Educational practitioners as designers of seamless learning:Lessons from a seamless learning scenarios design experience

In theory, seamless learning design and research with its focus on bridging gaps in learning across contexts can help formulate answers to educational challenges. The recent mass lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic causing education to urgently switch from school-based to online teaching is just one of the many examples in support of design for continuity of learning. In over twenty years of its history, seamless learning has accumulated a substantial body of knowledge of what learning across contexts entails and how bridges across boundaries can be designed. However, seamless learning principles and guidelines to design for continuity of learning with the help of e.g., ubiquitous mobile technologies still need to find their way into educational practice. The study focuses on the outcomes of a hands-on activity in designing seamless learning scenarios. This activity included getting acquainted with the basics of seamless learning and designing a seamless learning scenario. It was part of an event organized for educational practitioners interested in the topic of seamless learning. Analysis of the seamless learning scenarios collaboratively designed during this activity demonstrated that teachers build on inquiry-based learning and problem-based learning paradigms to design learning that combines in-school, out-of-school and online contexts. They were able to include location-based content in school and teacher-led scenarios, however, ideas on the use of mobile technology were still described rather vaguely. Crossing boundaries and removing seams between contexts, did not yet become apparent in these initial teachers’ designs

MOOC design analysis - Constructive alignment, interactions, task complexity, formative assessment & feedback

The aim of this presentation is to introduce and open up a discussion on scalable designs for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Since little research has been done regarding scalable (MOOC) design little context-independent design guidelines can be found. By getting insight in the scalability of MOOC design we ought to find a balance between scalability and quality. Quality is approached via the theory of constructive alignment and three interaction types. Both, constructive alignment and interaction are said to improve the quality of learning by facilitating deep learning experiences for students (Biggs, 2003; Blumberg, 2009; Wang, Su, Cheung, Wong & Kong, 2013). According to the concept of constructive alignment, learning goals/outcomes should be aligned with learning activities and assessment (Biggs, 2003). Students should engage actively in relevant learning activities to construct knowledge and to achieve the intended learning outcomes (Biggs, 2003; Blumberg, 2009). Next to constructive alignment, interaction can have a positive impact on deep learning and the quality of education (Anderson, 2002; Bernard et al., 2009). This article focuses on three interaction types common in the educational context: student-student (SS), student-teacher (ST) and student-content (SC)

User-centric evaluation of recommender systems in social learning platforms: Accuracy is just the tip of the iceberg

Recommender systems provide users with content they might be interested in. Conventionally, recommender systems are evaluated mostly by using prediction accuracy metrics only. But the ultimate goal of a recommender system is to increase user satisfaction. Therefore, evaluations that measure user satisfaction should also be performed before deploying a recommender system in a real target environment. Such evaluations are laborious and complicated compared to the traditional, data-centric evaluations, though. In this study, we carried out a user-centric evaluation of state-of-the-art recommender systems as well as a graph-based approach in the ecologically valid setting of an authentic social learning platform. We also conducted a data-centric evaluation on the same data to investigate the added value of user-centric evaluations and how user satisfaction of a recommender system is related to its performance in terms of accuracy metrics. Our findings suggest that user-centric evaluation results are not necessarily in line with data-centric evaluation results. We conclude that the traditional evaluation of recommender systems in terms of prediction accuracy only does not suffice to judge performance of recommender systems on the user side. Moreover, the user-centric evaluation provides valuable insights in how candidate algorithms perform on each of the five quality metrics for recommendations: usefulness, accuracy, novelty, diversity, and serendipity

Higher education beyond Covid-19:What do teachers need when moving to online education

The Covid-19 pandemic caused major upheaval of education across all levels. Schools, colleges, and higher education institutes closed and had to move to online delivery of content and teaching almost overnight. In the context of the Erasmus+ DigiTel Pro project we performed a rapid literature review to discover how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted higher education with a focus on teachers and students and what teachers’ needs are post-Covid when higher education moves to online education.It is obvious that the overnight switch imposed some challenges and problems. Immediate response was to make learning material available online and look for solutions to provide online lectures. Although students appreciated the effort in the attempts to continue education, after time some objections arose both by teaching staff and by students as quality was not as used to be. Moving to online education entails more than quickly providing content online and making use of commercial conferencing software. This was dubbed as ‘remote emergency teaching’ as an indication that the quality of this education is not as it should be. Some of the negative feelings and perceptions might be due to being inexperienced with digital and online education, pedagogies and didactics and lack of suitable learning environments and supporting technology and infrastructure.Many teachers felt overpowered by the abrupt change and experienced an increase in workload and change in their role as teacher having to provide mental and psychological support to students due to the crisis situation. Teachers did not have the proper technical resources, tools and internet access. More importantly, teachers reported not being equipped for online teaching and felt that they lack the skills and competences to develop new learning material suitable for online delivery. While there was not sufficient time to adjust instructional design and pedagogy, teachers tried to find alternatives for the interaction with students. Similarly, students wellbeing was affected. Students also report lack of facilities at home, such as a proper place to study, access to a computer for schoolwork and sufficient internet access. While solutions were found for online delivery of learning material and lectures, several other processes were discontinued. Many institutions had difficulty in taking exams and providing assessment; some institutions even completely stopped the exams, other institutions resorted to some form of online assessment. Not all was perceived as negative though, because the pandemic illustrated the need and provided opportunities to move forward. We already know a lot about various forms of online delivery of education, be that in hybrid, blended or fully online and distance education. The various EU and national policies on digital society and digital education support the further need of digitalisation of higher education. The literature indicated directions to take to support teachers: continued teacher professionalisation for digital education; educational models for online education; and more support for diversity, inclusion and accessibility. We provide some suggestions what these directions entails.<br/