Category Archives: Bill Caraher

The Future of the Computer Lab

Posted on March 3, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This year, I’ve been serving on a committee that distributes technology funding for teaching within my college.  One of things that these funds do is maintain computer labs in departments and programs across campus. Many of the computer labs that these funds will renovate are difficult to keep up to date (and currently rely upon computers purchased more than 5 years ago which is an eternity amidst today’s fast moving technology cycle),  relatively small with fewer than 40 computers, and serve relatively focused constituencies (typically limited to particular departments or programs). These three issues: the difficulty in keeping labs up to date, their small size, and their focused constituencies led me to think a bit about the future and function of the computer lab in the modern university.

As a preemptive caveat, I’ll admit that I do not teach in a computer lab and our department does not make use of one.  On the other hand, I have been involved with building a lab and have observed student behavior and the tech scene over the past 10 years.  So with that framework, I’ll offer some observations here and invite everyone to critique, expand, explode, or reject my observation in the comments!

1. The desktop computer is on the verge of extinction.  Computer labs are almost always associated with the desktop computer.  At the same time, a Pew Study (h/t to Mark Grabe) released last month has shown that just over half (57%) college-aged students have desktop computers whereas 70% of them have laptops.  The reasons for this are pretty clear.  Laptops are now powerful enough to handle all but the most robust computing needs. To be sure, the limitations of laptop computers – particularly at the extreme high end of, say, complex graphics production, video editing, controlling scientific equipment, or other processes that require significant computing power – still require desktop work stations with massive, multicore processes, massive amounts of storage, and robust cooling capacities, and ability to be customized and expanded. These environments, however, are fairly rare outside of upper-level or even graduate research programs.  Few students ever explore the fringes of their laptop’s computational power (except perhaps when they are playing games).  The growing preference for laptop computers among “millennials” makes clear that fewer users and ultimately software makers require the kind of performance limited to desktop hardware.

2. The cloud can do almost everything.  My suspicion is that while personal computers will continue to become more powerful, the real growth in computer power will come through leveraging “cloud” based computing.  In other words, powerful, remote computers with many, many times the power of even the most robust desktop will be available to handle the most demanding processes. Unlike a desktop or even a laptop which is designed for a single individual, cloud based computers can accommodate many users, sometimes simultaneous, and thereby reduce unnecessary duplication of processing power common to a computer lab where processing loads are often distributed unevenly across all users.  For example, processor intensive functions – like graphics rendering – now typically reserved for the most powerful desktop computers, can be sent out to the cloud where clusters of powerful computer can more efficiently and quickly handle demanding tasks.

Moreover, companies like CiTRIX are working to bring even common software to the cloud (like the Adobe suite of image editing software) making it possible for students to use specialized software which is not running on their computer, but in the cloud. The student’s computer become just an access point for the computer power of the cloud and the software running in that environment.  This both eliminates the need for students to purchase expensive, specialized software for one or two classes and eliminates the need to limit software on a group of designated machines in a computer lab environment.

So cloud computing is not only more powerful, but more efficient. If a student can leverage the power of cloud computing from their laptop, why do we need to provide a lab full of powerful desktop computers?

3. Decentralized learning.  Cloud based computing will become more and more important as programs turn toward increasingly decentralized models of instruction. The physical computer lab is based on residential, spatially local models of instruction.  While it is my hope that universities will always have classrooms, labs, and physical locations, I am also aware that the move toward online instruction will make some of these facilities less important for the definition of university education.  Students taking a class from around the world will no long be able to use a computer lab located in a particular building with particular hours and particular physical hardware.  Just as cloud based course management software like Blackboard or Moodle facilitate spatially decentralized learning models, more specialized software will also gradually become available in an online environment making the hardwire computer lab as marginal as the bricks-and-mortar classroom.

4. The line between a classroom and lab is increasingly blurred.  As Anne Kelsch has discussed, new models for classrooms – particularly those designed around the principles of active learning – have incorporated many of the features of the traditional computer lab directly into classroom space. While computer labs do have the benefit of physically concentrating students working on similar projects and problems, the classroom as computer lab brings that focus to even a finer point.  Spaces like the SCALE-UP classroom take computers from the lab (where my mind’s eye sees banks of computers facing the wall or arranged in ranks) and organizes them both in physical space and through software to encourage students to work together.  While labs have always been teaching spaces, the line between the lab and the classroom will become increasingly blurred.

5. The new economic normal. Computer hardware is expensive to buy, to maintain, and to keep current. Public universities are under increased pressure to trim budgets and use resources more wisely. Traditional computer labs will not remain a cost-efficient way to provide students with access to computer power, software, or a sophisticated instructional environment.  Specialized labs will continue to exist for particular kinds of highly-specialized computing needs or to support certain learning environments, departmental or program based computer labs designed to serve diverse constituencies will soon fall victim to the changing economic realities of American university life.  While many of the more powerful and specialized cloud based solutions are not inexpensive, they offer structural advancement over desktop computing by leveraging economies of scale.

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These are simply my reflections on the role of the computer lab in the teaching and learning environment. What do you think the future holds for the computer lab in the 21st century university?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Computer Labs, Technology

More than four reasons to teach more than four classes (sometimes)

Posted on February 17, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

To celebrate the filing of my application for tenure, I decided to indulge in a teaching sabbatical.  This involved dramatically increasing the amount of time dedicated to teaching for one semester.  If a research sabbatical emphasizes research, a teaching sabbatical focuses on teaching.

