Last Friday, October 5, I sent out an email to the Georgetown community, announcing the Georgetown Technology-Enhanced Learning initiative (http://www.georgetown.edu/tel-principles/). This initiative will have several phases, but this first phase is seeking input on whether we’re headed in the right direction for evaluating and implementing new uses of learning technology.
This post talks about two of the draft principles the deans and I are seeking your help to evaluate through your comments on this post:
- To continually recalibrate how to make the best use of our instructional resources in order to achieve our ambitions for our students.
- To optimize the use of digital resources and computer−assisted learning strategies to leverage faculty time for more effective student interaction.
The first principle requires that faculty and students talk about what works well and what works better in courses. How do students learn the material in a course? Does everyone absorb the material in the same way? What’s the role of recall, practice, and feedback? What’s the role of applying the knowledge in different ways? What’s the role of solving a new problem based on the information conveyed? What’s the role of discussion among peers? What’s the role of listening to the faculty make connections among concepts? What’s the role of student oral presentations?
All of this goes to the need for assessment. How do we know when we as faculty are doing well in our courses? We have quizzes, examinations, papers, exercises, and class discussion. Great faculty can immediately sense when they’ve temporarily lost the class and refocus. As a community, faculty and students should be continuously asking what works.
As we focus on what works, sharing teaching and learning experiences seems like a good idea. Matt Hamilton of the Georgetown biology department engages students in active learning and records results using iclickers (https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/clickers_cop/2010/11/08/matt-hamilton-exemplar-clicker-use-in-biology/). Would students who experience that have ideas in what other classes such a technique might be useful?
The second principle above is focused on leveraging faculty time for more effective student interaction. It’s trying to react to both student and faculty input on discussions about teaching. Students note that they can detect when faculty start talking about their area of research or scholarship. Their eyes light up; they become animated in their discussion. Neat things happen that immediately engage students. Doing more of that is great for all.
Frank Ambrosio of the philosophy department has used web technology to help students navigate through Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” with all its embedded allusions. Take a look at https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/mydante/ and the associated student commentary about the experiences they have had https://commons.georgetown.edu/teaching/stories/ambrosio/ . What are the ingredients of that experience that makes the class more enjoyable and effective?
Sometimes tools are available to enrich the course experiences, so that the introductory material in a course can be consumed more effectively. For example, Oded Meyer of the mathematics and statistics department built interactive software for Web use that reduces the difficulty of learning statistics by customizing the material to the different learning steps of different students (http://gli.georgetown.edu/oli/ ). Then Parina Patel incorporated his developments in her course in the School of Foreign Service (https://commons.georgetown.edu/teaching/stories/patel). Discussing what makes that work for a statistics course may help us to know whether similar techniques might work for other Georgetown courses. A student-faculty and faculty-faculty dialogue would help on this score.
In our community’s exploration of when and how best to use technology in our learning, we need to be critical about these developments. That’s the purpose of the Technology-Enhanced Learning Initiative. The deans and I have forwarded the two draft principles above to target our community’s efforts — are they ones that we should pursue at Georgetown?
(Next week’s post will discuss other draft principles.)
I am a technology-buff and am definitely pro using technology to help improve teaching and best utilize the scarce commodity here: faculty and student time. I think the old fashioned approach of teacher in front of the classroom lecturing to students can often be very boring to students, especially to the high caliber students at Georgetown who are often expecting a two way dialog and not to be lectured to as if they blank slates or vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge.
I am excited about the possibility of exploring moving to a more collaborative, project oriented mode of teaching where a professor works in a team with students on projects with a clear goal. Oftentimes students are most motivated by being part of a meaningful project with a clear goal and outcome, and they can often bring as much to the situation and teach the professor as the
professor can teach them. This is especially true in situations where students are aware of latest technologies and have new skills that older faculty don’t possess. But the faculty also often have a more extensive and mature sense of the issues and important questions in their field of expertise. When students and faculty can work together in more of a tean enviornment on group projects and research, there can be some very meaningful two way interaction that can benefit both faculty and students and end up being more productive and fun than the traditional classroom interaction.
But it is not easy to attain this sort of goal in all situations, and clearly perhaps the majority of entering students and maybe even a majority of upper year students willl want the more traditional classroom experience and want professors who are good lecturers
and can help motivate them and explain why their subject is interesting and important.
