Blended PBL Support

Interaction is seen as crucial for problem based learning. In this section we describe e-learning tools which can facilitate interaction during educational activities, like lectures and tutorial group meetings. But you can also offer (or make use of) tools to facilitate interaction e.g. in the context of collaborative learning, for example co-writing.

FeedbackFruits

Maastricht University (UM) has joined a four-year consortium license with FeedbackFruits so you can make use of a set of tools aimed at increasing student engagement, both during PBL sessions as well as outside the classroom.

Start using FeedbackFruits
All FeedbackFruits tools are integrated in EleUM, and can be chosen from the Tools menu in every course and organisation.

• Log in on EleUM
• Open a course you have instructor access to
• Go to Assignments / create an assignment
• Click on Tools (expand tools menu)
• Choose one of the FeedbackFruits tools
• Follow the steps

Peer review
With the peer review option students can review their peers’ work, by coupling one or several students. The instructor may structure feedback with criteria and constraints.

• Help setting up Peer review
• See the tool in action

Group Member Evaluation
The group member evaluation tool offers the possibility to students to evaluate group member contribution to collaborative group work.

• Help setting up Group member evaluation
• See the tool in action

Interactive document and video
The basic of these modules is offering a (key) document or video using the Interactive Modules. Three scenarios have proven to be successful.

• Help setting up Interactive document or Interactive video .

More info:
If you consider introducing peer feedback in your course and want to get inspired by UM practices or need some guidance in making choices concerning group work, group assessment or peer feedback scenarios, you can make use of some background information:

• Fact sheet peer feedback tools
• Guidelines on assessing group work

Audience response tools

An Audience Response Tool (ART) offers teachers and students the opportunity to communicate via polls, test questions, Word Clouds, gamification, etc. The questions are displayed on mobile devices and the answers are shown on a central screen. Using an ART, the presenter engages the audience in an interactive way with the learning activities. Increasing interaction between teachers and students can improve long-term retention of learning materials, enhance student attention and involvement, identify gaps in knowledge, and provide immediate feedback to your lecture or students present. In addition to hand raising or using microphones, audience response tools provide a way to increase interaction during lectures. They can be used as:

• quick formative assessments; to check whether students have understood information and concepts covered
• contingent teaching; based on responses of the audience switch the focus of the lecture (because they favour this or seem to know less about a certain topic)
• discussion and debate starters by posing propositions or asking no-correct-answer questions
• student engagement; creating a safe and attractive environment for interaction in which everyone can participate.

 

Wooclap for live voting

To support teachers and students with the use of an audience response tool to facilitate live voting during classroom sessions, the Library offers a campus-license for Wooclap.

Wooclap is an Audience Response Tool (ART) that offers teachers and students the opportunity to communicate via polls, test questions, wordclouds, gamification, etc. The questions are displayed on mobile devices and the answers are shown on a central screen. Using an ART, the presenter engages the audience in an interactive way with the learning activities. Wooclap offers a lot of different question types and is very easy to use. It’s an interactive solution that makes learning awesome and effective.

Start using Wooclap

• Get a Wooclap account by login in with your University Credentials (Single-Sign-On) and start setting up events;
• Watch our video and start-up manual and create your first questions;
• Contact the Blended PBL Support team if you need support or have any questions.

Concept mapping tools

Concept-mapping and mind-mapping software are used to create diagrams or relationships between concepts, ideas or other pieces of information. At several faculties, concept and mind mapping tools are being used by students and teachers. For example to support:

• note taking (often claimed that the mind mapping technique can improve learning efficiency up to 15% over conventional note taking)
• the brainstorm in the tutorial group meeting
• or structuring the study or writing process of the individual student.

Practice: Zooming in on concept mapping tools (FHML, tool available) Together with the faculty of Health, Medicine and Life sciences we experimented with several tools in order to describe them and their fit into education. As may be expected from mind mapping software, all include the same basic functionality of creating and naming relationships between elements of a certain theorem. We decided to describe four more in-depth.

• SmartIdeas (available via the Student desktop and -on request- for teaching staff)
• CmapTools (freely available on the internet, but also installed on the Student desktop)
• Coggle (free version available, for more functions you can buy a personal license)
• MindMeister (a tool available for buying).

