Thoughts on Teaching Summer School – 7/17/2013
Yes. I know. I have not written in a while. You can blame the birth of our daughter and the first nine months or so of her life. Between teaching a full load, teaching an overload, taking care of the other three kids, and taking care of a baby, blogging has taken a back seat to the rest of life. Now that things are settled down some, and my teaching is done for the summer, I hope to get back on here a bit. We shall see how I do, but you have to start somewhere.
I just finished up my seventh summer of teaching full time (yes, I also taught some summer classes as a graduate student). I have taught online every summer session that I have taught, and this one went about the same as usual. Since our pay decrease two summers ago, I now have to teach three summer classes to make the amount of money that I want to make, so I taught three sections — two of the first half of American history and one of the second. I am not sure why my department chair assigns me both halves in the session, as it would be easier to do all of one, but I don’t have a lot of choice there.
While teaching in the summer, I had some general thoughts that I thought I would share.
The quality of students we get at a community college is dramatically higher in the summer. The majority of students are ones that are off at a 4-year university somewhere and have come back to get a few classes out of the way cheaply. Thus, the quality of work submitted is often much higher, and the ratio of A’s to the rest of my teaching is much higher. It reminds me a lot of my teaching in graduate school, where I was always fairly pleased with the quality of work submitted to me.
At the same time, we also get a lot of students who are taking summer classes who should not. I started out at the end of the spring semester with three full sections at 30 students each. By the time the summer session started, I was down by about 10 students, as we always lose some for academic suspensions or failure to pay. Then, in the first week, upon getting into the class and seeing the level of work required, I lost about 10-12 more students. Then, over the course of the summer session, I had more drop and/or stop attending. All together, I started out with 90 students at the end of the spring semester and ended up submitting about 55 real grades to students who worked on material all the way through the summer. This is fairly typical.
One of the requirements at my community college is that we hold physical office hours over the summer, even if we are teaching only online. The required number of on-campus office hours is fairly flexible, but some must be there, and I ended up holding 8 on campus each week. In the five weeks of the summer session, I saw three students in those office hours, and they all came on the day before the first exam opened. So, except for that day, it was a waste of both my time and gas to go to campus every day. I also held online office hours in the evening for students who could not make the on-campus hours. In the five weeks, I had no students in my online office hours. So, traditional office hours were largely a waste. However, I answered emails all day every day, participated in online discussions, responded to student posts with questions in the classroom, answered messages in our LMS system, graded, evaluated, read drafts, worked on course material, and more. Yet, if you count my output on what I did during my “official” time in office hours, it would look like I did very little. This is the conflict that we run into with teaching online, that the actual productive activities are not easily quantifiable or restricted to traditional avenues. In our culture that wants to quantify everything, it can easily look like I don’t do much, yet, if you ask my wife, I never stop working. I am busy in the class every day from when I get up until when I go to bed.
As usual, 20% of my students say they loved the class, 1-2 students said they hated it, and the rest are never heard from. It is frustrating sometimes, as I can only assume I am doing good as most of what I hear is positive. Yet, all it takes is that one students to write how much (s)he hated the course to drag down the rest. That is the comment I obsess over and worry about. I know I shouldn’t when that person is outnumbered by far by the rest. The one this summer session hit me harder than usual, as she said that I came off as rude and unwelcome in my Announcements to my students. Thus, now she has me paranoid that this is how I came off, and that is why I don’t hear from the other students. The so-called rude Announcement that I made was that the students should read the syllabus and Announcements before contacting me, as I get irritated when I have to copy and paste the answer back to them from something I have already said. I didn’t think that was an unreasonable thing to say, and I have sent an Announcement out along that line most semesters that I have taught. Sigh. It only takes one comment to get under your skin.
And, finally, the good thing about my course now is that I have it all pretty well set up. So, it largely runs itself, which allows me more time to actually participate in the classroom rather than spending my time creating and maintaining. It was a generally pleasant experience overall.
