Design of a Learning Environment for Management Education The Case of EduORG2.0 at the University of Pisa Maria Cinque1 and Antonella Martini2 1
Fondazione Rui – Viale XXI Aprile, 36 00168 - Roma 2 Faculty of Engineering – L.go L. Lazzarino, 2, 56100 - Pisa
[email protected],
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Abstract. There has been a vast debate in recent years about usage patterns of social computing and web 2.0 tools in learning contexts. A growing number of researchers suggest that certain pedagogical approaches are best suited in these contexts, since they involve active engagement, social learning, continuous feedback, enabling students’ autonomous understanding and the transfer of those skills to useful or real-life settings. In this article we present the use of a social network as part of a formal course of Management at the University of Pisa. The institutional VLE – based on Moodle – has been integrated with a student support group hosted on Ning. Problems and opportunities for using Ning have been discussed in small groups and students feedback will be reported. The shift from Learning Management System (course centric) to a Personal Learning Environment (people centric) and then to Personal Learning Network is also been discussed and a framework for Education 2.0 is provided. Keywords: Management education; Technology enhanced learning; Social networking; VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), PLE (Personal Learning Environment).
1 Introduction As a part of the larger educational environment, technology provides a context that is shaped in part by the ways teachers enable their students’ uses of technological tools. Technological contexts include the actual devices students use and the systems that support these devices. These technology contexts are in a state of almost constant change as a result of both innovation and a deliberate effort to expand access to technology in schools and universities. This is why the concept of “disruptive technology’ was also applied to education. Katrina A. Meyer [1] points out that “although not a magical way to transform higher education, disruptive technology must interrupt our usual policies, practices, and assumptions. Consequently, 21st century education will be: student-centered, with learning put first, and flexible enough to accommodate M.D. Lytras et al. (Eds.): WSKS 2010, Part I, CCIS 111, pp. 487–492, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
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different styles and interests; designed to offer options, motivate students, and provide connections to students’ lives, jobs, and communities; able to capitalize on the willingness of faculty and students to experiment and fail, to improve, and to keep at problems until solutions are crafted. A growing number of researchers suggest that certain pedagogical approaches are best suited for instruction that makes use of digital technological tools. These pedagogical approaches typically involve active engagement, social learning, continuous feedback, and real world application [2]. Constructivist theory suggests that learners construct their own knowledge, but facilitating such knowledge construction in the classroom is complex. In an effort to further define the problem, Mishra and Koehler [3] have theorized about a specialized form of knowledge called Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) that represents the manner in which teachers integrate technology into instruction within the context of constructivist learning goals. When teachers use 21st century technologies to facilitate student learning, evidence suggests that the learning that occurs is dynamic and multi-dimensional. This is learning (or e-learning) 2.0, which is not only “student-centered” but “communitycentered”, based on community of practice formed by “people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour” [4]. In this sense it is “immersive” (learning by doing) and “situated” [5] and, basically, connected, networked learning [6]. Thinking on teachers’ side McLoughling and Lee [7] outlined the 3 P’s of 2.0 pedagogy: personalization (learner choice, learner agency, customization, selfregulation and management); participation (communication, collaboration, connectivity, community); productivity (learner created content, contribution to knowledge, generativity, creativity and innovation).
2 A Framework for Education 2.0 Using the 3P’s as background and building on Enterprise 2.0 literature, we define Education 2.0 as “a set of educational and technological approaches steered to enable new educational models, based on open involvement, emergent collaboration, knowledge sharing, internal/external social network development and exploitation”. From an organisational point of view, Education 2.0 is a point of discontinuity that breaks the boundaries of the PLE both in terms of opening up the organisation to ‘external’ players (customers, suppliers, partners) and of re-thinking the traditional schemes of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and management of functional and hierarchical relations, so questioning the rigid stereotypes regarding the workspace and working hours. We modeled the emerging needs of learners from the emerging needs of knowledge workers 2.0 [10]. These needs can be divided into six key dimensions, as shown in Fig. 1.: open belonging (to supply secure and selective access to information, tools and connections that go beyond the Institutional’s boundaries); social networking (learners increasingly need to develop and maintain that network of relations that is becoming a more and more important asset for their professional efficiency); knowledge networks (to prevent their knowledge and skills from being “surpassed” soon,
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learners must be able to build their own network to have access to knowledge and information from different sources, both explicit and implicit); emergent collaboration (in an increasingly fast and unpredictable competitive scenario, learners need to create cooperative settings in a fast, flexible way, even outside the formal organisational patterns); adaptive reconfigurability (students need to quickly reconfigure their own processes and activities); global mobility (learners spend an increasingly large share of their time far from the workplace and often in a state of mobility; new ICT enables them to be connected in any place and at any time of day through their own network of tools, thus making the workspace and working time more flexible).
