What's this blog about? Ikarus!

Hi,

I've created this blog to share with others in my MEd my Ikarus experience.

Please click any of the links on the left (or below) to know more about:

•   Background of how I got into Ikarus
• What I thought was the best thing about Ikarus
• What I thought was the worst thing about Ikarus
• Knowles Andragogy vs. Ikarus
• 7 Principles of Undergraduate Teaching vs. Ikarus
• Gilly Salmon's 5-step model vs. Ikarus

Insider Perspective on Ikarus

Background

How I got into Ikarus

• I heard about Ikarus from the IFETS mailing list (IFETS  International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and is a sub-group of IEEE – the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) http://ifets.ieee.org/.
• The email said that there was a free international online seminar on teaching and learning in virtual environments, and was inviting people to apply. For the full text of the invitation email, see Appendix 1.
• I browsed their website quickly, and decided to apply anyway since it was free. I filled in their (relatively long) set of questions, and waited for their reply as to whether I was accepted or not (this reply was expected to be just before the course start time in March)
  

Why I got into Ikarus 

• It was about teaching and learning in virtual environments (very relevant to this MEd and very relevant to my work)
• It was free! 
• It was a fully online course, so would give me a different experience of an online course other than the one I was studying for the MEd
• It was on a different learning environment (Moodle) than the one I used for work and MEd (both using same version of WebCT)
• It was international – a chance to see how others think all over the world and to network!!
• It said it required only 0.5 hours a day or 4 hours a week (not that much time). I will later show how I thought it required more time (and not just because I was an active participant)

 

What Ikarus 2004 is about, who it's for, and how it works

For full information from the course designers, see http://www.online-seminar.net/orga.html, but the below is a brief from my perspective:

• The objective of the course: to explore teaching and learning virtual environments collaboratively online. The course brings people from all over the world who deal with eLearning from pedagogical, technological and legal perspective.
• The divisions into disciplinary groups and sub-groups for discussions: the course included discussion forums divided by disciplinary groups and sub-groups. Some of the assignments involved reading articles and discussing them in the sub-groups (groups of about 20 participants for the pedagogy sub-forum I was subscribed to)
•  The interdisciplinary group projects: there were two projects that we did in pre-arranged (by the designers) interdisciplinary groups. The first project was an evaluation of 2 VLEs (our group did BSCL which was required and ATutor, which we chose from a list of two)
• The quizzes: there were weekly multiple choice quizzes consisting of about 3 questions. These quizzes looked easy but required a lot of internet searching techniques and a fair amount of reading online material to answer properly. They took tremendous amounts of time (up to 2 hours at first!) but were wonderful in the sense that they opened up our eyes to issues in eLearning that we did not have time to cover during the course. There was a special forum to discuss the quizzes, and some participants complained about the multiple-choice nature. Others in the pedagogy forum (with facilitator help) started to understand that the quizzes were not about multiple choice questions, but more about opening up doors for us to explore interesting angles on eLearning. This is where I learned about blogs and RSS readers!
• Some of the features of Moodle

.         A technology called "wiki" which has simple formatting easy for anyone to use and is very  user-friendly in the output
·        Group editing of the same document possible on a wiki workspace
·        You can see who is online at the same time your are (available in many VLEs)
·        You can easily navigate between forums, etc.
·        You can mark certain postings to go back to later
·        While reading someone's posting, you can easily go straight to their profile
·        You can edit your profile any time and put a picture, etc.

Concept map for Ikarus 2004 done by my subgroup 
The last activity done in the pedagogy sub-groups was to collaboratively create a concept map about Ikarus 2004. This was a new experience to many of us, and something not very easy to do collaboratively! If anyone is interested in seeing the resultant concept map, email me and I'll send you a copy (I don't want to put it on public internet)

Best thing about Ikarus 2004

Best thing about Ikarus 2004
      Diversity of different activities to suit different learning styles and preferences
 
      Some of the activities included 

• Reading articles and posting reflections in a small group
• Discussing reflections in a small group 
• Self-organized group research project (same discipline)
• Course-organized group research project (different disciplines)
• Opportunities for visual learners: concept maps at end
• Quizzes every week to get people interested in areas not covered in the course   

     There are different definitions of learning styles
·        The model used in this analysis is one of the information-processing models by Fedler (http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Learning_Styles.html) which categorizes learners as either:

• Active/Reflective;
• Intuitive/Sensing;
• Visual/Verbal and
• Sequential/Global

