#ocTEL2014 - Approaches to Learning: deep, strategic, and surface

Learning styles is a contentious topic and #ocTEL does acknowledge it. However, Week -2 'if you only do one thing' activity is :
to think about the general idea of ‘approaches to learning’ in relation to online learning. Questions for consideration are:

• Have you seen any evidence of these different approaches in online contexts, e.g. in technology-enhanced courses you teach? How did these differences manifest themselves in terms of online learning behaviour?
• Are you leaning towards one approach in particular on ocTEL, and if so why might that be? Perhaps you are employing strategies from more than one approach?
• Are learners who tend to take a ‘surface’ approach likely to learn more or less effectively online versus face-to-face?
• How might we encourage ‘deep learning’ in online contexts?

I am not sure I will be addressing all these questions but let me reflect on my approach to learning.

I really liked the blog post by @chcoll on the lines "Deep" learning is not the ideal. I tend to change my style of learning all the time depending on what I want at that point. If I wanted to quickly learn something to do a task say I wanted to write a programme script for something in a language I am non familiar with, I would search to find a similar source code and modify it to my needs. I may not go into studying all the little details of the language but I would focus on what is needed at that point for me. Now is this a form of surface learning? Some may say that it is but, I see it as surface + strategic learning (extrinsic motivation to complete the task at hand). 

As a creator/facilitator in a MOOC: I facilitated two runs of Begin Programming: build your first mobile game, a University of Reading MOOC on FutureLearn. In this beginner course we provide a game framework and explore various basic programming concepts each week by modifying the game. This video gives a brief overview of what we are doing.

In this course we used videos, articles, quizzes and discussions. When designing formative quizzes we used questions to check knowledge, the understanding they have and their ability to apply it to a different problem. In the 4th week (mid course) and at the end (7th week) we had dedicated discussion topics on reflection, in fact the 7th week of the course was all about consolidation, reflection and celebration. There is also a discussion in week 7 where we ask learners to think about one of the features in a game they like and try to deconstruct it - or think how programmers have developed the feature using building blocks that we teach in the course. This too in my view facilitates the higher order thinking skills that we expect from our learners. I think we sufficiently supported our learners to get knowledge, apply it, and reflect on their learning. 

Now as a learner in a MOOC:
I am on a statistical programming course that runs these days on a popular MOOC site. I find the material to be good but even after you go through them you cannot do the assignment unless you have prior programming knowledge. The assignments are difficult and very vague (example, assignment explains 3 parts for the question and you are expected to submit answers to 10! to be fair on making this point in my blog, I asked one of my colleague at work to have a look at the assignment and and he found instructions to be 'appalling'). Submitting assignments is a total nightmare due to various technical difficulties. Once I submit the answers (somehow) I get told that the answer is 'Correct!' but I do not get full marks. As a learner I am interested to know even after my program identically matches the output required why it is not getting the full marks allocated (who would not?) - that is feedback. Then I would learn what I could have done better. But there is no mechanism to support that. (Also if I click and view feedback it says I have got 2.0/2.0 but when adding up I am only given 1.6/2.0 - inconsistency doesn't help either!) There may be technical difficulties but then could they not provide 'ideal solution' under the 'honour code' only for those who have submitted already? The course does not say a previous course run by the university is a prerequisite but then seem to 'assume' that everyone 'knows' them. To be fair, I've taken (and completed!) another MOOC on the same platform but in that too I observed similar issues. (I really hope not all MOOCs on this platform are like that and my experience is in the minority).

 Biggs(1999) argues that
[g]ood teaching is getting most students to use the higher cognitive level processes that the more academic students use spontaneously (Biggs, 1999:58).
He suggests that to ensure learners reach the level of understanding generally achieved by 'academic Susan' (or learners who take deep approach to learning) teachers have to create more favourable and active learning opportunities for other ordinary learners. Not only that, he shows that assignments should align with teaching and that with the objectives set out in the course. 
He shows that "[l]ack of alignment is a major reason why students adopt a surface approach to learning" (Biggs, 1999:69). 

But sadly I think some MOOCs are not designed with these in mind - at least some of the ones I have taken. When this happens it may lead to unfavourable conditions for ordinary students while 'academic Susan' may still be able to excel. 

References:Biggs, J. (1999). What the Student Does: teaching for enhanced learning, Higher Education Research & Development, 18(1), 57-75.

#ocTEL Week 2 Explorer - Learner Diversity

Try to find one example from your own practice, or an example or resource from elsewhere, that you think exemplifies good practice in taking a technology-enhanced approach to addressing a key aspect of learner diversity.

