CHEM

Professor Susan Hendrickson Nominated for ASSETT Teaching with Tech Awards

Anonymous — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Professor Susan Hendrickson Nominated for ASSETT Teaching with Tech Awards Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2014 - 00:00

Not once, but twice now �� Boulder students have nominated Chemistry Professor Susan Hendrickson for an ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award for her teaching of General Chemistry 2, Chemistry 1133. "[Hendrickson]'s ... a really good, fun, effective teacher!" wrote one student.

In particular, students appreciate Hendrickson's use of lecture capture and document capture systems. She sympathizes with students who are not naturally early risers and is happy to post videos of her lectures online after each class. Students appreciate her efforts: "[Hendrickson's use of the lecture capture system] shows that she is genuinely interested in her students learning the material." Another student wrote, "... [Hendrickson] uses lecture capture ... so we can go back and watch her explanations of problems and concepts if we miss a class or are reviewing." Hendrickson explains her strategy: "When I lecture capture, I have one feed on the PowerPoint ... and the other feed is the document camera ... The document camera is really valuable because students can see how I write out a problem," rather than if they could only follow along instructions in a textbook or even just read through her PowerPoint slides without hearing her voice. Another student wrote, "... the document camera ... is extremely helpful in our large lecture ... because it lets us watch her as she does the problems step by step."

Students report that Hendrickson's lecture capture, along with the actual former tests that she posts on D2L, have really helped them prepare for exams. "I think it's good to share information," says Hendrickson. Additionally, "We use all online homework," says Hendrickson, citing McGraw-Hill's LearnSmart and BookSmart Adaptive Learning software, which, "Provides detailed answers to homework questions," and allows for highlighting when reading electronic text.

When asked about her favorite part of teaching, Hendrickson responds: "One of the best things is to see students go on and do something after and be successful," and she gives examples of students who have followed their dreams into both scientific and also not so scientific fields. Hendrickson adds, "And the jokes," and pulls up a nerdy Foxtrot strip that she recently put on the first page of students' exams.

Hendrickson says that her goals for teaching are adapting to a new textbook this fall and possibly incorporating Camtasia videos of working through problems. "I like learning new technology," she says.

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Ingrid Ulbrich: PhET Sims on Student Computers During Class

Anonymous — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Ingrid Ulbrich: PhET Sims on Student Computers During Class Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 06/15/2013 - 00:00

How can I teach undergraduate chemistry students to build pictures in their minds, and consider what might happen if something changes about that system? By giving them an example system that they can watch and manipulate. And how can I get my 600 students to explore such systems with guidance from an expert and discuss their findings? Ask them to bring their laptops to class!

Teaching and Learning Challenge

The real wonders of chemistry occur not at the macroscopic level where we experience everyday life, but at the microscopic level where protons, neutrons, and electrons exist as atoms, atoms interact to form molecules, and molecules interact with each other do something cool. In chemistry (and especially in General Chemistry), we want our students to be able to conceive of matter at this fine level, but they can’t observe these minute interactions directly, even in the lab. Really getting to the guts of chemistry can require a lot of imagination, especially since these systems are complex with lots of parts, and dynamic so that all of those parts move around at the same time.

So how can I teach undergraduate chemistry students to build these pictures in their minds, and consider what might happen if something changes about that system? By giving them an example system that they can watch and manipulate. And how can I get my 600 students to explore such systems with guidance from an expert and discuss their findings? Ask them to bring their laptops to class!

Let me talk about the simulations first. The PhET group at �� has created dozens of simulations (sims) for chemistry (and other fields related to math, science, and engineering) so that students can observe and explore phenomena at the microscopic scale. Even better than many lab experiments, the PhET sims let the user control and manipulate the system, sometimes changing variables that would be hard to change in real life. Some sims even show data that would be obtained for models that we’ve since proven incorrect, like the “plum pudding” and orbit models of the atom. These simulations are really built so that students can explore ideas about each system, pose their own questions (“What happens if...”) and answer them, and construct their knowledge about the system.

Since the PhET sims have so many options for exploration, you can’t just tell a student, “Here’s a sim. Learn everything you can about this topic.” Very few students would be able to construct good knowledge. Students need more guidance about what they can explore, especially for sims that show complex phenomena. A great way to use the sims with students is with guided inquiry -- asking a question where students can predict an outcome, then explore their prediction with the sim.

I’ve used sims in my course in several ways -- in lecture, where I show the simulation on my computer and ask students to make predictions, then show the changes; in recitation (20 students to 1 TA), with a worksheet-style activity; and as homework, with a short set of questions. But I really think that students’ learning is best when they can explore with an expert, manipulate the variables themselves, ask for clarification, and receive quick correction if their thinking goes astray. If we use the simulations in lecture, I’m also (more) sure that students are doing the activity, all students do it the same day (instead of across a week’s worth of recitations), and I can be flexible during the lecture with the direction of exploration. So in my General Chemistry course (2 lectures with 200 and 400 students, respectively), I invited my students to bring their laptops to lecture so that we could work with several of the simulations together.

