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Units of exchange for collaborative teaching of HCI

Contents (click to jump to a section)

Stephen W. Draper
Department of Psychology
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ U.K.
email: steve@psy.gla.ac.uk
WWW URL: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve

Tom Carey
[Add contact details]

Preface

Draft paper for submission to Edmedia99.

Introduction

What the paper is about
Why teaching collaboration is important

There is a fundamental reason for collaborative teaching between universities: the structure of higher education is that individuals specialise in narrow topics, but all are required to teach broadly. While teaching is done locally, then most teaching is done by people who, while competent compared to the students, are not expert in many of the particular topics they cover. It is becoming possible through the Internet and other communication technologies to teach collaboratively across the world. The spread of expertise is such that in few if any subjects is there a department whose expertise is greater than the sum of all the other departments in the world. Thus the future of teaching may be in collaborations organised by subject matter, not in single institutions' brand names.

At the level of particular courses and modest collaborations, there are two related fundamental reasons why collaboration is advantageous. Firstly, it saves authoring effort: if four sites collaborate, each need only author a quarter of the material, while doing it better and enjoying it more because they will author the topics they feel most interest and confidence about. Secondly, quality will go up: because participants author what they know best, because they are authoring less but for wider scrutiny, and because each piece of material will get delivered more often, and so revised and improved more often and more rapidly during its (short) lifetime. (For more details, see the attempt at a cost-benefit analysis for MANTCHI: Draper & Foubister, 1998.)

All of this raises the question of the size and nature of the units that would be contributed, shared, or exchanged by individual teacher-authors. Should they be whole courses (which is the size of unit aimed at by textbooks), or much smaller units, such as the student exercises exchanged in the MANTCHI (1998) project, the 15 minute chunks aimed at by the EUROMET (1998) project, or the small "nicheware" pieces of software produced systematically by the program described in Carey at al. (1998; altj paper)?

2. Models of collaboration

[?choose another term for the carey model: "telechi" model? Waterloo model?]
The contrast is in whole course sharing, or small units.

The scale of collaboration too, like that of the unit of contribution, runs from small to large, and may be illustrated by two example cases.

2.1 The MANTCHI model

The MANTCHI (1998) project explored collaborative tutorial teaching over the Internet between four universities in the subject area of HCI. All sites authored exercises, and delivered exercises to their own students that had been authored elsewhere in a reciprocal arrangement. The Internet supplied the medium for sharing material, for some active remote support during delivery (for instance remote marking of student assignments), and some interaction between students at different universities. The units of teaching and learning exchanged were called "ATOMs", and corresponded to about one week's work for students on a module. A small unit size is important for flexible and ready adoption by a variety of sites, thus maximising the amount of re-use of material. This collaboration based on barter, it can be argued, leads to gains in authoring time, curriculum quality, quality of materials, and staff development.

The kind of collaboration in the MANTCHI project, called here "the MANTCHI model", consisted of negotiated barter of small units of teaching. These were then drawn on for a small part of existing courses. Thus course design as well as administration and delivery remained local affairs, but there was some sharing of authoring.

2.2 The TeleCHI model

Tom Carey, at the University of Waterloo (in Canada), is assembling a consortium to offer courses in HCI: largely distance learning, targeted at industry (that is, students in full time work, taking courses for professional development), but also offered to local campus students as part of their degree.

His model is that there will be a single course structure, with elements contributed by participating institutions. All institutions will market the course, thus providing some students. For the first few years, subject to review, institutions will keep the fees of the students they recruit (both campus and distance students) and there will be no funds transferred between institutions.

2.3 Small unit size is important

Choosing a small size for the unit of exchange in teaching collaborations is important for a range of related reasons to do with how likely it is for material to be adopted. From an author's viewpoint, deliverers seem reluctant to use material "not invented here". From a deliverer's perspective, different situations, courses, students, and institutions require different materials and curricula. Small units increase the chance of being able to re-use part of what is used elsewhere, whereas large indivisible units lead to rejecting large units in order to avoid unsuitable parts of them. Another major consideration is that in the short term, it is much easier to introduce one or two new small elements to an existing course than to redesign the whole course around larger chunks: major redesigns require major approvals procedures, which typically take over a year. Similarly on a personal level, most course deliverers will want to try out only one or two units before committing to using them more widely.

