tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922262135446903512024-03-18T02:48:15.849-07:00Adventures in Blended LearningJen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.comBlogger154125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-83755723583307214662015-07-09T15:35:00.003-07:002015-07-09T16:07:47.800-07:00Guest Post: A Day in the Life of an Online Rome Instructor<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image Source: http://nabeeloo.com/2013/02/teaching-problems-teaching-online-is-different/</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline;">Now that I have finished the development phase of Online Rome and have entered into the far more complicated process of implementing a course that, by design, I am not teaching, I am encountering numerous obstacles. Lack of infrastructure and policies is the most significant obstacle. A complete ignorance of online pedagogy--and, especially, the time it takes to instruct a successful online course--is running a close second. I am stunned at the number of "deciders" who assume that online=automated. There is a clear assumption that, somehow, teaching online requires none of the intensive work (and then some) that teaching f2f does. Partly in an effort to address this assumption, I asked the instructor of the Online Rome course to write up a post about his experience of teaching the course. I asked him to approach it as "a day in the life," to give both administrators and potential online course instructors a sense of what it takes to teach online. It is my hope that, at some point, enough people will have experience with online instruction that these ridiculous assumptions about it will fade away. Until then, however, it is important for everyone to understand the tremendous amount of time and effort it takes to manage an online class, work with students at a distance, and keep the technology running. What follows is a post by Dr. Steve Lundy: </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline;">By
way of introduction, I didn't come to this course as a specialist in
online teaching. My initiation into online course development was a
happy accident of my growing dissatisfaction with the conventional
academic career path, and contributing to the Online Rome project
provided the perfect alt-ac opportunity which has continued to return
high yields as intellectual endeavor and professional trajectory. I
started work on Introduction to Ancient Rome Online in summer 2014 as a
developer, but by the end of the summer I had acquired a good
understanding of the course and its mechanics, and made the transition
to instructing the course in its first iteration. As with all pilot
courses, online or otherwise, much of that semester was a crash-course
for us in identifying what worked and what didn't; for Spring 2015, we
refined our model, eliminated elements that distracted students from
more important course goals, and made key additions (like short essays).
We also made the decision to cap the course at a much more manageable
figure, which allowed us to focus more on student experience and
student-teacher interactions. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline;">By
the end of the academic year we had developed a strong course design
which, we felt, was ready to be reiterated with new instructors at the
helm. A successful transition of this sort includes being able to
anticipate many of the major challenges and opportunities of online
instruction. With the work we have done this year, we're in a good
position to do this. After the frenetic first semester, I found that my
work week gradually settled into a satisfying and challenging routine,
with structured opportunities for interacting with students and moving
them efficiently through the work. Beyond office hours and emails, there
are a few ways to communicate with students: through Canvas
announcements, which I sent about three times a week; through Piazza,
the online discussion board; and through an f2f review held once a week,
which was also live-streamed and archived on the course website. The
last of these was a new addition to the Spring iteration, and was
successful enough to be continued and expanded for future iterations:
although a solid core of around 10% of students showed up in person
week-on-week, about a third of the class watched online regularly, with
spikes around major assignments and exams. I'd like to see this kind of
work be developed even further, with different kinds of f2f groups
appearing, like instructor-led reading groups and instructor-less study
groups -- the more participation the groups include, however, the harder
it becomes to make sure online students have equal opportunities to
attend and take part.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline;">The
largest part of my teaching time was taken up with grading student
essays. In the first semester of the course, we designed discussion
groups to be moderated in Piazza, but it was difficult to encourage
students to take these interactive exercises seriously. In the Spring,
these were replaced with essays, which students had to write for every
other module, based on randomly allocated sections; this meant that
around 50 out of 100 students were submitting essays every 10 days or
so. Especially compared to the Piazza-based discussions in the Fall, I
was consistently impressed with the quality of these submissions, which
demonstrated a good amount of care and comprehension. Since I wasn't
preparing and giving lectures, I also felt like I had more time to give
substantial feedback than I have done in many of my f2f classes,
offering detailed comments to students on matters of both content and
style. The technology assisted this work, and the "Speedgrader" function
on Canvas quickly became my favorite feature. Speedgrader allows for
various kinds of interlinear comments on the paper, as well as overall
comments, which function itself could become the basis for a
conversation with the student. Over the course of the semester, I got
pretty good mileage out of this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline;">The
other major part of my work was ongoing development. Although I had
drafted and implemented around a third of the course material over the
preceding summer, this work needed to be revised and refined as we
worked through both semesters. When the final drafts were produced, I
took on the role of copy-editor, including checking for consistency and
accuracy in multiple choice and short answer questions. The other major
part of this ongoing development was maintaining our archive of
podcasts, both writing scripts and recording them at the Liberal Arts IT
Services (LAITS) studio. This proved a tremendously enjoyable part ofmy
work week, in no small part because of the outstanding staff, sound
engineers, and student assistants who work at LAITS. Podcasts feature
prominently in our course design, because they are a simple and
cost-effective way to convey complex information efficiently and in an
attractive way. </span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline;">There
are several challenges ahead, as we transition the course out of its
initial development phase and into a regularly offered course with a
rotating instructional team. I will continue to work with this team in a
developmental capacity, but I will not be leading a course myself. This
may make it more difficult to experience how evolutions of the course
design are felt on the ground, and we do not plan to make too many
changes in the first post-development year. That said, the course is
designed to be continuously evolving to accommodate instructors'
personalities and student needs; I'm keen to see how we might
reincorporate peer-to-peer interactions in the mode of the old Piazza
discussion boards, since in the current model there is no strong (i.e.
graded) basis for student collaboration. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline;">That said, even contemplating
that kind of evolution feels unusual: in the past, when I have finished
work on a course one semester, I don't have much input into how it is
run subsequently; here, it feels like we're in continuous development,
building in the cumulative experiences of teachers and students as an
integral part of the model. This is certainly a concept I'm keen to
carry forward into any f2f teaching I'm doing, as well as my new role in
the development of UT's Online Latin program.</span></div>
Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com74tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-66626743749624385952015-06-12T12:08:00.003-07:002015-06-12T12:16:14.169-07:00Formative Assessment and Mastery Learning in Online Rome<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f8487F0-hpU/VXIBj_WruOI/AAAAAAAAAs4/Lbx0KxXNIuI/s1600/Formative%2BAssessment%2BMastery%2BLearning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f8487F0-hpU/VXIBj_WruOI/AAAAAAAAAs4/Lbx0KxXNIuI/s400/Formative%2BAssessment%2BMastery%2BLearning.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I have no formal training in the discipline of Instructional Design and, when I started the design process for Online Rome, my university did not have any instructional designers who had worked in the online medium. I felt a bit at sea but, intuitively and because I've taught for close to 20 years, I had some ideas about what would work for my content. One thing I did at the start was take nothing as a given. One hears various "rules" like "never make a video/podcast longer than 3-5 minutes." In the end, I found it much more useful to talk to others who had taught either blended or online courses in the humanities; and to go with my gut instincts and then adjust based on student behaviors.<br />
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I approached the design process very thoughtfully and with a clear idea of what I wanted the course to accomplish. I knew that much of it was going to be constructed to train students to be self-regulated learners. I knew that mastery learning and frequent formative assessment would be critical. I knew that a key component was frequent and timely feedback. But I had only a vague idea of how to translate all of these concepts and practices into the course. It was difficult to find clear guidance, mostly because I didn't know who to ask or where to go looking (if only I had started talking shop with Laura Gibbs a few years ago!) Likewise, I did not have charts like the one above sitting in front of me. It turned out that it didn't matter. In fact, my final course design follows Bloom's Mastery Learning Process (MLP) step by step.<br />
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Notably, the first version did not--but, based on student feedback and my own (and the instructor's) sense of how the students were working through the course, we made a number of adjustments to the design. The end result is a design that perfectly models Bloom's MLP. I think there's a useful lesson here: even though faculty often don't know the jargon of instructional design (three years ago, I was a total ignoramus when it came to terms like summative vs formative assessment), thoughtful instructors do understand the concepts and frequently apply them in their teaching. We can pick up the lingo pretty easily with some guidance.<br />
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I will dedicate another post to the roles that frequent and timely feedback; and self-regulated learning played in the course design. In this post, I want to focus on the the process of mastery learning, and how I used it to structure the course modules for Online Rome.<br />
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Each module is sub-divided into several parts, usually 5-6. For each sub-module there are typically some textbook readings (generally quite short). As well, inside the module, students are asked to read and answer questions about primary texts or objects. We included all the readings in a .pdf file on the landing page of each module, so that students could more easily access and review them.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vihh7uRFbLE/VXonZBLa3JI/AAAAAAAAAuo/0d2CALLKK44/s1600/Module%2BReadings.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="272" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vihh7uRFbLE/VXonZBLa3JI/AAAAAAAAAuo/0d2CALLKK44/s400/Module%2BReadings.PNG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Example of Readings in Sub-Modules</td></tr>
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Each sub-module is structured as a mix of questions of various kinds (multiple choice, matching, ranking, short answer) and bits of content "delivery" in the form of links to outside video clips, short podcasts, or blocks of text. There are usually 15-20 questions per sub-module. The sub-module begins with a short introduction to orient students, make connections, and highlight critical issues. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JwnRUvapRuY/VXsJn89MKKI/AAAAAAAAAvA/jglK7eo39X0/s1600/Submodule%2BIntro.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="277" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JwnRUvapRuY/VXsJn89MKKI/AAAAAAAAAvA/jglK7eo39X0/s400/Submodule%2BIntro.PNG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Introduction of sub-module on Tiberius Gracchus</td></tr>
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This constant re-orientation is time-consuming but is an important structural principle. I've found that, especially in online courses, orientation (and the feeling of security that orientation creates for the student) is an essential piece of the puzzle. These frequent re-orientations also provide the designer with the opportunity to re-emphasize important parts from previous sub-modules; and lets us foreshadow things to come. So, in the introduction picture above, we not only introduced the student to Tiberius Gracchus but also to his younger brother Gaius. That way, when the students come to Gaius Gracchus in a later module, they have already been primed to connect him to his brother Tiberius and to think about how their political careers differed.<br />
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We end each sub-module with a short conclusion that summarizes the key points of the sub-module and also points forward to the next sub-module. One reason for including the discussion of what's to come: realizing that students don't necessarily sit down and work through an entire module in one pass. We don't know exactly how they work through the modules--this is information I'd love to have--but it's clear that they tend to do 1-2 sub-modules at a time. So the other purpose of this constant re-orientation is to help them pick up where they left off. If they read a conclusion to a sub-module, they have some sense of what is coming; and then, when they start the next sub-module, and read its introduction, they are re-oriented in the material.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xl5ntx42xH4/VXsQGYqF8OI/AAAAAAAAAvU/pILjESZH_KY/s1600/online%2Brome%2Bcontent.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xl5ntx42xH4/VXsQGYqF8OI/AAAAAAAAAvU/pILjESZH_KY/s400/online%2Brome%2Bcontent.PNG" width="355" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Typical sub-module</td></tr>
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The image above illustrates the organization of a typical sub-module: we ask the students to read a short selection from the biographer Plutarch and then answer a question about the reading. The next question also refers them first to a short reading and then asks a question. These questions are followed by a text block, where we give them more detailed information about Numantia.<br />
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We also included podcasts on a range of topic, in this case the topic is the complex Gracchan Land Reforms. More questions follow the podcast, asking students to apply knowledge they have acquired from readings in the sub-module, podcasts, or text blocks. We often asked multiple questions about important bits of content, with these questions distributed throughout the module. An intial question might only ask the student to recall a fact; subsequent questions would require analysis and application of those facts. As well, towards the end of the modules, we would ask questions that required students to make connections between the bits of content in the sub-module (or even, with content that they had learned in earlier parts of the course). Repetition with variation was a key principle of design in Online Rome. <br />
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As they worked through the sub-module, students received instant feedback from Canvas. They were told whether they got the right answer but, whether their answer was right or wrong, all students received more information about the question in a feedback box. To give one example: A multiple choice questions asks, "According to the Lex Licinia, how much public land could a Roman legally cultivate?" There are five possible answer choices. The feedback box that pops up after the student submits their answer choice elaborates and reinforces the content that the question is testing: "The Lex Licinia allowed all Roman citizens to cultivate up to 500 iugera
(about 300 acres) of public land (ager publicus). This land was owned
by the Roman state but could be used free of charge by citizens to grow
crops."<br />
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In building the course, we used the feedback box strategically, to clarify common misunderstandings, to repeat content that was being tested in the question, and to elaborate on the content. The feedback box was another place where we "delivered" content. We regularly asked questions later in the sub-module from content that was given in the feedback boxes, in part to remind students to read the boxes even if they got the question right.<br />
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To receive full credit for their module work, students had to earn a 90% on the automatically graded questions. They could re-do the submodules as many times as they wanted to, until they were satisfied with their grade. The entire goal was mastery. This was explained to students in the orientation module at the start of the class and repeated several times during the first few weeks. Each module ended with a 15 question graded, MC quiz. A 90% or higher on the graded quiz earned full credit; 70-89% earned half credit. Although the quiz was graded, it was still very low-stakes, ultimately. Students had the opportunity to work through a practice quiz before taking the graded quiz. The practice quizzes usually had 30-50 questions and were useful for assisting students in identifying gaps in their mastery. Several of the questions on the graded quizzes were directly taken from the modules or practice quiz, or were variations that tested the same content. Everything about the module work emphasized mastery of content over grades; and formal assessment was used primarily to motivate students to review and consolidate the content from the module before heading into the more high-stakes midterm exams.<br />
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We did include summative assessments, in part to ensure that students were doing the work themselves and learning the content. If a student was working through the course as it was designed, however, the "high-stakes" midterms would not be exceptionally difficult. They would have had plenty of practice with the content and with answering questions about the content. The other type of summative assessment we included was a short (500-750 word) essay at the end of each module. Each student was required to write five essays over the course of the semester. The essay prompt required students to apply and analyze. But again, the essay prompts were simply extensions of the short answer questions that the student should have answered in the module work. The essay work also helped to prepare the students for the short-answer section of the midterm exams.<br />
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Because orientation and security are key factors for successful student learning in an online class, we found that this emphasis on mastery learning worked extremely well. Our students in the first two iterations of Online Rome demonstrated that they were willing to work hard when expectations and pathways were clearly articulated and rational. They appreciated the progression of activities, the frequent practice and feedback, that supported their mastery of the course content. Interestingly, one of the favorite activities was the essays at the end of the modules--a huge surprise since, in my experience, students don't love to write. But several students from the Spring 2015 iteration mentioned that they liked the essays. I suspect this is because, having mastered the facts and having done some basic analysis, they enjoyed the opportunity to do more in-depth analysis of key concepts/events in the course.<br />
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By building the course around the concept of mastery learning, using frequent formative assessments, and providing instantaneous feedback, we were able to create a comfortable learning environment for students. As well, by including the graded quiz at the end of each module, we incentivized students to consolidate their learning module by module instead of midterm by midterm--and this made a substantial difference in the exam grades of the "middle of the pack" students who tend to perform poorly when they cram for exams. Although the graded quizzes were not worth that much of the final course grade, students took them seriously--the distribution of grades mirrored pretty closely the distributions I see in my f2f classes. In its final version, Online Rome looks very much like its blended counterpart, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>. Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-58910705072904173952015-06-08T12:23:00.000-07:002015-06-08T12:23:04.099-07:00More Thoughts on the Small Pilot vs Immediate Scale-Up Dilemma<div class="post-message " data-role="message" dir="auto">
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I love social media, especially Twitter and blogging, for many reasons but especially for the way that it facilitates the creation of communities dislocated in space. When I first started to experiment with the flipped class model three years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I didn't even know that this thing that I was wanting to do actually had a name and that there were communities of teachers out there who knew a lot about how it worked (mostly in K-12 and in math and sciences, but still). I don't remember exactly why I got on Twitter, but I immediately discovered all sorts of interesting and helpful conversations that I could insert myself into (I also learned, rather quickly, to not be a shy lurker). Since that time, I have benefited enormously from the connections and conversations I've made via Twitter. I can honestly say that I learn something new every single day thanks to the plethora of smart people, through their comments or through their curation of interesting essays, articles, and blog posts. This has been an especially critical outlet for me because my own university is still very much in the preliminary stages of thinking about the kinds of questions that interest me. And, since I'm not an administrator, I'm generally not part of the conversation even at my own university. Twitter is where I've found people who inspire me, engage with me, and help me think through the nuances of different important issues.<br />
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Over the weekend I wrote a post about my own experience of "jumping into the deep end" with course development projects. In both cases, I had planned to do a pilot of the new course and then, over time, scale up the enrollments. In both cases, for different reasons, this isn't how things played out. The first iteration of each project ended up being taught at scale (400 students for the flipped class; about 330 for the online class). I've become convinced that one of the reasons our development process was successful--despite the enormous stress caused by the immediate scale up--is that we were able to troubleshoot very effectively. By the second iteration, we had a class that ran smoothly and produced high levels of learning. Thus, when I watched the <a href="http://mfeldstein.com/nyt-michael-crow-condensed-interview-more-info-needed-and-available/">e-Literate TV case study of ASU</a> and saw that they were embracing a "jump into the deep end" approach, it resonated with me. Likewise, when I read <a href="http://mfeldstein.com/pilots-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-pilots/">Phil Hill's comment</a>s on the "to pilot or not to pilot" question, I was struck by his observation that many pilots on academic campuses end up in what he calls "pilot purgatory" (a fabulous turn of phrase!).<br />
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I was really pleased to see that Matt Reed (aka @deandad) had taken up the issue in his regular column for Inside Higher Education. He made a number of really important points about this important question. Perhaps most usefully, he reminded readers that context matters. When talking about a single course that is largely self-contained and not especially resource-intensive, the immediate scale-up makes more sense (in my case, the additional resources required were negligible); but if the project is costly and depends on the collaboration of multiple units, taking it a bit slower often makes sense. Likewise, if total failure is a real possibility and if people can be irreversibly harmed by that failure, then common sense and basic morality dictates a slower development process. The main dilemma is distinguishing between projects that would benefit from a faster scale-up; and projects that, for various reasons, need to be developed more slowly and under less risky and potentially chaotic circumstances.<br />
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It is great to see a nice conversation developing from e-Literate's ASU case study. The question of how to develop projects, and especially how to do first iterations, is a major one on campuses these days. It seems to me that this conversation has gone a long way towards helping experimenters make informed choices. <br />
One thing that came up in a Twitter exchange between me and Phil Hill: industry is much more willing to take risks in developing new projects. Academia tends to be extremely conservative and, in general, fails to understand the cycle of iteration. Academics (and administrators) see any kind of failure as a bug instead of a feature. Failure is how we learn. <br />
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Yet it is difficult for professors to put something out there that is not, in their mind, perfect. It is even more difficult for them to deal with the inevitable setbacks and obstacles that arise during the first iteration of a new course design (including basic student resistance to change). Thus, a lot of money is spent to develop projects and get them to the testing phase. Yet very few ever reach the "developed" stage. It is challenging for faculty to change their mindset, to understand that everything we do--including our teaching--is a work in progress and should be constantly evolving. One of the great gifts of my experience with these course development process is an increased tolerance for error; and decreased perfectionism. It can be incredibly difficult to put something out that you know isn't as good as it could be--but to accept that the fastest way to improve it is to just put it out there and let people go at it. But this gets easier, as one understands that it is just part of the process. <br />
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Matt is absolutely correct about the risks of running a project at scale that requires lots of collaboration across different parts of the institution. With my flipped class, everything was very self-contained. I could handle problems myself. With the online class, I was suddenly trying to collaborate with a number of units across campus to keep things running: the registrar, the deans in my College, IT/Canvas support, my department, our Extended Campus school; our Liberal Arts Development Studio staff, and my instructor. It was nothing short of a circus, especially because the first iteration of the online class happened to coincide with a big increase in the number of faculty using Canvas as their LMS. Canvas crashed a few times during the semester and had a number of odd but critical glitches. <br />
