Alaeddin M.H. Alawawdeh1 , Stig Ottosson2, Stewart James Kowalski1, Simon McCallum1. 1. Dept. of Computer and Media Technology,. 2. Dept. of Technology ...
Learner Profiling for Innovation Education Across Disciplines A Work In Progress Paper Alaeddin M.H. Alawawdeh1 , Stig Ottosson2, Stewart James Kowalski1, Simon McCallum1 1
2
Dept. of Computer and Media Technology, Dept. of Technology and Management Gjøvik University College, Norway {alaeddin.alawawdeh3, stig.ottosson, stewart.kowalski, Simon.mccallum}@hig.no
Abstract˰˰˰ In this paper, we describe the efforts we are currently making to improve our innovation education exercise and competition called Idelab24. Over the past three years at Gjøvik university college, we have run the Idelab24 which has involved more than 2000 of our 2nd year bachelor students. This work in progress paper discusses both the major practical and theoretical problems we have faced while running Idelab24 over the last three years. We also discuss our current work in progress to develop a web based open access multi-lingual media platform (English, Swedish, Norwegian and Arabic) called Hyper Interactive Presenter (HIP) to improve our innovation education. This platform is designed to use learner profiling to improve group formation of participants and to improve the customization of training and education of innovative skills and knowledge across disciplines and across cultures.
e-learning platform for using learning profiles in the Idelab24 in 2015. Table 1. Norwegian higher education authorities’ mandatory general competence requirement, for students at the completion of the bachelor program.
Keywords—Learnering profiling, pedagogical media, innovative multi-disciplinary, innovation,
I. INTRODUCTION In 2013 EU Science Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn declared that “innovation is as essential to a successful modern economy as water is to life”. Consequently acquiring and mastering innovation skills and knowledge is becoming a basic element of most modern university education programs around the world. There are a number of methods to integrate innovation skills and knowledge into academic programs. Universities can offer programs specializing in innovation or can include innovative thinking into all educational activities. At Gjøvik University College [1] in Norway, we developed the Idelab24 [2] as a platform for teaching and learning innovation. The major goal of Idelab24 is to meet and even exceed the Norwegian higher education authorities’ mandatory general competence requirements, which state that at the completion of the bachelor program, the student “is familiar with new thinking and innovation process (see the bottom of column three in Table1 [3]). The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines a model of innovation contests proposed by Bullinger and Moselin. In Section 3 we summarize some of our experiences running Idelab24 over the last 3 years. In Section 4 we describe our work in progress to develop a multi-lingual
II. A MODEL OF INNOVATION CONTEST Bullinger and Moeslein have suggested a model of the common design and knowledge elements in innovation contests and propose ten design elements with a number of different attributes attached to every design element [4]. Their model is proposed after completing a systematic literature review of the area along with a field review of innovation competitions. Through using materials searchable by Google and their research, they identified 57 innovation contests that they studied in detail. Table 2 depicts the 10 design elements and attributes illustrating the state of knowledge on design elements of innovation contests in 2010. Table 2. Illustrates the state of knowledge on design elements
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of innovation contests. It subsumes the 10 design elements with synonyms, a definition (left column), and common attributes (right column)[4].
position for that work and had administrative support of 30% to take care of all administrative tasks to handle 700 students working for 24 hours. In terms of the Bullinger and Moeslein model the new approach used more of a task/topic specificity approach in the range “defined” to “high”. Table 3 Idelab24 2012 mapped to Bullinger Moeslein model:Light green indicates semi unspecified target participants
III. IDELAB24 FROM 2012-2014 The first full campus compulsory Idelab24 was run as a 24 hour exercise in 2012. External conference facilities at a local hotel were booked and food and beverage for the students were provided. Students were divided semi-specified into groups of approximately 6 students, each with one pair of students coming from each of the three faculties of the college: “Computer and Media Technology”, “Health”, and “Technology and Leadership”. Both external industrial mentors and internal academic mentors were on hand during the 24 hours period to assist the students in developing their ideas and aiding them in designing their presentations that were to be made at the end of the 24 hours exercise. These mentors functioned as roving advisers among approximate 100 groups spread among different rooms of the hotel. At the end of the 24 hour period six of the best innovative ideas were selected by a jury to present the best three that were awarded the 1st , 2nd and 3rd prize. Using the Bullinger and Moeslein model one can say that the design element of a task for 2012 was low and the degree of elaboration was between sketch and concept. For the task the students were asked to examine the problem in the area of universal access for physically handicapped individuals. One of the major challenges for the Idelab24 was the high cost of operations due to the use of external facilities and high personal cost. To lower costs in 2013, the external facilities where only used for an 8 hours period and the students were then required to work in teams to produce a result in 24 days by working where and when they choose to work. Although the facility cost was cut, unfortunately coordination costs for the event increased with this method. In January 2014 a new structure was implemented to encourage the transfer of ideas into innovations. Prof. Stig Ottosson was appointed project leader for the new Idelab24 to be run in September 2014. He was allocated 25% a full-time
