Core Area 1: Operational Issues

A) An understanding of the constraints and benefits of different technologies

Investigating a platform for hosting a Small Private Online Course (SPOC)

After successfully offering the “Begin Programming: build your first mobile game” MOOC with very high demand for a follow on course, the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading wanted to offer a SPOC with freemium type (the learning content is free of charge but you pay for additional services such as forums, quizzes, exams and tutor marked assessments) offering. Because this was an innovative way to offer a course, it was difficult to find a built-in system that was able to cater to all our requirements. In 2014, I was entrusted with the task of investigating the available options and recommending the most viable option. The main considerations were cost and the ability to cater for our requirements; that is, while the course materials were provided with open access some parts of the course (premium content) should be behind paywalls. As the university was already using Blackboard VLE there was the option to offer open online courses via the Blackboard’s OER (Open Education Resource) platform for free; thus Blackboard OER was included as a candidate. I also included Canvas platform and Moodle as potential candidates due to cost considerations. The FutureLearn platform was considered as the University is already a partner.

None of the platforms were able to satisfy all our requirements as is. The FutureLearn platform at the time did not have a facility to provide paid-for courses and my initial emails investigating their interest in a paid-for course offering were turned down. The Canvas platform provided the best course presentation; however, they could not provide paid-for items within an open access course. The only way around it would be to create different courses for each option we wanted to offer for a fee and bundle them together along with the free offerings, which could become a complex process with many paid-for course items. In Moodle we could get around the same issue by creating groups, however this created the problem of interactivity within groups; furthermore external hosting and the cost considerations for the same were also unfavourable. The Blackboard OER platform was unable to accept any payments. As this was an experiment, Blackboard offered us a free sandbox to build and test our course with their platform in the first instance offering free of charge. However, when a student pays for a paid-for section of the course, there was no facility to give access to this section immediately. That is, to register the student for that option in the system. So a student’s real-time auto registration to the courses after payment of the fee had to be supported with another provider named GoSignMeUp. This provider’s offering was not affordable for this test project. Thus we decided to enrol students in batches rather than in real-time. The university allowed the use of its Paypal payment for the test project instead of building a Blackboard building block to accept payments. Hence Blackboard at the time seemed to be the most viable option.

However, in a FutureLearn partner meeting when we informed the CEO of FutureLearn about our intention of providing a follow-on paid-for course, he was keen the course to be offered on their platform. FutureLearn is more accessible; the university is already a partner of the FutureLearn; they provide excellent advertising and their services would be custom made for our requirements; therefore we selected FutureLearn as the platform and at the moment the course is being created to be offered on the FutureLearn platform. I have attached a screenshot of the quiz I have set up in the testing space and an email that I have sent to my superiors reporting the options available via the Canvas platform for our work (Appendix 5 – Experimentation with Canvas)

Reflection:

While investigating a suitable platform for the SPOC I invited Blackboard and Canvas representatives to discuss our requirements. At the same time when I approached FutureLearn they did not show an interest. Thus I put in a lot of effort setting up sandboxes for each platform and investigating their ability to support our requirements. It gave me lot of insight into the abilities of various platforms. After selling the idea of a paid-for course to the CEO of the FutureLearn, it only took few weeks for the platform to be finalised as FutureLearn wanted to be part of our experimentation project. In hindsight I think we could have contacted FutureLearn at a higher level than we initially had done to perhaps influence their thinking of paid for courses. Had this been done the process of selecting a suitable platform would have been a much simpler and less time consuming.

B) Technical knowledge and ability in the use of learning technology

Programming Languages and Mobile Technology

I graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and worked for Millennium Information Technologies Ltd (now a technology partner of the London Stock Exchange) as a software engineer/senior software engineer for four years. In this capacity I programmed in C and C++ on Solaris platform and I am comfortable with Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. As Evidence I attach my degree certificate along with transcript (Appendix 3 – BSc Engineering Certificate, Appendix 4 – BSc Engineering Transcript). I also worked for WaveNET Ltd as an intern where I mainly used ASP, PHP and HTML for web development.

