eSCART2008: an online course for low resource settings - the final report

Today I proudly post our (= ITM's) final report on the pilot course of our newly build full online course: eSCART2008.

I did write about the subject while the course was under construction, in that post I focused on the pre-survey we gave the learners.

For those interested, you can look at the the full report on the pilot in which you will find our modus of operandi, the changes we have made during the course, etcetera.

In a couple of weeks ITM starts another eLearning course for health care workers in the field specializing in ART (AntiRetroviral Therapy). The response for this course was overwhelming and we were booked immediately. This course was presented in a pilot phase (from IT perspective, the content is already full prove from years of experience but not in an eLearning fashion). We redesigned the face-2-face content so it meets eLearning Quality standards, but we also added specific eLearning features (more interactivity, (limited) social media). The coordinator of this medical eLearning course (and main tutor) is Verena Renggli she will go and work for the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Basel beginning 2009 (she returns to her home country: Switzerland).

We started with a big learner group (over 40) because we wanted to make sure our finishing group would still be relevant... it turned out that 84% of the learners finished the complete course because they were so enthusiastic about the delivered material! We had learners from all over the world (the Tropical world): South-Africa, Myanmar, Cambodia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Nigeria... so that made it quite a unique experience as well. An institute is lucky if it has such strong learners.

The pilot phase of eSCART, offered over 3 months, was a full success. Although the course was offered for free, the retention rate was very high (84%) and the course was highly appreciated by the participants. Through offering the course content not only online but also on a CD Rom, problems with connectivity could be limited. The 22% increase in the average score of the posttest compared to the pretest reflects the increase in knowledge of the participants. It is interesting to see that the increase in the score of the pre- and posttest during the face-to-face SCART is similar to that of eSCART (19% increase).
To offer an eLearning course is very work intense. Not only the development and constant updating of the course content required a lot of time, but also the tutoring of the course. The presence of the course and expert tutors was shown to be of high importance for the ongoing learning process and motivation of the students. In future, the group of participants should be limited to a maximum of 25-30 participants per course to maintain a good communication between course and expert tutor and the participants.
However, it can be stated that not only the participants did learn during the course, but also the course and expert tutors, through all the postings (comments, questions and answers to questions of colleagues) in the DF by the participants.

I am proud to be working in such a great, creative and strong eLearning team.

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Online Educa Berlin 2008: Jay Cross for a whole day of informal learning

Online Educa Berlin in nearing and as such I am building my agenda. I have a couple of sessions in which I will be (partly) active, but for this post I would like to focus on the session Jay Cross is guiding.

On Wednesday 3 December 2008 Jay Cross will be guiding all the participants through a whole day workshop on informal learning (10.00h - 18.00h). During which a couple of volunteers (Graham Attwell, Nicola Avery, Stephen Citron, Peter Isackson, Charles Jennings, Nick Shackleton-Jones, Steve Wheeler and I) will drop in and add their two cents to the topic. The voluntering guides are asked to listen in for five or ten minutes and then tell all the participants who they are and hop into the conversation. Share your thoughts for five minutes or so (nice concept of building a network with outsiders and insiders during the workshop).

Description of the full day event:
An action-packed, informative, hands-on experience of informal learning, Web 2.0, and Learnscape Architecture. The metaphor for the workshop: a high-speed journey over the
Grossglockner Alpine road..
Topics include:

• how to design and nurture learnscapes, the ecosystems of informal and web-based learning;
• the explosive convergence of informal learning, the read/write web, internet culture, and new business models;
• how network effects impact organisations, changing the nature of learning and human performance;
• case studies of a dozen organisations that are accelerating informal learning with wikis, social networks, collaboration, podcasts, tagging, graphics, and online teams;
• how internet cultural values such as transparency, rapid prototyping, giving everyone a voice, peer-based decision-making, and openness impact learning and development;
• how to apply an informal-learning maturity model to successfully bring on-demand learning experiments into an organisation;
• preparing to deal with the conservative forces of “paradigm drag” by understanding “the state of the art” in Europe, Silicon Valley and worldwide;
• using learnscapes to increase innovation, improve productivity, become more responsive, serve customers better, and help people grow professionally;
• what organisational leaders can do to nurture productive learnscapes;
• reinvent learning as active, collaborative, need-driven adaptation to change.

