| Bloom's Sixth

Recent news, research, trends and thoughts about education. Compiled by Doug Ward.

That pricey fifth (or sixth) year of college

Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report writes about the overlooked cost of a fifth or sixth year in calculating the cost of a college education. Ninety percent of freshmen begin college thinking they will graduate in four years, though less than half actually do. … Also, in a disturbing trend, Hechinger reports that the number of homeless students in U.S. public schools has grown 58 percent since 2007-08.

Some trends worth watching

In a report released last week, the consulting firm Michael Cohen Group identified several digital trends in education. The report, which was created in late spring, provides no real surprises yet highlights some of the issues that educators everywhere should pay attention to, including social media, open educational resources, massive open online courses, blended learning, flipped courses, gamification, integration of coding into courses, digital simulations, bring-your-own-device programs, assessment, big data, and adaptive learning.

man standing on dock at foggy lake — Todd Quackenbush, Unsplash

The biggest challenge in educational technology? Managing change.

In its most recent research report, the Center for Digital Education says that technology itself “is never the biggest hurdle” in a changing educational environment. The biggest challenge is managing the changes brought on by technology, including integration into curricula, development of effective personalized learning, and effective training for teachers and staff members who use technology. Above all, the center said, institutions need to help instructors, students and staff member “think about how technology can fundamentally turn old pedagogy on its head.”

A startling statistic from the report: Singapore spends $21,200 per student on education annually, compared with $2,500 in the United States.

The university of the future

U.S. News & World Report recently looked at the challenges that colleges and universities face amid changing demographics, rising costs, a hypercompetitive admissions process, and a growing adoption of online courses, among other things. As part of the report, called College of Tomorrow, U.S. News asked six university leaders to offer their thoughts on the future. They talked about the need for improving transparency, leveraging research, and continuing to challenge students with new opportunities.

The most pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, was Robert Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University. Mendenhall said higher education in the future would probably look a lot like it does today, given the resistance to change on college campuses. He sees a need for change, pointing to areas like accountability and the growth in nontraditional students, and says that colleges that don’t may not survive.

Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic, touched on areas I see as among the most important for the future. She wrote, “Students need to acquire new skills for this digitally interconnected environment, including the ability to ‘translate’ between and among disciplines and sectors. They must learn to operate effectively and ethically in virtual communities, immersive environments, and in blended worlds.”

How millennial are you?

Finally, educators need to do a better job of understanding all their students, including Generation Z, but Pew Research republished a four-year-old but still relevant quiz last week about understanding millennials. It’s worth a look.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

At a meeting of the CTE faculty ambassadors last week, Felix Meschke brought up a challenge almost every instructor faces.

Meschke, an assistant professor of finance, explained that he had invited industry professionals to visit his class last semester and was struck by how engaged students were. They asked good questions, soaked up advice from the professionals, and displayed an affinity for sharing ideas with speakers from outside the university.

The interaction was marvelous to watch, Meschke asked, but how could he assess it? He could ask a question on an exam, he said, but that didn’t seem right. The content of the discussions wasn’t as important as the discussions themselves and the opportunities those discussions brought to students.

In a sense, Meschke had answered his own question: His observations were a form of assessment. I suggested that he log those observations so he could provide documentation if he needed it. No, that wouldn’t provide a numerical assessment, but it would provide the kind of assessment he needed to make decisions on whether to do something similar in the future.

Paint pots and letter blocks — WordPerfect

All too often we think of assessment as something we do for someone else: for administrators, for accreditors, for legislators. Assessment is really something we need to do for ourselves, though. Thinking of it that way led to an epiphany for me a few years ago. Like so many educators, I approached assessment with a sense of dread. It was one more thing I didn’t have time for.

When I started thinking of assessment as something that helped me, though, it didn’t seem nearly so onerous. I want to know how students are doing in my classes so I can adapt and help them learn better. I want to know whether to invite back guest speakers. I want to know whether to repeat an assignment or project. I want to know what students report about their own learning. All of those things are natural parts of the teaching process.

That sort of thinking also helped me to realize that assessment doesn’t have to be quantitative. Assessments like quiz and exam grades can indeed point to strengths and weaknesses. If a large majority of students fails an exam, we have to ask why. Was there a problem in the way students learned a particular concept? A flaw in the wording of the exam? A lack of studying by students?

I rarely give exams, though. Rather, I use things like projects, journals and participation.

I use rubrics to grade the projects and journals, but the numbers don’t tell me nearly as much as the substance of the work. Only through a qualitative assessment do I get a sense of what students gained, what they didn’t gain, and what I need to rethink in future semesters.