And, with that, I’m out for now. I just hit 1000 words, which is pretty good for the first time out in a while. I promise to try and write more.
Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin – 9/4/2012
One of the things I am doing this semester with my hybrid class is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is going to be something new for my community college students. I have assigned some outside reading before, but I have not asked my community college students to read an entire book outside of their textbook before. This has been, unfortunately, one of the things that has gotten lost as I have moved from teaching at a university to teaching at a community college. I regret that, but it was one of the things that I was told I would not be able to do with community college students. So, this is something new.
I am having the students read it in a different way. We are using the Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture site for the reading and work this semester. Instead of having the students just buy the whole book and read it, I am having them read it through the site. This has the advantage of being free, which is important. As well, I am having them read the novel as it originally appeared, as a newspaper serial. The breakdown is on the site as a weekly reading, set up in a way that makes it easy for me to assign pieces as we go along. I am not holding the students responsible for reading it weekly, as it is assigned, as I am really only concerned in the end that they do the actual reading. However, the bargain for them is that I will be reading it with them. And, every week, I will start the class by being available to answer any questions about the reading. So, if they read it on schedule, they get help. If they do not, they don’t. Very simple.
Ultimately, we are going to have a larger project to go along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I will write more about that here as we get to that point. In other words, the assignment is still under development. More later on that as well.
Thoughts on Teaching – 6/10/2012 – Teaching summer school
Well, that time is here again. Time for teaching summer school again. We always need the extra money, so I teach every summer. I teach online, as that is easier with my own schedule as well as easy to step in with prepared classes. Also, as I am the primary online history instructor at my community college, there is always a high demand for my classes in the summer. So, I never have to worry about my classes making. It’s a good thing all the way around.
The summer is always weird. Squeezing what the students normally do in a 16-week semester in 5 weeks is quite a challenge for them. They have a lot to do each week, and I don’t think that a lot of students realize what that means. We always get students who are taking vacations in the middle of the summer session or who wait a week before entering the course, leaving them tremendously behind. I think that students assume that an online summer course is going to be easy. The general perception of online courses, I have found, is that they are easy (not mine, unfortunately for them). As well, many assume that it will be easy to complete a course in 5 weeks because it takes up less time. The time demand is high, and you cannot put your work off until the last minute because there is a lot of it.
Summer school also attracts an odd mix of students. Here are some of the types I have noted:
- Students who want to finish their degree early and so are doubling up in the summer
- Students who go to a four-year university and are home for the summer and taking a class or two for cheap
- Students who have failed the class in the normal semester and are hoping for better results in the summer
- Students who have never taken either an online course or a college course and decide that this is the best way to do it
It’s the last group that is the biggest pain for me. It’s always a good 10-15% of the students. I don’t know if someone advised them to do it, or if they simply decided on their own that their first college course should be an online summer class, but it is almost universally a bad idea. Either online courses or summer courses by themselves are more challenging then many semester-long, face-to-face classes, but to do both as your first experience is brutal. I spend an inordinate amount of my time in the summer dealing with these students.
On the other side, the first two groups tend to be some of the most motivated and strongest students that I will see in an academic year, so the summer also has its good side, as these students can restore your faith in students. Teaching can be depressing, especially when a semester goes poorly, and the summer session can sometimes be rejuvenating because you do get some of the best students there.
As of right now, we are just finishing up the first week of the summer session, so four more weeks are left. The first set of assignments come in tonight at midnight, so I will be able to start sizing up the students at this point. And, as it is an online class, I again have online office hours. I have them Wednesday and Sunday nights, and, so far, one student has come by to ask a question. That makes it already one more student than came to my online office hours all of last semester, so there’s something.
I don’t know how active I will be posting on this blog this summer, but you will probably be hearing from me on Wednesday and Sunday nights at least, as I have to sit here at the computer for two hours anyway.
