Jun 22 2009

Taking Attendance Posted by Berlin Fang

There is so much absenteeism in one of the courses in China that the professor put his face in the final exam, and that test item asked: which one of following is the instructor of this course?  (Correct answer is C)

Teacher of the Class

Teacher of the Class

The North Institute has made it rather easy to take attendance using the “Here” application designed to work on iPhones and iPod Touches.  Please see a recent Fox News report on this and some other apps.  The application worked fairly easily.  Basically you design a poll for each class, set a password for this poll, and publicize this password in class, and have student log in to their “Here” app and type the password.  You keep the poll available for such a short time that students do not even have the time to send it to classmates who haven’t come to class.   This does not solve all the problems of absenteeism, but it may help in classes with a large number of students that manual attendance taking proves cumbersome.

In online classes, “attendance” is taken in a different way, since students will not necessarily appear in the class at the same time.  How to determine if someone has been sufficiently “present” in the course?  It is actually much easier to do this online (but I am assuming you use our course management system for the teaching of your course.)

  • Check “Performance Dashboard” in “control panel” to see exactly when was the last time a student log in to the course, item view status, and participation in discussions;
  • Check “Course statistics” if you want to identify a particular student’s performance, or usage of a particular course or tool;
  • Use announcements or emails to remind students to participate.  You can use “early warning system” of Blackboard to automatically determine if someone has not done what is supposed to be completed by a certain time;
  • Enable “track views” functions.  Most items in Blackboard should allow one to track views.  Under “edit view”, click on the “manage” button to enable the tracking of the views.  Once that is enabled, student will see a “mark reviewed” button for the item when they go to the course, that will at least remind them a particular item needs to be reviewed and checked off;
  • Use regular discussion sessions to ensure students are sufficiently present in the class and interacting with their classmates.
  • Diversify assessment methods to make sure students have been actively taking the class.  Some professors rely only on exams, which would encourage students to be cramming before these exams and less active at other times.  Use assignments, the presentation of projects, or portfolios or other types of assessment appropriate for your discipline.
  • Though flexibility is a great virtue of online learning, some students may be more used to more structure.  Using selective release of the content may reinforce a sense of structure and discipline in class.  You can release particular content at particular time of the semester to force students to work and finish within a selected window of time.
  • Last but not least, what would have a greater impact on student involvement and participation than an engaging class experience?
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Apr 10 2009

Social Media in the Classroom Posted by Luke Hartman

Recently an article came out about a professor at Penn State who encourages his students to Twitter during class. By having students actively share their thoughts and ideas on the lecture (the professor ideally wants a classroom with a separate screen dedicated to Twitter feeds), the professor believes students would open up more, share ideas, and become more involved in the lecture process.

Whether something like this would ultimately benefit students is not entirely clear, though it is hard to see downsides to encouraging greater participation and incorporating social technology in the classroom. On the concern that this would disrupt the classroom, the professor said:

He replied that his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.

Sounds like a very interesting idea.

Update:

Another article from techlearning.com lists nine reasons to Twitter in schools. The list is a good one, and highlights the strengths of Twitter as a platform.

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Mar 27 2009

Video Lectures: Better than the real thing? Posted by Berlin Fang

Academic EarthStephen Bell shared an article on “Academic Earth”, which is a platfom to host video lectures from top scholars.   Academic earth offers a “teaching company” type of lecture services except that they are free.   Most of these videos seem to be full-length lectures on various topics.  Check it out and see if there are vacancies of subject matter that you want to fill.  

Youtube EduIn the meantime, Google has just launched “Youtube Edu” for “videos and channels from our college and university partners.”   These videos vary in length and academic quality. 

All of these are happening when Apples’ ItunesU is going full steam.     Though the “youtube for teachers” concept has been out there (in the form of “Teachtube”, etc) for quite a while, it looks like that it really has not reached the “tipping point” until now.

For professors, if you have some videos clips that can be used, you can choose to post it in multiple places so long as it has good quality and it does not do disservice to your own reputation or that of the university.  

You probably would then be tempted to ask:  then who’d come to the lectures?  Well, you can post summary videos, partial videos (learning object) that do not have a cannibalizing effect on your teaching as a whole.   That takes an additional set of skills to analyze, storyboard and produce.

In all those places that claim to be hosting your videos, you find institutions like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Dartmouth… what happens to the myth that online offerings are offered only by the inferior ones of institutions?  I have heard of that myth many times, but there are too many evidences to prove the opposite.  Many good universities are also more agressive in pedagogical and technological innovations.

The New Scientist recently published an article “‘iTunes university’ better than the real thing” which showed in an empirical study that “Students who downloaded the podcast averaged a C (71 out of 100) on the test - substantially better than those who attended the lecture, who on average mustered only a D (62).”  That is not because the podcast format is better than the one-time lecture format, but because students can listen to the lecture episode or specific parts of it more than once.   For those who listened only once, there is no difference in scores.  As I wrote in an earlier post, increased exposure to course content is one factor that contributes to the difference.

