TEP Blog

I often hear from instructors that students desperately need to build basic skills, but there’s  no time in a ten week course to develop these skills in a ten week course along with all the content that needs to be covered. And besides, don’t students need basic skills before they can really work with the intellectually challenging material. But is this dichotomy, skills vs. content, a fallacy? Can you build fundamental skills ( grammar, usage, organization, etc.) within the context of the core material? Might combining skill and content instruction actually help students retain these skills and be able to apply them in other courses?
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The chronicle of Higher Ed wrote recently about Jose Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University who is on a mission to strip classrooms bare of technology.  He still wants instructors of higher education to use educational technology. But he he advocates taking full advantage of new technologies (podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, wikis, etc.) to move information delivery to the virtual classroom, leaving hours of face-to face time for discussion and hands-on activities. If students come to class having reviewed the “material” for the day, by watching the lecture online, everything is “covered” by the time you walk in the door. Which means you can finally get to all those activities you thought you didn’t have time for, like discussions, experiments, group-work, case-studies, even field-trips. Oddly enough, it turns out that students prefer spending class time  on activities to watching power-points. Who’d have thought?

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The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA conducts a survey of incoming fresh-persons every year. They ask students to anonymously  describe their family, political views, and socioeconomic status. But perhaps most interesting, are students’ self-evaluations of their character and their study-skills. This year, there are some telling discrepancies. For example  73% of fresh-men rate themselves as above-average in academic-ability, but only 51% of fresh-men  say they frequently take notes. (78% of fresh-women take notes frequently.) I think it says a lot about what fresh-men believe are the keys to academic success. There are also troubling results; 20% of fresh-persons believe that racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in America.  It’s an interesting read and could be fodder for useful reflective exercises. Write, and tell us what sparked your interest.

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Inside Higher Ed reports that at Blackboard’s annual conference this year, a “listening session” where Bb executives came to hear the concerns of college administrators and officials turned into a “communal gripe session.” Many of the frustrations centered on the parade of new editions coupled with a lack of user support and training. Does this sound familiar? As much help as Blackboard is, as much as we love all it does for us, sometimes the learning curve is steep and the hike can be a pain. Thank goodness the University has  excellent resources, Sherpas to guide you up the mountain of new technology.

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We tune a piano so that music sounds the same on each instrument. We know what to expect from each key and can play right away. Can you tune an institution of higher education the same way? Can we define certain reference points that would define a major the same way notes define a scale, or a song? The “Tuning”  process, as described by an article in Inside Higher Ed, “involves research and surveys of faculty members, students and employers, and consultation with business and government leaders, to determine exactly what a degree in a given field stands for in terms of students’ learning and competencies.” The goal is to help the major listed on a diploma say more about the abilities and knowledge of the  student who holds it. (more…)

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Inside Higehr Ed had an interesting article yesterday.  The Department of Education has released a meta-analysis of studies that compare  online, hybrid and traditional “face to face” learning environments. The results were surprising: Students perform better in online courses than in face-to-face courses, and they perform best of all in hybrid courses. The results certainly challenge  the assumption that online education is what we resort to when it’s difficult to meet in the classroom. It turns out there are clear advantages to online learing for students beyond convenience. But online learning and the software that allows us to pursue it  are just formats and tools.  And tools like whiteboards,or projectors, or laptops,  don’t make learning happen; a whiteboard with disorganized information isn’t better than a chalkboard with a simple, clear diagram.  While it’s true that a whiteboard makes it easier to have clear writing, and bright bold diagrams, those things aren’t impossible without a whiteboard. Similarly, online education and hybridized education facilitates a certain quality of experience that’s perfectly accessible in face to face courses.

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The Oregon Senate has voted unanimously to approve the Oregon Faculty and College Excellence Act. This bill  “allows part-time faculty at community colleges and universities access to quality health care insurance benefit plans through the Oregon Educator’s Benefit Board (OEBB) health care plan.”  It also requires institutions to keep track of staff and salary ratios,  with the idea that institutions will eventually move toward providing adjuncts equal pay for equal course-loads across public universities and colleges. This is a great step for adjuncts who, according to the American Association of University Professors, make up 70% of instructors in public and private colleges and universities.  We look forward to a time when adjuncts will have equitable support in all areas of university life, and we want to remind you that TEP is a university support service  fully available to every instructor free of cost.

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As University Instructors we tend to fixate on the content of our courses and the difficulty of communicating complex, often abstract, ideas. We want to be clear and efficient, knowledgeable and polished.  So we direct our energies toward creating knock-down syllabi, reading lists, lectures, and lesson-plans, because we are used to these being the indicators of good teaching. And of course good preparation is essential to good teaching, but what happens in the classroom ( how a teacher reacts, interacts, and improvises with students) can be just as important. Good teachers are aware of their students; they notice and they adapt their lessons in response to students’ interest, enthusiasm, confusion, and boredom. This skill is what Bob Pianta, dean of the the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, calls “withitness.”

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What if every terribly mistaken pop-culture  representation of our discipline  was actually a terrific learning opportunity? Lots of folks I know who are locked in the ivory tower bemoan the glamorous and adventurous portrayal of their  work in popular culture. What archaeologist carries a whip? What theoretical physicist wears a lab coat? How do you control a tornado with a lightening rod? How does an English Professor get an office that large, with that kind of view? Sure it’s upsetting that the only time information about what we do reaches a mass audience it’s usually simplified, or mangled to suit the plot twists of a summer blockbuster. Feel free to share your ideas!

But  Scientists who work on the Large Hadron Collider are finding that the popular misinformation in “Angels and Demons” is giving them plenty of chances to educate the public on the real nature of particle smashing and anti/matter.  Scientists affiliated with the collider project were really excited to have a sudden rush of public interest in what they were doing, and the opportunity to correct some big misconceptions  about the project. (No, it will not rip a hole in the space time continuum.)  They’ve scheduled fifty lectures worldwide for movie go-ers interested in the real particle physics. And there’s a similar, older, web library of terrible movie physics. This site details the real physics behind movie cliches like outrunning a ball of flames and igniting massive fires with a flicked cigarette.

I think there’s a lesson in this  for all of us. Misunderstandings and flawed first impressions, especailly those that come from pop culture,  are all great opportunities to lauch conversation with your students about the real-deal. So where are the representations of your discipline? And how can you engage students in fruitful conversations about the pop culutre  that misinforms.  One idea that comes from the movie physics site, is to have your students review a movie or television show for it’s accuracy with respect to your dicipline.  Or you might have students re-write a scene to produce a more accurate reflection.

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I got back from the EDUCAUSE Western Regional conference a few weeks ago and thought I would share some of the session resources.

The conference was themed: Finding Common Ground Among Shifting Technologies and Expectations and included some very interesting sessions, plus it is always a bonus attending a conference in San Francisco!

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