‘Tiger’, who came for chi

Much as I dislike obscure/punning blog post titles,  I’m afraid I couldn’t resist this one. ‘Tiger’ refers to children’s TV legend Debbie Russ, who played this role in the popular 70’s Saturday morning sitcom Here Come the Double Deckers!. And ‘chi’ is, of course, the “natural life force”, or “energy flow” that is “…the central underlying principle in traditional Chinese medicine…” (thank you, Wikipedia). The two came together last year when Debbie (who currently works as a news presenter for Radio Jackie) agreed to ‘get on board’ a series of videos I’d been commissioned to produce for Dr Felicity Bishop at the University of Southampton’s School of Psychology. The plan was to produce the videos for a research project aimed at measuring changing attitudes to acupuncture treatment and placebo. The script I devised with Dr Bishop and her team required an acupuncture expert, a patient with back pain, some animation and an experienced presenter who was willing to be ‘needled’ in the cause of progress – cue Debbie.

Filming, at the University of Southampton’s School of Health Sciences, went very smoothly. It was a real pleasure to work with Debbie, who brought her considerable experience in front of the camera to the project. I then spent several days producing animated infographics, which were finished by Rob Hull at Block and Ball Films (who also worked as cameraman on the shoot). Once my initial edits were agreed with the client team, the final voice over was recorded by Debbie at a morning session with Dubmaster in Alton, the edit was finalised, and then encoded for distribution via the LifeGuide research interface.

Now, after a year-long embargo (while the research was undertaken), I can publish the videos. I hope you like them:

My 9 month PhD Poster

My 9 month PhD Poster/Tim O’Riordan ©2014/Creative Commons by-nc-nd License.

A few months ago I reached a milestone in my PhD by passing my 9 month viva, and last week I was reminded (along with the rest of the lab) that my old poster was “looking as retro as a set of Alexis Carrington‘s shoulder pads” (to quote Prof Les Carr). So I set to, downloaded a trial version of Adobe Photoshop, and got designing.

Essentially I’ve retained the style of my previous poster and added some new words, scatter plots and logos to reflect my progress over the past few months. My supervisors love it, and in less than a week it’s had outing at the LACE SoLAR Flare 2015, and at JP Rangaswami’s Web Science Institute Distinguished Lecture.

What are my key findings?

Building on my earlier learning analytics work that used a single approach to rate comments associated with learning objects on a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in an attempt to identify ‘attention to learning’, I undertook further content analysis. The main idea was to use 3 highly cited pedagogically-based methods (Blooms Taxonomy, SOLO Taxonomy, and Community of Inquiry (CoI)) in addition to the less well-known DiAL-e method (that I had used in an earlier study), to see if there was any correlation between them, to test intra-rater reliability, and to see how these methods squared up against typical measures of online learning engagement.

I discovered that my intra-rater reliability was high, as were correlations between methods. That is, all methods of rating  learners’ comments produced very similar results – with Bloom and CoI producing the best results out of the 4 methods. Correlations with other measures (sentiment, words per sentence, and ‘likes‘) confirmed my earlier work: language used in comments appears to provide a good indication of depth of learning, and people ‘like’ online comments for many reasons, not necessarily for the depth of learning demonstrated by the comment maker.

So, I’m about half way through my PhD and still have a lot of work to do. The next stage involves employing some willing research assistants to rate many more comments derived from many more MOOCs than I am able to do.  The aim is collect enough data to train Machine Learning algorithms to rate comments automatically.

Why is this important?

Making education and training more widely available is vital for human development, and the Web has a significant part to play in delivering these opportunities. Running a successful online learning programme (e.g. a MOOC) should involve managing a great deal of learner interaction – answering questions, making suggestions, and generally guiding learners along their paths. But coping effectively with high levels of engagement is time intensive and involves the attention of highly qualified (and expensive) teachers and educational technologists. My hope is that through my research an automated means of showing how well and to what extend learners are attending to learning can be developed that will make a useful contribution to managing online teaching and learning.

New website for SEPnet

The new SEPnet website.

I have recently been working with University of Southampton postgraduate student, Sylvian Patrick, to produce a new design for the main South East Physics Network (SEPnet) website. The project came about as the result of a request from James West, SEPnet Executive Director, who was looking for help developing his organisations’ social media and web channels.

SEPnet plays an important part of the UK’s response to the shortage of STEM graduates. It works to cultivate links between education and business, and pioneer new approaches to collaboration, teaching and research in physics. As it receives significant support from HEFCE and nine UK universities, it was essential that we delivered a site that could help them achieve their objectives.

The SEPnet site as it wasAfter carrying out a review of the SEPnet site, I produced a report that suggested the foregrounding of SEPnets’ social channels, using more images, and moving the site to a responsive WordPress theme. At the initial meeting with James, Sylvian and I pitched the idea of adopting the i-transform WordPress theme. This theme has many features of a typical blog site, but also facilitated the creation of a style that would appeal to SEPnet’s many corporate and academic users.

SEPnet website as it was.With a deadline set for the start of the new academic year, Sylvian and I started work in what turned out to be the relatively glitch-free process of migrating content from the old site – editing it, and adapting it to the new design. Initially we used Zemedia’s web server for the development stage, but as we got closer to finishing we moved this to SEPnet’s host at the University of Portsmouth.

We kept James up to date with progress through all stages of our work, and he is very happy with the finished site:

“We are pleased with the new SEPnet website that Tim and Sylvian designed for us. It’s now in production and we’re getting good feedback. We now have the capability for producing better content with stronger integration with social media and have more of my team able to safely produce the content.” Dr E James W West, Executive Director, South East Physics Network.

You can see the new site for yourself, and compare it with the old version (at the Internet Archive). Please let me know what you think.