Umass Boston EdTech Newsletter

EdTech and CIT are cosponsoring a forum on Flipping the Classroom (see article on this topic below) on Wednesday, March 27 from 3 to 4pm in in the Center for Library Instruction, Healey 4.  Join us to hear Mike Milburn, Psychology, and Brian White, Biology, talk about two different models for using online delivery options to use learning time outside and inside the classroom more effectively.

The CIT/EdTech Conference is scheduled for Thursday, May 16, so save the date.  This year’s theme is Transforming Teaching through Partnerships and Collaboration.

Proposals are due on Monday, May 25:  Submit online here.  If you have an idea you’d like to pursue but missed the May 25th deadline, you can email Ellie Kutz before April 1 (eleanor.kutz@umb.edu) to see if it might be worked into the program as it’s put together.

In this issue, after our usual updates on the ongoing migration of courses from Blackboard Vista to Blackboard Learn, we’ll explore several ways in which the teaching and learning environment is being altered in conjunction with Blackboard and beyond:

• How faculty are using e-content from publishers within their Blackboard sections and working with publishers to create e-textbooks with rich added content.
• How faculty here and elsewhere are rethinking how they use classroom time as they make use of new online resources, “flipping” the classroom to move such elements as lecture content online while engaging students in new ways in the classroom.
• How MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) are evolving and the role they are starting to play on our campus.

The push for rethinking business as usual in higher education is coming from several directions–from publishers, from  Coursera and other MOOC content distributors, and from faculty who are seeing and sharing new possibilities for achieving their own teaching goals on campus.  As the conversation about new instructional models heats up on campus, we  in edtech want to support that conversation in ways that go beyond a focus on how to work effectively with particular tools and platforms such as Blackboard or wikis and that explores as well these changing instructional models.  To that end we have started a wiki (http://newinstructionalmodels.wikispaces.umb.edu)  for the sharing of information and resources about new approaches to instruction that are altering and will continue to alter the work of higher education, and we invite you to contribute.

The migration of courses from Blackboard Vista to Blackboard Learn will be continuing for courses offered in Summer and Fall 2013.  You can find regularly updated Information at the Blackboard Migration Wiki,  which serves as UMass Boston’s central clearing house for information about our Blackboard Learn Migration.

The Current Timetable

We have already moved half of our courses from Bb Vista to Bb Learn. We are continuing to plan for
all remaining Vista users to make the transition to Learn by September 2013, for the Fall 2013 semester.
This transition schedule has become more urgent because Bb Vista is already incompatible with some newer operation systems and browser software and it is no longer being updated. Other UMass campuses will also complete their migrations before September.

What will we need from faculty?

1. From March 15 through May 8, faculty should complete the Blackboard Learn course request form available on our website. We appreciate your filling out the request as soon as possible as we have many courses to migrate by our end-of-summer deadline. (Vista course section requests will continue to be taken for Summer 2013 only).  Faculty who teach online for CAPS do not need to fill out any request forms but will be contacted directly by instructional designers with further information and instructions
2. Faculty can learn the new system in several ways:
   • Through a self-paced online training course that will be available within each Blackboard Learn account as soon as a course is set up.
   • By attending overview sessions on Blackboard Learn that are scheduled for Tuesday, April 16 – 2:00 – 3:00 PM and Wednesday, April 24 – 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM in Healey, LL, P2.
   • By attending hands-on in-person workshops (find offerings and register for workshops at http://www.umb.edu/training).
   • By seeking follow-up support from the edtech liaison assigned to each department for educational technology help by email, by phone, or with an in-person consultation. Here is a list of assigned liaisons with their contact information
   • By seeking answers to specific “how-to” questions through Atomic Learning instructional videos (www.umb.edu/atomiclearning).
   • Chairs can also request a list of experienced Blackboard Learn users in their departments who might then serve as resources for new users.
3. If faculty have courses in Bb Vista that they won’t be teaching in Fall 2013 but anticipate teaching in again in the future, we are asking them to use the request form for those courses as well. Our support staff will focus first on Fall 2013 courses but will migrate other courses as they have time, so that by sometime in the fall semester all potentially active courses will be ready on the Bb Learn system.

For further information contact Mark Lewis (mark.lewis@umb.edu), Manager of Instructional Support, or for help with existing sections in Bb Vista or BB Learn, contact your edtech liaison or the Instructional Support Team at  lms@umb.edu.

