emerging technologies in education. conceiving and building a microblogging platform for formal and...

Emerging Technologies in Education. Conceiving and Building a Microblogging Platform for

Formal and Informal Learning

Tehnologii educaționale emergente. Construirea unei platforme de microblogging pentru învățare formală și informală

Scientific Coordinator:

Prof. Dr. Ing. Vladimir-Ioan CREȚUMariana-Carmen HOLOTESCU

2015

• Blended courses/flipped classrooms integrating Social Media (SM), Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) – new challenges for education (Johnson et al., 2014);

• Learning Management Systems extended with social functionality => LMS2.0, social LMS, Open Learning Environments or Social Learning Environments (Crosslin, 2010; Dahrendorf, 2010; Mott, 2010; JISC, 2011);

• Gap between new technologies and their uses:

• rigid policies in formal education related to curricular systems and assessment practices;

• teachers lack of time and interest to explore, understand, evaluate and use new technologies;

• scenarios for innovative approaches and best cases are presented in a too formal manner using Learning Design languages and tools, without a direct link between these scenarios and learning environments (Conole and Culver, 2010).

1. Thesis Context

Main aim: to explore possible solutions for designing and implementing effective learning environments, founded on new learning technologies and theories.

Expected result: to design, implement and evaluate an innovative educational platform, called Cirip, based on microblogging technology.

Research aims:1. to identify and to analyse emerging technologies, trends and theories in education;2. to elicit the needed features of an open learning platform, founded on the identified technologies and theories;3. to create and validate a model for the development of effective open learning platforms based on microblogging technology.

1. Thesis Objectives (1)

Answers and solutions for the following issues and problems represent the thesis objectives:

1. to map the requirements of the microblogging framework onto the features of an open learning platform;

2. to integrate microblogging with other emerging educational technologies;3. to give students, teachers and practitioners a space to explore and

experiment new technologies, 4. to capture and formally represent the new pedagogical approaches and

scenarios as learning design objects;5. to define and implement instruments for learning analytics and for assessing

students learning activities;6. to conceive, to design and to build a microbloging platform for formal and

informal learning.

1. Thesis Objectives (2)

Increasingly applied in educational software projects, Design Based Research (DBR) „is used to study learning in environments which are designed and systematically changed by the researcher” (Barab, 2006), this way three deeply intertwined goals can be identified: research, design, and pedagogical practice (Joseph, 2004).

DBR: Refinement of problems, solutions, methods &design principles (Reeves, 2006)

2. Design Based Research Methodology – Definition

DBR characteristics (Barab and Squire, 2004; Barab, 2006):

• object of the close study: (usually) a single learning environment in successive iterations and in different contexts;

• goals: to develop new pedagogical theories, artifacts and practices/theories that can be generalized and used in other learning contexts/environments;

• phases:- learning environment designed/developed by researchers to solve a

local/particular identified problem, bringing innovations inspired by a theoretical study/research;

- successive phases in an iterative cycle/on-going design process allowing the generation and advancement of the new theory:

• improvement/development of new facilities;• tests piloted in real-world educational settings, involving informal

learning, collaboration among learners, different resources, etc.; • evaluation implying social interactions with participants for sharing

ideas, and for bringing expertise into producing / analyzing the design.

