Author: mfseddik

Contemporary Pedagogy Vs. Bureaucracy !!

At the end of the course and in my last post I would really like to thank Dr. Nelson, the TA team, and all of my classmates for this great opportunity to learn new ways of pedagogy that will pave the road for us as future professors. Now to a shocking question, can we really apply these methods and techniques (i.e. PBL) in our classroom? In other words, will we be allowed to do so? I don’t want to be pessimistic, but the answer is in some places this can be very hard. Some universities in some countries are fully controlled by the government to the extent that the professor may not be free in choosing his way of teaching. For example in Egypt, most of the universities are public and controlled by the ministry of higher education. Each department’s curriculum is created by some of the professors working in the department through the department council. However, before starting the new curriculum, it should be reviewed and approved by the ministry of higher education through an entity called the supreme universities council. This process involves a lot of bureaucracy and it may take a year or more for a curriculum to get approved. Once approved, any minor change in the curriculum (i.e. Adding or removing a topic) should be reviewed and approved by the supreme universities council before being effective. The curriculum should define the list of courses required or optional for a specific degree, the list of topics within each course, the grading policy, the textbook, and any other relevant information to the course. Some of these requirements are obligatory (i.e.  exams and grading policy), and others are just recommendations (i.e. textbooks). For example if it is stated in the curriculum that there is a midterm or final for a course, then the professor is required to offer the midterm or the final and there is no choice for him. For me, I really hate exams and I don’t want to offer exams in my classes and I would like to rely on project assessment. But, it will be a violation by law if I didn’t provide the final!!! The good news is that there are some professors that can devise some workarounds to all these restrictions. I remember in one of my master classes in Cairo university in Egypt, the professor (a PhD holder from Maryland college park) decided not to give any exam and he just relied on submitting a report at the end of the semester. But according to the Computer Science Curriculum in Cairo University, there must be a final for this course. Accordingly, he told us to come at the time of the exam and just staple our reports to an empty exam paper!!!!! What an idea!!!! I really liked this, and I will never forget this professor. I really learned from him that a professor can be creative and do whatever he wants in his class despite any restriction or bureaucracy. But this adds some burden on the professor as now he is required to devise creative ways of teaching and devise their corresponding bureaucracy workarounds. Otherwise, he should then spend all his time in his career writing and submitting curricular changes to the supreme universities council!!

Paulo Freire evaluating my Syllabus!

It was really interesting to me to have a look at Paulo Freire’s point of view about how education should be like or what is called “The critical pedagogical practice”. Unfortunately, throughout my learning experience both in school and in college, I’ve never taken a class that truly applied Freire’s ideas and recommendations. I remember that we students were all passive receptors receiving knowledge from the “Oracle” or what we call the “teacher” without the ability to express ourselves and think critically. The result is just we “store” whatever knowledge is thrown on us from the teacher to spit it out in the exam and that’s it. The disaster is that most of us now after 10 years or so doesn’t remember what these classes were about! This is not the true goal of education and we as educators should avoid this “passive” approach of teaching. For me as a future educator, I don’t want to fall into the trap that most of my teachers fell into when I was student. For this reason, I will try now to evaluate my Syllabus draft from the previous week in the light of Freire’s approach about “Critical Pedagogy”.

My course is a project/activity based course that teaches junior level computer science students the fundamentals of commonly used data structures and algorithms in the field. This course is programming intensive, accordingly, most of the focus should be on giving the students hands on practical experience. For this reason, 60% of the grade is dedicated to programming projects that allows the student to experience how to write programs for real. I see that this part of the syllabus is linked directly to Freire’s point about “empowering students to be critically engaged and active participants in society” as they are writing their own programs that can help organizations and businesses in managing and manipulating the tremendous amounts of data they generate daily. I believe this to be a direct connection between the student and the society in which students are actively engaged in developing solutions for the welfare of the society.

I also devoted 20% of the course grade to participation. I want to listen to the students and make them active within the class. This satisfies Freire’s point “The importance of dialogic exchange between teachers and students, where both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in meaning-making“. This way, the student will find the tribune from which he can share his ideas with his classmates and the teacher and become an influential part of the knowledge creation process. This also satisfies Freire’s point “To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge“. Part of the participation grade is for creating activities for the students to do in class. This gives the student the opportunity to be more creative and to be an effective agent in the knowledge design process as he is the one who creates the activities for the class.

