Monthly Archive for January, 2007

Observation on U2.0 Teaching

In the last post I made some observations about how teaching in a U2.0 environment differs from traditional teaching. Here’s another one.

When more of the responsibility for learning is put on the students, in addition to the teacher spending more time answering questions than presenting material, he or she also spends more time assessing student work. At least that’s been the case with me over the last few years. I don’t mean I spend more time grading per se; rather I spend a lot more of my time checking to see that students are on track. For example, using just-in-time teaching methods students read the material and complete a formative assessment. The results of the assessment inform how the instructor spends his or her time in the classroom.

Students need to know if they’re off track before formal (and high value) exams. If the teacher doesn’t regularly supervise the assessment students are doing, the system breaks down. Using this approach, the purpose of exams is not to punish students who haven’t learned, but rather to affirm that learning has taken place. This is analogous to a thesis defense–a careful supervisor would never schedule the defense unless he or she was certain the student will pass.

Reflections from the ELI

Published on January 25, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

For the last few days, I been attending the 2007 Educause Learning Initiative in Atlanta. Here are my stray thoughts from the various sessions.

Chris Dede: “What kids do for fun outside the classroom looks more like 21st Century work than what goes on inside the classroom.”

Gardner Campbell: Can we make education (real school) meaningful to students, not merely a set of tasks to be completed, hurdles to be crossed? Can we convince students that meaning is possible?

Jerry Slezak: As more and more teachers ask students to blog, might the current powerful effects of blogging lose their power?

Perhaps the solution to this potential problem is for teachers to think carefully about specific applications for blogs that fit the pedagogical needs of a course. Is writing an analogy here?

Kate Wittenberg, EPIC, “Does learning become a process of being admitted to a community rather than merely receiving experts’ knowledge?” i.e. the data must be processed by the community of learners.

In University 2.0 the role of the instructor changes from being the “source of expert content” to being the “interpreter of a more diverse set of content”.

I’m already doing this in my ‘find the content for this topic’ model (from FSEM and econ482). What has been largely missing in my implementation is a vetting loop. Students have identified content and even summarized it, but I’ve had little explicit discussion of content quality or how they latched onto a particular course. I should be doing this or taking a more explicit role to lead them to do this. Starting in class tomorrow.

From the Connexions Session: Increasingly there is a blurring of traditional understandings about the text, the instructor, the class session, and the course.

“Courses” are arbitrary administrative distinctions, as perhaps are fields. We have developed a series of silos or walled gardens. At the same time, research indicates that education is made meaningful by connections to other fields.(Rich Baraniuk)

We need to build a culture of continuous formative assessment into the learning process. Can digital tools, like aplia.com, provide a low cost, low teacher-effort way of supporting this?

The Student as the Unit of Measurement

Published on January 25, 2007 in Teaching and Learning. 0 Comments

I’ve only recently gotten caught up on my blog reading. A couple of weeks ago, Martha posted this thought-provoking missive. The part I want to react to says:

I hear a lot of talk about how Web 2.0 is changing everything â€” how social networking, folksonomies and tagging, and user-created content have the potential to radically alter the way weâ€™ve been approaching teaching, learning, and the influence of technology in those two endeavors. … What does it really mean for higher education? …
If CMSs are off-base by valuing the course as a unit of measurement arenâ€™t they really just guilty of reflecting whatâ€™s valued by the institutions? When are schools going to start to value people over courses?

One thing that seems clear to me about this revolution in digital tools is that it should help change the focus of higher education (and by that I mean the unit of measure, the way instructors and students view their roles) from courses to individual students. We’ve played lip service for quite a long time to the notion that universities educate students individually, that each student has their own set of courses they study (think transcript), but below the level of the course, it’s been all the same. Each student in a given course faces the same set of expectations and assignments. What they make of them can differ, of course.

Increasingly I’ve tried to teach students as individuals where they are. What that means is that, to the extent I can, I expect different things of different students. I try to push all my students, but differentially based on their experience to date. In seminars I give stronger students more challenging readings, or I give students with certain backgrounds readings that draw on those areas. In my research methodology course, I push more experienced students to pursue more advanced research projects. Does this mean I expect less of weaker students? In a sense it does, though I try not to characterize students as stronger or weaker per se, but as having different strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think this is merely semantics. I think the seminar as a whole will be a richer experience to have the business students read and bring to the table the finance literature while the international affairs students do the same for the political science literature. If you disagree, consider this: would it be be better to try the converse, or should we only use readings that every student can handle?

Now, I suspect we’ve all been doing this to a degree, but digital tools increasingly allow us to make it a regular part of how we teach. The next step is to get students to buy-in to the notion that the education is their own. Perhaps that will be a way to reach the satisfycing students, whose only goal is to get by.

First JIT Session

Published on January 21, 2007 in BigWiki. 1 Comment

Yesterday was the first JIT day for the intermediate macro class. As I noted in an earlier post, the plan called for students to read the chapter and submit an analysis of the content including a summary of the main points and a list of questions about the material they didnâ€™t understand.

I had a few concerns going in: Since the chapter was introductory and the material relatively straightforward, what if the students had no questions? (Or what if they didnâ€™t do the reading or summaries and had no questions?) My plan in that eventuality was to spend the class time modeling the next step: Developing a class consensus summary of the chapter on the wiki. When I mentioned my plans to the TIP Seminar the other day, they raised a different challenge: What if the students said they didnâ€™t understand anything? I resolved to tell them that that was unacceptable, that they needed to dig deeper into the material to try to articulate what it was they didnâ€™t understand. As it turned out, only one group turned in no questions, saying they thought they understood the material well enough. I did receive a couple examples of the second concern:

“Can you go over all of the formulas in this chapter and how they were created?”
“Primary Identities”

I showed the class those and explained why they werenâ€™t helpful. I got a sense that perhaps at some level those students were testing me. But Iâ€™m getting a bit ahead of myself here.

