Core Activity 5.5 LSN certification

Having reviewed the CMALT and LSN E-learning competency frameworks, it appears to me that each approaches the challenge from a different angle; the ALT approach focusing more on adding learning on to technology skills and the LSN focusing more on adding technology to learning skills. The LSN approach fits most closely to my own situation, where I am aiming to add an e-learning dimension to my learning portfolio. I have examined how my PDP outcomes might earn me credit under the LSN accreditation scheme.

Not surprisingly, since my learning goals are focused on a current live e-learning programme, the majority of my goals fit under the Practitioner section of the Framework, but since the programme is a pioneering one in my own company, there are also a few design, leadership and staff development angles that will emerge from this PDP.

1. Awareness of Students and their learning needs
My plans to increase my awareness of student knowledge and special needs and to incorporate the learning into future programmes sits under the following LSN competencies:
LSN Competencies:
Practitioner: induct and guide learners entering and e-learning programme.
Developer: Develop e-learning materials and content
Core:What systems, resources and support are required for implementation

2 Creating the right online atmosphere
My plan to monitor and respond to learner participation and interactions fits under the following LSN competencies:
LSN Competencies:
Practitioner: monitor utilization of e-learning and related technologies
Practitioner: Interact with e-learners online/monitor utilization of e-learning and related technologies

3 Generating stickability
The study on learner motivation will qualify under the following LSN competency:
LSN Competency:
Practitioner: monitor utilization of e-learning and related technologies

4 Ability to use IT appropriately
4a Understanding of online course design: how to write online teaching material, how to design online activities, how to transform teaching or training material for the online environment.
LSN Competencies:
Design and Planning: Design and plan programmes that incorporate an e-learning component.
Practitioner: Identify resources for e-learning interventions/establish an e-learning environment.

4b Experience of audio and visual facilities of the web; for example, Netmeeting, Skype, digital photos, webcasting, podcasting
 LSN Competency:
Practitioner: Use specific e-learning tools relating to one’s own work role

4c Understanding of the different text-based communication systems: computer conferencing, bulletin boards, listserves etc
LSN Competency:
Practitioner: Use specific e-learning tools relating to one’s own work role

4d Skill in developing online community: what works and what doesn’t; providing focus, animating online groups, developing collaborative activities
LSN Competency:
Practitioner: Monitor utilization of e-learning packages and assessing effectiveness

5 Student Assessment
5a&b Ability to mark to the department’s standards
LSN Competency:-leadership: Evaluate performance of e-learning systems, tools, policies and procedures.

5c Written feedback on assignments
LSN Competency:
Practitioner: Interact with e-learners online in…..assessment roles.

6a Steps taken to improve your teaching
LSN Competency:
Advisor: Support staff development in e-learning.

7 Organisation and record-keeping
I am not convinced that this objective is specific to an e-learning goal.

8 Collaboration with teaching colleagues
LSN Competency:
Design and planning: Support staff development in e-learning.

EC: Web Tutorial 4 Some random thoughts

The fourth and final FSW web tutorial focused on the Excellence audit results and how to interpret them. As pre-work, delegates were all asked to complete the audit themselves, so that they could understand the experience their clients will be going through. They were also provided with results from  a real audit, and were asked to read through the practitioners guide section on the audit, and to begin to work out how they would interpret the data.
From the outset, it was clear that a couple, notably Gary and Berta, had spent time studying the data. Others may well have done the same, but did not speak out so confidently in the discussions.
The content delivered by us was quite significant, and I am still very thoughtful about whether this was the best way to deliver the material. For those who had studied the case study, it was probably fine, but others may have been a bit overwhelmed.
The dilemma over whether we should present any content in the webinar format is still on my mind. We will be issuing feedback questions to investigate the experience of the learners, and I am most interested to explore this question. There is no doubt that the students are hungry for input, but I am wondering whether that input needs to be more driven by their questions than by our description of our model.

