The bachelor in Medialogy at AAU currently has a comparatively high drop-out rate. Many Medialogy students find acquiring programming and supporting mathematical skills difficult and can lack motivation despite the high correlation of programming skills with post-graduation employment. While being a technical degree it provides access to B level math graduates who have a significantly higher drop-out rate than their A level math peers. A recent internal cross campus (AAL/CPH) study from the UNESCO PBL chairs found that Medialogy students seek  more face-to-face time interacting with and being coached by teachers and teaching assistants on concrete problem solving in informal settings in programming and math courses.

In flipped classrooms, students do not listen to a lecturer in an auditorium but prepare e.g. at home at their own pace for more hands-on interactive teaching sessions. Preparation often consists of watching video tutorials and checking knowledge using related online quizzes or through peer discussions. In-class time with the teacher focuses on hands-on activities e.g. posing concrete problems and having student pairs discuss possible answers. Data on learning from online content (videos, quizzes) allows for analytics to identify struggling students.

Students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines at Harvard university in flipped classrooms perform better and are only half as likely to change to non-STEM disciplines than traditionally taught students.

Research and our own experimentations have pointed out that the video lectures to be watched offline at the students’ convenience have to be engaging as the students find lengthy and static videos with no accompanying activities boring. While PBL is well aligned with flipped classrooms, Moodle as it is currently used and configured at AAU is not. We see great potential in developing PBL by better integrating the digital tools, in this case Moodle into concrete PBL learning activities. We arrive at this through a user centred development approach that includes hands-on class experimentation.

The end goal of this project is to extend Moodle to help teachers better support their flipped classrooms and providing them with student learning data.

The project will work on improving the following areas:

1. Teacher support for recording, processing, editing of video and augmentation of videos with interactive  elements.
2. Integration of interactive activities during class time with the digital learning environment e.g. for the teacher to review which questions the students struggled with. Moodle modules that offer functionality for interactive quizzes supporting different levels of knowledge and feedback exist but would need to be rolled out from ITS, evaluated by the course teacher, and then used to prepare the interactive sessions.
3. Student support for following own progress and online collaboration during individual preparation.
4. Supporting a faster workflow for creating moderated interactive quizzes with different levels of understanding.

PROJEKTANSVARLIG

Hendrik Knoche, hk@create.aau.dk

PROJEKTDELTAGERE

Steven Gelineck, Rikke Gade, Olga Timcenko, Claus B. Madsen og Lise Busk Kofoed