November 2009 Archives

Tomorrows-Professor is "a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to create a forum for comments and discussion about articles from the Tomorrow's Professor Mailing List and about general issues concerning higher education." A recent entry (posted November 17th, 2009) is taken from the October, 2009, issue of ASEE Prism by David Zax, a freelance writer specializing in science is Learning in 140 - Character Bites. (Long intro!)

Learning in 140 - Character Bites reports on the different ways that Twitter is being used in the classroom. For example, a prof at UIUC has students use Twitter in her aerospace engineering class to send her questions at the end of a class. Writes Zax about how profs are using Twitter in the classrom: "they've moved beyond the tweet-as-status model to harness the organizational, aggregating, and social possibilities of the technology, recognizing it as a potent educational tool."

Another example that was reported in the Chronicle told how two PSU profs had students tweet about the class while the class was happening. These profs found "a rich 'back channel' where students discussed what interested them or puzzled them." Another prof used Twitter the way some UA profs are using clickers. BTW, if you have students put a hash tag in their tweet it can organize their classroom tweets as well as separate them from their other tweets.

As well as solid examples of using Twitter in the classroom, this entry does a good job mentioning pros and cons. Pass it on to colleagues.

Last summer's Taskforce on Undergraduate Education recommended that these departments/staff - University Teaching Center, Learning Technology Center, Director of Assessment, Transfer Curriculum and Articulation - form a new unit called the Office of Instruction and Assessment. Monday, November 16, 2009, marked the first day of our new unit.

Members of the Learning Technologies Center are currently in a few locations at this time awaiting our link in the chain of organizational change to open space for us all in the Manuel Pacheco Integrated Learning Center (ILC) area. Professor Debra Tomanek, The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is the new Vice Provost for OIA.

Report and Recommendations from the Taskforce on Undergraduate Education, Gail D. Burd, Ph.D.,
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost,
July 26, 2009

The spreadsheets for last week's iTunes U usage came this morning. Here's some things I noticed.

Dr. Bernard Baars is teaching an online course for the Center for Consciousness Studies, a Center in the Psychology Department. He has his first track, Introduction to the Webcourse, in the iTunes U course site and it was downloaded 74 times last week and browsed 35 times (browses are when students and other visitors double click to play the track in iTunes instead of downloading it directly to their computer). I think that shows the kind of public exposure that an iTunes U site can bring.

Dr. Elaine Marchello's Trad104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present podcast for "Animism and Totemism and Animals in Mythology" had 131 downloads and 73 browses. This is one of the fall 2009 Centennial Hall courses, so it's interesting to track the students use of podcasts.

Download the Public site spreadsheet and/or the Private site.

Today's Faculty Focus, "Can Clickers Enhance Student Learning?" by Mary Bart, is a synopsis of points made by Dr. Peter M. Saunders, director of Oregon State University's Center for Teaching and Learning in a recent online workshop. Here are best practices she reports that Saunders made in the workshop. (an audio tape of the online workshop can be purchased from Faculty Focus for $259)

• Limit the number of clicker questions to five per class
• Use PowerPoint to prepare, manage, and display questions
• Reserve questions for specific learning outcomes and goals (What do you want to stress? What cognitive skills do you want to develop? What do you want to reinforce?)
• Allot enough time and use an on-screen timer.
• Check for ambiguity
• Create questions that support peer discussion and instruction
• Use a variety of assessment question types
• Bring index cards for students who forget their clickers
• Consider not just the answer, but the cognitive processes used

In last week's iTunes U Update Newsletter, Apple posted the latest members posting content to iTunes U. It's a long list so I posted it in the "continued" section of my entry.

Go to iTunes U [iTunes link] to see any of these.

Over the past week, Apple changed the day it sends out usage reports from Monday to Wednesday.

When Gregory and I were logging off the PCs in the UITS training lab after yesterday's workshop, Gregory said to me, "Today's workshop wasn't anything like Monday's." I know I felt like I didn't cover 80% of what I would have liked to. On the other hand, I think you got a lot of hearing Scott Hessell and Suzanne Westbrook speak.

I've written up responses to the questions we jotted down on the white board and referring you to some webpages we have about iTunes U and podcasting. Feel free to contact either us for more information.

Contact Gregory to set up a Podcast Producer workflow that streamlines getting your audio and/or video onto iTunes U.

As a consultant on learning technologies, I'll be glad to talk to you how to fit podcasting into your pedagogy, what other resources might work instead of, or in addition to, podcasting, and examples of podcasts in your discipline.

If you prefer to download a Word version of this entry, you may download it here:
Podcasting Workshop Follow-Up

• LTC's Podcasting Website Faculty page
• What is the UA's iTunes U?
• UA on iTunes U FAQs
• Stuart's Blog

Gates Stoner, who works in the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, sent a link to an article appearing in the November 9th Inside Higher Ed: "Fans and Fears of 'Lecture Capture'." I encourage anyone who has read this far in my entry to take look at this short article and read the comments that followed. The comments mirror questions and statements I've heard from faculty members here at the UA. The article summaries a presentation at the 2009 Educause Conference.

