Applied Abstractions

This term I am making two changes to my college algebra course, and the second is to have better alignment of course activities and student-facing directions of the weekly learning objectives. This is informed by my attempts at standards based learning, that I've ultimately backed off of. In short the grading methods got complicated quickly, which left students unsure of their grade and where they were in the course. I am still holding out for another chance at using standards for grades, and am looking for ways to do that this conference season. If you find some interesting ones, let me know.  Best practices in teaching tell us that learning objectives should be clear to students, and all parts of the learning process should align to that learning objective.  There should be some framing of the learning objective, why it is important, how it connects to other areas of the course or course of study. I have this in a Weekly Objective page that introduces the week and the learni...

This term I am teaching a corequisite support version of College Algebra at my home institution, and as an educator I am constantly tweaking and changing my courses. There are two changes I'd like to make this term; the first on process skill development which I'll describe here, and the second on better alignment of course activities and student-facing directions of the weekly learning objectives, which I'll talk more about in another post this week. Process skills, success skills, or foundational skills, are the skills students need to develop and use in order to learn. There are a wide variety of them out there (I also like the CAST UDL Guidelines , and there is overlap with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies ) and I use the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning ( POGIL ) Process Skills ; Teamwork, Oral and Written Communication, Management, Information Processing, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Assessment. Here are the three areas Process Skills will com...

 It is Week 1 in my online introduction to statistics course, and I've already detected unauthorized A.I. use in discussion forums. I'm not going to share the details of how I know, but in addition to technical details the writing is competent, factual, and bland. In just reading the suspected posts, they included course concepts we have yet to talk about, not really address the points being asked to discuss, and were just sad.  In looking at many of these student's posts and in the online discussions I'm having with other faculty, I get the sense that many were using A.I. because they didn't feel like their honest writing would be appreciated, or awarded credit. This bums me out, as the struggle to make yourself understood is something every human engages in, and in statistics, it is a central problem. By using A.I. to write their posts for them, these students are missing the opportunity to struggle through these ideas.  For example, I posted the following in a ge...

 In my last post I shared my AI policy (in short: red light) and that I included the following in my syllabus.  To be clear this means using generative A.I. for assignments is not allowed, and there are other aspects of learning and studying a student could use these tools for. To help guide students towards useful and acceptable uses of this technology, each Weekly Overview will contain a recommended activity students could use this technology for, in addition to other information.   I have to write these anyway, so here are the first three ideas I have. Again, this is for an introduction to statistics course. Learning Outcomes Help In past terms I have tried standards based grading to mixed results. However in doing that work I have a pretty good set of learning outcomes I want students to accomplish each term. They were initially taken from our current textbook, and over time I realized which ones I wanted to assess students on. This summer I spent time aligning m...

With another academic year comes another set of questions I have to answer; What assignments do I want students to complete? How? When? Why? What if they use AI? How can I structure my courses to reduce the likelihood of students turning to AI? In this post I'll share three decisions I've come to for the online statistics course I am teaching this fall; what and how I am grading, what are my late policies, and what are the consequences of unauthorized AI use? How and What I am Grading Below is what I have written in my syllabus for what I'll be grading. Much of this is informed by Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman, and Uncommon Sense Teaching by Oakley, Rogowsky, and Sejnowski.  Grade Composition Grades are generated from assignments and assessments that have students apply course information, in order to develop their understanding of statistics. Parentheses () include the percentage of the total course grade this component makes up.  This preamble seemed important to...

With Fall term drawing near, and the impending students questions of "Why do I have to learn this if A.I. can do it for me?" and similar questions has me preparing my quiver of responses.  In The New Yorker, Ted Chiang's August 31st article "Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" has some good criticism of A.I. Here are a few quotes and frames from the article I am drawn to.  "Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art." In short, are you really creating something of worth or value with A.I.? "Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth readi...