Course redesign and e-portfolios focus of Winter Faculty Institute
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Jan 12,
2010---
Tom Apple, University of Delaware provost, welcomed over 80 participants to the kick-off event of the Winter Faculty Institute on Jan. 5.
“UD’s path to prominence begins
with the excellence of our faculty, which
includes professional development such as
today’s. I’m thrilled to see this
turnout—it is heartening to see the
dedication of our faculty,” Apple said.
Faculty and others joined colleagues to learn
about course redesign and e-portfolios at the
opening day of the month-long teaching and
technology institute. After morning
presentations, participants were invited to
join their peers at hands-on workshops, which
focused on the morning’s topics.
Improving student learning while reducing
instructional costs: The case for
redesign
“Course redesign is the process of
redesigning whole courses rather than
individual classes or sections to achieve
better learning outcomes at a lower cost by
taking advantage of the capabilities of
information technology,” Carolyn
Jarmon, senior associate for the National
Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT),
said.
Jarmon has worked with over 100 institutions
across the United States to redesign courses.
The examples she discussed validate that
colleges and universities can use information
technology to achieve the dual goals of
improving student learning while reducing
instructional costs.
“However,” Jarmon said,
“just using technology is not the goal;
increasing learning and retention is the
goal.”
As technology has matured, educational
institutions have tried various technologies
to help their institutions enhance learning.
Because the traditional technique of
“live” classroom lectures is not
always the best option, colleges and
universities began offering
“bolt-on” (online) lectures.
“While the ‘bolt-on’
technique increased the number of students
who could be reached, it did not change the
basic form of teaching,” Jarmon said.
“Next, classes were made smaller by
offering multiple sections. Although the
groups were smaller, multiple sections
don’t ensure that the educational
technique is the same across sections,”
she added.
Using a combination of older and newer
technology, was it possible to increase
learning—and decrease costs—even
though established literature said it
wasn’t possible?
“We have a responsibility to provide
the best education possible,” Jarmon
said, “which led us to evaluate the
benefits of comprehensive course
redesign.”
According to Jarmon, the most common reasons
institutions explore course redesign are high
student withdrawal or failure rates, long
waiting lists, unavailable classes causing a
graduation bottleneck, over-enrollment of
courses leading to multiple majors,
inconsistency in student preparation,
difficulty hiring qualified adjuncts and
inadequate student preparation in subsequent
courses.
Jarmon discussed briefly seven models of
course redesign. Although each model is
different, every successful model applied the
following elements:
·
Redesigning the whole course—not just a
single class,
·
Emphasizing active learning—greater
student engagement with the material and with
one another,
·
Relying on readily available interactive
software—used independently and in
teams,
·
Demanding mastery learning—not
self-paced,
·
Increasing on-demand, individualized
assistance,
·
Automating components that can benefit from
this process (e.g., homework, quizzes, exams,
etc.), and
·
Supplanting single mode instruction with
differentiated personnel where appropriate
(e.g., undergraduate and graduate students,
adjuncts, etc.).
For faculty, benefits include working
directly with students who need help,
reducing the amount of grading, using
technology to do tracking and monitoring,
increasing practice time and interaction
between students without faculty effort,
facilitating different approaches to meet
different student needs and enabling
continuous improvement of materials and
approaches.
“In spite of what the existing
literature said, as these examples
illustrate, comprehensive course redesign
does lead to improved learning and retention
for students, benefits for faculty and
significant decreased costs for the
institution,” Jarmon said.
E-portfolios: Planning for successful and
efficient implementation
“Over the past few years, Clemson has
made some changes: All students now have
laptops, the University has a new set of core
competencies and every student is now
required to submit an e-portfolio to
graduate,” Gail Ring, director of the
e-portfolio program at Clemson University,
said.
Ring discussed Clemson's e-portfolio program
in which all 14,713 undergraduate students,
including transfer students, were required to
submit an e-portfolio to demonstrate their
skills and abilities toward achieving the
University’s new core competencies.
“The purpose of the e-portfolio program
was as a mechanism to evaluate core
competencies, an opportunity for students to
reflect on learning and a way to add value to
a Clemson degree,” Ring said.
One of the goals of the project was to
“shift the locus of control from the
teacher to the student—it helps
students connect their academic selves with
their professional selves,” Ring said.
“For many students, critical thinking
was a challenge. The students didn’t
know how to explain what they’ve
learned or how they’ve learned it. Some
students had difficulty getting what was in
their head into their e-portfolio,” she
said.
“It was helpful to tell students to
‘think about yourself as an engineer or
a biologist’ because that’s what
you are,” Ring said.
Student reflection improves a student’s
ability to attach meaning to an experience,
share experiences, look at the big picture
and makes learning visible.
“What we’re striving for is
better answers to the questions: What have
you learned here at Clemson and how can you
articulate what you’ve learned?”
Ring said.
“The project is now a student driven
initiative,” Ring said. A campus
facility called “Studio 1941” is
a gathering place for students to share ideas
and help one another with their e-portfolios.
Undergraduate students staff the studio and
help one another judge what they need to do
for their e-portfolios. Tutorials and
workshops are also available to students.
The program also offers peer mentors who
provide feedback. These peer mentors have
been through rigorous training and advise
other students how to improve their
e-portfolios.
“Every artifact students choose to
include in their e-portfolio must have a
rational statement attached to it,”
Ring said. “One of the tasks of the
peer mentors is to help students understand
and articulate the rational behind including
a certain artifact,” she said.
Besides the personal and academic benefits of
the e-portfolios, a professional benefit is
unmistakable: Over 70% of employers polled
(companies near Clemson) said they would look
at an e-portfolio for employment purposes.
“We currently have two type of
assessment for core competency,” Ring
said. These assessments evaluate how well the
students use critical thinking to articulate
what they know using the e-portfolio.
“Students use Google sites for their
e-portfolio,” Ring said. Originally,
the campus used other tools, but the tool
must provide built-in flexibility.
“Google sites provided the flexibility
we needed,” she said.
“The lessons we learned from this
project are that student and faculty
ownership is essential, flexibility and
reflection must be built into the system and
change takes time,” she said.
“One of our most interesting success
stories is an education major named Jenna who
was a self-professed e-portfolio rebel.
Initially, she rejected the benefits of the
program. She is now a poster child for
e-portfolios: Her e-portfolio clearly
demonstrates who she is as a learner, who she
is as an educator and how she fits into the
big picture within Clemson,” Ring said.
To access recordings of the presentations,
presentation slides and other archived
information from the day, visit the Winter
Faculty Institute Web site.
To register for Institute classes offered
throughout the month, visit the IT
Learning Resources Web site.
The Winter Faculty Institute is coordinated
by Information Technologies and the Center
for Educational Effectiveness and is
co-sponsored by the University of Delaware
Library, Institute for Transforming
Undergraduate Education, UD Online, Office of
Service Learning, Office of Educational
Technology, and Undergraduate Research.