Of course, there are some challenges. The expert to learner ratio is 1:200 or 1:400. I’ve just invited hundreds of distracting devices into my classroom. And now I’ll need to keep all of those people engaged and on task. But I’m up for the challenge! In upcoming posts, I’ll report about using three simulations during four class lectures (two different weeks) in these large lecture sections, what worked and didn’t in this course, and whether I’m crazy enough to do this again in the future.

Plan for Implementation

During two weeks of the Spring 2013 semester I invited students in my very large lectures (200 and 400 students, respectively) to bring their laptops to class so that we could work with simulations from the PhET group together in class. The planning for these lectures had two main components -- getting students prepared, and having the lecture prepared.

Preparing the students was easy -- they just needed to download the simulations and bring their laptops. We worked with three main simulations on student computers during the lectures: Models of the Hydrogen Atom (two lectures during the third week of the course), Molecule Shapes, and Molecule Polarity (one lecture each during the eighth week of the course). Students were instructed to download the simulations ahead of time and test them out on their computer, with reminders in the previous lecture and by email.

Preparing the lectures was more challenging. My co-instructor the course, a PhET simulation expert, and I wanted students to use the sims in several different ways, including exploration, answering open questions, making and testing predictions, and as a resource to check their answers to other questions. So we planned our lectures to allow all of these practices.

My co-instructor has done research about the level of student exploration of sim features and the level of guided direction. We wanted to set aside a few minutes for students to do some broad exploration of each sim, so we prepared a few broad questions in one slide and asked students to come up with some answers. After a few minutes we regrouped for whole-class discussion and filled in the answers on the tablet PC.

We also wrote clicker questions based on the simulation and its images.

Preparing for this type of “lecture” is really a challenge. The hardest part is developing a clear set of learning goals for the students to help guide them to construct new knowledge and build on their existing knowledge. Knowing how long each sim-related activity will take is a bit of an art, so you have to keep your eye on the clock during the lecture. It also helps to be flexible during the lecture to handle questions from students and decide how to tackle any technical challenges.

So that was the plan. What could go wrong??

Up next in my series: Was this experiment a success?

Indicators for Success

When your lecture seems like chaos, how can you tell whether it “works”?

A class session in which a third of the students have laptops out and most students are engaged in exploring a simulation of the microscopic world looks (and sounds!) like chaos. How can anyone tell whether these students are just messing around with the computer or if they’re actually learning something? In this post I’m going to discuss some ideal -- and some more realistic -- indicators of success.

First, I should say what “success” would look like. My goal for using simulations during class is to help all of my students gain better or deeper understanding of these topics than I think we could achieve with just the textbook and some lecture slides. Ideally, students will be able to clearly and correctly explain each topic, draw pictures of these phenomena, and predict what might happen if you alter the system. That’s a lot to ask for, and a lot of learning to measure.

Ideally, I’d try to measure each of these items compared to students from a previous semester. Unfortunately, I didn’t have this opportunity because this is the first time I’ve taught this particular course, and I didn’t have comparison data from other students. So I don’t have the “hard data” that, as a scientist, I’d use to draw a strong conclusion.

However, I surveyed my students after each of these sims-in-class weeks to see what they liked and disliked about using the sims in class, to what degree they thought using the sims in class improved their learning, and for their open feedback on this topic. I also asked exam questions based on the simulation topics (sometimes using screenshots from the actual sims) to gauge their comprehension. Finally, I was able to observe students during the class sessions and see their level of engagement with the activity, including discussion with their peers about open-ended and clicker questions that I used during each session. Engagement may not be the same as learning during these sessions, but I suspect that they are often related.

All of these metrics of success focus on the student side of learning, but there are also ways to assess potential growth in my teaching, too. “Success” for myself in this exercise includes whether I can achieve the learning goals that I have set out in each session, whether the questions I’ve posed to students are clear and solicit the responses I’m hoping for, and whether, if it didn’t quite work out during the first week of sim use, I was able to make an improvement for the next time.

In my final post on this in-class experiment, I’ll reflect on any successes for my students’ learning and my teaching when using sims on student computers in large lectures.

Reflection

During the Spring 2013 semester I invited my students to bring laptops to class to run simulations during two weeks of the course. These class sessions were a little bit crazy, with about ⅓ of students bringing computers to the very large lectures (enrollment of 200 and 400 students). After each set of in-class sim use, I surveyed students about their opinions of using sims in class. Overall I think this experiment was a success, both for my students’ learning and for my growth as an instructor. In this post I’ll discuss what worked, what didn’t work, and what I’d try to change in the future.

