Educational Solutions blog – Page 4 – Keeping up with the latest developments in learning, teaching, and technology

Call it a support group for GIS enthusiasts

Please check out a great web resources for GIS educators: http://www.teachgis.org/

“Teachers and learners of GIS, and related geo-technologies, want to increase the rewards while we lower the frustrations. This site, created by instructors and for instructors, is designed to support our educational community of practice.”

Resources, Discussions, and Blogs. This site is truly made by educators for educators who have struggled with the integration of GIS into the classroom. A great place to share ideas syllabuses, and data sets.

Linear algebra,classroom response systems, and questions about questions

I recently dived into studying linear algebra, and was intrigued to read Robert Talbert’s post about the use of peer instruction in linear algebra classes. Talbert says that “Linear algebra is loaded with big ideas that all connect around a central question (whether or not a matrix is invertible). The computation is not the hard part of linear algebra — it’s forging a real understanding of the ideas and concepts in the subject and coming to terms with how they relate.” All of which makes linear algebra a perfect candidate for peer instruction, if your classroom response system allows answers other than the multiple choice questions. Talbert used the Learning Catalytics system developed by Eric Mazur, the father of peer instruction. Learning Catalytics is a web-based system that allows, among other things, students to submit drawings, click on and/or draw on pictures, and select multiple correct answers to a question. It was very popular with the students. He didn’t draw any conclusions about how the classroom response system improved student learning, if it did at all. But, he poses an interesting question at the end of the post. “One of the things I’m especially interested in seeing is whether questions that admit more constructive input on a question correlate with improved student learning compared to more static multiple choice questions on the same concept.” Sounds like a good candidate for a future research study.
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/12/18/doing-linear-algebra-with-peer-instruction-and-learning-catalytics/

Do’s and Don’ts of Classroom Technology Use

A computer monitor with a padlock on it — Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Campus Technology’s Bridget McCrea recently wrote about several things a synchronous online teacher should and shouldn’t do, but the list applies to the use of technology in any class, I think.

One thing McCrea does not mention, that I’ve always wanted to have when I teach, is some kind of tech or assistant in the class to take care of things. One example of this is in the movie The Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan has a yeoman who organizes and displays slides as he’s presenting (at a presentation he was asked to give as he walked into a meeting). Continue reading “Do’s and Don’ts of Classroom Technology Use”

Credit for taking free, massive open online courses

Dave Cormier in a presentation about MOOC at Skolforum in Stockholm 2012.

In what I think is an interesting first, one of CSU’s campuses will grant students credit for participating in, and passing a test on, the Introduction to Computer Science course offered through Udacity, as reported in the New York Times. In another turn of events more recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that Amherst rejected joining edX and San Jose State professors reject a Harvard professor’s MOOC. Additionally, Inside Higher Ed reports that Coursera actually generated some revenue (hat tip to EdTech Magazine).

I think all these developments are natural and wise actions. Learning can happen in many ways and so giving people credit for provable or verifiable learning, such as participation in a MOOC, should count, if applicable, in one’s degree program. Additionally, institutions must decide what their business is. Amherst and Colorado College are in the business of education on a personal scale, whereas MOOCs are about a large scale. Perhaps these will change someday, but until then, we’re going to continue to educate students on a more individual level. Continue reading “Credit for taking free, massive open online courses”

Blended learning, 90’s style

blended learning methodology - online learning, mobile learning, classroom learning — Image courtesy wikimedia commons

I’ve been assisting or promoting blended learning since the 90’s! In one of my German lit classes (when I was a student), I recommended that we move part of the discussion online. My school had just implemented a new online discussion tool combined with a picture-based class roster. I learned about it and thought it would be cool if we used it in class. I recommended it to the teacher, who was happy to try something like that out. As we didn’t have wifi in the building and I didn’t have a laptop, I created a powerpoint that would mimic logging in to the system and posting to the discussion board.

The presentation went well and the system worked well enough, but the assignment due date was always “before class” which didn’t leave enough time for discussion online. Had it been due 24 hours before class started, it would have worked better. As I wasn’t the teacher and I was just a young college student at the time, that didn’t occur to me and the assignment remained less effective than it could have been.

