Researchers and educators are increasingly turning to large, complex data sources (big data) to transform education. How much information about an individual can be gleaned from big data? What can machine technologies detect automatically, without human interpretation? Dr. McNamara will describe how machine technologies provide a wide array of information about our demographics, behaviors, social interactions, personalities, emotions, and even our cognitive processes. There is a growing realization that getting the big picture — developing a complete and highly predictive understanding of student outcomes — will require multiple sources of information and interdisciplinary approaches to data analysis. One powerful source of information is language: the words used by the students, in their writing, in dialogues, within discussion forums, and in the classroom. The time is ripe for researchers to incorporate information about language into models of learning. Information about words, sentences, whole texts, and snippets of text can be obtained using tools that are readily available on the internet. Advances in these techniques present an interesting set of questions and goals for researchers, particularly regarding the accessibility of personal data, as well as the use of these techniques to develop personalized learning technologies.
Contemporary educators have been advocating that teaching and learning in schools should go beyond knowledge acquisition. However, schools tend to favor prescriptive learning tasks that give students only a limited space to stretch their creativity to develop a pre-defined proficiency level. A critical challenge is how to help students learn like expert creators who constantly display active engagement and personal autonomy, and who are keen to collaborate with others. Existing designs of learning systems often do not address the needs of student creators as they, by definition, have only a limited level of domain knowledge and have incomplete experience of the knowledge creation community. This talk will present our experience of transforming classrooms into creator communities which support students to learn as creators. It will revisit the key design principles of learning systems based on the needs of student creators: “low-threshold-and-high-ceiling”, “remix culture” and the “dis-engagement/re-engagement cycles”. Design examples and research findings will be presented in the hope of shedding light on the design of learning systems which can continuously engage students in learning-to-create activities.
Some challenges are emerging in scaling up instructional innovation powered by ICT. First, there is a gap of learning media between inside and outside class in the majority of schools. Second, what is crucial for majority of teachers to focus on learning outcomes, assessment and learning activities? Third, how to manage the diversity of students in a class in respective of personalized and adaptive learning? Fourth, what key skills are the must-have for majority of teachers in supporting easy, engaged and effective learning? To identify an innovation to scale up, we proposed a framework to figure out a scalable innovation and the potential routines by comparing a lot of international projects with technology-based instructional innovation. The framework is based on analyzing a real learning scenario from the perspective of students, teachers and administrators separately. At the end, we proposed five principles, which refer to basic instruction logic, suitable learning resources, timely learning assessment, rich learning experience and convenient instructional tools, for designing instructional innovation in terms of authentic learning scenario to match the needs of digital natives.
Big Data is an inevitable revolution, but it has already become a blurred ontology at the same time. And so have concepts such as flipped classrooms, digital natives, blended learning, 21st century skills, MOOCs, serious games, virtual environments and digital pedagogy. Who coined these terms, what was the rationale behind them and what are their current acceptations? Pervasive terminology may be persuasive and put pressure on educators and even researchers. In the first part of his keynote, Jozef Colpaert will defend the idea that in the field of educational technology, we need to focus on an accurate specification of these terms (as ontologies) in order to allow for more effective knowledge building in our communities of research and practice. In a second part, he will look at data from a variety of perspectives: the Internet of Things, Open Data, The Semantic Web, Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, Learner Analytics, and Research Data. He will present the pitfalls and affordances associated with personalization and contextualization of the learning process, with the authoring of learning content and with educational engineering as research method.
Finally, he will discuss with the audience to what extent these phenomena might –or not- support us in redesigning our language learning and teaching environments.
The advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) over the last decade has changed the landscape of human interactivities all over the world. Today, mobile phones and tablets are an integral part of the lives of youngsters. From the perspective of education, researchers and technological educators have been looking into the potential of various mobile technologies for offering school-age students new opportunities of constructivist learning. One of the foci is on harnessing the location-based context-aware technology, particularly the Global Positioning System (GPS), to support student-centred learning and teaching activities in outside-the-classroom contexts. In this talk, the speaker will delineate his research team’s latest R&D work, EduVenture—an integrated GPS-supported mobile learning system to support teachers and students in facilitating and conducting social inquiry learning in outdoor environments.
Flipped classroom emphasizes learner self-learning and teachers’ further guidance for higher-level cognitive learner-centered discussions. The speech will focus on the challenges and limitations in applying the flipped teaching methods, including how to handle the motivation for learner self-learning and the quality of discussions, how to deal with issues like the anxiety from social interaction during discussion activities, and what the assisting role game-based learning(GBL) can play in this trend. The speaker will introduce mini flipped GBL, which is proposed by the speaker’s research team. This teaching approach aims to design and apply 5-20 minute mini GBL teaching activities that integrate mini games, gamification mechanism, cognitive processing, social psychology interaction analysis, and empirical analysis. Mini flipped GBL features learners’ self-learning, immediate evaluations, and scaffolding feedbacks. The speaker will also introduce the application and promotion of mini flipped GBL in Taiwan, related industry-academic cooperation, relevant games, and teachers’ experiences in mini flipped GBL application. In addition, a series of innovative learning behavioral pattern analysis for BIG-DATA logs of educational games proposed by the research team will be introduced.
From the perspective of educational research funding agencies in various countries and regions, there have been fresh impetuses on the importance of understanding, emphasizing and tackling issues of sustaining and scaling educational innovations. An assortment of research and implementation efforts have experimented on strategies that seek to lead to successful implementation and scaling up of promising research or innovation outcomes. It is ripe to review this diversity of approaches, and see how we can learn from them. My talk narrates our current understanding and perspectives to scaling-up, and presents the latest insights, contemporary models and case studies that can advance our understanding of the scaling-up agenda. I will also present some views of the challenges as well as opportunities for sustaining and scaling up in the educational systems in the Asia-Pacific context.