Dress Up for the Class - Teaching with Simulations to Engage Students in Active Learning

Student-centred Learning

In this series of blogs, TaLT would like to explore the active and student-centred learning and share with you some great experience from our academics. In many cases, you will find the approaches quite handy and useful creating a student-centred and collaborative learning environment for our learners.

Dress Up to the Class

On 09.10.2017, the students in the BTF5340 Regional Trade Governance S2 2017 class all dress up and gather in the Racecourse Hotel function room next to the Caulfield campus. Their teachers Dr. Nicola Charwat and Ben Grunberg have set up the function room with round tables and afternoon tea for the simulated TOP Negotiating Round. About 60 students representing 10 Asia-Pacific countries are sitting in 6 negotiation tables and spend the afternoon to negotiate agreements on regional trade issues such as compulsory licensing, grant of patents, patent term extension, pharmaceutical data and marketing protection, biologic data and marketing protection, and tobacco-related exemptions.

Trans­‐Oceanic Partnership Intellectual Property Negotiation

The lecturers have prepared instructions for negotiation, negotiation issues summary documents, TOP - IP outstanding issues negotiating text, and other resources/readings on the faculty ePorfotilio system Mahara and use it as the virtual space for each country group to work on. Students have worked together throughout the semester to prepare negotiation strategy and discussion paper, position statement, this simulation, and the debrief/reflection. Two teachers move from table to table during the negotiation to observe and evaluate student performance.

The negotiation simulation encourages students to take initiative and actively engage in the study. Students organise the negotiation process quite nicely by sharing the agenda and prepare their materials in advance, use timer to keep each countries speeches in time so that every country can have a voice in negotiation, use technology to keep voting results and negotiation minutes.

The simulation finishes with a short report from each topic chairperson and the following debrief/reflection submission. An online survey is also published on Moodle to collect student feedback. Nicola has been doing this simulation for several years and has received very positive student feedback.

If You'd Like to Try

It is an interesting learning activity for the students. And if you would like to have a try, one lesson that we have learnt in the past is to break down the simulation into specific tasks with due dates. It will help the students to understand what they are supposed to do by time and prevent them from getting overwhelmed in the simulation. If you are interested and would like to talk to someone, TaLT is always there for you.


Reference
Faculty Focus (2017, 11 07). Using Role Play Simulations to Promote Active Learning:　https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/using-role-play-simulations-to-promote-active-learning/
University, C. (2017, 11 07). Teaching with Simulations. Retrieved from Carleton University: https://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/simulations/index.html

A Video Solution for the University

Finally there will be a video solution for the whole university. Monash university does not have a video management system at this moment. Lecturers create videos with different software programmes. Some might upload them to Youtube or Vimeo while some just upload the video files into Moodle. Once the lecturer leaves the university, the Google account might be closed and the videos might get lost on Youtube.

MUOLT has been investigating a complete video management system for the university and they are very close to implement the Panopto system for us. In this month's tool tips, we would like to introduce it and you can think about what we can do with it next semester.

Panopto Video

Panopto is a video platform designed by Carnegie Mellon University for the specific needs of businesses and universities. It is used to manage, live stream, record, and share videos across the university. It also makes it easy to search and use the video resources that created and shared by your Monash colleagues.

The following video is a demo of the Panopto platform application in education industry. It provides a video content management system for creating, uploading, managing and sharing video and audio files. It also has the ability to do lecture recording and it is a great tool to do pre-class lecture videos as it can integrate interactive quizzes in the videos.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It can create and edit video/audio files. The staff are using so many different programmes to do that. Now we will have a same one and there will not be a format issue in the future.
2. It makes it easy for the university to upload, manage, share, and search for Monash video and audio files. Even after the lecturers leave Monash, the resources will stay.
3. You can add interactive quizzes into the video easily to test the student understanding
4. It has detailed report function to indicate the students and the time that they spend on watch your videos.
5. It is perfectly embedded into Moodle and you can add your videos very easily. (Not yet working in our Moodle at this moment)

Hey, it sounds really good. How about taking a look and playing with some examples by yourselves? Go to www.panopto.com and click Free Trial on the top right.

