Connor's EDCI 335 Ramblings

The following is a review of the draft learning resource completed by the members of pod 11, and can be found at the above hyperlink.

Positive Points

• The assignment required at least two contexts of challenged learning, and right off the bat it’s evident that those have been taken into account, as we can see the student group contains an ELL and a user from home with only an internet enabled phone.
• The topic, artificial intelligence, or AI, is also very clear from the beginning, as are the learning goals.
• I like the mixed use of multiple learning tools in the first activity.  A quiz, and some competition will stimulate learning in students with differing learning methods, as well as the use of rewards (chocolates).
• The use of text and video is a good way of reaching visual, auditory and reading based learners, reaching students on multiple levels.
• The inclusion of a debate, banter, and group discussion are also good stimuli for learning.
• I appreciate the considerations for students struggling with making groups, or understanding various aspects of the lecture, you seem to be quite considerate of the different struggles that your students might face.

Recommendations

• One recommendation I would make to increase the readability of the resource would be to not stretch the text out so much.  There is very large spacing between lines, many paragraph breaks, and very large page margins, making the resource over 20 pages long, with an excess of white space.
• There is minimal use of headings, or indentation to show change of flow.  I would recommend using white space to show a change in topic, and adding indentations, titles, and headers as well to help split the block of text into easier to digest language.
•  I noticed that at the beginning you mentioned that there were two special cases among the learning group (ELL, and a remote learner with no laptop), maybe I missed it, I noticed how some activities would be adapted to their needs, but many of the activities made no mention of it.
• The structure of how the different activities are presented varies, it would help readability if they all followed a similar structure, e.g. Title, learning outcomes, description, requirements, etc.
• The last column in the “Preview Session” table has a heading, but no content.  I would recommend either not having it in the table, or having content that says “not applicable”, to show that the content is not in fact missing.  This carries through with the rest of the tables as well.
• The formatting of the table is also difficult to follow, with wide margins, only a word or two per line, and stretching across multiple pages.

Questions

• On the Direct Instruction section, I appreciate the idea of limiting a lecture to just 20 minutes long, but I’m not sure how you came to that number?  Is 20 minutes better than 15 or 30?  Was the length chosen for the amount of content, or to capitalize on student attention span?  How does a 20 minute lecture help minimize costs?
• Is there specific AI software or applications you’re wanting to use for the activities?  I noticed the mention of Siri, but also “There lots of AI app on phone”, so how is a specific app chosen for the lesson?
• I noticed learning outcomes listed for some of the activities, but not for others.  Are the learning outcomes the same for all of them, or different?

Conclusion

I feel as though your content is good, and you’ll be able to help your students understand AI better.  The most significant drawback I see to your learning resource is the formatting and organization.  The use of headings, a table of contents, reduced white space, and clear sections would make your content significantly easier to read and understand.

Good work!!

I chose to go to YouTube, as my preferred video service, and typed in “Electronic Health Record”, which is the main topic of our groups Interactive Learning Resource.  I was greeted with a variety of options, and selected  the video titled Why electronic health records?.

This is a two minute video that does would not directly prompt interaction from my students, or force them to respond in any way inherently, however, it would cause them to think about their own treatment, and how the implementation of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) would positively impact them and others.

After having watched the video, I could suggest that they do a personal activity, and think back on any healthcare that they or a family member had received that could have benefited from an EHR, and then think how much time and effort could have been saved for them, or people they know had an EHR been implemented.  This could help make the idea of an EHR more personal, as it would help the student identify ways in which it could directly impact them.

The students could use a form to submit their responses, with one question being how many instances have they experienced where an EHR could be useful, and a second one being how much of their time could have been saved.  These would be subjective questions designed to make the person think.  There could then be a couple objective questions, for example, what other ways could an EHR benefit society?  If the answers to these questions were submitted via an online form, then we would be able to respond to them through the same tool, providing information for the student.

Creating this activity would cause a minimal amount of work, however, responding to or providing feedback to students would be significantly more work.  It would also be quite difficult to scale the activity for larger numbers as there are very few ways through which the feedback portion could be automated.  However, once a certain number of students participated, the feedback portion could be replaced with a list of anonymous responses from other students to the same question, effectively providing feedback.  This list could be vetted by us so it would show accurate information as well.

I believe that this would be a worthwhile and low effort activity to create, and could help to inform its participants regarding how an EHR can be useful for the population and healthcare in the future.