Fig. 1. Education 2.0 framework
3 The Case of EduORG2.0 3.1 Integrating the Institutional VLE EduORG2.0 was created in 2009 for the course of Management – one of the Management Engineering degree – at the University of Pisa. It is based on two platforms: Moodle, which was already present in the Institution, and Ning1. While the first is used for the delivery of the programme (presentation of the course, calendar, slides etc.) and for formal communication (exams, calendar, mid-term tests etc.), Ning is used as a sort of ‘laboratory’, an environment in which students can enhance their learning through interaction and availability of further, non-compulsory, resources. See table 1. 1
Ning.com (http://www.ning.com) is a free web-based platform that allows users to create their own social networking sites.
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Moodle (1) the calendar of the course (Google Calendar) (2) the course presentation with a link to the teacher’s website (3) resources (slides, handouts, exercises, links, lessons videoclips); the resources are ordered by module (4) sign up for exams (link to faculty service) (5) assignment on a task (a team competition takes place along the course: every week the groups – 14 – work on a given task/problem and then discuss it in plenary session)
On Ning (1) blog with post concerning daily lessons or team competition (2) forum, with are 3 pre-fixed categories (3) groups: every group has its own page with logo (4) case histories of entrepreneurship: an article is available every week and can be downloaded with BoxNet (integrated in Ning) (5) useful links (6) twitter in home page: for rapid prompts by the teacher (7) Most popular videos (8) Must-read books: books review concerning Management are posted every week (9) rss from Il Sole-24 Ore and Ansa news (10) Events: seminars with visiting professors (11) scheduling meetings with the teacher through Doodle (12) surveys trough Polldaddy (13) feeds from Diigo (14) link to wikis (15) cultural links
3.2 EduORG 2.0 Approach It is possible to map EduORG2.0 on the dimensions of the framework reported in Fig. 1. It results that EduORG2.0 is an educational space that can be named ‘social’ since it creates an environment that is not targeted to the Institution population at large but to specific groups or communities. The level of users’ participation and proactive involvement is high since they see the community as an important element to increase their wealth of knowledge, create new relations and increase their “learning” effectiveness and visibility. In addition, a number of users proactively participate in the creation of contents, take part in discussions and create interpersonal relations of trust and mutual engagement. At the same time, the teacher’s commitment is very high, but the Institution does not ‘see’ and recognise the community as an important means to achieve its purposes, by proactively supporting it and allocating it some resources. The platform has been customized in order to outline a path for guided learning: a message is posted by the teacher after every lesson, describing what has been done, where and how to study. The idea is to offer opportunities and resources beyond the mere ‘technical knowledge’, a support that could enhance student learning and encourage them to develop not only their ‘hard’ but also their ‘soft’ skills. Although the 2
There is some integration between the social network and the VLE. There is a form on the Moodle course page, which allows participants to log on to Ning network, and an RSS feed displays news about the current module on the social networking site.