What is not so good?

We will have to wait until MUOLT and eSolution put it in the university system. It might take some time. Hopefully it can be done before next semester.

What's in it for us?

With Panopto, you can create and edit video/audio files easily. You do not have to look for a software programme to record your desktop screen and webcam or look for a programme to trim the videos anymore.

Also, you will be able to search and use the shared video from our Monash Panopto. You might be able to use the video resources in the same topic from other teachers without worrying about copyright issues.

And it would be great to see the student activity report about their timelines watching your videos. Therefore you can find out which videos are attractive and which are not so that you can improve the videos in the future.

If you are interested, give it a try. Keep following our TaLT communications. We will introduce more details about our Monash Panopto in the near future.

Gamification at a Glance

Blackboard TLC 2017 in Darwin

The Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2017 was just held in the first week of September in Darwin by our Moodle hosting supplier Blackboard Inc..  The Conference was delivered over four days through an exciting range of workshops, presentations, and sessions. TaLT had Tristan as the representative participant in the meeting and he has brought back some interesting experience to share with all of us.

Gamification

The gamification of learning is a relatively new educational approach to motivate students to learn by using video game design and game elements in learning environments. The goal is to maximize enjoyment and engagement through capturing the interest of learners and inspiring them to continue learning. It can provide instant feedback to the learners, as well as beter learning environment and experience. It might also promote behavioral change of the students.

The following diagram shows several benefits of adopting gamification in the learning design.

Image 1: https://pixelearning.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/final_info.jpg

Gamification in a day - Introduction

In the conference's Academic Adoption Day workshop, Mark Bailye, Customer Success Advocate and Nicole Wall, Lead Functional Consultant from Blackboard hosted a wonderful workshop giving us the opportunity to experience, explore, engage and evaluate key pedagogical practices including gamification, personalised learning and blended approaches.

At the beginning of the gamification workshop, the learners were divided into groups and experienced a set of well-designed gamification learning activities. Then we discussed what is good about the gamification learning experience. Participants think that the practical interesting learning activities, the clear expectation, and the associated curiosity have made the learning process quite engaging. But also at the same time, the concern was that there could possibly be too many distractions from the learning outcome in the games.

The workshop facilitators then introduced the commonly used approaches in designing gamified courses, including:

• Story telling
• Situated learning
• Constructivist
• Social
• Problem based
• Exploratory

Also, game elements in Gamification have been introduced:

Challenges	Narratives	Measurement
Competition	Penalties	Learning
Development	Rules	Achievement
Exploration	Risk	Skill
Feedback	Rewards/Incentives	Leaderboard

Then Hermy Cortez Llacuna from the University of West Sydney introduced their project of Quest in vUWS, which is a gamification course for new students to get familiar with the university's online learning environment.

Gamifying v UWS: Starting your quest in Blackboard Learn - Hermy Cortez Llacuna - Western Sydney University from Blackboard APAC

Gamification in a day - Do It Yourself

Then all teams have been asked to apply the gamification approach and design a course to teach the colleagues to cook scrambled eggs in LMS. And we only had 2 hours to do that.

We adopted the following approach to do that:

1. Know your learners
2. Design a game
3. Select game elements
4. Create gamified content
5. Play the game

Together with Paul from Monash College, Emily from The Australian College of Ministries, and Dajana from UNSW, we worked on the learning outcome, assessments, and then the learning activities. We decided to use the concept of Exploration to design this gamification course. Those who have played the famous PC game Sid Meier's Civilization should be familiar with that concept.

The course starts as below:
"The sun is shining and you've just rolled out of bed to get ready for the day. You've got a strong craving for scrambled eggs but you just can't remember how to make them!
Go down to the kitchen and have a look if you can find all required ingredients and tools to make scrambled eggs."

