Technological innovations and opportunities in educational research

hello welcome to the third and last webinar of a series of three webinars offered as part of the world University Network funded research methodologies and education project or Remy project for short my name is Lisa Kim and I'm the principal investigator of the project and the host for the webinar series today's topic is on technological innovations and opportunities in educational research and the presentations will be delivered by Professor dick nambi from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the second presentation will be delivered by Dr Nora McIntyre from the University of Southampton in the UK a few practicalities please use the Q a icon at the bottom of your screen throughout the session to post your questions and we'll address them at the end of the session while dick prepares to join us on the virtual stage I'll read out his online profile for us so dick number is a full professor of Education technology and head of educational technology programs in the school of education at the University of Cape Town in South Africa he's a founder and Project Director of the educational technology inquiry lab a digital sand people learning technology uses through play his work at the lab investigates how culture of innovation are created and how creativity is Unleashed in education he has served as a principal investigate and co-investigator on several projects including the Lego funded project and children play and technology in collaboration with the University of Sheffield in the UK he's currently leading a project on open educational research resource of indigenous games in Africa involving 11 African countries thank you dick over to you thank you for the kind introduction and I do appreciate that I'm sure you can be able to see my slides so um I just want to speak about the technological innovations and the opportunities that the educational research is a build too as a result of these technological innovations and what I'll try and do is to start with this Capital proverb because it's quite profound um the the African probe goals that do not test the depth of a river with both feet and of course you would almost understand why that um is the right is the reason for that there's a lot of wisdom in the whole thinking that when you want to know how how deep the river is it's not time for you to put both your feet in there this proverb does actually speak to how we look at the the Innovations and also how we begin to put one foot forward in the testing of these Innovations and once you have tested the the ground or the depth of water you put your feet in and test the the depth of the other part of the river with one foot and by so doing you are able to to keep moving so if you you should be able to find ways in which one moves even with that whole process or testing the depth and and making some kind of progressive movements uh forward the other thing that is useful for me to start with is to talk about this kind of work that was reported by crunky just about this year uh from the afro barometer kind of data what the arthroparometer do is that they collect data and they collected data from 34 African countries and particularly they were looking at the digital literacy index where they compare these very interesting Matrix that comes out here if you look at the uh the red there which actually speaks to the lack of Readiness in terms of the digital literacy and also when you look at does not own mobile phone or computer does not use of form or Internet just about nine percent on the phone no Internet does not use phone or Internet regularly it's about that this box here actually shows that there is no regimens at all in terms of the Digital Witness to use technology or even remote learning particularly when one reflects on where we just come from in terms of the pandemic here we actually see only the smartphone or computer does not use phone or Internet regularly it actually does make lots of common sense if you look at that use if one owns phone no internet access uses phone or Internet regularly and it's about 37 which is quite high but these are people that are using the phone or Internet regularly but they don't own phone or the internet access which actually means that their use of the phone and internet regularly is a very expensive kind of process the interesting part is that only this about 17 where they own a smartphone and the computer and that they use the phone and internet regularly which is a very small percentage if one thinks about it the other thing that we begin to see here is the kind of what what we refer to as the digital arms uh Readiness in in across the 34 countries and you actually see that the way this kind of data was put together is that they looked at these countries and looking at whether they have these blue these greens they do have a building and electricity at the cell phone service and that these ones here they do have the building with at least one component of that of one component of either the electricity and the cell phone service and then these ones here they do not actually have anything so to speak and and when this also this data was also compared with the rural digital hubs and they looked at the way these countries are positioned in terms of where people could actually have access to the internet or even electricity or the cell phone service which actually begins to show that if one is to look at the use of innovativeness and use of Technologies and the diffusion of Technology it must be seen in the context of the Readiness the digital kind of Hub index does show us where these countries are positioned in terms of their Readiness to use a technology and also their Readiness to provide access to the internet and also to the mobile network one of the things that I actually saw from in Mozambique for example they created a digital Hub and I3 so this is a Wi-Fi tree that you're looking at what they did was that they they provided Wi-Fi under these three and they they put electricity in this on these three so that it was World it and the students would then have access to this wi-fi tree 24 7 and um and and that was