Nonetheless, in 1998, I was thinking about blended learning!

Do screencasts actually help students learn?

In reading Robert Talbert’s blog post about a study that appears in the Journal of Engineering Education, I realized that answering this question really requires us to talk first about what problems the screencasts are meant to address. In the study he discusses, there were two types of screencasts: homework solution screencasts, where the professor worked out solutions to homework problems step by step, and screencasts that addressed a topic students indicated at the end of a class session that they had trouble understanding.

I suspect most of us, when we think about screencasts, think more about the former type – working through a problem step-by-step. Yet the idea of creating a just-in-time screencast to address a specific problem in understanding that the students themselves have identified intrigues me. It would be more challenging to develop, because it couldn’t be prepared ahead of time, but it might have a significant impact on student learning.

So what did the study find? The researchers reported that “students who use the screencasts more and perceive them to have increased their understanding of the course material actually demonstrate increased competence in terms of higher performance. This is particularly true for students seeing the concepts for the first time.”

Read Robert Talbert’s full blog post here and the complete study here.

Fair warning for flipped classrooms

MM900283832 — Image courtesy Microsoft Corp

Professor Steven Neshyba at the University of Puget Sound sent a warning to his students that they really needed to view the short videos before they came to class.

“I couldn’t help noticing that some of you came to last week’s Thursday/Friday session with little or no preparation and consequently did not benefit very much from the exercise. This observation is consistent with the fact that about a third of you didn’t watch the video, ‘Computational video 1 Preparation for the MO computation.’ It is your education, of course, and you are free to manage your time as you see fit; I just want to be sure you understand that putting class preparation at the low end of your priority list in the hope of making up that time later is a suboptimal strategy.”

Mortified, Sam fired back, “Is that a general e-mail or is it just for me? Because if it’s just for me, I take great offense at the accusation.”

Continue reading “Fair warning for flipped classrooms”

Why aren’t we using open education resources?

The Open Educational Resources logo, courtesy wikimedia commons

The answer is two-fold, I think. But let me back up for those who may not know: an open education resource is a textbook or learning object (website, video, simulation, etc.) that has been created for anyone to use freely. Some are even open to modification and integration into other projects for free. These are sometimes created through grants from large foundations or institutions.

So why aren’t we using them?

Well, in some cases, we are. I know of professors who use youtube videos in their courses; these are free to use, but for the actual open textbooks and such, I think the problem is that there is very little marketing done by the companies that create or aggregate the open education resources. Why don’t they do marketing? Because they use their funds to create the resources and don’t have a giant budget to market these things. Continue reading “Why aren’t we using open education resources?”

What we do at CC in this digital age

Distance education has been around for quite a while (remember hearing about correspondence courses? one started in 1728), then radio and television-based education entered the scene and now we have online education, with MOOCs, Khan Academy and the rest. I think online education as we now know it is still in its infancy and I’m very interested to see where it goes. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a blog post by Joseph Harris about how what we do is different and why that’s a good thing. Here’s an excerpt:

No doubt my professor took me seriously before I had earned such care. In my experience, that’s what good teachers do. The crucial moment in teaching, or at least in teaching writing or literature, lies not in presentation but response. We hand students a text and ask them, What do you make of this? Then we listen hard to what they have to say, looking for ways to help them develop their thinking.

Continue reading “What we do at CC in this digital age”

Let your students know how they’re doing

One of the nice things about small class sizes is that it’s fairly easy to know how your students are doing. If they’re talking in class and doing well on assignments and quizzes, it’s not too hard to have keep their pulse and help them succeed…right?

Back when I taught English composition in Ecuador, I tried to help my students succeed by doing exercises with them every class day. We’d meet for 90 minutes and so students had frequent opportunities to “perform.” I wish that I had known used flipped instruction and frequent assessment then. Instead of going over mistakes in class, I could have posted them online for the students to correct and respond to outside of class, then we could have discussed they why in class. Additionally, by taking care of several small assessments outside class and posting the grades online, the students could have constantly known how they were doing. Continue reading “Let your students know how they’re doing”