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.)

Lessons on usability from The Guardian iPad app

One of the things I've been enjoying on my new iPad is the Guardian app, which I think I can now say I find both easier and more enjoyable to read than the print edition of the newspaper. It's easier to handle, of course, being smaller, but I also find that I browse more and find myself reading more items than I used to do. (I don't use it at the breakfast table though, to avoid marmalade on the screen.)

But the improved readability and usability is down to some great information design, not solely the change of medium. Each issue is clearly divided into sections, and it's easy to switch between them or pop up to the whole-issue level. Within each section, the items are presented to you with a headline, a standfirst, and often a photograph. The photographs are strong, and look really striking on the iPad's retina display, and provide fixation points for each item. But what is more critical in determining whether or not you tap on one of these to read it is the quality of the standfirsts: those short paragraphs before the article proper, which both explain what the article is about and give you a reason to read it (as explained here and here).

Now all of these elements - sections, signature photographs, headlines and standfirsts - are features of the print edition also. They are part of the standard information design repertoire of journalism, and their quality is probably the most critical contribution to the usability of the iPad edition. In a sense all that's needed for the iPad edition is for these to be put on the screen appropriately - not a trivial design task, and one which they could easily get wrong, but one which is made considerably easier by those elements existing in the first place.

To write online learning materials as compellingly and addictively browseable as the iPad edition of the Guardian we may need to adopt some of the same techniques, to focus on that same point in time when a reader is scanning the screen and wondering what to do next. Pictures need to be interesting and relevant, titles need to be meaningful, and any introductory matters equivalent to a standfirst needs to sell the item not merely describe it, because it exists in competition with all the other things the reader or learner might be doing instead. We don't need to be apologetic about this; if we have materials which are good and interesting we shouldn't feel embarrassed about promoting them.

Why IT is bad for education

For my work, I make it my responsibility to know the drawbacks and downsides of IT, as well as its benefits and advantages. Since reading a magazine article by Marcus du Sautoy two years ago, I've been aware of a particularly insidious side-effect of IT's use in education, which has the potential to degrade and undermine the educational enterprise. That side-effect wasn't mentioned or discussed in the article: it was visible only in one particular phrase, the implications of which Marcus du Sautoy seemed only dimly aware.

That phrase was his summary statement of “what it is that I do as a mathematician and a writer”:

My job is, as the jargon goes, to “deliver content” in as many different forms and to as many different people as possible.

What he was doing was explaining how his venture into e-books and smartphone apps was simply an extension of  his work as a professional mathematician (“I prove theorems”), his formal teaching (lecturing in universities, schools and prisons), his informal teaching through books and programmes on television and radio, his collaboration with theatre companies and musicians on art pieces to explore mathematical themes, and his work on internet maths games. He was showing how all this work formed part of a single domain. But to do so, he used a phrase  - "deliver content" - which (as the scare quotes and the distancing "as the jargon goes" showed he was aware) came from quite a different and specialist domain: that of IT.

Now the word "content" sounds quite innocuous. Teachers or academics may use it and suppose that it means "course content" or "teaching content", roughly equivalent to "subject matter" or "subject knowledge". "Delivering content" sounds very like delivering a lecture, a class or a training course. Academics may also understand “content” as being opposed to “form, or perhaps to “structure”, allowing them to think of how essentially the same subject matter can be presented in different ways.

In IT, however, “content” has a different meaning. It means the information contained in a website, a database, or a computer file – as in the expression “content management system”. Delivering content means moving information from one place to another, irrespective of what that information, that content, actually represents. If you're emailing a digital photograph to a friend, it may matter to the IT system what format the file is in and how big it is, but the system does not know and does not care what the photograph shows. If you want to put some learning materials on a website, the IT people will want to know how many words there are, and whether you’ve got audio or video, but they won’t care what the words say or what’s in the audio and video or what students are supposed to do with it in order to learn.

Delivering content is what the IT industry does. It is the practical and commercial application of the central premise of information theory: that complex problems can be solved by reducing them to issues of signal, channel, noise and gain. The IT industry’s strength and success rests on the extraordinary degree to which real-world problems really are susceptible of treatment in terms of information flow: of not knowing and not caring what the information or content actually is, and focusing solely on whether it is delivered correctly. Just like postal services or courier companies, IT people's responsibility is limited to delivery on time and in good condition, and their relationship with sender or receiver need go no further than that. (You may be lucky enough to have a web developer who is actually interested in what you are trying to say and do with your web content, just as you may be lucky enough to have a courier or postal worker who is actually interested in you as a person, but this is not something which you should expect.)

