The subject matters to the experts

When working with subject matter experts who are invariably too busy to proof read what you are doing I have discovered that wikipedia is very useful.

Oh no no, fret not. I do not mean that wikipedia replaces subject matter experts only that if you happen to give someone a very nice looking e-learning module with stuff from wikipedia in it they suddenly become a lot more willing to write their own content.

When you know you are being a bit too caught up in the details...

...but you just can't stop.

I have been building a study guide in storyline and I decided that I wanted information to appear when the mouse hovered over a button. This should have been quite simple but the nice people at articulate do like to have a little fun with you first it seems. To make something appear on mouseover you have to 1st make it disappear. Seems obvious doesn't it? And it is until you realise that there are 2 ways of making objects disappear.

The eye.... and the state

 

If you hide it using the eye it will be hidden until eternity and beyond if you are trying to make it appear when 'mouse hovered over' so you need to go to the 'States' tab and then make the initial state hidden. Then when you add the appropriate triggers *poof as if by magic your extra information will appear. Which is quite pleasing really. 

The other complication, somewhat more visual than practical is that your hidden objects are still visible on your work-in-progress slide. Consequently if you have several of these hidden items it looks a bit like this. 

 

 The reason I am telling you all this though is because when it is finished, after a whole afternoon of messing about it looked like this

 

And I am really quite happy with it .

THE END

 

pastry assistance

In response to  my previous post I decided to try and put a bit of motivation into a STATA quiz - seven sections of medical statistics (thrilling). So at the end of each section I added in an extra results slide to break up the quiz and say well done to the students. Time will tell if they like it!

It wasn't all plain sailing either... I was struggling to get it to report to the grade book so I decided to motivate myself by going out for a pastry. As soon as I got out of the office I realised what my problem was, because I had put in extra results slides, when publishing I needed to tell Blackboard which one to look at... simple really.

Needless to say even though the problem was solved I still went to get to the pastry, which, I think, proves that everything is better when you have a pain au chocolat.

Learning that really does hurt!

I was in the gym today and I had a boxing lesson with an awesome personal trainer followed by a 30 minutes abs session in which I am fairly certain she tried to kill me. This is excruciating learning in its purist form... I was learning... and it hurt. However, it got me thinking about why it was a good session and what I could take from it and put into my own 'teaching'. I use teaching in inverted commas because I don't teach, I build things which teach without me.
 For example, my current project is to build an interactive tool to help medical students identify different types of study design. Hopefully they will learn something but I am not actively teaching them anything (which in this case is a very good thing because I know nothing about medical study design).

I have never boxed before and I am not sure I was even terribly good at it but that is not the point a good teacher will tell you how to do something in a way that is easy to understand a great teacher will make you want to keep doing it and I think this is the key. Throughout the whole session I was being encouraged and pushed to be better and I think this is the key to great teaching but how do you take that into an on-line environment? (I really don't know but I am going to keep thinking about it) How do you maintain student motivation through something like 50 questions on medical statistics? How do you make someone keep doing stomach crunches when everything about it hurts?

The final question I can answer because someone makes me do it every week - constant encouragement, manageable chunks and a bit of good fun. The 1st two questions I am not so sure about but I am going to make an effort to try and fit them in to my 'teaching' and hope that it will help the students keep going until they get to question 50 on medical statistics!

A mouse ran over my buttons

I have recently started working on a new website for myself, inspired in part by making one for a good friend of mine. Furthermore after going to a workshop recently and seeing someone make 'onmouseover' buttons I decided I wanted some. So I set about making some...

The website for my friend and her awesome business for one reason or another is being made through wix.com so I though I would start there. They have nice templates and can produce a very aesthetically pleasing site quite easily, however there is no obvious way of playing with the html so... no onmouseover buttons here.

So I decided to go back to google sites which I have used before to see what I could do there.  With the help of some html tutorial sites I made a nice piece of code which made a lovely button which grows when the mouse goes over it..

...which of course doesn't work in my blog as it doesn't in a google site.

So then what?
A bit of research led me to go hunting for a gadget to make this happen and after a bit of playing I found this one http://hosting.gmodules.com which very simply allows you to make nice buttons which pop out when your cursor passes over them. Job done!
Thanks to Paul Kern for the gadget.

To add his gadget to your site go to 'insert more gadgets' and search 'public' for image mouseover and you will see several. There are a couple of nice ones which change one picture to another but they require both pictures to be the same size which didn't fit my profile but they still worked well. Of course you also need to have the images uploaded to your site 1st.

Somersaults or back flips - The flipped classroom part 2

How do you flip a classroom?

Any classroom involves the educators concerned considering a number of factors; materials, delivery, self-study, assessments plus the usual aims and objectives of a course or module. There is no one way to do this and the same applies to the flipped-classroom. It can be as simple as videoing lectures for students to view before a class and setting 'homework' for students to complete during class time. This may work in some scenarios, calculus perhaps, but is far from ideal for most courses particularly at a higher education level. 