Then the learner has to explore the kitchen, starting from the cupboard, to the drawer, the fridge, and the pantry. Successfully accomplishing the tasks allow the learner to collect the tools and ingredients to make the scrambled eggs:

Students who have found the tools and ingredients are given badges in Moodle and we hope that the badges will encourage students to finish the activities. Also, progress monitoring is available for the students to see how far they are from the finishing line.

The learner might be surprised that they were not able to find the eggs in the fridge. But if they keep searching, they will find it in the pantry through the famous Where's Wally game:

At the end, students will finish a quiz and user the Zappar app on their mobiles to scan a Zappar code. You can try that on your phone as well.

Students will watch a video about how to make scrambled eggs and an assessment will be taken after that to evaluate their understandings.

We did a wonderful job and was considered the best by the workshop facilitators. On the next day, Tristan presented briefly about the design in the Game On! session in the conference.

If you would like to know about gamification or try it for a special topic in your unit, feel free to send us an email.

Let the Students Prepare the Learning Material Using Moodle Wiki

Less used Moodle activities

In this new series of blogs, TaLT would like to explore the less used Moodle activities and share with you some great experience from our academics. In many cases, you will find the approaches quite handy and useful creating a student-centred and collaborative learning environment for our learners. And in some cases, such as using Moodle wiki, it might also create a more interesting assessment and feedback approach while reducing teacher workload.

Moodle Wiki 

When people hear word "Wiki", the first thing that comes to their mind would be Wikipedia. Whether or not its contents are suitable for the academic purpose is a question. But it is definitely a very good example using Wiki to host interesting contents. A Wiki allows any user of the website to create, edit, and even comment on contents. It requires no coding knowledge but still offers functions such as multimedia or hyperlinks. In teaching practices, it provides great potential for a collaborative learning approach.

Moodle also has a Wiki activity for us to use. It can be quite useful when designing learning activities such as group lecture notes, brainstorming, group projects, and drafting when contributing to other internet Wikis.

Let the students prepare the learning material

Last semester, one of us own, Associate Professor Dewi Tojib, started to try a new learning task with Moodle Wiki for her students in the unit MKC2110 Buyer behaviour in marketing.

In this assessment task, students worked together in pairs to create a Wiki entry based on a randomly assigned consumer behaviour concept introduced in the unit. It required students to research, describe the concept, and discuss one real-life marking stimulus using the concept with visual materials. After students had submitted their wiki entries, teachers reviewed, graded, and provided feedback to the initial submission. Students would revise the wiki entries until they got the teacher's approval. A detailed Wiki marking rubric has been designed by Dewi and distributed to the students to standardise the grading.

After several weeks hard working from the students and teachers, a consumer behaviour Wiki containing dozens of concept items has been created in this collaborative learning process. Students also have the ability to comment on the Wiki entries. The Wiki was widely used when students prepared for the final exam. (447 clicks by 129 out of 160 students)

It has been a quite successful trial using Wiki as a collaborative learning tool. Detailed instruction and marking rubric offered students good guidance when writing Wiki entries. Students also received individual feedback to their work from the teachers. At the end of the assessment task, student work compiled into a useful Wiki learning resource which students used quite actively. The social constructivist learning theory was used to shift the teacher-centred approach to a student-centred one. We believe that it helped the students feel more satisfied in the learning process.

Future work

How can the assessment task be improved next semester? How about enhancing the student interactions in the Wiki. Maybe the new task can provide them opportunities to comment on all Wiki entries and edit their own entries in a more flexible approach. Hopefully, it might improve the student engagement and improve the student community cohesion by sharing knowledge. If you have any new idea about using Wiki in teaching, please feel free to post a comment below the blog.


Reference
Biasutti M., El-Denghaidy H., Using Wiki in teacher education: Impact on knowledge management processes and student satisfaction, Computers & Education, Volume 59, Issue 3, November 2012, 861-872

Bring Ideas to Life with Wolfram Demonstrations Project

New Semester

How is the new semester going? We hope that you are enjoying teaching the new student cohorts this semester. Have you ever seen them using a search engine called WolframAlpha other than Google? It is quite interesting as when searching for academic knowledge, it gives a set of related contents with equations and diagrams if applicable. It is quite handy and is popular among college students.

