Mainstreaming Academic Innovation with Emerging Technologies

Last spring I moved from being a consultant and part-time instructor to a full-time employee and part-time instructor and realized I really need to stay in the consulting and teaching arena. It's what keeps me passionate, happy, actively connected and learning.  I made that change in August and feel great about it.

However, over a year ago I set up an automated job search using a meta-search job agent called Indeed. It delivers results to my email each evening. Sometimes I look at them, sometimes I don't.  You might ask yourself why on earth I'd bother looking at these job postings when I'm not looking for a job.  Well, because I consider it part of my active learning experience about higher education. I like to see what other types of jobs other colleges, universities, and states are hiring for. This provides a good indication about how other academic organizations are solving problems.  Last night I saw a posting that turned a light on for me. 

Improving educational problems with emerging technologies

I teach online for a community college in California and I am thirsty to understand how to improve some of the big challenges the California community college system faces.  For one, how can we, as the largest system of higher education in the nation -- comprised of 112 colleges serving more than 2.5 million students and more than 50,000 faculty (most of whom are part-time) -- fully harness the potential that today's emerging technologies offer?  With about 25% of the state's headcount coming from online classes, the topic of teaching with technology is a provocative one and so are the topics of student success, retention, and access given the state's financial challenges. 

These are all factors that played into Governor Brown's recent support for MOOCs and the  controversial bill that would grant students credit at California's public institutions of higher ed for completing MOOCs (something that I wrote about here last spring).  All in all, I have been pretty silent about MOOCs through the whirlwind popularity they have experienced in the recent years. Mostly because they have done little to excite me, as a community college educator (read the word educator as "teacher").  I've observed little about a MOOC that can support the diverse needs of community college learners and they undercut the importance and value that student-teacher relationships play in the community college learning experience.

Mt. San Jacinto College, one of California's community colleges and the college where I teach part-time, developed a MOOC titled Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade this year. It was funded by the Gates Foundation and it was designed to support the writing skills of students as they prepare for college level writing courses.  That's a unique and fresh approach to MOOCs at the 2-year level, as it is clearly a self-directed journey through which a student travels on his or her own to success.

But yesterday, I read about Bill Gates' message to more than 2,000 community college leaders at the Association of Community College Trustees' meeting.  He spoke about the benefits that flipped MOOCs could bring to community college students, serving to improve learning and increase access (as there is the possibility of employing this approach to slightly decrease the time spent in class and open more "seat time" for more students).  Ah...now we're getting somewhere.  Despite the intense disdain you'll read in the comments of the Chronicle article about Gates' idea, I think there's merit to this approach.

In 2009, before the word "flipped" was ever used, I followed that nagging "itch" one gets when you know there's something about your class that needs to be changed, that just is not right, that is not reflecting your authentic teaching self.  I think we all get that itch but some of us can ignore it more than others.  Mine keeps me up at night when it gets really bad.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation
It was painful to make the change; I fought it for well over a year.  It's really difficult to put into words how much college professors -- even those who relish risk taking, like myself -- resist the notion of letting go of "the lecture." And encouraging professors to let go of lecturing will be the issue at the the heart of the controversy of embracing the flipped classroom in higher ed.  It will be disguised as many other issues -- but, really, if we look inside ourselves, this will be what's driving the controversy.  I believe we need to address these concerns and talk about them, as ignoring them only makes them worse.  I was scared to death.  I have never felt more vulnerable in my classroom than when I announced to my students I would "not be lecturing...(gulp)."  But as Brene Brown has discovered in her insightful research, vulnerability is at the heart of innovation.  Seems to me we should all be following this itch, not pushing it away if we are truly committed to making changes in teaching and learning.

Despite my deep-rooted insecurities, I decided to give it a try. In the spring of 2009 I finally chose to eliminate all the lectures from my face-to-face History of Women in Art class and had my students listen to (or read them -- they had a choice) before coming to class.  They also had to participate in pre-class formative assessments that I designed in VoiceThread.  There's much more to this model and I've presented on it many times and have produced an entire online ePortfolio about it, and it's detailed in the Introduction of my book, Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies. 

The flipped model is good teaching

For those of you unfamiliar with the flipped model, it's fairly simple. It is based on the concept of making the time that students spend in class with their instructors more active and less passive. Active learning has been at the core of effective learning research for decades. This is key. The flipped classroom fundamentally embraces many of the tenets of good, effective teaching.  Classroom time is spent applying, analyzing, critiquing -- moving up the pyramid of higher order thinking skills.  The lower order thinking skills are fostered outside of class by building a foundation of background knowledge through listening to the lectures and completing a brief online assessment prior to coming to class. The assessment is really key, as it serves to ensure students completed the lectures and also gives the instructor a picture of the class's overall knowledge of key topics and concepts prior to the start of a class.  In the end, class time is spent digging into the topics that are not understood, while those that have been more fully mastered can be filtered out -- this makes all the difference.  Why teach the same thing to everyone everytime?

