Tag: Teaching

  • Lessons Learned from Intentional Teaching Podcast Episode About AI Across the Curriculum – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Lessons Learned from Intentional Teaching Podcast Episode About AI Across the Curriculum – Teaching in Higher Ed

    I drew much inspiration from this morning’s listen to Derrick Bruff’s interview with Jane Southworth about AI across the curriculum. Derrick Bruff’s podcast, Intentional Teaching, gives us bountiful opportunities to learn from the experiences of educators who are transforming educational experiences for students across a wide variety of disciplines and contexts. While the episode did focus on what is obvious from the title, AI Across the Curriculum, I drew a lot of inspiration well beyond just that topic of AI. There are many layers of what they talked about that go well beyond the broad topic of artificial intelligence. Other aspects of leading and teaching within a university context are shared well beyond the particular initiative they discuss.

    Jane talks about the difficulty of making such a massive change across a complex institution. She made a few jokes about the difficulties, although she said it was such lightheartedness that I felt such kindness toward her in what must have been such challenging endeavors. Consider what it takes to make something like this happen, and all the committee work that it takes, all the different people that are need to be talked to, all the perspectives to consider. The intricacies, not just to make something work, but to make the fruit of that work visible to students such that they enroll in the program and pursue the educational aims beyond the requirements for their majors. Jane shares examples of them starting an AI certificate program within their curriculum. The mammoth effort that it was to make that technically possible from an operations standpoint, such that someone could take the right classes and that they would go through all the curriculum committees and get that to work within their policies and procedures is one thing. But another layer I found quite fascinating was how do you then make that visible to students such that they’re even aware that this certificate exists and that they find it of interest and worthwhile to pursue further learning.

    As Sam Cooke sang years ago, I also “don’t know much about geography.” There’s no doubt in my mind that I have subscribed to some of the myths that Jane described about her discipline of geography. Jane described how in the United Kingdom, when she was in college, that it was the third or fourth most popular degree. Geography graduates found themselves receiving among the highest earnings as they left school, as well as being surprised when they discovered just how much more the field is than studying rocks, like they had initially believed.

    In the show notes for the episode, Derek shares a couple of resources that come both from conversations with Jane, as well as from his ongoing collaborations with Flower Darby, co-author of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes and The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. The first article linked by Derek in the show notes is Developing a Model for AI Across the Curriculum: Transforming the Higher Education Landscape via Innovation in AI Literacy by Southworth et al. The second article was Building an AI University: An Administrator’s Guide by Joe Glover. I’m grateful, as always, to Derek and all of the opportunities he makes available to those of us interested in teaching with intention.

    Resources

    Source link

  • Overcast Reports My 2024 Top Podcasts – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Overcast Reports My 2024 Top Podcasts – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Dave posted on LinkedIn about a recent podcast catcher app update which has both of us looking at our listening habits for this year so far. I didn’t realize that Marco had put out an Overcast update until Dave tagged me in his post. Like Dave, Overcast is my favorite podcast app. Here are some reasons why:

    • Playlists: I can organize my favorite podcasts and hone in on just what I’m in the mood to listen to at a given time. My categories include: Priority; Business + Economics; News; Politics + Law; Productivity; Teaching, etc.
    • Smart speed: As Dave mentioned in his post, it is a subtle shift that adds up over time.
    • Queue: There are one-off episodes that I’ll want to be sure to listen to, but I may not want to subscribe to all future episodes of a given podcast. That’s easy to accomplish by setting up a queue playlist in Overcast.

    Dave highlighted what podcasts he pays for, which means that they can be listened to ad-free. We both like that we can support the makers of the shows in that way. I pay for the following shows: Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP); Mac Power Users; Sharp Tech, The Talk Show; The Political Gabfest (via a Slate subscription); and Hard Fork and The Ezra Klein Show (via our New York Times subscription).Now that the election is over, I imagine that my top podcasts will change and that over the next year will wind up being:

    • ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast): “Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters.”
    • Hard Fork: Often humorous exploration of the intersection of technology, culture, and the future.
    • The Ezra Klein Show: A phenomenal interviewer and writer discusses politics, philosophy, and culture. Ezra knows how to have rich conversations with people who agree and disagree with his views.
    • Mac Power Users: They keep me challenged in a good way to get the most out of my Mac and other Apple products and bring joy to my life.
    • Teaching in Higher Ed: Listening to my own podcast makes me seek to continue to get better as an interviewer. Plus, I can deepen the learning from having interviewed someone when I can relax more and consider what actions I may want to take from the conversations.

    Some favorites don’t come out as often as other podcasts that I listen to, so won’t show up on my top listens. I also devote time to almost all of Tom Henschel‘s The Look and Sound of Leadership podcast (which only airs once a month), many of Dave’s Coaching for Leaders episodes, and John Biewen‘s Scene on Radio.

    It was wild to me to see how many more hours Dave listened to podcasts than me so far in 2024 (and something tells me I’m not going to catch him by the year’s end). Some of that is likely attributable to Dave running 3-4 times per week and always listening to podcasts during his workouts via his Apple Watch (phone free). Me? I mix things up in my exercise practices by often doing walk ’n talks with friends over the phone, or doing Apple Fitness workouts (which are such a great way to infuse music that I love into my exercise).

    What podcasts are you listening to most these days?

    Source link

  • The Ultimate Guide To Online Teaching

    The Ultimate Guide To Online Teaching

    What is Online Teaching?

    Online teaching typically refers to courses that are delivered completely online, meaning there are no physical or on-campus class sessions. Online courses can be designed for a handful of enrolled students or can be made open and accessible to a wide variety of participants. Instructors may choose to teach an online course because they want to take their teaching beyond the confines of the physical classroom. Other instructors may choose to do so because they want students to benefit from the online environment. Online teaching gives students unlimited access to resources and the ability to collaborate and connect with each other at any time of day. It also gives educators the ability to teach online classes from home.

    Contents

    1) Developing and Teaching an Online Course
    2) Planning and Designing an Online Course
    3) Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Online Teaching
    4) Online Assessments
    5) 7 Best Practices in Online Teaching
    6) Conclusion

    Developing and Teaching an Online Course

    Preparing for online teaching is not as simple as taking materials from a traditional course and putting them online. Educators engaging in online teaching for the first time will need to plan their approach thoughtfully, even full-time experienced educators. This starts with identifying learning objectives and then building educational activities to support them. Rather than make wholesale use of course content from previous classes, materials should be repurposed or adapted by taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of online learning environments. Organizing course content into units, with submodules, key concept reviews and unit tests—along with a tailored and consistent content release schedule—will help ensure students remain on track to achieve desired learning outcomes.

    Online Curriculum Development

    In online teaching, curriculum development is defined as the step-by-step process used to create positive improvements in the courses offered by a school, college or university. As new discoveries are made, they have to be incorporated into the online education curricula. Innovative teaching techniques and effective online teaching strategies are constantly being developed and refined in order to improve the student learning experience.

    Current online curriculum models can be divided into two broad categories—the product model and the process model. The product model focuses primarily on results. Grades are the primary objective, with more emphasis placed on achieving desired objectives at the summation of the course rather than on the learning process itself. The process model, however, is more open-ended and focuses on how learning progresses over the course of a semester. Both models are important when it comes to developing a holistic and effective curriculum for online teaching.

    There are three types of online curriculum design: subject-centered, learner-centered and problem-centered.

