Flipped, online and blended learning: digitalization in TAMK
Different level of digitalization in education
Digitalization is present in many levels in education. Starting from
the top level, all administrative systems in universities are of course
digital. What comes to different courses, many of them use some kind of
learning management system (LMS) like Moodle. LMS offers many ways for
teachers and administration to investigate students’ online behaviour
and success with learning analytics (LA) [1, 2].
Digitalization in education is present in many ongoing research
projects as well. The projects can for example aim to find meaningful
ways to exploit digitalisation to enhance learning [3] or increase
teaching accessibility [4]. This can mean the usage of smart phones and
tablets to take the learning outside classroom – to the nature,
historical sites, museums etc. With smart phones’ powerful processors
and set of different sensors it is possible to let the students make
measurements by themselves in very many different locations for physics
courses’ needs, for example [5].
The smallest level of digitalization in education is different
(one-task) tools teacher can use to enhance learning. These tools can
be mobile apps or web sites.
Digimentors
In many cases digital tools and
methods in education are tested and taken into usage by enthusiastic
individual teachers, whereas most of the other teachers haven’t even
heard about those and lack the courage, time or interest to test
them. In many cases they don’t have a clear idea how digital
tools would be beneficial in teaching. To overcome this bottleneck,
Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) has established a
“digimentor”-network in 2015. Teachers sometimes need a little push
towards the new and the main idea in the digimentor network is that a
colleague in the same field is the best to inform a teacher about the
benefits and usage of a certain digital tool. In TAMK each university’s
field of education (called schools) has one or two digimentors.
Figure 1: Digimentor network
This mean that one digimentor has typically 30-50 colleagues to guide
and altogether there are 11 digimentoris in TAMK. Also the normal
helpdesk and ICT services are available to faculty members. Digimentors
share information regularly among each other and therefore they can
together cover wider range of tools and methods than single
enthusiastic teachers alone. The digimentors help colleagues typically
in two ways: either arranging workshops for a group of teachers in
certain topics depending on their needs, or giving on-site help on a
short notice for individual teachers on specific topics like “How to
create a channel in YouTube”. At TAMK, a part of working time is
allocated for this helping function for digimentors, but majority of
their workload comes still from their normal duties, in most cases
classroom and online teaching.
Tools and tips
Jane Hart's website “Centre for
Learning and Performance Technologies” [6] has presented the ranking
list for different digital tools in education since 2007. The ranking
is based on user survey among teachers and educators. This year’s
survey got 1238 answers from 64 countries and the list is shown as a
screen shot in Figure 2. In actual website, it is possible to get some
hints and tips for usage by clicking the names of the tools. Many of
the tools are widespread and need no introduction, whereas some are
rather unknown. In the next chapters, a few of the not so well-known
tools are viewed a bit deeper.
Figure 2: Top 100 Tools for Education (2016) [6].
PlayPosit
PlayPosit is an online learning
environment to create interaction to videos. These interactive videos
are called “bulbs” and they can be shared among teachers and can be
assigned to student groups. Teachers begin with any online video (Khan
Academy, YouTube, etc.) and build multiple-choice or open questions on
top of it. The video stops automatically for presenting the questions
at the chosen time instants. Teachers access the answers via web
interface. The idea is presented in Figure 3.
Figure 3: The principle of PlayPosit.
As the name suggests PollEverywhere
(www.polleverywhere.com) is used to pose polls and surveys to students.
There is an option to make answer anonymous. Sometimes students are shy
to present their ideas. Part of the student group may also want to
withdraw and stay passive.
Figure 4: PollEverywhere answers seen as word cloud (left) and text wall (right).
With anonymous polls and surveys it is possible to give voice to the
silent and shy ones. Moreover, it activates the passive students to
participate and to contribute. The questions are either multiple
choice, open ended or in picture format. The latter allows user to
define clickable areas on the picture and the students then answer by
choosing and clicking different areas. Other way is to let students
freely click different locations on the picture. What comes to
pedagogy, PollEverywhere can for example be used to quickly gather
students’ prior knowledge in the beginning of lectures. With suitable
questions the possible misconceptions of the presented topic can be
surveyed and then corrected right away. PollEverywhere with open ended
text questions can be used as a text wall. To hide individual answers
but still present the “average answer” of the group, the display can be
changed from a line view to word cloud view in which the word font size
depends on the number of times it had been mentioned.
Kahoot
Kahoot (https://getkahoot.com/) is
another polling website/software, but it differs from PollEverywhere by
having a competitive nature. In Kahtoot it is possible to present four
different answer choices. In the competitive mode the speed of giving
right answer is converted to points a student gets. After the polling
the ranking can be shown (using nicknames) and the student with the
highest point count can be prized.
YouTube and videos
Almost everyone is familiar with
YouTube from the watcher’s side. But fewer teachers and instructors
have own account and channels in YouTube despite its benefits as a tool
to present lecture recordings and short educational video clips.
Educational videos have enabled new teaching methods like flipped
classroom, just in time teaching and peer Instruction [7 - 9] and
videos can be used as tutorials or instructions for laboratory work [10
- 12]. The main idea is to use videos for one directional sharing of
information and free valuable face-to-face time for active learning,
which is demonstrated to increase learning outcomes [13]. Short video
clips and activating learning methods can be combined to enhance
learning, both in face-to-face and online implementations [5, 14].
At TAMK Physics, all educational
videos are produced by the physics teachers. Why not just link existing
online videos to the course material? One reason is the lack of Finnish
university level educational physics videos. There was no other option.
