The science of teaching

Eric Mazur was the opening speaker at the ALT-C 2012  conference in Manchester UK this week. The keynote presentations were streamed online and I attended this presentation virtually – well worth the hour spent.

The slides of this talk are available here

A recording of the keynote has not yet been posted, but should ultimately appear here

Eric Mazur is a Harvard University physicist who is as interested in researching how his students learn physics, particularly through peer instruction, as he is in researching specific physics concepts.

An interesting aspect of his keynote to the ALT-C conference was his focus on pedagogy rather than technology and his very convincing argument against traditional lecturing to large groups, despite the fact that he delivered the keynote through a lecture to a large group. He says in an interview with Seb Schmoller, before the conference, that lectures are ineffective for teaching anything that is conceptually very difficult, but are good for motivating people. I found his lecture very motivating and my attention didn’t waver during the hour, but I wasn’t asked to learn any difficult physics concepts.

His keynote focused on his recent research

• the gender gap between male and female achievement in physics,
• the ineffectiveness of demonstrations in physics teaching and
• the role of confusion in learning.

He urged us to continuously research our teaching and measure outcomes, using the scientific method. How he does this himself was very well illustrated through his talk.

Here are some of the key points for me.

The problem with traditional lectures….

… is that they hold the mind captive, whereas in fact the mind needs to wander to address problems. A ‘real problem’ is knowing where you want to get to, but not knowing how to get there. Science applies a known procedure to an unknown answer, whereas in our teaching we very often mark/measure students’ understanding by marking their answers rather than their procedures. A lot of assessment is simply regurgitation, rather than a measure of understanding.

The brain stores models not facts. To learn we need cognitive dissonance (Piaget).

Lectures don’t allow us time to make connections and reflect, or to register cognitive dissonance.

We need to build ‘speed bumps’ into lectures, to slow them down and allow time for sense-making.

Research on students’ neurological activity shows that they are more ‘asleep’ when they are in a traditional lecture than when they actually are asleep.

The scientific approach to teaching: Research as a basis for course design Slide 6

(click on the image to enlarge it)

Teacher explanations and demonstrations do not, by themselves, improve student understanding. Students’ misconceptions are very resistant to change. This can be seen in these two videos which I remembered when listening to the keynote

A Private Universe

Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos

Interaction and collaboration for more effective lectures

In his research into the gender gap between men and women’s achievements in learning physics concepts from lectures, Eric Mazur found that women’s test score can be hugely improved through interactive and collaborative lectures. Men’s scores also improved.

He also found that asking students to simply observe scientific demonstrations is not helpful. Critical to improving their understanding is asking them to predict a possible outcome and to discuss their ideas with their peers.

Also critical to effective interaction is skilled questioning by the teacher.

All this takes time – so taking this approach, there is no longer time to use lectures for the dissemination of facts. Students should therefore be asked to prepare for lectures through pre-reading and discussion. The lecture or classroom should be used for sense-making.  In the classroom teachers need to facilitate the assimilation of information through interaction and questioning. Information transfer (through ‘telling’) should happen in a learning space out of the classroom before or after the lecture.

Technology should be used to free up the lecturer and the student to have more time to focus on interaction, collaboration and sense-making. If it is not doing this, then it is not being used effectively to serve pedagogy.

The role of confusion in learning

Eric Mazur finished his keynote by making some interesting points about confusion. His research has shown that ….

• Confusion doesn’t necessarily correlate with understanding
• Confused students are twice as likely to be correct as students who do not think they are confused
• Confusion is not necessarily the result of poor teaching
• Confusion is an essential part of the learning process

My perspective on all this…

…… is that a focus on pedagogy and how students learn applies to all teaching, online or offline, to large groups or small groups, in physics or another discipline. If we are teachers we need to find ways to make our students think, become aware of and confront their misconceptions, to learn how to learn and realise that learning is about understanding, more than about the ‘grade’. According to Eric Mazur

‘You can forget facts, but you cannot forget understanding’.

