8/8/2019 Poster presentation - Social mechanisms to support the design of peer-based learning environments

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Social mechanisms to guide the

design of peer-

based learningenvironments

If we consider knowledge to be the result of a negotiation process about references andmeaning between individuals, then, we should consider it also a collective or socialproperty. This view underlies numerous initiatives worldwide providing unrestrictedonline access to educational content, software tools, and implementation resources,commonly referred to as Open Educational Resources. The projects that create, offer,and publish OER have been around for nearly a decade. Sustainability, or the ongoingability to meet the goals of a project, has always been a major challenge for all of them.Sustainability of OER-projects relate to the ability to provide relevant content, manage

the quality, and to initiate and maintain meaningful interactions and incentives betweenend-users. Strategies to sustain projects range from direct institutional support andmanagement to community facilitation. The Library of Labs is a EU funded projectaiming at providing access to remote lab experiments and online simulations through aportal. This paper focuses on how social mechanisms can contribute to bothsustainability and learners engagement, and describe implications for the design of theonline portal.

From publishingcourseware online forfree...

..to building learningcommunities

But how to design such an environment such that people will infact collaborate, share, and in the end sustain the production,management, and learning from educational resources?

The past decade, various non-profit initiativeshave been started with the intention to openlyshare educational resources, such as syllabi,lecture notes, presentations and videos,software and documentation.

These initiatives have been sustained through ongoinginvestments and funds by individuals and institutions, andcontent provided by numerous teachers and individualworldwide.

The emergence of open educationalresources have laid the foundationfor the next step in open education:decentralization of the development and maintenance oflearning resources, as well as of learning from learningresources.

This is a necessary next step, because an institutionalapproach for sharing educational resources is notsustainable. Sustainability addresses the following 2elements

1. continuously being able to produce and share openeducational resources; and

2. to sustain the use and reuse of these resources by end-users.

The first element of sustainability can be achieved through"the reduction of friction and decentralization, capturingintrinsic motivation of individuals to contribute withoutfinancial recompense."(Wiley 2006) Wiley literally states thatdecentralization means the active involvement of students.Decentralization happens through the peer production ofopen resources and sharing them in P2P (peer-to-peer)

networks (Benkler 2005,Downes 2007).

The second element of sustainability concerns the ability tolearn from these resources. More than downloading andreading materials, learning implies the co-creation ofmeaning with others. Open education must therefore focuson online tools and environments to sustain meaningfulinteractions between peer learners.

Researchque

stionMost top-down organized community initiatives fail to reachmomentum, and fade away shortly after inception. This isdue to lack of motivation to participate. Because the sustainability of

peer-based online learning environments depend on the willingness of individuals to contribute,the design of such a system requires much attention. Understanding of the factors that influencemotivation of individuals in online knowledge environments can be used to increase willingnessto invest time and share knowledge.

There are various descriptive and prescriptive frameworksthat relate to the design of social or community software(Preece and Maloney-Krichmar, 2005, Bouwman et al. 2007), communitysustainability (Culnan and College, 2008), and drivers of community participation andcontribution (Moore and Serva 2007, Kollock 1999, Ardichvili 2008, Yu et al. 2009). Someresearch focuses explicitly on communities of practice (Moore and Serva, 2007; Ardichvili, 2008)and others more generally on online communities (Preece, 2000; Garfield, 2006; Rashid et al.,2006, Kollock, 1999, etc.). We have created an overview of these findings in order to support thedesign of a community-based online environment for knowledge sharing and learning. Becausemany studies point out that social and technical factors need attention in order to enableknowledge sharing (Lee, 2008; Yu et al. 2009; Lee and Choi 2003; Preece, 2000; Hendricks andVriens, 1999; etc.), the design of such a system addresses technical and social elements.

Background

Casestudy

Designing LiLaWe developed a framework that addresses 12 social mechanisms and can be used to increasemotivation and participation, and therefore sustainability of peer-based Open EducationalResources projects. We applied this framework into the design of processes and technology ofthe EU-funded project called LiLa. LiLa is the acronym for the Library of Labs, an initiative forthe mutual exchange of and access to virtual laboratories and remote experiments. The portalalso disseminates and aggregates learning resources and lessons. The design of the portal isbased on the concept of active, self-organized, and participative learning. Because funding stopsafter 3 years, self-organization is seen as instrumental to sustainability. The design is thereforefocused on supporting all kinds of self-organization and co-creation of learning and learningresources. The framework has been central to the design of the portal. Per mechanism, weexplain and show an example of its application in the portal.

Alignment with userobjectives

Teachers: SCORM compliancy &teacher tips

Content providers: Storage, tools,analytics

Students: Personalizedlearning,peer assessment

Leadership & Roles Self-organization Heterogeneity

Learning & Networking Reputation & Identity Reciprocity & Feedback Common Ground

Privacy Sense of community& Accountability

Newcomers Self-efficacy &Social Comparison

NetworkedLearning

Connectedness

Profiling

Knowledge

BusinessDevelopme

nt

Sofie

said

Renee

said

I have a problem. I cannot

start the experiment.. Why

do I need a plugin?

Hi there.. I thinkyou first need to

download it.

Student and teacher roles &expertise are defined in thepersonal profiles.

Leadership from within the LiLaconsortium, and by active

participants.

Self-managementSelf-organizationSelf-categorizationSelf-regulation

EU project: different culturesVarious disciplines

Advanced reputation systembased on contributions:assessment reviews, answers onforum, and experiment popularity

Scientific Common Ground &Ontology

LiLa conference in 2011

Privacy protected at theinstitution level and with openIDEU legislation very strict

Authors

Thieme Hennis & Wim Veen

t.a.hennis,w.veen@tudelft.nl

Moreinfo

Help and support pagesForum topic "Getting started"See who else is here (institution)Invite others

Personal profilesActivity streamAnalytics

LiLa-Project

http://lila-project.org

Coordinator: Dr. David Boehringer,

boehringer@rus.uni-stuttgart.de