MOOC and on-campus teaching crossover has always been the ultimate goal for MOOC teachers and instructional designers. Recently, Dr. Masato Kajimoto has repurposed his MOOC Making Sense of News for teaching an Undergraduate course. We are happy to recount the experience and analyze students’ response via an edX blog. Learn more about his experience here.
Organized by Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit (EPSU) and Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI)
About the Joint Workshop
Many teachers who are planning to flip their classes might agree that moving traditional lectures online is an effective way to deliver instructional materials. More importantly, it can also make room for quality interactions between teachers and students. However, after the flip, what kind of learning opportunities can we create to engage, inspire, provoke, or even shock our students in the face-to-face sessions, the “face time”? How should face time and screen time be meaningfully blended? In this workshop, you will hear cases of flipped classes in different disciplines, analyze the key elements of the pedagogical strategies used in face time, identify the activities that you might be able to use, and come away with initial plans for a flipped class. Be sure to bring your wireless device and a lesson that you are considering flipping to work on!
This workshop is open to the first 42 registered participants to ensure that there is enough time to accommodate questions, provide comments, and give feedback for each participant.
For enquiries, please contact Miss Bonnie Yu by email yka0201@hku.hk.
Workshop videoDeveloping small private online courses (SPOC) is an increasingly popular teaching strategy in higher education. On January 26th, TELI’s SPOC team organized an interactive workshop offering participants a rare opportunity to gain hands-on experience in creating a video that can serve as an online lecture.
One clear advantage of restructuring a lecture into a series of short online videos is portability across time and space – it allows students to learn anytime, anywhere. Students are free to pause and review sections of the videos, which is not possible in traditional lectures. Condensing a two-hour lecture into short videos of about 6 minutes each also tend to be more engaging.
While creating an online course may seem a daunting task, it can actually be done by following a simple three-step approach: revisiting the course structure, storyboarding and scripting, then studio filming. At the workshop, a mock-up filming studio was set up to give our participants a taste of video production. They were invited to draft a short script in groups and speak in front of the camera and a green or blue screen that can be chroma-keyed into any background that you like. The responses were positive overall. Participants commented that this experience made them “feel much more comfortable when someone tells [them] ‘let’s shoot a video’” and “it’s doable.”
The recordings were edited by our team and sent to individual participants after the workshop.
It is TELI’s mission to provide technological support to teachers in creating online videos and e-learning materials. We are re-running this interactive workshop in March – please contact us to schedule your session.
Seminar video: Professor Ricky KwokSeminar video: Dr. Masato KajimotoDr. Masato Kajimoto from Journalism and Media Studies Centre joined us again on January 14, 2016 to continue his story on integrating a MOOC into on-campus teaching. Dr. Kajimoto’s MOOC “Making Sense of News” was launched last year and was subsequently repurposed to flip 5 lectures out of 13 for his on-campus course. The experiment provided new insights into how MOOC and on-campus teaching can supplement each other.
Although producing a MOOC takes more effort than face-to-face (F2F) lecturing because every single word in the video has to be scripted, Dr. Kajimoto pointed out that having a solid script helped him realize how repetitive on-campus lectures are and how time in class can be better spent. He pointed out that flipping lectures resulted in better activities engagement and quality of discussion as students had much more time and motivation to prepare for tutorials. This observation was backed up by the semester-end student survey, which showed that students enjoyed the blended mode of learning. Over 76% indicated that the online lectures enabled them to better manage their study time and facilitated their preparation for the tutorial discussions and exercises. When asked whether they would prefer solely F2F lectures, over 62% disagreed. It exemplified that “MOOC and on-campus teaching can help each other,” in Dr. Kajimoto’s own words.
In the process of repurposing his MOOC, Dr. Kajimoto beefed up the contents with additional readings and local examples. He even incorporated ideas and examples submitted by his MOOC students into his on-campus online teaching materials, facilitating inter-cultural knowledge exchange. Professor Chan Yuen-ying, director of HKU’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, is also keen on taking advantage of HKU’s position as an international knowledge exchange hub to roll out more MOOCs, particularly in the field of Asian Journalism. “The idea is that if you want to learn about China…[and] you want to learn about Asia on this subject, you come to us.”
To echo Dr. Kajimoto’s comment, Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) also agrees that MOOC and on-campus teaching are complementary. He said the best way to do a MOOC is a step-by-step transition, from flipping a few on-campus lectures, then scaling up to a SPOC, and finally developing a MOOC to face the world. He is happy to see that more and more young teaching advocates are embracing technology to scale up the quality of teaching. He is excited to work with more colleagues and scale out the innovative pedagogies.
