The October eEducation Council meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday, October 5 from 10:00 – 11:30 am in 118 Wagner. If you plan on attending by video-conferencing please provide me with the location no later than Tuesday, September 27th.
Updates from September, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Cole Camplese
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Allan Gyorke
Flipping the Classroom
Another thing we’ve been exploring this summer is the idea of “Flipping the Classroom”. The basic idea is taking “lecture” content and providing it to students so they can go through it before class time. Then you do activities during normal class time (discussion, problem sets, collaborative writing, etc…) so students can work with each other and get more personalized feedback from faculty and other students. This idea represents the convergence of many of the technologies that we have been exploring such as lecture capture, podcasting, screencasting, and Khan Academy along with pedagogical concepts such as active learning, collaborative learning, and student engagement.
This is similar to what we are doing with the new eEducation Council format: information ahead of time and then using meeting time for a deeper discussion.
Gary found an Infographic, which does a good job of illustrating a K-12 example of a flipped course: http://knewton.marketing.s3.amazonaws.com/images/infographics/flipped-classroom.jpg
An ETS Hot Team completed an investigation of this idea and produced the following white paper:
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Allan Gyorke
I wanted to make everyone aware that Jim Groom will be visiting Penn State on September 20th. We’re still working on the details, but it looks like we will have an open session with him in Foster Auditorium in the afternoon (3:00-4:00).
Why should you care? Have you ever heard in movies where they say “that’s so crazy – it might just work”? That’s Jim. He has been doing some insane experiments with educating in the open. He was the force behind University of Mary Washington’s adoption of WordPress. He is a critic of traditional learning management systems. He loves to take on the role of weird characters and talk about educational technologies. All of this culminated in Digital Storytelling 106 and the “Summer of Oblivion”.
Jim’s work is a reminder to me that the science of course design includes a lot of art and theater as well. I hope most of you get a chance to meet him.
SIgn up for his talk at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wiki/Jim_Groom_Comes_To_Penn_State
More about Jim at:
http://bavatuesdays.com/-
Brad Kozlek
The talk will be on the library’s Media Site page: http://live.libraries.psu.edu – looks the talk is not listed there yet.
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wea3
Thanks for bring Jim to PSU. I lurked around DS106 last fall, very interesting class. I’m interested in the profile of the students who enrolled in the course and how they felt about “the others” in course. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make it to UP for the event. Is it going to be broadcast or recorded?
I really gravitate toward some of Jim’s ideas, but always think – “Do I like this because of personal preferences or could this scale or apply various courses.” The DS106 radio was a great community building tool.
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Brad Kozlek
I am very excited for Jim’s talk. He is always thinking far out ahead beyond the conventional wisdom.
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Bart Pursel
I wanted to add some food for thought regarding a possible topic for the eEducation Council. Lately members of the Schreyer Institute are meeting regularly with Larry Ragan at the World Campus to discuss faculty development around online learning. More accurately, the lack of faculty development around online learning. Larry’s audience is primarily World Campus instructors, while the Institute’s audience are online instructors coming from the Colleges and Campuses, including UP. This past summer, we ran “OL 4000”, a course aimed at helping faculty author their own online course. Some of the things we discovered:
- Within 8 hours of publicizing the course it was full (approximately 70 people wanted to sign up, but we only had room for 30).
- Several faculty taking the course (the course was offered in mid-May 2011) had to have an online course designed and delivered by the middle of the summer. The others by Fall 2011.
- An alarming number of faculty indicated this was a ‘solo effort’, having no support from their college or department.
- The major issue the audience wanted to explore dealt with community, and what types of strategies and tools can be used to re-create the sense of community found within a face-to-face classroom.
We’re offering the course again this semester, and again in ~24 hours after publicizing, we filled the 30 seats. I’m excited to learn more about what college-specific units are doing around faculty development in the online space, and how the Schreyer Institute and the World Campus might be able to offer assistance.
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Brian
Using Clickers to Engage Students
Over the summer, I’ve had the opportunity to meet over 70 faculty who were interested in using clickers in their classes. The majority teach classes with over 200 students, with the largest being 720. The theme that binds every person I spoke with is student engagement. Teaching a large class has it’s share of challenges, and clickers are perceived as a way to involve all students in class in the learning process. While it’s true that clicking buttons is more engaging than just sitting in class, the real learning gains and engagement come in when questions asked are constructed in a way to challenge students to think deeply, apply new information, and use previous concepts to work together to come to informed decisions. In working with faculty, I was excited by the approaches that we came up with to work with their teaching style, course makeup and content, and expectations.
A couple of the most interesting approaches include:
Asking students open-ended questions, and having them work together in small groups to come up with answers. The instructor will be walking around, listening to the discussions, and choose a few answers to use as answers to a clicker question. The whole class will then come together and discuss the potential solutions, and vote on which makes the most sense. This is happening in a Soil Science class, with about 300 students.
In Marketing 301, basic information is presented, and using clicker questions, students are placed in the role of marketing professionals. They are given a product, and a problem, and are asked, using the information that was presented previously, to decide the best course of action with a particular product, from a marketing perspective. When I visited this class this week, I was so excited to see how much students were interacting with each other, and to hear the kinds of discussion happening in a class of over 300 students.
I’ll be writing up some more detailed posts about these, and other classes as the semester moves forward. You can find these, and other posts, on the Teaching with Clickers Blog at: http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/projects/clickers
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dkt6
The eEducation Council meetings have been scheduled for 2011-2012, all meetings will take place in 118 Wagner Building.
September 12, 2011 – 3:00 – 4:30
November 16, 2011 – 3:00 – 4:30
December 14, 2011 – 3:00 – 4:30
January 12, 2012 – 10:00 – 11:30
February 16, 2012 – 10:00 – 11:30
March 14, 2012 – 10:30 – Noon
April 18, 2012 – 2:30 – 4:00
May 14, 2012 – 10:00 – 11:30-
dkt6
The September 12th council meeting has been rescheduled for Wednesday, October 5th from 10:00 – 11:30 am in 118 Wagner Building.
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Dave Test
New Standardized Clicker System
During the Spring 2011 semester, ITS piloted two clicker systems in order to find a new standardized student response system for Penn State. Over 4100 students in 22 classes both here at UP and at 4 Commonwealth Campuses tested the two systems. After surveying the faculty, students, and support staff, i>clicker emerged as the clear winner.
i>clicker is designed from the ground up to be as easy to use as possible. The clicker itself has only 6 buttons – Power and A-E. The i>clicker software operates as a toolbar that floats above any application on Mac or Windows, enabling the system to be used with any presentation software or any other application.
So far, the response to the new system has been great. For the current semester (Fall 2011), we have 59 instructors using i>clicker in 64 classes, representing a total student enrollment of over 13,000 undergrads. That’s significantly more classes and students than had used our previous clicker system, and we expect the adoption to continue to increase, as word spreads about this new, easier to use and more reliable system.
For more information visit http://clc.its.psu.edu/clickers/
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Chris Lucas
lynda.com is an award winning provider of eLearning on hundreds of popular software applications such as Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint. Since 2009 this service has been available for free to all active Penn State faculty, staff, and currently enrolled students.
TLT recently created a new website dedicated to just lynda.com which can be found at lynda.psu.edu. One of the goals of the site is to give the service more visibility and make it easier to access. Moving it from the ITS Training Services site to lynda.psu.edu is just one strategy for accomplishing this. Another goal includes helping faculty, staff, and students understand how it can benefit them personally. Currently, there are examples listed for each audience. A long-term goal is to create case studies highlighting best practices and success stories.
We are in the final stages of upgrading our existing contract to the lyndaCampus model. This will provide support for personal profiles, allow users to print certificates of completion, and bookmark individual courses and movies. More details will be posted at lynda.psu.edu as they are finalized.
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Brad Kozlek
WordPress at TLT Labs
TLT is exploring the affordances of the WordPress platform as they relate to teaching, learning, and research. This is just some early experimentation right now, but we are investigating the viability of running a true pilot of the system.
There is no production support for the system, but it is available for those in the PSU community willing to experiment. You can visit sites.psu.edu and log in to get started.
In addition to a full-featured blog content management system, WordPress has other tools that are built on top of it. Here are a few of the more interesting add-ons we are running right now:
1) BuddyPress – A social network which allows you to friend and follow other users, to see their recent activity across the system, to create groups, and much more. BuddyPress allows for the aggregation of all content across the system and is what is powering the content feed on the front page of http://sites.psu.edu.
2) Anthologize – Organize the content in a site into a hierarchical structure which can be exported as a book in a variety of formats.
3) Digress.it -Collaboratively annotate and critique texts.
4) P2 – Turn a WordPress blog into a microblogging site similar to twitter. (This is what is currently powering this eEducation Council Site.) While you get the ease of use of a site like twitter, you are not limited to a specific content length like you are on twitter.
There are at least 5 courses right now taking advantage of this WordPress environment.
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Cole Camplese
Just to let everyone know that this site is running on the WP at TLT Labs using the P2 theme. Took me about 10 minutes to set it up.
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Chris Millet
Lecture Capture Pilot
The Penn State lecture capture initiative recently began the first semester of a year-long pilot to evaluate the efficacy of this technology for teaching and learning. The system we are currently piloting is Echo360, and it is now installed in 10 Sparks, 102 Forum, and Pond 123 and is primarily being used by large enrollment courses. Echo360 essentially automates the process of audio/video capture and publishing, making the recording of lectures or supplementary materials extremely easy. Courses that are being captured include ECON 102, BIOL 110, COMM100, ART H 111, and PSYCH 100. The faculty pilot participants are using lecture capture in a variety of ways with their students, such as a means of review for exams, to simplify the process of publishing supplementary content, to augment distance education courses, and even for faculty development.
We’re currently taking a triangulated approach to assessment with both faculty and students (similar to what was done for the LMS evaluation), and I will share what we learn this semester and in the Spring. I’d also like to share some of the captures (we have over 100 now) as soon as I secure permission from faculty. Some of what I’ve seen is quite good.
You can find out more at the pilot site at: http://capture.psu.edu.
I have also organized a cross-university working group which has conducted a systematic review of relevant literature, a process that has informed much of the resources we’re working on as well as the design support we provide. We’ll be publishing a meta-analysis at some point as well. So if you’re interested in any of the theoretical underpinnings of any of this, I can provide that.
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Cole Camplese
Chris, this is really great stuff! I think we are working to install another Echo360 appliance in 118 Wagner so we can use it for future eEducation Council meetings. I’ve actually watched a couple of lectures from PSU faculty on my iPhone while walking across campus and the quality and features are excellent. Looking forward to seeing more!
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Matt Meyer
VoiceThread at Penn State
VoiceThread is a completely web-based collaborative multimedia application that allows creators to upload various media (images, videos, PowerPoint slides, etc.) into a slide show and then invite others to access it and interact with the slideshow by leaving comments anywhere within in it in one of five ways: microphone, webcam, phone call, text or audio file.
Penn State entered a licensing agreement with this vendor in a software-for-service model, with the resulting service called “VoiceThread at Penn State”. This implementation now provides all faculty, students and staff at Penn State with with a free VoiceThread account accessed via web access credentials. The service has been in production since December 2010. The support site and log-in point is for VoiceThread at Penn State is located at http://voicethread.psu.edu/.
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Matt Meyer
I’m not sure if I’m ready to say this but it’s gotten some serious leverage this summer as a “poor man’s” lecture capture. Here’s a post on Dana Mitra’s use this summer in that way: http://voicethread.psu.edu/2011/09/voicethread-at-psu-use-case-education-and-public-policy.html
Also, Denise Woodward in College of Science created over 100 “mini-lectures” for this summer’s Bio110 course. This being said, I hesitate to lay that out here with all the other lecture-capture talk. The bigger context is perhaps ways to flip the classroom.
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Cole Camplese
And in our case, meetings. Thanks for the pointer to Dana’s course.
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cxm470
Matt – I like the idea of a poor man’s lecture capture. This can (and should be) accomplished with a continuum of technologies, depending on the specific needs. I think we can probably do a better job of articulating not just what each solution does, but also the relative benefits of each, to support faculty decisions about adoption. As we talk more about “flipping the classroom” I definitely see VoiceThread and Echo360 as great tools to bring more active learning into our classrooms.
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Cole Camplese
This is really a great service … what I’d like some help thinking about is how we could potentially leverage voice thread for conversations around eEd topics. Any ideas?
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jeff
LMS Search Update
Hi Everyone,
As you are aware from previous updates, the eLearning Strategic Committee has been exploring several learning management system (LMS) options since being charged with this task by the Provost of Information Technology in August 2009. The committee explored several candidates through discussions with vendors, product testing, and visits to other universities. Ultimately, the Committee decided to pilot three LMS platforms during the 2010-11 academic year: Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodlerooms. Data was collected over the course of the pilot through a series of surveys, focus groups, and direct observations. Data was collected from everyone involved in the pilot including students, faculty, instructional designers, and support personnel.
An analysis of the data indicated no preference when it came to the core functionality of each product, therefore the eLearning Strategic Committee requested each vendor to submit a request for purchase (RFP) agreement over the summer. This approach afforded us the opportunity to further evaluate each product as far as its future direction, infrastructure, hosting, and cost of ownership as well as our potential business relationship with each company.
The eLerning strategic committee is currently reviewing the RFP agreements and intends to make a recommendation to the Provost by 11/1/2011. If the recommendation is accepted we will begin contract negotiations with the vendor. After that preparations for migrating courses will begin. Please note this is a labor intensive process involving a lot of functional areas and therefore no one will see an immediate change regarding the use of ANGEL, our current LMS. Faculty, students, and staff can continue using ANGEL with full confidence that it will be available and supported. In fact, our current plans include supporting ANGEL through the completion of the migration process by 12/31/2014.
Progress of our LMS search can be followed by going to the LMS pilot site (http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/projects/lms-pilot/). Please let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to discuss them with you.
Regards,
Jeff -
Cole Camplese
eLearning Approaches and Environments Review
At Learning Design Summer Camp in 2010, I had started a wiki space to collect various organizations approach to eLearning Design and Development methodologies. This wiki then became the basis for a portion of the work completed by the Pedagogical sub-committee for the Future eLearning Environment steering group. During this time, Ann Taylor, Assistant Director of the Dutton e-Education Institute in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Chair of the Senate Outreach Committee, expanded this work to produce a Faculty Senate Report. This report provides an excellent overview of the efforts across Penn State as it relates to this topic.
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ema13
I think the important line is in the last paragraph, …”it is important to provide a diversity of toolsets that can be utilized to create eLearning materials.”
Diversity is important…
Eric
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dkt6
The meeting will run from 3:00 – 4:30 pm in 118 Wagner on September 12, 2011
Allan Gyorke, 
ryt1, 
cxm470, 
ema13 is discussing. 
Bart Pursel 2:36 pm on September 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The folks that I’m working with on this as part of the lecture capture working group are trying to flip small portions of their course. We spent some time looking at the course content for the 16-week format, then identified a week or two that would make sense to flip. This seems to be a nice method to both build adoption and allow people to just tip a toe in the water to see how they feel about it. So far the faculty member is really liking it and already discussing ‘flipping’ more of his sessions next semester.
ryt1 2:47 pm on September 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Are you collecting any feedback from students or the instructor? It might be interesting to see if there are common questions or research interests across the folks who are doing these sorts of things Bart. I know we have done several things with faculty, and for some of those we have collected data and done a few conference presentations/papers…
ryt1 8:21 am on September 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Engineering has been doing a few things along this line with faculty including revising targeted class sessions to identify where a ‘flip’ would be best to lecture capture, scaffolding problem sets, and placing ‘concept topics and worked examples’ online in order to allow for more active learning in the classroom. A couple of projects have provided promising information and results.
Cole Camplese 10:52 am on September 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
That is something we might want to explore — a shared methodology for *when* to think about flipping.
Allan Gyorke 9:06 am on September 12, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Rox, John Messner is the person I know about in Engineering who is doing this kind of work. When this goes further, we’ll need some great real-world examples of how this is done. Moving lecture content to online tools is only one part of this. I think redesigning the classroom time is what needs more attention.