Mobile Learning Post COVID-19 in the GenAI Era

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 where Vickel Narayan, Massey University, New Zealand, is speaking on "Navigating the Terrain:Emerging Frontiers in Learning Spaces, Pedagogies, and Technologies". I am one of the authors on this short paper, along with others in the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group and got to say a few words about it. The challenge is to take learning out of the hands of the teacher and out of the classroom into the real world, of a facsimile of it. Perhaps we need GenAIGogy.

Heutagogy Has Stood the Test of Time, Unlike Powerpoints in Lecture Theatres

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 at the University of Melbourne. This morning Chris Kenyon is talking about how he co-created heutagogy at Southern Cross University. Originally it was to be autogogy (for "self" directed learning). 

ps: I was a little distracted as the power cable for my laptop is jammed in the table hinge on my chair. The main lecture theatre in Arts West at University of Melbourne has a mains power socket between each seat. About a decade ago I thought this was a good idea. But after a few minutes use of the first installation at ANU it became apparent this is a very bad idea. It is difficult to reach under the chair to plug in the power. 

Art West has the sockets higher up so they are easier to read, but this turns out to be worse. The plug is aligned with the small folding desk on each chair. If you forget to unplug, and fold the table, the cable falls down and jams the hinge. In normal circumstances this is inconvenient, but consider a fire evacuation, with hundreds of people trying to get out in a hurry, entangled in cables. I suggest retaining the sockets for front row seats and removing all others.

Virtual University in Australia?

Torrens Building,
Adelaide, Wikipedia

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 at University of Melbourne, where Michael Sankey is discussing the virtual university. He nominated Torrens University as the closest to this in Australia, which is a reasonable assessment. However, I doubt that this would be a salable product. As far as I know, there is no regulatory requirement for universities to have campuses. But purely online education is perceived as low quality. For this reason universities emphasise their physical campuses. This at times is farcical, such as multiple institutions who offered courses from the Torrens Building in Adelaide. Each instution would photograph the building, showing their banner only.

Turnitin tracking how students turn in assignments to combat AI

Greetings from the ASCILITE 2024 conference at University of Melbourne. I had intended to go to a research talk, but I couldn't find the "Light Green Room", so I stumbled into a presentation from Turnitin on their AI detection tool (this is in a room with check green carpet & mould coloured roundell patterned wallpaper, so I don;t know what it is called). 

Last year Turnitin released an AI writing report with paraphrase detection. This did not appear to work well and ANU decided to switch it off. But perhaps it is time to look at the product again and see if now works acceptable. One aspect I had difficulty understanding is Turnitin is addressing paper based assessment (are universities really returning to paper based assessment.

Turnitin are building a student composition space. The idea is the student writes their assignment within Turnitin. This is an implementation of the "show your work" approach. The tool will have a word processing function. With this approach you can see when the student did what. 

Turnitin are also building an offline digital exam system. This is similar to standalone products already in use. 

A new similarity report is al in the works for Turnitin. One small example is allowing for margin comments. 

AI & Education at ASCILITE 2024

Greeting from the opening of the ASCILITE 2024 conference at University of Melbourne. In the first presentation, Professor Gregor Kennedy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UoM drew parallels between the challenges of AI in education today and online learning decades ago. In one way this is reassuring, as we have managed to incorporate online learning. In another way this is troubling, as there are many who still struggle with online learning, or deny its value, despite decades of research and experience. Hopefully we will do better with AI in a couple of decades.

Best of ASCILITE 2024

I have booked to attend the ASCILITE 2024 computers and education conference at the University of Melbourne, 1 to 4 December (being a joint author on one paper). But conferences with multiple streams can be a bewildering experience, so I like to do a best of, in advance. Here are my picks:

Sunday December 1, 2024 09:00

Third Space Symposium: Working well in tertiary education

Dark Green Room B101 (512 capacity) - 2.12.24 December 2, 2024 15:30

David Parsons et al - What does the Ideal Postgraduate Micro-Credential Look Like? A Student Perspective

Pink Room 153 (150 capacity) - 2.12.24 December 2, 2024 11:00

Ekaterina Pechenkina - Navigating the complex terrain of online professional learning

December 2, 2024 12:00

Taneile Kitchingman et al - Implementing an interactive oral task to assess undergraduate psychology students’ attainment of pre-professional competencies

December 2, 2024 15:30

Amanda Samson et al - From Campus to Career: Leveraging Technology to Improve Work Readiness and Industry Engagement

White Room 453 (60 capacity) - 2.12.24 December 2, 2024 14:10

Mehrasa Alizadeh et al - Investigating the impact of online learning platforms on student engagement and learning outcomes: Comparing Zoom with VR

