Tag Archives: Tampere University of Applied Sciences

October 8, 2011 · 11:03 am

Reconsidering teachers’ roles – how to do it without hitting the system wall?

I’m so happy to be writing this in one of my favorite cities in the world: Barcelona!

The UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning VIII international seminar with the theme of teacher training has just ended today. For two days, we’ve been hearing presentations and engaged in discussion about teachers. Quite aptly, the seminar started just after the 5th Teacher’s Day. The message of the seminar is clear: the role of the teacher has to change, the old practices and methods invented for the needs of the industrial society are not working anymore. This is 21st century, knowledge society, network age, participatory economy – there are many definitions.

But of course we know this. You know this. We all know this. Anyone who has attended any education events or read any publications – scholarly or not – about the topic must have heard all this before. For a few years already, this has been the topic of keynote presentations, editorials and opening ceremonies at the beginning of the semester in different educational institutions.

I believe we’ve reached the point of awareness that leaves us with the question: now what? Yes, we know things need to change. We need to educate students for the future, not for the past. We need to cultivate innovation, creative thinking, problem solving and collaboration. It’s no longer news to us. Just tell us, how do we do it? Sometimes we get the feeling that we teachers are just supposed to teach ourselves a whole new paradigm, a bunch of new literacies and the corresponding pedagogies, just like that, on our own and preferably yesterday. It doesn’t work like that.

Ferran Ruiz Tarragó, expert in and author of books on ICT and Education and currently President of the Education Council of Catalonia, gave a great presentation at the seminar with the title “The Usual Suspects? Teachers, Their Challenges and Development“. He pointed out how teachers are the ones getting all the blame on all kinds of shortcomings, from low student performance to bad employability. Most critics don’t realize that teachers are unrealistically being required to be excellent in a totally outdated system. An education system, after all, is only as good as its managers.

The crazy thing is that “the system” is doing the wrong thing and taking a u-turn to the wrong direction instead of accelerating towards the knowledge society. Or what do you say about the incredibly ignorant trend of increasing control in the form of standardized tests, standardized curricula and standardized teaching methods when the right way would be increased flexibility, increased trust and collaboration and increased personalization? If we wish to promote 21st century skills, that is. Stephen Downes shared a post today where he discusses this, referring and linking to Joe Bower’s recent blog post, Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon (and no, I’m not sharing this because I’m from Finland but because Joe is making such an important point!). The standardization serves as a bad excuse for quality assurance. A friend of mine and a great innovative educator pointed out that it’s the “McDonalds quality assurance” – everything standardized to the point where there is no variation and absolutely no gourmet meals.

Julià Minguillón, Academic Director, UNESCO Chair in e-Learning and UOC listed barriers education has to overcome in his conclusion of the seminar. Among these are school and university structures and bureaucracy, assessment and testing, coping with the ongoing change, isolated and fragmented knowledge and poor transfer of education research into practice. His list did not emphasize teachers’ bad motivation, ignorance or unwillingness to change – the reasons that we often get to hear.

My feeling after the seminar – and already before it, resulting from discussions with hundreds of educators all over the world – is that the greatest obstacle on the way of education to the 21st century is that teachers are not given their well-earned status as knowledge workers. For many a system, they are unpredictable variables in the perfectly standardized “McDonalds Quality Assurance Process” and thus they need to be controlled. The culture of control is then repeated in the classroom. And we all know what control and surveillance do to innovation, don’t we.

The bright side here is that the system didn’t just fall from the sky or emerge from the ground. People created it. Therefore, people can also change it. Let’s get started with it today.

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December 8, 2010 · 2:06 pm

Introducing social media assisted teacher education in Berlin

I and Timo @School Forum / Online Educa Berlin 2010

I have recently returned home from Berlin where I was talking about our new approach to teacher training. I and my colleague Timo had a stand at School Forum, which was one of the pre-conference events at Online Educa Berlin 2010. We enjoyed many great discussions and met great people – hope to work together with many of you in the future! I gave the address to this blog as reference, so I’d better fulfill my promises and explain here what exactly we were talking about! So, here we go:

We at TAOKK (School of Vocational Teacher Education at Tampere University of Applied Sciences) have been offering pedagogical teacher qualification studies through a distance learning program for many years now, but what’s different and new is that we’ve given up on using Moodle and moved completely to open social media environments. The studies are directed to teachers of vocational subjects, and most of the participants are already practicing teachers on secondary or higher education. They just haven’t had the pedagogical qualification yet. This is something you need to have in Finland in order to be a teacher of a vocational subject. The studies take 2 years when completed alongside work, and we also offer them f2f supported by Moodle. But what we introduced in Berlin was the new approach using social media.

