Institute of Education
Pathfinder Pilot
From Pedagogic Research to
Embedded E-learning
PREEL
The Pathfinder Journey Report
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1. Background
1.1. The Institute of Education
The IoE is the leading university research centre for education in the UK. With 6,500
registered students, a thousand are graduates undertaking Post Graduate Certificate in
Education, others study for other professional awards chiefly Masters Degrees and
Advanced Diploma, and there are over 700 students in the Doctoral School. Many
courses of are offered on a part-time basis; some are offered by distance learning or as
blended courses and the IoE has been delivering on-line courses since 1992.
We are a research led institution and our Corporate Strategy stresses that the IoE “must
maintain its reputation for cutting-edge research, and its teaching and consultancy
activities should be demonstrably informed by its research”. Amongst out research
strengths is e-learning itself, principally concentrated around the London Knowledge Lab
(www.lkl.ac.uk).
However, we had misgivings about how well we are doing in using e-learning in our own
teaching, and so we embarked on the Pilot HEA e-benchmarking exercise in 2005 with
the desire to see how well we were doing with respect to other universities, and
specifically to inform the development of an e-learning component within our Learning
and Teaching Strategy. This benchmarking exercise was also crucially an opportunity to
involve senior management in our self evaluation process. The results suggested that our
support systems and collaborative links with other institutions stood up quite well in
comparison with other institutions, and that there were some areas of excellent practice in
e-learning, and a strong research community, but that as an institution we were not
delivering across the board in the way that we should be.
1.2. From Pedagogic Research to Embedded E-learning (PREEL)
The big potential lever that we had to move us forward was the e-learning research base
that we had, and this fitted well with the rhetoric of our Corporate Strategy. So the simple
central idea behind our Pathfinder project (PREEL) was to try to capitalise on this local
research expertise and turn it into institutional practice. A survey of the research being
carried out in the IoE and associated institutions within the Bloomsbury Learning
Environment, and the University of London Centre for Distance Education identified 39
ongoing projects with direct relevance to e-learning in HE, and many more with relevance
to e-learning in other sectors of education. We wrote a review of this research
(http://www.lkl.ac.uk/research/benchmarking/?p=104.) and devised a programme of staff
development based on this review, and a plan of bringing the research and teaching
teams together.
For maximum impact we selected a number of courses for re-design that would be likely
to impact on other courses, so we selected modules from both the Primary and
Secondary PGCEs (which were also being redesigned as M levels courses at that time),
three research methods modules (one from each of our new Faculties – we were also
undergoing an institutional restructuring process – talk about innovation overload!), and a
range of MA and Diploma curriculum units linked to interesting changes in teaching
approaches or with novel ideas for using technology. To support embedding of the
changes we declared that we would revise our Learning and Teaching Strategy to give
clear support to e-learning, revise our QA procedures so that they would take e-learning
as the norm not the exception, and undertake a review of our e-learning support
structures.
2. Course re-design
The project was principally presented to the IoE staff as the redesign of courses, and we
recruited some 11 courses that met our criteria. We spent our project funding firstly on
funding a Project Officer (Magdalena Jara) drawn from our existing educational
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technology staff (so she would not go away after the project was over) and the rest on
buying out course tutors to enable them to devote time to course redesign. Two main
issues arose in the redesign process, the externalisation of pedagogic principles, where
tutors had to confront their own pre-suppositions about what they were doing, and the
designing of new course processes, activities and structures.
2.1. Externalisation of pedagogic design
There were two quite different constituencies of staff with respect to e-learning, many with
quite a lot of experience, but also many with no experience at all. Those with e-learning
experience used the project to extend their existing approaches, commonly moving from
using Blackboard as a content repository to making more productive and creative use of
Blackboard, turning it into a more substantial component of the students’ learning
experience. Tutors with little experience of e-learning found that initially their focus was
on identifying priorities amongst the wealth of possibilities (wikis, blogs, Blackboard, video
editing, and so on).
