COLRN: A Collaborative New Learning Environment

COLRN is a collaborative learning environment for participants in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These courses are growing very fast in number and quality. Already, millions of people have signed up to participate in mainstream MOOCs provided by Coursera, Udacity, EDx and others. Yet, what's lacking from these mainstream MOOCs is the collaborative, local, social elements of education. Learners have been organizing study groups, coordinating these activities using the message boards hosted by the course providers, as well as using the Meetup service. However, these services provide poor support for collaborative learning, and limited services for teaming up in study groups. As a starting point, we've built the COLRN website at http://www.colrn.com where learners can team up by requesting, announcing and discovering nearby MOOC study groups. This is a fully operational, publicly available service that provides a subset of the functionality we envision. Our design extends this service to facilitate collaborative learning and also be accessible from mobile devices such as smartphones and pads.

COLRN lists study groups in the vicinity of the use

The current version of COLRN is like Meetup for MOOC study groups. After using Meetup.com for MOOC study groups, weve encountered multiple shortcomings hat our design is addressing, including: Unreasonably expensive - hosting a meetup costs more than $100/year. Ownership model rather than peer organized groups. Inflexible grouping around municipality. Hard to discover nearby study groups. Confusing if listing study groups for multiple courses in same meetup. Lacks tools specialized for MOOC study groups and collaborative learning.

While the initial version of COLRN facilitates the discovery of nearby MOOC study groups, our design takes the service far beyond, to become a rich collaborative learning environment, integrating the various functionality that helps people learn more together. Use Case - Scenario Terje is late for his MOOC study group on Designing a New Learning Environment. Besides, hes not sure exactly where it is located. His study buddy William had used the COLRN service to schedule the meeting at a new co-working space on the other side of town. The participants that signed up then voted on the best time to meet. Fortunately, Terje has his handy dandy iPhone at hand, and gets the directions from COLRN. Its just around the corner. Arriving at the meeting, COLRN directs him to a table in the back with the other participants. No need to agree on a funny costumes to find each other: Their devices automatically locate the other co-learners in the room. Terje recognize Mark from his profile picture on COLRN, getting there from the link showing Mark intended to join the group. The profile told him that Mark takes many of the same courses, and is a step ahead of him in the lectures. Terje has a few questions hell ask Mark after theyve been introduced. Not wanting to forget nor disturb the presentation by another participant, he sends the questions directly to Mark using the messaging feature of COLRN.

The Agenda for the day is conveniently posted on COLRN. Terje checks it out on the phone, but notices that it is already shown on the big screen on the side of the room. Using his phone, Terje makes an addition to the agenda via COLRN, inserting a Q & A item at the end so he can ask the questions about the last lecture. The change immediately takes effect on the agenda shown on the big screen and on the devices of the other participants. They decide to watch the course video of the latest course lesson together (Dont forget that most MOOCs rely heavily on videos by renown university professors). While showing the lecture, COLRN shows annotations made by others in the study group, as well as the most highly rated insights from other collaborative learners. One of them even corrects a mistake by the professor. The backchannel is flooded with the exchange among participants and messages are also sent to Twitter, giving the discussion a global audience. When they got the to Q & A section of the meeting, Mark suggests that they create a shared concept map in COLRN to record and make sense out of the answers. Mark modify the concept map on his laptop, while Terje view and edit it on his iPhone. No problem working on it concurrently. Suddenly, a notification pops up on their screen, with a comment from Juliet. Shes not in town right now, but followed the study group from her vacation spot. Using COLRN, she could view what everybody worked on, and even get to hear the discussion while sitting on the beach. No reason to miss out on the learning. Juliet corrected a misunderstanding in one of the answers, and encouraged the participants to keep up with their studies. This turned out to be a productive meeting. Everybody said they learned more together and that it really motivated them to keep on with the course. And theyd just scratched the surface of using COLRN for collaborating on the learning. Epilogue: On the way home after the meeting, William had an idea for the next study group meeting: join in on sponsoring a study group in an underserved area of Mexico city using the crowdfunding of COLRN. He immediately posted the suggest as an agenda item on COLRN from his phone. Design Rationale With a diversity of MOOC providers and platforms, their limited collaborative tools can be confusing. Many students end up using a variety of tools available as services on the web. In contrast, our design includes integrated collaborative learning tools that enhance the group productivity, are uniform and useful for all MOOCs, reducing the efforts needed to learn the disparate social interaction systems provided by each MOOC platform, thus allowing students to focus on course related interaction with peers. In addition to unifying and facilitating social learning interaction among ALL MOOC platforms, COLRN's ability to record and archive every student, group and team's contributions, as well as evaluations by their peers AND to make them available as part of a single-source eportfolio, no matter which MOOC course, provides a value no other service offers, especially for the many MOOC students who will enroll in courses offered by several different MOOCs. It is expected that the value of having ones own archived group and team contributions available for future use within COLRN, as well as publicly, will encourage more frequent and more elaborate contributions, as one realizes that the idea that no one will ever see this is no longer true. System function and features

