Competencebased Training of VET-Teachers with ICT
Senior lecturer Niels Henrik Helms & Senior lecturer Susanne Tellerup
We are both working for The Danish Institute for Educational Training of Vocational Teachers (DEL).
DEL is a semi-governmental organisation under the Royal Danish Ministry of Education. DEL develops educational products including general training, educational counselling and specific subject related programmes for teachers in further and higher vocational training. DEL operates close with the schools in it’s remit where it provides a direct consultancy facility and promotes joint research and development projects.
The Teaching Context
First of all, we will concentrate on a short description of the context. The purpose of the project is to develop qualifications, plans and networks for the pedagogical use of ICT in the sector of vocational education. We have chosen to present the KOM.IT project because we think that the KOM.IT-courses are relevant examples of how to introduce new technology within the sector, and how some of the major problems have been solved, while others maintain. And we have both been involved in the KOM-IT project.
ICT- and The VET-Sector. The Historical BackgroundAn external commission highlighted the situation within the educational sector in Denmark in general – among their findings relating to the sector of vocational education were:
· The basic level of hardware in this sector was very good (computer-pupil ratio 2.8-1)
· All the schools had access to ‘The Sectornet’[1] at 64 Kbp/s minimum
· Most students and teachers had their own e-mail address
Nevertheless, there were problems in the pedagogical use of ICT. The schools had all the gear but what should it be used for? How did it affect the schools and their ability to collaborate? How did it change the learning approach? What was the role of the teacher? To cope with such questions the Ministry of Education formulated a strategy plan in 1996. This plan of action contained several different objectives: the new role of the student, In-service training of teachers, development projects, “The Sektornet” etc.
Following this we were asked to develop a programme for developing the pedagogical use of ICT within the sector of vocational education training.
The tasks were listed:
· We had to define the learning objectives
· We had to identify the learners
· We had to design the learning process
· We had to choose the relevant media
And the KOM-IT project emerged. The following part of this paper will focus on the emerging and development of the project. How the first course succeed, how the relationship between the choice of technology and educational goals were realised which changes we had to made in behalf of renewing the second course and why some changes were difficult because of the construction of the consortium.
The Learning Objectives and the Needed Knowledge
The learning objectives were closely related to the fact that we were dealing with professionals. It wasn’t students but adult people who had their trade and needed to do things differently. They had knowledge and the knowledge they processed embedded in practice.[2] The transfer of the knowledge was closely related to their practice. Which means that it is very difficult to understand or comprehend the epistemology of learning here as objective. We were dealing with a sort of subjective knowledge[3], a way to do things. And this way of acting had to be qualified and often also had to change. This is also related to the fact that we were dealing with organisations and not individual learners.
Knowledge within an organisation is often learned by experience and can not amply be transmitted in any form. Such knowledge remains often exclusively as “”tacit knowledge” in the words of Polanyi[4]. That kind of knowledge becomes collective meaning structures. In order to access these meaning structures, new information should be generated through common action by key-actors in the organisation. There should then be a process of integration and interpretation of the information, which leads to the decisive step where responsible action is taken[5]
New ways of organising the learning environment taking into account the potentials of ICT, changed behaviour of the learners and new demands from the labour market. Or in general if we speak about teacher training: In the information society knowledge is expanding quickly, and therefore the teachers can’t only be providers of information. The new technologies give access to so much information. It is therefore necessary for the teacher to cope with a more comprehensive role. The modern teacher has to be an adviser, a tutor, a mentor and especially the facilitator of learning. The role of the teacher is changing rapidly.
In the future, it will be necessary that the teacher concentrate on the development of different skills. Not least the skills of knowledge navigation will be of importance.
Bates seems to touch an import point, when it is noted that one of the major barriers to the use of technology is the fear because of “the lack of an appropriate conceptual framework to guide the use of technology”[6].
The KOM-IT projects were meant to be the context, in which the teachers could develop such an appropriate framework, so they could use the technology more effectively.
We summed up the learning objectives as:
· Qualify the teachers to use ICT in a competent critical way
· Qualify the teachers in using ICT by doing it
· Develop a strategy for the use of ICT in the college
· Develop infrastructures which enabled colleges to let this development happen
· And establishing (virtual) networks among teachers internally in colleges and among colleges
The Learners
We have already touched that question. But we identified the learners as persons who were ready to use ICT. But it should also be persons who had the necessary power to generate development in the use of ICT among their colleagues. The problem with these persons are that they have very limited time. They are the core teachers of the colleagues therefore they have very limited time. We agree to some extent with Bates,[7] when he claims that training is costly, but not the training as such but the time spend which could have been used for “production” (teaching, development work or management).
