Tag: seminar

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Blending right in: Seminar on Blended Learning 2010

*** This is old stuff, but since the next blended learning seminar is coming up and I had this mostly written already, here goes… ***

The 2010 Seminar on Blended Learning was held on the 11-12th of March at the functionally beautiful Metsätalo (“House of Forestry”) in Kaisaniemi, central Helsinki.  If you are unsure what blended learning is, here is the Wikipedia link. Simply put, think of it as mixing different modes of teaching in one course…

Keynote speaker Charles Dziuban from the University of Central Florida gave an entertaining presentation on blended learning from his point of view: he has been advocating blended learning & e-learning as solutions to problems with growth inside the university. From the 1970’s the Uni of Central Florida has grown from accommodating 1800 students to a whopping 54.000 students. Of course, in the U.S. more students equals more money more significantly than here, and it is definitely lucrative to offer courses completely on-line  in order to save on physical space & travel costs. Students were more satisfied with blended courses than fully online courses, and it was nice to see the claims backed up by some data. American lecturers like Mr. Dziuban are nice to listen to, even if I always get the impression that I’m being sold something rather than being told new things – watching the shopping channel too much on late nights has its drawbacks, I suppose  🙂

Online exams in the blender and in the bed

Taina Joutsenvirta from the Faculty of Social Sciences presented their Moodle-exam pilot, where students can take book exams on Saturdays from any computer they wish by logging into the Moodle course management system, either at home or at the computer class in the city centre. Students and teachers then evaluated their experiences of this way of planning, taking and grading exams, with the following results:

  • Good readability of the keyboard-typed answers were generally considered a big plus
  • Students liked the fact that they could do the exam in a calm, familiar place (and with no need to dress properly – imagine lying in bed in just your underwear comfortably typing away) which made answering easier.
  • There was, however, some discrepancy between students and teachers about the perceived quality of the answers – some teachers thought this type of exam produced poorer answers, and others (esp. students) were more satisfied with the answers they wrote.
  • Students liked the applied nature of the questions and felt that they learned more this way – as these weren’t monitored exams the questions had to be designed with a broader scope to cover instead of simply being a test of individual facts, since you can’t know if a student reads his notes, consults a textbook or makes Google searches and such.
  • But teachers were worried that too much trust is placed on student ethics – you couldn’t be sure that student’s hadn’t for example  used collaborative tactics and shared the exam into several pieces where each student concentrated on one part. The lack of monitoring thus potentially creates unequality compared with students taking the traditional exam, as cheating in one way or another is easier in this type of unmonitored online exam.

Further reading:

The Seminar on Blended Learning (Blog, in Finnish):
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/sulautuvaopetus/

Online exam pilot of the Faculty of Social Sciences (in english):
http://www.helsinki.fi/valtiotieteellinen/opkeh/online_exam.html

Official soundtrack to this post:

Here’s a piece by the Chemical Brothers celebrating the reboot of this blog!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APqm36XTqKE]

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Electronic exams in the Finnish universities

Verkkotentti

The Finnish Virtual University organized an online seminar on the 9th of December 2009 about taking exams using computers instead of plain ol’ pen & paper. The potential benefits are obvious: students can choose more freely when (and possibly where) to take the exam, and the teacher doesn’t have to worry about finding the suitable time and space to organize an exam. Four speakers from different universities told us about their solutions in this area during a two-hour Adobe Connect Pro meeting, so attending the conference didn’t require a lot of travelling and it worked surprisingly well.

From the presentations it became obvious that there are really two different philosophies of doing exams electronically:

First, there is the more traditional exam type where the student can book a time slot according to his needs, and then go to the space which has been setup as a dedicated exam environment with a computer shut off from the regular internet and a remote surveillance system (usually a video camera and a microphone recording the student). Even staff or students can be around monitoring the process, providing extra security to discourage cheating. These exams can be just like regular exams where you (usually) aren’t allowed any materials and must know all the details by heart.

Second, there is the completely do-it-anywhere-virtual-exam, where the student can use any online computer to take the test, even from the comfort of ones home if he or she so wants. This usually means that cheating cannot be monitored in any secure way and so the exam itself must be of a different type: learning materials are allowed but the questions are broad in scope and require knowledge that you simply haven’t got the time to learn in the time it takes to complete the exam.

