Category Archives: Undergraduate Research

Learning Design Summer Camp 2010

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Tomorrow is the third annual Learning Design Summer Camp, bringing together designers, technologists, faculty and other interesting Penn Staters for a day of interesting discussion in the IST Cybertorium.  A few of us here in the Institute have been examining what we call “Penn State’s Technology Ecosystem“, specifically focusing on Undergraduate Education.  Tomorrow at 1:00, I’ll be presenting in room 106 on our initial findings.

In a nutshell, we took data from two Penn State technology platforms: Wikispaces and Blogs@PSU.  This data was then combined with institutional data from Penn State’s data warehouse.  Some of the questions I’ll be exploring during the session tomorrow afternoon include:

  • What are the profiles of students that tend to use this technology?
  • What faculty are using these platforms? How are they using them?
  • Where are we, as a university, in terms of adoption?
  • What Colleges/Departments are already using these platforms in a pedagogically-sound way? (with examples)
  • What sort of impact are these platforms having on student performance?

After the presentation, I will put the finishing touches on a document outlining our initial findings and post a link here on where  you can download a copy of the report.  Already, we’re seeing some very interesting trends with the use of both platforms across the university with a positive impact on student performance! 

Technology’s impact on student learning

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I found an interesting article in the Chronicle today titled “Is Technology Making Your Students Stupid?“, a short interview with Nicholas Carr, a Colorado writer.  Overall, it’s an interesting read.  Carr has a psychology background, and comes at the topic from the school of thought that the brain is malleable and adaptable through life experiences, something often referred to as neuroplasticity.  Carr sites many observations regarding the use of technology in learning contexts, focusing primarily on studies and anecdotes that found things like multitasking and using laptops in classrooms hurts student learning.  One very interesting finding he mentions is the use of online archives for academic journals.  Carr points out that, in some instances, this is hurting academia, mostly research, as a whole.  The idea is that we, as researchers using online search to find journals, are increasingly led to the same citations based on popularity.

“…we become so dependent on search, and the results from searches are determined by popularity of one sort or another. And the risk of using search for online research is that everybody gets led in the same directions to a smaller number of citations which, as they become ever more popular, become the destination for more and more searches.”

The article touches briefly on social media, where Carr simply wants to make sure educators aren’t making assumptions that all social media is good for education.  This leads me to some numbers we’ve uncovered with our research into the use of blogs@PSU. We ran a cluster analysis on the the student blog data, which led to three distinct groups:

  • Infrequent users
  • Comment-dominant users
  • Entry-dominant users

When we begin to examine the GPA of these users, we see that infrequent users average a 3.21, comment-dominated users a 3.38, and entry-dominant users a 3.56.  Now, this isn’t saying that blogs lead to better GPAs; rather the reverse.  People with high GPAs tend to post more entries in the blog space.  We took a smaller sample from this data, examining students using the blogs that were admitted to PSU in Fall 07. We then examined when these students began blogging, placed each student into one of the above 3 groups, and examined their GPA curve over time.  We haven’t completed the analysis yet, but it does appear that entry-dominant users, from the time they start blogging, start to see positive gains to GPA. 

We’re working on a report now that details some of this information as well as data on the use of PSU’s wikispaces. Stay tuned for the release of the first draft towards the end of the summer.

Students and technology

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Cindy passed around a recent study conducted by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA).  They asked 200 students at the University of Maryland to go without any technology for 24 hours.  No cell phones, computers, television, iPod, and even radio or newspapers.  The study reports some very interesting comments from students, many focusing on the feeling of isolation, both from friends and also from sources of information related to news or current events. 

The question we are exploring deals with students as employees.  On one hand, some worry that this attachment to technology might hinder attention spans, multi-tasking and productivity.  On the other hand, the companies that successfully integrate both the technologies and the habits of those that use them into organizational workflows will be at a huge advantage and discover new efficiencies.  What do you think about the level of reliance on technology we see in today’s student, and how will that transfer to a new employee?

Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS)

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Today Cole passed along a link to Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) group. I had never heard of CNDLS before, but after taking a look at their website it represents a great model for how teaching centers can embrace the changes to pedagogy technology may bring with a very research-centered approach.  I particularly liked the website, both from its visual appeal as well as the organization of information.  For instance, the project portfolio section.  This provides guests with a great snapshot of all the projects associated with CNDLS, and links to go deeper into specific project cases that might be of interest. 

One initiative I particularly like is “Teaching to the whole person“.  This initiative sounds very similar to what we aim for here in the Schreyer Institute, but the final bullet caught me by surprise, “addressing the affective and emotional dimensions of student learning“.  Unfortunately the CNDLS website doesn’t unpack that statement or provide much more detail or meaning to this. How would you unpack it? 