The consequence of this is that when IT people approach the subject of education, they tend to see it in terms of transmission of information, because that's what they're good at. The technology which they design and build, therefore, tends to focus on the flow of information between teacher and student - and also, in these days of social media, between students - rather than any other aspect of teaching and learning. For example, when “virtual learning environments” or VLEs were first created for university teaching, they were designed on the assumption that their purpose was to get information - lecture notes, PowerPoints, articles to read - from teachers to students, and so that was the way in which university teachers found it easiest to use them (Britain and Liber, 2004, p. 4).

And this is the problem: that information theoretical thinking does not stay within the domain of IT, but through the widespread use of the technology and the surrounding vocabulary it bleeds out into the language and thinking of teachers, so that they too start conceiving their work in terms of information transmission instead of teaching. So even a good teacher such as Marcus du Sautoy can come to believe that his job is to "deliver content".

Why is it a problem to conceive of teaching as the transmission of information? Three reasons.

The first is that it’s bad teaching. Learning, even memorisation or assimilation, is an active process, and to treat students as though they're a passive receiver of information like a radio set or a hard disk is to encourage them to work at too low a level, not trying to do anything more than remember and repeat it.

The second is that it widens social divisions. If teaching only delivers information, it favours those with the educational experience and intellectual capital to make good use of it, disadvantaging those with less privileged backgrounds. This may not be a problem if you are happy to focus on the education of elites, but if you have a mission for social justice, as we do at the Open University, this most definitely is a problem.

The third problem with seeing teaching as the delivery of information - a problem for universities and other educational institutions at least - is that it threatens their existence. Information is cheap, or thought of as such thanks to the internet; there are no fees for the MOOCs or Massive Online Open Courses which a few leading institutions have started to provide (see here, here and here). If all universities do is provide access to information, they have no economic or moral basis for continuing in their present form.

But of course, even focusing solely on their teaching function, that is not all that universities do.
Those of us who work in such institutions and believe that we do have a social role to play may need to remind ourselves, and keep reminding others, that the business of a university is not the delivery of content but the transformation of lives.

Seen and heard: December 2012

"Tapestry: Weaving the Century at Dovecot Studio 1912-2012" - exhibition at Compton Verney. Extraordinary story of how a group of arts and crafts weavers, assembled to make tapestries for a Scottish aristocrat, created a future for themselves by collaboration with modern artists such as Graham Sutherland and Henry More.
The Nativity - lovely illustrated book, with the story sensitively told by Geraldine Elschner to accompany paintings by Giotto.
A Very Peculiar Practice - both TV series (1986 and 1988), written by Andrew Davies, on DVD. Classic black comedy set in a university medical practice, basically about trying to do a decent job while the seismic shifts in the higher education system make it almost impossible. Timely re-viewing!
Cinderella - pantomime at Milton Keynes Theatre. Annual treat for our grand-daughter.
Strictly Come Dancing final - won by Louis and Flavia, whom we're proud to say that we supported from the start. Not only an impressive showdance (where the other contestants went for fast and flashy, they went for slow and strong), but also massively improved performances of their salsa and Charleston.
Sister Wendy and the Art of the Gospel - a Christmas meditation from the unlikeliest of TV stars, whom her producer persuaded to leave her hermitage for what may be the last time.
Climbed Every Mountain: The Story Behind the Sound of Music - surprisingly profound BBC documentary by Sue Perkins, tracing the problematic relationship with the film of both the Von Trapp family in particular and Austrians in general, culminating in the first ever Salzburg performance of the stage show (in German), which seems to make some kind of reconciliation.
LATER ADDITION: Jacquie Lawson advent calendar -  excellently conceived animated e-card, with daily reveals through December, which we sent to our grand-daughter when the month began. Only later did I realise, watching her playing with the snowman-building, wreath-tying and tree-decorating animations, just how good it is: rich and rewarding and well within the capabilities of a five-year-old.