The table above shows how an educator can start to think about the type of information that is being presented followed by when and how that information will be disseminated to the students. Specifically the change from practice exercises to open-ended or group based problem-solving in a class. Thus giving the 'sage' a chance to come down from the stage and interact with the students giving them dynamic feedback as opposed to marking a homework assignment with a red pen. Prober and Heath ask us why, in an era of video and freely available resources such as youtube and TED, we would waste time on a traditional lecture. In some ways there is a simple answer to this “putting dozens, hundreds or even thousands of students in a room with a professor – endures because it makes economic sense.” In other ways the answer is far less simplistic. A lecture is traditional, therefore it is easy, so if we are going to flip our classrooms we need to know how to do it in a way that enhances the student experience. To change the world you have to know you are going to make it better and you have to have a plan. Which takes us back to the question of how do you flip a classroom. There are several options;

1.
Record the lecture that would have been given in person and encourage the students to watch it before class. Then give the students case studies, group based tasks and discussions to do and use the classroom time to enter into face-to-face discussions with. On the positive side it allows students to watch the lecture at their own pace and in their own time. On the negative side it almost doubles the amount of time required from the lecturer and in addition to that one of the reasons for flipping a classroom is student engagement. The table below shows that students brain activity levels in a lecture are similar to when they are watching TV and lower than when they are sleeping. Providing a full lecture to watch through as screen is not necessarily going to improve that.

 2. 
Students are asked to prepare for classes by engaging with material before a class and are discouraged from being passive learners by the expectation that they come to class with a question or engage in an on-line discussion. Professors/teachers are therefore also able to prepare answers to questions that have been received beforehand. This may, in many respects, mean they are coming to class and 'lecturing' however the subject will have been created in response to student questions. In this scenario the information provided to the students can be as limited or as varied as the faculty's imagination. Heath and Prober suggest that based on accepted time frames for student concentration teachers could provide 10-15 minute online presentations that cover the basic concepts with reading material and embedded quizzes which provide instant feedback. Of course in every subject there are is a wealth of resources on the web which, combined with tailor made videos from a 'sage', can provide a bank of knowledge that can then be reused and revisited many times over.

    Despite the differing suggestions for pre-class work all sources suggest that the flipped-classroom should have interactive lessons based around case studies, real life problems and scenarios which students are encouraged to solve using all available resources. This may well include the on-line information as well as the faculty and their peers thus greatly increasing the breadth and depth of knowledge which students can apply to their problems.
References
Medical Education re-imagined; a call to action
Lecture halls without lectures - a proposal for medical education
How flipping the classroom can improve the traditional lecture

Flipping out in the classroom - The flipped class part 1

I have been thinking a lot recently about flipped classroom. What they are, how they work and how one could potentially be implemented in my current location. Here is part 1 of what I have been working on.

“The last substantive reform in medical student education followed the Flexner Report, which was written in 1910. In the ensuing 100 years, the volume of medical knowledge has exploded, the complexity of the health care system has grown, pedagogical methods have evolved, and unprecedented opportunities for technological support of learners have become available. Yet students are being taught roughly the same way they were taught when the Wright brothers were tinkering at Kitty Hawk.” (n engl j med 366;18)

The flipped-classroom is possibly the approach that will change medical education, in fact all education, if it is done in the correct way. However before we get the how and the why we should start with the what.

What is a flipped-classroom?
The flipped-classroom is the inverse of a traditional classroom where students do what is normally considered to be homework in class with their lecturer or teacher and outside of class they consume the information that may traditionally have been give in lecture format.

(The full infographic can be found here) 

As you can see from the illustration above, part of the process is changing the role of the teacher and the way they, as an educator, view their position in the classroom. It may be that the lecturer feels most common being 'the Sage on the Stage' but surely, the knowledge and expertise that made them sage like in the first place could be put to even more use if disseminated to the students through discussion and one-to-one or small group interaction. The sage on the stage is not being lost in the process either, more becoming the sage on TV, laptop, ipad or smartphone on the bus. The flipped-classroom is not an entirely new concept either. It can be seen to an extent in the socratic teaching methods used in Law instruction, where students must prepare for a class by reading and fully expect to be quizzed on their knowledge by a sagely professor. English Literature also works on the premise that you read the book before class, not in it and as Prober and Khan point out in their paper 'Medical education re-imagined. A call to action'1 Gross Anatomy classes are also essentially a form of flipping where by students must know their text book anatomy before they can do dissections in a lab. 

References 
Lecture Halls without Lectures, a proposal for Medical Education
Medical Education re-imagined, a call to action  
 
 

Things I have learn't about articulate storyline today

When making complicated slides with multiple data entry fields - which is possible, if time consuming - the temptation to duplicate the slides and change the questions is as tempting as a mirage in the desert BUT in the little letters at the right of your screen pay attention.

It changes things - be ware of the number of your data entry field when you are changing the values!! You have been warned!

If you thought scroll of death was bad...

... try this on for size!

How many file systems do you see?
4?
Actually there are really only three but it makes your head hurt a bit doesn't it.
What you are looking at is the file system on computer drive, the file system in Blackboard Learn and the front end navigation system that the students use.

