Author: thomaslum

Learning Pod: #4

Peers’ Names: Kevin, Elijah, Harry, Jason, Nancy

Interactive Learning Resource Topic: Dynasties in Chinese history

Identify components of the Interactive Learning Resource that might be missing (e.g., appropriate outcomes, alignment, interactivity, inclusivity, technology use and rationale, presentation, grammar, spelling, citations, etc.).

• Grammar: Just curious – is the interactive learning resource to benefit student-instructor or student-tutor, or do they mean the same? Overall no major grammar issues.
• Citations: Make sure to include any in-text citations in the final draft.
• Interactivity: I noticed you’ve mentioned that the learners will complete an assignment, can you expand on this more and make sure you clearly state which part of the assignment is interactive.
• Technology use: I noticed in terms of technology use, there will be YouTube videos and Quizlet. Is there anything that you will be making (i.e., a self-made video)?
• Assessment: Is there going to be a quiz made by the professor or a quiz on Quizlet? Will you create any assessment that will be on the final draft, or will it just stay theoretical?
• Context: Definitely expand on your alignments of who the learners are. There is minimal specific context of the student itself (age group, state of education, etc..)

Provide a summary of The Interactive Learning Resource’s strengths and weaknesses. Draw out specific examples from your peers’ work to justify your feedback.

• As the interactive learning resource will be on the topic of Dynasties in Chinese history, there will be a lot of memorizations, which is really good that you’re utilizing Quizlet! Posted YouTube and lecture videos will also allow students to re-watch as many times as needed at their own pace. You will definitely want to expand on your interactive activity because I’m wondering how formative assessment will take place. In terms of assessment place, I feel that a quiz might be a little too simple if they already do a bunch of quizzes on Quizlet. However, I don’t know anything in depth of your plans so keep at it with your ideas! In terms of the summative assessment, I’m assuming that will be the quiz and group presentation, so I’d like to know how they will be graded on both. I like that your design includes support for ELLs to ensure that they are learning in an effective manner. Ultimately, you learning outcomes are a great look and it’ll look even better when you expand on your work!

Provide general, specific, and practical recommendations to your peers on how to improve their Interactive Learning Resource.

• Overall, I can really see that there’s a lot thought that’s been put into developing this. I am somewhat a big fan about learning Chinese history as I do enjoy understanding more of it time to time. My biggest recommendation would be to vastly expand on your work, especially interactive activity, assessments, and general contexts. Ensure that you lay out what is interactive and where the formative assessment comes from. Additionally, the summative assessment is still very blurry. Although I can see you’ve mentioned grading on the quiz and group presentation, I’m still wondering on how the lecturer will evaluate this. Will both assessments be added together and give you a final grade or will it just be the one (just quiz/ just presentation). Will the grading be a % grade, or letter grade, etc… And make sure to add in citations/in-text citations on your final draft. Very solid resource with some tweaks to be made for the final copy.

In the video, the learner is put in a position where they have to interact with the system. Oftentimes, the learner is required to click on prompts to view, for example an external article. Additionally, there are many clickable objects such as buttons, links, and interactive questions that needs a response (yes/no) from the student. These interactive buttons/links would require the user to interact with it in order to continue to the next page or section. By having interactive tools all around the module, learners are likely to interact with them as long as it catches their eye or they know they need to perform an action to proceed. This is why interactive activities are great for learning because they tend to pull in the student, requiring them to interact with the material and proceeding along.

For our designated learning resource, students will complete several interactive activities from answering quiz questions like True/False, and solving mix and match puzzles. By providing a variety of small activities, this help keeps the student focused to completing these activities. This would also help build the students knowledge regarding the learning material. We would then have the activities to provide feedback after they complete each activity so that there is something the student can take away. There will also be additional resources linked with the feedback allowing the student to review answers or the textbook if needed.

That being said, the technology requirement in our resource is not high. We request that learners only need access to the internet which should be able to reach the webpage/module. They should be able to complete the module on a number of smart devices, but best experiences will still be on computer. Students will be completing interactive activities made from H5P. Utilizing H5P to complete the design of some of these tools gives us more room to come up with formative assessments. And H5P allows designers to put in a general feedback post quiz, which is extremely important for providing the correct answer and additional resources to the question/topic.

However, a more advanced method would be introducing greater technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning where it would learn a students thought process on their decision making/answers and to provide a more descriptive feedback to assist the student. Modern day, the topic of personalized learning often comes in where the idea is to come up with a student-tailored solution. This is important because every student has their own needs and moves at their own pace in learning. To do this, the mentioned artificial intelligence, machine learning, and many more algorithmic systems can help improve the needs of students. For example, Khan Academy utilizes machine learning to better improve student experience. There’s many more learning resources that has adopted different forms of artificial intelligence in their system to improve personalized learning. Since there is a need for better student education and a large growth in modern technology, combining the two may produce superb results such like Khan Academy, or Duolingo.

Overall, there could have been different activities in the video such as short introduction surveys. For example, by providing a few questions to ask the learner on what kind of interactive activity they want/like best. This would give the student a chance to input their needs and wants, which is important to keep the student focused and want to interact because they feel that their inputs are also important in the process. There will always be potential barriers to inclusive design, but we will ensure to include to a variety of activities that will help to teach a diverse range of students, and to continue checking up on them to ensure the learning process is smooth and successful.

