Lesson 3 - Implementing Online Learning

1. Watch this Video on Implementing Online Learning

2. Understanding Technology in Education

Understanding the nature and role of media and technologies in education, and being able to use media and technologies appropriately, are critical to teaching well in a digital age. This lesson discusses media choice and use.

In this lesson, which focuses on the foundations of educational technology, you will cover the following topics

3. Choosing Technologies for Teaching and Learning - The Challenge

3.1. Defining the Role of Technology in Education

• Hardware? (e.g. TV monitor, laptop computer)
• Software? (e.g. computer operating system, channel selection)
• Networks? (e.g. Internet, cable)
• Services? (e.g. television, telephone)

The answer of course is all these, plus the systems that enable everything to be integrated. Indeed, the technologies represented in just this one photograph are too many to list (Nevertheless it is a futile exercise as I was forced to change the whole system a couple of years later due to technological ‘upgrades’ by the service provider.)

In a digital age we are immersed in technology. Education, although often a laggard in technology adoption, is nevertheless no exception today. Yet learning is also a fundamental human activity that can function quite well (some would say better) without any technological intervention. So, in an age immersed in technology, what is its role in education? What are the strengths (or affordances) and what are the limitations of technology in education? When should we use technology, and which technologies should we use for what purposes?

3.2. The Need for Decision Models

The aim is to provide some frameworks or models for decision-making that are both soundly based on theory and research and are also pragmatic within the context of education. This will not be an easy exercise. There are deep philosophical, technical and pragmatic challenges in trying to provide a model or set of models flexible but practical enough to handle the complexity.

For instance, theories and beliefs about education will influence strongly the choice and use of different technologies. On the technical side, it is becoming increasingly difficult to classify or categorize technologies, not just because they are changing so quickly, but also because technologies have many different qualities and affordances that change according to the contexts in which they are used. On the pragmatic side, it would be a mistake to focus solely on the pedagogical characteristics of technologies. There are social, organizational, cost and accessibility issues also to be considered.

The selection and use of technologies for teaching and learning is driven as much by context and values and beliefs as by hard scientific evidence or rigorous theory. So, there will not be one ‘best’ framework or model. On the other hand, given the rapidly escalating range of technologies, educators are increasingly caught between technological determinism (inappropriate applications of artificial intelligence, for instance) or the total rejection of technology for teaching because it is so complex. Thus we need some models to guide their selection and use.

We shall also see though that even with such models or frameworks for decision-making, there are in fact still some fundamental, unanswered questions regarding the use of technology for teaching, including:

• What is best done face-to-face and what online, and in what contexts?
• What is the role of the human teacher, and can/should/will the human teacher be replaced by technology?

Nevertheless, if we consider a teacher facing a group of students and a curriculum to teach, or a learner seeking to develop their own learning, there is need for practical guidance now about when to use one technology or another.  I will provide some theoretical models or frameworks that will enable such questions to be answered effectively and pragmatically so that the learning experience is optimized.

In the meantime, let’s start with what your views are at the moment about choosing technology for teaching and learning.

4. A Short History of Educational Technology

Arguments about the role of technology in education go back at least 2,500 years.  To understand better the role and influence of technology on teaching, we need a little history, because as always there are lessons to be learned from history. Paul Saettler’s ‘The Evolution of American Educational Technology‘ (1990) is one of the most extensive historical accounts but only goes up to 1989. A lot has happened since then. What I’m giving you here is the postage stamp version of ed-tech history and a personal one at that.

4.1. Oral Communication

One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral – through human speech – although, over time, technology has been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In ancient times, stories, folklore, histories, and news were transmitted and maintained through oral communication, making accurate memorization a critical skill, and the oral tradition is still the case in many aboriginal cultures. For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening, not by reading and transmitted by recitation, not by writing. Lectures go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Demosthenes (384-322 BC) was an outstanding orator whose speeches influenced the politics of Athens.  

Nevertheless, by the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece. If we believe Plato, education has been on a downward spiral ever since. According to Plato, Socrates caught one of his students (Phaedrus) pretending to recite a speech from memory that in fact, he had learned from a written version. Socrates then told Phaedrus the story of how the god Theuth offered the King of Egypt the gift of writing, which would be a ‘recipe for both memory and wisdom’. The king was not impressed. According to the king:

It [writing] will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on what is written, creating memory not from within themselves, but by means of external symbols. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part, they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow men.

Phaedrus, 274c-275, translation adapted from Manguel, 1996

I can just hear some of my former colleagues saying the same thing about social media.

Slate boards were in use in India in the 12^th century AD, and blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18^th century. At the end of World War Two the U.S. Army started using overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing, until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software such as Powerpoint around 1990. This may be the place to point out that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for education but for other purposes (mainly for the military or business.)

Although the telephone dates from the late 1870s, the standard telephone system never became a major educational tool, not even in distance education, because of the high cost of analogue telephone calls for multiple users, although audio-conferencing has been used to supplement other media since the 1970s.  Video conferencing using dedicated cable systems and dedicated conferencing rooms has been in use since the 1980s. The development of video compression technology and relatively low-cost video servers in the early 2000s led to the introduction of lecture capture systems for recording and streaming classroom lectures in 2008. Webinars now are used largely for delivering lectures over the Internet.

None of these technologies though changes the oral basis of communication for teaching.

4.2. Written Communication

The role of text or writing in education also has a long history. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten commandments in a form of writing, probably around the 7^th century BC. Even though Socrates is reported to have railed against the use of writing, written forms of communication make analytic, lengthy chains of reasoning and argument much more accessible, reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique than the transient nature of speech.

The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15^th century was a truly disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today. As a result of the explosion of written documents resulting from the mechanization of printing, many more people in government and business was required to become literate and analytical, which led to the rapid expansion of formal education in Europe. There were many reasons for the development of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the triumph of reason and science over superstition and beliefs in Europe, but the technology of printing was a key agent of change.

Improvements in transport infrastructure in the 19^th century, and in particular the creation of a cheap and reliable postal system in the 1840s led to the development of the first formal correspondence education, with the University of London offering an external degree program by correspondence from 1858. This first formal distance degree program still exists today in the form of the University of London Worldwide. In the 1970s, the Open University transformed the use of print for teaching through specially designed, highly illustrated printed course units that integrated learning activities with the print medium, based on advanced instructional design.

4.3. Computer Technologies

Computer-Based Learning

In essence the development of programmed learning aims to computerize teaching, by structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and providing immediate feedback to learners, without human intervention other than in the design of the hardware and software and the selection and loading of content and assessment questions. B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of programmed learning in 1954, based on the theory of behaviorism. Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning. There has been a recent revival of programmed learning approaches as a result of MOOCs, since machine-based testing scales much more easily than human-based assessment.

PLATO was a generalized computer-assisted instruction system originally developed at the University of Illinois, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. PLATO was a highly successful system, lasting almost 40 years, and incorporated key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.

Attempts to replicate the teaching process through artificial intelligence (AI) began in the mid-1980s, with a focus initially on teaching arithmetic. Despite large investments of research in AI for teaching over the last 30 years, the results generally have been disappointing. It has proved difficult for machines to cope with the extraordinary variety of ways in which students learn (or fail to learn.) Recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience are being watched closely but at the time of writing the gap is still great between the basic science and analyzing or predicting specific learning behaviors from the science.

More recently we have seen the development of adaptive learning, which analyses learners’ responses then re-directs them to the most appropriate content area, based on their performance. Learning analytics, which also collects data about learner activities and relates them to other data, such as student performance, is a related development.

Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982. In the late 1970s, Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology was experimenting with blended learning, using NJIT’s internal computer network. They combined classroom teaching with online discussion forums, and termed this ‘computer-mediated communication’ or CMC (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). At the University of Guelph in Canada, an off-the-shelf software system called CoSy was developed in the 1980s that allowed for online threaded group discussion forums, a predecessor to today’s forums contained in learning management systems. In 1988, the Open University in the United Kingdom offered a course, DT200, that as well as the OU’s traditional media of printed texts, television programs, and audio cassettes also included an online discussion a component using CoSy. Since this course had 1,200 registered students, it was one of the earliest ‘mass’ open online courses. We see then the emerging division between the use of computers for automated or programmed learning, and the use of computer networks to enable students and instructors to communicate with each other.

The World Wide Web was formally launched in 1991. The World Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link documents, videos or other digital media, without the need for the end-user to transcribe everything into some form of computer code. The first web browser, Mosaic, was made available in 1993. Before the Web, it required lengthy and time-consuming methods to load text and to find material on the Internet. Several Internet search engines have been developed since 1993, with Google, created in 1999, emerging as one of the primary search engines.

In 1995, the Web-enabled the development of the first learning management systems (LMSs), such as WebCT (which later became Blackboard). LMSs provide an online teaching environment, where content can be loaded and organized, as well as providing ‘spaces’ for learning objectives, student activities, assignment questions, and discussion forums. The first fully online courses (for credit) started to appear in 1995, some using LMSs, others just loading text as PDFs or slides. The materials were mainly text and graphics. LMSs became the main means by which online learning was offered until lecture capture systems arrived around 2008.

By 2008, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in Canada were using web technology to create the first ‘connectivist’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a community of practice that linked webinar presentations and/or blog posts by experts to participants’ blogs and tweets, with just over 2,000 enrollments. The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment. In 2012, two Stanford University professors launched a lecture-capture based MOOC on artificial intelligence, attracting more than 100,000 students, and since then MOOCs have expanded rapidly around the world.

4.4. Broadcasting and Video

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in the 1920s. The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC in 1924 was a talk on Insects in Relation to Man, and in the same year, J.C. Stobart, the new Director of Education at the BBC, mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio Times (Robinson, 1982). Television was first used in education in the 1960s, for schools and for general adult education (one of the six purposes in the current BBC’s Royal Charter is still ‘promoting education and learning’).

In 1969, the British government established the Open University (OU), which worked in partnership with the BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a combination originally of printed materials specially designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs made by the BBC but integrated with the courses. Although the radio programs involved mainly oral communication, the television programs did not use lectures as such, but focused more on the common formats of general television, such as documentaries, demonstration of processes, and cases/case studies (see Bates, 1984). In other words, the BBC focused on the unique ‘affordances’ of television, a topic that will be discussed in much more detail later. Over time, as new technologies such as audio- and video-cassettes were introduced, live broadcasting, especially radio, was cut back for OU programs, although there are still some general educational channels broadcasting around the world (e.g. TVOntario in Canada; PBS, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel in the USA).

The use of television for education quickly spread around the world, being seen in the 1970s by some, particularly in international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO, as a panacea for education in developing countries, the hopes for which quickly faded when the realities of lack of electricity, cost, the security of publicly available equipment, climate, resistance from local  teachers, and local language and cultural issues became apparent (see, for instance, Jamison and Klees, 1973). Satellite broadcasting started to become available in the 1980s, and similar hopes were expressed of delivering ‘university lectures from the world’s leading universities to the world’s starving masses’, but these hopes too quickly faded for similar reasons. However, India, which had launched its own satellite, INSAT, in 1983, used it initially for delivering locally produced educational television programs throughout the country, in several indigenous languages, using Indian-designed receivers and television sets in local community centres as well as schools (Bates, 1984).

