Videos in my active learning classroom

This semester I concentrated on true flipping: Lectures were viewed outside of class, and when we met, it was to do an activity or an assessment. I did in fact do direct instruction twice, for a grand total of about one hour. I had a goal of zero hours, but considering the class is scheduled for 1h50m twice a week, keeping lectures down to one hour for the whole term was a pretty good accomplishment. I feel good about that.

I loved not talking so much.

I delivered lectures through video clips. I did NOT convert powerpoints into mp4s where I was a talking head embedded on slides. My format was essentially this:

Title card
Gag/joke/funny thing
Voiceover of dynamic visualization
Gag
What to do next/conclusion

I made 33 videos with on these topics: Topographic maps, Google Earth, glaciers, severe weather, Koeppen climates, timezones, tectonics, wind and the atmosphere, using spreadsheets and using a compass.

In making these videos, I discovered an oddly artistic side to myself. I really enjoyed crafting these things and I got really good at it. I immediately set to figuring out a way to make fun of myself for being all artsy-fartsy.

One day I was listening to a podcast I really enjoy: Who's This Now? With Jim Bruce. He's a comedian who interviews other comedians. One guest was comedian Brandie Posey--although it could have been Tess Parker--and she was talking about her days in film school, and about how serious and pretentious the student films were. She had made a parody film about "going to the meadow to find her childhood" and showed it to her class. The very next student film shown was by a girl who--you guessed it--went to a meadow to find her childhood. That film was not supposed to be funny. I thought the story was hilarious.

I immediately decided that I could simultaneously mock myself and create an end-of-semester FAQ video by making a parody of a film school project. Those of you who teach Introduction To Anything know that students have a predictable set of questions. Good questions, reasonable questions, but like clockwork they come:

-Do you round grades up?
-Is there any extra credit now?
-How do I figure my grade?
-Is the final comprehensive?
-When will grades be done?
-How many points are there?

And so on.

So I shot this in black and white to enhance the art-school seriousness. I even labored over the font, trying to figure out which one would be most pretentious in a 1980s-film-school way (whatever the HECK that means, but it turns out to be Courier with no drop shadow).

I added a mock "DVD Featurette Interview with the Artist" (me) at the end because I mostly find those things in real life to be worthy of ridicule. Couldn't pass that up.

So here's the video:

People my age find this unbearably hilarious. My wife was in tears, laughing so hard. My campus Instructional Design Guru laughed his cojones off. Those of us in our 40s have seen more than our share of crappy art films like this. I decided to take the risk and show it to my students. I've received very positive feedback from my videos, but I'd never watched them watch one.

My students seemed to find the sight gags funny, but didn't have much else to say about it. No commentary on the false pretension or the mock irony, etc. There might be a few things working together here:

-the "YouTube" generation doesn't get my art (trying to be funny here)
-they were still absorbing the fact that I don't round up grades
-they haven't seen the kind of crappy art films that we geezers have so it's not as funny.

I'm not sure if I'll show it again to students. Maybe.

Later on I'll post some more videos. This was a blast to make.

Post #4

F*#% Technology

The Active Learning Classroom is a Technology Classroom. 

That's how it's built, and that's my philosophy of working in it and with it. 

Great. Read on, O Ye Who Dare to Use More than Paper.

  Technology Fail Number 1

I wanted to teach about Earth-Sun relationships. What I normally do is display this REALLY GREAT web-based simulator, and just diddle with it as I'm lecturing: 

Here's the link, it really is the bee's knees, no joke: http://astro.unl.edu/naap/motion3/animations/sunmotions.swf

Since I do no lecturing in this class, I wanted them to work with this awesome visualization directly. I asked them to bring to class the city and exact time of their birth. They were then to find the latitude (online) of their birth city, and set the Sun Simulator to show what the sky looked like and where the Sun was exactly when they were born. They had to record the Sun's position data and give that to me. I also asked for a screenshot. Neat little activity, right? 

There are 16 tables in the room, each one with two HDMI hookups and a dedicated monitor for students to hook up anything. We have a box of adapters to connect any device.

(Except a 30-pin IOS device. That's OK though, almost all of my students have Lightning connectors. Our I.T. geniuses were spot-on about that, and I was doubtful. Never doubt those guys.)

The Sun Simulator is Flash-based. 

Did you remember that IOS devices don't run Flash? Yes? Do I remember now that IOS devices don't run Flash? Yes. Did I remember, weeks before this class, that IOS devices don't run Flash? Yes. Did I remember that right before and during this class? Um... No.

How many students needed a spontaneous workaround? About half.

Technology Fail Number 2

I had my students do the text readings on seasons and seasonality. Here's the nifty part: Their quiz was not a paper or electronic traditional quiz. I required them to use class time to shoot a video that contained a demonstration and some required content. Each table of 8 students took roles in the design and production. Grading involved me looking at 16 5-minute videos with a rubric. Their 3-5 minute videos were due by the end of class, and they could prep as much as they wanted ahead of time. Videos had to be uploaded to Blackboard via Panopto. 

