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Ideas and reflections from UCL's Digital Education team
By Matt Jenner, on 2 October 2012
This summer E-Learning Environments have installed clickers into three teaching spaces at UCL, the Harrie Massey in the Physics Building, the Cruciform LT1 and Christopher Ingold Auditorium. Each room has every seat kitted out with a voting handset and the front teaching PC has a USB receiver and the software installed. Read on for some images and educational musings to chew on…
By Matt Jenner, on 17 September 2012
Moodle is open source software and is used by millions of people around the world. Open source allows anyone to tinker with the code; adding new things, changing existing & ultimately deciding which direction their Moodle heads in. Many of these changes are shared within the Moodle community for others to freely use – this leads to the core software being developed, extended and reformed in many directions. Keeping a steer on this is Moodle HQ, a group of 20 ‘core’ developers and, tightly connected, many global developers, testers, documentation writers, really helpfulers (people who help the community on Moodle.org with problems) and many others. What’s sometimes lacking with Moodle is the input, or link to education research including academics, learners, administrators, developers, testers, researchers and everyone else.
Blogging from Crete – Greece, this post attempts to summarise two days of the 1st Moodle Research Conference. The conference was the first iteration of an event unlike other established Moodle, or educational meet-ups. Sold as “a unique event dedicated to the research and development (R&D) on learning and teaching carried out with Moodle”. What that actually meant evolved right though the two days as the conference delegates shared, talked and discovered the direction Moodle is heading in.
The international conference had around 70 delegates from 22 countries. There were 23 presentations showcasing developments, case studies, new tools, learning designs, learning analytics and addressing challenging issues and introducing new ideas; all for Moodle. Additionally there were seven posters, three meals, one panel discussion and one keynote – from Martin Dougiamas, the man who invented Moodle. If that wasn’t enough, we were also in the Creta Maris – a somewhat splendid and slightly distracting conference venue with the Mediterranean Sea lapping at our feet, the sun beating down and wild cats meowing for scraps of lunch.
The aim of the conference, at least from my perspective, was to see how educational research was influencing Moodle development. After all, we have this tool which is designed around teaching and learning but it also continual evolves. To ensure it changes along with established understanding of how people learn and what affordances technologies can offer, we must ensure a cyclic loop exists, with each feeding in the other. Or, at least that’s the idea.
Often is the case that developers say they wish to just get on with developing and that theorists are too theoretical (with their heads in the clouds). The crux of the issue seems to be that established and ratified theory must influence design, design must influence development and developers must do the same.
User centred design (SAP, 2012)
One argument against Moodle is that it’s not intuitive, this may be most strongly felt by academics as they mutter that Moodle doesn’t quite map onto teaching, takes too much time and isn’t always an environment which encourages alternative approaches to learning and teaching. Instead, and this is something I’m happy to agree with, Moodle is technology, this is akin to something ‘that doesn’t work yet’. If Moodle ‘worked’ we wouldn’t need so many people helping with it, it’d just ‘work’. To keep things simple, I don’t remember the last time I explained how a chair works, which was once a technology itself.
Moodle is over 10 years old now, and along the way many innovative additions have come to the software. But, also over the years sometimes developments have not always been linked to the research and, unfortunately the emergent disconnect between designers, practitioners, theorists and everyone in the middle appears. This has resulted in both innovation and disruption. Moodle development is the output of highly skilled and passionate people all contributing towards something they want to improve. What’s being addressed here is slightly more complex, with so many developments it’s often hard to see where the edges are. Further, developments are not necessarily tied together, and we end up being back outside the cyclic process shown above.
While there is plenty of time to disseminate the talks in the conference, I felt this blog post was better positioned to give a higher level view into what’s happening with Moodle. The simple fact is the web is evolving very quickly, start-ups can build, destroy and rebuild with minimal fear of reprise. This could be because they promote agility in their staff and in their product, or because they are nowhere near as established as something like Moodle where agility can have a negative impact for a large community of users.
Essentially a lot of Moodle is internally facing, tools are developed to be a part of the ecosystem of Moodle.