What Worked

I organized these class sessions to allow students a few minutes to explore the sim and answer a few broad questions, and later in each class session students used the sims to answer several clicker questions. During these classes, I wandered the aisles of the classroom during open-answer exploration and clicker questions to observe the students. Students that were using the sim on their computer or sitting next to those students were engaged in deep, active discussion about the activity. Although I can’t be sure that they were learning everything I wanted them to, it was clear that they were participating and thinking. Students nearby, in the same row or in the row behind the computer, watched but rarely participated in a discussion. Students who weren’t able to see a peer’s computer reported that they mainly watched the sim projected on the instructor’s screen. I think these activities were quite beneficial for students that were able to actively participate.

I asked students whether they felt that using the simulations in class on their own computers was useful for their learning. Most students reported that the simulations helped their learning “a little”, “somewhat”, or “a lot”, with higher ratings after the second set of simulations.

Finally, there was some positive student feedback about using the sims in class. Many students noted that it really helped them to visualize some of the topics that are hard to draw on paper (the energy levels for the electronic structure of the hydrogen atom, the three-dimensional shapes of molecules); however, many requested more guidance and clarity during the class session to make the simulation use more productive.

This is a short list of “successes” for the class, but I think they’re enough to get me to try this again in the future, with several modifications for both my part and the students’.

What Didn’t Work, and How to Fix It

First, a lot of students were resistant to using simulations during “lecture” time and felt that they were not being “taught” the material. Most students think that “learning” happens when I talk and they write, but a couple decades of science education research have shown that’s not the case! Most �� students are used to clickers and are willing to go along with clicker questions as “learning”, but using computer simulations in class was too far out of the box for many. I think this resistance signifies that I haven’t done a good enough job of explaining to my students how learning happens, and why doing constructivist activities in class is learning. In future courses where I want students to use sims on their computers, I know I need to start this discussion at the beginning of the course and return to it often so that students can better appreciate active learning techniques.

Second, we had several challenges with actually using the sims during class. Many students were resistant or unable to bring a laptop to class. Some students commented that they don’t have a laptop, and some said that they don’t want to carry one all day. Nevertheless, about a third of students did bring laptops. It seems like that should make a nice arrangement for groups of three students per computer. But the computers were not distributed evenly around the lecture hall, so some students were in a laptop-less desert. Despite encouragement from the instructors, students would not move, even just one seat to be near someone with a computer. Perhaps this is a consequence of the fixed-seating arrangement of lecture halls, but many students had the opportunity to move over a few seats and would not go. I think one solution to both of these problems might be to form small groups (3-4) of students early in the course so that they get used to working together. One group task would be to make sure that a group member brings a laptop on days when we use simulations in class. Setting up groups in a class of 200 will be a challenge, but it might be a way to create a little bit of community and address this problem.

We also faced technical challenges to get the sims running on student laptops during class. We instructed students to download and run the sim on their laptop before coming to class, but only a few students did so. So when we asked students to start up the sims during class, many needed to download the sim and update relevant software. This caused two problems. First, in the larger lecture, we saturated the wireless network, and second, it wasted class time when I wanted students to be working with the sims. The network issues were an easy fix after I told OIT about the problem. Getting students to prepare for class is a little more challenging. I think the key might be to give an pre-assignment worth a few points that requires students to explore the sims and therefore download and make them run on their computers.

I could also improve my in-class plans for sim days. I wanted to give students time to explore the simulation, answer overarching questions about each topic, and create clicker questions to chain together the learning goals. During the first week, when we used the PheT Models of the Hydrogen Atom sim, the overarching questions were quite broad, and students reported on class surveys that they wanted more guidance during this activity. I think their comments were warranted; this sim shows several models of a complex system, with multiple representations of the models. That’s a lot to process on the fly during class! (Again, an advantage of a pre-class sim assignment.) During the second week of in-class sim use we worked with the Molecule Shapes and Molecule Polarity sims. Both of these are less complex than the Hydrogen Atom sim, which made them a little easier for the students. I also did a little more demonstration of some of the sims’ features and really worked to focus and clarify the open-answer, exploratory questions. After this round of sims, students reported that these sim days were more helpful for their learning than the first round. So I made some progress, but further improving the guidance and outline for these classes will be an added improvement.

