2nd year molecular cell biology in fall 2020

Introduction

This is my fourth reflection on my experience with online teaching during the pandemic of the 2020/21 academic year. This reflection considers the course AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology which I taught in the fall term of 2020. Links to my other reflections may be found at this link here.

I have taught cell biology in some form or other since 1990 at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. I taught BIO 201 - Cell Biology from 1990 to 1998. It was then removed from Augustana's biology degree program when the biological disciplines (zoology, botany, microbiology, and more) in the Faculty of Science on the North Campus of the U of A were reorganized into one Department of Biological Sciences. That initiated a whole scale change in the way that biology was taught in Alberta with one model following the University of Calgary and another following the University of Alberta. At that time Augustana was not a Faculty of the University of Alberta but was rather an independent private liberal arts & sciences college: Augustana University College.

To manage the issue of transfer between the Southern Alberta (U of Calgary) and Northern Alberta (U of Alberta) models of postsecondary biological education the three large universities (Universities of Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge) entered into a two-year block transfer agreement with the other smaller post-secondary institutions in Alberta (e.g., Athabasca University, Red Deer College, Augustana University College, King's University College, Concordia University College, Grande Prarie Regional College, and many more). I was a part of these negotiations which resulted in the following block of courses that if students completed in their first two years at any institution in Alberta would transfer as a block for equal credit thus solving the problem of a southern and northern model of biological education:

• cell biology - 3 cr
• evolution - 3 cr
• genetics - 3 cr
• ecology - 3 cr
• biological diversity - 3 cr (could be from zoology, botany or microbiology)
• biochemistry - 3 cr
• chemistry - 9 cr (comprised of general and organic)
• statistics - 3 cr
• mathematics - 3cr

Four of the five biology courses above must have an associated lab. This block transfer gave each institution the ability to organise these foundational biological topics in whatever made sense for their program enabling students to complete these transfer courses over a minimum of their first two years of their undergraduate degree program.

As a result of these block transfer negotiations, Augustana's 2nd-year biology course became a 1st-year biology course where it remained for many years. However, over the subsequent years, Alberta PSE found that many students still wanted to transfer their courses among the PSIs piecemeal rather than as a two-year block. In addition, the Department of Biological Sciences ended up not removing their 2nd-year cell biology course instead having a 1st-yr introduction to cell biology followed by a 2nd-yr eukaryotic cell biology course. By the end of 2010, the block transfer in biology was abandoned and Augustana revised the 1st-year cell biology course to 1st-year functional biology (Integrative Biology I) and returned to teaching cell biology in the 2nd-year of their biology major as AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology in 2011.

In this blog post, I reflect on the Fall 2020 offering of AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology for which I was the instructor. This was the first term that I taught completely online and it was also the first time since the 1990s that I was the instructor for more than three courses in one term all of which had to be revised from face-to-face delivery to remote delivery. This is how I spent my spring and summer in 2020: revising molecular cell biology along with a couple of other courses so that students had a reasonable educational experience in an entirely online environment. Needless to say, this was a large amount of work to complete in a very short amount of time.

My reflection on teaching molecular cell biology during the fall 2020 term relies on my own personal experience, students' feedback from the end of term student ratings of instruction (SRI), the SoTL literature I have read, and advice that I have received from my colleagues. These are the four lenses that Stephen Brookfield (2017) advocates should inform any critical reflection of teaching:

• students' eyes
• colleagues' perceptions
• personal experience of the instructor
• theory (the SoTL literature)

Methods & Materials

As noted in the introduction above, AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology has gone through a number of revisions from a 2nd-year cell biology course, to a 1st-yr introduction to cell biology, ending up being what it is today, a course which considers the molecular biology of the cell. The primary difference between where the course started to where it is today is that initially, the course focused on the structure of cells and what that structure told us about how cells function. It was a classic structure and function course which relied heavily on cell ultrastructure and biochemical studies to inform us about how cells work. The publication of Molecular Biology of the Cell in 1983 by Alberts et al. changed how cell biology was conceived and studied by senior and graduate students. Certainly, there were other textbooks that were designed to bring a molecular understanding to bear on how cells work, but none were considered the same way as Molecular Biology of the Cell which came to be known as "The Bible" of cell biology. But it was not until this same author team produced Essential Cell Biology in 1998 that cell biology education began to truly focus on a molecular understanding of how cells work for undergraduate students in the first two years of their degree program. 

Our knowledge of the molecular biology of the cell has exploded over the last couple of decades requiring instructors to carefully curate this burgeoning field for neophyte students. I have done this for the current iteration of AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology by asking students the overarching course question of how do proteins know where to go inside the cell? If proteins are not in the correct position at the correct time in the correct concentration, cell function is disrupted. To illustrate this point, I ask students on the first day of class what would happen to their ability to absorb sugar from their sports drink after a heavy workout if the apical and basal surfaces of their enterocytes were reversed? They soon realize after drawing a functional diagram of an enterocyte that they would die due to lack of nutrient absorption. So how do the correct proteins know to arrive in their correct intracellular positions after protein synthesis? And once there, how do they communicate with other proteins that they are there and ready to function?

This grabs students' attention and we spend the remainder of the course learning the techniques and experiments that have produced our current understanding of how cells get proteins into their different organelles and once there how they work and communicate with each other. Those of you reading this who are molecular biologists know that this is a huge field. This is a second-year (sophomore) course that only introduces students to this field. 

