Group work: why the humanities still matter...

I love justifications for my teaching from the business world!

For example, I heard one interview with an expert who had written a book about how business schools needed to update and change.  What's the ONE THING he said he wished business school grads had (but often don't?)...wait for it...

Writing abilities!

Oh yeah, I"m relevant, that's right, uh huh...  :)

But seriously, folks...today another article caught my eye about team work, describing interesting findings about what makes teams work.

Review of Screencast tools for teachers

I didn't write this one....but this guy spent a lot of time analyzing different screencast tools specifically for teachers.    It's nice to have all of these in one place  - I've heard of a lot of these tools, but didn't realize they all effectively did the same thing (although I feel like a bit of a tool for not figuring it out before now!).  Now I know that Camtasia and Captivate are really, really expensive screencast tools. 

Spoiler alert: if you are just starting out and looking for free tools, he recommends Screencast-O-Matic hands down.

https://andrewdouch.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/the-best-screencasting-software-for-teachers/

Thinking about Group Work - grappling with challenges

Partly inspired by attending workshops with instructional designers, this semester I"m launching (for the second time) a major group project to go along with their final essay in my face-to-face class at the end of the semester.  This week's readings gave me a lot of food for thought  about how to do it better (last semester I 'd say I had a 50% success rate and lots of "dissatisfied customers" - including both suckers & free riders) - and still more questions.   Wondering if y'all instructors out there had any insights?

 Here's my questions: After this week's readings in my instructional design course about group work & best practices, I'm going to implement a bunch of these

Instructional goals, critical thinking & creativity

This week our chapter in the DCC book was all about identifying instructional goals. 

When I first saw this, I was frankly a little appalled...the examples included things like performance measures and instructions on how to interact with customers in service jobs. In short, these kinds of "objectives" quickly brought back all my worst experiences with learning -

Who's doing the online teaching in higher ed? My Story

I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely makes me want to know more about how e-learning is happening in higher ed, and who is doing it, and how much support they have.

So context: I was in my second year of teaching.  That fall, I'd finally gotten what felt like a stable teaching job: 3 sections at my alma mater, benefitted, in the union.  I spent a lot of time that fall developing a curriculum, learning about my students & developing my teaching tools for English 101 - and learning how to grade 70+ papers in a week, six times a semester.  In December, I learned that I wouldn't be offered any course for the spring semester starting January.

Faculty vs. Administrators: starkly different views of online learning

 Summary & review of Inside Higher Ed's  "Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012"

June 21, 2012

Steve Kolowich

 

"Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education than are academic technology administrators, according to a new study by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group."  Thus begins a fascinating article about faculty and administrator attitudes towards online learning. 

This week I dove DEEP into the Horizon report about higher ed futures & the accompanying links to "further reading" articles...and was by turns fascinated, curious, excited & appalled by what I read.    (See my first reactions here).

I'm still trying to synthesize some of my reactions to the report - there's SO MUCH in it.  However, I was particularly curious about one idea in it that sent me looking for more information: the idea that higher ed faculty are very conflicted about the idea of online education.  I have my own ambivalence about online teaching, and so I was really curious about how generalized these ideas/thoughts/prejudices were.   This was reported in the 2012 Babson report, and I used Google to find the article above to explain this idea further (the entire Babson Report is like a small novel!)

So here's the data they found, after surveying thousands of faculty (3/4 of whom were "full-time" - a somewhat problematic term...does that mean tenured, tenure track, or contingent non-tenure track with 1-3 year contracts?)

• 58% of faculty said the future of online teaching filled them with more fear than excitement (while this number was *much* lower for faculty that actually teach online)
• 2/3 of all faculty responding said that they believed students learned less online than in a traditional classroom. (And  40% of online teachers also felt this way) 
• "Asked whether their institutions were “pushing too much online,” nearly 30 percent of faculty respondents agreed, and another 30 percent declined to disagree, giving a neutral response. "
• Adjunct professors were more optimistic: 52% said they were more excited than fearful about online teaching, although, dismally, this may be because it allows them to pack even more teaching into their busy lives.
• There is significant concern about pay: "About 30 percent of faculty respondents believe their institutions pay fairly for online teaching, with 31 percent disagreeing and the rest remaining neutral."
• Interestingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly?!), administrators had a pretty different take on online education: " 80 percent said the online boom excited more than frightened them" and 79% disagreed that they were "pushing too much online"
• Completely unsurpisingly (to me) was this statement: "The greatest difference was on the subject of pay, with 58 percent of administrators submitting that their institutions compensate online instructors fairly (nearly twice as high as the proportion of instructors who believe this to be true)." 

So....what do we have here?  

First Response to the NMC Horizon Report 2016 for Higher Education

Table of Contents for 2016 NME Horizon Report 

 Hi!  Welcome to this blog.  I'm excited to share my thoughts about teaching, learning and thinking here!

This week I'd like to talk about the NMC Horizon report for Higher Ed 2016...which echoes a lot of similar reports & forcasts I've heard about at other venues (education conferences, etc.).

I'd like to share my perspective on this coming at this from where I sit: as a higher ed teacher, with a position that's fairly representative of the majority of today's higher ed instructors.