Resource Success? It Bears Thinking About!

How do you tell if a learning resource is successful?

You have to use it of course! Or at least, it has to be observed being used by learners who may benefit from it in some way.

But there’s more to it than that . . .

A game-based resource can be seen to be popular and for this it gets a big tick in a check-box.

But does a learning resource need to be popular to be successful?
Does the popular resource assist the learner to meet the target learning objective?

Extensive research on a whole series of resources might throw some light on these questions. But let’s just limit the discussion here to one resource.

How do you know if a learning resource is effective in helping learners reach the objective or objectives the resource was designed to meet?

This needs more than just observation.

Learner focus

Attention must be focused on what the learner has gained by using the resource. This acquisition has to be very specific if the resource is to be regarded as a useful ‘learning object’.

Oops, I’ve used that term!

I know! ’Learning Object’ is not a popular term among some educators. At least the term implies that the resource actually has an objective associated with it. Whether the resource assists learners to meet the objective is quite another matter.

In fact, some very good learning resources are often found to meet objectives that are not necessarily directly related to the objective or objectives that the learners were supposed to be reaching. That’s life! Sometimes it just happens that way.

So how do we know when a resource is meeting its objective?

It’s taken me a few hundred words to get to this nitty-gritty stage.
How do we know the resource is really achieving the learning that was intended to happen?

As obvious though the answer may seem to be, it is often something that’s completely overlooked when a resource has been planned, crafted and produced for learner use.

Follow up

One of the important stages in the development of any course module, or even one of its components, is the time consuming and difficult process of assessing its real worth. It’s one of these stages that teachers and developers would rather not get too far into, for it is both complicated and complex. And it takes a lot of time.

But it is obviously very important.It means that a series of analyses has to be performed involving the learners.

As well, it has to involve a thing called ‘learner assessment’. Oops! Another not too popular term.




That’s right! The learner has to be tested. And this is difficult, for how do we know that the assessment item designed to test learner achievement assesses effectively the objective that it’s meant to?
This brings us more or less back to where we started.

Sorry folks! It’s the dogged chicken and egg story all over again.

Before we can be sure that the assessment item is any use, first it must be tested! And of course, this always means learner involvement.

Compounding problems

We now have learner assessment as well as learning resource design to deal with. It’s a bit like the collective effect of errors, if you’re familiar with how that works.

Small errors that occur at stages of a process tend to be cumulative. They add up to one significant error in the end. Often this error can be big enough to discount the whole process.

Catch my drift?

“What does it all mean then?” you say.

Frankly, it means that teaching and learning is a difficult process to assess. The learning that could possibly take place through the planning, building and subsequent use of a learning resource by learners is actually very difficult to assess.

Can you imagine the tasks involved in checking properly a whole course made up of multiple series of resources?

Time consuming? Yes! This alone is a factor that puts teachers and developers off the whole idea of attempting that all-important final stage of checking to see if it all works.

If you think that building a successful learning resource is a quick and easy thing to do, then maybe you should think again.

Change - A Possible Barrier to Progress

Change has come up a lot in the blogosphere recently.

Andrea Hernandez prompted me to write one of my post-type comments against her recent post on agents of change:

Seeds, Serendipity, Sustainability.

I thank her for the opportunity for that reflection. Part of my comment to her ran something like this:

Always, when I learn about change being brought about, I ask questions. I ask why we are changing and I listen. The reply I get allows me to decide whether the change that's proposed is something I'd support.

If I am confronted with the question, "Don't you support change?" my knee-jerk reaction is always to ask again, "What change or changes am I being asked to support?"

If I get back nothing but an argument on change, I become suspicious that the goal of the agent for change is simply to change, without recourse to why, how, or if a proposed change is for a real benefit.

There is always the possibility that change could mean a retrograde shift - moving back to what was - or moving to situations that are of no real benefit or worse. Yet it is always assumed that 'change' is good and that it means moving forward.

Why do I think like this?

Much of the change that I have been coerced into accepting in education over many years has not been thought through beforehand. It is only years, months or even weeks later, when in hindsight, it's seen that the enacted change was not needed, or was falsely initiated, or that there was a political agenda.

