With the unpredicted global pandemic of COVID-19 reshaping the world many of us live, study, and work in, we are met with unforeseen challenges. Not too long ago, there was an enticing, glamorous aspect to the idea of remote work and online courses, but the transition for many has not been easy. Whatever we imagined it to be, it’s not about the comfort of working in PJs all day and zen moments. When we realize the demands of the workday never stop and that we must remain focused, efficient, and able to be productive under ever-pressing deadlines, the reality creeps in. Some of us are able to triumph over the difficulties and meet these demands but others are struggling. Very few of us are fortunate enough to work at home with minimal distractions, and the vast majority of us are now working remotely from home with pets, significant others, and children disrupting our hyper-focused modes and flow of our productivity.
Across the world, and in Canada and the U.S., work that can be performed remotely has gone online and colleges and universities have followed suit with their coursework. For students accustomed to face-to-face or blending courses, this may be an especially difficult transition. For collaborative, group work, students may never before have worked remotely without the opportunity to meet face-to-face, and may not have the essential group work skills to be successful much less remote work skills (Roberts & McInnerney, 2007). In face-to-face courses, the announcement of group work was met with cascade of grumbles from students as many are averse to working in groups for various reasons. The group formation process leaves some feeling left out or isolated and students realize that formation of groups relies on nothing more than proximity to others and if a student is lucky, they have a friend or peer in the class they know they'd like to work with already, and this group formation “is a crucial part of online group work” (Chang & Kang, 2015). Even more dreaded is losing control to an instructor who creates the groups. There can be imbalances in abilities and skill levels, personality clashes, and the issue of few people doing all the work while some are free riders (El Massah, 2017). These same issues that exist in face-to-face classes bleed over into online group work, as identified by Roberts and McInnerney in Seven Problems of Online Group Learning (and Their Solutions) (2007).
The aim of my venture, Hive, is to harmonize online group work for students. Hive does not aim to resolve all student group work issues, but it does aim to be an all-in-one communication and work tool, to help guide students through essential group work skills, and to help instructors better facilitate group work when integrated as an LTI into an LMS. 100% of PSEs in Ontario and 93% in Canada use an LMS, so Ontario as a primary target market for an LTI such as Hive looks promising. Timing is everything, and Hive as a venture is well positioned to make an impact. In a 2019 study by the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association, 71% of PSEs had forecasted an increase in online course registrations for 2020 and fully online PSE course registrations increased 14% in Ontario and 10% nationally from 2018 to 2019 (2019). All data and statistics on online learning, LMS, and integration of LTIs, or educational apps, have been obliterated by the mass migration of face-to-face and blended courses to 100% online. I have not uncovered a good source of information for PSEs that have moved fully online vs. those who have cancelled courses completely, but I have only read about one PSE in the States that has cancelled classes completely with no plans to move coursework online. Assuming that most PSEs will shift their learning online, institutions, instructors and students will need a solution to help resolves the issues online group work presents, as group work is such an important learning tool The singular event of the pandemic has created a fundamental shift to online learning that will change the landscape of education.
My own experience struggling in remote student work groups has inspired me to imagine Hive, an all-in-one app and LTI that aims to meet the demands of students collaborating in remote groups. As an educator and student, I am an enormous fan of group work and thrive on every part of the process: sharing ideas, collaborating, learning from my peers, and getting a chance to create something are all appealing to me. I have recent and ongoing student experiences along with varied workplace experiences working in groups, but nothing has prepared me for online group work, and I see an opportunity to develop a solution. The recent ETEC 522 OERs on AI and machine learning pushed me further toward incorporating those emerging technologies into finding a solution. Most of us select the tools we have used already and often, those tools provide a solution for one need or problem but lack functionality to solve other problems. I surveyed enterprise tools for remote work: Trello, Jira, and Asana but they are too pricey to be considered for student use. Students, instructors, and institutions have yet to find an all-in-one solution to group work, and it shows. Hive aims to fill the gap. After receiving my colleague’s feedback on my elevator and venture pitches, I revisited them to improve certain aspects: a better description of the features of Hive such as the APIs, and found more info that I could relate to cost, revenue, and my ask. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable about doing this is not knowing where to best find this information, but my reading from Adriana Neagu at Formotus lead me to believe the source I used to generate an approximate cost was in line with figures she estimates in her article.
Through my own experiences and a review of literature on group work and online group work, I came up with the issues I presented in my pitches:
Student group work is inefficient, dysfunctional, and unproductive because of:
Undefined roles and responsibilities
Communication and work occurs across multiple channels
Unguided work processes
Undefined roles and responsibilities
Working in groups with undefined roles and responsibilities causes a significant delay in projects getting off the ground. In face-to-face groups the beginning stages of group work after group formation are rough especially when there's no established relationship or rapport, and collaboration and productivity suffer as a result. It takes time to learn everyone's strengths and weaknesses and to discover who wants to lead and who wants to follow, and there's a significant amount of time that can be wasted if everyone in the group is tippy-toeing around each other and no one steps up to drive the project. This becomes a major barrier to success in remote student groups that lack the defined roles and responsibilities The idea of incorporating the personality test after group formation made sense to help jumpstart a time-consuming process that eats away at time that needs to be used more productively toward the actual work, and I think this piece helps set Hive apart, as did my 522 colleagues. I dug further into pricing and though Truity and Traitify were two personality test APIs that could be used in development of Hive, the cost per use was prohibitive, and in-house development of the an open API could be used to promote awareness and use of the brand and generate more revenue down the line.
