Active Learning + Simple Technology = Revolutionized Teaching
by Alan Bilansky, CITES EdTech Consultant
The conventional wisdom about technology in the classroom includes a number of ideas that reflect individual experience and preference, but shouldn't be accepted as eternal truths:
If I add technology my lecture material will be more interesting...
I won't bother with all that work - it's just bells and whistles...
Technology has nothing to do with pedagogy - It's just a delivery method...
Professor of Animal Science Walter Hurley's course in lactation biology challenges all of these commonplace assumptions.
Ten years ago, Professor Hurley decided to transform his course from one that relied on a traditional lecture format to one that centered on problem solving and inquiry-based learning. To effect this transformation, he made relatively simple technology - mostly simple web pages that he constructs himself - serve his pedagogical purposes. As his course evolved from a traditional lecture model to a course completely based around inquiry learning, Professor Hurley has used technology to support and enable his new course model. To some extent, the technology made the transformation possible.
If we visited Professor Hurley's class a decade ago his students would have been spending much of their time sitting quietly in rows listening to a lecture. If we walk into his class today, however, his class is markedly different. His students spend the majority of their time working in groups, talking to each other, and asking Professor Hurley questions as he wanders around the room. Instead of listening to a lecture, his students learn about lactation biology by working to solve the problems Professor Hurley poses to them. This change in classroom teaching occurred when Professor Hurley began exploring active learning at the same time that he was discovering the potential of the interactivity of the web.
Professor Hurley began to transform his course by embracing the ideas of active learning, which posits that students learn best by doing. Professor Hurley decided that instead of lectures, students would be given problems to solve to help them learn about lactation. Therefore, students would need to master and understand the course content in order to solve the cases assigned to them.
"Professor Hurley thinks that what students learn from problem-solving (critical thinking, teamwork, diagnostic thinking) will probably be more valuable than the content of the course itself. Although the subject matter of Professor Hurley's course is lactation biology, "the object is really to get students to do other things like problem-solving, critical thinking, and team work.""
Professor Hurley thinks that what students learn from problem-solving (critical thinking, teamwork, diagnostic thinking) will probably be more valuable than the content of the course itself. Although the subject matter of Professor Hurley's course is lactation biology, "the object is really to get students to do other things like problem-solving, critical thinking, and team work." Throughout the semester students solve a series of case studies. In each case study students are given the details of an actual problem at a dairy farm (for example, "Farmer Bo Vine has called you in August and indicated that he has a mastitis problem in his herd. He provides the following information . . .") and must use the supplied background material to form their best veterinary diagnosis. Professor Hurley also provides students with an explicit, twelve-step procedure for problem-solving.
The first cases are "textbook problems" - the kind that can easily be solved using the provided information. Students then move on to harder cases - more like the ones practitioners face in reality - in which Professor Hurley's scenario simply doesn't provide enough information to come up with a simple solution. Now students have to use the information they have to make educated guesses at the solutions. As they go along, students have to rely more and more on the background material, which means they do have to decide which information is most relevant. "This is all a means to get the students to think critically," he says. At first, this background material included a textbook and handouts, but now everything is online.
"I do use PowerPoint," Professor Hurley says, "but only to present the cases to the class or give broader perspectives on the topic," not to serve up the course content to students. The technology most central to learning is his web site, and it's impressive in several ways. To begin with, it collects a huge amount of information on the subject. Professor Hurley maintains two versions of this web site, one open to the public, and one inside Illinois Compass. His Illinois Compass site is "basically the newest version of my public web site," which includes quizzes, student work, and other materials kept behind a password to protect student privacy and to better serve fair use and copyright concerns. Compass is where he does his experimenting, but "I try to move as much as possible from Compass to the public site." In part this is because he knows the public site is used as a resource for lactation biology-related courses at several universities. He says, "I get questions about a wide range of aspects on lactation from all around the world from people who Google 'lactation' or 'mammary gland.'"
Pedagogical Value
The web site is also impressive in its usability, or how it is designed to support inquiry-based learning. It is not simply a textbook, or a collection of handouts in a course packet, but a true online reference. Professor Hurley never stops thinking about design and usability issues. "I've been doing this for ten years and a lot of it gets down to these questions: How do I organize it? How do I make sure the web pages are integrated into my class? How do I make it useable to the student?"
