Social engagement in Dino 101

Happy new year folks! There are no pictures in this post, SORRY NOT SORRY.

A group of researchers at the University of Alberta recently published a study on learner engagement in Dino 101, and I thought I'd summarize it briefly here and share a few thoughts about it. You can read the original article online for free via Google Books: "Emotional and social engagement in a massive open online course: an examination of Dino 101". You might also want to check out another summary of their data at the University of Alberta's site.

Daniels et al. lay out four components for describing the otherwise somewhat nebulous term 'engagement':

• Cognitive engagement (investment into thinking about tasks and mastering content; could also be thought of as motivation for learning)
• Behavioural engagement (things like attendance, paying attention, and participation)
• Emotional engagement (things like anxiety, boredom, interest, etc.)
• Social engagement (willingness to socialize with others, to make connections)

They mainly investigated emotional and social engagement, since cognitive and behavioural engagement are largely measured by things like course completion rates and grade averages. Daniels et al. sent a survey to people enrolled in Dino101 towards the end of its initial offering, as well as the students enrolled for credit in Paleo200/201 at the UofA, and also interviewed a total of 30 students representing all three versions of the course. Because all of the lessons and study material for Dino101 was released at the beginning of the semester (in contrast to many MOOCs which release new lessons on a weekly basis, probably in line with the in-person lectures at the university), I wonder if conducting the survey at the end of the semester, in December, influenced the results. We heard from many students that they completed Dino101 very very quickly – some in as little as a day or two, and many within 2-6 weeks. From managing the forums, I can also attest that discussion board participation dropped pretty dramatically after about six weeks. Therefore, students that completed the course are not necessarily students that stuck around until December, and I wonder how well this slice of the long statistical tail might represent the majority of the people who engaged with Dino101.

Overall, the results showed that we did a pretty good job of emotionally engaging Dino101 students: many said they were inspired by the material, didn't get bored, and felt attentive during the lectures. We fared less well in terms of social engagement: many students were neutral about whether or not they had a sense of belonging in Dino101, but only 16% had expected student-student interactions to contribute to their own learning. (In other words, most students expected to learn primarily from the videos and course notes, and not from discussions with other students.) I'm not sure if this is typical for a MOOC or unique to Dino 101, so I'd be curious to see if there are similar studies for other courses that show similar results.

In the data from the student interviews, Daniels et al. highlighted both positive and negative aspects to the discussion forums – some students were really interested in the forums even if they didn't participate, some didn't look at them at all, and some found them overwhelming because of too many email notices. I think there are a couple of takeaways just from this one portion of their paper:

•  If you're doing a MOOC, make sure the button for the discussion forums is prominently displayed towards the top of the course page near the lecture videos. I think ours was located kind of far down the menu and some students might just overlook it.
• Give students some guidelines for using the forums, both technically (i.e. how to turn off email notifications for new posts, because that would have driven me COMPLETELY MAD if I hadn't known how to turn it off for most posts), and by giving suggestions for how to participate in the forums. Do this right at the beginning of the course.

Another thing that popped up in this paper is that while social engagement online wasn't as high as it could be, social engagement in meatspace was unexpectedly common. There were lots of people taking the course with their kids or other family members at home, and they would sit and do the course together. So, here is another takeaway suggestion: find ways to increase social engagement by giving people things to do at home together, in the physical world. Maybe we could provide suggestions for local museum trips or fossil sites based on where people in the course are based, or give some suggestions for hands-on activities people can do with stuff you find in your house.

Finally, there were mixed feelings about engagement with the instructors of the course (here limited to Phil Currie and Betsy Kruk, who presented the material, but excluding myself and the other teaching assistants who did most of the online interactions in the forums). Some students felt like they had a good connection with Phil and Betsy despite the scripted presentations, and others found they didn't like the scripted format at all. Strangely, the paper doesn't include much discussion about engagement with the instructors (and here I'm including the TAs) in the discussion forums, the only part of the course where that was really possible given the pre-recorded nature of the videos.

