The Problem of Learning in the Post-Course Era

The Problem of Learning in the Post-Course Era
Randy Bass, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), Georgetown University EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Conference February 14, 2011

Doonesbury, G. B. Trudeau http://www.doonesbury.com/
January 2011 Here is a Doonesbury cartoon strip from January 2011. Doonesbury, G. B. Trudeau

It immediately reminded me of one from 1985, known as “teaching is dead.” This strip was on many office doors for years in the late 80’s and early 90’s. “Teaching is Dead” January 1985 Doonesbury, G. B. Trudeau

January 1985 Are these the same joke update for zeitgeist quality? I think there is something fundamentally different about the two strips: in the first one, the students are all portrayed as doing what they seem to think is the key to success in this environment: professor delivers, they record. That’s what it takes to be successful: take down everything faithfully and study it later (don’t listen or comprehend at the moment). But in the second, the implication is that what students think is necessary for success in the course is not in the classroom, not even passively. The implication is that success depends on activities that have nothing to do with being in class, not even recording madly and passively. I also think what is interesting about the second strip is that the professor has a kind of passion too.. But it speaks to the challenges of engaging students in problem-solving practices. It is easy to lose students when the professor is engaged in problem-solving because students don’t see that as valuable information. Is this early in the semester? Prior to a first test where problem-solving seems important? In the first strip, faculty and students are in many ways on the same page—just not to the professor’s liking. In the second one, the professor and students are not in the same game—literally and figuratively. January 2011 Doonesbury, G. B. Trudeau

ELI Evidence of Impact “What evidence do we have that these changes and innovation are having the impact we hope for? What are the current effective practices that would enable us to collect that evidence? With the advent of Web 2.0, the themes of collaboration, participation, and openness have greatly changed the teaching and learning landscape. In light of these changes, what new methods for collecting evidence of impact might need to be developed?” My remarks come at the invitation of—and in response to—the ELI Seeking Evidence of Impact Initiative. “Evidence of impact” can be taken in many directions (as the growing bibliography of resources on the ELI site suggests). I have always been interested in the moving target questions: how are emerging technologies making possible ways of seeing student learning that were not possible before?

Core Questions What are the conditions for the most meaningful learning inside and outside the formal curriculum? How do emerging digital tools make it possible to see and capture evidence of meaningful learning in new ways? (moving target) Can we keep the “evidence of impact” agenda open in an age of metrics and accountability?

summative performance
Core Questions engagement summative performance the intermediate & the integrative The two locations of learning I’m interested in here are what I might think of as “the intermediate” and “the integrative.” By “intermediate” I refer to “intermediate thinking processes” that characterize all intellectual practice (novice to expert). One of the great features of digital tools has been their potential for making these intermediate processes visible (and usable) in teaching. By “integrative” I mean the connections that students can make across learning experiences, between and among courses and between curricular and co-curricular learning. This is in contrast to what is most typically the focus of “impact” questions: engagement (see for example Helen Chen’s excellent Educause presentation from 2010 and the summative. I think of the intermediate and the integrative as focusing on two relatively blank spaces on the map.

Second Wave of the Learning Paradigm (course design & classroom practice)
Active Learning: Theory/ knowing Experience / doing Integrative Learning Theory/ knowing Experience/ doing Reflecting / connecting I believe we are in the second wave of what was dubbed in the late 90’s the “learning paradigm.” The first wave especially focused on active learning and doing. This wave, influenced by new emphases on civic engagement, and further research the expansive nature of learning (including the impact of affect, prior learning, stereotype threat, confidence, creativity, etc, is placing new emphasis on integration. That logic takes us in many ways beyond individual courses.

The Post-Course Era One of the consequences of the logic of the learning paradigm is that it takes us beyond courses (the bounded course) as the central unit of analysis in the undergraduate curriculum.