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It was not easy to try to keep everything running and ensure that everyone was doing what they needed to be doing. Balls definitely got dropped. It didn't help that I ended up having unplanned surgery in early November and was out of commission for about three weeks. One thing I noticed, however, was that it was easier to get these different units to stop dragging their feet and take action precisely because we were live with over 300 students. They knew that if they didn't do their job, a large number of students were going to be adversely affected. So, while it can be a massive challenge to get all these different partners pulling their weight, it was actually a bit easier to pressure them when so many students were involved. It certainly put an enormous amount of pressure on me, as project leader, to ensure that everything got done and no major balls got dropped; and I spent a lot of time nagging people (and, I'm sure, annoyed many administrators!). Still, in the end, I was able to get things done--largely, I think, because so much was at stake.<br />
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There are absolutely times when it makes sense to hold back and develop ideas more incrementally. At the same time, it seems that too often,
the default is to start with the small pilot with the plan of figuring
out how to scale up someday. I suspect that more of these pilots would take hold if a more
aggressive experimental process was followed; and if faculty were more willing to embrace a tolerance for failure (or, rather, see failure as an essential part of the process).</div>
Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-40584737856185879682015-06-06T14:53:00.004-07:002015-06-08T10:03:19.067-07:00Scaling Up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CYMgn_oOmfk/VXNS_56imaI/AAAAAAAAAto/ed9nfWl8_Yk/s1600/Jen%2BScaling%2BUp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CYMgn_oOmfk/VXNS_56imaI/AAAAAAAAAto/ed9nfWl8_Yk/s400/Jen%2BScaling%2BUp.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Teaching a large enrollment class (250+ students), whether in a classroom or online, is not unlike herding cats. Actually, based on my considerable personal experience in both activities, I'd choose herding cats over the challenges of managing the logistics of a large enrollment class any day. Shake a bag of treats and the cats come running. Large classes, well, they take quite a bit more effort to prevent a decline into total chaos. <br />
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Earlier this week, I watched e-Literate TV's latest installment on <a href="http://mfeldstein.com/release-of-asu-case-study-on-e-literate-tv/">personalized learning at Arizona State University</a> with quite a lot of interest. While I recognize the deeply concerning labor issues that underpin the ASU model, and hope that over time a more just staffing model is implemented, especially with regard to non-tenure track faculty; I also find Michael Crow's efforts to create the New American (Public) University compelling (see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/12edl-12talk.html?_r=0">this condensed interview</a> in the New York Times about his plans and motivations). There's no question that the public university, even flagships like my own, are undergoing slow but fairly extreme transformations. I like a lot of what Crow is doing, not least of which is emphasizing broad access without losing sight of the need to provide intensive support for many of these students who would not otherwise have had access to a four-year university. I admire the clarity of his approach and the creative solutions he has found to create new revenue streams in the face of ever-shrinking state appropriations.<br />
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He is operating under extremely difficult circumstances, but takes that as a challenge. He has a "take no prisoners" mentality, and he has the decided advantage of being at least five years further along in the process of evolution than just about any other institution. He was already taking the first steps to re-imagine and re-invent the American (Public) University while most public universities (and their leadership) were unaware of how rapidly the landscape of higher education was shifting--and would continue to shift--even as the economy has begun to recover. Many academics are critical of his vision. For his part, Crow seems oblivious to his critics and powers ahead with his plans. It seems that, about once a month, a new partnership or initiative is announced by ASU.<br />
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Crow has hired some very smart and experienced people to help him realize his transformative vision for ASU (and the people of Arizona). In watching Phil Hill interview Adrien Sannier and others to capture ASU's approach to personalized learning, I was deeply impressed by several things. But what stood out the most was the rejection of the traditional "small pilot" model of course development. <a href="http://mfeldstein.com/pilots-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-pilots/">Phil Hill</a> nicely captures Timothy Harfield's rejection of the standard pilot model--and his own observations about the general failure of this model to lead to sustaining innovations. Typically, experimental course designs are piloted to small numbers of students, with the aim of identifying problems before "scaling up." At ASU, when it came to implementing their remedial math course (and, I gather, other similar courses), they skipped the piloting stage and jumped straight to scale. This is exactly the way to do it. [But see <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/creating-emergencies">Matt Reed's thoughtful response</a> in Inside Higher Education, including his important point that--in some circumstances--it does make sense to start small, especially when taking on complicated projects that involve collaboration across several different parts of the institution.]<br />
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By accident, my own course development projects have both followed this same pattern. The first time, when I flipped my Introduction to Ancient Rome course, I had planned to teach it to 200 students; but ended up with an enrollment of 400 students when my university needed more seats in introductory level courses. I had no idea what I was getting into, and the extra 200 students added about 5 times as much work and complexity to the logistics of the course. While it was, without question, a very challenging semester, the advantages of going straight to scale were quickly apparent: every problem became evident very quickly; we were pushed to maximize efficiency in every aspect of the course; we received a tremendous amount of feedback on every part of the course. I spent the winter break retooling the course based on the feedback from students and teaching assistants; and my own experience of teaching the course. I taught the revised version in the spring semester. It went off without a hitch. [as an aside: one other important factor in course development projects is teaching the course at least 2-3 semester in a row, in order to make the adjustments while everything is still fresh in the memory.] I can honestly say that the first iteration of the flipped version was one of the most difficult teaching experiences of my life; but, by skipping the pilot phase, I think we were able to create a very strong course very quickly. It was a painful first iteration, but there was a big payoff in subsequent iterations.<br />
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When we went live with the asynchronous online version of Introduction to Ancient Rome in Fall 2014, we assumed that it would be a small pilot. We had not advertised the course at all. It wasn't even listed and open for registration until four days before classes started. We guessed we might get 10-15 random students register for it. In fact, we ended up with over 300 students. Once again, I found myself in a challenging situation. Not only were we still doing significant development work on the modules; but I was also training an instructor who was new to the world of online education (and who had never taught a class over the size of about 30 students). Once again, though, we found that the large size of the class immediately highlighted the design flaws and encouraged us to figure out how to maximize efficiency in everything. It was a stressful semester for me as well as the course instructor, not least because we were rushing to finish modules and release them to students in the course of the semester. However, we learned everything we needed to know about the course's design flaws.<br />
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I spent this spring semester revising some parts of the overall course design (e.g. adding more structure, including a graded quiz at the end of each module); and then making revisions to the individual modules. As with the flipped version of the course, I was able to avoid a drawn-out process of identifying and eliminating the design flaws by jumping straight to teaching it at scale. In one semester, we figured out what parts of the course either didn't work at all or needed to be revised; and also identified the features that were crucial to the course's success (e.g. clear expectations; an extended orientation to the course; strong online presence of the instructor; integration of weekly f2f review sessions on campus). In addition, because I'd had the experience of making this scary leap before, it was a lot easier to manage the chaos and remind myself that nobody was going to die.<br />
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In theory, pilots make a lot of sense. It seems like a way to contain the inevitable problems of a new course. In reality, however, it doesn't actually make much sense to pilot courses that need to be scaled to small groups of students. A small class and a large enrollment class are entirely different in their character and their challenges. Many of the challenges of large enrollment courses are logistical and are a direct result of scale. In order to identify and remediate them, the "pilot" of the course has to be run at scale. It is a bit scary to take this approach, to be sure; but one quickly learns that students are resilient and reasonably forgiving of our learning curve. Most of the problems are not devastating to student learning; they just get in the way. When I taught the flipped class for the first time, the course evaluations were mixed--about half the students loved the class and half hated it. But their hate was a result of the flipped model, not problems in course design. Interestingly, the student evaluations on the first iteration of the online course were much more positive. While they identified parts of the design that needed more attention, the responses were in general very positive. Behind the scenes, it often felt like total chaos poised on the edge of disaster. But we were pretty good at keeping all of that behind the scenes (including our own high stress levels). As a result, the students had an overall good learning experience while also helping us figure out how to make the course better.<br />
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One of the most significant challenges for public universities in the coming decade will be figuring out how to support learning at scale. In particular, we have to figure out how to design and implement online courses that can be taught at scale. This is not to say that there is not an important place for smaller, seminar-style online classes--those are also going to be an essential part of any future curriculum at a public institution. But at least some courses will need to be large-enrollment, probably asynchronous (though could be synchronous) in order to meet growing demand, especially as institutions increase the size of their student population. So how do we teach at scale while supporting high levels of student learning? F2f, large enrollment lecture classes are not the answer, as universities are slowly coming to realize. The next several years will probably see a shift from faculty delivering content in the classroom to faculty building online courses that have the capacity to personalize learning (if adequately and appropriately staffed).<br />
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ASU has a good model in place for teaching at scale--a model in which the roles of the instructor and TAs in particular are re-imagined. One of the many positive things about teaching at scale is that, with a well-designed (and tested) course, it is much easier to identify the students who need our attention. The majority of the students are actually very capable of working on their own (often with a group of peers). They benefit from feedback on their work but don't require frequent interventions to keep them on schedule or help them understand content. With an adequately staffed course and skilled teaching team (and, ideally, an easy to use dashboard), members of the teaching team can focus on those students who most need intensive mentoring to advance successfully through a course.<br />
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The keys to success in teaching at scale? A good course and, most importantly, a skilled teaching team with clearly defined roles. ASU has figured out that the success of ALL students and not just the top 30% requires a significant structure of support, from an instructor to graduate assistants to undergraduate mentors. Too many people, including those in administrative positions, only pay attention to the first part of this equation--the quality of the course design--and don't realize the importance of the teaching team to student success. Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-14926402197696668282015-06-05T12:33:00.001-07:002015-06-12T08:23:17.114-07:00Liberal Arts of the Future: A Thought Experiment<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-naayjhI_56s/VXD6J1_6UxI/AAAAAAAAAsI/HXL9P45fyBo/s1600/Crisis%2Bof%2Bthe%2BHumanities%2BBad%2BBlood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-naayjhI_56s/VXD6J1_6UxI/AAAAAAAAAsI/HXL9P45fyBo/s400/Crisis%2Bof%2Bthe%2BHumanities%2BBad%2BBlood.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: Dr. Roopsi Risam</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">"Colleges of arts and sciences are going to have to evolve a bit." </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">--Dr. Larry Singell, Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences," Indiana University, Bloomington</span></span></div>
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As <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/04/colleges-arts-and-sciences-struggle-deficits-enrollment-declines">this recent Inside Higher Education</a> article highlights, colleges of arts and sciences/liberal arts at public institutions are in a state of crisis around the country. This so-called "Crisis of the Humanities" has been developing for many years, slowly but surely. Faculty and administrators in these colleges have been remarkably slow to recognize the seriousness of the crisis and its multiple causes; and to develop coherent and effective strategies for addressing its causes. Instead, in the face of reduced instructional budgets and cuts in soft money (the kind of money that is used to fund graduate students as well as lecturers and adjuncts. It is also used to fund faculty/grad travel to conferences, research assistantships, etc.), the prevailing strategy has been to institute cuts in hiring of all sorts (tenure track faculty but also lecturers and adjuncts) and to reduce the size of graduate programs. In addition, faculty and staff have received scant raises in close to six years (with the exception of promoted faculty, who received outsized raises in the past two years, effectively placing their salary among the lower-paid full-professors and completely leap-frogging over the senior associate professors).<br />
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If these budget shortfalls were a short-term problem, this approach might make sense. It would cause some temporary difficulties for departments but those problems would be reversible once the funds were restored. In the past, this was how it worked: in lean years, hiring freezes were instituted, no merit raises were given and everyone waited for better times. Inevitably, those better times came. This was the pattern of my first 6 or so years at my university. Then, when the economy collapsed and legislatures aggressively cut allocations to public universities (in part, at least, using the economic collapse as an excuse for these cuts), everything changed. <br />
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Now, some 7-8 years later, we have to face the fact that things aren't going to return to normal. In addition, faculty in the humanities/arts and sciences need to come to terms with the fact that part of what has happened is a deliberate reallocation of institutional resources, with liberal arts on the losing end. The result: colleges of arts and sciences that are starving for resources while facing ever-growing declines in enrollment. Some blame the widespread implementation of the Responsibility Centered Management (RCM) budgeting model, in which each unit has to pay for itself. Cross-subsidies and/or distributions of supplementary funds from the provost's office are a thing of the past. In a lot of ways, RCM is a good model. It encourages units to be fiscally responsible, strategic, and entrepreneurial. The downside is that, in effect, it pits colleges within the university against each other in a competition for students. This competition for students is far less of a problem at schools whose admissions offices make an effort to ensure a good distribution of admits for all colleges. If that doesn't happen, however, inequities ensue.<br />
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In the past, however, colleges of arts and sciences could rely on the fact that, even if more students majored in engineering or computer science or business, they still had to take several courses in the arts and sciences to fulfill graduation requirements. Even if public colleges of arts and sciences have little to no control over admissions and so tend, they could count on the fact that they could keep their enrollments up by offering a plethora of service courses. Thus, at most large, public institutions, every department offers several introductory level, large enrollment courses for non-majors. These courses meet some general education requirement and the students are predominantly non-majors (in my courses, approximately 35% are liberal arts students of some ilk).<br />
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So now we get to the real problem for colleges of arts and sciences these days: enrollments in our courses by non-liberal arts students (and even non-major liberal arts students) have dropped precipitously in recent years, especially the past 3-4 years. This drop isn't minor, and it is increasing at a nearly exponential rate with each passing year. What is happening? In basic terms, two things: first, non-liberal arts students are finding other sources of courses to fulfill their graduation requirements (AP exams, credit by exam, dual enrollment, online, community college, even other 4 year university courses). With the dramatic increase in the availability of introductory online courses in arts and sciences, campuses have taken a major enrollment hit.<br />
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It is critical to understand what motivates students to seek out these alternatives to our campus courses. It is often said that they are just looking for an easier class and, certainly, that is sometimes the case. More often, though, it is for other reasons. First, flexibility. Especially STEM students with lab courses have tight schedules and appreciate the flexibility of an online course, especially asynchronous online courses that nevertheless have *some* structure to help them stay on schedule. Secondly, students are taking their required courses during the summer. In the past, they would take these during summer sessions on campus. Now, faced with rising costs and a desire to avoid taking on more debt than is absolutely necessary, many students are working in the summers and cannot take courses that are scheduled during the day. Many of them return home to live rent-free with their families. These students are also taking courses that are offered online or at community colleges at a time that fits their schedule (and are less expensive than courses at the university). <br />
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My own university--and department--has seen a precipitous dropoff in summer enrollments, yet has made few if any changes to the curriculum. We do not offer tuition discounts; we continue to offer most courses during the workday instead of in the evenings; we have few online courses on offer. Similarly, we've made few changes to our regular semester curriculum. We are beginning to offer online courses, though most are synchronous and require students to log-on for a quiz each class period at a certain time. The basic strategy to prop up enrollment tends to be to create obstacles for students who are bringing in outside credits rather than to create positive incentives for them to take our courses.<br />
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The other cause of the enrollment hit in colleges of arts and sciences is more obvious: fewer students are choosing to major in our degree programs. Some of this may have to do with the students who are admitted. I don't know statistics for my own university, but a common complaint is that admissions offices admit more students who want to major in professional degrees like business; or STEM fields rather than arts and sciences students. This means that, from the start, colleges of arts and sciences are at a disadvantage. In addition, it is becoming more common for colleges and schools within universities to aggressively recruit majors to their degree programs in order to increase their enrollments (and, thus, their share of the pot of institutional funding). <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQHNncDoZ_o/VXHt6K39X_I/AAAAAAAAAsk/BknVh5-bGU0/s1600/critical%2Bthinking%2Bis%2Bmagic%2BPonies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQHNncDoZ_o/VXHt6K39X_I/AAAAAAAAAsk/BknVh5-bGU0/s400/critical%2Bthinking%2Bis%2Bmagic%2BPonies.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: Dr. Roopsi Risam</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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It is common for colleges of arts and sciences to claim "critical thinking" as its value proposition. This is not incorrect. Our courses and degree programs do, in fact, emphasize training and practice in critical thinking. Employers are clear that this is an important job skill. Yet, for some reason, we liberal arts folks have not been very good at moving beyond the "critical thinking" claim to more fully rationalize why it makes sense for an undergraduate student to major in English or History or Classics when entry-level jobs are hard to come by even for biology and chemistry majors. <br />
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In general, we do a terrible job of articulating distinction between short-term, jobs based skills and first jobs; and longer term, "soft" skills (like written communication, problem solving. creativity) that, over time, result in equally lucrative careers for liberal arts majors. We need to do a better job at tracking our graduates over time and tracking salaries. We need to be able to argue our case from data rather than anecdote. At the same time, we do need to pay more attention to equipping liberal arts majors for an increasingly competitive job market. It's all well and good to talk about long-term benefits, but that means little when you can't get a first job, can't pay the rent or buy food despite having a college degree.<br />
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If Larry Singell is correct that colleges of arts and sciences must evolve, as I think he certainly is, then what does/should that evolution look like? One approach that has already been taken is to add new degree programs that are more pragmatic and likely to appeal to job-focused students (and their parents), things like neuroscience, health sciences, data analytics. We also need to offer a wider range of courses, from first year seminars to upper division electives, that might appeal to majors in other disciplines. To give just one example, a friend of mine who teaches in an English Department is offering a Race and Cyberspace seminar for first year students at her university. The students are all computer science majors. There are all sorts of ways that we can broaden our offerings, whether through collaborative teaching or simply by spending some time to design a new course that is likely to appeal to students outside of our department or college. [And, ideally, any course development would be adequately supported by the university....]<br />
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Digital Humanities clearly has some role to play, and Institutes or Centers for Digital Humanities (or, alternatively, Digital Studies) are already thriving on many campuses. Digital Humanities won't save the humanities (or arts and sciences more broadly), but it is certainly one way to make the work we do in liberal arts more appealing and accessible to our students. It is also a way to equip our undergraduate and graduate students with key digital skills that are transferable to any number of careers. I don't want to over-emphasize the value of undergraduates (and graduate students) attaining some training in digital research tools as well as, for graduate students, digital teaching and learning--but these are both areas where we could do a lot to both better prepare our students for the realities of the jobs markets; and also open their eyes to new ways of thinking about familiar research questions and developing new research questions that emerge from these new ways of "seeing" data.<br />
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We also need to pay more attention to integrating such skills as project management, teamwork, and oral/written communication into all of our courses. We do pretty well, most of us, with oral/written communication in smaller classes, less well in large classes. We need to devise creative ways to get our undergraduate students involved in our research. This is a major challenge in liberal arts, and it has something to do with the kinds of research we do, the kinds of questions we ask. I'm not suggesting that we entirely re-formulate our research to make it possible to integrate undergraduates into a "research team;" rather, I'm suggesting that we get creative. For example, I've found that one of the best ways to have undergraduates doing significant research work in my field is to have them work with me on course development.<br />
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Finally, in the spirit of thinking of degrees more along the lines of a project, we ought to make better use of e-portfolios. When a student graduates with their BA, they should have a portfolio of work that documents their skills and highlights their best work. This work should not just be research papers--after all, it is increasingly true that most of our students will not continue their studies in graduate school. We are not simply preparing students to do research at the graduate level; we are preparing the vast majority of them to enter the workforce in a range of different jobs. It isn't fair to our students to pretend that this is not the case. E-portfolios might also encourage departments to do more to rationalize their curriculum, to connect their different courses and make an effort to have students learn and practice different kinds of skills in a range of major courses. It should be that, at graduation, a student can articulate in clear terms exactly what skills they learned during their college career. <br />
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At public institutions, colleges of arts and sciences are in crisis. This crisis is, to be sure, in part the result of deliberate decisions made by legislatures, regents, and even university administrators. But it is also in part the result of a failure to evolve and address pressing issues like declining enrollments. Thus far, the primary response has been to institute cuts--to the number of tenure track lines, lecturers and adjuncts; and to cut the size of graduate programs. As a result, some departments are now unable to staff enough courses to meet the existing student demand--which further drives students to seek alternative sources for these courses. Departments have to choose between staffing lower division courses that tend to be large enrollment; or upper division courses that serve their majors and keep their major going strong. It's a kind of Sophie's choice. <br />