quite useful to provide the whole idea of thinking about the the digital Hub uh using using means that uh and I actually thought this is very Innovative because what they've done there is to to provide the Wi-Fi um in in a way that they're not necessarily waiting to have access to the building with um with electricity and also having the Wi-Fi C and the cell phone signals the one cell phone signal here they provided the Wi-Fi under the tree they allowed a lot of students to access this tree 24 7. and um and that was quite useful to uh to note there when um in the in the intro Atlant was actually mentioned there it's not with a is an initiative that I was privileged to to found um which is a which is a lab education technology inquiry lab what we do do actually is that it aims to provide teachers with the space where they leave the stresses normally associated with emerging Technologies at the door and and enter enter with the goal of enjoyment and fun we're learning is with others and knowledge is freely shared like the sand in the sandpit what we do at HVAC is to create learning uh through a collaborative engagements and learning from one another and allowing their the learning processes being captured as very useful tangible evidence of learning and I'll talk to you just about why this is important because some of the technological innovations that were not possible just about 10 10 years ago have now been made possible for us and I'll just be able to show how we have appropriated that here in the atlab um these are teachers these are pre-service teachers uh training to um training and be being made ready to actually go out there in in the field in the field meeting in schools what we have actually done with these students that each year these students create an e-portfolio which is an Evidence of their learning the evidence of learning to become teachers and these portfolios are put together in in a way that the learning and play in the sun which is through fun as you can be able to see on the screen there um here the students were just being shown how the um the jump board works and the first thing they do is that they just scribble on the jamboard on their on the uh they just learn how to scribble on the frame they just learn how to uncover all these different um affordances of it and then once they have done that that is when they actually begin looking at how they can apply this meaningfully and what we have actually done over time is that over 2 000 um e-portfolios have been created by each and every one of the pre-service teachers so the pre-service teachers each one creates a new portfolio from the beginning of the year to the end of the of the year which then they carry with to the field as evidence of the digital Readiness and these are just examples of what these students have actually created as e-portfolios we we have actually a student of mine and myself we we created a framework called a teaching children and this teaching children is based on the two axis they are on one level in this access here is all about the awareness and access to technology and then this one here is about the pedagogy where if you look at Bloom's taxonomy on when we flip the blooms accidentally and we looked at the teacher-centric teacher-centric methods of teaching and then learner-centric weapons of of learning and then we we looked at these these different kind of quadrons where we have in quadrant a where one is actually it's very teacher-centric and no technology in use this is linear Centric no technology this is teacher-centric but the teacher the Technologies in the hands of the teacher and here is very learner-centric and the Technologies are in the hands of the learner and we are and this framework that we put together was appropriated by the department of basic education which and they put together a professional development framework for digital learning which was which has been rolled out Nationwide what we have done with this framework is that they have this box here called teaching where this is the traditional method of teaching where they are teaching with a choke and talk no technology is in use because you know so so teacher-centric moving from teacher-centric to learner-centric this is learning where there's no Technologies used but it's very data Centric technology here is in the hands of a teacher technology is in the hands of the learner and the awareness and use of digital tools and resources is what you see determining this here there's both Outlets awareness high levels of awareness we've actually used this to actually look at how the diffusion of innovation if you look at the diffusion the lower diffusion of Technology here at high diffusion technology and we see regulated institutional control and personal uh which is cloud-based we see here that in in the paper that we did just about 2016 we looked at how the technology has been has diffused in the country in South Africa in the last 20 years and we actually saw that we have moved from this quadrant to towards this quadrant here which is the digital literacies and social media flexible learning and that the pandemic this is what the pandemic did it actually accelerated the shift from these quadrants here where there's no use of technology to this quadrants here where there is high use but the teacher is actually using technology and then this one here where the Learners are the ones that are using technology the way this has actually played out is that here we have time space and distance because you must be in the same space you must be doing the same time and here of course we you don't have to be because you can be anywhere but but students need to have access to the technology to actually listen or or browse or listen to what the teacher is actually disseminating there what we have actually seen that in the recent past that the use of things like lms's and Powerpoints and videos and things like that they tend to be in the hands of the teacher and that when devices and tools they've actually moved in the hands of the learner or in the hands of students we've seen knowledge sharing we've seen collaboration we've seen co-production of knowledge Imaging in this quadrant