FAQs as Microlearning Units of Education

Despite significant advances in the use of online tools for teaching and learning, I still don't think we have conceptualized the right platform for learning online. Wikis, blogs, forums, repositories, social networks, and so on all have their place and usefulness in learning, but it is still difficult to assemble a powerful sequence of learning content and activities.

In the early stages there was much talk of "learning objects" as a basic building block of learning. Learning objects were conceptualized similar to software code objects that were designed to execute specific functions within a computer program (e.g., code for printing text) that could be used over and over again whenever that particular function was needed. A learning object was conceived as a similar unit of "learning" that could be used as needed in a teaching activity. Lots of puzzles and troubles emerged from this effort (see a summary of these problems), but gradually the idea of "learning objects" has been abandoned.

FAQs-- Frequently Asked Questions as a Learning Building Block

I think the problem is that we haven't developed the right building block for creating learning opportunities. In short, we haven't gotten the unit of production right. Yochai Benkler writes, "The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module" (The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 4, 2006, p. 101). I would suggest that whole courses, whole lectures, etc. are too big to include very many participants. Also, materials of this magnitude serve as useful resources if you are teaching similar material, but they are rarely designed in such a way that another teacher can easily incorporate the material into their own teaching/course, etc. This lowers the actual usage of such materials. The the brilliant aspects of the Wikipedia is that they developed a system that got the "unit of production" right.

FAQs as a solution to the "unit of production" problem for learning. If we start at the basic unit of learning, I think that most learning starts with a question. Whether we are thinking about the questions of a child (How did the stars get up there?) or the scientist (How did the stars get up there?), most learning begins with a question. So what if we began to create a platform in which teachers could write questions and answers (FAQs) and then there were tools for assembling sequences of FAQs into longer sequences of learning? Would this work?

A Limited Example

In a website, MissouriFamilies, I developed some limited models of this FAQ structure. For example, here is a simple FAQ, "What is the divorce rate in the United States?" Here is a longer article that is constructed from a series of FAQs about trends in marriage rates.

My own brief efforts in trying this strategy suggests that it is possible to create a series of FAQs that can be assembled into longer learning sequences.

What about Audio/Video/PowerPoint FAQs?

Although I have not tried to create audio or video FAQs it seems to me like they would be similar to text. That is, they would be short clips that answer a question or illustrate an idea. Again they might be put together in a sequence to teach a larger point.

I am less certain about how to create a easy set of PowerPoint slides for a lecture or other type of presentation from a series of FAQs. Clearly, you couldn't just string together the words or have a series of slides that had each of the FAQs. This is an interesting question to think more about.

Other Issues in Using FAQs to Building Learning Experiences

One of the biggest challenges in using FAQs is the developing an answer that is appropriate to the level of the learner. A child's question about the stars is not the same as a physicist question about the stars even if they use the same words. There is no easy solution to this problem. To build useful systems we will have to develop ways of tagging FAQs with metadata that capture the essential "learning attributes" that need to be considered with each FAQ. This will be challenging, but perhaps less challenging that to continue to create the same content for multiple efforts to teach the same content.

There are also all types of questions. One useful way to begin to think about these questions is to use the revised Bloom taxonomy of the cognitive domain of learning. (See Forehand presentation of this work.) Often this work is used to help teachers learn how to ask questions of students to encourage them to seek deeper levels of synthesis and analysis of an issue, but these same questions can be used to build a structured set of FAQs that move from basic information about a topic to a deeper understanding. Likewise, the Bloom conceptualization can be used to build learning sequences with FAQs.

Summary

I am not ready to give up on the idea of our creating learning materials that we can use and reuse in building learning activities.

FAQs-- Questions Matter

I have asserted in a variety of places that an important way to structure "learning objects" and ultimately to structure content on the web for use in multiple learning environments is through the use of questions. Today I bumped into a wonderful little quote that I will use in the future whenever I begin conversations about why questions are useful in learning.

"Questions are the door to human wonder" (p. 23). Harvey, S. (1998). Nonfiction matters. York, ME: Stenhouse.

This is a nice way to begin a discussion that questions are at the foundation of learning and when we start with the questions that a learner begins with we can take them through a maze of knowledge in an interesting and useful way that begins to link information to deeper and deeper knowledge and richer questions, but it always seems like the first place to begin instruction is with the learner's own questions.

Stephen Downes on Modularity (or Learning Objects)

In his comprehensive look forward into The Future of Online Learning, Stephen Downes, takes a look at where we have come over the past 10 years and looks forward another 10 years. (See my other comments on "learning communities" and the "learning marketplace.")

