"Wild West phase of textbook evolution" - Faculty opportunity AND responsibility!

"just about anything goes with platforms and pricing models,"  Steven J. Bell, Temple U. in "Views: Taming the Textbook Market", Inside Higher Ed, June 11, 2011

Excerpt "In this Wild West phase of textbook evolution, where just about anything goes with platforms and pricing models, faculty have a real opportunity, and perhaps a responsibility, to make the decisions that allow them to play the role of sheriff and bring order to a chaotic landscape. The alternative is having publisher solutions forced on them. Savvy publishers will work to keep faculty hooked on their system by rolling out an ever expanding buffet of prepackaged lesson plans, ready-to-launch slide shows, automatically graded quizzes, shared-revenue mechanisms and whatever else it takes to keep faculty connected to the existing textbook model. As they examine the multiple alternative textbook options emerging, faculty should take time to learn from the lessons of the scholarly publishing past. That history is one of lost opportunities and outright mistakes."

Challenge: Reimagine textbook resources that engage students in deep learning AFFORDABLY

Repositories, Open Educ. Resources,  and "multiple formats are combined to create non-textbook learning materials." are recommended by Steven J. Bell, Temple U. in "Views: Taming the Textbook Market", Inside Higher Ed, June 11, 2011
Excerpts:  
"The challenge lies in reimagining the textbook so that faculty construct the right set of learning materials that engages their students in deep learning, without bankrupting them. The open educational resources movement is already laying a foundation for that type of radical change.
...
"Hope for mending what’s broken in that system is on the horizon. Scholars are publishing more frequently in open- and public-access journals. Faculty conducting research with National Institutes of Health grants must now deposit their accepted papers in a free, community-accessible database. New models where author payments are used to support open access are gaining traction. At a growing number of institutions faculty are passing resolutions to support open-access publishing. 
...

Open Course Library Goals (Wash. State) "Getting from NIH to PBT"

Not Invented Here [NIH] to Proudly Borrowed from There [PBT]
- Cable Green quoting Steve Acker in Webinar 20110411
Goals for OpenCourseLibrary:

• design 81 high enrollment courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery 
• lower textbook costs for students (< $30) 
• provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses 
• our college system fully engages the global open educational resources discussion. 
• improve course completion rates through good design and affordability 

- excerpted from Washington State Student Completion Initiative opencourselibrary.org

Join us this Friday 4/15 2pm EDT "Publishing & Education - Synergistic or Symbiotic?"

Free Registration
More refs!

www.opencourselibrary.org

Cable Green posts here: http://blog.oer.sbctc.edu/

Open Course Library Blog: http://blog.ocl.sbctc.edu/

http://twitter.com/#!/opencourselib

Do your students HAVE textbooks? USE course materials?

How can publishers and faculty [together?] help students learn better?
Access is necessary but not sufficient.  Same for good learning skills.
How can authors and publishers make course materials more accessible?
How can faculty and academic support professionals encourage and enable students to prepare effectively for course meetings, activities, and assignments?
Join us this Friday 4/15 2pm EDT "Publishing & Education - Synergistic or Symbiotic?"

Free Registration

I find faculty increasingly worried about getting students to do ANY prep before participating in course sessions.  Obviously, if a student has no access to preparatory learning materials, that student cannot prepare for effective participation in a course session or to benefit as intended from course activities and assignments.
However, does the kind of help and support for students need to change for different forms of course materials?  How can faculty or other academic professionals help students to read/use textbooks if they actually obtain the books - in any form?  
Steve Gilbert

Flat World Knowledge Open Textbooks

Now "in" Webinar - good prep for this Friday 4/15 "Publishing & Education - Synergistic or Symbiotic?"

TLT Group FridayLive! 4/15 2pm EDT   Free Registration
How can publishers and faculty [together?] help students learn better?
What does "publishing" mean today? Tomorrow?

Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge  introduced his model for providing textbooks free (really) access via Web - by subsidy from sales of other versions of same "textbook".

Why Meta is Betta: Possible to help students learn math by reading textbook?

This Friday 3/25 - How to help students learn to study - even how to learn from reading math textbooks! Interview with experienced online teacher Lucy MacDonald - who worked with a math teacher to help students READ math. Observed that students did NOT read textbook at all. Helped teachers, students develop Textbook Reading Guides. Worked with students to WRITE instructions about how to read and study more effectively for students - intended for students who would take the same course next term. Subsequently other math teachers asked for copies of the handouts to use with other math textbooks - as model for helping students learn from math textbooks.

 How to Read a Math Textbook original handout.  

Join us for "Helping Students Learn to Study:  Why Meta is Betta" 

 Interview:  Lucy Tribble MacDonald "I'm an early adopter and i like to be pregnant"

Friday, March 25, 2011

2:00 pm (ET) 

Friday Live! Registration   More info...tlt.gs/MetaBetta3

What I Once Believed - A Summary

Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, I thought technology use powerful tools for active learning, faculty-student contact, student collaboration (and the rest of Chickering and Gamson's seven principles) to leverage a transformation in how students learned. The dimensions of revolution wouldn't stop at seven, of course. For example, words would be joined by images, numbers, and video as media by which students could acquire information. Students previously excluded by their location, schedule, disabilities or other aspects of situation would find new gateways to learning.

