Designing and Delivering Effective Lectures

“College is a place where the professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.” – Mark Twain 

Today's posting to Tomorrow's-Professor by Rick Reis is a reprint of an article by Jason N. Adsit at the State University of New York, Buffalo and is entitled "Designing and Delivering Effective Lectures".  I've found Adsit's original paper online at http://sites.iiitd.ac.in/indo-us/papers/Paper_Jason%20Adsit%5B1%29.pdf

Contrary to current educational theory that promotes moving beyond the lecture, this article acknowledges that the lecture remains the most common instructional model in Higher Education today.  Instead of "lecture bashing", it identifies scenarios where the lecture is still relevant and provides practical tips on how to design effective lectures.

The 12 tips include:
Tip #1: Plan Your Lectures
Tip #2: Avoid the Tyranny of Content
Tip #3: Know Your Audience
Tip #4: Create a Complete Lecture
Tip #5: Develop Lecture Notes
Tip #6: Audience Engagement and Interactivity
Tip #7: Create Visual Backups and Supports
Tip #8: Quality Control
Tip #9: Enthusiasm
Tip #10: Ask Questions
Tip #11: Answer Questions
Tip #12: Reflection

Each of the tips are supplemented with simple, practical advice.  I highly recommend having a read and subscribe to the notion that "like a good research paper" lectures must be "designed".

I Need My Teachers To Learn

Starting off the new year with an inspirational video about the changing nature of students and teacher response by Kevin Honeycutt.  The power really is in the (catchy) lyrics, such as:

"The kids are changing any fool can tell and the way that you're teaching has to change as well"
"Prepare us for the future and not your past"

What is WATTLE?

A short, sharp competition winning video about Wattle (The ANU installation of MOODLE) was made by one of the 2nd year Engineering students, Chris Arnold.  It's a great clip about the different features in Wattle and reinforces how important the LMS is to students as central to their academic life.

You can view this video and others on technologies important to students at:

http://information.anu.edu.au/about_is/doi/news_events/2011/video_contest_2011_winners.php

Engaging students by improving staff/student interactions

This afternoon I've been engaged by this video on engaging students by improving staff/student interactions. 


ENGAGE Webinar: Improving Faculty Student Interaction: from Susan Metz on Vimeo.

It is a 45min recording of a live webinar presented by Dr. Becky Wai-Ling Packard for the ENGAGE Project that offers research-based, time-effective tips to engage students.  It has an engineering focus as it was co-sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education, but I believe that the tips are transferable to a variety of disciplines.

The slides aren't overly attractive and the last 10mins can be skipped as they relate more to the people that attended the webinar as a live event, but the content and tips are good.

The focus is on the major barrier of time and what lecturer's can do to make the most of their time with students to maximise the interactions.


Some key points in the video for me:

• 3:48min:  "Interactions with faculty members especially make a difference for female students"
• 16:27min:  "Students are often alone with feedback on their assignments"
• 16:55min:  "When the grading process appears arbitrary or vague, student motivation can really go down as can the quality of their work.  This can translate into more office hours for faculty and a really discouraging teaching environment."
• 20:47min:  "Faculty expectations influence student performance"
• 26:20min:  "When students are in class, they're often wondering about their future engineering careers.  So they're more motivated to engage in the learning in the course when they view the class as relevant and important to their future."

Some of the tips provided by Becky that resonated with me:

1. Use a grading rubric.  When I have suggested rubrics to people in the past, a frequent comment is that they take to long to fill for each student in when they have a large class size.  I appreciate this, however when feedback is important to students (and the institution), rubrics can be an efficient way of combining marking time with time spent giving feedback.  You don't need to write copious notes on what the student did well or not so well, as the allocation in the rubric communicates this clearly.
2. Start the class with a 1 min message to link academic work to the professional career.  I agree with this one.  Just recently I've been involved in conversations with my colleagues about the fact that students often don't see the relevance of some compulsory courses at the time of completing their end-of-course evaluations, so that course can be perceived in a negative light.  Instead of accepting and allowing for this, I agree with the suggestion of helping the students make the connection between the course and the real world.  Tell them how the course is relevant to their future careers by conveying messages from former students, relating it to research areas etc.  This can help students see the bigger picture and increase student- and staff- satisfaction.

 
The slides from the webinar without sound are available at http://www.engageengineering.org/associations/11559/files/ENGAGE_ASEE_FSI_Nov292011.pdf

CASS Ethel Tory Centre - New Flexible Teaching and Learning Space at ANU

The ANU CECS Education Development Group recently took a tour of the new CASS teaching and learning space.  The Ethel Tory Centre is primarily for use in language studies and is designed to promote student collaboration while enabling flexible teaching and learning modes.  

