On-line Education?

I have last term completed the on-line module in Artificial Intelligence offered by Stanford's Sebastian Thrun and Google's Peter Norvig–both top-academics and experts in their field. I guess it was successful, as I received a grade of 79% (a 'first' in UK terms, but I have the suspicion it doesn't work like that). Given the minimal effort I put in (mainly due to lack of time) I could very likely have achieved a better result with some extra work. But with a full-time job it's not so easy to put aside 10 hours a week for doing so, which was the amount of time recommended by the course leaders.

So I got 79%, but did I learn anything? And do the 79% reflect my achievements? And what was the overall learning experience like?

First, the learning experience: the module was delivered as a series of short low-tech video lectures, interspersed with multiple-choice or number-entry quizzes. Then there was homework (multiple-choice and number-entry quizzes) and a mid-term and final exam (both multiple choice and... you get the idea).

The lectures were interesting: it was a camera view top-down on a piece of paper on which the lecturers would (hand-)write, not just a filmed 'lecture'. The tone was informal and friendly, and Thrun's charming German accent made me almost feel at home. And I also learned–from the few head-shot video sequences–that Peter Norvig likes colourful shirts.

The quizzes, however, were rather limited. There was the problem of turning quite complex material into a simple format, and also (which I found hardest) missing context. As a result the questions were often trivial side-aspects, or impossible to answer due to ambiguity (judging from the few forum posts I looked at, many other people had the same issue). You can interpret a question in many different ways, especially if you need to take into account external constraints which have not been clearly specified.

Quite often you get an answer wrong, and then look at the explanation of the proper outcome, and you think "oh right, that's how they meant it".

I quite struggled with Bayes networks, and I consistently got the wrong answers when asked how many independent parameters I would need to describe one. To this day I do not know why I need to know this. I can guess, but it wasn't really explained. Formal logic was one of the things I felt very comfortable with, as I had covered that in my own UG studies as a computational linguist, but I only got 1 out of 4 points in the final exam question, as I made one small error; based on that the subsequent answers were also wrong.

My best results were in computer vision–100%. And that's even though I'm short-sighted! But do I really understand computer vision so much better than all the other areas of AI? No. Thing is, all that was asked in the relevant quizzes was basic maths. There was a simple formula, relating various parameters such as focal length and distances to each other, and all you had to do was resolve the equation for different values and work out the result. I would have been able to do this beforehand, and didn't even learn that in the course. Still, I was assessed on it and scored 100%. But anybody with basic maths would have been able to do that, even without watching a single minute of any of the class videos.

So my first criticism is: the quizzes were not designed properly. There is a lot more one can do with multiple choice question, but Thrun and Norvig didn't do it. The assessments felt like an ad-hoc addition, along the lines of "I need a quiz now, so what could I ask?".

My second criticism is the way the scoring worked. One slight mistake, nil points. In a real exam you would get points for results which are wrong, but only because of a mistake in an intermediate step. An all-or-nothing approach is not very helpful.

Is this the future of education? Are on-line classes like this all we need? I don't think so. Apart from the implementation–it'd be easy to come up with some better quizzes–it's also quite detached. There is little direct interaction (impossible with 140,000+ students), and at times you feel a bit lost. It is obvious that this was an experiment, and as such it is not possible to expect wonderful and perfect results, but there is still a long way to go.

Did I learn anything I would not have learned from reading a book? Probably not. The main advantage for me was to have the pressure of getting through the weekly session before the hand-in date, which makes you put aside time you would otherwise spend on something else. So in that respect it is alright; and the fact that it was delivered on-line was convenient as you could choose the time when you wanted to study it. But while this is good for a supplementary course, I am glad I did have proper seminars and lectures when I went to university.

While you can't argue with a free course (you did get more than you paid for!), there is still a lot of scope for improvement for this particular type of course, an on-line distance course, and I cannot see it replacing 'proper' seminars any time soon. But it was overall an interesting experience, if only to find out what 'real' teaching should be like.

The No-Win Situation

As an academic committed to evaluation and feedback of one's teaching (aren't we all?) we frequently end up in no-win situations. This is when we try out a new innovative approach to teaching (or even an old, tried-and-tested one), solicit feedback from the students, and end up being stumped. Unlike the theoretical ideal, student feedback rarely ends up in a bell-shaped curve, where we have a few very positive, a few very negative, and a whole lot of indifferent plus/minus positive or negative bunch in the middle. Depending on whether the mean of that curve is more on the positive side or the negative one, we can judge the teaching innovation as having been a success or failure.

