Using the Clicker

One of my first charges when I became the Director of PETAL was to showcase the “clicker,” and since then I have seen and heard many testimonials about what a wonderful tool it is. I have also seen several complaints that is it nothing but a fancy (and expensive) way to take attendance. Of course, while the truth is undoubtedly somewhere between those extremes, I would contend that if you only use them to check attendance, then they are most likely a waste of students’ time and money.

However, it doesn’t take a lot of effort or creativity to find ways to use the clicker in other, more effective ways, such as to increase student engagement or keep abreast of where your students are in their understanding of the course content.

Clickers are also effective for fostering in-class interaction and administering quizzes. They can be used to create “teachable moments,” where you pique student interest by asking a question that leads to discussion or, more importantly, makes students realize that they don’t understand something and will therefore be more likely to pay attention to the explanation that is about to come. Clickers can be used for polling students with the added advantage of no one knowing how anyone else is voting (which can promote honesty and alleviate peer pressure). They can also be used to collect and grade homework assignments.

Of course, clickers are not ever going to be the savior of higher education; however, they can be a useful and effective tool in certain situations. And the more effort you put into finding ways to use them in your classes, the more your student outcomes are likely to improve.

The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education

Over twenty years ago, Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson published a short article on college teaching in which they advocated seven basic principles of good practice.

These are:

1. Encourages contacts between students and faculty.
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
3. Uses active learning techniques.
4. Gives prompt feedback.
5. Emphasizes time on task.
6. Communicates high expectations.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

While this simple list appears almost too simple to have a meaningful impact on your teaching, how many can you say you are currently applying in your classes?

Click here to see the article in its entirety.

Chickering, A.W, and Gamson, Z.F. (1987). "Seven
Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." AAHE Bulletin
39(7), 3-7.

Extending the Classroom with the Internet

While most people who think of online learning think of it in terms of distance learning, I would argue that the best use of online learning is actually in the classroom, or, more specifically, in connection with it, as an online supplement for the traditional course.

My first experience with “online learning” happened over 10 years ago when I decided to create a supplemental website for a Freshman Composition course I was teaching. It started out as just a spiffed up version of the syllabus I had handed out on the first day of class, but I soon realized that I wasn’t bound by paper limitations. I didn’t have to economize my use of space anymore.

I started supplementing my “page” with images and links to additional resources. After awhile, I started putting assignments online, saving paper and, perhaps more importantly, the time I had been spending in line at the copy machine. Then, I started using threaded discussion boards and even chat rooms.

Of course, doing all of this from scratch took time: both in learning how to do it and learning all the kinds of things I could do. However, my ultimate goal was to improve the learning opportunities for my students, to expand the pedagogical possibilities of my classroom.
I soon learned that the more substance I was able to give to my site, the more students took advantage of those opportunities. In fact, one month my website had over 60,000 hits, so there were definitely opportunities. The important thing, however, is that I was giving them things to do once they got there.

All of this combined to elevate not only the level of class discussions, in person and online, but also the level of student performance on papers, projects, and exams.

Of course, it took time for me to discover the various pedagogical applications of Internet technology, and there are plenty more applications out there or on the horizon for all of us to discover. But what I find most important in all if this is that the Internet is a resource of virtually limitless possibilities, and the more we are able to take advantage of those possibilities for our students, the better teachers we will be. And our students will be the ones who benefit.

Using Multimedia to Engage Students

When I was at UAB a few years back, I developed and led the Instructional Media Group at the School of Public Health, which basically meant that I was in charge of the School’s website and online course development. Upon my arrival there, I inherited a system where faculty taught online by simply videotaping all of their lectures. To do this, they would either just deliver them in the studio like they would in class or, worse yet, have us actually record them in the class. They would then consider themselves done with the course before it even started, except of course, the multiple choice tests.

It was a perfect example of how not to teach online.

One plus, however, is that it gave me the motivation to explore alternative ways of presenting instructor-based material, while, at the same time, providing me the opportunity to develop considerable expertise and experience in the use and production of streaming media.

However, I will leave further explorations on that subject to later entries and focus here on one example that came up this week.

I was invited this week to Dr. Sue Walker’s Poetry Writing course to talk about ways to present her students’ poems in multimedia. In order that I would have an example to talk about, as well as to force myself to think adequately about the issue before getting up in front of her class, I developed a couple of short films. I am presenting one here as an example of what can be done with multimedia in general.

This film is based on a poem I wrote several years ago. I recorded it on my computer with a cheap microphone, and then, using video editing software, images from the Internet, and an audio CD from the Instructional Media Center here in the Library, knitted everything together into something that is (I would argue) far more engaging than a sheet of paper with some words on it.

