Designing educational material (PDF Download Available)

Designing Educational Material Carlos Delgado Kloos Dep. Telematic Engineering, Univ. Carlos III de Madrid 28911 Leganés (Madrid/Spain), [email protected]

Manuel Castro Gil Dep. Ing. Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Control, UNED 28040 Madrid (Madrid/Spain), [email protected]

Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) and Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). The aim of the network is to provide leadership and perform advanced research in the area of educational technology, including technology transfer to companies. The eMadrid Network has organized special sessions in all previous EDUCON events [1][2][3][4][5]. In this year’s special session, an overview is given about the research carried out by eMadrid partners in relation to the design and creation of educational material.

Pilar Rodríguez Dep. Ingeniería Informática, Univ. Autónoma de Madrid 28049 Cantoblanco (Madrid/Spain), [email protected]

Gregorio Robles Dep. Telematic Syst. & Computing, Univ. Rey Juan Carlos 28933 Móstoles (Madrid/Spain), [email protected]

Edmundo Tovar Dep. Computer Languages and Systems & Software Eng. Univ. Politécnica de Madrid, 28660 Boadilla del Monte (Madrid/Spain), e-mail: [email protected]

Baltasar Fernández Manjón Dep. Software Eng. & AI, Univ. Complutense de Madrid 28040 Madrid (Madrid/Spain), e-mail: [email protected] Abstract—The appearance of MOOCs has boosted the creation of educational material for use in all possible contexts. However, this material is often created without much thought and without proper tools and methodologies. Much more attention should be placed on the design of educational material, since this is the basis for a successful learning experience. In this special session, we report about several interesting approaches towards the design and creation of educational material that range from the call to the definition of a discipline of Courseware Engineering, to a methodology for video recording, another one for the creation of smart adaptive content, tools metrics for teaching computational thinking, the integration of OERs, and the design and application of game-based material. Keywords- MOOCs, design of educational material, learning content, courseware

I.

INTRODUCTION

eMadrid is the Excellence Network about educational technology funded by the Regional Government of Madrid. Its members are the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), who acts as a coordinator, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Universidad

II.

DESIGNING EDUCATION

The design of educational material is prerequisite to have good learning experiences. Therefore, a lot of attention should be placed to the creation of this content. Rigorous theories, effective tool support, and good methodologies are needed to produce engaging educational material. In this special session, we will present several contributions from eMadrid members about the design and creation of educational material. The UC3M contribution notes the relationship between software and courseware and proposes to take the discipline of Software Engineering as a model to define a Courseware Engineering discipline. The UNED contribution presents best practices for video production. UAM puts the emphasis on smart educational material that is adaptive. The URJC paper proposes some metrics on how assessment tools should be designed to maximize learning and support for teachers. The UPM contribution highlights how Open Educational Resources can be integrated and consumed. Finally, the UCM contribution concentrates on the costeffective design and application of game-based educational material. III.

COURSEWARE ENGINEERING (UC3M)

The appearance of MOOCs has boosted the use of educational technology in all possible contexts. A lot of new content is presently being developed worldwide. Although some best practices exist, it is true that a lot of content has been developed without much thought about adequacy, reusability, maintainability, composability, efficiency, efficacy, etc. The main thesis the UC3M contribution is that we are facing a courseware crisis in the same way as there was a software crisis 50 years ago, and that the way out is to identify good engineering disciplines to aid in the development of courseware. We need to set up the discipline of Courseware Engineering in the same way as at those times Software Engineering was developed [6]. This includes the identification of the fundamentals, the development of specialized tools to support the development, and the definition of methodologies that underpin the courseware development process.

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IV.

