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

VCILT wins prestigious Commonwealth of Learning Excellence Award

Ten years of hard work and sustained effort finally gets worldwide recognition. After being a finalist in the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Awards by the Qatar Foundation, the VCILT gets recognised by the Commonwealth of Learning for its work in the educational technology field.

The award was conferred upon to the VCILT, University of Mauritius in the PCF6 forum on the 25th November 2010. The VCILT sets an example that the collective is far greater than the individual, by getting recognition at the level of the institution. The VCILT is proud to bring this recognition to the University of Mauritius.

We thank all staff of the University, whether academic or non-academic who have directly or indirectly supported us throughout these years. We also need to thank our students whose continous positive feedback of our work has kept us going and strengthened our belief in what we are doing.

Congratulations to us all once again.

The buzzword is currently Quality Education – what is quality all about?

The concept of quality and the process of assuring that quality is maintained are very important in the educational setting. However, quality is non-referential concept. This means that it depends on the point of reference that we take when we define what we mean by quality in educational processes.  Concepts associated with quality are often confused especially when the term quality assurance is used. Quality assurance is first and foremost, a process. Any process by definition of first principles have input(s) and then produces the output(s). The outcome of the process is therefore important to determine if quality (the objective) has been achieved or not. Therefore quality cannot be directly related to a standardized process and universally applied at the different levels of the educational system. In one scenario, quality can be linked to the number of students successfully passing a final exam and graduating from the University. In another context, quality can be linked to indicators such as external audit reports and the grades being achieved by students. 

While quality measurement through quantifiable variables can be straightforward, quality in the process is much more difficult to measure. For instance, quality of the instruction or teaching is very difficult to measure through quantifiable techniques. As a consequence, we find that feedback forms will be used for students to judge their perceived quality of the instruction, very often by agreeing or disagreeing with one or at most a few statements.  However, experience, field practices and research have shown that most of the time the filling of such questionnaires are mainly done in a rather subjective way by the students. A consequent number of them just fill in to get it ‘done’ or because it has been ‘imposed’ on them. When a student is not allowed to register for the coming semester because he has not completed the feedback forms for the courses he took in the previous semester, then the whole process of quality assurance through feedback is flawed.

In a recent workshop at the University of Mauritius with renowned international education specialists, the emphasis of the Financial Secretary was on quality education. Yet the term quality being mentioned repeatedly without having a clue from the policy makers what they mean by quality in a contextualized situation. For a Financial Secretary, for instance, quality might well be to produce more graduates with less money, while for an educational manager, quality can be reasonably defined as having fewer but more competent graduates with more investment in resources.  Quality and access to education are clearly two complementary elements of the educational landscape but in many situations they can become contradictory. Some people argue that opening access to under-qualified learners will automatically have an impact on the quality. 

The same argument is used when it comes to increasing intake. Again, without the existence of a unified framework to define quality in a contextualized multi-tier setting, quality will always remain a flawed concept and false debate around the educational landscape. Issues of quality in educational processes normally arise in terms of the content, the pedagogical approach used, the delivery of the course as per established rules, the facilities available, the skill of the facilitator and students’ satisfaction and performance. Another factor which is also very important with regards to quality education is the quality of students’ learning itself which gives completely different indications from students’ performances. Quality of students’ learning is often obvious in the competencies they develop rather than the tacit knowledge they acquire and reproduce in examinations.

