To kickstart the new year, HERESA hosted another edition of the HERESA Café on January 26th from 12h00 to 13h00 (SAST). The last two sessions of the Café saw presentations from Dr Elina Botha, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) in Finland, who discussed the Flipped Classroom model, and Dr Helen McGuirk, Head of the Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence at Munster Technological University (MTU) in Ireland, who spoke about how Communities of Practice can facilitate learning amongst educators and researchers in entrepreneurship and innovation. Both sessions were highly informative and engaging with HERESA members receiving the opportunity to express their views frankly and bounce ideas off one another.
For the third edition of the HERESA Café, Dr Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, Head of the Department of Technology-Enhanced Learning at MTU, delivered a fascinating presentation on “Contemporary themes in Technology-Enhanced Learning”. With over a twenty-five-year career in the field, Dr Ó Súilleabháin has led and contributed to an array of innovative grant-funded and commercial ed-tech and technology-enhanced learning projects. He has published and presented widely on a number of related topics to do with, inter alia, the integration of e-learning systems in higher education, the pedagogy of online learning, learning transfer, and game-based learning. He also chairs the Ed Tech and E-learning research group at MTU and is course director for MTU Cork’s online MA in E-learning Design and Development (http://tel.cit.ie/ma-in-e-learning).
To get a sense of what we could expect from this session, Khanya Mtshali, Media Liaison for Technological Higher Education Network South Africa (THENSA), spoke to Dr Ó Súilleabháin over Zoom to get a sense of what HERESA Café can expect from this exciting, innovation-driven topic.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Khanya Mtshali for THENSA: Dr Ó Súilleabháin, thank you for joining me for this third HERESA Café Q&A.
Dr Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin: Thank you for having me.
T: I like to start off these Q&As with a simple question and that is, what, in your view, is Technology-Enhanced Learning?
GOS: Yes, happy to do so. Technology-enhanced learning is about the ways in which technology can be used to facilitate learning or create a better learner experience. The range of technologies we look at has changed over the years, but it generally refers to a range of contemporary online and digital technologies.
T: Technology has become such an integral part of our daily lives that it can be easy to forget just how long we have been using it to assist with teaching and learning. For example, institutions still use photocopiers to disseminate learning materials, projectors to assist with lectures and online quizzes as a form of knowledge-testing. And yet you still have some educators who are anxious or leery of integrating certain technologies into the classroom. Why do you think that is the case?
GOS: I think there are a few different levels that this works at. One is a view of technology-enhanced learning as an automating kind of technology. In other words, it is seen to be taking away from the role of the teacher, lecturer or instructor figure. In one extreme view, some teachers or lecturers might perceive technology-enhanced learning as completely taking over from them or at least, they might perceive it as changing their status [as instructors]. We often hear that with technology-enhanced learning, the instructor becomes “the guide on the side” rather than the sage. So they become more of a facilitator. But those changes, if they are evident, don’t relate solely to the introduction of technology but are probably part of larger cultural and pedagogical changes.
The other aspect of it though is that we already ask our teachers and instructors to be dual professionals. We want them to be subject matter experts and we also want them to be experts in teaching or pedagogical experts. And now we’re saying, “well look, as if you’re not busy enough already, here’s a whole bunch of other things you have to master in terms of learning management systems, live e-learning or video conferences”. It;s all very well for us who are professionals in technology-enhanced learning to be keeping up-to-date with the latest killer app but it might be difficult for those who are already quite busy in their more mainstream roles.
T: In the last few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, two camps have emerged in response to these two years of online teaching. The first is in favour of remote learning for safety reasons and the second believes it stymies the ability of learners to develop social skills and enjoy the sense of community fostered in face-to-face teaching environments. What are your thoughts on some of these debates around online teaching? Is there an equilibrium that can be struck between these two camps?
GOS: Yes, I think there is an equilibrium that can be reached there. We’re coming out at an unprecedented time. I have seen many different advances in the use of technology-enhanced learning over the last 25 years, but usually those leaps forward were limited to the enthusiastic few or to areas that seemed as though they were particularly well-suited to the use of technology-enhanced learning. Now the big difference with so-called emergency remote teaching is that everybody had to be involved. Whatever your background or department was, every member of staff and every student had to become part of this “Great Online-ing” or this move to the online environment. Now to your question about compromise, we’re now emerging from this period of emergency remote learning in Ireland so there is an opportunity to investigate and support its legacy. As part of that, we don’t have to choose. We can look at the technology and see where it brings the greatest benefit, where it solves problems and proceed accordingly. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
And to the point about online learning being poor for social interaction or creations of learner groups, that stuff takes more effort. Emergency remote teaching was an urgent and temporary response. Given more time, resources and willingness, I think we could’ve addressed some of those things which are seen as failures of emergency remote teaching. Imagine a situation where doing everything online was the traditional approach and suddenly we had to move to face-to-face [teaching]? How would we react if someone were to have said, “could you quickly tell me what are the three things I need to do to adapt to an on-campus environment?” I think it would be unrealistic of us to expect people to change modalities and still be as pedagogically effective and comfortable.
T: Is it better to use collaborative or instructor-directed forms of online learning, as opposed to self-directed online learning? And how do you gauge whether students have internalised this information or if there has been a transfer of knowledge?
GOS: Well, the last question you asked there is a question of assessment. When we design our assessment approaches, we have to think about reliability and we have to think about validity. We have to think about the repeatability of what we’re doing on the one end and its fitness for purpose on the other. I think the latter is often forgotten because, in part, of an excessive emphasis on the former. In other words, because we’re so concerned about issues related to replicability, repeatability and accuracy, we don’t stop to think whether, for example, a high-stakes final examination is the best way to test for creative problem-solving or collaborative learning.
