The Active Class

I’d like to write today about a topic that is rather pertinent, as I’m gearing up to embark on teaching an intensive summer class:  How do you facilitate effective, online discussions?

The use of online discussion boards is increasing — I’ve seen some instructors use class blogs, and encouraged students to post questions and discussions, or perhaps posted a discussion question and required students to respond (via blog comments, for example).  Some instructors use class wikis.  Many course management systems (CMS) now automatically include discussion boards.  I was thrilled to find that this was a feature of our new CMS that I’ll be using this summer.  But then I remembered my experiment last summer, using a course blog and asking students to post comments or questions on the posts.  It fell flat.  What went wrong?

As I’m considering what to do differently, here are a few things that I’ve gleaned from my readings about how to promote effective discussions online.

1.  Make it comfortable

Last year, I just encouraged students to “post questions or comments” on the blog.  I thought that the need to get help on the homework or content would be a sufficient driver to do so.  I guess not.  It’s sort of sticking your neck out to post something online to a group of people you don’t know very well.  This year, my first homework assignment includes some “getting to know you” questions, such as their major and interests and hobbies.  Part of the assignment is to then post whatever they feel comfortable posting on the class discussion board.  This serves several  purposes, (a) getting them to discover the discussion board, which is where some other assignments will be posted, (b) giving them a chance to get to know their classmates, and (c) making their first posting something that is not about the content, but something that is hopefully more interesting.  This kind of “ice breaker” is considered best-practices for online discussion boards, as is providing a “social cafe” part of the board for off-topic posts.

This relates in part to what is called “social presence,” which is the sense of knowing someone online.  Getting a sense of their personality and selves through their postings.  There is a lot of research to suggest that people engage more fully in online discussions when they feel like they know the people they are talking to.  This is an important consideration for the instructor, too — how do you seem like “you” online?  Maintaining an informal tone can help.

2.  Give them a reason to do it

Again, last year, I thought that the motivation of getting help on homework would be sufficient, but it wasn’t. This year, I’m having students submit two types of assignments to the online discussions.  I’m hoping that by having them posted in the discussion forum, it may spark some discussion, or at least students can read what their peers write and see if their struggles are similar to those of their peers.  The two assignments are:  (1)  Post-reading, pre-class preparation questions, asking them to observe something in the natural world or explain something from the reading.  Since the point is to make sure that they do the reading and that they’re thinking about it, rather than that they get the answer right, the option to see each others’ answers is OK.  The other assignment is (2) posting pre-quiz review questions.  I’ve told them that if there are no questions, there is no review.  My hope is that they can start seeing each others’ questions and hopefully responding, and maybe even use this as an online study group.  We’ll see if it works.

3.  Tap in to their desire to share

Derek Bruff wrote on his blog, “Agile Learning” about Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.  I haven’t read the book, but Derek’s posts provide a really useful summary.

In Chapter 3, he focuses on what motivates people to contribute to…. social initiatives. He draws on research by Deci, Benkler and Nissenbaum, and others to describe four common intrinsic motivations: the desire to be autonomous, the desire to be competent, the desire for connectedness, and the desire to share.

So, Derek asks,

“How do you tap into your students’ desires for autonomy, competence, connection, and sharing?”

There are many ways to do this in-class as well, of course, but online, one might ask, what do students want to share?

4.  Make it authentic

To answer the above question, what do students want to share, I think it’s important to make the online assignments authentic and interesting.  In other words, it’s important to provide well-designed questions for the discussion, that help students stay focused and interested.   Derek suggests using questions based on the reading for that day, but one has to be careful to ask questions that students want to answer, that they are interested in sharing their opinion about.  Fact-based reading quizzes don’t promote an interest in connectedness.  You either got it right or wrong, what is the motivation to see what your classmates said, other than to see if you got it right?  Rather, thought-provoking questions are more likely to spur authentic discussion.

5.  Instructor’s role

And what do you do, once discussion gets rolling?  Mostly, just stay out of the way — don’t respond to every comment, so students don’t feel like you’re Big Brothering.  If you act like a good listener, you can know when it would be a good time to interject or add your insight.   If students get off-topic or post inappropriately, it is better to contact them separately, rather than shaming them in public.  Your people-skills are important online, just as they are in-person.  But it might be useful to post some summarizing comments at the end of the discussion, to wrap it together.  And of course, before things get started, it’s important to make it clear to students why they’re doing this, what the payoffs are, and how it relates to the topics being covered in-class.

6.  Credit?

I’m really torn on this one.  Early talks that I saw on the topic of online discussions said to make it really clear to your students what you expect of them in their discussion posts, in terms of quantity and quality.  That students should be graded on whether they post, but also on the richness of their posts, since many instructors find that students will post a cursory and shallow response in order to get credit, but that that doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the assignment.  If one wanted to grade on richness, one can easily use a “0/1/2″ scale, which is very helpful for grading such participation-oriented assignments.  “0″ means you blew it off, “1″ is that you did a somewhat adequate job but with something lacking, and “2″ is the default, for solid work.

However, I have several colleagues who argue against providing grading incentives for items such as clickers, or discussion boards.  This kind of motivation, called “extrinsic motivation”, since it is tied to something that someone is imposing on you from the outside, can sometimes become the end in itself rather than the learning.  My colleague Ian Beatty argues that clicker use in class, for example, should all be for the intrinsic, self-directed motivation of learning the material and doing better in the course.  Derek Bruff wrote on this topic too, in the same posts about the Cognitive Surplus book, about how assigning credit for participation can negate the social contracts in the classroom to participate. Could the same be true of online discussions?  Does assigning a grade reduce the motivation to authentically participate?  The research on grading clicker questions seems to suggest that it might — in classrooms using high-stakes grading incentives for correct answers to questions, the conversation devolves from making sense of the material to desperately deciding on what the right answer is.