• At Stanford University's School of Medicine -"Well-attended lectures were well-watched; poorly attended lectures were not watched. ... If you're bad, you're bad. If you're bad online, you're bad in lectures, students don't come."
• "Our students at Berkeley tell us that this is supplemental material, and it doesn't affect their decision to attend class."
• In 2008, 78 percent of undergraduate respondents to a University of Wisconsin at Madison study said they think having lectures available online would help them retain lesson material, and 76 percent said they believed it would help them improve their test scores.
• Two-thirds of the respondents to this year's annual study on undergraduate IT habits from the Educause Center for Applied Research strongly disagreed that having lectures posted on the Web would encourage them to cut class.
• At Purdue University, which is attempting to put standard lecture capture technology in 280 classrooms by next semester, faculty members said they would not even be willing to press a button at the beginning of class to initiate the recording, according to David Eisert, the manager of emerging technologies there.

Apple was a bit late in sending out the weekly spreadsheets this week. They rarely miss distributing them on Mondays but this week's just arrived. Here are the public and private site spreadsheets showing the number of downloads and browses to the UA's iTunes U.

What stands out in that week's usage? There were 206 downloads of the most recent Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series track, "Repetition and Differentiation -- Lorna Simpson's Iconography of the Racial Sublime," 90 downloads of the mostly uploaded Linguistics Lecture track "Understood complements and com," and 81 downloads of the audio track " 34 Reoviridae" for Dr. James Collins VSC433 Medical and Molecular Virology class lecture. On the private side, Elaine Marchello's TRAD 104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present " Exotic Animals and HIstory of the Zoo" was downloaded 189 times. Her previous four lectures averaged ~175 downloads.

Today is Veteran's Day, a U.S. holiday that was originally celebrated as Armistice Day, falling on November 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. The fighting in WWI ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 when the Germans signed an Armistice. It took another six months before a formal treaty between the Allies and Germany was signed. That treaty, The Treaty of Versailles, was signed at the Palace of Versailles' Hall of Mirrors. Here is a picture I shot in the Hall of Mirrors on October 22nd.

"iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?," is a study appearing in Computers & Education 52 (2009) 627-623. It was conducted by SUNY Fredonia Department of Psychology professors Dani McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck, and Elise S. Luber.

The study compared the test scores of introductory psychology students - some watched a recorded lecture available in iTunes and others attended the traditional classroom lecture. The results? Students who watched video scored an average of 71%. Students who sat through the 30-minute classroom lecture scored an average of 62%, and students who watched the video and took notes scored an average of 76%. Apparently being able to use the pause button accounted for the difference. Can't pause the prof giving the lecture and replay the last five minutes.

My conclusion is that attending the lecture and having video of the lecture for students to review is a way to enhance student learning.

Campus Rec has produced a promo about the 2010 expansion to the Rec Center. It's Coming: The Rec Center 2010 Expansion. A copy is also in the Campus Rec iTunes U section.

The Arizona Health Sciences Center (AHSC) has featured several videos on its homepage that were uploaded to the UA's YouTube channel. These videos are well suite for the YouTube channel because of their value as public information pieces.

Dr. William Crist, VP for Health Affairs

UA Scorpion Antivenom Study Featured in NEJM

UMC Opens New Trauma Center and Emergency Department

When the Scorpion Stings

I've been working on an internal report looking at the question: If I podcast my course, why would students still come to class?

There is a good deal of literature available that shows that students do not cut class because audio and/or video of class lectures are available. We also have anecdotal information from UA faculty who are podcasting course lectures who tell us that they have not observed a decrease in class attendance. In fact, these faculty members report that students appreciate having the lectures available and use them to review for exams, clarify difficult points, and catch up when they miss class for legitimate reasons.

Download a PDF of my report Podcast Your Lectures or, why students will still attend class.

Download a copy of the Public site and/or Private site spreadsheets.

Thanks to Deb Andrysiak for sending these three excellent sites about Twitter for academics.

100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics by Jill Gordon appears in the blog Best Colleges Online. The post correctly points out that Twitter "has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education" and offers 100 tips on getting started, Twitter etiquette, strategies, ideas for instructors, benefits for students, tips for the class, assignments using Twitter, suggestions for people and things to track on Twitter, Twitter tools, Twitter tools for use in academia, andinding people in academia to follow.

Twitter.edu: Resources for using a micro-blog application in an academic setting is Elaine Edwards of Kansas State's blog devoted to using Twitter in higher ed. It's current and includes posts titled "ech Tips for Educators," "Suggested K-State Twitter Guidelines," and "Examples of Twitter Usage from other Universities."

Twitter Fan Wiki is an actual Twitter site that was "set this up as a place to post cool ideas, uses and feature requests for Twitter. Share anything you've found that you think the Twitter community might be interested in!" This site also has a directory of higher ed Twitter sites.