Integration of online, hybrid and collaborative learning

1. What do you feel are the benefits of online instruction?
   Like the author said, online learning offers students a lot of flexibility in when they will learn, as well as where. I recievied a Psychology minor through primarly online courses. I would have never had the time to fit these classes in to my school and work schedules but the online delivery made it possible for me to work on these courses during my free time, AKA nights and weekends. I also suspect that for some students, online interecations are less stressful and intimidating than face-to-face interactions. Perhaps this means that some students communicate more with instructors and other students in an online setting compared to a traditional face-to-face.
   Of face-to-face instruction?
   Anactodoally I would say that it's easier for instructors and students to receive more informal, real time feedback in a face-to-face setting. Face-to-face instruction is also a more natural fit for hands on instruction and lab courses.
   
   
2. Limitations of online?I would say that online education expects the students to be more proactive. Since a majority of course inforamtion comes the them in the ways of email and Blackboard, they need to be actively using those resources to stay informed and up to date. As I mentioned above, its more difficult to do hands-on instruction in an online format and feedback is conveied a little differently in an online course.
   Limitations of face-to-face?Most face-to-face instruction has to happen in at X University, in Classroom X, at X:XXpm. It limits what students can take the course due to its predetermined time and setting. Face-to-face instruction can also be more expensive due to the high number of resources it demands (buildings, desks, heating, lights, maintenance, parking enforcement, etc.)
   
   
3. Do you believe that "blended learning" actually presents the best of both types of instruction?
   I do. I could see myself using a blended approach for my future courses. The online portion might house a majority of the factual/memorable content (for instance, the anatomy materiel) and the face-to-face time might be spent on diagramming the more dynamic concepts (physiology). The online portion would also be able to house resources to reinforce the content covered in class.

Shift from students as consumers to students as creators

1. Benefits and drawbacks of "makerspaces"
Makerspaces could increase motivation and be really engaging for the students to participate in. These activities would be very interactive and it would reduce the likelihood that a student could take a "passive" role in the learning process. They also have some grounding in education theory, that being Constructivism (shout out to Dr. Boyer for planting this thought in my head).

One draw back of this approach could be the logistic limitations of available space, time, materials, and instructor resources. I imagine it would also be difficult to use this approach in an online form

2. How are "makerspaces" being used in education? How have you used "makerspaces"? 
From the article, I gather that "makerspaces" are used in informal education (and probably in formal education) to have students construct something while learning. I think this might be things like making biomes while receiving instruction about carbon cycles. I've never used this approach before.

3. How could you incorporate "making" into your future teaching?
Last semester I thought about having some of my students construct "knees" using soda bottles and rubber bands in they hopes it would help them understand how ligaments work. They really struggled to visualize how the joint functioned so I thought they would benefit from being able to manipulate a model of that concept. I struggled with the construction of my own model and never actually did it with my students. It would be nice to be able to build moveable models for some physiology concepts but like this article mentioned, I really struggle with the DIY construction part. Maybe I'll get lucky and a board filled with them will pop up on Pinterest.

NMC Horizon Report

Key Trends:

            1. Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment

            2. Integration of Online, Hybrid, and Collaborative Learning

            3. Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators

            4. Growing Ubiquity of Social Media

            5. Evolution of Online Learning

            6. Agile Approaches to Change

Significant Challenges:

            1. Relative Lack of Rewards for Teaching

            2. Scaling Teaching Innovations 

 

            3. Keeping Education Relevant

            4. Low Digital Fluency of Faculty

            5. Expanding Access

            6. Competition from New Models of Education

Important Developments:

            1. Flipped Classroom

            2. 3D Printing 

            3. Games and Gamification

            4. Learning Analytics 

            5. Virtual Assistants

            6. Quantified Self

Blogging on Blogs

Nate

• Questions: From the author's statement of "registered users" I thought there would be some students taking this course for college credit.  I also assumed the creators of the MOOC would have some way to regulate the comments being made, by regulate, I mean delete if necessary. The courses in question, "Forums for a Future" and "Arts and Humanities: What Does It Mean To Live Well?", seem like they have the potential to bring up some potentially controversial topics and although an exciting discussion could be informative, it would need to be moderated. 
• Nate's Future Teaching: I've never experienced an educational application of reddit but with proper guidance, I can see how it would be helpful in fostering student-to-student communication.
• My Future Teaching: While reading this article, I kept thinking about how generous these instructors were. They were willing to offer up their course, without direct compensation, to as many people who were interested. Yes, they were getting paid to teach the "registered" users but I imagine their would be a significant amount of time spent reading and giving feedback to those students who took it out of their own interest. I can't say if I'd ever be able or willing to offer something like this to the general public, but it is something to admire. 

