reflective e-journals/e-portfolios

I have had great success getting my students to experiment with reflective e-journals over the last three years. Here is the blurb from the student guide followed by some samples from 2015-16:

The e-portfolio/learning journal is the place where will demonstrate your knowledge and skills through documented pieces of evidence of critical thinking and deep learning experiences in which you reflect on your learning processes and self-development: it means thoughtfully defining an experience, explaining that experience, and explaining its implications – a change in perspective and how it might lead to future actions or the way it has contributed to the development of soft skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_skills.You might describe how you felt about an assignment, task or experience and what you have learned: new concepts, new approaches to study, future application of knowledge or skills to a whole new context, identification of your learning strengths and weaknesses, or your ability to collaborate successfully in a group. This personal assessment is important to your ‘metacognition’: your active awareness of how your thought processes work in order to maximize the potential for you to become a lifelong learner.

Sample learning journals 2015-16

Happy accidents – re-functioning that spare lecture hour

Toledo, Spain, June 2015

This semester with my Contemporary Latin(o) Americas subject, I decided beforehand to just deliver the first 2 lectures face to face and put the rest (plus the first 2) up online in advance, in line with my continuing flipped learning experiment. Actually, I never really ‘delivered’ the first 2 lectures face-to-face – I just used the time to get to meet and greet the students, explain the course in detail, ask them to write down what they thought made a good tutorial, what their and my responsibilities were, etc. After the first 2 lectures I then intended to just meet the students for the 2-hour tutorial each week.

I continued that structure for the second week, as several students did not turn up to first week – some were travelling and some seem to have a perception that nothing gets done in the first week (?!) However, UTS has gone onto a 12-week semester and since I don’t do face-to-face lectures anymore, it is vital to fully utilise every week’s tutorial. Anyway, in the second week I invited along one of UTS’s education technologists, Ariane Skapetis, to speak in the lecture hour slot. Since I was instituting an e-learning journal for the first time (in lieu of the end-of-semester test), I thought it might be a good idea to ask students if they wanted to go the Full Monty and establish their own e-portfolios for future employment aspirations. The technologist would explain how to set them up. It is not a requirement to do a general e-portfolio – they only have to do a reflective e-journal for this particular subject – nevertheless, they mostly seemed keen.

A lot turned up and the session went really well. After an engaging demonstration by Ariane  on how to set up a free WordPress site, we got students to do a bit of hands on to get them started. They seemed genuinely enthused. Suddenly the penny dropped: why not use that one-hour lecture time slot, which I was going to abandon after Week 2, as a weekly, casual drop-in hour for individual student work on e-portfolios, assignments, their reflective journals, whatever, and then resume the normal interactive tutorials after that? So this is the happy accident. I am so excited because I know a lot are going to turn up each week. It gives them a chance at a lot of one-on-one with me or my teaching assistant or the technologist if they so desire. I have also now arranged in Week 6 for a campus career consultant to come and talk for 30 minutes in that same lecture time slot on desired graduate attributes by profession, especially since I teach a mixed class from all faculties. This promises to be a great move. I like happy accidents.

Asking the students – what makes a good tutorial?

My ideal tutorial dynamic

As a useful classroom activity, I asked my students to write down What makes a good tutorial and what are the responsibilities of the tutor and the student towards making the tutorial a worthwhile learning experience. I attach the verbatim replies – have fun thinking through the responses. I will return to this post at some stage and say what adjustments I have made in response to the students comments. The comments are coloured slightly by the fact that we had already had our first tutorial and they no doubt modelled a few of their answers based on that first experience. I’d like to believe the varied, interactive and comfortable learning environment I try to create from day 1 contributed to some of the replies, though I did ask them to comment on tutorials in general – not just mine. (thanks Peter Kandlbinder for the activity tip)

Organising effective groups for assignments

Welsh coastline, Glamorgan, 5 July 2015

Another of the interesting workshops at IML touched on good organisation of group work. One of the handouts was an extensive guide developed by Adam Morgan. I chose to form groups of 4 students (4/5 was the suggested size). I also read with interest the section on “Forming Effective Groups”, which reviews 4 options: “random selection; self-selection; selective appointment; and task appointment”. I wanted to avoid random selection, whether by alphabetical order or other – from past experience, a portion of students are always unhappy with their group because of this. I also wanted to avoid self-selection, because students tend to play it safe and gravitate towards their friends, usually leaving some students feeling unwanted. “Task appointment” was  a possibility (“the instructor offers students a number of topics and let’s them select”), but students need to do choose their won topic as long as it relates to their in-country study destination the following year. I decided it was better (and quicker to get them going) if I used a “selective appointment” approach. I spent a couple of hours looking at each student’s main degree and their country of destination for next year’s study abroad in the Americas (they are doing a double degree in a profession and International studies). This way I was able to combine students into groups based on country of destination and vocational degree area. For example, I was able to form a group of Journalism students who are going to Chile together, Public Communication students who are going to Argentina together, engineers, science, etc. When I explained the method to the students (I projected the Excel working sheet on the screen), they seemed quite pleased – no complaints: “This is better because one of the problems with group work I’ve had in the past is that tutors think it’s best to link one business student with one science and one journalism and so forth, but it doesn’t work – there is no real common link. Anyway, through this method we actually got the group membership we wanted!” So far so good, then. Let’s see the results later on.

