Fall NewsLetter #1

Learners

Teaching Central | Did You Know?

Learning Communities Galore | Visionary Status Book Review | Hot 5

Communicating for

Teaching Central

Visitors to the Center for

Teaching and Learning’s website may

have noticed some changes over the past

months. The CTL website has added a new

page, Teaching Central. Teaching Central was designed as an easy-to-use resource page for BGSU faculty, staff, and graduate students, a tool to help in the design and implementation of significant and meaningful educational experiences for BGSU students. The Teaching Central website is divided into five categories that help direct visitors to the information they are seeking: Learning about Teaching, Developing Your Course, Preparing Students to Learn, Engaging Students’ Learning, and Generating Feedback and Assessment. Each of these five categories is further broken down into subsections with information and links to CTL resources and helpful resources from centers at other institutions.

The Learning about Teaching section provides resources on learner-centered teaching to help instructors integrate these instructional practices into their own teaching.

Information on the newest teaching theories and personal and professional development is provided to assist instructors in staying up to date with current trends in pedagogy and to chart and help their growth as educators.

The Developing Your Course page applies learner-centered teaching principles to the course-design process, with subsections on course context, integrated course design, and dealing with specific issues and events in the classroom.

The Preparing Students to Learn section presents ways in which the instructor can help students “learn how to learn,” with subsections on developing learning dispositions, understanding academic integrity, and preparing students to be effective group participants. The section on Engaging Students’ Learning provides information on active learning strategies, tips on how to conduct effective course discussions, and ideas for using technology in the classroom. The final section on Generating Assessment and Feedback asks instructors to expand their conceptions of assessment beyond summative assessments and includes

sections on helping students to reflect on their learning as well as self-assessment development for instructors.

The Teaching Central site is the product of research conducted by the CTL. In seeking to create an informative, useful, and user-friendly resource site for instructors at BGSU, CTL staff members combed through the online resources of hundreds of institutions. This research was done to gain insight into what other centers have been doing and how the CTL can improve our own online content. The resources available on the Teaching Central site include those developed by the CTL and the best online resources available at other centers. It is hoped that Teaching Central will be found to be a useful and valuable tool for instructors at BGSU. http://www.bgsu. edu/ctl/page115724.html

Fall 2012: Issue One

2 Did You Know?

New iPads Available for Teaching Projects The Center for Teaching and Learning is interested in promoting new innovative teaching practices. In support of this pursuit, the Center has acquired 10 new iPads (also called iPad 3s) to check out to any instructor who develops a teaching activity that utilizes a tablet.

If anyone is interested in additional support in developing an activity, the CTL has prepared several workshops to highlight the array of opportunities technology offers teaching and learning. Workshop titles include: Teaching with Tablets, Increasing Student Engagement Using the “Inverted Classroom,” and Using Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning. In addition to these workshops,

the Center is prepared to do individual consultations on a variety of iPad applications and their uses in the classroom.

The Center’s iPad checkout process has two steps. First, each applicant will articulate the lesson/project that requires the use of an iPad. Once the application is completed and reviewed, there is a brief orientation about the functions of the iPad. If you are interested in more information about iPads, or would like to apply to use one contact ctl@bgsu.edu or call 419-372-6898.

Learning Communities Galore The Center for Teaching and Learning will run 12 Learning Communities this year, on a wide variety of topics. Each community, ranging in size from eight members to a dozen or more, is comprised of faculty, graduate students, and staff members. Learning community proposals are submitted in the spring by individuals who have a topic or idea that they would like to study in a community with other educators. Once the proposals are selected, the Center puts out a call for membership applications throughout the summer. Facilitators choose their members from among the applicants and usually begin meeting in early September.

Four new communities have been established this year.

One, entitled Critical Thinking Pedagogy, facilitated by Dr. Paul Moore and Dr. Heath Diehl, proposes “to promote a style of pedagogy that engages the student in analysis and evaluation of knowledge and information.” Another, Innovative Teaching Group, facilitated by Dr. John Folkins, Dr. Karen Sirum, and Dr. Steve Cady, intends to engage its members “in the process of continual questioning of what they do in the classroom and improving their practice” as teachers. Members also expect to share their innovations with the wider BGSU community. A third new community, Exploring the Cyber Campus: Adventures in Online

Teaching, promises to explore “resources, techniques, and philosophies impacting our work in cyberspace.” Dr. Savilla Bannister is facilitating this community, which will meet both face-to-face and online. The Firelands community this year, Student Learning Communities: Research, Planning, and Implementation, facilitated by Tracy McGinley, will work to “establish student learning communities and assess their benefits for Firelands students.”

