Asynch and Out of Synch

This week marks the one-year anniversary of my blog. Happy Birthday!!! What did I do to celebrate the grand occasion? Unfortunately, the answer is, keep my nose to the grindstone. There were a lot of things to keep up with work-wise and teaching-wise so I haven’t made a post in over a week. I hope to make up for that in the next few days.

Today I want to video in teaching and learning - not the full deal, that is too big a topic – just how it has impacted me this last week or so. I was slated to deliver a presentation at our EdTech Brownbag and since I’m going to be at a CIC meeting this coming Monday and hence will have to miss my class, I thought why not prepare for the Brownbag as if doing an online lecture and in case that turns out ok, I’d do something similar for my class.

So I made a little Web site in lieu of a PowerPoint Presentation that is available here and at first my plan was to use my built in iSight camera in my iMac G5 to record me as a talking head. Unfortunately, and I hope if Apple continues to offer the built in iSight they will change this if they haven’t changed it already, iMovie doesn’t recognize that camera. It seems to require an external camera. However, I found this cheapie third party tool called Boinx iVeZeen which in my tests worked fine and put out Quicktime movies compressed for Web Viewing that seemed quite reasonable in terms of both the effort to make the video and the finished product. But due to procrastination and other work, I didn’t make these videos way ahead of time. So now it’s Tuesday, the day before the presentation and I start recording them. Lo and behold, iVeZeen craps out on me. Either the videos I was making were too long (they were a couple of minutes of talking head) or there is too much of something in some buffer, but whatever, it just wouldn’t work.

Cool and collected under pressure, I start to panic. For whatever reason, while a week earlier I viewed making these videos something of a lark, by that Tuesday it started to seem a critical part of my presentation. So I went to plan B. At home I’ve got an inexpensive Logitech Webcam mounted on the monitor for the family Dell. Also, the campus has recently gotten a site license for the Real Helix server and thrown into the deal is RealProducer Plus. So I made some recordings at home Tuesday night after first trying it on my Tablet PC in my office to convince myself this could work. (The Tablet PC is absolutely horrible for recording audio. The quality is terrible. But it was ok to test that this could be done.)

The process itself begins with Logitech software that comes with the Webcam. That is used to record an AVI file. I’m not film star and actually feel quite uncomfortable making these movies. So I’m interested in “ good enough” quality in the AVI file that is produced. The Webcam meets that minimal requirement. The audio is audible with not too much hiss and the coordination with the video, although it seems surrealistic to watch yourself on screen this way, is not too bad.

Then the AVI file is used as input by RealProducer which converts the file to a streaming format. The current file type is .rv, but I wasn’t sure how that would work with our current streaming server so I converted to the older type, .rm. The default speed is for 256K (DSL at home) streaming and I kept that and added 56K. Perhaps I should have also included a higher rate stream for what I have to say next. But since my prior experience with this stuff was audio only (I had done some video but only with the free version of RealProducer), I did what I did. The software converted this stuff like a charm but it does take some time to get the conversion going. Then via sftp to our streaming server and identifying the links for the files so they will stream and voila, they’re up on my presentation page. I put them there both as embedded in a player (which for whatever reason play only the audio on my Mac) and as a link (which plays the full video fine on my Mac).

I recorded 3 clips Tuesday night. It is hard to do, harder than just recording audio, because there is the question of looking at the camera or looking at the screen (and if you do both back and forth creating a shifty look as a consequence) and you need to show some emotion so the thing is interesting to watch, which is extremely hard for me to do when I’m simultaneously trying to provide factual information, especially without getting feedback from anyone else. So I left the rest of the work for Wednesday morning. If you go through these, you’ll see my shirt is different starting on the slide, Goals for a Gen Ed Course.

Now I want to switch gears for a second and ask whether this sort of stuff should be streamed or downloaded. If the entire presentation were zipped up and then downloaded, to be expanded on the users computer, the file is on the order of 30 – 50 MB. That is not overwhelming size if you know you want to view it and in that case podcasting the zip file seems like the right way to go. But if you just want to sample a bit, that is too much and most people won’t be patient for the download. So better to do as is where each clip is streamed. Now watch a clip or two and let it play a bit. If you do this during normal business hours on campus, then although our server doesn’t get an overwhelming amount of traffic, there is some latency so the audio and video get a little out of synch. That’s one reason for the title of this post. Compared to a couple of years ago with streaming this is quite excellent. Compared to TV, this is still not good enough.

My sense is that we’ll stay at this level for some time now. Video for download will become more a regular thing, but because these are comparatively big files there will be a lot of sampling things online – sort of like a try this new appetizer at the grocery store. Streaming that is on demand will handle this sampling type of need. And for many of us who may have quotas on our Web site and have a separate server for streaming, streaming may therefore dominate download where the audience is open. With a known, predictable audience, download via podcast clearly makes more sense because of the improved viewing quality when the files are resident on your own computer.

Let me make another gear switch now and note that in the Brown Bag series my group runs they have been video recording the presentation and then indexing the recorded video for better access by on demand viewers. Several examples are available so you can get a sense of what is being produced. On the one hand, this is a nice thing to offer to campus for those who can’t make the brown bag, although I wonder how many watch it online after the fact. On the other hand, however, I wonder if this use of technology promotes bad pedagogy and hence shouldn’t be promoted broadly.

My own standard for a successful presentation is whether the audience interrupts early and often and there is good dialog back and for the between the audience and the presenter. I really don’t like when the moderator says – let’s hold questions till the end – and with that feel for sure the presentation hasn’t worked well if at the end there are no questions.

My talk was borderline, mostly I talked, a question here and there. If anything, I felt the camera that was recording me contributed to he monolog mode. We used a wired microphone, so I couldn’t stray too far. That’s one factor. But beyond that, we had an operator who ran the camera, one of my staff, and that “leant dignity” to the presentation, dignity that it didn’t otherwise deserve. But that dignity inhibits the audience from asking questions. They’d be less inhibited in a more informal discussion where the technology isn’t present.

Am I out of synch on that? And what does mean when the head learning technology guy would rather have less technology?

The Learning Technologist as Elmer Gantry

Very early on in my exposure to online learning, I believe this was late fall of 1994, I attended a presentation that may have been meant for those candidate faculty who would participate in the first round of the SCALE grant. I was there (a “smart classroom” on the first floor in Lincoln Hall) with my colleague in Economics, Larry DeBrock. He was the one plugged into innovative campus efforts in teaching and in this case I was his sidekick in the role of Festus playing off of Larry as Marshall Dillon. (We ultimately got a big bucks internal grant from SCALE for doing ALN in our respective Econ courses.) There was a fabulous crew of presenters starting off with Burks Oakley, whom at that point I believe I had met once before, and including Bob Jones who at the time ran something called the Advanced Information Technology Lab which had done a lot with hypermedia and provided a lot of support for faculty in the humanities, and Joe Hardin who at the time was at NCSA, one of the pioneers involved with Mosaic, and who now is at Michigan running their Sakai efforts. There was electricity in the air. Technology seemingly held such promise and these stars gave a really wonderful show to emphasize the point.

The idea that learning technology needs a show person, somebody who has charisma and knowledge of the technology, somebody who gets ordinary faculty excited about the prospects, who can with fluidity and depth speak of the benefits in terms of student learning but also speak of the technology itself and what the potential is or of the methodology that the that the technology enables, certainly was a prominent part of SCALE when I was brought into the administrative side of the project since Burks was such a master of it, and it became a big issue for the rest of us, who were not quite in Burks’ league in making presentations. Here I talk not just about myself but also the other SCALE staff as well.

For my own part, I’m not a bad presenter and can give a good and coherent talk and on occasion rise a level or two to bring the requisite level of excitement into the presentation. But I was brought up to view salesmen as pretty far down on the social totem pole, and have an aversion to being placed in a situation where I feel that there is a sales job being give to my friends and colleagues, especially when there seems a paucity of quality ideas behind the promotion. And as I’ve become more experienced in management of learning technology, where influencing the expectations of the instructors we support is a primary consideration, I’ve learned (perhaps I've been conditioned) to take a longer term view and hence am less inclined to represent the promise of an emerging technology or method without also discussing the possible pitfalls. That is argument, not promotion. It is what I’m personally comfortable with, but it does not do nearly as much to “sway the masses.” I’ll come back to this point. I think it is important.

Let me fast forward a few years later, say six months or a year into my next big administrative foray with learning technology, our hard money Center for Educational Technology, which supported early offerings of both Blackboard (then CourseInfo) and WebCT, in addition to some other offerings. While I had wanted each of my support people (here we call them CAIS, which is short for Computer Assisted Instruction Specialist, a holdover title from the Plato days) to be reasonably proficient in all the applications we supported and then to develop their own group of faculty clients who would then have a personal support person they would know and could rely on (we’ve since moved away from this model in a significant way because it is less scalable), it turned out that the staff concentrated on one or two applications, in large part because mastering any single one took a good deal of effort, and then something happened that I had not anticipated. The staff began to view adoptions by the faculty members as an indicator of their own personal performance. Of course, uptake was a key measure of the success of the Center as a whole. But it was a surprise to me that some of the staff would take this view at their own individual level when I had not imposed it from above. (At the time I was in no position to attribute adoption by a particular instructor to the efforts of a specific staff member.)

