Your Zotero Library on Your Android Phone with Zandy

Thanks, Mark, for your encouragement.

I have great hopes for what we can do to build off of the app; the BibUp app for iPhone shows one great idea that would be fun to implement, especially if we get the ability to write attachments through the Zotero API at some point.

Avram, thanks for your work! (And thanks for stopping by here, too!) I’m definitely looking forward to the future releases. Android has needed something like this for so long!

I’m both bothered by and encouraged by this report. I’m of course encouraged to see data that indicates what most of us have “known” all along — that hybrid classes are about the same as face-to-face classes. But I’m discouraged by the statement that this could reduce compensation for those teaching such courses. I’ve taught a great many online and online-enhanced (or hybrid) courses. And I can confidently say that I spend far more time per student in these courses than in a traditional course. I have to manage more technology, read more written work, and grade a great deal more (students need more feedback for the elements of the course that take place outside of the classroom, and much of that tends to be qualitative work that requires time to assess and provide feedback for further development).  I would stop teaching these kinds of courses if my institution suddenly paid me less than a traditional course or if I suddenly had far more students assigned to me “per section” because of the format. 

The advantage for cost-savings is not to short-change the instructors teaching these courses but to leverage the classroom space more effectively and to save money on facilities. It costs far more to heat and cool a classroom building than to provide server space, so by doubling up on the classes offered in a single location at peak hours of the day is to maximize cost-savings and to add value to the students’ education at the same time.  But don’t punish the instructors for having a good class that meets once a week instead of twice a week — that “online day” is far more time-consuming than a lecture class meeting for the instructor, and we do believe that good teaching should be compensated for what it is, right?

I am both a student and teacher online. I have a different prospective for each.

I teach online and find that too many of the courses are canned. There is no real incentive for the student to really learn and they don’t. Very few students get anything out of the courses, which is too bad. As the instructor I have no say in anything but the criteria for grading.

I am doctoral student in hybrid online/residency program. I have much reading to do with plenty of homework. I get graded very specifically on everything I do. I have to learn on my own. There is more going back and forth with others in my cohort.

I have taught online and in hybrid situations for the last 10 years and there is a great misunderstanding that this format is somehow less work or preferable for ALL instructors and students.  That is just not so.
Depending on your field of study, online/hybrid can actually be quite a benefit to the student who needs the flexibility afforded by this type of class.  If they want to finish an assignment or quiz at 4 am, they can.  If they want to work crazy hours while at school, they may be able to squeeze in an online course between classes and time at work.

However, many students are not interested in ‘figuring it out’ themselves.  That’s not why they paid tuition.  They want value for their money.  Any hybrid course that lacks engaging content or features a static display with a prof simply lecturing online is bound to fail.  Think of what today’s student is exposed to when they spend time online!  High quality graphics, production value to rival Hollywood and limitless content.  Can ANY institution claim that they can compete with popular video games and video sites like You Tube?  

Saving money on facilities is a lost leader.  Streamlining teaching practices is a fruitless effort.
When Google (or another company of that magnitude) fires up their engines and starts offering online education with high quality content starring Morgan Freeman, everyone else will scramble and fall down.

From http://www.sr.ithaka.org/people/about-us

“Ithaka S+R is a research and consulting service that helps academic, cultural, and publishing communities in making the transition to the digital environment. We pursue projects in programmatic areas that are critical to the advancement of the academic community.”

Sounds to me like the group believes that online education/culture is an undeniable good.  So it would be odd if they supported a study that went against their own interests.  In other words, read the above study with many grains of salt.

 While I can appreciate your view that there are more strains on the institutional budget coming from administration than teaching, I have to question your second point.  The article states “its conclusions don’t apply to all online
instruction, just a specific type of interactive online course in which
computer-guided instruction substitutes for some face-to-face
instruction.”  It does not seem to me that there was any suggestion that this format be used carte blanche to replace most coursework, but rather to assist with reducing the cost for courses that may be well suited for this format.  If administrative costs would negate any savings in teaching costs, then perhaps it isn’t the best option, but it is at least worth consideration.

