What is meant by 'Flexible and Distributed Learning'?

The term 'Flexible and Distributed Learning' (FDL) is one that has been very much on my mind of late. The context is the development and validation of the MAPP - DL, or rather the MAPP - FDL as we are now referring to it! It seems that we as a University prefer to describe this mode of delivery as 'flexible and distributed learning' as opposed to 'distance learning'. This is in accordance with the terminology used by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) who describe flexible and distributed learning as:

"educational provision... ...through means which generally do not require the student to attend particular classes or events at particular times and particular locations." (QAA, 2010)

 I am quite comfortable with the use of FDL as a description of the mode of delivery for our 'distance' MAPP, as FDL covers distance learning, e-learning, and even blended learning. One issue it does raise for prospective students is that FDL as an abbreviation is probably not something that many are familiar with, and even the full 'Flexible and Distributed Learning' needs a little clarification in terms of what exactly do we mean by this?

In particular, one thing to clarify is how 'flexible' is our provision? We will need to clearly explain to potential students that we are still bound by the University semesters and the academic calendar in that modules will run during these times and a 15 credit module will be a semester-long module. It is not so flexible that a student could begin whenever the wish, and complete within a week if they worked through the course materials in that time. This may be the expectation for some who are looking for 'online' courses. However, the course will be flexible in that students may access materials at times more convenient for them, there is some flexibility to allow students to work through materials at their own pace (within some constraints), and they do not need to attend classes at particular times and at particular locations.

Communities of Practice

As I touched upon in an earlier post, I have been reflecting on the the concept of 'communities of practice' in relation to a newly developed website, www.thepositivepsychologypeople.com (hereon referred to as 'PPP'). In this post, I reflect further on communities of practice and how this concept effectively lies at the heart of what is being developed by PPP.

The concept of 'communities of practice' (CoP) emerged out of Lave and Wenger's (1991) monograph discussing apprenticeship and 'situated learning', in which they argue that learning is essentially a social process. Thus, they explore how practitioners of certain discplines form communities to share knowledge and experience. Individual practitioners can engage in the community in different ways, through what Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to as 'legitimate peripheral participation'. A contemporary definition of CoP is:

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly."
(Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015, p.1)

Unpacking this definition a little further, hree aspects of the CoP are thought to be of central importance: The domain; the community; the practice. Let's look at each of these in turn in relation to PPP as an example of of a CoP...

Domain
The CoP has a shared domain of interest. For PPP this is clear: the shared domain is positive psychology. If one wanted to be a little more specific about this it would be the 'study, application, research, and promotion of positive psychology'.

Community
The notion of community is of course central to the concept of CoP. In this context, a community would be reflected in shared activities, sharing of knowledge and experiences, and an underlying sense of support and help for members of the community. Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015) explcitly note that "a website in itself is not a community of practice" (p.2), and so I should point out that PPP, whilst having a web-based resource at its heart, is setting out to be more than just a website. It seeks to build a community in the way it is defined here.

Practice
A CoP is distinguished from a community of interest (CoI) in that members of a CoP should be 'practitioners'. This where PPP perhaps blurs the boundary of a CoP with a CoI as its members may range from practitioners to researchers to teachers to those with an interest in positive psychology. The latter may include people who are considering undertaking a course of study or looking to learning more about the area. However, there is still a strong desire among the core team to develop a resource, a community, that would provide support for practitioners around the world, especially those emerging from MAPP programmes into the world of the practitioner. As Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015) point out, "this takes time and sustained interaction" (p. 2) and so there is time for this to develop.

The PPP website, the beginnings of a Positive Psychology CoP, was launched in March 2015. Within just two months there are already over 10,000 registered members. These of course will be people who simply have an interest in the topic of positive psychology, and not all will be practitioners. However, in time it is likely that a CoP will emerge among registered members who are also students, researchers, and practitioners.


References
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Communities of practice: A brief introduction. [Available here: wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice]

MAPP 'distance' validated!

Today was the validation for the 'distance learning' version of the MAPP... or officially the MAPP-FDL. I am pleased to say it was validated. No conditions, just some recommendations and a commendation. Yippee!

One of the recommendations did relate to the use of the term 'flexible and distributed learning' (FDL) and that we should should clarify what we mean by this term. The documents were modified accordingly, and this also led to us saying a little about what we mean by FDL on the course web pages here.

If you're really interested, the full validation documents are provided in the Bb shell, within the Introduction to Positive Psychology [Distance Learning] folder. Enjoy! ;-)

Padlet, Schmadlet

A childish title for this blog post I know, but there you go. I was inspired to try Padlet after one of my fellow students on the course introduced it to the group during one of the teaching sessions. I had a quick play with it, as I had been looking for something that might help encourage MAPP students to begin jotting down and sharing ideas about dissertation topics for next year. As padlet allows postings as though on a 'wall', I thought this might work as an electronic version of 'post-it' notes, something we had used in previous years. The advantage is the discussion could build and develop over time, students could comment on others' ideas, and so on. So I thought I would give it a shot and set up a page with some brief instructions:

The students needed a bit of coaxing, but eventually they started to add some of their thoughts:

So, so far so good. It does seem a little limited in that the option to print out as a text file doesn't keep comments together (in that a comment relating to an original post is not listed alongside this). Perhaps an online mind-mapping tool is what is needed instead? The live padlet page can be found here.

Using Twitter to support learners

I originally set up a @BucksMAPP Twitter account a couple of years ago (August 2013) aimed at students on the MSc Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) as a way of quickly sharing links and web resources in a way that other methods didn't allow quite so easily.

