A Higher Education Social Network to Share and Promote Teaching Innovation Experiences

2014

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IEEE Catalog Number: CFP14FIE-USBISBN: 978-1-4799-3921-3

Online Resource Platform for Mathematics Education ............................................................................................... 1865

The Use of Self-Monitoring Tools for Linear Algebra Course in Student Centered e-Learning Environment ......... 1873

Comparison of the Impact of Two Research Experiences for Undergraduate Programs on Preparing Students for Global Workforces .................................................................. 1877

EER7: Reflection and Metacognition

"I Just Google It": A Qualitative Study of Information Strategies in Problem Solving Used by Upper and Lower Level Engineering Students ............................................................................................... 1884

Using the Engineering Design Process as a Metacognitive Learning Strategy to Improve Student Performance .... 1890

Reflecting on Engineering Concepts: Effects on Critical Thinking ............................................................................ 1895

Using Cooperative Learning to Enhance Critical Reflection ...................................................................................... 1899

Writing and Conceptual Knowledge in Statics: Does Learning Approach Matter? .................................................... 1907

FAC2: Supporting and Empowering Faculty

Potential Minimum Viable Value Propositions for Engineering Education Scholarship .......................................... 1915

978-1-4799-3922-0/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE October 22-25, 2014 Madrid, Spain2014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference

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New Faculty Development: Creating a Community of Practice .................................................................................. 1920Mary Lynn Brannon (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)Sarah Zappe (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)

A Program Designed to Empower Engineering Educators.......................................................................................... 1925Melany M Ciampi (Safety, Health and Environment Research Organization, Brazil)Claudio R Brito (Science and Education Research Council, Brazil)Luis Amaral (University of Minho, Portugal)Rosa Maria Vasconcelos (University of Minho, Portugal)Victor F. A. Barros (Science and Education Research Council, Portugal)

An Examination of the Climate for Quality Teaching in Engineering ....................................................................... 1930Jacqueline McNeil (Purdue University, USA)Catherine E. Brawner (Research Triangle Educational Consultants, USA)Matthew W Ohland (Purdue University, USA)

A Higher Education Social Network to Share and Promote Teaching Innovation Experiences ............................... 1934Lina García-Cabrera (University of Jaén, Spain)José Ramón Balsas Almagro (University of Jaén, Spain)Ildefonso Ruano Ruano (University of Jaén, Spain)

PHI: Special Session: Agents for STEM Change - Articulating the Goals of Our Community5:00 PM - 6:30 PMRoom: El Jardin

Special Session: Agents for STEM Change - Articulating the Goals of Our Community .......................................... 1942Rebecca Bates (Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA)R Cheville (Bucknell University, USA)Jennifer Karlin (SD School of Mines and Technology, USA)Lisa Benson (Clemson University, USA)Cynthia Finelli (University of Michigan, USA)Susan M. Lord (University of San Diego, USA)

PRE: Pre-College (K-12) Engineering Education: Getting Them Early ... and Keeping Them!5:00 PM - 6:30 PMRoom: El Escorial

Pre-College (K-12) Engineering Education: Getting Them Early ... and Keeping Them!......................................... 1944Larry Richards (University of Virginia, USA)Susan Donohue (University of Virginia, USA)

PRE3: Measuring the Outcomes of Precollege EducationChair: David Reeping5:00 PM - 6:30 PMRoom: Comendador

"STEM Academies" and Their Effect on Student Perceptions of Engineering ......................................................... 1948David Reeping (Ohio Northern University, USA)Kenneth Reid (Virginia Tech, USA)

Middle School Students' Understanding and application of the Engineering Design Process .................................. 1954Linda S. Hirsch (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)Suzanne Berliner Heyman (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)John Carpinelli (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)Howard Kimmel (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)

A Higher Education Social Network to Share and Promote Teaching Innovation Experiences

Lina García Cabrera, José Ramón Balsas Almagro Department of Computer Science

University of Jaén Jaén, Spain

[email protected], [email protected]

