8 or Bust - Gamification of Learning

8 Or Bust
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.siddbetter.numbercrunchpaid

Gamification of Learning is a new approach towards making learning fun. 

Mobile games have advantages:
  1) Easily accessible as everyone has a smartphone of their own.
  2) Even parents and grandparents who were never into playing are finding it as a good source of passing time with challenges.
  3) We have so many options to download from Play Store.
  4) Play it at your leisure, while waiting for the bus, in the metro, waiting for the doctor, in long journeys.
  
Games are fun, lovable and addicting. So if games are so much fun, why do we not use gaming at our advantage of introducing learning into it. And Mobile games are here to stay for good or bad ...

Humans think they know the best way to learning but little they know of how the brain functions.When we are kids we play games and learn the most till we go to school, stop gaming and start the formal education.

Research are now recognizing this and advocating to introduce the concept of fun, games in learning.

   

In Siddbetter,  we do not make games with motive of teaching something. Instead we make games which takes some basic fundamental concepts of learning and allows you to play and have fun with intuitive learning. Just like chess, which does not teach you anything but makes you think about your steps ahead, build concentration, make strategies to overcome your opponent.

Siddbetter's "8 or Bust" teaches you -

• Simple rules of using adding/subtracting numbers to reach numbers in line. 
• Pattern recognition of match-3 with same numbers/color. 
• It teaches you concept of even/odd numbers because when the odd number starts appearing the game gets more challenging.  
• It makes the player think of complements of number to identify quickly the add/subtract compatible numbers.
• The patterns can be horizontal/vertical.
• It makes you think ahead of your steps so that you can achieve the better pattern. 
• It requires concentration to be able to find patterns.
• Foremost, it provides you a goal of catching as many cute animals like cats, dogs, butterflies...
• You compete with your friends for a spot in Leaderboard. 

This does not mean, everyone who plays will become the master of multiple skills but the game offers a puzzle and challenge which aids in learning.

e-Learning - New Innovative ways of Learning

A vision for e-Learning describes a future where the effective use of advanced learning technology will reduce the time to learn without compromising the effectiveness and quality of education. It is where the dream of a personal intelligent tutor for every learner is realized.

E-Learning will enable personal customized learning -
- Anywhere
- Anytime
- Any pace

To meet the vision of the future Architecture the trends can be classified in three main areas:
- Innovative Ways of Learning
- Enabling Pervasive Technologies
- Enabling Infrastructures

This blog I try to list Innovative Ways of learning….
Innovative Ways of Learning
This focuses on methodologies in producing e-Learning where the technological solution is transparent to the user. It emphasizes new ways of making the learning more effective and objective.

-Outcome based learning, learning methodology which focusses on aligning a course based on the final outcome based on standard.
Ex- First Grade State standard “Add and subtract within 20”
So the outcome here is learner should be able to add and subtract within 20, if learner is able to do addition and subtraction to that effect then the goal is achieved. Learner can move to next outcome.

This methodology works with setting up a defined goal and then gives concept and exercise to that goal and in end giving test exercise where learner has to answer these questions requiring students to demonstrate that they have learned the required skills and content. It promotes curricula and assessment based on constructivist methods.

-Collaboration & community, As they real fun is doing things together.
This methodology promotes collaborative way of working, giving rise to the way student projects are structured.
The days of isolated learning is disappearing, giving way to models in which students and their teacher collaborate together and understand address issues objectively with real-life examples by collaboration. The geography and location are also becoming immaterial in this paradigm.

- Project based plan, where learning objective is like a project to facilitate learning in measurable milestone programs followed by assessment to measure success of achievement of the milestone objective.

-Lifelong Learning, Learning never stops. One finishing goal shows next milestone to reach.
Learning is not only limited to curriculum and schools but also for personal, civic, social and employment.
There is high requirement for ways of progressing in life to achieve higher salary, better standards of living, and progress in social ladder. This methodology aims improving for current knowledge and expertise and sets up goal for next promotion and train for the job of tomorrow. It makes the practice of professional development a continuous one.

