innovation in teaching – Page 2

Ditch the Technology-Just Teach!

I love new technology tools. I’m waiting for the first truly functional house-cleaning, grocery-story-shopping, laundry-washing and folding, meal-preparing robot á la the Jetsons’ Rosie, the robot maid. I prefer playing around with my computer, my iPad, my tablet and my iPhone instead of….working. And lucky for me, my day job permits me to play around with technology and work at the same time.

I was also moved by the video produced by Michael Wesch’s anthropology class that focused on students’ lack of engagement with teaching, with learning, and with the material.

The video highlighted issues that many of us (faculty) had ignored about students’ world. And I agreed with Wesch’s focus on creating technology-based and enhanced real-life projects to reach and engage students.

Now Wesch is re-thinking his focus. In Jeffrey Young’s recent interview of Wesch, summarized in the Chronicle Article article, “A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working,” Wesch noted that other professors had tried his suggestions on technology use and had informed him that the technology did not work. In the article, Young describes Wesch’s encounters with faculty who lecture and who make a connection with students in the lecture (and who therefore believe learning has occurred). Those faculty connect with students despite the decision to forgo technology. According to Young, Wesch’s key point was that with all technology-enhanced teaching techniques, the technique’s success ultimately depended on the intangible “bond between professor and student.” Wesch’s point was that although technology can engage students, the students’ connection with the faculty helped determine student success.

I agree, with reservations.

The article does not refer to the research that supports the position that if the students “connect” through lecture that the expected learning occurs. My own research (of one, as a student in college, 30 + years ago!) supports the idea, in part, that a dynamic lecturer can connect with students and encourage them to want to learn. My own research (same standard as before!) also supports that there were some “dynamic” lecturers who neither engaged me nor fostered my desire to learn. My desire to learn in those situations was internal: I wanted to maintain my high grades so I could know enough to get into the courses I really wanted! And frankly, if dynamic lectures are truly the only significant ways to impart knowledge, I have a heretical suggestion: hire actors/actresses, train them well to express enthusiasm and “connection” and let them teach the courses! If research supported that lectures are the best/only way to promote learning, then students would succeed at much higher rates than they do now. Learning is more complicated than listening to a lecture. And there are multiple ways for faculty to connect with students.

There are intangibles that promote a connection between faculty and students so that students learn. Some exist with lectures. Some exist in online classes when students, when prompted appropriately, engage in thought provoking discussions. Some exist in face-to-face small group discussions where faculty and students examine topics. Some exist when students meet with faculty outside of the classroom. Some exist when students participate in out of the classroom service-learning projects. Some exist when students are immersed in the topic through technology or through, for example, performance. The point is that as faculty we can choose, adapt test and research teaching methods to determine which works well for students and for the faculty. And if it promotes critical thinking, deeper inquiry or other noteworthy educational goals, then learning has occurred regardless of the technology.

That’s the real message!

So yes, Rosie would be a wonderful addition to my household! But if I had a house filled with young children (as opposed to my current household that includes one grandchild to whom I’ve introduced technology and who embraces it just as her grandmother does!) I would be sure to let those children know that Rosie’s there to make one aspect of life easier, but that Rosie is not there to substitute for every aspect of life. Rosie may clean, for example, but I would want my young children to know what it means to make things dirty, what dirt is, and why it could be harmful (or useful, depending on the discussion). In other words, the technology is a tool that can be used to broaden students learning and to appeal to, or reach students. It is not a substitute for the hard work of learning (and teaching).

All in the Family: UW-Eau Claire Honors Program recognized for holistic admissions success

UW-Eau Claire Honors Program recognized for holistic admissions success.

Note the handsome guy standing on the left!

Copyright Law + Education = Strange Bedfellows

In the article, Do Students Have Copyright to their Own Notes, Erica Perez summarizes the arguments pro and con for students owning their class notes. The specific concern was that students were uploading the notes onto websites and, in some cases, purporting to sell them.

