Educational Technology Applications

1. Course Definition
2. Innovation Course Description
3. SECTIONS Analysis
4. Learn Something from CAI
5. Mobile-Ready Blended Innovation Course, Incorporating e-Portfolios

Course Definition

This is a description of the new course "Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship in Technology" (Innovation Tech). This is proposed for students undertaking STEM degree programs at Canberra's universities. The design was developed as outlined previously. It is in response to the need to formalize and recognize the learning of students through entrepreneur programs run as extracurricular activities for Canberra's university students.

Current Status of the Course

Innovation Tech is a proposed design for a course to introduce students to entrepreneurship. A brief description is appended. The course has two parts: Innovation and Business Analysis, each sub-divided into three equal length segments. The instruction was assumed to be by asynchronous on-line distance education, providing students with an e-book of course notes, electronic readings, and videos. Students would work through the weekly topics, reading the supplied readings and addressing set questions as a cohort with the help of a Learning Management System (LMS). The assessment was assumed to be in part based on forum contributions (peer assessed), but the majority of written assignments (instructor determined).

The course design assumed no face-to-face component. If required, classroom instruction could be added. As an example, students studying in Australia on international visas are required by law to undertake a set amount of campus-based tuition (Department of Education and Training, 2000). However, an alternative form of face-to-face engagement for students was envisaged, where students take part in an extra-curricular start-up competition, such as Innovation ACT (2016). This is intended to address demands from employers for work-relevant skills and the Australian government's innovation agenda (Commonwealth of Australia, 2015).

Innovation ACT

Innovation ACT is a ten-week program where students at Canberra universities work in teams to develop a business idea and compete for start-up funding (Innovation ACT, 2016). The program is sponsored by local government, businesses, and the city's universities. Students attend workshops and seminars at an innovation hub located in the city center, where they learn the language and techniques of "lean" development and "sprints" (Knapp, Zeratsky & Kowitz, 2016, p. 17). Students then prepare a document describing their business idea (the business model) and make a presentation (the pitch), which are judged by a panel of industry experts.

Innovation ACT uses face-to-face workshops and live pitch competitions. The program is run with the help of bespoke web based software, which has similar functions to an LMS. Similar events are sponsored by universities, government, and industry worldwide. Vanevenhoven and Drago (2015, 126) report that 47% of 300 university entrepreneurship programs surveyed had incorporated a business plan competition.

Institutions to Offering the Innovation ACT Program

Innovation ACT was set up by the Australian National University (ANU), and the primary partners are University of Canberra (the city's other major university), the ACT Government (the Canberra city and provincial government) and IP Australia (the national government's Intellectual Property Agency). Both universities offer courses and full degree programs in innovation and entrepreneurship. There are some attempts to use Innovation ACT to complement learning in the formal programs, but these are hampered by the difficulties of aligning a competition with the requirements of academic programs. The proposed Innovation Tech course was designed to bridge the gap between a competition and a formal program, by providing an educational framework around the competition.

ANU TechLauncher Program

One example of a program which has attempted to incorporate the Innovation ACT competition is TechLauncher at ANU (Flint, 2015, p. 19). Starting in 20015, software engineering students undertaking their group software project had the option of entering their project in the Innovation ACT competition. The participation in the competition workshops and artifacts, then formed part of program assessment:

"During the InnovationACT competition, your TechLauncher examiners and tutor will have access to your InnovationACT work products (mainly documents). This work and your progress through the InnovationACT competition should be presented during your Project Review and will be assessed as part of your Project Work (Section 5.2)." (Flint, 2015, p. 19)

This tight coupling to Innovation ACT caused difficulties, with the conflicting requirements and was dropped when the TechLauncher program was revised for the next year (ANU, 2016). Students could still use an Innovation ACT project for TechLauncher, but participation in the competition workshops and competition artifacts did not form part of the program assessment:

"TechLauncher students can form teams to work on student or externally generated ideas for software-based start-up enterprises. These projects will normally run over a two year period. In the first year, students will develop their idea and an initial product. In the second year, students will work towards entering external development programs such asThe Griffin Accelerator." (ANU, 2016)

Techlauncher uses face-to-face lectures, workshops, presentations, and tutorials. This is supported with a Wiki based manual, an LMS (Moodle: used primarily for providing video recordings of the live events and submission of assignments), an e-portfolio system (Mahara: used for e-portfolios), and a social media site. Students also use project management and software management tools.

Techlauncher has a complex mix of technologies. If the proposed Innovation Tech course adds further technology, this may be too high a burden. Rationalizing the current technology mix, or at least not increasing it, needs to be considered.

SECTIONS model

Bates "SECTIONS model" (2015), is intended to assist decisions about the media to be used for learning:

• Students
• Ease of use
• Costs
• Teaching functions
• Interaction
• Organisational issues
• Networking
• Security and privacy

It should be noted that Bates refers to "media," which might suggest, for example, that the model might be used to compare the relative advantages of still images with text (paper or e-book) and moving images with sound (a live lecture, analog movie or digital video). From an educational point of view, an e-book is the same technology as a book and an old fashioned live lecture is the same technology as a digital video recording. However, Bates then discusses examples such as smartphones and MOOCS, so the term "technology" appears more appropriate than "media" and will be used here.