So clearly we cannot completely abandon the “old fashioned” way of teaching but I think we can use technology in a much better way to free faculty time from mundane repetitive tasks so that they can spend more of their time in the newer sort of team/project oriented mode of teaching/collaboration with students.
I know many faculty (including myself) can be somewhat intimidated by what it means to use “technology enhanced instruction” and sometimes these initiatives can seem more like a burden and daunting challenge to many faculty, rather than as a an opportunity. Some faculty are tech-geeks and can program fancy classroom interactive games and experiences, but I would guess that the vast majority of Georgetown faculty do not have the time or capability for this, and it is not clear that it would materially improve their evaluations and student learning to try to turn their class into a big online/interactive “game”. In certain cirucmstances this can be really cool to do, but I think few faculty could easily design entire courses around such a strategy and the
time it would take them and the benefit might have a dubious effort to reward ratio.
So I would suggest exploiting the easiest technologies first and have some of the more technically proficient faculty serve as leaders to help other less technically capable but interested faculty to incorporate the best most cost-effective methods and technologies in their class.
I am talking about starting with the simplest technology such as course email lists which are reaally easy for faculty to use to keep in touch with their classes and express thoughts/ideas that they might not have had time to cover in class and to announce assignments, exam results, and provide a forum for other ideas to be discussed outside of the normal classroom hours. Also blogs such as the one the Provost is using are great tools to get a two way dialog going and have a cumulative record of the discussion going on. I am new to using the BlackBoard technology but I underrstand it can help faculty do these simple first steps. But how many GU faculty are actually using even these simple tools?
The final point I would make is that as a faculty, I find I am continually “self-tesching” by reading and searching, and increasingly I am doing this on the web. I think any top ranked
university has to teach its students to teach themselves and be effective in seeking out the knowledge they want, beyond the immediate classroom experience. Classroom interaction between faculty and students is a scarce opportunity and it should not be wasted by mechanical lecturing: studnets can read material on their own and digest it on their own: the class should be seen as an opportunity to get more of a dialog and for the professor to find out where the students are having a hard time or are getting confused with the material. Better formats for teaching can use technology to enable different ability students to proceed at their own pace through the material: some are very good and can proceed at a faster pace and go further, whereas others may be struggling and cannot go at the same pace and may end up learning less, but it would be better to learn less material well than learn a lot of material not at all.
So there is the possibility that technology can help us individualize instructional paths for students and indvidiualize
the help faculty can provide to students and avoid a situation where a faculty member has to decide whether to teach to the
average student or the top students in their class: ideally a more individualized instructional design can help faculty lever their time to enable the best students to really excel and go far beyond what the average student can learn in the course, while devoting
substantial time to helping even the most struggling student get the basic ideas and pass the course.
We can ask how much different a technology is a traditional paper textbook and online material: there is a basic deal of similarity, but moving a course online with a well designed syllabus can be a jumping off point to get students interested in a topic and help them start to learn, and continue to learn on their own even outside of the class room hours and even well after the course is done.
So I am optimistic that the technology will help a lot, but so far I have only managed to use information technology in the crudest of ways: as a communication device (e.g. emails to the class) and as a convenient document delivery service (via my online course syllabus). I have yet to use Java to build an interactive game and have my students play games in real time during my class. That would be cool to do, but the time it would take me to build the interactive Java program that could do all of this is still very daunting to me, and I would consider myself in the upper tail of the “techno geek” spectrum. (To be honest, I am the co-founder of a dot.com company called “Techno Luddites.com” and this more accurately describes the state of my technological sophistication)
The above posts are great contributions and raise concerns and insights that I feel must be addressed. The use of technology in classrooms is warranted if it will truly enhance the learning experience. That said, certain classes may benefit from greater use of technology while others may suffer. I believe we should have greater discourse on this topic, bringing academics and students from a wide variety of departments to the table in order to truly understand how technology can enhance Georgetown’s campus.
Having taken Prof. Ambrosio’s course with the MyDante website, I echo everything he has said. However, I see him and that course as the exception, not the norm here. It is a testament to Prof. Ambrosio that he was able to masterfully interweave the technology into the course, while remaining focused on the text and the substance of the Divine Comedy. The course was about Dante, not the website.