I think the best answer, for most of us, might lie somewhere in between.   Provide some credit for doing the assignment, enough to push them to the discussion board, but not so much that that is the only reason that students are engaging in the conversation.

7.  Other ideas?

Some other suggestions that I got from a talk by John Thompson of Buffalo State College at a conference a few years back:

• Give specific guidelines and rubrics regarding acceptable responses
• Don’t just settle for opinions:  Opinions must be supported with rational discourse.
• Don’t have too many, or too few, discussions.  Use enough so that there is fresh content, but few enough to avoid dilution.
• Bring in a guest participant
• Publicly acknowledge good participation in order to encourage it
• Ask for more detail when students submit shallow comments
• Relate your personal experiences, and keep some humor and fun in it
• Have students lead discussions on a rotating basis

Please share your experiences or best-practices on using online discussions in the comments!

Image by JohnnyMrNinja

As I’m gearing up to teach a summer physics course for non-majors, I’m thinking of a variety of things that I might do to engage this set of students in the wonder of the physical world.  But how to hook them into things that might seem boring on the surface, such as the electromagnetic spectrum?

I’ll be using a variety of techniques, such as driving questions for each module, clicker questions, hands-on activities, and observations of the natural world.  But one that I’m planning to make better use of is video and movie clips to inspire curiosity and investigation.

Movies add real visual impact to a presentation, but even better, they make use of the power of narrative to hook students in.  And when used cleverly, they can be great jumping-off points for a lecture topic.  Here are a few possible uses of videos:

1.  Illustrate a concept

This is probably the most common use of video, but is my least favorite.  Why?  This is akin to the type of boring undergraduate lab that serves only to confirm what we’ve known for hundreds of years — e.g., that a block of wood slides down a smooth metal ramp more quickly than it does a wooden ramp.  These so-called “confirmation” labs offer no opportunity for creativity.  Similarly, a video that only serves to illustrate what the instructor has been discussing is often kind of a “no-duh” moment.  Now, there can be a time and place for illustrative videos, as in the case of a video that does a remarkable job of providing a visual depiction of an abstract concept, or a surprising implication of a concept.  But overall, I prefer the use of video to lead into a topic.

2.  Create a “need to know”

What about using videos to generate questions, and a “need to know”?   For example, one astronomy instructor I know (Ed Prather) shows a video clip that discusses how zebras’ black and white stripes absorb different amounts of light energy, and poses the question of whether the white stripes or black stripes will show up as bright in an infrared camera image.  It’s an interesting question, since the white stripes reflect more light, but the black stripes absorb more to begin with.  But then he stops the video before the infrared image is shown.  The students’ curiosity is piqued, and they’re interested in knowing the results.  He uses this as an opportunity to delve into a discussion activity about the topic of infrared light, absorption, and reflection.  The zebra story serves as a motivator for this activity, and a concrete referent that students can keep in mind while learning about the abstract ideas.  Then they come back to the video to see if they can correctly predict the outcome using what they’ve learned.  Note that the same video could have been used in a very different way, to simply illustrate the ideas after they’d been presented in class.  Do you see why I consider such “illustrative” use of video to be a potentially missed opportunity?

Vacuum tube. I wonder.... what this is used for?

3.  Inquiry starters:  Phenomenon-based learning

We often start a topic, at least in the sciences, by outlining the background of the topic, creating a simple picture, and building up an understanding of something complex.  But what about starting with the complex, interesting thing, and then gaining the tools to understand that complex idea through a variety of activities?  You might show students an object, picture, or video of something a little confusing or curious and ask them to generate a series of “I wonder” questions.  In the sciences, this could be achieved with many existing YouTube or other videos of interesting phenomena by simply turning off the sound, leaving students to view the phenomena without hearing the explanation.  These “I wonder” ques

tions can then be used to lead into activities or lecture, tailored to students’ innate curiosity and questions.  They can also be used to generate inquiry questions for a laboratory or other hands-on activity, providing authentic motivation for students to explore a phenomenon.  For example, a video showing a levitating superconducting magnet could lead into questions such as “is the magnet cold?”  “What kind of material is that?”  “Will it still float if you put a piece of paper between the two magnets?”  These questions could be used to generate inquiry activities about magnets and superconducting magnets.

4.  Video demonstrations and experiments

What if you would like a large class to be able to engage in meaningful inquiry and debate, but there is no associated lab?  One method that is gaining popularity is to use a video demonstration or experiment broken into two pieces — the experimental setup, and the final outcome.  The first part of the video is shown to set up the experiment and the question about the outcome.  Students then work together to predict what they think the outcome of the demo or experiment will be.  In this way, the video serves as a jumping-off point for whole-class inquiry.  Then, after students have worked through their predictions, the end part of the video is shown.  Much research shows that this type of predict-then-show approach to in-class demonstrations and experiments is much more effective than simply showing the demonstration.  Note that you can achieve this same sort of benefit through simulations (such as the PhET simulations) by setting up a virtual experiment and asking students to predict the outcomes.

5.  What, if anything, is wrong?

Hollywood is great at making things flashy, but are they always good at making things right?  Of course not.   This, again, is particularly useful for the sciences.  There are a few great sites, such as Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, Bad Astronomy Movies, or The Good and Bad in Sci-Fi, where you can get great ideas for video clips of good or bad science.  These can be great little puzzlers for students to figure out whether what is shown is possible or not.

