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Social contexts for learning

By Ari Bader-Natal posted November 24, 2009

As promised in my previous post about the E-Learn conference, I wanted to share a few thoughts sparked by Terry Anderson’s keynote. The slide that caught my eye — and the one that I’ve been thinking about the most since the conference — mapped out three different types of “many” in social learning environments: the group, the network, and the collective. Based on a set of papers and blog posts by Jon Dron and Terry Anderson over the past few years, the model describes the characteristics of each of these social learning contexts. Here’s a composite reproduction of their illustrations, describing some of the key characteristics of each type of social software:

Dron & Anderson: Groups, Networks, and Collectives

While I’m several years late to the discussion, I think that it’s still worth mentioning why I find it so interesting. At Grockit, we’ve also been thinking about contexts for learning, albeit in different terms: we’ve been thinking in terms of supporting learning from experts, learning with peers, and learning alone. I can’t help but see parallels between these three learning contexts and that of Dron and Anderson’s groups, networks, and collectives.

Grockit: Learning from experts, with peers, and alone

Notice the similarities:

Expert-led classes in Grockit resemble traditional classroom groups.
Peer-driven sessions are based on an ever-changing network of participants.
Self-directed solo learners benefit from the collective behavior of all past Grockit interactions.

Each of these contexts has advantages and disadvantages, so we’ve opted to support all three and leave it up to the student to choose the way in which they wish to interact with others. We’ve noticed that for many, this choice changes from day to day, or even over the course of a single sitting. The choice is yours: How do you want to learn from others today?

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Do smaller classes mean higher SAT scores?

By thomas lotze posted November 20, 2009

That’s the question FlowingData posed last week. Nathan Yau examined the average SAT scores and high school class sizes for every state, using a parallel coordinates plot. From his analysis, it looked like having smaller classes (fewer students per teacher) resulted in higher SAT scores. Makes sense, right? Fewer students means more attention from the teacher, which should result in better scores.

But this wasn’t the whole story. A lot of people commented on the original post, suggesting some other factors that weren’t being taken into account. The main effect was that of the ACT — because many states have students take the ACT rather than the SAT, these states have only a few students taking the SAT. In this case, the only students taking the SAT might be the ones who expect to do well (or those students applying to colleges which require it).

I’ve put up an interactive visualization of the education data by state, which you can use to explore the different relationships. One clear effect is that having a low percent of students taking the SAT does result in higher average SAT scores for that state. In the graph below, the y-axis shows the average composite SAT score for the state, while the color shows the percent of students who take the SAT. The highest scoring states all tend to have low percentages of students taking the SAT (the dots are more blue), while the states where more students take the SAT (the dots are more yellow) are on the lower part of the plot.

The question of class size and its effect on education is still open. The investigation is continuing on the FlowingData forums, where anyone can contribute their own visualization. I’ve put mine up there, but I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with.

Here at Grockit, we’re interested in this topic because using study groups is one way students learn in Grockit. Understanding the impact the size of a group has on learning helps us improve our learning environment.

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How to Choose a College, Part One

By crystal schmelzer posted November 20, 2009

Let’s face it, getting into college doesn’t stop at a stellar ACT or SAT score. Not only can choosing which schools to apply to be a daunting task, but also completing applications, personal statements, letters of recommendation, and financial aid paperwork can be less fun than studying for midterms. There are thousands of colleges and universities in the US to choose from and the application process for these schools can be less stressful if you have an organized plan of action. Grockit’s guest blog series at www.eduinreview.com offers insight on how to select schools, manage the application process, and look into financial aid. Eduinreview is a site dedicated to helping students through all areas of the education process. Check out the first post from last weekend.

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DevLearn Conference Wrap-Up

By brian buser posted November 16, 2009

Ari giving a demo at the exhibition.

Last week we participated in the DevLearn Conference in San Jose. DevLearn is for e-learning professionals who are involved in the design, development, or management of emerging educational technologies. We had the opportunity to show Grockit at the exhibition and also were selected for the DemoFest. DemoFest was like a science fair for new technologies. People kept asking how Grockit’s approach to learning could be incorporated into their organizations and we enjoyed discussing ways Grockit could be used outside of our current test prep offerings.

The conference ended for us with our CEO, Farb Nivi, presenting “How Technology Will Revolutionize Education”. Farb dicussed how the traditional educational paradigm is broken and how technology offers new solutions for fixing it. Stay tuned for more on this topic from us in the future. Many thanks to the eLearning Guild members who organized DevLearn for putting together a a terrific conference.