For more on this model, see Appendix 3

• For a good listing of some other theories see http://web.indstate.edu/ctl/styles/model.html
• A common learning styles model is: Visual, auditory and kinesthetic (using  http://www.chaminade.org/inspire/learnstl.htm and www.howtolearn.com/personal.html) 
• A similar one is VARK Visual, Aural, Read/Write, Kinesthetic (from http://www.vark-learn.com/english/index.asp  – I am multimodal meaning I have a balance in preference in using all 4 kinds – tips for multi-modal students here http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=multimodal)

Formal and informal learning: 

There were "formal" designed activities that were part of the course e.g.:

• Discussions on certain assigned articles 
• Disciplinary research 
• Interdisciplinary research 
• Quizzes 

There were "informal" activities possible, e.g.: 

•  Café for participants to discuss whatever they liked (these topics ranged from eLearning pedagogy, to discussions of learning styles, to political discussions!)
• Chat facility for anyone who wanted to use it. You could tell who was online and if they were on the chat facility, you could "ring" them to let them know you want to talk.
• Each person's profile was posted up (edited by the participant upon joining the course) and included, with their background, were also their ICQ and their email (to allow informal contact). Many participants (upon my prompt hehe) also shared MSN logins and started interacting there.
• There was an area for discussing the quiz
• There were general disciplinary discussion areas where mostly no activities were assigned but some members used the areas for general discussion on their discipline (e.g. pedagogy) 

Addressing Different Learning Styles

 For reflective learners: 

• Mostly asynchronous activities which suit reflective learners (as well as to fit time zone differences because we had people from all over: Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa and the Americas) 
• Reading articles and post your reflection. When an article is first posed, everyone is discouraged from commenting on others' postings. This allows each person time to reflect before they write, and time to read the reflections of others before posting their own. 
• After the time allotted to post original reflections, the tutor summarizes all views said, and discussion is opened up to discuss back and forth among group. This also allows for reflective interactions (as well as active ones – see below) 
• Quizzes gave reflective learners a chance to get a glimpse of an uncovered topic, and no rush to find everything out about it in a short time 
• There was time (and assignments) to reflect after each phase of Ikarus

For active learners: 

• The second phase of article discussions allows short, quick interactions to take place 
• The quizzes were an opportunity for active learners to "dig into" new areas there wasn't enough time in Ikarus to go into details about. Also, the chance to go and do a "search" online gave some active learners (like this author) a kind of "rush of pleasure" J 
•  Chat facility (as well as ability to exchange ICQ and MSN) for synchronous communication which suits active learners 
• Moodle has Wiki workspaces whereby more than one person could edit the same document collaboratively 
• Many collaborative activities which active learners generally favor. 

 For verbal learners: 

• Almost everything required some level of researching, reading assigned articles, or online discussion – it was all dialogue 

For visual learners: 

• Emoticons on Moodle are very friendly and more MSN-like than on e.g. WebCT
• The way we were told about activities and deadlines was in several ways (one is a graph on the front page and another is a document linked from the front page, and another is an email, the text of which is also in the "news" forum)
• One of the last activities was to collaboratively produce a concept map
• One of the VLEs we were assigned to evaluate in one of the group projects was BSCL – which is very suited to visual learners (to the extent that it is difficult to navigate if your not a visual person!) 

For global learners: 

• Other than the assigned forums, there were several others that those interested could dig into 
• There was interdisciplinary group work, and informal discussions in the café and quiz forums 

For sequential learners: 

• There were usually only 2-3 assigned discussion forums at a time, so there was no need to be distracted by several parallel discussions 
• There was discipline-specific group work and discussions 

For sensing learners: 

• Some activities were well-structured such as the quizzes (multiple choice question) and the disciplinary group work (especially the research phase where specific questions were to be answered) 

For intuitive learners: 

• Some activities were less-structured such as informal areas and some of the group work

Worst thing about Ikarus 2004

Worst thing about Ikarus 2004 
Activities/tasks too tight on time, considering that the course is free, and done by people who are mostly either full-time employees or students 

• I joined (because of several issues) a week late. This wasn't disastrous in terms of catching up the main activities going on in my disciplinary forum (and because things were still at the introduction stage), but it was disastrous in terms of my ability to join the café (I barely looked there because it was already quite full by the time I joined) 
• Even if one chose not to head into the informal discussion forums, you felt lost by the volume of the assigned forums (numbers per group may have been too big - about 20) 
• Several people complained on more than one occasion about how the time commitment at Ikarus was too much (especially for a free course). Many people dropped out (I don't have exact numbers yet).

