Description
The design of the new campus reflects the strategic decision by the University to promote active learning across all curriculum areas and to provide the students with technology enhanced delivery that encourages and facilitates collaborative learning. In doing so the institution signaled its intention to move away from passive, lecture based delivery.
The NMC Horizon Report for Higher Education 2017 (Adams Becker et al, 2017) identifies such cultural transformation as number one in the ‘big picture themes’ that will drive key trends in learning technology over the next 5 years. Equally, it sees the redesigning of learning spaces and use of collaborative learning technologies planned for the new campus as key HE short and mid-term trends.
During 2015/16, three pilot rooms were equipped to the new specification on existing campuses and were evaluated by more than 260 staff and students in 23 taught sessions during the Spring and Summer Terms. The primary message that arose from this exercise was that lack of staff development was a barrier to the effective use of the learning technologies employed and that guidance in pedagogic innovation was needed as an enabler for the delivery of active student learning.
The staff development programme created to meet this need employed a strategy of engaging the staff themselves as co-designers in the process to draw out and share teaching innovations already being employed and evaluated by ‘early adopters’ in the institution. Small teams of Faculty co-designers were tasked with creating contextualized case studies of effective practice to be shared with colleagues.
A pedagogic profiling tool was developed to aid in this process based on work by Conole (Conole et al, 2004) and Laurillard (Laurillard, 2014). The pedagogic profiler allowed the co-designers to enter their lesson plans and for the learning activity mix to be graphically aligned to key pedagogic characteristics.
The session will describe how the co-designers are using the pedagogic profiler in their learning technology and pedagogy innovations and the creation of their case studies. It will draw conclusions about the effectiveness of involving staff in the co-design of their own professional development and implementation across an institution.
Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., Freeman, A., Hall Giesinger, C., and Ananthanarayanan, V. (2017). NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. & Seale, J. (2004). Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design. Computers and Education 43 (2004) 17-33.
Laurillard, D. (2014) The Learning Design App for Teachers. Research Briefing No 90. Institute of Education, University of London. Online. Available at: http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/18745/1/RB90_Learning_Designer_App_Laurillard.pdf