The Open University of ....... Mauritius

In between the year 2000 to 2005, the concepts of open learning and technology-enhanced learning were on the political agenda of the government. The first such initiative in terms of technology-enhanced learning was the very successful initiative called the Mass Computer Proficiency Project (CPP) that was targeted at making mass training in basic information technology in a bid to sustain the strategic objective of making Mauritius a cyber-island. The initiative was later enhanced, but within the same goal through the Universal IC3 (Internet and Computing Core Certification) in 2005. The pedagogical philosophy behind the CPP and IC3 courses was based on the “learning-by-doing” approach and “learning IT through IT” which meant that contents were made available in digitized form comprising of multimedia and hypermedia elements. At the same time during the 2000-2005 period, the government came up with the idea of an open-learning institute which would be fundamentally absorb the Mauritius College of the Air. The idea later evolved into that of an Open University in 2005 but it never came into operation, until a revamped bill was presented in 2010 in Parliament. A study of the bill reveals that the third public university of Mauritius is essentially a University on its own with more or less the same structure and functioning. The only or major difference is that this university will focus on flexible learning, open learning through distance learning and that this university is supposed to have a ‘thinner’ structure than the other two public universities. The question of distance learning as it regains momentum when the concept of Open University is debated retains the attention. Why do we not call “Open” universities as “Distance” universities instead? Is open learning same as distance learning? Of course not! But many of us will no doubt find an automatic association of open-learning to distance-learning and vice-versa. The other term that is often associated with open learning and distance learning is lifelong learning. While distance learning reflects more to the mode of delivery of content and the delocalized and asynchronous type of interaction between the learner and the teacher, the terms open, lifelong and flexible learning mainly reflect of mode of education. The mode of education is often confused with the mode of delivery of learning content. The mode of delivery of content for open, lifelong and flexible learning can very much be traditional face-to-face classroom-based lectures while the mode of delivery for distance learning can be printed manuals, digitized content on CD/DVD, websites and so on.

Open learning basically puts the emphasis on two major concepts, namely that of access and flexibility. This means that access to education and training is provided to those, who in a traditional setting would not be in a position to afford (financial, professional or social constraints) getting to full-time education or to attend scheduled classes at well-defined specific times. Access is also related to those who lack formal entry requirements on courses but who have years of working experience which can be used as recognition to compensate the lack of formal entry requirements to their desired study field. Open learning also provides the flexibility to those who want to study at their own pace and who only want to get a certain specific knowledge about a specific subject without the hassle of official enrolment and sitting for exams. Over the recent years, open education has taken yet another dimension, that of free education, but mostly in an informal mode of learning. What has emerged as open educational resources, are basically courseware released by known universities like the MIT and Open University of the UK, where anyone can ‘enroll’ without the payment of any fees and follow the courses on their own. 

Open Universities are mainly appropriate where the base market is quite large as such universities become cost-effective by making economies of scale. India, Malaysia, South Africa, the UK and Canada, for instance, have successfully implemented such initiatives. Moreover, the customer base of these universities more precisely the UNISA (South Africa) and IGNOU (India) span internationally. The cost of access to these universities is also quite low compared to other traditional universities. The funding mechanism of these universities need to be also effective, unless they are fully funded through public funds, which in the longer term and difficult economic situations may prove to be less sustainable. Mauritius, on the other hand, with respect to its size, geographical location and economic capability will definitely face much bigger challenges than the other open universities. 

Quality Assurance and OER in Courseware Development (Part II)

This perspective of viewing quality poses a problem for bringing innovation and creativity in the learning process. Quality is a non-referential concept and quality assurance techniques that are applicable in behaviorist learning environments are not compatible in socio-constructivist ones. The quality framework that can be applied depends on the learning design approach to be adopted. Quality assurance needs to be an ongoing and iterative activity and student feedback on their own learning (problems encountered, things that were easily understood, communication problems and other related issues) contribute towards making them better learners and develop the required competencies.

The issue of quality in OER-based courseware development process relates only to the content development phase on which the author has no particular control. This is where most of the concerns related to quality assurance lies. Traditionally speaking, reliable sources of academic information were only books, and published research (journal articles and conference papers) as well as from the academic’s philosophical perception of things (academic freedom). With the democratisation of access to content and the removal of publishing constraints via the web, reliability of information presented in content has been of great concerns to educational authorities. In this context we wish to highlight a very simple fact that out of ten consecutive searches that were tried on different topics on Wikipedia returned a number of resources which warned on the top about the reliability of the content (information) being presented to the user. Furthermore, most searches done on Google for particular information would most likely return Wikipedia as one of the top 5 sources. 

The fact that OERs came into the limelight more or less with the emergence of Web 2.0 era (contrary to the Learning Objects Concept) contributed to the significance of the concerns regarding QA issues. Therefore academics and instructors using OERs need to have a well-established set of guidelines that would provide a framework for the search and use of freely available content from the Web. De-facto trusted sites like the OpenLearn platform, Connexions and Curriki, just to name a few would greatly help but it is in fact very difficult for an institution to control such activities of their staff. One possibility would be for OERs to form an integral part of the institution’s courseware development policies rather than being used on piece-meal basis by individual academics. 