My Mental Block around E-Portfolios

The first six weeks of H808 have been a period in which I have felt extremely confused. I have had these same emotions on previous H80X programmes, and I have found that if I can trust the expertise of the Open University's course designers, the fog will eventually clear. Or perhaps to be a bit more theoretical about the description of this process, I will find a way to integrate the new knowledge into my existing knowledge bank.

My confusion has largely been around the use of the e-portfolio. The idea of having an electronic place to store, organise and retrieve pieces of work or pieces of interesting research or information is a straightforward enough idea, particularly in the era of Web 2.0. My confusion has arisen around how an established professional, with many years of experience and insights, and with a multitude of uses for an e-portfolio, would begin to set up and organise one.

On reflection, maybe the root of my problem is that I am not someone who thinks in a linear way. My first degree was in Music, and my Belbin team role is Plant; I have always considered myself to have a more creative than scientific mind. Organising thoughts at a meta level is not my strength, and I am lucky to have a business partner for whom this comes naturally. This may therefore have let me off the hook with this discipline in a work context.

My H808 confusion has arisen because I did not grasp quickly enough that to use tools like My Stuff, de-licious, and Google apps (these latter two highly recommended by H808 colleague Eugene), I must first decide how to sort and store my data. When I went back into My Stuff after 5 weeks of collecting, the tags were chaotic, to say the least.

So, I decided to become intensely practical, and to organise my thoughts around the immediate challenge; H808 activities. With that in mind, I was able to organise the My Stuff tags, which meant renaming a few tags, housekeeping the tags I had set up to avoid duplication, and revisiting those artifacts already stored there to include as many tags as are relevant. I then moved on to my Google Docs Application, and carried over as many of the My Stuff tags as are relevant to this (work based) project. Some additional tags were needed to reflect the H808 Skills and Competencies requirements of the EC. And lastly, I revisited the tags I had set up on De-licious, and discovered similar chaos to the other two repositories. Again, I have done an editing and clearing out job here, and have tried to maintain tag consistency with Google and My Stuff.

This all feels as if I have managed to clear out a cluttered kitchen drawer;-)

It will be most interesting to discover whether I am able to hold myself to the discipline of organising my thoughts, my work and my reading beyond H808. I suspect that I will, as my unease with the early clutter of H808 mirrors my general unease with the amount of data that is available in the world today. The explosion of information over the last 10 or so years that the internet and the other publishing media are generating has felt, at times, overwhelming. Having a way of categorising and then storing information which adds value to my practice and my hobbies is beginning to feel like a watershed in my cognitive mapping process.

FSW DL Reflection tool (1)

In an earlier blog posting (Reflecting on Reflection, 2nd October 2009), I described a moment of realisation about my own professional practice. I have tended to assume that allocating time for my students to reflect assumes that they will know how to reflect. My research around the subject of reflection has given me pause for thought on that subject.

I decided this week, to provide some extra scaffolding for reflection on the Web Tutorial. On this session, all students had been asked to prepare a five minute input summarising their learning on a section of the course manual (Practitioner's Guide). Listening to any subject tackled 8 times can be both tedious and challenging; I therefore provided a Reflection Tool for everyone to use if they chose. The tool listed all the names of students, and invited the listener to record their answers under three headings; features benefits that they focused on, powerful images/phrases, ideas to incorporate into your pitch, any questions.

Students have been invited to contribute to a blog discussion following that session, and I will be fascinated to see if there any good evidence of listening and reflection.