So it was for me with the introduction of unit standards to New Zealand secondary education in the mid-90s and with the introduction of NCEA this century.

When I heard of the proposed introduction of national standards to primary education in New Zealand, I experienced powerful déjà vu.
I had a dizzy sinking feeling, and something inside my head shouted, “Here we go again!”

When I hear John Hattie speak about the introduction of national standards, I think, “John! You’ve got it right mate!”



Video - John Hattie, Education Leaders Forum, Rotorua, October 2009

The Ubiquitous Question - a reflection on learning

“. . . unless you speak up... you will not be learning . . .”
Judy Jacob’s comment on Working With Online Learning Communities

I often wonder if our current education systems drive us to make invalid assumptions about how learning happens. I’m talking about educators here, not necessarily members of their learning communities.

Curious though it may seem, I learnt lots as I bumbled my way through high school. Not because I was especially able or bright.

I had an annoying knack of being outspoken when I couldn’t understand things. I hated not knowing what was going on. I asked questions.

The teaching moment

Fortunately, I had good teachers. They recognised the teaching moments that I presented to them – on a plate. I gained the respect of my teachers, probably solely because of this attribute of asking questions, for I certainly wasn’t a model student.

Good teachers admire learners who ask pertinent questions. It makes them feel wanted. Hence their intolerance of impertinence, I guess.

Asking a question offers a teacher the opportunity to fulfil that so-often-difficult-to-attain goal of the pedagogue. The goal is to teach relevantly. While it’s true that learners tend to engage more in learning when they interact during a ‘lesson’, I’m not so sure that speaking up or even asking a question is necessarily exclusive for learning to occur.

Questions and answers

One dated definition of education is ‘the ability to learn from a book’
(this implies the educated is still learning). You can’t ask a book a question. Today, we like our educated learners to learn from the Internet, using searches, networking and the like.

It’s presumed that these media permit the learner to ask questions. And the belief persists that asking a question – or even just speaking up – is so very necessary for learning to occur.

I’ve always thought of thinking as a stream of thought statements and questions, asked and possibly answered in the mind. My assumption is that a thinker asks questions of herself or himself and that’s what initiates further thinking.

Lying in bed, just awake, on a Saturday morning, having no plan pending for the unfolding day, my thoughts might go something like this:

“Shall I get up now? Or will I just lie here blissfully embalmed in the cosy bedding for half an hour?

I wonder what the weather’s like? Perhaps I could get the garden dug? Or maybe give the shed that coat of paint?

Ah, but isn’t it nice to lie in on a Saturday morning?”

This sort of discourse assists me to learn about how I feel. It can figure how the day that’s just beginning can become a part of my life. So yes, my assumption about asking questions still works. Even if I learn nothing of what’s happening outside my head, I can learn something about myself.

Assumptions on learning

So why do teachers assume that no learning happens without questions being asked? I think they are referring to what I call active questions, spoken or typed in a txt or email, or other such method of communication between two or more people. There is an assumption that the question has to be aired. But I am puzzled at how the idea fits with learning from a book.

It’s a point of view I’ve come across before, that of the lurker who never engages, never interacts and never asks questions. The inference is that the lurker never learns.

This is not the opinion of Nonnecke and Preece, who actually coined the phrase, Silent Participants for learners who lurk. They claim that learning can take place despite no participation from the learner. My own experience aligns with their research findings.

Etienne Wenger refers to community members who do not speak up as Legitimate Peripheral Participants. He recognises that learning happens even if the participation is only peripheral, that is to say the learners don't speak up.

Teaching, learning and assessment

Teachers are geared to assessment. Often they feel compelled to possess written evidence that a learner has reached an objective before they are convinced the objective has actually been learnt.

Assessment is forced participation on the part of the learner. Without engagement at the time of assessment, it could be construed that nothing can be achieved in an assessment test. Yet not achieving is hardy unequivocal evidence that learning hasn’t happened.

