Let’s Kahoot! Let teaching and learning become awesome

Kahoot is an interactive and engaging audience response system which can be used to promote social learning and collaborations among students with its rich quizzes and polls. Kahoots are used in diverse educational settings, enabling higher student engagement via game-like quizzes (pre-created or impromptu) and surveys or polls. This tool inherits many gamification elements such as a point system, timers, leaderboards, feedback and visually appealing quiz creation and simple learner interaction component.  Kahoot was an initiative around 2012, but now the platform has over millions of games and players from around 200 countries using the platform varying from educational spaces to workplaces. Kahoots are played using either the web-based application or the mobile application while encouraging BYOD (Bring your own device) classrooms. Teachers can create/ co-create games, launch with the students or share with the community. Also, the platform itself has a series of educational games for a range of subject areas, validated by the community that could be adapted into our educational contexts a preferred.

Students do not require a Kahoot login to participate in an activity. On the contrary, teachers need an account (can register for free) to create an activity and launch. Games (either a poll or a quiz or open ended questions) can be created from the beginning or import from an existing excel sheet or can use their existing question bank (mix and match to create your own questions) or modify an existing template or can even reuse an existing verified game. Free version of the application supports to create a quiz using multiple choice questions or true/false based questions. Kahoot pro or premium versions support more advanced features like enabling personalized activities, embedding puzzles or live polls, mixing different types of questions, etc.. 

For a teacher, there are two ways to publish the game either host as a live quiz which is displayed in a shared display unit and students use individual devices for interaction (Fig. 1) or set it as a self-paced challenge that students can try on their own leisurely. The platform is enriched with different learning analytics such as leaderboard for teachers and individual score tracker at every step indicating individual score calculated based on the time taken to answer and his ranking. Teachers get a real-time visibility on the activity progression.  

Figure 1. Kahoot game play

Since social learning is one key principle of Kahoot  students can gather around a shared screen for the game play. When the Kahoot is launched a game PIN is generated, using which students access the game. Kahoot pedagogy is to create a trusted learning environment where learners become leaders too. Hence, after teacher introduces a certain concept, students could be given the opportunity to create Kahoots from the newly gained knowledge and share those with peers in a playful, social environment.   

 

Dr. Kalpani Manathunga (CSSE Department - SLIIT) 

Zooms gets more professional in Zoom 5.2

 It's always good to have a competitive marketplace.  The consumer is the ultimate winner.  This has been the true in the sphere of Webinar Software.  

Zoom has not stuck to its laurels as the market leader but is now releasing a new suite of features that spices up its professional usage scenarios.

One of the issues of doing a quick live webinar in an unfamiliar environment is the lighting.  You may have the best lighting setup in your office or home office, but sometimes you may have to do a quick webinar on the go.

There are two options in Zoom 5.2 that improve your appearance, both appear under Video Setting and are called Touch up my Appearance (Fig 1) and Adjust for Low Light (Fig 2).

Fig 1, Skin Smoothing, Zoom Official Blog

Fig 2,Adjusting for low light, Zoom Official Blog

It also has a feature we have wanted for doing a webinar in a noisy setting, some kind of noise cancellation.  You can find this feature under Audio -> Suppress Background Noise.

The coolest professional feature is the ability for you to control where your video appears when sharing your screen during a webinar session.  You generally want the audience to see you while you present your powerpoint presentation or your demo.  

Fig 3, Overlaying your Video over Slides, Zoom Official Blog

Update your Zoom version now.  You can check which version of Zoom you are running by selecting About Zoom.

Fig 4, About Zoom, Screen for Zoom 5.2

This article extracts new features found in the Zoom Official Blog entry Filters, Reactions, Lighting & More! New Features to Liven Up Your Meetings written by Jen Hill

Exciting Features coming out in in August, September 2020 in Microsoft Teams

Zoom is the king of online meeting platforms and a majority use it as the preferred platform for conducting online classes.  But Microsoft seems to have finally caught up.  In the next couple of months Microsoft Teams are rolling out features which may finally swing the vote to Microsoft Teams.

The following extract is taken from a Blog published by Microsoft on the 31st of July 2020 titled 25+Updates for Microsoft Teams for Education back to School in July written by Abby Schibach of Microsoft.

Here’s a quick review of all the features we shared along with their launch dates:
1) Run engaging classes through online meetings

Large Gallery view (aka 7x7) – expected in August
(New) Together Mode – expected in August
(New) Dynamic view – expected in August
(New) See more videos on iOS or Android devices – expected in August 
(New) Attendance Report post-meeting download – expected in early September
(New) Whiteboard in Teams features – available now
(New) Digital Whiteboard without student access – available now
(Update) Teams meetings now 300 interactive participants – available now
(New) Teams meetings up to 1,000 interactive participants – coming in the last quarter of 2020
(Update) Virtual Breakout rooms – no later than early Q4 2020

2) Maintain student safety with control of meetings and classrooms

(New) Hard Audio Mute – expected in early September
(New) Control when students can join meetings – expected in August
(New) Students Wait in Lobby – available now
(New) Custom video background policy – available now
(New) Delete cross posts – available now

