Author: Dr Ian G Anderson (i.anderson@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk)
JISC e-Learning Activity Area: technology-enhanced learning environments
Higher Education Academy Subject Centre: history classics and archaeology, philosophical and religious studies
Case study tags: online learning, an effect on learning, an effect on exam results, staff satisfaction with e-learning, an influence on policy, modifications to learning spaces,management of learning assets, an effect on social equality, tangible benefits of e-learning, university of glasgow, history classics and archaeology, philosophical and religious studies, technology-enhanced learning environments
Background & Context
Why did you use this e-learning approach?
There are three reasons for choosing to adopt a VLE in my teaching: personal, departmental and institutional. On the personal level, I have a constructivist approach to learning and teaching that, on the one hand expects the student to take responsibility for their learning, but on the other a responsibility on my part to provide a range of teaching support to enable this. Aside from recognition of different learning styles I am also acutely aware that today's learning environment is far more demanding. The pressures of loans, debt, work, family commitments and a changing student demographic combine to make the traditional face-to-face contact limiting as the sole mode of delivery.
As an institute of advanced technology we feel a collective desire to adopt, adapt and promote the use of new technology in teaching. As part of HATII is also responsible for Arts Faculty ICT development and support we have the advantage that we can rapidly adopt and experiment with new technologies. However, we also share a responsibility that new e-learning approaches are appropriate, reliable and supported as other departments in the Faculty, and to a lesser extent the wider University, often look to us for guidance. This is not to claim we are the sole innovators, as the other case studies from Glasgow indicate, and within the context of e-learning I am certainly not the most innovative.
What was the context in which you used this e-learning approach?
HATII Honours courses have, rather ironically, been delivered in a fairly traditional format of lectures, practicals, some tutorials and visits. Although we have adopted a range of e-learning technologies this remains the main mode of delivery. Glasgow is still very much a civic university, the majority of undergraduates come from within 30 miles of the city, we have proportionally fewer overseas and mature students (certainly compared to the new universities) and a relatively high entrance tariff. Although we can claim some success in attracting students from less advantaged backgrounds, our retention rates are not as good as comparable institutions and overall I feel we tend to admit quite good students who come out with quite good degrees.
I am responsible for three of our six honours courses - 2D Digitisation, Document Encoding and Multimedia Analysis and Design. I co-teach on a fourth, Cultural Heritage Informatics, but I'm not responsible for this course's VLE. My honours class sizes vary enormously, from three or four (Cultural Heritage Informatics), through sixteen to twenty (Digitisation and Document Encoding) to over forty (Multimedia Analysis and Design). Until recently we only offered honours level courses to students from other departments as we did not have our own degree programme and we still attract a large number of students from outwith HATII. Nor do we expect any prior experience in the subject. A number of honours options (Digitisation, Document Encoding and Multimedia) are also offered to taught masters students. As a result classes have a diverse range of academic backgrounds and experience; it would not be unusual to have one of our Arts and Media Informatics Joint Honours students to have more experience of digitisation and VLEs than a mature graduate on our MSc in Information Management and Preservation programme. We do not offer any distance learning.
From my appointment in the department in 2000 we used our Institute's website to host lecture slides, lab handouts, bibliographies, web links etc. on a course by course basis. In the absence of a content management system or VLE this was often a time consuming and laborious process and ultimately limiting in the features we could offer. We briefly implemented a separate bulletin board system but with the expansion of online course content and dispersed means of accessing material this was a less than ideal situation for both staff and students. The University had been mooting a centrally supported VLE for a number of years but in the absence of a timetable for adoption HATII decided for the 2002-2003 session to make available the icampus VLE across the Faculty of Arts, encouraged by Iain Ruffell in Classics in particular. Our technical infrastructure and support meant we could effectively go it alone from the central university. The Social Sciences Faculty adopted a different VLE around the same time and other faculties had also adopted their own systems. By the 2004-2005 session the University, after a lengthy consultation process, decided to adopt Moodle as its centrally supported VLE. As IT services are distributed in Glasgow, faculties could continue with their own VLE if they wished but had to support these themselves. As an Institute we made the decision to migrate from icampus to Moodle but icampus was maintained in parallel for other departments who did not want to migrate immediately.
What was the design?
