e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: faculty-development

  • Slides and Follow-up From Faculty Development Workshop at Aurora University

    Today I facilitated a faculty development workshop at Aurora University, sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the IT Department. I always enjoy sessions like this, particularly with the ability to focus our discussions squarely on technology in support of teaching and learning. The session was titled “Emerging Trends in Educational Technology and Implications for Faculty”. Below are very rough notes, slides, and a follow-up.

    Apparent Dilemma and Challenge

    Building off of previous presentations at ITC Network, there is an apparent dilemma:

    • One one hand, little has changed: Despite all the hype and investment in ed tech, there is only one new fully-established LMS vendor in the past decade (Canvas), and the top uses of LMS are for course management (rosters, content sharing, grades). Plus the MOOC movement fizzled out, at least for replacing higher ed programs or courses.
    • On the other hand, everything has changed: There are examples of redesigned courses such as Habitable Worlds at ASU that are showing dramatic results in the depth of learning by students.

    The best lens to understand this dilemma is Everett Rogers’ Diffusions of Innovations and the technology adoption curve and categories. Geoffrey Moore extended this work to call out a chasm between Innovators / Early Adopters on the left side (wanting advanced tech, OK with partial solutions they cobble together, pushing the boundary) and Majority / Laggards on the right side (wanting full solution – just make it work, make it reliable, make it intuitive). Whereas Moore described Crossing the Chasm for technology companies (moving from one side to the other), in most cases in education we don’t have that choice. The challenge in education is Straddling the Chasm (a concept I’m developing with a couple of consulting clients as well as observations from e-Literate TV case studies): (more…)

  • Why All Faculty Members Should Blog

    So much to blog, so little time.

    There have been a few interesting responses to the “Sisyphus Taught Videography” post. For example, in a comment on that post, MIDizen X observes that students can be the producers of the media: (more…)

  • Sisyphus Taught Videography

    One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to tweak my blog’s CSS so that I can get my SUNY-specific blogroll section up. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pointing to SUNY bloggers from time to time. Today’s entry is from Alex Reid at SUNY Cortland, in which he reflects on the challenge of getting faculty literate in video and other multimedia forms. Alex calls this “information literacy”, which makes me think of charts, statistics, and search engine proficiency, but his definition is more expansive and provocative: (more…)

  • Experience as a Distance Learning Teacher Makes You a Better Classroom Teacher

    According to a faculty satisfaction study [DOC] conducted by SLN, a whopping 85% of their faculty reported that their experience as online teachers “will have a positive effect on their classroom instruction.”

    Here is their explanation for their findings: (more…)

  • Outstanding (and Practical) Learning Styles Research Paper

    This piece [PDF] from the Learning Research Centre is one of the finest educational research articles I have read in a long time. To begin with, their literature review of the research to-date is superb. They break down each major theoretical school with its strengths and weaknesses, as well as weaknesses in research and methodology. These guys really get the science and understand why it’s so hard to produce meaningful, reliable answers. To wit, here’s the first paragraph under the subhead in their conclusions section entitled “No clear implications for pedagogy:”

    There are two separate problems here. First, learning style researchers do not speak with one voice; there is widespread disagreement about the advice that should be offered to teachers, tutors or managers. For instance, should the style of teaching be consonant with the style of learning or not? At present, there is no definitive answer to that question, because –and this brings us to the second problem– there is a dearth of rigorously controlled experiments and of longitudinal studies to test the claims of the main advocates. A move toward more controlled experiments, however, would entail a loss of ecological validity and of the opportunity to study complex learning in authentic, everyday educational settings.

    In other words, one of the reasons that some of the central theoretical claims have not been tested is that, in order to do so, you have to isolate the variable you are testing in a controlled experiment. But a controlled experiment is not like a classroom, and we don’t know how stripping away the other variables impacts the holistic learning process.

    Nevertheless, all is not lost. The authors do offer some some good suggestions about how existing research can be used to enhance education as well as how to go about deciding which research to use in what ways.

    Hot stuff.

  • Two Thirds of Faculty for Online Courses Receive No Pedagogy Training

    According to this survey, a lot of universities still don’t get that teaching online involves more than knowing which buttons to click. Right now the administrations probably don’t have to care; the demand for distance learning (even weak distance learning) outstrips the supply. But that won’t last forever, and when the market tightens up, universities will be shocked to learn that their customers can now sample a course, a degree program, or even an entire school, and bag it in favor of the competition with far less effort than they can in a bricks-and-mortar world. When that day comes, the competitive differentiator for customer loyalty will be pedagogy.

    (Found via Online Learning Update.)

  • Preparing Professors for Online Teaching: How Long Does It Take?

    I recently had some conversations with a small university that is starting up a new distance learning program. The university president is convinced that the two-hour intro course provided by eCollege would be enough for professors to get up to speed on designing and teaching online. This sounded pretty far out-of-whack to me, so I decided to check around at some schools that have successful programs with multi-year track records. As a sample, the New School for Social Research apparently requires new online teachers to attend a six-week course in which they are online at least four days a week before they are allowed to teach their first class. (Returning teachers apparently “only” have to attend a four-week three-day-a-week refresher course.) The Borough of Manhattan Community College requires professors to attend a full semester training course, and all online course curricula have to be approved by a panel of distance learning administrators and designers before the course can be taught.

    What it comes down to, I think, is that not everybody believes that there is such a thing as pedagogy. If you believe that teaching is just pouring content into empty vessels, like Charles Dickens’ Professor Gradgrind, then what’s there to learn about distance learning besides which buttons to click?