Open World learning

Proposal for the UTFORSK-programme

  Spring 2022   Audun Skau Hansen (University of Oslo) and Jonathan Smith (Temple University)

Projects awarded UTFORSK funding should lead to:
  • development and implementation of joint educational activities
  • increased mobility of students, including internships/work placements
  • integration of higher education and research
  • strengthened involvement of non-academic partners
 Source: DIKU

Well known fact: one-on-one instruction outperforms other approaches [*]

A long standing problem in education: how to replicate this effect in larger groups?

[*] Bloom, B. S. (1984). The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational researcher, 13(6), 4-16.
Open World Learning : an online social learning community built within the Jupyter ecosystem, promoting curiosity-driven exploration.

Key components (from left to right) : curriculum mapping, collaborative content creation, data-driven personalized assessment and integrated modeling.

Nonlinear learning:

Follow a variety of personally tailored paths towards the same learning outcome.

The thing above?

We mapped key terms in the compendium for Physical Chemistry II, written by Thomas Bondo Pedersen, and measured their similarity in some content-based metric. We then let the terms interact with similarity-weighted harmonic potentials, allowing them to equilibrate in a 2D map, and finally used Cytoscape to represent them in a responsive, Python-powered graph.

To the right we can add position-dependent content, like videos, exercises, discussion topics, and even avatars of fellow students from around the world at the same location as you.

Collaborative content creation:

Connect with other student and tutors, create and share learning content.

Personalized data-driven assessment:

Get personalized feedback based on your own and other students experience.

Integrated modeling tools

Boost you learning with coding literacy and computational thinking.
How do Open World Learning connect with UTFORSK?

  • joint educational activities
  • increased mobility of students, including internships/work placements
  • integration of higher education and research
  • strengthened involvement of non-academic partners
 Source: DIKU
A joint project between the Department of chemistry, University of Oslo and Temple University