PROSPECTS FOR USING LEARNING OBJECTS AND LEARNING DESIGN
AS STAFF DEVELOPMENT TOOLS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Authors: John Casey (UHI MI, Inverness, Scotland), Kevin
Brosnan (University of Stirling, Scotland), Wolfgang Greller,
Alpen-Adria University, Austria)
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the potential for using learning objects and Learning
Design as vehicles for staff development in UK Higher Education (HE).
To support this approach we propose using Ramsden’s (1991) three
theoretical models of teaching in HE to provide a conceptual framework
to situate these technologies in. We observe that the introduction of
these technologies into HE reveal and highlight underlying obstacles to
their adoption by reifying existing pedagogic practice and values. We
map these obstacles onto Ramsden’s theoretical framework and propose
in outline a staff development strategy to help remedy them. This implies
a change both in the institutional and professional organisation of teaching
activity in HE, we conclude by presenting in outline the kind of changes
required which also provide us with an indicator of areas for further
investigation.
KEYWORDS
Pedagogy, Learning Objects, Learning Design, Staff Development, Institutional
Change
Table of Contents
1 INTRODUCTION
2 SYSTEMIC FACTORS
3 USING RAMSDEN’S THEORETICAL MODELS TO DESCRIBE HE
TEACHING AND ASSESS THE USES OF LEARNING OBJECTS AND LEARNING DESIGN
3.1 Theory 1: Teaching as telling or transmission
3.1.1 Learning Objects
3.2 Theory 2: Teaching as organising student activity
3.2.1 Learning Design
3.3 Theory 3 Teaching as making learning possible
4. A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR STAFF DEVELOPMENT
5. CONCLUSION
5.1 An Outline of the Organisational and Professional Changes
Required to Utilise a Re-skilled Workforce
6 REFERENCES
1. INTRODUCTION
Learning Objects and Learning Design (Koper & Tattersall, 2004) are
entering the mainstream of the educational systems around the world and
creating a ‘buzz’ of excitement about the possibilities of
providing an efficient means of finding, sharing and reusing learning
resources and designs. Yet, as is so often the case with the introduction
of technology into an educational setting, this is bringing some of the
underlying issues and features in our educational institutions to the
surface (Neil & Cornford, 2000). We argue that this reification effect
of technology in education far from being a problem can be a useful development
aid for improving pedagogic practice. To support our analysis we will
use Ramsden’s (1991) three theories of teaching in higher education
(HE).
The particular staff development need we are interested in is educational
design for e-learning. The heart of the problem here in the UK is that
teaching staff generally do not share and reuse learning resources and
learning activities for their students, instead they concentrate on preparing
‘their’ content to deliver to ‘their’ students
(Koper 2003). The teaching activity that is carried out is deeply embedded
in an institutional context and therefore difficult to share and abstract.
To deal with these problems effectively first we have to identify them,
as Ramsden (1991) observes:
“Half the difficulty with doing it better is knowing what the real
problem is”
Ramsden (1991) page 14
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2. SYSTEMIC FACTORS
The arrival of learning objects, learning design and their related technologies
from the industrial training and open learning sectors carry strong implicit
organisational models that favour greater corporatism and a division of
labour – an industrial model. This presents some problems, the opportunities
for efficiency and quality gains are already well rehearsed elsewhere.
The main problem for us is that the HE sector does not have the organisational
structures that these technologies require. Instead higher education is
characterised by a very high degree of informality and autonomy at all
levels – which is not necessarily a bad thing. An excellent analysis
of these systemic obstacles to using technology in higher education has
been carried out by Newcastle University (Pollock & Cornford, 2000).
The study found that the required administration processes often do not
exist; a web version of the report can be found in the ARIADNE newsletter
at:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/virtual-universities/
Teaching in higher education in the UK has traditionally been accorded
a low status (Ramsden, 1991) yet for most institutions income derived
from teaching is the major source of institutional wealth, with figures
of 80% - 90% and above not being uncommon. So, for most universities teaching
is the de-facto core business activity. As tightening financial constraints
bring this reality to the surface and technologies such as Virtual Learning
Environments (VLEs) are being deployed one of the emerging strategic gaps
is a lack of pedagogic expertise.