A METHODOLOGY FOR THE RECORDING OF VIDEOS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE MOOCS (UNED)

A dedicated methodology for the production of MOOC videos has been implemented within the IN-CLOUD project, [7], to guide all the partners, participants, and stakeholders, who will have to record them. In this case, the expertise needs have been achieved during the research period of a PhD Thesis on Technology Enhanced Learning by the design and implementation of online courses for both open education (OCW and MOOC) and formal life-long learning technical courses, mainly applied to the nuclear environment. Synergies and technical similitudes between nuclear engineering and computer science environments allow an appropriate approach. From the UNED [8][9], we talk about the main conclusions and best practices of this guide for MOOC video production. When we talk about producing a video oriented to MOOCs, we have to consider some of the basic principles of image language, where the visual information should be significant. One of the aspects that we will cover in the paper will be the most common mistakes made when producing a first video: either making an exclusively audio document, dominated by a talking head or torso, or a video centered on PowerPoint presentations. Apart from these big issues, we will consider in the paper a key element in every video: the narrative structure. Each video in a MOOC is a story with beginning, development, and end with clear objectives and conclusions. When we make a video for a MOOC the aim is to communicate, to enrich information, to offer new perspectives about the subject, and transmit as much as possible information, feelings, and experiences. A proper video may be the initial information from where the development of a complete subject starts. A video of 3 to 5 minutes has to offer the important questions that the students will investigate and discover along the development of the contents that could last from one hour to one week of personal work. V.

SMART EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS (UAM)

For years, designing and constructing smart educational materials is one of the objectives of the educational community, boosted over the last years by the evolution of several technologies like MOOCs or SPOCs [5]. In this context, at UAM we have designed, created, and evaluated some adaptive systems to help students and teachers in their assessment and self-assessment efforts [10][11][12]. Students’ motivation plays a key role in those scenarios [13] [14], which can be enhanced by the use of gamification techniques both in e-learning and in-classroom resources and activities. We have also developed adaptive applications to promote the development of capabilities such as focusing attention [15], socialization and integration [16], and others focused on people with special needs [17] by means of multitouch technologies.

VI. ON THE USE OF TOOLS ASSISTING COMPUTATIONAL THINKING DEVELOPMENT (URJC) In recent times, the development of computational thinking skills is a major topic of interest among educational institutions, politics, and academia [18]. There are many technologies that have been created in order to assist learners in the learning of these skills, such as the historic Logo, or the more recent Scratch or Alice programming languages, the introduction of robots in the classroom, or the availability of affordable hardware devices such as Raspberry Pi or Arduino. However, the number of learning assessment tools that support learners and educators in the development of their computational thinking skills is still a field to be developed conveniently. With our contribution we want to shed some light into how Dr. Scratch [19], a free/libre/open source software assessment tool for Scratch, correlates with other, classic software engineering complexity metrics, and provide a perspective of how these tools should be designed to maximize support to teachers and learning by learners. VII. INTEGRATING OER IN THE DESIGN OF EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL (UPM) The OER movement has challenged the traditional value chain by employing new methods to deliver high-quality educational content. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as to facilitate knowledge sharing, and capacity building. OERs not only play a crucial role in nonformal and informal learning but they are actual resources/tools that can help enrich any classroom environment and push student thinking and comprehension. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is “the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge”, and therefore be a way to create more economic and personalized learning. Reuse of OERs by both individuals and organizations may have significant creative and economic benefit for learning environments. The purpose of this work is to show a way to enhance the face-to-face classrooms with OERs integration, to create blended learning instruction. OERs are key to engaging students and teachers and offering a blended learning environment that couples the best of face-to-face teaching with the 21st century skills. This approach is based on Linked Data best practices for publishing and connecting structured data of OERs. In this new paradigm for educational content consumption and integration, OER are expected to play a decisive and productive role to support different blendedlearning models. VIII. SIMPLIFYING THE APPLICATION OF SERIOUS GAMES IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS (UCM) Nowadays, digital games are one of the most popular media consumed not only by youngsters but also by people of all ages. More and more people are now casual gamers as they play games at least in their mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets). As games are engaging and motivating for users, they have been proposed as a powerful educational material in the so-called serious games. But even if serious games have been


proved effective in different domains (e.g. medicine, business) it is still far from a generalized use in education. Aspects such as the high cost production or the maintainability of the games hinder this generalization. At UCM we think that more effort is needed for obtaining new more cost-effective ways to cover the design, production, and application of serious games. This implies not only the creation of the games and the development of new methodologies to simplify all the life-cycle of the serious games, but also considering the creation of tools to ease its application in the classroom and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the produced serious games (i.e. learning analytics). ACKNOWLEDGMENT The eMadrid Excellence Network is being funded by the Madrid Regional Government (Comunidad de Madrid) with grant No. S2013/ICE-2715.

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