Some thoughts on my MOOC experience

As I mentioned earlier, I participated in a mini-MOOC about MOOCs a couple of weeks ago. I left for vacation before the week ended and never had a chance to reflect on my experience. I’ll admit I had (wrongly) thought most MOOCs were xMOOCs, doing nothing more than providing a way to replicate the sage-on-the-stage model of education and transmit it to vast audiences. Participating in the mini-MOOC opened my eyes to the possibilities of connectivist MOOCs (or cMOOCs). (If you want some background on these different types of MOOCs, check out the essay created by one of the groups within the MOOC MOOC providing an overview of the MOOC landscape.)

Even with the potential of cMOOCs, my week of participation in the mini-MOOC left me wondering if I would ever feel completely comfortable in any “massive” educational endeavor.  Collaborating with 50+ other people I didn’t know to write an essay about MOOCs in Google Docs wasn’t exhilarating; it was anxiety producing. I’m a slow, reflective writer. I have to spend a lot of time thinking, testing a fragment of an idea, and then revising both the idea and the words that capture the idea.  In Google Docs, watching words and concepts, even entire paragraphs, change, appear, and disappear as I tried to add my own thoughts frustrated me. I felt wholly inadequate.  I also wondered how dissenting opinions would ever be heard when a group of 50+ people were writing and revising each other’s words to create a common document.

If collaborating on Google docs was unsettling, “discussions” via Twitter were even more so. Trying to engage meaningfully in 140 character snippets with people who are completely unknown was wholly unsatisfying. The constant barrage of tweets felt helter-skelter; it was too much, too fast, and without real connection or direction.  The steady give and take, the seeing in someone’s eyes when they are lost, or emphatic, or playful, the sense of shared enrichment that arises from face-to-face conversations, those things were entirely missing from the on-line conversations. As one of my fellow MOOC participants noted, MOOCs favor those who are on-line extroverts, and unlike a real classroom, there’s no teacher to encourage the introverts to participate, to find creative ways to allow everyone to speak up, to actively work to make the classroom an inclusive space.

I may be the exception to the rule, but from the time I was in 7^th grade, I knew I wanted to attend a small liberal arts college. The summer before 7^th grade I attended a summer camp at a Big 10 university, and I walked away from the experience saying, “I never want to go here for college.”  The University made me feel alone among thousands of students; my experience with the MOOC MOOC made me feel the same way. I felt overwhelmed and isolated, and I was without a coach (read teacher) to help me make the most of the experience. Did I learn something from the MOOC MOOC? You bet. Do I see potential for MOOCs in some arenas of higher education? Definitely.  I can even imagine finding ways to interface some MOOCs with a traditional residential college experience. But MOOCs are not for everyone, particularly those who are on-line introverts and those who lack self-confidence or direction. I’m not yet convinced that Twitter conversations with thousands or Google Docs collaboration with hundreds can create the same connectedness and community that make small liberal arts colleges such a wonderful place to teach and learn.

Readings for undergraduate women in STEM?

One of my roles this summer has involved coordinating weekly lunches for Carleton’s Clare Booth Luce (CBL) Scholars program. This is a three-year, grant-funded program supported by the Clare Booth Luce Foundation aimed at increasing the number of women computer science and physics majors at Carleton by providing early research experiences and developing a supportive cohort.

The weekly lunches are part of the effort to create a sense of community within the CBL cohort. Each week, I selected a reading that formed the basis for discussion or activities relevant to the topic at hand. I found choosing the topics for reading and discussion to be extremely difficult, in part because this program aims both to prepare the students to be successful at Carleton and also to help lay the foundation for success in the wider world beyond Carleton. And the world beyond Carleton has a lot more places where the old boys’ network is still strong and where others might judge you by your gender, not by your abilities.

Now that I’ve been at Carleton for a while, I’ve begun to see a trend. Women-in-science topics rarely come up in my discussions with current students, but fairly regularly, I get phone calls or e-mails from female alums who have found themselves in chilly grad school climates or uncomfortable work situations. I’m always happy to have conversations with alums and do what I can to support them, but I also wonder what we can do for current students so that they are better prepared when they encounter difficult situations after Carleton. I certainly don’t want to paint a doom and gloom picture for current students when, by luck of their choices and circumstances, they might never experience discrimination based on their gender. However, I also don’t want students to be blindsided when they encounter the difficult realities that still exist for some women in physics and computer science. I’m unsure of how to raise awareness of potential challenges without seeming either unnecessarily discouraging or out of step with the experiences students have had to date.

