Dr. Masato Kajimoto’s MOOC HKU04x Making Sense of News is not only a treasure to anyone who is interested in Journalism; the fact that it is so successful also makes it a prized specimen for researchers, data analysts and online course developers alike.
On October 8, 2015, Dr. Masato Kajimoto was invited to discuss the findings on data analysis of his course and the next steps forward. The learning experience was designed to structure around short videos of lectures and key lesson summaries, supplemented by interactivity and forum discussions which were initially considered crucial by Dr. Kajimoto and his team. By the end of the course, details of student demographics, their behaviors (e.g., clicking and seeking) and performance were studied and surprisingly, the findings were contradictory to the team’s presumption. It was found that students who performed best in assignments did not have high engagement in forums, probably meaning that they did not require much peer assistance in understanding the contents.
The MOOC is currently being incorporated into an on-campus equivalent course, allowing undergraduate students to take the lectures online in alternative weeks. Dr. Kajimoto is planning to compare the performance of on-campus students and MOOC takers by giving identical quizzes. Although the findings will not come until the end of the semester, certain other benefits of flipped classes can already be seen. Dr. Kajimoto explained, “when the course [lecture] is online… they have to discuss the exercise [in tutorials]; they have to show the exercise to other students… I’m seeing better and deeper discussions among the students…”
The seminar ended with the promise to bring Dr. Kajimoto back at the end of the semester to share how the flipped classes worked.
We are pleased to invite you to the Teaching and Learning (T&L) Services Seminar and Exhibition organized by the Information Technology Services:
Seminar talks — 14 October (Wed) 2:30pm – 4:30pm (please register to attend)
Exhibition — 13-14 October (Tue-Wed) 10:00am – 5:00pm
(A) Seminar of four talks
The talks will cover new T&L services in both virtual and physical learning spaces supported by ITS; Mr Patrick Desloge of the Centre of Applied English Studies will share his precious experiences in using SCORM packages to expand the capabilities of Moodle to enhance students’ learning experiences; and the Technical Director of Panopto APAC Ltd. will introduce new useful features of the Lecture Capture System Panopto for enriching lecture capture audio/video recordings.
Date: 14 October 2015 (Wed) Time: 2:30pm – 4:30pm Venue: Room CPD-2.16, Central Podium (CPD), Centennial Campus
Title of talks in the seminar session
Speakers
New technologies in the classroom
Mr. Wilson Kwok, Senior IT Manager (Learning Environment Services Team), ITS
Creating Learning Packages in SCORM to Expand Moodle’s Capabilities
Mr. Patrick Desloge, Centre for Applied English Studies
Break
eLearning Services provided by ITS
Mr. CP Lau, Senior IT Manager (eLearning Team), ITS
(1) Tips in Teaching & Learning support – “My eLearning” tab of HKU Portal:
The “My eLearning” tab lists the courses of a teacher as registered in SIS and the Moodle courses that he/she requests explicitly (e.g. use one Moodle course to replace two courses created in Moodle according to SIS data).
Now in the “My eLearning” tab, the courses activated for student access are grouped and appear first before the group of not-yet activated courses. (For more information, please visit the Moodle Resources website at http://moodle-support.hku.hk/new-arrangement-my-elearning-tab-layout-teachers for more information).
(2) Moodle & Panopto training workshops
Moodle is the central learning management system supporting teachers to create online learning content. Panopto supports teachers to do audio/video recording synchronized with PowerPoint slides and PC/Mac desktop display. Students can view the recordings through Moodle courses and search inside the recordings. A module Panopto unison lets teachers upload their existing video files for further editing. The lecture theatres upgraded after 2011 are equipped with PC/AV facilities for recording of lectures readily.
The following upcoming hands-on workshops in October are now open for your registration.
Note:
(1) KB110 = Room 110, Knowles Building
CPD-2.58 = Room 2.58, Central Podium (CPD), Centennial Campus
(2) If you have taken a Moodle hands-on workshop offered by the ITS, we recommend you follow up with an eLearning Pedagogical Support Unit (EPSU)/Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) and a Faculty of Education/Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) seminar. These seminars focus on teaching approaches and good and innovative teaching practices, complement the Moodle workshops offered by the ITS.
