incorporating social media and back-channel communication

I am beginning to be less and less concerned with online learning. Before I used to consider it to be inferior to what was happening face-to-face. But now, I think it is just a different mode of the educational medium. As Brookfield suggests in this 11th chapter, the F2F classes rarely live up to the billing or potential. Classroom teaching can be executed well or poorly. Online teaching is the same. But I do wonder if the best online learning experience can be favourably compared to the best F2F learning environment? Perhaps the issue is that it is so context dependent being affected by the skills and inclinations of the teacher, the student cohort, and discipline being studied.

Regardless, Brookfield, similar to Bowen, suggests that we make use of whatever educational tools are at our disposal if they make sense in terms of facilitating student learning. For Brookfield, social media and back-channel communication is a teaching tool that can facilitate democratization of the classroom by enabling quieter students to provide input toward the educational environment. In addition, it provides a conduit to instructors for the lens of students’ voices when critically reflecting on our teaching. The advantage here is that it can happen in real time as we are teaching. Critical to its success in conveying students’ voices is that students be permitted to log in with an anonymous name/handle/identifier. I am not sure how I feel about that. I tire of the social irresponsibility that happens with anonymous posting to blogs and online articles. I think we need to take personal responsibility for our expressed thoughts. I understand that Brookfield is making the case that anonymity is crucial for enabling students to feel safe in voicing their concerns or confusion but I have witnessed so many examples of online conversations descending to ad hominem. On the other hand, the classroom environment may have sufficient social constraints that students will regulate themselves. There will be those who want to learn rather than read vulgarity or needless harassment of other students or the instructor. Brookfield does assert that it is necessary to lay the ground rules for using social media as a back-channel to the instructor for questions/issues. Some of the examples he cites I have seen used well in instructional workshops: TodaysMeet, Twitter, PollEverywhere, among others. I wonder if my own LMS, Moodle has anything similar? The Forum module in Moodle is simply too slow/cumbersome to act as a back-channel. Are there other social media equivalents in Moodle?

Brookfield also makes the case that social media is good for the lens of our colleagues. We can allow our colleagues access to our online record or to even observe the social media feeds to get a taste of our teaching without the necessity of being physically in our classrooms.

I do wonder, however, if these teaching strategies and educational technology tools are as significant for my smaller classes? I think they could work well in my first-yr biology courses for which student enrolment is typically between 70-90 students. But in my more senior courses, the enrolment smaller: 30-50 in 2nd yr and 10-20 for 3rd and 4th year. Maybe in the 2nd year, but I don’t think it makes sense in my smaller enrolment courses at the 3rd and 4th yr. Also, using social media assumes that my classroom does not have many moments in which I am circulating among students as they work and discuss a problem. I can see social media use working very well when I am lecturing - it still happens often enough - but not when students are working in their groups. I get around to them when they have a confusion that needs clarification.

Bottom line, I think, is that social media can be a useful teaching and learning tool but that it requires judicious use that is context-dependent. I like Jose Bowen’s suggestion - ask the students what they want/need to support their own learning. Many of my students have indicated that they do not particularly like learning online. But I wonder if what they are really saying is that they do not like the work of learning - online teaching, done well,  typically requires reading and deep processing. Or I wonder if what they are indicating is that they view their online world as their personal world and they desire to keep it separate from their more formal learning world?

Not sure…

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley.

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Incorporating social media and back-channel communication. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 189-205. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