On the subject of collaborative technology-enhanced learning versus self-paced courses, I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to achieve in the department of technology-enhanced learning. In the past at the Munster Technology University, we would’ve done a lot of commercial work where we would’ve developed a lot of self-paced, e-learning courses for some well-known, private corporations. We’d always say to them that if there wasn’t an instructor figure in the loop, there was a lot more work that they were going to have to put in to make the learning experience more media-rich, responsive and interactive. There would be a lot more work to do to replace the presence of an instructor figure and similarly with learners learning from each other or peer-learning.
Certainly, the ideal situation is that you accommodate all of these things. You need to have great content, activities, resources, opportunities and successful ways to support peer-learning and peer communication. Of course, you also need good ways for the instructor figure to facilitate the learning, delivering lectures, supporting labs, providing feedback and all that good stuff. Look, these are deep conversations, not just about learning but about our assumptions about what learning is and how learning happens.
T: There is still an idea that certain technologies, especially ones that are commonly but solely favoured by younger people, trigger isolation, distraction and anti-social behaviour. In certain parts of mainstream culture, when people hear about video games or virtual reality, the stereotype of a teenage boy playing video games in his room all day comes to mind. But that is not the case. Not only do adults enjoy these technologies, but there are also a host of diverse, close-knit online streaming communities. Gaming has also become highly professionalised. How does one go about changing that perception amongst some educators who might hear things like virtual or augmented reality and assume that their students will become anti-social or distractable?
GOS: That’s a really great question. Look, if I make some statement like “video and computer-game technology is a great way to learn”. How people receive that will depend very much on their exposure to contemporary video and computer games. Sometimes people from a certain generation imagine we’re still talking Pac-Man or Space Invaders or other stalwarts of the 1980s and maybe even the 1970s, in some cases. But video games, as you say, have changed quite a lot in terms of their sophistication, their fidelity and also in that social aspect. The stereotype that you mentioned of the young teenage boy alone in his room playing video games – that no longer applies to the majority of people who play computer and video games. Many of these people are often involved in highly social activities when they play games, especially when they’re playing massive multiplayer online games or games with multiplayer modes. When they’re playing these games, they’re cooperating with others, they’re doing cooperative play, they’re coordinating activities and talking to one another literally. There’s a whole culture built around gaming too.
I also think the matter isn’t helped by the fact that anytime there is an awful event like a school shooting, the popular media is quick to point the finger of blame at computer or video games. But you can’t have it both ways. On the one hand, you can’t have people claim that people learn aggressive behaviour from playing computer and video games while on the other hand, indicate that there is no learning transfer from those environments. If there is learning transfer from those environments, the challenge for those of us working in the area of technology-enhanced learning is how to leverage the affordances of that technology and use it to teach pro-social skills and deliver a different kind of learning and learning experience. You can even take the word “games” out of it if you like and talk about environments that are extremely responsive, media-rich and representative of the cutting-edge. For example, many games have simulation elements involved in them which would have good cognitive or physical fidelity to something in the real world which increases the likelihood that something being learned in the virtual world can find its way into the real world.
T: I think when educators from developing countries like South Africa hear about these interesting developments in technology-enhanced learning, there is an excitement that quickly turns to dread because in many parts of our country, higher education institutions and students in higher education institutions do not have access to the necessary infrastructure and resources to implement these technologies. How, if at all, can Technology-Enhanced Learning practitioners ensure that these technologies are not just suitable for those who are from wealthier nations, higher education institutions, regions or even socio-economic backgrounds?
GOS: It’s a difficult one. Sometimes we have discussions around things like that under the heading “The Digital Divide” which can exist within a country, region and globally too. If one is lucky, there can be some kind of leapfrogging where a particular country, nation or region gets to bypass traditional stages of development so that they can jump directly to the latest technology without having to engage in all the steps along the way. The mobile is a nice example of that. But I’d also add that it’s not always about having the latest technology. In fact, as somebody whose job it is to pilot and mainstream new technologies, you’re often better off going one generation back as a way to be as inclusive as possible. While the word “technology” is in the term “technology-enhanced learning”, the idea is not that the technology creates the learning but that it has an amplifying effect upon it. One of the big trends right now is open-educational resources and with it open-educational practices. This is a practice where people are openly licensing content and resources that they’ve developed so that other people can take it, use it and remix it as they see fit. There’s an interesting ideological dimension to that which might contain the seeds of a solution to some of those global digital divides.
T: How do you think Technology-Enhanced Learning can assist in encouraging higher education reform? Despite some of the negative press that Silicon Valley has received in the last few years, technology and innovation still has a reputation for being disruptive and positive, in some instances. Do you believe technology has the potential to instigate change, specifically in higher education?
GOS: I do, I do. I think it’s a pity sometimes that technology-enhanced learning can seem to be too much about the technology-enhanced learning vendor, the technology, the money and the funding required to roll those out. I see technology-enhanced learning as being continuous with older traditions of distance education or new traditions like the open-educational resources mentioned earlier. I think technology-enhanced learning should be viewed as a way to create opportunities and break down traditional barriers to learning, be they social, geographical, personal and economic. We should put that at the centre of our discussions and our work rather than focusing too much on technology standards and the make and model of learning management systems. Obviously it’s hard to separate these things out. However, you do need an IT infrastructure that’s robust and dependable before you can build this additional layer of technology-enhanced learning services and solutions.
Written by: Ms Khanya Mtshali (THENSA Media Liasion)