In the class Meschke described, students applied their learning through active participation. Trying to put a numerical value on that would in some ways cheapen the engagement the students showed and the opportunities they gained in interacting with professionals. Observing those interactions provided excellent feedback to Meschke, though, and by writing a brief summary of his those observations, he could provide documentation for others.

The message was clear: Do it again next semester.

And when it comes to assessment, the message is clear, as well: Do it for yourself.

Additional resources

Portfolio Assessment: An Alternative to Traditional Performance Evaluation Methods in the Area Studies Programs, by Mariya Omelicheva

Assessment Resources for departments and programs at KU

Combining Live Performance and Traditional Assessments to Document Learning, by the School of Pharmacy

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Good teaching often starts with a simple greeting to students.

A simple hello will work. A smile helps. So does body language that signals a willingness to work with students. That recognition — both inside and outside the classroom — can go a long way toward engaging students and setting the tone for an assignment, a class or even a college career.

We can’t forget that. Stellar lesson plans, carefully chosen readings and incisive questions mean little if students aren’t engaged. That doesn’t mean that every instructor needs a cult of personality. Not at all. It simply means that an instructor needs to show human elements that students can relate to. They have to connect in some way.

hands with puzzle pieces that fit together — Pixabay

At a discussion at CTE in the spring, a group of freshmen explained just how important that is. During their first semester, those freshmen were trying to find their place on campus: Where did they belong? Did they belong? How would they know?

One drove home the point this way: A few weeks into her first semester, she was still feeling unsure about herself and about KU. When one of her professors smiled and greeted her in the hallway one day, though, she felt validated. Her professor recognized her. He knew who she was. He said hello. That simple acknowledgment made her feel that she had a place on campus.

Charlie Blaich and Kathy Wise made a similar point in their opening plenary at the annual Teaching Summit last month.

Good pedagogy is important, Blaich said, but students need professors who make connections with them. They notice instructors who experiment with teaching and pay attention to students. They seek them out, and they learn from them.

“Being human and being present for them is a really important thing,” Blaich said.

A Gallup-Purdue Index Report released earlier this year further reinforced that idea. Students who felt that their professors connected with them, cared about them and made them excited about learning were far more likely to succeed in college. That held true whether colleges were large or small, public or private.

The connectedness lasted long after college, the report said, doubling the likelihood that graduates were engaged in their jobs and felt an overall sense of well-being.

None of that is surprising, but it provides a reminder of the important role that instructors play in the lives of college students. Simple acts of humanity pay dividends in students’ engagement, learning and long-term success.

That’s worth keeping in mind the next time we walk into a classroom, reply to email or see a student in the hallway.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Whenever I give workshops about teaching with technology, I try to provide a handout of resources.

This is one I distributed after workshops I led at the Best Practices Institute at CTE last week and at the School of Education. It’s a relatively modest list, but it includes sites for for visualizing text; for editing images; for creating maps, charts, infographics; and for combining elements into a multimedia mélange.

My goal in creating lists like this is to help instructors think about ways to incorporate multimedia elements and technology into their teaching. I never insist that instructors use specific tools. Rather, I try to show how various resources can enrich assignments, deepen learning, expand skills, and make class time more engaging.

Not all assignments lend themselves to multimedia elements, but I’ve found that multimedia tools inspire creativity in students, and make assignments more interesting and more meaningful.

I’ve listed a few tools below. The rest are available in the accompanying PDF.

You’ll find more tools like this at my site journalismtech.com and at Teaching With Technology, a site that Germaine Halegoua and I manage. (This post appears on that site, as well.) Nearly are all are free. Some may have restrictions, so please read the terms of use on each site.

Multimedia tools

New Hive. Provides many options to create a single web page with text, images and video.
ThingLink. Allows you to upload photos and place icons on them that pop up with text, other photos and video.
Weavly. For creating mashups from YouTube, SoundCloud and other sources.
Popcorn Maker. A tool for mixing video, audio and images from the web. From Mozilla.
Meograph. A site for creating multimedia stories.
Storify. An easy-to-use tool for creating stories from many types of social media.

Timelines

Dipity. Create timelines, flipbooks, lists and maps. Easy, effective and free for the basic version. One glitch that I’ve found: The embed codes don’t always work well with WordPress sites.
TimeGlider.
TimeToast.

Text visualization and analysis

Wordle. Insert text and create customizable word clouds.
Document Cloud. Upload documents to the website, analyze them, highlight them and annotate them. You can also create a slideshow-like form that can be embedded elsewhere.

