Faculty Attitudes toward Technology

On Thursday I viewed a webinar discussing the results of a recent Inside Higher Ed survey of faculty attitudes on technology; 2075 faculty and 105 administrators had been surveyed.  (If you would like to view the PowerPoint from the webinar or the webinar itself, you'll find it at https://www.insidehighered.com/audio/2015/11/12/2015-survey-faculty-attitudes-technology )

Four issues stood out for me:

1. When asked “Did use of educational technology lead to improved student outcomes?” only 20% of the faculty and 35% of the administrators said outcomes were improved significantly.  Tenured faculty were somewhat more skeptical than non-tenured but most were in the middle, agreeing that technology somewhat improved student outcomes. The majority of both faculty and administrators felt that the cost was worthwhile.

2. However, when asked “Do for-credit online courses achieve outcomes at least equivalent to in-person courses?” only 17% of the faculty said yes, while 62% administrators said yes.  One of the narrators made the point that it might be that the comparison faculty have in their minds is an idealized picture of a small group of interested, motivated, high-achieving students sitting around a seminar table discussing complex issues rather than, for instance, a big lecture hall in an introductory course.

3. With respect to Plagiarism Detection Software (like Turnitin), most faculty liked it.    The moderator, however, was concerned that students often don’t know what plagiarism is and pointed out that this is something teachers need to address and not just have a false sense of security that if students run their papers through the software they will understand the complicated issue of plagiarism.

4. Finally, there was one issue on which everyone agreed: 93% of faculty said textbooks are priced too high, and 92% thought professors should assign more open educational resources.  Here, the moderator pointed out how much time was needed to find and incorporate open educational resources into a class and, more worrisome, how much time is needed to change those resources as times change, serving as a possible disincentive for course improvement.

What do you think?  Any reaction to any of these points with respect to your own attitudes and your classes here at Lincoln?

Online or Not Online: The Question Persists

I had just left a Distance Learning committee meeting this week when Elizabeth Pitt, librarian, passed along a “Fast Fact” from College and Research News, October 2015. It summarizes the main findings of a Gallup poll commissioned by Inside Higher Ed last year that surveyed 2,799 faculty members and 288 academic technology administrators.

According to the summary, “A majority of faculty members with online teaching experience say those courses produce results inferior to in-person courses. They say most online courses lack meaningful student-teacher interaction. Only about one-quarter of faculty respondents (26 percent) say online courses can produce results equal to in-person courses.What should we make of these results?  

If even experienced online teachers believe by such a large margin that online education is inferior to face-to-face learning, should we question whether our efforts here at Lincoln to put together a distance education plan—the purpose of the DL committee meeting I had attended—are warranted?  At most should we be planning distance learning options only for those populations we cannot feasibly meet in person?  

Or is that majority opinion simply skepticism without foundation, our human preference for what has always been and our innate distrust of the new?  Do you come down on the side of the studies that have shown no significant correlation between mode of delivery and learning outcomes? 

So your question for today (come on, you know that you need to take a break from thinking about midterms) is a simple yes/no one.  Do you personally believe that online teaching and learning—assuming the necessary technology, course design, and instructional expertise—can be as effective as classroom-based instruction?  (Of course if you have any additional energy, I would love to hear the reasoning behind your answer, whichever side of the issue you champion.)

I had to "go back" to school....

Guest Blogger:  James Wadley

So for all the years that I have been in school to get my doctorate and postgraduate certificate, it turns out that I have to “go back to school” in order to obtain a credential that will enable a smoother transition for the Master of Science in Counseling program to eventually become accredited here at Lincoln University.  The courses that I am taking online are Theories of Counseling and Human Development.  (The irony of me being a student at this time is that I am teaching Theories of Counseling this semester in the MSC program.) 

I am blogging because I just completed an assignment where I had to offer my opinion about a case and then offer two postings to the students in my cohort who also had to chime in on the same case. 

I am disappointed.  It feels like there is minimal interaction between myself and my cohort, and the responses on my thread are very superficial.  There seems to be a theme around response production that if someone responds to my post, they rarely exceed four sentences.  The readings from the text are okay….but do not contain some of the latest research/clinical findings and assumptions that move the field forward. 

I’ve been spoiled academically and have had nothing but face to face interaction with my peers, professors, and supervisors over the years.  I think what’s missing is the anecdotal accounts that provide depth. Shared face to face, classroom stories are woven with theory and invites critical discussion. This may not happen online since people in my cohort rarely revisit discussions beyond the minimal standard of posts.   I wish that my online experience could be different and possibly mirror face to face instruction.  I’m struggling to stay motivated, and so I decided that I was going to go ahead and knock out all of the assignments for the semester for these two classes between now and next weekend. No, this is not 7-1-7. I’m just bored and disenchanted….