Have you thought about learning a new skill like programming or brushing up your creative skillset in filmmaking? Are you naturally curious about why and how everything works?
Together with the General Education Unit, the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative team will organize a two-day event on October 5 and October 6 to discuss the power of the Internet in making education open and accessible to all. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a growing trend worldwide with educational content made openly available to virtually anyone who has access to the Internet. Active practitioners in the field of e-learning will discuss what massive open online courses (MOOCs) are and what they can do for you. A film screening of the award-winning documentary, Ivory Tower, will get you to question the value of higher education and open your eyes to alternative paths of learning. Facilitators will also share their experience with MOOCs and offer insight into its potential to reach new heights in student learning.
The brains and builders behind the Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform (KEEP) visited HKU to demonstrate this one-stop e-learning aggregator on September 21, 2015.
Professor Irwin King, one of the Principal Investigators of KEEP, and also his team from CUHK, demonstrated on how learners can easily fish out relevant education content in a sea of learning materials around the globe. On the other hand, the platform is a hub where teachers are encouraged to share ideas on pedagogical innovation. In the near future, the KEEP team will be focusing their work around learning analytics, gamification, social learning and mobile learning. “We really believe that active learning and more engaged learning is the way for the future, and we want to encourage that,” said Professor King.
Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at HKU, also made use of the occasion to share HKU’s initiatives in gamification with examples of making the Rubik’s Cube a pedagogical tool in a course on everyday computing, and also designing a game for the MOOC on Epidemics (which is currently on offer). “It’s all about how to engage and incentivize participants to take desirable actions […] we want to make learning happen, that’s why we want to try the gamification idea,” said Professor Kwok.
The two parts of sharing triggered intensive discussions on the floor. The audience was curious to learn the tricks to engage course learners from the beginning to end and to further investigate in how gamification can be meaningfully incorporated in different disciplines.
Over the weekend of 19-20 September 2015, the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) team participated in the EdTech Team Hong Kong Summit, which provided them exceptional insights by the amazing variety of how Google utilized and maximized their apps and projects for teaching and learning.
Google Views- Bringing you to Grand Canyon and More
Mr. Jim Sill, Director of Global Development for EdTechTeam, went on a tour to the Halls of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles in Versailles with participants.
One of the most inspiring sessions to the team was delivered by Mr. Jim Sill, Director of Global Development for EdTechTeam, on Google Views featuring 360° panoramic photo-taking – a project in which participants go on expeditions and record views for the Google Maps application. There are often places, such as heritage sites, inaccessible by vehicles and made filming of streets by the Google van impossible. Google is therefore recruiting volunteers to carry professional ‘Trekker’ into the bits and pieces of places on Earth. The views collected from places like the Arctic and the Grand Canyon have put all of us in awe, and have also become valuable assets for especially Geography, Architecture and Science students all around the globe to have a glimpse of what the world is like.
At the same session, teammates also learnt about Cardboard, Google’s virtual reality viewer. It allows teachers to take their students on expeditions to almost anywhere they can imagine. Combining the power of panoramic photography and Cardboard, it looks that that field trips, experiential learning and lab simulations will soon take on a whole new meaning. So what’s your idea about making good use of these new technologies?
Organized by Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative
Speaker: Dr. Masato Kajimoto, Journalism and Media Studies Centre Date : 8 October, 2015 (Thursday) Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm Venue : Room 321, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Building
Abstract:
Assistant Professor Dr. Masato Kajimoto from Journalism and Media Studies Centre taught the third iteration of HKU’s online course on edX titled HKU04x Making Sense of News from May to June 2015. The six-week course has attracted more than 7,500 registrations from 147 different countries. It has largely been seen as a successful implementation of journalism-focused media literacy course for the general public and he has been invited to give talks and workshops by different universities that focus on news literacy education.
In this talk, Dr. Kajimoto shares the findings of his investigation into the behavioral data mined through the MOOC in order to illustrate what educators could learn from the learning analytics in terms of curriculum development, instructional design strategies and other pedagogical planning. He then discusses how he has integrated the MOOC into his on-campus teaching.