So what you say. Its just some files in some folders... mmmmm, that is what I thought. Files that need to be constantly upgraded in both places! I inherited a system where the shiny student interface was always up-to-date and the computer drive was always up-to-date but the in between was the stuff that horror films are made of.

I should also add that these systems are accessible by multiple people and as you can imagine have the potential to get horribly messy unless some kind of system is put in place.
I am hoping that we now have a system. I am also hoping it will work. Only time will tell.

My system is thus. Working back from the student interface, all folders have the same name as do all the files inside them. So a person in the computer system would look in the same place for a document that the student would. Hence if you need to overwrite something you always no where to look. Furthermore if one person updates the file on one system... they must update it on the other!
That way everyone knows where they are.
Fortunately I have an awesome admin team who appreciates the art of good filing.


In the future wouldn't it be nice to have one system that is all joined together... what's that you say?? Equella?
Watch this space

real time... moodle on the wall

How to use a teachers page on moodle in a real time classroom... quick and dirty.
How to add a bit of techno-snap to a lesson in 15 minutes.

Imagine I am teaching from Straight Forward Advanced – Chapter 5

I need some supplementary material and I know I have a room with a projector (maybe even an IWB)

What do I do?

Step 1 - Create a warmer.

• The teachers book suggests writing 4 names on the boar... YAWN!
• I copy and paste 4 pictures into a moodle page an Bob's your uncle... you have 4 pictures on the wall of you classroom!
  
  
  
  
  

Step 2  - The next activity in the book is a snarly reading activity with some fairly tricky words in it, even for me, so I can create a glossary in Moodle which can have many functions.

1. Acts as a vocabulary box but without the need for cutting up little pieces of paper. Teachers after all should not be allowed to use scissors unsupervised.
2. Students can be involved in making the definitions – they learn while making life much easier for you. 
3. Words can be added to throughout the week so by your review session on Friday you have an awesome bank of words and you can....
4. ...create a hangman game with. Then sit back and watch your students play happily while you take a na... mark their home work. 
5. You can also share the glossaries with your colleagues (making you very popular) so you get the benefit of several classes worth of extra vocab feeding into one dynamic beast. Multiply this by every chapter of every course book and Moodle glossaries may take over the world. Use with caution.
   
   
   

Step 3 is the grammar... no one likes it but there it is!

1. Instead of copying 12 pages from murphy – come on everyone does it – you can add a link to a page from the British Council. Stick it on the wall, explain it, write over it and then do the nice little exercise at the end.
2. It is embedded in Moodle so even the British council site is all nice and branded – suits you sir!
3. You could also find some more links to on-line activities which students can do on the board or you can write your own worksheet to hand out and then put it on Moodle for next time.

Because yes there will always be a next time!

Save the environment... start e-learning

I recently went on course for hockey coaching which turned the tables on me a little. I went from being learning provider to learner and I have to admit I didn't like it all that much. They say doctors make terrible patients and I imagine the same goes for teachers being hypercritical of other training providers. Well that is my excuse and I am sticking to it!

Both trainers were obviously very good hockey coaches but evidently disliked being in a classroom, as of course did the 30 odd hockey players sitting in front of them with a folder full of paper. A combination of a bunch of sports people sitting in a room and a load of unnecessary paper got me thinking. Why do we persist in forcing trainees to fill in lots of boxes on a bit of paper while half-heartedly discussing it in groups. I will confess at this point, I hate group work and always have but as a teacher I also see that there is limited point in giving people a question, asking them to discuss it and then showing the answers. 80% of the time there is nothing to be gained from the discussion which inevitably leaves the 20% that would be great to talk about with limited time. Equally giving people a stack of info and some papers seems a little bit like a test, not to mention a total waste of classroom time. Time which you could use to practice coaching techniques, discuss the rules or, just putting it out there... playing hockey!

So what is the answer?
Clearly everyone has access to a computer with the internet because one of the course pre-requisites was an on-line safeguarding course so why not give attendees and information handbook in .pdf (so if people want the paper copy they can) and a nice little on-line quiz which they can do in their own time before the course thus freeing up a nice amount of time to focus on things which are actually better when done in a group!

My control has lost focus

I have spent quite a lot of time recently trying to work out how to make Articulate storyline do what I want and I have been making ever more complicated slides.

 

Thus far at least they seem to be working although it frustrates me that Storyline does not have a feature which allows you to put more than one data entry field into a slide without having to do through the whole performance of setting triggers outside of the field to actually select the answers. 

It is also frustrating because I am yet to work out how to tell Storyline to unselect a box if the user changes their mind. As it stands at the moment,  if the student selects no and then changes their mind to select yes both boxes 'correct' and 'incorrect' boxes will be selected forcing the slide to return with a wrong answer. 

However I am still having fun trying to make things bend to my will....

Sarajevo, Mostar, Srebrenice. Experience, Remember, Learn.

This is not anything to do with e-learning but it is about education, about remembering and about learning.