Ildefonso Ruano Ruano Department of Telecommunication Engineering

University of Jaén Jaén, Spain

[email protected]

Abstract— This paper presents a social network specializing in higher education teaching innovation, InEdUn (Innovación Educativa Universitaria, http://inedun.campusandaluzvirtual.es). InEdUn is the result of two inter-university teaching innovation projects (TIPs). InEdUn site allows faculty to spread and share achievements emerging from TIPs such as Open Educational Resources, OER; teaching and learning experiences in engineering; new supporting services to improve learning. Furthermore, it provides the creation of learning communities that foster collaboration and exchange of ideas among higher education faculty members. Both services can be integrated into existing web sites such as higher education teaching innovation portals.

The website not only encourages contact between active innovation researchers to promote the creation of inter-university projects, but also incorporates valuable design features such as: federated login for using same login credentials from Higher Education Institutions or Research Centres, web searching and navigation facilities to locate contents, a recommendation system, sharing TIPs or collaboration proposals on social networks, adding comments about projects or collaboration proposals by the innovation community.

At the present moment, the project has received positive comments and reviews, and we will continue previous plans to spread the system among several Andalusian Higher Education Institutions.

Keywords—Teaching Innovation Projects; Collaborative Network; Cross-Campus Faculty Collaboration; Higher Education

I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays teaching innovation is a reality in all

universities in the world [1] including technology in education, distance learning, and leadership training. For instance, Spanish universities have incorporated Teaching Innovation Offices which promote teaching innovation projects and innovation actions such as the creation of multimedia resources or OpenCourseWare courses.

However, the impact of these innovations is hardly seen. Most times, almost nobody knows the results of these contributions beyond the innovation team. Moreover, collaboration between academic specialists in different fields of innovation is low within the same university and very low

between different universities. Despite this, the importance of disciplinary networks will be evident for the diffusion of engineering education innovations [2].

Therefore it would be necessary to provide a social network to exchange ideas or learn about different training areas. These aspects should facilitate the creation of spontaneous communities called Learning Communities [3] which are defined as “shared interest domain in which the components interact and learn together to develop a shared repertoire of resources” [4]. However, this technological approach should be attractive, easy to use and must be accompanied by a parallel study of the real needs of the innovative community.

In order to overcome this gap, we have designed a social network specialized in higher education teaching innovation: InEdUn (Innovación Educativa Universitaria, http://inedun.campusandaluzvirtual.es/, Fig.1). InEdUn is the result of two inter-university teaching innovation projects (TIP). InEdUn site allow faculties/a faculty members to spread and share achievements emerging from TIPs such as open educational resources, OER; teaching and learning experiences in engineering and new supporting services to improve learning. Furthermore, it provides the creation of learning communities that foster collaboration and exchange of ideas among higher education faculty. Both services can be integrated into existing web sites such as higher education teaching innovation portals.

User-centered design methodology [5] and principles of web usability [6] has been applied in order to design InEdUn. The aim was to carry out a case study of good practices to use it as an example in courses related to Web Technology in the Computer Engineering and Telecommunications Degree. Many students are more inductive than deductive reasoners [7]. The use of case studies and problem-based learning can therefore be a very effective classroom technique [8].

User-centered design is a design philosophy where the end-user’s needs, wants and limitations are a focus at all stages within the design process and development lifecycle [9,10]. In the design, development and implementation of the InEdUn we applied the following phases:

1. The research phase, where we studied whether Information and Communication Technologies, ICT,

978-1-4799-3922-0/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE 19342014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference

Figure 1. Home page of InEdUn site at http://inedun.campusandaluzvirtual.es/.

help professors to exchange teaching experiences and to establish new teaching innovation networks. Thus, we have analyzed how different Higher Education roles –innovation managers, innovation project coordinators and professors in general – make use of present Internet resources in order to improve their teaching innovation activities.

