7 principles in action: Over action

Reading 1

The authors present no evidence to support the statement that the typical student is apathetic. Giving up on your students and saying they are apathetic is just a poor excuse. However, saying that student only do what they can to pass, is usually more of a workload and life-study balance issue. Not realising that they need to spend 10-12 hours per course per week is what leads to unrealistic expectations that they can do more courses, or work more hours and that’s where they are pressured for time. The authors even go on to list such things in the “Barriers to High Student Achievement at the Undergraduate Level”. But apathetic!?! The authors say that “the first step for the instructor is to overcome student apathy and motivate them…” I believe that students wouldn’t be there if they weren’t actually in some way motivated. The trouble is more that instructors tend to de-motivate them or teach by death by powerpoint and turn the students off. There really is no apathy to overcome, just don’t make them tune out by poor teaching practices.

Saying that mans that the requirements to pass the course are actually too low if the outcome is not useful to anyone.

Interesting that the comment about number 6. communicating high expectations, is that, “students need to feel that the instructors believe their students can achieve the high goals set for the class”, kind of is exactly opposite to the authors saying that students are typically apathetic. What could communicate lower expectations??

Er, perhaps there is another reason they have a great deal of trepidation? It couldn’t be because they have seen students struggle with it previously or they are aware of things such as high cognitive loads, intrinsic and extrinsic, and they have seen previous students shut down due to poor teaching?

Dumbing down the assessment has never been an answer to increasing student motivation. Wow, they can do well on something really basic… woo hoo! How is that really assessing content knowledge? Is that really what you want them to get out of the course? How about more appropriate and guided teaching activities that build them up result in them having confidence to know that they can even do the hard questions? The easy questions need not be part of the assessment for the sake of taking away their fear and boosting confidence. Easy questions are incorporated into a scaled quiz or question paper to assess the level at which their learning is at, but focuses on the difficult questions.

Group work is inherently difficult to assess and in general, students do not like group assignments where their mark depends on other students’ work. So taking this approach is a good idea. To know something well, teach it to someone else.

The authors go on to peer review and it does seem like it is closely monitored, which I believe is good, as peer review simply for assessment can create animosity between students especially in a group work situation.

Active and relevant learning activities are important, such as the authors' example of, “assigning classes to classrooms on the university campus”. Often, however, the more authentic problems are too complex and may need to be introduced later. Something like: in the end we will be able to analyse the motion of a rollercoaster, but first we need a few basic principles, such as I drive 30km in 20 minutes, what speed am I doing. While the basic problem is still real life, it is not a particularly riveting example, but they will build up to the roller coaster, which is – especially if you can take the students to a theme park! (We did for Grade 11 Physics.)

I definitely agree with the authors that, “to pass on… information in lecture format could prove immensely dry”.

The option to resubmit after feedback are a recurring theme in the courses this paper talks about and this is a good idea. It means that the students do have an option to learn from their mistakes and not necessarily have a bad grade because they have not yet learnt the concept.

I found the time on task discussion interesting. The “very important” material received the most time on task and the students did really well in it. The “to be covered material” had the least time and the students did not do so well in it. What I find strange, is that there are still assessment questions on this material, so why isn’t there more time spent on them? Because it is less important as a concept overall, does that mean that it is less important to the student? Aren’t marks still marks?

Is this an optimum way of spending instructor time? This is not feasible for a large class. Is there a way, such as using a lesson in moodle to give the weaker students more time on the task in a constructive way, and therefore use the instructor time for examples and demonstrations that benefit everyone?

I can see that many of the options for implementing the seven principles in action have actually increased the instructors time commitment. There might be more efficient means with the same ends if instructors think outside of the box and utilise technology. Yes, it might have more of a preparation time initially, but over the course of the term or several years, it might be able to lessen the teaching load and only require small preparations in future terms.

Deconstructing Constructive Alignment

Shovel ware – just uploading static material to the web as Dr Merrill says – violates the principles of learning. I think, however, with CQUni’s switch to Moodle, that many of the courses at least have some component of ‘active’ learning. Now I put active in inverted commas because it is still not necessarily actually doing the thing that they are learning. For example, I can give them a quiz on mechanics and they can do the problems, but they are not seeing they physical reality.

Dr Merrill says it is important that the concepts and skills be demonstrated, then the students do it for themselves. That is really hard to do for flex students! Last night even, I tried to do a video about mechanics in an ISL room. I was walking back and forth across the room, swapping insanely from the presenter camera to the document camera and back, and zooming in on a ruler I was trying to use to demonstrate levers. Also telling them how to do the experiments and other experiments for themselves. In the end, I don’t know if that is going to be a help or a hindrance!

