The Open University (OU) has led the way in pioneering innovative methods of teaching and learning. Mike Sharples, professor of educational technology, at the OU tells Rosie Niven how technological changes and better learning analytics is making its teaching more effective.
How is technology having an impact on teaching and learning in universities?
Since the 1990s technology’s main influence has been through virtual learning environments (VLEs), where learners can access their course learning materials online and where they can submit assignments. That’s had a huge effect in getting away from the lecture / seminar mode of teaching towards supporting students wherever they are, enabling them to learn off campus.
Universities are also allowing students to bring their own devices, including mobile phones and tablets. That is extending learning so that they can access resources on campuses and can also learn at home using their own devices. The idea is to bridge learning that they are doing on campus and the learning they are doing at home via the VLE, or more recently by personal devices.
There’s also this notion of flipped classrooms, where some universities are providing teaching materials which students study in their own time and then when they are on campus focus more on seminar and tutorial based teaching. We get students who are working part time and students who are trying to juggle jobs and learning and family and learning. Digital resources like e-books allow them to do their learning in a way that works for them.
We did a survey of our OU students and found that students are using e-books when they are sitting with their families watching TV. Whereas it is not acceptable to spread out all of your course material and notes while you are on the sofa with your family, it’s fine to have a tablet or an e-book front of you.
Are there any new trends that you’d particular like to highlight?
I see three recent developments, the first one is MOOCs. Over the past ten years universities have been making some or all of their teaching material available online but what MOOCS have done have opened up, not just teaching materials, but courses. Now, people can take university-level courses online for free and millions of people worldwide are taking MOOCs courses from providers like Coursera, Edx and in the UK, Futurelearn.
What that does is allow people to sample university-level courses and it also provides pathways into universities, both at undergraduate and masters levels. For example, Futurelearn had a course on forensic science based on a TV cliffhanger format, covering blood sampling analysis, fingerprint analysis, so that you could get an idea of what these things really are.
MOOCs have provided an understanding of higher education and a pathway into higher education. Beyond that is this idea of hybrid or blended learning. There are two sorts of hybrid and blended learning – there is blending of campus and online learning and there is there is blending of free and paid-for learning.
For example, Edinburgh University is making all of its masters courses available in an online format so instead of just having, say, twenty people in a seminar room, studying on campus you might have 100 people studying online. Everybody gains, the campus students gain from interacting with people around the world online and the online students gain from having that interaction with people on campus.
The final thing is learning analytics – using the data coming from these courses to improve the teaching and learning. So you use the big data coming from the MOOC courses to influence design and to innovate in the teaching and learning.
How has the Open University responded to these changes?
The Open University hasn’t just responded, it has been a leader in distance learning since the 1960s. It has taken a lead in supported open learning, students taking courses at a distance supported by local tutors. And we have taken a lead in learning analytics.
We do massive scale analysis of our learners on OU courses and collect extensive amounts of data. Until recently, we tended to analyse that data after the course has ended so that we can improve it for the following year.
Now, we can also do predictive analytics, tracking each learner so that we can give them customised help, even in the first week. That way, we can see which learners are succeeding, which ones are likely to have problems and then help those people by giving them supplementary material or perhaps putting them in contact with other students. We are using analytics in a much more active way than we used to and the OU is taking a lead in predictive analytics and using analytics to inform the design of courses.
Drop out rates and failure rates can have an impact on an institution’s bottom line and ultimately its efficiency. How can analytics help reduce drop out rates?
That is one of the prime reasons for having analytics, particularly active learning analytics so not just analysing a course after it’s finished but intervening actively to help students right in the first week of the course who are struggling.
They may be struggling for a number of reasons. It may be that they have disabilities and access problems. They may just not know how to learn online. They may find the material too difficult and challenging. They may have particular issues with fitting the learning into their daily life.
In all of those ways you can provide interventions like helplines, or study buddies to motivate them to keep going. Students who study in groups are much more likely to complete the course. We already provide associate lecturers as tutors and if you provide that motivation, some students can complete a course that they might have otherwise failed.
Do any of these innovations potentially have a positive impact for universities more generally, for example in terms of saving money and making teaching and learning more effective?
There are three ways they are making an impact – efficiency, opportunity and access. So efficiencies come from using analytics to improve the retention rates and also optimising teaching through analytics informing learning design, both to engage students and to provide materials at the right level, at the right pace and the right kind of informative assessment.
And then opportunity, this notion of blended learning is allowing students to study a university degree at a distance. It is not just the Open University now, an increasing number of universities are offering distance learning. It is really widening the opportunity for people to study part time, studying at a distance and even take a collection of modules, perhaps from different universities, that can add up to a degree.
The last one is access because we are now providing access, not just on desktop machines, but also on laptops, tablets and mobile phones. Futurelearn is a platform that offers access on mobile devices. Many people, particularly in Africa, south America, China, don’t have computers for studying online, but can still access higher education.
How will the learning environment in more traditional universities adapt to innovations in pedagogies?
We also need to look at how we can teach differently to improve retention and optimise costs. With the flipped classrooms, you’re using students’ time on campus more effectively by having more intensive seminar and discussion sessions and students doing the basic learning at home and online.
Other basic pedagogies include enquiry based learning, so students are using their own devices to carry out investigations. At the OU we have an app for android phones which gives you access to all of the sensors’ data to let you do experiments.
Previously, we used to send students home experiment kits – we literally sent lasers and computers through the post to them. A mobile phone has a voice recorder in it, it has data sensors in it. Now, with your tablet and mobile phone you have your own scientific toolkit.
Another example is case-based learning where students can get information from real medical cases, environmental cases and work on those cases together. They can propose their own cases from their workplace that other students can study using case examples from data collected from interviews, or recordings or from photos, sharing them with other learners.
These new sorts of teaching and learning are really starting to take off in universities because the technology now exists and also, there is a much better understanding by universities as to how those new pedagogies can be run alongside those traditional lecturing models.
As a professor, how well do you feel academics are able to influence changes at institutional levels? Do you feel more could be done to connect with them?
There was a time during the mid-1990s when VLEs came in until about five years ago where there really wasn’t a big connect between what was happening in the academic world of education technologists and what was happening at universities in terms of strategy. I think that has changed and changed quite radically.
MOOCs are one example where universities are seeing the value of new kinds of learning and technology as part of their core business model. So, if a university is using them well, MOOCs are a central part of their business model and blended learning means that technology has a more central role than it did five years ago.
So far, these trends have been technology-led. But just recently, there has started to be more interest in the new pedagogies, enquiry-based learning, case-based learning, game-based learning. And at the OU we have got a new vice chancellor, Peter Horrocks, who is leading a programme of innovation at the university that focuses on innovative pedagogies. This work really starting to impact on teaching and learning.
