Meeting User’s Needs While Driving Engagement, Reflection, and Learning with Custom Built Learning Apps in the LMS.

In life, we’re always looking for the right tool for the job at hand, but often we’re not happy with the options at our disposal. You could roller-skate from New York to California instead of flying or eat cereal with a garden shovel instead of a spoon, but those are far from ideal options to accomplish the goal. The same is often true for the options available to faculty and students inside of Learning Management Systems. There are many tools available but they’ve generally all been built to cover dozens of different use-cases which creates a lot of excess and confusion. This can be paralyzing and often leads users to throw their hands up and walk away in defeat without ever taking the first step. We all want simple, reliable, and elegant solutions, and we want them at our fingertips. Most LMSs have a similar toolset that covers the necessary bases, but faculty and pedagogical needs are changing: it is now more important to create a suite of easy-to-build tools that meets the specific needs of a few, rather than the overwhelming, general needs of all. Instead of naively believing we can build a tool that every faculty and student will desire and benefit from, which would inevitably become incredibly complicated to use, users would be better served if we focused on building 20 small learning apps that solve their individual needs really well.

The Office of Learning at the University of Dayton was tired of recommending the wrong tool for the job or waiting on innovation to happen outside of its campus so it set off to build a web-based App Store in early 2018. The App Store allows faculty to view a list of niche ‘Learning Apps’ that can be easily added to their course sites on the campus Learning Management System and live within existing content. Each Learning App is scoped to be relatively small, easy-to-use, and designed to assist faculty and students in completing a particular course task (e.g., – guiding reflection, collecting feedback, sharing images, building flashcards, creating inactive videos, etc…). The apps fill technology gaps in the LMS but aren’t necessarily meant to be revolutionary by themselves. Their benefit is that they live in a place where users already are – the LMS. Using the integrated App Store approach, users don’t even realize the apps aren’t natively part of the LMS, feel like they’re getting bounced around to many different sites, or have to maintain multiple accounts. The best part is that they’re relatively simple to build if you know PHP which means a simple idea can move from conception to production-ready in as little as a few days.

The University of Dayton is using the open-source Tsugi Framework (www.tsugi.org) created by Dr. Charles Severance from the University of Michigan to build its learning apps and integrate them into its local LMS (Sakai) for easy use by faculty and students.

The App Store at the University of Dayton currently contains the following Learning Apps that faculty are quickly embracing with many more already in the planning stages:

1. Quick Write – Ask questions and easily collect and review typed responses from students
2. Pre/Post Reflection – Students answer a question before and after an activity or module and then reflect on what they’ve learned.
3. Quick Quiz – Simple quizzing app for formative assessments.
4. Topic Selector – The instructor sets up topics or groups that students can sign up for.
5. Photo Gallery – Users collaborate to build a collection of pictures available to everyone in the class
6. Study Questions – Students add questions and answers that other students can use to study. Questions can be voted up or down and instructors can provide additional detail to the answers.
7. Interactive Video Quiz – An instructor can add questions to a YouTube or Warpwire video that will pop up as a student watches. Students must answer the question before the video can proceed further.
8. Emoji Ratings – Collect ‘confidence-level’ or ‘feeling-based’ feedback from students using a visual emoji scale
9. Simple Certificate – Create and award simple, yet attractive, printable certificates that students can earn.
10. Randomly – management tool to help faculty randomly create groups, select students, or order their class rosters for class activities.
11. Class Notes – students can upload and share their class notes with each other while the instructor can provide comments and clarity on them when needed.
12. Flashcards – Create interactive flashcards that students can use as study aids

The App Store approach was the University of Dayton’s first step towards embracing a NGDLE (Next Generation Digital Learning Environment) approach that began with EDUCASE in 2015. NGDLE is a move away from bloated Learning Management Systems, which attempt to include every feature under the sun, to a distributed component-based ecosystem approach with seamless integrations. Learning Management Systems aren’t going anywhere in the near future but it’s very conceivable that one day they’ll just become a central launch point for technologies all over the web. UD's approach to Learning Apps means that these apps can be shared worldwide (interoperability and integration) while still personalizing the tools to the user or the institution. The NGDLE mindset permeates the learning app design and results in an advanced learning and teaching environment.

This presentation will showcase the learning apps currently in production at the university, the design process, how they’ve been marketed to gain popularity and share the feedback received from faculty and students. Q&A will be encouraged throughout and at the end of the presentation. Participants will be encouraged to think about and share potential learning apps that could be useful to their work/institutions. They will also be shown how they can begin using some of the Learning Apps immediately at their local institutions.