(upbeat music)
(Patsy Moskal) Norm Vaughan is the professor in the Department of Education
at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
A little bit colder than Orlando, Florida.
He's an international expert in blended learning
and frequently presents and publishes on his work in blended learning
and faculty development. Dr. Vaughan's also the co-founder
of the Blended Online Design Network, a member of the Community of Inquiry
Research Group, the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Mobile
and Blended Learning and is on a number of editorial boards. Bottom line is
this guy is a serious expert in blended learning and faculty development.
(Norm) No pressure, no pressure. (laughter)
(Patsy) No pressure. We've known him and he's been a friend of UCF for probably
pushing 15 years now, I would say. So, for those who are attending the
Online Learning Consortium conference next week here in Orlando, he's doing
a number of sessions, so look him up. But we're very fortunate that he's here
today to share some of his expertise with us, so please help me in giving a big
Knights welcome to Dr. Norman Vaughan.
(clapping)
(Norm) Patsy, thanks so much for that. So, the first thing I just want to say is
I really appreciate you making the time to do this. I know it's like the airline.
You had a lot of choices today, a lot of things happened last night,
thank you for being here. The second thing I know is how busy your day is throughout
the day and so, if you've got to leave for a class at one or whatever, I totally
understand. I'll try and finish my stuff up by then so we can have a discussion.
The second thing is what a privilege it is for me to be here. Most of my work,
as Patsy mentioned, I've been sort of clinging on to the work that you've all
been doing here over the past fifteen years. A lot of the work that I've done
in blended learning or faculty development has directly come from your work,
so I think you might find this kind of interesting to see how your models
here have been taken by another institution and tweaked a little bit
just based on our culture and what we do. So just, you know, if you want the slides
or whatever, we're unfortunately a Google-licious state or province.
Google's poured all the resources into us, we're out of money,
so we use everything they can give us. We know there's the Patriot's Act,
though it all sits on America. It's amazing in Canada that we got it.
I'm going to be careful about where I come from.
I come from Texas North, and I'm going to apologize
but a pipeline now will be pushed through your major aquifers
because of last night, and we'll leave it at that. So, a lot of business people
where I come from are very happy. So, what I thought we could do today,
though, is just talk about, I see you've got your creed here,
you've got your goals here. But I always like to start with
the factors about student and faculty engagement,
why we engage in online and blended learning.
And then, I'm really curious to see your definition because we still
call it the M mode, the mixed mode. And again, I think you understand it,
like you are the mothership. This is where this whole idea of hybrid
and blended learning comes from. It's this campus, this institution.
Again, the issues with cost, issues with all the learning. So, I want to talk
a little bit about that cause I want to get some information from you.
Then, I think this is really important because again, this is what you do
so well, working with the faculty here. So, I'm just curious about the roles,
what your roles are, what we're looking at in terms of faculty.
I think the big thing we talk a lot about now is PR, a partner relationship,
that we just can't do this alone. So, I'm really curious about how
you support it, and this is something I'm very nervous to talk about,
but I'm going to give you some ideas about how we evaluate
the success of our blended courses. Again, we're at a bit of an infant stage.
We don't have the wealth of experience, and we don't have this woman either.
Patsy. (laughter)
We don't have evaluated experts, we've got people like me.
Well, she told me she still has a winter coat, so.
(laughter) Cause unfortunately, where I live,
I can't make it up, it's cold. I was skiing on the weekend.
Okay, so let's just see if I can sit down and not be hyper.
Go to the next slide. So, this one's a biggy for us.
Our institution, I learned yesterday, 1963 is when you folks got going here,
and it's about 64 thousand students, I think. I guess you're not supposed
to say you're second, but you're up there in the top five,
I think, in terms of the largest physical campus in the United States.
It's amazing I'm here. We're a little over a hundred years.
We were formed in 1910, and it's fascinating.
When you go through every mission statement, every learning plan
that we put together, there's this idea of student engagement, and you know,
sometimes, that word may be overused. I think these days we should talk about
student empowerment. But just to sort of break it up a little here.
You know the old think, pair, share. Would you mind just with the person
beside you, maybe it's somebody you haven't met before, just saying hi.
I'm always curious, and I get my students, oh yeah, you're already onto it,
but just share what you term student engagement, so hi.
But this is what I always do with my students the first day of class
because what engagement means to me is completely different to them.
So, I'm just curious. Just have a chat, what you think engagement means to you
and your student? So, two or three minutes, go for it, engagement.
Alright. (claps)
Let's go Knights.
And again, just so you know, I'm a recovering lecture-holic.
My background is actually, I'm a geologist.
I worked Rexon for a number of years doing corporate training,
and that's why I thought I'd be so good in education, I'd just stand up and talk,
and I learned very quickly this isn't the most engaging thing to do,
but I've learned this could be a really cool activity with the students,
especially if you're using some sort of collaborative tool like Etherpad,
Google docs, get the kids to brainstorm what engagement means to them
by sharing stories, a really powerful learning moment, and then coming up
with a set of guidelines for engagement for our course, and that's so powerful
to be right at the beginning of the class. Now, I know I'm within friends here,
community, so this won't be a problem, but often when I do this, it's tough
to get somebody to volunteer the first response so I always ask volunteer
your neighbor if it was a really great one but I'm curious, did it just anybody
engagement. I heard the Nike commercial over here, just do it, is active learning.
