Category: edci335

Iris Xiong – Learning, Motivation & Theory: https://yris-blog.opened.ca/post-1-learning-motivation-and-theory/

Hi Iris, your story about how your mother nurtured your interest in mathematics in your early childhood was fascinating and very touching at the time. She was very insightful in being able to relate basic mathematical concepts to you at an early age in such a tangible way. You mention in your post that your mother employed the concept of Behaviourism. While this may be true, it seems to me that she went even further than that. I say this because once you learned about multiplication, she guided you towards learning about division and decimals. It can be argued that in this instance, she employed Cognitivism, because she helped you to uncover new concepts on your own, and use the right strategies to make connections to prior understandings. All in all, this was a very interesting post and I enjoyed reading it. 

Chloe Schmidt – Learning Design II: https://chloandtell.opened.ca/2021/05/29/post-2-direct-instruction/

Hi Chloe, this was an interesting post on direct instruction. I liked the clip in your post that talked about how direct instruction and project-based learning do not necessarily need to be the antithesis of one another, and how it’s possible to pair both approaches in a strategic way to provide students with the best possible learning conditions. I can think of a scenario that demonstrates how this can be achieved. You could have a classroom where students first watch videos to gain the prerequisite knowledge for a given topic. Subsequently, the instructor could have a more collaborative session with the students where the whole class is engaged to participate in a brainstorming session or something similar, after which the class would work together to practice under the guidance of the instructor. This last part would comprise a majority of class time, unlike the traditional direct instruction model where at least half of the class is the instructor passively lecturing the students. 

Shrey Patel – Inclusive Design: https://shreypatel.opened.ca/inclusive-design/

Hi Shrey, your story about the challenges that your cousin faced in his education due to being visually impaired was truly touching. The line that you quoted from Debra Run was very striking, where she states that the only disability is when people fail to see human potential. I definitely believe this is the case, as I have seen and heard of many such instances where people with seemingly debilitating disabilities have overcome the odds to achieve successes that would be spectacular by any measure, disabled or not. When you describe the methods that you plan to use in order to accommodate students with hearing loss, you mention speech-to-text software. While this is definitely a great step in the right direction, I believe a student in grade 2 could be helped even better if rather than transcribing the material being taught to everyone else, there was learning material that was designed with students like him in mind. For example, rather than having to read about what was said, it would be great if he had learning exercises that employed visual cues. But all in all, great post!

Utkarsh – Interaction: https://iamutkarsh.opened.ca/design-for-interaction/

Hi Utkarsh, this was an interesting post to read. The video that you reference in this post is definitely a great resource for your target audience of grade 2 students. I really liked your Lego Set Tower activity that students are meant to do after watching the video. Such a group activity is certainly a great way to reinforce the concept of subtraction by applying it in a stimulating, practical and fun way in a collaborative group environment. Your plan to provide formative assessment to students is also a good approach, as it would enable them to receive feedback on their progress and use it to improve upon their understanding for subsequent evaluations. For your plans regarding inclusive design, you describe how the video can be adapted for students with hearing loss. But how would you be able to accommodate students with other challenges such as being an English language learner or colour blindness? Overall, I enjoyed reading your post. 

This is the video that I have chosen:

2. In what way are they likely to respond to the video on their own, e.g. make notes, do an activity, think about the topic (learner-generated)?

Students are likely to think about the topic on their own. They might form questions on the topic. They might take notes on the video. Given the relevance of the topic, they might be able to better contextualize some of the health directives from the government that affect their lives on a day-to-day basis such as masking and social distancing. The information gleaned from this video might help them to understand the reasoning behind the importance of following the health directives. 

3. What activity could you suggest that they do, after they have watched the video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity?

After watching the video, students can be grouped into random groups of 3-4 and given a white board for collaborative drawing and labelling. Students can be given a series of tasks and objectives, such as being asked to draw a big circle, representing a cell, and draw the ACE2 receptors somewhere on the circle represent how viruses can enter the cell in any way they like. Such an activity would help students to work together and identify each the gaps in each others’ knowledge and improve each others’ understanding of the topic through discussion and collaboration. 

