I attended the Augmented-Virtual-Mixed Reality Workshop hosted by LDE Centre of Education and Learning and the Leiden Centre for Innovation, where the Aryzon AR Cardboard Headset caught my attention. The Aryzon AR/MR Headset is an interesting alternative to the high-tech AR headsets. It is both available and affordable for average students, schools and universities. Like the Google Cardboard, it uses a smartphone for rendering and displaying virtual models. Different to Google's solution, the Aryzon Headset does not block the field of view.
At the Augmented-Virtual-Mixed Reality Workshop in Leiden we learned about different approaches and solutions for using this technology in higher education. It also hosted a marketplace for sharing ideas and solutions from research and the industry, where I met Ralph van der Meer from Breinwave. Ralph brought some Aryzon Headsets and a bunch of demos that showed possible interactions between HoloLens wearers and cardboard headset wearers. This allowed me to compare the Aryzon Headset directly to the HoloLens 1.
]]> Disclaimer: This article reflects my own views and impressions from wearing the Aryzon AR Cardboard Headset and the HoloLens. I tried and used the Aryzon Headset for about 10 minutes and I report only about my subjective impressions during this short trial. I am not related to or paid by neither Aryzon, Google, Microsoft nor Breinwave.The Aryzon Headset uses a regular mirror and a half-transparent mirror in order to overlay the virtual model with the real environment. This allows users to see a digital model and the real world simultaneously, instead of the non-stereoscopic camera image of conventional cardboard apps. This creates a more natural feeling for the overall AR/MR experience compared to the one of my own Google Cardboard.
While the HoloLens wears way more comfortable and does not look as awkward as the Aryzon Headset, I was surprised that the cardboard headset with my phone attached did not feel as clumsy as my Google Cardboard at home. I assume that this is partially due to the lower center of mass. While this is certainly an improvement compared to Google Cardboard, it cannot compete with the "heavy" HoloLens 1: I can easily imagine to wear the HoloLens for an extended period, which is certainly not the case for the Aryzon Headset. I guess that regular wearers will not exceed 15 minute sessions with it.
With respect to the freedom of movement, the HoloLens wins as well. The Aryzon Headset has the wearer's smartphone attached. However, this connection is not rock solid. So if the wearer moves too quickly, then the phone will set for its own destination, which might become easily the smartphone nirvana. This is similar to the Google Cardboard, so I was warned. Also looking up or down can be dangerous for the phone and potential bystanders as the phone may slip from its fixation in the headset. In these cases, it is important to keep the phone in place by using the own hands, which can be limiting the immersive experience.
HoloLens wearers will certainly miss the lack of support for hand gestures, so when using the Aryzon Headset, the only way to interact with the virtual model is by staring intensely at menus or interaction points. While this is not too bad, it is not very natural either. Ralph mentioned that the Aryzon team is working at this.
After playing with the HoloLens a few times, I found it always irritating that the digital models were sometimes cut off in the middle of the field of view. It feels somewhat like looking at the model through a hole, while the rest of the environment remains continuous. The Aryzon Headset has an overall narrower field of view, so at the beginning I had a brief tunnel view impression. However, I got quickly used to this perspective. The perspective has the positive side effect that the digital model and the real view have the same boundaries. Therefore, I had a more consistent AR impression, in which the virtual model is covering the entire field of view.
Another aspect of the experience is the display resolution. With the HoloLens I never had the feeling that visuals are as crisp as shown in the adverts. While I got used to the visual artefacts quickly, the resolution was not that high that I could not recognise individual pixels. This is most apparent when working with complex models or model-textures. With the Aryzon Headset I had the overall impression that the resolution of the virtual model is better and visual artefacts are not that prominent. I assume that this is because the Aryzon Headset inherits the screen resolution from the wearer's smartphone, which tend to be pretty good even from a close distance.
The Aryzon Headset allows developers to use existing development frameworks and libraries, because it uses the same split screen approach for stereoscopic imaging as Google Cardboard. It also allows developers to provide quick solutions for Android and iOS, without learning completely the device specific frameworks of the professional AR hardware. Of course the optimal results can be achieved with Aryzon's special libraries that also account for the offset between the wearer's field of view and the device position in the headset.