The three courses (Multimedia, Digitisation and Document Encoding) adopt a similar approach. In lectures students are introduced to theory and concepts - analysis and evaluation, design, media properties, technical principles, standards, process, uses and users etc. and in the lab sessions put this into practice. Assessment on each course is by a combination of project (100% for multimedia, 60% for Digitisation and Document Encoding with an exam of 40%). In each course students are required to provide non-assessed coursework, typically comprising of a project proposal, storyboard and plan on which they are given formative feedback.
My primary aim was to use Moodle to make course administration and content delivery more efficient, rather than supporting any radically different pedagogical approach. As such I initially viewed the use of icampus and Moodle as a content management system to support my face-to-face teaching. Students could access general course information, lecture slides, practical handouts, bibliographies, web links, course announcements etc. that were used in lecture and practical sessions. In doing so I hoped students would have some sort of safety net should they miss classes, although I always stressed that Moodle was not a substitute for lectures and labs. Furthermore, I also hoped that having course content online would enable students to better absorb what was being taught and reflect on the issues raised during lectures and labs rather than them being just a narrow window in which to transfer information.
An initial concern was that making this material available would impact class attendance so material was only posted after each class. However, student feedback suggested having the material available in advance would better prepare them for lectures and adopting this approach has had no noticeable impact on class attendance. Some students did start to appear with lecture slide print-outs and I noticed the complaints if I forgot to post material in advance. By the use of logs and reports in Moodle, activity does peak around the weekly topic in each course, with students accessing content before and after face-to-face contact and at times that would suggest many are using the system to support their learning that would not be possible were physical access to the campus required.
Unsurprisingly, activity also increases as coursework, assessment and examination deadlines approach. Interestingly, student access also continues after examinations and graduation. For example, there have been over 50 uses of the Digitisation course Moodle by 11 different students since exams finished at the end of May. This raises the issue of how much and for how long we should continue to support students once they have graduated. Although lab sessions provide an opportunity to discuss findings, concepts and issues is was necessarily limited by the practical work students need to undertake during these sessions. Therefore, for the 2005-2006 session an effort was made to use the forum features of Moodle to provide a place for this discussion without requiring additional contact time.
For example, as part of Multimedia, students are required to mark a previous student project and explain why they gave them that mark. They also have to critique several examples of multimedia and develop these into five 'must do' and five 'never do' design points. Students now post these to a topic based forum rather than complete paper sheets. Forums are also used for ongoing technical Q&A and general announcements/queries.
For the past two years I have also participated in a Podcasting experiment in my Digitisation and Document Encoding classes. This was expanded to include Multimedia this year. Podcasts were delivered on a separate site as part of the experiment but from next year will be delivered through Moodle, once again providing a single point of access for all course content.
How did you implement and embed this e-learning approach?
Staff in HATII had a brief introduction to Moodle and students are introduced to it at the start of each session, ten minutes is all it takes.
Each of my courses uses the same evaluation form and students were asked to comment specifically on Moodle in its first year of use and the issue was put on the agenda of staff/student meetings and staff teaching meetings. There were no negative comments received but no exclamations of enthusiasm either, for the majority of students VLEs appeared to be something they just expected to be part and parcel of their learning. I have since dropped the Moodle specific question and its use rarely produces comment in the general question on use of ICT teaching aids or in informal feedback.
As we had been using icampus beforehand there wasn't much embedding to do. The support environment changed as this was now centralised, but this had little day to day impact on us.
The problems we encountered were technical, not pedagogical. Moodle is a more sophisticated tool than icampus but some of its functions are not entirely intuitive and there are inconsistencies in operation. Some features are just a bit convoluted; uploading a file takes about four steps when it should just take two etc. A 16mb limit on uploads is a frustration as much of my content includes images, video, audio etc. Moodle was down over one weekend when the servers ran out of space. A few years in, some niggles remain, but these are due to the design of Moodle rather than any implementation issues.
Technology Used
What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you?
As mentioned above, we initially used icampus as our VLE, a locally re-branded version of Claroline. I am not aware of all the factors that lead to this choice but with the uncertainty over the University's position, the fact that it was free, open source and had large community of support was certainly attractive. The VLE itself was relatively simple, but contained all the basic functions one would expect, was easy to learn and got participants up and running quickly.
The decision to adopt Moodle as the University's centrally supported VLE took place after widespread and lengthy consultation. Although I only participated in a small part of the consultation process, which was a demo of what we were doing with icampus, similar factors were involved. Cost effective, well supported and open source were all major considerations. There certainly seemed to be a consensus amongst staff that we should adopt an open source platform rather than a commercial alternative. There certainly didn't seem to be much difference in functionality between the products on offer.
