New company: AdaptCourseware

In order to develop a rich community of courseware developers, there needs to be a variety of people, companies, and organizations whose aims, costs, and product offerings are different. On this front, over at the Higher Ed Management blog, Dr. Keith Hampson (who is 'publisher' of the site? Is he bounding blog entries and publishing them? Is this a boomer thing?) has an interview with Dr. John Boersma, CEO for Adapt Courseware. In the interview he discusses the company's courseware development process. Two things caught my eye, the first;

 We start by fine-graining course content – defining 200 or more learning topics for a typical three-credit course, each with its own set of learning objectives.

This is a time intensive process which, on face value, should increase the level of tracking student performance, and would allow for a wider amount of feedback. I've had similar thoughts of doing this for the CCSS for Mathematics, breaking down each standard into smaller sub-standards. In general I think this is a great approach, you can align your content to these smaller standards/topics, and build from there. In practice though I could see issues pop up around interpretation of standards, differences in the pedagogical theories of participants, and making measurable standards/topics from generalized ones.

The second was;

Academic object analytics look at the same data through another lens – just how effective is that instructional video, text, or multimedia interactive across all students? We work on continuously improving our content based on this feedback loop.

This is an area I would like to research at my home institution, utilizing learning analytics for resource, activity, or item analysis. Classical Test Theory has been used for item analysis for 50 some years, and I'm interested if there were a way to apply it, or other psychometric theories, to a larger scale.

Webinar Listing: Data-Driven Curriculum Mapping - Closing the Loop on Accountability

I've signed up for the webinar Data-Driven Curriculum Mapping - Closing the Loop on Accountability, on January 9th, by Dr. Jane Souza. Granted its through ExamSoft, and I'm sure there will be some product pushing, but the description sounded interesting;

Dr. Jane Souza, Associate Dean of Assessment from St. John Fisher College, explores curriculum mapping as an essential aspect of the educational process as institutions face increasing accountability. The presentation will discuss how the process implemented by St. John Fisher College has engaged faculty and provided valuable evidence to improve curriculum mapping, foster research of scholarship and teaching, offer real-time personal feedback to students, and provide direct evidence of learning that can be used for institutional reporting.

I'm mainly curious about the 'real-time personal feedback to students' portion, and how its setup. I find it challenging to develop courses with real-time constructive feedback.

Lead on a project.

I have a lead on a project; an editor is needed to convert a teacher's guide on how to teach math to K-6 student into a digital version. Email me (robert.weston.82@gmail.com) for more information.

Teaching - Week 0 (Preview Week)

I mentioned before that I'm teaching a course online at my home institution. I've taught this course before (a developmental Mathematics course), but I've found that things are going a bit better this time around. Our term started on 12/8, so we're only on the third day of the course. Next Monday I'll pull some reports and post some summary statistics on student logins. While they're not the most advanced of learning analytics, they do point to useful trends.

The week before the online term starts is called Preview Week, where students have access to their courses, but not any of the graded assignments or activities. This is primarily so that students can access the syllabus, get a feel for the course layout, the instructor, and what the expectations of participating in the course will be. In addition to the normal professor bio, course outline, and term specific syllabus, I included:

• A screen-capture video (with webcam inset) of myself going over the course introduction information, and the syllabus. It turned out 18 minutes long, something I'm hoping to change in the future.
• A recommended timeline of when I expect students to complete certain activities. I also provide alternate timelines if a student prefers using the Khan Academy videos I provide in the course.
• Links to my RatemyProfessors.com profiles at the colleges I've taught at. Not all the reviews are flattering, but I believe being upfront with that information builds trust.
• A Student Cafe (which is in all courses) where I ask students to post introductions. I'm hoping that using the Student Cafe in this way, rather than having a specific Introduction Forum (which we've done in the past) will create a 'path' for students, one they can travel later on during the course.
• A short pre-assessment to allow me to gauge student abilities, and to jog their memory of different operations and concepts.
• A poll to see if they have the textbook.
• A Google Form on their likelihood of which course resources they believe they would use. They have all responded fairly positively to using most of the course resources, but I would like to compare their choices with their actual performance.

Students were not participating very much during the Preview Week. Thus I sent a fairly strongly worded email to them about the lack of participation on Friday, and how they should complete those activities before the graded material is assigned. This consisted of reporting on the number of students who completed the Preview Week activities, a very direct but non-judgmental method. That seemed to move most of them, getting about a 60% completion rate for all activities early on Monday. 

Will post next week on how Week 1 fared.

Coursera course not going as planned...

I'm currently enrolled in Computational Investing, Part I, offered through Coursera, taught by Tucker Balch from Georgia Institute of Technology. I signed up for a few reasons; to learn more about MOOCs, to use some of the techniques and methods in my personal investing, and to learn a bit of Python.

We are currently in Week 5 (out of 8) and I just got this message:

Hello all,

Module 2 for Week 5 has been released. 

Due to our delay in releasing content, I've asked that the course be extended one week. Thanks for your patience in our content creation.

Tucker

So far in this class we've had one assignment that the professor offered up in a video, and in the discussion forum, but had no way to collect it, other than email. There was some outcry by students about being confused as to how to submit the assignment. Over the next few days the assignment was fleshed out, and an assignment page was presented. I didn't attempt the assignment, it being a paper trading exercise, using the Sharpe Ratio, something I've played with before.

There are also supposed to be programming assignments in the course, using Python, and some custom software. While there have been videos demonstrating how to install the required software, there haven't been any assignments, and actual demonstrations of using the software have been minimal.

This is quite different than the Computing for Data Analysis course I took through Coursera, where the vast majority of content and assignments were ready ahead of time. There was a hiccup with the first assignment, but it was fixed fairly quickly.

In no way am I faulting Tucker Balch for the state of the course, but I do wish Coursera or GIT provided him an Instructional Designer, or a Project Manager to flesh out the course before it was offered. In my experiences teaching face-to-face and online, its clear that the content creation part of an online course is weeks, if not months, before that of a face-to-face course, which is usually in class. This is a fundamental paradigm shift, one I don't think was conveyed to Professor Balch.

One thing that has gotten progressively better in the course are his videos. They've become a bit more planned out, and it seems that he is editing his own videos giving him finer control, and making him more comfortable on screen. I do wish he would change out the songs each week/module.

Job Opportunity

Freelance Writing Opportunity for Leading Education Website

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/wri/3453437113.html

Teen bank robber on YouTube gives us an insight into the 'Digital Native'.

You may have heard about the teen who robbed a bank, and posted about it on YouTube. The Consumerist blog makes a good point, emphasis mine:

Here we were, under the impression that today’s tech-savvy generation of young people know all about the social media and the Interwebs. But then why would a 19-year-old allegedly rob a bank and then post a YouTube video bragging about it — wearing the same clothes she wore during the heist — and expect no one would see it? SMH, TTYL, ROFL, etc.

While kids have access to varied technologies, I'm not entirely convinced that they know how to use them effectively. From my experiences with students, it seems that their understanding of the underlying technologies is severely lacking, and as a result, they have misconceptions of how their information is used, the difference between programs and browsers, what functionality is available on a program or site, how to troubleshoot issues, and ultimately how to do new things they haven't done before. These sufficiently advanced technologies appear to be magic to these 'digital natives', and students treat them as such.