Bates (2015) claims "There is currently no adequate theory or process for media selection.". However, the technology could be matched to the educational approach being used. As an example, Dougiamas claimed to have developed Moodle to support a constructionist approach (Dougiamas & Taylor, 2003), so Moodle and similar LMS presumably are suited to a constructionist approach.

There a large body of literature in the software engineering discipline, on the evaluation of software, including the use of formal international standards, such as the Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) Standard (ISO/IEC JTC 1, 2011). Franch and Carvallo (2003) propose a methodology based on such standards and in one example they use evaluation of e-learning software:

"The e-learning domain provides more than one example. Consider the term virtual classroom. Some packages use this term and course as synonymous, referring to the contents of particular subjects. Other packages use different semantics for virtual classroom-meaning, for instance, the interface (such as the base URL where the contents of a course are to be placed) or the list of tasks to be performed during the course." Franch and Carvallo (2003)

Applying SECTIONS Model

Addressing each of Bates "SECTIONS model" (2015) items for the proposed Innovation Tech course:

Students

Students of the Innovation Tech course would be final year undergraduates or coursework masters in a Science, Technology Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. As an example, the ANU Techlauncher students are typically enrolled in a Bachelor of Software Engineering or Masters of Computing (ANU, 2016). As a result, the students have advanced computer skills and access.

ANU has a significant enrollment of international students, with more than 60% from China (Joske, 2016). The University intends to target students from other Asian countries, particularly India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore, including arrangements for in-country teaching (Joske, 2016). This could change the mix of students and their broadband access, if distance education or satellite campuses are used to reach these students. While students on campus in Canberra have high-speed broadband, those in the Indo-Pacific region may not.

1. Do students have easy access to the technology necessary for this technology? Yes. Students at Canberra's universities have access to desktop computers on campus with broadband access. They typically also have a high capability mobile device.

2. Do students have access to broadband Internet? Yes, students have WiFi broadband on campus, wired broadband to campus desktop computers and broadband in on-campus accommodation. Much of Canberra is serviced by Fibre-to-the-Home (FTH) and Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) high speed broadband access, providing students with high speed, reliable access at home.

3. Do students have access to power to run/charge their devices? Yes, student learning centers (libraries) provide mains and USB charging.

4. Are transferable skills being developed? Yes, the objective of the innovation tech course is, in part, to provide technology students with the ability to communicate with non-technical people.

5. Does the technology allow for an appropriate degree of openness to the community beyond registered course participants? Yes, the innovation tech course materials are designed to be open access, and the ANU TechLauncher project has a public community interface. However, some student projects are for companies and government agencies, so cannot be open to the community. Also, Canberra's universities are subject to national privacy legislation and are required to protect the students. There must, therefore, be the option for students not to make their details, or work, public.

6. Can students show their work via web link (URL)? Yes, students need the option of providing some details of their project public, but also have the choice not to.

Ease of use

The students can be assumed to be very advanced computer users, having already completed two years of computing courses. Students should be familiar with the technology routinely used for university courses: e-mail, lecture video recordings and a Learning Management System, but not have encountered other technology. In particular, IT students are not trained to write e-portfolios or discuss projects via social media.

Costs

Canberra's universities receive government funding to support teaching and charge full fees for international students. There is, therefore, funding available to cover the cost of technology. In any case, the technology is a relatively low cost compared to teaching staff salaries. However, if the universities offer courses more widely in the region, then cost may be a factor in poorer countries.

Teaching functions

Innovation Tech assumes a blended mode of instruction. The student self-studies the theory using an on-line system and the practice in groups in face-to-face workshops as part of Innovation ACT. One issue is the high staff cost of the face-to-face teaching and assessment. ANU Techlauncher has students working in groups as small as three, each with a mentor, "client" and a tutor. Student's project work, including presentations, also requires assessment by paid instructors who have both teaching and IT skills.

Some peer assessment is used, but this also requires coordination of the large numbers of groups. Assessment of individual learning portfolios also currently is by instructors. However, this may be changed to use peer assessment after on-line training, which has been found useful in another Canberra course (Caldwell &Gedeon, 2015).

Projects are real-world and so all different, with results which cannot be easily anticipated. An example of a project is Australia's first indigenous-language video game (Travers, 2016). The game is being developed in conjunction with a remote indigenous community, raising issues which are a useful learning experience for the students, but require careful oversight by instructors.

Interaction

Innovation Tech assumes multiple levels of interaction. Students need to be able to communicate with the instructors, with stakeholders outside the university environment (mentors and clients). Also, students need to be able to conduct intense interaction with small teams.

In addition to the conventional learning technology (LMS and e-Portfolio), the students require specialist software development and project management tools. Ideally, students should use real-world tools. However, this can make the assessment of the work developed with these tools harder, as they may not have built-in assessment. An example of the software typically used is a project management tool. The products Gitlab, Trello, and Slack, have been used for Techlauncher (Flint, 2015). Zamyatina and Mozgaleva (2013) provide a brief assessment of the suitability of such products and more general purpose tools (such as Google Docs) for developing project management competencies.

Organizational Issues

Canberra's universities provide LMS and e-Portfolio tools for all students. Moodle and Mahara are used at the ANU and the University of Canberra, with specialist in-house support staff, backed up by commercial contractors. There is good support for the software in Canberra, with some of the developers of Moodle and Mahara in the city. The universities provide in-house face-to-face training for instructors and the companies train-the-trainer. The universities have IT support staff during office hours and a help desk.

