The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence: Comments

Comment on "A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education"

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:54:38 -0500

This is good stuff, and I think it makes perfect sense to put this in the Teaching Excellence workspace to see if we can iterate and/or improve upon it. I'll migrate it over today.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Teaching "Millennial" Students: Why are faculty so interested?"

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:55:19 -0500

"I would also like to explore what specific student expectations and behaviors are different, and help faculty work toward a better alignment."

We did a few student feedback sessions in IST a couple years ago, asking students how they would like to see technology integrated into the courses. We specifically asked about using Facebook in the flow of courses, which received 2 very different responses:

1. Sure, I go there each day anyway, might as well have school related things there.
2. NO! Stay away from my social spaces!

Eventually, we found students wanted a course to be *like* facebook.
- Ability to post questions/thoughts and have reactions from your peers AND instructor.

- Ability to network both within and outside of the class (on course related materials. Kind of 'ask the expert' for instance, someone in industry)

- Timeliness. This will always be a sticking point as students expect near-instantaneous feedback from instructors, while instructors are doing a lot more than just teaching (which many students do not realize).

When faculty voice frustrations about students using cellphones and facebook during class, I always try and put it in perspective. It's nearly identical to what many of us did pre-cell phones or computer in class: pass notes. Instead of passing papers or hand signals across a room, it just happens to take place via a new medium.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Assessing Instructional Development"

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:06:50 -0500

I definitely agree that the CCT seems a good starting spot to try and get at some data whether changes are implemented (and beneficial) after participating in that course.

I also wonder if Carlton College and WSU received some sort of grant or support for this project. This is definitely a worth while undertaking, but it seems like it would require a lot of collaboration and resources to do it well.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Does Online Education Fare Batter than Face-to-Face Learning?"

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:13:07 -0500

I have to agree with you, Bart, about motivation. Students that I observed who were taking the online course that I taught several years ago were also working quite a bit and many juggled new family responsibilities (birth of first child) on top of working toward a promotion and working on an advanced degree. Multitasking and being proactive enabled them to accomplish quite a bit. Traditional students, comparatively, often take a more relaxed view of life as they place greater emphasis on leisure activities. I think that research comparing online to traditional courses would be very wise to thoughtfully consider the audience those courses attract and the motivations of those audiences toward the course content as well as the delivery mechanism of the course.

- ANN E ECHOLS

Comment on "Digital Textbooks via Blackboard"

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:08:25 -0500

"...e-textbooks have so far failed to catch on in academe..."

Every here and there I hear about e-textbooks for courses, but the DRM protection policy, pricing and limitations make it really hard for students to get behind. Many of these e-books require a special e-reader (based on the publisher) that comes with a slew of DRM mechanisms so the students can't do things like:
- print pages of the ebook
- take screen shots of images in the ebook
- copy and paste text to create notes

On top of this, the ebooks are priced in such a way that they are only a bit cheaper than the paper version (with amazon, often the paper version is still cheaper). Many publishers only provide ebooks on a semester-based timeline; when the semester (or allocated time duration) is over, the student can no longer access the ebook.

The icing on the cake? No buyback at the end of the semester! I see ebooks slowly picking up steam for leisure/entertainment with the Kindle, iPad and other devices. Academia? We still have a lot to sort out.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Does Online Education Fare Batter than Face-to-Face Learning?"

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:02:34 -0500

I was told during my PhD studies that "all research is flawed", and I still believe that. If you examine any study long enough, I'm sure some sort of flaw will emerge. In this case, I would find it flattering that people are spending that much time picking apart the report; that at least indicates people find the topic matter very meaningful.

I feel like the type of student in these studies is periodically controlled for (adult or returning students vs. a 'typical' undergraduate student) but I rarely see a key issue examined: motivation. My hypothesis is that students in online courses are, generally, more motivated vs. traditional courses. For adults, courses cost money, and online courses provide the biggest freedoms. I assume they are highly motivated.

At PSU, we also see a lot of 'traditional' students taking online courses. In many instances, this is because the resident section is full. At that point, the student has a choice: take a different course (if permitted) or try and find the online version of the course. If they choose the online version, I suspect they have a high motivation to enroll, and do well, in that course.

I have a lot of personal experience with online education and enjoy reading these studies. We're finally starting to see a critical mass of research in this area that will only help us understand things better moving forward.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Assessing Instructional Development"

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:08:45 -0500

We could potentially do something similar, for instance by recruiting CCT participants. If taking the CCT leads someone to make substantial changes in an assignment he/she uses in teaching, we could look at students' performance before and after the change.

