Prof. Dr. Christian Swertz of the University of Vienna, Media-Pedagogy

Educational metadata as a guideline in online teaching and learning material

(Transcript continued ...) Christian Swertz: There is another aspect of this media. All these media share some common attributes. The first one we had to consider is these online communication media are according to the theory of Marshall McLuhan and cold (cool) media. I assume you heard about McLuhan his idea that 'cool media causees a hot culture'. And the 'hot' culture develops according to McLuhan a desire to a close and intimate communication this desire for close communication. This desire for close communication is met by another point easily seen here as we are using synchronous online communication we always use headset and webcam and this you could see the microphone is pretty close to the mouth you can imagine that you usually get so close to my mouth that you are a few seconds before a kiss, that is close to each other close distance that the voice is recorded only a few centimetres from the mouth. Thus we had to consider the heterogeneity of media on the one hand and the desire for close communication by setting up our learning program.

The second type of heterogeneity is the heterogeneity of methods. In the tradition of teaching and learning there has been a wide range of different methods like 'Up-front teaching', 'Group tuition' and 'Individual learning' and all different types of methods have been successfully used, so these traditions are not only often still appropriate for online tuition but they also determine the expectations of people who experience these methods in school and as these traditional methods shape the students expectations they constitute an essential background for computer assisted teaching and learning. So the basic idea is that we are not inventing a completely new learning environment but that we are shaping a cultural change and while shaping this change we have to refer back to the established and still strong and existing methods teaching and learning.

That point of heterogeneity is the heterogeneity of cultures. In different cultures and more precisely in different media cultures different teaching and learning methods are usually used so while being educated people are getting used to different teaching and learning methods that are usually used in their culture. As adults they expect teaching and learning to happen according to the method they know and if trainers are now in online environments meet trainers of different cultures, these expectations that are most often subconscious are most probably not met and this might lead to a disappointment imagine that this disappointment are often not good for learning. So to avoid this frustration we had to consider the heterogeneity of teaching and learning cultures in our project.

Ok, how can the heterogeneity in media methods and cultures being transferred into an teaching and learning online environment? The best idea whilst setting up our teaching methods in LANCELOT project is to refer to the context that is traditional teaching method and map them to online communication tools.

Basically there are three simple types of learning. First type of learning is 'Individual learning', like reading, writing essays and so on the second type of learning is peer-to-peer activities, group tuition like discussion and reflection. This refleection might include a reflection on teaching and learning experiences and so on and of course the third type of teaching and learning is the teaching and learning 'in a class' like 'Up-front teaching' or 'Instructional discussion'.

So this is basically the simple background we are referring to and now we try to map these three types of teaching and learning to synchronous online media.

Individual learning is covered by an online learning platform. This online learning platform offers material for reading, provides tasks for essays and so on. This is already for use in the environment for an invidividual learning process. This is combined with the synchronous communication that we are using for peer-to-peer tasks or group tuition and actually the evaluation results of our project have shown that this part, the peer-to-peer activity, has become the most important part of the project for student motivation has been really most important and it really worked well because we only had very few drop-outs, I think we started with 23 students and we had 2 drop-outs during a 12 weeks period ... even .. we under-estimated the workload of the students and they had to work twice as much as we thought and still they continued within the program. So this has been pretty successful.

The last thing is 'Classroom interaction'. Classroom interaction has been mapped to web conferencing tools as you have already seen and what we did is, we placed these three methods into a circle. This circle was brought back to the traditional set of presentation acquiring and practicing. So at first, in the online environment, a best practice example is presented, subsequently the students acquired the content by reading about it and by completing some tasks on an individual basis, then they reflect what they have seen in peer-to-peer activities and prepare a presentation. In the last step they present what they present what they have learned in the environment, web conferencing system, where their presentations are supervised by experienced trainers and reflected within the learning group....

So we view this traditional circle but we put a lot of reflection processes in here so at the same time we covered the content of situated learning here. So while doing so we mapped the traditional method to online media and we considered the demand for close communicaiton by putting in lots of communication and reflection tasks so people were very involved into the program. ... After setting up teaching methods we used educational metadata to integrate the program. Here you see a best practise scenario that is presented within the online environment and metadata is shown on top of this example, see that [Scenario] on top is highlighted. There is [Writing exercise] and these two words are derived form the media data vocabulary. Presenting this metadata here provides at the same time an opportunity for learner control or self-directed learning in the environment. We integrated the individual tasks for the learning process the metadata vocabulary. Here you see a [Peer-to-Peer task], so this task appears in the individual learning process but asks you to complete a task that requires peer-to-peer activity. This is how we link the 'Individual learning', the 'Group tuition' and the 'Classroom tuition' together. You see there one point is [Group Session], the individual process refers to the other way round so these things are linked together pretty well.

Another point where we used the metadata vocabulary is for that we had to use different teaching methods in the three strands. So we have three strands in the project, about Tools, about Teaching Methods and about Intercultural Aspects and all these tools had to be organised in different methods and here you see a choice of 'knowledge types' that are used in the 'Tools Strand' and the idea here is to support the student in the decision on the use of the tools. So this is a decision oriented model, we give them the knowledge type they need about which tools to use. Here you see another chart. This is from the 'Intercultural Strand'. The idea here is to reflect on intercultural issues and to increase intercultural awareness, thus the knowledge types that we used intend to support the reflection process of intercultural issues. What we did is, we set up these knowledge types for each strand and then produced the content on the different topics we covered in the strand according to this model. So we used this metadata vocabulary besides of self-directed learning to support the trainer to set up the learning environment accordingly and consistent... As you have seen we have been using different levels with this metadata system, we have 'Media types', 'Knowledge types' and the 'Learning units'. These Learning Units are described by certain topics and you can interpret this whole thing as kind of topic driven, for example forum communication is always oriented by certain topics. The program is arranged around the topics that we used.

Here is a quick look on the vocabulary. Just a quick look, there is no time to talk about this in detail. But if you are interested in this metadata that is called webdidactics so there are papers online that are available so you can read about it. ... We used this metadata vocabulary to set-up these learning sequences. You see on a certain topic you might start with the [Scenario], then [Orientation], [Explanation], [Peer-to-Peer Task], [Collaboration] and [Resources]. And this sequence is again offered to the learner at the top of the screen here. There is a teaching sequence 'Forward-Backward'. This teaching sequence moving through the material 'Forward-Backward' is used at the same time as the individual navigation tools so the student here can choose whether they follow the guided tour that we set up or if they move through the material on an individual basis and the idea is again to support the reflection process. This time the idea is to reflect on the own learning styles and learning ideas so you can decide on your learning style and learning strategy according to the material. (End of Transcript)

Prof Dr. Christian Swertz