To do this, I decided to take an overload and teach a digital history practicum. This took my normal spring teaching load from 3 courses to four and a half course, and four and a half different preps.  Each class is different. I am teaching a large (100 student) online introductory course, a smallish (20) midlevel course for majors, a four-credit language class, a graduate seminar, and a 2 student hands-on practicum.  Many people offer condolences when they hear about my teaching load, but so far this semester (5 weeks in!), it has been a blast, and, more importantly, I’ve learn things about teaching, my work flow, and what it takes to be a productive and successful in academia.

1. Always Be Teaching.  Malcolm Gladwell has famously argued that expertise is only achieved after 10,000 hours of practice. My typical teaching load (2 or 3 classes) occupied 10 “contractual” hours per class per week. So each year, I earn about 750 hours of teaching practice.  At this rate it will take me about 13 years to become an expert teacher.  Adding one extra course a year, or 150 hours of expertise will cut over 2 years from that number.  I think the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps attributed part of his dominance of the swimming world to his willingness to practice 7 days a week rather than 6 like many of his competitors. Over the four years between Olympic games, he gained 200 days of training or a 17% more practice than his competition.  While there is a line between pushing oneself to exhaustion (over-training to continue our sports metaphor), I also think that the more we do, the better we get at things. Taking a semester periodically to increasing the intensity of our teaching commitment can give us an advantage in the classroom.

Unlike many semesters, where teaching is a pretty modest part of a diverse, busy, and demanding week, I have discovered that the 4 course/4 prep combination makes it almost impossible to compartmentalize the responsibilities of teaching.  As a result, I am always teaching this semester.  So not only is one more class 10 more hours (or so) per week of experience, but, for me, those 10 hours per week are the tipping point. Teaching has become what I do this semester rather than one of the things that I do.

2. Efficiency. In order to survive my other responsibilities, however, I have had to become much more efficient.  I hear colleagues who have had children say that they become much more efficient scholars as they learn to balance professional and family responsibilities. This semester, after only 5 weeks, I am feeling similar results. I am becoming better at getting things done in the interstices between classes, reviewing lectures while walking across campus, and answering student emails as they come in (rather than letting them pile up and having to deal with them as a unwieldy batch).  I have come to think much more carefully about how I grade and comment on student papers to make sure that I focus my comments on the most valuable information and avoid my time-consuming habit of rambling remarks.  I have also begun to review my reading and writing assignments and consider how well and efficiently they achieve the stated course goals. In a semester where I can feel even 20 extra pages of reading a week, I have become extra sensitized to how closely each page and assignment contributes to what I want to do in the course.

3. Good Work Habits.  At some point in my life, I stopped working much in the evening. I tend to be an early riser and I am usually at my desk by 6 am. For some reason, I began to declare my day done around 6 pm. While this is a nice long work day, I found that I typically wasted evening hours watching TV, reading, surfing the web, or just doing … well … nothing.  This semester I have rediscovered my ability to do work in the evening.  Even just an hour of work – typically course preparation or light grading – makes my day far more manageable and allows me to use my prime working hours (typically from around 7:30 am to 11: 30 am and from 2-5 pm) to accomplish more thinking-intensive tasks. I only rediscovered the evening as potential work time when I began to push my day to the limit with short term responsibilities of teaching.  Long term research and writing goals can always be put off. Grading papers, designing tests, or working on lectures are pressing and immediate.

4. Being able to walk away.  I am teaching a mid-level language class this semester for the first time. Sometimes the class goes well and I feel like I’m a genius, and sometimes the course goes poorly and I feel like fraud. When experiencing the ups and downs of teaching in the past, I would take time to revel in the high of a good class and linger over a botched explanation for hours.  Now, I don’t have time. Quick notes in my teaching journal and, if necessary, on my to do list (e.g. re-learn the gerundive), and I am on to the next class.  Rather than dwelling on the emotions that come with teaching, I have had to channel my energies into pro-active practice. When I botch things, I note that I need to do them better. When I am successful, I write a quick note reminding myself of the success of a particular assignment.

5. Work-Life Balance. There is a good bit of talk in academia today about work-life balance. In college I developed some pretty unbalanced work habits which became more exaggerated in graduate school.  I don’t have much of a life, but since I’ve never really had one as an adult, I am not sure that I understand what I am missing.  That being said, the daily demands of teaching this semester have made me appreciate a lazy Friday or Saturday night with friends or Sunday evening in the kitchen with my wife far more. Simple things like writing this blog or reading a book have become far more pleasurable and important, because I have to make time for them.

There are downsides to my all-teaching, all-the-time semester, of course. My modest research program has suffered. I am not writing as much as I usually do and when I do write it is less polished and more fragmentary. I am fortunate to have understanding colleagues who have picked up whatever I have dropped in terms of service. I am only on a few committees that have regular responsibilities.  Finally, the intensity of always be teaching is probably not sustainable, but I do hope that some of the lessons in efficiency, good work habits, and being able to walk away will carry forward when my schedule returns to a more normal pace.