This is not a surprise to me anymore. I believe support staff rightly see their good efforts manifest in what the instructors whom they have helped do with the technology. A very cool implementation is an object of pride and so is getting many instructors on the bandwagon. For the latter, this gives the staff member a reason to be a sales person. In my opinion, some of them embrace this role because they see it as synonymous with doing a good job. They want to be a latter day Burks Oakley and get the faculty excited about the technology.

And now a related point and the real reason for the post. A big deal has been made of late, not in the learning technology arena but rather in the world of politics, that it’s not ideas that are important but rather ideas the way ideas are framed. Ergo the furor over George Lakoff’s book, Don’t think of the Elephant, and how that influenced Democratic Party politics as described in this article by Matt Bai from the New York Times Magazine last summer. (You must subscribe to the Times Select service for that link to work.) So let’s ask the question, what type of framing sells, especially in the case when the recipient of the sale is a faculty member?

The answer to this question that I would like to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but I suspect is not, is that reasoned argument sells, especially when the argument is supported by empirical evidence. Perhaps that answer is correct for some (small) fraction of the audience. Suppose, however, that one assumes the faculty are not that much different from the rest of the population and what sells to the rest sells to the faculty too. So what is the answer then? Well, it’s obvious. It’s sex. Sex sells and any promotion we’re talking about has to be made sexy if it is to catch on.

Ok, so what of it? This alone doesn’t seem like a terribly novel proposition. Here’s the related point. Think of Web 2.0 or for that matter any other comparatively new technology. Does it offer potential for improving teaching and learning? Sure it does. Do we who support learning technology know the details of how that improvement is likely to happen? Well, we might if we tried to use it in our own classes or if we worked it through with some instructor who was going to give it a try or if not that then having a serious conversation with that instructor who did it on her own and wanted to share what she learned from the experience. So it is possible that we know. But it is also possible, and I think in many cases it is likely, that we don’t know this way. But we believe. We believe in the potential for the technology because at our core we got into learning technology because of the potential for it to transform teaching and learning. Part of our essence in what motivates us in doing our work is this belief in the power of technology to transform.

So, based on our belief, we promote technology as sex because that sells and we substantiate that approach by the hope that the technology will transform the teaching. We could go the reasoned argument route and accumulate evidence about effective practice with the technology, but that is a much slower way to diffuse things and after all, doesn’t it create a chicken and egg thing with new technology? How can we know in that case?

This sounds like Elmer Gantry to me.

Comparing the Teacher and the Student to the Writer and the Reader

Yesterday my campus held its annual Active Learning Retreat, sponsored by our Center for Teaching Excellence. The featured speaker was Ken Bain of NYU. He gave a good talk. I was one of about half the audience who had not yet read his book, What the Best College Teachers Do. So it may be surprising for me to say that I learned nothing fundamentally new from his presentation. I already understood the issues he was addressing from my other reading, my interactions with knowledgeable teachers, and my own experience with teaching. But he did provide a very nice framework on which to hang these ideas and to bring it all together. And he was quite engaging while doing that. I’ll get back to his key points in a bit.

His session started out, almost immediately, with an “active learning” exercise. On the one hand this was nice in that I met a faculty member in Animal Biology whom I did not know and we got along well. She lectures in our very large auditorium (Foellinger) and uses the campus Learning Management System (WebCT Vista) and seemed to be doing well with these, which was good to hear. And she is the product of public Higher Education, having been an undergrad at the University of Michigan, though she grew up in Illinois. We shared experiences about a teacher who really shaped us in our thinking (that was what we were tasked to do) and in the process I learned that she knew her career path as a scientist early on in her college career, certainly by the time she took organic chemistry as a sophomore. I wouldn’t have noted that except that I asked my own students this same question earlier in the week and they too seemed locked into a career path and most of them were freshmen. Ironically, the only student who expressed uncertainty on this point is a junior.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with active learning. I can see the benefit as a “warm up” activity to get those in the audience ready for what the presenter has to say. And I will concede that in the context of the Retreat, where the presenter had not addressed the audience before, it was a way to level the playing field in terms of audience expectations, getting those in attendance more in tune with what the presenter had to say. But because I still believe in and cherish the necessity of “head scratching” to come to a deeper understanding of what is going on and because that reflection typically needs to occur outside of class when the student is alone and able to concentrate and follow the flow of his own ideas and because nobody seems to be promoting head scratching nowadays as a necessary component to learning, somehow conveying instead that either it is all quick hitter in getting the ideas out or if not that then group brain storming suffices, so instructors should fix their attention on promoting either the quick hitter or the brain storming and God forbid they ask something really hard that won’t be able to be addressed these other ways, I feel we’ve been leading faculty down the wrong path. The hard problems have to be there. Learning depth of understanding and how to penetrate from the surface has to be there. And getting stuck while working on hard problems definitely has to be there. Learning not to abandon ship but rather to develop persistence and that ultimately this produces invention and alternative ways to approach the issue, this is the key.

I’m off my soapbox now and want to get to the title of this post. It is curious to me that the metaphors we use in teaching, in particular “learner centric” or “teacher centric” are so unlike the metaphors we use in writing, good or bad, when the two activities seem to have so much in common. Let me first make the case for invoking that parallel and then draw the lesson from that argument.

Consider this book review of Stephen Jay Gould’s Bully for Brontosaurus. The author of the review, John Noble Wilford, quotes Gould in the prologue of the book on Gould’s approach to writing.

Mr. Gould acknowledges that his favorite method of writing is "beginning with something small and curious and then working outward and onward by a network of lateral connections."

The striking part of this quote is that in this single phrase Gould embraces two of the three pillars that Bain argued are the keys to good teaching; first, that knowledge must be constructed, Gould clearly does that via working outward and onward form his initial curious observations and, second, that the learner must be motivated and have passion for the learning, which is why that Gould starts with the small and curious, to make the learning personal and to invoke the interest of the reader.

Bain’s third pillar (it was the first one he introduced to us) is not in this quote from Gould but it infuses his writing and to a large extent provides his raison d’etre for the writing itself – the learner (reader) must be confronted with evidence that his current world view is inadequate to address certain observations or, better still, that the current world view evokes predictions that directly contradicts what is being observed. Gould, in other words, understands his readers. They read on because they want a more mature and complete understanding of reality and they are motivated because their current views are inadequate in this, creating either dead ends or contradictions. Gould as a writer is precisely at the same point where Bain says good teachers are. They understand learning deeply, at this fundamental level.

Good writers (and in my opinion Gould was a wonderful writer) are teachers and their craft as exercised in their writing is exactly what we’d like to see in our teachers; their teaching should reflect the same insight and the same attention to detail to produce the learning in the students. Lest the reader of this blog post think that I’m exaggerating the point, after all Gould was a professor of biology at Harvard, all he was really doing in his writing was professing to a general audience who wanted to be touched by the great professor but couldn’t get admitted to Harvard to take his classes, try reading some short story fiction by a good writer. I’ve recently read some of Melville’s classics. Of course, he writes to entertain the reader. He was in the business of selling his stories to periodicals that published for a general, if enlightened, readership. But his stories also clearly educate – they serve as a political commentary, as ethical lessons, as exemplars of how to tell a story well, all tied together in a way that makes it seem so natural and flowing. This is teaching excellence at its highest mark.

We've reached the juncture where we can turn to the metaphor, “learner centric.” For a while I think it was useful to me and helped me think through the fundamental critique of the lecture – you can’t show the learner where to cast his gaze if he’s not ready to look. So lecturing that amounts to pointing the (non) learner in the direction of where to look but does nothing about getting the learner ready is not good teaching and needs to be criticized and rightfully so. But some of what I’ve been hearing from the learner centric crowd – the learner needs to be in control of the learning – is both wrong and wrong headed. I hope by focusing in on the issue we can agree where he problem lies and then move past it.

If the learner operates from an immature frame of view and is comfortable in that, the learner is apt to defend that view rather than to abandon it for something more mature that can account for what is being observed. Bain said this in his presentation. It jives with my experience and is explained by observing that it is unsettling to be forced to abandon one’s world view. Consequently, the students need to be confronted and shocked into the realization that their immature view will not suffice. They will not engage in this confrontation willingly on their own. It is not comfortable. It is only the unusual student who will seek it out. For the rest, the teacher must initiate it. But for the teacher to be able to do that, the student can’t be in control.

