Back in January 2012 I wrote about Piazza, the free online Q&A site used by instructors for teaching. Since then, Piazza has grown even more popular with STEM subjects. Piazza reports that over 1000 schools and 300,000 students have participated in online discussions using their system. Continue reading Piazza – part 2 – web-based discussion forums for university courses — Paul Kates
In the past few years, mental health issues have become increasingly visible as an obstacle in university education. Ivy League schools, such as Yale and Harvard, have been faulted for placing 
stressful burdens on their students without providing access to services that would help them manage the load. Rachel Williams, a student at Yale, wrote of her experience suffering from depression and attempting to navigate the withdrawal/readmission policy, ”Thinking back to that welcome packet, there is a conspicuous omission: ’We love you and want you and will provide for you and protect you, as long as you don’t get sick.’”
In this student’s case, her forced medical withdrawal from campus was prompted by her sense that her safety and security were in jeopardy at her university. Others felt that they were being forced to choose between staying in their programs at the expense of their health, or medically withdrawing with no guarantee of being able to readmit. After Luchang Wang explicitly referred to the readmission policy in her suicide note in January 2015, Yale promised to examine where it can do better. But is it too little too late?
These are the schools that students aspire to attend and educators strive to emulate, and even they are struggling with how to handle the mental health issues of their students. Therefore, it’s important for us to look at the experiences of those affected by these problems in our own community. This winter, Imprint published a feature article (I Don’t Live Here I’m Just Visiting) that discussed one student’s battle with depression and how it impacted her academic success. A key point in her narrative is the idea that the services were never going to be sufficient for the number of students that needed to use them, leading to wait times that could be extremely detrimental.
It took about a month of waiting for my first appointment. And then when I was walking to the bus to go to my first appointment, I got a call saying the counsellor I was meeting was taking a sick day and I’d have to reschedule. The next available time was a month later.
The University of Waterloo has committed to address this issue, but in the meantime students are left in the cold without the tools to handle their symptoms. Untreated mental health conditions can lead to withdrawal from courses, failing grades, late or incomplete assignments, and many other negative outcomes in the classroom. With the aim of keeping students in the university system, what can instructors do to help students?
At a classroom level, there are many actions instructors can take to improve the learning experience for those with mental health issues. A huge factor in student success is the sensitivity of the instructor, and this can manifest in many ways. For a student who has suffered a trauma, some seemingly innocuous subjects can cause flashbacks or anxiety attacks. An instructor who is willing to preface these topics with a warning or allow students to pursue alternate assignments will allow for greater success in their class. For students whose depression leaves them without the energy to complete assignments on time, flexible and reasonable extensions make a huge difference.
In the next installment of this series, I will discuss specific accommodations and strategies in more detail, focusing on the debate over reasonably accommodating different needs while still accurately testing the abilities of each student.
References:
In the eternal battle for power in the classroom, instructors and students butt heads for who should hold the power when it comes to how a course is handled and taught. And both parties’ have arguments to why each side sho
uld have power.
Instructors argue that students would abuse the control of having any say in how a course is handled. Students argue that instructors are out of touch with what students want and that they forget what it feels to be a student again. Instructors have started to listen to students about these problems, but there is still a large amount of instructors using instructor-centered teaching, which is generally taught in a way that is ineffective in teaching students. And as it is, all instructors hold all the power. This, as a student, seems like a horrible thing. But there is a better way.
I decided to read “Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching”, one of the new books in the CTE library. In the book, authors Alison Cook-Sather, Catherine Bavill, and Peter Felten make the argument of allowing instructors to keep holding on to power in the classroom, but giving students a voice (besides written feedback at the end of the term). They make the argument that unless instructors make the actual attempt to listen to their audience, the students will be disengaged from the material taught. The partnership they describe rests on four main pillars: trust and respect, shared power, shared risks, and shared learning. The book also goes through many case studies and exemplars from different schools around the world, and the different methods that these professors use are also outlined as well.
The benefits are extensive as well. For one, you can control the amount of student contribution that students make to change the curriculum, whether you want to redesign how an assignment is given or want to overhaul the entire course. The ways that the students contribute are also extensive, and the ways to leverage students are outlined in the book as well. And finally, there are almost an infinite amount of ideas that students and professors can produce together.
This being said, partnering with students and redesigning something as small as an assignment is difficult. It involves a lot of student participation and the ability of the instructor to use feedback from the student ambassadors and the classroom to modify what needs to change. Sometimes, it can take several classes and a large amount of student data to change the way an entire course is implemented. As a new instructor, this would be incredibly difficult to achieve since you are dealing with the new challenge of teaching. The final barrier is the instructor’s acceptance to change: if instructors are stuck in their own methodology of teaching, then they will have created a huge barrier of what they think the students need versus what the students want. Because of this barrier, students will lose interest with the material after the first lecture.
