RA5a

University of Bolton Submission to the RAE Education Panel 2008

Research Mission
The University of Bolton’s research mission in Education since 2001 has been focused on two key areas of concern: (1) to have an international impact on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for learning and learning management, in particular in research into issues around the adoption of technologies that embrace open standards for interoperability; and (2) to lead research and influence practice in the learning and skills (formerly post-school), sector (LSS) in particular with regard to competence and vocational education and training. Since 2001, we have become international research leaders in both these areas through the work of two research groups in pursuing this mission: the Learning Technology Research Group, now led by a new Institute for Educational Cybernetics (IEC); and the Education Policy Group within our School of Arts, Media and Education.

Strategic investment in Research into eLearning
The University has seen the development of research in education as crucial to its overall strategic plan for two reasons: (a) to encourage the growth of research activity in one of its key subject areas, and (b) to benefit from the results of the research in the development of teaching across the university. As part of this strategy the University created a new chair in e-Learning in 2002 to which Professor Oleg Liber was appointed. His role was (a) to develop research activities, including winning externally funded projects and raising the University’s profile nationally and internationally; and (b) to promote new e-Learning approaches across the University. Consequently the focus has been on applied research that would have an impact on educational practice.

Major successes in gaining external funding resulted in the University establishing a new Institute for Educational Cybernetics as a full cost centre of the University, with Professor Liber as Director. All externally funded eLearning research is based here, and the University has additionally invested in three new full time research posts: a Readership in eLearning in 2006 (to allow continued development of the research profile); and two more full-time and one part-time Readerships in 2007 to research, develop and promote the use of technology to support inquiry-based learning across the University. The University is acutely aware of changing learner profiles as communication technology becomes more widely adopted in society, and the need to adapt the way education is made available to them. It expects its investment in eLearning research to pay dividends in the future by providing guidance on new technologies and their implications for pedagogy and access.

The combination of external funding and University investment has resulted in an institute with a full range of staff from researchers to readers, creating the possibility of progression within the institute. All staff members have a personal development plan (PDP), reviewed annually, and are encouraged and supported in developing their own research interests and in finding funding to make them possible. The institute has established a seminar programme, where all staff members present their work and interests for critical review and as a mechanism for developing their research and publication skills.

Partnerships
Applied research requires a close engagement with external partners, and the success of IEC’s research and development work has been made possible by its strong collaboration with national and international partners, a consequence of the high international profile of its work. IEC provides a national development service for JISC, the result of a successful tender in 2005 and building on a much extended JISC funded project that was awarded to and managed by Professor Liber at his previous University and that came with him to Bolton when he joined the staff in 2002. The service is entitled the JISC Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (JISC CETIS), and has the following aims:
 * 1) .	Provide strategic advice to JISC on eLearning developments and how these should affect JISC funding programmes
 * 2) .	Represent JISC and the HE and FE sectors on international eLearning interoperability standards bodies
 * 3) .	Inform the sector on developments in eLearning and consult the community on future requirements for educational technology development through the establishment and management of Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
 * 4) .	Provide support for JISC funding programmes and advise projects on development issues

JISC CETIS is managed by IEC, and includes the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, Heriot Watt University’s Institute for Computer Based Learning and the Centre for Recording Achievement as partners. It is crucial for the successful delivery of the JISC service that there is a close relationship with HE and FE institutions, for which the service is ultimately provided. Many universities and colleges are members of the JISC CETIS special interest groups, resulting in a wide network of collaborations. This has had the added benefit of helping build partnerships with some participating institutions to develop funding proposals and win projects, and it has been a key part of the IEC strategy to pursue European Framework Programme funding using these partnerships and building on the work of the JISC CETIS service.

The development of interoperability standards requires that close working relationships are built and maintained with relevant national and international bodies, including standards bodies, government agencies and other universities and colleges. These are too numerous to list comprehensively, but especially close working relationships are had with the IMS Global Learning Consortium, SURF (Netherlands) and DEST  (Australia) in developing state interventions into technology development, and in the UK with BECTA  in elaborating the roll-out of the DfES e-Strategy.

IEC has also been an invited partner in three European Framework Programme Six projects during this period, in recognition of its expertise in educational technology standards and their application. This has in involved partnerships with leading European Universities (the Open University of the Netherlands, the Fraunhofer Institute, INSEAD and many others) and companies (e.g. Logica, the Open Group).

Interdisciplinary Research
e-Learning is an interdisciplinary subject, bringing together Computer Science, Information Science and Education, but also incorporating Psychology, Sociology and Management Science. The department’s name, the Institute for Educational Cybernetics was chosen to represent that interdisciplinarity, Cybernetics being the name given to the subject that brought together elements of Biology, Engineering and the Social Sciences. We seek to explore the application of Cybernetics to Education, researching the implications of technology for the organisation and operation of the education system and its components. Members of the IEC have backgrounds in subjects as diverse as Art, Mathematics, Computer Science, English, Psychology, Music, Biology, Chemistry, Philosophy and Management Science, and bring together insights from all of these, grounded in the discipline of Cybernetics.