      • Subject-centered curriculum design revolves around a particular subject matter or discipline, such as mathematics, literature or biology. This type of curriculum design tends to focus on the subject matter being taught online, rather than the individual student.
        Educators create lists of topics and specific examples of how they should be studied, which are then mapped to the most effective online learning activity or method. This approach is most popular in large university or college classes taught online, where teachers focus on a particular subject or discipline in their classes.
      • Learner-centered curriculum design prioritizes student needs, interests and goals. It acknowledges that students are individuals and have different learning needs and therefore should not, in all cases, be subject to a standardized curriculum. This approach aims to empower learners to shape their education through choices and relies heavily on asynchronous online teaching and learning. This can be complex for large class sizes and is more suitable for smaller, seminar-style courses.
        Differentiated instruction and learning plans provide an opportunity to select assignments, teaching and learning experiences or activities online. This form of curriculum design is highly effective at engaging and motivating students, particularly in online teaching and learning environments by providing students with greater choice and flexibility. However, the drawback to this form of curriculum design is that it can create pressure on the educator to source learning materials online that are highly specific to each student’s personal learning needs. This can be challenging due to teaching time constraints.
      • Problem-centered curriculum design teaches students how to examine and analyze problems and develop solutions, largely using online simulations. This is considered an authentic form of learning because students are exposed to real-life issues, helping students develop skills that are transferable to the real world.
        Problem-centered curriculum design has been shown to increase the relevance of the curriculum and encourages creativity, innovation and collaboration in the online classroom. However, one shortcoming of this format is that it does not always consider individual learning styles and requires a great deal of collaboration between students.

    By considering all three types of curriculum design before you begin planning, instructors can choose the types that are best suited to their students and the learning objectives for their course.

    Planning and Designing an Online Course

    Planning for Online Teaching

    An important step in bringing your online course to life is the actual implementation. This includes aligning course materials to learning goals and in accordance with your online teaching philosophy. There are a number of things to consider during the decision-making process.

    First, it is important to understand the audience for your online course and who will be participating in supporting the delivery of modules, labs and other learning activities. Recognizing that learners may vary widely in their background, knowledge and skills is essential in order to accommodate these differences in your course design. Secondly, it is imperative to have specific learning goals in mind. An effective online pedagogy means carefully considering what you expect your students to know and be able to do at the conclusion of your course. Next, consider the different types of content your course requires. Decide how students will engage with that content and with each other. Also consider which assessment types best support the measurement of learning objectives for your students. Here are a number of helpful methods that can be used to guide the planning and development of your online teaching curriculum.

    Backward Design

    Backward design is often used in online teaching to design learning experiences and instructional techniques to meet specific learning goals. Backward design begins with identifying the objectives of a unit or course—what students are expected to learn and be able to do—and then working “backwards” to create lessons that achieve those desired goals. In online teaching, the educational goals for a course or unit are often closely aligned with a given institution’s learning standards. These are concisely written descriptions of what learners are expected to understand and be able to do at a specific stage of their education. In the context of online teaching, this includes the expectation that students have mastered certain technology tools and platforms to meet these goals.

    There are many benefits to backward design. Starting with the end goal in mind helps educators design a sequence of assessments, readings, course materials and group activities that are more likely to result in learners achieving the academic goals of a given course or unit—that is, actually learning what they were expected to learn.

    Beginning the planning process with the end goal in mind is often a counterintuitive process. However, backward design gives educators a structure they can follow when creating their curriculum, as well as planning their instructional process. Using a backward design approach also helps educators better align the different elements of their course by methodically integrating learning goals, activities and assessments at every step.

    Managing the Logistics of Online Teaching

    Even though planning for an online class may start in a similar way as an on-campus or face-to-face course, there are several important differences that those teaching online should keep in mind. First, it is important to consider how technology will influence the way you conduct your online teaching. If you would like to use an interactive lecture format, you will need to find ways to engage students in an online environment. Chat channels, discussion forums, blog postings and online office hours are a few ways for online teachers to connect with learners. Those engaging in online teaching will also need to consider how the use of virtual classroom technology will impact student learning. Do your students require specific technical knowledge or computer functionality such as a webcam? How will they interact in the online environment? What will you do to make your online classroom inclusive to all students?

    When transitioning to online teaching, educators also need to address technical issues. It is important to plan all of your components for an online course before the first day of class. Start early and seek collaboration and support from your colleagues, when possible. Many institutions have Centres for Teaching and Learning with experienced instructional designers who are able to help manage the transition for instructors and their students.

    Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Online Teaching

    Synchronous Online Teaching

    Synchronous online teaching occurs in real-time through video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Go-to-Meeting and YouTube Live. When used with an online teaching platform or learning management system, synchronous online teaching allows educators to continue many of the same learning activities found in an in-person classroom. Learners can access lecture slides, respond to interactive questions and engage with discussion threads with their peers.

    Delivering online teaching information and presentations in real-time creates a sense of speed and intimacy that helps increase student engagement. This allows educators to respond directly to student questions and discussions, provide feedback and adjust online teaching to ensure students are comprehending course material.

    To ensure synchronous online teaching is effective, it is important to have the proper technology tools and platforms in place. Ideally, video conferencing solutions should be used for delivering online lecture content, as well as an active learning platform or learning management system to support assessments, readings, live discussions and interactive questions. With large class sizes, having a remote teaching assistant is especially helpful in alerting instructors to any technical or experiential issues that may occur when using technology tools and platforms. Online teaching assistants can also provide support by responding to discussion threads directly or gathering commonly asked questions requiring further review and clarification.

    Similar to a physical classroom, it is important to balance content delivery with interactive learning activities, as well as building in time for review into the lecture schedule. A best practice is for course information to be presented in ten-minute chunks, followed by blocks dedicated for reflection exercises and interactive questions and discussions to keep students engaged.

    In the same way that the answers to in-class discussion questions inform how comprehensively course material is covered, it is important to be able to understand where students are struggling. This includes using low stakes quizzes and discussion questions to ensure students are able to achieve online teaching objectives. Synchronous online teaching provides opportunities to apply concepts and collaborate, helping to deepen learning. Real-time interaction is also particularly useful when it comes to delivering complex concepts that require immediate feedback or clarification to keep students on track.

    Asynchronous Online Teaching

    Asynchronous online teaching uses many of the same technology tools and platforms, with the main difference being student learning is self-paced. With asynchronous online teaching, educators deliver course content and assignments remotely using a combination of solutions like Zoom to record and post lectures online as well as learning management platforms to centralize assignments and other learning resources. Learners interact with digital courseware, assignments and their peers through discussion channels. Asynchronous online teaching is more convenient for students who may have children or other dependents as well as inflexible job hours. As well, not every student can afford or has easy access to the internet. The ability to learn on an individual schedule gives learners the flexibility they need to find time where they can engage with online course material. The benefit of this online teaching method is being able to utilize active learning techniques without the need for participants to be active at the same time.

    Asynchronous online teaching is particularly useful when it is difficult for your students to maintain a specific schedule. Accessing materials, readings, assignments, quizzes and lecture recordings in a single place allows students to engage with course material at their own pace. There are many simple ways to drive engagement even if much of the learning is self-directed, such as using discussion forums, integrating questions into assigned readings to test comprehension and using multimedia elements like video to dimensionalize learning. Asynchronous online teaching also provides the opportunity to promote peer collaboration, creating specific assignments that require students to work with one another or review others’ work outside the confines of a class schedule.

