COLRN VLAB DNLE final project

7/30/2019 COLRN VLAB DNLE final project

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COLRN: A Collaborative New Learning Environment

COLRN is a collaborative learning environment for participants in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

These courses are growing very fast in number and quality. Already, millions of people have signed up

to participate in mainstream MOOCs provided by Coursera, Udacity, EDx and others. Yet, what's lacking

from these mainstream MOOCs is the collaborative, local, social elements of education. Learners have

been organizing study groups, coordinating these activities using the message boards hosted by the course

providers, as well as using the Meetup service. However, these services provide poor support for collaborative

learning, and limited services for teaming up in study groups.

As a starting point, we've built the COLRN website at http://www.colrn.com where learners can team up

by requesting, announcing and discovering nearby MOOC study groups. This is a fully operational, publicly

available service that provides a subset of the functionality we envision. Our design extends this service to

facilitate collaborative learning and also be accessible from mobile devices such as smartphones and pads.

COLRN lists study groups in the vicinity of the use
http://www.colrn.com/


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The current version of COLRN is like Meetup for MOOC study groups. After using Meetup.com for MOOCstudy groups, weve encountered multiple shortcomings hat our design is addressing, including:

Unreasonably expensive - hosting a meetup costs more than $100/year.

Ownership model rather than peer organized groups.

Inflexible grouping around municipality.

Hard to discover nearby study groups.

Confusing if listing study groups for multiple courses in same meetup.

Lacks tools specialized for MOOC study groups and collaborative learning.

While the initial version of COLRN facilitates the discovery of nearby MOOC study groups, our designtakes the service far beyond, to become a rich collaborative learning environment, integrating the various

functionality that helps people learn more together.

Use Case - Scenario

Terje is late for his MOOC study group on Designing a New Learning Environment. Besides, hes not sure

exactly where it is located. His study buddy William had used the COLRN service to schedule the meeting at

a new co-working space on the other side of town. The participants that signed up then voted on the best time

to meet. Fortunately, Terje has his handy dandy iPhone at hand, and gets the directions from COLRN. Its just

around the corner.

Arriving at the meeting, COLRN directs him to a table in the back with the other participants. No need to agree

on a funny costumes to find each other: Their devices automatically locate the other co-learners in the room.

Terje recognize Mark from his profile picture on COLRN, getting there from the link showing Mark intended to

join the group. The profile told him that Mark takes many of the same courses, and is a step ahead of him in

the lectures.

Terje has a few questions hell ask Mark after theyve been introduced. Not wanting to forget nor disturb the

presentation by another participant, he sends the questions directly to Mark using the messaging feature of

COLRN.


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The Agenda for the day is conveniently posted on COLRN. Terje checks it out on the phone, but notices that

it is already shown on the big screen on the side of the room. Using his phone, Terje makes an addition to

the agenda via COLRN, inserting a Q & A item at the end so he can ask the questions about the last lecture.

The change immediately takes effect on the agenda shown on the big screen and on the devices of the other

participants.

They decide to watch the course video of the latest course lesson together (Dont forget that most MOOCs

rely heavily on videos by renown university professors). While showing the lecture, COLRN shows annotations

made by others in the study group, as well as the most highly rated insights from other collaborative learners.

One of them even corrects a mistake by the professor. The backchannel is flooded with the exchange among

participants and messages are also sent to Twitter, giving the discussion a global audience.

When they got the to Q & A section of the meeting, Mark suggests that they create a shared concept map in

COLRN to record and make sense out of the answers. Mark modify the concept map on his laptop, while Terje

view and edit it on his iPhone. No problem working on it concurrently.

Suddenly, a notification pops up on their screen, with a comment from Juliet. Shes not in town right now, but

followed the study group from her vacation spot. Using COLRN, she could view what everybody worked on,and even get to hear the discussion while sitting on the beach. No reason to miss out on the learning. Juliet

corrected a misunderstanding in one of the answers, and encouraged the participants to keep up with their

studies.

