Which
Media When, and Why?
Erica McAteer, Ian Ruffell, Shanti Williamson and Alison
Muirhead
University
of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
The influence of educational context within tutor’s roles is illustrated
through three case examples from a traditional, campus-based, higher education
institution. Different subject disciplines, different student levels, different
learning objectives and different categories of learner activity were
supported, utilising currently available communication resources. Lecturers
recorded learning support interventions during key periods within a single
module block or unit within the courses for which they had tutorial
responsibility. They extended their log
sheets to include self-report commentaries and these, together with
intervention records and student feedback through a set of measures , provide
data to inform extension of this self-monitoring system to the wider HE and FE
community, to better inform resource provision practice.
asynchronous conferencing, blended learning, electronic media, on-line
forum, tutor roles, virtual learning environment.
Increasing availability of electronic media for the support of learning
challenges established tutoring practice, forcing questions around media choice
which were less explicit in the more ‘traditional’ settings which situated our
own learning experiences.
Asynchronous conferencing systems are used to join up people and
resources, supporting communication and the sharing of information between
staff and students, regardless of time and location - between those who join.
Real-time interaction, virtual or face to face, allows spontaneity and
immediacy for interchange of ideas and questions but in practice often impedes
it. Digitisation means that wider use of both teaching resources and
contributions from students can be made from one teaching year to the next,
requiring an extension of critical faculties that may need development. Word-processing now allows online interaction on assignment work,
reflective feedback between tutor and learner, and between peers. Lines between
feedback, collaboration and plagiarism may need re-drawing. Email is simple to use, effective, and
widely available. It has opened the
floodgates to a flow of communication between individual students and academic
staff, which was previously not available, and may not always be welcome, to
overworked staff. Telephone
communication allows immediacy (once connected!) but invades privacy. Mobile
resources – phones, pda’s and combinations – currently fascinate educational
research communities because of their potential, it is critical that we develop
our understanding of their use in practice.
This presentation reports development work at the University of Glasgow
following from three case studies, originally undertaken by institutional
members of the Scottish Centre for Research into On-Line Learning and
Assessment to complement a discipline-wide pilot project with forty distance tutors
across a range of subject disciplines. The SOLACE project, undertaken by
SCROLLA in partnership with the Open University Scotland, studied interventions
by tutors to support learning development, and their choice of media for
intervention purpose (McDonald and McAteer 2003).
The University of Glasgow, established in 1455, is a traditional
campus-based institution where a major method of teaching is ‘the
lecture’. Tutorial meetings with
lecturing staff for individuals or small groups are common practice for the
provision of learning support,
particularly for large classes. While
some group tutorials are compulsory and in certain cases even require
performance to be assessed, many are optional for students to either attend or
ignore.
At Glasgow, in common with the global higher education sector, new
technologies and government encouragement for their use in learning and
teaching brings a range of electronic media resources to close and remote
classrooms. Although (at the time of writing) the university has no single
Virtual Learning Environment (VLE),
Blackboard is used in the Faculty of Life Sciences, WebCT in Electronic
Engineering, an open source system, Moodle, is used in the Faculy Education and
underpins certain ‘fully distance’ courses round the campus. More generally, departmental web-sites in
all faculties provide a range of course resources, including handbooks, study
guides, contact information, notice boards, timetables, and, in many cases,
course-relevant links to content information through the internet. An
increasing number of courses make use of Web-based tools such as WebBoard or
I-Campus to provide asynchronous conferencing as a resource for student and
student-tutor use. On-line assessment resources include Questionmark,
Perception, I-Assess, Triads (see reference section for contact details) as
well as open source ‘quiz engines’ and those provided by the University’s
current VLE packages. Their assessment
purpose is usually formative, for self-assessment during course work or before
class exams, but is in some cases summative, with performance outcomes actually counting in course or degree
grades. The university library provides an online portal, www.gla.ac.uk/lib/merlin which can be accessed by students and staff
on or off campus.
The three courses focused upon for study of intervention and media use at
the University of Glasgow are represented in Table 1. All courses represented had conferencing software as part of
course resource provision, and all course lecturers made use of it for tutorial
purposes with their learner groups.
Table 1: Courses participating in the University of
Glasgow’s study of tutorial intervention and media use.
|
Courses |
Provision mode |
Role of on-line conference |
Class size/Tutorial group size |
|
Undergraduate, Year 2 Classic Civilisation: ‘Conflict and Change in Ancient
Greece and Rome’ |
Campus based |
Required preparation for face to face seminar |
80/20 |
|
Postgraduate
Certificate in Academic Practice |
Work based |
Requested
provision of examples from practice, discussion of theory |
40/5-6 |
|
Postgraduate
Master of Philosophy in Medical Law |
Distance |
Encouraged for discussion
of course content |
12/12 |
Although all based at the same higher education institution, the three
courses under scrutiny differed considerably in their learning and teaching
contexts, teaching aims, learning objectives and outcomes, and tutorial
resource provision. They also differ greatly in the level and nature of their
learners.