Thoughts on Education – 6/6/2012 – Studying in college
I wonder about this all the time. How much work do students really do in a class? I don’t know if my own memories are clouded by the distance, but I certainly remember working a lot in college. Admittedly, I went to an upper-tier private school, but still, I worked on my classes every day of the week. The only day that I took off completely throughout almost all of my college experience was Friday. I only worked a few Fridays over the four years I did my undergraduate work. All other days were fair game, and I usually did school work on all other days. Now, I did not study all the time by any means, and I did plenty of other things as well, but I just remember doing almost all of the assigned readings, working on assignments before they were due, and just generally being engaged throughout the school year as a full-time student. Of course, I did have the luxury of being a full-time student, working only enough to earn some extra spending money, so that did affect what I did.
At my community college now, things could not be more different. We struggle to get the students to do any work, and certainly do not expect the students to work on anything any earlier than absolutely necessary. Of course, it is a community college, and the students here are largely not that strong academically and often work in addition to going to school. Still, it is disappointing and difficult to try and teach students like this. I’m certainly not trying to romanticize my own background, but I think I was a pretty good and pretty diligent student overall. I had good semesters and bad semesters, good classes and bad classes, but I consistently did my work, paid attention to assignments, and was mostly engaged in my classes.
I’m certainly not the only one who has noted this. You just have to talk with any of my fellow instructors, or really instructors in general, and we all feel like the students aren’t doing enough. It is easy to dismiss this, as it is the same type of thing that teachers have been saying about students for a long time. I’m sure my own professors groaned about me and my fellow students as well. So, I don’t know if I’m really bringing up anything new, but I have come across a couple of articles on the subject as well.
This Washington Post article is interesting, just from the perspective that it takes. According to the article, the average student today studies around 15 hours a week, whereas in the 1960s, the total was 24. Even at the “better” universities, apparently the average is only up around 18 hours a week. The article then notes the 5 top reporting schools, each of which exceed this average. Most are small, isolate, private liberal-arts schools, with the University of Wisconsin being the only exception. I have to wonder, however, what the average is at my community college, as I’m assuming that community colleges were not included in these numbers, although I could be wrong.
Also in the Washington Post, is this article, asking the question, “Is college too easy?” It takes these same statistics and turns it around. Is the problem that the students aren’t working hard enough or is it that we instructors aren’t asking enough of them. The data they have shows that the average student in the 1960s worked roughly 40 hours a week in college, while the average today is 27 hours a week. That brings about the chicken-and-egg conundrum. Are we asking less of students because we expect less of them or are students doing less because we ask less of them. Or is it really a symbiotic relationship all the way around that has led to this decline? I don’t really know. I have taught for around 10 years now, and I can see the creep toward asking less and less. This is especially true in an era of tight budgets and increased class sizes, since asking more of students means more work for me with no more (and sometimes less) compensation. So, I wonder where to look to think about this problem. Even my own wife has said to me that she remembers working harder in high school (over a decade ago) than in the bachelor’s degree program she just finished.
I don’t know what to think about it, so I’m just raising questions here. What do you think?
Thoughts on Teaching – 5/19/2012 – Revisiting office hours
Interestingly enough, I came across a recent article on a subject that I have written about before. I have debated the usefulness of online office hours here before, and a recent article in Inside Higher Ed raised the question again. Apparently, San Antonio College is considering going to online office hours because students just don’t go to regular office hours. As noted, professors these days are more likely to contact a student over email or something like that rather than them showing up to traditional office hours in an academic office. In this case, the professors still have to keep five day office hours on campus, but they are allowed to have five of their office hours off campus. However, my earlier issues are still there. I wonder about the actual office hours either way. If students don’t come to traditional office hours and they don’t come to online office hours, then what use are office hours in general?