There is a growing realisation that it is not very sensible to invest
in learning technology and not change the way we work. It is a bit like
a factory building a new production line and continuing to use handcraft
production techniques – yet this is the situation that many of our
institutions and teachers find themselves in. This is not surprising;
tradition, dominant groups and vested interests can delay and obstruct
the adoption and dissemination of new knowledge as the history of science
shows (Kuhn, 1996).
Thus, learning objects, Learning Design and their implicit organisational
and pedagogic models are colliding with the deeply entrenched pedagogic
values and attitudes of the HE sector. Anyone who has worked in this area
will recognise that it is a volatile environment that is still in the
process of forming as the recent collapse of the government-funded UK
e-University has shown (MacLeod, D. 2004). In this process orthodoxies
from both traditions are being challenged in the new and emerging teaching
practices and learning communities appearing at this interface. To move
forward we need to address the so-called soft issues of professional and
institutional cultures as well as some of the assumptions implicit in
the technologies.
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3. USING RAMSDEN’S THEORETICAL MODELS TO DESCRIBE
HE TEACHING AND ASSESS THE USES OF LEARNING OBJECTS AND LEARNING DESIGN
Ramsden outlines three theories of teaching in HE that co-exist and build
on each other in a hierarchical manner. They nicely represent the stages
a university teacher progresses through as their pedagogic expertise improves
and they also provide a useful way of analysing the proposed and actual
uses of technology to support teaching. The three stages see teaching
as concerned with (labels in brackets are ours):
• Delivering content (primitive)
• Organising and supervising student activity (simple)
• Teaching as adapting to circumstances and context in order to
make student learning possible (sophisticated)
As noted in the introduction, technology in higher education often acts
as a strong force to reveal hitherto hidden factors and demystify existing
processes; this section looks at some of these kinds of issues.
Universities in the UK tend to be quite traditional in the way they organise
their teaching activities. Lectures still tend to be the main focus of
undergraduate teaching despite there being little educational justification
for their existence other than being a medieval solution to the logistics
of delivering information to large groups of students (Laurillard, 1994).
In UK higher education teaching (outside distance learning providers)
there is little tradition of sharing pedagogic resources or strategies
and to try to do so is often met with confusion and hostility. One of
the major reasons for this is that teaching in higher education is essentially
delivered by groups of individuals who see themselves primarily as subject
specialists and not teachers. This situation is compounded by the fact
that many institutions do not see teaching as a core function either.
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3.1 Theory 1: Teaching as telling or transmission
A number of researchers have observed that the transmission model of teaching
is widespread (Shuell, 1992. Laurillard, 1994. Koper, 2003. Ramsden, 1991.);
it is based on a deficit – accrual notion of learning that sees
the main task of the teacher to supply information. There is little dialogue
with students; the teaching is monologic – the onus being on the
student to align their expressions of knowledge with the academic norm
in the area. As Shuell points out this is such a widespread view of teaching
that it is taken for granted, here the concentration is on content, on
the subject matter. This pedagogic model might have been partially defensible
when students and teachers were drawn from the same narrow social and
academic backgrounds in traditional university settings. However this
is failing under the sheer weight of extra students and the diversity
of their social and academic backgrounds as well as the demand for flexible
study modes. The teaching as transmission model is still widespread and
tenacious, as Ramsden observes:
“There are some more modern versions of this theory too: the belief
that the fundamental problems in university instruction inhere in the
amount of information to be transmitted, and that these problems can be
solved by technical fixes designed to transmit more of it faster…”
Ramsden (1991) page111
Here we can see much of the rationale for the proposed uses of multimedia,
computer based learning and the Internet that have been espoused since
the 1980’s. More recently, the interest surrounding learning objects
and digital repositories shows the strength of interest and concern in
content creation and its transmission.
The ‘teaching as telling’ scenario is consistent with the
‘subject specialist’ model of amateur teaching that has historically
dominated HE in the UK. The associated scholarly culture that ‘trickles
down’ onto the student experience is often one of isolated, individualistic
and competitive activity (Crook, 1994). The experience of students in
this kind of environment is often unsatisfactory. Typically a student
on a course will pass through the hands of different lecturers all teaching
from their own notes, not working as a team from the same ‘script’.
This has the effect of fragmenting the learning experience and subject
matter, it also places a higher load on the student than is necessary
and presents obvious barriers to ‘non-traditional’ students.
