Tag Archives: online learning

Walk the Talk

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stansted2Have you ever watched the videos that loop on the TV screens hanging from the ceiling, whilst waiting your turn to empty your belongings on the X-ray conveyor belt at an airport security gate – the ones that tells you what you can and cannot take with you as hand luggage? Most of us are far to busy stressing about whether we need to take our shoes off (do we have holes in our socks?), whether to remove our belt (will our trousers fall down?), empty our pockets and fumbling with our laptops and tablets – to even think to stop and watch. We are also usually familiar with current security rules and yet we still occasionally get caught out. A friend recently forgot she had a corkscrew in her hand luggage and had to wave goodbye to it as the security girl deftly removed it from her backpack – shame, as it was a really nice one. Others are too eager to glug down the remains of their bottled drinks before having to throw them away.

To draw people’s attention more to the security information, some airports have started showing animated videos that are projected onto a cardboard cut-out of a helpful assistant to make her appear alive. I watched one demonstrating to us earnestly at Stansted airport on my way to a conference in Ljubljana – and then watched people walking straight past her. No one stopped to watch or even glance at her. She appeared rather transparent, quiet and a bit limp and so in many ways, it was not surprising she was so ineffectual. But, when I mentioned it to one of my fellow conference goers he was convinced she had a Mona Lisa sideways look, that followed us through the aisles. That surely was enough to grab our attention. I was not convinced at all.

A couple of years ago, New Zealand Airlines made a safety video that was far more attention-grabbing. Since then, they have produced a series of very funny safety videos. I got to watch one this summer when on an Air New Zealand flight to the Cook Islands. It starred Grylls (the British adventurer) in “Bear Essentials of Safety,” delivering the safety message while tracking the extinct flightless Moa bird in the South Island of New Zealand. It had me hooked the whole way through. Very witty, amusing and at the right level of info-edu-tainment. Other airlines are now getting in on the safety funny act. Virgin America, for example, just produced a very elaborate one, featuring a posse of dancers and former contestants, some from American Idol participating in a highly entertaining performance.

Information salience mixed with a good dose of humour makes for compelling viewing – that stays with you. Even the jingles keep looping in your mind, admittedly, often annoyingly so. Perhaps the efforts to get passenger’s attention would be better designed with Russell Brand or Jo Brand projected onto the cardboard cut-outs, singing in cockney-style what you can or cannot take on board.

But it is not just security videos that could benefit from the presenters standing out more and being funnier. Educational videos can also be made much more watchable through humour and captivating delivery. The conference I was attending on the Internet of Education was about how to enhance online and traditional education with new technologies. There were quite a few talks about MOOCs; their pros and cons, promises and reality. Some reported on how they had developed clever technologies that could help students to annotate, tag and search for video lectures and other online materials.

Coursera was one of the first companies to get the ball rolling; its mission is to make high-quality education accessible to everyone by allowing the best universities to offer courses to everyone around the world, for free. Its website is mightily impressive – claiming a staggering numbers of students who have signed up for their courses and an equally vast number of courses they now offer. The fanfare and hype that greeted this free form of online learning a couple of years ago however has now been tempered by a fair share of public skepticism. It is dawning on many that it can never be the great leveler – as hoped. One of the Stanford professors, Andrew Ng, who co-founded the company, and has had a hugely successful online course in machine learning, gave the final keynote talk at our conference – virtually via Skype. He was still bubbling with boundless energy and enthusiasm. I watched him in awe – maybe the CAA could learn a few lessons from him about how to make effective safety videos.
TIME Summit On Higher Education

I was struck, however, as I listened to him waxing lyrical about their incredible achievements by how much of the content that gets delivered, interacted with and re-presented is all done via the computer keyboard. Inevitable, but it made me think whether we are educating a global generation of students to only talk about what they have learned through their fingers. There is no need for a MOOCs student to stand up and present their ideas, findings or concerns in a face-to-face setting or to confront their lecturers. It is largely about selecting the right answers using multiple-choice quizzes (of course there are a few courses that are the exception). Fine for working out answers and gauging the student’s progress as they work though the course, but not so good at helping them work out how to put those Q&As into practice. As any teacher or professor knows only too well, you only really learn about something when you have to talk about it yourself in front of a class of fresh-faced students.

How can online education courses help students actually explain or discuss a phenomenon or theory, such as deep learning, in the convincing way that Andrew Ng does in his lectures? How can they emulate him? Not by simply watching videos, or tagging them or answering multiple-choice questions. I raised my arm and asked him what he thought about the possibility that we might be producing a generation of students who only ever express themselves through their fingers. I suggested, as well, how about getting the students to upload videos of themselves verbally explaining what they have learnt? They might then be assessed, not through clicking through a series of radio buttons, but through being matched with other students from different parts of the globe, who are also taking the same course – each critiquing the other’s presentation. Would give a new spin to the idea of study buddies.

moocDuring his talk, Andrew mentioned a study that had investigated the value of having a virtual image (a bit like a cardboard cut-out) of the instructor appearing at the bottom of each slide. The researchers wanted to see what role it would play in motivating the students. To test this out, they split the class into two – and gave half the slides with the cut-out instructor appearing and the other half just the slides. Apparently, the students in the control condition were not at all happy when they found out they did not have the cut out instructor on their slides – feeling they were missing out. There was uproar and so the researchers had to abandon the experiment. That speaks volumes about the power of having the presence of a tutor near you to somehow make it feel a bit more real and that perhaps your tutor cares for you. And you never know they might just have that Mona Lisa effect.

