Techfoot

What Will Happen to My Ratings?

This piece from the Teaching Professor has some excellent tips for dealing with faculty fears that using new techniques or teaching methods might lower their teaching ratings. Methods that that put greater responsibility on students and that move the teacher off center stage often don’t map well to traditional institutional evaluations. One of the key points of the piece is to encourage faculty to get beyond the end-of-class “autopsy” evaluation and engage the students in an ongoing dialogue about their own learning throughout the term. The overall thrust of the piece is that by communicating honestly, openly and authentically about the evaluation process, it becomes more valuable for all concerned. (Thanks to the Kept-up Librarian for the link!)

I think that kind of communication maybe tough with undergraduates without a significant cultural change across the university. (I teach only graduate classes–and electives at that, but as the project manager for the restructuring of William and Mary’s evaluation process I’ve spent years up to my eyeballs in course evaluation issues.) On the surface, the findings from the Center for Academic Transformation that I wrote about yesterday certainly don’t argue for a particularly collegial relationship with students.

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NCAT: Learning MarketSpace April 2006

The latest newsletter from the National Center for Academic Transformation shares some key lessons learned from their ongoing program in course redesign. The Center has supported the redesign of 50 courses to increase learning while reducing organizational costs. (The Center is headed by distinguished William and Mary alumna Carol Twigg–another English major doing quite well in the field of Educational Technology.)

The lead article in the The Learning MarketSpace, April 2006 is entitled Freshmen Don’t Do Optional and confronts a common misunderstanding of courses redesigned by the center. While most of the redesigned courses have offer greater flexibility in times and learning methods than the courses they replaced, few are “self-paced”.

Each has discovered that students need structure (especially first-year students and especially in disciplines that may be required rather than chosen) and that most students simply will not make it in a totally self-paced environment.

Three key findings:

• Lesson 1. If you know that engaging in a particular learning activity will result in increased learning, you must require students to participate in it.
• Lesson 2. It’s not enough to require participation–you must give course points for doing so.
• Lesson 3: It’s not enough to require participation and to give points for doing so—you must also monitor whether students are engaged and be prepared to intervene if they are not.

This is one area where high-tech definitely can complement high-touch in courses in which content mastery can be measured fairly precisely. In traditional classes, it’s hard to tell how much time each student is spending and to find ways to encourage students who aren’t investing the time to be successful. Technology enhanced assignments can provide faculty members with much more information about how much time students are investing in their work and how well they are learning the content.

The entire article is worth reading to get the detail to support the bullets.

Link To: Weblogg-ed – The Read/Write Web in the Classroom

One of the themes I’ve been returning to often is that the K-12 teachers in the trenches are shaping the future for those of us in higher education to a far greater extent than most of us in the college and university arena realize. Here’s a partial program lineup from the Illinois Technology Conference, courtesy of Will Richardson.

* “No more excuses, it’s time to start blogging” full day workshop by Steve. (No seats left)
* “iPods in the Classroom” full day workshop with Karen Percak. (Full)
* “Read, Write and Blog” full day workshop with Susim Munshi. (Full)
* “Wikis and Weblogs as School Communication Tools” full day workshop with Tim Lauer. (No seats left.)
* “The New Read/Write Web: Transforming the Classroom” and “What’s Up with Wikis?” by, um…that would be me.
* “Blogging– Revolutionize Education” by Susim Munshi and Susan Switzer
* “Got Wikis?” by David Jakes
* “Web Based Communication Tools for Schools” by Tim Lauer
*Flickr in the Classroom” by David Jakes
* “Using iPods for Student Learning” by Karen Percak
* “Podcasting 101″ by Steve Dembo
* “Telling the New Story” by David Warlick
* “Radio For Kids, By Kids” by Tony Vincent”

Interesting implications….