Changing Perspective: Using Student Voices to Advance Learning Technology

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At today’s Friday Focus on e-Learning, we took a moment to reflect on the 2012 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology. This is a replay of a Feb. 2012 session from the EDUCAUSE Learning Institute (ELI) conference, of which UTHSC was a virtual participant.

Since 2004, ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually about technology in higher education. In 2012, ECAR collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences. The findings are distilled into the broad thematic message for institutions and educators to balance strategic innovation with solid delivery of basic institutional services and pedagogical practices and to know students well enough to understand which innovations they value the most.

Access a wealth of information about the 2012 and prior years’ ECAR Study reports here.

Various bits & pieces:

  • 74% of students say they’ve taken a course with one or more online components
  • 16% of students say they skip classes when course lectures are available online
  • 54% of students say they are more actively involved in courses that use technology
  • 55% of students say they wish their instructors used more simulations/educational games
  • 57% of students wish instructors would use more online open educational resources
  • 86% of students own laptops
  • 62% of students own smartphones
  • 33% of students own desktops
  • 15% of students own tablets
  • 12% of students own e-Readers

Important to do from a mobile device:

  • 66% access course website or syllabi
  • 64% using course or learning management systems

Platforms students are using:

  • 77% laptops; 20% macs
  • 44% iphone, 46% Android
  • 57% iPad

75% of students say that technology helps them achieve their academic outcomes

importance of various devices to academic success (the top 3):

  • laptop 85%
  • printer 84%
  • thumb drive 68%

Percentage of students who use the resources now as compared to 2010:

  • 7x as many students using e-portfolios
  • 5x as many students use web-based citation/bib tools
  • 3x as many students used e-books

Technology literacy isn’t innate

  • 66% of students surveyed in the US say they agree/strongly agree they’re prepared to use technology upon entering college/university
  • 64% say it’s very/extremely important to be trained
  • most students say that they get info from instructors on how to use technology

57% of students say they like to keep academic and social lives separate

53% of students say to use F2F interaction more

Key Findings for 2012

See the report for a full list key messages, findings, and supporting data.

  • Blended-learning environments are the norm; students say that these environments best support how they learn and best engage them.
  • Students want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices, and institutions deliver.
  • Technology training and skill development for students is more important than new, more, or “better” technology.
  • Students use social networks for interacting with friends more than for academic communication.

ECAR Recommends these Actionable Results

See the 2012 report for a full list of actionable results.

  • Look to emerging or established leaders (other institutions, other countries, other industries) for strategies to deliver instruction and curricular content to tablets and smartphones. Learn from their exemplary strategies for IT support and security with student devices as well as planning, funding, deploying, and managing instructional technologies, services, and support.
  • Prioritize the development of mobile-friendly resources and activities that students say are important: access to course websites and syllabi, course and learning management systems, and academic progress reports (i.e., grades).
  • Bridge the gap between the technologies that have seen the greatest growth (e-portfolios, e-books/e-textbooks, and web-based citation/bibliographic tools) and students’ attitudes about their importance. Focus training/skill-building opportunities for students, professional development opportunities for faculty, and support service opportunities on these emerging technologies.
  • Use e-mail and the course and learning management system for formal communication with students. Experiment with text messaging and instant messaging/online chatting, and don’t focus efforts on using social networks and telephone conversations to interact with students.

Next Generation Learning: What is it? And will it work?

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Today’s Friday Focus on e-Learning is a replay of the 2013 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) session from 2/5/13. Dr. Barbara Means, Director of the Center for Technology in Learning @ SRI, an educational psychologist, is the presenter.

What is NGL?

  • NGL better prepares students for a world that values and rewards deeper learning, collaboration, skilled communication, self-management, the ability to work across disciplines, and innovation practices.
  • NGL meets each student where s/he is and provides content, pedagogy, & access opportunities to meet individual needs.
  • NGL capitalizes on affordance of technology for learning.
  • NGL collects detailed data about the process of learning that can be used to diagnose student needs, and provide feedback to the instructional developer.

Challenge areas:

  1. Deeper learning – richly interactive technologies that increase student engagement and learning of conceptual content and 21st century skills. Example: U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s U-Pace – self-paced intro psych course; mastery based, shorter modules & end of module quizzes; timely & tailored feedback.
  2. Blended learning – combinations of online and teacher-led instruction to improve learning, increase completion, and lower costs. Example: Cal State U Northridge – redesigned gateway math course as hybrid alternative to conventional college algebra.
  3. Open Core Courseware – high-quality, modular, openly licensed course-ware for developmental, gateway, & high-enrollment core courses. Example: Cerritos College’s Project Kaleidoscope – 12 different OER courses implemented on 9 campuses.
  4. Learning Analytics – software for collection, analysis, & real-time use of learning data by students, instructors, & advisors to improve student success. Example: Marist College’s Open Academic Analytics Initiative.