Overview

As a group, we’ve decided to that for our final interactive learning design, we will be tackling the topic of Electronic Health Records (EHR’s).  EHR’s are longitudinal records of a patient’s medical history, diagnosis’, prescriptions, imaging, etc, that are linked with clinics, hospitals, and various other health facilities (Gagnon et al., p. 2, 2009).  They are important because they allow continuity of care to be maintained across multiple healthcare environments, offering seamless transitions from clinic to hospital to pharmacy.  The instructional approach that I will be analyzing is Open Pedagogies.  I’ll review literature to find it’s characteristics, applications, and ultimately verify whether it aligns with our topic, and if there’s a place for it in our final learning design.

Approach Characteristics

Pedagogy, according to google’s dictionary definition, describes “the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept”.  Along this line, an open pedagogy is the method or practice of teaching in an open manner, presumably free of cost and available to everyone.  This ties in very closely with Open Educational Resources (OER’s), which provide the means and tools to be taught, but leave the teaching to either the person viewing the resource, where often that individual is responsible both for the role of teacher and student in their learning.  Open Pedagogy, by its free nature, very often takes advantage of these OER’s

Pedagogical approaches are split into four main categories, according to Tes Editorial:

1. Behaviorism:  is based primarily on the theory of behaviorism. The teacher is at the center of learning, leading, and decision making.
   • Teacher centered
   • Uses direct Instruction
   • learning is lecture based
2. Constructivism: is based primarily on the theory of constructivism.  Centers around the learner, and is more experientially based.
   • Student centered
   • Project work
   • Learning based on inquiry
3. Social constructivism: is a fusion of the previous two approach characteristics.  It includes student leading and teacher leading themes.
   • collaborative student-teacher process
4. Liberationism: is focused on full provision for students, where the students voice is prioritized, and the classroom experiences a form of democracy.
   • Teacher is a learner
   • Class discover together

(Parker et al., 2020)

Open Pedagogy can then also be described using eight attributes, according to Hegarty:

1. Participatory technologies
2. People, openness, trust
3. Innovation & creativity
4. Sharing ideas & resources
5. Connected community
6. Learner generated
7. Reflective practice
8. Peer review

In order for an Open Pedagogy to be successful, it must incorporate elements from each attribute (Hegarty, p. 5, 2015).

Alignment with our chosen topic

The Open pedagogy model aligns quite well with our chosen topic, and our method of dissemination, as we will not be charging for the educational resource, and it will be openly available, once completed.  With regards to which of the four approaches we will use, there is a high likelihood of the constructivism approach best fitting our needs.  We will not be forming lectures, instead the resource will be a self-guided set of readings, slides, and animations.  At various levels along the way there will be questionnaires, but these are simply for the learner to test their own knowledge, and everything will be at the learners pace.

The behaviorism approach is too rigid for the resources and topic we have in mind, so it does not align well at all.  Additionally, we wish to allow our resource to be accessed by a large number of users at any given time, so direct instruction or leading of any resulting lesson would not work.

The social constructivism approach is more in line, and we may consider having enforced time limits for the quizzes, or making their accurate completion necessary to succeed in the resource, a feature that would lean more towards this approach.  However, at this point that is less likely.  It is still a viable approach, but not as high as that of simple constructivism.

Liberationism, despite being an interesting idea, is also outside the realm of our ability.  Too many significant changes would need to be made to our resource, as well as our direct involvement in every lesson, both of which are unfeasible.

Regarding the attributes, our plan is to incorporate participatory technologies, specifically teaching about them, and using them for learning exercises.  The second, third and fourth also clearly align with our topic of EHRs, as we are trying to increase knowledge of the need for such technology, and understanding of how it works to spark innovation and change in our health sector.  This in turn will help to connect people through a shared knowledge and understanding.  We are planning on incorporating a simple web-based game that would include learner generated scenarios, incorporating attribute six.  reflective practice and peer review are slightly more challenging, but we hope to expose our resource to a number of our peers before applying it, in the hopes that they can suggest improvements and changes that we may have overlooked.

Place in Final Interactive Learning Design

There is a very high likelihood that the Open Pedagogical approach is either the main approach, or one of the approaches to be used in designing our educational resource.  More specifically, using a constructivist approach.  We strive to touch on each of the Open Pedagogy attributes as well, as most of them seem pertinent to our chosen topic, and will most likely increase the quality of our product.

References

Gagnon, M.-P., Shaw, N., Sicotte, C., Mathieu, L., Leduc, Y., Duplantie, J., Maclean, J., & Légaré, F. (2009). Users’ perspectives of barriers and facilitators to implementing EHR in Canada: A study protocol. Implementation Science, 4, 1–8. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1186/1748-5908-4-20

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources. Educational Technology,55(4), 3-13. Retrieved May 26, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/44430383

Parker, Kate, et al. “What Is Pedagogy?” Tes, 26 Feb. 2020, www.tes.com/news/what-is-pedagogy-definition.