COLRN is a one-stop, one-login, user profile enabled/referenced service to: enable students find MOOC courses from all the available providers, to enroll in. communicate individual preference and enrollment in courses, benefitting clustering into study groups rate the quality of MOOC courses. connect with fellow students, study groups and/or teams with similar interests, commitment and availability within a MOOC course. create and promote study groups and/or teams. facilitate interaction and communication, sync or asynchronous, within study groups or teams. record, archive and share an individual learner, study group or team's e-portfolio. reputation system to recognize and evaluate the contributions by the learners Accessibility COLRN is designed to be used on a wide range of devices, gracefully adapting to various screen sizes and capabilities. The service fully supports web standards in a way that makes the content and services accessible also for people with disabilities and limited technology, using semantic markup, graceful degradation, and responsive design. Although the latest generation of smartphones still might be off limits to some in underserved communities, we expect them to rapidly catch up, particularly those on the educational level expected by mainstream massive online courses. Our design takes into account that permanent internet connectivity is a resource that may not be available for all MOOC learners. We use technologies like Qualcomm AllJoyn for peer to peer, proximity based collaboration that connect mobile devices directly and let these leverage the resources of study group participants with more capable hardware. Smartphones are increasingly becoming the computer for everybody everywhere including those in underserved communities. The COLRN service doesn't require students to have expensive laptops. We design the functionality to still work even on the small screen of smartphones, going far beyond our current version of the service seen in the iphone screen shot below.

We project that mid-size pad computers (like the iPad mini, Kindle Fire and BlackBerry Playbook) will become mainstream and possibly replace smaller smartphones and Netbooks as the inexpensive computer of choice. Our design takes advantage of the capabilities of these computers, and we intentionally keep all functionality of

the service to not demand more expensive hardware. Users accounts: Users have a profile with metadata that can then be used for group matching and differentially shared/made private for different courses and for their general (non-course specific) public profile. The screen shot below gives an example of the information to include in the profile, although our final design obviously will have a more sophisticated appearance.

All contact information is anonymized through the platform. The users email address is not shown to others without explicit consent. Users can send messages and email to each other through the platform without disclosing their email addresses. The user can announce their preferred time for meetings, entered in local time but time will be transparently converted to GMT for matching purposes. As it is expected that different students will have different motivations, resources and time to devote to a course, offering each student the ability to select different levels of commitment when joining a social learning environment, will allow students with minimal commitment to be excluded from study group or team peer evaluation, and still be able to access the social learning that happens in those entities. Different profile data as well as COLRN group or team contributions can be selected by the student, for sharing with a different courses or select or public audiences and for matching purposes - finding a group/team or possible members. In addition to the standard profile data above, course specific topics/interests can be entered or selected from topics, if supplied by course sources (instructors or TAs). Matching/Searching: Users select which course they want to find classmates for, as well as for what purpose - general study group or one-on-one collaboration. They then select profile matching criteria as well as the relative importance of each (similar to online dating sites). When results are shown, users can see which