7 Principles of Undergraduate Teaching vs. Ikarus

Criteria	Notes
7 Principles of Best Practice in Undergraduate Tecahing vs. Ikarus "The 'seven principles' are the best known summary of what decades of educational research indicates are the kinds of teaching/learning activities most likely to improve learning outcomes." (from http://www.tltgroup.org/Seven/Home.htm)
Encourages student-faculty contact	Examples of where moderators where communicating with students well (e.g. during group projects when we had trouble or questions) and poorly (no guidance provided unless called for – not something I am against). One thing I did not like was that I was once discouraged from commenting on others' postings too early!
Encourages student-student contact	This shows in the addition of a café and chat room (part of design) and the alumni forum (when assignments ended). A lot of work was done in cooperative groups. But also give examples where student-student contact was halted (e.g. replying to individual reflections at the beginning – same example as above).
Encourages active learning	Activities included reflecting on articles read, researching ways of using different technologies (e.g. weblogs, chat) in eLearning, two group projects and quizzes. All of these require active engagement, and there was almost nothing "given".
Gives Prompt Feedback	This was mostly true... our pedagogy facilitator seemed to be very good at keeping up with everything everyone was saying and responding. During groupwork, our facilitator was fast to respond to our needs, despite time zone differences. There was one time when our facilitator had to be away for a while and someone else stepped in for a while to make up. The facilitator of group work also used to give periodical summary report (weaving)
Encourage more time on task and reduces wasted time	Nooooooo time was tooooooo tight, even given the asynchronous nature of most activities.
Communicates high expectations	Not sure. I didn't feel that expectations by facilitators were that high but given the time constraints, they shouldn't have been!
Supports diverse student talents and ways of learning	Yes, this was the strength I gave as the "best thing about Ikarus" (please see Best Thing About Ikarus).
Encourages active learning	.

Gilly Salmon's Five Step Model vs. Ikarus

Criteria	Notes
Gilly Salmon's 5-step model vs. Ikarus ( http://www.e-tivities.com/5stage.asp) The E-tivities book is aimed at "academics, teachers, course managers, teaching assistants, instructors, trainers or one of the increasing band of e-moderators from many disciplines, from any level of education, within any teaching tradition and in any country. You will be online or wish to ‘move online’"( from http://www.e-tivities.com/about.asp )
Access and Motivation	Yes, there was time to do this and tutors/peers were motivating each other (for example I joined a week late but blended in easily and got support from tutors.   Support forum available (I used it once or twice to read and to ask).   Chat and café available for informal communication.   A lot of email communication for those still not used to Ikarus.  Guided tour available.
Online Socialization	Profiles ask you to talk about hobbies, leave your email and ICQ.   Café available, and chat.   Overall disciplinary forums available for general discussions among those of same discipline (partly social, mostly personal interests in the discipline).   All of this helped me to socialize and get to know others  At beginning of interdisciplinary group work we had a short amount of time to get to know each other (but not long enough). Also, second group work was with the same group which saved socialization time
Information exchange	This was mainly through the first activity to post reflections on articles
Knowledge construction	This was mainly through the second activity to discuss each others' reactions to articles.    Also in the research and interdisciplinary phases
Development	Collaboration in the group work   The disciplinary discussions where each person could open a topic of personal interest   In the café and quiz forums where we could informally learn from each other   The contact and networking allowed many of us to interact with each other beyond the course  The course tutors created an "alumni" forum for us to use after the course had ended.

Knowles Andragogy vs Ikarus

Criteria	Notes
Knowles' Andragogy vs. Ikarus "Andragogy applies to any form of adult learning and has been used extensively in the design of organizational training programs" (from http://tip.psychology.org/knowles.html)
Relevant to learner's current practice (need to know why they need to learn something; adults learn best when the topic is of immediate value)	This seemed to happen anyway as people who were involved chose this course and applied it. In many of the projects, we were prompted to consider how it affects our own teaching/learning environment. In many of the article reflections, we were prompted to compare to our own institutions
Adults need to learn experientially	It is all about active learning and there is almost nothing taught directly. This is especially evident in the group work where a group of people try out an external VLE and evaluate it based on their own experience.
Adults approach learning as problem-solving	And this shows in the task-oriented approach