I finished watching the lectures, about 90 minutes in total, yesterday and attempted the first quiz. The lectures were a lot of background information explaining what myth was for the ancients as well as some modern theorists; and then an introduction to the world of Homer and a close reading of the first 10 lines of Homer's Odyssey. I did not take notes on the lectures, in part because the information was either the sort that I can quickly look up or already knew. As a professional classicist (albeit one who has never taught myth and whose research doesn't tend to touch much on aspects of mythology), I felt pretty confident.
I scored a 16.2/20 on the first quiz. I was a little embarrassed. I quickly realized that I should have taken notes on the lectures about ancient and modern views of myth. There were several very detailed questions about that information that I struggled to recall. Partly, I was a little surprised to be asked such detailed, factual questions that weren't really about my ability to think but purely recall data. I don't tend to ask these sorts of questions so was unprepared for them. A great reminder that it is important to prepare students for the way you are going to test them (in this case, we could retake the quiz 3 times with no penalty).
Today I reviewed the two lectures with the details I had missed on the quiz and took notes. I also reviewed my first quiz. I am pretty sure there was a problem with the quiz--or at least a very poorly worded question. I missed it the first time but, when I retook the quiz, I gave the same answer the second time (because I am sure that it is the correct one), and still missed it. So got a 19/20. I retook the quiz a third time, just for fun, and had several new questions. Most of them were the sort of details I know from my general work in classics. But again, I was taken aback by a question about the size of Homer's army. I am not sure what the correct answer is and I didn't remember it from the lecture. It seemed like a nitpicky question and not a hugely important one. It also didn't reflect what had actually been the focus of the lecture, which was Helen as the face that launched a thousand ships.
I did learn some helpful things: a. having questions with multiple answers is a good idea (I will do this for my own exams, perhaps next fall); b. it is essential to think about what skills you are trying to encourage your students to develop. After this quiz, students will be scribbling down every word because it is too difficult to tell what is and isn't going to show up on the quiz. c. retaking quizzes with a randomizer is a fantastic idea and a very effective learning tool. If I do end up designing an online class, I will definitely make good use of weekly quizzes like this.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Student Altruism in a Large Class Setting
One of the more surprising things about my flipped class is the extent of student altruism at play. Perhaps it's just that it is more visible to me because of piazza and the indirect reports I hear about the class Facebook group. I've had students create study guides for every pre-recorded lecture and distribute those. They extracted the embedded review questions, put it into a single document, and posted it on google docs for everyone to complete and view. Others made e-flashcards and made them available to the class. Study groups abounded. The persistent mantra on the Facebook page was something along the lines of "let's team up and all get As." I don't grade on a curve so there's no incentive NOT to work with others. Still, I've been really surprised at the displays of altruism. I mean, I can understand small groups sharing work on study guides with one another; but why with the whole class? I'm really interested to hear about other instructors' experiences with this, especially in a large class setting where students don't know everyone. And interested to hear thoughts on the psychology of this (and whether there are studies of this phenomenon).
Managing a Team of Teaching Assistants
It's one thing to design a fantastic, student-centered course. It's a whole other thing to make that course work in a real-time setting. To make it work, at least for my large course, requires a team of teaching assistants. For just under 400 students I was assigned 4 TAs. Initially, I was given two TAs and I had to campaign vigorously for the "additional" two. I found it deeply irritating that I was having to organize letter-writing campaigns to the deans in my college so that there would be enough classroom help to actually implement the student-centered class that I had worked so hard to create (and that the college had spent at least some money to support). Sure, two TAs might have been sufficient when I was standing in front of the class lecturing and encouraging the students to be passive vessels; but the whole point of the redesign was for them to be active and engaged. Beyond classroom logistics "stuff", I needed TAs to help me by walking around and dropping in on the "turn to your peer" discussions. As well, the design called for a senior TA to lead a weekly review session of the material the students had viewed online.
In the end, I did get the team I had asked for: two relatively senior grad students who could take on a lot of responsibility; two first year grads who would be very helpful with classroom and other course logistics while they learned the ropes; and two student graders. I made one of the senior TAs the "grading czar" and it has been his responsibility to manage all things related to grading, including overseeing the team of graders who are marking the short answer questions on the midterms (the two first year grads + the student graders). The other senior TA was put in charge of the Friday review sessions. I have worked intensively with her on how to prepare a student-centered review that consists primarily of i>clicker and "turn to your peer" instruction. We have also worked on picking out the sorts of details that it will be helpful to emphasize; and how to choreograph and presentation so that it runs smoothly, doesn't have you jumping ahead of yourself, etc.
