Archives for March 2011

Presenters from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:

Matt Russell russelmr@uwm.edu
Dylan Barth djbarth@uwm.edu
Gerald Bergstrom bergtrom@uwm.edu

[ SLOAN-C Proceedings Web Site ]

Reflective writing is ideally suited for experiential learning.

Dylan’s part focused on using reflective writing in a blended English composition course. His course is a blended course with 24 students. It is focused on research writing and consists of two seven-week modules. There is a final portfolio that has two revised essays: a ten-page research essay and a reflective letter.

The reflective essay was only at the end of the semester and consequently wasn’t very good as it was the only reflective exercise assigned to the students. However, Dylan revised the journal a bit and made students do one journal entry in the middle of each module. They received prompts for all entries. Students were required to consider what they’d done, what they were doing, and what they were going to do. This was all done electronically using D2L’s ePortfolio feature.

All told, there were 5 journal prompts, looking at all aspects of the research essay (the major project for the course) from start to finish.

Dylan’s reflective pedagogy records what works and what doesn’t, as well as what might change in future semesters. He uses his own reflective journal through the form of a blog to record his own insights. It is public, so students can see an insider’s view of the course and get a better understanding of Dylan’s decisions for the course (and post comments and feedback if Dylan so desires). In other words, it serves as a good model for the students (Dylan is practicing what he preaches).

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Presenter: Jan Costenbader (Depaul University) jcostenb@depaul.edu

[ SLOAN-C Proceedings Web Site ]

He is a senior instructional technology consultant at DePaul University. His objectives for the presentation are to share the design process for moving to a blended course, how lessons learned during the process were applied to a rework.

Math 101, the course Jan teaches, is general education mathematics, started as a small lecture (35-40 students). Eventually, it grew into a large lecture with up to 350 students. Mostly this increase was driven by economics–Cal State Chico, where he taught at the time needed much more revenue. Blended learning addressed room space issues and allowed for increased enrollment.

Jan did all the large lecture portion of the teaching while 5-6 other instructors taught the online portion.

The course was mostly about basic quantitative literacy (computation, statistics, financials, and modeling).

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Presenter:John Kaliski (Minnesota State University)

John’s purpose of his research is to capture some student behavior from their Learning Management System (LMS).

• How often and for how long students log into the system
• When students access reading material and notes
• When students start online assignments
• How long students take to complete assignments
• How productive discussion forums are.

John proposes to dramatically expand monitoring of student learning behaviors online. He wants to offer a huge suite of tools to make raw data more useful (statistics, data mining, business intelligence). Two systems are already commercially available.

He wants a learning environment that is adaptive, but doesn’t have to adapt to all 200+ students at the same time.

Why “Internal Combustion Engine” as the title of the presentation? It is a somewhat loaded term that has both positive and negative implications for society. Likewise, introducing new architecture and technology for student behavior monitoring has both positives and negatives. Positives include mass customization, adaptive learning environments, large classes, improved retention, and assured learning reporting automation. Negatives include perceived (and actual) invasions of privacy–students find it creepy–as well as the fact that there are unintended consequences. Ethics of using such a tool are somewhat unclear.

LMS systems today give a core dump of raw data with no real analysis built in.

John’s new tool includes the same raw material found in LMS data. However, he also borrows ideas from Google Analytics and other tools. Data is collected at the event level–keystrokes and mouse activity. It also tracks hyperlink activity and how much of the content is viewable on the screen as well as how long it is on the screen. Huge amounts of data are collected–200,000+ records from 400 users in one month.

Raw data by itself is meaningless without context. The instructor communicates with the system what the expectation of the learner is. It measures for the alignment of learner activity and instructor expectations. For instance, when the instructor is working on a course objective, student traffic patterns on the online course components should increase. This system refines itself over time, especially for instructors that teach the same course repeatedly over time.

Presenter: George Morrison (University of North Texas) george.morrison@unt.edu

[ SLOAN-C Proceedings Web Site ]

George defines “large” as 100+, which also fits the definition of large classes at S&T. Most classes fall well below this definition.

We engaged with each other in an experiential learning exercise–first we described a picture of an orange, then he gave us the real thing and we had to describe that (in small group collaboration). George showed a video of this same exercise with a group of 116 students.

George has taught large classes for 10 years, and in that time (under the old model), he sometimes had significant failure rates (nearly 17 out of 110 enrolled in Fall 2010). Students often didn’t come to class and they were largely indifferent to achievement. George saw a disconnect between how he was teaching and how he wanted to teach. He had to find some sort of balance to resolve the “disequilibrium” he was experiencing. Disequilibrium is the driver which promotes change–so it is incumbent on us to promote disequilibrium in our faculty so they seek out the change that will lead to better course design and better student learning outcomes.

Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen has three things that stand out

1. Customize different online learning paths for students.
2. Transition from computer-based to student-centric technology.
3. Teachers act as learning coaches and tutors to help students find the approach that makes sense for them.

George’s old teaching methods were not engaging students and weren’t working.

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