The Lexicum Cycle of Learning

This week we are at the Innovation Arabia 10 congress. A colleague here asked us about the theoretical model that we use, so here are a few words on it.

Martin, our Product Manager did a doctorate at University College London. He was very influenced by Mick Flanagan's research on threshold concepts. As part of this, he often sees teaching through the prism of Davies and Mangan's (2006) model going from theory through pedagogical principles to learning activities. This is useful both for descriptive (analytical) and perscriptive (generation of learning materials) purposes.

This theory was even a cornerstone for his PhD research. It was emoployed and expanded into a process into a model for developing serious games, following that model for both elements of both learning and engagement to build in these games.

This process can also be seen to somewhat fall in line with ideas from two presentations during the first day of Innovation Arabia 10. In particular, these are the 4 atomic out of the 5Ps (prepare-personalise-practice-produce) that Fatema Alshaer presented for developing a community of practice on education with a Moodle. It is also similar to a model referred by Khawla Bajbouj from the University of Queensland, regarding the flipped classroom.

With Lexicum, we are also applying a similar process. This is what we call "the Lexicum Cycle of Learning" and is a cyclical process of four phases, that we use in our partnerships with schools. Based on a teacher's theory of choice, its Plan and Activity phases correspond to the pedagogical principles and learning activities. In one way or another, teachers already do that. What Lexicum adds is that based on the Practice phase when students work on exercises, we record a trace of their learning journey. We employ learning analytics to convert this knowledge into recommendations that can feed into the next phase of teacher planning, but most importantly, we feed this data into a semi-automated process of generating new personalised individual activities that the teacher could use in their practice sessions with students. This way in a classroom, each student gets an exercise that is catered to their needs, yet in line with the learning objectives of the learning session.