When learning gets real

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Student assignments (essays, group work, reports) are all too often written for an audience of one, namely the teacher, and for the sole purpose of providing a basis for grading. The student will adjust the effort according to the weight of the assignment (number of credits available) and try to meet that particular teacher's criteria. The idea that anyone else might benefit from the assignment or that it should have some real impact outside the confines of the classroom is seldom considered. However, the assignment can be transformed by making it public or better still aimed at a wider audience which can benefit from the findings. Learning can be transformed when the audience is expanded and the results can make a difference. In addition, most employers are looking for evidence of practical experience so let's make sure that assignments are as real as possible.

This is nothing new of course but the potential was reinforced for me during a seminar I attended in Beirut, Lebanon, this week, Skills needed for the twenty first century and their impact on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.The afternoon session featured interesting examples of how learning is enhanced when a course becomes a stage and the results of the students' work benefit a wide and even global audience. Several speakers described how business simulations generate high levels of student engagement and provide a realistic setting for developing decision-making and teamwork skills. This is combined with teaching and plenty of feedback and tutorials from the teachers. Simulations do indeed generate a high level of student commitment but the bar can be raised even higher when you move from simulated activities to real problems in real organisations and let the students interact with professionals in their field. Two examples in particular stood out for me.

Corporate virtual mobility
One way of raising the bar for students is allowing them to do projects for companies and thus develop their skills, gain work experience and learn to collaborate online and meet real deadlines. A great example of university-industry collaboration was from Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK). They had first linked business students with an international company that was interested in breaking into the Middle East market. The students spent 2 months working as marketing consultants for the company, under the supervision of their teachers and were constantly in contact with company representatives. The final product was a marketing survey that was of great practical use for the company whilst the students had been able to put their theoretical knowledge into practice and also gained practical work experience for their CVs. The success of this venture lead to the university linking up with the Spanish-based academic business network, Telanto. Telanto links companies who have problems to solve (challenges) with suitable university classes who can try to find a solution to these challenges. Students work intensively with the company to solve the challenge and the result is beneficial to both sides. In the case of USEK, several students were asked to join an internship programme with the company or even offered full-time employment on graduation. This is a further example of virtual mobility but this time the mobility is with a company rather than a university. Experience of working in virtual international teams to solve problems is extremely attractive in today's job market and I think we will see many more ventures like this in the future.
See slideshow: Teaching Through Real Cases in Collaboration with the Industry, Tina Habib (USEK)

International film festival
Notre Dame University (NDU) in Beirut organises each year an international film festival featuring short films from young film makers under the theme The power of youth. The festival has an impressive international reputation and attracts a wide audience but the most interesting aspect is how the festival is so well integrated into the academic work of the university with students of many disciplines helping to plan, produce and run it. Film students get the chance of international exposure and students from other disciplines are able to get hands-on work experience collaborating with professionals and working to strict deadlines. Workshops and master classes are run by professional film makers as part of the curriculum. Organising the festival is an all-year activity and students are able to weave their way between theory in class and practice in the festival, often working in multi-disciplinary and international teams. See the slideshow: On the ground. The case of NDU International Film Festival, Nicolas Khabbaz (NDU).

Linking theory with real-life practice and solving real problems take learning to a new level. If you then add elements of internationalisation, virtual mobility, problem-solving and collaboration into the mix, the experience becomes so much richer than in a traditional academic setting. Student engagement levels were much higher since they could see that their efforts really made a difference and there was a genuine sense of pride at contributing to a final product that gained public approval.

See all the slideshows from this seminar (including mine!).

Simulation for teachers

Iavante operating theatre. CC BY-SA Alastair Creelman

As part of the EFQUEL Innovation Forum we visited Iavante, an extremely impressive simulation centre for training medical staff and students in emergency situations. The centre had clinics, operating theatres, treatment rooms and waiting rooms where students and hospital staff could realistically practice realistic emergency situations with the help of sophisticated computer controlled dummies and real life actors. They even had a street where car accident scenarios could be re-enacted as well as a mock living room for emergency treatment in the home. All these rooms had cameras for filming the simulation from all angles for later analysis. This type of facility is of course very expensive but this type of training can save real lives later since the staff will be able to make mistakes in the simulation and get the chance to improve through practice and analysis.

Teachers are not involved in such life and death situations but it struck me that simulation training could save a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering in the classroom. Student teachers are often thrown in at the deep end and find themselves in front of classes of pupils who do not react in the ideal way no matter how pedagogically sound the student’s lesson plan may be. Students seldom get the chance to work out strategies for dealing with difficult classroom situations. The first experience is when it’s for real and of course there is a high risk that the situation will not be dealt with in a professional way. This can easily lead to students losing confidence in themselves and sometimes to dropping out of the course completely.

That’s why I was particularly interested in another session at the conference from a project called SimAULA. They have produced a computer simulation for trainee teachers to help them deal with difficult classroom situations. The simulation uses avatars in different types of classroom. The teacher can choose different classroom layouts to suit different pedagogical approaches and can plan the lesson using a wide variety of variables. The classes react in unpredictable ways and the students can try different tactics to deal with the situations that occur.

