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Creating and evaluating a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for Visual Anthropology

This item was added to our web on 28/06/2004

Project leader(s): Marcus Banks

Institution:

Marcus Banks
Professor of Visual Anthropology,
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology(I.S.C.A.),
University of Oxford,
51 Banbury Rd., Oxford OX2 6PE, UK

01865 274687
marcus.banks@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Summary:

Activities:

In early 2002 the University gave permission to launch a new M.Sc. degree in Visual Anthropology, something that had only been taught as an option paper on other degrees to that point. Given the short lead-in time only four students were recruited for the 2002-03 session: three British (2 male, 1 female), and one US (female). As this was a new degree and would be examined largely through submitted coursework (all other degrees in the department at that point were largely examined by three-hour written examination), the degree co-ordinator, Marcus Banks (MB), decided to introduce a further innovation and create a VLE to support the degree. A C-SAP award provided the salary for a part-time research assistant, Gabriel Hanganu (GH) to construct or implement the VLE and to use interview and participant-observation techniques to assess its effectiveness. At this time, the University had only two departments making use of a VLE and it was decided to purchase the hand-built system developed for one of these, the Institute of Archaeology, by its IT Officer. However, as implementation of the project grew closer, the University’s Learning Technologies Group (LTG), based in the central Computing Services, began a procurement exercise to purchase or obtain a VLE for University-wide implementation. MB and GH thus decided that purchasing the hand-built system from Archaeology would be a poor investment if the University would in due course provide a free and -- vitally -- supported service in due course.

Consequently, MB and GH built a static web site containing the resources needed for the degree, with the aim of porting it over to the University’s VLE in due course. A series of pages was created for each of the four papers comprising the degree: two papers in visual anthropology, a research methods paper, and an option paper. As the year wore on, lecture notes and images used in lectures and classes were uploaded to the relevant pages, together with reading lists for the weekly seminar, details of the weekly film screening programme, and details of other relevant activities taking place elsewhere in the university. An additional page was created explaining the C-SAP project and giving GH’s contact details. At the start of the project, two further applications were made which would have supported and expanded the project. One, to the University’s Academic Computing Development Team would have taken much of the burden of site creation and maintenance off GH, but was rejected on the grounds that the team was already supporting a number of similar projects. The other was to the AHRB for a ‘resource enhancement’ award, which would have covered the costs of locating and digitizing materials to provide specific visual anthropological content for the site; although the application received good feedback an award was not made, and consequently the planned involvement of the University’s Digital Library fell by the wayside.

With these limitations in mind, the web site itself was constructed as a simple two-frame page, a slim right-hand pane containing a menu of the site and a main pane for the menu-selected page.

The students began using the web site immediately, although over the course of the year use tailed off. One possible reason for this is that lectures and classes specific to the degree are front-loaded into the first and part of the second term; by the third term, students are receiving teaching shared with other degrees in the department (research methods, an option paper) which was only sketchily resourced on the web site. Another reason for the tailing off of use, of course, might be that the students had lost interest in the site or failed to find it as useful as at first imagined. In order to understand student use of and response to the site, GH conducted a series of one-to-one unstructured interviews and a series of group discussions throughout the year. Three sets of interviews were conducted in the first term (at the start, middle, and end), some group discussions were held in the middle of the second term, and a final set of discussions were held at the end of the teaching year, though before the students had submitted their dissertations. In addition, he attended many of the lectures and classes (he was completing a doctorate on a visual anthropological topic and so was familiar with the material) where he observed students’ note-taking, questions asked of the speaker, and so on. He also asked lecturers about their use of the web site, and monitored the uploading of material to it. Finally, he monitored the university’s VLE procurement process and interviewed some of the key personnel.

The four students’ initial expectations of the course were different, but they all had in common the fact that Visual Anthropology (VA) was seen as an alternative to their previous training, and consequently expected to be stimulated intellectually in unprecedented ways. That was confirmed at the end of the first term: they all reported they were impressed by the wealth of information and the way it had been presented, and that in many respects their expectations of an intellectually stimulating course were so far fulfilled.

