Initial reflections and summary of sessions from Day 1 of the ALT Annual Conference, Manchester, 3-5 September 2024.
Humanising digital education
Opening keynote, Chris Friend’s three aspects of humane education (policies, places and platforms) offer lenses on the challenges and opportunities the arise from decision-making over how, when and why educational technology is used. For me, Friend’s position that “all learning takes place in real, physical places” is critical to how learning is designed, particularly for online and distance education. Extrapolating the point, teaching can take place anywhere, but learning (at least the individual outcomes of learning) are situated with individuals in their own location, at their own desks or via their own mobile devices. There’s a personal context to learning that cannot be separated from each learner and the interplay between physical and virtual spaces is a key design consideration to foster engagement, connection and humanity of the educational experience.
Another aspect of Friend’s keynote is one of my personal drivers for being involved in education. This relates to disciplinarity. Friend introduced the idea of disciplinarity by showing the above photo of Dolly the Maltipoo dog (Josh Rocklage, Unsplash).
“Dolly clearly wants to become a bee. If we want to help Dolly achieve her goals, we need to teach her how to do bee things and how to become a bee.”
Chris Friend on disciplinarity in education
This is the core of discipline-based education, inculcating students into practices that are specialist and specific to discipline thinking and professions. Friend’s argument here is that educational technology, or technology more broadly, needs to be used and understood in a way that is authentic to the subject discipline. As an example, using digital platforms for the open publishing of work to engage audiences and stimulate conversation, rather than written assignments behind closed doors only for sight of the marker and assessment. Particularly within academia, there is a deep relationship between individual motivation and passion of the discipline, and unlocking this as part of teaching and learning can engage students.
Iteration and learning design
An iterative approach to course development was well-demonstrated in the short-paper session I attended featuring presentations from Matt Jenner and the University of Huddersfield, Ioana Macoveciuc and Tamara Montrose, and Asad Ghalib. Jenner discussed the importance of an iterative design process, allowing for changes to be made early in the design and development of courses as they are less costly than changes during and after teaching. This is an important view that places emphasis on the benefits of iteration during development with positive impacts for the learner, rather than a focus on the inconvenience of change for development teams. The case study offered from the University of Huddersfield noted the significance of data to inform iterations of courses, using data to justify decisions, particularly over engagement and where to target iterations. Jenner’s take-away message was to not try to do iteration on your own, and draw on the collaboration with others.
In supporting students with programming, Macoveciuc and Montrose talked through their decision to use GitHub Notebooks. Identifying PDFs as both cumbersome for students to use and high maintenance, they also considered in-line instructional guidance within programming code files. However, accessibility and the limited ability to structure learning through code comments showed that a further iteration on their approach was required. The solution to use GitHub Notebooks provided an integrated and structured way to provide learning materials, but crucially was both highly accessible and easily maintained by academic colleagues during teaching.
Ghalib’s case study on a technology that was deployed but not adopted by students offered another case of iteration through understanding more about learners’ intentions, concerns and needs. Noting a low take-up of a collaborative peer-feedback platform, Ghalib engaged students with focus groups and surfaced a range of administrative and pedagogical ideas which could inform future framing and use of the technology. This very much relates to Friend’s message about being transparent of the what and why of technology, with the focus group mechanism surfacing assumptions which could then be discussed with students in the future.
Future thinking
Visions of the future have always been of interest to me and formalising methods to consider how education is shaped in the future is becoming of great interest. At the Online Learning Summit in Leeds last year, Leah Henrickson walked through a futures thinking approach which encouraged extreme possibilities as a way to explore the impacts of generative AI. Matthew Moran’s workshop offered an alternative futures thinking model, with a speculative design approach. This model begins with identifying a positive and hopeful view of the future, before considering the decisions and steps to get there, the players involved and the role of technology. It provided a great structure for creative thinking and discussion, which included challenging assumptions of what a utopian view might be and for whom.
In Lawrie Phipps, Donna Lanclos and Peter Bryant’s session, Bryant talked of how the “value, self-worth and capability” in the use of learning technology and digital education that was generated during the pandemic was taken away in the “snap-back” to previously established (and largely in-person) approaches. The previous crisis was the pandemic, the current educational crisis is the impact of artificial intelligence. The vision of the future here is the perpetual crisis that demands a lot of educators and educational professionals, but doesn’t learn from it to move forward or shift the discussion. Relating specifically to learning designers, the constraints of precarity of role and triggers of cycles of crises lock the profession into solution-finding. However, in a view of the future uncoupled from crisis response, Lanclos suggested that learning designers and learning technologists were afforded the freedom to engage in broader conversations and not just focus on the technological solution.
Learning design work tends towards solutions. Learning designers are structurally disadvantaged to have to focus on solutions. However, when granted the opportunity to act as experts, and treated as experts, they didn’t have to look for solutions, but could explore scenarios and open conversations.
(paraphrased) Donna Lanclos on the role of learning designers in precarity
The research methodology behind this work was innovative also and along with the structured workshop approach offered by Moran, provides yet another technique for educational researchers and practitioners to facilitate creative, challenging and productive discussions to not just resolve problems but identify opportunities for educating differently.
The value of discussion
Returning full circle to the start of the day, with Friend’s keynote the focus was on humanising digital education. If current practice of precarity and devaluing of human contribution to education persists (as suggested by Phipps, Lanclos and Bryant), then placing an emphasis on human connection has to be a key aspect of the work of those responsible for leading and implementing digital education. With a more optimistic view of the future, as suggested by some of the participants in Moran’s workshop, humanising education is about the removal of barriers, the localising of global education and education for the benefit of both individuals and society as a whole.
My conclusion from the first day is about the effectiveness of collaboration and discussion to make change. Whether it is driven by a desire to bring human connection to the educational experience, to find ways forward for digital education futures, or to bring hope in crises, bringing people together to share ideas and perspectives is an essential part of the learning experience. That learning is not just about individual success, but about the collective learning of us as a group of values-led professionals seeking to enable education for all.
Acknowledgement
My attendance at ALT Conference was funded by the University of Leeds in my role as Head of Online Learning, Digital Education Service.
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