Biology eAcademy: Preliminary Meeting

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) (Wikipedia)

This week, I am at the California State University's Biology eAcademy. We are meeting for three days. The eAcademys are basically mini-conferences getting facuty together from across the system to look at proven course redesign practices in subjects that are "bottle neck" courses - courses that have the highest failure rate. "Proven course redesign" are course designs that have proven to increase student success. I am here with Chris Callahan and Michael Camann, faculty from the Biology department at Humboldt State. I am here because in my role as Director of Academic Technology, I also work as an instructional designer and I am working with Chris Callahan to develop a Human Biology course for HSU. This meeting of other Biology professors who have successful online courses has come at a good time.

Kathy Fernandez opened the meeting today to talk about 21st century learners: she says that students are used to immediate feedback, media rich environments, and instant access to information and data. We can be skeptical about online learning, but as instuctors, we should be curious and willing to explore. We have new tools and approaches. Students are used to a high level of engagement. Our eAcademy is a way to create a learning community (this is phase 2 of the eAcademy). There are professional learning communities coming out of the eAcademys. We are here to explore, connect, and engage with one another. Common topics on Course Redesign includes: quality online teaching and learning aligning outcomes with assessment.

Gerry says that he does not want to have this be a top down project from the Chancellor's office. He wants this to arise from this faculty community. He wants us to be skeptical - we have to look at the evidence and real measures.

CSU wants to increase on achievement and graduation rates. We need to use course redesign but also analytics. Kathy Fernandez says that we gather over 200 mb of data in our ag research on cows but gather very little data on our students. The CSU wants to use live data sources for decision making. Learning analytics covers activity in a course LMS, gathering real-time data every 24 hours, to provide a quicker

"Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs." -  George Siemens.

Kathy then shared a case study on a team taught intro to religion course that was converted to a hybrid course. The course had over 370 students. There was a 10 percent increase in students getting higher than a C, but there was also an increase in students who got F's. They then used data from the LMS and then demographic data from PeopleSoft. The tools they used were Excel, Tableau, Stata, IBM spss, and R. Blackboard and Moodle (Martin Dougiamas) are working on other tools. They found that final grade and LMS use were significant factors. Things like "first in the family to go to college" was less significant than use of the LMS for the grade. "At risk" students was not a significant factor.

Micheal: Accessing an LMS is a learning activity, simply being something isn't.

But at-risk students had to work harder to get the same grade. It is harder to get a B as an under-represented minority and Pell elgible student.

The question for us is: How do we reach these students?

She talked about Blackboard learning analytics. The CSU has a STEM grant for student analytics. We need analytics tools for all of our LMSs. Analytics tools will show us how they are engaging in the course.

We had a discussion about whether students are ready for online learning and how to prepare them.

We then discussed how to communicate with at-risk students.

For Moodle - there is a program called "X-Ray Research" SRL. It creates a data dashboard.

Connectivism and the Evolution of Pedagogy

Image via WikipediaIn some recent postings on connectivism and constructivism (see links below), educators and researchers write as if these models are oppositions; as if constructivism is early Bolshevist and connectivism is free market socialism. Pedagogy does not come from research and theorizing but from practice. The learning landscape changes over time and as the technology changes, we need new models to describe how people are learning. Connectivism is the next step in understanding how people learn in the digital age. Behaviorist and constructivist pedagogies describe a certain kind of learning that takes place in a particular milieu. Networks have changed a lot about the learning landscape, but on the other hand, much of how humans communicate and engage with one another has not. It happens faster, more often and over a wider population. I am talking to educators in India, China, and South America. I would not be talking to as many people around the world without the internet. There is a synergistic aspect to networks - we are smarter together than we are individually. There are network behaviors that are very different than purely social behaviors. Constructivist teaching is also occurring in networks. Connectivist learning is also happening. Will constructivist teaching fade away like feudal economies of old Europe?
An important point that should be made is that the social dimension of learning in constructivism isn't negated by connectivism. There is much that is complementary. To over-simplify, Connectivism accounts for the networks and learning in networks; constructivism accounts for what happens in them. Networks are only a means. Communication, interaction, and engagement all have to take place before anyone learns anything. Information itself is not knowledge. Forming a connection does not mean that any kind of engagement must or will take place.