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At this point, most colleges of arts and sciences are as lean and efficient as they can get. They cannot withstand further cuts as a response to additional budget cuts. It's already a nearly impossible to keep our department and programs running. There has to be some other, positive and proactive approach to the problem of decline enrollments. It's a tough time to be a faculty member in liberal arts, but it's also--potentially--an exciting time. We have the opportunity to re-imagine and modernize the liberal arts, not just because it will help our graduates find gainful employment but because it will improve our courses and degree programs. Many faculty will resist any kind of change, but we have reached the point that we either change or wither into irrelevance. We need to rethink such basic things as how we offer courses, especially required courses. But we also need to think about how to teach skills in addition to critical thinking. I'll conclude with a chart that illustrates why we need to teach our students, undergraduates and graduates, to operate competently in technology-rich environments. This is a challenge for most of us since it's a set of skills many of us don't have and didn't need. But we need to figure out how to instill them in our students if we hope to attract undergraduates to the liberal arts.<br />
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Update 6/12/2015: <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/teaching-vs-learning">An interesting essay</a> by Steve Mintz, Director of the UT System's Institute for Transformational Learning, on the need for a more integrative approach to undergraduate education. From his perspective, the humanities disciplines need to think about how to build bridges to STEM disciplines; and our curricula need to include humanities courses, but in an integrated and rational way (e.g. medical ethics, narrative medicine). It's still not clear exactly what this would look like, but I do think this is one step that liberal arts colleges need to make if they are going to thrive. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7XvcrDxPatE/VXIfOCl-kPI/AAAAAAAAAtM/S5Xib3JVDHY/s1600/Chart%2Bon%2Btech%2Bskills.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="352" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7XvcrDxPatE/VXIfOCl-kPI/AAAAAAAAAtM/S5Xib3JVDHY/s400/Chart%2Bon%2Btech%2Bskills.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: OECD Education<br />
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Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-55663804632272653962015-06-03T16:19:00.002-07:002015-06-04T09:21:33.365-07:00Why Universities aren't Dead....and Won't Be<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T-dVIhVjCrE/VWItBeYTZCI/AAAAAAAAAoE/HZLpF7R2WnI/s1600/jen%2Bin%2Bthe%2Blibrary.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T-dVIhVjCrE/VWItBeYTZCI/AAAAAAAAAoE/HZLpF7R2WnI/s320/jen%2Bin%2Bthe%2Blibrary.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Libraries, or at least the open stacks libraries of my youth and middle age, may well disappear over the next decade. The space of the library will be reconfigured for different activities, even if these activities are ultimately serving the same purposes as the libraries of my undergraduate and graduate years. I'm very interested to see what <a href="https://asunews.asu.edu/20141027-university-librarian-appointment">Jim O'Donnell</a>, a well-known classicist and transformative thinker, does as the new head of libraries at Arizona State University. I was lucky enough to write my dissertation with Jim and to have him as a mentor for all these years. He has some fascinating, truly innovative ideas. I'm excited to see what sticks. What Jim and other university librarians have concluded--from traffic and usage patterns over the past several years--is that the open stacks library on the university campus has become an inefficient use of space when space is at a premium. Many faculty, even in the humanities, rarely browse stacks anymore, and most of our students venture into them even less often and only under compulsion. In some cases, faculty barely set foot in the library--most of what we need for our teaching and research is available online or, at least in my case, so essential that I purchase my own copy of the book. The same has become increasingly true for our students. Something essential is lost when stacks are moved into storage, to be sure, but it seems to be a growing inevitability as libraries re-think their function in the university.<br />
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Libraries as repositories of books may well go the way of the typewriter over the next decades, as their space is reconfigured to support faculty-student interaction and collaboration. The space itself will continue to nurture curiosity and support learning, but will do so in a way that reflects the 21st century realities of college/university usage patterns and learning practices. For instance, it's not difficult to imagine a transition to storing most books off campus (or otherwise out of sight) and allowing users to request them electronically with a 24 hour turnaround. In place of bookshelves, we will find things like 3-D printers, Digital Studies Institutes, and expansive spaces for collaborative work between students and between faculty and students.<br />
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In the same way that the campus library is undergoing transformation, so is the university itself. It is increasingly apparent that we are living in a period of expansive change to higher education, some of it necessitated by state defunding of public education; and some of it the result of deliberate choices by high-level administrators to shrink the size of the tenure-track faculty, The focus the shifts to small seminars for lower-division students; upper division courses for majors; and graduate education. It is more and more clear that public universities, even flagships, can no longer afford to educate students for a full four years. The first two years of college--"grades" 13-14--are being grouped with the last two years of high school (grades 11-12) to form a unit that, currently, falls into a gap.<br />
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The private sector, in particular, is racing to fill this gap as students respond by cobbling together credits from AP exams, credit by exam, online courses from a wide range of sources (including 2 and 4 year schools), and f2f classes from community colleges as well as 4 year universities and colleges. When I was a college student in the 90s, we had AP exams and, rarely, we might transfer in credit from community college; but I took more than 128 credit hours during my 3.5 years (plus summers) in college. When I first began to teach at UT Austin, the general pattern of my own college experience continued to hold. Students might take some required courses over the summer at a school near their home, but many also remained on campus to take classes during summer sessions.<br />
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I have not seen enough internal data to know exactly when things changed; but the change became very noticeable about 4 years ago, not long after the Great Crash of 2007. Summer enrollments on campus plummeted. Now we struggle to get even 15 students for classical civilization courses that used to enroll 50+. Our first year Latin classes have not run for at least three years. It's not that students aren't taking courses during the summer--it's that they are doing it while living at home and working. They need flexibility. Courses scheduled in the middle of the day; or are scheduled to take up most of the day (with morning and afternoon sessions) aren't going to cut it. Many current college students can't afford to remain in Austin, so they take courses at schools near their homes or online. Increasingly, more of them are doing this during the semester as well, so that they are taking their major courses on campus but anything that they can take elsewhere, they are (either because we can't offer enough sections of courses to meet demand or because they need the flexibility of an evening or online course).<br />
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Many universities have been very slow to recognize and respond to this troubling trend. As a result, we continue to, in effect, outsource the instruction of many of our lower-division courses. This has a wide range of consequences for students as well as for the university. For students, it means that they are not necessarily being prepared for subsequent courses in that field (though this is often a non-issue since many courses are "one-offs" and are taken to fulfill some core curriculum requirement). For the university, it means that we are losing a significant number of credit hours. This is especially troublesome for colleges of arts and sciences/liberal arts. These colleges have long depended on the high enrollments of their "service" courses to subsidize the smaller courses for majors. As our semester credit hours shrink, we lose funding for new tenure-track positions as well as lecturers. This then means that we cannot offer enough sections of courses to meet student demand, thus shrinking credit hours and driving students to other "providers." It is a vicious circle.<br />
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The death of the (public) university has nevertheless been greatly exaggerated. It's not dying, even if it sometimes feels that way. But it *is* transforming. This transformation was enabled by the massive disinvestment of states over the past 7-8 years.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VuPWaJs4M2w/VWJLoV-rqvI/AAAAAAAAAoY/FSWZ2BMmzSo/s1600/Map%2Bof%2Bstates%2Bwith%2Binvestment%2Bin%2Bhigher%2Bed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VuPWaJs4M2w/VWJLoV-rqvI/AAAAAAAAAoY/FSWZ2BMmzSo/s400/Map%2Bof%2Bstates%2Bwith%2Binvestment%2Bin%2Bhigher%2Bed.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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As this map illustrates, the disinvestment was almost universal and on a huge scale. Even as students have taken on higher debt loads because of rising tuition, it has been impossible for universities to make up the losses in state funding. There is general agreement that things are never going to return to "normal," and that the days of viewing an education as a public good are in the past. As a result, it is imperative for universities to find new ways of fulfilling their missions. This presents a significant and, at times, nearly overwhelming challenge. <br />
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One result of state disinvestment, I suspect, is that we will see public universities increasingly directing resources away from the traditional large lecture courses that tend to dominate the first two years of college for most students. For one thing, the large lecture class is not a very effective way for students to learn. For another, we are learning how to deliver those classes more efficiently but also in ways that produce better learning outcomes. If ASU has gone to one extreme with the creation of the Global Freshman Academy, in which students take MOOCs from EdX for credit, most public universities will likely resort to some variation of this. Some freshmen may do an entire year from home, via online courses and MOOCs (though one hopes that this spurs improvements to the design and student support in MOOCs). This isn't a disaster--in many cases, a well-designed and well taught online class can easily outpace what we can do in a campus classroom (this is certainly the case with my Online Rome class).<br />
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Most residential freshmen, however, will likely be taking a mix of hybrid courses (which have a significant online component but also involve f2f interactions with the teaching team on campus); and small seminars that emphasize experiential learning. Online courses are not going to kill the university, as many before me have observed. Rather, they will highlight the value proposition of the residential college experience. Specifically, they will require faculty to develop learning experiences that can ONLY be done in a f2f classroom, that leverage the f2f. Experiential learning will play a big role in the university of the future. <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3046299/the-new-rules-of-work/this-is-the-future-of-college?utm_content=buffer68585&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign">This article</a> on the future of college makes a similar point.<br />
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Liberal arts won't be eliminated (though we may need to get a lot better at being able to talk about the value of our courses beyond "teaching critical thinking.") Regional public universities may move more towards emphasizing pre-professional subjects and "trades" instead of liberal arts, to be sure; but liberal arts should continue to have some place in this 21st century university. Still, it will require a lot of hard work to reconceptualize what that place looks like and how it works with other disciplines. We will need to be creative and collaborative. We will need to accept that we have to teach in ways that we ourselves were never taught. We will have to work on shifting from a model of content delivery to a serious emphasis on mentoring students on how to learn. Our students live in a world in which content is available in seconds, at all times. It is no longer enough to fill their heads with content and send them on their way. We have to do the hard work of teaching them how to work with that content, how to develop a set of learning behaviors that are transferable to everything they do.<br />
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Robots are great at making widgets. Students are not widgets, and learning is not linear. By necessity, all learning is to some degree personalized and adaptive. Sophisticated student learning requires the support of skilled experts aka professors. It also requires well-designed courses and, ideally, substantial interaction with a teaching team. The kinds of courses, like large lectures, that do not support this kind of learning will go away--not least because they can be done at least as effectively online (and, I suspect, with time and the insights of the learning sciences, they can be done far better than what is currently on offer). But the kinds of courses that privilege face to face interaction, like hybrid courses or courses built around experiential learning, will thrive on our campuses.<br />
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I imagine that this transition and transformation will be rocky for everyone. At the same time, it's difficult to see any other future (generally speaking) for public institutions. Most important is that, as institutions, we are able to articulate our value proposition, articulate to students what it is that they will get from the time they spend on campus--besides parties and football.<br />
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For more on the current enrollment declines and budget deficits in colleges of liberal arts/arts and sciences, see IHE's <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/04/colleges-arts-and-sciences-struggle-deficits-enrollment-declines">"Arts and Sciences Deficit" </a>(h/t Phil Hill)Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-62405063978803405142015-06-02T17:11:00.004-07:002015-06-04T16:44:04.302-07:00The Challenges of Ongoing Course Development<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PxdLG4nho0M/VW4sKnXvPGI/AAAAAAAAAqA/cnEtdAjf76w/s1600/Reconstruction%2Bof%2BArch%2Bof%2BTitus%2BCircus%2BMaximus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="248" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PxdLG4nho0M/VW4sKnXvPGI/AAAAAAAAAqA/cnEtdAjf76w/s400/Reconstruction%2Bof%2BArch%2Bof%2BTitus%2BCircus%2BMaximus.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reconstruction of the Arch of Titus in the Circus Maximus. Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11638975/Massive-triumphal-marble-arch-built-by-Romans-to-honour-Emperor-Titus-discovered.html</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As is my early morning ritual, I was browsing my Twitter feed while trying to wake up the other day. I paused on an interesting post: the remains of a second Arch of Titus had been excavated in the eastern end of the Circus Maximus. This is pretty big news. We knew this arch existed and even had a copy of its dedicatory inscription, but to actually find large pieces of it is kind of exciting. In my field of classics, we don't often find the remains of famous monuments. Intrigued, I read the news articles and, over the next days, several blog posts about the find and its significance.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WbYj3B8f2Yg/VW8mJAvCnTI/AAAAAAAAArE/qdgzgaEUV_s/s1600/Arch%2Bof%2BTitus%2Bin%2BCircus%2BMaximus%2BRemains.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="199" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WbYj3B8f2Yg/VW8mJAvCnTI/AAAAAAAAArE/qdgzgaEUV_s/s320/Arch%2Bof%2BTitus%2Bin%2BCircus%2BMaximus%2BRemains.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Remains of the Arch of Titus in the Circus Maximus. Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11638975/Massive-triumphal-marble-arch-built-by-Romans-to-honour-Emperor-Titus-discovered.html</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mF-M3spPtkw/VW5Cq_zPSkI/AAAAAAAAAqk/PierDUdcNbA/s1600/Circus%2BMaximus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mF-M3spPtkw/VW5Cq_zPSkI/AAAAAAAAAqk/PierDUdcNbA/s320/Circus%2BMaximus.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Remains of the Circus Maximus<br />
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Finding these blocks of marble doesn't actually change anything for ancient historians. The arch's existence was documented in medieval sources, which also preserved its dedication to Titus. We know that it remained standing until the 12th century, when the Circus Maximus was converted to agricultural use and inhabited. The arch was used to provide support for an aqueduct that provided water to the fields in the Circus Maximus. It was assumed that, around this time, the arch was plundered for building materials. Once the arch is reconstructed, we will have a better sense of its fate. We will be able to see how much of it remained intact until it was buried; and, possibly, the archaeological context will provide additional information.<br />
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One of the great things about an online class is the ease with which they can be updated and modified. If I had produced a printed textbook, there would be nothing to do except keep a list of updates for a second edition. With the Online Rome class, I can make revisions in minutes. The discovery of this second Arch of Titus is exactly the sort of thing that I will add to my version of the course. Confession: although I am a very good classicist and ancient historian, I don't know everything. I didn't actually know that Titus had two arches constructed in his honor by his brother and successor, Domitian. More to the point, the current version of Online Rome perpetuates the traditional "textbook" narrative: the Arch of Titus at the start of the Roman Forum, near the Flavian Amphitheater, is a triumphal arch that commemorates Titus's victory over the Jews and Judea.<br />
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In reading the articles and blog posts about the newly discovered Arch of Titus in the Circus Maximus, I realized that this traditional narrative is wrong in some important ways. The best source for understanding how the two Arches of Titus related is the detailed discussion on <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/36814">The History Blog</a>. A couple of important details: first, it is this Arch of Titus at the entrance of the ancient Circus Maximus (an arena where chariot races were held) that was, in fact, the triumphal arch for Titus's victory over the Jews. It was dedicated to Titus by the Roman Senate soon after Titus's untimely death. The dedication makes clear that the arch was erected in honor of Titus's military victory over the Jews and his sack of Jerusalem. This is the arch's dedicatory inscription:<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Senatus populusque Romanus imp(eratori) Tito Ceasari divi
Vespasiani f(ilio) Vespasiani Augusto pontif(ici) max(imo),
trib(unicia) pot(estate) x, imp(eratori) XVII, [c]o(n)s(uli) VIII,
p(atri) p(atriae), principi suo, quod praeceptis patri(is)
consiliisq(ue) et auspiciis gentem Iudaeorum domuit et urbem
Hierusolymam, omnibus ante se ducibus regibus gentibus aut frustra
petitam aut omnino intem(p)tatam, delevit.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">The Senate and People of Rome [dedicate this arch] to the Emperor
Titus [snip many titles], because by his father’s counsel and good
auspices, he conquered the people of Judaea and destroyed the city of
Jerusalem, which all of the generals, kings, and peoples before him had
either failed to do or even to attempt.</span></div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_arch">The Arch of Titus</a>
at the start of the Via Appia in the Roman Forum, by contrast, is not a
standard triumphal arch despite the allusions to Titus's victory over
the Jews in some of the relief panels. As The History Blog post
observes, "The central panel in the single arch’s soffit relief depicts
Titus being
carried to the heavens by an eagle. The inscription also emphasizes the
recently deceased emperor’s divinity: “SENATUS/ POPULUSQUE ROMANUS/
DIVO TITO DIVI VESPASIANI F(ilio)/ VESPASIANO AUGUSTO” (The Senate and
People of Rome [dedicate this arch] to the divine Titus Vespasian
Augustus, son of the divine Vespasian)." <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t7OImRkIV38/VW5B1hFVzZI/AAAAAAAAAqc/_cHo9DdIoVE/s1600/Arch%2Bof%2BTitus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t7OImRkIV38/VW5B1hFVzZI/AAAAAAAAAqc/_cHo9DdIoVE/s320/Arch%2Bof%2BTitus.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_arch</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This second Arch of Titus was erected in 82 by Domitian and, like the first arch, was dedicated to the memory of the deified Titus by the Roman Senate. Note the much less elaborate inscription in the second arch, the omission of Titus's many titles and offices. This second arch is clearly not a standard victory arch but rather, a kind of celebratory arch that, as much as anything, celebrates the divinity of Vespasian and Titus; and helps to legitimate Domitian's status as their successor. But how, exactly, are we to understand the meaning and occasion of this second, surviving Arch of Titus? How would a Roman living during Domitian's rule have understood these two arches? How would their relationship have been conceptualized?<br />
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It is interesting to observe that Titus's official triumphal arch was erected at the entrance of the Circus Maximus, a public space for entertainment. This choice seems especially meaningful when we remember that it was the Flavians who constructed the massive Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), not too distant from the Circus Maximus. In fact, Domitian would make significant renovations to the massive Amphitheater and held elaborate games to re-inaugurate it. So why erect a second arch to his deceased brother on the edge of the Roman Forum? Suddenly, the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, a monument that seemed to have a straightforward story to tell, becomes complicated. Suddenly, the traditional treatment of the extant Arch of Titus as a victory arch is not so easy to defend. <br />
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In this instance, a historian more versed than I am about Flavian archaeology might have discussed the two arches in the first place. Nobody knows everything, however, and the brilliance of the digital medium is the ease of revision. It forgives ignorance and allows easy correction. At the same time, important questions are raised by an online course that never come up when an instructor is teaching from a printed textbook: who is responsible for keeping an online course updated, especially if the original designer is no longer involved in the project? Is it the responsibility of the course coordinator? Should someone be brought in to provide updates and revisions to the content every year or two?<br />
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In my field of Classics, the number of necessary updates is likely to be fairly small compared to something like Contemporary US Government. Still, the original course cannot be left unrevised for years. There are new discoveries as well as new theories of old evidence every year. One of the reasons it is so important to have a content expert continuously involved with the running of the course is precisely that someone needs to stay aware of these new findings in the field (and be able to understand the significance of the new findings). <br />
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People frequently compare online courses to textbooks. In some ways, they do function like enhanced textbooks. They nevertheless differ from textbooks in some important ways, most especially in the fact that they are organic and can be modified. In addition, at least in my Online Rome course, there is no "textbook author" voice that is distinct from the voice of the instructor. From the perspective of the student, there is only the voice of the instructor; and the instructor can modify the modules as they wish, to reflect their own expertise and interests (within reason). An online course is a kind of living creature. It is never "finished"; it can be and should be constantly updated, added to, subtracted from.<br />
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I don't know if this will happen, but it is my hope that, even after the course has been handed off to the Classics Department to run, that the course coordinator as well as the instructors will continue to work on the content, adding something here and taking away something there. Perhaps they might have a new idea for a game. Although the course I handed over is complete, polished, and ready to go, I hope that future instructors will recognize that one of the benefits of the digital medium is the ability to make modifications and corrections. <br />
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I imagine coming back to the class in a decade to find that Online Rome has continued to evolve over that time to adapt to the needs of students; incorporate new content (new discoveries or theories of existing evidence but also, e.g., videos, animations, virtual reality experiences, and games); and incorporate new learning tools as they become available. It is important that everyone involved with the course recognize the opportunity they have to put their own mark on the course; but also, the responsibility to ensure that it is regularly and systematically updated. With every passing month, it seems, there is more and more content available, some of it very good.<br />
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For instance, I just noticed that the MAV, a museum which creates virtual reality experiences from archaeological remains, has just posted a reconstruction of the baths at Herculaneum. The MAV page on Facebook is a great resource for these virtual reconstructions (they also have reconstructed the Villa of the Papyri), especially because it is nearly impossible for students to imagine what ancient bath complexes looked like from the scant remains that we can show them. These reconstructions allow them to imagine the scale and magnificence of the original public buildings. Keeping track of new digital content and deciding what to integrate into the course will be an essential role of the course coordinator (or someone). Without revisions, additions, and modifications, Online Rome will indeed function more like a
