Final Report

1.Title of project

Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

2.Project director/s

Alan Cann

, Jon Scott

, Jo Badge

, Richard Mobbs

, Steve Rooney

3.Department(s)/Unit(s)

School of Biological Sciences,

IT Services,

Student Support and Development Service

4.Keywords

Personal learning environments, virtual learning environments, personal development planning,ePortfolios

5.Abstract

The aim of this project was to develop an institutional exemplar of a personal andshared virtual space for students' learning, research and networking using Web 2.0technologies independent of any institutional services. This will provide users with theskills to maintain such environments as the major component of their personaldevelopment planning (PDP) and as part of a lifelong learning agenda. The space wasbuilt around a range of freely available Web 2.0 tools and services, complemented bythe Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and other student supportinformation repositories.

Pedagogic Background to the Project

University of Leicester students are transients within our system, usually staying forthree or four years full-time study, possibly longer if they are studying part-time ormove on to post-graduate training. What they learn is relevant to their lifelonglearning skills and future career progression and, as such, students will benefit fromhaving continued access to a virtual study network based on their undergraduate andcareer experience. Resources for their formal learning not only originate from theiruniversity teachers but also from informal virtual sources of various kinds (e.g.,comments by members of the public on a fieldwork photo uploaded onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, information from the student union, etc). Integrating formaland informal sources into a symbiotic whole to benefit the students is a worthwhileobjective in its own right.At present, the School of Biological Sciences implements PDP as a paper-basedexercise, supported by the personal tutor system, which students are encouraged butnot compelled to take part in. This exercise terminates when, or frequently before,students graduate, so there is no guaranteed benefit in terms of lifelong learning. Tocomplement this application, we submitted an application for funding to the HEASubject Centre for Biosciences to introduce all first year Biological Sciences studentsto the concept of a PLE at the very start of their university career. Their progress andengagement was monitored and encouraged by regular summative assessment of individual e-portfolios. In the pilot project, we will use the personal tutor system toassess what proportion of second and third year students continue to maintain their e-portfolio to document the development of their PLE as part of the School PDPprogramme without the lever of formal assessment. This information will be used insubsequent years to decide strategies to roll out the programme to all studentsthroughout their degrees. This NTI project complemented an external grant awardwhich was made and sought to use the experience within the School of BiologicalSciences could be used as a model to roll out similar approaches across the wholeUniversity.

The concept of Web 2.0 has been attributed to Tim O'Reilly's conference contributionin September 2005 [www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228]. It is usually accepted within theWeb 2.0 framework that there is an increased emphasis on the sharing of onlinecontent, which is epitomised in social networking software such as blogs, Facebook[leicesteruk.facebook.com] and MySpace [www.myspace.com], and constructivecollaboration tools such as wikis, discussion boards and online office tools, such asGoogle Docs [docs.google.com].A natural extension of the success of the web has been the need to go beyond thereliance of a simple search engine to find relevant web content. Although web pageconstruction allows for metadata tagging, this facility has received very little supportfrom users, who find the library approach to content description too cumbersome.Popular search tools have concentrated on web page content, mark-up and popularityto rank-order information. The user solution has been to use a natural languageapproach to content tagging, called social bookmaking, which allows users to definetheir own tags to describe web content and bookmark them on web sites such asdelicious [http://delicious/].There is a proliferation of sites offering a variety of services and the need to keeplogging-on to such sites to pick-up new and changed content has been alleviated withthe introduction of syndication (RSS, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS). This enables a webfeed to be sent to a suitable site which can aggregate several feeds keeping the userinformed about activities on these sites from single web page. Aggregating sites cantake feeds a wide variety of web sites including emails and news feeds and as suchoffer act as an initial web starting point or portal site. Leading suppliers of such sitesinclude Netvibes [www.netvibes.com] and iGoogle [www.google.co.uk/ig].Web 2.0 technology suppliers require authentication. This proliferation of sitesrequiring log-in credentials and no emerging standards in this area of usernames(names or email addresses) means that there is a need for an aggregating servicewhich hosts account details. Until the availability of cross-platform authenticationservices such as OpenID or Shibboleth becomes universal, online password managerssuch as Clipperz [www.clipperz.com] offer a service which under some circumstanceswill allow automatic logging-in to Web 2.0 sites with an exchange of these credentials.Although Marc Prensky has identified the large number of HE students that havegrown-up immersed in technology as digital natives (Prensky, M. 2001. Digital natives,digital immigrants part 1. On the Horizon, 9, 5), we recognised that there are stillmany students who remain naive about the use of Web 2.0 technologies (EdgelessUniversity: why higher education must embrace technology. JISC, June 2009http://www.jisc.ac.uk/edge09). These students are not always aware of the pitfallsof over exposure of personal data on social spaces. This project addressed these issuesthrough training and documentation. The project also recognises the digital divide thatoften separates the digitally aware student from their tutors and also the growingrequirement that HE intuitions must address how the behaviour and use of externalservices by students impact upon the governance of Universities. The former wasaddressed by extending and continuing our staff development programme which hasbegun to address many of these issues. The latter was addressed through the structurethat is currently responsible for the production of the University Internet Code of Practice which currently only covers academic and research staff publishing on theUniversity web server.The project aimed to integrate into one system and one virtual space these key items:1. A user name and password management system, essential to control access to awide variety of Web 2.0 source sites.2. RSS feeds and automatic content aggregators that enables students to capture andorganise within a single aggregating space a variety of digital information relevant totheir courses.