First, should students have a copyright in their own notes? Absolutely!

Students’ notes are copyrighted by the students and students should be able to do anything they want with them, including sell them (although California law makes that illegal) or post them on a website. After all, when students take notes, they’re adding their interpretations of what their instructors present in classes. This is true whether the students copy from a faculty-member provided outline or whether students create and outline the notes solely from lectures or other presentations. And notes memorialize what students heard, so they can use them to study, to study with others in the class and to help students who did not attend class.

So, why the fuss? Faculty believe that the notes students take during class are based on instructors’ intellectual property. That intellectual property is the faculty members’ in-class presentation of research (sometimes) or other information that the faculty members have developed over time and often at great effort and expense. But let’s examine that point more closely. Most faculty did not create this knowledge independently–they created it by “standing on the shoulders of giants” in their fields and building on those giants’ research and knowledge. Although the instructors present their “take” on the knowledge and the faculty’s presentation is thus copyrightable/copyrighted and valuable, that doesn’t mean that the students cannot copyright their “take” on the information. Each individual’s interpretation of the information has value-and copyright law permits that value to be protected.

This raises a larger issue, though, the issue of “knowledge” in general and the copyright law in particular. In education, we remain wedded to the notion that knowledge resides solely within the purview of the instructor. Think about it, though. According to Google, there are nearly 130 million books (and it plans to digitize all of them). As of August 2010, Google has digitized approximately 12 million. That does not include other works, such as peer-reviewed articles available in paper and electronic format. It’s impossible for any one faculty member to have mastery over any significant part of that. In fact, that’s the reason that teaching information and digital literacy is so important-it’s not only having some knowledge that’s important, it’s equally important to be able to find and critically evaluation the information that’s available everywhere.

Most of us in higher education teach behind closed doors. We enter the classroom and the teaching and learning that occurs behind that door is a secret between the teacher and the students in that course. When students finish that course, they are to emerge with greater knowledge than when they entered. And I hope that’s true. Appropriate assessment can help faculty determine whether that has occurred.

Yet access to information has changed and so, too, must faculty’s role. The recitation and Socratic method of questioning so popular during Socrates’ time was based on the idea that Socrates had “read all the books” and as he presented his oratory he questioned his students to ensure that they were “getting it,” partly because the students hadn’t “read all the books.” Now, students have access to the books and access to a wide variety of digital resources-credible and non-credible. As technology continues to improve, students will be able to use their cell phones to access far more resources than the faculty. Faculty’s role must change to one of assisting students evaluate and manage that information, in addition to passing on the key concepts of a discipline. This evolution involves disruptive, transformational change in the way faculty promote and assess learning.

And copyright law has its own problems in that it, as Lessig would say, stifles creativity. I agree. If we continue to restrict access to

information, that will, of necessity encourage underground versions of information or stifle creative versions of information.

So, should students own the copyright to their notes? Absolutely! Does that have an impact on education? Yes, as long as we continue to teach from behind closed doors. Should it have that significant an impact? Absolutely not! Let’s move past this discussion to work on institutional change in the way we teach.

Using Research on Learning to Guide Teaching: Huh?!

It seems perfectly sensible and logical. As educators, we should take advantage of the research on how people learn and use it to guide our teaching. But we don’t! Instead, we stick with the tried and true (I did it this way, I learned this way and if students don’t get it, that’s their problem!) I’ve discussed this issue in other posts, for example, Is Higher Education Ready to Change, but it’s worth repeating.

Harvard recently held a one day symposium on the issue to try to encourage faculty to incorporate cognitive research findings into their teaching. This conference kicked off Harvard’s receipt of a $40-million dollar gift. The gift forms the basis of grants to faculty for Harvard’s Initiative on Learning and Teaching.

