Category Archives: Pedagogy

Bringing Mentorship Online

The Computing and Digital Media (CDM) [School of Computing Research Colloquium] recently hosted Dr. James C. Lester of North Carolina State University, who spoke about what I believe will be the future of online learning, and probably learning in general: “Narrative-Centered Learning Environments.”

Here’s the abstract:

The long-term goal of the intelligent tutoring systems community is to create adaptive learning technologies that bring about fundamental improvements in education. For the past several years our lab has been investigating a family of intelligent tutoring systems that have a dual focus on learning effectiveness and student engagement: narrative-centered learning environments. Narrative-centered learning environments integrate the inferential capabilities of intelligent tutoring systems with the rich gameplay supported by commercial game engines. In this talk we will introduce the principles motivating the design of narrative-centered learning environments, describe their roots in interactive narrative, explore the role of computational models of affect recognition and affect expression in their interactions, and discuss their cognitive and affective impact on students through empirical studies conducted in public school systems.

The abstract sounds promising, and I can attest the presentation was truly stunning. Continue reading →

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Choosing the Right Box for Online Teaching

Recently, I attended a workshop on assessing student readiness for online learning with some colleagues from other local colleges and universities. That morning, we spent two hours discussing how to assess student readiness for taking online and hybrid courses.  This lively workshop included discussions about: face-to-face vs. online, self-paced tutorials; whether or not preparations should also be assessing students’ academic abilities; transfer and nontraditional students who don’t have the same support networks that traditional freshmen have; and which factors we should be assessing to determine “readiness.” Many of the workshop participants lamented about the amount of time they’ve had to spend on technology training because it has cut into the time they need to teach traditional analog skills like proper writing, citation, computation, etc.  It seemed like a hard issue to solve, as student learning varies a great deal, and it’s very difficult to provide a one-size-fits-all solution for situations like this (and that, unfortunately, is what colleges and universities want from a management perspective).

Many of my colleagues felt they were not able to provide students with same sense of presence and engagement they had in a face-to-face class. Then it occurred to me that this conversation may need to be looked at from the a different perspective. I derailed the conversation for a few minutes by asking, “So, whose readiness are we really assessing?” In most developed countries, students expect that they will need a computer for college.  The majority have cell phones as well as other electronic devices that permit them to be online all of the time.  I’ve seen young people type with their thumbs faster than I can type with both hands. They are always connected to an online environment and always conversing with someone (or several people), even as they are in the classroom (unfortunately).  Since they’re already so good at technology, the real question is: are we ready to meet them where they are? Continue reading →

Reflections on my Experience in the Teaching and Learning Certificate Program

After having attended over a dozen workshops offered throughout DePaul’s Teaching and Learning Certificate Program (TLCP), I have developed a much better sense of what I can do as a teacher to affect a positive and measurable transformation in my students. I also learned that I am not alone in my quest to find innovative teaching practices that can be readily implemented in my courses.   Continue reading →

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Becoming a Learning Coach with DESIRE

The concept of a “learning coach” was introduced by Dr. Jose Bowen during his keynote speech at the 2014 DePaul Annual Teaching and Learning Conference while discussing the new role of a college professor.  When the knowledge held in the brain of a professor can no longer compete with the phone that is in the hand of a student, as he humorously pointed out, maybe it’s time to think about what makes a professor the most valuable.  During his presentation, Dr. Bowen called everyone’s attention to a painful reality: the vastly available content delivered through the Internet free of charge is depriving the professor of the privilege of being the knowledge owner and resource!  The value of a “residential” professor—verses the ones teaching to the world via the Internet—lies in the fact that s/he can be actively involved in the learning process with the students by monitoring and guiding them to the end result.  That role, as Bowen put it, would be a “learning coach”. Continue reading →

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“Could Rosie the Robot grade my papers for me?”

Image Via
Image Via

At the end of each term, as you pass your harried colleagues in the hall, there’s likely a common cause for your collectively frazzled state: the stack of papers (or digital file folder of papers) that awaits your grading. They loom there, at the corner of your desk, in the middle of your table at home, or in that desktop folder, and you can feel their mental baggage as you hustle through the rest of your end-of-the-quarter tasks.

Grading writing is hard. It takes time and thoughtfulness on your part, and even if you calculate how many hours of grading you have ahead of you (perhaps trying to limit yourself to 30 minutes per paper, knowing full well that your students [hopefully] spent far more time than that writing the paper), you’ll still be reading papers at all hours, struggling with eye strain and red ink visions and mental exhaustion because if you see ONE MORE comma splice…

All of this is what makes the concept of automated grading at least tempting. Continue reading →

UX for Online Courses

Does your online course provide a positive user experience? To determine if it does, you might see how it aligns with information architect and user experience consultant Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb diagram.

