Games Help Make Learning Fun

Playful design, the blending of serious educational games (SEGs) with immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, is becoming the next big thing in higher education. Playful design works because people like to play games and games make learning fun, according to David Chandross, professor of education, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.

“Serious games work by practicing skills and tracking achievement, but also by giving learning an addictive quality,” he wrote in an article for The Conversation. “The ‘one more move’ thinking that keeps video gamers up all night is harnessed for learning.”

Chandross noted peer-reviewed studies show SEGs encourage students to use what they learn while playing, engage them better than most lectures, and reward learners for their achievements. It’s a form of active learning that helps students succeed.

“We learn a lot when we love what we are learning,” Chandross said. “It’s a basic trademark of achievement in higher education. Human beings love doing certain things, and learning to become a master of their own world, however fantastical it might be, is one of them.”

New Ed Models Require New Staffing Models

New K-12 educational approaches that encourage personalized and blended learning—the latter replacing a portion of traditional face-to-face instruction with web-based learning—are running afoul of the typical one-teacher-one-classroom structure. The new models pile additional tasks onto teachers already burdened by an overwhelming workload, in most cases handled solo.

Effectively implementing these new learning strategies will require adopting equally new staffing strategies, according to a new report, Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning, compiled by the Clayton Christensen Institute and Public Impact.

The report’s authors examined how eight district, private, and charter schools and school networks used a variety of new arrangements to better support personalized and blended learning. They identified a number of elements key to the success of these endeavors:

• New roles for educators, including teacher-leaders heading small instructional teams, collaborative teams of teachers, support staff who tutored or mentored students to increase one-on-one or small-group interaction, and teachers in training who taught as part of their on-the-job learning.

• Intensive collaboration on small teaching teams to develop instructional skills faster and gain broader insights into the needs of individual students.

• Intensive coaching that involved weekly or even daily observation and feedback.

• Paid fellowships and residencies that allowed schools to establish their own pipeline of future instructors.

Increasing teachers’ pay was often needed to gain buy-in for their taking on added work and new responsibilities. Some schools stretched their student-to-teacher ratios to make teachers eligible for higher pay, while others brought lower-paid support staffers, trainee teachers, and volunteer tutors into the classroom to shoulder some of the duties.

“The organizational inertia of traditional staffing arrangements may take some time to change,” the report noted. “But as schools like these produce strong results and then refine and codify their practices, more schools across the country will have the will and the means to follow in their footsteps.”

Online Able to Provide High Quality

Some advocates argue that online learning can lead to better outcomes for students, lower costs for institutions, and more access to minorities. A new report concludes all are possible, if colleges and universities do it the right way.

Making Digital Learning Work, a study of digital-learning initiatives at three four-year institutions and three community colleges, found a generally higher retention rate for online students and improved outcomes for Pell-eligible and minority students. It also noted enrollment increases as a result of digital-learning initiatives.

At the same time, the report concluded that online courses do cost less to produce because higher student-to-teacher ratios and less need for classroom space offset the financial investments in course quality. It also suggested that some of the key practices in launching a digital-learning effort include a strategy to meet the needs of different students, support for remote accessibility, and treating faculty members as partners in the process.

“It is clearly important for colleges and universities to adopt a more entrepreneurial approach to digital learning, making innovation a part of their institutional culture and embracing evidence-driven decision-making,” the authors of the report wrote.

Arizona Creates New Learning Environment

A college classroom with the lecturer in front addressing students seated at rows of desks may no longer be the best way to deliver a quality education. In fact, research done at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point found the lecture model is outdated for the digital natives now on campus.

To address the issue, the University of Arizona, Tucson, began investigating evidence-based learning and launched a pilot that used objective data to design courses featuring shorter lectures and class activities. The next step was a collaborative learning space (CLS), a large room with portable furniture and tabletop whiteboards that allow students to interact easily with each other.

“Faculty across campus began seeking out opportunities to teach in our CLS,” Jane Hunter, director of academic resources and special projects, wrote in a column for eCampus News. “They tried new strategies they had never been able to successfully implement. They found new joy in teaching which, in turn, ignited students with a passion for learning.”

From that first CLS, the University of Arizona now has 20, ranging in size to accommodate from 24 to 264 students. The new rooms serve 210 faculty members from 60 departments.

“I am trying new ideas in the collaborative learning space that I have never tried in my 10 years of teaching. It has been fun for me,” said Richard Harper, who teaches in the School of Government and Public Policy at Arizona. “The classroom has become a ‘partner’ in the learning process.”

