First-Year Conference: Large Lecture Courses

I’m very interested in large lecture courses because they’re inherent to large, public research university environments and becaue there’s often an assuption that it’s logistically impossible to give assignments/assessments other than multiple-choice tests.  It was really inspiring to work with some brave faculty at UC Berkeley who were willing to explore transforming large lecture courses with research assignments.  I learned so much during that project about assignment design, but also about a variety of strategies for engaging students in these environments.

Cathy Middlecamp, Chem 108 for 100+ non-chemistry majors.  It’s important not to alienate students in first-year math/science courses.  Goal is to organize disparate topics into a foundation so that students can get to the good stuff later on, but many students may never take upper-level chemistry courses.  Instead, “teach through” big ideas (air quality, global warming) to the underlying chemistry and draw chemists into the world of people.

Jonathon Martin “Introduction to Weather and Climate” 385-405 students.  Martin does an early-semester survey and meetings with individual students — generating that intimacy transforms the class, this year met with forty students early and knows many by name.  Socratic method transforms lectures, willing to pause for fifteen seconds or more until peer pressure works in favor of a verbal response (doesn’t like clickers because it promotes anonymity).  Humor, human interest, fairness, approachability and enthusiasm are key to approach.

Kathy DeMaster is a TA in Nelson Institute and teaches IES 112 and 113.  These courses are structured so that she attends large lecture and meets with of sections of 20-25.  Brings in digital camera and learns names by second day and asks people to write down some of their interests, thoughout the semester, writes each student 2-3 emails to show she is in touch with what students are concerned about and connects people to job announcments by maintaining a database of students/interests.  To create a collaborative and participatory classroom, writes a list of things to master on the board and has students in groups plan course (what and how to go about it) and set the rules for the classroom environment, then brings typed syllabus the following week.      Asks students to explore multiple perspectives by arguing perspectives they don’t agree with.

Michelle Sizemore, TA in English, teaches in large introductory literature courses, 200 students where she facilitates discussion sections of approximately twenty.   Challenges may be tied to the content of the course (e.g. connecting to content that may seem remote, dealing with controversial issues).    Tries to build a comparative framework that provides students who are unfamiliar with academic discourse with another point of entry.  These could be related to popular culture, with goal of getting every student involved despite range of prior experience and learning styles.

Claire Wendland teaches Anthropology 104, which has 800 students in two lectures and 36 sections, and is the largest course at the university.  As a novice to teaching very large courses and first year students, she is surprised by the intensity of students’ grade focus, some of the lecture material that makes them uncomfortable, that students show up to the office hours without invitation but need help to know what do do there.  Many students are going through a difficult transition from being the star in their high school to being more average in this environment, so it’s important to engage with them in ways other than grading.  Can be useful to talk about the work in third person rather than “you.”  Important to talk about strategies for being efficient at meeting expectations.  In college, there are fewer opportunities for feedback than in high school, so gives self-graded quizzes that are discussed in class and may show up on exams.

Lessons for librarians?  Hope these notes give you a window into a few classrooms, since we usually see what’s happening through conversations with students, the syllabus, or the written assignment.  The more we know about the environment of a particular course, the more we can become an integral part of the learning experience there.  Maybe we should have a role in these large courses other than or in addition to library instruction or teaching students how to complete a research assignment…?  The idea that we can be a familiar face and someone who knows students’ names is a familiar one to librarians, but the one that many students are learning how to have appropriate interactions with authority figures is an important one.

First-Year Conference Keynote

The keynote, “The First Year at the University of Wisconsin: Building a Foundation for Student Success,” was given by Betsy Barefoot, EdD.   In the 80s, an ACE survey showed 37% of institutions were taking steps to improve outcomes in the first year, increased to 82% in 1995, today probably all would say they are taking some steps.  However, first year programs occur in much larger system with other, more engrained elements and attitudes about student success.  First year programs may take place as “innovations on the margins” rather than insitutionalized, large-scale improvements.  A new, more complex definition for the first-year experience is everything that happens to first year students, both significant and mundane.   A common experience would be one class or out-of-classroom experience required of ALL students, which we don’t have at UW.

“Foundations of Excellence:” A Nine-Part Model for First-Year Excellence.

1. Collective Sense of Purpose of the first year and acknowledgement of everyone’s role in fulfilling that purpose.  Historic purpose may be “cash cow” with very large classes not necessarily designed for optimal outcomes for first-year students, although some may be effective.  How might the “Wisconsin Experience” tenets inform our goals for the first year.
2. Rethinking how the first year is organized.
3. A focus on learning.  UW has intentional learning outcomes in the “Essential Learning Outcomes” which include knowledge, skills (including information literacy), attitudes, integration.  Which of these have special relevance for the first year?  Could any of them be postponed to the later years?   What do we know about how first-year classes are being taught?  Are the teaching/testing methods (i.e. heavy reliance on multiple-choice testing) most likely to result in student learning and engagement?   Learning goals should be staged and more tightly defined for first-year students.
4. Rethinking the transition experience.  When does the transition begin?  How are institution’s expectations communicated to students?
5. Role of faculty.  Do faculty understand the breadth of students’ first year experiences?  Is there an embedded disincentive for getting too involved with new students?
6. Service to ALL enrolled students.  How does the campus meet the needs of unique sub-populations and the common needs of all students?
7. Appreciate diversity of all types.
8. Roles and purposes of higher education.  More than preparing for a career; we need structured opportunities for students to explore other purposes.
9. Assessment for continuous improvement.  First step to invformed change and knowing where to allocate resources.

