Finally, student-controlled revision on Yacapaca

The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today.
Chinese proverb

I originally conceptualised Yacapaca as system that would be entirely teacher-controlled and teacher-led. That fits the market well, but I have always had a nagging itch that I don’t personally learn that way. My preference is to control my own learning, including my own assessment. Eventually I just had to scratch that itch, and the result is what I am calling the Revision Package.

The idea is really simple: just tag every question in our question bank according to subject, syllabus, difficulty level, average time required to complete, quality and core concept assessed. Then use this information to dynamically deliver a stream of questions that will keep the student both engaged and appropriately challenged for anything from 5 to 30 minutes at a stretch.

Well it would have been easy, had we not had 144,000 questions to chew through. As it is, it took rather a long time, even though we were able to automate some of that work. But it’s done now, and we launched it today.

Here are the key features:

• Matches the student’s current level in each subject
  Yacapaca uses Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) algorithms to continually adjust to find the exact level of challenge for each student.
• Matched to syllabus
  The questions are matched, topic-by-topic to the 55 most popular syllabi across all subjects. To check if yours is covered, look under the Resources tab for a Topics button against your syllabus.
• Spaced practice, automatically
  The key to successful revision is spaced practice. Yacapaca Revision uses an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve reinforcement schedule to re-present concepts to students at optimum intervals.
• 144,000 questions written by teachers
  Our teacher-authors have been enthusiastically adding questions to the question bank for over 7 years.
• Formative feedback
  Most questions incorporate formative feedback. This helps students to understand and think more deeply, and turns each wrong answer into a learning opportunity.
• Instant motivation
  Every action brings an immediate reward, so there is always an incentive to do just a little bit more.

Because we are launching late in the term, I have set the price at just £25 for all your students, from now to the end of term. Hopefully that’s cheap enough that you will be able to just dive in and try it out. Whether it works or not is really for the students to decide – that’s the whole point of student-led learning, isn’t it?

If you’re interested, log into Yacapaca and sign up here.

Classroom observation at City Academy Norwich

I visited City Academy Norwich on Friday, to observe some lessons with Matt Wells and Jez Thompson. It was a particular pleasure to meet Jez; I have known him for donkey’s years, but we had never actually met.

What struck me about the three lessons I observed was that there was no chalk and talk whatever. None. I don’t know if this is a school policy, but if it is then I approve. All the research shows that talking at kids doesn’t work; I suspect it actively inhibits their ability to learn by turning them off the whole experience. What I saw at CAN was kids on task, all the time. Some of that was Yacapaca, some was other activities.

This was also my first opportunity to observe a Year 9 Computing lesson. I was amazed and delighted at the range of tasks the students were undertaking, and the level of engagement the tasks generated. Jez had each student either working on their own task, or in pairs, on a carrousel system. I had not seen this done before in such a fine-grained way, and it was extremely effective. Students were focused much more on their own tasks than what their peers were doing, and as a result were almost completely self-managed.

My actual aim in going was to test out our (very) experimental “Tortoise and Hare” quiz template. And I’m glad I did, because results were fairly mixed and I think I would have missed the nuances of this had I relied only on third-party reports and log data. T&H has potential, but it’s a long way from ready. We shall iterate, and test again. I suspect there will be several rounds of testing before I am happy with it, so don’t expect to see it in production any time soon.

“Self-Calibration” is now a standard feature on all quizzes

We have just updated Yacapaca with what I think is one of the most profound changes we have made.

It’s called Self-Calibration. Your students will meet it as soon as they start their next quiz. Here’s why and how it works.

Charles Darwin said that “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”. You probably know students who consistently overestimate their own abilities. It is an emotional defence mechanism known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.  Students who over-estimate their own abilities are less likely to study and thus drive themselves into a vicious spiral of failure and denial.

Self-Calibration introduces a gentle but persistent way for students to build and ‘own’ a realistic view of their own abilities. At the start of each quiz, we ask the student to simply  “Predict your score”.

At the end of the quiz we assign extra motivation points (that they can spend on new avatars) according to the accuracy of the prediction. Result? Over time, students start to care about self-calibration, and to get better at it.

Self-Calibration appears automatically on all Yacapaca quizzes; you do not need to do anything to enable it. Please do observe it in action, talk to the students about it and give me feedback below on how well it is working.

September competition results

September’s competition was held over three days this week, and was open to all experienced Yacapaca users. There were three prizes (see below) of subscription upgrades. We had a better-than-expected field:

• 107 signups
• 66 entries
• 553 comparisons with comments
• 159 votes

The question I posed was: “Please explain the main problem that Yacapaca solves for you, that you have not been able to solve (or to solve as easily) in other ways.“

There were three winners, each chosen by your votes. All I did was read the results off my admin screen.

