Author: sijialiu6

Interactive Learning Resource

With my beautiful and intelligent team member:  Olivia Mitchell * Rena Zhang *Trinh Nguyen, we complete a great interactive learning resource together regarding English learning. Welcome to check it out

https://edci335class.wordpress.com

or you can directly open with the menu: learning resources

Peer Review: How the economy works

The final group project of EDCI 335 is creating a learning resource aligned with the learning design blueprint. As far as I see, this project is the first step for us to play the role of authentic educator thus considering what the learners need in their position.  In this post, I’m going to review my dear fellow’s learning resources ” How the economy works”, established with Squarespace. First of all, I think the layout of the resources is concise, clear, and easy to follow. The style is embedded with the theme, reflected seriousness, and rigorous. It seems very formal regarding the context. I like the explanation of the rationale of using the cognitivism approach and it also mentions the shortcomings of this approach, which is complete and objective. However, sitting in the shoe of a learner, I hope that I could know more about the course information regarding the requirements on this course, it lacks several parts, for instances, an overview of the resource, what Learning design was used, our learning context, what learning outcomes should they achieve, and the rationale of technology choices. In terms of the topics, I’m very impressed to see that you have utterly given six specific topics to learn. As a learner, I’ll grateful to have such specific drawing outlines to refer to. The best part is including diverse resources to guide the viewer to learn, for example, some useful links to extended concepts, or videos that they might be interested in. Overall, I think you guys nails it. The assessment plan provides a comprehensive reference for them to measure the learning process.

I really like your work! Thank you for your learning resources.

Sijia Liu

Access to our group:  https://edci335class.wordpress.com/blog/

 

Prompt 4: Interactions in digital age education

This video requires my students to conduct learner material interactions, as well as learner and learner interaction. Students can directly get to know a learning point through a video clip. The principle message it aims to deliver is to stimulate a natural interest through the materials, so that helps the instructor achieve the final goal of education. Since the target students in our group are K-12 level children, we need to use multifunctional materials to draw their attention to focus on. This video does not include any inherent interactions forcing them to give feedback in any aspect. However, it sets a good example regarding the topic “introducing yourself in English in front of people”, which could drive the students to practice according to the video and practice with their classmates in groups. Besides, students could take notes when watching this video, and discuss, imitate the video in groups. As instructors, we can design a small quiz regarding the information in the video, and conduct a competition in these groups. One important factor in cooperative learning design is student-student interactions. Video material is a kind of multimedia teaching method which has many advantages. Multimedia teaching can motivate children to learn actively. For children, interest is the best teacher and the driving force for learning. Multimedia technology, through realistic and creative pictures, combined with rich dynamic effects, turns passive remembering and listening into active watching” and “thinking, which stimulates students’ strong interest in learning and is also in line with children’s cognitive characteristics. It is easy for k-12 students to be distracted when listening to lectures in the classroom. The flexible use of multimedia in teaching can prompt the child’s unintentional attention to quickly turn into intentional attention. Teachers use the characteristics of rich multimedia, sound, and picture, and combination of dynamic and static to create the situation required for teaching, which can make students emotionally infected and emotionally resonate, increase the attention of pupils, and make them actively participate in learning Come here. A student can comprehend the content through the screen, develop associations, and develop thinking. In the teaching process, the use of multimedia means is conducive to deepening the understanding of knowledge and enhancing students’ memory. For example, it is difficult for young age kids to recite English essays or dialogues. At this time, teachers can use multimedia courseware to display the characters in the dialogue and give some hints to deepen the students’ understanding of the content and cause students to associate, so as to achieve the memory of recitation, like the video I provided.

Prompt 3: Make adjustment of Learning Activities timely

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

 

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has changed the people’s lives in many aspects. In response to the government’s demands on distance education, professors have to change the planned in-class activities to learning activities suitable for the online classes. Regularly, the course content is based on the teaching unit and adopts a modular organization method. Therefore, when design the online course activities, the division of modules is relatively independent. The content of each teaching unit has chapter introductions, the main points of this chapter, learning objectives, learning guidance, research tasks, and other parts. Among them, the research tasks are divided into formative small exercises and group research practice tasks with the support of course space functions. The course structure is a dynamic hierarchical structure, and the relationship between relevant knowledge points is established to ensure that learners can jump as needed in the learning process. Learning activities are one of the two cores of online courses. The teaching objectives of the courses are achieved through a series of teaching activities. Learning activities need to be completed with the help of tools, and different learning activities require different learning resources and learning tools. Learning tools play an important role in helping and promoting cognitive processes, and in training learners’ critical thinking, creative thinking, and integrated thinking processes.

  • Thinking visualization tools: concept maps, mind maps such as Mindmanager, Inspiration. Students can use these thinking tools to sort out research ideas and find existing problems.
  • Practice plan design tool: Students can use this tool to design, modify, and generate design solutions based on problem-solving online.
  • Practice data collection tools: including structured observation form generation tools, online questionnaire generation tools, online test tools, automatic measurement scale generation tools, and evaluation index system generation tools, etc. Through these tools, students can easily collect various practical data.

