Erik Yu

Review of Group 11’s Interactive Learning Resources

Group 11’s interactive learning resource utilizes various technologies such as video, text, and interactive quizzes in a decent online learning management platform called talentLMS. The overall design of the course is very concise and to the point, which I think could be a great demonstration of an interactive learning course. There are only three things I find that could be improved in terms of the design and structure. They are improving the rationale to be more specific, giving answer feedback for the quizzes, and if possible making the course remember students’ learning progress.

Fig. 1. A screenshot for Group 12’s rationale in Introduction Section

My first suggestion is that your rationale can be more specific in terms of telling how your course can benefit students. This can make learners interested in taking your course. Rationale means a set of reasons explaining why the topic is worthy of chosen and how it can benefit students, making them interested and feeling the need to take your course. Your rationale (Fig. 1.) does mention that it is critical to understand how HITs impact the delivery of patient care. But it seems to me that more explanation is required to convince me the importance of knowing how HITs can impact the delivery of patient care. Explaining that can motivate me to learn your course. Also, in the last sentence of your Introduction section, perhaps you need more explanation of the reason why you want to “further educate others on the importance of understanding the relationship between emerging information technology solutions and health care”. I think decently clarifying how the further education of HITs can benefit students will make students feel the need to take your course. Therefore, I think giving more specific explanations on the merits the course can bring to students will better your rationale.

I think the quizzes system you built is great. In order to make that perfect, adding answer feedback can be a great choice. Thus, my second suggestion is that you can provide answer feedback for each question in quizzes, which makes your course more interactive and educative. Specifically, in terms of Fig.3. below, perhaps you can give sentence explanation of why B and C are correct in multiple choice questions (question 1 & 2), and providing the answer you think is correct for the questions which ask for students’ short answers (in Fig.3 that is question 3). This is because author’s feedback is important to learners’ growth. It helps learners quickly understand what the thinking process is for choosing that answer, making your learning activity more educative. It also makes your learning resources more interactive. According to what we learned in week 2, Anderson’s model (Fig.2) suggests interactions between student and teacher, student and content, as well as content and teacher. If you are providing feedback for students, it connects an interaction link between student and teacher, which makes your learning material more interactive.

Fig.2. Anderson’s highlight three primary modes in learning environments

Fig.3. A screenshot after submit the quiz 1

In addition, when I passed the quiz, I could only click “Passed, Let’s continue” (Fig.3.). There seems no other buttons of options for me to retry the question I did wrong. I suggest to add one more button that has the functionality in retrying the question I did wrong.

My last suggestion is making your online tutorial remember students’ learning progress if possible. Sometimes due to the bad internet connection and accidentally closing the web page, I had to go to re-click the link you shared in the Group Signup Forum. But when I clicked the link again, my previous learning progress was lost. I had to press lots of “complete and continue” buttons and did the quizzes I had done before in order to get to the part I was studying. I am not sure if it is possible to make your learning resources remember my learning progress every time. In this way, if I accidentally close the tutorial window, when I get back, I don’t have to spend a long time clicking and filling out the quizzes in order to get where I have lost.

I pretty enjoy studying your learning resources. I think your design and structure of Introduction to EHRs are succinct and to the point. Therefore, there are only three things I feel that you can improve. They are making your rationale more specific, providing answer feedback for the quizzes, and if possible making the course remember students’ learning progress.

References:

https://aabuleal.talentlms.com/unit/view/id:2095

Anderson, T. (2003). Getting the mix right again: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 4(2), 1–14.

Basketball Challenge for Week 4

By persisting on practicing shooting and layups, my shooting percentage stays constant above 50%, and my layup rates are also staying high, which is considered good for a non-professional basketball player. Here is my statistics for last week:

	3-pointers	jump shots	layups
Day 1	44/80	50/80	66/80
Day 2	50/80	51/80	61/80
Day 3	55/80	56/80	70/80

For next week, I’ll make my plan more challenging than this week. I will make myself shoot a hundred balls and performing a hundred layups for each practicing drills. This is slightly more intensive practicing which can help me improve towards the next level. Hopefully, I can gain a lot of useful experience while training myself with more intensive planning.