My quick findings show that the cardboard headset is not entirely on par with the professional products, but I was impressed about the quality of the AR experience. A big pro over the professional products is, its availability to consumers at a very competitive price. This is particularly important for schools and universities where costs and availability are important factors for technology adoption in education.
I think that the Aryzon Headset is a useful tool for getting quick experiences with AR and mixed reality scenarios without requiring big investments to technology development. Having said that, also solutions for the cardboard headset require quite some technological development for the virtual models and the AR experience. In comparison to the embedded hardware these investments are by far more moderate. This makes the cardboard headset an interesting placeholder for experiments and pilots, while we are waiting for embedded AR headsets becoming available to the average consumer at a reasonable price. Moreover, the cardboard headset is eco friendly as it is highly recyclable and does not require replacement with every technological advancement of the hardware - it can "grow" as you upgrade your smartphone.
]]>Last week I received the information that it is now available online and as a harcover.
]]>
This book introduces readers to the latest state of research and development in seamless learning. It consolidates various approaches to and practices in seamless learning from a range of techno-pedagogical, socio-situated and socio-cultural perspectives. Further, it details our current understanding of learning in both formal and informal settings, crossover learning, incidental learning, and context-based learning approaches, together with these aspects' linkages to the notion of seamlessness. (from Springer)
The new book helps to understand the educational challenges that become increasingly urgent with the new role of context that is superimposed on education through modern technologies. The perspectives of the chapters show the wider implications of contexts for learning and education beyond mobile technologies. I find the chapters particularly interesting because they highlight that context actively influences learning and is not just a passive backdrop.
Working on the book also helped me to refine and broaden my understanding about seamless learning as an educational design principle. This is not a simple extension of what has been traditionally practiced in education, but raises new aspects that are hidden in previous models and concepts. Considering the role of context in education can definitely enrich learning experiences, but it can be challenging to balance contextual experiences. The book helps to master this extended view on educational design and practice.
]]>The ideas track requires PhD candidates to have completed some initial literature research on their research idea. The candidates should be able to justify their ideas in a three-page position paper.
If you intent to submit to the EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium, be aware that there are two deadlines:
We also expect all submissions to include a very short confirmation form, signed by their supervisor/professor. It might be wise to talk early with your supervisor or professor if you plan a submission.
Get all the details for the submissions on the EC-TEL homepage.
As a participant of the EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium, you have also the opportunity to present your work as a poster at the EC-TEL poster session. This allows you to gather even more feedback and have an easy way to discuss with other community members.
After the conference, you have the opportunity to revise your submission and include the feedback from the reviews and the conference. All revised papers will be published as Open Access on the CEUR-WS platform.
If you plan to submit to the ideas track, I strongly suggest that you join my workshop at the EATEL Summer School in Bari. Claim your place until 22 February 2019!
If you want to get an impression of Doctoral Consortium submissions, have a look at the proceedings of last year.
]]>The application deadline for Ph.D. students is 22 February 2019 to ensure your places!
]]> The first program draft with all workshops has been announced this week. This year the EATEL Summer School has a very interesting lineup that covers a wide range of topics that are relevant for researching technology enhanced learning and I am excited to be part of it.The EATEL Summer School is one of the longest running summer school on technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in Europe and is supported by major research groups. This year the EATEL Summer School partners with NTNU from Norway for ECTS credits.
Find out how to apply for your place at the EATEL Summer School on the EATEL Homepage.
]]>In educational institutions the learning environment is not limited to a LMS. Instead, an LMS is just one aspect of the learning environment that is completemented by a wide range of different tools and plattforms. Moreover, the organisational culture and values refine how students are expected to benefit from the learning environment. Moodle's built-in onboarding is limited to the functions and concepts of the platform and does neither reflects the organisational culture of the institution that runs the respective Moodle instance nor embraces the technological ecosystem that supplements features missing in the LMS. Therefore, an organisation cannot entirely rely on Moodle's internal "onboarding" features, but needs to extend or to replace them in order to get learners into the flow of the organisation.
For our very own Moodle plattform we identified three use cases for onboarding, but they are somewhat universal:
These use cases refer to differnt information needs and flows through the onboarding.