Finally, I also used the simulations to write exam questions to connect to the images that students had already seen in class. The question below was on an exam a few days after the first week of sim use, but before students had performed a lab experiment on the same topic. Unfortunately, students did not perform well on this question (45% answered correctly). I hadn’t asked a quantitative question about the relationship between wavelength and energy, so I’m not sure how to interpret the low scores. Discussions with students after the exam showed that some were confused because two of the lines weren’t the full height of the graph. Students had observed these short lines when using the sim in class, and no one who proofed the exam (my co-instructor and three chemistry graduate students) realized that the different heights of the lines would add an unintended challenge for students. Overall, I think using the sims to create exam questions is a good practice, and I intend to continue and reuse some of these in the future.

The Outlook

I think this experiment to have students bring their laptops to class to explore simulations of microscopic phenomena was a success. Despite the challenge, I think that the sims that show more complex phenomena are better for in-class use because students can benefit more from expert guidance. Making sims-in-class work better will require a lot of improvements. I’ll certainly be attempting this again in my classes, implementing the changes I outlined above. I think I’m on the right track.

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Is Lecture Capture Effective?

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Is Lecture Capture Effective? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/22/2012 - 00:00

"I don't think it's my job to make students come to class," says Dr. Ingrid Ulbrich, chemistry instructor at �� Boulder. Nor does she think it important to take attendance, though she cares deeply about her student's success. During the spring and summer of 2012, Dr. Ulbrich used Lecture Capture software to record her lessons and made the video files and lecture notes available through an online database. Because students have constant access to these recordings, there are no acceptable excuses for missing a lesson. Accessing class material is the student's responsibility alone.

Over the past several decades, new technology has enabled teachers to shift classroom dynamics. Some technologies are uncomplicated upgrades, like replacing light projectors with digital projectors. Others have the potential to fundamentally alter how students learn. On its surface, Lecture Capture is a simple recording tool, yet integrating this technology into the classroom can affect information retention and student accountability in profound ways.

In August of 2009, the �� Office of Information Technology began equipping select classrooms with the technologies needed to use Lecture Capture. In these classrooms, faculty are able to record lectures automatically. The system is set up to begin one minute before the lecture is scheduled to start and end one minute after, allowing the instructor to focus on teaching. These video-recorded lectures can then be automatically posted on Desire2Learn for students to access at any time.

Faculty who do not have access to the equipped classrooms can record their lectures with a computer webcam or video camcorder. Screen capture software can be used to supplement these recordings for more in-depth presentations. Software like Camtasia Relay[1] makes it possible for the user to display presentation slides and lecture notes alongside the video recording. These pre-recorded lectures can be used to supplement material covered during the lecture and are often made available on video sharing sites such as Vimeo and YouTube.

Instructors choose to use Lecture Capture for a variety of reasons. Dr. Ingrid Ulbrich encourages students who have a difficult time grasping the material to review lectures multiple times. "I remember trying to take notes as an undergraduate," says Dr. Ulbrich, explaining how she struggled to simultaneously take notes and listen to the presentation. With Lecture Capture, students can pay attention and think more." Simply having the option to review a lecture a second time has the potential to help students with a range of learning styles retain material. Making recorded lectures available online also means that students who miss class due to illness will not fall behind. Because all lectures are available, students are accountable for every lesson and have to determine for themselves the best way to retrieve the information. "It makes it less of my responsibility," say Ulbrich.

From the instructor's perspective, there are many additional benefits. Watching the recorded lectures allows teachers to experience class from a student's perspective. Instructors can refer back to the recordings in order to pinpoint weaknesses and improve their teaching ability. Instructors who must be absent due to illness or travel may also benefit from this system. One history professor at �� Boulder was able to use Lecture Capture to prerecord her lessons and have them shown in class during a long absence.

So what are the drawbacks? Some instructors worry that Lecture Capture will discourage students from attending class. Although regular attendance may not be an issue in large auditorium classes, smaller discussion classes may benefit from engaged dialogue. There are also some technical issues that still need resolving. Because audio playback can sometimes begin after video playback has already started, "students come to the video and think it's broken," says Ulbrich. However, with a little advanced warning, this problem is a minor one.

The most pressing issue is simply that there are too few classrooms to go around. "I'm kind of bummed that I don't have [a Lecture Capture classroom] this semester," says Ulbrich. This fall, she has been using a laptop recorder and Camtasia Relay software to continue recording her lessons, but this process is more time-consuming. Ulbrich encourages all instructors to try Lecture Capture and she has a similar message for students. "This is a tool that is available to you," she says "and you really need to take advantage of that."

Article By: Stephanie Hayden and Ashley Williams

[1] Camtasia Relay is lecture recording software that allows the viewer to jump directly to specific content through a simple word or phrase search on the sidebar. A table of contents allows the viewer to skip directly to relevant information without having to waste time fast-forwarding or re-winding, and closed captioning capabilities makes the content available for almost anyone to use. Students can access the videos from their iPods, iPhones, or iPads .

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