e-Learning cookbook. TPACK in professional development in higher education

Front matter

e-Lea rning Cookbook NataSa Brouwer Peter J. Dekker

Jakko van der Pol

TPACK in Professional Development in Higher Education e-Learning Cookbook

Preface

Information and communication technology (ICT) makes it possible to bring information to everyone who wants to learn. Rapid advances in technology offer strong support for using ICT in teaching. Online education can intensify and improve students' learning process, and enables us to reach more students than by traditional means. The number of courses and modules being offered online is increasing rapidly worldwide. This is happening not only at traditional institutions for distance education, but even more so in the ‘classical’ institutions for higher education. Such decisions are motivated by the improved technology available for web lectures, combined with financial motivations, i.e. being able to offer courses to larger groups of students. There is a huge trend toward open massive online courses or MOOCs. Prestigious universities offer MOOCs free of charge to a mass audience, often up to hundreds of thousands of learners.

Although online education can reach more people nowadays and new and challenging learning experiences can be created with it, in the average university course the digital dimension too often remains limited to simply publishing the existing face-to-face course content online. Educational technology is Often seen as an 'extra,' a luxury tool, and not as an integral and indispensable element of a university's teaching design. It is thus crucial that lecturers have and can obtain knowledge about how to design technology-enhanced teaching. Technical advances can be expected to continue in the future, and those who wish to implement educational technology in their own teaching practice must reckon on becoming lifelong learners. This fits the culture of academic teachers perfectly: they are already lifelong learners and creators of new knowledge within their discipline.

This book is based on the notion that a lecturer who uses ICT in teaching must learn how to apply his or her knowledge about content, pedagogy and technology in an integrated manner. The idea of integrating these three types of knowledge is based on the TPACK model, which stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).

The material for this book was developed in a Dutch higher education innovation project known as MARCHE! (MAke Relevant CHoices in educational technology, MARCHET, 2009-2011). This project provided four practice-oriented TPACK course redesign modules for the professional development of university lecturers. The modules all had the same structure and the same instructional design. For two years during the project, the modules were organized by five collaborating Dutch institutions of higher education. The modules were online, using a virtual learning platform based on SharePoint, which was enriched by a virtual meeting space in Adobe Connect. After the project was finished, the modules were further organized at local level by each of the five Dutch institutions using their own institutional virtual learning platforms. This book is based on the lessons they learned organizing professional development modules and implementing TPACK. It is meant to help others who would like to introduce university lecturers to TPACK. We have chosen to present this book in the form of a cookbook. Cookbooks give clear, step-by-step instructions — a recipe — for creating something. They also produce an immediate result if you follow the recipe, because they provide useful guidelines, tips on how to succeed, and pitfalls to avoid. But a good cookbook should also inspire you to use your creativity to adapt recipes to your own situation, and to invent new recipes that suit your taste perfectly.

We would like to thank SURF, the organization that supports ICT in higher education in the Netherlands, and the five universities that made it possible to undertake the MARCH*' project and to write this book: the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht University, UMC Utrecht and Utrecht University, and Eindhoven University of Technology.

We hope this book will help institutions and trainers organize professional development programs for university lecturers so that they can apply TPACK in their teaching practice.

Have fun making delicious TPACK redesign 'cakes'!

Nataša Brouwer, Peter J. Dekker and Jakko van der Pol Amsterdam, April 2013

Introduction

Many universities organize workshops or even a whole professional development program in which lecturers are taught how to teach and how to organize their teaching. Today, every university uses ICT in one way or another. Using educational technology is more complex than simply adding an ICT tool to a course. It should change the way we teach and also what we teach. Switching from face-to-face to blended or online teaching and learning is therefore not a self-evident enrichment. It requires teachers to adapt or even to change their course design completely. The question is:

How can a lecturer acquire the knowledge necessary to design quality technology-enhanced teaching? There is no simple answer to this question. Knowing how to operate the ICT tools is not enough. Different kinds of knowledge need to be integrated to create successful technology-enhanced learning activities.

A second important question is: What is an appropriate course design for teaching lecturers how to design technology-enhanced teaching?

Do we have to change the approaches to learning when the learners are themselves teachers in their daily lives?

In confronting these challenges, the Dutch project MARCH"' (MAke Relevant CHoices in educational technology, 2009-2011) developed four professional development modules to help university lecturers obtain the knowledge and skills they need to design their teaching using educational technology:

* ‘Collaborative knowledge-building' * ‘Web 2.0 educational applications’ e ‘Measuring knowledge and understanding’ e ‘Supervising students in distance learning’

The packages of materials for the four modules developed in the MARCHE project, including study guides and assignments, were written in English and are available to download free of charge at www.onderwijsontwerpenmetict.nl (Dutch website, click on ‘Modules’ in the bar at the top of the page).