My final comment here is that if engagement with an instructor is important for social engagement in MOOCs (and I think engagement with the instructor is important in education generally, so it should probably be important in MOOCs), I don't know what we're going to do. One of the comments from the interviews that's highlighted in the paper is that one student didn't have his question answered in the forums – and with my reading between the lines, that probably means we failed to socially engage this student, which sucks. I feel badly that a student felt ignored. But the reality is also that we had 23 000 people enrolled in Dino101, and had to manage hundreds of forum posts on very limited time budgets, in addition to managing the for-credit version of the course at the university. There is no way to scale up personal interactions between students and instructors in a learning environment without scaling up your teaching staff – either you need more instructors (in the form of profs, TAs, whatever), or you need fewer students, or you're not going to be able to interact with every student that wants interaction. And we shouldn't be asking instructors in a university to educate for free, so somebody needs to be paying for those extra people. So that's one more important takeaway here: social engagement requires a lot of time investment from the instructors to encourage discussion and set up an environment that encourages social interaction, so if you want to run a MOOC with high social engagement, you need to budget money for lots of instructor/TA time.

Anyway, that's probably one of the last posts I'm going to have about Dino101/MOOCs for a while, but I thought I would mention one other piece of news: before I moved down to Raleigh in 2014, I had started work on some new palaeontology mini-MOOCs in my role as the Science Digital Learning Manager at the UofA. After much hard work from the palaeo crew at the UofA, these courses are now just about finished and will be launching on Coursera over the next few weeks – if you liked Dino101, you might want to take a look at Theropods and the Origin of Birds (starting later in January), Ancient Marine Reptiles (starting in February), and Early Vertebrate Evolution (starting in March, not yet available for registration at Coursera but keep an eye on the UofA's page there). 

Edmontosaurus in Edmonton

Happy 2015, readers! So many exciting things are happening right now – the Dino Hunt Canada website launched a few weeks ago and the documentary will air on History Channel Canada later this month, things are chugging away here in North Carolina, and the Danek Edmontosaurus Bonebed special issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences was published just before Christmas. There's already been lots of great coverage of the special issue, but I wanted to share a few thoughts here as well.

Please enjoy these very fine Edmontosaurus bones!

The special issue on this bonebed came about when Mike Burns and I got to talking about how the Albertosaurus Bonebed special issue had been such a good motivation for the lab to do some collaborative projects, and given that the PALEO 400 fieldschool students needed to develop research projects on the bonebed, wouldn't it make sense to try to polish those into publishable form as well? This was back in 2012, and at that point there'd been 6 years of really good fieldschool students who had come up with a variety of interesting small-scale independent research projects. We put out a call to current and former students to see if anyone would be interested in expanding their project and contributing it to the volume, and also invited some of our colleagues who were working on hadrosaurs and/or bonebeds in some way to see if they would be interested in working on the material as well. Not all of the former students contributed papers, but I was really pleased by the number who did – it's a big job to get a paper through peer-review, and I'm really proud of all the first-time papers in this issue!

Albertosaurus tooth!

It's also been really rewarding to watch our volunteer fossil prep program grow over the years I was at the UofA – we started with a few volunteers here and there, but in recent years we've had as many as 8-12 people working in the lab on a weekday evening. We run two shifts of volunteers – an evening program from 5-7pm on some combination of Mondays to Thursdays, depending on the schedules of the grad students who supervise the volunteers, and a daytime program by appointment in our larger basement laboratory with the larger and more challenging projects. Most people start in our evening lab programs, and many of the bones prepared during those hours were from the Danek bonebed. The Danek material is amazingly good for volunteers – with a bit of soaking, the surrounding shaley matrix flakes off the relatively durable bones. We would never have gotten through all of that material so quickly without the dedicated help of a very large crew of volunteers! If you're reading this from Edmonton and are interested in volunteering in the DinoLab, follow our Facebookpage for up-to-date contact information and hours.

Ian is a shoveling machine!

Although I haven't gone out to the bonebed for the full 3 weeks each year, I've tried to get out at least a little bit each year, even if it's only for 'overburden removal' days. It's amazing how much dirt we've moved since my first year there in 2007! Because the bonebed is located in a nature preserve, we need to be a bit careful with how we handle the overburden – we can't let too much sediment get into the creek, and we also can't just cover up existing plants. What we've taken to doing is removing the topsoil from a 'meadow' nearby, evenly spreading the relatively sterile Quaternary sands/gravels in the clearing, and then 'replanting' the topsoil overtop and sprinkling with local plant seeds. We dig in the early spring, and by July the area is so green you'd never even know we had disturbed it. The bonebed is a beautiful place to work - we see lots of interesting wildlife because of the stream nearby, the matrix surrounding the bones is soft and incredibly easy to work with, and the bones are plentiful.

Clearing the 'meadow'.

