 I've done this presentation a few times now in Middlemoots this year and I like it. I like it because it's a little bit controversial. I hope I don't offend too many of you here today, but I will be challenging some things that you've been told, I suspect. Before I get into the content though, a bit of an introduction. If you're a Twitter user, my personal hashtag there, handle salvatore, but if you're interested in some more serious research or less casual tweets, middle research is sort of my professional alias at the moment. Who am I? Who am I? I'm an ordinary normal human being, just like you guys. I live in Australia, I have a family, a wife, two kids. I was an academic before I joined Moodle HQ, I have a PhD, I was a teacher for 12 odd years. My family heritage is Dutch, the family top left there is in the Netherlands, we spent a few months there at the beginning of this year. In my personal life I like to go hiking in the bush, what do you call it, through a forest or something. In my professional life, my job has a very grand sounding title, I am the research director, but really I'm just directing myself. Half of it is organization of Moodle Moods, and I hope you're enjoying this one because we've been spending a long time getting here. I also read papers in ed tech and so on, and I'm particularly interested in research that will benefit the Moodle community. If you're doing research or something that's touching on research, please share it with me so I can share it with the community, I really want to promote what people are doing. As I mentioned there's a bit of Twitter that goes on at Moodle Research, it's worth following. If you're wanting to chat about research or just see what's going on, there is a research forum on Moodle.org and you might want to subscribe to that as well. It's not overflowing with random stuff, it's actually quite poignant. All right, myths. What do I mean by myths? Well I'm not talking about fairies or submarinal people or anything like that, I'm talking about ideas that have become almost common knowledge in some circles and widely accepted without necessarily looking into whether they're true or not. Myself as a researcher, I have a bit of a scientific mind I like to look for whether the ideas I'm using are valid or not, so I'm going to be challenging some of the educational ideas that are being applied at the moment to see whether they're worth using or not. I'm going to start off with something very easy and inoffensive. These first few questions were drawn from a study of a number of things that were drawn together, there was a common paper and there was a survey done of educators in schools in a number of countries around the world just to see whether they were in agreement with some of these ideas or not. I'm going to ask for some audience participation now and so this is a statement, drinking less than six to eight glasses of water a day can cause your brain to shrink. Raise your hand if you think that's true, it's a bit of peer pressure here, isn't it? There's a small group of people here who are avid drinkers I guess. The study by Howard Jones that I mentioned was in these countries around the world, there's no United States there but there's a fair coverage of different continents and so on. Except for the bottom right, I'll get to that in a minute. Of those people who were surveyed, it varied from 5% in China up to 29% in Great Britain of people who agreed with that statement. Now, if you go trying to look for a source for this idea, it's actually quite hard to find. It seems to be that yes, it is true, you do want to stay hydrated. If you get dehydrated, you get a headache or something like that, it's not good for you and certainly not going to help your learning. But the quantity, 6 to 8 glasses and how big is a glass, seems to be a bit of a commonly tossed around thing that's not necessarily true. Okay, this is not too controversial I suppose. Let's get into something maybe a bit more meaty. We mostly use 10% of our brain. Who's heard that one? Yeah? All right. Put up your hand though if you agree with that. No? Yes? No? Okay, good, good. Oh, yeah, thank you Scott. So the same, this came up in that same study. More people were in agreement with this in the respondents. Around about 50%, some as high as almost 60% in China thought this was true. I did this presentation at the IMOOT and I accompanied it with a bit of a survey and it looked like Moodle users are about average in this one as well too. It turns out that's really not true. Apparently it rises out of research that had to do with brain damage. So people who had had accidents, damage done to their brain and then they were studying what effect did that have on their capacity afterwards and they found that some people who lost parts of their brain were still able to function. But 10% is a very low number and apparently if you had 10% you'd be less than a vegetable. You would really be in trouble and so that's not a real thing at all. All right, let's get into something to stir the blood. Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style. That's relevant here isn't it? All right, who likes that one? Put up your hand if you agree with that one. Some people are going, I don't know, I think I agree with that. I'm not sure. Okay, the same study. This is the last one from that same study by the way. That's quite high, the agreement with that. Almost 100% in some situations. Moodle is here not quite as in agreement with that. All right, is this a well supported idea or is it just a theory? Should we be applying this in our education? When we create courses online is it relevant? Let's see what some research says. This is the conclusion from that Howard Jones study. Reviews of educational literature and controlled laboratory studies fail to support this approach to teaching. In other words, the idea of learning styles in general is lacking evidence. This is a quote from another related paper. The present results suggest that people's intuitions about their learning styles may be incorrectly attributed. In other words, well, we want it to be true. Why would we want it to be true? We as educators, let's put ourselves in the teacher, let's put our teacher hats on. Why would we want this to be true? It's nice to be able to categorise people to put them into a container and say, all right, well, I know how to deal with that person. If I know that they're going to learn better this way, I can provide information to them that way. So it's a rational human thing to be able to do that. It makes it easier as a teacher if you know how to teach a student. So it's natural, but is it necessarily good? The literature fails to provide adequate support for applying learning styles, learning style assessments in school settings. In other words, when it's put into practice, there's no evidence to say that it necessarily helps. And why would you invest a lot of effort in something if it's not really going to help? There are literally, literally hundreds of learning style inventories. There's a few good collections of them. I'm not going to say that they're all bad, but clearly some of them are. Some of them I would consider to be about as good as the Survey and a Glossy magazine. Someone just made stuff up and, you know, they may have had the best intentions, but whether or not they've gone through and actually found a reason and a good evidence to support it, let's see. All right, so we are educators. What should we do then if we're not that keen on learning styles? If we want to move away from learning styles as a theory, what should we be doing instead? Okay, my first recommendation, and this is drawn from a lot of the studies that were just mentioned, is to design content appropriate forms of instruction. In other words, think about what you're teaching and what is the best way or ways to present that to students. Now, the notion of learning styles suggests that you should be presenting it in a variety of ways so that all learning styles can be accommodated. But that's not going to work in terms of some ideas. You're going to be really forcing ideas into different modalities. It also causes you, as teachers, a lot of work to be able to come up with so many different varieties of instruction. Just think about what is appropriate to what I'm trying to teach here and then go with that. It may be one or two things, but they're going to work the best. Consider multiple modalities when relevant. So in other words, it is okay to present things in different ways if they're appropriate. So you could have a video recording. You could have some text. But let's not try and accommodate everything for everybody. It's probably pushing it too far. This one already got mentioned today. Didn't it? All right. Digital native students are more tech savvy than their digital immigrant teachers. I don't think this one's so controversial. Who thinks that that is true? I think you're all catching on now. All right. I'm not catching anywhere. Okay, so it was an idea that was proposed a few years back just to sort of say, oh, we're all different now by generations. I asked this at the IMOOT about almost 30% of people there in the Moodle community, if you like, thought that that was true. Some studies that have gone into that. Teachers' age and technology skill could not be identified as the cause of the disconnect between students' use of technology. In other words, you can't really find a difference between teachers and students in general. Because we've got some good teachers and you've got some less good teachers and you've got some good students and some less good students. Text savvy, you know, you've put a whole population together. You can't generalize that by age. Recent research has shown flaws in the argument that there is why am I doing this in a bridge accent that there is an identifiable generation or even a single type of highly adept technology user. In other words, generation skill is inconsistent. If you categorized everybody by the decade they were born in, you'd find good and bad in all of them. So, as educators then, how can we sort of work around this if we're going to ignore that philosophy, that idea. Well, first of all, we still need to provide appropriate teacher training. Yeah. If we're just going to say, well, there's no point in training because all our students are smarter than we are. You know, you're really sort of abandoning your teachers there. We also need to be confident that teachers are going to do a good job. They do use the teaching technologies like Moodle more than the students do. Students, in general, are probably not living on Moodle. They are probably doing other things as well. All right. Is this one still controversial? No? Yes? No? MOOCs will replace current teaching practices. Is anyone going to raise their hand for this one? Good, Ben. Thank you. Okay. Was this fear mongering? Was this a challenge? Was this, I'm not sure. Let's see. Is there any evidence in this? Only 5% of I-MOOC people think. And that was Ben when he was being ironic then, too. So there's a site which collects together evidence from a number of MOOCs around the world, and some quotes from that. The