Light Blue Room 253 Tuesday 3rd December

11:00 - 12:00 Scaling-up technology-enhanced authentic learning across a university-wide curriculum innovation program Presented by Elisa Bone

Dark Blue Room 456

14:10 - 14:30 Navigating the terrain of academic publishing in educational technology Presented by Linda Corrin et al

Wednesday 4th December Light Blue Room 253

11:00 - 12:00 Navigating the Generative AI Response: Reflections from Four Universities Presented by Tania Broadley

Impact of Digital Technology on Children Webinar 5 July

Dr. John Worthington,
Educational and Developmental Psychologist 

Educational and Developmental Psychologist, Dr. John Worthington, will be speaking on "Discussions and Case studies of the Impact of Digital Technology on Children and Teenagers, a Clinicians Perspective" at the Mobile Learning Webinar of ASCILITE, 5 July 10:00 am (free, all welcome). For the Zoom participation details, see the ASCILITE website. 

MLSIG Webinar: Discussions and Case studies of the Impact of Digital Technology on Children and Teenagers, a Clinicians Perspective

Title: Discussions and Case studies of the Impact of Digital Technology on Children and Teenagers, a Clinicians Perspective

Speaker: Dr. John Worthington, Educational and Developmental Psychologist

Date: 10am, 5 July 2024 Via Zoom

Abstract: The three case studies drawn from clinical cases. While occasionally, the leading concern may be to do with the child’s use of or interaction with devices, typically the technology concern is a secondary, or even a non-issue until revealed by the history provided and or the assessment itself. Often, when the issue is exposed, the impact is not only on the child but can be wide ranging, and involve parents, siblings, peers, teachers, relatives etc.

About the speaker: Dr. John Worthington provides independent clinical, school and home based assessment and consultation services to support individuals aged 3 years through to adults. http://www.jweducation.com/

ps: Dr Worthington is my brother. 

Nurturing an Academic Community Online

Much as been written about how the Internet is undermining scholarship, and isolating us, but it can also be a way to bring people with common interests together, especially when isolate physically. When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, I found myself physically cut off from colleagues. One thing I did was join the Mobile Learning Special Interest Group (MLSIG) of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE). That proved useful in overcoming isolation, and productive, in writing conference papers, and giving presentations with members of the group. It was not for three years that I actually met any of the members of the SIG, face to face, when I attended an ASCILITE conference face to face. How the groups works is now published in an open access paper, from some of the members.

Reference

Narayan, V., Cochrane, T., Stretton, T., Chanane, N., Alizadeh, M., Birt, J., … Vanderburg, R. (2024). A model for nurturing a networked academic community: #ASCILITEMLSIG mobile learning special interest group. International Journal for Academic Development, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2024.2349930

Curriculum innovation at the research-intensive university

Greetings from the last day of ASCILITE 2023 in Christchurch, where Dr Elisa Bone, Melbourne University is speakin on "More than the sum of its parts: reflections on a networked program supporting curriculum innovation at a research-intensive university". This is especially relevant to where I work at ANU. 

Dr Bone described how UOM planned a hub & spoke model, with instructional designers outposts. This brought central units and faculties together. Now they have triads of education fellows, developers & video production staff.

ps: At the break after I was in a discussion wil som of the ASCILITE MLSig of the influence of SC fi on mobile devices. This reminded me of the not quite real Milesham Organisation.

Flat-pack Learning Analytics

Greetings from ASCILITE 2023 where Leah Macfadyen just spoke on 'The “IKEA Model” for Pragmatic Development of a Customizable Learning Analytics'. The idea is a kit of code to do analysis from the learning management system, in this case Canvas. 

I spent the session wondering where I knew the speaker from. Perhaps when I gatecrashed a UBC staff meeting nine years ago.

Making sense of Learning Designer skills

Greetings from ASCILITE 2023, where Assoc Prof Gilmore from RMIT is talking on an international analysis of qalifications and skills asked for Learning Designers. These are people who help academics and academics produce courses. This is relatively new in school and university systems, but more common in vocational education.

Best of ASCILITE 2023

The 

Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre, 
Photo by Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education ASCILITE 2023 Conference starts next week at the Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre. I have to make difficult choice as to which of the parallel sessions to attend, and the luxury of not having to present (although I expect I will have to chair something). 

