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Christopher Douce

Student Interaction and Collaboration in Tutorials: Why, What and How

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On 13 June 2024 I attended a seminar that was run by three colleagues from the School of Maths and Statistics: Cath Brown, Vinay Kathotia, and Abi Kirk. The seminar was intended for ‘anyone interested in the development of online teaching’.

For anyone finding this blog post, it might be useful to view this summary alongside other posts about Adobe Connect , tutorials, and online pedagogy.

What follows are some brief notes that I made from each of the presentations. For concision, I have taken the liberty of abridging each of the titles. Some reflections and acknowledgments are shared at the end.

Why should we promote students working together?

The subtitle for this first presentation, which was facilitated by Vinay Kathotia with Cath Brown was: what are the pedagogical and broader benefits?

A useful term was introduced: student-centred pedagogy. Student adopting an active role during a tutorial can mean increases in confidence and self-efficacy. Interaction can be as simple as students making points, listening, arguing, and responding to a tutorial.

These points can be connected to ‘inquiry based mathematics education’ where collaboration has the potential to lead to higher levels of inclusion. There are some advantages of collaboration: mathematics is a collaborative activity. Through tutors demonstrating mathematical thinking, students can see that mathematics can be messy.

I noted down the phrase: “community enhances attainment”. Community can relate to the study of a module, and anything that helps to develop community, but is also useful is important.

We were asked a question: what were everyone’s experiences? How do we convince the students it is a good idea for them to come along to tutorials? Perhaps writing can be useful; asking students to write an account of what happened during a tutorial, is one approach that can facilitate sharing and suggest the benefits of tutorials.

The design and structure of collaborative tasks

The second session was facilitated by Abi Kirk. The full title of this second session was ‘some ideas and examples on the nature, design and structure of collaborative tasks’. The presenters described some collaborative tasks they have used for tutorials: small-group problem solving (which takes place on M337), and ‘pub quiz’ group work.

In the pub quiz activity, students were put into breakout rooms where they have access to five questions. In each room, students record their answers. This then leads to a plenary session which is facilitated by a tutor where all the results are shared using an Adobe Connect whiteboard.

A question was asked: how could collaboration using breakout rooms work in your context? One thought is to giving information in advance; perhaps it is important for everyone to know what is going to happen in a tutorial. There is an inherent tension of giving them too much in advance. Making a session look enticing and interesting is a skill all of its own.

Technology to enable collaborative work

The full title of this session was ‘technology to enable collaborative work - Adobe Connect and beyond’. In this session we were introduced to a variety of different Adobe Connect features and maths tools the presenters have used, such as GeoGebra, Desmos and PolyPad. Different subjects will, of course, necessitate the use of different tools. What I might use as a computing tutor will, of course, be different to what a maths tutor may use.

You can, of course, use features within Adobe Connect, such as screensharing, file sharing and polls with external tools and utilities. In some tools it is possible to create multipart activities, for example, and share URLs (web page links) with students through a text chat window.

One other idea is to open a shared Microsoft OneNote notebook. Any OU student can use it through Office 365. It can be used as a whiteboard where student can share their work. Control could be given to students, where they could interact with mathematical text.

Towards the end of the session, we returned to the topic of breakout rooms. They are pretty complex, which means that it is important to make sure you have a solid understanding of the interaction metaphors that are used. Tutors need to know how to set up and move between different layouts, how to adding and deleting breakout rooms, how to start and end breakout rooms, how to communicate to all rooms, moving between rooms, and combining results from different rooms together in a virtual plenary space.

Reflections

Quite a lot of time has elapsed between attending the seminar (June) and making these notes available (November). This means that there is risk that the sessions may not be summarised as accurately as I would have liked them to be. This said, I hope the points that I have shared are helpful, and apologies to the facilitators if I have misrepresented anything.

I went to this session since I hold the view that student interaction through online tutorials is important, but I also have the sense that it is very difficult to do well. This session was of specific interest since there are some key similarities between maths and computing: both subjects work with textual notations. With maths, there are equations (and whatever mathematicians do); within computing there are programming languages.