Stage 1 winner: Leah Class from Edeavour High School

Leah’s answer had the greatest resonance for the most people. Note it wasn’t the “best” but rather the one most participants agreed with. Here it is:

Yacapaca enables me to provide end of unit tests for my students without having to create them from scratch myself. I find the quizzes very interactive and like the colourful graphics which are very student friendly. I also like the way different quizzes are contributed by teachers around the country so there is a variety and different approach to the same subject. I really like the markbooks which enables me to see what levels my students have achieved and then I can feed this information into my school mark books and show that I have created assessment opportunities for my students. I have not yet created my own end of unit tests but I should be inspired to do this myself. Unfortunately time is an issue as always in teaching and in fact after a very long and busy day and series of meetings I am now online doing this and some preparation for my lessons tommorow.

Stage 2 winner: Hannah Bowen from The Appleton School

Hannah’s judgements when comparing answers were closest to the overall consensus. You may wonder why there is a prize for that. The reason goes back to why I ran the competition in the first place. I wanted to know what aspects of Yacapaca constitute the core of what Yacapaca “is” in the minds of its users. I needed to know where the consensus is, where other methods are biased towards the opinions of the most eloquent or persistent commenters. Putting a prize on this stage gives everyone the incentive judge towards the consensus.

Stage 3 winner: Derek Roberts from Downham Market High School

Derek’s comments gathered the most votes by quite a margin. When I use this software as a learning tool (typically for CPD), the comments are more valuable than the initial question answers, hence they get a prize. Here is one of Derek’s 10 comments, which I think is fairly representative.

I have selected this answer because the author has mentioned the use of the white board charting feature being used to encourage the use of teams and building a sense of responsibility to others and also that the problem solved was to find a way to test in a fun and interactive way.

So, how will Yacapaca development change as a result of this?

I’m still digesting the enormous amount of material generated, but I thought I’d share the first thing to come out of it which is the tag cloud.

These are keywords drawn from all the answers. Size indicates frequency and colour means importance. You can see instantly what Yacapaca is all about: feedback! I’m already brainstorming different ways for Yacapaca to deliver even better feedback in the future. By the way, I’ll give a special mention to the first person to spot the ringer in this tag cloud, and give the correct explanation of how it got there. If you know anything about computational linguistics, it’s fairly easy (hint).

My favourite Yacapaca resources

Some of my favourite courses, organised by subject.

Business & Economics

Year 11 Business Communications Revision: Does what it says on the tin, and does it with very high quality. The feedback is truly formative, i.e. it does not just spoon-feed the right answer.

Design & Technology

Dawlish Community College Resistant Materials: A simple pictorial quiz. The real joy is when you come to do the analysis. The questions are very clearly tagged and the quiz analysis will return a simple graph showing you which machines the students can use safely, and which need some reinforcement. A great safety resource.

English & Media

Literacy Across the Curriculum: History: Nice mixed-question, high quality quizzes that really show what is possible. And a great literacy/history resource too!

Geography

Geographies of Sustainable Global Cities: Really interesting quizzes around two of the coolest cities on the planet: Dubai and Curitiba. It even gives a mention to my personal hero Jaime Lerner.

History

Age of Empires: Well-balanced quiz on the slave trade. A gruesome subject well-handled. I would love to see more from this author.

ICT

GCSE Computing A451 – Computer Systems: Excellent, rich quizzes with thoughtful formative feedback that will work well with the brighter kids who are taking Computing at GCSE. I have my fingers crossed that this is the first of a series.

Maths

Maths KS3 baseline tests, Doubling and halving. It’s a bit of a mystery why I am listed as the author of this. I was on the team that produced the 3000 base questions, but I certainly was not the creative driver. It’s excellent, nonetheless.

Modern Foreign Languages

Irish: CCEA Graded Objectives in Modern Languages, Level 1: There is an amazing flowering of Irish language resources on Yacapaca; I am really proud of what the community has achieved here. Plenty of French, German and Spanish too, but the Irish is a really unique resource.

Performing Arts

GCSE Listening: I spent so long listening (yes, listening) to these quizzes that I seriously jeopardised the deadline for this mailshot. Even if you don’t set them for your students, enjoy them for yourself.

PSHE

Sex and Drugs: Excellent scenario-based quizzes written by Michelle Smith, who at the time was the National Coordinator for Healthy Schools. She has since been snapped up by the altogether more glamorous Jamie Oliver Foundation.

Religion

GCSE OCR Religious Studies B Philosophy and Religious Ethics: If you want proof that multiple choice questions can make you think, try these.

Science

8J Magnets and electromagnets: Author Gavin Rayner consistently tops the Yacapaca quality ratings and you can see why. This is the perfect teaching resource in one neat package.

Paid subscriptions come to Yacapaca at last

After five years of not charging anyone a penny, we have finally started asking frequent users to pay a small subscription for the service. As any fee introduction is unlikely to be popular I wanted to explain a little of the background to the decision. I also wanted to show you that if you really have no budget to pay you have other options, based around the idea of ‘contribution to the community’ – see below.

Why now?

Because we need the money. It’s really that simple. For the last five years Yacapaca has been funded by our book publishing arm Chalkface. The availability of online content generally is killing the school book industry, and Chalkface no longer makes the profit needed to support an expensive-to-run project like Yacapaca. And it really is expensive: Yacapaca is run by a full-time and extremely dedicated team who don’t have other jobs, and who have families to support and mortgages to fund. On top of that we have offices, servers, data centre fees and all the rest.