Learn Online

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During the summer, my second cousin who was 13 at the time, came over to visit from Germany. On his second day, he picked up my acoustic guitar and found it sounded out of tune. What comes naturally to him is to know where to look to fix problems, by watching others on his iPhone. In an instant, he had a YouTube video showing how to tune a guitar. After balancing his iPhone on his knee, he switched his attention to the real guitar and located the D string. He began twisting the peg it was attached to, to wind up the string. I could hear it in the background ‘do, do du, du, de de, da da, din din’ and then an almighty ‘ping!’ The string had snapped in dramatic fashion. He looked up in surprise and then over to me rather sheepishly. The video had not warned that winding a string too far could cause it to snap.

I subsequently looked at some of the YouTube videos demonstrating how to tune a guitar. There are hundreds. But not one of them mentioned the danger of turning a peg too far. Instead, they all focus on the best way to learn; which is to develop your ear to hear the notes of the six strings. One nice chap provided a mnemonic for remembering the sequencing and notes of the six strings “Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie.” Befitting, I thought, as the string that pinged was the D – dynamite string.

What always surprises me is just how many people watch YouTube videos. For the ones I looked at, there was a staggering number of between 1 and 3 million views for each. Looking up on the internet how to do something is second nature for my cousin and his generation, whether it is how to bake a cake, use a software app, or change a plug. The trouble – as we saw with the tuning a guitar videos – is that they do not give the full story. They can explain a phenomenon and tell you what best practice is. They can make a skill seem easy to learn, when someone else is showing what to do in front of the camera, but they cannot convey the whole story. Tuning a guitar string is a visceral experience; besides listening to the sound it makes you need to know how taut it is so you know when to stop before it snaps. The same with many other physical activities. It is one thing to watch someone make mayonnaise, remove the flesh from a lobster or change a car tyre; it is another to feel the texture, resistance, lumpiness, etc., of what is being cooked or changed. One might think one has understood what is being shown but enacting it oneself is a different story.

But online courses that are designed with the student in mind, based on sound pedagogical theory, can be very effective at imparting knowledge – as anyone who has followed an OU course knows. During the last year, we have witnessed the rise of the MOOCs movement (massive, open online courses). Most notable, is the American online site, Coursera, which has grown exponentially. It now boasts 1,993,235 students who have taken one of their 207 free online courses that range from Neural Networks for Machine Learning to “Contraception: Choices, Culture and Consequences.” It was launched earlier this year by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with four top US university partners – Stanford, Michigan, Penn, and Princeton. It now has 33 partner universities, worldwide. How have they managed that in such a short period of time? Simple. The site is highly professional with top professors delivering short courses for nothing. It also provides a platform that just about any university can use. The descriptions of the courses and instructors are also very appealing. They run for 5-8 weeks and don’t require more than a few hours study each week. Even I was tempted to sign up to one of the courses.

The massive online learning experience is also starting to happen from a grassroots level in the UK. On the BBC website today was a report about a new photography online course that has been hugely successful. The university-based course run by Jonathan Worth and Matt Johnston in an old cinema in Coventry, is attracting as many as 35,000 students for each session. That is enormous – even by the Open University standards, which prides itself on teaching openly to large swathes of students, irrespective of their age, background or education (The OU needs to watch out if it wants to stay ahead of the online learning game).

Once a week, some of the 35,000 traipse over to the cinema to take part. But most log on via the Internet from all over the world. They join in a discussion about what a 21st Century photographer is. The tools they use to talk to each other are the ones that everyone uses now: twitter and blogs. What is really attractive about the class is that it sometimes draws big names in the world of photography to the online forum. So, an anonymous dude in Sri Lanka could end up having a conversation with one of the greatest living photographers in the UK. How exciting is that prospect? It is a bit like bumping into a famous person on a train but with the potential of having a more enriched experience than simply oggling and snapping a hurried photo. You’re guaranteed someone well known will be in the class but you never know who else might show up or whose words might be retweeted and commented on by lots of other people. Since we all crave recognition and appreciation of our ideas in public it is a perfect venue.

Rather poignantly, one of the tutors, Jonathan Worth (a former professional photographer) is quoted as saying “I realised the real thing of value was not the knowledge but the learning experience. The message of that experience is amplified by opening it up – hence the success of the open classes.”

Millions, too, watch Ted talks and are inspired. Webinairs have also become popular in industry. And what with millions now following Brian Cox’s every word, online is the place to learn – provided you can put it in to practice.