Email would have been the obvious other choice, but it wasn't so easy to send a link to a group email from my phone with just a couple of taps. Similarly, Blackboard (Bb) didn't allow a quick way to share in this way. Twitter did, so I set up an account for the MAPP (already having one myself), and then embedded the Twitter feed in the Bb module shells for each of the modules on the MAPP. This meant that even students who were not users of Twitter could access the tweets via Bb.

The aim was to encourage sharing between students on the course as part of the emerging MAPP community. Some students occasionally would send an email to the student group, or post a link on one of the Bb discussion boards. The use of Twitter in this way helped to show other ways of sharing resources and gave me a quick way of sharing things that I thought may be of interest to students.

Since then, the number of followers has increased modestly to show that the Twitter feed is of interest to people outside of the course and tweets have acknowledged that through more 'promotional' tweets, such as those promoting the PG Open Evenings. However, the underlying aim is still to support and develop the broader MAPP community.

I am just beginning to explore other ways of using Twitter to support learning, such as those discussed here. Even something as basic as using hashtags! It's a brave new world ;-)

The Positive Psychology People

Today is the UN International Day of Happiness. So be happy... If only it were that simple! We know it's not, and the area of psychology that I am most involved in is 'positive psychology' which is dedicated to the scientific study of topics such as happiness, wellbeing, flourishing, and so on.

The reason I mention this here is today has also seen the launch of a new website, www.thepositivepsychologypeople.com, that aims to promote positive psychology around the world. The website has been developed by a small team, of whom a number are some of our first cohort of MAPP graduates who completed the MAPP in 2014. It is therefore a project that has very much grown out of the MAPP, and something that we are keen to see develop and grow.

As I learn more about the concept of 'communities of practice' (e.g., Wenger, 1998), I am wondering if 'The Positive Psychology People' (also on twitter as @ThePPPeople) is something that might, in time, form the basis of a community of practice for positive psychology in general, and our students and graduates in particular. More on this in later posts.

Reference

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Go Luck Yourself!

One of the projects I was working on over the past year was something I was calling 'Go Luck Yourself!' (GLY!), a research project in which I wanted to explore the impact of certain apsects of positive psychology upon people's experiences of 'luck'. The project built upon previous research I had conducted on the psychology luck that formed my PhD (something I have blogged a little about elsewhere).

The GLY! project involved six fortnightly sessions in which participants were introduced to a set of related ideas based upon psychological theory that might impact their experiences of 'luck' (that is events that happen to us that are seemingly brought about by chance or other factors beyond our control). The reason I mention it here is that the GLY! project involved an online element, so that participants could take part without having to attend sessions at the university and could participate fully online.  Or they might choose to attend some sessions in person and some online. This was made possible by my filming the sessions I was running at lunchtimes on campus (using Swivl and an iPAD or iPhone), and posting these on a specially constructed Blackboard organisation for which I gave participants guest usernames. I have included these materials in my PGCert submission (itself a Bb organisation) to give an idea of how these materials looked and how they were presented to participants. An example of one of the recordings (the first of three parts that comprised session 1) is embedded below:

At the beginning of the project, prior to the first session, participants were asked to complete some online assessments (via PsychData.com, a secure service that allows online surveys and other psychoological assessments) and then complete the same assessments at the end of the project, up to 2 weeks after the final (sixth) session. They were also asked to keep a 'Luck Journal' throughout the 12 weeks of the project to record their experiences of luck (both good and bad!) during this time, along with any other thoughts about the GLY! project and luck in general. They could do this as a hard copy journal (and were provided with a book for this) or they could post their journal directly on Blackboard using the 'journal' facility on there.

A Twitter account for the project was also set up to help promote the project and also to support participants by reminding and encouraging them to view the sessions (if taking part online) and to remember to keep their Luck Journal. I even created a 'tongue-in-cheek' hashtag #DFYLJ (Don't Forget Your Luck Journal!). Those participants who completed the online assessments at the end of the project and submitted their Luck Journal received a certificate of completion.


I presented some initial findings from the project at the Applied Social Sciences Research Group in March 2015 and will also present as part of the Applied Positive Psychology Symposium in May 2015 (slides are in my PGCert submission Bb organisation, and can also be viewed via issuu.com here).

My reflections here focus on the effectiveness of the online element of the project, specifically how engaged online participants might have been. The long and short of it is that they weren't. Of 66 participants who originally signed up to take part (by completing the online assessments at the beginning of the project) only 14 (21%) completed the assessments at the end of the project (despite several follow-up emails to encourage completion). It was also clear that engagement in the project by those viewing the online materials quickly dwindled as the number of views of the video-recorded sessions reduced after the first couple of sessions.

In essence, I think there were two main reasons for this. The first is that I had originally intended to make the sessions far more interactive than they ended up being. They became more 'instructional' and I was aware that people's time was quite limited. The small number of people who attended in person were doing so in their lunch-break and so I was keen not to take up more than around 30 minutes for each session. Similarly, I was sensitive to the fact that those viewing online wrould be more likely to watch clips that weren't overly long (and I was limited to uploading in 15 minute parts due to YouTube's restrictions).

The second main reason is that I would have liked to given more time to building a 'community' for all participants that the online participants would have felt part of and perhaps supported them through the project. I attempted this a little through the use of a specific GLY! twitter account (@go_luckyourself) and by encouraging use of the discussion boards on Blackboard. But, if I am being honest, these were really a half-hearted attempt to create any sense of community.

I am considering running the project again in some way and looking at ways of making the sessions more interactive and introducing additional ways of supporting participants through a communityor example, maybe framing it as the 'Go Luck Yourself! Challenge' and explicitly asking those taking part to use social media to report on how they're getting on? One other simple change may be to make it a 6 week programme with one session (or 'lesson' or 'step') each week, rather than once per fortnight. Something that might help put it into the routine of participants.