Mindy Pitre forwarded me a video done by her undergraduate students at St. Lawrence University, and I just had to share it. It is about as adorable as caveman lovin' can be!
"I Believe in Gene Flow"
She writes: "It was for my Intro to Human Origins at St. Lawrence University. I made them do group raps/songs. They were super creative!"
UCLA animal behavior professor Peter Nonacs describes his experiment in learning by doing: "Cheating to Learn: How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midterm".
So last quarter I had an intriguing thought while preparing my Game Theory lectures. Tests are really just measures of how the Education Game is proceeding. Professors test to measure their success at teaching, and students take tests in order to get a good grade. Might these goals be maximized simultaneously? What if I let the students write their own rules for the test-taking game? Allow them to do everything we would normally call cheating?
Naturally, nearly the entire class decided to work together.
This is what I consistently find when I do game theory experiments with my classes. Students who work hard and contribute always tolerate free riders. When I explicitly point out the apparent unfairness of the situation, students sometimes articulate frustration with free riders, but shrug their shoulders. If Nonacs thinks he has taught them something new, he should sit in more classes.
Re: "Student attention spans are variable":
This has been a subject which has given me food for thought increasingly as I have grown older. I still attend a few medical talks where I work, but the problem is not just attention. It is wakefulness too. It seems unrelated to the subject matter. Excluding external factors such as how much sleep the night before, and activity levels previously during the day, I have come to the conclusion that some bright spark could devise an algorithm based on a number of factors.
1. Room temperature, especially a gradual rise due to x students cooped up for x minutes
2. Lighting levels; presentations involving slide shows often require low lighting
3. Oxygen levels falling in a room full of listeners, all breathing out carbon dioxide, and doors shut
4. The dreaded post-lunch 2pm spot.
5. Interaction levelsI am sure a p50 levels, based on when half the audience's heads are nodding could be calculated.
P.S. of course this does not appply to your lectures
I totally agree!
There is much discussion in online education about the "15-minute rule": that content longer than 15 minutes will lose students' attention. Part of this is because of the intrinsic pain of watching videos on a computer. But part is rooted in classroom observations, that students in lectures tend to become distracted and lose their attention for a lecturer after some period of time. Interestingly, the education research shows that this is more complicated. For example, Karen Wilson and James Korn [1] found that individual variations among students swamped any time effect for attention and effective recall or note taking.
It is clear that students' attention does vary during lectures, but the literature does not support the perpetuation of the 10- to 15-min attention estimate. Perhaps the only valid use of this parameter is as a rhetorical device to encourage teachers to develop ways to maintain student interest in the classroom. If psychologists and other educators continue to promote such a parameter as an empirically based estimate, they need to support it with more controlled research. Beyond that, teachers must do as much as possible to increase students' motivation to “pay attention” as well as try to understand what students are really thinking about during class.
Probably the most useful bit is this:
The information processing that occurs during classroom tasks resembles a large working memory task (D. J. LaVoie, personal communication, March 21, 2005). Students receive information from the instructor and must hold the information long enough to record it in their notes or do whatever else they need to do with it. Whether students will be able to maintain their attention in class depends on their working memory capacity as well as their motivation and arousal (Pashler, 1998).
This suggests that instructors should provide multiple cues to promote effective use of working memory during their classroom presentations. Specific callouts to reading materials -- preferably search terms in an ebook -- might be helpful. And visualizations ought to be consistent between lecture and readings, so that students can calibrate their note taking.
As for online presentations, I still think that short is better. But more to the point, they should also be calibrated to other material, such as online readings and quizzes, so that note taking will be more productive.
I've been doing a lot of tracking of massive open online courses, including enrolling in several of them, as research for my upcoming course, "Human Evolution: Past and Future".
A new site, "MOOC News and Reviews" has begun reporting on a range of MOOCs and research surrounding them. A recent post reports on the pathways that different students take through courses, in terms of watching videos, completing quizzes and assignments, and tracking the course's progress week by week: "Not All Online Students Are the Same: A Summary of Stanford’s MOOC User Study.
Using these tags, the researchers were able to predict how many would take the final exam within an accuracy of 9%. The graphic above illustrates some of the “prototypical” trajectories that students followed, but Kizelcec et al. identified over 20,000 different trajectories through a single course! As the graphic below shows, a student could “audit” the first lessons, fall “behind” for one and then “track” a few, drop “out” for one and then “audit” the next before taking the final.
