ICT SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS’
COLLABORATION IN PROBLEM
AND PROJECT BASED
LEARNING
Nikorn Rongbutsri (nikorn@hum.aau.dk)
Md. Saifuddin Khalid (khalid@hum.aau.dk)
Thomas Ryberg (ryberg@hum.aau.dk)
Dept. Of Communication and Psychology
E-Learning Lab – center for user driven
innovation, learning and design
Outline of presentation
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Overall question – identifying students use of technology to support
their problem and project based group work
– Background to the study – The Aalborg PBL model
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Social media are coming to Higher Education:
– Some pressing questions – vocal calls for educational change –due to
technological changes (web 2.0) and/or students as digital natives / Net
Generation
•
Some findings (and methodology)
– Is there a need to support students?
THE AALBORG PBL MODEL
The Aalborg PBL model
• Problem Based Learning
– Based on real-life problems
• Project Organised Education
- Project work supported by lecture courses
• Group Work
- groups of four to six students
- supervised by lecturers/professors
• Interdisciplinary Studies
- Integration of theory and practice
- Focus on Learning to Learn and methodological skills
• University Wide Model - Used in all faculties (with
variations)
Students’ use of time - lectures,
courses and project work
50 %
Project work : a major assignment within a given subject-related
framework determined for each semester (thematic framework).
50 %
Project related & mandatory courses supporting the project work
Evaluated as oral examinations based on the project report or
through individual written or oral examinations.
Problem Based Learning – the
Process
Literature
Problem
Analysis
Tutorials
Lectures
Problem
Solving
Field work
Group
Studies
Project
Report
Experiment
s
Welcome to Aalborg University No. 7 of 31
Welcome to Aalborg University No. 8 of 31
The Aalborg PBL-model – in short
• Long-term collaboration 4 months (semester)
• Students own and define the problem to work with
• Students decide on methods, theory, empirial investigations (together
with supervisor)
• Solution – ”open ended”
• Students write up an app. 100 page project report reflecting their work
• An university-wide pedagogy – not short-term or single course
Social media are coming to Higher Education
PRESSING QUESTIONS FROM
THE TECH-ED SPHERE
Why social media or web 2.0 in
education
• Some of the keywords from the tech-ed buzz-o-sphere:
Web 2.0
’Progressive’ education (since 19XX)
User-driven
Learner-centred
Collaboration
Collaborative learning
Participation
Active students vs passive recipients
2 -way communication
Dialogues and interaction
Creating and sharing
Knowledge construction vs acquistion
Bottom-up
Ahierarchical, flat – students as co-producers
• Realised through use of: Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking etc.
• Very much aligned with PBL thinking in many ways!
Web 2.0 in educational context (elearning 2.0) – general buzz
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From hierarchical structures based on courses and topics towards more
student centred networks
From students as consumers to students as producers
From distribution to more horizontal patterns of exchange – peer-learning
From Learning Management Systems (LMS)  Personal Learning
Environments (PLEs)
Encouraging exchange, sharing of knowledge and students’ production of
knowledge and artefacts
Encouraging the production of personal portfolios – personal repositories
From LMS to PLEs
• Separate management and
learning
• Focus on learning activities
• Individual and collaborative
tools
• From big packages of
educational software (LMSs) to
numerous light-weight,
interoperable web 2.0 service
(blogs, wikis, social
bookmarking)
• Dashboard systems where
students collect relevant
resources and tools
(Dalsgaard, 2006):
http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/
Christian_Dalsgaard.htm
Some pressing questions
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Is the net generation or digital natives coming to higher education?
– Strong discourses on ’digital natives’ and students being fluent with digital
technologies
– Crave educational change due to their intensified use of and experiences
with web 2.0 technologies
•
What should the university provide – the VLE vs. PLE debate?
Structured environment or self-chosen tools?
– Are students better able to collate various tools and services to support
problem and project based learning?
– Are students digital natives capable of identifying technologies for problem
and project based group work on their own?
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Notion of digital natives has been criticised heavily from a research
point of view!
SOME SELECTED FINDINGS
Methodology
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Data collection across different levels of scale - multi-method study
combining qualitative and quantitative studies
Questionnaire (cross-campus to 3000 students – 253 completed):
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Background
Mobile life style (where do students work)
Project collaboration
Familiarity with Web 2.0 tools (state of diffusion)
Narrative analysis of blog post (133 student narratives from 51 M and 82 F)
– 1.semester students within a programme (humanistic informatics) asked to write
blogs about technology use during 1.sem (analysing diffusion of various
technologie)
•
Oberservational studies
– Following a 2.semester group (interview and observation) – their use of
technology
Illustration from questionnaire
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Percentage of students who do not know about a certain tool – may not
mean they use it if they know about it though!!!
Green: Pervasive use or knowledge of (twitter – knowledge, but little use)
Red: Tools that might be very useful, but little/scattered following
Findings from blog posts and
observational studies
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Facebook & Dropbox rather pervasive
Skype used among many groups
Some groups utilised Google services (e.g. Calendar, Docs)
Live next to formal systems (e.g. Moodle but are not intertwined)
– formal system for course activities
• Cautious about bringing in new tools in their problem and project
based group work
• However, some of the more ‘advanced’ tools for academia 2.0
purposes (tech-ed-buzz) and problem based project work were
not very pervasive
– Google Docs
– Social bookmarking (delicious, diigo)
– Social referencing systems / bibliography (zotero, refworks)
Summarising
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Indications that students do bring in social media to the university –
forming digital ecologies, which may live next to formal systems
(happily or not)
Some systems pervasive, but systems which could support more
advanced academic practices are largely under the radar of the
students
Students are to some degree capable of creating efficient digital
ecologies to support problem and project based group work – but
also ask for introductions
For more advanced socio-technical academic practices to emerge
there’s a need for facilitation – combining tech-support with
meaningful integration of technologies into courses / group work
We should not ignore they are adopting social media, but neither
should we ignore they might need facilitation to ‘scholarise’ their
social practices, as to develop advanced academic socio-technical
practices