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Feature Release – Track Progress Over Time

By brian buser posted November 10, 2009

quantitative_improvement

When students start prepping for a standardized exam a good first step is to assess ability level. Grockit students accomplish this by taking a diagnostic test shortly after they sign up. From there students need to know where to focus their study time and how they are progressing. Today, we released a feature that displays student progress over time. This new feature is best explained with an example.

The screenshot to the right shows the GMAT Achievements for a particular student. Please notice the purple badge about half-way down that indicates this student took a verbal diagnostic on 8/11/2009 and scored in the 91^st percentile of all Grockit GMAT students. A score this high indicates this student has high ability in the verbal section of the GMAT exam. The next day she took a quantitative diagnostic and only scored in the 51^st percentile. Knowing there was plenty of room to improve in this subject of the exam she began to focus a majority of her study time on practicing quantitative questions.

You can see that every few weeks she took a quantitative challenge to get an updated assessment of her ability level. She steadily improved all the way to the 94^th percentile by time she took her last challenge.

This student should now feel confident about doing well in the quantitative section of the GMAT and may begin to balance her study time more evenly with the verbal section. This optimization of study time is of great benefit to test takers. Stay tuned to our blog to learn about future feature releases that help students in a similar way.

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Grockit's contribution to E-Learn 2009

By Ari Bader-Natal posted November 9, 2009

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the E-Learn 2009 conference, both to present some of our ongoing work at Grockit and to learn from others in the field. In this post, I’ll describe a bit about our contribution, and in a companion post, I’ll share some highlights from the talks that I heard.

The slides above were prepared to accompany my paper, Interaction synchronicity in web-based collaborative learning systems. Here’s a summary:

In building a web-based platform to support live collaborative learning online, we’ve faced (and continue to face) a variety of technical challenges. One significant challenge has been the mismatch between what the web was designed for — namely, a network of linked documents — and what we’re using it for — a network of live collaborations. Different learning systems deal with this mismatch in different ways. Some systems stick with the web-native document-oriented model, and support asynchronous (i.e. different time) collaborative interactions around “content”, “educational resources”, or “learning objects”. Other systems support live, synchronous (i.e. same time) collaborative interactions by relying on better-suited network protocols, but do not run within a browser. Finally, a growing class of systems, including Grockit, have chosen to engineer a way to support live user interactions on the Web. For us, the motivation for engineering a solution is to enable you to use Grockit from the comfort of most any web browser on most any computer. If you’ve participated in one of our learning games / study groups, you know how convenient this can be.

But just because the “hard” work is done (read: supporting synchronous interactions on the web) doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to pass on doing the “easier” work (read: supporting asynchronous interactions.) If you’ve spent time reviewing your Grockit study sessions and reading through the explanations and discussion threads, you’d probably agree that this, too, can be quite valuable. Here’s where I think that it gets interesting: If we can support both synchronous and asynchronous interactions among learners, how do we know which to use? Which interactions should to be synchronous? Which should be asynchronous? Which should be a mix? What should that mix be?

There are no clear correct (or incorrect) answers here, so it’s been an interesting challenge trying to figure out what seems to work best. In the paper, I share a few lessons that we’ve learned in the course of grappling with this, including:

implications of question complexity
implications of activity visibility
implications of continuous communication
implications for discussion repurposing
implications of group size on discussion dynamics
implications of community size on group formation

If you’re interested in learning more, you can read the full paper.

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Stacy Blackman Consulting Application Essay Tips

By brian buser posted November 4, 2009

Over on our GMAT Blog today we are fortunate to have a guest post from Stacy Blackman who leads a premier admission consulting service. Stacy Blackman Consulting has helped clients gain admission to every top business school in the world. In the post she offers application essay tips which are applicable to all college admissions. There is also a coupon code exclusive for Grockit blog readers for her firm’s newly released school specific application essay guides. Check out her great tips here.

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Happy 1,000,000th!

By brian buser posted November 3, 2009

cake_1000000 This past week we celebrated the 1,000,000th time a question has been answered in Grockit. Sarah from Baltimore who is studying for the SAT was our lucky number one million. She says her favorite part about Grockit is that she gets to study with other people. We would like to take this occasion to thank Sarah and all Grockit students for helping us reach this milestone. Our celebration quickly turned into friendly wagering on how soon we’ll hit the next million and beyond. We look forward to adding more zeros to the cake!