The Wheel

We had a great faculty panel last month on flipping the classroom! Professors Steve Luck and Jesus DeLoera shared their experiences with flipping classrooms at UC Davis.

Before I go any further, it seems worthwhile to define a few terms:

• Face-to-face course: Students come to a physical classroom for a set amount of hours per week that correlate to the number of units students earn (4 units = 4 hours). If the homework or in-class activities are supported by educational technology, these courses can be called “blended.”
• Hybrid course: Students come to a physical classroom less often than students in a corresponding face-to-face course; in the hybrid writing course I’m currently teaching, for example, students come to class for two hours per week (instead of four) and the other two hours are “made up” with online activities. Attempting to directly substitute in-class hours with online activities is complicated, though, which is why many online education advocates argue for competency-based education rather than credit hours.
• Online course: Students do not come to a physical classroom (though they may meet with their instructor or classmates virtually (i.e., video chat)(.

When we talk about “flipped classrooms,” we mean face-to-face or hybrid courses where students learn about course content by reading or watching materials at home, which frees up in-class time for more discussion and collaborative or student-centered activities.

Steve Luck: Flipping PSC 100

At the faculty panel, Steve Luck, professor of cognitive psychology, shared his experience with developing and teaching a flipped version of PSY 101. Traditionally, the class has two 2-hour lectures per week with some discussion, but as enrollments crept higher over the years, the opportunities for discussion dwindled. In an attempt to reverse this decline, Luck began to experiment with educational technology. He started two years ago by converting one unit’s worth of lectures into videos; with support from the Provost Hybrid Course Award, all of the lectures are now posted to YouTube and he’s transformed the 200-student lecture course into eight 25-student discussion sections (each section meets for an hour a week with either Luck or the TA).

Luck offered several helpful best practices based on his experiences:

• Videos should be no more than four minutes, and should be interactive. Luck recommends a short quiz after every video; forcing students to recall what they just watched helps the information stick.
• Lectures tend to be shorter in video format because you can speak more efficiently and more quickly; students can always pause or replay the video.
• Stand when you are recording your lectures; it makes you more animated and you project your voice better.
• Leading a discussion section is very different than giving a lecture! Be prepared to learn a new skill.
• Redesigning a course is time consuming. “Don’t try to completely revamp the course all at once,” Luck advised. “It’s a very different approach to how you teach face-to-face and it’s going to take some work.”

For more information, you can look through Luck’s presentation slides.

Jesus DeLoera : Flipping MATH 114

After Luck, Jesus DeLoera  (professor of mathematics) gave an inspirational talk about active learning, which is the true value of flipped classrooms. As DeLoera  put it, “People learn by doing. That’s the important part of the flipped classroom. If technology supports this, then that’s great, but the technology isn’t required.”

DeLoera ’s interest in active learning began with the Moore Method, an old inquiry-based mathematics pedagogy. He has been applying  a variation of this in his 350-student lecture linear algebra course. At home, his students watch MIT videos that complement their textbook and take quizzes in SmartSite. Then, in class, DeLoera  puts a problem on the board and divides the students into teams who compete to see who can solve the problem first.

The benefit of this approach, DeLoera  explained, is that the students have to take more responsibility for their learning at home, and then in-class sessions are much more active. However, the physical space of the classroom is problematic (the students are in fixed chairs that make collaboration difficult), and the MIT videos are not ideal (they are each an hour long so DeLoera  has to direct students to watch particular segments). Furthermore, DeLoera  did not have enough TA support to run discussion sections, which would have increased the value considerably.

These sorts of challenges are important to acknowledge, especially as more instructors look to educational technology to create better learning experiences for their students. If you have best practices or challenges to share, please do so by leaving a comment or filling out the Share Your Story form.

We hope you’ll join us this Friday (December 6) at 12pm in 1310 Surge III for the final DOLCE (Discussing Online Learning and Collaborative Education) meeting of the calendar year. We’re excited that David Lazar of Columbia College Chicago will give a presentation on Pedagogical Principles in Practice. David is a remarkable academic who created the undergraduate and Ph.D. programs in Nonfiction Writing at Ohio University, and who has seen five of his essays appear in the yearly Best American Essays anthologies.

Following Professor Lazar we will be joined by Philip Matern, a graduate student in Neuroscience, Physiology, & Behavior. Philip will discuss and demonstrate NB, an annotation tool that allows for collaborative annotation, discussion, and note taking.

Finally, Alex Alfieri (Information and Educational Technology) will show us the Aggie Feed, which creates an activity stream of Davis events and will provide a helpful portal for students and others using campus networks and databases.

We will leave one chair empty for you. Happy holidays!

P.S. For those of you who can’t make Professor Lazar’s teaching-centric comments this coming Friday at noon, David will also be giving a reading Thursday / tomorrow evening at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis. All are welcome.

Duke University professors Cathy N. Davidson and John Hope Franklin are preparing a massive open online course (MOOC) on the history and future of higher education, beginning January, 27 2014.

As you can see from this HASTAC blog post, which describes the course and includes a schedule of readings and topics, the purpose of the course is to explore how higher education pedagogies developed into the sorts of teaching and learning we see in universities today, and to consider and critique the evolving pedagogical innovations we are experiencing today.

I was particularly excited to see that they’ve made the syllabus a public Google Document and have invited comments. If you end up taking the course, we’d love to hear about your experiences!

At last month’s DOLCE Meeting, Joanna Normoyle presented on the interesting work she’s been doing at the UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute. They recently created a new undergraduate major, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. Because their curriculum focuses on experiential, out-of-the-classroom learning (they require a 12-unit internship and have labs or field work associated with the majority of their courses), the team needed to find an innovative way to help students capture their experiences and share their accomplishments. In the end, they developed a digital badge system based on the skills, knowledge, and experience students develop in the major, which has a curriculum design based on a Delphi Survey done in conjunction with the School of Education.