Each participant will receive a copy of Informal Learning, Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance and of Jay’s new un-book, Learnscape Architecture, Getting Things Done in Organizations, a six-month visa to the Internet Time online repository of learning resources, and membership in an ongoing community of practice.

One remark: you will need to register for this workshop and it costs 390 EUR, but you will get a lot out of it. For more information surf to this link.

If you are free and in Berlin during that period, join this workshop, it will be fun!

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mLearn08: MiLK: students building mobile learning games in higher education by Debra Polson

Debra Polson is a very enthusiastic speaker.

She showed showcases of custom mobile games. Debra motivates students to develop mobile games and they love it!

All of the examples are about Fun first, then Educational. Examples mentioned: Scape (an urban sustainability education tool), Scoot and Milk (the mobile learning kit), I will focus on this last one.



MILK: explore, research, design, publish, play, reflect. (the mobile learning kit)
It is written in php scripting + database technology.

It is all about connecting students, curriculum and everyday environments using simple web and mobile technologies. In half a day they learn all about botanical gardens, creating their own activities and playing it with each other. While testing Milk at Trinity Bay State High (with more reluctant students), the students came up with activities and learned more then they bargained for. One conclusion was that peer assessment is a HIGH motivator. Students wanted to create GREAT games, because their peers would play the game and give feedback on it.

Another example:
MiLK has been used to deliver course curriculum for Master of Fine Arts, Design and Technology students from Parsons, The New School for Design. The collaboration studio course, ‘PLAYLab’ was delivered by leading game design experts Katie Salen and Melanie Crean.

The course was delivered through exploration of three related domains: Game Design, Psychogeography, and Microfictions. The students were asked to develop new gaming concepts for MiLK for play by both students and teachers, propose and develop supplementary platforms or content, and prototype, playtest, and document their research findings.

It is a scaffolding tool for narratives, which makes it really student-centered.

From Milk's website: the MiLK system is custom made for schools. MiLK is basically a set of simple web interfaces that enable individuals (teachers and students) to design and populate there very own mobile games. The milk-building interfaces are designed to work like a simple series of storyboards with areas to upload images and write SMS text. Once the game designers have submitted their final designs, the storyboard content is dynamically sent to registered users mobile phones in a sequence and style the designers have planned. All communications are then stored and displayed on the students milk-journal for later reflection. The milk-journal is a web page generated by the Milk system and password protected. Students can add comments, upload images, send it SMS and MMS messages and share it with other group members. The teachers are also able to track these activities and set some specific assessment tasks.
We have a number of Primary and Secondary schools in both Adelaide and Brisbane currently trialling the system.

Long live Australian creativity!

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mLearn08: mobile ePortfolio's by Selena Chan

It was a chaotic couple of weeks in which I learned a lot, and now it is time to send it in to cyberspace.

During mLearn08 there were a lot of inspiring speakers and because of the parallel sessions I could not see all of them, but I would like to share the one's I found inspiring.

Selena Chan (photo by Alexander Hayes) who works at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology in New Zealand gave a presentation entitled "evaluation of a m-Learning pilot - narratives of workplace skill acquisition using mobile phones". This session was inspiring because her learners were bakery apprentices (so not your average mobile learning crowd, yet a very eager set of learners).

Selena is an energetic, but in non-verbal attitude a bit shy speaker. Working on a phd on tracking identity formation.

What really blew my mind was the fact that her apprentices choose their own mobile social media AND that they were not eager to learn in a classical style before they took up this apprentice role at the workplace. So this mobile learning really went into the real student-centered learning cycle as the learners choose what software apps to use and what to put on them and the learners learned without being the enthusiastic classical learners (yes, respect).

Why did they use mobiles as learning devices: they did not have access to computers (the apprentices), but all of them had mobile phones. Ten units standards are used.
Allow students to collect evidence for their work and put this in their m-portfolio.