teaching naked: the naked campus

Another thoughtful chapter concludes Bowen’s book. In this 11th chapter, he considers what issues integrate student learning with the on-campus/in-class experience. I like his suggestions about attending to classroom furnishings and layout as opposed to the technology in the classroom. This is an approach that my campus that houses the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta has used for some time. Rather than trying to implement the latest and greatest technology in our classrooms, our Technology and Learning Services department has focused on ensuring that each classroom has a computer, projector, document camera, speakers, blu-ray player and whatever connections (wired and wireless) are required to teach using a tablet or laptop. Currently, we are considering implementing Bowen’s suggestion to simply facilitate faculty’s ability to bring their laptop from their office to the classroom and plugin to the system. We have even had success using Apple TVs to link laptops or tablets wirelessly to our computer projector. In addition, as Bowen suggests, whenever we renovate a classroom we consider whether or not it is feasible to install whiteboards on every spare wall of the classroom to facilitate students’ in-class group work. I am quite pleased with the results - none of our classrooms has a Cadillac version of classroom technology, but they are all able to facilitate what is minimally necessary. Interestingly, what I have found in my own teaching is that as I increasingly move to a flipped classroom, I find that I use technology less and less in the classroom because I am responding to students’ questions for clarification and posing to students problems which provide practice in applying what they have learned outside of class in preparation for our face to face class meetings. In order to be able to respond to my students’ immediate learning needs inside the classroom, I find that a canned PowerPoint is too inflexible for me to adequately address students’ questions. And when students resist and request me to lecture more, I find that I end up being more reliant on my prepared PowerPoints and notice student engagement decrease. It is odd that my students resist out of class preparation in order to practice their learning in class which produces obvious student engagement. They insist that they would rather have me lecture, yet they clearly look more bored when I lecture. How do I square this circle? How do I get students to appreciate that their ability to learn will increase if they put in the pre-class effort and practice thinking with the material under my guidance in-class?

Enough about me and my students! Back to this final chapter.

Something I really appreciate in this chapter is Bowen’s assessment that as the middle ground for higher education becomes crowded out by online alternatives, that it will be necessary for universities and colleges to find their own particular niche and do that well. Bowen’s assessment suggests that the vast majority of university and college programs are far too similar but that we survive based on most students choosing what is locally available. Online learning breaks down the barrier of localized learning. Thus higher ed institutions need to articulate a clear mission of what it means to learn and teach and what is being taught and learned and how that mission is unique and well delivered. I do get weary of the rhetoric which emphasizes learning and teaching as a commodity. Suggesting that universities and colleges be evaluated on the basis of whether or not our students learn assumes that all students are actually willing to learn. Is it possible to coerce students to learn if they do not want to? Many students do not understand that learning is actually only the result of what they do themselves. Teachers simply design and deliver the conditions for learning, we cannot actually make students learn - this is something they need to do themselves. This misunderstanding of learning as something that is done to the student (open the skull and pour the knowledge and understanding into the brain) rather than something that is constructed by students themselves is what produces student comments that complain that the teacher didn’t teach, students had to learn it for themselves. Of course, students have to learn it for themselves, no one can do their learning for them.

What will be interesting as we move forward is the different niches that higher ed institutions develop for themselves. What niche will my Augustana campus carve out for itself over the next couple of years? How will we become a destination institution for some students here in the heart of central rural Alberta? How can we harness the opportunities that present themselves by using educational technology outside of the classroom in order to enhance the sparks that fly when people meet face to face in the same space to discuss the issues that need to be addressed today and in the future? I firmly believe, based on my own experience, that there is nothing like the immediacy of the engaged in-class experience to fire up the curiosity and passion of students. And I think this is what Dr Bowen is advocating for us - find ways to produce an exciting engaging learning environment for our students. The best way to do that is to stop squandering the in-class experience with content delivery and instead provide students with an opportunity to practice applying their skills in a real and immediate way under the guidance of curators and designers of learning experiences. Those curators and designers need to be us: the faculty.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). The naked campus. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 11. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 267-288.

teaching naked: the educational product in the internet age

I became somewhat sad when I first read this 8th chapter. Sad because I feel a sense of loss for how higher education is changing as Bowen describes it. On the other hand, the possibilities he envisions for how teaching and learning can be an active, engaged process is incredibly invigorating.

There is nothing new in this chapter that he has not been alluding to in the previous chapters. But he clearly articulates why he expects higher ed to change in response to the online educational resources becoming freely available. He uses the example of the music and book industry to illustrate his point. It was recording & print technology that transformed these two professions/industries. In both cases performing music and providing books was a local, social, live experience. In the 19th C, you could only hear music if you played it yourself or went to hear a live performance. As a result, local performers and composers had a niche livelihood. This changed first with the ability to print sheet music - international compositions could now be played and heard - and then recording which increased listeners’ expectations for a flawless performance. Online availability of music and books again changed the industry and professions by enabling a few star performers to monopolize what was read and listened, but it also changed the nature of performer vs composer. With recording, the performance became more important than the composition. Online consumption of music and books changed from being social and local to individualized/private and global.

