Best Practices: Online Teaching

1. Best Practices: Online Teaching Jim Mazoué Director, Online Programs Educational Outreach Wayne State University

2. Getting It Right

3. Poll • I’ve mastered the art of teaching. There’s nothing more that I need to learn. • My teaching practices may never be perfect, but at least I can improve them. • I will never be able to teach my students effectively in a way that they deserve.

4. Early experiments in educational technology

5. Disruptive Innovation There’s a tendency to think of disruptive innovations in terms of old paradigms and to use them to sustain current practice. A disruptive innovation can complicate your life! Unless you use a disruptive innovation appropriately, it can make your life unpleasant!

6. Disruptive Innovation

7. Responding to Disruptive Innovation • The Stethoscope Song • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., poet, physician and essayist, 1848

9. The Effects of Disruptive Innovation • Introduces new possibilities for interaction • Extends your range of functional control • May render previous practices obsolete • Liberating & Transformative

12. “the technologies that enable precise diagnosis and, subsequently, predictably effective therapy are those that have the potential to transform health care through disruption.” Clayton Christensen, et al. (2009). The Innovator’s Prescription.

13. Precision Medicine “the provision of care for diseases that • can be precisely diagnosed, • whose causes are understood, • and which consequently can be treated with rules-based therapies that are predictably effective.” Christensen, The Innovator’s Prescription

14. Personalized (Nano) Medicine • Monitor one’s own health • Individual control over and access to information • Patient management of their own health care

16. What does this have to do with best practices for teaching and learning?

17. Convenience ― Quality

18. A G B C F D E

19. Which comes closest to describing what should be our current practice? • Fast Food • Drive Thru • Vending Machine • Frozen Dinner • Gourmet Meal • Mom’s Home Cooking • Banquet • Something else. . . .

20. “It would be difficult to design an educational model that is more at odds with the findings of current research about human cognition than the one being used today at most colleges and universities.” Halpern, D. and Hakel, M. (2003, July/August ). Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond. Change.

21. “We individualize faculty practice (that is, we allow individual faculty members great latitude in course development and delivery) and standardize the student learning experience (that is, we treat all students in a course as if their learning needs, interests, and abilities were the same). Instead, we need to do just the opposite: individualize student learning and standardize faculty practice.” Carol Twigg, NCAT

24. Why Don’t Students Like School? • Feels like prison • Seat-time • Batch casting • Lock-step instruction • Location dependence

25. Monolithic Education Standardized Teaching Batch processing Fixed start/completion dates Inflexible curriculum Lock-step learning Teacher-centered “End-of-the-line inspection” Accumulation of credit hours

26. “There is a ‘digital disconnect’ between students’ educational expectations and the way in which educational institutions approach student learning.” Speak Up 2008, Project Tomorrow

27. “The aim of learning is to increase knowledge in long-term memory.” (Kirschner et al, 2007)

28. “What professors do in their classes matters far less than what they ask students to do.” Halpern, D. and Hakel, M. (2003, July/August ). Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond. Change.

29. Agree or Disagree? • Agree • Disagree

31. “Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.” Herbert A. Simon

32. “any conversation about effective teaching must begin with a consideration of how students learn.” Marsha Lovett, et al. (2010). How Learning Works.

33. Tallent-Runnels, T, et al. (2006, Spring). Teaching Courses Online: A Review of the Research. Review of Educational Research, 76 (1), 93-135. “A new model for online courses should be established, one that is based on research, not just on intuition or on the standard model for traditional courses.”

34. Shifting Paradigms • Moving from: students as passive consumers of information • To: students as active participants at the center of learning activity

35. “ biology has become the scientific basis for medicine, while cognitive psychology and learning research have not become the scientific basis for education.” • Newcombe, N. (2002, Spring). Biology is to Medicine as Psychology Is to Education: True or False? New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 89.

36. Bridging the Learning Research – Teaching Practice Gap

37. “We have found precious little evidence that content experts in the learning sciences actually apply the principles they teach in their own classrooms. Like virtually all college faculty, they teach the way they were taught.” Halpern, D. and Hakel, M. Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond.

38. As in medicine, our interventions and ‘treatment’ should be: • data-driven • personalized • based on standards of best practice

39. Twigg’s “Paradigm-Failure” criticism • Break out of the Traditionalist Paradigm • Avoid bolting tech on to traditional teaching methods (ATM example) • Mistake to use tech to replicate classroom instruction • Instead of using tech to do the same thing differently, do different things

40. Twigg: Quality Improvement Techniques • Adopt learner-centered instructional design principles • Mass customization • Individualized study plans • Built-in continuous assessment • Just-in-time assistance for students

41. Should not be doing in class what can be done online • Content delivery  Engagement • New technologies  Transformation of Teaching Practice & Student Learning • Offload content online (e.g., digital collections, lecture capture, discussion/blogging) • Overlay, ‘layer’ technology-mediated interaction (e.g, live chats during webcasts)

42. What is a best practice? • Evidence-based • Rigorous evaluation • Has a positive impact • Demonstrates better success than alternatives • Can be replicated • Requires the exercise of knowledge & skill • Endorsed by members of a profession • Evolves

43. Educational Best Practices Teaching Learning Assessment Technology Institutional Support

44. Micro-Level (instructional practice) • Teaching • Learning • Assessment • Macro-Level (institutional organization) • Learning Environments: Interconnected Feedback • Infrastructure • Continuous Improvement

45. Teaching/Learning • Student-Centered • Participatory • Personalized • Collaborative • Mobile access • Social networks

46. Assessment • Data-driven • Evidence of impact • Technology-based • Diagnostic & Formative • Individualized • Continuous Improvement

47. Quality depends on process: the how (and what?) . . . not the where

48. MCS Research • R. Clark: media do not influence learning • any medium appropriately applied can fulfill the conditions for quality instruction • learning depends on what one does within a medium • Instructional method, not the medium is what determines quality

49. Identify sound pedagogical principles • Apply research on learning to course design and teaching: • Motivation • Learning • Assessment • Interaction • Communication

50. Learner-Centered Environments Challenge students Choice & control Cooperation Respect & value the process of meaning-making Individualized attention Inquiry-based learning tasks Novice  expert