Background
Overview
RiPPLE supports UQ’s ambition to facilitate active, learner-centred, personalised and social methods of teaching in online or blended environments. It directly supports UQ's Strategic Plan 2022–2025 and the realisation of UQ’s long-term strategic vision to transform our students into game-changing graduates. RiPPLE is integrated into Blackboard and can be used in any course at UQ.
Active learning
RiPPLE enables teaching staff to use live formative quizzes to deliver engaging and active synchronous learning sessions. To do this, teaching staff first set up a formative quiz. Then, during a synchronous learning session, teaching staff open a question for response. Students can then respond to the question using their phones or laptops. The teacher then reveals the correct response. This is a great opportunity to grab student's attention, help students realise they don’t understand certain concepts, fix class-wide misconceptions and provide immediate feedback to large classes.
Learner-centred learning
RiPPLE partners with students in a course, as creators and evaluators, to develop a pool of high-quality learning resources to help each other study. These resources can be in the form of multiple-choice questions, detailed worked examples or study notes. Once a resource is created, it goes through a moderation process whereby other students and instructors evaluate the quality of the resource. Only correct and effective resources are added to the pool of study resources. Incorrect or ineffective resources are returned to the author for revision. Creation and moderation activities help students think deeply about course material and encourage students to teach to others, which is one of most potent study techniques.
Personalised learning
As students study on the platform, RiPPLE models their current level of knowledge on each course topic. The system then uses this model to recommend study resources catered to the learner’s current needs. For example, if a student is competent in course material regarding multiplication but a novice in material around algebra – the system will recommend more beginner algebra resources, and less (but advanced) multiplication resources. In this way, students are receiving a study session personalised to what they need to learn and at their current level of difficulty. This offers students a more efficient and effective study session. The same model the system uses to recommend study resources is also available to students to view. This is known as an open learner model (OLM). This has two benefits: 1) it gives students an understanding of why the system is recommending them certain resources and 2) more importantly, it helps students make an accurate judgement of their learning.
Process
Phase 1: Development of prototype (completed in 2018)
A prototype of the RiPPLE platform was built in 2018 with input from key stakeholder groups including the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Learning Analytics, Information Technology Services, eLearning, and faculty representatives.
Phase 2: Roll-out/implementation (underway)
As of February 2020, RiPPLE has been piloted across 16 courses at UQ with over 10,000 resources created and 450,000 attempts on resources. The agile development methodology adopted by the RiPPLE Project Team has allowed for continued feedback to be addressed at regular release intervals.
Phase 3: Whole-of-UQ deployment (July 2020 onwards)
From Semester 2 2020, RiPPLE will be available for use across all UQ courses. The deployment will be supported by ITS and eLearning.
Governance
Staff engagement
RiPPLE has been developed in partnership with UQ staff and students. Over 5500 users have piloted RiPPLE in 16 courses and contributed feedback to further enhance the functionality of the dashboard. The RiPPLE project team welcomes all feedback, ideas, and recommendations to improve the platform to better support your teaching. Contact the project team via email to ripple@uq.edu.au
Timeline and milestones
Between now and Semester 2, 2020, the pilot of RiPPLE will be extended to include seven (7) new courses. Enhancements to the platform will be made at regular release intervals based on feedback from pilot participants.