A ratio of 1 TA/100 students is an absolute minimum for a student-centered, flipped class; better would be 1/50. The students are more engaged and therefore asking more questions; there are more moving pieces and many of these can be handled by TAs (especially after the first iteration of the class). TAs are especially helpful in facilitating peer instruction. In my classroom, because of the design of the room and the fact that there are so few extra seats, I have two of the TAs stand at the doors and help late-arriving students find seats. That has minimized the distraction to me and the rest of the class and prevented students from plopping in the aisles. On exam days, I recruited an extra grad student to help us hand out exams. We put the scantrons into the exam so that we only needed to hand out one item. We then divided and conquered the room. Next time, I will have one person stand at the back and hand exams directly to students who are coming in after we start handing them out. But, using this method, we were able to hand out 400 exams in about 5 minutes and everyone was able to start on time.
I found out on Friday that the TA who was leading the Friday review sections was going to be transferred to another class with discussion sections (a medical emergency had left that course without a TA to do sections). This was not welcome news, but was the best solution for my department as a whole. It now means that I have to take on those review sessions in addition to everything else. This TA did not do grading; but she was slated to grade part of the final exam with me. I am working to ensure that she will be paid an extra stipend to do that. This whole episode reminds me of another mantra associated with teaching, but especially teaching student-centered classes: remain flexible and adaptable at all times.
There was a fair amount of logistical work to do at the start of the course, as I figured out how to divide the different duties among the TAs. Fortunately, I have a fantastic group--reliable and competent in every way. They have been really good at helping me figure out solutions to course logistics and have done what was asked quickly and without complaint. When teaching this sort of a class, especially for the first time, it is essential to have an excellent team of teaching assistants. They are the sine qua non, and it is their contributions that make or break the experience for the students.
In the end, I did get the team I had asked for: two relatively senior grad students who could take on a lot of responsibility; two first year grads who would be very helpful with classroom and other course logistics while they learned the ropes; and two student graders. I made one of the senior TAs the "grading czar" and it has been his responsibility to manage all things related to grading, including overseeing the team of graders who are marking the short answer questions on the midterms (the two first year grads + the student graders). The other senior TA was put in charge of the Friday review sessions. I have worked intensively with her on how to prepare a student-centered review that consists primarily of i>clicker and "turn to your peer" instruction. We have also worked on picking out the sorts of details that it will be helpful to emphasize; and how to choreograph and presentation so that it runs smoothly, doesn't have you jumping ahead of yourself, etc.
A ratio of 1 TA/100 students is an absolute minimum for a student-centered, flipped class; better would be 1/50. The students are more engaged and therefore asking more questions; there are more moving pieces and many of these can be handled by TAs (especially after the first iteration of the class). TAs are especially helpful in facilitating peer instruction. In my classroom, because of the design of the room and the fact that there are so few extra seats, I have two of the TAs stand at the doors and help late-arriving students find seats. That has minimized the distraction to me and the rest of the class and prevented students from plopping in the aisles. On exam days, I recruited an extra grad student to help us hand out exams. We put the scantrons into the exam so that we only needed to hand out one item. We then divided and conquered the room. Next time, I will have one person stand at the back and hand exams directly to students who are coming in after we start handing them out. But, using this method, we were able to hand out 400 exams in about 5 minutes and everyone was able to start on time.
I found out on Friday that the TA who was leading the Friday review sections was going to be transferred to another class with discussion sections (a medical emergency had left that course without a TA to do sections). This was not welcome news, but was the best solution for my department as a whole. It now means that I have to take on those review sessions in addition to everything else. This TA did not do grading; but she was slated to grade part of the final exam with me. I am working to ensure that she will be paid an extra stipend to do that. This whole episode reminds me of another mantra associated with teaching, but especially teaching student-centered classes: remain flexible and adaptable at all times.
There was a fair amount of logistical work to do at the start of the course, as I figured out how to divide the different duties among the TAs. Fortunately, I have a fantastic group--reliable and competent in every way. They have been really good at helping me figure out solutions to course logistics and have done what was asked quickly and without complaint. When teaching this sort of a class, especially for the first time, it is essential to have an excellent team of teaching assistants. They are the sine qua non, and it is their contributions that make or break the experience for the students.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
A Bee in my Bonnet: Why discipline matters in designing a flipped class
This will be the first post in a series I am going to call "A Bee in my Bonnet." What I mean by this is that these are posts where I take up an issue and rant a bit. These rants aren't directed at anyone in particular, though they are often stimulated by conversations (and disagreements). Mostly, this is me thinking out loud about my disagreements with blended learning orthodoxy. At the moment, most of the bees swirling around in my bonnet relate to ways in which I'm finding that a. flipping an intro-level humanities class works differently from a chemistry or calculus or statistics class; b. even within humanities, there are distinctions to be made. Intro English has very different objectives from courses in fields that students generally don't study in any depth in middle school or high school (e.g. economics or classics); and c. those who are teaching the teachers (i.e. instructional design and instructional technology folks) would do well to be open to the fact that the current research, while helpful, doesn't always work very well for a class like mine. And, if the aim is to encourage other faculty like me (i.e. faculty teaching courses that have some emphasis on delivery of declarative knowledge) to undertake blended learning, it will be helpful to be attunded to disciplinary differences, differences in student audience depending on the course and its particular function in a university curriculum, etc. I am delighted with the preliminary results of my flipped course; but am also learning that the "best practices" I read about don't always make a lot of sense or even apply at all to the course I am teaching.
