ATLAS Position Statement

Here is a 12 minute audio description of our work, it provides a very clear and understandable description of what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and the values that underly our work. It helps to give a context to our work on ATLAS.

Please note the voices in this podcast discussion have been generated by AI, after prompting it with a lot of our textual content we then did some minor audio editing on what the AI produced.

The ATLAS project (A Teaching Literacy Assistant System) is designing an easy-to-use help system to enable teachers to find, understand and adapt learning resources from the Citizen Literacy programme to use with their learners. There is a large amount of print and digital resources involved. It is a demanding design brief. The system will need to work across a wide variety of contexts and with a broad range of very different teachers and learners

ATLAS will support experienced teachers and ease some of their workload by making it easy to find what they need just in time and understand how that can adapt the resources to their own needs. For new teachers in literacy education and volunteer tutors the system will also need to explain literacy concepts and their applications with different learners.

We have produced a comprehensive adult literacy programme that features print and digital learning resources and teacher support materials. Feedback is very positive, but a challenge is how can experienced literacy teachers navigate and quickly make sense of this new set of resources, and adapt them to their contexts? The same holds true for volunteer tutors in adult education or teachers new to literacy. For these users there is an additional need to be able access just-in-time learning resources about literacy concepts and rules, to ‘learn on the job’.

Design Approaches

The project will employ a range of participatory and systemic design methods involving teachers from different sectors of adult education in order to understand their current working methods and organisational contexts, resources used, skills levels, constraints, mental models, and attitudes etc. This understanding will help us to develop initial analyses and system requirements to develop simple prototypes. This will be followed by a cycle of rapid prototyping and user testing to refine possible system designs. A key element of this process will be to understand how our own existing literacy knowledge base structure and resources can be represented to other literacy teachers in an accessible and easy to grasp manner — and what modifications we might need to make to the resources. This work will follow participatory design methods pioneered by Enid Mumford (Socio-Technical), Don Norman (Usability and Context), Ezio Manzini (Social Innovation and Sustainability) and others. For the educational content of the system we will be using the ADDIE model of instructional design and the work of Professor Diana Laurillard at UCL (Design Patterns). We will also be thinking about how users will interact with the system. For this we will also be using methods from Socio-Cognitive Engineering (Task Analysis and Mental Models) developed by Professor Mike Sharples at the OU in the MEDIATE ESRC funded Artificial Intelligence project.

Methods

We will use participatory people-centred and systemic design methods to understand the needs and contexts of tutors and organisations that are using our resources to support requirement gathering activities. These will include; interviews, workshops, observations of users of our existing resources, paper prototypes and simple online interface prototypes. Along the way we will be aiming to understand the different conceptions and mental models (ontologies) of the components of literacy by tutors and organisations in order to arrive at a broad and useful taxonomy of resources to use in ATLAS. We will use these exercises to test and refine our ideas and assumptions about our users and their needs. This will feed into the design documentation for the ATLAS help system.

To undertake the design of the ATLAS system we will work with our existing users and professional networks in the field of adult literacy. This will take the form of participatory design methods and action research to develop initial designs and rapid prototypes to test concepts and refine the design.

Outputs

All the outputs from this project will be free to use and open to the web. Teacher training materials and just in time learning resources for new teachers will be free and licensed under a Creative Commons ‘BY’ licence. These resources will be hosted on the OU Open Learn website for worldwide distribution,