LON-CAPA and PER

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LON-CAPA and PER

• University of Maine
• Gerd Kortemeyer
• April 2007

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Research Projects

• LearningOnline Network with CAPA (LON-CAPA)
• Resource Sharing
• Communities of Practice
• Sustainability
• Physics Education Research
• Some Old Results
• Discussion analysis
• Student attitudes, beliefs, and expectations
• Curriculum development

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NSF Project

• NSF Information Technology Research
• Investigation of a Model for Online Resource
  Creation and Sharing in?Educational Settings
• September 2000 - August 2006
• 2.1M
• Model system LON-CAPA

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Resource Sharing
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Sharing of Resources

• Creating online resources (web pages, images,
  homework problems) is a lot of work
• Doing so for use in just one course is a waste of
  time and effort
• Many resources could be used among a number of
  courses and across institutions

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Key to Re-Usability

• The key to re-usability is to create
  course-context free resources
• In other words, same resource can be used in
  different contexts
• This means
• No button next resource
• No button back to course menu
• No wording such as as we have previously seen
• etc

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Using Re-Usable Resources

• BUT how do you use context-free re-usable
  resources in the context of a course?
• You need an infrastructure to
• Find resources ina library of resources
• Sequence them up(put the puzzle together)
• Serve them out tothe students

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LON-CAPA Architecture
Campus A
Campus B
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LON-CAPA Architecture
Campus A
Campus B
Course Management
Course Management
Resource Assembly
Resource Assembly
Shared Cross-Institutional Resource Library
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Shared Resource Library

• LON-CAPA currently links 106 institutions in
  eight countries

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Shared Resource Library

• The distributed network looks like one big file
  system
• You can see each institution, the authors at that
  institution, and their resources

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Shared Resource Library

• Resources may be web pages

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Shared Resource Library

• or simulations and animations

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Shared Resource Library

• or this kind of randomizing online problems

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Shared Resource Library

• special emphasis on math

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Shared Resource Library

• chemistry

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Shared Resource Library

• physical units

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Shared Resource Library

• Dynamic Graphing

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Shared Resource Library

• Total holdings and sharing

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LON-CAPA Architecture
Campus A
Campus B
Course Management
Course Management
Resource Assembly
Resource Assembly
Shared Cross-Institutional Resource Library
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Resource Assembly

• Shopping Cart

Supermarket
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Resource Assembly

• Nested Assemblies
• No pre-defined levels of granularity (module,
  chapter, etc)
• People can never agree what those terms mean
• Re-use possible on any level

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Resource Assembly
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LON-CAPA Architecture
Campus A
Campus B
Course Management
Course Management
Resource Assembly
Resource Assembly
Shared Cross-Institutional Resource Library
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Course Management

• Instructors can directly use the assembled
  material in their courses
• navigational tools for students to access the
  material
• grade book
• communications
• calendar/scheduling
• access rights management
• portfolio space

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Dynamic Metadata
Campus A
Campus B
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Dynamic Metadata

• Dynamic metadata from usage
• Assistance in resource selection (amazon.com)
• Quality control

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Communities of Practice
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User Institutions

• Increasing number of institutions
• Unexpected growths at K-12 schools

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Conferences

• Annual user Conferences
• 2007 Conference will be at UIUC
• 2008 Conference at SFU
• Several workshops per year

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Teacher Initiative

• Initiative THEDUMP (Teachers Helping Everyone
  Develop User Materials and Problems)
• Assembling materials that are appropriate for
  high school use according to curricular units
• Including university materials

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Sharing Communities

• Online communities of practice
• Contributors versus users (institutions)

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Sharing Communities

• Work done with FernUni Hagen using LON-CAPA data
  set
• Data from
• 253972 learning resources
• 539 authors
• 2275 courses
• 2120 course instructors

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Sharing Communities

• Authors with the most contributions

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Sharing Communities

• Actually used resources
• Normalized Contribution Popularity

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Sharing Communities

• Co-Contribution Association

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Sharing Communities

• Summary

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Sustainability
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Usage Responsibility

• Graph shows student course enrollments at MSU
• Approximately 35,000 student/course enrollments
  systemwide
• 106 institutions
• Some responsibility to keep this going

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Sustainability

• LON-CAPA is open-source and free
• No license fees
• No income stream from that
• But
• Two support staff
• One programmer
• Hardware
• User support
• Training
• Conferences

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Sustainability

• Sustainability
• Commercial Spin-Off
• LON-CAPA Academic Consortium

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Spin-Off

• eduCog, LLC
• Founded 2005
• Hosting LON-CAPA for
• 2 Universities
• 32 Schools
• 6 Publishing Companies

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Academic Consortium

• Founding members Michigan State University and
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Associate Member Simon Fraser University
• Total commitments of 2.15M over the next five
  years

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Some OLD Results - Still True
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Time On Task
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Prüfungs- und Kursnoten
Before and After
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Gender Differential

• phy231 without CAPA
• phy232 with CAPA
• Gender differential
• Seen in studies at three other universities

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Discussion Analysis
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Discussions
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Problem

• A bug that has a mass mb4g walks from the center
  to the edge of a disk that is freely turning at
  32rpm. The disk has a mass of md11g. If the
  radius of the disk is R29cm, what is the new
  rate of spinning in rpm?