    Asynchronous learning requires online educators to take time to revisit learning objectives for the semester. Identifying whether there are components that can be recorded for students to view on their own schedule versus what information should be delivered live or asynchronously is an integral part of the design process. Giving thought to where students can access readings, lecture materials, assignments and instructions can help develop a more effective learning plan and identify any potential gaps that may exist in course instruction.

    Without the benefit of live interaction, it’s especially important to communicate expectations and reminders and address student questions in a timely fashion. Regular, helpful and empathetic communication is an essential tool for reducing the apathy and sense of isolation many students feel when learning remotely.

    Online Assessments

    When teaching online courses, there are two primary types of assessments: open-book tests and remotely proctored exams. There are a number of benefits to each, but the effectiveness of both is determined by how well they are designed and implemented into online teaching.

    Remote Open-Book Exams

    Online teaching provides the opportunity to look at different options beyond the traditional summative assessment. Open-book exams offer a great deal of flexibility, making it an ideal option for instructors or institutions that rely on asynchronous learning.

    An open-book assessment that is strategically designed provides interesting opportunities to test skills beyond rote memorization, such as problem-solving and critical thinking. Open-book exams are especially effective when they focus on using synthesis, analysis and evaluation to assess what students know, according to the Center for Teaching at Learning at UC Berkeley. The ability to intersperse questions with digital reference materials like images, video and audio clips also allow for more creativity and freedom when constructing an exam in relation to traditional in-class tests.

    Developing interactive digital documents with pictures and videos embedded alongside test questions creates a more dynamic assessment experience for students. Using multimedia and other reference content allows learners to discuss and assess opinions given to them within the assessment or analyze a diagram and its findings. Depending on the learning platform, open-book assessments can also include a variety of different question types, including matching, sorting, fill-in-the-blank, long-form answer and click-on-target (with multiple targets) questions.

    Proctored Tests and Exams

    In many cases, such as courses required for accreditation, open-book assessments are simply not an option. In these instances, there are a number of platforms that offer secure proctored tests and exams. Students can take on their own computers, at a pre-set time and from any location. Advanced ID verification, the ability to secure browser settings and the use of artificial intelligence to monitor students have helped assuage concerns over academic integrity.

    Using a variety of question types—multiple choice, word answer, fill in the blank, matching and long answer—instructors can provide students with an assessment that tests their knowledge as well as their analysis and communication skills. For these types of assessments, student performance can be automatically graded upon submission, making the turnaround time for student feedback much faster than manual grading.

    7 Best Practices in Online Teaching

    1) Bring who you are into the online classroom: One of the key benefits of traditional, face-to-face teaching is being able to share your passion with your students. Many educators use the performative aspect of teaching to their advantage, feeding off the energy in the classroom to deliver their lectures. However, it is easy for unique teaching characteristics—humor, emphasis, body language, facial expressions—to get lost in translation when a student can’t see or hear you. The predominant means of online communication is text, which can quickly become demotivating and uninteresting for students. It is necessary and inevitable that some components of your online course will be delivered through written communications. Assignment instructions, emails to students and weekly course-wide announcements can all be tailored to your unique voice and style:

    • Record yourself: audio or video recordings are a great way to bring your whole self to your students in addition to lecture videos (if you choose to use this functionality). Students need to know you in order to engage in learning online and showing them that you are human with a short video greeting at the beginning of your course is a great way to set the right tone.
    • Express your support: It’s important to infuse your writing with warmth when teaching online classes. As digital natives, Gen Z students are highly adept at sensing the tone of written digital communications. When reminding students about upcoming assignment deadlines, for example, don’t write, “A number of you have not completed the readings necessary for the assignment due later this week. Please note that the assignment is worth 40% of your grade.” Instead, write “Thanks for your hard work so far this semester. Small reminder to complete the specified readings before you start this week’s assignment. Please let me know what questions you have or if you need any help. Thanks all!”

    2) Be present and responsive on your online course site: Your presence is so important in teaching online college courses because it encourages bonding as the class evolves as a group and develops intellectual and personal connections. Thoughtful and consistent daily presence shows the students that the online educator cares about them and their questions and concerns, even if they are a part-time educator and busy with other responsibilities. It also shows that you are generally present for them to do the mentoring, guiding and challenging that online teaching is all about. Schedule a few hours of time each week to be visibly engaged and present in your online class. Here are a few ways to interact with your students:

    • Hold online office hours or virtual ‘coffee chats,’ to get to know your students on a more personal level.
    • Answer questions regularly in your course’s online discussion forum.
    • Post a weekly announcement to recap the previous week’s learnings or introduce the coming week’s content.

    3) Use a variety of large-group, small-group and individual learning experiences: Online teaching works best when a variety of learning experiences and activities are offered. Online courses are more enjoyable and effective when learners are given the opportunity to work through course concepts and assignments with their fellow students. However, some students learn and work most effectively on their own. Incorporating options and opportunities for students to work together and individually is beneficial for accommodating different types of learners. Small groups are particularly effective in online teaching when learners are working on complex case studies or scenarios for the first time. It is also important to have activities that involve the whole class such as discussion boards or events with invited experts for creating a sense of community in an online course.

    4) Ask for informal feedback on your online teaching: Early surveys or informal discussions are effective in getting students to provide feedback on what is working well in an online course. It is also a chance to solicit suggestions and ideas on what might help learners have a better online course experience. This early feedback should be done in week three or four of a semester so time is available to make corrections and modifications while the course is ongoing. A simple e-mail or discussion thread asking a few of these questions works well:

    • What’s working so far?
    • How could your online learning experience be improved?
    • What would you like help with?

    5) Think like a student: Teaching online means that the learning environment loses the built-in sense of community that comes more naturally to a traditional classroom environment. This can lead to feelings of isolation and disengagement and demands a different kind of support than teaching in person.

    Envisioning how your students will experience the class, having never learned this content before, helps prepare for these potential challenges. Did you give straightforward instructions for your extension policy? Have you supplied a detailed breakdown of how assignments will be graded? Are learning objectives and curriculum objectives explicitly tied to online teaching and learning activities? Students should ideally understand exactly what you are teaching online and what is expected of them as a result. Being intentional about course design is essential to ensuring students interact with course content the way that instructors intend. Here are a few ways to create a sense of community in the classroom:

    • Use a discussion board thread to have students share tidbits about their interests inside and outside of the classroom
    • Ask students to post pictures of their pets or what they’ve been watching on television (and be sure to share as well!)
    • Play music at the beginning of each lecture video

    6) Organize your content logically: When teaching online, the design and sequence of content and learning activities must be methodical, intuitive and systematic. Help students move through content and learning activities easily, so that their attention remains focused on learning the material. If they are required to leave a lecture module and use another drop-down menu or folder to watch a required video, that can be distracting—or frustrating if it’s complicated to find. When students use a lot of cognitive resources just trying to figure out where to go to access resources, they have less mental energy left for learning the content itself. This can be a bigger challenge for students who are already unmotivated in the first place. Instead, try to order materials and activities in a sequence that is straightforward and easy to navigate for students.

    7) Ground online teaching in reality: A variety of examples and explanations can help learners grasp course concepts in a way that makes the most sense to them. Examples are perhaps even more crucial in online teaching, since students don’t always have the opportunity to ideate with instructors or peers in the moment to clarify a course concept or missed detail. Online learners benefit from multiple explanations of difficult concepts and being prescriptive when it comes to the kind of work you want to see. Modelling behaviors is a good way to lead by example. For instance, use a friendly yet professional tone when writing discussion posts and assignment instructions. Demonstrate respect for diverse opinions and respect differences in learning. When you show students what you expect, they are likely to be more confident in their ability to make online learning successful. This positively impacts their motivation to engage meaningfully with course concepts, and participate in learning activities.