This sounds like a power play but it really shouldn’t turn out that way. The relationship between a good writer and her readers is not about power. Both writer and reader want the other to play their role as actively and effectively as possible. And writers most certainly want to hear from their readers and learn how those readers react to the writing. This is hugely important for the writer to keep up with the writing. The reader reaction and in particular the reader explaining his personal growth as a consequence of the reading is fodder for the writer in working on the next piece of writing and making sure it is on the mark.

We in the learning technology arena who have until now embraced the “learner centric” mantra uncritically should move to abandon it and replace it with something else. My vote is for “good teaching as good writing.”

The future of LMS and evolutionary biology

I’ve been “offline” the last few days tending to other things. I did a tad of catching up this morning and wanted to chime in on this future directions issue, because it seems to me that everyone is looking at this too narrowly. But before I get to that and as I warm up let me ask a more drill down question.

Suppose your shop that supports the LMS is thinking about supporting some Web 2.0 application(s) as an alternative to the LMS offering and to keep the folks who want to try something else from getting too restless. The question is this. How important is having a built in WYSIWYG editor as part of the requirements. I had thought it was a big deal, for user convenience and for helping those who are still early on in trying these technologies. But then I stumbled on this free editor that is like a desktop email client. It deals with images on the Web in a very nice way – allows those to be dragged into the message with no need to know the url of the image – and in general looks familiar enough that it should be easy to learn. I tried it on my test blog and it was simple to set up and easy to publish. Might we start seeing more of these utility like applications on the desktop and outside our server based environments? And, in particular, has anyone else tried Qumana and if so what do you think of it?

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Now a quick lesson in evolutionary biology courtesy of Steven Jay Gould. The right metaphor is that of the bush, not the tree trunk that you may have seen in your high school biology text. With the bush lots of branches are growing and viable. Then random factors, meaning that they are not predictable ahead of time, select some branch for continued growth and enhancement while the other branches wither and die. I think we’re still in this bush stage with the LMS and most of the insiders are looking at deterministic factors (features within the current offerings) as determinants of the path. It maybe human nature to do this, but it is bad biology. And it is bad industrial organization. Gould and many economists have made a strong parallel between evolutionary biology and how industries evolve. (Microsoft did not become dominant because it had the best offerings.)

So what other things should we be looking at? Let me point to two that seem obvious to me because they are both within the domain of campus CIOs. The first is email. Depending on where you are, email has been around for perhaps 7 or 8 years longer than the LMS. Most campuses I know are at present supporting big email systems, but many of the students are not using them, opting for gmail, hotmail, or some other commercial alternative that is free to them. I know that we are hearing from some of these vendors about offering us a hosting solution of some sort that would be branded with the University of Illinois and offer a variety of their current features. And I know we have some issues with this regarding information security. So we have not as of yet jumped at this opportunity.

But there is another possible path. That is to get out of the email business. Simply provide a forwarding service and let the users fend for themselves with what has become a commodity service in which we can’t compete in terms of service quality. (And then there is the hybrid version of this where we get out for the students and offer a more boutique service for the faculty.)

I don’t know of campuses that have made the leap on this yet and surely there is a lot of risk in doing so. My point is that how this plays out will have a big impact on how the LMS evolves, and how this plays out is not knowable now. So why aren’t we in the learning technology arena talking about it rather than leaving it to the techies to decide how it should play out?

The other side of this sandwich is the ERP system. At my university, which includes the Chicago and Springfield campuses, we are in the process of moving from Banner 6.x to Banner 7.x. And unlike with changes in the LMS system that usually take place over the summer, the move here is happening right now in time for students to register for their fall courses in the new system.

The ERP, of course, represents institutional lock in to a big system and a more massive expenditure on IT than the LMS. But there does not seem a way to outsource these functions (though I do think if we looked at our business practices for things like how many majors students have and how add/drop dates are managed we have ourselves to blame for the lock in). I know very few people who speak positively of the ERP. To most it seems like master rather than servant and it is a master nobody wanted beforehand. For CIOs who are not learning technologists themselves, the ERP may be a metaphor for the LMS and hence the CIO decision about the LMS may be guided accordingly.

What does that mean? I don’t really know, but again my point is that there is unpredictability here and that may very well come from outside the narrow LMS space. I do know that as an IT organization (our division of labor has the University supporting the ERP and all other administrative apps while the campus supports the academic apps) our back end is looking more and more like the back end needed for the ERP. At a big institution such as mine, that on the one had might signify we inside IT are “doing it right” but it also might signify from the CIO point of view, “this job is not fun.” Hmmmm.

Let me make one more observation to indicate yet another source of uncertainty. Right now in the CIC (the Big Ten Universities plus the University of Chicago), there are several CIO positions that are opening up as the current CIOs have announced their retirements or have moved on. So we’ll be seeing a new crop of folks in these positions in the not too distant future and it will be this next generation of leaders who make the decisions that will drive these outcomes. But who are these folks? And, assuming they have fire in the belly, what is their passion? That has got to matter.

So we can keep talking about the tools inside the LMS, but we are naïve if we think that will drive which approach becomes the branch that sustains.

Being Claude Rains

The Turner Classic Films Network is doing a series on Academy award winning movies (or those that received nominations) for the next month or so, until this year’s awards ceremony. Last night they had two Humphrey Bogart pictures back to back; first The African Queen, where Bogie plays opposite Katherine Hepburn in what might seem unlikely casting but which comes off remarkably well as the derelict gin drinking boatman and the prissy missionary form an indelible bond via their trip down the river in the African Queen and which provides the only role where Bogie won the Academy award for Best Actor, and Casablanca, the quintessential anti-hero picture, which still is a wonderful movie though it has become a cliché – in the Dooley Wilson character Sam, the song As Time Goes By, and the closing line “Louis, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

I want to focus in on the Capt. Renault character and then use that characterization and the relationship of that character to the Rick Blaine role that Bogart plays as the way to idealize the relationship between instructional designer and faculty member and then to pose the question how we might, even remotely, approximate that ideal. Louis has a knowing ironical style throughout the film. He is a corrupt lecher who abuses his power, but does so in a way that both the German bullies and the heroes in the film are comfortable accommodating. He has insight into the behavior and likes of others and in the main respects those deeply, not projecting his own views on things till the very end of the movie. He has a gracefulness in his speech and an elegance in his style that make others want to be around him. Yet he knows he is the second fiddle, in particular to Victor Laslow (played by Paul Henreid) or to “Monsieur Rick.” He knows the arena where it is right to make his own wants and needs the object of focus as wells as the space where he rightly should subjugate himself to the needs of the protagonists.

These features of Captain Renault, as embodied by Rains’ masterful performance, make the character a highly attractive model for the instructional designer. And it contrasts so strongly to the view Mark Prensky gave of instructional designers at ELI – Instructional Designers suck all the fun out of teaching. Rains as Louis is nothing if not fun – mischievous and scheming, taken with his own amusements. Prensky’s description, on the other hand, brings to mind another descriptor – pedantic. And I must say on this point I’ve heard Prensky’s view echoed by many others. The instructional designer is all too often the pedantic authority to whom no faculty member wants to listen. The instructional designer may not have started out that way and, indeed, may very well have been a member of the faculty early in the career. But somehow the pressures of the job or the removal from actual teaching transforms the instructional designer in a way that is detrimental to the job.

So we want to ask how we might turn instructional designers into Claude Rains and how we might make it that faculty seek out the friendship of Instructional designers. This, I think, is not easy and discussing it might create quite a good deal of irritation among practicing professionals. But, in the interest of trying to get from here to there, here is my list of suggestions.

A Bag of Tricks of Quick Hitters that Work

Many instructors don’t want a full analysis of their course for the purposes of coming up with a detailed teaching plan to implement a redesigned offering. Instead they want to make a tweak or two to try and keep the rest of what they were doing beforehand. If they are going to change anything, they want it in itself to make a difference. This is the spirit behind the work on Low Threshold Applications. Instructional designers either need to play with the existing ones on their own so they are comfortable with them and can with confidence recommend them or, alternatively make their own low threshold applications, which requires play of a different but related sort.

Part of the idea is to build up some trust between instructor and designer. If trust is low at the outset, then offer something lightweight that is likely useful. That very well will not solve all the teaching issues, but it will create a good channel for further problem solving down the road. Win some early battles, built trust, and then hope the instructor comes back for more.

Get out of talking about method and instead talk about teaching-issues

Most instructors are simply not interested in learning about method. If they have to learn a full methodology before they can begin to apply it to their class – well that is just too slow and most instructors won’t go for it. Instructors confront issues while teaching. Instructional design must be about issue resolution.

Brand new instructors most likely have a common single big issue – they are afraid of interacting with their students for fear of being shown that they’re not good enough to be teaching them, the “confidence thing” if you will. So the issue is how to build instructor confidence and how to avoid many of the struggles that young professors typically go through.