Wolfram Demonstrations Projects

The same company developed WolframApha and the famous Mathematica also created the Wolfram Demonstration Project to bring ideas to life. The project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.

The following video is a demo of the daylight calculator in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. With this demonstration, teachers can use it to explain the concepts in a much more visualised approach. It also allows students to play with it to have a better understanding of the concept and master the calculation.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It brings ideas to life with its interactive and visualised features. 
2. Now it has 11317 interactive demonstrations covering topics over math, physical sciences, life science, business & social system, system & model, engineering & technology,  arts & humanities, and kids & gaming.
3. It is an open source system and hundreds if not thousands of authors have contributed to the demonstrations project.
4. It is free for any teacher or student to use.
5. You can embed that into your Moodle unit

Hey, it sounds really good. How about taking a look and playing with some examples by yourselves? Download and install the free Wolfram CDF Player. Try Consumer Choice: Income, Taste, and Prices or Radial Engine with the Internet Explorer (When we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox)

What is not so good?

It works quite nice independently with the desktop application. It also means that it could be difficult to integrate the demonstrations into LMS or Powerpoint. Even though it works fine with Internet Explorer when we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox.

What's in it for us?

Using the interactive visualisation of the concepts in nearly any topic in the business school. As the teacher or the student move a Demonstration's control, they can see a change in its output that helps the students to understand the concepts.

And the good thing is that we don't need to do anything but just find one Demonstration to use. You can either browse the categories to explore topics or simply search the concepts. There are plenty of Demonstrations waiting for you to explore.

 

If you are interested, give it a try. We think that it could be quite useful if it happens that someone has contributed the Demonstrations that we are planning to use in our teaching. It can be a good learning experience for the students. You can find the frequently asked questions on this page.

Starting YouTube videos from a point in time

Do you ever want a YouTube video that you are using as part of a lecture or embedded in a presentation to start at particular time? It's easy to do: find the point on the video from which you want the playback to begin (3:43 in our example), then click Share, and check the check-box that says Start at. You will see that the start time has been added to your shareable url. Easy!

How Much Should We Assign? Estimate Student Workload in the New Semester

Break

Finally, the marking is finished. Now we are taking a break between two semesters. You might be in the conference/research/holiday modes. However, you are supposed to submit the unit guides for S2 in just a couple of weeks and then prepare for the unit contents. We know that and we hope this Course Workload Estimator can help you to estimate the student workload when planning for the new semester.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Course Workload Estimator

Planning your readings, assignments, and exams for your units can be challenging. And you will have to consider student workload for those learning activities. How much should we assign to the students?

We know that university has its recommendation based on the unit credit. An average study time of 24-36 hours a week is a reasonable expectation for our students. However, the research shows that the average college student in America only spends 12-15 hours per week studying.

The Course Workload Estimator developed by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University can help you to estimate the student workload based on the designs of your reading assignments, writing assignments, other assignments, and exams. We hope that the estimated results can assist you to plan your reading and writing tasks.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It is a tool to fill the blank. We have not seen any similar estimator for student workload.
2. It is easy to use and it takes only two mins to estimate student weekly study hours.
3. It is free.

What is not so good?

The question might be: is it really accurate? We do not know the answer, unfortunately. However, we can give it a try and see how it works in the next semester.

What's in it for us?

Students take much longer to complete a task than you do that. Even though it is not possible to estimate the workload without getting into the assignment details, you can still use this estimator to evaluate the assignment design. Then based on the results, you can change the structure, number, size, or expectations for the assignments.

It is a simple tool to use. We can spend two minutes to input the information with the designed reading materials, writing and other assignments, and exams. The web page generates the estimated student workload in the format of out of class hours per week.

And if you would like to change the design of assessments in your unit, you can just change the input and the system will calculate the workload again automatically.

If you are interested in the research of student workload and the tool, you can find more information in this further reading article.

