Category: Blended learning

Six Reasons I Like Laptops in the Classroom — Linda Carson

I’ve stood at the back of a lecture hall and seen the flickering laptop screens: email and Facebook and online poker. I recently heard of a student, braver or foolhardier than most, on Chatroulette during a class. How’d I hear? One of my own students tweeted it from a couple of rows behind him.

As I watched the number of laptops rise in my classroom this year, I made a mental note to keep an eye on their effect. I expected to give a speech, a few weeks into term, about shutting down the tech sometimes to improve our classroom interaction. That’s not what happened.

I didn’t start it. It took me a while to realize it was happening. Now I’m just trying not to get in the way. Continue reading Six Reasons I Like Laptops in the Classroom — Linda Carson

SCoPE out this rich international resource – Trevor Holmes

I’ve just returned from four days in British Columbia, where I had a small glimpse of Olympic fever in Vancouver as I passed through coming home from a conference in Kamloops. While Canada’s medal quest will be over in a short while, a site I’ve used before and was reminded of this past Saturday truly deserves the Gold. It’s called SCoPE, and it’s for anyone interested in higher education research and practice, often but not exclusively with an online flavour. There are synchronous seminars with live interaction, as well as asynchronous discussions and archives of past events. The content-rich site has documentary, wiki, and video resources from their early seminars to their latest offerings — currently, “Pimp your Post,” about that important first class message in an online course. It’s free to join, and an excellent use of resources through BCCampus (after a start-up grant ran its course through SFU a while ago). This was just one of many resources showcased at Educational Developers Caucus 2010 at Thompson Rivers University; in the coming weeks I’ll report on other useful stuff I learned (or re-learned — sometimes it takes Your Faithful Curmudgeon a few tries).

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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.

The Birth of the Learning Studio – Lynn Long

Last term, Marlene Griffith Wrubel , Jane Holbrook and I offered a new type of workshop to instructors in the Faculty of Arts. We called it the Learning Studio in order to distinguish it from our previous workshops which had typically involved a presentation supplemented with questions and answers. The “Customizing Your Course in ACE” Learning Studio took place in the FLEX Lab where three CTE staff simultaneously facilitated three small discussion groups each focusing on a specific online learning topic. Participants were able to choose which discussion group to join and were able to move to a different group at any time. Marlene and I were excited by the dynamic learning environment that we saw evolve during the first studio. Continue reading The Birth of the Learning Studio – Lynn Long

Twittering and Continuous Partial Attention – Trevor Holmes

For a week, I’ve been Twittering. Normally, Mark Morton (intrepid voyager in neotechnology-land) would be the jolly fellow bringing you glad tidings of great techno-teaching joy. Having experimented for something like fifteen years in the classroom, though, I thought it would be fun to continue my Early Adopter mentality and change up my own course this coming Winter term over at That Other University down the street, adding a bunch of social networking tools that had previously existed in partial form or by accident in Cultural Studies 101. Continue reading Twittering and Continuous Partial Attention – Trevor Holmes

Invest in People – Jane Holbrook

 

feet and grassI’ve just returned from a conference jointly sponsored by CSSHE (Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education), COHERE (Collaboration for Online Higher Education and Research) and CHERD (Centre for Higher Education Research and Development). Its title was “The Future of Online and Blended Learning: Strategy, Policy, and Practice”.  Along with Mary Power and Scott Anderson, I had the opportunity to learn about how blended and online learning are, or will be, supported and shaped by upper level policy decisions and through faculty development programs that are provided by teaching centres in universities and colleges across Canada.

I wanted to share my main take-away from the conference; invest in people.

