Artificial Intelligence + Open learning

 

https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/5170966/ai_artificial_education_intelligence_icon

As education is a critical factor in our daily life, it is always updating and integrating. New educational methods are created rapidly. Now a day, we have Entering the “Internet +” era. The online education industry is booming, and the latest technology is being continuously introduced into the field of online open learning education. Major educational institutions have originated the integration of new products consist of technology like Live broadcast, big data, adaptive learning, personalized recommendations, etc. we are now standing at the crossroads of technology and humanities. With the development and popularization of artificial intelligence, online education has opened the era of artificial intelligence. I deeply believe Artificial Intelligence can strongly support distributed and open learning.

 

Visualisation of the History of Openness in Education
Visualization of the History of Openness in Education

 

Artificial Intelligence is a new technology that simulates, extends, and expands human intelligence theories, methods, technologies, and application systems. The core of Artificial Intelligence is a set of deep learning systems. In the short term, it is still fresh compared to other more fully developed learning methods. The Artificial Intelligence we have now is just a tool that is utilized by human beings, it just a capacity so far. But if we investigate some specific areas, we will notice that Artificial Intelligence can do better than human beings. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, the human beings can just tell the machine what they are looking for, the machine will then constantly adjust and optimizes itself so that it can achieve the results that human has requested. Artificial Intelligence has already been used in many different areas such as Texas Hold’em, I-go, object recognition, voice recognition, etc. Artificial Intelligence has been widely used in various business scenarios such as Amazonā€™s product recommendations and Googleā€™s image searching engine, etc.

https://medium.com/point-nine-news/what-does-alphago-vs-8dadec65aaf

In the field of education, there exist two major criteria that people have always been concerned about: First, the fairness of education. And second, the versatile of education.

If the combination of the Internet and education provides human beings a theoretical solution to educational fairness, then the combination of Artificial Intelligence and education may be the only feasible solution to achieve the goal of personalized education. The concept to teach students following their aptitude of Confucius is likely to be realized with the promotion of Artificial Intelligence technology. The integration of information technology and the realization of digital transformation is an important guarantee for “developing a fair and quality education environment”, and it is also the only way for educational modes to reform and evolution.

http://www.iworldonline.com.au/the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-ai-for-education/

The development of digital education is more than just to replace the blackboards with projection screens, or to upgrade handwritten lesson contents to presentations. Information technology and Artificial intelligence have provided a great contribution to education that has been reflected in teaching methods, etc.

On the first level, the educational organizations and institutions should actively learn and use the latest information technology, whether it is big data, the Internet of technology, or artificial intelligence, mixed reality, so that the teaching content, teaching methods, and teaching scenarios can be upgraded faster and more close the immediate needs of different students. Instructors will then be able to teach students according to their aptitude and to provide students with education methods that have been customized. The interactive characteristics of media and technologies play a key role in online open education. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, it would make customization easier.

Artificial Intelligence helped its designer to discover some interesting user’s behaviors: For example, designers are able to get the conclusions like ā€œThe average learners are only willing to spend about 8 minutes to practice, but willing to spend more than 10 minutes to review.” Another example is, “learners from the same age groups, same regions, or nationalities sometimes are more likely to have the same kind of problems.”

On the second level, the addition of new educational technology can make the bond among the organizations, the institutions, the instructors and the students shorter. with the interpretation of technology, students’ feedback can be provided to teachers in real-time, students can also get teacher’s first-time Guidance to comprehensively improve the efficiency and quality of all aspects of the education process.

The third level concerns the operating costs of education. As we all know, offline education consists of many resources from the education location to transportation fees. Those fees can be expensive sometimes. Today, with the power of science and technology, all forms of education and educational content can be customized, and costs can be greatly reduced. This way, more people can enjoy high-quality educational resources at less cost.

The fourth level is usually ignored, but it is highly related to the present competitiveness and future development potential of educational organizations and institutions. Therefore, through digital transformation and the utilization of artificial intelligence, big data, mixed reality, and other technologies will empower teachers. Furthermore, artificial intelligence can reduce part of the heavy work of teachers. Teachers will then have more time to exploit their enthusiasm and creativity in teaching and train more students. This means that more time is devoted to the personalization of education toward students. This will create a win-win situation for individuals, schools, students, parents and even society.