Many more experienced instructors, after having gone through the “awkward teenage blues” of being a novice teacher, then have the problem that the students don’t talk up in class. This is a different issue, though almost surely related to the first one. The Instructional Designer recommendations have to be seen as instrumental in addressing the issues. Otherwise, why bother paying attention to the recommendations.

Don’t insist that the instructor make course goals explicit

Instructors know a lot about what they want their students to achieve, but they may not be able to articulate that as a list disembodied from the work the students do. Their knowledge may be more situated. So some instructors, and I’m definitely in this category myself, prefer a tacit approach to achieve course goals and thus a discussion of those goals can happen only over a long time period as the variations of the course unfold.

How to proceed, in other words, depends on the learning style of the instructor and the good instructional designer must be sensitive to that style. Absent the ability to administer a formal test of learning style, this will have to come out through conversation and other interaction with the Instructor.

If we’re preaching learner centric approaches, then make the designer–faculty member experience about the faculty member.

The idea here is quite simple, but I suspect this is very difficult to actually do. With regard to knowledge about teaching, presumably the designer is the expert and the faculty member more the novice. In a learner centered approach the expert brings attention to the learner’s focus and tailors the approach accordingly.

In this instance, however, the faculty member may very well not feel comfortable showing their lack of expertise and the designer may feel the need to establish a credential, to justify the faculty member willing putting in the time. But surely this is the road to ruin – the outcome that Prensky talked about. The designer must have enough confidence in himself so that he can encourage the faculty member to vocalize the teaching issues.


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I know my suggestions are only a drop in the bucket, not a full answer. I don’t have a full answer, but having the imagery of Claude Rains as the ideal endpoint seems a useful conception to me.

They’re Changing Guard (with apologies to A. A. Milne)

I’m at the ELI conference in San Diego and have been learning both from my peers and from the various presentations about how the world has changed within the world of learning technology. There are three different areas that I’d like to comment about.

Speaking personally, this May will mark my 10th year anniversary as an ed tech administrator. That is a long time. Since for the prior 16 years I was more or less an ordinary faculty member in Economics, this no longer feels like the beginning of a journey for me, as it did in 1996. I come to conferences like ELI now not expecting to learn a vast amount of new things but rather to get colleague’s perspective on issues, perhaps to pick up an idea or two, and to visit with friends. Among my peers who are senior to me, there is a feeling that the changes we are seeing are not for the better. (Some elaboration below.) There is some nostalgia for the NLII which seemingly paid more attention to the to the large R1’s like mine and had more direct discussion about the return on investment to learning technology, something that is not really being discussed now.

But there are fewer attendees of my generation and more in the next generation of learning technology leaders. They need their own issues. And they need to make their own mistakes. God only knows, that we made our fair share of blunders. So let me move to the next issue.

The word “pedagogy” is deified by many of the participants, but frankly there is too little discussed about it: what it means, how to promote it, what learning we are after.

I stopped writing the above to get breakfast and am now in the plenary session where we are talking about “learning design” instead of “instructional design.” This is the demonstrating the issue. We have to get past this. We have to drill down much deeper into the practice and in that sense we need to abandon these categories and just describe what we’re doing and what the students are doing.

Two examples of this are in the measurement area. I heard a presentation from NC State about their campus evaluation effort and their current efforts with evaluating the effectiveness of technology in the live classroom. While during the presentation there was specific mention of the “dark side” – death by PowerPoint – there was no mention of good practice with the technology that might promote learning. There was nothing about Just In Time Teaching, about showcasing student work, about using the computer to record the data from in class experiments, about encouraging students to make presentations with the technology, about showcasing information outside stereotypes that students wouldn’t find with their Google searches, or about any other practice where we might a priori agree, “this is helping.”

Instead there was just a discussion about the coarse correlation between the technology and the learning, manifest primarily between student and faculty perceptions, as measured by survey evidence. The problem with this, unfortunately, is that as we linger on this coarse correlation, we’re inadvertently communicating with the rest of the world that we really don’t know why the technology should be helping so, consequently, we can’t possibly know whether it is helping.

Suppose, in fact, that the technology does make the instructors life easier but actually is worse for the student – not a bad hypothesis in my view. How do we distinguish this from the case where it is really helping the students? What evidence are we looking for? I heard nothing about that.

In a different conversation I had a similar discussion with a colleague about the course management system. Again, there was the coarse correlation, but this time on whether student use correlated with student performance. Is this the technology at all? Or is it simply a proxy of the more general observation that students who spend more time on task learn more and those who spend more time on task will, on average, spend more time in the course management system? I tried to ask about drill down, but then one loses power in the statistical test. We’re enamored by proving this with “hard evidence.” But what are we proving.

Let me turn to the third issue, which is how the student is being represented. This really disturbs me. There has been much presented, for example in the opening plenary session by Mark Prensky, about hours spent playing games, reading, etc. These are generational averages from which conclusions seem to be drawn about all students. I’ve polled my own campus honors students this semester. Only two out of twelve students read blogs regularly. Only four out of twelve had ipods. The vast majority are engineering students. What should be concluded?

One possible conclusion, I’ll admit it is premature and I don’t have enough data but I might hypothesize anyway, is that serious students are unlike the students characterized by Prensky. Let’s say for the moment this is true. (And, truthfully, my students this time around don’t see so different form the students I had two years ago who didn’t seem so different to me to the my peers when I was an undergrad.) So should I abandon my teaching approach to what is being advocated because of these generational differences. Or should I be trumpeting loudly that teaching to these (statistical) mean characteristics of students is the path to ruin, not success.

Actually much of what Prensky said was not too shocking to me or out of my own way of viewing things. But on one key point there seems to be a difference. This is on the issue of deferred gratification and how one can do that and maintain engagement. Presnky (and others at this conference) seemingly argue that there needs to be immediate response that progress is being made and that must come from external sources (moving from one level to a higher one in a video game). This I think is wrong and pernicious and will actually be quite limiting for the generation if it becomes the norm in behavior. Kids need to learn stick-to-it-ness and they to learn to take their own personal voyage into investigation where the feedback comes internally as they make progress. How else will they learn to write? How else will they learn to work through hard problems? How will they deal with the disappointment of frustration of getting stuck?

These things are seemingly outside the agenda of the current generation of ELI leadership or, at a minimum, it is not center stage. Engagement is the focus. Engagement is not bad in itself, but it is not an end, or at least it is not the sole end. I hope people wake up soon, but if I were betting I’d bet against. Perhaps this is evidence that the only true learning is from making the mistakes for oneself rather than from absorbing the lessons of the prior generation.

Optimism and Experimentation

Generalizing from my own approach to learning technology, I think it is natural to see possibilities that I might want to try, focus on the upside if the experiment works approximately according to plan so those possibilities are realized, and use that as the motivation for taking a different approach. I’ve argued before that there needs to be experimentation in teaching to keep it fresh and to energize the students and this focus on the possibilities is one way to make sure that things get tried.

However, we know that experiments fail and the frequency of failure is somewhat in proportion to the risk in the experiment. Consequently, it is possible to go through a “boom and bust” emotional cycle about the teaching and when the bust phase is upon us to get shy about further experimentation. That will not do, but it too seems natural.

So the question arises how to sustain the optimism or, alternatively, how to drive a little out of control so there is some excitement but not so out of control that there surely will be a wreck. I think there are two key skills/functions that the instructor must have to make this work.

First, the instructor must be able to trouble shoot on the experiments. So a good deal of time is spent in understanding why the experiment failed and then in trying to fix that. This is not time waste at all but rather critical time for the teaching approach. This will challenge the instructor’s time management skills, but the key point is to identify whether a minor error has caused the problem or if there is a fundamental issue that needs to be confronted.

In my own teaching this semester where I’m using the linked spreadsheet system I’ve come up with, it has worked so far quite well on my own computer for doing the Just In Time Teaching that I designed it for. But, at present, when I transfer the file that does the aggregation so the students can also see the results, the responses are cut off after 255 characters, as I reported in an earlier post. I’m not yet sure why so I don’t know how to fix the problem. I can envision a possible work around indeed I can envision several of them that might give a short term resolution for this semester. But each mean the general approach is not sufficiently robust that it might offer a preferred alternative to using a discussion board or a survey in an LMS. I’d like to see the linked spreadsheet approach work, so I’m going to spend some more time on looking for the root cause of the problem – march to victory rather than declare defeat. But in the meantime, I can post html pages of the student submissions that, because the class is small, is not too hard to generate.

Second, the instructor must be able to come up with plan B in the event the experiment is declared a failure. Plan B must be a good path for the students even if it was not the announced path at the beginning of the semester. The students must be able to endure the experiment just as the instructor endures. So they shouldn’t feel they are being jacked around in the process. This can only happen if the course has an open and flexible structure. The more scaffolding and prior setup that the instructor has put in place, the harder it is for there to be change in midstream. It may break things further down the road in the course.
So the experimentation approach to teaching is in conflict with the highly structured approach. And while I’ve cast the experiment in terms of the technology in my particular case, there can be experiments in what the students read, the type of assignments they are required to do, the nature of the in-class activity, etc. Then the question becomes whether the two can be reconciled and if not what to do about it.

