Lightning Talk
Sarah Berry
Portland State University
Biography
Sarah Berry is an instructional designer specializing in participatory, inquiry-‐based learning and STEM pedagogy. She has a PhD in film and media studies and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunication from NYU.
Abstract
The last ten years have seen both the development of new web-‐based learning environments and the acceleration of a financial crisis in higher education. It’s now argued that the main opportunity provided by the internet is to scale up delivery of learning via the MOOC paradigm of online presentations and limited student interaction. Those in the trenches of instructional design, however, see most MOOCs as throwbacks to the correspondence-course-like beginnings of online learning. The real challenge for web-based learning is how to foster quality small-scale interactions.
The most common approach to designing a large-‐scale course with small-‐scale interactions is to put learners into group discussion boards or blogs. But this model doesn’t work for experiential collaboration, which is crucial for certain kinds of learning experiences. In their face‐to‐face form, these classes use a pedagogy of brief direct instruction followed by small group breakouts for collaborative inquiry and design projects, which are then shared with the whole class for feedback. The group interactions have a very high positive impact, so putting an online cohort into individual home lab projects would be an inferior option.
My current solution to this challenge is to use multiple Google Video Hangouts in each class. Initial tests show that video webcams give learners the freedom to move around, do stuff in front of the camera, and share ideas spontaneously with a full range of audiovisual and gestural communication. The groups on video present to the class, along with the in-‐ class groups, and see the other groups via an in-‐class webcam that shares the projected video with each Google Hangout.
What does all this mean in terms of the constant demand to “scale up” the size of college courses? Only that innovations like free video conferencing make it possible to expand opportunities to those who need or want to work online without sacrificing the central goals of participatory, collaborative learning.