students (and their criteria) are good matches (highlighted) - for each student, study group or team the search is for. NOTE: In addition to indicating their own expected level of commitment, when a user joins a group, they also indicate if they want access to, and the ability to share (publicly) a portfolio of their contributions to (archived) realtime group meetings or discussion forums AND whether they will allow other members to share their contributions (can be anonymously masked). At a later date, users can select specific items to share with a specific audience or make publicly available in their profile portfolio. Setting up a study group: users can enter or select what skill sets are needed as well as interests or group topic or focus. User profile and portfolio data that is made available within a course community or publicly can also be useful for users in searching/finding a good study group, team or member to solicit, or employers in finding a good hire. Groups Accounts/Settings: Once a group is located, the user can send a request to join the group to the group's owner or if one does not exist or the person prefers to set up a new one, the user can create a new group, specifying duration time. Then the group can be made open (public) to requests or the owner may locate people with similar interests and/or availability and send invites. Each study group or team area within COLRN provides a collection of services for use by the participants. This collection is associated with the description of the study group time & place, facilitating shared use of the tools. Notices of upcoming meetings in specific services can be emailed to those wishing to participate and have indicated their open times for meetings. COLRN services Tools for coordinating meetings and tasks/work: Coordinating Time: A way to indicate availability or preference for times, so the members of a study group can agree on a time to meet. For familiarity, well use a design similar to doodle.com with a row for each member/name and times in columns.

Shared agenda for study group meetings, available from web browsers and mobile devices, and editable in real time by all participants. To facilitate showing the agenda on a big shared screen or projector, the agenda can be opened in a web browser, in an alternative format with large fonts. Project management apps (such as Trello or Behance's Action Method) to organize team work/ tasks. See Trello example below

Tools for sharing resources: COLRN members can create labeled study groups at will. These group can go beyond geography to other factors such as age, language, culture, educational level, gender, etc. These groups can be for virtual collaboration and/or use the COLRN services to arrange to meet face to face. Study group members can annotate course lectures and other instructional material. These annotations can be shared between other study group members and others in the COLRN environment. Aggregation spaces (such as dropbox, Pinterest or Learni.st or LiveBinders) where individuals and study groups could build up a repository o even better, organize and give context to knowledge. See LiveBinders example below

COLRN members have the option to announce their progression in each course in a compelling format. This can help for individual accountability and for others to figure out who can help when issues arise. Showcase/e-portfolio of the individual efforts that many times goes unnoticed among the sea of other's works in a MOOC (LiveBinders and Behance could also serve as specific e-portfolio apps)

Tools for collaborating during meetings Realtime Meeting Spaces: Can work somewhat like Google Hangout or GoCast married with Scribblar (shared workspace). There will be two windows: the conversation window and a workspace window. The meeting discussion happens in the conversation window which can be side by side with a workspace window or a tear off free floating workspace window. The workspace window is where the user who has the floor can draw, paste text, a picture or a video or share a screen. Later users can modify or delete workspace items. Participation in the meeting can be in multiple modalities (test, audio or video) for groups with members who have access to different technology. When users wish to participate they hit a queue button to enter a queue. All of the discussion AND items in the workspace window can be archived, searched and played back from the beginning or a searched for or browsed cue point. As with asynchronous discussion forum posts, users can find or step through their own contributions. They can highlight or select certain contributions or time frames for sharing with a specific outside audience or in owns profile portfolio. See Scribblar example below

Study group participants have access to a shared text based chat open for the extent of the group meeting. Such chat rooms are commonly used among technical study groups, demonstrating their value for collaborative learning. A challenge is to distribute the link to the chat at the start of meetings - COLRN solves this by making chat available directly from the meeting announcement. Joint concept maps tools to help give global views and context to content (resembling Bubbl.us) helping teams build concept maps shared and updated in real time. See Bubbl.us example below