As I watch others on campus in their teaching, it does seem as if there are two camps – the structuralists and the experimentalists. The former argue for clear objectives in every lesson so the student can readily assess whether those objectives have been met and so the student can have clear expectations of what to get out of that class. The latter argue for a sequence of questions where the resolution of one begats the posing of the next and where that pattern is largely unknowable ahead of time.

Call me a wishy-washy liberal on this one; I try to craft a middle ground. I have a path in mind for the course and try to articulate it to the students. But it is somewhat general with not too much detail. Experiments are either deviations from the path or variations on a theme. I try to apply a discipline that irrespective of how the experiment turns out, we’re back on the path when it is over. So there are lots of small experiments, rather than a few big ones. This makes sense to me and is a way for me to keep my sanity and engagement with the class.

Does it constitute a general approach? I don’t know.

Tidbits –

Let me start with some more nuts and bolts. I did the first aggregating of student submitted spreadsheets over the weekend. Some of them changed the file name when they submitted their work. So I had to change it back. Certainly annoying, but that seems like a correctable problem. When they did the Greetings survey, some of them were exuberant and wrote a lot – beyond the size of the cell, this is the sort of problem instructors want to have. But from a technical view, all the text didn’t show up, because it didn’t have a place to display. As I learned from the survey on their computer use, they all are PC users. (Incidentally, the results may be a little surprising to some, although with such a small class it is perhaps not significant statistically.) Too bad I didn’t know that in advance. I could have used Active Text Boxes for their content and then it would have been scrollable. But I made it so it was Mac compatible. Consequently, I then had to reformat my aggregator sheet to accommodate this larger volume of text.

The aggregation otherwise worked nicely except for one thing, a “feature” of Excel, which makes this approach a tad more problematic. It turns out that if the source file (the file the student submits) has the worksheet with the student content protected, which is how I had it set up, then although the cells where the student content resides are unlocked, the linked cell in the aggregator workbook only receives the first 255 characters and lops off the rest. Aarrgghh! I didn’t know that beforehand (and it took me a while to figure out what was going on). So I had to go back and unprotect each of the submissions. That will teach me. In the future, content surveys where the students write paragraphs need to be unprotected. Surveys where they only do short answers or analytic exercises where formulas should be hidden from students need to be protected.

One other issue I encountered is perhaps a little more disturbing because it will likely affect many others aside from myself. One of the reasons to use Xythos instead of the LMS is that I had hoped I could “podcast” course content via the course blog and then a Feedburner feed generated from that. So yesterday I downloaded Doppler on my home computer, in anticipation of giving my students a demo of how to set it up for the course podcast. But it didn’t work. There were no enclosures. After figuring out that the problem wasn’t Doppler (it grabbed enclosures from other feeds) I started to wonder if there was a problem with Feedburner. This morning I verified with my colleague, Burks Oakley, that Feedburner wasn’t the problem either and indeed the issue was with our Xythos server or with my folder on it in that it wasn’t putting out the right type of Mime type information for Feedburner to identify links as enclosures. It had worked ok when I tested this in October, but more recently I had to restore my account from backup because there were some problems with files being deleted inadvertently. Perhaps that restore caused the problem. Double Aarrgghh!!

Now that I’m at least partially understanding the problem, I’m hopeful that I can fix it, but I haven’t done that yet. In the meantime, I’m wondering about whether sending every instructor and student off to podcast this way is such a good idea.

Now I’m going to switch gears. Last night after the kids went to bed I watched the second half of the movie, “A Passage to India.” I had seen it before some time ago and read the book afterwards. I’ve not read other things by E.M. Foster, his other themes are not quite so gripping for me, but this one seems so perfect in its way of capturing the tension between the English imperialists and the native Indians where in the main there is mistrust and contempt but where for a few enlightened individuals who can respect others across culture and behave with an appropriate sensitivity there can be valued cross cultural relationships that provide deep meaning for those involved.

Both the book and movie are worth considering along several dimensions. The British, in the main, are depicted as pompous and boorish, with a complete lack of understanding of India, imposing their own norms yet in a sub-tropical climate thousands of miles away from England. I think there are lessons here for Americans today and Forster is so good at guiding us toward the possibility of following the uplifting path while making it quite clear the negative consequences from playing the role of insular imperialist.

Forster, in his understated way, also is very good at exploring the race issues and how even well meaning people can go astray when circumstances become harder to understand and when explanations according to racial stereotype provide a ready alternative. His characterization is excellent.

I bring this up because I believe there are some parallels to the world of edu-blogging. For example, consider the blog roll on Glenda Morgan’s Accidental Pedagogy site. I haven’t done a complete look through of that list, but if you did I think you’d find that nearly all the bloggers are “western,” meaning they are from Canada, the UK, the US, and, in my classification, Australia or New Zealand. There are few if any of these edu blogs from “eastern” countries – India, China, Korea, etc., where the absence of representatives from India is the most surprising given that the language issue is not as acute.

I will go even further and observe that on my own blog I do track via Sitemeter where visitors are coming from. There are some from the “east” with Hong Kong and Singapore (not so surprising to me) and Indonesia (quite surprising to me) being the source of the biggest number of hits. I wonder if this is the same experience that other edu-bloggers are having and indeed whether there not be more exchange of ideas with educators in India or China should be a cause for concern.

I could readily see blogs and particularly the informality in communication with people who hardly know each other otherwise could be difficult in some cultures, where circumspection is the first instinct and a more light hearted open approach needs to be earned over time. But I also note that most of these foreign visitors to my site get there originally via Google, using a keyword or short expression search. What are we to infer given that?

In any event, I’d like to see posts from others about whom they believe is their community of readers and if the international distribution of those is indeed biased against the east. A few more data points would be useful before drawing too rash a conclusion.

Nuts and Bolts

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I’m not teaching with a learning management system this semester, at least for the time being, and am instead using the Xythos product to distribute content, to have students upload their work back to me, and then use email or the course blog, as the primary means of communicating outside of class. I’m liking our LMS, WebCT Vista, more as a consequence of this effort. It’s interesting what one learns by doing some drill down stuff of this sort.

Because I’m going to ding the Xythos product a little bit here, let me point out that my campus procured it for personal file space and Web publishing. It was not intended to be used as an instructional tool. However, a first pass at it gives the appearance that it might be used this way. Take a look at this screen shot, which gives the generic view for how one regulates access permissions to folders, subfolders, and files. In the menu bar you can see an icon for adding users or groups. You should also see the Read, Write, etc. check boxes that control which permissions the users have. It certainly gives the appearance that the check boxes are independent so, in particular, you might have the Write checkbox checked, with the Read checkbox unchecked. This would be the case if you were trying to use the folder as drop box.

As it turns out, if you do that the users with Write permission do not see the folder they have write permission to. I was told that is a feature, not a bug. I learned this the hard way by having it set up that way only to have my students tell me they couldn’t see their drop box. I couldn’t tell this myself. After they complained, I did verify by using my wife’s account (she is an employee of the University, so I could create a space for her as if she were a student) and based on that the students’ complaints were indeed justified. I then verified this functionality of Xythos with our service manager. But it isn’t in the online Help, so you wouldn’t know it that way. In contrast, the LMS has a student view for designer testing of the course site and that student view is built into the product. Further, I know the WebCT developers are actively working on the assignment drop box functionality to improve the work flow after the submissions have been downloaded (they’ve got the earlier part of the work flow done pretty well right now). So, really, one should use the LMS for this sort of thing.

I am doing something that is certainly out of the ordinary. Because I’m doing this linked spreadsheet system, which allows me to view the submissions of all the student work in one screen where I simply advance a button to see the submission of the next student, and also allows me to readily produce statistics based on the combined submissions, and indeed to distribute this stuff back to the students so they too can see the work of their classmates, there is a lot of setup. Each assignment has a file with a modified file name for each student; a student number is appended at the end of the file name. Then it is important that each student gets the file assigned to him and uploads it into the right place.

This is painful to set up. I have one folder per student for the files they will download and another folder per student so they have an individualized drop box. Each folder has to have permissions set for that one specific student and then I carefully have to move the right files to the folders where the students will download them. I’m doing this now because of the benefits in terms of Just In Time Teaching --- reviewing the student work and then sharing it. Ultimately, I think the LMS could do this better but it doesn’t have the functionality now and what it does have makes it harder for me to adopt my system to it.

Let me switch gears. I’m now getting a little more used to my Mac at the office and some observations about that. If you have a .Mac account and use it for publishing from the desktop, the integration is very tight. To a certain extent it reminds me of my old days in College of Business when they ran a Web server with the Microsoft Frontpage extensions. The big difference with the Mac is that it is smart about the media applications. One can go from iPhoto to Web publishing directly. That is slick.