In a Chronicle article, Harvard Seeks to Jolt University Teaching, Dan Barrett summarizes explanations of the purposes for the symposium and workshop. Barrett quotes Dr. Weiman, a Nobel prize winning physicist, who has conducted research on science education and how students learn, and who explained that faculty often teach by “habits and hunches.” This is partially because most faculty are content experts and not pedagogy experts.

Other conference speakers noted that students are changing, and that, for example, students are not as curious as before. Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaj debunked the popular belief that teaching should be designed to fit diverse learning styles-e.g. kinesthetic or visual styles. Others noted the importance of quizzing and frequent writing.

So what does this mean? It means that Universities should encourage faculty to develop evidence-based teaching practices. It means that faculty workloads would have to be adjusted to permit time for faculty to implement and evaluate new methods of teaching. It means that Universities should assist faculty to assess the impact of these new methods of teaching. The University of Central Florida has a center devoted to helping faculty assess the impact of their teaching. I’m ready to try it!

Reinventing the Wheel in Academia

Why is it that in academia we do not routinely adopt “best practices” created by other institutions? Why is it that we prefer to reinvent the wheel?

Maybe it’s the fact that to earn a doctorate one had to research and write an innovative, new, previously un-researched aspect of one’s discipline. The mindset that permits one to succeed in that environment may also be a mindset that prevents one from merely adopting another’s practices. Maybe it’s also the fact that each institution believes that its students and environment are so unique that what works for one institution will not necessarily work for another.

It is the latter belief in each institution’s uniqueness, that is the topic discussed in Beating the ‘Not Invented Here’ article by Josh Fischman in the Chronicle’s Wired Campus. In the article, the author summarizes a panel presentation by stating “There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses.”

One example of that on our campus is student evaluations. At the end of each semester, students complete evaluation forms for every course taught by adjunct and tenure track faculty. Each college in the University has a different evaluation form and many of the forms were developed by a group of faculty within each school. There are commercial instruments available composed of validated, reliable questions-yet faculty choose not to use them because, in part, our campus is so unique.

Student course evaluations can have an inordinate impact on faculty retention and promotion. This is true whether the course evaluations are composed of rigorously tested questions or not. And, this is true even though students may not be entirely honest about their answers to the questions. In my post Another A Word-Course Evaluations, I talk about a study in which one of its findings was that students lie in course evaluations. Even though that is probably true, and it is also true that faculty can (and may have an incentive to) manipulate course evaluations, faculty committees and administrators continue to place inordinate weight on those evaluations when making hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. The point here is that if course evaluations are to be used to make such decisions, those evaluations should be based on reliable, validated questions created by experts.

The point of the example is that universities should embrace best practices that have been successful and universities should focus upgrading the wheel rather than reinventing it. That would be more efficient, more effective and permit faculty to focus on improving teaching and learning.

Innovation in Academia

One of the pleasant benefits of my current position-working with faculty using technology-is that I have the opportunity to meet faculty from many academic disciplines and to discuss what they teach and how they teach it. It reinvigorates me and I learn different approaches to teaching my own subject. In addition, through this work I met a group of faculty who have worked together to write a manuscript on using videos to engage students and encourage critical thinking. The manuscript is under revision now.

I have frequently lamented universities’ lack of substantive support for cross-disciplinary collaboration and teaching. Perhaps that is because my area of expertise is legal studies-and legal studies are multi-discipinary. So, it was with interest that I read the article Communicating Across the Academic Divide in a January 2, 2011 commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In that post, the author discussed one critical issue that is a barrier to such cross-disciplinary collaboration: inability to easily communicate. The author stated, “Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting “truth”—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.”

Interesting and provocative. I had always thought that significant innovation could occur through cross-disciplinary conversations and had been frustrated by the lack of consistent, sustainable University encouragement of such efforts. But the author’s point is well taken.