Successes and projects in eLearning
The Institute for Educational Cybernetics brings together a number of activities started and maintained by its director, Professor Oleg Liber, and it has developed a high international standard of research. In the current assessment period we have become the one of the premier research groups in Learning Technology in Europe attaining the status of an international leader. We have also become a main node in European educational technology projects. The capture of large scale funding to research the application of educational technologies in Higher and Further Education has given us international eminence in this fast-moving field. In this RAE period, individual staff members have considerably enhanced their reputations nationally and internationally. Evidence for this now follows.

Professor Oleg Liber has a strong reputation as a leading international researcher in the field of educational technology. He followed up the hugely influential JISC Report “A Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of Virtual Learning Environments”, with a new report with the same co-author for JISC entitled “A Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of eLearning Tools”, developing the instruments proposed in the earlier report and applying them to the new technological environment. This report has also had a major global impact, and is widely cited and used by institutions in the design and planning of their e-learning provision. He has been one of the main proponents internationally of the use of educational cybernetics to inform and illuminate the role information technologies can play in the education system. His appointment to the University led to the aforementioned JISC project work, most notably the CETIS project being transferred from his previous University. In 2002-3 this project alone had funding of £540,000. Since its establishment in 1998 CETIS has played a key role on behalf of JISC in researching the standardisation requirements for the UK Higher and Further Education sectors, and then representing the national position on bodies seeking to develop specifications for standards, most notably the IMS Global Learning Consortium, but also including the IEEE Learning Technology Committee and the European CEN/ISSS learning technology working group. Following an independent review of the CETIS project, the JISC decide that the work of CETIS was of such importance to Higher and Further Education that a formal national service was needed to continue and extend the work of CETIS. The University of Bolton was successful in winning the tender, and in August 2006 launched the renamed JISC CETIS service, with annual funding of just under £1 million and a five year contract.

CETIS has been hugely influential in helping JISC define and establish its e-learning development programme. Based on recommendations from CETIS, JISC adopted a service-oriented framework for its future projects, and commissioned CETIS to elaborate the framework (known as the eLearning Framework or ELF). This was seen as being of such major significance that it was extended to include other parts of JISC and became the eFramework. A formal organisation has been established to provide governance for the eFramework, partnered by the Department for Education, Science and Training (DEST) in Australia, and great interest has been shown in this work by other international agencies. Working within this partnership CETIS has contributed to research into and development of a number of reference models addressing specific domains of activity. One reference model project CETIS was involved in addressed the challenge of developing a specification for a standardised way of representing course related information. The specification is known as XCRI (eXchange of Course Related Information), and is being widely adopted. CETIS has been given funds of £120,000 to undertake further action research in this area, to test the specification and to support and evaluate the success of other projects exploiting the standard before it is taken through a formal standards process.

The success of this work was due to the world leading contributions of CETIS staff in identifying where standards were important for the sector, actually contributing to the development of specifications, and then in promoting and supporting the adoption of standards. In 2002 another project was awarded by JISC to Professor Liber entitled the RELOAD project (Reusable Learning Object Authoring and Design. Led by Phillip Beauvoir, this £200,000 project undertook action research into the design and development of a software system that enabled standards-based e-learning materials to be developed. It implemented several interoperability standards: IEEE Learning Object Metadata, IMS Content Packaging, and SCORM 2004. It has since become the de facto reference implementation of these standards, acknowledged in particular by the US government’s Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative, the authors of SCORM. It is currently the most widely used software system in the world for this particular activity.

CETIS' work in standards development led to the Professor Liber’s team being invited to partner in the €600,000 UNFOLD project, a project under the European Union's 6th Framework programme researching the socio-technical conditions needed to foster the adoption of the IMS Learning Design specification. This project was managed by David Griffiths (now a staff member in IEC) of the University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, the project’s coordinating partner. The Learning Design specification permits the design of learning activities that support multiple learners and a wide range of pedagogic approaches within a technological environment. During this project Phillip Beauvoir researched and developed a Learning Design Author in RELOAD, now widely recognised as the reference implementation of the IMS LD specification.

RELOAD was selected as a core technology by the TELCERT project, a research and innovation project under the European Union's 6th Framework programme led by the Open Group and with CETIS as a contributing partner. Other academic partners included the Open University of the Netherlands, the Fraunhofer Institute, the University of Koblenz and the Italian Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI). The aim of the project was to help transform the adoption of standards-based e-Learning products and services, and involved research into the technological tools needed to facilitate this process. Building on the existing RELOAD code base, Dr Roy Cherian developed the RELOAD Content Re-engineering Tool (CRT), which allowed any XML schema based specification to be edited by the RELOAD software system. This now forms a key part of the toolset provided by TELCERT to organisations seeking to adopt standards based e-learning.