Travel broadens the mind. Or in this case opens your mind to things you knew were there but didn't fully understand. I remember the war in the Balkans, I knew it was happening, I knew bad things were happening but I didn't really grasp the magnitude of it until I went to Bosnia, saw the bullet holes, the rows of freshly dug graves and the bags of bodies that are still unidentified almost 20 years later. Having been to this beautiful country and met people who will go out of their way to pick up 4 strange foreigners because it is raining I want to try and explain it, to myself and to anyone that is interested but hasn't had the opportunity to experience the beautiful scenery, the wonderful people and the heartbreaking history that is still visible and will be for many years. 

Like any city Sarajevo his its monuments to past residents. I personally have always found a sense of beauty in graveyards, especially in places where they still exude a sense of family and togetherness. This set of old stones (Muslim graves have a stone for head and feet) to me shows a life well lived and an afterlife to be cherished. In Sarajevo however, my overwhelming feeling about its cemeteries was somewhat skewed because of the sheer number of them.

Every neighbourhood has one, and they are large. That is not to say that they aren't wonderful memorials to people that have been lost in the city but for me it was very hard to see so many and covering such a short space of time. The majority of the dates are between 1992 and 1995 when the city was under siege. 

The dates are even harder to look at on the children’s memorial where the names of young people who died during the conflict are remembered. Zuko (Suad) Adi 1994 -1995.

The city bears its scars as well as the people, much of the city centre has been rebuilt and restored to its former beauty but some buildings, or rather shells of buildings, still remain to show the damage the was done to the city, very recently, in my life time. It is also apparent in the hills surrounding the city which, from a distance, look like a hikers paradise. Tree covered mountains, spectacular views but inaccessible to anyone. The countryside was mined during the war and still is, a problem which is still claiming the lives of innocent people.

Leaving Sarajevo you can take one of the most spectacular bus/train routes imaginable to Mostar, a strikingly beautiful city with a crystal clear river running through the centre spanned by very a famous bridge. Constructed in the 16^th century and destroyed in 1993 after standing over the river for 427 years. A piece of world heritage that was destroyed forever in one mortar hit. The bridge has been rebuilt and is now a UNESCO world heritage site but it is clear that it is not the original structure.

The rest of the city also has its scars, more so than in Sarajevo presumably because of financial limitations. The scars are still displayed with a certain kind of pride to the thousands of tourists that travel through the city every year and there are still many many buildings that have been almost totally destroyed although many of them have been reclaimed, to an extent, by street art. Using the bullet holes in the walls as part of the picture I hope this is a sign that the city and the people are healing because it, like Sarajevo is a beautiful city with kind, welcoming and generally amazing people who have experienced and witnessed things that most of us can only imagine and could in no way begin to understand.

The sieges in Mostar and Sarajevo however are only part of the history. The name Srebrenice is probably familiar to many from the news broadcasts of the 90's. I know that I remember hearing it as a child but the full weight of what happened there cannot be comprehended, even a little, until you have stood at the memorial in Potocari. The memorial to the thousands of people killed there, in what was at the time a UN safe zone, and the 10's of thousands who were forced to leave during the process that became known as ethnic cleansing.

The memorial is the burial site of people who were killed there on July 11^th 1995, most of the of them Bosnian Muslim men, and were then buried in mass graves around the country, some of which are still to be found. The memorial shows the names of all the people buried there, currently that number is over 6500 and holds entire families. 

I have visited war memorials and holocaust memorials but only here have I witnessed the freshly dug graves and been around the relatives of the people buried there. Every year on July 11^th more people are laid to rest, this year over 400 victims. Almost 20 years on and people are still being identified and many more are still missing and will in all likelihood never be found. Meaning some families will never get the closure they need.

I was also given a somewhat unique opportunity for someone in my position to visit the facility where victims are given back their identities. On top of the many thousands of victims already identified and returned to their families the ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons) facility still has over a thousand remains to be identified. Many of these bodies are not complete and may never be complete leaving families with a decision to bury whatever percentage of their loved one has been found or whether to wait and hope more will be found. This is a decision no one should have to make and for many of the families in the area they are making this decision multiple times for husbands, brothers, sons, fathers.

I am still not sure I have processed in my own mind the magnitude of seeing so many fresh graves, so many grieving families, so much work still to be done but I hope by sharing my experiences that more people will take 5 minutes to think about what happened in Bosnia and maybe take a step closer to not letting this kind of thing happen again, to anyone, anywhere.

Let Me See about that SCORM

My challenge of the day was to get my SCORM package created in Storyline into Blackboard and reporting to the gradebook.
It took me a few attempts (and an email from a helpful colleague) to get them right but I seem to be getting reports into the gradebook from a PC and a tablet so it is looking good :)

Step 1 - Player settings.

When I first tested on an tablet (Samsung) I had this problem.

The submit button was cut of and I could not resize the screen. It worked if I rotated the screen but that left the player very small. So in player settings I did this...

(worth  noting is, even in my super awesome version of Blackboard where files update automatically if they are changed in the file system, SCORM packages don't seem to update. I had to remove and rebuild the package)
- although that could just be me -


Step 2 - LMS settings

When publishing the story you are also given options for reporting.

Under advisement I set my reporting to pass/fail.
I think - purely speculation at this point - that if you set it to complete/incomplete for it to report to the grade book you also need to change the settings on your results slide.

