My professional values...

The first thing I should note here is that this statement is almost certainly incomplete. Trying to complete an exhaustive list would be impractical, and I suspect that I will realise I have missed values as I read the comments of my course colleagues.

As an underpinning for my professional behaviour in general I would begin by echoing the core values of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) (of which I am a Member):
honesty, integrity, fairness, confidentiality, competence, objectivity, environmental sustainability and health, safety and risk.

These provide a firm foundation, but obviously don't offer any guidance on educational or educational technology aspects. For the technology-enhanced-learning aspects I would look to the values of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT):

• Commitment to exploring and understanding the interplay between technology and learning
• Commitment to keep up to date with new technologies
• Empathy with and willingness to learn from colleagues from different backgrounds and specialisms
• Commitment to communicate and disseminate effective practice.

However, these also do not give voice to the educational values which I hold. I feel that I have a commitment to learners, and to the support and development of learning opportunities in general. This includes respect for individual learners, to supporting and enhancing their learning by incorporating relevant research outcomes. I feel passionate about the transformative power of education (in all its guises), and committed to learning opportunities for all.

The Higher Education Academy values include a commitment to continuing professional development and evaluation of practice, which (while I do not share their higher education focus) I also support. Commitment to developing my competence and understanding of pedagogical issues, including methods of supporting and enhancing teaching and learning is one of my core professional values, and is my prime reason for undertaking the MA ODE.

One conflict that I note as I write this is between my current professional practice, and the professional values I hold personally. In particular, I work in an organisation where the majority of work is defence focused. I have begun a new role as an Instructional Designer, and this requires adherence to the military's preferred methods of training. While understanding, supporting and working for client needs is a feature of many professional codes, I am left with a tension because of my pedagogical views on the value of students becoming independent learners, or the development of metacognitive skills, for example. This tension is not specific to military training, but I suspect common in many fields where there is a requirement to train students in specified procedures, and a need for consistency of delivery. However, issues like this challenge my values of supporting the student as an individual and applying research-evidenced best practice to specific tasks.

Differing professional values

In this post, for activity 7.1. I explore the professional values mentioned by the Association for Learning Technology in the CMALT prospectus, by the Higher Education Academy, and by several other professional bodies.

The ALT's CMALT prospects specifies a surprisingly limited list of only four values:

• Commitment to exploring and understanding the interplay between technology and learning
• Commitment to keep up to date with new technologies
• Empathy with and willingness to learn from colleagues from different backgrounds and specialisms
• Commitment to communicate and disseminate effective practice

While the document does mention in passing "taking a committed and serious approach to professional development" and "critical reflection on practice, achievements and expertise", (and therefore implies that these are also professional values), I found it surprising that these aspects were not made explicit, and that while it is mentioned that CMALT will allow you to demonstrate these attributes, they are not an underlying principle.

The professional values expressed by the UK Higher Education Authority are:

1. Respect for individual learners 
2. Commitment to incorporating the process and outcomes of relevant research, scholarship and/or professional practice 
3. Commitment to development of learning communities 
4. Commitment to encouraging participation in higher education, acknowledging diversity and promoting equality of opportunity 
5. Commitment to continuing professional development and evaluation of practice 

Point 5 here makes clear the value of commitment to professional development. There are further notable differences between the ALT and HEA's value statements. I found it particularly striking that the ALT makes no mention of values which directly involve learners. While it is a society of technologists, there is a need to understand the learners for whom they develop technology, and I feel that learning technology professionals ought to have a professional commitment to students, whether or not they work directly with them. Stemming from this need I would also expect a learning technologist to have an understanding of educational or pedagogical principles, and hence a value of commitment to appropriate understanding and application of these principles.

Interestingly, neither the ALT or the HEA make any reference to ethical principles or standards, and consequently there is no comment on procedures if such standards are not met. There is also no mention of quality, or the aspiration towards it, for professional knowledge, application or behaviour.

Other organisations, such as the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) provide more detailed codes of conduct. For example, the IET has 22 rules of conduct, each of which are underpinned by one or more of 8 principles (honesty, integrity, fairness, confidentiality, competence, objectivity, environmental sustainability and health, safety and risk).

It is possible that the less prescriptive approach of the ALT and HEA are indicative of a teaching profession which has (until relatively recently) had considerable freedom in its own organisation. Conversely (and in particular for the ALT), it may be considered unsurprising that a fledgling profession (if indeed it is one) has not yet established the depth and rigour that underpin professions such as engineering or medicine. However, the fundamental principles such as honesty, integrity and fairness, as exemplified by the IET's code of conduct, might be considered to be universal, and so should be expressed somewhere.

Some organisations, such as the IET or the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), have a value set which further illuminates the key activities of the profession. For example, the BACP values include a commitment to:

• Respecting human rights and dignity 
• Ensuring the integrity of practitioner-client relationships 
• Enhancing the quality of professional knowledge and its application 
• Alleviating personal distress and suffering 
• Fostering a sense of self that is meaningful to the person(s) concerned 
• Increasing personal effectiveness 
• Enhancing the quality of relationships between people 
• Appreciating the variety of human experience and culture 
• Striving for the fair and adequate provision of counselling and psychotherapy services. 

By contrast, the ALT's only values which make clear their professional activities are commitment to exploring and understanding the interplay between technology and learning, and to keeping up to date with new technologies. It seems that there is much left unsaid in these statements about what learning technology professionals do. Perhaps this is again due to the relatively undefined nature of the profession, and to the fact that it incorporates many roles. In fact, the ALT themselves acknowledge this in their statement that "values and codes of practice differ from institution to institution, discipline to discipline, role to role, and may evolve through time". It is therefore perhaps understandable that their listed values are not as prescriptive as more defined professions, but I fear that this lack of coherence may hamper attempts to become a recognised profession.

