Attendees: Vikram, Sairam, Sonu, Ravi, Shilpa
This blog is in particular meant for our tutoring group. Tutoring group, I am thinking of maintaining blog pages for all the tutoring sessions. This can serve as a medium to communicate by leaving comments etc. Please feel free to add your comments to this. It served two ways by logging our experience for all tutoring sessions and secondly for communications between the group.
Today we all assembled at Q203 and 2:30pm to rehearse the following three experiments before going to the tutoring venue. We got a little late reaching there and met Ben, Jeff, Caroline there at 3:25pm. Today the number of students was less around 8 as many students had gone to a party arranged for one student who was scheduled to undergo a surgery in near future.
As discussed in earlier meeting (refer last week’s MoM) we demonstrated following experiments today.
1)Burning the paper by dipping it in mixture of ethanol and water. Thanks to Shilpa for helping us with Ethanol for the experiment.
2)Demonstrating the reaction of Sodium hydroxide + sugar with water and potassium permanganate. When reactants are mixed the mixture changes color from pink to blue, green, brown and finally yellow.
3)Effect of surface tension of water, Ravi Prasad demonstrated this experiment by putting about 30 coins in water and showing the curved miniscule resulting from surface tension
After arriving there we set up two tables in front and around 8 children were made to sit facing the table. It was like a demonstration being done before a very anxious audience.
Following method was used to do the demonstrations. The demonstrators talked about what they were about to show. Children were asked to think about the experiment and their reasons that could explain the experiment. This gave them an opportunity to argue their point of view and understand the logical explanation.
Vikram and Shilpa were careful enough to keep the demonstration-2 simple for the school children to understand. Ravi showed demo-3 and finally the experiment-1 was shown by Sonu and Sairam.
We missed many of our tutors today. Good luck to Tina for her Ph.D defense!
thanks,
-Sairam
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Maximizing learning in an conventional undergraduate class
In this relfection blog, I am considering a traditional class room teaching set-up where a teacher uses blackboard and his experience in transmitting knowledge to the class.
As a part of this reflection writing, I was sitting in a physics 1112 class taught three times a week. This class is held in a large lecture hall with around 120 undergraduate students. Typically the students are freshman or sophomores who are required to learn basic physics before completing their major degree. Its interesting to see them in a theory class where there is a less probability of individual attention from the lecturer as compared to a lab where the teacher to student ratio is better.
Firstly as the lecture class is large, almost all the rows in the front were occupied and in the last rows there were more unoccupied seats between the students. The lecturer was teaching by looking at the entire class but in my opinion his eye contact was not enough to grab attention of the students in the class. The lecturer wrote down the topic on the board and then looked at the students and explained the concept. In my opinion due to the nature of physics concepts, the teacher did not have time to write the entire definitions on the board. The content written on the board included the topic names, formulas, diagrams that were important in explaining a physics concept. The students had an opportunity to take notes as the teacher spoke and more importantly it is essential for them to note down all that is written on the board.
I realized that the students sitting in the front rows were less probable to get distracted due to their proximity to the teacher and less visual distractions. Students sitting in the immediate front rows were busy with listening and note taking and did not have their text books open where as some students at the middle rows were observed to look through the text book along with note taking. The students sitting at the last rows were seen to have laptops open with non-physics related topics on the screen. In my opinion, they were more probable to miss out on the lecture notes as the volume of the lecturer faded off coupled with more chances of getting distracted by seeing a large number of students sitting in their front view. Another disadvantage of students sitting in the last rows is that on the last rows, there are more vacant seats between students (as compared to the front seats) and students don't have a chance to look at neighboring students notes. Ultimately if a student sitting on back rows misses out on some notes, he has very less chances of making it up from the neighbors notes.
From my experience of this class, I think its wise to sit in the middle rows where there is a probability to see neighbors notes and also look at the text book as the lecture is going on. Also a little distance from the lecturer gives an opportunity to talk with neighboring student to clarify an concepts being taught in the class.
As a part of this reflection writing, I was sitting in a physics 1112 class taught three times a week. This class is held in a large lecture hall with around 120 undergraduate students. Typically the students are freshman or sophomores who are required to learn basic physics before completing their major degree. Its interesting to see them in a theory class where there is a less probability of individual attention from the lecturer as compared to a lab where the teacher to student ratio is better.
