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When it comes to learning we have tried more and we have tried better–now we need to try different. Great sentiment and good video but it doesn’t address how we do the different.
Category: Learning
Project Information Literacy
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This youtube video offers a summary of the Truth be Told: How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age Project Information Literacy Progress report by Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg. The report deals with college students and their information-seeking strategies and research difficulties, including findings from 8,353 survey respondents from college students on 25 campuses distributed across the U.S. in spring of 2010, as part of Project Information Literacy.
Overall, the findings suggest students use an information-seeking and research strategy driven by efficiency and predictability for managing and controlling all of the information available to them on college campuses, though conducting comprehensive research and learning something new is important to most, along with passing the course and the grade received.
Some of the results are not surprising–students reported difficulties getting started with research assignments and determining the nature and scope of what was required of them. Other finding suggest that college students aren’t as information illiterate as many assume. The 36 page report offers valuable information that we can use to inform the development of effective learning environments.
Thanks to Richard Beck for sending this information my way.
21% Increase in Enrollment in Online Courses
Enrollment in Online Courses Increases at the Highest Rate Ever – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The Wired Campus article points to the reality that online learning is growing rapidly. The for profits like University of Phoenix, Kaplan and Capella understand this and see undergraduate online education as their “bread & butter”. Perhaps traditional Universities will start to understand this student demand and move toward meeting it. Consider the following numbers:
- 2,600 higher-education institutions surveyed by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group.
- 1 million more students than in 2009 were enrolled in at least one Web-based course.
- 5.6 million – total number of online students.
- 20-percent increase over last year in online learning from for-profit universities (they get it).
- More public colleges than private for-profits—74.9 percent versus 60.5 percent—say online learning is part of their long-term plans.
- 32 percent of for-profit institutions—compared with about 17 percent of public colleges—said it will be difficult to comply with government regulations on financial aid.
- 66 percent of college administrators say that online education is the same as or better than face-to-face classes—a slight decline from last year.
The Shadow Scholar – Academic Ghost Writer for Higher
ASSUMING the Chronicle of Higher Education article is true and I am not so quick to assume that it is, this article points to a one of our most significant problems in education. A system that:
focus[es] on evaluation rather than education
and where meaningless work that can be easily created by someone who isn’t even in the course.
The author is a self confessed ghost writer who writes custom papers for students and claims that he as written thousands of vacuous scholarly pages, contributed a masters degree in cognitive psychology and a Ph.D. sociology as well as countless other undergraduate assignments. We all know that cheating is rampant in higher education and articles like this confirm the problem is only getting worse. In the article Anti-Teaching Confronting the Crisis of Significance, Micheal Wesch a social anthropologist from Kansas State and the creator of the viral youtube video Vision of Students Today suggests that our classrooms and what we do in them are void of meaning for our learners. Wesch argues that when we hear questions like: “How long does this paper need to be?” or “What do we need to know for this test?” we should understand that
Such questions reflect the fact that, for many (students and teachers alike), education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create.
When assessment, grades and credentials become the focus, is there any wonder that ghost writers that support cheating can exist and flourish in this type of environment?
Do Podcasts Help Students Learn – Maybe This is the Wrong Question
When I see a title like “Do Podcasts Help Students Learn” in an article, paper, blog or any other location I know for certain that I will see some variation of the following statement in the document:
Overall, the study found no statistical difference between the performance of students who used…
In this article the “no significant difference” statement came just a few paragraphs into the piece. Anyone who has more that just an Introduction to Psychology or Educational Psychology course should know that measuring learning is a very challenging task. It is much easier to measure the factors that contribute to an effective learning environment like, engagement, motivation, time on task etc. and fortunately some of these factors were included in the article. While the researchers in this study found no statistical difference between the performance of students who used podcasts over those using text it did reveal the following:
1. Podcasts grab attention and maintain it.
2. Students conceptually understood the content, not just remembered it, and the scale of understanding seemed to tip toward the podcasts.
3. The students who said they weren’t that motivated at the beginning of the class scored higher on the test when they listened to the podcasts.
So the students who used the podcasts were more engaged, understood the concepts better and were more motivated. While we aren’t sure if podcast help students learn they do contribute to the factors necessary for effective learning environments. The study also reveals that the men who participated in the study increased their post test scores and general the students like using the podcasts.
If we step back from the fact that this is an implementation of a relatively simple to use technology and look at the pedagogy we will see that condensing information into a 10 minute summary enhanced by audio and video, is there any wonder that students preferred these supplements and were more engaged. If we just look at the learning the title of the piece could have been “Do Effective Instructor Class Summaries Help Students Learn.” But that doesn’t increase hits or solicit reader responses…