To facilitate students' learning of the molecular details of cells and the approaches we have used to study them, I use the instructional strategy of team-based learning or TBL (Haide, Kubitz & McCormack, 2014) which I have explained in some detail in a previous blog post. Briefly, students are assigned pre-class preparation (a reading &/or a video recording) guided by a reading or viewing guide with learning objectives. After this pre-class preparation, students come to class to write a two-stage quiz (iRAT + tRAT in TBL lingo) consisting of 10 MCQs answered individually in 15 minutes followed by a longer period of time for the team attempt of the same quiz. Subsequent classes consist of team applications (Apps) of their learning. In the online environment that resulted from the pandemic, RATs and Apps were completed over Zoom using the breakout rooms to facilitate the teamwork. In addition, I allocated the class time before the two-stage quiz to a drop-in session over Zoom during which anyone and everyone in the class could come to ask questions about the pre-class assignment. Some students used this time to either ask me questions or to individually review the reading or video-recording. The quizzes were conducted using the quizzing feature in adaptive mode of our LMS which is based on Moodle. Apps were completed by teams using Google Forms to deliver the problems. Both RATs and Apps contributed to students' final course grades. You may view the course syllabus that I used in Fall 2020 at this link here. For this course, I did not use any proctoring or exam monitoring software as I have in other courses. There were repercussions from this decision that I will address in the Discussion.

Something new that I implemented for this course was the use of Smartwork5, the online homework website that is available to students free of charge with the purchase of the assigned textbook for the course (Essential Cell Biology, 5th ed.). Completion of these online individual assignments was awarded some marks toward their final grade (15%) to encourage their completion resulting in the study of the course material. These homework assignments were available to students for one week after we had completed our consideration of the topic in the course schedule (i.e., after RATs and Apps were completed and graded). Students were permitted to submit their Smartwork5 homework assignments late (5% penalty per day late). I also made available to students pre-class quizzes through Smartwork5 which enabled students to practice their learning without penalty; these pre-class quizzes did not contribute to students' final grades and were available to students throughout the term once the course schedule reached that topic.

SRI results were analysed for statistical differences among the different student cohorts using ANOVA (α = 0.05). The Tukey-Kramer post-hoc test was then used to detect differences among pairs of student cohorts (α = 0.05) if ANOVA initially detected differences among all cohorts. Details of the SRI survey were described in a previous blog post. The student comments in the following Results section are in response to four open-ended questions inviting students to type their comments into our online SRI survey:

• What aspects of the course and/or instructor did you find most valuable?
• What aspects of the course and/or instructor did you find least valuable?
• How useful were the course textbook(s) and/or other learning support materials?
• Please add any other comments that you would like to make about the course and/or instructor.

Results

ANOVA detected significant differences (α = 0.05) among the student cohorts for all SRI prompts. Generally speaking, the Tukey-Kramer post-hoc test indicates that the Fall 2020 cohort had the best experience and Fall 2017 had the worst experience in AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology among the student cohorts I have taught.

Students' perceptions of the instructor

Instructor overall

In Fall 2020 I received the highest rating ever (mean = 4.8) for my excellence as an instructor by students in Molecular Cell Biology but this was only significantly different from the cohorts in Fall 2017 and 2019. Statistically significant differences were detected between F2017 and all other cohorts except F2019 with F2019 being significantly different from the W2012, F2012 & F2020 cohorts (α = 0.05).

Student comments corroborate the numerical data above regarding my excellence as an instructor:

• I believe Professor Haave truly wants his students to succeed, not only in his course but in life. The endless resources and repetitions that Haave's style of teaching provides are unparalleled. The instructor was amazing and planned the semester perfectly.
• Professor Haave, is a great professor who took a lot of time to set up the best possible way to learn during COVID.
• Neil is awesome! So thankful I had him this semester and can't wait for more classes with him!
• Dr. Haave is a wonderful professor, very respectful, passionate and organized.

Instructor preparedness

Significant differences were indicated between F2017 and all other cohorts (α = 0.05). The Fall 2020 cohort highly rated how well prepared I was to teach this course (mean = 4.8).

Students' comments support the numerical data above that I was well-prepared:

• This is reflected by the way he constructs a rigid schedule for the semester, that if not maintained students will drastically fall behind. The structure creates the habits that students need in order to succeed in the field of Biology. 
• This whole course was very valuable as the eclass set up was very easy to follow and the amount of work placed into the preparation of the class was reflected in the course content.
• The course was well organized and is one of few that a student could asynchronously learn the material effectively
• I thought that the mini lectures were concise and easier to digest than the readings which was helpful.
• I was truly impressed with the organization of the class, especially now being online.
• [what was valuable to me was] Having lecture videos to go back to and office hours when I needed help.

Instructor's effective use of in-class time

The F2017 is significantly different from all other cohorts. In addition, F2019 is significantly different from F2020 (α = 0.05). The Fall 2020 cohort highly rated how effectively I used the synchronous Zoom sessions (mean = 4.5).

The student comments on the SRI support the graphical data above that class time (i.e., Zoom time) was well used:

• I really liked working in teams and completing the "apps".
• I found the instructors [sic] explanation of application questions quite valuable.
• The instructor used synchronous and asynchronous classes very well and effectively. All lectures were taught asynchronously and all quizzes were during a synchronous time.

Clarity of instructor's speech

Statistically significant differences (α = 0.05) were detected between F2017 and all other cohorts except F2018. The Fall 2020 cohort highly rated my clarity of speech but there were no typed comments that specifically referred to this.

Instructor's constructive feedback

The F2017 cohort was significantly different (α = 0.05) from all other cohorts except F2018. The Fall 2020 cohort was clearly appreciative of the feedback I provided them (mean = 4.4) but was no different from the previous cohorts, other than Fall 2017 (mean = 3.3).

Note that one form of feedback that I designed into the course was the Smartwork5 assignments. Student comments support the numerical data above:

• I found that working as a team made for a deeper understanding of course information and I appreciated the direct feedback about the apps after completing them. 
• The textbook and SmartWorks were very useful to the course. I found that having the Pre-lecture quizzes were very helpful as a whole chapter review, and the homework was helpful (especially with the feedback it gave you).
• I really enjoyed the smartwork assignments as a way to help cement learning before RATs and APPs

Instructor's respectful treatment of students

The F2017 student cohort was found to be significantly different  (α = 0.05) from W2012, F2012, F2019 & F2020. I have consistently treated my students with respect as illustrated in the graph below.