    Conclusion

    Online teaching can be quite different than teaching in a classroom. Teaching online requires specific competencies and skills associated with effective online course delivery and facilitation. However, it is clear that the ability to teach effectively in online environments is becoming more of a necessity than a nice-to-have in the higher education space. The good news is that there are many resources available as well as tools and platforms to support educators in making this shift. By combining the power of experience with the right technology, instructors can pivot their teaching practices online, increasing flexibility for students and accommodating the diverse needs of today’s learners.

    Tagged as:

    ,

    Source link

  • 2024 Top Tools for Learning Votes – Teaching in Higher Ed

    2024 Top Tools for Learning Votes – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Each year, I look forward to reviewing the results of Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning and to submitting my votes for a personal Top Tools for Learning list. I haven’t quite been writing up my list every single year (missed 2020 and 2023), but I did submit a top 10 list in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022. I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year.

    My 2024 Top Tools for Learning

    Below are my top 10 Tools for Learning for 2024. The biggest change in my learning tools involves using social media less, most specifically that service that used to have an association with a blue bird and can most closely be associated with a cesspool these days.

    Overcast

    This podcast catcher is a daily part of my life and learning. Overcast has key features like smart speed and voice boost, which you can have for free with some non-intrusive ad placements, or pay a small fee for a pro subscription and have them hidden from view. Overcast received a major design overhaul in March of 2022, which led me to reorganize my podcast playlists to take full advantage of the new features.

    Unread

    While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread.

    LinkedIn

    The biggest change from prior year’s surveys has to do with social media. The bird app just isn’t like it used to be. I’ve found most of my professional learning via social media takes place on LinkedIn these days. If you’re on LinkedIn, please follow me and the Teaching in Higher Ed page.

    YouTube

    Once I found out that I could subscribe to new YouTube videos on my RSS reader, Inoreader, it changed how often I watch YouTube videos. That, plus subscribing to YouTube Premium, which means we get ad-free viewing as a family, makes me spending a lot more time with YouTube. I even have my own YouTube channel, which I occasionally post videos on, most recently about my course redesign and use of LiaScript.

    Loom

    The expression tells us that it is better to show than tell in many contexts. Loom is a simple screen casting tool. Record what’s on your screen (with or without your face included via your web cam) and as soon as you press stop, there’s a link that automatically gets copied to your computer’s clipboard which is now ready to paste anywhere you want. I use Loom for simple explanations, to have asynchronous conversations with colleagues and students, to record how-to videos, and to invite students to share what they’re learning. If you verify your Loom account as an educator, you get the pro features for free.

    Kindle App

    I primarily read digitally and find the Kindle iPad app to be the easiest route for reading. I read more, in total, when I am disciplined about using the Kindle hardware, but wind up grabbing my iPad most nights.

    Readwise

    It is so easy to highlight sections of what I’m reading on the Kindle app and have those highlights sync over to a service called Readwise. The service “makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook and article highlights.

    Canva

    My use of the graphic design website Canva has evolved over the years. I started by using it to create graphics and printable signs for classes. Now I also use it to create presentations (which can include embedded content, slides, videos, etc.). For some presentations I’m doing in the coming weeks, I’m experimenting with using Beautiful.ai for my presentations. I still think Canva is great, but am having fun trying something new.

    Raindrop.io

    Probably more than any other app, I use Raindrop on a daily basis. It is a digital bookmarking tool. I wrote about how I use Raindrop in late 2020. I continue to see daily benefits with having such a simple-yet-robust way of making sense of all the information coming at me on a daily basis.

    Craft

    I don’t change my core productivity apps very often. In the case of Craft, once I made the switch, I never looked back. This app has both date-based and topic-based note-taking, as well as individual and collaborative features. From their website: “Craft is where people go to ideate, organize, and share their best work.”

    Those are my top ten for the year, not in any particular order. The first draft of this post had eleven items, since I lost count as I was going. I wind up using Zoom as so much a part of almost every day, it winds up getting forgotten, given its ubiquity in my life. I’m leaving it on this post, even though it takes me over my count of ten.

    Zoom

    I use Zoom so often that one of the years, I entirely left it off of my top ten listing, because it is just always there. Recent enhancements I have grown to appreciate are the built-in timer app, the AI transcripts and summaries, and that you can present slides while people are in breakout rooms.

    Your Turn

    Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? You can fill out a form, write a blog post, or even share your picks on Twitter. The 2024 voting will continue through Friday, August 30, 2024 and the results will be posted by Monday, September 2, 2024.

    Source link

  • Achieving work-life balance (or is that even possible?) – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Achieving work-life balance (or is that even possible?) – Teaching in Higher Ed

    A friend and colleague asked me about how to achieve work-life balance and what tools are best for doing that. Let’s just say I got a bit energized by her question that I recorded a video for her and sent her some key points from what I shared. If you’re wondering about these same questions, check out the comments for a link to the video I sent to her, which is now on my YouTube channel.

    RESPONSE

    I appreciate you reaching out with your concerns about achieving a more effective work-life balance and integrating tools like Microsoft Planner with your team. Here are some insights and recommendations based on what you’ve shared, which I share in more detail in the video:

    View Work-Life Balance as a Journey: Rather than seeing work-life balance as a fixed destination, it’s more helpful to view it as an ongoing journey. This perspective allows for flexibility and adaptation, acknowledging that some days or weeks might be more challenging than others.

    Incorporate Consistent Tools and Habits: To achieve effective work-life integration, it’s crucial to not only have the right tools but also to establish consistent habits that make the use of these tools part of your daily routine. Just as I shared in my video, using apps like Calm for meditation has helped me manage stress and maintain productivity through structured breaks like the Pomodoro technique.

    Maintaining Flexibility in Tool Usage: It’s okay to step away from certain tools occasionally. What’s important is returning to them when you realize they bring balance and peace to your life. This adaptability is key in managing not just tasks but also your mental well-being.

    Implement Practical, Routine-Based Strategies: Strategies such as a weekly review can dramatically reduce feelings of being overwhelmed and improve your organizational habits. Scheduling regular check-ins on your progress can guide you in managing your workload without feeling inundated.

    Choose and Stick to Appropriate Technologies: The effectiveness of any tool depends on it being integrated thoughtfully into your day-to-day activities. My experience with tools like Raindrop for bookmarking and Zotero for academic references emphasizes choosing technologies that fit seamlessly with your workflow. Also, avoiding frequent changes in your toolset helps in building a routine that you and your team can rely on.

    Continuous Commitment to Your Tools: Commit to your tools unless there’s a compelling reason to change. This consistency will help not only you but also your team in becoming more proficient with the technologies adopted and ultimately, more cohesive and functional as a unit.

    VIDEO

    Remember, the key to integrating any new tool or process effectively into your work-life system relies heavily on consistent usage and the development of supportive habits around it.

    Source link

  • Teaching Skills are Durable Skills with AI –

    Teaching Skills are Durable Skills with AI –

    You are here: Home / Ed Tech / Teaching Skills are Durable Skills with AI

    By .