Moodle and Mahara have import and export functions, allowing instructors to move content quickly (University policies allow staff to change the course content without approval from a third party). Students can import and export their work. Moodle and Mahara systems are under unified access control systems, linked to the student management system, so instructors do not have to manually add students and students do not have to log into each package separately. The packages are in widespread use, but a significant proportion of instructors are not happy with the software, and a few are not satisfied with the utilization of any software for teaching.

Networking

Many of the projects worked on by students have a social media component. That is the students are building new social media software, are interfacing to existing systems or are using social media as a marketing tool for their product. Some access to social media would, therefore, be useful. However, this represents several challenges, discussed below under "security and privacy." An alternative is the use of an internal social media tool, only accessible to the university community, the course, or student cohort. TechLauncher makes use of the Piazza forum tool, although an issue to be considered is if this is sufficiently superior to Moodle's forums, to be worth the inclusion of an additional software package.

Security and privacy

Use of on-line systems, particularly social media, exposes the students to risks to their privacy, safety and liberty. Students risk releasing sensitive details of themselves and their projects. In the extreme case, international students who express views critical of their government online could face imprisonment, or execution, when they return home.

As Australia's seat of government, Canberra organizations are a prime target for cyber-attack, by hackers collecting sensitive information. Canberra's universities educate government personnel, military officers, and the children of members of parliament, making them a target for hacking. Cloud-based and social media systems, therefore, are something to be considered cautiously.

Advantages of Aligning Academic Requirements with Innovation Competition

Combining a course with an innovation competition provides several benefits. Industry experts can bring their expertise and enthusiasm to the education of students. The competition offers excitement and a realistic challenge for the students, beyond the usual rigidity of academia. As innovation competitions are run worldwide, the student can take part in a face-to-face group learning activity, as a complement to their on-line course. Advantages for the course organizer is that they do not have to resource or schedule the innovation competition or face-to-face activities.

Problems with Aligning Academic Requirements with Innovation Competition

As an entrepreneurial competition (such as Innovation ACT), is independent of a program (such as TechLauncher), they may not be aligned regarding content or timing. Innovation programs use the same general approach. However, the terminology may differ, requiring the student (and instructor) to be able to translate. The timing of competition is unlikely to coincide with that of a fixed schedule university course. In particular, extra-curricular activities tend to be scheduled during teaching breaks.

Extra Educational Technology Which May Help

Examples of technology which may help integrate an entrepreneurial competition with an educational program are an e-portfolio and Learning Management System (LMS), both of which could support assessment using a competency framework. Examples which are under consideration for use in Canberra's universities are Mahara SmartEvidence (an e-Portfolio) and Moodle Competencies (an LMS).

The Problem of Accrediting Degree Programs

Vocationally orientated university programs, which Canberra's universities incorporate entrepreneurial skills into, need to ensure that every student has met every requirement. Beyond just entrepreneurial skills, the availability of educational technology to support tracking competencies could provide a more flexible way to meet national and international accreditation requirements.

Meeting all competency requirements is of particular importance where a degree is accredited by a professional body or licensing board. As an example, the Australian Computer Society (ACS) accredits computing degrees in Australia, and the CIPS does this in Canada. A complex process is required to ensure that every graduate of every accredited program has the required Body of Knowledge.

The Innovation Tech module is designed around two skills definitions from the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). SFIA is used by the ACS for course accreditation (Holt et al., 2016, p. 3).

Scope for changing what a national IT professional body requires is limited, as there is an international agreement as to what a computing professional should be able to do (the "Seoul Accord"), to which ACS and CIPS are signatories. Accreditation is not just a matter of a university getting a badge so students will enroll. ACS Certified Computer Professionals have their liability limited by Australian law, and CIPS members have their status legally recognized in some Canadian provinces.

The usual way a university constructs a university degree program is from a set of courses. The institution must ensure that all skills are covered somewhere in the courses offered. This results in complicated rules about which courses the student has to take, with less flexibility and less scope for broad and deep learning.

Fitting project based "entrepreneurship" into a course in a program is a difficult task. An alternative approach is to define the required competencies and allow the student to demonstrate these in activities of some courses and extra-curricular activities, such as a competition. The problem then is to do this in a way which does not require excessive administration, instructor or student time. Thus the need for supporting educational technology.

The Mahara e-portfolio, as used for the MEd Capstone demonstrates the limitations of the technology. The e-portfolio can be used to provide copies of artifacts as evidence of competencies and a place for the student to reflect and integrate their learning. However, the current version of Mahara requires the student and instructor to identify and check off progress with the acquisition of competencies manually. This process will be much more complex where there are multiple sets of competencies to acquire, to meet university, industry and government requirements.

Shankararaman and Gottipati (2016) propose automated mapping of skills to the SFIA framework. However, while that would be desirable for the envisaged application of suggesting which jobs graduates may be qualified to apply for, it is unlikely to meet accreditation requirements for university programs. A less ambitious approach is to have the skills required listed in a framework in the LMS or ePortfolio and have the instructor and student jointly check off which have been met, with the technology acting as an automated bookkeeper and check.

Conclusion

The Innovation Tech module could use a range of technology to formalize and recognize the learning of students in extracurricular activities. The use of e-learning for start-up education could be usefully applied beyond STEM programs. Tools for competency based assessment could be implemented more widely to university programs.

