Hey. So what is this? We have a new color background. And this image over here, what is that? A brain cranking on something, a brain constructing some knowledge. I don't know. You can think about it what you will. But, whenever you see it, you're going to know that the video you're going to watch next isn't particularly about the content of teaching computation in a digital world. But, it's more about how do we teach or how do we help people learn? And you'll find that we're going to have an entire series of lessons where we're particularly talking about how to teach and support the learning of teaching computation in the digital world. But, we'll also have these quick short videos here at the beginning of this course, explaining about the different learning activities and engagement that we're providing for you, and how it's supposed to support your learning. And we're doing that so that you will understand and you will be able to maybe understand a bit better about how you can engage with it to help your learning. So, these are pedagogy videos. So, we're going to have you do your very first interactive reading. Okay. We're going to tell you about why we are doing interactive readings, show you a little bit about how you're going to experience them with the particular software interface we're using, and then finally we're actually going to talk to you about how we're using this new interactive reading and we're going to be exploring together how it works to support our learning. So, let's say you are reading a textbook. Where do you usually do that? Usually, it's by yourself maybe in the library, struggling to stay awake, maybe you're on your bed, maybe you're wherever. But it's a very solitary thing. And you know what happens when you have a question? I mean, where do you post that question. Maybe you have an online discussion forum but you got to keep reading. Right? You set aside some time to read. How are you going to get answer? How are you supposed to go on reading when maybe you're little bit lost in what you are. So, I feel like it can be a really inefficient process, especially when you have questions about your [inaudible]. And it's certainly very much a lonely process. So, interactive readings are going to bring three benefits, I think, to this idea of reading. First off, you're going to be allowed to ask questions immediately or even just make comments about the reading, which will probably engage you more effortfully and thoughtfully than when we traditionally read and you might have done this, right? You're like halfway through a paragraph and you are like oh! Have to get start over because I really wasn't paying attention. Yeah. So, knowing that you can ask questions and write comments, maybe that will help you be a little bit more engaged. The other thing is you should be able do it right in the context of this. Even if you were to go ask your question, maybe you know the professor or the TA, you'd have to explain like on page 77, I was here. No, you'll just be able to highlight an image or some text and immediately ask your question right there and it will be displayed in the context for other people to see. And that's the third thing, is you won't be doing this by yourself. You'll be doing this in groups. Now, the group size won't be the entire class because having a whole bunch of people commenting on the same document probably get a little messy. So, you'll find we will vary the group sizes potentially based on how it's going, but, you can imagine 10 to 15 other people commenting in that document. So, you'll not only be able to ask a question and the comments, but you'll be able to answer questions that your peers have and you'll be able to have your peers answer your questions. So, again, a way that we can make this a little bit more engaging. So, that was why we're doing it. Let's show you just briefly how you're going to do it. I think the interface is fairly reasonably simple, but let's just overview how it's going happen. So, the tool that we're particularly going to use is called Perusall and it's a really new tool. I want you know that we'll come back to that later. But the goal is to help you actually be prepared. In this case, it looks like for traditional classroom settings or lecture settings, but you will learn from the reading. So you will, just like you are now, you'll be prompted to do an interactive reading through an item on Coursera. This will be kind of what it looks like. This is your next one you're going to do. It says the name of the assignment and it says this course uses a third party tool. Okay. And it gives the name of the assignment, which is a little bit weird. But anyway, it's actually Perusall. It's going to ask you to check this box to say that you're going to submit your work. Okay. And then that is your own work and you're going to put your name in. Okay. And then you click on open tool. That's going to open a whole new web page. And this is sort of an idea of what it looks like. This is my interface, so, I have to admit I think it might look a little different but it's about the same. So, you'll notice from the tab at the top and the word Perusall, you're now off the Coursera platform interacting. But, the work that you do here they're going to send those grades back. We'll talk about that in a minute. So, you'll be immediately placed into the reading that is appropriate for this item. Okay. And we have created these readings. We're going to be copying in content. But at the beginning of each one you'll see usually a picture of me and some probable text, which is our introduction sort of like why we're doing this and what we're asking you to do so, and if you're going to be doing something afterwards that leads to the reading, we will usually forewarn you there so you can be prepared. In blue, you should always find a set of instructions that says how you should interact, you can ask questions, answer questions or comment. And it's going to tell you how many times you need to do that for this particular reading. Because our readings are different lengths, although generally kind of short. We'll tell you exactly how many times you need to engage with each reading. We'll also suggest that to get full credit you want to make sure that there was a meaningful