Category: Pedagogy

Honor in defeat

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

In all my years of online teaching (and it’s over 20, mind) I have never had a worse start to the semester. My inbox is receiving student messages at the rate of about 3 per hour, and has done the entire first week. These messages are, as I’ve mentioned before, mostly related to not being able to find things. Many indicate that they haven’t read my announcements, so all have required individual responses.

This is heart-breaking for me, and not because of the time suck. My navigation in my courses has always been my pride. Students frequently mention on evaluations the ease of getting around the course, the knowledge of knowing what is due and when, the way the class hangs together. One Canvas feature, the To-Do list on the app, has put an end to all of that.

When the LMS undermines the integrity of my courses, it puts me in a bind. The disaggregation of content creates larger problems, as I’ve noted. I am being defeated by Canvas. The question is whether I can snatch honor from defeat.

The solutions I articulated last time, the new rules, are proving to be difficult to implement in Canvas.

For example, it is clear that proximity of content to task is crucial when students engage class material through disparate tasks. Reading must be together with a quiz or writing on that reading. Self-reported items must have the self-reported task alongside the submission. So what’s the problem?

The To-Do Lists

Canvas makes this much more difficult than it has to be, because the To-Do list itself is a fickle beast. Over the last 48 hours, I have learned a lot about it. There are, it turns out, several To-Do lists. One appears when you open the Home page of the course itself (let’s call this List A):

It includes Calendar events, so it would tell students everything they need. Unfortunately, it is useless, since the problem is that students no longer go to the course Home page in the first place.

Another To-Do list is on the new, improved Student Dashboard (List B). For some reason, it prefaces everything with the words, “Turn in”:

This is on the right side of what is basically a home page for the entire Canvas system for the college, and the Canvas folks don’t seem to understand that students don’t go there either. One reason is that it’s utterly cluttered with college announcements. It also does not include Calendar events.

Here is what students see in the tool they’ve suddenly started to use now that all their MiraCosta classes are in Canvas, the aggregated To-Do list on their phone in the app (List C). It also uses “Turn in”:

No Calendar events, no ungraded assignments. Here are the other things they can see on their phone:

The Inbox (Messages) Notifications (the default is Announcements and Message) Events (which shows only those manually added to the calendar) Dashboard with tiles

My student account is set as a student in five of my classes, so imagine all these from different classes, in different colors.

As far as I can tell, almost all of the students now only use the To-Do list in the app, List C. The questions I’ve received indicate that few use the Notifications, which is where all my Announcements would appear. These don’t appear on the To-Do list, implying that reading them is not something one needs To Do.

The Attempt to Solve This

Since they cannot see either the week’s readings or my lectures in the To-Do list, surely the trick was to get these to appear.

Option 1: Add everything to the Calendar as an event on a date

This would be easiest, but it didn’t work, because the app To-Do list does not show Calendar events.

Option 2: Make a page for each reading and lecture and check the box “Add to student to-do list”

I thought I could make a page for each reading and each lecture, then click the “Add to student to-do list” box, and they would be visible!

But it turns out this is not the case. Things added using the “Add to student to-do list” box only appear on the Course home page list (List A) or the Student Dashboard (List B), not the app To-Do list.

Option 3: Make readings into 0-point assignments or ungraded quizzes or surveys

No dice. It turns out nothing will appear on the To-Do list in the app unless it is a graded discussion, assignment, or quiz.

So that leaves me with only one option: make everything graded.

Grading and ungrading

No way am I grading every time they do a reading or view a lecture. Out of the question.

So the other possibility: ungrading.

I have never been a true believer in ungrading, or in the honor system. I allow it for some items, but not for others, and for those self-reported items I not infrequently discover plagiarism, dishonesty, or inferior work. The point of the system is to give feedback on this work, which I can do only up to a point.

The way to force ungraded tasks to appear on the app To-Do list is to adapt Laura Gibbs’ brilliant self-reporting quizzes and embed the material or link it in the instructions to that quiz.

So each lecture link would go to something like this:

For readings, I could adapt the trick I’ve been using to bring proximity to readings and homework assignments: use iframes to embed the reading in the instructions of the quiz. Then each reading link will go to something like this:

For six classes, needless to say, this will take a huge amount of time.

Now some people may say, “But Lisa, what happens when Canvas changes everything? It worries me that you might have to do all this work again!” As the Scottish policeman said in Casino Royale (1967), when it worried James Bond that he was a French police officer but had a Scots accent, “Aye, it worras me too.”

The Justification

As Jeff Goldblum’s character noted in The Big Chill (1983), it is impossible to go through the day without a juicy justification — it’s more important than sex.

So here I will defend a system in which I don’t believe: the honor system. Clearly, if everything that is assigned becomes a self-graded or auto-graded quiz, we’re on the honor system automatically.

I return to Stephen Downes’ idea of education: that it is the role of professors to model and demonstrate, and the role of students to practice and reflect. I think, frankly, that reflection is dead when the content and tasks are disaggregated. So what’s left is practice. The doing of history is what’s important, and I will grade it when they do it: writing assignments will always be graded by me. The rest will be (ungraded) practice, for points.

This will create an environment of trust (um….ok) and responsibility for learning (yes indeedy). [Suppressing cynicism will become my new watchword. Whiskey may become important.]

But wait, there’s more!

Possible further changes, then, after the zillions of hours making quizzes for the unquizzable, would include:

1) changing from weighted categories to points accumulation, because there’s no point in weighting anything

2) returning to Modules (which I just happily jettisoned) to force task completion

3) using Modules as the ugly home page to eliminate beautifying a Home page no one uses

4) eliminating the weekly pages I decided to keep instead of using Modules, which would entail losing all my introductory videos because it’s stupid to put a 2-minute Voki on a quiz

5) eliminating all multiple-choice quizzes because (a) I get too many student questions about them, (b) it isn’t really practicing to do them, and (c) Canvas can’t properly handle test banks anyway and I’m always having to fix them

6) vigorous use of James Jones’ brilliant due dates spreadsheet to make sure everything is dated properly

7) sorting out the remaining problems: getting students to the Information page (which is a FAQ they need), and forcing them to return to a Discussion that they think is completed after only one post

Thomas Jones Barker, Death of Captain Nolan (1855)

Disaggregated knowledge and the LMS

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

The advantage of teaching so many classes online is that I see patterns in student messages that lead me into larger issues. This one is HUGE. It’s not just about Canvas. It’s about the decline of Western education as we know it.

I stopped using Modules last term, because they “flattened” the elements of my class, making it appear as though each were of equal worth. Modules also forced students along a linear path of that week’s work.

I instead chose to keep my weekly pages, which list the things we do each week and when they’re due. I use bold for the higher-stakes assignments. Canvas automatically puts my due dates on the Calendar, and thus populates the students’ To-Do and Upcoming lists, which appear on the main (Home) page.

Over the years, more and more classes have switched to Canvas, so the average full-time student at MiraCosta would have four classes in a term. What the Canvas Calendar does is acts like any other calendar — it lists the tasks for each day or each week or each month. On the student Canvas app, it shows the To-Do list for each week from all their classes.

Sound convenient? It is convenient in the same way that bottled water is convenient, and that credit cards are convenient. It undermines traditional relationships globally, and creates a sea change.

Yes, I probably sound crazy saying that the Canvas Calendar represents the decline of Western education as we know it. But bear with me.

This week, the first week of class, I have had an unusual number of students message me saying they missed the assignment because they didn’t “see” it. By probing this, I’ve discovered that they mean it isn’t appearing in the To-Do list. This is regardless of the fact that I did check to the box to add these items to the To-Do list (I”ll check that technical issue later). I quickly responded with the yellow highlighted note on the Home page you see below, but I still was getting apology messages for missing work they couldn’t tell they needed to do.

This morrning a student wrote me saying she was sorry she missed it, but the primary source assignment wasn’t on the To-Do list. I sent a student my screenshot in Student View, showing that the assignment was indeed appearing on the list.

 

She replied with two screenshots where it wasn’t there. Here’s the one she sent from her phone:

And it suddenly hit me. The process she’s accessing, the To-Do List, lists all the tasks for all the classes a student takes. It thus disaggregates the courses entirely. She’s no longer taking my History class, or a Sociology class. She’s just doing work, clicking links, crossing things off a list.

By showing the student the tasks for the day, for all three of her classes, Canvas has not only reasserted its contention that all learning tasks are equivalent, but that they are tasks unrelated to anything else. They are just stuff the student needs to complete.

Most scholars think in terms of their field, then teachers think in terms of wrapping elements together to encourage understanding. On my weekly page, you can see that the tasks for the week relate to each other. They are all part of that week’s topic. They follow sequentially: first post the primary source (forum), then check it for points (quiz). My design has instantly become irrelevant.

My practical response today has been to go through all my classes, adding the weekly page to the To-Do list, as the first thing that week. It will be tricker to do this for my lectures and other non-graded or linked items, since Canvas doesn’t “see” those at all. I will have to link each on a Page and put the Page on the To-Do list, forcing students to click twice to get to it. This will take all weekend.

But my holistic response is much more important. The units we teach are no longer units — they contain no flow or contiguity when seen as disparate tasks. If students access all academic work as a flat list of tasks, there is no connection between assignments. There is no connection, for example, between Reading 3 and Quiz 3. Assign the Reading for Monday. Assign the Reading Quiz for Wednesday, and it isn’t clear they relate to each other.

This explains the other messages I’m receiving. “I see we have a Lecture quiz due, but what is that on?” At first I smirked and thought, “The Lecture, of course!” But now I realize they don’t see the Lecture unless they’re on the weekly page. “The Calendar says the second post is due – where do I post?” You can’t put two due dates for the same discussion forum. They don’t know where to return to in order to post.

In an age when we worry that students don’t read whole books, we have something here that is much worse. How can they do sequential and scaffolded learning when the system won’t let you scaffold?

It changes the rules utterly. Here are the “new” rules (some have been good practice for awhile):

1. Assessment and responses must appear with the content.

Quiz 3, in other words, must contain Reading 3 within it. You can’t have a link for Reading 3 on Monday and Quiz 3 on Wednesday.

Note here that group text annotation, of the kind I’m using in Perusall, is ideal. The content and the activity are inextricably linked.

2. Double-level discussion may not work.

In Canvas, to have students return to a discussion, it will be necessary to link to that same discussion in the Calendar later in the week.

One alternative will be to have the entire class inside a discussion forum. This won’t work in Canvas because it doesn’t allow real threads, but might work in other systems.

3. Navigation schemes are useless.

Obviously, my own weekly page navigation, even if it’s on the To-Do list, is worked against forcefully by Canvas.

