Integrating Teaching and Technology

This past weekend, I was in my old hometown of Atlanta for the first Teaching Professor Technology Conference.  With only 650 people attending, the conference had an intimate feeling to it.  This was one of the first conferences I have attended in which I knew very few people, but friends were quickly made…and I added to my Twitter PLN.

After the opening plenary, poster sessions, and a day of rapid fire sessions (including mine), I awoke Sunday morning with an interesting epiphany.  Online education actually has become mainstream.  Many of the sessions mentioned online instruction, but the fact that the instruction was online was not the point.  The point was how technology … digital technology … was being used to impact learning.  It seemed everyone at the conference was passionate about learning!

For someone who adopted online instruction before Blackboard was created…this rocked!

Friday afternoon, Joshua Kim, Director of Learning and Technology for Dartmouth and blogger for Inside Higher Education, gave the opening plenary talk entitled “The Teaching Professor in 2020: Shaping the Future in a Time of Rapid Change.  A good talk, yet troubling.  With the increasing use of online education and the fascination this past year with MOOCs, Joshua suggested that higher education is in the midst of a historic shift…and that shift could be one that moves education from relationships with students to mass production of learning content and processes.  He suggested that higher education over the past two hundred years succeeded because of the relationships built between faculty and students (and between students).  In an era when rock star faculty can create a “course” that has 160,000 people enrolled, Joshua suggests that there cannot be an implicit relationship between the individual faculty and individual student.  In some ways, it reminds me of the move industrially from craft manufacturing to assembly line manufacturing – which had both positive and negative outcomes. Joshua suggested that you need those relationships for authentic learning … and stated “Authentic learning does not scale.”

True?  I am not sold that authentic learning is implicitly tied to small class size…but I do buy the issue of relationships.  And I agree with Ollie Dreon, who tweeted:

Joshua suggested that higher education might move in similar directions to the airlines, which have unbundled travel into commodities you buy…or very elite high end first-class travel.  The relationship-creating experiences might become our “first-class” education while MOOCs and low cost competency assessment represent “coach-class” education.  Reminded me of the discussions we have had in our CTE led by Jeff Nugent on the idea of the post-course era.

In a blog post, Joshua noted that his three takeaways from the conference were:

• Faculty Not Satisfied with the Status Quo – Looking to Improve Teaching and Learning
• Faculty are looking for Campus Partners
• A new generation of tech savvy faculty will be the future campus leaders

The poster sessions were held Friday night during the reception.  Fun discussing digital technology while wandering with a glass of wine…might be a model for future faculty development! 🙂

One high point for me was as I wandered by the poster of Erin Wood of Catawba College entitled “Engaging the Change: From Hardback to No Back” and heard her say “We got that idea from the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU.”  Turned out that Erin was a graduate of VCU and had attended a number of CTE workshops while working on her degree.  At Catawba College, she had pointed her colleagues to our website of resources, many of which they have adopted.  One never knows the impact our group might have…but fun seeing a concrete example.

Saturday, Brian Kibby from McGraw-Hill Higher Education gave the breakfast plenary entitled “Gradually then Suddenly: How Technology Has Changed Teaching in Higher Education.”  I initially tweeted that it was interesting that the conference brought in someone from publishing to talk to faculty, yet Brian gave an uplifting talk.  He stood not at the podium but out in the room, and used no technology (other than a microphone).  One of Brian’s strengths is storytelling, and he wove a compelling story that examines the parallels between changes in publishing and changes in teaching.  In both cases, the “customer” or “consumer” is changing.

Brian’s question was whether the culture at our institutions was one of YES or one of NO when it came to using technology for teaching and learning.  Rather than focus on why one should not use technology, he suggested one look for the possibilities and then make it happen.  He discussed the focus on learning analytics and suggested that if one focuses on results, one is use a lagging indicator.  Instead, he suggested we should look for leading indicators, and engagement might be one of this indicators. (So how does one “measure” engagement in an online class?  Page views, time on pages, eye tracks?)

Brian had a recent article in Inside Higher Education that looked at the question of when will we see the complete digital transformation of higher education in the United States?  He suggests that it is started and will occur in the next three years.  Optimistic…but then again, I am an optimist!

Brian ended his session by discussing MOOCs.  After the session, I talked to him and made the suggestion that McGraw-Hill might want to consider MOOCs less as a new model for courses as much as a possible new model for textbooks.  He seemed intrigued with the idea.

The next session was led by Ike Shibley, Chemistry professor at Penn State Berk, on tips for blended courses.  Ike teaches organic chemistry online…reminding us that the hard sciences can be taught online.  However, given lab components, blended makes much more sense.  Ike reminded us that students were not paying for our time or lectures…they were paying for learning.  He suggested that course design should include opportunities for learning before, during, and after each class.  He uses screencasts to cover lower order thinking levels of Bloom so that he can concentrate on higher order thinking in class.