A second level undergraduate module offered by the Department
of Classics at the University of Glasgow. Its main purpose is to introduce
students to a range of different kinds of ancient political writing and,
through study of internal and external conflict in Greece and republican Rome,
including historiography and oratory; explore interrelationships between
political theory and behaviour and historical change. Students will be taking
the course either as a basis for an honours degree in Classics or a cognate
discipline, or as an option within a degree course in another discipline. The module
is mainly taught through lectures
(three each week) with fortnightly tutorial meetings, and assessed through
essays and an exam.
The University of Glasgow’s ‘New Lecturer/Teacher Programme’
is compulsory for new teaching staff. It is a two-year part time course
offering two modules: the first covers a range of teaching and learning issues
through face to face or on-line workshops, unit handbooks and readings. The
second, running in parallel with the first but intensifying during year two,
supports individual course participants through small tutorial groups for development of portfolios evidencing
competence in their subject disciplines.
The course, accredited by the UK Institute of Learning and Teaching in
Higher Education (ILTHE), as peer- and tutor-assessed through portfolio.
The Distance Learning Programme in Medical Law (DLP) is a
course offered by the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine at the University
of Glasgow. It comprises three years of
part-time study towards the degree of MPhil in Medical Law. The first and the second years of study are
structured around modules devoted to particular topic areas. Students are provided with materials for
each module, which consist of course notes, reading lists, activities,
reflection and analysis points, and details of the essay question(s). Students
also attend three residential teaching weekends in the first and second years
of the course, providing face to face teaching through seminars and discussion
groups, and opportunities to meet with other students and with tutors.
Assessment is through module essays and, in the final year, a dissertation.
Despite the considerable differences between the case
examples, the three lecturer participants in this study have much in common
(aside from all working for the same academic institution!). All are ‘experts’
in the subject discipline of study, all have responsibility for provision of
course content, of learning support and of assignment guidance and assessment.
Consideration by the three participants of the tutor roles, central and
peripheral, identified in Paper One for this symposium (Denis et al, 2004) for
their individual course contexts allows their (rough) assignment of role
‘presence’ and role ‘emphasis’. Table 2 shows that, though all tutor roles are
served by all lecturers, the different contexts imply interesting differences
in emphasis.
Table 2: Tutor Roles for three course lecturers. One star
indicates low emphasis of role, five stars indicates high emphasis.
|
Tutor Role |
Central / |
Classical |
Academic |
Medical |
|
A Content facilitator |
C |
***** |
*** |
**** |
|
B Metacognition facilitator |
C |
***** |
***** |
***** |
|
C Process facilitator |
C |
***** |
*** |
** |
|
D Advisor/Counsellor |
C |
***** |
* |
**** |
|
E Assessor (formative,
summative) |
C |
***** |
***** |
***** |
|
F Technologist |
C |
* |
* |
*** |
|
G Resource provider |
C |
***** |
***** |
* |
|
H Designer |
P |
**** |
**** |
** |
|
I Manager/administrator |
P |
** |
*** |
** |
|
J Researcher |
P |
***** |
***** |
***** |
|
K Co-learner |
P |
* |
***** |
** |
The interest for this study lies in reflection upon perceptions of tutor
roles, student and teacher experience of learning support provision, learning
activities and outcomes. All three case example lecturers, as participants in
SOLACE, reviewed their own teaching contexts through the lens provided by its outcomes.
‘Tutor roles and their application in context’ was not an explicit theme within
the SOLACE work but, as course lecturers and associate lecturers across sector
and discipline logged their tutorial interventions and their medium of use,
critical issues of concern emerged. These were developed through the project
discussion boards and through face-to-face meetings of participants, and in
this work we take up those aspects which, we feel, qualify both teacher and
student perceptions of tutor roles.
Outcomes from the SOLACE work inform current concerns and question some
of the implicit assumptions underpinning present practice in student
support. Figure 3 is an attempt to
organize and clarify emergent concerns and themes for reflection.
Figure 1: Tutor concerns as evidenced through discussion
by SOLACE participants (data drawn from discussion boards and an away-day
session, adapted from Macdonald & McAteer 2004, p 175)
Relationship/relevance
of tutorial intervention to other course events and resources, eg, lectures,
readings, study activities, practical work, assignment performance..
Relationship/relevance
of tutorial group events to larger class events (whether on-line or
face-to-face, or as blended learning provision)
Relationship/relevance
of group tutorial intervention to one-on-one tutorial contacts
Ability to
cover range different topics
Flexibility
– to help group, plus individuals
Interactivity
– able to tailor intervention in response to reaction
Timeliness –
relationship to assignments particularly
Supporting
learning – whose learning?
Level
playing field – same support to all students? Duplication, redundancy?
Media
availability, accessibility
Medium
affordance
Demands of
group/individual
Proactive/reactive
implications
e-Tutoring
or face-to-face tutoring - what are the conditions for success?