So, happy movie-watching, and here are a few resources to help you out:

1. Downloading videos from YouTube.  If you can’t be live on the net, here are some tools to download videos for offline viewing.
2. MovieClips.com.   An extensive (12,000 and growing) catalog of short video scenes from a variety of films.  In developing the site, Movieclips’ founders have worked collaboratively with Hollywood studios and are therefore able to provide high quality, free, and legal video clips.  Movieclips offers a powerful search function that allows you to find scenes by actor, title, genre, character type, mood, and even dialogue.
3. TeacherTube.  This community-based website provides free educational videos, suggested and rated by a broad teacher community.
4. Teachers’ Domain.  Teachers’ Domain is a free digital media service for educational use from public broadcasting and its partners. You’ll find thousands of media resources, support materials, and tools for classroom lessons, individualized learning programs, and teacher professional learning communities.
5. National Science Digital Library.  This free digital repository of media for educational use includes a search by audio/visual media, subject, and grade level.
6. NOVA Education. This free digital library is tied to teaching standards and includes video, audio segments, interactives, and much more.

Image by Vrysxy on Wikimedia

Clickers are a great way to get students thinking deeply about a topic, weighing the arguments and evidence for and against different multiple choice answers.  For example, here is a famous biology question that gets students to confront some deeply held misconceptions:

Many people — university instructors included — will often go for A) or B).  But trees get their substance from photosynthesis — taking in carbon from carbon-dioxide and converting it into mass.  So, the answer is C), and students will often put together a more correct understanding once they get a chance to talk to their neighbors about the question and think more deeply about the process.

But now, most clicker systems offer the ability for students to enter in their own answers, such as numbers and words — called alphanumeric entry – rather than responding to fixed multiple-choice answers.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of alphanumeric entry?

First, to fess up, I was always staunchly against alphanumeric entry clickers.  I had heard from the early beta testers at my university that such open-responses were a nightmare:  Ask students to input the answer to a calculation, and the instructor had to quickly scan over 200 entries to get a sense of the audience.  And to make matters worse, “2.0″ is read differently from “2″ or from “two”, making that visual scan nearly impossible.

But I’ve been changing my tune lately, as I’ve talked to instructors with a different view. Much of what I will write about today is taken from a presentation by Matt Evans, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin at Eu Claire.  In the abstract for his talk, Moving from Multiple Choice to Alphanumeric Clickers (American Association of Physics Teachers meeting in Ontario, CA in February) he opines:

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I say that unexamined clicker use is not worth using.

So, with that in mind, let’s examine the possible advantages and uses of alphanumeric entry.

Use #1:  Ranking

I love asking students to rank-order different choices.  But this is cumbersome at best with multiple-choice clickers, leading to horrible answer choices such as BA) 1>2>3, (B) 3>1>2, etc.  Matt gave a few examples of excellent ranking tasks:

Instead of asking:

The highest temperature is:    (A)  0 F   (B)  0 C    (C)  50 C  (D) 100 F   (E) 300K

Instead ask students:

Rank the temperatures from lowest to highest:    (A)  0 F   (B)  0 C    (C)  50 C  (D) 100 F   (E) 300K

This forces students to consider all answers, rather than only needing some limited information to get the right answer.  Matt suggests giving students a visual of the right answer at the end of discussion, since the correct ranking using just the letters (in this case, ABEDC) is hard to parse.

Another nice example that he gave was using graphical analysis:

Use #2:  Choose all that are appropriate / More than one right answer

Again, with multiple choice clickers, if you ask students to choose more than one item in a list, the answer choices become quite clunky. Here is an example from Matt’s talk:

And here is the “reformed” version:

One question I like to use in workshops is the following, but you could only do this with alphanumeric entry:

Use #3:  Avoid “priming” the right answer

Oftentimes, there is something tricky about a problem or a question, but if you show the correct answer in a list of choices, then students will recognize it as correct.  But this doesn’t mean that they could generate the answer on their own.  For example, Matt uses this question with his students:

What is the average velocity?

The answer in this case is velocity = displacement / time = -3 m/s.  Many students will recognize that the negative sign is important if they see it in a list, but may miss it if they have to generate the answer on their own (or on the final exam).

Which leads us to another use of alphanumeric entry:

Use #4:  Numerical Answers

I’d approach this particular use with caution.  We’ve found that when you ask students a numerical calculation question, then they turn to their calculators and work individually.  But the point of using clickers, especially if you’re using it with Peer Instruction, is to get students engaged and discussing the questions with their classmates.  But still, sometimes it can be useful to have students input their own answer rather than giving them a choice of answers.

One item that Matt didn’t cover that I think is another really useful application of alphanumeric entry:

Use #5:  Generate answers for multiple choice

One of the questions that instructors ask me a lot is, “where do you find the tempting distractors for multiple choice questions?”  While one good answer to that question is to pore through your old student exams and homework for common errors, an even easier way is to give students a question as an open-ended question, and then use common responses for next semester’s multiple-choice version of the question.

Drawbacks

Of course, there are drawbacks, as Matt admits:

1. Time. It takes longer to cover these in class, both for students to vote, and for the instructor to discuss the answers with the class.  So, you can’t do as many open-ended questions in a class as you can multiple choice.
2. Harder to grade or assess. This is especially true if you’re giving points for correctness, which is a common practice (but needs to be done sparingly, to not shut down student conversation).
3. Harder to get instant feedback from students. A corollary of the above, it’s tougher to scan student responses and get a quick idea of where the majority of the class is.
4. More complicated to enter. It’s logistically more challenging for students to input this data, but Matt says that his students don’t seem to mind it.