Figure 1. The User Experience HoneycombUseful. First, is your course useful? The matter of whether the subject and learning objectives are ultimately useful to the student is certainly important, but here I’m thinking of whether the course supports the stated learning objectives. Does it provide the content and tools a student needs to meet learning objectives, or must the student search for solutions or create workarounds to overcome shortcomings, limitations, errors, or omissions? For example, if your course requires students to record and post audio comments, does it provide tools for doing so, or at minimum direct students to the appropriate tools and tutorials? Further, are the elements or components of your course useful? Do the graphics, audio, or video support learning objectives? Do the readings and assessments? Continue reading →

Making the Most Out of Office Hours

Having in mind the theme of our upcoming Annual Teaching and Learning Conference, “Full Contact Teaching: Making the Most of Class Time,” I reflected on what other student-faculty contact opportunities there are that could be used more effectively. I realized that in my experience more often than not office hours tend to be used non-effectively, or even worse not used at all by students. I firmly believe that office hours are a unique opportunity that I have to get to know better my students’ weak and strong points in the learning process, and then provide my students with proper and timely feedback. That is, office hours are certainly one avenue that a student has to provide me with valuable information that I can then use to help him/her better individually, and then the entire class at large. I thus decided some time ago to consider strategies that could help drive purposefully more students to my office hours. Of the many strategies that occurred to me, I will talk in this blog about one that I implemented with great success in the second quarter of general chemistry that I taught in spring of 2009 (CHE113, now known as CHE132). Continue reading →

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Highlights from the 2014 ELI Conference

One of the best things about the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) annual meeting is the broad spectrum of institutions represented, from the Ivy League to large public and private universities to community colleges and small liberal arts schools. If you’re looking for colleagues who are grappling with the same challenges you’re experiencing at your institution, chances are you’ll find them at ELI.

The ELI audience is as diverse as the institutions they represent and includes instructional designers, faculty with a passion for technology, and IT professionals working in higher education. Unlike conferences that focus primarily on distance learning, ELI attracts a large proportion of CIOs and people passionate about the intersection of technology and physical learning spaces. As a result, the conference typically includes ample hands-on time with new gadgets and hardware. On Tuesday, I learned more about Arduinos during a hands-on “maker-space” session that left me missing my old Capsela set. At breakfast on Wednesday, I had a chance to chat with remote conference participants who roamed the venue using a device designed by Double Robotics. And just before heading to the airport, Jeremy Littau, an Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, let me test-drive Google Glass.

Of course, you don’t have to be on a first name basis with the staff of your local Radio Shack to get something useful out of ELI. The annual meeting agenda is brimming with presentations on everything from faculty development for online learning to predictions on the future of open-source textbooks and MOOCs. Here are a few highlights from some of the sessions I attended.

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Reclaiming Your Classroom

As the name might suggest, Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) is tasked with providing technology support to instructors for the purposes of enhancing teaching and learning.  A great deal of the job entails the development and support of online, hybrid, and flipped classes.  We’ve been doing this for a while, but lately we’ve been hearing a new set of questions as the direction of higher education moves more and more online:

“I’m teaching a hybrid/flipped class, and I’ve put all my documents online, provided lecture videos, and I do all my papers and exams online as well.  But now I have all this extra face time in class…what do I do with it?”

Fear not. We’re here for that too.  It is true that the majority of learning materials can usually be offloaded to an online resource.  Students can come to class having seen the lecture material, perhaps turned in a homework assignment or taken a quiz, and maybe even participated in a discussion online.  This offloading of materials means students can take advantage of the ebb and flow in their personal schedules to complete the class work online, but they still need meaningful learning experiences when they are face to face.  Let’s examine some possible strategies that can be easily implemented to reclaim your class time.

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From Content Critical to Content Cheap: The Change of Online Course Value

In the December issue of the Campus Technology magazine, Gerry McCartney, CIO at Purdue University, was cited in “What Will Happen to MOOCs Now that Udacity Is Leaving Higher Ed?” for his response to the downward spiral of the MOOC.  McCartney “applauded the MOOC makers for demonstrating that ‘content has almost no value…”, and when it comes to the value of this type of education, “the money is not in the content”.

McCartney believes that the learning experience delivered through a MOOC is like learning from watching The History Channel. It is merely access to content—a low-value type of education.  In his opinion, one can get the best Chaucerian professor to publish a book for everyone in the world to read, but it is impossible for the same professor to offer a class to teach everyone in the world because learning requires personal interaction. Personal interaction, as Gerry McCartney points out, is the high-value type of education—something that is not scalable in a MOOC.

Continue reading →