- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
No doubt some (most?) thought, "Karen's done lost her mind again." No, not really. I just got lost chasing a rabbit down its hole for a few days, and it was fun! So much fun, that I thought I'd start a blog about what I find exciting about learning and teaching and designing instruction, using my experience of the last few days as a start. But before I share my adventures in that particular rabbit hole, let my explain how I got there.
When I was in college at Penn State, I started out as a physics major and then switched to secondary education, physics and math certifications. However, although I never wanted to be an astronomer, I loved astronomy, so I took as many astronomy courses as I could, just one of the many reasons I graduated with about 30 credits more than I needed (but I still did it in four years!). I joined the Penn State Astronomy Club, where I was the press officer ("Look, up in the Sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's - come find out at the Astronomy Open House tonight on the roof of Davey Lab!"). They say you never forget your first time, and it's true; I'll never forget the first time I looked through those telescope lenses and saw the rings of Saturn or the Great Red Spot of Jupiter or the Moon up close and personal. I even muddled through Solar Physics and Astrophysics (and all those differential equations) with real astronomy majors.
After a few years, I gave up teaching high school physics, went back to Penn State for grad school (Instructional Systems), became an instructional designer, and after several years developing computer-based training programs in industry and another stint at Penn State for grad school (Educational Psychology), I landed at a community college back in my home state of Pennsylvania. About ten years ago, when the Science department was looking for an non-lab science course they could offer online, I basically said, "Oooh, ooh, have I got a deal for you!" and PHY 111 701 was born. PHY 111 is Descriptive Astronomy, designed for non-science transfer students with very limited math, nothing beyond what you need to understand Newton's Laws of Motion or Kepler's Laws. Granted, it had been a very long time since I had taken an astronomy course (when I was in college, Pluto was still a planet, we hadn't sent a probe to Jupiter yet, and the Hubble telescope was still a pipe dream), but I looked at the textbooks and was confident that I remembered enough to provide a good experience for my students.
Then a few years ago I tried a new assignment. I don't like doing the same thing in my online courses all the time; not only does it get stale, but the technology changes, providing us better tools to encourage student learning. A Blackboard Learn upgrade had introduced some social media tools, including blogs and journals. I decided to assign a weekly Astronomy in the News Blog, in which students must find a current news article on a topic I give them, provide a link to the article, summarize it, describe one thing they learned, and one question they still had (they also had to read and comment on at least two blogs from their classmates). As I gave them feedback on their blogs, I would read the article they found and try to answer their questions. I teach general education courses, and I believe the purpose of general education at least in part is to relate what you are learning in the classroom to what you encounter in life. These blogs do a great job of showing students that what they are learning can be used to understand things that are going on around them right now.
That was my first glimpse into that particular rabbit hole. Reading all those articles and researching what I didn't know showed me things had changed a bit since I graduated from college. Black holes, the Kuiper Belt, and exoplanets, oh my! Reading these articles wasn't enough; I decided I had to update my astronomy skills and soon.
Rather than risking the expense and ignominious failure of a traditional - or even online - college astronomy class, I looked into MOOCs. A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course, usually a free course with open enrollment to anyone in the world. I found just what I was looking for at Coursera, a course called Confronting The Big Questions: Highlights of Modern Astronomy, offered by Dr. Adam Frank from the University of Rochester. It lasted about a month, wasn't too hard, and I received my Statement of Accomplishment With Distinction.
When I was done patting myself on the back for that, I got cocky and decided to try another one, The Science of the Solar System, offered by Dr. Mike Brown from Caltech. That one interested me because I had read Dr. Brown's book, How I Killed Pluto (and Why It Had It Coming). Dr. Brown teaches planetary science at Caltech and used the Coursera platform to "flip" his Science of the Solar System class, providing lecture videos and objective quizzes online so he and his students could focus on discussion and problem solving in the classroom. However, he opened the online portion up FOR FREE to anyone in the world who wanted to learn from an expert in the field. Not only did the concept interest me as an instructional designer, I loved Dr. Brown's book so much, I thought it would be a kick to learn from him.
