Hope vs. Reality in Online Learning
Chief academic officers are bullish on digital learning but don’t think the investments their campuses have made in many technologies have been very effective, according to a new survey. The vast majority of CAOs believe digital learning resources can have a positive influence on the undergraduate academic experience and would also like to see their faculty use more technology in entry-level courses. But many of these CAOs are also sharply dissatisfied with the technologies their campuses are using, such as tools to support student success, according to the survey report Provosts, Pedagogy, and Digital Learning, produced by the Association of Chief Academic Officers and the Campus Computing Project.
The survey is one of several in recent months that present mixed views among academics toward teaching technology. Many professors believe it has pedagogical value but aren’t sure how to use it effectively. And it seems that provosts and other academic administrators, in this new survey, feel the same way.
A Library of Student Learning
It has been very difficult to evaluate learning in a way that helps students improve and tells faculty members how to adjust their teaching, while also showing institutions how they stack up against their peers. One effort that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years involves something called Value rubrics, which were developed by the Association of American Colleges & Universities and use authentic, home-grown student work to draw generalizable conclusions about learning. The association recently announced that it was starting the Value Institute in partnership with Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research. According to the institute’s website, participating institutions will be able to collect and upload samples of student work to a digital repository and have the work scored by certified faculty members for external validation.
Students Will Google First
How should professors guide their students to trustworthy information online? One option is only allowing them to refer to credible corners of the internet. Professors could require students to use “academic search engines and peer reviewed journals” in their assignments, wrote Sarah Summers, an assistant professor of English at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in response to our questions on the topic last week. But Ms. Summers has taken the opposite approach, she wrote. “Lately, I’m inclined to ask them to incorporate more, not fewer, popular sources into their research.”
Why? “Students — like many of us, if we’re honest — will Google first,” she writes. “It’s an almost instinctive reaction to needing information.”
When students seek information online outside of a classroom context, they are certain to find some that isn’t reliable. That means they need to develop the ability to determine which sources are solid. And where better to practice that skill than in their classes?
Ms. Summers has designed a collection of classroom activities to develop this skill, which could be applied to any discipline. One of them, for instance, has students annotate the bibliography of a research paper to indicate how reliable each source is, and how they know.
Sneak Preview
Where can professors turn for advice on improving their teaching? At a university in California, one answer is undergraduates. This fall, Beckie tagged along with a group of trained students as they collected feedback on what happens in the classroom — and presented it to professors. Find out more in her article on Chronicle.com next week.
Thanks for reading. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Please also note that there will be no newsletter next week. Happy Thanksgiving!
— Dan, Beth, and Beckie