But more importantly, “abudance” of content is a defining characteristic of our time.   Students now have an overload of choices to learn specific content.  Some universities simply embrace the open source trend by, for instance, making their content available for the general public. That poses challenges for professors who all of sudden finding themselves competing with peers from other institutions who post their teaching online, but the trend is also opening doors to those who want to try.

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Mar 17 2009

The Tolstoy Bailout Posted by Berlin Fang

This may not be a “typical” North Institute blog, but here is an interesting debate to be reading:

In February, the New York times published a piece called “In tough times, humanities must justify their worth”. The article itself seems milder than the strong title it carries. Nevertheless, this led to a powerful rebuttal from the literary editor of the New Republic magazine: The Tolstoy Bailout

Some quotes from the article:

The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the world. They will change only the experience, and the understanding, and the evaluation, of the world.
The securitization of mortgages was not conceived by a head in the clouds. No poet cost anybody their house. No historian cost anybody their job. Not even the most pampered of professors ever squandered $87,000 of someone else’s money on a little rug. The creativity of bankers is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
The study of religion, defending itself to capitalists? The study of literature, afraid for its prestige? Let the SEC grovel before the MLA! I am being somewhat precious, I know. But adversity is always a clarification: it refines the sense of what matters.
They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of meanings. The external world is no longer a source of strength. The temper of one’s existence will therefore be significantly determined by one’s attitude toward circumstance, its cruelties and its caprices. Poor people and hounded people have always known this, but now the middle class is getting its schooling in stoicism.

The article offers a lot of clarification on what  “useful”, “utility” and “worth” , and being “practical” actually mean.  If something like this was written earlier,  the New York Times article might not even have been written in the first place.

In other news, Shakespeare has recently been named a management guru.

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Mar 11 2009

Online Education Posted by Berlin Fang

Disrupting class book cover

Disrupting class book cover

Educational writer Clayton Christensen predicts that half of all instruction will take place online within the next 10 years–and schools had better get into the online-learning market or risk losing their students to other providers.  Read this eschoolnews article that explains online education as one of the “disruptive innovations” that may end up becoming a game changer:

I also recommend Professor Pat Smith’s blog post on “Online Education” in which he uses firsthand experience to show what online education takes to succeed.

Tags: — 11:05 am
Mar 6 2009

Making “Sense” Posted by Berlin Fang

It is March, so the Callery Pear trees are in full blossom.  It is a gorgeous sight, but it has a somewhat sickly smell.  It is a feast to the eyes and not as much a feast when you smell it.   Listening to Lang Lang playing piano is a similar experience, in a slightly different way though.   His music is gorgeous, but many listeners dislike his exaggerated expressions and gestures that accompany his music.

God has given us beauty in its different formats.   When it comes to learning, it is a very similar experience.    Fleming describes four kinds of learners in his VARK model of learning:

  • Visual learners;
  • Auditory learners;
  • Reading/writing-preference learners;
  • Kinesthetic learners

These kinds of tendencies can sometimes be assessed by the way people talk.   Visual learners, for instance, are more likely to say things like “Picture this in your mind…” “It appears that…” “Look!” “See!”  Auditory learners are more tempted to say “Listen to this!” “It sounds like…” Kinesthetic learners?  “You act as if…”  I am a reading/writing-preference learner, hence this post.

I often hear of concerns of “losing personal touch” when things are moved online.  What they are really saying is that students are deprived of certain sensory access to learning.  This is why in many online course rubrics you find clauses like  “providing multiple paths to learning”.

For a long time, as information comes mainly through printed materials, and increasingly through web pages, there has been much talk about “competing for the eyeball” as a way to describe ways to grab attention.  Increasingly, there is going to be more and more effort to “compete for the ears”.   A quickly accelerating amount of content is now being produced in, or converted to audio formats.  Books are being published as audio books.  Columnists read or even produce their columns in pod casts.   Methods are also available to convert text to speech.  In addition, Microsoft is believed to be working hard at natural speech recognition technologies to allow users to have an auditory method to have communication between people and computers or other types of smart objects.

Educators may also want to consider presenting instructional content in auditory formats.  Here are a number of ways to do this:

1.    Record: You can use either Garage Band on the Mac side or Audacity on the Windows side to record your voice.  Many other types of recording software are available, but the two mentioned here are free.    We have sought to make this even easier for you to record and share your audio by utilizing the Podcast Capture to help you record, upload and share in a few clicks.

2.    Convert: You can use applications like TextAloud to convert text to speech to have an alternative format of your content.   This application is rather inexpensive.  If you use Mac OS, you will also find a text-to-speech utility, which can also produce audio content from text.

3.    Link: Some users allow you to link to their audio content using creative commons methods to protect their copyright.   More and more people are also producing their own audio content through podcasts or personal radio stations (such as http://www.last.fm).

Contact the North Institute if you need help producing any auditory content.

It does not sound right if we are simply WRITING about “auditory learning” .  Listen to this post instead.  This is produced with a text-to-speech software that may not be as good as listening to me speaking (complete with accent … etc), but it may work well if you have a lot of lecture content to transfer while you do not have the time to record. Click on the link below to listen (open it):

auditorylearning

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