I completely understand why we are supposed to have them. We are meant to be available. We are meant to be working. If we are not there physically, then we are not working in the traditional sense of the word. We have a board member at my community college who is already convinced that we do not work enough. According to him, our contract is only for 15 hours of teaching and 10 hours of office hours, so we are overpaid and overworked. If we were to move to even less “on campus” time, then the argument would be even stronger that we do not really work.
On the other side of things, there is the question of whether the office hours that we do have are useful at all. What is the use of simply sitting in the office. Am I filling a purpose sitting there? Am I fulfilling a purpose by sitting in online office hours that nobody attends. Or, as the article raises as the real question, is the real interaction that we do with students not in something easily classified as an “office hour?” Where are the real interactions with students? Here’s what I do with students:
- talk with them before and after class
- answer emails within 4-6 hours of receiving them, if not sooner
- participate in class sessions both online and in person
- consider myself on as a teacher from the time I get out of bed to when I go to bed
What do you classify all of those things as? They all take place outside of traditional office hours, except the that I do answer some of the emails and participate in online classes during what are my on-campus office hours. Yet, for the most part, the time sitting there is simply time for me to get things done. However, is doing those things on campus useful? Could I be just as useful doing them somewhere else? But if I’m not on campus, am I not fulfilling my duty as a teacher to be available whenever my students need me? If I’m not on campus, what about those 6-10 students who do come by my office during the semester for help? Or, if I was available in other ways, would those students not come by? What about the non-tech-savvy students? What about the students who want face-to-face interaction? Is it enough for me to be available before and after class? Or do I need to be there for them?
There’s also the question I did raise in my earlier post about the online office hours. I had only one person come to them all semester. Apparently they are not useful as I have them right now either.
So, what is the solution? I don’t know. Any ideas out there?
Thoughts on Teaching – 05/16/2012 – Wrapping up the semester
I know I’m a bit late here, as I finished up the semester almost a week ago now, but things have not slowed down since. Now that we have time to work on our new house, we’ve been doing that every day. As well, my wife graduated with her BA over last weekend, so we had celebrations for her graduation. Also, Diablo III came out yesterday, and that is eating up my free time as well. So, summary of all of that is, it’s been busy.
However, I did want to wrap up the semester here. It was a pretty good semester overall. I tried out some new material, writing a new lecture and piloting some new assignments in my classes. Both my new in-class activities and the chapter quiz activities that I was using were quite successful and will be part of my core redesign next semester in my classes. The base class went well also, with few major problems. There were a few instances of cheating to deal with, and I didn’t devote as much time to the class in the second half of the semester because of our house hunting. Overall, it was at least a typical semester. I crunched some of the numbers from the semester, and it was about as bad as normal in the raw numbers. That’s the way with community colleges, we have a high non-success (a D, F, or withdrawal) rate. My overall non-success rate for the semester was 44%. So, 44% of the students who started the semester finished with a grade of D, F, or W. As I said, it is sad, but that is typical. We have a large portion of the population who is on the edge of whether they should be in college or not. For a lot of them, they are trying their best, but they really can’t deal with the level of work required for a college education. For others, they don’t really want to be there. They are in college because it seems like the right thing to do, or they have been pressured in by their family, or they just don’t have anything else to do. A lot of those don’t make it very far. Another group fall victim to the too-many-obligations curse. They are a full-time student, work full time, have family to take care of, and so forth. School starts out as a priority but fades over the semester. Even worse are those who are teetering on the edge of being able to do school and then have something bad happen – with a job, family, health, or something else. All of those things contribute to the high non-success rate. In fact, in my class, if you show up and do all the work, you are probably going to get a C or better, so almost all of those who are not successful are that way because of the reasons above. It makes it hard to fix from my end, because there is little that I can do in my class to make it better for those students.
Anyway, as I said, I just wanted to wrap up the semester here. I’ll have more substantial posts later, but this will tide everyone over, I hope.
