My Big MOOC Adventure

MOOCs have been a hot topic for a little while now; I've read a lot about MOOCs and I have friends who have taken several MOOCs for personal enrichment and just loved them. As a person who would become a professional student if I could, I've been curious about the MOOC experience, so I decided to give one a try.

I started off by Googling "MOOC" and checking out the course offerings on various sites, like Coursera, edX, and Udacity. Fortunately for me, I'm particularly interested in STEM topics - MOOC offerings seem to be heavy on the math and science. I wanted to find a course that would be interesting and self-paced, as I wasn't sure that I'd be able to stick to a regular schedule of study. (Some MOOCs are more like traditional classes, in that they have set schedules and require submissions of work at certain times.) For this initial experiment, the ability to work independently was a higher priority than the possibility of interaction with other students.

I eventually ended up looking at courses on iTunes U, Apple's "store" for educational materials. I settled on a Calculus course [Calculus I (MA005)] offered by Saylor via iTunes U. I chose this mainly for ease - because of the Apple connection, I'd be able to easily download all of the materials onto my iPad, so I'd have them with me all the time. I've been interested in reviewing Calculus for a while now (since it's been years since I've studied or taught it), so that seemed like as good a subject as any to start with.

I was pretty excited to get started. I bought myself a new grid paper notebook, got out my favorite pencil, and set up a schedule for completing lessons. The materials provided for this course included textbook sections, practice exercises (with answer key), and a link to a graphing calculator app. This was a truly self-paced, self-study course, and I was ready to go...

Until I got incredibly bored. Several lessons in, I lost my enthusiasm entirely, and I knew exactly why. The text was pretty good, and the exercises were interesting enough, but there was no human element to the course. In addition to being self-study, this particular course did not even include any kind of video instruction or messages from the instructor. One thing that I know about myself is that I'm very much a visual learner, and I really missed watching an instructor explain concepts and draw out supporting charts and graphics. The text was not very visually engaging, either, so it was even difficult to do the reading.  I missed the interaction with other students and the opportunity to ask questions or listen to the questions asked by others. Wow, I thought - if I can't stay motivated to do this, how could students ever stay motivated through a course like this? I've heard people advocate MOOCs as an option for developmental students, and based on my experience, I'm just not sure I can see that working.

So, my intitial experiment with MOOCs was an utter failure in terms of reviewing Calculus, but I did learn some important lessons about virtual classrooms and independent study. I've since downloaded another Calculus course (also from iTunes U) from Ohio State, which is much more engaging - in addition to a text, dozens of videos are provided, and they're well-produced and fun to watch. The instructor, Jim Fowler is animated and has clearly thought about how to keep students engaged online. I'll post more on this course when I get further into it - stay tuned.

Screencasting with Explain Everything

For my classroom flip, I recorded a short video on solving and graphing inequalities in one variable, using the iPad app Explain Everything. [See the "screencasts" section of my blog for a more detailed post on Explain Everything.] I chose to make my own video for this lesson because I wanted to use some real life situations as examples of inequalities, and I couldn't find exactly what I wanted on Khan Academy or other similar sites.

I started by creating slides in Google Drive Presentation with my title, headings, and examples. Explain Everything can import Powerpoint slides, but not Google Drive Presentations, so I had to save the Presentation slides as photos, then import the photos into the app. This was a little cumbersome, but I'm trying to work with the Google Universe and wanted to test out this workflow.

The app worked well for this video, especially now that I'm getting more comfortable working with the options while recording. The one thing that I don't like about this app is that the microphone on the iPad picks up quite a bit of ambient noise - at a couple of points you can hear my computer chiming in the background. This will happen to some extent with any microphone, but I notice less ambient noise when I record with my Logitech headset.

Uploading the video takes a bit of time, but works smoothly. You can find the video here on my YouTube page.

I took the plunge and flipped my classroom...sort of.

I've been feeling really challenged this year by homework. I think that because the classes I teach are nongraded / no credit classes, students sometimes see them as "no effort outside the classroom" classes. Even those motivated students who are diligent about completing homework sometimes just don't know how to approach homework - they've never learned how to study and how to make the most use of out of class assignments. And because attendance is often an issue (sometimes for totally legit reasons; sometimes for pretty sketchy reasons), I'm always looking for resources for students who need to catch up on things they've missed. I've toyed with the idea of flipping my classroom for a while now and finally decided to give it a go this term because I believe that flipping my class can help me deal with many of those issues.

If you're not familiar with the flipped classroom model, here's the quick and dirty explanation: a flipped classroom inverts the usual model of "students learn something new in class and then practice the new skill/content outside of class." In a flipped classroom, students are first exposed to a new concept or skill before they come to class - usually via a video or reading - then spend class time practicing and applying the new concept/skill with the teacher's guidance. My hope was that flipping my classroom would make students more likely to do the assigned work because they would see more reason to do so, would give me more opportunities to help students with the practice part of the cycle, and would lead to a situation in which students who missed class could easily access information on the content they missed rather than just getting a make-up homework sheet that they hadn't been taught to do.

Since this was an experiment for me, I decided to start with a "mini-flip" of my math class. I began assigning my students a video (or videos) to watch on whatever topic I planned to cover the next day in class. Most of the time, I use Khan Academy videos and/or videos that I create. To add some accountability, I created questions to accompany each video - sometimes questions related to how information was presented in the video, sometimes questions related to the content itself, sometimes questions about the connection between the video content and what we'd already studied in class. Other times, rather than a video, I gave the students a reading and related questions. In class, we discussed what they'd watched or read, cleared up any areas of confusion, and did small group work or independent problems and projects to apply and practice the new material. I do still periodically assign practice and projects for homework, so I haven't truly flipped my classroom.

So far, this routine is working well. While there are still a few students who are not doing homework regularly, some of the students who were not doing homework before the flip have been willing to do the "flipped" work. Students show up to class with questions nearly every day, and we've had great discussions and "aha" moments. I did have to work out some technical bugs related to accessing videos - I started off posting links on our class web page, but some students who were accessing videos with their cell phones were bypassing the class page and trying to search directly for videos on YouTube, with varying results. I worked around this issue by continuing to post links on our class page, but also creating a playlist for our class on my YouTube page. Each week, I post a comment on my YouTube page that links to the class videos, which allows students to more easily find videos with a YouTube app or phone browser.

For more information, Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching has a great explanation of flipping and suggestions for successfully flipping a classroom. A recent Inside Higher Ed article looks at the pros and cons of flipping. You can also check out the Flipped Learning Network for more information and resources.