 Today morning session is on Effective Integration of Visualization for Active Learning. Let me just recap quickly, first in the morning we discussed what are learning objectives, we explained the need for learning objectives and you also wrote several learning objectives for a particular topic in your class. So, the what why and how of learning objectives was something that we discussed in detail yesterday in the morning. After that we looked at a specific technology tool that is visualizations in the form of videos and animations and simulations which are particularly relevant for engineering education. So, there we looked at why these sort of visualizations might be useful, what purposes teachers can use these for while teaching in engineering classrooms and so on. And in the last session in the visualization lab what you all did is you in fact, browsed several repositories and browsed the web and found a visualization for your class, you wrote learning objectives and you all of you wrote some strategy of how you think you would use it. Here is a summary of what happened in the lab responses, I think about 350 responses were seen and in majority of the cases most of you said that you will play the visualization or show it or demonstrate it in some manner. For example, you would use PowerPoint and projector or you would play the video and so on and the role of the students there was a question in the lab which asked what would the students do and you said that what the students do will watch the video or watch the animation and asked for clarification their last doubts if needed. So, this is what most of you thought. So, now here is a question that we want to explore, we want to examine more carefully that this strategy where a teacher shows the visualization and the students view the visualization. Do you think this strategy is effective or not? So, what we will do is we will do a quick A-view poll here. I am starting the polling now. So, let us see what you all think, this is related to yesterday's lab of using the visualizations. Ok, it turns out that your responses are if not 50-50 about 20 centres say that well the strategy is effective and another 13 or 14 centres say that no it is not effective. So, let us explore this, let us examine this question a little bit more and remember what we are actually looking at is a strategy of using the visualization in class. The strategy where the teacher will play or demo the visualization and students will watch it. The next thing, the next activity we will do to examine this question is what exactly do we mean by effective? So, the polling question was left open and vague, it only asked do you think it is effective? It did not ask what is it that you really mean by effective? So, both yes and no might be valid answers. So, we will do this in a think-pair-share format and what we will do here is in the think phase by now I think all of you are familiar with it because we did this activity a few times yesterday. In the think phase all of you please write one definition of what you mean by effectiveness. So, take about 2 or 3 minutes, I have put all the phases on the same slide today since you are already familiar with it. In the pair phase what you need to do is discuss your definition of effectiveness with your neighbors because you and your neighbor might have different definition and see if you agree with your neighbor's definition and together come up with 2 possible definitions. So, this question is already letting you know that there may be more than one possible definition of what it means for a strategy to be effective. And finally in the share phase what participants can do share your definitions with your with the rest of your participants and with the remote center coordinators and the coordinator as usual can share the top 3 definitions from your center on a view chat. So, let us spend may be about 10 minutes or so totally on this activity 2, 3 and 5 or so and we will have the chat window open for you to respond ok. So, let us reconvene and look at this question again what is meant by an effective strategy and from your responses it let me read a few responses and then we will do a summary. So, some of you one of you has said that an effective strategy is something that is understandable it reaches all and it is recallable. So, you have actually looked at several dimensions that all students must understand it and they must be able to do it do the activity later. One more response is that students should be able to apply a strategy in day to day situations. Another strategy is that effectiveness is where there is clarity of concepts leading to achievement of learning objectives. Somebody else has lot of you are talking in terms of learning objectives. So, the idea we want to do here is when you talk of an effective strategy sometimes it is that students must understand that particular concept. Sometimes it is that they should be able to apply the concept in a new situation. Sometimes it should be recall the concept and the various definitions and really it all depends on learning objectives and it also depends on what we are calling as teacher's goals. So, we will see what we mean by these teacher's goals and learning objectives, but I think all of you are getting the idea that there is no single unique definition for what is an effective strategy, but it depends on what the teacher wants to do and what they want the students to be able to do. So, if you are looking and I have deliberately separated teacher's goals and learning objectives in terms of what a student should be able to do. So, let us see what is the difference here and whether all of it is applicable or only one of it is applicable let us look at this a little deeper. So, if you look at purpose of a strategy of a teaching strategy or effectiveness of a teaching strategy one way of thinking about effectiveness is that the teacher can cover the syllabus faster or by using visualization the teacher can use more technology and yesterday afternoon session when we asked you why use visualizations we got a lot of questions like a lot of answers like this. Today in fact I am happy that I am not seeing many of these because these kind of purposes or reasons for effectiveness are something that we want to avoid really. Covering a syllabus faster you should not be using visualizations for that purpose only. So, let us not discuss that part at all in instead we will look at effectiveness from the perspective of students learning or understanding of the content in a better fashion. So, another perspective on what is an effective strategy or what is the purpose of a strategy comes from the point of view of the topic. Again you may recall this from yesterday that in most engineering domains there are some specific