Using Learning Analytics System to Communicate with Students with Personlised Emails

Learning Analytics

With the growing size of the class in Monash Business School, teachers have found it is hard to track individual student learning path and maintain quality communication with them as there are simply too many students in the class. More and more communications initiated by the teachers are now sent as a general message to address all students. For example, the same messages are posted on the online forum, sent via SMS, or email to all class participants to reduce the teachers’ workload. Recently, with the innovation in educational technology, it is possible for lecturers to use information technology to draft and send personalised emails to students in bulk according to their online engagement, tutorial attendance records, and assessment results. Learning analytics allow us to identify certain student groups with different selecting criteria and reach them via personlised emails.

Zoee Cohen from the University of Arizona has also been sending personlised emails to students for year and seeing improvement in student academic performance: Small Changes, Large Rewards: How Individualized Emails Increase Classroom Performance.

TaLT has tried to answer that challenge by trialing using a learning analytics system to communicate with students with personlised Emails with one of our Business Law units in S1 2018 and the results are very encouraging.

SRES - The Student Relationship Engagement System

The SRES, Student Relationship Engagement System, empowers teachers to collect, analyse, and act on data to better engage students at scale. It was developed by built, run, and supported by a bunch of teachers primarily at the University of Sydney. Monash Biology has set up a server for those who are interested: https://sres.biol.monash.edu/

Here is a short introduction to the system:

Our trial

Last semester we have trailed SRES to send personalised emails to certain student group worked on his BTF5903 unit with 389 students. We think that it improves student engagement as well as their classroom performance. We have attached a brief report here:

Time/Event	Students No. Received Emails	Students No. Read Emails	Student Action
Week 4 before 1stassessment	57 students who did not do more than 4 online learning activities	51	Students finished 3.1 activities on average in the following days.
Week 5 after 1stassessment	24 students who scored 100% in the 1stassessment	23 (3 left feedback to consider the email useful)	2 students wrote back to the lecturer
Week 8 before 2ndassessment	185 students who did not do more than 3 activities in Week 5-7	180 (4 left feedback to consider the email useful)	Finished 2.1 online activities on average in the following days.
The mean student final grade increased by 6.7 and the median grade increased by 8 compared to the previous semester together with other unit design improvements

And here is an example of the email:

Dear XXX

I hope you are well. As you know we will hold our first major assessment for BTF5903, the Mid-Semester Feedback Test, this week.

In the first three weeks there were 8 online Lessons and Quizzes on our Moodle site that you needed to complete. We noticed that you completed 1 of them: that’s no more than 50%! Our past student records prove that those students who fail to complete half of the online learning activities by the middle of semester are TWICE as likely to fail the ENTIRE unit when compared to those who complete more than half of the online learning activities.

We strongly advise you to complete your online Lessons and Quizzes, as well as all other relevant study materials to prepare for the test in Week 4. The test result will contribute to your final grade.

Good luck and see you next week.

Regards

Lecturer

What is not so good?

The system is not integrated with our Moodle yet. We have to export results from Moodle into CSV files and then import those files in SRES.

Would like to try?

If you are interested in using that in your unit this semester, just let us know. All you need to do is to sit with us for an hour to discuss and then we will take care of the system set up, etc. 

Build Your Equations Easily

Designed for math symbols and expressions 

Many of our Business School units require teachers and students to build math equations on their computers. Simply use Microsoft Word equations is quite time-consuming and inconvenient. Word always works better with normal letters and number, but when it comes to the special symbols and equations, extra help is definitely needed. This month we have looked into a software programme EquatIO which is known as g(Math) previously. It is specially designed for math symbols and expressions. The software makes it easier than ever to write with math and science symbols in Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, and so on.

EquatIO

Equatio easily creates mathematical equations, formulas, and quizzes in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms on mobiles, tablets, Mac, PC, or Chromebooks. It requires intuitively type or handwrite but does not require learning any coding.

You can type or handwrite virtually any mathematical expression directly on your keyboard or touchscreen. Therefore it is easy for teachers and students to use.

The software can recognise the mathematical abbreviations. For example, when you type ‘sq’, it knows that you mean ‘square root’. It is also able to do voice recognisation. It is smart enough to ignore ‘umms’, ‘errs’ and other unwanted non-math words.

The following video is a demo of the EquatIO software.

What is good?

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

1. Speech to text:

   2.  Handwriting recognition so that you can draw the math expressions

    3. You can write on your mobile phone or iPad while synchronising to the computer:

   4. Copy and paste LaTex to generate your equations:

   5. Draw the graphics easily with your equations:

What is not so good?

The programme works quite well with Google Doc and Form. But you cannot integrate the software into Word. Even though it has a Windows version and a Mac version, but we are not able to make it work on our PC. We would still suggest you use it with your Google Chrome browser to edit your Google Docs and Forms.

What's in it for us?

With EquatIO, we can easily create mathematical equations, formulas, graphics, and quizzes. LaTex, speech, typing, or handwriting, you name it. And the full version is free to teachers. It is well integrated with Google Doc. Therefore, you can create equations in the Google Doc and convert that into Word later if you prefer that way. However, you will have to use Chrome browser to use the extension software.

If you are interested, give it a try. Keep following our TaLT communications. We will introduce more useful and interesting tools in the future.

Teach with Videos and Overcome Boundaries

How far have videos come?

It is very easy to let multimedia content go by unnoticed these days, only because they have become so ingrained in modern society. Ever since the rise of video-sharing platforms like Youtube in the last two decades, and the dominance of other social video players such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat (to name a few), videos have disrupted the way we absorb and digest information for good.  