Thoughts on Education – 4/29/2012 – Technology in the classroom – iPads and more
I have been saving up quite a few articles over my inactive time the last month or so, and today I want to turn to a couple that address technology in the classroom. Technology is often presented as the cure-all for education, and I will admit as much guilt as far as this goes as anyone else. I am always out looking for the new piece of technology (although often I can’t afford it), and I will often then sit down and think about how I could use it in the classroom. Unfortunately, a lot of what I would like to do with technology, namely engage the students more directly, would be difficult without all of the students having the same access to the same technology. This can be fixed through things like classroom sets of technology instruments, but that is an inelegant solution at best.
We have done several of those things at my community college in the past and present. A couple of years ago, we acquired a couple of sets of clickers, when that was seen as the latest tool for attracting student interest. We also had a push for getting online classes to think about using Second Life for a short period of time. Both of those technologies seemed limited and untried at the time, and I never found any interest in adopting them. Neither went far at the college, although I do think we have a couple of people still using clickers, and we do teach some of our gaming in Second Life. The question of the day on this topic is, of course, iPads. They are the latest thing, and I am part of a faculty workgroup that has gotten iPads as a test piece for our own educational use as well as overseeing the deployment and use of classroom sets of iPads. The question will be if this is another short-spike-of-interest device or if it has a long shelf life in education.
The latter option is reflected in this article, titled “How the iPad is Changing Education.” Although the article is more speculative than directly tied to evidence (probably because of the short time these devices have been really available), the article does point to some increase in learning and success among students using iPads. Of more interest is this point: “In the meantime, the devices make a great tool for self-directed, independent learning. There’s no shortage of one-off educational apps on any given subject, from American History to advanced biology.” Of course, this requires engaged students, and use outside of a classroom set (or time set aside in class to use the iPads for this purpose). Still, that is certainly what I have found as I have looked around for possible apps for use in the classroom myself. I can find dozens of whiteboard and projection apps, but the actual learning apps for the classroom are scarce. However, from teaching American history, I can certainly vouch for the number of American history apps out there, most of them informative and of very uneven quality. Few have much in the way of classroom application, although I have found a few. So, the iPad, as it stands right now is much more an information-retreival device than an active-use device in the classroom. As the article notes at the end, the real strength of the iPad for classroom use comes in the ability to make your own books and access iTunes U. As those areas develop more, there might be some possible in-class uses for them, but they still remain mostly passive presenters of information. I’ll be curious when the first truly in-class, adaptive, learning app comes along. Has anyone found one yet?
As this article notes, the issue is also not just what you can access through a device like the iPad, but also how the iPad is used. If it is used, as I noted above, as a substitute textbook, then that’s all it is. The students will ignore it just as they ignore the current textbooks today. This is my greatest fear of our adoption, that we will not find enough content out there and not have enough time ourselves to develop new, and the iPads will end as just a fancy way to access content, leaving it relatively unnecessary. It will then be a neat trick, and not much more. This article comes back to the whiteboard idea again. We will have a new academic building where our iPads are going to key into Apple TVs in the room and hopefully be able to interact with smart boards. I might get more use out of the iPad as a teaching tool, and whiteboarding might be a good way to get students working with each other. We shall see.
However, without the new building, I have been struggling to figure out how to use this new technology in the classroom. That’s why this title caught my attention – “Five Ways to Bring High-Tech Ideas into Low-Tech Classrooms” These ideas are interesting enough to detail a bit here:
- Put the Facebook page on paper – Start up something that the students can use as a reading log or something like that. Basically, it’s a way to create a live blog of material going on in the classroom and outside. The students can see each other’s blogs and like them. Status updates, posting of pictures, linking, etc. can all take place. This is the most promising use of the iPad in the classroom that I have come across, as a platform to extend what is going on outside of class into the classroom as well.
- Build a classroom search engine – less interesting to me because I tried this before. I started using wikis to create a classroom definition bank starting about 4 years ago. I never was able to use it with any real success, but it might be useful someday for something like this.
