Creativity in MOOCs. Esther Quaedackers Marie Postma

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Creativity in MOOCs. Esther Quaedackers Marie Postma"

Isaac Richardson
5 years ago
Views:

1 Creativity in MOOCs Esther Quaedackers Marie Postma

2 Context: Big History MOOC Big bang Stars & planets Life Human evolution Human history

3 Stimulating creativity in big history Write a little big history by: Choosing a subject that fascinates you Formulating questions about a link between that subject and an aspect of every class or video Developing the most promising questions into a coherent essay

4 Assessing creativity in big history Problem! We assess the creativity displayed in papers intuitively, based on our knowledge of big history and on our experience assessing hundreds of papers. We cannot personally assess every MOOC paper. Peer review? Computer algorithm?

5 What is Creativity? A novel and useful idea, process, or product (Amabile, 1996; Mayer, 1999) whenever a person imagines, combines, alters, and creates something new, no matter how small (Vygotsky, 2004)

6 Creative Thinking Decline Since 1990, IQ score increase ( the Flynn effect ) Creativity distinct from IQ Measured with TTCT (Torrance, 1966): Fluency, Originality, Elaboration, Abstractness of Titles, Resistance to Premature Closure, Creative Strengths Result of large study (N= ): significant decrease in creativity (Kim, 2011)

7 How to support creativity? Creativity is challenging it involves a high amount of cognitive control (i.e., cognitive flexibility) and emotion regulation Students need personalized support and training in the creative process (Muldner & Burleson, 2015) MOOC design over-emphasizes shallow procedural knowledge To support critical thinking and creativity, personalized student models need to be implemented in the digital environment

8 Big History Small exploratory pilot Structured and unstructured texts in English and Dutch (sometimes both)

9 Automated Assessment Tools Simple text analytical methods (e.g., Elaboration ~ N of words) Word count: 688 words Common words: 357 (53%) Primary Keywords: horse 26 ecosystem 8 legs 7 history 5 K-means clustering on a pre-specified set of features (Maher & Fisher, 2012) NLP techniques (Wang, Li, Rosé, Huang, & Chang, 2006)

10 LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) a.k.a. Latent Semantic Indexing (Landauer, Foltz, & Laham (1998), Dumas & Dunbar (2014)) analysis of documents to compare underlying concepts behind words (not just strings) it maps words and documents into a semantic space (order not important) Provides similarity measures Previously used for scoring of essays

11 LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) In support of the creative process (Wang, Chang, & Li, 2008; Forster & Dunbar, 2009; Blok et al., 2011) Understanding the originality of an idea requires understanding the meaning and the conceptual distance between a prompt and its response

12 LSA: Near Neighbors Theme Student Human Evolution One major aspect of human evolution has been the development of the brain. Early humans had much smaller brains than modern day humans. The brains became larger as a result of many factors, tool use being one of them. As the brain became larger, early humans were able to construct ever higher forms of complexity and this trend has continued to this day and age. Due to the development of our ancestor s brains we have, amongst many other things, come to understand hygiene and all that comes with it and developed showers and baths to maintain our hygiene. Near Neighbors: brains convolutions humans habilis neopallium homo sapiens neocortex erectus transection lobotomy -

13 LSA: Near Neighbors Theme Student Human Evolution As I said before at life and evolution: evolution made dancing physically possible. In human evolution in particular a couple of changes are important for the development of dance, the most prominent of which will be walking upright. But also the development of opposable thumbs and losing a lot of body hair contributed to the development of dance trust me, you want to wear your hair in a ponytail while dancing. I don t even want to think about dancing covered in body hair Near Neighbors: hair hairstyle scalp styling frizzed nape curl(y) criminologist shampoo tangling relaxer hairnets pincurls combing -

14 Wordnet Similarity Score

15 LSA: Pairwise Comparison cat mouse 0.34 house dog 0.02 Theme Student 1 Student 2 Student 3 Model Text x y z Similarity rating between the model document and the student s document (documentto-document comparison) Model answer created by the lecturers

