Author: Mark Morton

As Senior Instructional Developer, Mark Morton helps instructors implement new educational technologies such as clickers, wikis, concept mapping tools, question facilitation tools, screencasting, and more. Prior to joining the Centre for Teaching Excellence, Mark taught for twelve years in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. He received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Toronto, and is the author of four books: Cupboard Love; The End; The Lover's Tongue; and Cooking with Shakespeare.

Has the feedback sandwich passed its “eat-by date”? – Karly Neath

sandwich Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Evidence from research, our personal experiences, and common sense make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances student performance and achievement.

A commonly used approach when delivering feedback is the “sandwich method”. You sandwich the negative feedback between the pieces of positive feedback. It has always been done this way, so it must work, right?

This traditional approach might work once, maybe twice. After that people recognize when a feedback sandwich is coming their way and it is the moment that they hear the positive praise.

In fact, we actually start to form a conditioned response (anchor) to positive feedback from an instructor followed by negative feedback. The negative feedback blasts the first positive comment out of the receiver’s brain. The receiver then thinks hard about the negative feedback which drives it into memory. The receiver is now on guard for more negative feedback and cannot hear the positive comments that end the cycle. The result is that what the student is doing well is not being reinforced. This is a good enough reason to search for alternative ways of delivering feedback.

An alternative method has been proposed by Marion Grobb Finkelstein, a member of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers.

According to Marion, the key to success when structuring feedback is to only offer positive feedback. Here is her formula:

How to Give Feedback:

“When you… (describe his/her behaviour)
…consider doing this” (describe your suggested behaviour)
This will help you get… (describe the benefit, the gain, what they will move towards)
And it will help you avoid…” (describe what they will move away from)
End with an authentic compliment and encouraging praise.

Here is the model put into action:

“Brenda, when writing up your experimental report, consider the idea of including a graphical display to represent your data. This will make your data clear to the reader and avoid the frustration of the time-pressed TA marking your report that would arise if they do not understand your results. Good job on the written component of the report! I look forward to seeing your final version.”

Instead of giving Brenda feedback using the typical sandwich – “Brenda, your report is good but it didn’t have graphs. Your written component was good.” – the new approach communicates the same information with a positive tone.

With this model comes the hope of keeping students engaged and motivated with the end goal of improving student learning. It may have a different flavour than the sandwich that you typically order. But that one is full of bologna anyways!

I encourage you to give this method a try and to research other ideas. Do not be afraid to challenge the traditional sandwich method!

Students are just [not] like they used to be — Mary Louise McCallister (Faculty of Environment Teaching Fellow)

A few years ago when I was an undergraduate student (OK, it was the 1970s) I heard the following from another student in my class. I don’t recall if it was an eye-witness account or just a good story:

A professor was lecturing in a sonorous monotone at the front of a huge lecture hall. He was becoming increasingly frustrated by the apparent lack of interest exhibited by the meager group of students scattered throughout the room. One member of the class was slumped in a chair fast asleep right in front of the lecture podium. In an aggravated tone, the professor asked the student sitting next to his slumbering classmate to rouse his peer. Said student retorted, “YOU wake him up; you put him to sleep.”

I remember this story every time I read or hear about university instructors in North America and elsewhere worrying about how students these days are too easily distracted (often by mobile devices), seem to have poor listening skills and don’t have due regard for pursuing serious knowledge—not like when THEY were in school. Really? If so, these instructors were either much better students than I was (which might very well be true) or they were educated throughout university by star performers. I have a somewhat different perspective: while we did not have the smartphones and iPods, we did have other ways of tuning out uninspiring lecturers.

I discussed this perspective with one of my colleagues at the Centre for Teaching Excellence, Mark Morton, a renaissance kind of person, who has expertise in new educational technologies, but is also a scholar of Shakespeare, etymology, food culture, and arcane types of knowledge. It could persuasively be argued that the sentiment held by ‘learned professors’ about their students’ listening skills and lack of attention to scholarly pursuits has been going on throughout human history. As a case in point, Mark sent me the following quotation penned in the medieval ages. It’s anonymous, and found in a collection known as Carmina Burana 6, translated by George F. Whicher:

Learning that flowered in days of yore

In these our times is thought a bore.

Once knowledge was a well to drink of;

Now having fun is all men think of.

Today mere striplings grow astute

Before their beards begin to shoot –

Striplings whose truant dispositions

Are deaf to wisdom’s admonitions.