Some would say return to Modules. But Canvas’ own Modules are irrelevant, except for adaptive release, or to force task order. Students won’t use the Modules page either, even if it’s the main page. They may never see it.

This also applies to the Home page itself, especially a nice one. It is now obsolete. All we’ve learned about making the Home page welcoming is irrelevant.

Again, the new rules (and I’m sure there will be more as we all think about it) are the result of the disaggregation of content and tasks. This is both an effect of the technology, and a cause of the disaggregation of knowledge. We’d better plan accordingly.

Ending the reading/quiz cycle

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

I certainly didn’t mean for the relationship to end suddenly. It has been tenuous for awhile, various arguments and complaints, but I always thought it was a communication problem. But finally I had to walk away.

In my History of England class, the textbook has been an issue for a long time. The most suitable and available academic text, by the Messrs Roberts, is two volumes, so that won’t work. The class is, unfortunately, only one semester (we have two for the history of the U.S., with a much shorter history). And realistically, even one volume is asking for trouble.

All the books I’ve used, including works by Roy Strong, Asa Briggs, and F.E. Halliday are outdated, out of print, or both. These have been replaced by volumes that sell well in the U.K., but require a previous knowledge lacking in American students: works by Jeremy Black, Simon Schama, and Simon Jenkins. I’ve been using the Penguin Illustrated History, which I love. It’s visual, I’ve written a bunch of quizzes for it, and it’s beautifully written. But students have become less enthusiastic, and it’s outdated now anyway.

Besides, it costs money. All my other classes require only my own pdf textbook, freely downloadable and printable. We are now required to indicate in the class registration system if we have a low-cost or no-cost class, so that automatically creates competition among classes as students realize they can take a class for less money. This was my last class with a textbook that had to be purchased, and it wasn’t easy for the bookstore, or students online, to find an inexpensive copy. So I unceremoniously dumped the textbook, and spend a couple of weeks this summer downloading, editing, and reformatting appropriate pages from the web. Then I wrote matching quizzes.

Canvas is not user friendly when it comes to importing, editing, and reusing quizzes, in any format. It’s test banks are obscure and hard to use. The result of my machinations was a set of single-question, matching quizzes for the new readings, and my old (now five-question) multiple-choice quizzes for my lecture. So I put one due Wednesday and the other Sunday.

Well, now the weekly course page was becoming really cluttered:

I don’t want to go all Copernican on this, but if I were a student it’s starting to look like hoops to jump through, instead of ways to explore material.

So I thought, what do I want them to get out of the reading anyway? My lectures already have a good outline of the main events of English political, social, and cultural history. And the depth is already provided by the documents we “read and discuss” (i.e. annotate in Perusall) each week. These readings are pretty intense for today’s community college students (Magna Carta, Archbishop Cranmer). So instead of adding new readings, it may be better to have them deal with these documents more.

I spent yesterday deleting all the quizzes, both lecture and reading. Instead, I’m having each student submit a “Document analysis paragraph” which uses all the names of the documents to support any single idea they have about the era we’re studying. I made a silly sample paragraph to model what I want them to do:

It’s in the form of a single-question graded survey, which will automatically apply points if they turn it in, so I can read them at my leisure and communicate individually with students who are struggling. And now students are doing, not reading and quizzing.

And thus I’ve broken the entire reading/quiz cycle in one swoop. I didn’t set out to do this — it just happened. But I’m pretty sure I’ll have no regrets.

 

Class annotation of images

Lisa M Lane

This is another post where I share how I did something, solely so I don’t forget how to do it.

Perusall is a wonderful program for annotating documents with a whole class, and I’m currently using it for all my online classes, which are located in the horror of an LMS they call Canvas. I upload a PDF, and students and I can highlight the document, with a panel popping up for discussion. When anyone clicks on the question mark, it indicates a request for responses. When anyone uses @Someone, it notifies them someone has responded. I have used it to solve the “what if they don’t do the reading?” problem, since we all kind of do the reading together.

All this is great. The system “auto-grades” (though I have to set it then check it very carefully), and pushes the grades to Canvas gradebook on my command, so I can focus on the discussion itself instead of evaluating it.

But you can’t do this with images — just upload and everyone talk about it.

Except…you can. Perusall won’t upload images natively, nor link to images directly on the web. So I downloaded an image, and saved it as a pdf in Preview, then uploaded it. Then I clicked on a section of the picture. Instead of highlighting text, Perusall put a pin. I can then ask a question or make a comment about just that portion of the image. Click the pin, and the conversation panel opens.

But the interface itself takes up a lot of the screen, which we don’t want for images. So I’m going to show students what to do about that:

If they do it, then it will look like this:

More room for the image, less clutter. I’m thinking it would be possible to put several images on a page to be discussed for that week.

What it’s doing is similar to ThingLink, which I learned about from our wonderful art historians over a decade ago. But ThingLink and similar programs, although they can be embedded into Canvas with iframes, cannot track a student’s comments, nor auto-grade them. Perusall can, which shortens my workflow so I can focus on the discussion, just as I do with annotated text.

So, annotations for images when I teach a European history course that focuses on the Humanities, and a History of Technology class that can get bogged down in text? I’m in!

 

Prepping adventures: the big questions

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

To the dismay of some of my colleagues, and the delight of others (and the total incomprehension of most), I am continually preparing the next class. So, even though it’s June and I’m teaching three classes that started last week, I am thinking seriously about Fall.

Fall for us begins in August, so it’s not that quirky. And next term, for the first time, I will have an intern. The SDICCA program in San Diego County, in association with San Diego State University, matches Masters students with community college professors*. The intern will work closely with me the entire year, attending my classes and campus meetings, and learning from me as his mentor.

This requires a certain meta approach from me as I design and teach my classes, particularly the on-site classes. This opportunity was one of the reasons I wanted to be a mentor. While my ego does not require a minion to learn things “my way” (on the contrary), I do require that things change up a bit to keep me on my toes. The necessity to explain why I do what I do, and to change things in response to someone else’s thinking, is a boon. Although I do change things in response to students all the time, the power relationship there is quite different than that between mentor/intern, particularly as I intend to make clear I hope to learn as much from him as he does from me.

But one thing I must “teach” is class discussion, my bugaboo. I have only one class where I really do it, my early American history online. At the beginning of the week, I post a 5-minute video from a series that considers “both sides” of an issue, and ends with a question (for example, “Was the Constitution a democratic document?”). The first few days of the week, I allow students to respond with their ill-informed opinions, vent, argue, etc. Then mid-week I summarize their contributions and reframe them, asking new questions based on their input that nevertheless point them toward deeper, thematic issues that connect to the assigned documents. It works well for them, but requires a lot of work from me: it is very much instructor-guided.

Although I have done this also in a classroom setting (using video clips from controversial issues in the news), I feel that these days some larger, philosophical issues should be considered. I do not want to simply increase polarized views by encouraging evidence-based arguments. My goal for teaching has always been to train a person see the news of the day and connect it to similar “news” from the past, to put today’s events into perspective. That’s what history is — context. THE context. It’s the way we know what the present might mean.

When I didn’t know that my modern European History class would be cancelled last spring, I prepared a list of such questions, one per week. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do with them, and I never got to find out. (Don’t get me started on how students are being told by equity-minded individuals to avoid European history, and how they are avoiding classes that require deep thought so they can more easily achieve “academic success”.)

I tied each question to that week’s area of coverage:

  • 1 Story So Far
  • 2 17th c Politics and Culture
    Should only people who own homes vote? -or-
    At what point should society’s leaders no longer be allowed to lead?
  • 3 Science and Enlightenment
    How important is reason as opposed to emotion?
  • 4 Enlightenment Economy and Society
    How should a country’s economy be regulated, if at all?
  • 5 Political Revolution
    Is there a point where the people can get too much power?
  • 6 Industrial Revolution
    Should we help workers who don’t make enough to live on? how?
  • 7 Socialist and Romantic Response
    How do ethics come into politics?
  • 8 19th century society
    How important is it that people have definite roles in society?
  • 9 Nationalism and Imperialism
    Does nationalism necessarily lead to treating others poorly?
  • 10 Great War and Russian Revolution
    Does war settle disputes?
  • 11 The Interwar Years
    How can fiction help us understand the present?
  • 12 World War II
    Why do people become followers?
  • 13 The Cold War
    How does one find ones place in society?
  • 14 Social Revolution
    How can literature guide people’s views?
  • 15 The Contemporary West
    What issues or values should transcend politics?

So now, keeping in mind the need to connect their own opinions to the topic, I’m starting here for modern American history:

  • 1 US to 1865
    Why study American history?
  • 2 Reconstruction
    What might have been a better plan for Reconstruction, and what would have made it difficult?
  • 3 The West
    What happens when we see people from the past as victims as opposed to people with agency?
  • 4 Incorporation and Immigration
    How do immigrants become part of the American story?
  • 5 Empire
    Does America still have an empire?
  • 6 Progressivism
    What should be the government’s role when capitalism causes problems?
  • 7 The Great War
    How should Americans who oppose war be treated?
  • 8 The 1920s
    In what sense is progressive thinking countered by traditional thinking?
  • 9 The Depression
    What is the government’s role in alleviating suffering?
  • 10 WWII
    How should the U.S. respond to authoritarianism around the world?
  • 11 Post-war and Cold War Politics
    In what sense do fear and restrictions of civil liberties go together?
  • 12 The Fifties (culture)
    Why is celebrity culture so influential?
  • 13 War and Activism
    When a college tries to make its curriculum “relevant”, what does that mean?
  • 14 Inclusion and Exclusion
    Which is more important to social justice, the laws or the courts?
  • 15 New Millenium
    What have been the impacts of the internet?
  • 16 Contemporary US
    What is the role of the idea of “privilege” in contemporary discourse?

I am not sure that these are the exact questions, or how I want to use them in class, but it’s a start to think bigger.

 

*It’s interesting. We are called “professors” in the press and in the commencement program, but when I asked for this designation on my college business card, I was told no. We don’t even get “instructor” anymore, only “faculty”.

The refusal of the gatekeeper

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

It’s nearing the end of the semester, so like all professors I start getting the pleading emails. Students who have not submitted work want to know if there’s extra credit. Students who had a crisis in the middle of the semester and said nothing then now want consideration. So many family responsibilities, funerals, justifications…

It’s an open secret that I’m actually a very nice person — I deliberately come off as being no-nonsense, no exceptions. But I do assist students as individuals, as anyone knows who reads this blog (and as any crisis-prone student of mine knows).

This semester I had one of those students, writing me last week to say he’s lost his home and has been living rough and just got a sofa at a friend’s place, and he’d missed all that work, and if he doesn’t get a C he’ll lose his financial aid for summer and have to drop out of college.

