Click on the COMMENTS link below the video to get started!

The research-based concept of a “new” paradigm for learning in higher education was originally proposed over a decade ago. In 1995, when the term “paradigm shift” was all the rage, Barr and Tagg described a shift from an instructional paradigm to a learning paradigm. Then in 1997, Smith and Waller set forth over a dozen examples of changing paradigms for learning. More recently, Fink (2003) echoed the need for moving from a content-centered to a learner-centered paradigm, while Bain (2004) uncovered the effectiveness of challenging students’ existing models or paradigms, helping them transform existing understandings into better, more accurate models of truth.

Semantics aside, the change involves a clear shift from one-dimensional, unidirectional teaching to multi-dimensional, multidirectional learning. So why now? Primarily because we live in a changing, connected world, with increasingly complex problems to solve.
What is the Learning Paradigm?
The student-centered learning paradigm is not a new concept, but the implementation of these revised pedagogical strategies has yet to become mainstream in higher education. At the core of the learning paradigm is a foundation of reciprocity between students and faculty. Essentially, it requires active, problem-based, collaborative strategies for both student and faculty learners. The learning paradigm is based on a community of continuous learners—both students and faculty. This change from higher education to continual learning has “learning how to learn” as its valuable product.

Just as early explorers set out to discover new places of potential riches, educators too can set out on their own journey of discovery in learning. Christopher Columbus, who was looking for a new world, certainly found something that resembled a “new” place—unfamiliar people, plants, foods, and treasures. But what he really did was bridge two unconnected land masses already sharing the same water and sky. Similarly, faculty “explorers” of the new learning paradigm can help students connect seemingly distant concepts, creating bridges to deeper, synthesized, and meaningful learning.

Beginning and Continuing the Journey
When working toward changing a paradigm, especially one that may have worked well for us as students, it is important to consider the future—what will our students’ emerging careers be, what skills and knowledge are essential for them to be engaged in their professional worlds, and what paradigms might they face? Our teaching behaviors, our expectations we set for our students, and our students’ learning behaviors must evolve to fit our students’ futures.

Tagg (2003) reminds us that to change our paradigm from teaching to learning is to view education through a new lens—“seeing” our work in a different light and having diverse experiences as we and our students interact to learn. As we peer through the telescope to chart our course toward a new horizon of a learning paradigm, what do we see? Where will BGSU students and faculty travel in their journey toward a learning paradigm? Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!

• Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning—A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change (27) 6, 12-25.
• Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Smith, K. A., & Waller, A. A. (1997). New paradigms for college teaching. In Campbell, W. E., & Smith, K. A. (Eds.), Paradigms for college teaching (pp.269-281). Edina, MN: Interaction.
• Tagg, J. (2003). The learning college paradigm. Bolton, MA: Anker.

• providing choices for students in relation to where, how, and when they study,
• fostering (focusing on) learning rather than teaching (incorporating active rather than passive learning),
• encouraging student responsibility (and accountability) and activity rather than teacher control and content delivery,
  
• developing mutuality and interdependence in the teacher-learner relationship, and
• emphasizing context-specific learning in which students build their own new understandings and skills through engagement with authentic problems based on ‘real world’ experiences (emphasizing deep learning and understanding as opposed to simple “coverage”).

Maryellen Weimer describes seven “Do” principles for teachers/faculty to begin their planning for learner-centered teaching:

1. Teachers do learning tasks less (let the students do more)
2. Teachers do less telling; students do more discovering
3. Teachers do more (instructional) design work
4. Faculty do more modeling (of the learning process — for student benefit)
5. Faculty do more to get students learning from and with each other (collaborative)
6. Faculty work to create climates for learning (conditions conducive to learning)
7. Faculty do more with feedback (formative ‘along-the-way’ and summative assessments; grades and comments)

For more information on learner-centered teaching:

Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice
by Maryellen Weimer (2002). Jossey-Bass. (A summary by Bill Peirce; available for check-out from the Center’s Library)

Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
From The American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, March 1987

Mapping the Learning Space: Overview of the Territory
5 Learner-Centered Principles and Practices in Higher Ed: Design Implications, Learning Activities, Deeper Learning, Teaching Practices, and Technology Uses

International Institute on Student-centered Learning and Engagement
May 20-23, 2008 at Portland State University

Student-Centered Learning: What Does it Mean for Students and Lecturers?
O’Neill & McMahon, 2005

Briefly describe one of your “learner-centered teaching” activities or strategies . . . Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!

After presenting a multitude of recent statistics on the technology use habits of 18-22 year olds, Robbins explained how the numbers simply represent symptoms of a larger issue – young people want to express themselves and communicate with others, which all too often ends at the classroom door.