Chart and graph tools

Many Eyes. Offers tools for creating maps, charts and diagrams, and for analyzing text (word clouds and tag clouds, for example). It offers many examples of how to turn data into visual information. You can input or upload data.
Chart Gizmo. A free website that allows registered users to create basic charts and graphs.
Cacoo. Allows you to create and share diagrams, which can be linked, embedded or saved as .png files. More options available with a paid account.

Maps

Google Maps Engine Lite.
Google Fusion Tables. Powerful tools for creating maps, charts and graphs. They aren’t difficult to use, but they will take time to learn.
Community Walk. Based on Google Maps, with some added features.
MapFab. A useful editor for Google Maps.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Participants in the Best Practices Institute work at the Spahr Engineering Classroom. — Participants in the Best Practices Institute work on a backward design exercise at the Spahr Engineering Classroom.

By Doug Ward

I’m always surprised at the common themes that emerge when faculty members talk about teaching.

Goals and challenges transcend disciplinary boundaries, allowing for robust discussions about learning; class design and preparation; assessment; the struggles of students, and other areas of teaching.

In discussions Tuesday at CTE’s Best Practices Institute, faculty members from a dozen disciplines shared aspirations and strategies for improving their classes. Among the speakers was Meagan Patterson, associate professor of psychology, who explained the key elements of backward design and then asked participants to write down goals they hoped to achieve in their classes.

My table included instructors from pharmacy, philosophy, journalism, and health, sports and exercise science. The overlap among the group was remarkable. As I wrote the goals on a whiteboard, nearly everyone in the group nodded in agreement. They, too, had essentially the same goals. Here’s a distilled list:

Learn basic course concepts (as in science or philosophy)
Learn basic definitions and moral principles and apply those to specific situations
Demonstrate a big picture view of a subject
Apply knowledge to real world problems
Demonstrate good persuasive writing and an ability to refute opposing positions
Make connections to other disciplines and ideas
Demonstrate an ability to synthesize and explain discrete specialty topics learned in a course.

Identification of goals is only the first step of creating or remaking a class. The bigger challenge comes when a faculty members starts to envision ways for students to learn material and to demonstrate their learning.

That’s part of what makes teaching so enjoyable, though, no matter the discipline.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan specializes in a branch of probability theory called stochastic systems, which views problems through a lens of randomness.

She teaches courses in that area, as well as in subjects like applied statistics, linear algebra and optimization theory.

When faced with a high dropout and failure rate among students in a large 100-level calculus class, though, Pasik-Duncan found a solution in a distinctively humanistic equation: She created a sense of community.

Her methods offer an excellent example of how cooperation among students and instructors can improve learning – and help everyone make friends along the way.

The calculus class that posed the challenge for Pasik-Duncan was Math 121, a 500-person class with several lab sections. In a typical semester, 30 percent or more of the students who enroll eventually withdraw or receive a D or an F. In university parlance, that’s known as the DFW rate, a statistic that administrators follow closely.

individuals gathered around globe representing community — Colinda, Open Clip Art Library

To address that problem, Pasik-Duncan urged collaboration from the first day of class. Everyone was expected to collaborate: the instructor, the teaching assistants and the students.

Collaboration was just the beginning, though. She promoted the idea of “C to the power of five”: collaboration, community, connection, curiosity, and connectivity.

“Always interpret,” she told students. “Always question. Why, why, why, why do I need to know that?”

About a quarter of the students in the class struggled with concepts like derivatives, domains, integrals and arc lengths. A quarter of the students, many of them from outside the United States, excelled at calculus. So Pasik-Duncan struck a deal. She asked for volunteers to help the struggling students and said she would write letters explaining their role in helping others succeed.

“We’re a community. Let’s help each other,” Pasik-Duncan told students. “At this moment, you need my help. Next semester, I may need your help.”

Students loved it, she said. Not only did they make connections among concepts in the classroom, but they made connections with other students. The DFW rate in her class fell to less than 14 percent, less than half the typical rate.

And not only did the struggling students improve in math, but the international students who struggled with English found that the one-on-one interactions with fellow students helped them improve their language skills.

“I consider this a beautiful thing,” Pasik-Duncan said. “On top of teaching and learning, we also have this community service.”

And the power of community.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Angelique Kobler offered an uncomfortable question about education last week.

Kobler, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at the Lawrence school district, met with the KU Task Force on Course Redesign and explained the steady expansion of blended learning in Lawrence public schools.

