Simon’s Physics Education Blog

Some random verbiage about university level Physics teaching in the UK, with sometimes a particular bias to e-learning

Some podcasting links

September 14th, 2006 by · 3 Comments · Uncategorized

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/lds/podcasting.html#Benefits (5.5.2006)
Related Websites

http://mgsonline.blogs.com/mgspodcast/ (5.52006)
podcasting at Musselburgh Grammar School

http://www.darcynorman.net/2004/10/30/podcasting-for-education (5.5.2006)
ideas about educational uses for podcasting and discussion

http://www.recap.ltd.uk/articles/podguide.html (5.5.2006)
educational podcasting ideas, aimed at school students, but techniques appear possible for university as well

http://epnweb.org/ (5.5.2006)
interesting resources and podcasts available (though “‘healthful’ living” sounds a little scary to me …)

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/jun2005/0506_trends (5.5.2006)
another interesting collection of ideas for educational podcasts use

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/lds/documents/podcasting_ideas.pdf (5.5.2006)
this is a nice diagram – maybe useful to append to our bid to show where other UK institutions are at?

Protected: Physics 1A course questionnaire results for 2005/06

August 8th, 2006 by · Enter your password to view comments. · 1A course development, Uncategorized

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PER projects on resits and attitudes to learning

July 31st, 2006 by · 2 Comments · 1A course development, Education research projects

Two new projects for PER type SH projects. Other three are in an email in
DoT folder

1. Attutudinal variation of shifts in student views of learning.

Course 1A : 2006-07
Duration is S1, S2 for student interviews

Aim: to evaluate students attitudes towards learning, possibly contextualised
towards Physics at the start adn end of the course

Use clickers to capture responses to questions, perhaps also using confidence
levels as well.

Makes use of Perry’s developmental model classifying students as a (A) spoonfed,
(B) better, but uncomfortable and (C) progressing to autonomous independent learning.

Matrix of their views of various roles (themselves, their lecturers, their beliefs
about knowledge and exams) and example questions are in the HEA Phys Sci Centre
practice guide called “Evaluation fo Teaching” by Alex Johnstone.

Has implications for vanguard courses as it attempts some ind of measure of student
attitude at the start and at the end of the course.

1A is seem as one of the most successful courses that the College has to offer.
Yet tracking shows that there is still this enormous peak of activity just before the
exams, suggesting that there is a lot of what Johnstone / Perry would classify
as “type A” behaviour. Is this just the timing of the exams or are we really frustrating
the students from being more autonomous. Could 1A still exhibit “spoon-feeding”
characteristics? Will it change as Sec A of the exam changes??

2. Resits

Investigate online behaviours of resitting students during course and suring resit period
via tracking data collected from WebCT. Interviews to assess
(i) why they failed first time; what they didi differently for the resit (recall
that this period involves no formal face to face teaching).
(ii) any attitudinal shits they can identify as having taken place during the course
(appliation of Perry’s questionnaire “twice” – imagine if you could go back – how
would you have answered it.

Protected: Speech!

July 31st, 2006 by · Enter your password to view comments. · Uncategorized

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Podcasts for learning… again

July 31st, 2006 by · 2 Comments · 1A course development, Uncategorized

For some time I have been toying with the idea of using podcasts as a way to support
student self study time. In collaboration with Divinity, we put together a bit to PeLF
which was not funded. However, a reduced project will go forward to provide proof-of-
concept with a view to resubmitting next year and hopefully being successful.

I beleive that there is real potential in the technique, provided — as with all these
developments — it is applied in an educationally sound setting. I think that simply
recording lectures so that students can put them on their iPod, is NOT a good use
of the technology and could ultimately undermine the enterprise.

I recently came across the Impala project, www.impala.ac.uk, one of the recent projects
funded by the HEA. This I think is one of the best projects in this area; in particular
it has links to other activities of the same kind elsewhere. Digging in deeper, I found
the  project by Chen and Lee (http://www.impala.ac.uk/projects/FromAustrlia.html).

This project addressed student anxiety in an IT course by provision of podcasts created
from other students. This paper has an enormous number of useful links in a vareity of
different areas. It links in very neatly to our plans for a wuantitative investigation
of the usefulness of podcasts as pre-lectures. (described in a page on this blog here).

I noted with interest the comments from the Scottish Council for Educational Technology
(1994) about the problems of conveying details and facts. In that respect, it would seem
that lecturing via podcasts, particularly in a subject such as physics is probably
not a good idea.

The paper does offer support for the idea of multi-voiced, short, radio style productions
rather than monologues.

The use of other students is also discussed;
Lee, M.J.W., Chan, A. & McLoughlin, C. (in press-b). Students as producers: Second year students experiences as podcasters of content for first year undergraduates. To appear in Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET 2006), Sydney, July 10-13, 2006.

PGs teaching in UG classes

June 20th, 2006 by · 9 Comments · Uncategorized

Notes taken from TLA Colloquim on preparing Tutors and Demonstrators for their teaching and academic roles at University, 19th June 2006.

Michelle Marincovich, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford

  • Outlined Stanford model of requirement to train TAs in general pedagogy (done centrally) and preparing to teach in their discipline (subject based, conceptual problems, Shulman’s pedagogical content model)
  • Enforcement mechanism; TA oversight cttee, comprising faculty and student reps, produce evaluative “What’s working” pamphelt
  • 3 phases to programme; preparation, mentoring and reflection / evaluation.
  • TAs not deemed satisfactory are not reappointed.
  • Can get experience in micro-teaching videotaped session
  • Only 8% of PhDs go on to lectureships at research intensive Universities
  • Not only ptofessional but leadership training as well; ehance ability to communicate, influence and inspire: exposure to other academic disciplines to ensure grad students leave with a network of contacts in other discplines.