In this pedagogic world-view it is possible to see why some teachers
like to stick with creating and transmitting content. It is partly because
they created their own content as part of the process of their own learning
and relearning of their subject in order to teach it to their students.
Thus their teaching strategy is often to get their students to learn from
what they did – this is not a very sound approach, but it is common
and intuitive and helps account for lecturers deep attachment to their
own ‘stuff’.
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3.1.1 Learning Objects
The arrival of learning objects and learning design into this scene is
having some unexpected effects. One of the traditional learning object
orthodoxies is that they should be free from internal contextual content
to make reuse easier, this makes a lot of sense for a specialist educational
workforce as in computer based training and instructional design. But
this presents severe problems for ‘general practitioner’ teachers
and lecturers who are increasingly clear about their need for meaningful
contextual information about the resource to enable them to assess it
and reuse it. A particularly popular request is for some kind of review
process that allows users of the resource to record their usage and evaluation
of it for others to examine (Rehak & Mason, 2003, Casey 2004). It
is also increasingly being recognised that the production of this kind
of usage information (sometimes called secondary metadata) can be important
for professional and institutional strategic development purposes as Robyn,
& Dalziel (2003) propose:
“These requirements make clear the need for new conceptions of
learning object meta-data, and new ways of using repositories—not
just for search and retrieval, but as a living, growing body of shared
practice.”
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3.2 Theory 2: Teaching as organising student activity
As Ramsden observes the transmission model of teaching in HE (although
still widespread) has in public discourse tended to be supplanted by concern
about managing and directing student activity.
“Teaching is seen as a supervision process involving the articulation
of techniques designed to ensure that students learn…Activity in
students is seen as the panacea. It is assumed that there is a finite
set of rules which may be infallibly applied to enable them to understand:
these all imply that the students must learn energetically.”
Ramsden (1991) page 113
Although often this discourse acts as a ‘cover’ for the continuation
of the transmission model it is at least a step in the right direction.
Here the concentration is on what the student does, not on what the teacher
does – or delivers. Here we can see much of the existing rationale
for the use of VLEs (virtual learning environments) as being management,
direction, supervision as well as the ubiquitous delivery of content.
We can also discern the basis for the use of ‘interactive’
media and computer programmes. Currently a popular mantra amongst UK e-learning
designers (who are usually media designers with little educational knowledge
– the role of instructional designer being almost completely absent
in the UK) is that learning must be active to be effective, showing us
the sharpness of Ramsden's earlier criticism. Often this is little more
than a justification for using some interactive aspect of the media being
sold. A more sensible and efficient approach can be seen in the distance
learning community where the academic subject specialist is just one in
a team of professionals (Laurillard, 1994) and is often dispensed with
after they have contributed their subject knowledge while the educational
and media specialists finish the job.
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3.2.1 Learning Design
Currently, a lot of excitement has been generated in the world of educational
technology by the arrival of ‘Learning Design’ a technical
specification for representing in both human and machine readable terms
the pedagogic strategy that can be employed to teach a particular course.
The particular risk with Learning Design is that its proponents will fall
into the trap outlined by Ramsden concerning the over-emphasis on activity
and an implicit positivist conviction that all we need to do is find the
‘right way’ to teach a particular course and encode it to
make it a ‘run-time’ success. It is easy to get over-enthused
by the possibility of the technology and lose connection with the reality
of teaching and learning at the ground level. Despite this caveat, Learning
Design does have a great potential for ‘capturing’ and sharing
pedagogic strategies with obvious applications to staff development as
well as uses for institutional knowledge management.