highest completion rate in any MOOC was 19.2%. And the majority of MOOCs had a completion rate less than 10%. Now, I don't know if you work in an institution where a 10% pass rate would be acceptable, but I don't think that would work where I've been a teacher. So they're not retaining the students. This is relevant here at this conference. The U.S. Campus Computing Survey from last year was the end of last year said less than 38% of respondents agreed that MOOCs offer a viable model for the effective delivery of online instruction, which was down from more than 50% the previous year. In other words, there's a bit of a downward trend in the hysteria, I think, there. So these people were relevant to tertiary and they're considering less relevant as time goes on. That quote, by the way, was out of the U.S. Campus Computing Survey report. They said that MOOC mania is over. I don't know if that's really true, but it's calmed down a bit, let's say that. I would like to say that MOOCs like any other platform, including MOOCs that are run on Moodle and there's quite a few of them, have their place. I think the reason why there was such a response to MOOCs initially was people were afraid of losing their jobs and that always gets a response. Anyway, they do have a place and they will be continuing to be used. I think you'll start to see a blurring of what is regular online teaching and what is a MOOC over time. It'll just be, oh, we have a large course. We open it up to people. Okay. Let's get the blurring. Got some time. Problem-based learning. Who's an advocate for problem-based learning here? Some people? Good, good. Problem-based learning is more effective than transmission models. I'm standing here transmitting something to you. I hope you're engaging with me a bit. Problem-based learning is an important element whereby you set the students a task and through that task they are learning. I asked, I moved people about that. 79% of people there thought that statement was true. So it's got a bit of backing behind it. What does some evidence-based research stay? Clark is an American researcher and it's quite an important piece of work requiring students to discover what they need to learn results in 45% less learning than demonstrating how to solve problems. The most vulnerable students are harmed the most. Okay. So if you ask your students to go and do some learning and they have to imply what it is that they're supposed to be learning from their task, it's detrimental to them, you might have some success with the students who are going to be successful regardless, but the other end of the scale are going to be hurt the most. So, less effective and harm-strugglers. Okay. This one's an older reference, but I relied on this a lot in my PhD research and I still like it. It's a beautiful, the chick-sexing paper. You've got to go find it. It's worth a read. One minute of explicit training can be more effective than the rest of implicit training. I guess I've got a few minutes to describe this study. It's got nothing to do with regular classroom training as such. It was chick-sexing. I'm not talking about, you know, things in a bad way here. You get chickens and you're trying to determine whether they're male or female. There's people who do this for a job. And they need to be trained. The traditional approach was to look at the underside of the chicken. I'm trying to be very PC here and determine the gender of the chick. Unfortunately, the males don't end up well out of this process. There's a bit of a blender thing that they end up in and it's rather nasty for them. And the females, though, they can lay eggs. They're worth keeping. So, they go into another conveyor belt and they just keep going. The traditional way of teaching these people you get an expert doing their job and the novice stands there looking over their shoulder and every now and then the expert will go, what do you reckon this is? It could be a female or I think it's a male. And that was the way that they would train and it would take them, it was 13 weeks or something like that. It was quite a while. It was a number of months. There was an experiment done by some educationalists. They said, I wonder if we could improve this method of education? So, they got a guy who had been doing it for a long, long time. They pulled him aside and they said, how do you identify what are the things you're looking for? Here's some diagrams. Identify the bits that you think are important. And they created a single sheet of paper with some photos on it and some notes in there and that sort of thing based on what this expert had said. And then they got some people who had nothing to do with chick-sexing and they basically said, all right, well, we're going to train you up. Here's this. You can read it for 15 minutes. Just try and learn from it. 15 minutes. They then went and then showed them a whole bunch of different photos and asked them to identify whether the chicks were male or female based on their 15 minutes of instruction. And it turned out that 15 minutes of instruction was, you know, their responses were more effective than the guy who'd been trained looking over the shoulder of an expert. Okay? So making things explicit is a more powerful way of teaching things. Okay. So it's more effective. All right, well, okay. Is problem-based learning bad? I don't think it's a bad thing. But let's see what's going on here. Constructivism is a very well-studied idea. It's incorporated heavily into the way that Mool is designed. But it doesn't mean unguided learning. It doesn't mean you just have an open course