New Educational Technologies – Page 3 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

Reading the (Class)room: There’s No App for That — Josh Neufeld, Department of Biology

I teach a 2nd year “Fundamentals of Microbiology” course, with hundreds of students distributed across multiple lecture sections. After years of prodding by student evaluations, I consented to posting videocasts of each lecture last term. Previously, my concern had been that attendance would drop. This same concern accompanies the development of online courses, which will be happening to my course, serving students who are off campus. With online course material circulating widely, in addition to the availability of videocasts from past and current years, why should students come to class? Given these concerns, I was very surprised that, although videocasts were posted within an hour of each lecture last term, attendance was higher than ever. This unexpected outcome reminded me of a videocast-requesting student evaluation comment from the previous year: “I believe being in class has its own benefits, students will still come”. But why?

At the 2014 Waterloo Science Grad Ball, I stopped by the mixing board of DJ Whitegold (pictured above), who is described as “one of Canada’s most versatile and talented DJs”. DJ Whitegold explained how the turntables he uses on his mixer no longer hold vinyl LPs, but instead are linked to music tracks on his system’s laptop. Nonetheless, he still uses the traditional one-handed turntable-rocking motion to help transition between two songs seamlessly, synchronizing the beats (“beatmatching”) and 16-bar phrases (“phrasematching”) of each song. After a moment of reflection, I asked whether software could automate the process of beatmatching and phrasematching, which would eliminate potential human error and possibly even make the DJ unnecessary. “Yes, there are apps that can automate the mixes,” DJ Whitegold was quick to reply, “But, there is something important that no app can do.” Gesturing toward the sea of science students, he continued, “Read an audience.” DJ Whitegold explained that the ability to connect with a crowd, sense their minds and moods, manipulate a group’s connection to the music, and engineer a dance experience are all important and irreplaceable skills of expert DJs, skills that can never be automated.

It later occurred to me that this conversation captured the teaching experience perfectly and helped address my concerns about recorded course content. Analogous to DJ Whitegold’s role of synchronizing musical tracks, the classroom experience is fundamentally one of beatmatching and phrasematching ideas into a coherent lecture. This process enables students to follow new information and understand concepts, not on a dance floor, but in a lecture hall. And of course we can digitize this process by offering online versions of our courses and by posting lecture videocasts. But there is something else important that can never be captured in an online course offering, or even in a videocast. Professors work very hard to read a room in every lecture, gauge student comprehension and mindset, sense and manipulate energy and attention, react to body language, engage students in group conversation, pause, watch, smile, and surprise. Much like a DJ manipulating a dance floor, the ability to shape a classroom experience is reactive and dynamic; it is art and it is science, it takes experience, and it can take a lifetime of practice to perfect.

Although videocasts have undeniable value for students reviewing course material, and online courses are essential for off-campus education, DJ Whitgold’s comments helped convince me that in-class education is alive and well. DJs are central to nightclub stages despite digitization, and professors in lecture halls remain an essential element of university education.

______________________________________
Josh Neufeld (Twitter: @JoshDNeufeld) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology, studying the microbial ecology of terrestrial, aquatic, and host-associated communities. For several years, Josh has taught a large second year course (600-900 students) as well as a small upper year course (18 students), and is a recipient of the 2013 Jack Carlson Teaching Excellence Award by the Department of Biology.

Photo credit: DJ Whitegold

Winter 2014 — what’s in store for faculty teaching development?

Welcome to January! This is a pretty special term for us here at CTE in that we have our new workshop spaces fully operational. We hope you’ll come round for our official Open House on January 20th between 10 and 2 to see the space and experience its features. More than that, we hope it will be your teaching development “home away from departmental home” when you want to join one of our many workshops and events this term. Most will take place in EV1 241 or EV1 242; an overview follows.

The Centre for Teaching Excellence offers workshops and events on a range of topics; we invite you to visit our Events page for the full listings of workshops for you, and for instructions on how to sign up (myHRinfo will be unavailable on Friday, January 10 for scheduled maintenance).