"SimAULA will setup a virtual practicum in the form of a three-dimensional, online world adapted in the context of teaching-learning in school. Both active teachers and teachers-to be will interact with avatars, develop lesson plans, and teach in the virtual classrooms. In order to provide interesting and effective learning activities, this project will focus on the pedagogical side based on the knowledge of teachers and pedagogic and psychology experts to define the behaviour model of the virtual students and create simulations and situations that are both pedagogically and educational sound."

A simulation like this not only gives students the chance to test different strategies but also plenty of scope for group discussion and reflection with the teacher afterwards. Computer simulation in teacher training offers the chance for students to make mistakes and learn without the stress of interacting with real classes. SimAULA show what can be done in this field and I'm sure more advanced and sophisticated simulations for teachers are on their way.

Adding the spark

I stumbled upon an old article in The Guardian earlier this week, Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring?. It is based on a 2009 study of student attitudes to teaching by Dr Sandi Mann and Andrew Robinson of the University of Central Lancashire. I've written several times about the limitations of lectures and the need to spend classroom time on more interactive activities and let students access lectures on their computers or mobiles. This article breaks no new ground by criticising dull lectures but the interesting part was that students find even lab sessions uninspiring. According to the study the practical work sessions were even worse than the lectures.

"We might expect more hands-on practical sessions to be more engaging but, surprisingly, lab work and computer sessions achieved the highest boredom ratings in our study. One of the problems with lab studies is that the experiments the students conduct are often just controlled exercises where the results are already known"

The main reason for this is the fact that although the students were practising necessary skills the sessions were merely exercises following strict guidelines (ie. do it like this) and without any element of discovery and creativity. Doing is simply not enough, we need to be more engaged in the process and feel that we are discovering new skills for ourselves or in collaboration with our peers. Prescriptive workshops are similar to lectures in that they are clearly teacher-centred. The shift towards learner-centred activity is not an easy one for teachers raised on the traditional paradigm and it is all too easy to revert to old habits.

So what kinds of activities then will inspire students and pupils? How do we create engagement and enthusiasm? A superb example can be seen in an article and film on Mind/Shift, Technology Adds Spark to Science Education. The film, produced by KQED Education in conjunction with Northwestern University’s iLab, shows pupils using various laptops and tablets to perform virtual science experiments, create their own simulations and studies and interact with complex experimental equipment in labs on the other side of the world. The enthusiasm and creativity is clear and the fact that they can perfom experiments that could never be performed in the classroom (dangerous radioactivity experiments demanding extremely expensive equipment for example) adds to the interest. Instead of controlled and predictable training exercises they are interacting with the real world and with the teacher's help reflecting on their experience and learning together.

I just wish they would stop using terms like cyber-learning as if it was something just landed from outer space. It's about learning - with the tools and media available today.

Changing behaviour through virtual experience

There's still a great degree of skepticism about the value of virtual worlds in education but there's plenty of activity going on and valuable experience being gained. At Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab they've carried out an interesting piece of research on how virtual worlds can be used to bring about changes in attitude in ways that cannot be duplicated by more traditional communication.

This particular experiment was about people's attitudes to the environmental impact of paper use. One group was given written descriptions of the effects our paper consumption have on our forests and how non-recycled paper leads to deforestation. Another group went into a virtual world and cut down trees with a virtual chainsaw. Despite the graphic details and convincing rhetoric of the written accounts the groups who simply read about the problem did not change their paper consumption after the experiment whereas those who had been in the virtual world really did change their behaviour afterwards.

The research was not about paper consumption or deforestation but about how virtual experiences can have a real effect on our behaviour. This is not the first example of such research but it shows that virtual and augmented reality will be increasingly used for simulations and training as an effective behaviour reinforcer and in many cases will enable us to simulate experiences that would be impossible or extremely costly to carry out for real. Watch the video below for a report on the Stanford experiment and read the article from Stanford Report, New virtual reality research – and a new lab – at Stanford.

Augmented reality gets even realer

I've been following the development of augmented reality (AR) with interest over the past couple of years. It's still far from mainstream but a breakthrough could come soon, especially since so many people now own devices that can cope with it. By viewing the world through your smartphone you see extra layers on top of reality. It can be links to more information on a restaurant, historical building, a house for sale and so on. You could see monsters on your street that you have to fight or see instructions on how to work some equipment in front of you.

If you aren't sure of what effects AR is going to have in the future have a look at this amazing film trailer. It's a German film where you play one of the roles and you see the action in AR through your mobile. You have to actually visit the action scenes and your reactions to each situation determine how the film continues. The potential for educational simulations are enormous; for training emergency situations, safety routines, military training etc. Here you can practice situations that simply cannot be practiced in any other way.



For some more thoughts on why all this is relevant to education read a blog post by Vicki Davis, A lesson in simple augmented reality.