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I am quickly learning that, for all that blended learning and flipped classes are a commonplace of conversations and faculty workshops at campuses around the country, we are still very much on a pedagogical frontier. Our understanding of how this model works and, perhaps more importantly, why it works, is very much a work in progress. As well, most of the preliminary research that is being used to create "best practices" guidelines for faculty interested in blending or flipping their classes comes out of the natural sciences/math/computer science disciplines. Courses on logic taught out of philosophy departments are the rare instance of a liberal arts discipline using blended learning successfully. All of these types of classes have something in common: they are concept based. Teach a concept (how to calculate mass) and have students practice the application of that concept. Concepts are reasonably discrete or, when they are cumulative, it is in a very logical, additive process.
But what about courses like my Introduction to Ancient Rome, where one of the explicit learning objectives is to master a body of declarative knowledge (a basic narrative of Roman history from 1000 BC-476 AD)? It is all well and good for people to do seminars, write blog posts or journal articles, and record youtube videos heralding the death of the lecture. That probably is and should be true for courses that don't require instructors to first teach students the basic facts of the topic of the course. So, for instance, nearly every (all?) students taking Intro Chemistry at a university have had some chemistry before. They might not have learned much, but they at least know what the field is about. Likewise with English or math. The same cannot be said for teaching students a dead language like Latin or Greek. Or teaching a course on the history and culture of ancient Rome. For the most part, my students know where Rome is but they know very little else. This semester, I did a content pre-test that used items from previous exams (so they were tested and we knew something about the likelihood that students would know the answer by the end of the semester). These items were just basic facts. The highest score was 50% and most students got 4-5 out of 24 correct. In other words, about what you'd expect from pure guessing on every item.
I can't start out the semester having them apply or practice knowledge they don't have. As well, the nature of my material is such that it is not well-suited to 3-5 minute mini-lectures. It's not a series of concepts that come together to form the course; it's the story of a culture, with all sorts of interwoven complexities. So I had a couple of big challenges when I decided to flip my Rome class. First, how do I teach them basic declarative content without lecturing. Can I assume that they can read the textbook, digest it, know the significance of various events without being told, etc.? Well, no. So I need to do that for them. But I can't do it in 3-5 minute videos--that would be jarring and would never teach them enough unless they watched 20 of them for each week. I agree that the 50 minute lecture is too long and unnecessary (though, ironically, many of the webinars telling us this are doing so in a 50-60 minute lecture).
I decided to do 20-25 minute lectures, with a clear break in the middle for review (I have a slide with review questions and tell them to press pause). I also remind them that they can always pause the lecture, just as they do when watching a movie on Netflix or a TV show on their DVR. Nobody will require them to sit still for the entire 25 minutes. But 20-25 minutes was a good way to "chunk" my material--not too long, not too short (and it could always be subdivided by the viewer). That is the time it takes for me to present a concept and explain it. My material is less dense in its initial presentation than a mathematical formula, though, which is why students will watch 25 minutes of a Roman history lecture but probably not 25 minutes of someone lecturing about math or chemistry or theoretical physics.
I absolutely agree that the lecture should not keep the same slide up for more than 5 minutes. Slides should have an image as well as words, and the words should be minimal. It helps the students focus if the slides change about every 3 minutes. Faster than that might be too fast for most students, but much longer and they start to zone out/want to press fast-forward. The trick is to find a pace that is steady, swift without being frenetic, and variable enough to keep the students focused. It is very possible to do this with longer lectures. I would not recommend a lecture longer than 30 minutes, however, and feel like somewhere between 20-25 minutes is the golden mean for a class with my content and constraints. It is important to speak quickly (you will feel like you are chattering a mile a minute but it will sound completely normal); to have elegant and visually interesting slides (but not excessive amounts of animation); and, in my view, to move as little as possible. The animation and charisma has to come from your voice, not from pacing around the video frame. Your students may be able to tolerate your pacing around your classroom (I do this too) but on a screen it looks awkward and can be vomit-inducing.