In 2005, Professor Liber was awarded a £150,000 project by JISC to research and develop a reference model for Personal Learning Environments (PLE), a term that was first coined by Professor Liber. The project was jointly led by Scott Wilson and Mark Johnson. Wilson’s unique contributions involved developing a pattern language for describing the use of software tools influenced by Alexander’s Pattern Language. Johnson complemented this by bringing insights from philosophy, including from Critical Realism and Phenomenology to define and describe the underlying concepts, boundaries and components of PLEs. A cybernetic model allowed these different viewpoints to be integrated, and resulted in a number of recommendations for further development work in this area. The project also provided a concrete example in the form of a software prototype, implemented by Phillip Beauvoir and named PLEX. The PLE project has resulted in many invitations for conference presentations, one of which won the best short paper award at the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) conference, 2006.

The concept of a Personal Learning Environment has become a subject of wide discussion in eLearning and Internet communities, and is making a major impact on the future development of eLearning systems. Recommendations from this project have been adopted by JISC in a subsequent call for projects to develop personal learning tools. A further project has been awarded to IEC with funds of £50,000 by JISC to research how PLEs can be interfaced with repositories of learning materials.

In 2005 IEC were partners in a successful Integrated Research Project proposal to the European Union Framework Programme 6, entitled Ten Competence. Led by the Open University of the Netherlands, this project won €14 million over four years to develop a new infrastructure for lifelong learning in Europe, with IEC receiving €1 million of that over the project’s life. IEC has a number of roles in the project. Scott Wilson has played a major role in defining the architecture of the total software system; David Griffiths has coordinated partners’ collaboration in research into software design; and Phillip Beauvoir has led the development of an enhanced Learning Design system, and contributed to the development of the Personal Competence Manager, a personal learning system founded on principles developed in the earlier PLE reference model project. This project brings together much of the research activity previously undertaken with IEC into an integrated learning and teaching system, with IEC playing a leading role in research into software design and development.

In 2007 IEC won another JISC project to research the issues faced by students transferring from FE to HE, and to research how new social software systems can facilitate this process in transforming learning habits. This project involves partners in the FE sector, the Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance and a number of commercial partners, and is led by Mark Johnson, Reader in Applied Research into Educational Technology and Systems.

In 2007 IEC employed Stephen Powell and Richard Millwood, formerly of Ultralab at Anglia Ruskin University as Readers to research the issues in developing and delivering university wide post-graduate courses that employ an inquiry-based approach, are work-based, and use modern social software as a means of learner support and community building. Millwood has worked in the field for 30 years, growing from early educational software development in the Computers in the Curriculum Project at Kings' College London to leadership in research at Anglia Ruskin, where he was director of Ultralab. He led the action research activity of the 50 staff as Reader and supervised two PhD students to successful conclusion in this period. Powell was involved in Ultralab's research from 1998 to 2007, most notably directing the Ultraversity Project involving 20 personnel. Millwood and Powell are both renowned for their central role in developing Talking Heads (an online community for headteachers) and NotSchool for the DfES, followed by Ultraversity, an undergraduate enquiry-based degree offered by their former University which was hugely successful in providing a new model of Higher Education for learners for whom current provision does not fit. Their research is exploring the social, technological, organisational and pedagogic issues in providing this form of interdisciplinary learning and involves innovation in negotiated action inquiry, assessment for learning developing Winter's patchwork text model and online community as a tool for enhancing learning.

Technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and as learners and teachers become increasingly comfortable with its social use this will have an impact on how it can be used in education and the kinds of services institutions will need to provide. This interface between the personal and institutional use of technology provides rich opportunities for research-based interventions, and is where the IEC will be putting its main effort in the coming period, building on its earlier ground-breaking work with Personal Learning Environments and interoperability standards, and founded on a cybernetic approach to understanding organisational concerns.

Esteem indicators
Professor Oleg Liber is an internationally regarded figure within the educational technology community. He has given many invited and keynote papers and is frequently invited to join national and international committees.
 * 1) .	Universities in the 21st Century. Keynote Address at the Online Educa Conference, Berlin 2002
 * 2) .	Technological challenges for the re-design of the education system. Keynote Address, 6th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2006), Kerkrade, NL
 * 3) .	Member of the editorial committee of the International Journal for Learning Environments
 * 4) .	Guest editor (with Mark Johnson) of the special edition of the International Journal for Learning Environments on Personal Learning Environments (Dec 2007).