Jon

• Question: Maybe this would mean longer hours of operation for computer clusters or fewer assignments scheduled over weekends to ensure students had ample opportunity to complete their assignments. I also wondered how this would affect coffee shops and other establishments offering fee internet to their patrons.
• Our Future Teaching: I liked Jon's statement regarding how this loss of net neutrality would make the differences of financial states of our students more extreme. Instructors already have to keep cost top of mind when assigning required course materials, this would make that cost even more extreme. I would hope that students would be offered some sort of additional financial aid to meet the monetary demands of accessing valuable sites in the event this does occur. 

Jessie

• Question: I think your concern about the capacity of an automated computer software to help students develop necessary skills is valid. When I read this, I too was wonder what that would look like and how it could give meaningful feedback to each student. Students make different error and have different levels of proficiency in all areas of a course. How can software be created to address each and every possible issue? Or maybe there would a more standardized form of feedback for those misconceptions or errors we might predict and then the more obscure problems would be dealt with by the actual course instructor. Maybe seeing this in real time would make us believers, maybe.
• Our Future Teaching: Again, I agree with your points Jesse. I would say MOOCs are still relatively new in the grand scheme of education and the long term effects are still TBD. With more evidence (I admit I'm not well versed in the world of MOOCs so maybe it's already out there) I might have stronger feelings either way. I can say that from my own experience with MOOCs, they do require amply motivation to succeed, not unlike traditional instruction.

Technology Blogger

I choose to follow Danielle N. Lee. Danielle is a behavioral ecologist who uses technology and media to connect with learners. She is an award winning blogger that focuses on science and technology. The purpose of one of Danielle's blogs is to make science more approachable by explaining concepts through hip hop songs.

I had an interest in Danielle because of her "youthful" approach to informing the public about science. Based on her acknowledgements and awards, she also seems to do it quite well. I was especially sold on her use of hip hop to reach out to her nearby urban population.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/about.php?author=20

Exactly How Many Students Take Online Courses?

Main points:

• Prior to 2012, the Babson Research Group was the leading source of information on online student demographics.
• In 2012, the Education Department started requiring colleges and universities to report out on their online student population.
• In 2012, 5.5 million students took at least one online course.

Further questions:

• I'm quite surprised that this information about online learners wasn't really of interest at a national level until 2012. Why weren't we interested until now?
• What does NDSU's online population look like?

 
Teaching implications:


I was quite taken aback by the number of students reported to be taking part in online education. In 2002, the Babson group reported that 1.6 million students (which the blog suggests is an overestimate) were formally learning online.  In ten years almost 4 million people caught the online learning bug. What does that mean for the future of post-secondary education? We know that instructors are, for the most part, lacking any real training in how to teach by using evidence-based pedagogy in the face-to-face classroom, I imagine they receive far less for the online classroom. Due to the rise in the online student population, both in the past ten years and the predicted future, I would hope that we, as a community, see an increase in online education research and resulting evidence driven pedagogy.

Exactly How Many Students Take Online Courses?
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/exactly-how-many-students-take-online-courses/49455

Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes

Main points:

• Disfluency increases retention. This increase is observed over an array of subjects and difficulty levels.
  
  

Still unclear: 

I haven't had much experience with Z-scores and am unsure how they are calculated. The authors state their rational for this conversion, to provide a common metric for comparison across different courses, but its still unclear why that was necessary. Perhaps the courses at this high school used different scales to assign letter grades but why wouldn't the percent correct on the exams still correlate?

I also wonder what types of questions the exams were comprised of. The authors seem to think they only measured memorized concepts. I imagine this is an accurate reflection of the assessments but I was surprised to see there was no further discussion of exams used, especially since it was surveying a number of different courses and subjects.


Further questions:

• So disfluency increases retention of memorized concepts... but how does it affect deep, meaningful learning?  
• How much disfluency is too much? The protocol here was 60% of the presented text. What would the affects be if 75% of the text was disfluent? How about 40%?
  

Teaching implications:

As much as I wish it wasn't so, I really feel that some concepts in human anatomy and physiology, or any course for that matter, can be sufficiently mastered by memorization. For instance, when my students are learning about the ankle and wrist, I'm completely fine with them memorizing the names of the articulating carpals and tarsals prior to a discussion of joint physiology. Often times we make lists of the names/terms we want our students to memorize and provide them as a study tool. I could envision that this article could change how I create those lists.