My courses follow a rather straight forward template. They consist of frontal 90 minute lectures, which contain me writing on the blackboard, interaction with the students, small exercises for them to do during the lecture and weekly mandatory assignments, possibly assignment sessions. The assignments are discussed also during the lectures and repeat the material, fill gaps, give connections to past and future parts of the course, and have the students reflect. Students are encouraged to do the assignments in groups. Assessment is via a final project and oral exams, which might be in the form of a midterm oral.
Interaction with students outside of class is by email, office visits and in one course I had a "chat office hour", meaning that for one hour a week, I would be in a certain chat room and answer within a minute.
An interesting concept we learned about in the course is the community of inquiry (CoI), see the very good book Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry by Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison, as well as the excellent article Online Collaboration Principles by Garrison. The CoI is a framework suitable for higher education with the premise that this requires a collaborative approach on the part of the students and that how we learn is contructivist, meaning we learn not passively, but by actively constructing our body of knowledge. This framework consists of three aspects, namely the social, the cognitive and the teaching presence in the course. The role of the teacher (the teaching presence) here is not only to give lectures, but to give all the scaffolding for the students to be a productive part of the community of inquiry. In the words of the before mentioned Eugene Kim, "space defines people". The methods with which people can interact, what the social and legal rules of interaction are and who the people in the interaction space are, defines the behavior.
As I described in the opening, I give the students very little scaffolding. And to be honest, I do not really understand the space my students are in. This did not use to be the case and the change is probably due to culture. The students in Sweden are massively less communicative than in the US or Germany, where I also worked as a university teacher. And it's not only that they do not communicate with me or other teachers, the communication between students is also extremely limited. Questions that their neighbour in class can answer are posed to me. Seating in class after 7 weeks is still that a large fraction sits alone. It used to take me a week to get a relationship to my students, now it's 3-4 and then the course is half over, since courses here are only 2 months (it's 2-3 in the US, 3-4 in Germany). Curiously, this actually reduces my incentive to invest time into the students, since after 2 months, it's a new batch. Since the students talk less in general, it also means that they talk less in general about the course content, leading to less reflection. All of this suggests that more scaffolding is actually needed, not only on the course level, but the level of the study program as a whole.
An important question going forward for me is how to further a community of inquiry not only in my courses, but in our study programs in general. An opportunity to work on this is our a mathematical programming course in Python that a colleague of mine has developed. This course has immense success, and is now being given several times a year to various audiences, such as teachers, immigrants with a technology background and math Bachelor students. Last summer, the lectures were recorded, which gives new options with regards to online teaching. A new group that we have in mind are PhD students. A question is now if one can offer a version of the course where they can work using the video lectures and small group assignments with little additional teacher support.
Interaction with students outside of class is by email, office visits and in one course I had a "chat office hour", meaning that for one hour a week, I would be in a certain chat room and answer within a minute.
An interesting concept we learned about in the course is the community of inquiry (CoI), see the very good book Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry by Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison, as well as the excellent article Online Collaboration Principles by Garrison. The CoI is a framework suitable for higher education with the premise that this requires a collaborative approach on the part of the students and that how we learn is contructivist, meaning we learn not passively, but by actively constructing our body of knowledge. This framework consists of three aspects, namely the social, the cognitive and the teaching presence in the course. The role of the teacher (the teaching presence) here is not only to give lectures, but to give all the scaffolding for the students to be a productive part of the community of inquiry. In the words of the before mentioned Eugene Kim, "space defines people". The methods with which people can interact, what the social and legal rules of interaction are and who the people in the interaction space are, defines the behavior.
As I described in the opening, I give the students very little scaffolding. And to be honest, I do not really understand the space my students are in. This did not use to be the case and the change is probably due to culture. The students in Sweden are massively less communicative than in the US or Germany, where I also worked as a university teacher. And it's not only that they do not communicate with me or other teachers, the communication between students is also extremely limited. Questions that their neighbour in class can answer are posed to me. Seating in class after 7 weeks is still that a large fraction sits alone. It used to take me a week to get a relationship to my students, now it's 3-4 and then the course is half over, since courses here are only 2 months (it's 2-3 in the US, 3-4 in Germany). Curiously, this actually reduces my incentive to invest time into the students, since after 2 months, it's a new batch. Since the students talk less in general, it also means that they talk less in general about the course content, leading to less reflection. All of this suggests that more scaffolding is actually needed, not only on the course level, but the level of the study program as a whole.
An important question going forward for me is how to further a community of inquiry not only in my courses, but in our study programs in general. An opportunity to work on this is our a mathematical programming course in Python that a colleague of mine has developed. This course has immense success, and is now being given several times a year to various audiences, such as teachers, immigrants with a technology background and math Bachelor students. Last summer, the lectures were recorded, which gives new options with regards to online teaching. A new group that we have in mind are PhD students. A question is now if one can offer a version of the course where they can work using the video lectures and small group assignments with little additional teacher support.
Now, that's interesting! Teaching and learning as a culture, students so different - do you think students learn more/better/different in Germany or the US compared to your students in Lund? I read this yesterday: http://acreelman.blogspot.com/2019/05/communicative-noise-barrier-to.html - a different view?
AntwortenLöschenIt's a hard question. My sample in the US is Stanford, which has a strong bias, since they preselect students and weed out the bottom half. But the students I experience in sweden are different from the german or american students and where I see the most difference is in communication, as well as in independence. When I expect from a swedish student at the bachelor level to work independently, they act with surprise (either positive and negative). There's a lot of insecurity, paired with a big sense of entitlement. The written and oral skills are also a bit lower than I am used to. I feel they need to train this, e.g. by communicating more!
LöschenDer Kommentar wurde von einem Blog-Administrator entfernt.
AntwortenLöschen