ICT SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS’ COLLABORATION IN PROBLEM AND PROJECT BASED LEARNING

Nikorn Rongbutsri (nikorn@hum.aau.dk)

Md. Saifuddin Khalid (khalid@hum.aau.dk)

Thomas Ryberg (ryberg@hum.aau.dk)

Dept. Of Communication and Psychology

E-Learning Lab – center for user driven innovation, learning and design

Outline of presentation

• Overall question – identifying students use of technology to support their problem and project based group work

– Background to the study – The Aalborg PBL model

• Social media are coming to Higher Education:– Some pressing questions – vocal calls for educational change –due to

technological changes (web 2.0) and/or students as digital natives / Net Generation

• Some findings (and methodology)– Is there a need to support students?

THE AALBORG PBL MODEL

The Aalborg PBL model

• Problem Based Learning– Based on real-life problems

• Project Organised Education- Project work supported by lecture courses

• Group Work - groups of four to six students- supervised by lecturers/professors

• Interdisciplinary Studies

- Integration of theory and practice - Focus on Learning to Learn and methodological skills

• University Wide Model - Used in all faculties (with variations)

Project work : a major assignment within a given subject-related framework determined for each semester (thematic framework).

Project related & mandatory courses supporting the project workEvaluated as oral examinations based on the project report or through individual written or oral examinations.

50 %

50 %

Students’ use of time - lectures, courses and project work

Problem Based Learning – the Process

Welcome to Aalborg University No. 7 of 31

Welcome to Aalborg University No. 8 of 31

The Aalborg PBL-model – in short

• Long-term collaboration 4 months (semester) • Students own and define the problem to work with• Students decide on methods, theory, empirial investigations (together with supervisor)• Solution – ”open ended”• Students write up an app. 100 page project report reflecting their work• An university-wide pedagogy – not short-term or single course

PRESSING QUESTIONS FROM THE TECH-ED SPHERE

Social media are coming to Higher Education

Why social media or web 2.0 in education• Some of the keywords from the tech-ed buzz-o-sphere:

• Realised through use of: Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking etc.• Very much aligned with PBL thinking in many ways!

Web 2.0 ’Progressive’ education (since 19XX)

User-driven Learner-centred

Collaboration Collaborative learning

Participation Active students vs passive recipients

2 -way communication Dialogues and interaction

Creating and sharing Knowledge construction vs acquistion

Bottom-up Ahierarchical, flat – students as co-producers

Web 2.0 in educational context (e-learning 2.0) – general buzz

• From hierarchical structures based on courses and topics towards more student centred networks

• From students as consumers to students as producers

• From distribution to more horizontal patterns of exchange – peer-learning

• From Learning Management Systems (LMS) Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

• Encouraging exchange, sharing of knowledge and students’ production of knowledge and artefacts

• Encouraging the production of personal portfolios – personal repositories

From LMS to PLEs• Separate management and

learning• Focus on learning activities• Individual and collaborative

tools• From big packages of

educational software (LMSs) to numerous light-weight, interoperable web 2.0 service (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking)

• Dashboard systems where students collect relevant resources and tools

(Dalsgaard, 2006):http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htm

Some pressing questions

• Is the net generation or digital natives coming to higher education?– Strong discourses on ’digital natives’ and students being fluent with digital

technologies– Crave educational change due to their intensified use of and experiences

with web 2.0 technologies

• What should the university provide – the VLE vs. PLE debate? Structured environment or self-chosen tools?

– Are students better able to collate various tools and services to support problem and project based learning?

– Are students digital natives capable of identifying technologies for problem and project based group work on their own?

• Notion of digital natives has been criticised heavily from a research point of view!

SOME SELECTED FINDINGS

Methodology

• Data collection across different levels of scale - multi-method study combining qualitative and quantitative studies

• Questionnaire (cross-campus to 3000 students – 253 completed):– Background– Mobile life style (where do students work)– Project collaboration – Familiarity with Web 2.0 tools (state of diffusion)

• Narrative analysis of blog post (133 student narratives from 51 M and 82 F)– 1.semester students within a programme (humanistic informatics) asked to write

blogs about technology use during 1.sem (analysing diffusion of various technologie)

• Oberservational studies– Following a 2.semester group (interview and observation) – their use of

technology

Illustration from questionnaire

• Percentage of students who do not know about a certain tool – may not mean they use it if they know about it though!!!

• Green: Pervasive use or knowledge of (twitter – knowledge, but little use)• Red: Tools that might be very useful, but little/scattered following

Findings from blog posts and observational studies• Facebook & Dropbox rather pervasive• Skype used among many groups• Some groups utilised Google services (e.g. Calendar, Docs)• Live next to formal systems (e.g. Moodle but are not intertwined)

– formal system for course activities• Cautious about bringing in new tools in their problem and

project based group work• However, some of the more ‘advanced’ tools for academia 2.0

purposes (tech-ed-buzz) and problem based project work were not very pervasive– Google Docs– Social bookmarking (delicious, diigo)– Social referencing systems / bibliography (zotero, refworks)

Summarising

• Indications that students do bring in social media to the university – forming digital ecologies, which may live next to formal systems (happily or not)

• Some systems pervasive, but systems which could support more advanced academic practices are largely under the radar of the students

• Students are to some degree capable of creating efficient digital ecologies to support problem and project based group work – but also ask for introductions

• For more advanced socio-technical academic practices to emerge there’s a need for facilitation – combining tech-support with meaningful integration of technologies into courses / group work

• We should not ignore they are adopting social media, but neither should we ignore they might need facilitation to ‘scholarise’ their social practices, as to develop advanced academic socio-technical practices