Comment on Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower

 I wrote a comment responding to my colleague Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower. In it he talks about the democratization of information through the internet, and the role community colleges play in higher education. Here is my comment, mainly so I can have it in an accessible spot for me to reference later. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts Joe! I’m having similar ‘big’ thoughts about community colleges and higher education in general. You’re right, our commitment to providing a high-quality, personalized education to anyone who walks in our doors is our value proposition, and we need support from the state, administrators, and colleagues to do that. Too often I see people from other departments operate under a scarcity model of resources, that to get ‘mine’ I must take from ‘yours’. That isn’t going to get us anywhere.

Where I see the biggest opportunities for growth in higher education is the mismatch between the new role of educators and the instructional methods that have been brought over from that previous age. As information disseminators, sure, lecturing makes sense in that we are to convey information quickly and efficiently. But if our role isn’t to disseminate information, rather to guide students to grow their own understanding of the world and develop skills, then our instructional methods must change.

The part that really bums me out is the fear that many faculty display when asked to do something other than lecture. Yes, it is absolutely scary to do something new professionally, but we can’t keep lecturing. Besides not aligning to our new roles, too much research has been done to show lecturing isn’t an effective instructional method, along with the negative effects it can have on BIPOC and first generation students.

If we don’t adapt to this new role, using effective instructional methods and technologies, then the private market is going to eat our lunch, ala https://www.outlier.org/.

Fall 2021: More on Standards Based Grading

I'm in a book club with some colleagues this summer, and we are reading Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. I've been meaning to write summaries of my thoughts after our assigned readings, but may wait to do a full book review. We're at Chapter 10 and it feels a bit of a cliff hanger; including any assignments or activities in a student's grade other than assessments of their understanding is inequitable. Our (seemingly) natural response has been to reject this as we have learned that high stakes assessments likely do more harm than good, especially for BIPOC students. The author has alluded to some solutions, which we will dive into in Chapters 11 (Practices that support hope and a growth mindset) and 12 (Practices that 'life the veil'). 

During our last meeting standards based grading came up, and most people seemed interested but intimated. In previous posts I've mentioned how I am balancing flipping my classroom and creating a standards based grading scheme that I'll test out behind the scenes for AY 21-22. Two concerns people had were creating the standards and levels, and the logistics of both recording student's progress and allowing for retakes of assessments. 

Creating the standards can absolutely be a difficult task, but for most textbooks there are standards available. This is absolutely becoming a requirement of the job for many faculty, the ability to create and align standards, and it would be nice to see more institutional and department support be the norm for those efforts. It can take quite a while to do this for any course, especially for courses that have more than five faculty teaching those courses.

For corequisite courses this is a bit trickier as you have to identify prerequisite topics that support the course-level standards. This took our department many, many months (if not years) and not something to be taken lightly. If you are thinking of doing something similar the Dana Center has great resources and tools to support faculty in this effort.

I'm finding that the levels for standards isn't as difficult, mostly because I know the course material, and have experience teaching so I know what areas most students struggle with. For example, to create the following levels I started with the Proficient level as meeting the Learning Objective (LO). From there I went up to Expert and included an additional aspect of this LO that I like students to be able to do, but it isn't necessary. After that I went to Developing, knowing that students struggle with the idea that a function can be defined only by a set of points, and that verbal descriptions of functions can be challenging. Lastly for Novice I knew that students struggle with functions that are not continuous, but I couldn't use that word so I decided on "for functions that are defined for all x."

Learning Objectives	Expert	Proficient	Developing	Novice
Determine the domain, range of a function.	The student can identify the domain and range of a function graphically, tabularly, and by a description, and do so for applications.	The student can identify the domain and range of a function graphically, tabularly, and by a description.	The student can identify the domain and range of a function graphically, but may struggle doing so tabularly, and by a description.	The student can identify the domain and range of functions graphically for functions that are defined for all x.

One thing that is really helping me get through writing these LOs and levels is the fact that I'm not going to be using them for grading this year, and I'll have time to refine them. I plan on using these LOs and standards to create my flipped materials and activities, but for AY 21-22 I won't use them for grades but will still record student progress as if I did. This would (hopefully) provide me feedback as to what standards should be adjusted or removed. I could also test sharing these levels with students, possibly using them for review exercises, editing any that students struggle with reading and understanding... In fact, creating a card sort from these would be pretty easy, save me time, provide good feedback, AND might help students review and understand terminology. 

The logistics aspect is absolutely a little difficult, and I plan on going back to the initial presentation I saw for ideas about how to share information about grades using these LOs and levels. One idea is to create a Canvas Group for each student. This way Canvas will generate a page for that group/student, and I can post their progress.

Another idea is to put it on the student. Give them a chart at the start of the term, explain how to fill it out, and make them responsible for them telling me what they need. Granted I'd have a spreadsheet of my own, but I would hope that by giving them the responsibility of maintaining a record of their progress AND grade the student would see how they are connected. 

In terms of assessments, my first thought is to copy Lewis and Ramos' plan; have a quiz where students can make their first attempt at showing mastery of the LOs for the week. After that have students try again. I'm resistant to using class time as I'll be flipping the course material and will likely need that time to help students. Using office hours sounds good, but maybe doing so in the classroom after class might be a better idea. (A colleague (Hi Hannah!) has been talking about having faculty volunteer time in a classroom to make a grassroots testing center. I like the idea but need to figure out the COVID-related logistics. It would certainly help me!)

I feel like I'm making good progress, but August is already here and I don't have ANY videos or activities made, and am only half-way through completing the LOs and levels. I feel like I have to make a solid effort towards flipping my class soon and get at least 50% of the videos and activities done in August or I might have to scrap it. I have previous homework assignments and materials I can use, but it'd be nice to have most of the course developed by then.

Fall 2021: Thinking about modalities

 A colleagues (If you're reading this, hi Allie!) has been asking some really good questions about how we'll return to campus, and what the experience of everyone teaching online might mean for our face-to-face (F2F) courses. In responding to one of her emails I started the following chart comparing different aspects of online, F2F, and flipped classes. I've since added a few more items. 

	Online	F2F	Flipped
Timed Assessment Logistics	Range of times, online, could be submitted on paper, some auto-evaluated and some faculty evaluated.	Specific time and place, on paper, there could be some variation in questions among students, faculty evaluated.	Same as F2F
Timed Assessment Questions	By necessity of online honesty could be more conceptual, but likely includes computational questions.	More computational, but could shift towards more conceptual if more online assessments include them.	Same as F2F
Learning	Self-taught with reading, videos.	Through in-class lectures, activities.	Partially self-taught with readings and videos, more difficult topics in-class.
Online Discussions	Bread and butter of student and content presence	Almost nonexistent	Same as F2F
Activities	A good number of online classes use activities in groups or individually	About 1/3 of f2f instructors use group-based activities	Unknown
Homework	Required after learning, online discussions, and activities. Mostly auto-evaluated	Required after in-class sessions. Some auto-evaluated, some faculty evaluated.	Required before, after, and during in-class session. Most auto-evaluated, some faculty evaluated.
Projects	Used for some courses and summative assessments.	Very few use projects, possibly upper-level courses and stats.	Same as F2F

It does seem like every implementation of the flipped classroom is a bit different, but I stuck to the common elements; some instruction and/or homework before in-class sessions, doing some (if not all) homework during class, etc. One thread you'll see running throughout is the use of auto-evaluated or faculty evaluated assessment or homework questions. This is becoming a bigger theme for faculty to consider for various reasons. 

• Auto-evaluated work is by definition evaluated by a computer and answers are generated by a computer, meaning students can use computers (Desmos, Photomath, etc.) to answer them. 
• Most of the time the only feedback students get with auto-evaluated work is whether the student is right or wrong. Yes, some systems provide some feedback, but as far as I am aware no system can detect what error was made and provide specific feedback on how not to make that error. Faculty evaluated work on the other hand can provide specific feedback.
• Faculty can save a huge amount of time using auto-evaluated work. 

To balance these concerns of academic honesty, feedback, and time savings it seems some middle ground should be established, like using these systems for specific functions like additional practice on computational skills.

In thinking through the feedback that online homework systems do provide, there is a trend towards using more general growth-mindset type feedback. Having seen some of these examples I worry that they appear tone deaf, and do more harm than good. If a student answers a question in correctly, seeing "Keep trying. We learn from mistakes." auto-generated by the system might not have the same effect as a human providing that feedback AND identifying what the mistake was and how to prevent it in the future. Another colleague is very interested in growth-mindset based feedback, and it seems clear that you have to do a lot of thinking about the student, their work, and what message would support the student to provide effective feedback. An automated message does not seem comparable. 

What do you think? Are online courses going to start resembling f2f courses? Are f2f courses going to start resembling online courses? What is your stance on auto-evaluated work or faculty evaluated work? I'd love to hear what you think.