    I recently gave a keynote on AI at the durable skills-themed D2L Ignite conference in Orlando. I took the following positions:

    • Durable skills, unlike so many educational buzzwords, is a genuine civilizational shift that requires our urgent attention. AI does not cause it. It just made the change obvious.
    • AI genuinely will cause profound and unforeseeable changes to the way we live. I gave a highly personal example to make this point vivid.
    • Teaching skills are durable skills that translate quite well to the AI world.
    • Other skills, such as those required to design and test solutions to complex humans, are durable skills.

    As usual, I tried to cram an hour-long talk into 45 minutes, so I rushed some parts and left a few dots unconnected. In this post, I’ll the video and restate the elements of the third bullet point to ensure they’re clear. I’m putting the video at the bottom of the post because I’m hoping you’ll read it before watching the talk and keeping the post short because the idea that you’ll both read a blog post and watch a 45-minute talk is expecting a lot.

    To be clear, I’m not arguing that teaching skills are durable skills because generative AI works like the human mind. It doesn’t. I’ll briefly explain why each teaching skill I discuss transfers to AI. The reasons are different from point to point.

    Here are the skills:

    • Scaffolding: In education, scaffolding is rooted in Vygotsky’s notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). We’re helping students stretch beyond what they could learn on their own by providing them with temporary supports or building blocks, progressively removing the support as we go. With AI, we focus the model on the right pieces by providing context and examples. It knows a lot, but it needs context. So, to get good results, we remind it of basic concepts it already knows, similarly to how we teach students of the basic concepts they need to solve complex problems. As with human students, we feed it more complex pieces to put together until it is thinking the way we need it to. The AI has something akin to the ZPD in the sense that it doesn’t always need scaffolding. Some things it can figure out on its own. Other things it can’t figure out even with help. Even though the reasons are entirely different, we get better results when we act as if the AI has a ZPD and apply scaffolding when we find ourselves working within that zone.
    • Formative assessments: Much is made of the fact that the AI is a black box. Little is made of the fact that the human mind is also a black box. We don’t know what students understand. In fact, good teachers probe continuously, in part because we are constantly trying to get a read on what the student understands and because students change. They learn. AIs don’t learn in the same way that students do, but they can change over time. ChatGPT is better at understanding some things than it was six months ago. And some of those improvements aren’t obvious. We have to design probes to test.
    • Worked examples: This one is crucial and goes beyond using generative AIs to actually building or fine-tuning models. With students, we show them how to solve a problem: here’s the question, here’s the answer, and here’s how we got from the question to the answer. If we’re making full use of this technique, we’ll show students a series of subtly but importantly different worked examples so that they can learn nuances. With AI, whether we are writing a prompt or constructing a training data set, the ideal input is a series of examples where we say to the machine, here is the input, here is the desired output, and here is an annotation explaining why this is good output. Particularly with model training, we want to provide a series of subtly but meaningfully different examples so that it can learn to differentiate.
    • Writing: To do almost anything with generative AI, you must be a good, clear, precise writer. We stress out about ChatGPT causing the loss of writing skills, forgetting that the majority of interactions most people have with the technology is, in fact, through writing. And better writing gets better answers or, if you’re training a model, better input data.

    That’s the short but (hopefully) clear version of the third part of the talk.

    The example I use for the second part of my talk is how ChatGPT helped me cope with the stream of medical information I was receiving about my little sister, who recently suffered a life-threatening brain hemorrhage. I recorded this video on my iPhone with no intention of sharing it with anyone but my close family. My sister is a teacher. I wanted to show her how the story of her struggle is helping other educators (and to show her a little bit of what I do for a living, which I have trouble explaining). I told her story to the D2L conference audience with her husband’s permission and with no intention of taking it further. I have been urged by a few people who were there that day to share it more widely. And so, with the blessing of my brother-in-law, I am publishing it. (My sister, by the way, is making amazing progress in her recovery. I hope she will be able to watch the video herself soon.) If you watch it and find it valuable, please comment below. She will find it meaningful to know that her story is helping other educators.

    This is for you, Sharon.

    D2L Rise Orlando 2024 Keynote on Durable Skills and Artificial Intelligence: https://youtu.be/ufwEElHcZAs



    Source link

  • Reflections from the Higher Education for Good Book Release Celebration – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Reflections from the Higher Education for Good Book Release Celebration – Teaching in Higher Ed

    What a way to start my week!

    November 20, 2023, I attended an online launch celebration event for a magnificent project. The book Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures brought together 71 authors around the globe to create 27 chapters, as well as multiple pieces of artwork and poetry. Editors Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin shared their reflections of writing the book and invited chapter authors, and Larry Onokpite, the book’s editor, to celebrate the release and opportunities for collaboration. In total, the work represents contributions from 29 countries from six continents. Laura Czerniewicz was invited to talk about the book by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), where she describes the values of inclusion woven throughout this project.

    Higher Ed for Good Aims

    At Monday’s book launch, Laura shared how the authors aimed to write about the tenants that were directed toward the greater aims of the book. Catherine described the call for authors to engage in this project, such that the resulting collection would help people:

    • Acknowledge despair
    • Engage in resistance
    • Imagine alternative futures and…
    • Foster hope and courage

    Laura stressed the way articulating what we stand for and not simply what we are against is essential in facilitating systemic change. Quoting Ruha Benjamin, Laura described ways to courageously imagine the future:

    Only by shifting our imagination, can we begin to think of a world that is more egalitarian, less extractive, and more habitable for everyone not just a small elite.

    It was wonderful to see the community who showed up to help celebrate this magnificent accomplishment. Toward the end of the conversations, someone asked about what might be next for this movement. Frances Bell responded by joking that she wasn’t sure she was necessarily going to answer the question, as she is prone to do. Instead, she described her use of ‘a slow ontology,’ a phrase which quickly resonated with me, even thought I didn’t know exactly what it meant.

    In some brief searching, I discovered a bit more about slow ontology. My novice understanding is that slow ontology asks the question of what lives might look like, were we to live them slowly and resist the socialization of speed as productivity and self-worth. Ulmer offers a look at a slow ontology for writing, while Mol uses slowness to analyze archeological artifacts. One piece I absolutely want to revisit is Mark Carrigan’s Beyond fast and slow: temporal ontology in critical higher education scholarship. 

    Next Steps

    I’ll have the honor, soon, of interviewing Laura and Catherine for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. I’m ~30% through Higher Education for Good and am glad I don’t have to rush through the reading too quickly. I mentioned as a few of us remained online together after the book release celebration that reading Higher Education for Good and Dave Cormier’s forthcoming Learning in a Time of Abundance has been an interesting juxtaposition. Rissa Sorensen-Unruh described a similar serendipity of reading Belonging, by Geoffrey Cohen at the same time as Rebecca Pope-Ruark’s Unraveling Faculty Burnout. After skimming the book description of Belonging, I instantly bought it… adding it to the quite-long digital to-read stack. I suppose that while I struggle with slowing down, that challenge doesn’t apply when it comes to my reading practice.

    Resources:

    Source link

  • 2022 Top Tools for Learning Votes – Teaching in Higher Ed

    2022 Top Tools for Learning Votes – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Each year, I look forward to reviewing the results of Jane Hart’s Top 300 Tools for Learning and to submitting my votes for a personal Top Tools for Learning list. I haven’t quite been writing up my list every single year (missed 2020), but I did submit a top 10 list in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021. I haven’t come across too many others’ 2022 Top Tools for Learning votes, yet, but did enjoy reviewing Mike Taylor’s list.