The Centre’s design, development, implementation and training were driven by the College Education Development Studio in consultation with College academic staff, and with reference to the growing body of literature on learning spaces for Higher Education.  Funding was contributed from each School and the ANU Division of Information (DOI).  All furniture was custom made and the modern space was designed to make the best use of limited available space, in consultation with architects and ANU facilities. 

In line with current literature on innovative learning spaces (see Further Reading), the Centre’s design is creative and has a motivating effect with natural light, modern architecture and open-plan social areas.  The distinct spaces in the Centre consist of different colours and furniture types which provide cues to assist learners to adjust their behaviour according to the purpose of the space.  "These represent shifts in attitude that welcome and support all types of learners and promote different ways of learning" (JISC, 2006).

Below is a summary of the Ethel Tory Centre’s features and a selection of images.

• Wireless internet enabled throughout
• Floor boxes throughout with power and network ports, to allow for multiple desk configurations
• All screens powered by Mac Minis
• Collaborative Learning Studio
• Movable jelly bean shaped desks for group work, with power for personal laptop use
• 'McDonalds style' bench for individual workspaces, with secured stools and power for personal laptop use
• Two technology enhanced booths, with power and network ports as well as a screen with Tidebreak software (pending) for collaborative work
• Internal and external break out areas
• “Chill-out” furniture
• Screens to display current language news programs
• Small kitchenette with vending machines
• Three Technology and Learning Studios each with:
• 4-5 Jellybean shaped, movable tables with 5 Mac laptops per table.
• 4-5 monitors (1 per table) for sharing/presentations
• Laptops are equipped with language specific software
• Tidebreak software pending
• Retractable data screen and projector
• Whiteboard
• DLD facilities
• State of the art video conference facility
• 3 monitors
• Movable furniture
• Microphones over entire ceiling
• Document camera
• Mac laptop
• Audio recording through DLD and laptop
• Brightly painted throughout
• Custom made furniture
• 24hr access for all ANU students and nominated staff

References:

Ethel Tory Centre

http://cass.anu.edu.au/story/ethel-tory-centre

CASS Education Development Studio

http://cass.anu.edu.au/education/education-development-studio

Designing Spaces for Effective Learning: A guide to 21st century learning space design (JISC, 2006).  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/learningspaces.pdf

Further Reading:

Learning Spaces: A New EDUCAUSE e-Book- “Learning Spaces focuses on how learner expectations influence such spaces, the principles and activities that facilitate learning, and the role of technology from the perspective of those who create learning environments: faculty, learning technologists, librarians, and administrators.”  http://www.educause.edu/LearningSpaces

Many Australian Universities are investing in flexible teaching and learning spaces.  The University of Wollongong's website showcases Innovative Learning Spaces around the Globe including examples of collaborative, connected, flexible, informal learning spaces as well as enhanced professional and lecture learning spaces-  http://cedirsd.uow.edu.au/ils/globe.aspx

Positive results and lessons to learn from a case study on the implementation of a First Year Engineering Learning Centre at the University of Queensland- http://www.uq.edu.au/nextgenerationlearningspace/5.14.pdf

Images:

Translating Learning Outcomes in Moodle Continued....

In a post last August, I showcased a project I have been involved in called Translating Learning Outcomes in Moodle.

This project was well received by the Moodle Community when it was presented at the MoodleMoot in July 2010 and MoodlePosium in October 2010.  We received many indications of interest to contribute and take this work further and one particularly well known Moodler Tomaz Lasic likened the work to a Moodle-Wizard in this entry on his wiki.

Unfortunately, I noticed that the page on the MoodleMoot site where we had collated our work are now disabled.  A version of my slides from the presentations are available on Slide Share and embedded below.

We are keen to progress this work further to include more learning outcomes.  If you are interested, please get in touch with us by emailing ed_dev@cecs.anu.edu.au

Translating Learning Outcomes in Moodle

View more presentations from Lauren Kane

ePortfolios: a novel way to assess engineering interns

This afternoon I am heading off to Melbourne for the ePortfolio Australia Conference 2010.  This event promises to "highlight the ways e-portfolios are serving as a catalyst to support and engage adult learning from the vocational education and training (VET) sector, higher education (HE) sector, and adult and community education (ACE) sector".

The program looks promising and as usual, it is difficult to choose between the presentations in the concurrent sessions.  I will be participating in the twitter-back channel at the conference hash tag #EAC2010.

I will also be presenting a poster on behalf of our Hubs and Spokes team, click the image below for a sneak peak!  The handout to accompany the poster is also available here.