Improving UMConnect Learning Activities
UMConnect Presenter enables instructors to create narrated Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and deliver them over the Internet. Many educators at the University are facing the challenge of delivering entire programs online. UMConnect Presenter is often a tool of choice because of its audio features and ease-of-use.
While using UMConnect is attractive, it presents challenges to instructors. There is less teacher presence and student-to-instructor interaction. The presentation must be structured to hold students' attention and create the sense of a learning community. Instructors may be less engaging when they speak into a microphone without students present. There are also logistical challenges.
Seminar
November 1, 2006
12:00-1:30 p.m.
155 Peters Hall
St. Paul campus
UMConnect Meeting recording
University faculty and staff members will discuss ways to address these challenges and create online learning materials with UMConnect Presenter, such as how to add interactivity, select appropriate teaching strategies, consider software and hardware options, and combine media in a presentation.
Moderator:
Tonu Mikk
Digital Media Center, Office of Information Technology, Twin Cities campus
Panelists:
Michael Golden (for Joseph Brocato, Jennifer Welsh, and John McCabe)
Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Medical School, Academic Health Center, Twin Cities campus
Edward Greeno and Tufia Haddad
Department of Medicine, Medical School, Academic Health Center, Twin Cities campus
Denise Guerin
Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel, College of Design, Twin Cities Campus
Pat McGovern, Debra Olson, and Krista Johansen
Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, Academic Health Center, Twin Cities Campus
Panelists' Projects
The panelists are working on the following 2006 TEL Grant Program projects that use UMConnect to deliver rich content and improve students' learning experiences:
Brocato, Joseph, Jennifer Welsh, and John McCabe. "The Integrated Family Medicine Residency Curriculum (IFMRC): Essential Core Content for Family Medicine Resident Physicians" 2006 Technology-Enhanced Learning Grant Program proposal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. http://dmc.umn.edu/grants/2006/brocato.pdf.
Greeno, Edward, and Tufia Haddad. "Utilization of UMConnect to Improve Access to Lectures for Medical Resident Education" 2006 Technology-Enhanced Learning Grant Program proposal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. http://dmc.umn.edu/grants/2006/greeno.pdf.
Guerin, Denise. "Development, Dissemination, and Marketing of Research-Based Design Curriculum Offered On-Line" 2006 Technology-Enhanced Learning Grant Program proposal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. http://dmc.umn.edu/grants/2006/guerin.pdf.
McGovern, Pat, Debra Olson, and Krista Johansen. "Online Course Development for Professionals in the Environmental Health Sciences: The Development of Best Practices" 2006 Technology-Enhanced Learning Grant Program proposal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. http://dmc.umn.edu/grants/2006/mcgovern.pdf.
Preliminary Readings
Peer-reviewed literature directly related to the problems of delivering learning content via UMConnect only now is beginning to emerge. That said, the general problems of presenting visual content using Microsoft PowerPoint and aligning such content with an instructor's goals are well documented. Some of the best documentation is abstracted below.
More Effective Content Delivery: Theory & Practice
Barnett, Jerrold. "Do Instructor-Provided Online Notes Facilitate Student Learning." The Journal of Interactive Online Learning 2:2 (Fall 2003): 1–7.
UMConnects addresses some of the challenges presented by the traditional in-person lecture, as critiqued by Wilbert McKeachie in Teaching Tips (9th edition): "Students using printed materials can choose their own rate of learning: They can review, they can skip, they can vary the order" (p. 54). Once the exclusive domain of written material, applications like UMConnect afford users a similar degree of control over a recorded presentation that they have historically had over books. In this study, Barnett identifies two variables that may be more important relative to student learning with UMConnect than control alone: individualization and depth-of-processing. He studied student memory and transfer following exposure to one of the following:
- an instructor lecture at which students took notes without any assistance from the lecturer;
- an instructor lecture at which students took notes using a lecturer-provided skeletal outline of his or her presentation;
- an instructor lecture with complete lecture notes; or
- complete lecture notes that students read instead of attending the presentation.
Students who took their own notes retained and understood more than those provided with complete lecture notes; there was no significant performance difference between students who took their own notes and those provided with a skeletal outline (although Barnett doesn't discuss either motivation or anxiety, so it's difficult to know whether students were made more comfortable by being supplied with outlines). This study also suggests that—even if we are providing students with a full record of a day's lecture and affording them control over what they view and how/when they view it—it is probably best to combine such content delivery with activities in which students may engage concepts (and each other) to ensure the development of understanding.
Kornelsen, Lloyd. "Teaching with Presence." New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 111 (Fall 2006): 73–82.