    I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year. Once my list was finished for 2022, however, I did compare and realize that I had left Zoom off for this year. Given that I use Zoom pretty much daily for meetings, teaching, speaking engagements, and podcast interviews, I suspect this is one of those things where Zoom has become so integral to my life that it’s become like water that I can’t see because I’m swimming in it.

    Something that I am still looking forward to getting more practice with is a technique shared by Kevin Kelly on Episode 406 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Kevin shared about how to turn a Zoom chat into a useful summary and included a sample summary from an AAEEBL Meetup in the show notes for the episode.

    Another thing I realize as I reflect back on the current and prior years of voting is how much every single tool I use fits into a personal knowledge mastery system, which I have learned so much about from Harold Jarche over decades now. Harold Jarche writes:

    Personal knowledge mastery is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM keeps us afloat in a sea of information – guided by professional communities and buoyed by social networks.

    PKM is the number one skill set for each of us to make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society. The PKM framework – Seek > Sense > Share – helps professionals become knowledge catalysts. Today, the best leaders are constant learners.

    Harold was on Episode 213 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, if you would like to learn more about PKM. There is also an entire collection of PKM episodes.

    My 2022 Top Tools for Learning

    Below are my top 10 Tools for Learning for 2022. Jane Hart’s survey methodology has shifted over the years. She now asks us to list each tool and then identify which of three categories we most often use it for: personal learning, workplace learning, or education. Mine overlap quite a bit, within those categories, but I’ve done my best to pick the context in which I use it most often.

    1. Overcast | Personal Learning | PKM-Seek

    This podcast “catcher” app is a daily part of my life and learning. Overcast received a major design overhaul in March of 2022, which led me to reorganize my podcast playlists to take full advantage of the new features. In October of 2021, I wrote up my podcast favorites, in case you’re interested.

    2. Unread | Personal Learning | PKM-Seek

    While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread.

    On a related note, if you like the idea of information flowing to you (via RSS) versus you having to go find it – and you like to cook – check out the app Mela. I switched to it in the past year and haven’t looked back.

    3. Twitter | Personal Learning | PKM-Seek

    I continue to benefit from a strong personal learning network (PLN), which for me is at its most vibrant on Twitter. Whether it’s for something as simple as getting some good tv/movie recommendations when I am under the weather, or for a deeper and more significant purpose of learning from those in the disability community, I find a tangible benefit with almost every visit. Yes, there are also major problems on social media platforms, including Twitter. But for me, the key has been all in who I follow and how I engage in community with others on Twitter.

    4. Raindrop | Workplace Learning | PKM-Sense

    While the first three tools I mentioned were all about seeking information, Raindrop is all about sense making (in the present and future) for me. It is a digital bookmarking tool. I wrote about how I use Raindrop in late 2020. I continue to see daily benefits with having such a simple-yet-robust way of making sense of all the information coming at me on a daily basis. Raindrop recently added the ability to highlight text on a page you have bookmarked, but I haven’t experimented with that feature much yet. If I want to do something with annotations and highlighting, I tend to gravitate toward Hypothes.is, a social annotation tool.

    5. PollEverywhere | Education | PKM-Sense

    When I started in a professional career in the early 1990s, I used to work for a computer training company. One regular thing that would happen with less-experienced instructors would be them standing at the front of the class, asking if everyone “got it” or was “with them.” As you can imagine, many times people either didn’t realize that they were lost, or they were too embarrassed to admit it.

    Polling tools like PollEverywhere remove the barrier of people not realizing that they don’t understand something, or for those are reluctant to share their confusion publicly. PollEverywhere also has features to support team collaboration, asynchronous and/or synchronous polling, and can integrate with a learning management system (LMS). I primarily use PollEverywhere for formative assessment, allowing people to respond anonymously to the questions being posed. I subscribe to the Present plan, which allows me to have up to 700 people responding at one time on a given poll question. People in an education context who needed to create reports and access archived poll responses would likely need to go with an Individual Instructor premium account, or department/university-wide plan.

    6. Padlet | Education | PKM-Sense

    One of many collaborative tools I enjoy using is Padlet, a virtual cork board. I use Padlet to create a shared vision for a class or a team, to create a crowd-sourced music playlist for an event or class, as a parking lot, and to collectively come up with ways to extend learning. This year for our faculty gathering, we have Padlet boards for virtual collaboration and have also printed out posters (with QR codes that point back to the Padlet boards) that people can respond in person to using sticky notes. I love the blend of the analog and the digital that is possible using this approach.

    7. Loom | Education | PKM-Share

    The past couple of years, Loom has become a part of my daily computing life. It is a simple screen casting tool. Record what’s on your screen (with or without your face included via your web cam) and as soon as you press stop, there’s a link that automatically gets copied to your computer’s clipboard which is now ready to paste anywhere you want. I use Loom for simple explanations, to have asynchronous conversations with colleagues and students, to record how-to videos, and to invite students to share what they’re learning. If you verify your Loom account as an educator, you get the pro features for free.

    8. Canva | Workplace Learning | PKM-Share

    My use of the graphic design website Canva has evolved over the years. I started by using it to create graphics and printable signs for classes. Now I also use it to create presentations (which can include embedded content, slides, videos, etc.). As I just revisited Canva features in writing this past, I discovered even more things I wasn’t even aware that Canva can do.

    I find the pro version worthwhile for both work and for Teaching in Higher Ed, as having the ability to include an entire team of people and have everyone be able to access a brand kit(s) to achieve consistent colors, logos, and other brand assets is a game-changer. We haven’t experimented as much with branded templates or comments and sharing, but there’s so much to benefit from with Canva working collaboratively. The free plan is also quite generous and worth signing up for, even if you don’t wind up upgrading to Pro or Canva for Teams.

    9. WordPress | Workplace Learning | PKM-Share

    The Teaching in Higher Ed website has been on a hosted WordPress site for so long, I can’t even remember where it resided prior to WordPress. My friend and web developer, Naomi Kasa, has helped keep the site beautiful and functional. One of my favorite features of the site is the page Naomi created with all my upcoming and past speaking engagements. It is great having all that information in one place and to see the collection of resources keep growing over time. Take a look at my resources page for a recent speaking engagement and how I embedded a Canva presentation, which includes use of embedded content and video.

    10. Blubrry | Workplace Learning | PKM-Share

    If you are going to have a podcast and you want to efficiently and effectively get it released to the majority of the various podcast players, you are going to need a podcast hosting company. We have used Blubrry for years now and appreciate its reliability, ease of use, and integration with WordPress.

    Your Turn

    Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? You can fill out a form, write a blog post, or even share your picks on Twitter. The 2022 voting will continue through Thursday, August 25 and the results will be posted by Tuesday, August 30, 2022.



    Source link

  • What the Archives of Actual Classrooms Tell about the History of Teaching | A Conversation with Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan

    What the Archives of Actual Classrooms Tell about the History of Teaching | A Conversation with Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan

    In The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study Dr. Rachel Sagner Buurma, Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, and Dr. Laura Heffernan, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida, turn to archives from the actual classrooms of major literary critics of the past century to see what the available course documents tell about the history of the teaching of literature. This approach contrasts with existing histories, such as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, which are based on archives of published works about teaching rather than archives of teaching itself. While this book will naturally interest literature teachers most, I think that Buurma and Heffernan’s methods and findings have wider implications across academia. Every discipline has a pedagogical past to learn from and a future to archive for. One of the most surprising findings in the book is that landmark works of literary scholarship often had tangible roots in classrooms. Seeing this documented helps us better appreciate that the classroom is a site of disciplinary scholarship in its own right. I’m grateful to Buurma and Heffernan for this fascinating historical work and for responding to my questions over email.

