My Univer: content, technology, audience
In our first publication - My Univer - why and for whom we are doing the designer of educational applications - we tried to tell about the main idea of ​​the project, and received from attentive readers a lot of questions concerning more practical details of the project. Therefore, this time we will tell you more about how My Univer works , and what we mean by saying the magic words educational platform .
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My University is based on three pillars - content , technology and audience .
Content is, first of all, a knowledge base , an ever-growing replenishable repository of educational materials with which users of applications and web services from My Univer universe interact. At the moment, the main content in the repository is micro-portions of knowledge, which we call facts , which represent an independent value for students (this is how an example of one of the facts looks like). In addition to self-sufficiency , the second main property of facts is the possibility of organizing them into more complex and “deep” in terms of meaning, educational objects (for example, micro-courses).
It is easiest to present such a fact as an answer to a specific, clearly posed question on a particular academic topic. It is distinguished from a simple answer by the presence of a detailed explanation, media content (for example, a screenshot of a textbook, a video clip, a presentation or audio recordings), as well as links to traditional and additional sources where you can get more complete information.
The fact store is structured by categories of sciences, subjects and individual learning topics, which allows you to effectively aggregate knowledge. At the same time, the facts themselves are adapted to create test materials, in other words, tests. This is achieved due to the fact that any fact at the same time is a control question , checking its assimilation. Together, it allows you to automatically create tests to test knowledge on individual topics and subjects in general. Tests (which will be described in detail below ) are the second key component of the knowledge base.
I would not like to delve into the methodological aspects of the concept of micro-knowledge now - this deserves a separate publication. However, I must say that the first time we talked about it at the All-Russian Innovation Convention in 2012. Then our approach StudyOnGo ( “Learning on the go” ) was very well received and won in the competition of ideas held during the convention.
Starting from that moment (and even now), we do not stop searching for the optimal format. The correctness of the chosen approach was confirmed by the recent news, announced by McGraw Hill Education and Microsoft . The McGraw-Hill, Microsoft Embrace Open Learning article discusses composite educational objects - “pedagogically related groups of reusable digital content and assessment tools associated with one articulated learning objective . ” At the same time, the composite educational objects themselves are designed to “Create smaller pieces of content that are easier to revise, update, find, reuse and assemble to meet changing needs; Produce data to support analytics-driven instruction and personalized learning; Increase their ability to build aggregate content repositories that can be used quickly and efficiently . ” Conceptually, the approach is very close to our facts with the possibility of automatic test generation .
Another example of recognition of this approach is the Unizin University Consortium now being created in the United States, which is based on three key principles underlying My University, a single LMS for all participants, a Learning Objects repository, an analytical platform that collects and processes educational data.
Of course, there are in our knowledge base and familiar to all online courses, and video lectures. However, they are mainly created for corporate users. How we plan to fill this part of the knowledge base for mass learning and generally generate content, we will tell you a little later. At the same time, when the course designer will be ready, illustrating the method of their creation based on the concept of micro-knowledge.
It remains to add one important detail: the word content in My University is more than just a repository of knowledge. It’s also a web interface for creating and managing your own content. As well as ready-to-use tools for analyzing student activity and their interaction with educational materials. Including social aspects such as comments (discussions) and likes.
Technology is the magic of My Universer, implementing “LMS out of the box” in the form of a REST API available for use in mobile applications and web services. Without going directly into the technical details of how everything works, let's talk about the educational capabilities of technology, which is the basis of the platform.
So, in your hands - everything you need to organize distance learning. Online courses that can provide simultaneous training of tens of thousands of people . Simply create your course in the platform and get a set of REST API calls to display the structure of the course and the interaction of students with it. Embed these calls in mobile applications or web services - there are no restrictions, it all depends on your desires. There is no need to worry about hosting educational materials or storing user data, even if you organize regular MOOC-courses per 100,000 participants. The platform takes over.
While your users are learning, the platform collects and analyzes in real time various aspects of the educational process. The collected information allows not only to automate the process of assessing learning outcomes, but also to study in detail the path taken by users to knowledge. This data is available in the form of analytical reports in the web-based management of educational materials, and can also be exported in a convenient format for analysis in the external environment.
A powerful testing technology based on learning outcomes allows evaluating acquired knowledge or, on the contrary, conducting preliminary diagnostics in order to adapt an educational trajectory (structure and content of educational materials) to the student's current level of knowledge. Perhaps the main difference between My Universe’s knowledge control technologies and what is usually called testing in other educational projects is our approach to generating a test task — a specific set of answer questions is created anew each time you pass the test individually for each student .
Yes, you can set up a test so that each participant will have the same questions with the same answer choices - something we have long been accustomed to. But it is necessary to prepare an excess bank of questions, as it is possible to ensure that each participant in the same test has different questions, or the same person gets new questions on the second attempt to pass the test. And in the already familiar question there were other answers.
