Opened up learning: generating content and learning opportunities with communities beyond the classroom

From Case Studies Wiki

The internationalisation of the curriculum has been interpreted in many ways, but may imply transformative change in course content, teaching style, assessment methods and classroom dynamics (Morey 2000). The multinational make up of students on this The Department of Information Studies module and its concern with social issues of information and ICT use, invited a fundamental curriculum redesign, along transformative lines.

General description

Rather than asking students to only produce traditional essays, they were supported to create a three minute long film, which subsequently they shared online, seeking to get substantial feedback on their film topic.

The intense nature of film making encouraged deeper group working and intercultural learning. The remit itself encouraged international comparison and invited them to think in terms of addressing a diverse audience. The film making task rewards a wider range of skills, than just essay writing, which especially favours those whose first language is English. Sharing the film online made students think about how to connect to wider networks, and leverage their own personal networks to support their learning. It also required they think through copyright issues fully. Students created engaging material, that can be reused in teaching in future years, a sustainable approach to decentring teacher knowledge and “hegemonic perspectives” (Schoorman 2000).

Context

It was a 40 strong class, with students drawn from two main programmes in Information Studies and the Management School, but also others (including journalism department). For most on the course English was not their first language. The topic of the class (INF6400 Module outline) is the concept of the Information Society.

Resources

The LETS team gave the students technical training on camera use and film editing, using Microsoft moviemaker. This was delivered in a couple of two hour long workshops. Assessment criteria explicitly excluded technical competence as a principal criteria of evaluation. Although a questionnaire at the beginning of the course showed students self rated their prior knowledge of film making as low, all the groups produced technically good work.
Video cameras, with tripods and mics.
The students themselves, who were from more than a dozen countries, brought a variety of perspectives and interests.
Clare Scott from the University library offered input on copyright issues, including responding to student plans and giving advice on copyright law compliance.
We had some previous experience of using Digital storytelling in the department, in the MAIK project. This allowed us to support students developing their storyboards and planning their projects. By permission we reused some storyboarding tools developed by “Llord Llama”
Research students, Nora Agestero, Gibran Rivera and Nashrawan Taha, as teaching assistants, brought perspectives on Internet use from the Philippines, Mexico and Jordan, undercutting the dominance of “Western” perspectives in the curriculum.

Issues

It was challenging to balance teaching for all the learning outcomes: the substantive intellectual issues, film making, group work principles as well as information literacy skills that were also intended learning outcomes of the module. We built in a lot of the teaching of theory in the first few weeks, so that students had enough time to work on their projects after they had gained some sort of theoretical platform. The module had to be completely redesigned to accommodate the size and shape of the film making activity. Framing the remit of the film was quite hard. We settled on the following: “Working as a group of four produce a multimedia project (e.g. video) reflecting on similarities and differences between two countries in their Internet use, focusing on one of the Information Society key themes discussed in the module: Web2.0/community, digital divides and surveillance/ censorship. The multimedia should be a maximum of 3 minutes long. Imagine a multi-national, multi-cultural audience.” Classroom discussion was used to generate a marking rubric. They also persuaded us to allow films up to 3 ½ minutes.

In general students seemed satisfied with the level of support they were given, but judging from a few comments of feedback we might need to do more work on storyboarding and project management of the film project. We might have done even more to focus on intercultural skills and IPR.

In addition to the group film, each group had to write about their strategy to gain user generated content by sharing it on the Internet. There was a group bibliography (created in the social bookmarking tool, diigo) and an individual essay. The assessment package was quite complex.

The literature suggests that with unusual assessment methods it is important to reduce stress and uncertainty by fully explaining administrative processes and having explicit marking rubrics. We put a lot of effort into this, but still made a number of mistakes. Student feedback did not show that assessment criteria were considered unclear, but from the teacher’s perspective, more could be done in iterations of the module.

Was it a fair assessment task? Student feedback showed less satisfaction on this account than most aspects of the module, perhaps because of the balance of marks for each element of assessment, with the film counting only 30% and reflection on the sharing strategy only a little less. In future we intend to make the film worth a greater percentage of the marks.

On the whole, student success in gaining substantive feedback on their films through sharing them online was a little disappointing. They got a lot of positive feedback on the quality of their films, but little response to the content. Most took the simple strategy of surfacing their film on youtube and facebook, without thinking about specialist online communities who might have had a more in-depth interest in the content they had created. Nor did they perceive the need to build up relations with others online (through commenting on the work of others) before trying to get comments on their own work. Their approach tended to be quite factual, whereas a more controversial or personal approach might have elicited a more interesting response. They showed good awareness of the issues of privacy and intellectual property rights that were raised by sharing their material online. We may need, or connect to specific classes in our own department or elsewhere in the university or other universities.

Students struggled a little with group work, with some complaints about group size (4-5) or that the course team chose the groups, or that members found difficulty meeting because they were on different programmes. Creating strong teams seemed to be in tension with creating a community across the whole class.

There were probably issues around accessibility, in that we didn’t have any visually impaired students, but if we had we would have found it difficult to easily enable them to fully participate. Arguably the student films needed subtitles or transcripts.

Benefits

An immediately engaging, even glamorous assessment task, which students acknowledged to be both challenging and enjoyable.
Useful film making skills learned
Sustainable generation of new content, which helps to initiate a process of decentring the teacher’s perspective and empowering students to shape the curriculum
Further value potentially through User Generated Content, where the films are shared online
Learning outcomes around intercultural skills in group work. Student evaluation comments often mention this. Students whose first language is not English are less disadvantaged than in simple essay/exam based assessment.
Increased knowledge of IPR and understanding professional of issues of using Web2.0
As a spin off of creating our own model film we also created some useful audio content for teaching
Personal value in terms of the lecturer reflecting on the meaning of transformative internationalisation. Working with a research student who was working on network formation in the class the lecturer learnt a lot about classroom dynamics.

Evaluation

A long evaluation questionnaire were completed by 39 out of the 41 students attending. On nearly every count the feedback was positive. Attendance seemed to have improved.