From this weekly learning in EDCI335, I learned that educational technology may not necessary be a good thing by learning an example of a “mind-reading robot tutor” named Knewton. However, I think this kind of learning and tutoring technology is not useless. The failure of Knewton doesn’t mean that kind of technology doesn’t work, it just could mean algorithms were not created decently and the computation ability were not fully activated. According to the Moore’s law, technology is growing exponentially fast. I believe in the future, mind-reading robot tutor can be popular, and can take over some kinds teaching jobs. In the article, the author also says that “this is not good because learning is more complicated than mere attention”. This is correct in the aspect that learning is not only about attention, it is a more complicated things that can also be related to IQ, social aspects, interactions, mood, etc. However, the software currently can only built to track students’ attention, which doesn’t mean it can’t do all the other things in the future. Computers would be much more powerful in the future which I believe can achieve the ability equivalent to thousands of Knewton adding together.

What week #4 readings also reminds me of learning basketball is the basketball shooting machine shown by figure 1.

Figure 1: Korney Boards Aides 6000 Gun Standard Shoot-A-Way (Basketball Shooting Machine)

This machine is used for training basketball players’s shooting ability. Simply speaking, when you shoot a ball, the machine will collect the ball you shoot, and then pass the ball back to you. If you want more information about the specific description on how this machine works, you can click this. This machine is also an example of educational technology. It has a timing device and works as an automatic rebounder. It creates the situation where players can develop their shooting skills off the move and with game like intensity. This is a good example of educational technology as you can practice shooting by yourself, which help players get up more shots in less time. If I can use this in my practice, My shooting skill would be enhanced a lot of time faster.

A video example of using the machine to practice shooting

How Internet Affect my Learning in Basketball

Internet plays a crucially important role in my learning of basketball. This is because the teaching content is increasingly open and available freely on the Internet. I can search the basketball skills to design a course for myself based on my personal interests, creating my own online personal learning environments. Bates introduced 6 key building blocks for media. Those are face-to-face teaching, text, graphics, audio, video, and computing. When I was learning basketball skills, the main types of media I used were text, graphics, and video. I read text of description for a certain basketball skill and others’ comment about that skill. I saw graphics in terms of diagrams and photos. Basketball coaches like to attach those graphics in their tutorial blogs in order to better explain different skills. Also, I train myself according to my research on those skills by watching several Youtube videos. All my self-learning in basketball are happened on the Internet. Therefore, it is so true that the Internet is an extremely powerful medium as there are tons of information on the internet transferred by a combination of tools and different types of media.

References:

Basketball Challenge for Week 3

I finished my week 3 basketball challenge. I feel that all of my three skills were improved. I started enjoying challenging myself by increasing the releasing speed when shooting. Here is the data of the result of each of my drills.

	3-pointers	Jump shots	Layups
DAY 1	51/80	53/80	70/80
DAY 2	49/80	50/80	69/80
DAY 3	55/80	31/80	56/80

My results were decent in the first day. I got expected well-performance on 3-pointers (63% is a pretty decent rate in terms of non-professional basketball players ), jump shots, and especially layups. The second day had almost the same result as the first day. However, during a pick-up game in the second day, my right foot got a little sprain, causing the lower successful rate for the last day. The best time for me to practice is still 10:00 to 12:00. But according to the CARSA schedule, the courts are booked for several days in next week. So I should probably reschedule the practicing time for next week. The most difficult part of this training was being able to continue on my plan after my right foot injured. Even though the sprain didn’t affect a lot, I still made myself slow down when doing the drills. Persistence is also one of the keys to success.

In designing learning section, I found that sometimes learners will face problems with learning environment. Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher had a dull and dry way of delivering lectures, showing a issue of learning environment. The way the teacher had taught reminded me of some Youtube basketball teachers who only talk without showing actual skills. The basketball coach only describes the theoretical way to shoot jump shots, without actually showing how to execute a jump shot by performing one, which is not conductive to learning.