The EUROMET (1998) project similarly decided on a policy of using small course units to maximize re-use across their multi-national project, which is concerned mainly with primary exposition. They originally planned to use units of 15 minutes of learner time, but pressure from authors, who argued that it made no sense to subdivide material this finely, has increased this unit size somewhat. Their resulting units seem to correspond to single learning objectives. In MANTCHI, the ATOM units correspond to a single "tutorial" activity. These units not only have a natural coherence, but correspond to the units in which courses are commonly planned. Fitting in with the units in terms of which course planners think, increases the ease with which parts can be adopted and used.

2.4 Large unit size is important

However economies of scale imply on the contrary that large unit size is important. Authoring material is only part of the work that might be shared: designing a whole course ("curriculum design") is important and time-consuming too. So is administering a course: why have the administration repeated in many institutions, when one admissions unit for the world market for the course would do?

3. What kind of units could be exchanged

[Tom's list from the email of some possible units: Tom fill this in: I didn't save a digital copy of your email]
[Here's my summary based on that email, in my models.html]

  • [30 mins.] EUROMET goes for single learning objectives (say about 30 mins of learner time).
  • [8-10 hours] MANTCHI went for "ATOMs": student exercises 8-10 hours. Tom's larger case studies.
  • [20-30 hours, over several weeks] A major seminar activity, including writing and presenting a paper.
  • [100-130 hours] A module / semester / course.

    The MANTCHI Atoms Keep this repetition only iff needed
    The units used in MANTCHI were activities of about one week's work for students on a module (approximately eight hours work, including contact time). They were called "ATOMs" (Autonomous Teaching Objects in MANTCHI). Eight ATOMs were both written and delivered at least once, and two more were written but not delivered during the project. These materials may be found via the project web site.

    There was a variety of types of ATOM, but one format was:

    Remote experts were sometimes used to give feedback on student work, and sometimes to hold tutorial discussions over a video link. Some ATOMs did not use a remote expert as part of the delivery.

    4. What principles lie behind these sample units?

    In the work mentioned so far, we can discern two alternative principles for characterising the units exchanged. In the EUROMET project, where whole courses rather than only tutorial teaching was the aim, the unit turned out to be one learning objective. Courses are then assembled locally from a large pool of such small units, contributed by a number of authoring sites. In MANTCHI, the unit was that of an exercise which is essentially that of a learning activity and assessment for a student. However in the "niche" approach (Draper, 1996) to designing courseware as pursued by Carey et al. (1998), the aim is to identify problems in the learning and teaching of an existing course, and to design (and exchange) units specifically addressed to these identified problems, whatever their nature.

    5. What principles could lie behind units of exchange?

    But those are not the only possible principles for thinking about parts of a course. There are an open-ended ("undefined", "undetermined") number of such principles. Doing it by syllabus leads to a learning-objectives principle. Textbooks in effect do this too, and can be viewed as organising a course around one primary activity: that of exposition. The text is structured around this, although other activities are added in around this e.g. self-assessment quizzes, suggested assignements and lab exercises, and so on. Some courses are structured around activities other than exposition: seminar-based courses (another good format for distance learning) may be organised around student, rather than teacher (or author), presentations, with feedback and other discussion from tutor and other students being standard subordinate activities. MANTCHI structured courses and exchanges around student exercises: typically weekly assignments that would be discussed in tutorials. Thus any single teaching and learning activity could be used as an organising principle for a course, and for exchanging material. If we accept Laurillard's model of 12 types of activity, then there are 12 possible principles for creating units. (Another, not wholly unrelated, categorisation of course organisations, is presented in Mason, 1998.)

    However another kind of exchange could be based on the Laurillard model itself, with consortium members reviewing their current courses to identify which of the 12 activities is most neglected and seeking material to address that weakness. A course based on a textbook, for instance, is likely to be very weak in feedback to students on their knowledge, and tutoring software that tests students and gives explanations of how and why their answers are faulty would be very valuable. Another characteristic weakness is in supporting reflection: in getting learners to relate the general and abstract concepts in the exposition to their personal experience. In HCI one specific activity to address this is getting students to relate their best and worst (most and least satisfying) experiences as software users to the problem categories introduced in the course: something that can be structured as a peer discussion. Another much larger scale attack on this is [Carey CHI'98] which used role play to develop a conviction and understanding about how HCI techniques could be applied in the given workplace of a group of learners taking a professional development course. The general principle of exchange here is to group units by which of the 12 activity types they represent, with a view to augmenting courses that have been primarily organised around other types of activity.

