Qrumbs proposal to Digital Media and Learning Competition

Turadg — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:05:54 +0000

The MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a competition for innovative Digital Media and Learning applications. I had learned of it through my colleague Derek Lomas who won last year for his Playpower project.

This year the applications are posted online with open commenting. The word limit on applications is 300 words (not the abstract, the whole application) which makes it easy for anyone to read through it and give feedback. It also makes it easier to write one and they have over 1,000 submissions last I checked. Judges will select which entries advance to the second phase for which a demo video is required.

With research partners I proposed Qrumbs, a system for social collaborative learning around any web resource. I’m glad to be working with Connexions, Curriki, and the PSLC DataShop, leaders in open educational resources and educational data mining. Below the fold is the full text of the proposal, springing from my work in question authoring. With so few words to work with, I used a narrated scenario to communicate concisely how the system works. I’m including the full text below and encourage you to leave comments both here, or even better on the application’s page.

Qrumbs: Collaborative reflective learning and self-assessment on any web page

Qrumbs turns questions into social media to help learners reflect upon and improve their understanding of anything on the web, including videos, books, articles and individual blog pages. The web is becoming a vast learning environment in which youth can easily reach the information they seek. Qrumbs completes the pedagogical picture with assessment, providing a data-based laboratory for learners, teachers and researchers.

Consider Catrina, who is writing an essay on eradicating malaria. She finds a video of Bill Gates’ TED talk and watches it. To check whether she understood the key points, she clicks the Qrumbs button in her browser and answers the highest rated questions that pop up. Some questions challenge her and she reviews the video. Some are multiple choice and she receives immediate detailed feedback on her answers. Some are funny and she smiles. To learn more she reads Wikipedia on malaria, scrolling to the relevant section. Clicking Qrumbs shows no questions on this piece. She thinks about her favorite questions from the TED page and clicks to add her own.

With Qrumbs helping her focus and reflect, she writes her essay and forgets about it. Two weeks later, she gets an e-mail from Qrumbs, “What do you remember?” She clicks the link and answers the questions again. She then sees a comparison of her answers from now and before. She’s glad she retained most of what she learned and posts it to Facebook, challenging her friends to match her. She sees comments on the questions she wrote and some new additions which she also answers. Her teachers begin using Qrumbs with free online textbooks at the start and end of lessons, mixing select student questions with their own.

Qrumbs builds on the QCommons, Curriki, Connexions, and DataShop platforms, and a decade of experience programming web-based tools for learning.

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Results from study on open authoring

Turadg — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:44:00 +0000

In September of last year I ran a web-based experiment in open authoring of educational materials. The goal was to learn about the quality of the materials that volunteers can produce and how that differs across their expertise. I’ve since published the results at the International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, but I’m also blogging about it as part of my goal to do my research in a more “open” way.

Here’s a short summary (abstract) of the paper:
Open collaborative authoring systems such as Wikipedia are growing in use and impact. How well does this model work for the development of educational resources? In particular, can volunteers contribute materials of sufficient quality? Could they create resources that meet students’ specific learning needs and engage their personal characteristics? Our experiment explored these questions using a novel web-based tool for authoring worked examples. Participants were professional teachers (math and non-math) and amateurs. Participants were randomly assigned to the basic tool, or to an enhanced version that prompted authors to create materials for a specific (fictitious) student. We find that while there are differences by teaching status, all three groups make contributions of worth and that targeting a specific student leads contributors to author materials with greater potential to engage students. The experiment suggests that community authoring of educational resources is a feasible model of development and can enable new levels of personalization.

For the full details, there is a version of the paper is available on my own web site and the official version is available from Springer.

Also, I am conducting a follow-up experiment now on how people are able to improve the materials from the first study.

Questions or comments are wholly welcome.

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Open Education Research » authoring

Qrumbs proposal to Digital Media and Learning Competition

Qrumbs: Collaborative reflective learning and self-assessment on any web page

Results from study on open authoring