Firstly as the lecture class is large, almost all the rows in the front were occupied and in the last rows there were more unoccupied seats between the students. The lecturer was teaching by looking at the entire class but in my opinion his eye contact was not enough to grab attention of the students in the class. The lecturer wrote down the topic on the board and then looked at the students and explained the concept. In my opinion due to the nature of physics concepts, the teacher did not have time to write the entire definitions on the board. The content written on the board included the topic names, formulas, diagrams that were important in explaining a physics concept. The students had an opportunity to take notes as the teacher spoke and more importantly it is essential for them to note down all that is written on the board.
I realized that the students sitting in the front rows were less probable to get distracted due to their proximity to the teacher and less visual distractions. Students sitting in the immediate front rows were busy with listening and note taking and did not have their text books open where as some students at the middle rows were observed to look through the text book along with note taking. The students sitting at the last rows were seen to have laptops open with non-physics related topics on the screen. In my opinion, they were more probable to miss out on the lecture notes as the volume of the lecturer faded off coupled with more chances of getting distracted by seeing a large number of students sitting in their front view. Another disadvantage of students sitting in the last rows is that on the last rows, there are more vacant seats between students (as compared to the front seats) and students don't have a chance to look at neighboring students notes. Ultimately if a student sitting on back rows misses out on some notes, he has very less chances of making it up from the neighbors notes.
From my experience of this class, I think its wise to sit in the middle rows where there is a probability to see neighbors notes and also look at the text book as the lecture is going on. Also a little distance from the lecturer gives an opportunity to talk with neighboring student to clarify an concepts being taught in the class.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Virtual Demos: A new teaching paradigm ?
As I was thinking about my experiences with virtual demos for the class, I couldn't help but merge the differences(?) between simulations,computer models and virtual demos. I think of virtual demos as a super set that contain all computer models, scale models, demos that can be used to augment educational experience without actually going through the real-time live experience .
As far as learning is concerned virtual demos can only supplement the main material and cannot stand alone as a teaching paradigm, in my opinion.
As far as learning is concerned virtual demos can only supplement the main material and cannot stand alone as a teaching paradigm, in my opinion.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Experiences of using: Learning Management Systems
I think its a good idea for me to keep a blog entry of the research papers I read. In this blog I am attempting to put together the research findings of Steven Lonn and Stephanie D. Teasley on the effectiveness of using Learning Management System (LMS) in a university set up.
This research article is titled "Saving time or innovating practice: Investigating perceptions and uses of Learning Management Systems". It was uploaded for my EDHI 9040 class. The paper can be found here: Computers & Education 53 (2009) 686–694 The research was conducted in a US university setup consisting of a heterogeneous group of people with respect to their computer/IT expertise. Their research took into account these differences and attempted to inform the readers about the preceived advantage of using an online learning management tool in promoting student learning.
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
Learning Management Systems (LMS) is a web-based system that allows instructors and students to share instructional materials, make class announcements, submit and return course assignments, and communicate with each other online.
Although most LMS are used for the distribution, management, and retrieval of course materials, these systems can also incorporate functionality that supports interaction between students and instructors and among students to provide opportunities for enabling institutional innovations in learning and education.
These tools provide opportunities for using LMS that are consistent with constructivist approaches to learning rather than simple transmission of knowledge models. Specifically, LMS can facilitate a shift from ‘‘the transmission of information towards the management and facilitation of student learning”
Aim of Research:
The authors looked at two years of survey data to learn whether LMS was changing instructors’ pedagogical practice and the new online methodology affected student's learning preferences. This peper investigated the survey responses focusing on items relating to efficiency vs. interactive-teaching and learning practices of the students.
Research Findings :
- About 39% of the instructors agreed to an improved communication to their students. While 45% of the students reported that LMS improves efficiency (saves time).
- About 26% of instructors chose ‘‘efficiency (saves time)” indicating that efficiency is important to many instructors as well as their students.
- Very few instructors or students chose teaching or learning improvements as the most valuable benefit from using IT in their courses, nor did many respondents choose the items about student-to-instructor communication
or student-to-student communication.
This suggests that these systems are valued most by faculty and students for the ways they improve instructors’ ability to push out information to students rather than general support for teaching and learning, and for opening up
communication from the students to the instructor or from the students to their peers.
