Three Ways to Improve Undergraduate Teaching

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DBSK12

  1. Take the Time
  2. Teach Out Loud
  3. Turn the Tables

A few months ago I presented at the Innovations in Undergraduate Learning  summit – SFU Public Square – Simon Fraser University.

I was asked these two questions:

  1. What is the most compelling innovation in undergraduate learning that you have seen?
  2. What are three changes Canadian post-secondary institutions can make today to support undergraduate student-centered learning?

The three points above are what I ended up with. This is the explanation.

  1. Take the Time
    1. ID – do a decent job of instructional design.
    2. Don’t always take what you’ve done and rehash it.
      I’ve come across far too many courses that really haven’t changed much in over a decade. We’ve learned some things in that time, and while I’m not proposing change for change sake, do things the same way year after year makes you look lazy, not skilled.
  2. Teach Out Loud
    Always be prepared to answer these two questions:

    1. Why are we doing this?
    2. What is it good for?
      I’ve said this before. I’m not saying that everything we teach needs to be immediately applicable in a practical setting, but you need at least to be able to connect the dots for your students. You need to be able to explain how this helps the students, and how what they are learning fits in to the big picture. If you can’t, then maybe they don’t really need to learn it. If you won’t do this, then shame on you.
  3. Turn the Tables
    1. Faculty need to be students from time to time
      For PD, and to encourage reflection on teaching
      Remember what it is like – assignments, exams, ….
      I think everyone who teaches should have to TAKE a course, say, every 3 years. For faculty in higher ed, that means taking an undergraduate course – FOR MARKS – and the grade earned becomes part of your public record. Also, it must be a course outside of your immediate area of expertise. If you can’t do that, then may you shouldn’t be teaching.

 

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Innovations in Undergraduate Learning

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A few months ago I presented at the Innovations in Undergraduate Learning  summit – SFU Public Square – Simon Fraser University.

I was asked these two questions:

  1. What is the most compelling innovation in undergraduate learning that you have seen?
  2. What are three changes Canadian post-secondary institutions can make today to support undergraduate student-centered learning?

Here are my answers:

  1. What is the most compelling innovation in undergraduate learning that you have seen?
    Forgive the lack of humility, but at this point in time, I’d have to say my gamified approach.
  2. What are three changes Canadian post-secondary institutions can make today to support undergraduate student-centered learning?
    This was my initial answer:

    1. Lighten up on (or at least change your approach to) cheating.
    2. Recognize & reward good teaching.
    3. Quit giving high-stakes exams.
    4. Quit assuming all classes will have marks that fit a normal curve.
    5. Move to competency-based assessment.
    6. Give up on the lock-step notion of teaching & learning.
    7. Respect your students.

Each is important, but the answer isn’t very pithy, so I worked on it while I was at the conference. Stay tuned to see what I ended up with.

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Academic Integrity, do YOU have it, or do you just mouth the words?

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cockroachHow many people actually take the time to check the things they cite? Even worse, how many bother to check what they quote?

I’ve complained about this before.

When I want to cite some seminal bit of information, I usually try to find the primary source and actually find and READ the part I want to cite. I rarely read the whole piece, but I do at least try to verify that the thing I’m claiming this person said is something they actually said.

 

contradiction is a misfit within elements between them between different activities or between different developmental phases of a single activity Google SearchIf I want to quote something, then I try to find the actual source. Google is so wonderful for that – there really is no excuse not to these days (aside from laziness or a lack of integrity).

I’m working on a new book. (Choosing and Using Digital Games in the Classroom – A Practical Guide ) I’m working on chapter 2, which is an introduction to game-based learning. It’s been a real hard slog, as one of the sections is a review of learning theories that play (or should play) a key role in the design of game for learning (turns out very few people mention any learning theory when they talk about the game they designed, but that’s a tale for another post). I’ve had to go and find the original sources along with some contemporary research. It’s been like doing my candidacy all over again.

One of the theories is Activity Theory and there is mention of contradictions in one of the studies I looked at. I wanted to explain what that meant and since I no longer have the article I was talking about (I was using something I wrote some years ago) I did a search and came across this wonderful quote

“contradiction is a misfit within elements, between them, between different activities, or between different developmental phases of a single activity”

It’s perfect. But, since it’s a quote, I wanted to find the original source so I can quote that, rather than the paper that quoted it. You’d think it would be a simple matter of tracking down the citation, right? WRONG.

I did that, and, silly me, I searched for the first word in the quote: “misfit”. It wasn’t there. So, step 2: ask the Great Google to look for the entire quote, which I did. I found PILES of places that used this quote. The image right is just the first page of the search. The ones in yellow used the words, but didn’t indicate it was a quote. The ones in green at least put it in quotes and cited it. Of course, they cited a variety of sources. I didn’t bother to track them all down but I’m guessing the ones that aren’t the original are simply the first place they found.

SO, I go back to the original source. This time I look for the second word in the quote. Lo and behold I found this:

snap01803

IT’S A DIFFERENT WORD.

It came from here:

Kuutti, K. (1996). Activity theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research. Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction, 17-44.

This may not seem like a big deal. After all “unfit” and “misfit” are pretty close. Well, I think it IS a big deal. It indicates that the people who used the phrase (quoted or not) never bothered to look up the original source.

To be fair, a reasonable number of those who cited the quote used the right source, and even the right page number. I did find one paper that had the correct quote, but unfortunately, they didn’t bother to quote it, OR even to cite the source, AND if that’s not bad enough, they actually copied most of the paragraph without quotes or a citation. Now, all I found was the paper itself, which had a copyright notice from a very well known computer science conference, but when I went to look up the paper in the conference proceedings, I couldn’t find it. So, maybe this paper was never accepted (which is why I haven’t listed it here). One can hope.

