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301 course Critical Inquiry Learning Activities Reflections Resolution showcase

Building on OTL courses

As I complete my initial pass through the OTL 101, 201, and 301 courses, I record the following summary observations and plans. These represent only a first pass through the material and closely correspond to specific questions posed at the end of the last course.

most important lessons from the course

The concentration of the curriculum upon design in course delivery demonstrates for me that there is a crucial connection between the design and my role as a course facilitator. Commitments in the course readings toward blended delivery were obvious–and serve as a reminder that continuous-intake delivery of courses is not an optimal learning environment for most subject areas–but the lessons learned have applicability across a wide range of delivery modes.

Another principle learned in the course set is that my role is chiefly to encourage concentration on the work and understanding of the curriculum, but within a context of safe and frequent communication. There is no substitute for the presence of a facilitator when students are working towards completion of their course as individuals. Of course, this principle has been more poignantly demonstrated in its lack herein–OTL 101, 201, and 301 completely lack a facilitator presence at a time when faculty being trained could use it.

Change of thinking from completing the course

In the past, I have had a practice of staying out of students’ way when teaching in a course. Some students seem to resent too much “hovering” on the part of instructors (perhaps in the same way that service personnel can be intrusive when interrupting meals in restaurants to ask if clientele are finding “Everything okay?”).

One thing I will try to make more obvious in future is my own presence in the course, but not in a way that is obtrusive to students who are taking online courses because they are “good independent learners” and who want to demonstrate that they do not need “help to get through the course.” In short, I want to be there for those who need me without being in the way for those who don’t.

In the LMS I am most familiar with, it would be nice if forum discussions could show post authors how many times their posts had been viewed by others. At present, the only way to show authors their post has been read is by replying, but it is sometimes too intrusive for instructors to reply to every post: It would be good for me to be able to see that others have read my messages without necessarily having to have them reply. Visibility of post-views, of tacit response to messages, would be a helpful way to show presence without intruding into (mostly peer) discussions.

platform (WordPress) influence on interaction with the content, other people, and learning

I like the WordPress environment, given its openness and (relative) simplicity. I think it would be a very good option for synchronous course support (and it is not deficient at all for asynchronous support–although tracking when blog posts have been viewed by others would probably be a good enhancement). However, I think it would be very good for WordPress to have some tools for social markup of readings by users such that others could choose to see or ignore such commenting (sort of a mashup of WordPress and Diigo, if that were possible).

However, it would be a mistake to believe that WordPress can deliver personal presence into asynchronous courses where facilitators are absent. The platform is fine for its intended purpose, but it doesn’t provide a sufficient guarantee of success in and of itself.

most effective learning strategies

I think that the most profitable aspect of this course was encouraging me to write (blog) regularly and often. I have long felt as though more writing in university contexts would be better evidence of learning and exploration, but this series of courses has nurtured my own desire to write. Since I teach primarily in humanities, I cannot speak for the benefits of writing in STEM disciplines directly, but I have come to believe quite strongly in the value of writing across the humanities.

This video is the first of a four-part discussion of how writing takes centre-stage in the development of journalism skills that go far beyond writing itself.

two or three ideas to implement

Although I am completing the three courses in this training program as a requisite to continued work with TRU-OL, I believe the value of skills learned will lead to changed practice across all my teaching. Since our default delivery of university education is planned to be remote for the current (fall 2020) semester as a response to the Covid-19 crisis, thinking of  learning as a remote process with asynchronicity as a default feature, my role in courses throughout all my teaching will have elements that are central when teaching an online course for TRU-OL. With this in mind, the courses have helped me to think of the current year’s instruction in the following (very different) ways.