However, in many other courses at Georgetown I have not see this kind of successful integration, which I believe to be quite difficult to achieve. In this sense, I echo Prof. Mitchell’s point, that we ought to be concerned with something much more basic here. Most students do not have a common intellectual vocabulary or foundation to draw on in having intellectual discussions in and out of the classroom. The ‘core requirements’ have become distribution requirements. There is very little vestige of the liberal arts left there. Let’s focus on educating students about what is, about things of ultimate importance and reality. This begins with a certain ‘canon’ of texts with which everyone ought to be familiar (it need not take the form of an entire great books program, though Georgetown lacks what BC does masterfully there). It continues with pedagogy that is text-centric, and discussion drive, to get students to actually have a conversation, not merely reflect on their ‘feelings’ about what a particular author may be saying, in the historicist sense. On this, Strauss is very good, as is his student, Bloom. The process continues outside of the classroom, where, by the last student life report, there is admittedly little or no intellectual life. Tocqueville Forum seems to be the only oasis. Let’s not see the day where someone needs to write “the closing of the Hoya mind.”
Without overlooking the valuable comments already posted, I did wish to make an acknowledgment of the invaluable contribution of Ed Maloney, Bill Garr and Theresa Schlafly, all of CNDLS, to the MyDante project. Without their expertise, both technological and pedagogical, the experiment would not have been possible at all, and with it, has proven very fruitful within the context of limitations that reach beyond CNDLS, and to which the present conversation seems to be directed. I look forward to its progress.
I like the suggestions and find some of the examples fascinating.
One issue that immediately surfaces by looking at these examples is that they are wonderful instances of individual faculty members doing something innovative. Yet there is no sense that there is a context in which these innovations connect to anything in the students’ learning beyond the individual course. They are not part of a curricular thinking where curriculum is the embodiment of a shared notion of educational goals, of pedagogical practices and purposes, and, ultimately, shared educational values (and may be even go beyond that). There is very little discussion of curricular issues in all of this. Without that component, we have much individual innovation and creativity (all good, of course, but not sufficient as a response to some of the current and coming challenges) but no systemic change to the educational environment, the learning opportunities that students are exposed to and the articulation of why it is important to have a Georgetown specific educational experience. I believe that is where smart academic administration comes in and needs to frame some of the issues broadly, enhance, foster, support, drive, lead the efforts.
I think it is interesting how two of the most powerful forces driving education right now are really at cross-purposes. On the one hand, there is a strong push for skills-focused, certification-type education. On the other, transformative education is de rigeur, producing the much talked about “life-long learners” . They both have their value but they exist in almost separate universes (with very different utilization of technology). We have both of them here at GU and we need to figure out a way how to address the understandable desire to get some sort of “certifiable” (practical/marketable/useful) skills/education and yet also address what I believe is a powerful argument for an education at a Jesuit university, i.e., that it enables the students to focus their particular interests through the lens of community, responsibility, and service to others.
For anyone who was at the fall convocation tonight: It was instructive to see the speaker give her lively talk on ecotones and how the transition to the new technological environment will make things categorically different. Yet, behind her was a cadre of colleagues who had just received tenure or promotion to full professor not because (for the most part) they dabbled in ecotones of disciplines but because they had established themselves as authorities in precisely those disciplines with at times very rigid understandings of what constitutes recognized research. It was another indicator that if we want to respond to some of the challenges, we need systematic change.
Thank you for the thoughtful post. I agree with Joshua’s notion that the learner is often forgot in the developmental process or strategy. Perhaps we could take note of the evolving field of medical education and think in terms of competency-based education. In laymen’s terms – what are the outcomes we hope the learner to achieve through the curriculum. From that point, appropriate instructional methods and correlating assessments may be employed to meet those particular outcomes.
While I understand the need to make curriculum more engaging, technology will not solve the problem alone. Employing other methodologies to achieve competency may drive what technology is useful and what is not. The idea that the class lecture is infused with technology by web-based delivery does not alter the rote-learning method employed with lecture.
In conclusion, I recommend that you consider defining learner outcomes and craft instructional methods to meet those outcomes. In terms of technology – perhaps individual learning (recorded lecture) may take place offline so that the classroom could become the application of such content (e.g. team-based learning). Just a thought.
I have now read several of these posts, and I come away each time with the uneasy sense this initiative is singularly focused on processes and mechanisms and feedback, but ignores what I take to be the single most important question we need to ask: with what sort of knowledge do our student need to be presented so that they can begin that long and ardous task–whose results cannot be immediately measured–of becoming thoughtful citizens.