Aye, there's the rub. A your-video-did-not-upload rub a dub dub.

This particular Panopto I'm talking about is a neat little app that lets you upload a video from your device to the CMU space on the Panopto server linked to my course. It's mostly great when you're not blasting the hell out of its bandwidth. Well, unless you're using a Samsung Galaxy S5. Then it just doesn't work. No one knows why. Guess how many of my Android users have the S5? Yeah, All of them. I have an S2. I'm a tech tool.

Quick-witted IOS students attempted to get to Panopto via Blackboard. They discovered that Bb wants their device to install and run Microsoft Silverlight. What? Yes. IOS devices don't like doing that, so they don't. They had to get and use the Panopto App, which worked just fine. 

But there's two things going on with that: Bb is a portal for them for this class not only in an "online environment" sense, but also it's just how they approach interacting with this class. Asking them to work with GEO 105 Active Learning without Bb is like asking them to keep their eyes shut all day. It's not natural. 

The other thing is that students resist putting apps on their phones, even free ones. They say "I don't want to clog up my phone!" With what, exactly? I can tell you, they're probably just like certain members of my family who NEVER move photos and videos off their phones until the thing balks. 

In all seriousness, I suspect I'm dealing with a pedagogical phenomenon here: students are reaching a critical point of "device-as-tool" versus "device-as-toy." I appear to be making a leap by asking them to use their phones for educational productivity. There's a paper in that somewhere.

I love the video quiz format and I'll use it again. I got an immediate sense of what they knew and what they didn't about the concept. But next time I'll give them time to transfer it from their devices to a computer and put it on our class' server space. 

Technology Fail Number 3

Citrix Receiver: It's great for letting students and faculty access remote software. But, man the students wrestled with this. For about 40%, it just didn't work. I can explain why for about half of that group. 

One big explanation is something I should have known: There's a cap of 60 on the number of people that can be logged in at any one time, specific to our environment. The class has 99 students. Yes, "I did the math." File that under "Sh*t that's useful to know BEFORE deploying." Yeah.

Technology Fail Number 4

I always teach some spreadsheet basics to my intro classes. My position on this is you can't function in today's (white collar) society without knowing how to use one. Google Docs are really useful. I can send students out to collect data and put those data all in one place. 

Last spring, I could access a Google spreadsheet from a device directly using a webpage. You get the link, right? You paste the link, right? You edit data, right? 

In spring, yes. 

Now, in fall, if you're working on a device, you have to have the "Sheets" app. Without it and through a webpage, the cells are displayed and you can't enter anything. You feel like a jerk trying to type in a cell. It took me about 3 hours to figure out I needed the stupid "Sheets" app. 

How did I finally figure this out? I f*#%ing Googled it. At least I got this squared away before class and not during class. Yay me.

********

You can add worksheets to a workbook, you knew that. In a shared class document, students can have their own worksheet in every workbook. 

Yeah, wait on that...

Google Spreadsheets has an upper limit of cells that can exist in a workbook. Yes, even if those cells are empty. Did you know this? Great for you. So, if you want 99 students to create their own worksheet, at some point the damn workbook is going to lock up. 

When do students typically complete an assignment? When I'm in bed the day before it's due. They had to create a worksheet and enter some data by 6am on one day. They had a week, and since most intro students are night owls, that meant that they could push the deadline during their normal waking hours.

I was prepared for that: I have strict due dates and I figured I would get about 7 panicked emails between 11pm and 559am from students who were overtired and underorganized. And I did. These are usually teachable moments about due dates, staying on top of things, blahblahblah. 

Except one of those emails was very polite, expressed an understanding of the due-date-teachable-moment, further expressed a willingness to take consequences of said moment, and then went on to explain the technical limitations of Google Spreadsheets. 

So I went to add a sheet. FAIL. Verified: a technical limitation that the students should not bear responsibility for.

This required me to do something of a backpedal in class. I explained the teachable moment thing to them, and said that I wasn't going to bust their chops on any more on pushing due dates. But I didn't know about the spreadsheet limitation, I said, and I should have. I also said that what I really cared about was that they understood and could show me how to do simple things on a spreadsheet. I extended the due date so that students who attempted to meet the deadline could still do it.Yes, some students who missed the due date and didn't know about the problem also benefited. Ting-a-ling.

I spent some capital doing that backpedal, but I gained some also. 

F*#% technology? Yes, because every fail is, at its core, my fault; either partially or wholly. 

So in conclusion, I love technology. F*#% technology.

Day 2: The Excrement Hits the Air Circulation Appliance

I don't have a lecture for today.

Lemme repeat that: I don't have a lecture ready for my class in less than 3 hours. And I ain't makin' one.

My personal goal for this term is to not lecture more than 10 minutes in a class. 

