Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education
Invitation to attend CITE Research Symposium 2015
You are invited to participate in the CITE Research Symposium (CITERS 2015) on 29-30 May 2015 (Friday & Saturday) at The University of Hong Kong. This year’s CITERS is organized by the Centre for Information Technology in Education of the University of Hong Kong (CITE), in collaboration with Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education (CAISE), Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), the Libraries of the University of Hong Kong and HKU SPACE. The goal of the symposium is to discuss recent research, share good educational practices, and new technologies, with a view to furthering research and practice that support learning with IT. It also provides a platform for the presentation and sharing of outcomes from research and development work conducted by practitioners and researchers to advance our knowledge and understanding of the many issues related to technology-supported learning and teaching.
There are four sub-themes, which are (1) Cyber worldness and Cyber worldliness; (2) Designing and assessing learning; (3) The future of open learning; (4) Emerging pedagogies and technologies. The symposium will feature sessions on a broad range of topics related to the Symposium theme and subthemes. In addition to invited speakers and paper presentations, there will also be experience sharing panels, hands-on demonstrations and discussion forums. Symposium activities are organized as a two-day event. On each day, there will be keynote addresses and parallel sessions on e-Learning, including introductions to CITE projects that focus on various areas such as self-directed learning (SDL) in the Science KLA, e-Learning implementation in schools.
CITERS 2015 is designed to be of interest and relevance to academics and research students in tertiary institutions, school principals and teachers from local and international schools, school administrators, librarians, government officials, publishers of educational resources and e-Learning related industries, and interested members of the community. The program rundown and details about CITERS 2015 can be obtained from http://citers2015.cite.hku.hk. If you are interested in attending the event, please visit the symposium website for online registration and details of the registration fees. School teachers and principals who are interested to attend the event are requested to register with the EDB Training Calendar. The deadline for online registration is 10 May 2015.
I look forward to seeing you at this important Research Symposium. Please encourage others who may be interested to attend this Symposium.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Jingyan LU & Dr. Timothy HEW
CITERS2015 Organizing Committee Co-chairs
Guest blogger series: Grahame Bilbow on Coursera Partners Conference 2015
Professor Grahame Bilbow has been Director of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) since May 2013. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Director of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in the UK, with responsibility for the Arts and Humanities. In recent years, Grahame’s interests have turned to the quest for quality in teaching and learning in higher education internationally.
The Coursera Partners Conference was a great opportunity to learn more about Coursera, their vision and their strategic priorities, and to meet many of their partners.
Specialisations: the answer to the problem of scalability?
A recurrent theme at the Conference was to do with the ‘scalability’ of MOOCs: their capacity to grow in a planned and efficient manner. At the moment, MOOCs tend to spring up in an organic way, and are largely disconnected from each other. In the interests of scalability and future revenue-generation, Coursera are becoming interested in the development of so-called MOOC ‘specialisations’: sequences of interrelated courses that culminate in a capstone project that only course completers are eligible to take.
What do specialisations look like?
Specialisations tend to consist of a number of MOOCs that are shorter than standard individual MOOCs. According to Coursera, nearly half the learners they surveyed expressed a preference for specialisations that consisted of three or four MOOCs, each of four weeks’ duration separated by one or two weeks, leading on to a capstone experience. An example of a specialisation is the Modern Musician specialisation designed by Berklee College of Music in the United States, which consists of three short MOOCs followed by a capstone project.
How do learners react to specialisations?
Coursera’s research suggests that there is a widespread preference among MOOC takers for specialised MOOCs of this type. It appears that the rates of course completion and verified certificate conversion are both higher among takers of specialisations than among takers of individual MOOCs, and this translates into higher revenue. What appears to appeal to learners about specialisations is the fact that the content of MOOCs can be more comprehensive and cohesive and have clearly aligned learning outcomes. This knowledge can then be applied in practice in the capstone – something that also appeals to employers. Specialisations can also involve collaboration across training providers, and this can result in more broad-based learning that appeals to learners and employers alike.
So, what’s in it for us?
Specialisations are of interest to the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) at the University of Hong Kong. The MOOC we are planning in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education could quite easily be broken up into a number of three-four week modules dealing with discrete topics such as instructional design, student learning styles, assessment for learning, and so on, and include a capstone project which would require takers to apply what they have learnt to their own real-world teaching and learning situations. I am optimistic that such a modular specialisation course with integrated capstone would be of interest internationally; however, it might be of particular interest in a regional context, among teachers in higher education in Mainland China and elsewhere in East Asia.
Message from Professor Ian Holliday, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Teaching & Learning)
Dear Colleagues,
Staff Teaching Space Experience Survey – February 2015
IT Services is conducting an online Teaching Space Experience Survey on behalf of the University from today till 13th March 2015.
The purpose of this survey is to gather information about your experiences and perceptions of the classroom environments that you use to deliver your lectures and seminars etc. in order to find out what you think is important and of any issues to be addressed.
Your opinions are valuable to us and this information will help us understand how we can provide better facilities to support your teaching. A separate survey investigating the student learning environment experience will be running concurrently.
The results of both will be used to inform the University Strategy for future development of Teaching and Learning Spaces over the coming planning period (2-3 years) to ensure that space provided for teaching and learning is fit for purpose and of good quality in order to enhance the student learning experience.
Guest blogger series: Masato Kajimoto on Coursera Partners Conference 2015
Dr. Masato Kajimoto is an Assistant Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. Masato specializes in news literacy education, multimedia storytelling, and social media in journalism. His MOOC, “Making Sense of News”, starts on May 19, 2015. Register now.
As an instructor of the upcoming Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) at HKU, my focus to attend this conference was to find out how other university educators around the world have been developing their pedagogical designs specific to the online platform that is totally new to me.
The conference featured more than 25 sessions and covered various aspects of MOOC implementation from institutional strategies to video production workflow. I was particularly intrigued by the engaging teaching approaches adopted by some participating scholars whose instructional methods draw on a number of research in cognitive science, neuroscience, educational psychology, social psychology and other related fields.
I was aware that the concept of MOOC is still in its early stage in the academia and some observers are skeptical about where it is heading but what I didn’t know was the tremendous amount of efforts put into the production of courses at a global scale with many experimental projects and the user analytics data that eloquently tells us about the effectiveness of different teaching and learning approaches.
There are two major takeaways for me from this conference:
First, seemingly subtle changes in the instructional design and video presentation could have a strong impact on users’ learning experience and improve the overall understanding of the subject matter.
Take, Dr. Barbara Oakley, for instance. She is the author of New York Times bestselling science book, A Mind for Numbers, and her MOOC is one of the most popular and successful on-demand courses on Coursera. She demonstrated through a series of workshops how she performs and produces her video clips based on her knowledge in science of learning — the complex connection between neuroscience and social behavior — to minimize learners’ cognitive overload.
For example, she takes an aesthetic decision of how to frame a talking head in the video to a new level of pedagogical decision. According to her, including the hands of a standing instructor (three-quarter shot) has proven to be more effective in the asynchronous online communication than a close-up shot as researches have shown that hand gestures would help learners understand the instruction better.
When she uses graphical elements, they appear just a second earlier before her narration kicks in. In other words, explanation comes shortly after the visual cue is presented. This seems to create a moment of short cognitive challenge inside our head (as we try to figure out what the graphic illustrates), which keeps users engaged in the video.
Professor Richard Mayer, a well-known educational psychology expert who penned such books as Learning and Instruction and Applying the Science of Learning, also shared in his keynote speech a variety of multimedia teaching techniques derived from his research in the science of learning. His presentation focused on how we could effectively reduce students’ extraneous processing of information and solidify understanding of the subject matter in the video-driven, online environment.
His illustration of research findings again reminded that instructors need to pay attention to subtle details. The spacial distance between a graphical element to the text; instructors’ intonation in the voice over; frequent inclusion of the word ‘you’ in the narration, signaling what to focus with gestures (or other cues like highlighting texts); they all significantly affect the learning outcome.
The ‘tricks of the trade’ shown by the two scholars and many others like them in the conference are tremendously valuable to the course I am developing right now.
The second takeaway might sound somewhat contradicting to the first, but, I find that it is important to remember there is no one formula that guarantees success on the online platform. Although there are some proven methods to improve MOOC courses as discussed above, this new way of creating a global, non-restricted teaching and leaning environment for all members of the public has encountered many unexpected challenges and we need to figure out what to do as we go along.
The sharing session on copyright-related issues, for one, was both helpful and confusing. On the one hand, I could learn a lot from the cumulative experiences of the expert panel members and participating educators in dealing with the legal matters; on the other hand, the circumstance and the nature of each course is different and thus, in the end, there is no straightforward procedure one can follow in this regard.
The same goes to the marketing strategies of promoting the courses. In this workshop, while I could learn a great deal about the basics such as search engine optimization and social media integration as well as other common public relations planning, the participants’ experienced outcomes greatly differed for the same methods. University brand, country, timing, targeted student groups, public’s demand, industry’s demand and all other factors obviously come into play, and thus, one’s experience cannot be easily duplicated by others.
The second takeaway is nothing unexpected or insightful but it was a reminder for me that in practice I need to try everything I can for my upcoming course and see what comes out. The two-day conference taught me not to be afraid of making mistakes because that was the way other colleagues have been tackling the MOOC.
In one workshop, two researchers showed us their horribly executed web-cam video lectures they used for their first MOOCs and their dramatically improved third iterations, which put me at ease as it has taken some pressure off my shoulders; at the same time, their presentations made me realize that we teachers are also learners in this global endeavor and we all learn something important for our trade along the way.
The ITS Panopto and Moodle hands-on workshops in March are now open for registration. A new Moodle workshop “Using Scales and Outcomes” will be offered on Wednesday 11 March, 2015. Teachers can easily link outcomes to the Moodle activities and measure student performance. Details can be found in the online training schedule.
New Moodle and Panopto Usage Report of Individual Courses
A new Moodle and Panopto usage report for teaching staff is now available inside the one-stop eLearning hub under the My eLearning tab of the HKU Portal. This new report provides teachers and class instructors with useful data on students’ usage patterns of different e-learning resources of a Moodle course. Detailed information about this new report can be found on the ITS E-learning resources website.
Upcoming Seminar – Broadening Horizons: Knowledge gained, experiences shared and lessons learned from HKU’s first MOOC HKU01x Epidemics
To celebrate the successful running of HKU01x Epidemics, EPSU has announced a seminar on Tuesday 17 March at 12.45pm in Run Run Shaw Building in which the course team and the design team share their experiences, reflect on what transpired during those hectic ten weeks and look towards the future, both the Epidemics re-run and other upcoming HKUx MOOCs. Register online for the seminar and we’ll see you there.
Educational Video Production: a seminar on design principles for meaningful learning
With video playing an increasingly dominant role in online education, Steve Roberts, Instructional Designer from the EPSU, delivered a fascinating and timely seminar looking at how we can follow best practices in our own educational video production, whether for high-profile MOOCs or own more humble productions. Steve considered the importance of a learner-centred approach, the need to reduce unnecessary cognitive processing and offered a set of guiding principles based on the work of Richard Mayer (2012). Read more about it on e-learning Blog.
New Appointment
Professor Ricky Kwok of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, currently the Chairman of the HKU MOOC Working Group, has been appointed as the new Associate Vice-President (Teaching & Learning) from January 1, 2015. Furthermore, Ricky has also been appointed as the Director of the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit (EPSU). Ricky receives a very warm welcome at this exciting time in HKU’s E-learning journey and we look forward to future developments in this area.
This symposium showcased the findings of postgraduate students, post-docs and RAPs across all faculties in the university in order to promote the cross pollination of ideas and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. Testimony to the breadth of topics are the variety of keynote speeches, which explored Neuropsychology, Computer Science and Engineering, and Psychology and Human Development. Post-doc presentations drew on research conducted in fields including Speech and Hearing Science, Medicine, Psychology, and Human Performance.
Preceding these highly innovative and engaging discussions was a series of talks which explored new methods in the Science of Learning. The E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit’s Steve Roberts delivered a presentation which looked at how to maximise germane cognitive processing of the viewer of educational videos, and minimise extraneous cognitive load*. Richard Mayer’s Educational Psychology research into multimedia learning formed the backbone of the discussion and initiated a series of questions which touched on learner expectations, available tools, and best practices given potential resource constraints.
The enthusiasm behind the possibilities to collaborate through cross-disciplinary research and chats around how to bridge research and pedagogy were inspiring. Many thanks to the symposium hosts for this fantastic opportunity to learn from peers and colleagues!
*If your centre, division or faculty would like to discuss the principles underlying cognitive load in video production, please contact an instructional designer at the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit.
Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education
CITE Research Symposium 2015
Call for Contributions
CITE Research Symposium 2015 (CITERS 2015) will be held on 29-30 May 2015 (Friday & Saturday) at The University of Hong Kong. CITERS 2015 is organized by the Centre for Information Technology in Education of the University of Hong Kong in collaboration with the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education (CAISE), Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), the Libraries of the University of Hong Kong, and HKU SPACE Centre for Cyber Learning. The symposium’s main theme is:
Digital generation is one of many labels coined to describe individuals born in years following the advent of the personal computer and the Internet. Many scholars have argued that since the digital generation has been exposed to various forms of technologies from young, and is frequently immersed in a networked world of digital tools, they have different learning preferences, are capable of multitasking, and have different ways of information sense making. What exactly are these learning preferences? Does being connected digitally mean that people are learning? How we can meaningfully connect digital learners to their peers, teachers, and communities? How can we support the development of a learning society for the digital generation? It can be argued that given the rapid advances in technology, the digital world that young people grow up in are very different even within a matter of several years. Would it be more meaningful to refer to them as digital generations? What needs to be done to help the digital generations become constructive and responsible members of a learning society and avoid the dark side of the cyberworld?
This conference aims to investigate these questions. Specifically, the following sub-themes will be explored:
Cyber worldness and Cyber worldliness. Topics include but not limited to young people’s use and experiences of the Internet, keeping learners healthy, safe and productively engaged as collaborative knowledge builders on the Internet.
Designing and assessing learning. Topics include but not limited to learning and assessment designs, learning analytics and visualizations to provide a ubiquitous and informative learning environment to help learners, teachers and parents set appropriate learning goals, monitor learning progress and revise learning pathways so that learners can achieve their desired academic, cognitive, social, and emotional learning outcome goals.
The future of open learning. Topics include but not limited to the use of open Educational Resources (OER), the impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on students’ learning and on educational institutions, the sustainability and accreditation of open learning.
Emerging pedagogies and technologies. Topics include but not limited to games for learning at scale, gamification, fablabs, location and context aware technology, wearable technology, automated feedback and grading tools.
The CITERS 2015 Organizing Committee is now calling for contributions from educational researchers and practitioners, including teacher educators, principals, teachers, government officers, librarians, students and graduates from education programmes, CITE members and those interested in IT and educational research. More details about CITERS 2015 call for contribution can be found in http://citers2015.cite.hku.hk/call-for-contributions/
Submitted contributions will be reviewed by the CITERS 2015 Organizing Committee and Program Committee. Full papers (optional) submitted will have a chance to be published in the ITEC e-Journal. Regarding the instructions for preparing the full papers, please kindly refer to URL http://ejournal.cite.hku.hk/ for details.