This educational institute really got into social mobile media as well! An amazing set of tools, that are screened for their usefulness by the institute.
The great thing is also that the apprentice could suggest their own mobile apps. For example:

Multiply for audio (remark for myself: get into this a bit closer)
COMIQ is the favorite of the apprentices for this specific application (just take a look it is GREAT for k12 students... and I :-)

evaluation of the project

• familiar tools to learn unfamiliar processes: it works
• extensive support required
• different ict skills in apprentices are addressed
• use students' existing social networks so they immediately get into the program
• cost of web access limits mportofolio concept
• web2.0 sites usability issues need to be taken into account
• make no assumptions: let them (apprentices) guide you and really listen to them

An apprentice got 50 dollars if they participated in a trial.
They followed the activity theory framework.

future directions

• meshing mobile with desktop
• customisable portfolio platforms
• peer feedback loop - using mobile phones (at this time this was not the case)
• richer narratives of lifelong learning.

At the end the apprentices got a challenge test in which the apprentices needed to demonstrate that what they claimed they did was actually real.

Selena is also a blogger, if you are interested in a presentation she gave on this topic as a keynote speaker in 2007, look at this pdf.

How she came to this project is explained in this blip.tv video in which Stephen Parker interviewed Selena.

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mLearn08: keynote Diane Laurillard on mobile learning methods

It has been a while since I added a blogpost, but it was quite hectic the last two weeks. mLearn08 started which resulted in a lot of extra knowledge. I would have blogged live from the venue, but the hotel's infrastructure could not cope with all of the participants logging into their wireless.

So all of my notes and movies on mLearn08 will be posted in the next few days and weeks. Because I did not have the opportunity to live blog, I got thinking about possible ways to provide feedback of a conference. This resulted in some ideas going from simple text, to synthesizing papers I found interesting to movies that give a more indepth idea of what the speaker was talking about.

This post is based on the keynote speach of Diane Laurillard who is well-known for her ground breaking work on (mobile) learning methodologies. the notes were taken during her keynote, so they are a bit hectic, but it might inspire you to take a closer look into her publications.

mLearn keynote Diane Laurillard - Towards a pedagogy-driven account of mobile learning

Dianne Laurillard works at the Institute of Education. She is a renowned researcher.
Her talk is very structured, filled with knowledge and definitely positive on new learning techniques in which the learner is central in identifying what they want to learn and learn.

Were do new TELearning pedagogies taken us? Digital technologies are not optimized for learning. So understanding what would make the technology pedagogy driven is essential.
Technology is transforming learning. Technology tools are optimezed for business and leisure. They are good for learning trhoug attention, discssion, production, emotional engagement. Waht we need are tools for guided inquiry, structure discussion, orchastrated collaboration, adaptive practice, serious games.

Technologies for transforming teaching. These tools need to be good for guiding inquiry, structuring discussion, orchestrating collaboration, adapting leanrners' practice, designing learning activities.

So how do we make sure that the pedagogy is developed to take technology into teaching.

a common framework of representation:

• teacher <=> learner, pracice environment, learner's practice.
• Construtionist approach takes a more practice-focused environment: task goals, feedback, actions, revision.The iteration between these links leads to better achievement of developing ideas and knowledge.
• Social constructivist: debate, ideas, develop your own concepts, the social aspects between learners is important.
• collaborative learning: reflecting on peer ideas, offer their own output, so learners driving each other. The teacher sets up this kind of learning environment.

Informal learning: environments where the teacher is no longer there and the practice environment is more like the real world. Learners help each other AND there is no set curriculum. But the group of learners (or social group) can have learning rules (invisible, but still there and resulting in learners being in or out of the learner group).

So this is a conversational framework in which we can try the learning theories of the last centruyr, and ecncapsulate them in a form that enables educatiors to test them.
Testing the value of our conventional and technologies

Learning through inquiry: explore resource banks, libraries, research..
learning trhough discussions: peers become important as well next to the teacher.
learning through practice: less teacher input.
learning through production... (12 cycles)

In conventional we have parts of the complete learning design.
The conversational framework - challenges the learning design.

conventional learning:

• learning through attention: powerpoint, digital videos,animation, podcast
• learning through inquiry: online resources, digital libraries, website
• learning through discussion: chats, wikis,
• learning through collaboration: meetings, group work
• learningh through practice: simulations, spreadsheets, data analysis, tool, game
• collaboration: networks, wikis
• production: websites, programs, powerpoints, digital videos,...