3. A personal learning, research and networking space in which students can engage informal learning, communicate with tutors, peers, friendship groups and the widercommunity, continue their personal and professional development programme, andenrich course material (through material that they research and generate).4. Web 2.0 tools for social networking and bookmarking, for authoring, editing andpresenting, and for picture and video sharing. Students are becoming familiar withmany of these through online social networking sites largely outside formal education.5. Opportunities for collaborating in wikis and reflecting in blogs.The project goes beyond the use of personal learning spaces as already explored in theCETIS project [wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Ple], by enabling students to use concurrently and withsubstantial synergy the Blackboard VLE and their personal PLE. Moreover, unlike theBlackboard system, students will be able to take their PLE with them after graduating, forfurther enhancement during continuing lifelong learning. The PLE architecture wedeveloped is flexible enough to cater for campus-based students and for distance learnerswho cannot benefit from campus-limited information and learning technologyapplications.

7.Specific Environment for the Project

The evaluation phase of the project was completed on schedule by May 2008. This wasfollowed up during the 2008/9 Session by a roll-out in the first year Biological Sciencesdegree programmes for all students (~200).

8.Details of the work undertaken

The initial phase of the project completed in May 2008, trialed a wide range of Web 2.0services. The results of this analysis can be viewed online at http://pleuol.wetpaint.com.This resulted in the selection of the following key services for delivery on the first yearkey skills module in 2008/09:1.Google reader (RSS)2.delicious (social bookmarking)3.Google Documents (word processing, presentations & posters)4.Flickr5.Wordpress.com/Wetpaint/Wikispaces (ePortfolios)The PLE content was delivered over two 10 week periods in the context of first year keyskills modules (BS1010 and BS1011). The choice of tools was based on our prior evaluationproject but was limited to some extent by the timetabled slots for these modules.Selection was based on what was felt to be most useful and sustainable for this cohort,e.g. most relevant to degree study, freely available, not likely to disappear. To beeffective, staff need to be online with students and "live" the experience. ”Authenticassessment" in which marks are awarded for tasks which students perceive to be clearlylinked to their course of study rather than designed to familiarize themselves with thetechnologies is also important for assessment.The academic staff involved in delivering these modules also developed new markingmethods by collaborating in realtime using a mixture of Google spreadsheets and Twitter(public and private comments) to mark and moderate student submissions.It is difficult to accurately assess ongoing use of some of the services in the PLEs due toprivacy problems. To counteract this and to provide a focal point, at the end of themodule we asked students to draw mind-maps of the components they felt made up theirPLEs. This complex data is summarized in the following figure: