuals know
• More what individuals can do
• Preparing students for a changing and
unknown future
• Increasing importance of flexibility,
adaptability and self-reliance
• Need to change and reinvent identities
• Characteristics of learning
– It’s about transformation
– Knowledge is information transformed
– Personal, social, distributed, ubiquitous,
flexible, dynamic and complex
https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/FUTL54/FUTL54.pdf

6. The future of learning
• Competences
– Critical thinking
– Problem solving
– Team work
– Communication
– Collaboration
– Meta cognition
– Networking
– Creativity
– Reflexivity
– Flexible
http://www.rockyview.ab.ca/21stC/learning/competencies

7. The future of learning
• Digital literacies
– Evaluation
– Transmedia navigation
– Multitasking
– Distributed cognition
– Networking
– Visualisation
– Metaphors
– Collective intelligence
– Play
– Digital identity management
Jenkins, JISC

8. Researching through the generations:
reflecting on the past, present and future

9. Supercomplexity
• The state of affairs we find
ourselves in…
– Uncertainty
– Unpredictability
– Challenge
– Change
• Impossible to resolve by
traditional means
• Teaching learners for an
unknown future
Barnett

10. Related concepts and discourses
• An ecosystem of learning
– Educators, learners, technologies, resources
– Boundaries more permeable
– New kinds of agency in learning (Barron, 2006)
– Learner-centred ecology of resources (Luckin, 2010)
• Affordances
– All "action possibilities" latent in the environment,
objectively measurable and independent of the
individual's ability to recognize them, but always in
relation to the actor and therefore dependent on
their capabilities (Gibson, 1977)
– Co-evolution of tools and individuals
• Distributed cognition (Salomon, 2003)
• Rhizomatic learning (Cormier, 2008)
• Digital literacies and identities
http://e4innovation.com/?p=935

11. Illustrative examples
• Open practices
– OER
– MOOCs
– Digital scholarship
• The flipped classroom
• Heutagogy
• Smart learning
• Seamless learning

12. Open practices
• Increase of free resources and expertise –
via webinars, blogs, open repositories and
journals, and social media
• Digital technologies enable more open
practices
• Educational practices that are concerned with
and promote equity and openness
• Range of practices around create, use and
management of OER
• Results in a change in practice
• Connectedness, trust and innovation
• Increasing importance of OER and MOOCs
• Challenging traditional business models

13. Integrating OER
• Assess the validity and reliability
• Determine placement in curriculum
• Check licensing
• Eliminate extraneous content
• Adapt to your context
• Remix with other educational materials
• Clear instructions on how the OER will
be used
• Make pedagogy explicit
• Consider getting students to find and
collate relevant OER
13

14. OER Case Study
• OER at the Open University UK
– Research
• OER hub conducts research on the
impact of OER
– Community
• GO-GN develops a global community of
OER PhD students
– Content
• OpenLearn releases thousands of hours
of open licensed materials
– International
• TESSA and TESS-India use locally
developed OER to aid teacher education

15. Open Online, Flexible & Technology-
Enhanced Models project
• OU UK and FIBS commissioned by ICDE
• Identifying new business models
– Looking at content development, content delivery,
recognition and certification
• Business model components (Boer and Lindgren, 2015)
– Products and services
– Markets
– Communication Channels
– Value chain
– Competitive advantage
– Networks
– Sustainability
http://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/OOFATGENERAL

16. Principles
• Identify exemplary
distance provision models
• Focus:
– Content (subject
knowledge, support and
learning analytics)
– Delivery (place, pace and
timing)
– Recognition (of learning
achievements)

17. Mohsen Saadatmand
A new ecology for learning

18. MOOC timeline
Powell & Yuan (2015).

19. Saadatamand, 2017

20. An Open Networked Learning Ecology
Saadatamand, 2017

21. MOOC drivers
• Cost
• Technology solution
• Learner demands
• Ways to educate the many
• Institutional branding
• Shared services
• Collaboration
• Exploring online pedagogies
• Innovation
• Toe in the water…

22. MOOC a contested discourse
• Social inclusion
• Quality
• Accreditation
• Support
• Disruptive
• Transformative
• Connectivist
• Personalised

23. MOOC priorities
• A strategic approach to MOOCs
• Benefits of learning and teaching in
MOOCs
• Well designed assessment and
accreditation
• Widen participation
• Use of appropriate pedagogies
• Support development of educators
• Effective use of Learning Design
• Effective quality assurance
• Address privacy and ethical issues
Ferguson et al., 2016
http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/article/10.5334/jime.439/

24. MOOC strategies
• Clarity of relevance/purpose, for
– Institution
– Academics
– Participants
• Clear evaluation plan
• Design support
• Alignment to institutional mission
• Sustainability
• Quality assurance
• Learner support
• Assessment and accreditation mechanisms
– Badges
– Certificates of participation/completion
– Peer feedback
– Routes into formal educational offerings

25. Designing effective MOOCs
• Design steps – the 7 C’s of
Learning Design
– Conceptualise
– Create
– Communicate
– Collaborate
– Consider
– Combine
– Consolidate
• Tips and hints
– Keep short
– Keep video below 10 minutes
– Video or podcasts?
– Indicate learning hours
– Clear learning outcomes
– Encourage reflection and dialogue
– Simple text and instructions
– Core and extension activities
– Structured learning pathways:
• Connect, activate, consolidate
• Present, apply, review
– Use learning analytics to:
• Evaluate
• Improve
• Support
http://e4innovation.com/?p=800

