Building a Teaching and Learning Technology lab

Thanks to our always-helpful government grants office, we were able to find money to develop a technology lab for teaching and learning. We brainstormed for a way to augment our existing installations, which already provide a lot of technology for course instructors. Given our new foray into online learning, lecture capture seemed the best bet--it's focused, manageable under our budget, and can give us an immediate payoff. It's also scalable in application from simple video recording to much more sophisticated productions. It will shine a light on our distribution system for electronic media too, and prompt infrastructure improvements that will have multiplier effects.

"Lecture capture" is of course a terrible name for it. Lecturing means literally reading, which is what our academic forbears did before there were enough books to go around. Like wearing those heavy black robes in the May sun, some ideas are ripe for overhaul.

There's a nice introduction by Educause here (pdf), if you want to see what they have to say.

What if we started from scratch?


It's not just the robes and readings that have seeped into the weave of the academic tapestry. Exposing young minds to the conceptual treasures of our disciplines is constrained by the combinatorics of time and space so that that certain optimizations are so standardized we don't think about them. Like having students sit for fifty minutes at a stretch in classrooms. What if instead we could engage them for ten minutes at a time on focused topics all day long? Another optimization is that all students in the class get the same linear flow of narration, and the discipline itself gets strung out into a one-dimensional string, codified into textbooks and syllabi that have the same linear style.

Imagine if the world wide web were like that: a single linked list of information, so that you had to start at the beginning and work your way forward link by link until you got where you wanted to go. It's a lousy way to organize rich information.

Sometimes concepts do have prerequisites. Math is full of it. But even in math there are optional topics, and opportunities to go into more depth even the simplest subject. If you want, you can think of the long multiplication process you learned in third grade as a convolution product, which can be optimized with Fourier transforms. One of my professors in graduate school (David Kammler) took an approach he compared to "Island hopping" as practiced in the Pacific theater in WWII, which consisted of learning certain important topics in depth and assuming that students could then make logical leaps to nearby topics, which could be skipped or treated as exercises.

Imagine instead of a linear trip through a discipline, we captured key ideas and used those as anchors for a network of related facts, concepts, processes, etc. One immediate advantage would be the ability to easily update the network as the discipline changes. Group evolution is back in vogue? Add a node and stick it in there. No need to fell a forest for the new edition of a book. Another advantage is that focused topics can be crowdsourced, as in Wikipedia, with experts in sub-sub-sub-fields filling in blanks ad infinitum. Other thoughts:

• interdisciplinary connections become easier to integrate naturally
• because learning happens in detail, it's easier to assess a small topic than a big one, allowing for faster improvement of the captures and related pedagogy
• custom methods can be applied more easily to particular topics. Think apps. When you get to the bit about singular value decompositions, you can download the stuff you need to see it in action, and then it can go away. It's modular.
• It creates a way for professionals to agree on something. A whole textbook? Never happen. But a five minute tour of Darwinian evolution? Better odds. This standardizes at the right level. You can still customize your curriculum--just match assessments to content.

All of this is probably being done in bits and pieces now, this divide and conquer approach. But it hasn't gelled yet into a common framework supported by real infrastructure and common culture (like say Wikipedia is).

I don't want to go all Utopian here, but let me push this one step further. With a rich network of high quality instruction/assessment/activities modules, the whole idea of a course becomes outdated. I know, I know, that's scary stuff. But if we don't have to have students sitting in desks for fifty minutes at a time, why do we need them for 15 weeks? All that really matters is that they learn and demonstrate mastery of concepts that we think are important. So then our whole bureaucracy can go hard a-port and do something really interesting. All that bricks and mortarboard infrastructure can be focused on motivating students. I've written enough about that already, so I'll stop here.

I should hasten to add that our modest project at my institution has none of these grand ambitions.  I will be selling the idea that a "lecture capture" doesn't need to be 50 minutes long, however, and keeping my eye on the horizon...

EduPunk and the Matthew Effect

Inside Higher Ed today has a piece on "The Rise of Edupunk." I didn't find much new in the article, except that perhaps mainstream institutions are beginning to pay attention, but this struck a chord: Quoting Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia,

In a bow to the “Edupunks,” Sullivan explained that Virginia is incorporating student habits into its pedagogy.

In "Edupunk and the New Ecology" I proposed three elements necessary to student success outside the academic walls:

• Access to quality learning materials
• A learning community
• Motivation to succeed

I find it interesting that the conversation is moving beyond technology and specifically focusing (at least in this instance) on non-cognitives. As a case study, we might consider Matthew Peterson, whose story is summed up in MITnews from Nov. 3:

In his junior year at Klein Oak High School in Spring, Texas, Mat Peterson — now an MIT freshman — was struggling with the his physics course. A friend of his recommended that he look at MIT OpenCourseWare, where Peterson turned to Walter Lewin's videos and found the help he needed.