    The niche principle, while related, has still a different emphasis. Here, a course would be reviewed to identify the greatest weakness or difficulty of any kind at all, and then units sought to remedy that, often using approaches and technology quite different from those currently employed. Weaknesses can be classified in each of the ways described above. Thus one type is characterised by a particular learning objective that experience has shown is hard to achieve and requires special treatment. (For instance, in HCI, no-one really believes that interfaces cannot be designed right the first time, and that iterative testing and refinement are therefore essential, until they see users failing to operate a design they themselves created: hence a design, testing, and modification exercise must be included.) Another type is the systematic neglect of one or more whole categories of learning activity such as specific feedback or reflection, as described above.

    6. Conclusion

    It is just not possible to tell yet whether the big or small scale sharing of material will win out. Abstract arguments about economics suggest the big overlapping may win in the long run, while experience in (collaborative) teaching and parallels with commercial enterprises both suggest that in the short term success will go to small overlapping because that allows continued attention to local requirements. That is, the tension is between economies of scale, and a more specific "customer" (i.e. learner focus) that is more easily organised locally.

    But this tradeoff can also be conceived in purely educational terms, independently of the economic and commercial issues.

    Learning and teaching is a mystical balance of the universal and the particular. Knowledge is in one sense universal, is what is eventually held in common by all the teachers and learners in a field; and of which, therefore, only one version, presentation, or representation is needed. But in another, constructivist, sense knowledge is particular: unique to each individual learner's reconstruction, although there will be more overlaps among the constructions of one type of student than across those of all students; and so it should be tailored differently in each country, in each institution, and for each identifiable category of learner. Similarly the business of delivering a course is a mixture of the universal and the particular. In part it is the business of finding and selecting the universal material, and presenting it through a universal set of learning activities as described in a general model of teaching and learning like Laurillard's. But it also comprises a lot of the particular: helping to bridge the gap for each learner separately by customising material for their particular circumstances, by providing individual feedback to learners, and by conversational interchanges with them.

    Is that sufficient to justify describing it as "mystical"? The Oxford English Dictionary includes in the definition "...of hidden meaning ... mysterious and awe-inspiring". That certainly applies to the learning process, and (given how little is really known about what makes the difference between the results obtained by the best and the worst teachers) to the teaching process. Here it is used to indicate why this paper offers no prediction or prescription of what unit of exchange will prove best in teaching collaborations, although some of the main factors important to that have been suggested.

    [Is this cute enough to leave? If not, write a better last sentence/para]

    References

    [Some possible refs: add and delete to taste]

    Carey CHI'98

    Carey et al. ALTJ paper submitted

    Draper, S.W. (1998) "Niche-based success in CAL" Computers and Education vol.30, pp.5-8

    Draper, S.W. (submitted) "Reciprocal collaborative teaching" in ALT-J and [WWW document] URL http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/altj.html

    Draper,S.W., Brown, M.I., Henderson,F.P. & McAteer,E. (1996) "Integrative evaluation: an emerging role for classroom studies of CAL" Computers and Education vol.26 no.1-3, pp.17-32

    Draper, S.W. & Brown,M.I. (in press) "Evaluating tutorial material in MANTCHI" in M.Oliver (ed.) Innovation in the evaluation of learning technology (London: University of North London) and [WWW document] URL http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/

    Draper, S.W. & Foubister,S.P. (in press) "A cost-benefit analysis of remote collaborative tutorial teaching" in M.Oliver (ed.) Innovation in the evaluation of learning technology (London: University of North London) and [WWW document] URL http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/cb.html

    EUROMET (1998) EUROMET project pages [WWW document] URL http://www.euromet.met.ed.ac.uk/ See also the related National Learning Network for remote sensing http://www.nln.met.ed.ac.uk/ and Charles Duncan.

    Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology p.103 (Routledge: London).

    MANTCHI (1998) MANTCHI project pages [WWW document] URL http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/ and http://mantchi.use-of-mans.ac.uk/

    Mason,R. (1998) "Models of Online Courses" in Networked Lifelong Learning: Innovative Approaches to Education and Training Through the Internet L.Banks, C.Graebner, and D.McConnell (eds.) University of Sheffield and ALN Magazine Volume 2, Issue 2 - October 1998 URL http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/vol2_issue2/Masonfinal.htm

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