Backflipping the classroom – nothing new under the sun.

Before it's sudden closure, the Fundamentals of Online Education reintroduced me to two terms I'd previously encountered in passing, but never really thought too much about (I probably wasn't actively teaching at the time, so didn't really have much of a framework of reference to evaluate them against): the flipped classroom and backwards design.

The flipped classroom is a fairly simple idea, and its theoretical merits should be immediately obvious. I believe it arose in higher education, so let's look at it in that context. Every year, a lecturer delivers the same lectures (more or less) to a room of students. Lectures are not generally highly participatory, particularly early on in degree schemes (during my 1^st and 2^nd year in Edinburgh University, we were well into the 3 figures even in my smallest lecture group). But teaching time is a precious resource, and very limited. Why are we wasting the time of some of the most intelligent people in the world by having them say the same thing year in, year out, rather than freeing them up to get extra time with the students, dealing with problems? And why do we, as students, end up doing most of our practice exercises at home, where there's no-one to help us when we go wrong or get confused?

So the goal of the flipped classroom is to overturn the orthodoxy. Let's make the lectures available as video for study beforehand, and then when students come into class, the teacher's dedicated to what they individually need.

There are several reasons that this might not be such a good thing in practice for many subjects, but that's not what I'm interested in today. No, today, I just want to show that this is not a new idea.

What I've read about the flipped classroom seems to be coming more out of science faculties than arts, which is not surprising to anyone who had friends that studied literature at uni. Us science students used to mock the arts students for their light workload, because they had fewer classes on their timetable than us, but we saw that backbreaking pile of books they were carrying and thought “there but for the grace of God go I.” A literature student may have to read a long, heavy novel every week, and they have to read it before class. Their timetable is as empty as it is because they have very few lectures, and instead have more seminars where they discuss what they've read.

The same is true for a lot of arts degrees. You may be expected to read a major treatise by one of the great thinkers before going to a Philosophy class, and if you're studying classics, you might even be expected to read it in the original!  So it is wrong to suggest it's a new idea, simply because we now attempt to apply it to science classes.

Does it matter that it's not a new idea? In and of itself, no. However, in practical terms, if you don't acknowledge that someone is already doing it, you deny yourself the opportunity to go and ask the experts how it should be done!

Anyone who wants to “flip” their classroom should instead by asking how science can be made more like the arts. They should be asking arts lecturers what works and what doesn't; what can be passed to the student to do beforehand, and what has to be kept for the classroom. They should be auditing arts courses and experiencing for themselves the phenomenon they wish to replicate.

The other idea was backwards design.

Backwards design is the idea of starting by setting out what you want the students to know at the end of the course; then by deciding how you will verify how they have learned it; and finally you work out how to teach it.

For this to be presented as new or in anyway unusual is pretty hard to swallow, because people do this all the time, it's the absolute norm in schooling. A national committee writes a national curriculum. The exam board plans an exam format to test the criteria set out in the curriculum. Finally, the teachers and textbook writers are given the curriculum and sample exams and write their lessons.

Now, the traditional line is that teachers should be teaching to the syllabus, not the exam, but in reality, most teachers know that the exam is the primary goal for the students and they do indeed “teach to test”.

I said presenting it as something new was hard to swallow, but in fact I actually found it more frightening than anything. Were there people who weren't actually doing this?!?

...and then I realised: there are, and as a language teacher, I'm one of them.

It's been a source of frustration to me ever since I got into languages almost a decade ago that language teaching seems to have institutionally rejected the notion of a “syllabus”. There is no list of what a student should know at any level. We're asked to “learn/teach the language” rather than “learning/teaching the test”.

It's a laudable goal, but it leaves the learner or teacher, and particularly the self-teacher, in a rather bewildering forest of choices. Where to start? What next? Can I afford the time to cover this language point properly, or do I need to make do with an incomplete understanding and move on to something else?

For a long time I was convinced, though, that Cambridge (for example) had to have some kind of syllabus internally; a list of words, expressions and language points that examiners are allowed to include at every level, but now I'm beginning to wonder. Do they give their examiners the same advice they give us, the mere teachers that only have to prepare the students to sit and pass an exam based on unpredictable language: to use their “judgement” to pick something “appropriate to their level”?

