Author Archives: nidal khalifeh

Assignment 4

Final Synthesis Reflection

Me

My name is Nidal Khalifeh. I am a proud father of two with a passion for edtech. Born in 1982 I went to eight different schools throughout my K-12 life. I did not do well in school. I am not sure what the reason was but this was in the past and now we are in the present. I started enjoying education when I choose my topics “University years” and even more when I was able to also choose the time and place “Distance learning”. I believe this is how I fell in love with edtech and the flexibility it can offer to learners. This is why I am here in the MET program

My career started in 2004 when I enrolled as a sales employee at my father’s factory. In 2005 my father started focusing more on the factory and less on the trading business we had since 1982. I decided to takeover the trading business and improve it. The trading business used to sell stationery & office machinery. Today it is one of the top companies in smart-buildings, home-automation, video conferencing, edtech, audio & video solutions, IT solutions, and security solutions. I did not quit on the factory. In 2008 I decided to add an interactive whiteboard to the product line and it is now doing great. Moreover, in 2012 I started working on building a learning management software. Today “2016” we launched a pivot of what we started in 2012 to become EDaura “The Teachers’ app”, which is a simply and easy to use free LMS for teachers and students.

ETEC565A

Throughout my ETEC 565A course I learned a great deal. The course took place in two virtual environments as a delivery mechanize. First the course started on Blackboard, the official university portal that we are as learners familiar with. Second the course moved to a WordPress environment that gave both the educator and the learner more flexibility, less limitations and better design or UX. ETEC 565A assignments are designed to build knowledge and experience on top of each other, resulting with a usable/real product. Furthermore, such design scaffolds and connects different skills acquired by learners throughout the course in a one complete product. ETEC 565A included Twitter as a social networking aspect of the course. Social media is considered an essential space in todays educational environments (Bates, 2014). I noticed how my peers twitted about the course and how their tweets showed in the course page side-menu.

The ETEC 565A allowed us to use different edtech tools such as; web publication, LMS, Online communication, multimedia, and social media. I did not engage as expected with my peers due to a stress of managing the launch of my new product EDaura. Yet I learned a great deal from the posts my peers shared throughout the different discussions. Participation in a digital learning environment is essential for learning (Jenkins, 2004) and I wish I had more time to engage with my peers.

The ETEC 565A course focused on creating an understanding for the need to have a framework when selecting different types of technologies for education. I used SECTION framework (Bates & Poole 2003) to assess my edtech tools. I consider it to be comprehensive and takes into account different variables effecting the learner, the content, the educator and the environment. One of the most important variables that SECTION framework covers is the organizational issues “the environment”. I strongly believe that the environment is what we learn from and it must be rich and informative for learners (Vygotsky, 1929).

I found the International Society for Technology in Education ISTE website a useful and rich resource for educators seeking to deploy technology inside their classrooms. The “National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers” (or NETS) is an excellent resource to set the expectations for education technology & teachers (ISTE, 2008). Educators must facilitate & inspire learners, use digital age tools and assessments, model for their learners how to use technology, model good-digital citizen behaviors, and nurture entrepreneurship and leadership skills for their learners.

I worked with my peers on a group assignment to build a rubric on selecting the proper LMS. It was a very interesting experience as each of use had different concerns on what a proper LMS must look like. We worked in a synchronous and asynchronous environment that supported our learning (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer 1999). We used Google Docs and Google Hangout to achieve the synchronous and asynchronous communications. Moreover, I found it very interesting how mobile learning or m-learning is a very important part of the digital learning space. Mobile learning can motivate learners through curiosity, challenge, recognition, control and cooperation (Ciampa, 2013).

I selected Moodle as one of two options provided in the ETEC 565A assignments. Moodle is open source yet requires a complex setup when first installed on servers and the user experience is difficult for educators who are new to the Moodle environment. I used assignments as a core formative assessment method in the design of my Moodle course “Building a successful startup” in order for learners to apply their knowledge (Gibbs & Simpson 2005). Furthermore, Learning management Systems are platforms that offer different features that are found to be important for education all under one roof. Throughout my experience in building a course on Moodle I estimate that a course of 4 units (1-2 weeks each) requires at least 72 hours of work if the content and design are ready.

It is important that we work to develop different strategies to support vast levels of interactions within the digital course (Anderson, 2008). One of the media content presented in my Moodle course is my digital story. I used Go Animate tool to build a short animated video that illustrates my own experience in the entrepreneurship field. Educators need to use creative and engaging tools with their learners. The digital story creates a relationship between the learner and the teacher and the learner and the content. I selected Go Animate because it allows for both visual and audio delivery of the digital story, which accommodate for different learning styles (Valley, 2011).

