Synapsys Blog - Learning Theory

Changing our thinking about VET trainer competency development

We've recently been working with a client to define a trainer progression framework for around 3000 trainers spread across the organisation. Our thinking was influenced by research coming out of the E.U. around competencies for VET professionals. It's produced by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Education, and the 'Handbook for Practitioners' can be found here . It's well worth a read. Some of the key themes that made good sense to us include:
- The explosion of new learning technologies and pace of change of information now demands far greater flexibility and responsiveness of trainers than has been the case in the past
-In order to respond to this challenge, trainers need to see themselves in broad partnerships and networks. "Professionalism and expertise are no longer understood as personal properties..." p13.
-This change is sufficiently important to justify a quadrant of the framework being dedicated to networking.

The Handbook goes on to break down competencies across administration, training, quality assurance, and networking. These categories are mapped to teachers, in-company trainers, and leaders.

While written at a high level, the competencies provide a really pragmatic, useful set of indicators that can be adapted for individual organisational contexts.

It's always hard to know where to focus your limited time when exploring new models for trainer development. This should definitely be on your reading list.

eLearning design process, moving on from ADDIE

Most training developers are familiar with the ADDIE training development model, based on a series of steps moving from analysis through development to evaluation. This article by Kevin Kruse suggests that eLearning development processes might benefit from the incorporation of systemic design models that involve an interative process. Creative teams evolve and test concepts until there is broad user acceptance. He also suggests that a rapid prototyping step can be inserted as part of CD ROM solutions design to test out working models.

Our experience is that project practicalities such as budget and timeframe often preclude an open ended process of iterative inquiry. If (and it's a big if) the right information is gathered in the initial scoping phases, we can have confidence that the proposed solution will fit.

A relatively linear model doesn't preclude creativity. The key determinant here is that the development team needs to have clearly defined roles and processes which allow the creative/expansive work to be done in a managed way. If the team composition isn't appropriate, or if the process is unclear, it's doubtful whether a truly effective solution will emerge, no matter what time or resource is allocated to it.

At Synapsys, the vision for the elearning experience is driven by the educational designer. Graphic designers and coding developers are charged with responsibility to 'make it so', as much as techncially possible.

As more and more of our work involves blended learning solutions, the other big challenge becomes clearly defining the relationship between the different media/experiences so that the learner has a clear pathway to follow that makes sense to them.

On larger projects we'll manage this process through the use of media-specific project managers, whose output is managed by the lead educational designer. It is this person who is charged with the role of 'champion of the learner', continuously monitoring from the perspective of the learner whether the final experience will be both seamless and effective.

Communicating with Novices – getting the basics across when you’re the expert

Ever found yourself running training and staring at blank faces when all the time you’re thinking – “but this is simple stuff”? Maybe you’ve been inducting someone into your organization and you’ve simply forgotten to tell them a detail that is important to them but seems like just commonsense to you? It may be that what you’re experiencing is part of the inherent communication difficulties between novices and experts. When we are designing learning experiences for our organization we often turn first to our subject matter experts to provide the content and maybe even the training itself. The only problem with this approach is that experts have often forgotten what they didn’t know and have moved to a stage of performance which is enormously fluid and often difficult to explain.

Contrast this with the needs of Novices – clear rules, simple situations etc and the communication gap can sometimes be too wide to cross. Novices become confused, experts become frustrated and everyone looses out. So how can we encourage our experts, and ourselves, to provide learning experiences that are accessible to novices?
Step by step it – encourage Subject Matter Experts to break information down into workable chunks
Start with the commonplace – guide novices through the ‘normal’ tasks first to allow them to begin to develop a base of experience to learn from.
Provide constant, simple feedback – novices can find lots of complex reasons difficult to absorb so stick with the ‘one reason’ explanation.
Make sure they feel they can ask – remember novices have limited situational judgment so encourage them to seek clarification and feedback by being receptive to questions and providing ‘one reason’ answers.

These tips are based on the Dreyfus and Dreyfus Novice to Expert model of acquiring expertise. For a great summary of the 5 stage model and some coaching tips for each stage – have a look at this article www.nols.edu/store/pdf/leadershipnb_competence.pdf

Rubrics round every corner

Just when you thought you were catching up with all the jargon to do with assessment and web portfolios, along comes another term to send you scurrying for the dictionary – Rubric.

This term has only relatively recently scrambled out of the Christian churches and insinuated itself into educational circles, however, it was only a matter of time before Rubrics were being touted all over the web.

A rubric is a set of rules of conduct or procedure, and especially referred to conduct or procedure for a Christian service. It has a secondary meaning to do with titles of a book, but its primary meaning has much more application to online assessment and web portfolios. Basically it now means a set of procedures or standards by which a piece of work is judged. It can also set a standard for observed activity, such as “samples show student knowledge of netiquette” or “participated several times a week in the eForum”.

Within New Zealand’s Qualification Framework an Element and its related PCs form a “rubric”. The rubric starts with a clearly defined skill that needs to be demonstrated as learned and/or internalized and then defines the standard that will demonstrate whether that standard has been exceeded, met or has not been met.

A Rubric is written to reflect a certain agreed outcome for a specific assignment. Each class assignment, topic or training session would have a different Rubric with different skills and standards that would demonstrate the level of skill the learner has achieved. Rubrics can be applied across many groups (in much the same way Elements and PCs are supposed to work) to standardize the way different teachers might judge achievement; or they can be applied to work compared between one year’s cohort and the next year’s intake.

