E-Algebra Online Course

Over the past few years I’ve been fascinated by the rise of online courses (in particular Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs), covering topics from just about every path of academia, to business, leisure and everything inbetween. I started wondering how hard was it to create learning materials like those you often see on Coursera, Edx or Udacity. Another similar system which interested me was OCR/CUP/Raspberry Pi collaborative project to turn the entire Computer Science GCSE into an online self-taught course (example here)

Typically these courses will have series of videos, often with embedded content such as multiple choice quizzes that prevent the user moving on past certain points in the video unless they answer correctly. They are usually supplemented with further quizzes, assignments and forums, some which are moderated automatically and others which are peer-assessed.

Most of the established platforms have their own in-built tools for creating courses, however there are a number of pieces of software in the public domain  that aim to do just that. I would suggest the two biggest heavyweights in this category are the commercial packages Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate, however any google search for ‘course authoring software’ will return a plethora of results. These programs typically remove the need for any formal programming knowledge and provide interfaces similar to the likes of PowerPoint to quickly and easily create rich content.

The possibilities to me seem really really vast. I’ve experimented a little bit with students creating short videos and quizzes and using the platforms to package neatly, track data and provide some added interactivity; but I would like to take this much further. The first few things that come to my head when I think about my ideal online learning course are:

1. Engaging content

People don’t always want to just sit in front of a screen and be talked at. What could be done to make things more interesting, interactive and exciting?

2. Delineated paths

The problem I see with much of this content is similar with the problems of powerpoint – you already know what is happening on the next slide and the user’s understanding or knowledge of the current won’t do much to change it. I’m a big fan of ‘branching’ structures that may still have the same main or central path for pupils to follow, but with lots of sidetracks for those either needing a little extra help or wanting to extend or fast-track.

3. Use of data

These types of courses allow us to gather huge amounts of data. Traditionally people would simple collect overall scores of examined content and sometimes individual question responses, however nowadays (in particular thanks to a little thing called tin-can api), you can track just about everything – what did people click on? How long did they stay on a page for? How many wrong attempts did they have before getting the right one? Did they give up? Did they come back? It would be really nice if this data, along with where people provide more direct feedback could be built into a course design cycle.

4. Feedback

This couples with the delineating paths, having strong systems in place to give appropriate feedback that helps the learner work through cognitive conflict and develop understanding. Ticks and a mark out of 10 simply aren’t good enough – if you look at any game people play on a games console it is most likely that the environment will adapt to the users’ actions and provide lots of continuous subtle feedback. Through making mistakes and trying different options/strategies the user should be able to slowly gain a better understanding of how the world they are in works. I don’t see why much of the same principles shouldn’t apply in a more academic learning context.

5. Collaboration

Current courses often try to make use of the fact that many people are studying the same course at the same time and will have fairly ‘live’ forums and assignments. But what about the people who are watching the exact video at the same time? or both just starting the same assignment? Are there way to make use of the fact there are other real people in the same situation? My go-to response when it comes to these types of things are to tell people to check out and try the lessons from desmos.com (I’ve written a post about one of them here). These activities are designed for use by students who will most likely be in the same classroom or computer lab and working on the same problem with a teacher available to facilitate.

I strongly believe that given the right motivation and support, teachers can really lead the way in the production of high quality, engaging learning materials. Technology that used to only be available to people with vast programming experience and even bigger budgets is now much more accessible. I’ve already mentioned two of the software packages that can be used without any real programming knowledge to create interactive template-driven content. I’d like to find ways to couple these with good data-management, animation,  and game production platforms (which I hope to write more about in future posts). There are currently a number of larger groups working towards these goals, ones that have stood out to me in the past include Glass Lab Games and Sparx, however I still think there is a definite place for individual or small teaching group contributions. In the next section I’ll show you something I started putting together a little while back but struggle to find the time to really develop: