Final Report - Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

8/14/2019 Final Report - Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

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Final Report

1. Title of project

Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

2. Project director/s

Alan Cann1, Jon Scott1, Jo Badge1, Richard Mobbs2, Steve Rooney3

3. Department(s)/Unit(s)1School of Biological Sciences, 2IT Services, 3Student Support and Development Service

4. KeywordsPersonal 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 2.0

technologies 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.

6. Pedagogic Background to the Project

University of Leicester students are transients within our system, usually staying for

three 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-based

exercise, 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 ofindividual 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.


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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 keep

logging-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 authentication

services 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 issues

through 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 ofPractice 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.


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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 be

effective, 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 their

PLEs. This complex data is summarized in the following figure:


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Points to note: This is self-reported data and needs to be interpreted accordingly, but theGoogle/Wikipedia internal control (100% use) seems valid. Students expressed a strongpreference for "trusted" brands which they recognized, such as Google and YouTube, eventhough these are not normally considered to be academic channels. Nearly all the mind

maps show a complex mixture of personal and professional services. This seems to havechanged over the last 2-3 years, when students liked to compartmentalized the personaland university identities. Online identities are merging. Institutional services feature lowon this list - is this accurate of just perception of what is required? At this time, is theInstitution becoming transparent? This is confirmed by other recent research(http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/06/top_100_student_websites_uk.html).

To assist in the construction of ePortfolios, students were give exemplars based on afictional first year students "Joanna Hughes". These were hosted on theWetpaint/Wikispaces sites. Students were also given assessment criteria and a schedule offour assessment deadlines. The assessment criteria were based loosely on the reported E-Portfolio Assessment Criteria from Penn State University

(http://www.wikieducator.org/MOSEP_Module_4/session2). There modified assessmentcriteria proved to be robust and reliable and will be used again next year. Many studentsstruggled to distinguish between a curriculum vitae and a portfolio, so the process andvalue of reflection needs to be emphasised. Because eportfolios were "taught" within asingle module, there is little feed-forward, at the end of the module students move on tothe next course, a drawback of modularization.

Students tend to dislike portfolios, whatever the format. Fundamentally, it is the processof enforced reflection they find challenging rather than the software used or theimplementation. In responses to questionnaires, students implied that they didn't enjoyreflecting on learning because they perceive it to be "not relevant" to a science degree.This is a common attitude which takes a long time to wear down. The context theportfolio task is presented in is of great importance. Once the assessment ceased, thestudents stopped contributing to their portfolios and only 1% of ePortfolios created onmodule BS1011 were updated >1 month after end of module. 56% of the ePortfolios


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created were public - students had been made aware of the issues relating topublic/private access to their e-Portfolios.

9. Project Outcomes and Achievements

This project has already resulted in a number of conference presentations andpublications (see Dissemination). Our review of Web2.0 services is available online at:http://pleuol.wetpaint.com. Several manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals describingthe outcomes of this work are currently in preparation.

10. Evaluation

Many different methods of data collection were used during the course of this work.Although Blackboard was used as an authentication hub for administration and assessmentof the modules, student activity took place across a wide range of distributed services,some of which were difficult to track. All of the services used were linked to assessedtasks and marks were recorded via Blackboard. Formal and informal feedback wasreceived from students in face to face sessions, and via numerous online channels,including Blackboard, email and Twitter.

11. Further Developments

All of the students chose to use a wiki format for our ePortfolios last year, but the nativeflexibility of these sites seems to have been difficult for many. Interestingly, some of themore "successful" examples (i.e. those which seemed to get to genuine reflective insight)imposed a chronological format on their wiki - i.e. turned it into a blog! Consequently, weare going to utilize the reflective blog format next year, with tagging for aggregation andrecord keeping. In summary, out future plans for the continuation of this project are:

Repeat of PLE module with slightly revised assessment schedule.

Repeat of ePortfolio module with blog scaffolding of reflection, and tagging foraggregation and record keeping.

12. Dissemination

AJ Cann presented the initial findings of this work at the HEA Science Learning andTeaching Conference in Edinburgh in June 2009 and will present further findings at theALT-C conference in Manchester in September 2009. Jo Badge presented the findings atthe HEA conference in Manchester in July 2009.AJ Cann and Matthew Mobbs (SDSS) have delivered workshops on this topic at Centre forRecording Achievement (CRA) meetings, and an article describing the work has been

published in the CRA eJournal "On Reflection".Additional manuscripts describing the PLE and ePortfolio aspects of the project arecurrently in preparation for peer-reviewed journals.AJ Cann has also blogged extensively about and discussed the findings of the project:http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search/label/PLEhttp://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search/label/e-portfolios

13. Acknowledgements of external bodies

Additional funding for this project was awarded by the HEA Subject Centre for Bioscienceswhich enabled staff buy-out for delivery and assessment with this large group of students.