The driver of the revolution would be the power and excitement of the day's emerging technology, a technology that would enable faculty and students to do what they most wanted to do:

• Self-paced tutorials on mainframe computers promised a world in which each student would be guided toward the fastest possible individual progress through materials, at least a third faster than conventional teaching/learning activities;
  
• Microcomputers running word processors, spreadsheets, and BASIC would enable students to learn by designing, analyzing, composing, serving. The work would be creative, a different vision of individualization
  
• Videodisc and the graphic user interface would power a shift toward the visual;
  
• HyperCard would give everyone the ability to use hypertext to navigate interdisciplinary webs of knowledge and create their own maps of learning;
  
• Students siting side by side, collaborating on the same computer, would help one another to new skills and new understanding;
  
• Then email expanded cooperations that could reach across barriers of time and space;
  
• Boom! Gopher servers and then the Web put the whole planet onto our hard drives: an explosion of access to expertise;
  
• If revolutions are marked by explosions, surely a revolution was coming: the decades since 1970s have been marked a series of blasts as promising new technologies rocked higher education, one after another...
  

Of course, words, textbooks, and lectures would not be eliminated by this blitz; sometimes a good clear explanation with Q&A is just the ticket.

But, I thought, let's prepare to discard the theory that huge lecture halls and wonderful textbooks are the way to deliver learning (i.e. facts plus inspiration) while cost-effectively expanding our mass system of higher education.

In fact, whether students were on campus or off, I believed, faculty and students would soon combine to make the whole notion of 'delivering' education obsolete. “Delivery” was an image that had never matched reality – learning never has been “transmitted” into student minds by talking into their ears.

Each year, I was persuaded that the newest technology would finally be the key to unlocking all of this. The results would be greater achievement, a larger and more varied student body, and, most important of all, students who would, far more than in previous decades, be committed to learning.

This vision of transformation could be achieved, I assumed, by allowing the various specialists the freedom to do their various jobs:

• Faculty would teach their courses. But big new instructional packages and powerful tools in student hands would result in a wave of exciting changes in the nature of each of those courses.
  
• Information technology specialists would explain to faculty and students how to use each new technology. Then the faculty would take over to redesign the courses.
  
• Evaluation specialists would measure progress: percentage improvements in performance, more students (and more kinds of students), cost savings...
  
  
  

Want more? Read entries 1-13 of this series. How well does this summary describe what you and your colleagues once thought about the coming computer revolution in higher education? Was this where you were? Did you start at a different place?

10. TLT support: Why and How

You can't understand teaching if you ignore learning. And you can't understand either unless you pay attention to the facilities, resources, and tools used to accomplish them: classrooms and computers, libraries and the web, and other such 'technologies.' At one time staff could ignore classrooms, textbooks, and other traditional technologies because the choices were few, and universally familiar. That's no longer true. Especially in the last decade, the options have multiplied. Because these technology options are not equally good, equally easy, or equally inexpensive, the choice of technologies requires conscious attention, just as teaching and learning themselves do.

That close relationship of teaching, learning, and their technologies
is one reason why it's important for institutions to have units that
function as TLT Centers, real or virtual.

A virtual TLT Center is a constellation of two or more units such as faculty development, technology support, the library, the facilities program that supports classrooms, distance learning, and departmental TLT experts -- units that work so closely together that they act like a single service provider. For example, their staffs continually learn about each other's resources and from one another's experiences; that way each staff member can draw on all the capabilities of the virtual center.

These things I do believe.

But some of my beliefs have changed. I once believed that, when helping faculty, TLT staff needed to focus on (just) two things:

1. WHY: Teach enough about a new technology and its teaching/learning uses so that instructors would want to learn more, and, for those who are persuaded,
2. HOW to teach in those ways.

Is that a good summary of the kinds of help that TLT staff provide faculty at your institution? Or is there something additional that faculty are taught about emerging TLT topics? Please post your observation by clicking 'comments' below.

My second old belief was that support for faculty should be provided directly and entirely by experts in TLT support. At your institution are there people in addition to TLT staff who provide such support?

My third old belief is that this training should be entirely interdisciplinary: faculty are specialized by discipline but TLT staff are not. So this faculty support service should be 'one size fits all departments.' Is that true at your institution?

PS Anyone who knows the work of "the Steves" knows how many of the thoughts in this series come wholly or partly from Steve Gilbert. Our thinking has been so intertwined over so many years that it's not even possible to point out which of the observations in this series originated from him and which from me.

PPS You probably know that this post is part of a series called 'Ten Things I (no longer) Believe about Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology.' If you like these posts, please spread the word. Perhaps you can use these ideas to help with a more intentional approach to TLT planning.

And join us online for a free, live discussion of these issues on Friday, October 23, at 2 PM ET. It's part of our FridayLive series. If you don't already have a FastPass, click here to register. Thanks!

F. Organizing to Improve Teaching and Learning with Technology: Collaborative Change

How do we organize the process of improving teaching and learning (with technology)?

At most institutions, the context is a sharp division of labor. The most important divisions:

• Individual faculty exercise relatively personal, private control over the content and methods of each course. (In most departments, this individual ownership of individual courses is far more meaningful than any collective faculty responsibility for the degree program.)
  
• Various facilities, resources and services are controlled by various staff units (e.g., classrooms, course management systems, libraries, study areas and their equipment) and by outside organizations (e.g., Internet sites, Google tools, textbooks, ...)

