Course Design as a Creative Endeavor

Posted on January 4, 2009 by sgreenla

Designing a course is a creative endeavor. I don’t mean just creating a new course, but rethinking, re-presenting a course you have taught before, even many times before. This design creativity seems so personal to me, but I imagine every serious teacher does something similar.

Before each semester I find myself thinking about what changes I will make to each of my courses. I find myself asking “What will be the theme of the course this time, that is, what theme makes the course relevant for this time and this place and this cohort of students?” The obvious theme for several of my courses this coming term is the 2008 financial and economic crisis.

The purpose of the theme for each course is to hook students, to make the course “sticky” by hopefully showing its relevance. (No theme has ever grabbed students’ attention more than the current economic situation.)

Sometimes the theme requires major changes in the way I structure the course; sometimes it’s only a slight change in focus. I rarely start out to complete a “major revision” as it’s called at my school, though sometimes it works out that way.

Let me discuss how this will work in a couple of my courses. The first is Macroeconomics, one of two intermediate theory courses we offer. The goal of the course is to teach students to manipulate economic models to derive insights about macro issues and problems. The theme (or outer wrapper) of the course will be to explore three questions: What is the mechanism by which the financial crisis led to a recession? How is the recession likely to play out? What are the optimal policy responses given where we find ourselves? The first major change to the course will involve reordering the topics we explore–in recent years it’s been common in the discipline to teach the long term issues of economic growth and productivity change before the short run issues of business cycles. This time, it makes sense to switch those so that we learn the tools necessary to understand the recession earlier rather than later. The other major change will be to explore the role of financial markets in a bit more depth than we usually do. For this, I hope to draw on the text we used in the big wiki experiment, several years ago.

The second class is a senior seminar in International Finance. This is always an interesting class to teach; the way I teach it, it’s not a technical course, but rather very much an interdisciplinary one. I recruit students to try to obtain a group which is one third economics majors, one third business, and one third international affairs. That way, we can draw on the expertise and perspectives of all three disciplines. We spend the first half of the course learning the nuts and bolts of international finance, and then in the second half we explore broader issues in international finance, usually focusing on some foreign financial event or concern. This year, the joke is on us–the theme will be to explore the global implications of the U.S. Financial/economic crisis.

In both of these cases, I will frame the theme as a research question, for which there is no generally accepted answer yet, and which we will publish when completed.

Feel free to follow along: econ304.umwblogs.org and econ482.umwblogs.org.

Posted in Teaching and Learning | 1 Comment

Here’s a novel idea…

Posted on January 3, 2009 by sgreenla

The college president as a public intellectual.

A couple of weeks ago, I read this op-ed piece in Inside Higher Ed. I forwarded the link to Gardner, since his son is a first year student at Hampshire College, where Dr. Hexter is president. The other day, he tweeted about Hexter’s fascinating blog.

I commend it to you.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

More Vision for the UMW Teaching Center

Posted on January 1, 2009 by sgreenla

Our institution will soon embark on a strategic planning initiative. What common mission binds us together as a faculty at UMW? I would say that our mission is to provide quality liberal and professional education at a public university price. Our current programs were developed out of our historic strength as a school of liberal arts and sciences, a school which has always emphasized teaching excellence at our core.

It is no surprise then that UMW is developing a new teaching center, as I have discussed before. The purpose of this post is to argue that the new teaching center is well situated to play a key role in re-visioning of UMW’s place in the world of higher education. But only if we think broadly about what a teaching center should be.

It would be easy to fall back and think mechanically of a teaching center as a set of programs to promote teaching and learning. Programs require budget, so the TC is about budget and a bigger budget creates a bigger TC. This may fit an administrative perspective of what a TC is, but I think we can do better than thinking this way.

An innovative Teaching Center should be conceived of as an entity, which does things, not an as entity that funds things. The TC staff and associates should have an active agenda. I’m not sure exactly what this looks like, but I think it involves efforts to think about and execute pedagogical innovations on a regular and continuing basis. Such a center should be a think tank, conversation hub, conversation catalyst, and in fact a leader in the institution’s inward-facing and outward-facing deep intellectual conversations about teaching and learning.

Think of the best professional conference you’ve ever attended, where you met and talked with people doing very interesting work, work with relevance to your professional life. There you learned important insights which you were anxious to take home. You also heard ideas to inspire you. That experience is what I think the teaching center should be: the conference, and the preparation, thought, experimentation, writing and reflection that led up to the conference.

