Serendipity35

I was very pleased to see a post titled "Pedagogy – You Keep Using That Word… I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means" by Rolin Moe on his blog All MOOCs, All The Time. He bounced his response off Bryan Alexander's post about a MOOC course called CFHE12 (more later). Although Moe is focused on MOOCs, his question is one I often ask myself when dealing with the use of technology in classrooms.

People toss off the word "pedagogy" easily. I hear vendors use it when pitching products as a way to connect a tool with good teaching practices. I hear educators use it to mean that they have changed their classroom practice.

Using PowerPoint slides instead of writing on the board does not change your pedagogy. It probably doesn't change learning either- and don't tell me it addresses visual learners because those bullet points have some clip art next to them.

As Moe points out, "learning theory" is not pedagogy. Neither of those are topics that many teachers in higher education have ever studied, and that most have probably not even considered formally.

Learning theory is the study of the way people learn. They are conceptual frameworks to describe how information is taken in, processed, and retained. The big three are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism, but there are others like connectivism that come up in MOOC discussions.

Pedagogy is the blend of art and science and the way we teach.

CFHE12 (Current/Future State of Higher Education) is a course that started last week. It is an open online course to "evaluate the change pressures that face universities, and help universities prepare for the future state of higher education." That's a big mission. Good luck kids.

Some MOOC history: cMOOCs versus xMOOCs. Udadicty/Coursera/edX courses are referred to as examples of xMOOCs.  xMOOCs are based on the teaching model (instructivist) where the teacher teaches, and the students learn by consuming the knowledge from the course, and by doing activities such as watching/hearing a lecture. cMOOCs are based on connectivism.

It's not that no one in education is considering the possible pedagogical and learning theory possibilities and implications of MOOCs. And it's not that there aren't clear connections to online learning that has been researched for decades.

Moe's post references how Coursera courses are self-described as being "designed based on sound pedagogical foundations, to help you master new concepts quickly and effectively" but that those pedagogical foundations are not explained.

In most of these xMOOCs you watch a segmented video lecture, take a quiz during (embedded) or after viewing. There are discussion boards (perhaps with a facilitator) to discuss concepts and ask questions and share knowledge. There might be supplementary resources. There might be a written assignment, but that's hard to assess when there are thousands of students in a course, unless you use peer review.

Described in that way, a lot of people in higher ed might say, "That's new? It sounds like an online course that could have been offered ten years ago. And not even a great online course at that." 

Of course, in 2000, you wouldn't offer the course to 50,000 students. Or have it open to anyone. Or offer it for free. And a learning management system (more likely called a course management system back then) and the bandwidth would never has been able to sustain the activities.

So, is that what is new?

Take a learning theory like constructivism from educational psychology which came out of the work of Piaget and Bruner. It emphasizes the importance of active involvement of learners in constructing knowledge for themselves. It is top-down processing. Start with complex problems (problem-solving, problem based learning) and teach the basic skills while students solve the problems. If you believe in constructivism, you are less likely to believe students will learn deeply by experiencing a lecture or reading a textbook.

Connectivism is a learning theory and cMOOCs seem to rely on the networking of those thousands of students, personal learning networks, digital artifacts, and not much teacher involvement. No teacher, no pedagogy?

And xMOOCs emphasize content over teaching and are very student-centered. If the student utilizes the resources, they can learn, but that is up to the student.

Besides MOOCs, another very buzzy concept this year has been the flipped classrooms. Platforms like Coursera follow a similar model to Khan Academy’s flipped classroom.

Didn't we have flipped classrooms before this? Sort of. We didn't have HD quality video and that bandwidth to stream it. Sal Khan was asked about the research and learning theory behind his Academy, but he passed on the question and allows that others can do the research. Khan also expects his lectures to be used along with teachers to assist students. The "teacher" in a MOOC may be another struggling student.

So, when we talk about MOOCs are we also talking about pedagogy or learning theory? Not yet.  And don't let me get started about andragogy.

Launched spring of 2012, the mission of the Flipped Learning Network™ is to provide educators with the knowledge, skills, and resources to successfully implement Flipped Learning. 

The goals of the FLN are:
to provide professional learning opportunities on Flipped Learning;
to conduct, collaborate and disseminate relevant research on Flipped Learning;
and to act as the clearinghouse for distributing best and promising practices for current and future “flipped” educators.