Downes also reviews the idea of "modularity" or what has been referred to as "learning objects." He is not quite ready to abandon this idea even though he acknowledges that this idea has been not been as promising as many thought. In general, he reminds us that the "lego" metaphor has not been useful. So far educational content has not been reduced to small chunks of material that can be easily assembled into larger learning units. He has a couple of ideas that seem to help move this conversation forward. First, he suggests that the reuse of learning objects may need to shift from the teacher's hands to the learner's hands. In other words, he suggests that rather than teachers assembling content and connecting it together, the student collects learning materials and assembles this material for themselves.

He also comments that the size of a given unit of learning is shrinking. Rather than thinking about learning coming in course-size units he writes, "a 20 or 40-hour course may be appropriate in an in-person learning environment, shorter courses are more appropriate online, as short as ten or fifteen minutes."

In the end, he acknowledges, "None of our metaphors, such as Legos or atoms, describe this version of modularity appropriately. I once used the metaphor of objects in an environment....the objects function autonomously, connected, interacting, but not joined." Here is acknowledges Wienberger's idea about "everything being miscellaneous." Although this is true, this does not mean that it is not useful to create particular types of miscellaneous units that can be assembled into largeer integrated structures.

This does not seem to help us move forward. I remain unconvinced that we have either the right metaphor or the right "unit" in which to construct learning. I remain convinced that the simplest learning unit is a "question and answer." This is the smallest learning transaction and could form the basis for constructing larger learning units.

Sharing Slides/Data One slide at a Time:

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice slide sharing set up in which other's can quickly download or build slideshows using their data. This Fast Facts structure is useful in thinking about how to distribute research information in a customizable fashion.

There are many cases of "slide sharing" sites, but the Kaiser set up allows a user to easily select specific slides and put together a unique slide show that serves the particular purpose of the user rather than conforming to the original presentation. This is a good example of the application of David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous ideas.

As we think about various ways of sharing educational materials in open source educational repositories, this seems like a powerful model.

Connexions-- An Open Educational Repository

There are many challenges in developing open educational repositories. I continue to follow the evolution of various repositories so here is an update on Connexions.

This repository has many of the same tools and structure that are available in other repositories. Teachers can search by subject, author, language, popularity and/or specific words. A short summary of the content in the teaching module provides you with the basic ideas. Obviously, these vary in quality, but this provides the teacher with a quick way to assess whether the topic is relevant to your search.

A key concept in Connexions is the idea of "collections" which they define as akin to a "course." This is an important idea because they are trying to help instructors to think about ways to group modules together in various configurations or "collections" to make a course. Since my interest is in "families" I searched for a collection that includes this term and found a literacy course that is fostering new approaches to teaching literacy that is based in the Trinidad and Tobago.

The collection consists of four brief web-based text summaries of information about language and reading development with a particular emphasis on Trinidad and Tobago. This material is much like what one would find in a typical online course. These materials can be downloaded and tagged and used in a variety of ways. Likewise, there are links to the author and the author's open course at the University of Trinidad and Tobago. Inside a course module there are also links to print materials, web materials and other resources. In some cases these are open access and in other cases a person would need access to a library or bookstore.

Another example is a collection is a set of modules on "communications skills.

In this case the author provides a very brief sentence about the content and each module is a link to a pdf document that resides on another webpage that appears to be the author's course. The material seems to be open access and conform to the agreement of the Connexions repository, but this is less helpful to mixing and matching materials across collections.

One of the major assertions of open education advocates, particularly those who recommend the development of repositories is the idea that students and instructors can assemble their own various collections and/or course materials without starting from scratch. The challenge that remains is that the formats for these contributions by instructors have little or no common structure so it is unlikely that a very coherent "collection" can be assembled.

I also remain skeptical about the size of the content. The creators of Connexions asserts that they are inviting teachers to create modules that are non-linear. They write:

"Most textbooks are a mass of information in linear format: one topic follows after another. However, our brains are not linear - we learn by making connections between new concepts and things we already know. Connexions mimics this by breaking down content into smaller chunks, called modules, that can be linked together and arranged in different ways. This lets students see the relationships both within and between topics and helps demonstrate that knowledge is naturally interconnected, not isolated into separate classes or books."

This is the right spirit, but I suspect that in order to create truly flexible teaching materials we are going to have to break down the units of instruction even smaller than modules-- something like concepts or "main ideas." Creating a common structure for this is even more problematic and creating the tools to assemble these "units" into larger educational materials is also a big challenge. But this still seems like the right direction. Although "learning objects" have been abandoned in many of our discussions, we still need to explore this idea.