Pricing
Truity: For a Typefinder personality test, pricing becomes available as part of the sign up process:
Pricing $4/use 1-499/month, $3 500-999/month, $2 1000+/month
(Truity, 2020)
Traitify 90 second personality test API:
“The pricing model on the API calls is interesting. You are charged $.50 per assessment. There is tier pricing so that can come down to $.30 per assessment. This seems totally reasonable, but it also means you better have a revenue model associated with it or you could end up with a really big bill without realizing it” (Gordon, 2014).
Communication and work occurs across multiple channels
Remote group work and communication happens across multiple time zones and in different mediums, and asynchronous tools used over synchronous tools are issues that can cause inefficiencies, dysfunction, and low productivity. We use what we know, and thus, students propose tools like Slack, Whatsapp, Google Docs, school email, personal email, text, Mattermost, Canvas.....you name it, and work and communication ends up there and everywhere. Students work in one tool that lacks what they are looking for in a work/communication tool before discovering another that may help resolve those problems, and then everyone migrates there. Communication or work gets missed or lost that way, and we never stop trying to find a better tool because one doesn’t exist. Hive is designed with being an all-in-one place to work and communication that solves the problem of spreading out work and communication across multiple channels and includes both asynchronous tools such as chat, messaging and file sharing and synchronous tools such as chat, video and voice calling and conferencing, and realtime collaborative work tools, such as Google Docs. Chat and email are incredibly useful asynchronous tools that students prefer, and notifications help resolve some issues with delays but do not fully resolve the issue. An AI chatbot that detects new activity within the app followed by no activity could nudge users into action. Students who don’t know each other already may be reluctant to jump on a phone call or video chat, and schedules and time zones are barriers to organizing these kinds of synchronous communication. The traction of videoconferencing tool Zoom and how educators and students are using it is a game-changer for people to feel more comfortable jumping on a video chat when they form groups, as what can be discussed and planned over video takes relatively the same amount of time it would in person, rather than over the days and weeks it takes remotely over chat/email.
Unguided work processes
AI chatbots are tools that can be developed in house with basic programming, and they take care of scheduling and nudging tasks and let workers use their mental focus to work instead of keep track of everything. Text analysis technologies seem somewhat limited, but they are developing, and IBM Watson's API made sense to incorporate in the project, as a global industrial champion with access to all the datasets needed to analyze text, and the pricing structure for API calls seems reasonable:
Pricing ($/NLU items/month):
Tier 1: $0.003/ NLU item for first 1-250,000 items
Tier 2: $0.001/ NLU item for next 250,001 to 5,000,000 items
Tier 3: $0.0002/ NLU item for next 5,000,001+ items
(IBM, 2020)
The use of AI and chatbots as an emerging learning technology in education is impressive with use cases in virtual assistants as TAs, for nudge tech, and automating grading (Gose, 2016; McMurtrie, 2018, Blumenstyk, 2018), and through my research on Girl Effect for my A1 and chatbot integration with Slack, it made sense to incorporate it into this venture.
This assignment really pushed me to think about emerging technologies and how they can be used to improve group work in blended learning and online courses. Like all assignments in the course, I had to work out of my comfort zone in thinking about user and education institution needs, marketing, graphic design, and finally, the venture markets piece that I am still struggling with. I have had the unique and surreal experience as a notetaking assistant in a boardroom on Bay St to hear pitches asking for millions of dollars during some of the last rounds of capital raises for cannabis companies, and admittedly, I knew next to nothing about any of it but was curious. And now I want to know even more, and may find a way to learn more about raising venture capital in the ed tech space. The feedback from my colleagues and from the professor gives me confidence that the work I create has an impact, and that I need to focus on improving my weak areas. All of this is leading me to seriously consider Product Design or UX as a potential career paths or skills to upgrade. As long as I’ve been in Canada, I have been underemployed and am not finding my role as a classroom instructor to be fulfilling, and this course has opened my eyes to the opportunities that await, if I am willing to chase them and market myself properly.
References
Blumenstyk, G. (2018, April 8). Can artificial intelligence make teaching more personal? The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/article/Can-Artificial-Intelligence/243023 Chang, B. & Kang, H. (2016) Challenges facing group work online, Distance Education, 37:1, 73-88, Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2016.1154781 eCampusOntario. (2020, January 23). 2019 Ontario Infographic National Survey. Retrieved from https://onlinelearningsurveycanada.ca/publications-2019/ El Massah, S. S. (2018). Addressing free riders in collaborative group work: The use of mobile application in higher education. International Journal of Educational Management, 32(7), 1223-1244. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-01-2017-0012 Gordon, S. (2014, November 18). Spotlight on Traitify: Who The Hell Are You, Anyway? Retrieved from https://www.smartdatacollective.com/spotlight-traitify-who-hell-are-you-anyway/ Gose, B. (2016). When the teaching assistant is a robot: Faculty members experiment with artificial intelligence in the classroom. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 63(9), B10. Retrieved from https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/article/When-the-Teaching-Assistant-Is/238114 IBM. (n.d.). Watson Natural Language Understanding - Pricing. Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-natural-language-understanding/pricing McMurtrie, B. (2018). How artificial intelligence is changing teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 64(40), A14. Retrieved from https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/article/How-Artificial-Intelligence-Is/244231 Neagu, A. (2019, December 14). Figuring the Costs of Mobile App Development. Retrieved from https://www.formotus.com/blog/figuring-the-costs-of-custom-mobile-business-app-development Personality Test API. (2019, March 4). Retrieved from https://www.truity.com/form/personality-test-api Roberts, T. S., & McInnerney, J. M. (2007). Seven problems of online group learning (and their solutions). Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 10, 257–268. Retrieved from http://www.ifets.info/ index.php Vasudevan, K. (2017, August 17). API Business Models for the Modern API Economy . Retrieved from https://swagger.io/blog/api-development/api-business-models/?_ga=2.102812096.1125393911.1586183211-172
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