How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom is the title of a 2001 educational psychology book edited by M. Suzanne Donovan and John D. Bransford and published by the United States National Academy of Sciences's National Academies Press. The book focuses on "three fundamental and well-established principles of learning that are highlighted in How People Learn and are particularly important for teachers to understand and be able to incorporate in their teaching:

"Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

"To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand the facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge i

Unsupervised extraction of students navigation patterns on an EPFL MOOC

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Victor Faramond, Louis Pierre Faucon

How do students learn in MOOCs? This project aims at answering this question by analyzing the activities of thousands of students registered on EPFL Scalaa MOOC hosted by Coursera. With the rapid growth of MOOCs, Education Science has entered the Big Data bubble, bringing new opportunities to study and improve learning technologies. We are interested in studying students navigation patterns which are the short sequences of learning activities that a students perform on the MOOC platform. In our case, the learning activities are one of watching a video lecture, reading or posting on the forum and submitting assignments. In this project we use unsupervised machine learning techniques to extract the main navigation patterns of students and gain insights on their behavior. We produce a simple and efficient visualization tool in order to provide feedback to teachers to help them understand the potential difficulties encountered by their students during the course and, if necessary, take actions accordingly

2017

MOOC Learning in Spontaneous Study Groups: Does Synchronously Watching Videos Make a Difference?

Pierre Dillenbourg, Nan Li, Afroditi Skevi, Himanshu Verma, Guillaume Zufferey

Study groups are common approaches for students to study together at schools. However, little is known about how this approach is suited to MOOC based learning, where learners watch and discuss MOOC lecture videos in a collaborative manner. Watching MOOCs with peers creates learning experiences that blend the way students learn in classroom with learning through a computer: Students get a chance to “pause” the professor as well as to discuss with other learners. In this paper, we explore this type of MOOC-based learning. Findings from our longitudinal study on spontaneous collocated MOOC study groups suggest that groups tend to stick to a certain kind of study style. A strong positive relationship was found between how often students pause and replay the videos and the synchronicity among groups. Further, synchronous groups tended to perceive better group learning experience, in terms of self-assessed quality and mutual participation. Future MOOC designers as well as schools that offer courses in a flipped classroom format can use the insights to provide guided support for group learners of MOOCs.

P.A.U. Education2014

Design and evaluation of digital tools to expand experience in vocational education

Kevin Gonyop Kim

Vocational education and training (VET) is the most popular form of upper-secondary education in Switzerland, with more than two-thirds of the teenagers enrolling in a VET program after finishing their compulsory education. The vast majority of the Swiss VET systems have a dual-track structure where students learn in schools for one or two days per week while they do an apprenticeship in a company for the remaining days. Their professional competencies are developed through a combination of workplace experiences reinforced by the theoretical knowledge learned in school.While the apprenticeship at workplaces provides valuable experience to the learners, one concern is that there is a lack of diversity in the experiences of an individual apprentice. Motivated by this limited experience of VET learners in the workplace, the goal of our research has been to explore the possibilities of expanding their experiences. Focusing on design-related professions in VET, we consider exploring digital variations of a design as a way to expand the original experience related to the design. The research objectives of this thesis are (1) exploring possibilities to expand the experience of learners in design-related VET and (2) investigating the potential benefits of the expanded experience. To accomplish the research objectives, we formalize the idea of expanding experience for VET learners by defining the three dimensions of expansion: parametric, temporal, and social. We explore these three dimensions in three studies.For the parametric dimension, we investigate how learners explore a multidimensional space of possible designs using a digital tool and how we can support the process with an interface that enables disentangled exploration of design parameters. We present a tool called BloomGraph that has been developed for florist apprentices to explore flower bouquet designs, and the results from an experimental study that investigates the effectiveness of a graph interface for design exploration.For the temporal dimension, we explore how we can support the VET learners with envisioning the designs that change over time. We present a virtual-reality tool called GardenVR developed for gardener apprentices that allows creating a garden and exploring it in an immersive environment. In an experimental study with gardener apprentices, we investigate how they explore the time dimension using the tool, compare the tool with the current method of practice, paper-sketching, and study how the two interfaces can be combined in an instructional design to enhance the design outcome.Lastly, for the social dimension, we present a tool called Mixplorer that has been designed for a classroom scenario of gardener apprentices. The tool provides a way to socially explore design spaces by allowing the apprentices to create an initial design and recombine it with the designs of other learners. We present the results of two studies conducted using the tool that investigate its feasibility in the VET setting, potential benefits for the learners, and the effectiveness of the design-mixing process in creative practices.

EPFL2022

Design and evaluation of digital tools to expand experience in vocational education

Kevin Gonyop Kim

EPFL2022