2. Design Based Research Methodology - Characteristics

2. Design Based Research Methodology

adapted for the educational platform development

DBR – Phase I• 3. Emerging Technologies

and new Trends in Education. A Conceptual Model for Open Learning Environments

• 4. Features, Uses and Architectures of Microblogging Platforms

• 5. Emerging Technologies in Romanian HE

DBR – Phase II• 6. Requirements

analysis for platform• 7. Platform

Architecture and Implementation

• 8. Platform as an Open Learning Environment

DBR – Phase III9. Case Studies for Platform Validation

DBR – Phase IV10. Platform Evaluation

image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhoypaco

PRESENTATION STRUCTURE

1. Thesis Context and Objectives

2. Design Based Research Methodology

3. Emerging Technologies and new Trends in Education. State of the Art.

A Conceptual Model for Open Learning Environments

4. Features, Uses and Architectures of Microblogging Platforms

5. Emerging Technologies in Romanian Higher Education

6. Requirements analysis for an educational multimedia microblogging platform

7. Platform Architecture and Implementation

8. Platform as an Open Learning Environment

9. Case Studies for Platform Validation

10. Platform Evaluation

11. Conclusions and Future Work

12. Publications and Projects

DBR Phase I

DBR Phase II

DBR Phase III

DBR Phase IV

Amy Campbell (2010): three characteristics of Social Media: the majority of content is user generated, a high degree of participation/interaction between users, and easily integrates with other sites. Anthony J. Bradley (2010): six core principles - participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence and emergence.

image: http://matetrack.webs.com/SOCIAL/SOCIAL.html

DBR Phase I 3. Emerging Technologies and New Trends in Education.Social Media Landscape

DBR – Phase I: 3. Emerging Technologies and new Trends in Education. A Conceptual Model for OLE DBR – Phase II DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

Social Media networks and applications for content sharing – Classification (1)


Groups (Groups.Google.com, Groups.Yahoo.com, Ning.com, Meetup.com)

Forums/Spaces for discussions (phpBB.net, Quora.com, Disqus.com)

Localization (Foursquare.com, Yelp.com, Zvents.com)

Augmented reality (Layar.com, Wikitude.com, Zooburst.com)

Virtual worlds/Social Games (Secondlife.com, Playdom.com, OpenSimulator.org)

IM (YM, GTalk, Jabber, Skype)

Social Media for communication / collaboration / location-based Classification (2)


Scopes of classification:

• understanding the characteristics of Social Media platforms (features)• assessing uses in Romanian HE• choosing the platforms to be integrated in the OLE to be built

Trends and technologies connected with Social Media (1)


A conceptual Model of Open Learning Environments (1)

Open Educational Resources

Learners as content co-creators

Collaborative/ distributed

assessment; Learning Analytics

Interactions with external learners and experts

Collaborative applications and platformsPublic PLE

Time-persistency/Retrieval

Teacher training/sharing Learning Design

Institutional /administrative management

features/privacy assurance

Mobile Learning

PEDAGOGICAL

TECHNOLOGICAL

SOCIAL


A conceptual Model for Open Learning Environments - OLEs (2). Use Case

Existing OLEs:

• Enhanced LMS

• Integrated LMS

• Widgets Network

• Dedicated Network


Open Learning Environment based on Microblogging

Open Educational Resources

Learners as content co-creators

Collaborative/ distributed


Interactions with external learners and experts

Collaborative applications and platforms / Public PLE

Time-persistency/RetrievalTeacher training/sharing Learning

Design

Institutional /administrative management

features/privacy assurance

Mobile Learning

PEDAGOGICALTECHNOLOGICAL

SOCIAL

MICROBLOGGINGCIRIP


Microblogging is a new form of blogging, with brief text updates of 140 characters, via Web, SMS, email, IM or 3rd party applications, which allows

real-time interactions between users.

DBR Phase I 4. Features, Uses and Architectures of Microblogging Platforms

DBR – Phase I: 4. Features, Uses and Architectures of Microblogging Platforms DBR – Phase II DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

Mar 2006 Oct 2007 Jan 2008 Jul 2008Dec 2007 Mar 2008 Dec 2009 4 platforms in Tops 100 Tools for Leaning 2009-2014: Twitter, Cirip, Yammer, Edmodo

Elizabeth Koh, An overview of microblogging, http://www.slideshare.net/elizabethkoh/an-overview-of-microblogging, slide 16

Educational Microblogging Platforms


Other Microblogging Platforms

Problems identified for the current microblogging platforms (Passant et al., 2010; Cheong and Ray, 2011; Penela et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2012):

• centralized architectures may cause performance bottlenecks, single points of failure and malicious attacks; decentralized solutions would improve the robustness, scalability, availability and reliability of the micro-services;

• lack of machine-readable meta-data about posts (creation date, author, recipient, etc.);

• lack of semantic in microblog posts; the #hashtags semantics are not a complete solution;

• information overload because the stream available for a user doesn't take into account his/her current context;

• issues of seamless access, ownership and control.

