OER1149 Oral Presentation pptx

Thursday 12 May 16.20 Breakout Room 6

Integrating pedagogies and technologies that support individual learning and group knowledge building

Marlene Scardamalia, University of Toronto
Candace Thille, Carnegie Mellon University
John Rinderle, Carnegie Mellon University

Conference Theme: Collaboration and communities

Abstract: The goal of this OLnet project is to integrate pedagogies and technologies that support individual learning and group knowledge building. The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University provides open access to courses that are the complete "enactment of instruction". OLI courses are designed to support an individual learner, who may not have the benefit of an instructor, to learn a subject at the introductory college level. A learner in an OLI course works independently, supported by frequent opportunities for practice and guided by targeted hints and feedback. In this project, we are layering OLI courses with an open discourse environment, Knowledge Forum (KF) developed at the University of Toronto, to encourage collaborative knowledge building. Knowledge building calls for community discourse to advance knowledge on shared problems of understanding. With KF, learners interact within a shared social space using tools designed to help structure and organize their ideas.
Learners in the blended OLI/KF environment will be encouraged to raise questions, share ideas, and engage in collaborative problem solving in KF as they progress through the OLI course. They will use the OLI course as an authoritative source in the shared discourse and observe how ideas in the discourse connect to instruction in the OLI materials. Learners will collaborate in virtual cohort groups to modify and extend each other's ideas, creating public knowledge thereby transforming and extending the OER and building a community of support. We will collect real-time, interaction level data of all student use in the combined OLI/KF environment. We will examine and relate data from the frequent assessment opportunities in the OLI course with the semantic space and social network connections formed by the knowledge building discourse. We will explore ways these data can be used to provide feedback to students, instructors, and course designers to influence student achievement of desired learning outcomes. In the presentation, we will show the combined OLI/KF environment and discuss the research questions we are exploring such as if learning is enhanced for a few students, do their contributions to the collaborative space enhance the work of the group; how can we assess growth and spread of ideas; can we keep ideas alive and improving in a worldwide open community?

Keywords: oli; open educational resource; knowledge building; community discourse; group learning; use driven design

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