At present the Learning Design language itself looks far too abstract
for general teaching staff to be able to use and is likely to be restricted
at least initially to those with the educational design skills that can
work at the required level of pedagogic abstraction. Yet this situation
is not as negative as it might seem. A seminar of the JISC X4L programme
in January 2004 building on earlier discussions in the e-learning community
suggested that what was needed were a number of initiatives and support
tools to help teachers bridge the gap between traditional embedded pedagogy
and the more abstract representations required by Learning Design (Beetham
2004). One of the conclusions of the X4L seminar was:
“That many teachers do not possess a vocabulary for articulating
and sharing their pedagogic strategies and designs with others, particularly
beyond their cognate discipline areas”
Currently there is a lot of work going on that intends to address this
issue by looking at ways to support teachers to articulate their designs
and activities in ways that can then be further developed into formal
learning designs. Tools and methods are being proposed to take care of
the these ‘middle’ representation such as mind maps, concept
maps, the Semi-Structured Learning Design Statement from the ACETS, project
at Edinburgh university (http://www.acets.ac.uk/)
and the Dialog Plus (http://www.dialogplus.org/)
design toolkit from Southampton university. The UNFOLD European project
(http://www.unfold-project.net:8085/UNFOLD)
is also doing valuable work in this area and serves as a focus and forum
for this kind of development as well as more sophisticated explorations
of the Learning Design concept and specifications. All this work is valuable
but we need to also recognize the rougher and more tentative conceptions
of pedagogy that practitioners really use, we would call these ‘primitives’
and ‘artefacts’. Together these approaches give us a useful
notion of a Learning Design continuum as shown below:
Primitives/Artefacts………………….Semi-Structured…………………….Formal
Figure 1. A Proposed Learning Design Continuum
As we shall see this nicely complements our proposed framework for staff
development using these technologies. From a staff development point of
view the good thing about this continuum is the support it provides to
help in beginning to articulate teaching strategies.
Paralleling these developments there is a growing realisation that content
in the form of learning objects and pedagogic designs in the form of Learning
Designs are less likely to be useful (or even used) without some sort
of contextual information about how they are intended to be used and how
the actual use of them has worked out in the past. This may be obvious
to teachers but not for some technical developers who are often far removed
from the realities of teaching. This vital contextual information has
been referred to as ‘secondary metadata’ and ‘secondary
resources’ see Casey (2004) and Robyn & Dalziel (2003) for an
interesting discussion of the implications of this.
One interesting development related to this is the emergence of and growing
interest in educational design ‘patterns’ (Bartolucci, S.,
et al. 2003) for courses that can be shared and reused. An intriguing
aspect to the use of patterns is that it might also present an elegant
solution to some of the dilemmas described by Stephen Downes (2003) between
context and reuse. In this way, patterns might usefully correspond to
what the community has called intermediate levels of description. In this
vision it would make sense for learning designs to be associated with
their ‘pattern’ to help teachers adapt the design. This could
help reduce the cognitive load of deciding how and what to reuse by future
users. This is certainly an area that would benefit from further research.
This approach has striking parallels with the techniques employed by the
Toshiba software factory where programmers were asked to file such ‘high
level’ generalisations with their code (van Vliet, 1993).
What this points towards is a realisation by the technical and developer
community that there is much more to teaching than delivering the ‘right’
content and organising the ‘right’ student activities. This
is uncomfortable for some as it implies that there is going to be things
they are not going to be able to capture or represent even with the wonders
of XML and the techniques of the semantic web. It’s about time,
many of us have been labouring under the dubious illusions touted by some
proponents that it is possible to capture everything we need to know about
teaching and represent it in machine-readable form.
Still, the myth that there is some ‘magic bullet’ type of
solution persists in the developer community and we hear phrases such
as ‘with enough computing power’ and with the right ‘AI’
(Artificial Intelligence) techniques’ that we can crack the problem.
To be blunt they should know better – they had their own AI bubble
back in the 1980’s, a kind of dress rehearsal of the dotcom bubble
at the end of the 1990’s. AI works best in well-defined problem
spaces. Using learning objects and learning designs to support a teaching
and learning community is very far from being a well-defined problem space.
Those who have recovered from their AI hangover now advocate using technology
to support human intelligence in dealing with these kind of problems which
is well fitted for dealing with complexity and multiple meanings –
and resolving them. The future of e-learning will consist of humans, assisted
by technical agents; operating and maintaining networked e-learning systems.
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3.3 Theory 3 Teaching as making learning possible
This leads us nicely to consideration of the third level in Ramsden’s
hierarchy of theories of teaching. He sees teaching as an activity that
includes delivering content and organising activities but is also fundamentally
concerned with learning about teaching itself and applying the lessons
learnt to new students and situations. In this view teaching is a constantly
evolving, reflective, and reflexive process in which there is no steady
state of masterly expertise that one may attain and encode. As in any
other craft, mastery brings an awareness of what one does not know as
much as what one does know, and this is a prime requirement for the attainment
and retention of that mastery.
