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: 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.