Closing The Participation Gap in Online Learning

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Karsten D. WolfClosing the Participation Gap - User Generated Content in E-LearningUser Generated Content is an important aspect of Web 2.0's appeal to education, allowing learners to participate and fostering deeper elaboration. In an analysis of open participation projects such as Wikipedia, one can observe the long or thick tail effect, meaning that even low activity authors contribute a substantial part of such collaborative services. 1. Motivation for participation in open content projects (OCP)The main factors of motivation for participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects are summarized based on the empirical research in this field. This contribution discusses, what differences are to be considered in the study of Open Content Projects (OCP). A motivational model for OCP participation is presented based on self-determination theory (Deci/Ryan). Furthermore, important content factors are proposed and analysed, such as content size, audience size, difficulty level, and marketability. For the content factors examples are presented from different user generated content platforms such as Wikis, Blogs, social bookmarking services, and Friend-of-a-friend networks. An analysis of successful OCPs shows that there are different "hot spots" for open content, and that "Don't Repeat Yourself (and others)" as well as smaller content sizes are the strongest forces to increase open content creation. 2. Structure and learning effects of participationBased on the analysis of activity data of 3000 students in an user generated content learning platform at the virtual university of bavaria, the structure of and differences between user activities will be presented.The idea of „Learning by Teaching“ (Papert, Kafai, Harel) and „Writing pedagogy“ (Elbow, Bereiter) assumes, that people learn more by participating actively. In a detailed analysis of learners activities’ impact on learning a business education course it can be shown that users who create more content also learn more.3. How to "thicken" the tail of user participation?If we target user participation, how can we achieve equality? And should we try at all?Based on the same data, different didactical scenarios are compared with regard to the participation gap. The main results are, that groups with a higher level of peer interaction and a higher number of common tasks reduce the gap between the learners. Still, clear differences in the amount of participation between users remain visible.4. Discussion of obstacles and enablers of participation While providing strong arguments for user generated content in education and detailing ways how to close the participation gap with Web 2.0 techology, this presentation concludes with a discussion of technical barriers and the idea of personal learning environments to even further increase the participation of all learners in open education settings.

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cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Closing the Participation Gap - User Generated Content in E-Learning

Karsten D. WolfDidactical Design of Interactive Learning Environments

Online Educa 2007Berlin, 30.11.2007

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What is the participation gap?

attribution: wasta on flickr

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1,731,000 569,000

474,000 367,000

353,000 288,000

283,000 251,000

222,000 221,000

19.04.2007Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

native speakers of language Wikipedia article

Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe

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articles ratio

Suomi 109,454 48

German 569,000 176

native speakers of language Wikipedia article

Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

articles ratio

Suomi 109,454 48

German 569,000 176

native speakers of language Wikipedia article

Wikipediaarticle

1

Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

+17% +13%

+19% +17%

+18% +27%

+25% +15%

+27% +14%

ca. 6 months later (1.10.2007)

Suomi +22%

Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

statistics*

really old: October 2005 = 2 Internet years ≈ 14 years ago

50% of all edits done by 0.7% of users (615 people)

72% of text written by 1.8% of users (1,500 people)

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20% of people are doing 80% of the work

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I am doing all the work and everyone else is lazy!

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equal participation

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# of

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Wikipediholism#1 159,825#10 79,162#30 53,500#50 46,529#100 36,608#500 17,305#1,000 11,101#2,500 5,300

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

# of

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authors ranked by # of edits

Wikipediholism#1 159,825#10 79,162#30 53,500#50 46,529#100 36,608#500 17,305#1,000 11,101#2,500 5,300

10 edits a dayfor 3 years

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# of

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authors ranked by # of edits

as of February 2007

Long Tail of Authors

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Wikipedia: consuming vs. producing?

20k requests per second1,728,000,000 requests/day

200,000 edits a day8,640 requests/edit

(0.01%)

67,000 editors active in November 2006approximately <0.01% of user base editors

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

German youths

25% Creators

Datasource JIM 2007 Press release

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Why participate?

© Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Why engage for free in OSS?

• The economist‘s view: It‘s just signaling for self-promotion (Lerner & Tirole, 2002)

• Empirical studies contradict: it is intrinsic motivation!

• Hertel, Guido, Sven Nieder and Stefanie Herrmann (2003)

• Lakhani, Karim R. and Robert G. Wolf (2003)

© Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Understanding Open Content Authors Motivation

• Altruism – for the love of other people

• Reputation – showing off one‘s own capability = self-promotion

• Interest, Fun and Flow – doing it for the Joy of it

• Learning – learning by authoring public entities

• Collaboration – tackling something not feasible for oneself

• Job – getting a paycheck

• Saving – no need to buy textbooks and giving back some time

• Political Statement – e.g. anti capitalist point of view, anti copyrights pov…

• Assignment – getting a grade and a diploma

• Convenience – it is easier to find notes in public repositories than on my HD

© Karsten D. Wolf 2007

What kind of content makes good candidate for OCP?

• both basic and advanced level of content, doesn‘t matter

• both Super Special Interest and Mass Audience

• Opportunity costs of making it open is low for most scientific SSI and school market

• Reputation gain is great for Mass Audience

© Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Content size, team size & collaboration

• Smaller snippets are easier

• Wikipedia = collective

• Blogs = individual

• The bigger, the more authors = more difficult (e.g. WikiBooks)

• Solution: snippets!

• Problem: Thousands of snippets do not make great textbooks

© Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Commented Collections

• DRY = Don‘t Repeat Yourself

• DRY(AO) = Don‘t Repeat Yourself and Others!

• Good bye Open Content Books

• Hello Commented Collections of Open Snippets

• Makes sense from the Personal Learning Environment viewpoint, too!

Why participation in education?

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

buildpublicentities

Seymour PapertFather of Logo

Constructionist

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culture of participation

recreation to become a form of re-creation (remix, tinkering, sharing) based on productive inquiry situated in communities of co-creation

learning about ➙ learning to behttp://mitworld.mit.edu/video/419/

John Seely BrownXerox Parc

Cognitive Apprenticeship

http://www.everlearn.info

Structure and effects of participation?

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Research project settings

• Learning environment EverLearn (http://www.everlearn.info)

• about 4000 active users (= having completed a course)

• logs from fall 2004 to summer 2007

• about 1,85 million logged actions of users

• non-reactive observational data (level 5, Fritsche & Linneweber 2006):the users are not aware of the observation and they don‘t know, that their data is used for research

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Consumptive usage

• read pages

• navigate the course

• download files

• …

cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Productive usage

• Edit pages

• Upload files

• Discuss

• Chat

• …

Usage by time: consumption vs. production

Usage by time: consumption vs. production

Usage by time: consumption vs. production

Correlation between production and problem solving

Chat Messages

Discussion entries

Created content in

words

Problemsolving Score

.03(.425)

.28*(.048)

.43**(.005)

n=36 (Wolf/Prasser 2006)

Gender: productive vs. consumptive usage

Cons. Prod. Total P/T

M 677,2 106,7 783,9 13,6%

F 924,2 130,6 1054,9 12,4%

n = 1688

Wikipedialinear

MeanMedian

exponential

50% edit morethan median!

0.001% edit morethan median!

Wikipedialinear

MeanMedian

exponential

50% edit morethan median!

0.001% edit morethan median!

production is harder than

consumption

participation isless equal distributed

How to close the gap?

technical: make it easy

social: make it a smallaccountable community

motivational: build up interest and develop meaningful taks