The Post-Course Era End of the era of the self-contained course as the center of the curriculum This doesn’t mean that courses do not continue to structure the curriculum. We have thought of courses is several ways: as a time and resource management tool; as a way of structuring expectations and delivering a version of disciplines or a conception of a liberal education, or a professional degree, or whatever. And we thought of them as the most important piece—the centerpiece—of learning. All I am suggesting with the phrase the “post-course era” is that we now have some data that the latter of these assumptions is no longer true. And we are living in an era where we are thinking increasingly in terms of outcomes and programs. Eventually these two shifts will run headlong into the assumptions that structure the use of courses as a time and resource management tool and as the primary way to structure the story of a discipline or delivery of a vision of a degree. “The fragmentation of the curriculum into a collection of independently ‘owned’ courses is itself an impediment to student accomplishment, because the different courses students take, even on the same campus, are not expected to engage or build on one another.” (AAC&U, 2004)

High Impact Practices (National Survey of Student Engagement--NSSE)
First-year seminars and experiences Learning communities Writing intensive courses Collaborative assignments Undergraduate research Global learning/ study abroad Internships Capstone courses and projects This is the list of High Impact Practices, according to the data that has come out of NSSE. You’ll note that these are all either in the co-curriculum or anomalous curricular experiences. George Kuh, High Impact Practices: What are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. (AAC&U, 2008)

Outcomes associated with High impact Practices
Attend to underlying meaning Integrate and synthesize Discern patterns Apply knowledge in diverse situations View issues from multiple perspectives Acquire gains in skills, knowledge, practical competence , personal and social development They are considered high impact because students most highly associate them with these outcomes. Experiences that help students… George Kuh, High Impact Practices: What are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. (AAC&U, 2008)

High Impact Activities and Outcomes
Outcomes associated with High impact practices Attend to underlying meaning Integrate and synthesize Discern patterns Apply knowledge in diverse situations View issues from multiple perspectives Gains in Skills, knowledge, practical competence , personal and social development High Impact Practices: First-year seminars and experiences Learning communities Writing intensive courses Collaborative assignments Undergraduate research Global learning/ study abroad Internships Capstone courses and projects Half of the list of high impact practices are in what we would call the co-curriculum. And the others are anomalous or exceptional curricular experiences.

So, if high impact practices are largely in the extra-curriculum (or co-curriculum), then where are the low-impact practices?

Low-impact practices: Formally known as ‘the curriculum’?
So what does that mean for the allocation of resources, energy, focus if the formal curriculum is the low impact part of the institution? Is this just the way it is and we always knew this at some level?

If the formal curriculum is not where the high impact experiences are then what are the options?

Making courses more like high-impact practices
courses designed as inquiry-based & participatory Virtual Labs Constructivist social tools: wikis & blogs Here I am just naming those approaches relevant to instructional technology. There are of course many other important emerging approaches, such as civic engagement and community-based learning and myriad other pedagogies. I think it is also possible to work with faculty and create course designs with a "post-course" consciousness: paying attention to such elements as prior learning and prior conceptions, experiential knowledge, course design decisions based on program-wide learning goals, and the long-view of expert practice translated to what this skill or domain level looks like over four years or even out in a career? There are also many ways to create assignments (and reflections to go with assignments) that gesture beyond the course itself, to life experience, to other courses, to larger communities of practice, etc. All of these are post-course consciousness strategies that acknowledge the snapshot status of a course but recognize its arbitrary or fluid boundaries. Leveraging “the crowd” as a way of teaching

What are the shared and salient features of participatory cultures in Web-based environments?
wikipedia Let’s look then a second dimension bearing in on the “formal curriculum” as the center of the undergraduate experience: participatory culture. Video gaming communities fan sites grass roots organizations Jenkins, et. al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (MacArthur Foundation, 2006)

Participatory Culture of the Web
Features of participatory culture Low barriers to entry Strong support for sharing one’s contributions Informal mentorship, experienced to novice Members feel a sense of connection to each other Students feel a sense of ownership of what is being created Strong collective sense that something is at stake This is how Henry Jenkins and his associates describe the nature of participatory culture on the Web. I don’t know that every college course needs to function like this, but it is worth asking the question, How many college classrooms or course experiences could rise to this set of features? Jenkins, et. al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (MacArthur Foundation, 2006)

Participatory culture
High impact practices Experiential Co-curriculum Informal Learning Participatory culture The Formal Curriculum Here is how I see the landscape in this view: that the formal curriculum actually has pressures on it from two side—what we know about the impact of the co-curriculum (the experiential curriculum) and the ubiquitous space of informal learning and participatory culture.

High impact practices Experiential Co-curriculum Informal Learning Participatory culture The Formal Curriculum Can we continue to operate on the assumption that the formal curriculum is the center of the undergraduate experience?