Charlotte Taylor, University of Sydney

  • “Welcome to the Team” : large scale TA training programme, implented in Science (8000 ugs)
  • Standard programme across faculty (not subject specific) aimed at first year students
  • Students don’t really know lecturers in classes of 550;Ta’s are the face of the school, to induct them into the research culture of the University.
  • Tutor training website : useful set of “trigger” exercises to prompt reflection on the part of Tas.
  • Also good links to SUPER: Sydney Unvisersity Physics Education Research Group

Lewis Elton, Visiting professor of Higher Education at the University of Manchester.

  • Argued the case for disciplinary-specific training being done by someone with expertise of considering teaching in that discipline, to avoid the enless spiral of “teach as I have been taught”.
  • Departmental culture may stifle innovations by Tas
  • Teaching as an activity carried out in private by (not always) consenting adults
  • Lab work to either verify known results OR instill compentancies to use equipment or practice a technique.
  • Enquiry-based learning; learning in “research mode”; students as researchers but learning for themselves what is already known (eg EBL and PBL)
  • The key role of assessment; innovative assessment is rare. Innovative teaching and learning may be hobbled by inneffective assessment.
  • The need for a small number (1%) of eg Physicists to study Physics teaching as a scholarly activity.

PGs teaching in UG classes

June 20th, 2006 by · 1 Comment · 1A course development, Training PGs as TAs

One of the things we are instigating for next year is a training course specifically for our PGs who will teach in in our early years (1 and 2) workshops.

Have been giving some thought to how this will look to get the right balance of generic material about teaching and Physocs-specific material. More on that when it comes.

Yesterday I was at a colloquim organised by the TLA centre at Edinburgh; there were some interesting talks (along with some I did not understand at all) on this topic; there’s a page to summarise them with links.

How do you show it does some good?

June 8th, 2006 by · 1 Comment · Uncategorized

A colleague of mine often responds to discussions of the benefits of e-learning to students with the comment:

“ … but how can you show quantitatively that it does any good? “

It’s a fair question and one that I have found myself struggling to answer in the past. There’s a number of inherent problems with trying to do “experiments” in the scientific sense on a learning activity with a class cohort.

  • the opportunities for experimentation tend to come around relatively infrequently (say, once every year)
  • there can easily have been external reasons why comparing last year’s cohort with this year’s is not a level playing field. Maybe the entrance grades went up, different people taught the course, the structurer of the academic year altered radically (as it did in Edinburgh two years ago).
  • the ethics of having half your class as a control group who do not get the benefit of the wonderful new development that you want to evaluate…

 I heard a talk by Norman Reid a few weeks ago, from the Centre for Science Education at Glasgow and he was describing the idea of splitting the class into two and doing two repititions of a similar experiment, thereby allowing each half to act as the other’s control group. Any one student is treated just like any other, insofar as they are in the control group once and the other group once.

I thought about using this to try and evaluate the use of podcasts as a delivery vehicle for pre-lecture preparative work, to aid understanding of what we know to be the traditionally conceptually difficult bits of a course.

Rather than selectively releasing material to a group of students (who might not all listen to it) I planned to broadcast the material at the start of a workshop (tutorial-ish) session fir half the class (and not for the other) about a week ahead of the material being covered in the lectures.

The following week, I would ask the entire class a concept question (we call them time to think’s) at the beginning of the section on the material covered in the podcast pre-lecture.

Based on workshop sign-in sheets, we should be able to assume an even spread of ability (could cross check this with start-of-course diagnostic tests) in each workshop and could then look at the response profiles for the “have’s” as compared to the “have not’s” (collected using an elecctronic voting system during the lecture).

Repeat a few weeks later where the have’s become the have not’s.

 

Podcasts in HE : disruptive, subversive, pointless or just plain misunderstood…?

June 8th, 2006 by · No Comments · 1A course development, E is for....., Education research

Came across this great quote on Tama’s eLearning blog talking about Stanford on iTunes:

 ”professional obligation of educators to embrace podcasting and use its disruptive potential for constructive opportunities.”

I have been toying with the idea of incorporating podcasts as additional learning resources in a large first year undergraduate Physics course I am course organiser for. But not, as an example, just to record and deliver the audio stream from my lectures. I wanted to be able to use them to supply additional resources that would tap into that time we know nothing about: self-study time, when students get to grips with the course material outside a face to face classroom setting.  

This led me onto Wesley Fryer’s blog “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” and his thoughts on podcasting as “disruptive transmediation” and a piece on a professor who didn’t understand the value of podcasting

There are some interesting comments to this piece, but what struck me the most was this diagram:

Average learning retention rates

Makes you begin to question the lecture as (still) one of the fundamental content transmission vehicles for university education…..

M-blog… or whatever the heck it is called

June 6th, 2006 by · No Comments · Uncategorized

So what do you call a b log entry written on the move …? An m-blog…. I am suresomeone knows.

Well, just because I can, I thought I would give this a go. Currently on a train just outside Newcastle….but the power socket under my chair which allegedly gives my machine juice is refusing to give me any charge at all…. and the keyboard is refusing to type certain letters which means this has taken me about 5 minutes to write as many lines….I blame the hot sun streaming in through the window…..

So the network connection appears to be the easy bit…..