Category: Technology

Categories
Education Technology

Chorus: Visually creating mobile web, SMS, and interactive voice apps

Presenter: Armen Arevian, UCLA (Telemedicine specialist, among other things)

Personal note: Chorus looks a bit like IFTTT to me

Disparities in Technology Development

  • Technical sophistication
  • Financial Resources
  • Creating tech that’s actually used and has impact
  • Sustainability of projects/maintenance

…results in several limitations

  • Created by a select few
  • Smaller subset sustains them
  • Limited types of people that can be directly involved in creating technologies
  • Time delays to create technologies
  • Limited customization/tailoring of technologies that can be created

Traditional Development

  • Development process = Expert + IT + User feedback

“Participatory Technology Development”

  • Stakeholders as equal co-partners
  • Community-based participatory research

Chorus

  • Visually create apps yourself in real-time
  • HIPAA compliant
  • Vetted by UCLA OIT security & Semel IT
  • Approved for use in research
  • Provides basic interaction building blocks, but users create their own story about what makes sense
  • Reads & writes to the web app

Armen then gave a demonstration of Chorus…very impressive!

Categories
Education Technology

A Global University Experience: how The Minerva Schools at KGI’s Technology allows its Students to become Global Citizens

Presenter: Eric Bonabeau

With Minerva, we have a chance to start from scratch, with first principles…we know how to maximize learning, based on a set of metrics. Let’s build a delivery mechanism that will maximize learning.

Putting 300 students in a big auditorium and lecturing them should be illegal! Well, let me walk that back…the issue is that classes of that size will not allow for students to meaningfully interact with the (likely world class) professor. In a city like Los Angeles, Berlin, San Francisco, the city is your campus, in smaller towns, the campus is your city.

93% of employers said a demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly and solve complex problems is more important than a job candidate’s undergraduate degree. This is the reason Minerva exists.

What is the most common job in America today? What will it be in ten years? Self-driving cars were not something that would have been predicted ten years ago…what’s next?

“A future proof education”

  • Practical knowledge
  • Engaging Classrooms
  • Global Immersion
  • Accessible Admissions

We get students involved in lots of co-curricular activities.

Tuition is $12,000/year, which is inexpensive by American standards. However, for the rest of the world this is pretty expensive. Out of 12,000 applicants, we only accepted 300 students. We want innovators and global citizens.

Specific Aspects

  • Thinking critically
  • Thinking creatively
  • Communicating effectively
  • Interacting effectively

Habits of mind/automatic cognitive reflexes

Use plausibility checks to determine whether claims are reasonable; use principles of effective debating, ID your audience & tailor oral & written work accordingly, and more.

It’s a journey toward mastery; active learning is key

Eric then showed a video that sampled class instruction and interaction with students.

 

 

Categories
Technology

A Watch Hands-On Session: Distraction-free Notifications with Apple Watch and Android Wear

Presenter: Wren Reynolds, @wrenjs

This post is short, but it was a great session…the interactive pieces unfortunately prevented an in-depth writeup. Nice session, Wren!

Interactive Exercises

We did a couple exercise demonstrating how difficult it is to create and interpret ultra-short messaging. Implicit was the challenge of over-notification.

Principles of Good Notifications

Minimal, concise, only when you really need them!

Resources

 

Categories
Accessibility Technology

Making Peoplesoft Accessible at the University of Minnesota

Presenter: Hendrix Bodden from GreyHeller

Project Overview

  • Campus views Disability as Diversity
  • Large Peoplesoft installation
  • Self-service was not accessible, but required high customization
  • Upgrade: new version splitting CS/HR databases; accessibility came in at the end; modifying PS pages in-house to make accessible too expensive!
  • Deque provided accessibility assessments
  • Intrasee provided UX

Access & Accessibility: Details

  • Use cases (there were TONS on student and HR)
  • Test User accounts
  • Environments
  • Test data
  • Collaboration tools

Platform-wide accessibility

  • Interaction: all functionality available from keyboard
  • Optimized UX: easy to use
  • Full-featured: parity with desktop use.