Until lecture capture arrived, learning management systems had integrated basic educational design features, but this required instructors to redesign their classroom-based teaching to fit the LMS environment. Lecture capture on the other hand required no changes to the standard lecture model, and in a sense reverted back to primarily oral communication supported by Powerpoint or even writing on a chalkboard. Thus oral communication remains as strong today in education as ever but has been incorporated into or accommodated by new technologies.

In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-speed Internet access.  This reduction in the costs of recording and distributing video also led to the development of lecture capture systems. The technology allows students to view or review lectures at any time and place with an Internet connection. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started making its recorded lectures available to the public, free of charge, via its OpenCourseWare project, in 2002.  YouTube started in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. YouTube is increasingly being used for short educational clips that can be downloaded and integrated into online courses. The Khan Academy started using YouTube in 2006 for recorded voice-over lectures using a digital blackboard for equations and illustrations. Apple Inc. in 2007 created iTunesU to become a portal or a site where videos and other digital materials on university teaching could be collected and downloaded free of charge by end-users.

Until lecture capture arrived, learning management systems had integrated basic educational design features, but this required instructors to redesign their classroom-based teaching to fit the LMS environment. Lecture capture on the other hand required no changes to the standard lecture model, and in a sense reverted back to primarily oral communication supported by Powerpoint or even writing on a chalkboard. Thus oral communication remains as strong today in education as ever but has been incorporated into or accommodated by new technologies.

4.5. Social Media

Social media are really a sub-category of computer technology, but their development deserves a section of its own in the history of educational technology. Social media cover a wide range of different technologies, including blogs, wikis, YouTube videos, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, Twitter, Skype and Facebook. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2010) define social media as:

A group of Internet-based applications that …allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, based on interactions among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

Social media are strongly associated with young people and ‘millenials’ – in other words, many of the students in post-secondary education. At the time of writing social media are only just being integrated into formal education and to date their main educational value has been in non-formal education, such as fostering online communities of practice, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as ‘tweets’ during lectures or ratings of instructors. It will be argued though and they have much greater potential for learning.

4.6. A Paradigm Shift

It can be seen that education has adopted and adapted technology over a long period of time. There are some useful lessons to be learned from past developments in the use of technology for education, in particular, that many claims made for a newly emerging technology are likely to be neither true nor new. Also new technology rarely completely replaces an older technology. Usually, the old technology remains, operating within a more specialized ‘niche’, such as radio, or integrated as part of a richer technology environment, such as video in the Internet.

However, what distinguishes the digital age from all previous ages is the rapid pace of technology development and our immersion in technology-based activities in our daily lives. Thus, it is fair to describe the impact of the Internet on education as a paradigm shift, at least in terms of educational technology. We are still in the process of absorbing and applying the implications. The next section attempts to pin down more closely the educational significance of different media and technologies.

5. Media or Technology?

5.1. Defining Media and Technology

Philosophers and scientists have argued about the nature of media and technologies over a very long period. The distinction is challenging because, in everyday language use, we tend to use these two terms interchangeably. For instance, television is often referred to as both a medium and technology. Is the Internet a medium or a technology? And does it matter?

I will argue that there are differences, and it does matter to distinguish between media and technology, especially if we are looking for guidelines on when and how to use them. There is a danger, particularly in education, in looking too much at the raw technology, and not enough at the personal, social, and cultural contexts in which we use technology. The terms ‘media’ and ‘technology’ represent different ways altogether of thinking about the choice and use of technology in teaching and learning.

5.2. Technology

There are many definitions of technology (see Wikipedia for a good discussion of this). Essentially definitions of technology range from the basic notion of tools, to systems that employ or exploit technologies. Thus,

• ‘Technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems‘is a simple definition.
• ‘The current state of humanity’s knowledge of how to combine resources to produce desired products, to solve problems, fulfill needs, or satisfy wants‘ is a more complex and grandiose definition (and has a smugness about it that I think is undeserved – technology often does the opposite of satisfy wants, for instance.)

In terms of educational technology, we have to consider a broad definition of technology. The technology of the Internet involves more than just a collection of tools, but a system that combines computers, telecommunications, software and rules and procedures or protocols. However, I baulk at the very broad definition of the ‘current state of humanity’s knowledge ‘. Once a definition begins to encompass many different aspects of life it becomes unwieldy and ambiguous.

I tend to think of technology in education as things or tools used to support teaching and learning. Thus computers, software programs such as a learning management system, or a transmission or communications network, are all technologies. A printed book is technology. Technology often includes a combination of tools with particular technical links that enable them to work as a technology system, such as the telephone network or the Internet.

However, for me, technologies or even technological systems do not of themselves communicate or create meaning. They just sit there until commanded to do something or until they are activated or until a person starts to interact with the technology. At this point, we start to move into media.

5.3. Don’t just sit there – DO something!

5.4. Media

Media (plural of medium) is another word that has many definitions.

The word ‘medium’ comes from the Latin, meaning in the middle (a median) and also that which intermediates or interprets. Media require an active act of creation of content and/or communication, and someone who receives and understands the communication, as well as the technologies that carry the medium.

The term ‘media’ has two distinct meanings relevant for teaching and learning, both of which are different from definitions of technology.

We use our senses, such as sound and sight, to interpret media. In this sense, we can consider text, graphics, audio, and video as media ‘channels’, in that they intermediate ideas and images that convey meaning. Every interaction we have with media, in this sense, is an interpretation of reality, and again usually involves some form of human intervention, such as writing (for text), drawing or design for graphics, talking, scripting, or recording for audio and video. Note that there are two types of intervention in media: by the ‘creator’ who constructs information, and by the ‘receiver’, who must also interpret it.

Media of course depends on technology, but technology is only one element of media. Thus we can think of the Internet as merely a technological system, or as a medium that contains unique formats and symbol systems that help convey meaning and knowledge. These formats, symbol systems and unique characteristics of a particular medium (e.g. the 280-character limit in Twitter) is deliberately created and needs to be interpreted by both creators and end-users. Furthermore, at least with the Internet, people can be at the same time both creators and interpreters of knowledge.

Computing can also be considered a medium in this context. I use the term computing, not computers since although computing uses computers, computing involves some kind of intervention, construction, and interpretation. Computing as a medium would include coding, animations, online social networking, using a search engine, or designing and using simulations. Thus Google uses a search engine as its primary technology, but I classify Google as a medium since it needs content and content providers, and an end-user who defines the parameters of the search, in addition to the technology of computer algorithms to assist the search. Thus, the creation, communication, and interpretation of meaning are added features that turn technology into a medium.

In terms of representing knowledge it is useful to think of the following media for educational purposes within which there are sub-systems (only some examples given):

• Text: textbooks, novels, poems

• Graphics: diagrams, photographs, drawings, posters, graffiti

• Audio: sounds, speech, podcasts, radio programs

• Video and Film: television programs, movies, YouTube clips, ‘talking heads’

• Computing: animation, simulations, online discussion forums, virtual worlds.

Furthermore, within these sub-systems there are ways of influencing communication through the use of unique symbol systems, such as story lines and use of characters in novels, composition in photography, voice modulation to create effects in audio, cutting and editing in film and television, and the design of user interfaces or web pages in computing. The study of the relationship between these different symbol systems and the interpretation of meaning is a whole field of study in itself, called semiotics.

In education, we could think of classroom teaching as a medium. Technology or tools are used (e.g. chalk and blackboards, or Powerpoint and a projector) but the key component is the intervention of the teacher and the interaction with the learners in real-time and in a fixed time and place. We can also then think of online teaching as a different medium, with computers, the Internet (in the sense of the communication network) and a learning management system as core technologies, but it is the interaction between teachers, learners, and online resources within the unique context of the Internet that is the essential component of online learning.

From an educational perspective, it is important to understand that media are not neutral or ‘objective’ in how they convey knowledge. They can be designed or used in such a way as to influence (for good or bad) the interpretation of the meaning and hence our understanding. Some knowledge therefore of how media work is essential for teaching in a digital age. In particular, we need to know how best to design and apply media (rather than technology) to facilitate learning.

Over time, media have become more complex, with newer media (e.g. television) incorporating some of the components of earlier media (e.g. audio) as well as adding another medium (video). Digital media and the Internet increasingly are incorporating and integrating all previous media, such as text, audio, and video, and adding new media components, such as animation, simulation, and interactivity. When digital media incorporate many of these components they become ‘rich media’. Thus one major advantage of the Internet is that it encompasses all the representational media of text, graphics, audio, video, and computing.

The second meaning of media is broader and refers to the industries or significant areas of human activity that are organized around particular technologies, for instance, film and movies, television, publishing, and the Internet. Within these different media are particular ways of representing, organizing, and communicating knowledge.

Thus, for instance, within television there are different formats, such as news, documentaries, game shows, action programs, while in publishing there are novels, newspapers, comics, biographies, and so on. Sometimes the formats overlap but even then, there are symbol systems within a medium that distinguish it from other media. For instance, in movies, there are cuts, fades, close-ups, and other techniques that are markedly different from those in other media. All these features of media bring with them their own conventions and assist or change the way meaning is extracted or interpreted.

Lastly, there is a strong cultural context for media organizations. For instance, Schramm (1972) found that broadcasters often have a different set of professional criteria and ways of assessing ‘quality’ in an educational broadcast from those of educators (which made my job of evaluating the programs the BBC made for the Open University very interesting). Today, this professional ‘divide’ can be seen between the differences between computer scientists and educators in terms of values and beliefs with regard to the use of technology for teaching. At its crudest, it comes down to issues of control: who is in charge of using technology for teaching? Who makes the decisions about the design of a MOOC or the use of animation?

5.5. The Affordances of Media

Different media have different educational effects or affordances. If you just transfer the same teaching to a different medium, you fail to exploit the unique characteristics of that medium. Put more positively, you can do different and often better teaching by adapting it to the medium. That way students will learn more deeply and effectively. To illustrate this, let’s look at an example from early on in my career as a researcher in educational media.

In 1969, I was appointed as a research officer at the Open University in the United Kingdom. At this point, the university had just received its royal charter. I was the 20th member of staff appointed. My job was to research into the pilot programs being offered by the National Extension College, which was delivering low-cost non-credit distance education programs in partnership with the BBC. The NEC was ‘modeling’ the kind of integrated multimedia courses, consisting of a mix of print and broadcast radio and TV, that were to be offered by the Open University when it started.

My colleague and I sent out questionnaires by mail on a weekly basis to students taking the NEC courses. The questionnaire contained both pre-coded responses, and the opportunity for open-ended comments, and asked students for their responses to the print and broadcast components of the courses. We were looking for what worked and what didn’t work in designing multimedia distance education courses.