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use of the social networking space is optional, all course participants have accessed it at least once. About a half of the participants are regularly (almost daily) active in the network and share information, resources and messages. The Ning platform has been presented with the metaphor of football camp, where students can train themselves. All the items of the network are inspired by this metaphor: a football team, composed by different players (the students with their distinctive abilities); a coach (the teacher); a training program; a to a football match (the exam). 3.3 Students’ Feedback As we said before, although not mandatory, Ning was accessed at least once by all course participants3. Each year, during the course, two meetings with team leaders are held to discuss on the following subjects: groups internal management (learning process and state of the art, learning difficulties, participation of all group members at the project works); evaluation of didactical resources (book, slides, handouts and exercises); suggestions.The opinions gathered during these meetings are very useful to the teacher, that asks the team leaders to express freely any problem arisen during group activities. Answers focus also on classmate and group feedback: sometimes – due to different problems – groups are not so tight and so collaborative as the team leader would expect. Some responses stress ease-of-use and practical application of Ning. Finally, some students (not all) show awareness of the ‘additional value’ of EduORG2.0 network for personal growth. Other important elements emerging from meeting report are related to the affordances offered by EduORG2.0 network and, generally, to functionalities and features a social network should contain in order to encourage students participation, to allow them develop competencies and to motivate them to learn. Didactical web sites are very much appreciated and aspects or features that motivate to learn were found to be related to the boundary (clear expectations, functionalities, goals), and usability aspect (ease of use, reliability, user-friendly, appealing interface), more than to particular aspects of learning or competence development (trace learning paths, progress indicator, test skill development, the idea that there is something to learn). These opinions show that powerful, intuitive social media tools represent and facilitate fundamental shifts in human interaction—shifts that can improve university learning.
4 Helping Students View Ning as a Personal Learning Network In technology-enhanced learning discussion there is a strong trend that promote the change from Learning Management System (course centric) to a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) (people centric) [8] and then to Personal Learning Network [9]. “Learning networks capture an essential element in learning today, the simple fact that we don't know what we want to teach” [9]. Indeed, it is often suggested that the best we can manage is to teach students how to learn, and to encourage them to manage their 3
EduORG2.0 in numbers: (2009) 156 enrolled, 13 groups, 87 posts, 49 forum discussions, 11 videos (each 30 views), 200 comments for each group (average rate); 41.285 log-in; (2010) 318 members, 14 groups, 85 forum discussions, 112 posts, 18 videos, more than 50.000 log-in.
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own learning thereafter. The main purposes for implementing Ning community into the Management course were two-fold. First, we wanted to try to create a virtual classroom — an online community where students could converse and collaborate, and where the teacher could support and enrich their learning. Secondly, the teacher was hoping to enhance the course curriculum in a way that would help prepare students for the literacy demands of the 21st century. On both accounts, the experience has by far overwhelmed the original purposes, and we have just begun to glimpse its ultimate potential. As a virtual classroom, EduORG2.0 is in many ways a much more flexible and dynamic space than a physical classroom. Students can interact with any member about any topic or question at any time. And rather than being limited to a classroom where only 20 to 30 students are able to collaborate with one another, the virtual space enables students to interact with all 100 plus of their classmates, as well as alumni who continue to participate on the site. Furthermore, EduORG2.0 is a learning context in which the teacher can be the kind of educator 21st century students need—a facilitator, collaborator, and co-learner.
References 1. Meyer, K.A.: The Role of Disruptive Technology in the Future of Higher Education. EQ (Educause Quarterly) 33, 1 (2010), http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterly MagazineVolum/TheRoleofDisruptiveTechnologyi/199378 (verified on 24.04.2010) 2. Doolittle, P., Hicks, D.: Constructivism as a theoretical foundation for the use of technology in social studies. Theory and Research in Social Education 31(1), 71–103 (2003) 3. Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J.: Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record 108(6), 1017–1054 (2006) 4. Wenger, E.: Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998) 5. Lave, J., Wenger, E.: Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1991) 6. Downes, S.: E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine (October 17, 2005), http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article= 29-1 (verified on 23.04.10) 7. McLoughling, C., Lee, M.J.W.: The Three P’s of Pedagogy for the Networked Society: Personalization, Participation, and Productivity. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 20(1), 10–27 (2008) 8. Wilson, S.: Future VLE – The Visual Version (2005), http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050125 170206 (retrieved April 23, 2010) 9. Downes, S.: New Technology Supporting Informal Learning. Journal Of Emerging Technologies In Web Intelligence 2(1), 27–33 (2010) 10. Corso, M., Martini, A., Pesoli, A.: Enterprise 2.0: What Models are Emerging? Results from a 70 case-based research. International Journal of Knowledge and Learning 4(6), 595–561 (2008) ISSN 1741-1009