Getting Started with LEARN? Check out the January sessions of LEARN for TAs, the quiz feature, the grades tool and timesaving tips in LEARN.
CTE642: Course Design Fundamentals (six hours) is offered on Monday, March 3 and repeated on Tuesday, March 4.
CTE908: Documenting Your Teaching for Tenure and Promotion Lunch and Learn for pre-tenure faculty being held in Needles Hall on Tuesday, March 25 from 11:45 am to 1:15 pm.
CTE601: Instructional Skills Workshop is scheduled over four days in February 2014. Very limited enrolment for this 24-hours workshop on February 18, 19, 20 and 21.

Teaching Squares is a peer based program well suited to faculty interested in broadening their teaching perspectives by taking part in reciprocal classroom visits. Teaching Squares focus on the valuable take-away(s) made accessible by observing other teachers in action rather than on the potentially harsh critique of peer evaluation. The aim of the Teaching Squares approach is to enhance teaching and learning through a structured process of classroom observation, reflection and discussion (leading to a plan for revitalization of one’s own teaching). A square is formed by four instructors who visit each other’s classes over the course of one term. The visits are preceded by an organizational meeting and followed by a debrief meeting where the participants share their experiences (the positive aspects of what they have learned and how they might improve their own classes). The total time commitment over the term is approximately 6 hours. If you are interested, please send Monica Vesely an email (mvesely@uwaterloo.ca) indicating the term you would like to participate (this term – Winter 2014 or later in the year) and the course you will be teaching.

The sixth annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference: Opportunities and New Directions (OND) will be held Thursday, May 1, 2014 with the theme “Rethinking and Reframing the Assessment of Learning”. We welcome research-based or practice-based submissions related to the theme. We are excited that Dr. John Bean will be our Keynote Speaker. Proposals are due Friday, January 31, 2014. The call for proposals, as well as the proposal submission form can be found on the Conference website: https://uwaterloo.ca/cte/OND2014 . Even if you do not submit a proposal, we hope that you and your colleagues will join us for what we hope will be an enriching and exciting day! For Conference-related questions, contact Julie Timmermans (julie.timmermans@uwaterloo.ca).

Upcoming Deadlines

OND Conference proposals: Deadline Friday, January 31, 2014

LITE Seed Grants: Application deadline Saturday, February 1, 2014
Distinguished Teacher Award: Nomination deadline Friday, February 7, 2014

Amit and Meena Chakma Awards for Exceptional Teaching by a Student: Nomination deadline Friday, February 14, 2014

Waterloo’s 2014 Loving to Learn Day falls on Friday, February 14. Enter the contest by Tuesday, February 11, and win a book prize! “What makes a teacher a really GREAT teacher?”

As always, contact your CTE Faculty Liaison with any questions you may have about CTE services.

If you have difficulty enrolling using the myHRinfo system (most of us have, at various points), contact Verna Keller.

For confidential consultations about course ratings, classroom observations, or the like, contact Trevor Holmes or Jane Holbrook.

Presenting and Recording Notes Using a Tablet – Carsen Banister

Tablet technology has been available to consumers since the 1990s, but was not originally heavily adopted. New generation tablets, most of which are designed without dedicated keyboards, are becoming more common.

I am currently taking a Graduate course with an instructor that uses a tablet to present his lecture content. The environment created is very similar to the typical blackboard or whiteboard classroom, but instead the instructor’s laptop screen is projected for the students to follow. I am recording notes for this class in the same way, using my tablet to reproduce what is being created on the projector. For both of these applications, tablets provide some advantages over traditional methods, but also introduce some drawbacks.

As a note-giver
From a lecture or presentation perspective, a tablet simplifies many of the activities required, such as eliminating the need to erase the board, allowing the marking up of images, and offering many drawing tools, such as coloured inks of varying thicknesses. With the addition of a desktop recording software, the lecture can be recorded and saved to the class website. Students are able to review these screen-castings and catch up on content they missed. This can be particularly helpful for graduate students, where travel to conferences can interfere with a class schedule.