To illustrate the need for new ways of engaging students, she said, she asks her staff a question that can make even the most experienced teacher squirm: Has teaching occurred if learning hasn’t?

Education is never that cut and dried, of course. Learning depends on a wide range of factors that have nothing to do with an individual teacher. Kobler knows that. She uses the question to spur discussion about the need for change.

blended learning graphic — Wikimedia Commons

Today’s students are different from those a generation ago, as are their needs in an era when laptops and smartphones offer access to nearly unlimited amounts of information.

Fifteen years ago, Luc E. Weber, a professor of public economics at the University of Geneva, made an observation that has grown only more apparent today: “Teachers will have to accept that their role is changing,” Weber wrote in Challenges Facing Higher Education at the Millennium. “They will be decreasingly information providers and increasingly animators and commentators in charge of giving context and in-depth understanding of an area.” (p. 10)

Blended classrooms force teachers to heed that call for change. Many teachers are responding. Lawrence public schools started with a pilot program of eight blended classrooms in Spring 2013. By fall of this year, the district plans to expand that number to 150.

Kobler defines blended as “somewhere between traditional and virtual.” Students in blended classes can use whatever means help them learn: Some choose textbooks. Others work through assignments online. Sometimes students work alone. Other times, they reach out to peers to help them understand a topic or a concept.

In all those scenarios, the teacher keeps tabs on students and meets with them individually or in groups to keep them on track.

This approach isn’t easy to pull off. Teachers have to be willing to experiment, to make mistakes in front of students, and to talk with students about those mistake, Kobler said. Blended classrooms can seem chaotic as students go in several different directions at once, something that doesn’t also sit well with teachers who demand order.

Parents, on the other hand, have been enthusiastic about the blended approach, sometimes asking that their children continue in a blended classroom because the approach works well for them.

On the other hand, high-achieving students sometimes struggle in a blended environment, something I’ve found in my own classes. High achievers often thrive within a tightly structured, traditional model of “tell me what I need to know and I’ll tell it back to you on a test.” A blended, flipped or hybrid environment strips away this neat order and pushes students to find their own structure and to pace their own learning. That’s a far more difficult task, but it’s also far more meaningful in the long run.

Let me put a twist on Kobler’s earlier question: Can education survive if educators don’t adapt to the needs of students?

That question may make us squirm as well, though it’s also a bit easier to answer.

“If we don’t keep up, we will become irrelevant,” Kobler said.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Thoughts from two speakers I’ve listened to in the last week have been bouncing around my brain.

At Journalism Interactive last week, Richard Hernandez of the University of California, Berkeley, pressed conference participants to experiment with technology that allows new forms of expression. To illustrate his point, he held up a smartphone and said: “You have more information in your pocket than Ronald Reagan had as president.”

Last night in a speech in Lawrence, the columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. used his smartphone as a prop, as well, after an audience member asked him about effecting change. His response went something like this:

In the 1950s, the civil rights movement started among concerned people who used rotary dial phones and mimeograph machines to mobilize citizens and end American apartheid. Today, he said, with smartphones that give us access to infinite amounts of information and an ability to communicate with nearly anyone, anywhere, anytime, why can’t we seem to steer society in an inclusive direction?

The take-away is that technology alone can’t solve problems. Simply having access to infinite amounts of information does us no good unless we know how to find the information we need. Having the information we need means nothing if we don’t know how to interpret it, to synthesize it, and to present it in meaningful ways. And even if we do that, new information is meaningless unless others have the context and the means to learn from it, use it, and act upon it.

I’m a big fan of technology, and I’ve written more about Journalism Interactive on one of my websites, JournalismTech.com.

Listening to Hernandez and Pitts speak, though, reminded me how important the human element of technology is. I continually push my students to experiment with new digital tools and new techniques of storytelling. Technology can give us superpowers, of sorts, abilities to make sense of things we once could only dream about. It can make us look smart (or dumb), and can shrink the world to the size of a smartphone screen.

Technology means nothing, though, unless we apply it to meaningful questions and problems at a human level.

I hope you’ll let that idea bounce around in your head this weekend.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Education Matters: College costs and trends, and a look into the future

That pricey fifth (or sixth) year of college

Some trends worth watching

The biggest challenge in educational technology? Managing change.

The university of the future

How millennial are you?

Why assess student work? For yourself, of course.

Humanity pays off in the classroom and beyond

50+ resources for teaching with technology

From a variety of disciplines, goals of teaching converge

Helping students learn the power of math with the power of community

Question of the day: Has teaching occurred if learning hasn’t?

You have the world in your pocket. Now what?

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