However, it more commonly seems (purely impressionistic non-scientific anecdotal impression) to end up with the 'Valley of Death', where roughly half the students are in favour of it, and the other half against. One such case was in last year's FREDA module, where I got the students to work in groups, and to write a formative essay as a group. Some students felt this was "not the way we work in English", as if group work was only suitable for those pesky science types, whereas others were initially skeptical, but realised that it was great because you'd get to see how others approach the same task and topic from a completely different direction.

So, what to do? The route of least resistance would be to drop the change, as then the negative comments have been taken into account, and the positives don't matter, as long as they don't state they wouldn't want to go back to the situation before the change. This, however, is deeply unsatisfactory, and my non-pc view is that we as qualified educators know better and that our views, based on sound pedagogy, are actually more worthy than those of the students. This attitude is of course not popular in a culture of constant evaluation and league tables, but then, it's a no-win situation anyway. Maybe I should just retrain as a merchant banker.

The Business of Learning

I just spent almost an hour watching a video from a presentation at the Business of Software 2009 conference. Why? I have a pile of unmarked essays on my desk.

The real reason was that the speaker is Kathy Sierra, who has a very good approach to teaching programming concepts & looking at things from different angles. I used to read through her "Creating Passionate Users" blog, which she unfortunately discontinued. In this presentation (see below) she discussed how you can make your users feel good about using your products. Users don't want to view your company or your product as 'awesome', they want to see themselves as great. And good products make the user feel awesome.

That clearly has applications to teaching. I always try to answer the question "so what?", to give the students some motivation for why they're sitting in a seminar looking at a text. I think next year I will try even harder with making the students feel awesome...



I do not yet know how many students will be in my modules next year, but I'm already thinking hard about how to change them further. My impression is that my modified teaching style has been very successful, only some things did not work out as well as I had planned them - mainly those which required student participation. I guess the way to get students to participate is to make them more motivated. Or to use a stick instead of a carrot?

Analytical Thinking

Yesterday I had a brief conversation with some of my first year students, who were asking me about the second year module choices. On the language side there are two choices: DAVE ("Development and Variation of English") and FREDA ("Frameworks of English Discourse Analysis"). I teach FREDA. This year we had about 90 students in DAVE, and 44 in FREDA.

The first years then said they had heard DAVE was easier. Where from, I asked. Some second year students they answered. It took me a while to work out at least two fatal flaws with this, and one unintended positive side-effect.

1. How on Earth is a second year student able to compare those two modules? I can't, and I'm teaching one. The only way to compare them is to attend both modules, and this is not possible, as they are mutually exclusive choices. It's a bit like claiming that this life on Earth is better or worse than the afterlife. Either you only know one of them, or you're dead.


2. The next thought is a bit scarier: how can you believe/trust someone who claims something you know to be invalid/impossible? I don't want to push the religious analogies too far at this point, but I guess second year students must have quite a reputation amongst the first years when they can tell them this kind of stuff and get away with it. The first thing you learn at university, however, should be to never trust anybody just because they're older/have more authority/have published a book.


3. "Easier". How do you apply this term to a module? Is it easier to get good marks? Is the subject material easier to understand? I don't know, but I would probably call a module easier if it didn't involve much work and you'd still get a good mark. But is that what you want from a module at uni? And I doubt that DAVE involves less work than FREDA, and I would also guess that the distribution of marks will not be so different either.

And now the positive side-effect: if students think DAVE is easier because it involves less work, then students who don't like the idea of work will obviously choose DAVE. Therefore, students who choose FREDA should be eager, keen, and willing to work hard for their money (that is the money they paid to come here). This is mostly the case, but I suspect there are also some other students in FREDA. However, those at least will know not to trust the second years and are able to think for themselves. Not all bad, then!

PS: The imbalance of student numbers (which I suspect is mostly due to such rumours and ignorance of what the module is about) is one of the reasons for producing this film about FREDA.

Marketing can be fun

In the second year students have the choice between two language modules, called DAVE and FREDA. Most students choose DAVE, even though they don't seem to have a lot of knowledge about what the modules are about. As I teach FREDA, I decided to do something about it: together with our web master Billy Fallows I did a promotional video:



This was a spontaneous idea after Billy mentioned to me that he was filming a colleague for some MA info-material. I went away and scripted it, and we then decided to go ahead.