When I started analyzing the questionnaires, I was struck particularly by the ‘open-ended’ comments in response to the television and radio broadcasts. Responses to the printed components tended to be ‘cool’: rational, calm, critical, constructive. The responses to the broadcasts were the opposite: ‘hot’, emotional, strongly supportive or strongly critical or even hostile, and rarely critically constructive. Something was going on here.

Findings from the Research: How Media Differ

The initial discovery that different media affected students differently came very quickly, but it took longer to discover in what ways media are different, and even longer why, but here are some of the discoveries made by my colleagues and me in the Audio-Visual Media Research Group at the OU (Bates, 1984):

• The BBC producers (all of whom had a degree in the subject area in which they were making programs) thought about knowledge differently from academics with whom they were working. In particular, they tended to think more visually and more concretely about the subject matter. Thus, they tended to make programs that showed concrete examples of concepts or principles in the texts, applications of principles, or how academic concepts worked in real life. Academic learning is about abstraction and higher-order levels of thinking. However, abstract concepts are better understood if they can be related to concrete or empirical experiences, from which, indeed, abstract concepts are often drawn. The television programs enabled learners to move backward and forwards between the abstract and the concrete. Where this was well designed, it really helped a large number of students – but not all;

• Students responded very differently to the TV programs in particular. Some loved them, some hated them, and few were indifferent. The ones that hated them wanted the programs to be didactic and repeat or reinforce what was in the printed texts. Interestingly though the TV-haters tended to get lower grades or even fail in the final course exam. The ones that loved the TV programs tended to get higher grades. They were able to see how the programs illustrated the principles in the texts, and the programs ‘stretched’ these students to think more widely or critically about the topics in the course. The exception was math, where borderline students found the TV programs most helpful;

• The BBC producers rarely used to talk heads or TV lectures. With radio and later audio-cassettes, some producers and academics integrated the audio with texts, for instance in mathematics, using a radio program and later audio-cassettes to talk the students through equations or formulae in the printed text (similar to Khan Academy lectures today on video);

• Using television and radio to develop higher-level learning is a skill that can be taught. In the initial foundation (first year) social science course (D100), many of the programs were made in a typical BBC documentary style. Although the programs were accompanied by extensive broadcast notes that attempted to link the broadcasts to the academic texts, many students struggled with these programs. When the course was remade five years later a distinguished academic (Stuart Hall) was used as an ‘anchor’ for all the programs. The first few programs were somewhat like lectures, but in each program, Stuart Hall introduced more and more visual clips and helped students analyze each clip. By the end of the course, the programs were almost entirely in the documentary format. Students rated the remade programs much higher and used examples from the TV programs much more in their assignments and exams for the remade course.

At the time (and for many years afterward) researchers such as Richard Clark (1983) argued that ‘proper’, scientific research showed no significant difference between the use of different media. In particular, there were no differences between classroom teaching and other media such as television or radio or satellite. Even today, we are getting similar findings regarding online learning (e.g. Means et al., 2010).

However, this is because the research methodology that is used by researchers for such comparative studies requires the two conditions being compared to be the same, except for the medium being used (called matched comparisons, or sometimes quasi-experimental studies). Typically, for the comparison to be scientifically rigorous, if you gave lectures in class, then you had to compare lectures on television. If you used another television format, such as a documentary, you were not comparing like with like. Since the classroom was used as the base, for comparison, you had to strip out all the affordances of television – what it could do better than a lecture – in order to compare it. Indeed Clark argued that when differences in learning were found between the two conditions, the differences were a result of using a different pedagogy in the non-classroom medium.

The critical point is that different media can be used to assist learners to learn in different ways and achieve different outcomes. In one sense, researchers such as Clark were right: the teaching methods matter, but different media can more easily support different ways of learning than others. In our example, a documentary TV program aims at developing the skills of analysis and the application or recognition of theoretical constructs, whereas a classroom lecture is more focused on getting students to understand and correctly recall the theoretical constructs. Thus requiring the television program to be judged by the same assessment methods as for the classroom lecture unfairly measures the potential value of the TV program. In this example, it may be better to use both methods: didactic teaching to teach understanding, then a documentary approach to apply that understanding. (Note that a television program could do both, but the classroom lecture could not.)

Perhaps even more important is the idea that many media are better than one. This allows learners with different preferences for learning to be accommodated, and to allow the subject matter to be taught in different ways through different media, thus leading to a deeper understanding or a wider range of skills in using content. On the other hand, this increases costs.

5.6. How do these Findings Apply to Digital Learning

Digital learning can incorporate a range of different media: text, graphics, audio, video, animation, simulations. We need to understand better the affordances of each medium within the Internet and use them differently but in an integrated way so as to develop deeper knowledge, and a wider range of learning outcomes and skills. The use of different media also allows for more individualization and personalization of the learning, better suiting learners with different learning styles and needs. Most of all, we should stop trying merely to move classroom teaching to other media such as MOOCs and start designing digital learning so its full potential can be exploited.

5.7. Implications for Education

If we are interested in selecting appropriate technologies for teaching and learning, we should not just look at the technical features of a technology, nor even the wider technology system in which it is located, nor even the educational beliefs we bring as a classroom teacher.  We also need to examine the unique features of different media, in terms of their formats, symbols systems, and cultural values. These unique features are increasingly referred to as the affordances of media or technology.

The concept of media is much ‘softer’ and ‘richer’ than that of ‘technology’, more open to interpretation and harder to define, but ‘media’ is a useful concept, in that it can also incorporate the inclusion of face-to-face communication as a medium. Another reason to distinguish between media and technology is to recognize that technology on its own does not of itself lead to the transfer of meaning.

As new technologies are developed and are incorporated into media systems, old formats and approaches are carried over from older to newer media. Education is no exception. New technology is ‘accommodated’ too old formats, as with clickers and lecture capture, or we try to create the classroom in virtual space, as with learning management systems. However, new formats, symbols systems , and organizational structures that exploit the unique characteristics of the Internet as a medium are gradually being discovered. It is sometimes difficult to see these unique characteristics clearly at this point in time. However, e-portfolios, mobile learning, open educational resources such as animations or simulations, and self-managed learning in large, online social groups are all examples of ways in which we are gradually developing the unique ‘affordances’ of the Internet.

More significantly, it is likely to be a major mistake to use computers to replace or substitute for humans in the educational process, given the need to create and interpret meaning when using media, at least until computers have much greater facility to recognize, understand and apply semantics, value systems, and organizational features, which are all important components of ‘reading’ different media. But at the same time, it is equally a mistake to rely only on the symbol systems, cultural values and organizational structures of classroom teaching as the means of judging the effectiveness or appropriateness of the Internet as an educational medium.

Thus we need a much better understanding of the strengths and limitations of different media for teaching purposes if we are successfully to select the right medium for the job. However, given the widely different contextual factors influencing learning, the task of media and technology selection becomes infinitely complex. This is why it has proved impossible to develop simple algorithms or decision trees for effective decision making in this area. Nevertheless, there are some guidelines that can be used for identifying the best use of different media within an Internet-dependent society.

6. Assessing Media Affordances: The SAMR Model

6.1. Exploiting the Affordances of a Medium

It was noted in the previous section that video technology can be used as a straight replacement for a face-to-face lecture by merely substituting the face-to-face delivery with online delivery. The mode of delivery has changed but not the pedagogy. The full affordances of the medium of video have not been exploited.

On the other hand, using video to show a documentary can bring powerful examples of situations to which can be applied the ideas and concepts covered in an academic course. A documentary thus has the potential to make better use of the affordances of video than recording a lecture because the learning experience from watching a documentary is different from watching a lecture; at the same time, using a documentary the video will require a different approach to teaching than using a lecture and will probably have different outcomes. With the video lecture, students will focus on comprehension and understanding; with the documentary the students’ the focus will be on analyzing and critiquing the material.

6.2. The SAMR Model

A good way to assess whether a particular application of media or technology is making full use of the affordances of a medium are to apply the SAMR model developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, a technology consultant based in the USA.

Puentedura suggests four ‘levels’ of technology application in education:

• Substitution: A direct tool substitute, with no functional change, for example, a video recording of a classroom lecture on water quality made available for downloading by students; students are assessed on the content of the lecture by written exams at the end of the course.
• Augmentation: A direct tool substitute, with functional improvement, for example, the video lecture is embedded in an LMS, and edited into four sections, with online multiple-choice questions at the end of each section for students to answer.
• Modification: Significant task redesign, for example, the instructor provides video recordings of water being tested, and asks students to analyze each of the recordings in terms of the principles taught in the course in the form of essay-type questions that are assessed.
• Redefinition: Creation of new tasks, inconceivable without the use of technology, for example, the instructor provides readings and online guidance through the LMS, and students are asked to record with their mobile phones how they selected samples of water for testing quality, and integrate their findings and analysis in the form of an e-portfolio of their work.

In the first two levels, substitution and augmentation, video is used to enhance the method of teaching but it is only where the video is used in the final two stages, modification and redefinition, that teaching is actually transformed. Significantly, Puentedura links the modification and transformation levels to the development of Bloom’s higher-order ’ 21^st-century’ skills such as analysis, evaluation, and creativity (Puentedura, 2014). For a more detailed description of the model and how it works, see the video: Introduction to the SAMR model.

6.3. Strengths and Limitations of the Model

First, I was unable to find any research that validated this model. It has a powerful feel of common sense behind it, but it would be good to see it more empirically validated, although there are many examples of its actual use, particularly in teacher education in the k-12 sector (you can find some examples collected by Kelly Walsh here. For a more critical response to the SAMR model, see Linderoth, 2013).

Second, while the model is a useful means of evaluating whether the use of technology merely enhances or radically changes teaching, it doesn’t help much with the hard part and that is imagining the transformative ways in which technology could be used in the first place. Nevertheless, it is a good heuristic device to get you to think about the best way to use technology in teaching.

Third, there will be situations where substitution and augmentation will still be a perfectly justifiable use of technology, for instance for students with disabilities, or to increase accessibility to learning materials.

On balance, it is a very useful model by which an instructor can evaluate a potential or actual use of technology. In particular, it focuses on the way students will need to interact with the technology and the ways technology can be used to assist the development of 21^st-century skills. At the same time, we still need to understand how and why media and technology could be used to transform teaching in the first place.

7. Broadcast vs Communicative Media

7.1. Key Media Characteristics

It will help clarify the possible benefits or weaknesses for the education of each medium if we understand the characteristics or affordances of each medium. To do this we need to identify where media have common or different features.

There is a wide range of media characteristics or affordances that we could look at, but I will focus on three that are particularly important for education:

• Whether media are broadcast (one-way) or communicative (two way)
• Whether media are synchronous or asynchronous, including live (transient) or recorded (permanent)
• Whether media are single or rich

We shall see that these characteristics are more dimensional than discrete states, and different media will fit at different points on these dimensions, but the exact point on the continuum will depend to some extent on the way they are designed or used. In this section, I will focus on the broadcast/communicative dimension. The other two characteristics will be discussed in subsequent sections.

7.2. Broadcast or Communicative Media

A major structural distinction is between ‘broadcast’ media that are primarily one-to-many and one-way, and those media that are primarily many-to-many or ‘communicative’, allowing for two-way or multiple communication connections. Communicative media include those that give equal ‘power’ of communication between multiple end-users.