Finally - The SCORM settings

My SCORM settings looked like this. The top half of course changes depending on your requirements but under advisement again I set the grading settings as shown.

I tried messing with them and didn't get results in my grade book so this is my settings and I am sticking with them!






And just to prove it works...

Here is my grade book with multiple results reported!

Articulate - multiple answers on 1 slide

My only frustration with storyline at the moment is not being able to have a question that has multiple part answers. After reading a few blog posts however I have found a work around. 

First create your slide with the objects you need then add extra buttons for the number of correct answers. On mine you can see I have three blank boxes (numeric entry objects) so I have created three 'correct' buttons to correspond to them. For ease of identification later I renamed the objects to match their corresponding buttons. The 'correct' buttons are out side the slide so they are not visible to the students.

Then convert the slide to a 'freeform pick many'

This process works by adding logic operations to the slide. These operators are added as triggers that tell articulate to select the correct button if a specific answer is entered into the numeric entry field. If the student answers an incorrect answer the button will not be selected and the slide will return and incorrect answer.


Select new trigger and your trigger wizard should look like this...

• Where 'button 1' is my 1st 'correct' button
• Object 'MEAN' is the numeric entry box associated with MEAN 
• control loses focus seems to be the term for the change of state of a text entry box - the logic escapes me but this is how I got it to work.

You then need to add conditions by opening the 'show conditions' tab at the bottom of the page.

• Add a condition by clicking the green + in the bottom right corner
• Then you can specify your variables
• 'NumericEntry 6' is the name of the box which I called MEAN 
• Then you only need to select the operator you want and the appropriate value. 

After you have added conditions to all your buttons you can edit your pick many slide in the normal way and you should get a multiple answer question on 1 slide...

Or that is the theory anyway.

Learner time, learner control and learner engagement

I was reading Clive Shepherd's - Clive on Learning blog this week and have a few reflections on what he has written. Clive on Learning is primarily about providing training in the business sector so has slightly different priorities to those of learning techs in the education sector but in his series of visions I think he made some valid point that I think are worth considering for university students as well.

Vision 2 - economical learning

"time spent learning could have been used productively elsewhere" 

I think this is particularly relevant to the kind of ungraded e-learning content that I am working on providing. Students, many of whom also work, will always have course work or assessments to do which are a graded part of their course so why would they spend time doing other activities? If they are going to complete an exercise that is not graded they need to know how and why it is relevant to a course of study that they are taking. I think the best way to do this is probably to tell them as part of the assessment. This assessment is designed to... etc. 

Time is also important to students especially if they are juggling a course, a job and a family. In this respect I think it also important to tell students how long a task is going to take them, this should enable them to manage their time in a more efficient way. This probably falls under a topic I have written about before namely 'signposting' in an on-line environment this takes the place of the teacher as there is no one person who will physically give students this information. With learner time commitments in mind it is also very important that all questions are valid and worthwhile and adhere to the general principles of assessment.

Vision 4 - flexible learning

“Adults expect to have control over what they learn, when and where and will increasingly demand it. They expect it because they have grown accustomed to finding whatever information they need at the click of a mouse from Google, YouTube and Wikipedia. Synchronous learning (that takes place with others, at a specific time, perhaps in a virtual classroom) can be powerful, but it is certainly not flexible. It means you have have to compromise on when you learn in order to suit others. Similarly, face-to-face learning can add a great deal of value when used for the right purposes, but is highly inflexible. Being face-to-face means you have to compromise on where you learn in order to suit others.”

I don't really have any comments on this other than to say that this is what I am aiming to do and think it will become more and more relevant as the next generation of students who have been exposed to google, YouTube and Wikipedia for their whole lives come through into higher education and consequently bring with them a higher set of expectations relating to the technology they expect from their learning institutions. 

Vision 5 - Engaging learning

"Engaging the learner is about getting the elephant on board. While the rider may be engaged by the long-term benefits of a learning activity or an intellectual curiosity, the elephant is much more interested in what’s in it for him right now." In this example the elephant is the intellect and the rider is the learner.  

Clear goals, immediate feedback and a sense of control are some of the things which Clive suggests are a way of making learning engaging for adult learners and I whole heartedly agree. The sense of control in some ways come from the goals and the feedback, for example including links to information relating to the questions so students can find the answers to wrong questions rather than just showing right or wrong answers.  In addition showing learners what they will gain from an activity, particularly a voluntary one,  allows them to plan and direct their own learning and gives them a sense of control. Clive also suggests that "the elephant may also be motivated by a challenge - perhaps a game which involves some form of competition. Humour may also do the trick, or just plain novelty." In addition to that I would also (as you have probably worked out by now) suggest that something pleasing to look at and easy to use is also a good way, if not to motivate the elephant, to keep the elephant engaged while working through a boring or challenging subject. 

My first storyline

After some discussions about using the quizzing tools in Blackboard vs using other software to come up with something prettier (see earlier post about educational aesthetics) my bosses bought me my very own authoring tool, articulate storyline. This is not a post about why one tool is better than another, more that this is what my colleagues use so this is what I have, but a post about a new toy and my first attempt at doing something with it. It is a bit like lego but more professional!