Postscript

Iriti, Bickel, Schunn, and Stein (2016) note that the US and the European Union government, as well as the private sector, had invested in EdTech ventures. Perhaps innovation is an area Athabasca University could usefully explore with students of the MEd?

Innovation Course Description

The design of this course was developed in assignments for "Instructional Design in Distance Education" (MDDE 604) and "Introduction to Mobile Learning" (MDDE 623), but has not yet been implemented:

Title: Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship in Technology

Short Title: Innovation Tech

Level: 3rd-year undergraduate and postgraduate versions

Course Description: Innovation requires the ability to recognize the opportunities provided by technology and know how to exploit them in business. The aim is more efficient and effective organizations, be they for-profit or not, existing or new start-ups. This requires documented investigation, analysis, and review. A methodical investigation of functions and processes, requirements, costs, sustainability and business benefits is needed, with specifications and acceptance criteria. Twelve weekly topics introduce the materials to students with interactive quizzes and forums to help build the skills needed for assignments. The student can undertake this course in parallel with Innovation ACT, or another entrepreneur program, and submit artifacts from that program for assessment.

Rationale: Course to provide recognition of the work of students undertaking entrepreneur programs such as Innovation ACT.

Structure and Content: The course consists of two parts, corresponding to the skills:

A. Innovation

1. An Introduction to Innovation

2. Business Model Thinking

3. Stakeholder Engagement

B. Business analysis

4. Concept Generation

5. Value Capture

6. Documenting

Learning Outcomes:

After completing this course, student will be able to:

1. Innovate: Prepare a plan to exploit business opportunities provided by technology, for more efficient and effective performance of an existing or new businesses,

2. Analyze: Document an analysis of business regarding functions and processes, by identifying and quantifying improvements to reduce costs and enhance sustainability.

The learning objectives are based on the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) skills definitions: "Innovation" and "Business analysis."

Workload: To complete the subject you will need to spend 8-10 hours each week reading, communicating with colleagues and tutors, and preparing assignments.

Assumed Knowledge: It is assumed the student is familiar with basic computing concepts, from an introductory university course. The student will need to be able to use a computer and the Internet to complete this on-line course and be familiar with academic writing and referencing to undertake assignments.

Assessment: There are two areas of assessment in the course:
1. Weekly Assessment (20%): Contributions to weekly discussion forums (10%) and completion of a weekly quiz (10%),

2. Assignments (80%): midcourse (40%) and at the end (40%).

To pass the course at least 10/20 for Weekly Assessment and 40/80 for Assignments is required. Grades of 70% and higher (Distinction and High Distinction) are based only on Assignments.

Assessment Rationale: The questions each week are on topics to be covered in the assignments, allowing students to build their skills. Each major assignment corresponds to a learning objective for the course: 1. Innovate: Prepare a plan to exploit business opportunities provided by technology, for more efficient and effective performance of an existing or new businesses, and, 2. Analyze: Document an analysis of business regarding functions and processes, by identifying and quantifying improvements to reduce costs and enhance sustainability.

SECTIONS Analysis

Some of the technologies which might be used in the course "Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship in Technology" (Innovation Tech) are examined here. The approach used is Bates' SECTIONS model (Bates, 2015) as applied by Underhill (2010). In particular, e-mail, list servers, electronic portfolios, Learning Management Systems (LMS), videoconferencing, computer-based education, Social software (Elgg/Landing), Web 2 (RSS, Blogs, and Wikis), Podcast and Cloud Computing are examined. "Innovation Tech" is a new course proposed for students undertaking STEM degree programs at Canberra's universities.

SECTIONS model

The features and limitations of the Bates "SECTIONS model" (2015), was discussed earlier. Here the eight items are applied:

• Students
• Ease of use
• Costs
• Teaching functions
• Interaction
• Organisational issues
• Networking
• Security and privacy

The approach of Underhill (2010), with the supplied spreadsheet template, has been used to:

1. Define

2. Assess

3. Implement

4. Refine

However, the emphasis is on the first two steps (Define and Assess).

These steps are carried out in the accompanying spreadsheet. The process of defining requirements was reasonably straightforward, using the description of the course from previous work. Assessing individual technologies was made difficult due to the author's familiarity with LMS. Having used a purpose designed LMS (Moodle) daily for several years, as a student and teacher, makes it difficult to conceive using other technologies. The problem is to break out of a habit of thinking just regarding the features the LMS offers and think of other ways to teach which could be supported by other technologies.

It is also difficult to assess technologies in isolation. As an example, an e-portfolio would not normally be used on its own, but alongside an LMS. E-mail might be used to supplement other technologies, but using it on its own would be, in many ways, as a step backward, to something not more advanced than DE using paper, delivered by the postal service.

E-mail can cause considerable problems, both for students and teachers, with important course-related messages being lost in a flood of other e-mail. E-mails from students can be easily overlooked, and it is a time-consuming task to manually archive all these messages (as required by Australian law). A list server could be used for education, as a way to provide some automation of the e-mail (and archiving). However, one-to-one and one-to-many communication options were built into LMS (such as the Dialogue and Form tools in Moodle) specifically to support education and so are better suited to this task.