16 LSA: Pairwise Comparison Agrarian Revolution Student 1 Student 2 Student 3 Started around years ago, after the last ice age. Started domesticating plants and animals. Now humans were able to use solar energy (stored in plants). This allowed them to use low quality energy from sunlight after it was converted into higher quality energy such as in vegetables and animal protein. This way humans started to control their environment and increase their complexity. Humans could now stay at one place for a longer time. This resulted in a sort of calendar where timing and planning of things such as harvesting and weeding became important. This led to a bigger role of the concept time in these social groups, which would eventually lead to a way of keeping time during the day. When humans stopped living a lifestyle of hunters and gatherers and instead decided to settle and live of agriculture they started to produce products such as grain. They stored the surplus of the products. This attracted small animals like mice and rats. Cats were used to get rid of these animals. During this period early farmers used their ability to control fire to provide fields for their animals. With regarding to a lamp, fire control is also an important feature. When the circumstances are not right, for example if a lamp gets to hot it can cause fire. Humans have learned how they could control fire. The knowledge gained in the past is still useful. Growing bigger as a state can have it s advantages, but growing to big will lead to more costs than gains. In other words, in order to become stable as a state, there needs to be a certain balance. Balance is everything in dance, especially while dancing on pointe. Not only because it looks prettier, but dancing on pointe, off balance can seriously injure your ankles

17 LSA: One-to-Many Comparison Theme Student 1 Student 2 similar Student 3 similar Student 4 highly dissimilar

18 LSA: One-to-Many Comparison Human Evolution Student 2 Student 3 Student 4 Student 1: As I said before at life and evolution: evolution made dancing physically possible. In human evolution in particular a couple of changes are important for the development of dance, the most prominent of which will be walking upright. But also the development of opposable thumbs and losing a lot of body hair contributed to the development of dance trust me, you want to wear your hair in a ponytail while dancing. I don t even want to think about dancing covered in body hair In human evolution the brains played an important role. This lecture contained a story about a scalp that was found in Africa by Raymond Dart. They calculated that the brain size was 600 cc, this is 100 cc more than by apes. The brains had become bigger through the time by evolution. Salt plays a very important part in the functioning of human brains. Brains need sodium to transmit signals between brain cells. This is very important in order to think or talk. One major aspect of human evolution has been the development of the brain. Early humans had much smaller brains than modern day humans. The brains became larger as a result of many factors, tool use being one of them. As the brain became larger, early humans were able to construct ever higher forms of complexity and this trend has continued to this day and age. Due to the development of our ancestor s brains we have, amongst many other things, come to understand hygiene and all that comes with it and developed showers and baths to maintain our hygiene. The connection between island adaptions and perfume. You could say that perfume differs from one country to another. For example in France they use different methods to create Chanel no 5, than for example in Germany or the bottle is different because of some regulations in that country. You could see that as an island adaption. Which means that for example a pygmy elephant is bigger in Crete than in Sicily. Island adaptions counts for multiple other living organisms and inanimate products

21 Summary - Automated text analysis techniques can be used for personalized student feedback in MOOC - Support of creativity by measuring originality of ideas - can be used to support peer feedback online - group assignment discussion support - writing process ( divergence )

22 Summary

23 Selected references Dumas, D., & Dunbar, K.N. (2016). The Creative Stereotype Effect. PLOS One, 11(2): e Kim, K.-H. (2011). The creativity crisis: the decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4): Landauer, T.K., Foltz, P.W., & Laham, D. (1998). An introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes, 25, Mayer, R.E. (1999). Fifty years of creativity research. In Sternberg, R.J. (Ed.), Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press. Muldner, K., & Burleson, W. (2015). Utilizing sensor data to model students creativity in a digital environment. Computers in Human Behavior, 42,

Walking upright Specific changes in chewing design: teeth, jaws and skull. Homonoidea, Hominidae, Hominininae, Hominini, Hominina, Homo

Bio 1M: Hominins (complete) 1 Emergence Hominins refer to people and our upright ancestors Characterized by: Walking upright Specific changes in chewing design: teeth, jaws and skull Taxonomy Homonoidea,