- Tweet to Learn – OK. I don’t use Twitter. I probably should, but I don’t. Why should I? You tell me how it could be useful in a classroom situation.
- Encourage students to “chat” – an in-class chatroom is something I’ve been toying with for a while. Maybe this coming semester, as part of my broader changes.
- Talk the Text Talk – OK. No. Not going to do this, especially not in college
Anyway, I thought those ideas were interesting enough as part of what we could all be doing more of. I’m also getting a bit more desperate about how I’m going to use the iPads in the classroom. The college has spent quite a bit of money to get me one and have several classroom sets. I’m just afraid I don’t know what to do with them, and so I’m trying to think about it more and more.
As a side note, I start the final grading push for the semester tomorrow, so I may not be very regular here for a while. We close on our house this Friday as well, so that will also bring a whole new set of obligations.
Thoughts on Education – 04/28/2012 – Mentoring college students
I went up to campus yesterday on my day off to a meeting centered around a new push to mentor our students. I have been on our college’s retention committee for two years now, and we are starting to see some of our ideas floating up through the bureaucracy of the college and becoming an actual part of what we do. Some of the changes so far have been with regard to easing registration, requiring students to visit their instructors to get drop slips signed, introducing a small set of students to a “how to do college” class, and so forth. The faculty side of things has largely been left out of the changes so far, but one of the things that I have been pushing for is starting to come into existence. I believe that students should have actual faculty advisors that they talk to, not for setting up schedules, but for more general college advice and help making it through the college process. Thus, we now have the beginning of a mentoring program. It will be slowly launched in a pilot program this fall, and the meeting yesterday was the first in a series of meetings to gain interest and see who would be willing to use their time for this.
The program itself, from what I understand, will be aimed fairly narrowly at first. We will be advising first-time-in-college, first-semester, full-time students. Out of our 5000 or so students, that means about 3-400 students that we will be directly mentoring in this first batch. I fully applaud this idea. I would love to see it expanded soon, but I know that it has to start somewhere. As the program sits now, we will be given 5-10 of these students to mentor, with the expectation that we will try to meet with them around three times a semester, serving as a person they can talk to about college, get advice from, and use as a sounding board. These are students who need all the help they can get, but, honestly, there’s probably not a single student on campus who could not use some set of advice.
This was echoed in this article from the Chronicle recently. In it, community colleges are admonished to stop blaming others for the problems of students not succeeding and doing what they can internally to improve this. I think the retention work we have been doing, and this mentoring program as a part of it, is a good step along the way toward creating better chances for success among our students. As well, the second point from the article is also part of this. She says that colleges, especially community colleges, need to be better at guiding students through the process. Right now, our students, without a serious amount of advice outside of preparing schedules each semester, blunder forward until they have reached enough credits to do something with them. For many, the idea of a degree plan, a goal outside of taking their “basics,” or even what it takes to graduate, is something that only the most academically involved and prepared students have. A mentoring program can help focus the students in on their plans and help with general academic planning throughout their career. If we can get them in, out, and done, we will be succeeding. The longer they take, the more likely they are to not succeed. As well, the less focused they are, the less likely they are to reach a satisfactory conclusion to their academic career. Hopefully this mentoring program can get them going with that.
Programs like this are also an answer to the question of how we measure student progress. Right now, we are in this wave of measuring, one that looks at the progress that students make academically as they proceed through college. This article from The New York Times illustrates that, discussing the need for something that can measure progress and pointing out the different ways this is currently done. I think an equally valid measure is what success the students have in reaching their goals, regardless of specific success in a specific course. With a mentoring and advising program, that can be helped, as we can work with students who are often lacking in a real idea of what they want to do. This group we will be dealing with is especially unconnected to the traditional measures of success and progress, as they have no family experience to fall back on as to what they should be doing in college. What they know is that they are supposed to go to college to get something (often undefined) and that by taking classes they will somehow get there. I know we are not the first place to ever put in place an advising program, and I know that success with the program will depend on both instructor and student participation. However, if we can even point half of these students in a more productive direction, then we will have success. If they can come out with a better idea of what they need to be doing, what classes will get them there, and what they can do with the classes/degree afterwards, then we will have helped them along the way.