What I’ve done here may or may not seem to apply to your class or discipline, but I would wager that with a little thought and creativity, you could come up with some ideas that would be appropriate and that, more importantly, provide you with a strategy to engage your students in new and exciting ways.

To see the video, click here. And please feel free to provide your comments and feedback.

Some Thoughts on Turnitin

Sorry for not posting last week. I was tied up early in the week preparing for our Turnitin workshops, and then I had to go out of town to close on our house outside of Birmingham. I promise to make up for the missed post with one or two extras this week. But since I spent so much time working on Turnitin last week, I thought I would write about that here.

Turnitin is a powerful anti-plagiarism tool that is typically used to catch students who dangerously (or ignorantly) push the limits of academic honesty, and, indeed, it is most popular among faculty as a police mechanism, as a tool to apprehend students who play too loose with “the rules.”

And that is fine, to an extent.

The problem arises, however, when we realize that, perhaps, students don’t know the rules. Or, worse yet, that students have an unsophisticated understanding of them, and therefore an inadequate appreciation of what makes them so important.

As is typical with most everything else involving the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, a “thou shalt not” approach will often not work, and can just as frequently backfire. Recognizing this when deciding how to use Turnitin can not only improve the effectiveness of your plagiarism prevention efforts, it can also create new teaching opportunities that can extend those efforts beyond just your current assignment.

For example, I was recently working with a faculty member on how to use Turnitin. She had given her students a famous essay in her field and had asked them to summarize it. As is consistent with new policies that USA will be implementing soon, she had also had her students email their files to her so that she could submit them to Turnitin to protect their identity, which she did one at a time. What she realized was that each time she added a new student paper, the percentages in the originality reports got increasingly worse.

I suppose many faculty’s gotcha meters would have red-lined about that point, but she wisely decided that rather than signaling widespread cheating on the part of her students, what it really signified was a significant misunderstanding on the part of virtually all of her students on what is appropriate in regard to quoting, paraphrasing, and citing. So instead of failing all of her students on the assignment, she decided to use the originality reports from Turnitin to show them what they were doing wrong, as well as to give her students opportunities to get better on the next couple of assignments before bringing the hammer down.

The beauty of this approach is that not only are they learning from and about famous essays, they are also learning how to write about (and from) them appropriately.

Reader (i.e., Student) Response Theory

As many of you know, my dissertation work (and my research agenda in general) involves the application of literary theory to teaching and learning. Most of my writing involves teaching and learning in the online environment, but virtually everything I write about is equally applicable to the traditional classroom as well.

Today I want to talk a little about Wolfgang Iser and Reader Response Theory. For Iser, the meaning of a text is determined solely by the individual reader’s interaction with it. It is important to point out, then, that meaning cannot be located purely in the “author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology,” but rather in the interaction between the two, during the “reading process itself” (Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, p. 31).

I firmly believe that this concept, while obviously oversimplified here, can lend a tremendous amount of depth and insight into our understanding of issues regarding teaching and learning. Indeed, it is this kind of interaction, between the author’s writing and the reader’s reading, between the instructors teaching and the student’s learning, that needs to be explored more fully, especially in the online learning literature, but also in other areas of education research.

For Iser, a text is simply a collection of marks on a page that only comes alive in the experience of a reader, so when we begin to think of teaching in the same way that Iser thinks of a text, we come to realize that teaching is like the proverbial tree in the woods: it is only “heard” if there is someone there to hear it.

The critiques and possibilities of online learning

Over the years, online learning has taken its share of hits from critics all too ready to spring. Yet while online learning, in its past and present states, is certainly worthy of attack, most of the attacks are troubling in either their shortsightedness or their tendency toward the reactionary. These attacks, with David Noble’s Digital Diploma Mills (1997-2001) chief among them, all seem to hold an irrational fear that some kind of fast-food-one-size-fits-all-mass-produced-cookie-cutter-reductionist-automated monstrosity is going to kill off and ultimately replace the hallowed halls of academia, a fear that the ivory tower will be devoured by a vacuous pit.

In this regard, it is worth noting that while a library is an important feature of a university, and while that library contains an appropriate amount of “knowledge” or information from which an enterprising student could appropriate a sufficient learning base equivalent to what could be learned in a classroom course, or even an entire degree program, there is no one who would argue that the library threatens to render the rest of the university obsolete. In other words, the library is not the university.

Instruction has as much to do with the provider and provision—as well as with the receiver and reception—of instruction as it does with the actual content to be learned, and no quality instruction or learning can result from a lack of understanding of this principle. Or, to put it another way, the unique advantage of the Internet is that it is not a delivery mechanism; rather, it is a two-way communication device, and if online learning is ever going to gain its share of respect in the academy, online instructors and course designers must never lose sight of this.