A good example of this might be the working group that developed our summer 2008 First Year Seminar Workshop. The group consisted of a somewhat eclectic group of interested faculty: the Dean of Arts & Sciences, the Associate VP for Academic Affairs, the Directors of the Writing Intensive and Speaking Intensive Programs, the Director of the former Teaching Innovation Program, the Coach of the Debate Team, the Director of the Division of Teaching & Learning Technologies, the University Librarian & three reference librarians, and two faculty who co-chaired the FSEM Advisory Committee since the inception of the program three years ago.

The group worked intensively and effectively during the spring 2008 semester to develop a excellent faculty development workshop for FSEM instructors. (Contrast this with the all too accurate view of most faculty committee meetings.) This wasn’t just administrative exercise, but very much an academic one. We spent quite a bit of time brainstorming about how we envisioned the FSEM program and how we could best incorporate that vision into a two day workshop. We explicitly planned for the workshop to model the themes we agreed were the crux of the FSEM experience. Finally, we recruited expert faculty to prepare and present the individual workshop sessions.

The dynamics exhibited in the working group were particularly interesting. The participants were a group of individuals, each of whom brought a particular expertise to the table which was respected by the others in the group. The Dean seemed to take a backseat role, allowing the rest of us to step up and contribute in unique ways. The result was a workshop that, based on the evaluations turned in, the participants found more than worthwhile. (You can judge for yourself by looking at the videos of each session here.)

Another model for the Teaching Center might be the academic department. An academic department revolves around a faculty. The faculty teach, but they also do research in the field. The research and teaching are complementary, even symbiotic. Students come to the department to learn about the field. Some even desire to become specialists. An academic department has a budget but it’s not primarily about funding speakers or travel. Rather, a department’s activities revolve around the study of the field, by people with various levels of expertise: from novices to authorities. Its focus is both internal (teaching) and external (scholarship).

This raises an obvious question: Beyond the director (who we are currently searching for), who would serve as faculty of the Teaching Center? The Teaching Fellows program, which we are initiating this Spring provides a start:

More than a faculty development initiative, the program is designed to bridge teaching, scholarship and service. … Teaching Fellows will be given the opportunity to explore a specific question involving research and experimentation with new pedagogies, assessment of student learning, innovative course design or curriculum development, emerging academic technologies and tools of access to information, or other areas that may promote excellence in teaching. Fellows will use what they learn to develop a new course or to substantially revise an existing course which will then be taught in the academic year following the fellowship. … An important objective of the program is to develop expertise by participants that can be drawn on subsequently by faculty at large. Fellows will be expected to engage in regular conversations about their work with the Teaching Center Director and other participants in the program, as well as to reflect publicly using the Teaching Center web environment.

The Teaching Fellows program provides a core faculty for the TC, but at present we can only fund four fellows per year. I wonder if we could also create affiliation for other faculty with the TC? Could faculty solicit TC imprimatur for teaching innovations that have been done in the past or are being done currently? Could we develop a list of faculty experts in certain areas of pedagogy, faculty who are willing to consult with others who wish to learn more about their expertise?

A colleague who is generally supportive of the teaching center asked: Why would someone want to affiliate with the TC? What’s in it for them? This raises a more general question: How to make this kind of activity (as well as pedagogical research more generally, or creative scholarly digital activities) valued for promotion, tenure, and pay raises?

One possible idea is suggested by the online section of the Journal of Economic Education. In addition to traditional articles, the Journal solicits scholarly digital creations, which if accepted are allowed to post the Journal’s equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval: “JEE Selection”. You can see an example of this at a recently approved submission which identifies short clips from feature films with economics content. (For a complete listing of JEE Selections, see here.) This seal has gained acceptance in the economics education community. Perhaps we could create something similar for TC-affiliated faculty or creations.

The issue of giving faculty credit for pedagogical scholarship is a bigger problem than UMW can solve on its own, but progressive leadership could help. Note to those on the provost and dean search committees: keep this in mind!

The vision for the Teaching Center I am outlining here goes beyond the traditional model, which revolves around collecting resources on teaching & learning, funding workshops & faculty development opportunities, and nurturing a culture that respects pedagogy as a scholarly responsibility. These are necessary, but not sufficient for what I have in mind, a center which has the potential to energize what we do as an institution.

I think this idea could have legs. What do you think?