Other ideas for engagement? Everybody looks down.
Again, you can point to someone else, feel free.
Yes, good one.
(silence)
I love it, and that sense of passion, I felt in your voice, this is wonderful,
they are there, they are in the moment. Any other folks?
Everybody looks up, looks down. I know, none of us got any sleep
last night, I understand. Anybody? I feel like Ferris Bueller.
Anybody? Anybody? (laughs)
Maybe one more? Yeah, go for it. I love it.
Yeah, okay. (laughs)
(silence)
Wow, that's deep. Okay, let's give it up for that one. I love it.
So, what happens is I'm a simple person and the great thing is when it's not
snowing out, we actually are able to attract some interesting people
to come to Canada, and how many people know the work of Dennis?
So, he served both terms on Obama's National Advisory Committee for Education,
lives in a little cabin that's full of smoking in Northern Hampshire.
Are people familiar with his work, bigpicture.org? It is the coolest
non-profit within your country. So, the way it works is helping kids
identify questions, big questions in the world that are really meaningful
and passionate to him, and what I like about Dennis,
he follows the KISS principle, Keep It Simple and Straightforward.
So, my kids like to take the three R's and create the five C's.
so I'm going to give you our five C's. So, the idea that I think for all of us,
when we conceive the connections and the curiosity about what we're learning,
how it impacts our personal lives. So, those are our first two C's,
is curiosity and connection. I've got three sisters,
one of them is an Outward Bound instructor and she actually worked in Florida,
the Outward Bound center here, and are you folks a little familiar with
Outward Bound where you just put people out in the middle of nowhere,
and I hate using these terms but has anybody heard of this guy
Jean Piaget and the different stages of development, and he talked about
a big part of learning is making people uncomfortable and the whole philosophy
of Outward Bound is putting people out of their comfort level,
and then they have to assimilate and accommodate and it can be
a really powerful way for learning and when you think about a lot
of our experiences in life when we overcome challenges,
so that sense of rigor being a challenge, when we accomplish something,
man, there's a sense of excitement. We are engaged because we are
empowered to solve the problem, and last but not least, this goes back
to one of your incredible educational philosophers, John Dewey,
one of the first faculty members at the University of Chicago,
and I realize the University of Chicago was created by the Rockefeller family
right at the turn of that last century. So, this idea of community
and collaboration. So, those are our five C's.
So, we'll start with Dennis, there's Dennis, and then
this next guy I know you've heard of is the Mr. Zone man.
I can actually pronounce his name because he shows up in our city every four years,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Has anybody heard of this guy before?
He's the one in the 70s that coined the term 'being in the zone'.
You know, with the athlete, the optimal flow?
We're going to talk a lot about him in a minute.
The reason he shows up in my town every four years, we're Canadian
but we're passive aggressive, we play a really weird game,
we play it on something called ice, you actually have two teams here.
So, what happens? We may look calm, but you give us a hockey stick
and we go crazy. So, what happens, the city that I live in, the university
I live in, the 1988 Winter Olympics were held there. We made a ton of money
from ABC, it's the last time we got a really good TV deal, so we've been
living on that money since then, it's still our national training center.
We're the only university in the world that has a covered skating oval,
that's two NHL rinks inside a giant oval. So, this guy shows up because we probably
have some of the best sports psychologists in the world because we are obsessed
with doing well with the Winter Olympics. I mean, we got snow at night,
we got to do something. So, he comes up and works
with our athletes but I'm able to persuade him to come over and do some work
with our education students, and just a fascinating individual.
Okay, so we've got Dennis, we've got Mihaly, and then,
we've got this guy kicking around in Boston now,
I'm sure you've heard of this guy, Dan Pink, pop writer, speech writer
for Al Gore when Al was the VP, and it's really neat.
When you look at this book, he's written a whole brain on those books,
but that book is based on extensive interviews with Mihaly and both
of Dan's kids go to one of Dennis' schools, bigpicture.org, so it's amazing,
it's like investigative journaling. When you start picking around at it,
you see how it's all connected. So again, I think we know that it's for kids.
What's really engaging is when you take responsibility for your learning autonomy.
You don't have to do it, you want to do it.
The second one comes from a Canadian who lives in New York, Malcolm Gladwell.
Does anybody know The Tipping Point, Dog Ate My Tail? So, Malcolm's thing is
this idea that learning mastery takes time and he talks about The Beatles,
it was 10,000 hours of practicing in underground taverns and stuff
in Germany, up in Liverpool. We talk about hockey players,
so the autonomy, the mastery, and the purpose.
Okay, so we got those three dudes and here's what we've tried to do in Canada.
So, we have a real problem in our country. It's a huge country without a lot of people,
and instead of working together like you do down here,
you've got federal educational systems, we have state or provincial systems
that don't work together. So, this is one of the very, very few groups we have,
it's called the Canadian Educational Association, and we did a study
a few years back, it was called, 'What did you do in school today?'
And what we wanted to do is what's its flow, what does this idea
of being in the zone look like for kids, mainly at middle school and high school
and what we ended up doing, and it's a really good friend of mine,
Sharon Friesen, who was the lead on this study, was looking at different
dimensions of engagement, and I think we see this here at UCF or anywhere,
that I think it's still so rich, the co-curricular, the ex-curricular,
whether you're on the student newspaper, you know, sports isn't the be-all, end-all
but it's important for health. So, you've got the social engagement,
I'm going to talk a lot about academic engagement in this session,
and this is an idea of things you have to do.