Broadcast Media

Television, radio and print for example are primarily broadcast or one-way media, as end users or ‘recipients cannot change the ‘message’ (although they may interpret it differently or choose to ignore it). Note that it does not matter really what delivery technology (terrestrial broadcast, satellite, cable, DVD, Internet) is used for television, it remains a ‘broadcast’ or one-way medium. Some Internet technologies are also primarily one way. For instance, an institutional web site is primarily a one-way technology.

One advantage of broadcast media and technologies is that they ensure a common standard of learning materials for all students. This is particularly important in countries where teachers are poorly qualified or of variable quality. Also, one-way broadcast media enable the organization to control and manage the information that is being transmitted, ensuring quality control over the content. Broadcasting media and technologies are more likely to be favored by those with an ‘objectivist’ approach to teaching and learning since the ‘correct’ knowledge can be transmitted to everyone receiving the instruction. One disadvantage is that additional resources are needed to provide interaction with teachers or between learners.

The telephone, video conferencing, e-mail, online discussion forums, most social media, and the Internet are examples of communicative media or technologies, in that all users can communicate and interact with each other, and in theory, at least have equal power in technology terms. The educational significance of communicative media is that they allow for interaction between learners and teachers, and perhaps even more significantly, between a learner and other learners, without the participants needing to be present in the same place.

This dimension is not a rigid one, with necessarily clear or unambiguous classifications. Increasingly, technologies are becoming more complex, and able to serve a wide range of functions. In particular, the Internet is not so much a single medium as an integrating framework for many different media and technologies with different and often opposite characteristics. Furthermore, most technologies are somewhat flexible in that they can be used in different ways. However, if we stretch a technology too far, for instance trying to make a broadcast medium such as an xMOOC also more communicative, stresses are likely to occur. So I find the dimension still useful, so long as we are not dogmatic about the characteristics of individual media or technologies. This means though looking at each case separately.

Thus I see a learning management the system as primarily a broadcast or one-way technology, although it has features such as discussion forums that allow for some forms of multi-way communication. However, it could be argued that the communication functions in an LMS require additional technologies, such as a discussion forum, that just happen to be plugged in to or embedded within the LMS, which is primarily a database with a cool interface. We shall see that in practice we often have to combine technologies if we want the full range of functions required in education, and this adds cost and complexity.

Web sites can vary on where they are placed on this dimension, depending on their design. For instance, an airline web site, while under the full control of the company, has interactive features that allow you to find flights, book flights, reserve seats, and hence, while you may not be able to ‘communicate’ or change the site, you can at least interact with it and to some extent personalize it. However, you cannot change the page showing the choice of flights. This is why I prefer to talk about dimensions. An airline web site that allows end-user interaction is less of a broadcast medium. However, it is not a ‘pure’ communicative medium either. The power is not equal between the airline and the customer, because the airline controls the site.

It should be noted too that some social media (e.g. YouTube and blogs) are also more of a broadcast than a communicative medium, whereas other social media use mainly communicative technologies with some broadcast features (for example, personal information on a Facebook page). A wiki is clearly more of a ‘communicative’ medium. Again though it needs to be emphasized that intentional intervention by teachers, designers or users of technology can influence where on the dimension some technologies will be, although there comes a point where the characteristic is so strong that it is difficult to change significantly without introducing other technologies.

The role of the teacher or the instructor also tends to be very different when using broadcast or communicative media. In broadcast media, the role of the teacher is central, in that content is chosen and often delivered by the instructor. xMOOCs are an excellent example. However, in communicative media, while the instructor’s role may still be central, as in online collaborative learning or seminars, there are learning contexts where there may be no identified ‘central’ teacher, with contributions coming from all or many members of the community, as in communities of practice or cMOOCs.

Thus, it can be seen that ‘power’ is an important aspect of this dimension. What ‘power’ does the end-user or student have in controlling a particular medium or technology? If we look at this from a historical perspective, we have seen a great expansion of technologies in recent years that give increasing power to the end-user. The move towards more communicative media and away from broadcast media then has profound implications for education (as for society at large).

7.3. Applying the Dimension to Educational Media

We can also apply this analysis to non-technological means of communication, or ‘media’, such as classroom teaching. Lectures have broadcast characteristics, whereas a small seminar group has communicative characteristics. In Figure 9, I have placed some common technologies, classroom media and online media along the broadcast/communicative continuum.

When doing this exercise, it is important to note that:

• There is no general normative or evaluative judgement about the continuum. Broadcasting is an excellent way of getting information in a consistent form to a large number of people; interactive communication works well when all members of  a group have something equal to contribute to the process of knowledge development and dissemination. The judgement of the appropriateness of the medium or technology will very much depend on the context, and in particular the resources available and the general philosophy of teaching to be applied;
• Where a particular medium or technology is placed on the continuum will depend to some extent on the actual design, use or application. For instance, if the lecturer talks for 45 minutes and allows 10 minutes for discussion, an interactive lecture might be further towards broadcasting than if the lecture session is more of a question and answer session;
• I have placed ‘computers’ in the middle of the continuum. They can be used as a broadcast medium, such as for programmed learning, or they can be used to support communicative uses, such as online discussion. Their actual placement on the continuum therefore will depend on how we choose to use computers in education;
• The important decision from a teaching perspective is deciding on the desired balance between ‘broadcasting’ and ‘discussion’ or communication. That should then be one factor in driving decisions about the choice of appropriate technologies;
• The continuum is a heuristic device to enable a teacher to think about what medium or technology will be most appropriate within any given context, and not a firm analysis of where different types of educational media or technology belong on the continuum.

Thus, where a medium or technology ‘fits’ best on a continuum of broadcast vs communicative is one factor to be considered when making decisions about media or technology for teaching and learning.

8. The Time and Space Dimensions of Media

Different media and technologies operate differently over space and time. These dimensions are important for both facilitating or inhibiting learning, and for limiting or enabling more flexibility for learners. There are actually two closely related dimensions here:

• ‘Live’ or Recorded
• Synchronous or Asynchronous

8.1. Live or Recorded

These are fairly obvious in their meaning. Live media by definition are face-to-face events, such as lectures, seminars, and one-on-one face-to-face tutorials. A ‘live’ the event requires everyone to be present at the same place and time as everyone else. This could be a rock concert, a sports event, or a lecture. Live events, such as for instance a seminar, work well when personal relations are important, such as building trust, or for challenging attitudes or positions that are emotionally or strongly held (either by students or instructors.)  The main educational advantage of a live lecture is that it may have a strong emotive quality that inspires or encourages learners beyond the actual transmission of knowledge or may provide an emotional ‘charge’ that may help students shift from previously held positions. Live events, by definition, are transient. They may be well remembered, but they cannot be repeated, or if they are, it will be a different experience or a different audience. Thus, there is a strong qualitative or affective element about live events.

Recorded media on the other hand are permanently available to those possessing the recording, such as a video cassette or an audio cassette. Books and other print formats are also recorded media. The key educational significance of recorded media is that students can access the same learning material an unlimited number of times, and at times that are convenient for the learner.

Live events, of course, can also be recorded, but as anyone who has watched a live sports event compared to a recording of the same event knows, the experience is different, with usually, a lesser emotional charge when watching a recording (especially if you already know the result). Thus, one might think of ‘live’ events as ‘hot’ and recorded events as ‘cool.’ Recorded media can, of course, be emotionally moving, such as a good novel, but the experience is different from actually taking part in the events described.

8.2. Synchronous or Asynchronous

Synchronous technologies require all those participating in the communication to participate together, at the same time, but not necessarily in the same place.

Thus live events are one example of synchronous media, but unlike live events, technology enables synchronous learning without everyone having to be in the same place, although everyone does have to participate in the event at the same time. A video-conference or a webinar are examples of synchronous technologies which may be broadcast ‘live’, but not with everyone in the same place. Other synchronous technologies are television or radio broadcasts. You have to be ‘there’ at the time of transmission, or you miss them. However, the ‘there’ may be somewhere different from where the teacher is.

Asynchronous technologies enable participants to access information or communicate at different points of time, usually at the time and place of choice of the participant. All recorded media are asynchronous. Books, DVDs, on-demand YouTube videos, lectures recorded through lecture capture, and available for streaming on-demand, and online discussion forums are all asynchronous media or technologies. Learners can log on or access these technologies at times and the place of their own choosing.

Figure 11 illustrates the main differences between media in terms of different combinations of time and place.

8.3. Why Does this Matter?

Overall there are huge educational benefits associated with asynchronous or recorded media, because the ability to access information or communicate at any time offers the learner more control and flexibility. The educational benefits have been confirmed in a number of studies. For instance, Means et al. (2010) found that students did better on blended learning because they spent more time on task because the online materials were always available to the students.

Research at the Open University found that students much preferred to listen to radio broadcasts recorded on cassette than to the actual broadcast, even though the content and format were identical (Grundin, 1981; Bates at al., 1981). However, even greater benefits were found when the format of the audio was changed to take advantage of the control characteristics of cassettes (stop, replay). It was found that students learned more from ‘designed’ cassettes than from cassette recordings of broadcasts, especially when the cassettes were co-ordinated or integrated with visual material, such as text or graphics. This was particularly valuable, for instance, in talking students through mathematical formulae (Durbridge, 1983).

This research underlines the importance of changing the design as one moves from synchronous to asynchronous technologies. Thus we can predict that although there are benefits in recording live lectures through lecture capture in terms of flexibility and access, or having readings available at any time or place, the learning benefits would be even greater if the lecture or text was redesigned for asynchronous use, with built-in activities such as tests and feedback, and points for students to stop the lecture and do some research or extra reading, then returning to the teaching.

The ability to access learning materials on-demand (recorded lectures or webinars, learning management systems, web sites, social media) is particularly important for increasing access and flexibility for learners, especially those working as well as studying, for those with young families, or for students with long commutes. Thus, there should be clearly justified pedagogical benefits that could not be provided by the use of technology if students must be present either in the same place or at the same time as an instructor. In particular, what are the social or pedagogical reasons why students should come to the school or campus or be present at a set time when so much teaching and learning can now be done asynchronously?

The ability to access media asynchronously through recorded and streamed materials is one of the biggest changes in the history of teaching, but the dominant paradigm in higher education is still a live lecture or seminar. There are, as we have seen, some advantages in live media, and direct inter-personal contact, but they need to be used more selectively to exploit their unique advantages or affordances.

8.4. The Significance of the Internet

Broadcast/communicative and synchronous/asynchronous are two separate dimensions. By placing them in a matrix design, we can then assign different technologies to different quadrants, as in Figure 12 below. (I have included only a few – you may want to place other technologies on this diagram):

Why the Internet is so important is that it is an encompassing medium that embraces all these other media and technologies, thus offering immense possibilities for teaching and learning. This enables us, if we wish, to be very specific about how we design our teaching so that we can exploit all the characteristics or dimensions of technology to fit almost any learning context through this one medium.

