Everything you need to know about animation-based learning — from elearningindustry.com by Huong Giang Bui When people talk about education, they often stress the formal side of learning like delivering knowledge, getting high scores on exams, etc. But animation-based education is here to up the game, with animation you can get fun, practical, and informative learning all at the same time!
Excerpt:
What Is Animation-Based Learning? While it sounds like it, animation-based learning is not all about visual materials. Rather, resources such as videos, infographics, and GIFs are used in tandem with existing resources when employing this method. This can be applied to many different fields, from scientific visualizations to corporate training schemes; from motion-graphic narratives used in primary courses to university-level demonstrations.
One insight Lepper brought is that when education software tools simply list all the errors students made and points out what they should have done instead, what many end up hearing is, “You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.” For students, this is a discouraging engagement,Lepper says.
“That kind of feedback would be perfect if you had a robot learner on the other end,” he says. “The robot learner would be delighted to have you say, ‘Okay, you made three errors in problem number one,’ and being a robot learner, they’d be able to take out those bugs and do better the next time. Real kids, especially real kids who are kind of phobic about math and who think they can’t do it, they leave and say, ‘See I can’t do it.’”
Sandwich method — Include the strengths of student’s reasoning or responses in addition to your constructive critique(s)
Acknowledge student contributions
Let them know you care and appreciate them
What’s timely feedback? The quicker the better, but whatever your availability is, tell what students can expect, and stick to that. Put that into your syllabus along with communication methods (email, LMS message, phone, other)
Here are some design tips to increase the probability for success.
Structure the course so that there are opportunities for instructors and peers to provide formative feedback several weeks before final projects/papers are due.
Identify key time frames in the course when instructors will be heavily engaged in providing written or video feedback that is individualized and moves the learning forward.
Create a bank of content-specific feedback comments that instructors can use for common issues and errors.
If end-of-course survey evaluations are low, implement strategies to provide feedback that directly connects to learners as individuals.
If you teach and grade papers in a professional discipline, provide feedback related to the course and program learning outcomes, and focus less on grammar and language usage.
This is a chapter of that book. It will be available on June 15.
The thing everyone wants is not a technology, it’s engagement. The same kind of engagement that you would have in real life, but better, faster, cheaper *and safer* than it was before.
Augmented, Virtual, and other mixed reality technologies are rapidly emerging and advancing, creating new and exciting opportunities for training and education. XR for Learning collects some of the best XR content that learning professionals can learn from.
Here again, good organization is essential. I organize my content by units that are aligned to tests, so my students always have a clear learning goal in mind. If I have six tests in a semester, I divide the content into six units. Each unit contains an overview for the module, a submodule for each section, a review of the key concepts from the unit, a set of review problems for the unit, and a test. Within section submodules, I give an overview of the objectives, activities for students to engage with and learn the content (reading assignments, videos, animations, homework problems), and a discussion question. I also include modules on getting started with the course, the technology we’ll be using as well as tutoring information and resources.
From DSC: The article below is meant as fodder for thought for us now…until we get back to holding class in physical learning spaces again. But it caught my attention because I’d like to see us give students “More choice. More Control.” in all areas of their learning — whether that be in the physical realm or in the digital/virtual realm.
Simplify the explanations of what you’re presenting as much as possible and break down complex tasks into smaller parts
Don’t place a large amount of text on a slide and then talk about it at the same time — doing so requires much more processing than most people can deal with.
Consider creating two versions of your PowerPoint files:
A text-light version that can be used for presenting that content to students
A text-heavy version — which can be posted to your LMS for the learners to go through at their own pace — and without trying to process so much information (voice and text, for example) at one time.
Design-wise:
Don’t use decorative graphics — everything on a slide should be there for a reason
Don’t use too many fonts or colors — this can be distracting
Don’t use background music when you are trying to explain something
In an increasing number of schools, teachers of very young students are pressured to pack every moment of the day with structured, academically rigorous tasks. One recent whitepaper linked the practice to preparing kids for the long road of schooling ahead, in which progress is measured through standardized testing starting in third grade.
Friedrich Froebel, a pedagogue of modern education, coined the term “kindergarten” in 1840 after recognizing the importance of play in the development of young children. Inspired by the idea of a garden, he designed a classroom where the teacher presented children with objects, which they were allowed to play with in any way they could imagine. When they lost interest in one object, they would be presented with a new one to spark curiosity and creativity. Children were encouraged to grow and flourish in this free form, play-based environment.
From DSC: Given that we are all into a lifelong learning situation now, I vote for more importance being placed on whether someone enjoyed their learning experience. That said, I know there is struggle in learning…and learning in the struggle. But we focus so much on grades and standardized testing. This robs the joy from the teaching and learning environment — for the teachers as well as for the kids.
From DSC: When I saw the learning space as pictured below, I couldn’t help but ask a couple of questions:
Doesn’t this look like a colorful, fun, engaging active learning space?
One that encourages communication and collaboration?