  1. First of all, I need to revisit the syllabi/outlines for all my courses to make sure that course objectives align with assignments and assessments completely.
  2. In addition, I need to “pare down” assignments that needlessly overlap or provide redundant evidence of competency–leading to potential for overwork in students.
  3. Finally, I need to provide more formative work to help student gain skills and confidence in their abilities and understanding of the more complex summative assignments.
Plans for future learning

I would like to review Teaching In Blended Learning Environments and E-Learning in the 21st Century as stand-alone sources to reflect upon their place and value outside the OTL courses. The use and value of a source is different when it is being studied in the context of a course that needs to be completed versus a reading that needs to be applied to practice in the days ahead. I hope to blog more about these sources in the coming days and particularly with a view to the valuable ideas marginalized or hidden by the current course curriculum. (This does not mean that I disparage OTL courses in any way, it is only that McLuhan’s observation (medium = message) is endlessly productive for modifying our thinking and views of our reading and reflection. Learning is a never-ending process. We need to be both careful and humble in using the expression “I have learned . . .” and “I know . . .”

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301 course Critical Inquiry Integration Learning Activities post 1 Reflections showcase

Peer Study and Learning

The paradox of education
Adapted from a concept of Paul Feyerabend

Although I currently teach mostly “lower-division” university courses, I have directed programs in university education, advising undergraduates pursuing a major or minor and directing a graduate program. I have also been involved in the design and implementation of multiple graduate programs generally in the humanities and specifically in theoretical linguistics. In this context during the early 2000s, I taught a capstone course that primarily served a linguistics program. In the course, taught every spring, I taught primarily graduating 4th-year linguistics majors with a few philosophy majors. About a third of the class was graduate students in applied linguistics. During the course introduction in the first week’s (three-hour) class, I presented how to quickly discern an author’s main point and key supporting ideas in an academic article. This was a “hands-on” session that gave students practice at key skills in study they would use during the remainder of the course. Selecting and quoting or paraphrasing these key ideas was modelled, along with proper citation expectations.

Also during this introductory class, students would form into study groups of four or five students per group. They would be presented with a list of some 40 authors that would be read during the course. Each student was expected to read work written by an author each week during the course with 1/3 of the authors from the list read by each student during the course. During the first week of the course, students in each study group would pick an author from their choice of three for each week of the course. For example, at the second weekly class, students would have read Frege, Whorf, or Quine concerning their view of what language is. At the third class meeting, students would have read Austin, Searle, or Grice concerning the nature of human communication. By the fourth week, authors were Kuhn, Pepper, and Devlin and the topic was the nature of scientific progress. Obviously, in groups of four or five there would be multiple readers of the same author, but their would also be a significant part of each study group that would not have read the author, so readers of Frege or Grice would have to explain to the others in their study group what key ideas each author had provided to answer the week’s main question.

Course topics were aligned with authors, such that each of four authors had written significant text on the subject matter to be discussed at that week’s class. Groups were told they needed to insure all authors for each week had been studied by at least one member of their group. Each week, I would have students meet initially in their groups to review the work of each of the authors for that week (first hour). Then, I would have the readers of each author meet together in a sort of mega-group to discuss the author they had all read (second hour). Groups during this hour were generally between ten and fifteen students per group. Their task as they met together was to decide key material and create a presentation for the whole class to help us all understand the contribution of that author to our overall considerations of the nature of language and communication. Since we were meeting within the same room, discussions created a happy bedlam during that second hour. The third hour was devoted to presentations from each “team” who had read the same author during the week. Each team had 10 minutes to present to the whole class, so choices had to be made quickly during the second hour of what to include and what to leave alone.

During the course, students would consolidate ideas about the nature of understanding, language, science, meaning, communication, translation, identity, and so on, picking and choosing concepts and principles that would allow them to build a research essay reflecting their own emerging understanding of the nature of these topics and their inter-relationship.

Why was this an effective practice?

One reason this practice was so effective was that each student had their group depending upon them. If work was neglected between class meetings, the group was let down. Also, each student had something to bring that no one else could provide. They were allowed to bring their unique contribution to their study group and see how it aligned (or contrasted) with the work of other authors.

Then, too, the groups where everyone had read the same authors provided a means for each student to check their understanding with peers who had also read the same author. Different understandings could be compared and readings reviewed for accuracy and coverage.