Questions to Ponder for Online Courses

A recent article from the digital news outlet Quartz detailed efforts by a pair of Texas A&M economics professors to update their mandatory introductory microeconomics class. The class has been moved online, a first for the university.

Students taking the class no longer have to sit through lectures because the professors have already created prerecorded lessons, an interactive video platform, and prepared all the homework and reading material. The lecturer uses a transparent whiteboard to explain concepts and discussion boards to engage students.

“Do I think [this new course] is better than 30 students and the Socratic Method, Dead Poets Society-style? Probably not,” Jon Meers, one of the professors of the course, told Quartz. “It’s still vastly superior to delivering a lecture to 300 students at 8 a.m. on a Friday morning.”

The article claimed the course will increase the quality of learning by allowing professors to interact directly with students, while also saving money for the university. However, Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for Advancement of Learning and technology blogger for Inside Higher Education, questions that conclusion.

He pointed out that creating high-quality digital materials and video lectures is hard work, requiring time and plenty of collaboration between the professor and instructional designers and media educators. He added that while the Texas A&M approach may be more effective than traditional lectures, it’s also a lot more expensive.

“Everything that I know about flipped courses tells me that they are more expensive, not less, to develop and run than traditional lecture courses,” Kim wrote.

Horizon Report: High Tech in Higher Ed

The NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Ed Edition, produced by the New Media Consortium in partnership with the Educause Learning Initiative, examines what’s on the horizon for technology in postsecondary education. This year’s topics were chosen by a panel of nearly 80 experts from 22 countries engaging in a three-month virtual discussion.

One new topic for 2017 is finding technological solutions to advance digital access and equity for students from all backgrounds to enable them to succeed and complete their education. Artificial intelligence in the classroom and next-generation learning-management systems are tech developments that are also new to this edition of the report.

Already identified as a trend in previous reports, use of virtual reality, while still a developing technology, will continue grow in higher ed. “The most effective incarnations of this trend,” the report said, “incorporate emerging technologies that enable students to learn in ways they would not be able to on a strictly physical campus.”

Overall adoption of both existing and upcoming technologies, however, will require a level of digital literacy that is still lacking. As a preview for the report states, “Digital fluency is more than just understanding how to use technology.” In short, students need to develop not only technical proficiency but also cognitive skills in order to use technologies to absorb, evaluate, create, and communicate information.

One of the challenges cited in the report as “most wicked” will be rethinking educators’ roles amid a move toward more student-centered learning. That shift will require instructors to retool their approach to act more as “guides and facilitators.”

This year’s Horizon Report also looks back to track topics addressed in previous reports, listing blended learning as the most pervasive trend across the last six years.

The Use of E-Learning Content is Growing

Flipped and virtual classrooms, along with blended learning, are the driving forces behind the growth of generic e-learning content and courses, which is expected to increase by 8% in each of the next four years.

Other factors in that expected growth are cost savings produced by generic online classes and the proliferation of mobile devices on campus, according to a report from the technology research firm Technavio. Generic e-learning courses are defined as classes prepared according to a standard curriculum and offered by service providers, educational institutions, and experts.

“Generic e-learning courses have been incorporated across all these methods as [they provide] learning opportunities in any kind of learning methods,” wrote the authors of the report. “This enables faculty and corporates to incorporate various hybrid and unique learning and training methods.”

The study found that the flipped classroom model has more than 50% penetration in the United States education market. In addition, the adaptive-content publishing market will produce $1.07 billion in revenue by 2020 and more than 70% of all corporate training is already done online.

CRAFT Experiment Shows Potential

Faculty members of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, are experimenting with a flipped-classroom model that is showing some promise. CRAFT—for Create and curate content, Replace lectures with Active, and Flipped, Team-based learning—targets classes with high rates of dropouts or students getting poor grades.

In the first two years of the program, students in most of CRAFT courses received higher grades than their peers taking the lecture version. In addition, the university has been able to enroll more students in the classes. Instructors also report that their workload remains about the same, according to a report for Inside Higher Education.

A philosophy course that went through the CRAFT redesign typically had 40 students who met three times a week for 50 minutes per class, with lectures making up two of the three sessions. As a flipped class, enrollment increased to 90 students divided into three groups that meet once a week for group quizzes and other forms of active learning. Students watch video and do homework exercises on their own to complete the weekly coursework.