Sometimes it's cold in April in Edmonton!

One of the things we mentioned in the press materials for the special volume is the presence of other dinosaur fossils throughout Edmonton and the surrounding areas. I have a hunch that if you dig pretty much anywhere in Edmonton, you're probably going to hit a dinosaur bone at some point. There've been dinosaurs in the sewers and dinosaurs in the pipelines, and dinosaur bones pop up along the North Saskatchewan River with relative frequency. If you think you've found a dinosaur bone in Edmonton, make sure you understand the laws protecting fossils in Alberta – you need a permit to dig up fossils in Alberta, and fossils should be stored in accredited facilities like the Royal Tyrrell Museum of the University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology. But if you find something, tell the University of Alberta about it! Take a picture of what you found, and if you have the ability to mark the latitude and longitude with a GPS or your phone, do that too. You can get in touch with us via the DinoLab Facebook page. Maybe you will be the next person to stumble across a dinosaur in your city!

Not in Edmonton? The Danek Bonebed is where much of the taphonomy and fieldwork lesson for Dino101 was filmed! The 4th session of Dino101 started today, so go have a look if you're interested in learning more about the bonebed.

Discovering Dinosaurs, Revealing Teamwork

It's a wonderful feeling when you get to be part of something that celebrates teamwork.

Yesterday was the opening reception for the University of Alberta's new exhibit, Discovering Dinosaurs: The Story of Alberta's Dinosaursas told through U of A Research. The exhibit features the work of almost all of the current people in Phil Currie's lab, as well as many of our alumni and colleagues.

The exhibit focuses in on research projects and new discoveries at the university. You'll see lots of fossils and casts, but you'll also see plenty of panels like this one featuring my work on ankylosaur tail clubs. (To see more of the folks in our lab featured in the exhibit, check out the DinoLab's Facebook album.) I really like this approach, because it shows that science is done by real people, and it shows the specific kinds of questions that we ask in order to tell the bigger stories about dinosaur lives. How DO we find out if ankylosaurs used their tail clubs as weapons? What kinds of techniques do we use? What surprises do we encounter as palaeontologists?

 

There's so many great stories in the exhibit, and I think the focus on dinosaur parts rather than full skeletons means we get to focus on the subtler bits of anatomy that might be missed in a room full of giant skeletons. (Not that I don't like a good room full of skeletons!). The exhibit is divided into several themed rooms – this one is obviously the theropod shrine, but you'll also get to see ankylosaurs, hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, and birds, and some non-dinosaurs, too!

Even vertebrate microsites get some love in the exhibit.

 

I think this is particularly fun – take a peek inside our camp kitchen tent in the Mongolian fieldwork room, and see some film footage from the early days of collecting at the university and from more recent work in the PALEO 400 field school at the Danek Bonebed.

 

Edmonton-based palaeoartist extraordinaire Julius Csotonyi provided much of the art you'll see throughout the exhibit, including life-sized restorations of the species featured in the exhibit. I think this is really effective – the specimens are the data, the research stories are the process, and the art shows how it all comes together in the end to reconstruct these extinct animals.

 

It's really cool to see some of the specimens I've only known as trays in cabinets come to life as full skeletons. On one level you 'know' how complete a skeleton is, but it's still a bit surprising, even to me, just how good some of our specimens are. We have good fossils, you guys!

 

This will probably sound corny, but it was somewhat emotionally moving for me to see UALVP 31 all laid out and on display. This was one of the most important ankylosaur specimens for my work on revising the taxonomy of Euoplocephalus, and I did a lot of the prep work on the postcrania in conjunction with my colleagues Mike Burns, Robin Sissons, and Kristina Barclay, and with WISEST summer research students Carmen Chornell and Idel Reimer. (See what I mean about teamwork?). We also added in UALVP 47273 waaayy down at the other end, the tail club that Phil Bell found the year before I joined the lab and which was super important for my work on tail club biomechanics.

I'll finish off here, but know that this is only a tiny sampling of what's in store for you at the exhibit. I hope you'll check it out and learn something new. Discovering Dinosaurs is on display at the Enterprise Square Galleries in downtown Edmonton from now until January 31^st, 2015. There's a great series of K-12 education programs associated with the exhibit, as well as a fun program of speakers and events for the general public over the next few weeks (if you want to hear more about ankylosaurs, I'll be speaking on September 27th!). You can also check out our permanent exhibit in the Paleontology Museum in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Building on campus. Not in Edmonton? You can still join the fun with Dino101, our massive open online course that's currently underway at Coursera.