comments and questions. We'll talk more about that too. And we may even give you some advice about this particular reading and how you could interact with it. All right. Now, we are going to look at how to engage with Perusall. So, up here, in the top, you might see there's a little purple text. I actually highlighted part of the reading that was there. And then what happens is, over here, on the right, this conversation pops up and you are invited to start by creating a conversation. So, here's a screen pull out. You'll notice that when you are highlighted, like I didn't do a great job. I've missed a couple of the letters on either end. Don't worry about that. Perusall is, the technology behind it is kind of interesting, but it may not be able to give you the exact explicit highlighting you want because it's trying to sort of find words in there. Don't worry about it. Just get close. Now, over here on the right, I have the question I asked. Here's what I asked, "Does lyft help me find services? I think that's a difference in that app versus doordash and yelp." Now you'll notice I didn't just say like services question mark. I wrote with complete sentences. I even said not just lyft help me find services, but if you read the instructions to this, we are supposed to compare the three different apps and find ways in which they're the same in which they're different. So, I particularly used the word difference to say I think this is the difference. All right. After you've added that conversation you'll see that it'll pops up, and now other people have the ability to add onto your conversation. Let's look at a couple more of the interface options you might use. Honestly, I don't think you're going to use too many of these, but this one is really important. If you come into a document other people have already been there, you can click on this double conversation window and it will show you all the conversations around and all the highlights in the entire document at once. Down here, I don't know if this will be of interest to people or not, but I'll tell you about it. You can keep private notes about the reading if that's of interest to you. So, that's why we're going to do it. That's how it's going to work. Now let's come back to this image, exploration. This is supposed to, you know, kids exploring something new. What does that have to do with our interactive readings? Well, again, I want to emphasize that Perusall is a really really new tool. I don't think I would guess less than 50 people in the country, in the United States, are using it. I really don't know. I haven't asked. But, I can tell you that when I e-mail tech support, the CEO gets back to me. I want to have some good time discussing about how I'm going to be using it with you guys in this class. And he's very excited because we weren't exactly the class that they imagined when they built Perusall. Perusall is a company, that's true. We are getting access to it for free. One of the co-founders is a faculty member at Harvard in physics. So, I really, really respect, I've used a lot of his work to improve retention and student pass rates in my classes. His name is Eric Mazur. He teaches physics, and one of the key things about his in-class work that he does is he relies on students to actually read the physics textbook before class and actually learn something from it. I don't know the last time you tried to read a physics textbook, but the reality is that we all think that basically hardly anybody can learn from a physics textbooks and there's always complicated stuff that people are struggling to understand. And if you're asking people to read something before class so that you can then go more deeply in class, which is what Eric is doing. Then, how do you help them read that? How do you hope answer their question? How do you know what it was students were struggling in reading with that book? And so that was the original design of Perusall, would allow people to read and actually understand it better and also would provide a report for the professor about what things people were asking questions about. Now, while we're looking at things that are a little bit different, and so we're a little unsure exactly how Perusall is going to work for us. I see the interactive portion still being incredibly great for our online course. But, here's the point. You actually get points for doing this interactive reading. Anything that your effort, that we think, is leading to your learning, we're going to be giving you points for. The Perusall system grades each of your comments on a scale. Each single comment will either get a two or one or a zero. A two is that as a in-depth thoughtful comment, a one is it could be a little bit more meaningful, and a zero is you wrote like "hey, cool" or didn't do anything at all. Now, the key thing is the Perusall system actually automatically scores each of your interactions using a machine learning algorithm. What? You may not even know what a machine learning algorithm is? We actually we are going to be learning a little bit about this. But, the computer algorithm actually uses some ''smarts'' to try to give you an automatic score. But, here's the point. Don't panic! Okay? They've done a lot of training of their machine learning algorithm, but they've done it a little lot on these sort of heavy-duty physics calculus kind of textbooks, and our reading is a little bit different. I've talked to the CEO about this and we're not really sure how well their algorithm is going to do on your particular comments. But don't panic because we are exploring this together with you as like is this a cool tool to support reading? Is it better than just reading things on your own by yourself. And if their algorithm doesn't do a good job of recognizing when you provide a good comment, we can override the points and we will do that, okay? So, that's the key thing to remember. This is hopefully a tool we think that's going to make your life better. It's going to make it more interactive in this online setting and give you a chance to integrate and talk with each other and learn from each other. But, we're exploring it together. So, we'll be asking for your feedback. We will be asking you to tell us how we might be able to make it work better for you.
