Educational Solutions blog

A few ideas bubbled up at the block 5 block break workshop we did on that topic. We started off with a presentation from Thomas Riedel of Regis University in Denver, who told us about a project undertaken there to help students better understand academic integrity issues. We then split up into groups to talk about teaching challenges we face, and ideas for ways we could address them. A couple of themes emerged. One was related to helping students do peer review and finding ways to make that take less class time. Another was that sometimes people, students and faculty alike, feel self-conscious about asking for with things that they think they should know, but don’t. A third theme was finding ways to deal more effectively with students of different backgrounds. Many classes have no prerequisites, and as a consequence, they combine novices in the subject with students who have much more knowledge of that area.

For peer review, a couple of ideas were floated for how online discussion forums and making peer review sessions “homework” rather than in-class time, might help. For addressing the issue of people being reluctant to ask for help, we discussed how providing resources in an anonymous, online format could be a good way to get learners access to the resources they need.

There were a couple of ideas that may develop into full-fledged projects, and if they do, you’ll hear about them eventually on this blog!

What is the difference between education and indoctrination? This debate rages back hundreds, thousands, of years, and will rage thousands more into the future. Every major philosopher has had one answer or another, from Plato to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Continuing in that venerable tradition, linguist, political activist, and academic generalist extraordinaire Noam Chomsky, one of our most consistently compelling public intellectuals, has a lot to say in the video below.

At the end of CC’s half-block winter session, we held a winter conference where various people around campus presented on topics related to the strategic planning process we are currently working through. Steve Lawson, our humanities librarian, and I ran a session titled “The CC Classroom: Using Technology to Improve Teaching and Learning.” We centered the discussion around common teaching challenges and how various types of technology can help address them. We began by asking people to indicate a challenge they encounter in their teaching from the list below:

• Not knowing if students “get it” or not
• Not enough time to give the kind of feedback you’d like to give to students
• Getting students to a conceptual understanding of the material as opposed to surface-level understanding
• Spending so much time on basics you never get to more advanced material
• Dealing with students of very different ability levels in the same class
We then asked the attendees to add challenges that weren’t on the list, and came up with
• Students need more practice – a one-shot session isn’t enough.
• Absences
• Too much to cover in the available time
• Students don’t retain information between blocks, leading to too much time spent on review instead of on new material
• Block plan fatigue
• Need to break up the three hours of a block plan class

At the end of this block (next week on Wednesday!), we’ll be doing another workshop around this theme, with the goal of generating ideas for online modules or other activities that can help teachers address some of these challenges. I’ll report back on how that workshop went and what project ideas came out of it in my next blog post during the third week of block 6.

I recently read an article in the New York Times about Maria Popova, founder of the Brain Pickings “online ideas emporium,” and was struck by her quote describing how she views her work as “helping people become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in, until they are.” It’s a perfect description of the most important job responsibility of an instructional technologist. We are supposed to research the latest and greatest in technology and teaching methods, then bring that information to our faculty. The question is, how do you get someone to be interested in something when they don’t know they are interested in it? The best way I’ve found to do this is by having a thorough understanding of the problems teachers encounter in the classroom, the learning challenges students face, and the ways that the technology or tool you are looking at can help someone solve those problems.

To understand the problems teachers encounter in the classroom, I’ve found classroom observations to be a useful tool. In addition, one of the questions I most frequently ask faculty is “What is it that your students have trouble understanding in this class?” This information provides a starting point for thinking about how a particular technology might help a faculty member address their teaching challenges.

The next piece is understanding where students have problems. One way to do this is to talk with the students in the class directly, and ask them where they are encountering difficulties as well as what resources they wish they had available to them. Sometimes I will also try being a “student” myself, by getting a copy of the text or reading materials they are using, and attempting to complete some of the assignments and/or problems. I also read research studies that address student study and research habits, like the work done by Nancy Fried Foster, an anthropologist working in the University of Rochester library, and her colleagues in their “Studying Students” report.

Finally, you need a thorough understanding of the technology or pedagogical method you are working with, its strengths and weaknesses, and the types of problems it is suited to address. Keep in mind there are usually many ways to solve a particular problem, and in most cases, you want to find the fastest and simplest way.

At that point, you are ready to begin getting people interested in what you have found. Describe your technology or teaching method in a way that addresses a problem the faculty or students have. Remember that the language of Educause is not the language of faculty, so be sure you translate into terms your audience of faculty members will understand. And, keep your description short! Entrepreneurs have to be prepared with an “elevator pitch” to promote their idea/product in one minute or less. You need to do the same, because like entrepreneurs, the people we work with are very busy and have many other things to do. So if you can’t describe in one minute or less why your technology or teaching technique should be of interest, keep refining your description until you can.