Abstract:

Active learning has been recognized as an effective pedagogical approach in the field of STEM education including different methods like collaborative learning, problem/project-based learning, situated learning, and learning by discovery. Among the advantages of active learning are: positive motivation, stimulation of deep learning, long term knowledge retention, and promotion of lifelong learning by taking responsibility for own development.

A common challenge when adopting the blended learning approach to active learning is to provide adequate tracking of learners’ progress along the “offline” part of the learning path, and to identify the need for pedagogical intervention/help by the instructor. This is especially important when each team of students progresses with individual pace on nonlinear and personalized learning path.

The main problem addressed in this publication is how to collect and process in real time data (learning analytics) about students’ offline learning activities and progress, in order to enable dynamic adaptation and gamification of presented activities, as well as informed support actions by the instructor. This problem is solved in the context of active, situated, and gamified group learning setup, using novel approach combining elements of Extreme Programming (XP), stations rotation and flex blended learning models.

In order to implement and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method a client-server application called Challenge Unicorder™ was developed. Unicorder allows the teams of students to log (blog, podcast) their progress along the learning path of challenges, which are provided in adaptive way at each learning station. This logging is done in multimodal (gesture, text, audio, video), easy to use graphical, and augmented reality mobile user interface. The collected data is used to gamify the learning process, to allow immediate feedback and achievement recognition of different student teams, as well as to present multimedia “stories” about the achievements at the end of the session.

The instructor role is also empowered by receiving real-time data analytics about the progress of individual teams. This allows the instructor to actively support the teams online (using Unicorder) or in face-to-face mode, when there is little progress reported. So instructor’s role is transformed from being director to playing the role of “block remover” in terms of XP. The instructor’s effectiveness and efficiency are both improved by interactive learning analytics dashboard presentation, allowing to track the progress, and identify need for pedagogical intervention for multiple student teams in the same time.

Unicorder allows the instructor to adapt the sequence and difficulty of challenges according to the previous results of students in the team by providing proactive suggestions. This allows to fit the problem to learning context requirements (as discussed in previous author’s publications) such as students’ knowledge models and time available for the task. In the spirit of gamification certain tasks in the challenge are dynamically “unlocked” only when previous tasks were completed in less time than expected.

The publication presents the proposed active, situated, blended learning method, as well as the details of its practical implementation using Challenge Unicorder™ system. The evaluation of the proposed method is work in progress. Some preliminary results from learner’s feedback study are included.

Keywords:

Active learning, situated learning, blended learning, IoT, instructional method, learning analytics, adaptive learning, mobile learning, gamification.