In some of the online classes I have experienced with George Siemens (which I highly recommend), I see much of the constructivist pedagogies at work:

• students are actively involved, rather than passively absorbing information;
• the learning environment is democratic,the teacher is not seen as an authority figure as much as a learning guide;
• the activities are interactive and student-centered instead of being lesson-centered;
• a teacher facilitates activities in which students are responsible for their own learning and are autonomous from one another.

All of these are classic characteristics of the constructivist classroom (as opposed to the "sage on the stage" students-as-empty-vessel model). But I also learned as much or more from the connectivist aspects of his classes - the networks. My teaching, learning, and professional life have been immeasurably enriched by the people, communities, and networks I discovered through his classes.

All of the conversations about tools and personal learning networks presuppose an individual with some technical skills, facility with managing information and networks, the critical thinking skills to interpret that information, and a fairly high degree of motivation. All of these seem to be taken for granted - in the community college system (at least here in Humboldt Co.) and in less developed countries, one cannot make the assumption that networks in themselves will lead to learning. I am going to have to use all of the techniques of constructivist learning to show the value and purpose of these networks. I need to bring in the students prior knowledge and experience and guide them in applying that to new information and skills.

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Digital Writing, Digital Teaching - Integrating New Literacies into the Teaching of Writing

Image via Wikipedia

I wanted to write a brief note recommending Troy Hick's excellent blog, Digital Writing, Digital Teaching. I live in a schizophrenic shadow world of being an instructional designer (lots of tech) and a former English teacher (where's the pencil sharpener?), and I really appreciate the natural merging of these fields that this blog represents. Recently I heard George Siemens define literacy as facility in the dominant media of the day; this blog is a great big step in that direction. This is generally rare in English departments. It is also a very useful blog because he links to his syllabus, teaching tips and assignment ideas.

When today's students go into the modern workplace, they will not be asked to write a 10 page paper on how new media can be used to promote collaborative work. They will be judged on their ability to actually do that. English departments can be the place where the traditional writing skills, rhetoric (in the good old classical sense), and critical thinking can be brought together with social networking and the new media.

Why We Need OER Textbooks

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I can't recommend enough George Seimens and Peter Tittenberger's "Handbook of Emerging Technologies." I had been working on (and co-teaching) a "Student Success 2.0" class that has a wiki associated with the syllabus that links to tools. Seimens and Tittenberger will save me a lot of time in the future with keeping this up to date, especially their tools page. As an instructional designer, I need resources like these to help faculty solve problems and keep their courses interactive. I have one faculty member who just calls now and again and says "what really cool tools are out that that I don't know about?" (She is any instructional designer's dream teacher!) I will be directing a lot of people to this book. But here is the real point, it would be ridiculous to try to make this a print textbook. The tools change too rapidly for a print edition with the minimum two-year turn around time to make any sense. Also, for maximum usefulness, there has to be live links to the internet and these have to be kept up. I was thinking about this after reading a review in the New York Times about Leher's book on how we make decisions. It is essentially a popular look at the neuroscience behind decision making. His book discusses research that involve fMRI and I thought "wouldn't it be cool if this book could link to the research that is on the web?" And many books do, some have webpages associated with the book that serves as an online bibliography. But lets take all this further - the bulk of the relevant research in nearly every discipline is at least being managed on the web. When all of the information was in print, it makes sense to design textbooks that way - but since so much of it is accessible on the web now, why not create textbooks that utilize the media? There are cognitive science textbooks on the web and I think there are enough resources out there and combined with RSS feeds, one can imagine a textbook that essentially updates itself. And this could work for the humanities too. I was in an online workshop that was moderated by Steve Hargadon called "Remixing Shakespeare" that presented ways to get students involved in Shakespeare using new media tools. This workshop was presented by PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 and featured people from the Folger Library and of particular interest to me Amy Ulen, an English teacher at Tumwater High School in Tumwater, WA. who is the founder of Shakespeare High. There were enough resources in this one workshop for someone to turn around and create a living, dynamic "textbook" of interactive texts, tools for recording, videos of plays, and an online community dedicated to the subject matter. It didn't cost anyone a dime. Why wouldn't you want that?
I want to make sure that when we are discussing OER textbooks that we are not just talking about doing this because of the financial crisis. This is an opportunity to not only solve a problem, but to redefine textbooks in such a way that they include up to the minute research, instant corrections and updates, and community.