The issue which Bates "SECTIONS model" (2015), does not help with is how to use combinations of technologies. An educator would not normally be faced with the task of choosing one technology over another, but choosing what features to use in overlapping bundles of technologies. An e-portfolio and an LMS are not each one technology, but bundles of features. As an example, the e-portfolio and LMS both provide a way to communicate with one person (as with email) or a group (as with a list server). Given that the Educator will be provided with e-mail, a list server, e-portfolio, and LMS, which should be used for one-to-one and one-to-many communication?

In the case of the Innovation Tech course, the assumption is that an LMS will be used as the primary tool, supplemented by an e-portfolio. However, when this is incorporated into the TechLauncher program at ANU (Flint, 2015), the problem is compounded by the use of additional tools, each of which has provision for communication with students. The use of multiple tools can be very confusing for instructors and students.

Better Taxonomy of Learning Technology Required

The division of learning technologies into the nine categories, used in the analysis did not prove to be particularly useful. It is suggested that a multidimensional taxonomy of the affordances of the technologies is required. That is, what does the technology allow the student and the teacher to do? Different "technologies" would offer different, most likely overlapping bundles of actions which those involved in learning can carry out. Ideally, the learning designer and the student could mix and match what they needed.

Anderson and Dron (2010) suggest matching the distance education pedagogy being used to the educational technology. They suggest Cognitive-behaviourist models were pre-Web and social-constructivism "flourished in a Web 1.0". There claim that "connectivism is at least partially a product of a networked, Web 2.0 world" is perhaps overemphasizing the role of the web, but does acknowledge the interrelationship of education and technology. Anderson and Dron (2010) go on to speculate about how the semantic web or "Web 3.0" could be used for education. However, there other digital technologies which could be adapted for education.

Software Engineering Tools for Education

Software engineers have developed tools for managing large computer programming tasks and adapted tools from hardware manufacturing. Two examples which could be used for education are version control systems and project management. Version control systems allow large teams of programmers (in some cases tens of thousands of people), to contribute to one software development project simultaneously. The GitHub version control software is used for teaching software engineering and has been proposed as a more general application for education (Zagalsky, Feliciano, Storey, Zhao & Wang, 2015).

Project management software, specifically that implementing the Kanban system is used for teaching rapid software development techniques. Web based Kanban products, such as Trello allow a team of students to coordinate their work on a project (Seppälä, Auvinen, Karavirta, Vihavainen & Ihantola, 2016). What communication tools students use in software projects and how do different tools suit different parts of project work?. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ACM, pp. 432-435). These tools could be used for small scale e-learning, with individual students, small teams or massive open on-line courses with thousands, where the students coordinate their work together. In the case of design thinking, they might be used to have students organize their ideas, as well as implement their work.

Conclusion

The results of this analysis are inclusive. An e-portfolio tool is, not surprisingly, suitable for the students to prepare an e-portfolio. E-mail and list servers are of little use, unless more specialized tools designed for education, are not available. Videoconferencing, computer-based education, Social software (Elgg/Landing), Web 2 (RSS, Blogs, and Wikis), Podcast and Cloud Computing are useful as components of an overall learning environment. However, using stand-alone implementations of all those technologies would be complex for the instructor, the student and to support. An LMS provides a useful way to have these technologies bundled up and supported together. The LMS does have the limitation of being designed for conventional coursework, however, when supplemented with the e-portfolio for project work, it provides a balanced set of tools. The LMS might be supplemented by tools from software engineering, for version control and project management.

Learn Something from CAI

Here is how I learned "something" using Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). This content is extracted from a page of my electronic portfolio (e-portfolio), and was an exercise to see how readily available e-learning materials is in practice.

Why I Chose This Subject

As I wrote in my portfolio, CAI, also known as Computer-managed instruction (CMI) and Computer-based testing (CBT), is a field I had little experience of and none of it good:

"... I have had to undertake compulsory CAI training units on work-place safety and similar topics. These usually are Flash-based, with Powerpoint-type slides, simple animation, a voice-over and multiple choice questions. Usually, I skip the animation, read the summary page and do the quiz.

Some of these courses were about what attitude I should have in the workplace and what I should believe, rather than skills or knowledge and were more brainwashing than teaching. I tried to get them over with as quickly as possible, by attempting to mimic the behavior expected, feeling like a lab rat in a Skinner Box undergoing operant conditioning." From e-portfolio, 2016

The first problem was that I was not clear as to what a CAI was. The example provided was Lynda.com, so I started there. The next problem was what to learn. I did not want to produce a demonstration website (I have produced many of those) or use Flash (I never want to have to use flash, ever, again). Retouching photos in Photoshop does not appeal (and I don't have Photoshop), I don't play the guitar and failed high-school French. But perhaps I could learn to be entrepreneurial (there were93 entries for this in Lynda.com).

What I hoped to learn

A recent interest of mine is teaching "Design Thinking," so I looked for CAI on this. A web search for "free online course in 'design thinking' self-paced," turned up Class-central.com as the first hit, with approximately 100 courses. Of these courses, fifteen wereself-paced. The top three rated courses were:

1. Model Thinking, the University of Michigan via Coursera

2. Designing A New Learning Environment, Stanford University via NovoEd

3. Responsive Web Design Fundamentals, Google via Udacity

However, while I searched for self-paced courses, the first is on a scheduled date. The second requires 4 hours a week for nine weeks, which is more time than I can afford to "learn something." The third course is six hours a week for two weeks, which is feasible, but it is about Responsive Web Design, not design thinking. This illustrates a problem with "free" on-line courses: there is considerable effort required just to find a suitable course.