As more teaching and learning is taking place on line and course management systems such as Blackboard are becoming more sophisticated, textbook publishers too are adapting to the new environment and our faculty are working with new delivery models, both as teachers and as textbook authors.

A recent article by Jeffrey Young on “The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook”  in the Chronicle of Higher Education ( 1/27/13) points to the ways in which textbook publishers are going far beyond the digital presentation of text as they create “learning experiences” that are “really software programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments,” while providing customized learning activities for individual students and managing grading, becoming, in effect, “courses in a box. “  Young notes that companies aren’t even using the word “publisher” anymore quoting a Pearson executive as saying, “We’ve gone from being a textbook company to being a learning company.”  (And I’ve recently discovered that at McGraw-Hill, the role of acquisitions editor has been redefined as “branding manager.”)  At the same time, these companies are both creating their own learning management platforms and integrating their content into Blackboard, with at least five major “learning companies” (McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons) now offering content that way according to a recent announcement.

What is it like to teach in this brave new world of such content delivery?  In a recent edtech presentation here at UMass, two members of our faculty, Russell Schutt of Sociology and Michael Carr of Economics, shared the ways in which they are using the affordances of media-rich e-textbooks in their own courses.

Russ, whose own textbooks with Sage Publishing such as Investigating the Social World  are available in ebook versions with ancillary online resources, offered a clear picture of what those resources might look like.  They include PowerPoints for course lectures, interactive class activities, links to web resources and to Sage journal articles, and videos that explain concepts and research approaches (including UMass Boston colleague Lakshmi Shrinivas speaking about using ethnographic methods in her study of the audience of Indian cinema).  There are also various review and study tools for students including flashcards, quizzes, interactive exercises, statistics tutorials, GSS datasets, etc., all appealing presented.  The ebook version provides direct links from within the chapters to explanatory videos, related resources, or other activities, and students can move back and forth easily without exiting the text.

Russ finds that the ebook resources support student learning in several ways:

• They facilitate the explication of complex concepts while maximizing impact on those with diverse learning styles through the use of mixed media
• They allow structured practice outside of class
•  They encourage self-paced learning by providing review of prerequisite knowledge and skills, offering ongoing self-testing, and providing options for in-depth exploration of topics of individual interest.

At the same time, however, he acknowledges that the resource options can be overwhelming and divert learners from central issues, and that it’s important for the teacher to provide explicit guidance for using resources and give students practice in using e-resources in groups, in the classroom.

Mike shared what he is looking for now in an introductory microeconomics text and why.  Teaching large classes to mostly non-major students who are fulfilling the social and behavioral sciences requirement, he looked for the following features when he chose a “textbook” from McGraw-Hill:

• A full integration of homework assignments and other elearning materials with the textbook chapters so that students can easily move back and forth between them
• A dynamic system (McGraw-Hill’s is called LearnSmart) that adapts to the answers individual students give on quizzes and review questions, so that they spend less time answering questions about what they already know or more time if they need further review
• A system that offers immediate and permanent feedback to students
• Tests that are offered in the same format as the homework

The LearnSmart component of the McGraw-Hill platform offers the dynamic review site, and the Connect component offers an integrated text and homework plus exams, and all feed into Blackboard, which serves as the front-end interface, so that students simply log in to their Blackboard section and then (after they’ve purchased McGraw-Hill content access and entered a one-time code) they can access all of the materials.  Mike finds that these integrated platforms allow him to provide all of the major resources he needs for his course, let him organize those resources effectively, and allow students to interact with the materials in ways that suit their own learning.

In discussions of the e-textbook phenomenon, some writers have voiced concerns that the availability of such total course resources could “shift the professors’ role to be more like pilots on modern commercial planes, who let the autopilot do the flying except when they have to step in” (Young) or even that faculty have effectively lost their “role[s] as content organizer[s] and deliverer[s]” and may soon lose their roles of evaluators of student learning as well. ”  (Grward comment on Young’s post) .  Yet others involved in the new models of course delivery, such as Frank Lyman of CourseSmart, in a discussion of the future of digital textbooks, continue to assert the value of “the traditional authoring model for core college textbooks, i.e., an author or authors whose clear vision for teaching a course is refined through peer review into an approach that is adopted by a significant portion of the community” even as the mode of delivery changes.