All this is easily configured via the web interface in the test parameters and is implemented at the server platform level, which makes mobile clients independent - the architecture of the corresponding REST API section is designed so that the client does not depend on the logic of the formation of test tasks and test them, but only receives displayed a list of questions with answer choices generated for it, collected the user's answers, sent it to the server for verification, and then displayed its results.
In addition to the necessary minimum - courses and tests - the platform supports work with most types of modern educational content. Implemented embedding in applications video and presentations, viewing PDF documents, viewing and editing MS Office documents and much more. Initially, the open platform architecture makes it easy to expand the list of possibilities, which we continuously do. And if your educational service is of interest to a wide range of users, and you yourself are interested in an additional audience and new channels of monetization - we will be happy to integrate your capabilities into the My Univer platform.
Finally, the audience is the soul of any mass project. In the case of My University - not just users of applications and services of the platform, but themselves - a resource available for use by other inhabitants of the ecosystem.
The user base of My University is based on the principle of Single Sign On or a single login , as we call it. This means that by registering once with the application, the user can later use the same data to access any applications and services of the platform. Users can communicate with each other from different applications, there is no need to have the same application for this. Moreover, the transition of users between applications is carried out without loss of data, and in each new application, the educational services provided can be increasingly personalized by analyzing all the previously accumulated information about the user's activity.
This open approach to building a user audience allows you to achieve three important results. First, creating a completely new, unknown application, there is an opportunity, without waiting for the growth of the number of "their" users, to immediately put them into a living, developing environment of people relevant to the level of education, the subject being studied and many other parameters. Secondly, you can quickly increase the user base of your application by inviting thousands and tens of thousands of potential users, segmented by levels of training, educational institutions, cities, educational preferences and level of knowledge. And finally, thirdly, a natural environment is created for lifelong learning and the construction of a vertical “educational elevator”, allowing for the implementation of truly unique educational projects.
And in conclusion, there are literally a few facts about the real audience of My Univer’s mobile applications:
Thus, with My University you can do not only global, but also local projects , for example, a university application. Even in this case, you will get a serious advantage in the form of an assembled audience, about which a lot is already known - in-demand subjects, preferences, level of knowledge, etc.
The task of My University is to help the authors of applications (and educational products in general) to concentrate on user interaction and pedagogical issues, leaving aside the care of technology, content (at least partially) and the search for an audience. How well we do it - time will tell. For now comments and hot discussion are welcomed!
')
My University is based on three pillars - content , technology and audience .
Content is, first of all, a knowledge base , an ever-growing replenishable repository of educational materials with which users of applications and web services from My Univer universe interact. At the moment, the main content in the repository is micro-portions of knowledge, which we call facts , which represent an independent value for students (this is how an example of one of the facts looks like). In addition to self-sufficiency , the second main property of facts is the possibility of organizing them into more complex and “deep” in terms of meaning, educational objects (for example, micro-courses).
It is easiest to present such a fact as an answer to a specific, clearly posed question on a particular academic topic. It is distinguished from a simple answer by the presence of a detailed explanation, media content (for example, a screenshot of a textbook, a video clip, a presentation or audio recordings), as well as links to traditional and additional sources where you can get more complete information.
The fact store is structured by categories of sciences, subjects and individual learning topics, which allows you to effectively aggregate knowledge. At the same time, the facts themselves are adapted to create test materials, in other words, tests. This is achieved due to the fact that any fact at the same time is a control question , checking its assimilation. Together, it allows you to automatically create tests to test knowledge on individual topics and subjects in general. Tests (which will be described in detail below ) are the second key component of the knowledge base.
I would not like to delve into the methodological aspects of the concept of micro-knowledge now - this deserves a separate publication. However, I must say that the first time we talked about it at the All-Russian Innovation Convention in 2012. Then our approach StudyOnGo ( “Learning on the go” ) was very well received and won in the competition of ideas held during the convention.
Starting from that moment (and even now), we do not stop searching for the optimal format. The correctness of the chosen approach was confirmed by the recent news, announced by McGraw Hill Education and Microsoft . The McGraw-Hill, Microsoft Embrace Open Learning article discusses composite educational objects - “pedagogically related groups of reusable digital content and assessment tools associated with one articulated learning objective . ” At the same time, the composite educational objects themselves are designed to “Create smaller pieces of content that are easier to revise, update, find, reuse and assemble to meet changing needs; Produce data to support analytics-driven instruction and personalized learning; Increase their ability to build aggregate content repositories that can be used quickly and efficiently . ” Conceptually, the approach is very close to our facts with the possibility of automatic test generation .
Another example of recognition of this approach is the Unizin University Consortium now being created in the United States, which is based on three key principles underlying My University, a single LMS for all participants, a Learning Objects repository, an analytical platform that collects and processes educational data.