textbook--a stable object that slowly becomes outdated in a range of ways. Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-6459309034066885522015-05-25T12:21:00.006-07:002015-05-25T12:36:52.391-07:00Some Challenges in Implementing Technology in Teaching<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I love Twitter for many reasons, but most of all because, in my own experience and use of it, it has been an excellent way to connect with people and talk through ideas. I learn something new every single day. I tend to avoid fights, though I do frequently express my views on controversial subjects. For me, Twitter has been a space for networking with a range of people who share my interests in education technology, digital pedagogy, and higher education policy. It's also been a great space for thinking through and adding nuance to my views through dialogue with smart interlocuters.<br />
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Yesterday I wrote a blog <a href="http://teachingwithoutpants.blogspot.com/2015/05/ignorance-is-not-excuse.html">post</a> about the need for faculty to get up to date on education technology. Implicit in my post was the view that classroom technologies like student response systems make it much easier to implement best practices in our teaching. It's not that I want faculty using technology for the sake of technology; but rather, that education technology is a crucial tool for updating one's pedagogy to integrate current best practices. The growing array of ed tech tools--which seems to expand by the day--makes it easier for us to do our job well, but it requires faculty to be aware of what is out there and figure out how to use it.<br />
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To give just a few examples: student response systems are a fantastic way to check comprehension and evaluate what topics need clarification, what topics are already well-understood in large enrollment classes (and even in small classes). I use i>Clicker questions to tell me what I need to spend time on in class. Instead of just running through my prepared lecture, I figure out what students understood from their pre-class work, and what they didn't. I then spend the majority of my time on the parts they didn't understand. It requires a lot of improvisation, and has completely changed the way I teach large classes.<br />
i>Clickers are especially helpful because they are anonymous and you get a response from all students, not just the few who raise their hands. <br />
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A second example: we know that practice and rapid feedback are crucial for learning. This can be entirely automated by creating a database of practice questions that include feedback for the students. These practice questions let students practice answering questions; and they let them know quickly where they need to do more review. In addition, well-written questions can push the students to make connections across the course. In all of my classes now, I have a database of automatically graded questions (MC, matching, ordering, etc.) for the students to practice on and build their mastery of the course content. This small change, which required a substantial initial investment of time, has done wonders for student learning. Most obviously, it has meant that students can know do much more higher-order thinking in class and in other activities.<br />
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The incredible array of ed tech tools is all great if you are fortunate enough to teach at a university where a. your classrooms are "smart," i.e. equipped with the technologies you want to use, like lecture capture; and even a good projector or Smart Board. As well, if you want students working online during class, the room needs to be able to support those wireless connections. In large enrollment courses, this can be a huge challenge. Even at UT Austin, we only have a few classrooms that can reliably support more than 100 or so wireless connections at one time. This should change when Google Fiber comes to campus; but UT is, in this respect, a very advanced campus. More typically, austerity has meant significant cuts to IT budgets, and this has had serious consequences for classrooms. At many non-elite, public universities, classrooms are seriously out of date.<br />
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And then there's the question of accessibility for students. As Megan Kelly gently reminded me this morning on Twitter, i>Clickers are an additional expense for students, one that many don't want to take on. In addition, especially in more rural areas, students don't necessarily have reliable access to a broadband connection. Even if our campus libraries and such provide that access, it may not be feasible for a commuter student who is working 30-40 hours/week to remain on campus to do their homework and studying. Even at UT Austin, this issue occasionally crops up. The first semester that I taught my Introduction to Ancient Rome as a blended class, I had a lot of students who lived in the campus dorms. They paid for broadband based on their usage at that time and many were upset to be using their broadband bytes for school instead of gaming or Netflix. Again, no matter how eager an instructor might be to integrate digital assets into their course, it may not be feasible if the students can't easily access the online content.<br />
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As Megan noted, in the classroom there are some ways around these limitations, using analog tools that let us implement the same pedagogies. I will say, when I teach on campus, I always opt for analog over digital--partly because we are still at a stage where things go wrong with the digital. So, for example, I give low stakes, weekly quizzes. It would be much, much easier to do these online but I can't assume that all students have a device to get online; nor can I assume that the wireless will support 200+ students at one time, especially on a timed quiz. Rather than deal with endless tech issues, I use scantrons. It's more work but it saves the hassle of constantly troubleshooting tech issues.<br />
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I am also a huge fan of student response systems in class. But there are a lot of ways to do this, including making laminated cards of different colors and having students hold these up. I ended up not using them, but I have a box of laminated cards, four colors held together my a ring. I was planning to hand these out to students at the start of the semester and then collect them at the end. These analog methods are not quite as easy as using an i>Clicker but it accomplishes the same goal. I also do a lot of "talk to your neighbor" with complex questions and then have the groups click in with their response. This could also be done with laminated cards.<br />
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One of the things that my conversation with Megan clarified for me was that, in pushing my faculty colleagues to get up to date on education technology, what I was really advocating was that they get up to date on the latest pedagogy, as they are informed by the learning sciences. It's always about the pedagogy, not the technology. Ed tech tools can make it a lot easier to integrate good pedagogical techniques into our classes--most especially in the area of providing immediate feedback and frequent practice. But ed tech does not replace pedagogy; and much of what ed tech does can be accomplished with analog tools.<br />
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At the same time, it is crucial that universities invest in keeping their IT and classroom technology up to date. This also seems like an area where foundations ought to be looking to provide financial assistance. In addition, libraries should be places where students can go to do any work that requires a quick and reliable broadband connection. This doesn't entirely solve the problem for our students, many of who are commuting to campus and working long hours off campus; but it at least provides the option.<br />
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Foundations like the Gates Foundation, I have an idea for you: provide stipends for students who don't have access to broadband at home. Make it possible for them to sign up for broadband so long as they are registered students. Similarly, it must be possible for companies like i>Clicker to provide under-resourced public universities, especially in more rural areas, with used i>Clickers (e.g. first generation i>Clickers). These first generation clickers are perfectly functional for what most of us need and it would be a great service to students and instructors. Just a thought...Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-24065436600939839492015-05-24T11:16:00.005-07:002015-05-26T16:01:56.857-07:00Ignorance is Not an Excuse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e8-w_YzUPDQ/VWILhPjYzlI/AAAAAAAAAnw/6S6O0BmE65s/s1600/Luddite%2BTweet.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="95" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e8-w_YzUPDQ/VWILhPjYzlI/AAAAAAAAAnw/6S6O0BmE65s/s400/Luddite%2BTweet.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
I've been reflecting a lot on the issue of professors and education technology of late. In particular, I've been thinking about the exact issue raised by the tweet pasted above: we have reached a point where it is no longer acceptable to be unable to use classroom technology and the extensive suite of learning tools available to support student learning. We are horrified if a professor shows up to class unprepared; yet regularly turn a blind eye to colleagues who refuse to invest the time and energy necessary to master the latest ed tech tools and research; and integrate them into their classrooms. Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that all faculty need to learn how to code. Rather, I'm suggesting--to give one obvious example--that it is malpractice to continue to teach by lecture and high stakes midterms when we now know that there are many other, more effective ways to teach large classes; and we now have the technological capacity to implement at least some of those tools (e.g. online practice quizzes; pre-recorded content lectures; student response systems like i>clicker).<br />
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Likewise, if one is in any kind of leadership role, with decision-making authority, it is simply inexcusable to be unaware of the vigorous conversation about the role of education technology in higher education. In particular, it is essential for our college/university leaders to grasp what is at stake when a decision is made about, for instance, outsourcing online course development to the private sector. Higher education, especially public education, has become deeply politicized. Debates about the role of education technology are central to the politics of higher education, in part because there is a lot of money at stake. As campus IT evolves into a complex (and expensive) part of the campus infrastructure, more and more resources are directed away from instructional budgets and towards IT departments (in various configurations). This includes the creation of entirely new units in such areas as Learning Sciences and Data Analytics. This isn't a bad thing; it has the potential to be quite a good thing. But it is a big change.<br />
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This reallocation of resources is largely invisible to most teaching faculty and even department chairs; yet an awareness of it is essential. For one thing, it might finally demonstrate to departments that our universities are in the midst of significantly redefining the way they accomplish their mission. Rank and order faculty remain ignorant of this important conversation at their own risk. Departments with graduate programs have an ethical obligation to ensure that their graduate students are trained in the latest best practices, including a strong knowledge of online course design and implementation; and a basic knowledge of important ed tech tools. The graduate students of today will be expected to have this skill set when they apply for jobs, and many of them will be asked to teach both in classrooms and online. It is inexcusable to not prepare those who pursue academic jobs for this reality.<br />
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For many decades, it was possible for faculty, and especially for our department leadership, to be disconnected from the larger, national discussions about higher education. It is surprising to me how few faculty have any real sense of the vigorous debates currently happening, especially around the issue of the private sector elbowing its way into both K-12 and higher education. It is simply impossible for departments (and Colleges within universities) to make wise decisions about where to direct resources if you don't understand this encroachment by the private sector--and what factors are fueling it. Most faculty have little sense of where their students are taking classes. They don't realize that, over the past three years, the number of students taking courses outside of the university--either online, at community colleges, or even at other 4 year institutions--has increased exponentially, to the point that a college like mine (Liberal Arts) has already outsourced an unacceptable amount of our General Education/Core Curriculum courses. We should be having vigorous conversations about how to reverse this trend, including how to integrate our own, high-quality online courses into our curriculum. It is frustrating to me to see that, if these conversations are happening, they are happening at very high levels and largely exclude faculty. It is equally frustrating, though, to see my faculty peers express so little interest in these important conversations.<br />
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I appreciate that faculty are busier than ever these days. It would be helpful if institutions did more to ensure that faculty are educated about policy conversations but also, that faculty are held accountable for using best practices in their classrooms. In any other profession, an individual who refused to remain up to date on basic technological developments would no longer be able to work in that field. This has become a real issue in medicine, as more and more sophisticated diagnostic tools come out (e.g the Da Vinci robot for abdominal surgeries). Physicians in procedure-intensive specialties regularly have to learn how to use new devices--otherwise they would lose patients and business. Likewise, it would be considered malpractice for a physician to be unaware of the latest research and medications for various conditions. Imagine a rheumatologist who ignored all the new studies about the dangers of long-term use of prednisone and continued to prescribe it at high doses to his patients!<br />
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Out of date or sub-par teaching won't kill anyone, to be sure. Eventually, though, students and their parents will become more savvy and less willing to tolerate poor learning experiences. The result won't be that tenured faculty are fired for poor teaching, however. Instead, the persistence of faculty resistance to ed tech and best practices will be used in higher education debates to persuade the leaders of our institutions that the teaching of, especially, first and second year courses can't be left to the luddite faculty who refuse to update their practices. This will (and, in some places, already has) lay the foundations for outsourcing these courses to private-sector companies; and to the continued redirection of resources away from departmental instructional budgets. If departments want to hire more positions, the best thing they can do is figure out how to reclaim the credit hours that we have lost--and will continue to lose in escalating numbers. We are approaching a tipping point. Soon it will be too late, if it isn't already too late.<br />
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One of the best historians of education technology is Audrey Watters. She regularly posts her public presentations to her site hackededucation.com (see <a href="http://hackeducation.com/2015/05/08/wonderwoman/">The Golden Lasso of Education Technology</a> for a recent example). I am also a huge fan of this collection of her essays, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Education-Technology-Audrey-Watters/dp/1505225051/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1432502702&sr=8-1&keywords=audrey+watters">The Monsters of Education Technology</a> (a bargain at $4.99 on Kindle; 9:99 for pb). Another fantastic way to get caught up on the conversation about higher education and the politics of education technology? Twitter. Really.<br />
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5/26: See also The <a href="http://edtechcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2015/05/tools-of-empowerment-enlightenment-and.html">Ed Tech Curmudgeon</a>: "If the educators that care about students don't find a way to respond,
the future of education will belong to those who stand to profit
economically or politically or both. Who will build the universities and
colleges of the future - those who understand the history and share the
values of the educational enterprise, or those who simply want to make a
buck?"Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-12467250571187602902015-05-19T11:19:00.004-07:002015-06-06T15:29:49.793-07:00Another Funny Thing Happened....<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QQQkkqyno6w/VVtwm9LSv_I/AAAAAAAAAnU/Ja4HaSVDYMA/s1600/Arging%2Bwith%2BStrangers%2Bon%2Bthe%2BInternet%2Bcomic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QQQkkqyno6w/VVtwm9LSv_I/AAAAAAAAAnU/Ja4HaSVDYMA/s320/Arging%2Bwith%2BStrangers%2Bon%2Bthe%2BInternet%2Bcomic.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With thanks to Laura Gibbs for sending me this perfect cartoon!</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You know something is up when you wake up at 7:30 am to an overflowing inbox and a large number of notifications on Twitter. All my early bird friends let me know that Steve Kolowich at the Chronicle of Higher Education had picked up some bits of the Online Rome staffing saga. The article has the somewhat odd title of "<a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/when-your-online-course-is-put-up-for-adoption/56723">When your Online Course is Put up for Adoption</a>." It opens as follows: "Jennifer V. Ebbeler always knew that somebody else would end up teaching
her online Roman-history course. But that didn’t make giving it up any
easier." Let me be clear, in case it hasn't been utterly clear to everyone who reads this blog: I have never taught the online course--I only designed and built it. I never intended to teach it except randomly and in the distant future (see <a href="http://teachingwithoutpants.blogspot.com/2013/08/ancient-rome-online-re-imagining-my.html">this blog pos</a>t from August 2013 about how I worked to design a course around my own absence). I had no problem giving it up; in fact, I couldn't wait to unload it. Indeed, I learned of the department's bizarre decision to hire a non-Romanist as course coordinator from a Facebook post in which I celebrated handing it off. There was no regret, no second thoughts. I WAS DONE. I bought myself a pair of expensive earrings to celebrate. <br />
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It had been a long and difficult two years, made much more challenging by severe health issues over this past year. Despite those issues, I felt like I owed it to my team to continue the project (thus letting them remain employed). Especially this spring, it was incredibly difficult to find the energy to do the work on the course. I motivated myself by thinking about the big picture: we needed the course to be finished this spring so that funding and staffing could be in place for the Fall 2015 semester, when the course would be in the Classics Department's possession. I had also worked hard with my PM and the Asst Dean who oversees our development studio (LAITS) to get the funding in place. This required a great deal of work and time and politics, especially on the part of Joe TenBarge, the Asst Dean. The department was totally uninvolved in getting the funding lines in place. But, when I finished the last of the development, it seemed like everything was finally coming together. It felt like it was worth all the horrible days of working on it this spring.<br />
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Because I had designed the course for others to run and teach, I also put in place a transition plan. It's not a typical "sage on the stage" MOOC-model course. There are no video lectures; I appear nowhere in the course. It focuses on active learning and, especially, the use of primary source materials. Students work through modules and create their own narrative through a kind of Socratic method of course design. We draw on documentaries, primary sources, and other things for content. But thinking and questioning are key features of the course. One of the reasons students like it, and why it produces high levels of student learning, is precisely because of this unusual model (unusual not because of the focus on active learning but because we do this at a scale of 1 instructor/100 students).<br />
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Let me be clear that my issue has nothing to do with wanting control or with wanting "my chosen successor" appointed. In fact, what I suggested in a document dated 9 March is that the department continue the current instructor's appointment. As I said, he couldn't succeed me in a job I never did--it's always been his job. But, as the course transitioned to the department, I was no longer able to appoint him. That became the responsibility of the department chair. The main motivation for my suggestion was an interest in ensuring a smooth transition. The plan I suggested would have had the current instructor be "course coordinator." One thing that is not clear to most people: this is one course, but with multiple sections, taught to somewhere between 300-500 students (depending on how many sections are run; the College is requiring at least three/semester to keep the funding for the position).<br />
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So, in truth, it's about running a small business, working with at least some grad students who aren't content experts and have no experience in online teaching but who will be "instructing" sections of 100 students. It's a model that can work, I think, but it needs for certain key components to be in place. One of those is a course coordinator/mentor/supervisor who knows the course inside and out and knows how to teach online. Of course, over the year, I expected that others would learn how to run the course through the experience of training under an experienced course coordinator. My goal, always, was sustainability. That requires many people with the ability to teach the course at any given time.<br />
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I am the only member of my department to have taught a course over 250 or so students. For two years I taught a 400 student Intro to Ancient Rome class. It was a huge production and logistical challenge. It's not just like teaching 200 student classes times two (which is the common assumption of those who have never done it). It's about ten times the work and complexity. The current instructor dealt with this in Fall 2014, when we had over 300 students in the course. It was his first experience of such a set-up, which included managing graders; it was a real challenge and he learned a lot by trial and error. My concern is that, now, the Classics Department is asking someone with no experience in any of the key components required to run the course to step in and a. run a huge, multi-section course; b. know how to manage, support, and train the instructors of the individual sections.<br />
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Thankfully, LAITS had a kind of back-up plan in place. They have hired the current instructor to teach the Extended Campus version of the course in the Summer and Fall 2015. In the Summer, he will be focused entirely on converting the 15 week course into a five week course while a graduate student from the department is the instructor. He will work closely with that grad student and mentor him as much as possible on the challenges and tricks of online instruction. Likewise, he will work with the course coordinator in the fall semester. I was relieved to learn of this plan and I think it will do a lot to keep things from being a total disaster in the fall. But it depends on the fact that the current instructor is extremely gracious--far more than I would be in a similar circumstance. It also leaves unaddressed the larger issue that the course coordinator is far from a content expert or online teaching expert, and yet is going to need to mentor several graduate instructors each semester. I would understand if there had been no other option but that just wasn't the case.<br />
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I'm a bit disappointed that the article's melodramatic (and oddly gendered) tone encourages comments about me instead of about the issues at stake here. This isn't about me or my course design. In fact, a key component of the project from the start was figuring out a sustainable model at scale--all without overly compromising on the quality. It was a huge challenge but we did it. The course is an excellent example of a quality online course that is "efficient"--or at least more efficient than our current campus version; and works at a 1/100 scale. It also, ideally, provides graduate students the opportunity to teach online under the supervision of an experienced course coordinator. Finally, it created two lecturer positions for my department for next year, with money from my college as well as LAITS.<br />
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In return for taking on this project, I received nothing. I was not paid a stipend. My time was paid for, including summer funding; but, for instance, the 20 hours/week this spring didn't come close to paying for the 60 hour weeks the project required. It's not at all clear that the creation of this course will "count" for anything professionally. After all, it's not a monograph. I get no royalties, which I would get if this were a published textbook. I didn't even get a thank you from anyone. In essence, I donated two potentially productive years of my career to a project that I cared deeply about and was intellectually challenging to me; but which benefited my career and bank account not at all. I'd have been better off to design courses for online programs for a negotiated stipend (if it was the money that I cared about).<br />
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The real lesson of my experience is not that your baby can be taken away (ugh!); or that instructors can be separated from their courses (duh!); but that, at the moment, institutions are still playing catch-up in terms of policy and infrastructure around the delivery of online courses to campus-based students. What I found, over and over, was that we were inventing policy and procedures as we went. A big part of the problem is the fact that the development of these courses is done in non-academic units, but then the courses are handed over to academic units to manage. Sometimes this is ok. But if the department isn't up to date on the latest best practices of online education; or if a chair decides to make unilateral decisions and not collaborate with the people who are familiar with the course and its design, it can lead to real problems.<br />
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The reason I have made such a sensitive issue public is to try to encourage more conversation (and action) on the policy front. If administrators are going to ask faculty to take risks, to sacrifice years of their time to projects like these, then there need to be clear and rational policies. For instance, despite the tradition that departments control all staffing decisions, with online courses (which are very expensive to develop and keep updated), this is probably not the best procedure, especially if the main concern is ensuring a quality course and learning experience for our students. I want to encourage my smart and talented colleagues to take on a project like this instead of focusing entirely on work that is great for their career but doesn't do much for the larger community (i.e. writing monographs and articles). At the same time, for this to happen on a larger scale, we need to get policies in place. Faculty want to take risks, they want to take on projects like this. I think most of us have no problem handing our courses over to others. What we want are some assurance that the course we spent two years building will be treated well and, hopefully, run as it was designed to run. This seems like a reasonable expectation to me vis-a-vis Online Rome, given that I have essentially donated two years of work to my department and have received no extra compensation.<br />
