Tag Archives: social media

by | November 19, 2012 · 22:53

The story about MOOCs

“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to the classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill. And I’ve seen wonderland.”–Sebastian Thrun, Founder of Udacity

The red pill refers here to launching massive open online courses (MOOCs) for which an email address is the only requirement for admission. Thrun actually gave up his tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a provider of MOOCs in computer science, physics and mathematics so far. Other folks from Stanford teamed up to create Coursera, which offers courses in a larger variety of disciplines, including medicine, song writing and poetry.

These MOOCs have been immensely popular with millions of students from all over the world signing up just this year. In fact, last week the New York Times called 2012 the “Year of the MOOC“! Participants do not get credit quite yet from completing courses though, but because MOOCs have been such a tsunami in higher education, some form of recognition will eventually need to be given to those who pass courses. Giving out certificates will be challenging when identity cannot be easily controlled online (watch Sebastian Thrun as he discusses that point and more in a Charlie Rose interview from last April). In any case, it should be interesting to watch what will happen when all of a sudden 100,000 of people get credit from Stanford, Harvard or MIT every year!

Click the picture to go to Sebastian Thrun’s interview by Charlie Rose

One might think that online courses will not replace the more intimate and personalized experience at your favorite campus. It’s definitely a challenge for MOOCs, as any learning experience typically benefits from being personalized. That’s why for example MOOCs have not been taking off so much at Oxford or Cambridge in the UK. It’s quite difficult to transpose a 1,000 year old culture of teaching small groups in colleges onto an online free-for-all platform!

The vice-chancellor of one of the top British universities even said “You can download lot’s or Rolling Stones online. But there’s nothing quite like going to the concert”. For sure. But how often do you actually get to go to a Rolling Stones concert and what do you do the rest of the time? “I’m a research nurse”, posted a woman from Oklahoma, “I wanted to go to Stanford when I graduated high school, but stuff happened and that didn’t work out. Forty years later, here I am.”

Free opportunities for a top-class higher education for all, worldwide, 24/7. That’s what MOOCs are about. It’s the combination between the ‘M’ and the first ‘O’ that is the trick. And it’s just the beginning.

Understandably, most universities feel challenged by unfair competition — not everyone can afford professors of Stanford caliber. But after the buzz of MOOCs, comes the time to assess their effectiveness at improving quality teaching while reducing costs. Several public universities in Maryland have received $1.4 million from the Gates foundation to study just that. “Over the next 18 months, the University System of Maryland will serve as a test bed for various online or hybrid courses, including Coursera, edX, and possibly other MOOCs, in a variety of subject areas on different campuses,” wrote Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation, as quoted in a news post by Inside Higher Ed a few days ago.

Can’t wait 18 months to see what will come out of this! Meanwhile, think about doing your own experiment and trying out one of these MOOCs – always good to see for ourselves!

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by | August 24, 2012 · 14:49

Personal Learning Environments? Yes, of course! By expanding the mothership or docking the dorm.

Looking at the debates and research about how web 2.0 technologies should be integrated in university teaching practice and what technologies students should use for learning, a disagreement between the people in favour of an extensive use of external web 2.0 technologies and the people in favour of using an institutionalised VLE as the main technology for learning can be identified. On one side you’ll find IT administrators and e-learning managers such as Niall Sclater that argues that the learning systems should be robust, integrated, allow tracking of its usage, and that only a very few teachers and students would ever use the highly advanced features of state-of-the-art web 2.0 tools for learning. On the other side you’ll find researchers in educational technology such as Martin Weller and Christian Dalsgaard that argue that students are better off with external, up-to-date web 2.0 tools and self-governed learning activities. However, having a closer look at this debate it is difficult to spot the actual dissent. For instance, Sclater points out in his bulletin ‘Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management Systems‘ (Sclater, 2008) that VLEs should be able to integrate ‘software innovations’ from elsewhere and that ‘it is possible that the LMS will evolve into more of a management information system, working away in the background’. Weller brings forward a similar statement: ‘…what you want to have is some kind of default learning environment first of all, which is a number of these tools combined together, but then allow students to swap in their own preferences’ (Weller, OU podcast). In other words, it looks like both Sclater and Weller agree on the solution; however, they have very different starting points; either extending the institutional VLE by integrating useful and selected external innovations or – the other way around – let the students use their favorite tools and technologies and integrate those in the VLE.

