All posts by K Bax

Events, Show and TEL

Show & TEL: Keynote Presentation 17th November 15:00 – 16:00

Concluding our Show & TEL presentations for November, openTEL is pleased to announce a special guest lecture. Join us online via Zoom (hosted externally) on Tuesday 17th November 2020 15:00 – 16:00. JOIN HERE

RoboTutor: Toward Learning at Scale in Developing Countries
Musings from a $1M Finalist in the Global Learning XPRIZE

Jack Mostow, Carnegie Mellon University

Advances in education technology are enabling tremendous advances in learning at scale. However, they typically assume resources taken for granted in developed countries, including reliable electricity, high-bandwidth Internet access, fast WiFi, powerful computers, sophisticated sensors, and expert technical support to keep it all working. This talk examines these assumptions in the context of a massive test of learning at scale in a developing country. We examine each assumption, how it was broken, and some workarounds used in a 15-month-long independent controlled evaluation of pre- to posttest learning and social-emotional gains by over 2,000 children in 168 villages in Tanzania. We analyze those gains to characterize who gained how much, using test score data, social-emotional measures, and detailed logs from RoboTutor. We quantify the relative impact of pretest scores, literate aspirations, treatment, and usage on learning gains.

Jack Mostow is Emeritus Research Professor of Robotics, Machine Learning, Language Technologies, and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his A.B. cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2010 he was elected President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society. He has published, collaborated, reviewed, supervised students, or given invited talks in artificial intelligence, children’s reading, computational linguistics, computer science, educational data mining, human-computer interaction, intelligent tutors, learner modelling, machine learning, psychology, robotics, software engineering, speech and language technologies, and statistics. Dr Mostow founded Project LISTEN, which developed an automated Reading Tutor that listens to children read aloud. He now leads the RoboTutor team (www.robotutor.org), a $1M Finalist in the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE competition to develop an Android tablet app for children in developing countries to acquire basic literacy and numeracy without adult assistance.

Events, Show and TEL

Call For Contributions: Show & TEL November 2020

We welcome you to present online at our next Show & TEL event in November! There are a number of 20minute slots available on the following dates:

  • Monday 2nd November: Ethics & TEL Themed (AM only)
  • Tuesday 10th November: TEL Themed (AM & PM)
  • Wednesday 11th November: TEL Themed (AM only)

Call for Contributions: Ethics and Technology Enhanced Learning (Monday 2nd November)

openTEL’s November Show & TEL event will start with a workshop focusing on ethics and technology enhanced learning (TEL). The workshop will be an opportunity for an open discussion on ethics in TEL and will begin with an update on an ongoing project on the topic. The project update will be followed by a series of short presentations. The workshop will conclude with time set aside for open discussion.

If you would like to deliver one of the short presentations, then please send a short description of the topic to opentel. We invite contributions on any of the following:

  • A specific TEL-related ethical situations that the presenter has found themselves in. This could be from the perspective of a student, a lecturer, a learning designer or something else
  • The ethics of a specific area of TEL
  • The philosophical underpinnings of ethics in TEL
  • Ethics and TEL research

Call for Contributions: Technology Enhanced Learning (10th & 11thNovember)

We also welcome contributions which are TEL related for the above dates. Show & TEL is the perfect opportunity to showcase your ideas and network with people from across the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) community. More information about our past Show & TEL events can be found here.

Save the Date: External Speaker (17th November 15:00 – 16:00)

We are concluding Show & TEL with an external speaker for the 17th November and ask that you save the date in your diaries if you can. More information to follow.

Submission Deadline

If you are interested in presenting on any of the above dates, please respond to this email by 23rd October with a very brief description of your presentation.

Assessment & Feedback SIG, Events, YouTube Video

Recording and Slides: Assessment & Feedback SIG September 2020

If you missed our last Assessment & Feedback Special Interest Group meeting, you can find the recording and the PowerPoint slides below.

Presentation 1: Simon  Cross

[embeddoc url=”https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/opentel/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OPenTEL_Presentation_1-v2.pptx” download=”all” viewer=”microsoft”]

Presentation 2: Chris Edwards

[embeddoc url=”https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/opentel/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Assessment-and-Feedback-SIG-some-IET-activity-v3.pptx” download=”all” viewer=”microsoft”]

Presentation 3: Christothea Herodotou

[embeddoc url=”https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/opentel/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Explore-WISEflow_SIGupdate_Sept20-1.pptx” download=”all” viewer=”microsoft”]

To join the Assessment & Feedback SIG mailing list please get in touch.

Literature Review

Taking Part from a Distance: Doing Participatory Research during Covid-19, an IET literature review 

By Johanna Hall

Covid-19 has had a dramatic impact on how we live, work and do research (Ruppel, 2020), and most significantly when that research involves working closely with those in the field to build trust and co-produce knowledge. Participatory approaches such as Participatory Action Research (PAR) seek to improve social practice through a reflexive process of planning, implementing, observing and reflecting (McTaggart, 1989), and maintaining equity and openness between participants and researchers.  

When social distancing needs to be maintained or travel to fieldwork sites becomes disrupted due to lockdown measures, how can we ensure the equity and openness of participatory approaches are maintained? Furthermore, how can we support participants, especially those in developing countries which may still be experiencing the negative effects of lockdown, through what is, arguably, one of the most stressful global events in recent history? And how can equal-power relationships be maintained between researchers and participants if they are geographically dispersed, sometimes in dramatically different social and economic climates?  Continue reading Taking Part from a Distance: Doing Participatory Research during Covid-19, an IET literature review  →