We’re often missing a clear sense of what all our innovations add up to.   There are many payoffs for a big picure view.  At UW, the Center for the First Year Experience is a reorganization of resources/initiatives toward that purpose.  For information on how you can be involved in first-year initiatives, there’s a web page for faculty/staff.  Sheila Stoeckel from the LILI Office is the libraries’ liaison to the center and a member of the Advisory Board.

Access to Public Universities in the Chronicle

After three years working at a large private institutions, I decided I was committed to working at large, flagship public institutions.  I graduated from one of these (UW Madison) and have worked at two (UC Berkeley, UW Madison).  I know that there’s a lot that’s unique to these institutional environments when it comes to information literacy initiatives.  And I’d like to believe that we’re part of an important enterprise to provide a high-quality education to a broad population of students — education as a public good.   There’s a lot of data out there that demonstrates that we’re not living up to this ideal.

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education includes several articles on this topic.  Universities at Risk: Seven Damaging Myths, is by Christopher Neufeld, who just wrote a book Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008). The other is “Public Universities at Risk: Abandoning Their Missions.”  That article (“commentary,” not a research study) takes a look at equity in access to education at large, flagship institutions like our own.

Referencing an Education Trust report, “Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities,” the author writes, “our flagship public universities have become less accessible to low-income and minority students since 1995.”    There has been a decline in enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students and public universities have become “less representative of the racial composition of the nation’s high-school graduates.”  This challenges some of our assumptions and ideals about the environment where we work.

At our WiscNet presentation about K-20 information literacy, Jo Ann Carr presented some statistics about the UW system that painted an even more depressing picture.  UW Madison, our flagship, fits this picture.  But if I remember correctly enrollment at the colleges is even less diverse than that at UW Madison.  I’ll ask Jo Ann to share those stats with us in a broader forum, because it’s so important for us to have a realistic picture of the characteristics of the students we’re working with.

Chancellor Martin Inaugural Address

Along with a big contingent from the Libraries, I attended the inaugural address of Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin at the Kohl Center yesterday evening.   It was a really nice event that included student group performances and was attended by many local and state luminaries.

In her remarks about undergraduate education, Martin talked about the need for liberal education in general, but also specifically at some length about the need for students to be able to approach information from a variety of sources critically.

To quote from the Capital Times online, “Martin went on to talk about her desire to improve the UW’s undergraduate education — so that students are properly prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the future after graduation.  ‘That means promoting again and continually liberal arts education — or what we might call a general purpose education that allows students to develop the knowledge, analytical skills and independent thinking that are necessary for responsible citizenship,’ she said”

It’s heartening to know that this is such an important value to our new chancellor that she discussed it explicitly in laying out her vision.

ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT ‘08

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2008 was released today.  You can link to the key findings here, but the full findings are also freely available online.

This year’s study includes some information literacy questions based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.  At first glance (I haven’t read the full report yet), these look like student self-report of selected items related to searching web-based sources (freely available and licensed databases).  Here’s what they found:

• 79.5% rate themselves highly for their ability to “use the Internet effectively and efficiently to search for information,” with almost half rating themselves as “very skilled” and another third rating themselves as “experts.”
• About half of respondents also say they are “very skilled” or “expert” when it comes to “evaluating the reliability and credibility of online sources of information” or “understanding the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of digital information.”

I’m looking forward to examining this section more closely, but if anyone else gets to it first I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

This year’s report also includes a special focus on social networking sites.  One of the PIs for this study, Judy Caruso, is right here at Madison and I heard her talk about ECAR last year at a brownbag.

K-20 Information Literacy in Wisconsin

This afternoon, Jo Ann Carr and I facilitated a discussion, “Not a Bridge to Nowhere: K-20 Collaboration in Information Literacy” for the WiscNet 3rd Thursday series.   Maddy Covelli, formerly Head of STS and now at WiscNet, is working on reviving the series and this was the first session.   So I want to thank everyone who participated, including many of our colleagues at Madison. WiscNet “serves Wisconsin’s education, library, government, and affiliated organizations by: Providing high quality, cost effective network services and adding value to the network through the services we provide; Helping people use information technology services effectively; Fostering information and resource sharing; and Embracing partnerships with government, consortium, education and information provider organizations.”   We should invite Maddy to tell us more about it sometime.  She travels for work and they’re touring the supper clubs of Northern Wisconsin.

Our session was about bridging K-12 and higher ed information literacy efforts in the state: “The students and the environments of K-12 and Higher Education  are changing. The diversity and amount of information these students encounters continues to increase. What is our vision for preparing Wisconsin learners for the 21st century? How can we build the bridge of lifelong information literacy to help students at all levels to navigate these new environments?”  I learned a terrific amount in putting the presentation together with Jo Ann Carr, she is an amazing resource since she is so involved in many of these initiatives.  I’ve posted our slides and handout and I think the presentation will be archived eventually.