Finally, I am concerned about student learning outcomes.  While it is difficult to determine at this point in the semester whether I am still as effective in the classroom as I was with a lighter teaching load, it is something that I intend to monitor both through standard assessment practices, student grades, and my own continued reflections on classroom performance.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Teaching

Some Teaching Thursday Tweets

Posted on November 18, 2010 by | Leave a comment

For those of you who don’t follow our Teaching Thursday Twitter Feed (OIDatUND) here are some of the recent tweets on teaching related topics.

  • The Electric Archaeologist offers some observations on using alternate reality gaming in a digital history class: 
  • The number of international graduates students in US graduate schools is up 3% this year:  How does that influence how we teach?
  • There’s a great article on an academic ghost writer over at the Chronicle. It has gone viral: .  The article reminds us that teaching can have a direct effect on the academic grey market.
  • Does anyone ban Wikipedia in the classroom anymore?  This is an article that suggests that it still happens:  .
  • Check out The Beat blog from the University of Minnesota.  It focuses on teaching technology ranging from information overload in the classroom to teens and texting:  
  • Has anyone seen the full report on the beneficial uses of Twitter in the classroom this in this quarters issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning:  But for every positive report, there are perspectives that at best make the social media seem irrelevant: 
  • The National Survey of Student Engagement always make useful and interesting reading: 
  • A nice article on graduate student thesis advising: .  It would great to hear some local views on these topics.
  • Some interesting finding from Project Information Literacy on how students understand researching in the library:  (.pdf)

We also tweet news updates like the application for Graduate School Summer Research Professorships (a great opportunity to include students in research): 

So follow OIDatUND on Twitter!

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Twitter

Archaeology and QR Codes

Posted on November 11, 2010 by | 3 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This post is cross-listed to my Archaeology of the Mediterranean World blog. The topic of using QR Codes in teaching is just now rippling across the country, I thought the my musings on the character and value of QR Codes might be of some interest to the Teaching Thursday audience. In particular, I think QR Codes provide a way to embed information on the internet more deeply into the “real” campus space.  Unlike “augmented reality”  which draws upon ideas of mediated reality to compels the viewer to understand new relationships between the physical space and various geolocated metadata, QR codes are mobile objects that enable a viewer to remix the link between information contained on the internet and physical reality.  In fact, the portable character of a QR code almost demands that the relationship between physical space and the space of the internet by remixed to create new relationships between our physical selves and our built and natural environment and our digital selves as denizens of the electronic space of the internet.

My wife recently attended a conference on marketing and higher education hosted in part by Google. There as a low buzz about QR codes at the conference. For those who don’t know, QR codes are funny-looking, square bar codes, and QR stands for “quick read”. They are designed to be read by little applications on a mobile phone that use the phone’s camera like a bar code reader.  QR codes are most frequently used to display a URL (a web address), but they can contain a number, a v-card, or even instruction to send a tweet to a twitter account.  Over the past year, QR codes have moved into mainstream marketing, appeared in popular culture (e.g. a Kyle Minogue video!), and have even attracted the interest of academics.

I’ve been thinking about QR codes for six months now. Yesterday, I had a great chat yesterday with a colleague from our Working Group in Digital and New Media, and we began bandying about ways to use QR codes on campus to install art, historical information, subversive (in a polite North Dakota way) messages, and challenges to the barrier between the internet and real space on campus.

NewImage.jpg

After the conversation, I struggled a bit to understand what made using QR codes unique or interesting.  On the one hand, I understood that they are a gimmick and fad, but that didn’t bother me.  I like gimmicks and fads. (After all, I love the interwebs!). Finally, after I mulled over this discussion ever more, I realized that I like QR codes because they are archaeological.  Here’s how I am thinking about them:

1. They are mysterious and demand action.  Like an archaeological artifact (imagine a sherd of pottery), QR codes beg to be understood or contextualized.  They demand action on the part of the viewer or, at least, the viewer who recognizes a QR code as something to be deciphered.  Just as an archaeologist is almost compelled to figure out the context for an artifact (and anyone who has ever walked across an archaeological site or any complex landscape with an archaeologist knows how powerful disciplinary training can be!), people “in the know” feel compelled to scan and understand a QR code.  In fact, if you don’t read the code, the QR code is meaningless.

2. Codes are objects. The form of a QR code communicates meaning. Like most archaeological objects, a QR code does not communicate in an explicitly textual way (except in the sense that all objects can be read as types of texts).  Within the discourse of archaeology and, presumably, QR code-ology, the form of the object prompts the action required to understand it. Archaeologists are obsessed with the materiality of objects – shape, texture, size, weight –  and recognize that to produce meaning, it is necessary to compare one object to another to create a context for archaeological material and, ultimately, to create meaning. QR codes have the same material character. Codes are things which must be understood in a non-textual way and placed within a particular context to produce meaning.  Only people familiar with the code and who recognize the action required will understand the message.

ArchObject.jpg

3. The are mobile.  Like many artifacts in an archaeological context, a QR code is mobile meaning that there is tension between its present physical context and its the meaning embedded (by the code’s creator) in its form.  In archaeology we like to think about formation processes; these are the processes that led to an object being discovered by an archaeologist in a particular place or condition.  Formation processes recognize our environment as constantly changing and almost infinitely mutable. A QR code printed on a sheet of paper, or a sticker, or t-shirt can travel from one place to the next while still retaining a formal link to another context.  Even if a QR code is designed for a particular place and time, because they are material and mobile, they will travel and endure.