what we we actually every year I do create an activity for these students towards the end of the year why do you teach better why do you think you teach better a very reflective task and students have responded to the task and technology has actually made that possible and we have used the flipgrid to actually do that and over time you know when one looks like the way our students have actually use flipgrid to just collaboratively share a response to why they teach better just before they leave to go and to go to the field to go and teach um it has been quite amazing to actually look at the way technology has facilitated and enabled the collaborative engagement of students where they actually move from just being able to learn in isolation to being able to reflect and allow their Reflections to be heard and to be engaged with by other students we have actually seen that just creating two tasks uh using Fleet grid for these students this year um if one and I create there were only two topics that were created why I teach better and why I chose teaching and um for 160 students we have had 274 videos created and the 53 300 views uh which which has actually totaled about 128 Hours um so students have created these resources and they're able to engage with these resources um and and technological innovation this is an exploitation of the affordances of technology which has actually made it possible for us to actually do this and um when one has things about the 21st century skills and and oftentimes we've seen the disparity between what teachers feel that they must be able to engage students with and what is students themselves us engage with in terms of the technology I ask the students to tell me about some of the apps they use for communication and for collaboration and for creativity and for critical thinking and I was amazed at the number of apps that students were actually using and they students were busy using different kinds of tools for critical thinking for the 21st century skills and and which actually began to to confirm that there is a good shift towards that quadrant where technology is increasing in the hands of the students which is actually students are having access to the smartphones and and different kinds of tools and they are gravitating towards there and I and I think there are lots of opportunities that allows us to um to begin looking at how do we understand what we can be able to do in terms of effective uses of Technologies when evidence is actually showing that there's a gravitation towards this quadrant here which is the digital meaning quite right the um and and this time at this point I'm actually leading this project for open education resources of indigenous games in Africa I'm going to originally do here is that the indigenous games are becoming obsolete and they can't they are becoming obso because they're becoming extinct they are not being handed down by the parents to their children because their children either their parents are too busy or their children are not necessarily interested in indigenous games what we're actually doing is that we are collecting and documenting indigenous games from across the continent and what we have done so far is that we want to be able to ensure that indigenous games that are played in southern Africa they can be played in central Africa and the ones that are played in North Africa that can be played in East Africa and so what we're also doing with this with this project is that we want young people to to learn how to code to design uh digital indigenous skills and and to date we have collected about 150 games and this is the kind of distribution of the games that we've collected from uh from 10 countries in Africa and I should just be able to mention that I know I'm running out of time now but some of the things that were very we are looking at things to do with the fact that a number of people particularly in Africa are very very communal and that we know that being able to speak it comes very naturally as opposed to being able to text type text and typing text is not a normal kind of process as opposed to being able to be able to use voice and and and this and the use of a Google assistant and and just being able to speak to that I mean it's one of those that we are really exploring at the moment just people to say hey Google and and once you once we we're trying to really design something that would allow um this kind of level of Engagement where one can be able to just speak normal voice to actually engage with the the different um kind of resources and and this is quite useful because increasingly we have seen that Google has actually made all these translators um we can be able to see Google in in Zulu Google in esposa and and so on but then we want to be able to to look at how we can be able to explore the different possibilities that are rendered by the Google assistant at the moment that's one of the things that you're actually looking at and and I think it does render lots of possibilities the other is uh this airtime which of course uh they have been quite quite an interesting uh thing that we we are currently um exploring the possibilities of what this would mean in education because currently we know that the um the air attacks are so limited to wanting to track um different kind of things like I've got an airtime which I've put on my keys I've got an air tank which I've put in my later I've got an air tag which is is in in bags or luggage and something like this and in fact just just about this morning I tracked my one of my air tanks and I could see here that there is a case uh there's there's a there's a case here just about amazingly this is in in England because this is my my daughter is just flying back from from England and she's got in the air tank in a case and I saw that she was at the airport this morning so you could actually see that the airtime uh does have the little bit of potential in fact there are lots of potential there for what you can what to do with this and we are actually looking at what this would mean in education and whether we could actually look at the possibility of using air attacks to just allow students come in a space