Making Sense of News will be re-launched on edX In February 2016. Enroll now!
About the interactive session:
Wondering what are the basics of an online course? Do you want to be innovative? But you don’t know where to start? If you have any of these questions, then maybe Small Private Online Course, commonly referred to as SPOC, might work for you. Come and join us in our series of TELI seminars on SPOC and learn its basic foundation and the different practices being applied in developing it.
In this interactive session, we will look closely into several SPOCs that are currently being developed in HKU. You will have hands-on experience with the different stages that spans from knowing the basic requirements to restructuring your course into an online mode, and from making a concise script to representing it visually through a storyboard. Plus, you can experience a mock-up studio filming and say a few lines in front of the camera. We will also explore different possibilities and options for collaboration to make your class more interactive, fun, and accessible through the use of different technologies and expertise available at TELI. This seminar is open to the first 30 registered participants to ensure that there is enough time to accommodate questions, provide comments, and give feedback for each participant. Late registrants will be placed in the waiting list and contacted when spots are available.
About the Team:
Our team, formed with the support of a UGC grant, is part of TELI that takes charge of the development of SPOCs within HKU. It is composed of four researchers and one programmer handling ten different courses across five different faculties for its initial stage. Wincy Chan is an instructional designer and researcher for SPOC with interest in students’ social-cognitive and behavioural outcomes across learning designs. Her current projects cover student learning in the traditional and blended classrooms. Elizabeth Oh is the project manager who oversees all project- and research-related activities for the SPOC team. As an avid online learner, Elizabeth is passionate about assisting teachers and students to use technology to advance learning in engaging ways. Donn Gonda is a tech-savvy research assistant currently responsible for the engineering courses. He is experienced in creating online contents for teaching and research. Andrea Qi is a project associate and research assistant responsible for the development, implementation and evaluation of a series of SPOCs. She is an experienced teacher in both F2F and online mode, and an active online course learner. Alex Yi is a technical officer responsible for the development of “Learning Design Studio” which is a handy tool to design teaching plan. He is proficient in various programming language and well adept in delivering courseware materials to the online platform.
This interactive session is open to the first 30 registered participants to ensure that there is enough time to accommodate questions, provide comments, and give feedback for each participant.
For enquiries, please contact Miss Bonnie Yu by email yka0201@hku.hk.
About the seminar
Further to his seminar delivered on integrating a MOOC into on-campus teaching in October, Dr. Masato Kajimoto is offering to show us more data from the student evaluation of his online lecture experiment in the Fall semester of 2015-16. Some of his students are also joining the seminar to recount their experience of this flipped classroom arrangement. Professor Ricky Kwok will share with participants how he puts Masato’s initiative into context with the new paradigm of scaling out teaching and scaling up learning through the use of technology. We are planning to budget good enough time for you to raise questions, provide comments, and also to find out how the University might support your plans to introduce more innovative ideas in teaching and learning.
About the speakers
Dr. Masato Kajimoto is an Assistant Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Masato specializes in news literacy education, multimedia storytelling, and social media in journalism. He taught the third iteration of HKU’s online course on edX titled HKU04x Making Sense of News from May to June 2015. The course will be re-run from February 16, 2016 (register here).
Professor Ricky Kwok is Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at HKU, assisting the Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) in various endeavors related to e-learning (e.g., MOOCs, blended learning and gamification). He leads the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) team which consists of e-learning technologists, instructional designers, researchers in learning analytics, specialists in systems development, multimedia talents and collaboration associates.
For enquiries, please contact Miss Bonnie Yu by email yka0201@hku.hk.
Important message from Vice-President & Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching & Learning)
Dear Colleagues,
You are cordially invited to participate in an online e-learning survey conducted at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). The aim of the survey is to collect data about teachers’ perceptions of their experience on the use of all types of technologies to enhance teaching and learning in conjunction with face-to-face learning. We invite all teachers to participate in this survey. A separate survey investigating students’ perceptions of their e-learning experience is being administered concurrently. Findings from last year’s survey have informed the formulation of our E-learning Strategy 2015. Your feedback this year will continue to help us to provide a better physical and virtual learning environment at HKU.
It takes about 5 minutes to complete the questionnaire. Your answers will remain anonymous and your survey responses will be kept strictly confidential.
