Hi
I'd like to throw out there to the moodle community an overly ambitious idea. I'm placing it in the hub forum because the hub project is one of the corner stone technologies that makes the idea conceivable. However, if there is a forum for pipe dreams and pixie dust it might be better there.
Still I'd certainly be interested to see what people thought.
The core of the idea is that some of the big questions (and the little ones) of our human condition and educational design could be answered if:
1) Task Meta data relating to curriculum, syllabus, & learning outcomes such as seems identified in the Curriculum Design tool by Ye Chen [1] .
And
2) Student resource interactions and activates results (timestamped)[2]
could be
3) harvested[3] from participating[4] sites
Basically, I’m suggesting that emergent properties of the db would answer questions like:
Do multiple intelligences exist and if so what are they?
If multiple intelligences exist they would exhibit in the db as factorial clusters of students results across subject areas.
Do students learning style preferences effect outcomes?
Learning style effects would exhibit in the db as factorial clusters of students results across task types.
Does Learning Orientation (a theory that learners emotions and intent is primary in determining learning success) effect outcome?
If this is true it would exhibit in the db as a positive auto correlation across time within students results (ie positive reinforcement leading to better future outcomes).
What sorts of learning tasks motivate students?
Resource and activates that provide better results or more frequent interactions with content.
Do certain resources/activates types facilitate learning of certain content types or areas?
If they do, it would exibit in the relationships between task type and content or area.
What is the best sequence of content presentation within any given topic area… or what prerequisite knowledge helps students and what confounds?
A positive relationship across students between a previous outcomes and present outcomes would indicate prerequisite knowledge helps a negative would indicate a confound.
What is the decay function of learning ?
Does the strength of the above relationship reduce over time?
What cross curriculum content links assist students?
Within a given time frame for students if two curriculum areas are presented how are outcomes effected?
So many questions & all of them interacting with each other to make more questions. In fact it is not hard to imagine that such a db could suggest an optimal syllabus for each content area and from the optimal norm truly efficient individualisation for students. Frankly, the list of questions that could be asked and answered by the db relationships boggles the imagination.
I wouldn’t presume to suggest that the analysis types used as examples above would be definitive answers … they are just off the top of the head examples. Rather, I would suggest that an open interface using something like the open source R statistical package could be used to query the db & run whatever analysis the teacher/researcher could imagine. Further, for those not particularly statistically minded analysis functions could be packaged into real world human questions like contributed plugins with a user friendly interface to variable data sets for teacher/researchers.
In traditional research the collection of data is driven by the theory and though good researchers try to avoid it, bias can be introduced. Even the very best researchers can only work within the paradigm of their time. What I’m suggesting here is a resource independent of theory or paradigm where the relationships between variables (and some variables themselves) would just be waiting for us to discover them. Numbers don’t lie …. bias is only in the questions we ask and how we interpret the answers. But an open interface for researcher/teachers would allow rephrasing of questions and reinterpretation of results. The possibility of sampling bias & other confounds diminishes as the sample size increases. Given the number of institutions who have adopted moodle if this sort of idea were ever to be integrated into the moodle core over time it would provide a resource that would change the face education (not that moodle isn’t doing that already) maybe even change our understanding of ourselves.
Pipe dreams and pixie dust like I said …. but thanks to you folks the technology is out there so people can start dreaming these types of dreams.
Regards
Michael
[1] See http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=5041 when I saw this block it’s scope blew my mind with it’s potential to develop a cross institutional curriculum maps for content areas and link them to learning objects. It has an object rating system (excellent also) but what if they could be linked to actual student outcomes. This block is the second cornerstone technology for this idea…. Question is how does it relate to the moodle hub which I imagine will have a higher adoption rate by institutions.
[2] Martin Dougiamas suggest Outcome/Competencies/Goals/Metadata http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Metadata and there is a discussion http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=63577 which I’m obviously too late to join. However from the discussion, the ability to equate students results across institutions would be pretty darn tricky as institutions will have different grading systems. I wonder however if a lowest common denominator –a binomial achieved/ failed to achieve would not be enough for analysis given sufficient sample size. It would change the analysis type but would it invalidate it??? Not sure…. Certainly a percentage achieved would be better data. Probably, this would be task dependent as computer graded tasks would always have number. Then the question becomes how much weight towards the demonstration of each outcome does the task give evidence of. Messy! Teachers would have to decide that but I expect if the interface was friendly enough (say a table with learning objects down the horizontal outcomes along the vertical [maybe even tabs for different outcome dimensions/scales] and sliding scale in each cell indicating the task/outcome weighting) and the reward great enough …. Clear & detailed end of teaching period reports of what outcomes students have achieved it might be something people would like…. Frankly, I think many of the problems in this area will be addressed in moodle 2.2 which from what I read will be moving to standardised rubrics allowing for clearer outcome description…. We will see.
[3] I know that harvesting of students results would be a super sensitive issue but nothing that could possibly identify the individual student would need to be sent to the hub db ..... off the top of my head a student Id sent to the hub db could be an encrypted combination of siteid from the hub db and and moodle system userId number. Further, participating sites could set their own encryption key. … Anonymous third party harvesting student submissions is not unheard of. Turnitin for example maintains a copy of every student submission through its system.
[4] As for weather sites would participate. I don't know but lots of software these days asks users to contribute feedback on usage to assist in further development. I'd think if I was asked to allow harvesting of information "for the benefit of humankind" even I'd agree.