Educause: “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009

After four months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community has voted on the, “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009.” The final list for 2009, ranked by popularity, includes (click on individual Challenges to visit their wiki page):

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.  
2. Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).
3. Reaching and engaging today's learner.
4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

The community has spoken. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and contribute ideas from your vantage point on campus to build a network of solutions around each challenge. Do you have a reading or a resource to suggest? Would you be willing to interview colleagues on campus providing a snapshot of how your campus is addressing an issue? Would you volunteer your name as a resource for others to contact to learn more about your campus solutions? In the coming weeks, we’ll use individual challenge wikis to begin organizing content under the guidance of volunteer workspace managers.

In the meantime, visit the project homepage to get the background and find your place in the Challenges Ning network. Then, bookmark this wiki to begin adding your voice to the community.

Source: http://connect.educause.edu/wiki/TLChallenges09

Recession and online classes

Ms. Allen also expects the number of students enrolled in online courses, which two-year and private for-profit colleges have embraced, to rise during the recession. Back in November, the Sloan survey asserted that the high cost of gasoline might compel more people to learn from home. Although gas prices have since fallen, Ms. Allen said she still expects the struggling economy to push more students into online courses for other reasons.

“If you don’t have a job, lowering your gas costs is not your primary motivation for going back to school online,” she said. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want. We also see that most of the online learners are older, and there are family issues.” With online programs, she said, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

If the recession does move more adults into cyberclassrooms, it will accelerate a trend that has been happening since the Sloan Consortium began publishing its online-education reports

That is an excerpt from the Chronicle--my go-to site every morning for news and updates on the academic front.

Of course, the Sloan Consortium has an online agenda.  But even otherwise, it is only common sense that people without jobs--and that number is rapidly increasing--would way prefer to upgrade their academic qualifications from their homes as opposed to rushing around to classes.  They would rather rush around to meet with people for possible job openings.  

Rating faculty becomes easier in the online mode?

The reports at Maryland remind us that as professors put material online, they are leaving far more of a trace than traditional lecturers ever did. In the old days, once a class ended, the chalkboard was quickly erased by the next group, and the scrawlings were gone forever. Now professors are converting their yellowing lecture notes to text on course-management systems, or posting videos of their lecture performances for students to watch later for review.

All of those materials are preserved on college servers. And such data could easily be used to evaluate the quality of the teaching going on behind closed classroom doors, though the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has no plans to do that.

Though the idea of using technology to rank activity is new to teaching, it has long been a staple of academic research.

For decades, scientists have tracked the number of times their articles are cited by others, and such citation indexes have been important for career advancement.

Teaching has had no similar metric—except, of course, for student evaluations. But many people consider those evaluations imperfect measures because students may rate most favorably those professors who are more generous with their grading rather than those who challenge them.

So in an era when colleges are under more pressure than ever to be accountable for their costs and quality, the question arises: Will colleges begin to use technology to help them measure teaching? And should they?

This excerpt from a report in the Chronicle will not help sell online teaching and learning to the unocnverted.

But, at some time, we will have to recognize the fact that there is no "metric" for teaching.  It is an article of faith that those who teach are good at it.  The reality is though we faculty are far from being good teachers.  

I joke around with my students that they should thank their stars that they were not in my classes even five years ago--I know I sucked then compared to now.  Even two years ago!  In California, the first time I taught a televised class, I got a copy of the first telecast, which I asked my wife and daughter also to watch.  I came home and asked them for their feedback.  As they started listing the different things I was horrible at, I remember how awful I felt.  I stopped them after a while.  

Later, when they were asleep, I played the VCR (yes, that antique item!) and watched my lecture in solitude.  I was awful.  Simply awful.  My hands were flailing all over the place.  Every sentence had ums and ers.  I was asking students for their views, but not putting them together to tell a story.  My PowerPoint slides were awful.  There was nothing that seemed ok.  Bloody depressing it was.

Yet, there was nothing in the system to pull me up for the awful teacher that I was (And, after having observed quite a few, I am sure there are even worse than me!)  Do we run any other service with such profound implications where we care not about the quality of the service?  A simple error at the DMV and we are ready to pounce over the separator and assault the person!

Thinking and reflecting about teaching and learning has made me better, no doubt.  I am not sure if I am anywhere near being a "great teacher"; I am just happy I am not as bad as I used to be :-)

I am sure though that it is only a matter of time that society--maybe the goverment--demands that there is a measure of teaching.  It will be neat if we can preempt that.  But, I doubt it.  After all, I am at a university where even the student evaluation of faculty and courses happens only once a year and not every time!!!!!