Simply watching YouTube basketball tutorials is not enough for improvement. In order to enhance my basketball skills, I need to actively execute my plan and push myself out of comfort zone every time when I am practicing. This is because learning is about what students do, not what teachers do. According to the part 1 video, the teachers concern what students do are categorized as level three teachers. The reason why they are categorized as the top teachers is because they are caring about the products and learning outcomes, which is the best way to measure students’ abilities. Applying this idea to my training, I should actively care about what I can improve. I should keep working hard, trying to shoot in the form of what coaches taught me to do. Practicing shooting in my brain with my imagination would not work in enhancement. I have to actually execute my planning and do the drills, which can make me improve.

I need to use high level cognitive skills to learn shooting and layups. I cannot simply just memorize what Youtube videos told me to do. I ought to think if the way that coaches taught actually suitable for my situation, which is the process of evaluating and critiquing. For example, a Youtuber coach says in order to make stable shots, everyone needs to use their wrist strength to shoot. However, when I am practicing shooting, I feel that simply using writs strength is not enough for shooting 3-pointers. I also need to utilize more arm and legs strength to make the ball goes further. Since I am not a professional basketball player, I need to put strength from other parts of body to shoot, not merely writs strength. The Youtube coach was asking audience to use full wrist strength is probably because he assumed that we all have enough wrist strength. In this way, I use high level cognitive skills of critiquing and assessing the coach’s teaching, in order to find a most suitable approach for me to improve.

Constructive alignment needs to exist every time when learning occurs. The outcomes of a learning experience ought to be aligned with the learning methodologies. Since the goal for me to learn playing basketball is to make all my shooting rates over 80%, if the assessment of my learning is through writing exams, testing my theoretical knowledge of shooting balls. Then, it shows the lack of constructive alignment. I could just memorize the knowledge, gaining 100% in the knowledge test without even touching the ball.

Blended learning experience in a way that creates purposeful communities of inquiry should follow the seven principles. Three presences of COI are cognitive, social, and teaching. The first designed principle focuses on social presence. Social presence should be cooperated with cognitive presence, and it is also the crucial step before building cognitive presence. Students with the purpose of being socially present, they have to have the chances to interact with each other. Facilitating the social interaction, and promoting active discourse collaboratively, can build familiarity, safety, and reliability among learners. This cognitive presence can make them getting deep into learning. Also, teaching presence is the central element in COI. It contains three elements which are “design and organization, facilitation, and direct instruction”. These three elements are affecting each other, which are not mutually exclusive.

I feel that in order to apply blended learning of COI and its three presences to my learning in basketball. I should firstly find a group of people who are also willing to learn playing basketball. I should keep interacting with those players, talking about the basketball skills and trying to solve their problems according to my own experience. Teaching others and asking questions in this basketball community can be two best approaches for me to better myself and get deep into learning playing basketball, which can generally build a simple form of COI. Everyone in the community is responsible for designing, organizing, facilitating, and directing teaching process. In this way, everyone in the basketball community are able to improve skills together.

References:

Basketball Challenge for Week 2

I successfully completed my week 2 basketball challenge. I practiced three days for 3 drills. After accomplished my tasks, I had a great feeling of sense of achievement. Here is the data about the results of my each drill.

	3-pointers	Jump Shots	Layups
Day 1	31/80	36/80	68/80
Day 2	50/80	52/80	70/80
Day 3	48/80	41/80	71/80

I had the lowest performance in the first day. It is understandable since I haven’t touch basketball for quite a long time. But the second day, my score for each of the drills were improved significantly. However, for the third day, the number of shots made went down slightly. After a week, I found that the best time for me to practice in a day is starting at 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. This is because having lunch right after 2 hours of training can make me feel good. Also, during that period in the summer, there are few people in CARSA basketball court. So I can execute my training plan mostly without other players’ interference. The most difficult part of my training is shooting both Jump shots and 3-pointers. Performing layups is relatively easy as the success rate is obviously higher than other two. I am considering if I need to increase the difficulty level of layups in my training.

Here is one of the videos I watched that teaches shooting 3-pointers.