Platforms that adress these issues: Cuckoo, SMOB (Semantic MicrOBlogging ), WebBox, miKrow.


Limited Features of microblogging platforms OLEs

• The existing open/general microblogging platforms such as Twitter or Identi.ca offer the characteristics of communication/collaboration and ePortfolios visibility, but those for courses' privacy or history (groups) are missing.

• The educational microblogging platform Edmodo or Twiducate, which integrates LMS features, don't offer the possibility to interact with external experts, nor to built a public PLE.


Aims of the study conducted in 2012:• to gather information on ways in which Romanian academic staff are adopting

new educational technologies and applications;• to find out best usages;• to identify expected features;• to examine policies related to new technologies use in Romanian education.

Research questions:• How faculty members use new educational technologies/Social Media as

reflective and collaborative teaching and learning tools, also for research and professional development?

• Which are the potential benefits, challenges, and disadvantages in using new educational technologies/Social Media in universities?

• Which is the relation between these technologies and mobile learning? • How the usage can be extended, is there a need for training the educational

actors in this topic?

DBR Phase I 5. Emerging Technologies in Romanian Higher Education

DBR – Phase I: 5. Emerging Technologies in Romanian Higher Education DBR – Phase II DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

Significant results (summary of findings) (1)

Need for :- policies related the use of new educational technologies in education- teacher training in using emerging technologies


Significant results (summary of findings) (2)


Need for:- integrated online spaces for students / teachers / practitioners:

- to experiment new technologies- to share learning scenarios.

DBR Phase II 6. Requirements analysis for the educational microblogging platform as a social network and OLE

Identified 25 categories of functionalities for Social Media platforms based on: • Pistachio Consulting (2008): study of 19 enterprise microsharing

applications, 19 criteria • Smith et al. (2012): set of 15 types of Social Media applications, 8

capabilities• our previous research and work/develop educational platforms.

Comparing Social Media platforms functionalities:• 6 microblogging platforms used in education Twitter, Edmodo, Plurk,

Identi.ca, Yammer, Twiducate;• 23 categories of Social Media networks and applications:

• 17 categories for content sharing • 6 categories for communication/collaboration/location-based.

DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II: 6. Requirements analysis for the educational microblogging platform DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

Requirements the educational microblogging platform as a social network


OERsMultimedia

objects embedding

Learners as content

co-creators

Resend notes

(Retweet)

Access to group

documents

Collaborative editing

Import/ Export

notes (re-sharing)

Collaborative / distributed


Statistics/Visualizations

forusers/groups

Surveys / pollsonline/

SMS

6. Requirements analysis: Characteristics mapped onto the OLE features (1)


DBR Phase II 7. Platform Architecture and Implementation. Open Technologies

DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II: 7. Platform Architecture and Implementation DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

Platform Architecture


MySQL Database (36 tables))


Relations between tables


REST API (12 functions). Example: show function


Plug-ins and Mash-ups


announcements

modules - LOM/SCORM objects

collaborative exercises

learning from the stream

multimedia messages

polls/quiz/ comments via

SMS (f2f)

RT wall

validations - interactions with users/experts/

groups

DBR Phase II 8. Platform as an Open Learning Environment (1)

Cirip as a social network of msLMS (mobile social Learning Management Systems)DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II: 8. Platform as an Open Learning Environment DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