So, you have the SAT, you have the MCATs, we've adopted all that and more.
Where I live, kids do standardized exams at the end of Grade 3, the end of Grade 6,
the end of Grade 9 and the end of Grade 12. All the results are published
and put in the front page of the neighborhood.
So, you're basically voting, you can put your kid in
where supposedly the test scores are the best, not that it's about learning,
but that kids can really master rote memorization and then hopefully,
what we're trying to do is get on that third one, the intellectual engagement
where, Rohan, it was like you said, you're investing socially, cognitively,
emotionally, you are part of the learning. So, we have those different modes
of engagement and I think you're actually, for the first time I've ever done this
presentation, going to able to read a few of these graphs, and again,
I hate to say this, but I have a feeling this might happen in Florida as well.
Every measure of engagement we looked at dropped consistently from Grade 6
to Grade 12. Sense of belonging, intellectual engagement, attendance,
participation in sports and clubs, every single one of them,
and I come from an interesting province, again, until recently, until oil crashed,
it was one of the wealthier provinces, but when you dig down,
we have the lowest high school completion rate of any province in our country.
I'll be honest, part of it was because of employment,
but we started drilling down further. (clears throat)
Excuse me. Less than 25% of the rural male population, this is the year 2016,
is getting a high school diploma, and just think how that's
short-changing them in terms of trades, in terms of opportunities,
and when we started interviewing the kids, it was, and again, we have two boys,
"I feel stupid. I don't like going to school because I don't feel good.
It's not good for my self-concept, so there's options, I leave school and I go."
So, this is a big thing we're working on and just to keep moving here,
we'll get back to you folks in a minute, we adopted the SSE snake from you folks.
So as you know, I think it's US Report, you do an annual ranking of institutions
in your country, it used to be on how well the sports team did,
how many of us had those silly PhDs in the world report,
and we had the same thing in our country, how many books we had in the library,
and this is out of I think Indiana University, Bloomington,
you may be familiar with the work. Unfortunately, we often take what you do
in the states and take it to the wrong direction.
So, this is our rating of universities in Canada, they're ranked like this
every year. I mean on the positive point, it is coming from students,
student perceptions, and what I like, it's student perceptions of behaviors,
not whether they like something or not, but it's based on their behaviors,
their perception of these five benchmarks, although they changed these a little bit.
Their perceptions about what they're doing, are they working with others
in and out of classrooms, what is the nature of the interaction
with the faculty member, how are they perceiving that they're being challenged,
they're being put out of their comfort level, enriching educational experiences
like volunteer experience, community service experience, practicums,
international experience, and what sort of campus environment.
Now this SSE snake has gone crazy, it's like all over the world,
so we adopted it, it's called the AUSSE, so both in Australia and New Zealand,
every institution does it there, it's the SASSE in South Africa,
and I just came back from Ireland a couple weeks ago and Ireland
does it as well, so I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing,
but as we've started to move to blended learning and the way we evaluate it,
we're trying to align what we're doing with a blended environment
and trying to really foster these types of educational practice.
So, this is what we're trying to do with our course and our program design,
is align it with this Survey of Student Engagement
because whether we like it or not, it is a bit of a mission that we want
student success and satisfaction at our institution, but I'll be honest,
I hate to say it, it's trite, our senior administration wants to see us
go up in the rankings. Sorry, I have to be honest.
Okay, so we've got the idea of student engagement.
Let's just park this for a moment. This one I'm excited about
because I am in the home of mixed-mode learning.
Now, you adopted, I think it was like in the early mid-90s here,
so you've got over 20 years experience. We didn't adopt it, we came down,
copied everything we could. We took all your stuff.
We are still struggling with it because we have an institutional definition,
I bet you do as well. Our students, because we've been doing blended learning,
I'll be honest, for 15 years now, this is my perception, N of one,
I still don't think students understand what blended learning means.
For them, it's all about them maybe reducing class time or whatever,
but they really don't understand what their roles and responsibilities
are going to be in this learning environment.
So, just one more because this is for me. I'm learning from you.
I'm just curious because I know we use your institutional definition.
I know what your institutional definition is because it's similar to ours,
but I'm curious, for a lot of you who are supporting faculty
or who are teaching, what does it mean to you?
Because I found if I'm not clear on what blended learning is,
it's chaos with my students in the classroom because,
I'll be honest, you can just about make anything blended.
So, just going to put it back to all you folks for a minute,
just if you could share, and I am going to ask for a few volunteers
because I'm so curious after 20 years, what does the blended learning mean
here at UCF, or mean to this group that's here in this room.
So, back to you folks. (claps)
Alright. This is always the difficult part because this is what engagement is,
it's you actually talking with each other and working with each other.
One of my grad students recently gave me a really good book.
It's called Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. It's by a fella that unfortunately
passed away, Donald Finkel, from Evergreen College out on the West Coast.
But I think, this is with blended learning,
I am a dangerous instructor because I feel I have less class time,
which means I have to speed things up. My problem is I focus so much on content
and delivery and less on student interaction and listening to the student,
so I'm just curious for people. I know challenge is blended learning, go for it.
But you know what I love about that, it really talks about the integration
of the two because our definition is terrible.
