Category: Week 3 – Engaging the Imaginations of Digital Learners

Enhancing enjoyment by fostering the imagination seems to be effective and is clearly helping enhance education, but maybe not all topics lend themselves to the nontraditional models. STEM fields require a foundation of knowledge that while the lecture may not always be the ideal means of information transfer, I question how much benefit there is for trying to apply these methods to things like Fluid Dynamics. Yes, hands on labs support learning, but there is little room for imagination and creativity around the equations of fluid movements. All through STEM there are core courses that without their foundation, students will be ill equipped to move on to, unfortunately those are also the potentially more engaging courses. Full disclosure, I have no idea how to go about bringing imagination and engagement to a STEM core course.

 

The new learners of the 21^st century featured classroom environments fostering creative learning approaches which allowed the students to explore their interests. I have worked in commercial video production and photography, and while skills like editing and composition can be taught, it takes an already creative mind to truly master the craft, and those creative minds can often master the craft by practice alone. Coding has been described many times as more akin to a language in terms of the learning process, so while it is a STEM aspect being taught in this creative way, I still don’t see a connection to how these approaches would address calculus, or basic chemistry. Specific topics in STEM may benefit from these gamifications and alternative strategies in the classroom. But there are still large amounts of knowledge that needs to be transferred consistently before there is room for creativity and exploration.

 

I have noticed there is often a relation between engagement and enjoyment, if the topic is not interesting to the students (or myself) the chances to achieve engagement are low, and the non-class related activities will come out on the technologies. I have encountered several topics where due to enjoyment I have greater desire to learn more, and spend more of my time pursuing further learning. Unfortunately, not all of these topics have direct application to pursuing my PhD, but many of them have become hobbies. Finding some means to change the learning experience from that of a standard lecture to focus on fostering enjoyment might build greater engagement, but who truly loves those core STEM courses that are usually offered as a “weed out” course?

 

In one of the courses I have been involved in, on Fridays the students take over the course. They get to find a part of the material that speaks to them, develop a brief lecture and then spend most of their time leading an activity which they feel facilitates understanding the material of the week. The students on both sides of the room seem to enjoy the flipped classroom days. But the course is a senior level technical elective where we are covering a lot of interpersonal and management theories. The students clearly gain a deeper understanding beyond the simple definitions of the concepts and theories in class, which enables them to adapt them in their work lives, but they still had to suffer through the core STEM coursework to get to this elective course.

 

I still am not sure how this could be applied to say, fluid dynamics and relay enough knowledge to set the students up for continuing through a course progression. But there is a definite need to enhance those core STEM courses, get more students interested in the fundamentals earlier so that they can master them and apply them later. I only wish there was a straightforward way to make the courses more engaging.

I know, this should be a rhetorical question.  It really should.  Unfortunately there are a few misnomers in the question itself.  You might ask “don’t you mean lectured to?”  While I’d like to, I think everyone can think of at least one experience of a professor or instructor droning forward with straight lectures.  No invitation for class discussion, no chance to reflect on the source material, just 50 minutes (or in the in the cruelest of circumstances, a three hour seminar) of pure lecture thrown at you.  Place yourself back in that classroom, and ask yourself “did I even learn anything?”  Even if you did, the absorption of information was probably minimal at best.  Depending on your own personal experience, you may also remind yourself “this was probably the worst class I’ve ever taken.”  So with the obvious common reaction, why is it that I’m betting 99.9% of you reading this can all relate to this example?

The term “lecture” is something that students and instructors alike are beginning to hate.  This point has become more obvious to me the more classes I take, and the more classes I TA for.  Instructors will make the statement on the first day of class that “I don’t like to lecture for the entire period, so I hope you (the students) will engage in discussion.”  While this provides a far more stimulating situation than having a PowerPoint displayed and then read word-for-word with little to no elaboration, this statement can also start to mimic a plea for help.  It’s like saying the lecture is still going to be boring, and the source material won’t stand on its own without the help of outside discussion and inquiry.

