Month: June 2020

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.