Tools for collaborating asychronously

Collapsible discussion tree (forum) - where members can create new topics or join in an ongoing (asychronous) discussion a la Banana Dance. The tree has collapsible comment/sub-comments and users can "vote" on a contribution. Topic trees can be sorted by date or "votes". See Banana Dance. example

below

Peer Evaluation: Every learner has the possibility of evaluating, on several criteria, the performance on contribution of other learners. The evaluation criterias average (as well as any comments) can appear in the person's profile if the person chooses to make it public. In any case, it will serve as a feedback given by the peers. This tool will be within the --MOOC Evaluation-- survey tool (see below). Platform Analytics Evaluation (for study group members): As study groups can be quite large and keeping track of who contributed what and when could be difficult for individual group members, COLRN analytics will automatically create study group member evaluations based on: Level of commitment a student selected when joining group (or changed before 1/3 of the way through the course). Time each user spends on COLRN study group productivity spaces versus the amount of their contributions.

Number of comments on a student's contributions Number of "thumbs up", "votes" or "stars" student's contributions receives.

MOOC Course Evaluation: COLRN will provide a survey tool where the user can evaluate a MOOC course based on several criteria. Before evaluating a course, students select their motivation for taking the course (just interested in the subject, professional development, wanted to take (experience) a course from a prestigious university - this and relevant profile data, will be used for cohort matching for future search for courses by students with similar motivation/profiles. Course evaluation criteria: Understandability of lectures Value of course support material (readings, third party web references, peer feedback opportunities) Workload (can vary based on what track a student takes within the course - some courses offer a couple "tracks" for taking the course) Difficulty of assignments Value of peer feedback When searching for courses, COLRN provides a way for participants to indicate their preference or interest for courses, including before the start of each course. This facilitates collaborative decisions about which courses to follow, which benefits the formation of study groups. Showcase/E-portfolio tools could be open to (public/private) assessment, with user configurable privacy/ sharing settings. Students can review all their contributions for a COLRN study group or team that were submitted asynchronously AND synchronously to chats, discussion trees, real-time workspace or file space. NOTE: Contributions to asynchronous or synchronous conversations can include a wider (time frame) selection of the conversation so that a students contribution can have some context. The names associated with others (contextual)l contributions can be anonymized (masked for privacy) or, if granted, displayed. User profile and portfolio data that is made available within a course community or publicly can be useful for users in finding a good group or member, or employers in finding a good hire. Finding good/appropriate team members would be a significant value in tech Agile development environments. The e-portfolio can eventually include a transcript of all MOOC courses taken and grades/certificates received. This may need some technology enables for verification with each MOOC platform. Target audience and learning conditions COLRN targets Worldwide learners participating in mainstream MOOCs. Business/implementation model Scalability and sustainability: COLRN is hosted on a cloud server (currently Heroku) with portability to other cloud providers. This allows the service to scale to millions of users without investment in expensive server hardware. COLRN respects the privacy of learners, and will not base its revenue model on selling their personal information or in other ways compromising their privacy. We may analyze the data in aggregate to improve our services and benefit the science of education, as well as to fund the operation.

COLRN will connect study groups with accredited tutors online for a nominal fee, providing nearly instant answers to any questions that arise. We will take a cut of the fee paid to the tutor. COLRN will help learners crowdfund study groups worldwide, with collected funds used to provide a safe place to learn individually and together, required technology for those with less access, and local educational activities. Study groups will be able to solicit sponsors from other learners as well as outside the learning community (such as businesses). COLRN will take a small percentage of raised funds to support our services. We intend to register as a California Benefit Corporation to allow us to be profitable while upholding our core values of creating a positive impact on society. Please see the presentation of our business model from Venture Labs Technology Entrepreneurship class for details.