4. Codes provide a link between the real and the virtual.  As a historian I spend much of my time in a “virtual” environment girded about by the rules of my discipline and embedded deep within my imagination. The past is something that obeys particular rules and, in a particular sense, does not exist except within my imagination.  At the same time, as an archaeologist, I am constantly challenged to recognize the past as real by the physical nature of archaeological artifacts.  QR Codes can bridge this same gap between the virtual world of the internet and the physical world of the code itself.  The real world context of the code creates a physical point of departure into the virtual world of the internet.  In short, the code locates the internet in physical space.

QR codes are easy to generate through any number of sites on the internet. (Here’s a basic list.)  And most mobile phones have QR code reader applications available for them.  Phones with better browsers, of course, provide access to far more robust content.

Do you use QR Codes in the classroom?  Teaching Thursday would love to hear how!

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Posted in Bill Caraher, QR Codes

The (Teaching) Revolution will not be Blogged

Posted on November 4, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Anyone who follows the happenings on the internets is probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in the October 4 New Yorker: “Small Changer: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted“.  In this article, he argued that the connections produced by such social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are “weak ties” which are unlikely to hold up to the kind of social pressures that real revolutionary action will both require and endure.  He begins his article with the students who participated in the revolutionary Greenboro sit-in of 1960 and noted that the four participants had deep social connections as roommates at North Carolina A & T or as friends from high-school. These social connections, characterized by regular physical proximity to one another and a significant body of shared experiences, enabled these four brave students to have the confidence to imagine radical ideas and to maintain their resolve in the face of adversity.

Other pundits, like Clay Shirky, have challenged the idea that such dedication is necessary to generate revolutionary change.  Shirky, particularly in his most recent book Cognitive Surplus, has argued that the internet and social media sites become conduits funneling myriad rivulets of surplus energies together making the great deluge of internet knowledge possible (manifest in sites like Wikipedia and The YouTubes).

These two positions intersect with the mission of this blog.  The idea for this blog was to capture the hundreds of short (and long!), thoughtful, creative, conversations about teaching that go on weekly across campus into a central place.  The hope was that the blog could become an alternative source for stimulation for busy colleagues who missed a great program offered by our Office of Instructional Development or were not in the hallway at the second two colleagues were unpacking a tricky issue or did not have a moment to read the newest book that presents a new solution to the latest problem. Over the last three months, I extended this effort to Twitter once again trying to funnel energy and ideas from across campus into a single conduit.

Follow us on Twitter at OIDatUND!

So far, the blog has had its moments, but they have been few and far between.  Over the last three months, I’ve been promised many, many blog posts, but always “in the spring semester” when, of course, the songbirds return, the snow melts, and other obligations drift away on the first warm, scented breeze.  I expect that some of these posts will come to enliven our blog, but even these contributions (which I know will be excellent), do not really represent even a fraction of the exciting conversations I have had about teaching.  Of course, we are all busy, all of the time, and finding time to write is a challenge.

Having read Gladwell’s article, I began to wonder whether the experiences of teaching actually resist blogging as a medium for communication. Perhaps this is because so much teaching on campus represents spontaneous responses to spontaneous issues.  Could it be that our day-to-day teaching activities – a troubled student, a particularly bad classroom experience, or a brilliantly successful assignment – all exist within such a complex matrix of variables that communicating how something succeeded or failed in writing would be either a monumental task unsuited to the limited medium of blogging or somehow impossible to articulate in a useful, generalized way?

In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that understanding how to become a better teacher is impossible through public reflection — obviously the research conducted by various academic departments in teaching and learning have both real practical value and a robust disciplinary tradition — but to wonder whether many of us on campus do not think about teaching in a way that lends itself to even the modest structure of a blog post.  Teaching is an emotional experience full of frustration and excitement as we join the struggle to achieve goals that, in most case, are very difficult to articulate.  Of course, we can all enumerate formal learning objectives, classroom goals, content expectations, and the like, but I wonder whether these are the things that really motivate us as teachers.  For me, teaching is about realizing goals that extend far beyond the classroom.  These goals are resistant to clear quantitative or even qualitative evaluation and they often exist at the fringes of my ability of articulate them in a rational way at all.

In short, maybe this blogging experiment reveals the limitations of media dependent on the kinds of “weak ties” that Gladwell assigns to Facebook friends and Twitter colleagues.  Face-to-face meetings, intimate seminars, conversations over strong beverages, and hallway insights depend upon the strong ties of shared experience to have value.  Extracted from that context, everything seems mundane and hardly stuff that matters.  The teaching revolution will not be blogged.

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A Defense of Asynchronous Teaching

Posted on October 28, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Recently, I’ve been talking a good deal with one of my favorite interlocutors on teaching matters, Bret Weber.  He and I approach online teaching in different ways.  While I hesitate to speak for him, it seems to me that his online teaching emphasizes more cohort building, realtime interaction, and incremental assignments with set due dates.  This approach has suited his students, his teaching goals, and his program (Social Work) well.