It says a minimum reduction of 30% class time, doesn't talk anything
about the online or face-to-face, and I'll be honest, so when the students
read that, especially the new students coming into the institution,
in their mind, less face-to-face time equals less work and then they get
a huge shock. So, for us, it's really been an education process, and I'm sure
we burrowed some of yours, is that we're trying to get students
to make informed choices about whether they're taking a completely
online version, a blended, or what we call enriched, we don't call it traditional
anymore, enriched, but again, it's not whether you just have a computer
and Internet connection, it's about are you willing and are you ready
to take on these roles and responsibility, and I'll mention, I'm getting ahead
of myself, but our biggest challenge and our biggest support around
blended learning at our institution is not technology, it's student support,
student support around writing, study skills, and the biggy,
time management, that's rough. So, thanks for sharing that
because I thought you guys are the home. So, I'm just going to whip through
a couple of these slides because there's more stuff I want to talk about,
so again, I think when it came out, I know that Patsy has worked
with the Babson Report, the slow and see, and that was the scary thing,
when we saw that it was all about class time, and I'll be honest,
one of the reasons we got involved in blended learning was reading
your case studies here and the case studies we read in the mid-90s
is that you are still one of the fastest growing campuses in the US,
you're out of space and the rumor was that there was a movie
or some sort of theater near campus, and that you could book that
at certain times and so our administration was all over this because we could take
psychology and run three sections. One group would come Monday,
a different section on Wednesday, and a different in Friday.
So, that's where our administration got excited, it wasn't so much
about the quality of the experience, it was the efficiency of using rooms.
So, just a little history lesson based on you folks here.
I hate using the idea of traditional, but when we think of it,
you know those medieval universities, Oxford, Cambridge.
I just learned that Bologna, I was there a couple weeks ago,
is considered the oldest western university,
but it was the idea of these medieval scholars coming
and physically being together, and then Rohan I know that
you were at the Open University, we burrowed all their stuff
and we created our own, we call it Athabasca,
but a lot of the first online learning was asynchronous, it was mediated
through a computer, discussion forms, things like that,
and sorry, we do have to do a little Ra Ra Canada here,
as one of the first learning management systems came out of Canada.
I think some of you know Murray Goldberg, the homegrown server.
And for me, that was sort of the modern version of blended learning,
that we could use these technologies just like this gentlemen said here
to intentionally integrate what was taking place in and out of the classroom,
and for me, this is really powerful because it's demonstrating to students
that learning can take place anywhere, anytime, really enculturating those habits
of lifelong learning, that's why I'm still a big fan of blended learning.
It's interesting.
Is there anybody here from nursing? I always get caught on this slide.
So, nursing in our area, they have a long history of distance and open education.
They keep reminding me the telephone, that synchronous tool, has been used
in teleconferencing for a long time, but what we've noticed at our institution,
this is where I really got into this idea of blended online design,
is online courses that make use of not just the LMS,
you're using Canvas here, but also using Adobe Connect.
So, that real blending and the real integration
of synchronous and asynchronous communication online.
We're really fortunate in Canada, if you just step down,
this is where I'd love us all to be. So this guy is kind of an interesting guy.
His name is Shawn Atleo, So, we have a huge country
with all kinds of diverse people here, they used to be called Indian and Eskimos,
now we call them First Nations indigenous people,
and Shawn just stepped down as the grand chief,
and he's a really interesting guy. He did his master's
in Instructional Design at a distance at Curtin University in Australia,
so this guy gets it first hand. Also, his mom's a good friend of mine,
his mom's a full professor of education at one of our universities.
But they came up with an idea, why can't we blend all quadrants.
So, using something like Adobe Connect. So, working with a lot of our indigenous
people, it makes sense, storytelling, face-to-face interaction is so important.
So, until recently, we ran a lot of money with oil companies.
Also, I don't know if you're aware, but the first cruise ship went through
the Northwest passage this summer. The ice is gone, there is a hell of a lot
of oil minerals there, but anyways, this is going to be weird
because we got the Chinese, the Russians, and we're with you guys,
we're with you guys, but that whole area is going to be weird, so we're trying to
keep people up there, we're going to try and pretend that it's Canada,
So, what we did partnering with a lot of oil companies is we dropped a lot of
trailers, high speed satellite inter-access, and found a local person,
often this local person didn't have a formal high school education,
but they really knew the community and they could support them
at that emotional level, and then what we've come in to do, using things
like Adobe Connect and Moodle, is we set up week-long sessions,
week-long modules, because what we found with people, anybody,
is that sense of success, that sense of accomplishment that you're moving forward.
Unfortunately, with our indigenous population, very few are able to
complete high school certificates, they have to move, so over the past
ten years working with this group, and I've just been the research guy,
they're the ones really doing the work, we've moved up to about 80%
high school completion, which is amazing
because it means they can stay in their communities and create the leadership,
create the entrepreneurship happening right there,
and there is lots of employment. We're second after South Africa
in terms of diamond exploitation. It's a dirty business though,
you drain lakes to get diamonds. Anyway, won't tell you what we do
in the northern part of our country So, we just keep moving here.
This is a concern to me. We have one, and I know it's
a really wonderful administrator here, and I love our administrators dearly,
but they often go to conferences, and they hear this term,
flipped classroom, I know you've all heard it, and so they come back to me
and they go, "Norm, flipped classroom, blended learning, sounds the same to me,"
and I was going, well, let's just gently look at this.