A sample of student comments on the SRI corroborates the data in the graph above:

• The prof cared about his students and made sure everyone was on the right track and was always ready to help.
• I liked how they were encouraging and very understanding to the students, especially now that everything is online.
• He always treats students with the utmost respect and creates a positive learning environment that I enjoy participating in. I especially appreciated Neil's anecdotal stories, sometimes random, but always entertaining.

Students' perceptions of the course structure & material

Quality of course content

Statistically significant differences were detected between F2017 and all other cohorts except F2019 (α = 0.05). In addition, F2020 is significantly different from W2012, F2012, F2016 & F2019. The F2017 cohort was the most dissatisfied (mean = 2.8) with the course whereas F2020 was the most satisfied (mean = 4.7).

One student comment echoed the numerical results:

• This was a very interesting course and I am looking forward to taking similar ones!

Clarity of course goals and objectives

The F2017 cohort was determined to be significantly different from all other cohorts (α = 0.05). The Fall 2020 cohort found them to be clear with an average SRI of 4.7. There were no student comments that referred to the course goals and objectives.

Course workload and difficulty

The F2020 cohort rated the course difficulty to be significantly less than the student cohorts in W2011, F2012, F2016  & F2017. In addition, the F2018 cohort rated the course difficulty significantly lower than the W2011 & F2012 cohorts (α = 0.05).

Reflective of the numerical data above, there was only one student comment directed toward the course difficulty:

• Team apps were challenging at times.

The F2020 student cohort rated the course workload to be significantly lighter than all other cohorts except W2011 (α = 0.05). 

There was only one student comment that addressed workload whereas in previous years I have received many comments concerned about the workload (and difficulty) of molecular cell biology. I think the fewer comments regarding the course difficulty and workload indicate students found the Fall 2020 offering of Molecular Cell Biology to be not as overwhelming as previous years being more similar to what the Winter 2011 cohort experienced:

• The reading [sic] were valuable, but can be overwhelming at times.

Students' perceptions of their own experience

The course was a good learning experience

There were significant differences between F2017 and all other cohorts (α = 0.05). Students in the Fall 2020 cohort highly rated their learning experience with a mean and median SRI of 4.5.

The written comments by students on the SRI corroborate the numerical data above that this was a good learning experience for students in the Fall 2020 cohort:

• This was by far my favourite course this semester. Neil is great and so nice! I really liked how some classes were synchronous and some wre [sic] not. and the synchronous classes were so fun. I really enjoyed splitting into teams to do quizzes and assignments - this time is hard so being able to actually talk virtually with your classmates was great!!
• Overall, this instructor provided a positive learning experience throughout the semester.
• The learning environment was very encouraging.

Motivation to learn more

The F2017 cohort is significantly different from the cohorts in W2011, F2012, F2018 & F2020 (α = 0.05). In addition, F2020 was significantly different from W2012 & F2016. The cohort in Fall 2020 had greater motivation to learn more (mean = 4.4) than previous student cohorts but there were no student comments that addressed this SRI prompt.

Students increased their knowledge

Statistical analysis found F2017 to be significantly different from W2012, F2012, F2018 & F2020 (α = 0.05). In addition, F2016 was significantly different from F2020. The Fall 2020 cohort highly rated their increase in knowledge with an SRI average of 4.8.

There was one student comment that echoed the numerical data:

• This course and its instructor were very good and I learned a lot from this course.

Student concerns

Two students commented that the team Apps were the least valuable portion of the course or induced anxiety for them during class. The student who was anxious about the Apps suggested that they not contribute as significantly as they did toward the final course grade (Apps contributed 12% toward students' final grade). Another student commented that they found the information between the mini-lecture videos and the textbook to be virtually the same and so could not justify for themselves the need to read both the text and view the videos. Another student comment suggested that it would be helpful to have an additional office hour that was outside of the flex class time (i.e., the class before the RAT that I used for students to drop in to ask their questions about the pre-class assignment) as they used the flex class time to view the videos rather than come to class to ask questions.

Discussion

I am very pleased with how learners responded to my efforts to produce a quality learning environment for Molecular Cell Biology in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. This corresponds to my own experience teaching the course which I found to run well from my perspective. I am also pleased that students recognized the time and energy required to prepare a traditional F2F course for online learning. 

What did I learn? What will I do differently?

It is interesting that before the pandemic before I was forced to teach online, I was very dismissive of preparing and making available video-recorded mini-lectures thinking that they could not recreate the experience I provided students in F2F real-time. The pandemic has taught me that video-recorded mini-lectures are a good alternative to reading the textbook for some students. The problem, of course, is that video recording mini-lectures take an inordinate amount of time whereas an excellent author team has already made available an excellent reading resource. Is it worth an instructor's time to recreate in video format what is already available in text format? I am not sure. In the case of the 2020/21 academic year, I took the advice of my colleagues and the published literature that the online learning environment is best served with video recorded minilectures. The response from my students seems to validate this claim.

A couple of things that I am considering changing for the next time I teach this course in response to the feedback I received from students are:

• Mix-up the Apps so that some are low stakes (no marks attached) and some will have marks recorded. I can typically run two or three Apps in a single 60 min class. So something I may try in the coming academic year is to have at least the first App not be for marks and the last App to count for marks. Of course, I will warn the students about which ones count and which ones do not.
• Many students reported to me anecdotally that they appreciated the flex days when there was no formal class but I was available in class (over Zoom) to answer questions or discuss the pre-class assignment. I had announced to students that I would be available to meet individually with students outside of these flex classes if they were unable to attend to ask their questions. Clearly, I need to be more explicit about this alternative as at least one student in Fall 2020 did not understand this to be available to them.
• I need to make it clearer to students that the learning resources are there for them to use as they wish and that the reading/viewing guides indicate what they will be responsible for on exams. At least one student in Fall 2020 thought that they had to read and watch everything. For some students this may be beneficial to their learning. But I need to make it clear to all students that the learning resources I provide to them may be used (or not) as they see fit. But that to be successful in the course they need to use the reading guide to inform their learning. Maybe I need to rename these as learning guides instead of reading/viewing guides?

