Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog – Page 28

Redundancy and Contingency – Mary Power

We weathered the storm of the three and a half day outage of our campus learning management system and have come out the other side relatively intact. It has left me thinking about our reliance on this technology and about redundancy and contingency. Basically, what do we need to do to prevent complete immobilization in the (I hope extremely unlikely) event of another shutdown?

An IT colleague described redundancy as: “If a system crashes, or the building falls in a sinkhole, an identical backup system takes over within minutes. Like our Connect email server. We have 5 servers in the Math building and 5 identical in another building. If the math building gets sucked into space, within minutes the other building takes over and users notice little or no change.” Obviously, Desire2Learn needs to be responsible for the server redundancy – but it behooves all of us to have backup plans, our own redundancies, in place in case another black hole event occurs.

That brings me to contingency. In hospitals contingency plans are required to be in place to cover the eventuality of any system outage. Arguably there are more serious consequences of a system failure in a hospital environment. However, since so many are reliant on our course management system, a framework both system wide and as individuals should be in place – at least for peace of mind. The conversations have begun at an institutional level and I believe many individuals created their own workarounds.

It seems to me that the key in an event such as this, as with so many other things, is communication. A great deal of anxiety can be alleviated if communication lines can be kept open. Keeping an email list of your students is a good idea. If you have sent an email to your class the copy that the system sends to you will have all the Bcc: addresses – keep that. The classlists available for download from Quest contain the student email addresses as well. Just having the ability to let students know that you know what is going on and what your expectations are of them is a good first step. A number of faculty members are already using twitter as a means of communicating with their students. Generally a course specific Twitter account is created and then students are invited to follow and important information can be broadcast. Bill Power in Chemistry has been using this for several semesters now and his students did not feel the pain of the recent outage. Bill presented on his successful use of Twitter last year at the OND conference. During this downtime the Biology Department began using its departmental Twitter account to communicate with students.

Course materials are the other thing of primary concern to students. IST supports a secure file transfer service called Sendit by which faculty can send a link via email to their students. The advantage of this route is that it is secure and supported by the university. Many people already use Dropbox to share files (even just between their own computers). With Dropbox, a url to a specific file can be shared to students via email or tweeted via Twitter. Google Drive is another option.

These are just a couple examples of the contingencies that had been devised and I would love to hear of others that were used. Of course we hope that something like this does not happen again, but if it does at least we can be prepared. I wonder if that is the silver lining? Or the 100s of new followers of the Biology Department on Twitter!

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.

Using “Transit Questions” in place-based pedagogy – Trevor Holmes

I love being in the classroom, whether it’s large or small, whether I’m officially the teacher or the learner. But I also love getting out of the classroom. Some of the most powerful experiences in my own learning and my own teaching have been observing, interacting, and reflecting in spaces other than lecture halls and seminar rooms. Some time ago, I wrote about place-based pedagogy (with some suggested reading) and gave the example of a workshop for the Educational Developers Caucus (EDC) conference at Thompson Rivers University. Since then, I have continued to use what previously I hadn’t a name for in my own cultural studies course — the field observations and intellectual response papers, the spontaneous “field trips” out into parts of campus to apply concepts, the incorporation of people’s experiences into the framework of the course.

Today’s post is about a small piece of the place-based learning experience I had at the EDC conference, a piece that I’m considering using with my own learners when they do their field observations. To date, I’ve supplied them with reflection questions and notetaking guides for the site visits. I’ve used the online quiz tool in the learning management system to ask “prime the pump” journal questions. But I’ve never yet tried the “transit question” approach. Transit questions were thought-triggering questions handed out just before traveling to the field sites in Kamloops. There were, to my recollection, four different cue cards and each pair of people received one or two cue cards. The idea was that the question on the front (and maybe there was one on the back) would ready us for what we were about to see by asking us about related prior experience with X, or what we expect to find when we get to X, or how is X usually structured. The idea was to talk to our partners about the questions and answer them informally as we made our way to the sites (which took 10-20 minutes to get to).

Photograph of two people in Iceland — Photo of two people in Iceland. Source: Karlbark’s Fotothing stream (shared under CC license)

I can imagine transit questions for pairs that would be suitable for my course too. However, we don’t always have pairs (sometimes small groups, sometimes solitary learners going to a space in their hometown, and so on). I can easily adapt the idea for solo use, though clearly I wouldn’t want someone to be taking notes in response to the prompt while, say, driving!