Ex- It takes up the profile of a software developer and quickly draws up a career plan for him like 2 year senior programmer, 4 years managing capabilities…. The plan may list skills required, available options of certifications …

-Adaptive Learning, All learners are unique in their requirement and their skill to learn.
Adaptive-learning is moving away from traditional mass-teaching based one-for-all learning methodologies. There is increasing trend to model the learning programs based on individual learners’ needs, preferences, and learning goals, that is  learning has become  more and more personalized and adaptive.

Adaptive Learning is based on some intelligent engine which compiles the course based on the learners IQ, his performance in earlier assessments.  The engine adapts the content based on the learner’s behavior – like his assessment score, his last questions’ answer, and his behavior in time…

Ex- During assessment, if learner gives wrong answer to an addition question, the next question could be more simple addition question or showing him answer and then putting similar question again.


-Learning Analytics, Analytics is heart of adaptive and optimized learning. Collection of learner behavior, Measurement, Analysis and subsequent reporting or profiling and using that report of profile to adapt the course, next goal or Next assessment question ….

Leaning Analytics models the learner activity, interaction, assessment results and learner profile to predict and in short-term the adaptive learning by course and content customization, learning personalization and in long-term help in finding the learning opportunities based on the objective map and skills.


-E-Portfolio, is kind of management of record for lifelong learning methodology. It is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user. E-portfolios are both demonstrations of the user's abilities and platforms for self-expression. It also record of things that the learner has done over a period of time, and may be directly tied to learner outcomes or rubrics.

E-portfolio is like progressive curriculum vitae of a person.

Trends in eLearning Curriculum

The trends in eLearning Curriculum can be summarized by generational changes and disruptive technology advance to suit the new generation:

This the age of ”Nintendo children” -- raised on video and computer games, Walkmans, the Internet, etc. Ref.  http://www.games2train.com/site/html/article.html

--They work at jet speed. 

--They multi-task – doing homework while watching TV, 

--Always talking to their friends with headphones on, 

--On-demand access instead of sequential. 

--Graphics as main theme and text for elucidating it. 

--"Connected" experience” --Interactive learning, by playing and fun

Trends 

• “A picture is worth a thousand words”!!!

Hence, the learning content i.e. curriculum is going more graphical, interactive with more images, audio, and video files along with text.

• “Adaptive Learning” 

Hence, the need of the tailor-made content instead of standardized content. Student does not want to pick and choose from mass of content based on their requirement. Students want learning more suited to their own learning needs and adapted intelligence to gradually become complex as student start understanding the complex concepts.

• Objective Learning or Outcome based learning

Ref . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome-based_education “Outcome-based education is a student-centered learning philosophy that focuses on empirically measuring student performance, which are called outcomes. OBE contrasts with traditional education, which primarily focuses on the resources that are available to the student, which are called inputs.” Example:-Objective of session could be “Student will be able to add 2-digit addition after this section”.  After the course, student can be assessed with 2-digit addition questions for measuring the student performance. If student scores above 80%, he can proceed for next section else sequence of learning can be adapted for explaining the concept again.

•  Connectivism

Learning is not limited to individuals working their heads out in the deep concepts but emulates the classrooms with students and friends connecting together using internet tools (chat, whiteboards, desktop sharing, video etc) irrespective of geography and time. This connection is in tune with the trends of growing connectivism and social networking evident with increasing mass base of face book and twitter.

•  Participative Active Consumer

Today’s learning is not one-way communication where teachers impart lectures in monotonous mode but is 2-way communication in form of questions, assignment, problem solving, lengthy discussion over shared learning content.

The learning content starts with basic concepts and material which evolves with active contributions from students their comments, notes, annotations, tagging into a more useful content with semantic and meaningful tags (something like our old notes for fast track exam refreshers).

However, this has additional advantages of sharing and thought of multiple minds. It also is digital content with all advantages like find, search, retrieve etc.

