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We gathered in WCC 245 again, slightly different group of folks in attendance, but certainly some familiar faces. We’re starting slowly to develop a group of usual suspects around digital learning. 🙂

The focus of our discussion was online textbooks, an issue Truett Cates brought to our attention but one that several Working Group participants had experience with and thoughts about. He discussed his concerns with online textbooks’ interfaces and how they are different in each case, publisher to publisher. They curate assignments within the textbook app, so that means another administration team to deal with if/when things go wrong. Mike Higgs seconded Truett’s sense that Cengage is particularly bad at this aspect of online textbook development.

I (Brett Boessen) steered the discussion toward open education since I had recently attended the conference. Drawing on the open education community and its practices for OER development can empower faculty by allowing us to directly shape the scale and scope of the resources we ask our students to use. The Working Group thought this might have enough legs among our colleagues to develop as a separate initiative, so we decided to look into that more.

The Group also revived an idea from a previous meeting about creating a digital networked space for discussion in between face to face meetings, and we decided Slack might be a good tool.  If you are an Austin College faculty member who would like to participate in the Slack, send Brett a request via email.

I’m here semi-live-blogging our latest Johnson Center session, “Digital Tool Share: Nailing Down and Ratcheting Up Your Digital Pedagogy” (slides will be available on the Johnson Center web page).

12:30 – Finished up with a reminder about this site and to talk to me if you’re interested in discussing more the possibility of Open Education at AC.

12:05 – Turning to group reporting.

• Classroom Salon – online annotation tool. Can easily get away from you but useful for intraclass communication.
• Scalar – digital publishing app that helps create pathways/linkages and visualizations.
• RooFolio – a “blog kind of thing” which allows production of eportfolios. Frustrating interface.
• Moodle (for commenting) – Did spark discussion, but requires manual checking of each entry.
  • Classroom Salon sorts for who posted what.
  • Moodle can do this too if you use the Discussion Forum tool.
• Organization and logistics of graded discussion writing – Can be problems with front-loading/tail-loading, not posting enough in length and/or depth.
• Tools that look good today can be gone tomorrow.
• Hypothes.is – web annotation tool. Had the unintended consequence of migrating the social structure of the students into their interactions online.
• Kahoot – quizzing tool. Great for breaking down complex concepts step by step, but requires students to have their phones open and in use in class. Notably used frequently in the K-12 world, so students are likely to be familiar.
• Socrative – quizzing tool. Can also be used for polling class preferences. Helpful for faculty to take temperature of the room and then potentially retool class organization.
• Survey Monkey – polling software. Use it for pre- and post-tests to help students see how they developed during the semester.

12:00 pm – Listening in on a few groups, some have taken the group sharing shell I provided and run with it, turning more to a discussion model and letting the conversation range wherever it might want to go.  Love it. 🙂

11:55 – I’ve asked the attendees to break into small groups to discuss digital learning successes and/or failures in their own experience. Lots of good chatter happening right now.

11:50 am – I’ve just finished talking about some broad trends in Technology and Education, focused on Bryan Alexander’s excellent Future Trends in Technology and Education trends analysis, as well as providing a thumbnail sketch of a summary of my visit to the Open Education Conference last month.

Next week we’re doing a Johnson Center session on successful (and unsuccessful?) digital learning approaches in Austin College classrooms.  A crowdsourced digital pedagogy dragnet that we’re hoping will help your colleagues identify potential new approaches to their teaching.

And we need your help! If you’re reading this blog, you probably are using the very kinds of approaches to implementation of digital tools and practices in the classroom that we’re looking for!

If this is you, please a) leave a comment below indicating what you do, why it works, and how others can find out more about it, and b) come to the session on Thursday the 8th at 11:30 am. 🙂

OK – we were gone for a while. But we’re back!

This time around, we’re focusing on small group interactions and collective problem solving, to wit: some notes from our first Digital Learning and Pedagogy working group meeting.

Past, Present, Future

I had asked the group to organize our thoughts about digital learning at Austin College loosely around chronology: what has already happened, what is happening now, and what do you anticipate happening in the future.

Past – What issues have you run into?

To start us off, Julia Shahid noted that she’d had some problems with Classroom Salon’s recent shift from a completely free model to a tiered pricing or “freemium” model; John Richardson had similar issues with software updates to Explain Everything (both have talked about these tools in their Mellon grant project proposals and updates elsewhere on the site).

This issue of software updates “breaking” pedagogical workflows is certainly not new(s), but it continues to impact how effective and efficient we can be in employing digital networked tools for our students’ learning. We discussed the way this creates student “dependencies” on one workflow that then makes it harder to extricate oneself from should an update require reworking procedures for access and/or use.