Doing it was fairly easy: I asked for some student volunteers, and got some, then we filmed a few shots, put a mini-slideshow together in Keynote, recorded the audio, and put it together in iMovie. The result is obviously better than the above video, which is much reduced to be suitable for the web.

Now I wonder whether this will have any impact on the recruitment figures for next year...

UPDATE: A higher resolution version of this video is now available on YouTube.

Catching up...

The last few weeks have been very busy. Nothing like a bout of marking to mess up your basic schedule! Now that marking is out of the way, normality is slowly returning. Still, there are things to do, and blogging tends not to be the one with the highest priority.

In my Frameworks module, the podcasting was the thing to suffer most from marking. A colleague told me that one of her AST students was sad about it, and I feel somewhat bad myself. I will try and get another podcast put together this week. In the meantime I set the students a task that involved them making their own podcasts, and slowly the results are coming in. Some are really good! They will be made available on the course blog, finally a way to get some activity going there. With any luck, students will not only post their podcasts, but also listen to each others and comment on them.

Language Foundation is slowly ticking along, and finally we're getting to the point where students feel it making 'click' during the grammatical analyses. They are hard work, but by constantly practicing them I believe students will better understand how they work, and feel more self-confident. Only the exam will tell, of course!

Then, almost out of the door is a research project proposal. Only a few things to sort out, and then the big question will be if there is enough money still around within the AHRC to fund it. This leads me back to my main gripe with the current model of research funding: the effort that has gone into this project proposal could have been spent on doing quite a lot of the actual work. Add to that the time spent by university admin people checking the figures, and by the AHRC administrators, and the academic reviewers, etc, and you will find that you probably have spent more money altogether on that proposal then it would cost to just do it. And that is assuming it will get funding, otherwise all that money would simply be wasted.

I can see that this doesn't work with your average science project, even if not all of them cost as much as the Large Hadron Collider, but many smaller humanities projects should just be funded directly. Cut the red tape, avoid the frustration of having your proposals rejected, and put some trust in your academics!

Enough ranting for today, still some things to do before today's list is empty.

The Future of Learning?

Unlike some people, I am quite excited about the iPad, which was announced yesterday. A tablet computer with a touch screen will have many uses, even if it seems to be somewhat awkwardly positioned in a strange niche between laptops (more powerful, but cumbersome) and smartphones (lighter & smaller, but smaller screen). I think where it will be really useful is in education.

The iPad seems to me to be an ideal device for students: you can easily keep notes, check email, have textbooks accessible, look things up, check your schedule with the calendar, etc. You can even write essays on it. And then, because of wifi, you could submit them with the touch of a button.

So far the biggest obstacle with electronic essay submission for me has been the marking. Marking an essay electronically on a computer just does not work for me. You cannot easily scribble comments on the margins, and annotating a text file like you would a submission to an edited journal is just too much. But if you had a large touch screen on which to read the essay, you could just swipe over a stretch of text, it gets selected and a comment box appears, together with the keyboard. You quickly type your comment, the keyboard disappears again, and the annotation sits on the margin. Back to normal reading. You don't even have to sit at your desk. You can mark a pile of essays easily, even on a cramped train.

I think the universities should set up a subsidised scheme where each student gets an iPad - this would probably push the costs even lower than the current $499 for the basic model (due to bulk buying and/or educational discounting). Teaching staff would also get one, and then we will all sit in the seminars, iPad on lap, looking at texts or media together, sharing group work live on wikis, and have more interactive lectures. This would also save a lot of money currently spent on paper and toner - all hand-outs would be electronic, in colour, and multi-media capable.

This of course is all a bit speculative, as anything regarding the iPad, as I've only seen a video and some photos of it; but if it is anything like a bigger iPhone, I think this should work. But I am rather pessimistic. Such a scheme might be set up at Harvard or Stanford, but Birmingham is so deeply committed to Microsoft software and PC compatible hardware, that I don't see much of a chance for the iPad becoming the learning and teaching enabling tool it could be.

Shame, really.

Great Expectations

I found myself in an interesting situation yesterday. A colleague had told me how some of my students were really enthusiastic and happy about one of my seminars (which is a wonderful thing to hear!), and I am fully aware that the module is working a lot better than last year, due to some changes in the way I am running it.

