Wednesday AM Open Session 1 Ideas:

• Patrick Wirth (AADL CoLab), Hal Schlais (IIURL/System liaison) and Bob Hoar (IIURL Director, UW-L).  Discussion of the work at the Institute for Innovation in Undergraduate Research and Learning. For more information about the IIURL, see http://www.uwlax.edu/iiurl .

  Questions that can be discussed:

  • Which technologies are being used to create teaching and learning materials?
  • What are the current and future projects?
  • How can faculty and students from UW institutions get involved?
  • Where can you find the materials that have been developed?

Who has Interest:

If you have an interest in one of the stated topics, please post your name and the topic that interests you (also list whether you would be willing to lead).

• David Wirth
• Laura Shears
• Your name here

Time/Date/Location: 

9:45 AM-10:45 AM, July 9, 2008, Location TBD

Notes

   (Notes taken by Sarah Ross-Lazarov)

• History: an NSF faculty-development grant regarding creating learning objects--successful, but the objects weren't widely used. PRAXIS is more successful in both regards--materials related to the WI teacher licensure exam. This project focuses on math and science content area. The audience for the objects are students that are far from their math and science training--returning students, international learners.
• The Co-Lab built a template for the objects. The questions for the objects are gathered from example exams. The content, then? The group works with faculty members that have interest, assigning objects to them. Scalability issues: wanted 100 objects, but didn't have 100 faculty participants... So built in student participation in building objects. This is a new component of the project. The faculty, then, are undergraduate mentors. The students tend to be interested not only in the content but in the project and its technology, too.
• The faculty member selects four students, who then study the content and determine what should go in the objects. The groups just storyboard high tech objects and send them to programmers. They thought that programmers could be part of the teams, originally, but... students received $250 each. One of the students assumes authorship, and then became the voice of the chalktalk.
• Per learning object, spent hours determining the fundamental concepts that object users needed to learn--the subject matter experts sometimes didn't realize at the start what those basic concepts would be.
• Faculty participants received a stipend ($500-$700 per object, with $1000 for the four students together, and a little funds for administration stuff), but it wasn't enough to cover a full course release; if you figure their stipend by the hour, it was basically a volunteer effort. The faculty did consider it a professional development project. A workshop at the beginning of the year introduces faculty members to the vision for the objects. For instance, the objects should be reusable and shouldn't reference one another. There is also a PC-based template with blanks for text entry which then generates dummies for all the files the object needs and then zips them so the set can be put on the content server. So while the project is high-tech, working on it isn't high tech; many processes are being automated. So faculty getting involved now aren't doing so because of the technology, but because of the student interactions. The conference presentations and the papers that are emerging from the project are numerous; also, other proposals for funding. The institute is a little over a year old now.
• BTW, Bob and Hal are both math professors in previous professional incarnations.
• As Bob reviews drafts, he makes a video of his comments on the object and returns it to the group as an item in a task list.
• LaCrosse has a studio set up for the project; the project was grant supported for the first few years, and then the institutional system has adopted project support under the name of the Institute. The studio was part of the creation of the Institute. It's part of the library; the students know where to find it; the sound booth there enables creation of good audios.
• The students involved in the project say that it provided them an opportunity they've never had before, i.e. in undergraduate research, creating materials that will be used in the classroom someday, and in the use of the technology--alumni send examples later of podcasts they have made. This is their first experience, too, of learning to explain something. The student teams work on this together. They realize how hard it is to help someone learn something. Part of the challenge is defining the scope of a single learning object. Also challenging is stepping back from the content and connecting it to the standards that the exams assess.
• You don't want the tutorial and the chalktalk to be duplicates of each other.
• The template is available--that is part of the role of the Co-Lab. The template is not as dynamic as it could be--they don't have the human resources, for example, to make the sandbox interactive--Flash developers are rare and/or expensive. Need materials that are easy to animate, tools that make these animations easy. Captivate and Camtasia are possibilities. Now in Camtasia you can publish as a Flash file.
