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

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.

Learning (Good Handwriting In Greek) By Teaching (A Humanoid Robot)

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Thanasis Hadzilacos

We report on a follow-up study of the Co-Writer project at EPFL [1]; we confirm their findings, extend the applicability to another language with a different alphabet (Greek) and go into an in-depth qualitative study of the child-robot relationship. The core idea of "learning by teaching" is that the student learns by undertaking to teach what they are supposed to learn which motivates them into ownership of the process. Although a highly effective method [2], there are serious practical obstacles in scaling learning by teaching to larger numbers or extending it to younger learners and to certain skills such as handwriting. This is where we enlist the assistance of a humanoid robot to help a young learner with her handwriting by assuming the role of the cacographer pupil who asks help from its human friend. The robot pretends writing mistakes similar to the child's own; the child recognizes the errors as such even when she would refuse to acknowledge them in her own writing, and makes an extra effort for better writing as the robot's instructor; the robot improves its writing; the child goes through another round of amelioration; and, hopefully, gets in the habit of better writing. In order to extend the original study for the Greek language and alphabet we first needed to collect data from beginner writers, children of 6-9 years. The nine-month study for collecting and evaluating handwriting samples from primary school students in Cyprus in order to examine and describe cacography for the Greek alphabet used a questionnaire, an evaluation sheet for the letter formation and copies of students' notebooks. It involved four primary schools in Limassol, Cyprus and a total of 68 students and 11 teachers. We were thus able to obtain a consensus on what constitutes poor letter writing in Greek. All writing samples were evaluated by teachers and were classified based on Chandra et al. [3] taxonomy. The qualitative research involved three case studies of children who held two sessions each with the humanoid programmable robot NAO. We video recorded the child-robot interactions and assessed their progress in handwriting. In all three cases, albeit not in the same degree, we saw that (a) the child-robot interaction quickly improved; the increasing number of correct remarks from all children in only two meetings shows the comfort that they gained with lab environment and the robot itself and (b) the correctness of children remarks and their comments about letters shows their ability to distinguish the correct from the wrong letters and to justify their answers. Both conclusions confirm the findings of the Co-Writer project [4].

IATED-INT ASSOC TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT2020

Expanding Eye-Tracking Methods to Explain the Socio-Cognitive Effects of Shared Annotations

Andrea Mazzei

Social technologies are leading to transformations in education, by empowering the way learners connect to each other, by introducing new means for teaching and learning and by reshaping the way knowledge is delivered. Annotating texts is a learning strategy that is spontaneously adopted by learners during lectures or while reading text books. Students still individually take annotations on paper, that tend to be thrown away when the learning goal is achieved. Students also engage occasionally in the spontaneous practice of note sharing. Our work explores experimentally the benefits of note-taking and note-sharing behaviour. First, we study how sharing student-annotated instructional texts can improve learning, enriching an experimental approach with a new eye tracking method. Second, we conduct experiments on computer-mediated note sharing in the classroom. Our results demonstrate the virtuous circle of note-taking: both annotating while reading and reading annotated documents lead to a better learning achievement. In the first experimental study, we measure if the presence of annotations, on an instruc- tional text, can influence the reading pattern, and how visual features of annotations can elicit the reader’s attention. To complement the results concerning learning and reading comprehension, we look into the readers’ gaze patterns, to explain how the students’ learning outcome relates to reading annotated texts. For this purpose, we design a novel eye tracker, that can be used to study reading and note taking in unconstrained experimental settings. This eye tracking system is based on a systematic error correction procedure that exploits the appearance similarity between the annotated texts and the spatial distribution of the fixation points. We show that this method can extract accurate gaze measures without introducing experimental constraints, that could disturb the note taking process and affect the readers’ comprehension. In the second study, we move from a controlled experimental setting to the classroom. We discuss how the use of technology can facilitate a spontaneous transition from personal to shared annotations and support students in the learning process. We complement the analysis by reporting a friendship bias in browsing the shared annotated material. We further speculate on the potential of shared annotations in triggering adaptations of the instructional material and teaching workflow. These two studies provided an insightful understanding of the effects of student-generated annotations on reading comprehension, and the underlying impact on a community of learners. The obtained findings should inspire further experimentation on social learning environments, meant to facilitate knowledge sharing through shared annotations and their diffusion within educational institutions.

EPFL2013

Learning (Good Handwriting In Greek) By Teaching (A Humanoid Robot)

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Thanasis Hadzilacos

IATED-INT ASSOC TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT2020

Expanding Eye-Tracking Methods to Explain the Socio-Cognitive Effects of Shared Annotations

Andrea Mazzei

EPFL2013