It might also be helpful to ask an outside expert in the faculty member's discipline to do blind reviews of students' assignments from before and after the change.

- CHARLES RONALD BRUA

Comment on "The Changing Nature of Privacy"

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:35:55 -0500

Angela passed this post onto the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) list and it led to some email responses summarized below.

Coastal Carolina's Center for Effective Teaching and Learning is partnering with their campus library to offer workshops for both students and faculty dealing with managing their identities online. It appears that the "Choose Privacy" week was the spark:
http://www.privacyrevolution.org/

Also, UC Boulder is working on a session this fall titled:
Portraying and Monitoring Your Online Professional Presence as a University
Instructor

I'm curious how these sessions will be received and if this will be a growing trend in our centers focused on teaching excellence.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Wave technology and collaborative learning?"

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:25:57 -0500

Google Wave saw a LOT of hype in the ed tech community when it was first released, but it seems to have died down now. I tried it a few times (even on a project with World Campus I'm working on) and it's simply very hard to manage right now and not as intuitive as other Google services.

The potential is enormous, but the barrier to entry right now feels very high.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Teaching Excellence or Proficience?"

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:51:14 -0500

I'd suggest that instructional consultants/faculty developers have been targeting the smaller group of early adopters for about 30 years! Happily, that has created quite a bit of diffusion of more effective teaching methods. That has resulted in more of a critical mass of active teachers, and TA Training programs through out the country continue to build on that mass. However, the challenge of reaching "beyond the choir" to the rest of the current faculty remains a challenge.

How might we find way to identify a sub-sample of the larger target group of faculty? Maybe we already do this. For example, our SRTE consultations often reach this target audience. SRTEs provide a means to get our foot in the door to inspire and advance excellence!

If we could be successful with a more deliberate pilot program, then perhaps we'd reach beyond the choir. Whatever the size of the group, I'm still really intrigued by the idea of targeting faculty who use particular techniques.

- Angela R, Linse

Comment on "Teaching Excellence or Proficience?"

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:25:38 -0500

"I wonder if any teaching center has ever explicitly approached their programming in this way--explicitly focusing on reducing the use of the worst techniques among the largest group of faculty users?"

That would be an interesting experiment and I'd be very curious to see what sort of % of the largest faculty users would try and implement some sort of change. Coming from an adoption standpoint, it's often difficult to get traction by targeting the largest group of users first. Rather, focusing on a small subset of users that have specific early adopter tendencies seems to work well, then using the early adopters to help strengthen your case with the larger user base works really well.

This idea of modeling behavior is something that continues to come up whenever we talk about adoption lately.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Engaged STEM Learning, AAC&U Conference"

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:42:56 -0500

We had Julia Kregenow in our stack...I believe that's Cindy, but I'll have to double check.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Millennials, computer use and you"

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:36:36 -0500

"I would guess that students whose brains are wired to gain pleasure from a text message or the virtual annihilation of virtual zombies *could* learn to gain pleasure by something less technological"

I think the pleasure experienced might go beyond the specifics of a text message or annihilating zombies to more abstract characteristics of those activities, the big one being immediacy.

For instance, imagine a classroom that somehow provided students with instantaneous feedback whenever they completed an in-class exercise. I think clickers and other live polling systems used in a pedagogically sound manner have the potential to really increase engagement due to their immediacy. Google forms and Harvard's Live Question Tool allow students to instantly voice an opinion, but also receive immediate feedback on how their opinion stacks up to their classmates.

Does that fire off the same dopamine shot or pleasure response as a text message or shooting a zombie? I have no idea, but I think they both hit on this idea of immediacy in a similar fashion (and maybe even the social aspect too!)

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Online teaching and promotion and tenure"

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:28:38 -0500

Nope, I agree, I don't think we can say something like that just based on quant numbers. I also agree with the quote, but I wonder...how many tenure committees see it this way? My guess is that some decision makers look at SRTEs as a comparison mechanism between instructors, vs. a measuring stick against a certain number that unit/college feels is acceptable to represent 'good teaching'.

Just a guess, I really don't know what goes on behind closed doors when administrators and peers sit down with a faculty member to discuss SRTEs.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Online teaching and promotion and tenure"

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:56:37 -0500

I just came across this interesting quote
“The spirit of the SRTE is best served by regarding SRTE results as the students’ view of the candidate’s teaching effectiveness in absolute terms – that Professor X (whose evaluation mean is 6.25) is a “very good teacher,” without necessarily saying that Professor X is a better “very good teacher” than Professor Y (whose evaluation mean is 6.10).”

