PRIMM, Replit and some stuff I did while studying EdTech with Open Polytechnic

I've recently completed the New Zealand Certificate in Education Technology (Advanced Practitioner) (Level  6) through The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (a subsidiary of Te Pūkenga). I had previously completed a National Certificate in Adult Education and Training (level 4) and had considered doing the level 5. However, given my interest and focus on online education, Education Technology felt like a better fit.

The qualification comprises three courses delivered every trimester, making it very easy to start. If you're more academically inclined than me, you'll likely be able to complete it within twelve months. I took a little longer, finding I needed a break from essays and contemplating the meaning of everything.

EDT601 Introduction to Education Technologies

This course introduces a range of learning theories, models and frameworks and their proponents, including Behaviourism, Constructivism and Conectivisum. Particular focus is given to Maori and Pasifika approaches, with Te Whare Tapa Whā, and Kakala.  Kolb’s experiential learning model, Salmon’s five-stage model and the Community of inquiry model are also covered.

Back in 2004, I was enrolled in Teachers Collage in Wellington as part of a conjoined degree (that I never finished). Back then I remember learning about these theories and approaches, but at the time my very soft and smooth brain was not really capable of understanding the point of theories, and my preconceived notions of teaching and education hampered my ability to get to grips with them. Revisiting them nearly twenty years later gave me more than a few aha moments.

The course does also introduce education technology but in a very broad sense. It kind of describes almost any technology used to enable or facilitate engagement with learning as "education technology" which while true, is not super helpful for someone like me who is interested in discovering more about specific technologies and how they can be leveraged in a learning environment.

EDT602 Facilitating using Educational Technologies

This course introduced designing for e-facilitation and e-facilitation models including The Community of Inquiry model, the Five Stage model and the Computer Mediated Communication model and social constructivist learning theories.

The concepts of Synchronous and Asynchronous facilitation were also introduced.

During the first COVID lockdown in New Zealand, the company I worked for had to pivot really quickly to an online delivery model. During the first week or so, I spent a significant amount of time encouraging tutors to adopt a more asynchronous approach to their delivery.

As online delivery was relatively new to them, many tutors initially thought conducting three-and-a-half-hour Teams meetings as a replacement for classroom time would be effective. I managed to convince (most of) them it wasn't. Instead, I proposed a very simple set of engagement points that they could deliver in Teams that revolved around three activity types – Reading, Watching and Doing.

here's a couple of quick example:

During this course, I also started a new role as a Learning Designer and given that I had seen some success, I was still very interested in asynchronous delivery.

EDT603 Leadership using Education Technologies

This last course centred on coaching models and techniques, communication and motivating people, with the goal of bringing people together to implement "Education Technology" within an organisation.

I can't tell you how many leadership courses I've attended while in my previous roles, but it's a lot. Pretty much every time the company I worked for was bought, sold, or merged, we were put on a leadership course.

I got my highest mark in this course, and I think having spent nearly a decade in leadership roles definitely contributed to that achievement.

During this course, I discovered both the PRIMM model for teaching programming and Replit, which I used as the subject of the two assessments.

PRIMM & Replit

PRIMM

PRIMM was introduced by Sue Sentance in 2017, and is an extension of a previous model known as UMC (Use-Modify-Create).

PRIMM is an approach to planning programming lessons and activities and an acronym for the following stages:

• Predict: Students discuss a program and predict what it might do, drawing or writing out what they think will be the output. At this level, the focus is on the function of the code.
• Run: Students run the program so that they can test their predictions and discuss them in class.
• Investigate: The teacher provides a range of activities to explore the structure of the code; this involves activities such as tracing, explaining, annotating, and debugging.
• Modify: Students edit the program to change its functionality via a sequence of increasingly challenging exercises; the transfer of ownership moves from the code being ‘not mine’ to ‘partly mine’ as students gain confidence by extending the function of the code.
• Make: Students design a new program that uses the same structures but solves a new problem (e.g. has a new function).

PRIMM helps overcome some of the barriers to learning programming.

Making something work, doesn’t mean you understand it.

Often coding tutorials have you following along, typing in specific instructions to create a script or program that does something. If you've done it correctly the program works and get the desired output. Getting it to work, doesn't necessarily mean you can apply that knowledge to something else, and it also doesn't mean you know why or how it works.

The first three stages of the PRIMM model are about empowering learners to explore working code to make predictions, test them and investigate how and why they work.  

Mistakes matter!

In many other creative outputs, mistakes don't actually affect whether or not the output is successful. If you use the wrong colour or brush in Photoshop, you still get a result, and I've seen many learners choose to describe their mistakes as intentional to avoid having to start again.

You've likely seen this meme floating around on the internet:

I'm definitely not suggesting spelling doesn't matter but it often doesn't prevent the message from  being communicated.

Compare that to missing one of these in your C++ or Javascript:

Everything grinds to a halt, and a beginner could spend literally days trying to find a solution.

PRIMM exposes learners to working code to build confidence before they start to modify and eventually make their own.

Replit

Replit is a free, collaborative, in-browser IDE to code in 50+ languages — without spending a second on setup.

As a facilitator, you can create working examples of code that learners can fork and experiment with. For asynchronous delivery, these examples (known as Repls) can be embedded inline in an LMS and can be interacted with. Learners can make a prediction, Run the code, Investigate how it works and Modify it without leaving the LMS.

Here's an example:

This example introduces data types, and uses variables and operators and outputs to the console.

With no programming experience, you may find it difficult to predict what the program is going to do, but you should be able to press the play button and observe what it does do. Then by looking at the code and comparing it to the output, investigate where the values that were outputted came from, and have a go at modifying them.

Conclusion

I've never been particularly academic, and I hate writing essays. During each course, I struggled with motivation and the wording of assessments that required me to keep repeating the same points. My partner will attest to my insufferable whinging about the way questions were phrased. She helped a lot with maintaining focus and powering through. Looking back, I got a kick out of seeing my grades improve, and I now have a fancy certificate framed and mounted to my wall.

I think completing the qualification as an online learner also helped clarify my interest in asynchronous delivery and exploration of technologies that can help facilitate it.