Notes from ELI 2015 Riyadh - Day One

Rob Kadel
The Untapped Potential for eLearning
Pearson Research & Innovation Network / University of Colorado Denver

- learning to think laterally, or to think divergently (think outside the box)
    - instead of thinking of one answer, thinking of many possible answers
    - example: alternative ways to commute to work

- Research & Innovation Network (Pearson) - Kimberly O'Malley, head
    - turning ideas into useful and usable innovation networks
    - various centres for different projects
    - accomoplishments: collaborative games, essay scoring algoritms, etc

- Student success - what does it mean?
    - beyond school - Oxford Economics survey 2011 - skills most in demand:
        - interpersonal and communication skills
        - digital
        - agile thinking
        - global operating skills
    - CEOs valued these, but said most employees today do not have these skills
        - we can reach this, but have to look at the world students live in today

- The current environment - tech in schools
    - two speeds: full steaam ahead, or, what do we do now?
    - we need to meet students in their own space, in the technology they already use

- Personalized Learning
    - Howard Gardner: individuation, pluralization
    - individuation: each student taught in ways that are comfortable
    - pluralization: anytung being taught should be taught in several ways (to reach more students)
    - in a practical snese - not just 1:1 computing
        - students and teachers customize learning objectives and strategies for work
        - rigorous curriculum framework
        - relevant assessment, teachers as facilitators
    - SAMR model of technology integration

- It takes a village: components of education transformation
    - leadership: establish vision, lead by example,
    - policy: align with outcoms
    - curriculum and assessment - in alignment with each other, must ensure students gain essential knowledge and 21st c skills
    - digital tech - tools and data to support personalization
    - sustinable resourcing - develop resources at scale
    - research and evaluation

- Purposful planning - getting to goals
    - eg. 'all studnets must achieve success in mathematics before graduation'
    - need to clearly define what these thinsg are
    - Goals > Objectives > Activities > Tasks (hierarchal structure)
            - if you can measure the tasks, you can measure all the way up
            - the task level is the easiest to measure
            - eg. Pearson's MathXL
    - importance of verbs (action words) - use Bloom's digital taxonomy (HOTS to LOTS)
    - the full-steam ahead approach is not purposeful
        - need to map out all learning tasks beforehand (example, school with Chromebooks couldn't read MS Word documents)
        - ensure that adequate staff are assigned to each task
        - ensure that budgets are accurate
        - that you can measure the success of your program

- Learning outcomes and efficacy
    - it isn't enough to merely be good, you have to do good (ie., you have to show you are good)
    - Pearson - has taken a strong effort to measure our products and our services
        (video clip from Pearson CEO) (but no, this isn't an advertisement for Pearson, he assures us)
    - "return on investment in human capital"
    - measuring the tasks = measuring efficacy

- Challenges in the Gulf region
    - infrastructure - are all schools and all users connected?
    - leadership - are leaders supporting and demonstrating effective technology use?
    - language - more than half of websites that exist are in English
        - how to maintain rich heritage of Arabic language
        - but how to teach them all English
    - digital literacy - students need basic understanding of how to use devices
        - not just mobile phones, can you work with computers, eg., save and send a file
    - professional development for teachers

Q&A

    - Q: will tech in the education field cut out labour, the way it has in other fields
    - A: I don't think it will replace teachers
        - there is the danger or potential that it will replace teachers, but that's not the way we want to go
        - want to keep teachers as facilitators
    - Q: you talk about an outcome-based theory, based on tasks, which is a classical theory around for years
        - but do you do tasks first, or goals first?
    - A: just a way of redefining the way we have thought of education in the past
        - it is very difficult to measure goals, but it is possible to measure the outcomes
    - Q: what about social media
    - A: replicate them in the 'walled garden' -- or experiment with tools (but they don't always work)
    - Q: knowledge is non-reductive?
    - A: it depemds on the language we use - 'what does it really mean'?



Olaf Zawacki-RichterThe development of online distance education and media usage behavior in higher education


- traditional students - 1950s - male, <25 br="" from="" high="" school="" straight="">- C.A.Wedemeyer 1981 - increasing diversity in university, beginning of open university, open admissions
    - University of London 1826 "beginning" of open university, distance learning
    - 1889 - sample of advertisement describing correspondance study
    - so correspondance education is closely linked to the development of the postal system in Europe
    - South Arica - UNISA
- The open learning movement - begins in the 1960s
    - list: OU (1969), Athabasca (1970), FernUniversitat (1974)
    - some very large ones - China, Turkey
    - new open universities - Nigeria, Malaysia
- UMUC - development of online distance education
- more open universities - Russia
- traditional campuses - eg. Penn State - 'world campus'

Institutional Structures
    - Oldenberg University, Germany
        - need organizational structure to "manage this process in a profeessional way"
        - Centre for Lifelong Learning (C3L)
    - Structure of the blended learning program:
        - independent study phase
        - 1st cintact session
        - online projevt work
        - 2nd contact session
        - project portfolios

Instructional design model: ADDIE
    - emohasis on first phase, evry important - need to know prior knowledge, media preferences