The concepts of practice and competence - post 2

Second paper for activity 6.1...

"Competences for Online Teaching: A Special Report" Peter Goodyear et al.


This paper presents the outcomes of a workshop on competences for online teaching, held in the UK in 2000.

The begins by noting that while there is much hype around the growth in the market for online learning, the research evidence for this rate of growth is lacking. However, despite the hyperbole, it acknowledges that online learning is growing, and that part of this growth will be due to the reduction in expensive human resources. It notes (as you'd expect teacher/trainer/lecturer authors) that "more agile companies are realizing ... that a judicious mix of technology and teachers... can help achieve greater learning effectiveness".

The workshop reported on was tasked with sketching out the roles and competences associated with online teaching, and also to give a critique of the competency-based approach to understanding teaching. The authors also note the alternatives of humanistic or cognitivist perspectives, and state that while they are not explored in the paper, they should not be overlooked.

In considering the terminology used, the paper considers that major corporations and virtual universities seek to operate in a global context, and so consequently, definitions of the competences of effective online teaching should be expressed in a way which minimizes problems of interpretation across national, linguistic and cultural boundaries. For me, this suggested that there was as assumption that the competences would be the same across cultures, but this seems to run counter to Hillier's point that students and staff (even within the same culture) can have different views on competence/excellence, and with the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)'s view that "values and codes of practice differ from institution to institution, discipline to discipline, role to role" (and presumably therefore also between cultures).

A major outcome of the workshop was the identification and description of the main roles of an online teacher. The authors note that while all the roles are unlikely to be of equal importance in any one specific instance of online teaching, they should all be understood. The roles identified were:

• Content facilitator
• Technologist
• Designer
• Manager/administrator
• Process facilitator
• Adviser/counsellor
• Assessor
• Researcher.

The workshop also identified candidate competences associated with each of the above roles (except adviser), see original paper, p.71. The authors made the interesting observation that a "number of statements are colored by an educational philosophy, which is not necessarily associated with online teaching and learning". This may reflect the attitudes and backgrounds of the workshop attendees (who are not identified, but which was sponsored by the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction, the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology, and the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK universities funding councils). It is possible that many of the attendees will have had a background in non-online teaching and learning, and access to online learning products, tools and research was far less when this paper was written nearly 10 years ago. These conditions would make it unsurprising that more general education philosophies are widely reflected in the competences identified. However, this observation may also relate to the underlying fact that online education is still education, however it is delivered. Conceptions of good practice in education have evolved over time, and online provision is a very new facet (in historical terms). This also reflects the ALT view that e-learning will become an embedded normal part of most learners' experience, and that therefore the term 'e-learning' will fall into disuse. They suggest using the term 'learning technology', reflecting the fact that technologies are used to support learning, teaching, and assessment.

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Goodyear, P., Salmon, G., Spector, J.M., Steeples, C. & Tickner, S. (2001) 'Competences for Online Teaching: A Special Report' Educational Technology Research and Development, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 65-72

The concepts of practice and competence - post 1

Two papers to read for activity 6.1, on the subject of good practive and competence. There were no specific guidelines for the activity, so these are a few notes on the papers. First up:

"The question for competence, good practice and excellence" Yvonne Hillier.

This article is situated in the government-sponsored discourse around the development of professional bodies for higher education (HE), and hence has a focus on policy and on HE in particular. The paper identifies challenges in defining and assessing competence, good practice and excellence in teaching and learning.

HE is the subject of various initiative to increase participation. It is also subject to various bodies' assessments of the quality of provision. "There is an increasing recognition that good practice in teaching and learning plays an essential part of achieving government targets" (p.1). However, teaching is a social practice, reliant on an interchange between tutor and learner, and between learners themselves. Achieving excellence requires an understanding of what constitutes excellence in teaching and learning, but learners differ in their definition of excellence. Indeed, the conceptions of excellence expressed by learners are not matched by those of the QAA or ILT.

[This raises the question of what might constitute excellence in a course delivered online and with minimal tutor/learner exchange. Presumably there is a requirement for a high standard of materials, but a course which offered only excellent materials would be unlikely to be viewed as excellent - so what more is needed? Presumably the learning opportunities, activities and support must also be of a high standard... Unfortunately that is where this musing must end for now, as an exploration of what excellence means in an online course requires a lot more research than I can manage alongside this course!]

Back to Hillier... the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) evaluates applicants on four criteria:

• the ability to influence students positively, to inspire students, and to enable them to achieve specific learning outcomes
• the ability to influence and inspire colleagues in their teaching, learning and assessment practice
• the ability to influence the wider national community of learners and (HE) teachers in relation to teaching, learning and assessment
• the ability to demonstrate a reflective approach to teaching/supporting learning.

Hillier notes that the characteristics of excellence identified in policy models of teaching relate to:

• planning
• resources
• explicit statements of outcomes.

These differ from staff and student definitions of excellence which include;

• enthusiasm
• creativity
• interpersonal skills.

"Excellence is not something that is a defined outcome, but is part of a process where competence is the starting point for the pursuit of excellence."

Given the difficulties in defining excellence, the conflicting views as to what it means, and the consequential problems in measuring excellence, it is not surprising that Hillier concludes by noting that excellence is becoming less central to the research agenda, possibly for the pragmatic reason that it is so hard to quantify.

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Hillier, Y. (2002) ‘The quest for competence, good practice and excellence’ (online), The Higher Education Academy. Available from:http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id494_quest_for_competence (accessed 22 November 2009).