This is harder to describe, but the value of tools external to Moodle are immensely useful. Linking intelligently to these is important, and focusing on strengthening the internal tools make sense, rather than necessarily diversifying them by adding many more. This is just one view, the route is still to be defined. The important thing is to consider Moodle as the base, the developments focus around educational developments and the wider tools linked in, rather than reinvented.
What’s most important is that the developments are fed back from users; that’s all types identified. The next few years are going to be important for Moodle, for UCL and the wider community. At some point will come the dreaded system review, comparison and evaluation. It will have to stand up against the changing landscape of tools and environments for online learning and teaching. By concentrating its developments around the best understanding of relevant pedagogical research, it’ll hopefully retain Moodle’s strength, improve the system for everyone and keep Moodle aligned as one of the world’s best learning management systems.
Well, that’s the current plan.
SAP (2012). Principles of UI Development, SAP Community Network. Last accessed 17th September 2012 from http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BBA/Principles+of+UI+Development
By Jessica Gramp, on 14 September 2012
SMS doesn’t need to be limited to administrative tasks. It is being used by some teachers to motivate students to continue their studies out of the classroom and is having a positive effect on student retention. Clare Killen, Rob Englebright and Matt Smith spoke about the use of SMS in Further Education at ALT-C 2012. Read more about the session here: http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/28133
While some of the uses described here can still be classed as administrative they did have a positive affect on students’ study habits. SMS was used to communicate with students to:
Some of the issues that students faced included:
Students with privacy concerns, access issues or who were not comfortable texting were able to email their responses to their teacher instead.
The trial was conducted in two forms. One method involved using SMS technology within the classroom. The other involved texting the students outside of the classroom – once or twice per week. Students didn’t like in class texting as much as out of class texting.
In the classroom:
Out of the classroom:
Overall students reacted positively to being sent school related text messages a couple of times a week. They said it felt it helped them stay on task and also helped them to feel part of a community. Teaching staff noticed a marked improvement in student retention because students who received text messages felt they had been able to still contribute when they were absent from school. Teachers could send messages to absent students encouraging them to return to class, so they were less likely to feel like they were too far behind to return.
By Jessica Gramp, on 11 September 2012
In the first plenary session for the ALT-C conference this year, Eric Mazur from Harvard University spoke about how student’s brain activity slows during lectures. The highlighted area to the immediate left of the circled lecture periods in the graph below shows that student’s brains are more active during sleep than during traditional lectures. Eric argues that analysing classroom data is essential to improving teaching.
Eric Mazur presenting a graph showing the brain activity of students during lectures (circled)
So how do students actually learn?
Information transfer is the easy part. The hard part where students need to understand the concepts is often being left to students to do on their own. Eric Mazur realised that most of his own “ah-hah” moments of understanding came outside of the classroom. He now uses voting handsets to involve students in his lectures. After voting he asks students to find someone who disagrees with their answer and then try to convince their neighbour why their own answer is correct. His collaborative approach to teaching ensures students stay engaged during lectures.
Women in particular thrive in a collaborative environment as opposed to a competitive one, so they perform better when he involves them in his lectures. He also encourages students to work together to complete their homework.
Lecture demonstrations are not as effective as students doing the activity themselves because students may make incorrect assumptions about what the demonstrator has done to achieve the results. Asking students to predict the outcome of the demonstration, record their observation of the demo and then discuss whether they correctly predicted the outcome of the demonstration with their peers leads to a better understanding of the core concepts.
The reason for this is that “the brain stores models not facts.” You need to give students time to re-adjust their models in the lecture. Otherwise students are more likely to continue to believe in their incorrect models. This effect is known in psychology as cognitive dissonance. Predicting, explaining and discussing the concepts makes a significant difference in the ability for students to absorb the correct models. The graph below shows a significant improvement in understanding by those students who had predicted the demonstration results and an even higher improvement by those who also discussed their predications after the demonstration.
Eric Mazur showing the improvement in results as students are asked to predict and discuss the results of a demonstration
It’s difficult to teach students who have the wrong model, because teachers who understand the correct model find it difficult to understand where these students are coming from. Asking students to show their working out helps teachers to understand their misconceptions. Instead of just marking incorrect answers as wrong and leaving it at that, Eric Mazur argues that teachers should concentrate on understanding the thinking behind the incorrect answers. That way they can help students to re-adjust their thinking to incorporate the correct models.
