MOOCs for Professor Profit?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Beth Thornburg

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days.  Usually they’re free.  But a provocative story in the Chronicle highlights a new service that offers “ultra-affordable” MOOCs — and the tuition paid by the online student is split between the service (StraighterLine) and the professor.  The professor chooses the price point, as long as it is above StraighterLine’s base price.  For example, one University of Colorado adjunct offers a math class.  Base price: $49. Tuition: $99.  So the professor keeps $50 per student. Professors also decide what services they will offer, and our sample math professor has decided to promise that he will respond quickly to student emails, hold online office hours every week, and create additional tutorial videos.  Presumably, course offerings and prices will vary widely as the market determines what services students demand and what they will pay for them.

A similar venture is Udemy, which uses each professor’s personal reputation as the credential that will attract students.  Two economics professors from George Mason have used the platform to start “Marginal Revolution University,” which is offering Development Economics as its inaugural course.

But will students enroll and make the course profitable?  Do faculty members participate for cash or glory or the satisfaction of helping provide education to those who can’t otherwise get access to higher education?  Maybe it’s a return to the medieval university’s use of famous lecturers to attract students, or maybe it’s just crazy.  Stay tuned.

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Better Research Assignments

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Beth Thornburg

While planning our spring semester courses, many of us may be looking for new ways to teach students both content knowledge and research skills. Get a good start with the resources on CTE’s Designing Research Assignments page.  In addition, personal help is available — Carolyn Carpan, CUL’s Assistant Director for Research Services, shares this offer of assistance from the library staff:

“Get I-Tagged” with Help from Your Liaison Librarian

Liaison librarians are available to enhance the effectiveness of the classes you teach. A liaison librarian is assigned to every subject area and is the specialist for understanding the information literacy needs for that particular area.

The importance of having a connection with your personal librarian is highlighted by the need for courses that satisfy the information literacy competencies (the I-tag) in the new university curriculum. When you are ready to “Get I-Tagged” or are considering including a research component in your class, your first stop should be a consultation with your liaison librarian.

What can you expect your liaison librarian to do?

  • Assist you in designing research assignments that match your student learning outcomes and enable your students to find, evaluate, and use information sources effectively
  • Teach class(es) and/or create research guides to help your students get started on their research
  • Meet with students for research consultations as they progress with their work
  • Take faculty suggestions for ordering library materials to support your teaching 

To locate your own liaison librarian, click here for more information.

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An Example of Teaching with Technology

Posted on November 29, 2012 by David Son

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the new Teaching with Technology Faculty Learning Community (FLC).  The nine members of the group bring different perspectives to the application of technology in teaching.  Even from reading the various entries in this blog, it is clear that technology has an important role in education at SMU!

Among the technology I use is a tablet PC.  First of all, it’s important to note that a tablet PC is not the same thing as an iPad or an Android tablet.  A tablet PC looks just like a regular laptop, but the screen can be folded down over the keyboard and written on with a stylus.  When connected to a classroom projector, the tablet PC can be used as a whiteboard/blackboard with the ability to switch to PowerPoint slides or any other application.  Built-in software allows you to scribble notes and figures on a blank page in various colors, patterns, and stroke widths.  You can also move parts of your scribbles to another part of the screen, and enlarge or reduce them at will.  When switching over to show PowerPoint slides, you can easily make annotations directly on the slides.  In addition, you can write freely over Excel and Word 2010 documents, and PDF documents using certain commercial software. While the features I describe above are certainly useful, using a tablet PC has some other benefits.  For example, one can “screencast” a classroom presentation using free or commercial software.  In screencasting, the software records the visual output of the tablet PC while at the same time recording audio through the built-in or external microphone.  Once the recording is complete, you can save the recording in any number of formats.  I now use this technology to record all of my lectures, and then I post the recordings to Blackboard (link to a short lecture excerpt).  How is this technology useful?  For example, if I have student-athletes who miss lectures, they now have an easy way to see and hear exactly what I presented in class.  And as long as an internet connection is available, they can access the recordings while they’re on the road.  Students who couldn’t quite understand something during the lecture can now review the lecture, pausing and rewinding as necessary.  A possible concern is that students will no longer come to class if they can simply view the recordings later.  However, in my experience I have observed very little drop-off in attendance.

A number of other educational applications are possible with a tablet PC, and I will discuss these in future posts.  Obviously, numerous other teaching technologies exist.  The members of the technology FLC have experimented with flipped classrooms, classroom response systems (clickers), podcasting, website organizers, blogging, and more.  We believe technology has a definite role in education.  Be open-minded about using technology in your teaching!

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Chaucer Doth Tweet, and so can you!