and we know the class attendance or we can be able to just drive where students are particularly when they're doing field projects and things like that so lots of possibilities there I want to end with this African proverb it says that when you show the moon to a child it only sees your finger um and it's so very easy to want to think that you have successfully shown the child the Moon when actually the child has only been looking at your finger thank you great thank you dick for your wonderful presentation and you've talked about various elements of Education Innovation you've talked I started off with the digital literacy index and how there's there could be a quadrant dividing different sections then you talked about what you're doing with the e-portfolio with your PGC students which I thought was fascinating in terms of equipping that when digital literacy so that they are ready to teach um with those skills when they're in the workforce in the teaching Workforce then you also talked about your digital games which I find is a fascinating project and then you've ended with different technological Innova technologies that are available that we can think about as we're looking at educational research um just a quick question and so you talked about how the PGC students are being equipped with different skills during their time as a PGC student then they are going to the classroom how can we ensure that their skills of teachers are progressing at the same rate as as students sometimes we find that students seem to be ahead of us in terms of the game in terms of technological advantages how do we ensure that teachers are equipped with and similar skills well I think it's a good question I think we need to be able to uh create and strengthen more professional learning communities and I think that's what we need to be able to ensure we can we can build more and allow these uh pre-service teachers when they go out there in the field they should become members of the professional learning community and I think in in a professional Learning Community which is um we would definitely allow the in-service teachers to learn from their pre-service teachers um the very experienced teachers they do have a lot that they can teach their young teachers in terms of the pedagogy um even though they've got lots of experience in that regard and the new teachers name and more technology and the and this is one of the things that really trying to get with our teachers to do to equip them with the know how how they can do what you teach with Technologies but we know that we're still going to have to learn from those that have got the experience of being in the classroom so we actually need to be able to create to create what we call very even non-judgmental non-threatening many spaces where in-service teachers and regardless of their levels of experience can be able to learn in a very relaxed way in which case and and that's exactly what we are really trying to to do with these pre-service teachers and bring them doing this because obviously the experience teachers I think we need to be able to ensure that they can they can learn from The Young teachers and vice versa right thank you very much dick sure thank you we'll move on to our second presentation so I'll read from Nora's online profile out to so Nora McIntyre currently works at the Southampton education School University of Southampton in the UK as the school's educational Innovation specialist Nora asks how best to improve teacher Effectiveness in educational technology among diverse Global populations she has a research interest in culture socio-emotion and inequalities she particularly Advocates the use of intensive data via Innovative research technology and process oriented analytic techniques over to you Nora hi everyone I'm just um trying to set up so that I can see everyone as as I'd like to okay all right um great so thanks Lisa and for inviting me to um this um exciting Workshop series and um to today's webinar which focuses on um research methods for technological innovations and just trying to hide this panel here in case it uh bothers other people right there we go okay so that's and that's what I want people to see and so I'm very much focusing on research methods and with educational technology in mind and focusing on how as technological innovations um Advance at a at a quick Pace how um research methods can advance accordingly in order to appropriate the way technology is used and the way technology changes so the framework I'll follow um for kind of four examples and four areas of focus will be um the way Innovations in edtech are and I'll describe a characteristic um and so according to that characteristic how research methods um should should be used so the first um characteristic about Innovations in edtech are that they are Global and so research methods should be contextually diverse um and what does it mean for a research to be um contextually diverse and while there are kind of three broad ways in which we can think about this um they could be within study diversity So within one study we might focus on a collection or all of the Low Middle income countries um if we're thinking about Innovations for International Development um we could be contextually diverse in the way we conduct our studies across the life of our research so between studies and we focus on various sub samples of low middle income countries and also within studies we could take the comparison design which I do like to do and where we compare High income countries with low middle income countries so we can really get a grasp of what's unique of the various regions that we're trying to focus on and so that we know what really is a unique characteristic or quality um or need of for example where middle income countries if we're thinking about educational technology for International Development we could also compare multiple income countries um in terms of the cultural differences that can be found among across the global South um but today I'll focus on the approach of taking one study and having um within one study diversity of multiple countries and the study I'll focused on is where we did a systematic