Product Demonstration

  • Transformation of the HTML provided by the out of the box Peoplesoft pages (it looks sooo much nicer).
  • Ran the page on an iPad with VoiceOver – this was a powerful demonstration of the proper use of markup.

PeopleMobile

  • Plug-in to PeopleSoft environment (on the PS web server)
  • Inherits from deployed PeopleSoft system: security rules, all business rules & audits, all calculations, all customizations and bolt-ons made by a customer, all database updates and access
  • Starting point is the PeopleSoft page
  • All back-end logic is the same

Semantic HTML

  • Ensures proper HTML structure: sequence, hierarchy, eliminates extraneous content, proper relationships & roles
  • Eliminates dependency on CSS for proper display
  • Showed a slide of audit of the enrollment shopping cart

Common PeopleSoft HTML Issues

  • Lightboxes
  • Prompt Dialogs
  • Set appropriate values for heading, subheadings, grids
  • Sets presentation mode attributes on read-only tables
  • Associates labels with form fields

Improves Navigation & Taxonomy

  • Sets Aria roles
  • Sets navigation role
  • Adds skip links
  • Tabs & tab structure
  • Links & buttons
  • Navigation menus and submenus

Improving End-User Interaction

  • Highlight content in focus
  • Remember scroll position on reloads, AJAX updates, and other processing

Lessons Learned: Challenges

  • High-level commitment to accessibility
  • Accessibility integrated from day one
  • Changing FTE commitments at U
  • Understanding of fuller picture
  • Immature U processes

 

Categories
Education Technology

Assessing the Impact of the Learning Analytics Paradigm on Management Education

Presenter: Owen Hall, Jr. from Pepperdine

Challenges

  • Growing business demands: web savvy, with global perspectives
  • Increasing use of the web in management education: hybrid, online, MOOCs, SoMe
  • Rising Educational costs (MBA >= $100K)
  • Stagnant economy

Faculty Perspectives

  • 90+% believe web-based learning tech is important to fulfilling their institution’s mission
  • Nealy 60% believe SoMe will influence delivery of management education

AACSB Survey

  • Study sponsored by AACSB revealed gap between current delivery of education and what is needed & expected in the future

Business Analytics Categories

  • Descriptive (analysis): categorizing customers by their product preferences; performance metrics like inventory turns and employee absenteeism
  • Predictive (forecasting): FICO credit scoring, product/service demand
  • Prescriptive (optimization: investment portfolio design, yield management

Learning Analytics

  • Student Outcomes feeds Data Mining feeds Analytics feeds Student Outcomes

Learning Analytics

  • Understanding how students are learning: ongoing soft & hard measurements, assessment rubrics
  • Optimizing the learning process: crowdsourcing, MOOCs, interventions, conditional release

Learning Assurance System

  • Assessment Repository
  • Interface with SoMe
  • Analytics based
  • REal time processing
  • High degree of interaction and collaboration
  • Consistent reporting
  • Continuous improvement!

Graziadio Assessment System

  • LiveText + Peoplesoft data feeds Outcomes (Performance, Intervention, Curriculum).
  • Provided an example rubric

Curriculum Reform

  • Tied directly to QA
  • Better align products with the needs of the business community
  • Increase flexibility and student choices
  • More bootcamps to address growing “technical” deficiencies
  • Reduce time to graduate
  • Address tuition challenges

Curriculum Reform Process

Mission, vision, values feed the following cycle:

  • Learning goals,
  • Curriculum design
  • Course delivery
  • Student assessment
  • Continuous upgrading

Spillover Benefits

  • Focused on learning
  • Courses as Building Blocks
  • Working as Teams
  • Making Hard Decisions

Big Picture

The Cycle: QA > Analytics > Curriculum Reform

Cloud Based Collaboration Networks

Primary goal of a cloud based collaboration network is to provide a platform where the management education community can converge and share

Summary

  • Employers looking for grads who are web savvy  problem solving oriented
  • Learning tech is changing face of mgmt ed by better aligning business programs with needs of business universe
  • Learning analytics offer dynamic resource for supporting the qa process
  • Curriculum reform is essential to meet the needs of the business universe
  • Collaboration platforms are crucial to success