Summer Faculty Institute on Learning Technologies at NJCU

Fresh from the Faculty Institute at NJIT, I will be participating in another similar event at New Jersey City University. Their Academic Computing group and the Center for Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with the Office of Grants and Sponsored Programs, is hosting their first Summer Faculty Institute on Learning Technologies. The three-day institute is a time to connect with colleagues, guest speakers, and to get hands-on practice with new technologies.

I will be one of the keynote speakers (on June 3). My talk - "I Have A Theory About Learning" - will hopefully give the faculty a number of ways to think about learning theory that is emerging from current technologies. I know that some of those will be developed further in sessions offered during the three days. My take on some of these topics may be a bit unexpected. For example, rather than talk about flipping the classroom, I am more interested in flipping the teacher and flipping professional development.

Craig Kapp is another keynote. He is  an interactive developer that I have seen before demonstrating some really interesting tech he has developed. I first met him when he was in Instructional Technology at TCNJ.  Now, he's at New York University as a Researcher in Residence at the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His company is ZooBurst, a web-based startup that focuses on bringing augmented reality digital storytelling tools into classrooms around the world.

Eric Sheninger is the third keynote. I have not met him before but know of him and follow him on social media. Eric is a  Principal at New Milford High School in NJ, but he is known for his work on leading and learning in the digital age. "Pillars of Digital Leadership" is a framework for educators to initiate sustainable change to transform school cultures. His book is Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times.

I will also be doing a workshop session on bringing Open Educational Resources (OER) into courses. The good thing about having two hours in a workshop setting is that rather than just try to sell faculty on using something like open textbooks or open courseware, we can actually look at sites that offer them and try to find some resources that work for their classes.

Too often professional development sessions give faculty good ideas to use, but then they have to leave and do the work of designing to implement those ideas. And that's where the model breaks down.

One idea in my opening talk is that with all the talk about "flipping the classroom" I would like to hear more about flipping the teacher and flipping professional development/learning.   I think that professional development would be more effective if some of it was done online and on-your-own prior to going to any face-to-face session. Get the theory out of the way and use the synchronous time to do the work and application.

The other NJCU sessions will be looking at how to use Personal Learning Networks, flipping the classroom, lecture capture, augmented reality, data visualization and mobile devices, assistive technology for faculty and students, clickers for class and online polling, social media technologies as tools to engage college student, and robots in education for STEM and NAO.

Faculty Learning, NJIT and Rubrics

It's the season for professional development (though I am told the preferred term now is professional learning) in higher education. Grades submitted, graduation over, but early enough that faculty have not escaped to vacation or research projects.

I started these institutes at NJIT with my Instructional Technology group back in 2001 and they have continued ever since. The 14th Institute is this week.

Sessions are always about educational technology - new features in Moodle, Camtasia Relay and editing, WebEx, network security, Khan Academy, convergence models, clicker, Adobe Acrobat X, BYOD and more.

I'll be doing attending sessions in my faculty role and doing one session on rubrics.

A rubric started out as a word or section of text traditionally written or printed in red ink to highlight it. The word derives from the Latin: rubrica, meaning red ochre or red chalk. It originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts where red letters were used to highlight initial capitals. It later became notes at the edges or margins and probably led to the practice of teachers making notes to students - often in red - in the margins.

I find rubrics to be a great tool for grading and assessment that can make the grading process more efficient and more objective. I actually use them as much as formative assessment and for students to use while working on projects as I use them for "grading."

In this session, I will go through many rubric types, discuss rubric creation, best practices for students and faculty use and talk about using the Moodle rubric tool.

I have collected some information and links on rubric use on my NJIT website.

What the Best Teachers Do Online

I did a full day this week with faculty at Raritan Valley Community College as the first day of their three days of faculty technology and teaching days.

They were offering a lot of ways to supplement and expand the physical classroom with a learning management system and tools like Twitter, Google Drive, Pinterest, Google tools beyond Google search and YouTube. Some of this is aimed at online and hybrid teachers working on developing online components or flipping their classrooms with resources to do it like those mentioned and screencasting and Khan Academy.

The person who asked me to facilitate the first day said that she wanted to offer a kind of a National Great Teachers Movement retreat that brings teachers from different teaching fields together to explore teaching and learning, innovations and solutions. I was not familiar with that movement, although it goes back to 1969 when David Gottshall started it. It is not about teaching in a specific discipline, but rather on the art of teaching.

What I found appealing about the day - from my point of view - was that I was not being asked to give a talk or a presentation. I wasn't supposed to bring PowerPoint slides. I was to facilitate discussion using the collective wisdom of the group, their experiences and the creativity of the group.

Of course, that's also scary. What if people don't want to talk, share and do activities?


I suspect we all want to renew ourselves professionally and personally, but how much effort are we willing to put towards that?

I was familiar with Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do which also examines what makes a great teacher great. Bain did a 15-year study of a hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities trying to figure out what the best teachers do.

If there is a short answer to the question, it might be that it actually is not what teachers do, it's what they understand.

He believes that the plans and assignments and lecture notes matter less than the way the best teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning.

I don't think that in the five hours I would have faculty in a room with me, that level of transformation could occur, but I did think we could start people down the path.

But the twist in my day beyond either of those other approaches is that we were talking about being a great teacher online.

Some of the topics we discussed were:

• What is instructor presence in the online classroom? 
• How do we best engage students? How do we, as teachers, stay engaged too?  The best teachers I ever had were engaged in their subject and that's why I was engaged in their class.
• The importance of feedback to students and to teachers.
• What does teaching online offer us a teachers that we don't get in a physical classroom? I like that because most of the time I hear teachers talk about what they can't do online that they can do face-to-face.
• What can we learn from MOOCs? I don't think they will replace college courses or even online courses, but I know they will change how we do online learning and how we teach on and offline.
• We all shared our own best practices of online pedagogy/methodology and of using the technology. We also shared the challenges of teaching online that persist even after doing it for years.

I did have some prepared materials in case the talk slowed down.  But it didn't slow down, so I gave out those materials on academic integrity online, prevention versus detection, and pedagogy compared to andragogy as readings to take away. They are good topics and ones teachers like to discuss, but we had plenty to talk about with the earlier topics.

And that's the way it was supposed to happen.

The 21st Century Professor: Challenges of Digital Learning

If what you read is true, then the 21st century professor designs curriculum to support student success and creates an engaging classroom whether it is face-to-face, online, or in a blended learning environment.

This professor engages students through a variety of learning strategies, creates effective instructional materials and assesses student learning with a variety of tools and strategies.

That's quite a professor.

This week, I will be doing two workshops at Union County College in NJ examining the professional practices of the 21st century professor and looking at some of those tools and strategies that are being used.

"The 21st Century Professor: Challenges of Digital Learning" will include mobile learning, apps, learning networks, open education resources (including open textbooks), and collaborative learning online. We'll look at many tools from Google Docs to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).

We will also consider what the evolving qualities of a professor in the 21st century seem to be. Any nominations?