The final part of the grade is dedicated to assignments. The main purpose of these assignments is just to ensure that the student has Grasped the required conceptual fundamentals so that he will be able to do the projects and the activities. These are True/False, Fill in the blanks, simple programming, and MCQ. They are designed to test the student understanding of a particular concept not his ability to memorize the concept. Since the course has no exams so I believe there will be no need for students to memorize, but they learn the concepts to apply them in the projects and activities. This aligns with Ferier’s point “Intellectuals who memorize everything, reading for hours on end . . .fearful of taking a risk, speaking as if they were reciting from memory, fail to make any concrete connections between what they have read and what is happening in the world, the country, or the local community.  They repeat what has been read with precision but rarely teach anything of personal value“. The course is carefully designed to avoid any means of memorization and focus mainly on practical hands on application.

Finally, I believe that the syllabus will do a good job in applying Ferier’s approach of critical pedagogy as it satisfies some of the points that Ferier stressed on.

I Don’t Want You In My Class!!

Yes, I know the title is shocking, but I want you to imagine that you feel this from a course instructor because of your race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, age, ethnicity group, or nationality. what would be your reaction?

Of course mostly you will drop the course, but with an incurable wound. We don’t want this discriminative atmosphere to prevail in higher education. All of us as students demand a diverse and inclusive atmosphere in which we can pursue our studies fairly and safely. As an instructor, you shouldn’t discriminate between your students because of anything pertaining to their beliefs or origin. All of the students should have the right to learn and interact in class without being worried about how the instructor will treat them. The same thing also holds for classmates. All the students in a class should be welcoming to and accept each other.

However, in every location in the world there are some problems hindering this diverse and inclusive atmosphere. To me the most disastrous is this “unconscious bias” as described by Shankar Vedantam. The story that he mentioned about the death of Deletha Word is really terrifying! The question that needs an urgent answer now, is why the crowd on the bridge didn’t help her get rid of that assailant. Is it because of her race? Is it because of they are cowards? I believe this to be an incarnation of the “hidden brain” or the “unconscious bias” problems. I believe a fair number of people are biased towards people who are not like them in race or religion even though they are not aware of that and this is really the major problem. They don’t know about it! In higher education, we still have this problem. a fair number of instructors and classmates are having this “unconscious bias” (or may be conscious?) towards their minority classmates. This has a very bad impact on the minorities as they are not feeling safe in their classes and accordingly, they are not able to pursue their learning in a suitable atmosphere.

I want to share with you this video of an experiment that was done to see how people respond to the harassment of a Muslim woman.

Finally I want to share with you two verses from the holly Quran and one authentic speech of Prophet Mohammed (Peace be Upon Him) about racism and discrimination.

“O Mankind, we created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into tribes and nations so that you may know each other (not that you despise each other). Verily, the most honored of you in the sight of Allah (god) is he who is most righteous of you.” (Al-Quran, Chapter 49, Verse 13)

“And amongst his (refers to god) signs is the creation of heaven and the earth, and variation in your language and colors; Verily, in there are signs for those who know” (Al-Quran, Chapter 30, Verse 22)

“O people, your Lord is one and your father Adam is one. There is no favoritism of an Arab over a foreigner, nor a foreigner over an Arab, and neither red skin over black skin, nor black skin over red skin, except through righteousness. Have I not conveyed the message?” (prophet Mohammed PBUH)

Students from passive receptors to dancers?!!!

As an instructor, crafting your teaching philosophy that you believe is the most effective for your students is not an easy task. As Sarah Deel mentioned, you probably as a new instructor will try to imitate the way your professors used to teach you when you were in school. However, everyone has his own personality and not all instructors can do the same thing and be effective for students. In addition, students are different from each other and accordingly, one method of instruction is not effective for all students. So, how to figure out a method of instruction that suits your personality and is effective for your students is really a challenging task.

According to me I believe in active learning as a good way of conveying knowledge to students. It was mentioned in several educational research papers that engagement is a key factor in student understanding. Active learning turns the student from a passive receptor of knowledge (less engagement) to an active generator of knowledge (high engagement). So how can this be achieved?

I will take an example from a computer science course named “Data Structures and Algorithms” which is a critical course in any computer science curriculum and contains a lot of abstract concepts with no physical manifestation. This makes it really hard for students to easily grasp these concepts. The old traditional way of teaching this course is to present the idea behind a particular algorithm and show its pseudo code and try to discuss what this code is doing. For example here is the pseudo code for one of the most important sorting algorithms named Insertionsort.

code-insertion-sort

As you see this code describes the dynamic process of sorting a list of numbers. It is really hard to make your students understand this mechanical process using static pseudo code representation. I bet the students will not be engaged to this method of presentation.

