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Record W7125516164 · doi:10.22582/ta.v14i2.769

Virtual Mystery Webtool: Collaborative Critical Thinking with Online Hybridised Problem-Based Learning

2025· article· W7125516164 on OpenAlex
Stephanie Shishis, Sherry Fukuzawa, Courtneay Hopper

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueTeaching Anthropology · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicInnovative Teaching Methodologies in Social Sciences
Canadian institutionsUniversity of AlbertaUniversity of Toronto
FundersUniversity of Toronto MississaugaUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsCritical thinkingLikert scaleExperiential learningVariety (cybernetics)CurriculumStudent engagementVirtual learning environmentClass (philosophy)Blended learningActive learning (machine learning)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Integration of digital technologies in post-secondary curricula has increased since its widespread implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic (Strielkowski, 2020; Sukula et al., 2020). The Virtual Mystery (VM) webtool is an online asynchronous hybridised problem-based learning webtool designed to provide cost-effective small group collaborations for large in-person courses. The practical and unique nature of each mystery promotes collaborative critical thinking and self-directed learning. The VM webtool facilitates experiential learning and has demonstrated success in large introductory Anthropology courses (Fukuzawa et al., 2021). In this study, we examine the effectiveness of the VM webtool in a variety of different course disciplines with smaller class sizes in both online and in-person course modalities. Quantitative data of student rankings on five-point Likert scale and qualitative responses from open-ended questions were collected in post-course surveys across four undergraduate courses which included Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, Psychology, and Forensic Toxicology. The results demonstrate positive responses for the content and problem-based learning application of the VM webtool across disciplines and course levels. Student responses highlighted the need for updated technological solutions to enhance student communication in the VM webtool, leading to a larger discussion on challenges of sustainability with online applications in the digital age.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.019
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.027
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.760
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0190.027
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.003
Science and technology studies0.0160.024
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.040
GPT teacher head0.425
Teacher spread0.385 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it