Professional simulation through quizzes

One of the challenges in teaching a work-related subject through distance learning is to get students to think in a professional way. It's easy enough to give them theory, case studies and exemplars, practical tips and suggestions; but what you really need to give them is practice in thinking on their feet and feedback on their efforts so that they can improve.

Here is a neat example of how to do this in a technically simple and pedagogically powerful way. Taken from an OU course on technology management, this exercise drops you into the scenario of investigating a serious accident which resulted in loss of life - based on Richard Feynman's investigation of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. As in Feynman's case, this scenario includes many people who have an interest in hindering your investigation, and a series of questions ask you what you would do in one difficult situation after another. For each question, there are a number of possible responses, and for each response you get feedback.

There are no wrong responses, and no responses which are indisputably right; even the least favoured courses of action might work out under certain circumstances, and even the most favoured carry some degree of risk. So although the simulation takes the form of a multiple-choice quiz, there's no scoring: the learning comes in your thinking through the pros and cons of the possible courses of action and in checking your thinking against the model analysis provided in the feedback.

The only weakness in the quiz format is that the response options, by being given explicitly, may prompt you to consider possible courses of action which you wouldn't have thought of for yourself - but that it seems to me is a small price to pay for the simplicity and elegance of the delivery. As I commented in my review of the varieties of simulation, it's never possible to simulate every aspect of a scenario: the learning design challenge is to focus on those aspects which are relevant to the training: which allow learners to exercise their relevant abilities, and to make mistakes. In this case, the aim of the learning is not about the creative generation of possible actions in difficult situations, but the practical and ethical thinking through of their consequences. And in that, I think this exercise succeeds brilliantly, using very simply online technology, but with a well-realised scenario and very well-written feedback .

The exercise was promoted as a tie-in with the BBC/OU co-produced docu-drama on the Challenger investigation, with William Hurt as Richard Feynman, broadcast on 18 March 2013. The programme is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer until 10:30 pm on Monday 25 March.

How to be patronising

Claire Warwick, of the Guardian Higher Education Network, has imagined a lovely piece of spoof guidance to academics, on how to give a talk.

Walk into the room – do make sure that you open the door first, or you might get a nasty bang on the nose! You might notice there are people sitting in seats in front of you. Don't be scared. They are called the audience, and they are there to listen to you. They might ask questions afterwards. You will need to think carefully about your answers: you wouldn't want to say anything silly!

Would anybody ever write anything so crass? Perhaps not. But her point was that much of the guidance to academics on how to use Twitter is just as patronising and inappropriate. And immediately after reading this article, I was looking for something helpful on work-related stress and found that the best that one major employee-assistance company could offer was "Quick fixes" (their own title) such as the following:

Don’t bottle it up
Talking to people is a good way to beat stress because it helps us see the problem more clearly – it may not be as bad as we thought, and other people may have different perspectives and solutions we hadn’t considered.

Worries? What worries?
Worrying about the ‘what ifs?’ in a situation takes a lot of time and energy, and anxiety can quickly escalate. First, find out the facts about a situation – your worries may turn out to be unfounded. If you’re still concerned, plan your strategy, with a friend if necessary, so that you feel more in control of the situation.

Take time out
Ring-fence time in your day to unwind and reflect – it will help you recharge your batteries and get things into perspective.

The problem with these suggestions isn't that they're wrong, but that anyone who has got to the point of needing help with work-related stress will almost certainly have thought of them already and tried them and still be in trouble. (One of the awful things about high-level stress being that it reduces one's ability to deal practically with the things that are causing it.) What these suggestions imply that the reader is too stupid to have thought of them for themselves. If I were suffering from stress and someone were to talk like that to me, I think I'd probably hit them - which, though very bad of course, might actually be more effective than any of these ideas in relieving my stress.

What makes these efforts to be helpful so patronising, wrong and offensive ? They tell you things that you already know (or think you know), and by making a big deal about them as though they're a great secret or revelation, they position you, the reader, as ignorant and stupid. They don't address the mistakes which you might actually be making, or tell you things you actually want to know; when it comes to areas that are difficult (responding to audience questions, dealing with weak management) they avoid them or fudge the issue completely.

How often do we do the same with the guidance we provide for students, I wonder? When they reach out to us asking for our help, all too often we ignore their actual needs (or remain ignorant of them) and just provide them with information which they most likely have already. But at least we don't usually finish, like call centre operators do, by asking - after they've completely failed to solve your problem - "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Seen and heard: February 2013

Dancing on the Edge - BBC TV drama series by Stephen Poliakoff and starring the very good Chiwetel Ejiofor as the leader of a (black) 1930s jazz band. Compelling television, driven by excellent characters, vivid (and frequently sumptuous) settings, great music, and a continual sense of insecurity, of things being not quite what they seem, of menace lurking just beneath the surface glamour of success.
CloudAtlas - film of David Mitchell's high concept novel of nested stories, running from the 19th century pacific ocean to the post-apocalyptic future. The exposition and middle section work beautifully, with the inter-cutting of stories heightening the pace and enhancing the connections, but the endings don't work so well: there isn't the same sense of one interrupted story after another being resolved and wound up. And the changed optimistic ending of the far-future story is a cop-out. (But visually stunning, though; see the videos on the movie website.)
Irvin Yalom, Love's Executioner - a psychotherapist's collection of case stories, beloved by other therapists on account of his openness about his own mistakes and short-comings.
The Sound and the Fury- BBC TV / OU documentary series on music in the twentieth century. Funny how everyone's queuing up now to diss serialism! (No argument from me.)

Seen and heard: January 2013

Goodbye to Canterbury - inspirational meditation by Rowan Williams, the out-going Archbishop of Canterbury, in the form of a tour of Canterbury Cathedral. He should do lots more telly.
A New Beginning - saving-the-world-from-environmental-disaster adventure game in a comic book style, which lives up to its glowing reviews.
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, by Sherry Turkle, 2005 edition, originally published 1984 - ground-breaking (for its time) anthropological investigation of the human-technology relationship, from kids arguing whether their new computer toys are live to the peculiarities of hacker culture. (Interesting to compare to a more recent anthropological study of hacker culture, see here)
OLDS-MOOC - the Open Learning Design Studio Massive Open Online Course.
It's Complicated - 2009 film, now seen on TV, with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin as a divorced couple starting an extra-marital affair with each other.
Rachel Cusk, article in Guardian Review, original title "The Book of Self" - especially interesting on what drives people to creative writings courses: "Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels the need to assert a 'true' self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every social and personal network, has given rise to a 'false' self."
Theatre of the Ayre - counter-tenor, lute and viol band, playing at The Stables, playing Dowland and other late-Elizabethan music. Extraordinary perception-heightening effect of listening to this intimate kind of music for an extended period.
Howard Goodall's Story of Music - proof that didactic television isn't dead, as long as you've got something to say and something to show. (Also that you don't need location shooting to tell a historical story; it's all done through studio and concert hall filming, supplemented by archive and stock library footage.)