reasons related to the topic why it is a good idea to use visualization. So, for example to make any invisible elements such as atoms, fields, internal working of a machine to make it visible you can only do it with an animation one cannot take a picture one cannot see it in real life. So, an animation is absolutely necessary to make invisible elements visible. To try to analyze motion of objects trajectory of objects dynamic changes in systems and so on again animation or videos here videos also might work could be useful. So, there is a whole set of reasons why to use visualizations from a topic perspective and finally, there is the perspective of what the student should be able to do such as student should be able to explain the reason they should be able to draw different representations of a process. In engineering especially we want students to convert between a graph and an equation and actually what is happening in the system. So, for those visualizations could be useful. So, now when you think about strategies to use a visualization which strategy should I use will the strategy be effective? What you should start thinking about is effectiveness criteria related to the topic or the content and effectiveness criteria related to students performance and then we will ask then you should ask this question about your own strategy and let us ask this question related to the strategy of demonstrating the visualization that will showing a visualization in class help achieve the learning objectives and the content specific goals that we discussed a moment ago. So, if a teacher place the visualization in the class will it help students explain the reason underlying the phenomena will students be able to draw representations of a process and before we give our own answer this is a good point to look at what research literature says because there is a lot of research on this topic on what kind of visualizations to use that we talked about yesterday and how to use it in class and what I mean by research is people have done field studies in a classroom where they take one group of students and they demo the visualization for that group of students. Then they take another equivalent group of students and they try some other strategy we will see what strategies these are and then they have compared learning outcomes between these two groups and what research has found is the following. So, here are some research results that the first thing the prime the summary of all this research is that the way the instructor teaches with the visualization has a profound effect on the learning effectiveness. In fact, this statement goes is even stronger that for even for a well designed visualization if the visualization has all the components and all the interactivity the learning effectiveness depends strongly on the way a teacher teaches with it. So, this is a summary, but the first point still does not tell us which way is better than which way. So, now let us look at the second and third point. This keeps cropping up in several dozen studies that showing demo only is not very effective I have just listed two here. And then this last point makes it says that even stronger even more strongly that the potential benefits of visualization the potential benefits that we have talked about over the last two days is lost if students merely watch the visualization. So, study after study is telling us that simply showing the demos simply playing it in class is not as effective. And if anything the purpose of using the visualization the potential benefit gets lost. So, now the next question for us to ask is well if showing is not effective what should we do instead as teachers. And again let us first use the help of research here and it says that active learning based strategies with visualization led to improved outcomes than mere view. So, I have just summarized a number of studies here and there is some jargon here we will look at examine each of this jargon, but it says that instead of mere viewing you should do something called active learning based visualization strategies. So, what is meant by it again here this is a summary that visualizations lead to improve learning only if used well. What does if used well mean? Minor demonstration of playing is not enough. So, do not let the students only watch look at this first picture instead see if students can directly interact with the visualization. So, in lab or homework if students can actually go change the variables play with the visualization interact with it on a one on one basis this it is a little hard to do this in a lecture classroom, but at home or even in a lab it may be possible to do it. So, in such cases the teacher should provide some activities. So, we I will leave this point here if we are more if you are more interested in it we can discuss it during the Q and A later in the evening, but the focus of this session is within the lecture classroom. If you want to use a visualization what you need to do is use active learning based strategies. So, in this session from now on what we will be doing is looking at several active learning strategies trying to understand what is meant by active learning and so on. So, this finally brings us really to the introduction of this session in terms of what is it that we want you the participant the teacher participants to get out of this session. So, at this at the end of this session we want you to be able to describe what is active learning and argue why it is required that is the first set of activities we will discuss. We will then discuss and identify some active learning strategies, some specific strategies on how to use and how to integrate visualization in engineering topics. And finally what you will do is design one active learning strategy for your course while teaching with visualization ok let us go on. So, what is active learning we have in the last three slides I used this phrase several times and just said well use active learning strategies. So, in an active learning strategy you may have heard this word, but it has a specific meaning and it has a specific role for an instructor and a specific role for a teacher. So, the instructor should create carefully designed activities that request students to talk, write, reflect and express this thinking. So, the main role of the instructor in an active learning strategy is not to speak. So, I am not doing active learning I am speaking a lot, but the role of the teacher is to actually create and design these activities. When we were doing activities like polling and think fair share that is when we were doing active learning. What students do is actually go beyond what they do in a normal class. So, in a regular class there are two main things that a student do. Can I give you 