The implication: each can handle those responsibilities relatively independently of the others. Presumably, the sum of their efforts will yield sufficient return on the institution's investment in expensive technologies such as course management systems, classrooms, and libraries. Many of us had hoped for much more: computing would revolutionize how students learn, what they learn, and who can learn. Perhaps the cost structure of education would be transformed, too. Or maybe not. That division of responsibility has been a major roadblock. Of course, we occasionally overcome that division. I have already talked about how a variety of independent choices by faculty led to a coherent pattern of change in learning activities and outcomes at Reed College in the 1980s. Here's an example of an unusual degree of collaboration. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that this story unfolds at an entrepreneurial research university where team research is the norm. A few years ago, my old undergraduate department, the MIT Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, decided that major curricular change was needed. Faculty started by asking what skills their graduating students would need. To develop those skills, faculty decided, students would need plenty of practice in four activities:

1. the conceptual work of design,
   
2. converting those ideas into plans for something that could be built,
   
3. actually constructing the engineered work, and
   
4. testing the product.

Faculty called this four step cycle “Conceive – Develop – Implement – Operate (CDIO)”. And they realized that most of CDIO needed to occur outside classrooms, 24 x 7. Conceiving such a reform is one thing. To actually develop, implement and operate such an innovative academic program would require collaboration involving many faculty in the department along with many individuals and groups outside the department. For example, faculty realized that their building (which was due for renovation) was unsuitable for this kind of 24x7 approach. When the institution's architects balked at planning such a facility, the department responded that it would raise its own money and hire its own architects. (One advantage to having a faculty with a track record of raising large sums of money and well-to-do alumni– it changes the internal balance of power!) 'Support staff' and faculty from other departments and offices then teamed to develop these plans, e.g., figuring out how, in order to work on their projects, engineering undergraduates could use keyless access to enter otherwise-locked rooms in the building at any hour of the day or night. That MIT success story is the product of a coalition of effort, complementing a division of responsibility. How are things going at your institution? Who takes responsibility for improving teaching and learning with technology? Do those folks have the respect and budget to carry out that responsibility? For example, how does (or might) your institution deal with questions such as these:

1. Should your institution switch to Google Mail? What are the educational, budget, and policy implications of relying on such an external service?
   
2. The monograph and article no longer have a monopoly on academic expression. More work in the disciplines is being developed and shared through web sites, video, email, and multimedia. In each department, what media do your advanced students need to use to do their projects and communicate professionally? To prepare for that, what kinds of multimedia skills should your entering students learn in the first year ? Who should help them acquire those skills in the first year? How do you assess those skills?
   
3. What issues of policy and practice are emerging as a result of ePortfolio use at our institution? Should projects and the portfolios themselves should become part of the student's formal academic record? How long should they be saved? Who has the right to change those records?
   
4. Much of what faculty do to improve their teaching is the result of informal learning. How can such learning be improved and extended? What roles might other staff (e.g. librarians) play in helping faculty learn about teaching and learning with technology in their disciplines at other institutions?

“It takes a village.” Steve Gilbert and I have been supporting collaborative change for fifteen years. Here are just two of the ideas and resources we've developed at The TLT Group:

1. Your institution has what we would call a Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable if you have a council or conclave that meets regularly, advises the chief academic officer on issues of policy relating to teaching and learning with technology, and convenes many kinds of stakeholders. To assure that the Roundtable balances a variety of points of view, it's important to include faculty (tenure track and adjunct) who represent a variety of degrees and types of technology use, for example. TLTRs have advised on budgets and tricky policy questions. They can help faculty and support staff to understand one another's perspectives. And they can accelerate the sharing of information between junior faculty and senior technology administrators, senior librarians and junior facilities staff, student affairs staff and academic department heads, as TLTR members from all these areas work together to develop a policy position for the institution. A well-functioning TLTR helps the institution seize opportunities and deal with problems that are not the responsibility of any one office, department or segment of the institution. We can help with getting a TLTR underway and providing resources for its agenda.
   
2. Gathering information from stakeholders: Flashlight Online, our web-based survey system, has been used by a few institutions to regularly gather input from different segments of the academic community. Sandy Shugart, president of Valencia Community College, has said that Flashlight Online is one of the keys to their strategy for shared governance. Tenure track and adjunct faculty are regularly surveyed so that they can contribute information, ideas and opinions for use in developing new policy at Valencia.

What steps has your institution taken to exercise collaborative responsibility for improving teaching and learning with technology? What do you suggest as next steps? Click on the word “COMMENTS” below, just to the right of my name, to share your observations and suggestions. REFERENCES For a bit more on the history of CDIO at MIT, see William Litant's article, “Learning in a Landmark Laboratory,” in http://bit.ly/MIT-CDIO.

2. Improving learning: Use technology to improve 'test' scores

Of the ten things I once believed (beliefs I now consider misleading or false), #2 is 'If you want to improve what people learn in a demonstrable way, use technology to improve test scores.'

For decades, skeptics about the value of each new technology have challenged its proponents to show that the use of that technology causes gains in test scores.

Accepting the terms of that question, the proponents of distance learning have boasted that their students score just as well on tests as students in comparable courses on campus: 'no significant difference'. And I remember feeling great when seeing Kulik's meta-analysis of research on computer-aided learning showing that, typically, students using computers learned about 1/3 faster than students who did not use computers.

At first, no one questioned the terms of the question itself: Does technology X (e.g., facilities on a campus) cause better learning than technology Y (e.g. some distance learning infrastructure)?

Do you see the fallacy? Well, consider this version of that same question about the learning impact of a more familiar technology: paper, "Let's measure educational achievement by two sets of courses. One set of courses will use paper. The other group of courses will have no paper. Will the paper-aided learners score higher on exams, on the average, than the paperless learners? How much higher?"

Silly questions. Although paper has valuable uses for learning, sheets of paper don't cause anyone to learn. (Try taping a sheet of paper on your head, and see how much you learn if you wear it there all day.) 'Tell us whether the paper is used for textbooks,' you might insist. Even then, you'd probably hesitate about predicting gains in test scores; you'd want to know how good the textbook was, and whether students actually read it or not. And you'd also have a right to ask how the paperless group was studying.