What was different for the Fall 2017 and Fall 2020 cohorts?

I was left with a couple of questions after reviewing the statistical analysis of the cohorts' SRIs for molecular cell biology since 2011. Why did the Fall 2020 cohort have the best experience whereas the Fall 2017 cohort seems to have had the worst experience when taught AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology? 

I think the explanation for the Fall 2017 student cohort reporting a relatively poor experience (relatively speaking because the F2017 experience is still overall positive, rating generally > 3, for the SRI prompts) is because that is the year that Augustana first implemented its new term structure consisting of an initial 3-week block followed by an 11-week block in which students completed one compressed course in the first 3-wk block and then four courses in the subsequent 11-wk block. Teaching (& learning) a course in a three-week block is a very different experience from completing the same course over eleven weeks. Most Augustana faculty had never taught a compressed course before Fall 2017 and were still trying to make adjustments (or realizing that adjustments were necessary) when teaching in the three-week block. Thus, many students were feeling somewhat shell-shocked when they entered AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology during the subsequent 11-week block after their first ever experience of a three-week block course. On top of that, none of these students had ever experienced a TBL course before AUBIO 230. The SRI response rate was only 51% which is ~25-35% lower than typical for me and thus may represent a disproportionate number of students taking the time to respond to the online SRI survey to express their frustration with Augustana's new term structure and having to adjust to my implementation of TBL as a learning strategy. In subsequent years there were more students enrolled in AUBIO 230 who had some exposure to TBL as a teaching strategy and Augustana faculty became more adept at teaching compressed courses in the three-week block. Fall 2017 may have been a perfect storm for student dissatisfaction when I taught Molecular Cell Biology that term.

What about Fall 2020? Why did they have one of the best if not the best experience since 2011 in Molecular Cell Biology when I taught it in the fall of 2020? This surprises me because this would have been the first term that Augustana students were forced to complete all of their courses in a completely online environment as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. I know students were stressed and dissatisfied with their learning experience because a number of them personally confided in me about this. 

When we were forced to transition from fully F2F teaching and learning to fully remote delivery of our courses in the middle of the previous term (Winter 2020) I had my first experience teaching online. Thus, when it became apparent in the spring of 2020 that the entirety of the 2020/21 academic year was going to be completely online I spent all my spring and summer months preparing the five different courses I was to teach in 202/21 for a totally online experience. This required many hours of attending teaching workshops to develop my ability to continue using TBL in an online educational environment. Mini-lectures needed to be video-recorded, two-stage quizzes needed to be converted from paper delivery to online delivery via our LMS, Apps had to be converted from a paper format to Google Forms. 

This. 

Was. 

A. 

Lot. 

Of. 

Work.

I was unable to attend to my scholarship during the 2020/21 academic year as a result. But, the silver lining is that I was able to deliver an educational experience that was sensitive to students' needs during the pandemic. I think the SRI ratings and accompanying student quotes are evidence of that. The advice of my colleagues through conversations in the different educational communities I belong to (COPLAC, ACUBE, oCUBE, UBEA, STLHE, ISSOTL, The Teaching Professor, Team-based Learning Collaborative, UofA's CTL) all provided me with the necessary advice to successfully prepare for online teaching. The most surprising advice that I was given was to not lecture during the in-class Zoom meetings but rather use those times to answer student questions, support students as they struggled to learn in an online environment, and provide as much as possible the opportunity to practice what they are learning online. This was relatively easy for me to do because it was what I was already doing with my implementation of TBL during my typical F2F classes. The thing I had to master in order to continue doing this in an online environment was delivering two-stage quizzes (Readiness Assurance Tests, or RATs in the vocabulary of TBL) and Apps using the breakout rooms in Zoom, the adaptive mode in our LMS (Moodle which the UofA has branded eClass) quizzing function, and Google Forms. Plus learning how to use Loom to successfully video record minilectures. An incredibly large number of skills to quickly master.

Apparently, I was successful.

Dealing with academic dishonesty

The one sad result from the Fall 2020 teaching term was the number of cases of academic dishonesty I reported to my Associate Dean (Academic). While marking the final exam for Molecular Cell Biology I was shocked to read an answer that was word for word the one I had in my answer key. How did that happen? I found that I had used a question from an older textbook question bank and the question bank (with answers) had been photocopied and uploaded to a "homework" or "study" site such as Course Hero. After I read that copied answer I went through the other students' answers carefully and found a few more that were worded suspiciously similar to my answer rubric. 

The prevalence of academic dishonesty in the Fall 2020 11-week block was a result, I think, of my decision to not use exam proctoring software for online environments. I had decided not to use exam security software in the 11-week block of Fall 2020 because students in the preceding 3-week block course that I had taught (AUBIO/AUCHE 381 - Biochemistry: Intermediary Metabolism) complained that they found the implementation of ExamLock to be anxiety inducing during exams. Being mindful of the anxiety already present in students as a result of the pandemic I made the decision to discontinue using ExamLock during the fall 11-week block. After experiencing the prevelance of academic dishonesty in both AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology and AUBIO 111 - Integrative Biology I, I made the decision to return to using ExamLock in Winter 2021. I was unable to detect academic dishonesty in both of the courses I taught in Winter 2021.

So, there is a balance that needs to be sought between inducing unnecessary anxiety in students during exams while simultaneously ensuring that students are being examined fairly without undue advantages to some students. Using ExamLock for online learning environments seems to be the best balance for my online courses. ExamLock does not record students' physical surroundings, but does take periodic screen shots of students' computer desktop. In addition, it detects and alerts the instructor when students navigate away from the window containing the exam. This does not prevent students from using a smartphone or 2nd computer to look up answers to questions, but at least it prevents students from simply copying and pasting answers they find on the internet. I now pre-Google all exam questions before setting the exam rewording them until they are no longer easily Googleable. It takes time, but on balance using ExamLock and pre-Googling questions seems to be the best compromise when examining student learning in an online environment. 