Onboarding new students has been done typically towards the end of the freshmen week of the academic year in the form of in-class activities. However, it turned out that there are plenty of pitfalls that are not easy to solve with 20, 40 or 80 students within 20 minutes. Moreover, being located towards the end of the freshmen week and sometimes even at a later point during the term created a tension for the students, because many need that information much earlier in the process. Earlier means at least for our students after enrollment, because study information are published and prep-classes are often running prior to our freshmen week.
The onboarding process to the online learning environment includes the following steps:
These activities are integrated in an ongoing moodle course that serves simultaneously as a tutorial and a source for help. Through Moodle's prerequisites rules, we can arrange the onboarding process and guide the students through the different activities.
Here I can into a challenge with Moodle's preconditions: While it is possible to identify authenticated and guest users, Moodle has no way to identify whether a user is enrolled into a course or not. In order to identify an unauthenticated user to a course, a precondition simply needs to test whether the email Address in the user profile is empty. The guest user is the only user in the system that has an "empty" email address.
For the course enrollment we cannot use a field in the user profile to test if a user us enrolled in the current course or not. Unfortunately, there is no precondition for that purpose available for Moodle. As I wanted to learn a bit about Moodle's precondition system for a while, I hacked a small precondition plugin for exactly that purpose. Course designers can now define preconditions for testing wether a current visitor is enrolled in a course or not. Obviously this makes only sense for courses that allow guests to access the course material.
With this additional plugin we can now build a storyline that follows this flow:
The present limitation we presently face with the different tools, is that we have no feedback channel for predefined tasks, so we can verify that the students actually succeeded in setting up the components.
Onboarding new lecturers is pretty similar to onboarding new students. The main difference is that lecturers need additional information about building their courses. Therefore, we divert new lecturers in the last step of the storyline into our Blended Learning handbook course, where they can learn about different strategies and practices of using moodle.
Our Moodle system is a front-facing platform and, thus, not only our students but also people who are interested in our programmes reach that system. Onboarding potential students means to help students to learn about how it feels to study online at our institution and help them to find the study programm that meets their interests best. The objective of this onboarding process is to guide these students to the application form.
Onboarding means that these students create "test"-accounts that allow them to access personalisable course materials and by that way get a feeling of our platform. For this kind of onboarding, Moodle administrators need to consider that these students will be regular users of Moodle and thus capable of self enrolling into different courses. Therefore, it is important that this kind of onboarding is aligned with the system wide course management strategies. The pro of this approach is that students already provided most information and indicate their study interests and capabilities, so they can be directly used for the later enrollment process.
Guest experts are very similar to potential studens as they need to authenticate against the system. The main difference compared to potential students is that these experts are invited by our regular lecturers to participate in regular courses. Once these experts authenticated with our Moodle, they can get manually enrolled by their contact point into the correct course.
The key limitation of onboarding irregular users into Moodle is that the system offers no easy way for handling user groups from different origins. Once visitors are logged in, they look all the same to the system and restricting access to different groups requires manual work for the system administration. This is not really an issue for onboarding as such, but limits the last two use cases in settings, in which self-enrollment is heavily used, because these external audiences have also access to these courses. The limitation araise from the fact that all users can equally enroll into all self-enrollment courses, which is not necessarily what our lecturers want. All variants I could find for Moodle require manual interventions by lecturers or system administrators for handling users from outside the organisation, properly.
Onboarding becomes increasingly important as the digitization of educational institutions progresses. We need to understand onboarding as storylines that help students and staff to find their way around the learning environment. These storylines are also more complex than provided by vanilla Moodle.
In this article I outlined the reflections that have led to the idea of the enrolment precondition plugin. Go ahead and try the plugin for you onboarding experiences. You can find the latest release on GitHub
]]>One of the main misconceptions I find frequently that computational thinking is handled like a subject like mathematics or languages. Because of the term "computational", the interpretation of computational thinking tends to lead towards computer science and programming - and many teachers and lecturers consider it therefore out of scope for their subject, discipline, or area of interest. The connotation as a subject makes this separation even easier, because it allows arguing that computational thinking is actually part of a different discipline than one's own. However, computational thinking is a mindset for understanding and describing processes and interactions. This mindset is at the core to describe and study the relations within systems for transparency, optimization, automation, and eventually innovation.