What way forward? The most important thing, particularly for learning specialists in campus centers for teaching and learning, is to keep in mind that there are no hard and fast rules. It really does depend a lot on the course content and student audience. Certainly, with so much research now on flipped classes in the natural sciences, especially physics but also chemistry, we know a lot more about "best practices" for those disciplines. But it's still a very new frontier for liberal arts and our subject matter is rather different from the natural sciences (not least because, in the introductory level courses that are most likely to be candidates for flipping, it is not problem-based). Furthermore, one humanities class can't stand in as the model for all of them. The key thing as we all venture out into the wilderness will be to have a good knowledge of what has worked in individual situations (and why); have flexible ideas about "best practices"; and, most of all, to think hard about what is going to work best for a particular class and its particular mix of students (and level of student experience with the subject matter). Discipline matters!
**************************
I am quickly learning that, for all that blended learning and flipped classes are a commonplace of conversations and faculty workshops at campuses around the country, we are still very much on a pedagogical frontier. Our understanding of how this model works and, perhaps more importantly, why it works, is very much a work in progress. As well, most of the preliminary research that is being used to create "best practices" guidelines for faculty interested in blending or flipping their classes comes out of the natural sciences/math/computer science disciplines. Courses on logic taught out of philosophy departments are the rare instance of a liberal arts discipline using blended learning successfully. All of these types of classes have something in common: they are concept based. Teach a concept (how to calculate mass) and have students practice the application of that concept. Concepts are reasonably discrete or, when they are cumulative, it is in a very logical, additive process.
But what about courses like my Introduction to Ancient Rome, where one of the explicit learning objectives is to master a body of declarative knowledge (a basic narrative of Roman history from 1000 BC-476 AD)? It is all well and good for people to do seminars, write blog posts or journal articles, and record youtube videos heralding the death of the lecture. That probably is and should be true for courses that don't require instructors to first teach students the basic facts of the topic of the course. So, for instance, nearly every (all?) students taking Intro Chemistry at a university have had some chemistry before. They might not have learned much, but they at least know what the field is about. Likewise with English or math. The same cannot be said for teaching students a dead language like Latin or Greek. Or teaching a course on the history and culture of ancient Rome. For the most part, my students know where Rome is but they know very little else. This semester, I did a content pre-test that used items from previous exams (so they were tested and we knew something about the likelihood that students would know the answer by the end of the semester). These items were just basic facts. The highest score was 50% and most students got 4-5 out of 24 correct. In other words, about what you'd expect from pure guessing on every item.
I can't start out the semester having them apply or practice knowledge they don't have. As well, the nature of my material is such that it is not well-suited to 3-5 minute mini-lectures. It's not a series of concepts that come together to form the course; it's the story of a culture, with all sorts of interwoven complexities. So I had a couple of big challenges when I decided to flip my Rome class. First, how do I teach them basic declarative content without lecturing. Can I assume that they can read the textbook, digest it, know the significance of various events without being told, etc.? Well, no. So I need to do that for them. But I can't do it in 3-5 minute videos--that would be jarring and would never teach them enough unless they watched 20 of them for each week. I agree that the 50 minute lecture is too long and unnecessary (though, ironically, many of the webinars telling us this are doing so in a 50-60 minute lecture).
I decided to do 20-25 minute lectures, with a clear break in the middle for review (I have a slide with review questions and tell them to press pause). I also remind them that they can always pause the lecture, just as they do when watching a movie on Netflix or a TV show on their DVR. Nobody will require them to sit still for the entire 25 minutes. But 20-25 minutes was a good way to "chunk" my material--not too long, not too short (and it could always be subdivided by the viewer). That is the time it takes for me to present a concept and explain it. My material is less dense in its initial presentation than a mathematical formula, though, which is why students will watch 25 minutes of a Roman history lecture but probably not 25 minutes of someone lecturing about math or chemistry or theoretical physics.
I absolutely agree that the lecture should not keep the same slide up for more than 5 minutes. Slides should have an image as well as words, and the words should be minimal. It helps the students focus if the slides change about every 3 minutes. Faster than that might be too fast for most students, but much longer and they start to zone out/want to press fast-forward. The trick is to find a pace that is steady, swift without being frenetic, and variable enough to keep the students focused. It is very possible to do this with longer lectures. I would not recommend a lecture longer than 30 minutes, however, and feel like somewhere between 20-25 minutes is the golden mean for a class with my content and constraints. It is important to speak quickly (you will feel like you are chattering a mile a minute but it will sound completely normal); to have elegant and visually interesting slides (but not excessive amounts of animation); and, in my view, to move as little as possible. The animation and charisma has to come from your voice, not from pacing around the video frame. Your students may be able to tolerate your pacing around your classroom (I do this too) but on a screen it looks awkward and can be vomit-inducing.
