Ever thought about doing an online course?

The UK-based Oxford Centre offers online courses for academic development. Although pricey (265 Pounds for 5 weeks of online interactivity) - they are a highly regarded service. I would highly  recommend the experience of being an online learner to anyone who wanted to improve their online teaching.  Some of the upcoming sessions are:

1. Researching and Evaluating eLearning 20 April - 22 May 2009 (too late!)
   
2. Engaging learning with Social Software 3 June - 3 July 2009
   
3. Engaging Students with Assessment and Feedback 4 June - 4 July 2009
   
4. Enquiry Based Learning 10 June - 10 July 2009
   
5. Online Tutoring 17 June - 17 July 2009

A sip of Merlot perhaps?

Why not!

The amount of content on the web is growing exponentially - and this includes materials that can be shared and may help students with their learning. 

There are many places that you can search for content to add to your materials - a few of which I have put as a permanent link on the right hand side of this blog - but there is one that has been seriously under-utilised and that is MERLOT - Multimedia educational resource for learning and online teaching. 

Merlot offers a well-established peer-reviewed database of learning objects for sharing: http://www.merlot.org 

For example -  I searched for Merlot for materials by category - selecting Science and Technology > Engineering on the left hand side. There were 595 entries. You can search within this category if you like. There are simulations, case studies, tutorials, quizzes and more.

The first link in this engineering browse was a 'Classic' - MecMovies - by selecting 'Go to material' I arrived here  http://web.mst.edu/~mecmovie/ . MecMovies takes learners step by step through various concepts in Mechanical engineering such as torsion, sheer stress and strain. The community had rated it as 4 and a bit stars and it was included in the personal collection of 17 Merlot Members  (which is pretty good). 

There was also a 2 minute movie from the author http://taste.merlot.org/Videos/MecMovies.html that explains what Tim Philpot was getting at when he designed the tool and how he determined that it was making a difference for his learners. 

So why not give Merlot a go and see what it might be able to offer you?

Putting Defence lecture material on-line

Peter Hamilton (Defence and Systems Institute) writes about his approach to e-learning by using online presentations to replace the lectures.

I had the job of creating an Associate degree in Engineering (Defence Systems) program where all students would be working in industry and needed flexibility for learning. The students were more mature and had worked in manufacturing engineering roles, primarily as technical officers, and needed to retrain for work in companies that service the growing Defence industry.

Below is a presentation that describes the project (UniSA staff can view the web sites linked within the presentation).

Associate Degree in Engineering (Defence Systems) e-learning project

One of the strategies used was a 'lecture capture' technique where we made short recordings of the topics given by our course experts that could be accessed online 24x7. We had financial support from the federal government to implement the program and create the resources.

To make this happen, I purchased 6 licenses for Adobe Presenter 7, the application software underlying the ‘In a Nutshells’, in about Sep/Oct 2008. It works as a PowerPoint add-in that publishes that allows ‘narrated PowerPoint presentations’ to be created and saved on a special server in ISTS. The process of up-loading narrated presentations to the Server is centrally controlled by me.

The tool is relatively easy to use with most lecturers being able to master the tool in under 30 minutes. Narrated presentations have been created in a number of ways depending on the preferences of the lecturer:

1. Lecturers use an existing PowerPoint presentation for which they have prepared a script or, sometimes, good notes. Lecturers then record the script using the Presenter 7 tool. The script becomes the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation.


2. Lecturers use an existing PowerPoint presentation but without a script. Using the Presenter 7 tool they record the narration for each slide speaking ‘off-the-cuff’, prompted by the slide content. The sound file is then transcribed into a Word document by a professional transcriber; is edited by the lecturer to eliminate ums and arghs; and forms the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation.


3. Lecturers present a PowerPoint based lecture in the normal face-to-face fashion. The lecture is recorded using a digital recorder. The sound files are transcribed in the same way as above. Using Presenter 7, the sound files are uploaded to match the PowerPoint slides while the transcribed and edited sound file is used as the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation. This is a quite labour intensive process.

These recordings have been well received by students both on-line and on-campus as they can revisit them as often as they like. We have sometimes just played them as a lecture and still the students appreciated them as they were very clear.