What was learned:

  • Most Wave 1 innovations didn’t really have evidence of effectiveness before the grants began.
  • Many technology components weren’t completely developed before the grants started.
  • The most commonly reported difficulties were technology problems followed by student resistance. Students often didn’t have comfort being in charge of their learning.

Broader implications of the data:

  • There are campus impediments to a fast start.
  • Many faculty volunteer to try out new learning technologies and they typically respond more positively to innovations.
  • There are few online and blended learning initiatives set up to collect rigorous evidence of the innovation’s impact on students.

Barriers to collecting rigorous evidence:

  • Campus policies or IRBs may prohibit assigning students to courses with significant online components at random.
  • Some campus research offices weren’t willing to release student-level data.
  • Different instructors often don’t want to administer the same assessment.
  • Valid, reliable assessments weren’t readily available for many of the projects’ learning objectives.

U-Pace project Outcomes:

  • compared 230 students in U-Pace psychology to 334 students in conventional psychology course
  • positive effects on % of students earning an A or B (ES = +.96) and course completion (ES = +.35)

Cal State Univ Northridge outcomes:

  • compared 4,479 who took the hybrid course to 1,825 students from past courses
  • again, large positive effect sizes

The presenter went on to describe MOOCs and how the features of those course delivery models fit with or vary across different platforms.

Want to hear all of this session yourself while you’re at your own computer? Let Cindy Russell know and you can obtain the login to watch it at your place and time.

 

What’s the Horizon Report and What’s it mean to me?

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Replay of the recording of the 2013 ELI 2013 session where the Horizon Report was first released.

Released on 2/4/13, the NMC (New Media Consortium’s) Horizon Report, Higher Education Edition, is an annual “unbiased source of information that helps education leaders, trustees, policy makers, and others easily understand the impact of key emerging technologies on education, and when they are likely to enter the mainstream.” This is the 10th annual edition.

The Horizon Report is about LEARNING.

Time to adoption horizon:

  • One Year or Less:
    • Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
    • Tablet Computing
  • Two to Three Years:
    • Games and Gamification
    • Learning Analytics
  • Four to Five Years:
    • 3D Printing
    • Wearable Technology

 

Key emerging trends:

  1. Openness – concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information – is becoming a value.
  2. MOOCs – weren’t even on last year’s report; but today are on the near-term list.
  3. The workforce demands skills from college grads that are more often acquired from informal learning experiences than in universities.
  4. There is increasing interest in using new sources of data for personalizing the learning experience and for performance measurement (learning analytics).
  5.  The role of educators continues to change due to the vast resources that are accessible to students via the Internet.
  6. Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.

Significant challenges limit the transition to the emerging trends. We seem to be playing catchup a lot these days.

  1. Faculty training still does not acknowledge the fact that digital media literacy continues its rise to importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
  2. The emergency of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching outpace sufficient and scalable modes of assessment.
  3. Too often it is education’s own processes and practices that limit broader uptake of new technologies.
  4. The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices.
  5. New models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of higher education.
  6. Most academics are not using new technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research.

Want to get a head start on knowing what’s coming up for the next Horizon Report?

  • Into Twitter? Use the hashtag #NMCHz to stay in the know and get a steady stream of resources.
  • Mobile? Get the app for HZ News (iOS and Android)
  • Want to keep up with the advisory board’s work during the year? Log onto horizon.wiki.nmc.org
NMC Horizon Report 2013 Higher Education Edition

NMC Horizon Report 2013 Higher Education Edition

EDUCAUSE Learning Institute (ELI) 2013 – join us to learn more!

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The last session of ELI 2013 was delivered by Robbie Kendall-Melton, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs: eLearning at the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR). She was a dynamic speaker who kept engaging the audience with all her apps and mobile devices. She had mobile devices no one had heard of!

At the conclusion of her session, she pointed the group to the TBR’s emerging technology website. From there, you can explore the Education & Workforce Mobile Apps Resource Bank, register to receive email notifications of new apps that match your key variables of subject, device, and level, and explore a variety of other resources related to mobilization and emerging technology.

Want to become part of a mobile learning special interest group? Sign up here. Access a variety of mobile-related information and apps.

For UTHSC faculty, we’ll be hosting Friday Focus on e-Learning and reviewing several of the recordings from the ELI 2013 session. For the next 3 Fridays, here’s the schedule (click the title to read more about each session/presenter):

There’s something for everyone in the ELI 2013 archive. From MOOCs to badges to mobile learning and more, plan to join us for a lively discussion on Fridays from 1-2pm!