I kept coming back to that difficult balancing act when I was trying to decide on readings for the summer. Here are the topics/readings that I settled on:

Week 1: Research experience expectations. Reading: “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” by Martin Schwartz.

Week 2: Mentoring. Reading: Selections from CWIT Mentoring Tool Kit, Center for Women & Information Technology, University of Maryland Baltimore County and from the Mentoring Guide, Center for Health Leadership & Practice, Public Health Institute.

Week 3: Negotiating. Reading: Introduction and Chapter 1 from Women Don’t Ask by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever.

Week 4: More on negotiating. Gender schemas. Reading: Chapter 1 from Why So Slow? by Virgina Valian.

Week 5: Gender schemas and stereotype threat. Reading: Selections from Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele.

Week 6 and 7: Career exploration. Readings: Step by Step: Your Career from Undergrad to Postdoc from ScienceCareers as well as other discipline specific web resources for CS and physics.

Week 8: Work-life balance. Reading: Peruse the Atlantic‘s on-line collection of articles on the myth of work-life balance.

Do you have favorite readings that I should have included instead of those outlined above? Do you think we should do more to try to prepare students for chilly climates they might encounter after Carleton, or do we do enough by trying to provide a supportive undergraduate environment?

Giving a mini-MOOC a chance

MOOCs (massive open on-line courses) are all over the higher education news these days. Having never either taken or taught any sort of on-line course, much the less a MOOC, I’ve only guessed at what good and evil these brave new courses might hold. Then came the announcement a couple of weeks ago that Hybrid Pedagogy was hosting a week-long MOOC about MOOCs, and I decided to try participating in this mini-MOOC. My motivation was primarily curiosity.

Today was the first day of the MOOC MOOC, primarily an orientation day, but already I have two strong impressions:

1. There is a lot more potential for interactivity and connectedness in MOOCs than I had originally envisioned. While some MOOCS, particularly Coursera and EDx, tend to replicate traditional hub and spoke educational models, with the teacher distributing knowledge, other MOOCs are aimed at creating networks and generating knowledge. One of today’s suggested readings for the MOOC MOOC nicely outlines a participatory pedagogical model for MOOCs. It is this model that the mini-MOOC follows, and I’m intrigued.

2. The scale and style is overwhelming for a newbie like me. The “introduce yourself” thread contained hundreds of comments, and despite my best efforts to read through the comments to learn a bit about my fellow participants, I simply felt like I was drowning in a sea of unknown people who all seemed to have agendas, knowledge, and familiarity that I lacked. It is rather amusing that even in this sea of introductions, the person after me in the introduction thread was a colleague from Carleton. Nevertheless, as someone who values personal interactions and a tight-knit community, I felt distinctly disconnected and adrift in the mini-MOOC. Those feelings are accentuated because there is no designated individual to turn to for guidance or advice.

It’s clear I won’t be able to devote as much time to this endeavor as some of my fellow participants, but I’m interested to see how things unfold.

On-line versus face-to-face professional development

These days you can’t read much about higher education without someone opining about the promise/ peril/possibilities of on-line education and its impact on students, but much less has been said about how on-line education trends might impact the professional development of professors.  However, that’s been on my mind in response to Andy Rundquist’s recent post comparing his experiences at the AAPT summer meeting and at the Global Physics Department (GPD). As there become more opportunities for on-line networking, presentations, and discussions, how will that change the role of professional conferences? Andy’s post summarizes nicely some of the key benefits/drawbacks that he sees in these two avenues for professional development.