• There was an online assessment tool that the Co-Lab created... The Co-Lab does a lot of work behind the scenes.
• Two Co-Lab members are putting together a paper about the results of the objects...
• Each object is a dozen or more files, so file management has been an ongoing challenge, especially as the students would change something and then send a single file in for review. A content server was needed. At LaCrosse, then, is their first instance of this, built off of Plone. A software engineering master's student is using the project as his capstone project, developing an opensource content server. He's created a server that allows them to place all the components and deal with versioning, with a private and public settings. There's now a movement underway to link these to registries so these objects can be found easily. August 1st project goal here...
• Finding Flash resources...
  • Laura demonstrated a Flash-based graphing object that has increased her students' success on the problem type from half to almost 100%.
  • Wraptivity: a company in India that creates Flash interactives. 100s of templates you can choose from. But it's expensive.
  • Hoping that eventually you could recycle and tweak components, but with the turnover of participants, they haven't seen a lot of this yet.
  • There are also lots of math and engineering students who are good at Flash
  • At UW-Madison, however, fewer students with Flash experience are applying for jobs, and while their code does its task, rediscovering later on how the code was constructed is a nightmare. Especially in Flash, there are a million ways to create the interactivity you are looking for. Now, if they find a student with real interest in Flash and not just a hobby perspetive, they have them work with a programmer.
  • On the project, now, they require thorough commenting and placing the code in central locations... You can't find the code in the objects themselves. Some use decompilers to find the code.
  • Some, now, they train students in Flash creation... still, there aren't enough students for the volume the project needs. Beyond this, and beyond looking for new programmers, they are looking for an alternative to Flash.
  • Not all objects require the same complexity of Flash animation... in an example, one student animated with PowerPoint.
  • Right now, the objects only accept swf or video. Maybe there is a plug-in to publish PowerPoint as swf?
  • It's also challenging to provide the time and patience as students need iterations to get the projects done, for their own development, when project directors could do the tasks themselves much faster.
  • It's a fine line to maintain high quality but make it doable for students.
  • Students come out of high school now with excellent PowerPoint skills, so they use that for the tutorial piece. Better sandbox processes would be better.
  • So if anyone has 1000 Flash developers... or better yet, if someone is training Flash developers... perhaps you should look at the technical colleges... and WiscOnline has a large collection of objects, and impressive processes for doing so.
  • It would be a curriculum change, to put the creation of objects like this into an existing program--this type of change is like changing the tides. And what kind of variation is there across the technical college programs of this kind?
  • User tests showed the digital manipulative aspect of the objects as very helpful to users, as is also shown in the literature; it helps especially with multiple learning styles.
• In Fall, a project extension will explore adapting the objects to students' unique needs... i.e., new chalktalks that present material in a different way... i.e., narrative between objects (context)... They may also work on scaffolding. They assume a certain level of prior knowledge, but maybe they didn't hit the level quite right...
• Overall, the project has been a success: equal professional development for faculty as NSF project, but more effect on future teachers. Starting to do research on the impact on learning--this is more long term--couldn't have done this earlier. The content the students are creating is fabulous, but even if the server was destroyed tomorrow, the effect on the students is still impressive.
• Once the objects are in the registry, people can download them, put them in their LMS... the SCORM will record completion.
• The original vision was to sequence the objects after a pre-test. This particular group is highly motivated, since they want to pass the test--so they don't really need to write the grades down. Next week, more SCORM functionality being added, so they can record use patterns.
• Check out Wisc Online -- really impressive materials -- a previous director, Larry Johnson, is now director of the New Media Coalition.
• The registries will make looking for materials easier, as well as communicating about materials that have been found. Students could enter objects they have found into the registry. Perhaps a preliminary search for existing objects could be added to the students' process of creating objects. The design process can be speeded up when students find an object and make specifications for a new object that is a tweak of the existing object.

Resources:

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