Our grassroots approach to supporting blended learning at UW seems to be working as well, or better, than what is happening at other institutions. Rather than just applying large amounts of money to the development and ongoing support of a few “flagship” blended courses, or having pockets of course developers working in isolation in Schools or Faculties to develop programs of blended courses, UW provides support for the development of blended courses more broadly.  Through CTE and ITMS (Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services) there is support to design courses that represent a range of “blendedness” and that align with the discipline and objectives of instructors who choose to use online components in their courses.  We do this through our CTE faculty liaisons and through my role as an instructional developer of blended learning, as well as through the technical support provided by the UW-ACE help  team. These people are knowledgeable about teaching and learning, bring a range of expertise to the job and adapt their practices in response to the needs of the students at UW.
 
Mary and Scott presented a session called “One Model for Success: Supporting Blended Learning through Faculty Liaisons” where they shared how liaisons promote technological and pedagogical best practices together as “one stop shopping” when they consult with instructors  and how the physical placement of the liaisons within the Faculties increases their visibility and accessibility and facilitates relationship building. They spoke about how they function as neutral and objective consultants within their Faculties and how, through their own networks, they can share what works well, and what doesn’t, in blended courses.  They talked about how they collaborate with the folks at ITMS, work on technology-related committees and how their input promotes better decisions around UW’s support of technology.

Reactions from the audience? Many commented on how lucky we are to have this model, that this seemed really different from the strategies used on their campuses and how this approach must have involved some risk and vision on the part of our upper administrators.

Of course there are challenges. As Mary and Scott pointed out to the crowd, there is just too much work now. The liaisons have become victims of their own success. We are all struggling to continue to support this model and its original intent because  as the number of blended courses grow and the number of faculty using UW-ACE increases we are strapped to provide the same levels of pedagogical consultation and support that we did when these (mostly part-time) roles were envisioned in 2001. My hope is that in this atmosphere of cut-backs and fiscal restraint that we can maintain this vision and even  increase our support at the grassroots level, in people.

Screen Idols — Trevor Holmes

colour-tvI’m not late — I’m in fact right on time — but the only seats left are close to the front and strangely they do not afford a very clear view of the screen at all. The chairs themselves are decades old and make my back hurt almost immediately. When things start up, I crane my neck upward and slump way down in my seat with the broken arms, hoping to be able to focus on the unfolding of the next hour and a half while people around me text, eat, have side conversations.

Contrast this with the following evening. When I am ready, I open a laptop and click “play.” I’m surrounded by loved ones — my cat and my spouse — and I spend an hour focused on the screen. We can pause to go back or pause if we need to make a comment, or reflect a bit. After it’s over, there’s a willing conversation partner to help analyse what I just experienced.

If you’re reading this blog entry from the CTE website, you could reasonably assume that I’m describing the difference between a large lecture hall and online learning. Perhaps you surmise that I’m a fan of online learning, and feel that lecture halls are bad places for learning, both cognitively and somatically. However, I’m actually describing my experience this past weekend of going out to a movie versus watching a downloaded TV episode (paid for, on iTunes, just to be clear). But when I think about it, I have to wonder if there is a connection to be made.

I’ve long been a proponent of the lecture , done well, as a great way to teach and learn. It’s a craft that can be honed, and my own lectures (according to me anyway) are universally adored while being chock full of memorable brilliance (jokes and useful theory).

Thinking back, though, on my weekend, I guess I am reconsidering my position a bit. Can self-paced, high-quality learning online be better for minds and bodies? You bet! Can it replace the social dimension of dozens or hundreds of people coming together and the (occasional) “aha” moments that arise? Sometimes, yes. I’m not going to stop holding lectures, but this weekend reminded me, again (it takes me  lot of reminders), that how we use lecture time and space needs to be thoughtful rather than assumed.

“Fail often to succeed sooner”- IDEO

By Katherine Lithgow

I noticed these words on the door as I entered an instructor’s office, and commented on how appropriate they were, particularly in light of the fact that we were meeting to discuss how eportfolios could be used to help her students. She wanted to incorporate their use into a project her students would begin in the winter 2010 term and complete the following winter 2011 term with different aspects of the project being addressed in a number of different courses. Continue reading “Fail often to succeed sooner”- IDEO