Split-Attention Elements and Students' Learning in Multimedia Environments

The research project investigates the effects of multimedia learning environments (MLEs) that divide attention of learners (split-attention effect) compared to MLEs that cater for such phenomenon on the learning experiences of the learner.  It aims to look at the effects on the cognitive load of the learner when attention is split between multiple sources of information. It also looks at the differences in performance and depth of understanding of the subject matter when two groups of students use the learning environments to learn the same content.

It was surprisingly found that although students who used the split-attention learning environment were subjected to increased cognitive load, they performed better in the learning activities and all of them achieved above average marks in contrary to those in the non split-attention environment. From the findings of the current research, it is perceived that although split-attention elements in multimedia environments would increase cognitive load, it did not specifically affect performance and understanding.

On the other hand, a combination of elements like previous subject matter knowledge, learning preferences, degree of learner control over the learning process and the type of assessment methods used can be determining factors that can improve the overall learning experience including learner performance.

Women Literacy and Entrepreneurship training through Innovative Technologies

The VCILT participated in a project with Commonwealth of Learning, the NPCC, Ministry of Tertiary Education and Ministry of Gender Equality... to develop interactive video lectures in the Creole Language. Two prototypes have been released. 

The first one is legal literacy for women and the second one is on business plan development. The Hon Minister Jeetah and the President of COL praised the work of the VCILT. The President of COL, Sir John Daniel also told one radio that VCILT is a very useful asset  for the country in its endeavour to launch its Open University.

You can find Minister's Jeetah's thoughts on the event here. http://rajeshjeetah.blogspot.com/2011/05/launching-of-lifelong-learning-for.html

 

From the allergies of the blackboard chalk, to the radiation of interactive board: What has changed?

We all remember our first day in school with that huge board in black (blackboard) (at least for our generation) with the teacher coming in class with his chalk palette (white, blue, pink, green and yellow).....Years later the whiteboard was seen as a nice innovation where chalks had been replaced by less dusty markers of different colours. However, the whiteboard did not really kick off in schools in its early days due to the perceived high cost of markers. From the blackboard to the whiteboard, nothing changed in the way of teaching rather than the educational technology was improved.

Then came the overhead projector, which saved the teacher from having to write on the boards, rather he would display things that are already written. This is a facility for the teacher. He could also display images/graphics which otherwise he would have had to draw these on the board or bring photos and pictures in classrooms. Again, the pedagogy has not changed, although the technology has improved and facilitated the work of teachers. Educational technology at the service of teachers in this way is great as it facilitates the teaching process, but every new technology is costly, and it has to be mastered, then implemented. Many of them never arrived in our primary school classrooms, the overhead projector for instance. The same logic of improvement applies, when the digital projector was invented and could work with the laptop. The teacher could now project multimedia in an easier way to enhance student understanding. 

Well, we argue that the interactive whiteboard does nothing more than being another piece of modern technology of the digital world that we are living in. What is the difference between the digital camera and an analogue camera? its fundamentally the technology but at the end of the day we have the picture. What has changed? The picture is obtained quasi-instantaneously (remember of the Polaroid camera?) but it is also conserved in digital format. 

Now the question is: If we have an interactive white board, does it mean our children will learn better? 

If we have the interactive white board, does it mean students with ADHD syndrome will improve in terms of attention, hyperactivity control and performance in the class?

If we have the interactive white board, how many students will we still be having in the class?

Will we be in a position to have one PC, laptop or tablet for each student to replace his copybook? What will happen when the ‘copybook’ of the student gets lost or broken?

Are we ready to invest in this technology for each and every classroom when the pace at which the technology gets obsolete is just unbelievable!! Think of IPAD - IPAD2 is already out - how many of us got the chance to even see a real IPAD 1 in front of us?

Technology is like digital games. We have not yet mastered one level of the game when the next version of it is already on the market....What needs to be changed is the pedagogy and traditional ways that teaching and learning has been going on and those methods that we are currently employing.  Those methods that we call teacher-centred are still at the heart of the educational process, and this has to change. We are equipping ourselves with better tools but we are working the same way. If the way of driving is not good, a better car will not make any difference unless it is K2000 which can drive on its own...unfortunately there is no such educational technology that can teach on its own.

e-Learning @ University of Mauritius (UoM): Case of the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies (VCILT)

The Officer-in-Charge of the VCILT, Mr M Santally was invited as a keynote speaker at the ICT in Higher Ed Conference 2011 in Johannesburg from 30th to 1st April 2011. His 50 minutes talk focused on the VCILT since its creation to its current state. The presentation highlighted the challenges that the centre had and is still facing to bring about a paradigm change in the teaching and learning process. The presentation was highly acclaimed by the participants who were from different African Countries.

