October 17, 2012, 7:21 am
By Robert Talbert
I just completed my second MOOC, the “Securing Digital Democracy” course from Coursera. Emboldened by actually completing it with a passing grade I’ve jumped into another Coursera offering, this time “Introduction to Interactive Python“. My colleague John Golden and I are both taking it, and yesterday John tweeted:
Which got this attention-getting reply from Bret Benesh:
Further down the conversation, Bret pointed to this quote in the Coursera terms of service:
Notice for Minnesota Users
Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If…
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October 11, 2012, 9:52 pm
By Robert Talbert
Whenever I talk or write about the flipped classroom, one of the top two questions I get is: How do you make sure students are doing the reading (and screencast viewing) before class? (The other is, How much work is it to do all those videos?) Everybody seems to have this question, even if they don’t ask it. It seems like an important question. And yet increasingly I think it’s the wrong one.
In my flipped transition-to-proof class, we meet three times a week for 50 minutes each. In between classes, students have roughly 6–10 pages of reading to do in their textbook and around 30 minutes of videos to watch. This is not a huge amount of work to do, but it’s substantial, and the way the class meetings are set up — 10 minutes of quizzing and Q&A, and then launch into a proof-writing problem done in groups — if they don’t prepare, they’re toast.
But here’s the thing: …
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October 3, 2012, 8:46 am
By Robert Talbert
The flipped transition-to-proof class is now finishing up its sixth week. It’s hard to believe we are nearing the midpoint of the semester. The management of the class is still something of a work in progress, and I hope to have more posts up soon about how the class logistics have evolved since August. But one thing for which I am really grateful, and which I frankly find surprising, is that nobody in the class has yet to express any kind of longing for the good old days when professors lectured and students sat there and listened. In fact most students who express anything at all say that having the lectures on video, in addition to having a well-written textbook for reference, is hugely beneficial for their work in the class.
Recently. when I’ve asked students what we could do differently in the class that would help their learning, two items have shown up multiple times (and these…
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September 10, 2012, 3:13 pm
By Robert Talbert
Sorry for the absence, but things have been busy around here as we step fully into the new semester. The big experiment this term is with my flipped introduction to proofs class. As I wrote last time, I was pretty nervous going into the semester about the course. But things seem to be working really well so far. I don’t want to jinx the experience by saying so, but so far, nobody in either of my two sections of the course has given any indication that the flipped model isn’t working for them. In fact, I gave a survey in the first week of class that included an item soliticing their concerns or questions about the flipped model, and here’s a sample of the responses:
- I think the “flipped” structure will be better for a lot of the students and end with success from more students than normal.
- I think this sounds really great. The idea of actually working on problems in class …
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August 29, 2012, 9:16 pm
By Robert Talbert
The semester for us has gotten underway, and with it the flipped-classroom introduction to proofs class. This class has gotten a lot of interest from folks both at my institution and abroad. In the opening remarks at our annual teaching and learning conference, our university president gave some love to the flipped classroom model — and correctly pointed out that he’d been using it in his chemistry classrooms for 35 years. Indeed, there’s nothing inherently new about the flipped classroom — the name and the technology we sometimes use are new, I suppose — and yet this idea seems to be getting increasing amounts of interest, more than you’d expect from a mere educational fad.
I have to admit that prior to the semester starting, and after I had made the above blog post publicly commiting myself to running the proofs class this way, I had several bouts of cold feet. The first…
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August 14, 2012, 8:00 am
By Robert Talbert
I’ve been sort of quiet on the inverted transition-to-proof course (MTH 210, Communicating in Mathematics) lately, partly due to MathFest and partly because I am having to actually prep said course for startup on August 27. It’s almost ready for launch, and I wanted to share a document that I’m going to hand out to students on opening day and discuss. It’s called “How MTH 210 Works”. I’m fairly proud of this document because I think it says, in clear terms, what I want students to know not only about this class but for inverted classrooms generally.
I’ve written before that the inverted or “flipped” classroom approach always tends to engender a lot of uncertainty and sometimes strongly negative responses. With this document, I am hoping to pre-empt a lot of those feelings by stressing what this is all about: Being realistic about their education in the present day for the things that…
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August 13, 2012, 8:00 am
By Robert Talbert
Allow me to make a shameless plug for a very cool project currently underway by my GVSU colleague Matt Boelkins. He is writing a free, open-source calculus textbook that will be available in PDF form online for anyone to use and for any instructor to modify. He has already written the differential calculus portion of the textbook — his Winter semester sabbatical project — and he’s about to begin work on the integral calculus portion. You can download the differential calculus parts here. This is at his blog, where he is promoting the book and soliciting feedback. Matt’s also on Twitter.
Matt and I have talked about this project a lot in the last several months, and I’m deeply impressed by his vision for what this resource could become. He sums it up in this blog post:
While on sabbatical during the winter semester of 2012, I began drafting a free, open-source calculus text….
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August 10, 2012, 9:00 am
By Robert Talbert
About one hour after I wrote my last post about the importance of leaving an academic position gracefully, I came across this item about the resignation of Annette Clark, the (now former) dean of the law school at Saint Louis University. She didn’t so much resign as she blew up the administrative offices of the university and walked slowly away from their burning ruins. Check out this excerpt from her resignation letter to the university top brass:
…[Y]ou have failed to make good on your assurances to me when I accepted the deanship that you would fully support the law school and our efforts to enhance its program of legal education, national reputation and rankings. From the beginning of my deanship, you have evinced hostility toward the law school and its faculty and have treated me dismissively and with disrespect, issuing orders and edicts that allowed me virtually no…
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August 9, 2012, 9:00 am
By Robert Talbert
This is the final post on Finding Your Next Job. I hope it’s been of some use. As a reminder, you can one-stop-shop the entire series at this link. Helpful for if you need to bookmark it or pass it to a colleague.
This post assumes that you’ve gone through the process of the job search and accepted an offer. Congratulations! You’ve just stepped into the unknown. But before you get too far out there, you have to take care of business at home, which means acting with integrity one last time and leaving your current employer with grace. How this happens depends on the climate of the job you are leaving. If the job’s been good to you overall, beign gracious is easy; leaving will be hard. If the job has been a bad scene, then vice-versa.
But first, why should we try to be gracious when we leave a job, though, especially if your dean has been a jerk and you can’t wait a second …
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August 8, 2012, 3:33 pm
By Robert Talbert
The panel discussion on Issues for Early-Career Mathematicians in Academia went very well at MathFest last week. We had a small crowd with good questions, and I enjoyed getting to know and hear from Rick Cleary and Jennifer Quinn, who spoke on how to get tenure (from the department chair’s point of view) and how to get involved in the mathematical community. This blog series, which was an incubator for my part of the panel, has a couple more posts left in it, both having to do with what might happen at the end of a search for the next job.
On the one hand, absolutely nothing might happen at the end. You may go through the soul-searching of understanding your motivations and balancing your stakeholders’ needs, spend hours research schools and putting together your materials, and spend days going to interviews — and nothing may come of it. You get no offers. If that’s the case, …
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