awareness and collaboration in the ihelp courses content management system christopher brooks, rupi...
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Awareness and Collaboration in the iHelp Awareness and Collaboration in the iHelp Courses Content Management SystemCourses Content Management System
Christopher Brooks, Rupi Panesar, Jim Greer
Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems (ARIES)Department of Computer Science
University of SaskatchewanSaskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada
IntroductionIntroduction
The Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is not an online classroom
Learners are unable to collaborate just-in-time around the artefacts of learning Questions in and around lectures are important!
Learners have no idea who is doing what around them Consequential understanding of your fellow
students is important! Instructors have no idea what the participation is
like, unless they force it Who is interacting with whom? What are the cliques? Who is sleeping in class, and how many people do
this? This presentation will outline our work in bringing
these social cues and collaborative technologies into the online world
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
iHelp CoursesiHelp Courses
iHelp Courses is our standards-based research LCMS Courses are deployed at IMS/SCORM Content
Packages The SCORM Run Time Environment (RTE) has
been extended to add some user modelling support
The system is used by hundreds of students annually, and with the discussion/chat tools is used by nearly 1,000 students each academic term
This talk focuses not only on the things in the paper but our current environment as well as things on the test bed right now!
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Issue #1: Artefacts OnlineIssue #1: Artefacts Online
Some insight in our solution comes from the notion of activity theory. We believe:
“achievement of learning outcomes arises from the interactions between the learner, the artefacts in the environment, the tools to manipulate those artefacts, and the learning community.” (p3)
Distilling this down we suggest Interaction around the artefacts of learning is
important Good tools support to manipulate these
artefacts is needed Connecting members in the learning
community is key Online artefacts tend not to be
synchronous in nature
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts
Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Solution #1: Learning Object CollaborationSolution #1: Learning Object Collaboration
We have coupled our content management system directly with interaction tools As users browse through learning material
they are able to see and interact with other synchronous learners
Discussion forums are content-based; instructors can create a discussion forum for a particular module, a particular lesson, or even a particular page
Courseware provides subtle cues as to who is looking at content, or what content has had discussions centred around it
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning
Object Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Solution #1: Screenshot (Solution #1: Screenshot (DemoDemo))
Indications exist for bothsynchronous and asynchronous collaboration
Chat follows learner browsing
Events happening in backgroundare still “visible”
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning
Object Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Solution #2: Groupware for CollaborationSolution #2: Groupware for Collaboration
There are a number of research collaborative tools out there but: Very few deployed, “prime time” tools in
educational institutions Very few (none?) that are browser-based
iHelp PEPL (iHelp Share) Allows students to share code from within the
iHelp Courses system Is invoked through the chat system, so
sharing sessions can start naturally (not prearranged)
Allows for more than two participants (current version)
Aimed at computer science students, but being deployed for online writing lab as well (2007)
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware
for Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Solution #2: Screenshot (Solution #2: Screenshot (DemoDemo))
Annotations “bubble”up to the top onmouse over
Users all share a newchat room as well
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware
for Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Issue #2: Lack of AwarenessIssue #2: Lack of Awareness
Two groups get awareness in face to face environments, but not in online environments Students Student: Walking through the
halls, labs, and into the classes give students an idea of who their peers are, what they are working on, and how they “measure up”
Instructor Student: Online systems may give an idea of what marks a student has, but that casual glance around the classroom for missing (or lost) faces doesn’t exist
A key design goal in enabling this kind of awareness is to do so consequentially It must be easy and fluid to go from tool to
tool No more interpreting big lists of numbers!
More subtle visualizations are key.
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of
Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Solution #1: Measuring Up (Beta)Solution #1: Measuring Up (Beta)
General idea is to indicate the process of other students How much content they
have viewed How much time they
have spent What their current
knowledge level is Coloured bars: “me vs.
the average” We want to leverage the implicit traces a user
leaves behind as they interact directly with the learning environment
We see this as a form of open user modeling See Adaptive Hypermedia (2006) workshop
paper
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring
Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Solution #2: Class AwarenessSolution #2: Class Awareness
Very tedious for instructors to get an idea of how “healthy” their online classes are
As more classes move to online and blended modes, the measure of health begins to include content management system metrics Do they post questions? Do they answer? Are they even checking the system for new
questions? Analyzing lists of stats is ok in a small course,
but once it gets bigger than 20 people it can’t be done in a glance
We’ve started investigating visualizations to handle large sets of complex interaction data in online/blended courses
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Screenshot: Instructor VisualizationScreenshot: Instructor Visualization
Based on sociograms, but recognizes three classes of students Participants: Those who write messages. The
bigger the node, the more popular their messages are.
Lurkers: Behavior is quantified – the closer they are to the participants, the more they are lurkering.
Delinquents: Those who can, but never have.
12
3
Participants
Lurkers
Delinquents
Red nodesare instructors
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
Visualization notesVisualization notes
Currently we include no notion of time – you get a snapshot of how the class looks taking into account all data
At the moment graph is anonymous, considering implications of making this graph public for students and watching how motivation changes
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions
ConclusionsConclusions
We have implemented a number of awareness and collaboration features in our online content management system
A number of these features are undergoing specific evaluation
Student and instructor uptake has been strong – instructors really enjoy the code sharing facilities, and students chat and discuss a lot with these tools
We’re currently investigating how these tools can be applied in more media-rich environments, e.g. with streamed lectures
Happy to answer any questions!
Jim Greer ([email protected])ARIES Lab
University of Saskatchewan Canada
Introduction
iHelp Courses
Issue: Artefacts Online
Solution: Learning Object
Collaboration
Solution: Groupware for
Collaboration
Issue: Lack of Awareness
Solution: Measuring Up
Solution: Class
Awareness
Conclusions