Awareness and Collaboration in the iHelp Courses Content Management System Christopher Brooks, Rupi Panesar, Jim Greer Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems (ARIES) Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada

Introduction  The Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is not an online classroom  Learners are unable to collaborate just-in-time around the artefacts of learning  Questions in and around lectures are important!  Learners have no idea who is doing what around them  Consequential understanding of your fellow students is important!  Instructors have no idea what the participation is like, unless they force it  Who is interacting with whom?  What are the cliques?  Who is sleeping in class, and how many people do this?  This presentation will outline our work in bringing these social cues and collaborative technologies into the online world Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

iHelp Courses  iHelp Courses is our standards-based research LCMS  Courses are deployed at IMS/SCORM Content Packages  The SCORM Run Time Environment (RTE) has been extended to add some user modelling support  The system is used by hundreds of students annually, and with the discussion/chat tools is used by nearly 1,000 students each academic term  This talk focuses not only on the things in the paper but our current environment as well as things on the test bed right now! Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Issue #1: Artefacts Online  Some insight in our solution comes from the notion of activity theory. We believe: “achievement of learning outcomes arises from the interactions between the learner, the artefacts in the environment, the tools to manipulate those artefacts, and the learning community.” (p3)  Distilling this down we suggest  Interaction around the artefacts of learning is important  Good tools support to manipulate these artefacts is needed  Connecting members in the learning community is key  Online artefacts tend not to be synchronous in nature Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Solution #1: Learning Object Collaboration  We have coupled our content management system directly with interaction tools  As users browse through learning material they are able to see and interact with other synchronous learners  Discussion forums are content-based; instructors can create a discussion forum for a particular module, a particular lesson, or even a particular page  Courseware provides subtle cues as to who is looking at content, or what content has had discussions centred around it Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Solution #1: Screenshot (Demo) Demo Indications exist for both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration Chat follows learner browsing Events happening in background are still “visible” Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Solution #2: Groupware for Collaboration  There are a number of research collaborative tools out there but:  Very few deployed, “prime time” tools in educational institutions  Very few (none?) that are browser-based  iHelp PEPL (iHelp Share)  Allows students to share code from within the iHelp Courses system  Is invoked through the chat system, so sharing sessions can start naturally (not prearranged)  Allows for more than two participants (current version)  Aimed at computer science students, but being deployed for online writing lab as well (2007) Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Solution #2: Screenshot (Demo) Demo Annotations “bubble” up to the top on mouse over Users all share a new chat room as well Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Issue #2: Lack of Awareness  Two groups get awareness in face to face environments, but not in online environments  Students  Student: Walking through the halls, labs, and into the classes give students an idea of who their peers are, what they are working on, and how they “measure up”  Instructor  Student: Online systems may give an idea of what marks a student has, but that casual glance around the classroom for missing (or lost) faces doesn’t exist  A key design goal in enabling this kind of awareness is to do so consequentially  It must be easy and fluid to go from tool to tool  No more interpreting big lists of numbers! More subtle visualizations are key. Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Solution #1: Measuring Up (Beta)  General idea is to indicate the process of other students  How much content they have viewed  How much time they have spent  What their current knowledge level is  Coloured bars: “me vs. the average”  We want to leverage the implicit traces a user leaves behind as they interact directly with the learning environment  We see this as a form of open user modeling  See Adaptive Hypermedia (2006) workshop paper Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Solution #2: Class Awareness  Very tedious for instructors to get an idea of how “healthy” their online classes are  As more classes move to online and blended modes, the measure of health begins to include content management system metrics  Do they post questions?  Do they answer?  Are they even checking the system for new questions?  Analyzing lists of stats is ok in a small course, but once it gets bigger than 20 people it can’t be done in a glance  We’ve started investigating visualizations to handle large sets of complex interaction data in online/blended courses Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Screenshot: Instructor Visualization  Based on sociograms, but recognizes three classes of students  Participants: Those who write messages. The bigger the node, the more popular their messages are.  Lurkers: Behavior is quantified – the closer they are to the participants, the more they are lurkering.  Delinquents: Those who can, but never have Participants Lurkers Delinquents Red nodes are instructors Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Visualization notes  Currently we include no notion of time – you get a snapshot of how the class looks taking into account all data  At the moment graph is anonymous, considering implications of making this graph public for students and watching how motivation changes Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions

Conclusions  We have implemented a number of awareness and collaboration features in our online content management system  A number of these features are undergoing specific evaluation  Student and instructor uptake has been strong – instructors really enjoy the code sharing facilities, and students chat and discuss a lot with these tools  We’re currently investigating how these tools can be applied in more media-rich environments, e.g. with streamed lectures  Happy to answer any questions! Jim Greer ARIES Lab University of Saskatchewan Canada Introduction iHelp Courses Issue: Artefacts Online Solution: Learning Object Collaboration Solution: Groupware for Collaboration Issue: Lack of Awareness Solution: Measuring Up Solution: Class Awareness Conclusions