Uses technology to support needs of diverse learners

The flipped classroom also puts technology to good use by having students view brief videos, curated around key topics, prior to coming to class.  The format of video is important, as it provides students with the ability to pause, rewind, and replay -- features live lectures do not offer. These features are like built-in accommodations for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia, which are more common in student populations at public 2-year institutions. 

I would advocate for these videos to come along with a text transcript, as well.  When I provided my students with the option to view a visual enhanced podcast or read a transcript, my evaluation of the students' learning at the end of the semester revealed that 40% chose to read the lecture, 15% listened to the lecture, 30% did both, and 15% toggled between reading and listening throughout the semester. What amazed me here is that 30% of the students chose to listen and read at the same time (view video of student data results overview here).  I noticed some of my students doing this before class and when I asked them why, they shared that it really helped them to remember the content when they could hear my voice and highlight the text or make notes in the margins simultaneously.

As I reflect back on it, the results of this experiment were dazzling.  Not only did I feel more engaged with my class and passionate about my teaching than I had in many years but my students reported significant gains in deep learning and the multiple methods of representing the content (reading or listening to lectures and students completed formative assessments about the lecture content prior to class in VoiceThreads that were visual and supported voice commenting) helped students to meet the learning objectives more effectively. You can listen to a 20-minute audio interview with me and three of my students here.

Moving from experimentation to focused pilots

But little traction has been made to systemically research the effects of flipped classrooms at the community college level in California and, admittedly, expecting community college faculty to develop their own online lectures would be rough.  Few community colleges I know of are equipped with the instructional design staff needed to support faculty through this time of endeavor.  And there are benefits to curating a collection of existing videos from different subject matter experts for students to view.

What does this discussion about my flipped classroom experiment back in 2009 have to do with looking for a job?

Well, yesterday in my Indeed job search results I saw a posting for a position at Maryland University College's new Center for Innovation in Learning for an Online Learning Innovation Scientist. Key responsibilities include:

• Take responsibility for conceptualizing, proposing, and directing innovation pilots and/or assisting in collaborative multi-unit pilots. 
• For each pilot assist with a research and evaluation framework tied to adult learning and use scientific principles to support  (a) learning innovation, (b) technology tools to improve the efficiency or quality the learning experience; (c) evidence based non cognitive improvements for the comprehensive learning experience.
• Document and disseminate the results of research and/or development projects through publication and presentation.  Publication includes peer-review journals, peer-review conference proceedings, patents, books and book chapters, and other print media. Presentation may be at international, national, or regional conferences, and internal audiences.
• Create a culture of understanding learning science throughout the pilots and those collaborating units.

As I reflect on these two methods of improving education through the use of emerging technologies (the example shared from Maryland and MOOC bill in California), there's a big difference between creating a center for learning innovations and staffing it with high quality researchers and educators who are dedicated and trained to examine and study the effects of emerging technologies on learning, while collaborating with regional/statewide constituents to collect, evaluate, share, and reflect on metrics than having politicians react to a national trend, create a bill at the state level, and expect institutions of higher education to follow suit.

Thanks for reading. What are your thoughts about flipped MOOCs for community college students?

The Underbelly of CA's Community College MOOC Bill

As an online California Community College (CCC) instructor who has worked hard to promote practices for cultivating high quality, high touch, humanized online learning, I am watching the news about Steinberg's proposed bill (SB 520) to allow California's community college students to complete MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offered by third party vendors to complete high demand courses that the students are unable to access through California's community college system. 

The concept is rough but is being applauded by open educational resource (OER) supporters and certainly makes significant strides to support a mission of the CCC system which is to promote access to low cost higher education to Californians.  And Steinberg has been quoted, "This is about helping students. We would be making a big mistake if we did not take advantage of the technological advances in our state" to do so.

But is it high quality learning (another thread of the system's mission)?  This is the question I want to untangle here. 

The concept at the heart of SB520 is driven by the exciting work of Simon Thrun, who received a 2012 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for "transforming the way people learn around the world" and Daphne Koller, co-founder of the MOOC-hosting site Coursera.  Thrun and Koller have become to popular pioneers of MOOCs (but are by no means the founders -- scroll to "The Forgotten History of  MOOCs" by Audrey Watters here) which are massive open online courses.  MOOCs are online classes that have lots of students -- lots of students, like over 1,000.  This is why the model in California would promote alleviate the road blocks that students have hit in recent years as the system has cut classes in response to the state's devastating budget deficit.

To date, there is no large scale effort in the uS have an entire system of education grant college credit for the completion of a MOOC.  If SB 520 is approved, California's community college system, the largest system of higher education in the nation which serves roughly 2.6 million students, would make a huge precedent in higher education and MOOCs would make quite a foray in formalized learning.

