For LNRT 526, 
the focus is critical inquiries in teams and on an individual basis on a modality of our choosing. This blog post defines the beginning of my journey into my individual critical inquiry and is written in hopes that it will spark ideas or additions that my MALAT cohort mates can gain for their own individual pieces or that they can provide me within the comments for this post.
Our Group’s Chosen Modality
Our team Awesome Sauce, consisting of four other MALAT students and myself, chose educational apps as our modality. For our team critical inquiry, we are focusing on edX as an instance of this modality. As explained in our team post, edX is a MOOC provider that is offered to learners in multiple modalities, including a web-based online site and educational app.
Specific Issue for Examination – My Specific Interest & Question to Focus My Critical Inquiry
Awesome Sauce consists of five group members – one in higher education, one in K-12, two in corporate learning and one in a K-12/adult dual role. For each of our individual educational contexts, I believe that there is a potential future for creating, utilizing or implementing educational apps as a modality for our learners to use, or even potentially represent a new digital learning environment.
The unique pieces about edX as a learning platform is that it is:
- Open Source: They have an open source component that is free for use for others. To me, this means that there is then a potential for others in multiple educational contexts (including the contexts of each of my teammates) to adopt this platform to support learning (note: I recognize there may be barriers to change in each context but it still remains a possibility to adapt it to our context 😊).
- Using Platform Data for Learning Research: edX works with xConsortium of university partners to use data acquired from edX to provide more insights into pedagogy and learning about learning. They have questions that lead their research as well as a list of research papers that we can use to investigate our individual topics, including mine.
Within Dr. George Veletsianos‘s LRNT 523 Assignment #2 that involved a critique of 14 articles, my interest was sparked in the effectiveness of using data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology to promote personalized and adaptive learning. The topic stemmed from my background as a corporate educator with a focus on knowledge sharing on data analytics that I performed and researched for my past company.
Now within a corporate learning context in a learning and engagement role, I ask the question:
- What are the ways that educators can utilize educational apps within corporate learning environments?
I will focus on the ways that relate to AI, learning analytics and personalization and critique edX to determine the fit of educational apps within my context and discover more in this growing area!
April 28, 2018 at 10:26 am
This is a good question with good potential for further explorations. As you move further into your research you will also find that some MOOC platforms have shifted from higher education into the corporate market, in pursuit of revenue potential. See this article in Forbes: Point # 2 is particularly interesting, focusing on a survey result that industry is interested in open educational resources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/06/10/moocs-emerge-as-disruptors-to-corporate-learning/#3386fe6e744a
There is a lot of information (as above) in the more business-oriented press, but also make sure to see what you can locate in academic literature.
May 1, 2018 at 6:55 pm
Hey Nicolette!! Really cool inquiry. I was already able to personalise a few things in the MOOC I’m taking, but I concede I didn’t choose a thrilling course… 😉 Aspects of the profile learners complete are kind of funny…I entered incorrect information, to see if this changes anything for me on in edX or not. >:D
May 21, 2018 at 1:53 pm
Hi Nicolette,
Thanks for all the great thoughts!
Now that you’re deeper in the investigation process, I’m curious how your perspective has/hasn’t shifted. Any surprising revelations since your initial plan?
As well, a lot of what I’ve read concerning AI and education either references the impact of reducing monotonous tasks (grading assignments, administration, etc.) or personalized learning. As for personalized learning, have you seen how this is proposed? Early on it seemed to me that this would be to tailor the program to an individuals learning style, but with so much literature emerging that proposes learning styles to be a myth, where does this leave the options for personalization?
P.S. If you haven’t seen ‘Alphago’ on netflix yet, it’s a very interesting view on AI. ‘Go’ is a very old board game that has more combinations than there are atoms in the universe so programming a computer to foresee all combinations isn’t possible. The team trying to design a program to beat human champions had to teach the program how to learn, then let it play. It’s interesting from a technical perspective but places an interesting lens on what it means to be human!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2017/12/27/how-ai-impacts-education/3/
June 3, 2018 at 7:45 pm
Hi Todd,
Thanks for your comment – your questions took me some time to reflect on before I could come up with insights to share with you in response. Also, I wanted to acknowledge to you that in answering your first question, I came across a learning that I hadn’t realized, so thanks for asking me to go back to my initial plan to reflect!
One of the most surprising revelations I encountered was while I was researching into whether apps as a modality were truly differentiated from other modalities, including web-based platforms. In our group project critiquing an instance of edX, we experienced a course that we perceived to be limited within the app learning environment of edX, when compared to the web-based platform of edX. After going through this experience, I recall being surprised that the app limited the course, as opposed to adding further optionality to it. This made me think more about why I felt surprised and I realized that this implied that I had held some type of expectation for the app that I didn’t see as being met.
When our group first chose educational apps as a modality in the first week of this course, I can now identify that I had a limited understanding of what apps can offer as a technology to learning, after reading and researching this modality since that week. At the time, I had a high-level understanding of an app’s abilities. Within this understanding, I had assumed that apps could offer more advanced technologies to the learner than a web-based platform. Now that I’ve undergone critical inquiries into apps themselves as part of my larger inquiry, I’ve realized that this high-level understanding can be true in some cases but more so, it represents only one of the two major ways that an app can be developed.
One way is to use the app as a window to a web-based platform that is built well for multiple interfaces (ie. smartphone, computer, tablet, etc). This way does not necessarily benefit from the use of the app itself as a technology, but rather utilizes the app as a way to better orient and structure the information based on the device. In other words, the app is more like a mobile-friendly access point to a website rather than fully utilized for all the abilities that an app may add to the learning experience. I believe this way is more used as a method to increase accessibility to a learning platform in general, rather than increasing accessibility for a learner to the learning itself.
The second way to develop an app is building the app more directly to optimize and benefit from the direct access it can provide to a learner through a mobile device that is heavily utilized to input information, such a smartphone. Most learners carry their smartphone on them everyday and check it multiple times in a day (likely more), compared to a device like a laptop. This second development way looks for opportunities to increase the dataset that the app can access. For example, if the learner allowed the app to (note: this opens a highly related topic of ethics), the app could gain data from the learner’s location, photos, alarm clock and more. This would be in addition to the learner data within the app itself. The app could also be built to learn more about the learner from sensors such as light and touch. Lastly, it could benefit from phone push notifications which gives the app 24/7 access to the learner with recommendations (note: again, if the learner allows it). These notifications would be immediately actionable for the learner and are familiar to most learners that have smartphones with apps that regularly send push notifications.
I hope the above examples provided some answers to your question about ways that can provide personalization for the learner that are not related to learning styles. On that note, I have found some prior personalization research that relates to learning styles that I do not see as much as valid anymore after our discovery in George’s LRNT 523 class that learning styles may be a myth. However, I also observed within the research that there are many other classifications for learners that are being attempted to be used but I have not seen anything consistent enough to hold the same representation that learning styles had in the past.
Lastly, thank you for the Alphago recommendation – I will be checking it out this month once I get a chance and will let you know when I do!
Thanks again for providing such thought-provoking questions, I enjoyed the process to comment back to you and appreciate your patience in my reply.
June 4, 2018 at 11:27 am
Hi Nicolette, thanks for these very thoughtful comparisons between web and mobile app platforms. Something else to consider is that apps offer the benefit of being able to function while offline, which may be useful for learning where bandwidth is pricey or unavailable. A common concern about apps has to do with the way they pull people away from the open web toward proprietary silos, locked file formats, etc., which are antithetical to open education philosophies.