The four quadrants of Splace - reflections on topic 5

Oh no, yet another theory of learning. 

When I saw Gizeh Perez Tenorio speaking on video about the Elmore model, I had a general response to the model, and a specific response about the different quadrants.

My Generic Response. 'Oh no, yet another theory of learning, learning styles, or course design.' Bloom, ABC, CoI, Iceberg, Elmore...I could also name UDL, Carpe Diem, and my own system I call ALBUS. I was struck, not for the first time, by the disconnect between the learning sciences and most classroom teachers. 

After 7 years of pedagogy workshops, I have come to view educational models like films or books. You have to 'read' them widely, or you cannot distinguish between good and bad ones. You may be easily impressed - or discouraged - by the first model you meet, not understanding its benefits or its drawbacks. 

I came up with my ALBUS scheme because my colleagues needed a quick guide of 'what to leave out' and how to 'find the centre' of your course in the transition to online learning. How do you decide the syllabus, when you are accustomed to 'jigsaw programmes' that rely on willing colleagues agreeing to give one lecture each?

ALBUS 

ALBUS is a backward design algorithm for a module or course unit. Your syllabus needs to hang on 5 pegs: Assessment, Learning Outcomes, Big Ideas, Unique features, and Skills. If your module proforma shows 5 learning outcomes that completely describe your module, you have already found the centre. You can treat each of the 5 learning outcomes as a module theme and proceed to map learning activities onto this theme. Your ALBUS looks like LLLLL or (L)5 . If on the other hand your learning outcomes by themselves do not truly summarise 'what your module is all about' you can use the full ALBUS mnemonic, or a permutation like AALBBUS. In the limit, you can take each letter to be one week of learning.

How do you organise that week? Here, I was inspired by Bloom. The stages of learning across the week will include some, or all, of the following phases: Motivate, Acquire, Extend, Apply, Challenge, Perform (or Assess), and Reflect. There is a clear cline across the week. All the phases follow from each other, and each provides opportunities for baked-in feedback (including automated quiz, self-reflection, dialogue with tutor, depending on the phase). ALBUS is task-oriented. Unlike Elmore, I was not thinking about the hierarchy or individuality, but I assume that the learning is student-centred and challenge-based, with incentives for private investigations and community sharing. 

ALBUS fits most closely with the bottom left quadrant; ALBUS is hierarchical collective. There is strong direction of the course design, though elements of student choice and self-direction. It depends on collective participation of the students in the weekly challenge activity and their 'performance' at the end of the week.

Distributed collective: the teacher vanishes

Have I modified my view after doing ONL? I have thought more about the lower right quadrant, distributed collective, and the problems of making it work. 

Gizeh said in her video 'the network becomes the classroom.' We come back to the old David White dilemma: is the network usable, or reliable? The short-lived connections, the unstable groups, the flickery signals, the unreliable marketplace of ideas...it requires a high level of maturity for students to work in this way. 

I am well aware of educated, literate people who spend their lives in a 'dark net' of conspiratorial thinking about viruses and vaccines. After a while, they build a highly coherent mental model that features an engineered virus, a deliberate release, western complicity in funding it, drug companies holding governments to ransom, infection data that don't tell the real story, a plot to lock down society. The model is so consistent that you cannot damage it by subtracting just one facet of it. There WAS a natural animal virus with a furin site (supposedly something that could only have been engineered on purpose). But the whole mental model resists this attack.  Some of the participants in these networks have impressive credentials in molecular biology, medicine, public health. 

Networked learning is fine for factoids. How do I? What is the best way to? When did X happen? What is the definition of Y? For learning what to do about challenges and frontiers, or programmatic learning that you need for maths, languages or other discipline, the network becomes a collection of loosely connected rumour hubs. 

We need to attend to the meaning of Education, and the role of the teacher, if the network is supposed to be its future. Position papers by bodies like UNESCO or the European Higher Education Area refer to teachers as one of many professionals producing online learning...in this view, teachers are 'content providers' or 'subject experts' but have no role in transmitting culture.

Individual distributed: the student vanishes

Speaking of this quadrant, Gizeh said that the task of the course organiser is to 'create models of learning that attract the learners...' The learners choose courses from a smorgasbord, and decide their own pace of learning, and the learning journey they want to follow. They cannot access learning-on-demand, personalised to their own interests, as they can in theory through the distributed network. 

A veteran of many online courses in the Individual Distributed mode, I think that the default I.D. learner is atomised. We watch a video. We type in a forum box. We might have a brief dialogue with one or two other learners. We click the 'next' button and we have twenty more pages until we reach completion. There might be a multiple-choice quiz. If there is a question or think task to consider, the responses will normally not be curated by the course tutor. Many learners will simply type their surface reaction to the question, rather than consider other sides of the problem.

As one student said to me in a lively seminar: 'When are you going to start the class? We're all just chatting.'

Courses of this kind are well adapted for some technical subjects, if tutor feedback is not required, or if feedback can be automated. Coursera rates of completion are around 1%, though many learners will benefit from even a passing engagement with their course.