JISC

Start date: 1 May 2006

End date: 31 December 2006

Funding programme: e-Learning Pedagogy programme

JISC theme(s): e-Learning

Despite significant enthusiasm towards developing a language for describing learning designs that will enable sharing and reuse, researchers have yet to find ways to describe practice models so that practitioners in mainstream education can understand and apply them.   Final report (PDF)

Practice models can be viewed as generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices. There is a need for practitioner-focused resources describing a range of practice models and offering guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability. To be effective and sustainable practice models should be grounded in authentic practice and represented in ways that are meaningful to practitioners. In this sense practice models need to be both representations of effective practice(signify successful instances of good practice), andeffective representations of practice (have high impact on practice).

Aims and Objectives

Mod4L aims to develop a range of practice models that can be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. It will move JISC towards the use of models as a focus for communication, sharing and reuse of designs. 

The objectives of the project are to:

• Develop a range of practice models in the form of generic learning designs, exemplars or patterns abstracted from case studies and/or examples of real practice in post-16 and higher education contexts
• Map these practice models to one or more conceptual framework(s) e.g. a typology of generic learning activities, educational taxonomies, databases of case studies
• Derive additional practice models to fill any gaps indicated by the conceptual framework(s) chosen
• Review ways of representing practice models (eg. Lesson plans, concept maps, LAMS, Smart Learning Designs), and develop representations of practice models that are meaningful and usable by practitioner communities
• Use the representations to make the practice models available to practitioners in an accessible, coherent and usable form, with appropriate guidance on their use
• Make these models available to the Pedagogic Planner projects for inclusion in the online planning tool

Project Methodology

The project team will work in close partnership with practitioners to develop practice models that are meaningful to the learning, teaching and developer communities.   The project will abstract practice models by a top-down, bottom-up approach, starting by scoping existing case studies and learning designs, and conceptual frameworks, deriving generic patterns from the case studies and mapping these against the conceptual frameworks. For the long term success of the project, measured by its impact on practitioner communities, it is vital that the conceptual frameworks and representations identified have meaning to practitioners.  To ensure this, practitioners will be involved at all stages of the project, in particular in developing evaluation criteria and subsequently evaluating the designs, frameworks and representations. 

A ‘practitioner focus group’ will be established drawing members from the JISC/SFC Transforming and Enhancing the Student Experience through Pedagogy project (TESEP), HEA subject centres and CETLs. The practitioner focus group will operate by face to face meetings near the beginning and end of the project, with online communication in between. The practitioner communities will include teaching professionals and curriculum teams in both HE and FE across a range of disciplines and teaching approaches. It will not include technical developers.

Deliverables

Project website; community discussion website; report on exemplars, case studies and learning designs; report on effective forms of representation; a range of practice models represented in usable ways that will feed into the pedagogic planner projects, and guidance notes on the use of these. 

Stakeholders

Design for Learning projects, JISC, learning technologists, software developers and vendors, teaching practitioners.