Bowen thinks the same thing will happen with higher ed with a few gatekeepers producing standardized introductory courses (History 101, Chemistry 101, Biology 101, etc) available online but perhaps, as has happened with online sales of books, produce sufficient numbers to warrant more niche courses locally produced. Bowen’s advice is to embrace the coming change and remake traditional courses into hybrids which use freely available online lectures delivered by excellent lecturers but still meet face to face with students and instructors. Course instructors then become curators of online content and in-class guides for how to think with that content. This coalesces well with the movement to change higher ed teaching from sage on the stage to guide on the side. Hybrid courses (blended learning) could facilitate this revisioning of what it means to teach. Rather than teaching being the delivery of content, teaching becomes coaching to think with that content. And Bowen argues that this has already been available and possible with textbooks. Textbooks can play the same role as online content - something I have always also argued. Use the textbook for delivering the rote learning outside of class and use the in-class experience to practice thinking and applying that content.

This is basically what Bowen is arguing for with Teaching Naked: stop being the sage and become the guide. Instructors should curate the course content not deliver the course content. Of course, he is more nuanced than this. It is not a cookie cutter approach. Each course and locality will require particular approaches for the local students because teaching in higher ed will continue to primarily cater to the local populace. But the principle is still sound: move content acquisition out of the classroom and move engaged thinking with the content (I like the idea of playing with the content) inside the classroom.

This is something that I have been trying to do with my implementation of Team-Based Learning in my classes which has been met with some resistance from students. And student resistance to this sort of active learning that results from flipping the classroom has been documented many times in the literature by different educators. Reading Tanner’s reflection on teaching a large introductory biology course and also rereading Weimer’s Learner-Centered Teaching reminds me that it is possible to transition a class from passive didactic lecture to engaged active learning if the time is taken to acculturate students to a new way of viewing what teaching and learning are. This requires a myriad of things to keep in mind when becoming a naked teacher. It requires being transparent with students about the pedagogical reasons for doing so but also being mindful of students’ cognitive load and time for the effort at being independent learners outside of class. Higher education aspires to produce self-regulating independent learners, but it does not happen on the first day of students' first year of university. So, I think it is even more nuanced than Bowen asserts about curating content in large introductory courses. Of course, this could change if students are given the experience of flipped learning in their primary and secondary education. But until students are experienced learners with naked teaching, it will require instructors to be careful with its implementation nurturing their students’ understanding from passive recipients of knowledge to active seekers and creators of knowledge.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). The educational product in the internet age. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 9. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 217-242.

King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching, 41(1), 30–35.

Prince, M., & Weimer, M. (2017, November 2). Understanding student resistance to active learning. Faculty Focus Premium.

Seidel, S. B., & Tanner, K. D. (2013). “What if students revolt?”—Considering student resistance: Origins, options, and opportunities for investigation. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 586–595.

Tanner, K. D. (2011). Moving theory into practice: A reflection on teaching a large, introductory biology course for majors. CBE-Life Science Education, 10(2), 113–122.

Weimer, M. (2013). Taking a developmental approach. In Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed., pp. 218–238). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.

teaching naked: technology for assessment

I have difficulties with this chapter. Not that I think Bowen is wrong asserting that technology can be used to deliver frequent low-stakes assessments. My difficulty is retooling my assessments so that the questions actually assess student ability or mastery of the material rather than their ability to search the answer via Google. It is a difficult issue for me because most of what I teach is very content heavy: biochemistry and molecular cell biology. So there is a much material to simply know. But to engage students in higher-order thinking, the assessments (whether formative or summative) must include judgement and analysis. For example, it is difficult to develop a question that assesses a 2nd-year student's ability to judge which catalytic mechanism makes more sense according to biochemical logic. However, I do appreciate Bowen's example of the TCA cycle in which the question asks students to assess the result of a particular enzyme deficiency or the consequences of recycling a particular substrate. These are less Googleable but they do take time to develop. In addition, online testing in today's environment must assume that the internet is being used to search for answers. Bowen's advice is to make the tests time-limited. This I do, but students certainly complain that it increases their stress level. I suspect they are stressed because they are not yet comfortable with the material and as a result still wish to rely on the security of their notes, textbook, and Google. But of course, Bowen (and I) wish to limit students' ability to access these resources to encourage students to actually attend to the material. Students need feedback on how well they are mastering the material. Googling answers does assess mastery. I do not think that there is a balance that will ever satisfy everyone.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Technology for assessment. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 7. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 153-184.