Resources

Alberts, B., Johnson, A. D., Lewis, J., Morgan, D., Raff, M., Roberts, K., & Walter, P. (1983). Molecular Biology of the Cell. Garland Science.

Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Hopkin, K., Raff, M., Roberts, K., Bray, D., Lewis, J., & Walter, P. (1998). Essential cell biology. Garland Science.

Alberts, B., Hopkin, K., Johnson, A., Morgan, D., Raff, M., Roberts, K., & Walter, P. (2019). Essential Cell Biology (5th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company. 

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. 

Haide, P., Kubitz, K., & McCormack, W. T. (2014). Analysis of the team-based learning literature: TBL comes of age. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 303–333.

last class of the term

I just finished teaching my last molecular cell biology class for the fall term and I am feeling out of sorts. Out of sorts because I don't know what to do with myself. For three months my energy has been focused on preparing in-class activities and reading quizzes for each and every class meeting. Team-Based Learning, a highly structured version of the flipped classroom, requires preparation for every class. Activities and questions that worked last year, don't necessarily work for the subsequent cohort of students. So for the last three months, I have been probing my students trying to get a sense of what they do and do not know so that I can provide learning experiences to address their knowledge and skill gap and trying to hold a mirror up to them so that students know what they do and do not know.

Now the class is over, the students are completing the end of term student rating of instruction. And I am at a loss over what to do with myself.

Yes, I have service committees that need my attention, I have papers that need writing and revising, I have reviews that need to be typed. But those were always completed in the background while teaching has been foremost in my mind. Now that is over for the term, I feel disoriented - I no longer have the lodestone of instructing my students to set the priorities for my day. Can I actually take the time to read that article, to browse that recent journal issue, to walk down the hall and say hello to my colleague?

Strangely, I feel guilty about even taking the time to consider going for a coffee with a colleague. This is how all-encompassing the teaching term is for me.

It didn't always use to be this way.

Certainly, when I first started teaching I was always running to stand still. But after a few years and being successfully tenured, the pace became reasonable. I was able to tweak and re-use previous lectures and received great student reviews for my efforts.

Then, about eight years ago, I became bored with the sound of my own voice and experienced the revelation that good lecturing doesn't necessarily equate with good learning. In 2012, I began experimenting with implementing active learning in my classes culminating with most of my classes being reworked with team-based learning. And then the realization inherent with learner-centred teaching that each cohort of students is different; that to be able to meet the needs of each student cohort, each student, required that I continually formatively assess my students in order to understand and meet their learning needs.

That is difficult exhausting work. But such rewarding work! After my last class today, a few students came up and thanked me for my efforts. One student expressed gratitude for my class structure that facilitated their ability to learn from the assigned readings. The reading guides are doing their work. My preparation efforts were well-received.

So now I am sitting in my office wondering what to do with myself. I have decided to sit quietly for a moment and enjoy the fruits of my labour: student learning and gratitude. The teaching and learning experience is fleeting. Just allow me a few minutes to enjoy it before it fades into the ether.

student perceptions of active learning (3)

Before I discuss this paper, let me make it clear that I think the balance between lecture and active learning is completely dependent upon the class context. This is not an either/or situation. Teaching involves careful consideration of what our students need to learn and how to best support their learning efforts. Sometimes this will involve telling students something to clear up a misconception. Sometimes this will involve having our students apply or discuss their learning in order to make their learning stick by having them realize that they have not yet deeply learned a concept. I liken the situation to tuning the dial of a radio tuner.

Thus, whenever someone asks me how much active learning they should introduce into their classroom I answer: it depends. It depends upon the student cohort (their experiences and preparation), the year level of the course, the discipline of the course, whether the course is heavy on learning theory, or producing an assignment, what the learning culture is of the particular campus on which you find yourself teaching. All of these things will influence the right balance of lecturing and active learning that happens in your class. What I can say is that if only one is happening in class, then likely not enough of the other is occurring.

Having said that, I really liked this paper (Deslauriers et al 2019). It seems to me to be a well-controlled and thoughtful paper. The authors used a randomized, cross-over design to determine whether students' feeling of learning (FOL) correlate with their actual learning (as assessed with a test of learning - TOL) in an intro physics course taught with active learning vs lecture.

The results clearly indicate that students' FOL was greater when lecture was used whereas their TOL was greater in the active learning environment. This agrees with the Dunning-Kruger effect which suggests that novices have poor metacognition with which to assess their own learning. Their results also agree with other published results which show that students do not appreciate active learning (van Sickle 2016; Smith et al 2011) despite active learning producing better learning outcomes (Freeman et al 2014).

The FOL survey used in this study allowed the authors to also consider the impact of lecture fluency and they found that FOL was positively impacted by fluency. The literature suggests that fluency can inflate students' perceptions of learning as cited in Deslauriers et al (2019).

In a good mixed-methods design, the researchers followed up a subset of the participating students with interviews and they found that students' perceptions of learning were negatively impacted by the struggle required with active learning. When it was pointed out to them that studies show that cognitive effort positively impacts learning, students suggested that knowledge would influence their perception of learning in active learning courses.

So what is impacting the disconnect among novice students' perceptions of their own learning? As suggested above, one is that novices do not have well-developed metacognition. They have difficulties recognizing good judgement and, as a result, have difficulties judging their own learning. In addition, lecture fluency can mislead students into thinking they have learned something when in fact they have not. Finally, students unfamiliar with the cognitive effort required for active learning may resent the effort required to master a body of knowledge.