Then I needed to prepare this week's seminar session. Blank. Procrastination. Emptiness. Stress. The reason: I felt I needed to aim high, and find activities that would really live up to the high expectations that I now anticipate in my students. I couldn't possibly be letting them down by doing a second-rate thing, something I might have got away with in previous years. So I was contemplating what to do, dithering between different options, trying to (somewhat in vain) evaluate/second-guess which one would work better. In the end I ended up with a compromise which I think did work fine.

The problem with teaching is that you never stand still. You innovate, hit upon a successful improvement, and then you have to keep maintaining high standards. No time to rest and fall back. Constantly pushing yourself.

I guess it's a good thing...!

/raʊndrɒbɪn/

In the first year Language Foundation seminars I am currently teaching phonemic transcription. I write a few sentences on the white board, and then the students transcribe them in group work (if they want) into phonemic symbols. At the end of the session we discuss their transcriptions.

One issue that was always rather unsatisfactory is how to involve everybody (and not just the vocal and confident students) and how to get round the issue that it's a continuous stream (and not words in isolation).

Yesterday I suddenly had a flash of inspiration: instead of waiting for the students to volunteer solutions, and to ask somebody else when a word had been completed, I start with a random student. This students says how they transcribed the first sound (phoneme). Then I go clockwise through the room, each student contributing the next phoneme. If there are differences (there always are, due to the nature of the task), we briefly stop and discuss alternatives, before resuming the round robin.

Simple idea (pretty trivial, really), but it solves the problems. It also keeps all students on their toes, as they need to keep track where they are and which sound they have to do. And even the quiet ones have to participate. As it's low stakes (only a single sound each time), getting it wrong is not a drama.

Win-win situation!

Google Forms for Student Feedback

While thinking about a good way to elicit feedback from students on what they think of my re-designed module delivery, Bill suggested Google Forms (I was almost resigned to the fact that I'd have to use the dreaded WebCT for that!). In Google Forms you simply create a form, and populate it with questions.

Several options are available, multiple choice ('radio buttons'), check boxes, open text, scale, etc. The form can be embedded into a webpage, or sent by email, and this is just what I've done: each student registered on the module got a copy sent to them. All they need to do is to fill it in (which shouldn't take too long), and then that's all done.

The beauty of the whole procedure is that the results are automatically collected in a Google Spreadsheet, and you can even view an automatically created summary of all the answers. I'd be hard pressed to think of a way to make that easier!

Of course you can also use that for 'testing'. It just depends on the questions you're using. But it seemed to me to be an easy way of getting some feedback, anonymously, while the module is still running. The students will then also see the point in filling in the form(s), much more so than the end-of-year form they are usually being asked to fill in.

If this sounds like a sales-advert, it just mirrors how impressed I am with it. And amazed how I could have missed that in the first place...

Wild Idea on a Friday Afternoon

There's a particular style of presentation, called Pecha Kucha. With this you have 20 slides at 20 seconds each, meaning you'll be talking for 6 minutes and 40 seconds. And each slide changes after a fixed 20 second period. Maybe suitable for creative sales pitches a la Dragon's Den, but how could that possibly work in an educational setting? For one way to approach this, you might want to listen to this 6:40min YouTube clip:

Now, having a number of different people present in a single lecture slot is probably not feasible. But what about 4 individual, separate short lectures? You simply(!!!) take your lecture topic, and identify the four most important individual points you want your students to take home. Then you have the first talk. Maybe that's an overview talk, giving some context on what is to follow in the other three talks. Then a short break, and perhaps a few questions from the audience (being optimistic, student participation is anticipated...).

After that, you fire up the next talk. Again, just 20 slides at 20 seconds each. Just under seven minutes later you stop again, fielding another set of questions about the talk. Rinse and repeat.

I have no idea whether that would work. It could be great, in that it keeps the students' attention going, as there are breaks; no continuous talking for long amounts of time. It forces the lecturer to be well prepared, decide carefully what to talk about and how, and – as mentioned in the clip – lends itself nicely to podcasting. Bite-sized chunks, just right for the facebook generation?

It could also be a complete disaster. A choppy lecture, stop-and-go, artificial constraints, innovation for the sake of innovation, strange concepts, violating students' expectations on how to absorb information, potential for a stunned silence after 6:40mins, topics might not lend themselves to being presented like that.