Last week’s forum presentation suggests that our own faculty are not only adopting these new materials (there are at least 30 users of etextbooks/resources from McGraw Hill in Management and Economics for example) but integrating them into their own pedagogical practices in thoughtful ways, taking on an important role as evaluators and users, but also as guides for their students to the new e-learning resources being made available, and in some cases, as authors of e-textbooks as well.

There has been much talk lately about the idea of “flipping the classroom” and two of our own faculty, Mike Milburn of Psychology and Brian White of Biology will be talking about/demonstrating their quite different approaches in a  CIT/EdTech forum this week. The idea behind flipping is to use new technologies and resources to move some of what has traditionally gone on in classrooms into an online environment so that students can access the material or engage in the learning activities at any time, opening up classroom time for activities that can deepen students’ learning, whether they involve group problem-solving, teacher to student or student to student coaching and mentoring, or project-based activities.

Here are some general principles of flipped learning, according to Jon Bergman, the high school chemistry teacher who may be most responsible for creating a movement around the concept:

• Flipped Learning transfers the ownership of the learning to the students.
• Flipped Learning personalizes learning for all students
• Flipped Learning gives teachers time to explore deeper learning opportunities and pedagogies with their students (PBL, CBL, UDL, Mastery, Inquiry, etc)
• Flipped Learning makes learning (not teaching) the center of the classroom.
• Flipped Learning maximizes the face to face time in the classroom. ( What IS the Flipped Class?  November 25, 2012)

Often a first step toward a flipped classroom at the university level involves recording lectures and posting them online for students’ review (as many of our faculty do using Camtasia classroom capture software or Adobe Presentation software).  A second step might involve having students listen to those lectures and engage in some related activities (e.g. guided note-taking, quizzes, problem sets, online discussions, the formulation of questions) that draw on what they’ve understood.  Frequently what were initially longer lectures will be broken into smaller segments combined with activities, so that students move from listening to application more quickly, and sometimes the professor will record small videos explaining specific concepts or processes (such as how to do a particular statistical analysis).  Such a model supports individual learners, letting students spend the time they need on various segments of the work and letting them test their own understandings through quizzes or applications, and some courses may even become self-paced.

In the meantime, instructors make use of class time in different ways.  In some instances, the flipping might involve having students work through what would have been homework in class with the instructor providing one-on-one instruction as students encounter difficulties or to confirm their understandings.  Mark Pawlak of Academic Support has been flipping some of his basic math classes in this way, using Aleks, math learning software with self-paced tutorials as an instructional resource.  In other cases, the class time that has been freed through online lectures, discussions, and other activities is used to engage students more deeply in problem-solving and analysis.  Mike Milburn of the Psychology Department has flipped the work of his course Psychology 305:  Social Attitudes and Public Opinion, where online time is  used for readings, lectures, and assignments that allow students to review a base of knowledge of research findings on a topic, while students might work in class to further explore an issue of interest to them, learn to use online databases and tools such as iPoll’s database of responses to public opinion questions, or get experience using an interactive statistical program the way a researcher would, guided by teacher demonstrations of the tools they are using.  And Brian White of the Biology Department is currently working with colleagues at MIT to develop a MOOC for biology that can be used in a flipped model to provide a core of lectures and interactive, multimedia activities, with classroom activities then be built around that core.

By moving learning activities that can take place online out of the classroom, innovative instructors are gaining time for in-class learning activities than enrich and deepen students’ understanding.  The question for all of us is “what are the richest face-to-face learning experiences I could provide for my students, in my discipline, and how can I use the wide range of resources now available to me to free my class time for those experiences?”

You’re invited to attend Mike’s and Brian’s presentations in the Flipping the Classroom Forum. After the forum, you can return to this page to find a recording of their presentations.

If you’ve been following news reports about higher education, you know that MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), using online technologies to offer courses open to the world, are capturing the imagination of education prognosticators who see them either as benefits or as threats to traditional universities and the students they serve.  UMass Boston is offering its first MOOC this spring, “Molecular Dynamics for Discoveries in Computational Science,” taught by Nishikant Sonwalker, adjunct professor Physics and founder of Synaptic Global Learning , to be followed in June by a second MOOC on Coasts and Communities,  and the Center for Innovation and Excellence in E-Learning (CIEE) in the College of Advancing and Professional Studies held a symposium on “The Sustainability of MOOCs in Higher Education” in December to prepare the way.