Posted in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I don’t know if this is slow blogging

Posted on January 1, 2009 by sgreenla

But HT to bgblogging for the idea nonetheless. At the end of last semester, I had a number of posts floating around in my head. I published a couple but decided to put the rest of them aside to mature in my head. I hoped that the hiatus would make the posts richer as Barbara’s invariably are. I found that it worked in at least a couple of the following cases (though not necessarily to Barbara’s standards).

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Course Quality Control

Posted on December 22, 2008 by sgreenla

This past semester I was invited to join the university’s Blending/Distance Learning Advisory Committee. I attended my first meeting of the committee a couple weeks ago, and it was very interesting on a number of levels. As the new guy, I mostly stayed quiet and listened.

The committee is drafting a process for developing a university-sanctioned online course. A significant piece of the process is quality control, and early on the course developer is asked several questions about their qualifications for teaching an online course and how the course design leads to effective learning.

One of the group asked, “How come we have to answer these questions about online courses, when the Curriculum Committee doesn’t ask them of courses offered in the traditional face-to-face manner?” We went into a predictable discussion about how the reality is that online courses, as something relatively new and nontraditional, are suspect in quality and that we need to explicitly address those concerns in our online course development process if we hope to give the process validity among the UMW faculty. In the middle of the discussion, it occurred to me that a more profound response would be to imagine a time when we would ask those questions of all course proposals.

Could our work on this committee lead to more deliberate thinking on course design and course quality by all our faculty at UMW? If we get sufficient buy-in from this online course development process, perhaps the curriculum committee would consider adopting aspects of our process for theirs.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Teaching, Grading & Baylor Graduate Instructors

Posted on December 18, 2008 by sgreenla

Last month, I was interviewed online by Gardner as part of a workshop he was leading to a group of graduate students at Baylor, each of whom is teaching a course in their own field. Aside from some technical glitches (We were using Skype for voice and a webcam on each end.), the interview seemed to go pretty well. The topic of the interview was this post I wrote, which addressed some of my thoughts about the interplay between teaching and assessment.

At the close of the interview after I had hung up but before they had, there was a follow-up question which I heard. The question was clear to me since I have heard it before in many different incarnations: Will the approach to teaching and assessment I described work for “creating scholars in a discipline”?

The question was summarized by a note taker at Baylor as:

Can we train scholars in this model of the integrative domain, or does the model cater to students who are going to have trouble?
Or, if we’re only looking holistically at the progress someone is making, will we be pushing them toward excellence? How do we balance these concerns?
There have to be consequences, and there has to be something at stake; you have to know some things. But, this teaching venture is difficult because you’re perpetually trying to navigate a course between the need to engage students and have them actually learn.

(Wow, lot’s of unstated assumptions here. Can you teach students without engaging them? Can students be engaged and not learn? Where to begin?)

The questions are understandable. After all, these are graduate students who have been socialized into the culture of research universities, but have only limited teaching experience. This is not to demean the questioner, but to point out the context from which he is posing the questions.

That said, the questions reveal a lack of understanding and imagination of what real learning is and, I suspect, what learning in a discipline is. I can’t claim expertise about learning in any discipline but my own (economics), though I believe my ideas are generalizable. Let me be clear: the approach to teaching that I describe is absolutely suited to teaching the body of skills and content that a discipline needs its students to learn. How have I reached this conclusion?

We all want to promote excellence. But what incentive does a student have to do more if their work has already been graded an A? What incentive does a student have to do more if they are passing and that’s all they need from the course? The approach I espouse treats each student as an individual learner. It pushes each student from where they are, to (ideally) the best they can be. It doesn’t treat a class as a collective.

Grading, the way it is usually done, corrupts the learning process for most students. The grade becomes the objective rather than the learning. This is not a novel idea. Indeed, today’s Inside Higher Education has an article that addresses this point. We all know this, but we usually assume that there’s a high degree of correspondence between grades and learning. Is there, though? Grades have a high noise to signal ratio, as the engineers would say, that is, only a rough correspondence. There are bright students who achieve good grades without much learning. And there are at least some students who learn much without achieving good grades. The default assumption of the educational establishment is that the problem is with the students. I assert that the problem may be in the grading scheme.

We know that some people don’t test well, or that some people test better with written examinations than multiple choice. Can you conclude beyond a doubt from a multiple choice exam that the student who earns less than an A isn’t really learning the material? I would say no. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t test our students, but rather that we need to be aware that traditional tests are imperfect measures of learning.