David Griffiths


 * 1) .	Guest Editor (with Oleg Liber and Rob Koper) of a TENCompetence Special Issue of the International Journal of Learning Technology (IJLT) (forthcoming)
 * 2) .	The state of IMS Learning Design three years on. Keynote address at the SPEDECE conference, Barcelona 2005. http://www.uoc.edu/symposia/spdece05/contribuciones.html
 * 3) .	Member of the Program Committee for the IADIS Web Based Communities Conference, 2007. http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/2007/committees.asp
 * 4) .	Learning Repositories: the view from the UK. Keynote address at the SPEDECE conference, Bilbao 2007. http://spdece07.ehu.es/html/programa.htm

Scott Wilson has been heavily involved in the development of technical standards, and has contributed to a range of standards and specifications from IMS, BSI, and IETF. More recently he has been engaged in community standardisation processes, including XCRI and Micro formats.


 * 1) .	Key contributor to the e-Framework for Education and Research, an international strategic partnership for IT management in the education sectors of the UK, Netherlands, and Australia.
 * 2) .	Member of the advisory board for BECTA's Learning Platform Strategy
 * 3) .	Member of the editorial advisory board of the international journal Campus Wide Information Systems.
 * 4) .	His presentation of the co-authored paper “Developing a Reference Model to describe the Personal Learning Environment” (Milligan, Beauvoir, Johnson, Sharples, Wilson and Liber 2006) won the best short paper award at the ECTEL conference in Crete 2006.

Richard Millwood is the former director of Ultralab at Anglia Ruskin University, and has a strong reputation for academic leadership in educational technology in schools and higher education. A selection of esteem indicators are:


 * 1) .	Invited talk to The Guardian Higher Education Summit, London, February 2006
 * 2) .	Invited talk at the ICT in Higher Education conference, London 2006
 * 3) .	Member of editorial board for the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning
 * 4) .	Member of editorial board for the Journal Technology, Pedagogy and Education.

Paul Hollins is a highly regarded expert in the field of Multi-User Virtual Environments and online games, and is regularly invited to contribute to and chair conference sessions.
 * 1) .	Invited speaker at the International Games Developers Association Conference Academic Day 2002
 * 2) .	Invited speaker at the BECTA Annual Conference 2005,
 * 3) .	Invited speaker at the World of Learning "Using Serious Games in Learning" conference 2006
 * 4) .	Academic board member of the Association of New Generation Interactive Leisure Simulation. (ANGILS),

(2) The Education Policy Group
The Education Policy Research Group was established by Professor Terry Hyland in September 2000 at the time of his appointment as Professor in Post-Compulsory Education and Training at Bolton. From the outset its key aims were - in the process of fostering an active research culture in what was a predominantly practitioner-oriented department concerned principally with post-school teacher training and development - to produce high quality policy studies, both philosophical and empirical, with the aim of influencing research and practice in the post-school, now the learning and skills sector (LSS).

The Education Department had no research students when Professor Hyland took up his post in September 2000 and now has 13, 11 part-time and 2 full-time students (with 1 completion in 2007)

As part of the developing research strategy for the Policy Group, Professor Hyland has written joint conference and published papers with group members and is currently involved in a collaborative project on work-based learning with the University of Huddersfield. Future plans include work on the literacy and numeracy common core introduced into PGCE programmes in 2007 (David Kitchener) on blended learning incorporating ICT (Maria Rodriguez-Yborra) and on developing confidence in post-school learners (continuing collaborative work between Terry and Marie Norman). In addition, the general work on monitoring and analysing policy - particularly in the area of vocational education and training (VET)- developments in the LSS continues, most recently with the Guide to Vocational Education and Training written with Professor Christopher Winch of Kings College (Continuum, 2007).

Esteem
Professor Terry Hyland was appointed as an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Huddersfield in June 2006, and is a member of the Institute for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. He has been external examiner for the EdD in Lifelong Learning, University of Nottingham (2001-5), the Advanced Certificate in Education (Post-Compulsory) at Canterbury Christ Church University College (2002-5), and the PGCE/BA course at the University of Sunderland (2000-2004). Professor Hyland has also been active as external examiner in the LSS examining 12 doctorates in the period 2001-7 He is currently external examiner on the PGCE/BA programme at the University of Surrey, and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Further and Higher Education and the Journal of Vocational Education and Training. In his policy studies on competence and vocational education and training (VET) Professor Hyland's work has been highly influential in the LSS, along with his work with Dr Merrill of Warwick University on further education trends. In addition to his outputs listed in RA1 (incorporating for the relevant 2001-2007 period, 2 books, 3 book chapters and 22 articles) other members of the group have produced significant and worthwhile public esteem outputs in the areas of inclusive education (Joe Whittaker), comparative vocational education and training (Chris Smith), literacy and numeracy (David Kitchener), and information and communication technology (Maria Rodriguez-Yborra).