Get Started with Loom

We are interested

Since we posted the last introduction blog post of Loom, we have received some inquiries of this tool. As our academics are interested in using Loom for creating video materials for teaching, TaLT has prepared a user guide for you.

Get started

1. Open Google Chrome
2. Go to the web page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions
3. Enter "loom" and then press Enter key in the search box Search the store
4. Find Loom – Video Recorder: Screen, Webcam and Mic, and click the ADD TO CHROME button next to it
5. Click Add extension. Then the Loom icon appears on the top right of the browser:

6. Click the Loom icon and then click Continue with Google to sign in with your Monash account
7. Click Allow if Loom ask the permission to use your cameras and mics
8. Then you will see the Loom menu and a camera screen on your browser:

9. Click Camera icon to choose the camera that you would like to use
10. Click Mic icon to choose the mic that you would like to use
11. Click Capture to expand the recording menu:

Current Tab mode allows you to record the browser tab contents with the audio from the tab. Cam Only mode allows you to record the video signal from the camera as well as the audio from the mic. Desktop mode can do a full-screen capture. We will use Desktop mode as an example.

12. Click Start Recording
13. You can choose to record a full monitor screen or just an open software programme. Then click Share
14. When the recording is completed, click Stop sharing button on the bottom of the screen
15. The video is now opened in a new tab. You can edit the video name and add comment to the video. Click the Download icon to download the video to your computer as an MP4 file.

Please make sure that you download the video to your computer as the free version will not allow you to access the online video after a certain period of time.

Create Webcam and Screen Recording Video with Loom

Exam season

Welcome to the exam season. We hope that the life is getting easier until it hits the point that we have to start marking the exams. If you are interested in preparing your units for the next semester, this month's video creation tool Loom can be very helpful.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Loom

Loom is a cloud-based screen recorder and video creator. Videos are widely used as teaching resources, and recently more and more teachers are trying to give video feedback to the student assignments. Screenshot of the student assignments in the video has been proven quite useful when providing feedback comment to the student submissions.

Now this entire process is made easier with Loom. The platform brings a great simplicity to the screen recording space, by allowing you to instantly record, edit and share your video.

It is integrated with Gmail. It will be so easy for you to create a multimedia email as well.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Well designed and it is SO EASY to use.
2. High-quality video
3. Integrated with Google Chrome and it supports both PCs and Apple computers.
4. Linked with your Google account. You can bring it to any new computer.
5. Screen recording function
6. Unlimited online storage for the premium version
7. Download as MP4 files
8. Free for the basic version

What is not so good?

The basic free version can only create videos up to 10 minutes. However, we don't think that it is a big problem as students won't watch long videos anyway.

It needs Google Chrome. Therefore if you are not a Chrome person, you will have to use it to enable Loom.

For the basic free version, you can only access the videos online for 7 days. You might need to download the files before that or you can refer the tool to two others to get the unlimited access.

What's in it for us?

The easiest tool so far to make webcam or screen capture videos for teaching resource or video feedback. We have run two workshops for using this tool in Monash Malaysia and the academics there absolutely loved it.

We have posted a user guide for using Loom. Take a look.

If you would like to learn to how to use the tool, please watch the following video instruction:

Build Effective Teamwork with Trello

Easter

How are you doing in the middle of the semester? We hope that you can have a nice holiday during the Easter break. This month we are planning to introduce a very nice teamwork management tool for both teachers and students.

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool which is widely used in Agile development. It is web-based and you don't have to install any software on your device. We have found that this visual collaboration tool is very useful for teamwork and project management.

It uses the kanban paradigm for managing projects. If you are familiar with the concept of lean production, you would know it was widely used by Toyota as part of its lean production, which is the secret for them to produce top quality cars with minimum cost and gains one of the top profit rates in the automotive industry.