However this intense integration from desktop to online is anathema to Web 2.0 folks who want everything open and everything to interoperate. For example, see this post by Brian Lamb on the iTunes University project at Stanford and this related post by Gardner Campbell on the entire approach by Apple to podcasting. I also note, in a somewhat related way, some irritation expressed in user comments on Apple’s iLife page about there being no upgrade discount from iLife ’05 to iLife ’06. My own views on this are (1) some disappointment with the iTunes client for not handling all file types that can be podcast (the course blog that I listed earlier has a Feedburner feed to which many zip files are linked and I don’t believe iTunes can handle zip files), but (2) companies are in this for a profit and the world is changing in how they generate revenue. Apple, though not the size of Microsoft, is no start up. It needs to generate revenues for the services it provides. And so far it doesn’t do that with the advertising model. So…………

Let me make one more comment about my new Mac, which is not a comment about Apple but about browsers and Web pages. I’ve got the screen resolution set pretty high but then the minimum font size in the browser set way up, to 16 or 18 point, so I can read it readily. (And similarly with a Word doc I will routinely view at 150% of normal.) I’m not sufficiently technical to understand why Office products have a zoom in the View menu, but browsers don’t. In any event, some Web pages readily accommodate the large point size of the font and are easy to read, but many pages (the ESPN Web site is an example) are designed in a way where the column widths are fixed so that if the font gets bigger it simply overflows into the next column and can obscure links or photos. I could do better, perhaps, by having a lower resolution on the screen, and maybe I will go back to that, but a lot of stuff gets on the screen now and then and its nice to have all the real estate to accommodate that.

One more point. I don’t know whether any of the sensibilities I’m expressing are felt by long time Mac users. My sense is that they are loyal and not critical about what they are being offered up. But I don’t know whether this is because ignorance is bliss or if they’ve just got a different take on the issues I’ve described.

Class Size and Lectures

Before I got into online technology but after I got married (1990 – 95), I spent a good deal of my teaching time with intermediate microeconomics. It was not very satisfying. Part of this was the student motivation. Business students, who were the bulk of the audience, had to take this as a requirement and so they and students who wanted to transfer into the College of Business (at the time many Econ majors from Liberal Arts and Sciences were in this category) took the course. Both groups viewed it as a hurdle to overcome and in the main they didn’t like it. This was evidenced by the course evaluation ratings across instructors teaching the course. Everyone scored in the low 3’s or lower (on a 5 point scale), a rating that was poor measured against comparable courses. (I’m not sure what comparable means in this case, but I’ll leave that and hope the reader gets the idea.) As I’ve written elsewhere, my experience was to have a few students who really liked what I was doing and thought it was great, a bunch more who hung in there, and then a number who “fell over the cliff,” measured by exam performance. In terms of what these kids got out of the course to affect their thinking afterwards, I’m not sure there was much of a distinction between those in the latter two categories.

This experience provided me with many reasons to reflect on teaching and all the various issues involved – the role of math in teaching economics, whether students should be forced into taking required courses that they themselves don’t endorse, the obligations that students take upon themselves as a consequence of enrolling in a course, and a host of others.

Here, however, I want to consider class size. Most of the time I taught in a classroom with amphitheater seating that had a capacity of about 65. I was the best of the worst, meaning while the students taking intermediate micro thought it was a pits, being required to take it they wanted into my section over other instructors, so I started off with full capacity. I might lose 5 or 6 of those by the time the semester ended. I don’t have good recall about class attendance, but I don’t think it was a major issue.

At the time, it never would have occurred to me that any of the teaching and learning issues I had were a consequence of having so many students – offering this course as a seminar didn’t seem like a possibility and certainly in the principles classes we were offering huge lectures with 10 times as many students. So I just took the class size as a fact of the environment.

I have many colleagues who advocate for online teaching, and in that environment 20 is a large class and most don’t recommend going beyond 25. But because teaching is allocated by “load” where in my unit the standard load was 2 courses a semester, in our residential instruction world we’re more apt to see classes of size 65 (or somewhat larger) rather than a plethora of sections sized 22 or so. From the point of view of both instructor time commitment and also freshness in teaching the material, teaching the class with 65 for three hours a week is better than teaching the 3 sections of the class with 22 students per section for a total of nine hours a week. Indeed, as a consequence of the tight budgets on campus the last few years, the biggest area of growth for classroom use is for rooms in the size range 60 – 110. How does one teach a class of that size well?

On the flip side of that, however, the university needs to be the agent of the students as well as of the faculty. Suppose that students prefer the classes in the size range of 22 or so because those classes enable more give and take, even if those are taught by less high paid faculty (but if you get the drift those faculty must be paid on the order of 1/3 of what I’m paid to make this a break even proposition financially or teaching loads must rise dramatically among research faculty, implying less time allocated to the research). Wearing my economist hat, an efficient solution for high enrollment course rubrics would be to offer both alternatives and have and exchange rate for compensating instructors (e.g., 1 section of size 65 gives the same teaching credit as 1.5 sections of size 22, where that number 1.5 is the exchange rate) and a different rate for students (e.g., opting for the 65 seat section for this course increases the likelihood that you can get into a small section of some other course next semester, and graduating seniors get lowest priority on small sections unless they’ve already banked higher priority). One could then “let the market” determine the relative frequency of the two types of offerings. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll see this any time soon. But even if we did, it still begs the question about how do to a good job teaching the larger class.

I’d like to break that up into two parts. The first part is an instructor mindset issue. When most instructors lecture they think about teaching in terms of what they deliver in the classroom and they focus on the delivery. In so doing they don internalize fully, if at all, the student experience as the student goes about learning the subject matter of the course. Suppose we can change the instructor mindset. The second part is on whether lectures still make sense and if so what should the lecture be on and how should it be delivered.

Apart from the folks who teach Physics and advocate for Just In Time Teaching, I don’t know anyone who has really asked this in a serious way. I think there is quite a bit to JITT (and some related ideas about using “clickers” in the classroom) but either a somewhat different tact must be used for a large lecture course in American History or and Intro to Philosophy course, or one may be forced into arguing that in courses where there are “right answers” the approach can work but in courses where there are “points of view” the lecture becomes difficult. So I’d like to bring to the fore both sides of that.

It’s easy to describe he internalizing the student issue. Let the instructor envision herself as the student and let the instructor describe what it is that she would do if she were a student in the class and had to learn the course material. Many instructors have the (naïve) expectation that the students will do just that. One of the great things about learning technology is that it provides evidence of student learning (and non-learning) to dissuade instructors from this naïve view. Most students will do something other than how the instructor would go about the task simply because most students are not destined to become instructors and they don’t have that type of mindset.

It will be harder for the instructor to give an informed opinion of what the students actually do, but for the sake of argument here let’s say the instructor can learn this from dialog with the students outside the class setting. Confronted with a dissonance between the student behavior the instructor would like to see and what actually occurs, the instructor can then ask how can the student behavior be moved closer to the ideal, using in class activities, out of class assignments, individual work, group work, etc. – all instruments at the instructors disposal. When the instructor has thought long and hard about this, then the instructor is internalizing as I’ve described. It is then a matter of repeated experimentation with method and approach to get to a good point in the teaching. That won’t happen all at once when the instructor has the “AHA!” that she must internalize the student learning. But the instructor will be well on the way.

So now let’s assume the instructor has had the AHA moment. Can the instructor continue to embrace lecture? There are certainly things about lecture as it is now commonly practiced that I think should be abandoned. Lecture as the student’s initial foray into the subject, without the student doing prior reading or other preparation for the live class session seems particularly wasteful. That type of stuff can be put on line and then serve for some students as an alternative to reading the text.

But if not that, then what should the instructors lecture on? I believe some suggestions can be indirectly garnered from the research on how students learn and then the instructor can try to design the lecture based on the principles articulated there. But that may still be too abstract for some teachers. So, personally, I prefer to ask this particular question. There is a well understood distinction between novice and expert in that a novice has one view of an idea and struggles to maintain and apply that one view while an expert has multiple views of an idea and effortlessly moves between the various representations. So the teacher (presumably an expert in the subject) should ask, what is that one view that students have and what are the next steps toward broadening that perspective?

My friend Peggy Lant used to tell me that good instruction is modeling for the students. We instructors should model taking that next step along the novice-expert continuum. We should lecture about that. We should also lecture about taking a wrong step and then back tracking. We should do a lot more of that especially to convince students that we are not oracles and that we learn just as they do.

Can this be done effectively in lecture? I hope so and I believe so, but I don’t know so. I’m teaching now but I’ve opted to teach a small seminar not a large lecture class and I haven’t taught a large class in 5 years. So I don’t have first hand experience with which to resolve the question.