Her remedy for bridging this chasm is to determine what faculty need to know and be able to do in this new, changing world. She suggests that an instructor’s technological expertise should be “somewhere between (knowing) everything and nothing” – enough so faculty can help build a bridge from the place where students are interested and engaged to where they need to go, educationally.

Her overall message centered on three approaches to reach current (and especially future) students:

1. Second Life – a MUVE, or multi-user virtual environment (not an online game, since there are no game mechanics and no goals assigned; instead, each individual must figure out what to do and has free reign within certain boundaries.
2. Social Networks – (e.g., Facebook, Ning) where communities are built around common interests, including trends, culture, ideas, events, ideas, and creations.
3. Contributed/remixed content sites – (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, blogs, wikis) where students can collaborate, create, contribute, and critique – with text, audio, and/or images.

Benefits of these three approaches include:

• Collaboration
• Creativity
• Authenticity
• Community — around the content; they try much harder – “recreate it for the web”
• Engagement – students are engaged in participatory explorations
• Social
• Local/Global – local issue becomes global and vice versa
• Immediate – instant experiences; questions researched and answered quickly
• Participatory — not just a consumer; students become knowledge creators/synthesizers

Robbins is known to some for her often-publicized, academic exercise where students were asked to portray Kool-Aid people and mill around various Second Life spaces to experience diversity, crowd mentality, exclusion, and discrimination. She explained that because most of her Ball State University (Indiana) students never felt excluded or discriminated against, the “Kool-Aid man experience” was the best way to get them to quickly and easily understand a previously foreign concept.

So how did the students react to this new (and strangely unique) exercise? Robbins said many of them expressed they felt safe because they were in a group who were like themselves; had they been alone, “it would have been worse.” In other words, within five minutes, students learned complex, experiential concepts that were only marginally successful during a 50-minute, face-to-face class.

Robbins shared several other educational uses and applications of Second Life:

• Chat text from each student can be exported, saved, analyzed
• Group IM (instant messaging) – allows a lifeline when out interviewing others in SL (like an expert or advisor in an earpiece)
• Translating metaphorical ideas
• Role Playing
• Building, testing, synthesizing theoretical models (e.g., customer traffic flow, chemical molecules)
• Recreate works from literature to build understanding (e.g., Dante’s levels of hell, science fiction/fantasy recreations or interpretations)
• Critique and parody
• Sharing and presenting works to hundreds, rather than only the instructor or single class
• Student-generated schizophrenia simulator
• Her students were treated as co-researchers

Robbins closed by emphasizing the need to find and use technologies that meet the needs and goals of the course and your comfort level – not all tools are for everyone or every purpose, just because they are popular or novel. And with that, we’ll close with a few questions about your thoughts… What do YOU think?

How have you used Second Life or other “connecting” tools to engage students? What are your thoughts on teaching/learning in Second Life? (concerns, questions, success stories, ideas, etc.) …Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!

For more information:

Intellagirl Website

Sarah Robbins’ Ubernoggin Blog

Second Life

(Search for Article) Professor Avatar: In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes on a new personality (from The Chronicle of Higher Ed – September 21, 2007)

What is your opinion of the video? Do your students have similar concerns? How can you or the University help to change and encourage better student interaction? …Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!

In the film “Master and Commander,” 19th-century British sea captain Jack Aubry is handed a wooden model of a new warship. He examines it carefully, noting its many innovative features. Finally he sets it down, saying, “What an age of wonders we live in.”

If he had only known what was just over the horizon.

…For those of us who teach (and who directly support the teachers), this is a huge challenge. Many of our students know far more than we do about the new tools and toys. Others struggle with basic skills most of us mastered years ago.  Every semester faculty come to me and say, “Please get me set up with Blackboard. My students say I need to use it.”  

But in truth, the technology doesn’t matter all that much. Regardless of the tools they use, people are still people.  We all have the same basic human needs: for food and shelter, for security, for love and belonging, for esteem, for self-actualization.  Under the iPod and Razr, behind the email or discussion board post, is a human being with the same fundamental needs as his or her great-great grandparents.  

They just meet those needs in different ways, that’s all. iTunes is not so very different than the traveling minstrel of Chaucer’s time.  It just has a larger repertoire.

A tool is merely a set of affordances and constraints – stuff it lets you do easily, and stuff it makes it hard to do. That applies to tools used for teaching, too.  You can teach in the 3D simulated world of Second Life, where people can fly and a student may appear as an alien with an orange mohawk (ok, bad example – that can show up on campus, too).  But you also can teach while sitting on a log and using your finger to draw in the dirt (hey – digital interactive multimedia!)  

…Is that good? Is it bad?  Neither.  It’s just different.  

…We often feel like hamsters on a wheel that’s spinning faster than we can run.  But we keep up as best we can with what’s going on “out there.”  We try new things.  Sometimes they work better than we’d planned.  Sometimes they crash and burn.  We pick up the pieces, learn from the experience, and try, try again.  

