What have you done to improve online student engagement?

I will be speaking on "Teaching Green Computing Online: 15 Years of Student Engagement via Nudging" at the free Online Engagement in Higher Education Special Interest Group Webinar, of HERDSA, 1pm, this Wednesday, 10 April 2024. HERDSA didn't want this to be just me talking, so as well as ten slides, I prepared four questions for the participants to answer, & discuss live:

"1. What have you done to improve online student engagement?
2. What level of granularity is best for feedback to students: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly?
3. Do students get tired of boilerplate replies?
4. Will they get annoyed by AI generated feedback?"

"In 2008 the Australian Computer Society commissioned Tom Worthington to design an online course in green computing. This course formed part of the Australian Computer Society’s professional development program. This was later run at the Australian National University as a masters course, and is still offered fifteen years later through Athabasca University (Canada).

The course uses a conventional text-based distance education format, with no video, and no webinars. Why? What was the rationale? This presentation shares key design principles of this unique format that has positively impacted student engagement. As a means of facilitating student engagement nudging techniques have been employed.

This HERDSA Special Interest Group, Online Engagement in Higher Education, will discuss the factors that have improved online student engagement and consider implications and applications of their own online courses, including a coordinated nudging process. This event will provide insights for those looking to adopt a nudging approach to better facilitate student engagement and learning.

Join this to see how this works, and can be applied at your institution."

Teaching Green Computing Online: 15 Years of Student Engagement via Nudging

I will be speaking on "Teaching Green Computing Online: 15 Years of Student Engagement via Nudging" at the HERDSA Online Engagement in Higher Education Special Interest Group, 1pm, 10 April 2024.

"In 2008 the Australian Computer Society commissioned Tom Worthington to design an online course in green computing. This course formed part of the Australian Computer Society’s professional development program. This was later run at the Australian National University as a masters course, and is still offered fifteen years later through Athabasca University (Canada).

The course uses a conventional text-based distance education format, with no video, and no webinars. Why? What was the rationale? This presentation shares key design principles of this unique format that has positively impacted student engagement. As a means of facilitating student engagement nudging techniques have been employed.

This HERDSA Special Interest Group, Online Engagement in Higher Education, will discuss the factors that have improved online student engagement and consider implications and applications of their own online courses, including a coordinated nudging process. This event will provide insights for those looking to adopt a nudging approach to better facilitate student engagement and learning.

Join this to see how this works, and can be applied at your institution."

Presentation available.

Is engagement the same for face-to-face and online?

I will be taking part in the HERDSA panel “Is engagement the same off and online?” (Wednesday 19th April 1pm, Sydney time). So are my thoughts on the subject:

The question should be: "What is engagement? How do we know when we have achieved it?"

Engagement is the same for face-to-face and online. The challenge is to make person-to-person connection with the student, more importantly *between* the students, and ideally with an external client. This can be done online, just as, or more effectively, than face to face.

For eight years I have been helping with the Techlauncher program at ANU. This has hundreds of students in teams of a half dozen, working on projects for clients, from academia, business, industry and government. It was designed for face to face delivery. Clients give 60 second pitches competing for students, in an intensive two hour session, on campus. Teams form and then work for a year on the project.

The format worked fine. But in 2016 I suggested Canberra's universities should be ready if a regional crisis kept international students off shore. I argued international and Australia students could work together online.

In 2019 I described flipping the classroom activities for part of Techlauncher, and adding a pure online option ready for an emergency (Worthington, 2019). This was implemented for COVID-19 in 2020 (Worthington, 2020). There was no change to the course content, or assessment, replacing classrooms with Zoom rooms. A key part was the use of a Learning Management System (Moodle), online forums (Piazza), and specialist project management tools (Slack), which are routinely used for running software development teams spread around the world.

This semester I have been mentoring a dozen interns, doing individual projects at workplaces in Canberra, and across Australia. Most of those in Canberra have opted to come to the campus to talk face to face. But this is not an option if they are in Perth, and Zoom works fine. One who was in transit between workplaces Zoomed from a car (not driving). The shaky-cam made me slightly sea-sick, but otherwise this worked okay. ;-)

The key part of the student engagement is for the teacher to be trained in how to teach real world relevant skills. It helps if they have been trained to do this using online courses. I had the advantage of training at TAFE, and online universities, in these skills. We need to have our teaching academics routinely exposed to these tools and techniques, to get them away from the nonsense of lectures and exams.