Why not go ad-supported?

Oh, yuk. I’d rather eat broken glass.

How much does it now cost?

An annual subscription gives you the right to assign a certain number of quizzes per month. There’s a full rate table at the bottom of the post. The important points are

• If you are a light user (and in a recognised educational institution) assigning no more than 250 quizzes per month, it’s still completely free. (updated from 100 qpm Dec 2012)
• Graded levels above that range from just £99 up to £300 per year.

We meter assignments rather than quiz usage because this is completely under your control, and if you go over your monthly limit you find out at the time of assigning rather than in the middle of when students are taking a  quiz.

The only thing that gets metered is quiz assignments. Everything else is free and unlimited – number of students, number of teachers, offline assignments, quick assignments, analytics, everything.

Add as many colleagues as you want to your subscription; department or whole-school contracts are fine. So you can cover the whole school for just £300/year. I told you it wasn’t going to be expensive!

Any other fees?

Nope.

I’m an author, do I get consideration?

Yes, you do. Authors are the lifeblood of Yacapaca, and your contribution to our community is fully acknowledged. Here’s how. Whenever one of your quizzes is assigned by a teacher (including yourself), we credit this back to you at a rate of 4:1. So if a teacher assigns 2 attempts your quiz  to 30 students, you get 2*30/4=15 assignment credits spread over your account for the next 12 months. What this means in practice is that if you are a moderately popular author, you won’t need to pay. And I’m very proud of that.

How can I earn credits by being a Champion?

There is another way to make a contribution to the community, and we will be delighted to reward you for it. Our Prizes! revision service is paid for by parents. Students love it because it has real prizes and teachers love it because it really improves results. Many parents are willing to pay for it provided it is championed by their child’s teacher, which is where you come in.

Read about Prizes! and if you think it’s worthwhile, become a Prizes! Champion. If a parent signs up via your personal link (requires login), we will credit you an extra 25 quizzes/month for the next year. Sign up just 20 parents, and you have already saved £99!

I need to get my subscription organised, where do I go?

Start here: http://yacapaca.com/teacher/subscription/buy/ (you will need to log in). You can buy by credit card, or download a proforma invoice that your school’s bursar can use to purchase on account.

Don’t flip the classroom – flip the whole school!

The idea behind ‘flipping the classroom’ is to video your didactic presentations and have the students watch them at home via YouTube or similar. It’s a great idea: research has shown that video leads to greater recall because students can pause, rewind, etc over bits they did not get the first time.

What can be flipped?

Here is my list of things students can now do at home, including the traditional ones

* didactic presentations
* demonstrations
* practice exercises
* essays
* tests and low-stakes assessments
* educational computer games
* and probably much more

In tertiary education, these are now routinely getting packaged up into MOOCs – Massively Open Online Courses that have been shown to be highly effective and highly engaging. Because they have many game-like aspects, they should work even better with secondary-aged students.

So what’s left?

With the students doing all this at home, you can now knock out a lot of teacher activities that are no longer necessary

* patrol and control
* taking the register
* handing out/taking in worksheets, books, etc
Now the difficult question for someone whose mortgage is paid through teaching. What’s left? Sitting in the staffroom drinking Maxwell House?

A better use of resources.

Actually, I am quite convinced that this is the wrong question. Instead, let’s ask “What else?”  Freed from the drudgery of classroom routine, how can you apply yourself to developing the young minds in your charge beyond what could have been done in the past?

What would a flipped school look like?

What I’m going to propose is a variation on the Oxbridge tutorial system. Oxbridge separate teaching into “lectures” (that can now be flipped) and “tutoring” (Oxford) or “supervision” (Cambridge). Tutoring is done in small groups of 2-3 students with one tutor, and has the key aim of developing the students’ ability to think. The tutor’s role is to challenge and to guide the discussion, whilst the students work out the answers collectively.

Organising this with just your own class is difficult: if you are tutoring 6 students, what do the other 24 do? It works best if organised on a whole-school basis. Let’s do the sums.

• Teacher:student ratio 1:20. Including support staff this goes up to 1:15 or higher; I’ll take 1:18 to make tidier sums.
• Tutor:student ratio required 1:3
• If out of every 18 students 3 are in a tutor group, 15 will not be. Each student therefore spends 1/6 of his or her time in a tutor group, and 5/6 “flipped”.

Wow, that’s an hour a day of small-group tutoring. What’s that going to do for your GCSE results?

Doing this requires a complete reorganisation of the school, and that is precisely what I am calling for. Create open learning spaces where students can study individually as they would at home – or extend the ‘study leave’ idea and allow them to study at home if that if that works for them. Chop classrooms up into tutoring spaces organised for discussion, not presentation. Give staff intensive un-learning of redundant didactic habits so they can develop their tutoring skills. And, as a by-product, watch job satisfaction soar.

So what are you waiting for. It’s still three weeks to the start of term in England. Get your sledge hammer, and go start remodelling classrooms!