I have inherited some e-learning content which was made by an external company so I cannot edit it and furthermore it does not provide us with any student results so there is no way of tracki... blah blah, that is not the point. The point is my new toy.

I am making a pre/post test which in theory is given to the students before they start the module and then again at the end of the module. The first thing I wanted to do with this quiz was to add in some aims and objectives so students know what they are doing and why they are doing it. So my front page currently looks a bit like this (subject to edits).

Before I started the projects I created templates for the front page and for each question type so there is a level of continuity going through, not just this particular test, but all the tests on the course. I hope this will also reduce my workload by meaning I can import and edit slides rather than building from new every time.


My second task was, of course, to create some questions. Standard multiple choice questions are easy to achieve but can, in my opinion look a bit dull especially if you are answering 50 questions in a row. Which is why I have varied the format slightly by making some of the questions with numbers for answers into squares rather than just normal lines of options.

 


In addition to this I spent a bit of time with the questions before hand and worked out which I could make into different formats and which I could add graphics to, so as to further break up what could be a very monotonous test. I was able to utilise most of the available question formats, including the hot spot question.

How could you not want to do a quiz with skeletons in it?

The pre test does not have much feedback other than correct/incorrect however the plan is to use the same questions again for the post test and add in a feedback slide for each question so that students are not only told the correct answer but are given suggestions for reading to help them focus on areas which still need work. This can help them prepare for examinations or just be used as a consolidation of work done.

Finally, I just want to revisit the question of aesthetics for a moment. After having a discussion with a friend about using an authoring tool over blackboard quizzes I had to argue that while BB quizzes may be more functional, easier to edit and many other things, they simply do not look nice. To start with the opening page looks like this...

and the questions look like this...

Which would you rather do?

The tests I am making are formative, they are essentially for the student's personal benefit. It is my opinion that they need to look a little bit fun or they will be a chore and students are much less likely to gain the educational value from them. So before I become a broken record. My favourite thing about my 1st storyline quiz, is that it was fun to build and I am excited to make another one!

16 reasons why...

... I want an interactive white board. The student made excellent presentations which, as per the course policy, were filmed but the written aspect of those presentations was done on flipchart paper. So instead of nice screen captures from and IWB we had 16 photos of pieces of flipchart paper uploaded to Blackboard.
Sigh!

A transfer of light and sound

I was filming a lecture on diabetes management today and the lecturer set the students a group task and prefixed it with: “A lecture is just a transfer of light and sound what you are going to do next is learning.” I thought this was a rather charming description of the 'teaching' method common to most higher education institutions. He was absolutely right when he said “learning happens when you interact and engage with the material” and this is exactly what he had them do. They were given three areas of research and asked to discuss in groups and then present the information from their papers. As a lecturer he could have easily summarised the information and compared the three papers in 2 or 3 slides, and I think many in his position would have, but as an educator he made the students involve themselves with information. Furthermore in adding a level of peer evaluation to it the students are more focussed on knowing and presenting the info because it is important for them to stay on a level with their peers. Some may argue that at a masters level students should have the skills to take presented information and learn from it. However I am not sure at what point Higher Education stopped teaching and started presenting. You wouldn't expect an 8 year old or a language student to watch a presentation, listen to some facts and understand maths or become a proficient English speaker. So why expect the same of a student studying for a masters.

Web-based learning functionality

I found this action research project written by some strange woman... (me) and I have been revisiting some of the ideas in it and how they have changed with technology changes since I wrote it.

Web based learning has at least seven areas of functionality to take into account. Real time announcements so students are as up to date as possible with changes and information. Real time grading and feedback systems allowing students some of the interactions that may be missing by the removal of a tutor in person. A facility for posting materials in any format that will be accessible to both students and teachers on a variety of operating systems. External links and reading lists that students will need throughout their course in one accessible place. Automated quizzes, worksheets and tests to keep the work interactive on some level Discussion boards and chat rooms to facilitate student to student and student to teacher communication An email function that allows private communication between students and teachers about topics which should not be discussed on the message boards and forums. (Roberts, T. S., & McInnerney, J. M., 2007)

This list of functionalities is based on a course undertaken entirely on-line but how would they need to be changed or developed to take into consideration the possibility that some students will be in full attendance, some in part time attendance and some totally distance based. It strikes me that in any course where some or all of the students are distance learners all of the above points remain equally important as students must all be offered the same resources and information. This emphasises the importance of a CMS such as moodle or Blackboard as it provides a level playing field of information for all students. I think it is important however to train students and staff alike in what interactions are expected of them and how to use the information that is provided as part of an initial introduction. For example, tell students that all information will be posted as announcements on their CMS. Feedback will be sent to them and their teachers via the gradebook and set up a protocol for the answering of questions. All information should be in .pdf form and ideally labelled in a uniform way (although this could just be me being a tad OCD about filling). Staff throughout all courses/modules post links to the CMS in the same way so students do not have to learn a slight variation in the system for every module leader. As much as possible should be automated rather than 'on paper'. Although there is a level at which this becomes unrealistic. Discussion boards can be a fantastic learning tool but are worthless if they are not widely used, this also should be part of the induction packages that gives students an idea of what is expected of them and how they should be using the available forums. Likewise, in many content management systems there are a variety of methods for sending personal messages, along with institution emails and private emails. There should be a precedent set from the begging of the course regarding how students should contact various staff members.