One question that I have always had about the teaching of science through discussion, based on my own experience is:

How do you prevent students from compounding their misconceptions through interaction and discussion with equally confused peers?’

I think the answer to this question might lie in Eric Mazur’s work on learning catalytics, which as yet I don’t know anything about.

For an alternative perspective on the keynote, see this blog post – Black Hole

Read Full Post »

The Business Model for MOOCs

Last week I was at the HEA/SEDA day conference in Birmingham, UK

HEA/SEDA Conference on OER and Staff Development: Open Horizons: Sharing the future

I was there with my colleagues George Roberts, Marion Waite and Liz Lovegrove  because we had a slot in which we shared the work we have done on the FSLT12 MOOC. George has posted his slides to Slideshare.

What is Necessary and what is Contingent in Design for Massive Open Online Courses?

 

You will see that there are a lot of slides (48), but in fact we only got to slide 27 because there was so much interest in the MOOC and so many questions – and of course, so little time for discussion.

However, there was one very interesting, topical and pertinent question, which was,

What was the business model for the FSLT12 MOOC?

And it seems that this question is currently being considered by others on and off the net – see for example the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses

It seems that many institutions think about business models in terms of how much money they can make from MOOCs and certainly Oxford Brookes is thinking of accrediting the MOOC and charging for assessment next year.

But I wonder whether it would be better to think of the benefits and strategic advantages of offering MOOCs in non-direct monetary terms.

I was very interested at the conference in the session presented by Melissa Highton on OERs and Staff Development at University of Oxford. In her presentation she talked about the development of OERs – iTunesU – at the University, what this had involved, how lecturers had been encouraged to share their work and the benefits to Oxford University.

Through their iTunesU open lectures (videos and podcasts) Oxford University now has strong links with their alumni and prospective students. iTunesU thus helps the University to meet many of its institutional goals. The iTunesU site effectively markets and broadcasts the high quality teaching practice at the University and provides access to the expertise of Oxford University lecturers and the latest research.  The University has a quick turn around time for creating and uploading videos of lectures and podcast. For example they were able to upload a response to the Higgs boson discovery within 24 hours.

ITunesU also puts Oxford lecturers and researchers in the limelight. A video of a good lecture can get up to 100,000 hits a week and a lecturer can become widely known for his/her work in a matter of years or less, rather than it taking anything up to a lifetime as in the past. This has also had the effect of raising the status of teaching/lecturing in comparison to research.

The situation at Oxford University (and Cambridge) is different to some other institutions – because at Oxford the lecturers own their teaching materials and work, unlike at other Universities where anything produced by a lecturer as part of their work belongs to the institution. So through iTunesU and providing OERs in the name of the academic staff, the University is able to openly market the expertise of its staff. The reward for staff who do this is a high quality resource in their name which is open to the whole world. Both the institution and the lecturers benefit.

Clearly Oxford University must have the money to be able to produce these high quality OERs so quickly, but these resources are open access, clearly licensed through Creative Commons and free.

Whilst iTunesU is not a MOOC, the non-monetary benefits, or non-direct monetary benefits (since attracting increasing numbers of students from across the world will ultimately bring monetary benefits), are probably those that can be gained from running a MOOC.

Perhaps Universities who wish to run MOOCs need to take a fresh look at what they mean by ‘business model’.

Read Full Post »

Teaching and Learning in #FSLT12

Today has been the last day of the #fslt12 MOOC, at the end of what has felt like an intense week of participants presenting their microteaching activities in Blackboard Collaborate. Without exception these have been impressive and as one of the course conveners it is humbling to work with learners from whom I learn such a lot.  It has been a privilege. The recordings of the microteach presentations, which happened on Wednesday and Friday of this week can be found here  They are well worth watching and listening to.

I have also been so impressed that participants who did not choose to be assessed have entered into this activity and have been willing to present their work and receive feedback from their peers. No matter how experienced or confident we are in our teaching, there is nothing like being peer reviewed to make us take stock and critically reflect on what it is we are doing.