Thoughts on Teaching – 3/17/2012 – Writing a new lecture
I did something new today. I didn’t finish it, but I did get it started. I started writing a new lecture. That might not seem like that big of a deal, but it is when you are stuck in the academic rut that teaching at a community college can get you in. At my community college, I am only allowed to teach the two halves of the American history survey. That means that it is easy to simply rely on the same lectures over and over and never fundamentally change anything as far as what you teach. It is just the same two classes over and over, and it is an easy rut to fall into.
This semester, as I was looking at my schedule for classes this semester, and I came up one day short with all that I wanted to do. So, I decided it was time to write a new lecture. I have been relying on the lectures that I wrote in graduate school, over six years ago. I have altered them some and moved things around, but I have not fundamentally changed anything about them in all that time. My own lectures have ended in 1992 since the point, as that was appropriate when I first developed the lectures for the second half survey. With the new space that I had this semester, I decided it was time to extend the class. So, I am now going to go until the September 11th attacks.
That means that I wrote a lecture today that covers basically 1992-2001. It was weird to write that lecture, that’s for sure, as I lived through that period, even more than the 1980s material. I was a fully functioning and politically aware person through all of that time, and so I saw the things first-hand.
It was also weird to sit down and write a lecture, as I have not really done that in a long time. I had to think some just about organization and what I wanted to cover, in a way that I have not had to in a while. Right now, the lecture is running quite long, but I’m taking the approach of putting everything down that I can think to talk about in a class. Then, I can go back in and shorten, clarify, and focus the lecture. I want to make sure that it has a good thematic focus and a strong base of evidence, just what I ask of my students in their own writing.
The next step after I finish writing and editing the lecture will be to do the other things that are involved. I will then have to put together the PowerPoint associated with it and record the audio podcasts that accompany the lecture. All of this will be in preparation for the debut of the new lecture next week.
The ironic thing about all of this work is that I’m about to abandon the lecture format, so this might be something that doesn’t even get used that much. But I still want this to be a good one, even if the students don’t appreciate it.
Thoughts on Education – 3/28/2012 – Thinking about the future of education
I haven’t done any article reviews in a while, so I thought I’d sit down and hit my Evernote box a bit here. So, here we go.
The first article comes from the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. As with so many others, the intent here is to look at way the future of the university system will be, and while I teach at a community college, and not a university, the ideas are still relevant. I also, of course, like the origin of this one, since it came out of a conference at my alma mater, Rice University. It starts off this way: “I sometimes hear that the classroom of today looks and functions much like the classroom of the 19th century—desks lined up in neat rows, facing the central authority of the teacher and a chalkboard (or, for a contemporary twist, a whiteboard or screen.) Is this model, born of the industrial age, the best way to meet the educational challenges of the future? What do we see as the college classroom of the future: a studio? a reconfigurable space with flexible seating and no center stage? virtual collaborative spaces, with learners connected via their own devices?” Certainly, my classrooms are set up that way, even my “other” classroom, the two-way video one, still has all of the emphasis on me. The article also noted: “With declining state support, tuition costs are rising, placing a college education further out of reach for many people. Amy Gutmann presented figures showing that wealthy students are vastly over-represented at elite institutions even when controlling for qualifications. According to Rawlings, higher education is now perceived as a “private interest” rather than a public good. With mounting economic pressures, the public views the purpose of college as career preparation rather than as shaping educated citizens. In addition, studies such as Academically Adrift have raised concerns that students don’t learn much in college.” I have posted up articles that talk about both of those things before, but this information from this conference really narrows it all down well. At its heart, what the article notes from the conference is that it is time to update the model to the Digital Age from our older Industrial Age. That we have adopted the multiple-choice exam and the emphasis on paying attention in class from this old Industrial model, where creating a standardized and regulated labor force was key. In the Digital Age, it will be important to “ensure that kids know how to code (and thus understand how technical systems work), enable students to take control of their own learning (such as by helping to design the syllabus and to lead the class), and devise more nuanced, flexible, peer-driven assessments.” Throughout the conference, apparently, the emphasis was on “hacking” education, overturning our assumptions, and trying something new. While the solutions are general in nature, I found this summary of the conference to be right up my alley, and certainly a part of my own thinking as I redesign. I wish I had known about the conference, as I would have loved to have attended.