Using reflective e-journals for the first time as an assessment task

Zen Garden, Kew Gardens, London, June 2015

I decided to ditch the end-of-semester test from last year’s iteration of the Contemporary Latin(o) Americas subject that I coordinate and teach. I used the test in an innovative way, getting students to co-design 6 questions and then choosing 4 of 6 for the test (they didn’t know which ones and had to study for the 6). They chose 2 to answer – the two they thought they could tackle best. I posted on this back in October last year: https://testingflippedlearning2013.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/students-designing-their-own-test-questions/

Nevertheless, it still does not completely eliminate the issues of exam anxiety or last-minute cramming, leading to information loss rapidly after and thy exercise leans to surface learning more than deep learning. Interestingly, I tutored in someone else’s subject in Autumn semester this year and one of the students in the Student Feedback Survey panned the weekly in-class tests on required readings:  “I feel there was a lot of extra readings, and there was no way that I could get through it all each week as much as I tried … there was too much to complete the weekly exams [sic quizzes], and these always created extra stress for me, making the semester much more stressful due to trying to juggle all the assignments with the exams”.

So this year I have replaced the test in CL(o)As with a reflective e-journal. I asked a colleague what she thought of e-journals as she had experimented with them in the past with a language class. She responded that the reflective journals on language were very negatively evaluated by students as a waste of time and she herself regarded the whole exercise a waste of time for her to mark as well and will probably not use them again.

I am going into this open-minded, however. Perhaps the key is the nature of the subject you want students to reflect on in an e-journal. You also need to properly present the task, give clear guidelines and give examples, then check a couple of times during the semester that they are on track (creating entries demonstrating deep reflection). Here is a great online guide from RMIT University in Melbourne, which I have included in the student guide: http://www.deakin.edu.au/students/study-support/academic-resources/reflective-writing

I have high hopes. Let’s see how I go. If it is a flop, I’ll drop it, but at a minimum I will gain insight into student thinking about learning that I might not otherwise get and this will guide my subject design for 2016. Stay tuned for results.

First class – set the tone and expectations

Lily pond, Kew Gardens, London, July 2015

I recently attended a teaching workshop at UTS’s Institute for Interactive Media and Learning (IML): ‘Active & collaborative learning in the classroom’. One of the key takeaways was the importance of getting off on the right foot from day one: set tone (friendly, collegial, ready to work), and be well organised. I then did something I have not done for years, since the days when I used to teach Spanish at university: I walked into the classroom (3rd year subject in a double degree) with a detailed tutorial plan. I had devised a mix of student group activities, general classroom discussion, and short tutor instruction pieces. The assessment tasks in this subject are: critical literature review (30%); group cultural case study (40%); reflective e-journal (30%).

3 new things I did:

I began by getting students to introduce themselves and say why they had chosen a Latin American Major and what they were passionate about. One of the tips I picked up at the IML workshop was to get students to write down 3 things they were excited about as the subject began and 3 things they were anxious about. Students discussed their individual responses among each other on each table; then we had a classroom discussion based on the brief summaries of each table’s responses. It worked a treat. Not only did it act as another icebreaker (with humorous interludes), but it was a mini-diagnostic exercise for adjusting their expectations against the subject and vice versa – I told them what I am both excited and anxious about. (Some sample responses follow below at the end of this post).

The other thing I did was invite an education technologist from IML to brief the students on using Google Drive as a way of warehousing their draft group case studies. Some had used it before, but most had not. She explained the flexibility and other features of Google drive and Google Docs as well as made comments on using a reflective e-journal (new assessment task this year instead of the tired old standard in-class test). I also learned a lot from the session.

I arranged for an ex-student to turn up halfway through the tutorial. He has done this subject before (2013) and spent 2014 on In-Country Study in Mexico. I asked him to address the students about his experiences and also to display some of his own work, including a great, reflective blog he did while in Mexico. He is currently doing some part-time work for me as a research assistant and is also co-creating subject content. Students thus got a chance to see what success is like and also ask the student speaker about other aspects of his work and learning experiences.

Students are excited about:

• ‘meeting those going to the same country’ (they do a year of In-Country Study in Latin America);
• ‘no exams!’ (old pedagogy for me)
• ‘a class environment where critical thinking is encouraged’
• ‘using the knowledge to further my career’; ‘potential for career’ (we discussed being conscious of the leverage to be obtained from the subject for career opportunities)
• ‘blogging and use of WordPress’ (for reflective journals)
• ‘group work’; ‘working with the group to produce the final project’
• ‘preparation of research project – exciting ideas, blogging’
• ‘new perspectives on cultural issues’
• ‘seeing similarities and differences [in Latin America] with Aust/Sydney’
• ‘becoming more historically aware’
• ‘different style of learning and assessments’ ; ‘excited to experience a different way of learning’ [I explained that this is a flipped learning environment]
• ‘doing a case study’