Back by popular demand are a number of communities that have been offered previously at the Center for Teaching and Learning. Often these communities change their emphasis from year to year to keep the subject and the membership fresh. Communities that are returning this year are Active Learning and the Transition to Digital, Applying Principles of Video Game Design to Improve Student Learning, Examining Wikipedia’s Place in Undergraduate Education, Pedagogy and Scholarship Using Mobile & Web Apps, Peer Review as Active Learning, Service-Learning, STEM Hi-Tech & Highly Engaging Learning Environments by Design, and Understanding Student Information–seeking Behavior to Enhance Student Learning.

Fall 2012: Issue One

3 Visionary Status: Daphne Koller Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. She has served as the Oswald Villard University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.

Koller completed her bachelor’s degree at 17 in her hometown and country, attending the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where she also stayed an additional year to complete her master’s degree. In 1993 Koller completed her Ph.D. at Stanford and joined the faculty there in 1995.

In her Stanford bio, Koller describes her research as “using probabilistic models and machine learning to understand complex domains that involve large amounts of uncertainty.

Within that topic, my work touches on many areas: representation, inference, learning, and decision making.

We like to be driven by real-world problems, and therefore a lot of my group’s work tackles various application domains.

Most recently, we have focused on problems in computer vision and in computational biology and medicine.”

In her area of expertise, Koller has more than 180-refereed publications and numerous awards to her credit. In April 2008, she was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences. In 2009, she published a textbook on probabilistic graphical models with Nir Friedman, an Israeli Professor of Computer Science and Biology, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Koeller offered a free online course on the subject starting in February 2012 through Coursera, a groundbreaking educational enterprise that allows thousands of students to take online courses for free. Koeller, one of the co-founders, is a third generation Ph.D. and daughter of two academics who recognized her privilege and set out to take the best courses from the best faculty and make them freely available to the global community. Coursera is an organization that offers massive online open courses (MOOCs), one of several, including Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and Udacity.

As of June 2012, Coursera was supporting 43 courses through 4 universities from a range of disciplines. Each

course has 100,000 people or more enrolled. Since the Coursera website opened in February 2012, they have accumulated 640,000 students in 190 countries with 1.5 million total enrollments, 6 million quizzes assessed, and over 14 million educational and instructional videos viewed.

The design of Coursera provides a unique break away from the one-size-fits-all model of teaching and allows for a distinct, personalized curriculum. Course segments are interactive, quizzes and tests are immediately graded, and Coursera tracks every aspect of these classes, so if numerous students struggle with specific elements, adjustments can be made to that aspect of the course work. The large online community also allows for extensive peer-to-peer interaction, encouraging peer reviews of course assignments.

Koller and her Coursera cofounder Andrew Ng have raised a challenge to the higher education community: can we teach so that the majority of our students achieve mastery of the subject? Clearly Koller and Ng believe that the design of Coursera courses can and does lead to mastery. In June 2012, Koeller delivered a TED talk, entitled “What We’re Learning from Online Education.” She recommends, “We should spend less time at universities filling out students’ minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity --- by actually talking with them.”

At the end of her TED talk, Koller tells us her vision: to establish education as a fundamental human right, to support true lifelong learning, and to allow for innovation from people who might not otherwise have been exposed to learning. The TED video and links to further information about Daphne Koller are below.

Stanford Faculty Page http://ai.stanford.edu/~koller/ TED http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_ re_learning_from_online_education.html Coursera https://www.coursera.org/about

Fall 2012: Issue One

4 Book Review Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, by José Bowen.

Although José Bowen’s new book, Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning (2012) sounds like the work of a 21st-century Luddite, it is anything but. Bowen, a Dean at Southern Methodist University, is an avid user and promoter of technology and social media as tools to engage students and extend learning outside the classroom and into all aspects of student life. Much of this book, in fact, is a compendium of terrific ideas for using technology to engage students and could stand on its own as just that.