with some tasks, and then the students will learn. You still need to use scaffolding. You're trying to build a mental model for students. You're trying to build on what they know so that they can know more. Okay? It needs help. All right? So you do need to explicitly instruct people to learn through their exploration. Okay? My point here would be it's a good way to round out someone's problem-based learning can be used once someone has a good foundation to build on, but it's not the place you want to start. Yeah. Okay. I'm sort of running out of time here, so I might skip over some things. Yeah. All right. Okay. Okay. Good. Questions? Now, don't make a run too hard. We've got time. Raise your hand. I know there's some people who are disagreeing with me. Surely. Surely. Ah, the chick-sexing one. The top here. Nineteen, sexing day-old chicks. See if you can find that. I like it. It's a good read. Then again, I'm a research nerd, aren't I? Questions? There's a hand up over there. Mark's a fit guy. Let me tell you. Hi. My name's Tanya. So I'm one of the persons that raised my hand about learning styles. Yep. I don't feel that instructors really should create a resource for every single learning style, but I think it's beneficial for students to know what their learning style is. And what I mean by that, sorry. Go on. What I mean by that is that I work with students on a regular basis to try to help them. Usually these are students that have learning disabilities or on academic probation. Students who have found that they have an issue of learning, maybe reading, writing or something. So we work with them to try to enhance those issues by finding tools that will help them with that. I kind of agree and don't agree with the learning style and I understand there's not a lot of research that's supporting it. But I think that for some students it's beneficial to have an audio version of a text that may not be able to read that effectively and comprehend well. So not so much that I'm trying to push because I'm also an instructional designer that faculty have to create audio versions, but for me it's more about let's empower the students and what are the tools that are available to help them create an audio version of that text? What tools can they use as part of the Disability Resource Center? So that's been my role in supporting some of the student success programs like gadgets, different gadgets they can use to enhance their learning. So I'm sure I'll be cornering you some time in the next couple of days to talk more about that. I would like to answer and say if you look back at my personal history of papers I'm guilty. I myself have used learning styles in a class that I taught for working, basically. The main purpose that I used learning styles for was the same as yours. I wanted a way that I could encourage learners in my teaching, in my classes to think about how they are learning because metacognition knowing what you know, what you don't know and how you learn makes you a better learner. If you don't think about what you do and don't know, well, you don't know if you're successful or not. I would say though that to extend that beyond that point to try and apply it to the way that the teaching is delivered seems to be where research stops working. So it's not a bad exercise as long as we don't take it to the point where now we know what all our learning styles are of all of our students and we're going to try and cater for it. Of course, people with special needs I agree with that for sure and that there are different studies on memorization and the ease at which people can absorb information through different modalities. There is some evidence to back that up. So that's still quite good. Yeah. Hi there. I guess I would say that as I'm sure you recognize in many cases, and this is talking about the learning style statements, which I'm sure we found as one of your more hot button or controversial statements. It comes up a lot. For many people learning in a class perception is reality. So if they believe that they learn better in a certain way that may translate into the reality that they are. So you say it's like a placebo thing? Perhaps, but it's also I wouldn't as a teacher want to use any, and I'm not saying that you're suggesting this, but I would say to a student and say, well, you may think you learn better that way, but you really don't. That's dangerous. Possibly, yeah. To me, because to say, well, no, you should be able to learn this material using these other styles or using the way that I'm presenting it to you because I've made the decision that this is the best way to present the material, so therefore you should be able to learn it better. And I think also it would be interesting, I mean, you know, in terms that you cite there, but I do remember from taking my ed-site classes and stuff like that that there are plenty of peer-reviewed journal articles from solid sources that probably do support learning styles. There are some. Yeah, and so we know that education and research is a constant iterative process. So I also wouldn't want to take this one article or whatever and say, well, I think initially there was a lot of educational theorists backing learning styles and there was a lot of weight thrown behind them. We've got psychologists almost in another camp. It's like a big boxing match. Unfortunately, I think for the educationalists, the psychologists have the upper hand at the moment. I wouldn't like to say that there's, you know, no evidence for learning styles, but I think it's primarily against at the moment. I don't think, yeah, I