We need to be mindful of the length of the recordings as there is only a certain amount of time that someone will look at their screen to watch a recording. Our average lecture length is about 20-30 minutes, some a little longer, others a little shorter. For a lecture, I consider about 30 minutes to be optimal.

Capturing lectures

When developing content for teaching in online courses, or providing extended flexibility for face-to-face or external students, many people consider the use of lecture capture techniques. Lecture capture could be as simple as making an audio recording of a lecture and slides/notes available online or can involve using sophistocated software programs that link together the voice, visuals and resources.

Educause put together a short document called the 7 things you should know about Lecture capture that describes what it is and considers the significance, implications and downsides.

One of our first podcasters at UniSA was Tim Sawyer in Medical Radiation - he prepared this short presentation about his approach to share with others in 2007 (6 minutes) as he was quite impressed with how much his students engaged with the recordings.

Currently we don't have any automated systems to do podcasting or lecture capture at UniSA - although last year we were close to getting Lectopia - an automated record and publish tool installed in lecture theatres - but for some reason it all faded away. If you want to make recordings you need to have access to your own (school's) recorder.

If you do want to try making audio recordings, Online advisers will set up "podcasting" environments for courses that students can subscribe to to receive lecture recordings to their ipod as soon as they are available. A manual upload of audio files and pdf documents (lecture notes) by the lecturer is required.

Our next blog post will be from Peter Hamilton from DASI who has used Adobe Presenter as his main lecture capture tool for courses in the Associate Degree in Engineering (Defence Systems).

Stay tuned ....

Mixing it up for more engagement

Do you accept the argument that people have different learning style preferences and therefore we need to mix it up a bit as teachers so we are not favouring one learning style preference over another?

This notion is build into our assessment policy - section1 - Assessment Principles and Requirements. 

1.1.4 Assessment tasks should be diverse.

Assessment practices should be inclusive and support equity principles, catering for both individual and group diversity. It should be recognised that all assessment models have limitations and a capacity to disadvantage certain students. Every effort should be made to minimise such disadvantage by, for example, using a variety of

 assessment techniques. Inclusive language must be used to avoid gender, racial, cultural or other language bias.

Honey and Mumford (1992) developed a learning styles questionnaire that grouped learning style preferences as

• activists - prefer to do something practical
• reflectors - prefer to read and take time to consider options
• theorist - prefer to read and analyse
• pragmatists - prefer to do something related to the real world. 

Later, Palmer and May (2004) tried to map different online environments on to these learning styles. 

• activists - prefer simulations, discussion groups and noticeboards
• reflectors - prefer online content, multimedia, tasks and research
• theorists - prefer structured content and structured systems
• pragmatists - off-line tasks, focused discussions and just-in-time learning.

Palmer and May then wanted to apply this information to balance assessment - with learners being reassessed in different learning styles. 

The questions this raises for me are many - for example - do I teach to my preferred learning style (pragmatic) as this most the most sense to me? Will the teachers in a program have enough intrinsic variety in their preferred learning styles/teaching that students will get a fair go across a program? Are learning styles a disposition that is shared by many in a professional/discipline group?  With the focus on experiential learning at UniSA - will this curriculum re-design better suit the pragmatist? Is Peter Lee's preferred learning style pragmatic? Does it matter?

Interested in your thoughts...

References

Honey and Mumford (1992)  The Manual of Learning Styles (3rd ed) Maidenhead: Peter Honey. 

Palmer and May (2004) Using learning style theory to improve online learning through computer assisted diagnosis' 8th CAA Conference, http://www.caaconference.com/pastConferences/2004/proceedings/Palmer_May.pdf 

A conversation with Peter Kentish about Moodle quizzes

I cornered Peter Kentish recently, gave him coffee, a comfy chair with a cushion and asked him to recount  some of his experiences about using Moodle quizzes to share with our readers. 

Q: How come you are using Moodle Quizzes now?

It all started in 2007 when the new common first year in engineering began. I had always taught my old Engineering Materials course with a cohort of 60-70 students using 6-7 multiple choice and text-based questions but now, with the new common first year core course it was going to be 200! There was no way I was going to be able to do all that marking! I knew  that the quiz approach had worked well for motivating my students to learn consistently in this course so I asked for an automated system to help me mark these tests. 

