J. Support: Teach Faculty to Solve Problems

“It just struck me the other day...Life is adversity. That is the meaning of life. We crave adversity. We need to get into trouble and stay in trouble...Teachers who retire go back to teaching because they need to be in trouble again."  - Garrison Keillor, “News from Lake Wobegon,” Feb 25, 2008


On Monday, I summarized my former belief that TLT units should teach faculty two things about emerging TLT ideas and material:

1. Teach them enough about a new technique or technology so that they can decide whether to learn how to use it ("why") and, for those interested,
2. 'How' to use it.

And my post assumed that it would be specialized, paid staff who would teach both kinds of lessons.

Those two kinds of support, why and how, aren't enough, however. Nor does any university have enough staff to provide the teaching and help needed for continual improvements in teaching and learning (with technology) across the curriculum. Let's start with the missing links in the content of support; then we'll conclude with a fresh look at who should provide that support.

WHY, HOW, AND (?)

To improve educational results, it's usually necessary to help faculty and students make qualitative changes in what they have been doing. Putting 'old wine into new bottles' isn't enough. Unfortunately, when faculty use technology to alter course activities, they can easily be ambushed.

Consider difficulties such as these:

• A faculty member begins teaching online. Some students begin to fall behind.
• An instructor adds some challenging new online assignments as homework, with the intent of building on that experience in class; but more students than usual arrive admitting that they haven't done their homework.
• Students begin discussing issues in a chat room. The conversation splinters. Two students get into a violent argument.
• In response to an assignment, students create web sites. Some projects are good on the content, but badly organized. Others are well organized and easy to navigate, but the substance is shallow. How should the projects be graded?
• Each student or small group is working on a different topic of their own choosing. Many choose to work on problems that are each outside the faculty member's comfort zone. The instructor doesn't have time to do the reading needed to become sufficiently expert in all of these areas.
• The instructor's teaching takes an adventurous turn. However, some students object that 'this is not how this course is supposed to be taught,' and complain to the dean. Student ratings of the course take a dive, and the faculty member's tenure case is coming up soon.

Many faculty resist a new TLT approach because they sense that it could lead to unexpected problems, and most professors and instructors know they're being offered no preparation for coping with those TLT dilemmas.

Here are a couple suggestions to help faculty deal with such problems:

1. Organize faculty seminars to discuss case studies that each describe one such problem. Cases might be just a paragraph or two, briefly describing a problem, or a bit more elaborate (video clip; artifacts such as transcripts of online discussions). For each case, participating faculty discuss their own experiences: how they interpreted their version of that situation, how they responded, and what happened next. Usually most participants are surprised at how many different ways there are to interpret such a situation, and how many options there are to respond.
2. After a little practice with such disguised case studies, it's easier to do what Steve Gilbert calls a 'clinic.' One of the participating faculty members describes a problem that he or she has seen personally, perhaps something that's troubling them now. Then the other participants share their own experiences with similar problems, and their suggestions for how to respond now.

Technology's role in academic improvement is analogous to the role of yeast in baking a cake. The staff in TLT support units need to be cake specialists, not just yeast specialists: they need extensive personal experience in using various technologies, old and new, for teaching and learning. But I don't know of any institution that has remotely enough staff to serve their faculty. That's especially true for programs that want to engage most or all of their faculty in improving teaching and learning (with technology).

FACULTY MUST SUPPORT ONE ANOTHER

If a program or institutions to improve teaching and learning on the large scale that technology enthusiasts hope to see, much of the help needs to come from the faculty themselves. That's true even if the TLT improvements are usually low risk, low cost, increments. The professional TLT staff's role should be to support, organize and sustain those faculty-to-faculty efforts. The only way for such mass engagement to happen is if faculty want it, and if their departments and the institution recognize and reward faculty who help their colleagues. [The focus of this post is how faculty can help one another. But that faculty effort can also be complemented with support from trained student technology assistants.]

