 Hello, everybody, and welcome. I'm delighted to introduce you to Matt Croslin, who will be speaking on encouraging learner agency through self-mapped learning pathways. Over to you, Matt. All right, thank you and good morning everyone from Not Quite Sunny, Texas. Glad to be here and really enjoy that fun intro to that. I'm just gonna talk with you a little bit today about some of the work we've been doing for the past few years and some of the research that's happened with that. Real quick about myself, I currently work as an instructional designer for Orbis Education, as well as being a part-time faculty for the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. I teach in their master's program, the doctoral program in instructional design. And this work that we're doing is actually primarily what I did in my previous position at the University of Texas at Arlington, where we explore the option of giving students choices to explore their own agency through self-mapped learning pathways. Real quick, just to leave you with a couple of resources that we've put out that you cover the topic today. One is a book that we've published free as OER, creating online learning experiences. I'll drop these links in the chat later. And then the edgygeekjournal.com is a blog or a blog about these topics. And then you can also follow me on Twitter if you want to hear me ranting about things that are going on in online education and how people don't listen to instructional designers and they really should. So the topic that I'm going to talk about today, we came across this issue that we wanted to get at when I was working at the Link Research Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington. And we caught the problem of individualization because that's sometimes what people refer to. I don't really see it as a problem, but it's something that we wanted to explore this issue of how learners are individuals, even though we would like for them to standardize and follow patterns in the work that we do. It would make, you know, at least some people is teaching a lot easier if that were the case. But the truth of the matter is, is that we do get individuals that come into our courses. And so, you know, the problem that we deal with is that when you have an instructor center learning pathway, this often subtracts individuality and takes culture away from learners in ways that can be detrimental to their learning. Now, you know, there are benefits of listening to experts, of course, but there is this individuality that often gets lost in our instructor center learning. And even when you look at say student center learning, it's often a case where it's based on consensus rather than individualization. And what this means is that your student center courses will come together and vote on consensus as to what the students will be doing. Even there is that choice there for the students, oftentimes the dominant voices, those with more of the power and the privilege often get to dominate those conversations and the individuals can often get lost when we have that consensus model. That's not always the case, but that is often what happens. So, what we want to really look at is how individuals have different sociocultural intersections, they have different voices, and they have different capabilities when they come into our courses. But is there a way that we can somehow honor that and not subtract that from the learners that come into our courses? But then on the other hand, and we also realize that many lack the capability to self-determine their learning completely on their own, maybe due to oppression in the system that they face, or maybe you just from, just let's see it the way it's been, and they always just do what they're told in learning. And I quoted some research in the description of the session where you can go into the research and the path as far as intersectionality and Crenshaw and Spivak with different voices and those kinds of things that you can go back and look at. So we asked, is there a way to have both in one class? Some learners want to follow the instructor pathway for various reasons, others want to do their own thing and create their own pathway. Is there a way to have both in the same class without necessarily creating this massive mess that doesn't make sense to anyone that's participating in the course? So in 2015, we started experimenting with having both of these options in the course. We called it a dual-layer course at the time, but some of the research found that where they liked the choice, but they thought the layers implied that we preferred one of the options over the other. We prefer students either follow the instructor or to do their own student-centered pathway. So that was what led to the term self-map learning pathways. And so when we say these layers and choices and pathways is what we're talking about is that in your typical online course, what you have are typical courses today, even not necessarily online, is you have where the course goes along in a linear pathway and you often have your, say your first module and there's one pathway to follow and you have your second module and there's one pathway to follow for that. And then you complete those and move on in a very kind of linear pattern. Now the reality is that even these pathways aren't necessarily straight and linear. They're often choices in there. There are trails that kind of lead off in different directions. It's the instructor's force of ideas. Often the instructor will loop back to other ideas. And so we thought, you know, if instructors can do this, then why not the students? Why can't we empower individuals to explore their own pathways that they choose to? And so, you know, what that will look like is, of course, you would have lots of individuals running off in a lot of different directions. The red here representing maybe some kind of official pathway that they follow, you know, our official, some kind of say on Twitter or the school library, the gray representing things that they could do maybe on their own behind the scenes that we wouldn't necessarily see. So, like I said, our original question came to how do we situate these two options next to each other in a course? And so we just decided to do that and see what learners started doing. So of course we did this in some open courses, so MOOCs, the Data Analytics and Learning MOOC of 2005, the Humanizing Online Learning MOOC of 2016. And so when we talk about self-math learning pathways, what that means is we students come into