Now the one thing I really hate about this job is the idea that I’m supposed to adjudicate crises. I’m expected to somehow weigh, like a professorial Solomon, dead aunts and foreclosures and parental neglect and (increasingly) emotional problems complicated by (or being treated with) various pharmaceuticals. I have neither the training nor the interest to judge people’s lives. I only judge their work.

So even though I’ve been doing this for thirty years, a request like this one can still throw me. I happened to be in a meeting with an education professional a few days ago, so I asked what he would do. He gave me the party line: it was on the syllabus, it wouldn’t be fair to others to make an exception, I’m sorry but the answer is no.

Keeping in mind that as a Teaching Assistant back in the 80s I got both the Cream Puff Award (for cushiest grader) and the Iron Balls Award (for harshest grader) in the same year, I know that student success is up to them, not me. But I don’t like being what one colleague called “gatekeeper”, the troll guarding the path with gates made of rules. So before the pro had done speaking, I knew I wasn’t going to follow his advice.

The student had missed the document annotation for 12 weeks. These are the Perusall assignments, where I don’t allow late work because we’ve moved on to the next unit. It would have been a royal pain to both reopen all these assignments for him, and to go back to each one and grade them. So instead, for 90% of the points available in that category, I made sure he was stable on that sofa with an internet connection (he said yes) and offered to have him turn in the answers to all the questions he’d missed on all the documents he’d missed for all the weeks he’d missed. I gave him five days.

It came out to eight pages, but I could scroll and write comments in SpeedGrader at the same time, checking everything at once and assigning points. He had told me he had done the reading, just hadn’t posted, and his work showed that was true. I assigned a grade, and it looks like he’ll get that C if he does the last couple of weeks of regular work, and does it well.

Because really, the point is learning. The rules are there to make it possible to grade the work of 40 students per class, about 30 of whom are underprepared for the work, without a T.A., while giving meaningful feedback and opportunities to practice historical skills. His work showed his learning – does it really matter that he did that at the end?

I don’t know. And maybe I was wrong. But I don’t think so.

The hour before the deadline

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

We all have stories, usually told while shaking ones head, of how students do things at the last minute.

Long ago, the deadlines for my online classes were set at 5 pm on the day something was due. But “everyone else” (the dozen or so others teaching online) set theirs at Sunday midnight. I would receive panicked emails between 5 pm and midnight, or after an assignment was graded late. So my nicely planned evenings of sitting and marking papers didn’t work. I changed my deadlines to Sunday midnight.

So when I began using Perusall for annotations, I asked, repeatedly, for students to participate beginning on Tuesday and ending Sunday midnight. Some do so. But many try to read five documents and cram in all the annotations on Sunday. This prevents the close reading I had intended by assigning annotations in the first place, an issue for another post. But it also provides a bizarre opportunity.

Perusall emails me when a student answers a question I’ve posted.  It also emails when a student tags me with an @. Throughout each Sunday, these emails increase, with a flood of them in the last hour: 11 pm to midnight.

If I go into Perusall on Sunday night between 11 pm and midnight, I can participate in the discussion, adding questions and using @ to reply to individual students, and I’ll get a response. It becomes almost synchronous.

I’m not saying I do this every week and every class, but if I’ve assigned a particularly difficult document (last week’s Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer comes to mind), I can engage a great deal of the class at that hour.

No, I’m not recommending this. But it does seem to open potential for the last hour before the deadline. I have a colleague who uses Google Docs and notices that same activity shortly before the deadline — he sees the number of participant bubbles at the top increase as he watches.

So I wonder two things. First, is it safe now that we have many online classes to change deadlines to a more reasonable hour? And is the last hour before the deadline an opportunity to teach that we should be using?

CE History

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

I’ve spent the morning following references related to the Rebel Wisdom Summit, posted by Jenny Mackness, exploring the war between what’s being called the “authoritarian left” and “safe conversations” about racism and equity (rather than invoking them as weapons). I’ve been learning about Ian McGilchrist’s update on the bicameral mind in a pleasing RSA format, the case of Brett Weinstein and Heather Heyling at Evergreen College, the issues surrounding their pedagogy, Jordan Greenhall’s Medium article from 2017, and Heyling’s own post on Grievance Studies. All together, quite an education for a morning when I’m supposed to be marking papers and reading discussion posts!

But the notes I took weren’t directly about any of them. I began to think (as I am wont to do): “all of this has a history — I wonder what would happen if we studied it”. It seemed to me it would be interesting for all parties to step back and examine in historical perspective the issues they were fighting about in real-time. Because that’s what’s missing, of course — perspective.

I am teaching an on-site modern US History class in Fall, and if I’m lucky I’ll have an intern. This will be a new experience, teaching someone to teach while I’m teaching. I expect it to be quite wonderful, and educational (especially for me). I naturally feel a responsibility to improve my ability to articulate my pedagogy. At the same time, I’m hoping to do some workshops on equity and history in my department. Combining that with all this “rebel wisdom”, what I began to do is map out class potentials.

                                                                                      From Historical Association

At first I thought, I’ll gather resources appropriate to demonstrating the national social conversation from 1865 to the present: what the issues are, what arguments were used, where violence ensued and why, etc. Then I realized, of course, I already have this, in my set of primary sources (mentioned in my analysis of the “new agenda”). So it becomes a matter of reframing, of making the resources a conscious set, rather than a collection students later realize were “activist”.

For now I’m calling this Conscious Equity, an effort to showcase the discipline of History, privileging the underprivileged not just because that’s what we do,  but saying that we’re doing it. Whatever rules the “authoritarian left” wants to make to control the conversation, it must still take place, in classrooms and in a spirit of inquiry rather than fear and personal emotion. We still set the tone in our classroom. We can try to establish an environment that demonstrates the peaceful sharing of ideas, concern for each other’s learning and the opening of minds, and privileges modernist scientific rationality as a method for developing individual interpretations. Every historical document is a fact, and we can use the advantage of time to step back and use perspective as a tool.

So onward to read some research and develop some methods for Conscious Equity as a tool for US History.

 

 

Continual feedback on my work

Lisa M Lane

Recently, I added a new assignment to my online classes, called Lecture Notes.

It’s just a one-screen write-in-the-box assignment, with the following instructions:

 

It automatically scores credit when they submit it. This is for two reasons: immediate feedback/acknowledgement of the submission, and so I don’t have to rush to grade anything. I can stop by and enjoy them all, reading through, at my leisure.

My original intention was just to make sure they were somehow responsible for the lectures, into which I’ve put a huge amount of work. These lectures are written out, with audio of me reading the lecture, illustrations, iframes with the assigned readings, embedded video, music snippets, and quite a bit of my own personality and interpretation. I’ve created them for all six of my classes, 15-16 lectures each (one per week). I don’t want them ignored!

But what’s happened is even better, thanks to the first and last bits of my instructions.

The “implied thesis” has told me a lot about whether my interpretation is getting through. Fact is, most students don’t get this idea, and just tell me what the lecture was about: “You talked about immigrants coming over from other countries and the impact of industrialization”. But some students comprehend that this is interpretation: “You implied that the capitalist system made it difficult for labor unions to succeed”.

Even better is the “brief response” I’ve requested. This has given me a chance to talk with students directly.

Those who don’t understand that I’m an interpreter of history write things like, “I don’t agree that the Romans should have invaded Gaul”, so I get that they’re responding to certain events. But often they tell me things like, “I was surprised that the new household technologies made more work for women” or “I didn’t know that Augustus Caesar was a title instead of a name” or “it made me really sad to learn how immigrants were treated in the factories” or “this seems just like today”.  Sometimes they ask questions like, “why did Cleopatra kill herself instead of just sending a big army against Octavian?”

I can respond to each student privately, which often opens an ongoing dialogue. And the cool thing is: it’s always about the material, never about the grades/assessment/navigation. They’re real conversations, about history.

It’s like ongoing feedback for me – it tells me what’s getting through, how I’m doing, and what they think.

It’s entirely possible that it’s all there, and could replace stultifying assessments like quizzes, or (shock!) papers. We’ll see. For now, it’s just great.

New Title V and substantive interaction

Lisa M Lane

In its wisdom, the state is proposing the following changes for online classes:

Originally, the issue was teacher-student contact, a response to the fear that teachers would just upload stuff and not do any work. Now they’ve decided to legislate pedagogy, and insist on student-student contact.

I know several faculty who aren’t happy about this, because their pedagogy doesn’t rely on student-student interaction. Rather their course is set up to maximize student interaction with the course materials. Several instructors I know engage students in highly individualized feedback. One responds to each student’s posted analysis of each reading each week. Another evaluates submitted assignments in great detail. They both have in-depth, ongoing, substantive contact with every single student. Neither relies on students interacting with each other.

So this is bogus from the start, pedagogically speaking. The state has decided to intervene in methodology, based on research that is questionable at best. Studies using physical classroom research, for example, compare straight lecture to group activities (active learning). They tend to ignore the many other activities that can be assigned in an online class but aren’t reliant on other students (for example, instant feedback on a quiz question). Other studies of “community” in online classes focus on the affective domain rather than the quality of work. While it is an option, it is not necessary to have student-to-student interaction for a student to feel like part of the class; that can also be achieved through instructor presence, student-instructor interaction, and student-content interaction. Focusing on students interacting also ignores the teacher-student tutorial model,  which provides individualized responses. Many students want individual attention far more than they want “community”.

But we don’t make the rules.

Since the state is so dedicated to the word “substantive”, I looked it up:

Substantive- “Having a firm basis in reality and so important, meaningful, or considerable.” (Oxforddictionaries.com)

1. denoting substance, 2. expressing existence, 3. meaningful or important (OED)

So if it’s there and it’s real, it’s fine. An instructor, without being pressured, wouldn’t have such interactions if they didn’t believe them to be important or meaningful. In the case of “considerable”, a class that has a lot of meaningless discussion would also be covered.

This brings us to Lisa’s Rule on Rules: when confronted with legislative stupidity, it is usually best to look at what you’re already doing and see if it can be used to demonstrate that your work already complies with the new rule.

Tonight I attended a wonderfully balanced session on the new pending rules. It was led by Sean Davis, our wonderful sociologist at MiraCosta. He noted the controversy over the rule, but focused on options for how to create such interactions. These included discussion/question forums, emails between students, peer feedback, student groups, interactive video (we have a pilot for Arc), video conferencing, chat, and collaborative projects. I would add to this group annotation, which is a major source of interaction in my own classes.

For those instructors who do any sort of student-student interaction, it should not be hard to justify what they do within the new context. It is indeed these instructors who are most concerned about the new law.

Most instructors have a discussion forum. Some of these are problematic or meaningless, but if they do it every week, they’re good. I can justify much of my students’ work, because in addition to annotating written primary sources, they post their visual sources in a forum, and “like” the sources they enjoy. “Like” is interaction, and if you ask students to “like” for a purpose (they plan to use the idea, or vote up ideas the class will use), it’s meaningful.

