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5. TECFA's new Campus project

Overall Design

Spacial metaphor

Zones = courses
buildings = main activities
rooms = sub activities

HTML interface
Other interfaces under way:
3-D abstract VRML
3-D VRML island
2-D (MOO linked ?)

Featuring a growing amount of activities

5.1 Our growing activity collection

Features (each has some)
Sharing

Project monitoring
Construction
Discussion & argument
Information classification
Navigation tool construction
Current growth rate of implementations
about 2/month
Planned for later
3D multi-user environment navigation and chat interface
Central authentication
Common tools (each activity basically is programmed from scratch)
More information tools
Better integration of synchronous communication

5.2 Zone Example: The Staf 16 - Educational software course

Main buildings (activities):

Argue & Graph
Mister QCM
Design Studio
Concept Factory

A building fore each activity
(teaching/learning activity class)
Each building:

sets up various tasks with special tools
contains the necessary information
features collaboration

5.3 Activity examples

The Courseware Design Studio

Part of STAF-16
Goal: Learn to design educational software
Phases
Topic specification
Objectives specification
Content analysis
(analyse the objectives)
Operational pedagogical objectives spec
(of other pairs)
Architecture and scenario spec
Learning activities spec
(of 3 learning activities)
Preparation of Materials
Realization of a module
(with Authorware)
Assembly of all the modules

Practicum Authorware

Staf 12: Man-machine Interaction (Ergonomics)

Goal: Learn Authorware
Method: Instructional Design
Support:

Authorware manual (on-line & paper)
News Forum
Examples

Task:

Each student has to solve series of grouped exercises
Some exercises must be deposited in the campus

Motivation:

Exam
Prerequisite for STAF-16

Argue & Graph

part of STAF-16
Goal: Support classroom discussion
about pedagogical style
Scenario:
Students fill in questionnaire about design choices

Campus produces summary graph
(system vs. learner control
discovery vs. teaching)

Classroom discussion
Collaborative fill in (again)

Teacher selects opposite pairs
Pairs fill in questionnaire
Campus produces summary + details

Classroom discussion
Synthesis

HomeWork: a text for each student

The Iconometer

STAF-13 course
Goals:

Test icons
Learn about "monosémie"

Scenario
Look at an icon
Formulate hypothesis

one or several
each with a confidence factor
total must not exceed 100%

Look at results
Look at each hypothesis
Look at summary information

Mister QCM

STAF-16 course (ergonomics)
Goal: Students have to experience QCM design effects
Scenario:

Students fill in 2 badly designed QCMs about
Belgian Athletes and European capitals.
They also indicate their level of competence.
Students look at results
(question by question and overall plot)
They are very angry at the results
(bad performance on european capitals and
good one on Belgiam athletes)
Now they are motivated to understand QCM design and participate in classroom discussion

The tool has design notes on each question (including "don't"s)

Analysis of Information Units

Goal: Learn to classify information units in texts

Project Supervisor

Goal: Project management

Ergonomics Lab

Goal: Play with 6 versions of the same application and determine features

Scenario Construction Workshop (Staf-15)

Goal: Students design scenarios for help systems and implement parts of it

..... there is more .....

5.4 Other tools

MapLinks

Goal: maps of information space

to ease navigation
to organize knowledge
to clarify links between pages

Related activities:

under construction
(this tool is very new)

Other info tools

E.g. RDF style classification of files

Motivation:
Better support for less structured scenarios ...

5.5 Immediate Plans

More activities
Work on information space
Integration of a multi-user environment
Why multi-user environments ?
People collaborate better when they have a feeling of co-presence
(same space = same context)
People working in pairs can infer what the other is doing from his location
3D space metaphors might make hyperspace navigation easier
Community building

5.6 Summary

A lot of structured activities, mostly:

Students do something

using tools and resources

Results are collected
Debriefing, synthesis, feedback

tasks are often pseudo tasks
these phases are sometimes repetitive
most are collaborative
collaboration is structured
teacher can monitor, add, help, edit ...
Student acceptance
Overally good
Assessment
Unknown yet (well, our students like it)
A word of caution
Some student projects/exercises are "open" and will remain so

We have to avoid the "video game effect"
We must plan the mastering of the content and not the tool

We are looking further into project management and information tools

Problems

"Mushroom style development" will make maintenance difficult
Often decentralized authentication
.... in addition to all the other tools...
Tedious navigation:
.... several clicks to get "there"
Klunky HTML-based interfaces
Yet more work for us...

cost/benefit yet undetermined

Students don't have much of a collaboration culture
Our information web is badly managed so far

resource collections
on-line manuals, etc.

Nobody wants do the boring stuff:

navigation aids, updating, etc.
resource indexes, information sheets, etc.

We have ideas about our information web

we just got started (XML, RDF, visualisation tools)