Hi Gloria - thank you so much for your reply. I was beginning to wonder if I would attract any responses :-) My question arises because I am interested in looking at the role of evidence and expertise in informing the collaborative development of online learning. I am more comfortable with the term evidence-informed than evidence-based, although evidence-based practice (EBP) as it is known in nursing, is where my interest springs from in looking at the application of EBP in online teaching and learning. In nursing, expert opinion, is listed in the Joanna Briggs Institute's framework as one of the qualitative sources for EBP. I have focussed my interest on online teaching and learning specifically as this is one area of education that draws heavily on the expertise of more than educators alone. I am only interested in the potential of online learning: beyond merely posting PDFs, accompanied by quizzes, discussion fora and electronic marking via a Learning Management System. I am interested in innovation in online learning that requires the collective input of software developers, multimedia producers, educational designers (like myself), visual artists, 3D animators, vendors of online products and services, and neuroscientists with an interest in how new technologies impact on learning. I am interested in how an iterative approach to online development that draws on this collective expertise can be applied in Higher Education. I totally agree that the 'gold standard' of refereed journals alone is not adequate in recognising those who are the true innovators and 'experts' in this field. So what criteria should we apply?

Hi Gloria - thank you so much for your further thoughts. It is so wonderful to find a like-minded person but also one who has put theory into practice. I am greatly encouraged by reading about your experiences. I am very familiar with the work of John Hattie who I met last year at Melbourne University and I am a great fan of his meta analysis work. My question is focussed more on how to define the expertise needed to achieve the kind of online experiences you were able to create with your three online mysteries, for example. Who were the people you worked with in the EDUTag Multimedia group at RMIT and what was their expertise? I totally agree that it is also about good learning design. Like a good movie or a great building it is collaborative expertise based on a good script or design that gets results. What I hope to define is 'how many experts does it take' so that we can move higher education beyond its academic silos of expertise. These silos have sometimes reminded me of the characters in the first two books of the Gormenghast Trilogies by Mervyn Peake but I am optimistic when I hear from people like you who are innovating and challenging from within. I look forward to your reply.

Thank you for sharing your experiences Gloria. It sounds like it was a very rich experience for all. Has there been any formal evaluation of your project? Cheers, Irena

It would be interesting to know the previous learning history of the students who had difficulty with problem solving. That in itself I think would be a fascinating study. My suspicion is that we have spent so much effort on spoon feeding our students from the start of their learning journeys and on crowding their lives with so much 'busy stuff' that when it comes to the 'unknown' they are at a loss where to start. I loudly applaud your work in introducing 'slow learning' in our otherwise fast food on-the-run education systems that in many cases have become credential factories. The challenge is to change this culture by proving that it is better to create citizens who are problem solvers than factory model graduates.

Irena,

I would say a useful expert is a person who knows the knowledge domains and their structure and how it can be explained to less knowledgeable others.

Thank you for your response John - do you know of any qualitative research that has been conducted/published to support this view within a Higher Education context?

Irena

Tom Gilbert did some work many years ago about how with work with experts he made the distinction between and expert and exemplar, the latter knew the area but could also explain it to others. You are seeking someone who knows how it is structured and what to emphasise.

Thanks John - I'd be very grateful if you could provide me with a link to this work by Tom Gilbert.

I think your question is too broad Irena. What do you mean by "expert"? It could be someone who has knowledge, or someone who can apply knowledge, or someone who can creatively seek necessary knowledge and use available resources, etc. And then what do you want your expert to do? Impart that knowledge to others or simply use it in an isolated manner to solve your problem at hand or show you how to solve the problem yourself so you too become an expert, etc. And then if you are going to interact with that expert (rather than simply worship them from a distance) all sort of interpersonal aspects come into play.

I can tell you that each time I have been referred to a supposed expert (eg in my university's IT dept) I have been disappointed and I lose patience and work out a work-around myself. That could have been Gloria's experience too but she was able to persist with her experts until they came around (I wonder if they learned to be less dogmatic for future projects rather than reverting to "we're the experts, we'll tell you how you should do it").

Thank you so much for your response Mark which certainly points out some of the 'flaws' in naming people as 'experts' and the expectations this creates. I'd be particularly interested if you could add any further thoughts about how we could find better ways of defining 'academic expertise', in particular, which is mostly currently 'assessed through number of appearances in refereed journals'.

I guess my main point is that conceptualising "expert" is probably too much like conceptualising "intelligence". Sure you could come up with a score but because the concept is so broad (or has so many aspects) it might very well be mostly meaningless except as a gross tool.

The university also assesses expertise (even if it's not called that) through teaching evaluations (student and peer-based), grant success, community engagement, HDR recruitment and throughput, and so on. And it uses judgements based on these (and other) measures for things like recruitment, promotion, annual progression, etc. It would probably be a big project to try to nail it down into something objective and quantifiable, though that would then allow us something to work towards at least (in order to climb the ladder, get tenure, etc).