Category: Assignment 1 – Blog Posts

Have you used a tool like Khan Academy that creates a learning path for you? Did you find it to be useful or a hindrance to your learning? Or both?

Khan Academy is a very powerful online learning resource that helps educate students in all sorts of subjects. As Khan Academy has become extremely well known, one of their biggest solutions was to incorporate artificial intelligence. By utilizing forms of artificial intelligence such as machine learning and deep learning, students in need are receiving extra education support that is tailored to their needs. For example, when a student partakes in a certain subject, the machine learning in the background will look through its algorithms and continue to understand what you’re looking for. It’ll look at the decisions you make and try to look for improvements where needed. Thus, Khan Academy is creating an environment where personalized learning is possible with the use of Artificial Intelligence. Which will allow all types of students to get better support and succeed in their learnings.

That went the same for me as well. With my experience with using Khan Academy, I felt that I was really able to learn things that I might’ve missed or didn’t understand to the fullest in class. Math was one of the main subjects I used Khan Academy for because there’s occasionally a few parts that I don’t understand. And I was able to use this online resource to review videos, practice on a number of questions, and overall just move at my own pace. It feels reassuring that I know there is a learning resource like such where I can fall back on and re-learn a thing or two. Recently, there has been the addition to gamify the learning process by making the learner collect points as you progress. This idea of gamifying the process really makes learning fun and interesting. I personally love the idea of combining games with education. Just like many, I’m not a top student, and what I think would help some students out there is to find a way for education to become fun. By gamifying the process, our brain releases natural dopamine, and learners become more attached to the learning process as there is a reward at the end.

Overall, I can’t really say anything bad about Khan Academy because it really has paved way to help me find success. It was really helpful to have an online resource that is free to use, online 24/7, and tailoring to my educational needs. I find that the application of artificial intelligence to learning is a major step in the educational standpoint, but also reflecting on how large of a growth technology has become. I would highly recommend Khan Academy to anyone looking to better their understanding on certain subjects.

References:

https://www.edweek.org/technology/q-a-the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-artificial-intelligence-and-personalized-learning/2019/11

What are the game elements used in your interactive story using Twine? How would you build an activity for students that would have them use this tool? In what type of learning do you think Twine would be particularly effective?

Twine is a very interesting tool that allows people to turn a normal story into an interactive story. During my time using the tool, I found the tool to be more and more amazing where choices can be made for the audience to answer in the story. I knew that including several choices for the audience to pick would allow for more interactivity and make them think more. I was thinking that the best way for student interaction is to give them a good story with difficult decisions to make. This allows them to analyze what they’ve done in the story, and critically think of what to do next. For example, one choice can lead to very good things happening, whereas another choice can lead to very poor consequences. This acts as if it is a game where the student becomes immersed into the storyline and needs to understand the choices and consequences in ever part of the story without knowing ahead of time that something good/bad can happen based off of their choices. I believe Twine becomes especially effective when it comes to the application with students who major in any form of technology (such as computer science, software engineering, etc…). It’s a very simple tool allowing for lots of critical thinking in the process of creating and developing a story. Understanding how different sections or nodes connect in the tree, and how they can be interrelated.

You can visit my story that I’ve played around with on this GitHub link:

https://github.com/LumThomas/website/blob/main/index.html

How have you found the balance of passive and active learning in this course for your learning? How does it compare to your experience in other courses?

Prior to this course starting up, I had my doubts about how much I’m able to learn. This is because the course is an asynchronous class which allows students to work whenever they are available to do so. This is a fairly recent and new method of learning for me, which might make it a little more difficult to learn to content in the course. The initial few weeks was for me to get used to the rhythm of the class and how to properly learn the presented information. It started out more difficult than I imagined because there was more passive learning than active learning required. Later into the course, we’ve began to see more and more active work which required me to spend a little more time to complete. By now, I’ve managed to find a decent balance of active and passive learning and this is from the help of reviewing the presented information, asking and creating conversations with my group, applying my passive and active learning knowledge to blogs, and working together with my group of larger assignments. In terms of passive learning, there has been a lot of information to absorb, whereas active learning, there has been a lot of thinking in how to apply my absorbed knowledge to be presented. In terms of some other classes, many professors often weighs in more on one side. This means the courses becomes heavily active learning, or heavily passive learning. I find it actually difficult to learn if it is heavily passive learning as the information presented is dull and may not be well absorbed. This is why it’s important to have a mix of both for the student to both absorb and analyze the information being presented. Allowing for further critical thinking can improve a students understanding of the subject.