I encourage not only new and old faculty instructors to read up on partnerships in the classroom, but also students. Speaking as a student, it is important to remember that we have a voice in the classroom. Instructors, it is important to remember that you have the ears to listen to students. And when both parties work together, hand in hand, we can mold the future of learning.
For interested readers, this book is available at the Centre for Teaching Excellence library (EV1 325).
References:
Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., & Felten, P. (2014). Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: A guide for faculty. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
“LO”.
Those were the first letters sent through the “Internet”, back in October 29, 1969. The first use of the ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute. The word they tried to send was “LOGIN”, but the system crashed when trying to send the “G” (a literal “lo”w). Decades later, the Internet has developed into a monster of complex links to different servers and computers that is one of the greatest accomplishments in human history.
The original purpose of the Internet (which is not, as everyone says, cat pictures) was to communicate information between the different universities to share research and information that could not be easily sent through the phone or the postal system. It was a system that encouraged learning from others’ information, and using that information to create more information, and so on. But after computers started to condense from the size of an entire room into a device that could fit onto your desk, becoming much cheaper, and connections that were starting to be created all around the world, the common people were finally given access to a large amount of information and tools all in a short amount of time. But this information, as wonderful as it was, could not be communicated properly with the masses.
First, some of the information to articles and journals were (and still are) blocked, unless you pay a substantial fee to access that information. As well, this information was made for people in the field they were in, so people from other fields of work could not understand the information that was trying to be relayed since it would be filled with jargon and complicated information.
But it wasn’t until Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, who started the Academy in 2006 on YouTube for the purpose of free tutoring lessons to friends and family in subjects of chemistry and mathematics. As time progressed however, the number of followers has grown to around 2 million and the site has broadened its focus: topics now include history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, cosmology, American civics, art history, economics, music, and computer science, with videos available in 63 different languages.
A lot of other educators who wanted to provide free education to everyone followed suit, and more websites and YouTube channels popped up. For instance, my favourite educational channel on YouTube is CrashCourse, which currently covers subjects in literature, chemistry, world history (my favourite), biology, ecology, big history (as in the history of our universe), psychology and US history. Current sessions are going through the subject of anatomy and physiology, astronomy and US government and politics, while forecasted ones are going to be in intellectual properties and economy. Basically, everything you wanted to learn about a multitude of subjects in a very friendly and open matter that also brings up real world issues in the lessons.
As free and easy-access education is becoming more available, with different teaching styles, languages and subject matter being used, the future of online education is a bright one.
One of the things I enjoy most about working at CTE is the opportunity to work with c0-op students. Each term, we have a co-op student who writes Teaching Stories that feature Waterloo instructors whose teaching practice is especially effective or innovative. After the co-op student writes the teaching story, I’ll usually edit it and — because my PhD is in English — I really give it a thorough going over! Fortunately, we’ve always had co-0p students with excellent writing skills, so not much editing is needed.
Nonetheless, the process recently reminded me of a document that I wrote more than 20 years ago, when I was teaching first-year English courses at another university. I eponymously entitled it “Mark Morton’s Quick and Dirty Guide to Sentence Structure.” Rereading it, I still like it: it’s brief, efficient, and clear (which is not an easy job when you’re trying to explain the vagaries of English grammar!). Rather than have it languish on my PC, where it would eventually vanish when my hard drive crashes, I’m going to share it here as a PDF: Mark Morton’s Quick_and_Dirty Guide to Sentence Structure. Use it or ignore it as you see fit!
An email I received this morning momentarily pleased me: I was being invited to submit to a journal called the American Journal of Education Research a version of a presentation I recently delivered at the annual conference of the Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association.
But then I noticed some odd grammatical errors in the email. My suspicions raised, I went to the journal’s website, and then to the website of its publisher, Science and Education Publishing. On the surface, everything looked legit: the 70 journals published by Science and Education Publishing all have hundreds of articles written by academics from all over the world. Each journal also claims to be peer-reviewed, and provides a list of its peer reviewers. But then I came across a tab that explained the “processing fees” that an author must pay in order to have his or her paper considered for publication.
A bit more sleuthing revealed that Science and Education Publishing (and all of its subsidiary journals) are considered by the scholarly community to be “predatory” publishers – that is, they are bogus. They even invent journal names that are easily confused with legitimate journals. For example, the American Journal of Educational Research appears to be trying to ride on the coattails of the American Educational Research Journal, published by the highly regarded Sage Journals.
On the one hand, I wasn’t surprised by all this, as I’d recently read an article about a Canadian journal called Experimental and Clinical Cardiology that used to be legitimate, but which has been lately purchased by an offshore corporation that has turned it into a predatory publisher. But what I was surprised by was how much digging I had to do to confirm that Science and Education Publishing journals are bogus. As a former English professor, I was usually able to detect plagiarism in seconds – and I guess I thought that that skill would transfer over into the realm of fake journals.