review and me and colleagues in the edtech hub we looked at how technology can be used for Teacher professional development and we actually focused on all low model income countries that we could get our hands on and you'll see that quite a lot of studies were included to begin with about 5 000 studies had to be um sifted through um because we because we really wanted to get a grasp of the the oversight of the field um and I'm just going to describe how we grappled with that approach and of taking um contextually diverse research methods to appropriate to um the kind of life stage of educational Innovation um we really thought that we should try and focus on all of the limit Lincoln countries and because it's um educational technology and Innovation through those um has is kind of really early on in the field and we thought that systematic review should um scope the field um comprehensively in order for us to then know um where to focus in in terms of subsequent studies and you'll see here the inclusion criteria in our search strategy and and what we meant um by Educators it included informal context as well as formal and our intervention for the systematic review was the use of tech and for three broad criteria which were um teacher learning teacher use and or technology for student learning we used an app called colander and to help sift through the studies that we included if you are interested colander actually has an automated um screening function and capability and where it can recommend whether to include or exclude and that could um vastly increase the pace of your systematic review process especially if it's a very big one like R1 um also because it was such a um because the review was focused on such a new area of the field we needed to develop our own thematic framework for how to organize the studies um in quite a broad and comprehensive and large scope of a systematic review so we had a system of developing emerging codes um where um there would be a proponent um we had several rounds of people proposing new codes for our thematic framework of how to organize um the various findings and qualities and characteristics of the studies um colleagues would propose new codes there would be several rounds of um coding and at the next subsequent round of coding all the studies and we would integrate the new proposed codes and in total I think we had about six rounds of coding all of the included studies so that all of the included studies were thematically organized in a way that was meaningful and that that encompassed the broad scope of the field um in the end we ended up with um this all these codes and that we applied to in order to organize the many studies that we found and that were relevant to our research question um and the findings looked something like this um where there were macro level Mesa level and micro level um considerations to be taken for um teach professional development through through edtech and with use of edtech another quality about Innovations in edtech is that they are intensive and so research methods should capture um the kind of high rate of change from moment to moment when us teachers or students are using Innovations in edtech educational Technologies produce intensive data by which I mean and even within one second or one minute or one hour there can be many samples um taken from the same participant who may be a teacher or learner or a school leader and so we need um research technologies that actually can match the pace at which data is being sampled and recorded and for this I suggest that we use process tracing Technologies and I suggest that we take look look carefully at log files that you can export from educational Technologies um we can use an approach called eye tracking and with think aloud and so supplementing two data streams in order to really unpack the processes that are going on and when teachers or students are using educational Technologies um related to that we could look at the physiology because heart rate and skin conductance and those change similarly quickly as as the moments moment decisions and processes that are experienced by teachers or students when they use technology and just briefly I'll focus on one of those examples and which is when eye tracking was used with think aloud and so recently I compared um what you can um find out from um videos and that are used to stimulate and participant think aloud so you I got teachers um in a room and I showed them their own eye tracking video recorded from when they were teaching and I used that as a way of looking at um of finding out how teachers um think and operate in the classroom and that can involve the use of tech as well and there are insights from the study that can relate to how to use videos for the teacher professional development so you'll see in this video when I play it that there will be the sound of the teacher talking when she was teaching and also the sound of the teacher talking when she's explaining um what's going on in the classroom you'll see red dots and floating around the screen that's where the teacher was looking at the time when the video was being recorded and the teacher was doing the teaching and I've made a high con made the video picture and high contrast so as to preserve confidentiality um of the students involved who are recorded by this eye tracker but this kind of research technology data would would look like this right that's me just trying to get to the front of the room to get started and I'm trying to make sure that they're cooperating during the lesson and the last few people are coming in I couldn't work out why Jack was moving and then I realized he hadn't got a chair and I'm trying to settle Meg down there all right so you can see that um the moment's moment changes are captured by the um I the eye movements and the video recording it's all it all can be coded and reflected the Intensive way in which and peace at which um decisions are made and actions are taken and the teacher herself is able to explain what she was thinking from moment to moment if you supplement the eye tracking data with think aloud and in this study I in I adapted um a qualitatively developed framework for