Some observations:

A large number of schools classify hybrid courses as courses where substantial seat time is replace by online interactions, and a number of these do so by running one class meeting per week, where there would usually be two or three. So, there are a number of schools with hybrid courses that meet on a weekly basis (including my own and the one I worked at before that).

As I mentioned in the thread above, there are certainly subjects where full online instruction would be inappropriate. Laboratory chemistry or sculpture, for example. However, absent a strong physical component and any questions of student safety or institutional liability, a number of subjects are amenable to online or hybrid learning.

One example: I’ve heard a number of English professors argue that they need direct access to students when they are writing, so they can look over their shoulders, make comments, and guide the process. Yet, in my undergraduate studies in English (second major, emphasis in creative writing) I don’t recall a single class that would have been handicapped by being delivered partially or completely online.

Yes, the real time meetings with my classmates were fun and useful, as far as time management and camaraderie is concerned. However, the actual interaction and feedback could very well have been written and delivered online. Yes, I very much enjoyed the colorful personalities of my writing teachers (the cigarette, pipe, and cigar smoke not so much), but they’re professional writers for heaven’s sake. I have no doubt they’d have engaged the heck out of me online, and in their native, written habitat.

My major in art is another story, but even there, the history component would easily transfer online, and even some of the studio work, particularly the work we did outside of the classroom, sketching and painting landscapes and passers-by, would migrate with only minimal distress, particularly if balanced by the in-class component of a hybrid course. If anything, it would play to the individualist nature of the artists in training.

the biggest cost increases are administrations including overbloated CEOs in 1965, i knew personally the dean at university of pennsylvania and regularly sat and drank coffee with full professors. similarly in graduate school at rutgers. other students are a major learning resource. now the dean is driven around campus in a limosine. all the secretaries knew my dog. now they never look at my face. online courses don’t need more administrators.  online courses do not have to be fill in the blank. i designed online courses at Sultan Qaboos University in the 90s. The University had a very limited library and virtually no trained librarians. Engineering learners were assigned a problem to solve. we used appropriate technology and ecology and assigned groups developed regional or country development plans. Impossible to plagiarize. For example permaculture in India was not an acceptable project although permaculture in Niger might be. Internet, computer skills, writing, reference library, research, documentation, biography, discourse, skills and a wide spectrum of basic science, philosophy of science, and other knowledge were incorporated into one course’s curriculum. Across the sciences scholars were able to enhance the practical effectiveness of limited University resources in a country which a little more than a decade earlier had no education at all. There was no additional budget. Just better allocation of teaching time and educational resources. Learners better prepared to take responsibility to know what they needed to know.

 cb_10 one might wonder at the quality of design of the study when Footnote 30 on page 19 tells us:
 
“Some degree of caution is warranted in interpreting the results for the CAOS post-test because the average student’s CAOS score only increased by five percentage points over the course of the semester (among students who took both the pre-test and the post-test). This may have resulted in part from some students not taking the CAOS test seriously because, in most cases, it was not part of their grade. However, it is reassuring that the results for the CAOS test are consistent with results for pass rates and final exam scores.”

Why was it the case that “in most cases, it was not part of their grade”?  Why wasn’t it in fact a requirement to pass the course?  Not taking tests seriously is an old excuse, why is it still appearing? And why when most did poorly on CAOS and the final did so many pass the course?

There is a mention of reducing teaching costs. But whether the course is online or not, someone has to grade all the papers. And in any course involving writing, that is a huge task that takes probably more time than lesson planning and in-classroom teaching combined. Rather than “reducing teaching costs,” universities should be paying MORE to faculty –especially adjuncts, whose hourly rate of compensation comes out to something around $12-$15 an hour when grading papers is factored in.

One might also suspect that:

“the average score increase was 5 percentage points”

could be explained simply by those students that dropped out or by the fact that one might suspect a lack of attention to the pre-course running of the CAOS test.
 
The reality may be that neither regular nor hybrid courses achieve anything of value.  And if one were to get CAOS results 6 months later what would they show? 