It has become almost shameful to advocate for the lecture – it is so teacher centric, students are too disengaged, it is not active learning. Unquestionably there is some truth to the critique, but it doesn’t fully resonate with me. I’ve had some excellent professors when I was an undergrad and I thoroughly enjoyed their lectures. If the form itself is lacking, how could this have been possible? I know that I went out of my way to attend lectures that I thought would be enlightening, without any course grade depending on it or the need to fill a prerequisite, just to learn. And I’m sure I’m not alone in that experience.

Shouldn’t it be possible to capture some of that even with students who are not destined for the professoriate, if the instructor is attuned to the issues?

On Acting and Learning and Effective Teaching

Last night after the Bear game concluded (odd that the both road teams won in this round of the playoffs) I watched Ralph (rhymes with waif) Fiennes on Inside the Actors Studio. He was interesting to watch because he has played such horrible characters (the Nazi in Schindler’s List, the serial killer in Red Dragon, and of course Valdemort in the latest Harry Potter movie) and yet seemed so genuinely humble and vulnerable. Indeed, his representation of good acting experiences featured these aspects: openness, a willingness to take risks, unanticipated outcomes from trying new approaches, and, particularly from his female co-stars, a sense of humor to acknowledge situations where each was particularly vulnerable. In Fiennes view, good directors are those who promote this sort of environment.

It is tempting to envision teaching a course from this point of view, with the teacher as director and the students as actors, in which case one of the prime teaching questions must be this. How do I, as the teacher, get the students to open up? What activities can I design to get the students to explore and take risks?

Let’s leave that for a moment and come back to it. Actors and Directors have their preferences in alignment to the extent that both want to see a good movie made. Focusing on the student work, there is a similar alignment. But teachers often focus on their own presentations in class and because teachers assign grades to students the power relationship between teacher and students is different from the relationship between director and actors. So an important related question is how to move that teacher-student relationship more toward the collaborative director-actor relationship and away from the exertion of arbitrary authority that might very well act as an inhibitor rather than a spur to student risk taking.

To the extent that class size matters in teaching, I think this is one big reason. In large classes it is harder for the instructor to move outside this authoritative role. In smaller classes it is easier for the instructor to act as collaborator with the students. And, not surprisingly, it is easier for there to be meaningful dialog in small classes. I note this because I want to focus on method and using learning technology to make the instructor more like the director, and abstract from the class size issue.

It seems to me that innovative teachers in the humanities might ask this question but those in engineering, the sciences, or the social sciences would be less prone to pose a good teaching question in this form. But perhaps now the learning technology can make the question seem sensible, even in these other disciplines.

Suppose that students do project work and that the deliverable is a podcast, a vidcast, a multimedia presentation with PowerPoint, or some other format in which the students of necessity provide a performance as part of the project deliverable. Suppose that deliverable is “viewed” by other students, in a manner similar to the way we view films (but perhaps we encourage students to play the role of the critic in their viewing of other student productions). Does it then make sense to cast the role of instructor as director?

If the instructor is to do this seriously, then the instructor must put attention into it and thus must take attention away from something else, notably the presentations the instructor makes. It would then seem that this approach makes sense only if the instructor comes to the conclusion that the students learn what they need to master by being performers about their projects rather than being exposed to instructor presentation.

Actors don’t just act. They do a lot of preparation for their roles. They do research. Fiennes talked about doing this for the role of Francis Dolarhyde, the serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy, who had trauma during childhood because of sexual abuse. That was the root cause for his horrendus behavior. The research as preparation for performance seems akin if not identical to the research students should do as they work through their project. So the wrinkle here, something that now doesn’t seem so out of the usual, is to add performance into the delivery of the project. The performance should encourage student engagement and should help the students understand there is an audience for their work.

I believe this can be done irrespective of discipline, but does require imagination on behalf of the instructor. It also requires devoting considerable time to getting the students to prepare for the roles and for the instructor to deliver directions to the students qua actors.

I wonder how many instructors might try something like this.

The Virtual University Conundrum

My campus is the Land Grant University for the state. We have a still new president, B. Joseph White, and one of the things he’d like to see is for the University (which currently is a 3-campus system) to be doing online learning big time via a fourth campus that is totally online. I’ve heard him speak about such efforts as being 21st century approaches to address the original ideal of the land grant university, providing educational services to all citizens of the state and indeed projecting our university and our state on a global stage. This is a noble vision.

But there is a difference between providing an education program for all citizens, such as with basic information about gardening, that traditionally has been the mission of the campus Extension service, and providing degree programs or certificate programs to students where tuition covers at least part of the cost and where these students are at least partly motivated by the degree or certificate improving their prospects in the labor market. My campus is highly selective. We don’t admit anyone out there for such a degree. Indeed, we turn away a lot of people. (And to the extent that admission has gotten even more competitive over time, this has rankled many who feel they or their offspring should be entitled to enter the university.) So issue number one with a virtual university is which one is it, a 21st century version of Extension or an online alternative of a prestigious degree granting institution? In other words, does it let everyone in or does it have selective admission?

Issue number two, which I believe applies to professional education in general but may be exacerbated in the virtual university case, as I elaborate below, is on the relative importance of having research faculty versus clinical faculty doing the instruction and indeed how much the curriculum is tied to research versus how much the curriculum is tied toward current practice in the field. This matters in several ways. It affects the cost of the instruction particularly with respect to whether tenure track faculty or adjuncts are doing the teaching, the market value of the degree or certificate, the extent to which the program can scale, how student centric the instruction will be, and how much competition there will be from other virtual universities.

A crass view, which I myself can slip into fairly easily, is that my university’s reputation is built on its research success (we take every possible opportunity to mention the Nobel Prize winners on the faculty when we promote the place) and for marketing purposes the research tie to instruction may be emphasized, but for practical reality and having programs that make business sense, courses that are part of a program will be designed by a team and then will be taught by adjuncts who get trained in the approach of the course. The adjuncts may very well have been researchers once and now have moved on to teaching or they can be folks who’ve already had a career in industry and have now moved on to online teaching. But they are not engaged in current research and they are not actively in communication with the faculty who are doing current research. In other words, there is a severance between the research and the instruction in deed but not in the marketing of the program.

There are two ways to be less crass. First, be up front that clinical faculty will be used and market the program accordingly. Don’t try to rely on a historic reputation that is based on assumptions not relevant to the virtual university situation. Second, really do engage active researchers in virtual university instruction. I’m agnostic about the second approach so I’ll discuss the first.

I believe one can get quite good instruction with clinical faculty doing the teaching and I know within the MBA world that some have argued for that type of instruction being more useful to the students than what they are taught by the research faculty. But I’m far less sure that such instruction should be done by not-for-profit universities and particularly public universities. The biggest argument for, that I can see and so far I’ve not heard many people make this argument, is that clinical faculty are a good thing not just for professional education but also for residential, undergraduate instruction. To date, the arguments I’m seeing are that having research faculty teach undergrads is the ideal, but for cost reasons we need to go the other way on occasion and then, maybe, in some make or break large intro courses people who teach those courses perhaps should know more about student issues in transitioning from high school to college rather than know about current research issues in the field. Otherwise, the clinical faculty idea hasn't really come up in the undergraduate context.

If clinical faculty are and remain mostly outside the culture of the R1 type of university, however, what mechanisms are there for these institutions to assure quality in instruction, both curriculum-wise and delivery-wise? Doesn’t one need a setting where the clinical faculty member is a main part of institutional culture to get the requisite quality? And if so, what type of institution can provide that culture? It looks like University of Phoenix can, but I'd bet we cannot.

Issue number three, particularly in my state which is seeing declines in state funding of higher education, is that any new virtual university will require substantial start up funds and if one looked from where those funds might arise, an obvious answer is that the money would come from funds already earmarked for higher education and in that sense would be a tax on existing programs. I believe many on my campus view the possibility of the fourth campus this way and hence feel angry about the initiative because it seems so insensitive to current residential campus needs.

The obvious solution to this, and I’ve heard President White talk directly on this point, is for the virtual university to be a for profit venture that can raise capital in other ways. I do believe that the fourth campus would be perceived in a much more welcome light on my campus if it went this route for the start up funds. But, as with the clinical faculty issue, I don’t then understand why then the affiliation with the University of Illinois is needed and why not, instead, be an entirely separate private venture.

Issue number four, which is the one I’ll close on, is defining the real goal of the university and asking whether it is something that we can expect to achieve, or if instead there is some wishful thinking acting as the driver and that is creating an unreality about what might be delivered. Consider these two distinct alternatives. First there is a high tuition, restrictive admission approach. Second there is a low tuition, open to all approach. My economics knowledge tells me the first is one that can produce high value in the labor market for the graduates while the second can produce a scalable solution that enrolls thousands and thousands of students. But, there is no free lunch. You can’t get both. Certainly, you can’t get both easily. However, the rhetoric behind the fourth campus seems to be saying that we want to produce both outcomes. I find that troubling.