My Future Plan

Today I am focusing on EDaura. The platform that I have been working on for the last four years. I will be adding different tools and features as the product grows. I will keep following edtech influencers and educators on the social media in order to stay up-to-date with what they are expecting from the edtech industry. I wish to engage more in groups and organizations researching and studying different technologies and how such technologies can be deployed in the educational sector. Furthermore, I need to deepen my understanding in existing frameworks used to assess and evaluate different technologies. Such frameworks can be an outline for my next product or feature.

I will keep an open eye on my own children. How they learn and how they interact with new technologies. My daughter is using augmented reality on Snapchat without even knowing what it is. Snapchat is just a game for her. My son expects all screens to be touch and interactive. Both insist that technology is easy to use, available and connected, which means there is no place in the future for complex and disconnected systems. If I want to build edtech solutions for the next generation I need to stay close to them and understand their expectations towards technology.

I am also trying to find a way to help the less fortunate to access high quality learning. Distant learning is a good tool for university level yet when it comes to children we need to be careful how we design such environments. I do not think MOOCs as we know them will fit in such age groups. I wish to achieve this goal by build a space where teachers from allover the world participate in giving free online sessions for students on different topics in a synchronous & asynchronous manner. This can be possible with the growth of internet access around the world and the reduction in cost of owning technology.

Moving forward I seek to explore different technologies that can aid the educational process. I now have my “teachers’ app” product EDaura that is being used now by educators from around the world. I plan to understand how augmented reality can help in the educational sector. It can be an effective tool inside the classroom if enough content or creative tools are provided to the concept (Billinghurst & Duenser, 2012). Such tools can replace labs and offer learning experiences to students located in poor schools that cannot afford building labs for different subjects.

Virtual reality is becoming more hot in the technology sector after Microsoft finally released HoloLens. Again such technology is bounded with the content and tools built for it. I believe that not much content is being built for education when compared to entertainment. Yet again the virtual reality field is a space that I wish to explore.

I see the future of edtech as unified. Students will master writing code. Different programmable products both hardware and software will emerge. Learners will build learning as they learn. Web 2.0 will become Web 0. which means that people or young people or learners are capable of building environments from scratch “Zero” and make their own rules “Open/Closed”. We can see that trend today in the dark web (Bradbury, 2014). I hope that I can be part of this development and make learning better for our future generation

References

Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/ (Chapter 7, point 6)

Bates, T., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Billinghurst, M., & Duenser, A. (2012). Augmented reality in the classroom. Computer, 45(7), 56-63.

Bradbury, D. (2014). Unveiling the dark web. Network Security, 2014(4), 14.

Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved fromhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Retrieved fromhttp://www.anitacrawley.net/Articles/GarrisonAndersonArcher2000.pdf

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers

Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled promise: Formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, i, 67-80. Retrieved from http://www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/jenkins.pdf

Microsoft, HoloLens. Retrived from https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us

Valley, K. (2011). Learning styles and courseware design. Research in Learning Technology,5(2)

Vygotsky, L. S. (1929). The problem of the cultural development of the child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, id, 414-434.

Reflections on my digital story

My Digital Story

It is the first time for me using Moodle to create a course. It is a great experience as I am building a lighter version of an LMS. I found the UX of Moodle very challenging and it is sometime difficult to predict/image the outcomes of your design. In this course I used the below steps to evaluate the media I intend to use within my course (Siemens, 2003):

1.Outcomes: The learning outcomes within my content module are clearly stated in the introduction of the unit. Yet I need to use those outcomes to select the media that better represent the different outcomes. I used video to give short explanation to the term Entrepreneurship. Videos are a very effective delivery mechanize yet it should not be abused. Videos need to be short when used in education in order not to lose the attention of the viewer. Moreover, I used a PDF journal covering most of the important details of entrepreneurship as an industry and an environment to give a deep understanding of the entrepreneur, the environment & eco system, and the challenges along with real-life examples. I also used the digital story to connect with my learners and share my own experience while highlighting the “Lean” methodology that will be introduced in the next unit.

2.Rate my outcomes: In this unit the aim is to establish both the cognitive & affective domains (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl, 1956). The activities did not involve the learner with a practical experience of entrepreneurship yet the learner improved analytical skills in what can be a successful startup. Furthermore, learners felt the emotions found within an entrepreneur journey for success. The challenges and the different cased shared with learners throughout the media allowed for those feeling to mature.

3.Media characteristics: Text is used for deep learning. The format is in PDF to allow for offline reading. Videos are used to deliver short explanations. Digital storytelling allowed me to connect and share a personal story with my learner. I used my own voice in the digital story to make it more personal. Discussion groups as tools helped learners to engage in peer-to-peer learning.