It is important to note that peer-reviewing has over the years proved useful in research-related quality assurance systems. With the concept of collaborative editing through wiki technologies, the concept of peer-reviewing has been very much the motor for those promoting an approach based of OER development through communities of practice. However, the issue that remains contradictive is the impersonation issue. While there are ways to counter this, sites like Wikipedia and others will definitely encounter difficulties to enforce identity checks for its users. One recent article on the web also mentioned the declining number of people who were involved in ‘watching’ of pages and their content on Wikipedia. 

One possibility to counter the above problem is therefore to completely rethink (re-engineer) the pedagogical approaches used when designing courses using OERs. When courses are fully content-oriented, it is obvious that quality assurance processes will focus mainly on the content being used and presented to the users. However, if the content is not the central focus, but an element in a broader pedagogical scenario, then the whole quality assurance issue takes a different perspective.

The concept of project/activity-based learning that focus on the development of a set of skills and competencies by the student through socio-constructivist models can be useful. Quality assurance will in this case be a process that ensures the learning path of the learner will lead to the desired outcomes. In doing so, using a variety of available contents on the web which are labelled as OER is not a problem as the learners will develop higher order cognitive skills where they can synthesize, argue and discuss on the contents rather than adopting them to be factual information. However, again as was mentioned earlier, this different perspective can be disruptive to the traditional organisational processes of QA.

Quality Assurance and OERs in Courseware Development (Part I)

Open Educational Resources provide instructors with an innovative way to conceptualise courses. The philosophy behind it is that courseware development becomes a distributed and a split 3-phased approach. This means that the development of content can be done by anyone, anywhere and at any point in time, thus becoming the first phase of the process. The instructor involved in the use of OERs has practically no control over this phase but has access to a range of tools than can give him access to content having been developed in that phase. A simple example would be to use a search engine to look for related content or to access OER repositories. 

The other phase would be to build-up the course from the content available manually or through the help of courseware building tools. The third phase would be the delivery and dissemination of the course content in a face-to-face classroom or via an Elearning platform. The instructor might have control on both phase 2 and 3 or on only one of them. This approach being an innovative way in itself, is set however to be a “disruptive process” in well established traditional educational systems. Issues of quality in educational processes normally arises in terms of 

1. The content
2. The pedagogical approach used
3. The delivery of the course as per established rules
4. Students’ satisfaction and performance

The issue of quality assurance (QA) has increasingly become a priority for Higher Education institutions. As universities compete to attract more students, but also to attract financing through various projects, quality represents one of the main criteria for ensuring a significant share of the educational market (Abdous 2009, p. 281). Guaranteeing quality, however, is not always an easy process, first and foremost because the very concept of "quality" is disputed and many different, contextual definitions are used (Mihai 2009).  

 

The main barrier to such an innovative way to reconceptualise the educational process in traditional universities are the quality assurance procedures that need to be 'strictly' followed. In a traditional lecture, quality is believed to be maintained if the lecturer spends 3 hours in the classroom irrespective of what he does or not. This is proved by the log book in which he signs. In another context, quality is maintained if students' results follow the normal distribution and if academic/administrative records related to the course are duly kept. Furthermore, quality is considered maintained if feedback forms are given, at the end of the semester, to students who fill in most of the time in a subjective way. 

Activity-Based Learning

the VCILT has been since 2003 an active promoter of the pedagogical concept of activity-based learning where the students is provided with a number of learning scenarios rather than e-book versions of paper-based manuals. As mentioned the real drive at the VCILT to engage in such approaches came from the interactions that the academic staff engaged with high-profile researchers and practitioners like Daniel Schneider of TECFA, Pierre Tchounikine of LIUM and Gilbert Paquette of TELUQ , just to name a few, in the field of educational technology. The VCILT was also very fortunate to have the visit of people from the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research of the University of Helsinki who are involved in transformative pedagogies and work intensively on activity theory. Consequently, the academics of the VCILT embraced that approach which proposed a clear demarcation from the use of the web as only a new delivery medium for learning materials. It was clear that this concept would bring about a new paradigm in the teaching and learning of the University of Mauritius.

