The Bind: How Good Pedagogy and Helpfulness Breed Inflexibility

February 4th, 2010

We all want to help our students. Even those of us who are not of the “caregiver” personality (I’m certainly not), want to share our discipline, and help students understand it and the course within which we explore it with them.

I know a number of instructors who go to great lengths to do this. They create tutorials and visual pathways leading students through the class. They think out discussion prompts carefully, rewording over many semesters to get the phrasing right so students understand. They screencast, podcast, send messages and announcements and reminders.

The development of such assistive elements for a class takes time and effort. Our Jing workshops at the POT mini-conferences are filled every time with professors eager to help guide their students. Many appreciate the vast encyclopedia of resources that is the web, and create engaging activities that access what it has to offer. Some are creating social bookmarking sites and Nings, each with accompanying guides on how to use them for their particular class.

Years ago, when I was constructing my second online class, I wanted to use links inside my lecture to assist students in gaining depth on certain subjects. I created lectures in HTML with lots of links. Over the years, I revised the lectures. Often I wanted to keep the links to excellent websites, but the sites kept disappearing or moving, leading students to frustrating 404 errors. My effort to utilize the web from my own perspective, my own written lectures, was great pedagogically but it meant I had to either find the missing site or track down a new one. Even this semester, when I’ve offered students extra credit to find replacement websites for those that have disappeared, I feel trapped by what I created.

mousetrap
cc Flickr unloveablesteve

My audio recordings intensified the entrapment. Wanting to help students understand my lectures, I audio recorded them. Many students over the years, both visually impaired and not, have told me how much they appreciate hearing my voice and inflection. But this means that every time I revise a lecture, I must re-record. Not only re-record and upload so when they click the QuickTime button that section plays, but convert it to mp3 and re-zip the big file of all the lecture sections for those who download it and play it on the go. This also means that when a link disappears, I must find a new one or else me saying “link” in the lecture (as I did throughout for those not reading it and for the visually impaired) is silly.

If I decide to change something that affects the pathway of the course (create a wiki instead of a weekly forum, for example), I’d have to reconstruct all my visual guides, edit my FAQ, and re-do the screencast of how to make your way through the class. In addition, then, to a navigational overhaul I might wish to do, I have to remake all the assistive elements.

And I’m not even going to mention the entire technologies in which we create things, and then they disappear (OK, I’ll mention Furl, where I was trying to cache the web pages to prevent 404s).

Certainly, we have similar issues with classroom teaching, but often that is a matter of simply explaining differently in class. Here the technologies we want to use, want to use because they’re effective, mean far more additional work, stifling creativity and making us more reluctant to do something new.

And that’s bad in so many ways.

Posted in Pedagogy | No Comments »

Are students breaking the Bb habit?

January 28th, 2010

Every semester, students go to Blackboard looking for my class. Of course, my class is not in Blackboard. If you’re one of my online students, it’s in Moodle. Not the college’s Moodle, but my Moodle. If you’re at San Elijo, the class is in a Ning (well, and in the classroom).

Nevertheless, all of us deviants have a Bb class assigned to us, even if it’s not visible to students. We are supposed to create links from there to where we want students to go, acknowledging that students use Bb like a portal. When I chaired the technology committee, I agreed this was a good idea, mostly because I was doing it anyway, so now we’re all supposed to do it.

So every semester, I erase all the Bb menu buttons so students won’t get confused — they can only click on my info page, and it opens in a new window to eject them from Bb.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a number of students always enter their class through Blackboard — they are unaware that the class is actually somewhere else. As I’ve commented elsewhere, even if they know it’s another site, they still call any class website “Blackboard” or “the blackboard”.

Well, this semester I forgot to make the Blackboard shells I’d set up available to students. It was an honest mistake. I did set them up, which takes some time, so obviously I meant to do it. I thought I had done it.

But yesterday I got an email from a student. You see, I have huge wait lists of people wanting to get in to very full classes. So if a student doesn’t “show up” at the site on the first day, I email them. Of course, I have already emailed all students via our enrollment system the week before, pointing them to the right place. This student didn’t get that email, but today got the one where I said I’d have to drop him if he didn’t show.