The SECTIONS model assesses the quality of technology being implemented in a given learning environment. Prior to implementing any technologies, the model’s guidelines will help answer many questions, for example: what is the most effective and appropriate technology to use for the students? How can students be evaluated with the use of technology? Many of these questions are answered with the following process:

• Students: Who are the designated learners and do they have all the necessary tools to access these technologies?
• Ease of use: How difficult is it to use these technologies? What level of technical literacy does a learner need for these technologies?
• Costs: How affordable is it to adopt and maintain these technologies? Is there a long-term plan in place?
• Teaching functions: What form of technologies will delivery the best learning outcomes to students? Additionally, what form of content on these technologies will be most beneficial to students?
• Interaction: How much interaction is going on between the technology, student, and teacher? How will more or less interaction affect the student and their learnings?
• Organizational issues: What are the organizational rules that are needed to be followed? How is the adopted technologies maintained?
• Networking: Who can access these technologies? Only students? Can expanding the network of users benefit the learners?
• Security and privacy: How secure are these technologies in terms of data? How can it ensure data cannot be manipulated by a third party program?

The whole SECTIONS model broken down into acronyms can be seen above where it outlines a number of questions prior to adopting new technologies into the classroom. In my opinion, security and privacy becomes highly important and difficult to solve. This is also because of the fast growing development of modern technologies where you must always be up to date. There are always ongoing issues with privacy and security where there is no best solution yet. And this is because as the development of modern technologies continue, the development of security and privacy breaches also improve.

For this weeks blog, I’ve decided to utilize the design principles on an infographic. Creating this infographic, I’ve decided to go into a more program specific topic, which is healthcare and Information Technology related. While creating this, it was important to keep in mind of the 8 basic design principles below:

1. Focus on alignment
2. Use hierarchy to help focus your design 
3. Leverage contrast to accentuate important design elements
4. Use repetition to your advantage
5. Consider proximity when organizing your graphic elements
6. Make sure that your designs have balance
7. Optimize colour to support your design
8. Leave lots of negative space

(Adobe Express, 2020).

Although not all principles were used to my greatest ability, some of the principles such as focusing on alignment, optimizing colour to support my design, maintaining white space and hierarchy were all used. I also tried to only use 2 fonts maximum when creating this infographic to keep a balanced look on the text. Additionally, I also looked into the 6 promising practices for infographic design when putting this together. In brief of my design, it was important to optimize my colour choices to a few select colours, look for images that related to my topic, maintain a similar font and style choice, and ultimately to leave enough but not too much white space throughout the infographic for an ease of consumption. Overall, utilizing the provided principles and good practices helped guide me through creating a better infographic. Although difficult to incorporate all principles and good practices, they definitely aid the process of all sorts of designs that are not limited to infographics.

Infographic:

Reference:

• Adobe Express, (2020, Oct 17). 8 basic design principles to help you make Awesome Graphics. Adobe. https://www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/8-basic-design-principles-to-help-you-create-better-graphics
• https://www.canva.com/design/DAFOZ4eK0zU/jIpb9rTrgpqiXBCS5cw2tw/view?utm_content=DAFOZ4eK0zU&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=homepage_design_menu

Inclusive design is a way create a product while incorporating the needs of different people. This is to continue improving on modern design where we need to understand that there is less and less things in society that is a one size fits all. The idea of inclusive design will improve user experience through an open minded approach to design a product with diverse needs. Some of the inclusion design methodologies mentioned in this week’s lecture was:

1. Recognition exclusion: biased solutions
2. Solve for one, extend to many: universal designing
3. Learn from diversity: user centered design

In my opinion, this solution to move away from a one size fits all approach is very important for modern users. This might be due to the fact that users these days having much higher standards and requirements to the products they consume. In addition, if your product is tailored to fit one group of users and not all users, the rest of the users will have a poor experience with the product. Ultimately making people stop using it. In terms of the design, it should be user centered. Thus, there needs to be end user involvement in the process of creating any sort of product that will eventually be consumed by users. Additionally, there needs to be more than a few end users in the designing process as they have their own needs but cannot represent an entire community. This can also reduce the biases when designing because there are more people involved. An example of a completed product that would be beneficial with inclusive design would be surveys. For example, if I am filling out a survey, I would be hoping that the survey is designed to be: short and concise, color coded with meaning, accessibility with ease, some sort of feedback, etc…

References

https://rmjm.com/inclusive-design-accessible-architecture/