One way where it might just work are workshops or mini-conferences. There would be a genuine reason for having such constraints, as there wouldn't be any pre-specified 50min slots, and you would have more than one speaker.

When starting this post I was all enthusiastic and willing to give it a go, but the more I think about it the more skeptical I get. Maybe I will give it a go some time. Maybe it's best to try it out at a low-stake event, such as organising a mini-conference. Especially in the English department this might work well, with a mixture of different subjects, from Linguistics, to Literature, to Old English... or at School/College level. A more varied set of topics would mean you could get a good overview, and if you weren't interested in a talk you'd just wait until it's over. While waiting you might find that it's more interesting than you initially expected.

Now how would that be for Open Days...?!

Back to Basics?

Technology is not always the best solution to a problem.

One issue that took two weeks to sort out was the assignment of students into groups in the FREDA module. I put students into groups, made one of each group a coordinator, and put their emails on WebCT with the 'suggestion' that they all should look up which group they were in, find out who their coordinator is, and email that person so that a group meeting could be set up.

For some reason, some students simply didn't do it. I have no idea why. Maybe this is too strange and unusual given the other tasks they have to perform at university? It was beginning to interfere with my running of the seminar, as I expected them to discuss the readings in the groups, and I didn't want to assign further readings until that had all been sorted.

Now in today's lecture I cut through this Gordian knot. I finished 10 minutes early, and sent all the TELLING students away (even though some were confused enough and stayed on asking what groups they were in...), and called out the groups, asking them to come to the front of the lecture theatre. And finally, the groups would meet... A few students were absent, so I rearranged/merged two other groups on the spot, but most groups now managed to get themselves set up.

What email and WebCT did not manage in 2 weeks was achieved in 5 minutes after the lecture... Now I hope that it'll all be a lot easier when the groups get reshuffled after reading week!

Various Updates

And another three weeks have passed since the last entry. Blogging for academics really cannot mean a post a day... but among these three weeks was: spending one week abroad at a conference in Mannheim, Germany, and then the first week of term with a re-written lecture and various other planning and preparing of teaching.

My conference talk was about reconciling grammar and phraseology (you can't, really), and I think it was well-received. It's always hard to tell, as my presentation style is very different from most other talks at pretty much any linguistics conference. Most talks will feature slides full of text, and very few images. Perhaps the odd diagram or two. Mine, on the other hand, hardly contain any text. Lots of pictures, and some slides with one sentence, blown up to fill the whole screen. And about 60 slides for a 30 minute talk. Now all I need is a black turtleneck sweater...

I also use this presentation style in my lectures, and in today's lecture on phonology I had the impression that the audience (first year students) did indeed listen (apart from lots of coughing, but I blame the weather for that). There is so much useful information about presenting effectively on the web (and in books), but this does not seem to have filtered through to academia. On the other hand, I don't know if there are any studies on how students respond to different presentation styles.

Then my Discourse Analysis module started. I duly split the students up into groups, deciding on the spot that the students in one seminar group would be 'group coordinators' for this half term, and then of course timetable clashes and late registrations messed up my nice 10/10/10/10 distribution, which now seems to be more like 12/7/9/12 or something. Still have to wait for another week or two before this settles down. And of course, some students didn't turn up, and consequently missed all of the detailed administrative monologue I delivered. I also hope the students where not too overwhelmed, but I will see over the coming weeks how this turns out.

Yesterday I then produced the first podcast for the module, 12 minutes altogether. I think that's plenty long enough to listen to me talking about odds and ends... I thought it was a useful way to round up what had been done in the seminar group meetings, repeat and expand on various issues. Tomorrow and Thursday in the group meetings I will find out if anybody actually listens to the thing!

Producing it was not very difficult. Just jotted down a list of things I wanted to cover, got the digital recorder set up, and started talking. One thing I noticed when doing the post-editing: I need to make it clearer when I restart. Probably say 'RESTART', that makes it a lot easier to find where to cut out bits where my spontaneous talking lead into a cul-de-sac. I don't like writing a full script, as it would be a lot more time-consuming, and it would take away the informal/conversational character of the podcast. Who would want to listen to me read out stuff? No, just as in lectures, free speech. I did notice some things I didn't like, eg my blatant over-use of the word 'basically', which I need to cut down on next time. But for the first attempt I am quite happy with it.