We are talking about adult learning and adults in general have a special attitude to learning. Which could be summed up the way Rogers did; Learning is episodic, the goal is usually some concrete task, aimed at solution of specific problems, adults tend to adopt a particular range of learning styles and strategies, their interest in overall principles is relatively small.
Compared with the children of today, adults seem to have more barriers to overcome coping with the computers in a constructive and critical way:
“Children today take what they understand to be the computer’s psychological activity (interactivity as well as speaking, singing, and doing math) as a sign of consciousness. But the still insist that the breathing, having blood, being born, and as one put it, “having real skin” are the true signs of life. Children today contemplate machines they believe to be intelligent and conscious yet not alive. Today’s children who seem so effortlessly to split consciousness and life are the forerunners of a larger cultural movement “[8]
And if the teachers in the sector of vocational education want to be part of the cultural development and also influence the so called movement, they have to develop both their learning and teaching styles. If they remain unaffected by the ‘the online world, they and their school might get redundant within a short time! Working with the training of managers and teachers confirms these assumptions therefore it is very important to have their own practice as the subject matter – and to add some new (and perhaps provoking) perspectives to their own practice.
Furthermore, it is of importance that the managers and teachers understand the meaning of the KOM-IT project. KOM-IT stands for Communication, Information, Technology, and last not least the name has been chosen to point out the commitment of all the participants. When computers are used as a communications and learning tool, the participants have to be committed if they don’t want to waste their money. The selection of the participants therefor has been of vital importance. We wanted to avoid situations like Evans describes:
Some employees may be dragooned into courses, other may volunteer. Some employees may regret they were not chosen, others may regret that the were[9]
The Team and the Individual Learner
Apart from being the VET-SECTOR we offered the project to institutions and not to individuals. We emphasised the need for the schools to recruit teams and also to spend same time in order to make it into a team.
The team was made responsible for the project on the schools. That meant that the team should ensure that the individual projects where important for the individual otherwise they would not allocate enough interest and time. But they should also reflect on how the individual project could benefit the overall strategy-project. Management should be represented in the team. We have learned from experience that unless we do that it will be extremely difficult for the participants to “sell” the project to the organisation and also to get the necessary resources.
Then we asked the college to ensure that the team had the following competencies or that they were in the process of getting them:[10]
· The team should be capable of motivation
· The team should be capable of creating security and drive in the process of change
· The team should be political powerful inside the organisation
· The team should be keen on the use of IT in learning
· The team should know basic IT
This is very interesting to have a focus on teams as opposed to individuals. This may sound somewhat propagandistic but we have spent a lot of time on consultations with the schools in order to secure that they had a team with enough power and imagination to spearhead the development.
Identifying and Designing the Learning Process
We were talking about a process, and from a theoretical point of view it could be described as a constructivnist learning process. It was orientated towards practice of the participants, but it was also a social process, that could be described in the words of Mason:
“...the constructivnist model is based on a theory of learning in which meaning is derived from and embedded in context . It therefore places more emphasis on group activity in the learning process, peer exchange and social networking, and enhances rather than devalues the contextual and social factors of the learning environment.”[11]
Accepting this and the description of the learners this also meant that it should be a collaborative learning process. Again, the recruitment of teams instead of individuals became important. We were then talking about a kind of third generation distance education. Where we are talking about distributed collaborative learning. Learning materials are available, counselling as well but where the most import issue is the social process among the participants this called for a solution with CMC (Computer mediated communication).
Designing the learning process then had to cope with the problems stated above. We found that we had to design an ACTION LEARNING programme with an electronic infrastructure, able to facilitate the counselling and collaborative processes.
We have been developing Action Learning as a way to qualify professionals in the sector of vocational education for many years, but now it had to be combined with the possibilities in ICT and especially the WWW. The overall framework looks consisted of five important elements:
· Preparation: Recruiting the team and introducing them to the idea. Identifying projects with learning potentials
· Individual projects: Projects dealing with ICT and learning. These projects generated input to the ICT-Strategy.
· ICT-Strategy: The overall project knitting the whole process together
· Consultants: Guiding the team through the process
· Conference-days: Meeting the other participants, learning in workshops, listening to keynotespeakers
The model we use for Action Learning is very much inspired by concept of experiential learning, developed by David Kolb. To a large extent we learn by doing things, getting experience from that doing, reflecting on the experience and finally getting some knowledge out of it. Furthermore learning is as well an individual as a social process. And with CMC it is possible to work on your own and to interact with your team, other teams and the different specialists – advisers or tutors.
