Backing up a bit, suppose you were asked to design and deliver a class or training session that had to maximize educational outcome – meaning, it had to work as a learning tool more to the benefit of the students than the teacher – no holds are barred, and you knew of a technique that resulted in an 80% improvement over the traditional lecture method. Would you use that method? More to the point, could you justify not using it? Well that is what Deslauriers, Schelew and Wieman found (see Science article below) when they compared the lecture with a more interactive class they designed to teach physics. All things being equal, if you supplant the lecture with a presentation that is designed to work more in accord with how most people learn, test scores go from 41% for the garden-variety lecture class to 74% for the interactive class. Pretty impressive stuff.

So what is the nature of the design of the interactive class? Put simply, research in cognitive psychology suggests that learners will get better results if they use what they have just been given right away. The theme: Deliver new information, play with it, use it to solve problems, evaluate mastery of the skills and concepts, repeat as needed. Deslauriers, Schelew and Wieman’s physics students were hit repeatedly with questions during class that they had to answer with clickers. Students frequently worked in groups where they were challenged to use their new knowledge to solve problems. Lastly, the students were evaluated in part using two class tests rather than the traditional single mid-term exam.

Let’s make it clear, pouring the old wine in a new bottle does not make it sweeter. Content matters. Doing homework in class and listening to lectures at night is not “flipping the classroom.” Recording lectures and putting them on YouTube or iTunes U is no solution:

“A University of Maryland study of undergraduates found that after a physics lecture by a well-regarded professor, almost no students could provide a specific answer to the question, ‘What was the lecture you just heard about?’ A Kansas State University study found that after watching a video of a highly rated physics lecture, most students still incorrectly answered questions on the material.” — David H. Freeman, Discover Magazine

Even in the best cases of well-thought-out well-designed interactive classes some likely criticisms remain. There is an issue with the Hawthorne Effect that needs to be retired, but personal experience suggests that these findings are not surprising or unusual, at least in kind. Another question that surfaces is whether this kind of interactive class lends itself to subjects like literature, philosophy, history or political science. What are the limits of the approach?

Finally, we have to ask why if there is so much evidence and personal experience against lectures do we persist in giving them? The answer might well be wrapped in four prominent qualities of the practice: 1) lecturing is easy and cheap to do; 2) we have been taught to accept bad lectures as normal (for well over a thousand years!); 3), they (certainly the live version) create an illusion of interactivity between the presenter and audience that is not supported in actual observation (see D. Clark below); and 4), they stand as proof by the presenter and/or the institution that the material has been covered and “delivered” to the audience.

Pragmatically, and for the reasons above, lectures inherently favor the presenter and the institution. Lectures originated in a time when books and information were both scarce and expensive and colleges needed to solve a problem of distribution. Closer to the modern era lectures appear to be supported by tacit agreement with the dubious notion that teaching and telling are the same thing:

“The problem is not with the lecture but with the idea that receiving information is the key part of learning.” — Dominik Lukeš

The notion that the lecture’s time has come is finally reaching the Academy. Educators like Graham Gibbs (see below) have been questioning its value for over thirty years. More recently university professors like Stanford University’s (formerly) Sebastian Thrun have had their own epiphanies on the matter:

“Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move [away from Stanford] was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, ‘the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digital media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,’ he said.” — Nick DeSantis, Wired Campus

Dr Wieman likewise has his own concerns about his colleagues and the future of the lecture in science instruction. As recorded by David Freeman of Discover Magazine:

“But scientists who teach have proven reluctant to toss out the lecture, never mind the evidence that it doesn’t work. ‘They say this is the way it’s always been done, and it was good enough for them, so it’s good enough for their students,’ Wieman says. Were this attitude to hold in medicine we would still be bloodletting, in physics we would be trying to reach the moon with very large rubber bands, and in economics we would still be suffering major worldwide financial crashes. (Well, physics and medicine are advancing, anyway.)” — David H. Freeman, Discover Magazine

What seems certain is that we are on the foothills of a major shift in what happens in the classroom. What develops in terms of the effects on corporate, college and military training remains to be seen. After all, it might not result in a single universal one-size-fits-all form. How this upheaval in teaching feeds into distance learning and web-based training is another discussion that almost certainly has to rear its head. The resultant form of the instructional process is anybody’s guess, but what is certain is that whatever it evolves into, whatever we see as the best fit for our instructional purpose, teaching well will remain hard work.

References.
Freeman, David, H., Impatient Futurist: Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~jiayang/me1005/2011f/2011%20Science-%20Improved%20learning%20in%20a%20large-entrollment%20Physics%20class.pdf

Gibbs, G., “Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing,” SCED Occasional Paper No. 8, Birmingham. 1981.

Clark, Donald, “Don’t Lecture Me” – ALT-C 2010.