Of course universities shall and must support a personal learning environment (as both sides agree), but the question is the process of developing the setting. In my experience a self-governed use of technology will work for some students and teachers, but far from all. If you are not already using a specific tool or technology, it is very time-consuming to find and adopt one – especially if you are not a techie. Basic (web 2.0) tools need to be available and integrated for the general audience, just as it is important that new innovative technologies can be embedded in the VLE; either by the teacher and students themselves or through an ongoing review and development process. Sclater’s idea of the VLE as the ‘mother ship’ with standardised ‘docks’ for the students’ PLEs could set the basis for a breakthrough in the use of personal learning environments (2008, p. 4).

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by | July 12, 2012 · 17:03

Three easy ways to engage and motivate your students —yes, I did say ‘easy’ :-)

  • Easy way #1 | Have students solve problems as a group, and write clicker questions for each other – See how Ditlev Brodersen at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Aarhus University, Denmark, tried this out in a course on Advanced Biochemistry (you will need to download the full report as PDF to read more about what he did).
  • Easy way #2 | Organize ignite talk sessions with your students – As a group, or as individuals, have them prepare 5-minute talks with 20 slides total, which automatically move forward every 15 seconds. They’re like ‘mini-TED talks’: both focused and engaging. You can think of prices for best speakers, best presenters, best visual artists, etc and have the students in the audience be part of the jury. Or make it the format of your final evaluation, but still practice that format for presenting in class, perhaps also using video recording for helping with improvement.
  • Easy way #3 | Assign collaborative tasks through Google Drive and MindMeister  - Group work in general is quite engaging and motivating, which can both contribute to increasing learning. But group work often goes wrong –one student talks too much, another too little, or students lose track of time– unless clear guidelines and rules are followed.  One of these rules is to make sure the group keeps track of its progress and produces a concrete output. Google Drive (former but expanded Google Docs) makes it quite convenient to organize collaborative tasks with students. Google Drive now incorporates MindMeister, which can enable students to create mind maps that connect to their Google Drive documents. The whole Google Drive+MindMeister suite is also now incorporated into the brand new Chromebook Education pack, which, after Apple’s iPad, seems to be yet another strategy to supplant PCs in schools.

Alright, just three easy ways, as I promised – easy in the sense that they won’t cost you anything (you don’t even have to use clickers) and they correspond mostly to slight but significant adjustments of current teaching practices. Although it might take some time at first to get set up –as when pursuing any new avenue– think about the resulting engagement and motivation of your students, and how rewarding that will be for both you and your students!

But did those ways appear as being ‘easy’ to you just as I announced it? Were you more like “yeah, that’s totally easy, I can do that no problem” or more like “oh, no way – I can’t use clickers/ignite talks/MindMeister that easily in my exercise sessions”? So, were you, or not, somewhat turned off after the “easy” announcement that was meant to be comforting?

If you were a bit turned off, or felt under pressure, or were looking for excuses why this would not work for you, don’t worry – that’s just a normal reaction to hearing the word “easy”. As teachers we like to use that word with our students to appear comforting and reassuring. But most likely what we achieve actually is to scare our students or have them feel bad about themselves (see number 24 on the list). Telling them for example a particular concept or assignment is “easy” will often make them feel they can no longer just ask any question about anything now, and they were probably not very eager to doing so to begin with… They also don’t want to say something that could reveal they are missing a point, which would be just like admitting the task was not “easy” to them, in front of you and all their peers!