We have to, if we want to prepare our students for the next Age of Wonders.  It’s just over the horizon.

This is distrubuted with the author’s permission and a Creative Commons license (non-commercial with attribution).

What are your thoughts or observations about this “age of wonders”? How does or will these realities change the way you teach… or change the way students learn — in 3-5 years, 10 years, 20 years? Any other comments regarding the essay?

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Expectations help define a boundary for students in which they can focus on the required tasks, leading them to the desired learning outcomes, rather than being distracted by unclear or obscure objectives. Some areas you can define or clarify include:

• workload per week (2-3x the credit hours out of class time, usually),
• assignments (what will need to be accomplished – readings, papers, presentations, projects, research, etc.),
• assessment/evaluation (how will they be graded/assessed – quizzes, exams, homework, rubrics, informal feedback, etc.), and
• behaviors (also important to include in order to educate the “whole student” – participation, attendance, professional, during presentations and group work, etc.).

In concert with expections, here are some assignment ideas or discussion topics that allow students to claim ownership of their role in the learning process, :

• Have students list their expectations for the course before seeing the syllabus or learning outcomes; near the end of the course, return this list and have them revise it, including a list of suggestions for next semester’s students
• On the first day, have them write a letter to you about why they deserve an A in your class; return it to them just before the final exam for them to revise and resubmit, including a section about how they have changed as a result of your class
• After looking at the course outcomes in the syllabus, have students write their personal short and long term goals for the course

What are some other expectations, outcomes, or activities that help your students take ownership of their learning ? Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!

(See the YouTube video )

What are your thoughts on these 10 forecasts?
How will these affect education, teaching, learning, and employment opportunities for our students? For us?
Do you have any other predictions/forecasts?

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Below are some tips to keep students actively engaged in large lectures:

1) Use a deck of index cards of student names to randomly call on students to share in their own words their understanding of key concepts of the reading and/or lecture. This strategy will keep students actively listening in lecture since all students have the possibility of being selected to participate.

2) Develop a routine time, either before or after lecture, for students to drop off written questions they have about the material/concepts discussed.

3) Give students the option to turn in a piece of paper with their name and the discussion topic they shared in class for participation points. This can also help you with learning your students’ names.

4) Invite the class to bring in materials, such as current news articles, which are pertinent to the class topic.

Read More Ideas:

• The Chronicle’s Big, But Not Bad article with additional resources at the end, such as tips and books

• Survival Handbook for Teaching Large Classes (from UNC Charlotte)

• Interactive Lectures: Summaries of 36 Formats

• Engaging a Large Lecture Course

What works for you? Please comment with additional ideas you use to encourage student engagement in large lectures. Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!

I appreciate how many of you read my article, commented on it in various online venues, and linked to it so that others might read it. Please keep in mind my goal in writing this piece was not to denigrate our Information Technology Services office in any way. As I mentioned in the article, I worked there for years, and I still know and respect the folks that work there. Heck, our Director of ITS even had me over for Thanksgiving dinner a while back. Our ITS office, if I may attempt to personify it as a single entity for a moment, works tirelessly to make sure our network infrastructure remains stable, dependable, and active. Without the often thankless efforts of this office, we wouldn’t be able to send a single piece of email. We wouldn’t be able to rely on a vast, yet standard set of software tools that are officially supported on campus. We we wouldn’t even be able to get our paychecks. 

My point in writing this piece was not really about Tor, either. It could have just as easily been about Bit Torrent, YouTube, or any other application or service that could potentially be problematic for our university on a variety of levels. Rather, my point in writing this had more to do with my own need to explore, discuss, and attempt to balance the often competing needs of faculty and administrative IT, within the context of this ever-increasing pace of technological change swirling around us at all times.

The incident that served as the catalyst for the article — plainclothes detectives and IT security staff visiting a faculty member, unannounced — is certainly not unique to me, nor was the request to avoid teaching specific content areas in class. What is perhaps unique about it is that is occurred within the times we are living in now: pervasive broadband times, consumer / creator times, Web 2.0 times. This tenuous balance between faculty and IT needs is only going to be amplified in the coming years, as more faculty try to explore more technologies that may or may not be officially sanctioned by their respective IT departments. This isn’t a black or white, right or wrong issue, yet it is still an issue that needs to be debated in a heathy, open manner.