We tend to assume that at least the strong students will buy into the system, that they will learn for learning’s sake. After all, didn’t we? And the others? Well it’s not our problem that they’re not academically gifted, and besides there’s nothing we can do about it unless we are willing to dumb down our teaching, and dilute our grading standards. Either they’re willing to do the work that the bright students do, or they are not. Perhaps they’re fundamentally not really able to excel.

But what is excellence? Is it a grade, or a measure of learning. Do excellent students obtain good grades because they are bright to begin with? Or are they excellent students because they seriously engage with the material and learn a great deal?

A good instructor needs to think carefully about what students should learn from a course. Novice instructors may think they should be teaching everything they know on the subject, or everything which is in the text. But ‘covering the content’ should not be the point since course coverage is not the same as student learning, and since it’s not possible for students to master all the content in a single serious course. A thoughtful instructor will identify both for themselves and for their students a limited number of goals that students can learn well in a course.

I believe that all students can learn my discipline. Do you believe the same? For me, an introductory course is not merely a course that teaches facts about a discipline, but a course that introduces students to the reasoning of disciplinary practitioners, something which is difficult for students to grasp. What that implies is not that I teach easier material, but that I have appropriate expectations of what learning is achievable at different course levels. I tend to cover less content, but teach in greater depth.

I’ve used this approach at all levels, from the first year seminar to intro courses in my field to senior seminars. I don’t apply the approach the same way in all courses, but it certainly colors my teaching and assessment. During the interview I was specifically thinking about two courses I teach; the FSEM, but also our intermediate macroeconomics course, which is one of the gatekeeping courses in the discipline. People rarely fail this course; instead, they drop the course and the major when they decide that they are not willing or able to do the type of work required. Few students earn A’s in the course since that requires extraordinary effort and mastery of material–understanding and being able to apply what a macroeconomist does. In short, students don’t get an A by being bright and by going through the motions. They get an A by learning how to do economic analysis and by consistently demonstrating their mastery of it.

One final point: Engagement is not entertainment. Engagement is a necessary precondition to substantive learning. Sure you can memorize definitions without engagement to but follow an argument and construct your own, to learn the tools of a discipline, one has to care. Caring starts with engagement.

Posted in Podcast Reviews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

First Year Writers

Posted on December 4, 2008 by sgreenla

The biggest thing I’ve learned from teaching a first year seminar is how freshman writing differs from upper class writing. Today I handed back the second formal paper my students have written and here is what I told them:

The biggest flaw I saw in your papers, from the best paper to the worst, is that you didn’t develop your ideas enough; you didn’t think more deeply about your topic. How does one bake bread? Answer: Mix and knead the ingredients, let the dough rise, bake and enjoy! How does one make wine? Answer: Crush the grapes, add yeast, let it age, drink and enjoy! Writing is like baking bread or making wine. After you start it, you need to put it aside to give it time to mature, rise, age.

First year writers tend to put their thoughts down and be done with it. That may be all they know. They don’t seem to understand that writing is a creative process; a writer doesn’t write what they already know; rather the process of writing/thinking creates new insights which the writer can discover through the composition process. Of course this takes patience, as well as planning so that one doesn’t wait until the night before the assignment is due to start.

If one doesn’t know that the process is productive, it may not make sense to wait before putting the paper to bed. We need to explain this to students as explicitly as we can, especially when we are teaching first year students. I certainly never learned this in high school or frankly, in college, so we shouldn’t expect first years to know this.

Posted in First Year Seminar | 8 Comments

State of the University

Posted on December 2, 2008 by sgreenla

On November 17, Dr. Judy Hample, President of UMW since July, gave the first substantive speech of her tenure. A video recording of the speech can be viewed here.

I’ve been mulling over how to respond to the speech or whether to respond at all. I decided that it’s important to make public my response in hopes of promoting conversation on the direction of UMW.

I was hoping to be inspired by the speech to make UMW stronger and more distinctive than it currently is. I’m not sure how much of that hope was fulfilled.

Dr. Hample’s thesis was the following:

“My vision and dream is that UMW will become a premier, public, national liberal arts university.”

Fair enough, but how will we get there?

The first third of the speech, with a few nods to catch phrases like ‘fewer silos’ and ‘embracing a culture of excellence,’ emphasized administration, rather than academic leadership. Dr. Hample talked about greater efficiency and the need for tough decision-making. She stated that decisions would be made on the basis of an upcoming strategic planning initiative.