So, they say in a traditional environment, it's very passive, you're sitting,
you're listening to people, but somehow, kids are engaged outside,
they're doing homework and activity, so their idea is to flip it.
The problem with the flipping, it's passive, so instead of you sitting
and listening in classrooms, now you're going to sit and listen
to videos at night and then do something in the classroom.
So, I want to go back to your definition of blended learning and your idea
about just doing active learning. It's active learning everywhere.
It's active learning not just in the classroom but it's in
the online component that we are learning by doing and co-constructing our knowledge
with each other, so I just had to put that slide in.
Whatever's left on my head, a few hairs go up on my head.
Okay, so our zero contribution is over the past eight to ten years
I've been involved in blended learning, and this is with a really good friend
of mine, Randy Garrison, this Chuck Dziuban,
Randy and Chuck are identical. So, I think that was eight years ago.
The only two things I think we contributed to the conversation
is that this isn't cookie-cutter, and I know all of you,
we have a lot of instructional designers in this group, is that each group
of students, each group of humans that we're working with is unique,
and I often teach three sections of the same class,
and all three sections are completely different, they're all blended,
but we have to be attuned, so I hate using it but it is that word
organic, we really have to listen and we have to shape it,
it's wonderful because I'm base thinking that we go in with the design
but we have to be willing to organize and change things based on the needs
of the student. The other thing, and this is something we ripped off
of you folks, this is one of the other biggest problems with blended learning,
is a woman, Carol Anne Twig, who talks about the onion effect,
that we just keep building layer on and layer, and we're so focused on
content delivery that there's no opportunity to really develop
conceptual understanding, so what we need to do is bare bones and row in it.
It was just wonderful talking to you this morning.
You know, this idea of backwards design. What do we want students to be able to do,
the habits of mind, the knowledge, the skills at the end of it?
How do we develop really deep meaningful assessment techniques,
and they are aligned? So, that's all from you folks. Thank you.
Okay, keep moving here.
(silence)
Oops, hand-eye coordination is not my thing.
So again, I think it's just back. just two slides I want to contribute
is a lot of us in the early 90s, we were involved in sort of these
quasi-experimental studies. What's best?
Blended vs. face-to-face or online, and I think, Patsy, it's you and Chuck
who said, "What isn't blended these days? We're all combined."
So again, I think for all of us, and I know I'm here with,
I'll be honest, some of America's best instructional designers here,
it's so wonderful to be here with you, but the idea is blending the boat,
and again, it's contextual, based on the course,
based on where the students are, but making the best of both opportunities.
So, for example, I always wanted to be a journalist. I'm just going to go
for journalism here, but you know, there's certain things that work.
I still think we synchronously are better face-to-face where we need to have
the voice, the conversation, and I think this is so important,
just using the tool I've got on my head, is that my wife whether we like it or not,
whether we call it the work place, whether we call it working with nonprofits
more and more of our work day is going to be done using these forms of communication
and I think we really need to empower our students, our future people,
to be able to work on this the way where we can actually have critical
and constructive dialogue, so how do we combine those asynchronous
and synchronous so that they're really integrating.
The students aren't seeing this as a course and a half,
where there's an online and a face-to-face course that's truly integrated.
Okay, back to you in a minute.
So, again. I always thought you and Chuck should have done this study.
There was a study done six years ago in the States.
It was Stanford Research Institute. It was Barbara Means who looked
and sort of did a meta-analysis, and you know, blah, blah, blah.
They found out that blended learning is probably the most effective,
and what Barbara emphasized for that, it's not so much the modality,
it's the idea of the intentional design. So she put out, and if you get the slides,
you don't have to buy the book, she gave me her executive summary.
But I think you've seen this, that full course redesigns have a better
opportunity than just looking at modules now and then, although we need to start
with that. Mathematics appears to be in a really great sweet spot,
that's an area that a lot of our students are challenged with.
And the most important thing, I think for all of us as designers,
is that it doesn't happen overnight. Design's an integrative process,
we're always learning, we're never going to get it right,
we always are redesigning our courses because it keeps it fresh for us.
Okay, enough of a lecture about student engagement and blended learning.
This is where I wanted to get more information from you.
This is the home idea, this is the home of probably
the very first faculty development program, I'm going to say probably in the world,
for supporting faculty to engage meaningfully in these online and blended worlds.
So, I'm going to turn it over to you because you guys have been working
at this since about 1995, after looking at this, what are the key roles?
What are the key things that faculty need to do to ensure that there's
a successful blended environment for students, so back to you folks
because I know a lot of you have worked with faculty, a lot of you are faculty,
but I'm finding it's just too complex, I can't do everything right now,
so I need to be clear about what my roles and responsibilities are as a teacher
but who can I work with in partnership in terms of IT,
in terms of student support, in terms of the library,
so just back to you for a moment. I'm just keen.
After all your experience here, I want some shared wisdom from you
that I can take back, what are the roles, so if we are helping and UCF
is the world leader, I mean you are the leader, the BlendKit.
No pressure, but this it it. This is it. I want to know what is the secret sauce?
What's the secret sauce? It's like KFC, I'm finally going to get the recipe.
So, back to you folks, what are the roles, and then, can I build on that?
Because you folks are the ones who changed that because I'll be honest,
I've been doing ID for a long time as well and again, I come from the corporate world
so it was the idea of divide and conquer. The faculty member would see
the subject matter expert. Faculty member, you're over here.