This turned out to be a productive meeting. Everybody said they learned more together and that it really

motivated them to keep on with the course. And theyd just scratched the surface of using COLRN for

collaborating on the learning.

Epilogue: On the way home after the meeting, William had an idea for the next study group meeting: join in

on sponsoring a study group in an underserved area of Mexico city using the crowdfunding of COLRN. He

immediately posted the suggest as an agenda item on COLRN from his phone.

Design Rationale

With a diversity of MOOC providers and platforms, their limited collaborative tools can be confusing. Many

students end up using a variety of tools available as services on the web. In contrast, our design includes

integrated collaborative learning tools that enhance the group productivity, are uniform and useful for all

MOOCs, reducing the efforts needed to learn the disparate social interaction systems provided by each MOOC

platform, thus allowing students to focus on course related interaction with peers.

In addition to unifying and facilitating social learning interaction among ALL MOOC platforms, COLRN's abilityto record and archive every student, group and team's contributions, as well as evaluations by their peers AND

to make them available as part of a single-source eportfolio, no matter which MOOC course, provides a value

no other service offers, especially for the many MOOC students who will enroll in courses offered by several

different MOOCs. It is expected that the value of having ones own archived group and team contributions

available for future use within COLRN, as well as publicly, will encourage more frequent and more elaborate

contributions, as one realizes that the idea that no one will ever see thisis no longer true.

System function and features
http://twitter.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding


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COLRN is a one-stop, one-login, user profile enabled/referenced service to:

enable students find MOOC courses from all the available providers, to enroll in.

communicate individual preference and enrollment in courses, benefitting clustering into study groups

rate the quality of MOOC courses.

connect with fellow students, study groups and/or teams with similar interests, commitment and

availability within a MOOC course.

create and promote study groups and/or teams.

facilitate interaction and communication, sync or asynchronous, within study groups or teams.

record, archive and share an individual learner, study group or team's e-portfolio.

reputation system to recognize and evaluate the contributions by the learners

Accessibility

COLRN is designed to be used on a wide range of devices, gracefully adapting to various screen sizes and

capabilities. The service fully supports web standards in a way that makes the content and services accessible

also for people with disabilities and limited technology, using semantic markup, graceful degradation,

and responsive design. Although the latest generation of smartphones still might be off limits to some in

underserved communities, we expect them to rapidly catch up, particularly those on the educational level

expected by mainstream massive online courses.

Our design takes into account that permanent internet connectivity is a resource that may not be available

for all MOOC learners. We use technologies like Qualcomm AllJoyn for peer to peer, proximity based

collaboration that connect mobile devices directly and let these leverage the resources of study group

participants with more capable hardware.

Smartphones are increasingly becoming the computer for everybody everywhere including those in

underserved communities. The COLRN service doesn't require students to have expensive laptops. We design

the functionality to still work even on the small screen of smartphones, going far beyond our current version of

the service seen in the iphone screen shot below.

We project that mid-size pad computers (like the iPad mini, Kindle Fire and BlackBerry Playbook) will become

mainstream and possibly replace smaller smartphones and Netbooks as the inexpensive computer of choice.

Our design takes advantage of the capabilities of these computers, and we intentionally keep all functionality of
http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_3/http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesignglossary/g/graceful-degradation.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_designhttps://developer.qualcomm.com/mobile-development/mobile-technologies/peer-peer-alljoyn


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the service to not demand more expensive hardware.

Users accounts: Users have a profile with metadata that can then be used for group matching and

differentially shared/made private for different courses and for their general (non-course specific) public profile.

The screen shot below gives an example of the information to include in the profile, although our final design

obviously will have a more sophisticated appearance.

All contact information is anonymized through the platform. The users email address is not shown to others

without explicit consent. Users can send messages and email to each other through the platform without

disclosing their email addresses.

The user can announce their preferred time for meetings, entered in local time but time will be transparently

converted to GMT for matching purposes.