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As we venture forward into this brave new world, we also need to make sure that all decision-makers are educated in the areas about which they are making important decisions; and ensure that there is campus support for all online instructors/course coordinators. This brave new world of online course design and delivery is, potentially, a fun, stimulating, and surprising one. It is also one that doesn't quite work like our traditional campus education. Online teaching requires a lot of different skills than does classroom teaching. I'm confident that, eventually, all these pieces will get into place on our campuses. My aim in discussing my experience is entirely to provide a kind of "case study" for why it matters that we get these policies in place sooner rather than later.Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-70428822027486673392015-05-18T10:35:00.005-07:002015-05-18T10:35:56.441-07:00Administering Exams in Online Classes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4Brx4siiPRU/VVoNpNz_9VI/AAAAAAAAAm4/oIlhF7mml7o/s1600/Lilah%2Bon%2Bthe%2Binternet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4Brx4siiPRU/VVoNpNz_9VI/AAAAAAAAAm4/oIlhF7mml7o/s400/Lilah%2Bon%2Bthe%2Binternet.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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One of the persistent challenges in teaching online is designing assessments that are credible, reliable, and resistant to academic dishonesty. In smaller courses, this can be done by avoiding exams and turning to papers, blogs, creative writing, and other kinds of activities that can be gathered into a final portfolio. As much as I would love to assess students using something other than quizzes and exams in Online Rome, it just isn't feasible given the large enrollments that we are required to maintain. We do make a point of making written work some part of the grade, in the form of essays and short answer exam questions. But, ultimately, about 50% of the final grade is determined by the students' performance on quizzes and exams. <br />
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I've been waiting for a reliable and affordable online proctoring service to come on the market. With today's <a href="http://www.verificient.com/blog/2015/5/13/pr-newswire-verificient-instructure-announce-alliance-partnership">announcement</a> that Instructure (Canvas) has partnered with Verificient, an online proctoring service, it looks like we are making some progress on this front. This was an obvious next move for Instructure, now that their LMS is being used as a platform for online course delivery of all sorts, including MOOCs. The absence of a proctoring service was a serious gap that, it seems, is now being filled. We'll see how effective it is--I never underestimate the creativity of students and their ability to outsmart any monitoring system. But, at least, it is a good start. As online courses become more common, we need a way to protect the integrity of the grade. The system doesn't need to be perfect. After all, academic dishonesty happens all the time in face to face classes. But instructors need to feel reasonably confident that the grades they are awarding were, in fact, earned. This is especially true as universities move towards a policy of not distinguishing between online and classroom-based courses on transcripts.<br />
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The quizzes, which appear at the end of each module, are not proctored. We tried to disincentivize dishonesty by writing questions that are application of facts rather than regurgitation of facts (and therefore difficult to Google or find in a textbook). The quizzes are timed and each question has three variations, so it is unlikely that students working together will have very many questions in common. The quizzes are also not worth all that much of the final grade. Ultimately, even if a student cheats on 1-2 questions/quiz, it is unlikely to make any difference in the final course grade. <br />
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Still, I would have preferred for the quizzes to be mastery quizzes rather than graded quizzes. When we tried that approach in the Fall 2014 version of the course, however, students didn't study for them and, ultimately, were not learning the material as well as they needed to in order to perform well on midterm exams. By switching to graded quizzes, we were able to get the students to take them seriously. The performance data looked almost identical to the data produced by my classroom-based students, which suggests to me that there was not much cheating going on. Likewise, we saw significant improvements in the exam scores--another indication that the students were studying for the quizzes. Finally, there were no obvious cases where a student had high quiz scores and low exam scores--not a sure sign of academic honesty, but a decent indication that any cheating was small-scale.<br />
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Online Rome also had three midterm exams that were administered on campus, in a proctored environment. We included these, in part, as a way to ensure the course's credibility. I suspect that, at some point, these midterms can be eliminated. I suspect that the quiz data will demonstrate that it is a reliable indicator of a student's mastery of the content; and that the instructor can design other, more engaging activities that require students to make connections across the course. A key skill in the study of Ancient Rome is the ability to see patterns and connections across time. Studying for midterm exams is one way that students begin to see broader patterns--but there are many other ways that this could happen.<br />
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For now--and, I suspect, the next several years, midterm exams will be a part of the course. For all sorts of reasons, it would be easier to administer these exams via Canvas. This spring, we required that all students--even non-UT students--take the exam on campus or in an accredited testing center. We had to resort to this after several problems with academic dishonesty in the fall semester, when we did allow distance students to take the exams online (there was an oral component to the exam, which was largely just a pain for everyone and did not work especially well). Since the majority of the students who currently take Online Rome are Austin-based, it has been fairly easy to administer the exams on campus. As we make a real effort to expand the enrollment to non-Austin based students, however, it would be great to have an effective proctoring service built into Canvas.Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-78266641958712652092015-05-17T10:39:00.004-07:002015-05-17T17:28:05.126-07:00It's about the Relationships, Always<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fPTTKZn5cT8/VVjEP-0vSkI/AAAAAAAAAmg/Z1DWASsCmAM/s1600/Laura%2BGibbs%2Bquote.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="348" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fPTTKZn5cT8/VVjEP-0vSkI/AAAAAAAAAmg/Z1DWASsCmAM/s400/Laura%2BGibbs%2Bquote.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image source: https://notegraphy.com/mdvfunes/note/1750710</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I can't emphasize enough how true this statement is. One of the major reasons why the delivery of effective online education presents such a challenge to institutions is the failure to understand this basic principle. Online courses need to be well-designed and accessible; they require a different set of logistical skills to manage than does a classroom course. They do not especially require a lot of bells and whistles. It turns out that students don't much care if the video is high quality so long as it is acceptable quality. While it is convenient to have the resources of a production studio, as I did when I built Online Rome, it is certainly not a sine qua non. There are plenty of tools available gratis on the internet that can be used to record video and/or audio and even live stream video/audio.<br />
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Without an instructor who is a. capable of creating and nurturing relationships with the students; and b. capable of creating a learning environment that provides opportunities for students to connect to and learn from one another, an online course is very unlikely to be truly successful. It certainly will never rival the classroom experience. Faculty who oppose online education generally rationalize their opposition by claiming that the online medium cannot replicate the intimacy of the classroom, the ability of the classroom space to nurture the kinds of relationships that support learning. This is a dangerous failure of imagination. In fact, a skilled and experienced online instructor knows exactly how to nurture these crucial relationships--and often can do so much more deeply and with many more students than can a classroom instructor. That's the irony in all of this.<br />
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These days, most of the attention of institutions is on the courses. There is a tendency to get wowed by fancy videos, animations, and the like. None of these things matter much for student learning if the course lacks an instructor who knows how to build relationships and also provide space (and incentivizes) for the students to build relationships with each other. This latter task is especially challenging. Discussion boards are the old fallback but, in my experience, they don't actually do much to encourage student to student interaction.<br />
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One of the areas where Online Rome could use more development is in the area of supporting peer to peer learning. Steve, the course instructor, and I had planned to do some of this in the upcoming semester. I hope that we will have the chance to implement our plans for non-UT Austin students at some point. For campus-based students, however, it should not be very challenging to design some activities that require or at least strongly encourage peer learning. I know that there was a fair amount of this happening on an informal level (e.g. students worked together on the modules; they studied for exams in small groups). We captured information about some of this through course surveys. But I suspect that a well-designed class activity (or series of activities) that puts students into small groups for the semester would improve the student learning and general experience even more.<br />
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Until then, though, I won't stop saying: teaching is about relationships. Period. The medium of instruction influences how we construct those relationships, what tools are available to us, but the process of teaching and learning is always about relationships and will always be about relationships. Further, it is incredibly shortsighted (and uninformed) for faculty to believe that face to face relationships are inherently superior to other kinds of relationships. This prejudice for presence is at least as old as Socrates and Plato; but it has been debunked over and over again.<br />
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P.S. So, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/17/why-is-the-university-still-here/">TechCrunch</a> asks why the university is still here. An idiotic question, but a pretty simple answer: in part, because we haven't figured out how to support social learning online. MOOCs are the opposite of the right answer. Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-558299705071985152015-05-16T14:22:00.000-07:002015-05-16T14:22:00.412-07:00Learning Outcomes and Backward Design<br />
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A few weeks ago, my department chair sent an email to the faculty list-serv with the news that UT Austin had once again failed to pass its SACS Accreditation. The problem, it seems, hinged on the failure of departments/colleges to define and measure learning outcomes in a way that was acceptable to SACS.. The chair expressed her view that this was a nonsensical process, anticipating the general moaning and groaning that was sure to emerge from faculty who believe that things like learning outcomes are silly. At the start of the academic year, our CTL had sent around a very helpful sample syllabus, with the various UT policies included as well as things like a place for the instructor to list the course's learning outcomes. Two senior colleagues ridiculed this document as useless and stupid--after all, they have been teaching for decades and don't need such guidelines. Sadly, I'm fairly certain that if they were asked to define the learning outcomes for their course and explain how their course was going to support students in achieving those outcomes, neither colleague would be able to do so. <br />
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Writing learning outcomes is very difficult for faculty who were never trained to think about their teaching in such terms. We are great at describing what content our course will cover; we are pretty good at knowing that we expect our students to master a certain amount of content or skill set by the end of the semester. We are terrible at framing our expectations for student learning in terms of learning outcomes, with all of our learning activities in the course aligned to those learning outcomes. We are even worse at measuring learning outcomes. We conflate grades with learning outcomes on the regular.<br />
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Every professor will tell you that students learned in their course--they will insist on it, despite never having measured how much students knew at the start or measuring their knowledge using a standardized instrument rather than an instructor-written exam. In fact, we generally have no real way of measuring what they did or didn't learn, and how well. This is especially true for one-off courses, like the lower division general education courses many of us teach. So a student of mine doesn't really know anything about Roman culture or history at the end of the semester... This is likely to have little impact on their educational career unless they decide to be a Classics major.<br />
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To my mind, one of the great boons of digitizing our teaching is precisely that it requires faculty to finally learn about things like learning outcomes and backwards design. These are not difficult concepts but they require some intentionality--and sometimes some assistance--to implement. The activity of building a hybrid or online class encourages faculty to think hard about how all the pieces contribute to student learning. The existence of the course on a digital platform means that the experience of taking or teaching a course is now preserved as an artifact that can be examined by a third party. It is no longer an ephemeral experience in which we depend on the reports of instructors and their students to evaluate teaching efficacy.<br />
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I worry about "Big Data" intruding on academic freedom, both in terms of what we teach and how we teach. Will we all be forced to teach in 3-5 minute blocks because someone decided that this was the average attention span? At present, online courses are closely scrutinized and monitored by our campus administrators. To what extent will this monitoring expand as our ability conduct this monitoring with computers grows? Currently, we are required by law to post our course syllabus. At what point will we be required to use the Campus LMS for all graded activities, so that student data can be captured more easily? I suspect that the refusal of most faculty to understand that they are accountable for demonstrating student learning will make it all the easier for university administrators to start tracking students and imposing ever more restrictions on what and how we teach.<br />
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I make it a point to identify and articulate course learning outcomes for all my courses, including graduate seminars. I also include a "map" that illustrates how the different learning activities in the course will help students reach these outcomes. It took a bit of practice to learn to think about teaching and course design in these terms but, after two years, it's become second nature. These are the learning outcomes for Online Rome. The least important of them is mastery of the course content. I am much more interested in helping students develop crucial "soft skills":<br />
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competing explanations or theories</div>
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history from Iron Age-2<sup>nd</sup> Century CE</div>
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<br />Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-12192039942545742102015-05-16T11:43:00.002-07:002015-05-16T11:50:33.230-07:00Enaging Undergraduate Students in Course Design and Instruction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is a lot of conversation on college and university campuses about getting undergraduates involved in research as soon as possible. It is clear that the close contact with faculty as well as more experienced students is a high impact experience and is positively correlated with graduation and shorter time to degree. At UT Austin, this emphasis on undergraduate research seems to be a main plank in our new president's platform. It has been a central topic in the Campus Conversations, which the president sponsored over this past year in his role as the Provost. There are many different initiatives on campus, particularly in STEM fields, which already focus on this effort, including the Freshman Research Initiative in the College of Natural Sciences. My own home, the College of Liberal Arts, briefly had a program for freshmen and sophomores, whereby students could work with a faculty member on a project connected to the faculty's research program. I worked with a couple of students through this program but, ultimately, found it to be an exercise in futility. The students who were eligible had no language training and my research absolutely requires knowledge of Latin as a sine qua non. Even the task of constructing a bibliography requires more than a knowledge of English. I struggled to devise interested but manageable tasks for the students; and I think they left the experience wondering why anyone would want to do research in Classics!</div>
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In liberal arts, and especially in the field of Classics, the major obstacle to involving undergraduates--especially early undergraduates--is that they lack the specific skills that are necessary to do even the most basic research. Classics training at the undergraduate level focuses on language instruction, and it typically takes a student most of their undergraduate years to even master Latin and/or Greek to a level where they can begin to make sense of an ancient text. Very often, research is postponed to graduate training, even the PhD these days. Given this, it is a real challenge to think about how to bring inexperienced undergraduates into the faculty research process. In truth, it can't really happen for a scholar who produces the kind of scholarship I do.</div>
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This is not to say that I cannot engage in productive conversations about research with undergraduates; or have them learning some of the "skills of the trade" in my company. As I learned during the production of Online Rome, though, the best place for this to happen--for me, given the kind of research I do--is around teaching. It is my sense that the value for students in engaging in research early in their undergraduate career is not research qua research so much as it is, first, structured contact with faculty as well as, ideally, more senior graduate and undergraduate students who can act as peer mentors; second, an opportunity to see the application of knowledge (I don't think it's particularly relevant whether the application occurs in a research or a teaching environment); and third, an opportunity to see "behind the curtain" of academia, to see what it is that professors do and what it means to be a professor. This third element is especially important for students in liberal arts who think they might want to continue their study of the field as graduate students.</div>
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When I was putting together a team of students to work with me on building Online Rome last summer, I included an advanced undergraduate student (a double major in Classics and Religion). In retrospect, I wish I'd included more. It was fascinating to see how, in giving her the task of creating a first draft for one of the modules, we were able to have deep and engaged conversations about the content, how best to present it, what sorts of trends it connected to, etc. Whereas I feel like any effort I have made to involve undergraduates in my research has ultimately meant that they are doing uninteresting "grunt" work, this project allowed for genuine intellectual growth. The key was the fact that it was project-based for the student. She worked on it and then we discussed the work. In the future, I hope very much to involve a larger team of undergraduates in a course-building project. In liberal arts, and especially in Classics, it is an ideal way to connect with undergraduates on intellectual grounds, but at a level that is accessible to them (because the task is not the production of original research but, instead, how to teach complicated content to their peers); and which results in the production of something tangible and useful.</div>
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I've never been much of a fan of the "hack the syllabus" approach to undergraduate teaching, primarily because it doesn't work terribly well with the particular audiences I teach. What does work is involving a group of students in the design and build of a course from the very start. I can imagine a very interesting learning experience in which, for one semester, a group of students works with me to design and build a course. The following semester, we would teach that course, with the student builders acting as peer mentors to the enrolled students. In this way, it would be possible to put more experienced students together with less experienced students--something that happens to great benefit in graduate seminars but is nearly impossible to do in undergraduate classics courses (in part because, through an odd system of incentives, nearly all students in upper division "seminar" courses are non-majors).</div>
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At present, I have only involved undergraduates in the delivery of Intro to Ancient Rome/Online Rome as graders. It's not a bad job and it is enormously helpful to the instructional team, especially when we are teaching very large numbers of students and need to turn around the exams quickly. The course instructor graded 10-15 short answer sections on the exams, to establish a rubric. The instructor then met with the graders, reviewed the rubric and scoring of points (with attention to common errors and breakdown of points for each question). Without exception, the undergraduates did an excellent job and were very attentive and punctual. They more than earned their stipend. The job offered an opportunity to engage with the instructor and to see a bit how large courses are run.</div>
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I am a much bigger fan of peer mentors in the classroom. I saw them
used to excellent effect in my colleague Cynthia LaBrake's Intro to
Chemistry course. I wish that I had had the funds to create a more
elaborate network of peer mentors for Online Rome. This is one aspect of the Online Rome course that could be developed. Especially in the online class, putting current students in contact with former, successful students would go a long way towards helping the new students figure out how to take an online class and, in particular, how to do well in Online Rome. Online bulletin boards/Rate My Professor-like sites can offer some information, but it tends to reflect narrow points of view. It would be much more effective to have a group of former, successful students who act as mentors and graders. If some effort were made to meet weekly with these peer mentors, it would also be an excellent way to sharpen and expand the mentors' content knowledge as well as their ability to explain complicated concepts to their peers. There is really a great opportunity here, especially for Classics and related majors, if the funding can be found and if someone is willing to spend the time developing and running such a program.</div>
Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-9293478911351323912015-05-15T11:09:00.001-07:002015-05-15T16:30:25.653-07:00Practice Makes Perfect: Online Course Design and Digital Affordances<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Even as it has become evident that online courses will play an increasingly prominent role in higher education (and <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/3-things-academic-leaders-believe-about-online-education/55727">academic administrator</a>s acknowledge this reality), faculty have <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/survey/conflicted.html">continued to be skeptical</a> of their quality and ability to support crucial skills like critical thinking (see also <a href="https://medium.com/whos-afraid-of-online-education/the-doxa-of-the-classroom-or-when-online-learning-fails-8163df82291a">this article</a>). I have always found this skepticism odd and more a reflection of the fact that most faculty have no direct knowledge of or experience with online education in its current forms. It is especially challenging to imagine how an online course could do the same kind of work that, at least in the minds of faculty, our small seminar-style classes do. In addition, we overlook the fact that, in truth, most of us have little sense of what goes on in the classrooms around our campuses.<br />
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When it comes to the courses of our own departmental and institutional colleagues, however, we know very little about what or how well students are actually learning. Our default assumption is that any classroom based course is a good course with abundant, high quality student learning; but we should probably assume that such courses are the exception rather than the rule, especially on R1 public university campuses where the majority of courses are currently taught by professors in training (aka graduate students) and contingent faculty who are badly paid, carry heavy teaching loads, and lack any kind of job security.<br />
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This prejudice against online education is one that I find interesting but also troubling. On the one hand, faculty who know nothing about it assume that it is, by nature, inferior to a classroom-based course (much like Plato and the ancients perpetuated the view that writing inferior to speech). On the other hand, these same faculty view online courses as effectively self-teaching. My own sense is that, lacking any first hand knowledge of the wide variability in online course designs, most faculty assume that all online courses look like the standard MOOC: a set of talking-head lectures by a content expert followed by some machine-graded quizzes and/or exams.<br />
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In reality, online courses are highly variable, far more so than classroom courses. I suspect that, as more faculty get down in the trenches of online course design, we will see even more variability in course design. The online platform allows for far more innovation, variation, and creativity than does the current college/university classroom, even so-called Smart Classrooms. The trick is for the faculty designer to recognize that the online space is a wholly different kind of space with different affordances--and to leverage those affordances. One of the most disappointing things about MOOCs is that, in most cases, they are incredibly conservative in format. They attempt to recreate the classroom experience, but imperfectly. Few MOOC designers approach the task of designing the learning experience as an opportunity to invent new models of teaching and learning that maximize the strengths of the digital while minimizing its weaknesses.<br />
