#ocTEL2014 - Week 3 - Materials & Platforms for Learning Technology

This week's TEL One activity is to

Take the perspective of a learner and spend some time using:

• one resource from Khan Academy’s YouTube videos
• one resource from ElearningExamples e-learning games
• the iEthiCS simulation.
• What elements of these do you think are appealing to different learners?
• What learners, if any, would they be inappropriate for and why?
• How do each of these resources differ from that of the resources we’re using in ocTEL? Do they promote social learning, re-use of their materials, or open access?
• What ways can you see to improve the effectiveness or potential reach of these resources? 

I looked at "Origins of algebra" and "Introduction to variables" videos on Khan Academy. 

Khan Academy Logo from https://www.kastatic.org/images/missing-leaf.png

To me, they seem to present material using a coherent story with attractive visual aids. However, beware that this can be a very biased view given the sample I have used is not at all representative of the thousands of videos also I am familiar with both topics.

I think this type of videos will be appealing to younger generation (say below 25) and would be good for introductory materials. From my experience in our FutureLearn course "Begin Programming:build your first mobile game", which attracted over 48 thousand entrants over two runs, many elderly participants preferred reading materials to videos. However, I am unable to back this up with evidence from post-course surveys as we have not got the demographic details captured in them. Nevertheless, during course discussions over and over again we saw that elderly participants (mostly leisure learners) many of whom were the Open University alumni preferred reading materials to videos. 

* One good thing about these videos are they give you a "quick view" to the topic, serving a similar purpose like Wikipedia. However, does this encourage deep learning I don't know.

* These are stand alone resources - OERs. So there is no way to interact and ask questions. Well in a way you can use the comments. 

* But as the Khan academy founder said in his TED talk, you can pause, replay and listen multiple time which is good for learners who may be struggling to grasp the subject matter or the language. 

These pros/cons have been already discussed in the ocTEL forum by Teresa MacKinnon @warwicklanguage 's articulative post.

With my developing country research experience, one major problem with this type of resources is that they require large data volume downloads. During my PhD research I got to know that in Sri Lanka, the internet access centres set up by the government's Distance Education Modernization Project had blocked access to YouTube website because of bandwidth issues (You can read more about my findings in my blog "Using non-Personal Computers for eLearning" or the research paper "Using non-Personal Computers for eLearning: Sri Lankan Experience" published in the Journal of Education and Training Studies). 
The resource being offered in video format reduces its reach to many learners who do not have good internet connectivity. I suppose one way to increase the reach for this resource could be to provide it in various formats: transcripts with illustrations;audio download and video.

#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.