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Kristina Booker

I’ve really enjoyed the recent posts on using blogs in the classroom, so I thought I’d share how some of my colleagues in the English department have been using Twitter to interact with their students and the course material.

First, here’s how to get the ball rolling, especially for the Twitter-illiterate.  The instructor sets up a Twitter account specific to the course, incorporating the course number or the instructor’s name.  For example, for my Intro to Fiction course, I might use something like @BookerENGL2312.  Students could also set up accounts specific to the course if they would prefer to keep their personal tweets private from the instructor.  (I confess, I think I would prefer that they do!)  The instructor directs students to “Follow” the course account and can, in turn, “Follow” the students.  However, the instructor should also designate a hashtag to accompany all tweets related to the course, like #BookerFiction or #Booker2312.  This hashtag is very important because it allows the instructor to search for all tweets related to the course.  Finally, the instructor must give clear requirements for the Twitter component of the course, like a number of required tweets per week or per reading assignment.

Once everyone is connected and the hashtag has been designated, there are lots of ways to use Twitter as a supplement to the course.  Students can tweet links to material they see in the news or read online that relates to the course content; they can ask questions of their fellow students.  My colleagues sometimes use Twitter to send updates or reminders to students about paper conferences or deadlines.  I have also seen them re-tweet announcements about lectures from the English Department’s Twitter account or interesting tweets from literary luminaries with Twitter accounts.  (I highly recommend @DrSamuelJohnson, @LeVostreGC (Geoffrey Chaucer), and @1759MaryWol1797 (Mary Wollstonecraft.)

At this point, the functions I have described may sound like what you are already doing with Blackboard–posting resources and links, making announcements about deadlines, etc.  However, Twitter does offer some functionality that you can’t necessarily get from other tools because of its 140-character limit and updates in real time.  Because tweets must be so short, the most fascinating way to use Twitter is to ask the students to engage with the reading assignments outside class time.  I have watched my colleagues’ students “live-tweet” as they read class assignments– making connections, asking questions, noting patterns, brainstorming for paper ideas, etc.  By moving this interaction from the margin to the Twitter-verse (or, by replicating some of their marginalia online), the students create a conversation about the material before class even begins.  Additionally, instructors can model critical reading with their own “live-tweets” about the reading.  Further, reviewing the students’ tweets about the reading allows the instructor to gauge how they are responding to the material and plan class time more efficiently.  Tweets might reveal that students are misreading the text, or really interested in a particular element of it, or already developing arguments about it.  The instructor could even pose a specific question on twitter about the reading and allow students to begin to respond in their tweets, preparing them for a more informed in-person discussion.

Of course, any use of technology must be responsible and in support of the course goals.  What I have described would probably not work for all disciplines or all instructors, but my techno-savvy colleagues have really enjoyed its benefits in their discussion courses.  If anything, maybe Chaucer will finally seem accessible…140 characters at a time.

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Helpful or Just Creepy?

Posted on November 24, 2012 by Beth Thornburg

My students have reading assignments for every class, and the quality of class discussion depends very much on whether they have read (and even thought about) those pages.  Sometimes, especially at this busy time of year, I suspect that not every student has done his or her homework.  I think I’d like to be able to know who’s keeping up — both to deter slacking and to get some feedback on student engagement.

So you’d think I’d be overjoyed to learn about CourseSmart (a company that sells digital versions of textbooks by big publishers) and its new analytics service.  According to the Chronicle for Higher Education:

Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.

Nifty, huh? Textbooks that monitor student engagement.  Yet there’s that pesky invasion of privacy element that sort of creeps me out about secretly “watching” my students, especially when it could be combined with other forms of student data-mining. I can see that much of this information can be used for good.  But right now, I still vote Creepy.

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Reflections of a First-Time Classroom Blogger

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Meghan Ryan

BlogThis semester, for the first time, I experimented with blogging in one of my seminar courses. I asked the students to post at least one blog entry every other week and to feel free to post additional entries and/or comment on their classmates’ posts. I opted to count their blogging as part of their participation grades for the course. After twelve weeks of blogging, I thought I would briefly share my takeaways from the experience:

  •  Only Minor Technical Issues—I am pleased to report that there were only minor technical issues in setting up the blog and introducing the students to the technology. If I opt to blog with my students again next year, I think those technical issues would likely fade (although not entirely disappear because the technology may continue to be foreign to the new students).
  • “Prior Restraints”—I opted to require my preapproval before blog posts could be “published” on the blog because I wanted to ensure that the students were respectful of each other and any potential readers. Looking back, my law students were well behaved, and I probably did not need to take the precaution.
  • Early Connection Between Classroom Discussion and Outside World—I think blogging was effective in encouraging my students to connect our classroom discussions to the outside world more quickly and effectively than would otherwise have been the case. My guess is that this helped them to come up with more interesting, exciting, and timely paper topics at an earlier point in the semester, which is a positive.
  • Integrating Blogging into the Classroom Discussion—If I were to do it over again, I might  have further cut down the volume of outside reading assignments and instead allowed the blog to act as a good portion of the assigned reading. The risk of this is that the students would be less exposed to the authorities in the field and instead would bat around their own self-generated ideas and those of their classmates. Finding the right balance was a real struggle for me. I had hoped to integrate the blog posts into the classroom discussions, but we regularly ran out of time because the comments and ideas that the outside reading generated were more than enough to fill our mere two hours of discussion during each class period.
  • Early Assessment of Writing Abilities—One incredibly useful aspect of the blog is that it allowed me to gauge the students’ writing abilities very early in the semester. Emphasizing the importance of careful writing, I even printed out one of each student’s blog posts in an early class period and asked each student to edit what he or she had previously posted on the blog. I believe that nearly every single student—or perhaps even every single one of them—found a silly error that he or she should have caught before making the blog posting public. I hope that this was effective in training the students to not make similar errors in the final versions of their papers that they will turn in to me at the end of the semester.

The verdict is still out on whether I will engage in this experiment again when I next teach this seminar. At the beginning of the semester, I informed my students that this was an experiment and that they should let me know their thoughts on it as we progress. I imagine that I may hear something about the experiment on my student evaluation forms. Until then, I am withholding judgment.

For those of you who think blogging may enhance your classroom experiences, I recommend visiting the CTE resources on blogging, which I found incredibly helpful. Also, I found WordPress to be the easiest platform for me to use as a blogging newcomer.

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Teaching Toolkit

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Beth Thornburg

Toward the end of the semester, many of us could use an energizing new teaching idea.  Or we may be working on planning a spring course.  In either case, here’s a resource full of quick and useful strategies that may provide some inspiration.  “Little Ideas for Teaching” (LIFTs), from the Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology at Illinois State, offers more than twenty suggestions — each with a basic idea, citations to research about its effectiveness, a long list of ways to apply it, and an opportunity to reflect on how the reader might use that technique in teaching his or her own class.  All are short, but the topics range broadly, including things like Engaging Students in Critical Reading, Writing, & Speaking; Grading Student Participation; Smartphones; Building Classroom Communities; Using Infographics; Developing a Course Metaphor; and many more.  Here’s one for right now — Ending the Semester:  Individual and Group Activities.  Try one — it may give you a “lift.”

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Training Independent, and Diverse, Thinkers

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Meghan Ryan

Last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin—the big affirmative action case. The Supreme Court last tackled the issue nine years ago. Basically, the plaintiff in Fisher is arguing that UT should not take race into account in the admissions process because the University already has a sufficiently diverse student body due to its policy of automatically admitting any Texas student who graduated in the top 10% of his or her high school class. Pundits on both sides of the issue are now trying to predict the outcome of this case, which is, of course, important to the future of higher education.

In law school classrooms, we foster diversity even beyond race—diversity of viewpoints, that is. When I call on first-year law students, I often ask them to argue a particular side of an issue: “Defend the murderer.” Or, “explain why Bernie Madoff should not be held liable.” Being able to argue on behalf of any client is an important skill for lawyers to possess. Indeed, in certain circumstances, our model code of ethics does not allow us to refuse representation of a client unless “the client or the cause is so repugnant to the lawyer as to be likely to impair the client-lawyer relationship or the lawyer’s ability to represent the client.” But the importance of diverse viewpoints goes even beyond this professional skill of, as students often call it, “arguing both ways.” In the classroom, I also look to foster students’ confidence to challenge authority. “Why is Justice Scalia wrong here?” “Is this statute just?” This takes a bit of doing because students often enter law school with significant respect for the law. Respect for the law is naturally a good thing, but it does not mean that the law, or even a Supreme Court Justice, is always right. Those students in my classroom, they are the future. They are the ones who will be shaping the law, and to effectively do so, they need to be able to see that the law can be changed and that it should be questioned. And to accomplish this they need to engage with each other so that they can see all sides of the law, or any other source of authority. In my experience, a diversity of viewpoints makes them stronger, and smarter.

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What Do You Think About Algebra?

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Lynne Stokes

There was an interesting article in the New York Times this summer called “Is Algebra Necessary?“.  The author is Andrew Hacker, an emeritus political science professor of political science at CUNY, who has co-authored a book entitled Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.A provocative quote from the article is the following:

“Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interests of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.”