Teacher cognition and with a focus on Expert teachers and I adapted it to um to perform a cross-study comparison um so that I could find out when to use which methodological approach when asking differing research questions you'll see that there are different mergers and there were unemerged codes that were applied to Raw data then those in underwent a mid merge and then finally they underwent a full merge and the full merged codes were subjected to quantities of analyzes and so that there could be a macro level comparison between two countries and two studies and just briefly what we found is that expert teachers typically um think differently in terms of the they report differently and what they think and consider at the time of their teaching and in particular the greatest difference between the expert and the novice is that the expert teacher talks and thinks a lot more reports thinking a lot more about classroom relationships um whereas the novice teacher reports thinking a lot more about disruptive behavior and kind of behavior level and concerns in terms of our research methods and recommendations going forward it seems that the kind of the when when the teacher is wearing their own eye tracking glasses to track their own eye movements and then thinking aloud in response to that video you get a lot more insight into classroom relationships where whereas you get a lot more insight into all the other kinds of cognitions if you're trying to find out about all the other aspects of teacher cognition by showing a teacher someone else is teaching and then asking them to think aloud in response to that so another area of Innovations in edtech is that they are media rich and so I suggest that research methods might also try and employ media Rich Avenues techniques so educational Technologies are usually very multimedia in nature and these are just some examples here in the screen including click stream and messaging and learning exercises and then as dick was talking about how there's an internet of things you can be in this apple ecosystem and then you're in this Apple Internet of Things where you're tracked you're trapped in all sorts of levels for and and and it's really um the various things that can be tracked is extremely multimedia in nature when you start taking a whole ecosystem or Internet of Things approach to looking at um educational technology and one media Rich Project that I've been involved with um looked at student collaboration with use of an edtech tool called geogebra and it was focused on eye tracking and physiological tracking and electronic um pen um for implementing the geogebra a geogebra problem um to size and here's just another photo of the multimedia the kind of media Rich setup of not only the Learning Resource that was in Focus but also of the whole research project um so in terms of classroom data collection um first we would set up the eye trackers and we would um complete our students and tell students how questionnaires are to be completed and once the lessons starts the teacher was asked to present um the kind of res the problem in Focus that we'd like them to focus and to to present so that we could collect the relevant data and then there were for the rest of the lesson there was group work with all this research technology multimedia research technology recording multimedia data of the student collaborating at the same time as um yeah using on the educational innovation of geogebra in terms of the coding of the Gaze in particular of the eye tracking data um these were the codes that we analyzed and that we coded manually and then analyzed um we analyzed the gate in terms of the durations per visit so you need to relativize um the duration the total durations according to the number of instances of eye movements that were recorded we used this questionnaire mentioned here um so that in total there were 14 variables subjected to a multivariate regression analysis and ultimately we found that um students who are higher in anxiety tend to look at the collaborators uh bodies more which suggest to me that anxious students are monitoring their cluster environment more vigilantly than students with less or no anxiety and then finally as a last example um Innovations in edtech are often online and so research methods might adapt to that and respond to that by being remote or being revised appropriately for how um data is analyzed so online learning is Innovation um it is esteemed to increase access to education and so how should research on online learning be conducted one way that can be done is by remote data collection for example um instead of tracking eye movements or student behavior in a classroom now you need to find ways to track students my movements or behaviors remotely and so kind of this natural experiment or natural observation approach needs to be taken in order to really um appropriate the the home-based environment that online learning takes place in also other than looking at the kind of moment-to-moment human behavior and there are a lot of technological um interactions that can be tracked through and the use of data analytics and when you start talking about data analytics then you might need to adapt inferential stats or conventional statistics and to the high dimensionality of the data so you can't just run regression or standard stats that you might multi-level modeling in the way that you might do and there are some nice papers recently on how to appropriate the big nature of the data that comes out of data analytics there's also alternative non-inferential approaches to Stats with big data such as you taking the Basin or machine learning approach and I'm going to give an example where this is done um in particular I take and the human in the loop approach to machine learning analyzes and I'll focus on the one that is particularly um appropriate to the idea of innovation um because it's a about educational access um to online learning the reason why human in the loop machine no learning analyzes are appropriate is because it can actually um handle the higher dimensionality of the data although there is a paradigm shift when you take machine learning or Bayesian approaches which um