The two educational philosophies that influenced the VCILT's pedagogical approaches mainly came from the activity-theoretical method of conceiving the learning process together with Schneider's definition of project/activity-based learning. In one of the presentations that Daniel Schneider made in Mauritius, he argued that new pedagogies alone including project-based and collaborative learning do not guarantee automatic results. The role of the teacher was therefore still very crucial for meaningful and successful learning to occur. However, the teacher was not the same "know-it-all" version that we are accustomed to but mainly with a redefined role mainly that of a facilitator, orchestrator and manager of the pedagogical scenarios that he elaborates for the students. As orchestrator, the teacher can be seen as the one who is the author of the pedagogical scenarios and learning content. As facilitator, he is the one who is the pivotal point for learner support as he needs to be there to clarify concepts, resolve students' perceived deadlocks, and helping in the fuzzy parts of the learning activity. While the role of the teacher as manager is described by Schneider (2003) as "make sure that such loops are productive, e.g. that the students produce something, that it is task related, that they engage themselves in meta-reflection (look critically at their own work) and that they discuss and share with others", it is also important for the teacher to manage the affective side of the students' engagement in the learning activity.

The first problem which is of pedagogical nature, that can arise in such situations are the possibilities of over-structuring of the scenarios that result in the same 'spoonfeeding' technique that is so much criticized by proponents of socio-constructivism. It is this lack of too much structure in the learning activity steps that creates the fuzzy element to foster original thinking as well as unique and different solutions from the learners. The idea is to have semi-structured learning activities or scenarios to prevent learners to propose stereotyped work that look similar to each other.

Learners should have the freedom to propose their own solutions but in a negotiated way with the teacher. Daniel Schneider also concurs with this by highlighting the need for equilibrium between liberty and guidance (figure 3.1). 

The second issue is more complex, given that the teacher no longer performs one single role, but panoply of roles from orchestrator and facilitator to the management of the learning process. From experience, this can be a really difficult situation for the teacher who is more and more solicited by the students and at any time. The time that a lecturer has to devote with respect to project/activity-based learning also increases drastically with respect to the number of students and/or the number of learning activities to be monitored. It also depends on the number of courses being taught by one academic. While the first implementations of activity-based learning at the VCILT were within the Masters in Computer-Mediated Communications and Pedagogies course, the number of students was less than twenty and it was perfectly manageable for the academic. However, as the number of students started to grow and the VCILT started to diversify its courses, the workload of academics involved in activity-based pedagogies increased to a great extent. At some point, taking into account the constraints, the exigencies of service and other professional commitments, we tend to realize that having recourse to such efficient, innovative and competencies-based pedagogies are not affordable and sustainable by institutions in developing countries with limited resources.

On the other hand, after going through this painstaking process, the results are more than comforting for the practitioners when students are able to demonstrate the competencies they have developed. For instance, some years ago the VCILT offered a module on "Educational Technologies" which was offered as a general elective module. The course had three main learning activities and the outcome that students had to achieve was the production of an educational website. In the first learning activity they had to use concept mapping tool to devise an appropriate structure for their course. The second activity was based on presentation software to model a prototype of the final web based learning environment while the third activity was to actually learn to use a web authoring software to develop a small educational website. While the students came from different fields and with different levels of exposure and skills with respect to computers and information technology, they all (those who submitted their work) managed, in successive cohorts to achieve well above average in the course. The illustrations below (Fig 3.2) are sample of the outcomes of activity-based approaches to learning.

figure 3.2

This leads us to the third important issue related to the implementation of activity-based pedagogies. While teachers need to have the right mindset to be able to keep up with their new roles, students need to also understand their new responsibilities and tasks. In an e-learning environment focused on the development of skills and competencies, students are no longer mere recipients for 'pre-cooked' knowledge. Students need to be equipped with the relevant techniques of methods of inquiries, information search, retrieval and classification as well as application in context-dependent scenarios. Therefore, students need to show a more entrepreneurship culture and independence in the learning process. An entrepreneurship culture would therefore mean more autonomy, development of self-management and self-regulation abilities in terms of commitment, time management and work rate.