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Paul Bacsich Abstract Time is strangely under-examined in the literature of e-learning (Goodyear 2006). This paper aims to build on this observation to provide a researched starting point for a new synthesis of time aspects of e-learning in general, and microlearning in particular Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Microlearning organisation and specifically to Professor Peter Bruck for facilitating the later phases of this work via an invitation to speak at the Microlearning 5.0 conference in Innsbruck, Austria in July 2011. My researcher Sara Frank Bristow was responsible for the first draft of the bibliography on time. Time has been a key factor in this paper, and surrounding its writing. From time to time, work on this topic has been supported by JISC via its support of my work on costs of e-learning. I am grateful to my wife and colleagues for their support and flexibility in allowing me to eventually finish this paper. Even Time3 did not help (read on...)
Microlearning
As is common with concepts in learning, there is a range of meanings of the word microlearning. Wikipedia (2011) in its informative article starts off its treatment with the crisp statement Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term learning activities. The educational technologist Schneider (2010) in his EduTech wiki article places this definition alongside two others derived from the Microlearning project: [a] term used in the e-learning context for a learners short interaction with a learning matter broken down to very small bits of content. At present this term is not clearly defined. Learning processes that have been called microlearning can cover a span from some seconds (e.g. in mobile learning) to 15 minutes (learning objects sent as emails). in a wider sense [microlearning] is a term that can be used to describe the way more and more people are actually doing informal learning and gaining knowledge... especially those that become increasingly based on Web 2.0 and Wireless Web technologies. The literature references from these sources all point to the work of Hug and in particular to his analysis of the dimensions of microlearning (Hug 2006). Of these dimensions, time is the one mentioned first. It is also implicit (rather than explicit) in the concepts of informal learning and Web 2.0 that time is a key factor.
Paul Bacsich
January 2012
As noted in Wikipedia, as Lewis Ryder has put it, In the Quantum Theory, these [classical] divergences do not disappear; on the contrary, they appear to get worse. And despite the comparative success of renormalisation theory the feeling remains that there ought to be a more satisfactory way of doing things. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization
Paul Bacsich
January 2012
No Significant Difference
Even in the mid 1990s, it was regarded as surprising that there appeared to be large returns on investment in the training world from some deployments of what would now be called e-learning, yet little evidence of any similar return in the university sector. A 700% return at Royal Bank of Scotland was reported by one commentator and it was routine to expect 10-25-40% learning gains using e-learning compared with using a conventional classroom for the same time, and some situations where 60% learning gains were reported. Very little of these results came out into the public domain because the results were so spectacular that the companies regarded them as trade secrets, and the culture and technology of the time (just at the start of the Web) did not encourage or facilitate open publication. On the other hand, it is believed by many academics, and apparently validated by the seminal work of Thomas L. Russell (1999), that the mode of delivery makes no significant difference to the grades or other performance indicators of students. The Web site http://www.nosignificantdifference.org, now supported by WCET, rounds out and updates this earlier work. There have been several impassioned critiques of this work (see for example Oblinger and Hawkins 2006) and an increasing number of recent studies Sweet and Sealover (2007) is one of many, relevant to us since it focuses strongly on time issues) and meta-analyses (US Department of Education 2010) do suggest significant differences in some cases, but the main thrust of the NSD argument is still accepted by many analysts. But not by all and by fewer and fewer institutions. KC Green (2010) has documented the inexorable rise in online learning at US university and college campuses each year since the No Significant Difference results first came out use keeps growing. Carol Twigg at the National Center for Academic Transformation talks about moving beyond No Significant Difference (Twigg 2001) with an increasing focus on reducing costs (Twigg 2003). I have contended since my 1999 work on costing that the No Significant Difference work has several major flaws in particular many key variables were not controlled. Putting it at its crudest, if students are offered a course, in the majority of cases they will study as much on the course as they think is justified, however well or badly the course is presented: many will aim to pass but not necessarily excel, so that when their effort-grade curve begins to tail off (in their mind, as well as they can predict) they will stop studying. In a situation where students were studying full-time (often rather less than a working week at many universities in many countries) and time was thus Paul Bacsich 4 January 2012
Saving time
So how can the use of e-learning save time? (Even if the institutions do not notice, or care to notice, this saving of time by students.) There are three main ways:
1.
