A Decade of Digital Education: We Are Still Learning A look into digital education over the past 10 years. What’s worked? What hasn’t? And what can we be doing better? Keynote presenter: Assoc. Prof. Chris Tisdell, Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Science, UNSW

1. A Decade of Digital Education:
We Are Still Learning
Chris TISDELL
Faculty of Science
UNSW
cct@unsw.edu.au

2. What keeps me awake?
• scale
• flexibility
• personalization
• feedback
• openness
• diversity and inclusion.

3. What were you doing in 2007?

4. What were you doing in 2007?

5. What were you doing in 2007?

6. What were you doing in 2007?

7. Horizon Report 2007
• User-Created Content.
• Social Networking
• Mobile Phones
• Virtual Worlds
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming

8. Horizon Report 2012
• Mobile apps
• Tablet computing
• Game-based learning
• Learning analytics
• Gesture-based computing
• The Internet of Things

9. Horizon Report 2017
• Adaptive Learning Technologies
• Mobile Learning
• The Internet of Things
• The Next-Generation LMS
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural User Interfaces

10. 2007: A New Beginning in Digital Education
• scale
• flexibility
• personalization
• feedback
• openness
• diversity and inclusion.

11. A level playing field
a situation in which everyone has the
same chance of succeeding.

12. Technology
A tool, or something else?
Opening up new opportunities?
Part of the solution?

13. Maths!
• It’s not easy to teach maths.
• “Choosing maths” vs
“Having maths chosen for you”
• Boring, irrelevant, esoteric?

14. YouTube – You too?

15. Numbers….
• Watch time: 30 million minutes = 57 years
• Subscribers: 53,000+
• Views: 10 million
• Countries: 200+

16. Early days

17. What have I learnt?

18. Some Questions
• To what extend do students use online video for their learning?
• What is the nature of the engagement?
• What are the students’ perceptions of the usefulness of these
resources?
• What recommendations can be made, based on the above?

19. Approach
• Beginning 2008, several hundred instructional videos on
mathematics were created for engineering students as a
learning resource and freely shared via YouTube.
• The videos were designed as optional out-of-class educational
resources for students to enhance regular face-to-face lectures
and tutorials, rather than replacing them.

20. Methods
• Examining popularity and usage patterns of the resources
via YouTube Analytics over 5 years across Australasia
• Analysing watch-time and other indicators of learning
engagement across Australasia
• Examining satisfaction scores regarding the students’
experience with the videos at UNSW
• Analysing user comments regarding their experience with
the videos at UNSW.

21. UNSW Satisfaction 2010-2014 (n = 854)

22. Common Themes
• a revision tool to prepare for assessment
• a way of catching up on missed classes due to illness or
late enrolment
• a mechanism for clarifying points that were not fully
understood within class
• a forum to provide feedback or raise questions by
commenting on the YouTube video
• an avenue that enabled self-paced study.

23. Typical Activity: Aust-NZ

24. Devices: Aust-NZ
2013 2014 2015
Smart Phone 3.4% 4.6% 5.5%
Tablet 5.4% 6.3% 6.8%
Total 8.8% 10.9% 12.3%

25. Key Results
• Over 71% of students chose to use the online videos for
their learning
• Student use of the resources was particularly
concentrated around revision periods for tests and
examinations across Australasia.
• A growing trend in student engagement involved
accessing the videos on mobile devices.
• Over 96% of students broadly agreed that the videos were
a useful learning resource.

26. Recommendations
• “If you build it, they will come”. For educators who are considering
creating these type of online learning materials, it is likely that students will
use them, with the likelihood increasing if the video creator is also teaching
the course that the videos are related to.
• “Assessment drives activity and engagement”. The most popular time
for these resources is in the lead up to final examinations and educators can
expect a periodic cycle of engagement. Just in time learning?
• “Get ready for the small screen”. Video creators are encouraged to
consider design principles that enable learners to engage with the videos on
mobile devices with small screens.

27. Further reading
Chris Tisdell (2017):
“How do Australasian students engage with instructional
YouTube videos? An engineering mathematics case study”
presented at AAEE2016 Conference, Coffs Harbour, Australia,
04 - 07 December 2016,
http://www.aaee.net.au/index.php/resources/category/13-2016#

28. Girls and Maths

29. 57 000

30. E-books
Stop watching, start doing

31. More numbers….
Audience: 10 million
200 countries
Freely available

32. Imagine a world where sound and language
are no barriers to learning

33. UNSW 2025: A Just Society
“Our success will have been built upon embracing the
diversity and cultural richness of our communities and
ensuring that our staff and students can achieve their full
potential.”

34. Class action lawsuit over MOOCs in 2015
Failure to provide closed captioning in their online lectures,
courses, podcasts and other educational materials.
“Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs,
online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf
or hard of hearing.”

35. Example

36. The problem with auto closed-captioning

37. What did we do?
• A team of students volunteered to manually create CC
for 45 educational videos
• Standard notation was agreed upon by all to ensure
consistency
• Students worked in teams to create the CC
• No particular method was prescribed to foster diversity
in methods
• Each transcription was checked by another student and
then approved by Chris
• Final transcript uploaded to YouTube and auto-synced
with video.

38. The experiment
• Students were encouraged to watch our
videos with CC over a 2 month period.
• We surveyed the students on their
experience.

39. CC was useful to my learning (Likert)

40. CC was useful to my learning (% Agree)

41. What did we learn?
• The educational benefits of CC go way
beyond usual “expected” audiences and
situations.
• CC is not just useful for those who are hard
of hearing or who have English as a non-
native language.
• CC is useful for everyone (noisy places,
accents).

42. The change we want to see
National guidelines on CC for online video
Further discussion around best practice and
scale in CC for online video

43. Further reading
Chris Tisdell & Birgit Loch (2016):
How useful are closed captions for learning mathematics via online video?
International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology,
DOI: 10.1080/0020739X.2016.1238518
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2016.1238518

44. Openness in Education

45. We’re all in this together!
• Students
• Universities
• Industry
• Government
• Wider Community

46. Learning from Partnerships

47. Hardware

49. Technology + The Future
• Removing barriers, or creating new ones?
• An integrated experience?
• Is openness an educational virtue?
• Tech as a tool, or something else?
• Learning from something vs learning with something
• Posthuman teachers?