He wrote me that he went to Blackboard, but the class wasn’t there, so he asked at “registration” and they said wait, it will open. So it wasn’t fair of me to drop him.

Bad on so many levels! Totally understandable that it wouldn’t occur to him the class might be elsewhere, but he asked at “registration”. He obviously hadn’t gone anywhere else at the college’s website — we have many pages for the online class information, all of which are linked properly to my classes. We have a call-in Student Helpdesk. But all he had was my second email, which he happened to discover on the third day of class.

Here’s the strange thing. He was the only one. I swear, I had received only two other emails from students who couldn’t find my class, and that was because they had gone to the college’s Moodle installation instead of mine. This is out of 160 online students!

In other words, 99.38% of students found their class without using Blackboard. Despite this student’s brief distress (don’t worry — I tell them I’m dropping them but I always wait awhile so long as it doesn’t affect their record — he’s fine), that stat is amazing to me. It means they did use the website, or did check their email, or didn’t make assumptions, or just found their way like they would on campus when looking for their classroom. Only one other student had even mentioned the course not being in Blackboard.

There is hope.

Posted in CMS/LMS, Students, The Web | 1 Comment »

A Tale of Two Chapters…well, one

January 8th, 2010

Way back in the distant past (2007), I was asked to write a couple of chapters in a forthcoming book about digital learning in the humanities. I agreed, and wrote one on Course Management Systems (duh) and one called “Learning With Style”. They were well-documented, yet informational, designed for the new online college instructor.

The second chapter focused on learning styles. I was big into learning styles then, the idea of catering our teaching to hit as many learning styles as possible, based on Gardner’s multiple intelligences. I had even given presentations on the subject, including one at San Diego City College, which I was asked to reprise in 2008.

The chapters disppeared into the void for a couple of years. Then this fall, the editor contacted me. A new editor had been assigned at the publisher, and would I be willing to update the sources and do a little editing in response to her suggestions? Why, sure.

Trouble was (isn’t there always a problem?), I no longer believe what I wrote in 2007 about learning styles. I have, quite simply, changed my mind. (As the saying goes, if you can’t change your mind, how do you know you have one?)

I was conversing with a colleague at San Elijo, and we were discussing how students on campus have been using their challenges and difficulties in life as justification for not completing their work. My response was, “This is college. They’re here to overcome those things, not wallow in them.” Then I started thinking about learning styles, and how I’d changed what my students do in class in a way that clearly emphasizes writing: gathering evidence and developing a thesis. And how this semester, not for the first time, I had a student say to me, “Well, I’m no good at taking notes from lecture. I’m a visual learner.” But he wasn’t a genuine visual learner — he just liked pictures. He didn’t analyze visuals any better than he did text.

A number of my students have been told that they have a particular learning style already, before they get to me. They are beginning to figure it’s my job to cater to it. But I need them to write, too — we’re doing historical inquiry here. Is it good teaching to let them wallow in their “preferred” learning style?

So I decided to rewrite the chapter. First I wanted “Teaching the Students We Have”, with an emphasis on how students really are today, what they need, how we should teach them. My editor said OK. Then I changed it to “Reducing the Distance in Online Classes”, which involved less rewriting, but reducing the learning styles thing to a small section and bringing in some current research. My editor said OK (he’s quite amiable).

Then I found it. A great new study saying (ta dah!) that there is no evidence that catering to learning styles increases their learning, linked from this post at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Vindicated!

Posted in Multiple Intelligences, Musings, Pedagogy | No Comments »

A Rubric Relationship

January 5th, 2010

I often talk about my relationship with technologies as if they were people. For example, in 2007 (!) I said my CMS needed to start taking out the trash if I was going to keep it around. Well, here’s another one — it’s about rubrics.