Kevin Love teaches us how to shoot consistent 3-pointers

Changing habit is hard

“Learning is changing your mind about something”. When I was practicing shooting jump shots, I found that my hands’ gesture were wrong comparing to what the coach taught in the video. But I already had a habit to shoot in the wrong way. This reminds me of the riding-a-backward-bike example. The guy tried to learn how to ride a backward bike for approximately 8 months. After he mastered riding a backward bike, he surprisingly failed to ride a normal bike. The guy in the video says that ‘truth is truth, no matter what [people] think about it’. He wants us to learn that we should be careful about how we interpret things, as we are looking at the world with bias. It also shows that the way of integrating new knowledge to old knowledge is a very difficult process. Changing my style of shooting is much more difficult than learning a new shooting skill. This is the reason why learning is difficult as I have to change my previous shooting form to a better one in order to increase my rate. Moreover, this requires lots of self-awareness as I was practicing basketball alone. No one can point out the mistakes I made.

Misconception

Before the guy started learning the backward bike, he had felt riding that bike should had been easy. He had felt that just thinking in the opposite way theoretically would make him able to ride that bike. However, it actually took him 8 months to learn how to ride that backward bike. He made an misconception between what he thought and what actually was. I also had misconceptions about basketball shooting. One of the misconceptions I made in shooting basketball is that if players jump off hard, they can shoot well. This is because when I watch NBA players shoot, Almost all the good shooters jump very high. However, when I was actually shooting, I found that jumping off hard doesn’t really matter. The most important thing for shooting well is balance.

Combination of teachings methods is useful

After reading Bate’s chapter 3, I think that I need to combine a variety of teaching methods to apply to my basketball learning. it is necessary to provide “a rich enough learning environment for a full range of skills to be developed within the subject area” (Bates, 3). However, being a basketball learner, I basically self-teach all the skills. So providing myself with a rich enough learning environment can help me improve much faster. I will not merely watch YouTube video to learn basketball. I am planning to read basketball skill online articles, watch YouTube videos, and ask some better players how to play better. I will try to talk to people on the basketball court to ask them for advice. In this way, I will practice, watch videos, read articles, discuss with other players, and constantly give my self feedback, by using media, social, and conceptual knowledge. I think this can be a decent learning style in current digital age.

Apply agile to learning

One of the ideas mentioned in Chapter 4 about agile design also inspired me for planning my basketball challenge. The main point of being agile is being able to handle changes in this “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world” (Bates, 4). In order to apply the idea of agile to my basketball learning, I need to respond rapidly to the environmental changes. For examples, if my legs get injured one day, I am not able to attend normal training. Instead, I can do some other workout to train my arm muscle and wrist muscle, which enhances my shooting strength. Also, since my normal training location is on the second floor in CARSA building, if the basketball court is used for other activities that are conflicted with my training time, my schedule was forced to change. To cope with this situation, I can go to other basketball courts to train myself. Lastly, if I find the current 80-shots schedule is too easy for me at some time in the future, I can increase the difficulty of my drills by turning them to 120-shots drills. Therefore, I will be constantly changing the content of my drill if environment force me to do, but the core skill should remain constant, which is improving both my shooting and layup skills.

An interaction way of learning basketball

The definition of interaction that Ellen Wagner proposed inspired me a lot. I come up with an idea to create interaction learning between me and YouTubers in playing basketball. There are lots of basketball coaches using YouTube to promote their teaching through videos. When I watch a shooting tutorial on YouTube, if I have any questions about the topic, I can leave a comment beneath that video asking the coach some questions. If the coach found my question is worth thinking about and he replies me with his answer (hopefully). The interactions of learning formed between me and the coaches. Also, if other people watch the same video, seeing my comments, they can give feedback to my comments by replying me. In this way, the interactions between the coach, other people, and me are formed. It is certainly reciprocal and having more than two objects and more than two actions. We are also mutually influencing others in this way.

References:

Erik Yu Self Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Erik Yu, and I am a third-year computer science student at University of Victoria. I am an international student from China and came to Canada on 2016. Since I went to international high school in China where all teachers are English-speakers, I didn’t find it very difficult to get used to living in Victoria in the first year I came here. I like acting. I attended lots of musical shows in different theaters in Victoria. I performed in Death Note Musical at Mcphearson Playhouse a year ago. The character I performed is called Ryuk, which is the most successful character the I have acted.