4.Media selection: I selected media using a criteria of time, cost, and message effectiveness. Go Animate as a tool for my digital story gave me a free trial and excellent delivery method. Moodle as a platform costs learners only the bandwidth to access the website. All content used is under Creative Common making it free to share.
I believe Moodle as a platform is excellent because it is robust yet it needs some work on the UI & UX. As a first user to the system I found it difficult to understand even though I am sure Moodle is pre-setup to me via a professional administrator. Which means there is even more complexity to installing a Moodle environment.

More about the digital story part

Go Animate is a tool using flash with predesigned objects and themes to simplify the process of creating a full digital story. The tool allows the designer to include different audio & video files to the digital story. This was the first time I use this tool and I was not sure if it is the right tool to deliver the story. Yet I believe it is an excellent tool that saves time and effort. As a tool Go Animate is as good as the content and the design instructed by the author. Go Animate runs on any browser which makes it easy to access. Yet using Flash may be a limitation as Flash support is not available and will become an obsolete technology soon.
I selected Go Animate because it allows for both visual and audio delivery of the digital story, which accommodate for different learning styles (Valley, 2011). The fact that the digital story is recorded this allows the learner to pause, rewind, and forward. This also allows the learner to watch the digital story on her/his own time. Telling a story is a good way to deliver a message, yet it is even better to bring your learners closer to you and to open-up and share their own experiences and concerns. The fact that an online course is a culture on its own means that all learners are new to this culture and need a motivation to start sharing and collaborating together (Benedikt, 1991).

I started building the digital story with a learner-centric design (Anderson, 2008a). The learner is a startup company or a person trying to build one. The digital story offered a simple and effective way to share my experience with my learners and to illustrate how the method I am offering in my course was applied by me during my carrier. This modeling approach requires the educator to fully understand the learner and to have a learner-centric design. The digital story explained how the LeanStartupMachine tool is used. This makes the design Knowledge-centric. Furthermore, The LeanStartupMachine methodology was applied to an existing company throughout the digital story. This delivers the message that this tool can be applied at any point of time a new product or idea is proposed.

The Go Animate digital story offers a modeling approach for the educator to share her/his own experience with learners. The digital story allowed me to engage with the content “teacher content” and to share the content with the learner “learner content” and opened a possibility for learners to communicate with me “learner teacher” (Anderson, 2003). I also opened discussion within the same unit in order to achieve a hybrid approach for synchronous and asynchronous communication (Richardson, 2000).

My digital story explains my journey as an entrepreneur which relates to the learners as they consider themselves entrepreneurs and wish to succeed in a specific domain. The digital story is a fun and engaging method and it is a powerful teaching tool offering personal narratives, music & audio, images & animations that create unique snapshots intro the learner’s experience (Matthews, 2014).

References
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Anderson, T. (2008b). Teaching in an online learning context. In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F.Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca University. Retrieved fromhttp://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Anderson, T. (2003). Getting the mix right: An updated and theoretical rational for interaction. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 4(2). Retrieved August 27, 2007, from http://www. irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/149/230

Bloom, B.S. (Ed.). Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., Krathwohl, D.R. (1956).Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New

Benedikt, M. (1991). Cyberspace: Some proposals. In M. Benedikt (Ed.), Cyberspace: First steps (pp. 119–224). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Matthews, J. (2014). Voices from the heart: The use of digital storytelling in education. Community Practitioner, 87(1), 28.

Richardson, J. (2000). Researching student learning: Approaches to studying in campus-based and distance education. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Valley, K. (2011). Learning styles and courseware design. Research in Learning Technology,5(2)
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved fromhttp://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htmUBC Copyright requirements. Retrieved from http://copyright.ubc.ca/requirements/

Unified Edtech

I remember when I first joined MET in one of my first courses I read “MindStorm” (Papert, 1980). I was shocked when I knew how old this book is and how futuristic Papert was! It is very sad how slow the educational system adapts technology. Until today a few schools teach code to their students as a mandatory subject. Even though programming means: project-based learning, applied math, creativity, and lifelong learning skills.

My vision to the future is a unified edtch. Students will master writing code and different programmable products both hardware and software will emerge. Learners will be building learning as they learn. Web 2.0 will become Web 0. which means that people or young people or learners are capable of building environments from scratch “Zero” and make their own rules for their environments. We can see that in trends today such as the dark web. Why unified. Because if we look at the telecom industry it is now in the unified communication era. Which means that all products software and hardware talk together. We also saw that recently with gaming when Xbox now connects with PS4. This force coming from the end-users requesting more open communication pushes competitors to work together on a common base to connect their solutions and respond to the end-user requests. So Unified edtech means that any piece of software or hardware connects together in a way. The future is people becoming producers all over again as they were once planting the earth and eating from their own farms. Yet now its technology as the seed

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Aaron Swartz – Creative Common

Each time I hear the copy rights issue I remember the documentary “The internets own boy” Aaron Swartz. Aaron is a hero to most “except for the government and some large publishers”. He believed that information wants to be free and access to information must be open to all. Even though information wants to be free “if we all agree” it still needs to be cited and ownership of this free content must be labeled, referenced, and cited properly. I think this is very important specially when we want to build on this knowledge and expand. Research is always built on other findings and this is how we develop and improve.