She claimed that UMW faces three challenges which prevent us from achieving her vision:

1. We need to make UMW student-centered.
2. We need to make UMW a more diverse, inclusive institution.
3. We need to realize the full potential of being a [real] university.

I admit to being taken aback by her first challenge. UMW is the most student-centered institution that I know. Classes are relatively small (though not as small as they used to be) and faculty know and work closely with their students. Unlike at large state universities, it is all but impossible for a student to remain just ‘a number’ at UMW.

It turns out that Dr. Hample meant the term ‘student-centered’ in a much different and narrower sense than I interpreted it. She used it to refer to the user-friendliness of business services like accessing financial records and registering for courses.

Dr. Hample made several remarks about campus life, saying alumni she talked with praise what they call the “Mary Washington experience.”

“I wonder if that is as strong today? I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that it might not be. The perception of too many of our students is that we have an unresponsive bureaucracy and administration.”

I have no quarrel with more user-friendly access to services, but her alumni story seems a non-sequitur to me. I doubt that the Mary Washington experience alumni describe is about business services; I imagine it is about close relationships they formed with other students and with faculty, something which is still very much a characteristic of UMW. And to be fair to administrative staff, my sense is that existing bureaucratic hurdles, and there are some, are largely the result of resource constraints as past leadership has moved funding out of administration to protect the instructional program.

Dr. Hample also said she wants to renovate dorms into “living and working environments” with places to study, socialize and get a cup of coffee after midnight. “These simple things that students want, need and are, frankly, long overdue,” she said. Yes, but these innovations come with a cost, and I don’t think UMW will ever win the battle of student amenities; nor do I think we should. Rather, if we are to be a truly distinctive institution, it will be on the basis of our academic programs.

Dr. Hample’s second challenge is to make UMW a more diverse, inclusive institution. This is, of course, worth doing and something we have struggled with as an institution for years. If she has a way of achieving this, I applaud her.

The third challenge, on which Dr. Hample spent the majority of her speech, is to make UMW realize the potential of becoming a university. She plans to accomplish this by creating two new schools: a College of Business and a College of Education, as well as developing selective graduate programs in the College of Arts & Sciences. These are worthwhile goals. Arguably, the College of Graduate and Professional Studies has failed to live up to its potential, and so reorganizing its programs along traditional disciplinary lines makes sense to me.

My concern comes in that Dr. Hample plans to finance these plans by belt-tightening and eliminating programs that don’t meet her standards.

“The choice comes down to this: What programs, what jobs are critical for insuring high quality education, high quality safety, high quality services, [and] high quality welfare for our students?”

I don’t doubt that these initiatives are worth doing, but in my view they won’t make UMW a premier, national institution. The College of William & Mary is such an institution. It has a total budget of roughly $220 million or more than three and a half times UMW’s total budget.

I don’t think it’s possible to build a premier public, national liberal arts institution on our current budget no matter how well we reallocate it. To achieve such a goal would require significant additional funding which Hample didn’t address.

What I fear is that without significant additional resources, the changes planned by Dr. Hample will only reduce what makes UMW distinctive, and turn us instead into a generic state university.

Posted in The Future of Higher Education, UMW | 6 Comments

Do Over Redux

Posted on November 23, 2008 by sgreenla

I recently gave the second exam in my principles class so my students have been coming in to explain the right answers to the questions they got wrong. Two things have struck me this time around.

First, the good: As we go over the questions, I regularly quip to the students “You’re doing a lot better today [than you did on the exam].” They laugh, and several have said something along the lines of “I really had to learn it this time around.” These are the better students, not necessarily in terms of grades but in terms of their seriousness towards the course.

Now, the not so good, but still something to learn from. I’ve had a number of weaker students, not students who can’t do the work, but ones who didn’t work very hard and as a result did very poorly on this exam, come in unprepared to explain the right answers.

Okay, this has happened before, but one thing I saw this time which was new for me, was that as I tried to walk them through the problems they revealed a lack of understanding of some very basic things, e.g. what the Keynesian consumption function looks like, things that any student should know. What I thought was that they must have crammed for these very basic concepts, and forgotten them in the short time since the exam. What’s surprising is that these concepts are to most students like riding a bike: once learned, you always remember them. It’s hard to imagine, but I guess these students never truly learned them. Or rather, they didn’t try to learn them until the last minute when they only had time to pack things into (very) short term memory. A little genuine effort earlier on could have made a huge difference.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

W(h)ither Online Learning?