There are some activities for online courses:

  • Situation observation activity: the learner conducts the situation provided by the online course
    Observe positively and think and respond according to the questions raised by the teacher.
  • Data search, analysis, and identification activities: through human-computer interaction, online
    Search and retrieve the learning resources provided by the network courses
  • Line analysis and comparison, and choose to fit.
  • Reconstruction of data: students should take root on the basis of existing research data
    According to your research topic, you need to deconstruct and reconstruct the research data (induction, performance
    Interpretation, comparison, synthesis, etc.).
  • Independent exploration activities: raise questions around the subject to be explored and be able to
    The host will discuss and discuss with teachers and classmates in-depth exploration of related issues.

 

Learning approach: Cooperative learning for Language

Cooperative learning is also regarded as a small-group learning which is a teaching approach that divides a class of students into small groups working together on a task in the meantime helping each other developing potentials. The essence of cooperative learning is to showcase the positive effects of interdependence so that students feel responsible for the effort they made for the team. In addition to the positive interdependence, according to David Johnson and Roger Johnson (1999), there are four key factors to support the cooperative learning including face-to-face interaction, individual and group accountability, group behaviors and group processing. With help of cooperative learning, teacher is no longer taking the sole responsibility of educating. Instead, the group of students shared the roles of both learner and teacher. In each group, everyone’s role in the team is discussed and determined by the group. Besides, they make assessment of their learning by examining each other according to the learning goals set by all. Johnson & Johnson (1999) claims that cooperative learning contributes to not only a higher group achievement but a huge individual improvement in addition to a healthier relationship with peers and mental statement. They also argue that cooperative learning helps to foster a healthier self-esteem (Johnson & Johnson, 1999).

From my perspective, Cooperative learning should be based on a reasonable combination of gender ratio, interest tendency, learning level, and communication skills. In essence, each group of 4-6 people sits in a rectangular shape to facilitate group discussion after face-to-face guidance. Cooperative learning also facilitates resource sharing and facilitates mutual help. First of all, the instructor can set some competition between the groups so they can make progress together. The problems that arise between the groups must first be solved by members of the group. If they fail to solve them, they can ask other groups for help. Through everyone ’s efforts, the problems are solved together.

The blueprint learning process that our group chose is language learning. The cooperative learning approach is suitable for language learning because language learning includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The group learning can facilitate practicing listening and speaking ability. We know that the purpose of learning English is to communicate, so language has become a tool for communication. The purpose of our teaching is that students can not only understand that the teacher teaches in English in class, communicate with classmates in English and express their own ideas, but also use English outside the class to communicate with native English speakers.

Reference

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1999). Making cooperative learning work. Theory into Practice: Building Community through Cooperative Learning, 38(2), 67-73. doi:10.1080/00405849909543834

Learning experience and Theories

Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use?  Use the language you learned in this unit.

I’m going to share with you a learning challenge occurred last year. It was the first time that I attended the online course in Uvic. In the beginning, I have no idea what I am going to do in each session without the actual class so I lost in the ocean of information and materials. The instructor offers tons of reading materials each week and forum discussion requirements. Since I don’t have the experience of self-learning, it is difficult for me to arrange my own study plan which leads to the delay of learning missions and objectives unaccomplished. The main obstacle is that I could not focus on reading materials and extract the main ideas, so the writing assignments have been procrastinated. I was warned to fail this course in the mid-term, which gives me a heavy strike. I realize that I have to alter my learning habits. The first step is to place an emphasis on understanding the content of materials. I cognitively convince myself to read. According to the Theoretical Perspectives in the way of behavioralists, learners are given reinforcement and feedback to develop their own learning habits, which requires the ability to identify the weakness and strengths in studying. I think this kind of learning design suit the senior students because the learning process is based on prior experience.

Learning is a unique function of the human brain that distinguishes human beings and other animals. I agree that motivation accelerates learning.  As I mentioned before, I barely persis to continue the first online course if there is no pressure of gaining the credits to obtain the degree. The fact is that once I’m prepared cognitively, I will seek help to overcome the obstacles.

Self Introduction

Hello, everyone

My name is Sijia Liu. I’m very excited to attend this course for a brand new method of learning, and of course, the complete different demonstration of class offers great opportunities to learn various online learning methods.  I’m not good at technologies, I’m very happy to learn practical skills apart from the theories.

Speaking of myself, I’m a Chinese boy and living in Canada for more than three years. I major in Econ in Uvic. I attended several online courses before, I think the best part of the online course is testing time management ability and self-learning ability. I am an introverted person preferring staying alone. I like movies and sci-fi animations. I rarely hang out with friends except for tasting the delicious food. I also like taking pictures of beautiful scenery, I went to Europe myself and had a really good time.

This is my favorite film called Paprika by Satoshi Kon, a Japanese master director. It is a fantasy movie with perfect cinematography, highly recommended.