The DEI Evidence Imperative American Council on Education
RISHI RAJ S GERA
Chief Solutions Officer, Magic Edtech
Rolanda Mitchell is Using Diversity, Equity and Inclusion To Help Build Strong Educational Systems in K-12 Schools and Higher Education – NC State College of Education News
Rolanda Mitchell is Using Diversity, Equity and Inclusion To Help Build Strong Educational Systems in K-12 Schools and Higher Education NC State College of Education News
Tech Solutions to Literacy skill development
Teachers who have English learners strive for different tools that help them be efficient in imparting literacy skills. The aim is to have the learners reading skill on grade-level at the earliest. Learning time for reading skill may differ based on individual’s pace and abilities.
There is an ever-growing need of solutions that offer both listening and reading to support literacy learning goals.
What are the technology solutions that enable impart of Literacy skills?
Improvement in any literacy skill require first focus on communication. A phonetic dictionary enable learners convert their native language into English. Teachers can translate learning content into learner’s first language for easier comprehension. Translation tools like Google Translate struggle to relay important messages. A language consultant can optimize this content and enable learners to comprehend the information.
Reading aloud is essential, especially for entering, emerging, or developing listeners. eBooks with read aloud feature improve listening, vocabulary and comprehension skills in learners. These help in their evolution as independent readers. eReader technology solutions available enable Read-Aloud in the content. Read aloud audio can use either Text to Speech technology or studio recorded audio. The eReader solutions offer Read-Aloud audio with word-by-word highlighting.
Age-group of a learner plays an important role for the design of content. Smart content templates use game based, interaction techniques suited to the age-group. These aid in improving vocabulary, spelling and comprehension skills. These templates can ingest and deliver instruction as per latest education standards.
Video play an important format and offer enough creative ways to engage. Learners can watch characters, animation and enjoy on screen activity to relate to concepts visually. Audio in video’s can further improve the listening skills. Smart Video Content players enable delivery of videos tagged with captions. Learners can turn on the closed captioning feature in the player for building listening skills.
Digital Learning using Simulations
In the world of education and learning, instructors are looking for the tools that can impart the learning with dynamic content sets and enable learners in application of their learning.
There is an ongoing need to develop immersive simulations/virtual labs across varying learning topics. Each simulation can be offered to a learner with different intensity modes. In each intensity, the actions of a learner in the simulation should be calculated and updated at different time intervals.
A well designed simulation offers an enjoyable and exciting experience for both instructors and learners.
Benefits to the Learners:
#1 The learners in a simulation are able to perform tasks and learn through performing actions in each task in order to get to a certain outcome. Additionally the outcome from a simulation are one that comes from experience and hence cant be compared with those achieved by simply reading.
#2 Simulation offer a variety of learning paths to determine effective learning Learners can learn better through experience in multiple paths and can have better retention of knowledge. The learners are encourage to explore paths, and there is no discouragement on any failure, as it doesn’t waste and resources.
#3 Simulations also offer that can enable a learner to make adjustments and move forward to achieve a correct outcome. The immediate feedback helps in immediate application of knowledge.
Metadata and Education
The Education world is seeing a real shift in the entire learning paradigm. The new trend is focused on Learning, Learner, Engagement and Discovery with aim to provide the learners with enhanced Digital content and Instructional material in the form of eCourseware, eText, Games, Simulations and other form of Open Educational resources.
The supply chain for the digital content involves interaction and collaboration of different user groups like Content Distributors, Content Providers, Publishers, Districts, Schools before it actually gets accessed by Instructors and learners.
With Educational resources taking a boost in the market, it is critical to have this digital resources content tagged with standardized “Metadata”.
What is Metadata?
In simple words, Metadata is the who, what, when, and where for a content resource. Metadata describe the learning context to which the Learning object is suited for.
It is much beyond the Title, Description, Keywords and can cover the Learning resource type – video or assessment or picture or more, Discipline/Subject, Differentiation – readibility, Date, Time, Topics, Standards, Skills and much more, Remediation paths, Links to learning progression maps, Accessibility support, Usage Information.
Common Usage of Metadata in the Digital Content
Design and delivery of a sustained and immersive learning context in which learners can master the learning skills and objectives and apply those skills to solve cognitively complex real world problems is time consuming. The capacity to provide instructors with an adequate access to range of learning resources appropriate to learning is among the most challenging.
- Using standard metadata Instructors, learners and parents can seek resources matching appropriate learning objectives to meet the learner needs.
- Digital Content Providers use metadata in content for better marketing of their work and allow Learning Institutions, Instructors and Parent opt for what is better for the learners.
- Content Managers curate the learning content and tag them for imparting efficient learning.
- IT Teams at Schools, Libraries use standard metadata to import content and communicate between different technical infrastructures.
What are the kinds of metadata?
The commonly used type of metadata includes:
- Descriptive metadata is typically used for discovery and identification, as information used to search and locate an object such as title, author, subjects, keywords, publisher.