What's new with Dino 101?

The third offering of Dino 101 kicked off again last week, and we're already into our 2nd lesson, on taphonomy and fossilization. Here's a quick update for what's new this time around!

• A new section about the palaeobiogeography of dinosaurs was filmed, including lots of new scenes at the Royal Tyrrell Museum
• We get to show off the Edmontosaurus with the "cock's comb"!
• We added in some more information on non-dinosaurian critters from the Mesozoic throughout the course, including pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and early mammals
• I made a bunch of new 3D models for our fossil viewer interactive – now you can enjoy the baby chasmosaur's skull in three dimensions of terror and amazement!

These are all in addition to some of the snappy upgrades to version 2, like the section on the baby chasmosaur and the fancier study guides.

So far there's more than 11 000 students registered in Dino 101 v3, which means we've now reached nearly 50 000 students from around the world! The on-campus versions of Dino 101, including the flipped/blended PALEO 201, are also underway, and the PALEO 201 team is making some new activities about dinosaur footprints and trackways. I'm sure they're going to have a great time!

You can join the fun at Dino 101 for free - register now at Coursera! And you can follow the course in its various social media forms, including Facebook and Twitter.

Paleo201 comes to an end

The first offering of Paleo201, Dinosaurs in the Fossil Record, essentially comes to an end today with the final field trip of the semester. The students will have their exam later in December.

Even though it is a lot of work to be involved in the creation of a new course, I think Paleo201 is a great addition to the University of Alberta's paleontology offerings. Using the Dino101 content on Coursera, and pitched at an essentially first-year level (despite its 200 designation) for students from all faculties, Paleo201 is what's called a blended learning course. We rely on the Dino101 course videos to deliver the base lecture content for the course, which means we typically only meet once per week for an in-class lesson. These lessons have included research talks by grad students in our labs on topics relevant to each week's lesson. However, we also tried to break away from the lecture format for at least some of the in class lessons, to take advantage of some of the resources available on campus. One week we learned the basics of the rock cycle and general Canadian geology using the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Geoscience Garden, an installation of rocks from around Canada arranged in a particular fashion for students to learn basic mapping skills. And last week we did tours of the Paleontology Museum and our prep labs, including sneak peeks of some cool up and coming research projects. FUN FACT: Our Dunkleosteus skull cast was ranked higher than the dinosaur specimens in my highly scientific 'what did you find most interesting' poll. Blindingly obvious take-home message for instructors: Students like new things and surprises, and dinosaurs are not necessarily the be-all and end-all!

But the highlights, in my opinion, are the three field trips to Jurassic Forest, Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

Jurassic Forest is a tourist attraction outside of Edmonton that features animatronic dinosaurs set outside in a forest. Although I had some comments that this was an odd place to take students on a university field trip, I actually think it worked really well as a way to ease students into some of the topics covered in the first couple of lessons – basic dinosaur anatomy, diversity, diet, etc. And because a lot of the signage and interpretive material at the forest has been put together by graduates of the UofA's BSc program in Paleontology, the educational content is accurate, up to date, and nicely presented.

Many of the students told me that our trip to Dry Island was the first time they had really gone hiking, so I think that speaks to the value of having a course like this one. We hiked the students around the badlands and out to the Albertosaurus bonebed, stopping to discuss  geology, look for fossils (but not collect any, as we didn't have permits this time), and talk about how we interpret bonebeds and make inferences about dinosaur behaviour. Everyone was SO EXCITED to find little bits and fragments of bones. A couple of the students told me they returned the next weekend with their families because they had enjoyed the field trip so much! Blindingly obvious take-home message for instructors: Students like to go outside! And while videos and online stuff and lectures are perfectly fine, doing 'real' things with real fossils and real locations etc. etc. can never fully replace the online experience. Also I got artists and history students and linguistics majors and such to like rocks, so there.

And today we headed down to the Tyrrell Museum, which is a bit of a long day trip from Edmonton, since Drumheller is a little more than 3 hours away – but we were helped along by some dino documentaries. As always, the museum is an amazing resource, and it was super fun to see the students putting together many of the different concepts learned this semester. There were many good questions and enthusiastic discussions about the things we were seeing. And of course, having Phil there to talk to the students about the history of the museum and some of his personal experiences in collecting many of the fossils on display is pretty cool!