Matthew was motivated enough to use MIT's Open Course Ware. Here's the branding from the website:

No registration required. I would suggest that young people today (rightly or wrongly) expect intellectual property to be public property: songs and movies are free to download, information on any topic is at your fingertips, and there is impatience with any barrier that gets in the way. And in fact, the actual knowledge that professors design to deliver in curricula falls into that category. Think about how archaic the idea is of lugging around a Biology textbook. And paying $150 for it when everything you need to know is already free online seems ridiculous. A week ago I wrote about the Fat Middle, and textbook publishers are a good example of one ripe for revolution. But it's not just textbooks. Lectures too. The whole traditional delivery of static classroom experience is already freely available for many subjects. The effect on MIT itself has been significant. In a "MIT OpenCourseWare: A Decade of Global Benefit", Shigeru Miyagawa writes:

Over the past 10 years, OCW has moved from a bold experiment to an integral part of MIT. Currently, more than 93% of undergraduates and 82% of graduate students say they use the site as a supplement to their course material or to study beyond their formal coursework. Eighty-four percent of faculty members use the site for advising, course materials creation, and personal learning. More than half of MIT alumni report using the site as well, keeping up with developments in their field, revisiting the materials of favorite professors, and exploring new topics. Open publication of course materials has become an ordinary element of scholarly activity for MIT faculty, and the ubiquitous availability of that curriculum to our own community has become the everyday reality of teaching and learning at MIT. 

So how does this play out over the next decade?

The Matthew Effect wasn't named for Mr. Peterson--that's just a happy coincidence. Some time ago, in assessing our general education goals (not my current institution), I found indications that "higher ability" students learn faster. The graph below is taken from Assessing the Elephant. It shows assessed writing ability for a cohort over six semesters, controlled for survivorship. The cohort is split into high and low GPA groups. It's not surprising that the high GPA group was judged on average to have better writing skills, but it was surprising to see that the amount of change was so different.

This jibes with my own classroom experience, however, and I would venture to guess that (as Gladwell poses in Outliers) talent and motivation go hand in hand. In fact, we have evidence for that. In a recent post, "Assessing Writing," I showed that if we can just get the low GPA students into the writing lab for help, we can significantly improve their writing over four years. If this is true, then their ability is constrained by activity and engagement and not solely by innate talent.

I had not seen the Wikipedia article on the Matthew Effect before, but it's interesting:

[E]arly success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows, while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of life-long problems in learning new skills. This is because children who fall behind in reading, read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers. Later, when students need to "read to learn" (where before they were learning to read) their reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. In this way they fall further and further behind in school, dropping out at a much higher rate than their peers.

If we apply this same idea to the Edupunk model, what we might expect is that self-starters, confident students, and those with enough knowledge and skill to begin self-education, will flourish like Matthew Peterson.  On the other hand, a student who struggles in school and as a result doesn't like it much, seems unlikely to be in a position to benefit from the OCW or other free resources. This is a recipe for an increasing divergence between intellectual haves and have-nots.

A Modest Proposal is to begin early to teach students how to access and use self-serve education. Honestly, this has to start in the home--the teachers can't do it all. The article "Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage" from Miller-McCune points to research linking home libraries to educational achievement.

Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

(Here's Science Daily on the same topic.) How might it work? Math instruction would be very different from the traditional approach. Instead of telling students that the equation for a line is y = mx +b, they'd be tasked to go out and find it. Or figure out that the formula is needed at all. There are many "meta" levels of questioning. If we built this kind of inquiry into the curriculum from the start, we'd avoid the "catch-up" information literacy training we try to do in college.

Note that I don't propose this as a panacea or some great new idea that could revolutionize education. There is enough snake oil on sale already. But complex problems require evolutionary solutions, and this seems like something that ought to be tried out. The proof is in the actual success or failure of the attempt.

Mass culture in the United States works against us. The irony of the information age is that although deep veins of accumulated knowledge are there to be mined, most informational interactions are expected to be brief and shallow. Television is an extreme example, but it seems pervasive to the point of oppressiveness. And so we come back to non-cognitives. It's like the problem of building self-discipline: a chicken and egg dependency.  (If you procrastinate on learning how to not procrastinate...) It isn't really about learning. It's about wanting to learn. So I leave you with the problem at the heart of the edupunk Matthew Effect:

How do people learn to want to learn if they don't want to?

Blags and Electronic Resources

On the education subreddit I came across 100 Most Inspiring and Innovative Blogs for Educators. It has some good finds, including Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day. Jane posts small articles with links to interesting online resources. Go look for yourself.

I found a couple of mind mappers I hadn't seen before, and one that a friend had mentioned called The Brain. The video demos look good.

There's also an open-source web-based HTML editor called Amaya I hadn't seen before.

By the way, the neologism "blag" comes from "blog" as an intentional misselling, courtesy of xkcd:

So...log comes from a ship throwing a piece of wood over the side to see how fast it's moving, which comes to mean the book the readings are written in, which comes to mean any form of recording information regularly. Meanwhile "world wide web" gets shorted post haste to "web," and the two words get put together to make "web log," which contracts to "blog" and now (if you're sufficiently geeky and want to be ironic) "blag." Isn't language fun?