Not all faculty need do the same things to help their colleagues. The scholarship of teaching and learning provides one set of possibilities. The teaching case study seminars above are another; the cases should be created and published by faculty (the clinic discussions should help identify candidates) and the seminars should be led by faculty. Similarly, 'scrounging' for TLT ideas and materials needs to be done mainly by faculty. And to develop the constellation of support workshops described earlier requires faculty participation as well.

I'm curious. Does your institution's support service for faculty go beyond the 'why' and the 'how?' Does your program encourage faculty to help each other? Can such faculty engagement be scaled up enough so that, over the years, a large proportion of the faculty can comfortably, cumulatively improve their courses?

Improving Teaching and Learning with Technology-Conflicting(?) Schools of Thought

Interesting post by Phil Long (University of Queensland, TLT Group Senior Consultant, and formerly Senior Strategist at MIT) about how to think about improving teaching and learning (with technology).

I think Phil, Steve Gilbert, and I each have slightly different views about how to proactively improve teaching and learning with technology (TLT) in an academic program. Dramatizing our disagreement will, I hope, be an aid to deepening and widening the conversation. Here's my summary of what each of the three of us currently think:

1. Wait until external conditions are really demanding (a near crisis, perhaps). Then marshall your forces and push for a big change that responds to that crisis. A big change might be, for example, a combination of a curricular redesign, a fresh approach to teaching and learning, and the facilities to support both of them.
   If there is no external pressure, try rallying staff effort and resources around an inspiring vision of the future. Use that enthusiasm to create change that will last. Change will come faster when change agents can take advantage of a crisis, however. An evolutionary metaphor is suggested by Phil and by a comment by Trent Batson about Phil's post. I think that's misleading, however. Evolution is a 'mindless' metaphor to apply to programs, but Phil (and I) each tend to think in terms of faculty and staff who are trying to change the larger institution or program of which they are a part. (Phil Long, as translated by SteveE)
2. In contrast, Steve Gilbert has been working to promoteevolution in small steps, an inductive approach to improvement that emerges from relatively independent actions taken by each faculty member. SteveG suggests that staff help each faculty member find or invent small steps that make sense to that individual faculty member. Then help them use feedback to guide what they're doing. Finally, help them each to share their ideas and materials with a few more colleagues who can quickly adapt them with little or no risk or expense.
   SteveG rarely talks about helping faculty to change in any particular direction. I think he's wary of the lure of Big Changes. Remember what Newton said: Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction. Big pushes create big pushback. The small approach is sneakier, producing change that is too invisible, and too grounded in faculty freedom, for anyone to oppose. (Steve Gilbert, as translated by SteveE)
3. Here's my perspective: identify small steps being made by faculty (here SteveG and I agree). Then try to spot a subset of those changes that could be the beginning of something big and important for the programs' students, faculty and other stakeholders. Then start consciously supporting progress in that direction through small steps and, where warranted, big steps. When identifying directions for improvement, pay special attention to outside pressures and rewards:e.g., falling enrollments and the potential to increase enrollment; trends in thinking in the discipline. (SteveE)

Do you buy any of these strategies? Have a fourth to suggest? or perhaps you think the whole idea of a proactive strategy to improve teaching and learning is futile?

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!

I. Programs make faster, better educational progress when they're world class scroungers

Earlier this week I described my mistaken belief that one should pay most attention to the newest ideas, especially if you can create your own idea or phrase, or at least your own wrinkle, and then claim the credit for being first.

The folly of that belief was pounded home for me in 1996. That was the year that Arthur Chickering suggested that we write an article on how to use technology to implement the 'seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education.' He and Zelda Gamson had summarized these seven lessons from educational research a decade earlier.

I replied that such an article was unnecessary. “Everyone knows how to do this already,' I told him. 'According to your seven principles, when students cooperate, educational outcomes usually improve. Anyone can see that using email can provide new avenues for students to cooperate. And the kinds of complex, real world projects made possible by computing often compel students to work in teams. Who needs an article to tell them that? It's old news.” Chickering persisted. So we wrote the article, got it published in a little newsletter, and soon put it on the web. Very quickly, 100 people per month were visiting our article. Then 200, and 400. A decade later, over 5,000 people per month were taking a look at it . Not bad for an article about ideas so obvious that I'd thought an article totally unnecessary.