I'm the instructional designer. I'll design all the activity,
and then you do what I tell you. So, I think that is the key that I've seen
at this institution, it's relationships, relationships, relationships.
It's that you really work as a community. Oh, what's that silly? It's a great phrase,
that it takes a village to raise a student and I think that's so important.
Other thoughts, ideas? So, relationships, partnerships.
Can I keep building on this because I'm just, this is my observation here,
I've been observing you folks for about fifteen years,
is how you involve current and past students in what you do.
I think that's so important. Again, we took your techrangers idea
right away, we call it the student technician and resource tutor,
and it's been wonderful not only as support,
but can I just, was there anybody in this room who was a techranger?
Yeah. And again, I just think this is wonderful because you're really
invested in the community. I mean you bring the student perspective,
which I think is so important, and the energy, and I think
this is something, Linda, I'm still learning at kind of an old age,
is this idea of learning partnerships. That we're all in this together,
the students, the faculty, go for it, yeah. But I think that's so key
because if we're passionate, then the teachers are passionate,
the students are passionate. That we're all excited, you know.
Now that's the one I was really going to bring up and that's,
again, why we all look to you. It's great to be excited,
but how do you really know if you're making a difference?
We often have a gut feeling that yeah, I think that was really good.
But I've done it so much with students. You do those little focus or lunch time
things, or coffee with students that wow, I just felt great after that class,
and then you go out there and the students go wow, I've never felt so uncomfortable
in my life. I felt like I was in a therapy session. I mean, I'm here to learn
about the concepts, I'm not here to get in touch with my inner self.
So again, it is the partnership. Yeah, don't worry about my class.
Okay, so some of the things, this is some of our stuff, is that
if you're at Online Learning Consortium, I always want to say SLOAN,
but a really special friend of mine is going to be at SLOAN.
He's just retired. His name is Terry Anderson,
he's Federal Chair of Distance Education. He was always Randy's favorite
doctoral student, I was always number two. Anyway, we'll let that go.
But it's interesting, what Terry did for his doctoral dissertation is looking at
what are the different roles and so, some of you know these names.
Zane Berge and Bob Mason, two Americans, Morten Paulsen from Norway,
and then these guys that were in Canada just getting together over coffee.
And so, they tried to figure out what are some of the key things.
Obviously, there's an organizational role, you've got to design, organize your class,
and this is where I think it's not just social but it's back to your idea
of passion. We have to be modeling, learning, I think that's more important
for us than teaching, is modeling what it's like to be engaged learners
and the learning, and at the end of the day, there was always
that controversy, guide on the side vs. sage on the stage.
You'll see the data from students in a minute.
Students want to have content knowledge, they want us to be the knowledge experts,
that's what we're here for. So again, they want us to be
the captain of the ship so when things go off in discussion,
that we're bringing things back. So, we're just not a guide on the side.
So, this is all Terry's work, this is his dissertation here,
and I'll show you some slides to back this up.
So, his idea was if we're going to really make this work,
we've got to shift from teacher to teaching presence.
The idea that everybody, everybody in the room is responsible.
and what we're going to see in some slides is that this isn't new,
this comes from indigenous culture. But the whole idea,
if we're creating and designing a course, it should be shaped and scaffolded
that as the course progresses, students are feeling more confident
to take on more and more responsibility for their learning and providing advice
and ideas to others, and I always know that I've taught a great course
because I cry at the end. I know it's a great course at the end
because they don't invite me out to the public.
They've taken over for their learning and they've moved on to the next one,
which is, I mean I'm not a crutch, I'm there to help them move forward
in terms of engaging and empowering them, so the design and organization,
the learning leadership, and the idea of content knowledge.
So, what these academics do, we always have to put out books,
and I hate how this works. This is Randy's fault. I wanted six.
Every time we do something, it ends up at seven.
There's Art Chickering and Zelda Gamson's Seven Principles of Undergraduate Practice.
I've got a really good friend, Dave McNichol, in Scotland.
He's got these seven principles of meaningful assessment.
So, basically, and we have a wonderful woman, she's the Chair of the Distance Ed.
program at Athabasca University, our open university,
and we made sure it's an open book. But again, when we're designing
how we're trying to design for academic discourse by creating an environment
where it's safe. In Canada, we call ourselves pathological.
I'm sorry, not Newfoundland. You guys tell it like it is.
But a lot of us in Canada, you know, we're nice. Sorry. Thank you.
Oh, you hit me in the head? Oh, I'm sorry you hit me in the head.
But this idea that we can have a critical discourse, and again,
I'm not criticizing you, but we're criticizing the idea.
Is that based on opinion, is it based on fact, how you feel, experience?
And then this idea of how do we maintain that sense of community,
that sense of inquiry, and five and six, how do we bring everybody across
the finish line, how is everybody able to develop their own frameworks
for solving problems, and then Rohan Bass here, this is the one Randy,
he's a big John Biggs fan, that's why number seven came in,
making sure that our assessment is congruent with the learning outcomes.
If we're talking about critical thinking, we're talking about problem solving,
we just don't have multiple choices. We may have it but just like in research,
we're really striving for triangulation.
Okay, we're almost on the home stretch now.
(silence)
Okay, I was mentioning to Rohan just before this that this is nothing new.