But overall, I admit, I’d like to try alphanumeric entry questions.  They offer a richer opportunity for discussion and student critical thinking, though they’re certainly no magic bullet.

Clickers are great ways to involve your class in what they’re learning.  I want to write about one type of clicker question that is particularly adept at enabling whole-class inquiry:  Clicker questions that engage students in an experiment or demonstration.  There are a few ways to do this, some which I find extraordinarily clever.

1.  Using clickers to predict the outcome of a demonstration.

This is pretty easy to do, and lots of research shows that students recall and understand demonstrations better if they’re first asked to consider what they think will happen.  This works particularly well with demonstrations that are intended to show “discrepant events” — something surprising or counter to intuition.   Many classroom teachers use a cycle called “predict-observe-explain” with such demonstrations, where students predict the outcome, observe the demonstration, and then work together to construct an explanation.    Clickers are especially well-suited to the “predict” portion of this cycle.

For example, here is a nice set of demos from Rhett Allain at Dot Physics many of which could be done using clickers.  One common demonstration is that of the Cartesian Diver, where an object that has some small air cavity in it is placed in a bottle.  When the bottle is squeezed, what will happen to the “diver”?  Will it go up, down, or not move?  That would be a great clicker question, especially if you embedded some reasoning into those answers.   Ie., “It goes up because XXX”, “It goes up because YYY,” “It goes down because ZZZ”, etc.

The answer?  It goes down, because, as Rhett explains, “When you squeeze the bottle, you increase the pressure in the liquid AND in the air in the diver. This makes the air bubble get smaller so that the diver displaces less water. The buoyancy force on the diver is equal to the weight of the water it displaces.”

Or, here’s an example from Eric Mazur, which could be easily tested using real equipment (left) and another one from Chemistry (origin unknown; right).

2.  Using clickers as an interactive lecture demonstration

A somewhat more structured way to use clickers with a demonstration is with interactive lecture demonstrations.  ILD’s are a more structured version of the predict-observe-explain cycle, and perhaps the only way that I really distinguish the two is that ILD’s are not always “surprising,” but often structured to help students see and apply particular concepts, usually in physics.  Below is an example.

Question via Shane Hutson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.

3.  Clicker questions based off simulations / clicker questions where students generate graphs or other predictions

But you can get creative with this type of question, too.  For one not all demonstrations need to be with real equipment.  Demonstration can be done with virtual equipment — the PhET Interactive Simulations are perfectly suited for this.

Second, you can have students generate their own answers, and then show the multiple choice version.

Here is an example from Kathy Perkins and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

First, they show students the Moving Man simulation, where a man will move in response to the input of initial position, velocity and acceleration.  Then, they have students generate their own graphs for a specific situation:

Then, they use common graphs to turn the students’ free-responses into a clicker question:



4.  Use clickers for real-time experiments on the students.

This works best in psychology classes, or some course where you want to demonstrate some fundamental aspect of human behavior.  One of the best ones that I’ve seen in this genre is listed below, which demonstrates our innate tendency to prefer immediate rewards.

5.  Use clickers to gather real-time data that students perform.

Sometimes having a few students performing a quick little experiment isn’t necessarily that compelling, but if you can aggregate data from the whole class then you have a powerful tool for demonstrating a principle or an outcome.  For example, if you want to demonstrate that flipping two coins results in a greater probability of getting a head and a tail than two heads or two tails, it’s pretty boring to have students sit there and do 50 coin flips to get a robust result.  But, if instead, you have each student do their own coin flip, and then click in with their results, you can get a real-time histogram that shows authentic data demonstrating that idea.

A fabulous article on using this technique with students to demonstrate the Monty Hall Problem (a nice statistics problem) was just published in The Physics Teacher. Students were able to perfectly replicate the theoretical prediction as a whole class, running the experiment in pairs.  It’s a free download, so check it out.

Since my last post on the Flipped Classroom, I’ve stumbled across enough particularly good resources on a similar topic to merit a follow-up post.  The idea behind the Flipped Classroom is that classtime is better spent in helping students to apply ideas (e.g., working problems, doing labs, or in other words making sense of the content) rather than in the traditional lecture content-delivery mode.  So, students watch mini recorded lectures at home to get the content, and then spend class time applying the ideas, with the teacher as a coach.  You can see more about this technique on the previous posts, or at Learning4Mastery. In this post, I will talk about ways to help students use pre-lecture time to adequately prepare for class — whether you’re using a flipped classroom model or not — and the research behind some of those techniques.

Have student reading habits changed?

It’s a common complaint:  Students don’t read the book before class.  It’s probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences.  Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it’s a real challenge for an introductory student to muddle their way through all that information to try to extract useful information from it.  So most don’t bother — they go to class to see what content the professor thinks is important, and then use the textbook to help them to do the homework and guide their exam studying.  But this constrains us to use class in content-delivery mode: If students don’t know the first thing about Newton’s Laws, then how can we do anything in class other than tell them about Newton’s Laws?

Do they read?