While writing the article on using videos, it was evident that we each had different habits of mind and approaches to what would be required for the article. We reached a rough compromise and I hope that that compromise will result in a published article (the first submission was rejected), but my experience confirmed what this author learned: the challenge may be in convincing our colleagues that each of our approaches is genuinely valuable. My experience in coordinating and co-writing the article was positive, yet there were differences in approaches that had to be resolved. And we each had an interest in engaging students and encouraging critical thinking, so our different approaches did not prevent us from reaching a mutually beneficial compromise.

Downsides of Curricular Innovation

Does innovation mean dumbing down?

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) urges institutions to develop low cost, effective methods to deliver course content and improve learning. Efficient uses of technology are integral to that process.

But what if the technology is a substitute for professors? That is one of the greatest fears of academics-that faculty will be replaced with professors in a box who do not “teach” and that instead serve as reviewers similar to instructors in correspondence courses.

In the article A Curricular Innovation, Reexamined, an Inside Higher Education special report on a for-credit set of courses organized by StraighterLine, the organization raised questions about the use of technology in teaching. According to the article, the courses are cheap (unlimited for $99 per month, $399/course, or 10 for $999) and are accepted for credit at some institutions. The report highlighted some positives-individual tutoring and the ability to self-test for improvement and some negatives–older course materials and significant numbers of errors.

I think that quality can be incorporated into online courses. The report reminds me that we need to be vigilant to be sure that online materials must be checked for rigor. The report also reminds me that face-to-face courses are seldom rigorously evaluated and should be subject to the similar oversight for quality.

Have you ever presented materials (PowerPoint slides, handouts, exams), that had errors? Have you ever said something in class that was wrong and later had to correct it? In a face-to-face class, the only people who know you made those errors are the students who saw the materials. Seldom do our peers review all our materials and note errors. In an online class, those items are memoralized electronically in the course and thus errors can be more easily identified. Since many faculty want to check online course materials more carefully, the errors become a basis for arguing that online education and materials are inferior.

So what does that mean for innovation? We must innovate and as faculty we should be integrally involved in oversight of face to face and online courses. We have to figure out the balance between academic freedom and evaluating quality, but some of the problems discovered in online courses are also equally evident upon review of face to face courses.

Let’s treat both with equal rigor.

Accessibility and Innovation

In the article Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online, Marc Parry describes the one-man odyssey of Darrell Shandrow, a self-described blind journalism student who has embarked on a campaign to demand that universities across the United States incorporate acccessibility into their design of websites, textbooks and all other college experiences. Mr. Shandrow joined the lawsuit filed by the National Federal for the Blind against Arizona State University for its use of Kindle eReaders for etextbooks. According to Parry, Kindle eReaders’ menus are not accessible, although the Kindle does include text to speech software.

In a previous post, I talked about Universal Design for Learning and some of the legal requirements for accessibility. As I noted in that post, one of the key tenants of UDL is that instructional materials should incorporate as many approaches as possible so that many different learners can understand the material. That approach makes sense from a philosophical point of view. However, practically speaking, it is difficult to develop a non time-intensive way for faculty to implement it. I am part of a Faculty Learning Community at Fresno State that is working on helping faculty implement those principles in teaching. We are a group of approximately 20 faculty who are using the book Universal Design in Higher Education by Burgstahler and Cory to prepare instruction and/or materials that incorporate UDL principles. I have learned a great deal from that experience and look forward to the opportunity to incorporate UDL into my courses.

Parry’s article highlights a tension that exists between accessibility and innovation. Creating materials and delivering instruction using UDL principles automatically results in increasing the amount of content that is accessible on many dimensions. However, it takes time and it can sometimes stifle innovation when that approach is adopted for all new things. I wholeheartedly agree with UDL and accessibility principles, yet as someone who likes to push the envelope, I sometimes find that that approach creates barriers to immediately trying a new approach. Conducting pilots help to provide balance but that can create obstacles to more comprehensive implementation.

