Tag: teaching

Online Learning Trends

In the article Mapping the Terrain of Online Education, Kenneth Green summarizes the increase in online education.  He notes the increase in the number of students taking online courses and ee notes that a significant number of schools require that faculty receive training. He also refers to a Higher Ed article that explains survey results that the significant obstacles to online learning are internal rather than external.

Fresno State is moving in the direction of increasing its offering of online courses. It’s an exciting trend, especially as the focus continues to be on the quality of the courses rather than merely adding online courses just to add them.

The struggle to evaluate the extent and quality of learning in the traditional environment is mirrored in that same struggle in the online environment. How do we know how much/whether students have learned? How do we measure that learning? Which tools work best for which students? Which instructors are more effective using which teaching methods? Where are the benefits of online learning? How are they to be measured? There are a host of questions and some research to answer the questions.  A core question is how do we measure learning in any environment? If we can answer that question, that can help us determine the effectiveness of a variety of teaching methods.

Is Higher Ed Ready to Change?

Credit for this headline goes to Inside Higher Ed, an online newsletter. In the article Is Higher Ed Ready to Change? Doug Lederman, the article author, summarizes commentaries at several meetings of higher ed officials and notes that, although there are some institutions who have adopted changes, there are still many who are reluctant or slow to change.

The article lists a variety of reasons for the slowness. I’ve mentioned the reluctance to change in a previous posting. We are educators: informed, intelligent, engaged and articulate. Yet, as a group, we resist change just as many people do. Change in higher ed seems to occur at a snail’s pace. I think it is because, in part, we (faculty) prefer to analyze prior to taking action and because each faculty member must conduct that analysis independently, the cumulative effect is that little change occurs quickly.

I think of myself as embracing change, as embracing disruptive, transformational change especially, but I know that I also don’t want to embrace a change which harms my students or my discipline and its knowledge.  I also realize that although I embrace change, I still do many things the same way, the way in which I feel most comfortable. Thus, for example, although I can include audio in my blog, I still tend to post written comments and fail to include pictures. Yet the audio and/or pictures could add a richness that may not be apparent from merely writing.

I embrace change, at least, I think I do…….(to be continued…..)

Changing Faculty Roles

Changing faculty roles: change makes us nervous. How do we, as faculty, recognize and embrace changing roles? The change in roles is due, in part, to the availability of a massive amount of information. This information, available online, makes being a  content expert more nebulous. After all, if I speak of current events, and I allow students to use their laptops or phones in the classroom, they could verify what I say through researching a variety of sources (credible and non-credible).

So, the following is my suggestion for re-viewing our role as faculty. It’s a graphic insight for me–but is one that others have probably already thought about. Thanks, George, for your post about changing faculty roles on the Red Balloon Project.

Any thoughts about this diagram?  Changing faculty roles

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/)

Learning (and Teaching) in the 21st Century

I belong to a reading group on campus that is reading Christopher Hedge’s Empire of Illusion (http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568584377).

Thursday’s discussion focused in part on the differences in learning abilities now and what constitutes literacy. We discussed the public’s attendance at the Lincoln-Douglas debates to demonstrate the public’s literacy in the mid 1860s. That compared unfavorably with the nature and intellectual challenge of current political debates.  One participant in the discussion noted that the Lincoln-Douglas debates are difficult to read and understand now and this participant considers himself well-educated.

That analysis was interesting. My only comment was to wonder what percentage of people actually attended the debates and we didn’t have the answer. However, on reflection, I have another theory about it. What if the reason the debates were well attended was because that was the way most information was communicated? What if so much information was communicated orally that people who were literate were those who learned best by listening and analysis. If you consider Socrates’ oral tradition and his methods of challenging students to complicated verbal exchanges, it would make sense that those who learned best would be those who learn from listening.

To continue with that thought, what if in the 20th century, those who learn best are those who learn through reading? Those who became professors learned much through poring through books, making connections from that reading and flourished in that system. The oral lectures supplemented that learning, but perhaps we learn best from reading.

Now, we are teaching a generation of students who seem to focus best on “sound bytes” and quick flashes of visual information. Video games manage to attract individuals’ attention to “learn” how to master a game. And many individuals are motivated to follow through on video games enough to analyze a complicated game and develop a strategy to accomplish the goal.

So what does that mean for educators? As educators do we need to change how we change? How do we do that?  How do we get learners to maintain their curiosity about how life works? How to we get learners to develop that curiosity into a curiosity about multiple topics? How do we get learners to become as curious about learning as (many) are about videogames, social media sites and celebrities? That is our challenge.

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?