Educational tools, tools, tools on my mind

There are so many tools out there that all supposedly support education that it’s mind-blowing. There is seemingly even a mind-map of mind-mapping tools!

I was trying to learn about mind mapping when I came across this mind map of mind mapping software #meta pic.twitter.com/D6vPsKg1Ht

— Ravi S. Kudesia (@rskudesia) November 10, 2020

Fascinating!

There are way too many that one could account for, let alone keep up with. Throughout the ONL course we are experimenting with quite a few, and while that’s perhaps not the learning objective of the course, it’s a good experience to get to know them from the student perspective. A few quick take-aways:

• Many tools are platform-dependent. And we cannot take for granted that all our students have the same platform. (MS Teams works differently for Macs vs PCs, and whatever is the official info, that’s what students report.)
• Some tools are restricted to people from the same organisation. (Sway sounded like a great idea until it didn’t actually work for people from different organisations.)
• Some tools don’t work with other tools. Try using them through your favourite screening app, e.g. through Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting etc. to see whether they are compatible.
• Most tools require individuals to create their tool-specific logins first. Quite a waste of time and effort to do during a class, but asynchronously tech support can be even more difficult.
• Others require one to have a credit card to begin with, even for the free version. Needless to say, we cannot assume all students can do that. (Interestingly, some tools, e.g. Prezi, requires that from some geographical regions but not others. How would you know what applies where?)
• …

Where am I going with this? A couple of things:

1. We don’t know which interface students encounter when signing up for a tool. It may differ from the facilitator’s interface.
2. We cannot presume students have the means or the platforms to get everything to work.

I.e. trying out things helps but only to some extent. Giving options could help; using only the tools that every student within a university, or across participating universities have access to restricts the possibilities somewhat but is a workaround. For MOOCs, it may come down to sticking to one and only platform throughout, without changing them for assignments, either.

This takes away quite a bit of the variety or creativity of the learning experience, though. => Any better suggestions?

Ghost member

Now that I am not able to attend any of the synchronous meetings of my group it feels like being a ghost group member. So I started to wonder whether this ghost-like feeling extends to online education overall.

From an instructor perspective there is a long-standing discussion on how an online instructor comes across, as a sage, guide, or ghost. According to Mazzolini and Maddison (2003), e.g. instructors who post more frequently in online education are perceived as “more enthusiastic”, for example. Yet, more frequent postings by instructors do not necessarily result in greater student participation rates; and very frequent postings by instructors even result in lower numbers of postings by students once the instructor starts to dominate the discussion. Perhaps more importantly, they also found that the type of posting (i.e. not answering questions as a “sage” but encouraging the discussion itself as a “guide”) made a difference in engaging learners. Something to remember for our MOOCs for sure; and MOOCs are in fact the topic of our group work 🙂

[As a side note, our humanitarian logistics MOOC has been updated also with new topics and is up and running again! Check it out at https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/humanitarian-logistics and join the 2260 other people from 124 countries who are currently enrolled in it.]

From the student perspective, “ghosts” in online education refer to “ghost accounts” for the purposes of cheating (Hollis, 2018). Not quite the feeling I have here 🙂 Rather, what I was wondering about is whether you would start feeling like a ghost yourself if contributing week after week to the documents your group writes, and watching their recorded interactions, while not actually being able to participate in those synchronous meetings. There are quite a lot of studies on how using additional synchronous media incl. messaging apps would improve the engagement of learners in online education, but right now it is in fact exactly the aspect of not being able to participate in the synchronous bits that makes me feel almost left out. It makes me wonder whether there is any study on this situation in light of course drop-out rates; and if there is any such relationship, how we can overcome it and keep people engaged after all.

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Hollis, L. P. (2018). Ghost‐students and the new wave of online cheating for community college students. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2018(183), 25-34.

Mazzolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2003). Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Computers & Education, 40(3), 237-253.