An important element of discussion in many course redesigns was the relationship
between face-to-face and online teaching: asking what kind of activities are best done in
each context, and how can they be made to work together.
The first step in redesign often entailed the externalisation of pedagogic principles which
had previously been tacit, and just as in the work of students, we also noticed serialist
versus holist approaches to course design, which did not always sit well together. Other
causes of tension arose from using course redesigns as the opportunity to bring a closely
related courses together under one roof, and the explicitness of the course design
process revealed the tensions between different conceptualisations of topic areas – for
example research methods conceptualised broadly as a set of empirical competences,
versus a conceptual definition of research methods as pertaining to particular
problematics, such as the relationship between method and theory.
In a research led institution where “teaching ... should be demonstrably informed by its
research”, knowledge can sometimes take precedence over learning, and for some tutors
e-learning usefully placed the learner back centre stage:
If you talk about e-learning, you’re talking about the learning of
students, and it’s quite clear sitting in the working party meetings that
actually considerations of the students’ learning were not number one,
I’m not saying they’re completely ignored.
2.2. Communication, activities and structures
For many courses communication was the concept at the centre of the re-design.
Technology could enable contact with student teachers whilst they are in schools and
they could be engaged in reflective, evaluative activities focused on their professional
practice, and support could be given to the integration of theory and practice by enabling
students to follow up practice-oriented sessions with reflection-based activities.
A common reason for wanting to incorporate e-learning was enabling access for
international students, and for busy professionals unable to attend face-to-face sessions,
thus increasing the diversity of the student body and this was itself seen as creating a
powerful resource for learning:
one of the things that I think is of value is people [coming] up against
the assumptions of someone from a different background…. The issue
pedagogically is using that difference and supporting it.…
A number of modules either involved a range of specialists covering relatively discrete
areas, or they dealt with a wide spread of content, and e-learning was seen in these
cases as a way to develop coherence by allowing the integration and discussion of
diverse, specialist content over the length of the module:
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3. Linking research and practice
3.1. The relationship between research and practice
We were clear from the start that the relationship between teaching and research could
be usefully thought about in a number of different ways. Whilst the most obvious
interpretation was ‘applying the results of research’, we also wanted to think in terms of
teachers as researchers, both as researchers in their own fields and as researchers of
their own practice, and of students as researchers. Talking to tutors about research also
identified their concerns with present e-learning research, their perception that too much
of it was concerned with what were seen as rather irrelevant cutting edge issues, and
they proposed areas for future research based more directly on problems arising from
teaching. These discussions are still ongoing internally within the team, and are expected
to surface most strongly in a special issue of the on-line journal Reflecting Education
(http://www.reflectingeducation.net/index.php/reflecting) which many of the PREEL team
and tutors will contribute to.
The clear focus on research did help to raise the profile and prestige of the project, and
so to attract staff within a research-led institution. This also fed into institutional agendas
about building relationships between research and teaching and so generated
management support. The research basis of the research review and of the staff
development sessions gave the re-designed modules a certain level of credibility,
increasing practitioners’ status in their department as well as their confidence in the
module’s future delivery. The link with research was seen to have made the
implementation of the re-designed module easier, by helping to convince other staff of its
validity, because the re-design process was perceived to have been undertaken in a
considered, reflective way, informed by expertise, and consequently based on tried and
tested approaches:
It connects research to your practice. It gives it some sort of gravitas,
some sort of respect that may otherwise not be there. And being the
Institute, unless you delve into research here, then you’re not visible,
you’ve got to have that back up…it’s not something scribbled on the
back of an envelope, it’s actually evolved in quite a structured kind of
way…Although we haven’t used what we’ve heard or what we’ve
learned in practical ways, it has in our own heads made us feel more
confident in the way we’re trying to put things across or the way we
talk to people or the examples we can give to back up what we’re
trying to say.
