Is it Helping Learning?
So far, NJIT has conducted two beta studies—one in the 2014 fall semester and one this past spring—to determine how students use the search tool, and whether or not it has any impact on learning outcomes.
According to the studies conducted by Dr. Edina Renfro-Michel, LPC, ACS, associate professor of Counseling, Dept. of Counseling and Educational Leadership at Montclair State University, the difference in attrition rate for students who used the search tool was noticeable.
“In the fall beta, we asked students in our experimental group to use UCS. Those in the control group did not have access,” she explained. “Though both classes are fully face-to-face, they have many multimedia resources. The difference in the attrition rate was this: Only 2-3 students dropped out in the class that had the tool, while 50 percent dropped out of the class that didn’t have access to UCS. To me, that’s staggering.”
What’s even more interesting is that in the second beta conducted this past spring, the study results were skewed because students started sharing their UCS login with the control class.
“We had to move to a hybrid study model for the spring beta because the students who had access to UCS started giving their login information to help the students in the control group who didn’t have access! So, our data for our research is a bit skewed at this point, but it’s a good indication that students really appreciate UCS,” she exclaimed.
She also noted that UCS is not an extra time-suck for faculty. “We didn’t have to change the way we uploaded our multimedia materials,” she said. “We just uploaded into the system and UCS took care of it.”
Renfro-Michel aims to have a paper published on data collected from the beta studies within the next few months.
Big Implications for the Future
Though Dasadia says the next version of UCS will allow students to search by all courses at all participating institutions, the UCS team is also working on finding search terms via text-to-speech.
“This means that a student could enter a search term and the system could locate the exact moment in a video or verbal presentation where the term was said aloud,” he explained.
Oria says that though UCS is robust (doesn’t break when used frequently), the team must now figure out how to turn the software into a marketable product.
In the meantime, building off of the technology used in UCS, a team composed of NJIT and CUNY faculty (Dr. Soon Ae Chun, associate professor, CUNY-Staten Island; Dr. James Geller, professor, NJIT; and Dr. Reza Curtmola, associate professor, NJIT) is working on a different search tool that could be considered an added functionality of UCS once it’s further developed and tested. The tool is working on search via ontology, or the taxonomy of ideas.
“Think of it as an umbrella of terms,” said Dasadia. “If the user searches for “denial of service” and can’t find the exact phrase or term match, the tool will run through an ontology of descending terms; meaning that the tool will skip down to the next closest idea to the term or phrase and provide resources, continuing to descend down the taxonomy list until something is found for the user.”
But even providing ontology-based search functionality is merely scratching the tip of the search technology iceberg, said Oria.
“The future of search, just like learning overall, is heading toward personalization,” he emphasized. “By this, I envision a student posing a question into the search system and the system giving a personalized answer. The answer will be personalized not just based on relevancy of material, but on the system recognizing the student’s unique learning preferences and tailoring the search results to that individual student; in other words, presenting the information to the specific student in the modality and format that works best for him or her.”
He concluded that this personalized search technology may be seen in classrooms within the next five years.
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