On the penalties part each country/region has its own policies. An action must be taken against whoever uses content in a none proper “legal” manner. Yet teachers are somehow protected by law to an extent when content is used for educational purpose (Saab 2010).

What you write online stays online. I strongly believe that we all must be careful while sharing our personal life and other media on the social media. The access levels and policies keep changing and it is possible to expose your content by mistake. Even commenting on posts may get you in trouble “supporting or disagreeing”.

Pros & Cons

Today technology is helping students learn on their own speed and in their preferred style of learning. Yet for instructors to decide how to use technology to measure learning a few things must be taken into consideration:

Cons:
1. Environment: When technology is being used for assessment the instructor can only observe the digital environment
2. IT Learning curve: Learners need to be familiar with the technology and the platform used otherwise they may score incorrectly even though they know the answer
3. Motivation: It is easy to demotivate the learner specially in a distant learning environment because the learner cannot estimate how his/her peers are doing on the assessment
4. Plagiarism: With the digital world plagiarism became easier yet there are softwares to uncover it

Pros:
1. Formative & summative tools: Instructors are equipped with different tools and content that can create different types of assessment
2. Learner behaviour: Standards like SCORM and xAPI allow instructors to measure the experience of their learner. This can help better design the course. For example the instructor can know how much time is spent on each page and where did the learner clicked or got stuck
3. Machine Learning: Some advanced algorithms are offering data analysis that can be done automatically can generate useful information.
4. Big Data: The amount of data recorded from different institutes can be analyzed and cross referenced in order to validate assumptions or find new methods of assessment

References

Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/ (Appendix 1. A8)

Jordan, M. I., & Mitchell, T. M. (2015). Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects. Science, 349(6245), 255-260.

Metz, S. (2015). Big data. The Science Teacher, 82(5), 6.

Feedback for students

I believe our instructor in this story can use the quiz feature found in Moodle and choose to input a feedback for each selection students make. This way students get the feedback required in an automated manner when the instructor uses the auto-correct question types such as multiple choice. Prior asking students to take the quiz I recommend posting some interactive content that offers a self-learning approach to the periodic table.

My experience at UBC

The experience I had at my online masters can be 60% learner-to-content 30% learner-to-learner and 10% learner-to-teacher. Learner-to-content is the majority of my time as the course is an online program I have to self-study and engage with the content through research, reading, and building content. The online environment also allows for peer-to-peer engagement through chat, discussion boards, and other types of collaborations. Usually in the online environment the teacher is not always present and the engagement is limited with the learner.

Webinar office hours

It seems that the main problem is to organise communications in an organised manner. I would put a policy:
1. I need a 1 week minimum to reply to emails or blog posts, tweets…etc.
2. Webinars will be hosted weekly for 2 hours on Friday 12:00PM EST (It works for most of times zones)
3. Posted questions or problems must be accompanied with a proposed solution

I recommend using the free online webinar service: www.bigbluebutton.com

Assignment 1 – Reflections – Nidal Khalifeh

Working with groups without having a face-to-face experience is not easy. It was a challenge to know if I was providing what was expected form me. I enjoyed the task, as LMS is my main concern these days, and I wanted to know what is relevant and important when people evaluate an LMS. The case was a special one and not a regular LMS would solve the problem. Therefor the rubric needs to address those challenges.

My IT background made me suggest that the LMS must support the BYOD approach (Bring Your Own Device), which means that LMS must be cloud and support multi platforms while runing on mobile phones & tablets. I also knowing the challenges of integration and migration of different softwares so I suggested that the LMS must comply with the Ed-Fi standard which offers a standard for developers who build educational software and allow seamless integration and communication between such softwares. Security and privacy are now a major concern. SSL encryption and the Student Privacy Pledge can help in guaranteeing a level of security to the system.

Cavoukian, A. (2013). BYOD: (bring your own device) is your organization ready? Retrieved from: https://www.ipc.on.ca/site_documents/pbd-byod.pdf.

Ed-Fi Alliance. (2012). Ed-fi-powered student information system vendors poised for new ed-tech market opportunities and growth. Retrieved from: http://www.ed-fi.org/news/2012/08/ed-fi-powered-student-information-system-vendors-poised-ed-tech-market-opportunities-growth/.

Hope, J. (2015). Obama pledges student privacy protection in state of the union address. Enrollment Management Report, 18(12), 8-8. DOI: 10.1002/tsr.30038