I have taught hybrid courses in the mix with traditional courses for two reasons. First, as a graduate program director, I saw the challenges of of scheduling courses and of giving working graduate students choices. The hybrid classes had a smaller footprint on the course schedule, at the same time, I was confident that I could design an equal or better learning experience for the students in the mixed mode format. I also teach a general education, writing intensive course as a hybrid course. There, my goals are to expose students in a carefully structured way to some rich online resources and to encourage students to write more and in more different formats (online discussion, blog, essay questions).  Other than taking a small amount of pressure off of classroom and parking space, these hybrid courses in no way save the university funding and the courses certainly didn’t save on faculty time.

Unemployed_Northeastern, you point is excellent.  Though the damning result of only a 5% improvement in CAOS scores over the WHOLE hybrid course that is hidden in footnote 19 seems very much worth pursuing.

It should also be noted that the article quotes someone who appears to be the same William G. Bowen who came out with a 1989 study that predicted a Humanities Ph.D. shortage.  Many seem to forget Lynne V. Cheney’s New York Times Op-Ed rebuttal “The Phantom Ph.D. Gap”?   They also seem to forget the Bowen and Sosa rebuttal letter http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/09/opinion/l-we-can-act-on-coming-faculty-shortage-now-414089.html
which says:

“The severe shortages of faculty members that we project for 1997-2002 are not caused primarily by ‘faculty members retiring, dying and otherwise leaving the academy,’ but rather to known population trends that will affect enrollment in the late 1990′s.”

As with many studies and articles on studies your “many grains of salt” are valid.

MakeCash10.comONLY

The “significance” of the finding of “no signficant difference” would be enhanced if the instructors made use of quality assured open educational resources, thereby reducing the costs of student learning materials to near-zero.  With students now paying textbook costs that equal 25% of their tuition, they would flock to courses where learning outcomes are the same as those that require high priced textbooks.

The article starts, “Students learn just as much in a course that’s taught partly online as they would in a traditional classroom . . .”

But based on the referenced study (footnote 19) wouldn’t it be more accurate to start:

Students learn nothing or almost nothing in a course that’s taught partly online just as 90% would largely fail to learn in a traditional classroom. No harm is done because both are almost equally ineffective. But both collect the money and generate the credit regardless of whether 90% learn nothing beyond the very short term.  Even over the short term the hybrid course only resulted in a 5% average improvement in standardized test scores, before and after taking the hybrid course, which might only be due to students dropping out.”

I agree with your ciritique but don’t think the placebo affect can be applied to a change from traditional to hybrid design. Why would students think more on-line instruction would automatically make them improve or learn better as someone would think about a medication placebo which is being sold as something it isn’t. There is no bait and switch with a move to a hybrid approach. It simply is what it is. The only way that would apply is if students are being told (lied to more accurately) that hybrid design classes make students learn and test better by upwards of 25%. And that is a social psychology experiment as opposed to rational course design.

CAOS is 40 question multiple-choice test. It appears that there is no penalty associated with incorrect answers.  Therefore it is again a test that rewards strategic guessing.

The CAOS developers used these criteria in their verification testing:

” . . . if the test was taken out of class, have taken at least 10 minutes, but no more than 60 minutes, to complete the test. The latter criterion was used to eliminate students who did not engage sufficiently with the test questions or who spent an excessive amount of time on the test, possibly looking up answers.”

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/serj/SERJ6%282%29_delMas.pdf

It all seems incredibly lax.  Given it is a multiple-choice test, the maximum time allowed should be 20 minutes and every wrong answer should have a penalty of 10 to highly discourage guessing of any kind. You either know or you don’t know the answer.

But even with their incredibly lax setup the results were poor:

“There was an increase from an average percentage correct of 44.9% on the pretest to
an average percentage correct of 54.0% on the posttest”

The sad results of the hybrid CAOS posttest was 47.5%, with exam results of 56.7% and yet, somehow, 79.7% were allowed to pass (see Figure 1 page 19 of the study referenced by the article).