Because to be blunt, institutions like Cambridge are completely failing in their goals. A responsible teacher will always “teach the test”, and if you don't give us the language we need to teach, then we have no choice but to devote more of our time to exam techniques, and we end up spending less time teaching language.

So I'm very much in favour of the goals of backwards design, but I'm worried that by naming it and treating it as something new and different, it will come up against resistance to “change”, even though it is not, in fact, real “change” – it's a defence of the longest standing traditions in education against a combination of flawed teaching ideologies and sloppy practice.

So these philosophies have created two obstacles for themselves by pretending to be new: they discount all the existing evidence, and they turn off people who might otherwise be convinced by the past experience of their colleagues.

Coursera offering free teacher training!

I've just been nosing around on Coursera looking for interesting courses to take.  I'd read recently that they'd signed up several new course providers, including the first of their providers that aren't accredited universities.

My first reaction was to doubt the value of non-university courses, but one of these suppliers has brought with them something that was lacking in the previous material: course progression.  Some of the universities have been joining Coursera just because it's the in thing, and others have been using it as an advert for their distance education programmes.  But it's never in a university's interest to offer an entire programme for free.

Enter the Commonwealth Education Trust, a charity whose mission is to provide teacher training at primary and secondary level to improve children's education in developing countries in the Commonwealth.

Their whole goal is to provide complete teacher training for free, so teaming up with Coursera reduces their costs and extends their reach and their 8 module teacher training programme is a win for everyone involved.

Their main target is at practicing teachers who haven't had any formal training, and I'm intending to follow it as a supplement to my CELTA certificate, which I always felt was slightly insufficient as teacher training.  The CET programme is estimated at between 180 and 280 hours in total, covering 46 weeks of activities spread over about 16 months (the first sitting of module 1 starts this August, and the first sitting of the final module starts next November).  In total, that's actually comparable to the amount of time you're expected to spend on a 4 week intensive CELTA course, so I suppose I'm hoping there's a difference due to the quality of content, and the fact that this is general teaching with no specific language focus (I've always felt that language teaching suffers due to a belief that "language is different", so the lessons from general teaching are sometimes ignored).  Also, the pacing of the course should theoretically help long-term retention: my CELTA felt heavily "crammed", with no proper consolidation of learning.

On top of this, the Trust are also offering some kind of certification for people who complete all 8 modules:

On the satisfactory completion of each course you will receive a statement of accomplishment related to the course.  On the completion of all the courses you may contact the Commonwealth Education Trust to request a statement of accomplishment related to the overall program.

I'm not aware of whether the Trust is part of any recognised accreditation scheme, but it's certainly likely to be looked on favourably if you're applying for voluntary teaching work in a Commonwealth country.

I'll be taking it this year (or at the very least "starting it" -- I've got a poor record with free online courses, not having completed a single one yet), so I'll let you know how I get on.  There's a second sitting starting next January.

A little video sketch on MOOCs

The OU's Open Education MOOC is officially over, and unofficially it's winding down as people continue to finish off.  This means I'll probably be shifting the focus of this blog back to its traditional ground of languages and language learning, but I just saw an interesting post via the Open Education blog aggregator, with an ExtraNormal video describing something of the MOOC experience, and I thought I'd share it.


It kind of sums up a lot of what I feel about it all.

Rhizomatic non-learning

I've justed watched a video on "rhizomatic learning" set as part of the OU MOOC Online Education.



The "course" proceeded to ask four questions, and suggest that we answer then on our blogs.

1. Were you convinced by rhizomatic learning as an approach?
2. Could you imagine implementing rhizomatic learning?
3. How might rhizomatic learning differ from current approaches?
4. What issues would arise in implementing rhizomatic learning?

So here's my answers:

Were you convinced by rhizomatic learning as an approach?

No.  One of the most important rules of knowledge and understanding is that if you can't explain something, you don't understand it.  Cormier singularly failed to explain anything about what rhizomatic learning actually means.  He explained the roots of the analogy, but failed to explain how that maps on to pedagogy.  It is hard enough to be convinced of something that you don't understand, and it's harder still to be convinced of something that isn't understood by its leading proponents.

Could you imagine implementing rhizomatic learning?

No.  Until I actually know what it is, I have no way of picturing such a process. All I know is that it "deals with uncertainty", but all good teachers already do that.  I already try to give my students strategies to deal with unknown language, including guiding them to understanding how to determine what is an important word, and which words can safely be ignored without losing the main thrust of the sentence.  If that's "rhizomatic learning", then the term is pretty trivial and meaningless, because it's already common practice.  If that's not rhizomatic learning, then rhizomatic learning is unnecessary.