Digital bring something to the practice that other techniques cannot do. Technologies also address but a part of the complete learning design.

We need to incorporate all of the technologies available.

What are mobile technologies good for?

• the learning affordances fo the technicale features.
• exploring: real phywical environments, linked to digtal guides
• investigating
• dscussing
• recording capturing data
• building making modelling
• sharing
• testing: products built, against others' products
• adapthing
• reflecting
• Rich forms of cognitive motivation.

affective forms of motivation

• control over goals
• ownership
• fun
• identity
• learning-in-context
• continuity between contexts

(jones et al, in M Sharples - big issues in mobile learning 2007


How do we ensure the pedagogy exploits the technology and not vica vesa. What are the specific affordances of mLearnng.

• theory in the conversational framework: the engine that powers the learner's developing experience, a continued iteration.
• digital technoloiges are not typically optimised for learning design.
• we need to reverse the direction of influence to make pedagogic resquirements the driver.
• the confersational framwork shows that several integrated technologies are needed to support formal learning
• its specific requirements for collaborative learning are well met if the learning design for mobile technology is designe to .. them

Question from mike sharples: simulated practice environment can only come as close to the actual work. Mobile learning can take you to the real world, rather then simulations of the real world.
informal learning, but the learner is in control in that context. But there is always an aspect of structure or background starting from the teacher.

question from woman in the audience (did not get her name): Questioning if the adaptation of technology for learning/education is a good market.
(personal argument: look at the longtail, if we can prove that technology for learning IS a market, the market will follow). Diana: we must give more voice to the educational field.

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mLearn08 and can mobile phones help the fight against poverty?

The mobile conference with a difference (mLearn08) runs this week in Telford, Shropshire, United Kingdom. I am looking forward to attend, speak and learn from the other participants. This is a renowned conference on mobile learning, so I am quite excited to go and gain new insights on the future of learning (yes, as you can see I am a believer...)

While preparing my trip, a TED-talk by Iqbal Quadir on how mobile phones fight poverty caught my eye. I was rather sceptic at first, because the first notion that came to my mind when reading the header was: 'right, give poor people a phone so they can give the limited money they do earn to the big telecom providers'... but by now I know that my quick judgements must not keep me from gaining more information about something, so I watched and it was worth the 16 minutes.

What got me enthusiastic about Iqbal Quadir (originally from Bangladesh) were the phrases:

• You must activate the citizens of a nation;
• Economic development is off the people, by the people, for the people.
• Connectivity is productivity.

He builds on the knowledge from the World Bank and ... his train of thought makes sense. So my hope in mobile connectivity and learning is enhanced thanks to Iqbal's speech. And now I am even more enthusiastic to follow the mlearn conference.

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Tikitag: the Internet of Things is now available

Today a Belgian invention called Tikitag was launched to the public. Tikitag uses RFID as the main communication form between ... things. The promoters behind this idea is Alcatel-Lucent, a mobile and very inventive company.

So what is it? Tikitag enables users to get information through a microchip that is embedded in whatever 'thing' you might be interested in. This microchip can start other software to begin a certain procedure or it can simply deliver, transfer data or information between 'things'. If you want to read the sales pitch, you can. I prefer the youTube version of the product (here the demo on 'social business card' that shows all the social media in which the person on the business card is involved):



For those who want to get started, the website includes a comprehensive manual (short and handy).

They also used the marketing idea of getting users to post possible ideas and applications for the tikitag. The ideas that came up in the tikitag forum so far are interesting for all marketeers.

So today I have ordered my Tikitag starter pack (39,45 EUR or 49,95 USD) from the tikitag store that can be purchased from Amazon (yes, Alcatel Lucent has good business people).

There are some similarities with the QRcodes, but because tikitag use a chip more data can be transferred. It will be interesting to make a comparison between both these technologies in a real life product world. A superb bonus: you can 'build your own application' also... let's face it, it sounds promising!

(will be continued)

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