Crucial question: How do you spread ideas and skills from the 5% of faculty for whom they're old news to those who would also respond, “That's wonderful!” if they ever heard about the idea or tried the skill? These blog posts are about using technologies in a way that can improve what's learned, who learns, and how they learn. To achieve that kind of change, engaging large numbers of mainstream faculty can be important. Each of them may not need to change what they're doing very much, but they each would probably need to change a little. Suppose it's a change they'd like if they ever heard about it; how can we help them notice the possibility in time?

Steve Gilbert, Flora McMartin and I did a major research study for MIT and Microsoft several years ago. Microsoft had made a multi-year, $25 million grant to MIT, and chunks of that money were being awarded to MIT faculty to do pioneering projects involving educational uses of technology. Our research: discover factors that influenced whether the best of these innovations were ever used by faculty other than their original developers.

One story from this MIT/Microsoft study suggests an important lesson for any program that wants to accelerate the pace of improving teaching and learning with technology.

Pete Donaldson is a Shakespeare scholar at MIT. For years before the Microsoft grant became available to MIT faculty, Pete had been experimenting with ways for his students to use film clips (without violating copyright) in their papers and online discussions. He'd had some success, enough to give workshops on the topic and to be a keynoter at the Shakespeare Association of America, where he gave a spectacular demonstration. His use of video clips, however, relied on an assembly of expensive equipment. Then he received a grant from the MIT/Microsoft iCampus program. The support enabled programmers to work with him, and to figure out a much more inexpensive strategy. The resulting software was called the Cross Media Annotation System (XMAS). Pete used the SHAKSPER, a popular listserv in the Shakespeare community and a mailing list of people who had attended his prior workshops to ask if anyone would like to use this free service in order to incorporate film clips into their Shakespeare courses. Quite a few did, especially because they knew and trusted Pete. One comment we heard from several adaptors: Pete wasn't threatening because he wasn't a techie, himself. He was like them. So if he could use XMAS, so could they.

The story is not all success. XMAS ought to be a great tool for film courses taught by film scholars, even more than for Shakespeare courses taught by English professors.

But Pete Donaldson is not a member of that community of film scholars, doesn't go to their conferences, doesn't know their listservs, and doesn't write in their journals. Nor do the other English faculty he has helped.

At some point, XMAS and Donaldson's techniques for using it may be adapted by a film scholar who, like Pete, uses the idea for teaching and for research and who, like Pete, has a yen to help his or her colleagues. And then the use of XMAS may begin spreading like a virus in that community.

Let's pull these threads together.

In the real world, instructors rarely have much time to uncover new ideas. Nor can they can take many risks (e.g., fear of embarrassment, wasted time when they're already over-committed, risk to a tenure case). That's one reason why new ideas about teaching and learning tend to spread so slowly. However, it can help to hear about such ideas from peers with a reputation for this kind of improvement (especially from peers who teach similar courses to similar students, even at other institutions).

Therefore, I suggest that any institution that wants to make unusual progress in TLT ought to help create and sustain faculty learning communities whose members often (a) teach similar courses, and (b) come from different institutions. If those similar courses have similar students, and the faculty have similar styles, so much the better. That way, if one faculty member has an idea, or uses a technology, or has a puzzling experience, it should be relatively easy for others to emulate. And, by including faculty from other institutions, you and your colleagues will hear about new low threshold steps much more quickly.

You can't search everywhere for everything. That's another reason why it's so important to set one or two focused priorities. Those priorities should help faculty and staff focus their searches for ideas. Become a world class scrounger and borrower of appropriate teaching ideas and materials from around the world! Ironically, that's also a great way for faculty members and their program to get a reputation as world class innovators.