8.5. Conclusion

It should be noted at this stage that although I have identified some strengths and weaknesses of the four characteristics of broadcast/communicative, and synchronous/asynchronous media, we still need an evaluative framework for deciding when to use or combine different technologies. This means developing criteria that will enable us to decide within specific contexts the optimum choice of technologies.

9. Media Richness

9.1. The Historic Development of Media Richness

In ‘A short history of educational technology’, the development of different media in education was outlined, beginning with oral teaching and learning, moving on to written or textual communication, then to video, and finally computing. Each of these means of communication has usually been accompanied by an increase in the richness of the medium, in terms of how many senses and interpretative abilities are needed to process information.

Another way of defining the richness of media is by the symbol systems employed to communicate through the medium. Thus, textual material from an early stage incorporated graphics and drawings as well as words. Television or video incorporates audio as well as still and moving images. Computing now can incorporate text, audio, video, animations, simulations, computing, and networking, all through the Internet.

9.2. The Continuum of Media Richness

Once again then there is a continuum in terms of media richness, as illustrated in Figure 14 above. Also, once again, design of a particular medium can influence where on the continuum it would be placed. For instance, in Figure 14, different forms of teaching using video are represented in blue. Ted Talks, a televised lecture, and often xMOOCs are usually mainly talking heads. The Khan Academy uses dynamic graphics as well as voice-over commentary, and MrExham’s 

However, although the richness of video can be increased or decreased by the way it is used, video is always going to be richer in media terms than radio or textbooks. Radio is never going to be a rich medium in terms of its symbols systems because it depends on a single medium, audio, and even talking head video is richer symbolically than radio.

There is no normative or evaluative judgment here. Radio can be ‘rich’ in the sense of fully exploiting the characteristics or symbol systems of the medium. A well-produced radio program is more likely to be educationally effective than a badly produced video. But in terms of representation of knowledge, the possibilities of radio in terms of media richness will always be less than the possibilities of video.

9.3. The Educational Value of Media Richness

But how rich should media be for teaching and learning? From a teaching perspective, rich media have advantages over a single medium of communication, because rich media enable the teacher to do more. For example, many activities that previously required learners to be present at a particular time and place to observe processes or procedures such as demonstrating mathematical reasoning, experiments, medical procedures, or stripping a carburetor, can now be recorded and made available to learners to view at any time. Sometimes, phenomena that are too expensive or too difficult to show in a classroom can be shown through animation, simulations, video recordings, or virtual reality.

Furthermore, each learner can get the same view as all the other learners and can view the process many times until they have mastery. Good preparation before recording can ensure that the processes are demonstrated correctly and clearly. The combination of voice-over video enables learning through multiple senses. Even simple combinations, such as the use of audio over a sequence of still frames in a text, have been found more effective than learning through a single medium of communication (see, for instance, Durbridge, 1984). The Khan Academy videos have exploited very effectively the power of audio combined with dynamic graphics. Computing adds another element of richness, in the ability to network learners or to respond to learner input.

From a learner’s perspective, though, some caution is needed with rich media. Two particularly important concepts are cognitive overload and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Cognitive overload results when students are presented with too much information at too complex a level or too quickly for them to properly absorb it (Sweller, 1988). Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD (Vygotsky, 1934) is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what can be done with help. Rich media may contain a great deal of information compressed into a very short time period and its value will depend to a large extent on the learner’s level of preparation for interpreting it.

For instance, a documentary video may be valuable for demonstrating the complexity of human behavior or complex industrial systems, but learners may need either preparation in terms of what to look for or to identify concepts or principles that may be illustrated within the documentary. On the other hand, interpretation of rich media is a skill that can be explicitly taught through demonstration and examples (Bates and Gallagher, 1977). Although YouTube videos are limited in length to around eight minutes mainly for technical reasons, they are also more easily absorbed than a continuous video of 50 minutes. Thus, again design is important for helping learners to make full educational use of rich media.

9.4. Simple or Rich Media

It is a natural tendency when choosing media for teaching to opt for the ‘richest’ or most powerful medium. Why would I use a podcast rather than a video? There are in fact several reasons:

• Cost and ease of use: it may just be quicker and simpler to use a podcast, especially if it can achieve the same learning objective;
• There may be too many distractions in a rich medium for students to grasp the essential point of the teaching. For instance, video recording a busy intersection to look at traffic flow may include all kinds of distractions for the viewer from the actual observation of traffic patterns. A simple diagram or an animation that focuses only on the phenomenon to be observed might be better;
• The rich the medium may be inappropriate for the learning task. For instance, if students are to follow and critique a particular argument or chain of reasoning, text may work better than a video of a lecturer with annoying mannerisms talking about the chain of reasoning.

In general, it is tempting always to look for the simplest medium first then only opt for a more complex or richer medium if the simple medium can’t deliver the learning goals as adequately. However, consideration needs to be given to media richness as a criterion when making choices about media or technology, because rich media may enable learning goals to be achieved that would be difficult with a simple medium.

This is the last of the characteristics of media and technology that can influence decisions about teaching and learning. 

10. Understanding the Foundations of Educational Media

I am aware that this lesson may appear somewhat abstract and theoretical, but in any subject domain, it is important to understand the foundations that underpin practice. This applies with even more force to understanding media and technology in education, because it is such a dynamic field that changes all the time. What seems to be the major media developments this year are likely to be eclipsed by new developments in technology next year. In such a shifting sea, it is , therefore, necessary to look at some guiding concepts or principles that are likely to remain constant, whatever changes take place over the years.

11. Ensuring Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

For quality of teaching in digital age refer to lesson 9 as it offers some practical guidelines for teachers and instructors to ensure quality teaching 

12. Supporting Teachers and Instructors in a Digital Age

12.1. Are You a Super - Hero?

Figure 33, developed by Simon Bates, Associate Provost, Teaching and Learning at UBC (2016), encapsulates well the role of a teacher or instructor in a digital age. At this point in the book, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is all too much, especially if you are a university professor whose passion is the discipline in which you are an expert, and whose priority is to extend the boundaries of knowledge in that subject through research or other scholarly work. Where earth will you find the time to become expert in teaching if this means completely changing the teaching model you have become comfortable with? You are not alone in thinking this. Martha Cleveland-Innes (2013) writes:

It is unrealistic to expect higher education faculty to have sound, current, content expertise, a productive research program, an active service commitment AND be expert online teachers. The biggest lie in the academy is that the role of faculty, and its rewards and responsibilities, is made up of a seemingly balanced set of activities around teaching, research and service (Atkinson, 2001). With some variation across the type of institution, research is the most valued work and most notably rewarded.   While this reality has not changed “…classroom teaching and course materials (have become) more sophisticated and complex in ways that translate into new forms of faculty work. ….. such new forms are not replacing old ones, but instead are layered on top of them, making for more work.” (Rhoades, 2000, p, 38). It is time to clarify this reality and consider how, if, at all, changes in teaching are, or maybe, integrated into the role of the faculty member.

How changes may be integrated into the role of the faculty member, instructor or classroom teacher in a digital age is what this lesson is about. It is not realistic to expect all teachers to be super-heroes (even if you are the exception), but it is realistic to expect all teachers to be competent and professional in a digital age.

The good news though is that if you have read your way through all the lessons in this book, you will have done what you need to do to be competent and professional for teaching in a digital age, and will certainly be ahead of 99 percentage of your colleagues on this (at least until they have also read this book). At the same time, there is much your employing organisation and senior administrators can do to help you with this lesson.

13. The Development and Training of Teachers and Instructors in a Digital Age

13.1. The Need

By mid-August in most countries in the northern hemisphere, teachers’ pro-d and faculty development workshops and conferences have ended, and everyone has headed off for a well-earned vacation. Many thousands will have learned how to use learning management or lecture capture system for the first time, and hundreds of others will have been introduced to new technologies such as e-portfolios, mobile learning, and open educational resources. A smaller but significant number will have been introduced to new methods of teaching built around the potential of new technologies. All good stuff – and all totally inadequate for the needs facing teachers and instructors in a digital age.

13.2. A Broken Professional Development Model

In universities, faculty are trained, through the doctoral route, to do research, but there is no requirement to be trained in teaching methods. At best faculty development is voluntary for faculty once appointed, and although post-doctoral students may be offered short courses or in some instances even a certificate in preparation for classroom teaching, this is usually voluntary and minimal. Indeed, post-graduate students interested in experimenting with learning technologies or taking professional courses or programs in teaching are often deliberately discouraged by their supervisors from doing so, as it would detract from their research. Increased use of adjunct/contract faculty exacerbates the problem. Being on contract, they require payment for any training, but institutions are often reluctant to train contract workers who may then leave at the end of the contract and take their training and skills to a competitor.

The situation is somewhat different in two-year colleges. Many jurisdictions (but by no means all) have a regional, state, or provincial Instructor Diploma Program that some colleges require instructors to take on appointment or shortly afterward. However, many of these programs have not been adapted to take account of online learning, and probably none are yet up to date on blended learning. I was an external reviewer for one such program a while ago, and there was almost no mention of online or blended learning. Most of the technologies discussed in this program were at least 20 years old.

The lack of comprehensive and systematic training at a pre-service level places a disproportionate burden on ongoing professional development, which is at best ad hoc and variable in both quantity and quality. Above all, it is an entirely voluntary system – in other words, teachers or instructors can choose not to take any in-service workshops or courses on teaching, if they decide – as most do – that their professional development time will be better spent focusing on research rather than teaching. Christensen Hughes and Mighty (2010) argue that less than 10 percentage of all university instructors take professional development activities focused on improving their teaching, and the faculty that do opt-in are often those in the least need of training as they are often already excellent teachers.

Lastly, most faculty and instructors do not base their teaching practice on empirically-based evidence or research on the effectiveness of different approaches. Christensen Hughes and Mighty (2010) have edited a collection of studies on research on teaching and learning in higher education. In the opening lesson the editors state:

…Researchers have discovered much about teaching and learning in higher education, but that dissemination and uptake of this information have been limited. As such, the impact of educational research on faculty-teaching practice and student-learning experience has been negligible.

In the same book, Christopher Knapper (also of Queens University) states (p. 229-230):

There is increasing empirical evidence from a variety of international settings that prevailing teaching practices in higher education do not encourage the sort of learning that contemporary society demands….Teaching remains largely didactic, assessment of student work is often trivial, and curricula are more likely to emphasize content coverage than the acquisition of lifelong and life-wide skills….

[However] there is an impressive body of evidence on how teaching methods and curriculum design affects deep, autonomous, and reflective learning. Yet most faculty are largely ignorant of this scholarship, and instructional practices are dominated by tradition rather than research evidence.

This book has shown that we do not have to invent or discover what’s needed to teach well in a digital age. There is well-established literature and generally agreed best practices, yet, as Christensen Hughes and Mighty have pointed out, many if not a majority of teachers and instructors are unaware or continue to ignore these standards.