Ramsden describes this as the development of an awareness of the seemingly
contradictory development towards an increasingly relativistic and problematic
understanding of the relations between teaching and learning:
“It is as if the development itself denotes an acceptance of the
restless tension of opposites in education”
Ramsden (1991) page 117
This 3-level view of teaching certainly does not lend itself to being
reduced to a simplified mechanistic process that can easily be entirely
encoded in a Learning Design – which suggest limits to the application
of Learning Design. It does however provide us with a potentially powerful
way to analyse and evaluate proposals for utilising technology to support
our teaching activities. Or to put it another way if we intend to live
by the slogan “education should lead the technology” it gives
us a way of explaining the “why” and “how”.
Teaching, of course, does consume content and information and it is very
concerned with planning and directing student activity. But that is not
the whole story – there is much more to effective teaching than
using content and directing student activity. The vital component of effective
teaching is what the teacher learns about their own teaching as they go
along and applies it to their teaching, Ramsden makes the important point
that this can occur at an individual, departmental and institutional level.
In this view, good teaching it is concerned and involved with the students
- their activities and their perceptions, the subject matter, and is reflective
and reflexive about the experience of teaching and incorporates lessons
learnt from the experience of teaching into teaching practice. In this
view teaching is a continuous process not a repetitive act of pumping
the same content at students or finding some illusory magic formula for
student activity. As Ramsden explains:
“Theory 3 is a compound view of instruction. In this conception,
teaching, students, and the subject content to be learned are linked together
by an overarching framework or system. Teaching is comprehended as a process
of working cooperatively with learners to help them change their understanding.
It is making learning possible. Teaching involves finding out about students’
misunderstandings, intervening to change them, and creating a context
of learning which encourages students to actively engage with the subject
matter. Note that this theory is very much concerned with the content
of what students have to learn in relation to how it should be taught…
a teacher who uses this theory will recognise and focus especially on
the key issues that seem to represent critical barriers to student learning.
The content to be taught, and students’ problems with learning it,
direct the method he or she uses.”
Ramsden (1991) page 114
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4. A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR STAFF DEVELOPMENT
We should not underestimate the problems we are up against here, as Ramsden
points out:
“To do these things is never easy, especially if the departmental
or institutional context is one where surface approaches are seen as a
normal way of learning and where students’ learning difficulties
are not seen to be the teachers’ problems”
Ramsden, (1991) page 151
Assuming change is really desired then Ramsden’s three theories
of learning provide a fairly clear and intuitive development framework
model for individuals and groups to follow, each stage building on the
previous one. Briefly, the prescription for change is as follows.
Technologies such as VLEs, learning objects and learning design all strongly
imply working as a team to design, develop and deliver courses –
the importance of this should not be underestimated. Working as a team,
sharing learning resources and discussing approaches to teaching are currently
comparatively rare in HE in the UK.
A good model for academics learning to teach along the lines advocated
by Ramsden is that of the notion of ‘cognitive apprenticeship’
a development of ideas from the work of Lave (see http://tip.psychology.org/lave.html)
by Brown, Collins & Duguid (1989) (see http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/papers/JohnBrown.html).
This approach proposes that people learn a ‘craft’ (practical
or theoretical) in the context of a particular ‘community of practice’
(Wenger), and expertise is maintained and passed on through that community
by people working together. This model often includes the notions of zones
of proximal development from the influential Russian psychologist Vygotsky
(http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html)
and ‘instructional scaffolding’ developed by Bruner see http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html).
It sounds more abstract than it is, zones of proximal development is the
concept that expertise in a particular subject can be separated into a
number of steps and that with support (scaffolding) the learner can move
up the steps to achieve proficiency. Scaffolding denotes the idea that
people need support (ideally from their peers and ‘masters’
in the craft, but potentially from many other sources) until they can
develop their expertise at a level above where they currently are.
Ramsden’s three theories of teaching provide us with a good description
of the ‘zones’ that require to be mastered by academics, departments,
faculties, and institutions as they mature as teachers. The diagram below
shows their relations to learning objects and Learning Designs.