Looking at the question from the opposite end is this article from The Choice blog at The New York Times. The blog post was in response to the UnCollege movement, that says that college is not a place where real learning occurs and that students would be better off not going to college and just going out and pursuing their own dreams and desires without the burden of a college education. What is presented here is some of the responses to that idea. A number of people wrote in talking about what the value of college is, so this gives some good baseline information on what college is seen as valuable for. Here are some of them:
- “a college degree is economically valuable”
- “college is a fertile environment for developing critical reasoning skills”
- several noted that you can get a self-directed, practical college education if you want it
- “opting out is generally not realistic or responsible, given the market value of a degree”
- “the true value of college is ineffable and ‘deeply personal,’ not fully measurable in quantifiable ways like test scores and salaries”
That’s just some of the responses, specifically the positive ones, as that’s what I’m looking at here. It is interesting to see the mix of practical things and more esoteric ideas. I think that both are hopefully a part of college education and that both are part of what we deliver. I would like to think that’s what my students are getting out of college in general, and I hope that the redesign that I am going for will help foster that even more. I especially hope to bring more of the second and fifth comments into what I am doing, as that is the side that I think a college history class can help with.
Then there is this rather disturbing article, again from The Chronicle of Higher Ed. It discusses the rising push for more and more online courses, especially at the community college level. As the article notes, that is often at the center of the debate over how to grant a higher level of access to the education experience for more and more people. But, with more emphasis being put on the graduation or completion end and less on the how many are enrolled end, this could end up putting community colleges at an even higher disadvantage. As one recent study put it, “‘Regardless of their initial level of preparation … students were more likely to fail or withdraw from online courses than from face-to-face courses. In addition, students who took online coursework in early semesters were slightly less likely to return to school in subsequent semesters, and students who took a higher proportion of credits online were slightly less likely to attain an educational award or transfer to a four-year institution.'” So, we are actually putting our students into more online classes that make them less likely to finish overall. In fact, they are not only less likely to finish, but they are less likely to succeed at that specific class or come back for later classes. As well, a different study pointed out similar problems for online students: “‘While advocates argue that online learning is a promising means to increase access to college and to improve student progression through higher-education programs, the Department of Education report does not present evidence that fully online delivery produces superior learning outcomes for typical college courses, particularly among low-income and academically underprepared students. Indeed some evidence beyond the meta-analysis suggests that, without additional supports, online learning may even undercut progression among low-income and academically underprepared students.'” This is disturbing to me, as this is exactly what I teach at least half of my schedule each semester in – the online environment exclusively. I know that success in an online class is difficult, although I have actually been slowly improving the success rate over time in my online sections. I think I’ve finally hit a good sweet spot with the online classes right now, and I’m less in need of fixing them at the moment. I do, however, agree with the very end of the article that says that what is often missing from the online courses is the “personal touch.” That is the only part of the class that I would like to change, as I need a way for me to be more active in the class right now. I can direct from the point of putting in Announcements and the like, but I do feel that I get lost in whatever the day to day activities are. I need to design some part of the class that has me participating more directly rather than leaving it up to the students. Otherwise, I do think I’m doing pretty well in this part of my teaching career.
OK. I think I’m going to call it a night here. Any reactions?
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 