3) Easily Deploy and manage Teams for your school or institution

(New) GradeSync to OneRoster API – expected in August
(New) Group policy assignment – coming soon
(Update) SDS adding back team creation– expected in August
(New) Educator-led team creation – expected in August
(New) Early Class Access API – expected in August

4) Do more with Assignments in Teams

(Update) View assignments across all classes (again) – expected in August
(New) Link thumbnail preview – expected in August
(New) Anonymous Grading/Marking – expected in August
(New) Assignment settings – expected in August
(New) Four additional overall improvements – expected in August
(New) New Assignment languages supported – available now

5) Keep learners engaged and collaborating in the classroom

(New) Class Materials on Android – available now
(New) New Turn-in celebrations – expected in August
(New) D2L’s Brightspace Course Connector – expected in August

6) Nurture social and emotional wellbeing outside of the classroom

(New) Reflect messaging extension – expected in early August

Learning Styles based Checklist for Instructional Material Features in E-learning

E-learning is a rapidly growing industry with a large number of users around the globe. The learning process of e-learning mainly depends on different learning techniques of instructional materials provided in the learning environment. 

Learning materials are the key component of comprehending information in an e-learning environment. Thus, it is vital to develop e-learning learning materials that are beneficial for the target learners. 

Different learners have different preferences in learning. Several learning style models have proposed over the years to define the different characteristics of different types of learners. This presentation describes an approach to map learner characteristics of seven such learning style models with features available in an e-learning environment.

The defined characteristics of each learner style in all seven learning style models are tabularized to emphasize the overlaps of learner characteristics focused in different learning style models. As the next step, a list of unique learner characteristics with reference to learning styles was defined using the information in the table with all learner characteristics. This paper also defines features available in e-learning materials. At present, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) can be defined as the key pillar of e-learning. Thus, several MOOCs provided by Coursera platform were analyzed to derive features of e-learning materials or e-learning environments. The identified unique learner characteristics of learning styles are then mapped with the list of features in learning materials in an e-learning environment. The final result of this research is a checklist which can be used by e-learning content developers to classify how the instructional materials are effective for the target learners. This checklist defines the satisfied learning styles of all seven learning style models by each identified feature of e-learning instructional materials. It can be used as a guideline for e-learning content developers to determine the features that has to be included in the learning materials to provide an effective learning environment for the target learners.

Learning Styles based Checklist for Instructional Material Features in E-Learning - Research Paper

Presentation Slides

Ms. Kushnara Suriyawansa

Using QR codes for interactive engagement in live webinars

QR Codes has been used widely as a way for people to quickly interact mainly with websites.  As everyone in the Educational Sector is moving to online delivery of lectures QR Codes may provide the interactivity that is required to keep the students engaged.

We have used a wide variety of Webinar platforms for instance Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams Meeting and to Microsoft Live Events to deliver online lectures at the SLIIT Faculty of Computing.  We have embedded planned Quizes, online Activities and Q&A during these online lectures.

Zoom has a built in polling feature, but most of the other webinar platforms do not have a built in polling or a quiz feature.  We have used tools such as Slido, Socrative, freeonlinesurveys.com and repl.it for interactivity.  All these tools have support for mobile friendly web interfaces.  We were able to get participants to go to specific interactive content with ease using QR Codes 

The first QR Code  is a link to Slido, the second to a sample program in repl.it.  The third is a quiz running in freeonlinesurveys.com and the final one is a Google Forms Survey.

We can effectively use QR Codes in any situation where a mobile phone can be used to provide interaction.  One advantage is that the student can continue to be attentive to the webinar that is being conducted without moving onto a separate screen in the browser to complete the interactive activity.

Dr. Nuwan Kodagoda

Using repl.it for conducting self guided programming labs

Programming Courses are generally challenging for undergraduate freshman who haven't done coding at school.  Generally most programming courses provide ample lab exercises and physical guidance to novices in programming.  However there is a limitation in time during physical lab sessions, and students typically do not exhaustively test the programs they write for possible errors.  They generally assume that their programming efforts are successful if their program compiles and is able to produce a reasonable output.

We wanted to have an environment that allows students to self check if their programs were correct and submit them once they pass a set of unit tests.  repl.it provides a feature called classrooms which essentially allow you to create lab assignments for students with auto grading features.

repl.it is a very popular online collaborative programming Integrated Development Environments (IDE).  repl.it supports over 50 programming languages and has support for unit testing of student programs.

Setting up a repl.it account is straight forward by signing up.  There are two modes Teachers and Students.

When you select Teachers mode you can create Lab Assignments which are essentially classrooms in repl.it.  

The Create Classroom option allows you to create a Lab Assignment, you have to name it and also specify a Programming Language.  If you on a paid option you can make these classrooms private.  By default they are public and accessible to anyone who has a link.

You can setup the Lab Assignment as show below.

For each Assignment (Exercise) you can provide details of the problem on the right hand side panel  and provide skeleton code on the left side.