    CORRIGAN: I’m interested in the origin of the project. What prompted you to turn to archives of actual classrooms? What gave you the idea that you might find a different history of literary study there than what has previously been found based on archives of scholarly publications? 

    BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Well, the project really began as an attempt to investigate how the New Critics actually taught. We had both heard New Critical pedagogy invoked over and over again as the foundation for how literary scholars teach, even if they are practicing historicism in their scholarship. And mentioning the New Criticism immediately brought to mind the familiar image of a professor leading students in a close reading of a single poem on a page. But what, we wondered, was this imaginary of the New Critical classroom predicated upon? New Critics wrote *about* teaching in their major works: Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn, for example, begins with a classroom scene in which the student senses the aesthetic value of Wordworth’s Westminster Bridge sonnet but needs to have that native critical judgment nurtured and amplified and modeled by the teacher through practices of closely attending to not just what the poem says but how he says it. But how did Brooks actually teach? 

    So we started there, and luck had it that Brooks’s papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale included transcriptions of not just his lectures but his students’ comments and questions from his Modern Poetry course (he had planned to publish a book of his lectures, and these complete transcripts were to be the basis). So, we were able to get a real sense of the ups and downs of his classroom hour; the kinds of unexpected queries he fielded from students; the historical facts he included or even misreported; and the ways that the sheer time that he spent on certain poems (like Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” which he deemed a “failure”) belied a different kind of literary valuation at work than his stated theoretical account of what makes good poems good. 

    From there, we saw that there was a lot to be learned—indeed a whole other disciplinary narrative—by witnessing how scholars taught alongside what they wrote. We went to see, in the same spirit, how other foundational formalist critics including Eliot and Richards taught in their classrooms. But we also began to wonder and investigate what kinds of teaching were happening in other kinds of institutions in these same moments. Scholarly publications—particularly those manifestoes or arguments over how we should teach or read or research—tend to overrepresent figures at elite institutions. So looking at teaching instead gives us back a sense of the much bigger field of practice in these eras. 

    CORRIGAN: Early in the book, you stress that your book is a history of teaching—not an endorsement of how the particular teachers in your study taught (p. 17). But as I read, I kept finding things these teachers were doing really creative and interesting, such as Edith Rickert having her students create visual representations of elements of style in a text (p. 99). Were there times in your research where you thought, “Oh, that is good teaching” or even “I’m going to use that in my classroom”? 

    BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Yes—and we think it’s actually a testament to how creative and interesting and maybe above all experimental literature teaching has been—we weren’t looking for model practices or assignments, but so much of what we came across seems worth stealing for our own classrooms, even though we try hard in the book to point out that we’re not holding up these figures as examples of Great Teachers or—what would be even less useful—suggesting that somehow teaching in the past used to be better and that we need to return to some previous, unfallen state of literature teaching! Because we don’t think that at all. In fact, one of the things that prompted us to write the book in the first place was knowing how hard we were working to learn to teach well in our own classrooms, how much time we were spending inventing new courses and assignments and little strategies for solving problems we ran into in the classroom, and how we saw that—despite omnipresent messages in higher ed about how bad college and university teaching is!—most of our colleagues and friends in the profession were working hard at being engaged, effective teachers and were often using really inventive methods to help their students learn. And we realized that no matter how many professors of literature were doing that, somehow engaged, effective teaching was always being framed as exception or unusual, and not the norm—and the norm, despite what we saw in our everyday professional lives, was always framed as this boring unengaged research who hating being in the classroom and just droned on to a lecture hall of bored students. So we thought that it was likely that if the present of teaching looked very different than official stories about it, there was a good chance that the past of teaching would look very different as well, if we could figure out how to find it.  

    And like you, other people also seem to have found the practices we document in the book useful. In his review of the book, Ben Hagen writes that:  

    The Teaching Archive is not a “How To” guide, yet Buurma and Heffernan acknowledge that “some of the past teaching [they] describe seems new and exciting now” (17). I can confirm that reading and rereading The Teaching Archive is pedagogically generative. This past semester (Spring 2021), inspired by the example of Spurgeon, I asked graduate students to create personal indexes of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. As we learn in chapter one, Spurgeon’s 1913 Art of Reading course did not conclude with an academic research paper but led students “just [up to] the point where [they] would begin to write a research paper,” working slowly through a process of studying, note taking, and “coordinat[ing] information into knowledge” (30, 31). Index-making, according to Spurgeon, is far from a “banal scholarly practice[]”; it is, rather, a “thoughtful” activity that “encode[s]” the values and perspectives of any given indexer—“recording this and not that, subordinating one point to another” (36). Building an index of a text, or an anthology, reveals networks of ideas as well as chains of citations and references, “set[s] of strands that you can reorder and reconnect” (36). This research emphasis on note taking and indexing—not paper writing—encourages students to make something and also to acquire a personal hold on obscure or difficult material; moreover, this activity leaves students (including mine, I hope) with a surviving record of what mattered to them in their studies, an organized set of data that they can “then recompose . . . into the shapes of [later] interpretations and arguments” (37). 

    CORRIGAN: One practical takeaway from your book might be an encouragement for teachers to more carefully archive our teaching materials. You mention, for instance, how rare it was to have “meticulously preserved” teaching notes like those of Caroline Spurgeon (p. 25). Do you document your own teaching any differently now that you’ve written this book? 

    BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Haha, no! We should but we don’t, really. We always mean to take good notes about a class—what worked and what didn’t—but fail to do so nearly every term. (Josephine MIles, one of the poet-scholar-teachers we write about, jotted a very short and charming version of this end-of-term notes-for-next-time in one of her English 1A notebooks, which simply read: “Kill error + model style / Rouse C’s / Personal confs before midterms.”) Our teaching documents themselves are well stored because they’ve been made in word processors from the beginning. And of course, that big archive is keyword searchable—we’ve both had the uncanny experience of discovering a document of teaching notes on a relatively obscure text that we were looking up to cite or read for the first time (no kidding!).   

    CORRIGAN: On a related note, it strikes me that, just as your book was coming out, the pandemic forced so many teachers to do some pretty intensive archiving by making all aspects of our courses available electronically in various online, remote, and hybrid formats. Of course, intentionally online courses existed before the pandemic. But the scale we just saw was unprecedented. Do you have any thoughts on what this past year or so of teaching under these conditions might mean for cultivating “the teaching archive” going forward? 

    BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Well, one thing we worry about is how much of that archive now exists within Learning Management Systems. Canvas, for example, is set up to encourage you to build out your “How to Revise a Thesis” handouts or your introductory notes on a novelist within the platform itself rather than linking to or embedding external documents. Feedback, too, often happens within the LMS. Laura, for example, has had to be really mindful about all of this because she saw how much of her own teaching record was disappearing from her personal computer—she’d go to write a recommendation letter for a former student and realize she had no record of the students’ work or her feedback on it to access. And another thing we worry about is the extent to which universities have tried to capture intellectual property in individual instructors’ courses in the chaos of everything going remote; we probably don’t even yet know to what extent this has happened at various universities. That’s an issue that faculty and faculty unions are paying more and more attention to, we think, but there aren’t really uniform practices or policies around this yet—and of course, many people don’t have a union and then advocacy for faculty around this issue can end up getting lost, or happening in piecemeal ways.   