FERPA vs. Facebook: Observations on student privacy

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A recent posting by a friend on Facebook examining Facebook’s changing privacy policy from 2005 – present got me thinking about students and the various ways they are impacted, directly and indirectly, around privacy.

On the one hand, as university employees and people who work with student data, we must adhere to FERPA guidelines.  From Penn State’s own FERPA FAQ:

“If you’re a student, it’s important for you to understand your rights under FERPA. If you’re a parent, you’ll need to understand how the law changes once your student enters a post-secondary institution. If you’re an employee of Penn State with access to student education records, you’re obligated to comply with FERPA and to protect those records according to the law.”

What are education records you might ask?

  • Grades
  • Class lists
  • Student course schedules
  • Disciplinary records
  • Student financial records
  • Payroll records for employees who are employed as a direct result of their status as students

So this makes sense, right? As someone with access to massive amounts of student data, I certainly respect and adhere to the FERPA guidelines.

Moving on to Facebook, I find students really don’t seem think about privacy.  When I taught IST 110, one of the first things my TA and I would do is go out and look for every single student on Facebook as well as run their name through Google. What we found, particularly on Facebook, is 70-80% of my students had publicly-open profiles.  This led to some very entertaining slide shows, where I would begin by pointing out cases of people losing jobs, wives, husbands, or even careers by what they post online, in the public.  Then I moved into images and quotes from my students that have publicly-open profiles. 

Some students played along, some students were embarrassed and some were irritated with me.  “How could Bart do this to me?!?!?!”   Easy, you have an open profile, ANYONE can do this to you. 

One of my course objectives dealt with building privacy awareness and helping my students identify and deal with privacy concerns. By the end of my 2-week social network module and the Facebook activity, nearly ALL of my students had private profiles, many choosing to create FB lists to manage who sees what information.  Objective achieved.

My question is this: How can we raise privacy awareness at the university level with undergraduate students?  Many seem oblivious to privacy concerns, choosing to post material on FB dealing with their own grades, classmates performance, disciplinary actions, and finally things that could cost them an internship or job opportunity.  Many students proclaim “That’s not FAIR!“, and to an extent I agree!  Unfortunately even if we agree the practice of employers withholding opportunities is unfair, it’s reality. Just take a glimpse at all the social networking search services employers are using, like Spokeo.
 

Wikispaces utilization by instructors

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I spent some time this morning cutting up more wikispaces data, this time focusing on instructor (see some student data here).  This dataset is somewhat difficult to make sense of for a lot of reasons.  Many instructors teach at multiples campuses (had to deal with some duplicates). The biggest instructor demographic using wikispaces are graduate students…but the data doesn’t discern course use vs. collaborative (or other) types of use.  Some data points:

  • Fall 2009 saw n=295 individuals with an ‘instructor’ classification in the data warehouse use wikispaces.
  • Of these instructors (n=295), 5 performed 100+ (this is not restricted to Fall 2009, this is lifetime edits).  Two of these 5 individuals have faculty appointments, but do not actively teach courses.
  • Of these instructors (n=295), 64 made AT LEAST one edit, 22 made 10+ edits.
  • Of these instructors (n=295), 261 originate from University Park.  The remainder are distributed somewhat evenly among remaining campuses.
  • Breakdown of users by academic appointment:

Wikispaces users by academic appointment type

You can see nearly 50% of the users are 1/2 time graduate assistants.  This makes things foggy, we can’t be certain their use is related to teaching and learning.  The next slice represents ‘instructor’, followed by ‘research associate’,then by ‘assistant professor’. 

INSIDE HIGHER ED April 26, 2010 Daily Update

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Interesting article: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/26/aacrao

Retention, From Beginning to End

In thinking about retention as discussed in the article referenced here as well as the alcohol issue going on at Penn State, I have to ask, even if it is politically incorrect: “Why do we not expect our students to be adults?” Why are we attempting to babysit them so much? Going to college is a luxury that one works to achieve. I am not saying that retention is something that we should ignore, or helping students understand the hazards of dangerous drinking is not our responsibility; support structures are essential to being a socially responsible entity. However, in the scope of resources available and given the expectations for students to navigate their independence and the workplace successfully, at some point they are going to have to learn to cope with failure, make sense out of high uncertainty, and go for challenges that take their “all” to achieve. To protect people from failure, from dealing with high uncertainty, and to not give them very challenging challenges is to keep them from developing to their fullest potential, IMHO.

