Table of Links
3 A Virtual Learning Experience
3.1 The Team and 3.2 Course Overview
4 Feedback
6 Summary and Future Work, Acknowledgements, and References
A. Appendix: Three Stars and a Wish
3.4 Pilot 2
By the time of the second pilot in September 2020, we had gotten a lot more used to online meetings and two members of the teaching team had trained in a summer course on hybrid teaching called An Edinburgh Model for Teaching Online. This time we allowed 30 participants to sign up with over half of them from Scottish Government and the commercial sector, alongside university students and staff.
The main change we made to our first pilot, without altering the course content, is that we restructured the course material into teaching with digital badges (Gibson et al., 2015; Muilenburg and Berge, 2016) which are used in gamification of education (Dicheva et al., 2015; Ostashewski and Reid, 2015). The principles that guided us were: flexibility, compartmentalisation and empowering the learner. Each badge is built around a Threshold concept (Land et al., 2005), a core step or skill (a ‘eureka’ moment) that opens the doors to further learning. Using a clear name and symbol, each badge signposts students’ takeaways and how it fits within the top level learning journey (see Figure 2).
The macro-structure in which badges form our course is complemented by a micro-structure of each badge: background theory and instructional content, code-along videos, notebooks with worked examples, exercises of increasing difficulty, relentless feedback, pair work and mini coding problems (with solutions). Badges build on top of each other, forming branches and enabling optional, further learning. Additionally, the modular micro-structure, enables easier switching between platforms or teaching modes (e.g. videos versus slides) and multiplies the benefits of improvements. Badges proved to be a promising format for delivering teaching of this course, especially in times of change, disruption and pivoting.
We wanted to give us and our course participants more flexibility, so we recorded all of the short lectures presented at the start of each badge and situated before each coding session in the course. This allowed students to come back to the recorded lecture materials later-on. It also gave us more flexibility answering questions in the chat, solving technical issues in the background and discussing the running of a given badge in a teaching team break-out room while participants were watching the video lecture.
Authors:
(1) Amador Durán, SCORE Lab, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain ([email protected]);
(2) Pablo Fernández, SCORE Lab, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain ([email protected]);
(3) Beatriz Bernárdez, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain ([email protected]);
(4) Nathaniel Weinman, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]);
(5) Aslı Akalın, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]);
(6) Armando Fox, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]).
This paper is