“I’m effectively teaching more students than I was before, but it’s taking less of their time … and the workflow is neutral for me because I’m spending the same amount of time in the classroom,” said Wade Maki, who teaches the redesigned course. “You can move the needle on access and affordability with this. And we need to do that.”

The workload for instructors only becomes neutral after the redesign stage is completed and student savings come in the form of less money spent on course materials that are replaced with online lecture videos. However, student grades did go up, with the share of students earning an A or B increasing from 40% to 56% in one course alone.

“We have shown the model didn’t fail, which we expected it might,” Maki said. “Now, we have to get others on board.”

Tool Makes Flipped-Classroom Model Better

The flipped-classroom model, which has students do their classwork at home, works best when students come prepared. Eric Mazur, a Harvard university physics professor, has created a social tool to help that happen.

Perusall is a social learning platform that allows students to interact with others working on an assignment, pose questions, and receive email notifications when their question is answered so they can come to class ready to talk about the subject.

The platform also includes an assessment tool for instructors based on the quality of the responses posted, how often students comment, and whether those comments are posted before the next class. To keep extra work for teachers to a minimum, the app uses an automated assessment engine to analyze the postings.

In classroom tests of Perusall, Mazur found that 70% of his students read every assignment during the semester and 95% missed no more than a chapter or two. He is also working with publishers to make textbooks available through the platform, which can be integrated with most learning management systems.

“Education is not just about transferring information,” Mazur said in an article for eSchool News. “It’s not about getting students to learn what we know. I want my students to stand on my shoulders to solve the problems I cannot solve. To do that, active participation and social interaction are a must.”

Making Tech Work in the Classroom

Technology in the classroom can be a distraction or it can be used to enhance students’ classroom experience. Stephanie Cole, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas, Arlington, has chosen the latter.

“Using technology changes not so much student behavior as my behavior,” Cole said in an article for Campus Technology. “It makes me craft lectures so that I can apply information and create questions and quizzes. You’ll be amazed at how it makes you rethink how to get information across.”

Cole uses an active learning platform that combines lecture-capture with student engagement, learner analytics, and content-management tools. The system allows her to lead discussions and field questions in real time, and also makes it possible for students to use their mobile devices to ask questions.

The mobile nature of the platform gives student the option to skip her class and watch lecture videos later, so Cole uses it to take attendance and rewards students for their engagement in the classroom. However, the 24/7 access to the course materials and lectures has led to higher grades.

“Great access to lecture material—that is, being able to hear a lecture that you missed or to listen to all or part of a lecture a second time—offers good students an advantage, especially if English isn’t your first language,” she said. “For those students, or where this course is their first exposure to U.S. and American history, keeping up with the class is easier because they can review the lectures at any time. I see more A’s and B’s from these hard-working students.”

Georgia School Taking Classes to Students

In 2013, Central Georgia Technical College, Warner Robbins, received a grant to test blended-learning methods in its health-care program over an 11-county area of rural Georgia. That led to BlendFlex, an initiative that provides students the option to switch instructional delivery formats.

“In the past, students had to sign up for face-to-face, hybrid, or online courses—they had to make a choice,” Carol Lee, educational technology director at CGTC, said in an article in eCampus News. “We have a lot of students who would sign up for a face-to-face class, but then lifestyle changes, sickness, or family issues would force them to drop out and we would lose those students.”

Even though CGTC has satellite campuses for rural students, before BlendFlex the only choice for many was to drive to one of the institution’s central campuses or take the course online. Once the telepresence option was added, faculty could teach in their classroom as well as to students who joined from the rural centers via the videoconferencing that is part of the program.

CGTC reports that BlendFlex classes have only a 12% dropout rate, compared to a 21% rate among other classes the institution offers. In addition, evaluations indicated that 99% of students said they liked the ability to switch delivery methods, 93% would recommend a BlendFlex class to other students, and 91% would definitely take another BlendFlex course.

“The biggest challenge is getting teachers to [rethink their role] in the classrooms that are now student-centered,” Lee said. “But that’s what it’s going to take to be a successful college these days.”

Making Online Learning Better

Companies are working on ways to make online classes better than the traditional classroom setting, according to a report in eCampus News.

One issue with online learning is it requires a level of self-discipline that many students lack. Blended learning has been found to be an important part of the online experience because it combines online with face-to-face learning.