a neutral zone in the course where they can choose either option and then jump back and forth between the two as they need to. If they feel like they need to follow the instructor, say start off, they need to follow the instructor because they're unsure and they start getting kind of an idea of what they want and that, you know, maybe the instructor goes off on a tangent and they think, well, this tangent's kind of interesting. Or maybe they look at the professor and say, well, he's, you know, a white male like me and I want to support some of this closer to my sociocultural background. So they decide to go on their own pathway and start mixing in some of their own ideas and their own thoughts. They can then go back to the instructor pathway and get more out of there or stay on their own or go, you know, kind of outside the course structure and do what they want to until they complete the competency. And so this is kind of what we mean by self-math learning pathways is the learner can pick from following the instructor pathway, which is laid out completely for them as a complete pathway that they can then follow and, you know, learn the topic or they can go from their own or they can jump back and forth and mix and match if they want to. And in fact, they don't even necessarily have to follow a linear pathway. We even have mentioned this course design model that students could pick and choose as they want to from any of the options and to create the map of what they're going to learn for a specific topic. One way that we gave a metaphor for learners to engage with this is if you have a large, you know, beautiful botanical gardens in the city where you live in, they design these pathways, these sidewalks for you to walk along where you can follow this sidewalk and enjoy all the beautiful things they've designed but they also have open areas where you can go and explore on your own. And you're free to jump back and forth in the garden to enjoy the garden as you like. Follow the pathway maybe if you don't, if you just want to have a nice stroll or jump into the open areas to create your own fun for the day if you feel like that for the day. And this is kind of one, another way that we imagined it is that students come into the beginning of the course or the lesson they choose between self-regulating and instructor guiding but they follow that or they jump back and forth as they need to, as they self-determine what they need for the competency completion. So the research that we've done on this and a few others that have done on this is that we really saw two themes that emerged from this. One was that they really appreciated that choice even if they couldn't do it on their own for some reason. They really enjoyed it but the technical and design limitations of the course kind of created some barriers to learning. And when they say they appreciate the choice we have learners that said that they could handle during the student centered ideas but they just didn't have time. They're busy or someone's wanted to laugh at that moment. But then there are also some learners that are very skeptical about going on with their own. Maybe they didn't have the capability. Maybe they had faced a lot of oppression in their learning or something in the past and they weren't sure if they could do it but they saw other learners doing it and they said, well maybe I'll try this for the first time in my learning. So there were students that were all over the place. We found that a lot of stereotypes are broken and what we thought we would find in this course. The technical difficulties in our first offering especially in the data I had on Linux MOOC we offered a lot of technology choices, a lot of things to help the students that just got too confusing. We decided to let the learners use technology they're already familiar with. Maybe give them some guidance and some help and scaffolding into it but let them determine what technology to use and we don't have to offer it all to them. And then we explained the underlying design of that to the learners and gone to a lot of ologies and isms and things and that confused the learner as well. This is definitely an experiment in Utagaji if you're familiar with that term and once you start digging into that students do get a little bit of a loan by all that. So we had the learners focus on their individual mapping options as part of a course metaphor. Currently we're looking at a process mining analysis to describe tactics and strategies. This is, we're trying to get this published. We're finding that the, because we kind of reject grades as a paradigm for analyzing these pathways we find that a lot of people aren't interested in publishing research that doesn't compare which pathway is best as far as grades go but we reject that because we want everyone's pathway to be equally meaningful to the others. So we would prefer to look at, okay, if these pathways aren't scoring as well how can we help that pathway to score better? Not which pathway gets the better score. And so it's a bit hard to, the learning outlets committee in general hasn't been very interested in our work because we reject grades and failure rates and stuff as a context for research. But we are trying, we is under review. Hopefully we'll get this published. So what we did in this research is we actually looked at the clickstream data. I'm very skeptical about clickstream data research myself personally, but because a lot of times you don't know what exactly that click can mean but because we offered many options that were all equally valid in our eyes that the clicks we found in the different systems that we had actually did have some kind of meaning to it. As long as we didn't assign value to it beyond that where they actually did the click, it did have a little bit more meaning than your typical clickstream data. We did identify five tactics that learners use to navigate the choice that we had. And we label these as you see on the screen there internal and external, internal means more of the instructor pathway internal to the learning management system, external means and external tool that we use for students to collect their artifacts within that they did outside of learning management system as they explored on their own. As you can see, these are not pathways that students took. These are tactics that they use, say in a session when they signed on and then signed off. What was the tactic that they did there? And they also see we also look at maybe how individualistic or interactive they were