2. The requirement phase, where we defined its scope, its features and functionality and how it behaves. The analysis of the research phase has helped us to establish the functional and nonfunctional requirements and to develop a specialized web portal that meets encountered needs.

3. The design/prototyping/testing phases (an iterative and agile process), where we identified the design features and where we tested that those ideas actually worked for its intended audience. This phase was typically followed by further rounds of design and testing to solve the problems you inevitably find when you test with users.

Issues related with maintenance and sustainability have been taken into account when selecting the User Interface (UI), the User Experience (UX) and supporting technologies. On the one hand, the system should be easy to learn without complex and unused features. On the other hand, software platform should be easy to maintain and extend in the future, because this fact could be critical to guarantee operation under low funding periods.

In this paper we present the full lifecycle of this specialized social network on teaching innovation, InEdUn,

from its first stages to the present situation, so it could be replicated in other institutions or even academic contexts. The paper is structured as follows: Firstly we show the results of the study how different Higher Education roles – innovation managers, innovation project coordinators and professors in general – make use of present Internet resources in order to improve their teaching innovation activities. Taking into account the results of this analysis we establish design, functional and nonfunctional requirements of the social network specialized in higher education teaching innovation, InEdUn. Next, we describe InEdUn, its technological facilities and functionality. Finally, we draw the conclusions, and future work and projection of the website are presented.

II. KNOWING THE NEEDS OF ACTIVE INNOVATION RESEARCHERS

At the research phase of the project we collected interesting information about sites related to teaching innovation: Internet usage habits of respondents to access information, initiatives or meeting collaborators on teaching innovation. We also observe the widespread use of different general social networks – facebook, twitter, etc – and general interest in the existence of specialized portals that integrate resources and services on the Net. Study results helped us to understand the global innovation context and to develop a specialized web portal that met encountered needs.

First at all, we developed a collection of surveys to know the needs and opinion of different stakeholders. With those valuable data, we analyzed information and obtained the requirements and guidelines which were taken into account in the development of a kind of social web portal. In the

19352014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference

Figure 2. Web page of RedIRIS Federated Authentication Service shown after requesting indentification from InEdUn.

following phase, we researched on technological solutions to build a low-maintenance web site which reflected the obtained requirements with the available funding.

Three surveys were prepared for interested stakeholders roles. One of them was aimed to those Responsible for Teaching Innovation from regional Universities, which was answered by 20 people from eight Universities; another survey was designed for professors who were participating in teaching innovation projects during the last two years. It was answered by 358 participants. Finally, a third survey was aimed to faculty members in general and was fulfilled by 245 professors. Among the final results obtained, we can highlight: 98,19% faculty members consider that Teaching Innovation (TI) on Higher Education was relevant for their teaching labour and 72,29% of them participated actively on Teaching Innovation Projects (TIP), even many of them (83,18% participated in 4 TIP at least).

The ten TIP categories more covered by professors were Teaching Innovation Methodologies (68,42%), Materials & Resources On-line (58,65%), Assessment Systems (34,96%), Tutoring and Mentoring (31,2%), Blended learning and E-learning Environments (27,82%), On-line Campuses (25,56%), Learning Management Systems (25,19%), Learning for Teaching (21,05%), Multilingualism (19,92%) and Open Educational Resources (18,8%).

All the responsible people for TI (100%) considered that it would be interested in using an interuniversity website to collect TI initiatives, in addition to their local websites. They agreed that TI could benefit from the possibilities offered by services and on-line tools and that on-line collaboration encourages TI. Almost all TIP participants (94,33%) thought that it would be appreciated a university website which allowed interchange of TI information, contacts and TIP in which they could participate,.

TIP participants considered that services offered by such TI website would be (from highest to lowest percentage): TIP reports (90,99%), TI initiatives and announcements (86,27%), Possibility of contact with people interested on TI (83,26%), Ability to form collaboration groups on TI (66,09%), Reports of people involved on TI (63,09%), Automatic notification about TI news (60,94%), TI forums (57,94%), Self-publishing

information about TI (56,22%), Generic Information about TI (50,64%) and Integration with other Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter, Researchgate, Linkedin (34,76%).