When the big fuss was being made about rubrics a number of years ago, I was skeptical. But I like anything that makes teaching more transparent (yes, I really will get to that post someday!). So I developed a rubric, and it is the heart of my students’ self-assessments of their work and participation. This morning, for example, I will receive from my on-site class their physical portfolios, where they suggest their grades for participation and work quality based on this rubric.

I have also studied excellent rubrics written by others, such as my brilliant colleague Louisa Moon, and use them myself to assure satisfactory grade progress in courses I’ve taken.

Rubrics are great, right? They let the student see exactly how the instructor is going to grade their work. The instructor has created the rubric based on how s/he really grades, what is actually sought, so the grading appears to be impartial and fair even though the qualities in it are subjective. It’s a great balance.

But here’s the rub of rubrics. They break down the grading process into little segments, and prevents a viewing of the whole.

A number of years ago, the wonderful Megill brothers (David and Don) taught me that no matter what, a grade is subjective. There is no such thing as “objective questions” or an objective grade. Grading is always subjective because it is always based on what the teacher wants.

I can try to list what I want, and give each item a point count. But what if a student does a superior job on one aspect, and not so well on another?

An example: let’s say I break down grading an essay into 4 points max for a solid thesis, 4 points for writing style, and 4 points for content development. The students created a thesis that should be published by Harvard University Press and turned into a book. I give him 4 points for that, but the writing’s kinda whatever and the content development not so hot considering how great a thesis it is. Total is thus 10 out of 12. I want to give him a 12 and write “OMG go back and develop this thesis and get the thing published!”

There isn’t room for this, even if I add an “overall quality” category or something, because then it applies to everyone. I have to break my own rubric.

When it comes to final grades, I do this naturally. My rules state that I reserve the right to reduce the grade due to:

instructor’s evaluation of overall learning, within one letter grade of total points earned. For example, your points could add up to a B, but if your overall work was not at the B level (see rubric, above), I could lower the grade to a C.

I also use this rule to boost a total up. After all, learning is about progression. If a student got lousy grades early in the semester, but improved as the course got more complex and involved, I want the final grade to show that progress, so I bump up a number of grades at the end of the semester. An “improvement” category wouldn’t make sense, except in an individual context.

That individual context is undermined by rubrics. I don’t grade on a curve, but rather try to grade each students’ work according to both a standard and individual progress.

And I think we all do this to a certain extent. Thus my relationship to the rubric has become fraught with suspicion. Is my rubric really doing the job I set it out to do? or is it sneaking around on me, limiting my options?

Posted in Interactivity, Pedagogy, Students, Workflows | 2 Comments »

Blackboard as Kleenex

December 18th, 2009

In recent conversations with Mike Bogle, I’ve stumbled on the idea that a lot of students, and online teaching novices, are using the word “Blackboard” when what they mean is “web learning stuff”.

It’s become like Kleenex, at one time the top brand of facial tissue in the U.S. People say “hand me a Kleenex” instead of “hand me a tissue”. The brand has become synonymous with the generic item.

My evidence is that students often say things like “I posted in the Blackboard”, when my class is actually located in Ning or Moodle. I find it interesting that they know what “posted” means, but not where they’ve posted. It’s all just the web, a Narnia that exists somewhere behind their computer screen. If their other teachers have referred to their course being in Blackboard, that must be where the online courses live, back there behind the fur coats amd the ads for enhancing male potency.

I’m sure this would thrill Blackboard, though it annoys the hell out of me, and folks like Mike, a leader in applying technology to the problems of pedagogy, who’s being called “the Blackboard guy”. I frequently have novice faculty approach me and tell me they’re getting into online teaching, so they’re going to take a Blackboard workshop, and where do they sign up for one?

I am always shocked no matter how often this occurs. I never know where to start. Do I first mention that they need to decide what they want to accomplish, then look at technology? point out there are many other systems (and non-systems) they can use? point out that POT doesn’t do “training” but we are delighted to help with their pedagogical needs?

Instead, I think I should try to figure out what they mean by “Blackboard”. Then I’ll probably need a Kleenex.

Posted in CMS/LMS, Pedagogy, Program for Online Teaching, Students, The Web | 4 Comments »

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