How do you learn?

Are you effective? Strategic? Curiosity driven? Do you prefer to think deeply about a concept, or would you prefer to learn just enough to get by?  Your answers to these and other questions will very much drive your learning experience. 

Traditionally, we have had few ways of tailoring our teaching to the learning styles of our students.  However, Transform has the potential to change that.  Profoundly.

With the official release of the Experience API (xAPI), also known as Tin Can, we are entering the next age in data collection about learner behaviour.  The field of learning analytics is concerned with collecting, interpreting and reporting data about learners to help them and their teachers optimise learning experiences.   xAPI consists of statements about individual learners and sends these to a Learning Record Store (LRS).  You just need to work out what functionality you want, and then build it into your system.

I want to use the xAPI LRS to help learners build portfolios quickly and easily from a set of completed modules. This would make it easy for them to showcase work they are particularly proud of in LinkedIn or at their next job interview. How about a set of learning activities targeted to an individual learner and only sent to them when they are ready? We could even set up an automated assessment process, where modules unlock for learners as they complete well-specified requirements.

We usually only find out where our students have gone wrong after they’ve messed up an assignment, and the best we can do is tell the next class not to make the same mistakes.  Learning analytics give us the opportunity to help people learn how to learn, and direct their learning towards much more individualised goals and objectives. 

Dr Kirsty Kitto -- Transformational Teaching Fellow / Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Online learning: A student's perspective

I'm Sam. I’ve been asked to give a student’s perspective on what’s going on. My first brief is to talk about what I like about learning stuff online.

An online learning experience's primary strength lies in its flexibility. We keep hearing about how everyone wants everything to become more convenient; it's inherent to human nature. Online education is a (probably the) next step in making learning more convenient. And it isn't (solely) the fact it allows me to stay indoors and watch lectures in my bed. It enables a fluidity in learning that simply isn't available by a course with a timetabled lecture and tutorial.
The gaps and inconsistencies in access to tertiary education are well documented. We're paying so much more for university education than ever before. Plus, if you don't live within an hour of a major Australian city, it's not going to be easy for you to even attend university. The logical response is what we've seen beginning to happen around the world: massive open online courses (or MOOCs, because it's not a thing until it's an acronym).

These courses, despite various obvious criticisms, have proved extremely popular. This is unsurprising. I can think of over 50 people off the top of my head who would have been willing to complete an online course, but weren't willing/ able to commit to a physical university course. There are a hundred reasons they didn't, but most of them would be overcome by the type of online environment QUT Transform is proposing.

In Sue Savage's previous post, Developing modern learning experience, she set out the key principles grounding what Transform is trying to achieve. They all seemed to fit in with what I, as a student, would expect from an online course. They are all challenges that need to be addressed in a contemporary manner, with an eye fixed on what kind of new technologies can be employed. As students, we are no longer fazed by having to learn new interfaces and programs - so long as they aren't overly complicated.

This semester, one of my units, Online Journalism, required us all to create a Twitter account. Using the hashtag #QUTOJ1, we would all post relevant links to stories we created, or comments on lectures. It was a constantly moving platform, and the updating twitter feed was even displayed on the screen during lectures. It was an extremely forward thinking concept devised by the unit coordinator, Susan Hetherington. It offered me the most engaging experience in a unit I've had at QUT so far.

Maybe I'm just a bit weird, but I've never found learning a chore. An old teacher of mine once told me, "When you stop learning, you stop living." She was probably 60 years old, and was completing her fifth degree while teaching at my high school. I can't help but think we'll see cases like that increase exponentially as universities harness online learning technologies.

Sam Weston -- QUT Journalism & Law student / Transform Student Ambassador 

Immersion and Flow

I recently spoke at the ‘Immersion’ Keyword Seminar held by QUT’s Children and Youth Research Centre.  Seminar convenor and Transformation Teaching Fellow, Dr Peta Wyeth, invited me to consider immersion in relation to the Transform agenda and how digital technology creates meaningful and absorbing personalised online learning experiences.

The idea of learning immersion is founded in Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’ (1990). His 8 dimensions of the flow experience are: clear goals and immediate feedback; equilibrium between the level of challenge and personal skill; merging of action and awareness; focused concentration; sense of potential control; loss of self-consciousness; time distortion, and self-rewarding experience.

During the last decade, many studies have considered ‘flow’ in online learning, with most endorsing its positive effects. For example, a study of 525 students in 23 different online courses at Seoul’s Dongguk University (Shin 2006) found that ‘flow is a strong predictor of student satisfaction with online learning’, with student perceptions of skill and challenge influencing their level of flow (p.719)

Some educators point to the challenge of providing evidence of flow in online social and collaborative learning.  In this environment, is flow also aligned to ‘engagement’?  Research in Networked Flow: Towards an Understanding of Creative Networks (Gaggioli et al, 2012) identifies ‘social presence’ as a key element in building and sustaining ‘networked flow’.

This has clear implications for designing and organising online social and collaborative learning experiences.

As we move forward with Transform, our faculty fellows are developing principles and approaches to ensure the experiences we offer are based on an authentic understanding of personalised, small-bite encounters with learning, as well as learners’ more expansive social and collaborative experience in networked, online communities of inquiry. It’s an exciting time to be working at QUT as we chart our path towards real future learning.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: HarperPerennial.

Gaggioli, A., Riva, G., Milani, L. & Mazzoni, E. (2012). Networked Flow: Towards an       understanding of creative networks [EBL version]. Retrieved from http://www.qut.eblib.com.au.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/EBLWeb/patron/

Shin, N. (2006). Online learners’ ‘flow’ experience: an empirical study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 37, 705-720. doi:  10.1111/j.1467-8535.2006.00641.x

Sheona Thomson
Associate Director, Learning and Teaching Transformation