Digital coaching is needed for the DTA:
Do we have the technology for that?
Preliminary analysis of the functions of a digital coach in a MUVE and consideration of how some of those functions could be provided by a digital coach using current technology. Future articles will cover more functions and more details. This article is explicitly licensed Public Domain (CC0).
The Empty Classroom
Survey the requirements
- The Digital Teaching Assistant (DTA) for MUVES (virtual worlds): Summary
- A Digital Teaching Assistant (DTA) in MUVE (virtual world): What would it do?
- Just-In-Time (JIT) learning in virtual schools, maybe with DTA coaching.
- We need to know what we want from Digicoach in a MUVE
- We can start with coaching activities in education. What do coaches do?
- Educational coach
- Academic coach
- homework coach (Wikipedia)
- Homework coach (search)
- Instructional coach (search)
- Two levels:(1) improve study practices;(2) help with learning specific content.
- The Difference Between Tutoring and Academic Coaching
- Here I take up improve study practices.
- Online education, sure. But why a virtual campus? Why in a virtual world (MUVE)?
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Improve study practices
- Improve study skills, time management, organization of work, motivation.
- There is plenty of instruction available on such topics.
- The role of Digicoach would be to use these for active guidance at the right time.
- Digicoach would detect the right time from student questions.
- Or the teacher might tell Digicoach to give specific guidance.
- Ideally, Digicoach would recognize what is needed from its data, but that may not be possible yet.
Time management
- Digicoach advantages: calendars, student progress, records of typical performance.
- Digicoach can give advice such as:
- "Successful students in this course spend about 2 hours a week on the homework.
- That would be .5 hours a day assuming a 6 day week.
- I am marking that schedule on your school calendar. You can rearrange the schedule as needed"
- Digcoach can monitor homework progress and revise projections as needed.
- Frequent messages would be annoying, so digicoach would use a silent progress graph unless the student is falling behind.
- Digicoach can detect time management problems and alert the teacher
- Digicoach knows the value of distributed practice, so would advise in favor of that.
Motivation
- Digicoach gives the student a weekly progress report comparing with successful students.
- Several learning MUVEs may be available for the same unit: digicoach offers choices.
- The DTA can asses learning style and offer the MUVE best suited to the student.
- For group study, Digicoach forms groups with common or complementary interests.
- Complementary: Students learning Spanish meet with students learning English .
- Remember, on the internet everyone is 20 seconds away.
- Digicoach may be able to offer MUVEs with game-baser learning.
- Lack of motivation would appear as poor progress. Digicoach would alert the teacher on that.
Organization of work
- In the digital campus model, the DTA handles all the courses for the student.
- In time management support, Digicoach provides a calendar with the class schedule.
- Digicoach keeps the student's portfolio, with all class products (in-work and done).
- Digicoach gives the student periodic reports on the status of each product in-work.
- Class related work is organized in separate folders for each class.
- Completed work would probably be organized by subject.
- Digicoach does the organization so students are more likely to accept it.
Study Skills
- Study skills (Wikipedia)
- Study skills (search)
- 8 USEFUL STUDYING STRATEGIES FOR STUDENTS THAT DON'T ENJOY STUDYING
- Suggestions are abundant. The problem here is Overchoice.
- The JIT model calls for only the suggestions likely to be useful at that time.
- Development of a JIT guidance capability requires input from experienced coaches.
- The DTA can monitor student performance and so detect problems.
- In the Digital Campus model, the DTA monitors student performance in all classes.
- The DTA can distinguish between low performance in one course and low performance overall.
- The DTA can recognize time-management problems because it records study time.
- The DTA will also note activity during online homework and factor that in as effort.
- In any case, the DTA notifies teacher and counselor, proposing action if it can.
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- Cybalounge and 3DWebWorldz (Orientation room)
- I will be in both places, so you may need to speak to get my attention.
- Web-worlds, 3D virtual worlds running in a browser. Summary
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- Don't register -- enter as guest.
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