If we do the field trip to Laurel Creek Conservation area again to test ideas found in Jody Baker’s article about Algonquin Park and the Canadian imaginary, I’ll be using transit questions for the bus ride for sure. With other observations I will have to think about how to adapt the idea. Choosing the right question or questions seems to be important, and offering space to jot notes for those who don’t want to start talking immediately. I’d strongly encourage this approach when you know people will be traveling somewhere for the course by bus, or by foot/assistive device. I can imagine that there are lots of opportunities to do this (and it’s likely already done) in disciplines as varied as geography, planning, fine art, architecture, biology, geosciences, accounting, anthropology, and many others. I’m thinking it would be great if they could pull questions from a question bank to their phones or other devices en route as well… the possibilities!

Transit questions on the way to field sites helped to ready me and my partner for what we’d be looking at, to reflect on the implications of our mini-field trip, and to connect our histories to the present task. I recommend them wholeheartedly.

Turning Information into an Invitation – Trevor Holmes

I’ve been teaching undergrads since 1994 I guess, as a TA at first, and by 2001 as a course instructor. Since 2006 I’ve been the instructor of record on a large first-year cultural studies course (and assisted in 2005 on the same one). This post is in the head-scratching, old dog / new tricks category, and is about office hours.

Generally speaking, I hold 1.5 to 2 hours of office time for consultation with students. I’m happy when I see three to six students in a week, which only happens around essay writing time. Some students come for help getting started, others with drafts to go through together, and others afterward to understand feedback. Although I ask students to show up or make an alternate appointment, I probably only see ten percent of my class that way in a good year (I teach 200).

Over the years I’ve read about some ways to use office hours more effectively. Don Woods (McMaster, Chemical Engineering Emeritus and architect of their problem-based learning approach) always talks about using student ombudspeople (1 or 2 per 50 students), with whom the professor meets each week or two to have a dialogue about how the class is going. A former professor at York when I was a graduate student there used to have his undergraduates come in to receive their essays — they’d have to read them aloud to him in order to get them back (this usually led to a deeper understanding on their part of their grades and their own writing). Teaching tips abound — and of course CTE has our own version of advice for the beginning TA or instructor.

This year, though, thinking I was past all such tips — surely these are all for beginners, not for seasoned oldtimers like myself — I once again posted my office hours for the term in the learning management system calendar tool. Week in, week out… can I remove just the one instance over Reading Break this time? Yes! Great. But…

…instead of writing “Trevor’s Office Hour” like I normally would, I wondered what might sound more inviting. I’m so tired of the discourse of “information delivery” as our role in higher education. In lecture, I’m not an information-delivery specialist. My discipline isn’t about transmitting information from me to many. That is a subject for another post, but it’s important to think about the whole endeavour, and how I communicate this belief I have. If I simply post my hours as information, how am I welcoming the discussion and support I feel I can share with my first years? So, I tried instead posting the calendar entry with the words: “Trevor’s Office Time: Come and Visit me in xxxx-xxxx from 4:30 – 5:00” (and the same, but an hour, on the other day).

For the first time in nearly 20 years of teaching, two students showed up for my first office hour before the first lecture day. I told them I was happy to meet them, we talked about their interests, majors, futures, and I asked them what made them come see me before the class had even begun. They said “because you invited us to come and visit you.”

I was pretty much gobsmacked, not having expected anyone to pop by until three weeks hence when the paper is due. I hope this signals an increase in the frequency of visits and the diversity of visitors. Pleasant surprises like this, that by the students’ own account were because of the three small words “come visit me,” are the kinds of things that keep my enthusiasm for teaching so high even after eight iterations of the same course.

Make Tutorials Matter – Mihaela Vlasea, Graduate Instructional Developer

It is often mentioned that with large engineering classes, it is difficult to truly engage students and provide them with the opportunity to get involved in classroom activities. I recently had the opportunity to teach a tutorial review session, for which I prepared extensively. I presented the material in a very organized fashion, while being careful to periodically ask a few questions while I was solving problems on the blackboard. Based on the answers I was receiving, as well as some feedback from the class, I felt that students understood the material very well. However, upon marking a final exam question, one very similar to the one I had solved in class, I was quite surprised to see that the majority were not capable to meet the basic framework of the solution. Upon reflecting on this fact, I realized that there is a major difference between students understanding my approach and them being able to solve questions on their own. This realization was quite important, because it has forced me to somewhat re-think my tutorial teaching strategies in the future.

Gear Wheels - photo by Ian Britton via flickr — Get the Gear Wheels Turning (Gear Wheels photo by Ian Britton via flickr)

Provide more opportunity for students to think about the problem

Instead of dwelling on copying the problem requirements on the board, I could provide students with a copy of the question (wither on a Power Point slide or a handout) and ask them to take two minutes to read it carefully. Then, I would ask students a few clarifying questions to make sure they have understood the problem requirements.

