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From learners to educators
(2020)
The rapid growth of technology and its evolving potential to support the transformation of teaching and learning in post-secondary institutions is a major challenge to the basic understanding of both the university and the communities it serves. In higher education, the standard forms of learning and teaching are increasingly being challenged and a more comprehensive process of differentiation is taking place. Student-centered teaching methods are becoming increasingly important in course design and the role of the lecturer is changing from the knowledge mediator to moderator and learning companion. However, this is accelerating the need for strategically planned faculty support and a reassessment of the role of teaching and learning. Even though the benefits of experience-based learning approaches for the development of life skills are well known, most knowledge transfer is still realized through lectures in higher education. Teachers have the goal to design the curriculum, new assignments, and share insights into evolving pedagogy. Student engagement could be the most important factor in the learning success of university students, regardless of the university program or teaching format. Against this background, this article presents the development, application, and initial findings of an innovative learning concept. In this concept, students are allowed to deal with a scientific topic, but instead of a presentation and a written elaboration, their examination consists of developing an online course in terms of content, didactics, and concept to implement it in a learning environment, which is state of the art. The online courses include both self-created teaching material and interactive tasks. The courses are created to be available to other students as learning material after a review process and are thus incorporated into the curriculum.
Many prediction tasks can be done based on users’ trace data. In this paper, we explored convergent thinking as a personality-related attribute and its relation to features gathered in interactive and non-interactive tasks of an online course. This is an under-utilized attribute that could be used for adapting online courses according to the creativity level to enhance the motivation of learners. Therefore, we used the logfile data of a 60 minutes Moodle course with N=128 learners, combined with the Remote Associates Test (RAT). We explored the trace data and found a weak correlation between interactive tasks and the RAT score, which was the highest considering the overall dataset. We trained a Random Forest Regressor to predict convergent thinking based on the trace data and analyzed the feature importance. The result has shown that the interactive tasks have the highest importance in prediction, but the accuracy is very low. We discuss the potential for personalizing online courses and address further steps to improve the applicability.