So we set about trying to ‘design’ instruction. This is similar to what we use in Engineering. As Susan said it is similar to the Nursing process too. Engineering is: Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create, Improve and it is a circle with links between all parts. One difference I can’t help notice is Imagine. In Engineering, this is where the creativity comes in. Between analyse and design I guess the creativity is covered, but I like to think, at least momentarily, that the possibilities are endless. That’s how we get the really ingenious ideas!

We are, of course, still trying to get our learning objectives across. This could be rather different from where the students’ imagination is taking them. As John Medina pointed out, curiosity is a good thing. Especially in Physics and Engineering. Careful attention does need to be paid to constructive alignment – but not necessarily trying to fit your instructional design to your learning outcomes. Learn from the students. See where it is they take the ideas. Let them run with it for a bit. Perhaps the learning objectives need to be changed?? Oh dear, Engineers Australia (the accrediting body) might not like that!

I did make a comment on the forum about students basing all of their learning time around the assessment so why not make all the learning assessable? The reply comment was about ‘over assessment’ and why can’t we just find ways to motivate and engage students. I guess in the ultimate learning world that would be great, but is that really going to work where our students are so pushed for time: studying, working and family? This is mentioned in Warren’s 2004 article on Constructive Alignment: “we know that students will inevitably tend to look at the assessment and structure their learning activities, as far as they are able, to optimise their assessment performance”.

The analysis of the Monitoring Academic Policy showed that the main reasons students fail courses are: unrealistic expectations on the amount of time it would take to study, and unexpected changes in work/health/family situation. It is extremely rare that the reason is because the course work was not motivating or engaging.

I must, however, clarify a bit on what I mean by making all learning activities assessed. Sure there is content. We all want our students to learn the content. In the end, we must assess that the students have learnt this content to a satisfactory level. Reports, essays, quizzes and exams can be good for that. What else can happen, though, is assessing the process used to get to learning that content. Of course you can’t assess content knowledge during the learning process – that is just a bit too presumptuous. For example a moodle lesson where each step is marked so mistakes and the invaluable learning that comes from getting it wrong is penalised. That turns the activity from a learning activity into one where there student has to go away and learn the material some other way before attempting the lesson. That would not be what I would want.

I get a few enquiries from students for worked examples, tutorial sheets with answers that come out later, past exam papers with worked solutions. They want to try before they buy. These tend to be motivated students who are not afraid of asking for help and I believe are already engaged with the learning. The rest of the cohort will simply try the assignment and perhaps see if there is a similar worked example in the study guide and just do enough until they feel they have mostly done the question correctly, and will achieve the 50% to pass the assignment/course. Yes! Very surface learning! I don’t think that having more assessment will help engage these students. They will then feel like they are ‘over assessed’.

What I would like to do, and I can feel my portfolio activity emerging from this, is to design a learning activity where the objective is the learning as well as the content. It would be a non-threatening learning environment with room for error and mistakes, and these are not penalised, but rather rewarded with encouragement and an even richer learning experience. Perhaps something like a lesson in Moodle with some content learning objective – let’s say understanding resistors in parallel circuits in electricity – but it could be anything. There would be some introductory activities, reading, examples and demonstration videos (yeh, have to work on that one…), then there would be a large question bank and the objective would be that by the time the student finishes the lesson, he or she would have correctly answered 5 of them. If they get a question wrong, there would be no penalty, but they would be taken to a branch where there would be further explanation of the concept and the opportunity to try another question. This also tailors the learning to common mistakes. Say, the student forgot to convert the units – then this particular wrong answer would be included in the choices, but if selected it would jump the students to a page where it said, “Oops, you forgot to convert the units – here’s how you do that…”.

Thus, it rewards the learning, the going from not knowing how to do the content, to knowing how to do the content. These sorts of activities could make up (this probably needs some thought and discussion, but just off the top of my head) about 30% of the assessment. Yes, it would be a guaranteed 30% if the activities were completed, but wouldn’t it also be pretty much guaranteed that the student would know that much? Isn’t that rewarding deeper learning rather than if someone went into an exam after cramming the night before and achieving 30/30 but forgetting it all the next day?

The learning activity, the assessment and the intended learning outcome are aligned. This also reflects cognitive load theory where practice on small bits can create the new sophisticated memory schema while using technology to incorporate the audio/visual/text mixture, and ensuring that the student has truly worked through the problem, not just worked the system.