The modules teach lecturers how to use TPACK when designing their teaching. They have been designed according to the TPACK principle.

TPACK, which stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model, was developed by Mishra & Koehler (2006) and brought about a revolution in our understanding of the quality of teaching using technology and the role of the teacher in it. Technology-enhanced course design using TPACK is like creative cooking: you need high-quality ingredients, a good basic recipe and a lot of creativity. A good TPACK course design, one that fits the lecturer's teaching style, the subject matter and the group of students, will result in a unique learning experience every time.

It isimportant to mention here that the universities that organized the modules and used the MARCH!” TPACK material adjusted the material in some way to fit into their situation. In this book we describe what these universities have taken into account to reach an optimal situation. Based on their experiences, we defined ten dimensions that influence the decisions that must be made when organizing professional development modules for lecturers.

This provided the basis for developing ten recipes, one for each dimension. The recipes are accompanied by helpful tips from ‘our tasters' — people who have organized or moderated actual modules.

This book consists of three parts. They are closely related to one another, but they can be read in the order that the reader likes best. In Part One you will find the ten recipes with helpful tips from our 'tasters' on how to implement a professional development module within an educational institution. In Part Two we explain why we chose these ten recipes and not others.

In Part Three we discuss the theoretical backgrounds and the structure of the TPACK professional development modules for course (re)design. We also list the competences needed to be able to design technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education.

Part One Recipes for implementing TPACK

1. Integration into the Organizational

Context

If you want lecturers to study a professional development module on using ICT in teaching (such as the MARCH*! modules, see Part Three) or even a series of modules, you need to think about the level at which to organize it. For example, the module can be organized only for lecturers working within a single faculty, for lecturers working within a single institution for higher education, or more broadly, up to the national or even the international level. Each situation has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of organizing modules on an inter-institutional level (national or international) is that it becomes possible for lecturers who teach the same subject at different universities to share what they have learned. The lecturers who teach the same discipline 'speak the same language'. Experiences with and approaches to solving students’ learning problems will be very recognizable to them, and they will be able to share teaching materials — though every institution for higher education has its own educational approach, of course. In general, a nationally organized module will be an important enrichment for the lecturers who attend it. On the other hand, if the professional development module is more integrated into the organizational context, it will be more successful for the organization as a whole.

If you organize the professional development module on course design at the local level, the lecturers can share thoughts about their teaching designs more naturally, since they will meet spontaneously at the coffee machine or during lunch. A module organized locally allows the institution to adapt the pedagogical learning outcomes and technological knowledge expectations to the institution's pedagogical vision and the available technological infrastructure.

For instance, the electronic learning environment that is chosen for the module itself can be the same as the learning environment used for students. The module moderator can

‘teach by example.’ A more local approach to organizing can therefore lead to the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) most closely attuned to the participants' educational practice.

Each discipline has to deal with its own difficulties in learning and teaching and faces its own challenges. The core disciplinary concepts need to be constructed and refined by engaging in the practice of scientific inquiry. While the natural sciences operate in a universe of data evidence and equations, the social sciences tend to operate in a world of perspectives and opinions. These things will influence the choices that must be made in the course design. When the professional development module is even more locally organized, for example within a specific department, it becomes even more possible to adapt the content of the module to the specific subject that the participants are teaching. Using disciplinespecific examples and more content-specific assignments will motivate the participating lecturers to learn about pedagogy. It will also help them integrate their technological, pedagogical and content knowledge into their courses more efficiently. A locally organized module can rely on existing social structures and can create more commitment and ‘momentum,’ which in turn can strengthen the social structure. The efforts and the achievements of the participating lecturers will also be more visible to the management.

Recipe for 'Integration into the Organizational Context

Ingredients: - Adapted content - Integrated internal training pro- - Adapted vision grams - Adapted technical infrastructure - Involved management

Adapt the module to the context of the organizational level The professional development module needs to fit the organizational level. If you use an existing professional development module developed for mixed inter-university groups at a different organizational level — such as a university, faculty, or department — you need to adapt the module to the context of the new organizational level. The better a module fits the participants' teaching context, the more effective the module will be.

Adapt the content of the module to the institution's educational vision It is important to adapt the module to the institution's educational vision. If an institution bases its teaching on one strong vision — such as problem-based learning or competence-based learning — the course design that participants will create and the teaching materials they will develop during the professional development module need to be consistent with this vision in order to be useful. By adapting the module to the institution's educational vision, the participants will gain a better understanding of this vision and will adopt it more easily in their own teaching.

