Let’s go back to the research paper on screencasting that I first blogged about here. In that post, we saw that students on the study generally watched the screencasts, even without explicit rewards like grades, and the tended to do so strategically. But what about student learning? Did it help?
To answer that question, we have to go back to a previous paper by the authors [PDF]. (That one is in the queue this week to read and blog about.) In that paper, the authors did find a positive correlation between screencast use (which they tracked using stats for the class’ course management system) and overall performance. But – this correlation does not imply causation, and indeed when the data are sliced along various demographic lines, sometimes the students’ performance was better explained by GPA than by screencast use.
I haven’t gotten into that second paper yet, but what …
Screencasting is an integral part of the inverted classroom movement, and you can find screencasting even among courses that aren’t truly flipped. Using cheap, accessible tools for making and sharing video to clear out time for more student-active work during class make screencasting very appealing. But does it work? Do screencasts actually help students learn?
We have lots of anecdotal evidence that suggests it does, but it turns out there are actually data as well that point in this direction. I’ve been reading an article by Katie Green, Tershia Pinder-Grover, and Joanna Mirecki Millunchick (of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan) from the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education in which they studied 262 students enrolled in an engineering survey course that was augmented with screencasts. Here’s the PDF. This paper is full of interesting…
Last week’s flare-up over Khan Academy was interesting on a number of levels, one of which is that we got a new look at some of the arguments used in KA’s favor. Perhaps one of the most prominent defenses against KA criticism is: Khan Academy is free and really helps a lot of people. You can’t argue with the “free” part. On the other hand, the part about “helping” is potentially a very strong argument in KA’s favor —but there are two big problems with the way in which this is being presented by KA people.
First, the evidence is almost entirely anecdotal. Look through the Pacific Research Institute whitepaper, for example, and the evidence presented in KA’s favor is anecdotes upon anecdotes — possibly compelling, but isolated and therefore no more convincing than the critics. The reason that anecdotes are not convincing is because for every anecdote that…
Dave (Coffey) sent me a tweet alerting me to this whitepaper published by the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank based in San Francisco. “Look at page 14,” Dave said. I did, and found that I was being used as a prime example of a Khan Skeptic. Actually I am the last in a list of skeptics whose skepticism the authors attempt to dispatch. I’m in good company, as Keith Devlin is the first on that list and Veritasium…
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.
Marshall Thompson writes in this blog post from a couple of weeks ago that he’s concerned over the tone of the recent and ongoing Khan Academy/#mtt2k debate and is worried about the cost it incurs. It’s a good post, and in the process of commenting on it I realized a few things. Marshall writes:
I get the impression that KA has a goal of pedagogical soundness. Is this the best way to help them achieve that goal?
Sal Khan is not a dummy. He is clearly working through some of the same pedagogical misconceptions we all worked through (and continue to work through). How can we best help him through his personal journey without alienating him or causing him to be defensive?
I have tremendous respect for Sal Khan, but I have to admit that I’m not really concerned about his personal journey or his working through pedagogical misconceptions. It would be fantastic if he began…
This week I am adding to the playlist of screencasts for the inverted intro-to-proofs class I first mentioned here. There are seven chapters in the textbook we are using and my goal is to complete the screencasts for the first three of those chapters prior to the start of the semester (August 27). Yesterday I added four more videos and I am hoping to make four more tomorrow, which will get us through Chapter 1.
The four new ones focus on conditional (“if-then”) statements. I made this video as the second video in the series as a prelude to proofs, which are coming in Section 1.2 and which will remain the focus of the course throughout. Generally speaking, students coming into this course have had absolutely no exposure to proof in their background with the exception of geometry and maybe trigonometry, in which they hated proofs. Watch a part of this and see if you can figure out my …
Here’s the first (and so far, only) screencast that students will use in the inverted transition-to-proof class:
This one is a bit more lecture-oriented than I intend most of the rest of them to be, so it’s a little longer than I expect most others will be. But I do break up the lecture a little bit with a “Concept Check”, which is the same thing as a ConcepTest except I’ve never warmed to that particular term (the word “test” puts students on edge, IMO).
If you have tried out any of Udacity’s courses or read my posts about taking Udacity courses, you will see some obvious inheritances here. I tried to keep the video short, provide simple but interesting examples, and give some measure of formative assessment in the video. I am exploring ways to make the Concept Check actually doable within YouTube — Camtasia 2 has an “interactive hotspot” feature I am trying to figure out — …
When I see the first back-to-school sales, I know it’s time, like it or not, to start prepping classes for the fall. This fall I am teaching two courses: a second-semester discrete math course for computer science majors and then two sections of “Communicating in Mathematics” (MTH 210). I’ve written about MTH 210 before when I taught it last fall. This fall, it’s going to be rather different, because I’m designing my sections as inverted or “flipped” classes.
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’ve worked with the inverted classroom before (here, here, here, etc.). But except for a few test cases, I haven’t done anything with this design since coming to GVSU. I decided to take a year off from doing anything inverted last year so I could get to know the students and the courses at GVSU and how everything fits together. But now that I have the lay of the land, I…
At some point around the beginning of February 2012, David Coffey — a co-worker of mine in the math department at Grand Valley State University and my faculty mentor during my first year — mentioned something to me in our weekly mentoring meetings. We were talking about screencasting and the flipped classroom concept, and the conversation got around to Khan Academy. Being a screencaster and flipped classroom person myself, we’d talked about making screencasts more pedagogically sound many times in the past.
That particular day, Dave mentioned this idea about projecting a Khan Academy video onto the screen in a classroom and having three of us sit in front of it, offering snarky critiques — but with a serious mathematical and pedagogical focus — in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I told him to sign me up to help, but I got too busy to stay in the loop with it.
I am a mathematician and educator with interests in cryptology, computer science, and STEM education. I am affiliated with the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. The views here are my own and are not necessarily shared by GVSU.
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