Awareness and Collaboration in the iHelp Awareness and Collaboration in the iHelp Courses Content Management SystemCourses Content Management System

Christopher Brooks, Rupi Panesar, Jim Greer

Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems (ARIES)Department of Computer Science

University of SaskatchewanSaskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada

IntroductionIntroduction

The Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is not an online classroom

Learners are unable to collaborate just-in-time around the artefacts of learning Questions in and around lectures are important!

Learners have no idea who is doing what around them Consequential understanding of your fellow

students is important! Instructors have no idea what the participation is

like, unless they force it Who is interacting with whom? What are the cliques? Who is sleeping in class, and how many people do

this? This presentation will outline our work in bringing

these social cues and collaborative technologies into the online world

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

iHelp CoursesiHelp Courses

iHelp Courses is our standards-based research LCMS Courses are deployed at IMS/SCORM Content

Packages The SCORM Run Time Environment (RTE) has

been extended to add some user modelling support

The system is used by hundreds of students annually, and with the discussion/chat tools is used by nearly 1,000 students each academic term

This talk focuses not only on the things in the paper but our current environment as well as things on the test bed right now!

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Issue #1: Artefacts OnlineIssue #1: Artefacts Online

Some insight in our solution comes from the notion of activity theory. We believe:

“achievement of learning outcomes arises from the interactions between the learner, the artefacts in the environment, the tools to manipulate those artefacts, and the learning community.” (p3)

Distilling this down we suggest Interaction around the artefacts of learning is

important Good tools support to manipulate these

artefacts is needed Connecting members in the learning

community is key Online artefacts tend not to be

synchronous in nature

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts

Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Solution #1: Learning Object CollaborationSolution #1: Learning Object Collaboration

We have coupled our content management system directly with interaction tools As users browse through learning material

they are able to see and interact with other synchronous learners

Discussion forums are content-based; instructors can create a discussion forum for a particular module, a particular lesson, or even a particular page

Courseware provides subtle cues as to who is looking at content, or what content has had discussions centred around it

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning

Object Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Solution #1: Screenshot (Solution #1: Screenshot (DemoDemo))

Indications exist for bothsynchronous and asynchronous collaboration

Chat follows learner browsing

Events happening in backgroundare still “visible”

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning

Object Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Solution #2: Groupware for CollaborationSolution #2: Groupware for Collaboration

There are a number of research collaborative tools out there but: Very few deployed, “prime time” tools in

educational institutions Very few (none?) that are browser-based

iHelp PEPL (iHelp Share) Allows students to share code from within the

iHelp Courses system Is invoked through the chat system, so

sharing sessions can start naturally (not prearranged)

Allows for more than two participants (current version)

Aimed at computer science students, but being deployed for online writing lab as well (2007)

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware

for Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Solution #2: Screenshot (Solution #2: Screenshot (DemoDemo))

Annotations “bubble”up to the top onmouse over

Users all share a newchat room as well

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware

for Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Issue #2: Lack of AwarenessIssue #2: Lack of Awareness

Two groups get awareness in face to face environments, but not in online environments Students Student: Walking through the

halls, labs, and into the classes give students an idea of who their peers are, what they are working on, and how they “measure up”

Instructor Student: Online systems may give an idea of what marks a student has, but that casual glance around the classroom for missing (or lost) faces doesn’t exist

A key design goal in enabling this kind of awareness is to do so consequentially It must be easy and fluid to go from tool to

tool No more interpreting big lists of numbers!

More subtle visualizations are key.

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of

Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Solution #1: Measuring Up (Beta)Solution #1: Measuring Up (Beta)

General idea is to indicate the process of other students How much content they

have viewed How much time they

have spent What their current

knowledge level is Coloured bars: “me vs.

the average” We want to leverage the implicit traces a user

leaves behind as they interact directly with the learning environment

We see this as a form of open user modeling See Adaptive Hypermedia (2006) workshop

paper

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring

Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Solution #2: Class AwarenessSolution #2: Class Awareness

Very tedious for instructors to get an idea of how “healthy” their online classes are

As more classes move to online and blended modes, the measure of health begins to include content management system metrics Do they post questions? Do they answer? Are they even checking the system for new

questions? Analyzing lists of stats is ok in a small course,

but once it gets bigger than 20 people it can’t be done in a glance

We’ve started investigating visualizations to handle large sets of complex interaction data in online/blended courses

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Screenshot: Instructor VisualizationScreenshot: Instructor Visualization

Based on sociograms, but recognizes three classes of students Participants: Those who write messages. The

bigger the node, the more popular their messages are.

Lurkers: Behavior is quantified – the closer they are to the participants, the more they are lurkering.

Delinquents: Those who can, but never have.

12

3

Participants

Lurkers

Delinquents

Red nodesare instructors

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

Visualization notesVisualization notes

Currently we include no notion of time – you get a snapshot of how the class looks taking into account all data

At the moment graph is anonymous, considering implications of making this graph public for students and watching how motivation changes

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions

ConclusionsConclusions

We have implemented a number of awareness and collaboration features in our online content management system

A number of these features are undergoing specific evaluation

Student and instructor uptake has been strong – instructors really enjoy the code sharing facilities, and students chat and discuss a lot with these tools

We’re currently investigating how these tools can be applied in more media-rich environments, e.g. with streamed lectures

Happy to answer any questions!

Jim Greer (greer@cs.usask.ca)ARIES Lab

University of Saskatchewan Canada

Introduction

iHelp Courses

Issue: Artefacts Online

Solution: Learning Object

Collaboration

Solution: Groupware for

Collaboration

Issue: Lack of Awareness

Solution: Measuring Up

Solution: Class

Awareness

Conclusions