Read more: Classroom Demonstrations: Learning Tools or Entertainment?
Eric Mazur also asks students to tell him what they find difficult or confusing from their readings before the lecture. He asked students to provide him with at least 2 concepts they found confusing and also some feedback on why they found the items confusing. If they found nothing difficult they had to provide him with two examples of what they found interesting and why. He then adapts his lecture to address the areas students found most difficult to comprehend. This method is known as just in time teaching. You can find out more about this method in the book Just in time teaching: blending active learning with web technology (Novak et al., Prentice Hall, 1999).
Eric Mazur’s research shows that confused students are around twice as likely to understand a concept than those who claim they understand it
In Eric’s study, those students who mentioned they were confused by a concept were roughly twice as likely to demonstrate understanding than those who said they understood it, so “confusion doesn’t correlate with misunderstanding.” He concluded that those students who claim to understand are likely to have passively read the material instead of properly comprehending it. It’s important to ask students to reflect on what they have read. One way to do this is to ask students to write their own analogy for difficult concepts. Eric Mazur says that “confusion is an essential part of the learning process…and should be elicited.”
Read more: Understanding Confusion
More information about Eric Mazur’s research is available from his website: http://mazur.harvard.edu
By Matt Jenner, on 27 August 2012
Massive online open courses, or MOOCs as they are colloquially know as, can best be described as a mixture of distance learning with the addition of thousands of students, new platforms, generally old teaching methods and a lot of media hype. Yet, they are heralded as a tsunami of change coming to education, the future of learning and a firecracker into institutions who fear they are not able to provide such approaches. Most importantly is that they are largely unproven, mainly due to entering rather new (yet trodden) territory. This post covers some of the history of MOOCs and of my recent experience being a student in one of these courses. It’s fair to say that this big distance learning on a big scale, and what it means for UCL, and education in a wider field, is not known by anyone, but it’s very exciting to watch it unfold, and to look for opportunities of alignment.
An open course where fee-paying and free students mix (or it’s just free) which uses an online learning and teaching environment usually backed by a university or a group of individuals, usually led by top academics. Student numbers are generally not paying a fee and range in numbers between 100 and >150,000 at the moment.
Learning activities are generally asynchronous and follow a flexible structure ensures that promotes students contributions as a core to the learning activity. Usually not using systems such as Moodle but instead tools such as blogs and wikis or bespoke software. Teachers are present, but there has been upwards of 50,000 students per staff member (MITx – Circuits course) so student participation plays a significant part. Systems used reflect this, for example Q&A areas have voting mechanisms and collaborative approaches to answering queries.
They are largely driven by Canadian and US Universities, perhaps due to their initial cost or promotion on western-facing media. Originating in Canada in 2008 and made ‘famous’ by Harvard, MIT, Yale and other elite US universities. Less were discovered from other continents but many exist under the more generic ‘open’ banners of education. Big names include: edX (the recently combined MITx and Harvardx), Coursera. Udacity and more.
A MOOC opens a course and invites anyone to enter, resulting in a new learning dynamic for collaborative and conversational opportunities for students to gather and discuss the course content. A new pedagogy has been associated entitled Connectivism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivism) and edX, potentially the largest MOOC identified will use it as a massive educational research tool to benefit the institution’s in-house learning and teaching, among other things.
The non-traditional dynamic of a MOOC may make some students uneasy, particularly those who expect, or thrive, on a high level of interaction with the teacher. Students with no financial stake or educational background in the course may bring a different, potentially disruptive, approach. Teachers must rethink the at least some of the course’s elements to take advantage of a MOOC, giving particular consideration to the technical and structural demands and logistics of running such a course. Learners and academics may oppose this style of learning and teaching and demand more traditional approaches.