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Instead of lamenting the absence of face to face interaction in online classes, and the challenges that this presents, we need to look at the online medium for what it CAN offer that face to face cannot--and then maximize those affordances. This is tough work. It requires a lot of creativity and a willingness to, in some sense, re-learn basic skills. It requires the course designer to understand that you can have the same basic learning outcomes for a classroom course and an online course; yet the pathways to achieving those learning outcomes are likely to look very different. This can be intimidating to successful and experienced classroom instructors. Yet, if one tries to build an online class that is a poor imitation of a classroom course, it is not likely to succeed.<br />
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Online Rome exploited the affordances of the digital learning environment in several crucial ways. Two of these: the ability of digital learning activities to provide immediate feedback and opportunities for repetitive practice and self-correction; and the ability to personalize student engagement with primary source material. I'll talk about the ways that the course highlighted student engagement with primary source material in another post. This post focuses on the ways we exploited the digital learning environment and mastery learning in the course design.<br />
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A driving theoretical principle in the design of the Online Rome course is, essentially, that practice makes perfect. In my previous life as a serious athlete (I played fastpitch softball at a pretty high level, as a pitcher), I learned at an early age that the key to success under pressure was practice. A lot of practice. As a pitcher, I practiced every day. I had a coach who critiqued the tiniest things and made me re-do pitches over and over until I got every part right. I watched video of myself. I got better because I worked very hard at it--even though I am 5'3 and have short "levers." I wasn't born with a pitcher's body, but I was smart and I worked incredibly hard to maximize the talent I had. <br />
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Online Rome follows the same basic principle that hard work can make up for a lack of natural talent--and, in fact, is far more important than natural talent. My job, as course designer, was to create activities that focus the work and provide immediate feedback so that students can recognize their misconceptions and correct them before they take hold. This process is much easier done in the digital environment than in a classroom, especially when dealing with larger class sizes. In a classroom, it is very difficult to know what every single student is thinking at a given moment (though student response systems like i>clickers are of great help). It can also be difficult to clarify misconceptions, because the nature of those misconceptions will vary from student to student. In the long run, it is much better pedagogy to train students to recognize and correct their own misconceptions using instructor-provided feedback. In the digital environment, that feedback can be instantaneous thanks to machine grading.<br />
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2/3 of the grade on the 10 course modules is entirely about effort. Students earn full credit if they score 90% or higher on the in-module questions, but they can repeat the module as many times as they need to. The theory is that, by incentivizing practice, we are actually incentivizing the type of behavior that leads to learning. Similarly, at the end of each module we included a large number of practice quiz questions (c. 35-50). The point of these practice questions was for students to be able to check their mastery, figure out where they needed remediation, and fill in those gaps BEFORE taking a graded quiz. The graded quiz provided motivation to do the practice quiz but, in fact, the far more important and influential learning activity was the practice quiz.<br />
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The performances on the graded quizzes at the end of each module; the essays; and the midterm exams suggests that we were right about this. The students practice learning the content until they master it. They are happy because this produces high grades and I am happy because it produces high quality learning, especially in the essays (where we ask them to do analysis and application). I use various forms of digital learning activities and automated feedback in my blended classroom-based Intro to Rome class (i<clicker questions, practice quizzes, in class quizzes). Because I teach large numbers of students, I have to teach students to use the diagnostic information that they get from these activities to self-correct. This process is no different online than in the classroom--except that I can do it far more thoroughly in the digital learning environment of an online course.Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-90968545245982353622015-05-14T17:36:00.003-07:002015-05-14T17:53:09.519-07:00In Search of the Golden Mean<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The process of designing and building Online Rome was filled with obstacles. A big one--perhaps the biggest and most challenging one--was figuring out a design that would allow the course to scale well enough that my university would be willing to create and fund future instructors. I discovered only in Fall 2014, more than a year into the project, that there was no plan in place for funding the instruction of Online Rome after Fall 2014 (when, as part of the terms of the grant, I hired and paid all instructors and graders). I gather that there was the expectation that departments would take on the instructional costs. Yet, with no clear incentives to do so, that was unlikely to happen.<br />
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A savvy department leadership might understand that there were long-term (and even some short-term) benefits to working their soft money budget to fund the instruction of an online course but, given the general lack of experience with or knowledge about online teaching and learning in academic units, this was not likely to happen. My own department certainly had no interest in supporting the ongoing instruction of Online Rome without additional soft money from the College of Liberal Arts. Thankfully, with the help of our fabulous Liberal Arts ITS department head and my project manager, I was able to get my college to foot the bill for the course instruction in Spring 2015. I then spent this Spring advocating tirelessly for my college to find a longer term solution to the funding of the course's instruction--which, thankfully, they did in the form of giving my department instructional funds to hire a lecturer on the condition that at least three sections of Online Rome were offered each semester.<br />
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One of the ways that I was able to "sell" my college on continuing to support the instruction of Online Rome was by designing a course that is, in fact, less expensive to teach than the classroom based version. For me, the challenge was to navigate between the Scylla of deans who wanted efficiency; and the Charybdis of quality. If I could not find a way to design a course that also produced high quality learning, I had no interest in extending the life of the course. The design of the Fall 2014 version was labor intensive and totally unsustainable. It also did not really produce the kind of quality critical thinking that I wanted to see.<br />
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My main task during this past spring semester, on the development side, was finding a way to reduce the labor demands on the instructor; and ensure that the instructor's time was being spent as much as possible on high impact activities. In brief, it was about finding a balance between questions that could be automatically graded but still required students to do more than regurgitate content; and instructor-graded activities--in our case, short essays. In the Fall 2014 version, I tried to use short answer question inside the modules. I then wanted the instructional team to read, grade and respond to these short answer questions. This might have worked for a class of 30 but was unmanageable in a class of 300+, also because Canvas is not set up very well for this. Speed Grader only works for a graded quiz but, for other reasons, we needed to categorize the modules as practice quizzes. It rapidly became clear that the module grading had to be automated if the course was going to scale at all.<br />
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In order for the module grading to be automated, the short answer questions had to either be removed or be ungraded. I did not want to remove them. They served several purposes, the most important of which was to require active thinking/writing at frequent intervals. They also allowed me to ask certain kinds of questions that could not be reduced to a multiple choice/matching/ranking, etc. question. My solution was to retain the short answer questions and provide extensive feedback on each one. In the course orientation module, I spent a good amount of time introducing the students to the concept of self-regulated learning; and explained how the concept was used in the design of the course. Of course, students could skip over the short answer questions or write nonsense. They could paraphrase the feedback. I did test some of the content in the short answer questions later in the module. I would love to be able to work with a programmer to design an LTI that makes it easier to spot the short answer questions in the modules.<br />
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The course modules were worth 35% of the final course grade. Each module was worth 3 points. 2 points were awarded for getting 90% or higher on the questions in the module. Students could redo the module questions as many times as they wanted, until they earned that 90%. The third point was awarded for earning a 90% or higher on a graded, 15 question quiz at the end of the module. A quiz grade of 70-89% earned a student 1/2 point. Anything under 70% earned no points. These graded quizzes were intended primarily as a way for the students to get feedback on their learning before the midterm exam. They were graded to encourage them to take them seriously--which worked. They were not weighted very heavily because they were intended to be formative; and because they were not proctored. We did have a database of questions and no two students would get the same quiz; and the questions were not easy to Google. At the same time, to remove the temptation to cheat, we de-emphasized the graded quiz. Students also had an optional practice quiz that they could take; and many of the quiz questions came directly from the module and practice quiz. The emphasis and incentives were entirely on effort, persistence, self-correction, and time on task. <br />
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45% of the course grade was 3 proctored midterms, administered on campus in the evening. The midterms consisted of multiple choice questions, of the same sort that they saw in the modules, practice quizzes, and graded quizzes; and then short answer questions. The instructor provided a detail study guide for the short answer questions and took the exam questions from the study guide. Again, the emphasis was on effort and focused work. In reality, the study guide was so comprehensive that nothing was being given away--it was simply a way to soothe anxieties and help the students focus their study. <br />
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In place of the time-consuming and low-return short answer questions, we added 500-750 word essays to the course. The essays were worth 10% of the total grade. Each student had to submit 5 essays over the course of the semester. All students completed a final, summative essay with the last module. For modules 2-9, we divided the students into sections and, for each module, half of the sections had an essay. This meant that, for each module, the instructor had 50 essays to grade rather than 100. Five essays was plenty of writing and practice with critical thinking. The instructor spent a lot of time crafting and refining the essay prompts. On the whole, the students did an outstanding job with the essays. The instructor reported that he enjoyed reading them and, frequently, found the students thinking critically and deeply about Roman history and culture. This change in the course design was a resounding success.<br />
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The final component of the course grade, a new addition in the spring, was a movie module that was worth 10%. We chose Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, partly because it's a good way to introduce students to the ways in which Ancient Rome has been used to talk about contemporary political issues. An area ripe for future development is the addition of more movie modules (Gladiator, Pompeii, etc.).<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-W0VvIkEgGTY/VVU9e5oiR4I/AAAAAAAAAjo/2QA8JEs3924/s1600/Spartacus%2Bintro.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-W0VvIkEgGTY/VVU9e5oiR4I/AAAAAAAAAjo/2QA8JEs3924/s320/Spartacus%2Bintro.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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We introduced the module with an outline of the module as well as a reminder to review their earlier work on the historical figure of Spartacus and his revolt. There were two in-module quizzes. The first focused on slavery in Ancient Rome, so that the students would understand that aspect of the film and also understand the ways that Roman slave practices differed from what they might have learned about slavery in the US.<br />
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The second in-module quiz focused on Kubrick's film and the political background of the McCarthy Hearings--a topic that was unfamiliar to nearly all the students.</div>
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The module ended with an essay prompt. All students were required to write this essay (so, in fact, students wrote 6 essays in total during the course).</div>
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The instructor held a screening of the film on campus for interested students and did a brief introduction. The movie module was a great way to introduce the idea of Classical Reception into the course but also to sneak in a bit of modern American history. I suspect that movie modules on Gladiator or Pompeii would also be very successful and popular with the students--and, certainly, those films are a bit easier to watch and understand than Kubrick's 3 hour masterpiece!<br />
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In the end, I am happy with the end result. Students engage in a substantial amount of critical thinking and writing, especially in the essays. Effort and persistence are highly rewarded, two things that we know are crucial to learning. The scores on the proctored midterms were very high over the semester, indicating that the work that the students were doing on the modules was leading to real learning that they were then able to demonstrate on exams. <br />
<br />Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-29751883684289683192015-05-13T17:57:00.003-07:002015-05-13T17:57:48.265-07:00Online Rome: An Overview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HuHt3O7MBO8/VVPxVed6bPI/AAAAAAAAAi8/4QYEbjIwZOg/s1600/Roman%2Broad%2Bat%2BPompeii.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HuHt3O7MBO8/VVPxVed6bPI/AAAAAAAAAi8/4QYEbjIwZOg/s320/Roman%2Broad%2Bat%2BPompeii.jpg" width="238" /></a></div>
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At the moment, Online Rome is not publicly accessible. There are various complicated reasons for this, mostly related to FERPA and the fact that we used UT's Canvas platform. This means that one needs to be a UT System employee in order to access the course, for the time being. I am working with the project manager to make at least some part of it publicly available. I hope this will happen over the next month, once students are finished with the course.<br />
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In the meantime, if you are interested in the course design, take a look at<a href="https://prezi.com/kvba4inj0x4_/cc-302-wb-introduction-to-ancient-rome-online/"> this excellent Prezi</a> put together by the course instructor, Dr. Steven Lundy. The Prezi was for a presentation to the UT Classics Department, to familiarize them with the basic structure of the course as well as the function of different elements (and why various elements, like the weekly review sessions, seem to have been crucial to improving retention from about 80% in the fall semester to the low 90s in the spring semester (a stat which is right in line with f2f classes of 100+ students). Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-65884927904654810622015-05-11T09:58:00.003-07:002015-05-11T09:58:26.679-07:00When Your Online Students are Campus-Based<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ulOGw8ykWxk/VVDLZJeFsEI/AAAAAAAAAic/jPrAmRSNjfA/s1600/Online%2BStudent%2Bon%2Bcampus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ulOGw8ykWxk/VVDLZJeFsEI/AAAAAAAAAic/jPrAmRSNjfA/s400/Online%2BStudent%2Bon%2Bcampus.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: http://csuw3.csuohio.edu/offices/ist/studentcomputing/mobile_campus.html</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
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As online courses proliferate, one of the more interesting developments is the emergence of the category of campus-based online student. These are students who are taking most of their courses in the traditional, classroom based format but, for a range of reasons, are also taking online courses. Some of these online course might be offered by distant institutions; but, increasingly, they may be offered through the student's home university, as the web-based version of a course that is also offered in a face-to-face format.<br />
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UT Austin's College of Liberal Arts began to experiment with different forms of online instruction several years ago when they offered Intro to Psychology as a SMOC (Synchronous Massive Online Course). The SMOC format involved the live streaming of lectures that were recorded in a campus studio. Students were required to log-in to the class session, at least for the first ten minutes, to take a short MC quiz. The course design also included opportunities for students to discuss questions in small groups--something that would have been more successful if more students had remained logged into the course after the first ten minutes.<br />
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As we went live with Online Rome, to test and revise the design as well as to determine staffing needs, our primary audience was UT Austin students. The course was offered through the Classics Department, side by side with the face to face version of the course. For UT Austin students paying flat-rate tuition, the course was fully covered. The demand for the course was extremely high--somewhat to my surprise given that it was brand new and still in development. In Spring 2015, we had to cap the course at 100 just to be able to have enough time to finish the development. <br />
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The majority of the students preferred the online class to the classroom course for reasons of flexibility. Many of the enrolled students were STEM majors who had very complicated schedules and long days on campus. The much preferred to take a core requirement course online, where they had much more flexibility in completing the work. The course still had plenty of structure and deadlines to keep everyone on track, but we saw that many students would spend several hours working through a module as soon as it was released. In fact, in future iterations that we control, we will release the modules well in advance to provide as much flexibility to students as possible. <br />
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One of the unexpected elements of teaching campus-based students was that, for about 20% of the class, they desired face to face interaction with the instructor. Typically, such interactions are not possible in on online class. But, when the students are campus-based, it is possible to hold office hours, exam review sessions, and even weekly review sessions. Based on feedback from the fall semester, we added a weekly review session to the Spring 2015 class. The vast majority of students did not need or want this extra interaction with the instructor. But for the 20% who did want it, it made a tremendous difference in their ability to stay on track and feel engaged with the course. We also live-streamed the review sessions, so that everyone had access to them.<br />
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In the end, the instruction of an online course to campus-based students seems to push towards the hybrid. This makes a lot of sense to me. The hybrid model produces the highest learning gains. It combines the best of all worlds--the advantages of face to face instruction while leveraging all the affordances of the digital. It is also something that online instructors are not always prepared for. They often assume that, since they are teaching online, they don't really need to interact with students face to face. This isn't really true in any context. Even in distance online courses, there needs to be significant attention to connecting with students and building a learning community. <br />
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When students are campus-based, they expect that instructors will be available for scheduled office hours, appointments, and structured reviews. It was interesting to watch as a significant number of students intuitively grasped that, for them, this kind of hybridized model was going to best support their learning. Of course, many students were fine to work through the modules, submit assignments, and use the provided study guides to prepare for exams--those are the 30% of our students who would be A students regardless of what we did. But for the students in the middle, the B students who can become A students, the C students who can become B students, they recognized and asked for more direct contact with the instructor. An advantage of offering the course to campus based students is that, in essence, we can retain the asynchronous online class for those that want it while also providing the hybrid course for those who prefer that model.<br />
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Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-47063814322131252172015-05-11T07:22:00.001-07:002015-05-11T07:22:03.880-07:00Beyond Content: Critical Thinking Online<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TwkkUQj7iUE/VU6l9jVvqeI/AAAAAAAAAhY/xgHo6TFFcbU/s1600/Core%2BCritical%2BThinking%2BSkills.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TwkkUQj7iUE/VU6l9jVvqeI/AAAAAAAAAhY/xgHo6TFFcbU/s320/Core%2BCritical%2BThinking%2BSkills.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Image source: http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/main/critical-thinking-skills-you-need-to-master-now/)</td></tr>
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Probably the biggest misapprehension about online course design and instruction is that the course is an automated version of a pure lecture model of instruction. This misapprehension includes the wrongheaded reduction of instructors to the role of "content deliverer." Students are imagined as blank slates whose minds are supposedly filled by all this delivered content. If this were an accurate model of teaching and learning, in any environment, then it really would be possible to record faculty delivering lectures and put them online. It really would be possible to reduce the role of the instructor to "course manager/grade accountant." In this role, the course manager would be responsible for trouble-shooting technology problems, proctoring exams, answering logistical questions that are already answered on the syllabus. If only it were so easy.<br />
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Partly in an effort to discourage anyone from thinking that my Online Rome course could be run without the involvement of at least one content expert at the top, I did not include any lectures in the course. You will never see me in the role of "content deliver" or "content expert." We did include some old pre-recorded lectures that covered the basics, mostly because we had them and I was curious to see how much students used them when they were unnecessary. Those lectures will not be used in the version of the course that is run for UT Austin students, in part to avoid the false assumption on all sides that students will pass by watching those lectures.<br />
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Rather, the design of the course emphasized active, constructivist learning. Students learn by answering questions that highlight essential bits of ancient Roman history. We ask them to think about things deeply and critically. Oftentimes there isn't one "correct" answer--and that's the point. We talk a lot about the limits of evidence. We make it clear that this is a class that goes well beyond memorizing a bunch of random information and regurgitating that on graded assignments. If that's all the class were, it really should be taught by a robot. As Mike Caulfield puts it, <a href="http://hapgood.us/2015/05/01/we-are-not-in-the-content-business-we-are-in-the-community-business/">we are not in the content business; we are in the business of building communities of learners.</a><br />
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In designing the class, we did as much as we could to focus on the development and exercise of <a href="http://ctl.utexas.edu/teaching/learning/critical-thinking">critical thinking skills</a>--in the modules, in essays at the end of modules, and on graded activities. In the first live version of the course, we tried to use short answer questions inside of modules to accomplish these outcomes, but without much success. A big part of the problem: Canvas isn't really designed to give students feedback on short answer questions inside of modules; and it required that graders have a substantial knowledge of ancient Roman history to give useful and on point feedback. It also required that students review the feedback and take it in.<br />
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In the Spring 2015 version, we retained the short answer questions but emphasized the self-regulating aspect of learning with them. We provided extensive but general feedback in the comments but relied on students to answer the questions (or not). We also reviewed the contents of some of the short answer questions later in the module, through an automatically graded question. The instructor feedback was shifted to the essays. This produced much better results, both because the students took the essay more seriously and very often produced thoughtful responses; and, because of how we distributed the work, the grading for the instructor was 50 500 word essays/week--a small enough amount that he could give extended and engaged feedback to students. The students, in turn, were more likely to look at the feedback for a single assignment that felt weighty to them. The depth of student engagement on the "big issues" has been very impressive.<br />
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There is nothing about the online meeting that makes it easier or more difficult to teach and practice critical thinking skills. It's entirely about devising and incentivizing the right learning activities for the environment. It also requires that one view the instructor not as a content provider or manger of logistics, but as a teacher. At every step, critical thinking requires reflection from the student and, at key points, feedback from the teacher. It is crucial that the teacher has the knowledge to provide that feedback that then pushes the student to think more deeply and critically.<br />
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To give just one example of a Q&A from the class discussion board:<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;">A student asks the following question while working through a module: "A question says that this was necessary to confer the powers required to
rule as emperor. However, the recording states that this was a self
defeating proposal as it conferred power beyond the legal basis law.