My approach to online teaching is almost the complete opposite.  When I first developed my idea for online teaching I wanted it be as experientially different from the classroom as possible.  I was probably overly strident in my efforts to establish this difference and romanced by change for the sake of change. Whatever the cause, I developed a radically asynchronous model for teaching my History 101: Western Civilization class.

The class has 2 deadlines, and one of those deadlines is optional.  All work must be done by a date toward the end of the class so that I have some some time left to grade the inevitable onslaught of papers and assignments.  All the course material is available from the start of the class.  The only optional deadline is an optional midterm paper that, if the student decides to write it, is due at the mid point of the semester.  If a student opts out of this midterm paper, he or she must write a final exam paper that brings together all the content of the class.

The lessons in the class are organized into 15 folders numbered for each week.  So students are guided to engage a body of material and assignments each week.  Each weekly folder includes readings, a quiz, a discussion board post, and, in many cases, one or two potential paper topics.  Along with the cumulative paper, students must write two other 3-5 page papers analyzing historical documents from the class. All the work from the all the weeks is due at the end of the semester.  In general, I grade two or three weeks at a time as assignments come in.  Assignments that come much later than two or three weeks behind the weekly folder inevitably get less attention, but the students know that I grade on schedule and give greater attention to work submitted in a regular and consistent way.  I use a Twitter feed and announcements to remind the students to keep up with the course and to let them know where I am in terms of grading material.

This system has certain risks.  For example, I regularly write off the last two weeks of the semester to grade the papers from all the students who leave the work in the class to the last minute. These assignments tend to be, generally, of a lower quality, but the average grades for all assignments are not significantly lower than in my classroom classes where I tend to have more regimented deadlines.  It appears to be the case that this system probably leads some students to do more poorly on their papers which they leave to the last minute. On the other hand, it also appears that some some students do better than they would in a traditional synchronous course, and the students with better outcomes tend of offset the students who perform less consistently.

Aside from the assessed results of the class, his system does offers some additional benefits as well:

1. Flexibility for Students.  Teachers have always bemoaned the absence of face-to-face contact with students in an online environment.  My online classes have attracted students from around the world and across the country.  Face-to-face time would be impossible with these students even leveraging all the technology available to maximize realtime communication in an online environment.  Moreover, many of my online students have lives that make regular schedules difficult.  Online teaching gives a student who works on oil pipelines and needs to be far from civilization for weeks on end, a way to begin a university education. To me this is a good thing, and an asynchronous course, particularly at the introductory level cultivates diversity in our classes and expands the democratizing aspects so close to the heart of higher-education.

2. Flexible Engagement. One of the most challenging parts of creating a class schedule is attempting to address how different students will engage course material over the course of the semester.  For every assignment that some students master easily, other students, particularly in an introductory level course, will find challenging.  An asynchronous course allows students to engage material at their own pace and, moreover, allows different paces to exist in the class at the same time. It is interesting to see the natural divisions among students as small cohorts of students form and engage course materials at similar paces over the course of the semester. In a course of 70, about 10 students stay precisely on the weekly schedule, another 10 or so may fall the occasional week behind, and a third cohort of 10-15 students are never more than 2 weeks behind over the course of the semester.

2. Flexible Assessment. One of the best things from a faculty standpoint of asynchronous teaching is that it restricts the bulk grading experience to one occasion at the end of the semester.  During the semester there is a constant trickle of two or three assignments a day.  I tend to assess assignments on a weekly basis and contribute to the online discussion board slightly more often. I find that grading the slow trickle of assignments over the course of the semester gives me far more time to make substantial comments on student work.  Moreover, it gives an advantage to students who can make reasonably consistent progress through the course.  I’ve found that even students with the most complex schedules rarely fall more than a couple weeks behind if they attend to the course in a serious way.  The half of the class that maintains a good schedule of engagement over the course of the semester tends to get the kind of substantial comments that allow their work to improve over the course of the semester.  Students who turn in all their work at the end of the semester do not get the same benefits as students who approach the course in a regular way.  They not only tend to get less sustained comments on their work, but also have less time to develop skills and improve on the skills introduced over the course of class.

Asynchronous teaching is not a perfect system for all classes.  I might suggest that that it works best in larger, introductory level courses. It does little to accommodate  unmotivated or undisciplined student who can easily leave their work to the end of the semester or to set deadlines. My experiences has been, however, that these students tend to struggle in any learning environment and  the asynchronous system only exacerbates these issues.

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Posted in Asynchronous Teaching, Bill Caraher, Online Teaching, Teaching

Ten Questions for Teaching Thursday Readers

Posted on October 21, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had numerous conversations with potential contributors to Teaching Thursday. Many expressed an interest in contributing, but protested no time to write.  Others explained that they had ideas, but that they had not yet figured out a way to articulate them in a cohesive blog post.  Others, suggested questions that they would like to see considered on the blog.