I do feel that there are multiple structural and technological barriers that are put in everyone’s way before interaction can become possible. More often than not, I don’t hear any student voices in tutorials, since no one really knows anyone. I remember that a book called eModeration by Gilly Salmon emphasises the importance of digital socialisation. In the currently tutorial world, where students can attend any number of different tutorials by different tutors, the tentative social connections between everyone works against interaction and collaboration. I don’t know what the solution is.

Using distance learning technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration is difficult. I don’t know where this comes from, but I’m always minded that perhaps digital educators have to become digital media producers and performers. To be good at digital performance, rehearsals are essential.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all facilitators.

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Christopher Douce

Gresham College Lecture: Notations, Patterns and New Discoveries (Juggling!)

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On a dark winter’s evening on 23 January 2014, I discovered a new part of London I had never been to before.  Dr Colin Wright gave a talk entitled ‘notations, patterns and new discoveries’ at the Museum of London.   The subject was intriguing in a number of different ways.  Firstly, it was all about the mathematics of juggling (which represented a combination of ideas that I had never come across before).  Secondly, it was about notations.

 The reason why I was ‘hooked’ by the notation part of the title is because my home discipline is computer science.  Computers are programmed using notation systems (programming languages), and when I was doing some research into software maintenance and object-oriented programming I discovered a series of fascinating papers that was about something called the ‘cognitive dimensions of notations’.  Roughly put, these were all about how we can efficiently work with (and think about) different types of notation system.

In its broadest sense, a notation is an abstraction or a representation.  It allows us to write stuff down.  Juggling (like dance) is an activity that is dynamic, almost ethereal; it exists and time and space, and then it can disappear or stop in an instant.  Notation allows us to write down or describe the transitory.  Computer programming languages allow us to describe sets of invisible instructions and sequences of calculations that exist nowhere except within digital circuits.  When we’re able to write things down, it turns out that we can more easily reason about what we’ve described, and make new discoveries too.

It took between eight and ten minutes to figure out how to get into the Museum of London.  It sits in the middle of a roundabout that I’ve passed a number of times before.  Eventually, I was ushered into a huge cavernous lecture theatre, which clearly suggested that this was going to be quite ‘an event’.  I was not to be disappointed.

Within minutes of the start of the lecture, we heard names of famous mathematicians: Gauss and Liebniz.  One view was that ‘truths (or proofs) should come from notions rather than notations’.  Colin, however, had a different view, that there is interplay between notions (or ideas) and notations.

During the lecture, I made a note of the following sentence: a notation represents a ‘specialist terminology allows rapid and accurate communication’, and then moved onto ask the question, ‘how can we describe a juggling pattern?’  This led to the creation of an abstraction that could then describe the movement of juggling balls. 

Whilst I was listening, I thought, ‘this is exactly what computer programmers do; we create one form of notation (a computer program), using another form of notation (a computer language) – the computer program is our abstraction of a problem that we’re trying to solve’.  Colin introduced us to juggling terms (or high level abstractions), such as the ‘shower’, ‘cascade’ and ‘mill’s mess’.  This led towards the more intellectually demanding domain of ‘theoretical juggling’ (with impossible number of balls).

 My words can’t really do the lecture justice.  I should add that it is one of those lectures that you would learn stuff by listening to it more than once.  Thankfully, for those who are interested, it was recorded, and it available on-line (Gresham College)

Whilst I was witnesses all these great tricks, one thought crossed my mind, which was, ‘how much time did you have to spend to figure out all this stuff and to learn all these juggling tricks?!  Surely there was something better you could have done with your time!’ (Admittedly, I write this partially in jest and with jealousy, since I can’t catch and I fear that doing ‘a cascade’ with three balls is, for me, a theoretical impossibility). 

It was a question that was implicitly answered by considering the importance of pure mathematics.  Doing and exploring stuff only because it is intellectually interesting may potentially lead to a real world practical use – the thing is that you don’t know what it might be and what new discoveries might emerge.  (A good example of this is number theory leading to the practical application of cryptography, which is used whenever we buy stuff over the internet). 

All in all, great fun.  Recommended.

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