Transcript of MP3 Audio File Presentation by Paul Bailey, JISC


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The Design for Learning Programme (I said I was going to go through this backwards) it - quite rightly (as Oleg just said) - it consists of about 13 or 14 projects at the moment. And within those projects, the sort of the structure that was built up... that we would start off with a models project, [points at slide] which is sitting in the middle there, that would look at pulling together all of the work that has happened so far in terms of the work that JISC has funded and the work that was out there... to look, from a theoretical point of view, at the models of learning stuff that had been put together. I know the sort of reports that sort of suggested they were ex-models of learning. I think ten seems to be a number that comes up quite commonly, I don't know why. Why not eleven or nine? And that then, based on those models, that some tools would sort of emerge or be developed and these were the pedagogical planners. We'd wrap around this a series of support and evaluation work, which was the support project that now CETIS is looking after and some formative evaluation, and then build on that with a number of implementation and development projects looking at developing the tools further and testing things out.

I think... I'm learning now, after I've been out for six months, what's going on with this Programme, because it's something that we were talking about six months ago and the projects have been funded since I came. But to hear Amanda talking about the project that's going on at Liverpool Hope, it sounds really exciting. I think, as Oleg says, these things are actually starting to happen.

I'm going to go backwards through this, because I want to take you back to somewhere where this actually came from where we were talking about the Programme. We were talking about... and I think this probably relates to some of the things we've discussed so far today. We looked at these four areas... Practice - what there are a lot of people actually doing out there in terms of learning. [Points to slide] That's the one up in this corner here. [Points to slide] Down in the bottom - specifications development. I think in there we'll just put in Learning Design now to keep life simple. What we'd been doing was quite a lot of conceptual development testing, i.e. people were theoretically doing this on paper. So they were saying "well, let's look at practice, what's happening, can we actually ground this up somewhere in technology?" What also was happening was a number of tools being developed that was taking these specifications - or not even taking the specifications, taking some other conceptual model and trying to relate it and use it in practice. So the Programme was built around the idea of trying to bring all these bits together and trying to see whether what was actually happening in this tools-building specification world could be made to relate to the practice theoretical models-type world that was happening out there - because the two had been sort of happening almost independently. We'd sort of come from this bottom-up top-down and sort of from the inside-out and it was a matter of trying to pull all those bits together.

So we ended up, I think, with a Programme that had, I think, quite a wide range of aims and Design for Learning was looking at doing all these things - and I know we’re going to go for coffee - but one of the things is really from your point of view: which of these is the important things of these aims that we could start to pull out of this Programme? It's got another 12 months to run. There are a number of things, obviously, we want to do - promoting the sharing of expertise, promoting the actual sharing of learning designs, and testing those things out. But we've got an opportunity now that the Programme is up and the running. The projects are doing good stuff. They're there and, I think, along with all the other work that's happening in these areas (and the work that you can probably bring along as well), it's an area where we can start to decide quite strategically what we want to pull out and how we want to move things forward. So they were the sort of discussion questions if we’d had time.

And just to put it into a wider context. I could probably go up and up and up in wider contexts and probably end up where Bill started this morning! But within the pedagogy strand itself, the Design for Learning bit is one strand that is working there at the moment, looking - and this is the other thing - it is looking very much at the practitioner planning process - that has been the focus of it. There's another strand that is looking at the learner experience, but not - we don't have anything, I think... that I don't know the projects in enough detail - that's actually looking at Design for Learning in a way - I think you touched on it - a way that learners could pick up learning designs and actually implement them and use them themselves. I think that's an area certainly from our Programme that we’re missing.

So that's sort of the overview of where the programme is at the moment and where it's going, but I think we're at a good stage. The projects have got settled in. They're doing some good work. There's another 12 months to go and an opportunity to sort of start with CETIS and with the support project to look at what it is we could really usefully extract out of that in terms of lessons, in terms of stuff, and how we could start to just shape and manipulate things, so that they go in the direction where we could get something really good. So in 12 months time, when you have your next conference, it’ll be... I mean the change in... the progression in 12 months has been enormous, hasn't it? And to see another 12 months... we could have it cracked by another year's time, couldn't we? OK. Thank you.