Pedagogy and Large Course Redesign

By John J. Doherty and Wally Nolan
Instructional Designers,  e-Learning Center at Northern Arizona University

In this semester’s episodes of our podcast series, Tuesday Tips on Teaching With Technology (iTunes U link), we are highlighting some discussions from the recent Course Redesign Conference held at NAU. With our faculty colleague, Dr. Brandon Cruickshank of the NAU Department of Chemistry, we facilitated discussions on pedagogy, and we saw three major themes emerge from the discussions:

• Coverage versus depth
• Student engagement
• Academic integrity

Coverage versus Depth

We asked conference participants how we could think less about content and more about promoting deeper knowledge or mastery of fewer skills. We were interested in understanding how participants helped their students to “drill down” in depth, as opposed to trying to cover as much as possible in the lecture. Participants pointed out that curriculum designers design things backwards, focusing too much on coverage of content and not enough on student understanding of content. They suggested that instead of “spewing content,” instructors could focus on the essential understandings we want our students to come away with, those important concepts and applications that students will be able to recall five years from now.

This reminds us of the ideas of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue, whose Understanding by Design is in its second edition and now has a supporting web site that serves as a curriculum development “exchange.” Understanding By Design suggests the following stages of curriculum development (.pdf):

• Objectives: What are the desired results?
• Assessment: How will students demonstrate that they have achieved these results?
• Learning plan: What learning activities will help students develop their understanding of the content?

If we spend more time in class focusing on deeper knowledge and getting students to think about material in greater depth, then they will be able to gain broader knowledge outside of class. In other words, we don’t have to cover all the material in class; we just have to give students the foundation to be able to learn further on their own through directed activities that occur outside of class.

Our discussion focused in part on the use of clickers by some of our participants. Dr. Cruickshank makes extensive use of clickers in his chemistry classes. For example, he used clickers to quiz his students about reaction rates, a topic he had not covered in class before the quiz. After the students answered some questions and looked at the responses of the whole class, he had them talk in groups, then answer again. He then assigned homework that covered the same general topics. Some students who visited him during office hours said, “We didn’t do this yet in class.” He replied, “Yes, that’s what the clicker question was about.” It was, he said, a light bulb moment. In other words, he gave them the framework without being explicit about it.

Student Engagement

Dr. Cruickshank’s clicker example is one way of engaging students in large courses. He used the clickers to spark student interaction with each other. By making students active participants in their classes and, therefore, in their learning, we can better engage them with the concepts and ideas that we want them to learn.

The online publication Faculty Focus recently published Building Student Engagement: 15 Strategies for the College Classroom, a report that offers some helpful tips for getting students involved in their own learning. Another way to get students engaged is to have them prepare for class not only by reading or interacting with assigned material, but also by completing self-assessments or pre-tests of their knowledge. We talk more about pre-class activities in two earlier podcasts, episodes 19 and 20, on Pre-, During-, and Post-Class Learning. Faculty who try this approach note that their students are more engaged and even seem to be having more fun. Some students even told Dr. Cruickshank that his “class seems so short.”

One key to engagement is peer instruction, a concept developed for the sciences in detail by Eric Mazur (1997; Crouch and Mazur, 2001), currently the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. The success of peer instruction stems from research indicating that dialogically rich learning environments—those that emphasize dialogue among students and between the teacher and students—help students develop critical thinking and in-depth conceptual understandings. For more information about research in this area, see Reiter, 1994; Anderson et al., 1996, 2001; deCorte, 1996; and Matthews, 1996.

Mazur began using peer instruction in his introductory physics classes in the late 1980s and 1990s to give his students immediate feedback on concept tests during his lecture time. He later began using audience response systems (clickers) to better manage the peer instruction. Together with Catherine Crouch (Crouch and Mazur, 2001) he has shown that introduction of these methods into their classes led to significant improvements in students’ conceptual reasoning.

An excellent comparative study by Nicol and Boyle (2003) of Strathclyde University provides more information on this method and its potential application to large courses.