It also goes along with brain rule #5, repeat to remember – has to be successfully completed 5 times so the success is remembered, and #8, stressed brains learn differently – takes the stress of getting it right to get the marks away, so learning can be a less stressful activity.

There are several other ways of constructive alignment where assessing learning and therefore ensuring adequate learning rather than just whether the student can regurgitate facts. Reflective blogs; portfolios showing how the learning was achieved; practical, work-based competencies where the student has the opportunity to be ‘not yet competent’ without penalty; and group work where the group must show how they have worked together and what they have learnt from that (eg peer review), as well as the completion of the set project.

Disconnected connectedness

I think being a child of the 80s (generation X) taught me that where technology is concerned, anything is possible. I learnt to think outside the box. I am old enough to remember the time before computers, but young enough that they were part of my later education. While my schooling had nothing to do with computers or the internet, it all started to come about while I was at uni. Also, being a Physics student led me to think well outside the box.

So while I am not generation Y, and don’t have that inbred hyperconnectivity, I am not denying it and I’m willing to work with it. As Mark Pesce said, it needs to be incorporated and harnessed, not avoided. I need, however, to become the learner as Mark said at the end, and learn the technology.

I facebook, I do like to see my friends’ status updates, comments, photos, what they’re reading, what they are interested in in terms of current affairs etc. I use it as a connection – I might go on every couple of days, or at the most a couple of times a day, but it is not a hyperconnection. My friends and I don’t bounce ideas and conversations back and forth, we are not up to the minute with details. I don’t twitter… just haven’t found a place for it in my life. I do text, a fair amount. Probably 10 – 12 a day, nearly all with my partner who I live with, so I guess you can say we are almost hyperconnected. I email all day everyday with colleagues – work just wouldn’t happen without it. And I love Moodle, but I know I haven’t grasped the connectivity aspect of it.

The problem I can see with learning and particularly at CQUni, is that we are not just talking about gen Y. I think a lot of lecturers are actually seeing the benefit of connectivity (I’ll leave out the hyper for now) in learning and collaboration and sharing of knowledge, especially with flex students, but not all students can see that. Not all students embrace technology. Even if they want to, some don’t have the knowledge. So by asking (forcing) all students to use forums, blogs, wikis, google docs… there seems to be a fundamental chunk missing.

This was also brought up by John Medina that if a fundamental chunk of knowledge is missing, it really affects subsequent learning.

I know this from teaching Intro Physics. If a student cannot conceptualise displacement, they will not understand velocity. If they cannot conceptualise mass, they will not understand force. Even to the extent that if they cannot work with fractions, multiplication, decimals…, they will have trouble in all of Physics.

Colleagues of mine at Purdue University in Indiana were working with children aged 1 – 3 years. They were studying the children’s conceptualisations of cardinal vs ordinal numbers. If that is missed, along with other fundamental concepts, then the children are going to have a hard time with maths at primary school. They will have a hard time with maths at high school. They are probably going to avoid maths, they have been left behind by the system, the curriculum. Then they come to an enabling course at uni. What we do then is most important.

Without getting too side-tracked, I believe the same is true for computers, the internet and other technology. Some students come in and have never turned on a computer, let alone done a wiki. Then others come from school and expect this hyperconnectivity. The question is how to integrate the two extremes and everything in between? No, really, how do we do it?? Should I just be making my implicit curriculum ‘how to maximise connectivity as a student’? Or even ‘make sure you know how to be connected as a student so that you are ready for that in your degree too’? But still, how do I do that?

Brain Rules OK!

I started to watch the video, sitting in my study at home, late Wednesday evening and to my surprise, or rather intrigue, one of the first things that Dr John Medina said was, “The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in near constant motion” and that most modern classrooms and business cubicles are designed seemingly completely the opposite.

At the end of the site on Brain rule #4, we don’t pay attention to boring things, is a power point presentation – of all things, denouncing power point presentations! Also, the message in the power point is that “passively sitting is a very unnatural thing. Audiences have no patience for tedium.” I read this after sitting listening to his presentation (including power points) for 52 minutes and 10 seconds. He was presenting to an audience who was sitting relatively passively and listening! What he said was interesting, but I wasn’t in the least sitting passively. Apart from the fact that I was making notes… I made toast and ate it, I got a drink, I watched the rain out of the window, I looked a the titles of some of the books on my bookshelf, I got annoyed by the noises from the printer and then moved it, I patted the cat, I checked on the dogs… get the point?

Then in the very same rule, it says that the brain cannot multi-task and that it has to undergo 4 processed to switch from one to the other and that it can lead to a lot less productivity. Yes, it’s true, it’s taken me longer to view the video than just sitting here watching it straight through. But if I did that… then I would have tuned out after 10 minutes!

