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Cross-HEI collaborative teaching

by Steve Draper

Contents (click to jump to a section)


This memo is occasioned, from my personal viewpoint, by two invitations to join in teaching collaborations with other universities, which itself is timely as we are just completing the MANTCHI project which explored one form of collaborative teaching over the Internet between 4 HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) in Scotland. From the viewpoint of university management, this memo offers a briefing on some arguments and models about collaboration in teaching that may be of interest, and seeks to discover what degree of interest, if any, the university may have in them. Interest and possibly material support would be a factor in deciding whether and how vigourously I and my colleagues may pursue these ideas and opportunities.

The briefing points are two tentative offers for teaching collaboration with other universities I have had, two possible models for such collaboration, and an original approach for spreading the use of learning technology in a university. In the appendix, these briefing points and further pointers to other documents are grouped for reference, while the main text presents them discursively.

In the first section of this memo I outline the arguments for collaborative teaching. This outline fails to discuss many important issues, including: whether the subject matter being taught is changing rapidly, or very slowly; whether it is important to adapt material for local circumstances and if so how this affects collaboration; the advantages as well as disadvantages of tutors who are not expert in the topic (knowing it all inhibits student thinking and enquiry); the division of labour between designing courses, creating materials, and delivery including giving students feedback. Some of these are raised in the later section on the subject area I am concerned with here (HCI), which is particularly advantageous in some important respects. Some I have answers for, but this memo is meant to be too short to write them out. Some I probably do not, at least yet, have answers for.

Arguments for reciprocal collaborative teaching

There is a fundamental reason for collaborative teaching between HEIs: the structure of HE 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 idea that leading HEIs such as Harvard, MIT etc. might dominate the market for distance learning may be quite wrong: it may be multi-national consortia who could provide overwhelming combined expertise and quality (and monopoly power, should this approach take off).

At the level of particular modules and modest collaboration (as in the MANTCHI project), there are two related fundamental reasons why collaboration is advantageous. Firstly, it saves authoring effort: if 4 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 referred to in the appendix.)

The MANTCHI model

The kind of collaboration we actually did in MANTCHI, called here "the MANTCHI model", consists of negotiated barter of small units of teaching. These are then drawn on for a small part of existing courses. Thus course design as well as administration and delivery remain local affairs, but there is some sharing of authoring.

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

His argument is:

The kinds of quality and originality/distinctiveness aimed for, and on which success is expected to depend, are:

  1. Content quality from the expertise of contributors
  2. Up-to-dateness: of some importance throughout HE, an acute issue in the field of HCI; most critical for professionals in work, as opposed to undergraduates.
  3. Original forms of teaching and learning to suit this kind of course: both at the level of whole courses, at the level of modules, and at the level of each learning activity.

Distance learning

Thus for reasons already mentioned, these models for collaborative learning can and probably must involve significant aspects of distance and flexible learning. Conversely, therefore, developing these models could be used as one kind of exploration and development of distance and flexible learning. However in some ways, this would be in contrast to models commonly put forward of these: this would not be about "distance-ising" an existing local course, nor would it be about competing against other HEIs and hoping UoG becomes a brand leader: on the contrary, it would be about being a founder-member of a multi-national consortium whose weight could counter any and all solo players.

Actually of course, the most important thing is to explore the terrain, and it is likely that some part of the middle ground will turn out to be the best place to be. For collaborative teaching, that will mean exploring the ground between the MANTCHI and Carey models: between local courses with a modest proportion of imported units, and fixed courses with mostly imported units and structure. For distance and flexible learning, that means exploring what elements of these approaches will benefit campus students as well. At least outside science and engineering, students have always done most of their learning at a distance: in library booths or their bedrooms. Now that most students have jobs, fewer turn up to "fixed" contact hours, and still fewer to special occasions put on at short notice. It is the teachers, not the students, who now need to be flexible, and to discover which activities really do need to be synchronous (at a non-flexible time that all attend). And of course, these two thing interact, because if travel is not required (from home or workplace) then many more people "attend" by video or Internet link: that at least is the experience currently reported from inside Microsoft and other large organisations. Furthermore, future ways of addressing the needs of lifelong learning (LLL) are likely to use flexible and distance methods, so giving our campus students some experience of these methods of learning now is to equip them for future LLL.

