Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
http://www.igi-global.com/gateway/issue/131613
A new study co-authored by Richard Mayer,
The study took place with about 100 middle school students taking a brief “virtual field trip” to learn about climate science. Some students experienced the field trip while wearing a VR headset, while others watched the same material in standard video on a computer screen.
“higher ratings of presence, interest, and enjoyment,”
The paper noted an obvious logistical benefit to virtual field trips over getting on a bus for an in-person outing. “Virtual field trips make it possible to experience things that are too expensive, dangerous, or impossible in the real world,” it says. The experiment did not address the difference in educational value between a real-world field trip and a virtual one.
for programs like nursing, pharmacy and medicine, VR seems promising for teaching some skills, as a piece of a broader curriculum that includes in-person hands-on learning as well.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20220413115741390
Located in a building renovated over the past two years, the Dreamscape Learn centre welcomed 1,000 students in this, the first full semester. In place of traditional biology laboratory time, these students attend labs in the state-of-the-art virtual learning centre that cost US$20 million, paid for by Dreamscape Immersive, philanthropy and ASU.
What we’re doing with the alien zoo is replacing conventional biology labs with these highly immersive laboratory modules in which students get to enter into a virtual world and really deal with the way real scientists collect data, look at problems, collaborate, come up with solutions, try the solutions and then come up with other hypotheses.”
Making the abstract concrete
As is the case in many video games, the avatars can travel back in time, in this case to Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when widespread burning of coal began increasing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We have an amazing tool, Schlosser told the conference, to put students next to where things happened, next to where they might look into the future. Doing this makes the abstract become concrete.
It is important to use the lessons of this transition to challenge what Paulo Freire calls “the banking system” of education—where professors aim to simply deposit knowledge into students—and instead create inclusive pedagogies that acknowledge the diversity of our students and provide a safe space that invites them to speak up. Decolonization is not just about removing a few dead white men from our syllabi, or adding more women of color. It’s about making sure that everyone’s experience is represented. It’s about decentering the traditional power hierarchy in the classroom, so that the professor is not the sole transmitter of knowledge who imposes a singular (and often Western) view. It’s about ensuring equitable participation among students, so that they don’t remain silent and passive receivers whose varied life experiences are dismissed.
In a Zoom classroom, the teacher is no longer the central authority. Chat offers real-time parallel participation. The ability to enter and exit at will equalizes power.
Even before the pandemic, many educators knew that the traditional methods of teaching and research would have to be overhauled at some point. As a professor of humanities, I had been aware of the need to employ hybrid pedagogies more in tune with the digital age and shortened, over-stimulated attention spans. Advantages to joining students in their digital space far outweigh dated arguments railing against the medium; if anything, the pandemic’s isolating effects already prompted students to seek refuge there.
At this moment, the modern university stands at a turning point. Instead of wanting to go back to how things were, we should be looking at radical pedagogical interventions that make the most of remote learning as an accompaniment to the traditional classroom experience. This is the time to put “interdisciplinary” ideas into practice by experimenting with new methodologies.
The university model needs to evolve.
https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/lifelong-learning/#Echobox=1640581247
universities and curricula are designed along the three unities of French classical tragedy: time, action, and place. Students meet at the university campus (unity of place) for classes (unity of action) during their 20s (unity of time). This classical model has traditionally produced prestigious universities, but it is now challenged by the digitalisation of society – which allows everybody who is connected to the internet to access learning – and by the need to acquire skills in step with a fast-changing world. Universities must realise that learning in your 20s won’t be enough. If technological diffusion and implementation develop faster, workers will have to constantly refresh their skills.
By teaching foundational knowledge and up-to-date skills, universities will provide students with the future-proof skills of lifelong learning, not just get them ‘job-ready’.
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https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=upskilling
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=lifelong+learning
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.673594/full
Readiness for teaching online has been defined as the qualities or predispositions of an instructor that exemplify teaching high-quality online courses (Palloff and Pratt, 2011). Mental and physical preparedness (Cutri and Mena, 2020), a willingness to create active, collaborative learning environments that foster a sense community (Palloff and Pratt, 2011), and acceptance of online teaching (Gibson et al., 2008) also demonstrate readiness for the online teaching and learning modality. An inability or unwillingness to adopt student-focused approaches and the perception that online courses provide low quality learning environments (Gibson et al., 2008) and are not worthwhile (Allen and Seaman, 2015) can be important barriers to the successful transition to teaching online.