OK, so how can I relate these brain rules to my teaching? In particular, stimulating multiple senses simultaneously?

In Physics and Engineering, this would seem pretty straight forward – have the students stand up, move around and do short experiments and explain the Physics to them while they are doing these experiments. Have them change a condition in the experiment every 10 minutes so that something different happens and interest is maintained. This allows them to receive visual, tactile and auditory information all at once. Then repeat the experiments and facts several times in one session, and repeat the session in another class 2 hours later, of course avoiding the 1:30 – 3:30pm timeslot (nap time, but that doesn’t matter because it is consolidating the information anyway). AND relate the experiment somehow to something emotional/exiting/personal to encode the experiments in a more complex – therefore memorable – manner.

Easy? That’s actually quite doable for on-campus students. But for flex students… it is somewhat more difficult. My students have nearly all said that the videos I do of diagrams and solving problems and me walking backwards and forwards across the room to show displacement really help. So would me videoing the experiments work? Probably somewhat. I guess, however, that designing experiments that they can do at home would be even better.

We did do that with exponential decay. We had the students poor a carbonated beverage into a glass and measure the froth head. Then design an experiment to determine the rate the head went down. This also encoded the learning with a more complex situation – and undoubtedly, every time the student had a carbonated beverage, they would recall the exponential decay rule for the froth.

Now how to do that for nuclear physics without invoking Fukushima Daiichi in every student’s house???

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

Whoever said, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", I think really had something to offer. When, however, Jack was a young boy, everything was play. So what changed and when?

Engagement is all over the education arena. I found the article "Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based teaching and learning" by Greg Kearsley & Ben Shneiderman in the list of readings. They give three basic principles of engagement in electronic and distance education, which is a main feature of CQUniversity. These are that they occur in a group, are project based, and have an outside (authentic) focus. I feel that somewhere in there, there is a distinct lack of "be interesting" or "be fun for the student" or "help the student be intrigued with the contents and therefore be engaged".

There is a whole section on collaborative learning in the list. "Collaborating over the Internet" by Pierre Dillenbourg and Daniel Schneider goes into the mechanisms for collaboration. It even talks about adult-adult interaction. The authors describe task features and breakdown of the task, the media used for collaboration, and attributes to help discussion, such as conflict. It does not mention motivators or interest. It actually seems very task oriented, and not learner oriented. Even the section on Social Grounding is more about technical issues than personal issues. Understanding also includes a desire to understand, an interest in understanding, and for that matter an interest in helping the other party understand. All the best technical communication tools in the universe are not going to help if the motivation is not there.

So now I bring it back to play. What is the difference between work and play? Why is work dull? When children get together, what they naturally do is play. Even when adults get together in a "social" context, they have fun. They enjoy what they are doing and enjoy each other's company while doing it. Somewhere along the developmental line, there became a distinction between play and work. Whether that be in Grade 1 when "play" was for lunch time and "work" was what was done in class and was hard and "not fun", or whether it was a gradual development as more school "work" took over from "playtime" and home "work" left less time for after school "activities". When going to "work" meant being a responsible adult who did no "play".

So do we put learning in that realm of "play" or "work"? Is there a way that we can not distinguish between the two? Is it outside the realm of believability that learning and working can be fun? I'm not saying that it all has to be a game, and I'm not saying that to have fun and be interested is not to take the learning seriously. If I want engagement from my students, I'm going to have a bit of fun. Fun for me and fun for the students. I think it will lead to a more engaging and motivating experience for all.

Indeed I have done a little experiment. When I was at a Complex Systems conference in Atlanta, Georgia, my colleague and I did our presentation using play. We wanted the participants to come up with a representation of Engineering and one group used play dough and the other crayons and paper. These university lecturers and professors were rather taken aback when we announced the task. It took some time, thought and questioning from them to feel comfortable with doing non-traditional activities, but in the end they did it and had a great time and really delved into the meat of what Engineering was.

One time I was, however, challenged that the difference between children and adults is that children need to play/enjoy/have fun in order to be engaged, whereas adults can be mature and put that aside and work or learn without these factors. True, I say, but what a different experience the learning is when there is genuine interest from just haveing to do it.

I'm not saying turn the classroom into a circus - but we have actually quite successfully done that with undergraduate Physics students at The University of Queensland - just that "engagement" goes beyond being in a group, doing a project with authentic focus with all the best technology.

Well, I certainly had fun reading the material and writing this! Very interesting indeed.