Below is a great infographic from OnlineDegrees.org (spotted on the TBR’s website) about the mobile lives of college students. Any of this ring true to you?

2013 Profile of the Mobile Lives of College Students

Mobile Lives of Online College Students

Graphic attributed to OnlineDegrees.org.

Evaluating Class Size in Online Education

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The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) sponsored this webinar, facilitated by Dr. Susan Taft of the Kent State University College of Nursing in Kent, OH. Taft co-authored “A Framework for Evaluating Class Size in Online Education” that was published in The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 12(3), 2011, 181-197.

The bad news … there is NO one size fits all for determining optimal class sizes for online courses. The good news … there ARE guidelines for determining optimal class size.

Optimal class size is defined as healthy revenue generation PLUS desirable student learning outcomes.

Variables (factors) associated with workload in teaching online courses include:

  • faculty experience with distance education
  • the level at which the course is offered – graduate or undergraduate
  • content to be covered and course design
  • size of the class
  • online platform used, and presence or absence of technology support and/or teaching assistants
  • the mode of instruction (e.g. whether strictly web-based or combined with other modes of instruction)

Taft went on to review three educational frameworks that provide guidelines:

  1. The Objectivist-Constructivist Continuum
  2. Bloom’s Taxonomy
  3. The Community of Inquiry Model

Class sizes on the objectivist-constructivist dimension:

  • objectivist – largely one-way communication – can be large class size
  • mix of objectivist-constructivist – medium teaching intensity – medium size 20+
  • constructivist – interactive with higher teaching intensity – < 20 students

Class sizes and Bloom’s Taxonomy dimensions:

  • upper levels of taxonomy – analysis, synthesis, evaluation – small class size < 15
  • middle of taxonomy – application – medium teaching intensity – 16-40 students
  • lower levels of taxonomy – knowledge, comprehension – lower teaching intensity – > 30+ students

The Community of Inquiry Model is the more complex of the three models. Three types of presence are recommended for online courses:

  1. Teaching presence (faculty)
    1. course design & organization
    2. facilitating discourse – this may or may not be used
    3. direct instruction – may be fully or partially used
  2. Cognitive presence (students) – may or may not be fully required
  3. Social presence (faculty & students) – faculty being a “real person” in the online environment; may or may not be present
  • With the Community of Inquiry model, partial teaching presence that is associated with lower teaching intensity can have a class size of 25+.
  • With full teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence, there is higher teaching intensity and smaller class sizes of < 20 students.

Using the objectivist-constructivist continuum + Bloom’s Taxonomy leads to a more objective and quicker determination of class size. When Community Of Inquiry model is considered, the complexity of judging appropriate class size increases.

Examples of class size determinations considering combinations of all 3 frameworks:

  • Use of objectivist teaching methods, lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, limited implementation of COI – class size can be large, > 30 students
  • Constructivist methods, higher levels of Bloom, and full use of COI model – class size should be small < 15 students

For courses, determine how much the faculty member needs to be present and in the center to help students learn. Much of this determination (80%) can be discerned from the syllabus (as long as it’s a good syllabus). For the additional 20%, need to review online workload – are faculty facilitating good meaty discussions among the students, are faculty grading online discussions.

A truism – most faculty see their specific course as the highest intensity, requiring the highest workload level. In most cases, it is not true. So the administrator needs to review across all faculty. Develop guidelines for courses offered during this particular semester will have this many students allowed into them. Develop guidelines for different levels in the program. RN-BSN courses should have between 20-40 students in each section so that faculty can grade papers and give effective feedback to students.

Synchronous can add an additional level of teaching intensity – because faculty need command of the tools to make them work and because synchronous sessions tend to generate questions and issues that the faculty need to follow up on. Synchronous teaching should add in to the faculty workload.

Discussion of the Quality Matters Program – it is great for structure of a course, but it doesn’t address process and outcomes. The Sloan Consortium quality scorecard is a better model for online work, according to the presenter.

In addition to the presenter’s article (referred to above) some accessible online resources related to determining optimal class size in online education are:

REMINDER: UTHSC is an institutional member of the Sloan Consortium, which enables faculty and staff to obtain important and relevant materials related to online education. Contact Cindy Russell for details.

For follow-up material or discussions related to this or other topics, contact Cindy Russell at crussell@uthsc.edu or 901-448-6158.

UTHSC and Sloan-C Virtual Conference

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UTHSC is a virtual attendee for the 18th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning, running from October 10-12, 2012. The conference will provide the latest information on asynchronous learning programs, processes, packages, and protocols. It’s geared to both experienced professionals and interested newcomers.