Provide more opportunities for students to solve the problem

After going through the first step, I would allow students to work in pairs or about 2-3 minutes to discuss a few ideas on how to start solving the question. I feel that it is important, as it would make students feel that their suggestions are valuable to the development of the solution. This would increase their level of “ownership” over what is discussed in the class, rather than having a one-way teaching approach.

Facilitate and moderate discussions on alternate solutions

Often times, students only have the opportunity to be exposed to a single solution to a problem. Offering students the opportunity to think and suggest alternate solutions in a supportive environment would be a great opportunity to expose students to more approaches as well as to encourage creativity in engineering classes. This is a critical point that should be endorsed in tutorials. Students may be encouraged to propose an alternate solution in class or they may be to be allowed to post their own solutions on a forum or wiki page, where their peers can discuss or correct their input (this would be a bit harder to moderate, but it would certainly be interesting).

In general, I think that tutorials in engineering should be more student-focused and should promote discussion, rather than being an extension of lecture time. These are just some of my ideas which stemmed from recent experience in teaching tutorials in large engineering classes.

Slow Learning: Mitten Ball Debates — Shannon Dea, Department of Philosophy

Sometimes, great teaching and learning solutions are right at our fingertips.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching a winter term night course. It was mid-way through the term and the students were clearly exhausted. My usually participatory class clammed up, and I had to do something.

I stopped “delivering lectures” per se years ago. As I’ve grown into my teaching, I’ve become less and less concerned about transmitting content, and much more interested in helping my students to engage with the material sufficiently that they’ll be motivated to seek out the content on their own. So, nowadays, I’m more of a facilitator or master of ceremonies than a lecturer. I don’t tell my students what the readings say; they tell me. And, as they do so, they tell me what’s plausible about the positions we’re considering and what requires a more critical response.

I’ve developed a bunch of different methods to encourage students to participate in class discussions, but that night nothing was working. My mind raced as I struggled to think of a way to kickstart the conversation. And, then it clicked.

I grabbed my wool mittens from my coat pockets, turned them inside-out into a soft ball and told my students, “Ok. Time for a mitten ball debate.”

I wrote a controversial statement related to that week’s material on the board. Then, I drew an imaginary line down the middle of the lecture hall and told the students that everyone left of the line was on the “Pro” side and everyone right of the line was on the “Con” side. I gave them a few minutes to gather their thoughts and jot them down before elaborating the rules of the game:

The only person permitted to speak is the person holding the mitten ball.
Speakers must make new points, not repeat those points other speakers have already made.
No one may hold the mitten ball more than once.
After one has finished speaking, s/he must toss the mitten ball to someone on the other side of the lecture hall (and, hence, on the other side of the debate).
If you catch the mitten ball and have nothing to say, you may toss it to someone else on your side who has not yet participated.
Whichever team runs out of novel comments first loses. (Or, more constructively, whichever team doesn’t run out of points wins.)

I closed my eyes and tossed the ball toward the students.

And it worked. The discussion that followed was energetic and engaging. And, in the remaining weeks of the term, the students themselves several times requested mitten ball debates. There were several mentions of the mitten ball on student evaluations of the course, including such pseudo-koans as “Trust the mitten ball.”

So, what is it about mitten ball debates that students like? I’m still working it through, but here are a few of my ideas about this:

It’s fun to throw things. Moreover, having to follow a projectile with one’s eyes, to throw and to catch, pulls students out of the “alpha state” they so often slip into in three-hour classes. Just that little bit of physicality can make a huge cognitive difference.
Mitten ball debates involve everyone, not just the smartypants who sit in the front row with their hands up all the time. Students too easily fall into patterns about who the speakers are in the class and who the non-speakers are. Mitten ball debating is premised on breaking those patterns. And, students are often grateful when the usual suspects don’t get to weigh in three times on the same point. (The corresponding advantage for instructors is that, in a mitten ball debate, one need never say, “That’s another really great point, Smartypants, but let’s hear what someone else has to say…”)
Mitten ball debating takes the pressure off to make the best point. Since the game just requires teams to come up with as many points as possible, students are helping their team just as much with comparatively weak points as with strong ones. This means there’s less stigma associated with “saying something stupid.”

There are a few different ways you can run a mitten ball debate. You can, as I did, arbitrarily assign a position to each side of the class. Or, you can allow students to move to whichever side of the class corresponds to their own view. Alternatively, you might ask students to move to whichever side corresponds to the opposite of their own view. Adducing evidence for the opposite side is always a great exercise!