“We’re definitely seeing a trend over the last three to five years of people moving to these blended, online, hybrid, flipped-classroom models,” said Jennifer Ferralli, math product manager of the online instructional platform WebAssign. “We’re seeing this across the different disciplines, not just in math, but also in physics and chemistry. People are trying to find different ways to connect with students to make classroom time more effective and more efficient.”

Video helped support the flipped classroom concept, but it’s been found that video works best with an interactive element. That is being addressed through mobile apps that allow faculty to drag and drop material and learners to go on their personal devices to access the content.

Other online learning issues being address include identity verification and cheating, auto-grading, and open learning management systems.

“We’re starting to hear a real desire for online learning to turn the corner and be focused on a mode of instruction that is inherently better than what we have today in traditional education,” said Chris Walsh, CEO of the video-learning firm Zaption. “People are starting to look at new tools and new opportunities to create an instructional experience that is different, but hopefully better as well.”

Video Lectures Are Not That Effective

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, have found that online lectures are not really very good teaching tools. Ken Koedinger and his team studied results of nearly 28,000 students who took massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the Coursera platform and found that video lectures were actually the least effective way to learn.

Students who only watched the provided video lectures did the worst on the 11 quizzes and final exam given during the 12-week course. Those students who used a combination of reading and video lectures did only slightly better. Students who did nothing more than complete the interactive exercises used in the course did about the same as those who combined reading and watching the lecture videos.

“People have such strong intuitions about their verbal learning experiences: ‘I learn from listening to a lecture,” Koedinger said in an article that appeared in U.S. News and World Report. “It sure feels that way. But in fact, lectures do very little to change your brain.”

The study recorded every mouse click to calculate how often a student read a passage, watched a video, or completed an interactive exercise, according to the report. Findings from the report were presented by Koedinger at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Learning at Scale conference.

“We have all kinds of assumptions about what works in learning and education,” Koedinger said. “But what we find out, not just in this field, but in almost every field, is that when you put those assumptions to the test, they’re more often wrong than right.”

Video a Key Part of Blended Learning

There was a day when video in the classroom, particularly a high school classroom, meant an easy afternoon for both student and teacher. A white paper from the London educational technology firm Knowledgemotion reported today’s students prefer to learn through video.

The report, Perfecting Blended Learning: Why Video IsThe Missing Ingredient In Blended Learning, found that using relevant video provides an alternative teaching tool to traditional textbooks. It also reinforces reading and comprehension, enhances different learning styles, and promotes teacher effectiveness.

The study found video should comprise of short, edited clips categorized with the curriculum. It should also be used as a complementary resource with textbooks and other content.

“The impact and value of video in ‘blended learning’ represents an ongoing field of research,” wrote the authors of the report. “Recent surveys, empirical studies, and industry reports overwhelmingly agree that video in education, when used correctly, can significantly boost student engagement, enjoyment, and learning outcomes.”

Carnegie Mellon Trying a Blended Approach

Because Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, has too many students signing up for some of its computer science courses, the institution is planning a “blended learning” approach to the courses to meet demand this fall.

The program, funded by a $200,000 prize from the Google Computer Science Capacity Awards program, will be like other blended learning courses, but also combine video lectures with optional mini-lectures and group meetings with instructors to reinforce concepts that need to be taught in person. If successful, some of the materials from the course could be used in high schools next year.

While there are no guarantees, some research indicates the Carnegie Mellon approach should work, according to a report for Slate. A study by Columbia University’s Community College Research Center found that students taking hybrid courses had results similar to those taking traditional classes. Other research has found the blended-learning model helped poor-performing algebra students do better than their counterparts in a teacher-led class.

“Carnegie Mellon’s determinate efforts provide a spark of hope—if the school is successful, others may follow in its path,” Amy X. Wang wrote in a Future Tense blog post. “Perhaps we will begin to see more diverse teaching methods, as well as fewer students crouching in the aisles of overcrowded lecture halls.”

10-Minute Videos Preferred in the Classroom

A study on video usage in the classroom found that 71% of responding educators believe the optimal length for viewing is 10 minutes or less. Another 28% preferred videos between 10-30 minutes in length, according to a report in THE Journal.

Authors of the report, The State of Video in Education, felt shorter videos could reflect the fact that students are used to watching videos on YouTube, while the longer lengths might relate to the popularity of the 18-minute TED Talks video format.

The research also found that 91% of the respondents said video had a positive impact on student satisfaction and 82% said it led to higher student achievements. At the same time, 83% of the educators said that ease of use continues to be the biggest need to bring video to the classroom, while 60% reported needing more training and support on tools already available.

