Group items tagged

It seems to me that instructional design and course design models presume that every student in the class has to pursue the same objectives and should be taught in the same fashion; yet, as universal design ideas suggest, we may need to occasionally use different assignments and allow different learning approaches. And maybe, to take this idea a step further, learning in general should be personalized and course designs become more flexible. At least that's what some educational pioneers from Silicon Valley have declared. What follows is the introductory passage of a very recent New Yorker article, an article which is ultimately quite skeptical of the new models and of the role of technology in the classroom: "Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning."

As the article goes on to highlight, the founders of the company AltSchool intend to break with traditional educational models. In the older model, the founder Max Ventilla asserts, the teacher is "an artisanal lesson planner on the one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand." Not just that, the teacher also creates, following Common Core for example, standards and objectives for his or her class; one teacher quoted in the article claims that "by looking for standards to pull everyone up we are forgetting to address what the individual needs." This is where the AltSchool idea intervenes. This new school's approach "acknowledges and adapts to the differences among students: their abilities, their interests, their cultural backgrounds." How so? By monitoring students and collecting as much data about each student as possible, thus personalizing plans and projects for students (sound familiar? Ventilla worked for Google before founding AltSchool). While I think the idea of personalized learning is compelling, I also read with interest about the mixed results of AltSchool and other similar institutions - plus, the schools seem to be very utilitarian, focusing on what the student purportedly needs to succeed in the workplace (languages are supposedly rather useless, for example, because everyone will carry an electronic, speaking dictionary in 20 years from now). On a slightly different - and final - note, I was also intrigued by a quote from Daniel Willingham, education scholar at UV: "The most common thing I hear is that when you adopt technology you have to write twice the lesson plans. You have the one you use with the technology, and you have the backup one you use when the technology doesn't work that day." Congratulations! If you read this sentence, you have survived the challenge of reading this epic post.

I found this article to be very helpful in providing a sense that it will be possible to control time use when teaching on line. It gives great tips on how to overcome the feeling that online teaching will be a 24/7 class rather than one that meets TTh 10-11:15 in White Hall 208! I like this one a lot.

I won't say that this makes shifting conceptions of assessment in one's own courses less daunting, but I appreciate that it acknowledges the significant demand that changing assessment criteria can put on teachers. I have to admit that lot of the time, when I read about new assessment techniques, they sound interesting but exhausting to implement. We've seen a lot of stage-based models for education/assessment/collaboration/etc., but this one is especially clear and I like the thoroughness of the horror story example.

Dan I greatly appreciate your view point on this and can share another horror story with you that actually turned out to be a fairy-tale situation in the end! I'll make a note to discuss in tomorrow's live session. Cheers!

The more that I read about student centered learning and assessment, the more I realize that this is the direction I have been (slowly, glacially) moving in for years. Thanks for this!

In the time I do not have, I am keeping an eye (and only that) on a Coursera online course on how to create an online course. Nowhere as exhastive as this one, but it does provide me with hunting ground for sites to suggest in this forum. Here is one of two I will post on writing SLO's

Following up on Brent's post on Justine Sacco, here is a feature story one of my students wrote last semester on public shaming at Emory. You also can go to her podcast which you might find interesting despite its length and annoying undertone of typing.

The survey sought to dig deeper on the quality question, asking respondents which aspects of credit-bearing online courses they think can be better than, or at least equal to, those of in-person courses. Faculty members say they think online courses are the same quality as or better than face-to-face classes in terms of grading and communicating about grading, and in communicating with the college about logistical and other issues. And professors were split 50/50 (the same or better vs. lower quality) on online courses' "ability to deliver the necessary content to meet learning objectives."

"Much of the faculty consternation in the last year about how institutions (and, increasingly, state legislators) want to use online education has revolved around the perceived quality of online offerings (although there are undoubtedly undercurrents of concern about whether colleges and universities will use technology to diminish the role of, and ultimately the need for, instructors)." Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/survey-faculty-attitudes-technology#ixzz38WwyClaW Inside Higher Ed I think it's interesting that indicators of 'quality' that were considered important (by faculty) included whether or not the online course was offered for credit. But, there are plenty of for-credit courses offered at accredited colleges in a traditional format that are pretty....bad. And I think that the EFOT course has given us the clear indication that online courses almost need instructors MORE than traditional f2f courses.

The author discusses the theory behind online discussions, as well as the potential value of - and problems associated with - online discussions. Some excerpts: "The argument I offer here is that saying an online discussion is a worse version of an IRL discussion is like saying an apple is a worse version of an orange. Disappointment with online discussions because they are not like IRL discussion is like being disappointed with an apple because it is a bad orange." ... "In an IRL discussion, students look, speak, and listen with multiple objects. In online discussion, like during a lecture, students sit and stare at a single object as well: but it is a computer rather than a person speaking. The lecturer is the computer. This lecturer is a screen with a keyboard and includes a complex series of frames within which the student types sentences in varying sequences. By this I am not only talking about video lectures which students watch, but rather more perceptually. In a lecture, the lecturer is the sole object of attention. There is only one object of attention: bracketing the complex material engaged with in the screen, it remains true that students exclusively engage with the screen when learning online. Students in online courses stare at a computer when learning online the same way they would stare at a lecturer speaking, focusing their attention on a single object. At a lecture, it's a person. Online, it's the computer."... "In any case, online discussions are still discussions. It would be a mistake to say all we do during online discussion is stare intensely at a computer. Most of the discussions in my online courses occur asynchronously on discussion boards. On these written discussion boards, for example, we read and write responsively. The whole situation of online discussion is therefore more akin, in this respect, to written correspondence."