traditional statisticians and psychologists um need to kind of um customize themselves too and you need to be happy to take more of a bottom-up approach um where model model development and optimization is viewed as a way of finding the best way to explain a model rather than um rather than P hacking or cheating so that you have to shift in terms of the way you view the role of each model that you develop um as you develop the models in order to best explain the dates that you've got and you need to view humans as the end users of edtech and so human interpreters and human expertise should always be involved um as you're developing your models for analyzes and the online platform on a learning platform in focus is with education and the initial number of data points you can see there is High um for that I use Python unemployed um this approach and to cleaning through the data organizing it and then developing the appropriate and most um the optimal um model in order to explain the data and once I found the final model I then um employed future importance analysis which I did feature by feature and also I looked at the feature interactions um a simplified version of what I just showed is is now on this screen um and basically you'll see that by using only the theory and to develop a model the fix the model fit the training adjusted r squared and the test just r squared is is not is not good but once you use a data slash algorithm LED approach to developing your model and the fit is much better so when I am employed both Theory and data then model development um I ended up finding that um country is important when I'm thinking about access to online learning especially when you look at whether a country is um Low Middle income country um the access is significantly lower than if you are a high income country in terms of interactions and there was a cultural effect on educational access especially as learning difficulty increased and gender was important where girls access to online learning decreased with time taken to produce and to under to undergo the um the lesson and that's often related to the girls home and responsibilities and covert had an impact to how much access and to online learning students had and and age also interacted with the role of covid so educational Innovations in a tech um should be Global intensive media rich and online and research methods should appropriate those qualities thank you I'm sorry I took a little bit longer great thank you Nora for your very detailed presentation about various research methods and how different Innovations and Technology can be helpful in addressing those questions so you talked about Innovations and educational technology being Global intensive media rich and online and you used various examples from your eye tracking data and your systematic reviews and others to demonstrate that a quick follow-up question would be so you talked about how different technological innovations can have affordances in answering certain research questions what were your experiences of what kind of research methodologies may be best to answer certain research questions and okay um I guess um the if you think of a research question um then you you might need to consider the life stage um of that research question um and so the um systematic review for example we thought um looking at teacher professional development through edtech or with use involvement of edtech it's never really been reviewed properly systematically before and even in the field study by study it's all very early stage still especially in Low Middle income countries where edtech is still needing to scale sustainably and so because it was such an early stage we wanted to keep the scope Broad and we adopted quite a qualitative approach um to to the whole design whereas if a research question is later in the stage in the life cycle and then we might take a more macro level approach and also kind of focusing in on the number of variables kind of reducing the number of variables that we might actually focus on so that each variable is then seriously investigated and analyzed and so often kind of a more qualitative and open approach um would be appropriate when it's kind of an early life stage for the research question whereas a more quantitative systematic approach might be more appropriate when a research question is quite mature in terms of how much it's being investigated and scaled fabulous thank you Nora if I can bring dick up onto the virtual stage with us and we'll just address some of the questions that it's been raised in the Q a and as well as other Reflections and questions as well so dick um you talked about PGC models and also Nora's talked about the in-service teacher professional development and implications of the research into in that so maybe we can talk about implications and teacher and teacher practice and teacher development so maybe starting off with the model of teacher education so dick you you talked about the pgce model and the um the e-portfolio how what kind of content was in the PGC that covers both learning and pedagogy or is it more modeling the techniques can you tell us more about what is taught in the education technology modules well what is taught um first and foremost is not so much about what is taught in the it's not it's not it's not like it's not like a course like that the pgce attained what you call digital centipedes and in each of the sandpit sessions they are exposed to A2 and they play with that and they are shown how it was designed and then they built it themselves and they reflect on how they can teach with it so um so that is what they do so they so they go through that kind of a process so they have looked at collaborative engagements we have looked at the use of Google docs as a collaborative writing spaces we looked at uh Google Slides we've looked at of course they've we've we've actually used the Google Classroom as overarching platform as overarching engagement space for them and they have built the e-portfolio using the Google sites they have been exposed to Partners they have created things like that there's always a pedagogical activity for which the use of a technology is just to