This sort of “passive interaction” or “accidental interaction” can satisfy the rule. Passive interaction is like a cocktail party — everyone is in the same place but not necessarily at the same time or for the same purpose. But they see what the others are doing, and adapt their behavior according. Open forums where students post assignments can serve this purpose. Particularly if they’re graded only individually, and privately, posted student work can help other students see where they stand, demonstrate alternative ways of doing the work, and serve as examples.

So the professor who has students submit their assignments directly to her could instead have them submitted to a forum (if necessary, the forum could be set not to show other work until ones own work is submitted). The prof who responds to his students individually after they post in a forum could add a summary post noting the contributions of particular students, asking that they be used as examples.

I admit that I am completely uncomfortable with asking students to email or message each other privately, and I have never been a fan of peer feedback although I know people who do it well. And I remain appalled (I am often appalled) that the rules never seem to care about the interaction between the student and the content. Where’s the rule that says courses should include deep, sustained, meaningful interaction between the individual student and the materials being studied? Where’s the rule that says courses should integrate important and meaningful contact between the student and the norms of the discipline?

It’s bad enough that so many courses contain discussion forums because the instructors think they should. That has been going on for years, even before this rule was enacted. The inevitable response to the new rule will be more one-post-two-reply “discussions” that frustrate online teachers and become rote and meaningless for students. Surely the new rule must be a misguided attempt to replicate the classroom, except perhaps the people who wrote it haven’t been in one for awhile. Where’s the rule requiring students in a non-distance education class to be forced to interact with each other?

In the meantime, such attempts should be dealt with by showing that what we already do satisfies the rule. It’s just a shame that we have to.

 

 

Doing grades well

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

There has been quite a bit posted lately about grades, grading, and not grading (or marking). I read that grading practices:

  • play into systemic inequalities,
  • undermine compassion for our students as people, and
  • are inadequate to assess learning.

I’ve been reading, for example, the tweets of Laura Gibbs. She is one of my heroes, bravely creating innovative teaching practices despite the use of Canvas, and even in temporary despair creating a community response that is both empathetic and practical. I’ve also come upon a number of things from fall of 2017 (not sure why then), such as Arthur Chiaravalli’s The Gradeless Garden, where he questioned whether getting rid of grades is enough. John Warner wrote in Insider Higher Ed that not only don’t we need automated grading tools, but that removing grades gives students better ownership of their work. And Jesse Stommel’s Why I Don’t Grade also dates from then.

Lately the issue of grading (and ungrading) has emerged again in my Twitter feed, and more professors and teachers post that they’re “giving up” grading.

I think something’s getting lost here, and I don’t just mean the continual marking. I’ve considered non-grading for several years and have adopted self-grading for portions of my classes (but not all assignments). One obvious problem is that our institutions require us to assign a final grade, so one question is how we do that without a record of grades to justify that final mark. Laura Gibbs, for example, does it with accumulated points — the student chooses how much to do to get that grade. Grading contracts, which I learned about years ago from David Cormier and tried for my Honors class, use a similar technique.

What’s being ignored, in educational reform as in other places in political and social life, is the idea of doing things well.

Grades, as the name implies, rank student work according to a set of standards developed within a discipline. At least, that’s what they’re supposed to do at the college level. Professors, good professors, agonize over grades. I’m not the first to sit with my finger hovering over the B or C drop-down, wondering about how that student had to have surgery, so shouldn’t I give her a break, but she missed the first three assignments, but another student who came to class between chemo visits managed to do it all.

Obviously, I realize that the quality of student work is affected by outside factors and institutional hierarchies, but it’s my job to make sure that the inside factors encourage good work. I’m supposed to do my own work as a professor, and do it well.

Grading, to my mind, is one of those things that should be done well. It should be fair, but not heartless. Standards and expectations should be transparent. There should be opportunities to improve work, and the work should be assessed by an expert (me). Not everything has to be graded by me, which is why I adopted self-graded assignments despite the abuses that occur. But the final grade in the course should reflect the overall quality of the work that has been submitted.

So within that context I’d answer the current trendy complaints about grading as follows:

Grading practices play into systemic inequities

Educational systems are based on unequal results. That’s what grades do – they grade. They let the student know where their work ranks in the context of other work within the discipline at that particular stage of education. One must still tackle the evil of the exclusivity of opportunity, which is quite different from results.  Everyone should have the opportunity to undertake college studies, but not everyone will succeed. The system is supposed to be a meritocracy, and I know that’s a bad word these days, but it shouldn’t be. Merit is simply another word for doing a job well. Those that do academics well get high grades. Those that don’t get the low grades so they have time to decide where else they should be, what they should learn, to have a successful, meaningful life.

As a side note, the educational systems (at least public systems) are supposedly designed to maximize chances to provide opportunity. I work at community college, which is open access. There is no standard for admission. For the last 150 years or so, scholarships and endowments and aid have been designed to provide access for people who need them. All of this is done to find those diamonds in the rough, the academically suited individuals who would otherwise be excluded. It is not designed to force people into academic molds that do not suit them. But even then, anyone is welcome to come and learn. Not everyone needs grades.

Grading undermines compassion for our students

This is where the idea of grading students is the problem. I’ve seen it technologically embedded into systems: “student grade”, “assign the student a grade”, etc. We don’t grade students; we grade work. Judging other people, particularly people whom you know only through one small life window, is wrong. I have had students say to me, “I hope you don’t think less of me because I did a bad job on this paper.” Of course I don’t — what on earth gave them that idea? Well, years of school where the grade was used to represent them, when someone punished them for poor grades, when they were called a “D student”.

There are no D students. But there is D work. And there is a D that goes with compassion, that says, I’m sorry but this work wasn’t up to the standard, and here’s why. Please let me help you as we go through the course. Let me find you the services you need. I’ll sit in my office and listen to you cry even when I’m supposed to be at a meeting. What I don’t want to do is change your C to an A because you need it to make your family proud or because you really need it to get into another class. If I do this, I am not doing my job well. I’m doing it poorly. I know it and so do you. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about you.

Grades are inadequate to assess learning

Of course they are. I’m not even sure it’s possible to assess someone’s learning, but it certainly isn’t possible when my class is just one discipline, at one level, in a limited area of study. Again, the grade only assesses the quality of work. And lest we get all uppity about education being about process instead of product, it is often an invitation to unfairness to grade only a process. Most disciplines require products of some sort.

I do everything I can to create an environment conducive to learning, featuring a good balance of freedom and structure. I individualize where that makes sense, and standardize where my experience tells me that works better. And yes, I completely understand that my students come to me adversely affected in many ways, by racism or mental illness or poverty or having their confidence undermined. My intention is to privilege an environment where it is possible to put that aside for a bit to allow the expansion of the mind.

In short, I think we ask too much of grades. They weren’t meant to make up for social inequality, or to symbolically represent a student as an individual, or to evaluate the learning process. They’re meant to discriminate and inform, to rank levels of work. We’re required to assign them, as social signals as much as credentials. They signal the level at which someone is good at school.

By all means, we must change the system if it isn’t doing what society needs it to do. Educational reform has been around as long as education. But we shouldn’t place the entire load of unfairness on grades. We should instead try to do them well.

 

 

 

The nuances of sources

Lisa M Lane

It should be easy to distinguish a primary source from a secondary source, a first day exercise in all my classes.

A primary source is one written or created during the era you’re studying (such as a letter, diary, newspaper article, artwork). A secondary source uses primary sources to make a more general statement after the fact (a journal article, textbook, newscast, for example).

The next step adds nuance. What about a newspaper article written in 1869 about the Peloponnesian War? This would be a secondary source for the Peloponnesian War, but a primary source for 1869. It can tell us something about 1869 that people were interested in the Peloponnesian War.

“Historical” movies cause a similar issue. A film made in 1970 that is set in the 19th century West is a secondary source for the 19th century West, but a primary source for 1970 (or just an exercise in enjoying Clint Eastwood).

So far so good, but what about sources that aren’t factually correct in their “primary-ness”?

Chief Seattle. I think.

I’m talking about documents like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to be a report of a group of Jews trying to take over the world by undermining Christian morals and dominating the economy. It’s considered a “literary forgery”, but it had an impact, particularly in encouraging anti-semitism. It’s not a primary source for the supposed Elders, but it is a primary source for studying those in the 20th century who printed it, distributed it, used it, believed it.

And now I belatedly discover a more benign, perhaps, version of this trend. Chief Seattle is frequently used in primary source document sets to portray the 19th century Native American view of white incursion and cultural genocide. But the actual sources, it turns out, are cobbled together from unverifiable documents.

I don’t use Seattle for my classes, so I was unaware. Where did I learn it? From a tweet about the Historical Association materials for teaching. The page on Interpretations had some resources for teachers about citizenship, and even though this would be British citizenship I thought it might be helpful. Certainly as I go back to the classroom to teach US History, I should focus more than ever on the responsibilities we all have as American citizens.

The Teaching History article by Andrew Wenn gave an excerpt from Seattle, which I’d seen before:

This was then followed by:

“My own feelings”? That sounds like today, where things that didn’t happen are considered true because they fit with pre-conceived notions. Naturally I had to look this up, so I plugged in “I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies left by the white man” and Google took me to a book that had a very long version of this as if it were utterly legitimate. It’s also in a recent book on “wilderness wisdom” as a speech. It’s in class materials for a faculty member at the Community College of Baltimore County. Those are the first things listed in Google Search.

Of course, further down on the results there are sites noting it’s bogus.

Wikipedia covers it as a story of the screenplay Ted Perry was writing, and reveals what the producer did with it in terms of publicity.

So this bogus document is clearly a primary source (I’d argue a very good one) for the environmental movement of the 1970s. There are all sorts of topics here: the role of movies in environmentalism, the use of Native American ideas to support the movement. It’s also possible that bits and pieces of it came from Chief Seattle, somehow — it just can’t be verified. Some would say it portrays the “feeling” of the Native Americans, or the Suquamish or Duwamish people particularly. Which is fine so long as we understand it isn’t a verifiable primary source for them at this time.

Given the use of truth and lies in contemporary political and social discourse, I’d say the balanced approach might be too nuanced for community college students. Showing such things as lies and forgeries seems right, but perhaps it’s just a new form of what happened when scholars joyously tore down the images of people like Thomas Jefferson. Historians were still buzzing from Fawn Brodie’s 1974 analysis of Jefferson and his relationship with Sally Hemings when I started in the field. That book may have been the start of the trend toward knocking people off statues, a trend no doubt assisted by the fall of Richard Nixon that same year. Now even Monticello is just a slave plantation.