Posted on October 22, 2008 by sgreenla

Let me start off by saying, I am a friend and supporter of our College of Graduate and Continuing Studies. I believe in what I understand their mission to be, that is, to offer a high quality, but lower cost alternative to commercial, adult education options.

I have attended two recent discussions about instructional technology at UMW, which have raised what, in my mind at least, are some fascinating questions. What I’m about to say here may be perceived as unfair. I don’t really have a seat at the table, but I have been lurking nearby, and I think I may have something to contribute since I have over a decade of experience with electronic teaching and learning environments. I readily admit that, not being at the table, it’s likely that I am mistaken in some or all of my ideas. In any case, I am not raising these issues to criticize anyone, but rather to advance the conversation.

Part of the mission of our College of Graduate and Professional Studies is to develop blended and online course offerings. What do those terms mean? Allen, Seaman and Garrett (2007) differentiate between three types of learning environments:

• Web-facilitated Learning, where up to 30% of the course content is delivered online,
• Blended Learning, where 30 – 80% of course content is delivered online; and
• Online Learning, where more than 80% of content is delivered online.

Notice the emphasis on content delivery, which I think it is misplaced, as I explain below.

Since the beginning of our CMS review process six months ago, I have been concerned that I was unable to articulate the need a new CMS was supposed to address. Indeed, the first answer I heard when I raised the question was that the purpose of the new CMS was to replace our existing Blackboard product. That clearly begs the question. It felt to me as if everyone else knew the answer, and that I was simply ignorant, but if so why weren’t we talking about it?

At the meeting two weeks ago, I heard several people say that CGPS needs a common CMS across all courses. We were told that both faculty and students typically have full-time jobs elsewhere, so they don’t have the time or inclination to explore alternative tool sets in each course. They would rather use a common toolset; they also seemed to be suggesting that the toolset be fairly simple.

In conversation at last week’s forum, the question was raised whether we had the infrastructure to support online learning at CGPS. The response was jarring to me:

We have the infrastructure, but what we don’t have is support from the top or from DTLT. DTLT is great at what they do… Jim Groom is internationally known for his work with WordPress… but they don’t do what we (CGPS) need, specifically, training. They make occasional visits here (to CGPS) but there’s no one here permanently. (The bottom line is) after ten years (at CGPS), we still don’t have a real distance learning program.

These statements raise a number of issues in my mind. First, DTLT has assigned one full time Instructional Technology Specialist and one half-time person (a new media specialist) to CGPS. While this may not seem like much, the College of Arts and Sciences, with roughly six times the faculty, has 5.5 IT staff. That works out to approximately 25 faculty for every ITS at CGPS compared with 42 faculty for every ITS at CAS. (Additionally, CAS is short by two ITS right now, so the actual comparison is even more skewed.) One may argue that it’s appropriate for CGPS to have more IT support, but one can’t say legitimately they have none.

The learning environments described by Allen et al suggest a view of teaching as content delivery, at least that is the phrase they used. Content delivery makes me think of online versions of textbooks or other text resources, and online testing. There is nothing wrong with those things, but they’re neither cognitively demanding nor complex.

My idea of teaching and the view of most faculty I know is bigger, involving student interaction with the content (and people) to construct an understanding of what the content means. This involves reading, thinking and writing about content, and debating meanings with others in the class. In my experience you can do these things effectively with technology. And, it is this view of teaching that DTLT supports very well. DTLT is not primarily about training (or training is only a minor part of what they do), rather DTLT is about instructional design. User services is the group to talk to about training, I think.

Unless we are considering completely on-line courses (and I don’t think, for the most part that we are), the distinctions that play a central role in Allen et al are missing the point. The real questions that need to be addressed include:

• What should the course environment look like?
• How are students going to access and interact with the course materials (e.g. content)?
• How are students going to interact with the instructor and how are they going to interact with each other?

The answers will be different for different courses and that’s as it should be. It is dealing with these types of questions that DTLT is ideal for.

The emphasis to date in the CMS review has been on IT questions: What types of software (e.g. CMS), hardware (less of an issue these days), training and other support are necessary and desired (a slightly different question) to support those course environments? Until we understand the pedagogical questions, outlined in the previous paragraph, I don’t think we can correctly answer the IT questions. It’s discussion of the former that I think has been lacking, and it’s that discussion I look forward to having.

Posted in Teaching and Learning, UMW Teaching Center | 8 Comments