As it is expected that different students will have different motivations, resources and time to devote to a

course, offering each student the ability to select different levels of commitment when joining a social learning

environment, will allow students with minimal commitment to be excluded from study group or team peer

evaluation, and still be able to access the social learning that happens in those entities.

Different profile data as well as COLRN group or team contributions can be selected by the student, for sharing

with a different courses or select or public audiences and for matching purposes - finding a group/team or

possible members. In addition to the standard profile data above, course specific topics/interests can be

entered or selected from topics, if supplied by course sources (instructors or TAs).

Matching/Searching: Users select which course they want to find classmates for, as well as for what purpose

- general study group or one-on-one collaboration. They then select profile matching criteria as well as the

relative importance of each (similar to online dating sites). When results are shown, users can see which


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students (and their criteria) are good matches (highlighted) - for each student, study group or team the search

is for.

NOTE: In addition to indicating their own expected level of commitment, when a user joins a group, they also

indicate if they want access to, and the ability to share (publicly) a portfolio of their contributions to (archived)

realtime group meetings or discussion forums AND whether they will allow other members to share their

contributions (can be anonymously masked). At a later date, users can select specific items to share with a

specific audience or make publicly available in their profile portfolio.

Setting up a study group: users can enter or select what skill sets are needed as well as interests or group

topic or focus.

User profile and portfolio data that is made available within a course community or publicly can also be useful

for users in searching/finding a good study group, team or member to solicit, or employers in finding a good

hire.

Groups Accounts/Settings: Once a group is located, the user can send a request to join the group to the

group's owner or if one does not exist or the person prefers to set up a new one, the user can create a new

group, specifying duration time. Then the group can be made open (public) to requests or the owner maylocate people with similar interests and/or availability and send invites.

Each study group or team area within COLRN provides a collection of services for use by the participants. This

collection is associated with the description of the study group time & place, facilitating shared use of the tools

Notices of upcoming meetings in specific services can be emailed to those wishing to participate and have

indicated their open times for meetings.

COLRN services

Tools for coordinating meetings and tasks/work:

Coordinating Time: A way to indicate availability or preference for times, so the members of a study

group can agree on a time to meet. For familiarity, well use a design similar to doodle.com with a

row for each member/name and times in columns.


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Shared agenda for study group meetings, available from web browsers and mobile devices, and

editable in real time by all participants. To facilitate showing the agenda on a big shared screen or

projector, the agenda can be opened in a web browser, in an alternative format with large fonts.

Project management apps (such as Trello orBehance's Action Method) to organize team work/

tasks. See Trello example below

Tools for sharingresources:

COLRN members can create labeled study groups at will. These group can go beyond geography to

other factors such as age, language, culture, educational level, gender, etc. These groups can be for

virtual collaboration and/or use the COLRN services to arrange to meet face to face.

Study group members can annotate course lectures and other instructional material. These

annotations can be shared between other study group members and others in the COLRNenvironment.

Aggregation spaces (such as dropbox, Pinterest orLearni.st orLiveBinders) where individuals and

study groups could build up a repository o even better, organize and give context to knowledge.

See LiveBinders example below
https://trello.com/https://trello.com/http://www.actionmethod.com/https://trello.com/https://www.dropbox.com/http://pinterest.com/http://learni.st/http://www.livebinders.com/http://www.livebinders.com/


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Study group participants have access to a shared text based chat open for the extent of the group

meeting. Such chat rooms are commonly used among technical study groups, demonstrating their

value for collaborative learning. A challenge is to distribute the link to the chat at the start of meetings

- COLRN solves this by making chat available directly from the meeting announcement.

Joint concept maps tools to help give global views and context to content (resembling Bubbl.us)

helping teams build concept maps shared and updated in real time. See Bubbl.us example below

Tools for collaborating asychronously
https://bubbl.us/https://bubbl.us/


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Collapsible discussion tree (forum) - where members can create new topics

or join in an ongoing (asychronous) discussion a la Banana Dance. The tree

has collapsible comment/sub-comments and users can "vote" on a contribution.