Well, paper is a technology. A textbook, campus, a computer, and the Web are all technologies, too. None of them 'cause' learning.

Technology is just a tool. Its value for learning lies in what teachers and students do, thanks to their use of that technology: their teaching/learning activities. How much learning results from making a technology available? That depends on the activity and on the circumstances.

I used to talk about two ways that teaching/learning activities could be enhanced by using the right technology:

1. "Help a popular teaching/learning activity occur better, more frequently, or with less effort (.g., using PowerPoint to improve the legibility of a faculty member's notes on the board)" and/or


2. Make a hitherto little-used activity so much easier or richer that the instructor or student changes the course activities themselves. For example, in the 1980s, distant learners rarely communicated with each other. Today, thanks to email, discussion boards, and chat rooms, discussion among distant learners is common, and research suggests that such discussion improves learning outcomes.

Which activities are most likely to improve outcomes? In 1986 Chickering and Gamson answered that question by describing 'seven principles of good practice.' A decade later, Chickering and I wrote a widely-read article in 1996 summarizing how each of those seven principles could be implemented with technology. In recent years, I've greatly expanded those seven sets of suggestions.

(Notice that all this still accepts the basic terms of the original question: 'When trying to demonstrably improve the value of what students learn, the goal should be to improve performance on traditional tests of learning outcomes. That's the only practical, politically feasible way to show that computer use can improve what students learn.'

Well, what do you think of my old belief?

• Have you seen any such gains in test scores resulting from the use of digital technologies such as computers, clickers, portfolios or the web itself? evidence of a lack of such gains? or even lower test scores when digital technologies are used in certain ways in courses?
  
• In your program, has any such evidence ever played a role in budgeting for technology or planning teaching improvement?
  
• Are there other ways in which technology use has improved what students learn in your program? If so, suppose someone challenged you to provide evidence that the student learning had improved and you couldn't cite improvements in test scores. What evidence would you gather instead?

PS. If you'd like to see a table with my ten old beliefs on the left, and my 10 new ones on the right, see: http://bit.ly/ten_things_table

Ten Things I (no longer) Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology: Introduction

(revised November 23, 2009)

Working on a curriculum committee? planning a new academic building? are you a chief information officer? director of a teaching center? Welcome to this discussion!

I've been writing a series of posts about how to improve (or even transform) college education.  I'm 60 now, and I've begun to realize that I've changed my mind about a lot of things I used to believe in that area.

I first heard about an imminent technology revolution in higher education when I was a senior in high school.  Initially the change was to affect how people learned and what they learned (e.g., programming). Later the hopes also grew to include who could learn (e.g., distance learning) and a reduction in the costs of instruction.

I heard more about this coming transformation when I was in college, in graduate school, as a program officer for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (1978-85), as a senior program officer with the Annenberg/CPB Projects (1985-96), at the American Association for Higher Education (1996-97), and since Steve Gilbert and I founded the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group (1998- ), a non-profit that supports over 100 colleges and universities around the world.

The buzz continues, continually changing its details. The catalyst would be mainframe engineering analysis and design programs. It would be simulations, computer-aided instruction, microcomputers, computer-aided design, videodisc, email, distributed laboratories, hypertext, Gopher servers, math tools, the Web, asynchronous learning networks, national learning infrastructure, streaming video, ePortfolios, eLearning, blended courses, course redesign, iPods, clickers, lecture capture, smart phones, digital cameras, social networking,...

Each new technology changed important elements of the direction -- students learning to program in BASIC on microcomputers would learn to think logically and creatively for themselves, videodisc would make education more visual and interactive, HyperCard would trigger a wave of hypertextual, interdisciplinary thinking...

There are common threads to this rapidly flickering vision, ideas that I've heard repeatedly over the decades:

• Education will shift the student's role from passive to active. 
• Education will become more self-paced. 
• Many new kinds of students will be involved. 
• As more of the explaining function of education becomes embodied in technological materials, the faculty role will shift from always being the 'sage on the stage' toward spending more of their time coaching and managing the learning process("a guide on the side"). 
• Although the upfront costs would be large, there will be cost savings, too. 
• And the exponential improvement in the power and efficiency of computer chips will help assure that the wave of change that we could already see would soon accelerate. 

Those are frequently repeated hopes.

THE BAD NEWS

Since 1966, most predictions I've heard for technology-driven, paradigm-shifting change in the "how" of learning have not come true - not pervasively, not yet.

For example, most of today's students still seem to do most of their learning through what instructors and textbooks explain to them, for example. The students' job is still mainly to take notes, preparing to verify on the test that they have understood what they have been told. (Do you agree that this was, and is, the norm in colleges? If not, what was the norm 20-40 years ago? has the norm changed?). I think the norm has changed a little, but not in the ways most people predicted years ago.

Please add your own observations (click the 'comment' button below.)

What claims for technology-driven change in learning did you hear, 5-10 years ago or more?

What did you think that academics would need to do in order to achieve that improvement in learning on a programmatic scale?

Have any of those hoped-for improvements in learning actually happened across your program?
Which predicted changes in learning have not yet occurred on that scale? Why not?

• Were those goals for changes in learning actually unattainable or over-valued?
• Were there problems with the proposed strategy for achieving those changes?
• Was the new technology of the day inadequate to the task?

Link to: The first thing I no longer believe: to attract attention, people and resources, be the first to buy into the hottest new technology.