Yet it was true in ages past

No scholar paused from toil at last

Nor shrunk from studies the most weighty

Till his years numbered more than eighty.

Florebat olim studium,

nunc vertitur in tedium;

iam scire diu viguit,

sed ludere prevaluit.

iam pueris astutia

contingit ante tempora,

qui per malivolentiam

excludunt sapientiam.

sed retro actis seculis

vix licuit discipulis

tandem nonagenarium

quiescere post studium.

Students have tuned out lectures tens of decades, or centuries, before Twitter was invented—they were just possibly somewhat less obvious about it. Nevertheless, today, academics and members of the media (as noted in this BBC piece) are increasingly sounding the alarm about how the conventional form of university education—the class lecture—is threatened by a combination of technological advances, mobile devices and MOOCs (massive open on-line courses). This situation is now stimulating a conversation around university teaching and how to ensure that it is both effective and relevant; how to foster ‘deep’ vs. ‘shallow’ learning; and how much ‘content-delivery’ is to be traded for ‘student-centred’ learning. The fact that such conversations are now taking place could certainly be seen as a positive development. I’ll be sharing some diverse perspectives about how university education is perceived, and is evolving (or not), as well as some innovative approaches to teaching in the context of this rapidly-changing learning environment.

In the meantime, here is a simple, but important teaching practice employed one of our colleagues, Prof. Kevin Markle in Accounting and Finance: memorize your students’ names in order to effectively engage their attention. Kevin does so by the first week of classes and he has 270 students. Click here to see how he manages it.

[This post originally appeared on the Green TEA blog, and has been republished here with permission of the author]

Mistakes– Keemo Delos Santos, CTE Co-op Student

Mistakes are one of life’s great inevitabilities (along with death and taxes). From small blunders to monumental life-altering ones, mistakes are destined to terrorize our numbered days. In fact, the capacity to err comes so naturally to us that it might as well be a bodily function. However, in spite of (or maybe because of) this certainty, we have grown scared and indifferent to failure.

A side-effect of my continuous years of test-taking is a tendency of assigning a great deal of weight on grades rather than mastery of the material. The upshot: a fear of failure shackling me to the comfortable and routine. Often times, this fear has prevented me from speaking up in class or visiting office hours. But, as humbling and humiliating as they are, mistakes should not be avoided or ignored as they are critical to the learning process. Our attempts at ignoring them serve as barriers to learning. By way of example, the questions that I’ve gotten wrong on tests, and the topics I’ve failed to fully comprehend on the first try are the ones that have stayed with me long past the two-week statute of limitations after exam period ends.

While it’s a struggle to be deal with our insufficiencies, it is vital that we change our attitudes on erring as it is from them that we can grow as learners and citizens of this world. Ultimately, our errors, the inconsequential to the significant, are our becoming. The grace to admit our mistakes and the willingness to learn from them is not only a useful skill to have in university, but is also imperative to our survival in the “real world”.

MOOCs Usher in a New Era of Learning — Katheryn Rivas

The past year has witnessed a landslide of global participation in Massive Open Online Courses. These classes are commonly referred to as MOOCs and have attracted a diverse range of students from across the globe. In addition to massive enrollment figures (spilling over 100,000 in some cases), these courses are unique in that they are offered by some of the top universities in the United States and the world– for free.

Last month one million users registered with Coursera, making it the most popular MOOC site on the web. The site was founded only a few months ago, in April of 2012, by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. A competing MOOC site, Udacity, was also launched by a former Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun.

It would be remiss not to mention Sebastian Thrun and his role in the MOOC revolution. It was his Fall 2011 Artificial Intelligence class that ignited the spark of MOOC fever that swept the U.S. after enrollment numbers climbed to 137,000. Though only 23,000 completed the course – Thrun said he was hooked on the thrill of teaching massive classes, describing a particular fascination with the peer-based teaching that flourished among the course community.

The trend of MOOCs is spreading not only in the U.S., but to other countries as well. Today, Coursera has a participating university in Canada, India, Scotland and Switzerland. International support for these classes is most evidenced in the international student participation rates. In Thrun’s original AI class, only 25% of the enrolling student body was located within the United States. Independent classes are cropping up across the world in Internet labs and open universities, providing education to those who may not have had access to such information otherwise.