Here are some interesting points I think:

• There are some strong parallels between the LEAP initiative in higher ed and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in K12.  Wisconsin is very involved in both of these initiatives.
• The framework for information literacy of educators presented by Shinew and Walter in “Instructional Literacy Instruction for Educators: a global perspective on needs and opportunties” has very interesting parallels to our interest in faculty consultation / assignment design in higher ed.
• The Council on Library and Network Development (COLAND) draft vision report is an important document for us all to read.
• We have some amazing outreach efforts already underway across campus, but particularly in College and Ebling.
• Steve Baumgart will participate in a panel on this topic at WLA, where we should learn even more.

Liaison Forum: WARF

WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, is the technology transfer office for the university.  WARF was established in 1925 by Professor Harry Steenbock.

They take an invention by a faculty, staff, reseacher, or student to see if it’s patentable and move it to the marketplace.  WARF has 400 inventions disclosed to it each year and patents about 240.  Criteria for taking on an invention include legal test for patentability and the ability to predict whether early stage technologies will deliver.  Generally, it takes about seven years for a technology to pan out, but it can be longer or not at all.

Over $1 billion of products are sold each year under license from WARF.  Licensing proceeds are invested to fund further research at UW Madison; WARF gives the graduate school a lump sum to distribute.  Since 1993, WARF has also taken equity in 31 faculty start-up companies.

It’s tax-exempt and not-for-profit, with a board comprised of alums.   The challenges for WARF are to assure a consistent (or increased) grant to the university, particularly as state support decreases.

“Innovation, Learning, and Learning Spaces”

At lunch, I participated in this Malcolm Brown ELI Web seminar. UW is an institutional member of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.  I was interested in this one because Malcolm Brown was on the faculty of the ELI Institute I attended, and his explanations of abstract ideas work well for the way I learn.  A few interesting snippets:

• “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”  Linus Pauling.
• “Implementation is the hardest part of innovation.”  This is interesting to me because I usually think of myself as an implementer, which doesn’t have the glamour associated with new ideas, R&D, etc.  I like the idea that implementation is part of innovation.  There are so many decisions and abilities required to keep a process open but moving toward a successful outcome.   I think there’s an interesting study in how “big ideas”/implementation are valued in an organization, if anyone wants to chat about it more.
• Librarians were mentioned often in this talk as key collaborators and stakeholders.
• There was some discussion of motiviting faculty to use “incubator classrooms” and diffuse innovations.  This is a discussion we had here last week at a meeting about the incubator classroom idea, and I got some new lingo to describe those ideas…. “observability,” for example.
• Apparently, Crit Stuart from ARL talked about Learning Spaces at the ELI Fall Focus Session: “The Research Library as a Center of Learning: Noteworthy Trends and Complementary Assessment Efforts.” Something I’ll look at more later.
• In evaluating innovations, focus on what people do, not what they say.

The web site at the top includes the slides and a lot of good resources.  There are a few campus events about learning spaces coming up: a Delta dinner and a ComETS event.

Catching Up…

One thing I’ve always wondered about blogging is how people find time to do it. Despite my oath to myself to make it a short part of most days, or at least once a week, time is really slipping by. So I’ll just make a quick list of what’s occupying me these days that might be of wider interest and fill in some details as I can find the time. If you’d like more information about any of these, I encourage you to get in touch.

• TEL Grants: Technology Enhanced Learning Grants are administered by the Vice-Provost for Teaching and Learning to “enhance student learning by developing technology tools and
  infrastructure that help us meet our challenges and support all aspects of the classroom of the
  future.” I’m involved in two of these grants (along with other librarians and many other players), which are linked and relate to creating repositories for digital learning objects. I hope to share more information as these take shape, but my role in one of them is to serve on the Steering Committee (my current role is to draft an evaluation framework) and on the other I’m collaborating with liaison librarians (currently Erika Sevetson, and we’ll be meeting with Bob Sessions) to create information literacy learning objects related to the “OneHealth/OneMedicine” initiative.
• Library Instructional Content: After meeting with the Library Course Page Steering (LCP) Committee, we started a group to discuss our vision for how the library’s instructional content will be presented in various learning environments. The group includes Jean Ruenger-Hanson (LCP, Library Web Site Team, Research Guides), Sheila Stoeckel (Vice-Chair, LILI Instructional Design Working Group), Diana Wheeler (Liaison between LILI Coords and LCP), Jeff Bohrer (Academic Technology, Learn@UW) and myself. I’m working on a statement of what we’ll create, but our goal is to help guide conversations and design decisions about this topic.
• Learning Spaces Event: I’m on the planning group for this November 13th, all-day event and am organizing the panel. Look for an announcement in the next few days.

Other than that, I’m going to many meetings and doing a lot of talks around campus (courses, WiscNet, SLIS classes). And doing some teaching of undergrads, of course.