I have also received this evening an email from one of the MOOC participants sending me this link to Carl Rogers’ work. All he said was,

Thought you might like this Jenny.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rogers.htm

.. and I do like it.  I feel a strong sense of resonance with Carl Rogers’ ideas about facilitation and the importance of relationships in teaching and learning. These are ideas that I think I have always aspired to – but recently with the advent of MOOCs, my thinking on this has been challenged – because in MOOCs, at least in connectivist MOOCs, or in massive online MOOCs of the Udacity type, the role of the teacher changes …. and for me it has become difficult to continue to understand what, as a teacher, my relationship with learners should be.

In connectivist MOOCs the role of the teacher changes because of the associated  ‘hands off’ approach to teaching – or at least that is my experience of connectivist MOOCs. In these MOOCs the teacher is a convener of an event or learning environment, where learners learn from each other and co-construct knowledge. Stephen Downes explains his thinking on this in his post The Role of the Educator  This post demonstrates how complex (or even confused) the role of the teacher has become since the advent of MOOCs.

In the Udacity type of MOOC, the scale of these MOOCs means that the teacher is necessarily even more distant. I haven’t had experience of one of these MOOCs yet – but this blog post seems to describe the situation. This post would seem to support the idea that a relationship between teacher  (whoever that might be) and learner (whoever that might be) cannot be denied as an important factor in learning.

For me FSLT12 has been an open course rather than a MOOC.  My main reason for thinking this has been that in it, I have felt myself to be more present as a teacher/facilitator than I would expect to do in a connectivist MOOC or Udacity type massive open online course. That might be because I have been required to assess some participants’ work. And it might also be because I have been involved in the planning of the structure of the course and therefore am at least in part responsible for its success. But probably mostly because I have felt a sense of responsibility, not only for the success of the FSLT12 MOOC, but much more so for the participants’ learning experiences and I know that this sense of responsibility doesn’t quite fit with a connectivist MOOC philosophy. In my past experience of connectivist MOOCs, this sense of responsibility is not overt, if indeed it exists at all. And that’s OK. I haven’t expected anyone to be responsible for me when participating in MOOCs, or that I would have any sort of a relationship with the MOOC convener.

You will gather from this post that I am still confused about the role of the teacher in MOOC environments. I am still thinking all this through – so I would be very interested to hear what others think. For me it’s all a bit of a dilemma. In MOOCs, am I a teacher, or not, and if I am, what kind of a teacher am I? In FSLT12, I have felt like a teacher/facilitator, but I have not thought that FSLT12 is a MOOC – rather an open online course.

Read Full Post »

#fslt12 Final Week – Microteaching

This week the focus is teaching and the evaluation of teaching.

This #fslt12 course  is based on a course which runs face-to-face at Oxford Brookes University. The First Steps course is an element of the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development’s (OCSLD) HEA accredited Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PCTHE).

#fslt12 has been aimed at new lecturers, people entering higher education teaching from other sectors and postgraduate students who teach. But in true MOOC spirit we have also had some very experienced ‘teachers’ join us who have openly shared their experience.

(Click on the image to see it more clearly)

In the face-to-face course the key activity is to ‘microteach’ -  i.e. teach a short 10 minute session to a small group of peers and receive feedback from that group.  In order to try and ensure alignment between the face-to-face course and what is offered online, we are trying out this activity in #fslt12.  On Wednesday and Friday of this week, #fslt12 participants will showcase the teaching sessions they have prepared in the live sessions and receive feedback from their peers.

Click here to enter the Blackboard Collaborate room. (See time zones below)

Wed 20 June – Check your time zone

Frid 22 June –  Check your time zone

I will be able to reflect further on this activity at the end of this week, but it has already raised some interesting challenges.  These include:

• feelings of exposure. I think it’s fair to say that it’s one thing to practise your teaching in front of a small face-to-face group, but quite another to practise openly online in front of anyone and everyone
• 10 minutes. This will also be a challenge face-to-face, but how do you demonstrate your teaching skills in just 10 minutes
• technology. I also think it would be fair to say that however this activity is presented it will involve a greater degree of technology than it’s face-to-face equivalent.