Artificial intelligence’s market entry point is to help teachers in the real world save a lot of time in repetitive labor, such as urging students to do exercises, correcting and correcting mistakes. Interestingly, the machine can even do these things better, Machines always take the trouble and stand by at any time.

https://www.extremenetworks.com/extreme-networks-blog/in-the-algorithmic-age-ai-is-changing-education/

Artificial Intelligence also helps discover Student differences with respect to learning with technologies. Artificial Intelligence will learn the weaknesses of different students Through the feedback of students. The machines never get tired of the heavy work of teachers. They are ready to take the task anytime for students and are always waiting for students. They will not be emotional to students. When the algorithm finds a weakness of students, it will give the student guidance and related exercises to conquer this weakness. This is the concept of ā€œadaptive learningā€ that has been very popular in recent years.

These all are the benefits brought to human beings by Artificial Intelligence and big data to help them better design education products. Many professors and experts related to Artificial Intelligence are also involved in designing Artificial Intelligence.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years, many people started to worry about future career changes that might happen. In my opinion, education is the best approach to eliminate everyone ā€™s worries, because education can stimulate people ā€™s potential and creativity and make human the irreplaceable existence. nowadays, the world is changing rapidly, and the update and iteration of knowledge are also changing overnight. Technological innovation can create a fairer and higher-quality educational environment.

Of course, the development of technology can help reduce the phenomenon of injustice in education, but to eliminate imbalances fundamentally, it requires the joint efforts of many parties in society.

http://chinaplus.cri.cn/news/china/9/20190517/290318.html

Why is the role of the human being irreplaceable? Artificial Intelligence can indeed liberate a lot of repetitive human labor, but it can be seen from the requirements of content and service of the solution of Artificial Intelligence incorporate with the education that the human factor is very important. For example, to complete the reconstruction of the content, you need a teacher. complete the reconstruction of the content is an extremely heavy workload, and it has to be constantly updated every year.

The effectiveness of the output of machines depends on human beings. The machine is cold, but the person is emotional. A human passes cares to each other and it will be better to be accompanied by people in learning. Thus, we can conclude that the concept ofĀ Humanizing online learning is very important.

 

Throughout the process, we must balance the relationship between people and machines. We need to optimize both experience factors and cost factors. If the experience is good but the efficiency can’t keep up, then the overall value can’t be played, and vice versa.

It is clear that people are taking ai for grande, and will put effort into improving it constantly. I believe Artificial Intelligence will develop at an even faster pace overnight. I am excited to see the change that Artificial Intelligence brings to us. And I strongly believe the process of learning will become more interesting and enjoyable with the addition of ai.

References:Ā 

  1. http://chinaplus.cri.cn/news/china/9/20190517/290318.html
  2. https://edtechuvic.ca/med/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/23-147-4-PB.pdf
  3. https://medium.com/point-nine-news/what-does-alphago-vs-8dadec65aaf
  4. http://www.iworldonline.com.au/the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-ai-for-education/
  5. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/chapter/pedagogical-roles-for-text-audio-and-video/
  6. https://www.extremenetworks.com/extreme-networks-blog/in-the-algorithmic-age-ai-is-changing-education/
  7. https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/5170966/ai_artificial_education_intelligence_icon
  8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

 

 

 

Diversity in learning approaches

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/

To counter the spread of the epidemic Covid-19, the Ministry of Education and every major school decided the postponement of school hours and the suspension of offline teaching activities starting in the middle of March. The Ministry of education issued an advance of the Spring Break and announced that all primary and secondary schools across the province should delay school. Since the burst of the virus happened by the end of a study term, offline education became the “rigid demand” for Students other than eating and sleeping.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/covid-19-10-steps-online-learning/

The epidemic has intensively and unexpectedly brought a group of online education flatforms and operators to a peak period of customer acquisition. It is the first time for such large-scale students to receive online education at home. Therefore, from the perspective of many education practitioners, the outbreak of the epidemic has greatly promoted the popularization of online education. Due to the delay in offline classes, many teachers and students are now couldn’t help to take online courses. This causes many potential users of online education(could be instructors or learners) who used to doubt the new learning mode reach out to it. This has taken the first step of conceptional change to the potential open learning users.