My experience engaging with AAPT and GPD is one example of the challenges of making the transition from the face-to-face world of professional meetings to the on-line world of professional meetings. For those who are unfamiliar, GPD “meets” on-line every Wednesday at 8:30 pm CT. A speaker presents, with a back channel for communication, and then there is plenty of time for discussion at the end. I like the format, and I’ve learned a lot from several of the GPD meetings, but I’ve never actually “attended.” My entire involvement with the GPD has come from watching/listening to recordings of the meetings after the fact.  Wednesday nights are difficult with my schedule, and when I do manage to find the time, I often feel obligated to take care of the to-do items that are in front of my nose, rather than spending the time logging on to GPD in real time. AAPT meetings on the other hand demand my attention as they pull me away from the daily grind. Yes, conferences are expensive and require travel, but that forces me to commit to being involved in a way that GPD doesn’t, and I find the long conversations and relationship building to be extremely valuable. The downside, of course, is that AAPT meetings are few and far between. Particularly for those individuals who feel isolated in their endeavors in the classroom, meeting once or twice a year doesn’t provide much support. GPD, with its weekly meetings, can provide a stronger sense of community.

If I could actually “attend” the GPD meetings in real time, I’d be able to participate in the conversations, but as is, the GPD isn’t an interactive experience for me. Because I don’t participate in the conversations, I don’t feel like I get much of a sense of community. Therein lies both the blessing and the curse of the on-line world. It’s flexible enough to allow you to connect when you can, but if you don’t connect on-line in real time, the engagement isn’t as fulfilling.  Have you had a great experience with on-line professional development? If so, what made it work? If not, what were the stumbling blocks?

Back from the BFY conference

I’m just back from the ALPhA Topical Conference on Laboratory Instruction: Beyond the First Year (BFY) and a bit of the AAPT meeting. I walked away from the BFY conference with mixed feelings. The conference itself was fabulous (with the exception of an over-packed schedule): lots of hands-on workshops, valuable conversations, and interesting glimpses at what is going on in the laboratory curriculum at other institutions. I brought home many ideas for new experiments, approaches, and assessments to employ in my lab courses. However, I also came away from the conference with a sense that our department as a whole needs to spend some time thinking about the laboratory curriculum (a sentiment shared by another Carleton colleague who also attended the BFY conference).  Some of challenges in the laboratory curriculum have implications beyond the upper level physics lab courses in the department, and as an individual, I can’t transform my mixture of enthusiasm and concern into a solution to these challenges. I won’t go into gory detail of my reflections on Carleton’s laboratory curriculum, but I’ll highlight one example.

One of the unique challenges at Carleton is the structure of our introductory sequence. We require only one ten-week term of introductory physics (usually split into two five-week courses) before students begin the sophomore-level physics sequence. (A discussion of the intro sequence at Carleton is a blog post unto itself.) Because the intro sequence is only one term long, our students usually have done only  9 physics labs before they enroll in their first sophomore-level lab. Most physics students who have had a standard year-long intro sequence will have had 25-30 labs in the first year, providing many more opportunities to explore and practice a variety of laboratory skills before they move to more advanced labs. That disparity puts some unique demands on the upper level labs at Carleton as compared to what is expected in intermediate and advanced labs where students have already had a full year of laboratory instruction at the introductory level.

Another challenge in updating the lab curriculum that is not unique to Carleton is cost. For example, there are a number of amazing single-photon experiments have been developed to demonstrate quantum phenomena, but implementing this suite of labs from scratch costs on the order of $15-20k.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the BFY conference is that it reminded me that there are a lot of physicists at many different types of institutions who are enthusiastic about teaching experimental physics and incredibly creative in how they approach the endeavor. Connecting with this broader advanced lab community is immensely valuable.

Three summertime questions

Summer research is in full swing here at Carleton. I’ve got two wonderful students working with me in my lab. However, with the arrival of summer, I am once again reminded of just how poorly others understand what ‘doing research’ entails for an experimental physicist.

Top three questions/comments I get about my summer:

“Are you on campus this summer?” Yep. The last time I checked the local coffee shop doesn’t have a UHV chamber for me to be able to do my work there. And packing a cryostat in my suitcase so I can do some research while I spend my summer visiting family in Europe isn’t a possibility. The laboratory is my research home.

“Isn’t  the flexibility of the summer schedule wonderful?  Don’t you particularly appreciate it now that you are a parent?” While it’s true I don’t have scheduled classes, for the first part of the summer, when my students are getting started on their research projects full-time, I’m generally in my office/lab from 8:30-4:30 Monday through Friday.  And because lab scheduling doesn’t confine workdays to weekdays, I sometimes have to drop by the lab on weekends or after hours.

