How to guide the learning process of a group of students who are different, who have different training needs since they are in different acting contexts, who learn different codes, practices, and values by expanding the learning surroundings: generating electronic learning environments which are adaptive, active and collaborative.
The Universidad Autonoma de Occidente has set in its Institutional Education Project - PEI (2011), the elements of its model in the training function: competencies development as the purpose of the comprehensive training, curriculum as intentional selection of culture and knowledge, and pedagogical guidelines for training. In the latter one, there is a description of learning, teaching and pedagogical mediation where there is a migration of educational contents to the learning experiences.
With those horizons in mind, the Institution has rethought and configured, in an innovative manner, the conceptual and strategic bases that must orient the use of the ICTs with academic purposes.
The first step was the conceptual definition of technology based on these horizons. For the UAO, technologies are tools for knowledge management, understood as a process by which data become information that is transferred, exchanged, applied and is meaningful in historically specific and socially structured contexts, to turn into knowledge. This critical path involves not only starting from the systematization and sharing experiences and resources at regional, national and international levels (publication in various formats: text, graphs, sounds, videos, infographs, multimedia, web) in the framework of an educational environment, but also in the resignificance of such materials from their meaningful application in a specific context that involves some impacts, a transformation or improvement of a community. On the other hand, technologies are spaces (synchronous and asynchronous) of interaction (Ubiquitous) where there is construction, flow, exchange, and transformation, through symbolic forms[1], the social meaning of knowledge: Electronic Learning Environments.
From these conceptual perspectives of technology, besides other cultural phenomena, the University has characterized challenges and goals for its educational processes mediated by ICTs: moving from linear training structures to rhizomatic ones, from the massive diffusion of knowledge (homogeneity of contents) to the selection and customization based on individual needs (multiple intelligences) and needs of the surroundings, changing the student’s recipient roles into the co-creation (collective intelligence, Crowdsourcing, Connectivism) and democratization of knowledge (MOOC Open Educational Resources, big data) which demands academic “curatorial activity”.
In order to operationalize these goals, the Design of electronic environments and learning experiences has been defined (2015) from quality standards integrated by educational, technological, and communicative components.
1. PEDAGOGIGAL PHASE
In each subject, the performances that the student must reach regarding competences expressed as knowledge, practices or values are defined. One performance, in terms of writing, should integrate the following elements: the action that will be performed by the student expressed through verbs, which determine the level of the competence to be achieved, the object of the action, and the purpose of the learning action.
Competence in action refers to performances that have different levels. In terms of knowledge (cognitive), one of the most recognized taxonomies is that of Bloom (1956), which establishes six progressive categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Performance levels used by the University (Fig. 1) range from the identification and implementation of a simple procedure (unistructural), to the extended abstract level where the person has skills that permit them to theorize, generalize, and evaluate critically and to transform creatively their immediate environment
Having defined the expected performance with its respective level, the central question is what learning activities are necessary to develop, in order to achieve this performance. These activities are possible training itineraries for the learner, which begins with performance A, to cover routes, defined in the curricular micro-design and thus to achieve a performance B.
The learning activities electronically mediated at Universidad Autonoma de Occidente are composed of the following elements: a Context that makes it possible to place the student on the rationale and relevance of the activity in the course framework; the Slogan, understood as the purpose and general guidance on the action(s) that have to be carried out; the Methodology, understood as the path or set of actions to be developed to achieve the objective; educational Resources (open or own) that are necessary for the development of the activity; and the Evaluation composed of several elements, with valid and reliable measurement bases (rubrics) to weigh student performance, so it is possible to recommend new routes for improving the level of competition achieved.
Stated briefly, the pedagogical phase shows the following procedure (Fig. 2):
2. TECHNOLOGICAL PHASE
Once the learning activity is clear enough, the technologies that support, facilitate, and enrich the development start to be determined. The academic needs are the ones that stablish the use and pertinence of technologies.