Many of these advantages also have direct disadvantages, such as reducing the movement of the instructor in the classroom. Since the tablet is typically used at a podium, the instructor will remain rooted here during the lesson. It is much harder to interact and gesture with a projection screen than a blackboard. This reduced movement can impact the interactivity of the class, confining it to a style of note-copying rather than getting input and involvement from the students. Although no erasing is required, the screen is much smaller than a collection of blackboards, so less content can be shown at one time. This can hinder students’ ability to visualize the progression of course material and make connections.

As instructors, we should be aware of these advantages and disadvantages because our choice of presentation method affects all members of the class. Switching perspective now to the role of student, a tablet and note-taking software can also be used to record notes, regardless of the method of presentation.

As a note-taker
I have used this method for a couple equation-intensive engineering courses and, as expected, also found some advantages to be balanced by drawbacks. A strong benefit I have found is the high speed of typing compared to writing. In courses with a lot of text note-taking, a lot of time can be saved. An added benefit is being able to look up while recording these notes, something that is not easy when writing on paper. This allows for more focus during the lesson and less time bogged down blindly copying notes.

I don’t find drawing on a tablet faster than on paper, but the added tools do provide benefit. Being able to draw shapes or axes with a couple clicks saves time and improves quality. Drawings can also be modified after they are created, rather than having to pull out an eraser and start over. For mathematical equations, there is a choice to write it out in full or use a built-in equation editor to type the equation. The latter option provides a nice appearance that is less likely to be misread in the future, but it requires some getting used to and can be slower than the former method.

Recording all the content digitally means that it can be easily searched using keywords, even handwriting in many software packages. This can save time if you need to find something quickly and don’t want to look through all your notes. But being able to leaf through your notes is exactly what you lose when going digital. No longer can you quickly flip through them to look for a key image or figure.

A major concern with taking notes electronically is the reliance on electronics and electricity. What if your computer crashes during a lecture? What if you don’t have an electricity source for the 3 hours of class coming up? A backup is always required in case your tablet is unavailable. A pencil and paper don’t have these technical limitations and are much more reliable.

Although it may not be reasonable to expect tablets to replace pencil and paper or chalk and blackboard, they have established a place in the classroom. In both cases, there is a significant learning curve when beginning to deliver or take notes using a tablet. If you want to start using this technology in the classroom, take the time to become comfortable with it before taking the leap!

Refining my Twitter “voice” for CTE tweets — Trevor Holmes

I think I was probably born in the wrong era. Sometimes, I feel like a late Victorian. Other times, I feel like a Millennial. I want to talk about the latter feeling in today’s blog post. In a dizzyingly “meta” moment, I’ll probably tweet the link to it as soon as I post.

You see, I’m someone who has been more comfortable texting than phoning someone ever since texting became a thing. This seems to characterize most of the Millennials I know, and few of the Boomers. Perhaps as Generation X, I just tend to sit on the cusp one way or another. Unlike Millennials, I also played around in very rich text-based virtual worlds before there was a visual web… you know, when the internet seemed all fresh and new and had no pictures besides ASCII art. Of course all these generational generalisations are probably false. I suspect I’m just a sci fi geek in educational developer clothing, and therefore an “early adopter” in my tech and teaching life.

So when Twitter came along in 2006, I did the usual exploration* that I do when new things pop up. That is to say, I pretended I was evaluating its possibilities for teaching and learning. In truth, I DO do this with new software, new platforms, new technologies. But it’s also, of course, about my own predilection for fun toys I only imagined as a kid (this may be why I held onto my flip phone far longer than anyone I know — it reminded me of an original Star Trek communicator!).

paper speech bubbles laid on a green background, concept of open discussion and debate — Speech Bubbles

In short, nothing seems more natural to me than musing in 140-character thoughtlets, or sharing interesting links to topics various with hundreds of other people, or recirculating helpful hints by others. This is probably why I jumped at the opportunity to tweet on behalf of CTE when it came round. Our Faculty Liaisons had a Twitter account, run mostly by Zara Rafferty, who has since moved on to teach in Recreation and Leisure Studies. When Zara left, it became clear that we could leverage Twitter for CTE more widely, and so we created @uwcte, and started to gather followers. For the most part, I’ve been handling the daily (except for weekends) tweets, and to be honest, it’s a very different approach to tweet institutionally than to tweet individually.