What way forward? The most important thing, particularly for learning specialists in campus centers for teaching and learning, is to keep in mind that there are no hard and fast rules. It really does depend a lot on the course content and student audience. Certainly, with so much research now on flipped classes in the natural sciences, especially physics but also chemistry, we know a lot more about "best practices" for those disciplines. But it's still a very new frontier for liberal arts and our subject matter is rather different from the natural sciences (not least because, in the introductory level courses that are most likely to be candidates for flipping, it is not problem-based). Furthermore, one humanities class can't stand in as the model for all of them. The key thing as we all venture out into the wilderness will be to have a good knowledge of what has worked in individual situations (and why); have flexible ideas about "best practices"; and, most of all, to think hard about what is going to work best for a particular class and its particular mix of students (and level of student experience with the subject matter). Discipline matters!
BlendKit2012: Week 1
I am participating in BlendKit2012, an online course about blended learning. It is my plan to write a weekly blog post in response to issues or questions raised by the readings for the course. This week, the readings focused on some of the big questions that underlie the redesign of a course to incorporate elements of blended learning. I wanted to respond to two of the "points to ponder" in detail.
"Is it most helpful to think of blended learning as an online enhancement to a face-to-face learning environment, a face-to-face enhancement to an online learning environment, or as something else entirely?"
Before I started teaching my blended (actually, flipped) class, I'd have answered the first option, an online enhancement to a f2f learning environment. Certainly, I embarked on the redesign of my traditional lecture-format course with the thought that I would move some/all of the content delivery to outside of class so that we could devote class time to learning and applying the basics of Systematic Moral Analysis to case studies from roman history. Now that the class is underway and we are 1/3 of the way into the semester, it is clear to me that, while the class is combining f2f learning with online learning, the end result is something entirely new. I feel a bit like a chemist in her laboratory, mixing beakers full of chemicals and expecting a certain reaction to happen when, in fact, an entirely unexpected reaction happens. Something I've been reminded of: students are not predictable creatures (or at least, not entirely predictable); and group dynamics are very hard to explain and predict. I have been really surprised to see all the ways that changes in my behavior as an instructor have resulted in some predictable and many unpredictable changes in student behavior. It is clear to me that we are still very much on the frontiers with blended learning and that there is a great need for additional research, more data, before we reach firm conclusions about what it is and how it works.
"As you consider designing a blended learning course, what course components are you open to implementing differently than you have in the past? How will you decide which components will occur online and which will take place face-to-face? How will you manage the relationship between these two modalities?"
I went about my redesign in a pretty straightforward way. I figured out what my objective was, beyond getting them to master the course content, and then thought about what parts could be done without me. So, first, I decided that my main aim was to reinforce with every element of the course a basic idea: the mastery of course material is about student learning and not instructor teaching. I needed them to take responsibility for their learning, to become self-sufficient in their use of the tools for learning that I provided (textbook readings, pre-recorded lectures digesting textbook readings, piazza discussion board, Friday reviews of recorded lecture material, in class discussions, i>clicker questions, etc.), and to view me as an experienced guide rather than a fount of all wisdom who would magically fill their minds with knowledge.
When I determined which components of the course to move outside of class (e.g. pure content delivery, announcements about course logistics) and which to retain, I asked myself one question: for what parts do they need me? What parts can they reasonably do on their own, especially when they can post questions to piazza? How do I make sure that at least 80% of class time is spent with them talking, clicking on questions, and otherwise being actively engaged? I have been fairly ruthless about finding ways to do everything apart from i>clicker and peer instruction outside of class. When I hand back their first midterms, for example, I will direct them to watch a short video of me reviewing the exam, talking about trouble spots, telling them the class grade distribution, etc. If they have questions or want to review their exam, they will be directed to the TA who oversees the grading team. I refuse to waste 15-20 minutes of a 45 minute class period conveying information to them that can be conveyed in other ways. By being so ruthless about preserving class time for student engagement, I am able to preserve the integrity of our classroom as a place for them to talk, not me. They seem to like this.
"Is it most helpful to think of blended learning as an online enhancement to a face-to-face learning environment, a face-to-face enhancement to an online learning environment, or as something else entirely?"
