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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.

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.

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.

 ”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:

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

Steve Draper’s page has a ton of information on it. Everytime I go there I find I read something new. I think I will just use his references page as my one reference….. http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ Plus it has a photo of him and Jim Boyle with a lobster….

I came across a useful article from Falkirk council on the various hardware that is available from Andy Watson’s edublog: http://andywatson.edublogs.org/2006/03/27/voting-systems/