On developing an active social learning video-based platform: goals and achievements

Pablo A. Haya1, Pablo Llinás2, Estefanía Martín2, Miguel A. Gutierrez2, Jorge Castellanos2, Isidoro Hernán2, Jaime Urquiza2, Nils Malzahn3, Oliver Daems3, Heinz Ulrich Hoppe3

1 IIC, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

2 Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain 3 Rhein-Ruhr Institut für angewandte Systeminnovation (RIAS), Duisburg, Germany

pablo.haya@iic.uam.es, {pablo.llinas, estefania.martin, miguelangel.gutierrez,jorge.castellanos, isidoro.hernan, jaime.urquiza}@urjc.es, {nm, od, uh}@rias-institute.eu

Abstract. This position paper is framed within JuxtaLearn project. We present our approach on active social learning that relies on supporting reflective video-based activities. We summarize ClipIt, a social learning platform that stimulates student-to-student interactions using an online web-based platform where learn-ers reflect on videos and related material (storyboards, comments, ratings…) posted by other students. This paper summarises ClipIt’s design goals, our cur-rent achievements and future challenges that have not been accomplished yet, and are open to discussion.

1 Introduction

There are psychological [1] and physiological [2] well-known evidence that show hu-man beings learn from their interaction with their peers. Collaborative Learning (CL) [3] capitalizes this bias [4] creating a context where learners work together to accom-plish a common goal [5]. While individualistic learning dedicates effort to support teacher-to-student and student-to-material interactions, CL is devoted to develop stu-dent-to-student interactions. This different approach affects both teachers and stu-dents. The former shift their role of educators from providers of knowledge to design-ers and facilitators of learning [6]. Conversely, the latter change from being passive knowledge recipients to actively implicating themselves by participating and reflect-ing about what they are doing [7].

Collaboratively, technology acts as a learning catalyst in two ways. Firstly, ena-bling student-to-student interactions with the goal in mind of developing understand-ing with peers. Meaning arises from interacting with others and reflecting during the process. In some social learning scenarios, the presence of the teacher may even not be necessary. Secondly, closing the gap between teachers (if any) and students result-

ing from the role shifting [8]. As teachers turn to adopt a passive role, they need an increasing control of the learning process, both explicitly and implicitly.

As it has been mentioned, this social reflective learning method may require differ-ent levels of teacher implication. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) [9], there are three different types of learning:

Formal learning: It is structured, planned, designed and evaluated by a teaching authority (e.g. a subject from a school course). It is arranged by an institution and guided by curriculum.

Non-formal learning: Although this may be planned, there is neither assessment nor is it included as part of curriculum (e.g. a workshop).

Informal learning: Tasks are spontaneously guided by the learner’s initiative (e.g. something you learn in an online community). There is no planning or evaluation imposed by a teacher.

Active learning [7] has proven to increase student performance in STEM subjects [10]. JuxtaLearn is a European Union project aiming to increase STEM uptake by provoking student creativity and curiosity. It supports the understanding of science threshold concepts [11] through a process of video-creation in which students work in small groups to create a video that juxtaposes the science concept with everyday con-cepts. The videos are then shared through a social learning platform - ClipIt- to stimu-late online student-to-student interaction around the videos which focus this student discussion on the science concept.

2 ClipIt’s Goals

The design of ClipIt envisions an on-line social platform that can be summarized using four main attributes: sociable, configurable, inspectable, and motivating.

Sociable One of the main goals of ClipIt is to support a wide range of student-to-student inter-actions. Table 1 categorizes these interactions into six general groups.

Table 1. Student-to-student interaction classification

Interaction type Description Participatory production Engage in commons-based peer production of video Discussion Discuss video exemplars through online forum Peer evaluation Comment and rate peer video exemplars Knowledge diffusion Support uploading, viewing, sharing and recommending

learner-created content Knowledge/Expert Search Connect novice and advanced students Socialize Build interpersonal relationships

In theory, these interactions may occur in both formal and informal contexts. We have identified four different types of social learning spaces: Group, Activity, Organi-zation, and Community. Depending on where the learning takes places, different in-

teractions are supported as it is showed in sections 3 and 4. The design of ClipIt aims to support all steps from formal to informal tasks. Videos produced in an inner space can be published in an upper level, but not the other way around. Teachers can inter-vene in the publication process from one level to another, and their influence varies as these publications travel from the inner to the outer layers: moderation and learning control decrease, while the filtering stringency increases.

Configurable A key challenge in active learning is keeping the teacher in the loop as the technology by itself it is not enough for supporting a successful learning. The active learning’s paradox is teachers lose part of their protagonist in favour of incrementing student’s participation and decisions. Thus, the activity design is especially critical in these approaches where teacher control is more limited once the activity is started. Teachers have strong control over the way in which the activity is set up deciding parameters such as group size, duration, content privacy, deadlines, number of expected videos, etc., and to the assessment of the activity such as number of quizzes, scaffolding commenting options, rating mechanism, etc.

One step further, different organisations may require variations on the pedagogical arrangement due to cultural difference or learning objectives. This level of tailoring needs a tech steward role [12] who will take responsibility for the technological re-quirements that support the organisation’s perspective, and its evolution. This role can easily select which tools are available on the platform and their functionality settings, which require a fine-grained end-user configuration mechanism. Changing platform and tool configurations will allow teachers to control the environment that modulates what happens spontaneously.

Inspectable Learning together depends on the quality on the interactions that occur in the plat-form. Teachers configure a learning activity pursuing a particular dynamic. Evaluat-ing the effectiveness of the design process is an important and central part of the plat-form. Learning Analytics (LA) [13] metrics are provided to different stakeholders including teachers, students, tech stewards, researcher and educational managers. They rely on quantitative measures to analyse and report data about the learner per-formance. LA can support and promote evidence-based practices that include as-sessing student progress, identifying successful learning patterns, detecting indicators of failure, or evaluating the appropriateness of certain learning materials, among oth-ers.

