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The following learning plans and teaching projects are intended only as examples of what can been done under this program. You need not follow them in form or content when completing your application. The examples are taken from the Greening the Future, a compilation of the Miami University Alumni Teaching Scholars Program, the pilot program for this teaching enhancement initiative. We would like to thank Milt Cox, director of the Miami project, for his permission to use these examples. Teaching Scholar Initial Learning Plan Beth Dietz Uhler--Psychology 1. ATS goals and objectives for the year. My goals for this year primarily revolve around learning more about online learning and online distance learning I also want to team more about teaching and learning in general. Toward that end, I intend to: 1. Read more about online learning and online distance learning, including pedagogy, technology, specific online techniques, and the effectiveness of online learning 2. Engage in more in-depth discussions with colleagues who are using various technologies in their classrooms. 3. Become more proficient in using technology. 4. Critically analyze my current teaching style and the various types of activities that I use in my courses. 5. Gain teaching ideas from other educators at Miami and elsewhere. 2. Courses I am teaching this semester and my focus course. This semester, I am teaching Introductory Statistics (PSY293) and Developmental Psychology (PSY23 1). In Statistics, I primarily lecture, but have found ways to incorporate some active-leaming activities. One thing that I have learned from teaching this course in the past is that students are always convinced that they understand the day's material completely and confidently. Then, when they go home to do their homework, they often have no idea what they are doing. It seems that in class, when I am explaining principles or completing problems, students really believe that the material is intuitive and easy to understand. But, statistics requires repetition and hands-on practice before it really becomes internalized. If students do not get that repetition and practice before they leave class, they have great difficulty with their homework. One solution to this problem has been to have students solve problems or answer questions in class that immediately tests their knowledge of what they have just learned. Inevitably, the same problems that appear when they used to go home and try to do their homework also appear in class. The advantage of having the problems appear in class is that I and other students are available to assist. In Developmental Psychology, I use a variety of active- and collaborative-leaming techniques. In a typical class period, I lecture for about 15-20 minutes. The remainder of the class is devoted to other activities, including small-group discussions followed by sharing with the rest of the class, videos, whole-class discussions (typically involve broad, often controversial issues) , reflective writing, or in-class activities (for example, I recently asked the class to write out a time line that included ten milestones from the time they were born until today, and another time line with ten milestones from today until the day they die, to give them a better sense of "lifespan" development). I also use a fair amount of collaborative learning One technique that I have had success with involves dividing the class into about four or five four-person groups. Each person in each group is asked to complete a project for each topic. The project involves answering two short-answer, primarily factual, essay questions for each chapter, and then reading a short article and answering two or three opinion-type questions. All of the members of the group are required to complete the project individually (and each turns in their responses). Each group is given a different set of questions to answer. On the day that the project is due, each group discusses their answers to the two factual questions that they have been assigned. Then, each group is asked to report their answers to the rest of the class. Because these questions serve as the basis for some of the exam questions, students are motivated to make sure that they have the answers to all of the questions. My focus course for my teaching project is Introductory Psychology (PSYI I 1). 3. Plans for interacting with my mentor. My mentor and I plan to get together every other week to discuss a variety of issues related to online learning and teaching. Among the items on a typical agenda are discussion of a particularly interesting or noteworthy article about online teaching, evaluation of online techniques currently being used by one of us, discussion of technical and theoretical issues regarding teaching and online learning, and discussion of conferences that one or both of us have recently attended. My goal is to learn as much from my mentor as I can. I plan to get his feedback on things that I am currently doing in my classes, as well as ideas for things that I plan to do in the future. 4. Plans for interacting with my student associate. I plan to try to involve my student associate in a number of different activities. First, I will ask my student associate to provide me with feedback about some of the online learning activities that I am currently using. Second, as I create my online course, I will ask my student associate to provide feedback about the technical and theoretical aspects of the course content. Third, my student associate will assist me in actually creating the online course. 5. My teaching project. See subsequent document. 6. Plans to involve the scholarship of teaching. I have already begun to include new teaching techniques in my scholarship and have had the opportunity to present my work at a teaching conferences this past summer. I plan to continue to "research" new techniques that I use for teaching, on formal and less formal levels. For example, I am especially interested in active learning and ways to assess its effectiveness. During a class that I taught this summer, I divided the class into three two-person groups. All groups were assigned two short-answer essay questions. The members of group one were asked to answer the essay questions on their own and present their answers to the rest of the class. The members of group two were asked to discuss their answers with each other, and then present their answers to the rest of the class. The members of group three were asked to engage in think- pair-share and then present their answers to the rest of the class. If active learning is really more effective than more passive styles of learning, then students in group three ought to provide "better" answers than group two, who ought to provide better answers than group one. It is my belief that this hypothesis was confirmed. During the next two semesters, I hope to discover better, more rigorous assessment techniques that will allow me to actually collect some usable data. 7. Use of funds. I will primarily use my funds to purchase books and pay for xeroxing costs. 