I also like playing badminton. However, due to a bad injury of my left leg happened several years ago, I did not play badminton as frequently as before. I like singing. I also like to perform singing on stages. Recently I sang an classic Chinese song called Hand in Hand on the stage of Element Casino Theater for elders from Victoria Chinatown Care Center.

My Favorite Learning Experience

I would like to share my own learning experience about when I was doing a group project in CSC350. The course is talking about computer architecture. The goal for the final project of my group was to build an emulator for Intel 4004 CPU. My task was creating three interesting demo programs for testing if Intel 4004 emulator worked. Since the language used for Intel 4004 is an unique assembly language which I have never seen before. It became a huge obstacle for me to write codes for the demo programs.

Fortunately, I found a youtuber talking about the codings for Intel 4004 in three of his videos. I spent 2 hours watching all three videos. Then, I tried my best to memorize all the syntax and the functions of different instructions. After that, I started coding my first demo program dealing with chip’s memory, which was successfuly done because of my hard working.

However, after the first demo program was done, I felt that I have no clue on how to write my next two demo programs. This was because I thought I almost put all my creativity to my first demo program. Then, I started browsing lots of websites for codings in order to come up with an idea. After a long time, I felt creating two demo program dealing with arithmetic operations would also be a decent way to show how powerful the Intel 4004 is. Finally, I successfully finished my all three demo programs. My groupmates thought my work was well done, and we got an A for the project.

My Basketball Challenge Plan

In the next few weeks when studying this course, my challenge would be improving my basketball skills according to what I learned from EDCI335 this week. The readings I did this week told me that in order to master a skill, I have to build synapses in the brain to interconnect useful information or data. Doing consolidation and retrieval would be the top actions I should take when practicing basketball skills, building both muscle and brain memory. My goal is to improve my overall shooting abilities and three-step layup abilities when playing basketball.

My plan would be practicing basketball for three times a week, containing three parts for each time. With the purpose of improving shooting skills, I need to both practice 3-point shootings and mid-range jump shots. The first part is practicing 3-pointers. I will practice 80 3-point shots in a single drill. The second part is practicing mid-range jump shots. I will also do 80 jump shots for each practicing time. The last but not the least, layup is also a very useful skill in basketball games. I will practice 80 lay-ups in each drill.

I am planning to do three drills for a time, which are 80 3-pointers, 80 mid-range jump shots, as well as 80 three-steps layups. The reason why I am going to do 80 repetitions of actions is because it is doing the job called retrieval. In terms of shooting 3-pointers, I’ll try to score and try to make my muscle memorize the feeling when improving my 3-point skills. In this way, doing 3-pointers for 80 times strengthens the connections between axons through repetitions, which makes improvement in shooting. Practicing layups skill for that number of times also work as an example of retrieval.

The idea of behaviorism described in Bate’s book also influenced me when planning my challenge. He talks about that behaviorist did a demonstration in the lab, showing that “it is possible to reinforce through reward or punishment the association between any particular stimulus or event and a particular behavioral response”. This inspires me that I am capable of being trained to be a great basketball player by rewarding myself when I achieve a certain number of shots out of 80 shots. In this way, I am planning to divide my one 80 shots drill to four 20 shots sub-drills. I will keep shooting 20 shots and count how many shots I make and how many shots I miss. If I make 10/20, I can have a rest and drink some energy drinks or water. If I make 15/20, after the drill, I can feed myself a small piece of chocolate. However, behaviorism also suggested that punishment plays an important part in learning. Therefore, If I make lower than 5/20 shots in a sub-drill, I will punish myself by doing 25 push-ups.

During the time of practicing basketball skills, I’ll be constantly watching Basketball tutorials on Youtube. This is also a demonstration of learning skills by using educational technologies. Since there are tons of useful Youtube videos teaching normal people how to play basketball, I should utilize them to better myself. I will watch basketball coaches teaching their players about how to shoot 3-pointers, make jump shots, and do three-steps layups, in order to improve my own skills in an accelerated speed. I wish my strategy can achieve a huge improvement on my basketball skills after two months!

References:

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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