High impact practices Experiential Co-curriculum Informal Learning Participatory culture The Formal Curriculum Among the many implications of this, there are certainly many for instructional technologies. So what are the implications of this for understanding the impact of learning technologies?

John Seely Brown: Practice to Content
John Seely Brown frequently uses this image of the iceberg to talk about the condition of the “new learning.” practice From John Seely Brown, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0”

John Seely Brown: Practice to Content
In particular he talks about what he calls “reversing the flow” from what had been content to practice, now to practice to content. That is, we start in practice and practice drives us to content. And the optimal way to learn is reciprocally or spirally between practice and content. Unfortunately we have a curriculum that is built content to practice. practice From John Seely Brown, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0”

High impact practices Experiential Co-curriculum Informal Learning Participatory culture The Formal Curriculum JSB sees the different between being above and below the water line as the difference between “learning about” and “learning-to-be.” So, to come back to this diagram, where and how does one “learn-to-be” inside and outside the formal curriculum? Where and how does one “learn-to-be,” inside and outside the formal curriculum?

Connecting Intermediate Processes to Practice
NOVICE MIRACLE EXPERT This is the model of novice learning under the old “instructional paradigm” (pre-learning paradigm). Experts do their thing. We ask novices to do mini versions of expert work and grade them accordingly. And we hope something happens. product product

NOVICE processes EXPERT product practice LEARNING LEARNING processes In the learning paradigm we came to value active learning and attending to learning processes; but the second fundamental shift that happened is that we started to realize that we shouldn’t be privileging expert products but expert practice.” That new “endpoint” backwardly changes what we should be attending to in the intermediate processes. evidence of process

Key role for emerging digital tools NOVICE processes EXPERT practice LEARNING LEARNING processes and it both changes the role of instructional and emerging technologies…but also one of the salient features (and affordances) of certain emerging digital technologies is that they significantly change the ways we can see, capture, harvest and design for intermediate learning processes. How can we better understand these intermediate processes? evidence of process How might we design to foster and capture them?

Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University
Let’s look at one concrete example. We could take this in a thousand directions, but let’s take one: the uses of the backchannel and micro-blogging (or tweeting) in the classroom. I take this example from Derek Bruff at Vanderbilt, who writes a blog about classroom response systems and many other interesting pedagogical tactics derekbruff.com

Derek Bruff (Vanderbilt University)
Bruff’s remapping of Cliff Atkinson’s uses of Backchannel: Note taking Sharing Resources Commenting Amplifying Asking Questions Helping One Another Offering Suggestions Building community Opening the Classroom Here is the list of nine uses of the backchannel, as repurposed from Cliff Atkinson’s book, The Backchannel, as well as others doing interesting work here, Gardner Campbell, and others. derekbruff.com

How can we better understand these intermediate processes?
Connecting Intermediate Processes to Practice Evidence of impact: emerging digital tools? NOVICE processes EXPERT practice When we put this excellent list back into the intermediate space, I want to ask what can we learn about the ways that these means of engaging are really serving as a bridge to expert practice? What is the relationship between the intermediate activity and the stages of intellectual development or the constituent skills and dispositions of college or of a discipline? Note taking Sharing Resources Commenting Amplifying Asking Questions Helping One Another Offering Suggestions Building community Opening the Classroom How can we better understand these intermediate processes? How do these processes serve as a bridge from novice processes to expert practice?

“Twitter is a Snark Valve” http://www.samplereality.com/
On the use of Twitter in the classroom (Mark Sample, GMU—after Rick Reo, GMU) Let’s take this up a notch. This is one schematic of trying to understand the use of twitter across a spectrum of uses that gets increasingly sophisticated? Moving from the passive to active and the monologic to dialogic. In some ways Derek Bruff’s list moves students higher on the learning scale (his notion of students answering each other’s questions, etc). But this matrix is at least suggestive of a next step, of a way of seeing involvement in social learning in relation to developmental abilities that might be mapped onto learning outcomes. “Twitter is a Snark Valve”

“Thin Slicing”? Connecting Intermediate Processes to Expert Practice
Where can you look for evidence of Impact? LEARNING processes NOVICE processes EXPERT practice Are there examples on your campus for projects where you are trying to capture the relationship between intermediate engagement and intellectual development? How do you capture the relationship between intermediate engagement and intellectual development? How can we better understand these intermediate processes? How might we design to foster and capture them? “Thin Slicing”?