Clark, Donald, “Lectures selling students short: evidence from ‘Science’ “

Lukeš, Dominik, “Putting lectures in their place with cautious optimism“

DeSantis, Nick, “Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up“

Deslauriers, Loius, Schelew, Ellen and Wieman, Carl, “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class” Science 13 May 2011: Vol. 332 no. 6031 pp. 862-864

“E-learning experts argue that withholding computers at a young age could actually deprive children of modern communications skills. ‘One area of literacy that’s changing is the order in which things are presented – it isn’t linear, it’s organised spatially, and often some meaning is carried in the design, layout, images, sounds, movement, subtle changes in colour in a game – it’s all part of what literacy is in today’s world,’ says Flewitt. ‘These are fundamental changes to operational literacy, the biggest since the printing press.‘ ”

Naturally some question is left as to whether this effect is limited to young children as a group or if one can detect a tendency toward acoustic involvement among younger participants in college classrooms and corporate training centers. The main point, however, is that linearity might already be optional in the classroom, where new and different styles of presentation and involvement might be called for in order to better reach the audience.

To contrast Dr Flewitt’s comment on linear versus spatial literacy, consider this synopsis of McLuhan’s acoustic space by Library and Archives Canada:

“The key characteristic of acoustic space is that it engages multiple senses at the same time. It does not demand that objects be dissected to be understood; rather, the multiple parts co-exist simultaneously. To understand acoustic space, you must perceive all of it, not focus on one part. In other words, acoustic space demands that you apprehend figure and ground simultaneously, that the senses work together. McLuhan believed that oral cultures existed in acoustic space since their primary mode of communicating was speech.”

In this interview with Nina Sutton, Mcluhan explains the rise and dominance of visual space from the phonetic alphabet forward: McLuhan on Acoustic Space.

As a sidebar it is interesting to note that McLuhan eventually dropped the use of the term Global Village from his work preferring the term Global Theatre instead. Apparently Global Village goes back to the advent of radio while the notion of the Global Theatre is more a part of Sputnik, television and modern global communications.

References.

AllThingsD: Early Adopters

PCPro: How Much Tech Can Children Take?

Library and Archives Canada: Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine (©1969, 1994) by Playboy. Download here in PDF: (mcluhan-playboy).

Source: MIT

Substitute (instructional design | course development | teaching | writing | learning) where you see “research” and “physics” in the excerpts below.

“But when it came time to do some research. I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!… And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”… Then I had another thought; Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics…. So I get this new attitude… I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. Withing a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air…. I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate… And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ – working, really – with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos; my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly…. There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” – Richard Feynman, excerpts from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman

There. How does that make you feel? More importantly, how does that make you feel about your work? Worth a try, isn’t it? After all, if Feynman had not realized the connection between play and learning he might have stayed in funk much longer and, perhaps, missed the opportunity to experience the pleasure in discovering something really interesting. (I am tempted to end the last sentence with something like “…that ultimately led to a Nobel Prize in Physics,” but I know enough about Richard Feynman to avoid that one. He would be quick to say that nothing he did was ever about winning a prize.)

Attribution

Miki at PythonWise

References

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (PDF)

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

Related Posts

Cargo Cult Science and Education

What started as simple private tutorials in math for his cousins – utilizing what he describes as about $200.00 in computer accessories and shareware – Khan drew upon his innate interest in education (along with perhaps his own personal frustrations as a student) to craft a series of screen capture how-to guides for solving high school math problems. As word spread among friends and family members, viral interest forced Khan to move his homespun videos to YouTube to service his burgeoning audience, completely for free. The rest, as they say, is history.

At present the Khan Academy (a not-for-profit educational organization founded in 2006) has served over 51 million views from a library of over 2200 videos. In addition to math and physics, topics now embrace history and biology. School districts and major corporations are attempting to use and develop his methods for their own internal applications. Donations from private sources and the likes of Google and the Gates Foundation have subsequently allowed Salman Khan to quit his day job and devote his energies full-time to the development of his Academy and the distribution of educational programs worldwide (“providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”).

Looking over Khan’s presentations on his methods you begin to wonder what makes the Khan Academy so successful. After all, this isn’t the result of a major educational research program, a sweeping government initiative, or a mass popular movement in educational reform. Further, what makes the Khan Academy even more interesting is that Khan’s tutorial method is not so much ingenious as it is ingenuous.

In several of his talks Khan is fairly straightforward in his assessment of what makes his method work. First and foremost, as Khan attests, each of the videos offers a lesson on a single concise topic (a “concept”) for no more than about 10 minutes. One key idea, cut in a bite-sized chunk, for a period not to exceed the boredom threshold of the average viewer. Given that the videos are recorded and stored online, the presentations can be played any time and repeated as needed by the student until he or she feels comfortable to move forward.