MONDAY 4 DECEMBER

0845 - 1000 Plenary - Rakaia Room
0930 -1030 Keynote address: Being effective isn’t authentic: Building digital education culture David White

1030-1100 Morning Tea + Poster Viewing

11:00 AM Conway 4, Assoc Prof Dawn Gilmore, Academic Director, RMIT Online

Qualifications, Interpersonal Skills, and Career Pathways: Building a Competency-Based Tool for the Recruitment and Career Development of Learning Designers

1:30 PM Rakaia Room Dr Shannon Rios, Lecturer, The University of Melbourne

Authorship Verification in Software Engineering Education: Forget ChatGPT and Focus on Students' Academic Writing Profiles

3:40 PM Conway 4 Dr Kashmira Dave, Lecturer, Academic Development, University of New England

Beyond Appearances: Unveiling the Hidden Biases in Hiring Academics in Australian Universities

ps: I will be in and around the 3 to 6 December. Happy to catch up with people, and give a talk, if someone has an audience and venue. 

In Christchurch NZ for ASCILITE 2023 3 to 6 December

Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre, 
Photo by Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

What is there to do in Christchurch in December? I will be in and around the Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre, 3 to 6 December for the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education ASCILITE 2023 Conference. I don;t have a paper to give, just a Mobile Learning Special Interest Group (MLSIG) session to contribute to. Happy to catch up with people, and give a talk, if someone has an audience and venue. 

What to do and not do with Augmented Reality for Education

Greetings from the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group (MLSig) meeting with Dr. Patrick O'Shea, at  Appalachian State University. His most recent paper is "Educational Practices and Strategies with Immersive Learning Environments: Mapping of Reviews for using the Metaverse". He characterized Apple's new headset as "Mixed Reality" (MR), combining features of AR & VR. He has been thinking about the implications of such tools broadly for education, but is frustrated by the lack of research into long term use. His podcast is "The Versatilist".

What is Coming Soon with Educational Technology in Australia and New Zealand

ASCILITE have released their first "Scanning the Australasian Ed Tech Horizon: The 2021-2022 Contextualising Horizon Report" (Campbell, Porter, Logan-Fleming, & Jones, 2022). It is a big title for a relatively short 47 page report. This covers  rethinking lectures and assessment, blended learning, Co-design and Microcredentials. The bigger picture is covered with rethinking the university experience, and support for staff and learners. This will be useful for administrators and academics considering what to do post-COVID. 

The most telling point for me in the report was:

"Higher education needs to mainstream assessment design that better prepares graduates with 21st century skills for an ambiguous future". 

 (Page 15, emphasis added). 

The key point here is "mainstream". We already know how to improve assessment, and a few of us are doing it. The problem is to make this use widespread, and routine, not something novel a few do. Online learning, was proven years before COVID, but took the threat of financial ruin, and death, to make mainstream. Hopefully improved assessment can be introduced without a similar crisis. But it may take a little pressure from funding and accrediting bodies, to push universities into this.

I was one of those who pressed for my professional body to require students to have 21st century communication and teamwork skills. Universities agreed to do this, not necessarily because they thought it was a good idea, but because if they did not they would not be accredited and international students would not enroll. It takes a staff with new qualifications to teach these new skills.

The report is optimistic about online learning: 

"Higher education learners are choosing the convenience and flexibility of online learning, and it is therefore less likely that higher education will flip back to face-to-face teaching to the same extent as has occurred in the school sector. Learners in higher education are largely there by choice and will likely select providers that enable them to juggle study as part of their increasingly complex lives." (Page 15)

However, how will these online learners be treated? Pre-COVID-19, most university students were studying mostly online, despite being officially registered on campus. The students took advantage of the online services offered. COVID-19 forced universities to take online students more seriously, and not pretend they weren't there (or they were in the classroom). Especially in the case of international students, online mode creates marketing and administrative problems for universities. It is difficult to market online study as a premium product with high fees. If a student has to turn up to campus to meet the requirements of a student visa, then dejour online courses are not relevant.

Designing for online, blended and synchronous learning for computing students

Today I talked to the participants of Thomas Cochrane's "Design for Transformative Mobile Learning Design BootCamp", along with other authors of the paper, "Analysing mobile learning designs: A framework for transforming learning post-COVID" (2022). 

My notes on "Designing for online, blended and synchronous learning for computing students" are available. 

The talk gave me a needed confidence boost, as I was writing Some Thoughts on the Future of Australian Higher Education, and thinking: "What do I know about higher education?". After the talk, I realised "I know something about it", as Dr McCoy would say. ;-)

Reference

Cochrane, T. D., Narayan, V., Aiello, S., Alizadeh, M., Birt, J., Bone, E., Cowie, N., Cowling, M., Deneen, C., Goldacre, P., Sinfield, D., Stretton, T., & Worthington, T. (2022). Analysing mobile learning designs: A framework for transforming learning post-COVID. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 38(4), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.7997

GPT3 + AI: What is the human value in light of AI developments?