More videos are being watched every day on Facebook (over 8 billion videos in 2016), videos are getting shorter (up to 2 minutes long), and more than 50% of videos are watched on mobile devices (TechCrunch, 2016; Wistia, 2016; Ooyala, 2016, as cited in Lua, 2017). MOOC providers such as Coursera, Lynda and edX have attracted millions of users and are proving the demand for e-learning options. This speaks volume about the future of information consumption, and the inevitable changes in education alike. 

Young generations are now considered “digital natives” who are growing up with every aspects of their life submerged in technology (LiteracyPlanet, 2016). Education at K12 level has been preparing children to be equipped for future work in the 21st century, so it is imperative for higher education institutions to continue with this roadmap and incorporate digital technologies in teaching and learning. 

Why should we care about teaching with videos? 

You have probably come across this video of Salman Khan sharing inspiring stories on how he accidentally embarked on a journey to lead a global change in education technology and pedagogical methodology. 

The idea is by that by utilising technology that is seemingly dehumanising, specifically talking into a microphone and illustrating on a screen, Salman was able to bring a human touch to the learning experience in three ways: 

• First, by allowing lectures to be watched online prior to class, valuable time in class is now devoted to meaningful interactions between teacher and students, as well as among fellow students. 
• Second, learning is personalised to students’ pace and to their level of understanding. Teachers are enabled to identify students’ deficiency and have more meaningful conversations with students about their progress based on video analytics. 
• And third, videos have removed boundaries in terms of time and space, i.e. limited class time and physical classroom space. Now students are able to watch, pause, rewind their lessons in the comfort of their own home. 

All of these benefits point to an increase in efficiency in education, which has been threatened by the increase in size of cohorts and restricted time and space at many institutions. As a result, our effort in maintaining high quality teaching is facing critical challenges, and video teaching could be the answer. Ljubojevic and colleague’s research (2014) echoed the same sentiments when they found that using videos in teaching has led to an increase in students’ engagement and efficiency of the self-learning process, their satisfaction, and overall improved quality of learning experience.

More importantly, this approach puts students in the driver’s seat and encourage them to take ownership of their own learning journey. Videos could assist students in mastery learning, allowing them to explore and review a subject matter as much as they would like to in private, while taking the load off of lecturers (Galbraith, 2004).

What’s the catch?

The blended teaching method and flipped classroom model have sparked many fascinating debates regarding its efficacy and its impact on the effectiveness of teaching and learning. It is an evidence-based practice, and whether these models are suitable for every educator is subject to professional judgement. The literature has not offered a systemic look on the outcomes of using videos in teaching, and a consistent framework in how videos could be used to optimise the teaching and learning experience.

What is the best practice for using videos in teaching? 

What we can suggest, however, is how to best adopt videos in your teaching to achieve the optimal results: 

• Videos could be considered as a complementary element of lecture delivery, not necessarily a substitution (Ljubojevic et al., 2014; Ramlogan et al., 2013). Keep your videos short and sweet, as this keeps students focused on the relevant information and support students' self-learning process (Ruiji, 2012).

• Videos need to be accompanied by interactive learning activities (Meguid & Collins, 2017). A few simple examples include using Mars and Poll Everywhere in real time to keep students engaged and gaining immediate feedback on students’ understanding, or accompanying online lectures with interactive content such as H5P activities on Moodle. For more ideas on how to engage students on Moodle, visit the support site.

• Constructive alignment is still at the core of teaching, regardless of the chosen tools and teaching approach. A connection between video materials and other components of the learning package must be clearly and actively communicated to students. Lectures are advised to be mindful of closing the loop between pre-class, in-class and post-class activities, and how videos could support the achievement of learning outcomes.  

What is available to us? 

Monash has been progressive in this space for years. We have seen a significant growth in the use of lecture recordings, online lesson packages, internally produced animation videos and YouTube content to support teaching. This year, we are excited about the introduction of Panopto, the new video management platform to help manage your teaching video content. From Semester 1, 2018, you will be able to create, edit, upload, store, search and share videos all in one secure place. Panopto will be integrated fully with Moodle so that all learning materials are centrally stored. Read more on Panopto in our blog, and be sure to get yourself up to speed by watching a quick start guide for Panopto. 

 

Further reading: 

Galbraith, J., (2004, September). Active viewing: and oxymoron in video-based instruction?. Paper presented at the Society for Applied Learning Technologies Conference. Retrieved from designer.50g.com/docs/Salt_2004.pdf

Khan, S. [Ted]. (2011, March 09). Let’s use video to reinvent education. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education

LiteracyPlanet. (2016). eLearning in Australian classrooms [Report]. Retrieved from https://www.literacyplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/LiteracyPlanet-eLearning-Report.pdf

Ljubojevic, M., Vaskovic, V., Stankovic, S., & Vaskovic, J. (2014). Using supplementary video in multimedia instruction as a teaching tool to increase efficiency of learning and quality of experience. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 15(3). Lua, A. (2017, February 16). 50 Video Marketing Stats to Help You Create a Winning Social Media Strategy in 2017 [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-video-marketing-statistics Meguid, E. A., & Collins. M. (2017). Students'Perceptions of Lecturing Approaches: Traditional versus Interactive Teaching. Advances in Medical Education and Practice (8), 229–241.  Partnership for 21st Century Learning. (n.d.) Framework for 21st century learning. Retrieved January 29, 2018, from http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework Ramlogan, S., Raman, V., & Sweet, J. (2014). A comparison of two forms of teaching instruction: video vs. live lecture for education in clinical periodontology. European Journal of Dental Education, 18(1), 31-38. Ruiji, L. (2012). The development on multimedia teaching resources based on information processing theory. International Journal of Advancements in Computing Technology, 4, 58-64.

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.