A principle upheld by designers of resources for distance learning is that if the student hasn’t been asked a question about a learning objective, and responds with the correct answer, the objective hasn’t been learnt. Prompting the learner to respond in this way gives the teacher an opportunity to record that learning has occurred. It tends to subscribe to the tick-box mentality, but at least it is a recordable event.

Questioning a way to learn

I’m not entirely opposed to the suggestion that questioning is a way to learn. Nor am I questioning the idea that learners will learn nothing if they don’t ask questions. My hunch is that questions are asked in the mind all the time. The trick of learning relevantly lies in asking the right questions.

A student who always has a question, and puts it, will learn. They can ask it out loud or online, to a teacher or to another learner. Or they can ask it in their own mind. As long as the learner keeps asking questions, there will be answers given in return and they can learn from those. This is especially the case if a learner knows a thing or two about metacognition, even if they don't know the word.

Do learners have to ask their questions directly? To a teacher, for instance? Do you think learners will not learn unless they speak up?

Or can they learn without asking questions?

What’s your take on learning and participation?

Is It Teaching? Is It Learning?

detail from Le Foyer de la Danse a l'Opera de la Rue Le Peletier - Degas

During part of my professional development appraisal this year, I was urged to incorporate student learning into my goals. I resisted this, defecting to goals where accountability clearly lies with my vigilance in identifying learner needs and in giving the learner appropriate and timely access to required, available learning resources and quality teaching.

My CEO, who I have a lot of respect for, mentioned in one of his addresses to staff last year that, as a school, we were responsible for student learning. The emphasis seems to be on the teacher taking responsibility for the learning. I challenge this point of view in this post.

courtesy Make Beliefs Comix

It’s all about learning

In discussing the differences between teaching and learning in a previous post, I used the throwaway line,

“it’s all about learning - you don’t talk about teaching anymore”.

There is more to this idea than one might think.

Everywhere I look in education, I see the teacher being charged with the responsibility for learning that occurs in the student. It is seldom that teaching is discussed. Even raising the matter of pedagogy (which incidentally is to do with teaching rather than learning) causes some concern among educators and sparks discussion that is more to do with learning than teaching.

Learner centred

There’s no doubt that the learner is where it is at, but the learner centeredness of today’s education suggests, perhaps erroneously, that teaching is not as important as learning. While I believe that teacher centred education is not what’s needed, the focus on the learner, brought about through a learner centred mind-set, has moved the teacher so far out of the spotlight that the learner is beginning to suffer.

I’ve been told on good authority that it’s not like this in some cultures. In Spain, for instance, even the idea that teachers take on leadership roles in working with groups of learners, rather than the more prominent function and traditional role of a teacher, is thought to be culturally strained. But in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and America the role of the teacher seems to be morphing into the background – a resource rather than a force.

Assessing the players

Part of the change in the limelight is to do with the idea behind the sage-on-the-stage. Even the guide-on-the-side has been slid behind the curtain. It is as if the teacher has become more a stagehand than a player, leaving the learner to extemporise in full view of everyone else.

I wonder that assessment has perhaps been a contributor to this shift. It certainly takes the emphasis off teaching, while forcing an undue importance onto what is assessable by a teacher. However, the subsequent effect only appears to put the spotlight on the learner.

Summative assessment is rightly seen as being to do with what’s been learnt, but it is not really learner centred. Formative assessment is to do with what’s yet to be learnt while giving positive feedback and encouragement to the learner on what’s been learnt. It is truly learner centred, yet it is often upstaged by summative assessment.

Learner engagement

The essential aspect of learner engagement comes into its own when considering what’s important for it to happen. This is where learner centeredness is appropriate and necessary.

A learner has to be interested in what’s being taught for engagement to be sustained. But the content of that teaching has to be relevant to the learner for interest to be initiated in the first place. When these conditions for engagement are met, the learning becomes entirely the responsibility of the learner.

It takes good teaching to identify what interests a learner and what content will be relevant to that interest, as well as appropriate to required learning.

This is the supreme skill that is part of good teaching. It is being overlooked while acting out a script that is supposedly learner centred.

First posted 31 July 2009