Vision from Interactive Event: What do you think

[Carolyn Rose]

Here are notes that came out of our group work activity at the CSCL 2015 Interactive event, where groups worked on visioning of what could be enabled with platform extensions for collaborative and discussion based learning.  Do you have additional ideas?  What do you think are the priority ideas here?  What feedback do you have?

DALMOOC Interactive Event June 10, 2015

Group 1: Piotr, George, Dragan, Matt

Goal: Advance the field and bring in people.

Audience: Initial course had two audiences: technologists and educationalists.

Topics:

• Social network analysis

• Predictive modeling

• Discourse analysis

Assessment:

• Analysis, share with others, reflect on other’s work, reflect on own work

• Students wanted: Day 1: Download a tool. Do some analysis.

Tools needed:

• Unified interface where students can flow between the learning analytics tools.

• Clear expectations about what students are doing. Is it a connectivist MOOC about communication? Is it an intelligent tutoring system where students need three decimal digits precision? How do we have different teaching and learning styles with the same audience, with consistent user experience.

• Some way to move to connectivist learning and sharing while being respectful of students’ privacy. Student should have complete control over privacy, public profile, etc., but be able to comfortably share their work and thoughts with the learning community.

• Clear scaffolding between instructivism and connectivism.

• Twitter, blog, lightside, Hangouts, gephi, ProSolo, all the Rose group tools had inconsistent user experiences.

• Tools should disappear in the background. Single sign-on.

• We have BS theories, but we haven’t really analyze the data. Do students read the syllabus? How to students use ProSolo? Etc. It’d be nice to be able to decide issues like this based on data rather than intuitions and Twitter anecdotes.

Group 2 (Kshitij Sharma, et. al):

Group formation -- heterogeneity, should be some, depends on the course you are teaching, interdisciplinary courses require this so you can benefit from different expertise

Focused courses like programming only require heterogeneity in terms of expertise.

Automated vs semi-automated group formation -- starting the course with automatically formed teams, or wait and take a step back for one or two weeks.

Another point about knowledge building, where dual layer opportunity comes in, can we add opportunities for students to participate in development or refinement of the course materials

synchronicity -- should people be matched with people of same language and time zone, depends on how many similar students there are.  Different working styles -- could be positive or negative within groups, also scheduling practices

Adaptive scaffolding: what should be the depth provided to individual members of team (maybe not uniform across team?  Novices need more scaffolding)

Assess gain.  Students may be coming from different fields, and their learning goals might ideally be different, and it wouldn’t be “fair” to measure success by the same “yardstick”

How can we help students find team members?  Is automated the ideal.

Group 3

Forming groups -- what makes a good group.  do you want a consistent group throughout the course, or should you have experience in multiple groups over time.  What kinds of group experiences would foster learning -- maybe depends on the type of course and age level.  Profile information -- what is important for the matching?  What data is being generated just based on behavior that can be used for the matching (and might provide input to social recommendation algorithms).

What are team building activities and ice breakers that would give it a more playful atmosphere, which is conducive to social learning, and not distracting to the content.  How can we use this to raise the bar for active participation?  How can these things contribute positively to student experience.