Real Students, Real Teachers, Virtual Learning Spaces
New technologies promise novel ways of connecting people and are revolutionizing how knowledge is disseminated. But what are the challenges facing real teachers and students in the changing spaces of the classroom?
The physical learning environments that our students engage in are increasingly diverse, as these examples from our Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) Seminar Series presenters suggest. Their students include novice science teachers situated in their own classrooms; medical students and residents located in clinics across Minnesota; and students in Asian studies working across universities. Virtual learning spaces provide these physically dispersed students with common learning environments. Even the traditional classroom experience is undergoing a transformation, not only because we have an ever-expanding repertoire of teaching technologies to enhance learning, but also because the disciplines themselves are increasingly characterized by new technologies that impact teaching and scholarship. For example, students in an undergraduate linguistics course not only rely on video and audio to study language situated in conversations, they must also use various technologies to represent their work.
Over the course of the past academic year, the Faculty Fellowship Program has supported five fellows from diverse disciplines as they designed virtual learning spaces that will allow students to interact with mentors and instructors who provide information and feedback, with one another in support of community, and with learning materials to develop competencies and reflect on practices. In this session, the faculty fellows will address the challenges they've encountered and insights they’ve gained as a result of this process of design.
Seminar
April 23, 2008
12:00-1:30 p.m.
101 Walter Library
East Bank, Twin Cities campus
Access a UMConnect recording of the seminar, or subscribe to the podcast or vodcast.
Moderators:
Lauren Marsh
Digital Media Center, Office of Information Technology
Kimerly J. Wilcox
Digital Media Center, Office of Information Technology
Panelists:
June LaValleur
Obstetrics, Gynecology & Women's Health, Medical School
Josephine Lee
English, College of Liberal Arts
Anne Minenko
Rheumatic and Autoimmune Diseases, Medical School
Gillian Roehrig
Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education and Human Development
Polly Szatrowski
Linguistics, English as a Second Language, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, College of Liberal Arts
Campus Projects
June LaValleur, “Development of an Image Archive to Enhance Medical Student Learning in Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health: Challenges and Opportunities”
In 2007, the American Association of Medical Colleges gave medical schools the directive to assure that individual students achieve comparable experiences during their clinical rotations, no matter where they are assigned. This is particularly challenging to schools such as the University of Minnesota, where students are scattered throughout the state. In addition, the Medical School is undergoing a curricular change with one of the aims to integrate the basic sciences more fully into the clinical curriculum. Professor LaValleur is part of the team developing 30 “must see” cases to fulfill both of these directives. During her time as a fellow, she has explored authoring tools for these cases and is assessing the relative strengths and limitations of the Interactive Scenario Builder and Pachyderm to support diagnostic cases.
Josephine Lee, “Creating Online Resources and Community for Asian American Studies in the CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation)”
This past year, Professor Lee has been working with other directors and faculty through the CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) Consortium in Asian American Studies. The CIC is a consortium of 12 research universities, including the 11 members of the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago. Their goal is to encourage cooperation and collaboration between different programs and faculty in the Midwest who work in this interdisciplinary field. As a fellow, she has focused on the challenges of creating different kinds of virtual learning communities for the CIC Asian American Studies Consortium, developed strategies for sharing online resources, and created asynchronous and videoconferenced forums.
Anne Minenko, “Web-based Self-Learning of the Musculoskeletal (MSK) Exam: Redesigning for Higher Order Learning”
Joint complaints are the second most common reason for primary care consultation, and the musculoskeletal (MSK) exam is a fundamental skill used by a broad cross-section of health professionals. Upon completion of the Rheumatology elective, rotating medical students and residents should demonstrate confidence in their MSK exam skills, including both technical and interpretive proficiency. But opportunities to learn the MSK exam are limited in a conventional Rheumatology time-constrained teaching clinic. Adding Web-based instruction to the existing clinic experience would reduce demands on faculty time and ensure content uniformity for a two- to four-week elective offered at three sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Gillian Roehrig, “Project TIN: Using Collaborative Synchronous and Asynchronous Technologies to Deliver Online, Community-Based Induction Support for Beginning Science Teachers”
TIN (Science Teacher Induction Network) is an online induction and mentoring program for beginning secondary science teachers. The goal of the program is to increase the retention of highly qualified teachers in the state of Minnesota and to increase novice teacher performance. To combat job dissatisfaction caused by isolation and a lack of support, TIN utilizes both synchronous and asynchronous technologies to connect novice teachers with content-specific mentors. In addition, TIN connects these novice teachers to a community of their peers. This year, with the support of the DMC Faculty Fellowship Program, video capacity has been added to TIN. Video will be used in three primary ways: exemplar video cases of best practices, illustrative video as dilemmas for discussion, and video for self-reflection on teaching practice. All of these video applications are run through VideoANT, an online application that allows teachers to view video and stop at any point to annotate a salient event.
Polly Szatrowski, “Using Digital Media Technology to Discover Patterns in Conversational Interaction”
Professor Szatrowski’s project addresses the challenge of teaching students how to use digital media technology in their analyses of patterns in the use of verbal/nonverbal behavior in conversational interaction in courses on Conversation Analysis, Field Research on Spoken Language, etc. In particular, this involves learning how to collect video and audio data from actual conversations (using .wav recorder, DV video camera). Steps include:
- digitizing the data (iMovie)
- performing acoustic analysis (Praat)
- performing gesture analysis (Quicktime PRO, PhotoShop)
- delivering a presentation and writing a final paper related to spoken language (incorporating pitch displays, video excerpts, and video frames).
To support students in their use of technology, she uses a variety of approaches that include creating detailed written directions with screen captures, making dynamic screen capture modules (using Camtasia), and giving hands-on demonstrations that enabled students to learn and review the process involved inside and outside of class.
Readings
Bransford, J.D., A. L. Brown, and R. R. Cocking. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000.
This book compiles research about teaching and learning into a highly engaging and readable text that is a valuable resource for instructors at any level of experience. Because this was a government-funded project, you can access the entire book online.
Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003.
Fink begins with the assumption that "all teaching should strive to create significant learning experiences." The book engages instructors in reflecting on what constitutes significant learning in our disciplines: what are the skills, concepts, and values that we would like our students to have long after the last exam has been graded? What kinds of learning activities will promote these skills and what strategies might we use to assess them? He introduces a taxonomy of significant learning that advances the work initiated by Bloom in 1956. With this as a starting point, the book offers a systematic approach to developing individual learning activities as well as effective and integrated course design.
Fink, L. Dee. "Publications."
This page on Dr. Fink's professional consulting Web site includes links to some of his major publications, including the "Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning," a 37-page workbook that introduces key ideas from his Creating Significant Learning Experiences book cited above.
Pace, David, and Joan Middendorf, eds. "Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking." Special issue, New Directions for Teaching and Learning 98 (2004).
Decoding the Disciplines encourages instructors to consider that our disciplinary expertise can be an obstacle to communicating with and teaching our students. The book presents a format for exploring how we as experts do what we do and considering how our knowledge and skills can be modeled for novices. The authors of the book collaborated in the context of a faculty learning community. Each member of the learning community contributed a chapter that explains how they applied the process laid out in the introductory chapter.
University of Oklahoma Program for Instructional Innovation. "Tips on Teaching."
This site provides access to course design guides based on L. Dee Fink's book cited above.