III. DESIGN, FUNCTIONAL AND NONFUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

As the results of the research phase showed, information about teaching innovation projects was so dispersed as to be of real use. Respondents used different social networks or specialized platforms and all of them considered that it would be of interest to count with an interuniversity website to simply collect teaching innovation projects, in addition to their local websites. The presence of local Higher Education Institutions repositories on teaching innovation was very irregular and the information was in many cases rather limited.

A. Previous web design requirements Therefore, in order to solve this situation, we designed a

minimalist, modern, useful and robust website specialized in teaching innovation with at least the following technological functional and non-functional requirements:

� Minimum maintenance needs, in terms of both frequency and costs. This has been achieved using an open source Content Management Server, Drupal [11], which is configured to automatically self-update with security patches or improvements from Drupal community repository. In fact, plugins selected to implement certain features have been chosen considering the level of community support, to guarantee their updates in future.

� Automatic management of new users in a simple manner and without the need of creating another service account. User Experience (UX) has been a key factor from the beginning to encourage participation without complicated registration methods. So it was determined than only essential contact information was required to get in touch. User login was performed through a Federated Authentication Service [12], based on SAML [13] open standard, in which users made use of their own University access credentials (Fig.2). In this way, the portal can assure that only faculty


Figure 3. Partial screen capture of an user profile.

Figure 4. Partial screen capture of the integration code generation page.

members can access to the system in an identified manner and can be observed as a natural extension of other services at their home University.

� Simple profile user only with a brief biography, email contact, topics of interest, an automatic summary of the projects where innovators are involved and also, the option of add links to their websites or any external references to other information sites (Fig.3).

� Social interaction services to establish contacts among professors and to share teaching innovation projects or promote the creation of inter-university projects. This is accomplished through collaborations. They are of 2 types: “Need partners to …” and “I want to collaborate in …”.

� Predefined taxonomy system that allows faculty to easily sort, filter or search through TIPs and innovation collaboration proposals among people. Both TIPs and proposals are classified by Higher Education Institutions, year, knowledge area (closed set) and innovation tags (open set). The knowledge area is defined by a closed-term classification or Taxonomy. The innovation tags are defined with an open-term classification or folksonomy, where terms can be added or reused by participants for other proposals. Users can provide keywords to proposals, and these keywords are suggested on typing (in a similar way to Google input search).

� Possibility of embedding InEdUn contents/services

on other websites to help spreading and use innovation contents on the Net. Automated generation of customized HTML code for embedding content on Higher Education Innovation websites, specialized blogs or personal web pages to publish InEdUn information (TIP or collaborations lists) with filtering possibilities by funding agency and number of items to display. Two formats were provided: main page content or widget content. Fig.4 shows this a partial capture of the page where the integration-code is generated and an integration example for the Innovation Web of the University of Córdoba can be seen in Fig.5.

� Functional and minimalist visual design, which simplifies and facilitates user experience and integration in other websites. It also reduces web design to the essential elements, simple and clean typography, limited colour palette with colours that coordinate and balance well and, finally well-organized content.

B. InEdUn functionality features The InEdUn website not only encourages contacts between

active innovation researchers to promote the creation of inter-university projects providing the previous requirements, but also incorporates valuable functionality features such as

� Web searching and navigation facilities to easily locate contents (projects, experiences and


Figure 5. Innovation Web of the University of Córdoba (integration example).

collaborations).

� A simple web to fill out the information of the TIPs or collaboration proposals (title, code, abstract, knowledge area, year, dates, coordinator, members). In addition, it may provide links to other third party websites and attached files.

� Automatic promotion mechanism. When a teaching innovator fills out a new TIP, he can detail the members of the project by means of their official

emails. If a member is not yet registered (he has never registered on InEdUn website), the system will automatically send him an email.

� Recommendation System. Users can recommend interesting projects and each one shows the number of recommendations made (Fig.6A). Each user profile shows his or her current project recommendations.


