Half an Hour,
Mar 04, 2015
Rob Kadel
The Untapped Potential for eLearning
Pearson Research & Innovation Network / University of Colorado Denver
- learning to think laterally, or to think divergently (think outside the box)
- instead of thinking of one answer, thinking of many possible answers
- example: alternative ways to commute to work
- Research & Innovation Network (Pearson) - Kimberly O'Malley, head
- turning ideas into useful and usable innovation networks
- various centres for different projects
- accomoplishments: collaborative games, essay scoring algoritms, etc
- Student success - what does it mean?
- beyond school - Oxford Economics survey 2011 - skills most in demand:
- interpersonal and communication skills
- digital
- agile thinking
- global operating skills
- CEOs valued these, but said most employees today do not have these skills
- we can reach this, but have to look at the world students live in today
- The current environment - tech in schools
- two speeds: full steaam ahead, or, what do we do now?
- we need to meet students in their own space, in the technology they already use
- Personalized Learning
- Howard Gardner: individuation, pluralization
- individuation: each student taught in ways that are comfortable
- pluralization: anytung being taught should be taught in several ways (to reach more students)
- in a practical snese - not just 1:1 computing
- students and teachers customize learning objectives and strategies for work
- rigorous curriculum framework
- relevant assessment, teachers as facilitators
- SAMR model of technology integration
- It takes a village: components of education transformation
- leadership: establish vision, lead by example,
- policy: align with outcoms
- curriculum and assessment - in alignment with each other, must ensure students gain essential knowledge and 21st c skills
- digital tech - tools and data to support personalization
- sustinable resourcing - develop resources at scale
- research and evaluation
- Purposful planning - getting to goals
- eg. 'all studnets must achieve success in mathematics before graduation'
- need to clearly define what these thinsg are
- Goals > Objectives > Activities > Tasks (hierarchal structure)
- if you can measure the tasks, you can measure all the way up
- the task level is the easiest to measure
- eg. Pearson's MathXL
- importance of verbs (action words) - use Bloom's digital taxonomy (HOTS to LOTS)
- the full-steam ahead approach is not purposeful
- need to map out all learning tasks beforehand (example, school with Chromebooks couldn't read MS Word documents)
- ensure that adequate staff are assigned to each task
- ensure that budgets are accurate
- that you can measure the success of your program
- Learning outcomes and efficacy
- it isn't enough to merely be good, you have to do good (ie., you have to show you are good)
- Pearson - has taken a strong effort to measure our products and our services
(video clip from Pearson CEO) (but no, this isn't an advertisement for Pearson, he assures us)
- "return on investment in human capital"
- measuring the tasks = measuring efficacy
- Challenges in the Gulf region
- infrastructure - are all schools and all users connected?
- leadership - are leaders supporting and demonstrating effective technology use?
- language - more than half of websites that exist are in English
- how to maintain rich heritage of Arabic language
- but how to teach them all English
- digital literacy - students need basic understanding of how to use devices
- not just mobile phones, can you work with computers, eg., save and send a file
- professional development for teachers
Q&A
- Q: will tech in the education field cut out labour, the way it has in other fields
- A: I don't think it will replace teachers
- there is the danger or potential that it will replace teachers, but that's not the way we want to go
- want to keep teachers as facilitators
- Q: you talk about an outcome-based theory, based on tasks, which is a classical theory around for years
- but do you do tasks first, or goals first?
- A: just a way of redefining the way we have thought of education in the past
- it is very difficult to measure goals, but it is possible to measure the outcomes
- Q: what about social media
- A: replicate them in the 'walled garden' -- or experiment with tools (but they don't always work)
- Q: knowledge is non-reductive?
- A: it depemds on the language we use - 'what does it really mean'?
Olaf Zawacki-RichterThe development of online distance education and media usage behavior in higher education
- traditional students - 1950s - male, <25 br="" from="" high="" school="" straight="">- C.A.Wedemeyer 1981 - increasing diversity in university, beginning of open university, open admissions
- University of London 1826 "beginning" of open university, distance learning
- 1889 - sample of advertisement describing correspondance study
- so correspondance education is closely linked to the development of the postal system in Europe
- South Arica - UNISA
- The open learning movement - begins in the 1960s
- list: OU (1969), Athabasca (1970), FernUniversitat (1974)
- some very large ones - China, Turkey
- new open universities - Nigeria, Malaysia
- UMUC - development of online distance education
- more open universities - Russia
- traditional campuses - eg. Penn State - 'world campus'
Institutional Structures
- Oldenberg University, Germany
- need organizational structure to "manage this process in a profeessional way"
- Centre for Lifelong Learning (C3L)
- Structure of the blended learning program:
- independent study phase
- 1st cintact session
- online projevt work
- 2nd contact session
- project portfolios
Instructional design model: ADDIE
- emohasis on first phase, evry important - need to know prior knowledge, media preferences
Media usage behavious in Education
- does the net generation now arrive at the university?