Their relationship with teaching and learning resources was different. Some found the resources available in Oxford extensive and rather intimidating; others said they were used with that from their undergraduate years, and they knew how to find their way and isolate what was useful for their purpose. From this perspective, the simple, concise, well-structured web site was appreciated by both groups as providing a very appropriate balance between huge yet unstructured information and scarce or one-sided, restrictive data. In addition, the lack of stylish visual adornment was considered extremely beneficial, and helped them concentrate on their work better than in the web site’s absence, or in the presence of a more ‘flashy’ interface. (One could speculate here that they correctly understood the web site as an internal utility tool, rather than as a mirror reflecting the course-related activities to the outside world, as other VA web sites do)

They all acknowledged the advantage of a centralised yet multi-point-accessible tool providing selective information and resources in relation with their course. However, one of them pointed out that, should the VLE become too central to the teaching and learning process, there existed the risk of making less mature students become too much dependent on such ITC learning machines, thus inhibiting their resource searching skills, and overall their critical and original thinking.

The active links pointing to online resources available outside the web site itself allowed them to place VA as a sub-discipline in the broader context of the social sciences, and to assess the quality of their training in Oxford in the perspective of other visual-based research and production projects. Visiting the web sites prompted the students to ask for the expanding of the selection of links to include more specific examples of current professional employment available to VA-trained students. As a result, a possible session on career perspectives was suggested by the course director.

The possibility to access both textual information and the related images of the PowerPoint (PP) presentations and the strings of digitised slides at subsequent and repeatable moments after their first presentation in the lectures was considered by the majority of students a key feature of the web site. Some students appreciated the possibility of seeing a lecture’s content outlined in a PP presentation before the lecture was actually delivered by the teacher. One student emphasised that the pressure to pick up the key points of the lecture had disappeared, and she could allow herself to make verbal and visual associations of a different nature, which she jotted down in a different way than when taking content notes. Later when she confronted these notes with the presentation’s outline she realized how much her perception of the respective topic was enlarged by combining the two strategies of producing and conveying lecture-based data. This view however was not shared by all students. One of them confessed that she used the web site mainly for downloading and printing new reading lists as soon as they became available online, and another admitted that the notes taken during the lecture helped him much more than the bulleted points provided in the PP presentations, which he mainly employed in order to have access to images.

When asked whether they thought the web site worked as a teaching and learning interface that mediated in some respect the relationship of the teachers + students group, the students considered the term ‘mediator’ too powerful, but admitted that the role of the web site in structuring the teaching and learning group relationship would probably have been more important had the group been bigger, and the direct, personal communication between students and teachers been restricted. One student believed that the course as a whole would have been different had the web site not existed at all, and from this perspective the web site did influence the ways in which she communicated with her teachers. She agreed that the term ‘catalyst’ better described the role of the web site in defining the group relationship, and mentioned that some ideas she was going to use in the elaboration of the assessed essay had originated while browsing the images of a lecture’s PP presentation. An image on her computer screen triggered the visual associations she had made when having seen it projected on the screen during a past lecture, and that flashback lead to tutorial discussions with her teachers that would have not occurred had the web site not been used in teaching. However another student said that, although she didn’t mind the web site in its actual form, she would be unhappy if it became something more central to the teaching practice, i.e. something she had to look at, and that she clearly wouldn’t like it to become an intermediary between the teachers and herself.

Interviews conducted at the end of the teaching year revealed that the students’ early perceptions and opinions had not significantly altered, although some had become sharper. Students needed to feel they had the opportunity to discuss directly and freely with their tutors (beyond any potential hindrance imposed by electronic communication, and beyond the limitations of mere course-related issues). The transformation of the static web site in a more interactive teaching resource was perceived as potentially reducing that liberty. They did not think that in their particular case an electronic discussion list or other similar devices could generate fundamentally different learning experiences. However one accepted the possibility that in larger groups they could stimulate people to better know each other, and thus enhance group cohesion. Another one conceded that in larger groups the supplementing of face-to-face dialogue with course-assigned forms of electronic communication could be beneficial, but he did not see its utility in the case of their small group. Students did not feel that their use of the web site had modified in any way their perception of, and interaction with, each other during the course. Moreover they did not seem to wish that such thing happened. Their primary objection to this resulted from their perception of a VLE as a tool for distance learning: the greater the use of the VLE, the less contact they thought they would have with tutors and lecturers.

In sum, the bulk of the activities consisted of updating and maintaining the web site, monitoring the students’ use of it, and polling them at regular intervals for their experiences and opinions.

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