Decoding the Disciplines
(University of Indiana David Pace and Colleagues) Let’s back up now and think more about expert practice. It seems to me that one of the things that is most necessary for this kind of mapping—between instructional tech or social learning tools and intellectual development—is to get faculty to slow down and unpack their own practices. how do experts think about and practice their discipline? “instructional bottlenecks”

The Seven Steps to Decoding Disciplines with Instructional Bottlenecks
Step 1: Identify “bottlenecks” Step 2: Define expert thinking Step 3: Model this kind of thinking for students Step 4: Give students a chance to practice and get feedback Step 5: Motivate students to stay with the process Step 6: Assess the learning Step 7: Share what has been learned Over time the Decoding the Disciplines project developed a process for focusing faculty attention on disciplinary thinking—and where students get stuck in that thinking and how to help them learn disciplinary thinking. At first the second step is the hardest: getting experts to realize all the steps that it takes to do things they regularly ask their students to do.

The Seven Steps To Decoding Disciplines
Step 1: Identify “bottlenecks” Step 2: Define expert thinking Step 3: Model this kind of thinking for students Step 4: Give students a chance to practice and get feedback Step 5: Motivate students to stay with the process Step 6: Assess the learning Step 7: Share what has been learned Critical steps, after identification and slowing down and analyzing the intermediate stages of expert thinking, are thinking through the sequence of modeling and practice (with feedback). Key to this is motivating students to stay with the process.

One challenge for evidence of impact is to synthesize our evolving notions of how to design pedagogies for expert practice with our evolving ways of analyzing intermediate activity with digital tools. A faculty development (and course development) process like the Bottlenecks process is a promising way to map learning activities to emerging tools. Let’s look at two examples.

Michael Smith & Ali Erkan, Ithaca College
Using Wiki’s to teach history Students work in collaborative teams to write history wiki-texts on subjects that interest them in historical context For this project Michael was interested in how wikis might lead to more engagement and sense of agency on the part of students in an introductory U.S. history course (U.S. since 1865), as well as whether the opportunities for non-linear narrative wikis offered conformed more closely to how students think about the organization of information. Ali’s focus, on the other hand, was more on a network theoretic perspective to study the structure and interconnections of wiki pages in addressing questions such as “Was the topic interesting?”, “Did the students make even or bursty progress?”, and “Did the students linearize information or discover conceptual interconnections?”

Bottleneck(s) in History
Students often have difficulty understanding that history is about constructing an interpretation based on multiple sources and perspectives Construct and evaluate an argument Link specific details to broader context

Among the pieces of evidence they are studying are network diagrams of Wiki structure.

Research Agenda: From their “research agenda”: Can mathematical/ computational means be used to categorize the structures emerging from student produced wikis? Can those serve as indicators of… student comprehension of content? The extent to which students find a particular project “interesting”? How well we convey complexity? “How can students be engaged so that there is meaning in the structure of wikis they produce?” “If there is meaning in the structure of student wikis, how can it be harvested and, subsequently, analyzed?

“Thin Slicing”? From their “research agenda”: Can mathematical/ computational means be used to categorize the structures emerging from student produced wikis? Can those serve as indicators of… student comprehension of content? The extent to which students find a particular project “interesting”? How well we convey complexity? This is another good example of “thin slicing”: what are the small slivers of information about student thinking that can reveal rich sources of information, to faculty and to students? “How can students be engaged so that there is meaning in the structure of wikis they produce?” “If there is meaning in the structure of student wikis, how can it be harvested and, subsequently, analyzed?

Digital Stories Multimedia Archive
Michael Coventry (Georgetown) and Matthias Opperman (Bielefeld Unviersity; Georgetown; ) Here is a second example from Georgetown: the Digital Stories Multimedia Archive.

Digital Stories Cross-Campus Study
Research Agenda: What is distinctive about the kinds of immersion we witness in research, production, and presentation that is specific to digital storytelling? What are the advantages in the area of student engagement…and relationship between emotional and epistemological dimensions of learning?

Cross-Classroom Study
Coventry and Oppermann did a cross-campus study of student authoring practices around digital media.

