No Attendance Required:
I consider myself a nontraditional learner. I have difficulties paying attention in lectures, so I tend to not attend them if there is no attendance required. As a result, I get most of my learning from reading the book or watching videos about the subject online. I find it a lot easier to pay attention when I am able to rewind parts of a video or increase the playback speed. I don't think that this is a rare thing for college students nowadays either. Most of my friends in Computer Science and ECE have professors that upload lectures to youtube so they can watch at their convenience. I know some in math classes that completely disregard the lecturer they have and watch some of the MIT open lectures or others on youtube. I do not think this is a bad thing. If these students are able to get a better understanding of the material than if they had attended lectures this is positive for education as a whole.
A big exception to this rule of learning by oneself is communication type courses. I absolutely do not think that one can learn as much alone in something like a language class. Speaking to others to cement the actual usage of that language is very important. This is also applicable in public speaking courses. There's no way someone can replicate the public speaking experience effectively online yet. Finally, courses that are very group driven probably cannot be replicated online. Some examples of these could be a group project-driven course or a course that has heavy class discussion, like an ethics course.
Saying all this, I think that if you want students to come to lecture in person the class should be very interactive between the students as well as the professor. An idea to do this could be trying case competition like simulations. Different management styles could be applied, and students could talk through their methods and why or why not things worked out. This would certainly take more of the student's time, but I think it would be a very interesting learning experience for those that chose it.
Otherwise, if a lecture-style class if preferred, then recording and posting lectures may be the way to go. This will allow students to learn at their own pace and create a deeper understanding.
Soft Deadlines:
The soft deadlines are an interesting idea for me. I have never had a class with these before. I think that a soft deadline was translated in my head as having an actual deadline of a day or two after. This is evident by all of my Saturday and Sunday blog posts. However, I turned all Excel Homeworks and concept quizzes on time for the soft deadline. The soft deadlines just added further power to the students to plan their work optimally for themselves.
Had there been hard deadlines for the blog posts on Sunday I think that more students would have left them later. This would have been more difficult for you to grade, as they'd all rush in two days before class.
All in all, I think the soft deadlines are an excellent way to get students to spread out their submission dates while also giving the students the decreased stress of being able to put a piece of homework off if they are overloaded. I would not change how they are currently implemented.
I consider myself a nontraditional learner. I have difficulties paying attention in lectures, so I tend to not attend them if there is no attendance required. As a result, I get most of my learning from reading the book or watching videos about the subject online. I find it a lot easier to pay attention when I am able to rewind parts of a video or increase the playback speed. I don't think that this is a rare thing for college students nowadays either. Most of my friends in Computer Science and ECE have professors that upload lectures to youtube so they can watch at their convenience. I know some in math classes that completely disregard the lecturer they have and watch some of the MIT open lectures or others on youtube. I do not think this is a bad thing. If these students are able to get a better understanding of the material than if they had attended lectures this is positive for education as a whole.
A big exception to this rule of learning by oneself is communication type courses. I absolutely do not think that one can learn as much alone in something like a language class. Speaking to others to cement the actual usage of that language is very important. This is also applicable in public speaking courses. There's no way someone can replicate the public speaking experience effectively online yet. Finally, courses that are very group driven probably cannot be replicated online. Some examples of these could be a group project-driven course or a course that has heavy class discussion, like an ethics course.
Saying all this, I think that if you want students to come to lecture in person the class should be very interactive between the students as well as the professor. An idea to do this could be trying case competition like simulations. Different management styles could be applied, and students could talk through their methods and why or why not things worked out. This would certainly take more of the student's time, but I think it would be a very interesting learning experience for those that chose it.
Otherwise, if a lecture-style class if preferred, then recording and posting lectures may be the way to go. This will allow students to learn at their own pace and create a deeper understanding.
Soft Deadlines:
The soft deadlines are an interesting idea for me. I have never had a class with these before. I think that a soft deadline was translated in my head as having an actual deadline of a day or two after. This is evident by all of my Saturday and Sunday blog posts. However, I turned all Excel Homeworks and concept quizzes on time for the soft deadline. The soft deadlines just added further power to the students to plan their work optimally for themselves.
Had there been hard deadlines for the blog posts on Sunday I think that more students would have left them later. This would have been more difficult for you to grade, as they'd all rush in two days before class.
All in all, I think the soft deadlines are an excellent way to get students to spread out their submission dates while also giving the students the decreased stress of being able to put a piece of homework off if they are overloaded. I would not change how they are currently implemented.
Thanks for telling me about your learning issue. That was interesting to hear. There may be a difference in our class than the others you mentioned in that the standard model is lecture first (or textbook reading first or watching a video first) and that is then followed by assessment of some sort. I tried to flip-flop that, so students would do some of their own investigation first (which it sounds like you to as a matter of course) and then see if we can expand on that in class discussion. In years past that has worked reasonably well. But it really didn't this time around.
ReplyDeleteI might add that if a majority did attend class, then I'd feel okay that the students who missed would be responsible for that. But once the majority stopped coming to class, it made it awkward for me to do a lot of interesting sequence material that only a handful of students would be getting.
Now let me make a general observation, not about you. That habit on campus is that instructors would assign readings from the textbook before class and the lecture then was supposed to be the second pass at the content for the students. But the reality is that the vast majority of students wouldn't do the reading in advance and came to expect the lecture to be their gateway to the subject matter. This is a terribly inefficient way to think of the live class session, especially given that videos can be made of lectures. So there is some reason to want to break the cycle to get students better prepared. But habits are hard to change.
In years past I've put a cutoff time on Sunday for the blog posts. I did that for one or two weeks this semester but then backed away from it. The stress level of students in our class seems enormous. I didn't want to contribute more to it than I had too. Of course it is necessary to impose obligations on students in a class to do the coursework. But I'd hope students can take that in stride. This semester that hope seemed less realistic than it had in the past.
I understand your frustration with doing a lot of work for only a few people to appreciate. I had the same experience in a club I started up and it was difficult to motivate myself into keeping everything going.
DeleteI think your observation is completely on point. It seems like a difficult problem to solve. To me it seems like the overall structure of education has to change to incentivize students somehow to learn before lecture. I recall you posted once about school that operated on a quarterly schedule. This made me think of my best college learning experience so far. I took calc 2 at a community college in the northwest suburbs over one summer. It was 3 hours of lecture a day, 4 days a week, for 6 weeks. There were 15 or so students. For some reason I was completely engaged in lecture. I think the longer time and the much smaller class size had something to do with it. Whatever it was, it made me understand the class material better than I had in any math class so far or since.
Since this experience I have always wanted to do one class at a time, with longer lectures and more homework over a 5 ish week period. I feel like if a student can devote tall of their time to studying that one subject it will result in a better time usage overall, and a deeper understanding. That is, I think that would be the result for me at least.
I think your flexibility this semester has been admirable, and you have taken all the pitfalls pretty gracefully. I have learned a good deal from this course. I don't think I have any other courses lined up before graduation that will teach me anything to do with management or workplace ideas, so this knowledge will be valuable to me in my professional life. All the best!