On technological level• create, localize and join mobile groups • access social media and open educational resources • share opinions• work collaboratively on multimedia objects• participate in polls and quizzes• receive/send updates via SMS• create and manage mobile PLEs• recover password via SMS

On pedagogical level• develop multimedia educational resources / learning

objects by using mobile technologies specific for different subject areas

• build mobile social learning environments engaging students in PBL, case studies, and collaborative projects

• capture and formally represent experience and new pedagogical approach as learning design objects - shared, discussed, validated, improved, and reused

Mobile Learning Features

DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II: 8. Platform as an Open Learning Environment DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV

Dashboard of a mobile group


Integration of other SM platforms

Multimedia objects embedded in messages (part of the communication flow, created/recreated, openness to (small) OERs - Weller, Martin (2010)): - livestreaming - images (flickr, tinypic) - audio (eok, trilulilu, deezer, blip.fm, vocaroo, mp3) - (live) video (youtube, dotsub, vimeo, screencastle, screenjelly, screenr, 220.ro, myvideo) - presentations/learning design (slideshare, capzles, voicethread, flowgram, photopeach, picasa, notaland, prezi, diagrammr, mindomo,

mindmeister, spicynodes) - documents (odf, odt, pdf, doc, xls, txt, ppt, google docs/forms/spreadsheets)


Learning Design Objects


CompendiumLD2CiripLD Mash-up – extending community of practice


The Network section of a user / group displays statistics, which facilitate the assessment and the analysis on various research directions:

• the activity• the relations

formed• the interests• the means of

participation• the content of

messages.

Students Assessment Metrics. Learning Analytics


9. Case Studies for Platform Validation

1. Online Courses and Courses Enhancement 2. Learning from the Stream 3. Integrating MOOCs in Blended Courses (Holotescu, Cretu, 2014)4. Teacher Training 5. Personal Learning Environment

DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II DBR – Phase III: 9 Case Studies for Platform Validation DBR – Phase IV

Blending MOOCs in university courses - EdX

„We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine the classroom.”We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos. We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification. To go to completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards.

Everything really has to change.”

Integrating MOOCs in Blended Courses

Anant Agarwal, 2013. Why massive open online courses (still) matter. A TED presentation, ted.com/talks/anant_agarwal_why_massively_open_online_courses_still_matter.html


Variants of blending MOOCs in university courses


Web Programming, 2013-14, III CTI

• HTML/HTML5, Javascript, CSS, XML, Perl, PHP, MySQL, Ajax;• Web2.0/Social Media (blogging, microblogging, social networks, collaborative applications,

curation/collaborative bookmarking systems, RSS feeds, mash-ups), Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons licenses, Massive Open Online Courses.


announcements modules

collaborative exercises

learning from the stream

multimedia messages

opennes to (small) OERs

polls/quiz/ comments via SMS (f2f)

validations - interactions with

users/experts/ groups

Web Programming Blended Course


2. To enlarge knowledge/topics of the course, to obtain an auxiliary support for students’ group project development.

3. Allow students to have concrete views, opinions and proposals on MOOCs and to critically evaluate their usefulness for personal development and for different ways of integration in formal higher education courses.

Aims of integrating MOOCs

1. Allow students to become familiar (aware) with the MOOC phenomenon and trends:

• the most important players/platforms/offers, types of learning, interaction and specific pedagogies

• to be able to search and evaluate useful and quality MOOCs.


