Visiting Scholar

Professor Ron Oliver, Pro-Vice-Chancellor(Teaching and Learning), Edith Cowan University, Australia

I have been very fortunate to be involved with staff from the Caledonian Academy in research activities associated with improving learning and teaching in higher education. I have long held an interest in seeking to better understand the factors that influence the quality of student learning in their university studies and have been actively researching the use of ICT as a possible means to this end.

A project in which I have been engaged with Caledonian Academy, the Mod4L project, involves explorations of learning designs that can support effective learning outcomes. The term learning design, describes the plans a teacher makes when organising a learning environment. Teachers typically instigate a planning process with particular learning outcomes in mind and skilfully develop a series of activities for the learners that will provide learners with the experience needed to achieve these outcomes. When researchers attempt to articulate the process of learning planning, the complexity of the process presents many difficulties. Contemporary teaching involves providing learners with a structured yet flexible learning setting where they must make many of their own decisions in using a range of tools and resources to some productive end. Typical learning settings are characterised by learners with many differences and the learning settings needs to be able to accommodate this diversity.

Our project has been exploring, in particular, ways that teachers can describe and represent learning designs with the view to discovering how these designs might be reusable and sharable. Teachers can expend much creativity in the design on learning settings and there will always be some products that are better than others. Our research has sought to determine representation that can describe learning designs in ways that provide teachers with clear plans for implementing their activities while at the same time enabling other teachers to recognise the processes involved and perhaps to be able to implement similar learning activities in their own classrooms.

The research has investigated a number of representation that are currently used to describe learning designs and has explored the utility and efficacy of these different approaches in providing for the needs of the teachers seeking to use them and other teachers who might be able to use them.

The collaboration with Caledonian Academy in this project has been very fruitful and worthwhile. It has facilitated the formation of a team of talented researchers with similar interests and passions and has enabled this team to undertake a project with collaboration at a distance. The links that the Caledonian Academy has with other researchers and research groups within the world has contributed greatly to the outcomes of the project and the development of new knowledge in this field.

As we draw findings from the Mod4L project, it is likely that we will continue to collaborate further and to use the outcomes to commence the process of creating actual learning designs that can be shared and reused. Once we have determined appropriate representation schemes, we will look to develop representations of both simple and complex learning designs, especially those that use ICT as a resource. We will then spend some time investigating the factors that influence the sharing and reuse of learning designs. We are very interested in exploring whether or not we can build ICT-based learning designs in the form of software shells that teachers might use as the framework for their learning activities. Our hope is that one day, the world’s best learning designs might be able to be described and represented in ways that will enable mainstream teachers to seamlessly populate them with high quality reusable learning resources (learning objects) to create learning environments that offer students the highest quality learning experiences across a range of subjects.

There is still so much more research to be done in this area in which Caledonian Academy leads the world. I look forward to being an active collaborator with this outstanding team of researchers for many years to come and hopefully expanding our collaborations and shared interests.

Professor Ron Oliver,
Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning),
Faculty of Education and Arts,
Edith Cowan University,
2 Bradford St, Mt Lawley 6050.

Updated: 12 August, 2009 | Site editor | Legal