Adapt the content of the module to the available technical infrastructure The module content should also to be adapted to the available technical infrastructure. If the module makes use of tools or software licenses that are unavailable to the participants, they will need to redesign their products/plans/outcomes in order to apply them in their own course. This will take extra time and extra technical effort. If you do not adapt the content of the module to the available technical infrastructure, you run the risk that the tools developed in the module will never be used in practice.

Involve the management

The synergy created by approaching issues through multiple platforms at the same time can be very powerful. Making the curriculum coordinators or program managers aware of the professional development module —or even involving them in it — will increase the extent to which the knowledge gained in the module is applied in teaching practice. It can be very effective to apply the module in an existing curriculum development or revision process. In addition to commitment and motivation, the module will also be more effective if it addresses questions, issues or problems that are already ‘on the radar’ of the lecturers’ team or the management. The management can raise relevant teaching problems that the module should address.

Make the module an integral part of internal professional development training programs and policy

Many institutions organize professional development training. In the Netherlands, for example, university lecturers are obliged to obtain a national teaching certificate. This requires them to show evidence of their competencies. Attending professional development modules designed according to the MARCHE” approach allows participants to produce sound evidence of their teaching design skills, which can then be used to acquire a certificate. It is advisable to integrate the module into the existing certificate training program, so that the pedagogical and personal coaching structure will suit the specific expertise available in the field of educational technology.

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The module content was fully adapted to the demands of Maastricht University’s educational vision, especially our ‘problem-based’ approach to learning. The module only made use of ICT tools then available at the university.

One important wish on the part of the participants was to have fellow participants from the same faculty, as this would facilitate feedback.

The need for a course on blended learning was greater than the need for pure online teaching. My advice: only offer a module when there is a genuine need for one, and give participants the opportunity to apply, more or less immediately, what they have learned in the module in their own practice.

Both our modules, which focused on different ‘themes,’ were organized at the university level. The modules could be used as a part of a professional development course leading to a teaching certificate. This course is available to lecturers in all the different faculties. Although not specifically involved in implementing this particular module, the management was involved in implementing the professional development course as a whole.

To reflect the lecturers’ actual teaching conditions as closely as possible, we decided to use Blackboard as a virtual learning environment, since this is the standard virtual learning environment at Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht and lecturers were already familiar with it.

The module at the University of Amsterdam was organized at the faculty level, i.e. the Faculty of Science, and in the context of an ICT-in-teaching innovation project. Each of the participating lecturers in this project worked on his/her own course (re)design, in which they introduced ICT in their teaching. For example, they implemented ‘voting’ as an activating teaching method in their course.

The lecturers who enrolled in the teaching certificate program at the same time could use their course redesign and the teaching materials they developed in the project as evidence of their competence in teaching design and quality control.

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The module was organized at the institutional level at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). There were only a few participants. They came from different parts of the organization and ‘volunteered’ themselves. Other than giving its consent, the management was not involved. The module was not dedicated to a specific group of lecturers, so it was not adjusted to a specific teaching situation.

Having a small group of participants meant that there was not much group interaction in the virtual learning environment.

The positive effects of having a rather small group were that the moderator was able to link the participants’ goals to the local circumstances, since he knew the participants’ work conditions (such as the level of local support, policy, hardware and software, and specific implementation projects that were already under way).

An existing module in the university's teaching certificate program was adapted to include several elements of the MARCHE" modules. The participants first investigated the different tools and chose one tool to implement in their teaching. They then redesigned their course to integrate the chosen tool. Finally, they presented their course redesign to the other participants in a face-to-face meeting. We used the MARCH" resources, particularly the wikis with tool overviews.

Tip: First consider which tools are available at the institution before searching for external tools. In many cases, the institution actually has more available than teachers realize!

2. Social Bonding

Online courses have often a high drop-out rate.

Participants can leave the online environment with just one click of the mouse. Social bonding is therefore considered an important means of keeping participants committed, active, on track, and, above all, ‘connected.’

The relationship of mutual engagement is the element that binds members together into a social entity (Wenger, 1998). Research on the formation of communities of lecturers (who did not become accustomed to learning together as students) emphasizes this aspect. For example, Grossman et al. (2001) and Admiraal et al. (2012) identified face-to-face interaction, dialogue and trust as necessary elements for building social cohesion in communities of lecturers. Using social ties to ‘bind’ participants to the learning module and to one another will therefore increase their chances of finishing it successfully.