Sometimes, I just want to dive in when I find something new. That new thing could be a new technology, a new teaching approach, implementation of information from an article about a new theory with which I was not familiar or just something different. I dive in and sometimes I learn what others already knew, but which, for some reason, I needed to learn for myself. I dive in and sometimes I learn something new that I can use and that others also find useful. When I incorporate UDL and accessibility as a habit of mind, though, I must exercise more caution and that can sometimes stifle creativity. So, although I strongly support UDL principles and support implementation of them in my classes, I realize that I must also more carefully consider the options before jumping in. Thus the implementation of UDL has a cost of reducing innovation. Maybe that’s a cost that’s an acceptable one in light of the benefits of UDL. That’s something to consider.

Fair Use, Videos, UCLA and Educational Filmmakers

The Association for Information and Media Equipment has announced that it has sued UCLA because it allows students access to streaming video that UCLA has made available to its students. This lawsuit is the result of an ongoing battle between UCLA and this organization of whether UCLA’s decision to permit student access via streaming video is consistent with the fair use exception to the U.S. Copyright law.

It is ironic that this lawsuit was filed the week after I lead a discussion of Web 2.0 and Plagiarism at the DET/CHE conference last week. One of the discussants mentioned the dispute between UCLA and AIME and noted that AIME’s purpose (creating educational video for sale and use) was negated if educational institutions would be permitted to stream the video. Pricing models for video were traditionally based on how many copies of the video were purchased and if only one was purchased, then would not be profitable to make (and sell) the video.

This dispute is reminiscent of the issue faced by music manufacturers after digital music was available. After peer-to-peer sharing networks were created, music manufacturers could not longer force customers to purchase an entire album of music to obtain a song or two that they liked. iTunes and others recognized that there was a market in selling songs individually and as albums. Although the iTunes model did not solve all the problems of illegal downloads, it was certainly a practical alternative for those customers who wanted to obtain the music legally and did not want to purchase an entire album.

So perhaps the pricing model should change. In the article Who’s Right on Video Copyright, the author suggested that videos should be sold by the use (e.g. so that students pay each time they watch the streaming video). Another model might be to encourage institutions to collaborate to help pay for the video (through mini-grants, for example) and those institutions would have access to the streaming video. Another might be to commission institutions who have media majors to create professional videos and compensate students and others to create those videos. A combination of these and other approaches might result in educator access to videos and profits for the video producers. Reliance on the traditional pricing model when technology has changed the way institutions and individuals gain access to videos seems misplaced.

Information Overload and Innovation

In the article Information Overload, Then and Now, Ann Blair explains that complaints of information overload began two thousand years ago, when people began preserving information through writing . She explains the joy and frustrations created in earlier times in this way: “Writing on durable surfaces (like parchment or paper), with a high level of redundancy (when multiple copies were produced, whether manuscript or printed), also made it possible to recover texts after they had fallen into oblivion, so that being in continuous active use was no longer essential to a text’s transmission, as is the case in an oral culture.”

Information overload in older times included the complication of searching for and finding relevant information. Blair notes the range of history from note-taking, informally collecting information through note-taking and formally storing information alphabetically and using indexing, organization methods within books to make the information more accessible and use of bibliographies. The article ends with a caution to build on what we’ve learned about storing and collecting information as we continue to store, collect and access information in electronic formats.

The issues raised in the article are magnified now that individuals can search using search engines such as Google, can store that information on their own and other computers, can add to that information through online mechanisms such as wikipedia and can create mashups that take data (regardless of its format) and manipulate it quickly to create new materials.

As we adopt methods to implement disruptive transformational change in teaching and learning, we must remain mindful of the tension between the traditions of knowledge that have served us well and the need to help learners filter through massive amounts of information available at their fingertips. In teaching, that involves, in part, helping students manage information literacy, or the ability to review information to determine its credibility. At the same time, change often occurs through innovation and mashups and using other web 2.0 tools can help create that change. Educators continue to struggle to figure out the best way to accomplish that balance.