Building community knowledge about learning and teaching through technology

Education is changing. In response to demand for more and better education - more people to higher levels of attainment - the institutions that offer vocational and higher education are having to find ways of doing this without commensurate increase in funding. The only way to improve quality and scale without higher cost is to deploy technology. So there is extensive activity across schools, FE and HE. Investment in all sectors has enabled education to develop a wide range of resources, skills, and teaching methods that make use of many different kinds of technology. However, the activity has not yet focused on achieving the greater productivity we need for all young people to achieve their learning potential. The new policy review of professionalism in the FE sector, in New Challenges, New Chances, makes it timely to investigate how teachers themselves can be supported in developing new models of teaching and learning, given the right tools.

A recent ESRC/EPSRC-funded project produced a new kind of research tool, the Learning Designer, to help the teaching community to innovate effectively and efficiently. The interactive tool elicits the characteristics of a teacher's good pedagogic idea in a structured form, similar to a lesson plan. The program assigns properties to the design: e.g. type of learning outcome, nature of the learning activity, amount of learner and teacher time needed, use of technology, aspects of differentiation. Therefore the program has some knowledge about the learning design, making the Learning Designer a unique and valuable design tool because it can
analyse the teacher's design and provide feedback on the nature of the learner experience, and teacher and learner workload;
use its known properties to find relevant technology-based learning designs that offer alternative ways of teaching to that learning outcome;
store and represent the pedagogy in a form that other teachers can find, adopt and adapt ideas for their own context.

The tool therefore helps teachers build on each others' best ideas for using technology, test them in their own context, improve them, and then use the same tool to contribute their improved versions to the community library. The evaluation with users demonstrated that teachers liked having feedback on their design, thought more about their students' activities, reflected more on workload, and appreciated seeing interesting new ideas for the use of technology.

Now we ask: does it scale up, improve the quality of the learning experience, and improve teacher productivity? We want to test the capacity of the Learning Designer to improve the professionalism of teachers as innovators. We will use three main strands of work to
1. co-develop with teachers a library of learning designs on which teachers can build
2. use community requirements to develop the tool and its links further
3. work with institutions to evaluate how the tool works in practice.
The project will run webinars, workshops, and online support to help teachers create collaboratively their own learning designs to focus on better use of technology. This will develop the community-generated peer-tested library of good pedagogic designs and specifications for software adaptations.

The Learning Designer itself helps to measure impact through student evaluation: designs specify the form of assessment, and the explicit online representation of pedagogy enables students to provide targeted feedback by annotating the same representation.

The tool tests productivity by comparing teacher workload for different designs. In doing so it demonstrates the value of reusing existing designs or resources, which in turn can promote the use of Open Educational Resources. The project work should help our partner colleges to use the data and information generated by their learning management systems to track teacher productivity in terms of enhanced student learning and improved teacher workload.

The motivation for this project is the need to improve the learning experience and attainment of post-16 students, both for their personal benefit and to enable them to contribute to the knowledge economy. Educational institutions and the teaching community know the importance of deploying technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching and learning - this is reflected in many policy documents - but have had little investment, in their time and personal development, for working out how to do this. The technology evolves rapidly, and investment has been targeted more at hardware and software than at R&D for optimising its use. Our research has shown that an interactive learning design tool can support teachers in focusing on the effectiveness and efficiency of their teaching, and in sharing their best ideas. Now we set out to develop this shared community knowledge of how to improve teaching and learning.

Our aim is to help teachers help learners.

The principal tangible output will be a public library of shared learning designs created by the teachers in our partner schools and colleges. To collect and organise these designs the project will use an interactive design tool developed by an earlier ESRC-EPSRC-funded project. The Learning Designer provides a unique methodology for building a public library of learning designs because it helps teachers design, analyse and organise them in terms of the pedagogies and technologies they wish to use. By adopting, improving and sharing their best ideas, teachers can more easily discover how best to use technology to give their students an efficient and effective learning experience.

To achieve this, the project team has planned activities on several fronts:
> dissemination of the idea behind the Learning Designer: i.e. that teachers can innovate with new technology more effectively if they build their knowledge collaboratively;
> co-development with central staff in colleges to integrate the tool and the developing library of learning designs into the normal teaching-learning process;
> collaboration with teaching staff to assist them in using the Learning Designer to generate, test, and share their best ideas, and to build on other teachers' ideas;
> co-development of the public library of learning designs, to ensure that alternative designs relevant to what they are working on in the Learning Designer can be found and presented to teachers at the point of need;
> updating of the advice and guidance in the tool to link teacher-designers to evidence and research relevant to their current pedagogic decisions at the point of need;
> upgrading of the Learning Designer in response to further user requirements, to ensure it blends easily into individual and institutional practice.

These activities aim to contribute four types of impact:
* Academic impact, in the form of a collection of learning designs structured according to theory-based concepts of pedagogy, providing a well-organised body of evidence about how teachers conceptualise their teaching, useful for further theory development in the under-theorised area of technology-based pedagogies.
* Professional impact, in the form of a new type of methodology to develop teachers' professionalism in the skill of optimising the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning in a way that is more likely to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness of student learning and attainment.
* Economic impact, in the form of help for educational institutions to adapt to a challenging and changing environment by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their use of technology for teaching and learning.
* Societal impact, in the form of graduates who have been schooled in the use of new technologies for effective independent learning, who are more likely to include this capability in their continuing use of technology for work and leisure.