Finally, the group presentation to the whole class increased all our knowledge concerning the authors and the topic for the week. I came away from each class meeting aware of some new perspective on each author that I had not noticed before.

What are some of the key ingredients?

I believe a key element of this approach to learning was the trust placed in students to do the assigned work each week. It was obviously a key component of the class composition that these were more experienced students who were highly motivated and capable of processing difficult readings well.

Without exception, students did not trust themselves (or each other) to do reliable and competent work, but over the weeks they came to respect each other’s capabilities and talents for both study and presentation.

what changes would improve the experience?

I have used this approach in more basic areas of study (for example, in a beginning linguistics course on grammatical analysis), but I would like to extend the method across more academic disciplines. I would also like to apply it in classes where students are less experienced and less motivated to find simpler work for students to collaborate on. If I could find a way to make this approach productive earlier in students’ academic careers, I believe it would lead to much more independent study skills, as well as demonstrating the benefits to be gained by the formation of study groups early on in a student’s program.

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101 course Critical Inquiry Integration post 4 showcase

Feedback Gaps otl101, post 4

 

Mills Memorial Library at McMaster
Mills Memorial Library at McMaster

The consideration of Hattie’s discussion on feedback raises my awareness of some important gaps in the feedback I have been offering students. I teach across a wide range of disciplines in both applied and theoretical areas, so my feedback is necessarily diverse.

For example, in a course where I am preparing students to succeed in the office environment at the end of the year, my feedback is focused upon what will make them valued employees in the very near future. By contrast, when I am teaching writing courses that ultimately are aimed at on-the-job writing, but for students whose career paths require longer terms of training before working at a job, I need to couch my comments in a context that involves a much longer training path before the students are writing for an employer. Finally, when I am teaching critical thinking or ethics, my concerns pertaining to the writing of students is more the clarity (and charity!) of their thought, rather than the specific form of their written communication.

All of this tends toward a careful consideration of the goals inherent in the course being taught (as well as students’ compliance and interest in those goals). One of Hattie’s notions that caught my attention is that students may and should be involved in the process of goal-setting. I have tended to think of goal-setting as something done as a part of the process of getting a course approved at the university, and so, not open to negotiation on the part of the instance of a course being taught. Having generally understood the important of creating a class-collective (learning community or community-of-inquiry–COI) and welcoming processes of knowledge construction socially in the context of class sessions, I did not see how dis-empowering the notion of predefined goals were to an authentic learning community dynamic.

As a result, I can see that I need to have more careful discussion with students concerning the process of goal-setting as a prerequisite to engaging and providing feedback on students’ work during the course.

This is merely the first step to increase the quality of feedback I provide. I must also include the questions and the types of feedback Hattie considers in providing a more beneficial feedback process to students.

 

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101 course Critical Inquiry post 3 Resolution showcase

otl101, post 3

In today’s post, I wish to explore the alignment of course objectives with course activities and assessments, so as to promote more thorough skill development in the critical thinking introduction that I teach each year. The course objectives are stated as follows in the course outline:

More specifically, by the end of the course, students will:

  • come to understand the structures of clear thought and argument;
  • increase their discernment of reasonable argumentation;
  • be able to identify several common errors in reasoning;
  • acquire tools to clarify their own thought and communication, including, but not limited to, the use of basic deductive reasoning; and
  • appreciate the relevance of careful thinking and expression for leaders in society.

At the beginning of the course, students need to build skills at identifying patterns of sound and unsound reasoning. Characteristically, they begin with simple situations and progress through the course into increasing complexity and sophistication. The textbook used in the course,

David R. Morrow & Anthony Weston. 2015. A Workbook for Arguments: A Complete Course in Critical Thinking (Second Edition),

provides careful consideration of first, simpler, and then more complex arguments as students gain expertise and confidence. The book is structured upon consideration of 45 rules that can be applied when people assess the relative strength and clarity of argumentation.