Topic trees can be sorted by date or "votes". See Banana Dance. example

below

Peer Evaluation: Every learner has the possibility of evaluating, on several criteria, the performance on

contribution of other learners. The evaluation criterias average (as well as any comments) can appear in the

person's profile if the person chooses to make it public. In any case, it will serve as a feedback given by thepeers. This tool will be within the --MOOC Evaluation-- survey tool (see below).

Platform Analytics Evaluation (for study group members): As study groups can be quite large and

keeping track of who contributed what and when could be difficult for individual group members, COLRN

analytics will automatically create study group member evaluations based on:

Level of commitment a student selected when joining group (or changed before 1/3 of the way through

the course).

Time each user spends on COLRN study group productivity spaces versus the amount of their

contributions.
http://www.bananadance.org/Comments/http://www.bananadance.org/Comments/


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Number of comments on a student's contributions

Number of "thumbs up", "votes" or "stars" student's contributions receives.

MOOC Course Evaluation: COLRN will provide a survey tool where the user can evaluate a MOOC

course based on several criteria. Before evaluating a course, students select their motivation for taking the

course (just interested in the subject, professional development, wanted to take (experience) a course from

a prestigious university - this and relevant profile data, will be used for cohort matching for future search for

courses by students with similar motivation/profiles.

Course evaluation criteria:

Understandability of lectures

Value of course support material (readings, third party web references, peer feedback opportunities)

Workload (can vary based on what track a student takes within the course - some courses offer a

couple "tracks" for taking the course)

Difficulty of assignments

Value of peer feedback

When searching for courses, COLRN provides a way for participants to indicate their preference or interest for

courses, including before the start of each course. This facilitates collaborative decisions about which coursesto follow, which benefits the formation of study groups.

Showcase/E-portfolio tools could be open to (public/private) assessment, with user configurable privacy/

sharing settings. Students can review all their contributions for a COLRN study group or team that were

submitted asynchronously AND synchronously to chats, discussion trees, real-time workspace or file space.

NOTE: Contributions to asynchronous or synchronous conversations can include a wider (time frame)

selection of the conversation so that a students contribution can have some context. The names associated

with others (contextual)l contributions can be anonymized (masked for privacy) or, if granted, displayed. User

profile and portfolio data that is made available within a course community or publicly can be useful for users

in finding a good group or member, or employers in finding a good hire. Finding good/appropriate teammembers would be a significant value in tech Agile development environments.

The e-portfolio can eventually include a transcript of all MOOC courses taken and grades/certificates

received. This may need some technology enables for verification with each MOOC platform.

Target audience and learning conditions

COLRN targets Worldwide learners participating in mainstream MOOCs.

Business/implementation model

Scalability and sustainability:

COLRN is hosted on a cloud server (currently Heroku) with portability to other cloud providers. This allows the

service to scale to millions of users without investment in expensive server hardware.

COLRN respects the privacy of learners, and will not base its revenue model on selling their personal

information or in other ways compromising their privacy. We may analyze the data in aggregate to improve our

services and benefit the science of education, as well as to fund the operation.
http://heroku.com/


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COLRN will connect study groups with accredited tutors online for a nominal fee, providing nearly instant

answers to any questions that arise. We will take a cut of the fee paid to the tutor.

COLRN will help learners crowdfund study groups worldwide, with collected funds used to provide a safe

place to learn individually and together, required technology for those with less access, and local educational

activities. Study groups will be able to solicit sponsors from other learners as well as outside the learning

community (such as businesses). COLRN will take a small percentage of raised funds to support our services.

We intend to register as a California Benefit Corporation to allow us to be profitable while upholding our core

values of creating a positive impact on society. Please see the presentation ofour business model from

Venture Labs Technology Entrepreneurship class for details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporationhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8IaBTWEWPU

Documents

COLRN VLAB DNLE final project