    But you’re right that all of those issues and attendant dangers aside, there are a lot of exciting possibilities for what we might be able to know about teaching during this moment because of how much of it was happening remotely and has left more traces than usual—video recordings and transcripts and probably millions of hours of voicethreads and video assignments and blog posts and text chats. And we also noticed that more instructors were entering into the classrooms of instructors at other institutions. The two of us, for example, recorded lectures together, podcast style, for one of Laura’s UNF classes earlier this year, and we saw many other visits and guest lectures being organized on social media during that time. This kind of growing awareness of what’s going on not just within your colleagues’ classrooms but across different kinds of institutions seems really, really promising to us because it could serve not just as a foundation for stronger subfield scholarship but potentially also a foundation for the kind of cross-institutional labor organizing that disciplinary formations will need to nurture more and more.  

    CORRIGAN: Your history of literary study focuses on the teaching of “major literary scholars” (p. 3), in part so that you can contrast their writing about the discipline with their teaching of the discipline and in part (I’m imagining) because major scholars are the ones most likely to have their papers archived. But I’m curious, do you have any guesses about how different your history might look if it had been possible or practical to look at an even broader range of teachers—especially the great majority who are not major literary scholars, not well known at all?  

    BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Yes—we focus on major literary scholars for exactly the reasons you describe, but part of what we found is that research is happening in tandem with teaching for everyone, whether they are writing major critical monographs, editing important collections, and publishing widely read public writing or not. This is partly because teaching itself requires research—when we prepare to teach classes, most of us find ourselves reading scholarly articles, tracking down new sources and texts, and searching out how peers past and present have taught a given text, topic, or course. All of that is literary studies research, even though we might not always recognize what we do when we prepare classes as research, and even though there’s no way to put that work down as research on a cv or make it count as research in an annual review. So we’re hopeful that we’ve written a history that opens up to the work of the great majority you mention.  

    CORRIGAN: I love your observation that most of literary studies takes place in classrooms. You write, “literary value seems to emanate from texts, but is actually made by people. And classrooms are the core site where this collective making can be practiced and witnessed” (p. 6). When we teach, we’re not transmitting literary studies to students for later. We’re doing literary studies with them right now. That feels revolutionary. What might change, would you guess, if more of us who teach literature consciously adopted this stance—that our courses are not about the discipline, they are the discipline? 

    BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: We’ve thought about this question a lot. We think it’s an insight that a lot of teachers understand, in a tacit way, through their practice. For example, there’s a line in our introduction just past what you quote here that reads, “The answer to the question, ‘Did I miss anything last week?’ is ‘Yes, and you missed it forever’” that REALLY resonated with readers. People shared that excerpt on Twitter more than any other part of the book. Because we all do know that what we’re doing in these classrooms is much more than content transfer—we’re creating knowledge!—but it’s relatively rare to see that insight ratified within the institutions in which we work, and so it’s difficult for teachers to really keep hold of it as a conscious insight about our everyday work. And if we could really hang on to the fact that we are actually creating literary value in our classrooms, we think we’d not only see new differences AND new connections to the work of other disciplines, but we’d also have a better sense of how literary studies is in some ways distinct—and so perhaps we’d be more consistent at describing and claiming the  expertise we exercise in our teaching, and thus better equipped to advocate for the conditions we need in order to do that teaching well.  

    Because if it’s rare for the institutions in which we work to ratify (or even be able to get out of the way of) that insight, it’s even rarer to have the kind of labor this teaching entails valued by those institutions. In her “Money on the Left” podcast appearance about her book, The Order of Forms, Anna Kornbluh pointed to just this section of The Teaching Archive:  

    But people need time for teaching. And that means that they need small class sizes, they need workable loads, and they need the ability to have preparation that involves reading new things and changing their course syllabi all the time and like genuinely encountering and making ideas happen in the classroom. There’s this line in Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s book, The Teaching Archive, about how like in the humanities you deal with students saying like, “I couldn’t make it to class, what did I miss?” And they say, “You missed everything and you missed it forever.” Because we make the knowledge happen in that haptic, collaborative, and dynamic moment of mutual determination of meaning. That is what you missed. So I think we need time for research driven teaching and research generative teaching. And what we also know is that it is just emphatically and empirically good for students, about small class sizes, about a lot of individual attention, about a lot of dynamic kind of evolution of what’s on the syllabus, and a lot of in-person collective work. 

    Source link

  • 21 Top Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Episodes

    21 Top Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Episodes

    I started producing weekly Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episodes in June of 2014. Since that time, a new episode has aired each week. This is something that I’m both proud of – yet a little horrified that I have got a streak going that may not be sustainable (or make sense) in the long run. As of today (October 2), I also have another streak going… I’ve closed my Apple Watch rings for 334 days straight. That means I’ve done at least 30 minutes of cardio, stood for at least a minute for 12 hours, and burned at least 440 calories during the day. I’m thinking it might be healthy if I were to not focus as much as I have been on maintaining either of these streaks and give myself a bit of a break. But I plan on sticking with them both (if I can) at least until the end of 2021.

    A few years ago, Dave and I switched hosting companies for our podcasts. That’s why, instead of this being a list of the top 21 episodes of all time, I’m sticking with the top 21 since 2019. Someday, I might go back and combine the data from before the switch and now. However, for now, I’m keeping it simple.

    Top 21 of the Most Listened to Episodes since 2019

    1. Episode 324 – Teaching Effectively with Zoom with Dan Levy (2020)
    2. Episode 309 – Hyflex Learning with David Rhoads (2020)
    3. Episode 263 – Recipes for Effective Teaching with Elizabeth Barkley (2019)
    4. Episode 320 – How to Be Together in Learning Online with Jesse Stommel (2020)
    5. Episode 258 – Paying the Price with Sara Goldrick-Rab (2019)
    6. Episode 316 – Designing for the Uncertain Fall with Maria Andersen (2020)
    7. Episode 254 – Stop Talking, Start Influencing with Jared Horvath (2019)
    8. Episode 291 – Learning Myths and Realities with Michelle Miller (2020)
    9. Episode 314 – Culturally Responsive Online Teaching with Courtney Plotts (2020)
    10. Episode 295 – Online Engagement Through Digital PowerUps with Travis Thurston (2020)
    11. Episode 256 – Creating Wicked Students with Paul Hanstedt (2019)
    12. Episode 296 – Toward Cruelty-Free Syllabi with Matthew Cheney (2020)
    13. Episode 273 – Engaging Learners in Large Classes with Bonni Stachowiak (2019)
    14. Episode 264 – Serving Hispanic Students with Melissa Salazar (2019)
    15. Episode 271 – The Missing Course with David Gooblar (2019)
    16. Episode 269 – Removing Learning Barriers with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with Jennifer Pusateri (2019)
    17. Episode 290 – The Productive Online and Offline Professor with Bonni Stachowiak (2020)
    18. Episode 282 – Using Challenges to Motivate Learners with Mike Wesch (2019)
    19. Episode 277 – Intentional Tech with Derek Bruff (2019)
    20. Episode 253 – Spaces and Places (and Nudges) with José Bowen (2019)
    21. Episode 259 – Intentional and Transparent Assessment with Natasha Jankowski (2019)

    Other Popular More Recent Episodes

    Here are some other more recent popular episodes from 2021:

    Source link