OpenEd2009 Conference in Vancouver

After two days of attending the OpenEd2009 Conference in Vancouver, I am incredibly impressed with the vast array of new projects that are emerging in the open education field. The energy level is high, and the connections being made here at the meeting promise to produce an even higher energy level throughout the field in the months and years to come.

At least two of the sessions I attended are direct outcomes of connections and conversations that began just one year ago at OpenEd2008: Peer2Peer Univesity (P2PU) and the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in OpenCourseWare.

P2PU describes itself as "an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses." The P2PU helps enrolled students navigate the wealth of available open education materials, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and the leaders are exploring the extra step of building pathways to formal credit. You can view the session here via Ustream, and enrollment is now open for its first offering of courses.

The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in OpenCourseWare is a soon-to-be-released document with the goal of helping OCW producers to interpret and apply fair use under US copyright law. As one of the Code's co-authors along with a group of practitioners from other institutions (Notre Dame, University of Mighican, Tufts University, MIT, and Yale), I am eager to see how its release will affect the practice of OCW production in the future. When the project began as an ad hoc session at OpenEd2008, I was very skeptical of its value and was worried that encouraging fair use in OCW would discourage the creation of new open learning object. Now, however, I'm convinced that this is an important step toward attaining OCW's full potential. You can view the session led by Lindsay Weeramuni of MIT OpenCourseWare and Lila Bailey of ccLearn here via Ustream. 

0 comments - Posted by Ira Gooding at 7:50 PM - Categories: Teaching Strategies | OpenCourseWare

Teaching Naked

Do faculty rely too much upon PowerPoint and other technologies during their lectures? Have students become dependent upon PowerPoint handouts and are they now resistant to taking notes in class? These debates and concerns are often expressed here at the School and on campuses throughout the United States.

As a teaching device, PowerPoint was once a welcomed alternative to blurry overhead projectors. The flexibility provided by a PowerPoint presentation for printing, saving, and updating one’s material cannot be ignored. But after a decade of this technology, many students and professionals dread the idea of having to sit through one more PowerPoint presentation. 

An article by Jeffrey R. Young in the current Chronicle of Higher Education considers alternatives to PowerPoint in a review of José A. Bowen’s web page about “Teaching Naked” or without technology: http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/

Mr. Bowen is a dean at Southern Methodist University and has actually removed technology from the school’s classrooms. He contends “class time should be reserved for discussion, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the web.” 

Here at the School of Public Health, some faculty are similarly asking students to listen to pre-recorded “lectures” before class and then using classroom time for discussion. Most report good results though there are some complaints about students not listening to the lecture as requested and thus being unprepared. However, is this any different than asking students to read an article before class? Both Bowen and others attempt to offset the preparation problem by issuing short quizzes at the beginning of every class. Alternatively, the faculty could start each class with a question and answer session. Faculty who have done this also suggest resisting the urge to re-lecture on that same content during classroom time to make up the lack of student preparation. This only reinforces the problem.

If you too decide to experiment, the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology (CTLT) has many tools that can support this strategy. You can pre-record your lectures, either on your own or in the studio, post them on your CoursePlus site, and use the Quiz Generator feature of CoursePlus for quizzes. The Instructional Designers will also work with you to brainstorm alternative classroom strategies for engaging the learners.

PowerPoint and other instructional technologies serve many good purposes. But anything can be overused. A bit of variety keeps everyone interested.

Posted by Kathy Gresh at 4:41 PM - Categories: Teaching Strategies

Improve Your Lecture

For many teachers, lecturing is a preferred method of delivering information to learners. But is it an optimal method? Research shows that students capture only 20-40 percent of a lecture’s main ideas in their notes (Kiewra, 2002). And if there is no review of the material, students may remember less than 10 percent after three weeks (Bligh, 2000).

So how can we ensure that students learn the content of our lectures and retain it? Here are some strategies:

1. Aim for 3 to 5 main points in each lecture.
2. Begin the lecture by asking a high-level question that the upcoming information can answer.
3. Prepare a handout of the lecture’s main points.
4. During a lecture, be explicit about what students should focus on.
5. Throughout a lecture, give students short breaks to review their notes and ask questions.
6. Include a formal activity or assignment after every 15 to 20 minutes of presentation.
7. Don’t use too many different types of presentation materials at once.
8. Don’t give students two conflicting things to attend to at the same time.
9. Use examples from student life, current events, or popular culture.
10. Ask students to generate their own examples from personal experience.
11. Tell students how new information relates to previous lectures in your course.
12. Show students how specific skills can be applied to real-world problems.
13. Create activities and assignments that ask students to fit new information into the overall themes of the course.

Source: Tomorrow's Professor, The Standford University Center for Teaching and Learning. Photo: Aaron M. Sears. Creative Commons BY-NC-ND.

0 comments - Posted by Linda Bruce at 11:32 AM - Categories: Teaching Strategies