8. Time line. September 1: Begin reading articles and books on online learning which I have been stockpiling since the beginning of summer. My mentor and I will discuss some of these readings during our biweekly meetings. I expect to never finish reading about online learning and distance learning September 22-24: Attend the Flashlight Workshop (sponsored by the Teaching and Learning with Technology Roundtable) in Indianapolis, which will focus on the costs and benefits, to institutions, of teaching with technology. November 1: Begin building the web pages and materials necessary to construct the online course. This portion of the project is likely to continue until the course is offered in Summer, 2000. However, I currently use and will continue to use online components in my courses. I am always working to refine those components and will continue to do so with the assistance of my mentor. January: Pending funding, I will begin taking the online courses necessary to obtain my Certificate in Online Teaching and Learning from California State University. From January until May, I will continue building the online course. Teaching Project Beth Dietz Uhler--Psychology The problem or question: The "problems" that I wish to address with my Teaching Project were initially observed when I began teaching on the Middletown Campus during the evening. Specifically, while teaching Introductory Psychology (PSYI I 1) from 6:00-9:40 one evening per week, I noticed several behaviors on the part of students that I believed were problematic. First, the majority of the students simply did not want to or could not be there. The reasons for not wanting to or being unable to attend class were numerous. First, more than half of the students had children who were dependent on them. Second, almost all of the students had jobs, many of which were full- time. Third, some students simply did not want to do any work. Regardless of their reasons for not wanting to attend class regularly (or not wanting to stay until 9:40), 1 found it difficult to teach students who would prefer to be anywhere but in class. A second observation that I made was that there was a great deal of variability in learning styles - some students wanted the entire class to be devoted to lecture, some wanted to have a discussion for the whole class period, some wanted to have time to read their textbook, and others wanted to be "doing" something. Although I include a number of different styles of teaching (lecture, active-learning exercises, videos, small group discussions, internet activities), I found it difficult to simultaneously address all students' learning styles. The goals of my Teaching Project are to find solutions to these problems. This will involve designing a course that: 1. Students can "take" anytime during the day or week that they want, and 2. Accommodates different learning styles. The development and implementation of such a course will potentially enable students to meet goals that they might otherwise not have been able to meet in the current version of this course. The following is a list of learning objectives that students will be able to achieve better after I implement my project:
Context: I have spent a good deal of time discussing the problems posed above with my colleagues. Among the solutions offered are: 1. To teach using a variety of teaching approaches (e.g., active-learning, collaborative learning), 2. To have a mandatory attendance policy which threatens to drop students who miss more than two classes, for example, 3. To find out from students what they want out of the course. I have tried all of these approaches and, while I believe that they have helped, they have not completely solved the problem. One approach that others have taken to address some of the problems that I have identified is to create online courses. (Note that there are many other reasons for creating online courses, many of which have little to do with the problems I am seeking to solve). Online courses offer students the flexibility they seem to want or need. During the early stages of my Teaching Project, I will spend the majority of my time becoming even more familiar with online teaching (by reading books and articles and by taking online courses to complete an Online Teaching Certificate program). Proposed Solution: As previously mentioned, one possible solution to the problems that I have identified is to design and implement a distance learning course that is entirely online. Such a course offers the possibility of solving the problems I have observed by: 1. Allowing students to complete the work for the course anytime they want. Literally, students can "take" the course on any day of the week, at any hour of the day. This flexibility is especially important for students who work, have children whose schedules they need to work around, have family obligations that prevent them from attending class, or who get their "best"work accomplished in the middle of the night, for example. An online course makes it impossible for students to be constrained by having to sit in a class for a specified period of time on a specific day. 2. Allowing students to tailor the course to fit their style of learning. Thus, the course will offer students multiple ways of learning the material, including online lectures, textbook reading, chat room discussions, bulletin board discussions, internet activities, interactive study guides (using CD-ROM and the WWW), and nearly unlimited access to the instructor. Thus, students who are visual learners will benefit from the interactive study guide and internet activities. Students who prefer to learn by "doing" will benefit from the internet activities, interactive study guide, and the chat room. Students who prefer more passive styles of learning might benefit from textbook reading, bulletin board discussions, and online lectures. There is currently an explosion in online learning. In addition to having the potential to solve some of the problems that I have observed, online learning (distance and otherwise) seems to offer the promise of enhancing student learning. At the moment, there are thousands of online distance-leaming courses that anyone with a modem and a computer has access to. From the teacher's perspective, there are a multitude of online teaching resources, both on the WWW and in print. Therefore, it is clear that others have successfully attempted to design and implement online courses. What is less clear is if the implementation of those courses really does enhance student learning in ways that will solve the problems that I pose. Evaluation: One of the greatest challenges facing online learning, and online distance-leaming in particular, is determining its effectiveness. The majority of the material that I have been exposed to suggests that students taking online distance learning courses learn at least as much as students taking face-to-face courses. However, my exposure to this information has typically been at conferences promoting online distance learning. I have had little exposure to information refuting the effectiveness of online learning. I have become very interested in designing measures which assess the effectiveness of online learning. There are two avenues with which I am exploring this issue. First, I am the co- chair of the Teaching and Learning with Technology Roundtable on the Middletown Campus. (Briefly, the goal of this roundtable is to promote the use of technology in teaching). One issue that the members of the Roundtable are exploring this year is assessing the costs and benefits of teaching with technology. It is my hope that we can identify ways of measuring the effectiveness of online learning. Second, my ATS mentor, Richard Sherman, is also concerned about and interested in assessing the effectiveness of online learning. He and I have only discussed this issue briefly, but we hope to spend more time examining ways to measure the effectiveness of online teaming. At the moment, I perceive that there are a number of indicators of the effectiveness of an online distance-learning course. If the online distance teaming course is effective in solving the problems that I pose, then I should observe: 1. A lower drop-out rate in the online course than in a face-to-face course, 2. Greater student participation (in online chats, discussion boards, emails to the instructor), and 3. Higher exam scores. Timeline:
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