You can use Mark down on the right hand side panel to write the details of the Exercise the student is going to solve.  This can include text, code snippets and images.  You can also embed html tags as well if needed. You can have fairly elaborate descriptions provided for the assignment description, when you include images.

The next step is to setup unit tests to check if the students code submissions work.  You can get to the next screen by clicking on the next button which is on the top right hand corner of the figure above.

You can setup as many test cases as needed.   Basically in a test case you provide the inputs separated by spaces and the outputs.  In the figure below the inputs to this problem are 10, 10, 10, 2, 3, 4 and the expected outcome of this program is the addition of the volumes of the two boxes with the dimensions 10x10x10 and 2x3x4 which is 1000 + 24 = 1024.  This is given as the output in the cage below.

There are subtle variances on how you can specify the output.  

1. Flexible - Will ignore whitespaces and and special characters when checking with the output
2. Strict - Will check for an exact match in an output including whitespaces
3. Regexp - Here you can use regular expressions to check for the answer

These are essentially unseen unit tests that we are providing to check the students solution.

In the same page you can also provide feedback to students by providing a sample solution.

You can preview the exercise as the student sees it and once satisfied you can publish the assignment.

There are multiple ways to distribute the lab assignment to your students.  The easiest way is to send them an invite.  You can select Invite more under Student Overview.

Here you can either enter the emails of the students or share the Direct invitation Link

One of the coolest features that you get as a teacher you can monitor how your class is progressing.

You get email notifications of when students enrolled and submit lab work.  You can also click on any of the completed lab work to see what the student has done and also to provide feedback if needed.  

The students when attempting the assignments they use the built in repl.it editor on the left panel to write computer program.  

In the above assignment the student had to complete the function given in line 32 to 34 as part of solving the lab exercise.  The students use their own test data to check the program.  The beauty of repl.it's unit tests is that using the Flexible and RegEx options you don't need to have exact matches.  The students output has the text Volume of Box is followed by the calculated output (See the black panel on the bottom left corner above).  This additional text is ignored.  For this specific run the student has used 40 30 20 5 6 7 as inputs and has got 24210 as the output.

The CSV file that can be generated contains a summary of all submissions done by students.  You receive an email of the CSV file when you select the option Export to CSV.

We have found increased student satisfaction and engagement when we used repl.it to support programming labs.

A detail study of using repl.it and other related tools were published in a research conference. This paper highlights the use of Active Learning Approaches to enhance Student's learning experience in programming and related concepts[1]

References

[1] Imbulpitiya, Asanthika, Nuwan Kodagoda, Anjalie Gamage, and Kushnara Suriyawansa. "Using Active Learning Integrated with Pedagogical Aspects to Enhance Student’s Learning Experience in Programming and Related Concepts." In International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning, pp. 218-228. Springer, Cham, 2019.

Dr. Nuwan Kodagoda

Using repl.it for interactive programming during a live Webinar

repl.it is a very popular online collaborative programming integrated development environment.  repl.it supports over 50 programming languages and brings online collaborative programming to a new level.

In this article we will explore how we used repl.it as a mechanism that supports online activities during a live webinar session.  In an undergraduate freshers programming module we used to use Microsoft Visual Studio in physical lab session.  The current online delivery methods that we are using forced us to rethink about the Integrated Development Environments (IDE) that we should use.  Essentially we wanted to use an IDE that allows online web based programming and one that supports online collaborative programming.

We have had experience using repl.it in the past and we have used it widely at SLIIT Faculty of Computing for several programming modules. In the past we have used it as a way to share code we academics write to the students and also as a way for self assessed labs which students are required to submit.  repl.it's ability to share code seamlessly and allowing students to change the code the teachers write is the reason that we have used in the past.  It also has a unique way of setting up assignments which can be auto graded using a feature called classrooms.  

During live webinar lectures that we conducted through Microsoft Teams Live Events and zoom we got students to write code using repl.it.  The students had to submit their program code by copy pasting the url of their code to Slido.  This is a Q&A tool that we used during the live lectures.

This allowed us to show and run programming code that the students did during the live webinar session.

Allowing us to look at student submissions, discussing it, running the programs and also modifying the programs submitted during the live webinar made a compelling interactive session allowing students to try out the programming concepts thought during the live webinar itself.

Typically this would have been done as an asynchronous activity alone, where students would try out programming exercises after the lecture is over.  Students also had the option of clarifying doubts that they had by asking questions directly using Slido. 

70% of the student population felt that the repl.it platform was effective for coding during the live webinar.  We suspect that the 25.7% who were neutral might have failed submit a correct coding solution to the problems we gave. As we continue to use this platform we feel that students will be more comfortable with the programming environment and will be able benefit more.

What was amazing was that we introduced this environment during their first live webinar, the students were able to setup their accounts get used to the environment and submit code for a new programming language that they just learnt C++.   Usually students are introduced to programming environments during physical lab sessions.  A sample first program submitted by one of the student is given below.

Dr. Nuwan Kodagoda