teaching naked: technology for engagement

In this 6th chapter, Bowen is advocating for instructors to design their teaching, assignments, and courses such that they use internet resources and tools. It is a good idea to interact with students periodically (no more than once a day and not on Friday afternoon!) via email. This allows linking and summarizing the particular topic of the day and perhaps linking it to what is going on in the world and in students’ lives. He also thinks that Twitter and other messaging apps are a good way to interact with students outside of class time. He is urging instructors to find ways of keeping the learning happening outside of class between class meetings. This would take a little time to craft a good paragraph linking the material together. I understand why this is a good idea. But I do have trouble trying to imagine how I could fit this in on a regular basis with my teaching/research/service schedule as it currently is. Writing this blog takes some time away from other things I should be doing. It’s a little like saying I’ll write 20 minutes a day. Wish I could do that. It works when I have done it, but other things rise on the priority list and after a while, it disappears. So this suggestion, like any suggestion for improving our teaching praxis, requires discipline to keep at it. But this is what Bowen is advocating, changing the way we approach our teaching which does require rethinking the priorities on our to-do list.

I do like his ideas about using freely available internet resources as sources for students' first contact with the material being learned. But it does mean taking the time to determine which sources are reliable and truly of pedagogical value. Which is why once you find a good textbook that works for students I am so reluctant to change. It takes time to assess and field test a textbook for a course. And this would be the same for using internet resources.

Currently, my university is encouraging faculty to consider adopting open educational resources for our courses. Thank goodness our Centre for Teaching and Learning is willing and able to provide some resources to help us curate that freely available content. But it still takes time away from other things I need to be doing. What do I do less of in order to do this?

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Technology for engagement. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 6. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 129 - 152.

teaching naked: the flat classroom and global competition

In preparation for Dr Bowen's keynote at our Festival of Teaching and Learning this year, I have been reading his book Teaching Naked. I'll be posting my reading notes to my blog a couple of times a week for the month of April. By the time of his keynote, I should have read and blogged on all eleven chapters.

This is an interesting book. The first chapter explains how online learning threatens to make traditional liberal arts colleges obsolete because information and lectures are freely available online. Of course, this assumes that education is simply information transfer. Dr Bowen argues, however, that education must include interpersonal skills and critical thinking: skills that are not so easily learned online. So he makes the case to use educational technologies to leverage content coverage out of the classroom and online in order to release time inside the classroom to engage with the course material by learning how to apply and communicate it.

Bowen makes the analogy that online learning is revolutionizing education similar to how Japanese car manufacturers revolutionized the car market by producing better quality for a cheaper price. GM lost massive market share because they were unable or unwilling to change their product and how it was produced. Is the same thing going to happen to bricks and mortar colleges? Bowen thinks it will unless we focus on the advantages inherent in face to face learning when content is moved online outside of class time.

My issue with this is that students still want to have content in class rather than online. Many of my courses are taught using Team-Based Learning as the instructional strategy. I regularly receive student comments on my student evaluations of teaching complaining that they had to learn the material themselves and that if they were going to have to learn that way then they might as well take a cheaper online course. So is the problem mine in that I have not taught students what true mastery of a discipline is? Or is it that their learning curve is too great for the first contact I give them in the textbook? More likely many students do not understand that learning ultimately requires that students learn it themselves. Teaching is guiding students to do the learning.

