The Medium

I received an interesting email from one of my online students that made me think about the medium of online education. We as faculty are all experts in our respective disciplines. Most of us mastered our discipline in a traditional face to face classroom. And most of us try to replicate how we learned in those classrooms. However, very few of us have taken an online class and our thought process is very different from those of our students in an online class.  What they view as acceptable way of learning. Their views may or may not be mistaken, however half of reality is perception and the medium of communication creates perceptions.  

Ease of use creates the false perception that "this material must be accurate"  explaining the popularity and acceptance of  the content in Wikipedia. 

What we the faculty were trained in a traditional classroom to consider as cheating is not considered cheating by students in an online class. 

The following is a portion of the email that got me thinking:

Hi, Mr. Javanmard, I took the  Quiz, and found this question, I probably spent half an hour trying to answer it, and I gave up and just chose an answer, I was curious so I also posted it on Yahoo Answers, I recently received an answer and the people told me the answer is none of the above, can you explain to me the correct answer, because everyone I contacted couldn't answer it

Please notice:

First the student considers half an hour as a very long time. In the world of instant gratification of online half an hour is an eternity.

Second, the student did not see anything wrong with posting the question on Yahoo answers.  This point made me suspicious and I spoke to some students and found out that most test questions can be found on popular search engines. So a student sits down at a computer. Enters the question into a search engine and answers the question. Another way is for a group of students to take turns taking quizzes and sharing the correct answers with others in person or over Social Media sites.  The second method does not work in my classes because I do not release the correct answers till the day after the due date.   

This made wonder is this the fault of the technology or is this the fault of educators who advocate Cooperative Learning? These students are extremely cooperative. They take turn sacrificing their score on small quizzes to help the team. This is exact behavior that is encouraged in cooperative cultures of Asia and the U.S. Army Infantry (the team above one self).
 

Flipped Classroom & Mobile Technology

During the spring semester, I watched a student constantly staring at his phone during the lecture.  He was paying attention but kept staring at that damn phone. Extremely annoyed after class I asked him "WHY?"
 I was surprised by him showing me his phone and what he was looking at.
He was using the Kindle App on his iPhone. What was he reading?  The textbook which he bought for $9.99
I was embarrassed and felt old all at the same time. I quickly realized that I am getting old. My vision has been declining since my forty second birthday.  Also I realized that the PC is out and Mobile is the new technology. I had read this in financial papers but here it was confronting me. I was jealous of that 19 years old kid.He had great eyesight and he was up with the latest technology.
Fast forward to today....
I got an email from Techsmith they produce Camtasia, Snag it and Jing which I use for my online classes.
They are coming out with their new and improved Camtasia 8 (I am too cheap to update I am still on version 4 or 5). After watching their video pitch I started watching some of the other videos on their Youtube Channel.

I found an old idea but with a twist. The old idea was a "Flipped Classroom". Instead of the teacher being "a sage on the stage" have him/her be a helping hand or a tutor to the students. The idea is have students get the lecture material at home at their own pace using (my old fashioned version) computers, CD, DVD,...  or (the new mobile version) using iPod and/or i Phones.
So what will they do in the classroom? You ask!!
In class they participate in classroom problem solving exercises where they attempt to apply what they learned from reading and the lecture on their little handheld devices.
This idea of  flipping the classroom goes way back to the days of CDs and DVDs see the video below. (this video makes me nostalgic for the days of CDs)......

 

Here is the twist, The following is a video showing how one teacher uses iPods to accomplish the same task. No more CDs and DVDs!!

Here is another one with more little iPods. It must be nice to have 20/20 vision! 

 

In case you are wondering, I am doing this whole thing on my little iPod Touch! I want to be young!!

Oh before you get excited there is only one problem a very big problem!!!!
No most of our students have iPods and some have iPads.  The BIG Problem with this method is as follow:
Many of  the students do not read the textbook. Will they watch these videos? I gave up on the Flipped classroom method when I realized this fact.
Only if there was a way to track them.. Where I could be sure that they have watched the lecture and are not just winging it.
Want to see my attempt at a Flipped classroom?

