Category Archives: Pedagogy

Avatar photo

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 →

Avatar photo

“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 →

Avatar photo

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.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

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.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

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 →

Amazing Learning from Amazing People

A Selected Recollection of my Teaching and Learning Experiences

PART 1

Ever since I was a little boy, I have been blessed with plenty of opportunities for teaching to and learning from others both in academic and non-academic activities. Going back to my first grade times, I recall an assignment where I was asked to draw a traditional family picture: you know, dad, mom, children, and a dog. I was sitting in my study desk at home struggling with this assignment because I was (and still am) not a good illustrator at all. Then a friend of the family who was visiting us that day offered me his help. With his help, I was able to finish successfully the family picture. In his own ways, he taught me a few tricks regarding the drawing of a human face, and the contour of a typical dog. With his help, I was able to tackle later assignments involving drawing with much more confidence. As I learned from my friend, as artistic as drawing can be there are usually some basic steps that can be followed by anyone to end up with a decent picture or portrayal. What is remarkable about this story is that the person who helped me draw a family picture was himself a person who had a moderate degree of intellectual disability. Also in first grade, I remember one of my classmates having difficulties with reading and math, two subjects I was pretty good at. She asked me if I could help her and I gladly did so. Thus, here I was in first grade on the one hand struggling with drawing but improving thanks to somebody else’s help, and on the other hand having an opportunity to help a classmate in her struggles with reading and math. Continue reading →

“Any questions?” Engaging your students with interactive polls.

I’ve been indulging in a bit of a guilty pleasure lately: a network television series that ran a couple of years ago called Lie To Me. It stars Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman, a deception specialist who is hired by agencies and individuals to determine the “truth” at a crime scene.

Dr. Lightman and his team of experts study the micro-expressions (brief, involuntary facial expressions) on all of the parties involved.

Be it a downturn of the mouth, or a twitch under the eye, “The Lightman Group” banks on the fact that these micro-expressions consistently indicate emotions such as guilt, shame, fear or arousal.  These expressions are especially apparent when video footage of a subject is slowed down and studied, frame-by-frame. The scientific premise of the show is based on the cutting-edge research of psychologist Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman group facial expression picturesPhoto credit: Paul Ekman Group

Continue reading →

Fostering a Culture of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at DePaul

One of the central purposes given by DePaul University’s mission statement regards research broadly (emphasis mine):

Research is supported both for its intrinsic merit and for the practical benefits it offers to faculty, students, and society. Broadly conceived, research at the university entails not only the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge but also the creation and interpretation of artistic works, application of expertise to enduring societal issues, and development of methodologies that improve inquiry, teaching and professional practice.

Continue reading →