MM Personal Development Plan.rtf

H808 PDP: Madeleine McGrath

	Overview
	I am currently leading a team who are running a 5 week Distance Learning Programme for consultants to train them in the use of my company’s Organisation Development model. Successful consultants will be granted a license to use this product with their own clients. The programme has been developed in the light of my experience of designing and facilitating an online module as part of my H804 studies, and following my occasional use of webinar technology to make presentations to dispersed audiences. I plan to use the experience of running this programme to develop my skills as an e-learning professional. I judge the following skill areas to be the most promising places to make improvements.
	Skills and Competences	Existing competence level		Improvement Actions/Goals
1.	Awareness of Students and their learning needs	Memo: this was an area that was judged lacking in my H804 EC.
1a	Understanding of students’ knowledge base	The current process uncovers the students knowledge base from student cvs and registration documents		Experiment with ways systematically to find out the existing levels of knowledge of my learners in future programmes.
1b	Knowledge of students and their backgrounds	The registration process asks questions about the professional, academic and personal backgrounds of learners		The existing process will be reviewed, and more searching questions included in future if necessary.
1c	Awareness of individual and special needs	This information is currently derived from the current registration process.		Identify specific learning needs based on findings from 1a and 1b, and the experience of the first programme. Introduce a more searching inquiry process if necessary.
2	Creating the right online atmosphere
2a	Use of voice and gesture	We currently have both voice and online communication with learners.		Monitor the online/telephone responses of learners to my and my colleagues inputs.
2b	Ability to include all students in discussion	The telephone conference format makes it difficult to ensure everyone can participate. A number of strategies to support this have been introduced on this programme. The success of these strategies will be reviewed at the end of the programme.		Monitor participation of learners in telephone and online conferences, and investigate any disappointing participation levels. Identify strategies to encourage optimum participation in the learner’s circumstances.
2c	Ability to create a suitable atmosphere in groups	The various learning arenas (blogsite, webinar, Linkedin) I have chosen give my colleagues and I a variety of ways of judging whether we have been able to generate a group dynamic.		I will monitor participation in group sessions/arenas, to decide on any improvements for future events. The long term test of success in this factor will be whether learners choose to remain active members of our online community after the end of the programme.
3	Generating stickability	Memo: this was an aspect of my H804 project that I found most disappointing.
3a	Ability to engage students	Persistence levels of learners have been variable in past programmes of mine – from not even participating though to erratic, unreliable participation up to enthusiastic and energetic participation. Participation is important to this programme, as it gives us visibility of learners who will be representing our products in the market place and assists in our assessment of their capabilities.		Though observing any differences in participation levels of learners, identify the factors that do/will motivate learners to participate in our programme, and incorporate as many as possible into future programmes.
4	Ability to use IT appropriately
4a	Understanding of online course design: how to write online teaching material, how to design online activities, how to transform teaching or training material for the online environment.	Our current programme has a blog, an audio webinar platform, participant guide book and a mentored assignment as its learning methodology.		In order to turn this programme into one that can deliver high quality training to larger numbers of geographically dispersed students, it is vital that our basic programme includes a much greater proportion of asynchronous activities. The experience of the first programme will provide insights into the activities and discussions that are essential in our learning process. This learning can be incorporated into the next design of the programme. The fact that we have chosen technologies for the first programme which give us visibility of the process learners are going through will provide valuable insights into the actual learning process that is taking place.
4b	Experience of audio and visual facilities of the web; for example, Netmeeting, Skype, digital photos, webcasting, podcasting	The current programme uses webcasting (which is called webinar in my field).		In future programmes, I envisage much greater use of podcasts to replace some of the webinar inputs, and will be very interested to experiment with the use of Skype and its video conferencing capabilities.
4c	Understanding of the different text-based communication systems: computer conferencing, bulletin boards, listserves etc	The current programme uses a webinar platform for synchronous communication and a blogsite for asynchronous communication.		It is my aim to migrate the programme gradually to incorporate a greater proportion of asynchronous communication. This will make the programme more time efficient for tutors and learners, and will give us much greater scalability of numbers of learners.
4d	Skill in developing online community: what works and what doesn’t; providing focus, animating online groups, developing collaborative activities	We are using two online community platforms; blogger and linkedin..		Monitoring the community dynamics of the first programme will give us data to assess our community building capabilities and identify areas for improvement. The ultimate test of this competence will be the extent to which learners stay active in this learning community after the programme has finished.
5	Student Assessment
5a	Ability to mark to the department’s standards	No previous experience	This is the first programme that we have developed in this field. I will work with colleagues, and research best academic practice to establish the criteria against which we will judge the performance of our learners.
5b	Consistency and reliability in marking standards	No previous experience.	I will engage my colleagues in the assessment process, which will give me a benchmark to judge my own assessment competences.
5c	Written feedback on assignments	At present I am not required to provide written feedback to learners. This programme will therefore provide my first experience of this.	The experience of providing feedback for the first time will be a valuable learning experience for me. I shall reflect on that experience and ask for feedback from colleagues to help me to hone my skills in this area.
6a	Steps taken to improve your teaching	This programme was created based on my previous H80X experience and in particular the experience of designing and facilitating three online modules in H804.	The items in this Action/Goals column provide a template against which I will develop my e-learning skills for the future.
7	Organisation and record-keeping	Since this has been a prototype programme, the documents and records have been created using our best instincts and prior experience, which is largely of face to face training.	In the light of our experience, I will analyse the documents and course materials that we have used, and streamline their use and storage.
8	Collaboration with teaching colleagues	On the programme to date, my colleagues have collaborated in supporting the delivery of my course design, although this has largely been rather passive collaboration.	I will involve colleagues in the end of programme review, and encourage them to take part in the design of future programmes. This will improve the quality of future programmes, and will increase their ownership of the programme in the future.