The differences between these two ways of thinking about e-tests are interesting and the exam culture probably depends a lot on the subject being taught/learned, so it was interesting to hear about the different approaches chosen.

The aquarium approach

Three universities had built an “electronic aquarium” -type solution, of which two – the University of Jyväskylä (UJ) and Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) – had a solution based on the SoftTutor application. LUT had an aquarium in their library building, with 10 machines (seats) and 4 cameras monitoring the place, as well as some paid students on monitoring duty. About 30 teachers are taking advantage of the system at the University, especially for the “maturity test” (fin. kypsyysnäyte, a small exam that tests the student’s knowledge of his/her thesis).

Jyväskylä has a similar solution, with 12 seats and 6 drawing tablets, enabling some sort of free hand drawing to be added to the the exam. 8 courses and 7 teachers were using this electronic exam system as a compliment to the normal exams.  The University of Helsinki has a few different approaches to electronic exams, of which the oldest has been the aquarium system called “Tenttiakvaario”, which is currently in use on the Viikki Campus (3 seats) and at the Faculty of Law and Order… awww, ok, just the Faculty of Law (1 seat), so this is a smaller scale solution that students and teachers nevertheless have been happy with.

The more Out-of-the-box approach

At Tampere the University has taken the course management system Moodle and uses its quiz module for making exams, with the goal of having large groups of students taking the exams in a short time period. Electronic exams have been seen as being especially helpful with organizing book exams, that students need to take sporadically.  Using existing computer classes especially the summer exams have been popular – during the summer of ’09 927 exams were taken.  The exams were monitored, as with the previous examples, using access control cards, video surveillance and spot checks.

At the University of Helsinki Moodle has also been thought of as a way to make remote exams, and then of course the exams themselves have to be re-thought because surveillance is next to impossible to organize.  For example, exams then have to be more “putting knowledge in practice”-type broad questions than questions asking for detailed tidbits of knowledge. This approach could in the future mean great savings to space costs if people could do exams on their home computers instead of being dependent on expensive computer classes. And space costs are always an issue in Helsinki.

It was nice to hear these stories, and I think electronic ways of taking exams – or really any new way of grading & monitoring learning – could be helpful, but maybe the biggest challenge then is to embrace the new possibilities instead of trying to fit the old ways into new technology. It is an frustrating idea that you have all that processing power and networked knowledge at your fingertips, but you’re only allowed to write text in a Word document during the exam.

Edit – forgot the music to this post, here it is – a soothing piano piece (no video) by Eluvium, the album Copia is really great!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rEkxKhCp40]

Further reading:

The seminar presentations:
http://palvelut.virtuaaliyliopisto.fi/palvelut/seminaarihuone/?q=node/179

Tenttiakvaario at the University of Helsinki:
http://ok.helsinki.fi/tentti/

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Verkkoja kokemassa: Turku, 8-9.10.2009

The Educational Centre for ICT arranged a trip to the former capital of Finland, Turku, where the E-learning network attended the “Verkkoja kokemassa” -seminar. The seminar is an annual event which – unsurprisingly – explores the themes of e-learning. It’s always nice to visit Turku and as an added bonus I also briefly hooked up with an ol’ friend from the biology studying days. Oh, and a small disclaimer: this is actually mostly a reflection piece for my self and not an exhaustive seminar report. So there, you have been warned… 😉

Turku_ICT_sali

The first day’s theme was Focus on Students & Sociality – and that´s sociality as in social media: yep, it should come as no surprise that everyone and his grandmother are cultivating the term “social media” in every e-learning sentence these days. Päivi Häkkinen from the University of Jyväskylä introduced a concept that was new to me, “Pedagogical scripts”, which seemed similar to having a screenplay for the course where certain events are scripted (like in computer games) to achieve the desired learning effect. Of course, what this again boils down to is that actual work and planning is required to get any benefits from ICT even in collaborative learning situations. Relying on students sorting matters out among themselves and Just Learning (TM) doesn’t work, and the input of teachers is still needed as computers don’t do the work for them. So the central point from the perspective of e-learning once again becomes: plan how to use ICT correctly.