Another feature of the tutorials is the general tone they are given in. As Khan describes it, they feel like they are coming more from a friend than a teacher. You have a sense that Khan is there with you, sitting by your side, leading you through the problems with a pencil and paper. They are down-to-earth, enthusiastic and rigorous without a trace of giddiness, pomposity or pedantry. The student feels like “…there is an individual who cares about you,” Khan says. The student comes away with a sense that the instructor wants to help him or her over the obstacles in the landscape because he has been in the student’s place himself and sympathizes with the struggles that lay ahead.

Drilling down a layer into the Khan Academy’s unique style reveals even more about what makes the “secret sauce” special. Each of the bite-sized topics that are referred to previously are in fact carefully culled and curated learning objects. The trick, of course, is to first know the subject well enough to select which topics to present and in what order. Following that, the teacher must distill the concepts to their absolute essence.

This distillation process is, to all who have tried it, much harder than it looks. In fact, the ability to select and summarize complex material and ideas, rather than resorting to the indiscriminate slathering of a PowerPoint slide with bullets, might be one of the hallmarks of an educated mind. Clearly, Khan groks it.

Despite the thought and planning that goes into Khan’s presentations they can hardly be accused of being over produced. This is not Pixar doing technical training. If anything, the digital blackboard and colored chalk renderings show the human side of learning and mastery. The notes and diagrams often appear rough and awkward, but they are at the same time quite genuine, funny and sometimes – to the advantage of the learner – mistaken. As Khan explains it, he is often in the place of the learner and, in contrast to many schools and universities, has not rehearsed the solution beforehand, offering the student the patented procedure. Instead he lets the students witness his own thought processes as he wrestles with the problems and sometimes wanders down the wrong path from which he has to back out and start again – just like a real student.

Nowhere in Khan’s methods can be found any of the bells or whistles of modern post-industrial pedagogy. No Flash animation, interactivity, games, social networking tools, 3D graphics or monolithic learning management systems are to be found. In fact there is little beyond a virtual blackboard and some equally virtual colored chalk. You don’t even see Khan’s face.

The faceless almost tactile sketches and equations provide little distraction and promote focus on the material. This decidedly low-tech solution to training might harken back to ancient watch-me-do-it tribal methods but its effectiveness is not lost on Khan’s students, many of whom write to express thanks that they are not only mastering their classes for the first time but excited about the subjects as well.

Khan’s approach is to teach for academic competency. That is, he instructs in the methods and procedures that assist the student in passing standardized tests and formal exams. After the student completes a module, test problems are offered through a program that Khan designed himself that acts to monitor student progress and flag trouble areas for the teacher. The student is asked to correctly answer 10 problems in a row before moving to the next module. This final process closes the instruction, feedback and assessment loop in Khan’s method and further acts to eliminate the small voids in understanding that can multiply as the student moves forward. Interestingly YouTube assists in the process as well, offering statistics on usage and attention.

One of Khan’s own revelations about his method is telling: it’s so simple and effective that he does not see why anyone needs to give live lectures anymore.

Although he does not refer to it by name, Khan points to (and his method directly parallels) the use of what is commonly called the Inverted Classroom. In an inverted classroom recorded presentations impart new information prior to class while class time is taken up with teachers and peers solving problems (or “doing homework”) quite in reverse to what is traditionally done in schools and training centers.

The results of this method have so far been compelling. Both teachers and students benefit. Teachers benefit because more of their time is spent in directed remediation (particularly if they use Khan’s monitoring software), problem solving and exploration of the material. Students like the inverted classroom because it potentially transforms class time into something useful and interesting. In Khan’s case the testimonials from parents, teachers and students are hard to ignore. His academy and tutorials do work.

More needs to be seen to ascertain whether the Khan Academy represents the future of education as some claim. But what is clear is that it stands as a forceful reminder of what can be done to improve the instruction of certain skills and particular subjects while simultaneously improving the classroom experience for everyone.

References.

Bill Gates’ Favorite Teacher

Salman Khan on Future Talk

YouTube Teaching as Guerrilla Public Service

Yes, the Khan Academy IS the Future of Education (video; singularityhub.com)

Yes, the Khan Academy is the Future of Education

Khan Academy Exercise Software

Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos

The Khan academy is Not that Good

We are Khan Academy, You Will Be Assimilated!

Can the Khan Academy flip a classroom?

This mural by Eileen Clegg and Val Ibarra of Visual Insight chronicles the development of corporate and executive education from 1880 to present. I assume it reflects American trends - the notes do not say. The size of the mural is approximately 4 feet x 12 feet but you can explore it on screen using zoom and grab/drag. You might have to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in (free) to do so however. A scaled-down jpeg of the mural can also be viewed here.