The parent comment, which I get a lot these days, bothers me immensely.  Faculty contracts are nine month contracts, so when I don’t have an external grant, I’m not paid for work in the summer. Yet because my presence is required on campus to do research and because letting a toddler loose in a lab full of buttons and cables and shiny objects seems unwise, I have to pay for full-time childcare. I have to pay out of pocket to be able to do research, and doing research is an expectation of my job. Something is strange about that situation.

“Oh, working with students must be great. They can do your research for you.” Working with students is indeed great! The reason why I wanted a career at a college like Carleton was so I could work closely with undergraduates, introducing them to what research is all about and helping them grow professionally. However, doing research with students is another form of teaching, and like all teaching, it demands effort.  This particular type of teaching involves working with students one-on-one on a daily basis. I love it! But it takes time, patience, nurturing, and the willingness to allow students to make mistakes. I find sharing the joys and challenges of the lab with students who are getting their first taste of full-time research is immensely rewarding, but it certainly doesn’t make research easier or faster.

The next time you see me, feel free to ask about my summer, my research, or my research students, but please try to refrain from the three questions/comments above.

Talking about teaching: sharing pedagogical knowledge

Last week, Maryellen Weimer had a post about the tendency of faculty to share their pedagogical developments primarily through word of mouth. She discusses what she sees as the problems with this approach: dissemination is spotty, it doesn’t “establish the value or permanence of pedagogical knowledge”, and  it doesn’t provide any peer review of the knowledge that is being disseminated (as publication in a journal would). It’s an interesting critique, and she has some valid points. While the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has grown immensely in the past decade or two, and I appreciate the contributions that many are making in that field, as someone whose primarily scholarship is not in that area, I find I don’t have time to keep up on the SoTL literature. Heck, I can barely keep up on the condensed matter literature that is relevant to my research. Granted, I do peruse the physics education research articles that appear in American Journal of Physics, but unless I hear about a particular SoTL article via word of mouth (at an AAPT conference or through social media), I’m unlikely to read anything beyond AJP or The Physics Teacher.

I rely primarily on word of mouth to expand my teaching horizons, to get ideas for addressing pedagogical challenges, or to learn about the approaches others successfully use in their classrooms. Where do I turn to learn from and share ideas with colleagues? On campus, I find that many valuable conversations begin at the lunch time sessions that the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching (LTC) organizes almost weekly. The aspect of LTC lunches I enjoy most is the opportunity to listen, learn, and share pedagogies across disciplinary boundaries. Classroom approaches that are taken for granted in one discipline can provide tantalizing new ways to engage students in another. Beyond campus, I find that national AAPT meetings and the local MAAPT meeting (just attended one today!) provide valuable venues for learning about how other physicists think about teaching. I particularly like that AAPT brings together physicists who teach in high schools, community colleges, undergraduate institutions, and research universities.  There is a lot to learn by having conversations across different institutions and different types of institutions. Finally, I find on-line social media, and blogs in particular, to be a valuable way to learn, share, and start conversations. Although the comment section of this blog is rarely active, blog posts here have sparked a number of interesting off-line conversations about teaching and learning.

For me, it’s the concept of conversation that makes word of mouth pedagogy so valuable.  No two teachers, no two classes, no two institutions are the same. Having conversations with other teachers allows more give and take, and an opportunity for tailoring the conversation and the pedagogy to one’s particular needs.  Reading a journal article about teaching, although it may catch my interest, is much less likely to cause me to change what I do in the classroom than talking with another teacher. That teacher can describe how he or she changed his or her approach, acknowledging benefits and drawbacks, while at the same time defusing my concerns or addressing my uncertainties. A journal article can’t do that.

For those of you who are teachers, what do you think about the role of the oral tradition in sharing pedagogy? Are we doing a disservice to ourselves and our teaching by not reading and sharing more through the peer-reviewed SoTL literature?

Something new, part 2: Screencasting

Although winter term is long gone, things have been so busy that I still haven’t had a chance to thoroughly digest and reflect on the new pedagogical approaches I tried in electronics. I already mentioned the performance assessments I employed. Screencasting was something else that was new to me.

