Examopedia for all students

'myExamopedia' is a wikipedia style, collaborative exam revision site for students anywhere in the world.

The success of Examopedia in my own practice is evident from the Google search for the term "Examopedia". See below, a wonderwheel on the term, links to University of Portsmouth, where I work. It also links to "Exam Revision" related search results, basically showing that it has made its place in the Google Search results. These are the main ones.

I know you are not convinced by its success yet! Now thats perfectly normal. Take look at the report written by Engineering Subject Centre's Associate Phil Barker or read his blog post on Examopedia. For this work I was awarded 1 of 4 National Teaching Awards by the HEA's Engineering subject Centre. This work has also been reported in several JISC projects and report.

Some student voices and usage stats to my site are also avilable for you to see.

Now, if you are convinced and want to use it for your students or if you are a student want to use it with your friends before your exam the visit the free to all Examopedia site.

Figure: Examopedia - Conceptual diagram.

 Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.

To keep you up-to-date with any further developments and future innovations follow @myexamopedia on twitter.

Lastly, if you liked the site or have a suggesstion, please drop a line or two here :).

Thanks for you time.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is? (shorter version)

What is a CLE or Cloud Learning Environment? - The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution/organisation.
Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, where both share the same privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. This control is different from that in a PLE, a VLE or a PTE. If needed, the academic and the learner can have same rights to the shared content. For example, each "Google Site", can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.
This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learners in an institution. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if the tools used were chosen / managed by either the academics (PTE) or the learners (PLE) or for that matter the institution (VLE). Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and across institutions (CLE).
CLEs also make it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Examopedia re-birth on Google Sites - an Exam revision site that lives on the cloud

Examopedia - A collaborative exam revision site that fosters student's informal ways of preparing for exams using past exam papers and helps them improve their solutions to past papers through critical feedback from the academic and peers. This site now lives in the Cloud which makes it an example of a cloud learning environment or CLE.

Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.



The Past
For the past three years I have been using Twiki for my Examopedia service that I run for my students. I have blogged about it earlier. Students particularly did not like the wiki interface and its WYSIWYG editor, although better than most, is not perfect.

This work of mine is quite close to my heart as it has won me the National Teaching Award from the Engineering Subject centre of the HEA as well as University Learning and Teaching Fellowship. Here is a link to a case study by Phil Barker written for the EngSC. Phil has also blogged about the service and has done a wonderful job of explaining the full potential of Examopedia as a service to students and as an OER.

The Present
This blog post is a reflection about moving from an institutional system (using Twiki) to a Cloud Based service - Google Sites. You can visit the new home of Examopedia that is on Google Sites on port.ac.uk domian. (This domain will die eventually and I will have to move it to another port based domain on the cloud).

It is for the first time in three years that I was able to create and share, the wiki pages involved in creating this year's Examopedia, with all students in my class. This meant that all students were invited to view the site via a link in their mail box sent by Google Sites during sharing the site with the students. It is the first time in three years that I could easily give access to all students as collaborators/editors. In the past students were required to create accounts on my Twiki site and only then could they edit the wiki pages. Now the account exists as they all have a google email address.

With Google Apps access to all students and Google mail accounts for all students, this worked like a trick. Better still, I was able to add Google Analytics to capture the site usage and site behaviour. An amazing 3000+ page views in just 14 days of its operation - most of which from portsmouth (class size = 58+80=138 students).

The Future
I have said several times that I wanted to use Google Wave for the Examopedia but decided against that at this stage as Google Wave was accessible by a handful when I created and shared Google Sites with my students.

I think when and if Google Wave becomes part of the Google Apps deal for universities I may try it out as a platform for Examopedia. I think I will straighaway loose out on the analytics part if I did that. Besides I am observing a colleague Dr. Boris Gremont's tutorial wave, who kindly added me to this wave that does what Examopedia does for exam revision but on Google wave.

What do students make of examopedia?
 It will not be wrong if I was to say that it is very successful in what it does and achieve. I surveyed a few students so far and the results are very positive. Its is not for everyone though, especially those who are very independent learners and like to revise all topics individually and practice exam questions individually. But even such student visit the site and read contributions from other students and my feedback/guidance to gain confidence.Forums are not the same as wikis and students can see the difference as in Examopedia students can conly contribute a solution. Communication between collaborators is muted on examopedia, but can go on in the forums if needed. All the contributions to a specific question are at one place as opposed to a forum which usually have a long thread of contributions and arguments too. Reading through these contributions can be confusing and time consuming.

One criticism I had this year was the amount of questions that were on Examopedia. Students said they wanted more questions to revise the entire syllabus. Clearly, they liked the revision service and wanted more of it. Another critiscim was that some of the answers were confusing. I usually provide guidance and feedback on conflicting and confusing answers. This view may have developed prior to me giving feedback but I need to investigate more. There were some access issues initially and for some time as the students first time used Google Sites and the fact that we had 2 domains (@myport and @port) did not help at all. That is why I said above that the @port domain will die eventually and we will have one domain.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is?

I have been meaning to write this for quite some time now. To be honest, at some point in the run up to the ALT-C 2009 conference, I got this idea. There is a shorter version of this post too. There were many people at a session titled  "the VLE is Dead" hosted by James Clay, Josie Frase, Graham Attwell, Nick Sharrat and Steve Wheeler aka Timbuckteeth :).
Martin Weller blogged about the death of VLE/LMS too in Nov 2007. Scott Leislie coined a term Loosely coupled teaching a month before that. Martin's prediction about a move towards loosely coupled teaching tools has examples in practice today. However, there is more to it. Let me exaplain

PLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy full control on and choice of.  The tools within a PLE are most likely not used for the purpose of formal education of all learners within an educational institution. Each learner may use a different set of tools to support/enhance their informal learning.

VLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy very little control over, if any, or choice of and is an institutional system that is mostly likely for formal education. Academics and the institutions have the most control on this learning environment. Learners may have a say in it to some extent.

Loosely coupled.....to quote Scott, "course taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system." - again these tools the learner may have little control over but the academic is the owner and has most control/choice. As its non institutional learning environment, it is most likely to support informal teaching and learning but may be used for formal teaching and learning too. I have blogged on this type of tools as my own personal teaching environment.

CLE or Cloud Learning Environment....The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, who all equally share the privelages like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. Then this is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each "Google Site", for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if either the academics or the learners or for that matter the institution designed and developed the set of tools or bought it from any one supplier. Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and accross institutions.

CLEs also makes it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme. With a bit of search engine optimisation it could work magic in terms of making the educational material that sits on a CLE visible and usable by the rest of the world.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.