30 seconds to say what these two main things are? What do students do in a normal classes? They watch the instructor they listen or we think they are listening and at most they are taking down notes of what you write on the board or what is on the slide. So, when students go beyond listening and copying of notes that is when we say that active learning is happening. So, what do they do beyond listening and copying of notes they do this talking with each other writing answers to posed questions doing activities reflecting on why something happened reasoning expressing their reason and so on. So, active learning is something more than simply asking students did you understand or what doubts do you have it is actually doing all of this making them do specific well designed activities where they are engaged with the content. Any of the blue slides that you recall from yesterday or even today for example, this one that you did about 15 minutes ago this is an active learning strategy because you are talking we are writing your answer to some question you are talking with each other and so on. So, in this whole workshop all the active learning activities or strategies that we are using we have color coded the slides as blue. So, that as soon as you see it you think aha here is an active learning strategy can I use it in my classroom. So, that is what you should be thinking ok. So, this is what was active learning. So, now let us do a mini activity and part of the answers I have already told you quickly recall and shout out all the active learning strategies that we used yesterday and this morning there were about 3 or 4 maybe 5 that you used. So, just raise your hand in your class and say which active learning strategies we have used yesterday and today and coordinators can quickly type the answers on chat. Many of you are saying we did polling and TPS good aha somebody said debate excellent somebody said quiz debate. So, if I remember correctly there were 4 that we have used so far I do not know if you thought of the last point in one of the activities we posed criteria for self-assessment. This I think this was when you were writing your own learning objectives we first had you write learning objectives and then we said here are 2 criteria did you use action verbs did you start with student should be able to and self assess your own activity. So, any type of self-assessment or peer assessment you do in class any type of worksheets you do in class come under active learning on the other hand showing video and showing simulation that was also done would not count under active learning because students are merely watching they are not doing anything on their own. So, the next important question now so far what we have done is let me go back to the learning objectives. In fact, I am going back a few slides we have described what is active learning and we have argued we have not argued its benefits yet, but we have at least described and given some examples of what is active learning. So, next question is how to achieve active learning and specifically in the context of using visualizations how do we design active learning strategies with visualizations. So, before we actually come to the strategies as a teacher here are the steps you have to follow. First thing is you have to ask yourself a few questions. What is the pedagogical purpose the content centric purpose of using the visualization and we discussed this a few minutes ago when we were looking at effectiveness and purpose and so on. Is the content centric pedagogical goal is it to make invisible components visible is it to trace the motion of some object. We did not discuss this too much, but some of the participants said this yesterday that visualization like animation can help slow down processes which are normally very fast such as split second processes one can not see it with the naked eye. So, you can slow it down in animation or you can speed it up. So, for example, how do earthquakes happen the tectonic plates shift over several thousand years and finally they break down. So, this process happens over several thousand years, but you can actually speed up this process using an animation. And a large type of large category of goals especially in engineering and science classrooms is that there is some system some interacting objects and some variables are changed. You increase a value, you decrease it, you change its color, you change its position and you want visual feedback of what happens in the system when you change the variables. So, all these what if scenarios experimentation scenarios. So, for that again you can use videos and simulations. Simulations particularly are useful for changing variables and seeing the effects on system and by system I mean anything in the sense it can be a machine with working parts, it can be gas molecules moving everywhere, it can be signals traveling, it can be internet communication packets going back and forth, it can be physical phenomena such as fluids are flowing and what happens if the fluid flow is speeds up and so on. The next question you want to ask yourself is what are the learning objectives for the student. So, this since we have discussed a lot I will not say more, but you want clarity on both these questions. And once you have answered these two questions for yourself then you can choose a strategy based on the purpose and the learning objective. So, now we will see how to do so, but unless you know what your purpose and learning objective is you should not think of a strategy because a strategy depends on this. Ok. So, now let us actually dive into three different strategies. The first strategy is what we are labeling we are calling it as predict outcome. So, what happens here is that the objective the learning objective is that students should be able to predict the outcome of physical phenomena. And the visualization which is the animation or the simulation or even a video it shows the physical phenomena and what do I mean by physical phenomena it could be an experiment where you increase the current and observe what happens to voltage. It could be that the speed of a car is increased and you ask what happens to its trajectory. It could be that you change the time and ask what happens to the signal. So, there is some stimulus some input variable with changes value and you want to see what happens to the output. Before what happens to the output you want students to be able to predict what happens to the output. So, let us look at two examples here. The first one is fluid flow. So, this is a pipe it has some fluid like water the blue stuff is water and the red dots are actually the particles of the fluid. So, they have been visualized as red dots and what you can change in the simulation is the size. So, when