Tuesday 8 December 2009

In favour of research

I've just submitted an early draft of my dissertation so have a few days "grace" before I get back on the rollercoaster.

However, that leaves my creative juices a little lost for a repository, so I thought I'd do a mini piece of the benefits of research to my practice.

I've been looking at the academics experience of using multi-media in their teaching. Late in the day I had to widen this to include VLE's - simply because definitions of multi-media generally started with "Text".

Following much work on a literature review of the current situation, hours of interviews and weeks of analysing and reflecting on that data, I produced a list of recommendations. Here’s a few:
- my dept to do some marketing around the role of the learning technologists - confusion and therefore tensions exist;
- rewards for staff for using TEL - currently there are none, or even a deficit model
- to encourage a lack of tolerance to equipment failure
- to encourage academic staff to share best practice - perhaps facilitating mechanisms for this
- Ensure all staff that need to teach “On-Line” have attended a basic course about how to teach on-line, that may cover everything from expectations through to feedback and marking online, and visiting contentions issues such as IPR along the way.
- Ethics - do some
- Alignment - yes please
- Replace activities with tech stuff, don't use TEL to add more work
- Go organic - look for home grown initiatives rather than top down dictates - the latter never work (lots of refs on this one);
- JIT training - team based
- Accept that stuff is becoming more fluid (evidenced by lack of printed manuals in the ICT field)

I believe my practice and my role are enhanced by this research.

Kindest regards

David
07:15 on a wet Wed in December


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