4. How would students get feedback on the activity that you set? What medium or technology would they and/or you use for getting and giving feedback on their activity?

After the activity, students would go through quizzes that they take through an online learning management system like BrightSpace. These quizzes can be in the form of a self-assessment, formative assessment or summative assessment, depending on how much of the material they’ve covered and which activities they have completed. 

7. How will you address any potential barriers for your learners in the use of this video to ensure an inclusive design?

For learners with colour blindness, the contrast of the video could be adjusted to suit their needs. For those with loss of hearing, the video comes with captions. For English language learners, the video comes with captions in many other languages. For a single parent who is working full-time with 2 children, the video can be viewed asynchronously at their own convenience. For the person who does not have access to a computer at home but has a mobile phone with a data plan, this video can be accessed on their phone through the YouTube mobile app.

There are many steps we can take to accommodate the needs of all learners. For those that are English language learners, we can make translations available for all of our content. For those with loss of hearing, we can have captions available on any video or multimedia content. For the single parent who is working full-time with 2 children, all of the content can be made available online in a learning management system so that they can access it asynchronously at their convenience. 

For colour-blind learners, there are multiple things we can do. One method of catering to this group of learners is to ensure that all content in the class, which will be available digitally through an online learning management system will be visually adjusted to ensure they appear on screen with the right levels of contrast. But when it comes to working on the interactive learning activities which involve more visual learning and collaboration, this alone may not suffice. As a result, our online learning management system will have an additional feature that allows colour-blind users to simply click on a part of a diagram or image with a colour that seems ambiguous to them, and that colour will be instantly identified by a text-based graphic that pops up. Such measures will hopefully mitigate the challenges faced by colour-blind learners. 

For a person that does not have access to a computer at home but has a mobile phone with a data plan. Since learners will be able to work on computers available during the class, this person will likely not be impeded in any way while they are with everyone else in class. However, they would face some challenges when they try to access the class material outside of class hours through the online learning management system. Our approach to mitigating this issue would be to have our online learning management system incorporate responsive design and data minimization. Responsive design is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of different devices and window sizes ranging from small to large [2]. In this particular context, it would involve ensuring that the online learning management system follows responsive design principles so that all the class materials can be viewed on the small screen of a smart phone with ease, while still giving the learner full access to all the material. This could involve things such as making sure content appears larger with a menu that is easier to navigate by touch on a small screen. When it comes to data minimization, this is about ensuring that the learner can access the class material online without having to use up too much of the data they get from their data plan. This involves making sure that along with responsive design, the online learning management system has features in place that ensure that the content appears on a smartphone without having to consume too much data. This could involve various strategies such as displaying only the content that is necessary and pertinent to the topic the learner is viewing, and displaying any images, multimedia and graphics at a slightly lower resolution.

The instructional approach to a learning environment that I have selected for discussion here is experiential learning. In its essence, experiential learning is about learning by doing, followed by reflection. The theory of experiential learning draws on the work of several 20th century scholars like John Dewey, Carl Jung, William James and more. They gave experience a central role in their theories about human learning and development. The amalgamation of their work consisted of a set of propositions about learning theory. The first was that a learning outcome is not the endpoint, but simply a resting point of an on-going learning process. The second stated that as new ideas are learned, old ideas can be modified and disposed of. The third stated that effective learners are capable of balancing the opposing modes in the learning cycle. This is a balance between active experimentation and reflective observation, as well as a balance between abstract conceptualization and concrete experience. The fourth stated that learning never truly ends, as it encompasses all stages of life from childhood to old-age. The fifth stated that when learners and the environment interact, both are changed. The sixth and final proposition stated that every field requires unique skills and a special learning process. Educational theorist David Kolb took these foundational theories produced by those 20th century scholars, and brought them together to develop a holistic model of experiential learning theory. He explained that learning is a process in which knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Experiential learning involves recursive cycles of experience, discussion, feedback, practice and application in real-life contexts. This gives learners a better capacity to apply and connect theoretical knowledge with real-life applications.  