In addition to this there is also the possibility of using social media to encourage learning and sharing of information, that however is for another post.

Information vs performance in e-learning

I was reading this blog and it got me thinking about the differences (if there are any) between commercial training and education. In commercial training, as outlined in the blog I was reading, the focus is often on compliance and establishing that goals have been achieved and protocol is understood. I would suggest in an educational setting the focus is more on gaining knowledge and cementing understanding but the process is generally the same.
Information based courses provide the learner with the knowledge that they need, however as the author points out this is often unnecessary as the information is probably somewhere else. This is definitely true of the Masters Programme I have been working on where the information is provided in a variety of forms. Lectures, attended or watched on-line, reading lists provided by the faculty or peer led debates or discussion forums for sharing information. I am not sure this entirely negates the need for information based e-learning content but it certainly suggests that the focus should be on directing students to appropriate locations rather than feeding them information.

Action based learning focuses on enabling a student to use the information that they already possess. This type of e-learning content is also in abundance within the masters programme. Where students are provided with case studies, multiple choice quizzes, interactive 'formative' assessments and pre/post tests. As mentioned in a previous post I am upgrading from Blackboard CE8 to Blackboard Learn, this gives me a chance to re-evaluate the current e-learning material and perhaps enhance it.

Information vs performance e-learning provides an interesting view on the way the information is already presented. As it stands at the moment the course effectively has both but they are almost totally independent of each other. This, I think, is a problem. By simply adding links to both sections the information and the activation can be joined together. For example a case study which is essentially a set of questions based on real or simulate information assumes knowledge of certain pieces of information. If the educational purpose of the case study is to definitively test if a student knows the information then there is no reason to provide a link to that information. However if the case study is a formative assessment meant to cement knowledge by asking the student to actively engage with it then there is no reason a set of resources should not be provided for reference. This also encourages students to revisit information and provides links with that information and the real world application that is being tested in the case study.

The formative assessments, in the form of multiple choice quizzes or graphical drag and drop exercises, provided are also purely an activity for students to complete on their own. They are interacting with it in a somewhat 2 dimensional way. If students were in a classroom situation working with these activities, teacher led or not, students would almost certainly develop a discussion on the content or make comments to each other. This adds another dimension to the way students interact with the information and with each other and I think this level of interaction should also be encouraged in distance learning. Whether or not students will have the same level of uptake as they would in class is another matter but I think it is worth a try.

 As I mentioned each module also has a pre/post test attached to it. This subscribes to the test-teach-test approach which definitely has benefits for the student. However I think the presentation of the pre and the post test should be slightly different. The pre-test should, in an ideal world, be used by teachers to make sure that students get the information they need from the module. The post test should prove that they have. However, what if they do not get 100%? The principles of assessment tell us that all assessment must be relevant and I am not sure that assessment can be fully relevant if no feedback is given. So the post test should probably include links back to the information to help students find the answers to questions that they did not answer correctly.

In essence I can see the benefits of e-learning being solely information based, or performance based but their needs to be links between the two areas to provide a total and rounded learning and assessment experience for students. 

Should on-line education be aesthetically pleasing?

I am currently working on upgrading a course from Blackboard CE8 to Blackboard Learn. At face value the course is set up to look very visual with large icons and graphics. However because of the restrictions of the CE8 system the file contents where the student information actually kept, mostly in the form of pdf documents and weblinks. it looks in many ways like the file manager on windows 95. 
Blackboard learn is in some ways much friendlier and allows for icons and a much cleaner approach to the file systems making it look and feel a lot more like a smooth web tool than Windows 95, which is good, but I have found myself wondering... Is it worth it?

I personally think that students are more likely to engage with information that provided for them if it is easily accessible, well labelled and looks attractive. Which would be why publishers spend large amounts of money on the layout and design of textbooks. Furthermore in a digital age where students have grown up with the soft and well rounded aesthetics of sites like Facebook and the BBC I-player this is what they expect from educational websites. Perhaps a clunky, unfriendly system would have the same educational content but this means very little if students are unwilling to use, or fully engage with, the materials because the system is either hard to use or looks outdated. Which could in turn cause students to believe that the information is outdated.

Friendly moodle - signposts

In my attempts to make moodle more friendly, particularly for foreign students I have been thinking a lot about sign posting. Not in the traditional sense of arrows which point one way or the other but more about providing a platform that is easy for students to navigate by using links and icons.

To an extent I think I had some success in this area with the LTC moodle and the beautifully designed icons which were both visually striking and containing relevant information. In my IELTS course I am slightly restricted by the confines of the course layout so there is no possibility for big icons as such.

What I started with was a set of bullet points directing students to activities which they should complete before starting on their course. 

It is clear that this set of instructions was lacking in some way when a student asked why there was no practice test to ascertain level built into the course.