Some of my colleagues at CU Boulder studied how students use textbooks in introductory physics (Podolefsky and Finkelstein, “The Perceived Value of Textbooks: Students and instructors may not see eye to eye.” The Physics Teacher, 44, 6, 2006),     Noah Podolefsky, one of the study’s authors, summarizes it below (as quoted from a physics teacher listserv):

In a nutshell, what we found was that few students read the book before class, more student did read (but still not many). However, there was no correlation between reading habits and final grade.  We interviewed students and basically found that they had different strategies for
reading – some read straight through, some read in a non-linear way (going back and forth), some just read the summary. Some students didn’t use the book because they scoured the internet for resources that made more sense to them. We couldn’t find any consistent patterns that related reading habits to performance in the class.

From their data, he claims, it was not clear that encouraging students to read the textbook would have actually helped them.  There’s no correlation between reading the book and doing well in the class, and students are reading in so many different ways that it’s hard to say anymore what “reading” means.  Noah postulates:

I can speculate as to why textbooks are not read, and perhaps not that useful, which is that they aren’t very well designed tools for learning physics. They’re pretty good for re-learning physics if you already have a good framework (i.e., you’re an upper level physics major or grad). But they don’t match very well how new comers (intro students) learn.

I think that this is why we, as academics, get so frustrated when students don’t read.  This is how we learn a new topic — by reading a journal article or a book.  But we’re experts, and we can make sense of the information as it’s presented in the book.  But students are novices, and need more guidance.

So how can we provide that guidance?

One thing that some faculty have tried are multimedia modules to help guide your students in their pre-class preparation.  For example, the University of Illinois has created a suite of multimedia modules, about 10 minutes long, which each guide students through some of the main ideas in the text for a particular topic.   Students watch the videos before class, and take a short quiz on their content to encourage participation. Below are a few such resources that are available online, but please let me know of others that you’re aware of:

1. Physics: Multimedia Modules; 20-minute lessons with pictures and audio from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne.  Published work on effectiveness here.
2. Various science: Hippocampus. Short lessons on various topics from the Monterey Institute of Technology, including some recommended ones on physics.
3. Chemistry & Physics: Georgia Public Broadcasting.  Videos on science, recommended by a high school teacher.
4. Chemical Engineering: LearnChMe screencasts from CU-Boulder. A richly developed suite of materials on engineering topics.
5. Various science: Learning4Mastery website by Bergman and Sams covers high school chemistry, physics, earth science, astronomy, calculus, and biology, though their style is idiosyncratic and less easily incorporated into another class

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Some other ways to guide students in their preparation are:

1. Skip the multimedia part and just record your own lectures (using, for example, Panopto).  See some examples of this in physics here and here.
2. Use pre-existing lectures such as MIT Open Courseware, or other lectures available on iTunesU.
3. Ask students a pre-lecture quiz, to encourage and guide the reading, or simply ask them what was confusing or what they don’t understand.  This can also guide you as the instructor as to what students are struggling with.  This is called Just in Time Teaching, or JiTT. The quiz can be multiple choice and graded in your course management system to reduce grading burden.
4. Have students write a brief summary of the reading, and a question that they have about the reading.

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The research.

Of course, the big question is, does this stuff work? The answer is probably, as always, “it depends.”  There are few, if any, plug-and-play solutions in education.  How an instructor uses these resources, and coordinates them with the class time, is essential.  That said, here are the results of a few studies.

The UIUC multimedia modules have been studied for several years.  One way to look at the effectiveness is to look at a particular topic, and show students either the multimedia modules, or let them read the traditional textbook.  When they did this (Am. J. Phys, 2009), students did better on a subsequent test on their learning of that topic than with the text-based presentation alone.  That’s not too surprising, since using multiple modes of presentation is typically better than only one mode.  The UIUC folks have also used the multimedia modules in several courses — students watch the modules, and then take a short quiz on their understanding before class.  In another publication (Phys. Rev. ST, 2010), they found that students overall performed better on these “preflight” questions than did students in traditional lectures.  However, they have also reported that students don’t do much better, if at all, on course exams (Am. J. Phys, 2010).  Their interpretation of these results are that students are masters of efficiency.  If they’re aiming for a “B”,  then they’re going to get that “B” with as little work as possible.  So, by guiding students, the modules might have helped them to be more efficient in their studying practices.

Another study in Biology (Lents and Cifuentes, Web-based learning enhancements, J. College Sci. Teach., Nov/Dec 2009), some lecture attendance was replaced with video lectures that consisted of the visual of a powerpoint slide presentation enhanced with audio voiceover.  They found no effect (negative or positive) on student learning from this substitution.  While these authors were aiming to reduce student time-on-task for their largely commuter college, this does suggest the next step — having students engage in video-based learning at home and using lecture time for additional engagement — could be beneficial.

So, it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt to add some sort of pre-class preparation, and if you find some way to guide your students through the topic in a way that is more suited to novice learners than a dense textbook — it could help free up some of your class time to do more in-depth learning.

I’ve written before on the idea of the “Flipped Classroom” for science instruction, where some of class content is moved outside of class time.  Video lessons are recorded in advance, and assigned as homework, freeing the in-person instructional time for working to apply and master that content with the guidance of the instructor.  This is not that radical of an idea — after all, in English class, students read the book before class, and then discuss it in class.  Science is somewhat anomalous in that we think that content delivery has to happen during instruction because students can’t wrestle with the ideas on their own.

I just had the opportunity to take a workshop on the flipped classroom from one of its’ active proponents, Aaron Sams, and wanted to share a few of the ideas I got there.

First, here’s a short YouTube video where Aaron Sams describes his Flipped Classroom, which I think gives a good overview of what it looks like in practice.