So, nothing for three weeks, and then a massively above-average-length post. I'll try to go back to a more regular schedule of smaller posts, and will try to also write a bit more about the 'research' part, which is the slightly under-represented triplet of the blog's title...

Twitter in Teaching?

I've been thinking about using twitter for teaching this year. One obvious application would be to get students to summarise articles they've read in the eponymous 140 characters or less. This I think would be really good to force them to be concise and restrict what they write to the most important part. But one problem I was wondering about is the transient nature of tweets: here today, gone tomorrow... But by chance I stumbled across a solution on twitter (thanks to Lou Burnard for that!): TweetDoc

Tweetdoc collects tweets and turns them into a PDF. Basically I'd get all students to mark their tweets with '#freda' or something, and then tweetdoc will be able to aggregate them in a single document (you can specify a date range as well as search terms). That seems like an OK solution to automatically produce a discussion document: everybody tweets about things they come across during the week that are in some way relevant to the module (and I think Discourse Analysis is almost everywhere...) and then in the seminar session the students get a tweetdoc as a handout, and comb through it, discussing what has been collected. Might work.

On the other hand, it might not; but it could work as an additional way of getting students who are interested in new technology to contribute to a seminar in a more indirect way. Perhaps they are too shy to mention something in the seminar, or by the time the seminar comes they've forgotten what they wanted to say. Twitter here can fill a gap between email to the lecturer (which might be too intimidating) and a direct communication in the seminar. It'd be somewhat anonymous (given the wide variety of twitter names) and as such might just be the ticket to more student-led discussions.

What do YOU think?

How many blogs does it take...?

I now have some more details about the shape of the FREDA module for next year. There will be 40 students, in 4 groups of 10 each. This makes life somewhat easy, as I can divide them up into 10 groups with 4 students each, which seems to be a good number to be able to have good discussions/collaboration, while still finding a regular date/time to meet during the week. And with ten groups there'll be 10 copies of each formative task, which should also not be too hard to deal with.

However, one component of the plan worries me: originally I had planned to set up one blog per group, but ten blogs seems rather excessive. What is the answer? One blog for all the students? Several blogs for more than one group? Somehow I will have to strike the right balance between it being too fragmented and too crowded. I shall have to think about that in more detail. It also, of course, depends on the great unknown: how the students will take up Web 2.0!

Why not WebCT?

The next iteration of my FREDA module will make use of a course blog. No WebCT. Well, some WebCT: I will need to use it as a repository for some of the seminar reading, as it cannot be put on publicly available sites, but that will pretty much be all I'm going to use it for. Why?

There are several reasons why I believe WebCT is not all that great for teaching. First, it's slow and clunky. Having moved it to a hosted environment rather than self-hosting it at Bham might have improved things a little, but it is still slow and clunky, that's inherent in the way it is implemented. Too Web 1.0. Doing anything in it takes ages, for example putting a link on. Creating the link wasn't too bad, but I wanted it in the top-left corner, and by default it started bottom-right. So I had to click on the properties/move/up about five times, having to scroll the screen each time. And all just for one link!

The second argument, which came to me today while responding to a comment on an earlier post, is actually far more important, as it deals with inherent motivation. Sure, we can make our students use WebCT because it is the only way they can get access to certain materials. But will they enjoy doing it? No. If I curse and swear while using it, then the students will not scream with pleasure either. That means, no points for motivation. It's a drudge, not an enjoyable experience.

However, blogs and other Web 2.0 stuff is interesting. It's part of modern life, and students will see that it is a useful skill. It is inherently useful to be able to find your way round this stuff, and many students are already used to it. That, I believe, is instrumental for participation. If they have a positive attitude and are interested, then they are much more likely to do things. At least that's the theory. I'll keep you all posted on how it goes next term!

Web 2.0 in Teaching

In a quiet post-marking moment I have set up the course blog for next year's FREDA module. I have built the year into the title, as there will be a new blog with every iteration of the module, and it's always easier to do if you plan that right from the start.

In the initial post I have outlined my plans for teaching the module. Any feedback welcome!

Job Advertising

I've always been in favour of openness and transparency when it comes to job advertisements. In the last millennium, when I was student representative at my university's faculty council, I managed to get through a motion that professors had to openly advertise any student RA jobs (there was money in those days for students to act as kind of personal assistants, doing a variety of jobs such as photocopying, putting together reading lists, or even, in my case, programming and systems admin). Until then, they would just approach some student they knew from their own seminars or lectures and would give them the job.