Priorities for TLTG Online Symposium 2009 - Fac/Pro Dev/Support

Priorities for Faculty/Professional Development/Support Online Symposium

August, Sept, 2009, the TLT Group, Inc.
Frugal Innovations: Faculty Roles and Programmatic Support
What should we focus on first, next?

---

Include Exclude 1st results from similar online poll 8/4

This Web Page: http://preview.tinyurl.com/TLTG-FrugalPriorities09

---

---

Try to Include topics, issues, questions, activities, challenges, strategies - In what order?

We seek participants' input for determining the
order in which we address some of the following in this 2009 Symposium. We will also welcome
polite responses to "How could you have been so stupid as to omit
XXXYYYZZZZZ, which should be one of the top priorities for this
series?"

• Cope with $ Cuts
  How to cope with current budget cuts just for now? or forever? Planning/hoping for return to "normalcy"?

• Info for Decisions
  What kinds of information or data will really effect related decisions (by whom?) in the next 12 months?

• Nanovation, Extermissions, & Milli-Everetts
  See also: "Milli-Everetts - Smallest Essential Steps for Incremental Exponential Education Revolution: Nanovation?"
  Nanovation = Intentional use of new resources for "sharing forward" improvements
  and innovations in ways that multiply impact (like "viral marketing,"
  - morally and intellectually responsible version of "Ponzi
  scheme"/Pyramid/Chain Letter; Extermission = Intentional, informal outreach - used during TLT Group's online
  sessions about Twitter in July, 2009.
  Milli-Everett = The smallest effort required to enable and encourage at least one teacher to at least:
  

• Make one improvement in one course,
  
• Get a little feedback and improve that improvement,
  
• Help two at least colleagues each make similar improvements - and each help at least two more colleagues ....

• Mid-Level Roles
  Role of mid-level academic professionals (dept
  chairs, division leaders, deans, …)in success/failure of dissemination, innovation, ...
• Gmail Decision
  Tools that appear to have great potential for
  teaching/learning and become even more accessible when all students and
  others have Gmail accounts - implications for budget, policy, operations, teaching/learning
  
• Using Un-Owned Resources
  Web 2.0 -
  the difference between "free beer and a free puppy"; who is
  responsible for what kind of support and usage policies, standards when
  the college or university cannot own or control the resource? - implications for budget, policy, operations, teaching/learning
• Handheld Devices
  Love em or leave em? Use in courses or forbid in classroom? Clickers, PDAs, smart phones, netbooks, audio & video recorders - - implications for budget, policy, operations, teaching/learning
• Back-Channel Communication
  Constructive "back-channel" communication - anonymous or not,
  sanctioned or not!
  
• Brief Hybrids
  Taking advantage of these compact combinations of plans, media, activities, references, to make small low-risk, low-cost course improvements: Dipping a toe in the shallow, quiet end of the raging technology sea!
• Textbooks: Evolution or Extinction?
  Emerging alternatives and variations. How
  changes in technology are both impeding and facilitating the
  opportunities for students to take their own notes and engage actively
  with readings and other learning resources.
  The myth of standardized resources for independent learning.

• Fundamental Paradox of Faculty Development
  Recognize and try to reconcile these two approaches:
  A. Rational: emphasizes data, assessment, "scalable" strategies
  B. Personal: emphasizes trust, individual differences, relationships and growth
  
  Address these provocative-but-useful questions:
  Why is Faculty Development a low institutional priority?
  
  
  

  Why are so many
  faculty members still, in 2009, ''assessment-phobic'' and ''rubric-ignorant''? [Maybe we need to
  find Latin or Greek terms for ''assessment-phobic'' and ''rubric-ignorant' -
  ha! ha??]

  
  
  What could be done to avoid or reduce disproportionately large budget cuts for faculty development? So that when we return to better economic times, a larger portion of institutional resources will be committed to faculty development?
  
• Collection & Dissemination Challenge
  Agree/disagree/deal with: Most conscientious and valuable efforts to collect, assemble, publish, and get others to use valuable practices, policies, and ideas for improving teaching and learning in higher education fail to reach more than a few percent of all faculty - ever, certainly not in a year or two. Its getting even more difficult to get anyone to pay attention to any message or information - even about resources they need and are already entitled to!
  How can we enable and encourage effective exchange of information and innovations among Symposium participants, their own Institutions, even more widely!
  
• Faculty Learning Communities - Communities of Practice
  
  

• Even More Important!
  "How could you have been so stupid as to omit
  XXXYYYZZZZZ, which is the one that REALLY important to me? It should be one of the top priorities for this
  series!"
  

Return to Top

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Try to Exclude the Seductively Plausible and Unrealistically Contingent:
topics, issues, activities, challenges, strategies

We'll try to exclude from our discussions topics, etc. that are

Seductively Plausible but we already know they just don't work or they're unlikely to be
accomplished in a short time with scarce resources

Unrealistically Contingent on
major changes in campus culture that are still not within reach (e.g., changing the promotion/tenure system)

Return to Top

Challenging faculty assumptions (and your own)

I was recently asked for ideas for a workshop for faculty who believe strongly in the power of lectures and textbooks alone to educate their students. This is what I wrote in reply:

"You might try showing all of (or clips from) "Minds of our Own," an amazing video series (3 hours in all) from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center (producers of the earlier, brilliant "A Private Universe." Both MOOO and PU are available in streaming form, free, at http://www.learner.org. Or you can buy the DVDs, I believe.