How might rhizomatic learning differ from current approaches?

Rhizomatic learning appears to be fundamentally very similar to other recent approaches in that it builds a complex and intriguing narrative to capture the imagination and build a following, but it gives no concrete, reproducible guidelines or anything approaching "information".

What issues would arise in implementing rhizomatic learning?

Simple: you'd have to figure what the hell they were talking about before you started.


Don't get me wrong: the philosophical notion of the rhizome is a very useful conceptual tool when analysing large bodies of data, and it gives an interesting way of looking at learning schemata, but the thing is that the rhizome is an attempt to explain the underlying conceptual structure of information, and not a model of the learning process.  It can and should inform the teaching process, and it does provide a philosophical counterpoint to a hardline belief in a single "correct" order of teaching, but this alone does not justify it as a direct model of the learning process.

In fact, Cormier doesn't even seem to talk about the central point of the rhizome paradigm: the interconnectedness of knowledge.  Instead he veers back off into networked learning, and instead of the "rhizome" representing the culture connecting various visible phenomena, its something connecting people as nodes of information

And this leads us to the biggest contradiction in the connectivist pedagogical ideology: Cormier talks briefly about the qualities of MOOCs (and by this he means "connectivist learning") and he talks about self-organised groups learning from each other ("the community is the syllabus").  But we naturally self-organise into groups with shared interests and philosophies.  To use an extreme example, people who believe that the Earth is flat are more likely to be members of the Flat Earth Society than members of their local astronomical society.  Their network therefore contains information that is objectively and scientifically verifiably incorrect, and the network reinforces the belief of all members.

If a course was to be written that brought together a bunch of educators that were predisposed to believe in the untested, unverifiable and barely defined theories of a bunch of educational ideologues, would we not similarly find that the "truth" within their network would be very different from the "truth" in the global network, or indeed the actual truth (as much as there is) in the peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals...?

The myth of "no training required".

I was just watching a "slidecast" by Martin Weller, through the H817 MOOC.  I stopped.  Why? Because any time my computer did something else, I jumped out of my skin.  There was a reason for this: the volume on the recording was so low that I could only hear it with a pair of headphones on and the volume turned up to 11, and any beep, bloop or bing that my computer made was deafening.

As a side effect of having such low volume, there was a lot of hiss.

My laughter was pretty ironic when at around 3:30 he claimed that this sort of thing needed "minimal tech skill" and suggested that you don't need training.  This is one of the pervasive myths of the internet age: "intuitive", "natural and easy, "no training required"; no matter how you word it, it's not true.

Recording volume is a perfect example of this.

I was asked by the university to lend my voice to a language course they were recording.  I brought along my field recorder, because I had a feeling the person doing the recording wouldn't have been adequately trained.  She wasn't -- not her fault, but she wasn't.  And she didn't know how to set the recording levels, so I ended up recording the session on my own equipment.  And all because the university didn't set a big enough budget for the recording... "no training required", right?  But our university has a department dedicated to that sort of thing, and you'll often see students in the corridors and the car parks with video cameras and boom mics.  But anyone who's been in a university knows that effective interdepartmental knowledge sharing is something of a pipe-dream....

A year or two ago, I was watching an Al Jazeera programme online, Living the Language: Canada: The Ktunaxa.  The Ktunaxa people were using technology to record their language and produce software to help teach it to others.  The pictures show them using an expensive-looking, high-quality microphone, but the output is pretty poor.  The following pictures demonstrate why.

First up, here's a picture taken by the film crew during an on-site recording of an elder speaking:

What you are looking at, if you've never seen the inside of an audio editor before, is a very, very, very quiet recording.  Now have a look at this:

This is the woman's post-recording editing process.  Here she has taken a very, very, very quiet recording and boosted the volume by about 5 times.

Unfortunately, when you record very, very, very quietly, you don't capture much information.  The software cannot just magically pull that information out of the ether, so instead it takes a best guess, which results in a muddy, unnatural output.

Because nobody taught her how to set her levels.

And that need for education is well known.  It has been observed time and time again that an untrained user will more often than not set the volume far too low.  They know that you can "max out" a recording (red lights flash!!!) but they don't appreciate the problems of poor quality that occur when the volume is set too low.

