Hi Ron,
Thanks for your detailed feedbacks, really interesting.
Video is not always the best support for reasons your precisely described: it is not easily search-able; when it is, it required a tremendous editing effort. From my experience, I found created video to be very useful to my student on very specific how-to, and after teaching it in class. My students told they repeatedly used to prepare for a test in Algebra[1]. Nevertheless, to have a tool to easily annotate video is a must for a Dynabook, the easier the tool, the more the teacher could use it. I add your ideas on video transcript and searchable.
Some non-motivated students are so because after repeated non successful efforts, it becomes emotionally less risky for them to stay in their comfort attitude zone "I am not motivated". The Dynabook may help them to train themselves without being socially exposed to their "un-ability" to conduct a task. There are other reasons for students to be unmotivated: bad habit on no homework, or gifted student which found themselves in difficulty because so far homework was not a necessity for good score, but then it does not work anymore and they don't know how to be effective on homework. Of course theses reasons can appear mixed in one student. It will be interesting to see how could be oriented the Dynabook concept for unmotivated students.
Live interaction in your software is the real-life interaction part between teacher and his students. I wonder about a feature to mimic the rich non explicit informations/feedbacks occurring in real life face to face situation as gesture or facial expression.
Best
Hilaire
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIkMRjmX9qM&list=PLziC9ALSenVub36p4O0JMH...
Le 30/08/2018 à 17:47, Ron Teitelbaum a écrit :
Hi Hilaire,
Nice write up on the flipped classroom. Thinking about video there are a few things that come to mind. First, video is not easily searchable. With the ability to easily caption and index video now it would make sense to allow users to jump from place to place on the video by clicking on the transcript. That would make it easier to read the content (which is much faster) after you have watched the video. It would also be nice if you could annotate the video by adding your own highlights and notes to the transcript. This takes video and converts it to something that is much more active. For me video is great but only the first time. Once you have seen the video it becomes a time sink if you ever need to reference it since you really don't want to watch it all over again but you may want to gather details or re-watch something you didn't understand. That's when text takes over and become a much more useful medium. So highlighting a video transcript and being able to watch just what is highlighted and see your notes at the same time would be very useful.
The concept of a flipped classroom raises some issues I've seen. Distance education is really difficult and is a bit of an analog for a flipped classroom. When you are trying to teach people using media alone the amount of time and effort required to produce the content is, I'm told, much like the effort required to write a book. The benefits of consistent delivery of information need to be weighed against the efficiency of discussing the material and being able to gauge how much is being understood and leaving the detailed information for later study (by interested students). The live interaction is what our software "Immersive Terf" adds to distance learning.
The risk I see is that it is very difficult to produce material that covers all the aspects that would be required for everyone without losing the interest of those that already have a background in the material by putting in too much, or flying over the heads of students by leaving things out. Having the interaction between students and teachers is critical so I'm not sure how efficient it would be to push the learning to home assignments.
I've always thought that it works best to film some content, for consistent delivery, up to about 5 minutes, then immediately move to Q&A, then have users break out to discussion groups. This model of learning, questioning, and discussing is very powerful when done in an interactive setting. Breaking out the learning portion to a solitary activity seems wrong. Leaving the solitary time for reinforcement and detailed analysis makes more sense. I guess what I'm saying is that if as a student we have time alone that time is best spent reviewing what was learned, working on projects applying what was learned to be presented back to the class for discussions, or expanding on what was learned by reading or exploring the fine details that may have been skipped in class.
I'm not saying this is best for all people since everyone does seem to learn in quite different ways. In many ways, students do benefit from trying to figure something out for themselves. The questions become much more relevant, they seem to learn at a much deeper level because of the effort required to "figure it out". The issue in my mind is that these motivated students are going to learn no matter what you do. Even without prodding them in a structured way they are going to come to class much better informed than their peers. Non-motivated students will come to class saying "I TRIED to learn the material but I didn't understand it".
This, of course, brings up the question is Dynabook intended to support a motivated student to learn and explore information or to help improve the ability of non-motivated students to learn? Maybe both?
Thanks again for sharing your posts.