The natural light is wonderful. And the physical setup seems to let the students know that they will be collaborating with each other the second they walk into this learning space…and it does so without saying a word.
From DSC — and with a shout out to Brad Sousa for this resource:
For those involved with creating/enhancing learning spaces as they relate to pedagogies:
How Has Technology Impacted Higher Education? In part one of this three-part series, AVI Systems CTO Brad Sousa talks with Jeff Day, Founder of North of 10 Advisors, to discuss the key ways education and, specifically, pedagogy differs from 10, 5, even 3 years ago.
Discussion Topics
The impact of active learning and the introduction of the internet of things (IoT) in the classroom
Recommendations for deploying modern learning environments with technology partners
Classroom systems design, then and now
Some timestamps (roughly speaking)
5:15 — changes in pedagogy
7:15 or so — active learning
15:30 design needs around active learning
17:15 DE rooms and active learning — software-controlled platform
21:30 — advice; look to outcomes & expectations that want to achieve/meet; uses cases
Media controller w/ intuitive interface to mimic the way someone teaches / way a classroom goes:
“Class start” — chaotic; mics on everywhere
“Lecture” — gates /mics closed and focus shifts to the professor
“Class interaction” — presents roster of who’s there (20:00 mark roughly)
In this first post, I’ll share some preliminary results about video usage, obtained from initial analyses of a few edX math and science courses. Unsurprisingly, students engaged more with shorter videos. Traditional in-person lectures usually last an hour, but students have much shorter attention spans when watching educational videos online. The graph below shows median engagement times versus video length, aggregated over several million video watching sessions:
From DSC: If you have access to a tool like Canvas Studio, then you can probably extend the length of your videos if you are interspersing your videos with a healthy dose of interactivity — i.e., inserting quiz questions every few minutes.
In addition, on the day of a presentation, educators and students now can help every person in the classroom or audience understand what they’re saying by clicking on “Present Live.” Live Presentations enables every audience member to view the presentation on their own device, such as a laptop, tablet or phone. Each audience member can turn on live captioning and choose subtitles from more than 60 languages.They can even navigate between slides, so they don’t miss a single, important detail. The audience is engaged throughout the presentation and sends reactions in real-time.After the presentation, the audience can provide feedback on the content and delivery of the presentation, which educators and students can use to improve skills over time.
Live Presentations will be coming soon to PowerPoint for the web as part of Office Education, which educators and students can access for free. If you haven’t already done so, get started with Office 365 Education now.
From DSC:
If you are using a tool like Cisco Webex in your school, consider implementing the idea below. I’d like to thank Mr. Steve Grant and Mr. Nelson Miller from the WMU-Cooley Law School for their work in implementing/recommending this approach.
If you are using a tool like Cisco Webex, you can use it to share content to displays, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. If the professor starts a Cisco Webex Meeting Center session using their own personal room, the students can then join that meeting via their devices. (To eliminate noise and confusion — as well as to reduce bandwidth — the students should mute their microphones and choose not to send the video from their webcams.)
If you were doing a think-pair-share, for example, and you really liked what a certain pair of students had going on, one of the students could share their work with the rest of the class. By doing so, whatever was going on on that student’s device could be displayed by any projectors in the room, as well as on any other devices that were connected to the Cisco Webex Meeting Room.
“So you could project any student’s work as students proceed with in-class exercises. Projecting student work adds another level of accountability, excitement, and concentration to in-class exercises.”
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Also, using the Cisco Webex Meeting Center in your face-to-face classroom not only opens up that sort of collaboration channel, but, via the chat feature, it can also open up a runningbackchannelto draw out your more introverted students, or those students who have questions but don’t want to have the spotlight thrown on them.
From DSC: Though we aren’t quite there yet, the pieces continue to come together to build a next generation learning platform that will help people reinvent themselves quickly, efficiently, constantly, and cost-effectively.
XR technologies are being used to achieve learning goals across domains.
Effective pedagogical uses of XR technologies fall into one of three large categories: (1) Supporting skills-based and competency-based teaching and learning, such as nursing education, where students gain practice by repeating tasks. (2) Expanding the range of activities with which a learner can gain hands-on experience—for example, by enabling the user to interact with electrons and electromagnetic fields. In this way, XR enables some subjects traditionally taught as abstract knowledge, using flat media such as illustrations or videos, to be taught as skills-based. (3) Experimenting by providing new functionality and enabling new forms of interaction. For example, by using simulations of materials or tools not easily available in the physical world, learners can explore the bounds of what is possible in both their discipline and with the XR technology itself.
Integration of XR into curricula faces two major challenges: time and skills.
The adoption of XR in teaching has two major requirements: the technology must fit into instructors’ existing practices, and the cost cannot be significantly higher than that of the alternatives already in use.
The effectiveness of XR technologies for achieving learning goals is influenced by several factors: fidelity, ease of use, novelty, time-on-task, and the spirit of experimentation.