- very few empirical studies supporting the claims of Tapscott, Presnky, etc
- so what are these studients doing? Research questions: wat do they use, what is their value, informal media, etc?
- exploratory study - data in 2012 - big 276 question survey, 2,339 students fro German universities
- 99% have access to broadband, 38% use internet 4-6 hours per day
- media typology (Grosch and Gidion)
- acceptance rates llfdifferent tools and rechnologies
- second Life - dead last on the list
- cluster analysis - 5 groups:
- ubiquitous web services, email, LMS
- provuided by uni - eg. online library
- cooperation & entertainment - comouter conference, social netwirks, iTines
- external web 2.0 toos, blogs, skype
- exotic applications - 2nd life, Twitter - not used much for learning
- high acceptance by traditional studnets just a few, eg. email, non-traditional students use a wide range of tools
- gap between demand and supply of e-learning, significantly higher demand for e-learning among non-trad
- media usage typology
- entertainment - 51%
- periphrial - 20%
- advanced - 20%
- instrumental - 7%
- Implications:
- developed authoring tool for courses for tablets - iAcademy
- C3LLO - mobile LMS - mostly for communications
- no relationship between age and media usage
- very high acceptance for LMS and print-based materials
- the university should not imitate informal social networks
Richard L. Edwards
Executive Director, iLearn Research, Ball State UniversityIncreasing Student Success through Online Learning, Learning Analytics, and Learner-Centered Practices
- student success - students maximizing their abilities
- online education joins: online learning, learning analytcs, and learning processes
- from minister of education: "less teaching, more learning"
- more learning = more effective teachning
Student Success
- formal vs informal learning
- learning anytime, anywhere
- learning how to learn
- lifelong learning
Areas of broad agreement at #ELI_2015
- we have the technology to make online learning effective
- the demand for online education is growing rapidly
- 21st century learners were born into a digitally connected workd
- there will continue to be waves of innivation in e-learning
Claim: students are leading us into the "postmodality" er
- online learning is no longer a novelty
- meeting the needs of these students will require institutional ecosystems
Thomas Cavanaugh, 2012, Educause
Premise #1 - success in online learning requires an ecosystem
- can't focus on student success in isolation from, eg:
- faculty development, eLearning support, 3rd party support, IT support, admin & services
- "we have educated them in terms of their whole mind and body" - clubs, sports, etc
- we have to replicate that in online learning
- Ball State's iLearn
Premise #2 - eLearning mindstes andd our cultures of learning affect how we develop our online programs
- institutions that take risks succeed, institutions thta take a step back do not succeed
- success is possible, but you first have to believe that onlin innovation is what you want to do
- "You have to believe"
- Drector of iLearn - chief moral officer:
- foster continuous learning among faculty and staff
- encourage critical and creative thinking, new solutions, etc
- turn research into practice, support pilot projects, fail fast
- build a culture of assessment to identify successes and failures
"we no longer can talk about what constitutes great teaching without evidence"
- disruptive innovative - elewarning has that potential, but it won't be destructive
- educate more of your citizens at a lower cost
- continbuous evolution
- the more we talk about teaching and learning and the less about technology the more success you will have
Premise #3 - anticipate great change
- what is going to change the most? education, work, or society?
- I would say all of them are going to change a lot
- the drivers are deep changes in the nature of work - the jobs 20 years from now aren't the jobs of today
Overview of iearn Research Projects
- new forms of content delivery
- open educational resources
- learning analytics
- gamification
- flipped intsruction
- enhancing student engagement
Slide:
Support :: learner Centred Practices
Engagement :: Blended and Online Learning
Feedback :: Learning Analytics
(Research-based model :: Action Research Projects)
Analytics
- student in the centre
- types of anaytics, stakeholders, data quality and transfers, potentiql bottlenecks, scale of analytics
- speed of anaytics
- small data: descriptive; big data: predictive
3 Takeaways
- Adopt best practices for learners (7 principles of good practice - Chickering and Gamson 1987)
- what are the practices great students do
- eg. self-regulation
- eg. Ball State MOOC to give students better skills - note-taking, study skills, historical thinking, writing skills
- help students develop their metacogntive skills - learning how to learn
- most of your existing tools can be reourposed to support this
- eg our HITS project - eg. pretest for foundational skills, then fix deficiencies
- eg. write metacognitive questions to be answered each week - identify misunderstandings and confusions
- based on data from online course - students responses result in just-in-time changes
- start small pilot projects, see how it works in your ecosystem, and evaluate outcomes
- collqborate with faculty and staff
- strategic coordination
- teaching is teaching; learning is learning
Q: should we be building one platform for the whole country, or multiple platforms?
A: I tend to favour one platform, because of support costs, but prefer a flexible and customizable approach
- one platform for all is just good business sense
Q: suggestion to use MOOCs not to teach a course, but to teach the skills hey need - but how do we make sure students use them?
A: we're going to require the prep-MOOC for every student that gets a deficiency grade at the mid-term