Travel
Just as in training, students can save travel time by studying via e-learning. Bacsich et al (1999, p.1) noted that: The student survey showed that there is a disjunct between student beliefs in essence, students believe that Networked Learning increases costs to them and student behaviour time has an opportunity cost to them Many academic thinkers still seem stuck in a mythical era where students walked (or at worst, cycled) to a campus-based university where they spent all day, either in lectures or the library or laboratories. Somewhere like KU Leuven or Oxford comes to mind. Yet having lived in Oxford and worked at the university, even 30 years ago many students had long bus journeys into Oxford and the traffic was nightmarish. The reality of travel to many city-based universities, be they in London or Hong Kong, is far worse, with commute times in excess of an hour. At many other universities, even though students may be supposed to live nearby, many do not. When teaching in Sheffield a few years ago, I was surprised to find several of my students living in other cities, with long commute times, and subtly they implied that this commute time was the universitys fault despite our brochure clearly stating where our university was situated! So every journey saved to a lecture, or (much more common) to the physical library is time saved and indeed money directly saved as travel is no longer free for students. The situation is far worse for part-time students, an increasing minority in many universities, since they on average live further away. And all kinds of students complain (Bacsich et al 1999, section 6.6) about other wastes of time: Students reported that the main cost to them was time: including time to gain familiarisation with software, time delays at log on, time queuing for printing, and time lost due to system crashes. The telephone bill, hardware and software were next most important other items such as insurance were fairly low on the list. That paper also reports that other projects have reached similar conclusions.
2.
Even in universities, students can also reduce time on task. This is not only possible by using sophisticated e-learning systems (intelligent teaching systems, etc) much more commonly students can do this by studying only the parts they do not know, and thus avoiding lectures and other activities where they have already got the knowledge in other words, personalised learning.
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January 2012
3.
Bologna
The fundamental credentials of the university are defined by time, not by content or competence. In Europe (and the countries influenced by it), each course is specified not only by its syllabus but also by its points. A similar situation pertains in the US and the countries it influences. The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System always now called ECTS is defined as follows in the ECTS Users Guide (ECTS 2009). The Guide is a complex document but the essence of ECTS is described in just three short paragraphs. ECTS credits are based on the workload students need in order to achieve expected learning outcomes. Learning outcomes describe what a learner is expected to know, understand and be able to do after successful completion of a process of learning. They relate to level descriptors in national and European qualifications frameworks. Workload indicates the time students typically need to complete all learning activities (such as lectures, seminars, projects, practical work, self-study and examinations) required to achieve the expected learning outcomes. 60 ECTS credits are attached to the workload of a fulltime year of formal learning (academic year) and the associated learning outcomes. In most cases, student workload ranges from 1,500 to 1,800 hours for an academic year, whereby one credit corresponds to 25 to 30 hours of work. This is the Bane of Bologna but in fact there are several linked banes. The first bane is that there is a 16% jitter in the definition of ECTS credits anywhere between 30 and 25 study hours. Suppose a teacher worked very hard to ensure that he could teach his course in such a way that students could take 10% less study time. An evaluation would probably not pick that up. Worse than that, his rival could just drop 10% of the syllabus (keeping the same ECTS points) and achieve the same result! The second bane is that the figures for study hours are not realistic. In particular a low end student workload of 1500 hours for an academic year equates to 37.5 hours per week, on the assumption of a 40-week academic year (much longer than in many universities) and this figure of 37.5 hours per week is far higher than survey figures suggest is typical in many countries. The well-known HEPI student surveys in 2006, 2007 and 2009 produced some embarrassing figures: [surveys] revealed an average of just 20 hours of total study per week in mass communications, and not much more in business studies. This is just two thirds of the amount required on average in, say, engineering. Paul Bacsich 6 January 2012
Competency measures
The classic approach to resolve the issues of time-based measures of education is to move to a competency-based approach. This has been much talked about since the 1970s but with one notable exception (discussed below) little has happened within universities. This paper is not an overview of competency-based learning merely an introduction to the topic designed to tease out the issues of time. An introduction to early work on the topic can be found in Voorhees (2001). A competency-based approach to learning is one where in order to pass a course a student need only demonstrate competency in the syllabus the demonstration can be via exam and/or some kind of practical assessment, depending on the topic. There is no need to attend any specific classes, Paul Bacsich 7 January 2012
In timesheet terms, these longer chunks of Time3 are often the kind of time period where one agonises about how to code it on the timesheet and sometimes the kind of time period which it can be hard to charge out to clients some national funding agencies in some countries refuse to pay for travel time (or travel, even when necessary). But Time3 can also emerge from the cracks, and this is where the link to microlearning is very clear. In interstitial time gaps between meetings, odd moments of reflection (or distraction), whether on-duty or off-duty, and other short periods access to a personal mobile device (and ones brain) can allow one to make profitable use of these time fragments to send emails or texts, look up a blog posting or Wikipedia entry, etc. This is all possible and effective, without resorting to contestable theories about net gen multitasking, since in such moments one is only handling one foreground activity, the other activities being autonomic (like sitting or walking). Thus Time3 has at least two subdimensions: Paul Bacsich 9 January 2012
1.
Why did The Captain manage preferentially to attract many lecturers to teach on his postgraduate face to face courses when on these courses they had the same teaching load as they would have had on other face to face courses?
2.
A distance teaching university (DTU) can attract tutors (adjunct professors) even in times of high employment, yet how can it do this while paying labour rates lower than equivalent positions at other universities?
3.