For discussing computational thinking, it is important that it is not the same as programming. While programming refers to expressing algorithms so computing devices can execute them, computational thinking, on the other hand, emphasizes on understanding systems and processes in ways that allow identifying patterns and algorithms. This is quite different to programming.
The key core elements of computational thinking are systemic abstraction, understanding of processes, and data awareness. Systemic abstraction refers to the ability to think in, out of and across boxes. Understanding processes is essential for creating links between the boxes and being able to define trajectories and flows. Data awareness is necessary for setting the input and getting the output of a system's boxes as well as for defining indicators that help measuring the state of the processes in the system.
The core aspects of computational thinking are not specific to learning or education. So why do I claim that every teacher, trainer or professor should be fluent in computational thinking? Computational thinking links to learning and education in the form of learning design. Many educators know the core principles of learning design as "curriculum development" and "teaching plans". However, learning design goes beyond these concepts by expanding beyond conceptual and sequential consistency to the level of the learners' experiences.
The activity of designing learning experiences includes the preparation of informing and verifying learning achievement from the enactment of the learning activities. Educators know this as the desired and actual learning outcomes, which are the foundation for assessment and grading. Learning design also includes the planned arrangement and interactions of social forms, learning, tools and technologies, as well as the practices related to the learning objective.
In order to master learning design, I argue, computational thinking is crucial. This is independent from digitizing learning and education. However, if digital technologies are included into the learning experiences, educators will find it hard to achieve useful results without computational thinking. This is particularly the case for supporting education and human learning through learning analytics and AI. Educators at all levels need to be capable of designing and arrange their educational units in ways so they can generate meaningful data on their students' learning paths.
Educators need to comprehend learning activities as systems as they shape the individual learning. This requires a systemic as well as systematic understanding of the alignment and the dependencies of learning objectives, activities, outcomes, environments, resources, and tools. Consequently, a typical unit of learning is not just a single system but is a collection of systems with specific functions for the learning and teaching process.
Learning designers consider learning activities as the functional building blocks of the learning process. These building blocks always have the same internal structure:
It helps to think of these elements as functions and not as a process on its own: the affordance informs the learners to perform an activity and present the result, which means that a learning activity requires means to collect these results in a format that allows producing a meaningful feedback. Leaving one of these steps breaks the learning activity system. Thinking of these elements as inseparable activity functions rather than sequences is the key to avoid over scripting: Any step that does not have an output that generates a feedback, is not a learning activity that should not get included into a learning design.
While learning designs should be limited towards the granularity of the learning activities, they need to consider the logistics of educational processes. This includes the administrative and organizational activities that do not directly contribute to the learning experience. While most modern learning management systems emphasize on supporting these activities, educators are often unaware of them. I experience that educators find it hard to identify these logistical tasks because they tend to hide them within other activities without highlighting their specific functions and procedural dependencies.
Conventionally, the systemic perception of learning and education considers the arrangement of learning resources, tools and the learning environment and often exclude the role of the facilitators, social interactions, internal rules of an activity, and the feedback. These additional elements are often set outside of the system.
Within curricula and teaching plans, educators arrange learning activities into processes. In the analog realm, such processes remain mostly sequences with minor variations. Only at the higher curricular levels of study programs, we find procedural variations more often. The understanding of processes includes that educators are able to analyze their teaching plans as arrangements of the functional systems that define the individual learning activities. This includes clustering and sequencing these activities as well as deconstructing these activities into sub-processes. At this level, educators need to be aware about the different concepts of controlling the educational processes.
Educational design theory often underestimates the data awareness as a central competence for educators. Data awareness fuels the learning process. In the processes of learning design, this implies that educators need to be able to define the prerequisites (input) and learning outcomes (output) of the learning activities, because they are the key for monitoring and controlling learning processes as well as for automating them. Moreover, data awareness is the foundation for new forms of digital assessment as well as for scaling up personalized learning.
Data awareness includes not only awareness of different data formats that students produces as their learning outcomes, but also awareness about the traces that are characteristic for different types of learning and achievement level. This is not only relevant in technology-enhanced learning but expands to conventional forms of education. Being aware about the characteristic traces of learning is beneficial for focusing on the relevant aspects even if no technology is involved.
