idajones

Wikipedia is dead! Long Live Wikipedia!

A colleague shared this link with me: Students Mourn Wikipedia Blackout.

The blog post summarizes Wikipedia’s decision to create a one-day blackout to protest Congress’s consideration of two controversial laws on Internet sites. The comments following the post are priceless and are a testament to Wikipedia’s popularity as a source of any and all educational material. Students’ “colorful metaphors” [as cursing was described by Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV] are priceless: simplistic, expressive and responses from desperation at being unable to conduct academic research.

The Journey Begins…Sidetracked by an Unwelcome Foe

The start of the college academic semester is a time for new beginnings and excitement. New courses. New students. The euphoria that comes from efforts to facilitate learning for a new group of students. And unfortunately, the reality sets in again that not every student is in the course to learn. Many students are in the course because it is mandatory and to get a grade; regardless of whether they’ve learned anything.

In his article, Cheating is Hard Work , Isaac Sweeney reminds me that cheating and plagiarism are still alive and well in academia. His article confirms my own past and recent experience: two students in my Executive MBA class this winter cheated on a quiz. Frustrating, but not surprising.

Despite those instances, I still look forward to the new semester!

MOOC

I love acronyms and this posts starts with a new one for me? MOOC is Massive Open Online Course. I’m interested in finding out about this different way of teaching and presenting course content. It’s a little bit overwhelming, because it is not “structured” the

way I structure a class. For example, I’m entering during week 6-so there are previous weeks’ work that I haven’t looked at or completed. That is disconcerting for someone my friends characterize as somewhat structured and a workaholic.

So this post is the first of many I may post about MOOC and how/whether I’ve learned, The topic of this course is online learning (in a very broad sense) and this week’s topic is about OER-Open Educational Resources. So, I’m diving in….

What’s New is Old Again-More High-Tech Cheating

In the Chronicle article With Cheating Only a Click Away, Professors Reduce the Incentive, the author discusses student cheating in the classroom using student response systems or Clickers.

Clickers have been touted as an active learning technique that engages students and improves learning. However, just as with any technique, there is a downside. According to the article author, the larger the class, the more likely it is that students will cheat using clickers. Students cheat by sending a representative to carry their clickers and record responses. And if used for homework, students consult with each other during the class to get homework answers.

Solutions:

Count clicker responses as a relatively small percentage of the overall grade (5% or less)
Have teaching assistants “patrol” the classes to search for those who have multiple clickers
Count the number of attendees and the number of clicker responses (difficult with mega-classes)

For every education innovation or technology, there’s a corresponding reaction by some to minimize effort required and thereby maximum the lack of learning. Use technology but be aware of that tension and take steps to address. I’ve previously discussed cheating in this blog.

Can I see your ID card please? Our President who is Black….

I happened to turn on the news yesterday morning and watched in amazement while President Obama released additional birth certificate documents.

It is disheartening to see that important issues, among those, helping students develop skills to become critical thinkers so that they can help manage issues now and in the future, have been disregarded by media figures who persist in attacking the president through subtle and not so subtle challenges to the President’s bona fides. It smacks of the type of racism that is most difficult to combat-racism that is covered in a veneer of civility. The following video from Rachel Maddow’s show The racist roots of ‘birtherism.‘

I hope that this is the end of challenges to President Obama’s bona fides. It is a very frustrating and sobering look at education’s failure to educate media and the public about a true critical analysis and debate.

Improving Critical Thinking in Higher Education-Possibly

In Chapter 2 of Academically Adrift, authors note that improving critical thinking is a skill that many university’s tout as one of their leading goals. Yet, according to the study, the improvement in critical thinking during the first two years of school is minimal at best—according to the authors, the improvement is statistically not above zero. The book authors state

“An astounding proportion of students are progressing through higher education today without measurable gains [emphasis added] in general skills as assessed by the CLA. While they may be acquiring subject specific knowledge or greater self-awareness on their journeys through college, many students are not improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.” (ch 2-reading on Kindle so don’t have page #)

How can that be? Institutions require that students take a package of courses and one key goal is to improve critical thinking. How is it that institutions can miss the mark by so much? Similarly GE courses have as one of their goals requiring students to write a minimum number of words in a course. Why is it that students cannot write (well) after their first few semesters in college?

I have a couple of thoughts (I still haven’t finished the book to find the authors’ suggestions). One is that faculty have not been taught how to teach critical thinking. Most of us teach the substantive content in our disciplines and teach primarily in the way that we had been taught. We presume that if we learned that way, then students can learn that way.

I enjoy critical thinking questions and challenges, yet I am not certain that I do a good job teaching students how to think critically. (And we don’t’ always agree what that means.) I try to model how we think in the discipline through the way I solve problems, but I don’t know whether I’m helping students learn how to do it or not.

Critical thinking is a skill and habit of mind that must be practiced. At the same time, one must have an interest in it. If I am giving a complex problem, case scenario or reading, I dive in. I presume that I will be able to read through it and analyze it enough so that I can understand it. I see it as a challenge to try to understand it.

Many of my students do not approach tough material or a complex scenario with the same gusto. They seem to just want me to tell them the answer and they are uncomfortable with the idea that there could be multiple ways of approaching the issue and multiple solutions depending on one’s interpretation of the scenario. They are not comfortable with the idea that I want to know how they arrived at the solution—they just want to know whether their solution is the “correct” solution.

So far, the reading implicitly presents an argument that these initial courses should be taught by full time-tenured faculty who have had guidance in learning how to teach someone to develop critical thinking skills. On most campuses, however, the faculty who tech the GE courses are part time or adjunct faculty and those faculty may be excluded from opportunities to learn how to teach critical thinking more effectively.