13.3. Why the System Needs to Change

When university education was limited to an elite few students, where faculty had a close, one-on-one relationship with students, it was possible to manage quite effectively without formal training in teaching. That is not the case today. Faculty are challenged by large classes, and heterogeneous students who learn in a variety of ways, with different learning skills and abilities. The emphasis is changing from knowledge as content to knowledge as a process. Teaching methods need to be chosen that will develop the skills and competencies needed in a knowledge-based society, and on top of all this, constantly changing technology requires instructors to have analytical frameworks to help choose and use technologies appropriately for teaching.

In particular, the profound effect of the Internet on scholarship, research, work, and leisure requires a major reconsideration of our teaching methods if we are to develop the skills and knowledge our students will need in a knowledge-based society. This requires comprehensive and systematic training of our instructors, not a system that depends heavily on opting-in, and that fails to reward adequately excellence in teaching as measured by the standards required in today’s context.

Moving to blended, hybrid, and online learning requires a much higher standard of training for faculty and instructors. It is not just a question of learning how to use a learning management system or an iPad. The use of technology needs to be combined with an understanding of how students learn, how skills are developed, how knowledge is represented through different media and then processed, and how learners use different senses for learning. It means examining different approaches to learning, such as the construction of knowledge compared with a transmission model of teaching, and how technology best works with either approach. Above all, it means linking the use of technology to the specific requirements of a particular knowledge domain or subject area.

The expansion into blended and online learning has been facilitated mainly by the establishment of separate learning technology support units to support faculty and instructors who do not have the experience or skills to teach online. Although this is essential, it will be prohibitively expensive to continue to expand such units as blended and online learning continues to grow (Bates and Sangrà, 2011). It is much more cost-effective to provide adequate initial pre-service training so that learning technology units can concentrate on training, professional development and R&D into new methods of teaching and learning as new technologies develop.

13.4. What Needs to be Done

Identifying the problem is much easier than fixing it. In particular, the culture especially of universities protects the existing system. Academic freedom is often used as an argument for the status quo, and unions in the college system insist on payment for instructors for any time spent on training over and above their normal teaching load. As Bates and Sangrà (2011) have pointed out, this is a systemic problem. It is difficult for a university, for example, to change for fear that their best young researchers will move to another institution where training in teaching is not demanded.

There are many different ways to address this challenge. I set out one possible strategy below.

First, it has to be recognized and accepted by institutional leaders, teachers, instructors, and faculty, the relevant unions, quality assurance boards, and state funding agencies that there is a major problem here. Donovan et al. (2019) in a national survey of post-secondary institutions in Canada found that while 71 percentage of all institutions rated online learning as very or extremely important for their long-term future, 79 percentage reported that the main barrier to greater adoption of online learning was inadequate training and in only 29 percentage of institutions was required in order to teach online.

Developing skilled teachers (and that’s what we need in schools, colleges and universities) is as much economic development as an educational issue. If we want people with the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age, then teachers must get the knowledge themselves about how to develop such skills, and in particular, recognize that learning technologies and online learning are critical components in the development of such skills.

It is much more economical and effective to prepare instructors properly at the start of their careers than to try to get large chunks of their time for training while in their mid or late careers. Although technology will change over time, the basic essentials of teaching and learning are relatively stable. Thus the problem needs to be tackled at the pre-service level. For those wishing to work as faculty in universities, we need to examine the post-graduate degree and in particular the Ph.D., to ensure that there is adequate time for courses on and practice in post-secondary teaching, or develop a parallel route for developing teaching and research skills.

Ideally the state or provincial Council of Universities or Colleges, or school boards, should get together and develop a comprehensive system of training for all teachers and ensure that such programs are continually updated. Similarly, a common plan and set of standards needs to be established across a jurisdiction for hiring and promotion linked to proper training in teaching and learning, through the establishment of appropriate working groups that would include professionals from learning technology units and professional development offices.

We need to walk the talk, and use technology to support professional development. Increasingly, centres for teaching and learning are creating web sites with ‘on-demand’ resources for faculty and instructors, such as best practices in using video, podcast production, or designing a course with technology.  Too often, though, other faculty development support sites focus on the technical operation of technology or just provide a schedule of faculty development workshops, rather than providing pragmatic advice on best educational practice in the use of a particular technology or medium. Also, teachers and instructors need to know about such sites – and use them.

The system-wide working groups should agree on a ‘core’ curriculum, minimum standards, and measures of performance for pre-service training in teaching for each sector. These standards should include the knowledge and skills needed by learners in a digital age. No person should be hired to new positions that have a major teaching component without recognized training in teaching, once the training system is in place.

ALT (Association of Learning Technologists), the UK, provides professional accreditation of learning technologists, operating at three levels (novice, career, advanced) through certified membership of ALT (Association of Learning Technologists). It uses a combination of personal portfolios of work and peer assessment. A similar program could be extended to teachers and instructors, enabling a form of accreditation based on the practice as well as taking courses.

For in-service professional development, one strategy would be to require an individual professional the development plan for every teacher or instructor annually negotiated between the teacher and their head of department. This plan would include regular up-dating in new teaching methods and technologies, similar to the compulsory professional development programs for medical practitioners. Different individual professional development plans will be needed for different subject areas.

Governments should exert pressure on school boards, colleges and universities to ensure that an adequate the pre-service and in-service training system is in place, as a condition of future funding. Governments should refuse to fund any public institution that does not follow the standards for training in teaching set and endorsed by the relevant system-wide authorities.

Integrate Internally

Blended and fully online teaching and learning technologies should be seen as integral components of professional development, not as separate activities. Therefore faculty development offices should be integrated with learning technology support units into Centres for Teaching and Learning (either centrally or divisionally, depending on the size of the institution), where this has not already occurred.

13.5. Conclusion

We would not dream of allowing doctors or pilots to do their work without formal training related to their main work activities, yet this is exactly the situation regarding teaching in post-secondary education. We have to move from a system of voluntary amateurism to a professional, comprehensive system of training for teaching in post-secondary education, and a modern, up-to-date curriculum for pre-service and in-service training of school teachers. This book attempts to provide at least a basic curriculum for this kind of training.

I have suggested some solutions to the systemic problem. Others support the professional communities of practice route (see for instance Carvalho-Fino et al., 2019), which is more culturally acceptable to university faculty, but does not meet the test of being comprehensive and systematic.

Online learning and new learning technologies are not the cause of the problem nor the solution, but they do provide a necessary catalyst for change. Our students deserve no less than properly trained teachers. The current situation, at least in post-secondary education, is increasingly unacceptable, a truth no-one dares to speak. It’s about time we dealt with it.

14. Learning Technology Support

14.1. The Need for Learning Technology Support Systems

There have been many references in this book to the need for teachers and instructors to work, wherever possible, with instructional designers and media producers when teaching in a digital age. The reasons for this are fairly obvious:

• No teacher can be an expert on everything; working in a team covers a wider a range of skills and knowledge;
• Technology should be used to decrease instructor and faculty workload, not to increase it, as at present; instructional designers, in particular, should be able to help teachers and faculty to manage their workload while still producing high quality teaching; media producers enable subject experts to focus on content and skills development;
• Team teaching, with different skills within the team (two or more subject experts, instructional designer, media producer) will lead to higher-quality teaching.

As a result, over the last ten to twenty years, there has been a rapid expansion in the number of learning technology support systems, both centrally, and in larger institutions, within different academic departments. Over time, separate units focusing on faculty development, learning technology support, and distance education have become merged or integrated into multi-functional units, under a variety of names, although legacy systems can sometimes take a long while to make this shift.

14.2. The Scaling Problem

As the move to blended, hybrid and online learning increases so does the demand for these support units, to such an extent that one university I know well now has over 60 support staff and a budget of over $12 million a year for its central Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, plus several ‘satellite’ units in the larger faculties. At the other end, a small elementary school will be lucky to have one teacher with some training in maintaining the computers and the Internet added to their responsibilities. However, many school systems also have a central educational technology unit that can provide support to individual teachers and schools within the system.

Institutions are already spending a good deal to support just the fully online courses or programs. We have good models here based on instructional designers and media specialists working in a team with instructors in developing fully online courses. This way, the special design requirements for students studying off campus can be met.

However, at the moment, fully online courses constitute somewhere around 10-15 percentage of all the credit-based teaching in North American universities. What happens when we go to 85 percentage or more of the teaching being blended? The current learning technology support model just won’t be able to handle this expansion, certainly not at the rate that it is being predicted. However, without a design strategy for blended learning, and adequate support for faculty and instructors, it is almost certain that the quality will be poor, and it is certain that all the potential benefits of blended learning for transforming the quality of teaching will not be achieved.

Trying to extend the support the system from fully online to blended courses and programs will ultimately be unsustainable. Although support units will be essential to get blended learning successfully started, teaching activities must be economically sustainable, which means faculty and instructors will eventually need to become able to design and manage blended learning effectively without continuous and ongoing support from instructional designers and media producers. This will require a huge training and retraining effort for instructors.

14.3. Faculty Training or Support Units? The Need for Balance

I am a strong supporter of such specialized units to work with teachers and instructors. However, this has to be balanced against the costs. Funding from these units usually comes from within the overall budget for teaching and learning which in the end results in larger classes. These support units grow in inverse proportion to the lack of pre-service and in-service training.

However, these learning technology support units are essential for the effective development of teaching in a digital age. Thus a balance needs to be found between the provision of training in the use of learning technologies and the need for learning technology support units, which is why faculty development and learning technology units have tended to become integrated, and why institutions need a defined strategy for supporting teaching and learning.  Thus although it is possible for a particularly dedicated teacher to teach successfully without such support, learning technology support units are becoming an essential service for most teachers and instructors.

15. Conditions of Employment

There are currently some major changes in conditions of employment that will influence the ability of individual teachers and instructors to deliver the kind of teaching needed in a digital age.

15.1. Class Size

The most obvious is the class size. Although some economies of scale are definitely achievable through the use of technology for teaching (see, for instance, Bates, 2013), and there is no magic number as to how many students there should be per teacher, that instructor presence and the interaction between subject experts and students are critical factors in developing knowledge and skills needed in a digital age.

Although technology can replace the need for instructors for the transmission of content, the need for ongoing communication between teacher and students for deep understanding and the development of skills means that there soon becomes a limit, in terms of the number of students per instructor, beyond which the teaching rapidly starts to become ineffective, at least in terms of the knowledge and skills that matter most (Carey and Trick, 2013).

Thus the major challenge is in universities and some large two-year colleges, where first and second-year classes can number in the thousands, and even in third or fourth-year classes, in the hundreds. What can be done to ensure that teacher-student ratios are kept to a manageable size? Institutions have taken a number of different approaches to this challenge.

15.2. The Increased Use of Contract Instructors and Teaching Assistants

One of the biggest changes to universities in North America over the last twenty years has been the growth of non-tenured teaching faculty in universities. An explosion in undergraduate enrolments across Canada – 400,000 more students from 2002 to 2012 – has come without a corresponding increase in tenure-track faculty. While the number of instructors doubled between the 1980s and 2006, there was a decline of 10 percentage in tenure and tenure-track faculty (Chiose, 2015). The position is, if anything, even more, dramatic in the USA, where universities and colleges were much harder hit by the economic crisis in 2008 than their Canadian counterparts.