Why did I try screencasting?

I first heard about screencasting from Andy Rundquist at MAAPT meetings. Several conversations with Andy suggested that screencasting might address some concerns that had been rolling in the back of my mind. One particular concern was how to truly differentiate the level of student understanding of the material when students work in groups on homework. I encourage students to work in groups, and I think it is valuable, but when the group arrives at an answer to a problem, not all students come away with the same level of understanding. Some students think deeply, spend a lot of time digesting the concepts, and obtain an ownership of the material through working in groups; other students participate in the group conversations but once a solution to a problem has been found, these students are finished with the problem without necessarily reflecting on the depth of their understanding. The problem sets turned in by both types of students can look similar, although the level of understanding is different. Having students talk through their solutions in a screencast allows me to hear subtle (and not so subtle) differences in the level of understanding.

An added incentive to try screencasting was that our department had a number of discussions this fall about how we did not give students as many opportunities to develop their oral communication skills as we would like. Weekly screencasts would give students regular opportunities to practice how to effectively communicate physics concepts orally.

How did I employ screencasting?

Often faculty members, particularly those employing a flipped classroom, use screencasting to make lecture-like experiences available to students outside of class. I did make a few screencasts to provide background information before we met for class or to follow up on an idea that we didn’t have time to finish during class. However, the bulk of the screencasting in my electronics class was done by students.

I asked students to submit screencasts instead of written problem solutions. The questions that I asked students to answer via screencast were typical of the type of questions that would appear on any electronics problem set, and I had students produce between 1 and 3 screencasts per week.  For some questions, the students used scanned PDFs of their problem solutions and talked me through the solution, but for other questions, student screencasts would combine calculations in Mathematica with simulations in Multisim, which made the most of the screencasting medium.

What were the logistics?

I had students use Jing to create their screencasts, and then upload them to screencast.com. Jing is freely available, and it limits screencasts to 5 minutes. This forces students to distill their responses, and I think choosing how to present the key elements of a solution to a problem in 5 minutes is a test of how well one understands the material. Key concepts have to be distilled, incorporated, and connected effectively and efficiently.

I would then evaluate the screencasts, and chose one student screencast for each problem to post on Moodle in lieu of posting my own solution. Sometimes I chose the screencast that was the most in-depth and articulate, but other times, I chose screencasts that were less polished but had a particularly unique approach or insight to the problem. By sharing model screencasts with the entire class, students were able to see peer examples of effective screencasts.

How did I evaluate screencasts?

I knew going in that I wouldn’t be able to evaluate screencasts like I evaluate problem sets. Because of the varying approaches one can take with screencasting, I could see no way to assign x points for this and y points for that.  Rather I adapted the 4 point scale the Andy Rundquist uses for his SBG classroom to evaluate each screencast.

1: Doesn’t meet expectations.

• Response either lacks the detail necessary to demonstrate basic understanding or response shows a lack of understanding the concept/skills.
• Cannot articulate the main ideas involved in the problem.
• Repeatedly uses incorrect concepts or vocabulary.

2: Approaches expectations.

•  Shows a general understanding of the content/skills, but there may be some confusion about important parts.
• Response may have significant information missing in the presentation.
• Articulates key concepts well, but may not be able to articulate details or make connections that are relevant.

3: Meets expectations.

• Response demonstrates an in-depth understanding of the main ideas.
• Can correctly and clearly explain the “how” and “why” of the work.
• May be a few small errors, or lacks confidence in the presentation of results.

4: Exceeds expectations.

• Response demonstrates in-depth understanding of main ideas and of related details.
• Can correctly and clearly explain the response (main ideas and details) in a manner that would be appropriate for “teaching” a peer.
• Demonstrates extension of work or connection of concepts beyond the minimum required for the problem.

What were the advantages and disadvantages?

The biggest disadvantage to this approach was grading the screencasts. Often times when I grade, I listen to music or have the TV on in the background. With a screencast, I wasn’t able to do that. I had to focus both on listening to what the student was saying and watching the screen. I have never had grading that required such complete, undivided attention,  and I hated that if I zoned out for 20 seconds I had to go back and re-listen to the screencast. 2 screencasts per week x 5 minutes per screencast x 15 students meant that I spent at least 150 minutes/week watching screencasts. I found taking notes on the screencasts helped keep me focused and helped me distill common misconceptions, but the whole approach made grading more tedious than usual.