References:

• https://www.turito.com/in/blog/general/hrd-ministry-guidelines-for-interactive-learning

For my groups interactive learning resource, it is an online training tool regarding brain lobes which helps students by providing them with learning material to study on. We understand that there are different types of learners who requires their unique set of needs. This is why to ensure that we can meet most if not all of our learners needs, we will need to approach creating this resource through a user centric design. In this design, we stress the idea that there is no one size fits all, meaning no single method or approach will fit all the designated learners. We may look to start the course with asking the learner a number of general questions regarding education/knowledge levels, and setting the goal for the online course. As different students learn differently, we will look to provide a variety of activities throughout the course. Additionally, in our online learning resource, we will ensure that there are different types of content (short videos, short reads, etc…) that is delivered to the learner. This is because there are potential obstacles for example where one student learns better reading whereas another learns better watching a video. Throughout the online course, we aim to design a tool that can fully assist a student who needs help at any point in time. This would require the design to include tips throughout the course, and having checkup prompts once in awhile. The learning resource will also provide different forms of assessment activities, which may include answering True/False questions, matching terms to the definition/image, creating case scenarios, etc… By involving the learner and encouraging them to take part in these activities will hopefully maintain their interest to continue learning. While designing this tool for our learners, we know that it is impossible to fully accommodate all their needs. However, we will be utilizing universal design in the hope that many tools that we include will benefit most of the learners. Ensuring that the resource will fit a diverse community who are eager to continue learning.

References:

Figure 1: https://www.answerlab.com/insights/the-business-case-for-inclusive-research

What is Cooperative Learning and why?

Teachers have always been looking for different methods to enhance the material being taught. This is because there is no best way to teach, and instead, being open minded to different learning approaches can be highly beneficial. One learning approach called Cooperative Learning, is a method that is used on students to integrate group work. Additional to group work, it allows students to see and improve on the elements when working in a group, such as group responsibilities. The aim of this approach is to enhance student learning through the use of groups to help each other out (Brame, C.J. & Biel, R., 2015).. There can be formal and informal approaches to cooperative learning. Briefly speaking, formal cooperative learning typically involves the teacher/instructor to form a structure for the students to follow within the group. Informal cooperative learning is where the instructor has little to no intervention and the group itself has to do most of the planning/peer work (Brame, C.J. & Biel, R., 2015). A few examples of cooperative learning includes:

• Think pair share
  • Students are to first think about a given question, then pair up with peers, and lastly share their thoughts regarding the question.
• Peer instruction
  • Students are to first think and answer a given question, pair up and discuss their answers, and ultimately keep or change their answers after discussing.
• Jigsaw
  • All students in a given group will excel in their group topic, the groups are then scrambled where each group will contain exactly 1 student that excels in their previous group topic. This suggests that after the group change, there will be 4 unique students that excel in different topics.

(Brame, C.J. & Biel, R., 2015).

In terms the alignment of this approach and my chosen topic (online learning course), there is almost none. This is because the chosen topic is typically heavily reliant on individual work to complete, whereas the cooperative learning approach relies on peer to peer work. In some cases, it is possible to integrate cooperative learning to the topic where discussions can be made to solve some of the interactive and assessment material. For example, if two students are participating in an online course, and one of the students get’s stuck on a difficult question, they can turn to the other student taking the course and discuss on that matter. Of course, if discussion is a matter of just cheating and no intention to learn, then there is no benefit of taking the course. But ultimately, material in the online learning course is intended to enhance the knowledge for individual students.

References

• Brame, C.J. & Biel, R. (2015). Setting up and facilitating group work:
  Using cooperative learning groups effectively. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/setting-up-and-facilitating-group-work-using-cooperative-learning-groups-effectively/.

• Aida Tate, E. D. (2019, January 4). Cooperative learning – planning and implementation. Thrive. https://thriveglobal.com/stories/cooperative-learning-planning-and-implementation/

Learning can be challenging to many individuals because there is a change in the mental process where you need to adapt to the foreign information. This is why not only how you learn, but also how you reinforce the learned information is important. Learning requires the learning to have an open mind so that their brain becomes flexible to change and open to intake new information. Oftentimes, learning can feel more easy when the learner has a need to learn it, or has an interest for the material. This is because when the learner needs to learn something/has an interest for it, they will tend to pay more attention and feel a greater level of satisfaction as it will have an actual impact. There can also be external factors such as who is teaching the material or how the material is taught, which can ultimately be beneficial or detrimental to a learner.

One example of a learning challenge I had was at a co-op work term where the training methodology was poor, resulting me to not properly take in the information. This also pushed me to become unmotivated to continue learning because I was losing interest in the subject. Knowing that I was starting to lose interest in the subject, I had to find a way to regain that interest and learn to the best of my best ability. I started getting motivation from talking to co-workers and getting more understanding about the subject from them. Talking to co-workers also resulted in me to understand what I can do after I properly learn the subject. I started to see the relevance and put more time/attention to learning through both co-workers and external sources (internet). But since learning requires you to change how your mind sees something, this means that a period of time and reiteration of the learning material was needed. This is why I had set up meetings to go over the learning material and receive feedback at times to help improve my learning process. Lastly, It was extremely important to reinforce what was learned so that I don’t forget about it too soon.

References

Meilleur, C. (2019, Sept 18). From surface to in-depth learning. KnowledgeOne. https://knowledgeone.ca/from-surface-to-in-depth-learning/