Thus these experiments in collaborative teaching are also experiments in variations on distance and flexible learning; and also explorations in how to improve what we offer our "traditional" students.

The HCI field as subject matter for teaching explorations

The subject area being taught in these projects is HCI (Human Computer Interaction). It has features that make it particularly suitable for these explorations.

In theory, HCI should be an interdisciplinary field involving at least Psychology, Computer Science, and Sociology or ethnography. From a teaching perspective almost all the demand comes from Computer Science, not least because the BCS (British Computer Society) makes HCI a requirement for accreditation (though many departments are still honouring this more by avoidance than observance). It is now very widely regarded as a crucial part of building software, which is the main market for computer science graduates. However expertise is in short supply, and concentrated mainly in a few sites, which in the UK include Glasgow, Dundee, York, QMWC, UCL.

The field is subject to an extraordinarily rapid pace of change, rendering teaching materials out of date very quickly. Besides the normal rate of change of current research in any field, HCI teaching should be based on examples from the students' current computing environment: this changes about every 3 years. But even more fundamentally, the main centre of the field is continually in flux and dispute: is it about human interaction with computers or with any artifact (door handles)? Is it about communications technology e.g. video conferencing? Researchers say yes, curricula lag behind. Still more fundamental again, is a rapid flux in what the important component disciplines should be. In the last 5 years, it has become ever clearer that ethnography is one of the most important tools because it can uncover the human-human tacit interaction patterns on which the success and failure of many designs turn out to depend i.e. designing systems to fit the workplace, not to fit an isolated computer operator is crucial. As far as I know, no university computer science department (unlike the leading research labs) has yet hired an ethnographer.

It is clear, then, that HCI provides extreme pressures on staff development (how do each of us keep up?) and on keeping teaching up to date, while working from a relatively skimpy national base. Thus collaborative teaching is likely to be of even greater value in HCI than in many other areas.

The same pressures give rise to a considerable demand from industry for LLL or continuous professional development. Many practitioners got no HCI from their original degree courses, and in any case often need to hear about the latest developments. While 10 years ago most companies claimed they couldn't afford HCI (rather like saying you can't afford taxes or to pay a sales staff), more and more now think they can't afford to do without it. On the other hand, the same companies are under great pressure not to release their staff for a moment, and HEIs may have to struggle to cover topics of direct practical relevance, and to show that their courses are more effective than leaving individuals to read the literature themselves. All of this increases the pressure for keeping course material up to date, and also makes distance and flexible learning crucial.

Finally, HCI is a good place to make use of learning technology, since its students generally expect to be studying state of the art technology. That is, means and ends match unusually well for innovation in this area of teaching.

Implications for university structures

If this direction were to take off in a big way, it would probably soon have to be accompanied by some change in university structures and procedures.

The rapid change of courses does not fit with current standard procedures for course approval. On the other hand, quality checks would be more not less important: firstly, because rapid change makes actual problems more likely, and secondly, because innovation makes it more likely that challenges may be made, thus making it more desirable to be able to show good process.

The interdisciplinary mix in HCI also makes department-centered teaching structures less appropriate. Furthermore, rapid changes in the intellectually best mix ideally requires structures that can allow rapid changes in teaching team membership that cut across department boundaries.

Addressing courses more directly to the needs of employers brings some of these issues into sharper focus. Traditionally, university departments offer courses they find convenient and interesting to teach: a supply-driven approach. Providing relevant courses for those in work is at the demand-driven end of the spectrum. HCI is a good example with which to explore the problems, but it is by no means unique. Another example would be the growing need for IT managers: traditionally trained in computer programming, their actual job has little programming in but a lot of management techniques. The millenium bug is another relevant case: although a software problem, the solution being recommended (by experts, government departments, and this university's officer for this issue) is to use risk management techniques. Computer science departments provide the training for people to create the problem, but not for people to remedy it. Presumably we should be promoting courses with this combination of skills (computer science and management), but we are not, and faculty and department structures make it twice as much trouble to create them than to go on producing training for how the industry used to be.