Information is exactly what students of MOOCs are receiving. The classes do not offer degrees or course credits to students who are not enrolled in a parent university, which makes the very purpose of MOOCs different from a traditional institution of higher education. Currently, the most popular courses are in business and technology, suggesting that professors are seeking to answer a need for information within the professional field, making MOOCs relevant and impactful for members of the workforce rather than a student body. There are certificates of completion available for some classes, but the certificates do not carry the title of any university.

Currently, Coursera offers the widest selection of classes of the MOOC sites and has branched out of the STEM box (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) with humanities courses such as poetry and mythology. Other sites such as edX seemed to be bound to the STEM courses for the simple reason that coursework can be assessed and graded by calculations – in other words, by a computer. Other sites are embracing the concept of a peer-educated community by requiring peers to review original work that cannot be graded by a computer. The quality of such peer-based education has yet to be determined.

Another unknown factor of the MOOC era is how these sites will develop sustainable business models. While the motives behind these startups have been primarily utopian – to make higher education globally accessible – the millions of dollars invested in these new companies demand a for-profit model.

The business model that Thrun has suggested would possibly transform MOOCs into a type of trade school in which qualifying students would agree to have their scores and information sold to recruiting companies. This relationship would support a definition of open courseware that provides education despite barriers of finance or distance; but it could also work to limit courses to relevant industry-related topics.

Katheryn Rivas is a prolific freelance writer and professional blogger who frequently contributes to www.onlineuniversities.com as well as other education and technology sites. If you have any comments or questions, drop Katheryn a line at katherynrivas87@gmail.com.

Visualizations for Assessment and Learning — Mark Morton

Web 3.0, they say, is going to be a “semantic web,” which I take to mean that it’s a web which will allow us to easily explore relationships among large amounts of discrete bits of data. One way of exploring relationships, of course, is visually: humans can literally “see” patterns of relationships more easily than they can otherwise apprehend them. Examples abound, but one that I recently came across is especially interesting from an “assessment” point of view. It’s a visual depiction of comments that a class of students made on one another’s blogs. In the visualization, each student is represented by a small circle (or node) and the the comments that he or she made are represented by arrows leading to the nodes of other students. So, if Matthew commented on Ephraim’s blog once, then the arrow starts from Matthew’s node and points to Ephaim’s node. At a glance, it’s easy to see who has been most active in making comments, who has received most comments, and who hasn’t been active at all — and that information can clearly help an instructor with both formative and summative assessment. You can the visualization, which was made with the platform Many Eyes, here.

Another visualization tool that I recently came across is called DebateGraph, which is intended to help people map out the various ideas, positions, and evidence that make up complex arguments. At first glance, a DebateGraph visualization looks like an ordinary concept map, but as you click the various nodes, you see that each one dynamically changes: it becomes the central node, and new nodes — ones that are connected to it — jump into place. The platform is collaborative, so if you want to contribute to the argument, you just need to log in, navigate to the appropriate node, and then add your point. You can see an example of a visualization in DebateGraph here.

I’m a bit sceptical of DebateGraph’s “practical” implications: in other words, if your family is having argument about where to go for your summer vacation, I don’t think that using DebateGraph would be worth the investment of time it would take to map out the argument. But as a learning tool — that is, as a way of helping students untangle the complexities of, say, a geopolitical conflict or an ethical issue — I think that the very “deliberate” methodology of DebateGraph could be very useful.

Talking to Yourself: Apps for Taking Audio Notes — Mark Morton

When’s the last time you sat down at your desk and said to yourself, “Okay, now I’m going to come up with a good idea.” Probably never. The thing about creativity, in my experience, is that trying to force it to happen simply ensures that it doesn’t. It’s a bit like a sixteenth-century woodcut I once saw that depicted a man gently cupping his hand so that it would hold a bit of water for him to drink: the message or moral of the woodcut was that if he tried to forcefully grab the water, by squeezing his hand tight, it would go squirting through his fingers onto the ground. Continue reading Talking to Yourself: Apps for Taking Audio Notes — Mark Morton

Where Good Ideas Come From — Shirley Hall

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For a while now I have been digging into the literature to find resources related to creativity and innovation. There appears to be a somewhat old-fashioned belief or assumption that states there are people who are creative and there are people who are not creative and that creativity is a result of natural talent. However, Edward De Bono and his staff state that formal skills of lateral thinking can be taught, learned, and practiced in as deliberate a manner as we learn and use mathematics. Continue reading