Conference sessions in Online and distance learning
Intimate, intimidating or interminable? Lecture chat culture versus live Q&A
Presentation at DEE 2021,‘I have been kicked out of the class!’ COVID-19 move to webinars in higher education: a process evaluation
Presentation at DEE 2021,What do business students value in the emerging virtualisation of learning and teaching that is accelerated by COVID-19? A pilot
Presentation at DEE 2021,Online lecture recordings during the Covid pandemic
Presentation at DEE 2021,To block or not to block: Does teaching delivery method affect students’ performance and learning experience?
Presentation at DEE 2021,Studying without distractions? The effect of a digital blackout on academic performance
Presentation at DEE 2021,The effect of online education on the academic performance of students during COVID-19 pandemic
Presentation at DEE 2021,Online learning: lessons from first-year undergraduate courses
Workshop at DEE 2019,At Heriot-Watt University, online learning now plays a key role in the delivery of principles courses in economics. These introductory courses are taught to a very diverse student population: students differ in many respects, including their degree programmes, the stage of their studies, their prior exposure to the subject, and their work experience before starting their degree. These differences reflected in their expectations, confidence, interest in the content, and potentially their success on the course. Jointly, these factors could also influence whether students choose to pursue economics further in their studies. Through a series of focus groups, we hope to investigate each student group's perception of online materials, their efficacy last semester, and their adequacy for future use.
A Data Visualization Tool for Monitoring Learners in a MOOC
Presentation at DEE 2017,Following learners' path while running a MOOC is a challenge for many educators. Learners may not have a linear trajectory and can easily jump from one resource to another, go directly to tests or have preferences for videos, case studies, games, or cartoons if any. Understanding how learners are spread over the available resources is generally done using data provided at the end of the course. However, real-time monitoring using daily data is also possible as soon as the data are updated and freely available; a situation that occurs on many platforms. We propose a data visualization tool aimed at monitoring a MOOC and show how it was used by educators in two runs of a 4-week course on FutureLearn. On this platform, all the resources are open from the start and data are collected and available for educators on a daily basis. The course has been designed such that each of the 80 resources in this course—each step—should engage learners in a specific discussion page. In theory, educators can follow, advice and engage discussions with some of the thousands of learners following the course, each at their own pace. In practice, having a bird-eyes view and spotting where to intervene, stimulate or direct discussions is a real challenge for educators. We show how the data-driven visualization tool we propose help educators monitor discussions as well as understand learners' path, globally or individually.
Is Lecture Capture benefiting (all) HE students? An Empirical investigation
Presentation at DEE 2017,The arguments for and against lecture capture have been going for some time and the debate is far from being settled either way. Most of the existing research about the impact of lecture capture on student attainment seems to show negligible or little effects while examples of a negative relationship between lecture capture and learning outcomes abound. The main purpose of this study is to add to the existing literature by conducting a large scale investigation (involving 90 modules and several hundreds of Economics and other Business School students at a UK University) on whether lecture capture improves student performance. A secondary objective is to determine whether (i) some groups of students benefit from lecture capture more than others (e.g. International students, high performing students, etc) and (ii) whether lecture capture can lead to differing benefits for students in different subjects (e.g. mathematical subjects versus discursive subjects).
The impact of online message boards on student outcomes
Presentation at DEE 2017,With the growth of student numbers in undergraduate study, universities are increasingly using online message boards to allow for easy communication between student and teacher, and to allow peer to peer instruction; in addition, message boards allow for positive externalities for both staff and students, as when one student asks a question, this provides an answer for all students, and means that the instructor only need answer the question once. This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the Piazza online message board for a first year mathematics and statistical methods unit for economists. The same students are educated in two successive units (MSM1 and MSM2). The message board software was introduced in the second of these units (MSM2), with support offered only by statistics teachers (but students were free to ask questions of each other). Only 50% of students signed up for using the Piazza message boards, allowing for a difference in difference analysis; the results suggest that students who signed up for the Piazza message board gained no significant improvement in their statistics score compared with students who did not sign up. However, a strong, statistically significant effect is identified in the mathematics part of the unit for those who signed up, suggesting that peer instruction is more powerful for improving outcomes than teacher instruction. Whilst sign-up for Piazza may be non-random, it is likely that this is exogenous from the progress that students make. The results are backed up by student questionnaires, examining the mechanisms through which this improvement occurs.
Teaching with Twitter: an extension to the learning environment
Workshop at DEE 2015,See also
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