Converting a F2F training to a Distance Learning Format

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. 

Click on link below to download the pdf of file on the planning stages of topic above. http://www.mediafire.com/?wdzhm5ygh4bimdh

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.

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

Mindmap

Idea of Distance Learning on Prezi

Instructional Designers Needs to Consider Learning Theories in Technology

In my eyes, an Instruction Designer role is very similar to the role as a Behaviorist in the school setting.  Both roles work directly with students and the ability to train staff, especially teachers.   When working with students, one has to consider how am I going to effectively engage the student to learn?  In the readings we learned about how to motivate a student and where a student may fall in the different kinds of learning theories and what type of learning styles can be used to increase learning.

Behaviorism theory has always been the center of my belief system when it came to learning.  I have always thought my own skills were built from this theory until now.  In this course I have learned multiple theories; Cognitivist, Constructivist, Connectivism, Social Learning (Ormrod, 2009).  Post conversations with my peers have presented me that not everybody falls under Behaviorism and that the other theories can relate to their needs of learning.   As I implemented ideas from these theories to try to figure out my students learning styles, I came to realization that there are only two kinds of learning theories, Cognitive and Behaviorism theory, everything else falls into these theories.  My most recent blog entry before this has my reason why I believe this to be true. 

When I train teachers I would always consider their input before I would implement interventions for the classroom or student. This course had me think: if I can figure out how the teacher’s learning style is then this will help in what type of approach I can use to train them.    All of these face to face interactions have been wonderful on implementing interventions for my program, but as an instructional designer I will not have the advantages of having face to face interactions.  I will have to learn how to transfer all of personal interactions onto a computer program.  I have already been able to utilize programs like excel and online programs to help view my data.  When I would show teachers graphs on theirs students learning performance, they are amazed to see the numbers.   I would tell them the data is always there, it just needs to be organized and this information can easily be formatted by technology.  As I start to convert from behaviorist to instructional designer I will now need to find ways to convert my skills to be utilized completely by technology.

When I studied undergraduate at Rutgers U, online learning was not available to me.  Retrieving information for my papers meant having to physically go to the library.  While in the library card catalogs were no longer available, computer stations were present and had to use the iris system to find information.  We have come along way from this.  Now I can find everything I need from the comfort of my home, just as long as I have a computer with internet access.  Today, Connectivism becomes the digital library, but the library has also expanded beyond the workings of scholars.

In the digital world any body can post their opinion without having any discipline in learning the material.  Connectivism is how or where the learner accesses information, this makes online learning successful. 

Google search engine is my key to the internet knowledge.  Everything I have found came from there.  I even use Mozilla Firefox as my web browser.   Firefox allows me to place as many bookmarks on my browser tab at once, this add on is called speed dial.  On my browser tab I can place multiple groups each labeled for different functions.  I have one group has my bills, another has free websites for education, my work bookmarks, personal websites, and websites for Walden course information.  Each group can hold between 2 rows and 2 columns of live bookmark screens to infinite amount of rows and columns.  Now infinite amount of screens would be hard to see so I would suggest no more than 10 rows and 10 columns.  I have each of my groups set to 6 rows with 6 columns.

 In the start of this course I have learned to use BlogSpot as a blog, before I have used it to set up a website for my wife’s side business.  Google reader was a nice site to learn as I have Google reader app placed on my droid phone.  On down time at work I can quickly access people’s feeds.  I am trying to find an App that can handle Walden’s University’s platform, but I still have not succeeded.  There are so many applications out in the internet that can be used for education purposes, to learn and to facilitate learning. 

Since there has been an increase in resources in the internet this will give a large amount of learning processes to occur, but the down fall is knowing which resource are true and which are not.  As I mention before the internet has no filter for discipline on the knowledge it is reporting.  As a learner the ability to filter the information on the internet also becomes a learning process.

Connectivism Academic Mapping