Academic Integrity

Briefly, the last topic of interest at the course redesign conference was academic integrity, or more specifically, strategies instructors could use to detect plagiarism in their students’ work. A few software solutions are available, such as TurnItIn and SafeAssign. Both products compare student writing to a database of other assignments, research articles, and the Internet, and they produce reports for faculty or students indicating the likelihood that the student writing is original. An unstated implication of these tools, though, is that students are intentional plagiarizers, which might not be the case. As one participant in our conversation noted, we need to keep the “generation gap” in mind, remembering that students and faculty have different levels of comfort and understanding with both the technology and the concepts of academic integrity. We need to educate both faculty and students about generational, cultural, and societal definitions and practices related to academic integrity. Indeed, we at the e-Learning Center are working on a tutorial to do just that.

And finally…

The issues surrounding course redesign are many and varied. NAU faculty identified the three we’ve explored here and in our podcast as some of the more important. We’d like to know more about what others think. What pedagogical issues do you face in your large courses? What strategies do you employ to resolve some of these issues? Use the comments feature in this blog to share your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.

References

(** = full text access)

Anderson, T., Howe, C. and Tolmie, A. (1996). Interaction and mental models of physics phenomena: evidence from dialogue between learners. In, Oakhill, I. and Garnham, A., Mental Models in Cognitive Science. London: Taylor and Francis.

Anderson, T., Howe, C., Soden, R., Halliday, J. and Low, J. (2001). Peer interaction and the learning of critical thinking skills in further education students (.pdf). Instructional Science, 29(1): pp. 1–32.  **

Crouch, C.H. and Mazur, E. (2001). Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results (.pdf). American Journal of Physics, 69(9): pp.970-977.  **

DeCorte, E. (1996). New perspectives on learning and teaching in higher education. In, Burgen A. (Ed.) Goals and Purposes of Higher Education in the 21st Century. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Matthews, R.S. (1996). Collaborative learning: Creating knowledge with students. In, Menges, R.J., Weimer, M. and Associates (Eds.) Teaching on Solid Ground: Using Scholarship to Improve Practice. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mazur, E. (1997) Peer instruction: A user’s manual. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Wiggins, G. and McTigue, J. (2005). Understanding by design. (Expanded 2nd Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. **

Nicol, D.J and Boyle, J.T. (2003). Peer Instruction versus Class-wide Discussion in Large Classes: a comparison of two interaction methods in the wired classroom. Studies in Higher Education 28(4): pp. 457-473. **

Reiter, S.N. (1994). Teaching dialogically: Its relationship to critical thinking in college students. In, Pintrich, P.R., Brown, D.R., and Weinstein, C.E. (Eds.). Student motivation, cognition and learning. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  **

This blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Under Pressure?

by John Doherty

Chippin’ around – kick my brains around the floor
These are the days it never rains but it pours
– Queen, David Bowie, “Under Pressure“

Under budget pressure from our universities, we faculty have no choice but to do more with less. Unlike Queen and Bowie, however, we cannot scream “Let me out,” so we turn to technology for some pressure relief.

Wally Nolan and I, instructional designers at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center, discuss ways to apply technology to your courses in our weekly podcast series, Tuesday Tips on Teaching With Technology (iTunes link). But we don’t just talk about it; we practice what we preach.

For example, I have been using technology in teaching my Honors courses to help make connections amongst my students. With Kevin Ketchner, another NAU Honors instructor, I have been using Blackboard Vista to move some face-to-face community-building tasks, such as icebreakers, online. Kevin and I discuss our approach in an article we have forthcoming in the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council:

[W]e adapted and moved an icebreaker from Conrad and Donaldson (2004) to Blackboard Vista. Following some brief peer-led introductions during our first live meeting, we assigned students a Name That Movie activity in a Vista-based discussion … .  For this discussion, we asked students to respond to the prompt in a discussion thread, in part to also introduce the tool to the students. Also, this assignment was not graded, yet still received such phenomenal interactions. It generated 307 messages in one class that initially had 18 students (one later dropped out) over the course of 5 days, between our Thursday meeting and our next meeting on the following Tuesday. Our only adaptation to this activity was to have the students come to class to discuss their final responses. Walking into this Tuesday class after this activity was a different experience from the week before—it was a very noisy room, students visiting with their neighbors, discussing their movie titles and music tastes. Students were referring to each other by name and moving about the room to share movies, songs, and other similar tastes with each other. Connections had been made and a community was forming. (pp. 66-67)

At the e-Learning Center we emphasize that the adoption of technology needs to be purposeful. Too often, technology gets promoted without prior consideration of the educational implications of its adoption. Successful adoption of educational technology depends on the instructor’s understanding of the potential educational benefits of the technology, consideration of the technology’s pedagogical appropriateness for a given course, skillful implementation of the technology, and clear communication to students about how they should use the technology.

For good information on new and emerging technologies and their potential applications in education, check out the Educause Learning Initiative series titled “7 Things You Should Know About ….”

References

Conrad, R-M. & Donaldson, J.A. (2004). Engaging the online learner: Activities and resources for creative instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Doherty, J.J. & Ketchner, K. (2009). Making connections: Technology and interaction in an Honors classroom. Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Society 10(2): 66-68.

A Tweet a Day Keeps the Swine Flu Away

by Lorraine B. Elder

Okay, Twitter is not really the new Tamiflu, but educational technology and social media are useful tools in combating the effects of sweeping illness. The World Health Organization has declared a flu pandemic, meaning widespread human H1N1 infection is occurring. Many colleges are bracing for large numbers of flu-related absences among staff and students. Wise faculty members are planning ahead to ensure continuity of classes in the event that either they or their students are felled by flu. Here are some steps you can take.

Use Officially Supported Tools

First, try using officially supported tools at your campus. At Northern Arizona University, we recommend using Blackboard Vista for posting class materials, iTunes U for distributing podcasts, Elluminate for live web conferences, and classlists.nau.edu for sending bulk emails to all students enrolled in a class.

Use Social Media

Then in addition to those tools, consider using social media—your blog, a class wiki, Twitter—to communicate frequently with your students if you or a large number of them are ill and can’t come to class. Just be sure to tell students which social media you’re using. Blogs are good for pushing information out to students while also giving them a mechanism for offering comments and feedback. Wikis are especially good for allowing students to complete group projects even if one or more group members get sick, and by collaborating online, sick students reduce the risk of infecting their classmates. If you designate a hashtag for your class, Twitter can serve as a chat tool and discussion board.

Use File Formats Accessible to All Students

Students don’t all have access to the same versions of software that you do, so avoid posting your class materials in formats that require proprietary software. For example, you might have the latest version of Microsoft Word, but your students might have an older version or no version at all, which means they won’t be able to open your .docx files. Instead, convert your class materials to web pages that students can view in a browser. In a pinch, you can convert documents to PDFs, which students can view using Adobe Reader or other free PDF viewers. But keep accessibility in mind for students who use screen readers or other assistive technology.

Record Short, Targeted Podcasts or Webcasts

While we don’t advocate recording entire class-length lectures, we do suggest scripting and recording short (no more than 5–10 minutes each) talks or demonstrations focused on a single key point or topic in your course. Audio recordings are fine for some subjects. Others, particularly demonstrations, lend themselves to video recordings. Be sure to include transcripts, and tell students where to find the recordings. If you have access to iTunes U, post them there. If not, post them in your learning management system or on your blog.

Communicate

At the outset of your class, tell students how you will communicate with them if you become ill, and tell them which communication channels they should use to let you know when they’re sick. Take a look at the Communication Toolkit for Institutions of Higher Education. Above all, be flexible and understanding with your students. Remember that the H1N1 virus seems to affect younger people more strongly than older people, so instead of giving students grief for missing class, send them some virtual chicken soup.

Ask for Help

Most campuses have support organizations that can help you figure out which kinds of educational technology are appropriate for you and your students. Don’t hesitate to ask for guidance.

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