I’ll start with what I am trying to do, and what we are trying to avoid.

What I tweet on behalf of CTE:

links to upcoming events across the range of our practice and audience (TAs, faculty — full-time and adjunct, teaching staff, postdoctoral fellows)
mentions of events underway or just finished (sometimes with links to relevant resources)
links to resources around the web for teaching practices /theory, including our Tip Sheets and blog posts
University of Waterloo or Faculty-specific good news (retweet)
material of interest to the mid-career professors who follow us locally
tips and sample techniques that suit the time of term we’re in (e.g. mid-course feedback tips at midterm, how to end a course and review for exams near the end of term)
publicizing CTE news (hires, retirements, accomplishments)
critical engagement with educational controversies where they seem relevant to uWaterloo communities
musings on current events, without taking a strong position

Some things I try to avoid:

particular endorsements of a one-sided position
inflammatory or controversial statements about higher education, particular people, or universities
bad press for our own University or any neighbouring ones
jokes — they are usually at someone’s expense

Again, this is all very different from my individual Twitter account, which I’ve had for some time and use to post items about more political aspects of higher education, items about my personal interest in food and food culture, and items related to my former discipline, among other things. As @vardalek, I’m very much my uncensored self; I rarely hesitate to post what I’m thinking or feeling, although I am very aware of the dangers of permanent archives and the problem of the fatal error in judgment. I guess I have nothing to hide that is unsavoury, in my view anyway. I have always taken seriously the idea that we ought to build personal histories and narratives using the internet archives of ourselves (some call it branding). Searches through old listservs devoted to higher education topics or to queer theory would likely result in some classic Trevor rants.

Such an apparently wanton approach (actually it’s of course more rhetorically intentional than one might assume) is exactly wrong, though, for an institutional account. As a CTE tweeter, or as @ks101wlu (my course over at WLU), I have a different relationship to official culture. I’m not the same kind of autonomous individual. Certainly, lines blur when we make a constant stream of crossings-over that transcends single or simple identity. Some of the people I follow and those @uwcte follows are the same. @uwcte even follows @vardalek (retweeting one’s own tweets turns out to feel rather self-indulgent, but I’m certainly not doing it for some future day when retweets count like citations do now!).

I draw the line at thinking like a corporate Chief Information Officer (CIO), though. I’ve noticed articles or blog posts lately about social media “compliance” and “return on investment” (ROI). While I can imagine ways in which our tweets can be shown to enhance our work, I’m not in this for the obvious ROI. We are a helping group, teaching developers, and we just, it seems to me, want those with whom we work to have a sense of confidence as they plan, deliver, and assess learning. That is why I tweet for CTE, and why I hope you will follow @uwcte if you join Twitter or are already using it.

*note: I’m more cautious than I let on here. I didn’t begin tweeting seriously until mid-2009. Apparently I have been a user longer than 93.9% of all users though. See Twopcharts’ tool for your own data.

Image Attribution: Creative Commons Stockmedia.cc/Stockarch.com http://stockarch.com/images/abstract/concept/speech-bubbles-3348

10th Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference July 2013 — Paul Kates

The 10th Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference took place in Boston this year and I was lucky enough to attend. There were over 200 presentations throughout the three day event. I was drawn towards talks about mathematics and MOOCs – massive open online courses. You can find my notes on the talks I attended online.

Many of the presentations were recorded and most presenters provided slides. If you find a talk in the conference schedule or list of talks in my notes that you want to know more about please send me email at pkates@uwaterloo.ca.

Presenting lectures with iPad and 2Screens — Paul Kates

Please visit the Presenting lectures with iPad and 2Screens page to learn about combining the ability of the iPad app 2Screens to make presentations to students in the classroom with the iPad’s ability to capture handwriting with a stylus.

Display, annotate, browse, or write-freehand with 2Screens on an iPad tablet. Using files from Microsoft Office or Apple iWorks; or files (pdf), images and video from the web you can present to your students or audience through the lightweight iPad with a VGA adaptor. With an additional pen stylus, pages can be annotated or new pages written, live in class. Files in 2Screen are displayed on tabs, so it is easy to switch among different content pages, jumping from a slide tab to a whiteboard tab for example, to work on a problem or exercise.

Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047

What do you need to know about the Flipped Classroom? – Jane Holbrook

The concept of flipping a classroom has been causing a stir in the world of educators over the last year or so. Seems you can’t open an educational blog or newsletter without finding an article or someone’s thoughts on what a flipped classroom is (and isn’t). The simplest explanation of the term is that active learning is achieved face-to-face in the classroom through discussion, problem solving, and group work or other activities, and what we think of as the lecturing, or “content transfer”, part of a class is done elsewhere (not during classtime) independently.

Discussions of flipped classrooms often include the comment that this isn’t a new concept and that courses in the humanities have been using this learning sequence for eons; in these disciplines instructors are the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage” and are in the role of facilitators, guiding discussion of concepts or texts that students have ingested on their own through traditional textbooks or online sources. Also much of what is written about flipped classrooms implies that online media consumption of some sort is part of the independent work. However putting lectures online or giving students access to videos through a course website doesn’t make for a flipped class, the key is that students are active in the classroom; the out of class activity could be reading the text book. As learning management systems and a plethora of online screen casting and lecture capture tools make online components to courses easier to provide and create, many instructors are using online lectures, websites, online videos, or online documents to prepare students to come in and be active learners during class time. An excellent summary of thoughts around flipping or inverting the classrooms can be found in Derek Bruff’s blog called “Agile Learning” http://derekbruff.org/?p=2108.

[As an aside Derek Bruff’s posting was written as a response to another blog posting by Steve Wheeler about a Wired article and I picked up the whole thread through Twitter. You just have to love social media for the layers and connections – check out @CTELiaisons ***).

My colleague, Mark Morton, and I offered a workshop during the fall 2012 CTE Focus on Teaching week and put together this list of reasons why someone might consider flipping at least some classes:

Allows you to spend class time having your students engage in active learning activities such as debates, discussions, Q and A, demonstrations, peer tutoring and feedback, role playing, and so on. This is the “constructivist” aspect of the learning theory known as Social Constructivism.
Allows you to spend class time having your students learn with and through each other. This is the “social” aspect of the learning theory known as Social Constructivism.
During class time, you don’t “lose” your students: in a lecture, the attention of most students starts to flag after ten or fifteen minutes.
Students have time to process and reflect on content before coming to class to apply and work with that content.
Students can control the time, place and pace of learning of the “lecture”.
Allows you to re-use your video content in multiple courses or across multiple years.
Lets you vary the pace and structure of the classes throughout the term which can impact student engagement.

Also we compiled this list of “things to consider”:

You need to devise strategies to ensure that students actually ingest the content outside of class. For example, start each class with a brief quiz that assesses their knowledge of the content. The quiz could be done via clickers or via LEARN (our LMS), both of which can automatically grade the responses and add them to the grade book in the LMS.
Convey to the students that the videos, or other components, are not supplemental to the course but rather are essential. Remind them that if they don’t watch the videos, they won’t be able to participate in the classroom activities.
Spend some time at the beginning of the course explaining to your students the pedagogy behind the flipped classroom model.
Don’t re-lecture. If students come to class without having ingested the content, move forward with the learning activities anyway. If you resort to lecturing in class to bring them up to speed, you’ll only reinforce their decision to not ingest the content prior to class.
Make sure the video includes some questions or reflective activities that you want the students to think about in preparation for the next class. These can appear at the end of the video or can be inserted at appropriate times throughout the video.
Determine what format will work best for your students (and for you). For example, you might videotape yourself talking in front of a flip chart. Or you might create a screencast that focuses only (or primarily) on the the content that appears on your computer screen. Or, depending on your discipline, you might be able to create an audio podcast rather than a video.
Accept the fact that you might need to decrease the amount of content that you cover in your course as a whole. However, students will experience deeper engagement with the content that they do cover.

Please feel free to add to this list through the comments!

Also see some examples of flipped classes in higher ed, http://www.emergingedtech.com/2013/01/flipped-classroom-successes-in-higher-education/.

***Follow the @CTELiaisons on Twitter – we’re following some interesting folks and retweeting from many sources.