Unfortunately, such efforts, while enhancing professional history, did not contribute to depth in popular culture. Just the opposite. People went from worshiping former public figures to denigrating them without restraint. Where previously such critical examination had been a scholarly exercise (I think of Charles Beard in the 1910s revealing the Founders to be men of property designing government in order to keep it), it became popular fun.

As this fun continues, with the wholesale denigration of former famous people as if they had no “good side” at all (I think again of J. Marion Sims or, for that matter, Robert E. Lee), it may not be the time to get into the nuances of forged sources. Those which inaccurately combine multiple sources, or which are attributed to people not responsible for them, should probably be tackled as they emerge, rather than presented as part of an introductory exercise.

But I’m still surprised about Seattle. And embarrassed that I’m surprised.

 

Surf report

Lisa M Lane

If you’re from around here, you know what a surf report it: “moderate waves today, let’s call it waist-high” a la Scott Bass on KPBS radio.

This is a report of today’s web-surfing, which is kinda different. Sometimes it’s piled a lot higher than my waist, but today I learned a lot, much of it triggered by Twitter posts. I don’t think I’m the only one who uses the “like” heart to file things for later, so I could find these again.

History Assessments

Except the first one. Somehow I found the Stanford History Education Group, and their Beyond the Bubble assessments. I’m not sure why I’ve never heard of this, but it’s a collection of items for teaching U.S. History. While geared toward the high school AP crowd, the method here is quite useful for college history. The primary source is embedded into the assessment. So for example, there would be a newspaper engraving of a protest from Harper’s Weekly, then a short list of facts related to that engraving, then open short answer questions. Sometimes these asked students to assess the veracity of the document itself in light of the other facts, or they might ask the student to say what the source tells us about the era.

These are short (usually just two short answers) and there’s a rubric with each one, indicating the level (proficient, emergent, basic) of various student responses. Some even include sample student answers that one is likely to see. Although undoubtedly intended to be used solely by the instructor, it might be interesting to give the rubric to students and have them analyze their own work!

The site has many assessments that a teacher could download, but it was their design that gave me ideas, because I could create my own assessments for any primary source I have.

And it was kind of eerie that I had just changed all my Learning Units to be inside the assessments. I must be very trendy in terms of design!

Cycloramas

Next, I found a serious gap in my knowledge about the history of media. A tweet by Civil War historian Lisa Tendrich Frank led me to a Smithsonian Magazine article on the restoration of the cylcorama in Atlanta. Apparently, during the 1880s, cycloramas were a huge draw as entertainment. Painters created 360-degree paints, attached to the walls of a circular building, and people would come to experience it. The article notes a scene might have a dirt floor and some trees to add a reality-inducing effect.

Beginning in the 1880s, these completely circular paintings started appearing from half a dozen companies, such as the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee, where Atlanta’s canvas was conceived. APC employed more than a dozen German painters, led by a Leipzig native named Friedrich Heine.

Half a dozen companies? How could I not have known about this? This isn’t just virtual reality, it’s late 19th century entertainment for the people. The closest I’ve gotten to in-the-round entertainment was the film they used to have at Disneyland, America the Beautiful, a movie made with multiple cameras that surrounded you. Yeah, I know, in days where the Google truck drives through your neighborhood, this may seem archaic, but it was very cool.

So now I have a whole research area to discover.

Paratexts

Can I use this word in a sentence? It shouldn’t be new to me: it’s a word I keep bumping into, but somehow it never entered my thinking as something I could use.

A tweet by early Americanist Michelle Orihel sent me to Digital Paxton, and reading the post I had an Aha! moment. Advertising and editors’ notes and issue numbers, as included in Victorian periodicals, would be paratext! I may not have a theory, but I at least have a structure, an interpretation, a word I can use for what these types of things are.

Some days it’s enough to learn one new useful word.

Blackmail

The last item for today was a piece of email spam. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to open these, but there was no attachment and I decided to read it. I found it fascinating.

The title was:

Security Alert. lisa@lisahistory.net was compromised. Password must be changed.

The email went on to explain that my account had been hacked, my information and surfing habits downloaded, and they wanted money, paid in Bitcoin. The blackmailer explained how s/he got access:

How I made it:
In the software of the router, through which you went online, was a vulnerability.
I just hacked this router and placed my malicious code on it.
When you went online, my trojan was installed on the OS of your device.

I noticed that there aren’t any contractions where you’d expect, indicating this person does not speak English natively. The OS of my device?

They also claimed to know that I have pornographic habits:

A month ago, I wanted to lock your device and ask for a not big amount of btc to unlock.
But I looked at the sites that you regularly visit, and I was shocked by what I saw!!!
I’m talk you about sites for adults.

I want to say – you are a BIG pervert. Your fantasy is shifted far away from the normal course!

There’s a normal course for the viewing of pornography online? I had no idea. But that explains why so much money was being requested.

I’m know that you would not like to show these screenshots to your friends, relatives or colleagues.
I think $701 is a very, very small amount for my silence.
Besides, I have been spying on you for so long, having spent a lot of time!

Wait, $701? Cheap at twice the price!

After payment, my virus and dirty screenshots with your enjoys will be self-destruct automatically.
If I do not receive from you the specified amount, then your device will be locked, and all your contacts will receive a screenshots with your “enjoys”.

I guess we’ll see…

(Discovered after posting: turns out this is a known spam thing and I should dedicate as much worry about it as I have already done. So that’s five things learned online today!)

Honors Contracts in Canvas

Lisa M Lane

Yes, it’s another how-to-so-I-don’t-forget post! (Sorry, I would much rather being doing England travelogues.)

Background

So… I have a stand-alone Honors section this semester, with 25 students of varied abilities, some Honors students and others not, some just desperate to grab a seat in an online US History because we never offer enough. This stand-alone section is online and in Canvas. I have created weekly research tasks for this class, each in a forum so all can share their work as their project progresses. You can see these tasks together here on this Google Doc.

Honors Contracts, however, are the mechanism by which individual students in non-Honors (regular) classes can take the class officially for Honors. This is typically done by working on research individually with the instructor.

I have strived to create community among my Honors Contract students, but with little success. One of the issues is numbers: I am only allowed to teach 5 contracts per term. Since Honors Contracts are fairly new, I usually only get 4-5 requests anyway, but they are from different classes. Excluding 8-week classes for European History and U.S., this leaves my History of England and History of Technology classes for Honors Contracts.

I have struggled with student self-direction with the Contracts, and many of my Contract students don’t complete, for various reasons (mostly personal rather than academic). The problem is that when they get into trouble, the system does not allow them back into the “regular” course – they do the Honors work or they fail.

So last year I had this great idea to combine the Honors Contracts students from these two classes, and have them work on this blog, with set readings and curriculum. The two students that finished did great. But there were problems with the technology (or rather, problems with me and the technology – if I hadn’t insisted the college connect WordPress to the enrollment system, they would not have happened).

The Plan

Since community is not working (for me or for the students),  I will be returning to the original intention of Contracts: individual research projects.

This does not mean I think my set course in “Victorian Science and Science Fiction” wasn’t wonderful (it was effing brilliant) or that everyone shouldn’t study Frankenstein, watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or read Arabella of Mars (they should). It just isn’t sustainable at this time.

Since I have already created weekly research forums for my stand-alone US History class, I will simply import these into my History of England and History of Technology Canvas shells. But they will only be assigned to one group, which I’ll name Honors Contracts (I supposed I could amuse myself by calling it Unicorns or something, but I might get confused.)*

The way it works at my college, Contract students are “in class” with the regular section, but just do some different, more advanced work. In order to provide time for their research, I have my Contract students stop taking quizzes and stop uploading lecture notes after the first two weeks of class, so long as their grades are OK. But I don’t want to keep a separate grade tally (you know, on a piece of paper, God forbid). I just found out that it’s easy to Excuse students from taking particular assignments, right in the gradebook, as shown here:

I got this from this Canvas help page. So I’ll do that for all their quizzes and lecture notes.

Since the research forums are forums, if I have more than one Contract student in a class, they can work together, but I’ll change the instructions to remove required interaction. I’ll be their buddy in the forum, just like an individual tutor (I would like to furnish my online office like an Oxford don, but that might be too much — oh, wait, I could Voki!**).  If I want to get Contract students together, we can use social media (Facebook group) and/or real-life meetings at Peet’s Coffee.

Ideally, it would be nice to have a separate Canvas course that would integrate all the Contract students from my various classes, but Canvas cannot do that and keep it connected to the regular class site. (I’ll be lucky if it does this properly.***)

And yes, it will take awhile to set up, particularly since Canvas will want to do stupid things, like put all forums on the Calendar so all students can see, or include it in the Syllabus Assignments list even when they aren’t assigned to everyone.

But I think it’s more likely that students will stick with their Contract if it’s easier, and if their Honors work is integrated with their regular coursework, at the same online site as their regular work.

Or at least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I continue down this road, paved with good intentions, of bowing to our Canvas overlords.

 

—

*Update: importing the research forums into the regular courses brought to light another problem — how will I know when an Honors Contract student posts in a research forum? I want to be able to respond to these immediately. But Canvas notifications are “all or nothing”: you either get notifications for all discussion forums in all classes or for none. For everything, you choose how to be notified of “Discussion” (every post) or “Discussion post”.  That would be a nightmare of email notifications. I’m going to try to solve this by adding myself as lisa-student (my test student account) to the course and to the Honors Contract group, and then subscribe to all 13 research forums. 

**After writing this, I renewed my Voki account. First week in the research forums will start something like this:

*** It didn’t. I have also discovered that checking it as a “Group Discussion” is not helpful, because Canvas assumes you want the same discussion assigned to all students, just in different groups. It’s better to assign each Honors forum or quiz to individual students and avoid Groups.

 

Standardizing what’s good

Lisa M Lane

Every October, I work on my classes for next term. Partly this is because the spring schedule comes out the third week of the month, and partly because October has always been particularly difficult for morale and motivation (mine as well as the students’). I’m not sure why. Could be the lack of any real holiday except Halloween (Columbus Day is tainted and it was never a day off anyway), or just mid-term blues.

That’s my excuse anyway, since I’m not supposed to be doing this till after my sabbatical is over. But I am still doing my reading and research. Prepping is more like a break, because mostly what I’m doing is changing settings rather than creating things. It turns me into a non-thinking machine, changing hundreds of due dates and adding lots of links (why aren’t we at a place where I can assign this to someone?). Definitely mindless.

I’ve decided I like the sources and readings for my classes, I like my lectures, so no changes are needed. But at the end of last term, I added two elements to my weekly coursework for two of my classes, then tested again for three this summer. These elements are “Check primary source for points” and “Submit lecture notes”.