Some of the milestones from the timeline include:

• 1880 ... the Industrial Revolution ... informal training via apprenticeships
• 1910 ... rise of the Factory Model ... training for efficiency, "scientific" management
• 1940 ... rise of the Organization ... training to create a formal management structure
• 1960 ... rise of the Individual ... modern educational theory and instructional design blossom
• 1980 ... rise of the Information Economy ... industrial model declines, lifelong learning ascends
• 1990 ... rise of the Internet ... global communications, virtual organizations, electronic media
• 2010 ... the Present ... "natural" learning emerges (again), asynchronous, acoustic environments

What is meant by "natural" learning is not spelled out by the authors, but it is is interesting to ponder which of the trends from the post-agricultural era (1880 onward) were particularly "unnatural." I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that the current post-literate environment we find ourselves in is taking us back to a period before the industrial revolution when apprenticeships and the oral tradition ruled. Ergo the current interest in experiential and immersive learning environments, informal learning, podcasts and the inverted classroom.

References.

History Map: Corporate and Executive Education

The History of Education Mural]]> http://www.hg2s.com/blog/2010/12/30/a-history-of-corporate-education/feed/ 0 http://www.hg2s.com/blog/2010/11/30/learn-unlearn-relearn/ http://www.hg2s.com/blog/2010/11/30/learn-unlearn-relearn/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:14:51 +0000 Jack McShea http://www.hg2s.com/blog/?p=1767

Figure-Ground Reversal by Laurel Neustadter

" The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

(c) Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, 69(20).

• Planning Online Courses
• Managing Online Courses
• Providing Feedback
• Online Interaction
• Quality Supplemental Materials
• Blended Learning Implementation
• Online Visual Learning
• Webinars and Webcasts
• Podcasting Uses and Applications
• Wiki Uses and Applications
• Blog Uses and Applications
• Hands-on Experiential Learning
• Assessing Student Online Learning
• Trends on the Horizon

Fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between animals of land and sea. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

I'm glad that someone has gathered the courage to say this out loud: Instructional design in the 21st Century is not about events, it's about experiences. No doubt from the looks of things, instructional design (ID) is in the natural throes of shaking off the learning events metaphor imposed on it by the educational psychologists of the Industrial Revolution, but learning and development thinkers like Charles Jennings hope that we can hasten it along for the sakes of our students and ourselves. For Jennings the shift from working with the hands to working with the head is a key indicator that promotes the need to move from events toward processes:

"Undoubtedly instructional design is crucial if the mindset is learning events – modules, courses, programmes and curricula. However, if the mindset has stretched beyond event-based learning to where most learning occurs for workers, which is in the workplace at the point-of-need, where process-based learning serves best – and where learning through doing and learning as part of the work process happens, then ID takes on a whole new dimension."

Jennings posits the notion of "learning" held by inhabitants of the 21st Century as moving from a habitat of "knowledge" to a new one of "behavior." The medium is the message. It's not about content anymore.

"For years we’ve been led to believe that ‘learning’ meant acquiring knowledge. If knowledge acquisition is the end-game, then the logical conclusion was to provide information that could be turned, whatever the magic employed, into knowledge in the recipient’s head. Believe me, the old idea that data becomes information which in turn becomes knowledge and finally transmogrifies into wisdom has been debunked years ago. We use our knowledge and experience to interpret data and information. Wisdom comes to a few only after years of experience."

Jennings reminds us that Ebbinghaus and the Forgetting Curve aside, we need to observe learning in action to make intelligent assessments about its effectiveness. Experience and practice are the keys and, as such, instructional designers need to become interactivity designers.

"Good ID will result in the design of experiences that can build capability and learning far more quickly and effectively than by filling heads with information and ‘knowledge’ and then hoping that will lead to behavioural change.

We need designers who understand that learning comes from experience, practice, conversations and reflection, and are prepared to move away from massaging content into what they see as good instructional design. Designers need to get off the content bus and start thinking about, using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity."

Further information about Charles Jennings and his work can be found here.

The Bandwagon

"...the educational use of social media may not counteract poor social connections that are seen in face-to-face communication or elicit the same impacts seen in the use of social media sites such as MySpace and FaceBook."

"Many social media advocates have argued that the use of these tools in classroom settings could greatly enhance interaction and learning and assist shyer, more reserved students in becoming more involved, as has been seen in other online environments. However, our findings show that the incorporation of social media had no measurable impact on social connections, to the point that students did not consider other members of the class to be part of their social network.”

“The issues surrounding poor social network construction within online educational environments points to greater opportunities to examine how technology and mediated software can be better designed to suit the types of communication and interactions desired by our students.”  - Christopher Egert, co-author

"Information is what allows us to confidently make a selection from a set of given or implied alternatives."