Before I started teaching my blended (actually, flipped) class, I'd have answered the first option, an online enhancement to a f2f learning environment. Certainly, I embarked on the redesign of my traditional lecture-format course with the thought that I would move some/all of the content delivery to outside of class so that we could devote class time to learning and applying the basics of Systematic Moral Analysis to case studies from roman history. Now that the class is underway and we are 1/3 of the way into the semester, it is clear to me that, while the class is combining f2f learning with online learning, the end result is something entirely new. I feel a bit like a chemist in her laboratory, mixing beakers full of chemicals and expecting a certain reaction to happen when, in fact, an entirely unexpected reaction happens. Something I've been reminded of: students are not predictable creatures (or at least, not entirely predictable); and group dynamics are very hard to explain and predict. I have been really surprised to see all the ways that changes in my behavior as an instructor have resulted in some predictable and many unpredictable changes in student behavior. It is clear to me that we are still very much on the frontiers with blended learning and that there is a great need for additional research, more data, before we reach firm conclusions about what it is and how it works.
"As you consider designing a blended learning course, what course components are you open to implementing differently than you have in the past? How will you decide which components will occur online and which will take place face-to-face? How will you manage the relationship between these two modalities?"
I went about my redesign in a pretty straightforward way. I figured out what my objective was, beyond getting them to master the course content, and then thought about what parts could be done without me. So, first, I decided that my main aim was to reinforce with every element of the course a basic idea: the mastery of course material is about student learning and not instructor teaching. I needed them to take responsibility for their learning, to become self-sufficient in their use of the tools for learning that I provided (textbook readings, pre-recorded lectures digesting textbook readings, piazza discussion board, Friday reviews of recorded lecture material, in class discussions, i>clicker questions, etc.), and to view me as an experienced guide rather than a fount of all wisdom who would magically fill their minds with knowledge.
When I determined which components of the course to move outside of class (e.g. pure content delivery, announcements about course logistics) and which to retain, I asked myself one question: for what parts do they need me? What parts can they reasonably do on their own, especially when they can post questions to piazza? How do I make sure that at least 80% of class time is spent with them talking, clicking on questions, and otherwise being actively engaged? I have been fairly ruthless about finding ways to do everything apart from i>clicker and peer instruction outside of class. When I hand back their first midterms, for example, I will direct them to watch a short video of me reviewing the exam, talking about trouble spots, telling them the class grade distribution, etc. If they have questions or want to review their exam, they will be directed to the TA who oversees the grading team. I refuse to waste 15-20 minutes of a 45 minute class period conveying information to them that can be conveyed in other ways. By being so ruthless about preserving class time for student engagement, I am able to preserve the integrity of our classroom as a place for them to talk, not me. They seem to like this.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Piazza.com
UT uses Blackboard as its LMS (Learning Management System), though they are currently piloting Canvas as an alternative. Many faculty are not fans of Blackboard but I don't really mind it. It does what I need it to do--store course documents and make them relatively easy to find; provide an e-gradebook and calculate grades. I have never used its discussion board features, though I've heard from both students and instructors that they are clumsy. Early this fall, just before the first review session of some content they had watched at home, I opened a thread on the discussion board for them to post questions for the TA leading the session. Immediately, a student emailed me asking if I would create a class site on piazza.com.
I have tried to approach every aspect of this course with an open mind and so figured that I should see what this piazza thing was. I browsed around and decided that it couldn't hurt anything and so created a site. It took about 5 minutes (though I now know I should have imported the class roster myself rather than letting piazza do it). The site itself is pretty simple and intuitive: students post questions which they can tag (thereby organizing posts and making it easier to retrieve posts on a certain topic). Other students or instructors can answer the question. I'm not sure why--perhaps the mere fact that it isn't a UT LMS--seems to have encouraged the students to feel some ownership of the class site and to participate pretty energetically. I get an email when a student has posted something (I've set it to be a two-hour digest). Typically, by the time I get to the question, at least one other person has answered it and often done a more thorough job than I would have (e.g. pointed the student to page # of textbook where topic is discussed or provided links to external sites).
Students certainly use it to ask basic questions that are, in fact, covered in the readings and recorded lectures. They use it to ask questions about course logistics (e.g. when will attendance grades be posted? when will we know our exam grades?). They also use it to ask questions that the readings and lectures provoke but do not address. That is, they use it to sate their curiosity or to extend a discussion. At times, I have used it to extend a conversation that started in class or to raise a related topic. I frequently get several takers who are willing to contribute their thoughts.
My absolutely favorite part about piazza? By encouraging students to post there (they can do so anonymously if they wish), my email traffic for the course has dried up almost entirely. I answer questions once rather than 34 times. I can answer their questions quickly, while they are still fresh and I can do it in a few words. It takes much less time to answer 4-5 questions on piazza than to answer 1-2 emails.
