This was a draft based on my work as an LTA in FASS.
The UTS Online Renovation Project in FASS
A rising tide lifts all boats
The title of this blog is a reference to the well known aphorism ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ Although it is usually deployed in an economic sense, it more generally means that some outcomes have a benefit for everybody. In the case of the UTS Online Renovation Project, we used it to describe the fact that while we might not be able to work on every UTS Online site across the faculty, we would be able to hopefully improve the efficacy and student experience of using UTS Online by working on a significant number of the sites. In effect, we would be the rising tide; the boats would be the subject sites.
Over the course of 18 months, Learning and Teaching Adjuncts (LTAs) worked on more than 250 courses from the Schools of Communication, Education and International Studies. The purpose was to improve the usability of the sites for both students and academic, while retaining and respecting the unique nature of each subject. This took the following structure: firstly, LTAs would contact academics and request permission to review a subject site. Once this approval was given, the site would be matched against the TTISU minimum standards document (insert link?) which set out essential and recommended criteria for UTS Online. At this point, LTAs would seek to meet with academics again and make a range of suggestions for the changes to be made. Sometimes these were reasonably minimal – changing the template to match the FASS one, for example – but there were often sites that required significant restructuring or the addition of expected materials (for example, the student study guide, or the staff contact details, or a link to Jumbunna).
‘Declickifying’ UTS Online
There were a number of common topics that arose through the work; we’ve listed a few of them below, based on our discussions with students and also a reflection on the work as it was in process.
One of the most common complaints that students often made is that there was too much clicking in UTS Online. Digging a little deeper into that statement, what students seemed to mean is that it was a laborious process to access required information. For example, to find the readings for a week, it might mean signing into UTS Online, selecting a subject, then finding the right section of that subject, finding the link to the reading, being taken to the library (and perhaps having to sign in there as well) before you are even able to access the reading. When faced with such an intensive process to access something that should be readily accessible, it’s not surprising that students grow frustrated and give up. One of the simplest ways of removing these barriers – and of course this is dependent both on know-how and the time to put it into action -is to insert permanent links to each reading from the library. In this case, all a student needs to do is navigate to the UTS Online subject, and then click on hyperlink to get straight to that particular reading.
Another example of how UTS Online can be annoying is the different structures adopted in different subjects. Even within the same schools, subjects can have very different menu structures. Some make an explicit point of where to find recordings of lectures or student guides, whereas other subjects place these documents under a few hierarchical levels. Both approaches probably make a kind of structural sense to the person who created them, but the differences between the two can lead to confusion on the part of students – who often have four different subject structures to which they must become accustomed. This was resolved in a number of different ways – by deleting old material (the record was a study guide dating from 2011!), by creating common templates for material like General Resources and Using UTS Online, and ensuring announcements were up to date.
But perhaps the biggest complaint raised by students was an inability to find what they were looking for: that is, the navigation structures of the site didn’t allow them to traverse the material quickly and easily. This is perhaps not surprising: many of the navigation bars that were worked on didn’t make use of subheadings to break up information, which meant there might have been 15 separate items present in one long list. On some occasions, there were navigation items that pointed to empty pages (this is now hidden by default in the new version of Blackboard), or repeated navigation items – for example, Subject Outline and Subject Outline (old). To resolve these issues, we adopted a common structure of Welcome, Activities, Resources, Assessment and Interaction. Anything to do with assessment, went in the assessment subsection. Groups, Discussion Boards, Blogs – they all went into interaction. And for most subjects, we added a beautiful image and description to the Welcome page – and made it the first page students would see when they arrived on the site.
Moving from a bookshelf to a classroom
So what have we learnt through this process? One of the key findings that will continue to inform the development of FASS learning management system environments is the need for elements of interactivity to be built in and designed in the process. Of course, we should be quick to point out that many subject sites had already moved down this path before we started the project; in this case, we’re speaking generally.
We’ve conceptualised this idea as moving from a bookshelf model of LMSs to a classroom model. In this idealised example, a physical bookshelf is a place where resources are stored. You can place books and DVDs and other materials on a bookshelf, which may or may not be accessed. In terms of thinking about an LMS, a ‘bookshelf-LMS’ is an online collection of resources in much the same way. Subject coordinators can upload material – readings, links to websites, but the learning, if it takes place at all, is purely transactional, and often not at the forefront of the coordinator’s mind. Rather, material is filed – and often in large amounts – which can be accessed as required.
Alternatively, a classroom model of an LMS would be one that allows for a far greater degree of interactivity. While there are bookshelves in a classroom, the learning takes place through the process of engaging in carefully designed and structured activities based upon the material. It is the interactivity that is crucial, and that feature should be central to the development of student learning. Fortunately, there are a great many different ways to structure interactivity within LMSs. We’re not sure that these approaches will ever (and neither should they) replace elements of face to face learning, but rather we consider them to be valuable supplements to the blended learning model.
A few simple examples might serve to illustrate this idea. It is not uncommon for subjects to have a list of readings for students to access each week. By itself, uploaded to UTS Online, this is a limited experience. However, by building in ‘reading leaders’ (students assigned to read and then lead discussion via a discussion group or a Google classroom), something that is individualistic can become a shared experience of learning. Another way to build interactivity is to ask students to complete a quiz after a session, where they reflect on what they learnt and test their mastery of the subject. More adventurous staff might experiment with students ‘live-tweeting’ their reading of a journal article or a lecture. By using hash tags, suddenly everyone can be involved.
Relational approaches to learning – even in an LMS.
What this really means is that LMSs need to be more than sterile environments populated by material that is as likely to be ignored as it is accessed – if the material can even be found. Instead, if they are to be effectively used by students and academics (and we mean effectively to be much more than students being able to find out when an assignment is due; i.e. we mean that they are an aid to learning) then it is necessary that there is both space and structure that encourages relational aspects and behaviours to develop. It is easy to limit this discussion to the relationships between students and academics, or between the students themselves, but that misses the crucial relationships between the academic and the university hierarchy, and the academic and other staff (such as learning designers and tutors). These relationships develop when there are opportunities for engagement with academic concepts and ideas, and crucially, the opportunity to share thoughts and discuss them.
The classroom approach to subject design, as described above, places the idea of relationships in the centre of a student’s learning journey, rather than hoping that it is a byproduct of a particular LMS or template to be adopted. Decisions about learning processes need to be made with what’s best, easiest and most efficient for students and for the academics. These decisions need to be reflected in the design of LMSs.