"In these videos, there are many sequences of graduating Harvard and MIT seniors, in graduation robes (and some of them graduating with majors in science or engineering) confidently misunderstanding fundamental ideas in science that are taught in junior high. The sequence on using a battery and a piece of wire to light a light bulb is particularly rich. It begins by showing the misconceptions of graduating seniors (one mechanical engineering grad from MIT who thinks she can light the bulb and then fails laughs and attributes the problem to "operator error." The scene then shifts to a public school. A bright girl is defeated by her misconceptions, even after a very clear lecture and what looks like a very good, thorough lab on batteries and bulbs. In fact, even when an interviewer later puts her in a situation when she can reason her way to the correct answer (which she then draws on an easel), she refuses to believe her reasoning over her preconception. Not until her easel solution lights the bulb does she see it. And hen she immediately flips to recommending that other students be taught in a way that we recognize as the way that she was taught in the first place: the way that failed.

"Several faculty have told me over the years that they have shown clips like these to their students (in one case, a course in classical music) and found that they triggered valuable discussions about the nature of teaching and learning. And I use them in workshops with faculty.

"Having said that, note that any teacher (including me) has strong preconceptions about how things work in a course or workshops, just like that girl had her preconceptions about how to light a bulb. Watch the whole three hours, and "A Private Universe" (22 minutes), thinking about those faculty you want to teach as the 'students.' The single most important lesson of both videos: if you don't know what your students already believe, and why they believe it, you're already 3/4 of the way down the toilet. And your 'students' almost certainly don't all believe the same things."


What do you think? Would you agree to lead such a workshop to help faculty become conscious of, and question, assumptions that have provided a foundation for their teaching? How would you organize it?

"The Lecture is Dead. Long Live the Lecture."

"The Lecture is Dead. Long Live the Lecture."

Role of Note-Taking

Response to previous postings "The best 'lecture' ever"

Excerpt from posting to POD listserv by Steve Gilbert Aug 29 2007.

"The Lecture is Dead. Long Live the Lecture."
That's the new title that emerged yesterday during a conversation I was privileged to have with Paul A. Lacey in preparation for a free online Webcast next Friday (Sept 7) about pedagogy.
Click here for full digital recording of this event:

Paul often referred to his experiences as the first Director of a Lilly Endowment project to support young faculty members. He described the rapidly growing movement to oppose lecturing in college courses, the over-zealous advocates of eliminating all lectures who claimed that students could learn more efficiently from textbooks, etc., and, eventually, the evaporation of this issue. All in the 1970s.

Paul noted the disappearance of note-taking by students during lectures as one of many important changes since then. He described some of his work with a variety of faculty colleagues over many years to help them improve the effectiveness of their lecture-dominated courses. He often focused on helping the faculty members to shape the students' purposes and practices in note-taking.

I want to suggest that student note-taking may be viewed as a valuable lens for focusing more clearly on the intersection of new technology options, changing educational practices, and common misconceptions about "engagement" and "active learning."

First, do you agree that most students do not arrive in most lecture-based courses prepared to take notes effectively? Is that quite different from a few years or decades ago?

Second, technology as culprit. Many teachers and learners have been seduced by the capability of recording and publishing live events in various ways, as the relevant technology has become so easy to use, available, and inexpensive. They have leapt to the conclusion that a full audio recording or full video recording of the entire event is superior to and removes the need for note-taking by individual students.

Third, the practice of a faculty member or student or other authorized person serving as official note-taker for a course is also seen as superior to and removing the need for note-taking by individual students.

The Misconceptions
I learned rather painfully by trial and error over many years that if I do not take notes myself during a lecture, presentation, or meeting I do not focus as sharply on what is being said and I do not engage as actively as when I am constantly trying to rephrase, summarize, identify main points, and jot notes - including my own questions, ideas for further actions, etc. Even if I never review those notes again, the process of writing them (by hand or by computer) makes a big difference for me. I don't think this need of mine is especially unusual. I also don't believe that everyone needs to take notes in the same way that I do. Nor do I believe that taking notes oneself is incompatible with making use of notes, guidelines, or recordings prepared by others.

Many students CAN entirely avoid engaging with what is being "delivered" in a lecture, and that is the beginning of a legitimate complaint about lecture-based courses. However, if the students are helped to take notes in an effective way or to participate using other structured activities and devices (many already described in this series of email messages), lectures can be quite effective. Students can be "actively engaged" without having to speak aloud to anyone.

Many college and university faculty members still begin their teaching careers with the tacit beliefs that all their students have career goals, enthusiasm for the discipline, and study/learning habits similar to the teacher's own. Overcoming that predilection has always been an important step on the path to becoming a good teacher for undergraduates who are not destined for graduate school or majoring in the teacher's field. With the increasing numbers and variety of backgrounds of undergraduate students, this step becomes even more important. And so does a faculty member's acceptance of responsibility for guiding students' efforts to learn in a course.

If a teacher includes lectures, the teacher may need to offer some suggestions about how and why to take notes. If the teacher decides to make some kinds of recordings or approved notes available that practice should be explained carefully. Students should be encouraged to use the other resources effectively in conjunction with their own note-taking. And, of course, students may need to know about the increasing variety of effective ways to take notes so that each students can determine which kinds of note-taking are most useful for that individual student in which kinds of courses. [Some examples of useful note-taking methods: outlining, concept mapping, drawings, verbatim phrases, indications of priority, follow-up goals, … etc.]

I'm looking forward to learning more from Paul Lacey next Friday and hope that some of you will join us. Oh, I personally prefer to include some kinds of visible interaction with students/audience/participants at least once every 10 or 15 minutes even in a "lecture" - whether that happens to be with a group of hundreds of people in a single room or in an online session.