• Open Society

There is a trend towards open society where there are no proclaimed experts and no predefined institutions or university authorized for providing learning. But, anybody who can provide knowledge and contribute can be part of this learning phenomenon.

Teacher or Expert can become publisher and write learning in form of blogs and provide knowledge and solve the students’ problems.

Technology Trends 

Technology has to keep pace with e-learning trends to be able to meet the demand requirements.

• The Content development is maturing the way other industries are working. Content is developed as modular granular components (text, images and video) separately and then assembled and aggregated to create the actual e-Learning product. 

• This promotes re-use by allowing the content being utilized in multiple place and product (composition pattern).
• This promotes parallel development by allowing people expert in their areas to develop. e.g Graphics expert developing images, author developing text content, Animation artist developing the animations.
• This also allows for better management over content development by breaking single content into multiple constituents and tracks their progress instead of older method where one author would be working on a single book for years.
• This also allows for “Objective Content” where content units can be linked to their objectives. Allowing for intelligence for adapting content based on the change in objective or changes in better ways of achieving the Objective.

New Specification like SCROM, QTI, and DITA all are based on the same concept of content unit’s aggregations into e-Learning content.

• With content going more digital (mix of images, video, animation), new editors are coming in which allows creating content by assembling this type of content text, images and video.   

The content writers are aiming for more colorful, intuitive and animation learning keeping up with the trends of technology change.  This innovative content makes the learning fun and play and keeps up the interest of the students.

The editors not only allows the content development but adding tags, annotations, comments, notes to add further value to the content. This allows for adding the relationship between objectives to a content unit.

This also allows the Content development based on the Objectives. Thus, “Outcome based content development”.

• Learning Management system (LMS) or eLearning content Delivery systems are getting very intuitive allowing for getting feedback from the learner on the go and adapting the learning sequence and content based on the learner’s needs and skill level.

It mixes the content with periodic assessment to assess skill (measure outcomes) and then change the further sequence of learning based on the outcome/score.

Specification like SCORM has student interaction and feedback collection mechanism which can dynamically drive the learning sequence (Sequence Navigation).

• ELearning Delivery system are getting more connectivist(Web 2.0) in nature.  It allows the multiple students and teachers to connect to with sharing the learning in “Virtual classroom”.

Students can interact over Instant messages (IM), white board (similar to blackboard) , Q&A and forums.  The tele-conference, video-conference, desktop sharing, file sharing al;l features are possible for virtual connectivity and presence.

They can further mark, tag, circle, write notes, underline (almost do anything which can be done on a paper books) to add meaning and write personal contents.

All these transcripts can be saved or recorded for references later. The content with additional notes can be saved and searched like other digital content.   

• ELearning content creation is also getting more open. It is no longer limited to “expert area”. The content today is no longer monologue or standard flow of text but collection of meaningful transcripts and conversation developed over chat, discussion and arguments.  

Past students, hobbyist, Subject Matter Experts and Student all can freely interact without any agents in between to share their thoughts and get feedbacks for improving the content.

Students can freely post their doubts and questions over forums and get the multiple answers which explain the content.

Internet technology, Social Networking, Social Networking Tool and Standard Specification are leading the changes in eLearning Curriculum.  

Technology Trends for School Systems

In last many years, there have been several trends in improving the Schools. There have been constant efforts from Educationists, Teachers and also Government to provide model school environment to produce the better Students.

School Administration focus area is the school infrastructure, classrooms, delivery of learning experience to students.

However, the school along with providing the learning also provides the overall development experience of the student. This may include other than courses support for physical education, library support, special classes like music, karate, swimming etc.

Trend of Integration of school’s disparate systems

The school also provides infrastructure for canteen and food services. Some school provides free nutritional programs for student as per state’s government aid. The school also provides the transport system for pick and drop of student from their residences. Some school also provides boarding services like hostel for outstation students.

Most of these systems are not part of the same school management application but separate applications which are not connected to each other.