I am a member of the Australian Computer Society (ACS), a professional body equivalent to CIPS in Canada. The ACS provides a library of educational material for members, boasting "Over 28,000 digital learning assets, made available exclusively to ACS members.". However, a search for "design thinking," produced no courses. A search of categories indicated there were several dozen videos on "Agile Project Management" which is a more technical topic than I was looking for. In any case, these appear to be just videos, not courses.

Next, I tried the IEEE Course Library, which offers self-packed courses for engineers and computer professionals. As search for "Design Thinking" produced more than six thousand results, but only five of these were courses (the rest are publications):

• Thinking like a Leader: the TILL System, Kim Sydow-Campbell, 2010

• Software Configuration Management and IEEE Standards Bundle, Rob Oshana, 2013

• Software Configuration Management, Massood Towhidnejad, 2012

• Software Configuration Management, Rob Oshana, 2011

• A Primer on Clustering: II. Tendency Assessment and Cluster Validity, James Bezdek, 2008

Only the first of these is on-topic, and that costs US$70. Clearly, I needed to look elsewhere to find something to learn.

After some thought, I recalled I had come across a course in "Invention and innovation," when working on a project for MDDE 604 (Instructional Design in Distance Education). A web search found this was an Open University UK (OUUK) free on-line course, but at 55 hours this was more than needed for the current exercise. However, in the same category "Design and Innovation," under "Engineering and Technology", were twenty-nine courses from the pen Learn consortium (establish by OUUK). Of these nine were free courses. Of the nine, the shortest and most relevant were: "Design Thinking: Introductory level," Duration 10 hours, Updated 29 Mar 2016 and "People-centred designing: Introductory level," Duration 12 hours, Updated 17 Mar 2016. So I signed in to try the first of these.

Design Thinking from OUUK

Design Thinking is an extract from the OUUK for-fee distance education course:"Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century" (U101 ). As such, it looks very much like Athabasca University's MEd courses, but with what appears to be a heavily customized version of Moodle. The course begins with learning objectives:

There are a menu column and a column for content. What becomes apparent is that this is not so much a "course" as a slightly intelligent e-book. The content is text with images. The narrower column is an interactive table of contents, which keeps track of which sections you have completed: an empty circle indicates a section yet to be attempted, a half circle for partial completion and solid circle for completed:

What is interesting about this is that the modified interface looks very different, and much more appealing, than the default Moodle interface used by the five institutions where I have been a teacher or student. It may be possible to refresh conventional DE courses, in this way, to make them more like the MOOC and App content students increasingly expect.

This is a self-paced adaptation of a DE course. What would normally be group discussions between students have been adapted to have "reveals." As an example, the first activity "Design in an office" asks the student to identify what has been designed nor not designed. The student then presses "Reveal Discussion" and suggested answers are displayed:

This is a much less rich student experience than having fellow students to discuss the topic with. Moodle does have the capability of providing some limited text-matching, but that would likely be more frustrating than useful (and multiple choice questions are not appropriate here).

Overall the Design Thinking course from OUUK was not a satisfying experience. There is very much the sense this is a cut-down sample of an old style DE course, with not much effort has put into making it CAI. However, some of these techniques might be useful integrated into DE courses, such as those run for the MEd. The student could undertake a small module on their own, with some automated testing. They would then take part in a student forum, and perhaps live session with an instructor. This would then be a form of on-line flipped instruction. There could be a small allocation of marks to encourage students to complete each self-paced component before the forums and live sessions (perhaps one mark per week).

Learn Something: AWS Educate

Not having much success with learning something from traditional educational institutions, I tried a corporate site: AWS Educate. This offers training for users of Amazon's Cloud computing service. One of the advantages of this service is that it offers the option of selecting where your application will run. I chose Sydney, as the only option provided by Australia. Many cloud services do not give you a choice of location, so your application may be running in a country which has laws incompatible with those of your own. As an example, Australian educational institutions fall under federal law based on the European Privacy Principles, which are not followed in the USA. This can cause difficulties where USA based cloud services are used by Australian institutions.

I signed up as an educator for AWS Educate and had to verify I was who I said I was, by providing an email address and web address at an educational institution. I was then offered options of "Build Your Course," "Skill up on AWS," "Collaborate," and "Free Access to AWS."

I selected "Build Your Course" and searched for "Design Thinking," which found 59 learning materials. None of these were full courses: twelve were lectures, eight were assignments, four were case studies, four syllabi, and five were teacher guides. I selected the first course in the list "Big Data" by Juliana Freire, New York University (2014). This provides a comprehensive set of materials, including a Course Overview, notes for four "lab" exercises, and the materials for three assignments. These are designed for a classroom based course. They could be adapted for DE, but it is interesting that the author has not attempted to do so, given that would be a way to package the materials, even for a classroom.

Grok Learning Coding Environment for Children

The OUUK course is a long way from something like Australian company, Grok Learning's coding environment for children. Grok's one-hour coding exercises on "Frozen Fractals" (Python Turtle and Blockly Turtle) is designed for an iPad, but will work on a laptop. The exercise is on drawing a snowflake using "turtle graphics" to learn geometry and iteration. Two versions of the exercise are offered: one using a visual programming language (Blockly) and one using Python.