 

The presentation is available for download on the following link - http://www.slideshare.net/moham14/elearning-the-university-of-mauritius-the-case-of-the-vcilt

Best Practices in Activity-based Learning II

Keep a good balance of complexity for the learning activities – not too complex and not too simple!

We are always under pressure to deliver quality education and in so doing very often we tend to associate quality with quantity and complexity. There is a perception among many educators and other stakeholders such as the students, parents and even policy makers that the more difficult the work is, means the quality or level of education is high. In activity-based learning it is important to keep the balance between complexity and difficulty level to maintain students’ motivation, confidence and drive to complete the activity. The learning activity designer needs to bear in mind that for a majority of the time the learner will be on his/her own in the learning environment. Therefore cognitive or psychomotor activity overload will have a negative impact of the learner’s affective levels. With respect to emotions and their effects on e-learning, a number of researchers have highlighted the decisive role that they play in human action and the forming of priorities by the individuals engaged in a particular process.

Provide a reasonable time span for the completion of learning activities

 Time keeping, estimation and management are important elements in e-learning. While courses are traditionally related to the number of contact hours in a semester between a lecturer and his students, the same formula cannot be applied when it comes to e-learning, more specifically online computer-based learning activities. It is important that a tutor or lecturer has a quite accurate estimation of the time to be allocated for a particular learning activity and/or sub-parts of a learning activity. Experience and previous feedback of students can play a very important role to guide the lecturer to set or review the time allocated to students for the work. The lecturer needs also anticipate possible issues and problems that students may face, evaluate how this will impact on the work of the student and to have a list of those issues listed and their workarounds. A FAQ style might prove handy.

Use clear and simple language in describing the activity steps 

When we write content and instructions it is important to bear in mind that we are writing for others to read and understand. Each and every learner is a different and unique individual and they perceive and process information differently. What can be seen to be a trivial instruction to the learner might actually be very confusing and therefore affect the learning experience. Technical jargons related to the course and/or to the learning environment should be avoided at this stage unless the terms have already been introduced in earlier activities to the learners.

 

Provide learners with examples of what is expected from them 

Learners continuously need assurances and reassurances that they are on the right track. This is a phenomenon which is observed because learners in reality do fear the autonomy they are given in the learning process. A good way in online environments and in activity-based learning is to provide them with worked-out examples, or sample of previous work of students. The only issue in this is that some students will just try to reproduce the same type of work leading to lack of application of their own creative skills.

Best Practices for Activity-based Learning from a Practitioner’s Perspective

Define the outcomes (competencies and skills) beforehand

You might be familiar as an educator with the process of writing learning outcomes and objectives based on the famous Bloom’s Taxonomy. However, many educators tend to focus on lower cognitive levels of Blooms Taxonomy especially when it comes to a content-driven approach towards learning. A structured approach to writing learning outcomes would be that the course designer needs to relate the outcomes with the assessment criteria and this should in practice be reflected in assignments, written exams or tests (whether theory or practical).

In activity-based learning, you can apply more or less the same principles but with some flexibility. Furthermore, in such approaches outcomes may not always relate to the subject matter content that is being taught. Outcomes are often translated into the words competencies and skills that demonstrate more what the learner can do in practice than his ability for rote learning and memorization.   

Keep the outcomes list and the number of learning activities reasonable

Learning activities essentially contain instructions on what is expected to be done by the student. In many cases, there are a number of sub-activities to do such as reading materials, installing and using software, participation on forums and other related activities. These sub-activities take time contrary to reading and understanding a chapter. Therefore, having too many activities will unduly overload the learner and cause a sense of illusion and de-motivation causing disinterest and probably dropping the course. As a rule of thumb a course of 45 hrs (3 credits) would preferably contain at most three major activities.

Furthermore there should not also be too many skills and competencies that should be targeted at in each learning activity. The support of instructional designers can help the lecturer in getting the right balance or if the lecturer is experienced in such types of pedagogical approaches, then this task can be quite easy. The focus needs to be on the quality of the learning experience rather than on quantity.

To be continued.....

New Research Projects for 2011

The VCILT is engaging in two in-house research projects for 2011. Readers can find a few details pertinent to those two projects in this post. Comments and suggestions are welcome. The two projects are headed by Mohammad Santally, Senior Lecturer in Educational Technology.

Research Project on Instructional Materials Design for Mobile Learning 

This project aims to look into the pedagogical design, usability and impacts of multimedia materials on learning experience using mobile devices. It looks at three categories of mobile devices namely the 4.3-inches wide PDAs, 7 to 10-inch wide tablet PCs, and mainstream 14-15.4 inch laptops.