Finally this activity also demands the skills of evaluation from those involved in peer review.

Greg Benfield from Oxford Brookes University has provided some excellent resources this week, which include two audio video presentations in which he introduces the topic of evaluation, reference to key readings and some sample videos for us to use to try out our evaluation skills.

The microteaching activities are beginning to be posted, both by participants who are being assessed and by others, and we expect some more over the next few days. Have a look in the Moodle wiki and on people’s blogs

It promises to be another interesting week.

Read Full Post »

#fslt12 Week 4 with Dave White

This week we welcome Dave White to the FSLT12 MOOC. Dave will be speaking to the title

The Impact on Teachers of Open Educational Resources and Open Academic Practice in the Digital University

Date and time: Wed 13 June 3.00 – 5.00 pm BST

Link to the session here

Check your time zone

Link to Resources to prepare for Dave’s session

Dave tweeted some time ago that he was preparing for this session. I have heard Dave speak a few time before and blogged about him, so I know I can look forward to this session.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

Lecturing

The curriculum thread this week focuses on ‘lecturing’. Rhona Sharpe has provided an excellent and thought-provoking video

The ideas raised by this video are being discussed in the Week 4 Moodle forum

Activity 3 Microteaching

The first two activities, reflective writing and collaborative bibliography, have both been very successful with excellent contributions to both. Many, but by no means all of the reflective writing examples have been on people’s blogs and the collaborative bibliography activity took place in the Week 2 Moodle wiki 

The third and final activity is ‘Microteaching’. The idea is that we share examples of our teaching practice

I think Rhona provides us with an excellent example of good practice. Within her video presentation she employs many of the strategies of good teaching.

One or two people have already submitted their microteaching activity. I am looking forward to seeing more and hopefully to having plenty of people present their work in the live sessions in Week 5.

So on to another set of stimulating discussion in Week 4.

Read Full Post »

#fslt12 MOOC Week 1 starts today, 21-05-12

The MOOC is off to a really good start. We have around 120 people registered on the WordPress and Moodle sites and about 16 interested in being assessed. And there are likely quite a few more following the course without registering.

Activity in the Moodle forums last week, particularly in response to the question ‘What is learning for you?’ indicates a real interest in the issues surrounding learning. Discussion has covered aspects of the process and product of learning, transformative learning and threshold concepts – worth reading if you haven’t already visited the Moodle site (you do have to enrol in the Moodle site though, if you want to add to discussion). See http://openbrookes.net/firststeps12/moodle/

This week the focus is on Reflective Practice. Some people have already set up their blogs and started this activity which is:

We suggest that in this first week you reflect on your overall experience to date as a teacher; what kinds of students have you taught, what have you discovered from the experience, and what have you most enjoyed in your teaching?

We have also suggested that Stephen Brookfield’s lenses might be a good place to start when thinking about reflecting on learning and teaching – beginning perhaps with the autobiographical lens. There are some resources on this in Week 1 of the Moodle site – http://vle.openbrookes.net/mod/page/view.php?id=67

For those who have chosen to be assessed the activity is linked to UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in Higher Education 2011 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/ukpsf/ukpsf.pdf  All the details are on the Moodle site

Also this week we have our first live session. We have allowed 2 hours for each of these sessions. The idea is that our Speakers (this week George Roberts and Rhona Sharpe, from Oxford Brookes University) will give us a presentation during the first hour and then we can use the second hour to discuss course issues, particularly those concerning assessment.

Looking forward to following the discussion in various locations.

Read Full Post »

#fslt12 MOOC – Week zero – discussion has started

The discussions in the FSLT Moodle site  are  beginning to get going and quite a few people are already blogging or setting up their blogs.

We have set up an Arrivals Lounge  where people can introduce themselves. And there is also a Course Questions forum, where we will try to answer any queries as soon as we can.

But in  the  Week 0 (Supporting Learning) area of Moodle (which is this run up week to the course), George has posted a great question to get us warmed up – ‘What is Learning for you’ and provided an audio introduction to go with it. Allan Quartly has pointed us to a blog post that he made last year

Like Allan, I feel as though this is a question I have asked myself before.