Aaron Sams – The Flipped Classroom

You can read more about the Flipped Classroom at several places:

• Learning4Mastery site about the technique
• Aaron Sam’s blog
• The Flipped Classroom network (where educators share ideas and support)
• The Daily Riff article

First, Aaron emphasizes, there is no such thing as “the” flipped classroom.  Every educator can take a different approach that matches his or her goals and classroom setting.  The way that he does his classroom is that he spends 5 minutes on a warmup activity, 10 minutes of Q&A time on the video, and then the rest of the class is spend in guided independent practice and/or labs. Of course, he’s in a high school setting, so his class size allows for such an approach, but stay tuned for some ideas that I got for use in the college setting.

In order to flip your classroom, you need three things:

1. Quality instructional videos (made by you or someone else)
2. Engaging class activities
3. Assessment to see if it worked.

Engaging class activities

Let’s start here.  What are you going to have your students do during class?  Worksheets?  Group work?  Labs?  The key is that the activity allows you to get in among the students, interacting with them so that that class time is better used to help guide them and allow them to achieve mastery of the content you want them to grasp.   The videos are meant to get at the lower levels of understanding (e.g., “remembering”).  The class time is meant to get into the higher levels of understanding (“application,” “synthesis,” etc.).

Videos

“We don’t use a tool for the sake of using a tool,” says Dan Spencer, “we use a tool when it is appropriate for the job at hand.”  Similarly, you shouldn’t make a video for the sake of making a video.  The pedagogy must drive the technology, not the other way around.  So, what do you want your students to learn?  Consider:  What do my students need me physically present for htat I currently assign out of class, and what I can I remove from class time that my students do not need me present for?  Direct instruction / problem sets / and lab reports, are common answers.

Consider a single lesson to start.  If you want to have students work on problem-solving skills, perhaps model problem-solving in your screencasts.    If you want to guide them through the book reading, perhaps create an online version of the lecture to help cue their attention to the important ideas (this has been done and studied some at UIUC).

Here are some example types of videos:

• A lecture (can use pre-recorded ones, like MIT Open Courseware)
• Video of you demonstrating how something works in real life
• Video of a lab procedure
• Guided problem-solving
• Homework solutions
• Prelab activity
• Exam review

So, in the college setting, you could imagine using this sort of approach perhaps once a week, to go over homework, to help students get started on homework, to get them ready for an in-class activity.  If the videos are useful and help students either do better in the course, or get a good grade more efficiently, that motivation may be enough for them to watch them.  And you can then use the in-class time for tutorials, small group work, or other activities.  Sure there’s some up-front work to be done, but once the videos are done, you can use them over and over.

You can see a wide variety of example videos on the Learning4Mastery YouTube channel. I highly recommend checking it out — just a few minutes will give you a better sense of what can be done.

What kind of equipment might you need to do this?

An iPad makes it very easy.  Use ReplayNote to import a PDF, or ShowMe is a free app.  ScreenChomp allows you to download the result as a video.  And you can make your own stylus for an iPad for more precise drawings using these instructions here.

An annotated Powerpoint is also very easy.   Use screen capture software to record your screen (Camtasia is nice but pricey, Jing has a 5-minute limit, and Screencastomatic is all web-based).  To annotate the powerpoint you can use:

• A tablet (like the $60 Bamboo tablet), though I found this to be a bit clunky
• Activeslate on your Promethean or Smartboard, if you have one
• A document camera (like Ipevo for $69) to focus on paper.  This seemed to be the easiest to do equations.

A webcam is helpful, to capture video of yourself.

It’s nice to have pop-up boxes (“callouts”) to point out certain items on your screen.  You can do this automatically in Camtasia, but you could do it in other software with manually created callouts.

A calculator emulator is very helpful, so you can model how students would calculate some of these quantities.  Just google Calculator Emulator to find a wide variety of emulators.  Here’s one.

Aaron had some tips to consider:

• Aim for about 5 minutes
• Use one video per topic, rather than cramming everything into one video
• It takes about 30 minutes to record and edit a 10-minute video (at least, once you get good at it)
• Do we need it perfect, or do we need it Tuesday?  Be satisfied with imperfection rather than obsessively editing.  You can correct your mistakes with callouts.
• Create PPT’s that have blank spots for the webcam image and the calculator emulator, as well as spaces for working out example problems.
• Think about how you want the final lesson to look when creating those PPTs.

Assessment

If you’re going to challenge students to learn at a higher level, you have to test them at that higher level too.  Use continuous formative assessment to see if they’re achieving your standards.   Have them make a Prezi to indicate how ideas in the class are connected.   Have them work together on a group research project.  Whatever it is, have it match your instruction, so that your goals, instruction, and assessment are all aligned.

The title of this post is taken, as a sincere form of flattery, from the title of an excellent semi-recent article in the Journal of College Science Teaching (Connie Russell, November 2009, pp 84-86, subscription required).  That, almost verbatim, is the text of a student email to her.  There was no salutation and no signature.  I’ve gotten disappointingly unprofessional emails like this — often from high school students who have read my blog on a topic and want the answers to their homework on a similar topic, or help on a science fair project.  One student wrote to me, frantically demanding a resource that had been linked to a blog post on ferrofluid, but the link was broken.  It was so rude that, while I answered his query, I did indicate that this was not the proper way to ask assistance of a professional.

So, why talk about students’ seeming inability to communicate properly with their professors?  Because, argues Connie Russell in her article, this problem is indicative of the lack of college readiness in the current crop of students.  While this is not a new problem, the nature of the problem might be changing.  What has changed about students’ high-school preparation in the last ten years?   Well, the increase in state-mandated testing, for one.  Has “teaching to the test” reduced attention to college-readiness skills in high school? Some have suggested that creativity and critical thinking suffer under the march towards higher standardized test scores; that students may not be well-prepared for college by this shift in K12 methods.