This is from page 3 of the a report written by Jim Smith, Senator from the Ogontz [Abington] campus and member of the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs.

It is the same argument that I was trying to make in response to the 0.6 point difference between online and f2f courses. Can we really say that f2f teachers at Behrend are "better very good teachers" than their colleagues teaching online?

- Angela R, Linse

Comment on "Millennials, computer use and you"

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:53:41 -0500

Changes in how the brain responds or what it responds to are real, physical changes in the neuronal structure and they do take a very long time. But, as the article points out, we know that the brain continues to change in adults.

I would guess that students whose brains are wired to gain pleasure from a text message or the virtual annihilation of virtual zombies *could* learn to gain pleasure by something less technological, but it would take a long time for it to happen and require that they be cut off from the old sources of pleasure, kind of like an alcoholic or drug addict must abstain completely from the addictive agent to learn to cope without it.

- SUZANNE ELAINE WEINSTEIN

Comment on "Online teaching and promotion and tenure"

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:13:58 -0500

"a faculty
member's tenure or reappointment should not hinge on a 0.6 point
difference." - I couldn't agree more. I understand your point about over interpretation of the 'meaning' of this data. But I get the impression we might be in the minority, where the majority puts too much meaning into these numbers. I'm somewhat curious regarding methodology behind Diane's data and if we should maybe think about replicating this type of study across other campuses. This might be useful to the PS Online committee, but I think some of the other questions we devised are much higher priority.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Online teaching and promotion and tenure"

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:24:01 -0500

Actually, the 0.6 point difference (on the 1-7 SRTE scale) between Online and f2f courses was documented by Penn State Erie-Behrend over the course of 8 years. The faculty member at Penn State Brandywine was concerned about this difference. Her question was whether pre-tenure faculty should be discouraged from teaching online--based on that data.

The question assumes a number of things:
1) that Behrend data can be extrapolated to all online vs. f24 comparisons; and
2) that a .6 point difference is a meaningful difference in terms of teaching quality.

First, while I am sure that Behrend's data are sound, they should not be viewed as representative of all Penn State courses. Nor should it be assumed that every year, they found a 0.6 difference between the Online and f2f courses. This is an average difference. The variation between campuses might very well be greater than 0.6 points!

Second, a faculty member's tenure or reappointment should not hinge on a 0.6 point difference. That would represent an over-interpretation of the meaning of that basically a half-point on the 1-7 scale. This is so, even if the Behrend's 0.6 difference is statistically significant. Statistical significance is not a measure of meaning.

If you had an individual or group of instructors with a mean score of 2.3 and a comparable group with a statistically significantly different mean score of 2.9, would you be comfortable inferring that the 2.9 scorer(s) are meaningfully better instructors than the 2.3 scorers?

Is the difference more meaningful if the scores are 6.0 and 6.6? Remember that the scores come from most students rating the former low and the latter high. It does not represent students saying that Dr. X is fractionally more excellent than Dr. Y.

The University Faculty Senate discussed the problems of interpreting SRTE averages (see Senate Agenda 2/21/1989 and page 7 of the Senate Record for the same date). In fact the original legislation referenced the student ratings research literature and cautioned against assigning SRTE scores "a precision that they do not possess" (see original 4/30/85 Senate Agenda and the Corrected Copy published in the 2/25/86 Senate Record).

- Angela R, Linse

Comment on "Millennials, computer use and you"

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:40:34 -0500

I hadn't thought about the two different modes of operating. My initial thought would be probably not, but that's just based on my minuscule understanding of neuroplasticity. What I recall is that the brain changes itself based on frequent, repetitive behaviors sustained over long periods of time. I feel like there's some sort of connection here with your subconscious...that all these interactions that change your brain and how you're wired almost happen at the subconscious level, so going back might be difficult.

- BARTON KELLER PURSEL

Comment on "Millennials, computer use and you"

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:14:36 -0500

Thinking about the article's take on neuroplasticity, I wonder:

How much exposure does it take before our brains begin reconfiguring themselves? And can our brains have two different operating modes that coexist?

In other words, if we've been exposed both to highly wired environments and to other environments where the interesting information comes from low-tech sources, could our brains automatically adjust as we move between environments? I'd guess that they can ... but I'm assuming two things:

1) There's actually something interesting going on in the environment fairly frequently (like in a well-designed class);

2) The learner gains some experience or training in filtering information and coping with moments when there's an "information ebb" and not just "information high tide."

I think part of our job as teachers is to make sure the conditions for (1) and (2) are met in our classrooms. But easier said than done....

- CHARLES RONALD BRUA