This resonates with my own teaching experience. Before I implemented active learning in my own classrooms a number of years ago, I was perplexed when students informed me of their frustration with their own learning because I explained things so well in class that they thought they understood what I was teaching but that perception did not translate into good exam performance. It was that student feedback that compelled me to look for other ways of teaching that would make it explicit to students what they did and did not know, what they had and had not learned. Team-based learning is the active learning structure I have implemented in my courses and it works well by hitting a number of the known factors by which active learning promotes student learning (Ambrose et al 2010; Brown et al 2014; Mazur 2009): pre-class preparation, attempting new problems in class, interacting with peers to practice their understanding of what they have learned. What these strategies do is make apparent to students what they do and do not know thereby enabling them to follow up and address the points of misunderstanding they have. In addition, being able to teach each other is a powerful way to cement their learning and create a robust knowledge structure and mental model of what they are learning that integrates with their existing understanding of their world.

So what are we to do to help students accept and embrace active learning despite the cognitive effort required with this teaching strategy? The authors conclude their paper by reporting on the results of an intervention they ran after receiving their study results. They spent time at the beginning of a subsequent term to show students the results of the research and explain how cognitive effort leads to increased learning. This was a 20-minute presentation of the results of the impact of active learning on learning gains and the influence of fluency on perceptions of learning. The researchers observed that students in the Q&A following the presentation were most interested in the idea that FOL and fluency can mislead their judgement about how their learning is progressing. A student survey showed that most students had a more favourable view of active learning as a result of the initial intervention.

These results agree with the earlier Finelli et al (2018) study that suggested that how instructors prepare students for active learning (explain why they are using a particular active learning strategy) goes a long way to mitigate students' resistance to active learning. More significantly in my mind is that the same Finelli study found that how instructors facilitated an active learning activity played a more important role in students response to active learning: being engaged with students during the activity promoted students' perceptions that active learning was enabling their learning.

Please notice, that as I stated above, in both the Finelli and Deslauriers papers it is not that lecturing is completely absent. Read carefully their papers and you will read that they note that mini-lectures were used as necessary. Similar to how I opened this blog post, it is not that lecturing is bad. It is that the injudicious use of lecture is bad. But of course, this can also be applied to active learning. Active learning will not fix bad teaching. Good teachers will be judicious about their use of lecture and active learning and implement either as the context dictates. Having students engaged in active learning for the sake of active learning is not the lesson here. The lesson here is that good instructors will implement lecturing and active learning as required by the particular context and that this will change from year to year, cohort to cohort, class to class, minute to minute.

This is what makes teaching such an interesting challenge as we support our students' learning efforts.

Resources

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., Norman, M. K., & Mayer, R. E. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brown, P. C., McDaniel, M. A., & Roediger, H. L. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201821936.

Finelli, B. C. J., Nguyen, K., Demonbrun, M., Borrego, M., Prince, M., Husman, J., … Waters, C. K. (2018). Reducing student resistance to active learning: Strategies for instructors. Journal of College Science Teaching, 47(5), 80–91. A PDF of this paper is available from Harvard here.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8410–8415.

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.

Mazur, E. (2009). Farewell, Lecture? Science, 323(5910), 50–51.

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.

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.

student perceptions of active learning (1)

This paper (Van Sickle, 2016) articulates what I have been experiencing in my TBL courses: student engagement and learning has been raised, but students do not like the process. Learning is being enhanced, but students do not like how it has been achieved.

One of the implications of this study is that students’ self-reports are not accurate indicators of their learning: students are not able to accurately assess the quality of their own learning. In this study, students performed better in the flipped classroom (as indicated by exam scores) yet they rated the learning experience as less effective than a traditional lecture.

Jenna Van Sickle unpacks this discrepancy with five possibilities:

1. Learning is messy and hard and students resent experiencing this reality.
2. Less equitable student-instructor interaction in the flipped classroom. It increases markedly for some and none for others whereas in the traditional lecture everyone receives the same interaction. I don’t think I agree with this because most traditional lectures, I think, will involve some Q&A between instructor and student, but typically this will be with the same students willing to raise their hands. But note this in the context of Anna Risannen’s findings in their blended learning Science courses on the North Campus - it seems that the instructor has the greatest impact (on student learning or on student perceptions of learning?). 
3. First time experience with active learning. Students understanding of teaching may involve the teacher telling them what to learn whereas flipped requires students to take responsibility for this.
4. Not all students will have done the pre-class assignment and thus feel ill-equipped to attend to the in-class assignments. Although this is their choice and responsibility when they assess the class with SETs they may remember that they felt uncomfortable in class and this is what influences their SET rating of the class.
5. Finally, Jenna suggests that a class culture of being ok to be wrong may be uncomfortable for students. This kind of learning environment requires students to take risks in order to benefit from the active learning opportunities. Many students will, but some students may feel uncomfortable doing this. Instructors can mitigate this by giving feedback often in a manner that praises effort rather than ability (promoting a growth mindset). Teaching is cultivating the development of ability which requires focus, effort, and time on task. These are the attributes on which instructors need to be giving feedback because these are what produce learning. In contrast, in a lecture-based class, students will not have to risk a wrong answer. There is inevitably embarrassment with a public wrong answer and this will colour students’ perception of the class. Yet, this is exactly what I am trying to do with my use of TBL - I want students to realize when they do not know something. I want to prevent students from fooling themselves that they have learned something - students may resent my holding a mirror to their learning.

The difficulty of a learner-centred classroom eliciting negative student perceptions, especially in first-year introductory courses for majors, is that it may impact retention and recruitment into the discipline. Van Sickle does make clear, however, that it is important to cognitively prepare students for subsequent courses in the major/discipline. But like me, she wonders if there is a way to do that, actively, without producing the negative affect in students.

Note the difference in study design between this and those that study student perception-outcome dichotomy. This study looked at aggregate scores for perceptions and outcomes and compared those. In contrast, Dunning-Kruger analyses consider each students' perception of their own learning and compares that to their actual learning outcome. That is, a regression among the individual points between perception and outcome is assessed. This is a more accurate way to look at this dichotomy. So a follow-up study would be to do this same regression analysis among active learning and lecture classes to see if there is a difference in perception correlation with student learning outcomes.

Resources

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.