What the organisers must do, is to help the learner to choose the activities from which he or she can learn in and from and to organise effective reflection processes. The experience and the knowledge are for the learner to get. And they get it if: The information they get is a difference that makes a difference (Gregory Bateson)
It means that the learners have to notice things first (focus on it) and after that they must want or need to do something about it. If that happens the learners get more knowledge, but how much they get depends on what they knew beforehand, how interested they really are, how important the issue is etc.
David Kolb shows it as illustrated in the figure.
We then had to find activities, from which there could be learned. We defined these as development projects dealing with learning and ICT.
The second step was to work actively with reflection. This would be done by working in peer-groups and being coached and counselled. The third step would be to conceptualise. The coreproject would be a strategy-project formulating a pedagogical ICT-strategy this would then be supported by and have input from other projects dealing with teaching and ICT.
How to Deliver? - The Choice of Technology
Summing the main-points up lead us to the following:
· We needed a programme based on distance learning for two reasons:
- Time and flexibility
- The need to see the learning potentials within the new technology
Looking at the learning context for this project and the choice of media make some decisions quite obvious – audio and television were never relevant. We needed an ICT set-up for the reasons stated above but which and how?
The set-up should enable the learners to:
· have access to learning materials
· communicate
· network
We came up with several suggestions. And the result was a homepage with access to learning materials and electronic distance learning programme, where all dialogues, arguments, discussions and counselling should take place. Topclass was chosen, because it seemed appropriate, and because UNI-C (the technical advisers) meant, that Topclass could meet all the demands. Obviously, it wasn’t the most appropriate choice – the platform had to – and still has to be developed to meet the demands in the most suitable way.
The digital infrastructure for the KOM-IT project was accessible to the learners in a technological sense. They were all connected to the Internet through the socalled “Sectornet” and it was a on-line system. A higher degree of transparency was however needed.
To get a sense of how we tried to realise the objectives, you have to visualise the following: 120 teachers from 20 vocational colleges having access to a large amount of electronic learning materials, establishing an educational project pr. person, and a strategic project pr. college having access to different virtual discussion forums and joining 5 days on campus (conference-days) for a period of 5 month.
The use of ICT in a critical and constructive way was encouraged by our feedback to the processes and the products. Each KOM-IT-consultant was tutoring 4-5 teams (20-35 participants), and the tutoring was first of all an electronic communication. But also some of the campus-time was used for dialogues between the KOM-IT-consultant and the learners.
Both the learning materials placed on the homepage and the days on campus were meant to give professional and special inspiration to the learners work with their different projects.
And the different discussion forums together with the days on campus were constructed in a way so that they could encourage the establishing of networks across the schools. None of the goals could have been reached without the use of the Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), or at least it would have been less effective, less meaningful, more difficult and more expensive, to try to reach the same goals without any use of the new technologies.
Conclusion - Limitations and Potentials of the TechnologiesAt this moment, we have ended the KOM-IT-courses. It is obvious that there are some limits, when you want to use the technologies in connection with the principles of action learning.
First and foremost, the participants are in control. This is no limitation – it is one of the major potentials and consequences of as well CMC and action learning. However, action learning with CMC is different from a common action learning course, because the consultant doesn’t have the personal knowledge about the participant. This causes some problems by the idea generation, linking and structuring. When a learner generates an idea, which he wants to follow and make the key of his project, it is very difficult for the consultant to decide whether it is a relevant problem. Or whether the learner just want to go the easy way and the learner is in other words just doing what he already know/does. In the classroom, the consultant will give such a learner plenty of time. Certainly the consulant cannot avoid the learner in following such a project, but in a dialogue he/she can make the consequences clear.
You can as an consultant feel the lost of control as a problem, because you really don’t know if the learners are in action. Of course you can see if there are visiting the homepage, but if the learners don’t contact you or the other participants you don’t know, how their learning process develops. And even if you want to help – give good and relevant advises – it isn’t possible. Of course you have some similar problems in the classroom: you don’t know whether there is any mental activity at all. You can ask some questions – and with some luck some learners respond. But the rest doesn’t react. They couldn’t care less, the questions are too simple or too complex? The teacher in the classroom doesn’t know. He reflects on the fact, but somehow it is easier to accept silence in the classroom. Perhaps because at least you can see some human beings – and therefor you know there is living activity. When you faces the computer and there is no one needing you, no one to talk to perhaps the teacher feel another kind of emptiness, loneliness, lack of control and especially the lost of authority.