We know this -- anyone with the slightest background in audio engineering will tell you.  And yet the "learning technologists" tell you that you don't need to be trained.

Well I'm sorry, but you do.  And that includes you, Martin Weller.

Modern learning experiences... repeatability...?

In the H817 MOOC, and everything else written about connectivist teaching, there is an evident strand of frustration among the proponents of connectivism that other teachers just don't "get it" and aren't buying into this new trend.

George Siemens claims that connectivism is a pedadogy for the internet age, as opposed to everything else which is pre-internet pedagogy crammed into an internet-shaped package.  Leaving aside the obvious criticism (that the human brain has not evolved since Tim Berners Lee first pinged his server), the real question is whether their successes (if they were indeed successes) are repeatable.

Since the start of the H817 course, I have been trying to remember the name of a guy I read about on Slashdot over a year ago... and funnily enough I never thought to check my bookmarks, and when I went looking for another bookmark today, voilà! Michael Wesch.

Wesch proposed a model of teaching based on social media and interactions.  He did it in his classroom and had great results.  He gave talks, he wrote articles, he encouraged other people to apply his techniques.  He was a teaching technology evangelist.

But eventually he stopped evangelising his techniques because the feedback he got from other teachers was that they weren't working.  There was something missing, some kind of magic that he hadn't included in his instructions.  And of course people with completely different techniques were getting results that were as good as his.

So he's stopped evangelising.

The important thing is the connection between the teacher and the student, and that's not down to the technology.  In fact, I would say that the technology has to follow as part of the teacher's passion and way of thinking.  What does that mean?  I haven't a bloody clue.  And neither does anybody, or that mystery -- "wonder" in Wesch's word -- of teacher/student rapport would be formulisable, and therefore teachable.  And if it was teachable, Wesch would have been able to teach people how to teach with technology.

When discussing language learning with other learners, I have always made a strong distinction between "what you do when you are learning" and "how you learn".

What I mean by this is that when someone does a series of grammar drills from a book, we cannot say that those drills are directly causing them to learn.  In fact, for every person who appears to learn successfully from such a book, you will find another half-dozen who fail to learn from exactly the same book.  Therefore we have to conclude that looking at the book's activities only gives us a very superficial view of the learning process.  We have to attempt to analyse the difference in approach between the successful and the unsuccessful learner.

But these approaches are very poorly understood and documented and very rarely taught.  The successful language learner's natural and intuitive learning process is not available to be repeated, so the method doesn't improve.

As soon as I started training to teach English, I quickly came to the conclusion that the same distinction affected language teaching techniques.  Everything in the how-to-teach books struck me as "what to do when you are teaching" rather than specifically "how to teach".  None of the activities really taught the language, and yet these books were written by very successful teachers.  They must have constructed sophisticated teaching styles and structures unconsciously, or their students would be failing -- it's just a shame they don't know what that is, or they could tell us.

The more and further I read into teaching, the more I find that this isn't specific to language teaching.  Don't get me wrong -- it's really not as bad in most fields as it is in language, but there is still a huge conceptual gap between "classroom activities"/"what I do" and "teaching"/"how I teach".

The connectivists are a prime example -- they give a list of fuzzy... I don't know, stuff; guidelines and that sort of thing, and a couple of fuzzy justifications for why it should work, but they simply do not give enough information to make it repeatable.  It's "what" not "how", "activity" not "teaching".

And right now the world is full of people trying to replicate the "MOOC", and as Siemens and Cormier are only too happy to tell us, they're doing it wrong.

Well, maybe that's because Siemens and Cormier haven't told us how to do it right.

And the most likely reason for that is simply that they do not know how to do it right.

Adaptive learning systems: nothing to be afraid of.

I was meandering through various blogs last week, following various links to material that I found idly interesting.  On Stephen Downes's website, I saw his link to a blog post by David Wiley (a name getting frequent mention in the OU's H817 MOOC*).  The post discusses the dangers of adaptive learning systems -- systems that track your learning and teach your stuff.
(* Actually, I'm starting to get a little stir-crazy reading a lot of data-free opinion pieces from the same four names: Siemens, Cormier, Downes and Weller.)

Wiley's criticism is that you don't own any of the material you access, and he accuses the adaptive learning companies of exploiting our willingness to pay for services while expecting content for free.