Next week I am helping with a webinar on AI and education (announcement below). AI has the potential to help students, by providing very dedicated personal tutoring, but risks making plagiarism much worse. In 2018 I took part in a workshop were participants built a tutor chatbot. Even in this primitive form it had potential for answering routine questions from students. However, that for of AI required the knowledge to be manually encoded by an expert. Much attention in recent years has been on AI which learns for itself. The OpenAI research laboratory, with for-profit and non-profit arms has come to prominence with AI trained using material on the Internet. Best known is GPT3, which can answer questions and write text. The Openai beta provide a simple question and answer demonstration. I had fun asking the algorithm some questions:

Q: How can we stop students cheating?

A: There is no one answer to this question as the reasons why students cheat vary. Some possible solutions include increasing the consequences for cheating, providing more opportunities for academic help, and increasing the difficulty of assignments.

A very plausible answer, although the first sentence could apply to anything. As one person at the seminar commented, it is the sort of answer a politician gives: vague on details.

Q. How successful was Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

A: There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the success of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic depends on a variety of factors, including the type of online learning platform used, the quality of the online learning content, the students' prior experience with online learning, and the students' level of motivation. However, overall, online learning appears to have been successful for many students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The start of this answer seems to use the same formula as thew previous one, to say there are many factors. It has that same vague quality to the balance of the answer.

Q: Who is Tom Worthington?

A; Tom Worthington is an Australian information technology academic, consultant and commentator. He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University.

A bit out of date: I am now an Honorary Senior Lecturer, and the School is now just "Computing".

What is more worrying is that AI has reached the point where it could write a plausible student paper. One way to address this is to use AI to look for the characteristics of AI written work. Another is to teach students about AI, and where it can be legitimately used.

GPT3 + AI: What is the human value in light of AI developments?

presented by The ASCILITE Mobile Learning SIG
28 October @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am AEST Free

In this presentation, the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group members will explore the implications of Artificial Intelligence for higher education. The panel will demo some of the current possibilities with AI generators for Art, Text, Video and Assessment. This will be followed by a discussion of the state of the art of AI and implications.

Language Teaching Tech Innovation

Greetings from the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group, where Paul Raine, developer of Zengengo, is talking on developing apps for language teaching. He is in Japan, along with two other of the Sig members, some are in NZ, and the rest Australia. He is discussing how to develop mobile versus web applications. As well as being a teacher and entrepreneur, he has published academics papers on language learning, and a series of webinars.

An import point Paul made was that web based products need to have a source of revenue. Edmodo recently shut down due to a lack of advertising revenue.

Paul suggested you don't have to throw away the Learning Management System investment, such as in Moodle, but can add new functions, for example language learning.

Paul is getting into the theory, with Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The practical implications of this is that students need help to learn, step by step. 

Virtual Reality for Language Teaching

Neil Cowie

Mehrasa Alizadeh

Mehrasa Alizadeh (International Professional University of Technology Osaka) and Neil Cowie (Okayama University) are speaking on "The Affordances and Challenges of Virtual Reality for Language Teaching" at the free ASCILITE Mobile Learning SIG monthly open webinar, 22 July at 10:00 am AEST.

Academic integrity and AI

 Just attended the ASCILITE seminar "A positive approach to academic integrity and the potential future of artificial intelligence", with Ishpal Sandhu & Patrick Lynch,from RMIT University. They discussed the potential and pitfalls of AI with issues such as student plagiarism. One of the audience asked how they could see the tools used, without signing up to a contract cheating site. So I did a quick search and found an interface to an AI system. I asked it a few questions, and got answers which seem very plausible, at a casual glance:

Q: How can we stop students cheating?

A: There is no one answer to this question as the reasons why students cheat vary. Some possible solutions include increasing the consequences for cheating, providing more opportunities for academic help, and increasing the difficulty of assignments.

A very plausible answer, although the first sentence could apply to anything. As one person at the seminar commented, it is the sort of answer a politician gives: vague on details.

Q. How successful was Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

A: There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the success of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic depends on a variety of factors, including the type of online learning platform used, the quality of the online learning content, the students' prior experience with online learning, and the students' level of motivation. However, overall, online learning appears to have been successful for many students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The start of this answer seems to use the same formula as thew previous one, to say there are many factors. It has that same vague quality to the balance of the answer.

Q: Who is Tom Worthington?

A; Tom Worthington is an Australian information technology academic, consultant and commentator. He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University.

A bit out of date: I am now an Honorary Senior Lecturer, and the School is now just "Computing".