Identifying the data that the different learning activities generate is key for learning analytics, because we can only analyze what we collect. This leads to the major misconception of many educators that learning analytics only considers the access of resources and clicks and that this is used by a management for controlling and evaluation their teaching. This perception is partly due to the default behavior of many learning management systems that primarily feed resource accesses and clicks into their analytical engines. Another aspect of this misconception is that many educators do not fully understand the relations of data and their educational designs. Therefore, data awareness implies that educators know about the kind and granularity of data the activities in their learning designs generate and collect.
Learning design refers to the design of complex social and interactive processes. Abstracting these processes for digital and non-digital learning solutions is not easy. However, this kind of abstraction is essential for expanding concepts and practices and transfer them to other subject domains or to new communication and mediated modes and technologies. The success of such transfers is dependent on a mindset that is rooted in computational thinking. This mindset has little to do with the ideas of programmed instruction or software programming. It seems closer related to creative activities such as design or modelling. These are skills, which all educators need to be capable to apply to their own practice and not just expect their students to develop.
The three topics match nicely the scope of ECTEL from lifelong learning through scaling technology enhanced learning all the way to realworld and industry applications. Find more details about the keynotes on ECTEL's website.
If your are working and researching in the field of technology-enhanced learning, there is still a little time left for submitting your contribution. The submission cutoff date is 15 April 2018.
In case your busy with your Ph.D., then you should also consider joining the ECTEL Doctoral Consortium, which has a separate call and a application deadline on 22 May 2018.
This year ECTEL is aligned with the Medical Education Informatics conference (MEI18), which creates a nice opportunity for participating to both conferences with minimum overhead.
]]>In addition to the EC-TEL, the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) also hosts a week-long doctoral training event:
This year the summer school is perfectly aligned with the Doctoral Consortium's submission deadline on 22nd May. Therefore, I will be present at the EATEL summer school and host a workshop on preparing submissions to the Doctoral Consortium and how to prepare for maximum benefit. The workshop targets at Ph.D. candidates in or shortly after their initial orientation phase.
Moreover, the EATEL Summer School awards the first
to a promising early stage researcher in the field of technology-enhanced learning.
Additionally, the EATEL Summer School has a very interesting program focusing on the burning challenges of technology-enhanced learning. Check the EATEL Summer School's Homepage for more details and the full programme for the week.
UPDATE: The application deadline has been extended!
Next Monday (12th March 2018) is the deadline for applying for the EATEL Summer School. Be quick and secure your place!
]]>The ECTEL Doctoral Consortium accepts online submissions until 22 May 2018.
The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium brings together Ph.D. candidates working on topics related to Technology Enhanced Learning providing them an exceptional opportunity to present, discuss, and receive feedback on their research with experts in the field in an interdisciplinary and international atmosphere. Prominent professors and researchers in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning will provide formative feedback to the selected papers through the review process and contribute actively to discussions at the workshop.
The intention of this doctoral consortium is to support and inspire Ph.D. candidates during their ongoing research efforts. The doctoral consortium is embedded into the main conference through a poster session that provides Ph.D. candidates the unique opportunity to get valuable feedback on preliminary work from the community.
Please refer to the call for contributions on the EC-TEL website.
]]>mLearn is the leading international conference on mobile and contextual learning, organised by IAmlearn. The conference takes place at a different venue each year, and has been hosted in places such as Finland, Australia, South Africa, Qatar, Canada, Cyprus, and Turkey, among other locations. This year's conference will be hosted by Concordia University Chicago.
The overarching theme for mLearn 2018 is:
Check mLearn's call for papers for more details and topics.
Grab your mLearn Starter Kit and get started with your mLearn submission.
]]>The slides from the ETWG welcome address to the 10th eduhub days, the annual meeting of the Swiss academic e-learning community. How did technology change teaching and studying in higher education over the past 10 years. It raises questions that will concern the community in the coming 10 years.
]]>This week the EC-TEL 2018 has officially released the full call for papers. The EC-TEL is co-located with the Medical Education Informatics (MEI2018) conference. Therefore, EC-TEL has a special track on medical and healthcare education and its technological applications alongside the long list of topics related to Lifelong technology enhanced learning and dealing with the complexity of 21st century education.
Check out full call for papers for all the details.