Tangible Benefits
What tangible benefits did this e-learning approach produce?
Tangible benefits for me are the ease with which I can manage online course content and communication with students and the speed and flexibility I have in adopting new features. This year course evaluation was moved within Moodle using the questionnaire builder. Hopefully this will mean I do more with course feedback than previously and can track trends more effectively.
From the students' perspective I haven't noticed any significant improvement in grades. My courses tend to be quite different from those experienced by students elsewhere in the Faculty and in general I have a high level of engagement and commitment. I suspect this is due to the novelty of the content rather than inspiring teaching on my part, but I'm conscious to maintain and encourage this as far as I can. The overall grade distribution is the typical bell curve with the mean and mode sitting in the 2:1 range, but perhaps slightly higher up the band than the norm. I also detect a slightly shorter tail than courses in other departments as I rarely have a third class student. Overall I would say the use of Moodle has helped students maintain their grades over the years, rather than outperform, in the face of ever more demanding external circumstances. It may be that the use of Moodle helps weaker students perform better but I suspect this is fairly marginal. I believe really able students will do well whatever, or sometimes in spite of, the way they are taught, so I'm not sure how much impact Moodle has had on them. There is usually a correlation between attendance, commitment, engagement and grades and students' use of Moodle is no different in this respect.
As for the use of forums, occasionally exchanges between students break out, but on the whole debate and questions are still directed through me. There is certainly more interaction online than it would have been possible to conduct in face-to-face sessions but overall the effect is marginal if welcome. I may consider reconfiguring some of the lab exercises to encourage more debate and direct interaction between students online.
The most noticeable benefit came when teaching a blind student for the first time this year. Having the entire course content online was certainly beneficial although it also exposed weaknesses in my composition of PowerPoint slides and the way I explained material in lectures. However, without Moodle the quality of support we were able to offer this student would have been greatly diminished and I doubt that they would have been able to perform to the best of their ability.
Did implementation of this e-learning approach have any disadvantages or drawbacks?
One aspect that has held me back from encouraging more debate online is that I'm acutely aware that to do this effectively requires far greater input from me, particularly as the best results seem to come when this activity is linked to assessment. As this would require a wider reflection on the course structure and assessment it is something that I am hesitant to experiment with.
How did this e-learning approach accord with or differ from any relevant departmental and/or institutional strategies?
As mentioned in point 2 above, our Institute has a longstanding interest in using new technology for our teaching. All of our courses from first year through to masters level have their own Moodle site with staff using the system in similar ways. Therefore, there is a strong alignment between what I have done and the Institute's strategies.
The University's decision to adopt Moodle as its centrally supported VLE gives us technical stability and a greater pool of support and advice. The University's Department of Adult and Continuing Education has been particularly active in providing support and training. As they use our labs for some of this I can detect a growing acceptance of VLEs as an integral component of teaching delivery in the Faculty. However, I'm also aware that a number of participants on these training events are departmental administrators and suspect that pedagogical buy in remains patchy amongst academic staff.
Lessons Learned
Summary and Reflection
Moodle, and before that icampus, have enabled me to achieve what I wanted; an integrated and efficient means of providing course material and communication online. I could, and perhaps should, have experimented more with how I taught, but in a subject that is itself about the appropriate use of ICT I'm aware that sitting behind the 'bleeding edge' is no bad thing. In particular I remain to be convinced that the benefits of developing online discussion forums further outweigh the costs, at least for the characteristics of my current student cohort.
I feel my adoption and use of VLEs has allowed me to do better what I was already doing and my use of more VLE features organic. In fact, I would not consider what I do as e-learning, if anything it is hybrid or blended learning. This may of course change, but for the foreseeable future I see developments in my approach as being piecemeal and incremental.
Further Evidence
Moodle, and before that icampus, have enabled me to achieve what I wanted; an integrated and efficient means of providing course material and communication online. I could, and perhaps should, have experimented more with how I taught, but in a subject that is itself about the appropriate use of ICT I'm aware that sitting behind the 'bleeding edge' is no bad thing. In particular I remain to be convinced that the benefits of developing online discussion forums further outweigh the costs, at least for the characteristics of my current student cohort.
The most noticeable benefit came when teaching a blind student for the first time this year. Having the entire course content online was certainly beneficial although it also exposed weaknesses in my composition of PowerPoint slides and the way I explained material in lectures. However, without Moodle the quality of support we were able to offer this student would have been greatly diminished and I doubt that they would have been able to perform to the best of their ability.