I’ve not said one whit about learning technology in this post. I really don’t think that is the issue. From my perspective the technology used in online instruction and in on ground instruction is converging if not altogether identical at present. But on these non-technology issues, there seems to be a big gap. I hope those involved in the planning for the fourth campus can be more explicit about what is likely to emerge before the fourth campus becomes a done deal. I’m not wanting to block the effort. I’d just like to see these issues thought through and brought out into the open.

Teaching Practical Stuff

I’ve been working on my Econ 101 course and this morning finished up the content survey on Stock Markets. My sense is that this particular module goes over quite well because it has a lot of info that students want. For example, they want an academic who doesn’t have a stake with them as a financial adviser to tell them that they can’t outperform the market on a consistent basis. And they want to understand why stock market prices change, whether there really are “bubbles” or if that is some psychological rationalization of a statistical artifact, and then want some nuts and bolts on things like how to read a stock quote. There is no question in my mind that the kids want to learn these things.

There is, however, a big question in my mind about whether my colleagues would think teaching this stuff is appropriate for such a class or if, instead, the students should be expected either to know this already or to learn it on their own. I really haven’t had such a conversation with Econ colleagues, but I’ve been through quite a few discussions on the analogous issue with respect to student computer skills, for example, in terms of making Web pages. There is a bit of a disconnect between the Computer Science faculty, who think we should be teaching the students stuff they really should have learned in K-12 and faculty elsewhere on campus, who themselves might not be so computer literate and who are exposed to some fraction of their student audience who are lacking in technical literacy. There is a lot of rhetoric under the umbrella – offering a course that is worthy of a U of I degree – and a strong feeling among the faculty that if the course is not worthy the students should take it at Parkland (the local Community College).

I’ve crossed that divide in my course but want to note it because teaching practical stuff is something out of the ordinary here. So there isn’t a lot of expertise to appeal to nor is there obvious best practice, at least as far as I’m aware. I should also say I’m far from an expert on personal finance and hence I don’t want to claim that my content survey is anything special in that regard. But I do want to make explicit some things I tried to do, in an effort to move toward what might be best practice with this type of material. What follows is an annotated list of my approach.

Philosophy – My approach is to assume that the students could sit down and learn this stuff on their own if they chose to do that. So what I’m trying to do is give them a focus and a reason for completing this module. (They get course credit for doing so.) Quite frequently, students will do required course work without ever asking why they are being expected to do that work.

Use Content Provided by the Feds – It turns out that The Securities and Exchange Commission has some really nice Web pages explaining how various stock market institutions work. Part of their role as watchdog and regulator is to educate the public, because the smarter the public is, the harder it is for the insiders to commit fraud. The SEC docs are written in a common sense style that is quite readable. This really is a good way to self-teach, but I doubt the students would stumble on these pages on their own, even if they were otherwise interested in the stock market and so did read a book on investment (as I recommended that they should).

Use Freely Available Online Tools for Nuts and Bolt Experience - I’ve got a link to the Nasdaq so the students can do their own stock lookup and learn to read the information that is provided. Of course, anybody who has done trading of financial assets will know this already. And this may seem a trivial point. But if a student hasn’t done this before, there likely is learning value for its own sake and it is relevant to the next point.

Tie the practical knowledge to the underlying theoretical issues – In this case one of the theoretical issues is to reconcile equilibrium trading with price variation over time. To do that, one first needs to provide evidence that prices do vary over time. Such evidence comes from the stock lookup. So that directly fits in with the rest of the economics I’m trying to teach.

Bring in expertise from famous academics – Eugene Fama’s name is mentioned explicitly as the father of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and there is some discussion as to what that means. Other finance experts from academia are mentioned in linked article about why the efficient market hypothesis has to be modified to accommodate facts that are known about the stock market.

Provide some institutional detail that is meant as a stand alone – In this case there is a discussion of stock indices that almost certainly the students will have heard of already, so the module helps to expand their understanding, but there is nothing else in the entire course that depends on knowing about stock indices.

Don’t drill down too far – because this is a self-help topic that some of the students should be inherently interested in, expect those students to learn more on their own outside of the class setting. That’s ok. This module is only an introduction into the subject.

On Elegance in Content Design and Learning Objects

Over the years, I’ve made a fair amount of content for my Econ courses and at one point I considered making an alternative to a textbook that would be composed entirely with different type of modules in Excel. (I might still do that in the not too distant future, depending in part on how much progress I make with the course I’m teaching this spring.) Based on that activity and previous content creation activities I’ve been involved with, I feel comfortable asserting:

(a) My graphical design skills are rudimentary at best. I might benefit from some formal instruction in graphical design. But, in truth, my interest does not lie in trying to make my content “look slick” so that as long as I feel the look is functional, I’m ok with that. I have learned something about having borders and white space on the page and not jamming in too much stuff into a small spatial area. I’m probably more textual and less image intensive than suits the medium. Given that, I can make something that is passable.

(b) I have a pretty well honed instinct on how to represent the economic ideas into elegant representations that really should help the students visualize what is going on. This is both difficult, because it really does require out of the box thinking, and fun and rewarding when something has been produced, because there is then visual evidence of how these representations improve on the understanding of the economics. This started back when I did Excelets and it has carried over into what I’ve done more recently. I’ve gotten better at it and more sophisticated in my design.

When I speak of elegance in design, I’m speaking about (b). That is representation of ideas that are good for the novice to understand what is going on. I believe that elegance in design facilitates deep learning of the ideas and I believe further that we should be talking more about this when we advise instructors on making their materials. Elegance and simplicity need to be considered as cousins if not as identical twins. But elegance is far from making things simple minded. Indeed, I believe it is only through an elegant design that depth and complexity can be brought in. Otherwise, complex ideas that are presented seem too hard and impenetrable and will be off putting to the students. Then there is no learning, just pretensions, and it is likely that the designer will develop contempt for the students, blaming the learners for the non-learning.

I want to ask here whether the notion of elegance in content design aligns with the concept of modularity that we associate with learning objects. Let me see if I can sketch the issue. Certain concepts are derivative. They depend on more primitive concepts. To understand the notion of a molecule, there must first be the notion of an atom. In the economics of supply and demand before understanding how a change in the price in one market affects the price in another market, there must first be the notion of equilibrium in a single market. Every subject has examples of this sort.

Now consider the case where those more primitive notions “may” be developed in earlier modules, and note that the use of the word “may” is deliberate. If the content is interconnected in this way at a conceptual level, is it still correct to think of it as modular? An appropriate metaphor to consider is chapters in a textbook which, for example, can each be stored as a its own PDF file. Does the ability to make those chapters into PDFs mean the content is modular? Or must they be read in a prescribed order where later chapters depend on earlier ones?

A correct response is, “maybe” or, “it depends.” When there is no conceptual dependence then yes, I would agree the content is modular, but otherwise not. Actually, the issue is a bit more subtle than that. The question is not just dependency but rather whether there is dependency on ideas/jargon/framework that may be non-standard in such a course. So the real issue is whether a non-standard approach (meaning different from the way it has been done traditionally) can be developed that is also modular. Why does this matter?

Suppose others wanted to try out my content to see if it is useful, but they didn’t want to use it all, just some of it. In particular, what they want to do is to replace some part of the textbook they are using that they find less than satisfactory. Isn’t it more natural to experiment that way than to fully embrace an alternative right out of the box?

But now suppose my elegant module is dependent on some primitive ideas from earlier modules that these other instructors are unlikely to teach. For example, in this module on Supply and Demand that I developed some time ago, the penultimate worksheet entitled, Scale, does a nice graphical technique to visualize how an economy gets bigger by making replicas of existing buyers or sellers but who are some different in their valuations from the agents they were based upon. This is done in a precise way under the hood that in the exercise is explained to the students by the expression “filling in the gaps.” This is a nonstandard development of the idea but it is quite intuitive and gives the correct core notion of what is meant by a competitive market. I am proud of that particular worksheet because of this development.

Now, suppose I make a different module on Elasticity of Supply and Demand and, consistent with trying to maintain elegance in design, I want to base the development on the ideas that were introduced in that Scale worksheet. This seems good and correct to me for teaching my own students. But it means somebody else who might try to use my stuff and wants the elasticity module, but not the supply and demand module may be out of luck.

To complete the cycle in this thinking, suppose my own sense of development is driven by the possibility of external use. This could be driven by a desire to make money selling the modules I’ve created or it could be driven simply by a sense that the effort is of value if there is this type of social utility, but not otherwise. (In other words, the motives should be pretty much the same as why faculty author textbooks.) That means I the author might be concerned about the external use at the time of the writing, and therefore might want to accommodate it out of the box.

So what should I do? My inclination now is to please myself in the design and then encourage anyone else who wants to use it to try it all. But that is the typical ego-centric approach and I’m not sure it is self-sustaining.