As part of our work supporting the University’s transition to Moodle, I’ve been spending a fair proportion of my time lately trying to work out how to give useful advice to staff about pedagogical approaches to help them in the design of their Moodle course areas. In particular, how this can be done at the arm’s length that the comparison of EDU head count to number of course teams seems to dictate. I’m repeatedly being haunted by the following sentence from Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe’s introduction to “Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age”:
The goal of a pedagogical meta-model, while it has many attractions, is in tension with a view of learning as culturally situated, negotiated between participants, and specifically contextualized.
Beetham, H and Sharpe, R. (2007), p9.
…in other words, are we missing the point if we try to carry out course design workshops at a generalized level, with staff from a variety of teaching contexts? The ideal would be, by implication, for EDU staff to work with course teams, within their specific context, to support the design process. In fact, this is exactly what will happen as we carry out one of our other functions, that of supporting teams through the course review and approval processes.
But practicalities intervene: Moodle will come online for teaching starting as early as May this year, and for the bulk of courses from September. How can a handful of staff support every course team at an intimate level within this timeframe? Do we accept that our advice will necessarily need to be uncontextualized and do our best to point our colleagues to how they can guide themselves through this? Maybe it is better to provide contextualized support to a few people and accept that not everyone will get the advantage of the extra input during their initial course designs? There are arguments both ways (and I don’t have a confident answer).
In the meantime, as we work through preparing workshop activities, guidance notes, working directly with course teams, I’ll be posting ideas and work in progress on this blog for colleagues to comment and to use wherever it’s helpful.
Reference: Beetham, H and Sharpe, R. (2007). An introduction to rethinking pedagogy. In: Beetham, H and Sharpe, R Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. Oxon: Routledge. Available from UoG Libraries.