See my earlier discussions of learning objects.

Does Discovery learning work?

At least one of the reasons I have been attracted to the use of online instruction is because of the possibility of creating more authentic learning environments. In general, I have had a bias towards creating problem-based, discovery, constructivtist approaches to instruction.

In the past few weeks I have been doing my homework which means that I have been reading the literature on instruction and I am increasingly skeptical of my simple ideas about instruction. Here are a few highlights from an article by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard E. Clark, titled, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential and Inquiry-Based Teaching (Educational Psychologist, 2006, 41(2), 75-86.

The main point of this article problem-based learning makes too many demands on novice learners' working memory. In short, beginning learners are trying to identify the basic facts and issues related to the problem while also trying to employ novel problem-solving strategies using that information. The authors write,

"cognitive load theory suggests taht the free exploration of a highly complex environment may generate a heavy working memory load that is detrimental to learnning" (p. 80).

They also cite the work of other researchers who note,

"when students who learn science in classrooms with pure-discovery methods and minimal feedback, ... often become lost and frustrated, and their confusion can lead to misconceptions.... Other researchers found that "because false starts are common in such learning situations, unguided discovery is often inefficient" (p. 79).

So why do many of us resonate to the contructivist theories of teaching and learning? These researchers also offer us insight here. Just as novice learners benefit from direct instruction, expert learners seem to benefit from the contructivist, inquiry-based approaches. In other words, the point is not that all constructivist teaching is wrong or ineffective, it is developing teaching strategies that over the course of a students' experience shifts from much guidance to less and less guidance.

A lesson from the BBC about elearning

In David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007) I have been struck by one particular example that I think we should heed as elearning educators. On page 112 he gives an example of the BBC's efforts to make their content available digitally. Weinberger writes,

" The BBC system standardizes over three hundred different attributes that may apply to recorded material, including subject, producers, language, length, type of media, even whether it has won any awards."

I am thinking that if radio and television requires 300 attributes to capture all the dimensions of this work, how many attributes do we need for learning materials. I am thinking that we have underestimated the extent of metadata that we need to add to text, images, etc. in order to make this material easily usable by other teachers. We have not understood the conceptual work that we need to do to make learning materials easily modular for use by others.

Weinberger also reports that Tom Coates and Matt Webb also have given much thought to how find programming, navigate it and use it. They ended up with a decision that the "the most useful object-- the one that accords best with how the audience thinks about programming-- was an episode, ..." Here is another lesson for elearning designers. Have we figured out the right "unit of teaching" or "unit of learning" for our audience? Is this different for teachers than students? It seems to me that rather than work on "microlearning" or "learning objects" we might be better off trying to figure out the "most useful object" for our audience.

On the Relationship between microcontent and learning objects

This chapter describes the relationship between microcontents and learning objects.

Definition of microcontent:

“A [very] small unit of digital information that is self-contained, individually referable/addressable, allowing use/re-use in different loosely structured macro-contexts and macro-containers” (p. 297).

“a microcontent piece with educational purpose plus metadata describing the piece itself and it educational usages may be considered as a regular learning object. However, the microcontent vision entrails those descriptions should come from subjective personal views of the world., e.g., those views offered by blog authors” (p. 296).

I am not sure about most of the middle of this article as it seems to focus on the engineering side of the problem of building repositories.

The concluding paragraph is telling about what remains to be done:

“ On the conceptual side, the main open problem is how to embed micro-pedagogies or micro-didatics into usable ontologies, so that software tools can be developed to aid humans in the setting of microlearning contexts—but for this, studies of learning theories must come before actual ontology engineering” (p. 302).

This captures one of the biggest problems in the use of terms like learning objects and microlearning—it is not at all clear how the “learning” part gets folded into the definitions. At present we do not have a metadata formulation that captures of the “learning” or “educational” dimensions of these data.

Source:

Sanchez-Alonso, S., Sicilia, M., Barriocanal, E., & Armas, T. (2006). In T. Hug, M. Lindner, P.A. Bruck (Eds.), Micromedia and e-Learning 2.0: Gaining the big picture (pp. 295- 303). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press.

Education Needs to Embrace Miscellany?

I am about half-way through David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007). In this book Weinberger suggests that order can emerge out of the miscellaneous disorder of the web.

In short, he suggests that when people are not restricted to the order of the physical realm or even the order of simple physical forms of metadata systems (e.g., the Dewey decimal system or the index in the back of a book), then people can create many new orders (he calls them "third orders") that reflect a particular individual.