So once I’m done, the weekly tasks for each class I teach online will be this:

  • Due Wednesday:
    • Read the textbook
    • Read/listen to lecture
    • Research and post primary source
    • Check primary source for points
  • Due Sunday:
    • Read and discuss the documents
    • Submit lecture notes
    • Quiz

In addition, for the first two weeks there are multi-pages quizzed Learning Units about primary sources. And, three times during the semester, there are Learning Units for the next writing assignment followed by the assignment itself. Writing Assignments are based only on the sources that have been posted in the Boards by the class, and have a scaffolded format that I created myself, so they are difficult if not impossible to purchase or plagiarize. The Final Essay, for the full-term sessions, is based on the third writing assignment, and folds into the grading for Writing Assignments.

“Read the textbook” is linked to the actual textbook pages, except for the one class where I’m still using a purchased book.

“Read/listen to lecture” is linked to my online lectures, hosted on my rented server, which contain audio of me reading the lecture, video clips, etc.

“Research and post primary source” is the laboratory type posting, on a discussion board, of visual primary sources students find on the web, with citations and student commentary.

“Check primary source for points” is a one-question quiz checklist of all the things required for full points on a primary source (image, author, title, date, live link, commentary), so it’s a self-evaluation of their own source, instantly graded.

“Read and discuss the documents” is annotating the assigned textual sources using Perusall inside Canvas as an LTI, which assigns points automatically but I do have to check through all of them and make sure they’re right.

“Submit lecture notes” automatically assigns 2 points when they submit them, and they can be in any format, including images of handwritten notes.

“Quiz” is a multiple-choice quiz based on lecture, documents, and textbook readings.

The grading breakdown is:

Read and discuss the documents 20%
Quizzes 20%
Primary Sources 20%
Lecture Notes 10%
Learning Units 10%
Writing Assignments 20%

Right now, the only class that varies from this is the one US History where I have full discussion. In that class, it’s:

Homework 20%
Lecture notes 20%
Writing Assignments 20%
Discussion 20%
Constitution exercise 10%
Final Essay 10%

The pedagogy, briefly, is based on emphasizing task completion, with grading considerations as secondary. Each individual assignment is low stakes, though with only three or four writing assignments, the stakes are higher for putting all the knowledge together. Assignments that can be graded immediately (quizzes, learning unit knowledge checks self-assessed primary source points, lecture notes) are, so that students can get immediate feedback (yes, I reserve the right to change points if there are inaccuracies or instructions aren’t followed). The addition of lecture notes and self-assessed primary source points adds a metacognitive learning aspect. The work of doing history is engaged in multiple ways, including reading, writing, discovery, sharing, and visual analysis.

Student choice is built in, in several ways. Students choose their own primary sources to post, and their own topics for writing assignments. They can choose which days they work, so long as deadlines are met (each unit opens a week in advance). Lecture note format is up to them, to meet their own note-taking style. Since each individual item is low points, they can choose to miss one or two without it doing serious grade damage. Two attempts are given for self-graded items, so they can go back and correct something without penalty.

My role is guide on the side, in the middle, at the front, and in the end. Instead of grading constantly, I spend my time reading their notes, viewing their posted primary sources, answering questions, writing weekly or twice-weekly communications, conversing with students in the Perusall annotations, and yes, grading their writing assignments. I have had no complaints about how much work the courses are, since most of the things I’m requesting (like lecture notes) are common to on-site classes. Some students appreciate the trust, and the autodidactic opportunities. Others appreciate that I’m there for them, and respond quickly to their individual messages. (On this, I’ve decided that students want the individual approach, but not necessarily for class content – rather they want it for their individual problems and issues, most of which have nothing to do with the subject. My method leaves time for that.) And I can grade more generously, because the point is to do the work, be the historian, rather than show me you’re good enough to do history without me.

There is also something interesting about having the courses this structured. The course itself seems to be its own entity, has its own trajectory and completeness. It is almost like it’s me, the students, and the course. The students and I interact with the course together, instead of the course acting as a weapon with which I beat students using grades. This goes along with the LMS (Canvas – blech), which the students and I can work in (and on, when things go wrong) together — it’s them and me against the system.

So although on the one hand I don’t like the idea of standardizing courses, in this case I’m standardizing what’s good, what works, what meets my pedagogical goals. I am free to change readings, lectures, materials, instructions, at any time. After 20 years of building these courses, I think I’m onto something less subject to the vagaries of passing fads (personalized learning, individual learning styles), dangerous web spaces (MOOCs, open education), and changing jargon (student learning outcomes, guided pathways), and more founded in solid pedagogy.

 

 

Historical correction (and Ruskin)

Lisa M Lane

Over two years ago I wrote a post that got no comment nor many readers. It was one of the only posts where I shared my discomfort with today’s identity politics.

Then this week, I received an announcement of some workshops at the college designed to engender “cultural sustaining pedagogies”. I wrote a five paragraph response to the ideas contained within this concept, explaining my views supporting universal principles over the perceived needs of particular groups, be they racial, age-based, cultural, gender, or otherwise. Having spent several hours writing, I realized there was no one to whom I could send it, and nowhere I could post it, without endangering my job and quite a few working relationships that were important to me. At the same time I realized that this was what was wanted, my refusal to engage, because the entire pretext is that I am not worthy to discuss any of these issues.

But when one attacks history, however, as a discipline, I do feel a professional responsibility. I did some reading about culturally sustainable pedagogies (cuz I’m always in for good pedagogy), and at one point was led to this article on How Racism and Patriarchy is Taught at School, published just a few days ago. It was about truth versus distortion in history textbooks and class materials, and cited as heinous examples phrases like black slaves were people “who came to work on plantations” and “[s]ome slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly”. Now the first of these is distorted enough to be an untruth: slaves did not “come” to work — they were forced and they were brought. Factually, they did not “come to work on plantations”, either — they were sold for whatever the buyer wanted them for. But the second quotation is not factually incorrect. Some slaves did report that their masters treated them kindly. There are primary sources where they say so, and I assign them. I then discuss with my students why they might have said so, what influences there might have been on their perceptions and testimony. But the truth is that they did report this kindness. So we are not replacing lies with truth. We are replacing nuanced views requiring discussion, with untruth.

The article mentioned how teachers should use the website Teaching Tolerance to teach “the truth” of the past. So I went to the site (which is sponsored by the ever laudable Southern Poverty Law Center), and it recommended a “formative assessment” for students. I link it here. Several of the questions are loaded or misleading. For example:

In the Declaration of Independence, what percentage of enslaved people were included in the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

You are supposed to answer 0%, or you’re wrong. This question demonstrates the same sort of oversimplification argued against in the article, just to the other side. Jefferson, like many of his contemporaries, were intellectually and morally conflicted by slavery, but stated in a number of places that men may be created equal, but were then subjected to unequal environments, treatment, birthrights, intelligence, etc. Some included women in “men”, while others did not. 18th century intellectuals argued the many sides of these issues. The “line” about equality was likely written by one man, approved by a committee of five, and agreed to and signed by the 2nd Continental Congress. Some had slaves, some didn’t, some had never owned slaves, some made money off the slave trade, some had vowed to release their slaves within a year, others had promised to release them upon their death, and many worried about slavery in its various impacts, discussing its moral, economic, and intellectual problems. To say that slaves were definitely included would be false. To say that they were all excluded would also be false.

The included Teacher Guide says: “The promise of equality and liberty in the Declaration did not extend to any enslaved people. ” But the passage from the Declaration does not promise equality or liberty. It declares them as natural rights. In fact, the Declaration of Independence doesn’t promise anything to anyone — it lays out an argument and justification for breaking away from Great Britain.

Later on the quiz there’s this question:

Which was the reason the South seceded from the Union?

– To preserve states’ rights
– To preserve slavery
– To protest taxes on imported goods
– To avoid rapid industrialization

You’re supposed to answer “to preserve slavery”. Yes, indeed. But the reason? The only reason? The main reason? There are no historical events with only one cause, and even the extremes of post-modern historicism admit to multiple explanations if not causation.

The Teacher Guide to this question says, “Every secession document cites slavery as the main reason the southern states seceded.” I have not reviewed every secession document, and I’m not sure whether this means official documents from the states, or whether it also includes letters, diaries, etc. Quite a few both official and unofficial documents also talk about states’ rights, but not always in those terms. A great many talk about freedom and independence, particularly in the context of the American Revolution. Preserving slavery was often discussed within a context of property and ownership, even by people who didn’t own slaves or didn’t care for it as an institution. To not understand and discuss these complexities is to commit presentism (the application of the values of ones own era to the circumstances of the past). Presentism, although increasingly popular, does not actually lead to a rational understanding, but rather a “stand”.

The article also says that our country was “quite literally founded on the slaughter, colonization, enslavement, segregation, and ongoing systematic oppression of millions of indigenous peoples and people of color”. Yes, indeed. But it was also founded on ideals, some of which are worthy discussing and defending. We might want to start with representation, open debate, or any of the rights listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

So none of this is really about truth. It’s about correction. It’s about grievance. It’s about telling the other side, because it isn’t being told. A worthy goal, certainly. Telling the stories that haven’t been told is a main responsibility (and joy) of historical work. It’s why we’re here. But the goal isn’t to replace Storyline A with Storyline Z. It’s to understand how both storylines interact, to whose benefit one side takes precedence, and to what extent evidence supports the stories.

But lest we think these issues are new, I’ve also encountered them in reading today about the man I cannot avoid in my work, although I don’t like him: John Ruskin. In Judith Stoddart’s article* on his Fors Clavigera, I learned about Ruskin’s push to develop cultural literacy in working people with whom he admittedly not only had little in common, but didn’t know very well as individuals. What he did know, however, were big social and political trends, and what he saw was a lower class that was forming into groups to create solutions for their grievances.

In brief, Ruskin saw a grievance culture, and radical groups loosely based on socialist ideals without actually examining them (he was likely thinking of the Paris Commune, for example). Their grievances focused on class-based social hierarchy, even though that was not, to Ruskin, the root of the problem. The problem was moral, not structural. Some people may have more of some things in society, and others less, but the people with less simply taking the things from those who have more does not create a moral system. In fact, it just puts the lower classes into the immoral position that the upper classes had occupied. The problem of capitalist, industrial exploitation cannot be solved by the exploited becoming the exploiters. It is solved by doing away with exploitation.

Ruskin thus had just as much sympathy for the conditions of working people as 19th century radical politicians did. Education was the solution, but it was moral education that was needed. This was not “character education” or brainwashing, or even Christian education (though Ruskin himself was pretty darned devout). Subjects like music, astronomy, and botany, for example, could teach that things in life have an order that can be understood (p53). Understanding the universal concept of order could thus underpin the planning of political action. Basic principles could then be applied in a rational way according to the needs of both society and the individual. Ruskin aimed to “replace class consciousness by cultural consensus” (p45). Movements that engaged in action without any philosophical underpinnings were dangerous, because they displaced morality, elevating the same greed and selfishness that had been protested against in the first place.