The rise of online education is accompanied by the rise of Internet development. In the early days, online education is also called long-distance education, remained at the stage of exchanging videos. The basic system is to record an instructor’s teaching into a video and propagate it online. Learners can then download the video and watch. However, due to the boundaries of video technology, network bandwidth, and other factors, the user experience of this mode of education is extremely poor, which is not very helpful for learning.

https://www.ui1.es/sala-de-prensa/tecnopedagogia-xv-que-caracteristicas-tienen-los-mooc

What really formalized the mode of online education was the launch of the MOOC system in 2012 in major universities. MOOC mainly aimed at college students who have certain self-learning abilities, intense curiosity, and flexible schedules. They are the best audience for online education.
Many teachers will film their lectures into videos and upload those videos to online in their spare time. Their students, audiences, and other learners from all over the world will actively ask teachers questions through the comment section. This kind of strong interactive learning atmosphere is not weaker than the offline class. We must know that in the real classroom, only a few students will choose to ask questions about what they don’t understand. Most of the students sitting in the classrooms and often too shy to ask questions, or are afraid to be blamed by other students for “wasting” the lecture time. Therefore, a huge percentage of students in an offline class will just pretend that they understand everything the instructor has taught.

[My math professor teaching the model of the Epidemics by doing open online courses.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrp40ck3WpI&list=LLBVZkFSex80W2OOUW3jjUNA&index=2&t=114s]

In addition to accessibility, the internet also brings fairness to education. Nowadays, the distribution of offline education resources is very uneven. Many highly qualified students are unable to get the corresponding educational resource to support them. But there is no distinction of education resources through open learning platforms. With network cable and WiFi, anyone can benefit from the equally distributed opportunity to gain knowledge.

http://jewishspecialneeds.blogspot.com/2013/07/fair-isnt-equal.html

Despite its mature development, online education is still a niche product and cannot be accepted by everyone. The reason is that the current strong offline education market has limited the majority of learners to receive online education. In other words, the public needs the “necessity” to try Open education. Just like 17 years ago SARS pneumonia made many retail companies starting to alternate their profit model from offline to online, people will only walk out of their comfort zone of education and abandon the old habit that has been formed for a long time only if they have to. This virus outbreak has forced the majority of students and educators to embrace online education and perceived its happiness boost for the first time. For more than a decade, online education has finally ushered its explosion.

https://www.careeraddict.com/websites-online-courses

Indeed, we can not deny that the recent blast of online education was an accident, but this will undoubtedly increase the public acceptance toward Open education. In other words, the postponement of offline educational institutions has advertised the online education industry by letting everyone know that we have another option to learn and teach. Therefore, the development of Open education will be a general trend, and it will become a major alternative to offline education just like how online shopping has taken over much offline business in our daily lives.

Thoughts on FLOE

During this week, I have read two interesting readings regarding the Floe Inclusive Learning Design Handbook. It exists as a free Open Educational Resource (OER) that is designed to support the community consisting of people that need to creating adaptable and personalizable educational resources. People like instructors, Web developers, content creators, etc can utilize Floe Inclusive Learning Design as a tool to build a variety of learning preferences to serve the individual needs. In this handbook, I have discovered a couple of fascinating concepts, ideas, and issues and I will talk about 3 of them.

First of all, I think a very interesting idea is Design for Privacy.
Design for Privacy involves Establishing the authority of online individual privacy toward the controls of the users. It is an essential feature of comprehensive design. Several services platforms do not provide an adequate level of authority over the userā€™s privacy. Sometimes, even when a Platform explicitly calls its privacy policy, it is often exhibited in legalese or in another language that is complicated or uncertain. This prospect is a very different and new perspective to me, and it is also something important but always get Neglect by designers. Many people around me avoid using services like online shopping and online banking due to concern about the leak of their personal information. This is the situation that I can highly relate to. I prefer designs that allow me to make my own decisions. Users have the right to deny sharing their info, and they should be respected.