Use Case1: Let us consider a scenario, when a new student gets an admission to a school. His entry is made into the school system. But his name is not entered into the Library system. His library entry is made manually by separate process. His profile is created again on which any special privileges required by his profile will become applicable. If he is from weaker section community and allowed to access more books from library, has to be updated in library system manually.

The trend is now to integrate these disparate school systems so that when a student gets admission his entry is made into school management system in one place and his profile is created in library system, transport system, canteen system and fees system (financial system) with special profile, if applicable. This removes the possibility of manual error and automation in the complete school environment.

Similarly, this integration also allows the principle to get the consolidated view of all activities of the school per student. It also allows the management to analyze and monitor the various programmes and their effect in totality. The data available is more consistent and useful because of reduction of manual errors.

This integration will also automate the end-2-end school management based on the activity like

• 
  
  Reports on the improvement of the students reports based on introduction of special program like Mathematical Olympiad.
• 
  
  Ordering more copies of a book which is high demand by students
• 
  
  Automating the process of canteen services based on consumptions
• 
  
  Transport facility notification to parents and students based on calendar and timings changes

This integration also allows innovating new ideas like updating the parents using SMS on sudden holidays, student reports, disciplinary activities etc.

Trend of Integration of different school system

Use Case2. Schools running with the state fund are mandated to show the utilization of the state’s fund by showing the improvement of school result over past year performance. It also may need to show the result of the school in various other ways like improvements in result of weaker section and result of girls etc.

This report may be compared across the schools. These trends of measuring and improvement are progressive but pose a problem because of different platform of the school systems.

Solution Trend

This requirement is being met by the SIF (School Interoperability Framework), specification by SIF Association http://www.sifinfo.org/us/index.asp , which provides

“The SIF Association´s vision is that schools will be enabled to better utilize technology in a manner that leverages the promise and capabilities of interoperability between disparate applications.”

The SIF is XML specification which provides the definition of the School domain objects. When the school make themselves compatible with SIF objects they get interoperable.

SIF provides the conceptual broker-hub architecture of this interoperability by using concept of ZIS(Zone Integration Server) which is broker to the agent representing the various school systems. The school system interacts through the agent which generates the SIF messages based on the application events. The other agents subscribing to these events receive the SIF message and perform its task.

Implementing Use Case1: School admission system’s agent on new admission generates SIF message and publishes to the ZIS. The library system, canteen system, transport system and other systems subscribing that new admission event receives the new Student Profile.

All these system now add the system in their own applications without any manual intervention.

Implementing Use Case2: Different state schools register to publish their data to the State Zonal Server. An agent at the Zonal server subscribe to all the data from the schools and puts into its data-warehouse. This data is used to create data-marts and star schema for analytics of the data and see the progressive results YearOnYear, QOQ; gender–wise, section-wise to judge the effective usage of their special funds.

Education vertical

Education space can be broadly categorized into 2 main areas:

School

The School is the main institution of education. It provides the infrastructure for providing the learning to the students.

The schools are mostly divided into grades K-12 (KG to 12). The students enroll in these grades. Each grade sets the standard of learning for the student. This standard is usually aligned to a specific Standards set by the Government like CBSE in India.

The School has classes which is where students of a particular grades are provided lectures and courses. The School also provides various other learning activities like student attendance, student- teacher interaction, student-student interaction.

There are support activities like management of classes, class infrastructures (like benches, chairs, blackboard etc.) and laboratory infrastructure etc. these support activities are provided by the School support staff.