to help them achieve that and then they reflect on what they have just done and then they reflect on how they can be able to teach with that and that is what they do throughout the year and each of those activities issues are documented on their individual portfolios and so at the end of the year they have a collection of this evidence of their own learning as their journey to becoming teachers and that is what we do in the PGC here great thank you dick that relates to the next question that I have for Nora so dicks just talked about all those kind of tools and apps that teachers are pre-service teachers are being exposed to in a pgce program and I'm sure they get exposed to once they were working in the teaching profession as well how do we and I know that some of your work is about decision making and think about an eye tracking to monitor that how do we what what do you see is the difference in the expert teachers in making those decisions in terms of using technology or using or their classroom practices yeah typically um we found just from the eye tracking research um and with think aloud um it's the way experts seem to be a lot better at being student-centered and experience focused for the students rather than Behavior focused and kind of just managing disruptors and so in a way experts are much more positive and future looking um where I'm able to manage can sift through and filter through and cut through um the disruption to almost prioritize the more important um whereas novice teachers and maybe in me that maybe that they're distracted by disruptive behaviors in the moment and it may just be that they haven't been become able to sift through um the noise of the classroom yet and they're just responding to the Salient and the Salient is quite a big eye tracking term and where you can't ignore what is sailing in the room whereas the expert teachers maybe has have been able to develop that ability to um to prioritize and suggest action what is the most important um and how you define expert teachers here yes I can see the Q a here preempting you um so in our studies and the expertise is defined and Beyond experience so we don't just think that teachers have taught longer tend to be better when they are better um um but it's also um social nomination so it's a contextually sensitive way of defining expertise um where they are nominated by you know School leaders and peers they have more qualifications often and when colleagues look at the the teacher in the classroom they will typically say um that you know I would rate this as an excellent lesson or a good lesson as opposed to one that is you know just satisfactory um or or less so they often have higher scores and when they are being assessed as well create we've just talked with you both dick and Nora about focusing on teachers maybe we can look at ourselves as researchers there's so many technological innovations out there and we are engaging in educational research using technology how do you keep up with learning about all the technological innovations that are out there how to analyze them and then maybe we can bring this to a bigger conversation about what we discussed in our first webinar was varying research methods in education how do we ensure that we grow a community of people who support each other in learning about these research methods can I turn to you first and then Laura well I think it's uh it's always a question as to um how do you learn about something that is in a continuous state of evolving and I think it's it's all about how do you how do you learn um how do you really place a thing on learning Imaging Technologies which are in a conscious state of Imaging and I think that's that's what the question is really I think they are I'm not sure whether I've got I've got a single answer to that um other than ensuring that we've got uh more engagements and collaboration and um and I think that's the I'm being able to be comfortable to to learn I think researchers are Learners you know they are in a continuous state of really learning and and I think that's the that's the only um a thing that I could be able to add there's no magic bullet to to to doing that um and and I think collaboration engagements um would be the the best way to uh to go I suppose right what do you think thank you Nora what are your thoughts yeah I think um being interdisciplinary and collaborative is definitely the way forward um especially as a lot of tech involves other fields like colleagues in engineering colleagues in computer science and the more you can collaborate and communicate with colleagues in other relevant fields and the better you'll be at kind of handling all the data that you come out with but I also think that a lot of data that you end up with as Technologies emerge can be similar to existing Technologies and so you know I can move from eye tracking data where it's not many participants but there's a lot of data from one person and then just move quite smoothly to looking at Big Data where there's quite a lot of data with quite a lot of people and if you don't just focus on you know the idea that I can only do gays data but think that you can handle kind of voluminous data and then you might realize the same approaches to to voluminous data can be applied to to data from of different Technologies as they come out and so just kind of being versatile and realizing that there are a lot of transferable skills even as Technologies emerge and and advance and yeah collaborating across the disciplines wonderful I think that's a very good way to end our webinar today so thank you dick and Nora for sharing with us the original knowledge and insight into this topic of technological innovations in educational research and we also thank the world University Network and its research Development Fund for funding the Remy project including this webinar so thank you for joining us in the third and final webinar series of a three webinar series and we hope the webinars have been helpful and more information can be found on the project website as as well as the recordings of the webinars so thank you again thank you

2022-11-25 20:51

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