26. Dimension Characteristics
Context
Open Degree to which the MOOC is open
Massive How large the MOOC is
Diversity The diversity of the learners
Learning
Use of multimedia Extent of use of rich multimedia
Degree of communication Amount of communication incorporated
Degree of collaboration Amount of collaboration incorporated
Amount of reflection Ways in which reflection is encouraged
Learning pathway Degree to which the learning pathway is supported
Quality assurance Degree of quality assurance
Certification Mechanisms for accreditation
Formal learning Feed into formal learning offerings
Autonomy Degree of learner autonomy
A taxonomy of MOOCs
http://e4innovation.com/?p=727

27. Recognising non-formal learning
• Analysed practices for
assessment and
recognition of non-formal
learning
• Barriers:
– Online seen as lower value
– Lack of guidance on
recognition options
– Cost of recognition
– Need to unbundle learning
provision
http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC96968/lfna27660enn.pdf

28. Digital scholarship
• Scholarship: four aspects (Boyer)
– Discovery
– Integration
– Application
– Teaching
• Digital scholarship
– Use of digital evidence and research to
achieve scholarly and research goals
• Digital scholarship
– Digital
– Networked
– Open
• Technologies are transforming practice http://blog.edtechie.net/
Weller (2011)

29. Education for all
• New EU strategy
– To support high quality, inclusive
and future-oriented schools and HE
– Focus on personal development
and active citizenship
– Priority areas:
• Raising quality and inclusiveness of
educational systems
• Supporting excellent teachers and
school leaders
• Equip learners with the right skills for
today’s economy
• Improving the governance of
educational systems
https://ec.europa.eu/education/news/20170530-youth-initiative-school-higher-education

30. The flipped classroom
• Students engage with
content before the
class
– Video, podcasts etc.
• Teacher poses
questions about the
content
• Classroom is student-
centred and active
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26pxh_qMppE&feature=youtu.be

31. Why flip?
• Information transfer is
not enough
– Lack of student
engagement
– Not meeting future
needs
– Need to go beyond
knowledge recall
– Fosters active learning

32. The traditional classroom
• Teacher as gatekeeper,
giving information,
deciding what is
important
• Content delivered during
class
• Students assimilate the
learning outside of the
class
• Students as content
consumers

33. The flipped classroom
• Students view content
before class
• Focus in class on active
learning
• More student centred
• Teacher as facilitator
• Fosters student
engagement
• Independent study plus
face-to-face interaction

34. Benefits for the teacher
• Can see students at
work interacting with
others
• Frees time to help
students during class
• Identify struggling
students
• Provide more
personalised attention

35. Benefits for the students
• Shift from passive consumer
of information to active
learning
• Can work at their own pace
• Have more control of
learning whilst watch videos,
can stop and re-watch or
skim through
• More peer interaction
• More engaging and
motivating

36. Heutagogy
• Study of self-
determined learning
• Knowing how to learn
• Learners are
autonomous
• Web 2.0 affordances
– Learner-generated
content
– Self directedness
http://leolearning.com/2014/03/heutagogy-designing-for-self-directed-learners/
Blaschke, L.M. (2012)

37. Smart learning
• Learning across formal and informal
contexts
• Personalised, adaptive and flexible
• Learner controlled
• Smart devices and intelligent technologies
• Ubiquitous devices such as the Internet of
things and wearable technologies
• Intelligent technologies
– Learning analytics, cloud computing
– How learning data can be captured,
analysed, and use to improve learning and
teaching
• Designing technology-enhanced learning
spaces
– Spaces for Knowledge Generation (SKG)
project
19-20 May 2017, St Petersburg

38. Seamless learning
• Across time and locations
• Ubiquitous access to
resources
• Physical and virtual
• Multiple devices
• Integrating different
approaches to learning and
teaching

39. A day made of glass

40. Educating for supercomplexity
• Rigorous approaches to learning design
• Harnessing the power of learning
analytics
• Implementing innovative pedagogies
that:
– Support self-reliance, resilience, agility,
adaptability
– Encourage meta-cognition and
reflection
– Utilize the affordances of digital
technologies
– Enable technology-enhance learning
spaces
– Develop competencies to deal with an
unknown future

41. Useful resources
• Learning Design
– Larnaca Declaration
– JIME special issue
• Learning analytics
– SOLAR
– Handbook of learning analytics
• Learning theories
– HoTEL learning theories
– Pedagogies for the future
– Bridging learning theories and TEL

42. Questions for the future
• How prepared are we for the massive changes digital
technologies are likely to enable?
• Are our future scenarios for education based on assumptions
from humanity, society and technology that may not be valid in
the future?
• How can we help shape the developments of technology to
enhanced human development?

43. The future of learning

44. Are we living in a simulation?

45. g.conole@gmail.com
Website: e4innovation.co.uk
BlogL e4innovation.com
Twitter: @gconole
http://www.slideshare.net/GrainneConole