Is College Too Easy?

 I ran into the following article and found myself agreeing with the writer. It could be that I am frustrated with poorly written papers. The article argues that college is becoming too easy.

Over the past half-century, the amount of time college students actually study — read, write and otherwise prepare for class — has dwindled from 24 hours a week to about 15, survey data show.

It criticizes not only the students but also the colleges.

Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy. Today’s collegiate culture, they say, rewards students with high grades for minimal effort and distracts them...

Are we guilty? How much of this is due to the political and economics pressure placed on schools to graduate as many students as possible? 

Here is the link to the article

Future of Online Education

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The push for Standardized Learning Objectives and discussions around verification of students in an online class will lead to the model used at Western Governors University.  The online class will be a platform for faculty to gather information to share with students, so they can take a standardized exam at a local testing center.

Once this model takes root, the next step will be to evaluate faculty based on success rate of the students on standardized exams.

I have mixed feelings about this vision of future.

Procrastination

This is a great video on Procrastination which you will encounter with your students.

Free Textbooks

Here is a company "Flatworld" that gives away the electronic version of their textbook away for free. They charge $25 for a printed and bound version of the book mailed to the student. They will let you cusomize the textbook. They will let you (I quote) "Change the order of chapters or sections - or delete them altogether. You can add large chunks of information like a case study or an exercise set." "...and actually make changes at the sentence level."

Here is another site with lots of good links to cut textbook prices.

Pick a Prof has arrived!

Everyone forget about ratemyprofessor.com! There is a new site that will send shivers up your spine. There is a new site called Pickaprof.com. This site posts grade histories, the number of A-F's given by every professor in every course, directly from Rio Hondo College records. I have blogged about this site before but due to Rio's grading being low tech, I did not expect them to have our grades for awhile. Well they have our grade history now and so do the students.

Rewiring your brain

Is the Internet rewiring your brain? Here is an article from Atlantic Monthly that claims the Internet is rewiring our brain. The article provides anecdotal evidence that people (the literary types) are having a hard time concentrating on long pieces.

The story quotes a study by University College London that states:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power
browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for
quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the
traditional sense.

The story continues with differentiating the effects of internet and television. The story also quotes a psychologist by the name Marryann Wolf who argues that:

...is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our
genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the
symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or
other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play
an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our
brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as
the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from
the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an
alphabet.

I can say that I have personal experience with the above statement. During my time in Japan and China, as I learned the various Chinese characters, I could tell something was changing inside my brain.

After concentrating and getting to the end of the article, I can summarize the thesis of this article is the internet makes us Skimmers and mere decoders of information and we lose our ability "to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction..."

If this is the case with previously formed brain just imagine how our students who have grown up with the internet read!

recommended content for you on iTunes U

I saw the following on iTunes U. The material is a little outdated (2001) but it explains how our students learn. The material is directed at children but it does apply to our students who have grown up with technology.

Media, Education, & the Marketplace, Fall 2001

iTunes for Mac and Windows

Copyright © 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved

The Darkside of the Web

First there was ratemyprofessor.com Next there was Pick a Prof where you can find out who is an easy grader and who is not. And now there is Postyourtest.com.
I read about it here on Inside Higher Ed.

Why The Hybrids Are Not Doing Well...Auditory Learners?

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a student. I asked this student "Why don't you sign up for Hybrid classes?" I explained that it is half the time in class and she can save time and money on gas. She replied "in an online or hybrid class I have to read the book more. In a regular class the Professor covers the reading."  She continued "If I take good notes, I can get the main ideas of the reading." Finally as she observed my facial expression, she closed with "I am an auditory learner."  

¿Habla Espanol? Poquito? maybe--

I am in Buenos Aires and my feet are killing me. This is my first trip out of good old USA in over 6 years. I decided to try and learn some Spanish but that upside down question mark has convinced me that I don´t want to study.
Instead I am drinking lots of Cerveza and begining to understand all of the Hablaing around me. Slowly I am begining to habla too.