I’m so glad our Lincoln MSC Counseling program is face to face and has 15 weeks of engaging semesters.  I wonder how entry-level therapists who complete this online program could ever develop the skills and competency to be effective and self-sustaining practitioners.  I just don’t see it.  Maybe something will change in my journey for another master’s degree.

If you have had a different online educational experience, please feel free to offer your thoughts and words of wisdom to me….

Searching for support…
James Wadley, Ph.D 
Chair, Graduate Counseling and Human Services Programs
Lincoln University

Online? Hybrid? Web-enhanced?

What, from your perspective, should Lincoln most productively be doing with respect to online teaching and learning?  

• Should we be developing more totally online courses?  (If so, should they be options for our current students or just for new, non-resident populations?) 
• Should we be developing totally online programs?  (If so, in what disciplines and why?)
• Should we be focusing mainly on hybrid courses [= classes still meet face to face but some of the normal seat time is replaced by online activities]?  (If so, how do you see them enhancing student learning?)
• Should we at least be encouraging web-enhanced learning in our classes [= regular seat time but more assignments using Internet-based resources] ? (If so, what training/resources do you need to do so more effectively?)

Please add your thoughts, whether by raising additional questions or by providing your answers for any of the questions posed above.

Socrates or Social Media: How Do Our Students Want to Learn?

Is higher education’s focus on learning technologies helping students to connect with each other and the subject area content so as to learn easier and better, or is it separating them from each other and from the higher order learning that occurs through interpersonal communication?  The picture below of a group of Dutch school children circa 1930, walled off from each other behind the “learning technology” of the day, made me stop and think. 

This picture, from a Nov 7, 2004 article in Vitae by Kirsten Wilcox, was used to underscore her argument that “the classroom as a space for human interaction has become a luxury in higher education,” and that it is precisely this human interaction that students today need, connected as they already are technologically by email, Facebook, Twitter, and all the others.

“Ten years ago,” Wilcox argues, “using course blogs, wikis, or online discussion forums to teach was an exciting innovation, which students embraced.” Today, she says, things are different: “Not only have these platforms lost the aura of immediacy and creativity that they once had, but students have little desire to add an intellectual online persona to the profiles that they cultivate across multiple media.”

As a long-time proponent of technology-enhanced teaching, my viewpoint has always been, “Students like technology, so they will learn more willingly and more deeply if the course offers them a chance to use those tools.” Clearly, it’s not that cut and dried.  What do you think?  Should we be trying to provide our students with the “luxury” of modern, technology-driven best practices in learning or the “luxury” of personal, face-to-face, in-class presence? And if the answer is “both,” (as it almost always is) how do you make that happen?

Worth a Thousand Words?

by Linda Stine

This week—when I wasn’t stuck on snow- and ice-covered highways or shoveling said snow and ice out of my driveway—I have been putting together a lesson for one of my classes on how to create effective PowerPoint presentations. Up till now, I had always focused mainly on getting students to stop putting whole paragraphs of text onto their slides and then simply reading them to the audience during their oral presentations. “We can all read,” I reminded them.  “Use bullet points.”

Imagine my confusion, then, when I read an article entitled “Improve Your PowerPoints” and got to this section:

The good news is that 90% of the problem can be solved by following one simple rule: No bullet points. Reread the rule again (and again, and again) to make sure that it sinks in. Bullet points are the primary source of Death by PowerPoint. Bullet points are basically ugly wallpaper thrown up behind the presenter that end up distracting and confusing the audience. The audience is getting a message in two competing channels running at different speeds, voice and visual. It's a bit like listening to a song being played at two speeds at once. The audience member is forced to ask themselves: Do I listen to the presenter (which is running at one speed), or read the bullet points (which I read at a different speed)?

The author, John Orlando, argues that the main role of a PowerPoint slide should be to present a visual that focuses audience attention on your main issue.  This is true, he argues, not only for an oral presentation but also for a PowerPoint posted on the web.   He recommends software like Jing (see Bill Donohue’s earlier blog on this topic) or Audacity to explain the content of the presentation while the audience is looking at visuals—not written words—that reinforce the main points of that content.

What do you think?  What advice do you give to your students about making effective presentations?  Do you use PowerPoints in your own class presentations, whether face-to-face or online?  What, for you, makes an effective PowerPoint?  Do those bullets really cause death by PowerPoint?