Another method of presenting this is to provide a visual animated depiction to this dynamic sorting process. I believe this to be a large leap from the traditional pseudo code approach, but still the students are passive in that they are just viewing what is going on in the animation without being actually active. Look at this animation.

What about making students learn this sorting algorithm with dancing? Believe me we can do that.

If we can make our students learn this hard and abstract concepts by performing a joyful engaging act like dancing, then we have turned our students from passive receivers to active generators of knowledge. The only drawback of this method is that it is embarrassing to most of the students. But I totally agree with  Sarah Deel when she mentioned that if you as an instructor described the reason of doing this type of activities to your students as to make them learn better, I believe they will like to participate.

How about Assessing professors!!

Last week we talked about how we as professors assess our students and gauge how much knowledge they acquired from our courses. An important question here arises. How professors are being assessed themselves?

Probably the most widely known method of evaluating university professors these days is this survey given to the students at the end of each semester to evaluate their instructors. While I believe this to be an effective way of evaluating whether the instructor has achieved the aspirations of his students in making them understand the content, I think other evaluation methods should be available to have a more complete picture. What about monitoring instructors? The department can hire an evaluation committee composed of 3-5 faculty members who are selected anonymously. A new committee should be hired each academic year and each faculty could only participate in this committee once every 3-5 years so that all the faculty members in the department can take their turn and join the committee. A camera should be installed in each classroom and each instructor should sign a consent form that he is agreeing to be monitored. Only 4 or 5 lectures are randomly recorded and selected to be used in the evaluation, but the instructor doesn’t know which lectures are being recorded. This selection strategy is to ensure that the faculty members in the evaluation committee are not overwhelmed as they have their own research and teaching responsibilities. The evaluation should be fair and any conflict of interest (i.e. one professor from the committee is working on a project with an instructor) should be clearly reported to the department. While reviewing the recorded lectures, the evaluation committee should evaluate the instructor according to how he treats his students, the effort he exerts in making his students understand the content he is trying to convey, whether his knowledge is up to date, and other factors that the department feels necessary. Finally, the committee should submit an evaluation report to the department for each instructor. I know this may have some ethical problems but I think it may be one of the additional ways that can be used beside student surveys.

 

Are Exams The Only Way of Assessing Students?

How many of us are scared when they hear the word “EXAM”. I bet most of us do. The reason behind this is the stress caused by studying and digesting fair amounts of information before a predetermined date and our will to pass the exam and get good grades. The exam itself is supposed to be a way of assessing how much knowledge a student acquires in a specific course. Let’s now ask some important questions. 1) Is the time of the exam (at most 2-3 hours) sufficient to design a set of questions that can span the whole syllabus? 2) Are exams the only way of assessing our students’ learning gains? 3) Do we assess our students to just give them a semester grade or to help and guide them improve their learning?

The answer to question 1) is absolutely no. How can I test the student in a set of topics I lectured through a whole semester in just 2 hours? Of course I will not be able to design the questions in such a way that it span the whole syllabus. Accordingly, most of the time I will just focus on those important or hard topics. This is not a real assessment. Unfortunately this is the way we were assessed back home in Egypt when we were applying for university. We were given classes for a whole year and then given a standardized test for 3 hours at the end of the year!! Another way to do that which is what is usually applied these days in the US and other countries is to have midterm exams in addition to a final exam and a set of assignments or projects. This may seem as a good approach at first. Now an exam doesn’t need to span the whole syllabus which is fine and may allow the professor to better assess and improve their students. However, this adds more stress to the students since now they will have to do all the assignments and projects on time and also prepare for the midterm and final exams.

Personally I see that some sort of assessment of course is necessary, but it doesn’t need to be an exam or a strict assignment. In most Engineering disciplines, learning how to do things practically is more important than just learning about some theories or concepts and dump them in an exam without applying them. Accordingly, I believe that practical colleges should focus more on activities that span the whole semester and based on milestones. For example, students can be given a set of projects that they should work on for the whole semester. And the professor should define a set of milestones that they should accomplish and their due dates (with a bonus for those who did it early and some sort of penalty protocol for late students). If the student fail to achieve the milestone, the professor then can sit with the student and discuss with him what he did wrong and how can he better accomplish future milestones. This way, I believe students will master the practical skills required for the course at the end of the semester. On the other hand we don’t want to ignore theoretical and conceptual knowledge. Accordingly, in addition to projects, students can be given a set of assignments that are intended to measure their level of understanding after each topic with the same due date protocol as in projects. The professor now can see the performance of his students and intervene when necessary if he find a student that needs help.