This poor college preparation could mean a dearth of critical thinking and reasoning skills, but it can also just mean that students are ill-prepared to understand what is expected of them.  And it could also mean that the “digital natives” have not been equipped to apply technological tools appropriately to support their learning.  Today’s instructors did not grow up in a digital world, and so did not themselves receive instruction on how to appropriately use technology when they were students — how to properly write an email without text-speak, whether multitasking by surfing the web during class will affect their attention to course content, or how to use good internet research habits.  Well, actually that last one has become the purview of the school librarian, bless their souls, but it’s not clear who should be responsible for helping students learn how to best use many other technologies in education.

So, who should be responsible for helping the digital natives integrate technology into their education?  The faculty teaching introductory courses should, it seems.  Not only are these faculty responsible for introducing freshmen to their discipline, but they are introducing freshmen to the world of college.  One of the goals of college instruction should be that a student becomes an expert learner — that they learn how to learn — or how to be metacognitive in their approach to their education. Or, as Russell concludes:

If we want students to meet our expectations, we must give them instruction on what we expect.

That includes the use of technology, such as the internet, email, and clickers.  In fact, one of the most common failure of clicker users that I’ve seen is to fail to explain to students why they’re introducing this technology, and how they expect students to engage with it.   It’s also important, too, to make it clear — to yourself and your students — just what your learning goals are for the class.  And if you’re using technology, how it relates to those goals.  Technology isn’t used just to keep students awake, but to further your goals in class.  One possible resource of interest – Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media (Edutopia, free registration required).

So, while it’s easy to roll your eyes at such inept emails, it’s worth a moment to pause and consider:  Is this a symptom of a larger breach in the college-readiness of students and their use of technology?  If so, consider making your expectations of students explicit — and giving them a chance to become more expert learners.

Image from University of Salford on Wikimedia

I’ve been working for the past several years to figure out the best ways to teach faculty about how to use clickers effectively; to engage students, ask questions that get students thinking, and to use peer discussion to help students work together to learn from the questions. It’s not always easy. Recent research has shown that a lot of faculty, at least in physics, get really fired up about using clickers (by hearing Eric Mazur speak, for example, or perhaps by attending a talk or workshop like what I give), but then they go home to try it, and it all falls apart. Motivating faculty to use new teaching techniques isn’t the issue, it seems. They want to try new teaching methods, and see the value of interactive questioning during lecture. But there are a lot of little things that go into making clickers work with your students — such as creating student buy-in by explaining why you’re using clickers, showing students that you value the discussion around the questions and modeling that discussion, and providing proper incentive for engaging in this activity.

So, I’ve been putting together faculty workshops (and K12 as well) to teach educators about effective use of the tool, and trying to figure out the best ways to do so such that faculty have a high chance of success in using clickers when they return to their institution and try it. I’ll be sharing the results of this work in a free webinar in October, specifically aimed at others who work with faculty and teach them about effective questioning and clickers. Consider joining us, to get some new ideas and to share your own.

Here’s the full announcement:

—-

Teaching Faculty about Effective Clicker Use

Time: Tuesday, October 4th, 1pm EST
Register at: http://iclicker.com/newsandevents/events/
Note: Want the recording? You’ll get a download link after the session if you register.

Geared specifically for those involved in faculty development and support (e.g., instructional technologists, faculty excellence programs, or other faculty professional developers), this webinar will cover best practices in helping faculty to use clickers to enhance their teaching. The webinar presenter has been creating faculty professional development materials around clicker use for years, and will share tips and techniques — many based on research — for helping faculty to see the potential power of this technology and learn to implement it effectively. Webinar components will include: (1) best practices in clicker use, (2) resources available for faculty learning to use clickers, (3) research-based techniques for faculty development around clickers, and (4) working with faculty resistance and alleviating frustration. HIghly recommended: Watch “Make Clickers Work for You” webinar recording at http://theactiveclass.com/speaking-events/ prior to this webinar, and/or the video “How to use clickers effectively” at http://STEMvideos.colorado.edu.

(missed it?  You can watch the recording:

Streaming recording link

Download recording link

Homework is a key learning opportunity for students — it’s where they spend most of their time on your course out of class, and it’s typically the only place where they spend time on their own, puzzling out the ideas presented in lecture.

So, how do you create homework that helps bring students to a deeper understanding of the material, targeting their specific needs?

Some techniques are pedagogical — such as Just in Time Teaching, where you frequently quiz students on their understanding of the topics, adjusting your instruction and gaining deep insight into their common difficulties.  This can help you properly target the homework to the class.

But some solutions could be technological.  I’ve been really excited about ALEKS (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) since one of our chemistry instructors enthusiastically told me how much she likes it.  ALEKS provides individualized learning through “adaptive questioning” — or, questions that change as you go along.  If you’ve taken the computerized GRE, you know what this is like — if the questions start getting really easy, you know you’re in trouble, because that means it’s trying to adapt the questions to your level.

But unlike the GRE, ALEKS isn’t trying to assess student understanding to assign a grade or a score — rather, ALEKS offers targeted instruction to the student on the topics that he/she is ready for.  For those learning theorists among you, those would be the topics in that student’s zone of proximal development. And what’s most interesting is that it doesn’t use multiple choice very much — it uses open-ended tools, such as input into graphs.  The teacher gets a report indicating the students’ aptitude in a variety of topics.

Here is a very nice outline of ALEKS, complete with screenshots.

