Category: teaching with technology

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Ok, so Shakespeare might not have tweeted, but it has a nice ring to it.

Students who tweeted earned higher grades than students who did not in a particular class? It sounds like heresey, except that when you read this article in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning which summarizes an experimental study on use of Twitter in the classroom you see that the instructor used Twitter as a means to facilitate communication about classwork and class requirements. Twitter served as a non-LMS based system for communicating annoucements. Those results are consistent with the idea that those who participate more and access course materials more regularly will be more successful.

The study’s author conducted the end of course survey using NSSE’s student engagement survey and analyzed student active engagement based on Chickering and Gamsons 7 Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. Interesting use of social media to inform and engage students.

Cheating-online and face to face

Proctoring exams is the most effective way to prevent cheating on exams, whether the exams are part of a face to face or an online program. This is the conclusion according to the summary of a meta-study on cheating featured in an article, Proctor or Gamble, in today’s issue of Inside Higher Education.

Not surprisingly, the issue can be a more significant issue in online courses that rely solely or primarily on the results of multiple choice exams to determine the grade earned by a student. This study confirms what many who teach online already knew: multiple choice/true-false exams should not be a significant portion of the overall grade for an online course. Those items should be used for self-study and self-tests, but not to determine the course grade. Teaching online requires re-assessing how to assess. Business as usual is not as effective.

Teaching Backwards

I’m attending the Educause conference in Anaheim and listening to Gershenfield who taught a class called “How to Make (Almost) Anything” in which he asked students to come to class a build something. Student started the class with varying amounts of technical skill. He said the best time to get someone to “teach” something is when they first learn it. So, students who learned something that others’ needed to know would teach it over and over again, excitedly, because they were excited about what they had learned. At the end of the course, students had built projects.

What’s interesting about the conversation is the students learned as they needed-they didn’t start with a foundation of knowledge. Yet, they learned what they needed, and he used that methodology in places throughout the world. He asked the question whether MIT was obsolete. His answer: Not yet. Is that a question we should ask in education? And what can we do about it?

More information: Article How to Make (Almost) Anything (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/01/30/how_to_make_almost_anything/)

Sample class with the Fab Lab (http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MIT/863.08/)

Preparing for Syllabus Redesign Conference

I’ve been away for awhile. I made a presentation at the Academy of Legal Studies in Business. One was about attorney client privilege for corporations under criminal investigation and the other was as part of a panel of business law professors who teach online. The presentation can be found here: 2010ALSB_onlinetchfnl080710 and is also loaded on slideshare.net.

It’s interesting how involvement in online teaching varies from profession to profession. I’ve been so immersed, I’d forgotten that there are many who do not teach online and many who do not teach using technology.

I’ve also been working on the syllabus redesign conference for Fresno State on August 12 and 13. I’ve mostly been involved with organizing the faculty presenters to submit materials, references and other information to make the presentations as useful as possible. So far, a significant number of faculty have signed up and are interested in making their course syllabi more accessible and tying course learning outcomes to department and school outcomes. It’s exciting. It’s also interesting to work on coordinating part of the technology back end that makes this so interesting.

Academic Integrity

I’m attending an online class taught through Sloan-C on Academic Integrity in online classes.

I’m learning a great deal, and thought I’d pass on a couple of items.

One is that even those using online discussion boards should take care to change assignments every semester. According to Melissa Ott, who wrote this article:Seven Strategies for Plagiarism-proofing Discussion Threads in Online Courses http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no2/olt_0609.pdf, there are websites where students can purchase answers to discussion board questions, e.g. www.studentoffortune.com . The site calls them tutorials, but students can get answers there.

A second, which I knew already, was to be sure to either use huge test banks or value objective questions as a relatively small percentage of a student’s overall grade in an online course.

A third is to introduce academic integrity into an online course through a letter to students. I think I’ll do that for face to face and online courses.

Course Redesign

According to a National Center for Course Redesign report, many schools have had success with redesigning math courses using math labs–success as measured by increased completion rates for math classes and cost savings.  (The Course of Innovation: Using Technology to Transform Higher Education) Yet few schools have taken that success and used it to transform other courses within their institutions. Why is that? Why haven’t educators/administrators adopted innovative, technology based models for other courses? Is it the initial cost? Is it lack of knowledge? Is it reluctance to innovate? Aversion to change?

Multi-tasking

According to the author of Learning to Teach Through Video we cannot process 3 different instructional mediums at the same time. Thus, a screen cast needs narration and picture or text and a picture, but not narration, text and a picture.

How does that affect our accessibility push? I guess it means that one section should be a base and the other sections should be optional. In other words, the picture (for example) would be the base and individuals can choose between narration and text.