Teacher Development Multi-Year Study Series. Vanuatu: Final Report

The Australian Government is supporting the Government of Vanuatu through its Vanuatu Education Support Program (VESP) to undertake long-term education reforms. A key focus of these reforms is the rollout of a new national curriculum in conjunction with the National Language Policy (2012), intended to improve teaching quality and student learning outcomes for students in the primary and early secondary years of education. Part of a multi-year study series, the Education Analytics Service (EAS) is investigating how the VESP is making a difference to these teaching and learning outcomes. The new primary curriculum has been rolled out to schools in stages by year level, starting with Year 1 in 2016, and is accompanied by the distribution of teaching and learning materials and training. The new curriculum facilitates content uniformity and promotes pedagogical approaches, such as student-centred learning, that aim to transform teaching and learning. The National Language Policy is an important change implemented as part of the new curriculum, allowing agreed local languages to be used throughout the primary years as students make the transition to English or French (MoET, 2012). 1 Phases I and II of the VESP have been integral to the design and implementation of the new primary curriculum. In-service training modules have supported the curriculum rollout. VESP also supports the distribution and development of teaching and learning materials as part of the new curriculum. This study has provided the opportunity to investigate teaching quality and student learning outcomes in Vanuatu linked to the rollout of the national curriculum

The development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in mastering smoking cessation intervention in dentistry

Purpose – Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has appeared as one of the most explored trends of online learning. In September 2014, the Ministry of Education Malaysia has collaborated with four of its public universities; including The National University of Malaysia (UKM) to launch the Malaysia MOOCs initiative. As part of this collaboration effort, our faculty developed a MOOC for Smoking Cessation Intervention in Dental Practice course for our faculty teaching and learning. Methodology – This course was developed using Iterative ADDIE (Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement and Evaluate) Instructional Design Framework. The smoking cessation intervention content of this course was adapted from the Smoking Cessation Intervention Delivered by Dentists (SCIDD) Training Module and UKM’s Oral Health Curriculum. The analytics data was collected from the MOOC via OpenLearning.com’s analytics tool and analysed in SPSS version 23. Findings – Eight modules were developed for this course. The learning content of each module contained a video, a power point lecture slides and quizzes in English language. The structure of learning tasks was loosely structured and learner controlled. A total of 224 learners enrolled for the course. Mostly were dental undergraduates (n=72, 33.6%). Sixty-three percent of the enrolled learners completed the course. Significantly more dental auxiliaries (p<0.000) completed the course compared to other types of learners. MOOC could be an alternative online learning platform for the topic of smoking cessation in the dental practices for all learners. Significance – MOOC would be an alternative platform for curricular teaching among students and lifelong learning for employment and personal fulfilment for health professionals or those with special interest in tobacco control

Motivation in a language MOOC: issues for course designers

Whilst several existing studies on foreign language learning have explored motivation in more traditional settings (Dörnyei, 2003), this paper presents one of the first studies on the motivation of participants in a MOOC. The MOOC, Travailler en français (https://sites.google.com/site/mooctravaillerenfrancais/home), was a 5-week open online course for learners of French at level B1 of the CEFR, and aimed to develop language and employability skills for working in a francophone country. It took place in early 2014 and attracted more than 1000 participants. Intrinsic motivation (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), is directly linked to one’s enjoyment of accomplishing a task. We conducted a study based on the cognitive variables of the Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), and adapted the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory to the context of a MOOC in order to understand the expectancy beliefs and task values of participants engaging with the MOOC. Participants answered a 40 Likert-type questions on enjoyment/ interest (i.e. I will enjoy doing this MOOC very much), perceived competence (i.e. I think I will be able to perform successfully in the MOOC), effort (i.e. I will put a lot of effort in this MOOC), value/usefulness (i.e. I think that doing this MOOC will be useful for developing my skills), felt pressure and tension (i.e. I think I might feel pressured while doing the MOOC) and relatedness (i.e. I think I will feel like I can really trust the other participants). Results highlight significant factors that could directly influence intrinsic motivation for learning in a MOOC environment. The chapter makes recommendations for LMOOC designers based on the emerging profile of MOOC participants, on their motivation and self-determination, as well as on the pressures they might feel, including time pressures. Finally, the extent to which participants relate to each other, and are able to engage in social learning and interaction, is a real challenge for LMOOC designers

Early evaluation of Unistats: user experiences

This paper sets out the findings of the user evaluation of Unistats.UK Higher Education Funding Bodie

Visual analytics of academic writing

This paper describes a novel analytics dashboard which visualises the key features of scholarly documents. The Dashboard aggregates the salient sentences of scholarly papers, their rhetorical types and the key concepts mentioned within these sentences. These features are extracted from papers through a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, called Xerox Incremental Parser (XIP). The XIP Dashboard is a set of visual analytics modules based on the XIP output. In this paper, we briefly introduce the XIP technology and demonstrate an example visualisation of the XIP Dashboard

EU–originated MOOCs, with focus on multi- and single-institution platforms

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