We also discussed Turnitin.com, which Randi Tanglen indicated has a solid feedback tool built into it, but of course requires some level of buy-in to the entire system in order to be truly useful. This led us to wonder whether the process of building better feedback is one we could begin to take on, researching and testing what’s out there now and to what extent such tools could be useful in the small liberal arts context in which we work.

Present – What are you working on now?

The discussion then turned to opportunities and issues happening right now for the group. We discussed two projects in active development: timelines in Chinese history courses, and rich media production for oral history projects.

Larissa Pitts described how she has been working on ways to incorporate timeline software into her Chinese courses in order to help her students sort through their ideas. The visual arrangement of a timeline is helpful in this regard, but when handwritten or printed in a word processor document, can be limited by factors unrelated to the course (such as artistic and/or design skill limitations, or the lack of easy incorporation of visual media like images and maps). So a digital solution can make those issues much less onerous and consequently help students get to the good stuff – the learning – more effectively.

Felix Harcourt also talked about multiple versions of an oral history project in which he has students participate. Currently, the project is text only, but we talked about ways he might incorporate more rich media sources – images, audio recordings, video – as a means to help students develop more complex interpretations of their research.

Future – What opportunities and issues do you anticipate?

Toward the end of the meeting, we shifted again to longer-term questions. I offered the typology used in the Horizon Report – sorting problems into “solvable,” “difficult,” and “wicked” categories according to our ability to understand and/or solve them – and we discussed a few problems relevant to us at Austin College.

One issue that came up right away is wanting to try to identify what skills entering freshmen are bringing with them from high school. This impacts a number of facets of digital learning and pedagogy, including some we had already discussed like “student dependencies” on existing tools. If Texas schools are primarily built around the Google-verse (hint: they are), then perhaps our dependency on Microsoft tools just makes our collective job harder, as we spent large amounts of time helping them retool. The group felt this problem was solvable.

This discussion of tools the college has committed to quickly turned our attention to Moodle and the question, should we be committing our resources there? This question has come up in the past, both in conversations we’ve had on other occasions, and through the two faculty surveys on digital pedagogy conducted in 2012 and 2017. The group felt this problem was more difficult: we can see that Moodle is troubling for many users, faculty and students alike, but we also seem to need or want some form of learning management system (LMS), so perhaps Moodle is best worst option.

We ended our discussion with a question that is surely difficult if not wicked: What do we want our technologies at Austin College to do (be?) for our students? What functions ought it to serve, and in what ways might it help them to learn more deeply and effectively? We did not develop any answers, but we did commit to coming back to this question at future meetings to try to begin addressing it.

Quick Tip

In the course of our discussion, one kind of tool did come up that I told the group I would get back to them on, and that is “text expanders.” These are tools that

The next working group meeting will be on October 16th at 1130 am, again in WCC 245.

My project has been to redesign the BA 495 Strategic Management capstone course into a simulation-based management training program that integrates and reinforces knowledge and skills learned in courses of the core business curriculum. I have successfully implement the first iteration of the project in Fall 2016, providing students with an enhanced business strategy simulation experience enriched with a series of value-added activities and assessment. I am now implementing an improved version of the simulation in Spring 2017 based on feedback from students who participated in the first version.

The simulation software used in my course is called Marketplace Live Simulation (MLS). This is a web-based, large-scale, full-enterprise simulation interface offered by Innovative Learning Solutions, Inc. MLS has been used for corporate executive training programs in a variety of businesses around the world, such as Coca Cola, FedEx, Delta Airlines, Walmart, and IBM. The Mellon Foundation digital pedagogy award allowed me to work on the customization and adoption of MLS for business majors at Austin College. Our students are now learning with a management training tool that is widely used in real-life corporate management training.

The simulation employs a competitive market environment in which students build a business from the ground up to enter the microcomputer industry. The teams are tasked with introducing a new line of microcomputers into several international markets. MLS offers different difficulty levels for the simulated market environment. In Fall 2016, I used a market environment involving six decision rounds, three customer segments, and four geographic regions. This was my first semester at Austin College and I had little idea about the caliber of business students at the college. I started with a standard difficulty level in and planned to lower it, if necessary, in future iterations. However, observing how well students handled the decision making process in the simulation, I upgraded the difficulty to a very high level in Spring 2017. Students now interact in a market environment that involves eight decision rounds, five customer segments, and twenty geographic markets. A fifteen-minute overview of the simulation’s decision content is accessible at the MLS website.