3.2. The research review and staff development
The most straightforward form of connecting research to practice was through the
publication of the research review and the development of the staff development sessions
led by e-learning researchers
In practice, tutors often found difficulty making connections between research outputs
and their particular situation, arguing that the research did not match the realities of their
own approach to teaching. However, it was clear that the usefulness of the research
(particularly in terms of establishing a field of possibilities) might well become more
apparent in the future, as practitioners became more experienced. An interesting aspect
of tutors’ responses here was that they often found the research tools more interesting
and more useful than the results.
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One of the underlying reasons for the mismatch has to do with the genre of research
writing itself 1 , researchers conceptualised their work in terms of problematics, and the
generation of new enquiry, whilst practitioners were looking for answers, how to apply
research findings to generate teaching guidelines. There was a tension between
generality and particularity, the drive in research was towards generality (in order to
‘count’ as research), so that practitioners could no longer see its relevance to their
particular situation.
The research review was seen by some as a kind of encyclopaedia, which they expected
to return to in order to address specific issues in the future. However, tutors sometimes
ignored the research review because they could actually question its author directly so as
to get useful and precise answers more quickly! (Of course, we must not forget the
important part that writing this review had in preparing Magdalena for undertaking this
role, so that all this information was at her fingertips and could become a walking
encyclopaedia.)
Practitioners found the staff development sessions enjoyable and useful for generating
ideas. The sessions sometimes raised issues they felt were important but not able to
respond to this stage, examples mentioned included: accessibility for disabled students,
student time management issues, and more sophisticated, insightful approaches to
evaluation.
As we will see in the next section, this researcher-practitioner gap is addressed in
practice by the mediation of the research evidence by the Project Officer in small team
course re-design meetings. The main PREEL staff development input next year will be to
present a model of ongoing peer sharing of practice and peer support for course
development within teams which offers a model of peer observation aimed at sustainable
and meaningful sharing of practice and critical feedback, which may also help to address
this researcher-practitioner gap.
Some of the practitioners who themselves carried out research in the field of e-learning
found the opportunities to get to grips with another researcher’s work, and to establish
common areas of interest which could be followed up subsequently very useful. However,
possibly because of a perceived (and professionally threatening) disparity in knowledge
and expertise a lot of the practitioners did not interact with researchers at a more informal
level. Although we had involved e-learning researchers in PREEL to facilitate a more
direct interaction and knowledge exchange between research and practice, it seems
possible that the researchers’ participation actually led practitioners to perceive
presentations in terms of the delivery of (unassailable) expertise rather than an occasion
for interaction between research and practice. The imbalance in professional power
implied by the notion of ‘putting research into practice’ may have generated some
resistance from practitioners. By contrast when this exchange was ‘managed’ by
Magdalena in one-on-one support for course redesigns, it was not perceived as an
imposition of expertise, but as a service to be called upon, perhaps because practitioners
felt they retained a greater degree of control/power over their own practice in their
interactions with Magdalena, than with researchers.
4. Supporting the re-design process
4.1. Individualised support
The developments of new courses often goes alongside other changes within an
institution which are having far reaching consequences for the structure, delivery and
assessment of courses. It is not possible to wait for one process to finish before starting
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And is, of course, not specific to this field,see for example Kezar, A. and Eckel, P. (eds) (2000),
Moving beyond the gap between research and practice in higher education). San Francisco:
Jossey Bass
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another. There are often a large number of both internal and external stakeholders who
need to be consulted and brought on board It was certainly not possible for us to train
staff, and help them redesign a course and then move on. We had to support courses
through quite a long process of redesign as the evolving context emerges.
We produced a number of other tools to support the ongoing re-design process including
a guide ‘Pedagogical Templates for E-Learning’
http://www.wlecentre.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=127&Item
id=50, and an E-learning Case Studies Website to showcase IoE courses and modules
using technology http://www.lkl.ac.uk/ltu/elcs. Most importantly however was
individualised support, provided by the Project Officer.
Magdalena’s role in the re-design process was threefold.