- Interestingbly among 95% of the users, the document management and broadcast-oriented communication tools (Content Sharing, Assignments, Announcements, Schedule, and Syllabus) were used heavily. By contrast, tools that are more interactive (Chat, Discussion, and Wiki) are not used as much (5% of all user actions) and more instructors and students rated them as Not Valuable.
- For Sending/Receiving an announcement, more instructors rated this activity as Very Valuable than did students. With the passage of time and regular use of the LMS system both instructors’ and students’ ratings increased over time.
- For Posting/Accessing online readings and supplementary course materials, more instructors rated this activity as Very Valuable than did students.
- For students posting questions after lecture, more instructors rated this activity as Valuable than did students.
Concluding Remarks:
As long as students fail to see the relevance of interactive tools for their learning or for instructors’ teaching, they are likely to continue to view IT as merely a quick and accessible means to retrieve course documents and get messages from instructors.
This survey results indicate that while both instructors and students agree that information technologies improve learning, students do not agree as strongly as
instructors that such technologies do improve instruction. These ratings suggest that students, in particular, may be responding not to whether these tools are used, but rather how they are used.
Using tools to scaffold more interactive forms of instruction and learning may be required for success of LMS/on-line systems.
This research article is titled "Saving time or innovating practice: Investigating perceptions and uses of Learning Management Systems". It was uploaded for my EDHI 9040 class. The paper can be found here: Computers & Education 53 (2009) 686–694 The research was conducted in a US university setup consisting of a heterogeneous group of people with respect to their computer/IT expertise. Their research took into account these differences and attempted to inform the readers about the preceived advantage of using an online learning management tool in promoting student learning.
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
Learning Management Systems (LMS) is a web-based system that allows instructors and students to share instructional materials, make class announcements, submit and return course assignments, and communicate with each other online.
Although most LMS are used for the distribution, management, and retrieval of course materials, these systems can also incorporate functionality that supports interaction between students and instructors and among students to provide opportunities for enabling institutional innovations in learning and education.
These tools provide opportunities for using LMS that are consistent with constructivist approaches to learning rather than simple transmission of knowledge models. Specifically, LMS can facilitate a shift from ‘‘the transmission of information towards the management and facilitation of student learning”
Aim of Research:
The authors looked at two years of survey data to learn whether LMS was changing instructors’ pedagogical practice and the new online methodology affected student's learning preferences. This peper investigated the survey responses focusing on items relating to efficiency vs. interactive-teaching and learning practices of the students.
Research Findings :
- About 39% of the instructors agreed to an improved communication to their students. While 45% of the students reported that LMS improves efficiency (saves time).
- About 26% of instructors chose ‘‘efficiency (saves time)” indicating that efficiency is important to many instructors as well as their students.
- Very few instructors or students chose teaching or learning improvements as the most valuable benefit from using IT in their courses, nor did many respondents choose the items about student-to-instructor communication
or student-to-student communication.
This suggests that these systems are valued most by faculty and students for the ways they improve instructors’ ability to push out information to students rather than general support for teaching and learning, and for opening up
communication from the students to the instructor or from the students to their peers.
- Interestingbly among 95% of the users, the document management and broadcast-oriented communication tools (Content Sharing, Assignments, Announcements, Schedule, and Syllabus) were used heavily. By contrast, tools that are more interactive (Chat, Discussion, and Wiki) are not used as much (5% of all user actions) and more instructors and students rated them as Not Valuable.
- For Sending/Receiving an announcement, more instructors rated this activity as Very Valuable than did students. With the passage of time and regular use of the LMS system both instructors’ and students’ ratings increased over time.
- For Posting/Accessing online readings and supplementary course materials, more instructors rated this activity as Very Valuable than did students.
- For students posting questions after lecture, more instructors rated this activity as Valuable than did students.
Concluding Remarks:
As long as students fail to see the relevance of interactive tools for their learning or for instructors’ teaching, they are likely to continue to view IT as merely a quick and accessible means to retrieve course documents and get messages from instructors.
This survey results indicate that while both instructors and students agree that information technologies improve learning, students do not agree as strongly as
instructors that such technologies do improve instruction. These ratings suggest that students, in particular, may be responding not to whether these tools are used, but rather how they are used.
Using tools to scaffold more interactive forms of instruction and learning may be required for success of LMS/on-line systems.
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