ALEKS can help both with placement and with learning — in learning mode, the student gets practice problems and explanations.  Once the student has demonstrated mastery of the topic, then ALEKS moves on to new material.  It seems that this would be very appropriate to use with the standards based grading that I wrote about in my last post.

Ways I’ve seen ALEKS used:

• By institutions, to place students in the appropriate course
• By homeschoolers, as an instructional tool
• By students, as a tutor
• By instructors, for homework and formative assessment

They have a variety of course offerings, many in K12, but in higher ed they have many different products in math (e.g., pre-algebra, trigonometry, and various prep courses), business, statistics for the behavioral sciences, and science (mainly chemistry, plus math prep for college physics).  It’s not free — last I saw it cost $20 per student per month, though there are some bulk discounts.  Though, as ALEKS points out, it’s cheaper than a human tutor, and does provide individualized feedback.  I’m particularly  happy to see that it’s research based, though I admit I’m not familiar with the theory that supports it, and I don’t see information on whether it’s research tested (i.e., does it do what it purports to do) rather than just based on reasonable theory — though this article suggests that they are doing good work in that regard.

For those of you needing a free solution — there is Diagnoser, which isn’t quite the same, but offers research-based testing to help teachers determine their students difficulties and misconceptions and offer suggestions on addressing those difficulties in class.

Image by Mosborne01 on Wikimedia Commons.

Simulation of a lser

Computer simulations are a fantastic tool in education — especially in science. They can show us the models that we have our heads, like how atoms pack themselves into a molecule, or let us travel to the moon to see how gravity works.  They can give us insight into the invisible, or let us see exactly what’s supposed to be happening if the world were really a frictionless vacuum.  Some great simulation tools are the PhET interactive simulations, or the Physlet applets. But we too often tend to show students the “right” model, the “right” way of doing the problem, or try to show them the “correct” way of thinking about it.  But, think about it, does a wine expert learn what the taste of “oak” is in a Cabernet only by tasting the very best examplar of “oak”?  No, he tastes a wide variety of wines, to learn to distinguish flavors of “oak” from flavors of fruit or smoke.  This idea of using “contrasting cases” to help students learn to discern and differentiate different features of a problem has been used in a variety of educational settings, from teachers’ understanding of educational psychology, to interactive lecture demonstrations. If you’re not familiar with this idea, or its twin “A Time for Telling”, take the time to at least skim the seminal article by Schwartz and Bransford in Cognition and Instruction:  A Time for Telling. This article changed the way that I think about teaching and lecture.

But, how does this relate to simulations?  Most simulations tend to do the best they can to depict and accurate vision of how the world really works.  And that’s fine, that’s what the design goal tends to be.   However, we also want to teach students to be critical consumers of information — yet they tend to blindly trust simulations.  So, I was very pleased to see a recent article in The Physics Teacher by Anne Cox et al, where they took the instructional idea of asking students to identify”What, if Anything, is Wrong?” and applied it to instructional simulations.  The “What, if Anything, is Wrong?” technique is a wonderfully simple and powerful tool from the TIPER project — check out their website for a variety of other little gems, such as ranking tasks, working backwards tasks, and predict and explain.

The authors of this study not only had students identify the error in the simulation, but provided the code for them to fix it; thus building in computational skill into the classroom practice as well.  For example, we know that students tend to do poorly on questions regarding the electric force on a charged object due to another charged object.   The authors created a simulation where students can add and move charges around, visualizing the force vectors on the object.  However, if they happen to change the charges so that the charges are not equal, they will find that they will no longer push on each other with equal and opposite force (as required by Newton’s Third Law).  So, not only must they identify this error, but also find out what in the simulation is causing it.

Regardless of whether your aim is for students to be able to do computational physics, the brilliance of this task is that students go in knowing that they’re looking for an error — and if that error is one that students often make themselves, then finding it is both challenging and illuminating, and MUCH more powerful than just telling students what is the proper way to think about that concept.  Now, it’s cemented for them.  The authors’ “What is Wrong?” package for electric fields is available on Open Source Physics.

For those who don’t happen to have the time or resources to create intentionally incorrect simulations, you can still use this same method with pencil-and-paper tasks, such as the TIPER “What, if Anything, is Wrong” tasks, or “Find the Flaw” problems.  Daniel Styer write about Find the Flaw problems in the same recent issue of The Physics Teacher.  He has a very nice method for giving these problems.  He presents the problem to the students, and tells them that four friends have worked the problem and produced four different answers.  He asks students to provide simple reasons showing that three of these candidate answers must be incorrect.  So, this is basically a multiple choice problem, with the focus on the incorrect answers, rather than the correct answer.  He provides some examples here. I can imagine using this method with clicker questions and peer instruction — ask the clicker question, but instead of telling students to “find the correct answer” by discussing with their peers, have them determine why the incorrect answers are wrong.  This gives students valuable practice in checking their own work — how do they know if their own answer is right or wrong? They should be able to check the values, units, dimensions (or whatever is important in your discipline).  And, says Styer, students like them:  find-the-flaw problems “appeal to their sense of adventure and of Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing.”  He finds that students are not a bit better at checking their own work, certainly better than when just asking students vaguely to “discuss your result.”  What a boring question.

And, of course, this can easily apply to watching films in class.  Finding the flaw in films is an old mainstay of science instruction — see, for example, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics or Bad Astronomy’s Bad Movies or some more geology focused Good and Bad Sci-fi movies.    Showing students clips from movies and asking them to identify the incorrect science is fun and valuable.