I pulled this group of questions from conversations and emails with colleagues across campus. Following the recent fad for list of answers (10 best list, 100 most important lists, and like), I decided to turn the idea on its head and propose a list of Ten Questions about teaching, learning, and mentoring at the university level:

  1. It is a standard trope in certain corners of the academic discourse, that the increased specialization among faculty members has made us less effective as undergraduate teachers. If that is the case, it may also suggest that our tendency to specialize endangers the principles of shared governance that are at the core of many institutions of higher learning.  What do we do to make sure teaching, research, and service share common goals? How do faculty most effectively link teaching, research, and service into a cohesive, lived, career?
  2. How do we undermine contractual approaches to learning while still communicating our expectations clearly?  The last thing most faculty and students want is a learning environment where completing a set of tasks necessarily equals a particular grade. For the classroom to remain a dynamic, student-centered place, the goals and outcomes of the class must be individualized to some extent.  How do we balance the need to be clear and explicit and the need to be flexible and dynamic?
  3. Is synchronous or asynchronous teaching better for online courses?  This question invariably comes up in any discussion of online teaching. Some contributors to Teaching Thursday prefer radically asynchronous teaching environments allowing students to take the class at whatever pace they find amenable over the course of the semester. Other contributors favor live lectures, realtime office hours, and deadlines designed to keep students together as a cohort and on a steady pace through the semester.  Both techniques have advantages and disadvantages and neither may be “better” in for all students. So perhaps the better question is how does online teaching allow us to blend synchronous and asynchronous teaching in new and more effective ways?
  4. How does available technology influence the learning outcomes possible in our classes? With every new gadget, application, or social-networking service there are new opportunities and new expectations.  We live in a world where our normal, daily routines are increasing dominated by technologies that did not exist some five years ago. How do we adapt our teaching to take fullest advantage of these changes?  And more importantly, how do we assess the success of new ways of engaging with material?
  5. What are the “new liberal arts” or “liberal arts 2.0″ and do they deserve a place or at least a hearing in the academy today?  This follows on question 4. I don’t think that it is too cliche to argue that every generation seeks to redefine its relationship to the past. The recent escalation of connectivity and the technologies that make our interconnected world possible, however, would seem to pose new challenges to how we imagine the skill set and knowledge base at the core of liberal arts education.  Are these changes, however, enough to overturn the core of the liberal arts curriculum in the US?
  6. Is it possible to teach innovation and entrepreneurialism? And are these ideas as learning concepts actually separate from communication and quantitative reasoning?  This flows conceptually from question 5. Are such concepts as “innovation” and “entrepreneurialism” educationally bankrupt or are there ways to teach students specifically and vocationally to innovate or become entrepreneurs?  Do we live in a world today where such phenomenon are grounded in a specific skill set?
  7. Have majors and minors (or even disciplines) outlived their usefulness? Some have argued that the organization of our university today actually inhibits our students’ (and faculty’s) ability to address the challenges and opportunities posed by the world today. Majors, minors, and even departments and disciplines reflected the need for specialized expertise at the core of the industrialized world. As the US moves into a post-industrialized age, do we need to change the basic organizing units upon which higher education is based?
  8. How has the relationship between the on-campus library and instruction changed with the dual proliferation of online teaching and the growing body of digital resources? There has been so much interesting conversation both on campus and in higher education generally about the future of the research and teaching library.  Everyone would seem to agree that a dynamic and stable library should remain at the core of university life, but the images for this place range from a social and intellectual gathering place to a massive digital archive to a filter for the myriad streams of information that circulate about the world today.
  9. At what point should we regard certain examples of the lack of student performance as a form of resistance, rather than just laziness on their part or incompetence on the part of the instructor? And how should we respond to instances of resistance?  A growing (or enduring?) sense of student entitlement combined with new technologies, a greater degree of connectivity, and a new sense of anxiety about the political and economic future all provide ample scope and reason for student resistance. This resistance, however, may take different forms from traditional notions of student resistance coming from the civil rights on anti-war protests during the Vietnam era. How do we recognize student resistance today and how do we both accommodate it as an acceptable form of communication and channel it toward positive outcomes?
  10. Assessment is a such a common watchword in our progressive academic discourse that it sometimes is treated uncritically. For example, what is relationship between “assessment” and an more traditional forms of evaluating student performance such as grading? Concerns over the value of assessment techniques that stand outside the structure of the class have tended to make faculty approach these practices with a wary eye. At the same time, few faculty members would challenge the idea that assessment practices have value and can lead to a more cohesive curriculum, improved classroom practices, and even more clearly articulated learning outcomes.  At the same time, many faculty see external assessment practices as a serious threat to their academic freedom and the leading edge of the ever-expanding university bureaucracy. Is there way a balance the potential good gained by various assessment practices against the need to protect faculty independence against both real and perceived administrative involvement?

What do you think?

These 10 questions are not meant to dictate future directions for the blog, but to collate some great thoughts from a series of conversations across campus.  If you have responses to these questions drop me a line (billcaraher(at)gmail(dot)com) or write a comment.  If you have other ideas, add them to the list in comments.  Above all, start a conversation!

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What is the Future of the Textbook?

Posted on October 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

A recent short notice in the Chronicle of Higher Education asked the question: “As Textbooks Go Digital, Will Professors Build Their Own Books?“.  The short article goes on the discuss the various a la carte options offered by traditional textbook publishes that allow a faculty member to create unique combinations of material in an online textbook.  Such a modular approach to textbook content is not new, of course.  In fact, I wrote a module on the “Historical Jesus” for a modular textbook and source reader called Exploring the European Past coordinated by Ohio State and published by Thompson almost 10 years ago.