Having this strategy of assessment, I believe stressful exams are not required anymore and that professors will be now more able to guide and help their students.

Learning styles: A problem to the how question in course design!

It was really interesting to me to see this video of Sir Ken Robinson about how to escape the education’s death valley. The main lesson I got out of this video is that we as educators should try to design our courses taking into consideration the individuality of our students. In other words, after putting the syllabus and defining the material and content that should be learned, we should really take the second step which is deciding “how” we will deliver these content with great caution and keep in mind that our students are different. Given this truth that our students are different, do you think that using a single method of course delivery (i.e. lecture based plus assigned readings) will make all of our students engaged in the course? According to sir Robinson the answer is definitely no and I am totally agree with him.

In my research I am working on designing and evaluating new methods of course delivery that will make students engaged in hard computer science topics mainly Data Structures and Algorithms. The main hypothesis in my research is that if abstract text book material is presented more concretely relying on computer animations, students will be more engaged in the topic and their learning gains also will be enhanced. For an example of the difference between the two methods of presentations refer to the figure below.

Capture

To this point, do you see the flaw in my hypothesis? Clearly I’ve overlooked the individuality of my students and assumed that all of them will prefer learning through animations over learning through reading textual material. In education, there is something called learning styles which is defined as: an individual’s unique approach to learning based on strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. For example since students are different from each other, some of them may prefer to see the material as videos and photos, others may prefer animations, and others may prefer reading from a text book. When I was interviewing one of the students in my study and I asked him about his opinion if we replace the textual content with animated content, he suggested that the material is better to be presented using both methods and the student is free to use the one he prefers. I believe that this suggestion comes out from and supports the idea of learning styles.

Finally, my advice to all educators is to try to understand the preferences and abilities or in other words the learning styles of their students and work hard to deliver the content based on this. I bet this way we will have lower course drop rates and we will have our students more engaged in our courses.

Learning in the information age: Let’s Connect!

No doubt we have heard this statement before “We are now living in the information age”. Yes, this is the age of information in which knowledge is available everywhere and can be easily acquired from a tremendous variety of sources wherever we are. The corner stone of these sources is no doubt the internet. Of course being able to collect information about politics, economy, or any other field of specialization has changed our lives. In addition, being able to connect together and share information through social media, has also a great impact on our lives. All these changes have an inevitable impact on learning and education. According to [1], there is a wide agreement that new models of education are needed to suit this information age, and not simply new models of schooling, but entirely new visions of learning better suited to the increasing complexity, connectivity, and pace of our new knowledge society.

According to Wikipedia [2], connected learning is an approach to education centered around the abundance of information and social connections brought by networked and digital media. According to [3] it is not a learning theory and it is not a specific set of learning techniques, it is just a set of principles that allow students to be engaged, empowered, and equipped to learn effectively and continuously through their lives.

According to [1], there are three values that forms the core of connected learning.

  • Equity: Within connected learning, all students should have the same opportunity for learning in terms of finding information and joining institutes. This aligns with the principle of diversity and inclusion in which underrepresented groups are encouraged to have a good education opportunity.
  • Full participation: When learners are actively engaged in education, the community, learning environment, and the civic life all will thrive.
  • Social connection: The learning experience is better when the learning process is part of a valued social interconnection with shared practices, culture and identities.

According to [1, 3, 4], connected learning has six principles in order to realize the previously defined values. These principles are:

  • Interest-powered: Intuitively speaking, when a student is more interested to study a specific subject, his learning outcome is expected to be better as compared to other subjects that he is not interested in. Connected learning relies on the innate interests of the learner and it also views interests and passions as something to be actively developed through the learning process. In addition, learners better engage when they connect what they learn to their short-term and long term goals.
  • Peer-supported: Powerful engaging learning can be achieved in the context of peer interactions between individual learners contributing to each other, sharing information, and give feedback to one another.
  • Academically oriented: Learning outcomes should be linked and directed towards some academic achievements and excellence. Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth.
  • Shared purpose: Connected learning environments are populated with learner peers who share common interests and are contributing to a shared goal. Today’s social media provide exceptional means for common interest learners to connect together, share knowledge, and engage in common projects and inquiry.
  • Production-centered: Connected learning environments are designed around production relying on new digital media as tools for sharing products with wider audience.
  • Openly-networked: Connected learning environments are created around networks of institutions and learning groups in which learning resources, tools, and materials are abundant.

References

[1] http://connectedlearning.tv/connected-learning-principles

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected_Learning

[3] http://altlab.vcu.edu/showcase/defining-connected-learning/

[4] http://clalliance.org/why-connected-learning/