This phase is constituted by two moments: search, selection, transformation, design, development, and appropriate use of digital educational resources; and the selection of the space where the learning activities will take place.
2.1 Educational resources
2.1.1 Open
There is a countless number of open educational resources in Internet. At international level, there are different recognized projects of open digital educational resources.
Once the learning activity is defined, the institutional guideline is to search for text, audiovisual, and/or interactive open resources (with licensing to use) which are pertinent for the development of the activity. What is important in this aspect is the academic curatorship facing the available resources.
2.1.2 Own educational resources
At Universidad Autonoma de Occidente, the development of texts, images (2D – 3D vector and bitmaps), audios, videos, animations, and multimedia are conditioned by the type of data to be built. That is to say, which are not determined by novelty or fashion of a specific format (interactive video, electronic game, augmented reality), but the educational intentionality and the characteristics of the information to be developed corresponds to the particular features of the format to be used. Three types of resources can be identified: expositive, descriptive, and narrative.
When the information has expositive characteristics, or in other words that there is knowledge to be disseminated in a precise, clear, and organized way, the most suitable format is the written text because it allows carefully reading of concepts and ideas which require a high level of detail and concentration for their understanding. When the information is descriptive, which consists on the representation of processes, ideas, objects, beings, feelings, landscapes, among others, the most suitable format is the image, since its symbolic power allows visioning what is necessary to represent. Narrative, whose emblematic means is orality (audio), consist on telling stories, cases, facts, experiences. Such variables are combinable: presentation-description, narration-description, presentation-narration, and presentation – description – narration.
Applying these criteria avoids inappropriate use of the ICTs.
Additionally, from the technological point of view, there are three variables to consider in the design and development of the digital educational resources: the capture, edition, and publication (format) processes.
2.2 Spaces: adaptive, active, and collaborative
Technologies must encourage and promote three educational scenarios: adaptive, active and collaborative as spaces of interaction for the social significance of knowledge, practices and values,
Adaptive scenarios are those set from learning particularities, training needs, and multiple intelligences of each student. In electronic environments, the adaptive phenomenon is understood as spaces and resources that are rewritten (palimpsest) in an environment (Learning Management System - LMS) from the learning experiences that will be developed.
Assets go from the passive reading and viewing practices to meaningful and significant practices.
Collaborative environments respond to the principles established by Pierre Levy in his book “Collective Intelligence: An anthropology of cyberspace” (2004), in which he synthesizes a philosophical commitment of the social construction of knowledge that is reflected in the so called "theory" of electronic learning environments. This “theory” takes cognitive and constructivist theories elements to explain the learning network (rhizome, nodal, tangential) in the digital age.
Nowadays, there is a countless number of collaborative tools within the frame of learning management systems (LMS) and the cloud, enabling the development of multiple activities (adaptive) in group, active, synchronous and asynchronous ways. The academic challenge, rather than the domain and instrumental use of active and collaborative tools, is defining methodologies, from a pedagogical approach to guide and to enable knowledge construction.
From the educational point of view, the global tools have been organized within the Institution according to the type of learning activity that can facilitate or enhance learning processes. The activities are what define the spaces and the necessary resources for their development.
3. COMMUNICATIVE PHASE
It is clear that besides the design of the course activities and the selection of resources and spaces for its development, it is necessary to consider how the environment, interaction, observation, participation and experience will be. It is about building the learning experience through symbolic forms to give it a concrete sense.
To do this, the recognition of the participants, synchronous and asynchronous audiovisual messages, the Storytelling, the visual metaphor, advertisements, netiquettes and advisory and feedback spaces have been defined as fundamental and constitutive elements of an electronic learning environment.
[1] According to John Thompson, described in Ideology and Modern Culture: critical social theory in the era of mass communication era, the symbolic forms are actions, objects and meaningful expressions of several types related to contexts in which, and through which, those symbolic forms are produced, transmitted and received.