PS. If you don't have much money, search for great ideas in countries where money has been scarce for some time.

8. Support strategy: Help a few faculty; teach one new technology after another

The topic of this series of blog posts is how to use technology in ways that, over time, result in substantial improvements in teaching and learning. When I say "substantial," I am pointing to hopes that many have had for educational evolution, perhaps even revolution, triggered by the use of technology. Each Monday I describe something I once believed about how to make such major, long term improvements, a belief I question today. Last Monday, we discussed the content of faculty support offerings (services focused either on technology OR on teaching/learning).

Today, I'd like to hear your observations on scale of faculty support: size of the change in teaching practice by faculty, number of faculty helped, time scale (frequency of change of topics for support), and total budget for support.

Traditionally small support budgets for faculty have divided among two or more units (one in the technology unit, perhaps someone in distance learning, staff in the library, staff in the teaching center, staff in colleges or departments).

Historically, many of these units would respond to technical changes as quickly as possible ("Which technologies are the subject of the most buzz this year?"). Then the unit would offer faculty workshops during the term and during the summer to help faculty learn to use that new technology. To attend such a session, faculty would need to set aside more than hour (sometimes much more) and go to a different building. Limited interest, that time requirement, and size of computer labs would combine to limit attendance: a few faculty at a time. Help desk operations would assist one faculty member at a time.

Costs: Because only a few faculty members could be helped at once, because each person was being helped to master a major technology, and because the topics of support might change rapidly (with expenses to develop each new support unit), the cost for each faculty member receiving support (including the faculty member's own time to attend and to master that new technology) was probably substantial (though it was rare to see estimates of such total costs).

Outcomes: Even after backbreaking effort by each tiny support unit, it's possible that only a few faculty could describe how they had improved teaching and learning in their courses by using that support. And I'd guess that no academic department could describe any cumulative improvement in teaching and learning made in one their degree programs over the years with aid from a technology support unit.

Is this a good description of what used to happen, or what still happens? What have you seen? (Depending on which URL you used to see this post, you can post your observations either by clicking on the phrase "Post a Comment" below or else by clicking the word "COMMENTS" to the right of my name below.)

G. To engage most faculty, support must meet many needs

How should an institution help faculty improve teaching and learning (with technology)? I'll respond to that question in different ways over the next three weeks. Here's my first set of suggestions for faculty support (e.g., teaching centers, information technology units, library staff, distance learning staff, ...).

At most institutions, support programs only influence a small fraction of the courses each year. And support staffs are usually so small and under-budgeted that they're often kept pretty busy serving just the small fraction of faculty who actively pursue their services.

But if you're looking for a reason why we haven't seen major improvements in teaching and learning (with technology) at most institutions over the last thirty years, this is certainly one of them. Faculty aren't getting the help they need. Or, from the point of view of the helper, we might say instead, "Not enough faculty are asking for the help we think they need."

Under what circumstances does an institution need to engage large numbers of faculty in some teaching and learning improvement (using technology)?

1. When a major is being transformed (e.g., to offer a degree program at a distance, or reshape a degree program as MIT did when it created the CDIO program) many faculty need to be engaged in order to offer a full constellation of courses, provide advising, etc.
   
2. As that Reed senior said about learning how to rethink his reasoning and writing, 'I don’t think I could have learned that from just one course. But, over the years, it gradually sank in.' If one's goal is to improve what the average graduate is able to do, or think, or feel, make many small changes across many courses. That requires the participation of lots of faculty.
   
3. (Technology-supported) innovations are sometimes resisted by students who say, "No one else is asking me to do this but you." For innovative faculty, there's safety in numbers.
   
4. Get enough faculty engaged in an improvement big enough, visible enough, and last enough to gain an advantage in the competition for new students, new faculty, donor support, grants, and other resources that the program needs to function, as we discussed in an earlier post. That's why a degree program or an institution might decide that it's a priority to work for 5-10 years to internationalize the curriculum, to develop a national reputation for the design skills of its graduates, or to become widely known for the work of its faculty and students in responding to climate change. Those are just three examples of technology-supported improvements in teaching and learning.
   