Trello will be able to help your team to keep track of everything, end the endless email chains, organise things together, always stay in sync, and collaborate more effectively with clarity.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Well designed and it makes the team collaboration really easily
2. It has a free basic version and it is good enough
3. There are plenty of examples online to inspire your use
4. iOS and Android versions for mobile devices
5. The contents are mobile friendly.
6. Very easy to use and the learning curve is minimum
7. It can also be used to manage your daily tasks

What is not so good?

I think that one of the issues is that the single sign on function is not there and we cannot log in with our Monash Google accounts. Also, people might think it is too much trouble to use a new online tool to coordinate a small team project even it might be helpful.

What's in it for us?

As Mahara is still on trial, our students normally use Google Doc or just Facebook groups to coordinate their group assignments. They can use Trello for this purpose and it does a great job. You can also use it similarly for coordinating the work with your tutors and co-lecturers in your unit.

Or you can use it to plan your lesson:

Or plan a project based learning activity for the students:

There are many inspiring ways to use Trello. If you are interested, you can find more examples at: https://trello.com/inspiration.

Fun Classroom Engagement with Socrative

New semester

The new semester is going to start! Have you gotten everything ready for the coming semester during last few super busy weeks? And how do you like our blog post about Create Interactive Videos with H5P from last month?

If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

Socrative 

This month we would like to introduce Socrative. Teachers can initiate formative assessments through quizzes, quick question polls, and space races with Socrative. You all know that Monash will implement Poll Everywhere and MARS this semester. Socrative is also an in-class polling tool for the similar purpose. It has its special charms for this application.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. Free account to create quizzes for up to 50 students
2. Real-time results display
3. Single sign on with Google emails
4. The contents are mobile friendly.
5. Student responses can be exported into Excel.
6. It is very easy to create, edit, reuse, and share the contents.
7. It has a Space Race assessment which is ideal for certain learning experience such as individual or group contests.
8. 
   

What is not so good?

This product is more popular in the K-12 programmes and there is a reason. The free account supports a 50 students session and the paid premium account supports up to 150 students per session room. It might be good enough for a tutorial but not a large lecture.

What's in it for us?

Monash has chosen MARS and Poll Everywhere, which also has a group quiz function. However, Socrative provides an easier and more interesting approach to do a team contest quiz in your classroom. If your tutorial has less than 50 students, why not give them an individual or team spaceship contest quiz as the students gonna love it:

If you are interested in finding more about Socrative, check out the introduction video below:

Create Interactive Videos with H5P

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you our dear readers. We hope that you had a relaxed holiday and are ready for the coming year of 2017. In 2017, each month we are planning to write one blog post to explore a new tool which might be useful for our innovations in teaching and learning.

If you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.

H5P

This month we would like to introduce H5P, which stands for HTML5 Package. It is a free and open-source content collaboration framework based on JavaScript. The purpose of H5P is to make it easy for everyone to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 contents, such as Interactive videos, interactive presentations, quizzes, interactive timelines and so on. 

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It is totally free to use. That's a big win compared to its competitors such as HapYak, ClickView, Verse, or Vidversity.
2. It is by default able to add and replace multimedia files and textual content in all kinds of H5P content types and applications.
3. The contents are mobile friendly.
4. It is very easy to create, edit, reuse, and share the contents.
5. It can be integrated into Drupal, WordPress, and Moodle.

What is not so good?

Well, it is not integrated with Monash Moodle yet. Therefore we are not able to track student activities on that. And to create the interactive videos and other activities, you would have to upload the videos and other resources onto the H5P sites and it creates a possible copyright issue.

What's in it for us?

• Create interactive course presentation:

• Create interesting game quizzes:

• Or my personal favourite, interactive videos:

What are we going to do this semester?

We have created a short interactive video with H5P. And we will work with at lease two academics to try to use H5P interactive videos in their units this semester. At the same time, our Senior Educational Designer Deb will work together with MOULT and eSolution to investigate the possibility to add the H5P plugin into our Monash Moodle. Once it is integrated into our LMS, it won't be long that many of us can use it in our teaching. And if you want to start to explore it now, just go to h5p.org to learn more about what it can do for your online contents.