In order to explore the effective ways to “blend” the two modes of learning experience for the students (namely, face-to-face interactions and self-paced online tuition), he has “flipped” a half of his lectures in the elective course, JMSC1001 Principles of Journalism and the News Media, this semester, which enrolled 127 students from different faculties. He demonstrates how the content has been migrated from edX platform to Moodle while showcasing some of the benefits and challenges he has observed thus far in his experiment.
(1) New Moodle function “Moodle Student Performance by Percentile”
It shows the students’ performance in a Moodle course by 25th, 50th and 75th percentile according to the students’ results in the Moodle Gradebook. This provides information about the performance of the class and may help the teacher give appropriate advice to the students as the course is in progress.
The web page “Moodle Student Performance by Percentile” is accessible via HKU Portal -> “My eLearning” tab -> choose a Moodle course -> click the hyperlink in “Course specific information” section at the bottom of the web page.
(2) Learning Management System (Moodle) and Lecture Capture Service (Panopto) training workshops in September 2015 is now available for registration
Workshops on Moodle and Panopto
Course Code
Course Title
Date
Time
Venue
Registration
PAN-001
Introduction to Lecture Capture Service using the “Panopto” system
Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education
CITE Seminar Series 2015/2016
CITE Seminar – Automated Analysis of Student Contributions and Behaviors
Date: 23 September 2015 (Wednesday)
Time: 12:45 pm – 2:00 pm
Venue: Room 104, 1/F., Runme Shaw Building, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Dr. Xiao Hu, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
Chair: Dr. Allan Yuen, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
About the Seminar
Learning analytics is an emerging and fast growing multidisciplinary field in which data about learners and their contexts are analyzed for understanding and optimizing learning and learning environments. This seminar will discuss two recent and ongoing studies in learning analytics. The first study is on automated analysis of student comments on Wikis of group writing projects. Association rule mining and text categorization are applied to analyze and automatically classify student comments into categories in social interaction, thinking process and thinking development. The second study is to predict student performance based on system logs in Learning Management Systems (LMS). Linear regression with feature selection is used to build prediction models. A framework is proposed to link LMS logs, assessment tasks and learning outcomes. The goal is to design and develop a tool for instructors and students to monitor learning progress in real-time.
About the Speaker
Dr. Xiao Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Information and Technology Studies in the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include learning analytics, applied data/text mining, and information retrieval. She is leading several projects on using learning analytics to improve teaching and learning, and has co-organized Learning Analytics Summer Institute, LASI-Hong Kong in 2013 and 2014. Dr. Hu has experience and background in multiple disciplines. Before joining HKU she was an Assistant Professor in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver. Dr. Hu holds a PhD degree in Library and Information Science and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Information Systems from Wuhan University.
(A) The central learning management system Moodle lets teachers create online learning content to support teaching and learning.
In 2015-16, all Moodle courses created based on SIS data will include the following new features on the homepage of a Moodle course:
1. A Forum for discussion among the students and teachers/teaching assistants.
2. A shortcut for “Adding common functions” for teachers to easily add common activities to a Moodle course. The common activities are “Assignment”, “Turnitin Assignment”, “Forum” and “File”.
3. Four themes are now available on Moodle and teachers can change the look and feel of a Moodle course under the course settings page.
(B) The Lecture Capture Service Panopto supports teachers to do audio/video recording synchronized with PowerPoint slides and PC/Mac desktop display. Students can view the recordings through Moodle courses and search inside the recordings.
A new module Panopto Unison allows teachers to upload their existing video files to the Panopto system for further editing. The lecture theatres upgraded after 2011 are equipped with PC and AV facilities which support recording of lectures readily.
Note:
(1) KB110 = Room 110, Knowles Building
CPD-G.03= Room G.03, Central Podium (CPD), Centennial Campus
CPD-3.21 = Room 3.21, Central Podium (CPD), Centennial Campus
(2) If you have taken a Moodle hands-on workshop offered by the ITS, we recommend you follow up with an eLearning Pedagogical Support Unit (EPSU)/Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) and a Faculty of Education/Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) seminar. These seminars focus on teaching approaches and good and innovative teaching practices, complement the Moodle workshops offered by the ITS.