MOOCs present a new opportunity for an independent, life-long learner. By removing the risk attached to a course, it may encourage participation from those who are less-likely to enrol in the traditional educational methods. “The most significant contribution is the MOOC’s potential to alter the relationship between learner and instructor and between academe and the wider community” – http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7078.pdf
Six months ago I blogged about being an MITx student and now I am undertaking a wider programme of study through Corsera – a similar platform founded by two professors from Stanford; Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. The course I am taking at the moment is Internet History, Technology and Security. We’re up to week five and it’s going well so far, I think.
The main direct tuition I’ve received has been via recorded videos of either Dr. Chuck (Charles Severance) and other resources, mostly video based. They have a nifty feature whereby as the video progresses it stops to ask a question – this is clearly indicated on the timeline for the video (see screenshots). After some feedback the video continues. This helps break up the didactics but it’s obvious (even to the founders) that this isn’t directly innovative but it’s a little step forward than just a video. In addition is the ability to control the playback of the video, increasing the speed to 1.75x or 2x of the original.
Videos in Coursera - answering a question
With so many students MOOCs can’t have teaching staff interact directly with the students for all conversations / questions. With this in mind, the discussion forum (much like MITx) employed a rating system where all questions can also be rated (and flagged). There are many students answering one another’s questions, and this is widely encouraged. Additionally there is a wiki, although this is used less. Surprisingly, for an online course, there’s a lot of face to face interaction where students form study groups and meet in cities across the globe. Lastly, with one teacher and over 10,000 students there’s little chance for much else, but Dr. Chuck is still offering contact hours by arranging meetings in coffee shops across America.
So far we have had a quiz most weeks, where 10 MCQ questions can be answered – nothing special to report here. The peer-assessment worked rather well, with the submission of a short essay after week one each student had to use a grading rubric for at least five other students, and give written feedback. After leaving mine for seven students I eventually got my feedback, it was a mixed bunch of reviews of my work, from excellent to rubbish – so I averaged it overall. Needless to say this approach is understandable, but not necessarily meaningful for my learning, especially when considering the potential lack of investment from the students either fiscally or effort-wise.
I’m not putting much into this MOOC, I know the subject fairly well and it’s more of a learning journey into distance learning / MOOCs than it is about Internet History, Technology and Security. I don’t think it’s a problem how much I put in, as the course is designed to fit with my life, not the other way around. As I am also studying for my masters, I instantly see a difference between this seven week course, and say, a 15-credit module. I’m sure a lot of people are learning a lot more than me from this course, and that is obviously wonderful. It’s early days for MOOCs and these courses are all forming the next steps of what they will evolve into. I am sure during this course the platform is developing, the teachers are learning and the data collected is showing what’s working, and who isn’t (ahem).
MOOCs are still emerging and somewhat undefinable at this stage. The usual trending phenomena warnings are present, as are the ‘unknown’ opportunities. As the buzz fades and MOOCs evolve the expectations and methods are likely to stabilise, thus making them more consistent and definable. Universities may be ‘too slow’ to realise the potential, or not get caught up in the buzz, potentially wasting significant resource. As the world becomes more connected, and education opens up, there is an echo of this being a permanent and positive change to higher education.
There’s a whole load of commentary on MOOCs, here’s some of the best so far:
Learning for Free? MOOCs by Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths. Presented at their Future Tense 2012 conference.
The Campus Tsunami by David Brooks, New York Times
What’s right and what’s wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs by Tony Bates, Research Associate, Contact North
MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera by Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair, MSc in E-learning Programme Team, University of Edinburgh
By Matt Jenner, on 24 August 2012
iTunes U is known as a wonderful platform for finding recorded lectures and podcasts from academics and institutions across the world. But recently it’s also become a location for entire courses, with students, multiple resources and some interaction all happening on devices such as the iPad. It’s all very Apple-based, which means anyone without this hardware can’t access it and thus it remains a little elitist. BUT there’s still some good reasons to look into it – and I hope this begins to explain why.
“On May 30, 2007, iTunes U was announced at Cupertino, California. The service was created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content and PDF files for students within a college or university as well as the broader Internet” (Wikipedia). UCL became an early adopter of iTunes U, sharing content such as Lunch Hour Lectures and some recorded materials from our academics. It was mainly a platform for distribution, rather than an active learning (i.e. engagement or interaction), but this is slowly changing.