The research questions are:

What are the usability issues that need to be addressed with respect to design of materials to enable seamless access to educational content on the different devices?

Usability issues in terms of ease of use, navigational aspects in the environment, multimedia support, amount of material that can be effectively loaded and presented and catering for a multitude of resolutions as well as internet browsers will be looked into.  Here we would like to look into whether the environment can be designed as such that its automatically adapted to the user interface being used or whether there is a need to do different designs to suit the different devices. Can there be a generic design that will fit all the devices without compromise the pedagogical approach that is preferred and/or the amount and type of content that the course designer would have liked to present.

The three devices selected for this research question are the HTC HD2 or devices with similar capabilities like the iPhone/iPod Touch, the Apple IPad or equivalent devices running on Windows and/or Linux platforms and a seven-inch laptop screen with a minimum resolution of 800x600 pixels with a possible investigation at 800x480 pixels. The control device will be a normal 14 inch or 15.4 inch regular laptop PC.

How does screen resolution and size affect the intended learning outcomes, learner concentration and motivation in the learning experience?

Mini laptops (known as netbooks) are getting cheaper and popular within the student community given their highly portable characteristics. These devices are equipped with latest technologies such as Wifi, Bluetooth and Webcam. However they are limited in terms of screen size and resolution. For instance some netbooks have screen size as small as 7 inches while some go up to 9/10 inches.  This definitely limits the type of material that can be seen, causes inconveniencies due to the need to frequently scroll up and down a page and also affect the learner on the affective side due to repetitive eye stress causing fatigue and stress. This may result in a lack of motivation and a less fruitful learning experience. For this component of the research, feedback from learners through usability evaluation will be gathered and their perceptions on the learning experience will be analysed.

How do the different technical abilities and limitations of the devices affect and impose restrictions on the learning design of content?

In this part of the research, the findings of the previous research question will play an important role. Combining the feedback obtained from the students and observations from the usability evaluation with the technical abilities of the devices, we will be able to devise appropriate guidelines for the type of material to be presented to the learner on these devices. We will also look at the effects when textual and graphical materials are presented (e-book format) compared to when multimedia interactive materials are used.

Are the differences on imposed cognitive loads on the learners significant when using the different devices? 

This is a sub-element of research question 2 where intended learning outcomes will be measured using the different devices. Learners will also be interviewed and probed to see how they feel the learning experiences were different with the different mobile devices. We will also look at what types of activities related to the learning experience are less complex and more difficult to carry in a learning activity, from logging in a platform to playing the learning activity with respect to each device being used.

Research Project on effects of Multimedia-based Instructional Cartoons in Students of ZEP schools and Learners with difficulties

This projects aims at the development of a set of pedagogical materials for the primary school curriculum using the cartoon-based story telling approach for students in ZEP schools. Students in those schools mainly come from poor families and from families experiencing different types of social problems. Students have difficulties to learn and concentrate in schools and do not have appropriate follow-ups at home. Many of them have problems related to reading, writing and foreign language understanding (English and to some extent French).

On the other hand, there are a number of students in the Mauritian educational system that experience learning difficulties in schools, particularly students suffer from ADHD elements. These students find it difficult to remain concentrated throughout a class and this result in inattention and lack of interest which indeed can negatively impact on the academic performance. Given that animated cartoons have a kind of attention grabbing effect and are by their nature visually appealing to kids, it is believed that animated cartoons designed to fit in pedagogical aims of a syllabus can help learners with difficulties and learners in general to have an improved learning experience and a better understanding of the subject being taught. The term ‘fun learning’ is associated to this concept by a number of cartoon makers as well as educators and educational researchers.

ThThe following research questions will be addressed in this project:  

•  How can the use of educational cartoons improve the learning experience (understanding, motivation, attention and performance) of students in ZEP schools and those with learning difficulties?

• Does the addition of interactive features in the educational cartoons emphasizing the ‘fun learning’ concepts through educational games contribute to better student learning?

• Can interactive educational cartoons be considered as a real alternative for traditional classroom pedagogies for a certain subject areas such as science, history and geography?

• Can we still use same types of assessment or is there a need to review learner assessment strategies and instruments used?

Related works

K. Dalacosta, M. Kamariotaki-Paparrigopoulou, J. A. Palyvos, and N. Spyrellis. 2009. Multimedia application with animated cartoons for teaching science in elementary education. Comput. Educ. 52, 4 (May 2009), 741-748. DOI=10.1016/j.compedu.2008.11.018

 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2008.11.018