Even before Stoddart began comparing Ruskin with Alan Bloom’s ideas of cultural literacy midway through the article, I saw connections to today. We have political and social movements, on both left and right, that are not based on moral philosophical underpinnings, except in their insistence that they are. The oppressed may become the oppressors, claiming their own truth and the inadequacy of all other truths, but that does not solve the problem. It is oppression itself that must be eliminated. The problem of people being silenced necessitates eliminating silence, not applying it to those who speak. Kindness, goodwill, and understanding are universals, not privileges withheld from some groups and given to others. It is not only unnecessary to prevent talking about incomplete ways of understanding the past, it is essential that we encourage such talk to make the historical picture more complete.

If one is trying to create Ruskin’s cultural consensus, then the intention of education should be to examine views based on what human beings have in common. The elements that bind humanity together should be openly available to discuss and to use. These elements may change over time, but to abandon a search for larger truths in a headlong drive to redress grievances will be of no more help now than it was in the 1870s.

 

*Judith Stoddard, “The Formation of the Working Classes: John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera as a Manual of Cultural Literacy”, in Culture and Education in Victorian England, Patrick Scott and Pauline Fletcher, eds. Lewisburg: Buckness University Press, 1990.

Three kinds of online classes

Lisa M Lane

As a six-year update to my Three Kinds of MOOCs, I present this idea.

While it is possible to combine these pedagogies, they are in fact already combined. It is possibly to start with one kind, then expand into the others, if one goes down the list — it is more difficult if one goes upward. The adjectives are ideals rather than realities, models rather than prescriptions, environments rather than methods.

Controlled

The Controlled Online Class features pedagogy created by the instructor or another entity, designed to make sure students complete tasks in a particular way to a particular standard.

This need not, however, be instructor-centered pedagogy. It is entirely possible to embed choice into each task, assign low and high-stakes items, or have differentiated grading.

For students, the experience emphasizes familiarity and predictability. However, it can still allow for surprise and independence within the assignments themselves, or within an alternate grading system.

This environment is often preferred for large classes, where the instructor would rather spend time in conversation with students, or individually advising, than in managing options. It is also good for workplaces where accountability is needed.

Curated

The Curated Online Class features selected resources, technologies, or methods designed to embed student choice, while the instructor takes the role of expert or guide.

This need not, however, reject standards nor prevent inventiveness. The application of curated resources may be creative or standardized, and include open debate as well as formal presentation.

For students, the experience balances choice with expert resource selection. If it allows for student-centered application with a variety of expressions, it can also look like a Chaotic course.

This environment is often preferred when choice is desired, but students may not be prepared for the work, or where there are too many exciting resources from which to choose.

Chaotic

The Chaotic Online Class features the appearance of freedom in pedagogy, with so much choice that the result can be beyond instructor influence.

This need not, however, mean there is no control at all. The very existence of any kind of “course” distinguishes this from an unfettered “community”. If there is a timeline, a start and an end, that can provide containment, as can scaffolding of assignments or creative expressions.

For students, the experience can be creative, exciting, and dynamic. It can also be frightening, or give rise to criticism regarding autodidacticism.

This environment may be preferred by instructors who want to break the mould of what they perceive as students’ previous educational experience, or where creativity is a larger goal than accountability or learner comfort.

 

In all cases, the “setting” for the class need not be particular. A Controlled course, for example, may seem more suitable for an LMS or software package, but in fact may be accomplished in an open course or through various web tools. A Curated class, while easier to conduct using tools that allow instructors and students to collect resources, can also be offered in any platform. A Chaotic class may be the most difficult to create inside an LMS, but it can be done by engendering student control over the platform elements (discussion board, resources, externally-linked web tools) wherever possible.

The concerns about all these models revolve around misapplication rather than design choice. A Controlled class, done poorly, allows students no independence of thought or development of mental processes, and becomes merely an exercise in memorization or task completion. A Curated class, done poorly, limits the selection in a way designed to push a particular agenda, or creates convoluted pathways for learning, or offers so much choice that there are no options for students who come in without previous ideas. A Chaotic class, done poorly, provides no guidance or standards at all, abandons students who need help, or awards intellectually inferior work and thus defeats any sense of accomplishment.

 

Images from Public Domain Review

The ed tech dream is dead

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

As if regular old political news weren’t bad enough, we must make connections between the behemoths of technology and the decline of enthusiasm for web-based educational technology and online learning in general. The conclusions are not inspiring.

As you know if you read my blog, I essentially gave up on web-based apps for my students a couple of years ago, and have moved all my class activity to the Canvas system or a Canvas-based LTI within that system (with the exception of one Honors blog).

As the author of Insidious Pedagogy, this has been a painful, soul-searching path leading to closing my classes. Since the beginnings (I started teaching online in 1998), I have encouraged faculty to put their pedagogy first, to find ways to force the technologies to do what you want. As an early fan of pedagogies that emphasize constructivism and connectivism, I have experimented with many formats (contract grading, connectivist learning, open blogging). If you’ve heard of Ning, Glogster, Dellicious, Blip,tv, Blabberize, Elgg, Eyejot, GoAnimate, Lingr, Mind42, MyPlick, Overstream, Plotagon, Plupper, Screenr, Slideshare, Trialmeme, and Posterous, you have some idea of what I’ve tried.

My college went over to Canvas in the wave of California Community Colleges who’d been made an offer we couldn’t refuse. As California began to standardize its online college education, mass media began to cover the concerns I’d had all along about student privacy and exposure in online environments. I no longer had any arguments to answer those who objected to students working on the open web, even as the web was closing.

So whatever else Facebook and Google have done (and none of it struck me as exceptional or unusual), they have underlined my concerns about students working openly, and undermined public confidence in living portions of our lives on the web. We were so concerned about not being sold by Learning Management Systems that we were sold by the very providers who gave us freedom.

Educators who persist in using social media for the classes are not just outliers in ed tech anymore – they are now collaborators in the dissemination and sale of student information and data. Stalwarts who object to online teaching and web-based learning can now say, “see? it isn’t safe!” Anything not in a protected, encrypted, controlled system is rightly suspect.

We’ve lost, and to me that has meant not only abandoning my own open classwork and my own research in educational trends but a return to subversion inside the system.

My pedagogical focus now is creating encouraging environments and meaningful tasks for students that take advantage of system-based automation while allowing for freedom of pursuits. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in ed tech — Canvas forces me to take my place as a nobody functionary, a foot soldier following orders, with limited creativity and continual frustration. It’s one of the worst LMSs ever created, with a “community” deluded into thinking we help improve it. When my head is flat from pounding it against Canvas walls, I try to remind myself it’s like making a movie during the Hays Code.

But doing anything else isn’t moving forward.

Paradigm shift? best practice? perhaps not

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

In searching for information about distance learning theory that might inform my research into 19th century distance education, I came upon this article (thanks to Jenny Mackness):

Lee, K. (2016). A paradigm shift rhetoric and theory-practice gap in online higher education : a case study of an open university. In S. Cranmer, N. B. Dohn, M. de Laat, T. Ryberg, & J. A. Sime (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Networked Learning 2016 : (p. 251-259).

The author is Kyungmee Lee, Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning at Lancaster University. Her paper focuses on the discrepancy between social constructivist learning theories and the actual instructional designs for online classes used at places like the Open University.

I have long suspected that the maniacal adoption of collaborative pedagogy was based on very little evidence of efficacy. Instead, in my experiences studying connectivism and constructionist theory, I was aware that such methods were lauded by techno-utopians, many of whom weren’t actually teaching first-year college students. Studies demonstrated student satisfaction with the methods, but not better grades.

Lee notes that despite the insistence on a “paradigm shift” from “old” methods to collaboration and constructivism, resistance implies that the paradigm never shifted at all. The shift has been purely theoretical, and not adopted in practice, where most online classes do not use these techniques. While many studies have chided instructors and designers, implicitly or explicitly, for resisting the new and superior methods, this one subversively questions whether the methods really are better.

Hercules and Bacchus presenting libations while Atë, goddess of mischief and deception, flies above (1778)

It’s an interesting approach, questioning the assumption of a change in the field. While the study does not get into the “new” pedagogies per se, it implies that they may not be better, or may be better under certain conditions, or that people who really want a paradigm shift think they can just declare one. This last is most interesting to me, because it begs the question cui bono?

Many of us assume that if there’s a new technique or tool, it might be better than what we’re doing, or at least be better than older options. We ask questions like: will this work for my students? is this an improvement on what I’m doing? We give it a try.

With a tool, it may occur to us that adopting it benefits the company providing it, especially if we pay for it. If we don’t pay, it’s become increasingly obvious that the “freemium” model either benefits the startup, or that our data becomes the product being traded, a la Facebook.

But perhaps with a method, we fail to ask these questions. To whose benefit is it that I adopt this method? The well-meaning researchers and their careers, certainly. But our students? If so, which students? Does it benefit me as an instructor? How?

I have attempted many different pedagogical models in my 28 years of teaching, both in the classroom and online. None have been inherently better than the others. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Whatever is trendy, though, is considered a paradigm shift, or a “best practice”. Right now, for example, the Online Education Initiative, which is moving to control all online classes at California community colleges, insists that collaboration among students is required as part of its online course approval rubric. There is little research to support this requirement.

If we consider that a paradigm shift has occurred, we are much more comfortable requiring such methods, as if they were based on research instead of theory and some successful practice. By questioning whether the basic principles are sound, whether there is any support for “best practices”, we give ourselves much more choice. We also give ourselves the opportunity to examine past practices, not as outmoded or disproven (which in most cases they are not), but as possibilities for current and future practice.

Automat(i)on

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments
Automaton at CIMA, photo by Rama, CC licensed.

From Business Week (2 April 2018) about Russian startup Robot Vera:

“The co-founders, with a background in human resources, two years ago found themselves making hundreds of calls to candidates who’s lost interest in the given job or couldn’t be located. ‘We felt like robots ourselves, so we figured it was better to automate the task,’ [cofounder] Uraksin says.”

Ever feel like a robot teaching online? I know I do. Hours of time spend adjusting grades, putting in zeros for incomplete assignments, activating rubrics. Clicking to sort student names, clicking down three levels to send a student a message. I can imagine myself as a Victorian metallic automaton, typing on my computer instead of writing with my quill, mousing around, click, click, click.

Then there’s grading. I’m really fast. I can read an assignment quickly and click the appropriate boxes on the rubric. I know exactly what to look for, because the whole thing is my design. Click, click. But I have good rubrics, that give meaningful feedback to students, so that takes time to do well. Click, click.