Recently Apple broke iTunes U from the iTunes app and developed the extension of it to run courses/modules designed in Course Manager.
“From the iTunes U app, students can play video or audio lectures and take notes that are synchronized with the lecture. They can read books and view presentations. See a list of all the assignments for the course and check them off as they’re completed. And when you send a message or create a new assignment, students receive a push notification with the new information” (Apple.com).The App presents itself like a course and in the example below, we can see Duke University example of Core Concepts in Chemistry which utilises itunes U, and a plethora of Open Educational Resources, to bring together a course which is rather unique to some, but a growing phenomenon to others.
Duke University - Core Concepts in Chemistry overview page
Duke University - course outline page
Duke University - all materials in the course, all OERs sourced from many locations
Duke University - discussion posts, all based on the course structure and asynchronous
Duke University - optional apps for this course is, well, a good money spinner *ahem* but also there are many worthy apps for education
We are strong users of Moodle at UCL, but we like to promote some level of exploration. We (E-Learning Environments) wish to express interest in talking to anyone interested in making a course in iTunes U for UCL, or has already (we checked, it seems clear so far). It could be a growth area for some cases, or not, we want to find out. Caveat aside, let’s take a look at how you create courses.
Course Manager is a simple and easy to use tool for making an online ‘course’. Sound good? The problem is the course you make it’s necessarily very educationally robust, in fact pedagogically speaking it’s somewhere in the 1970s, but it is strong in terms of presentation and clarity, so let’s presume this is why we’re here and carry on..(am I covering my back enough here?)
Course Manager – Login page
Course Manager – Setup your profile
Course Manager – Course Manager aka Instructor Homepage
Course Manager – Creating a new course
Course Manager – Setting up a new course – everything requires images
Course Manager – Setting up a new course – information required
Course Manager – Course licensing
Course Manager – Courses overview screen
Course Manager – Course outline
Course Manager – Course outline becomes the discussion topics
Course Manager – Starting a discussion from the course outline
Course Manager – Adding materials to your course
Course Manager – Configuring users in the course
So once you’ve gone through a lot of adding, it’s time to see it come together. This course I just made is alive and you may enrol by visiting the following link:
https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/enroll/D7M-MRY-7Y5
(this must be done on an iOS device) such as iPad)
When looking at this course, we can see it’s already taking shape
Distance Learning at UCL course – overview
Distance Learning at UCL course – instructor information
Distance Learning at UCL course – course overview
Distance Learning at UCL course – discussions (none yet!)
Distance Learning at UCL course – course notes
Distance Learning at UCL course – resources available (none yet!)
This was just to take an initial look at Course Manager and first impressions are that it’s functional but not necessarily wonderful. It’s clearly an Apple product, and you can tell because it’s clean, accessible (in terms of getting started) and non-assuming. Using Apple focuses strongly around aesthetical production quality. They have not provided a system which does quizzes, for example, because they can quickly become convoluted with features (hi Moodle), or feature poor/ too simple – the Apple mentality appears to regularly be that if they can’t do it seamlessly, then they don’t do it. If you’ve ever compared installing software on Windows to a Mac then this is probably the online learning version of such a thing. In Windows you can install a LOT of stuff, but it’s complicated, not initiative and certainly not user-friendly. On a Mac, you pick up an icon and drop it on a folder, couldn’t be much easier, especially after you’ve done it once. On Windows, each install is different. In Moodle, each course is different. A critic may say it’s a little wonky – but able to do a lot. On a mac, you have a slick interface that does some stuff well and that’s it (*prepares shield*).
To finish, I think this is good, if anything its indicative to designers that Moodle, for example, could do with some more slickness. In iTunes U’s defence, it has a large user base, but a rather specific one too. This development isn’t able to replace Moodle, and that’s not the plan, but it has scope to be a part of our e-learning ecosystem (or environment as we may say) and as a tool to do more good than harm, it’s welcome to join.
If you’re interested in knowing more, or you use iTunes U, contact E-Learning Environments.