I run the simulation you will see that this does not look like a balloon and instead it looks like a cylinder. You can change the speed of the fluid molecules. You can change a number of other parameters and see how the system behaves. So, let me just play that. So, here is the simulation what I can do is I can change the flow rate I can make it really small I can change the fluid density make it really dense I can change the pressure no I can look at what pressure it is I can add friction and based on all of these I can make predictions. So, for example one example you can say is what will happen to the fluid flow rate if the fluid density becomes much higher will it increase decrease or stay the same. So, you want to think of prediction questions of this nature. Let me show you one more example here I will not play it, but I will just describe what happens. So, in the second example in the second example the picture here I think what you can see is a man without his face. So, you can see a man's hands he is pushing a cart. So, this is a clear plastic cart here and there is a balloon which is suspended in the cart. So, what the man does in the simulation is actually pushes the cart he gives it a jerk in this direction to the left and then students can observe what happens to the balloon does it stay does it move to the left does it move to the right and so on. So, all the URLs of all these animations and simulations are included in the slide. So, you can actually go and play it and see what happens. So, this is actually we are still setting up describing what the visualization does. So, now how to use it it is a three phase process. In phase one we are calling it the observe phase the teacher place the visualization only up to the point where the problem is described where the stimulus is shown. So, for example, in the fluid flow problem the teacher will say that ok I am going to increase the fluid density, but the teacher does not actually increase the density or in the balloon problem the teacher say place the video or the animation till the man is about to move the cart. So, that students understand what is the setup it is like setting up the problem. This is very important pause and do not show the result yet what students are doing in this phase is observing the setup of the problem. Then in phase two at this point there is a predict activity call it the predict phase. So, we will ask questions to make the prediction what will happen if the man gives a push to the left right what happens to the balloon and students actually make the prediction. There are a number of ways you can do it here you can have students right in their notebooks individually or you can do a polling here the balloon will move to the left right stay the same. So, this is the most important phase where students are doing the prediction and note that the visualization is paused at this moment. When the students make the prediction there is something which we call as a correct phase students do a the teacher shows the rest of the visualization and students does a do a self check of their prediction by simply watching the result on the visualization. So, in the balloon example as soon as this teacher plays the visualization again the students see that the balloon did not move backward as they had expected instead it moves forward and then there is a discussion phase. So, again summarizing the three phases here observe predict and correct and in any any this is a very there are two such common scenarios that we do a lot in engineering what where we want students to be able to predict what happens if something is changed. So, do the pause may do an activity in the pause when the visualization is paused and then have students corrected by playing the rest of the visualization ok. So, let us move on to the next strategy which is similar, but here in the next strategy we are looking at more mathematical problems and we are calling this strategy as calculate output. So, here the learning objective is that students should be able to calculate the output or the next step of a process or of a problem for example, there is a program a computer program is running step by step. So, students should be able to say what happens when the program ends or what happens when the next step of the program is executed. So, if you are this is a very good strategy to use while doing mathematical problem solving with visualization and here are two examples I am not going to play this I am just going to describe this it is ok if you cannot read what is happening here, but you just I think even at this resolution you can see that this looks like a program here. So, this is a visualization it is an interface which has a program and when the program is run by clicking this forward button this actually has to do with the topic of pointers and variables. On the right hand side there is a table where the value of 4 variables starts getting stored and starts getting displayed. So, step by step as the program is run at each step of the program the line is highlighted and the value of the variable is shown. So, as the variables change their values when the program runs students can see step by step how the program gets executed. By the way for all these simulations I would encourage you to go and play with these. These are examples which regardless of your domain you can in fact follow them through. Another example is from this is from core electrical engineering signals and systems. So, signal transformation is a very common topic in many in all electrical engineering courses and many other engineering courses also. So, here what happens is that there is one signal and lots of things you can see a graph that is all you need to see. Number of parameters in the graph can be changed its height or amplitude can be changed its width or time can be scaled it can be broadened or narrowed. Its time can be shifted that is this entire graph can go from here to somewhere to the right and so on. So, number of parameters can be changed and the students are supposed to predict what will happen if the time is shifted by what will happen to the signal of the time gets shifted by some units or if the amplitude gets enlarged by some units and so on. So, this is really a type of problem solving where the output has to be calculated. In a way it is similar to the previous process the steps are very similar. So, in a particular phase teacher place the visualization up to the point where the problem is described do not show the result yet pause before that. Students observe the first part predict phase or calculate phase actually this should I think this is a typo it should say calculate phase. Ask students to calculate the next step of the output and do this either individually or in groups depends