Secondly, an important idea is The Importance of Natural Language. Ensuring all the base content is accompanied by a natural language equivalent. It is one of the key principles behind providing transformable learning content. the text often acts as the lowest common denominator for learning material since text can easily be both visual and aural, and conversions between the two can be automated. Therefore Natural language content is immensely malleable and functional in many different contexts

The third important idea that I’m going to talk about is The 80/20 Principle. The 80/20 Principle (also known as theĀ Pareto principle rule, theĀ law of the vital few,Ā or theĀ principle of factor sparsity). This law applies to multiple fields like in economy, In sport, in computing, etc.

A scatterplot of needs of any given population, the distribution is like an exploding star. https://via.hypothes.is/https://handbook.floeproject.org/AskStrangersToHelp.html

To create a design that will be covering 80% of the dots (or needs), you will only be needing to cover 20% of the space. This sounds very reasonable and efficient. This law allows for quick wins and obeys manufacturing markets and mass production well.

https://images.app.goo.gl/h9m1gnMcA6X1hBhz7

After reading two readings, I have notices that there are two concepts that I have trouble understanding. The first one is the Metadata. I am still confused by the definition and property of metadata. The second one is the Creative Commons 2.5 Canada License. I am having trouble understanding this license is and the reason for all content in the Handbook is licensed under it.

Finally, I have the last question that is about the Issues and Controversies Considering Cognitive Needs. Can cognitive accessibility be examined accurately and affordably? Is it necessary to test it?

How I started my online learning experience

Have you ever wonder At most how many people can learn synchronically? Now that technology has been developing Swiftly, it altered the way of our living habits in so many different ways. As the passing of knowledge to the newest generation is crucial in our culture, online knowledge gaining became a key factor that people have put their effort into integrating it.


As a statistics student, there is a mandatory course called math 248 that I had to pass. This course is all about utilizing programming tools to write codes that can be used to pull, organize and analyze data that could be useful. the programming tool that is now used for this course is Python, which has a different syntax form with the programming tool Java that I was taught from a year ago. This is reasonable because the coding industry is developing very fast, but it also takes me more time to understand and get used to the syntax in Python.

In order to better get used to the skill of utilizing python, I decided to go for tutorials on the Mooc platform Udacity. Through this course, I feel the style of the Udacity course. Through Udacity, People from all over the world can register online and participate in classes, and it’s often free.

It can be said that Udacity is relatively conscientious. Even for the free courses on Udacity, the quality of the content is very high. The most consequential feeling for me is that the “practical” nature of Udacity courses is very powerful. Moreover, the experience of the course was magnificent, for the first time I felt the “interactive” power of MOOC. The tutorial does not simply let you watch the video but has a lot of real-time interactions, such as in every 10 minutes, the instructor will ask you a question, or let you write a piece of code.

The object of Mooc is, the instructor is talking in a way that is easier for me to understand. He is not like many university teachers that follow the text-books. the instructor also likes to uses a lot of ” humor” melodrama, dialogues, interviews, etc in the course. All these adds up and creates a very nice learning environment for “Noob ” students that have zero knowledge of the contents.

I personally feel that In most of the Udacity courses, theory and practice are pretty well combined, and there are quite a lot of very practical courses. In some online courses, I can see that the instructors are really trying hard to make breakthroughs and come up with new ideas in various forms and content. but In other courses, It feels that the instructors just pulled the contents of the lectures directly from the classroom to online.

Alsoļ¼Œthe most direct benefit from learning through MOOC is that you get the chance to pause whenever needed. learners get the chance to go over the contents regularly until they understand. If learners can take a good advantage out of it, it can be extremely beneficial to learners.

How Good is OCR

The heart of open education is about sharing resources. This term is usually used for the mix of educational resources, practices, policies, and communities that can provide board access to opportunities for everyone. In terms of What open means particularly is that it is not just that the resource is free but that it also comes with a set of permissions about how you can use that resource.

Open education resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium: digital or otherwise that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license. they permit no-cost access to adaptation and redistribution by others with no limited restriction.

we are now in this much more information abundant, resource abundant era of the Internet. Many creators are challenged by the consequences brought to us by the well-developed internet. many creators are mostly facing copyright issues about how products of human creativity are used. Products of human creativity can be any stuff. it can be logos, academics books, articles, music, arts, etc. The copyright law grants an exclusive set of rights to the creator of products so that the creator can prevent others from copying or adopting her work for a set amount of time.