The more interesting idea from the short Chronicle note is the idea that textbook publishers could become distributors of a wide range of content for increasingly customizable course packets.  In short, textbook publishers could become more like iTunes which produces almost no content, but provides an easy interface to access content produced by others.

With the growing amount of content available on the web, a central hub for certain kinds of content would certainly make the creating of custom textbooks easier, but, many of us, I expect, have already taken the plunge into both aggregating content from across the web for our textbook, as well as creating on own content.  In other words, the model has probably begun to shift aware from the usefulness of the textbook as a single, authoritative entity and toward a far more fragmented, user-generated, and maybe less profit driven “marketplace” for course content.

For example, instead of a formal textbook, my rather low-tech History 101: Western Civilization I class combines podcast lectures with a short, inexpensive monograph, and a gaggle of historical documents available in the public domain. For maps, I created a bunch of “places” that students can view in Google Earth.  For basic reference material, I provide comprehensive indexes with links to useful website or to Wikipedia.  In the end, I have created a custom textbook for free.

Other contributors here to Teaching Thursday have taken some of these basic techniques even further by integrating custom made interviews, student generated content, and other techniques to produce sophisticated and dynamic bodies of content.  With more and more content becoming available online, it is not difficult at all to imagine a custom textbook that draws exclusively from free material without sacrificing content, scope, or authority.  Perhaps this is more the case in a discipline like history where a blurry line has always existed between high-quality, professional, specialized content and content generated for a popular audience, but I could imagine it being the case for other disciplines as well.

What makes this scenario so compelling is that textbooks are becoming increasingly expensive.  Moreover, most textbooks are pretty mediocre in terms of content coverage, readability, and even accuracy.  One of my longstanding justifications for using Wikipedia entries in place of a traditional textbook is that they are no less accurate than collectively produced textbooks where little errors tend to creep in between editors and authors and unlike Wikipedia they can’t be easily fixed, on the fly, by a critical reader.  At the same time, the pervasive (if somewhat shallow) criticism of Wikipedia creates an environment where students are prone to read entries critically and recognize the contested nature of even basic “facts”.  And the increasingly robust online teaching tools make it easy to incorporate into the classroom a dynamic and growing body of good quality online video, audio, and massive quantity of public domain documents, works of literature, and data.

All this being said, there is a convenience factor with textbooks that may for the short-term outweigh its flaws.  But what do you think? Are the days of textbooks numbered?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Textbooks

A Showcase for Online Teaching Technology

Posted on October 7, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This week the Senate Continuing Education Committee hosted its regular Online Teaching Showcase.  Each semester the showcase brings together faculty who teach online and asks them to share some the techniques and technologies that they use to make their online classes more successful.  In some ways, this regular gathering of online teaching faculty is a great way to get a sense for future directions in online teaching.

Many of the most common (and intriguing) applications that faculty used to reach their online and distant students sought to facilitate realtime interaction between faculty and student.  The old stalwarts, Adobe Connect and the various Wimba Applications (which are conveniently bundled into Blackboard), made an appearance.  Their reliable and familiar interfaces allow faculty to stream a lecture to a group of students in real time, record the lecture for an archive, and share screens with students.  Tegrity Lecture Capture joined these two applications as another option for faculty who are interested recording lectures live. Tegrity is a server (or as they say now “cloud”) based application that allows students to view lectures either in real time or recorded without downloading software to their computer.  To watch a recorded lecture, the student downloads a relatively small executable file which they then run on their computer. Based on the demonstration that I saw at the Showcase, Tegrity allows for the faculty member to track students who stream the lectures from the cloud.  Faculty could not only see how long a student viewed a recorded lecture, but also isolate parts of the lecture that a student re-watched in order to identify problem concepts or explanations.

I also saw a demonstration of Tidebreak which is an application that creates a dynamic, shared environment where students and faculty can share screens, swap files, and even take control of a central, shared workstation to demonstrate a procedure or execute a task.  I could imagine that software like Tidebreak could be used alongside Adobe Connect or Wemba to create a far more interactive online classroom, but with this advance comes greater complexity.

Cloud based computing also was on display with products like Citrix.  Citrix allows students to access applications run “in the cloud”.  The applications range from Adobe products like Photoshop to the standard suite of Microsoft offerings (Excel, Word, Access) and even more specialized applications like the statistics application SPSS.  From what I can tell, the goal of this kind of service is allow students access to software without the expense and complications individual licensing. It will eventually allow a faculty member to create an online computer lab where they could work with a group of students using virtualized software (again, from the cloud) without making them each buy the applications or worrying about the hardware that remote students are running.

