Learners
Active Learning Classroom | Did You Know? Visionary Status | Book Review | Hot 5 |
Communicating for
Active Learning Classroom
Engaging Students in Active Learning Spaces Today’s student is constantly connected through mobile devices and technology. BGSU’s new Active Learning Classrooms (ALC) capitalize on this connectivity through spaces that offer a flexible physical environment encouraging movement, collaboration and seamless access to technology. Last year an ALC test-bed space was constructed in Hayes Hall, and this fall four new Active Learning Classroom (ALC) prototypes were introduced in Olscamp Hall. These spaces offer slightly different options from the Hayes ALC. The five different ALCs give faculty and students the opportunity to compare and contrast classroom designs, as BGSU plans to incorporate more ALCs as part of the future master plan for new construction and campus remodeling. Each of the four ALCs in Olscamp features a very different design. Rooms 201, 203, 206, and 208 range in size, but are all spacious enough to allow students to easily roll, swivel and move around to work in groups and to view the many monitors, screens, and white boards. The rooms offer innovative designs that inspire creativity and conform to students’ learning needs.
Students enjoy some of the low-tech features of the ALC such as huddle boards (small white boards) and writable walls. At the same time, the ALCs offer many options to incorporate technology, including options for students to project their work from their laptops or tablets onto large-screen televisions. Although the technology in these rooms is alluring, it is important that pedagogy remains the primary focus and that technology is used primarily as a tool to improve learning.
The ALC classrooms have multiple ways to project information.
While there is a large screen for projection in many of the spaces, there is no obvious “front” of the room, which can be one of the most challenging adjustments for the instructor and the students. In this “decentralized” classroom, the teacher becomes a guide, while the students are encouraged to create content and more actively contribute to the learning process. The classrooms are currently being used by faculty from a variety of disciplines including General Studies Writing, Math, Science, and Communication.
Students gather around a large-screen TV in Olscamp 201.
The versatile layouts activate learning and increase student engagement. For example, room 208 Olscamp uses uniquely shaped tables with a whiteboard surface to promote hands-on collaboration.
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Fall 2013: Issue One
2 Active Learning Classroom (continued)
Dr. Glen Tiede, is part of a team from the Department of Physics & Astronomy that is conducting an experiment to measure the impact of the ALC on the learning process. He says, “We need to communicate to instructors that active learning classrooms don’t demand that classes be completely restructured. One can, and should, use one’s previous practices and experiences with teaching when teaching in an active learning classroom. It’s just that the active learning classrooms provide more resources and flexibility for teaching and so more opportunities for creative teaching.” One innovative use of the space is to conduct a flipped
classroom where the lecture takes place online outside of the classroom and assignments and hands-on activities are completed in the classroom. If you are interested in offering your class in an ALC during the spring semester, please contact Monica Hartzler at mhartzl@bgsu.edu or 419-372-5333. There are some available time blocks this fall if you would like to try out the spaces. And stay tuned for future Active Learning Classroom trainings and workshops at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Did You Know? Top Hat Top Hat, formerly Top Hat Monocle, is a relatively new Canadian start-up company that created a new Student Response and Engagement System. The creators noticed an increasing number of devices cluttering up students’ desks causing distractions, so they decided to develop a program that uses students’ own devices to engage them in classroom learning. Instead of purchasing a new device such as a clicker, students use their laptops, tablets, smartphones and even non-smartphones. The program is free for instructors, while students pay a $20 fee for a semester or a 5-year subscription fee of only $38.
PowerPoint slides. The information can be stored so that students can access and review questions from previous lessons. Dr. Rainey plans to incorporate Top Hat in smaller classes to increase student participation and provide a more comfortable option for shy students to be heard. Top Hat allows teachers to ask more than seven types of questions diving deeper than simple knowledge questions. Question formats include traditional multiple choice, matching, ordering, and sorting. Students can also provide a single word response that is used to create a word cloud. Teachers can poll the students to ask for their feedback or to evaluate their level of comprehension. There is a discussion option, in which students can also ask questions during the lecture. Often students may have pressing questions that hinder their comprehension of the lecture. Instead of waiting to find the answer, they can submit the question through Top Hat. Meanwhile TAs, lecture assistants, or the instructor can monitor discussion questions and provide instantaneous responses. When students are engaged in learning, large lecture halls feel smaller, quiet students feel more comfortable participating, and easily distracted students stay on task.
BGSU assistant Professor Sarah Rainey, in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has introduced Top Hat to her larger lecture classes. She finds the program easy to use for both instructors and students. She demonstrated the quick add feature that allows instructors to quickly create questions by pulling information from
If you are interested in using Top Hat in your classes you can find more information on the company’s website: www.tophat.com.
3 Visionary Status: Patrick Awuah Jr. Patrick Awuah Jr. is the founder and president of a private liberal arts college in Ghana, West Africa. Ashesi, which literally means “beginning” in the Fante dialect of the Akan language, is the name he chose for his college to make a case for the need for liberal arts education in Ghana and other countries in Africa. The college opened its doors in 2001 and graduated its first students in 2005. Awuah believes that liberal arts education provides the best preparation for leadership. He explains that leadership matters, particularly in Africa, and that it is not merely about politics; leadership requires an intellectual, as well as, moral commitment. He believes that problems facing the continent of Africa are a result of poor leadership. Awuah therefore asserts that his job at Ashesi (together with other leaders) is to help educate good and committed leaders - the leaders who will put Africa on a better path. He emphasized that leadership was about the elite, those who have had a good education – the 5% who have had the chance to go to college – and who are empowered to lead their nations in such capacities as civil servants, lawyers, nurses, and police. His belief is that a good education is one that engages the student in critical thinking so that he or she can better “create” solutions for problems that are encountered. Thus students who enroll in Ashesi are engaged in four years of a curriculum that emphasizes critical thinking, community service, and the use of technology. Awuah saw firsthand that the “ability to create is the most powerful thing that can happen to an individual” during nearly a decade of working for Microsoft in Seattle. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Cooperation (BBC), Awuah described what planted the seed of a university in his mind. He described how becoming a parent caused him “to reconsider the importance of Africa for his children and their children,” which led him to return to his native country of Ghana in West Africa. Furthermore, the desire to secure a better education for his own children spurred him to reconsider what kinds of educational opportunities should be available to all the young men and women of his country. As a result of research into what he considered ineffective leadership in Ghana and most of sub-Saharan Africa, he became convinced that “every society must be intentional about educating its leaders.” Thus, his
goal in establishing Ashesi University was to “train a new generation of ethical entrepreneurial leaders…of exceptional integrity who have the ability to confront the complex problems, to ask the right questions and come up with workable solutions.” Patrick Awuah left Ghana in his teens to attend Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. There he earned bachelor degrees in engineering and economics. In addition, he holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He has also been awarded two honorary doctoral degrees, one from Swarthmore and a second from Babson College. He was also nominated as a Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and again awarded one of Ghana’s highest awards, the Membership of the Order of the Volta by President J. A. Kuffour in 2007. Other awards to his name include Microsoft Alumni Foundation “Integral Fellow,” John P. McNulty Prize, and the Millennium Excellence Award for Educational Development. For more information on Patrick Awuah’s establishment of Ashesi: http://media.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/?p=384 http://www.ted.com/speakers/patrick_awuah.html http://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_awuah_on_educating_ leaders.html http://www.ashesi.edu.gh/about/office-of-the-president/ biography.html http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/world/africa/patrickawuah-ashesi-ghana/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/ international/2013/04/29/african-voices-patrick-awuah-a. cnn.html
Fall 2013: Issue One
4 Book Review
Higher Education in the Digital Age This new volume by William Bowen, President Emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and of Princeton University, is a revised version of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values Bowen gave at Stanford University in 2012. In the first of the two lectures, Bowen’s background as an economist helps to create the context for his discussion about the need for American institutions of higher education to cut costs. In an extraordinarily well documented argument, he analyzes the current financial state of American higher education, examining several ways to curb expenditures. His ideas are firmly rooted in an academic rather than a corporate context, but some of the solutions he proposes will still be difficult for many in the academy to swallow. For example, he notes that while universities are very good at adding programs, centers, and majors, they must become better at “subtracting” the same elements when they have outlived their usefulness. He also asks administrators to think beyond the individual institution when asking the crucial questions about the future of higher education in America, questions including: How many research universities do we need as a nation? How many Ph.D.s do we need in various fields? Should tenure be granted for a limited number of years, rather than for life? In his second lecture, Bowen argues that online education has the potential to be a “truly transformative” force in cutting costs and helping more students complete their degree programs on time. At the same time, he notes, there are three obstacles that must be overcome before the full potential of online learning can be realized. The first is the lack of hard evidence about the efficacy of online learning and the potential cost savings. The second is “the lack of shared but customizable teaching and learning platforms.” The third, and most important, is the current “mindset” of many faculty and administrators regarding online instruction. In this context, he says that when making decisions about how faculty will teach (online, face-to-face, blended) “there is a self-evident need for consultation with those who are expert in their disciplines and experienced
in teaching” but, he adds, “this is not the same thing as giving faculty veto power over change.” He even takes on the question of academic freedom, saying that while faculty members must have complete freedom of speech, “this freedom of expression should not imply unilateral control over methods of teaching.” In discussing opportunities for lowering costs and raising completion rates, Bowen looks at the potential in massive open online courses (MOOCs), collaboration among colleges and universities to design and share courses, data-driven computerized instruction such as the courses being designed by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Khan Academy courses, and inverted classrooms. He also looks at the potential inherent in asynchronous online courses for simplifying scheduling, allowing for flexible start and end dates, among many other possibilities. Lest he be considered an iconoclast of the first order, Bowen ends his lecture with a plea for what must remain of the traditional idea of a university. He is clear that not everything can or should be online and insists that personal interaction with faculty members and fellow students must be maintained. He also emphasizes the importance of “unswerving commitment” to freedom of thought. And he is clear that universities must teach values as well as knowledge. Bowen ends with an exhortation to universities to take risks and try new technologies, to constantly and rigorously assess the impact of the new technologies, and to be patient because the process of trying and testing will be slow and sometimes frustrating. A particularly nice addition to this volume are responses to and reflections on Bowen’s talk by such higher education luminaries as Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner, Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller, Columbia professor of literature Andrew Delbanco, and Stanford President John Hennessy.
Fall 2013: Issue One
5
Hot 5
Teaching Tips Below are five websites that can assist educators in a variety of ways, from teaching tips to document sharing to educational videos. Check them out!
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Faculty Focus http://www.facultyfocus.com/ Faculty Focus is an online blog focusing on effective teaching strategies. Through e-newsletters and website information this blog addresses both face-to-face and online classroom approaches. It offer a variety of features− from App of the Week to Philosophy of Teaching−that help faculty learn about teaching.
Pirate Pad http://piratepad.net/eNHM7XSK4F Pirate Pad is a real-time document collaboration tool that provides a workspace for one common document to be created by a group of people. There is also a chat feature. The major difference between this collaboration tool and others is that each contributor’s additions are highlighted in a different color.
TeacherTube http://www.teachertube.com/index.php TeacherTube, as the name suggests, is YouTube for teachers. The site primarily focuses on educational and instructional videos, along with photos, audio and documents relevant to specific topic. Teachers will find this site particularly useful because they can now easily use a video or audio to help make learning interactive and fun.
BaseCamp https://basecamp.com/ Developers designed Basecamp to “offer to-do lists, wikistyle web-based text documents, milestone management, file sharing, time tracking, and a messaging system.” With an entire project on one page, BaseCamp keeps everything organized.
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Google in Education http://www.google.com/edu/ Google in Education is self-described as “open technology to improve learning for everyone everywhere.” Teachers and students can use the website to find a variety of academic resources.
Fall 2013: Issue One