To establish social ties, a proper introduction and teambuilding activities are a good — and important — starting point. On the other hand, explicit teambuilding activities take a lot of time. Requiring busy university lecturers to devote this time to a course can have the opposite effect and result in drop-outs. Instead of specific teambuilding activities, the module’s moderator can create a social bond by encouraging collaboration between participants. In other words, instead of a social bond being a prerequisite to effective collaborative learning, it becomes the result of it. When viewed from this perspective, the moderator’s role shifts from the ‘provider of teambuilding activities’ to the ‘conductor of a successful collaborative learning experience.’ For instance, in order to establish trust and social bonding between participants, the moderator can offer the participants multiple simpler tasks that slowly increase in complexity. The participants can thus achieve many ‘small successes’ together, which will be reinforced in multiple cycles (Van der Pol, 2010). They will develop a set of different ways to collaborate (Wenger, 1998) that they can fall back on and that will improve their confidence and motivation.

Recipe for 'Social Bonding'

Ingredients: - Buddy system - Trust - Existing social structure - A Activities with shared success - Sense of community - Peer feedback

Integrate activities that bring shared successes Regular collaborative learning tasks that participants can complete successfully and on time help establish a sense of community. Successfully completing collaborative tasks helps build and sustain motivation, trust, and an interactive repertoire. It is much better to ‘prevent’ failure than to ‘repair’ it afterwards. Once a group becomes demotivated, it is hard to turn it around, so make sure that the collaborative assignments can and will be a success.

Create buddy systems In the buddy system, moderators create pairs of participants. These buddies only team up for some of the collaborative assignments, but are also expected to keep in touch regularly (preferably face-to-face). They serve as each other's first line of support when questions arise, and should check up on each other between regular meetings. Pairs can also be trios, but the idea is to keep participants collaborating in the same small subgroups throughout the module.

Use the existing social structure Try to find participants who already know one another, or who share the same research discipline. They will make ideal buddies, not only during the module for the reasons explained above, but also after the module is finished. Another way to improve social bonding is to add pictures of the participants alongside their online profile or activity. This will increase participants' sense of social presence online.

Use peer feedback

One effective collaborative learning method is peer feedback. The participants respond to one another's work and reflect on their own work at the same time. Be aware, however, that this is also a process that can easily lead to drop-outs, as the participants depend heavily on their peers. If a participant has not finished the assignment (for example their draft course (re)design) in enough time to receive feedback, or has offered feedback without receiving any in return, the effects can be very harmful for the process and demotivating for the future. It is important to see that the participants carry out peer feedback assignments and that they are aware of the importance of the whole process and the deadlines.

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We organized three video conferences. The first one, at the start of the module, was to get to know one another, since we had not met beforehand. We sent weekly emails to inform the participants about deadlines and about fellow participants’ activities. But it remained challenging to create a ‘classroom feeling’ between participants who were not in the same physical location.

Tip: A kickoff meeting should not take too long (maximum of 1.5 hours). Consider generating more interaction during the module: more video-conferencing sessions or more synchronous peer review. If possible, organize the first meeting face-to-face to introduce the participants to one another, explain the module and set the ground rules.

During the face-to-face meeting, the participants introduced one another based on information they were able to find on the internet. It’s a fun way to get to know one another and can be an eye-opener when it comes to digital identity.

One module was organized as a part of a Faculty of Science teaching certificate program in which the participating lecturers started as a group. Most of the participants worked in the same building and already knew one another. Participants paired up with peers to give each other feedback on the course (re)design.

Tip: From the moderator's point of view, it is important to ask the participants (or let them ask one another): "Why did you design the course/this part of the course this way?,’ not only in order to understand their design, but also to hear their opinions on good teaching. Such discussions are also very ‘bonding.’

To encourage social bonding, we planned a face-to-face introduction session. This was easy to organize, since all the participants teach at the University of Utrecht and/or UMC Utrecht.

Tip: You should always use pictures of participants if you are working in a virtual learning environment. It is a good way to make it more personal. Unfortunately Blackboard does not offer this option, but social networks such as Ning or Facebook do. The pictures give the participants and the moderators a better sense of who else is participating in the module.

3. Degree of 'Blendedness'

The idea of offering courses completely online, without any limits on time or place, is very attractive. Participants can adapt their learning process to their own priorities, pace and available time. In 2011, thousands — and sometimes even hundreds of thousands — of people enthusiastically applied to enroll in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Some commentators predict that MOOCs could change universities’ business model (Daniel, 2012). On the other hand, MOOCs have huge numbers of drop-outs.

Purely online courses face certain difficulties when it comes to a lack of presence and 'immediacy' for the participants, together with possible gaps in expected prior knowledge, both of which can cause participants to drop out.