The first of these rules invites students to identify premises and conclusions of arguments. At the very beginning of the course, students search for overt words such as “therefore” or “so” to signal a conclusion, or “if,” “since,” or “because” to mark a premise. They also may be tempted to believe that premises must precede conclusions. As a result, they apply lower-level cognitive skills that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Gradually, they are presented with arguments that use no signal words or order conclusions and premises in surprising ways to increase their ability to see relations between unmarked and disordered statements and correctly identify premises and conclusions, as well as statements that provide (relevant and irrelevant) background information concerning the situation.

Since the exercises in the book are presented as a set of puzzles, students are generally engaged and motivated to use more than lower-level reasoning skills even in the early days.

Additionally, students are challenged to compare arguments that are neither universally strong/good or completely weak/bad, but scalar, having relative strength or weakness and being quite or only somewhat persuasive of their conclusions. Not only are the standards scalar (as opposed to polar), but each rule application tends to provide a new dimension of evaluation, such that the consideration of an argument’s value or strength is a multi-dimensional field, rather than a simple line connecting strong at one end and weak at the other.

Class activities consider a range of exercises from the book (which provides solutions for about half of the items, and course evaluations are largely done on students’ work on exercises in the book for which solutions are not provided. As the course proceeds, various exercises that have been evaluated for credit in the course are also critiqued in group sessions, to give students further practice at improving their skills.

Extended arguments from current events and opinions expressed concerning the events are also included in the course to give students practice in subject areas they are interested in.

In all these ways, there is an application of the course learning objectives to both the class activities and assessments to bring the course into alignment. One key way I believe this can be further reinforced during the course would be periodic review of the course outline’s learning objectives, so that students are reminded how and why they are gaining skills in the areas they are.

 

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101 course Critical Inquiry showcase Triggering Event

On Cognitive Presence, post 2

In the article read for this section of the course, I have been encouraged to consider the notion of critical thinking as a social process, whether synchronous or asynchronous. The article attempted to construct a heuristic to diagnose the presence or absence of processes in a community based upon the use of key terms or phrases that are indicators of ongoing community processes reflected in the text transcripts of interactions. Although I believe the attempt at coding discussions for the processes indicated was misguided and the progress made in assessing and categorizing phases present in the course was too uncertain, I consider the conceptual framework of the learning process to be a useful one. I like both the challenge to imagine critical thinking as less an individual project and more a community one and the handing over of judgement to a collective, rather than a hierarchical and imposed power move. I also enjoyed considering the construction of meaning as a by-product of cognitive presence. While it might be possible to view the construction of meaning as an individual’s response to a situation, it is more subtle to notice how ‘meanings’ are negotiated in a community, with individual reactions being suppressed and again supported by reactions from others in the social context. For example, consider a joke told in a community of speakers. Hypothetically suppose that one person in the audience is offended by the joke, while another is significantly amused. It might be possible to take the joke as having two meanings in that context. However, notice that it is also possible for the ‘meanings’ to be negotiated in further interaction, resulting in the mitigation of both offense and amusement, as the two audience members reflect upon each other’s reaction. Also note that the two reactions may not resolve each other, but may provoke greater offense/amusement on the part of each person. That is, we need not necessarily assume that all social interaction will necessarily resolve into similarity, but make further distance interlocutors. I am not here saying that the individual reactions are irrelevant, but I do claim that the further interactions are relevant to the overall process of the construction of meaning in a social context.

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101 course Critical Inquiry Resolution showcase

Hello, otl101 post 1

This is Day One of online training to facilitate in the TRU Open Learning world. This is a good chance for me to see how the online environment intimidates those whose roles are less empowered among the learning community. For example, learners who must excel to succeed at whatever project they hope to complete may face uncertainty both as to whether we are doing the process correctly and what cost will attend if we fail. Also, learners who are less familiar with expectations of learning in the 21st century, the bulk of whose training has been face-to-face and has used older technology, may face lack of clarity and a fog of possibilities without any clear direction or a map to guide us. Finally, those of us used to being in “the driver’s seat” regarding course operation may be be unable to relinquish control over our learning, particularly when we cannot see those who are “actually” driving. All in all, the feelings are puzzling, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable. We forge ahead . . . ?