According to Ferguson and Shum [14] different kind of analytics may help to un-derstand learner’ interactions from different angles: social network analytics, dis-course analytics, content analytics, disposition analytics and context analytics. Each category can be studied using several scopes including personal, group, activity, or-ganization and community. It’s crucial to provide an easy-to-interpret analytic toolkit to overcome the overwhelming amount of analysis combinations.

Motivating JuxtaLearn seeks to provoke student curiosity in science and technology. From the technological point of view, a first approach may be based on recommendation mech-anisms. Learners make use of rating and tagging functionality to classify their peer’s videos. This social recommendation process contributes to highlight the best practice videos according to different criteria such as its adaptation to the underlying concepts, its creativity, its originality, its motivational power or its ease of communication. Thanks to recommendations, the platform opens new paths of learning to students, showing them new sources of inspiration from other peers.

Another approach is directly targeting motivational aspects of the students. Ryan and Deci [15] define extrinsic motivation as that in which the reward is external to the activity, not the activity itself. Grades are the classic case of extrinsic motivation in education. Conversely, intrinsic motivation is that in which the activity itself is inher-ently satisfactory, rather than satisfaction coming from some external reward. ClipIt will incorporate mechanisms for persuading students to change their behaviour and habits [16]. These methods will increasingly focus on intrinsic motivational factors like verbalizing the learning through participating and discussing [17].

3 ClipIt’s Achievements

ClipIt is an on-going platform which aims to satisfy the goals listed previously, an-gled from two different but complementary perspectives.

3.1 ClipIt as Social Video-Based Platform

We have implemented a web-based platform supporting students’ learning by means of on-line discussion and evaluation. Currently, students perform three main reflective processes: participatory production, discussion and peer-review (see Table 1).

During the production phase, students use the platform for discussing first on a sto-ryboard for planning their video, and eventually on the video recording and editing process. ClipIt enhances team-work by providing groupware tools like discussion forums, a shared document storage facility and access to the teacher-uploaded refer-ence material (see Fig. 1). The rough versions of the group deliverables can be com-mented between group members so that they all get to share their opinion about how to enhance or correct their final video.

After the final versions of the videos are uploaded to the platform, students give feedback by leaving comments and ratings amongst each-other’s videos (see Fig. 2). These comments are scaffolded to guide the reviewer into giving specific opinion on whether the topics explained in the video were correctly covered (and why), and also into giving a numeric rating on resources used in the “performance” aspect of the representation.

Good quality videos, which meet the teacher’s quality approval, will be allowed to get published further out into the organisation and community layers enabling knowledge diffusion (see Table 1). Members of the authoring group will continue to

get feedback notifications about their videos so they can assess their work upon oth-er’s opinions and understanding of the explained topics in other to increase awareness (see Table 1).

Fig. 1. Group Discussion and Multimedia pages

Fig. 2. Scaffolded video commenting and rating. More info at http://clipit.es/video_intro

3.2 ClipIt as a Data Hub for JuxtaLearn

The JuxtaLearn project is defined by an 8 step cyclic process (Fig. 3) in which stu-dents work in groups planning-out with storyboards and creating educational videos which explain difficult to understand topics (Tricky Topics or TTs) by using common imagery. The TTs to work upon are decided between students and teachers, assessing student’s current knowledge by using quizzes, and inserted into ClipIt by means of the “Tricky Topic and Quiz Authoring Tool” [18], part of JuxtaLearn (Fig. 3: steps 1, 2 and 3).

Students communicate and coordinate through ClipIt while using the “Storyboard and Video Composing Surface” [19] –another JuxtaLearn component– to create and upload these elements to ClipIt (Fig. 3: steps 4 and 5). This system consists in a touch surface where vignettes and video fragments can be put together, organized and tagged to produce the final storyboard and video objects which will be fed into ClipIt.

Once the resulting material is uploaded, it is then reviewed by peer students from other groups for reflective feedback (Fig. 3: steps 6 and 7). In this final stage, materi-al-centred interactions occur between content producers and consumers. Teachers have an organizing and moderating role, but there is no linear work-path they must guide. Published material will also be shared by using “Large Screen Displays” [20] (JuxtaLearn component) which provide better exposure for videos, so that a more general public can view and comment about the results.

In the last step (Fig. 3: step 8), quizzes can be re-done to assess student’s progress and comparison of results from those previous to the activity, again using quizzes created from the “Tricky Topic and Quiz Authoring Tool”.

During the whole process, and more importantly during the development of activi-ties, events from all user interaction are gathered for processing to give useful feed-back including personal and group progress, content recommendations, results, and peer activity (Fig. 3: all steps). These metrics are provided by a Learning Analytics (LA) toolkit [21], which is integrated in ClipIt.

Fig. 3. ClipIt as the central data and interoperability hub across the 8 step process.

ClipIt has sought to manage data storage and interoperation between these compo-nents. The JuxtaLearn process is supported by an ecology of technical and pedagogi-cal tools that combine social and collaborative learning principles. When confronted with the requirements for building this component we devised a service-oriented ar-chitecture rather than following the “all-in-one” mainstream e-learning platform solu-tion. This syndicated approach facilitates not only a continuous integration with JuxtaLearn subsystems, but also being reused in future projects.

This is achieved using a core framework (Elgg1) as a base, and adds and extends functionality and structure in the form of interconnected plugins, making it totally modular and expandable from its core design.

Acknowledgements. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Euro-pean Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 317964 JUXTALEARN.

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