The approach used by Grok is similar to the "Snap!" programming environment and UC Berkeley's "Beauty and Joy of Computing" (Harvey, 2012). Turtle graphics for teaching were developed by Solomon and Papert (1976). It has taken 40 years for the hardware to catch up with these teaching ideas.

The student first runs the code, observes the result and when satisfied submits it for marking. The system shows what the student's code does and then overlays the desired outcome. As this is an automated test, the student's result must be identical to the expected result. As an example, one exercise was to draw a square. I left the turtle pointing a different direction to the model answer, and although this was not relevant to drawing a square, this was not marked as correct by the system.

Grok's software is being improved all the time. Overall the exercises work well for teaching programming fundamentals. However, these exercises would only really be useful where the student was able to obtain help from a human tutor (in person or on-line). On its own, for a distance education student, the exercises would be frustrating.

Benefits and detriments of CAI

The benefits of CAI are that a student can obtain assistance with learning at their pace, without having to wait for a cohort of other students. The computer provides infinite patience, prompting the student and offering feedback consistently day and night. However, the materials and topic have to suit CAI. Design Thinking is a group activity, being about how to work in teams to come up with products. This requires the student to work with other trainee designers, clients, and mentors. The best the computer can do is to introduce the student to the terminology and provide some of the simpler responses to common learning difficulties. Even environments developed for relatively closed environments such as computer coding struggle to replace a human instructor.

The detriment of CAI is that the topic has to be reduced to a standardized format and one for which there will be sufficient students to amortize the cost of developing the materials. The problem is seen clearly with Design Thinking, where the aim is to have the student learn how to think of new approaches: a difficult task for CAI to help with.

However, despite the limitations, I suggest CAI could be used as part of DE courses which have cohorts of students and human instructors. Students would learn with CAI and then discuss what they learned with peers and the instructor, to deepen that learning. Caldwell and Gedeon (2015) suggest that even simple multiple choice quizzes can help students with deeper learning.

Mobile-Ready Blended Innovation Course, Incorporating e-Portfolios

This is written as a proposal to an education institution to offer a new course on "Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship in Technology", in a program such as the Bachelor of Information Technology at the University of Canberra. The course would make use of e-learning and e-portfolios, to allow students to obtain course credit for undertaking the Innovation ACT competition.

While "Innovation" is a skill sought after by students and prospective employers, it has been difficult to provide a satisfactory practical, hands-on, student experience within resource constraints. It is proposed to use a blend of hands-on group work through the extra-curricular competition your institution already sponsors, with and an online component added to provide a course structure and an e-portfolio for assessment. In addition to providing useful learning for your students, the innovation e-learning course may be useful in introducing new teaching techniques to your faculty.

Appended are:

1. Statement of the Problem,

2. Proposed Solution,

3. Plan for implementation, including activities and deadlines,

4. Resources required for implementation, plan for evaluation,

5. Adoption attributes of the technologies.

My company can provide the course materials in an accessible, standard HTML format, with a responsive web design suitable for delivery to mobile devices, through your Moodle/Mahara system. All materials will be provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, allowing you to use and modify the materials without further fees. You will also be able to use updates created for other institutions. Tutoring can be provided on contract for the first cohort of students, with your instructors assisting, so they can then take over.

Statement of the Problem

The University of Canberra sponsors the Innovation ACT competition, along with other universities, to allow students in teams to develop a business idea in a ten-week extra-curricular program. There have been attempts to use Innovation ACT to complement learning in the formal programs, but these have been hampered by the difficulties of aligning a cross-institutional program, with the requirements of specific degrees. Modifications to Innovation ACT to fit with each institution's differing requirements and timetables would be difficult to accomplish. Also, the project-based nature of Innovation ACT would make supervision and assessment difficult and time-consuming.

Proposed Solution

A blended mode of instruction is proposed, where the student self-studies the theory using an on-line system (using a responsive web design, mobile compatible interface), via their institution's Learning Management System, alongside the hands-on Innovation ACT program. To keep students working, small interactive self-marked tests and peer assessed group forums would be used. To assess the student's contribution to group work, an e-portfolio will be used. As part of preparing the student for the e-portfolio, regular exercises with peer feedback and assessment will be used.

Plan for implementation, including activities and deadlines

It is proposed to avoid complex, time-consuming committee processes, by conducting most consultations using the university's on-line forums. Drafts of materials will be circulated for comment and responses collated.

Activity	Weeks
Initial consultation on course	1
Prepare draft course	2
Circulate draft for comment	2
Prepare revised course	2
Obtain approval	9
Course delivery	12
Evaluation	1

Resources required for implementation, plan for evaluation

Resources required for implementation

It is proposed to design the course materials and deliver the initial course with up to 20 students for a fixed fee. Access will be required to the university's LMS and one academic to act as a second examiner and co-instructor. The co-instructor will then be expected to take charge of the unit after the first offering.

The consultant holds Workers Compensation insurance in accordance with legislation and Professional Indemnity ($10M) insurance.

The fixed fee includes one one hour initial consultation with the client and one face-to-face meeting with the co-instructor. All other work is proposed to be conducted on-line. Any other meetings required will be at the consultant's standard rate of $300 per hour (including GST), minimum two hours.