I find this to be one of the most empowering aspects of teaching a MOOC. People can engage in the content at the level that makes sense for their own level of interest and preparation. Also, the huge range of skills and interests in people taking these courses may enable new networks of learning. As the linked article suggests:
The researchers leave unanswered a question that might make the biggest difference to anyone who is taking a large online class. What if the class itself can be considered a resource as opposed to a course? Will we be seeing mobile apps and news streams from our classmates, coming soon?
That's how I'm approaching my class. Every part of the content may be reused outside the course, and most will be useful far beyond the enrolled students. We'll be making materials available for use in many contexts including for K-12 students and teachers. Most of the videos will be useful as stand-alone introductions to topics in human evolution, and lab materials can be used in other courses. In other words, it's the ultimate mix-and-match.
Meanwhile, the NY Times has an article that is moderately skeptical of MOOCs, from the perspective of a student: "Two Cheers for Web U!".
The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon. Several of my Coursera courses begin by warning students not to e-mail the professor. We are told not to “friend” the professor on Facebook. If you happen to see the professor on the street, avoid all eye contact (well, that last one is more implied than stated). There are, after all, often tens of thousands of students and just one top instructor.
Perhaps my modern history professor, Philip D. Zelikow, of the University of Virginia, put it best in his course introduction, explaining that his class would be a series of “conversations in which we’re going to talk about this course one to one” — except that one side (the student’s) doesn’t “get to talk back directly.” I’m not sure this fits the traditional definition of a conversation.
The article is worth reading for its trenchant remarks on the personalities of the professors.
All the NY Times columnists will be writing about MOOCs before long, I suspect. Today it was David Brooks' turn: "The Practical University". His argument is that digital technology allows much more efficient transmission of "technical" know-how than do classrooms in big buildings, but "practical" know-how cannot be taught without real hands-on training.
The problem is that as online education becomes more pervasive, universities can no longer primarily be in the business of transmitting technical knowledge. Online offerings from distant, star professors will just be too efficient. As Ben Nelson of Minerva University points out, a school cannot charge students $40,000 and then turn around and offer them online courses that they can get free or nearly free. That business model simply does not work. There will be no such thing as a MOOC university.
Nelson believes that universities will end up effectively telling students: “Take the following online courses over the summer or over a certain period, and then, when you’re done, you will come to campus and that’s when our job will begin.” If Nelson is right, then universities in the future will spend much less time transmitting technical knowledge and much more time transmitting practical knowledge.
Like many NY Times columns about education, this one reads like a paid advertisement -- in this case for Minerva University. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, but I don't think the practical-technical distinction holds. In anthropology, for example, it is possible for us to use digital tools to bring much more of the experience of the field to students than we can accomplish in the classroom. I also think the "technical-practical" distinction breaks down when considering laboratory work.
I think a basic rule of thumb is to ask whether the analogy works for sports. In sports, we have broadcast events seen by millions, and coaching clinics that scale down to individuals. It takes lots of experience and practice to perform a sport well..and it also takes some experience and practice to watch a sport well. But watching and playing are not the same kinds of activity. They can enhance each other, feed back on each other, and both can contribute to broader appreciation. And digital tools can help with both of them -- they're just different digital tools.
Edward O. Wilson, in the Wall Street Journal writes: "Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math".
For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.
Wilson takes himself as the canonical model. Razib Khan comments somewhat critically ("Does one need math for a career in science?"). I think that field biology requires working diligently and independently in the field in a way that some kinds of science do not, and personal qualities that set successful fieldworkers apart are pretty much orthogonal to math skill.
I have begun a project that may change the way we teach and communicate the science of human evolution. Starting in January, 2014, I will be offering a massive open online course titled, "Human Evolution: Past and Future".
This course and all its materials will be open and free for anyone, anywhere in the world. As of this moment, more than 6500 people have already signed up for the course. The course is still more than nine months away, and I'll be developing materials across the entire time up through January.
Developing this course is a huge investment for me. My institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is making it possible -- but at the same time I'm actively seeking out partnerships and sponsors. I'll be documenting the development process here on the blog, and in a series of presentations and publications as I go. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have begun to change the way universities approach online education, and the course will be a research platform as well as an educational experience.
What will be new in this course:
Expert interviews. I'll be assembling and curating a series of filmed interviews with experts in paleoanthropology to talk about their work. Why should students hear me describe other people's work, when I can engage the scientists themselves? I've already begun these interviews, and will be adding more than thirty by the time the course begins.
Mini-documentaries. To the extent possible, I'll be virtually taking students to the field, into the laboratory, and giving first-hand experiences with the materials of human evolution. That means many of my video presentations will be much more like short documentary productions than lectures. My priority is making the real materials as available as possible.
Guided laboratories. We'll be exploring genome data, providing some excellent virtual laboratories with the fossil evidence, and running experiments with evolutionary change.