Despite decades of evidence, good teaching is still considered more art than science. That’s hurting faculty and students alike.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-damaging-myth-of-the-natural-teacher
Even as universities have become more bureaucratic and centrally controlled, teaching continues to operate largely independent of oversight
when she was a college administrator, before becoming a professor, she was expected to spend two to four hours a week on professional development. It was written into her job description. Her training as a faculty member, by contrast, “has all been self directed, self led, things I want to do. It’s never been part of my annual evaluation.”
At most research universities if you were publishing in pedagogy journals they would not be counted or weighted as heavily as if you were publishing in a traditional journal.
Valencia College, a community college in Central Florida that relies heavily on part-time instructors, encourages them to improve their teaching by offering certificates and pay increases for participating in 60 hours of professional development.
Some of the most notable reform efforts are coming from external funders and academic associations. The National Science Foundation, the Association of American Universities, the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, the American Historical Association, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and others have sponsored research and projects on teaching reform, including work on how to advance discipline-based education research.
a pilot program at Kansas to reinvent the evaluation process, as part of a multi-campus project called TEval. The new process, she says, considers seven benchmarks, including course planning, class climate, and evidence of student learning. Teaching reviews consider, for example, how well course content is aligned with the curriculum, whether a faculty member is involved in scholarship about pedagogy, and how much time they spend advising and mentoring students. Departments are also encouraged to develop “peer triads,” in which small groups of faculty members whose coursework is related meet regularly to talk about their teaching and course design.
He and his peers were heavily involved in pedagogical innovation on campus, including the Center for Project Based Learning and discipline-based education research.
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More on teaching in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=teach
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https://academicpartnerships.uta.edu/articles/healthcare/pros-cons-competencybased-learning.aspx
The Glossary of Education Reform, “Competency-based learning refers to systems of instruction, assessment, grading, and academic reporting that are based on students demonstrating that they have learned the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn as they progress though their education.”
The benefits, or drawbacks, of competency-based learning (CBL) — also known as competency-based education, mastery-based education, performance-based education, standards-based education and proficiency-based education — are up for debate. Regardless, there are an increasing number of these types of programs, particularly in for-profit colleges.
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Problem-based learning is a category of experiential learning that involves students in the process of critical thinking to examine problems that lack a well-defined answer. In problem-based learning, students are given a problem with only preliminary information. They work towards solving the problems themselves, rather than reviewing how others have resolved the situation or problem as in a case study. They do not produce a product as in project-based learning, and students are not necessarily working in the community unless they are gathering data.
Problem-based learning fosters students’ metacognitive skills. They must be consciously aware of what they already know about an area of discovery as well as what they do not know.
Project-based learning is a category of experiential learning where students are presented with a complex problem or question that has multiple potential solutions and possibilities for exploration. However, after studying this problem or question in their teams, students are challenged to develop a plan and create a product or artifact that addresses the problem.
A discussion thread in the Higher Ed Learning Collective:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/853609748603058/
“Has anyone ever used Discord to communicate with their students and to deliver short lectures or have office hours? We don’t use Zoom and MS Teams only covers one section. I have four sections of the same course. I found one article in favor of it, but figured I’d check with the general community.”
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more on Discord in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=discord
“The goal of ALOE is to develop new artificial intelligence theories and techniques to make online education for adults at least as effective as in-person education in STEM fields,” says Co-PI Ashok Goel, Professor of Computer Science and Human-Centered Computing and the Chief Scientist with the Center for 21stCentury Universities at Georgia Tech
Research and development at ALOE aims to blend online educational resources and courses to make education more widely available, as well as use virtual assistants to make it more affordable and achievable. According to Goel, ALOE will make fundamental advances in personalization at scale, machine teaching, mutual theory of mind and responsible AI.
The ALOE Institute represents a powerful consortium of several universities (Arizona State, Drexel, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Harvard, UNC-Greensboro); technical colleges in TCSG; major industrial partners (Boeing, IBM and Wiley); and non-profit organizations (GRA and IMS).
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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education