To participate in the online survey, please visit:
https://onlinesurvey.cetl.hku.hk/elearn.htm
If you have any questions or queries about this survey please contact Dr Maggie Zhao of the Institutional Survey Team at myzhao@hku.hk.
Best regards,
Professor Ian Holliday
Vice-President & Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching & Learning)
The University of Hong Kong
On December 11, 2015, TELI worked with the Faculty of Education on delivering a live lecture to the audiences in the Institute of Education, University College London (UCL), in a Symposium organized by Science of Learning Strategic Research Theme (SoL SRT). This lecture was given by Professor Stanislas Dehaene, a leading scientist in the field of neuroscience, on the topic of “The Multiple Effects of Literacy on the Brain”. The web broadcasting enabled real-time and dynamic interactions between the participants in HKU and those in UCL, stimulating a series of great ideas and thoughts.
What transforms lectures into lessons learnt? Participation, perhaps. Small twists such as inviting students to provide short-written responses would allow for personalized learning in many ways, as suggested by Professor David Carless, Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) in the Faculty of Education, and Dr. David Pomfret, Chairperson of the Department of History. They gave a seminar on this subject on December 1st, 2015.
In Dr. Pomfret’s history class, students were prompted to write short responses to one question each time. For example,
· “What nation do you think you belong to? Why?”
· “Which do you think is more valuable – history in history books or history in movies?”
These questions invite personal participation and reflection, and are associated with issues to be addressed in the next class, where a summary of the graded responses would be presented by way of a springboard for discussions. The rewards of such a practice are manifold: it enables students to quickly connect learning materials with their personal experiences; and their participation keeps them motivated throughout the semester. Teachers may also gauge common prior knowledge (or misconceptions, sometimes) among students in a timely manner through students’ submissions. In other words, short-written responses facilitate closing the feedback loop in learning.
At the seminar, some teachers suggested inviting students to post their responses on online platforms such as Moodle as it is much faster, and allows everyone in class to view their peers’ submissions. That’s certainly one quick and easily doable way. However, if the teacher would like to have anonymous feedback, an audience response tool such as Mentimeter might serve the purpose better. Would you like to give it a try?
Video: Flipped Learning at HKU (LLAW 1005)Video: Sharing by Rick Glofcheski on Flipped LearningProfessor Rick Glofcheski from the Faculty of Law is undoubtedly one of the pioneers in HKU when it comes to flipped classroom learning. Having “flipped” a compulsory tort law class with over 260 students in this semester, Professor Glofcheski shared many exciting insights with over 120 participants on November, 26th 2015.
At this joint seminar by the TELI, EPSU and CETL, Professor Glofcheski presented his experience of “shrinking the classroom to create a more personal, meaningful, inquiry-based, active learning environment” for students. He saw flipped learning as something relatively new in higher education – offering a shift in learning for students from passive to active, content-centred to inquiry-based, instructional to learning paradigm and “teacher-dependent” to independent, through using and taking advantage of technology.
How learning happens, its purpose and how class time can be spent productively were questions Professor Glofcheski thought about. He believed online lectures in replacement of the traditional ones might be a solution as students can pace through at their ease. However, potential resistance of such flipped learning from students, colleagues and the institute needs to be considered, and difficulties in implementation such as finding a suitable venue were encountered. Due to these limits, this semester’s class was still a partial flipped learning. Professor Glofcheski found it suitable to resolve possible problems step by step to prepare for future full implementation.
Professor Glofcheski further elaborated that the key emphasis of this flipped experience was having students understand that the lesson is their learning opportunity. They should “take it seriously, come to class prepared to apply [their] learning and solv[e] the problems.” Students were asked to do assigned readings and watch video lectures before class. The short length of lectures (3-4 minutes) was well accepted by students, and Professor Glofcheski plans to incorporate problem-solving questions in future video lectures. It is crucial to align learning content with the assessments so students’ interest to participate can be aroused.
Various clips of the actual “flipping” in action this semester were shown in the seminar. (Read more about the flipping in action here.) The post-class survey results shows that while certain students may prefer the traditional teaching method, 94% found the experience useful/very useful. Students found “flipping” enhanced their ability in applying and consolidating understandings of tort law concepts through learning from peers.
Professor Glofcheski ended the seminar offering possible next steps for flipped learning in his course, such as embedding problem-solving scenarios in videos. This kind of new experience will be expanded and continued in the following semester.