In an article in Canada’s leading newspaper, the Globe and Mail, Simona Chiose wrote (2018):

Canadian universities say they can no longer afford to deliver higher education through tenured academics who may spend more than a third of their time engaged in research. Instead, most universities have decided that, to staff their classrooms at a reasonable cost, they must turn, in varying degrees, to contract instructors and teaching-track faculty.

Contract staff such as adjuncts or sessionals usually have either a doctoral degree in the subject area or strongly related work experience for more vocational subjects. In Canada, the union representing contract instructors (CUPE) is fighting to get multiyear contracts for sessional instructors who now have to reapply each year for their jobs. Ideally, the union would like universities to give sessional instructors priority for teaching-track jobs, which do not have tenure but have more job security than contract positions. With job security can come opportunities for training in teaching.

However, an even more alarming development in recent years has been an increasing tendency to use post-graduate students as teaching assistants, often responsible for delivering lectures to 200 students or more in first and second-year courses. This model is also being increasingly used where institutions are moving to a hybrid model, combining both online and face-to-face components, especially where the former very large lecture-based course is being redesigned for hybrid learning. Even including the TAs, the instructor/student ratio is often 1:100 or higher for these large enrollment courses. There is usually no additional training for TAs about how to teach online, although in many – but by no means all – cases, they do get some kind of training in teaching face-to-face.

With fully online courses, though, a different model has often been used where the instructor: student ratio has been deliberately targeted at under 40 for undergraduate courses, and under 30 for graduate courses. Scaling up has been handled by hiring additional part-time adjunct or associate professors on contract. The adjuncts would be paid to take a short online briefing course on teaching online which sets out the expectations for online teaching. This was an affordable model because the additional student tuition fees would more than cover the cost of hiring additional contract instructors, once the course was developed (Bates and Poole, 2003).

However, this has been possible because most of such online courses have been aimed mainly at a higher level undergraduate students or graduate students. With both blended and online courses now being targeted at large first and second-year classes, new models are being developed that may not have the same level of quality as the ‘best practice’ online courses. This is a particularly difficult issue for several reasons:

• Practices both for dealing with large face-to-face classes and with online classes vary considerably within each form of delivery, and from one institution to another, so making generalizations is fraught with danger
• Decisions about whether to use teaching assistants or part-time, contract instructors, are driven more by financial considerations than by best pedagogical practice
• There are other factors at work besides money and pedagogy in the use of teaching assistants and adjunct faculty, such as the desire to provide financial support to international and graduate students, the idea of apprenticeship in teaching, and the supply and demand effects on the employment of doctoral graduates seeking a career in university teaching and research
• There is no golden mean for instructor/student ratios in either blended or online learning. In the mainly quantitative/STEM subjects, much higher ratios are sustainable without the loss of quality, through the use of automated marking and feedback, for the theory component, while the practical component requires much lower ratios due to the need to share equipment and monitor students
• MOOCs are (wrongly) giving the impression that it is possible to scale up even credit-based online learning at a lower cost, by eliminating learning support provided by tenured faculty

Despite these caveats, there is a genuine concern that the over-reliance on teaching assistants for online and blended courses will have three negative consequences for both students and online learning in general:

• As with the large face-to-face classes, the pedagogy for online or blended courses will resort more to information transmission, due to the TAs’ lack of training and experience in teaching online;
• For the online or hybrid courses, student drop-out, and dissatisfaction will increase because, especially in first and second year teaching, they will not get the learning the support they need when studying online. As a result, faculty and students will claim that hybrid or fully online learning is inferior to classroom-based instruction;
• Faculty and especially faculty unions will see online learning and blended learning being used by administrations to cut costs and overtime to reduce the employment of tenured faculty, and will, therefore, try to block its implementation.

Why can’t TAs provide the support needed online if they can do this for face-to-face classes? First, it is arguable whether they do provide adequate support for students in large first-year classes, but in online courses in subject domains where discussion is important, where qualitative judgments and decisions have to be made by students and instructors, where knowledge needs to be developed and structured, in other words in any field where the learning requires more than the transmission and repetition of information, then students need to be able to interact with an instructor that has a deep understanding of the subject area. Thus there are good reasons to hire adjunct faculty (as usually, they already have post-graduate qualifications) to teach online or in blended formats, but not TAs in general (although there will always be exceptions).

15.3. The Elephant in the Room

However, the discussion about the use of adjuncts and TAs masks a more significant issue. There are two factors that lead to the very large class sizes in first and second year that faculty and their unions really don’t want to talk about:

• The starvation of first and second-year students of teaching resources; senior faculty concentrate more on upper-level courses, and want to keep these class sizes smaller. As a consequence first and second-year students suffer.
• Teaching subsidizes research: too often tuition revenues get filtered off into supporting research activities. The most obvious case is that if teachers spent more time teaching and less doing research, there would be more faculty available for teaching. Teaching loads for experienced, tenured faculty are often quite light and as stated above, focused on the small upper level classes. A report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (Jonker and Hicks, 2014) suggested that if professors whom it has classified as laggards in research doubled their teaching time, it would be the equivalent of adding 1,500 faculty members across the province, enough to staff an additional mid-sized university.

15.4. The Increasing Diversity of Teachers

Much has been said in this book about the increasing diversity of students, and the implications for teaching. We should add to that the increasing diversity of teachers:

• Fully tenured, research-focused faculty, with very high academic qualifications but relatively little or no training in teaching.
• Contract adjunct or sessional instructors highly qualified academically, but with little or no chance of professional development in the teaching area.
• Teaching assistants, with mid-level academic qualifications and little or no training in teaching.
• Work-experienced vocational and technical instructors, with a small amount of training in teaching.
• School teachers, well trained in general teaching methods, but few with training specifically for teaching in a digital age.

The reasons for and the significance of this increasing diversity of teachers and instructors is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, without some kind of job security there is little opportunity or incentive for training in new technologies and teaching methods.

16. Team Teaching

There is no easy solution to the problem of reducing class size to numbers that will ensure all students can be helped to develop the knowledge and skills needed in the digital age. Alex Usher in his blog One Thought to Start Your Day examines different ways to allocate teaching loads to instructors, resulting in classes of different sizes. However, the teaching load is usually organized at a departmental level. Too often, an individual instructor has little choice over the size of the class to which they are allocated. 

Whatever the course design, face-to-face, blended, or fully online, large numbers of students per instructor limits what is possible pedagogically. It is extremely difficult to teach the higher-level skills of critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaborative working in very large classes. Nevertheless, there are several successful approaches to re-designing these large introductory courses of 1,000 students or more, involving the use of blended learning. See for instance:

• The National Center for Academic Transformation‘s course redesign process
• A large first-year psychology course at McMaster University
• An online large enrolment course in anatomy at Dalhousie University

The following design attempts to build in at least some opportunities for the development of high-level skills in a very large class:

• Create a team to design, develop and deliver the course; the team will include a senior tenured professor, four TAs, plus an instructional designer and web/multimedia designer allocated to help with the initial design.
• The senior professor acts as a teaching consultant, responsible for the overall design of the course, hiring and supervising the work of the TAs, and designing the assessment strategy/questions and rubrics, in consultation with the rest of the team.
• Nearly all content is provided online through a combination of short videos and textual material designed and loaded on the LMS; this is largely the work of the senior professor working with the instructional designer, assisted by the TAs, before the course begins.
• Computer-marked assignments are used to mark student comprehension and understanding and to provide automated feedback/guidance; there is an end-of-semester computer-marked assignment that provides an individual mark for each student.
• Students are allocated to groups of 33, and each of the TAs is responsible for eight student groups, or 250 per TA.
• Each TA acts as the day-to-day link for each of the 33 students in each of the eight groups they are responsible for it.
• Each class of 33 is divided into five sub-groups of six to seven students, who work on two projects a semester; the first project is not assessed, but is subject to student peer review, using guidelines/rubrics established by the senior professor; the second project is assessed by the TAs (roughly 40 assignments per TA), again using rubrics designed by the senior professor. The projects aim to develop specific, pre-identified skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and collaborative working.
• Students in each group of six or seven work through online discussion forums or face-to-face on each project, depending on convenience to the students. The discussion forums are lightly moderated by the TAs, mainly to ensure that students are on topic and respectful to each other; if serious issues arise, these are referred to as the senior professor.
• TAs mark the group assignments, following rubrics decided earlier, and the senior professor monitors and calibrates the marking between instructors; for each student their group mark (50%) is added to their individual mark (50%) from the end-of-semester computer-marked assignment.
• The senior professor meets for one hour a week with a different group of 33 students three times a week either face-to-face or synchronously online; this means that every student gets at least one hour of personal interaction with the senior professor during the semester. The sessions are used to discuss key issues in the course and focus on pre-determined skills development. 

Whatever detailed design is done, these large courses should have a clear business model to work with, which basically provides an overall budget for the course, that includes the cost of the TAs, and takes account of the student's numbers (more students, more budgeted money), but allowing the senior professor to build the team as best as possible within that budget. TAs would receive a briefing on responsibilities, online mentoring, assessment marking, for which they would be paid in addition to or as part of their teaching contract.

Ideally, though the organization of teaching should not result in such very large classes, if at all possible. However, the principle of team teaching should be considered for all classes with more than 30 or so students.

17. An Institutional Strategy for Teaching in a Digital Age

It can be seen that issues around faculty development and training, class size, hiring of contract instructors and teaching assistants, and teamwork will influence the organization’s capacity to do the kind of teaching that will develop the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age (or any other age, for that matter). It may be possible for you, particularly if you are tenured faculty working in a university, individually to make the necessary changes to your teaching to fit the needs of a digital age, but for the majority of teachers and instructors, the institution as a whole needs to support the necessary changes to teaching. It can do this best by having a formal plan or strategy that sets out:

• The rationale for changes
• The goals or outcomes that such changes will lead to (for example, learners with specified skills and competencies)
• Actions that will support the changes (for example, funding for new course design, re-organisation of services)
• A financial strategy to support the intended changes, such as funding for innovation in teaching
• A way of measuring successful implementation of the strategy

There are various ways in which such a strategy may be developed (see Bates and Sangrà, 2011), including top-down and bottom-up processes for setting overall goals, but in a university it may be through an annual academic planning process where departments/faculties must submit their plans for the next three years, including resources needed, based on meeting the overall academic goals set by the university. In such a planning cycle, it is important to include the goals for meeting the needs of learners in a digital age as ‘targets’ for departments when drawing up their plans. These plans should indicate not only content to be covered but also delivery and teaching methods to be used, with a rationale for them.

Many universities and colleges are in the process of developing or implementing such plans, such as the University of British Columbia’s Flexible Learning Initiative and the University of Ottawa’s e-learning plan. Indeed, at least in Canada, most institutions have recognized the need for a strategic plan for ‘e-learning’. Donovan et al. (2019) found that 71 percentage of responding post-secondary institutions reported that online learning is very or extremely important for the institution’s long-term strategic or academic plan. However, only 42 percentage actually had implemented or were implementing a strategic plan for e-learning, and it is not know how closely these plans are tied to the development of the knowledge and skills needed in the digital age, or whether they focus mainly on resources or organizational issues. Nevertheless, a good plan, preferably dynamic and continually reviewed is essential for such developments.

