Ron Oliver is the Professor of Interactive Multimedia in the School of Communications and Multimedia at Edith Cowan University, and has been involved in the field of e-learning, computer education, multimedia and instructional technologies since 1977. 

With a research background in multimedia and e-learning, Ron has published widely both nationally and internationally and has received recognition for his achievements in development projects and teaching excellence.

His current research projects involve explorations and investigations into effective online teaching and learning in higher education. 

Ron is well placed to explore issues of pedagogy and practice in the online environment and with that in mind, we sent our intrepid reporter, Alison Cutler to find out his views.

Alison:  Is there a pedagogy for online learning?

Ron: Well, fundamentally, pedagogy exists independently of the medium but the online environment lends itself to supporting good pedagogical practice.  Let me explain.

The way people learn pivots on them engaging and having the right experiences.  In the past, the perception was that the teacher was in charge of the learning process but in reality a very good teacher guides and directs rather than telling.  Think about the way kindergarten and lower primary teachers operate.  Everything is geared towards giving the child ownership of the task, learning through stealth really.  As kids get older, perhaps by high school, there is far more teacher-directed experience and our models of past pedagogy are rooted in this teacher directed approach.    This approach may guarantee outcomes but it won’t guarantee it will work outside the classroom. 

When you go online, though, the teacher necessarily has to pull back and in many ways become a resource.  Online learning therefore can provide opportunities, encouragement and inducements for better forms of teaching than face-to-face.

Alison: What pedagogical principles can and/or should inform and guide online learning?

Ron:  All my work suggests learners learn when they are actively engaged with some task.  Yes, you need information but as a means to an end and not an end itself.  The best principle is one where the student is driven by tasks, problems and engages with the content and this is how the learning happens. 

As well, learning has to take place in meaningful, relevant contexts – situated learning.  Every thing has a practical application.  For example, say you are teaching cognitive development as part of psychology and needed to set an assignment on Piaget, you would endeavour to take one step away from the content and focus on how Piaget’s principles are used instead. So the student might be encouraged to develop a course of action where Piaget’s principles are applied to a particular problem (instead of simply writing an assignment saying what they are).  In this approach to learning, everything becomes productive.

And it’s nothing new really.  Look at youngsters and how they learn – they use everything at their disposal – they talk, they play, they interact with what’s around them.  People can be a bit bamboozled by the jargon surrounding pedagogy and think you’re very clever when really it’s very sensible.  And this approach gives instructional designers a job.  They need to ask themselves what sorts of tasks or activities do I need to design to get students to engage, what sorts of resources, what sorts of supports do I need, how do I avoid the shallow stuff.

Alison:  What do you think VET practitioners need to understand about online pedagogy?

Ron:  The key thing to recognise is that when people learn it is not a process of simply being able to remember but to apply it – allowing the learner to be in charge of him/herself.  Traditional notions of curricula often stopped short of achieving this.  The learning was expressed only in terms of what knowledge we will give our students, i.e.  “Students will know….”

Competency based approaches are heading in the right direction but can be underdone.  While students are encouraged to be able to demonstrate capabilities, it is still important for them to be able to apply general principles and the knowledge they have learned.   In some instances competencies are so narrowly defined, there is little room left for any judgement.  It is important to give students the capacity to make informed judgments.

You also need to appreciate the differences between levels of knowledge to be learned.  Sometimes it can be procedural, at other times students may need to comprehend or understand. Different levels of learning can require different approaches and forms of support from the teacher. 

The notion, “I have to tell my people everything” no longer applies.  We need to think back to the kindergarten teacher again and craft the learning experience.

Alison:  Some recent research from the NCVER contends that the reality of online delivery often matches poorly against constructivist assumptions.   Do you agree? 

Ron:  Yes this can be so.  But again, people often think of teaching as telling but it’s really about letting learners find out.  It’s that old fishing analogy – you can give someone a fish and he has a meal but show him how to fish and he can feed himself for life. The way our generation learned was very focused on being taught. And this is a really inefficient method, so much will disappear.  Mind you, constructivism in some ways isn’t efficient either insofar as it takes longer.  But it provides stronger guarantees that what goes in can be used again.

Online teaching provides strong supports for modes of teaching which are student-centred but they come at a cost.  Teachers need expertise to develop these sorts of courses and it often takes longer to teach with them. Institutions are slowly beginning to realise the extra costs associated with moving to these forms of delivery.  So while we know how we’d like to do things differently, many people are still some distance away from being able to do this completely.

Alison:  In a recent paper of yours, ‘Exploring Technology-Mediated Learning from a Pedagogical Perspective’, you identify a 3-stage process, which promotes knowledge construction in flexible and online learning environments.  Can you tell us briefly about that process?

Ron:  At Edith Cowan we have been looking at helping learning designers to work out what the objectives are, what sort of learning activities would you need to complete to make sure learners are immersed.    The first step is to identify what would be an authentic task to achieve the learning needed.  Then what sorts of resources (content) are needed to complete the task, for example, web links, learning materials, tutorials, and simulations.  And whilst planning this learning environment, it’s also vital to take a look at support mechanisms or scaffolding which will take the leaner to the edge of their comfort zone.  This framework is a useful one for the planning stage and is one which has been used in developing Toolboxes. 

In the beginning with Toolboxes, we worked to move away from electronic page turning to create learning settings where there’s lots of situated learning.  The student is often cast as say a Home Care Officer in a hospital if that’s relevant or say a finance officer in a bank with role-plays and simulated environments.

There are fewer pages and pages to read, it’s all designed to be reading with intent and tasks are broken up.  Anyone who has the time to look at the Toolboxes will see in many of them powerful learning designs that really do make strong use of the affordances of the technologies to improve the student learning experience. 

Alison:  What are the particular challenges of developing an online pedagogy?  One that immediately occurs to me is that it would be nearly impossible for the theory to precede or inform the practice given that the technology curve is almost vertical.

Ron: Yes that’s so.  For me, one particular challenge in the medium is that in face to face you can more easily build an authentic relationship with a student, you can see what’s puzzling them, you can go home and feel good as a teacher.  With online pedagogy you intentionally distance yourself from the learner, the connections and communication are different and even with better environments, this comes at a cost.  Online teaching definitely requires more time and effort but often the organisational supports that acknowledge this aren’t in place.  Another challenge is that of making people comfortable with teachers in different roles to those they might have been familiar with and similarly for students learning to come to terms with this. 

As well, there is, as ever, lots of technology zooming around and I guess the key challenge here is learning to reuse without having to reinvent.  There is though lots of sharing across the various sectors although you can sometimes have a sense of being a prophet in your own land!

Alison:  Where can our community members go to find out more about the pedagogy of online learning?

Ron:  Last year I worked on a project with Barry Harper, John Hedberg and Sandra Wills from the University of Wollongong and many other colleagues.  We were trying to describe learning designs for people wanting to develop ICT-based learning.  What we were essentially doing was extracting the ‘clever’ pedagogy from the specific learning designs so that you could take them and use them in your own setting.  We used a framework of learning activity, resources, supports and tasks, which seemed a nice way to describe a learning design.    I think your online community might find this useful. 
www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au

Alison: And I’d like to add that http://elrond.scam.ecu.edu.au/oliver is worth a visit as is this link to some recent research on the NCVER site: www.ncver.edu.au/publications/965.html

Thank you so much, Ron, for your time and talent.