Lloyd Kornelson reflects on the importance of teacher "presence" in engaging students and helping them build understanding and, more importantly, what presence means and how it is created in the classroom (or virtual space). The what question is easiest for Kornelson to answer; presence means
- making oneself vulnerable by ceding some control over the class to the students themselves, rewarding risk-taking, encouraging students to face challenges, and being open with them, both with respect to one's failures and feelings and to one's engagement with course content and the substance of students' observations and questions (p. 74);
- demonstrating one's excitement about course content and the relevance of that content to students' lives and interests—according to Kornelson, course content is best when it becomes the center of a dynamic interchange, with the instructor and students "[remaking] the subject in dialogue every time, with every class" (p. 77); and
- "living with chaos," i.e., being willing to depart from the day's lesson plan to pursue relevant connections that come up in the process of dialogue among students and between teacher and students (ibid.).
UMConnect can be part of an effort to increase presence in a class. By recording voiceover narration and dynamically linking students to examples and external resources, an instructor can communicate her or his passion about a subject to students, as well as build in an outlet for self-directed, 'chaotic' learning (enabling students to pursue individual courses of inquiry based on their own interests). Similarly, the ease with which additional slides and commentary can be added/altered and re-published means that instructors and students can easily develop customized course resources relevant to the particular needs and insterests of the class while maintaining a sort of easily updatable 'community memory' in the form of UMConnect archives. Finally, in some course settings, using UMConnect to asynchronously deliver course content enlivened by the instructor's voice might open up more time for interchange during the face-to-face or synchronous portions of the course and leave more time for dialogue and the pursuit of students' needs and interests.
McKeachie, Wilbert J. "Learning, Thinking and Thorndike." Educational Psychologist 25:2 (1990): 127–141.
McKeachie measured how the motivation, prior knowledge, and preconceptions of students and the organization, presentation, and processing level of the learning content impacted students' performances and self-reported measures of anxiety/efficacy. Relevant to a discussion of UMConnect and best practices in learning content design and delivery are several findings:
- "Anxious students do poorly in classes that are not well organized" (p. 136); clear signposts and summaries, concept maps, and frequent opportunities for reflection and practice are particularly important for anxious students (p. 139). Unsuprisingly, highly structured courses in McKeachie's sample sometimes gave rise to decreases in self-reported measures of interest and efficacy. The courses with the highest student reports of interest and efficacy were less-structured English and psychology courses: "Even though these students want to be told what to do, they apparently develop greater interest and self-efficacy when they feel a greater sense of control" (p. 137).
- As an aid to resolving this structure-motivation paradox, McKeachie recommends a phased solution, with a significant degree of supporting structure, scaffolding, and modeling early on, giving way to activities designed to afford students greater scope for application and self-direction: "As the course develops, anxious students need opportunities to find out what they can learn effectively without being told exactly what to do . . . [O]nly if the anxious students feel that success is due to their own effort and ability are they likely to gain in self-efficacy and to develop greater interest in the subject matter" (p. 138).
- Perhaps more important even than organization was faculty "supportiveness." Students in classes in which instructors devoted significant time and attention to providing adaptive feedback and developing students' confidence in their ability to do work in a particular domain performed better than students in classes where feedback and the development of self-efficacy were less prominent. McKeachie's finding may argue for the use of technology to support the development of stronger senses of teacher presence (see Kornelsen, above).
Szabo, Attila, and Nigel Hastings. "Using IT in the Undergraduate Classroom: Should We Replace the Blackboard with PowerPoint?" Computers and Education 35 (2000): 175–187.
Szabo and Hastings compared the performances of student who were exposed to traditional overheads, a PowerPoint lecture, and a scaffolded PowerPoint lecture. No performance differences were found among students exposed to the traditional overhead presentation and those exposed to the live PowerPoint-delivered lecture. Findings suggested, however, that PowerPoint delivery may aid recall and be particularly beneficial in presenting "specific instruction where dynamic models, animation, and variation of colour may definitively help in the better illustration of key concepts" (p. 187).
The Value of (Inter)Activity: Theory & Practice
Lowry, Roy B. "Electronic Presentation of Lectures: Effect Upon Student Performance." http://www.rsc.org/pdf/uchemed/papers/1999/31_lowry.pdf (first published 1999; last accessed 20 October 2006).
Lowry reports on a study he conducted related to student problem-solving performance before and after the introduction of PowerPoint in his classroom. One of the most significant changes Lowry made in his teaching post-PowerPoint was to utilize the application's built-in facility for sequential revelation of content. 'Walking' students step-by-step through a model problem and tasking them at each stage with attempting to solve that stage of the problem led both to improved student performances and to concomitant increases in students' self-reported perceptions of the quality of Lowry's presentations. By breaking complex problems down into distinct and manageable operations and providing students with regular metacognition and practice opportunities and immediate feedback prior to confronting them with messy intermediate- or expert-level problems, Lowry demonstrated the importance of concepts related by McKeachie and Bransford et al., i.e., the value of aiding students (Bransford's 'novices') in developing problem-solving heuristics or models and then affording them frequent opportunities to practice problem-solving and obtain immediate feedback. As students develop expertise in solving problems, the existence of the problem-solving frameworks provides a context for more efficient storage and retrieval of domain-specific knowledge.