Anyway, there are apparently hundreds or even thousands of bogus “academic” journals out there. Here’s helpful a list that’s published annually by a librarian at the University of Colorado.
What I’m still unclear about is this: are the academics who publish in these predatory journals being duped? Or are they knowing participants in this ruse? Is the market for academic research so saturated that even bona fide articles by good scholars can’t find publication in legitimate journals?
This past May, I had the great pleasure of presenting at Laurier’s Integrated and Engaged Learning Conference with Jill Tomasson Goodwin (Associate Professor -Faculty of Arts teaching in the Digital Arts Communication (DAC) specialization program; Scott O’Neill (Associate Director, Marketing and Communications within the Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment (MUR)department and Madhulika Saxena (a student in the W2014 DAC 300 course and a recent graduate from uWaterloo’s Arts & Business program).
We wanted to explore how we might bring high quality high impact practices (HQ HIPs) into the classroom. Our presentation focused on DAC 300’s collaborative project that provided students with an authentic experiential learning opportunity where the students worked in teams to address an on-campus community partner’s real world need. Our goal was to highlight how a course might embody the characteristics of HQ HIPs and what can be done in terms of course design and course delivery to make a course a high quality high impact practice. Using DAC 300 as an example, throughout the presentation, we provided ‘tips’ which we hope will help others incorporate high quality high impact learning opportunities into their classrooms.
Experiential education has always been important in education, and it is of particular importance at uWaterloo. We say it is in our DNA. We’re known for our co-op program; experiential learning is one of our Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations and our strategic plan promises ‘Experiential Education for All’. We know that when done well, that is, where learning is “as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as abstract,” and emphasizes both judgment and exploration, experiential education helps students better absorb, retain and transfer knowledge (Lombardi, 2007).
So… what are the characteristics of a high quality high impact practice?
(Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S., 2013)
You can view our presentation here to see how these characteristics came to life in DAC 300.
A lot of things came together to make the DAC 300 course a great learning experience. A couple that I want to highlight centre around 1) collaboration and 2) the impact on the instructor and students.
Experiential learning opportunities often bring students into meaningful contact with future employers, customers, clients, and colleagues. What struck me about the DAC 300 project was the extent to which Jill collaborated with an on-campus ‘community partner’ (Scott O’Neill and the MUR department) to provide her students with this real-world, relevant learning opportunity. In turn, Jill’s students collaborated together to provide MUR with a solution to address their real-world need. If we want to make more of these high impact practices available to our students, we will likely have to collaborate with campus partners -campus partners from writing centres, student affairs, living learning communities, residence life and librarians are just a few examples of who these campus partners might be. More important, the collaboration has to benefit all parties.
The role of the instructor often changes when you provide authentic learning experiences to your students. Prepare to learn along with your students. Incorporating authentic learning experiences into your course can be disorienting and uncomfortable for you AND your students. Your role shifts from ‘instructor’ to ‘coach’. Students will come up with solutions or approaches that you have never thought of. That can be a good thing, but it also means relinquishing a certain amount of control, being flexible, and adapting to circumstances- just as we do in the real world.
Jill Tomasson Goodwin has kindly created and shared these 6-Tips-and-10-Tricks-to-Facilitate-Classroom-based-Experiential-Learning. Jill encourages you to adapt them to your needs and invites you to email her (jtomasso@uwaterloo.ca) to chat with her further about how these choices worked in practice.
DAC 300 is a 12-week reflexive theoretically-informed, practice-based course in User Experience Design (the art of understanding, designing, and creating an ‘end-to-end’ experience of technology for users). The course design choices are based on a very real-world application of knowledge — facilitated inside, and tested outside, the classroom, for an actual client, with a pressing need.
During the W2014 offering, Professor Jill Tomasson Goodwin and her third-year Digital Arts Communication class consulted with UWaterloo’s MUR department to design an augmented reality version of a tour brochure. To complete the project, teams of undergraduate students drew upon their knowledge of user experience design, interviewed high school students, and then iteratively prototyped a range of augmented reality experiences, all designed to engage and inform students as they visit and explore the campus. The project and technology have been so successful that UW will use augmented reality to enhance other recruitment publications.
Resources
Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are. Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Kuh, G. D. (2008). Excerpt from “High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter”. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm
Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S. (2013). Ensuring quality and taking high-impact practices to scale . Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Lombardi, M. M. (2007). Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. Educause learning initiative,1(2007), 1-12. http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/authentic-learning-21st-century-overview
Integrative and Applied Learning Value Rubric (AAC&U) http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/integrativelearning.cfm