From the conclusion: "Participating well in online discussions might be more like writing a good letter or having a good phone conversation, as opposed to a good spoken kind comment in an IRL discussion. We should not expect online discussions to be anything at all like IRL discussions. They are categorically different. In other words, being disappointed with online discussions because they are not like IRL discussions is like being disappointed with apples because they are not oranges." "In planning online courses, generating online assignments, and creating materials for online teaching, it is important to remember that online discussions require students to focus intense attention on a machine, and therefore compels them to cathect and introject that machine. Independently of the fluidity of your module and software, students transfer meanings onto their machines during the learning process rather than a person. While the introjection of machines is an interesting opportunity for further educational research, as an instructor, plan for student participation with this in mind: they are interacting with a machine and not people. An online discussion is more like a computer's lecture than an IRL discussion, no matter how interactive."

Opinion Piece in the New York Times Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn't matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.

This is a multi-authored article that appeared in the journal Teaching Theology and Religion. I participated in the composition but the reason I am posting it is not my own little section on multi-sensory imagery but rather the part by Russell Haitch which discusses long distance education in the New Testament--the Apostle Paul to be specific. Haitch (as I recall) makes a good case that examples like this one show that one really communicate effectively and passionately, from a long distance, for the purpose of educational transformation. So, if you look at this, zero in on Haitch's case study.

This 2002 essay by Wilson and Peterson may be a bit dated, but it is one of the few broadly reflective essays I found on the anthropology of online communities. It is not a "how to" for online teaching, but I think an occasionally more critical, reflective piece can be very useful both for understanding our place in broader social processes related to online learning and in piercing through some of the enthusiastic corporate-talk through which these technologies are presented by our universities. I have included the abstract below. The URL is to the JSTOR site, which you probably need to access through your Emory account. I was not sure how to add a link here that would get you in directly, and that is something I need to follow up on with Leah. Abstract: Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. De- spite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review ex- plores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

One of the most important professional documents in my field is the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) Outcomes Statement. This statement, the result of years of collaboration and revision, defines general learning outcomes for first-year composition (FYC) courses. Most importantly for others in our EFOT class, the statement contains sections that explain how faculty in all programs and departments can build on the preparation students receive in FYC.

Smashing Magazine is one of my go-to sources for ideas when it comes to designing or publishing anything on the web. This piece is a very thorough how-to about producing and publishing a podcast. In my courses, I try to teach how to produce media, but also how to publish and circulate that media. I'm considering having students in my graduate composition practicum course develop a podcast related to the subject of each week's class.

This article is a rather old (1999) meta-analysis of the effect of small-group learning on undergraduate students in STEM majors and the outcomes of collaborative, cooperative, or mixed form learning on student achievement, attitudes and persistence. What we like about this article is that it is scientifically robust, from a really high impact (5 point impact factor) educational research journal. It serves as primary research evidence about how important small group learning can be on a number of outcomes, not just the outcome of achievement. While it doesn't address specifically online work, it is powerful research about the benefits of this kind of learning, which is really convincing, especially when we have students who might resist collaborative learning.

Curtis and Lawson (2001) looked for "evidence of good quality interactions among students who are not present in the one physical site from data obtained from students' online exchanges" (p. 21). They focused on the "depth of on-task activity" (p. 21) in an asynchronous situation, which they argue is the most common form of online courses, of a small collaborative learning group. They found that "the analysis of participants' postings reveals many of the behaviors associated with collaborative learning in face-to face situations" (p. 29). However, "the students spontaneously demonstrated a need also to use synchronous communication" (p. 24). Some did this via text or email, often when they did not agree with another student and some organized synchronous chat sessions. This shows that "there is a need to incorporate among the asynchronous interactions…opportunities for real-time interactions among students" (p. 29).

I am guessing that there are resources like this one available for many or most topic areas by now. I have found several that will be helpful in gathering materials for each of my planned Modules.

Marshall, I found one for teaching Literature Online. Similar layout: blocks with some materials/ideas, and a bibliography with some interesting sources. Good deal.

This guide to syllabus construction from Vanderbilt reiterates many points from our readings and is not specifically concerned with online teaching. However, one thing I had not yet seen in other readings that concerns us here is the importance of choosing the right tone for introducing the class to students. I am not sure that the warm and friendly approach recommended here is always the right one but it makes sense for us given the difficulty we will have in any case making personal connections with students in the online environment.

I think this is an important point. I had to revise some of my syllabi for exactly this reason. I guess when I first started teaching, I wanted to sound official and proper, but then a few years later discovered that I did not even recognize the person behind the formal, detached voice of the syllabi, and perhaps along the way, that a good instructor did not need to sound official or proper! Good reminder for me this time around, so thanks for posting this!

Thanks, Yu, I am just seeing this now. I think my draft syllabus was too formal and scary, but on the other hand I want to be super clear up front about expectations. I will need to tweak this,