So today is the Real First Day of active learning pedagogy. First, they will take a 3-question quiz at the start. Each person gets a quiz form with 8 versions of the quiz questions lettered A-H. There are 16 D-shaped tables with 8 chairs in this room. So I'm putting up a generic table map giving each seat position a number. Each seat number will have specific quiz questions to answer:

After I shot all my copies I realized that it would be easier if I had lettered each seat in order to match the quiz questions. I'm a #@^&!ing genius. 

Of course I'll explain that no two people at a table should be answering the same question. Here's the quiz, by the way (link). Not the beefiest thing in the universe, but the point is to drive them to do the readings. They also have to tell me the length of their pace in feet.

After the quiz, we start a participatory mapping activity. They have to figure out where on campus they start and end their day (a typical Tuesday), and where they go on campus. Then I send them off to pace it out, add up their walking and convert it to miles.

The purpose of this activity is to get them thinking about maps, and interacting with maps. Kind of funny that we built them a million dollar classroom and today they're going to spend most of their time outside. It's nice out right now though.

I would like to assign each table a number, but I have pretty much zero confidence in my ability to remember where I decided they would be. What a slacker I am!

Reflections on Day 1

This is the first thing on my syllabus:

SYLLABUS: Physical Geography GEO 105

TR 1530-1720 (3:30-5:20) DOW 135 Course Reference # 22258467

What on Earth is going on here?

You are sitting in the finest classroom in the state of Michigan, if not the entire nation. This is an “Active Learning” classroom, and this is an “Active Learning” class. Both are designed based on research proven to improve student learning—YOUR learning. That’s not all: an active learning class is way more fun to take and to teach. That’s also proven by research, but you don’t need research to know when you’re in a class that feels worth your time and money.

An active learning class shifts around the work. It may feel like more work compared to other classes, or it may feel like less because the when and why of it makes more sense. It’s NOT MORE work than getting an ‘A’ in a regular class, but it is definitely different. It’s way more work than getting a ‘C’ though.

I will not ask you to listen to me talk for 16 weeks and then vomit back everything I ever said on a test. I will not show you 7000 Powerpoint slides filled with words for you to write down and vomit back on a test. Instead, I will ask you to read and watch and do things outside of class. We will use class time for activities and for using the things you did outside of class. I really, really need for you to do these outside-of-class things. This is an expectation that I have of you. You need to be willing to trade that for taking a class that is not 16 horrible weeks of an old guy talking at you while looking at a screen. You’ll take some tests, but you’ll feel and be ready for them, because you USED the material instead of just copying notes. 

I was going for an ethos of accountability to match the frankly gorgeous room this is taking place in. I didn't read the syllabus to them. Instead, I gave them a self-guided activity that consisted of three parts (link to document). Part 1 was the typical icebreaker stuff; Part 2 was a syllabus scavenger hunt with some hypothetical situations where students had to come up with "what would Feig do" answers. Part 3 was some basic geography stuff, like lat/long, prime meridian, equator, and converting between English and metric. Normally I would lecture that. Today, they taught each other. While they did that I went around the room shaking hands and meeting students. I shook 104 hands!

I did have one tech flub though: Between this class and the one prior, I managed to damage the micro-HDMI socket on my Android tablet. So I had 104 people watching the moronic prof who couldn't figure out what was wrong. Sheesh. Well, as my wife says, you gotta have one mistake to let the evil spirits out of your endeavor. Okay, then. That ought to have done it.

It was really great to be focused on people instead of a PPT slide or a screen. 

And to set them on the active learning track, I gave them 13 pages to read from the text, and a video that I made on how using your pace to measure distance. (link to video). They need to view that and be able to say what their pace is (and answer some questions from the readings) on the quiz first thing. 

I think they're taking this seriously: So far that video has about 98 views since Tuesday. If each of those is a unique student user, then that's pretty good. 

I threw a bonus in there too: any student who wants to upload his/her own video on calculating their pace could contact me and do it for bonus points. I got 3 of those takers so far!

Tee Minus 35 and Counting...

Greetings! This blog is aimed to all who want to read about the development of an active learning, or "flipped"--classroom in an introductory Physical Geography class.

I'm going live with 104 students in just under 35 minutes. 

I have spent all summer prepping for this class. Know what I learned? No matter how many videos you make (I made 16), no matter how many activities you redesign, no matter how much you pore over your calendar, you CANNOT get an active learning class ready by Day 1.

Well, I can't.

There's so much to do! It was a blast rethinking this course. And it came just in time, too. I was recently tenured, and as we know, not reforming your teaching and just lecturing is a safe road to tenure (Feig, 2013--gratuitous self-citation! In a blog! Yay!) Now I'm ready to cause trouble.

The active learning classrooms CMU designed are freakin' amazing. They work beautifully, they are a joy to look at, and the student space is big with the teacher space being small. Beauty.

Later on I'll post excerpts from my syllabus, some of the videos I made, and reflections from Day 1. Since this is a TR afternoon class, it has about half upperclassmen, even though it's a 100-level.

Off we go!

-af