Flipping classrooms came out of a simple observation that students need their teachers present to answer questions or to provide help if they get stuck on an assignment and they don’t need their teacher present to listen to a lecture or review content. 

Interesting infographic available as a pdf on flipped classrooms

I recently discovered a Google/YouTube collaboration for teaching proper digital citizenship practices. The curriculum is for teachers to use to teach students what digital citizenship means and how it impacts their online and offline lives.

The interactive curriculum is on YouTube. There was a time in the early days of the Internet when I would hear that teachers felt an obligation to educate students on how to be safe, engaged and confident model "Netizens." It has been awhile since I heard that term used, and I'm not sure if this is still a topic that is taught. Perhaps, we are assuming that students are born into Net citizenship.

This initiative is aimed at students aged 13 to 17, but elements could certainly be used with older and younger students with some adaptations. For example, the lesson on Copyright includes a Teacher's Guide and Slides that would easily work with an introductory college group.




Google is using its own YouTube as the content for the lessons provided. They cover YouTube’s policies, how to report content, how to protect their own privacy, and how to be responsible YouTube community members. Teachers would hopefully lead students to see the wider implications of being part of an online community and how this applies to places like Facebook.

Each lesson comes with guidelines for teachers and ready-made slides for presentation. There’s also a YouTube Curriculum channel where videos related to the project will be posted.

http://www.google.com/edu/teachers/youtube/curric/

http://www.youtube.com/user/YouTubeCurriculum

"Trickle-down economics" and "the trickle-down theory" are terms in United States politics to refer to the idea that tax breaks or other economic benefits provided by government to businesses and the wealthy will benefit poorer members of society by improving the economy as a whole.

Though many people today associate it with Reaganomics or supply-side economics, the term has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression that "money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy."

In some ways, there is a “trickle-down pedagogy" theory around in education - especially in the use of technology. The theory is that innovation starts in higher ed and then works its way down into K-12.

Examples might be the use of learning management systems, or 1:1 computing, or giving students iPods, tablets and phones. A lot of this innovation is economically motivated. Colleges have more to spend and can require students to spend. They also have fewer restrictions on what they can do with adult students.

Right now, MOOCs (massive open online courses) are a hot topic in higher ed. Though I can't imagine a K-12 school or system being able to <i>offer</i> a MOOC, I can see high school students and teachers participating in them, In fact, I can imagine more of the secondary school people participating than in higher ed.

More and more vendors of educational software are looking to K-12 as an untapped market for products and services that were seen as more suited to colleges. Learning management systems is a good example.

I feel pretty safe saying that the innovation in pure pedagogy - how we teach - comes from the lower grades and sometimes bubbles up to higher ed.

Is there any trickle-down pedagogy?

When I moved from secondary education to higher ed in 2000, I was amazed at what professor had not heard of in education. Topics and movements that I had been exposed to ten or even twenty years earlier were unheard of on campus. I blew the dust off materials I had about Bloom's taxonomy, learning styles, backwards design, rubrics, problem-based learning etc. and presented them to educational theory virgins who were surprisingly interested. More than a few faculty confessed to me that they knew almost nothing about educational theory and research. Some said, "I try to be like the good teachers I had and not like the poor ones."

I guess that would be a form of bubble-up pedagogy.

When the college I was working at back then offered some days of professional development for high school teachers, we had a hard time finding professors and topics that would be new to the teachers that they could actually do in their classrooms. They loved seeing our labs and toys, but they knew they had no chance of using what they saw in their classes. In teaching those workshops and sitting in other professors sessions, I often heard the high school teachers suggest to the presenters ways that they taught the content that seemed more innovative than our pedagogy.

And I don't want to get started on the blame game that trickles down from every higher level about how the students are unprepared by the earlier levels. That game extends even beyond schools. Primary teachers can blame pre-schools who can blame parents. Employers can blame the universities.

Of course, the best pedagogy sharing would be bidirectional and we would  each learn from the other levels. It's unfortunate that upper level  teachers (high school and college) often look down on teachers in K-8  because the content is so "simple" and ignore the innovative ways it is  being presented and assessed. College professors are often seen as  working in ivory towers of rarefied academic air that has little application to the teaching of "children."

Trickle-down or bubble up. We need good pedagogy to move across all levels of education.