My first-year course went ok last year when I switched to giving students an overview lecture the class before their reading quiz. My second-year course was less successful I think because I did that with less consistency. Also, I wonder if the 2nd-year textbook I choose was at too high a level for students? Effectively flipping the classroom, which is basically what Bowen is arguing for, requires careful consideration of what to expect students will be able to master on their own before discussing and working with the material in class. Expecting too much of student first contact will cause needless frustration. Expecting too little results in students not appropriately appreciating what they need to learn in class. A successful flip really does require the Goldilocks touch.

So, I think Bowen is correct in his assessment of the place of face-to-face teaching and the role that online technologies can play in freeing up time to engage students in deeper learning. I look forward to reading subsequent chapters which may address how to successfully do this given that this is a  counter-cultural approach to learning for most students.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). The flat classroom and global competition. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 1. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 3-25.

Smith, C. V, & Cardaciotto, L. (2011). Is active learning like broccoli? Student perceptions of active learning in large lecture classes. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 11(1), 53–61.

Spence, L. (2004). “The professor made us do it ourselves.” The Teaching Professor, 18(4), 6.

Van Sickle, J. R. (2016). Discrepancies between student perception and achievement of learning outcomes in a flipped classroom. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(2), 29–38.

Weimer, M. (2014, September 10). “She didn’t teach. We had to learn it ourselves.” Faculty Focus - The Teaching Professor Blog.

laptops in the classroom are not the problem - it is the lack of engagement

An interesting discussion on CBC's The Current about whether or not laptops should be banned in the classroom. I am glad that the second interviewee takes a more nuanced view than this oft cited study from last year by Mueller and Oppenheimer. The argument is that students do not think about what they are taking notes about in class when using a laptop whereas taking notes by hand requires more cognitive effort on the part of the student and thus produces better retention/learning of the taught material. However, this assumes that the classroom is the place where information is imparted from the instructor to the student. I agree with Chris Buddle in this interview that if we understand learning to be an act of knowledge construction within the learner, then the classroom should be a place where this is supported. Classrooms and the teaching that goes on in them need to be redesigned re-imagined such that students are actively engaging with the material rather than only taking notes.

Don't get me wrong - there is a place for note-taking. But that is certainly not all that should be going on inside of our classrooms. And active learning instructional strategies often are able to capitalize on laptops/tablets/smartphones as a learning tool for personal response systems, crowd sourcing research, or collaborating on a common project.

Educational technologies can be used poorly or ignored resulting in a distracting learning environment. But if they are properly used, they can enhance the active engagement students can make with course material.

Resource

Bart M. December 5, 201. How Technology Can Improve Learner-Centered Teaching. Faculty Focus.

Carr N. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Mueller P.A. and Oppenheimer D.M. 2014. The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25: 1159-116.

Tremonti A.M. September 07, 2015. Laptops in classrooms distracting students, teachers call for ban. CBC - The Current.

Weimer M. February 20, 2015. Why Students Should Be Taking Notes. Faculty Focus.

Weimer M. January 30, 2015. How to Help Students Improve Their Note-Taking Skills. Faculty Focus.

Willis L. June 29, 2015. Using Google Web Apps to Improve Student Engagement. Faculty Focus.

Zipp G.P. June 11, 2012. Be Not Afraid: Embracing the iPad and the Wonderful World of Apps in the Classroom. Faculty Focus.

technology will not replace motivation for learning

A recent article on the Chronicle of Higher Education website suggests that technology will not save/improve/enhance education without student motivation. That student motivation may have its origins in the intrinsic goals of the student, peer pressure from student colleagues or inspiration and support from instructors. I wrote a short piece some time ago (see page 8 here) which suggested the same thing: that the digital divide will be those who have access to ed tech vs those that have access to in-the-flesh instructors, with the ed tech students being the impoverished and those being taught in the physical presence of peers and teachers will be the advantaged. It also echoes what another suggested about the history of educational revolutions: the revolutions never alter the fact that the educational enterprise requires hard work following on the heels of student motivation nurtured by instructors.

Resources

Cook P. 2014. This Will Revolutionize Education. YouTube.

Haave NC. 2010. Considering online learning technologies at CeLC 2010. The International Commons, 5(3): 8-9.

Toyama K. 2015. Why Technology Will Never Fix Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 19).