Of course, there are in our knowledge base and familiar to all online courses, and video lectures. However, they are mainly created for corporate users. How we plan to fill this part of the knowledge base for mass learning and generally generate content, we will tell you a little later. At the same time, when the course designer will be ready, illustrating the method of their creation based on the concept of micro-knowledge.
It remains to add one important detail: the word content in My University is more than just a repository of knowledge. It’s also a web interface for creating and managing your own content. As well as ready-to-use tools for analyzing student activity and their interaction with educational materials. Including social aspects such as comments (discussions) and likes.
Technology is the magic of My Universer, implementing “LMS out of the box” in the form of a REST API available for use in mobile applications and web services. Without going directly into the technical details of how everything works, let's talk about the educational capabilities of technology, which is the basis of the platform.
So, in your hands - everything you need to organize distance learning. Online courses that can provide simultaneous training of tens of thousands of people . Simply create your course in the platform and get a set of REST API calls to display the structure of the course and the interaction of students with it. Embed these calls in mobile applications or web services - there are no restrictions, it all depends on your desires. There is no need to worry about hosting educational materials or storing user data, even if you organize regular MOOC-courses per 100,000 participants. The platform takes over.
While your users are learning, the platform collects and analyzes in real time various aspects of the educational process. The collected information allows not only to automate the process of assessing learning outcomes, but also to study in detail the path taken by users to knowledge. This data is available in the form of analytical reports in the web-based management of educational materials, and can also be exported in a convenient format for analysis in the external environment.
A powerful testing technology based on learning outcomes allows evaluating acquired knowledge or, on the contrary, conducting preliminary diagnostics in order to adapt an educational trajectory (structure and content of educational materials) to the student's current level of knowledge. Perhaps the main difference between My Universe’s knowledge control technologies and what is usually called testing in other educational projects is our approach to generating a test task — a specific set of answer questions is created anew each time you pass the test individually for each student .
Yes, you can set up a test so that each participant will have the same questions with the same answer choices - something we have long been accustomed to. But it is necessary to prepare an excess bank of questions, as it is possible to ensure that each participant in the same test has different questions, or the same person gets new questions on the second attempt to pass the test. And in the already familiar question there were other answers.
All this is easily configured via the web interface in the test parameters and is implemented at the server platform level, which makes mobile clients independent - the architecture of the corresponding REST API section is designed so that the client does not depend on the logic of the formation of test tasks and test them, but only receives displayed a list of questions with answer choices generated for it, collected the user's answers, sent it to the server for verification, and then displayed its results.
In addition to the necessary minimum - courses and tests - the platform supports work with most types of modern educational content. Implemented embedding in applications video and presentations, viewing PDF documents, viewing and editing MS Office documents and much more. Initially, the open platform architecture makes it easy to expand the list of possibilities, which we continuously do. And if your educational service is of interest to a wide range of users, and you yourself are interested in an additional audience and new channels of monetization - we will be happy to integrate your capabilities into the My Univer platform.
Finally, the audience is the soul of any mass project. In the case of My University - not just users of applications and services of the platform, but themselves - a resource available for use by other inhabitants of the ecosystem.
The user base of My University is based on the principle of Single Sign On or a single login , as we call it. This means that by registering once with the application, the user can later use the same data to access any applications and services of the platform. Users can communicate with each other from different applications, there is no need to have the same application for this. Moreover, the transition of users between applications is carried out without loss of data, and in each new application, the educational services provided can be increasingly personalized by analyzing all the previously accumulated information about the user's activity.
This open approach to building a user audience allows you to achieve three important results. First, creating a completely new, unknown application, there is an opportunity, without waiting for the growth of the number of "their" users, to immediately put them into a living, developing environment of people relevant to the level of education, the subject being studied and many other parameters. Secondly, you can quickly increase the user base of your application by inviting thousands and tens of thousands of potential users, segmented by levels of training, educational institutions, cities, educational preferences and level of knowledge. And finally, thirdly, a natural environment is created for lifelong learning and the construction of a vertical “educational elevator”, allowing for the implementation of truly unique educational projects.
And in conclusion, there are literally a few facts about the real audience of My Univer’s mobile applications:
- 19 countries , including Russia, the CIS and Europe;
- more than 1800 educational institutions - mainly universities and colleges;
- more than 80 universities , in which more than 100 people use My University.
Thus, with My University you can do not only global, but also local projects , for example, a university application. Even in this case, you will get a serious advantage in the form of an assembled audience, about which a lot is already known - in-demand subjects, preferences, level of knowledge, etc.
The task of My University is to help the authors of applications (and educational products in general) to concentrate on user interaction and pedagogical issues, leaving aside the care of technology, content (at least partially) and the search for an audience. How well we do it - time will tell. For now comments and hot discussion are welcomed!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290616/
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