The idea of providing educational content for free to a larger public isn’t new, and one of my favorite posts on the subject, “A People’s History of MOOCs’” by librarian Barbara Fisher, looks back to the building of the Boston Public Library in 1865 with its inscription “Free to All”  as a milestone in such efforts (Inside Higher Education, November 29, 2012).

Although MOOCs are suddenly in the news, in some sense they’ve been developing for a long time, as new technologies led to video tutorial projects and multimedia instruction while the development of the internet stimulated further efforts to make educational resources widely available online, and there were several concurrent efforts, including the Open Course Ware initiative that a number of our faculty have been involved in to make course content freely available. But the development of the MOOC as a new model, providing not only open content but open course software, took off in 2011 when Stanford offered several free open courses quickly enrolled large numbers of students (165,000 in the first computer science course), and two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, launched Coursera to create a delivery platform for such courses with the intentions both of providing rich educational content to a world-wide audience and of changing g the in-class lecture model within the university (flipping the classroom).  Edex at MIT and Harvard was developed around the same time, offering a non-profit alternative to Coursera and one that our own MOOC activities are connected to. And in a short time MOOCs have reached across countries and also across disciplines, with Coursera now offering 328 courses from 62 universities, to 2.9 million registered users, in 220 countries. And, to my surprise, 28% of those courses are in the arts and humanities (Waldrop, 2013).

It’s clear that MOOCs have the potential to reach large numbers of students around the world and that, with significant resources being put into content development, they can provide a well-designed pathway to learning for those students who stick with them.

It seems that the upside of MOOCs, the ideal, is that

• They can make high quality educational content available to all, everywhere
• They’re gaining lots of interest from learners who can access that content anywhere.
• They are fueling the development of best learning materials, including interactive ones.
• They can address the needs of individual learners as new technology, such as that being developed by Nishikant Sonwalker’s company, allows online course environments to analyze how individual students learn and to customize instruction to individualized learning strategies while gathering data that can provide valuable information to professors about what’s working for their students.

But so far there are downsides as well, including:

• The difficulty of figuring out a revenue stream that will support the development of courses while making them available to all
• The problem of attrition, with a huge investment going, in the end, to serve the much smaller number of students who currently finish courses
• The problem of how to assess students’ learning
• The fact that the professor of a MOOC can have limited or no personal interaction with so many students (although some say that peer learning and even peer assessment can make up for this).  Some institutions are supplementing MOOC-delivered content with face-to-face classroom instruction in a flipped classroom approach (a model that Brian White in Biology will be working with).

So the question of the sustainability of MOOCs in Higher Education is a real one.  And there are further concerns that while the big players like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT may be able to make MOOCs work for them, other higher education institutions won’t be able to retain students if these free offerings end up providing an alternative route to certification or a degree.

What might be the gains?  In the world of higher education in general, Ng argues that the MOOC enterprise is fueling the development of better learning materials to make courses accessible to a diverse range of students and that online courses allow students “to create their own pathways through the material, which forces educators to think about the content in new ways.” He also believes that “MOOCs offer professors fresh opportunities to observe how their peers teach, learn from one another’s successes and failures and swap tactics to keep students engaged.”  To further support faculty development, Coursera is creating a  “Teaching a MOOC” course that will showcase successful practices and allow professors to share what they’re learning about teaching in online environments.

There’s no doubt that the world of higher education is changing rapidly, that our past models of college teaching and learning are being challenged, and that even if we’re not personally likely to teach a MOOC, this enterprise might well affect our thinking about the courses we do teach.  And we might explore MOOC offerings for ourselves, to see what they have to teach us about how others are teaching our discipline as well as what it’s like to learn in a MOOC.  (Gene Gallagher of EEOS has done this for graduate statistics.)

While much has been written about MOOCs, I’ve found three sources of information to be most useful to my own thinking:

M. Waldrop, “Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science,”(Scientific American, March 13 2013) offers a very useful overview of the development and current status of MOOCs.

A. Ng, “Learning from MOOCs,” (Inside Higher Ed, January 24, 2013) makes the argument for their educational value, for both students and professors.

The recording of the CIEE event on “The Sustainability of MOOCs” (December 11,2012), provides a comprehensive picture of their development and potential promise from two of the leaders in this work, Anant Agarwal (EdX) and Nishikant Sonwalker, who is teaching UMB’s first MOOC.