Figure 6. Details of the bottom of the teaching innovation project page.

� Sharing teaching innovation projects (TIPs) or collaboration proposals on social networks (Facebook and Twitter, Fig.6B).

� Adding comments about projects or collaboration proposals by innovation community using almost any current social network like Facebook or Twitter (Fig.6C).

� Automatic generation of TIP citation. (Fig.6D)

� Responsive web design. The site provides an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors, see Fig.7 and Fig.8).

� Possibility of bulk upload of TIP repositories from pre-existing databases at Higher Education Institutions.

C. Testing and promotion phase Usability testing helped us correct minor errors and

ensures ease of use and an optimal online experience for innovators. Usability testing is a technique used in user-centred interaction design to gives direct input on how real

users use the system. Usability testing focuses on measuring a human-made product's capacity to meet its intended purpose.

During the three months of the design/prototyping/testing phases we have done usability testing, one every month with 3 participants in each round (following the Krug method [14]). We have asked people to try using a Web site that we’re working on so we can see whether it works as intended. At the end of each round, the team does a short list of the most serious problems and a commitment to fixing them before the next round of testing.

After, the InEdUn website has been tested for over one month with around 30 teaching innovators.

The current platform has been available on-line during some months in beta stage for testing, exhibition and feature improving. During this time, the software has proven to be robust and some security and maintenance update have been accomplished without problem so we can conclude that this is at Release Candidate stage and prepared for public release.

At the present moment, meetings were held with those responsible for Teaching Innovation of Higher Education Institutions in Andalusia, who have shown their support for


Figure 7. Partial screen capture of InEdUn home page in a mobile device.

Figure 8. Partial screen capture of an user profile in a mobile device.

the project and the majority were in favour of integrating InEdUn in their local innovation websites.

In Andalusia there are 10 universities. So, a great number of faculty members could use this social network and create inter-university teaching innovation projects.

IV. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK Taking into account the current situation, InEdUn has

achieved the initial project objectives and it will pass to the production stage in next months. In that sense, we will be watching and measuring the impact of InEdUn which will be carefully researched using social network analysis after the system had entered in production stage. We are very interested in hearing what the innovator community think about our website, the level of cooperation and information exchange among faculty members.

We have found that this kind of specialized and localized sites can be more effective than generalized websites or social networks where information dispersion can be a serious problem to obtain a really useful tool. In that sense, our first ideas about the importance of user experience, improved by a minimized, easy and attractive interface, seem to be demonstrated. This assertion is supported by the fact that all users that had entered the system for the first time have agreed

that it is very easy to use and have learned they to themselves use most features.

The other key point of our proposal has been searching for an integration tool instead of a separate and probably competing solution. Namely, an independent solution could not have received the collective institutional support needed for the success of the initiative. Moreover, a solution supported only by one Institution could generate mistruths among other institutions which, perhaps, might want to preserve their branding. Thus, our proposal tries to bring the two positions closer with an independent and cooperative system, which can be embedded into institutional pages preserving the brand if desired. We have received positive feedback in that sense. In fact, some innovation managers consulted have expressed their surprise about the ease of integration on their home websites and the difficult to distinguish InEdUn embedded features from local ones.

Once InEdUn website has been well consolidated in the Andalusian Higher Education Institutions, InEdUn might be disseminated in Spain, in other Iberian Peninsula languages, then in the Spanish speaking community and even other Institutions around the world. Technically, our solution could easily integrate other Institutions thanks to federated login subsystem. Content Management Systems, CMS, as Drupal,


have native support for translation to other languages and it has been shown that they can scale well to support increasing bandwidth needs. However, there must be further studies on whether this kind of localized and specialized networks could have the same success to share information or experiences among other languages or nationalities with respect to other general social networks or web technologies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The present work has been sponsored by Agrifood Campus

of International Excellence, CeiA3, within the call for teaching innovation projects in 2013 “Teaching for Excellence”.

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