EC-TEL has four main parts with different submission deadlines:
Being one of the main research conferences in the domain of technology-enhanced learning in Europe, EC-TEL is an excellent opportunity for catching up with the latest result of Europe's top research groups in this field.
Traditionally, the EC-TEL conference provides the opportunity for international research projects to arrange meetings alongside the conference. Note the deadline for meeting reservations: 24 June 2018.
]]>During the six years of working in the SIG, the main activities were focused on sharing practices on using apps as well as creating and sharing resources that are accessible on a wider range of student devices. Of course, this includes the sharing of the apps we have built for the use in our institutions. This showed, not much to our surprise, that there exist common needs and that there is much work duplicated without making much progress. These insights have led to joint activities on the "resource-challenge" and the "identity-challenge" (or the roles and responsibilities in the photo) for mobile learning.
Before we could address these questions during the eduhub days workshop, a more fundamental question has been raised by the participants: What is this mobile learning anyways? I kicked off with Eliott Soloways definition that mobile learning implies to get into the learning mode easily and quickly, so working with laptops under a tree would not be mobile learning. Soloway called this type of learning a few years back "carry around learning". However, with the device ecosystem of today's students that includes smart phones, e-book readers, tablets, and convertibles makes distinguishing between mobile and carry around learning somewhat weak. So the discussion with the workshop participants lead to characteristics such as connectivity, accessible, tailored or specialized resources, locations and contexts, learning activities that address the mobility of learners and of course the changing roles and responsibilities for learning. These characteristics raised questions on connecting the tools in our students' pockets with their study activities.
The participants reported from the present practice in their institutions include clicker apps for classroom engagement. Many specialized third party apps seem to be an element of the educational practice, among which flash card solutions are among the favorites. One participant mentioned that its institution is currently working on a mobile companion to support their students learning and study organization. A particularly difficult challenge appears the use of text-based learning resources, which often require annotation, which seems to be particularly difficult on smartphones, but then there are e-books in the ebub format that make this task easier but require that existing resources need transformation and redesign to work across devices. A critical remark was that the data from the learning management systems indicate that the use of mobiles to access these systems are constantly low despite their widespread availability. This could indicate that students don't really want to use their mobiles for learning. Another explanation could be that the institutional platforms are not really designed with mobility in mind but follow more a "mobile after" design principle as opposed to the famous "mobile first" approach. Another participant remarked that the low mobile use of the learning management systems could be due to limited suitable activities for supporting the mobility of students.
By analysing at the landscape of the current mobile learning practice it shows that much teaching and learning happens in isolated tools and platforms that do or can not really follow the learners seamlessly across the device they have available in different learning environments. One solution for this could be that educators should rethink the institutional educational practice in order to free the students from narrow infrastructure requirements. Several remarks indicated that there is a big need for developing (educational) solutions in terms of good practices that can be used to bridge learning activities with the mobility of the learners in mind. The participants also mentioned that using mobiles to support the students' learning capabilities in terms of learning to learn would be of great benefit in and for their institutions. Finally, there is much unexplored potential for supporting portfolio work that learners can easily embed into their daily activities and practices.
Among the various challenges identified by the participants, identifying activity islands and improving the ease of use of mobile tools within and across these islands was raised several times. Therefore, it is extremely important to develop a much better understanding about where students learn, how they use the various tools in their learning environments, and identify appropriate resources and activities that support students utilizing the devices within their range for their studies. For educators it is important to identify the learning scenarios and the special role and benefit of mobile devices for these scenarios. This task requires reflecting upon the students' learning needs and technology use in order to rethink our educational strategies and practice for expanding academic learning into the world of different forms of mobility.
]]>Blended learning is insufficient concept for grasping the digital transformation in higher education institutions. This presentation gives a national perspective for Switzerland and an organisational perspective for measuring the transformation at the HTW Chur. It was presented at 27. Oct. 2017 in Bern at the swissuniversities "Tag der Lehre".
]]>Kurzeinführung zur praktischen Konzeption von Blended Learning Angeboten mit dem Churer Modell. Am Blended Learning Canvas werden die didaktischen Gestaltungsprinzipien für Blended Learning Angebote erklärt. Diese Präsentation ist Teil des Weiterbildungsangebots für Dozierende an der HTW Chur.
]]>