Professor Hurley thinks a lot about how much information his web pages should hold. Choosing to follow a link to a web page is a choice to read about a specific topic. Students trying to solve cases go directly to what they need to learn, drilling down from the general topic of mammary structure, for instance, into the narrower topic of the micro scale (or cellular structure) to the specific topics to be considered under the head of tissue organization. Instead of just printing out the equivalent of a whole book chapter - as students might do when they go to the Wikipedia for information - students are forced to make choices about what they need to learn.
"Professor Hurley's design allows opportunities for negotiating different paths, as students map out their own course through the content and move at their own pace."
Lectures and textbooks feed information to students in a pre-packaged order. If students are going to learn material as they need it, then information should come in small batches. Professor Hurley's design allows opportunities for negotiating different paths, as students map out their own course through the content and move at their own pace. You might ask, "How do they use it? On screen or on paper? A little at a time or a lot? The answer," says Professor Hurley, "is all of the above. It depends on the student."
More than the technical issues, he worries about questions of how much a person is willing to scroll, that is, "doing things horizontally rather than vertically," and this leads him to think about issues of how long individual pages should be, and how large the font should be, to encourage quick reading on the screen without printing. He thinks we should allow students to decide what should be read on the screen and what is important enough to be printed.
Simple Technology
At the same time that Professor Hurley was thinking seriously about active learning, he noticed that many professors were now using the web as a substitute for some paper handouts. To move his hard copy handouts to the web, Professor Hurley asked an undergraduate to come into his office and spend an hour teaching him the basics of HTML. "I just went on from there. That hour has served me for a decade."
Professor Hurley then began to hand code his web pages, taking paragraphs from his lecture notes and adding HTML tags around them. Now he uses Dreamweaver to create and edit his web pages, just because it's faster. At first, all he had was his own lecture notes. Eventually, he started to add images such as photographs and diagrams, and began doing more to control the formatting.
"Professor Hurley's course web site allows students to piece together their own hyper-textual textbooks as they take the class."
Professor Hurley thought there was more potential to this technology than merely an alternative way of distributing handouts. So, he began experimenting with making the material more interactive, giving students more control over the process of learning, allowing them to customize the course to their own learning styles. As a result, the web site evolved from simply displaying lecture notes, into an interactive space for students to engage in their learning. Professor Hurley reasoned that if students are going to learn the material according to their own learning style, then the lecture and the textbook, which feed the information to students in a prepackaged order, are not the best way to deliver information. Instead, course content should be called up in small batches so that students can choose the order in which they receive the material. Professor Hurley's course web site allows students to piece together their own hyper-textual textbooks as they take the class.
"HTML's so simple, I don't know why people are intimidated. Ten or a dozen tags is all you have to learn." The technical issues don't become a headache for him because, "I keep it simple. Everything on my site, I can do myself. If I can do it, that means I can get it done, so I don't have to wait on someone else. Even when the night before the first day of class comes along, I can do it myself. Because I can do this, that means everything can be changed, updated, reorganized."
"HTML's so simple, I don't know why people are intimidated. Ten or a dozen tags is all you have to learn." The technical issues don't become a headache for him because, "I keep it simple."
Professor Hurley is considering more ambitious use of multimedia in his course. Currently, his students go to the farm and watch (in person) sows nursing their litters. According to Professor Hurley, "you might watch this for two hours and only see the actual nursing twice." This led Professor Hurley to ask whether or not he could show his students short video clips before they go to the farm, so they can better recognize what they're seeing, and increase the effectiveness of their field experience. But, again, as he discusses this further, he turns to issues of pedagogy and design, remarking that the clips should only be long enough to get a single point across.
Professor Walt Hurley proves that you can do a lot with a little technology. You don't need to be a technology expert. You simply need to keep a clear view of your teaching goals, and let the technology fall in behind it.
Professor Walt Hurley's Teaching Awards:
- Campus Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Instruction Using Educational Technologies, Honorable Mention, 2003
- Land O' Lakes/Purina Teaching Award in Dairy Production, American Dairy Science Association, in recognition of outstanding teaching of undergraduate students in dairy science, 2004
- ACES Senior Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2005
- Campus Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Instruction, University of Illinois, 2005
- Teaching Academy of Excellence, College of ACES, 2005-2008
- NACTA Teaching Award of Merit, 2005
- NACTA Teaching Fellow, 2006
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