What I did to improve this situation was to rewrite the section into as set of points each of which including a link which takes students straight to the item they need to read or complete. This has the effect of removing at least one stage of the process and giving students a more straightforward link to the information you need them to have.

Distance in a classroom

I was recently presented with an interesting situation, I have been tasked with adapting a blended lecture course to make it accessible for students to take wholly as a distance course. Part of this task is to film lectures which can then be posted on the university VLE thus allowing distance students to watch them and physical students to revisit them in their own time.

Due to a series of unfortunate events two out of four speakers were unable to attend and the final speaker not due until 3pm giving the students several hours to kill and no lectures. Fortuitously both missing lectures had given their presentations before and had been filmed so we could used the recoding equipment in reverse to show the lectures from last year. In addition to this, to create an element of interactivity I created forums to go with each lecture to allow students to post questions even though the lecturer was not there to answer them in person. I encountered a little resistance from the academics at this as they did not want to get drawn into a discussion in which they are required to participate every day. Taking this on board as a very valid point I went ahead and created the questions forum anyway (I know – slap on the wrist) but prefixed it by telling the students that the questions would be given single answers and were not open for discussion.

In defence of my rather wilful disobedience if the course is being opened up for total distance learning there will need to be ways in which students can interact with each other, with the materials and with the lecturers. So in theory as part of delivering a lecture speakers may perhaps need to add an additional hour into their schedules a few days after speaking to log in to the forums and answer questions. If it is established from the start what format the questions should be in and when and in what form the speakers will respond all parties will know what to expect. When moving into the world of distance learning, as my last moodle post alludes to, communication is everything.

I was also given the opportunity to observe students as they were watching the lectures in a way similar to how they would if they were alone. However as there was not lecturer present and talking was not quite so taboo the students started a discussion mid lecture. It seems to me that this kind of spontaneous discussion should, if possible, be captured without disruption to the lecture. After the video had finished I encouraged the students to go and start a discussion thread to see if they could take the debate out of the classroom and into the VLE.

In an ideal world discussions could be started and questions posted in real time via smartphones, ipads etc and after the lecture from the comfort of home. As it stands at the moment Blackboard does not load well on touch screen devices but that is a battle for another day.

Moodle friendly: friendly moodle

In an earlier post I was pondering how to make classroom materials moodle friendly so that an IELTS course could be delivered through the platform as a distance course. I believe I have been largely successful in that task although time and students will be the judge of that. However a piece of feedback from one of the initial students to use the course was that the course was unsuitable because it was missing certain elements. Elements which I had put into the course because as the student quite rightly pointed out they are quite important for the study of IELTS. It can them be assumed that the problem is not the course content but moodle navigation. After some discussions with colleagues it seems the problem is the inverse to the initial one of making moodle friendly courses in as much as we need to make moodle courses friendly to the user.

I have not yet worked out how to do this but my first step has been to put a link with pictures to the teacher profiles so it is clear how to contact them with an additional skype button so students are made aware that it is, not only ok but, encouraged to use skype as a means of communication. To me this is just a cosmetic difference but may indeed make students feel more welcome on the site the larger task will be to make the site easily navigable for students whose native language is not English. Perhaps in this case the tab settings to reduce scroll of death are not helpful and should be removed to make way for visible (and larger) icons.

… to be continued

I took three weeks off of e-tech to go travelling in China to visit some former students. Don't worry I am not about to blog about my holidays, there is educational relevance. I was given an amazing opportunity while staying in provincial China, with a school teacher, to visit schools in her small city and I feel that as an English teacher visiting students learning English I must make some comment. First of all the reception I was given from my friends students (middle school kids) gave me a little bit of an insight into how it might feel to be Justin Beiber. I was terrified. In an informal setting they were all squeals and excitement but when it came to being allowed to ask questions and speak to me in English they were instantly very shy. Understandable I guess, most of them will have never had the opportunity to speak with a native speaker. From what I gather from talking to their teachers there is very little focus on speaking the language, they must pass exams and that is that, on top of that a lot of the kids view English as less important than their other subjects because it is not relevant to their lives at all. They are very lucky to have a teacher who speaks very very good English, many kids are not so lucky the language and pronunciation skills of a lot of the teachers I met were not that great. I can only hope that meeting me inspires at least one or two of these kids to see that learning a language can be a way out and a great opportunity for them to travel and that this will make them try harder with their own language learning.

I am trying not to judge the Chinese school system, it is very different from ours and while I find it hard to stomach a system which has kids in school from 7 am to 7 pm and then piles on the homework I am quite sure that people from around the world also think our school system is ridiculous. Although you would never see kids in an English classroom sitting so still and quiet for such long periods of time, or English parents suggesting that the teachers use more physical methods of punishment. I cannot say is this is good or bad, just different.

I also got a chance to visit another school on some kind of open day where the kids were all doing other activities such as art and music. Again I was struck by how much like a university physics lecture they all resembled. Expert at the front talking, kids sat in silence listening or practising. I did get to have a go at paper cutting.... terrible at it.. such a bad student. I would never fit in at a Chinese school (I only got the giggles once).