Here’s how you can participate:

  • Join campus colleagues at one or more sessions over the 3 days. See below for the schedule and location, including the specific session to be shown (hyperlinked so you can read more about the session).
  • Join colleagues in your colleges who have individual logins – contact Cindy Russell at crussell@uthsc.edu or 901-448-6158 for a list of individuals in your college.
  • Follow the Sloan-C Conference social networking on Facebook, Twitter (#aln12 hashtag) and LinkedIn.
  • Remember that you can follow UTHSC on our social networking sites for updates as several individuals participate in the virtual conference. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, and our blog.

UTHSC is an institutional member of Sloan-C and that comes with loads of benefits. Read about all the benefits of Sloan-C membership. Contact Cindy Russell at crussell@uthsc.edu or 901-448-6158 for instructions on taking advantage of this great benefit.

Wednesday, October 10 in Hyman 101

Thursday, October 11 in Hyman 407

Friday, October 12 in GEB A304

Asynchronous strategies are becoming a more important part of our teaching tools. Attend all or part of this virtual conference to make sure you’re up to date on best practices and know what’s new and useful.

Try AudioBoo for quick audio

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AudioBoo is a free tool that allows you to easily record and share audio. AudioBoo recordings can be created and shared from your computer or smartphone and can even be embedded into announcements that are posted within a Blackboard course.

For more information on this and other Web 2.0 teaching and learning tools, e-mail kconger@uthsc.edu or call Kristy at 901-448-1518.

ResponseWare Technology at UTHSC

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The Turning Technologies audience response system allows UTHSC instructors to pose a variety of questions to students and receive immediate feedback. With this fall’s introduction of ResponseWare, technology that allows students to use their smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices as audience response tools, instructors are no longer limited to multiple choice and true/false questions. ResponseWare allows students to answer fill-in-the-blank, free-answer, and essay questions with ease.

For more information about Turning Technologies and ResponseWare, contact Tonya Brown at tlbrown@uthsc.edu or 901-448-5902.

Tuesday TEDMEDLive 2012 and its artifacts

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What a great start to TEDMED2012.

Tuesday’s session had Traces, Bryan Stevenson, Teresa Monachino, Rebecca Onie, Jill Sobule, WPAS Children of the Gospel Choir, and Step Afrika! All packed into 2 hours.

Instead of repeating what was tweeted, I’d invite you to look at the uthscfrc Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#!/uthscfrc

Great Talks has compiled some of the best posts from Tuesday’s session and UTHSC is mentioned – find it here http://paper.li/sansfront/1294843801#!tag-tedmed

Make sure you have a look at what Alphachimp is doing in scribing TEDMED – find that here http://www.alphachimp.com/weblog/2012/4/10/tedmedlive.html

If you want to see ALL tweets related to TEDMED, go here http://twitter.com/#tedmed

One of the most re-tweeted tweets of yesterday was from uthscfrc (us) – it was a quote from Bryan Stevenson’s talk

if you’re a doctor you can do amazing things, if you’re a compassionate doctor you can do phenomenal things

Join your colleagues at TEDMED here at UTHSC at the General Education Building, Room A103!

The Great Challenges of Health and Medicine

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If you drew up your list of great challenges, what would be on it?

  • Managing Chronic Diseases.
  • The Impact of Poverty on Health.
  • Eliminating Medical Errors.
  • Unwed Teen Motherhood.
  • Elevating Dental Health.
  • Medical Information Overload.
  • Something else?

The diverse gathering of TEDMED attendees – onsite and at simulcast locations such as UTHSC – will be participating in The Great Challenges Program. The idea is to provide America and the world with a comprehensive view of the great challenges.

A proposed list of 50 great challenges of health and medicine have been drawn up [download full brochure here]. During TEDMED, 50 knowledgeable individuals will serve as Advocates for those 50 challenges. The Advocates will circulate among the 1200 onsite attendees and be able to interact with simulcast participants via the TEDMED Connect application.

The 20 final Great Challenges will be decided by a vote – and your vote, as a TEDMED attendee, will count!

In the coming year, multiple strategies will be used continue the dialogue on the selected 20 Great Challenges.

  • Interviewing the Advocates of the Challenge for their thoughts – leading to a series of TV program style segments called Perspectives
  • TEDMED community members will be able to post their thoughts and feedback to each perspective
  • TEDMED will host 40 webinars during the coming year (2 per Great Challenge) that consist of roundtable panel discussions featuring 4 to 6 qualified individuals engaging in multi-disciplinary dialogue.

Want to know if the issues on your list of Great Challenges is among the top 50? Visit TEDMED’s Great Challenges Program website!