In three years, the video count has increase to 1000 and they have been
watched over 110 000 times for 350 000 minutes.
Figure 5: Short video clips are produced at TAMK and used for blended and online learning.
The number of freshmen in engineering studies at TAMK is approximately
400-500 annually and physics is taught during the first two years. In
relation to this number of students, the videos seem to be well in use.
Teachers are usually rather busy and there is no extra time to spend on
video production. Therefore, very simple methods were chosen at TAMK
Physics and any teacher can start using similar methods rather easily.
Depending on the purpose and content of the video, as well as teachers’
preferences, the following methods are used:
iPad + pen + paper (Figure 6 A)
This is a very simple and
straight-forward way to produce for example calculus-based solutions to
homework exercises. IPad is placed to a holder above empty paper.
IPad’s camera and microphone are then used to record the video as the
teacher carries out calculations etc. on the paper explaining it
simultaneously aloud. These are fast to do, and pen and paper are an
easy interface for anyone to learn. The drawbacks are that the graphics
quality depends on the artistic skills of the teacher and once a
mistake is made, everything has to be started over.
iPad + ExplainEverything (Figure 6 B)
ExplainEverything is an app for iPad
which can be used to simultaneously record the teacher’s voice and
his/her drawings and writings on iPad’s screen with a stylus pen. As
such, this is a digital counterpart for the pen&paper method. When
needed due to mistakes, the recording can be paused anytime, rewound to
a certain time-instant and re-recorded
PowerPoint videos (Figure 6 C & D)
Presumably all teachers have
PowerPoints. It is possible and easy to record timing to a PowerPoint
presentation and then convert to video format. The video can include
teacher’s narration and highlights with “laser pointer” as any live
presentation does. Moreover, in PowerPoint it is easy to build simple
animations or include a video clip or audio file in the slide.
Video camera and cameraman (Figure 6 E)
For example, to explain the proper
handling of laboratory equipment or to present a demonstration of a law
of physics, video camera can be used similarly as in recording holiday
videos. In many cases two teachers need to cooperate: one is performing
the actual measurement or set-up of laboratory equipment and
simultaneously explaining what is being done. The other one is a
cameraman who is responsible for aiming and zooming the camera.
Screen capture (Figure 6 F)
Screen capturing is best suitable to
present how to use a certain computer program like CAD or Excel. The
recording can be taken from the screen alone or alternatively a talking
head can be included by recording it simultaneously using a web cam.
Naturally, both computer audio and narration are recorded.
Figure 6: Different ways to produce short educational video clips.
Learning analytics
Learning analytics means the measurement, collection, analysis,
reporting and visualizing of data about learners. Many learning
managements systems (LMS) offer built-in tools to record, view and
analyse student’s online activity. Typically, opening of different
learning activities, posting messages to forums etc. are recorded to
log files. The times, durations and sequences of these activities can
be recorded and analysed. Based on the log data it is possible to
tailor students study paths, suggest certain supportive study materials
or use it as an alarming system for interventions to reduce drop-out
rate from courses.
At TAMK, the LMS in use is Moodle. It offers some build-in learning
analytics tools, but for deeper analysis the event log data can be
transferred to Excel, in which it can be categorized according to
various parameters. In Moodle, the log shows all actions taken in the
highest level of hierarchy in Moodle’s structure, whereas deeper
structures are not recorded. For example, opening a folder containing
many links to videos is logged only as one event. Opening the
individual videos is not logged. Therefore, all activities which need
to be analysed, have to be on the highest level of hierarchy. All
actions and their timestamps are recorded individually for each
student. This way it was possible to analyse at what time a student has
taken a certain action: opened a homework assignment, watched a
solution video or handed out his/her own solutions to problems, and
what is the time difference between actions. It should be noted,
however, that learning analytics can’t reach the effectiveness and
intensity of studying, nor can it record such learning activities as
reading a book.
A few examples of different ways to use learning analytic data is shown
below. Figure 7 shows the correlation between student’s video watching
activity versus course’s final grade [1]. Clearly, the percentage of
videos watched tells about studying, since it has a correlation with
final grade up to mark 4. Interestingly, the students who got the
highest mark (5) didn’t watch videos as much as other passed students
(grades 1-4).
Figure 7: The correlation between video watchinh and final grade [1].
One possible explanation is that the good ones know that they
know – therefore they don’t need to watch the videos so much to get the
confirmation for their knowledge.
In Figure 8 students’ daily online learning activity is presented as a
function of time of day for two identical online course
implementations. Based on the graph, it can be noted that most of the
studying takes place after normal working hours. If a teacher genuinely
wants to help his/her students this result recommends that the teacher
should be online in the evenings. At TAMK, some of the teachers have
organized online “office hours” at 20-21 o’clock once a week to be able
to serve the students and answer their questions at suitable times.
Nevertheless, willingness to do so depends very much on the teacher.
In addition to LMS log data, also Google Analytics can be used to
survey students’ online activity. The amount of views and watching
times are easily accessible, together with a large variety of other
options (time, traffic sources, percentages watched, location, device,
etc.).
Figure 8: The temporal distribution of number of video openings from Google Analytics.
Figure 8 presents Google analytics data of a physics course. It clearly
shows the highest activities just before week exams and final exam.
Traditionally, learning outcomes are tested at the end of the course
using final examination. When using this type of summative assessment,
the studying activity tends to be highest just before the final
examination. By changing to continuous assessment or to assignments
with deadlines every week, it is possible to encourage the students to
spread their studying more evenly throughout the course.
References
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