In fact, it is difficult to find many limitations, which aren’t already in the classroom. Of course you don’t have the same social contact – and at the same time it is a potential that you don’t generate any bias. Actually CMC makes the interaction more unprejudiced.
At an early stage of the project, we developed a rather simple model in order to understand the relationship between Technology, Process and Product. We thought that it could be understood the following way: First technology, then process, then product.This meant that unless you design the technology with an emphasis on access and user-friendliness - you can forget about process and product. This conceptual understanding lead us to use a lot of energy in changing the digital set-up for second round. The learners were too silent! We had problems with access –We were right but only to some extent!
We had created a learning situation where the learners should work closely in teams. Why should they then write anything? The participants worked face to face, they reflected face to face in their own context. And when they needed something from their consultant they just wrote an e-mail! They did come up with the results we had anticipated: strategy, infrastructure a.s.o. So why should we bother? Because we wanted the learners to use the digital framework, they should learn to act in a kind of Digital Distributed Learning Environment. They also needed this for networking with other colleges. We then came up with different suggestions:
· A more simple and user-friendly framework with emphasis on access and flexibility
· A compulsory Introduction
· An Assignment Model
We don’t want to maintain that the computer-mediated communication is an easy one. As a consultant you have to make many decisions forwards – and in the classroom it is easier to change your decisions, if you see that something doesn’t act the way you wanted. Also the evaluation has to be more distinct, if the teacher shall use it to modify some decisions.
Finally it is important for the consultant to be member of a team, and it is fare more important than if it is a face-to-face-course. Some of reasons are that the whole framework must be created before the course begins, that the consultants must work closely together to build up a learning material, which contains the different elements for an action learning course.
But after designing and participating in the KOM-IT projects, we are convinced of that a developed model of Action Learning & CMC is the right way to go, when you deal with teachers training. The major part of the participating colleges moved from a rather traditional concept of the use of ICT to a new concept of learning environments. Individual and collective structures of meaning were challenged and often changed. Competencies were developed.
Bibliography
Bates, A.W. (1997) .Technology, open learning and distance education, Routledge: London and New York.
Burge, E.J., and Roberts, J.M. (1993). Classroom with of difference, University of Toronto Press: Canada
Dixon, N. (1994). The organizational learning circle, Cambridge
Edwards, J. (1991). Evaluation in adult and further education, The Workers’ Educational Association: Liverpool.
Entwistle, N.(1988). Styles of learning and teaching, David Fulton, Publisher: London
Evans, T.(1994). Understanding learners in open and distance education, Kogan Page: London. Gergen, K. J. (1991). The saturated self, BasicBooks.
Giddens, A. (1996). In defence of sociology, Polity Press.
Jacobsen, J.C. (Ed) (1997). Refleksive læreprocesser, Forlaget Politisk Revy: København.
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning, Engelsewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Polanyi, M. (1983). The tacit dimension, N.Y.
Rogers, A:(1986).Teaching adults, Open University Press, Oxford, 1986
Rowntree, D.(1994). Preparing materials for open, distance and flexible learning, Kogan Page: London
Turkle, S.(1995). Life on the screen, Touchstone.
Vygotsky, L.S. ”(1964, in danish). Thought and language
And visit the KOM-IT Homepage: KOM-IT.dk
[1] For the last four years all Danish schools ( primary, sec..etc) have been connected by a electronic network, which among other facilities provide internet access
[2]In understanding the process in wich people transforms from being craftsmen etc into being VET-teachers we have been very inspired by Jean Lave & Etiennne Wenger “Situated Learning. Cambridge 1991
[3]Pratt. D.D. Five Perspectives on teaching in Adult and Higher Education
[4] Polanyi, M. ”The Tacit Dimension”, N.Y. 1983
[5] Inspired by Nancy Dixon ”The Organizational Learning Circle”Cambridge 1994 p.44 ff
[6] Bates p. 245
[7]Bates p. 26
[8] Turkle S., 1995, p. 84
[9] Evans, 1994 p. 95
[10] According to the theories of ”The Zone of proximal development” Vygotsky, L.S. ”Thought and Language”(1964, in danish)
[11] R. Mason Using Communication Media in Open and Flexible Learning” Opcit in Sorensen: “På vej mod et virtuelt læringsparadigme”(in danish)
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