First, she provided expert, research-based knowledge and advice:
…it’s given us an insight into a different way that things could be
done…there are exemplars of where people have been creative with
the learning process… that’s why the relationship with Magdalena and
the intensive meetings that we’ve had just us two and her have been so
powerful and important and the biggest benefit to our involvement has
been those opportunities really. They’ve been very much tailored to
our needs
Second, she acted as ‘project manager’ of the re-design process, she set deadlines,
chased expected outputs, and ensured that tasks were carried out according to the
agreed schedule. The fact that practitioners met with Magdalena on a regular basis,
meant that tasks were carried out within those intervals, in time for such meetings.
Third, she had a role that might be described as a kind of ‘e-learning therapist’, in that
she enabled practitioners to ‘exteriorise’ their own knowledge and assumptions about
teaching and learning, a process which pointed to how e-learning could most effectively
be introduced or developed. A number of practitioners noted that the process of having to
explain to Magdalena how their course was structured enabled them to better understand
its logic, underpinning assumptions, strengths and weaknesses:
Magdalena has been superb in helping us to clarify…and
reinforce…[our thoughts] and really help us to push things out more
than we envisaged
It seems to have been Magdalena’s status as an outsider which sustained this capacity to
make practitioners develop their own thinking about their modules; in other words,
whereas the research report and staff development sessions ‘provided’ expertise, the
individualised support was effective in eliciting understanding and reflection on
practitioners’ beliefs, knowledge and pedagogic principles, in such a way that facilitated
its codification in the re-design process. It was however on the basis of her e-learning
expertise that such guided codification was accepted and generated practical, material
outcomes.
4.2. Explicit project focus and networking
The ‘project’ nature of PREEL – its fixed time frame and specific objectives – created a
focused momentum to achieve outcomes. Such outcomes were often perceived to be
relatively limited in nature – due notably to the restricted time-frame – but also
substantive enough to justify the allotted funding and pre-specified time commitment. The
financial assistance allocated to the re-design process was significant to its development
in a number of ways, it helped to create opportunities for practitioners to reflect on their
teaching in a way which they had not always had time to do before:
Within our course it’s given us that time to stand back and have an
overview of what we’re doing in each of the different sections of the
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course and how it all fits together. This has given us a chance to
consolidate a lot of different feedback and our own ideas and progress
generally… I know that I’ve got ten days of my time is protected to
contribute to this
The project has been given a high profile partly through synergy with other initiatives, and
the ability to participate in other networks – the Training and Development Agency, TQEF
funding, JISC, HEA, the CETLs – and links with the Bloomsbury learning Environment
and the University of London Centre for Distance Education.
Staff development workshops gave rise to social occasions which were both enjoyable
and professionally productive. Connections were established between people who do not
normally work together, which brought to light common interests and concerns
transcending departmental or disciplinary boundaries. Attendance at the staff
development sessions also seems to have generated for some – notably those with little
e-learning experience - a certain consciousness of a collective, a feeling of collegiality,
which offered some reassurance and confidence in developing and learning about new
kinds of teaching practices, and in this respect, PREEL seemed to have generated a
sense of collectivity and shared experience.
5. Embedding e-learning
We can not guarantee ‘embedding’ (whatever we mean by it) has been achieved but half
way through the project we can point to a number of positive signs.
The benchmarking exercise and the PREEL project have significantly raised the profile of
e-learning within the IoE generally and particularly at senior management level.
At the management level, we have seen over this last two years of the benchmarking and
the Pathfinder projects, the development of a greater sense of urgency with respect to elearning. The VLE is now seen as a standard part of the Institution’s Corporate Systems,
and so the Learning Technologies Unit is represented on the Corporate Systems
Programme Board. E-learning is now written clearly into the Learning and Teaching
Strategy, and the Corporate Strategy now asks the Validation Panel to require of all
programmes of study that they consider the development of interactive e-learning and
blended learning in all programmes of study, and this moves e-learning from being
positioned as the exception, to being positioned as the norm. The Director clearly sees
need for further changes as is evidenced in his setting up of an e-learning Task Group to
review implementation of e-learning support. All of this is a fairly major shift in
instructional ethos. It has its down side, staff who are not involved in e-learning are
beginning to feel that they are being pushed into e-learning … but I think we can interpret
such complaints as a positive sign!