I have tried to approach every aspect of this course with an open mind and so figured that I should see what this piazza thing was. I browsed around and decided that it couldn't hurt anything and so created a site. It took about 5 minutes (though I now know I should have imported the class roster myself rather than letting piazza do it). The site itself is pretty simple and intuitive: students post questions which they can tag (thereby organizing posts and making it easier to retrieve posts on a certain topic). Other students or instructors can answer the question. I'm not sure why--perhaps the mere fact that it isn't a UT LMS--seems to have encouraged the students to feel some ownership of the class site and to participate pretty energetically. I get an email when a student has posted something (I've set it to be a two-hour digest). Typically, by the time I get to the question, at least one other person has answered it and often done a more thorough job than I would have (e.g. pointed the student to page # of textbook where topic is discussed or provided links to external sites).
Students certainly use it to ask basic questions that are, in fact, covered in the readings and recorded lectures. They use it to ask questions about course logistics (e.g. when will attendance grades be posted? when will we know our exam grades?). They also use it to ask questions that the readings and lectures provoke but do not address. That is, they use it to sate their curiosity or to extend a discussion. At times, I have used it to extend a conversation that started in class or to raise a related topic. I frequently get several takers who are willing to contribute their thoughts.
My absolutely favorite part about piazza? By encouraging students to post there (they can do so anonymously if they wish), my email traffic for the course has dried up almost entirely. I answer questions once rather than 34 times. I can answer their questions quickly, while they are still fresh and I can do it in a few words. It takes much less time to answer 4-5 questions on piazza than to answer 1-2 emails.
Preliminary Feedback
I find that one of the biggest challenges in teaching a large class full of students I can;t really know (there are 400 of them!) and don't interact with by name in every class period is the absence of feedback. In general, I am quite good at reading a room and making adjustments. Yet, for the most part, I can't do that in a large class. I am still pretty good at taking the temperature of a room's vibes and I like to think I know when something is going really well or really poorly. Where I struggle is in the middle--when they aren't furious but also just putting in their time. I was especially stressed about the feedback problem with the flipped class. Other faculty and administrators as well as the research warned that students don't like flipped classes: they resist; they grumble about the perceived increase in workload; and they give the instructor and the course poor evaluations. I tried to anticipate some of these objections at the start of the semester by preparing a short video I titled "Teaching and Learning." In it, I did a brief overview of the the origins of the lecture model and gave an introduction to the flipped model, the reasons for it, and its objectives. I also reviewed lists of pros and cons. In other words, I tried to anticipate and address their objections before they could ever take shape in their heads.
We are now 1/3 of the way into the semester and, so far as I can tell, there is no palpable resistance and certainly no more grumbling about the workload than in previous semesters (which is to say, it is minimal despite the fact that it has indeed increased a bit, perhaps by 15-20%). Honestly, I'm a little surprised. I worked hard to get the students to buy into the design of the course; I made clear to them why they would be doing everything that we are doing, and why each part was inside or outside of the classroom space. Still, I expected more resistance (fortunately, faculty are ever willing to provide the resistance to pedagogical innovation). Instead, what I've found from the students is an eagerness to learn about ancient Rome (I had 111/387 students watch the videos for the next week in the 48 hours after the midterm exam; 250 of them showed up for a voluntary review of video content today. I am pretty sure *I* wouldn't have showed up if I were a student!).
With the first midterm exam earlier this week, it was a stressful week: the exam had to be written, proofed, all the logistics for its administration and grading worked out. My brain hurts. Yet I also feel energized by this amazing group of students and their response to the flipped classroom. On Wednesday night, mere hours after the midterm exam (and long before grades will be posted), I received an email from one of my students. In it s/he wrote, "Just wanted to let you know that i thought i would never be able to remember this kind of information (ancient rome stuff) in this amount of time. It is thanks to the echo lectures, all of the iclicker Q's, piazza, and of course your lectures as well as the TA reviews on fridays. Keep up the GREAT work, i'm really enjoying the class and the discussions that we have! :)" I am sure I speak for all teachers when I say that there is nothing more rewarding than knowing we were able to make a difference for a student. I was especially pleased to see the pleasure of mastery that I was able to help this student experience.
This afternoon, while waiting outside of my classroom for the previous class to finish, I had a conversation with a different student. I asked him how the class was going for him and he launched into an energized rave about how much he enjoyed the fact that he got to apply what he was learning and that it wasn't just about memorizing a bunch of facts. At that moment it hit me full force that a huge reason for the noticeable increase in student motivation to learn the "facts" part of the course (i.e. the content delivery that I pre-recorded) is because the course gives them the opportunity to do something with that knowledge in the form of evaluating the justifications for different literary and historical characters' ethical choices. They have clearly recognized that they can't evaluate these case studies if they don't know the facts. At the same time, they know that there's a point to learning those facts. In earlier versions of the class, I failed to provide intrinsic motivations for learning the course material. Sure, there were regular exams that served as extrinsic sources of motivation; but my students never really got to experience the kind of excitement and satisfaction that comes from higher-order, critical thinking.
