Building community knowledge about learning and teaching through technology

Education is changing. In response to demand for more and better education - more people to higher levels of attainment - the institutions that offer vocational and higher education are having to find ways of doing this without commensurate increase in funding. The only way to improve quality and scale without higher cost is to deploy technology. So there is extensive activity across schools, FE and HE. Investment in all sectors has enabled education to develop a wide range of resources, skills, and teaching methods that make use of many different kinds of technology. However, the activity has not yet focused on achieving the greater productivity we need for all young people to achieve their learning potential. The new policy review of professionalism in the FE sector, in New Challenges, New Chances, makes it timely to investigate how teachers themselves can be supported in developing new models of teaching and learning, given the right tools. A recent ESRC/EPSRC-funded project produced a new kind of research tool, the Learning Designer, to help the teaching community to innovate effectively and efficiently. The interactive tool elicits the characteristics of a teacher's good pedagogic idea in a structured form, similar to a lesson plan. The program assigns properties to the design: e.g. type of learning outcome, nature of the learning activity, amount of learner and teacher time needed, use of technology, aspects of differentiation. Therefore the program has some knowledge about the learning design, making the Learning Designer a unique and valuable design tool because it can analyse the teacher's design and provide feedback on the nature of the learner experience, and teacher and learner workload; use its known properties to find relevant technology-based learning designs that offer alternative ways of teaching to that learning outcome; store and represent the pedagogy in a form that other teachers can find, adopt and adapt ideas for their own context. The tool therefore helps teachers build on each others' best ideas for using technology, test them in their own context, improve them, and then use the same tool to contribute their improved versions to the community library. The evaluation with users demonstrated that teachers liked having feedback on their design, thought more about their students' activities, reflected more on workload, and appreciated seeing interesting new ideas for the use of technology. Now we ask: does it scale up, improve the quality of the learning experience, and improve teacher productivity? We want to test the capacity of the Learning Designer to improve the professionalism of teachers as innovators. We will use three main strands of work to 1. co-develop with teachers a library of learning designs on which teachers can build 2. use community requirements to develop the tool and its links further 3. work with institutions to evaluate how the tool works in practice. The project will run webinars, workshops, and online support to help teachers create collaboratively their own learning designs to focus on better use of technology. This will develop the community-generated peer-tested library of good pedagogic designs and specifications for software adaptations. The Learning Designer itself helps to measure impact through student evaluation: designs specify the form of assessment, and the explicit online representation of pedagogy enables students to provide targeted feedback by annotating the same representation. The tool tests productivity by comparing teacher workload for different designs. In doing so it demonstrates the value of reusing existing designs or resources, which in turn can promote the use of Open Educational Resources. The project work should help our partner colleges to use the data and information generated by their learning management systems to track teacher productivity in terms of enhanced student learning and improved teacher workload.