Adaptive learning systems exploit this willingness by deeply intermingling content and services so that you cannot access one with using the other.

But how is this any different from any other "teaching" experience?  Wiley seeks to equate adaptive learning systems with textbooks, but is he right to do so?

There are several problems here:

1. The difference between a teaching text and a reference book.
2. Course as "teaching" vs course as "material".
3. The need to ensure that your material is new to the student.

The difference between a teaching text and a reference book

Perhaps I'm lucky in that the subjects I have studied make a big distinction between these two categories.

In languages, you get course books, learners books, textbooks, workbooks etc... a whole bewildering array of paper that leads you through your learning, but when you've finished, you've got practically no need for any of it, and it sits gathering dust on your shelf as you can't bring yourself to get rid of stuff that cost so much to collect, but in the end, all you ever use is a dictionary (probably online) and a single reference grammar book.  That reference grammar book was no use to you when you started out, of course, as the examples contained far too many unfamiliar words, and the ordering of the book made it impossible to really understand anything new.

The same in computers, where a learner's book would hold your hand through the various concepts required to learn a new technology, but looking back on it later, the learner's book was never any good for looking up basic concepts (which were drawn out over entire chapters) and didn't contain enough information on the advanced concepts that would be of some use to you by this stage.  So that book goes to the second-hand shop and you buy a desk-reference or bookmark a webpage.

And yet publishers continue to attempt to sell books to suit both markets, invariably falling between two stools in the process.

A learner doesn't need access to a teaching text after the class is over, and is free to go out and buy a reference book instead.

Course as "teaching" vs course as "material".

As a teacher, I give out lots of material in class, but during the course of the lesson, the material is quickly "consumed" -- worksheets are filled in, and by the end of the day, the student has not accrued any additional work-at-home material over and above any specific homework I may set.  Do Wiley and Downes object to this?  Am I cheating my students if my material is not infinitely reusable?

Because an adaptive learning system is not an attempt to replace the textbook -- it's an attempt to replace the teacher.  A computer, in theory, is capable of producing a more individualised learning path for each student than a teacher, thanks to the computer's essentially limitless perfect memory.  I cannot remember every single difficulty each of my students has, but a computer can.

The need to ensure that your material is new to the student.

Even where there is a developed culture of sharing between teachers, ever teacher holds some things back for themselves.  Why?  It's the "old standby" -- that exercise or activity that can be adapted to various levels to provide an emergency lesson when the projector breaks or the new books haven't arrived.  If you don't share that lesson, then you're safe to use it with any and every class, but if you share it with your colleagues, there's a very high chance that sooner or later you'll have a class say "we did that with Mr So-and-so", and your stumped.

Most sharing at the local level is facilitated by having a shared syllabus -- if the lesson is for 2nd years, you're safe to do it with any 2nd year class, and unsafe to do it with any 3rd year class.  But one way or another, there has to be some way to ensure that students get tasks they've never seen before, because while a good story is no worse for being told a second time, a good lesson is destroyed by being taught a second time.

In the classroom, you can always rely on "we already did that" to let you know, and then you improvise something else, but could you do that in an adaptive learning system?  I don't really think you can.  You can't just accept any old feedback from the student (natural language processing systems aren't that sophisticated yet) and a big red button marked "already done it" would be very off-putting to the student and would make the software look really unprofessional.

No, the software has to know what you've done and what you haven't, and that means keeping control of when and how the learner accesses the material.


In essence, though, I think that Downes and Wiley are objecting on ideological grounds rather than practical, pedagogical ones.  They have aligned themselves with a rather dubious view of learner-centred education where the learner makes all the choices, apparently empowering and enabling them.  Adaptive learning systems take the diametrically opposite view: that by taking the decisions away from the learner and instead presenting whatever the learner most needs or is best ready for at any given moment, the learner attains a much more complete and well learned education.

And anyway, all the evidence is on the side of the adaptive systems guys, because connectivism and the like breaks away from the proven techniques of staggered repetition, planned progression and learning-by-testing which are the very foundations of adaptive learning, and replaces them with an almost entirely unstructured meander through materials effectively chosen by a known non-expert (the learner) with no real "testing" of concepts.

And yet this type of vague handwavery is presented in the absence of discussion about the many known effective techniques in a course that is supposed to be part of a masters-level module.  I am appalled.