Arquivo da categoria: LDT – GSE – Stanford

LDT Seminar – Week 3 – Learning Problem Statements v 1.0

Learning Problem Statements v 1.0

“In preparation for the expert interview, write at least three short posts, each one identifying one “learning problem” you might want to solve in about one paragraph. Include: WHO needs to learn WHAT and WHY it is important. For each, name three people who could help you learn more about this challenge.  Post each “problem” here as a post on this discussion (not on a google doc as I showed in seminar).”

Response 1:
Bruno is going to teach a course on iOS development at a training center. He is a skilled programmer but has never taught before. The center has general guidelines as to what topics he must cover over the course of the next 8 weeks. There is no course material (slides, videos or written material) to support his lessons. He has no idea where to start or how to structure his lessons. He needs to learn some basic strategies, techniques and teaching methods to be able to start preparing his lesson plan and teaching materials.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Sarah Wischnia – professor – Introduction to Teaching
  2. Paul Hegarty – professor – iOS Development
  3. Denise Pope – professor – Curriculum Construction
Response 2:
Alex is a motivated young developer who is fascinated with the new AppleTV OS that recently came out. He learned how to create apps for it and it was quite tricky, even though he has experience with iOS Apps already. He understands  this is valuable content he’s acquired and knows that he can make some money out of this (and he needs it). He now has to decide which platform(s) to use to distribute his content. To address this challenge he needs to find out what are the available platforms out there, their market share, revenue sharing business models as well as usability, feature sets and appear. In order to do so he must research the topic online, talk to other users and subject matter expert for some guidelines and pointers.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Karin Forssell – subject matter expert – LDT
  2. John Mitchell – subject matter expert – Vice Provost for Online Learning
  3. Soren Rosier – subject matter expert – former SRI researcher
Response 3:
Luciana is the manager of a software development center which teaches mobile development to software engineers as well as complete programming novices. She needs to insure that the novices are actually learning the basics in the introductory courses before she can move them on to the regular courses intended for those who already know how to code. In the regular classes the novices have a hard time keeping up with the pace. This results in them either giving up on the course, retaking the course, hindering the progress of the class and/or feeling the school has not taught him properly. She needs to be able to assess the novice’s progress early on in this 2 week long course to be able to talk to the teacher to pay more attention to that student or schedule extra help sessions. She also needs to assess students who claim they are at a sufficient level to take the course. In order to so, Luciana needs to learn about assessment methods commonly used in programming courses, how to implement and track them effectively.

Three people who could help learn more about this challenge:

  1. Dan Schwartz – subject matter expert – Dean – Graduate School of Education
  2. Jean-Paul Schmetz – Chief Scientist – https://codility.com – Software Developer testing platform

  3. Nate Hardison – Professor Computer Science

SAM – Stanford Alumni Mentoring Program

Went to an introductory meeting of the Stanford Alumni Mentoring Program – have to tap into all these incredible resources!

Vision:
For over a decade the Stanford Alumni Mentoring (SAM) program has been catalyzing relationships between students here on the Farm and alumni who were once in their shoes.

Mission:
We have a database of over 3,000 Stanford alumni and connect hundreds of students and alumni in mentoring relationships throughout the year. With a foundation of such incredible alumni and students our mission is as follows:

  1. Create mentorship opportunities that allow students to more organically connect with alumni.
  2. Assure quality interactions through stressing the importance of openness, sincerity, and appreciation in every mentorship situation so that both students and mentors understand the true spirit of mentorship.
  3. Provide support and guidance through the ups and downs of the mentorship experience and serve as a bridge for both mentors and mentees.

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Qualitative Research – Week 3 – Group Work

Met today with my group (James Leo & Ana Cuellar) to decide upon the technology setting we want to observe. Great conversation, easy going group, direct and efficient. We came up with the following for now… 

How does the adoption of technology impact the learning experiences of students with disruptive tendencies and/or lower academic achievement?

To answer this question, we are interested either in A) observing the impact of a education technology specifically designed to improve student behavior or B) observing whether a learning technology changes student behavior despite not being created for that purpose.

We sent our Professor (Denise Clark Pope) and T.A. Petr Johanes an email with some questions and got responses from both in less than 3 hours! So good to work this way…

Our questions:

“We are hoping you can give us some feedback on this progress before we reach out to potential interviewees. 

We are also curious about the order of the observation and interviews – can we interview a teacher pre-technology use, then observe the class upon tech adoption, then conduct the final interview after the observation? Or are we tied to the observation-interview-interview order?” 

Their responses I will maintain to our group. The result of the feedback will come later 🙂 Can’t spill all the beans right?

 

After we met, we walked around the School of Engineering’s Future Day and ran into a company we were actually talking about during the meeting: Little Bits!! Talked to Joe, the local representative, teacher, enthusiast and parent about possibly taping into his school to observe the use of this technology in action! Awesome coincidence.

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Learning Environment – Week 3 – Observations/Interviews of a Tech Learning Environment

Assignment: 

Describe the educational environment you’ve picked to observe and its background. What are key possibilities for employing technologies in the setting (physical or virtual)? Tell us how you will observe it.

Response: 

EDUC 333A – Paper One

Observations/Interviews of a Tech Learning Environment

Lucas Longo

The technology setting I am interested in investigating is the relationship between educators and the digital course content publication tools they use. I intend to observe how they work with the variety of tools at hand. What are the onuses and bonuses of such tools? What is missing or could be done better?

Online courses, MOOCS, and several other initiatives have been offering content digitally and promising access to education for all. One of the reasons I believe that there has been limited success is that the course material is generally not planned and produced specifically for such a context. It is not enough to record the live lectures, publish the slides and assign reading materials. The content has to be created in a new form so that it can be delivered in an appealing and effective manner.

The potential of improving these tools is that you would be able to capture more knowledge with a higher quality from more educators. If the process of creating the online content is easy and fun to do, more educators would “take the plunge” and share what they know more often. Learners would have potentially higher quality content delivered in a manner that is interesting, engaging, exploratory and effective.

My personal interest in the subject matter is integrating media editing tools into LMSs to make it easier to edit and manage multiple source materials such as video, slides, photos, links, tweets and so on. I also think that an essential part of the process is to provide the educator with some level of guidance and coaching during the process of creating their courses. The platform could provide templates, step-by-step ‘wizards’, access to similar lesson plans, quizzes and activities for inspiration and finally providing human feedback once the course is submitted for review. The gamification of lesson preparation, course creation or sharing of knowledge.

To observe this in action I intend to observe a subject matter expert who is preparing his course, creating the digital content and publishing it on an online tool. I am in touch with Edmodo, with whom I might intern next quarter, to observe educators in this process. Ideally I would have access to the existing training material they already offer their incoming teachers and be able to talk to the team responsible for designing the tool from the educator’s perspective.

Some potential interview questions are:

  1. How does the platform aid in the process of creating the content for your course?
  2. Do you see a necessity for the content editing tools be integrated with an LMS?
  3. What is you preferred method of teaching?
  4. Do you believe the tools you use provide a better learning experience for learners?

Learning Environments – Week 3 – Class Notes

Class Notes

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Notes Followup:

Half the class went outside to go and build things with some play material (my group). The other group stayed inside and watched videos about building things. We all came back, divided into 4 groups and had to create a air traffic control center that would withstand hurricanes, simulated by a blow drier 🙂 Fun. The groups that had gone outside seem to have gone right into the construction while the group who stayed inside conceptualized more before they started to build. As far as “who won” – hard to tell 🙂

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