Steve Gilbert
President, The TLT Group

SOME REFERENCES/INFO FROM /ABOUT PAUL LACEY:

Paul A. Lacey,
Emeritus Prof. of English, Earlham College
Clerk [Board Chair], American Friends Service Committee

"Boundaries in Academia: Personal, Professional, Political, Spiritual?"

"Terror and Other Threats to Humanity"
Fifth World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, Rome, November 2004

Improving Large Enrollment Courses - Issues?

Some years ago, Ron Bleed of the Maricopa Community Colleges pointed out that a few multi-section large enrollment courses accounted for a surprisingly large share of his colleges' enrollments. It's likely that, at many institutions, these courses (often introductory) are also crucial for whether students become increasingly engaged, or leave the institution.

Large enrollment courses have been at the focus of institutional efforts to improve quality and retention while controlling costs for a long time. Textbooks and lecture halls were early strategies for putting more students in reach of a teacher while, ideally, investing at least some of the savings in assuring that the instructional message was unusually engaging. The Open University in Great Britain developed an even more capital-intensive strategy to enable huge numbers of adult learners across the country, and around the world, to get a quality education at a time when few dollars per student were available to pay the price; their strategy has worked well. In the 1980s and 1990s, Annenberg/CPB invested of millions of dollars into this industrial model (capital investment that could improve quality and accessibility while lowering operating costs): the result included pioneering course materials such as "French in Action" and "The Mechanical Universe." The National Center for Academic Transformation has been a leader in collecting some technology-enabled approaches to redesign. Initiatives such as these have drawn attention because they've had money to solicit proposals and because of their uses of technology.

As I learned while a staff member at Annenberg/CPB, this capital intensive strategy has real potential for improving large enrollment courses, and equally serious limitations. The instructional materials embody the time, place, culture, and teaching approach of their designers, so they are vulnerable to change. Institutions and funders sometimes buy into this strategy because they assume that the high start-up costs can be amortized over 5-10 years of students. Then they're often dismayed to find that expensive upgrades or rebuilding of materials are needed because of changes in the discipline or world events, changes in underlying technology, or simply changes in who's in charge.

Another family of strategies for improving large enrollment courses are less vulnerable to these changes because their initial startup costs are lower than the capital intensive strategies. Some of these are 'cellular' - they increase interaction among very small groups of students (e.g., pairs of students) even in lecture courses of several hundred students. Personal response systems have been quite useful for that purpose. Another, less technical strategy, is to divide a large enrollment course into sections by the educational aims of the students, e.g., dividing a biology course into sections for premeds, prenursing, engineers, teacher ed majors, and so on; each section might use similar materials but their instructors would be prepared to lead discussions and give assignments tailored to the needs of that particular type of student.

Another family of strategies aims to improve the whole large course. For example, some faculty make exceptional use of diagnostic assessment approaches such as Classroom Assessment Techniques (Cross and Angelo). For example, a faculty member might do a diagnostic assessment of students as they enter the course, looking at their needs, goals, or even their personalities. Using the results the faculty member assembles a group of students, and meets with this group every week to discuss the events of the previous week, and plans for the next week. A few of the students in the group are chosen because they are typical of the whole class. The rest are chosen because each of them, in a different way, exemplifies a type of student who is unusual in the larger course. In other words, this small group of students is selected to represent the full diversity of the learners in the large course. The faculty member uses this group to see how the course is working for each of them, and all of them, and to discuss ways of making the course more effective for all of them. The approach, originally developed by Joseph Katz and Mildred Henry of SUNY Stony Brook, is called Paideia.

What families of approaches have you tried, or seen, for improving learning in large-enrollment courses (courses with 100+ students in one or more sections)?

Students writing their own textbook using a wiki

At Old Dominion University in Virginia, Dwight Allen and his graduate assistants teach over 200 students in "Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education." The course has many sections, some taught on campus, some in a distance learning format.

Allen saw that the textbook was not engaging students effectively, so he decided that, the next term, the students would be assigned to collaboratively create their own text, using the same software used by authors of Wikipedia.

Allen's team provided the chapter headings; students each worked on a different section, writing for other students. Three versions of each section were written and, later, students critiqued the drafts, and voted for the best version of each one. Using their advice, the faculty picked the versions for each chapter; the other versions were also included as supplementary material. All this was done in the first month of the course; after that, the students studied the textbook they'd created, as well as using other elements of instruction: lectures, discussions, readings, and so on.

For more on how the course and writing were organized, click here.
*************************
What you see above is a new addition to our materials on 'Digital Writing Across the Curriculum.'

A little explanation: Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is important because writing is the lifeblood of most college courses: when students entering a course can already write well, the instructor has more options for how to teach them, and how to assess what they've learned. When those same students also have skills of digital writing (e.g., creating web sites, using multimedia, writing for wikis and blogs), those options expand even further. That's my hypothesis, and this TLT Group resource gives examples of disciplinary courses that are being taught in fresh, effective ways by using assignments that involve digital writing. Please send me more examples! We hope that our subscribing institutions will use this web site to consider whether, and how, to foster such skills in their students in order to help all departments improve instruction and assessment.

If you like this work, the best way to support it is to urge your institution to subscribe to The TLT Group.

Blogging Loss for Elite Universities?

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12245

“Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge?”
E. Han Kim, Adair Morse, Luigi Zingales
NBER Working Paper No. 12245, Issued in May 2006
---- Abstract -----

“We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect weakened in the 1980s and disappeared in the 1990s. We decompose this university fixed effect and find that its decline is due to the reduced importance of physical access to productive research colleagues. We also find that salaries increased the most where the estimated externality dropped the most, consistent with the hypothesis that the de-localization of this externality makes it more difficult for universities to appropriate any rent. Our results shed some light on the potential effects of the internet revolution on knowledge-based industries.”
===============================================================

Economists' blogs “The invisible hand on the keyboard”
Aug 3rd 2006, From The Economist print edition

Why do economists spend valuable time blogging?