Turku_SL

Second Life (SL) once again reared its blocky 3d-head in one of the workshops. The main presenter Irma Mänty (Laurea polytechnic) had been enthusiastic enough about SL to print a very nice, almost life-sized cardboard copy of her SL-avatar (see picture). Like Irma I also think that identifying with your avatar makes these kinds of environments more attractive and you might behave more like in real life because of that, but I’m also more and more convinced that a free, Open Source environment hosted by the world’s leading universities (for example) is required to really make this kind of environment bloom. Second Life, IMO, is just a bit old fashioned and clumsy compared to modern 3d-games, and a piece of land costs too much, but OTOH it is currently the best bet available and there’s still an ongoing buzz about using SL in education. Some of the teaching examples – like taking students in tourism and language to visit appropriate culturally interesting SL locations (like the virtual Rome) were nice ideas. Again, it requires lots of planning ahead to get educational benefits out of Second Life.

The second day started with a couple of  nicely contradictory (or so it seemed initally) talks on video: Olli-Pekka Kangas from the University of Turku demonstrated how much hard work goes into creating good educational videos whereas Mauri Kantola from the Turku polytechnic school wanted teachers to start making videos with the bar lowered as low as possible – think shooting a lecture with your mobile phone and just putting it on the web without editing it (or only slightly with Windows Movie Maker). Of course, these guys were really talking about slightly different things: Mauri wanted teachers to make their first video with no quality requirements, just to get them started and realize that they can use videos for spicing up their educational materials. Olli-Pekka then reminded us of what it then takes to get to decent quality levels – it will cost you lots of time and money too. Like all ICT, a good educational video also requires planning ahead (heard that one before?).

Tarmo Toikkanen held a nice talk about the Creative Commons -license [wikipedia.org], a presentation quite heavily influenced by the (excellent) documentary film RiP: A Remix Manifesto. I’m personally a big fan of the Creative Commons license(s), and it greatly simplifies life in this copyright-jungle world – hopefully it will also make a big splash in education. I do think, however, that if I ever make a hit song, me and my children (and grandchildren) should be able to live off the royalties of that piece of music [wikipedia.org]. That’s only fair 😉

Wrapping up the seminar was self-made man Teemu Arina from his own company Dicole Oy, who I’d previously seen a couple of years ago demonstrating a course running on a blog platform with peer reviewing being a central aspect of the learning process – I liked that presentation. This time the talk was a bit more abstract with lots of flashy visuals and a slight rock star – attitude to the subject, which was a concept called fractal learning. The intellectually stimulating presentation had lots of food for thought but also some things which might have been more style than substance, confusing matters somewhat perhaps. What I’d truly like, however – and this is often missing on any subject regarding pedagogy – is some scientific data to back up claims that “fractal learning” or any such concept is something to “bet on”. I’m always thinking that when we are planning our teaching on certain pedagogical concepts assisted by certain ICT-tools, we’re “betting on horses” in regard to what tools and concepts we use, and the goal is of course to make the students learn what they should  optimally learn, that is to “win the race”. So, as a teacher I’d like to bet on the winning horse (not that I really teach, as I’m a support person for teachers, but still…)!

Thus, science is required to help us bet on the right horses, me thinks, and not just on any idea that feels fresh and intuitively innovative. But of course, if a teacher finds that a certain piece of untested theory/technology makes him/her enthuastic about teaching, it doesn’t have to be that scientifically proven – whatever makes you think about what students should learn and how you could achieve that is always a positive factor. We humans like style as well as substance, so perhaps a mixture of both is the winning combination even in education! At least a bit of flair helps the audience in staying awake, people should learn from Teemu in that regard… 😉

All in all, food for thought and a great time in Turku with cool people! Hopefully next year again… and oh yes, from now on I will end every post with a piece of music; the first post-post music is Fever Ray from Sweden with a great song from a suitably autumn-ish album that I’ve recently enjoyed:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX07gCjT7dA]

Further reading:

Verkkoja kokemassa – esitykset (presentations on the official seminar page)

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (homepage of the documentary)

Creative Commons homepage