So, why social media instead of Moodle? There are two big reasons for that. First of all, Moodle is not necessarily the best tool for non-linear, open-ended, learner centered, inquiry-based, collaborative, team-based, authentic e-learning. Now that’s some definition, but that’s basically the approach we use. :) Two more questions arise: 1) why is Moodle not suitable for this; and 2) why are we using such an approach?

We’ve found out through experience and research that, being the learning management system it is, Moodle is rather teacher-centered. The participants don’t have the same privileges as the instructor. They can’t upload new material, start new discussion forums or change anything in the process. What we get is a traditional classroom setting: expertise on stage, delivering a one-way message to the audience. We didn’t want that. We wanted to get rid of hierarchies. Moreover, we had found out earlier that this setting also made the formation of teams and the sense of community very slow and sometimes difficult. The participants didn’t feel they formed a community of practice, rather they felt they were in school. This was again something we had to change.

The reason for the approach described earlier is that we want to promote the acquisition of 21st century skills. Have you read the book of the same name by Trilling & Fadel? If not, read. At least open the link and read what’s there, you’ll get the picture of what we too have had in mind. We didn’t feel that a traditional, hierarchical e-learning approach would serve the purpose. This is how the social media assisted approach was born.

So, what does it mean in practice? I’ll try to summarize it here:

  • We use Second Life, blogs, Twitter and Skype, and there are also a few f2f meetings.
  • The students work in small teams throughout their studies.
  • We have our own learning café in Second Life. The teams use that as a meeting place and starting point as they leave for excursions. They observe teaching in SL, participate in events and meet people.
  • There’s a lot of reflection, discussion and sharing. That’s what the blogs are for.
  • Networking outside the university is important. The participants follow interesting people on Twitter, find resources way beyond the ones provided by the university and stay on track with the latest research results. They learn to find and process information and create knowledge together, instead of reading set books and memorizing facts.
  • We don’t have set books. We have learning goals. The students define them, not just the teacher.
  • There are no traditional exams.
  • There is no numeric evaluation.
  • Instead, there’s dialogic evaluation. It’s ongoing, reflective and it helps students learn and internalize. The students also write digital narratives in teams to reflect on what they have learned.
  • The students get to decide for themselves where they wish to publish their narratives. No tools are determined by the teacher.
  • There is no central place with a linear learning process described. There is no linear learning process.
  • There is no instructional design.
  • The teacher’s role is to be a facilitator. This doesn’t mean she’s invisible, far from it. She has just given up on her role as the expert on the stage and become a guide and a coach instead.

So far, the results have been incredibly encouraging. The sense of a community has been created faster than ever. The students say that after just a couple of months they have established networks and found resources they could not have imagined possible. They have been very happy with the support they have got from the teacher. What’s remarkable is that they say their idea of teacher’s work has changed.

This has only just started some 5 months ago, so unfortunately I can’t give you any research results yet. But I definitely will! If you’re interested in hearing more about this, you can always ask me. We’ll also be talking about this in a few international conferences in the near future, you’ll see the details on the publications page.

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May 11, 2010 · 8:15 am

Traditional schooling is a threat to learning

Image: k8marieuk

Mikael Jungner, the former CEO of YLE Broadcasting company in Finland, shocked the nation with his exceptionally direct speech at the end of April (article in Kauppalehti 29.4.2010, in Finnish only – sorry!). He believes the leadership culture in Finland is in a deep crisis: “senile” (he really did use the word) managers cling desperately to their authority, titles and old procedures, give orders, work behind closed doors and fail to see that the world has changed for good.

Wait a minute, this isn’t a business blog. Shouldn’t I write about education? What’s it with all this business and management talk?

But the sad truth is that I have just written about education. The situation is pretty much the same in schools and universities as it is in business life: we hold on to old structures and hierarchies, curricula and methods of assessment, without realizing that they’re no longer a part of this world. Mikael Jungner claims that the “traditional boss is a threat to the competitivity of Finland”. Similarly,  the traditional schooling is a threat to learning.