or how if they completed work when they started or not. And this is kind of what we mean. This is counting up different clicks in different places where they looked. This is tactic one where they did a lot of viewing activities and some good amount of completion but the common activity interacting with others here was very, very low. Compare this with tactic four where you'd have a lot of completing activities, a lot of completing competencies and actually a good amount of commenting on other students working interacting with other students as well. So hopefully when the paper comes out we'll be able to see this a little bit more. I'd be glad to send a preprint to anyone who's interested in it. Then we looked at how the learners used those tactics to combine them as a strategy moving through the course. And so this is where we started looking a bit more at the pathways, how they combine those strategies that we just looked at. And then we identified four or five different strategies. No, four strategy, sorry. And so time doesn't allow me to go through all those since I need to get to questions. But for example, strategy four had high levels of interaction. They started with the tactic of being interactive and reflective. They stayed mostly through that through the course, but they sometimes switch often to tactic five which is completing external activities which we found was kind of interesting. And so this is what the data looked like when you kind of mapped it out. These arrows show not numbers of students but the probability of which tactic they chose. And that's really the time that I have there for that. So that time went by very fast. But just to give this link is where you can find a list of the research as well as some people that have explored how to do this. The research that we did and the research that you saw was in a public university at an undergraduate history level courses. So we hope to get that out there as well. And I'm up on time so I want to open it up to see if there are any questions. Thank you. Great, thanks so much, Matt. That was really a whistle stop tour but there is loads of interest in the comments coming through if you want to take a look at them. We've got a couple of questions coming through. I've posted up that link that you just put up there for your website because people are really keen to read about it, read more, want to read your publication. Chrissie Naranze had a question. Would you consider a phenomena graphic study to explore the learning experience in more depth? Oh yeah, definitely. My dissertation was a mixed method but focused on qualitative analysis of that as well. So any type of anything that explores that I open to, I'm not a huge fan of learning analytics but I was even open to that exploring it. So I would be open to any of that. Yeah, and I think one of the things that I'm really intrigued by this is it's actually exposing to the students the meta-learning that they're going through as well. They have to think about their learning and where they want to take it and I think that element of choice and navigating that choice, how do you structure and support them in understanding the benefits of doing this and that following their own pathways and that lovely meandering path you had through the structure and through the non-structured parts. How do you help them with that? Yeah, there are lots of techniques that we've tried, some more successful than others. We'll have a chapter coming out in the upcoming Hidagaji book with Hase and Blansky that's coming out that will have a chapter where we explore that more in depth. It'll be open resource, hopefully released here in a month or two. But yeah, the concept of the neutral zone is something that we helped students, because it shows them not only what you can do in the instructor-led pathway, but also the options that you can use within the self-guided pathway, right? And then we also try to put in examples of what other learners have done so they can see that and really we like to encourage students to actually just write down an initial map. What am I planning on doing here? And then also feel free to change that as they go along and then reflect on that later. We also use the idea of assignment banks. We used Alamedine's assignment bank plugin in WordPress. There's a neutral zone for that. I can show you an example of the human loop. I did keep that, let's see. But I can just drop the comment there. But yeah, we had a neutral zone where students could look at their options. We had Activity Bank where they go through looking for ideas on what to do. Then we had a learner blogger. Some of the people at the conference actually contributed to this course. So we had students can see how other students did the work. We found we can get students looking at other students' work. It really helps them to start making sense of how they can map and they see other students doing it rather than us telling them, let's do this. And in the last minute we've got, I don't know if you can see the comments coming in there from Jane Sacker who's suggesting it might work better for post-grad who are more used to being independent in their studies. I think certainly the more self-directed study at post-graduate level is something I found a little bit more easier to work in this kind of thing. What do you think about that Matt? It is true that it can be easier there. In my own classes that I teach, I use some of this, it does help. The research that we're trying to publish we did do, like I said, an undergrad level history course at a public university. They mixed some of this with some of the stuff that they're required to teach by the university. So a lot of what I'm saying here is not an all or nothing method. You can take this and mix it with, take mix and match what works for you and what doesn't in your particular context. History courses had two tests that they're required to give at midterm and into the course. And so those were still in there, but they gave students these other options as they went along as well. So you can mix in different levels of structure depending on your institutional requirements. Great. I'm afraid we're just at the hour, so we're going to have to cut it there. But if you want to carry on conversations over on Discord or contact Matt on Twitter, it's really interesting. Thank you so much for your time, Matt. Thank you everybody for your comments and let's keep the conversation going in other channels. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Nom, nom, nom.