So stay away from the “easy” word –I promise I will do the same, even though these three ways are easy…

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by | June 4, 2012 · 18:45

You’ve had several years now to try Google Docs in your course… have you?

“Google Docs is explored as a tool for promoting collaborative learning in laboratory courses. Students working from multiple computers share a single spreadsheet in real time, using each others’ work to guide their understanding of complex calculations, while creating opportunities for timely instructor–student interaction”–Andrew Spaeth & Roderick Black, Department of Chemistry, Kansas University

On April 24 Google announced the release of Google Drive, which will supplant Google Docs. The new Google Drive can be seen as an extension of the now 5-year old Google Docs, with added functionalities for storage and file sharing, from any portable device (laptop, smart phone, or tablet) and any computer. Google Drive is naturally also compatible with both PC and Mac operating systems, as well as with the new Chrome OS.

Bottom line, it’s like now you just need a web browser to edit any text, table, or presentation, save it in the cloud, share it, and re-access it later from any device. And you get the first 5 GB for free.

Sounds cool, doesn’t it? But wait… what just was that Google Docs by the way and why should you care?

Think about when you had to edit any document together with several authors. You’d email it back and forth, taking turns in adding comments and keeping track of edits, until the margin would get saturated with everybody’s edits or the file version would get lost in the stream, or both. Now think about doing that with 200 students…

Yeah, no wonder nobody was doing it!

Then came Google Docs, which although at first rather rudimentary, grew into a power tool for editing not just word documents, but also spreadsheets, presentations, and forms (drawings and tables also joined the options later on). Not only did it become possible for 200 (or more) students to edit the same document, but all these people were able to do so at the same time without the whole thing turning into a complete clutter!

A few professors saw the advantage of that medium right away. See for example how back in 2007 Michael Wesch at Kansas University collected feedback from 200 of his students about the way they learn, how they view their education, but also about their goals, dreams and hopes. He used that feedback to generate the following fantastic video that has been viewed over 4.5 million times on YouTube only!

More recently, two chemistry professors, also at Kansas University, published a short account of how they organized for students of a lab course to add their experimental results into a shared spreadsheet. Students were thus able to compare their results to those of others and instructors were instantly alerted when students might need some help.

Also, the >2,500 teachers and professors who just joined the newly created Peer Instruction network launched by Eric Mazur’s group did so by signing up through a form created and hosted on Google Docs. Forms on Google Docs are indeed not limited in how many questions they can handle or how many participants can contribute, making them also quite ideal for mid-term or end-of-term evaluations.

In three select examples, that’s what Google Docs —or now Drive— can enable teachers to accomplish. These tools are part of a “wiki bandwagon“ that should make it easier for instructors to know where the students are at, to engage them on homework outside class, and to track their progress. With such tools (see more examples in this book), schooling could sort of happen smoothly 24/7, 365 days a year, and students on various continents could be contributing to the same document without feeling under pressure to contribute at a particular time and in a particular fashion.

Altogether, Google Docs/Drive instead of Facebook or Twitter may be just the solution for academic use of social networking that is right for you. So just give it a go!

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by | November 15, 2011 · 14:03

PI-JITT-IC: How you can stay in the raft with your students

PI-JITT-IC —for PI (Peer Instruction), JITT (Just In Time Teaching), and IC (Inverted Classroom)— is an ideal instructional synergy to upgrade education.

Are you ready to raft the bursting waters of technology-based education? (photo: Klearchos Kapoutsis, Flickr)

Class time and office hours are no longer the only possibility for students to interact with their professors. Smart phones, SMS, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few) have now invaded students’ lives. As a result, texting and tweeting habits have flooded into your classroom–yes, your classroom too! The question is not so much whether it’s good or bad, but how to adjust to this at-first unwelcome intrusion into the classroom, so that we can turn it into a positive experience for everybody.

Technologies are no impediment to good teaching, nor are they a panacea. Once again, it’s about balance. In our case, we’re asking the following: How can we best make use of technologies to support more effective pedagogies? In a nutshell, that’s what this blog proposes to help answer.