- Structural metadata gives a description of how the components of an object are organized. An example of structural metadata would be content organisation or table of contents in a book.
- Administrative data includes Rights management metadata explain intellectual property rights, while preservation metadata contains information that is needed to preserve and save a resource
Is Metadata creation an easy process – How to create Metadata?
- Elementary metadata in K12 Digital world can be created while an object/digital resource is created either manually or an automation manner. The primitive data may include information about when an object was created, who created it, when it was last updated, file size, and file extension.
- Specialised users can create advanced metadata by using automated workflows or custom tailored tools
Some popular standards in Metadata
| Metadata Standard | Users |
| Onix 3.0 | Online Information Exchange – international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form. |
| IEEE LOM | Learning Objects Metadata – specifies the syntax and semantics of Learning Object Metadata. |
| TEI | Text Encoding Initiative – a standard for the representation of texts in digital form, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. |
| MARC | MARC – Machine Readable Cataloging – standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form. |
| Dublin Core | Dublin Core – interoperable online metadata standard focused on networked resources. |
Other Ongoing Initiatives in metadata
- Schema.org is a joint initiative of the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex aimed at making it easier to index web pages in such a way that facilitates the building of sophisticated search services. Schema.org metadata can also be used for other eBooks and as stand-alone metadata records.
- Educational technology and curriculum standards organizations and their initiatives (IMS, SLC, SIF, RTTT, Learning Registry, OAI, W3C, PARCC, SBAC, ASCD)
References
Native App Vs Web App – Comparison
|
Features |
Native Apps |
Web Apps |
| Internet access | Not required | Required, except for rare apps with offline capability |
| Deployment and updates | Required to be downloaded from the stores/marketplaces | Hit refresh |
| User interface | Native apps are responsive and functional | Equally smart interfaces using HTML5, CSS and jQuery |
| Device compatibility | Platform-dependent, hardware-dependent | Platform-agnostic, content can be reformatted with CSS to suit any device |
| Animation/Graphics | Fast and responsive | Web apps are getting closer, but will probably always lag |
| Streaming media | Few problems with audio and video. Flash works, but only if the device supports it |
Obvious choices are 3gpp and Mp4 |
| Content search | Not on the web | By default |
| Sharable | Requires to be integrated as a custom build | Web links are shared freely. Social APIs and widgets allow easy one-click posting |
| Discussion and collaboration | Only if you build it, and it’s more difficult if data is disparate |
Discussion is easy, all data is stored on a server |
| Access to hardware sensors | Yes, all of them: camera, gyroscope, microphone, compass, accelerometer, GPS |
Access through the browser is limited, though geolocation is common |
| Development | Specific tools required for some platforms (like Apple’s). You have to build a new app for each target platform |
Write once, publish once, view it anywhere. Multiple tools and libraries to choose from |
| Commerce Integration/ Your personal store | Charge whatever you want. Most app distributors take a slice, up to 30% |
No distribution costs beyond server fees |
| Distribution | Most app stores require approval. And you need to wait till the store approves. |
Real-time access in a web browser |
| Outside access to your content | No, the reader must download your app | Yep, just click a link |
Questions to consider while porting an existing eLearning content to Mobile phones
Here are few questions one need to consider while porting the existing learning content to mobile devices:
- Have you considered any distribution model for your content?
- Is it available for download from application stores/marketplaces? OR
- Is it accessible using the web browser on the device?
- Do you have some target device platforms for application delivery?
- Do you need the application content to synchronize, if a user access the content through different devices?
- Does the application need to support Content/UI Localization? If yes:
- Are there any specific languages that are required to be supported?
- Does the application content need to be accessed by privileged users or the application content is accessible to all the public?
- In case for privileged access, do you have an existing user management system in place or would like to create a new user management system?
- Can you give a brief on the audience who are going to access this application?
- How many users may access this application?
- What is the expected geographical location of the users?
- How many users are going to access this application concurrently?
- Can you describe on the content formats to be used in the application
- Document formats – Pdf, PPT, ePub, Html
- Audio formats mp3
- Video formats- mp4, 3gp
- Do you foresee a need for content conversion to make the content compatible to multiple platforms?
- Do you need a meta-data driven search or do you want full content search? Do you have the meta-tags, keywords for the search ready?
- Do you need assessments and surveys to built in the application?
- Do you need a tracking mechanism built in the application to capture the learner responsiveness and areas of interest?
- Do you have the hosting infrastructure ready for the application. If Yes,
- Can you provide specifications for the hosting infrastructure configuration available at your end?
- Do you have a streaming server in-house/subscribed to allow serve the media(audio/video)?
- Do you need a Content Management System (CMS) to manage the content for the application or do you want to use any existing Content Management System available with you?
- If CMS is already available, kindly specify the details for the same.
- Does the content exist across multiple content repositories/databases?
- Is the content access restricted by a firewall or require some specific privileges.
- With regards to the new updates for the content, what is the frequency of content upgrades?
- In case, you look forward for native application development, do you have the application developer license(s) available to deploy the application on the application stores?