Figure 2. Ramsden’s Models Mapped To The Technologies
As Proximal Development Zones
The most important building block in our proposed model of development
for academics is for them to work in teams that do not just include academics
but also media designers, learning technologists and educational design
specialists such as instructional designers. This division of labour is
necessary for efficiency (Laurillard, 1994) but from our point of view
this is where the real usefulness of technologies such as learning objects
and Learning Designs becomes clear. They become what Wenger calls ‘boundary
objects’. This simple idea has some important ramifications about
the uses of these technologies
• They act as a form of collective memory for a particular community
that can be accessed and reused by that community in the future
• They support the construction of, and sharing of enough meaning
between different groups (subject academics, tutors, administrators,
instructional designers, media designers etc.) to allow them to understand
their place in the educational system they are working in.
• To achieve the first two objectives the necessary contextual
data needs to be collected
Working as a team to design, develop and deliver courses, sharing their
learning materials and conceptions about the teaching and learning are
the basis for potentially powerful staff and institutional development
processes. The ability of learning objects and Learning Designs to support
this process can be exploited. Properly conceived and planned this process
may also play a role in building and strengthening scholarly communities.
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5. CONCLUSION
Learning Objects and Learning Design have been eagerly welcomed and adopted
by the e-learning community in the UK and this has brought to the surface
some of the issues discussed in this paper. Rather than presenting an
impassable obstacle this reification of existing pedagogic practice, attitudes
and values is useful and identifies areas to be addressed through staff
development, although we do not underestimate the task at hand.
As a result of these developments it is now increasingly obvious that
the human infrastructure needs to be developed to effectively use these
new tools (and the more recent ones such as VLEs etc). This is likely
to pose some significant challenges in the form of institutional and professional
change. As Mayes (1995) reminds us:
“education is a social and political system, and the checks and
balances that keep the system working may not be shifted by any technology”
Along the way, we in may indeed find that learning objects and learning
design do help in transforming teaching in higher education – it
just might not happen the way we thought it would.
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5.1 An Outline of the Organisational and Professional
Changes Required to Utilise a Re-skilled Workforce
Alongside the staff development framework there needs to be a change to
the institutional and professional organisation of teaching that can actually
utilise a re-skilled teaching workforce along the lines we have been discussing.
As Carol Twigg (2005) has observed much of the development of e-learning
in HE to date has been ‘bolted-on’ to existing structures
and practice, to move forward she contends that the process of teaching
has to be re-engineered around the technology. In this context staff development
without parallel institutional/organisational change makes little sense
as there will be nowhere to use and develop the skills that we are advocating;
it would be a classic misuse of training and be counter-productive. To
be clear, the underlying causes of the obstacles to the adoption of learning
objects and Learning Design are professional culture and institutional
organisation. As Mayes observes there has to be the will to change to
accommodate the technology, staff development alone cannot make this happen.
The kind of changes we envisage are relatively simple but raise some profound
questions for traditional HE institutions and academic staff about their
roles and relationships, these are also the areas that we see as fertile
for further work:
• Teaching is recognised as the primary business activity for
most HE institutions and treated accordingly
• Courses are designed, developed and delivered by multidisciplinary
teams – rather than individuals
• Course content/syllabus is not changed (apart from maintenance)
for between 3-7 years
• All course materials are created and shared before the course
begins – i.e. no teaching from your own notes
• The staff who teach and tutor on a course are probably not the
staff who designed and developed the course
• Staff teaching and tutoring on a course are likely to be on
different employment contracts to traditional lecturers who are primarily
subject specialists
• All course content and teaching and learning materials are digitised
and shared in a central institutional repository in learning object
format
• Novice academic teachers (and support staff) are allocated a
‘master’ and team to develop their skills in a clear institutional
staff development framework
• Learning objects have enough contextual information in them
for the members of the team to make sense of them and reuse them –
pedagogically, technically and administratively
• Learning Design is used to represent the pedagogic strategy
associated with a learning object and this is used for staff development
purposes and as an aid to reflective practice, with a user-friendly
graphical interface.
• Learning Designs and learning objects are mapped to particular
curriculum teaching aims and learning outcomes in an easy to understand
graphical format to facilitate search and reuse
These activities and objectives are the type of context that needs to
exist to make our staff development framework meaningful. Currently, little
of this activity currently exists in HE outside distance learning providers.
As this context develops in HE then our proposed staff development framework
becomes more relevant.
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