Given that Vespasian was already emperor, and thus laid claim to supreme
power, did this truly do anything beyond codify what he already had?
That is to say, was it necessary or just convenient for Vespasian?"</span><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">The instructor replies: "Good question, and one without a clear
answer. On the one hand, as a non-Julio-Claudian, and a usurper of the
throne, Vespasian required the <i>lex</i> to give his position legal
standing. On the other, this seems to obscure a reality that had stood
behind Vespasian's rise and, indeed, Augustus': the power of the emperor
was not based on law, but his irrefutable military supremacy.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">In other words, what the <i>lex </i>did was standardize the
position of the emperor in a way that made it possible for an emperor to
hold power without basing his legitimacy on family lineage. What it
didn't do was resolve the ambiguity that resided between the "clout" of
the emperor and the notional continued constitutional existence of the
Republic (which echoes the contrast between <i>auctoritas</i> and <i>imperium </i>that
was apparently crucial to Augustus' reign). The degree to which this
was understood by contemporary Romans is debatable; for them, it was
merely a standard law that made Vespasian's extraordinary reign
consistent within existing fabric of Roman society."</span></div>
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The amount of expertise required to engage with this student's interesting and thoughtful question is very high and goes well beyond the "I read the textbook a week before the students did" approach of some out of their depth instructors. An interesting thing happens when you give smart kids a lot of information and ask them to think about it: they do. And sometimes they have questions that don't have an easy, Google-able answer. Sometimes, to answer their question, you have to have a deep knowledge of late Roman republican history; Roman law; Augustan auctoritas vs imperium, and how that evolved under the Judio-Claudians; and the intersection of law and martial power from Sulla onwards. This is very specialized learning, the sort of learning one acquires only by writing a dissertation/conducting research in the field or, possibly, after decades of teaching the course.<br />
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Learning does not happen by magic. It doesn't happen just by attending lecture nor does it happen just by opening up and even working through an online module. While many--most of all ed tech VCs--would love to be able to automate professors, the harsh reality is that we can't be automated. Parts of what we do can be automated, certainly; but WE can't be automated. We can be replaced by other content experts (who will have different sets of strengths and weaknesses), but we can't be replaced by robots or by a Physics BA who is looking to earn some extra money on the side.<br />
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If one thinks of an online instructor as nothing more than a grader and student wrangler, quite a lot of potential learning seeps away as students realize that nobody has the expertise to engage with them. It's interesting to me that we all recognize them when it comes to a physical classroom; yet want to believe that, somehow, when it comes to online learning, the course itself can magically provide all these ingredients--especially timely and engaged feedback--that are essential for developing critical thinking skills in the vast majority of our undergraduate students. Technology is not magic. Learning online is difficult and requires the same interaction with content experts that classroom learning requires.Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-59149022548496591342015-05-10T09:37:00.004-07:002015-05-10T09:51:43.838-07:00Orienting Online Students<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l-KRxTzxyxw/VU-CHOQMivI/AAAAAAAAAhw/gRbOmVLODRY/s1600/compass-on-map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l-KRxTzxyxw/VU-CHOQMivI/AAAAAAAAAhw/gRbOmVLODRY/s400/compass-on-map.jpg" width="400" /> </a></div>
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Every hiker knows not to leave home without water, an emergency supply of food, a map, and a compass. A cell phone or an emergency locator beacon can also be useful. Before setting foot on the trail, hikers will orient themselves to their surroundings and make note of the weather (and, hopefully, they checked the forecast before leaving home). They will find North and make sure they are headed in the correct direction.</div>
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Educators know that orientations are also important for our students. At UT Austin, we require students to attend an entire week of orientation activities on campus during June and July. The first week of classes is full of orientation activities. We orient new graduate students to campus, the department, and the program. Yet, for the most part, most of us devote very little time to orienting our students to our face to face classes. Sure, we spend the first class meeting reviewing the syllabus and discussing our expectations for the course. In a seminar course, students might introduce themselves to one another. But, really, we don't orient students to the course itself, including what to expect as the semester progresses. For the most part, this lack of orientation isn't a problem. The basic experience of taking on class is not that different from another class; and these students have been practicing classroom-based education since before they could use the potty on their own. What they don't know, they quickly figure out; and if they are truly disoriented, they will seek help from a classmate or us.</div>
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The problems come up in spades when we shift learning to online. Suddenly, the students feel lost, uncertain, unsure--even if, in actuality, their part in the learning process hasn't significantly changed and there is not reason for them to feel disoriented. The majority of these so-called digital natives behave as if they were plopped down on a different planet that operates by a wholly different set of natural laws when they participate in the online classroom. They are disoriented and looking for familiar landmarks--which are often not immediately evident to them. Sometimes they forget good behavior. The same student who would never shout obscenities to a classmate suddenly posts an invective-laced, <i>ad hominem</i> attack on the discussion board. When the impropriety is pointed out, they often are ashamed and deeply apologetic. They just didn't think about it, they say.</div>
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When I implemented the blended course design in my campus-based large lecture class, the first semester was an exercise in frustration for me and the students. Most of it, I realized, came down to issues of disorientation: the students felt disoriented and were unable to recognize the familiar when it was right in front of them. It really was as if they were wearing a pair of glasses that distorted everything and made even completely normal things seem unfamiliar. From this, I learned the value of crafting a thoughtful orientation for students in "innovative" courses. These days, students are much more accustomed to the expectations and workings of the blended classroom, so orientation goes pretty quickly. The new frontier is the online class, especially the online class at scale (the larger the class, the more potential for disorientation).</div>
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In the first live run of Online Rome, we were pressed for time to get the course ready for students (the decision to go live was made by UT days before the start of the semester). We put together a short orientation module, but hastily. It worked ok, but throughout the term it was apparent that some portion of the students--maybe 10%--were still confused and disoriented. It wasn't that we were asking them to do strange things; it was that they were disoriented in the online environment and so were unable to recognize and feel comfortable with standard learning activities. They felt the need to double-check everything, seek confirmation that they were "doing things right." All of this disorientation required significant time and effort on the part of the instructor throughout the semester.</div>
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Over the winter break, I spent considerable time revising the orientation module so that it did a better job of equipping students with the skills they would need to confidently and successfully navigate the course. I also worked with the course instructor on the issue of orientation. This spring, he made regular announcements to the class, reminders of where they should be, upcoming deadlines and other course activities, and general feedback on things like their essays. The results have been what I expected: the students felt comfortable, knew what was expected, and have wasted little time fretting about logistics.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KHAoAPciJMg/VU-KVHjxGHI/AAAAAAAAAiE/MOsFdsmdFQ4/s1600/Orientation.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KHAoAPciJMg/VU-KVHjxGHI/AAAAAAAAAiE/MOsFdsmdFQ4/s400/Orientation.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
Eventually, we will be teaching a generation of students who are as comfortable learning online as they are in a classroom; and who require less regular orientations and re-orientations by the instructor. For now, though, the default learning environment for our students is the face to face classroom. Anything else requires us to be aware of the constant potential for disorientation. A lot of time can be saved with a well-crafted orientation module, that lays out for the students the architecture of the course and their role in it. To give just one example, we focused on the role of self-regulated learning in Online Rome. We had the students read a little bit about the concept and answer some questions; and then had them apply the concept to a learning activity (answer a short answer question, look at feedback, reflect on how they would modify their response).<br />
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Finally, having students perform the sorts of activities that they will be doing throughout the semester is an excellent way for them to evaluate whether the online course is a good fit for them. If they find it difficult to complete the orientation module on time; or feel alienated in the online environment, they have plenty of time to drop the course and find something that is a better fit for their style of learning.Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-24729011173836461342015-05-09T14:39:00.000-07:002015-05-09T15:36:22.038-07:00Looking Forward, Looking Back<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jLwyv9vd_m0/VU4eHNw_E1I/AAAAAAAAAg4/kCgedkrmytc/s1600/Janus%2Bhead%2Blaureated%2BBronze%2Bcoin%2BCanisium%2B%2Bship%2Bprow%2Bon%2Breverse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jLwyv9vd_m0/VU4eHNw_E1I/AAAAAAAAAg4/kCgedkrmytc/s1600/Janus%2Bhead%2Blaureated%2BBronze%2Bcoin%2BCanisium%2B%2Bship%2Bprow%2Bon%2Breverse.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bronze coin from Canusium, with laureate head of Janus on obverse and prow of a ship on the reverse</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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My favorite ancient Roman deity is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus">Janus</a>, the two-headed god of beginnings, endings, and transitions. His temple in Rome, the first of which was constructed by Rome's second king Numa Pompilius, famously closed its doors when Rome was at peace. Rarely in the history of ancient Rome were the doors of Janus's temple closed--and by the time Augustus shut Janus's doors (first in 29 BCE), the gesture had become more imperial propaganda than a reflection of reality. It feels a bit like Rome has been pacified and it's time to enjoy a bit of engaged relaxation, what the Romans called<i> otium</i>.<br />
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Now that my part of the Online Rome project has come to an end, at least with regard to the instruction of the online course to UT Austin students, I'm thinking a lot about what's next. My job was to develop a sustainable, scalable (within reason) online class that could produce high levels of student learning. It was supposed to be efficient, both in terms of maximizing the efficiencies of technology and, bluntly, in terms of costing less $$ to instruct more students than our current face to face courses do. I also worked hard to leverage the advantages of the online medium while minimizing the disadvantages. I spent a lot of time and creative energy to find solutions that preserved quality but also maximized the efficiencies of technology. I made sure that the instructor's time was spent giving feedback on high value learning activities. I am very proud of the work I did, together with the course instructor, Dr. Steve Lundy. We delivered exactly what we promised when I was given the grant. Part of the final "product" was a trained instructor whom the department could afford to hire; and a plan for training additional instructors. Every piece was in place for the course to be a good experience for UT Austin students; and a good opportunity for Classics PhD students to get some experience with online instruction.<br />
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Quo vadis? First of all, Steve and I are not done with Online Rome, not by a long shot. Steve will work with the department on the transition, do consulting work for our Liberal Arts IT Development Studio (who have, thankfully, protected him in various ways for next year), and work with me on some research related to Online Rome. He will also be instructing the University Extension School section of the course in Summer 2015 and, probably, Fall 2015 (so, you want to take the course as it was designed, from an actual Roman historian? Pay $350 to register via UEX and transfer the credits wherever you need to, including back into UT Austin).<br />
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I am also thinking hard about other ways to connect students to the Online Rome class. One audience I'd especially like to reach is those in the UT System, who don't otherwise have access to a course like this. I'm also interested in collaborating with 1-2 large, established online programs to think about how these programs might be able to make this course available to their students, and what an agreement to do so would look like. As we move closer to a future in which many students will take a lot of the Gen Ed courses online, it will make sense for online programs to partner with faculty from other institutions to share content. This is roughly the idea behind <a href="http://unizin.org/blog/">Unizin</a>--but Unizin positions itself as the clearinghouse and repository. This is one model; another model is, in essence, a more direct kind of collaboration between individual faculty and online programs. I am very interested in working with some proven programs and experienced staff to see what a more direct collaboration might look like.<br />
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I am especially excited to now have the time to return to writing--about emperors and the senate; about online course design; about higher education policy. I am currently digging in on two book projects: a traditional classics monograph that looks at the complex and evolving relationship of the Roman senate and the emperors, beginning with Sulla in the 1st century BCE--a project that took shape as a direct result of my work in building Online Rome. My second book project, <i>Teaching and Learning in the New Digital Ecosystem</i>, builds on my "innovative teaching" experiences over these past three years, with blended and online course design and implementation. I have a rather unique vantage point: I know the scholarship and theory very well but have also been down in the trenches, designing and implementing and revising the courses, and doing so at scale. I have had to learn how to manage a budget, manage a project, hire and fire people, and deliver on deadline (this last one wasn't such a problem!). I've also had a first-hand look at the challenges our current policies and infrastructures pose to the successful implementation of truly innovative courses. There is a tendency to blame faculty for lacking creativity or being unwilling to take risks. I've learned, usually the hard way, that these risks rarely pay off, at least in the short run. I've also learned that, eventually, policies and infrastructure get put in place to prevent the worst abuses/problems.<br />
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I'm planning to use this blog as the place to organize and process a lot of the thinking for the Digital Teaching and Learning book. Blogging is a great adjunct to my writing process, both because I have to figure out how to articulate in writing what is in my head but also because it usually generates comments and insights from people who know much more than I do. These comments and conversations make me aware of issues that I hadn't thought about and, especially, clarify for me the real issues. Like, for instance, that the central issue with online education is labor. That has emerged so clearly from my project, at every turn and in every way. It's all about labor and contingency--and as soon as faculty automate their labor to the point that it seems like they can be cut out of the work, they will be. It's not an accident that the person my department hired to run the Online Rome is also running another major program that I built, together with another colleague. We did such a good job that, even to a PhD in classics, it seemed reasonable to replace us with someone who has a very, very different skill set from us or from what the job will demand. I don't think I would have realized the centrality of labor issues in this whole conversation without people like Karen Gregory.<br />
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Down here in the trenches of higher education at the large, underfunded state university, I feel like we are poised on the precipice. It's a time of great change. This is unsettling, particularly because much of the change thus far has been for the good of the empowered classes (mostly high level administrators) and has severely harmed our institutions, our current and future students, and the most vulnerable members of our profession. I am sad to see my senior colleagues so unable to protect the future of higher education, so disengaged with the political and economic realities of higher education that they make catastrophic decisions without even beginning to understand what they've done or why it matters. <br />
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I'm a historian--something I'd have never said a decade ago. But these days, I'm pretty solidly a historian and will be. I happen to study one of the most interesting periods of history--the end of the Western Roman Empire. The Roman West in the 4th and 5th centuries tells us that times of great change are also opportunities. I hope that I will also look back and think that some good things happened, that some unmet potentials were fulfilled. I have to confess that, at the moment, my optimism is flagging. I try to remember that change, especially good changes, often happen slowly and painfully. I don't want to believe that we are in a death spiral but I do sometimes wonder. I'll keep fighting the good fight for now.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0NGXZEWYScI/VU4eRszxa4I/AAAAAAAAAhA/_W8UnTDgeTE/s1600/Nero%2Band%2Btemple%2Bof%2BJanus%2Bwith%2Bdoor%2Bclosed%2B64.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="162" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0NGXZEWYScI/VU4eRszxa4I/AAAAAAAAAhA/_W8UnTDgeTE/s320/Nero%2Band%2Btemple%2Bof%2BJanus%2Bwith%2Bdoor%2Bclosed%2B64.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Coin issued by Nero in 64 CE, to commemorate the negotiation of a peace deal with the Parthians. The coin's reverse depicts the Temple of Janus in Rome, with its doors closed.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-36741219123657663132015-05-06T14:48:00.000-07:002015-05-20T14:24:27.910-07:00The Ruin of Rome, or Something Happened on the Way to the Forum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Xu6ZGOcSrl0/VUpkoxQPO-I/AAAAAAAAAf0/BtTCcf3pM9o/s1600/Forum%2BRomanum%2B312.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Xu6ZGOcSrl0/VUpkoxQPO-I/AAAAAAAAAf0/BtTCcf3pM9o/s1600/Forum%2BRomanum%2B312.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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This reconstruction of the Roman Forum shows what this remarkable civic space looked like in 312 CE, shortly after Constantine took over command as the senior co-emperor (with Licinius) of the Roman Empire. In 312 CE, Rome and the Western Empire were on the brink of one last great run before irreversible decline set in sometime around the late 6th century. Below is a photo of the Roman Forum today, from a roughly similar angle on the Capitoline Hill (photo courtesty of Darius Arya).<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-352UW3VLkzQ/VUpl2ppx4JI/AAAAAAAAAgA/JSPhIHz0RoU/s1600/Roman%2BForum%2Bfrom%2BCaptoline%2BDar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-352UW3VLkzQ/VUpl2ppx4JI/AAAAAAAAAgA/JSPhIHz0RoU/s1600/Roman%2BForum%2Bfrom%2BCaptoline%2BDar.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Even today, amid the ruins and barely identifiable traces of once magnificent buildings, a walk through the Roman Forum is magical. It is difficult to imagine what the experience must have been like for a Roman living during the height of Augustus's or Trajan's reign. The sheer majesty of the surrounding buildings, gleaming with gold and marble, must have been spectacular. The Forum's magnificence served as a daily reminder that Rome was, indeed, the world's capital (<i>caput mundi</i>) and, as the poet Vergil famously said, an empire without boundaries (<i>imperium sine fine</i>). Rome's former majesty is irrevocably lost to us, even as we catch glimpses of it in the city's remarkable ancient ruins.<br />
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I found myself reflecting on Rome's death this week, as I wrapped up the development of Online Rome. The project has been ongoing for two years, and intensively for the past 12 months. Working with a small team of content designers (including an MD!) as well as recent PhD with substantial classroom teaching experience and Roman cultural and literary history as his area of specialty, I built a modularized, fully online, aynchronous course that produced impressive results in student learning this past year. There was a lot of trial and error. We went live with the course in Fall 2014 with an enrollment of c. 300 students. This spring, we capped the course at 100 students, partly to figure out how best to staff the course in the future. While on medical leave, I thoroughly revised every module and the instructor added several new features to the course (some obvious additions, others much more subtle but equally effective).<br />
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It was an exhausting amount of work, but when I finished on Monday I was genuinely proud of the final product. The instructor and I were both very pleased with the performance of the students this spring and were looking forward to modifying the modules and course structure for a 5 week summer course that would have started in June.<br />
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From the beginning, I designed and built the course to be instructed by others. I also made a strong effort to work with the course instructor to ensure that there was a qualified and experienced instructor positioned to take over the project and manage its transition to the Classics Department. In order for this transition to be smooth, the current instructor and I both knew that he would need to figure out how to teach the course during a five week session; and would need to train others in the tricky ins and outs of managing the course and motivating the students to stay on track. I had hoped that the Classics Department would hire him as a kind of "course manager" to implement the training process while continuing to offer the course (the student demand has been very high). I would have been disappointed if the chair had opted to hire someone else, but fine with that decision if the alternative candidate(s) had an equivalent or better skill set in both Roman studies and online instruction than the course's current, demonstrably successful instructor. <br />
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I was stunned to learn yesterday, indirectly and in passing, that the Classics Chair had opted not to implement the "succession plan" that I had carefully and thoughtfully crafted. As well, different instructors were appointed for the summer session and fall semester--and, though both are skilled classroom instructors, they are either unqualified or under-qualified for the specific tasks that the successful instruction of Online Rome requires. <br />
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Besides the apparent personal politics at play in this decision, it also reflects a surprising ignorance about the crucial role of the instructor in an online class. As any (good) educator knows, the most important requirement for a successful course is the instructor's pedagogical skill, experience, and knowledge of course content. This does not change when the classroom is replaced by a computer. If anything, as my team learned this year, the instructor becomes even more crucial to the course's success. As a faculty member at an R1 institution, I recognize and accept that we always compromise a bit on this because we have a responsibility to train graduate students. We also require our graduate students to take a pedagogy class that focuses on f2f teaching before they set foot in front of paying students. Likewise, they are closely supervised during their first few semesters.<br />
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The learning curve is inevitably steep but the damage can usually be managed in classes of 15-20 students. We do not deliberately put graduate students into teaching situations for which they are wholly unprepared and for which they have no training or experience. Likewise, given the "buyer's market", it should not present an insuperable problem to find many candidates who are Romanists and have some experience with some part of teaching online/at scale/managing and training a team of TAs. And yet....<br />
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These staffing decisions would also be less concerning to me if I had not made a point of explaining multiple times, in multiple formats (oral conversation, letters, emails), to multiple people involved in decision-making about the course that the course's future success would depend on appointing a qualified and experienced instructor, at least to serve as "course manager" and work closely to train TAs. The course was deliberately designed NOT to be "plug 'n play"--I wanted for instructors to be able to own it and make it their own. There are no pre-recorded lectures and my face is nowhere in the course. But such a design means that instructors need to do considerable work, especially at the start of the semester.<br />
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This deliberate and willful devaluation of both experience/proven success and content expertise raises some important and unsettling questions for academics. These days, many of us expect our expertise to be devalued by people outside of academia. We even expect it, to some extent, from our administrators. But we expect that our disciplinary colleagues, most of all the leaders of our departments, will be the first to defend the value of experience and expertise. If we don't do it, who will? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal asked, "who will guard the guardians?" This is a very real and consequential question in higher education these days; and goes well beyond pettiness, favortism, and whatever else motivated the poor decision-making regarding the staffing of Online Rome.<br />
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First of all, it is crucial that every educator recognize the key role that instructors play in every teaching and learning encounter, whether online, in a classroom, or elsewhere. Second, we must value expertise in the content of our courses. Of course nobody can be the world's expert on everything Roman, but at the very least, the instructor should be a Romanist and have done significant work at the PhD level and beyond on things Roman if they are teaching an online Intro to Rome class. In recent years, my department has moved to staffing our introductory level courses with our best scholars and teachers. These courses are given to faculty who are experts in the general area as much as possible (e.g. the Greek cultural historian teaches Intro to Greece; the Greek literature scholar teaches Intro to Myth). An online course should be treated with the same respect for instructor expertise.<br />
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Modules aren't exactly textbooks, but they aren't an instructor either. They certainly cannot replace an instructor, particularly in the constructivist model of learning that I used. Finally, we must acknowledge that teaching and learning online happen in radically different ways than they do in a f2f classroom. There is a large body of scholarship on this topic. There are best practices for teaching online. It is possible to train people to teach online, just as we do currently for classroom teaching. To conflate the two media is to make a horrendous mistake and sets both the instructor and the students up for a miserable experience.<br />
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Why do we need to do these three things I enumerated in the previous paragraph? Because, as soon as we start hiring unqualified and inexperienced instructors when we could have hired a qualified and experienced instructor (and, in my case, for the same or lower salary), we are setting foot on a slippery slope. This devaluation of expertise, this belief that anyone can teach online, that content expertise is not a <i>sine qua non</i>, is exactly the tune that is sung in the edupreneurial world of For Profits and their VCs. This is the tune that companies like Pearson sing: have the content expert build the course (or, more commonly, review something already built and sign off on it) and then hire the cheapest labor possible to run the course. Sometimes we are forced to make do with an instructor who is not an expert. That was not the case in this situation.<br />
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It is a very short leap to go from hiring the early Greek archaeologist to teach a very difficult course on ancient Rome, a course that draws heavily on primary textual and material evidence; to hiring the English MA or the Psychology BA, if it saves money. Because, they sing, online courses don't require expert instructors trained in the pedagogy of teaching online. Anyone can run an online course--just load it up for them, sign up students, and off you go. It's the ultimate ed tech fantasy but it's just that--a fantasy.<br />
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In discussing this situation with a group of friends, one wise academic noted: "<span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0">In
my view, all attempts to automate courses have the goal of letting just
anyone teach them. I know you built it so that wouldn't be possible for
someone who cared about student learni</span></span><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">ng.