Students are anxious about:

• ‘achieving the assignment outcomes – understanding what is required’
• ‘that I won’t fully understand the readings or grasp the main concepts’
• ‘studying history as I found it boring in High School’ [challenge is with me as tutor]
• ‘creative presentations’ [I have an ex-student as well as myself to guide them]
• ‘group work’; ‘group assignments’
• ‘understanding how to write a critical literature review’; ‘literature review’ [no probs – sample work form previous students on blog site and we will workshop reviews – scaffold up]
• ‘analysing and summarising effectively the readings’ [on the case – a guide to reviewing and critiquing academic texts is available and we will workshop an example in class]
• ‘technology intimidation’; ‘using new technology tools’; ‘using new technology for a range of purposes’; ‘setting up an online blog – not my forte’ [IML has provided dedicated Faculty help for this. This morning I invited an IML education technologist to brief students on using Google Drive and Google docs to do group work. In addition, the ex-student and I will guide them in using various possible digital platforms for work presentation]
• ‘time management’; ‘workload’; ‘not having enough time to focus on subject as much as I’d like’ [I will direct them to: ‘Study Less Study Smart’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlU-zDU6aQ0]
• ‘contributing to an e[learning]journal to keep it to a high standard’; ‘keeping an adequate journal of work’ [clear and thorough guidelines provided, but no samples to view yet as this is the first year with this assignment]
• ‘coming from a design background into a world of essays and seated tutorials’
• ‘being culturally appropriate and not passing judgement on other cultures’ [they will learn it is okay to pass judgement – we do it all the time – the question is ‘how we do it’ and do we know enough about that culture to make such judgments? Need to avoid reverse cultural cringe].

I have some great feedback to work with here and we have barely begun. (Thanks to PK and AS from IML and JS from the BA International Studies).

Bundling with other universities the way to go rather than MOOCs?

The subject I am currently preparing to “go global” would fit well with this kind of initiative, should it come about: Does Online Learning Have a Role in Liberal Arts Colleges? The consortium discussed here links back to an earlier blog I posted about MOOC variations: the future?

The Angel of Independence, Mexico City

Monash Educational Design Team

Street corner, Guadalajara, Mexico

It seems everyone is getting on board with student-centred and flipped learning. Some nuggets here in these different videos, which are useful for my own subject design. Even if we don’t agree with it all, it is testimony to a massive, collective cultural change that is going on with how ‘teaching’ should function and how we create learning environments.

https://www.youtube.com/user/MonashEdDesign

Food for thought: the bundled university and just-in-time education

Long-beaked Corellas over the back fence, Sydney

This is interesting. It may not come about and even if it does, we may strongly disagree with it, but it is worth contemplating, if only to position ourselves for all options in the future. http://sr.ithaka.org/blog-individual/higher-education-free-agent-future

And be sure to take note of this, embedded in the article:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/04/just_in_time_education_is_a_technological_reality_economic_necessity.html

John Biggs on performative versus declarative understanding

Avalon Beach, Sydney, March 2015

Bigg’s “Teaching For Quality Learning At University” is a goldmine of student-centred learning – nuggets lying everywhere.

“This distinction between performances of understanding and verbal declarations of understanding are crucial when it comes to writing the intended learning outcomes of a course […] The difference between meeting the requirements of institutional learning and ‘real’ understanding is illustrated in Gunstone and White’s (1981) demonstrations with Physics I students. In one demonstration, two balls, one heavy and one light, were held in the air in front of the students. They were asked to predict, if the balls were released simultaneously, which one would hit the ground first and why. Some predicted that the heavy one would ‘because heavy things have a bigger force’ or ‘gravity is stronger nearer the earth’ (both are true but irrelevant). These students had ‘understood’ gravity well enough to pass HSC (A level) physics, but few understood well enough to answer a simple real-life question about gravity. They could correctly solve problems using the formula for g – which does not contain a term for the mass of the object falling – while still reacting in the belief that heavy objects fall faster. They didn’t really understand gravity in the performative sense – and why should they if their teaching and assessment didn’t require them to? These physics students hadn’t changed their commonsense conceptions of gravity, but had placed alongside them a set of statements and formulae about physical phenomena that would see them through the exams. To really understand physics or mathematics, history or accountancy is to think like a physicist, a mathematician, a historian or an accountant; and that shows in how you behave. Once you really understand a sector of knowledge, it changes that part of the world; you don’t behave towards that domain in the same way again. Gunstone and White’s physics students were good at verbally declaring their knowledge, for example explaining what gravity is about, or what the three laws of motion are. But is this why we are teaching these topics? Is it for acquaintance, so that students know something about the topic and can answer the sorts of stock questions that typify examination papers? In that case, a verbal understanding will suffice. Or is it to change the way (sooner or later) students can understand and control reality? If that is the case, then a performative level of understanding is implicated.”

Biggs, John (2011-09-01). Teaching For Quality Learning At University (Society for Research Into Higher Education) (p. 86). McGraw Hill International. Kindle Edition.