The course redesigns developed during first year of the PREEL project will be
implemented during the next academic year. Some of these redesigned courses will have
a significant impact on associated programmes – this is particular the case with the
Secondary PGCE, where the redesign will form a model for other redesigns across the
whole Secondary PGCE Programme.
Lessons from the staff development work will be embedded in future staff development.
We will support the networking of tutors working on PREEL through continuing to meet as
part of a Special Interest Group on ICT and Pedagogy. An important PREEL input next
year will be to present a model of ongoing peer sharing of practice and peer support for
course development within course teams, which offers a model of peer observation
aimed at sustainable and meaningful sharing of practice and critical feedback (see
http://www.cde.london.ac.uk/support/awards/file3281.pdf ). This model of peer
observation will then form an important element in the supporting the sustainability and
improvement of e-learning delivery over the next period of the project.
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The move from research to practice will be complemented in the second year of the
project by a move back from practice to research via reflection on practice, and each
course team will contribute a paper to a Special Issue of the journal Reflecting Education
(http://www.reflectingeducation.net/index.php/reflecting)
There are some clear challenges in the next phase of the project:
•
It became obvious during the course validation processes that QA/QE
procedures need modification to make the validation process run more
smoothly for e-learning courses.
•
Some of the redesigned modules will involve staff who did not directly
participate in the re-design process. A challenging task in implementing these
modules relates to the training of such staff in facilitating online discussions.
•
Widespread use of e-learning will have implications for administration
throughout the Institution:
I used to work at …. which entirely operates through distance and
increasingly through blended learning. One of the things that helped
that to be sustainable was quite an army of people who were involved
in supporting it from an admin point of view. We don’t have that here
and we tend to see admin as being about, maybe, photocopying some
stuff, perhaps helping with handbooks, but not taking part in really
supporting the work that people are doing in terms of online
experience. An issue for the Institute is to reorganise itself in such a
way that support mechanisms actually mirror what people are trying
to do….
6. Key messages
•
The benchmarking exercise sent strong signals to senior management which
prepared the way for increasing support for e-learning
•
Funding does help to open doors
•
Synergy with other initiatives helps a lot. We were able to link with a wide
range of initiatives -TDA, TQEF, JISC, HEA, CETL – and this considerably
added to the visibility of the project.
•
Research
•
The relationship between research and practice is many faceted, including:
using the results of research, teaching as research, teachers as researchers
and students as researchers
•
Research focus is helpful to raise the profile and prestige of the project and
attract staff within a research-led institution. A research focus feeds into
institutional agendas about building relationships between research and
teaching and so generates management support.
•
There are lessons to be learned in looking at how we presented research
evidence. It is quite difficult for practitioners to read the messages of elearning research, and we need to look at ways of mediating this research
and connecting it to people’s immediate teaching context. This seems to be
most effectively carried out by being mediated by a learning technologist at
course level.
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•
•
The tools used in research were often of more interest to tutors than the
results.
Course redesign
•
There are now two quite different constituencies of staff with respect to elearning, significant numbers of staff with quite a lot of experience, and also
significant numbers with no experience at all.
•
Serialist versus holist approach to designing teaching give rise to very
different approaches to course re-design
•
The developments of new courses often goes alongside other changes
within an institution which may have far reaching consequences for the
structure, delivery and assessment of courses. There are often many
different stakeholders to be consulted. It is not possible to wait for one
process to finish before starting another. As a consequence course
redesign needs to be supported over a long period of time, it can not be
dealt with in one intensive period of redesign.
•
The problems encountered were very rarely technological problems, they
were about reconciling perspectives on the purposes of the course,
designing and integrating activities and the sheer discomfort of conscious
design.
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