The Problem

I agree that MOOCs will find a place in the future of formalized learning.  But I also believe figuring out how, where, and to what extent is a fragile venture and the leap that is proposed in California is poised to fracture the foundation of community college student learning. 

The problem lies in the demographics of the students that are served by the MOOCs.  Thrun and Koller are Stanford professors.  They do not teach community college students.  Those of us who teach community college students understand the unique blend of needs our student demographics bring into our classrooms and how these unique needs tie into our pedagogy -- whether the class is face-to-face or online.  When teaching a community college class, you (the teacher) are pivotal to the success of the learners.  That is true regardless of whether the class is face-to-face or online. 

Each semester, in my online class, I work to support students with a variety of needs.  For example, many have cognitive disorders like ADHD and I often identify students who I suspect have dyslexia but have not yet been tested.  I have a student now who is about to give birth -- her due date was yesterday and we have made arrangements to support her through her delivery.  And I have another student this week who I needed to set up a special quiz for to accommodate his ADD.  I understand that by reaching out to understand and support the needs of my learners, I will increase their chances of success. 

That's just one of my roles.  I also must design learning activities that support a range of cognitive levels and differences.  Using tools like VoiceThread and blogs, in addition to traditional assessments creates scaffolded learning spaces where students receive personalized voice and video feedback from me and their peers.  My teaching and social presence resonates with my students. Dyslexic students have accommodations built in and more proficient students take roles as community leaders in our participatory learning environment.

 MOOCs are teacherless.  That's why they are so efficient.

The Issues

Taking the teacher out of an online community college class is a bad idea for students.  The active presence of a teacher in an online class has been validated as an essential element of a student's success for decades (Anderson, 1979; Paloff & Pratt, 1999; Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000;  Richardson & Swan, 2003). And when the the mix of learners in a class becomes more diverse, the demands of the teacher to work more closely with the learners to understand and facilitate their understanding and comprehension of the mastery of the objectives becomes more critical -- not less. 

Some studies have noted that MOOCs have a success rate as low as 20%.  A strategy Udacity is using to improve this is to hire "human mentors." 

I could not agree more that we have problems in California's community colleges and that students are feeling the pain of an ugly financial crunch that has landed on our community college system.  But the problems that we are disregarding pertain to the value of high quality community college teaching.

To start, more than 300,000 students have been turned away from California's community colleges because our state has elected to cut programs and classes and get rid of teachers.  And this solution replaces them with MOOCs developed by third-party vendors that are teacherless.

Moreover, out of the roughly 58,000 faculty members that teach California's community college classes, Jonathan Lightman from FACCC shared that only 31% of them are full-time.  Even though state law mandates California to maintain a 75:25% ratio of full-time to part-time faculty, this has been deferred in recent years because the budget has just been too weak.  I find it interesting that the system's proposed increased funds this year may go to support teacherless solution.

The solution proposed by Steinberg is not good for community college student learning.  It does not support the diversity of student needs that are critical to success in community colleges.  Community college learners need teachers who are held accountable to high standards to foster high quality, community-oriented learning experiences.  Motivation, engagement, morale, and ultimately cognition will not thrive in a MOOC environment with most community college learners.  Some will do fine, yes.  But most will not. 

Alternatives

In the future, learners will have no shortage of access to free, open content.  So what will the function of a community college be in society?  That is the question.  I think we are in the midst of re-envisioning the role of the institution from an access provider to a facilitater of learning.  In a lifelong learning society, individuals need to understand how to master their own learning and this will continue to play and increasingly critical role to both the success of the lives of people in the 21sst century and the relevance of educational institutions.

To put this more clearly, learners -- with all their learning differences in tow -- will come to community colleges because they will need teachers to inspire them, to help them understand and master new skills, and to help them create digital content that will demonstrate their mastery to the outside world.  Access to the content will not be the issue.  It will be how to learn the content.
 
Community college leaders today should be funding the creation of centers of innovation in teaching and learning -- empowering hotbeds of research and experimentation where instructors are incentivized to understand what it means to teach effectively with emerging technologies in their discipline and how to foster high touch learning environments that demonstrate ways to develop students into critical, mindful users and creators of digital media.  From these sites, resources would flow to other colleges through an interconnected, open sharing system that would empower faculty to learn together in community. 

In contrast, as an instructor in California, it's devastating to experience how disconnected I am from my 55,000+ faculty peers at the most connected time in human history.  We should all be learning in community from each other, sharing with each other, and in a constant dialogue with each other.   A new online instructor at a college in Chico should be able to locate an experience online instructor in Palm Springs in a moment and develop an informal mentor-mentee relationship.  A simple online commons, like the Academic Commons developed by CUNY, would foster a space for sharing and connecting across the state.

Innovations in teaching and learning is the area in which California's community colleges should be leading the way.  We have tens of thousands of committed, bright, passionate educators who teach because they are dedicated to their students.  Instead, we're sending our students to third party vendors and applauding the use of technology to deploy content to them.