Advertising jobs openly is not only good for equal opportunities, it also broadens the reach, and you might get a better candidate. I happened to be in a seminar where the professor announced that he had some money for a student to work on a bibliography project, and asked if anybody was interested. I wasn't, but at the time I knew somebody with a first degree in documentation/library science stuff, so I recommended that person. Needless to say, the professor was very happy and in the faculty council enthusiastically supported my proposal.

Now I am in the same situation: I got some money from our Learning and Teaching fund for a project on using podcasts in teaching. Part of that grant includes 60 hrs of a PG student doing some research on best practices. I could just have approached a student from our department I know, and that would have made life very easy for me. But, remembering the experience from all those years ago, I decided to advertise it to all PG students in the college (I thought that would probably sufficient for outreach, though I could have of course included all PG students at the university, which might have been fairer).

So far (deadline for applications is tomorrow) I received 8 applications from a variety of students from different subject areas within the college. I haven't yet received CVs from all of them, but I can see that early next week I will have a very difficult task at hand, deciding which of those 8 will be the lucky one. What I have seen so far is really great, there are some very good applications, which I would not have come across had I simply gone for the easy way out. No pain, no gain... Ultimately it will be very hard on those 7 who I have to reject, because I have to. Not because I want to, as all of them would probably be suitable candidates. I will also have to think of a fair way to make that decision, as I know some applicants personally, and have never heard of others. Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to involve my co-applicant (Hello, Bill!), as he might bring some more detached objectivity into the equation.

Audio Feedback

Today I took part in an on-line seminar on providing feedback to students not in writing, but in audio format. The seminar itself was interesting, as people from all over the UK were participating, and there was a combination of 'chat' (written) and audio/video (mostly from the people organising it).

One project reported on an experiment where students were given audio feedback over the course of a year, and they all liked it (and so did the staff). With speaking, you can say more in the same time you'd need to write it, and it's also a richer medium -- presumably less ambiguous due to tone of voice etc. The time required to produce it is variable, from shorter to same to longer, and that probably depends on how streamlined the whole process can be made. Here is a summary of some of the advice given.

One of my seminar groups whose essays are now in my marking pile is fairly small, ideal circumstances to try it out. After consulting both the head of department and the exams officer I'll give it a go, but will have to provide a traditional feedback sheet as well. I've ordered a digital recorder (which can record straight to mp3), and will start marking their essays as soon as it has arrived.

Just need to think of a way to elicit feedback from the students to see what they thought of it. And a way to deliver it! Presumably using the dreaded WebCT. Maybe one thing it is actually useful for.

Marking

The marking season hasn't even started yet, and I'm already tired of it. At present I'm looking through a pile of formative assignments, which are exam-style questions to prepare students for what is awaiting them in a few weeks' time. And I don't like doing it.

Why not? Is this the typical whingeing about an unpleasant job? Partly. I can think of many things I'd rather do, and that I still have to do once the marking is finished. But that in itself is not the reason. Giving feedback should be one of the central tasks in education, but the ways we have available for it are not very satisfactory.

Ideally I would write an essay about the length of the students' submission to give them proper feedback about all the things I like and don't like about their work. Because the student will read it at some point, and might come back to me with questions about it, I have to be very specific, and have to make sure they can be read out of context (ie without having the student essay still fresh in mind). This is very difficult to do. And would consume more time than is available.

It is also the case that it is very hard to phrase feedback properly. I can easily read a text and decide whether I like it or not, but then telling somebody else why I came to that conclusion is difficult. Often these points are on an almost sub-conscious level, and hard to verbalise. It would also be a lot easier if it could be delivered in a face-to-face conversation, as interactivity would be much better than simply a list of bullet points with good and bad points about the student's work. Resource shortage however makes that impossible, apart from practical considerations.

Maybe it would be an idea to try out what other people have done: record feedback orally, and then send it to the students. It would be quicker to say something, rather than to write it down in great detail, but dealing with sound files might be more time-consuming in the end.

So it remains the only option for the moment, filling in feedback forms, printing them off, attaching them to the paper, and hoping that the students will be able to use them to improve their work. Unsatisfactory!