The new structure created interdisciplinary teams with six students each, which were asked to create functional new solutions to the tasks given by teachers from different disciplines at GUC. The tasks all included themes related to Universal Design, Sustainability and Innovation. In terms of the Bullinger and Moeslein model the new approach used to increase the amount of task/topic specificity from “low” to “define” or “high”. In total 23 teachers each formulated one task. The students used a web interface to select a first, second and third choice of tasks. When the students had selected their preferred choices the administrator with some help tried to make interdisciplinary teams. This was a difficult task and for next year’s Idelab24 an automatic grouping system will be developed. The contest started with 527 students registering their participation and receiving a team number matching a numbered table for each group. If a group had less than four students they were asked to go to another group that did not have six participants. When each group had created ideas and settled on one solution, they had to explain their concept in such a way that someone else could develop it further to be an innovation. Each student had to submit a reflection report about their contribution, and their opinion of the group work. Each teacher had to select the two best solutions for her/his task, after which a steering board agreed on 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes, which were presented at a final seminar. The prices were monetary. One important result of the new Idelab24 was that a large number of concepts were created that could be transferred to
innovations. Discussions are ongoing on how to pick out promising contributions and refine them as well as building business plans and recruit entrepreneurs. The steering board has agreed upon that the new Idealab24 shall be repeated next year eventually extended so that each group has to give a business plan for their chosen idea. Evaluation of the Idelab24 in 2014 indicated that many of the students in the 2014 exercise were not motivated to familiarize themselves with the assigned task or the group before the actual start of the 24 hours exercise. Some tasks were too specific for the interdisciplinary studens to be creative. Many students indicated that the cross disciplinary groups where ineffective and communication about the task with the teacher were not efficient. Also off campus or distance student had difficulties in participating in the 24 hours exercise. To deal with these above problems with the 2014 Idelab24 exercise/contest it was decided to test migrating Idelab24 to an online e-learning platform that is being developed at our university college. In the next section of the report, we will describe the platform and the work we are doing to adapt the problem of motivating and teaching students about the innovation process.
exercise/competition. A similar experiment by Barabanov, Kowalski [7] found that for a student team performance in an information security scenario exercise, there was a strong correlation between the “optimal” group mixture of student types and the performance of the group. As to what the optimal group dynamic is for teaching and learning innovation process we are unclear at this point. It has been shown by some studies that cultural diversity has a positive effect on innovative outcomes in large enterprises [8]. Hence it is assumed that by having a group compose of students from diverse cultural backgrounds one component of an “optimal” team mixture could possibly be achieved. We also programmed the Chatbot to identify student learning preference based on the VARK model [9,10] (Visual, Audio, Read/Write and Kinesthic). In figure 2, there is an example of the first 3 questions from the VARK-Test that we will use in the experiment.
IV. THE HYPER INTERACTIVE E-LEARNING PLATFORM HIP is an e-learning platform that provides synchronized, structured and hyperlinked pedagogical content through audio/video, slide presentation, wiki and Webpages/documents [5]. It uses an artificial intelligence markup language (AIML) program Chatbot to ask and accept free text questions to and from students. Initial trials of this platform with student of Digital Forensic studies at the college indicated that this approach can improve student motivation by as much as 75 per cent [6]. Below is a screen dump of the digital forensics challenge.
Figure 2. Example of VARK-Test questions.
Figure 1. The digital forensic challenge http://tigger.tfl.nislab.no/the.forensic.challenger/ This Chatbot from the forensic challenge is currently being developed to identify student learning styles, culture and language bias to the concept of innovation and invention. The working hypothesis of this work in progress is there is an “optimal” mixture of students to learn from innovation
To further handle cultural, language and cross disciplinary bias when working in an innovation team, we are developing and experimenting with a series of psychological project tests that will be performed using the Chatbot interface. A thematic apperception test (TAT) is being designed to show a series of pictures that student will be asked to respond to both through multi choice responses and or short essay style responses. The theoretical content is the book “Practical Innovation Therory” [11]. In Figure 3, we show an example of myth of nature test used by Holling’s and Timmerman’s research into managed ecosystems [12] and where the responder needs to pick an image that best represent their view of nature and change. We also plan to expand on Joy and Breed work on innovation motivation [13].
To deal with the language aspect of group dynamic, the material is being developed to be presented in multiple languages, including English and Arabic as shown in Figure 4.
hypotheses related to the theory and practice of innovation education at the university level. Table 4 Idelab24 2015 mapped to Bullinger Moeslein model: Red indicates change from 2012.
Figure 3. Myth of Nature Test REFERENCE [1] [2]
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Figure 4. HIP Multi-lingual platform. As can be seen in Figure 3 and Figure 4 the platform is currently developed to establish learning profile and assign the student to an “optimal” student group but also to serve as elearning platform for teaching innovation online.
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[8]
V. CONCLUSION This work in progress paper has presented difficulties faced when teaching innovation theory and practice through team exercises and competitions. We have outlined some of our ongoing efforts to develop web-based teaching platforms to explore and discover the problem of diverse student groups with different learning styles, varying motivation levels, and different cultural and languages’ backgrounds. We plan to conduct preliminary experiment with this platform at the start of 2015 and launch the platform for open access in the spring of 2015. Table 4 depicts the changes in Idelab24 between 2012-2015. With the open access Idelab24 platform, we hope to obtain sufficient empirical data to test a number of different
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