As Mikael Jungner points out, passion and enthusiasm are the most effective fuel for profitability. Do I even need to say what they do to learning? Do I need to underline what outdated teaching and assessment methods, dull learning environments and hierarchical structures do to passion and enthusiasm?

Just a few days ago I ran into a wonderful example of true passion and enthusiasm – and great learning experiences. I had the opportunity to speak with Juho Hartikainen, the president of SCORE Game Development Club. He is a student at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, and together with fellow students, he wants to make games, collaborate with game industry, attend relevant events and create new innovative projects. There’s not enough of that included in the curriculum so they’ve worked on these things at the  SCORE club, outside school hours. These students have learned a great deal of valuable professional skills: networking, communication skills, presentation skills, language skills, interpersonal skills, project management, team work, responsibility – not to mention creating games – all through informal learning. These things are not in the curriculum. They have created their own learning environment, own learning methods, own networks, and become highly competent professionals in the field of game development – not because of, but despite formal education. And SCORE (or game industry in general) is no exception; this is a growing tendency.

Now, let me get back to the threat posed by traditional management. Here’s what Mikael Jungner says about traditional management in business life:

In many organizations the management has no clue of the real world…People who are completely at sea decide how enthusiastic people should or should not work.

If we take a close look at our curricula, learning environments and teaching methods, we are bound to see how this relates to education. Our school system was created to meet the needs of the industrial age. It hasn’t changed much since. Of course, the industrial age is long gone and the skills our present day society needs are very different from the ones needed back then. Schooling has the industrial age model built in it. It means that it naturally leads to the acquisition of the industrial age skills – which, of course, is a complete waste of time and terribly harmful to the economy. Now you can see what I mean by the threat.

PS.  Seth Godin writes about the same thing in his blog: It’s easier to teach compliance than initiative.

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December 18, 2009 · 9:16 pm

Autumn term 2009: Awakenings, Social Media and New Perspectives

This is my last day at work this year. The autumn term 2009 has been a very eventful one – hectic, actually, to say the least. It’s not just that there’s been a lot of work, but the changes in the outside world have been rapid and I think I’ve grown to fully understand the scale of the shift during this autumn term. I’ve known before that education has to take a look in the mirror and start keeping up with the rest of the world, but now I have a much clearer idea of what it actually means: it is definitely not a simple technical development, but a social revolution that affects the way organizations work and people collaborate. It’s a profound change in the communication system. I’m more convinced than ever that we’ve got to start acting right away, the time to observe and see what’s going on is over.

During this autumn, some changes have taken place in my own working environment. Some teachers have started to use social media tools in education, and many of the ones who haven’t, are planning to do so. Optional courses in online teaching and social media for both teacher students and teaching staff have been arranged at Tampere University of Applied Sciences. Learning environments are being rethought, and many teachers see the insufficiency of classroom-based lecturing as a teaching method. But as my colleague said just this week in a staff meeting, there’s one problem with all the things we’re doing: the speed. It’s way too slow.

I taught the optional course on e-learning tools and social media for teacher students, and was also one of the teachers for the staff training course. Therefore I’ve had the privilege to see and hear what teachers and teachers-to-be think about these issues. I’ve been very happy to find out that the teacher student have really benefited from the course. Many reported that it had opened their eyes to see what is really going on. Some felt a bit stressed with all the changes and the rapid development, but nobody thought that things could just remain the same. Each and every one wanted to expand their expertise to new learning environments and toward more authentic learning. This was one of my absolute highlights of the term!

I’ve also studied and read a lot myself. Somehow this blog has also led me to write much more than before – I’ve never written so many conference papers and articles during one term! All of my writings have something to do with the core message: the world has changed and won’t stop changing. Education has not changed nearly in the same pace. It should, or we’ll get run over by an unpleasant truth one day: they might just not need us anymore.

I’m not going to leave it here, of course, but will continue with the same theme in 2010. One of the greatest things I’ve managed to do this autumn is a research plan for PhD studies. In brief, I’ll examine how the meta-skills requirements of the working life have changed, and study how European higher education is answering to the new challenges. But more about that later!

Now I’m leaving for a holiday. It’s going to be good to give myself a break with all these concerns and relax for Christmas. I wish you all a very happy and peaceful Christmas time as well!

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