I was given an assignment to convert a face to face training
to a distance learning format: A blended online training. Below you will see how I plan for this type
of change and given example of a past experience that has worked for me. The key to converting this type of training
is to know who you are presenting to, and make your changes that will work best
for that audience and always practice the training before the real training to
get the kinks out of the implementation stage.
Showing posts with label Distance Learning 2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Distance Learning 2. Show all posts
Monday, October 24, 2011
Converting a F2F training to a Distance Learning Format
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Evaluation of an Open Source Online Course from Stanford Engineer
Introduction
The course I decided to evaluate is an open source online
course offered from Stanford Engineering, http://www.ml-class.org/course/video/preview_list , even though
the course is coming from an engineering department, the course is called
Machine Learning. I used to be a Mathematics’
major before I switched to Psychology, so this will help me to truly evaluate
the course since math as a lot to do with computer programing that can lead to
AI- Artificial Intelligence. These
online videos are based on linear algebra.
The pre-requisite skills are the
Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Calculus I, II, & III. The ideas of Linear Algebra are a different
way to solve problems with multiple variables that leads to computer
coding. When looking into the course you
will hear words like matrices, vectors, and linear equations. Now let us see how they planned and developed
this course for distance learning.
Description &
Planning of Course
The title of the course is Machine Learning; here there are
a set of 3 sections called Introduction, Linear regression with one variable,
and Linear Algebra review, which the last one is optional. All of the sections consist of videos to
watch all within a certain length of time.
The longest video runs for 14 minutes and the shortest video is 6
minutes. Within the introduction there
are 4 videos available that goes in linear order starting with the first video
called Welcome. Below is how the sections
are set up.
I.
Introduction
A.
Welcome – running 7 minutes
B.
What is Machine Learning- running 7 minutes
C.
Supervised Learning- running 12 minutes
D.
Unsupervised Learning- running 14 minutes
II.
Linear Regression with one variable
A.
Model Representation- running 8 minutes.
B.
Cost function-running 8 minutes
C.
Cost Function- Intuition I- running 9 minutes
D.
Cost –Function- Intuition II- running 9 minutes
E.
Gradient Descent- running in 11 minutes
F.
Gradient Descent Intuition- running in 12 minutes
G.
Gradient Descent for Linear Regression- running
in 10 minutes
H.
What’s Next- running in 6 minutes
III.
Linear Algebra Review
A.
Matrices and vectors- running in 9 minutes
B.
Addition and Scalar Multiplication –running in 7
minutes
C.
Matrix Vector Multiplication- running in 11
minutes
D.
Matrix & Matrix Multiplication- running in
11minutes
E.
Matrix Multiplication Properties running in 9
minutes
F.
Inverse and Transpose running in 11 minutes
Each of the videos
follow the same layout, you will see a person sitting in front of his computer
screen, he turns toward the camera and begins to talk about the topic having the video zoom towards the
computer screen. Then as you look on to
the screen of the computer you will no longer see the person talking but you
will be able to hear him. The person
talking (the voice) is always talking about the topic you see on the screen and
when the screen starts to show a problem to work on, the voice then describes
how to solve the problem using as many visual cues as possible. Below is a picture of one screen with the
voice describing the procedures on how to solve the problem.
Figure 1
As you can see in Fig. 1,the voice goes through the problem he
lets you know which number he is dealing with by highlighting it with a certain
color, and h when he moves along the problem and to another number he changes
the color of the highlighter, so when you want to pause the video you can see
the connection of which numbers are used.
This procedure is great, because you can see how to solve the problem
exactly as if you had a tutor in front of you as a F2F set up. Another edition that is great is the practice
function. When you look back on the
picture you can see two yellow hash lines on the video timeline, these markings
let you know when a practice exercise is available. When you get a chance to work on the problem
you get a choice to skip or submit your answer.
There would be 4 answers to choose from, only one is correct. When you
pick your answer and click submit you will be told at that point if it’s
correct or incorrect. If incorrect you can
still work on the problem to get it correct, or if you don’t want to you can still
have the choice to skip it. There is no
place on the video for you to write the problem out, you will still need a
piece of paper and a writing utensil. During
the video clip playing you have the choice to press previous video or next
video and to zoom in on the screen 1x, 1.2x, and 1.5x.
Conclusion
This open source online program was very well planned with
visual cues to follow along and activities for the learner to participate (Simonson,
2009). Allowing the screen to be legible
with multiple options of increasing the screen which would make the letters and
numbers bigger (Simonson, 2009). The lengths
of the videos are short to keep the student interested in the topic (Simonson,
2009). Giving the student options to
skip the problem or to see the videos multiple times gives the student options
when taking the course (Simonson, 2009).
I enjoyed this course layout so much I gave the link to one of my
students in high school who is thinking about electrical engineer for study,
now he gets a chance to see the topics and get more information about the
subject. He was able to follow along and
answered the problems from the Linear Algebra review.
Thank you Andrew Ng for making this open
source online course.