Maybe this is why it always seems to take me longer to write something that it takes other people.

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Learning Designer

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Learning Designer

snap01191

This is definitely one to watch.

“The Learning Designer suite of tools enables teachers to share their good teaching ideas. It is intended to help a subject teacher see how a particular pedagogic approach can be migrated successfully across different topics. There are sample patterns to browse and edit, or you can design your own from scratch.

‘Browser’ offers a collection of pedagogical patterns, which you can redesign for your own teaching practice.

‘Designer’ presents the pedagogical pattern template to help you describe your own teaching idea for a session (e.g. student preparation, class activities and homework).”

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Houzz-it: A fine example of a South African Serious Game done right

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Houzz-it: A fine example of a South African Serious Game done right – htxt.africa

A conference on Serious Games would be incomplete without an example of a real-life Serious Game that has been done properly.

From the presentation I’ve just seen by Sea Monster’s Jade Mathieson, Houzz-it is that game: it’s a gamified simulation of what it’s like to buy and sell houses with the aim of becoming a property mogul.

It was commissioned by Property Junction with the specific aim of exposing people to some of the realities of buying and selling houses in such a way that it would encourage more people to get involved. But it also needed to give them a taste of the sort of processes and challenges they will encounter in the real world should they decide to go for it.”

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Skeptic » Insight » The Myth of Learning Styles

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Learning styles are such a popular myth. Many teachers treat it as fact in spite of the fact there is no real evidence to support it.

Skeptic » Insight » The Myth of Learning Styles.

When I was working on my PhD I even wrote several papers about learning styles and games. I don’t recall ever being told that there was no actual evidence to support these ideas. I probably would have still published them, but I’d like to think I’d have taken a somewhat different approach.

I did this one as I was just starting in my PhD program:

Katrin Becker (2003) A Multiple Intelligences Approach to Teaching Number Systems The Journal of Computing Science in Colleges Volume 19, Number 2, December 2003, pp 6-17 Consortium for Computing Science in Colleges Northwest Conference, October 3-4 2003, Ellensburg, Washington presentation

I did this one after my candidacy:

Katrin Becker (2005) Games and Learning Styles Presented at the Special Session on Computer Games for Learning and Teaching, at The IASTED International Conference on Education and Technology ~ICET 2005~ July 4-6, 2005 Calgary, Alberta, Canada ( presentation slides pdf)

At best, the instruments which purportedly measure learning styles really just measure studying preferences. What’s more, a growing body of psychological research on metacognition demonstrates that our beliefs about how we process information and how we learn can actually be quite wrong, with people predicting superior performance with instructional methods that ultimately produce inferior results. Therefore objectively-measured improvements in performance, rather than self-reported perceptions of effectiveness, are ideal.

An evidence-based approach is necessary to prevent wasteful spending on ineffective educational interventions. Learning styles theory, despite its continued popularity, has failed to produce sufficient evidence of being a valuable educational tool. By focusing on teaching to students’ strengths this approach misses an important opportunity to encourage students to work on developing their weaknesses as well. The learning styles approach also provides an excuse for poor performance to the detriment of students who will not recognize the need to make changes or seek help.

Huh.

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How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids From How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning | MindShift

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This is a big part of what I’ve done in my practical gamification approach. See more here.

How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids From How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning | MindShift.

“I felt I had to remove all the barriers I could on my end before I could ask my kids to meet me halfway,” Holman said. The first thing he did was move to standards-based grading. He told his students to show him they’d learned the material, it didn’t matter how long it took them.

“The kids realized this made sense,” Holman said. He taught physics and math at Anderson High School in Austin, before moving on to become a vice-principal. His students were mostly well-off, high achievers, and they knew how to play the game to get the grades they needed. But Holman found when he changed the grading policy, students worried about grades less and focused more on working together to understand the material.

“It turned my students into classmates and collaborators because I didn’t have a system in place to deny the collaboration,” Holman said. His students stopped copying homework. There was no curve that guaranteed some kids would be at the bottom. Instead, the class moved at its regular pace, but if a student persisted at a topic until they could show they understood it, Holman would give them credit. “It turned the kids on my side,” Holman said. “I was there to help them learn.”

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Kids should code: why ‘computational thinking’ needs to be taught in schools | Jim Chalmers and Tim Watts | Comment is free | theguardian.com

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Learning to code is about understanding the tools and devices that are all around us, so that we have control rather than the people who made those tools.

Kids should code: why ‘computational thinking’ needs to be taught in schools | Jim Chalmers and Tim Watts | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

But it’s more than being able to interact with the remarkable microcomputers in our everyday lives, it’s about having the knowhow and the confidence to look beyond the shiny applications and to the code beneath: about using technology to create from the ground up, not just consume.

More of our schools’ curricula should be devoted to this kind of knowledge. It’s not just student’s technical skills that benefit from this type of learning. The spillover is that students develop better ways to approach and think about problems, which is just as valuable as the technical skills themselves.

Jeanette Wing, vice president of Microsoft research and pioneer of computational thinking – the ability to break a problem down and express the solution in a form that a computer can understand and evaluate – sees it as a skill as important as reading, writing and arithmetic, and one that will be embraced by everyone by the middle of the 21st century.

This type of thinking will be embraced not only for its computer science applications, but because the abilities to abstract, compartmentalise and synthesise can be transferred to any domain.

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