It's really fascinating how things work in life. Our provost was a Kiwi,
a New Zealander, the last thing he wanted to do before he retired is get
a formal agreement with his alma mater, it's called Massey University,
it's their big open university in New Zealand, so we all went down,
signed agreements, and boy, was it a learning experience for me.
So, in a lot of indigenous languages, they don't have a separate word
for teach or learn, it's back to that idea, to teach is to learn twice.
So, it recognizes that both students and teachers have knowledge to bring,
and how we can share it, and I think, for all of us who are teachers,
that's why we love teaching. It's probably the most selfish profession
because at the end of a course, who's learning the most? It's often us.
They've actually got eight universities and so their national faculty development
program is called Ako Aotearoa. So, they share everything,
all data, just a really cool set-up. If you ever want to go to New Zealand,
just let me know. And so this is a guy, this is a really interesting Kiwi
that I do a little bit of work with, John Hattie. Has anybody heard about him?
He was at Washington State for a while. He's sort of the guru who does
all the meta-analysis on assessment about what works and what doesn't work.
And if you push him hard enough, used to be at the University of Auckland,
he's in Melbourne, but I love this quote from him.
"When [we as] teachers see learning through the eyes of [our] students."
So, not dumbing it down but we're empathetic,
we know the challenges they're going through,
all those issues, and most importantly, when students see themselves
as their own learner. Okay, seven minutes to go.
So, this is another quote that I took, I think it was from Candace Tilly,
there's a woman who used to be at Carnegie Mellon.
She's a big mover and shaker in the open education movement here in the States.
She's at Stanford now, but this is Herb Simon, who I guessed was considered
the father of artificial intelligence, I think he won a Nobel prize.
But what I really love about this, and this is what I've learned
from all you folks. This is where I'm a little nervous to present mine
because you guys do some really neat work, but if we're going to make changes,
positive changes, we've got to document where we are and where we're going.
And we can't do it alone, so we've got to open up our LMS sites,
work with everybody and turn it into a community-based research activity.
So, here's what we did, baby steps, putting it into practice.
Going back to this notion of engagement, we found, and I never knew it,
it's a guy, Bob Smallwood. He's the director of the
Office of Institution Analysis and Planning at Alabama State,
you know, the big football place. And it's his wife, Judy, who I met,
who actually writes all the questions for the NSSE, so he was able to do
a small derivative of this, it's called the CLASSE,
just looking at things that specifically happen in the classroom.
So, we have the CLASSE and then, I know a lot of you do a lot of work
with EDUCAUSE, but we took, it's called the ECAR, you know,
the first year study, because it's looking specifically about how students are using
technology for their learning practices, assessments, so we got permission
to cobble those together and if you want to see our questionnaires or whatever,
we're happy to do it. So, what we decided to do
is focus on the bottle next. These are the courses at our institution
that have the highest E withdrawal and failure rates.
We figured these are the ones we should focus on and we did it in partnership.
This is my boss, he's the Associate VP of Teaching and Learning at the institution
and this is one of my former students who's now a nursing educator.
So, we had an administrative, a faculty, and a student perspective,
and I'm sure this is what a classroom, it's almost chaos now with all this.
I'm big on the idea of laptops, but I still think there's a time
and a place where maybe we can just turn them off and just talk to each other,
So, these are the courses and here's what we did. Yeah, I know. I know.
Now, it's the mobile devices. I know you've got a great, let me check,
I've seen a presentation from one of your faculty members,
how he really uses mobile devices effectively here at UCF, so again,
we did an online survey, we administered them both to students and faculty
because we wanted to see the gaps, the difference in perception between
what faculty thought was going on in these blended courses.
One of the coolest things we did, and you've got your techranger program,
we've got upper year students who've got a fair bit of experience
with stats and conducting focus groups, and in my mind, and us too,
we will always be nineteen. We will always be nineteen.
It's just when I conduct focus groups, students tell me much different things
than they'll tell each other, so we made sure all the focus groups were facilitated
by students who were great. This is back in the day
when we were just learning about learning analytics, so this is going to be
baby data compared to what you folks do, but we had all the Blackboard information,
we had final course grades for the fall, and then I did all the instructor stuff,
the interviews and the focus groups. So, I have to be careful, I'm so glad
Chuck's not here to tear these slides apart and they actually are really bad.
So again, this is all about—
(Speaker) Oops, move back here and come on little mouse. Get right to that arrow.
I feel like I'm playing a video game.
(Norm) Okay, yeah, if you just get it to the next one, if you move.
So again, this is not causation, this is total correlation,
and this could be really flawed data but administrative loved it,
So, what we did. (laughter)
We didn't have Patsy or Chuck there, they like these nice lines.
But the idea being those students who perceive they're more involved
in active and collaborative activity, making presentations,
working with people in groups, also just happen to be the people
that got the higher marks. Now, what we're doing is
we're doing a longitudinal study now actually to follow these students from
first to fourth year and it's fascinating to see where it starts to dip,
and it all lays around self-confidence. Once they lose their self-confidence,
it goes down, so anyway, they were happy.
Can you do the next one? I'm just so bad with the arrow.
The other thing we did, I think you've moved to Canvas now,
we are still so tangled up with these guys.
So, it does allow you to do really, really baby, completely simple analytics,
nothing like what you can do in Canvas. Because you can see how many times
they clicked, but who knows, are they just clicking a million times or whatever,
but again, the line goes the right way.