Adapted from Source: H851 Practice Guide 7, Reviewing and Improving your Teaching, The Open University, 1998, p.31. and Technology related skills and competences for e-learning professionals, Robin Mason.

Reflections on Unit 3 Activities

In researching unit 3, part 1, I came across the work of  Bisovsky and Schaffert (2009), on the subject of Learning and Teaching with e-Porfolios.They identify the most important processes in working with e-portfolios as:
" to clarify the target and context of the digital portfolio work, to collect, select and connect artifacts with a learning target, to reflect and manage the learning process, to present the e-portfolio artifacts, and to assess and evaluate the learning processes, development of competencies" (p13)

They use the European Commission definition of adult learning, which is  "all forms of learning undertaken by adults after having left initial education and training, however far this process may have gone [3]. Adult learning includes learning for personal, civic and social purposes as well as for employment-related purposes."

They also observe that the adult learners come with very different skills, experience and background and that these differences can be capitalized upon to create what they describe as connected learning. This connected learning dimension makes a most compelling case for the adoption of e-portfolios.

[ Personal note for future reference: In my own case, I am introducing a diverse group of seasoned professionals to a new organisation model. This model will only be adopted if they are able to make the connections with their previous learning on organisations. The e-portfolio functionality of being able to incorporate artifacts that reflect the broad range of experience of these learners should certainly facilitate the integration of the new knowledge with their existing knowledge. Being able to incorporate input from their diverse colleagues into their e-portfolio will also add value to their learning experience. Finally, the functionality in an e-portfolio of being able to collect, select, and then present relevant material from their connected learning, must be a valuable additional tool in their professional practice.]

This paper has provided me with some helpful guidance around the selection of the 6 features that I use to compare e-porfolio systems. Using Bisovsky and Schaffert's findings, there is a good argument for incorporating the five processes identified above as key to the use of e-porfolios into my 6 features. As a 6th feature, I would like to explore further one of my H808 Unit 2 reflections on learner reluctance as an obstacle to the adoption of e-portfolios.

I have decided to take the viewpoint of the educator in this analysis. What would be the features of an e-portfolio system that would matter to someone engaged in adult education, such as myself? I hope to be able to incorporate my findings into Activity 3.2 in which I have to make the case for the use of an e-porfolio system.