I don’t think I’m saying anything that you yourself may not have already thought to yourself.  So why say it?  Well for one, learning experiences like these are still happening to this day on this very campus.  Reading through Robert Talbert’s article, I found myself nodding my head in agreement without even knowing it.  When you think about some of the better lecturers, do you frame these individuals as good teachers or good speakers?  While I agree that you’re more likely to get more out of a lecture when you have a great speaker, I also think you’ll retain more of the material when you’re placed in a a situation to absorb the material yourself.  Be that in groups, or preparing a train-the-trainer situation, to name a few examples.  Newer and different learning environments are springing up each day.  The New Culture of Learning is littered with diverse examples.  So why do we keep finding the same situation of students sitting in classrooms being lectured at when we can do so much better?

Don’t we want more of   than 

There was a small piece of the discussion from last class that stuck with me the rest of the week, and I’ve found myself thinking about it pretty frequently.  It seemed there was agreement that higher education is widely viewed as training for a job and less so as educating for the sake of learning or personal discovery.  “Training” and “education” are sometimes treated as synonymous in our system, but in reality those are distinctly different concepts.  This mindset of higher education as a means of training for a job, with the end goal of making money and supporting oneself, contributes to what some may consider systemic problems in current pedagogy, and I don’t wholly disagree.  But I do think there’s something more than that.

The notion that we go to college to qualify ourselves for well-paying jobs is almost too generous, and assigns too much credit to what I believe is probably the majority of individuals.  From my experience, higher education (or at least getting an undergraduate degree) is less intentional, planned, and active than finding one’s purpose or training for a job.  I think in today’s climate, it’s simply what you do after high school.  I personally watched all of my siblings (3 older brothers, 1 older sister) graduate from high school and move on to college without questioning whether or not they should.  In my senior year, it’s what everyone did, and it’s all everyone talked about—SAT scores, college applications, visiting campuses, acceptance letters, rejection letters, safety schools, etc.  And I think that’s at least a national phenomenon, if not international.  No one questions why they’re putting themselves in this position, they just follow the crowd, in an incredibly passive manner.  And as Mark Carnes points out in Setting Students’ Minds on Fire, many fail to graduate, which he attributes to a lack of interest and motivation.  When we passively find ourselves at a university of higher education simply because it was expected of us by the rest of society, it’s no surprise that the result is often a lack of interest and motivation.

The impact of so many more people holding undergraduate degrees has a ripple effect on the rest of higher education.  So many people enroll in colleges and universities, that a bachelor’s degree probably holds a lot less value than it may have had 50 years ago.  At one time, a bachelor’s degree set people apart.  I think the devaluation of this degree over time has pushed many people who are serious about setting themselves apart to pursue master’s degrees and PhDs.  In fact, many people do pursue graduate school to do just that.  But I would venture to say that many people also pursue graduate school as an extension of their indecision.  It allows us to keep pushing reality a bit further away, and postpone the day in which we actually have to make a decision regarding our career.  Obviously this is not true of everyone, but personally it was definitely true for me.  By the time my undergraduate years were coming to an end, I realized I still had no idea where I wanted to end up.  It was another passive move.

I think this all comes back to the question of: What do you want to be when you grow up?  If I don’t have a good answer, I’ll choose to put myself in an environment of constant learning and personal discovery to increase my chances of stumbling upon that answer.  I’m not interested in going through all of this education and “training” to find the job that will make me the most money.  Personally, I’m interested in pursuing higher education to open up as many doors as possible in an effort to pique my intellectual interest and identify my passion.  So far so good.

One common concern I hear among those in the field of biology is how to teach students. Since there’s so many things to know in this field, professors typically only lecture the material at the students and the students memorize the information, take the exam, and forget about it the next day. I had a professor once call her exams “brain dumps” because you were just spitting back out her notes on her exams. I learned nothing from that class. I always hear complaints about how students are not actually learning the material but rarely do I see anyone trying to make a change about this issue because it’s what we know and it’s easy. There are complaints but nothing is even done to change anything.

