Generating enough feedback and motivation in university courses for teachers and students in a more at syllabus topic granularity.
We think that learning fast is a very hard problem to solve and also a very desirable to improve. We were analyzing some facts that have happened in our experiences. We discussed that motivation is a factor that is very important for people to learn and understand a topic. Other factor we also discussed is about providing feedback from a student to a teacher and vice versa in timely manner. We did some research around the MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory[1] and found several guidelines to foster motivation, student support, feedback and reflection. We also found people looking for difficult topics from classes they will be taking to be proactive (Mathematics and Physics to be more specific) in Quora[2] and Stackexchange[3].
The main goal of our system is to give timely feedback to students and instructors to make learning more efficient. We think we could make it topic based as well with the feedback from other students and peer-support from people interested in the same field. We think that students could have a better learning experience by knowing beforehand about the syllabus, goals, difficult topics from the course and experiences of other students. Students prior knowledge and understanding help them to create better constructs for learning [1], We think it is easier to find these constructs from other students. The contents must be personalized by the crowd and not just represented online as an open courseware. So far MIT Open Courseware and courses at KAIST do not support sharing experiences from former students of the same class at a topic level of granularity. There is mouth to mouth information sharing or course materials exchange with former students, but not available for everyone, just in peers. So, it is something that is happening, but it is happening in private.
How might we make the education system better? How might we encourage students to write the reviews? How might we use the better method for giving feedback? How might we effectively combine and demonstrate all the feedback? How might we ensure the privacy of the feedbacks? How might we categorize the data gathered so that it approximately suits the coursework of the majority of the universities? How might we integrate the system into the universities so that it becomes the part of the studying process? How might we check the validity of the feedbacks(bad words, empty feedbacks)? How might we promote the system throughout the different institutions? How might we discourage cheating? How might we bring teachers, instructors to use the platform? How might we get our first batch of early adopters?
Uploading the syllabus for every course and crowdsource color-marking the difficulty and importance level of the topics. Describe a scenario from the requester's point of view. Think how an imaginary requester might use the system. How do they create a task? How do they review results and successfully end the task? Whether it is a student or a teacher, the syllabus is uploaded to the platform. Students should be encouraged to start evaluation from the topics of the course to evaluate how difficult it is. Teachers are allowed in the process to review the feedback for a reactive strategy about the class. Students would keep using the system to have insight from former history of students in a given class. Teachers could use this platform for taking into account participation in the grades.
From the workers point of view, if it has a reward in the class grade it will give some motivation for them to participate. The easiness of evaluation could be the best point so no one miss the opportunity for answering. The experience might be sporadic if there is no reward. ### Analyze the idea using the seven dimensions above. Make sure your team's three ideas have clear differences in some dimensions. Our approach is organic. We think that aggregation is the rating sum of all the participants. The crowdpool would be the students and teachers in different stages. They are the actual stakeholders. There is no quality control so far, we don’t have any way to do that. It might be intrinsic because the students might benefit themselves for giving a sincere rating, it is more like Nash Equilibrium. We don’t need any special skill. The order of the process is: - Teacher uploads syllabus. - Student evaluates. - Teacher reviews the results. - Students watch the review of other courses and topics when history is generated.
Uploading the syllabus for every course and crowdsource comments about difficulty and importance level of the topics. Describe a scenario from the requester's point of view. Think how an imaginary requester might use the system. How do they create a task? How do they review results and successfully end the task? Teachers would upload the syllabus for students review. We would get crowdsourced comments from the students for a given topic. We would think other students will get more information out of them for studying or recommendations about how to perform better during the course. Students would be able to make a search among the comments, review comments from former classes and students. In the same fashion students would have to leave a message after class. Other users could take a look on them, sort them, flag them for inappropriate content and vote for better comments. Describe a scenario from the worker's point of view. Think how an imaginary crowd worker might use the system. How do they come into the system? What is the task experience like? What motivates them to keep contributing? This is an organic approach. Students would come to the system by suggestion from professors. We could bring the students because suggest it for participation & attendance. Likewise the comments would be received online in a very easy form for comments. Specifying caveats while studying, difficulties on topics.
Taking attendance or participation of the class while leaving an emotion status about the learning experience.
Describe a scenario from the requester's point of view. Think how an imaginary requester might use the system. How do they create a task? How do they review results and successfully end the task? Teachers could require for attendance and participation at the end of the class to leave an emoticon status and comments about the learning in class. Students could feel: doubtful, motivated, tired, not understanding at all, but expressed with emotions. They could leave an optional message. This information could be related to syllabus agenda and topics. Teachers and students could benefit from feedback. Teachers could use feedback to reinforce learning and students could be encouraged to help other persons who have questions. Describe a scenario from the worker's point of view. Think how an imaginary crowd worker might use the system. How do they come into the system? What is the task experience like? What motivates them to keep contributing? This is a mandatory approach where teachers would request it. However it might be easy to do it in just one step. You select an emotion out of emoticons and then leave a comment. Comments would be public by default, but also could be private which are sent as messages to the teacher.
[1] MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory. http://tll.mit.edu/guidelines/guidelines-teaching-mit-and-beyond [2] Quora: What is the most difficult concept to grasp in physics. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-difficult-concept-to-grasp-in-physics [3] Stackexchange: What concepts were most difficult for you to understand in calculus. http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/5286/what-concepts-were-most-difficult-for-you-to-understand-in-calculus