I did get a much more nuanced sense of what and how much students understood than I would have if I had only collected traditional problem sets. Some of the written solutions that students showed in their screencasts appeared similar, but listening to the students revealed huge differences in ownership and comprehension of the material. After doing this, I don’t think I’ll view problem set write-ups in the way I did before. Those write-ups don’t capture the same subtleties in understanding that a screencast does.

The verdict?

On the course evaluations, over half of the students said that they disliked doing the screencasts. After developing a solution to a question, students then had to spend additional time figuring out how to distill their solution into a 5 minute screencast, and they found this frustrating. However, a large minority of the students said they enjoyed screencasting and felt it was worthwhile.

As for me, I found screencasting to be an immensely valuable assessment tool.  I got a different sense of what students were learning than I would have gotten from problem sets. In my mind, that alone is reason enough to continue using screencasts, but in the future, I might limit screencasting to just one question per week and have students turn in standard problem set solutions for other questions. That would hopefully cut down the student frustration with preparing screencasts and reduce the tedium of grading screencasts.

As I continue to try to sort out my own thoughts about screencasting, I’d appreciate hearing thoughts from others about this approach.

A day in the life

In response to David Levy’s opinion piece in the Washington Post last week about about whether faculty work hard enough, Lee Bessette asked faculty to chart what they actually do for a day, today being the chosen day. As a faculty member, no two days are the same so trying to extrapolate how I spend my time from a snapshot of any single day is nearly impossible. I’m also afraid that this type of post can feed the “Look! Look! I am busier than thou!” mentality. I don’t intend for this post to play such a role. With the disclaimers out of the way, here is what my day happened to look like.

7:00 Everyone in the house gets up, has breakfast together, and gets ready to head out the door
8:25 Daycare drop off
8:35 Arrive at my office
8:35-9:00 Answer e-mails, peruse the web including arXiv, take care of some paperwork, talk with a colleague
9-9:30 Work on a conference abstract
9:30-11:00 Office hours, meet with a student about comps, prep for class (with the bulk of the prep done over the weekend)
11:10-12:20 Teach solid state physics
12:30-2:15 Strategic planning working group meeting
2:15-3:00 Answer e-mails, do some event planning associated with service role
3:10-4:30 Physics fair — an open house showcasing projects students worked on for physics classes
4:30-6 Faculty meeting. (Husband does daycare pick-up and takes care of dinner.)
6:10 Arrive home
6:10-7:15 Spend time with my daughter until her bedtime
7:15-7:25 Raid the fridge for dinner
7:25-8:00 Answer e-mails, more work on conference abstract
8:00-9:30 Do some prep for the next solid state problem set
9:30-11:00 Down time & taking care of things around the house

How does this day stack up with others? Most days I don’t have 3+ hours of meetings.  Also, faculty meeting days always leave me a bit grumpy because I get to spend less time with my daughter than I would like — an hour with her in the evenings isn’t enough.  Otherwise, feel free to draw your own conclusions about whether this is a sufficient day’s work.

Be Like Me

A long time ago, in a very different-seeming life, my first teaching job was at Rice University. I worked on their large introductory classes, and got to think about teaching as my first (and only required) priority. It was fun teaching there, and a critical part in my landing my job at Carleton. I also got to do some great research — a couple of solo papers (free of an adviser for the first time) and some collaborations with Rice AMO faculty — specifically Randy Hulet and Barry Dunning — that were transformative in helping me understand how to work with experimentalist collaborators, and helped me get 3 other papers as well. So yeah, that was a good few years.

My position grew into what has since become the Wiess Instructorship in Physics and Astronomy. Those of us who served in that position include Gary Morris (now a dean at Valparaiso), Nathan Harshman (Chair of Physics at American University), me (for my sins, a dean at Carleton) and Todd Tinsley (Assistant Prof at Hendrix College).

In short, it’s a good place from where to move on to a teaching career. They treated me well, and here’s me returning the favor by plugging their job: http://careers.physicstoday.org/jobs/4681305/wiess-instructorship-in-physics-and-astronomy.