The applicability of these new applications and services is immediately apparent to the part of me that wants to create a richer, more dynamic online classroom.  Another part of me observes that the complexity of these applications will certainly increase the learning curve for a student engaging in online learning (even while services like Tegrity and Citrix could lower the point of entry from the stand point of hardware and software).  Much of the collaborative technology on display also privileged a live teaching environment.  Most of my online teaching, however, and I imagine this is true for many faculty members, is done asynchronously.  That is to say, we are not interacting with students live; instead students are viewing course material at their own pace and interacting with the instructor or their fellow students at far less regular interval than they would in a classroom environment.  While I am sure the users of each of these technologies would stress that they could also work asynchronously, it still seemed clear to me that the goal was to reproduce the classroom experience in a virtual or online way, rather than to imagine the online classroom as something fundamentally different.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Online Teaching, Technology

Teaching the World for Free

Posted on September 2, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s technology blog featured a short article on two faculty members who offered a course to the public for free and attracted over 2,000 non-credit earning students.  The article argues that, for some classes, opening the course to the public created a more diverse and dynamic classroom environment only really possible through online teaching.  In Profs. Downes’ and Siemen’s class, non-credit students and paying, for-credit students mingled in discussion forums, witnesses the same lectures, and engaged the same readings, but unlike efforts pioneered by places like MIT where the lectures and syllabi are made public, these non-credit students were invited to participate fully in the educational process as well by engaging with their fellow students and, presumably, the faculty member.  In short, their class emphasizes the interactive potential of online teaching over and above the internet’s well-known ability to disseminate prepared content.

I couldn’t help but also see this as an opportunity to democratize the university experience in a fairly radical way.  Not only would students have to consider how a particular class or material or problem solving exercise helps them to navigate the unpredictable shoals of a distant, abstract “real world”, but they will be forced to confront the “real world”, right there, in the classroom.  In other words, such a public course might help students overcome the separation between what happens in the classroom where students sometimes regard skills, methods, and knowledge as simply “course objectives” or tools to get an “A”, and what happens in the real world where these skills, methods, and knowledge function in a far more ambiguous way and the rules followed to get an “A” rarely apply neatly.  Expanding the conversation by bringing the real world into the foyer of the Ivory Tower could have a revolutionary effect on how students understand the application of classroom skills.

I’ve just begun to discuss the possibility of running some classes like this at the University of North Dakota.  As part of my sounding out processes, I talked to my good buddy, online teacher extraordinaire, and frequent Teaching Thursday contributor, Mick Beltz, and he and I came up with some issues that will have to be considered before developing and deploying a class to the general public.  Both of us bring the perspective of teachers in the humanities with some online teaching experience.

So, five observations.

1. Technology. The first thing I thought of is how do we run a course like this.  It seems that the classes described in the Chronicle article ran through Moodle which is open source and, presumably, more flexible (or at least developable) than Blackboard in some ways.  The course will also have to be able to function with almost no live technical support.  I can’t imagine any university who would want to commit large scale technical support to a class full of non-credit, non-paying students. So every aspect of online delivery would have to be iron-clad to work and very straight forward to access.

2. Scaleable content and exercises. Once one had assurances of a solid platform, then the content would have to be scaled in some way. For example, a course that relied on a $400 textbook would not be a very appealing class to open to the public because few public, non-credit students will be interested (it seems to me) in purchasing a $400 textbook.  Open source content and public domain texts would work better.  Multiple-guess type questions are more easily scaleable than essay tests and papers.  Currently I teach my online History 101 class as asynchronous – meaning all the content is available from the first day.  This may not scale well for a massive online course where a less-engaged public might not be inclined to complete weekly assignments in order and prefer to skip around defeating any pedagogical goals dependent upon the sequential engagement with content.

3. Access and Control. One key to managing the relationship between paying, for-credit students, and non-credit students is creating levels of access that, for example, prevent open discussion boards from turning into the worst kind of comment sections on a blog.  I initially thought that limiting the length of time a discussion board was accessible would limit the opportunities for crazy comments or spam.  Mick offered a better solution.  He suggested that discussion boards be controlled through “adaptive release” exercises.  In other words, to get access to a discussion, you have to score above a particular grade on a quiz based on the readings.  Of course, a clever instructor could develop a whole series of adaptive release access points; with achievement would come ever more intimate levels of access much in the same way that video games release bonus features at certain levels.  This adaptive release model would not only limit access to people with malicious intent (to some extent), but also create incentives to non-credit students to engage the material in the class.

4. Goals and Objectives. A public course – like any course – will need a clear sets of goals and objectives. There is no escaping that any course like this would have to be experimental at first.  And like any experiment, we would have to establish certain metrics to determine whether the class was successful or not.  The simple statistics, like number of students and length of time on-site (as a metric for engagement) would be useful, but we would also want to see if we could gather data on student engagement more broadly.  The goal, to my mind, would be to draw people into the subject matter.  Following the model of many video game creators, we’d want our course to create an immersive space, and we would have to monitor certain clear criteria to determine whether this was successful.  We might also borrow from are colleagues in marketing to understand better the various metrics used to determine the success or failure of a website or a viral or web-based marketing campaign.

5. Resources.  The biggest hurdle to implementing a class like this would be to determine whether the benefits of the course are worth the commitment of resources.  A public access course has the potential to break down barriers between “the academy” and the public, engage types of learners who might not be inclined to enroll for credit at a university, and expose students to ways of thinking, priorities, and experiences rare or impossible in the classroom.  On the other hand, how many hours per week does managing a potentially massive online class take, how robust of a cyber-infrastructure, and, even, what is necessarily to publicize the course and actually get non-credit students to “enroll”.  As much as we’d like to say that we’re teaching the world “for free” there is always some cost in time and resources.

Those are just my preliminary thoughts on the potential issues and rewards of teaching the world for free.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Teaching the Public