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Solution

• No external torque, angular momentum is conserved
• Bug is small compared to disk, can be seen as
  point mass

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Student Discussion

• Student A What is that bug doing on a disk? Boo
  to physics.
• Student B OHH YEAH
• ok this should work it worked for me
• Moments of inertia that are important....
• OK first the Inertia of the particle is mr2
• and of a disk is .5mr2
• OK and angular momentum is conserved
• IWIWo W2pi/T
• then do this
• .5(mass of disk)(radius)2(2pi/T original)
  (mass of bug)
• (radius of bug0)2 (.5(mass of
  disk)(radius)2(2pi/T))
• (mass of bug)(radius of bug)2(2pi/T)
• and solve for T

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Student Discussion (cont.)

• Student C What is T exactly? And do I have to do
  anything to it to get the final RPM?
• Student B ok so T is the period... and
  apparently it works for some and not others....
  try to cancel out some of the things that are
  found on both sides of the equation to get a
  better equation that has less numbers in it
• Student D what did I do wrong?
• This is what I did. initial inertia x initial
  angular velocity final
• inertia x final angular velocity. Imr2,
  angular velocity w... so
• my I initial was (10g)(24 cm2) and w28 rpm.
  The number
• calculated was 161280 g cm2. Then I divided by
  final inertia to
• solve for the final angular speed. I found final
  Inertia by
• ( 10g 2g)(24 cm2)6912. I then found the new
  angular speed to
• be 23.3 rpm. This was wrong...what did I do
  incorrectly?

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Student Discussion (cont.)

• Student H sigh Wow. So, many, little things,
  can go wrong in calculating this. Be careful.
• None of the students commented on
• Bug being point mass
• Result being independent of radius
• No unit conversions needed
• Several wondered about the radius of the bug
• Plug in numbers asap
• Nobody just posted the symbolic answer
• Lots of unnecessary pain

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Where Online Homework Fails

• Online homework can give both students and
  faculty a false sense of security and
  accomplishment
• Most students got this problem correct
• but at what cost?
• how much physics have they really learned?
• This would not have remained undetected in
  hand-graded homework
• But copying is rampant in hand-graded homework -
  do you really see the students work?
• No human resources to grade weekly homework for
  200 students

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at the same time

• If you want to know how students really go about
  solving problems, this is the ideal tool
• Every student has a different version, so the
  discussion is not just an exchange of answers
• All discussions are automatically contextual
• Students transcribe their own discussion -
  compare this to the cost of taping and
  transcribing verbal discussions
• Discussions are genuine, since the students have
  a genuine interest in solving the problems in the
  way that they perceive to be the most efficient

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Qualitative Research

• Analyze students understanding of a certain
  concept
• Find student misconceptions
• Identify certain problem solving strategies
• Evaluate online resources

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Quantitative Research

• Classify student discussion contributions
• Types
• Emotional
• Surface
• Procedural
• Conceptual
• Features
• Unrelated
• Solution-Oriented
• Mathematical
• Physics

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Classifying Discussions
Discussions from three introductory physics
courses
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Classifying the Problems

• Classifying the problems by question type
• Multiple Choice (incl. Multiple Response)
• highest percentage of solution-oriented
  discussions (that one is right)
• least number of physics discussions
• Ranking and click-on-image problems
• Physics discussions highest
• Problems with representation-translation (reading
  a graph, etc)
• slightly less procedural discussions
• more negative emotional discussion (complaints)

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Degree of Difficulty

• Harder than 0.6 more pain, no gain

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Good Students Discuss Better?
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Correlations

• Force Concept Inventory (FCI)
• Pre- and Post-Test

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Regression

• PostFCI5,4860,922PreFCI0,24 PercentPhysics
• PostFCI7,6060,857PreFCI-0.042 PercentSolution
• Meaning what?
• Students who contribute 100 solution-oriented
  discussions on the average have 4.2 points (out
  of 30) less on the post-test, controlling for
  pre-test

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Attitudes, Expectations, and Pre-Meds
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Attitudes and Expectations

• Reactions to statements

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Attitudes and Expectations

• LBS students versus engineering students
  (published data) on survey clusters
• Percentage favorable answers

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Curriculum Development

• Its hard to teach physics to pre-meds
• Need good grades but frequently do not believe
  physics is relevant
• Survey on what would make physics instruction
  more relevant
• 1not at all 3neutral 5very

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Curriculum Development
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Curriculum Development

• Pending NSF CCLI with faculty from Human Medicine
  and Medical Technology

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Acknowledgements and Website

• Support provided by
• National Science Foundation
• Michigan State University
• The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Our partner universities
• Visit us at http//www.lon-capa.org/