Steps for MOOCs Integration

1. MOOCs discovery and selection - #mooc:• openeducationeuropa.eu• mooc-list.com• futurelearn.com• class-central.com

2. Participation in MOOCs –requirement: at least 10% of the activities3. MOOCs participation evaluation: survey with 55 responders/70 students


MOOCs Participation Evaluation

• knew about MOOCs before the course (49%)• followed MOOCs before the course (29%)• will follow MOOCs after the course (100%)• activities completed in MOOCs (66%: > 50%, 24%: 100%)

Followed MOOCs: Coursera (44%), Udemy (23%), Udacity, edX, Khan Academy, Codecademy, FutureLearn, but also European MOOCs found on Open Education Europa

In the same time MOOCs for other disciplines


Blended course activities and pedagogival benefits


Study of Learning Impact

DBR Phase IV 10. Platform Evaluation

DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV: 10. Platform Evaluation

Study of Professional Development Impact

10. Platform Evaluation (2)

DBR – Phase I DBR – Phase II DBR – Phase III DBR – Phase IV: 10. Platform Evaluation

11. Original contributions (1)

1. Identification and analysis of the emerging technologies, trends and theories in education, together with a proposed classification of Social Media platforms and applications. The findings are presented in Chapter 3 and were published in (Grosseck and Holotescu, 2011a).

2. An analysis of the features, uses and architectures of educational microblogging platforms was presented in Chapter 4 and published in (Holotescu and Crețu, 2013).

3. Two studies on the usages, challenges and policies regarding the integration of emerging technologies and microblogging in Romanian education, for teaching, learning and professional development. The results are published in Chapter 5 and 10. The studies were the first with this topic in Romania and were published in (Holotescu and Grosseck, 2012) and (Grosseck and Holotescu, 2011).

4. A model of Open Learning Environments founded on the identified educational technologies and theories was proposed in Chapter 3.

5. A model of Open Learning Environments based on microblogging technology was proposed in Chapter 6; some results were published in (Holotescu and Crețu, 2013).

11. Original contributions (2)6. The model was validated through designing, implementing and evaluating the Cirip educational microblogging platform. The innovations brought by Cirip and presented in Chapter 8 and 9 are summarized below, together with the corresponding articles:

• private and public groups can host online courses, having the characteristics of LMSs (Holotescu and Grosseck, 2009c; Grosseck and Holotescu, 2008);

• provides unique features for mobile learning (Holotescu and Grosseck, 2011; Holotescu, Crețu and Grosseck, 2014);

• integrates a large area of emerging educational technologies (Grosseck and Holotescu, 2010a);

• captures and formally represents the new pedagogical approaches and scenarios as learning design objects (Holotescu and Grosseck, 2010a);

• defines and implements instruments for learning analytics and for assessing students learning activities (Holotescu, Mioc and Grosseck, 2012; Grosseck and Holotescu, 2009);

• is used in formal and informal learning contexts (Holotescu and Grosseck, 2009c; Grosseck and Holotescu, 2010b; Grosseck and Holotescu, 2011c; Holotescu et al., 2012; Holotescu et al., 2013; Holotescu et al., 2014a).

Future Work

New features and case studies will be designed, implemented and tested in the next months on the Cirip platform:

1. Testing and consolidation of the MOOC features after designing and running a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) related to „OER and MOOC”;

2. Updating / enlarging the typology of social (multimedia) objects embedded on the platform - based on the platforms evolution/modifications and on the results of the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2014 (Hart, 2014);

3. A directory of (little) OERs (Open Educational Resources) (collaboratively) created on the networks connected with Cirip to be listed in user’s profile;

4. Integrating the Learning Analytics for Cirip courses with existing institutional metrics and reporting mechanisms and standards (IMS Caliper - Learning Measurement Framework) in a joint project with a research team from Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy;

5. Improving user experience: new layout, make more transparent the embedding of social (multimedia) objects, lowering access time.

12. Publications and Projects

a. Articles1. ISI Proceedings – 25 (9 not indexed yet); first author: 152. BDI - 53. International Journals - 24. International Conferences Proceedings - 235. National Conferences / Journals - 12

b. Books/Chapters - 13c. Research studies/Reports - 9d. Projects - 17e. Citations – over 520

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emerging technologies in education. conceiving and building a microblogging platform for formal and...

Education

new learning technologies

open learning environments

learning analytics

learning design languages

learning design objects

learning environments

learning management

single learning environment