But a lot of people don't care about students, or knowledge, or even
understand why the people who actually know shit must be the ones to
teach it. Sorry to be such a downer on this, but there's nowhere to run .
. .." Of course she is right. I never understood that, unless I controlled all aspects of the course--including staffing--I was making it possible for the course to be run badly. In retrospect, I should have demanded some input on staffing even thought that is not usual for f2f courses. Or required that an instructor meet a basic set of qualifications. </span></span></span></span></span></span><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0"></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">The particularities of this situation also clearly demonstrate why new models of teaching and new kinds of courses expose the need for changes to the existing infrastructure and traditions. It might have once made sense for a department chair to decide staffing, fairly unilaterally. It no longer makes sense, especially when a university has invested significant money to develop a course (at least $300K in mine, counting my time); and especially when few chairs have much familiarity with the world of online education. To some extent, bad decisions are the result of ignorance, of not understanding what the thing is or how it works. This doesn't excuse a bad decision, but it does suggest that decisions should be less unilateral in cases where the university has invested significant money and has good knowledge of what is required to maximize student learning outcomes.</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">I know it is possible to support high quality learning online.
It's hard to do and takes thought, skill, a lot of work, and experience. The course instructor and I figured out how to do it. But, once the
course left my possession, I lost control over an element that was critical to our
success. And, as my friend noted, by automating things, I made it too easy
for others, with a range of motives, to devalue experience and expertise. F</span></span></span></span></span></span><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".62.1:4:1:$comment10206481176848248_10206482322636892:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">or
my part, the solution to all of this was pretty straightforward. I
have finished the development work and met the terms of the grant. The
class is handed over in good working order. It is now the
responsibility of the department to recreate the successes that we've
had and to do ongoing development and training of additional
instructors. This task is going to be much harder for everyone than it should have been (or needed to be).</span></span></span></span></span></span>Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-61369475088553647592014-09-15T18:48:00.001-07:002014-09-15T18:48:03.029-07:00Rethinking Gen Ed/Undergrad Ed: A Tale of Two Meetings<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g9QIIarvgMs/VBdy-8-RAXI/AAAAAAAAAdA/PJec-190dDs/s1600/Education1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g9QIIarvgMs/VBdy-8-RAXI/AAAAAAAAAdA/PJec-190dDs/s1600/Education1.jpeg" height="240" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from elitedaily.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
During the past two weeks, I've had the opportunity to take part in two different but overlapping conversations about the future of undergraduate education. The first came on the UT Austin campus, when I attended a full-day symposium--Campus Conversation--dedicated to the complicated but important question of how a research university like mine can do a better job of integrating research and discovery into the undergraduate curriculum. In some ways, I think the charge of the symposium was too narrowly conceived. It struck me as an important question, but also something of a defensive response to legislative threats to the value of research that doesn't make money. My students can benefit from my activities as an active and engaged scholar without themselves "doing research". If we define research in broad terms, as something more like question-driven learning, then I'm fully on board. If we mean that all freshmen should be treated like miniature versions of ourselves, I'm a bit less enthused. In the same way that graduate programs have run into trouble by assuming that the end goal of graduate training was solely to produce imitations of ourselves, it makes no sense to treat all undergraduate as future researchers. It DOES make sense to leverage the power of curiosity and digital tools to structure our courses around questions to be answered, problems to be solved. I will say more about this Campus Conversation in a separate post (and I've written a quick overview of it, with links, <a href="http://www.dailytexanonline.com/blogs/a-matter-of-opinion/2014/09/15/efforts-to-integrate-research-into-undergraduate-experience">here</a>).<br />
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The consensus of the faculty was that we need to find ways to re-imagine our undergraduate courses and curricula to engage our students in meaningful, authentic learning experiences. How we do that, given the current state of budgetary austerity under which we are operating, is a different and more challenging question. The problem with meaningful and authentic learning experiences is that they tend to require a lot of resources, especially human resources. Indeed, it is the human interaction--the interaction of teacher and student (or, in other terms, novice and expert)--that stands at the center of the learning experience and drives it. It is exactly why, even as we experiment with taking certain kinds of learning out of the classroom (i.e. basic content acquisition), the interactive piece of learning--online or f2f--becomes all the more necessary. In <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/The-Power-of-the-Personal/148743/">"The Power of the Personal</a>", Daniel Chambliss observes: "Time and again, finding the right person, at the right moment, seemed to
have an outsize impact on a student’s success—in return for relatively
little effort on the part of the college." In other words, the secret sauce of student success seems to have student-faculty interaction as a main ingredient. Automation has a place to play in the 21st education at resource-starved institutions, I would contend; but faculty, especially tenure-track faculty (not because they are superior to non-TT faculty but because it says something about the institution's commitment to them and their subsequent willingness to give back to the campus community), are the <i>sine qua non </i>of meaningful learning experiences and student success, both narrowly and broadly conceived.<br />
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Today and tomorrow, I am in Washington DC as a member of a Digital Tools sub-committee for an AAC&U project on re-imagining general education for the 21st century. The project, called GEMS, is in the planning stage of submitting a proposal to the Gates Foundation. In this meeting as well as the two earlier ones, we have spent a lot of time talking broadly about general education and its role in the undergraduate curriculum, especially at a time when many students "swirl" around, collecting credits from a variety of institutions until they have enough of the right kind of credits to graduate. I'm not that old, yet I come from a generation that arrived at college with perhaps a handful of AP credits. I passed some graduation requirements by taking exams--essentially, a form of competency-based education that has always existed. But I remained a residential student for 4 years, taking full credit loads. I grew up not far from a community college and even had to take a course there in order to graduate from high school; but few people in my graduating high school class took community college courses with the intention of transferring them and counting them towards their college graduation requirements. My generation went to college and entered into an essentially closed ecosystem. That ecosystem is no longer closed. My UT Austin students take courses at community colleges, at other UT System campuses, and online to "get done with" their GE requirements. As an institution, we have little control over their lower-division curriculum at this point, even as we lament the ways that this change has not served our undergraduates all that well. Frequently we encounter upper division students who have weak writing skills, little sense of how to construct an argument from evidence, and a general lack of basic content knowledge. Oftentimes, they have to retake introductory pre-reqs in their majors in order to be prepared for upper division courses. This prolongs their time to degree and costs the institution as well as the student.<br />
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Given this widespread change in how students go to college, it is clear that general education is in need of reform; and that we need to have more cooperation between institutions, more agreement on what we think are the learning goals and outcomes--the Degree Qualification Profile--of a successful student. I hesitate to use the word "standardization"; but, in fact, that's partly what we need. But we also need to use this as an opportunity to get general education right--at least for this generation of students. My sub-committee, the Digital, has spent a lot of time trying to identify our task. What, exactly, is it that we expect the digital learning environment to support and facilitate. Today, continuing a conversation that began in June, we reached the conclusion that, in the end, what we were talking about was how the digital would support and, ideally, enhance, authentic learning. <br />
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I was struck by this focus on authentic learning today, in part because I realized that we all see essentially the same thing: we need to find ways to make student learning more authentic, more discovery-oriented. Our group would argue that the digital is essential to this curricular transformation, not because it replaces the human element of learning but because it enhances it. It highlights exactly what it is that we faculty bring to the classroom. It makes sacred that time when we share space with our students. It means that we can "offload" most content acquisition to other spaces and spend the time in class engaging in higher order thinking and analysis. It means that we can be there for the hard stuff, helping to prepare our students for an adult life and working world that will require them to be nimble and adaptable, to constantly learn new and complicated skills. If they are going to be prepared for this workplace, we need to think hard about how and what and where they are learning. We need to understand that the notion of students being graduates of individual institutions means something very different today than it did even a decade ago. Things won't change much for the Harvards and Reeds of the higher education world; but for the rest of us, they have already changed and we are already trying to catch up to the new reality. Tomorrow's task: articulate in clear terms the role of the digital in this catch-up game, as it pertains to general education courses.Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-18998851621524242172014-09-14T14:30:00.004-07:002014-09-14T14:30:23.246-07:00Going Live!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B--6jOb7Cu0/VAUHQfFnsWI/AAAAAAAAAc0/cSWkxAgjSi4/s1600/Celebrating%2BBig%2BDeadline%2BMet.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B--6jOb7Cu0/VAUHQfFnsWI/AAAAAAAAAc0/cSWkxAgjSi4/s1600/Celebrating%2BBig%2BDeadline%2BMet.png" height="292" width="400" /></a></div>
At 8 am on 2 September 2014, Online Rome went live for UT Austin students as well as for the ten students who enrolled in the course via our extension program (UEX). Since then, we have released two more modules. The total enrollments: 15 UEX students and 295 UT Austin students. In addition, I have 190 students in my blended instruction campus course. I am most relieved that we managed to go live and get the first three modules released without any major problems. This is a small miracle, given that a week before classes began I was pushing to postpone the course release date to January. No marketing had been done, registration was opened extremely late, and the oversight of the online courses had moved from one dean to another in early August. <br />
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Our biggest shock thus far has been the amount of student interest. Given the lack of advertising, even to UT Austin students; and the very late registration opening (the Friday before classes began), we were expecting somewhere between 15-25 UT Austin students. I was persuaded to wait on pulling the plug with the argument that this would be a good opportunity to beta test the course with a small group. With 300 students, though, we can't afford any screw-ups. If I've learned anything about teaching at scale, it is that any minor error has the potential to cause enormous confusion and chaos. It was a mad scramble to staff the courses appropriately and also to get all the usual course documents prepared for the instructors. In the first few weeks of the semester, I focused a lot of attention on making sure that we communicated regularly to the online students, and that we were exceptionally responsive to their questions. As expected, there was a bit of disorientation but I think we were able to resolve it pretty quickly and get everyone down to work on the modules.<br />
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And then there was the matter of getting the modules polished and out the door. We had nearly all of the content finished, but still needed to add short podcasts. Thankfully, my new project manager is an audio engineer. I sent him scripts and recordings of me reading all the strange Latin names and terms; he found people to record the podcasts in their studio. I wanted there to be a multiplicity of voices, and we have that. My technologist also worked hard to get the first three modules out during these first weeks of the semester. I did a lot of proofreading, editing, and decision-making while she worked on the packaging of the content. <br />
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The only major issue we've had was with copying the Canvas course site from one course to another. For some reason, this process is buggy and required us to go in and re-edit the copied site. Otherwise, apart from some broken links, we've had few questions from students. They seem to be doing what we want them to do: working on their modules. They will have their first discussion this week, on Piazza. In order to facilitate better discussion, we've divided them into groups of about 50. The quality of these posts should tell us a lot about how well they are learning in the online environment. It should also serve as a check for them.<br />
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My biggest issue is trying to figure out how to manage the scale problem. The course design is constructivist and high touch. So far, I've decided that we will make every effort to give generous amounts of feedback through the first three modules. This will get them to the first midterm. After that, I am thinking about introducing a couple of things: first, instead of the instructional team grading and responding to all short answer questions (there are quite a few in each module), we will respond to a selection of questions and then post general feedback for the others. Second, I will have them respond to a peer's short answers. I am thinking that I might do the first form of response for the modules that lead up to the second midterm; and then the third form for the modules that lead up to the third midterm. And frame this transition as part of the design (which, in fact, it is): by the end of the semester, we want them to have progressed from passive recipients of feedback to active givers of it, whether to themselves or to their fellow students. I was motivated to think harder about this issue because of the size of the class, but I actually think it's one of those situations where a problem is actually a stimulus to a better solution.<br />
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It is going to be a very long semester for me. Thankfully, I have my sine qua non, Dr. Liew, helping me every step of the way; a very strong instructional team; and a great project manager who is doing his best to take tasks away from me. Still, it takes a lot of time to prepare the modules for release. We have to work very carefully to ensure that no errors are introduced and to ensure that everything is set properly. But we are also focused on quality. My team of students who worked on the modules this summer did an excellent job of preparing drafts. Now we are revising, beefing up content, adding graphics, and creating introductions, summaries, podcasts, etc. It is interesting but mentally draining work. On the bright side, we are creating a durable artifact, and much of the work that we are doing this fall will not have to be redone in the near future.<br />
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<br />Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-292226213544690351.post-26106467876453950372014-08-31T12:58:00.003-07:002014-08-31T12:58:44.877-07:00It's Getting Real: From Conception to Birth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F3Rl_l0rKa4/U__fzAzChpI/AAAAAAAAAck/UG_xIojI9_Q/s1600/Perseverence.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F3Rl_l0rKa4/U__fzAzChpI/AAAAAAAAAck/UG_xIojI9_Q/s1600/Perseverence.png" height="234" width="320" /></a></div>
The single adjective that best captures my experience of building and deploying an online, for credit course is frustrating. Sure, it's been an intensely creative experience; it has made me grateful for all the wonderful people who have worked on the project. But it has also been intensely frustrating to ensure that all of our hard work was going to result in an actual course that actual students could take for actual credit. In mid-August, shortly after learning that the oversight for projects like mine was moving from one office and associate dean to another office and different dean (and, in fact, to a very different kind of unit), I thought long and hard about postponing the launch date to the spring semester. I knew that we would be ready with the course--the product; but was close to losing faith in my university's ability to ensure that the course was staffed and open to students.<br />
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As it happened, we barely got the UT section of the online course open for registration and an instructor hired. We jumped through countless hoops, some of them entirely unnecessary, but managed to pull it off. I owe a lot of this to the amazing executive assistant in the Classics Department as well as the fabulous staff at the International Students office (the course instructor needed a visa, and yesterday). We did almost no advertising. A good friend made a nice poster which we emailed to the undergraduate advisers on the Friday late afternoon before classes started on the following Wednesday. We were hoping that we'd get maybe 30-40 UT Austin students to sign up. We'd had no time at all to market the class because it took until late on Friday for the Powers that Be (no, not Bill Powers himself!) to finally sign off on opening the class to students.<br />
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Last Sunday night, I logged onto the Canvas site for the Online Rome UT section. 13 students had enrolled! I was thrilled. Suddenly, it felt real. All the work, all the stress and anxiety, the constant nagging of administrators to sign forms, seemed worth it. 13 students were going to take the course! I was immediately reminded of how challenging it is for faculty to work on courses when we don't have a clear sense of our audience, or even know if there will be an audience. On Monday morning, I opened my email to find a message from our undergraduate adviser, letting me know that some 70 students had registered for the online class over the weekend. I was stunned (and realized that Canvas was about 24 hours behind in updating the roster). Over the week, many more students added the class. We now have about 250 students in the UT Austin section, another 10 or so in the Extension School section, and then I am teaching 200 students the blended instruction version on campus. I am utterly floored that, in just over one week and with virtually no advertising at all and well after most students had finalized their schedules, we were able to attract so much interest.<br />
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I have especially enjoyed the many exchanges with students, both face to face and over email, about the online class. It is clear that the prime motivating factor for them is being able to fulfill a graduation requirement while introducing some flexibility into their schedule. We spoke a lot about how they would still need to find time for the classwork, but that they could do it a bit more on their own schedule instead of the university's schedule. Nobody asked if the online class easier, nor did they expect that it would be. Several asked if there were live streaming lectures (since this is the dominant model at UT): nope, I said. In fact, there's almost no lecture. These conversations gave me a great opportunity to chat with students about self-regulated learning, about time management, about making use of different kinds of feedback.<br />
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As we continue to fine-tune the modules and get ready to start the course on Tuesday with an orientation module, that feeling of intense frustration has been replaced by exhilaration, delight, and excitement. I am proud of what my team has built and am excited to see how these students worth with the content. I am sure that we will learn a lot, including ways to make the course work even better. But having 260 students on the other end of this makes it all worth it and is a great reminder for me of why I do what I do. I love writing and research and I continue to do it. But I am at a point in my life and career when I especially enjoy introducing my passions to others, opening their eyes just a bit and letting them have glimpses of the world to which I have dedicated my professional life.<br />
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When I tell people that I am working on building an online version of my Introduction to Ancient Rome class, I am sometimes greeted with skepticism: "Who would want to take a course on Ancient Rome?" they ask. A lot of people, it turns out, both undergraduates but also non-traditional students. I am convinced that, once we get the word out there that this course exists, we will find that our enrollments via the Extension School will also increase. To go along with the launch of the Online Rome course, I created a Twitter feed (@OnlineRome). I wanted a place where I and the course instructors could post cool images and other information about Ancient Rome. Basically, it would be a feed about Ancient Rome that is curated by content specialists, for students and other interested individuals. I was shocked to see that, within a few days, the account had around 200 followers from all over the world. Most of the followers are not academics and clearly just have a side interest in ancient Rome. This delights me. These are the people that I want to reach, whether via Twitter or an online course or even a non-credit, less weighty MOOC. If we are going to get people to care about the humanities, our first step is to engage them and get them to see why it is worth spending money to continue to support teaching and research in this area--even supposedly esoteric fields like Classics.<br />
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I am very excited to see how things go over the next several months. Most of all, I am delighted that all of our work over the past year (and long before that) is going to serve a purpose for at least 260 students. They say that mothers don't remember the horrors of labor once they have successfully birthed their child. I am hoping the same holds true for bringing online classes into existence!Jen Ebbelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213763781527781548noreply@blogger.com3