This is almost a blog
I’m constantly trying to find the best methods to use to teach my courses. I know I’m not alone in that, but for all the advice and research out there, it feels like a game of Whac-A-Mole. New problems always surface. As soon as I fix one, at least one more pops up.
Let’s start by defining what I mean by a problem. I don’t mean low student evaluation scores. I don’t mean nasty comments on websites. My primary metric for assessing the quality of my undergraduate teaching is how well the students do on exams.
No matter what the proponents of online education claim, I do not believe there is any sense in which online education is more effective. It takes longer to prepare to teach in that format. It’s more overhead for the participants. Students have to buy special equipment and software. Serving arbitrary educational content requires incredible server capability. Most people prefer the face-to-face feeling of being in a room filled with others in the same place. It’s easier for students to make connections with others in an in-person setting.
Something I learned while teaching in a mostly-online setting: a hybrid approach is best. If I have to choose between 100% online and 100% in-person, I’m going with in-person. Fortunately I don’t have to, and it’s been a long time since classes were taught 100% (or nearly 100%) online. My class time has a lot of lecture, but with a healthy dose of active learning exercises mixed in. The lecture part includes various current events and videos and so on. That said, some material is better learned outside of the classroom. If you want students to calculate nominal GDP, I really think that’s best covered on their own.
Video has become a popular form for posting content. Many students commented that they liked my approach to video for two reasons: the point was clear, and the videos were short. They definitely hated long videos (I try to keep my between two and six minutes). They prefer videos that focus on a single, clearly-defined topic, since that makes it easy to go back and review later. They have a strong dislike of 90-minute videos where the instructor is just talking and it’s not clear what they’re supposed to be learning.
The biggest concern I have with video (aside from the time and financial resources required to make good video content) is that students don’t comprehend the material as well. They didn’t do as well on exam questions as when I covered the same material in a lecture format. Not surprising given that it encourages passive consumption of content in an environment loaded with distractions.
What leads to better exam performance is html. Not “block of text” html. Interactive html. There are a few paragraphs of explanation. Students enter notes in a textarea. There’s a problem. Students enter their answer. Then they click a button to reveal the correct answer. They can edit the textarea holding their answer and add any notes that clarify it. Then they click a button to move on to the next topic. I had very positive feedback on this, and the students did well on related questions on the exams, so it seems to work. I may expand on this to embed videos for an overview of the material, but I’m not sure how much that will add.
Now to wrap this up by upsetting people. I find it annoying to hear educational researchers saying “We already know that” or “We’ve known for years that X is a better approach than Y”. I’ve tried to use education research in the design of my classes. It’s almost uniformly useless. “We had 27 students do a specific implementation of X and 27 students do a specific implementation of Y and the students doing X did better.” Good for you, but what you learned with those students in your setting tells me exactly nothing about how I should teach my class. Education research is not going to help much. You’ll burn through a lot of time that you could be using to actually improve your class.
Post written by Lance Bachmeier