Plan for evaluation

It is proposed that evaluation of the course be carried out by the university's Teaching and Learning (T&L) unit. An outline for evaluation is provided, but your unit may use their standard methodology. It is assumed the evaluation will be carried out by unit staff, independent of those implementing the course:

This is an evaluation plan for the course "Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship in Technology." Included is a proposed evaluation model. The approach taken is based on Owen and Rogers (1999, pp. 72-73). The evaluation will be undertaken to assess the cost-effectiveness of the delivery method and student satisfaction. The primary audience is the Associate Dean (Education). The University's "Course and Teaching Evaluation and Improvement (CATEI) System" will be used. Key Questions will be:

1. Is the course affordable?
   Standard 1: The Course resource use is comparable to that of other STEM courses.
   Criterion 1: The staff cost/hours is no higher than that set as a guide for STEM courses.

2. Do students respond positively to the program?
   Standard 1: Students respond positively to the program.
   Criterion 1: Sentiment Analysis of student forum postings is positive, using the University's standard Unit Satisfaction Survey (USS).

Innovation Course Description

Title: Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship in Technology

Short Title: Innovation Tech

Level: 3rd-year undergraduate and postgraduate versions

Course Description: Innovation is the ability to find opportunities provided by technology and exploit them, in for-profit and not-for-profit existing or new enterprises. Innovation requires investigation, analysis, and review. Weekly topics introduce the materials to students. Weekly interactive quizzes and forums build the skills needed for assignments. This course can be taken in parallel with Innovation ACT, or another entrepreneur program, and artifacts from that program submitted for assessment.

Rationale: Course to provide recognition of the work of students undertaking entrepreneur programs such as Innovation ACT.

Structure: Two parts, corresponding to the skills:

A. Innovation

1. An Introduction to Innovation

2. Business Model Thinking

3. Stakeholder Engagement

B. Business analysis

4. Concept Generation

5. Value Capture

6. Documenting

Learning Outcomes:

After completing this course, the student will be able to:

1. Innovate: Prepare a plan to exploit business opportunities provided by technology, for more efficient and effective performance of an existing or new businesses,

2. Analyze: Document an analysis of business regarding functions and processes, by identifying and quantifying improvements to reduce costs and enhance sustainability.

The learning objectives are based on the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) skills definitions: "Innovation" and "Business analysis."

Workload: To complete the subject you will need to spend eight hours each week reading, communicating with other students and instructors, and preparing assignments.

Assumed Knowledge: Basic computing concepts, from an introductory university course, are assumed. The student will need to use a computer and the Internet to read materials, participate in text-based forums and submit assignments with references.

Assessment:

1. Weekly (20%): Contributions to weekly discussion forums (10%) and completion of a weekly quiz (10%),

2. Assignments (80%): mid-course (40%) and at the end (40%).

To pass the course at least 10/20 for Weekly Assessment and 40/80 for Assignments is required. Weekly Assessment does not contribute to a final grade above Credit (74%). Grades of Distinction and High Distinction are based only on Assignments.

Assessment Rationale: The questions each week are on topics to be covered in the assignments, allowing students to build their skills. The contributions to weekly discussion forums are peer assessed using a simplified scale: Below Expectation (0), At Expectation (1), and Above Expectation (2), with no part marks.

Each major assignment corresponds to a learning objective for the course: 1. Innovate: Prepare a plan to exploit business opportunities provided by technology, for more efficient and effective performance of an existing or new businesses, and, 2. Analyze: Document an analysis of business regarding functions and processes, by identifying and quantifying improvements to reduce costs and enhance sustainability. Assignments are submitted in the form of an e-portfolio, with students encouraged to undertake their project in conjunction with the Innovation ACT competition.

Adoption Attributes of the Technologies

In addition to providing useful learning for your students, the innovation e-learning course may be useful in introducing new teaching techniques to your faculty. Chatfield and Reddick (2016) apply Diffusion of Innovation theory (also known as Innovation Diffusion Theory), to the adoption of open data policy in Australia. This provides useful clues to the way other technology innovation practices may be adopted. They use the five categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

Holt et al. (2016) surveyed Australian academic leaders on the potential ePortfolio implementation in business education. Just over half of respondents (54.7%), either don't know or do not use an ePortfolio (Holt et al., 2016, p. 10). The primary reason found for not using an e-portfolio "... lack of an institutional strategy and culture conducive to the use of ePortfolios ..." (Holt et al., 2016, p. 10), does not apply to your university, with its assessment procedures explicitly supporting e-portfolios. However, e-portfolios are still not mainstream, and their implementation in a new course provides the opportunity to lead by example.

Bowe (2011), which divided technology-using faculty at a US university into three groups: 1: Innovative Everyday IT-using Educators ; 2: Experienced but Skeptical IT-using Educators ; and 3: Purposeful IT-using Educators. It is proposed to use the new course on innovation to help move your educators to the third category, regarding the use of e-portfolios.

Next: International Issues in Distance Education.

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About the book: Digital Teaching In Higher Education

Higher Education is a global industry, driving a new technological, industrial revolution. However, it is important to remember education is about teachers helping students learn. This work is a collection of short essays exploring how to use digital technology to provide a form of teaching which will meet social and economic goals, and make use of technology, while still having a place for the academic as a teacher. Drawing on work undertaken for a Masters of Education in Distance Education, this book charts one future for Higher Education, including instructional design, planning and management, catering for international students, using Open Education Resources and Mobile Learning. E-learning designer and computer professional, Tom Worthington MEd FACS CP, uses as a case study his award-winning course in ICT Sustainability and the design of a new innovation and entrepreneurship course.