Learning in and with Community Webinar

Online Event

CSCL in Times of Crisis Webinar Series The Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) community of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) together with the…

Learning Together Online through Peer Review Webinar

Online Event

CSCL in Times of Crisis Webinar Series The Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) community of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) together with the…

The Power of Technology to Get Students Thinking Webinar

Online Event

CSCL in Times of Crisis Webinar Series The Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) community of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) together with the…

Promoting Engineering Students’ Intercultural Communication and Diversity Understanding Webinar

Online Event

Amidst the global disruption of international education programs, educators are creatively adapting their education abroad programs aimed at building global citizens. We will present the use of the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model to support students’ development of intercultural communication competencies and global perspectives within the context of a global virtual team learning environment where they work in culturally diverse project teams. This approach focuses on supporting students that seek alternative solutions to the traditional study abroad programs, or where access to travel-related international experiences have been limited by social distancing constraints. We will share how the International Virtual Engineering Student Teams (InVEST) initiative helps students to productively collaborate across virtual, cultural, ethnic, and geographic lines while building global competencies and technical research skills.

Fostering Humanistic Knowledge Building Communities using Online Collaborative Tools Webinar

Online Event

The learning goals of this innovation are to foster online humanistic knowledge building communities (HKBCs) where communities’ ideas as well as the participants’ identities as learners and knowledge builders are jointly co-advanced. Target groups include online courses in higher educational settings designed for collaboration in technology-enhanced KBCs. While it is relevant to all disciplines and contexts, we have implemented this at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels following the same design principles in teacher education, educational technologies, statistics education, and introduction to Ph.D. studies. Although our current implementations are fully online due to COVID, we have over a decades worth of relevant experience with this approach in blended formats with face-to-face with online learning activities.

Using Multimodal Data to Prepare the Next Generation of Data Scientists Webinar

Online Event

In an increasingly data-driven world, big data is infiltrating all aspects of our lives. As such, data literacy is becoming a central skill for the next generation of STEM students. However, most data science courses focus on pre-collected datasets and neglect challenges associated with data collection and data cleaning. This project is about teaching data science skills through real-world, ecological, multimodal datasets through a semester-long course. For this purpose, we developed a website where multimodal data (eye-tracking, motion, physiological) can easily be collected through traditional webcams. Traditionally collecting this kind of fine-grained data required dedicated hardware and software.

Collective Regulation & Enhanced Analysis Thinking Environment (CREATE)

Online Event

Our increasingly diverse society requires developing cultural competencies in a way that one could form relationships across differences. Developing these skills is a long-term endeavor that needs repetitive practices of collaborative sense-making around topics such as race, gender with diverse identity groups. However, learners have rarely been taught how to engage in this form of collaborative sense-making, and with the challenges COVID brings, the existing communication problems could be amplified across a larger scale, leading to more polarization in society. Thus, we introduce The Collective Regulation & Enhanced Analysis Thinking Environment (CREATE), an online text-based platform, and the pedagogical models. It was initially designed to develop learners' knowledge and skills to collectively monitor and regulate collaborative discussions. We will share our ongoing research on revising the CREATE to help develop the ability to regulate and optimize difficult dialogues and practice the skills needed for multicultural competencies in a CSCL context.

Positioning the university lecture in a time of crisis

Online Event

During the current pandemic, media commentators have often expressed the plight of college students in terms of their lectures being forced ‘online’. Moreover, fee-struggling students will themselves complain about the unanticipated loss of this face-to-face form of teaching. Yet, because the expository content of lectures is now made accessible as online recordings, any sense of that loss must be associated with the ‘live’ experience of exposition. However, such reactions are surprising: because lecturing has long been criticised for how it places the student in a relatively passive role – rendering the occasion a rather poor example of learning that is socially mediated. Our goal in this project has been to protect ‘the lecture’ as a central feature of college education: and so address the constraints imposed by social distancing. This has entailed recruiting networked technology to facilitate novel forms of social interaction around expository material. We have explored a number of institutional design solutions and can now report encouraging results. Our focus has been on how the content of a lecture can be choreographed to facilitate rich interactions between student, teacher, and expository texts. But also, how the recorded lecture could become a key artefact that facilitated subsequent collaborative knowledge construction between class peers.

Fostering Social Presence and Sense of Belonging in University Students Webinar

Online Event

The goals related to building an online community outside the classroom is to create a positive, holistic learning experience that contributes to improved engagement, sense of belonging, and retention. A well-curated online community provides scaffolds for building social presence. It also encourages interaction between groups of students who are usually perceived as separate groups (e.g., campus-based and online), thus enabling a sense of cohesion and mutual support. Studies suggest increased social presence and sense of belonging contribute to higher levels of engagement and retention among college students.

Facilitating Productive Disciplinary Engagement in an Online Class Webinar

Online Event

This pilot study focuses on an introductory course on Human-Computer Interaction for Educational Technology. This course is intended for graduate students who are interested in learning about design issues and key considerations while designing or evaluating educational technology. As such, the topics in this course cover the basics of interaction and usability issues and also go beyond by introducing students to various pedagogical and learning theories that influence the design of educational technology.

Virtual Learning Dens: A Third Space for Playful Reflection Webinar

Online Event

In partnership with the Mendon-Upton Regional School District, the MIT Playful Journey Lab is developing Learning Dens—virtual spaces that provide a weekly activity series to promote playful interactions and reflection among learners. These spaces create a safe, social, virtual opportunity to help educators connect with and support their students and for students to connect with and support one another. Learning Den activities emphasize creative and collaborative forms of reflection and empower each student to recognize the different circumstances that their peers have faced over these past months of the pandemic, fostering a sense of connection and community.