Participatory science. With a worldwide group of thousands of students, we'll be giving people the opportunity to participate in some real research. Some will be as simple as massive measurements of body proportions. Others will be more involved, leading us to...
Looking to the future. The course title is "Human Evolution: Past and Future." To me, the path of our evolution in the past is closely tied to where our species may be going. To that end, the course will be looking at the next hundred, thousand and ten thousand years of our evolution. I'll be interviewing people who are thinking about the impact of technology on our future evolution, and students will come up with their own scenarios based on a strong understanding of the forces that shaped human evolution in the past.
I'm doing this because human evolution is important. The effects of the past shape who we are today, our health and choices, our societies and imaginations. Anthropology can engage people in their own lives and experience. The MOOC technology platform has such potential for innovating new forms of education, I am eager to bring human evolution into that space.
And who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to reach tens of thousands of people looking for information about our evolution? Some people really don't like the word, MOOC. All I have to say is, I got used to "blog", so why not another strange word? This is a natural extension to what I've been doing for nine years here on my blog: curating and writing reactions to the best research in paleoanthropology. In this project, I'll be able to bring people virtually out to the field, and let experts tell about their findings in their own words.
What you can do:
Sign up for the course. I encourage everybody to sign up! You don't have to finish a MOOC, or even watch all the materials, to get a lot out of it. My MOOC will allow you to "choose your own adventure" to the maximum extent possible. If you want a strong module on ancient diets, you can get that by itself, or together with my best materials on Neandertal genetics and post-agricultural evolution.
Look for your opportunity to help. I'm working on several partnerships for this course, and the most important one is with you. With a worldwide group of students, many from developing economies, I cannot assign a traditional textbook. I need a free version of everything written for the students in the course, and that means I'll be providing the text myself. I'll be providing some opportunities to help support this important cause, which will impact students everywhere.
Adopt the materials. We're putting a lot of work into the materials for the course. A lot of professionals are donating time to be interviewed, and are allowing me to use photos and other materials to make a really high-quality presentation. I want to get these high-quality materials into as many classrooms as possible. If you're teaching human evolution in a college or high school setting, look out for additional information on how to use materials and develop curriculum that works in your context!
I learned a lot from my experiment last year putting lectures online from my regular course. I am putting those insights together with discoveries from other MOOC experiments to create new ways for students to network with each other and with ongoing science. This is just the initial announcement. As the summer progresses, I'll be giving you more background about how I'm producing the course, along with sample materials and some chances to participate. I'm looking forward to the experiment, and I hope you will follow on the journey.
John Thelin writes in Inside Higher Ed about the process of developing online courses: "Professors and Online Learning".
The official approval process was markedly different from the course preparation experience. It combined the slow pace of regular course proposal with added delays in deliberations because it was a Distance Learning course, especially at the higher levels of universitywide review. Approval and encouragement came promptly from my department and our college curriculum committee and from my dean – all of whom had an interest in having our college venture into online courses – and who understood that time was of the essence if an online course were to be available soon to students. However, at the next levels, the Senate committee reviews involved little in the way of acquiring skills or rethinking teaching design or course substance. It was characterized by objections or clarifications about relatively small details and was marked by long periods of waiting for word of approval to go on to the next step.
After subcommittee review, the most surprising finding was that in the Senate Council, and the full Faculty Senate, there were obstructionist colleagues.
There are some really useful ideas in this essay, which is mostly optimistic about the role of online learning in the future of college education. An essential point that must be made more widely known is that effective online courses are not cheap to produce. It is much, much cheaper to pay a faculty member to walk into a seminar room and conduct a discussion than it is to pay the same faculty member to produce watchable online content, design and monitor online forums that allow effective student interaction, and receive the supplemental training necessary to make everything consistent with university policies on accessibility.
Can the outcome justify the expense? Not in every case, and universities should think about how they contribute to a broader landscape of online curricular materials. They also need to think about what materials can be effectively reused by other instructors besides the one who designs them. These aspects require much more thought than the typical decisions about course readings and resources for classroom-based courses. In fact, the major use of many online resources will be to supplement classroom experiences in other universities.
This is big education news, from the California legislature: "Measure Seeks Campus Credit For Web Study".
If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own — including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university.
“We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed,” said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate, who will introduce the bill. “That’s the motivation for this.”
So instead of increasing funding to existing campuses at sufficient levels to train the students who are seeking education, California will mandate that online courses from other institutions be accepted as part of the degree requirements at its state universities and community colleges.
Does that mean I'll soon have Berkeley anthropology students taking my online course for degree credit? We'll see....