The point of real difference is that, unlike NZQA Unit Standards, Rubrics can be written for individuals choosing individual tasks for an assignment. They can be agreed between teacher and learner prior to learning starting. The learner can:
# Define what skills they most want to learn from being in a course.
# Decide on a task that will best demonstrate those skills.
# Work with the teacher to identify what will be an acceptable standard.

The value of such a process is to get buy-in from the learner. Before they start on anything they will have a clear idea on what is the minimum standard they can achieve and how the task they assign themselves will allow them to achieve it. They’re engaged in defining the learning process. The teacher, however, is in for a lot more work prior to a course as they will most likely need to guide the learner toward defining the parameters of the project in order to give learner enough opportunity to demonstrate their skills.

Want to learn more? Then try this site: Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators

Reading in lexiles

What’s a “lexile”?

a. An extinct lizard.
b. A system of measuring reading comprehension levels.
c. A set of exercises designed to strengthen the plexus muscle.

If you’re an educator you will have answered “b” … or would you?

What’s a “lexile”?

a. An extinct lizard.
b. A system of measuring reading comprehension levels.
c. A set of exercises designed to strengthen the plexus muscle.

If you’re an educator you will have answered “b” … or would you?

The system
The system of lexile measurement is a States-based system firmly bound by US education grades and expected levels of comprehension for each grade. If you are able to translate that to your local system then this tool could be useful.

The tool is available on this website.

It consists of a calculator where you:
1. Enter the grade level of your students, e.g.: Grade level 8 is aged 12-13 years approximately.
2. Enter either a percentage expected level of comprehension, or a range of lexile levels.
3. Click the Submit button and the calculator works out either the lexile range required or the percentage rate of comprehension.
4. Scroll down the page and you see a range of reading/comprehension books that fit students in the lexile range.

Writing to the range
If you want to check whether you are writing text at the required level you could use this tool to get a lexile range. You would select the grade that matched the reading age of your students, enter the expected level of comprehension as a percentage (how much you want them to understand the text) and Submit it. The calculator would display the lexile range required of the writing.

The lower the lexile score the simpler the language and the better the comprehension rate.

In order to check your writing against the lexile score you would use the Analyzer. This allows you to browse for your own file, upload it and have it analysed for ease of comprehension. You are fed back a lexile score, which you can compare with the lexile range for the grade of your students.

In my testing, a lexile score of 1210 equated to 74 Flesch Reading Ease and 6.4 Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
The drawbacks
The only files you can upload for analysis are .txt files. Generally you won’t be writing your material in plain text so you will have to copy and paste into another document and you will probably have to do it many times to ensure all of your material is tested for comprehension.

The test takes no account of any accompanying pictures, or special layout, that might assist your students to understand the text.

And, of course, you have to be online to do the testing.

12 Learning Principles

From Renate Nummerla Caine and Geoffrey Caine, a simple list of twelve fundamental learning principles rooted in neuroscientific research.

Link here...

Roberto Maragliano on eLearning

This is an interesting article that echoes a lot of the conversations we heard at the eFest conference... Can eLearning be effective if it doesn't just mean a change in technologies, but also a change in pedagogical approach?

"For now, let us simply say that e-Learning is a practical advantageous solution, but to a problem of which we do not yet know the full extent. We are just starting out on this: we have answers but we do not yet know the questions to which they are the answers. We mistakenly think sometimes that on-line training is a virtual version of traditional/classroom teaching. Far from it."

More here...

Informal Learning - The Other 80%

This interesting paper by Jay Cross addresses the phenomenon of 'informal learning', an activity that is purported to make up 80% of a person's learning on the job. The premise is simple: learning is a social activity (lots of learning theorists agree with this idea) and learning occurs most often on the job when people go to other people for help. The paper also address concepts around how people like to learn and what many of the Web's most successful tools can tell us about future possibilities for learning technologies. Very interesting stuff.

http://www.internettime.com/Learning/The%20Other%2080%25.htm#_Toc40161516

Interactive Technologies for eLearning

We gave the third in our series of eLeanring Solutions Seminars in conjunction with our partner, Hand Multimedia. We had a good turn-out and discussion...

We talked about theory related to interactivity, specific technologies and showed a number of examples of games, simulations and scenario-based learning.

Everyone really enjoyed seeing Hand's thermodynamics learning game, Fireman Frank. You can view it here, if you missed it.

We didn't discuss collaboration, lms/lcms's, or any of that as we'll be covering those topics in future seminars.

View the presentation...

Scalability and Sociability in Online Learning Environments

This is an interesting approach to learning theory, mapping different learning theories to different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (a fancy approach to categorising different types of learning, i.e. knowledge, comprehension, application, synthesis, etc.). So behaviourist approaches might work really well at certain levels, for instance, but social approaches are a must at the higher levels.

"Behaviorism, cognitivism, and social constructivism present significantly differing views of the educational universe. And though persuasive arguments are made that integrity of character requires an educator to adhere permanently to one view or another, I believe an individual's choice of a learning theoretic view of the world must always be as transient as it is pragmatic."

So, really, blended learning must also be about blending learning theories, as well.

More here:

http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000527.html

Constructivism and Online Education

This is the first entry in our new category, learning theory. We find it incredibly interesting to see how ideas about learning that have been around for decades are finding a home in the eLearning universe. Constructivism is one theory that is often bandied about in online learning circles, but how often are learners really constructing their own knowledge? This is a paper by Peter Doolittle from 1999 that addresses the opportunity and scores online learning across various constructivist dimensions.

http://edpsychserver.ed.vt.edu/workshops/tohe1999/text/doo2s.pdf