A critically important, obvious only through hindsight, question emerged
from the SOLACE project: ‘Perhaps we need to revisit what we do?’ To do this in
any way that can genuinely inform practice requires some effort to capture and
record ‘what we do’ and submit such record to scrutiny by ourselves, our peers
and, importantly our students. Though this has (certainly!) always been true,
it is perhaps particularly relevant at this moment of technological,
pedagogical and policy change across all educational sectors.
We know already that we need to be wary of “dressing up old pedagogies in
new technologies” and thereby missing opportunities for realising new ways of
teaching that exploit the best of available technologies in the service of
student learning. To support this
endeavour, we need to develop (in partnership with teachers and students across
subject disciplines and across sector) flexibile ‘activity design’ models to
test the current and potential resource(s) for pedagogic and practical
functionality. To develop instruments
which test target resources to the highest possible limits, we currently need
to evaluate use against aims for a range of key pedagogic functions in relevant
learning contexts.
Two examples of provision, underpinning assumptions and reflective
questions which emerged from SOLACE are given below:
Traditional
assignment feedback: will reach all individuals in the group; relatively
rich in quality of intervention, in terms of breadth of aspects covered, often
poor on timeliness, close to zero interactivity, impact on learning? Are there
for instance elements of correspondence tuition which could be delivered to the
group instead?
Face to face
tutorials: great on breadth of
coverage, interactivity, timeliness, flexibility group/individual work; but
reaches small minority of students; and are they the ones needing help? Is this
what students want? For group
interventions, whatever the medium, there is a significant overhead in
encouraging participation, and rounding up stragglers: is this good use of the
tutor’s time?
Still working at a small scale,
to allow ‘safe’ development of tools and procedures for wider enquiry, outcomes
from the three case examples described here will be disseminated to the wider
research and practice community through NL2004 and through the EQUEL research
network.
For the duration of the study all participating lecturers recorded
learning support interventions during key periods within a single module block
or lecture unit within the courses for which they had tutorial responsibility. Intervention purpose (administrative,
pastoral, conceptual support, skills development, assignment feedback, etc) was
logged against media of use (email, face-to-face, telephone, e-conference,
paper-based).
Figure 2: Intervention log for lecturer use, showing
function of intervention against medium used to achieve it.
|
Intervention function |
Medium used |
||||||||
|
Contacts with
group |
Contacts with
individuals |
||||||||
|
notice |
letter |
face to face |
e-forum or mail
list |
phone |
face to face |
email |
letter |
other |
|
|
Administration |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Encouragement |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reinforcement of concepts |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Assignment preparation |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Assignment feedback |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Study processes |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A second instrument to complement and inform reflection on the log data
gathered is a "Learning Resource Questionnaire". Case participant lecturers have provided a checklist
of learning resource provision to the students on their courses, with an
indication of their availability and a statement of potential pedagogic value
and intended use (see Table X). Through
this, students will be asked to indicate, against each item, whether they used
it, how useful it was (and why), how easily accessed, how critical for their
study etc. This checklist could be administered during a course, during exam
revision and, perhaps, after an exam. In previous formats and adaptations, this
instrument has been administered to students during evaluations of innovation
in several different teaching disciplines across the University of Glasgow and
outside it. The instrument has two main functions: to look at students'
independent learning strategies, in the context of a department's teaching resources;
to evaluate those resources - including of course those directly
relating to interventions of immediate concern.
Figure 3: Learning resource questionnaire, for completion
by case example lecturers, to be developed for student indication of use, and
usefulness, of resources.
|
Learning resource |
Availability
comment (eg number, access time, etc) |
Intended
value/use |
|
Lectures |
|
|
|
Course
texts |
|
|
|
Group
tutorial activities (face to face) |
|
|
|
Group
tutorial activities (on-line) |
|
|
|
Course
seminars (face to face) |
|
|
|
Course
seminars (on-line) |
|
|
|
Practical
work |
|
|
|
Field
trips |
|
|
|
Handouts |
|
|
|
Course
handbook |
|
|
|
Individual
meetings with lecturer |
|
|
|
Course
readings |
|
|
|
Course
assignments |
|
|
|
Exams |
|
|
|
On-line
course information and subject links |
|
|
|
On-line
assessment – quizzes and questions |
|
|
|
On-line
course tools (databases, word-processing, analytical resources etc) |
|
|
|
On-line
conference for a |
|
|
|
E-mail
communication |
|
|
|
Collaboration
with fellow students |
|
|
|
Outside
support (family, friends, workplace…) |
|
|
|
Other
resources not listed here |
|
|
Information drawn through the two instruments described here provides the
grounds for reflection by lecturers and students upon perceptions of tutor
roles for learning support in these particular course contexts, and on the
pedagogical practices through which these roles are realised.
We thank
Open University Scotland, particularly Janet Macdonald and the forty Associate
Lecturers who contributed to the SOLACE work, for the grounds from which this
study developed. We look forward to further work together.
Macdonald, J. and McAteer, E. (2003) New approaches to supporting
students: strategies for blended learning in distance and campus-based
environments. Journal of Educational
Media, 28 2 and 3, 171-188