These ideas have many implications. I have been thinking about the problems of learning objects and the sharing of teaching materials in general. Most of us expected that as teaching materials were converted from classroom lectures and textbooks to online modes, then there would be much more sharing and construction of courses from web-based teaching materials. Well, mostly this hasn't happened. There are probably lots of reasons, but I have begun to think that we have never gotten the model right for sharing teaching materials. If you look at most of the stuff that we share in repositories like Merlot, you find that we share whole courses, or lectures or web-based laboratory exercises. These are all nice, but they aren't easily adapted to another course or another teaching activity. In short, we don't have a third-order system for sharing teaching stuff. We haven't invented the Amazon or Wikipedia for teaching and learning. Maybe the model is out there, but it is not readily apparent.

Status of Learning Objects

On the one hand, writing about learning objects as the solution to better online education has been decreasing, but there is still some discussion of this idea. David Wiley wrote the following:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations [learning objects are dead] since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not.

Almost everyone cites his original definition of learning objects so it is interesting that he has come to this conclusion.

In another article, Michael Feldstein writes that there is no such thing as a learning object and goes on to say

I believe the term "learning object" has become harmful. It hides the same old, bad lecture model behind a sexy buzz phrase.

I think we may be giving up on the idea of learning objects too soon. I think Wiley is correct in saying that the current way of thinking about learning objects is dead or perhaps a deadend. I also think Feldstein is correct in saying that "learning objects" got a lot of buzz, but maybe there wasn't that much there.

Perhaps the most telling is that Wikipedia has a note in May 2007 on the "learning objects" page that says this article maybe confusing or unclear for some readers.

If even the Wikipedians can't figure out how to talk about "learning objects" we are really in trouble.

I think what has discouraged a lot of people is that efforts to develop learning objects and repositories has proven to be much more difficult than anyone imagined. Teaching and learning is complex and has many dimensions. We were naive to think that we could easily create online learning that would overcome all the complexity that exist.

However, I think we should still work on the ideas of sharing learning materials and the idea of reusing existiing materials. This time we need to do the hard work that it will take to make this happen.

Why hasn't educational technology made teaching more efficient?

The advent of the Internet was supposed to make the work of teaching and learning more efficient. If you read what many of us wrote over the past ten years you will find continuous reference to the idea that computers and the Internet would transform education into a much more efficient process. Few people who have built course websites and been involved with various course management systems (e.g., Web CT, Blackboard, etc.) would say that their work has gotten more efficient.

There have been important efforts to create teaching resource warehouses to store teaching materials-- the most extensive is Merlot which seeks to store a wide range of teaching materials.

Despite some significant strides in this area I think we are still only at the beginning and I think that we have several things wrong with our basic elearning educational model.

Here are my major criticisms of our efforts so far:

1. We haven't gotten the unit of production right. Yochai Benkler states, "The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module" (The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 4, 2006, p. 101). I would suggest that whole courses, whole lectures, etc. are too big to include very many participants. Also, materials of this magnitude serve as useful resources if you are teaching similar material, but they are rarely designed in such a way that another teacher can easily incorporate the material into their own teaching/course, etc. This lowers the actual usage of such materials.

2. We haven't opened the doors to full participation in our business of teaching and learning. Few teachers are prepared to let our students help write the curriculum and few of us are willing to invite people outside of education into the work of teaching and learning. Most of us are not willing to trust that anyone but other credentialed experts can contribute meaningfully to teaching and learning in our classrooms.

3. We haven't gotten the basic unit of learning right. We continue to try to teaching online in the same ways that we teach F2F or we try to adapt previous teaching tools to the web (for example, books). Mostly this stuff doesn't work very well. I would suggest that the basic unit of learning is questions and answers. The basic learning exchange is a student asking a question and a teaching giving an answer or a teacher asking a question or being given a problem and asking a student to solve it.

4. We haven't really created learning objects. There has been much talk about developing learning objects and repositories like Merlot make a point of suggesting that they are collecting learning objects, but they are really teaching objects. In other words, they are resources for teachers to use to help students learn, they are not resources that a student can engage with independently to learn something. Both types of materials are needed, but we need to call them by the right names and make this distinction.

5. We haven't really utilized computers, the Internet and web to create really interactive learning situations. There are some interesting new ideas about using games, virtual worlds and the like to create some interactive learning environments, but the level of technical expertise needed to develop these types of resources is very high. Rather than continue to develop another course management system we need an interactive platform to develop learning experiences that can be used by a wide range of educators.