Unlike face-to-face modules, it is easier in professional development modules implemented purely online to ignore the participants' need to establish a sense of community, with adequate levels of group cohesion, trust, respect and belonging. All these factors are important when applying acquired knowledge to improve one's own teaching practice.

Blended courses contain both online and face-to-face elements. This offers two major advantages compared to purely online courses.

First, face-to-face communication allows participants to conduct certain types of activity more quickly and efficiently, such as brainstorming, scheduling or making decisions and creating agreement (Meyer, 2003). Face-to-face meetings are also better suited for 'triggering’ events at the beginning of a module, such as posing a problem and getting everyone involved and committed (Vaughan and Garrison, 2005). Compared to a purely online module, online discussions in a blended module can be more reflective and more rigorous, and make it easier to track ideas (Akyol, Garrison, and Ozden, 2009). Second, incorporating face-to-face components in a module helps to create social bonding and increase the sense of community. It provides participants with more social common ground, giving them a 'head start' in their online collaborative knowledge-building activities. In this way the participants can put more effort into the cognitive part of the process, thereby achieving higher levels of collaborative knowledge-building and better individual learning outcomes.

The level of blendedness of a module is closely related to the dimension of social bonding.

Combining offline and online activities will generate a stronger feeling of community. The face-to-face activities help establish social bonding quickly within the group, while the online activities help sustain it. Even if the face-to-face activities are purely cognitive-oriented, the participants' social ties will simultaneously grow stronger than if they were performing the same activity online.

Face-to-face meetings are not always possible.

Online group meetings are a fairly good substitute for face-to-face meetings if the functionality of the online meeting tool used meets the requirements for collaborative learning: document exchange, (synchronous) collaboration on documents, sharing applications, video and audio of sufficient quality and chat.

Recipe for 'Degree of Blendedness'

Ingredients: - Face-to-face kickoff meeting - Strict deadlines - Hexibility to organize own work - Gentle reminders

Organize a face-to-face kickoff meeting A face-to-face kickoff meeting is an efficient way of creating social ties and common ground. It helps participants engage faster than a video-conferencing setting. It is easier during a face-to-face kickoff meeting to relay information and discuss how to complete online assignments as effectively as possible for each participant.

Organize additional online or face-to-face meetings

Plan regular meetings (online in a video-conferencing setting or face-to-face) with the whole group before the start of the module. Additional meetings can be organized by subgroups or buddies. One effective way to achieve this - and to make sure it really does take place — is to plan informal ‘guidance’ meetings between the moderator and the subgroups. If face-to-face meetings are not feasible from a practical point of view, organize video conferences. Although communication by video lacks the maximized social experience of face-to-face ‘presence,’ it will contribute considerably more to collaboration and to ‘momentum’ than e-mail or discussion group exchanges alone.

Organize flexibility in working on assignments The participants are attending the modules in addition to their regular work, such as teaching and research, and their priorities may therefore change during the course of the module. Online assignments can give participants the opportunity to organize their work flexibly, so that they can do them at times that suit them best. On the other hand, when peer feedback activities are planned it is very important for all the participants to agree and stick to strict deadlines. That is not always easy. In the MARCH" modules, the assignments are closely related to the participants’ teaching tasks. The deadlines for the assignments and peer feedback within the module should be synchronized as much as possible with the deadlines that the participating lecturers have to meet within the curriculum when preparing their courses. The participants should be given enough time for assignments to allow them to plan their own time flexibly, so that they can complete the assignments, create materials on which they can receive feedback, and use these in their own teaching practice. The deadlines need to be clear and published online, and the moderator needs to send the participants gentle reminders about approaching deadlines.

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We started with a face-to-face meeting, but during the module itself we organized video conferences. | think that if all the participants work in the same city, it might be easier to have face-to-face meetings instead of video conferences. Even then, having at least one video conference can be a valuable experience; it gives participants an opportunity to practice this form of online communication.

In our case the module had only one social online activity. The participants had to write a blog entry on using the university's electronic learning environment. Not all the participants did this, as they did not all feel the need for online activities. However, the participants were interested in one another's impressions of the learning environment during the face-to-face meeting. They preferred personal contact over online contact.

Since all our lecturers worked in the same building, we organized only face-to-face meetings. We started with a kickoff meeting and after that the lecturers worked independently on their own course (re)design. When most of the participants had implemented their (re)design, we organized a second face-to-face meeting to talk about our experiences in teaching practice. We used Blackboard, where the participants were authorized to upload their documents in order to make them visible for their peers and offer one another feedback.

Our whole module was organized online, but we also organized three video conferences and had regular contact by email. | think these two elements were crucial to the success of the module.