The simulation requires students to form executive teams consisting of four or five members. Within each team, students work as the Vice Presidents of specific functional areas. Throughout the decision rounds, they conduct market analyses, evaluate the strategic position of the firm, and make tactical decisions with regards to product design, R&D, manufacturing capacity, production processes, inventory management, human resource management, sales channel planning, advertising, and financial accounting. They are required to adjust strategies and tactics in response to uncertainties arising from the market environment, the consequences of their own decisions, and the actions of competing teams. The goal is to achieve strategic dominance in the marketplace that is measured by a balanced scorecard within the simulation.

I conducted executive briefings on a weekly basis. Each team meets with me for about fifteen minutes to discuss and justify the decisions that they are planning to make for the decision round. These sessions trains students in professional meeting preparation and management and allow me to monitor the critical thinking process of each student. I challenge the students’ thinking by looking for inconsistencies in their analyses and decisions. I do not indicate the correct decision to make, but try ensure that students have considered the relevant issues related to their strategic and tactical decisions. In Fall 2016, executive briefing sessions were conducted orally, and I used a rubric to evaluate whether students can think on their feet and respond to questions and challenges in a thoughtful, confident manner.

To emphasize the development of business writing skills, I have implemented a executive memo requirement for Spring 2017. Students are now required to justify their decisions both orally and with a two-page executive memo. I have now also developed a rubric for the written memos, assessing the student’s ability to thoughtfully present his/her tactical decisions based on a concise analysis of the market environment as well as a consideration of how these decisions will impact the firm’s overall strategy. Both the oral and written rubrics measure student performance along the dimensions of Depth of Understanding, Breadth of Understanding, and Management by the Numbers.

At the middle of the simulation exercise, students are required to prepare a business plan and present it to independent judge(s) who serve as venture capitalist(s). I am currently working with one independent judge for the business plan presentation. However, I have plans to involve two judges in future. With his extensive business experience, Mr. Charles Curtis, Executive Director of Information Technology at Austin College, has been a great resource person to play the role of the venture capitalist. I am thankful to Mr. Curtis for his willingness to take part in this exercise. Business plan presentation is a comprehensive and complex assignment. Students develop a formal strategy involving detailed tactical plans and pro-forma financial projections for the next four decision rounds. In Fall 2016, the PowerPoint presentation, tactical plan, and pro-forma financial statements served as the business plan. To emphasize writing, I have added a five-page written business plan component in Spring 2017. To maintain tactical confidentiality, each team presents their business plan in a closed-door meeting with the venture capitalist. Teams answer questions and try to persuade the investor that they are worthy of a full investment. After listening to all presentation, the investor then decide how much to invest in each company.

For Spring 2017, I have added a follow-up negotiation meeting with the investor. In these meetings, the investor (i.e., Mr. Curtis) met with each team separately to discuss the plan in more detail and negotiate an investment amount. The business plan preparation serves as an important tool for the development of the students’ ability to think broadly and deeply about their business. The purpose of the follow negotiation meetings is to give students a hands-on experience with business negotiation process. Students faces the challenge of learning how to ask for money, justify its use with a credible plan, and convince a critical investor. I have developed rubric for assessing students’ performance in presenting their business plan. The rubric cover thirteen performance dimensions. Students receive a copy of the rubric and we discuss it in class to make sure that expectations are fully understood.

At the end of the simulation, the venture capitalist is invited back to class. Teams present a final report to the investor about their business performance. They must look in the eye of the person from whom they took money and be accountable for their actions and performance. It is often uncomfortable in real life to report performance outcomes that fall short of promises. Student go through similar experience as part of the simulation. I have also developed grading rubrics to evaluate final presentation performance. The final report rubrics covers thirteen performance dimensions and also focusses on the assessment of lessons learned from the simulation.

Observations:

I used a sports-like draft process to form teams in Fall 2016. The simulation business environment is highly competitive and students are required to keep corporate information confidential. Since the size of the student population is relatively small at Austin College and most students personally know each other, maintaining business confidentiality proved to be challenging. I even had students who were roommates, but placed on competing teams. They reported that it took conscious effort  to refrain from discussing the simulation due to a fear of unintentional disclosure of corporate secrets. As a result, there was some effect on the openness of the conversations that they had previously enjoyed. Based on feedback, I changed the team formation process to a peer interview-based model in Spring 2017 to allow students more flexibility in choosing teams.

The peer interviewing process was an engaging experience for students. Most students reported that it was their first experience of sitting on the employer’s side of the table in a job interview, and it gave them an opportunity to reflect and evaluate their own job interview skills as candidates. However, some students used this opportunity to recruit friends or relationship partners in simulation teams. Teams that formed based on personal relationship are currently struggling to perform well. Since friends within a team tend not to challenge each other’s thoughts, peer scrutiny is relatively weaker in these teams, and as a result the quality of the decision making is poorer. I now realize that it is necessary to teach students the importance of keeping personal life and work life separate.