For information on making use of one of these, please consult the Blended PBL Support team.

Wikis, blogs & trends

Teaming and cooperation will often be stressed and chosen as the format to have students gather and use their knowledge. EleUM offers several options to facilitate co-creation and collaborative knowledge building. The EleUM support team is constantly focusing on the functionalities EleUM offers to facilitate teaching and learning. Amongst these are wikis (ideal for collaborative writing and peer review) and blogs (e.g. suitable as a reflection tool).

Practice: Wikipedia in UM education (FPN)

What are the benefits to your students? Writing or updating a Wikipedia page can help students to engage in the knowledge community. They practice encyclopedic writing, which resembles academic writing to some extent. For example, they have to write in a neutral point of view, use references, and follow a certain structure. Take advantage of our experience UM Library staff already has quite some experience with Wikipedia projects in Maastricht University (UM) education. For example at the Faculty of Psychology & Neurosciences (FPN):

• in the course writing a historical book review, FPN Honours students followed five sessions in order to write a review about an interesting, important and/or divergent psychology book from Maastricht University’s Special Collections. Wikimedia took care of the introduction and practical sessions, which could be provided in either Dutch or English. The UM Library provided guided tours and digitised images, which were made available by Wikimedia.
• in the first year curriculum of FPN as part of the Skills course, students performed the assignment writing a Wikipedia page. Students wrote – together with their peers of the mentor group – a Wikipedia page about a psychological topic. Wikimedia provided the introduction, while Wikimedia and a library information specialist collaboratively guided the practical session.

Interested? On Wikipedia: Benelux Education Program/Maastricht University you can find a full list of assignments at the UM. In case you are interested in integrating a Wikipedia assignment and/or workshop into your curriculum, you can check the Wikimedia page: Education Program. If you want to know more about how the UM Library can support you in how to implement Wikipedia in your course, feel free to contact Henrieëtta Hazen via Ask your librarian. Virtual classroom PBL in Maastricht is organised around small scale group sessions or tutorial groups (consisting of 12-18 students). Once or twice a week students meet in a tutorial group meeting under the guidance of a tutor. They then discuss problem tasks and define what they need to study of perform to master the theory and make transfer happen. Sometimes physically meeting on campus is not feasible. If you do want to interact even on a distance, you can consider making use of a virtual classroom (part of EleUM).

With the advent of emergent technologies, simulations and gaming can mimic reality and provide opportunities to deliver learning experiences in a realistic setting. Simulations are used in learning environments and offer a time-efficient way to reach the desired level of performance, while simultaneously increasing the performance level reached. Practice: serious gaming as a learning tool (FHML) Implementing games is done based on the assertion that thinking and learning skills can be developed by playing some adventure or role-playing games. Also at UM, the possibilities of gaming are being explored. Andreas Herrler (FHML) invested in creating a serious game to help his students actively engage with the subject. It is actually a self-assessment tool meant to improve student performance within the context of anatomy. According to Herrler, serious games “have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement. This does not mean that serious games are not, or should not be, entertaining.”

 

Video for your course

One image can be stronger than a thousand words! And videos can be a welcome addition to text books as well. The University Library offers a collection of videos and other AV resources, but the internet is also becoming a prominent supplier for higher education. Check for instance websites like http://www.youtube.com/education or http://podacademy.org/ . A specific category refers to web lectures. Higher education institutions recording (part of) their lectures are no longer an exception. To re-attend lectures on difficult topics or to be present at a distance when travelling is no option. Sometimes registrations are used for creating short clips on specific topics, to be used in other educational contexts or for other audiences.

VideUM as the result of the project Video Services (finished) With the rise of new opportunities in the field of recording devices more questions arise like (what tool fits best, what does offering a video mean for my role as a teacher, which copyright issues should I take care of, etcetera. Members of Maastricht University teaching staff, who would like to use video in their education, now have a one stop portal for video recording, uploading and sharing: VideUM. VideUM offers information on video production, didactics, and copyright. Here you can upload a video, find out how to register your lecture or get inspired by good practices within the UM and beyond. VideUM also serves as the gateway to UM video platform Mediasite. On this platform lecture recordings, as well as short educational videos, can be stored and shared with students.