Reference

Worthington, T. (2019, December). Blend and flip for teaching communication skills to final year international computer science students. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE) (pp. 1-5). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE48000.2019.9225921

Worthington, T. (2020, April). Responding to the Coronavirus Emergency with e-Learning. Athabasca University. https://news.athabascau.ca/beyond-50/responding-to-the-coronavirus-emergency-with-e-learning/

HERDSA mid winter networking & pre-conference meeting in Canberra

HERDSA mid winter networking
& pre-conference meeting

Greetings from the HERDSA mid winter networking & pre-conference meeting at ACU in Canberra. These are previews for  HERDSA 2021 Conference, of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA), in Brisbane, 7 – 10 July 2021.

Featuring:

1. Gavin  Mount UNSW Canberra: Student wellbeing: A community of practice staff survey.
2. Carol Hayes ANU: Creating the advanced Japanese tertiary languageteacher’s network across Australia, NZ and Singapore.
3. Elke Stracke UC: Dialogue in doctoral supervision: The Feedback Expectation Tool (FET).
4. Fiona Campbell ALIA: Where do new ideas come from? The problem withproblem-solving.
5. Marie Fisher ACU & Pam Roberts CSU: Innovation or auto-repeat? What inspires me to commit to the long-haul journey on continuous improvement of teaching practice?
6. Joe Northey UC: Perceived impact of COVID19 on the development of first year university student employability skills

The first conference preview was from Gavan Mount from UNSW on supporting student wellbeing. They have a community of practice on integrating student wellbeing into the teaching, rather than as something done by a separate unit. He said it was important to talk to sessional teachers. One important question he suggests is what are the boundaries for teaching staff in dealing with student wellbeing and the risk of becoming too involved. It was interesting that Gavan did not focus on COVID-19 until the end. This is refreshing after a year and a half of presentations about nothing but.

Carol Hayes, ANU talked on e-learning for language teaching with a teachers network across Australia, NZ and Singapore. They suggest the research findings apply more generally to the humanities, but one finding I suggest is of more widespread significance: differing vies between staff and students as to what an "advanced" course is. It was interesting that some of the student materials were anime and manga.

Elke Stracke UC presented on a tool for dialogue in doctoral supervision. Elke said there was not much research on pedagogic practice of research supervision, which I found surprising, given the number of advanced degree research students, the cost of their training and importance to the economy. The tool is a one page questionnaire for students and supervisors, where they agree or disagree with statements about the role of each. 

Something which struck me was that many of the questions were procedural and perhaps should be answered by the institution. However, even in areas where the answer should be clear, I suggest they can be changed for learning purposes. As an example, I should and usually know the deliverables and deadlines for student work, but I still ask the student what they are, so I know that they know. A paper has been published (Stracke & Kumar, 2020).

Fiona Campbell ALIA/UTS explained the presentation is based on her PhD on creativity: how do we develop cognitive flexibility. I must admit to doubts as to if you can teach creativity. In helping teach innovation at start-up centers and in hackerthons I am not so much teaching how to be creative as to direct the person's creative ability to a useful end.

Robert Kennelly talked about "TATAL: Talking about teaching and learning". I went through the TATAL process, around the same time as that for the Higher Education Academy, and  CMALT. Robert invited people at the meeting to talk about their TATAL experience. I explained that I was attempting to obtain multiple teaching accreditation and having difficulty with the required reflection. Attending TATAL meetings with people also going through the same challenges helped me with HEA Fellowship, although I abandoned attempts at CMALT and HERDSA Fellowship.

Joe Northey UC pointed out that researching the impact of a pandemic on employability skills was not planned. He quipped that nobody planned for a pandemic (I quipped back that I did). Very relevantly Joe is from a health faculty. He described how the first year was revised with a professional core. Each students starts their study with a unit on professional practice. This sounds like something which could be applied to my area of computing , to form the graduate's identity as a professional. Joe described creating a tool to help the students by having them rate themselves on employability skills. This started in 2019 and the pre assessment was one face to face in 2020. The shift to online learning provided a natural experiment. Obviously the inability of students to develop f2f skills was a factor. Some students found the online tools useful.