Other Supported functions of a school

• Library

• Transport

• Special Programs

• Cafeteria

• HR

• Finance

The school software support all the activities mentioned above. It usually has components for

• Administration for administrative activities of Schools like 
• managing staff, 
• managing students 
• managing infrastructure
•  Teaching activities
• managing classes
• taking attendance
• enrolling students
• grading
• promoting students
• disciplinary activities of students
• Special programs
• It may also have integration with supporting application like
• Library Management
• Transport management
• Cafeteria management
• HR
• Finance

General users of the software is Staff, Administrators, Teachers and Students

Curriculum

Curriculum refers to set of courses and their learning content which is imparted to the students.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum

“Curriculum means two things: (i) the range of courses from which students choose what subject matters to study, and (ii) a specific learning program. “

The first case is mostly applicable to the higher (collage education) where students enroll in various courses based on their chosen field.

The latter case which is more applicable to the primary and school education, the curriculum collectively describes the teaching, learning, and assessment materials available for a given course of study. This curriculum is mostly aligned with school’s chosen Education Standards (CBSE Board) accordingly with school grades. Most of the school aligns it with the age of the student.

Curriculum can be further divided into learning and then assessment material. Learning material is the comprehensive content for teaching the students in terms of stories, problems, scenarios…

Lessons

The Learning material is usually organized in books in forms of chapters and lessons.

The course is organized in form of a lesson. Each lesson is based on the some learning objective. For e.g. learning objective of teaching objective of addition of 2 digit numbers will have lesson demonstrating the concept of addition using several aid tools, carry over concepts etc.

Lesson is followed by lesson assessment to evaluate the concepts learnt during the lesson to measure the objective achieved.

Assessments

Assessment is evaluates the student’s learning. This is assessment material is again in form of assignments, test, quizzes and exams. The teacher’s grades the student learning based on the student’s response to assessments and assesses the student’s achievement against the learning objective.

The main assessment can be done periodically quarterly, half-yearly or yearly.

After yearly assessment, the students with the passing scores are promoted to next grade.

Standards

Standards are created to ensure that students from one classroom to another are taught the same basic information in a particular subject. It allows students studying in one school to get transferred to another school half-way through school year without any hindrances.

The stakeholders for this part of education are:

• Users: Student and Teachers
• Governing Bodies : Government and State
• Learning content Producers: Companies producing learning content or course Books
• Tool Vendor s: development of learning software LMS, LCMS.

The process of Learning

Standards & Objective --> Learning Design --> Learning Production (Publishing Course Books) --> Learning Deployment/Delivery (Lectures/Teaching) --> Learning Assessment

Technology Enhancements

E-Learning

E-learning is the process of imparting or delivering learning on computer based systems using technology. It involves instead of books software like LMS (Learning Management System) and LCMS (Learning Course management system) for online learning.

In e-Learning, instead of books, LMS which provides a online learning content in sequence. The student can read through the learning content at his own pace and in sequence. The LMS system also in between assesses the students on the things read. The LMS system are so advanced that they based on the assessment judge the students learning capacity pace the content adaptively.

Recently with advancement in technology of broadband and internet, e-learning is slowly picking pace as an alternative to the classroom training.

E-learning or web-based training uses internet for delivery of the learning content and allows students to access course materials, reference information and take assessments at their own pace and at their own location. This choice of pace and location has been making e-learning very cost-effective by eliminating the need of presence of expensive teacher.

However, e-learning cannot replace the classroom training it can only complement it because it is only suitable for motivated students or by student for refreshing the courses.

Virtual Classes

Virtual classes concepts is also picking up with the e-learning. It enables the classroom by effective collaboration of the teachers and student using internet’s collaborative technologies like live-meeting, video conference, chats and sharing desktop.

The new LMS software also allows whiteboard concept similar to blackboard of a class by allowing the teacher and students to scribble learning, share notes and comment on each other at real-time.

It allows opening a e-book and allows teacher to highlight, underline concepts while giving lectures in voice and student can ask teachers questions on chat by “rasing their hands”.

The notes, scribbling on the e-book, and chatting content is stored and shared by the student to make his notes for assessment and exams.

Virtual Classes is an innovative concept removing the constraint of physical location and lack of infrastructure of school and classes.

It has been in use by IIMS and IIT professor providing premium lectures distance learning course overcoming the problem of distance and missed admission due to filling of seats.