To say I quickly found myself in the weeds is an understatement. It. Was. HARD. Seriously, who knew a quiz with just 10-15 multiple choice or short answer questions on it could be so difficult? I had a whole new appreciation for what my students go through. So after a few weeks, I unenrolled, decided to follow Dr. Brown on Twitter, and thought that was that.
Then early this spring, Dr. Brown tweeted this:
Oh, crap. He was offering the same course again. Like the hackles on a dog facing an invader in his territory, I could feel my innate desire to Succeed At All Costs raising its ugly head. Failing to complete the same course the previous spring stuck in my craw...so I logged on to Coursera and enrolled in the course. Again.
This time I was determined to succeed. I knew what went wrong last time, and I knew how to fix it, and I knew how much work that would be, but I was determined to get it right this time, not just because, you know, I hate failing, but because I honestly wanted to learn the content this time. I want to be able to share the best information I can with my students, not just what is in their textbooks. And yes, I hate failing.
40 years ago I got an A in my high school physics class, but my teacher put in the comments "Works below ability." I still haven't forgotten that...The first time I tried the course, I approached it as a rather passive learner. I watched the videos, took some notes, tried the quizzes, managed to get through the first one on the third try, and then failed miserably at the second one. Now, in my defense, questions like:
...aren't exactly easy, but they are doable since others in the class managed to do OK.
So I decided to practice what I preach to my own students and be an active learner in the class. Rather than just watch the videos and take some notes, every week I downloaded the screen capture files for the ten lectures that week. I converted the text files into Word documents, took out all the line breaks, and reformatted the text into a readable document by reading it, adding paragraph breaks where they made sense, took out some repetitive wording and speaking hesitations (captioners caption EVERYTHING), fixed spelling mistakes where possible - pretty low level processing of information, but it was a start. The next pass I took was when watching the videos, and I started looking deeper into content. I added mathematical formulas where necessary, fixed more spelling and grammar, and changed some paragraph formatting to make more sense. That required a little deeper processing and greater understanding of the content. The final pass I took through involved just watching the videos and pausing at logical spots to do a screen capture and then paste it into the Word document. Again, I was processing the information in yet another way (much more graphically and aurally than textually), and creating a great set of notes in the process.
I also was much more active in the discussion forums this time, again, practicing what I preach about cooperative learning. I answered questions from other students where I could and read the answers others gave to the ones I couldn't. I noticed that others were bemoaning the lack of lecture notes for the class. With the permission of the professor, I posted mine in Dropbox, and posted the links to them in the discussion forums. This is a sample of what I created and shared with the class.
I picked this example, because my father helped design the heat shield for the Galileo Atmopheric Probe before he retired. And because I chastised Dr. Brown for saying heat shields burn instead of ablate.
This time it worked. It was nine long weeks of text reformatting, lecture watching, discussion postings, and quiz retaking, but at the end of the course, I correctly answered 49/51 questions in my final quiz submissions. One question I got wrong on the last attempt despite having gotten it correct on a prior attempt, because I got cocky and read the answers too quickly and picked the answer with the correct numbers transposed, but I KNEW the correct answer so that doesn't count. The other one I never managed to get right...until today. That was the question I screencapped several paragraphs ago, and that I finally figured out as I was finding a good lecture document to share with you. So I win! I got all the answers correct! Just not in the timeframe of the course...but close enough for my innate desire to Succeed At All Costs to be satisfied. (Note that in the course results, it lists my grade as 100% because I did the extra credit quiz, but that wasn't good enough because I Still Got One Question Wrong.)
Yes, I know I just spent an entire paragraph justifying why the two questions I got wrong don't really count as wrong. Deal with it. I've dealt with it for 56 years.So, that's how I got to the edge of the rabbit hole. Well, to the edge, lying on the ground, leaning over into the hole up to my waist...but I hadn't fallen in yet. That took a little thing called the New Horizons Mission and tholins and ice mountains on Pluto to send me over the edge. Stay tuned for Part 2...
BTW, if you followed those links I included while discussing MOOCs, you've had a taste of the rabbit hole, but only a taste. It goes waaay deeper than that.
No comments:
Post a Comment