So, to re-frame these points to fit into the activity 3.1, the six evaluation features of e-portfolio systems might be:
the functionality to target and contextualize the digital portfolio work,
the functionality to collect, select and connect artifacts with a learning target,
the functionality to reflect and manage the learning process,
the functionality to present the e-portfolio artifacts,
the functionality to assess and evaluate the learning processes, development of competencies, and
the functionality that makes the system easy to use by the learners



Ref: Bisovsky, G. and Schaffert. S., (2009), Learning and Teaching With E-Portfolios: Experiences in and Challenges for Adult Education,  International Journal: emerging technologies in learning, Vol 4, No.1,
http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/822/839 (accessed 10th October 2009)

My e-portfolio project

As part of my H808 studies, I am required build my own professional development portfolio; an e-portfolio. In this portfolio I must evidence my progress in each of four areas of competency; practice related, communication related, technology related and research related. Each area of competency involves skills, reflection, critique and pro-activity.

At the outset of H808, I was determined to devote my time to subject matter that will be directly relevant to my work life; I am looking for more than knowledge, I want demonstrable improvement in my skills! For this reason, my initial plan for this e-portfolio is that I will focus my reflections on a distance learning project at work, for which I have managed to attract 8 paying delegates. This project is being run between 5th October and 2nd November and the 8 participants live in 5 different countries. This project is a completely new departure for my company, and one that could open up significant new markets for us, not just for this Distance Learning training, but also the additional products and services that delegates may then wish to buy from my company. This is indeed what our company founder, Tom Peters, calls 'Work that Matters'.

I plan to use the portfolio initially, to use Barrett's (2009) distinction, as a workspace rather than a showcase. And having focused largely on formative reflections, my hope is that by the end of the 6 month period, I will be in a position to focus on what she calls prospective reflection, creating new goals for the next iteration of the programme. There may be a role for showcasing my learning, as this may be a piece of work that will have PR or marketing applications for my company.

As an initial piece of work in this portfolio, I will analyse my previous experience of running a distance learning project, working out how I fared on each of the four practice areas.

My next reflection piece will be to describe the decisions we have made about this latest distance learning project, with my rationale for the these decisions. Again, I will use the H808 Professional Development Framework to structure my thinking.

I hope then to be in a position in 6 weeks time to reflect on the actual experience of running this latest course, to critique how it has progressed, and make resolutions for the next iteration of this programme, always assuming I am able to assemble a second group.

Not only does this seem to be an interesting porfolio, it also has very practical applications for me and my business. Win, win, I would say!

Ref: Barrett, HC, (work in progress, last update 23rd April 2009), Balancing the Two Faces of ePortfolios, (online) http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/index.html (Accessed 25th September 2009)
Peters, TJ, (1999), Re-inventing Work, Professional Service Firm 50, Alfred A Knopf Inc, New York. See Chaper 4a.

What is it I am meant to be doing?

A re-reading of the H808 Course Guide and Assignment Guide has led to a bit more fog lifting for me;-)

A big 'AHA' moment came when I re-read the Diagram with the Framework for Personal and Professional Development on H808. I know I had seen the chart before, but I didn't really take it in the first time around. But now I am beginning to discover what some of the organising principles of my H808 e-portfolio need to be. I need to be providing evidence of my (and maybe other peoples'?) Skills, Reflection, Critique and Proactivity in my Research, Technology, Communication and Practice Competencies. It seems to me that I would do well to get my head around my level of competency in each of these areas before I set off on the H808 Journey.

I am, however, quite excited about one thing; the distance learning project that I am embarking on as part of my job is going to be an excellent artefact for my e-portfolio, as it is a real prototype, and I am deliberately keeping the technology to the minimum. I want to get to the bottom of what the learning issues are that can be supported by e-learning before getting too caught up in whizzy features. I guess the course itself will be a chance to use such skills as I already have.The reflection and critique I will have to do as the course progresses and completes will be essential for me to be able to be pro-active in designing programme number 2.

So I am still not sure I have quite got my head around H808, but I'm feeling relieved I can see a way through the fog!