The degree to which experiential learning can apply to my group’s chosen topic is not very clearcut. In one way, it is applicable because learners can be introduced to new knowledge and concepts, be tested on the same and receive feedback on their performance. The learner can then reflect on their performance and feedback and hopefully make improvements in subsequent evaluations. However, since experiential learning emphasizes practical applications, it is not so clear to see how that aspect of it aligns with our topic, since the topic we have chosen is very theoretical, involving the biological aspects of COVID-19.

Interactive Learning Resource: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-NjtMXzWDHV4ta3nBWYKOjWv4DDfKunQCr84NHZq2jU/edit#

Hi Jinliang, Minghao and Ziqing! This was a very informative Interactive Learning Resource on a topic that is somewhat aligned with my major of Computer Science. Your interactive learning resource emphasizes the introduction of R early on to give students a more in-depth background on what R is, its purpose, and its various applications instead of jumping straight into programming. This is certainly a great approach, as it can provide some much needed context for students, especially those without any prior exposure to programming, in addition to potentially sparking their interest in the topic. It is mentioned at the start of the overview that your target demographic is a grade 12 Math class. I would suggest that you build on this by elaborating on your learning context by dedicating a new section to it, and explain more about the details and constraints behind who and why you selected your learning context. It was good to see that you went into great depth in the Learning Theory section about how you embed Behaviourism and Cognitivism into your approach. In the Learning Outcome section, you have a few points that describe what seems like deficiencies in the students’ learning, such as students being prone to ignore certain details when typing code and so on. Perhaps you might consider removing and/or replacing such items from the list, and only retaining the ones that truly describe what a successful learning outcome should look like, such as students being able to identify unknown variables and so on. Your first lesson included a mind map of all the things you can do with R. This was very informative and provided a lot of context for many of the features of the R software package and its capabilities. But this mind map covers a lot of ground. It is not practical for you to teach everything it covers within your learning resource. But out of everything that you do cover, I would suggest that you highlight or circle them within the mind map itself, so that students have better context for what they are learning in the upcoming lesson, and understand where that material fits into the bigger picture of all the things you can do with R. Your assessment plan involved both self-assessment and formative assessment, which is a good approach to take. Perhaps you might also consider part of your assessment being more closely aligned with the first lesson where you cover the background of R in some depth. You have also provided good detail in explaining the reasoning behind how you plan to accommodate diverse learners. 

In the last term (Spring 2021), I overcame a learning challenge when I took a 4th-year Software Engineering course called Data Mining. This was an elective that I took as part of my major in Computer Science. The course subject matter primarily involved the topic of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. At the beginning of the semester, I found the content of the course to be extremely complex and daunting. I felt that maybe my foundational knowledge in some of the prerequisites for this course was too weak. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to tackle such a topic at this stage. Such concerns haunted me throughout the early part of the semester. Given the challenge before me, I began to break things down and start with the simple actions I could take, such as putting in the additional preparation before I jump into each topic covered in class, going through the textbook readings multiple times, with each pass taking several hours, watching Youtube videos on the topic, and so on. Soon after, my discomfort with the course material started to gradually decrease, with repeated exposure to the concepts. The course involved assignments where students were given feedback, and this constituted the Behaviourism aspect of the course. But the most significant part of this course that impacted me personally involved Cognitivism. This is because I eventually realized that the fundamental idea behind what seemed like very complicated theoretical concepts were simply just an extension of a very basic high-school math concept. Namely the equation of a line involving slopes and intercepts. This may be a borderline oversimplification, but the concept of machine learning at its core is really just an extension of that simple concept of a line and its slope in mathematics. Once I was able to make this connection in my mind, much of my stress and anxiety started to dissipate, and I suddenly felt like I had truly understood machine learning for what it truly was, putting aside all of the bells and whistles that come with the subject at an advanced level. This was an example of Cognitivism in my learning because I was able to make connections with my prior understandings.