don't think it'd be productive to challenge students and say that they're wrong, but at the same time, I wouldn't say, oh, well, I'm going to try and present everything in the modality that you suggest. I'm going to just use my idea of what is the best way to present this. I think it's still going to be more effective if you consider the content and how it should be presented as a first step rather than thinking about learning styles. Yeah. There's a question in there. I'm going to interject real quick and say that when lunch starts, we're going to open those back doors and try to have the lines go outside so it flows better. We're getting close to 12, right? Sure. We might make this the last question. What was that? Yeah, if you need to have, if you have a special diet and you can't see what you want on the tables, please ask one of the servers. Is there a special food? Yeah, there is special food, but you may have to ask for it. I required beer with my lunch, so if you all could go handle that, please. Did you note that when you registered? I did indicate that, and it made no difference. So I will freely admit and I just twittered that I finally have heard at a non-cognitive science conference someone out loud saying that learning styles are not enough to efficiently model learning. It's out of the closet now. Yes. If you will, I drank the Kool-Aid and I've gotten over it, if you will go talk to a cognitive science in private, they just face palm constantly every time we bring this up. And those students would be thinking that if we haven't been telling them for years that that's why they learn in a certain way. That's not why I, even if I don't catch them, and I think that time and again, they've found that you should, if you're teaching art history, you should show pictures, whether they are auditory learner or whatever you've identified them, that it's really more important the content. So I'm with you. One supporter, okay. One supporter. Now where's my beer? Yep. Yeah, that's right. Imagine having to do composition in every learning style. One other myth to add, although I think this is more a myth on the student side, is multitasking. I regularly have students tell me that they are much better doing things when they are doing other things at the same time. Yep. And the vast majority of research disagrees with them. And unlike the gentlemen over here, when a student tells me that in class, I have to look at them and say, you may feel that way, but the research says that that is not the most effective way of doing it. And what we feel is not necessarily correct. Yeah, it's very relevant to EdTech as well, because we can assume that students will learn if they've got, you know, Moodle in front of them and they've got other things going on as well. And it's also linked to this sort of generational idea that younger people who are brought up multitasking are going to be better at it. And I don't think it's really they haven't evolved that fast. I don't think so. It's a bit of a fallacy there. We do want our students to put things away and focus on what they're supposed to be doing. I agree there. Elizabeth, you may need to be the last person. Okay. First, great presentation and regarding learning styles, I've been following this same thread of research and he's right. Yes, good. There's one learning style that probably none of you have ever heard of that actually shows up as supported in research and that's field dependence versus field independence that has to do with which direction people learn things in, hold apart, apart the whole that kind of thing. That actually shows an effect. But beyond that, there's a difference between trying for learning styles where we try to only show or primarily deliver content using a particular modality based on something the student things they know about themselves or some kind of survey or instrument has shown about them and universal design. Universal design is when we try to design across multiple modalities as appropriate to the content to support people with different needs and we have hidden disabilities. So I have a bit of a harder time absorbing information in an only auditory format. I know that about myself because when I used to do phone tech support I found I had to type people's comments while they were talking to me on the phone and read what they had said and then I could help them. I developed an accommodation for myself. That doesn't mean that I'm not an auditory learner or visual learner. I learned in lots of different ways. It means that I had to learn to develop an accommodation for myself to be able to process information more effectively. We can help students do that for themselves. We shouldn't try to make decisions on the front end about how to give students access to content based on what we think we know about them. And I think that's where the learning styles literature is trying to go. We had for years this idea that we could somehow know something about our students that would help us pick content for them based on what we thought we knew. And that's what the research is not supporting. If you're investing a lot of time trying to determine your students' learning style you may be misusing your time. On the other hand, the whole idea that students understand for themselves their metacognition, how they learn best, staying focused, not trying to multitask, that's all good stuff. And I don't think any of the research is arguing with that. We still want to teach learners how to learn. And there are good effective ways of doing that. All right, well, where's my chair? Hello. OK.