Blogs

The fourth annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts conference is scheduled for Wednesday, May 20-Thursday May 21, 2015, and will be held at Bryn Mawr College. These conferences are intended as a forum for faculty and staff to share resources, techniques, findings, and experiences related to blended learning. Our definition of blended learning is quite broad, encompassing any combination of online and face-to-face instruction with a focus on supporting the close faculty-student interaction and emphasis on lifelong learning that is a hallmark of American liberal arts education.

We are currently seeking proposals for individual presentations, sessions, and workshops. We welcome proposals from any academic discipline, but faculty in the humanities and those who have used blended learning for open-ended and/or authentic assessment are particularly encouraged to apply.

For more information about the conference, the CFP, and to view materials from past conferences, please see our website at http://blendedlearning.blogs.brynmawr.edu/conferences/.

The deadline for proposals is February 15, 2015. Conference registration will open on March 1.

Many faculty are experimenting with reducing the amount of class time spent lecturing in order to devote more time to discussion, problem-solving, and other activities designed to engage students in active learning. Thanks to Salman Khan of Khan Academy, perhaps, the most famous example of this is the "flipped classroom" approach, in which lectures are partly or wholly replaced by short instructional videos designed to be viewed as "homework" outside of class. In Introduction to Key Concepts in Five Minutes or Less: The ‘Did You Know?’ Microlecture Series, Julia VanderMolen explains talks about the potential benefits of the recorded "microlecture," the tools and pedagogical approach she takes when recording them, and how she integrates them in to her classes. Although the focus is recorded lectures, the approach could be used for in-person "micro-lectures" as well. 

The CBE-Life Sciences Education journal has recently published a study that resulted in improved success for black and first generation undergraduates who have a more activate role in class. Six semesters of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s introductory biology class (~400 students per class) were studied. Three of classes studied were simple lecture-based courses where students were not held accountable for coming to class prepared. The other three classes had an active learning approach which involved more in-class activities completed through teamwork, online exercises, and assigned textbook reading in order to prepare students for class. Overall, active learning improved test scores and significantly increased the number of students who passed exams. Specifically, for black and first generation active learners, exams scores increased by six percent. Additionally, the score gap between first-generation students and other students was not present for courses with an active learning structure. Students in the active learning classes were more likely to complete textbook readings, dedicate more hours on coursework, participate more in class, and view class as a community. These findings suggest that an active learning course structure improves student academic success and accomplishment particularly for students who are from an under-resourced background.

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Below, read all about what others have been saying about Blended Learning!

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"‘Dubliners’Comes to Life in Boston College’s Annotated E-Book"

by Avi Wolfman-Arent in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus on June 10, 2014

"Learning R"

by Andrea Zellner in Inside Higher Ed: GradHacker on June 10, 2014

"Five Things Online Students Want from Faculty"

by Rob Kelly in Faculty Focus: Higher Ed Teaching Strategies from Magna Publications on May 30, 2014

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has awarded Bryn Mawr College a grant of up to $300,000 to evolve STEM teaching over the next three years to make BMC computer and information science programs more culturally accessible and substantive!

Liz McCormack, chair and professor of the Physics Department at Bryn Mawr College, leads this initiative, assisted by Doug Blank and Mark Matlin. The college will use this funding to develop online computing or programming instructional modules that the physics department can insert throughout curricula. These additions will supply students with exposure to new and innovative computing and information science skills.

These leaders hope this initiative will act as a model for other departments at Bryn Mawr as well as for other schools, especially those interested in increasing computer and information science exposure across the curriculum, in part, to reach a more diverse range of students than those that traditionally enter those fields.

...thought y'all might like to know what Barb's been up to lately,
and how far she's taken our work in the Cannery:
see Designing Justice Designing Spaces: Revisioning Justice Architecture from the Inside Out....

Swivl is a robotic platform which can be used for recording presentations or class lectures. Users can connect a smartphone or tablet, or a DSLR camera, and use the free Swivl app to record video of the presentation.

Swivl is a service with 3 important components: the robotic base, the free Swivl Capture app for smartphone or tablet, and Swivl Cloud.

The Swivl robotic base can follow the "marker," either held or worn on a lanyard, allowing the instructor or presenter to move around freely and have the camera follow them. The marker conveniently doubles as a wireless microphone and as a remote control for the slides in the Swivl Capture app. Powerpoint slides can be imported to the Swivl app on the smartphone or tablet, which can be used to present while recording video, and facilitate the creation of a video with time-synchronized slides and presenter video. The Swivl Capture app can be used with Swivl Cloud without the Swivl robot, or with the Swivl robot.

VoiceThread is a user-friendly way to share power point presentations, videos, photos, and other media. Students and professors can record video or audio responses, draw on the media to highlight certain points, and comment in text form. This site is useful for discussion outside of the classroom, allowing students to focus on the topic at hand and reflect in a collaborative way.

Want to Learn More?
Read how VoiceThread describes its capabilities.

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Capabilities

Through VoiceThread...

Professors can:

• Upload power points
• Upload question slides for comment
• Comment on students’ writing in video, text, and visual formats

Students can:

The Science Education article in the Spring 2014 issue of the HHMI bulletin interviews several faculty in biology, physics, and chemistry about their motivations for flipping the classroom, the strategies they used, and the results the have seen. Among them is Bryn Mawr College's Elizabeth McCormack, who discusses her her experiences flipping a sophomore electromagnetics class, including initial resistance from students and what she has learned from that resistance. (Click here for slides from McCormack's 2013 Blended Learning Conference presentation on this experience.)

Learning impacts described in the article seem consistent with those reported by faculty who discussed their own experiments with flipping the classroom at the 2014 Blended Learning Conference -- high-performing students continue to do well, and middle- to lower-performing students show improvement. One quasi-experimental study that compared students in a section of introductory physics course that introduced students to content through pre-class reading assignments to free up class time for active-learning activities to a section taught in a traditional format, found that the form scored significantly higher on a standard test of their knowledge of quantum mechanics.     

MediaThread, a project created by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning through the Digital Bridges Initiative is a service that allows you to blend your thoughts with multimedia sources and share them with others. MediaThread supports video, images, metadata, and many content websites listed below. Most compatible with Firefox, MediaThread is currently being used by Columbia, MIT, Wellesley, Dartmouth, The American University in Cairo, and many other institutions of higher education.

Who can do what with MediaThread? Through MediaThread...