Media usage behavious in Education
    - does the net generation now arrive at the university?
    - very few empirical studies supporting the claims of Tapscott, Presnky, etc
    - so what are these studients doing? Research questions: wat do they use, what is their value, informal media, etc?
    - exploratory study - data in 2012 - big 276 question survey, 2,339 students fro German universities
        - 99% have access to broadband, 38% use internet 4-6 hours per day
    - media typology (Grosch and Gidion)
    - acceptance rates llfdifferent tools and rechnologies
        - second Life - dead last on the list
    - cluster analysis - 5 groups:
        - ubiquitous web services, email, LMS
        - provuided by uni - eg. online library
        - cooperation & entertainment - comouter conference, social netwirks, iTines
        - external web 2.0 toos, blogs, skype
        - exotic applications - 2nd life, Twitter - not used much for learning
    - high acceptance by traditional studnets just a few, eg. email, non-traditional students use a wide range of tools
    - gap between demand and supply of e-learning, significantly higher demand for e-learning among non-trad
    - media usage typology
        - entertainment - 51%
        - periphrial - 20%
        - advanced - 20%
        - instrumental - 7%
    - Implications:
        - developed authoring tool for courses for tablets - iAcademy
        - C3LLO - mobile LMS - mostly for communications
        - no relationship between age and media usage
        - very high acceptance for LMS and print-based materials
        - the university should not imitate informal social networks




Richard L. Edwards
Executive Director, iLearn Research, Ball State University
Increasing Student Success through Online Learning, Learning Analytics, and Learner-Centered Practices

- student success - students maximizing their abilities
- online education joins: online learning, learning analytcs, and learning processes

- from minister of education: "less teaching, more learning"
    - more learning = more effective teachning

Student Success
    - formal vs informal learning
    - learning anytime, anywhere
    - learning how to learn
    - lifelong learning

Areas of broad agreement at #ELI_2015
    - we have the technology to make online learning effective
    - the demand for online education is growing rapidly
    - 21st century learners were born into a digitally connected workd
    - there will continue to be waves of innivation in e-learning

Claim: students are leading us into the "postmodality" er
    - online learning is no longer a novelty
    - meeting the needs of these students will require institutional ecosystems
        Thomas Cavanaugh, 2012, Educause

Premise #1    - success in online learning requires an ecosystem
    - can't focus on student success in isolation from, eg:
        - faculty development, eLearning support, 3rd party support, IT support, admin & services
    - "we have educated them in terms of their whole mind and body" - clubs, sports, etc
        - we have to replicate that in online learning
    - Ball State's iLearn

Premise #2  - eLearning mindstes andd our cultures of learning affect how we develop our online programs
    - institutions that take risks succeed, institutions thta take a step back do not succeed
    - success is possible, but you first have to believe that onlin innovation is what you want to do
    - "You have to believe"
    - Drector of iLearn - chief moral officer:
        - foster continuous learning among faculty and staff
        - encourage critical and creative thinking, new solutions, etc   
        - turn research into practice, support pilot projects, fail fast
        - build a culture of assessment to identify successes and failures
            "we no longer can talk about what constitutes great teaching without evidence"
    - disruptive innovative - elewarning has that potential, but it won't be destructive
        - educate more of your citizens at a lower cost
        - continbuous evolution
        - the more we talk about teaching and learning and the less about technology the more success you will have

Premise #3  - anticipate great change
        - what is going to change the most? education, work, or society?
        - I would say all of them are going to change a lot
            - the drivers are deep changes in the nature of work - the jobs 20 years from now aren't the jobs of today

Overview of iearn Research Projects
    - new forms of content delivery   
    - open educational resources
    - learning analytics
    - gamification
    - flipped intsruction
    - enhancing student engagement

Slide:
    Support :: learner Centred Practices
    Engagement :: Blended and Online Learning
    Feedback :: Learning Analytics
    (Research-based model :: Action Research Projects)

Analytics
    - student in the centre
    - types of anaytics, stakeholders, data quality and transfers, potentiql bottlenecks, scale of analytics
    - speed of anaytics
    - small data: descriptive; big data: predictive

3 Takeaways
    - Adopt best practices for learners (7 principles of good practice - Chickering and Gamson 1987)
        - what are the practices great students do
        - eg. self-regulation
        - eg. Ball State MOOC to give students better skills - note-taking, study skills, historical thinking, writing skills
    - help students develop their metacogntive skills - learning how to learn
        - most of your existing tools can be reourposed to support this
        - eg our HITS project - eg. pretest for foundational skills, then fix deficiencies
        - eg. write metacognitive questions to be answered each week - identify misunderstandings and confusions
            - based on data from online course - students responses result in just-in-time changes
    - start small pilot projects, see how it works in your ecosystem, and evaluate outcomes
        - collqborate with faculty and staff
        - strategic coordination

- teaching is teaching; learning is learning


Q: should we be building one platform for the whole country, o multiple platforms?
A: I tend to favour one platform, because of support costs, but prefer a flexible and customizable approach
    - one platform for all is just good business sense
Q: suggestion to use MOOCs not to teach a course, but to teach the skills hey need - but how do we make sure students use them?
A: we're going to require the prep-MOOC for every student that gets a deficiency grade at the mid-term

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