One of the author’s points was that algebra is not used in day-to-day life as much as some other quantitative knowledge, like Statistical Science. He suggests, for example, that a useful topic to cover would be how the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is created and computed.  Since I am a Professor of Statistics, people might think I would be all for this change of focus. I do kind of like the idea of educating future citizens about things like the CPI – it is after all based on a probability sampling— which is one of my main research areas. But I have some discomfort with the notion that we should only teach things that are applicable to daily life skills. Should we abandon Shakespeare?

I was delighted to find that Caroline Brettell thought the article was an interesting read too. In fact, she used it as a launching point for a discussion in the first ever SMU Interdisciplinary Institute luncheon discussion held on October 24.  I attended the Interdisciplinary Institute luncheon discussion, along with several others, most of whom had an interest in math or math education. My reading of our luncheon discussion was that no participants completely agreed with the thesis of the article. Maybe that was expected because it was a self-selected group (NOT a probability sample, so not conclusions can be drawn about the university community!) Two ideas that surfaced were these:

(1) The problem is not algebra but the teaching of algebra. If only we could train teachers better, every child would be able to learn algebra and then it wouldn’t be a problem.

I am not so sure about this one. I have a child with learning difficulties and I tried every way possible to teach her mathematics (never mind algebra!) and there seemed to be something different about her brain that prevented the type of logic needed to make it click. So while I’m sure that better teaching would make algebra accessible to MORE people, I don’t think it would make it accessible to everyone.

(2) The level of education being discussed matters.

I think we were in general agreement that it seems like a bad idea to eliminate algebra for college educated people. If the criterion were that knowledge must be directly applicable, wouldn’t we be a trade school? But I feel a little conflicted about K-12. Maybe there are talented and non-college bound people who are discouraged by having to learn the abstractness of algebra but who could benefit from a course in “citizen’s data analysis”. But frankly, it is hard for me to see how to talk about things like the CPI, for example, without the language of algebra—just as a way of representing ideas. There is a famous introductory statistics text by some faculty at Berkeley (Statistics by Freedman, Pisani, and Purves) who attempted to write a book without formulas (we use it here in STAT 1301). Here is its definition of mean: “The average of a list of numbers equals their sum, divided by how many there are.” You should see their definition of standard deviation! Their book is still in print (since 1978), and we use it here in STAT 1301. However, there are few other texts that take this approach, and this may be because of its awkwardness, and maybe it really doesn’t help make things accessible.

One final thought that bothers me about eliminating the teaching of algebra for anyone is this. I think there is value in educating the general public about the existence of mathematical tools, and how they are used by scientists and social scientists, even if they themselves aren’t able to use them to solve problems. These tools start with algebra. I feel disturbed about the “my opinion is as good as your opinion” attitude that some people (and politicians) have about scientific questions like whether there are man-made contributions to climate change. If people are not even educated about the existence of mathematical modeling, it may be even more difficult to explain the nature of the scientific evidence. Maybe we need a math appreciation curriculum – modeled on the arts!

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Command Attention–Your Way

Posted on November 2, 2012 by George Holden

Let me begin with an admission: Although I have been teaching for about 30 years, and am on the CTE’s Advisory Board, I have never taken a course on how to teach. Yes, I’ve read a few books on the topic, but most of what I’ve learned is through my own mistakes and observing others. So if I use the wrong terminology, forgive me.

In my role as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Psychology Department, I frequently have the opportunity to observe faculty and graduate students in the classroom. Invariably, I come away impressed. The instructors are knowledgeable, good communicators, and clearly committed to doing a good job.

That job, in some ways, has gotten more difficult in the past decade or so, particularly for those teaching large, required classes. Instructors are competing with the enticement of cell phones and laptops. Students also seem to have shorter attention spans than previous cohorts.

That brings me to what I consider to be a central characteristic of effective instructors: a strong classroom presence. Better instructors command attention and connect to the students. They do this in various ways. Some teachers are natural entertainers, and come to class equipped with a variety of jokes. Others frequently recount rivoting personal experiences. Certain instructors are virtual actors on stage and use body language, modulating cadence, and other techniques to maintain attention. My favorites are those who are so passionate about the subject matter that it is infectious. Maybe the best instructors do a bit of all of that.

When I started teaching, I’m afraid I used none of those techniques. I was too nervous and instead devoted all my energy and attention to trying to get across as much content as possible. Now, I realize that if students aren’t listening, my most brilliant insights will be lost on deaf ears.

So my advice to instructors is this: Develop your own style of classroom presence. But whatever that may be, be sure to connect to students and command attention.

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