And, of course, there’s nothing saying you have to limit the teams to two. In a Classics class, for example, one could divide the class in three and have a mitten ball debate about the comparative merits of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Crassus.

When I’ve held mitten ball debates, inevitably, some students colour outside of the lines – either “crossing the floor” once they become persuaded of their opponents’ position, or remaining where they are but shouting suggestions to the opposite side when they notice an argument the other team has neglected.

Fine by me. After all, the point of a mitten ball debate isn’t to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules, but to warm students up to a topic that at first leaves them cold. I suppose it should come as no surprise that, even in the depths of the winter term, mittens help to provide a little warmth.

Have your own ideas about why mitten balls work? Or, tips to share about cool teaching and learning solutions you figured out on the fly? Log in below to comment, or email me at sjdea at uwaterloo dot ca.

Shannon Dea is currently the Teaching Fellow for the Faculty of Arts. This blog post originally appeared on the Arts Teaching Fellow Blog.

Using Videos as an instructional tool

Using Online Videos (made with WACOM board)

In my brief time as a sessional instructor for calculus in the last school term (May – August 2012), I had an opportunity to experiment with making videos. You can access my YouTube channel. I had been a fan of KhanAcademy and Salman Khan’s desire to supply free knowledge to the world long before his recent explosion of popularity. I had watched most of his calculus videos on YouTube just to get ideas on how to teach the topics effectively as a teaching assistant.

I had even begun advertising his videos to my class as an alternative to what I was teaching in class…(if they wanted to hear and watch someone else teach) until I ran into a five-week long chunk of material that the website didn’t cover, or at least to the level I was expecting my students to know it. I wanted my students to have that alternative. While learning in class can have significant benefits, there are many good reasons to consider videos:

1) Pause and Play, Learning at own pace: If a student misses something the first time, they can just watch it again. Some students require additional reinforcement, and instructional videos are a very user-friendly tool to provide it.

2) Shortened Attention Span: Videos shouldn’t be the same length as 50-minute lectures. Students don’t have to listen to concept after concept without having the chance to try the problems or have their understanding tested.

3) Additional Examples: In both math and engineering, a measure of success is being able to solve problems on certain concepts. Providing additional examples through video allows students to understand the thought process rather than simply seeing completed solutions.

Since I decided to start making videos in the middle of the term, I did not spend that much time getting acquainted with the process. I used a WACOM tablet (with stylus) that I borrowed from Mark Morton at the CTE (I have since bought my own Bamboo Capture Tablet from WACOM for about $80 on sale). In terms of software, I downloaded CamStudio (free) which is a screen capturing program, and used Microsoft Paint. In Paint, I zoomed out as far as I could, and made the drawing space as long as I could so that I could have a “scrollable” blackboard. Here is the end product (increase the quality for a sharper look):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlM-ZT-jhzs&w=540]

I have to be honest. I know very little about video editing, so there was none (all videos were done in one take). If I significantly messed up, I would start over. So I intend on learning some video editing before creating the next batch of videos. I’ve also heard Camtasia works much better, but it costs around $300.

Some tips that I would have found useful before I had started:

1) Have a very clear idea and plan of what you will do and say. In my first attempt, I tried to have a general idea. I knew what problem I would solve and even have the solution in front of me. I didn’t have all of my explanations figured out though. While this spontaneity was not always a bad thing in tutorials, or in the classroom, students are likely to get bored or frustrated because they cannot interact with the video.

2) Talking and writing at the same time is more difficult than it seems. Again, this goes back to good planning. Making an effective lesson plan that outlines what will be said and written is very helpful.

3) Make sure the purpose of the video is outlined clearly at the beginning of the video. Videos that focus on examples may cater to a different crowd than videos that focus on additional theory.

4) Keep your videos short (not more than 10-15 minutes). If they need to be longer, offer them in shorter segments, such as theory, example, and example. Long videos make students lose focus.

In my future courses, it may be worthwhile to consider assigning some teaching assistants to make videos that supplement class material and guide students on problems. I had a chance to familiarize myself with clickers as well in the last term. My goal is to implement a teaching strategy similar to Eric Mazur (a Physics Professor from Harvard): where a video will be used prior to class to introduce students to a topic. Students will then come to class with their misconceptions and misunderstandings on concepts, and the in-class time will be spent on more interactive elements, such as clicker think-pair-share questions. Follow-up videos could then be implemented, but that’s a whole different topic for another time. Thanks for reading!