I have been the lead facilitator for “Begin Programming: Build your first mobile game” MOOC offered by the University of Reading and I am able to program with Java and Android. I have also followed various programming course for my own development and some of them are:

  • “Learn to Program: the fundamentals” course offered by University of Toronto on Coursera platform (certificate attached) which used Python for programming (Appendix 6 - Learn to Program: the fundamentals).
  • I have successfully completed four courses in the Data Science specialization offered by the Johns Hopkins University. The courses I have completed are: “R Programming”, “Data Scientists Toolbox”, “Getting and Cleaning Data”, “Exploratory Data Analysis” and “Reproducible Research. As evidence I have attached the certificates and my assignments can be found in GitHub https://github.com/moocparticipant/ (Appendix 7 - R programming, Appendix 8 - Data Scientists Toolbox).
  • I have successfully completed “HTML5 Part 1: HTML5 Coding Essentials and Best Practices” course offered by W3Cx (Appendix 9- HTML5 Part 1: HTML5 Coding Essentials and Best Practices).

Instructional Design and sharing Software

As an instructional designer at the College of Estate Management, I use Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Microsoft PowerPoint, Camtasia, Microsoft SharePoint, Video Scribe, Snagit, Audacity and iSpringPro on a daily basis. These are used to create a variety of eLearning materials for the distance learners.

I am a keen blogger (Appendix 10 - My Blog on Educational Technology) and Twitter (Appendix 11 - Twitter Account) user. I have attached links to my blog posts and Twitter account as evidence. I use Slideshare to share my presentations and Mendeley to keep track of references. I previously used EndNote. But when a word document becomes long, the time it takes to refresh reference list becomes disproportionately longer, which I experienced while writing my PhD thesis. Hence I moved from EndNote to the free tool Mendeley.

Virtual Learning Environments

At the University of Reading I used Blackboard VLE and at the University of Moratuwa and now at the College of Estate Management use Moodle VLE. I have been the lead facilitator for the “Begin Programming: Build your first mobile game” course offered on FutureLearn platform and I have investigated the facilities provided by Canvas.net platform to offer our courses. As a learner I have used Coursera, edX, ALISON, Canvas and other platforms. Thus I am comfortable with various VLE platforms.

I have successfully completed “Learning with Moodle” course (https://learn.moodle.net/mod/page/view.php?id=40) offered by Moodle on their MOOC platform (Appendix 12 – Moodle Certificate).

eBooks

At the College of Estate Management we use Dawsonera and VitalSource as eBook platforms and I am familiar with both of these.

Assessment

At the College of Estate Management we are using computer marked multiple choice questions on Moodle as a form of assessment. Both at the University of Reading and at the College of Estate Management I have been using Turnitin as a tool for assignment submission and marking.

Using eLearning Technology

As the lead facilitator of the “Begin Programming: Build your first mobile game” MOOC, I faced lot of difficulties due to the limitations on the then developing platform FutureLearn. This course was one of the first courses to go live on the FutureLearn platform. The platform did not support students’ posting their programming code nor posting images. However, when a student experiences that something was not working the easiest way was to share their code. So I encouraged students to share their code via GitHub or Pastebin while sharing their screen shots of errors using Postimage. I provided detailed instructions on how to use each of these sites via my blog (Appendix 10 - My Blog on Educational Technology).

The course required beginners to install Java JDK on their computers. We provided step by step instruction video screencasts that were produced on Windows environment. But some learners on Linux and Mac computers found it difficult to translate the instructions into their environments. This was especially the case with setting Java path as we identified from student queries. As a helpful resource I created screen casts of installing and setting Java path in Linux and Mac computers and shared these on YouTube. The YouTube video I created to set Java path has over 10,450 views so far with some great comments and appreciations (Appendix 13 – YouTube Channel).