I think it’s a slow transition out of the typical lecture format we are used to; people are resistant to change. I appreciated Talbert’s piece on how lectures are beneficial. There are times when you cannot get away from giving lectures but it does not mean we have to continue doing them as they have been done. I belive we can continue using lectures but alter things to “actively” enage the students in learning. This way, it is a less radical change that will make it easier for both students and professors to adapt to.

Some places are already starting to make this change. A paper was published on a technique called “Learning before Lecture” where students were given pre-class assignments and time during the lecture was spent on those assignments. The paper found a significant increase in performance after this method was used. A professor gives lectures where his slides are questions that forces the students to participate in the class. Methods like these are still similar to what we are used to but encourages both the students and professors to be active in the learning process. With methods like this, I hope we can move past the concept of “brain dump” exams and actually work on getting students interested and helping them understand their class material.

After having completed my B.S. in Biochemistry, all I can say is that most of my classes felt like B.S. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my education and I’m immensely thankful to my parents for being able to pay for as much as they did. Let me clearly state that I do not think my Bachelor’s was a waste of my time. However, I have categorized any class I took that was offered as a traditional lecture style into one single bin in my memory. I can no longer remember who said what or when because all of the information was delivered to me in a large lecture hall, in uncomfortable seats, for 50 to 65 minutes, multiple times each week, with the same droning voice, and the same terrible slide show that was already shared with me prior to class. Rinse and repeat for 16 weeks/semester and 8 semesters.

Not all of my classes were like this, but every class that I hold as a fond memory was not a traditional lecture based class.

I am not an auditory learner, so writing notes from professors while they lecture is not the best way I retain information. My junior year, I took Organic Chemistry (for the second time) with a professor who decided to “flip” the class. I took it because the other professor who was offered had already been my professor the previous spring and I couldn’t get higher than a D on any test. I didn’t know what this flipped class was going to be like, but I knew I needed new. This is where I truly got my understanding of all organic chemistry, and I became one of the top students in his class, where in a previous semester I had been in the bottom 10% of this same subject and unable to continue into my majors courses because I failed this prerequisite.

The flipped class had us watching his lecture videos before class met. I would pause and play ad nauseum as I wrote down the notes to the class and any phrases he mentioned that I didn’t understand, I could pause his lecture and instantly look up. His videos were about 20 minutes long but this way made them roughly an hour per video. We’d be given an average of 3 videos per class meeting. Now when we got to class, we had to bring this packet of problem sets. In class, we would go over the entire packet together with him and the TAs walking through the aisles of the lecture hall. I found myself much more confident in the material as we discussed in class and this had me pose more complex questions. I would ask “what-ifs” more than anything else where previously in any other lecture class my number one question was “Could you repeat that?”.  He had his class times gameified as well. Bonus points on quizzes and tests for asking novel questions, but there was a cap on the number of points he’d give you for the semester. Questions were worth two points if he had to get back to you with an answer. This course motivated me through my increased confidence and I chose to look up lecture videos from educational websites that were like his, Khan Academy is a great one that comes to mind, and I relearned everything that I hadn’t absorbed from the first semester of this course. I started to be the one in my study group that had the answers and could easily explain it. I didn’t have to struggle to make it to class on time because this was my favorite one for the semester.

Historically, my favorite courses from my undergrad were not my majors courses, but my English classes I took for my CLE degree requirements. I got my favorite professor ever by pure chance, he was a Master’s student for the English department here at Virginia Tech and I was in his section of first year English during spring. The best part of his class was that there was no syllabus. We had two assignments, some readings for class, and a large project in the place of our final exam. The theme of the course was Music. Anything we wanted to write for the course just had to fit into Music. Class times focused on readings by authors he enjoyed that wrote about music and we discussed them as a group. Our big project was an album review. The rules: it must be on the Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All Time and you may not have already heard the album before. I decided on Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True to do the review on.