The badge system functions as a competency-based (rather than credit-hour based) model of learning. The program has developed a set of competencies for the major—to name a few, systems thinking, experimentation and inquiry, strategic management, civic engagement, personal development—and each competency correlates to a “badge” that students work toward by collecting experiences.

To collect experiences, students first create a profile in the online system. Then, after they’ve completed an experiential learning experience, they post an entry to their profile that summarizes their experience and includes any artifacts (photos, videos, etc.) that support the experience. For instance, if a student has been working on the Student Farm learning how to fix the transplanter, they might write up a reflection on the experience and include photos or a visual diagram depicting what they learned, which may include social skills or problem solving skills in addition to the basic skill of fixing the machine.

Throughout the program, students collect a large number of these experiences, which can be combined to earn a badge. To earn a badge, the student has to demonstrate his or her “learning pathway” that shows an arch across a series of experiences and justifies the badge.

Importantly, the student decides which experiences demonstrate his or her competency and thus determines his or her eligibility for a badge, which helps students make sense of their learning and gives them ownership over it. It also means that one student’s learning pathway may be very different from another student’s pathway, which allows for more personalized education.

Students in the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems program can earn as many badges as they like (they can even create new badges!), but they will be encouraged to focus on earning the seven competency badges tied to the major’s learning outcomes as a part of their capstone experience.

Normoyle and the folks at the Sustainability Institute are still working out how to evaluate whether a students’ learning pathway truly earns a badge. For the moment, the system is still in the user testing phase, so no badges are being formally awarded. One of the reasons is because Normoyle and her colleagues recognize that evaluating student badge submissions is a complex process and requires multiple types of input to make the review a reflection of the student’s true skills or competence. Peer, faculty, expert and self assessments and system analytics will likely all factor into the final review process in some way. 

It’s always exciting to hear about such educational innovations happening at UC Davis! If you have similar innovations happening in your departments or programs, we invite you to share your story.

As you know from past postings, the Learning Management System (LMS) Working Group, part of the Educational Technology Subcommittee of the Campus Council for Information Technology, has been investigating potential replacements for Sakai, the learning management system that powers SmartSite. Last Friday, a Canvas representative gave a web-cast presentation of their learning management system.

The presentation included a detailed overview of many of Canvas’ exciting features, which is difficult to summarize. Instead, we offer a quick overview of some of the highlights below.

• Assignments. The assignments tool has a variety of features. You can require students to submit a particular file type, a text box, a URL, etc.; students can submit work from any cloud-based service; instructors can determine whether the assignment is individual or group work; there is a peer review feature where Canvas automatically distributes student work to peers who review the work using a rubric.
• Grading. Canvas offers a “speed grader” that renders files directly in the LMS; the gradebook is easy to organize and quickly allows instructors to drop scores, message students, and categorize assignments; there is a robust rubric system that allows for mapping between course, major, and institutional learning outcomes.
• Third-Party Tools. Canvas works with select vendors to integrate certain “best-of-breed” tools into their learning management system.  The companies they work with include Google, CrocoDocs, Kaltura, and others.  Canvas also features an “App Center” whereby instructors can easily integrate third-party tools (Piazza, VoiceThread, etc.) to add additional functionality to their course sites.
• Community. There is an impressive community of Canvas users who are very enthusiastic about the product. There are active message boards where users share best practices and also post complaints, which the Canvas engineers follow and often resolve.

We also invite you to watch a recording of the presentation. Per the vendor’s request, this video is only available to UC Davis community members, so please log into your Davis account to view.

There was a nice article in The California Aggie last week about the online version of Nutrition 10 (taught by Liz Applegate) that will be offered at UC Davis in winter quarter! As you’ll see in the article, Applegate anticipates enrolling 800 students, 200 of whom will be virtual.

http://www.theaggie.org/2013/11/21/uc-davis-to-offer-virtual-nutrition-10-class-winter-quarter-2014/

How do you use a learning management system (LMS)? What features are most important to you? You can share your thoughts by filling out this survey: http://www.sogosurvey.com/k/RQsWQQPsUsPsPsP

The survey also provides spaces for you to indicate your interest in joining the LMS Working Group and to volunteer to pilot Desire2Learn and/or Canvas in the winter.

As we’ve been posting about quite regularly for the last couple of months, the Learning Management System (LMS) Working Group, a subset of the Campus Council for Information Technology Educational Technology SubCommittee (CCFIT-EdTech), is investigating replacements for Sakai, the LMS that powers SmartSite. By completing the survey, you will help us determine what LMS features our UC Davis community most values, which will in turn guide our continued investigation and ultimate recommendation to the Provost.

If you have questions, please contact the Working Group Chair, Andy Jones (aojones@ucdavis.edu).

Our next LMS Transition event is a remote presentation to the UC Davis community by members of the Canvas community. If you are interested, join us in 1310 Surge III at 10:00 AM on Friday, November 22.

UPDATE: Please enjoy this recording of the D2L presentation. Per the vendor’s request, this video is only available to UC Davis community members, so please log into your Davis account to view.

At last month’s DOLCE meeting, David Levin (Director of ATS) gave a quick presentation about his experiences at the recent EDUCAUSE Conference. Gaming was a particularly popular topic at the conference, and David had the opportunity to hear Jane McGonigal talk about her work.

Below, you’ll find an excellent TED talk that McGonigal gave a few years ago: