Learners Communicating for
Coming Soon: The Center for Faculty Excellence | Apply to Join a Learning Community for 2013-14! Book Review | Visionary Status: Eric Mazur Hot 5 | Did You Know?
Coming Soon: The Center for Faculty Excellence
You’ve heard whisperings and rumors, but it’s now official: the Center for Online and Blended Learning and the Center for Teaching and Learning are joining forces to become the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE). This new unit is intended to be a “one-stop shop” for all faculty development needs, bringing face-to-face and online and blended learning under the aegis of one organization. The Provost’s office has put out a call for applicants for the new position of the Executive Director of the CFE, and the
process of interviewing candidates is underway. It is hoped that a new Executive Director will be in place soon. Connie Molnar of COBL and Karen Meyers of CTL will both report to the new Executive Director. Stay tuned. These are exciting times for faculty development, and the new CFE will play an integral role in what’s to come.
Apply to Join a Learning Community for 2013-14! The Center for Faculty Excellence will sponsor 15 Learning Communities for the coming year. To learn more about any of the communities described below or to apply to join one of these communities, go to http://www.bgsu.edu/ctl/ page96821.html. Active Blended Learning Environment Pedagogies (ABLE) The emergence of powerful web applications combined with the rise of mobile devices for teaching and learning in the classroom has created a unique opportunity for educators. With Active Learning pedagogies on the rise and new opportunities for Blended classrooms, many educators are asking “Where do I start?” This LC is focused on forming a community of faculty, staff and graduate students who are invested in the discovery of new technologies for the purpose of developing effective active or blended learning pedagogies, utilizing new tools for research, and transforming classroom experiences. The Active Blended Learning Environment Pedagogies (ABLE Pedagogies) Learning Community will focus on innovative strategies integrating new and engaging mobile and web applications
into the “Active” or “Blended” learning classroom as well as into academic research. Active Learning and the Transition to Digital This Learning Community focuses on integrating technology and pedagogy to foster active learning environments that challenge students to think critically and solve problems in creative ways. During meetings the community will actively investigate methods for employing technology in engaging and authentic ways to promote student learning; we will reassess instructional delivery styles and question how we teach with a goal of shifting pedagogy from traditional, instructor-focused methods to student-centered community building and learning; and we will work to transform our pedagogical styles by sharing knowledge, resources, ideas, tools, and solutions. (Continued on page 2)
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Curating the Digital This Learning Community is designed to continue to develop digital humanities work at BGSU, following the successful inaugural Digital Cultures in the Age of Big Data Summer Institute in May 2013. (Note: while we refer to the humanities throughout the following text, this LC would also be appropriate for those who are involved in the social sciences as well.) The facilitator, who was one of the co-organizers of the weeklong Summer Institute, is committed to helping develop Digital Humanities projects on this campus. Given how education is being transformed by technology, and how Digital Humanities has become central to higher education and public intellectual life, it is vital to develop these skills on our campus. By linking faculty and graduate students across departmental and school lines, this LC will offer critical support for new DH projects. Digital Humanities Project Management This learning community will expose participants to digital humanities, lead them through the process of conceiving and managing a digital humanities project, and result in at least a draft of a grant application for vetting by a grant official at an appropriate funding source. This community will also help its members consider how their current research questions, or new ones, can be addressed through digital humanities methodologies. Over the course of the learning community, we will discuss how to conceive digital humanities projects, what resources are necessary, how to find appropriate partners, how to budget, finding the best funding opportunities, how to write the grant proposal, and how to follow through on managing a digital humanities project. We will work together to review each other’s proposals at each stage of the process. Fostering Students’ Digital Literacy Habits with guideWIRE This learning community will examine today’s digitally-
connected student literacy behaviors and the obstacles faced during the writing, inquiry, research, and engagement processes across disciplines. Members of this Learning Community will collaboratively engage in the exploration, creation, and development of intra-disciplinary e-print and multimodal resources to enhance teaching strategies for digital literacy practices and that improve student learning and success. Exploring the Cyber Campus Increasingly, university courses and programs are being delivered in a completely online format. Faculty migrating to this venue may be challenged in multiple ways. How do we engage students in dynamic learning experiences and build community in a virtual environment? This Learning Community will explore resources, techniques, and philosophies impacting our work in cyberspace. In this Learning Community, we will begin to investigate innovative practices in teaching and learning, especially as they apply to online education. We will concentrate on student needs, and explore avenues of providing a sense of community for students in online programs. Our focus will be on actively engaging learners in our cyber campus and we will share specific ideas and tools to continue to grow as faculty passionately committed to quality online experiences. Exploring Media in the Classroom This learning community focuses on incorporating media into classroom activities to promote student comprehension and the development of critical thinking skills. By using popular culture examples that students are familiar with, (Continued on page 3)
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students establish a connection between mediated examples and textbook ideas. Members in this learning community discuss media literacy as a pedagogical method and create their own classroom activities. Exploring the World of MOOCs (Spring Semester ONLY) MOOCs (massively open online courses) are web-based courses that can be delivered to potentially thousands of students at a time. Participants in this Learning Community will learn the basics of how MOOCs work, participate in an active MOOC class, explore benefits and challenges, and discuss the relevance and the potential application of MOOCs in higher education. The intent of the community will be to learn about and experience a new format for teaching, sharing knowledge, and expertise, and to discuss and debate the value, issues, challenges, and potential for MOOCs in a higher education environment. BGSU Firelands: Engaging Students with Disabilities in the Classroom This learning community will be a way for faculty to come together and share their concerns and questions about how best to engage students who may have different learning styles due to development and/or disabilities. The learning community will start with exploring any questions/concerns faculty has. Sharing successful experiences within the classroom and seeking out experts to come and share information about best ways to teach and engage students. Improving Undergraduate Information-seeking Practices This community will explore the undergraduate information research process across disciplines, investigate successful teaching strategies to improve student information-seeking practices, and develop methods of assessing the research process. Along the way, members will have opportunities to become more familiar with the University Libraries’ research tools and reflect on ways to enhance student
learning through research projects in the classroom. As part of the work of this community, faculty and librarians who teach information literacy in the same subject area will work together throughout the year, share their different perspectives on the challenges students face in the research process, and their strategies for supporting student achievement. The pairs would also participate in the LC projects together and tailor them to their disciplines. Innovative Teaching Group Our learning community members will support each other as we innovate teaching strategies that significantly improve student learning and success. We will engage in the process of continual questioning of what we do and its improvement. We will help each other learn and disseminate ideas in our articles, webinars, blogs, workshops or other projects. In addition, together we will share what we are innovating with the broader BGSU community by organizing two activities per semester, which may take the form of interactive learning sessions, workshops, round-table discussions as decided by the group. New Strategies for World Language Instruction One of the persistent challenges in world language instruction is the separation of language proficiency goals and cultural learning, especially at more advanced levels. The recommendations from various professional organizations, such as ACTFL and MLA, have called for the integration of proficiency development and cultural competence in literary and cultural studies to help students understand language in context and the perspectives of the target culture. Through the activities of the World Languages Community, (Continued on page 4)
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participants will discover new approaches to teaching content in the target language in accordance with professional guidelines and will apply these proposals to their instruction. In addition, the community will foster collaboration among faculty who teach world/ second languages and/or train future teachers to examine current curricula and make revisions that address learners’ proficiency needs and cultural competence. Service Learning Sponsored by the Office of Service-Learning, this learning community supports the creation of high quality courses using service-learning pedagogy, addressing the development of personal and social responsibility, civic action, and community engagement. We welcome applications that address BGSU’s Strategic Initiatives and that lead to the effective achievement of the University Learning Outcomes.
(application) learning environments integrating cutting edge learning technologies into our teaching practices to enhance student attitudes, motivation, engagement, and ultimately student SUCCESS. Thinking beyond Numbers: Quantitative Literacy in Student Research This learning community will focus on improving quantitative literacy in the social science, arts and humanities, and natural science classroom. It explores the use of visualization, analysis and collection tools that articulate statistics concepts and help students manage data, make inferences and test hypotheses. The deliverable for each member would be to implement a module (in whichever way they envision it) in one of their classes in which they use one visualization/analysis technique to foster quantitative analytical abilities in a research-oriented context.
Members of the community will expand their understanding of service-leaning pedagogy, dialogue with peers engaged in course (re)design, and participate in an on-going professional development support network during course delivery. Proposals should emphasize approaches that can create distinctive coherent (under)graduate learning experiences that integrate curricular and co-curricular programs and connect academic programs and expertise to public purposes.
STEM Hi Tech and Highly Engaging Learning Environments by Design The STEM Hi Tech & Highly Engaging Learning Environments by Design focuses on ALL areas of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, teaching, and engagement). Student attitudes, motivation, and engagement are all predictors of student success. In this learning community, we will study and discover ways to design
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5 Book Review
Jeffrey Selingo, College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students Jeffrey Selingo is an editor at large for the Chronicle of Higher Education. His new book is both an indictment of the state of higher education in the United States today and a roadmap to what he sees as an inevitable future. His overall assessment is blunt and unequivocal: “American higher education is broken.” As with many recent critiques, including 2010’s Academically Adrift, Selingo’s book takes institutions of higher education to task for spending huge amounts of money on luxurious residence halls and recreation centers yet failing to ensure that students actually learn something during their time on campus. He details problems such as rising tuition costs, lack of academic rigor, and low graduation rates. He also says repeatedly that the academy has been extraordinarily slow to recognize the forces that will reshape education in the next decade. Selingo’s vision of the future is partially embedded in his title, specifically in the word (Un)Bound. He believes that colleges and universities will have to begin to “unbundle” their services and allow for alternative ways of both learning and credentialing. This will involve more articulation agreements, ensuring that students can easily transfer from one institution to another; cost-saving options for students; alternative ways of earning college credit such as badges and credit for prior learning programs; offering more online and hybrid courses; using online course offerings developed by other entities (such as general education courses developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative); and using data and technology to improve learning. For each of these ideas, Selingo offers examples of institutions already experimenting with one or another of them. For example, he discusses Arizona State University’s use of the adaptive learning system, Knewton, to personalize remedial math classes. This software walks students through math problems, ensuring mastery at each step along the way.
Instructors have constant access to student data and function as mentors and tutors when students are unable to progress. On the other hand, students who pick up the content easily are allowed to complete the course when they are ready without waiting for the end of the semester. Arizona State is currently exploring the possibility of using Knewton for introductory courses in psychology, biology, and economics. As an example of an institution working to provide less expensive options for financially strapped students, Selingo profiles Georgia State University which, in 2009, opened a new bare-bones residence hall, reminiscent of college dorms of the past. The rooms are small and sparsely furnished and the bathroom is down the hall. When the new building was completed, according to Selingo, “Students signed up in droves. Since it was built, the freshman hall has filled up before other residences as students can get a room there plus a meal plan that is equal to just the cost of the apartment-like residence halls.” College (Un)Bound may be simultaneously overly pessimistic and overly optimistic. Selingo is so conscious of the fact that his early chapters have the sound of a death knell that he goes out of his way to emphasize his belief that most colleges will, in fact, survive the next decade. On the other hand, the innovations he touts will involve massive changes in campus culture that may be beyond the ability of many colleges to implement. For all that, this book is an interesting read and a great conversation starter.
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6 Visionary Status: Eric Mazur There is a lot of talk these days about flipping the classroom, having students cover the material that is usually delivered as lecture before class and leaving class time for more active kinds of learning. One of the names that comes up frequently during these discussions is that of Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics at Harvard University. While Professor Mazur does use the technique of the flipped classroom, the heart of his pedagogical innovation is another technique he calls “peer instruction.” Mazur conceptualizes education as a two-step process: information transfer and making sense of/assimilating the information. The typical instructor uses classroom time for information transfer (usually by lecture) and then assigns homework as a way to help students assimilate information. The problem with this method is that students may need a lot of faculty guidance when trying to apply the material, but not so much during the information-transfer phase. Thus Mazur flips the traditional structure, assigning students to go over lecture notes as homework and using classroom time for group work and discussion. His primary method for helping students apply their learning is by asking conceptual questions designed to expose common misunderstandings of material; he has dubbed these questions ConcepTests. Many of the questions in his test bank have come from students themselves. Students are asked to respond to the question using a classroom response system such as clickers. They then form groups with those who may disagree with them about the answer and try to convince one another that theirs is the correct answer. As the groups talk, Mazur walks the room, listening in on the conversations and focusing particularly on flawed reasoning. When students vote on the question the second time, they tend to do significantly better, and Mazur is able to point out the sources of wrong answers. Mazur emphasizes that in any classroom, the person who learns the most is the teacher; through peer instruction students become teachers and significantly enhance their learning and conceptual mastery.
Mazur was motivated to develop his ideas on peer instruction after he came to realize that, while his students could pass examinations, “two months after taking the final exam . . . [students were] back to where they were before taking the course.” Mazur was understandably shocked at this finding and began to experiment with ways to ensure that students actually understand what they are learning and are able to apply their knowledge to the world around them. As a scientist, Mazur is not content to assume that peer instruction works; he has collected massive amounts of data on his students’ results using peer instruction, and concludes that students taught in this way do learn better and retain more. To learn more about Peer Instruction, check out Mazur’s book, Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual : Boston: Addison Wesley, 1996. Mazur has also created a DVD entitled Promoting Better Learning Using Peer Instruction and Justin-Time Teaching. Boston: Addison Wesley. He has also established the Peer Instruction Network as a way to allow educators to share ideas. Membership is free. Join at https:// www.peerinstruction.net/
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Hot 5
This column usually features a number (usually 5) of educational websites or apps that may be of use to faculty and students. In this edition we’re departing from that precedent to offer a sad and tepid 10. In January the plagiarism prevention company Turnitin released a report on what sources college students typically use when writing papers. Their data is based on the company’s analysis of 28 million papers that were submitted to the site between July 2011 and June 2012. And the top ten are:
1)
Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
6)
A social Q &A site where users can post questions and hope for correct or useful answers.
An online collaboratively edited encyclopedia.
2)
Oppapers.com http://www.studymode.com/
A part of StudyMode.com. this site is characterized by Turinitin as a “paper mill.” It is a subscription service that offers nearly a million “model” essays.
3)
SlideShare.net http://www.slideshare.net/
A utility for sharing presentations. The quality of the information varies widely, depending on who created the slides.
4)
Coursehero.com http://www.coursehero.com/
A site that offers study guides and homework help, which is fine. But it is not a good source for research leading to an academic paper.
5)
Scribd.com http://www.scribd.com/
A better source for information than most of the others on this list, Scribd calls itself “the world’s largest digital library.” Scribd is a document sharing website that allows users to post content.
Answers.yahoo.com http://answers.yahoo.com/
7)
Answers.com http://www.answers.com/
Similar to the Yahoo site.
8)
MedLibrary.org http://medlibrary.org/
Among the most respectable resources on this list, but of limited use for research on subjects other than prescription medications.
9)
BigNerds.com http://www.bignerds.com/
Another database jam packed with free essays and “custom research” papers.
10)
PaperCamp.com http://www.papercamp.com/
Yet another paper mill that boasts “thousands of essays and term papers.”
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8 Did You Know? Teaching large Classes Boot Camp The Center for Faculty Excellence is proud to announce a “Boot Camp” experience: “Teaching Large Classes.” This two-and-a-half-day program is an opportunity to work collaboratively with a number of other faculty from a variety of disciplines to develop large-class designs that are engaging and interactive. Our faculty is comprised of experienced teachers of large classes who are willing to share both what has worked for them and what has not worked. They will demonstrate best practices as they share, providing you with a rich learning experience. You will also have plenty of time to work hands-on to create activities and exercises for your course and to test your ideas in a collegial and collaborative atmosphere.
When: August 12 (9 to Noon), August 13 (8 to 5), August 14 (8 to 5) Where: BTSU 207 Click here for a more detailed outline of the program: http://www.bgsu.edu/ctl/CTL_Whats_New/page133746. html Click here to register: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/T9LYPJN
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