We had this project to do over the break which was perfect because I had uninterrupted time to just listen to this album on repeat. I was at my parent’s house and I had the album saved to my phone; if I brought my earbuds anywhere, I was listening to this album. A solid week during Thanksgiving break was dedicated to this album review for music that was originally released in the 1970s. After this album review on a man who was arguably the “Father of Punk Music” I then began my second project into a history of punk music as well as the societal impacts of the genre in current events at that time. This class wasn’t gameified like my Organic Chemistry, but there were no rules, just the ability to freely express myself on a subject I enjoyed.

These two courses shaped my views of education. I decided that I wanted to educate students in upper level life sciences because its a subject I truly enjoy and it’s one I can allow a lot of freedom of expression into the lesson plans of. I agree with Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown, as we enter the 21st century, we need to look to ways to teach in the 21st century. Blackboards and overheads are a thing of the past. Technology is the future. Gameification provides the platform for changing the classrooms successfully.

 

Generally, I’ve always “liked” school. I never really minded going to class in high school. Sure, tests were hard, and studying for them was too stressful for my health, but I never truly hated the concepts of tests and grades and homework. My brother, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. He’s smart, but he dislikes school and everything associated with it. He’s trudging through his undergraduate degree longing for the moment he can be done forever. Over the years, I have noticed that  he is definitely more of a learn-by-doing type of learner; lecture doesn’t do so much for him.  He has a graphic design type of side-business that seems to be doing quite well, and all he knows, he either taught himself or learned through online community.

So reading these articles dealing with reaching those who are “digital learners,” who learn by play and community, really reinforced the idea that communal learning is something I truly would like to incorporate into my classroom in any way that I can. Robert Talbert’s “Four Things Lecture is Good For” reminded me that lectures, though some are inspiring and memorable, are actually not that inspiring and memorable. How many lectures do I remember from high school? From undergrad? Few. In fact, as Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s Chapter “Arc-of-Life Learning” suggests, play and imagination combined for a more emphatic experience. He states that these concepts are “the very heart of arc-of-life learning” (18). The classes I remember from high school tend to be the days of active learning, of play. Any class’s favorite days were the review game days where we split up into competitive groups determined to beat each other by proving what we remembered, the lab days where we got to heat a solution and watch it turn a deep magenta pink. But the question that will probably make its way into every one of my posts now appears: how do I do this in my own classroom? In a writing class?

Thomas and Seely Brown’s chapter differed from my regular type of article reading mainly in content because it dealt so much with games and science. I don’t play games. I’ve never played games. I don’t understand them. But the article was actually really interesting, especially the segment on the little boy Sam, who knows more about technology and codes at the age of 9 than I could ever hope to learn over the course of the rest of my life. Sam grew as a learner, a teacher, and a professional, if you will, because of the collaborative learning community in which he took part (23).

This reminded me of the concept of peer review. I supposed I could even refer to it as a type of pedagogy. And it’s one that I have scheduled a lot of into my semester. Why? Because I believe that it teaches my students about audience. They’re writing for more people than just the instructor. It helps their writing become more clear. If their peer can’t understand what they’re saying, the likelihood of my understanding it goes way down. It helps them learn in a hands on way. Spotting problems in another person’s project is easier than spotting the problems in their own. As they practice finding issues in writing, I hope recognizing problems in the writing they produce becomes easier. But I’m always on the look out for more group work ideas and interactive ways of teaching concepts. I truly think my students have more fun when they have a sort of game or group work to take up class time. I think they learn more, too. But that’s the hard part, I think–coming up with ideas.

Last year I took a class that was taught by my advisor. This is usually a big class with around 80 students or more. I used to sit in the first row and sometimes, in the middle of the class, I used to look back, and guess what? I always see a couple of students sleeping. At that time, I could not understand why there were sleeping because I was so excited in that class (The motivation and excitement of the first semester at VT).