Reflection

I used my Blog and my YouTube channel to support learners who required additional help with the “Begin Programming: Build your first mobile game” course. For the learners who were absolute beginners to programming and required a helping hand, these blog posts and YouTube videos helped immensely. After first couple of runs of the course we included links to these resources in the original course because learners found them to be very useful in some instances they claimed they were clearer than the videos professionally produced for the course. In hindsight, I think we should have included these resources as links in the course itself. However, as I had created these using my own personal time and had published them on my personal Blog and YouTube channel and because they did not have the institutional branding it was not easy to get appropriate permissions to include these in the original course. This also shows the difficulties people who wish to use Open Educational Resources (OERs) would face if their institutions are not very welcoming of non-branded instructional content. Nevertheless, once proven useful getting the permission to include the resources became much easier.

C) Supporting the deployment of learning technologies

I was a member of the School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading’s MOOC and SPOC board where the School explored various ways to bring educational technology into on campus students and for its open courses. There were two broad strands: one to introduce Flipped classroom experience (Big Flip Project) to first year undergraduate courses in an ambitious bid to create a fully online first year of the undergraduate program; the other to create open online course with premium options (paid-for content within a free course).

I was the Technology Enhanced Learning advisor for both these projects that were operating under the MOOC and SPOC board which met weekly. I worked with academics helping them to find technologies that they were happy to use in their classroom offerings (attached an email conversation of exploring various options available to an academic teaching Engineering Mathematics who wanted to mimic the writing on whiteboard experience in an online offering (Appendix 14 - Supporting Developing Educational Technology Material). I also helped them with developing pedagogically sound materials for their teaching. I have also included a conversation with a new academic who wanted to introduce Flipped Classroom approach to his programming (Appendix 15 - Support for Introducing Flipped Classroom for Programming).

I also worked on the MOOC and SPOC project mainly looking after the School’s open online offerings as a facilitator, helping academics who wanted to offer open online courses to put together their story lines and getting their materials ready. I also investigated the technology platforms that were able to offer us the service we required of them. To show my engagement with the project I have attached meeting notes from one of the meetings.

In this capacity, I also explored new technologies that we could adopt to enhance our offering to the students. For example, after I attended an HEA event “New to Teaching” I learnt about the quizzing tool Kahoot. At the time the University was in discussion with suppliers of clickers to introduce clickers to do in lecture quizzes. Kahoot on the other hand is a free tool that anyone who have access to the internet can use. So I created a small quiz on Kahoot and presented it as a demonstration to the MOOC and SPOC board (Appendix 16 - MOOC and SPOC Meeting Notes). This was done on my own initiative and later my presentation was widely circulated in the University (I have attached the email conversation and my presentation here Appendix 17 - Kahoot Presentation). I have also completed the “Introduction to Instructional Systems Design” free course (https://alison.com/courses/Instructional-Systems-Design) offered on ALISON platform (May 2015).

Reflection:

When I support people who wish to introduce technology into their teaching, resistance mostly came from people who have authority. This may be partially due to the workload and additional time commitment they will have to invest in order to create new materials. For example, when a new lecturer wants to change the style of teaching that has been practiced for a long period of time, the module leader is not willing to allow any changes to take place. This could be due to the extensive efforts they have put to create the existing teaching content and the closeness of one’s own materials. In these instances, I had to encourage and support the new lecturer while engaging in dialog with the module leaders to remove the barriers they impose (without consciously being aware of it) on the new lecturer in changing practice. This was much harder than supporting people who are willing to experiment with technology. People, who believe a module that had been delivered in a particular way for the past number of years should be delivered the same way in the future, overlook the fact that the newer generations of learners are more technology savvy. By not using more engaging technology and trying to impose the traditional lecture on its own may not engage them as it had in the past. This is a constant challenge that the learning technologists are faced with.