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. https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v16i2.19216

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: the naked classroom

This 8th chapter continues the argument inside the classroom. Now that Bowen has explained the advantages of using technology to move content mastery outside of the classroom, he offers suggestions for how to use the time freed up in class to produce a more engaging learning environment inside the classroom. Many of these ideas I have heard before and some I have implemented. But it is worth thinking about the difficulty in designing these in-class activities. And I appreciate his supportive stance that developing the active learning classroom takes time. Just because it does not work as smoothly as your well-polished lectures does not mean that the attempt should be abandoned. It takes time to become an excellent teacher. And he makes a distinction between students complaining about the pedagogy when really what they are noticing is the quality of its implementation. This is something that I have experienced in my implementation of team-based learning. Many students complain about my use of TBL thinking that it is a poor pedagogy when the real issue is that I need to improve how I implement its use. Knowing when students need a guiding lecture vs when they need an activity to either wake them up or solidify conceptual understanding is a skill that I am still attempting to master. In addition, the skilful implementation of active learning requires that the instructor appropriately pitches the difficulty of the material because we are expecting students to engage the material first before coming to class. It is critical that that first contact not be too beyond their abilities. Most textbooks are not necessarily written with the understanding that this will be students' first contact with the material. Just as in the Star Trek universe where the Federation has established guidelines for first contact with an alien species, instructors (and textbooks) need to consider what is at stake and how to best manage first contact between students and the course material. This is the challenge I have with implementing active learning - knowing how to pitch the initial reading assignment (which pages? which figures? Are there sections that should be skipped?) and to what level should students be held accountable for their pre-reading? What I expect them to be able to do on a reading quiz is different from what I expect them to do on a MT or final exam. This will likely be different for every discipline, every cohort of students, and year level of course and student. Which means that a master teacher can never completely rely on what was prepared for the previous iteration of the course: a new instance of the course will require careful consideration of the course context in students’ real time. This is a difficult task.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). The naked classroom. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 8. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 185-214.

Felder, R. M., & Brent, R. (1996). Navigating the bumpy road to student-centered instruction. College Teaching, 44(2), 43–47.

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.

pre-testing and expectations in team-based learning

Last Friday I gave my 2nd-year biochemistry class its first readiness assurance test or RAT in team-based learning (TBL) terminology. It was a mix of new material (amino acids) and material they should have learned from their pre-requisite chemistry courses on pH and buffers. Typically, TBL RATs aim to be reading quizzes to encourage students to prepare for practicing to use their newly learned knowledge in class in subsequent classes in what TBL terms Apps (for applications). The design of RATs aims to produce a class average of 70%. My average last week was 49%.

So, what happened? Interestingly, when I analyzed the marks, it appears to me that students did better on the new material: recognizing amino acid structure and calculating pI of amino acids. What students had the most difficulty with was their understanding of their prior learning on pH and buffers. This surprised me and so I checked with my chemistry colleagues and they suggested that my questions on pH and buffers were more conceptual and that first-year chemistry courses tend to focus on calculating pH. In addition, my chemistry colleagues reminded me that our students prefer to plug and play (calculate) rather than think. I don't think our campus is unusual in this regard - thinking is difficult work!

But it does raise an interesting issue for the implementation of TBL as a teaching and learning strategy. My understanding of TBL practice suggests that RATs should focus more on the conceptual than on calculation style questions. As a result, this should promote discussion of the questions during the team phase of the two-stage style of testing that is inherent in RATs. In readiness assurance tests, students first complete the test (10 MCQs in my classes) individually and then repeat the same test as a team using IF-AT cards so that students receive immediate feedback about their understanding. It is great at immediately revealing misconceptions. I have been using this technique since 2011 and can attest that it works well.

However, there does seem to be an apparent tension in the Readiness Assurance Process of Team-Based Learning. The RAP is what makes TBL a flipped classroom teaching strategy. In the RAP, students are assigned pages to read from the textbook (or article, or podcast, or whatever students need to initially prepare themselves to learn in class), and then during the first class of the course module/topic, students are administered a RAT in the two-stage testing style I described above. The RAP is intended to encourage students to do their pre-class preparation and hold them accountable for that preparation. It is not intended to be the end of teaching and learning for the particular course module, but rather is supposed to mark the beginning of teaching and learning. Thus, the RAT should be considered to be, in essence, a reading quiz. It is suggested in the TBL literature that a typical RAT could be constructed based on the topic headings and subheading in the assigned textbook chapter. However, the TBL literature also suggests that the questions should generate discussion and debate during the team portion of the RAT. What I have difficulty in implementing TBL in my classes, is that there seems to be a tension between producing a RAT that is a reading quiz vs producing a RAT that generates discussion and debate. Typically, a reading quiz is designed fairly low on Bloom's taxonomy of learning (mostly questions testing recall). In contrast, questions that foster debate and discussion need to move beyond simple right/wrong answers. Hence, it seems that there is a tension inherent in the design of RATs: they should be designed as reading quizzes that are able to foster debate.

I have a hard time constructing these sorts of tests and I believe that is what produced the poor class average on my first RAT of the term in my biochemistry class last week. What I thought were simple recall questions based upon what students had learned in prior courses, ended up exposing some fundamental misconception about their learning. I guess that is what RATs are supposed to do. I was just surprised how many misconceptions students had about pH and buffers given they have been learning this since high school. On the other hand, if you don't use it, you lose it. And I suspect that for many of my biochemistry students they have not had to consider pH and buffers for over a year or two.

The way I handled the situation is that I made the RAT out of 9 instead of 10 (there was one question that no one answered correctly - a couple of teams got it correct on their second attempt) and I have also informed students that I will not include their lowest RAT result when I calculate their final grade for the course. Hopefully, that is sufficient to press the reset button so that students feel like they are not stumbling right out of the gate in the first week of classes.

Resources

Dihoff, R., Brosvic, G. M., ML, M. L. E., & Cook, M. J. (2004). Provision of feedback during preparation for academic testing: learning is enhanced by immediate but not delayed feedback. The Psychological Record, 54(2), 207–231.