My thinking on this has been influenced by the work of Etienne Wenger – and his book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity  and here  Etienne lists the key principles of learning that he outlines in his book. (Etienne and his wife Bev will be speaking to the FSLT MOOC on Wed 6th June)

I have also been influenced by the work of Stephen Downes who says that to learn is to practice and reflect  and that learning is about recognising patterns

 

(Slides taken from – http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/the-meaning-is-the-message)

And much of my recent thinking about learning has been related to the work I have been doing on emergent learning and embodied learning

So when I think about learning I tend to think more about process than product.  I don’t forget that Etienne has said that said that ‘learning is a claim to competence’ but more important for me learning is (as Ronald Barnett discusses in depth in his book ‘A Will to Learn’ ) the continuing process of ‘learning to learn’ and (through this) ‘becoming’ who I am and developing an understanding of my ‘being’.

Barnett writes on p.62 of his book

‘In a genuine higher education, the student not merely undergoes a developmental process, but undergoes a continuing process of becoming. This becoming is marked by the student’s becoming authentic and coming into herself ….. She discovers her own voice, is able to articulate it and deploys it to effect. She brings to bear not just her own intentionalities, but her own will. She not just is carried forward, but carries herself forward.’

My thinking is that this applies to all learners – not just students. We are all learners, are we not?

Read Full Post »

Scholarship and the ‘Tyranny’ of Openness

There have been some great comments by George Veletsianos, Mark McGuire and Fred Garnett on my blog post, which asked the question ‘What is a Scholar’ –  prompted by George’s presentation to ChangeMooc.

In George’s comment he asks

Are we are attempting to impose our values (of openness, sharing, online learning as the future of education, etc) without a critical examination of what that means for practice and for individuals who are part of social organizations?

This is a very timely question. There has been a lot of discussion on the web over the past 12 months or so about what we mean by openness. According to Martin Weller it is a ‘state of mind’. I agree…..

….but whose mind? As Carmen Tschofen and I discussed in our paper – Connectivism and Dimensions of Individual Experience  – openness means different things to different people – ‘learners may vary greatly in their desire for and interpretation of connectivity, autonomy, openness, and diversity’

On p.137 we write

This inner state of openness offers a significantly expanded perspective from the much more externalized “sharing” definition of openness and the “no barriers” definition currently articulated in connectivism. It leaves room for the speculation, for example, that legitimate peripheral participants may be experiencing “openness” in relation to connective learning by being attentive in a mindful and non-judgmental way.

An understanding of psychological openness and its relationship to connectivist principles and process also introduces a potential connection between creativity and connective learning. The personality trait of openness to experience is linked to curiosity, exploration, creativity, and unusual ideas. These elements may be significant in gaining insight into MOOC “early adopters” and in understanding the challenges and rewards of promoting and conducting such unusual learning ventures. By the same token, learners who express discomfort in learning networked environments, calling, for example, for more structure, may be closer to the “more cautious” end of the openness spectrum, with greater preference toward the familiar, including learning conventions and traditions. Questions remain as to how connective learning can best accommodate learners throughout this spectrum.

So I agree with George that we need to critically reflect on what we mean by ‘openness’ and how this might affect our expectations of scholars and influence their scholarship. And I think I understand where he is coming from when he writes ‘I am worried about imposing a single worldview that we view as “correct” on others. Freire talks about the oppressed becoming oppressors, and I find that without an uncritical examination of our practice we might be heading towards that direction.’

I also understand where Mark is coming from when he writes about the dangers of becoming institutionalized

‘in the process of working within an institution, we become institutionalized. We internalize the values, assumptions, and practices of the institution of higher education as it is currently constructed, and we take on the mission statements, strategic plans, and objectives of the organization that pays our salary.’

‘becoming institutionalized is like becoming acclimatized or acculturated — it is an induction into a particular set of habits, histories and beliefs that we come to accept as natural and right. If we wish to develop new ways of organizing our labour and our learning using more open networks, in keeping with shifts elsewhere in contemporary society, we must be prepared to examine and critique our institutions and our place within them.’

