Syllabus Redesign Conference-Day 1

Syllabus Redesign Conference at Fresno State went well. Lots of participation. Good attendance. Participants seemed to be engaged and interested.Ida M. Jones

I learned more about writing learning outcomes and about how people learn. In an earlier post I talked about the idea of interspacing brought up by one presenter and talked about its relationship to generative learning concepts I learned about at UCLA. Deliberately creating difficulty in learning (without making it impossibly difficult) is also another concept that was interesting. Dr. Oswald from our school, explained that making learning somewhat difficult helps us learn, as contrasted to just performing (e.g. on a test).

How People Learn

So, when we have conferences, based on Dr. Oswald’s presentation on how people learn, we should split up presentations even for a couple of hours.

Dr. Oswald talked about the spacing effect and how to implement distributed practice. It is an interesting concepts and it fits with generative learning theories that I learned in the UCLA course on teaching. I cannot recall the instructor’s name now.

I wonder how similar it is to scaffolding. With scaffolding you’re repeating the info to build on it. But there isn’t the spacing that Dr. Oswald recommends. Learning how people learn is interesting….

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.

Designing College Websites

This article is very timely as TILT (formerly known as Digital Campus at California State University, Fresno) is working on a website redesign.

As our University works on the website design for TILT, our faculty development center, we’ll undoubtedly keep this perspective in mind: No Laughing Matter, which discusses a cartoon about a college websites and their user unfriendliness.

More to think about…

Academic Integrity-Cheating on Online Exams

I’m participating in a Sloan-C course on academic integrity in online courses. There have been wonderful suggestions and resources and I’ll post some of those here.

It is disheartening, though, that cheating is endemic on college campuses–up to 60-70%! It shouldn’t be surprising; after all we see examples of it in government and business conduct, but it’s still frustrating to see so much.

One clear point that’s made during this course is that academic integrity has been an issue long before online education began. I’ve stated that before and I’ll probably reiterate that point: we should do what we can as educators to help guide learning in a way that lessens the ability to cheat.

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.