It wasn't the first time I had asked for an automated assessment system. The UniSAnet team tried several times but were quite frustrated in their efforts to create an in-house 

online assessment tool and resorted to trialling the Moodle version. I was one of 2 people who were allowed to use this environment and test it for the University. 

How do you use it?

I run 6 tests during the study period for this course. For each these there is actually a pair of quizzes. The first is a practice (non-assessable) one that students can attempt as many times as they like, find out which they got right or wrong and also what the right answer is. Then there is an assessable version that counts for grades.  There about 30-35 items in the assessable one and 15 or so in the practice version. 

A screen grab from the Moodle quiz environment

 

Students do the assessable quizzes in a computer pool during their tutorial time. I set the time the quiz is open for and a password - I make these up so they are different for each tutorial class. When all the classes have finished taking the test I send them their results which have been automatically marked. 

What has it been like using Moodle quizzes?

The system itself has been quite good - robust.  There have been virtually no bugs in the system - just one that hasn't been solved. This has no negative effects provided you are aware of it.

Like most things there are positives and negatives - there has been a lot of time setting up the database of questions, but the time saved with the auto marking has more than made up for it - particularly as I am now in the second year. The benefit will continue for future years as less time is required in maintaining the database.

How do you come up with your questions?

When I first started I had my old questions that needed to be entered into my database which took a long time. Now, when I want to set up a test I create a shell for it (setting the time and password for the class) and select the questions I want from my database. Each year I choose different questions. I also use the random shuffling functionality - my selected questions are presented in a different order and answer options are also in different order for each student (this shuffling feature can be turned off). 

Also, at tutorials I get ideas for questions where the content is applied to problems and write new questions to add to my database. This is good as I really want to test students application of knowledge rather than recall of memorised facts.  

Also, tutorials are not assessed directly, so to motivate students to engage with the tutorial activities I warn them that a certain amount of the quiz items are going to come from the tutorials so they need to do this work (i.e. memorisation of facts will not be enough to be successful - you are not very good as an engineer if you are not able to apply knowledge to solve problems!)

An example of a question from a practice quiz

What do the students think?

They generally like MCQ best - they think they have an advantage as the right answer is there they just need to find it.  For the first practice quiz there were over 958 attempts - some students attempted it 15 times, others not at all. The average mark for the test was about 70%. 

Even though the students were advised that quiz 2 would be more complex than the first, the number of attempts on the practice test did decrease to 795 -probably because the students have more competing interests or they have been lulled into a false sense of security from test 1. The average mark for this second test, which was more difficult,  was  lower - around 60%. 

Moodle curious?

When I first found out the Moodle was a real contender for our new online learning platform a few years ago I thought it would be good to see what it was like. 

My first exploration was edna - which offers free sites for educators as well as the opportunity to reach out to others in online groups - and uses Moodle for its environment. I had to make an application and after a day or two I was given approval to play in my own spot. To be honest I never got very far  - it wasn't intuitve (for a lass grown up on UniSAnet)  and I could never find the time to do the training course (although they offered a few times). 

This 1 minute movie gives an overview of the groups. 

This year I have now done the 2 day training and am able to author. The environment is very flat - all on one page - which is odd.

The stunning thing for me was the online assessment options available - with marks going straight into the system. It will be ultimately make the early assessment of student learning much easier, faster, better. 

I have started my first site (another 6-8 weeks before it will be finished as still preparing content). It is planned to be one that will be the basis for some of the ICUP modules (you can import and export easily out of Moodle). It is  on a tiny development server (slow performance) but it is enough for the experiment. 

There are still many decisions to be made for the new environment which will start going live in 2010 - e.g. will AssignIT stay or will we use the Gradebook in Moodle? What e-portfolio tool will we integrate? If its PebblePad what about the gateways??? What will we call it? (it won't be Moodle). 

But this is in the hands of others.... 

By the way, they are planning a progressive transfer; 5% first, then 30 % by another time etc... All done by the end of 2011 with UniSAnet switched off. 

Diana