Haide, P., Kubitz, K., & McCormack, W. T. (2014). Analysis of the team-based learning literature: TBL comes of age. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 303–333.

Metoyer, S. K., Miller, S. T., Mount, J., & Westmoreland, S. L. (2014). Examples from the trenches: Improving student learning in the sciences using team-based learning. Journal of College Science Teaching, 43(5), 40–47.

is it malpractice to not use active learning teaching strategies?

Any teaching and learning strategy can be poorly implemented resulting in a poor learning experience: Active learning included. A 2011 article by Andrews et al suggests that implementation of active learning strategies does not lead to improved learning outcomes without a fundamental change in instructors' viewpoint from didactic teaching to constructivist learning. Plugging in a technique will not transform a poor teacher into a good teacher. There are many facets that must be considered when implementing active learning; for example the impact of peer learning or giving time for students to first process the answer themselves.

But I do think that active learning is an essential component of learner-centred teaching which rests on a constructivist understanding of learning. We (learners of all ages and disciplines) construct our own knowledge structure by integrating new learning with what what we have learned before. Passive didactic lecture is no better than assigning textbook pages for students to read (Bligh, 1998). Notice that I qualified that with passive didactic. This is what active learning is typically compared to. Socratic lecturing is not passive didactic - that is a form of active learning IMHO. Is active reading a form of active learning? I believe it is. But not just passive reading with highlighter in hand. But rather active reading with pencil in hand and perhaps a set of guiding questions to consider/answer while reading.

In a  related study a flipped classroom approach was compared to a non-flipped approach in which both versions of the class were constructed using the 5E learning cycle. What they found was that flipping makes no difference if active learning is already taking place regardless of whether the instructor-mediated, in-class portion is during the content attainment phase or during the content application phase. They suggest that the improved student learning outcomes apparent with flipping the classroom are solely a result of the active learning that typically accompanies flipping. oCUBE discussed the flipped vs non-flipped paper at a recent journal club meeting and one of the interesting issues that came up for us is whether or not flipping the classroom is reliant upon technology. Jensen et al (2015) certainly assume that this is the case but oCUBErs felt that flipping with active learning can happen by simply assigning textbook readings prior to their active application in class. What makes the flip so powerful compared to the olden days when reading was assigned is that students in the flipped classroom are typically held accountable for their out-of-class preparation (quiz, assignment, blog post).

In contrast to all of the positive findings on the efficacy of flipped learning, another study found that flipping works in the short term but not necessarily the long term with the suggestion that impact on student learning outcomes might be sustained if flipping was more deeply embedded in the educational curriculum (i.e. students experience flipping in more than one course). If it is active learning rather than flipping that results in improved student learning outcomes, I wonder if this implies that active learning has long lasting effects only if implemented across students' curriculum (i.e. experience active learning in more than one course). Of course this is speculative given the different natures of the studies and what they were measuring (course outcomes vs metacognitive/collaborative skills). But it is interesting to consider.

The July 15, 2015 issues of Scientific American and Nature were coordinated to address the changes that need to occur in science education to improve student learning outcomes. While they both focus on the sciences, their advocacy of the the impact of active learning cuts across all academic disciplines. Given that the evidence for active learning is becoming overwhelming (Freeman et al 2014, Weimer 2013, Michael 2006,  Prince 2004; note that the Allen 2014, Weiman 2014, and Weimer 2015a & 2015b resources below are all commentary on the Freeman et al 2014 key reference) it seems almost like malpractice if instructors are not using active learning strategies in their classes. Freeman et al (2014), make the startling conclusion that 12% of the study's students would not have failed the course if active learning had been used. Could those students sue the institution/instructor for malpractice given the evidence of the efficacy of active learning?

Resources

Allen, D. (2014). Recent research in science teaching and learning. Cell Biology Education—Life Sciences Education, 13(4), 584-6.

Andrews TM, Leonard MJ, Colgrove CA, Kalinowski and ST. 2011. Active learning not associated with student learning in a random sample of college biology courses. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 10(4), 394-405.

Bligh, D. A. (1998). Evidence of what lectures achieve. In What’s the Use of Lectures? (5th ed., pp. 10–23). Exeter: Intellect.

Bray B. 2012. Active learning using the Socratic method. Rethinking Learning (April 21).

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okorafor, N., Jordt, H., and Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111(23), 8410-8415.

Hartle, R. T., Baviskar, S., & Smith, R. (2012). A field guide to constructivism in the college science classroom: Four essential criteria and a guide to their usage. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 38(2), 31–34. 

Jensen JL, Kummer TA, Godoy DdM. 2015. Improvements from a flipped classroom may simply be the fruits of active learning. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 14(1), 1-12. 

Linton, D. L., Farmer, J. K., & Peterson, E. (2014). Is peer interaction necessary for optimal active learning? CBE-Life Sciences Education , 13(2), 243–252. 

Linton, D. L., Pangle, W. M., Wyatt, K. H., Powell, K. N., & Sherwood, R. E. (2014). Identifying Key Features of Effective Active Learning: The Effects of Writing and Peer Discussion. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13(3), 469–477.

Michael, J. (2006). Where’s the evidence that active learning works? Advances in Physiology Education, 30(4), 159–167.

Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223–231. 

Tanner, K. D. (2010). Order matters: Using the 5E model to align teaching with how people learn. CBE-Life Sciences Education , 9 (3), 159–164. 

Van Vliet, E. A., Winnips, J. C., & Brouwer, N. (2015). Flipped-class pedagogy enhances student metacognition and collaborative-learning strategies in higher education but effect does not persist. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 14(3). 

Weiman, C. E. (2014). Large-scale comparison of science teaching methods sends clear message. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111(23), 8319-8320.

Weimer M. 2015a. Active learning wins. The Teaching Professor, 29(6), 4,6.

Weimer M. 2015b. More evidence that active learning trumps lecturing. Faculty Focus (June 3).

Weimer, M. (2013). Research: Evidence that learner-centered approaches work. In Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice (2nd ed., pp. 28–55). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.