Distinctive (not unique) aspects of multimedia authoring practice:
Authoring (overall process) Layers Compression Editing Audience They identified a set of areas particular to multimedia authoring.

https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/projects/digitalstories/

Areas of impact on broad learning outcomes: Traits of adaptive expertise Integrate the affective and cognitive Engagement and commitment They also linked these to three broad learning outcomes.

Database / Archive as Matrix
Then we put these in a matrix and started to try and understand the relationship of each of the distinctive processes in light of the larger learning outcomes.

And the exanding matrix puts evidence in each of the cells
And the exanding matrix puts evidence in each of the cells. In this iteration it is student reflection, but it could also include parts of their work as well (whether finished product or thin slices of process along the way).

Where is the learning? But the question is where do you look for the learning, because the final “product” does not really reveal all of the learning that has taken place.

Where is the learning? Evidence of Impact?
Depends on “reflection” (self-critique, design rationale, metacognitive analysis) Good reflection depends in part on having quality captures of thinking in process We learned at least two things about representing the depth of learning from the digital stories process, lessons that I think are portable to many other digital learning contexts: (1) seeing the full depth of learning depends on “reflection” (self-critique, metacognitive reflection, etc). And (2) the quality of reflection depends on having quality captures of thinking in process along the way.

“Thin Slicing”? Connecting Intermediate Processes to Practice
Evidence of Impact? What is the relationship between engagement and development? NOVICE processes EXPERT practice In short: this points on the one hand to a focus on the intermediate (thin slicing and reflection on intermediate processes), but also… How can we better capture the meaningful intermediate moments in these processes Authoring (overall process) Layers Compression Editing Audience “Thin Slicing”? Micro captures of thought, decisions, problem-solving

How can we better integrate with a larger context of practice?
Connecting Intermediate Processes to Practice Evidence of Impact? What is the relationship between engagement and development? NOVICE processes EXPERT practice …on the integrative, point far beyond the course to a larger learning context. Traits of adaptive expertise Integrate the affective and cognitive Engagement and commitment Authoring (overall process) Layers Compression Editing Audience How can we better integrate with a larger context of practice?

Second Wave of the Learning Paradigm
Active Learning: Theory/ knowing Experience / doing Integrative Learning Theory/ knowing Experience/ doing Reflecting / connecting And this brings us back to the second wave of the learning paradigm. Integrative learning (taken as a broad agenda) requires that we go beyond courses, both “in” (to processes) and “out” (to structures of meaning that make sense of larger learning).

ePortfolios as tools and practices for integrating
At the moment, the most active take by this outward movement is the ePortfolio.

Reflection at the heart of ePorfolio practice
And “reflection” is at the heart of ePortfolio practice: how do students make sense of their work in larger connective contexts.

ePortfolio as a tool for reflection and integration
ePortfolios can be a tool for both reflection and integration.

Carol Rodgers on Reflection: Deepening Developmental Cycle
Let’s think back to the twitter model that suggested taking a digitally based practice up a ladder of learning development. This is a model by Carol Rodgers of iterative and deepening reflection practices. It suggests not only depth but a range of ways to think about the use of thin slices in relation to cognition and metacognition.

Web 2.0 Tools and the Deepening Reflection Cycle
Note taking Sharing Resources Commenting Amplifying Asking Questions Helping One Another Offering Suggestions Building community Opening the Classroom In many ways, one could start to think of a range of tools arraying along a continuum from intermediate to integrative—with different kinds of tools being able to help students deepen their ability to move along this cycle, “course” by course, across courses, between their coursework and co-curricular experiences, and beyond. Intermediate  Integrative

Participatory culture The Formal Curriculum
High impact practices Experiential Co-curriculum Informal Learning Participatory culture The Formal Curriculum If we are to get beyond the dilemma of higher education, caught between high impact experiences and participatory culture, then we must learn more about the impact of emerging technologies (and their guiding pedagogies) on both the intermediate and the integrative. That’s the “problem of learning” in the post-course era. Intermediate  Integrative

bassr@georgetown.edu Thanks to:
Ali Erkan and Michael Smith, Ithaca College David Pace, University of Indiana Michael Coventry and Matthias Opperman, Georgetown Mark Sample, GMU Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt Bret Eynon, LGCC G.B. Trudeau The Teagle Foundation Heidi Elmendorf, Georgetown My colleagues at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship cndls.georgetown.edu

The Problem of Learning in the Post-Course Era

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