This student highlighted for me just how essential that is (and yet how difficult in a class that requires the instructor to ground the students enough in the facts for that high order thinking to be in any way meaningful). I have been delighted to see how willing my students have been to accept that content delivery had been moved out of the classroom space. Before this conversation, though, I didn't quite know what that was. I get it now: they'd rather talk to each about the intricacies of our Roman history case studies than listen to me regurgitate the textbook readings. Sure, most of them need that regurgitation for at least parts of the content; but they sense that what they are paying for and what they are getting out of bed and coming to the space of our classroom for is the chance to talk and interact with the material. In my conversation with this student, I seized the opportunity to observe that we were able to do the application of facts because of the pre-recorded lectures and made a point of sharing how much fun it was for me to teach the class this way.
I still feel like I won't really know what "the room" thinks until the end, when all the votes are tallied. Still, it's been great to hear such good things from a few of them. In my experience, students will be quick to tell us what they don't like but they aren't always so quick to tell us what they do like. I'm pleased that these two took the time to reinforce for me my sense that, as a class, my students were on board and enjoying the ride thus far.
We are now 1/3 of the way into the semester and, so far as I can tell, there is no palpable resistance and certainly no more grumbling about the workload than in previous semesters (which is to say, it is minimal despite the fact that it has indeed increased a bit, perhaps by 15-20%). Honestly, I'm a little surprised. I worked hard to get the students to buy into the design of the course; I made clear to them why they would be doing everything that we are doing, and why each part was inside or outside of the classroom space. Still, I expected more resistance (fortunately, faculty are ever willing to provide the resistance to pedagogical innovation). Instead, what I've found from the students is an eagerness to learn about ancient Rome (I had 111/387 students watch the videos for the next week in the 48 hours after the midterm exam; 250 of them showed up for a voluntary review of video content today. I am pretty sure *I* wouldn't have showed up if I were a student!).
With the first midterm exam earlier this week, it was a stressful week: the exam had to be written, proofed, all the logistics for its administration and grading worked out. My brain hurts. Yet I also feel energized by this amazing group of students and their response to the flipped classroom. On Wednesday night, mere hours after the midterm exam (and long before grades will be posted), I received an email from one of my students. In it s/he wrote, "Just wanted to let you know that i thought i would never be able to remember this kind of information (ancient rome stuff) in this amount of time. It is thanks to the echo lectures, all of the iclicker Q's, piazza, and of course your lectures as well as the TA reviews on fridays. Keep up the GREAT work, i'm really enjoying the class and the discussions that we have! :)" I am sure I speak for all teachers when I say that there is nothing more rewarding than knowing we were able to make a difference for a student. I was especially pleased to see the pleasure of mastery that I was able to help this student experience.
This afternoon, while waiting outside of my classroom for the previous class to finish, I had a conversation with a different student. I asked him how the class was going for him and he launched into an energized rave about how much he enjoyed the fact that he got to apply what he was learning and that it wasn't just about memorizing a bunch of facts. At that moment it hit me full force that a huge reason for the noticeable increase in student motivation to learn the "facts" part of the course (i.e. the content delivery that I pre-recorded) is because the course gives them the opportunity to do something with that knowledge in the form of evaluating the justifications for different literary and historical characters' ethical choices. They have clearly recognized that they can't evaluate these case studies if they don't know the facts. At the same time, they know that there's a point to learning those facts. In earlier versions of the class, I failed to provide intrinsic motivations for learning the course material. Sure, there were regular exams that served as extrinsic sources of motivation; but my students never really got to experience the kind of excitement and satisfaction that comes from higher-order, critical thinking.
This student highlighted for me just how essential that is (and yet how difficult in a class that requires the instructor to ground the students enough in the facts for that high order thinking to be in any way meaningful). I have been delighted to see how willing my students have been to accept that content delivery had been moved out of the classroom space. Before this conversation, though, I didn't quite know what that was. I get it now: they'd rather talk to each about the intricacies of our Roman history case studies than listen to me regurgitate the textbook readings. Sure, most of them need that regurgitation for at least parts of the content; but they sense that what they are paying for and what they are getting out of bed and coming to the space of our classroom for is the chance to talk and interact with the material. In my conversation with this student, I seized the opportunity to observe that we were able to do the application of facts because of the pre-recorded lectures and made a point of sharing how much fun it was for me to teach the class this way.
I still feel like I won't really know what "the room" thinks until the end, when all the votes are tallied. Still, it's been great to hear such good things from a few of them. In my experience, students will be quick to tell us what they don't like but they aren't always so quick to tell us what they do like. I'm pleased that these two took the time to reinforce for me my sense that, as a class, my students were on board and enjoying the ride thus far.
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