Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: the European Commission for the European Commission for the eLearning Programme
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Dear Colleagues:
At this point we have six institutions (Athens, Berlin, Madrid, Maastricht, Valencia, and Vienna) expressing interest in the general lines of the discussion on the Dotlrn forum and various individual emails. However, after further research and consultation I've come to the conclusion that the original idea of addressing the "Virtual Campus" section of the EU application guidelines in terms of the the first priority on page 8, relating to dissemination of good practices, was flawed: upon closer inspection, I now believe this priority is strongly associated with the second priority, supporting European virtual mobility projects building, and as this would involve administrative policies at the highest levels of university administrations, and as I believe most of us have a far more limited responsibilities for e-learning, I felt I must rethink the matter. I should also add that the idea of building an exchange of e-learning courses and materials has not won the support of some of the colleagues either. So, after study and much brainstormed with my colleagues, I now offer you an alternative, and I hope original enough a proposal, that might win for its originality and relevance.
I propose that we now consider a project in the "Transversal Actions" section, which means less money available, but something closer to the interests that I understand many of us to share in the making of existing technologies more effective by paying closer attention to the user experience and do so by focusing on the unique and often crucial role that student assistants and tutors play as they are closer to user groups and experiences than many of us professionaIs, constitute the pool of our future colleagues, and in many instances do much of the detailed work that professionals and instructors might initially design.
We would create a formidable cohort of research assistants tied closely to our operations and, if managed properly, tying our operations together with a rich, experience-sharing and coordinated communications framework.
An analysis of the bottom line might be the best place to start looking at the details. We would demonstrate our institutional commitments by each of us taking on the overhead costs of providing office space, computers, and seminar supervision. The EU would demonstrates its commitment to the student researcher cohort and their networking by devoting almost all of the grant money to them in the form of stipends. For 450,000 EUR we could pay 25 researchers to work 60 hours per month for 11 months per year and include an allocation of 750 EUR each for a conference trip per year so they have some face-to-face networking contact, too.
I am proposing that we create in each of our institutions a research seminar composes of 5-6 student assistants/researchers (depending on how many institutions we have), develop something of a common curriculum for them, coordinate their work through an online workspace, online workshops, and conference activities, and thereby add to our implementations a strong research component, a strong user-advisory function, strengthen our staff training, and as experience shows that, when properly supported, they are capable of preparing detailed case studies and contributing actively to forums, enable more sophisticated and continuous communications among our institutions, and for the EU public, too.
We would develop a two-level research design.
On the level of the study of relevant research literatures, we could hire three experts per semester in the fields of knowledge management, classroom assessment, participation/observation sociology, interaction research and design, instructional design, case study writing, and so forth to lead virtual seminars (12 x 3,000EUR or 36,000EUR). By publicizing these workshops and their results, this would offer the additional benefit of providing the EU e-learning community with a bi-monthly review of current research.
On the level of implementation research, would suggest that this be tied closely to classrooms (for blended learning institutions) and courses (for the distance learning institution). The researchers would develop detailed case studies, discuss them in their respective institutional seminars, present them in the project online forums and be required to comment on each other's presentations, and write up final reports. As we identify common concerns (such as the sequencing of learning activities, the development of e-learning workflows, and the application of project management research to course planning), we could effect even tighter coordination.
This particular suggestion would readily address a number of the criteria featured in the "Transversal Actions" category in the call for proposals as well as the relevant sections in the "Creating, sharing and reusing e-Learning Content" paper this call cites as directly relevant on the call's page 7.
For the former, on page 9 of the call itself, we would start with the section on "fostering a thriving 'Community of practice' for end-users …" and organize the seminar in a way that students are required to submit and comment on each other's case studies on a regular (basically, daily) basis, and thereby both demonstrate how the community "thrives" and create an extensive documentation of the activity in the process.
Also from this section, we might concentrate on the "development of methods and services for self-evaluation and peer review of digital content for learning, emphasizing the pedagogical value and context for use," and here I might add that we at the FU can recommend the adaptation of "Classroom Assessment Techniques", which we have found highly successful in such a seminar this past fall (available on my page: http://home.arcor.de/civici01a/programming/indexdev.htm).
From there we might survey the relevant sections of the "Creating, sharing and reusing e-Learning Content" report, perhaps beginning with the "more active role for the user" section on page 9, calling for "involvement of the user in the specification of the learning content development process and matching approaches to innovative pedagogical models which are better suited to the learning scenario."
An argument that might go far to win the award is to acknowlege that many of our operations are so production-oriented by institutional design (typically, we are service operations, not research operations), that the EU would be addressing limitations in current institutional arrangements. Further, we could argue the centrality of student/user roles in the production process as it is. For example, in the "supporting the practitioners" section on page 10, there is a call to "support teachers with easy to use tools having the relevant functionality to support the processes involved in creating high quality learning experiences," and where I suspect the use of student assistants for training, if not doing much of the work, is the rule. To wit: to address the "need to create a community of teachers developing learning objects across Europe so they can exchange them," I can think of no better way to insure frequent contributions to the time-consuming task of regular (daily? every second day?) posting to online forums than to delegate the responsibility to students. Finally, we could argue that many have acknowledged that the leading edge in e-learning application design has shifted from functionality to interaction design, and specifically, close-in studies of user experiences. On this note, we could argue that, if anyone were to offer advice on the "building of an information environment around the student" that the EU says is a priority, it would be the student.
I could readily go on in detail (compare "Issue 2" on page 11), but I think the overall suggestion, and its import, should be quite clear.
If you are interested in something like this, the thing to do is to respond with your ideas for how this seminar, common platform, and list of tasks these students might perform. If we are to meet the deadline, we will want to develop responses to this proposal as soon as possible, by Friday at the latest. If you are not interested, kindly let me know that, too. What do you think?
I'm looking forward to hearing from you soon!