“The data in this survey firmly suggest that video technology is a major force in education,” the report concluded. “In the future, students will expect video to be a part of their learning experience and will generate more video content. In 10 years’ time, video will become a standard part of education, will evolve beyond delivery of content, and enable innovative types of teaching and learning. It will gradually take the place of textbooks and will become an increasingly important skill in itself, participating in a shift in the role of the educators.”

Online Class Assumes Manual's Role

MOOCs (massive open online courses) and blended or hybrid learning (combining online and in-class instruction) have gotten a lot of attention recently in higher education, with both earning mixed ratings for academic effectiveness.

At George Washington University, another version of online course is receiving much better reviews. An associate professor of archaeology created a four-week online course as a precursor to a fieldwork program in Kenya. The online course replaces a 150-page, custom-published manual that students were supposed to study before they set off for Africa.

The problem was, the students rarely looked at the manual until they got to Kenya and were in the middle of field studies. The required online course “features videos from previous trips to Kenya and key information that the manual covered, but presents it in a way that’s more accessible for the students,” according to The GW Hatchet, the school’s independent newspaper.

The university couldn’t require students to take a traditional face-to-face class to prepare for the program because some enrollees were based in other countries. However, the online class is available to all students, regardless of location, and ensures they start the program armed with the necessary basic concepts to conduct fieldwork.

The videos incorporated into the course also help students to grasp the unfamiliar conditions in which they’ll be working and living in Kenya, something the old print manual couldn’t really convey.

AP 3.0 Platform Plans to Compensate Faculty

Academic Partnerships, which helps colleges and universities transition to online courses and degree programs, is about to begin sharing the wealth with faculty.

The online company added a revenue-sharing model as part of its updated online education platform, Academic Partnerships 3.0. Faculty members who host live online sessions can earn up to 3% of tuition revenue from the company.

The revenue-sharing agreement normally is between the university and the company, with the institution’s share growing as enrollment increases. In this new model, Academic Partnerships will not pay faculty members directly but will work with its institutional partners to distribute the money.

“This type of activity is highly desirable, and we want to properly reward and see that the professor is compensated,” Randy Best, CEO of Academic Partnerships, said in an article for Inside Higher Education. “We know universities’ budgets are tight, and we believe that the enhancement that is gained by participating [in live online sessions] is so significant that we believe it’s our responsibility to compensate.”

The faculty-hosted learning sessions will provide students with a blended learning opportunity that is fully online and available globally. The Academic Partnerships 3.0 updates will be completed by the fall and will include translation services at no extra cost to partner universities.

Digital Learning Software Studied

A recent study looked at 137 online and hybrid courses to determine what parts of the learning software helped students the most. The research was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Postsecondary Success initiative.

Researchers found that math courses and those that featured problem-solving produced the most positive learning effects. Individualized pacing received high marks from the study, while the learning impact from digital courseware was greater in community colleges than for four-year institutions.

The report recommended colleges and universities should invest in high-quality courseware for lower-division courses and that these innovations should be phased in. Institutions should also use third-party evaluators to get an objective look at the data on how well the courseware works.

“Our goals were to determine courseware features associated with greater learning effectiveness and to provide guidance for funders as they look to make learning technology investments in the future,” said Barbara Means, director of the Center for Technology in Learning, SRI Education. 

Digital Dominates Campus of 2023

Eight years from now, today’s fourth-graders will be finishing up high school in preparation for their higher education experience. The campus classroom will be much different by then, in the view of several experts interviewed by eCampus News.

For starters, they think more students will arrive on campus with a number of college credits already under their belts, thanks to more Advanced Placement courses and partnerships with colleges near their high schools. That’s assuming students even need to show up on the physical campus.

“The average student, an admittedly fluid term that will be even harder to define a decade from now, will likely take some courses on a traditional campus, but also an equal mix of online courses, flipped or blended courses, and massive open online courses (MOOCs),” wrote Jake New.

Some—possibly many—traditional universities may go out of business. The Clayton Christensen Institute, founded by a notable Harvard business professor, puts the bankruptcy rate at 25% to 50% of universities by 2030. Those that survive will have to reimagine graduation requirements, breaking the normal 15-week courses into shorter, more focused learning segments that award certificates for successful completion to students who may never need degrees as long as they continue to update their knowledge and skills.

“Big data” systems and digital apps will also help colleges and universities track student progress, help those who are struggling with certain concepts, and steer others to the right courses.