Now, trying to understand the students’ behavior, maybe, the class was too long. Well, this is not a maybe, this is completely true! The class was 3 hours long! and what could be worse? The class was almost at end of the day, from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm. At that time, everyone is tired from a long day and I guess everyone wants to go home!

As professors, we should consider the average human being’s attention span when planning the length of a lecture¹. It turns very difficult for students to keep their attention after have been seated for more than an hour looking at a lot of slides. Depending on the length of the class, the amount of information received could be overwhelming for some students. Next day, they would probably not recall all the information given in the lecture¹.

In fact, one of the things that I really like about the classes in the United States is that most of them are usually 1hr or 1 hr 15 min long. When I was doing my bachelor and my master in Colombia, 2 hours in a class were an eternity for me!  Believe me, most of the information provided by the professors during these 2 hours, sometimes, was very unuseful. So,

Do you carefully think about the content that you want to convey in a lecture? Are we preparing the students for the real world? or Are we just transmitting them things that they never are going to apply in their careers?

Let’s back to the class that I took last year. What I really liked about this class is that my advisor always incorporated some stories from either his own experience or life¹ These helped us to understand a concept easily. Even his sense of humor made the class more enjoyable. His jokes broke the wall between students and professor. The class was very active because we had to do several exercises. I consider this as an active learning² in my field (civil engineer) because students can work in teams for problem-solving. They actually felt very comfortable working with a partner during the class. They did not have the pressure of being evaluated, they generated discussions, and felt free to ask questions. This is something necessary during heavy classes because all the exercises look so good in the slides, and the solutions even better! But,

Do you really understand everything just by looking at the solution in the slides or in a book?

I totally agree with my advisor when he says that

“It is not until you do it that you learn how to do it” Don’t you agree?

Another reason that comes to my mind when I think why students feel sleepy during lectures is the lack of motivation or interest in the class or the topic. For me, this is the root of the problem. If you are motivated, you do not care if the class is late or long. You always have a positive attitude and try to do your best. So, when I read the following statement, I was not surprised about it:

“Students quit and fail not because they lack funds, but because they lack motivation and interest²”

This year, I am the TA for the class that I took last year. On the first day, I had to introduce myself. Usually, my advisor asks me to talk about where I am from, my background, and my office hours. However, I decided to do something different this time. This is what I told students:

You guys are so lucky for having the opportunity to take a class with one of the most well-known scheduling experts in the industry. In my case, I had to come from Colombia, which is thousands of miles away, just to have the chance to work with him. I can tell you that I have no regrets! I know that you have a lot of work to do in this class! But believe me, at the end, everything will pay off and you will learn so much!  So guys, don’t waste your time on Facebook or using your cell phones. Instead, work hard and learn from the best!

I know that I was out of the script as my advisor said but I felt that I should motivate the students in some way. You know what? It worked! Students are so interested in the class, they are paying attention, they are working on the class exercises and asking questions. They are taking notes instead of using their cell phones or laptops. It is really cool! I think that they just needed some kind of motivation.

Now, in this new learning era, as instructors, we have the challenge of taking advantage of the unlimited resources that the internet gives us and combine them with an environment that allows students to build and experiment the topics, concepts, ideas, examples, etc. in a different way³.

We have to be very creative!

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¹http://www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/02/13/four-things-lecture-is-good-for/

²http://www.chronicle.com/article/Setting-Students-Minds-on/126592/

³http://www.newcultureoflearning.com/newcultureoflearning.pdf

The one thing that intrigued me the most from this week’s readings didn’t actually come from the readings themselves. It was, rather, the contrast produced by the first comment following the “Setting Students’ Minds on Fire” article and the article itself (I’d link straight to the comment  if I knew how).