Pam Roberts talk about professional development for academics and what happened during COVID-19.

References

Campbell, F. C. (2018). Flow, resistance and thinking: a phenomenological study of creativity (Doctoral dissertation). URL http://hdl.handle.net/10453/129435

Schonell, S., Gilchrist, J., Kennelly, R., McCormack, C., Northcote, M., Ruge, G., & Treloar, G. (2016). TATAL: Talking about teaching and learning: Teaching philosophy workbook. Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia. URL https://www.herdsa.org.au/publications/publications/tatal-talking-about-teaching-and-learning-teaching-philosophy-workbook

Stracke, E., & Kumar, V. (2020). Encouraging Dialogue in Doctoral Supervision: The Development of the Feedback Expectation Tool. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 15, 265-284. URL https://doi.org/10.28945/4568

Reflections on Peer Review of Teaching for Promotion

Greetings from Canberra, where Professor Geoff Crisp, UC DVC&VP-A,  is speaking on Reflections on Peer Review of Teaching for Promotion. This has been organized by Pamela Roberts, the ACT HERDSA Chair.

Professor Crisp discussed the different forms of peer review (summative and formative) and their different uses (for promotion/awards, or for improving teaching quality).They then described the UNSW Summative Peer Review of Teaching. The UNSW website is very useful, having a description of the process and a set of downloadable templates.

The webinar is via Blackboard Collaborate, due to the the  COVID-19 Coronavirus. I could not get it to work with Firefox, but it is working with Chrome. However, the audio quality is much poorer than with Zoom, when using the same connection speed (and this is with my not transmitting any video or audio, just receiving). With Blackboard the audio would break up, stop and then proceed at higher than normal speed. A positive point was that the text chat form worked much better than Zoom. 

Developing my Philosophy of Teaching Statement

Greetings from the Charles Sturt University Canberra Campus, where Pam Roberts from CSU and Karin Oerlemans from Kairos are running a HERDSA workshop on "Developing your Philosophy of Teaching Statement"

This is no powerpoint click and flick exercise. We started at 4:30pm and are going through until 7pm, undertaking a series of short group and individual exercises exploring how we see teaching and our role in in. The workshop is aimed at helping those applying under the HERDSA Fellowship Scheme, but is also applicable to other educational fellowships, particularly the Higher Education Academy (HEA).

One exercise was the Curriculum Ideologies Inventory from "Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns" by Michael Stephen Schiro (2012).

Also I have been attending "Talk about Teaching and Learning" (TATAL) sessions at the Australian National University. These sessions take the educator through a series of exercises over several weeks to get them to think about their teaching practices (McCormack, & Kennelly, p. 8, 2009).

The reflective writing process is one now familiar to me having been through the process to be a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and before that in a  capstone for Athabasca University's MEd. However, this is something which still does not come naturally. Having do it several times I am tempted to use shorthand:

Tom Worthington's Philosophy of Teaching Statement

A social constructionist undertaking mentored, collaborative online learning  (Lindley, 2007) for scaffolded vocational professional education. For details, see my book "Digital Teaching In Higher Education".

Reference

Lindley, D. (2007, November). Computer professional education using mentored and collaborative online learning. In SEARCC 2007, Proceedings of the South East Asia Regional Computer Conference (pp. 18-19). URL http://ijcim.th.org/SpecialEditions/v15nSP4/P09SEARCC_ComputerProfessionalEducation.pdf

McCormack, C., & Kennelly, R. (2009, February). Talking about Teaching and Learning (TATAL). In A Transition Pedagogy: The First Year Experience Curriculum Design Symposium 2009 (p. 8). URL https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sally_Kift/publication/266461923_A_Transition_Pedagogy_The_First_Year_Experience_Curriculum_Design_Symposium_2009_Introduction_-_The_Contemporary_First_Year_Experience/links/54b5e1480cf26833efd3455e/A-Transition-Pedagogy-The-First-Year-Experience-Curriculum-Design-Symposium-2009-Introduction-The-Contemporary-First-Year-Experience.pdf#page=8