Encouraging active learner participation in the study process

Tuesday 11:00-12:30 (4), Blaydon/Gibbs

Type: Lightning talk

Theme: Students as users and co-creators

http://slidewiki.org #oer14 #abs30

Authors

Darya Tarasowa, PhD student at University of Bonn, [email protected]
Dr Sören Auer, Professor at University of Bonn, [email protected]

Abstract

Introduction

The concept of active learner participation in the study process was discussed for example in [2]. However, university students need additional motivation to spend time on learning activities that do not directly influence their marks. Our goal was to encourage students to participate actively in the study process without increasing their workload. In order to do so, we used the OpenCourseWare platform SlideWiki (http://slidewiki.org) [3] as an additional resource for preparing for the course examination at Chemnitz Technical University.

SlideWiki allows to create SCORM-compliant structured educational content (slide presentations and self-assessment tests linked to the slides) collaboratively in a wiki way. Thus, students are able not only to look through the material, but also add, improve and refine the content. Our study was aimed to investigate, how actively would the students participate without any obligation and how the participation affects the quality of learning.

Methods

Overall 30 students were working with SlideWiki for several weeks, and we collected the statistics of usage for that period. After the end of semester we asked the participants to fill out a questionnaire which consisted of three parts: usability experience questions (recommended by System Usability Scale (SUS) [1]), learning quality questions and open questions for collecting qualitative feedback.

Results

SUS yields a single number in the range of 0 to 100 which represents a composite measure of the overall system usability. The results of our survey showed a mean usability score of 67.2 for SlideWiki. According to the statistics collected, the students created 252 new slide revisions. Some of them were totally new slides, others were improved versions of the original lecture slides. Originally the whole course had 130 questions, and students changed 13 of them.

The statistics show us, that although it was not obligatory, students actively contributed to the content. Mostly, they improved the quality of content by fixing minor mistakes and creating additional distractors for multiple-choice questions. The free-text feedback comprised mostly positive opinions, especially about features and possibilities that SlideWiki allows. The students liked this way of learning, storing and sharing of the presentations. However, we found repeated complaints about several bugs, that interfered the working process. As well, we collected a few suggestions about features that were already implemented, but users were not aware of.

Discussion

Our study proves the efficiency of engaging students in the process of creating and refining the educational content. The ability to contribute to the lecture material encourages students to be more initiative and responsible. As well, it allows them to co-operate with their professors on equal. The experiment shows, that more active SlideWiki users received better marks on the real examination, that indicates the positive influence of the active participation on the learning quality. However, the efficiency of such activities strongly depends on the system usability. Thus, the intuitive interface and the high documentation quality are crucial for the success of an e-learning platform.

References

1. Lewis, J. and Sauro, J. (2009). The factor structure of the system usability scale. In Human Centered Design, volume 5619 of LNCS, chapter 12, pp94-103. Springer.
2. Pedreira, N, Salgueiro, J.R.M. and Carballo, M.M. (2009). E-learning in new technologies. In Encyclopaedia of Artificial Intelligence, pp532-535.
3. Tarasowa, D., Khalili, A., Auer, S. and Unbehauen, J. (2013). Crowdlearn: crowdsourcing the creation of highly-structured e-learning content. In 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2013), pp33-42.

Funding acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by a grant from the European Union's 7th Framework Programme provided for the project LOD2 (GA no. 257943).

Recap recording

A recording of this presentation is available at https://campus.recap.ncl.ac.uk/Panopto/Pages/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=4c9603ee-2bec-db9c-ca63-03ba4202421e University of Bonn 2014 Darya Tarasowa cc-by 4.0

Further details

Keywords: OpenCourseWare, e-learning, collaborative authoring, student motivation, lecture notes, statistics, CrowdLearn

Website: http://slidewiki.org