Blended Learning

The latest article posted to the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list, "1330. Flipped Classrooms- Old or New?," reconnects the idea of the "flipped" classroom to long-standing educational practice.

Current media coverage paints "flipped" as a revolutionary form of blended or technology-enhanced teaching. Instead of lecturing, an instructor introduces key concepts and skills though online videos or interactive tutorials, which students are required to complete before class. The instructor then uses class time for active learning exercises designed to help students engage with and master that material -- such as problem-solving, group projects, in depth discussion, debates, etc.

Philly-area faculty and IT's looking to develop academic technology skills and strategies should check out Westchester University's RECAP conference and hands-on workshops. This year's themes include mobile pedagogy; engaging students; assessment; universal design; and using technology to develop critical thinking and other soft skills. Technologies discussed include both commercial and open-source options. For more information and to register, see http://www.wcupa.edu/recap/schedule.aspx.

As the college experience becomes increasingly concentrated in students' technological spaces, the vendors of digital tools become more and more prominent parts of that experience. Textbook publishers and course managment system companies vie for market space, both seeking to gain control over the market. More and more, that means vying for increased control over the learning experience.

Between the textbook publishers and the course management providers, no one company has won out as the ultimate provider of every part of the learning experience. But as the two fight it out to provide an immersive experience, they're also taking control away from someone else: faculty.

Part of the immerseive experience, after all, includes creating activities, setting learning objectives, and designing assessments -- areas that are traditionally the domain of faculty. While the deadlock between companies suggests that faculty aren't in any immediate danger of corporations seizing control over their classrooms, some universities are working to partner with their supply companies. Working with publishers and CMS companies can allow faculty to engineer flexible materials. Freedom is important to faculty, and if ceding control to technology companies endangers that, the partnerships will fall flat.

For more information, read the Chronicle of Higher Education article "Textbook Publishers Push to Provide Full Digital-Learning Experience."

According to Steven Mintz, Executive Director of the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformation Learning, it isn't just education that's changing: it's pedagogy. He recalls Jerome Bruner's work in the early 1960s which found that the standard pedagogy of the era, knowledge transmission, needed to be revised. He suggested "discovery learning," which emphasizes learning through inquiry and team work instead of passive reception. Professor Mintz believes its time for another change: as he wrote in a recent post for Inside Higher Ed, "The time is ripe to move toward Pedagogy 3.0: a pedagogy of collaboration, creativity, and invention which treats students not simply as learners but as creators of knowledge."

Mintz notes that the way undergraduate institutions work, they only really serve one out of three subgroups they should be serving: those struggling without proper preparation and faced with other demands, and potential students who are currently workin adults and full-time caretakers, often go unserved. The Pedagogy of Discovery, according to Professor Mintz, would help address these gaps. Instead of treating college students as passive, it treats them as "knowledge creators whose school work needs to be meaningul and subject to vetting not just by a single professor but a broader audience."

In a series of posts on the Teaching Professor Blog, Dr. Maryellen Weimer took on the challenge of improving college-level multiple choice tests. While multiple choice tests are a convenience for many professors, for instructors of blended and online courses they can be a necessity. The problem is, of course, that many instructors question what multiple choice tests are really testing -- student learning, or student ability to select an answer from a list of choices.

According to Dr. Weimer, not all multiple choice tests are bad tests. The real problem is crafting the right questions. According to the first post in the series, "A number of years ago, a cross-disciplinary faculty cohort reported that a third of their questions measured complex cognitive skills. An analysis showed that only 8.5% of their questions did, with the remaining testing basic comprehension and recall." Improving the quality of the questions, according to Dr. Weimer, can make multiple choice tests efficient and effective. In the second post, she provides some tips for writing good multiple choice questions, including:

In a world of crowdsourcing and community-based expertise, it's easy to access reviews on everything from products, to services, to restaurants. As the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it, potential users looking to evaluate education technology now have a site of their own: Software PhD, a newly-created website designed to allow vendors and educators to share, discuss, and frankly opine about educational technology. For new users looking to find and buy products, Software PhD has a rating section where you can compare both company and product ratings to make better-informed purchasing decisions. The ratings are broken up into a (presumably expanding, given the site's relative youth) system of categories, including Catalog & Curriculum Management, Scheduling, and Retention & Advising, among others. While anyone can browse reviews, it takes a registered account to write reviews and to use the forum section. By requiring registration, creator Mark Baker hoped to inspire some transparency: while users are not required to provide their names, they are required to identify their institutions. As a result, all reviewers are "trusted reviewers" in some way. The site boasts less than 400 active users so far, but as it grows so too will its power to provide a comprehensive buying guide.

One thing I have learned from the NGLC blended learning and from working with various edu-tech tools and developers, is that the market is very much in flux. Inspired in part by the success of blended learning and the buzz around MOOCs, many companies are working on many different innovative tools and courseware packages, often in response to real needs identified by teachers and students. This is great news, but for the immediate future it means that most of us at some point will need to teach and learn with a tool that is still "in beta" and lacks the robust customer support or functionality of older, more established software.

I've written before about how difficult, yet ultimately rewarding, it can be to get used to working in a "live beta" mode, in which you publish or publicly try something you know to be half-baked, in order to get feedback on how it works in a real-world setting. A recent EdSurge article also offers some concrete logistical tips for instructors who find themselves in this position, due to the newness of the software tools they are trying to use -- such as workarounds for tools that lack "single sign-on" functionality.

There is a long history of evidence that cooperative learning has ample benefits. The study reviewed by Faculty Focus adds another piece to the evidence: the study focuses on the amount of time spent on task, a variable which is obviously important but was previously underexplored. Previous research would break students into groups of individuals and collaborative workers, but not necessarily take into account whether or not students were working independently outside of the group setting. This study controlled for that, by rigorously monitoring time spent studying in the classroom and out-of-class.