Media Rich Asynchronous Online Education with OB3

Gloria Gomez

Greetings from ASCILITE 2021 at UNE. This morning there are workshops, and I am in "STUDENTS AND TEACHERS CO-DESIGNING MEDIA-RICH DOCUMENT RESOURCES IN AN ASYNCHRONOUS VIRTUAL PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT". This is with the product OB3 from NZ, presented by Gloria Gomez. I was worried this would just be a sales pitch, but it is well founded in pedagogy, addressing a real problem, and could be applied with other tools.

The issue of engaging asynchronous materials is one I have been investigating since I stared teaching at a university 20 years ago. I have had supervised individual students and teams working building a "Async-Sync Learning System", with limited success.

The examples used for the workshop were from University of Sydney medical courses, which have a lot in common with the STEM computer courses I teach. The model where students jointly create course content in the form of a Wiki, and review it, could be applied in computing and other STEM subjects. With this approach students are assessed both on content contribution and collaboration.

Having been a student of collaborative work, and set it for a class with hundreds of students, the question for me was how not to get overwhelmed by the quantity of detail to assess. 

OB3 provides a system for students to jointly assemble complex documents, with tutors able to keep track which student contributed what. What could be added to this, I suggest, is a way for students to peer assess, and then the tutor assess the peer assessment. That would help with situations like mine, in ANU Techlauncher, where I have hundreds of students to keep track of.

Reference

Gomez, G., Daellenbach, R., Kensington, M., Davies, L., & Petsoglou, C. (2017). Benefits of enabling lecturers and students to author, share and discuss media-rich documents for online study. In Digital poster presented at ASCILITE 2017 at 34th International Conference on Innovation, Practice and Research in the Use of Educational Technologies in Tertiary Education. http://2017conference.ascilite.org/program/benefits-of-enabling-lecturers-and-students-to-author-share-and-discuss-media-rich-documents-for-online-study-2/