Last week I described how UC Davis is making efforts to personalize one of the most impersonal of learning experiences – large lecture introductory science courses. It is telling that the first changes that they made were not to the lecture itself but to the associated discussion sections led by teaching assistants (TAs). It is well known that much of the instruction in lower division classes at large universities is led not by faculty but by TAs. This situation is often seen as a weakness of the business model of a research university, but it can also be leveraged as an opportunity to lead educational change. Consider this interview with staff from the iAMSTEM group at UC Davis from our e-Literate TV series on personalized learning:
Tag: teaching assistants
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ASU Is No Longer Using Khan Academy In Developmental Math Program
In these two episodes of e-Literate TV, we shared how Arizona State University (ASU) started using Khan Academy as the software platform for a redesigned developmental math course ((The terms remedial math and developmental math are interchangeable in this context.)) (MAT 110). The program was designed in Summer 2014 and ran through Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 terms. Recognizing the public information shared through e-Literate TV, ASU officials recently informed us that they had made a programmatic change and will replace their use of Khan Academy software with McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart software that is used in other sections of developmental math.
To put this news in context, here is the first episode’s mention of Khan Academy usage. (more…)
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Personalized Learning Changes: Effect on instructors and coaches
Kate Bowles left an interesting comment at my previous post about an ASU episode on e-Literate TV, where I argued that there is a profound change in the instructor role. Her comment:
Phil, I’m interested to know if you found anything out about the pay rates for coaches v TAs. I’m also interested in what coaches were actually paid to do — how the parameters of their employable hours fit what they ended up doing. Academics are rarely encouraged to think of their work in terms of billable increments, because this would sink the ship. But still I’m curious. Did ASU really just hike up their staffing costs in moving to personalised learning, or was there some other cost efficiency here? If the overall increase in students paid off, how did this happen? I’m grappling with how this worked for ASU in budgetary terms, as the pedagogical gain is so clear.
This comment happened to coincide with my participation in WCET’s Leadership Summit on Adaptive Learning, where similar subjects were being discussed. For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll use the “personalized learning” language, which includes use of adaptive software as a subset. Let’s first address the ASU-specific questions. (more…)
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Instructor Replacement vs. Instructor Role Change
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about faculty members’ perspective on student-centered pacing within a course. What about the changing role of faculty members – how do their lives change with some of the personalized learning approaches?
In the video below, I spoke with Sue McClure, who teaches a redesigned remedial math course at Arizona State University (ASU) that is based on the use of Khan Academy videos. There are plenty of questions about whether this approach works and is sustainable, but for now let’s just get a first-hand view of how Sue’s role changed in this specific course. You’ll see that it took some prodding to get her to talk about her personal experience, and I did have to reflect back what I was hearing. Note that the “coaches” she described are teaching assistants.
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