The article painted this colorful picture filled with students that were excited about learning. They were invested in the content, and they were invested in the game. They were so invested it was hindering other students’ ability to party, which as we know is the priority of weekend college nights.

That first comment though, reminded me much more of the reality of my own schooling. The commentor, username richardtaborgreene, described what he learned through his school years, and it was mostly how to sit while being just aware enough to get decent grades. He had learned to be what he calls a “passive sitter.” Which is what the world wants… right? Passive sitters are perfect for corporate jobs, the commentor continues, because “they make excellent low cost machine substitutes… [and] excellent cannon fodder” when wars should arise.  Passive sitters are easy to manipulate and make other people rich. The commentor describes school as a prison forcing students to assume the role of passive sitters while tamping down their excitement to learn about what interests them, and suppressing real learning.

The commentor says that he first experienced a type of inspired learning that more resembles that actual article he was commenting on at a mass research event hosted by IBM 40 years ago.  Where he, along with his team, was able to go “from zero to as good as world best experts in 3 days!!” and said that “NO UNIVERSITY ever exposed [him] to as much learning, as fun-ly gained, and as much educating, as powerfully delivered, in equivalent time periods.”  The commentor seems baffled that universities don’t engage in such events, but corporations do.

My education certainly has looked more like the comment than the article.  Most of my classes were lectures. Some tried to include group work, but it was forced and not terribly effective. I had a few seminars where we the students did most of the talking and were encouraged to “learn from each other,” but that didn’t take much more effort than a lecture. I’ve never felt that inspired learning though. I’ve never been so engaged in a class, or in a portion of a class that I couldn’t switch school off for a while to engage in other activities. I’d like to experience that, though. More than experience it, I’d like to provide my students with that experience. Which raises the question: How do I, having never experienced this ” mind set on fire” learning, teach in that manner? How can I make that transition from perpetuate-or of passive sitters to a pilot light? Where do I find my English classroom equivalent of the IBM mass research event? Or will I have to come up with my own (a daunting task to say the least)?

High education faces variety challenge during the 21 centery.-the digital era. There are a great many methods that student access the information, books, Ebook, the internet, forum, online course, and tutorial.  How the high educational institutes keep the state of major educational center? What the students will experience in their life time? It is the questions that educator needs to face and think about.

Studying in the classroom is the major part of this step in our learning life. As we all know at the first class in each semester, the professor always gives us the syllabus and announced the schedule of the semester. Then, students will introduce themselves, like the name, the study background, the purpose of the study. Is anyone thinking about why the professor plans to do this? Communication and cooperation are the important part in learning. Even in the studio course, these are many group works and discussion in the class. It is not a chance to sharing the thoughts and ideas, but also the ways to enhance the ability of social communication. Learning from others and studying with classmates is the essential part, which the access of learning from the virtual world would never be replaced. Moreover, the another task for the professor is how to guide the student in further research independently. There are two different reasons to select the major: to choose the major followed by the mind, or select the major depends on the salary. It is easy for the professor to instruct the first type of student. They have a clear goal and schedule. But, it is a challenge for the professor that how to lead to the second type of students in the specific research area which they are not familiar and interested in.

A group of approaches that professors would use during the process of teaching in the digital era. The lecture is not the only ways in the class. As the student in the digital media, or be a teacher in the future. The main purpose for the students in this area is to use the digital media to enrich our learning and daily life. Therefore, learning from the game is a trend that widely used in the institutes that education is the main responsibility.  For an instant, my classmate Lisa Liu graduated on May 2017, her final project “Forbidden City In The Immersive Virtual Reality World” is a VR game which presents the history of the Forbidden City. The audience not only to appreciate the historical heritage in Beijing but also learn the historical background and aesthetic information about this Empire building. Besides, outside classroom learning is the essential part in the rest of life. In other words, the ability of self-learning is be training in the school. Where to learn and how to gain the information efficiently is the big task student faced after they graduate. The Master said, “When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teacher I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.”

“Choose your love, love your choice”