Creating and sharing Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) or open learning materials are learning materials that are accessible to everyone under an open license. Flexible and personal education comes closer when students and teachers have access to a large and diverse collection of learning materials. The University Library follows the developments in several initiatives on making use of these OER: support teachers to use the proper (creative commons) licenses, store the materials, and help students to find and select OER. Find out more about this topic on the Open Education Website, where we offer examples of repositories with open educational resources, but also information on copyright issues and a tutorial to help students and teachers to find and evaluate information, accompanied with some general search tips and tricks.

Check your digital footprint In addition to instruction videos the library offers tutorials on several topics, ranging from academic information skills to support for researchers. In Personal Branding Online you will learn how to build and maintain a professional online image. It contains chapters on topics such as self-branding, social networking sites and online identity management, including legal issues. Today your image is mostly defined by what people will find about you on the internet. This image, based on online data like photos, videos, likes etc., is your digital identity or footprint. In higher education, it is important to build and manage a positive professional online image. This tutorial will help you improve your online image so your name will turn up positive and professional within the academic community. Go to Personal Branding Online

As the amount of e-content grows and teachers and students get used to interact and build knowledge (also) online, you might wonder what developments are at hand for e-testing and e-coaching. Some universities invest in large test-halls, others collaborate in developing large item-banks.

Tools for e-assessment available for you:

Canvas  offers several tools for monitoring students progress or offer (formative) assessment. Also tools for plagiarism detection or peer assessment are embedded. Find out more about these tools on the Canvas Support Portal.

Project: tools for (peer) feedback (finished) In the context of group work, teaching staff showed great interest for feedback tools enabling them to organise and proces (peer-) feedback. That’s why we started a project, in which we:

1. explore alternatives for organising peer feedback;
2. consulted UM program directors to make an inventory of the online tooling needed and the desired UL support for their educational scenarios;
3. which will be continued by informing UM teaching staff about those available online tools (and supporting them when implementing) that have been indicated as valuable for education by program directors.

After piloting FeedbackFruits as a tool for organising feedback on students (by teachers and peers, both document and non-document related) and has decided to join the national consortium with FeedbackFruits. This means that we continue to offer tools for providing teacher feedback (e.g. on written documents) and for peer review and group member evaluation after summer, but also for other didactic scenarios like student interaction around documents, videos or presentations.

In Canvas you can make use of two tools to either have students review their peers’ work or evaluate the group member contribution to collaborative group work.

• Help setting up Peer review
• Help setting up Group member evaluation
• EleUM Support page
• Fact sheet peer feedback tools (UM)
• Overview of products (in Dutch)
• Thematic booklet on peer feedback and peer assessment (in Dutch)

At the same time EDLAB executed a project which resulted in guidelines on organizing and assessing group work.

Digital assessment

In line with several other Dutch universities Maastricht University (UM) explored what it takes to organise digital assessment. We focused on several aspects: devices, location, software, organisational issues and last but not least didactics.

For more information on this topic, please visit the dedicated page on digital assessment.

Interested to learn more about digital assessment? SURF created a (Dutch) thematic page on topics related to digital assessment.

Trends in educational technology In close consultation with the faculties, the University Library is responsible for the Digital Learning Environment: the UM gateway to education. We offer tools and support connected to educational activities mostly used at Maastricht University, as well as digital learning material. To share experiences with colleagues (and thus incorporate the latest findings when supporting you) we keep up with trends and innovations at other institutes. We share our impressions and lessons learned in specific blogposts or websites as you might have read before*. Interested to follow these as well? Find here our selection:

Open Education	OE Global – Conference on how open education helps us achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education
Technology and Education	EDUCAUSE
	ELI-annual meeting
	SURF, the collaborative organisation for ICT in Dutch education and research. Subscribe for the SURF news letter.
Digital Learning Materials	One of the programmes within the Dutch Acceleration Plan

* If you want to receive regular updates of the Library and Education blog posts, you can join our mailing list.

The Blended PBL support team consists of 4 enthusiastic members:

Gaby Lutgens	Expert in open educational resources (OER) and digital accessibility	85363
Barend Last	Blended learning & information specialist	81803
Ilse Sistermans	Expert in Online Learning and Media & Education	85013

We work closely with the Canvas support team and align our activities with the EDLAB, the UM institute focusing on educational innovation.