References:
Machine Learning Retrieved October 6, 2011 from http://www.ml-class.org/course/video/preview_list
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S.
(2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education
(4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Interactive Tour
Here I need to figure out a solution to a problem given to me for my distance learning course. Question below states:
A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students? When reading this question the first solution I thought was BigBlueButton and afterwards was Teamviewer. Teamviewer is very well developed remote assistance program. It’s an application that can be installed on your any computer device; pc, laptop, Mac, ipad’s, android tablets, smartphones, and iPhone’s. Teamviewer also has a portable version app that can run out of any usb drive. The portable app would have no need to install on any computer device and would still be fully functional. I have used this application for personal use, I had connected my work laptop with my home computer, so if I needed a specific file, for example; for teaching a class I forgot to place a specific video on my work computer, one choice can be to connect to my home computer and play the video on my home computer and watch the video on my work computer that is connected to the projector at the school or another choice can be making a file transfer of the video from my home computer to my work computer and just play the video from my work computer, if I had a student absent from class let’s say he is home sick and I didn’t want him to fall behind, I can send him an email with the potable app in attachment for the student to run his computer, or for a smartphone, download the free app so I can connect with the student and he/she can see the video with their classmates. Teamviewer is great for presentations connected to multiple participants. For the question above this application can connect the students with the Teamviewer and interact with the museum curators and take a tour of the museum. There is a chat function also available for students to interact with other students but there is no way to make group discussions during interactions, but the BigBlueButton can.
Bigbluebutton (BBB) is one of the best interactive distance learning applications I have seen. BBB can replace the traditional classroom by each component. Let’s think about the types of interaction we would come across when students would be in a F2F museum tour. Students would see the tour with their own eyes walking through the museum while hearing what the curator had say about each artwork on display. If the any student had a question they would raise their hand out, waiting for the curator to call on them, of if the curator would ask a question. At times to not make the tour boring I have seen teachers giving the students group projects where they would have to go back to the tour areas they visited and find the answers from the assignment. BBB allows this process to happen without stepping one foot into the museum. BBB is located on a cloud computer, a host site of the school, even embedded onto a LMS/CMS. For this problem from above, BBB is located on host site with a specific login. Everyone involved will have access to BBB with their own login information. When using BBB, the teacher would be the moderator who has control of the presenter and all of the participants; roles can be switched between presenters and participants, click on link to see all the videos of the features bigbluebutton has to offer http://bigbluebutton.org/content/videos.
References
bigbluebutton retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://bigbluebutton.org/overview
Teamviewer retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://www.teamviewer.com/en/solutions/meetings.aspx
A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students? When reading this question the first solution I thought was BigBlueButton and afterwards was Teamviewer. Teamviewer is very well developed remote assistance program. It’s an application that can be installed on your any computer device; pc, laptop, Mac, ipad’s, android tablets, smartphones, and iPhone’s. Teamviewer also has a portable version app that can run out of any usb drive. The portable app would have no need to install on any computer device and would still be fully functional. I have used this application for personal use, I had connected my work laptop with my home computer, so if I needed a specific file, for example; for teaching a class I forgot to place a specific video on my work computer, one choice can be to connect to my home computer and play the video on my home computer and watch the video on my work computer that is connected to the projector at the school or another choice can be making a file transfer of the video from my home computer to my work computer and just play the video from my work computer, if I had a student absent from class let’s say he is home sick and I didn’t want him to fall behind, I can send him an email with the potable app in attachment for the student to run his computer, or for a smartphone, download the free app so I can connect with the student and he/she can see the video with their classmates. Teamviewer is great for presentations connected to multiple participants. For the question above this application can connect the students with the Teamviewer and interact with the museum curators and take a tour of the museum. There is a chat function also available for students to interact with other students but there is no way to make group discussions during interactions, but the BigBlueButton can.
Bigbluebutton (BBB) is one of the best interactive distance learning applications I have seen. BBB can replace the traditional classroom by each component. Let’s think about the types of interaction we would come across when students would be in a F2F museum tour. Students would see the tour with their own eyes walking through the museum while hearing what the curator had say about each artwork on display. If the any student had a question they would raise their hand out, waiting for the curator to call on them, of if the curator would ask a question. At times to not make the tour boring I have seen teachers giving the students group projects where they would have to go back to the tour areas they visited and find the answers from the assignment. BBB allows this process to happen without stepping one foot into the museum. BBB is located on a cloud computer, a host site of the school, even embedded onto a LMS/CMS. For this problem from above, BBB is located on host site with a specific login. Everyone involved will have access to BBB with their own login information. When using BBB, the teacher would be the moderator who has control of the presenter and all of the participants; roles can be switched between presenters and participants, click on link to see all the videos of the features bigbluebutton has to offer http://bigbluebutton.org/content/videos.
References
bigbluebutton retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://bigbluebutton.org/overview
Teamviewer retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://www.teamviewer.com/en/solutions/meetings.aspx
Monday, September 12, 2011
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