That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out some of the more interesting comments, questions, and in some cases misconceptions I have either personally received or read in various forums online:

• One of the first and most repeated statements I have read about me is that I’m a Computer Science professor. I’m not. I’m faculty in our Visual Communication & Technology Education department, which is not only entirely separate from our Computer Science department, it is also in a completely different college here (Technology, as opposed to Arts & Sciences) and in most universities.
• I’m not a scientist, and make no claims to be one. I am a technologist.
• I do not have tenure, and thus did not attempt to use tenure as a “free pass” to get my own way. I am, however, tenure-track.
• Neither I nor my wife typically consider me to be a “brave freedom fighter” who was “sticking it to The Man”. I’m not even sure who The Man is, really, unless it’s the Director of our ITS office I mentioned before, who had me over for dinner. He’s a real decent guy, and was a great boss while I worked there.
• I did not lose my job, at least as far as I know.
• I realize the following sentence could be read two different ways: “Someone looking up potentially sensitive information might prefer to use [Tor] — like a person who is worried about potential exposure to a sexually transmitted disease and shares a computer with roommates.” My editor and I went back and forth on this sentence for quite some time. Thank you, Slashdotters, for pointing that out. 

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If anyone else has some specific questions or comments about my article, I would love to hear them. ~Paul

[Post them below in the comments section and Paul will respond -- Just click on COMMENTS to get started.]

Today’s topic is Blackboard, and for those who do not use or are unfamiliar with Blackboard, it is a teaching tool that provides an online grade book, assignments posting, calendar, discussion boards, virtual classroom, digital drop box, and much more. This discussion is focused on the following questions…

• What innovative uses of Blackboard have you implemented into your teaching?

• How do students feel about using Blackboard as a learning assistance tool?

If you are interested in learning more about how to use Blackboard to facilitate teaching and learning, contact IDEAL at 2-6792 or ideal@bgsu.edu — For technical questions, visit the ITS Blackboard Help web page or contact ITS at 2-0999.

The issue centered on ITS’s concern with Paul using Tor, or The Onion Router, which masks online activity from others (including ITS). Being that it is one of ITS’s charges to be aware of activity on the university network, they obviously felt the need to look into Paul’s usage and express their concerns. Here are some snippets from the article (reprinted with permission):

“My reason for downloading and installing the Tor plug-in was actually simple: I’d read about it for some time, was planning to discuss it in two courses I teach, and figured I should have some experience using it before I described it to my students. The courses in question both deal with controlling technology, diffusing it throughout society, and freedom and censorship online.

…Their (ITS) job is to protect the network that allows me to do my job: to teach classes that are mostly or entirely online, and to conduct research. If they weren’t here as the first or even only line of defense against the unscrupulous elements of our technological society, my university would cease to function. It’s as simple as that.

…A moment later, I heard another knock on my door. One of the detectives had come back to ask if I would reconsider my position. I told him that while I would think about giving up Tor, I honestly felt that this was a clear case of academic freedom, and I could not bow to external pressure. I reminded him that Tor is a perfectly legal, open-source program that serves a wide variety of legitimate needs around the world.”

• As a faculty member, have you had to defend your academic freedom? If so, how?

• Where does one balance the institutional needs (rules) with student needs and professional ethics?

We’d like to hear from the BGSU community what kinds of engagement strategies are being used during classroom discussions and for class assignments. To add your ideas to the discussion, click on the “Comments” link below.

More Resources:

Developing Course Discussions through Re-Engagement Techniques
Click here for article.

Creating Authentic and Engaging Assignments in your Online Course
Click here for article.

Read More Information:
Bollag, B. (2006). Making an art form of assessment. Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(10). Click here for article

Types of Assessments

9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning. (AAHE, 1991).

Share your opinion and experiences by leaving a comment below:

Resources
Conoley, J., Moore, G., Croom, B., & Flowers, J. (2006). A toy or a teaching tool? The use of audience-response systems in the classroom. Techniques: Connecting Education & Careers.
Available online: BGSU Libraries

Bruff, D. Classroom Response Systems, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching.
Click here for article.

Krueger, C. (October 3, 2005). Remote: New tool for alert classes. St. Petersburg Times Online.
Click here for article.

Share your opinion and experiences by leaving a comment below:
For those using “Clickers” in your classroom now: Are these handheld response devise purely entertainment, or do they really enhance learning? How so?

Click Here for Pros and Cons of Podcasting

Additional resources on podcasting can be found at the CTLT Podcasting Resource Page and in this article, “Teaching with Technology.”

Share your opinion and experiences by leaving a comment below:
How have you subscribed to a podcast? If so, which one and why? Haved you created a podcast before? Do you believe it can be used effectively as a teaching tool?

Read the article:
Craig, R. J. & Amernic, J.H. (2006). PowerPoint presentation technology and the dynamics of teaching. Click here for article

Share your opinion and experiences by leaving a comment below:
Has PowerPoint been an effective tool in enriching student learning in your classroom?

• What kind(s) of assessment strategies to you employ – rubrics, checklists, peer evaluations, etc.?

Visit the Writing Center’s website for many online resources, including student and instructor resources. Some samples resources and handouts include: MLA, APA, and other stlye guides, consultant tips, plagiarism prevention, resume tips, and much, much more.