Holding on to institutional learning in response to swift change

We are now into our third week of Level 4 'lockdown' in New Zealand, with another week to go. Indications are promising, with a decline in number of covid-19 cases in the last several days. A decision will be made Monday next week (20/4) on what will happen next. Whether the country will continue at L4 or move progressively to L3. Even at L3, most schools and VET institutes and universities will likely remain closed for the short term.

Therefore, we continue with distance/remote delivery for the short term, with plans to move back into normal delivery soon. Planning for the next month or so, will therefore be difficult, given the uncertainties. At the moment, after 3 weeks of intense activity providing professional development and support to our lecturers to move to distance delivery, we move into the next stage of ensuring distance delivery challenges are provided with sufficient advise and information to solve these. Coupled with this work, is the next step of ensuring learning and teaching for the rest of the semester is also well resourced and supported. One key task will be to help lecturers re-configure summative assessments to allow for distance learning. We have begun looking into on-line invigilation/proctoring platforms. These tools come at some costs and summative assessments online have not been encouraged. However, there will be a few programmes requiring traditional exams, due to registration board requirements and we will need to find, evaluate, test and implement a process very quickly, if exams have to be run online.

The Easter 'break' has also provided some time to reflect on the swift changes. I have been ambivalent about the range of on-line tools we have been supporting our lecturers to use. In the main, these tools (LMS, video conferecing, video lecture capture), provide a way for our lecturers to replicate f2f teaching on-line. The 'push' content out to learners model, is still the majority approach instead of a 'pull' and co-constructed model of learning which is possible. Digital literacy challenges and some equity issues with learners access to hardware and infrastructure (wifi) mean some programmes have been able to move into a holding pattern of sorts. However, in the main, we still see the teacher directed model as predominant. Therefore, in a way, as with the earthquakes, the opportunity to sift practice has been lost, due to constraints of time and capability.   However, there will be pockets of innovation, these we need to record, evaluate, celebrate and disseminate.

Derek Wenmouth provides some ideas for moving forward. There is need to think through what is to be emphased, going forward. Is education to meet compliance/'quality'/learner outcomes? or should we transition to something better? In the VET sector, the combination of the sudden move to another mode of delivery, unfamiliar to many institutes, and the formation of the NZ Institute of Skills and Technology, provide a once in a generation opportunity to shift practice. We learnt much from coping with the earthquakes, almost a decade ago. However, may initiatives moved back to the status quo once the market driven model of education took precedence. After all, Canterbury providers had to compete with all the other institutes and 'doing thing differently' was often 'less cost efficient'

Hopefully, this time around, some of the learnings from having to move to another form of delivery, will provide the nucleus for really actioning the mantra of 'the learner at the heart of learning'. As meeting the covid-19 challenge has shown, we have the technology and much of the capability with some innovation being shown. These need to be tapped into, going into the future, to ensure VET is 'seamless' as far as the learner is concerned and that 'delivery' is driven by the learner, not by the educational provider, as has been the case thus far.

Are you zoomed out?

I think I can speak for many when I say 'I am zoomed out!'. Last week, our team ran 4 workshops for our lecturers as they prepare to embark on distance learning. We had daily zoom team meetings to coordinate the workshops, debrief and additional meetings with our learning technologies to work out the technology. Average number of video conferencing meetings - 4 per day! All of this activity, left little time to do actual work.

This week, we are only offering one workshop this morning, to tie things together and bring the series of 'distance learning teaching' workshops to a close. However, we will be supporting the learning technologies team with their workshops covering our core learning platforms, Moodle, Panopto (for video sharing) and zoom (for video conferencing). They are offering 5 workshops this week, Taking that is a short week as Friday is a public holiday, it will be another busy week on-line in virtual meetings.

Therefore, it was good to read through this blog by Daniel Stanford on iddblog on alternatives to video conferencing. Our lecturers have become attached to zoom as it provides an easy entry into distance teaching. However, the 'stage on the sage' delivery approach is prevalent when all you do when you move to teaching on-line, is replicate the lecture. Therefore, the blog provides a platform for thinking through, more critically, the other ways possible to connect with and engage our learners.

Working from home

We live in challenging times. Although the number of covid-19 cases in NZ is still low and almost all originating from returning Kiwis or tourists, the government has raised alert level to 2 on Saturday, out of a 4 level scale.

Following have been persistent calls to raise the level to 4 , basically to snuff out any possibility of virus spread NOW rather than wait until there is clear evidence of community dispersal.

Given the dire experiences in China, Europe and now Australia (with a lockdown imminent in NSW and Victoria), it is perhaps best to pay attention to the calls for lockdown now rather than later :(

As part of level 2 alert, all employees who are able to are called to work from home. So today, after a series of planning meetings, all of my division will be working from home. We have had several 'tryout' days in the past two weeks. Zoom, our video conferencing platform and microsoft Teams have been mainstays for work productivity along with email and the Teams 'chat function'. As an institution, we are better placed than nine years ago, when the Christchurch earthquake struck and we lost all access to our internal networks and physical entry to our main campus for a whole semester.

However, many of our programmes, due to their vocational nature, will be hard pushed to go fully on-line. The practice-based / hands-on emphasis for our courses makes going fully into on-line and distance delivery, a major challenge. The focus for these courses is to develop small and well-structured 'projects' or inquiries for students to apply what they have learnt so far, to complete. We will evaluate how this approach has worked after things calm down.

For the moments, it will take some adjustment for all our team and the wider Ara community to adjust to working from home, whilst still being able to support each other as we move through the challenge.

21st century elearning - virtual schools

Yesterday, I attended a presentation by Professor. Niki Davis, University of Canterbury and Bridget Somekh, Canterbury fellow from Manchester Metropolitan University on 21st century elearning at a CPIT lunch time meeting convened by Nick Ford.
An example of 21st century elearning was presented via case studies of virtual schools. This was defined as primary and secondary school students being able to learn from a teacher who was not situated geographically in the same school.

Case studies were presented on the Florida virtual school, Iowa learning online and an example from the UK called ‘not school’ convened by Anglia Ruskin Ultralab (now disbanded). Each virtual school had different organisational and funding structures and met various objectives. What most had in common was the ability to provide access to specialised teachers who were recognised as leaders in their field.

Many virtual schools are set up around video conferencing facilities so that a teacher is able to teach more than one class at a time, one in physically in front of them and another linked to them via video conferencing. This provided opportunities for students in smaller schools and in rural / remote areas to study subjects they were interested in. The UK example catered to students who had been removed from the school system or who had reasons that prevented them from attending school (eg. Victims of bullying).

All in, interesting to learn about the diversity in virtual schooling, be provided with examples of teachers who exemplify good elearning practice and view the technology currently in use.