To integrate knowledge gained in other courses is one of the top learning objectives of this course. Evaluation of oral executive briefings and written executive memos show that students struggle to demonstrate cross-functional knowledge in early stages of the simulation. The average score on the breadth of understanding for the first four decision rounds in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 combined was 1.94 on. a 4-points scale, where 2 is the benchmark for satisfactory rating. Students generally lack the understanding of how decisions made in a specific functional area are tied into the overall strategy of the firm. In the later part of the simulation, the breadth of understanding score increases to an average 3.2, where 3 is the benchmark of effective rating. This indicates that the simulation promotes better decision making by helping students see how their decisions can affect the performance of others and the organization as a whole.

A strong group dynamic is at the core of the simulation exercise. Students are provided with an opportunity to work within a group context where group performance is a major determinant of final grades. I allow teams, under my careful supervision, to fire non-performing team members. If a student is fired from a team, he/she receives significant grade penalty and is required to complete the whole simulation on his/her own. In Fall 2016, one student was fired from their team and eventually had to drop the course due to increased workload. This challenging conditions tends to remove the barriers between the individual students and motivate them to become colleagues by creating a shared space that emphasizes care, trust, and commitment.

Instructors interested in developing simulation-based course should keep in mind that the changing market environment makes each iteration of the simulation unique. As a result, course preparation takes a significant amount of time as instructors will need to evaluate market condition faced by each team to be able to contribute during the executive briefings.

Simulation-based pedagogy offers an experiential learning process that emphasizes repeated action, reflection, accommodation, and testing. This process allow students to refine their knowledge and developed business skills. As such, simulation based-pedagogy can be implemented in any business courses. In the future, I am planning to extend simulation-based pedagogy at Austin College with a Jan Term course targeted to non-business majors. This will create hands-on experiential learning opportunity for non-business majors to develop an understanding of business with a fun, intro-level business simulation.

Bernice Melvin, Director of the Johnson Center for Faculty Development and Excellence in Teaching, has graciously offered DP@AC two Thursday lunch periods for March. We’re kicking around some ideas for discussion, but we’d like to hear from faculty…what issues and topics related to digital pedagogy would you like to discuss and hear more about? We interpret “digital pedagogy” pretty broadly, so if you’ve got any thoughts or suggestions, post a comment and let us know.

This year’s New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report just came out last week, and there are some intriguing points of intersection with the trends they identify and digital pedagogy practices and initiatives we’re interested in @AC.

For example, NMC identifies six trends accelerating higher ed tech adoption in the next few, including “Increased Use of Blended Learning,” “Redesigning Learning Spaces,” and “Increasing Cross-Institution Collaboration.” Each of these figures prominently either in the structure of the Mellon Digital Pedagogy grant itself and as a topic of conversation at Johnson Center workshops and lunches, around campus, or both. Of the challenges impeding adoption, “Improving Digital Literacy” and “Teaching Complex Thinking” are both issues we have been dealing with for several years if not longer.

Among the other developments highlighted, flipped classrooms and makerspaces are both concepts that have been much discussed of late. Makerspaces, in particular, are an early focus of this blog, and chemistry professor Andy Carr’s flipped classroom experiments are supported directly by the Mellon Digital Pedagogy grant.

I’ll have to agree with NMC that these issues will be prominent ones to watch at we move deeper into 2015.

Welcome to the blog and website for academic technology at Austin College. We hope this becomes a place where faculty and students at AC can find and share ideas and inspiration about improving teaching and learning with digital technologies. Thanks to a generous Mellon Foundation grant, “Collaborative Pedagogies for a Digital Age,” we are increasing our support for innovative projects in the Austin College academic community.

Our vision is to make this website a hub for the exchange of ideas and a space for experimentation and discovery. We’ll bring you relevant articles and resources from the wider world of higher education as well as news and features on local projects and activities. We hope this can be a space where genuine conversation about learning, pedagogy, and technology will augment our academic community. So we encourage you to give us suggestions and ideas, to comment posts, and to help us make this a resource that we can all benefit from.

We’ll be adding features to the website over time…for now, we’ll mostly be blogging about current trends and issues in pedagogy and digital technology, but our long term goal is to offer you resources and webspace to try new applications and to share projects with your colleagues. You can receive notifications of new posts and activities on the site via email updates, our Twitter and Facebook feeds, or through an RSS feedreader.

Above all, we’re here to help…let us know what we can do for you.