My theory on lack of writing ability is based on my concerns with student plagiarism. I will not repeat here what I explained in an earlier post.

ePortfolios for Assessment

I am attending the Western AAEEBL conference in Salt Lake City Utah on ePortfolios. Helen Barrett was the lunchtime speaker and she provided a great deal of information which I have compiled in tweets at the #11WAAEEBL hastag. [To find those, go to Twitter and type that hashtag in the search box.] Barrett discussed 3 points that I want to note here:

Label the eportfolio with an adjective so we know its purpose, e.g. learning eportfolio
Mobile technology is important for future technologies
Digital storytelling is more than entertainment; it’s also a method of learning

Those items have given me food for thought as I continue my journey to determine whether ePortfolios are solid assessment tool. I’ve discussed this a little bit in a previous post.

Learning More about Teaching and Learning (Or Lack Thereof)

I have not posted much since the beginning of the semester. It’s been hectic. I am currently traveling, so I have begun reading the book Academically Adrift. Note that this is a long post, so it may take more than a quick glance.

What I have learned from reading the book so far is disturbing. Some of it I knew but some of it was new. The following are my comments on some of the things I learned and my reactions.

I learned that there is an inverse relationship between the number of faculty publications and a faculty orientation toward students.

I knew this intuitively, but the book summarizes studies that suggest that faculty in non-research institutions have become more research-focused. This research focus is at the detriment of focusing on students (and teaching and learning). I believe that is true in my school-we have pushed to encourage faculty to publish. If faculty have a finite amount of time to work and the reward structure has shifted to reward publications instead of good teaching, then teaching must suffer. The one shining light in our school is that teaching-related publications are accepted now as quality publications. The benefit of that is that faculty can use the research as a way to improve teaching. It will be interesting to see whether that results in improved student learning.

I learned that the higher students’ grades in the course, the more positive the student evaluations.

I have heard this many times before. My response has been that if faculty challenge students in courses, students will rise to challenge and they will improve their performance. I also believed that faculty can have higher student evaluations in courses where they are tougher as long as the grading standards are clear and students know what to expect. My philosophy had always been that challenging students results in student recognition that they can do the work and student effort to complete the work. I haven’t read the studies to examine the parameters of the studies cited by the authors of ACADEMICALLY ADRIFT, but their summaries of those studies suggest that inflated grades result from reduced demands on students.

I also have anecdotal evidence that this is true. Adjunct faculty only get re-hired if their student evaluations are equal to department averages. Yet we know that student evaluations are nothing more than student satisfaction studies and student satisfaction doesn’t necessarily translate to student learning. In a previous post, I discussed the study that concluded that students admit that they lie on student evaluations. And if you look at Harvard’s study on implicit assumptions, one of the things that is apparent is that whether a student “likes” a faculty member could depend on factors unrelated to teaching and learning.

As I read, I resisted this suggestion. I want to believe that high quality teaching and challenging demands result in, at least equivalent student evaluations.

My belief has gone down in flames. I advocate change a great deal, but I was certain that students would recognize the value in challenges and would see that as an important quality in an instructor. Must I accept that this is an incorrect belief? I guess I must really re-examine that, because it seems to be contrary to the evidence.

I learned that grade inflation probably exists.

According to the studies referenced in the book, grade inflation is real. It seems that every generation looks at the previous one and says that the current generation is unprepared. One of the studies referenced by the authors says that student class and study time went from 25 hours per week to 14 hours per week during the past 40 years. (That includes the time spent in class each week.) This result mean either that the students now are smarter and thus need to study less or there’s something seriously wrong in education that students can earn top grades and yet study only 14 hours per week.

Disturbing. I’ll post more as I read and absorb the information in the book.

Semester Woes

This semester has been a quite exciting semester. I’ve enjoyed speaking with students about some of my favorite topics (sports & law & legal issues).

However, reality has reared its head. I’ve encountered at least two instances of cheating on quizzes. It’s amazing and frustrating to find that some students do not share the same joy of learning that I do.

Students Fail Because Colleges Fail

The Spring 2011 semester begins tomorrow, Wednesday, January 19. As I review my course syllabi one more time and ponder the weights to assign various assignments, I looked at today’s issue of the Chronicle-Faculty and read a blog post titled: New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorstep by David Glenn.

In that post, Glenn summarizes the findings in the recently released book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press). The book presents evidence, based on student scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that faculty do not demand enough of students and thus students are ill-prepared by the time they graduate. One of the more disturbing, but not surprising conclusions include students self-report that they study 12 hours per week (the Carnegie study recommends that students study 2 hours for every hour in class, which is a minimum of 24 hours per week for a 12 unit semester load).

That conclusion matches what I’ve found when I’ve spoken with students, especially those who are struggling. Many do not know how many hours per week to study and even more surprising, many do not know HOW to study.

During the past few semesters, I have included in the course syllabi of the undergraduate courses a recommendation that students study a certain number of hours per week and tips on how to study. Another recent change has been to spend time discussing how to take tests-as faculty we assume that students know how to prepare for and have developed strategies to take tests. Many have not.

The book’s basis, results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, does have the limitations that are noted in the article. However, one result should be that colleges should create a required course at the beginning of a students’ career that focuses on preparation for college-so that students know what is expected and thus can be better prepared. Another result is that faculty should not be afraid to challenge students and expect that they can do the work. Although that increases faculty workload and effort, it is necessary in order to graduate students who are truly prepared.