Submission
Please submit proposals via our conference system at CITE Open Conference System on or before 27 February 2015 (Fri). We are preparing the submission system and details will be announced soon.
Organized by
e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL
Speakers:
· Dr. Joseph Wu, Associate Professor, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
· Dr. Chao Quan, School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
· Dr. Jingli Cheng, Mr. Darren Harbutt, Instructional Designers, E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit
· Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning); Chairman of MOOC Working Group Date : 17th March, 2015 (Tuesday) Time : 12.45pm-2.00pm Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building
Abstract
From September to December last year, HKU’s first MOOC HKU01x Epidemics ran on the edX platform. Over 10,000 learners enrolled on the course taught by 12 experts in the field, with 12% of students earning a certificate of completion on HKU’s successful first venture into the world of MOOCs. However, the preparation started one year beforehand and the knowledge gained, the experiences shared and the lessons learned will resonate long after the course itself has finished.
In this seminar, the speakers will explore various viewpoints arising from HKU01x Epidemics: the institutional perspective for HKU and how it relates to current and future MOOC development; the professors’ perspective on leading and teaching in a MOOC; the perspective of a coordinator and facilitator; the students’ perspective, gathered from research data; and the development and implementation perspective from the instructional designers. Join us as we look back on this rewarding experience and look forward to HKU’s increasing presence in online learning.
About the Speakers
Joseph Wu leads the infectious disease modeling research in the HKU School of Public Health. In 2014, Joseph led the production of HKU’s first MOOC Epidemics which had more than 10,000 enrollees on the edX platform.
Chao Quan is involved in undergraduate teaching for the MBBS TB Clerkship/Emergency Medicine modules. He has also developed HKU’s MOOC, Epidemics.
Jingli Cheng and Darren Harbutt are instructional designers in the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, who helped to design, build and run Epidemics.
Ricky Kwok is Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) and Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at HKU. His work focuses on e-learning, and he is currently leading EPSU to work on HKU MOOCs.
It would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global internet networks each month in 2018, with video consisting of 79% of all consumer internet traffic in 2018 (Cisco, 2014). Whilst this vast access and consumption of video by no means implies viewers are engaging with or learning from high-quality content, it does indicate that video is a dominant online modality for information ‘chunking’ and broadcasting. In light of this ubiquity of video, the ease in which technology can be leveraged to create viewing environments, and its potential as a medium to provide input, higher education (HE) has been integrating video into teaching and learning at a rapidly growing rate. Flipped classrooms, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), blended-learning classrooms and distance courses are a few of the many contexts in which video is employed as a tool for learning.
The University of Hong Kong is no exception to this trend. With the dual aim of engaging faculty members who produce videos for their learners and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue around this topic, on 11 February the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit delivered a seminar entitled “Educational Video Production: Design principles for meaningful learning”. Key areas discussed were:
the importance of adopting a learner-centred approach to multimedia design
the need to reduce unnecessary cognitive processing in educational video production given the constraints of working memory
Using this theory as a starting point, participants had the opportunity to discuss issues which commonly arise in video production in their own contexts. For instance, what is the difference between video for education and entertainment? What is the impact of visuals and audio, and the relationship between these modalities, on student cognition and learning? Does adding graphics to spoken words help students’ learning? Is talking over PowerPoint slides more or less effective than a talking head alone? Does adding on-screen written text, which parallels spoken text, support or hinder learning?
Whilst the answers to these questions are not always clear-cut, the importance of generating informed dialogue around our design decisions is paramount if we are to produce videos which are engaging and conducive to learning. One need only glance at the seminar’s enrolee profile to see the breadth of interest in taking part in this dialogue.
The challenge perhaps now lies in further fostering communities of practice and supporting an ethic of exemplar sharing. So if you’re keen to share a clip you’ve created or ask for advice on one you’re currently working on, we would encourage you to contact an instructional designer in the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit.