A course is taught on campus to undergraduate students. A version of the course with the same syllabus is also taught at a distance to part-time students. The same lecturer teaches both courses. Paul Bacsich 10 January 2012
The Captain was a charismatic personality and treated his lecturers well but this cannot fully explain the strong willingness of many lecturers to teach on his courses. In this UK university, as in many, the teaching load is made up of a fixed number of hours (say 400) per year. The teaching load for each lecturer is the sum of the teaching load on each module they teach. For each module the teaching load is typically made up of two 1-hour sessions per week at the same times each week. This means that the typical lecturer has a diary which is very much cut up by teaching commitments each week of each semester. That makes it very hard to get uninterrupted spells on research or to travel to the capital city to liaise with funding bodies and win more grants. In contrast, the Captains postgraduate courses were taught in blocks of 2 or even 3 hours at a time. Thus the disruption effect was considerably less. Indeed, some of the modules were taught in intensive mode over 4-day sessions, and for those students and staff who found it appropriate, a few of these were taught over the weekend in residential mode. This bunching meant that in a few weeks of such intensive mode teaching lecturers could burn off (as they called it) a substantial part of their semester teaching. Interestingly, since they had a lesser teaching load (typically 200 hours) this proposition was even more attractive to the externally-funded and professorial staff, leading to another bonus that the postgraduate students got the most research-active staff of all to teach them. All within the same effort envelope but a very different pattern of time!
2.
The solution again lies in the different pattern of time the university requires and some gender biases in use of time and the opportunity cost of various time slots. Typically the DTU requires its tutors to teach online during the evenings (when the DTUs students, most of whom work in the day, are online). Occasionally the DTU also requires its tutors to attend Saturday sessions presented face to face in various cities. Many of the tutors are already employed (often at other universities) and this evening and occasional weekend work is useful extra income. (There are secondary benefits too the DTUs material may be relevant to their other teaching.) Other potential tutors are not employed or not fully employed, due for example to childcare responsibilities but evening work (and given planning with their partner, the occasional weekend) is often easier to sustain.
3.
On the face to face course the students are mostly young and in theory studying full time. Even though many do undertake some part-time work, it is easier for them to expand their time on just one particular course when a lecturer fails to teach it effectively. Also being on campus most students have an effective social network which straddles different years (a fact unknown to many lecturers) and so after the shock of their poor results on the first assignment, contact was made with the students from the previous year of the course (it was not a final year course) who supplied goodPaul Bacsich 11 January 2012
Conclusions
There are two headline conclusions: 1. We need better and more accepted ways of thinking about time in e-learning. At present there is no consensus even among the few researchers active in the area. 2. We need better less intrusive, more reliable ways of measuring time use in e-learning and in working life! Closer liaison with the Learning Analytics community is indicated.
References
These are split in two: on Time and then on Wider issues.
On time
Allan, B. (2004). E-learners Experiences of Time. Networked Learning Conference 2004. Available at http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2004/proceedings/individual_papers/ allan.htm Allan, B., & Lewis, D. (2006). Virtual learning communities as a vehicle for workforce development: a case study. Journal of Workplace Learning, 18(6), 367-383. doi:10.1108/13665620610682099 Brown, A. H., & Green, T. (2009). Time Students Spend Reading Threaded Discussions in Online Graduate Courses Requiring Asynchronous Participation. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(6), 51-65. Available at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/760/1432 Goodyear, P. (2006). Technology and the articulation of vocational and academic interests: reflections on time, space and e-learning. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 83-98. doi:10.1080/01580370600750973
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On wider issues
Bacsich, P. (1999). The Hidden Costs of Networked Learning: The Consequences for University Administrators. Paper presented at the 12th International Meeting of University Administrators (IMUA); 5-9 September 1999, Edinburgh University, Scotland. Available at http://www.maticmedia.co.uk/publications/IMUA99.doc Bacsich, P. (2008). Costs of E-Learning Scoping Exercise: Report. Report to JISC, October 2008. Available at http://www.sero.co.uk/assets/celse_report.doc Bacsich, P. (2009). Liminality. Page on Re.ViCa wiki, last updated 28 August 2009. Available at http://www.virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/Liminality Bacsich, P. & Ash, C. (1999). The hidden costs of networked learning: The impact of a costing framework on educational practice. Proceedings of the ASCILITE Conference 1999, Queensland University. Available at http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane99/papers/bacsichash.pdf Bacsich, P. & Ash, C. (2000). Costing the lifecycle of networked learning: documenting the costs from conception to evaluation. ALT-J Volume 8 Number I, 2000. Available at http://repository.alt.ac.uk/324/1/ALT_J_Vol8_No1_2000_Costing%20the%20lifecycle%20of%20 netwo.pdf Bacsich, P. & Heginbotham, S. (2005). The Trial of Activity-Based Costing at Sheffield Hallam University. First published April 2002 with additional footnotes added September 2005. Available at http://www.matic-media.co.uk/CNL2-overview.doc Bacsich, P., & Pepler, G. (2008). Organisational Change: First Report. CAPITAL Horizon Scans, July 2008. Available at http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/capital/Yr1/HorizonScans/HS1%20Organisational%20Change. pdf
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