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.

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.

Personal Teaching Environment: Exam revision, Google Talk and Social Software

I blogged earlier about the Examopedia site I maintain. Currently this is open to acces by all. Next year I might have to move it behind the intranet. Will it be good or bad I wonder?

I am very happy with the site's use and performance so far. My students used it in the last few days before the exam as can be seen from webstats and Site behaviour. If only they used it throughout the semester ...

Intended us of the site was to tap into collaborative revision amongst the following other things:

1. provide quick feedback on how to improve exam answers
2. indicate how many marks an answer would get
3. encourage sharing and collaboration amongst the students on informal learning activities
4. reach out to the students who do not normally like taking part
5. communicate using google talk directly with the students
6. create a personalised teaching environment that is in my control - (is the VLE/LMS dead really? as Martin Weller said some time ago).

I think we are seeing a change yet again. The VLE era may well be over (for at least it is over). I like the fact that I can use powerful scripts that give me VLE like features to something simple as a wiki. For each course or innovation I can use a set of these scripts to do things I want to.
Forums that we use in my department are much better than those supported in our VLE. To be fair the new WebCTVista seems to have some new features that I would like to use. I wonder in this day and age where you can easily add functionalities to web pages WebCT's model of one size fits all product will stay for long? Besides the boundaries between academic generated content and student generated content are becoming less and less significant.
We are seeing a change where our roles are changing inevitably from teachers to facilitators be it in online distance learning or blended learning environments. In blended learning there will still be the need to be a teacher, however new skills will be needed to facilitate students and their work as more and more students and staff start using the read write web. It looks like I am talking about Web 3.0 (video link).
Comments welcome.

Google Talk tales

Thanks to Brian Kelly for introducing me to Google talk. Although it was for a completely different purpose which I never got to realise fully.

I have put the google talk code on my wiki/blog/forums and my students seem to find it useful and in just one day I have chated with two students. These students are not on my twitter network but after this session of chat they are wanting to joing me there too.

One slight drawback of this is you will never know who you are chatting to. Also you may find that you are spending a lot of time with them. You may need to define some ground rules with them for this type of support, such as days on which you will address questions from students in this way or some other personall preffered way. I find this satisfying that I can help students in a totally different way. Especially with my flexible working needs I think this is a bonus. I just need my boss to appericiate this. Given that he is a reasonable person I dont think I have to wait for long:).

All in all I think Iam selling my soul to Google.

Twitter in HE Final year Project Supervision

A bit of background
I got introduced to Twitter through a course run by the OU (H806). Through this course I got to know about many interesting people whom I now follow on twitter (Matrin Weller, Grannie Conole amongst others).

Last year I had piloted e-logs for supervision of project students. The results were promising and students responded positively saying the amount of contact they got from me using the e-log and feedback mechanism was better than what other students were getting. For me, it meant a lot to be better informed about the progress of my students.

One thing was missing then. Twitter - an informal back channel for all students doing project with me. As soon as i heard about it, it automatically filled in that gap and I used twitter with my students for project stupervision.

How to use twitter for Project supervision

There are a lot of things that all my project students do each year this includes the process of planning, organising and doing the project. Up untill now these students would work in isolation, reinventing the wheel all by themselves again. Some students form groups on their own and meet and discuss their studies but not every one gets this opportunity. Being my students they have an added layer of commonality in their projects - GSM/Communication/web/etc - the things that I am interested in.

However, projects tends to be a one person battle. Students may feel lonely and isolated during their project phase.

Here is where I bring in Twitter. I have always belived that friends/communities are formed easily when people are going through similar events that bring with them similar challenges on all involved. Here the target group is project students supervised by myself and I use twitter with them to share with each other their current challenge(s).

We all follow each other. We regualrly post "what we are doing?". We read these short messages and try to help each other. Simple.

For example, A student posted "am stuck with this modem not working" another finds that he has used the same modem and suggests few things to try. I also step in to help. With so many suggestions the problem got solved quickly. Others see this happening and the community feelings grows and they join in too.

For the purpose of supervison I am also using a wiki with these students and they update their project plan progress status on that wiki, apart from this they also put docuements for me to provide feedback.

I have reduced the frequency of the face to face meeting (once in two weeks as opposed to every week) as a result. Blending modes of contact seems to work and my role of being s supervisor cum facilitator is made easier. I am not the only one guding the students they help each other.

I presented this work at the EdMedia Conference in Vienna in 2008.