Paper published in IJMEST http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020739X.2015.1076895

Diana Quinn presented, co-authors Amie Albrecht, Brian Webby, Kevin White

University of South Australia

 Photo link available here

Cautious about moving courses online. Courses to be open access too.

Format of courses to be kept standard to make it easier to navigate.

Moodle tip: Can set only to accept pdf uploads.

Used Moodle tool ‘Dialogue’ one-on-one dialogue between student and staff.

Coordinators selected staff to attend professional development. They later coordinated online courses.

Workshops and tutorials for staff.

Well-lit, quiet rooms with good equipment where staff could create videos.

Virtual tours on Camtasia.

Courses ticked off for meeting regulations (according to rubric criteria) months before implementation.

Outcomes

Participant ages 14 – 74!

High pass and failure rates – bi-modal distribution.

Many no-shows who paid $1 000 fee to join!

Some engaged but did not submit assessments – just wanting to learn for themselves.

Kolb’s cycle

Action research

Over 10 cycles of development over 3 years they learnt much about how maths students learn.

Excellent table of issues identified and how they were addressed.

table quinnTable from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020739X.2015.1076895

Student technical skills

Time budget and self-assessment quiz. SMS students to remind them to go online. (If they’re not going online, they’re not reading email!)

Staff technical skills

15 hours of in-house courses for all staff. 20 hours of sitting alongside a tutor and observing before going solo.

Tutorial classes held at 7 or 8 pm.

Staff support

30 min meeting with maths coordinator each week.

Amie Albrecht’s work on Mindsets (Jo Boaler, Carol Dweck). Had a mindset coach and then a mindset course.

Learning analytics showed that discussions were not dominated by a few participants.

3 levels of thinking about teaching (John Biggs, 1999)

  1. What the student is
  2. What the teacher does
  3. What the student does

Try to reduce Transactional Distance by integrating videos and discussions.

Refinements can improve other teaching modes.

Ethics about tracking online learning. Students told about tracking on enrolment. Tell them that improvements will benefit future students as tracking data from past students has helped them.

How clear is this post?