Socratease2, I just remember my first undergrad stats course, which was pretty much dull (it could just be that I wasn’t “engaged” or I was lazy).  I don’t remember anyone asking a question.  But an INTERACTIVE, fancy, ultra new, Carnegie-Mellon computer creation, that let’s me study at my own pace and when I want, with a whole HOUR each week just for questions, would have sounded WAY, WAY, neater and better, 35 years ago and it still sounds way better (but the study numbers tell a different story).  So I would have expected a placebo effect far stronger than eye of newt because I would have been enthused by the prospect. But I have always been positive about self-study, I liked doing in K-12 my own research, my own thinking and my own projects, back when it didn’t involve computers.

I wasn’t trying to imply “bait and switch.”  Placebos do very well. They do very well against  expensive new drugs, in many drug trials.  Benjamin Franklin concluded that Mesmer, who used hypnosis, was better that the doctors, because he did not harm (this was back in the day when George Washington would be killed by his doctors repeatedly bleeding him). But the idea in drug trials is that no one is supposed to know who is getting the placebo.  But in this trial both the students and the instructors know they are doing something different and are being measured, so I would have expected a much stronger Placebo Effect and a Hawthorne Effect even if hybrid should have no effect.

I actually learned Stats by studying my notes and the textbook.  I didn’t find lectures all that helpful other than a time where I would write down my notes. But I was part of the 10% (the non-90%) that was interested in learning, so I spent the time on my notes and the textbook and would have spent the time on the computer if it had been available.  So maybe the focus should be on hybrid courses for the top 10% because poor quality TAs (see my 1976 Berkeley Statistics 200 post that TAs might be worse than the top undergrads) and dull lectures aren’t very good for them.  For the “plug and chug, pump and dump” get that credit by hook or by crook, it probably makes no difference, they probably will remember almost nothing in 6 months and intellectually it would have been a complete waste of time.  But then it seems as if this has been true for at least 100 years.

BTW, I think having a good textbook and having lots of interactive feedback and lots of problem sets of increasing hardness and subtlety are the path to effective learning.  But an excellent textbook with excellent problem solution explanations at the back, can be quite effective. I would have liked to ask several followup questions of the late Professor Freedman and his example of 1976 Berkeley TAs and his very interesting footnote.

One premise that is questionable is focusing on instructional costs (faculty compensation).  Food for thought – according to the recent report “A Very Slow Recovery”,

“Over the past three decades tuition has increased at a much faster rate than full-time faculty salaries. The contrast is starkest at public institutions, where tuition and fees have increased over the past decade by 72 percent when accounting for inflation, largely in response to declines in state support. During that same time, the salaries of public-college professors, when adjusted for inflation, rose by less than 1 percent at doctoral and baccalaureate institutions and fell by more than 5 percent at master’s universities.

Reported here in the Chronicle.
http://chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Group-Says/131432/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Make no mistake, the push for increased online/hybrid courses over the last decade has *not* been to increase student learning or improve course availability. The major driver overwhelmingly has been to cut instructional costs. Virtually any college administrator or consultant who says otherwise is either ignorant or completely full of #%^.

So long as the primary motivator for online/hybrid continues to be financial and not educational, we as faculty will lose out on our ability to teach online/hybrid in a manner that improves student success rather than simply cheapens it. Anyone that *effectively* teaches hybrid/online knows full well that the amount of work involved matches if not exceeds that for teaching traditionally.

It seems odd that there isn’t the offer of full credit in “STAT101″ for anyone who scores over 35% on the CAOS test and pays $100, skipping the course entirely.

The sad results of the hybrid CAOS posttest was 47.5%, with exam results of 56.7% and yet, somehow, 79.7% were allowed to pass (see Figure 1 page 19 of the study referenced by the article).

So 35% on the CAOS test seem reasonable since for those who don’t take the course it is a sign that they actually learned something previously, while the hybrid course tells you nothing about what they will remember in a month or 6 months.