on how hard the problem is and you can do a small think pair activity here. The goal is for students to actually do the calculation and get the answer. The problem was in the visualization and the third phase is again the correct phase where they can where this teacher shows the rest of the visualization which has the answer to the output and the students check their answer and do a discussion of why their answer was right or not. So, in all these examples remember that we are splitting instead of showing the visualization as one long in one long session we are breaking it up we are simply pausing it having students do an activity and then resuming it so that students can check the answer to the activity. Ok one last strategy there are several such strategies I am just showing you three examples here and then you can get creative when you start thinking about your own strategies. The third strategy is actually not for problem solving as much as for coming up with explanations. So here the idea is that there is some physical phenomena which is happening again it can be an experiment and the example I have shown here is a radiation pattern. There is an antenna here at the centre and the antenna is moved it is shaken a little bit and some radiation pattern comes up. So again there is some situation where one object is changed some parameter is changed and then its effect is seen. The goal here is for students to explain why that effect happened in the sense come up with the underlying microscopic explanation. This is something we do usually in the first class in a particular topic or a first class of a module that we say if you wiggle the antenna in a sinusoidal fashion you will see a radiation pattern which has a certain shape and we go ahead and do a mathematical derivation. So in this strategy what is more effective is doing this visualization activity before you explain the theory. So as the very first activity before you even explain any definition any jargon the very first class of a particular of a new topic you can do this activity. So what you do is first you actually do an observe phase. Here play the visualization play the entire visualization so that the student sees what is happening but it is a completely new phenomena they have never encountered it before. Then there is an activity as usual the activity is where teacher asks the students to devise an explanation or a reason for why the process happened. So create your own reason there are students can come up with multiple reasons and in fact that is what we want devise your own explanation for why this happened. These sort of activities are best done collaboratively so you can do this as a think and pair. So each student first writes down what they think is the reason then they pair up with the neighbor and compare reasons and the role of students is to actually devise explanations. And in the third phase again the third phase is where the teacher brings it all together the teacher discusses the different explanations. So we call this is the share phase of the thing pair share. So the teacher says ok will this pair tell me their explanations then will the student their pre share their explanation and the teacher along with the students do a pros and cons analysis why some reason is valid why some reason is not valid. So it is not about why the student was right or wrong but the goal is some experiment is shown and collectively you come up with different reasons and then do a pros cons analysis and finally you arrive at the scientifically correct explanation. After that you can do what you normally do you do your theory and so on. So in this strategy all we are doing is changing the order in which we normally show the visualization. Typically what we do is we do a theory first we explain and then we simply demo the visualization instead the recommendation is you reverse the order show the visualization do not say anything before that. Pause students themselves to come up with an explanation and then do a discussion then do your theory ok. So here just to summarize all these strategies there is there is a pattern to all this show part of the visualization pause do activity this is the most important part because you have to devise this activity beforehand. If relevant like in the first two strategies resume the visualization where the students correct their answer or they do a discussion based on the answer that they see in the visualization and then you can do a discussion. So typically when I discuss these strategies with a group of teachers one concern that comes up is well this looks interesting but I do not have time in my class or you know this sounds not so complicated as much as how much time will this require. So I will just again tell you a recommended time and my colleague Madhuri Maan Kulwik and she has used this she can tell us how much time she spends. Sometimes you can do an activity in as little as four to five minutes because instead of demoing the visualization for three minutes you take a pause and do a two minute activity in between. So a total of five minutes is sufficient especially in the predict outcome very easy to do this as a five minute activity. If you have more time such as a tutorial session or a lab session you can actually take the activity and make that a central part of the tutorial. So do a problem solving a 15 minute problem solving in the tutorial. So it depends on how much what your constraints are and of course it depends on the learning objectives in the sense if you want students to be able to apply a principle to solve problems choose a visualization that helps do that and do the problem solving in terms of a calculate the output strategy ok. So what we will do for the next I would say here is a group activity. So remember the visualization you found yesterday and the strategy you designed where you mostly said you are going to demo it. Instead what you need to do now is design an effective strategy and we have already discussed what we mean by effective for yesterday's visualization. So the way you will do it is pair up with the same partner or group as yesterday and in your notebooks it is a good idea if you write this down. State the topic of the visualization, write the learning objective, write which active learning strategy you will use. You can use any of the three that we used that we describe now but you have to adapt it you have to operationalize it for your visualization and be very specific there in terms of your description. What are the steps in implementation? What will you do first? Where will you pause the visualization? What does the student do? What prediction question so whatever question you want students to do write this entire activity so that you can use it in your class when you go back.