Because this is partly an online course, one of the things I've tried to incorporate into the field trips is discussion of the field trip in the course discussion forums. Each time the students have had to take a picture of themselves with a backdrop of choice (favourite dinosaur at Jurassic Forest, favourite scenic view at Dry Island, favourite display at the Tyrrell) and tell us something about it. This worked really well and it is also a fun way to get some feedback about what people are twigging onto as interesting in the course. Fun fact: Not everyone's favourite dinosaur/etc. was T. rex! There is hope for the world!

This is the last course for which I will ever be a teaching assistant, as my grad school days are wrapping up in a few weeks. This course was lots of fun to teach, hopefully has been fun to take, and I hope future students and instructors have as much fun as I did!

Too many things!

Things have been quiet around this blog as of late because there have been TOO MANY THINGS. There are still too many things, but I figured I'd do a quick update as to the goings-on around these parts over the summer.

JUNE:

Jasper! I finally had a chance to visit during the summer. No dinosaurs, but lots of rocks and charismatic megafauna, so I was happy.

Another presentation for the Jurassic Forest! I talked about the ankylosaurs of Alberta. Thanks to everyone who came out to hear about the ugliest dinosaurs in our backyards.

Jurassic Forest has also opened some trail extensions discussing the evolution of mammals, and the evolution of birds. Kudos to the team at Jurassic Forest for tackling these subjects, which are super interesting and don't always get the attention they deserve (especially the origin of mammals!).

(And I like their dinosaur wrangler, too!)

JULY:

Dino101! This project has occupied a lot of my time since January. Filming was in full swing over the summer, including some scenes in our labs and museums on campus.

Body Worlds, at Telus World of Science - Edmonton! Sadly, no photos of the exhibit were allowed. I had seen the original Body Worlds exhibition in 2007, and this included largely the same plastinates and information, but presented in the context of growth and aging. However, a surprise bonus plastinate at the end tickled my fancy - they had an ostrich (presumably from Animal Inside Out?) on display!

It had been a while since I was last at TWOSE, and I found the renovated earth and environment gallery to be excellent and full of science. Make sure to check out the Science on a Sphere!

The body gallery always cracks me up.

AUGUST:

Canadian Paleontology Conference! and University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology 50th Anniversary Symposium! I was on the organizing committee, which kept me hopping for a lot of August. Thanks to everyone who came out last weekend. You can read more about the conference at our website.

THE FUTURE: I'm finishing my thesis this fall. My plate is pretty full with writing, job applications, and teaching (Dino101, and its sister-courses PALEO 200 and PALEO 201 at the UofA). I've got a couple of manuscripts that should be online pretty soon. Things will probably continue to be fairly quiet here, but hopefully I'll have some time to blog a little bit about research and SVP along the way. After December...well, who knows where I'll be then. Finishing things is always a little bit sad. But, onwards and upwards! Until next time!

Dinosaurs 101

In addition to working through the home stretch of my PhD, an exciting project has kept me hopping for the last few months. I'm part of the team creating the University of Alberta's flagship MOOC, in partnership with Udacity: Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology. If MOOC is a new acronym for you, don't worry - it was for me, too. There will be three flavours, so to speak, of Dino 101, but all will feature the same online content. Dino 101 will be available through Udacity, for free, to everyone around the world. Registered University of Alberta students who want to take the course for credit will register for PALEO 200 (online only), or PALEO 201 (same online content, but with additional in-person activities like field trips).

Working on Dino101 has been a great experience for me so far, even though it can be challenging. We're working closely with educational specialists to make sure the pedagogy is sound, and that our assessments will be rigorous. We want to make sure that real learning will occur. We've spent a lot of time thinking about the foundational aspects of the course, like what our learning outcomes will be, and what skills will be tested. I've been learning a lot about educational theory - even though the scale of MOOCs is new, there's a lot of people on board with this project who have researched the best ways to deliver and assess online content. We also have a great team working on unique interactives for the course, which should enhance the experience for students.

As we finish off scripts and move into production, I'm looking forward to seeing some of the cool ideas we have planned for teaching the basic concepts of dinosaur palaeontology come to life. I also hope that this course will serve as a springboard for people who are interested in animal biology and geology, and that everyone will come away with a better understanding of the scientific method.

I hope we'll see you in Dino101 when we launch this September!

(Check out the UofA's official Dino101 page for more information and to sign up for updates.)