Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Linking to Objectives in the OERPUB editor (a prototype between MIT OEIT folks and OERPUB)

Decorative, colorful concept map
Learning Objectives, Concept Maps
Image: By Sborcherding at en.wikibooks
[Public domain],
from Wikimedia Commons
The exploration: When creating textbooks and interactive learning activities, wouldn't it be cool if authors (and eventually others) could easily link material to learning objectives? This is the second exploration that OERPUB, Lumen Learning, and MIT's Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) took on together in Salt Lake City. Linking materials (textbook, activities, videos, quizzes) to learning objectives makes them easier to find, and could also allow navigation by objective rather than by a single linear path through the material.

The Scenario: An author is writing a textbook or course in the OERPUB editor. Perhaps it is a physics course, and the course has a set of objectives that it teaches (or hopes to). The author is writing a section on lattices and the ways that x-rays scatter through crystalline structures. Since the physics department at MIT has defined this as a learning objective, it would be great if the author could easily specify that a reading teaches this objective.

The Components: MIT's OEIT has a service for storing and looking up learning objectives, called MC3. MC3 has an API for returning learning objectives. Before we got together, Cole Shaw took the OERPUB editor and embedded it in a page that connects with the MC3 server. The screenshots below show his prototype. He added a new "widget" to the editor for adding an activity and wired it up to include an objectives drop down. The choices in the drop down are coming from the MIT's objectives server. He copied an existing widget and modified it.

shows the editor with a drop down added to choose which server to get objectives from and which set of objectives to use.
Cole added a top toolbar for choosing where objectives
should be looked up.

Shows a drop down "Bragg's Law Outcom 3B1" is chosen from amoung a set of options.
Here is the drop down in an activity added to the document. The choices
are looked up live. Once one is chosen, it is added to the activity.

And then when we all got together, Cole and Tom Wooward worked together to take Cole's work and make it a widget that works in the github-bookeditor. That is shown below. Tom also showed Cole some of the ways to configure educational widgets within the editor. (That also tells us where we need to improve documentation for developers.)
Shows a "Read"ing activity, with "Bragg's Law" chosen as the objective
This is the same widget, but in the github-bookeditor. The
server to query is hard-coded. This will live on a branch
to show how such a thing can be done.

Really making this kind of thing widely useful for general users of the editor, requires more thought, time, and effort. MIT is hosting their own course objectives, and their software provides the store and lookup service. But these aren't general purpose. The user interface would need to provide ways of configuring which objectives are relevant, etc.

If we did come up with a way to do something like this, I would love to see a way to make choosing an objective a standard option on all content sections and educational widgets. In other words, an author could attach an objective to essentially anything within the HTML and the editor would provide an easy UI for doing that and a simple encoding as metadata to store in the document. I think that would probably be Schema.org's educationalAlignment.   

Technical notes and links:

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Sprinting to embed assessments and learning objectives with MIT, Lumen Learning, and OpenAssessment

Shows a quiz in a textbook page too small to see
Idea: Wouldn't it be cool to have a really easy way to embed interactive assessments in textbooks, epubs, and courses?

People: The folks I have just been meeting with thought so and we got together to explore a few prototypes. I have been in Salt Lake City working in the Marriott Library at University of Utah, hosted by David Wiley of Lumen Learning, and joined by Brandon Muramatsu and Cole Shaw of MIT's Office of Education Innovation and Technology (OEIT), Justin Ball and colleague James from Atomic Jolt consulting, and Tom Woodward of OERPUB via Daft Labs.

Scenario: The following scenario sets up our first exploration. Lumen Learning is adapting a biology textbook from Open Stax College. They are creating courseware for college faculty that takes each section and adds interactive, formative assessments, and discussions and analytics and other cool stuff. They are creating completely open banks of questions to go along with the books and these will live at openassessments.org. Open Assessments is building a quiz player that works like a youtube video player. You find a quiz you like and use a simple embed code to include that anywhere you want.

Exploration: So what we wanted to explore was including the ability to find and add a quiz from Open Assessments in the OERPUB editor. So, imagine you are creating a textbook section, or a learning activity for college biology and you have just written the section on parts of the cell, and you want to help students retain what they have learned. So you click on the 'quiz' button in the editor, and search for quizzes about cells, preview the quiz, and pop it in. This is what we put together yesterday. Keep in mind this is code written quickly to see how to do this kind of thing while we had all the experts together. It isn't polished and beautiful. But the impressive thing is that we got this done in a couple of hours. The following screen shots show what we did.

"Insert an Assessment", with two fields, "Assessment url", or "Search"
After clicking on the quiz widget in the editor, search
for "cells".

"Insert an Assessment", with "Search" field filled in with "cells"
The search uses openassessments.org's API,
and returns one result. Click on "select" to preview it.
Shows "Question 2 of 3" about parts of a cell, with "golgi body" selected as the answer.
Preview the assessment to make sure it is what you want. The
preview is live, so you can check the answers and all the
questions in the quiz.


The quiz is embedded in the content and will play in the editor
and also in the textbook as long as there is an internet
connection. The quiz is being played by openassessments.org.
The actual quiz is stored as a qti file at openassessments.






Technical notes and links:
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