Fortunately, innovative educators and professors have already been putting into practice quite a number of technology-based solutions to the double problem of making teaching engaging and conducive to learning. For example, Sal Khan had the brilliant idea to develop a catalogue of YouTube lectures so that the transfer of information could happen on the home computer, with the option to pause and replay at will. This “inverted classroom” (IC) approach –students no longer sit in lectures that they can watch online– is so popular that it just raised $5 million to expand its efforts. Other successful innovations have been the development of Google Jockeys to teach for example information literacy, or the use of Twitter as a backchannel (or a more specific alternative such as TodaysMeet) during a course, so that more students can give feedback and exchange views during class. Those are only but three examples out of an ocean of bright ideas for technology-enhanced education.

On their own, each of these smart ideas was enough to revolutionize the way we teach. But when wisely combined, these approaches highlight a more modern path for what education ought to be really about.

Clickers in action (photo: Morten Koldby)

One such happy marriage between several strategies (actually including IC) was arranged by Eric Mazur at Harvard University. Previous posts on this blog (see for example Oct. 17,  Aug. 9) have already introduced peer instruction (PI) supported by audience response systems or clickers. A particular strength of this approach is to guide a dialogue between students that promotes deeper learning because students have to explain their reasoning to one another. This practice confronts them with what they actually know, and because they can discuss their explanations with someone they can relate to, they are more likely to retain “why the right answer is right” than if they “hear it from Professor Mazur in front of the class”.  What the clickers facilitate is the interaction, because every student sees how his/her own vote fits with the rest of the class and is invited to react accordingly. Without clickers, it’s much harder for example to count the number of hands up in the air from an audience of 200 students, and the voting is not anonymous. So, basically, anyone could see what the others voted, and decide to keep their own hands up or down.

Now, because PI basically relies on an engaging way to teach by questioning, Eric Mazur shifted most of the information transfer outside the classroom, by adopting an IC approach. In the way he uses IC, students watch a recorded lecture before class, and they come to lectures to do what they would normally do at home: solve problems. But because questions asked in class need to be relevant to the problems students are actually facing, Eric Mazur makes sure he asks his students to report back to him before class on what they don’t understand and what they find most interesting from these lectures. He can then check their answers by email or using some social media software “just in time” to adjust his next class accordingly, thereby adopting the “Just-in-Time Teaching” (JiTT) web-based strategy developed in particular by Gregor Novak at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

So here we are: PI-JITT-IC. Three technology-enhanced teaching methods that already impact learning when used individually. But when combined, the resulting synergy just brings the learning experience to the next level. As a result, we can educate students in ways that were not possible without such technologies. So it’s like rafting down an agitated river not just with the sturdiest tube, the most lightweight paddle, or the most waterproof gear, but with the three together. It adds up to make the adventure more worthwhile. More and deeper learning occurs. And slowly, such powerful synergies reshape what it means to raft, or to teach: no one would think today of sacrificing even one of such innovations. Why not make sure I promote learning in the most efficient way when I teach? After all, why would I go rafting if it’s not with the best equipment?

That’s why Eric Mazur and collaborators just developed Learning Catalytics, a platform that get the advantages of these individual practices together into a single package.

Using this new system for example on their cell phone, students are able to watch and annotate lectures, respond to assignments, answer questions interactively (not just by selecting an answer, but also by drawing it), and keep track of their progress. That’s the birth of a new technology, which again opens up new possibilities, new avenues for education. For example with Learning Catalytics, the “who answered what?” question can be monitored instantly and students are asked to turn around to a student they would learn the most from, based on the distribution of answers.

Stay tuned, because with the recent $40 million funds Harvard just received to promote innovative teaching and learning, we’re only at the beginning of the revolution!

Final note: Quite interestingly, PIJITTIC is almost exactly the name of a real boat ;-) So get ready to raft, sail, or cruise!

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