So from the Robot Vera perspective (and that of everyone discussing automation taking over jobs), I have to ask: what part of my job should be automated? So many of the things I thought would be done by the machine, after two decades teaching online, are not. Stupid tasks take much of my time. Even auto-grading has to be double-checked (I change about 20% of auto-graded items). I don’t call support for actual help doing or creating things with the system – I get the system. I call because something  horrid and unexpected happened, and 9 times out of 10, it’s because I left a box unchecked, or neglected to use a particular combination of settings. Because I wasn’t, in other words, a good enough automaton.

What would happen if I automated everything that makes me feel like a robot? Marking, grading, tracking, checking outcomes, planning courses according to state mandates to which I am opposed?

Would I have more time to do the actual teaching, the contact with students, the individual discussions, the leading of in-depth conversations? Wouldn’t that feel less robotic, like I’m a person who cannot be replaced by an automaton?

I have already noticed that handing off the grading of primary sources to my students, having them do a checklist to get the grade for their post each week, allows me time to instead respond to the sources, note connections, give feedback so they can fix their work and “earn” the points they gave themselves, encourage them to return and see the work of their colleagues. I get a better view of what’s happening, with human eyes.

I can also respond individually to their auto-graded Lecture Notes (2 points if you turn it in). Doing that this week for the first time, several students took the opportunity to engage in private discussion with me, and it was about the history, not the grades.

So instead of resisting automation, I will continue to grapple with how to make it work for us all. Because, as usual, the simplification of the problem does not reflect reality. The simple version is just a dichotomy: teacher-involved OR auto-graded. But (in current trendy parlance) it can be and. I suspect it can even be because of – because there is auto-grading, I can be more involved as a teacher.

The ideas I’m exploring (student independence, teaching as modeling and demonstrating, learning as practicing and reflecting, and transferring the burden of learning) fit well with some automating if it gives me the freedom to do what I do best: that old-fashioned human teaching. So hand me that can of oil…

What is required?

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Although I have stepped back quite a bit from my reading and research in online education, I still have a Google Alert set, and still receive and examine recent articles, when I can stomach it.

The dictatorial tone of both articles in my inbox today is the subject here.

The first, The Necessary Knowledge for Online Education: Teaching and Learning to Produce Knowledge (Ferreira et al), did a study of 27 educators, all in the field of Education, to determine what knowledge (this sort of article usually says “skills”) are needed to teach online. What struck me was the premise, stated in the abstract:

Online education requires pedagogical mediation and the skills and competencies to work with technological resources which promote interaction, collaboration, and co-learning.

Well, that’s just not true. Online education does not require an emphasis on collaboration – rather it is one possible approach. It is also entirely possible to create online education that personalizes the class through different kinds of approaches to content, or emphasizes at every step the learner’s relationship with the material rather than through colleagues and “co-learning”. I understand that the current phase in online education pushes the collaborative approach, but it certainly is not “required”.

The second article, Online Continuing and Professional Education: Current Varieties and Best Practices (Schroeder, et al), features this idea:

Teaching online requires a team, not just an individual. While face-to-face teaching may be a singular effort, online teaching includes a multitude of technical, pedagogical, environmental, and associated considerations that requires a team of experts.

That’s not true either. I have never had a “team”, but rather developed not only my own pedagogical and technological skills, but helped design a “Pedagogy First” paradigm wherein the individual instructor’s strengths were basic to course design. I realize that these days there are more resources (among them instructional designers with advanced degrees and research articles produced by candidates for PhDs in Education), but those do not, by some reverse design, indicate that these things are required.

As the literature has developed over the last decade, much of it written by people who are not teachers and have not taught online, the “options” have become “requirements”, and the possibilities have narrowed into “best practices” (best for whom?) and necessary elements. This creates downward pressure on the creativity of teaching online, stultifying the field and cookie-cuttering our courses. Faculty who want students to focus on content are forced to develop “interactions” which oppose their own pedagogy, common sense, and experience. Helpless in a context they did not create, and for which they are pedagogically unsuited, they are told that not only is the social learning method “required”, but that a team is “required” to help them.

Did I mention I’d stepped back from reading the newest in online ed? There’s a reason for that.

New perspectives on DE from 1961

Lisa M Lane

A book from 1961, New Perspectives in University Correspondence Study (Chicago: Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults), lists the “characteristics that a correspondence student needs”:

  • self-motivation
  • organization skills
  • concentration

and “the characteristics necessary for a good program in correspondence study”:

  • clear goals and objectives
  • manageably sized lessons
  • rapid feedback from a skilled teacher

That’s it then. Nothing has changed. Not sure why people are getting degrees in this stuff, really.

from Terry Ann Mood, Distance Education: an Annotated Bibliography (Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, Inc. 1995), p. 15.

Workflow control, guidance, or punishment?

Lisa M Lane

Yes, I’m practicing using the Oxford comma. But I’m also practicing guided pathways for student work.

In the LMS, you can restrict access to one assignment until another assignment has been done.

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Having completed well-designed Learning Units to prepare students for their writing assignments, I added them to all my classes. Then I made the writing assignment unavailable until they took the Learning Unit. I was nice, demanding only a score of 1% before they could submit it and access the writing assignment — I just wanted to be sure they opened it and went through it, practicing the skills they’d need with instant feedback.google-chromescreensnapz002

Having done that, I waited for next semester. But it kept eating at me. Why was I insisting they do this task before another, forcing them to do it, forcing them into what I was sure would be the last-minute opening of a writing assignment due that night, and the angst when they realized they couldn’t just write it and get it over with?

It seemed to violate my willingness to let them fail.

Fact is, when I started developing these units this semester, I posted a few as extra credit, just to see if they helped the writing. Why wouldn’t a student do the unit for extra credit, especially if it was designed to help them get a better score on the assignment. Yet 2/3 didn’t do it.

So I should force them? To what end? Better assignments? Doesn’t seem likely. Because not all of them care about feedback, or about their grade, or about doing well. Those who do will do the unit anyway. Those who don’t will be mad, or frustrated, or annoyed. Not good for getting work done. It feels…punitive. Rush your work in my class, will you? Well here — splat — take that!

So I went back and removed all restrictions, and replaced them with a request. The writing assignmets now say “please do the Learning Unit first!” That’s it. Asking nicely. Feels more respectful of all their needs, not just the need to do good work. We’ll see what happens.

Perils of the OEI Rubric

Lisa M Lane

As you may know, our campus is going over to Canvas from a two-LMS system (Blackboard in house, Moodle outsourced). I have, of course, deep concerns about Canvas as an LMS. But it isn’t just Canvas. It is Canvas sponsored by the state of California through their Online Education Initiative. Back in April, I commented on that arrangement. While I have discussed at my college how it’s being implemented, I haven’t posted on it yet.

Although not required at this time for the colleges adopting the free state-sponsored Canvas, there is a rubric and a review team for any course that will be offered on the “exchange”. The ultimate goal is to have any California community college online class count for credit at any other, a goal I have supported since, oh, 1998.

The 2015 rubric is hereoeichunked, and has been implemented fiercely. I have already spoken with faculty who have been told that the materials they set up for sound pedagogical reasons will not do — they must be changed to provide students simpler, clearer pathways and simple downloadable materials. The intent is clearly to reduce the complexity of all online classes in order for them to be seen as “excellent” by OEI.

Complexity, of course, may be a pedagogical goal in itself. Pathways to learning are not always in straight lines, either in education or in the working world. Exploration may need to be encouraged. Perhaps the instructor doesn’t want to provide too much guidance, in order to force discovery.

In some cases cognitive dissonance is being confused with cognitive overload. If a student has to click around to find something, this may cause some frustration but it may also created learning. Learning is not clean – it is messy.

Having gotten some pushback, OEI is now revising that rubric. But it isn’t really any better. Here is my annotation of that rubric (my comments are in the right-hand column). At this point, they seem to be only taking internal feedback, so all I can really do is post it here.

Some faculty are going ahead and doing whatever they want, and their dedication to offering their course on the exchange is admirable. Enforced pedagogy, however, is not my style.

Bad tech – no donut

Lisa M Lane

I normally offer students the chance to do revisions of assignments, but I won’t be able to do it anymore because Canvas makes it too difficult to grade individual items in a forum.

And really, the reason I have to grade so many revisions is that students don’t read the instructions carefully.

So I figure, hey, we spend so much time on how to display content online. How about concentrating on teaching them how to do process, how to demonstrate the skills in our student learning outcomes?

I do this some. I have several videos and tutorials on how to create historical themes. But that’s for the last few weeks of the class, as they head toward the final essay. I don’t have tutorials for how to create the writing assignments or post a source. Instead, I have instructions. And checklists. Lots of writing. They don’t read them. They just do the work they think they’re supposed to do, post it, get it graded by me, then re-do it.

So I’m thinking, interactive trails through the skills. Like a Moodle branched lessons, only for Canvas. Canvas’ advantage (there is one! this may be the only one!) is that you can block something (like an assignment) until they’ve done something else first (like a tutorial). Adaptive release. So let’s use that. I’ll make tutorials they have to do first, before they post.

I started with hp5, because I want something that’s on my server, not someone else’s. (Those who got burned painstakingly making interactive videos on Zaption know what I’m taking about.) I also didn’t want to make a bunch of Canvas-dependent page-quiz-page modules that won’t move from semester to semester. But hp5 only works in Drupal, Moodle (sniff), or WordPress.

I create a new WordPress blog, with the five minute setup. Set up my database and frantically search around for my db username. Install the hp5 plugin. Try to install the libraries for all the cool things h5p can do, but it told me I exceeded the max upload size. Oh, gosh, php.ini. Where did I put that thing? Doesn’t it go in wp-content? No…wp-admin. How many php.ini’s does it take to screw in a lightbulb? OK, got it. Uploaded libraries.

I open Interactive Video. I find the YouTube video I made for the start of class, and put that in. I create some little interactive things. OK so far.

So now it’s in a WordPress post. How to get it into Canvas? Try embed code on a page. Nope, it strips the Javascript, of course (according to h5p, I’d need to put it in the global javascript, but of course I don’t have that kind of access to the Canvas install).

Try as a link inside a module. It opens the thing really huge and you can’t resize it (that Javascript was for resizing, of course) or find the button because it’s below the screen space. Embed it in my own webpage with a set iframe size, then link to the page inside Canvas. Ugly. Makes you go all external.

Try making my own webpage SSL to make it stay inside the Canvas shell. No go. Shows a blank page no matter what. Even without the Javascript.

So after five hours, I’m at a dead end, because hp5, WordPress, SSL and Canvas won’t play nicely together.