The bias of the article is clear. This is illustrated by the statement ”Some experts advocate online classes as a way to deliver courses more economically and effectively, particularly for members of minority groups and others who might be subject to stereotypes in a classroom setting. Meanwhile, skeptics suspect that online approaches depersonalize education and shortchange students.” Experts (those in the know) advocate, but skeptics (uninformed cranks) suspect.
   There is much evidence that student-teacher interaction greatly influences student achievement. Why do we continually look for ways to decrease the amount of something that we know works?  

Given Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” I would have been interested in randomizing on age at start of school and seeing if there are any correlations.  In “Outliers,” Gladwell indicates those who start Kindergarden at an older age (due to date of birth and school district rules) have an advantage that tends to result in a virtuous circle, as success breeds success.  The survey used is quite nosy, it asks year and month of birth, yet the study doesn’t appear to have made use of the data.  It is worth knowing if there is no correlation.  But given the quite sad:

“the average score increase was 5 percentage points”

it is possible that these course are so very bad, whether regular or hybrid, that hardly anyone learns much of anything, it may be pure random luck. Or as I suggested earlier, it is possible that no one learned much of anything and the improved average is just due to dropouts.   It is also possible that CAOS may not be an effective measurement of what is attempted to be taught by either the regular or hybrid course. But then why was it used?

Unemployed_Northeastern, what do you think of Inside Higher Education’s take on things?”Score One for the
Robo-Tutors” http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/22/report-robots-stack-human-professors-teaching-intro-stats

Their article is about the same report.  They seem much more interested in the potential cost saving. I couldn’t find mention of the issues I raised.

It is possible that the reason for all the lecturing at Institution A was that the CMU course didn’t cover all the material that needed to be covered in the regular course at Institution A.  Yet that reason for 90% lecture is not provided. No reason was provided.

It would have been interesting to have collected personality, behavioral, intention and attitude data to differentiate between those who volunteered for the experiment and those who didn’t.  It would have been interesting to compare the CAOS and exam results of those who volunteered and those that didn’t and if there were any correlations with the personality etc. data.

The study reports:

“Among students in our study who took the CAOS test at both the beginning and end of the semester, the average score increase was 5 percentage points.”

This sad result, which appears to be true for both the traditional and hybrid Intro Stats courses, seems even worse than the CLA results reported in “Academically Adrift” and related reports (assuming you believe in the CLA and the handling of the data, please see earlier threads for some of the issues).  The most interesting aspect of that data was going to a “High Selectivity” college or taking certain majors produced maximum differences among treatments, over 4 years, of 5-6% of the lowest average scores.

The important take away from this study combined with “Academically Adrift” is not that hybrid courses “do no harm,” but that college does NO real good in the majority of cases, no matter what is done.  This is something that should get more attention.

@chronicle-15bf71a93d53f3fa044dd3b5f99a7a58:disqus 

In regards to the IHE article, I’ll put on my hat of flippancy and say it’s just another step towards the ultimate goal of using the children of Siri + Watson to take over all instruction, while administrators charge $100,000/year so as to repay their second mortgages in Newport or Newport Beach.

On a more serious note, I think this sentence is the takeaway from that article: “A hybrid teaching model could shift a great to deal of the teaching burden from tenured professors to teaching assistants and support staff.”  So, third-party for-profit vendors make bank by getting Max Headroom to deal with the mewling, indebted students so that the tenured profs can cloister themselves even further from their supposed mission of, you know, teaching, to create more [profitable] scholarship for the institution.  Sounds like a great deal for everyone except the students, but who cares about them, anyhow?  What do they bring to the equation aside from the debt-financed capital that keeps all of higher ed swimming in money?  Why not go all the way and just have them be taught by the Clippy the Paperclip from MS Word?

Incidentally, does anyone actually read IHE?  I ask only because with a mere 10 comments posted there, I seem to have become a Top 100 poster.  Which is sad for all parties concerned.

I don’t think the 5% score increase on the CAOS post-test has anything to do with the “hybrid course [failing] to achieve much” because Table A2 seems to indicate that the students in the hybrid sections and in the control sections both did the CAOS test. That footnote indicates the overall effectiveness of the course on the CAOS test regardless of the delivery modality, I believe.

Positive possibilities!