It seems to me that both Mark and George are making a strong case for critical reflection on and critical examination of the meaning of openness. Is openness (like participation) becoming a ‘tyranny’ that we are all just drifting into? Or is openness essential to the future of education and scholars?

I’ll be interested to hear what Frances Bell has to say about this when she talks to #fslt12 MOOC on Wednesday 30 May

Frances Bell, “The role of openness by academics in the transformation of their teaching and learning practices.” Wednesday 30 May 2012, 1500 BST

Read Full Post »

#fslt12 MOOC Distributed Learning Spaces

Over the weekend I prepared a video presentation to provide a brief overview of the learning spaces we will be working in during this MOOC. Actually – as one of my colleagues has already pointed out – it is not so brief – 5 minutes – which I know is a bit too long for a video of this type. It’s hard to be succinct . But despite that I hope it’s helpful.

For people who might not venture to our WordPress site – where the video has been posted – I’ll post it here as well. If you are an experienced ‘Moocer’, or very comfortable with different technologies and used to working in online networks, then this video is probably not for you.

But on this MOOC we are expecting people who are not only new to learning and teaching in Higher Education, but might also never have done an online course, or might not have worked in distributed online spaces, like we will be doing for this course. If you are one of those people, hopefully this video will help a bit.

Blogging for Reflective Learning Video Transcript

Working across distributed spaces does require some self-organisation. The strategies that I use are:

• To bookmark the urls of all the different sites so that I can find them easily – and make a note of my passwords.

• And although we are aggregating blogs in the WordPress site, I am also going to set up a new folder in my Google Reader account and gather the blog feeds there too.

• I have also started to check the #fslt Twitter stream on a daily basis.

I’d be interested to hear what strategies other people have for keeping up with distributed MOOCs/courses – particularly those strategies that you used as a ‘beginner’.

Read Full Post »

#fslt12 Week 0 – starts tomorrow – Monday 14 May

 

 

The run up to the First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Mooc is well under way. The course officially starts on 21^st May (and will run for 5 weeks until 22^nd June), so next week is a good time for anyone who is interested in following the course to have a look round our WordPress and Moodle sites and spend a bit of time setting yourself up and deciding where and how you want to participate. These sites are still being developed, so there may be some last minute changes next week.

Designing this course has been more complex than I anticipated and I think this is because the course is neither a fully connectivist course of the type conceived by Downes, Siemens, Cormier and Groom, nor an institutional or commercial type of Mooc (Stanford, MIT, Curtis Bonk). It is somewhere in between and is aligned at least to some extent to Oxford Brookes University’s and funders’ expectations. So we do have an LMS element (Moodle), which feels more like a traditional course, but also the course is open – we will aggregate blogs, and we are expecting people to interact in spaces of their own choosing.

Lisa Lane has written a very interesting (and for me – timely) blog post this week – Where’s your class? musings on course location   in which she describes the type of MOOC we have been developing as a ‘pseudo’ Mooc. A Mooc that perpetuates the idea that ‘class is here’.  She describes the model we have decided on as being the ‘middle ground’.

I recognise our Mooc in what she is saying. Like Lisa, my own preference is for Moocs to be open, distributed and aggregated, but as she has pointed out:

The WordPress Multi-User site, or the LMS that’s open to all, or the main blog where all blog within it but can have their content exported to save (which is what Dave is doing) may then be the preferred models for balancing these issues with those of exploration and innovation. They are being chosen because they take into account concerns of pedagogy and comfort, not because they can handle 1,000 students and use their content and personal information for other ends, but because they work.

Certainly for the #fslt12 MOOC, which is targeted at new lecturers in HE and PhD students who want to teach (although we welcome experienced practitioners as well), we hope to be able to provide a comfortable and safe learning environment for those who need it, for whatever reason.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating Whatever happens it has been, and will continue to be, a great learning experience!

Read Full Post »