I am a team member of the Begin Programming: Build your first mobile game on FutureLearn platform (see a short video what we do here ). We offered our MOOC twice now and third run is scheduled for October 2014. In designing the MOOC we adapted good practice guides to cater to differently-abled students. We provided transcripts for all videos, made them accessible by reducing graphics and basically adhered to all the adviced we received from the platform.

However, in the first run of the course we realised that our participants who were hard of hearing had difficulty with videos because on introduction video for each week a background music was being played. We had about 18% of over 55s in our first run and this was a distraction for lot of them. The team got the videos redone for second run without music but this time we had a different issue. We had a colour blind learner with us and as you may have seen from the video above, the game framework we provide creates an app that is green and red - the worst colours for colour blind people as she put it. Luckily it was only a matter of customisation to change colours of the app and I answered her query for help within couple of minutes. But this showed us that despite adhering to guidelines of best practices still we can potentially exclude learners had our game not being customizable.

In the same course we had a different forms of exclusion due to learners being residing on countries/areas where either internet access was monitored and access to some sites were blocked or broadband access was not available. For example a learner from Cambodia complained that he was not allowed to download Java software from the website. We had other learners with narrow band internet access trying desperately to access videos. We were able to allow them access to download them but due to platform guidelines we were not able to offer them a low resolution version of the videos. Here where I live now (Reading, UK) broadband internet access is taken for granted. But that is not the case in most areas of the developing countries and in some rural parts of the developed countries. We have tried our best to feed our learners concerns and feedback to the platform and we hope there will be a solution to at least the video download problem in our third run.

#ocTEL2014: Activity 0.1 Big and Little Questions about Technology Enhanced Learning

I joined #ocTEL MOOC by Association for Learning Technology (ALT). However as always I am late! But this time not only because I was busy at work but also because I am doing another MOOC with Coursera that also run concurrently - actually two but due to the difficulty of accessing materials on my mobile I gave up one of them. Two weeks behind I am trying to catch up.

Week 0 we are asked to

reflect on your work experience and ambitions for developing your teaching

and

Can you identify the most important question about TEL that matters to you?

I am currently working as a Research Assistant, heavily involved in creating, facilitating, and researching MOOCs. I do a little bit of teaching now but I have experience as a lecturer as well as a Teaching Assistant in Higher Educational settings. Apart from my professional work I enjoy exploring how children learn and my subjects are my preschool twins.

I come from a developing country where access to technology is scares (not merely physical access but also skills, language etc). My PhD work was also on this topic and with that background I always question the accessibility of learning materials when technology is involved. Don't get me wrong that I am against the use of educational technology - far from it.

The big question in the sky by Kevin Dooley - https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2672/3983181467_0c36538d82_z_d.jpg

Reading Sue Buckingham's post I think she poses a very important question.

"Why when there is now so much evidence that our future graduates need to develop a range of digital skills and understand how to use these alongside social media to communicate and collaborate, do we not see all courses embedding opportunities for students to learn how to confidently and effectively develop digital literacies?"

Another question is how do we keep up to date with the technology changes and get our students to do the same. In order to support students to gain the skills and develop the kind of digital literacies required of them educators need to be educated.

But thinking about what question matters to me most I realised my big question still is 'access'. By access I mean motivational, material, skills and usage accesses as defined by van Dijk in his book 'Deepening Divide'. So my big question is actually an umbrella question covering a lot of ground.

Dipping my toes in the sea of 'Learning Analytics'

This morning I received data from our second run of Begin Programming: build your first mobile game. The data from previous run of the course was already with me but I had not been able to dig into them. So today I took my first steps into using RapidMiner for data analysis (using the knowledge I gathered from the FutureLearn Academic Network Workshop) and managed to run a process for sentiment analysis on user reflections.

The process showed me that out of the 300 comments I analysed 248 were positive and 25 were negative, which can be interpreted to say the majority of comments on course reflections were positive.

Image by: DigitalRalph https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7422/12938324815_a21c70e832_b_d.jpg

However, as a researcher when analysing qualitative data, I do love to 'see' all of my data. I want to read the comments and get the minute details that may be 'lost' otherwise. But when the amount of data to be analysed is huge, for example data from a MOOC with many thousands of participants, these software tools provide an invaluable help. 

My colleagues and I are doing a comparative analysis of our two runs of the Begin Programming MOOC. Now that I have taken my first steps into using RapidMiner may be I could use it as a tool to support us in our exploration. Now it is time for a hot chocolate....!