Lowry also provides some insight on the value of PowerPoint as a media-aggregation tool (see Combining Media Effectively below). PowerPoint's capacity to juxtapose and control media in a single frame cuts down on what Johnstone and Percival labelled "attention breaks," non-instructional distractions (such as may be engendered while manually switching overhead slides or fumbling with VCR controls) that affect students' ability to attend to—and learn from—a presentation.
Roblyer, MD, and WR Wiencke. "Design and Use of a Rubric to Assess and Encourage Interactive Qualities in Distance Courses." The American Journal of Distance Education 17:2 (2003): 77–98.
Submitted by Pat McGovern.
Tomei, Lawrence, and Margaret Balmert. "Creating an Interactive PowerPoint Lesson for the Classroom." T.H.E. Journal 28:1 (August 2000): 69–71.
Lawrence Tomei and Margaret Balmert report on an effort at Duquesne University to train graduate education students to create interactive lessons using Jerrold Kemp's instructional system design (ISD) model. The authors describe several ways PowerPoint features (action buttons, hidden slides, etc.) can be used to generate self-assessment modules that provide immediate feedback and remediation based on student selections.
Wagner, Ellen D.. "Interactivity: From Agents to Outcomes." New Directions for Teaching and Learning 71 (Fall 1997): 19–26.
Submitted by Pat McGovern.
Combining Media Effectively: Theory & Practice
Astleitner, Hermann. "Teaching Critical Thinking Online." Journal of Instructional Psychology 29:2 (June 2002): 53–76.
Astleitner tested the importance of modality and scaffolding in improving students' performances and motivating them to learn and practice effective critical thinking skills. In the first experiment, Astleitner's subjects were exposed to either (1) an audio or (2) a video recording of a lesson on argumentative errors; half of each treatment group was also provided with "synchronous organizers" (outlines, verbal text, and figures in PowerPoint) keyed to the audio or video presentation, while the other half received unaccompanied audio or video. Students' post-exposure evaluations of their own work and of the learning process indicated that their perceptions of the learning process were better in those cohorts (both audio and video) that also received synchronous organizers accompanying the lecture; paradoxically (given preferences previously reported in the research literature), students reported better retention and transfer effects in the audio treatment cohort than in the video cohort, a perception that was confirmed by direct observation of student performances. Astleitner hypothesized that poorer performance among students who received the video-organizer treatment may have been due to "split attention" (i.e., because they had two visual inputs—the video and the organizer—they weren't able to focus on either; see p. 68). When comparing students' performances following exposure to the best treatment option discovered in experiment one (i.e., audio combined with a graphical organizer) with those of a group exposed to the same content delivered as a research report, Astleitner discovered no significant differences in the quality of students' analytical work (although this is complicated by questions of whether the two treatments were actually equivalent).
Examples
To see examples of how instructors at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere are using UMConnect Presenter, see the links below.
Allen, Rose (University of Minnesota Extension Service). "Tips for Talking to Your Child's Other Parent."
Rose Allen from the University of Minnesota Extension Service narrates compassionately about strategies for communicating with your child's other parent. The narration is supported by images and bold text. Rose also uses UMConnect to gather feedback for the presentation at the end of the slide show. See https://UMConnect5.umn.edu/p23587756/.
Kroening, Melanie (Mesa Community College). "Improper Fractions."
Melanie Kroening from Mesa Community College created this narrated slideshow. It includes a visible outline, quiz example, and embedded animations. See http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~mkroening/
UMConnect_ex/index.htm.
Sherrill, Karin (Mesa Community College). "Cardiac Dysrythmias."
This is a narrated slideshow by Karin Sherrill from Mesa Community College that includes an illustration of how some standard PowerPoint slide animations (e.g., "fly-in from bottom," "appear on click," etc.) and slide notes appear in UMConnect. See http://UMConnect.mc.maricopa.edu/p65735599/.
Vaidyanathan, Rajiv (University of Minnesota, Duluth). "CB [Consumer Behavior]: Designing Your Experiments."
Rajiv Vaidyanathan from the University of Minnesota, Duluth created this narrated slideshow for a consumer behavior course. It includes a visible presentation outline and slide notes. See http://UMConnect4.umn.edu/p79254110/.