5. Accreditors might have targeted this area as a deficiency that needs to be remedied over the coming years.
   
6. Sometimes a new foundational technology is introduced which works better and better as more students and staff use it, e.g., email, sharing of documents and social networking.

In any of these circumstances, faculty support units will need to ask themselves, "How can we engage large numbers of faculty to work in this chosen direction?" One key is to recognize that different faculty members want different things. For example,

• Headline some of your offerings with the issue itself as your headline (e.g., adapting curricula to respond to climate change.') If you've chosen the right issue, that should attract a significant number of faculty. But probably not enough. How can you attract more faculty to learn about and work on your issue?
  
• Some faculty love fooling around with new technology. So, if the goal is important, some support offerings for your issue should be headlined, "Play with this new technology" (even if the priority only uses that technology as one ingredient in a larger strategy).
  
• Some faculty are focused on their own teaching (i.e., lecturing, writing). Can they advance your priority by developing that skill? If so, headline your offering with the skill, and use your issue as the example. (Here, as in the other bullets, we're talking about a fraction of your total offerings relevant to the chosen priority.)
  
• Some faculty member see it as important to understand their students so that they can help each student excel. If your priority can help with that, headline some offerings with that need (e.g. learner-centered teaching). (What's marvelous about many educational uses of technology is how many of these headlines can be used with integrity. To internationalize the curriculum effectively, for example, all these kinds of changes are enabled.)
  
• Some faculty want to survive. Can something about your priority save them time? help make their teaching less like pushing a boulder up a mountain? If so, make that the headline some of the time.

To repeat: don't make promises you can't keep. If you headline a workshop with 'time-saver for faculty,' it had better both advance your priority and also save participants some time. Support for a high priority issue should also be offered in a variety of modes, each designed to engage a different subset of the faculty, e.g.,

• summer workshops;
  
• online tutorials;
  
• brown bags;
  
• 5-10 minute sessions led by faculty as agenda items in departmental faculty meetings.
  
• enlisting one or more faculty in each relevant department to play a more active role, e.g., studying what other institutions are doing in this arena and then sharing their findings with relevant colleagues in their department.

To sum up, it's important that faculty and support staff work together to set a few priorities for improvement. For those priorities which require engagement of large numbers of faculty, staff should offer support in several modes (e.g., workshops, one-on-one consulting, peer-to-peer strategies) and frames (e.g., new technology, educational priorities, saving faculty time).

It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest priority setting in a culture that values academic freedom. And I certainly wouldn't rely on this strategy alone. But such a widely-embraced priority has the power to mobilize the resources needed over many years to power major, cumulative improvements in education.

7. What I once believed: Train faculty how to operate the technology

This is what faculty support offerings look like at many institutions:

• The IT department offerings are about “How to use (operate) our course management system,” and “How to Use Photoshop.”
  
• The faculty development program's offerings are about “Using collaborative learning in the classroom,” and “What to do on the first day of class.”

In other words, there is a sharp division of labor. Most IT units help faculty mainly with “how to” use the technology, while many teaching units mostly help faculty with “how to” teach (they ignore the technology, which is the business of the IT department).

This isn't an arrangement I ever recommended. But I didn't initially question it, either; it seemed the natural way to do things. I did notice that at most institutions the attendance was low at the workshops. Nor was there much sign that average faculty members used other forms of service (e.g., web sites, phone-in for help) unless they had to (for example, when using the course management system was required).

Does your institution divide support this way? Are support services mainly about “how to?” Please use the “COMMENT” button below, just to the right of my name, to add your observations about how your institution handles these tasks.

(As you may know, this blog post is part of a series, “Ten Things I (no longer) Believe about Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology”. To see a summary of the whole series, where this entry fits, and links to all the completed posts, see http://bit.ly/ten-things-table.