Yesterday morning I retrieved all the chapter analyzes which had been emailed to me. It took me no more than 15 minutes to collect and sort the questions. The range of questions was not too bad:

Seven groups raised questions about one concept;
Four groups asked about another concept;
Three groups flagged two concepts;
Two groups flagged two concepts;
Sixteen more questions were raised by single groups.

I didnâ€™t have time enough during the day to develop answers to the questions, so I ended up having to do those in real time during class. If there had been questions I didnâ€™t think I could figure out that way, I would have had to find the time before class.

When the class met, I brought the pdf of the chapter up on the projection screen. We went to the part of the text that was the source of each question. I spent the session answering the questions and trying to make sure that the students actually got what I was telling them. I managed to answer all the questions raised by more than one group. Only one of the questions was actually substantive. The rest were definitional or presentational. This wasnâ€™t too surprising, given that it was an introductory chapter.

By the end of the period, I was both exhilarated and a bit exhausted, though I couldnâ€™t tell how much of this was due to it being the end of the first week of the term. All I can conclude is that this is a very different way to lead a class session.

On to the next step.

Faculty Seminar on Student-Centered Teaching and Learning

Published on January 20, 2007 in TIP Seminar and Teaching and Learning. 0 Comments

This semester I am participating in a faculty seminar on student-centered teaching and learning, sponsored by UMW’s Teaching Innovation Program. While the topic interests me, I suspect the best part of the seminar will be the opportunity to share ideas on a continuing basis with a group of colleagues, all of whose opinions I value.

In this space I plan to post “minutes” of each meeting. I make no pretense that this will be an objective record of what occurs; rather, they will be my interpretations which will hopefully benefit from reflection after the fact.

It probably makes sense to begin by defining student-centered teaching and learning. For now, I think I’d define it as empowering students to take genuine responsibility for their learning. I know this sounds like a platitude but I really mean it. Student-centered learning requires students to see education as something they create for themselves, not something that is done to them. It also requires that students have the power to do that creation, which implies significant changes in the way courses are perceived.

Several tensions revealed themselves in our conversation yesterday.

The first was content versus process. SCT/L seems to be more oriented to the latter. Many faculty I know worry that the need to cover the content limits their ability to teach in non-traditional ways. It is of course legitimate to be concerned about being able to cover content. As one example, if you are teaching a course that is a prerequisite for another, there is an expectation that you will cover certain content. (But when I asked if faculty have actually discussed these expectations with the instructor of the subsequent course, the response was ‘not really.’) A related issue: When the content is too sophisticated for students to grasp on their own, it makes little sense to force them to learn it by themselves. (Could you write a commentary instead of presenting the interpretation yourself. Yes, he said.) Ultimately, there shouldn’t be a trade-off between content and process since at one level the purpose of process is to better learn the content.

A second tension involving the question of whether student-centered methods imply a reduction in the rigor and thus the learning in the course.

Not surprisingly, some of the group expressed hesitancy to take the risks of experimenting with SCT when our student course evaluations are an important component of tenure, promotion and merit pay decisions.

One conclusion we seemed to draw yesterday: the degree to which one can incorporate SCT may depend on the type and level of the course; perhaps.

Just in Time Teaching with a Large Wiki

Published on January 17, 2007 in BigWiki, Economics, Teaching and Learning and Wikis forTeaching/Learning. 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I mentioned my idea for a very different approach to teaching ECON 304, my intermediate macro course. This is the first week of classes, so I guess I better figure out how this is going to work. As I introduced the students to the course on Monday, I told them that whatever they had heard about the course was no longer relevant since this semester we are doing it totally differently, and as a consequence they might want to consider taking the course another term. I made this suggestion for two reasons, first, because this really is an experiment and I don’t know how it will turn out, and second, because at the current class size of 35-40 students, a book study could be ungainly. Since Monday, the enrollment has changed a bit–it increased by one student. I guess they didn’t get the message.

So what is my plan? I plan to run this course using a version of “Just-in-Time” teaching. The idea is simple and derives in part from my experiment over the last few years to teach my intro students to think like experts instead of novices. Whether it will work in practice, though, remains to be seen. Students will need to read each chapter in the text and write an analysis of it, turning it in by the night before we begin discussion of the chapter.

I plan to ask students to do this analysis in groups of two or three, in part to make the paper load more manageable, but also because I hope students will benefit from discussing what to include. Each analysis will have three parts: first, students need to identify the main point of the chapter. Second, they need to identify and briefly explain the key elements of the chapter. Third, they need to identify all the key things they don’t understand from the chapter. The morning of the discussion (class meets at 1pm) I will quickly look over the analyses and then copy all the questions students identify into the course wiki, where I will sort them from most frequently mentioned to least. These questions will provide the content for our class sessions.

I’m not going to grade the analyses per se, though I will give credit for completing the assignment assuming they made a genuine effort. The real purpose of the analyses is to get them to think about the chapter and identify what they don’t understand. The next level of the course will occur on the wiki, where collectively we will sort out the meaning of each chapter. Students can use their analyses to start this process, and collectively we’ll make sure the final analysis is correct. I’m still thinking this part through since I’ve never facilitated a wiki with a group this large before. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Does this approach require a lot of buy in on the students’ part? Yes. What if it doesn’t happen? It could be ugly. Still, the initial response seems heartening. We’ll see.