The need seems likely to be for mechanisms that allow courses to be set up rapidly, drawing on academics from several departments, and facilitating collaboration within the university as well as between HEIs. Furthermore, to make the most of the potential economies, it must be relatively easy to recruit undergraduates from a variety of departments on to new modules. While departments think mainly in terms of specifying the complete range of options offered their undergraduates, rather than a core set leaving other options completely open, this may not be possible.

My personal interest in this area

My own interests are a very close fit to this area, which should be mentioned since they both qualify me to have an opinion, but also mean I have a motive for exploration for research reasons, not simply strategic and economic ones.

My research interests are in HCI, and latterly also in the evaluation of learning technology and hence in educational theory and technique. I teach HCI, and have taught industrial courses on this. Thus both my research interests and also my teaching focus are brought together in this area.

I was a member of the MANTCHI project, and am currently publicising it for academic gain. I also was a member of the TILT project, directing the evaluation team on that. On the other hand, my view of applications of learning technology is that they often bring no substantial gain: the few that do are those that were not driven by the technology but by the previous identification of a particular niche-specific need that new technology could remedy. (I argue this view in a paper, reference below.) In other words, I'm not a strong techno-phile. In a recent presentation, Tom Carey reported applying the niche concept in a programme of organisational change (see the appendix).

Work on evaluation drove me to seek a theory to structure my experiences, and I am now a big fan of Laurillard's model of the teaching and learning process. I co-supervise a PhD student (Michelle Montgomery) who adapted that model for use as a design method for educational software and other cases of instructional design. Her work has attracted favourable comment at international conferences.

Appendix, references, pointers

Briefing points

  • I have had an invitation from Tom Carey for some degree of collaboration on his creation of HCI courses, as noted above. I think he would like me to take leave to go to Canada to help create some of the structure ASAP, though I don't know if this is possible. I certainly hope we can contribute some elements, if only for the experience, and there is also some interest expressed in this by Phil Gray in Computing Science here.

  • I also, independently, had an impromptu suggestion of collaboration in relation to Universtas21 from Michael Nott at the University of Melbourne, whom I met recently at a conference. I don't know if anything will come of this.

  • A paper on the "MANTCHI" model for reciprocal collaborative teaching is at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/altj.html
    More information on the MANTCHI project can be found via:
    http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/ An attempt at a cost-benefit analysis of the MANTCHI model, based on our experience, is at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/cb.html

  • There is currently no public document on the Carey model of teaching collaboration.

  • There is an organisational change technique of how to promote learning technology use throughout a university, described by Tom Carey in a talk. A learner-centred design idea kit for student/faculty teams: Scaling up a learning technology strategy by Tom Carey, Kevin Harrigan, Antonia Palmer and Jonathan Swallow; University of Waterloo.

    His strategy was to run a course (repeatedly) on instructional design, where each team of students had to find their own client among the faculty of the university: apparently they are uniformly successful at this, while he often had failed. The students of course used their advantage of having taken courses given by prospective clients, and being able to suggest where technological improvements might make a useful difference (the niche idea). He has a series of hurdles for the designs, and a substantial number have now been used in regular teaching, and a few have been sold commercially. This is essentially a pyramid-like scheme for amplifying the effect, through teaching, of an academic hired into a support (not teaching) job. It seems to be an original, and successful, approach to organisational change.

    Other points

  • My "niche" paper is:
    Draper, S.W. (1998) "Niche-based success in CAL" Computers and Education vol.30, pp.5-8 also at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/niche.html

  • A diagram of the Laurillard model,and reference to the original, is at:
    http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/Laurillard.html The model is given at: p.103, in Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology (Routledge: London).

    Companion document

    A companion document with some notes on these issues is at models.html

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