So, if you could do the next one please. And so, it's not quite as linear,
but the idea being that the more often the frequency they're on
the learning management system, it seems that they were doing
their more successful course. Then the next one, please.
Then we started to dig down a little bit, and this is where we started using
not just the CLASSE but ECAR data because what we are really curious about
is the intensity and how they were using the technology, and it was really
fascinating because again, there's a time and a place for everything,
there's a time and a place for quizzes because you can do it over and over
on your own and in different courses, you can do pre and post tests.
They talked a lot about the ability to collaborate.
Our campus is like yours, the majority of our students
are commuters, so it's difficult for them to physically get together outside
of class time and it really is cool to watch how they use even simple tools
like Skype or Google Docs just to collaborate,
and they said this was something that was really meaningful,
and they really appreciate assessments and assignments where it's embedded.
We're not just telling them go to a workshop,
do this or whatever, but they're learning those group skills,
those collaborative skills, in context with the assignment.
I don't know if you've discovered this, but for us, group work in first year
is a disaster. The reason it's a disaster is because our kids coming into
university have been conditioned to take high stakes individual tests.
When they get into group situations, what they hate about it is they go,
you know it's often the Pareto principle, 20% of the people doing 80% of the work.
They don't know how to work collaboratively,
so that's what we're really trying to build into these assignments,
is how do we meaningfully learn. Again, it's a bit of a carrot and stick,
there is assessments, there are grades. But especially in the beginning,
it really is focused on formative. It's learning, trust, to make this work.
I promised I wouldn't get political, but no matter what happened last night,
we've got to work together. Guys, we're depending on you,
we're going to work together, collaborate.
Okay, next slide. I think we're almost done.
I'm getting political, I didn't want to do this.
So, I think all of us know that this is terrible data because we've all done this.
For some of us who are full professors, I actually love it when I get feedback.
Not that they hate me but, "Ugh, this course is so difficult.
He made me think my head hurts." I love that sort of feedback.
And then they'll come back into fourth year and say, "You know,
I hated that course at that time, but that was the course that forced me
to look at the world in different ways." So, you know, I don't love this,
but it's great marketing for our blended learning courses.
and I love our senior administration so I shouldn't be sarcastic,
but they love this as well. The next step is I think more important.
So, a few things and this all came from our students, and I'm sure
you're seeing this with Canvas. Our students don't like too many
usernames and passwords. They love us but they get really upset
when we build, I think we call them creepy treehouses.
So, instead of using the LMS, we start building our own.
We do Google classrooms with this. So, every course they take
there's a completely different technology infrastructure,
a completely different set of passwords. I'm sure we're the same as UCF,
we have a portal that the students log in. They can pay their money, do everything.
It's like banking, but they like that, they call it Blackboard plus.
The other thing that I was really impressed with,
these are first year classes, is that once students saw the value,
and understood about how to work effectively together,
they really appreciated the class project. And they talked about what a valuable
life skill this was, to learn how to work meaningfully and collaboratively,
and again, I just want to emphasize, and I think we all know this at UCF
because you pride yourself on teaching excellence,
the more technology around us, the more the need for the human touch.
And it's all about what you said, Linda. Relationships, relationships, relationships.
That you had an instructor who she or he knew the course content.
They were the experts, they knew what was going on,
but they also didn't dumb things down, but they really were excited,
they were passionate about you succeeding. One more and then we're done.
This is I think again, and you're probably the same as me, whatever you call it,
student evaluation of instruction, course grading, blah, blah, blah.
You know, nice that there's nice things. I always go to the page about
what were the challenges, issues, with me, and these are ones that
now we are working with students.
I'm going to be careful, but the biggest thing
we're working on with our first year students is reading.
Reading is a huge issue. What happens with us,
we have standardized exams so right in Grade 10,
students are being conditioned for timed writing assignments,
not reflective writing. That's what they're used to doing.
Reading as well, they're used to reading directions really quickly so that
they can get on and answer the question. So, we've built these activities
into all of our first year courses. For our students,
they're used to a semester system in high school that goes from
September to the end of January. So funny, a lot of them in December,
"What, it's over?" Yeah, it's over. And this idea that it is work, learning.
Again, we want to be passionate, we want you to be engaged,
but in order for you to get something out of life,
you've got to invest time and energy. This is something we really had to work on
especially our natural science courses and especially people like me.
I taught the same course for 20 years, makes sense to me,
why doesn't it make sense to the students?
So, this is where we brought people in like techrangers.
So, for all of our redesign. We have third and fourth year
students who've taken the first and second year courses within two years.
And they're the ones who go through the course with us,
that go wow, that doesn't make sense, we need to change things here.
And then last but not least is again, students have been conditioned in my state,
my province, to learn for other people, to memorize things and regurgitate things
to please mom, dad, to please state examination boards.
They haven't learned how to internalize the learning process.
They haven't learned how to develop their own framework.
So, I think that should be about it.
So again, there's the slides, feel free to do whatever you want
within the Google slides, you can add. I always see if there's comments on them.
But I know some of you are going to have to leave, but if you do have
questions, issues, concerns, I know you've got a lot more important things
on your mind after the election, but I'd love to hear any feedback
because again, I think there's a saying that we have in academia,
that we really do build on the shoulders of giants,
and a lot of this is what we've learned from you folks.
So, just poke some holes in it, what we've done,
new things that you're involved in that we can learn from.