EDUC720-Folkestad

Have you ever thought about the effect that our well-intended lessons have on student behavior and learning?  For example, we plan to have a midterm and comprehensive examination and this has the effect of getting students to concentrate their learning (cramming) just before those exams. Students behave in ways that are not optimal for their learning (long-term retention). Many of us teach the way we were taught and because, well, what students do is for the most part invisible to us. We close our eyes and plug our ears and pretend we don't know. Often, we ignore the learning damage that our lessons perpetuate. However, what if we did know what our students are doing? What if it wasn't so easy to plug our ears. I think this may be one of the potentials of learning analytics. If we can see what students are actually doing, we can reflect on our learning design(s) and just maybe improve on those designs. Furthermore, well-designed visualizations may nudge students ...

The 360-degree feedback system was originally developed for workplace teams is a process through which feedback from an employee's subordinates, colleagues, and supervisor(s) are gathered and shared with the employee. The feedback system is transparent and presented to those being evaluated prior to team-based activities, which in itself reinforces desirable behaviors in those teams.  This feedback system has been adapted and used successfully for managing and improving the success of teams in classrooms. The article by Tee & Ahmed (2014) provides a framework and description of a class-based integration. They suggest that the system has six core elements including timing, quality, quantity, social pressure, reflection, and communication ( link to article ). In the past, I have used a 360-degree feedback survey in the classroom when I have incorporated team-based projects. I found that the introduction of a peer-feedback system prompts students to th...

cc:link In using TBL, one of the big challenges that we face this semester is selecting and developing significant problems to discuss in class. As we will learn, this is a difficult challenge, one that requires creativity, reverse engineering, and focused design on "what do we want the students to be able to do at the end of the session that they couldn't do before?" This is a challenge that we will discuss throughout this class collectively, as your teams will be required to design significant problems. Those significant problems will then be used in class to generate discourse. As we work on these problems, we should not only be working to advance our understanding, but we should be critiquing the problem itself. For example, this week I have designed a problem for us to discuss in regards to our readings about TBL. After our discourse, I will ask you to use the following criteria/questions to critique that problem. Is the problem important, authentic, an...

Welcome to my EDUC720 Blog.  I look forward to learning with everyone this semester.  cc: Richard Lee