One interesting question for online faculty lay in how authentic our learning might be.  His metaphor was that it did little good to spend 45 hours talking about skiing and viewing videos of great skiers…and then for the final exam placing the student at the top of the hill on skis and pushing them downhill.  He suggested a climate of rehearsal in courses…formative assessments tied to authentic outcomes.

This conference had lots of practical applications embedded in the sessions.  One tool that Ike demonstrated was PeerWise out of Australia.  Students use PeerWise to create and to explain their understanding of course related assessment questions, and to answer and discuss questions created by their peers.

A team from Anderson University discussed their implementation of a campus-wide iPad initiative.  They saw their initiative not as a technology initiative but as a learning initiative…looking to change practices for faculty and students.  The tablets open up new possibilities for classroom instruction, but faculty have to rethink class policies about use of iPads in class.  What does one do if students do not bring their iPad to class?  Students get AppleCare and supplemental insurance if they need to replace their iPad, and have the option to buy it if they leave early.  Faculty are issued iPads, but they remain the property of the university.

A good comment made by one of the team is that iPads do not mean business as usual.  It is a new tool suggesting new practices, and for active learning to occur in class, one should have students doing active learning between classes.

Another app that looked interesting is BaiBoard, which allows for interactive shared whiteboard through iPads.

At lunch, Ray Schroeder, Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning at University of Illinois and founding director of the Center for Online Leadership and Strategy at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, discussed the Vortex of Technology.  This link is a Google Site page that Ray used as both his presentation and his handout, something I found rather cool. With my aging eyes, it also helped that I could sit in the rear of the ballroom and bring his presentation up on my iPad to follow along – links and all.

One emerging technology that he discussed was LeapMotion, which uses hand movements to replace mouse or touchpads…very cool!  At $80-some dollars, I see a purchase in the near term!

One of the more interesting sessions dealt with cognitive load and screencasting, by Oliver Dreon, Millersville University of Pennsylvania; and Tim Wilson, University of Western Ontario.  I loved Ollie’s comment that an hour-long (or two-hour long) screencast was not a technical problem, it was a teaching problem.  He suggested ways to chunk material into ten-minute videos.  They noted lots of screencasting options, but suggested that for many, screencasting was an opportunity to create poor material.  At the same time, they repeated a mantra I have heard from Bud Deihl, do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

My session was on “Preparing Digitally Savvy Future Faculty,” which I co-developed with my fellow GRAD-602 co-teachers, Jeff Nugent and David McLeod.  Around 30 people showed up at 4pm…so I was stoked!  The Prezi is embedded below:

The last session of the day dealt with service learning and social media, a topic that my partner David McLeod will discuss in our presentation at the SLOAN International Conference on Online Learning in November.  Purdue is doing some interesting things with OpenBadges as a way to incentivize service learning.  Another Purdue app that got some buzz was Backdraft, which allows a speaker to create tweets before a presentation and then release them via iPad as they speak to punctuate their talk.  Very cool!

On Sunday morning, I attended two more sessions.  Matt Cazessus of Greenville Tech led a session on student-led blogging.  He used Blogger to create a central class site, and then multiple group blogs with 4-6 student authors in each for online discussion…in both online and face-to-face classes.  He did a nice job contrasting how boring a Blackboard discussion is versus the creativity of student blogging.  I was following the tweets from Jill Schiefelbein‘s session in another room on adding human touch to online classes, and was struck how we were having the same discussion in the blogging session.

My last session was led by Shawn Apostel of Bellarmine University on using Prezi for active learning in a class.  Shawn shares his Prezi’s before class so that students can edit and add questions or resources…which he then uses in class.  He also creates shared Prezi’s for small group brainstorming.  I have used Prezi for presentations and done the shared editing with co-presenters, but had not considered using it in class.  I did learn a new word – Prezilepsy: sickness caused by unnecessary Prezi swoops and dives around the screen.  #guiltyascharged  🙂

Good to be back in the town in which I was born 63 years ago.  Atlanta has grown from a southern town to a megatropolis of over 6 million people.  When I graduated from high school, the blue domed Hyatt in the lower right of this image was the tallest building in town.  Now, I was sitting in my hotel room looking down on the Hyatt!  I left Atlanta to join the Navy in Annapolis, but spent another 7 years nearby when I was at Gwinnett Tech.  So good to come back to Atlanta!

And good to attend a conference exploring the intersection of teaching and technology.  Next year, the conference will be in Denver October 10-14.  I look forward to returning!

{Images:  Teaching Professor, Shelly Duffer, Britt Watwood}