HERE ARE EXCERPTS:

“…With professors spending so much time blogging for no payment, universities might wonder whether this detracts from their value. Although there is no evidence of a direct link between blogging and publishing productivity, a new study* by E. Han Kim and Adair Morse, of the University of Michigan, and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, shows that the internet's ability to spread knowledge beyond university classrooms has diminished the competitive edge that elite schools once held.

“…Top universities once benefited from having clusters of star professors. The study showed that during the 1970s, an economics professor from a random university, outside the top 25 programmes, would double his research productivity by moving to Harvard. The strong relationship between individual output and that of one's colleagues weakened in the 1980s, and vanished by the end of the 1990s.

“…The faster flow of information and the waning importance of location—which blogs exemplify—have made it easier for economists from any university to have access to the best brains in their field. That anyone with an internet connection can sit in on a virtual lecture from Mr DeLong means that his ideas move freely beyond the boundaries of Berkeley, creating a welfare gain for professors and the public.

“…Universities can also benefit in this part of the equation. Although communications technology may have made a dent in the productivity edge of elite schools, productivity is hardly the only measure of success for a university. Prominent professors with popular blogs are good publicity, and distance in academia is not dead: the best students will still seek proximity to the best minds. When a top university hires academics, it enhances the reputations of the professors, too. That is likely to make their blogs more popular.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=
HERE IS THE FULL TEXT

“CLEARLY there is here a problem of the division of knowledge, which is quite analogous to, and at least as important as, the problem of the division of labour,” Friedrich Hayek told the London Economic Club in 1936. What Mr Hayek could not have known about knowledge was that 70 years later weblogs, or blogs, would be pooling it into a vast, virtual conversation. That economists are typing as prolifically as anyone speaks both to the value of the medium and to the worth they put on their time.

Like millions of others, economists from circles of academia and public policy spend hours each day writing for nothing. The concept seems at odds with the notion of economists as intellectual instruments trained in the maximisation of utility or profit. Yet the demand is there: some of their blogs get thousands of visitors daily, often from people at influential institutions like the IMF and the Federal Reserve. One of the most active “econobloggers” is Brad DeLong, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose site, delong.typepad.com, features a morning-coffee videocast and an afternoon-tea audiocast in which he holds forth on a spread of topics from the Treasury to Trotsky.

So why do it? “It's a place in the intellectual influence game,” Mr DeLong replies (by e-mail, naturally). For prominent economists, that place can come with a price. Time spent on the internet could otherwise be spent on traditional publishing or collecting consulting fees. Mr DeLong caps his blogging at 90 minutes a day. His only blog revenue comes from selling advertising links to help cover the cost of his servers, which handle more than 20,000 visitors daily.

Gary Becker, a Nobel-prize winning economist, and Richard Posner, a federal circuit judge and law professor, began a joint blog in 2004. The pair, colleagues at the University of Chicago, believed that their site, becker-posner-blog.com, would permit “instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.” The practice began as an educational tool for Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chairman of George Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. His site, gregmankiw.blogspot.com, started as a group e-mail sent to students, with commentary on articles and new ideas. But the market for his musings grew beyond the classroom, and a blog was the solution. “It's a natural extension of my day job—to engage in intellectual discourse about economics,” Mr Mankiw says.

With professors spending so much time blogging for no payment, universities might wonder whether this detracts from their value. Although there is no evidence of a direct link between blogging and publishing productivity, a new study* by E. Han Kim and Adair Morse, of the University of Michigan, and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, shows that the internet's ability to spread knowledge beyond university classrooms has diminished the competitive edge that elite schools once held.

Top universities once benefited from having clusters of star professors. The study showed that during the 1970s, an economics professor from a random university, outside the top 25 programmes, would double his research productivity by moving to Harvard. The strong relationship between individual output and that of one's colleagues weakened in the 1980s, and vanished by the end of the 1990s.

The faster flow of information and the waning importance of location—which blogs exemplify—have made it easier for economists from any university to have access to the best brains in their field. That anyone with an internet connection can sit in on a virtual lecture from Mr DeLong means that his ideas move freely beyond the boundaries of Berkeley, creating a welfare gain for professors and the public.

Universities can also benefit in this part of the equation. Although communications technology may have made a dent in the productivity edge of elite schools, productivity is hardly the only measure of success for a university. Prominent professors with popular blogs are good publicity, and distance in academia is not dead: the best students will still seek proximity to the best minds. When a top university hires academics, it enhances the reputations of the professors, too. That is likely to make their blogs more popular.

Self-interest lives on, as well. Not all economics bloggers toil entirely for nothing. Mr Mankiw frequently plugs his textbook. Brad Setser, of Roubini Global Economics, an economic-analysis website, is paid to spend two to three hours or so each day blogging as a part of his job. His blog, rgemonitor.com/blog/setser, often concentrates on macroeconomic topics, notably China. Each week, 3,000 people read it—more than bought his last book. “I certainly have not found a comparable way to get my ideas out. It allows me to have a voice I would not otherwise get,” Mr Setser says. Blogs have enabled economists to turn their microphones into megaphones. In this model, the value of influence is priceless.



* “Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge?” by E. Han Kim, Adair Morse and Luigi Zingales. NBER working paper 12245, May 2006.

Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.