Thursday, 11 June 2009

#eden some Thursday morning writings from the conference at Gdansk

(For those of you interested in some feedback on the keynote speakers of today, I wrote a post on it (with my remarks) on my own blog. )

"The use of a peer-assessment and a reflection report to measure collaborating learning efoorts an interdisciplinary project for students of the faculty of teacher training, the faculty of social work and welfare studies, and athe faculty of health care" by Kristof Uvijn, Hogeschool Gent, Belgium.

A nice person with glasses, a black shirt.
Problems: would they use it to promote the learning process, or only for evaluation purposes?
They have a midterm evaluation to get the students more at ease with the technology.
they used it at 150 students from 10 different courses (teacher, logopedist, nurses, ergotherapists, ...)
The students are not face-to-face, but only see themselves 5 times throughout the year. The students are all in their last year before finishing, so the better students.

Want to hear/see more, look at this vodcast (just uploaded the movie, so it might not be accessible yet, depending on the youtube upload capacity, but you can see it later for sure):




"Online Learning: variations in Groups of parcitipants and tools" by Miri Shonfeld, Ilana Ronen, Kibbutzim College of Educatin Technology and Art, Israƫl (ah, art already in the title!)
(this presentation wanted to go immediately into the wiki, but the connection did not allow it)
Students with learner dissabilities (Inge, try to get her contact details to be able to see it)
Blended learning with the classic face-to-face meetings at beginning and end an two virtual field trips.

The question for the students: construct a science teaching unit.
They use a synchronous teaching platform similar to Elluminate and also asynchronous possibilities.
The course resulted in learning outcomes that were amazingly better results for disabled students. So an analysis was made:
students with disabilities participate more in an online course than in a f2f-course.
These students also evaluated the course much more highly than the others.
The final grades were also higher than the others (the others included the 'excellent students'.

why: because disabled students had to learn on their own anyway, they were better at time management (they do not have to wait for pick-ups, or other time consuming actions).
online courses allow them more flexibility which is motivating for them.

1 comment:

  1. I can underestand that slower learning students learned better on-line - but this was not clearly visible from the presentation. I mean - I am an engineer and can read diagrams. What was presented on y-axis? What was the scale of the experiment? Is it the statistical error or a significant improvement? Not sure...

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