Lastly, it is of course important for anyone who has read this book to make sure they are actively engaged in such processes, to help shape policy and direction. Without institutional support, it will be difficult to make significant changes.

18. Building the Future

19. The Rationale for Change

This book really sets out the case for increased training in teaching methods, or more accurately a different approach to training, for teachers, instructors, and faculty, if students are to be fully prepared for life in a digital age. The argument goes like this:

1. There is increasing pressure from employers, the business community, learners themselves, and also from  a significant number of educators, for learners to develop the type of knowledge and the kinds of skills that they will need in a digital age.

2. The knowledge and skills needed in a digital age, where all ‘content’ will be increasingly and freely available over the Internet, requires graduates with expertise in:

• Knowledge management (the ability to find, evaluate and appropriately apply knowledge);
• IT knowledge and skill;
• Inter-personal communication skills, including the appropriate use of social media;
• Independent and lifelong learning skills;
• A range of intellectual skills, including:
• Knowledge construction
• Reasoning
• Critical analysis
• Problem-solving
• Creativity
• Collaborative learning and teamwork
• Multi-tasking and flexibility

These are all skills that are relevant to any subject domain, and need to be embedded within that domain. With such skills, graduates will be better prepared for a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

3. To develop such knowledge and skills, teachers, and instructors need to set clear learning outcomes and select teaching methods that will support the development of such knowledge and skills, and, since all skills require practice and feedback to develop, learners must be given ample opportunity to practice such skills. This requires moving away from a model of information transmission to greater student engagement, more learner-centered teaching, and new methods of assessment that measure skills as well as mastery of content.

4. Because of the increased diversity of students, from full-time campus-based learners to lifelong learners already with high levels of post-secondary education to learners who have slipped through the formal school system and need second-chance opportunities, and because of the capacity of new information technologies to provide learning at any time and any place, a much wider range of modes of delivery is needed, such as campus-based teaching, blended or hybrid learning and fully online courses and programs, both in formal and in non-formal settings.

5. The move to blended, hybrid and online learning and greater use of learning technologies offer more options and choices for teachers and instructors. In order to use these technologies well, teachers and instructors require not only to know the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of technology, but also need to have a good grasp of how students learn best. This requires knowing about:

• The research into teaching and learning.
• Different theories of learning related to different concepts of knowledge (epistemology).
• Different methods of teaching and their strengths and weaknesses.

Without this basic foundation, it is difficult for teachers and instructors to move away from the only model that many are familiar with, namely the lecture and discussion model, which is limited in terms of developing the knowledge and skills required in a digital age.

6. The challenge is particularly acute in universities. There is no requirement to have any training or qualification in teaching to work in a university in most Western countries. Nevertheless, teaching will take up a minimum of 40 percentage of a faculty member’s time, and much more for many adjunct or contract faculty or full-time college instructors. However, the same challenge remains, to a lesser degree, for school teachers and college instructors: how to ensure that already experienced professionals have the knowledge and skills required to teach well in a digital age.

7. Institutions can do much to facilitate or impede the development of the knowledge and skills required in a digital age. They need to:

• Ensure that all levels of teaching and instructional staff have adequate training in the new technologies and methods of teaching necessary for the development of the knowledge and skills required in a digital age;
• Ensure that there is adequate learning technology support for teachers and instructors;
• Ensure that conditions of employment and in particular, class size enables teaching and instructional staff to teach in the ways that will develop the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age;
• Develop a practical and coherent institutional strategy to support the kind of teaching needed in a digital age.

19.1. Building Your Own Future

Although governments, institutions and learners themselves can do a great deal to ensure success in teaching and learning, in the end the responsibility and to some extent the power to change lies within teachers and instructors themselves. In probably no other profession is there such an opportunity to work in the way that you choose.

To help you create the kind of teaching needed in a digital age, provides an exercise for building a rich learning environment for your students, applying the guidelines outlined in this book.

Although a sound basis of knowledge and experience is important, no other quality in teachers is more important than vision and imagination. This book attempts to provide a glimpse into the possibilities of teaching in the future, but that future still needs to be invented. The demands of the market, the ethical and moral challenges of society, changing technologies, and the diversity of learning needs are all components in a complex mix of factors that require an appropriate response from teachers and instructors.

This book attempts to provide some foundations for decision-making in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, and I end with Scenario I that aims to suggest one possibility for the future, but it will be the imagination of you and other teachers inventing new ways of teaching that will eventually result in the kind of graduates the world will need in the future. I hope this book in some small way will help you along this road.

20. Scenario I: Stopping the Flu

Hi, Chris, you asked for an update on what I’m studying at the University of Central Canada. Well, I’m about half-way through a really neat program called Global Science. We get to choose from about five or six problems to research. At the moment, the problem I’ve chosen is called ‘Stopping the flu.’ Basically, we’re looking at the influenza virus, and how to prevent pandemics. I thought when I started it would be all medicine, but I’m having to do math, geography, agriculture, even management, and communications, as well as other types of science because they are all related in some way to the problem we are looking at. We work as a group on defining the problem, collecting data, and interpreting the results.

I’m in a group of 25 students and they are from all over the world. Altogether there are over 2,000 students taking the program. My main instructor, Dr. Madelaine McVicar, who is responsible for my group of 25, is based the other side of the country in a hospital in Halifax, but really she’s more like a conductor of an orchestra, because the course uses experts from all over the world, some of whom come in with just short podcasts or YouTube videos, while others run webinar sessions that deal with specific questions as they come up in our research. Dr. McVicar is great at finding resources to help us, and we also occasionally get sessions online with some of the professors at UCC who helped design the program.

What threw me at the beginning was the lack of lectures or pre-determined weekly study topics. Although we all had to do a set of modules on basic research methods, and we have a sort of program guide on the web designed by the UCC profs, we choose to study topics and are provided with a guide to a wide range of resources, mainly free stuff available all over the Internet, such as published papers in open access journals or stuff in MOOCs that will directly help us with the research problem we are tackling. The course web site gave us some leads as to where to look, and we had to provide an interim report early on to Dr. McVicar that listed the resources we were accessing or looking for. Some of these topics, such as the molecular structure of the flu virus, are pretty obvious, but other topics we had to identify ourselves. I was particularly interested in the link between international travel and the spread of flu. One of the things we have to do always is to provide an evaluation of the sources we use and their reliability.

Each month the group has to create our own online reports – called e-portfolios – which shows the progress we’ve made on the research question each month. In the end, we get 50 percentage of our marks from the monthly group e-portfolios and the other 50 percentage from an individual e-portfolio we each create summarizing the whole project and our individual contribution to the project. Dr. McVicar does the marking and grading.

There’s about 20 other student groups from UCC researching the same question, and we are sharing data across the groups, so we get great help and feedback from the other groups as well, through a discussion forum and a shared web site for the monthly e-portfolios. Because of my job, I’m particularly interested in mortality rates from different kinds of flu and I were able to hook up with another student in another group who turns out to be a specialist in that subject, working for a Swiss insurance company – it might even lead to a job for me!

Because of the agreements UCC has made with many hospitals and health authorities around the world, we’re getting access to some great data. We often have to go and find local data ourselves, such as the number of local hospital admissions for flu in a particular week. For instance, we were able to track the spread of a particular strain from the first week of our course, when it was identified in China, across the world over the following five months. UCC also has an agreement with IBM to load the data and use some of their analytics as well. Apparently UCC got money from one of the research councils to support some of the research on this program because of the ability to draw on so many sources of relatively raw data from around the world, which means my group sometimes get Skyped by one of the UCC profs who want access to our data! Another group even got asked by the WHO (the World Health Organization, not the rock group) for their data.

Many of the international students are in other universities and will transfer the credits into their own program, although a lot of the students are also sponsored by employers, such as hospitals or government agencies. You can in fact get a badge for successfully completing just one of the research problems, and a diploma for doing all three. However, the final 60 credits of the degree the program requires me to do my own, individual research project, and I think I’ll try and do that, because I need that to go on to grad school, although everyone says that doing the individual research project is pretty tough, as the standard is very high.

But what I really like about this program is that I’m learning so much, so quickly. We’re dealing with a real problem, and you know, having so many people from such different backgrounds all working on the same problem means that I feel we are actually making a difference, as well as studying.

Acknowledgment: This scenario was originally developed for the U.K. Open University and is used with their permission. The scenario was influenced by McMaster University’s integrated science program. However, the McMaster program is an on-campus program limited to a highly selected group of 50 students.

21. Activity (Reflective Thinking, Note Taking and Discussion)

This activity is optional. It is presented to facilitate your reflective thinking on the issues. There is no feedback. We encourage you to discuss these with your colleague.

SAMR and Media richness

1. If you are using any technology in your teaching, where does it fit in the SAMR framework in comparison with in-person teacher-student interaction? What could you change to make the technology ‘move up the ladder’?
2. What media are you using at the moment for teaching? Where would you place these on the ‘richness’ continuum? What benefits might there be to your teaching in changing your media to either increase or decrease the richness of media you are using?
3. Do you have to exploit fully the affordances of a medium? If so, why?

22. Key Takeaways

Key takeaways from this lesson are: Technologies are merely tools that can be used in a variety of ways. What matters more is how technologies are applied. The same technology can be applied in different ways, especially in education. So, in judging the value of a technology, we need to look more closely at the ways in which it is being used or could be used. In essence, this means focusing more on media, which represents the more holistic use of technologies than on individual tools or technologies themselves. We should recognize the fact that technology is an essential component of almost all media. By focusing on media rather than technologies, we can include face-to-face teaching as a medium. It enables comparison with more technology-based media to be made along with a number of dimensions or characteristics. Media differ in terms of their formats, symbols, systems, and cultural values. These unique features are increasingly referred to as the affordances of media or technology. Thus different media can be used to assist learners to learn in different ways and achieve different outcomes. It also helps in individualizing learning more. The Internet is an extremely powerful medium. Through a combination of tools and media, it can encompass all the characteristics and dimensions of educational media. 5Learning goals that are appropriate for learners in the digital age need to be set. The skills students need should be embedded within their subject domain, and these skills should be formally assessed. There is increasing pressure from employers, the business community, learners themselves, and also from a significant number of educators to develop the type of knowledge and the kinds of skills that they will need in the digital age. To develop such knowledge and skills, teachers and instructors need to set clear learning outcomes. They should select teaching methods that will support the development of such knowledge and skills. Since all skills require practice and feedback to develop, learners must be given ample opportunity to practice such skills. This requires moving away from a model of information transmission to greater student engagement, more learner-centered teaching, and new methods of assessment that measure skills as well as mastery of content. Governments, institutions, and learners themselves can do a great deal to ensure success in teaching and learning. But in the end, the responsibility and to some extent the power to change lies within teachers and instructors themselves.