Hey folks – I just saw this article from Campus Technology focused on key learning technologies as we move forward, and I figured I would share! Specifically, they’re pointing to the recent EDUCAUSE Horizon Report that lays out important technological issues facing higher education. Overall, they point to six especially important areas to consider: • Artificial intelligence • Blended/hybrid courses • Learning analytics • Microcredentialing (more commonly called badges) • Open Educational Resources • Quality Online Learning
The Campus Technology article is a little bit limited in how they address each of these, but they do link out to the EDUCASEwebsite, which further links to the full Horizon Report as well, and those resources are where we can find more to dig into. Perhaps unsurprisingly, blended/hybrid models and quality online learning are the two most important factors post-pandemic per the report’s findings. I was especially excited to see things like microcredentialing (including specific reference to using microcredentials/badges alongside game-based learning) and OERs show up as particularly important (3.2 and 3.1 out of a 4-point scale, respectively, too).
Possibly most important for us at Kirkwood, though, is the section dedicated to U.S. Community Colleges, which specifically highlights microcredentials/badges, OERs, and flexible course design. That seems to fit pretty well with our experience this last academic year, with flexibility often at the forefront of our minds!
For a few years now, I’ve run a project in my Educational Psychology course that I call the Discussion Leader Project. In a face-to-face course, that project has involved students leading a portion of a class session in a peer teaching style of learning – teams of students become relative experts in their chosen topic, and they help their peers to develop those same skills. Alongside my own activities, discussions, and lectures, these Discussion Leader sessions have been helpful for the leaders themselves, their peers, and even me – it’s useful to see these same topics in a different light.
Ed Psych Wiki Banner
The transition of the face-to-face Ed Psych course to an asynchronous online environment presented a challenge, however: how to maintain the collaborative, peer teaching atmosphere of the project when students are inherently more separated from each other? I struggled with this issue for quite some time before landing on an option that I’ve now come to enjoy: Google Sites as a tool for collaborative, student-led design of a learning resource. I first implemented this version of the Discussion Leader project in the Fall 2020 semester, and you can see how this student-led design worked out on the public wiki site here (a copy, with student information removed).
Google Sites for Learning
Google Sites (https://sites.google.com/) allows anyone with a Google account (it doesn’t have to be a Gmail account!) to create websites for free from within the Google Drive framework. If you’re familiar with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other Drive tools, Google Sites has a relatively easy learning curve. Perhaps most importantly for those of us shifting more and more courses online (but didn’t grow up coding), Sites requires no coding or programming experience whatsoever. Using plain language explanations and labels, website creators can drag and drop pre-made section designs or create their own designs with clickable buttons, images, customizable text boxes, and more. Perhaps best of all, because Sites is tied to the larger Google Suite, the system allows you to embed items from across your (and your collaborators’) Google Drive storage and beyond – including Docs, Sheets, YouTube videos and more. If you’ve made a file editable by anyone, viewers of the website can even edit from within your site!
Exam 1 Topic Listing (with clickable buttons)
For my use of Google Sites in my Ed Psych Discussion Leader project, students signed up for a topic and were then granted access to the editable version of the website via their Google Account (see the Caveats below!). As part of the introduction to the project (and to Google Sites), I also provided two sample pages on the newly-dubbed Ed Psych Wiki for students to use as a rough reference point for some of the capabilities of the system. In the image above, you can see an example of how I organized the topic pages based on the exam each topic was included on.
Students took to designing their webpages almost immediately, and I was pleased with the variety of layouts and approaches that teams had in developing their sites. In Zoom conversations and other interactions with students, teams displayed clear designerly thinking, with joint goals of usability and usefulness for their peers. On their peer review form, for instance, one student discussed how their team started from the point of asking what they wish they had learned first in exploring the topic, and designed the page around the core premise of what would be helpful to have while learning. Below, I include a sample of a student-built section of our Methods & Media topic, in which we discuss issues of how teaching method and instructional medium/format relate.
Game-based learning vs. gamification from the Ed Psych Wiki
Caveats
I have been very happy with how Google Sites has enabled my students to engage in collaborative, designerly learning through web-based peer teaching. However, there are a few things to keep in mind before using Google Sites in your course:
External Tool – while Google Sites is surprisingly easy and intuitive to learn and use, it is an external tool, which carries inherent risk and difficulty. Students may be hesitant to have to go outside of the college-branded/supported tools (Talon, MyHub, etc.).
One potential way to address this is to embed pages directly in Talon – just add the link to Course Content and *don’t* set it as an external resource!
Google Account – although it’s possible to *view* a Google Site either way (assuming you’ve set the site to be public!), both you and your students will need Google-linked accounts in order to access the editable version of the website. In other words, at least one member of each group will need a Google account, and most likely everyone will.
That said, keep in mind that it does not need to be a Gmail account – any account linked to Google Drive will work.
Learning Curve – Google has actually done a great job with smoothing out the learning curve, but it does still take time. Knowing how to combine items, build sections, and correctly set permissions will require a little behind-the-scenes work.
To help students with this, I published sample pages featuring some of the things you could do in the system!
My Conclusions
Overall, I have been very pleased with how Google Sites works, and it’s been a great addition to my online and hybrid coursework. It provides a fantastic tool for collaborative work that has a minimal learning curve and allows for seamless Google Drive and YouTube integration. During my first semester using Sites for the Discussion Leader project, more than 80% of my students indicated that they used the site to prepare for exams, and I even had a student volunteer to create an additional page (for a topic without anyone signed up). Furthermore, students largely produced well-designed and well-reasoned resource pages for their peers.
Research on Motivation from the Ed Psych Wiki
To wrap up here, I want to point to the above sample from a student-produced page (this time from our Motivation topic). As these students pointed out, research has shown that students are “more likely to stick with learning if the challenge in manageable and has value to them.” One of the best elements of using Google Sites for this kind of collaboration is that it presents a manageable and meaningful challenge – students work hard to become experts and then produce a tool that is useful both to them and to their peers. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with the same question I ended my corresponding Collaborative Learning Days talk with:
This is oriented much more toward K-12 teachers than it is higher education, but a new-ish report from McKinsey & Company brings up possible teacher benefits of advances in AI and other educational technology. Specifically, they make the argument that K-12 teachers could save 13 hours a week (roughly a fourth of total work time) by automating some tasks that they normally have to complete manually.
That saved 13 hours seems especially important when you consider another finding from their surveys: only 49% of teacher work time is going toward direct interaction with students. An extra 13 hours might have a pretty big impact on teaching and learning, and at minimum could help reduce burnout. I suspect this wouldn’t save as much time for college faculty, but it raises some interesting ideas for both K-12 and higher education.
In case anyone might be interested, I just wanted to make a quick post about an upcoming Ed Tech conference being hosted by ACT. That conference is the Educational Technology and Computational Psychometrics Symposium (ETCPS), and will be held on October 9 and 10 in Coralville.
There are quite a few interesting talks and sessions scheduled, including an Ed Tech demonstration session on the evening of October 9th that you can even register for separately from the rest of the conference. Topics include general educational technology, game-based learning, new assessment methods, and population models (on the psychometrics side of things!). With an educator discount, the entire conference (including lunch both days) is $160 to attend. You can find the full schedule, registration, and such on the conference website.
You must be logged in to post a comment.