So while copyright places restrictions on showing creations online, the Internet provides plenty of opportunities to share active resources to collaborate on creations. The Creative Commons is one of the licenses that help creators around the world to share their works legally. Open licenses have been used by different global movements and urban education in culture government size art etc. The license usually is under the global standard.

Here is a model created by Andrew Duffy. (http://www.oercommons.org/courses/constant-acceleration-same-physics/view) It is a 2D model on the relationship between time and displacement in various conditions. There is a cc license ļæ¼logo by the materials meaning it has a license. It is very helpful when it comes to understanding the basic yet important concept of physics in an efficient but simple way.

 

It is a very well made model with very clear content and various display options. The user can view and even compare the distribution of velocity under different conditions. This material is suitable for teachers to display in their lectures to help their students obtain a better understanding without having to spend a whole lot of time to build a model like that. It is also very handy for learners if they wish to get access to good material created by experts outside the school. I used this resource for better knowledge over the linear relationship between time and displacement, and this resource helped me a lot in my physics class.

To me, it is a good OER. The material perfectly addresses the information that I am looking for. by exploring the physics model I get to set the time and observe the displacement myself, and it is quite fun. It is simple but professionally accurate. the quality is also nice. It enables me to observe the differences between different motions. The model is not accessible enough since it can not be downloaded and used in a PowerPoint. it can only be run on browsers.

Just like all other OERs, This physics model is about using all the resources to extend our collaborative inclusive accessible and active learning.ļæ¼It gives more opportunities for studentsļæ¼ and teachersļæ¼.

Diversity in learning approaches

Now that technology Is developing Rapidly, it changed the way of our living style in so many different approaches. As the passing of knowledge to the newest generation is critical in our society, education became a key factor that people have put their effort into integrating it. After reading the Basic philosophies of online learning I discovered some fascinating thoughts and concepts out of it that are new to me.

Instructor-centered versus student-centered learningĀ 

As an international student who grew up in China, I experienced synchronous learning and did not have choices on the courses that need to be taken each term. The province publishes a version of textbooks and materials designed to make every single kid in the same grade learn the same topic at the same phase of a term. After I came to Canada, I was surprised that Canadian high schools allow students to decide which 4 courses they wanna take in one semester. This way, courses become very flexible and students also learn to plan for their future. And one day, I heard about the website calledĀ khan academyĀ which covers diverse topics and is open for everyone, which is on another stage of asynchronous learning. EDCI339 is the first online course that I have taken in. I am fascinated by the idea of A because I believe that every people have their preferred ways of learning. Through asynchronous learning, I no longer have to force my self to take notes flying and end up with unreadable messy notes just to catch my professor’s handwriting speed.

Asynchronous versus synchronous learningĀ 

In my opinion, the largest difference between a typical high school course and a university course is that A high school course is usually instructor-centered and a university course is often a mixture of instructor and student-centered. In the previous years, There were not many resources for the instructor to utilize and therefore it was not realistic for them to teach any knowledge other than the textbook contents. Slowly due to the development of the internet, the instructors can not only pass the knowledge to students but also helped the students to gain the ability of self-learning. There are always great resources online that can be used to improve one’s knowledge. I have taken several courses that direct the students to work on a certain project in a group. This way, students often need to research the topics on themselves and gradually learned how to learn things on their own.

Ā Connectivism

Connectivism is one of the most critical learning theories in this era. With its help, learning can be accomplished in a much more efficient and enjoyable way. In a few words, Connectivism indicates that one can gain the information that he/she obliges through numerous resources on the Internet. He/she can then pass the knowledge He/she has learned along with his/her new opinion to other people online or in-person. for example, GitHub is a perfectĀ Connectivism platform for programmers to discuss the difficulties in programming. in my opinion the pros of Connectivism burden the cons. On the Internet, people can gather knowledge from everywhere in the world on almost every topic, and everyoneā€™s thoughts can be distributed online through the network.

Ā 

 

The network has promoted the development of open learning, and open learning supplemented our ability to discover everything we are curious about. I truly believe it will persist beneficial to me in my entire life.

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