For example, Bowen outlines numerous ways to employ social networking to prompt students to think about course content in more connected and contextualized ways. While he is aware of the potential for seeming intrusive (and provides several cautions that we would do well to heed), he encourages educators to connect with students where they are–to use email to clarify and amplify ideas discussed in class, to tweet brief items such as study questions or to apply concepts taught in class to current events as they are happening. He touts the advantages of using Facebook or LinkedIn for online discussions, virtual office hours, and conducting quick polls.

He recommends using Skype and other video conferencing tools to access guest speakers from other campuses or, indeed, across the globe, or to team teach with someone from another institution. He is interested in using principles of gaming design to challenge and motivate students and offers many ideas and resources to incorporate games into both learning and assessment. He encourages educators to “think technology” as they are planning courses and activities: “Does my phone offer some technology that I might use? Could I use my camera to take photos of rock formations, maintenance problems, or other material I might gather in the field? Could I record accents or airplane noise?

With GPS, could students test the accuracy of maps? What about sending students to a museum with an iPad so they could compare the experience with those at other museums using the Google Art Project virtual museum tours?”

There are so many good ideas for using technology in this book, in fact, that it almost comes as a surprise when, in his penultimate chapter, Bowen arrives at the central point alluded to in his title: “The primary benefit of technologymediated content delivery, communication, and assessment outside of class is the additional time it creates for more active and engaged learning with prepared students inside the classroom.” In essence, Bowen advocates a flipped classroom, in which most of the foundational knowledge and content delivery occurs outside of class through the use of 21st-century technology. Thus technology enables “teaching naked,” creating an active learning experience in which students “are discussing, doing, and cooperating,” and which, in turn, leads to significant learning.

“Naked pedagogy aligns the most critical aspects of learning with our most precious asset of nontechnological faculty–student face time with faculty in the classroom.”

Bowen devotes the rest of this chapter to outlining techniques for making the most of face time to teach those skills and behaviors that are most important in the modern world–the ability to think critically, to sort through vast amounts of information to determine what is valid and what is not, to engage, apply, evaluate.

In his final chapter, Bowen takes a “macro” view, looking at how the various challenges faced by universities and the various opportunities afforded by technological advances will shape the future. He notes that the recent game-changing upheavals in the music, book production, and journalism industries can serve as guides to the changes that higher education will have to make in order to stay alive and relevant.

To learn more about Bowen’s ideas, read excerpts from the book, or find out where Bowen will be speaking in the near future, check out his website at http://www. teachingnaked.com.

Fall 2012: Issue One

5

Hot 5

1)

Below are five “hot” links that can be found within the CTLs new website “Teaching Central.”

Carefully Planning Course Discussions http://www.uww.edu/learn/diversity/ classroomdiscussions.php

The University of Wisconsin Whitewater has designed a guide to planning course discussions intentionally. This resource offers some quick tips to enrich course discussions, and a multitude of methods to approach discussion. If your courses are discussion-based, this would be a great resource to visit.

2)

Instructional Design Models http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/itc/ idmodels.html

Dr. Martin Ryder of the University of Colorado at Denver has developed a website that lists thorough resources about many course design considerations. While the number of resources Ryder includes may seem daunting at first glance, they are well organized and detailed enough that the user is not easily lost. This resource is a great place to start for any instructor who is designing or redesigning a course.

3)

Reflection Toolkit http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/files/ legacy/filemanager/download/615/nwtoolkit.pdf

This guide includes rationale for reflection, and examples of how reflective activities can be integrated into learning opportunities.

4)

Solve a Teaching Problem http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/solveproblem/ index.html

5)

Survival Handbook for Large Classes http://teaching.uncc.edu/articles-books/best- practice-articles/large-classes/handbook-large- classes

Carnegie Mellon University has developed a software called “Solve A Teaching Problem” that allows users to identify challenges they are having in their courses, and the software helps brainstorm causes and potential strategies. The practical and quick response of this service makes it easy to use and a practical place to troubleshoot teaching problems.

The University of North Carolina, Charlotte, has compiled a list of resources to help troubleshoot teaching sections with large enrollments. This site does a nice job of addressing some of the unique challenges of teaching large groups of students such as attendance, active learning, and using technology.

Reflection is an important assessment and learning tool in the classroom. The Northwest Academy of Portland Oregon has created a brief guide to enhancing reflection.

Fall 2012: Issue One