March 2020 – Stella’s Home :)

Diversity in learning approaches

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 user’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 the Pareto principle rule, the law of the vital few, or the 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.

Also，the 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.