So, what do you think would be a better use of extra money, if such were available: to (1) increase support structures for drinking, sex, retention, and student academic assistance [e.g., time management programs and studying skills sessions, etc.?], (2) to lower tuition costs?, (3) offer more fun recreation and leisure options?, or (4) other, or some combination of the former? 

The Undergraduate Education Technology Ecosystem @ PSU: Wikispaces

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With a big project just wrapping up, I’m starting to explore how students here at PSU leverage our wide variety of technology platforms.  Luckily, Penn State has a wide variety of in-house platforms we leverage for undergraduate education.  The first platform I’m exploring is Wikispaces from Emerging Technologies (thanks to the folks at ET for the data!). 

The data below represents a very quick pass at the numbers.  I started by looking at all the students who used Wikispaces in Fall 2009 and made AT LEAST one edit to a page (n = 1095).

  • 52.4% are classified as adult learners.  This needs further exploration because the wikispaces entire data set (n = 3414) seems to show a great deal of institutional use of the space vs. student use.  My initial guess is that a lot of these students classified as adult learners are also PSU employees, and their use of wikispaces might be work related vs. education related.
  • 25.6 average number of edits per user.  This number doesn’t mean much until you break it down further.  Of the 1095 students, 420 students (38.3%) made only 1 edit and 783 students (71.5%) made less than 10 edits. Students with 10 or more edits made an average of 166.3 edits in Fall 2009.  I would consider this a potential dividing line for regular users vs. power users of wikispaces.
  • The College of IST represented the largest userbase at 201 unique users, followed by Liberal Arts (186), Engineering (92), Capital College (92), and the College of Education (75).  Two things jump out at me: IST is one of the smallest Colleges on campus but has the highest number of users. Not surprising given the context.  Capital College (Harrisburg) coming in at the number 4 spot is very interesting and merits deeper exploration.
  • In terms of Campus utilization, UP had 715 unique users, followed by World Campus (171), Harrisburg (97), New Kensington (41) and Altoona (11).
  • The gender split is nearly even, with  males representing 57.9% and females 42.1% of users.
  • The average GPA of users is 3.23 and average credits is 59.45.

Obviously much more exploration is necessary, but I thought I’d put these numbers up for people to get a snapshot of Wikispaces utilization by undergraduate students in Fall 2009. 

Gaining perspective

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I recently worked on a report for the University Advising Council (UAC), examining students who performed poorly and dropped into a classification called “non degree, conditional” students.  Basically like academic probation.  If a student performs poorly and accrues what we call deficiency points, at a certain threshold he or she is moved out of a selected major and into this category. Then, the student has ~40 credits to try and pull out of the academic hole, and re-admit to a degree program.

Of the cohort we examined over a 4-semester period, over half of the students appeared to drop out once they were removed from a selected major and classified as non degree, conditional students.  At a place like Penn State, with 70,000+ undergraduates around the state, the number of students that fall into this category is relatively small (less than 1% of the population). 

What impressed me about the University Advising Council is their passion about these students.  The advising council really stresses treating each student as an individual, and we don’t want to see individuals fail.  I’m happy to continue supporting this group, and working with the data to help us better understand the circumstances that leads to students falling into this category and what types of interventions we can devise to help students avoid this, or help pull them out of this classification.

Research and distance learning

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Ann pointed me to an interesting article from Inside Higher Ed that deals with adding a human element to online learning.  Douglas Hersh is Dean of Educational Programs and Technology at Santa Barbara City College and shares his experiences going from Blackboard to Moodle, specifially focusing on a real-time video application they now run inside the open source system.

Hersh contends that this ‘human element’ via the real time video and audio (implemented with Skype) helps keep students involved and adds a much needed level of social presence to the course experience.  While I do agree with most of this, the article also draws in another very good point from Reggie Smith, president of the United States Distance Learning Association. Smith reinforces the idea that real-time video and audio can be great, helpful tools, it’s the overall design of the coruse that has the larger impact and dictates success or failure.

Also worth noting is that Hersh conducted research on his own course students (n=145) looking at satisfaction and a few other variables.  His research showed that students were more satisfied when using the video-rich features that allowed direct, real time interaction.  I applaud all researchers’ efforts towards this type of data collection and reporting, but I am starting to find that the instructor plays such a big role in the outcome of this type of research and represents a variable that is very difficult to control.  I’ve seen folks here at PSU try and replicate methods from different professors but end up with vastly different results.  The context or discipline of the course also has a big impact on this, especially when we examine tool.

Time to get back to work on that meta-review of technology-enhanced learning environments!