Tag Archives: #TeachingTuesday

An overview over what we know about what works in university teaching (based on Schneider & Preckel, 2017)

I’ve been leading a lot of workshops and doing consulting on university teaching lately, and one request that comes up over and over again is “just tell me what works!”. Here I am presenting an article that is probably the best place to start.

The famous “visible learning” study by Hattie (2009) compiled pretty much all available articles on teaching and learning, for a broad range of instructional settings. Their main conclusion was that the focus should be on visible learning, which means learning where learning goals are explicit, there is a lot of feedback happening between students and teachers throughout the interactions, and the learning process is an active and evolving endeavour, which both teachers and students reflect on and constantly try to improve.

However, what works at schools does not necessarily have to be the same that works at universities. Students are a highly select group of the general population, the ones that have been successful in the school system. For that group of people, is it still relevant what teaching methods are being used, or is the domain-specific expertise of the instructors combined with skilled students enough to enable learning?

The article “Variables associated with achievement in higher education: A systematic review of meta-analyses” by Schneider & Preckel (2017) systematically brings together what’s known about what works and what doesn’t work in university teaching, and their main findings.

Below, I am presenting the headings of the “ten cornerstone findings” as quotes from the article, but I am providing my own interpretations and thoughts based on their findings.

1. “There is broad empirical evidence related to the question what makes higher education effective.”

Even though instructors might not always be aware of it because literature on university teaching has been theoretical for a long time (or they just don’t have the time to read enough to gain an overview over the existing literature), but these days there is a lot of empirical evidence of what makes university teaching effective!

There is a HUGE body of literature on studies investigating what works and what does not, but results always depend on the exact context of the study: who taught whom where, using what methods, on what topic, … Individual studies can answer what worked in a very specific context, but they don’t usually allow for generalizations.

To help make results of studies more generally valid, scientists bring together all available studies on a particular teaching method, “type” of student or teacher in meta studies. By comparing studies in different context, they can identify success factors of applying that specific method across different contexts, thus making it easier to give more general recommendations of what methods to use, and how.

But then if you aren’t just interested in how to use one method, but what design principles you should be applying in general, you might want to look at systematic reviews of meta-studies. Systematic review of meta-studies bring together everything that has been published on a given topic and try to distill the essence from that. One such systematic review of meta-studies is the one I am presenting here, where the authors have compiled 38 meta-analyses (which were found to be all available meta-analyses relevant to higher education) and thus provide “a broad overview and a general orientation of the variables associated with achievement in higher education”.

2. “Most teaching practices have positive effect sizes, but some have much larger effect sizes than others.”

A big challenge with investigations of teaching effectiveness is that most characteristics of teaching and of learners are related to achievement. So great care needs to be taken in order to not interpret the effect one measures for example in a SoTL project as the optimal effect, because some characteristics and their related effects are much larger than others: “The real question is not whether an instructional method has an effect on achievement but whether it has a higher effect size than alternative approaches.”

This is really important to consider especially for instructors who are (planning on) trying to measure how effective they or their methods are, or who are looking in the literature for hints on what might work for them — it’s not enough to just look if a method does have a positive effect, but to consider whether even more effective alternatives might exist.

3. “The effectivity of courses is strongly related to what teachers do.”

Great news! What we do as teachers does influence how much students learn! And often times it is through really tiny things we do or don’t do, like asking open-ended questions instead of closed-ended ones, writing keywords instead of full sentences on our slides or the blackboard (for more examples, see point 5).

And there are general things within our influence as teachers that positively contribute to student learning, for example showing enthusiasm about the content we are teaching, being available to students and being helpful, and treating the students respectfully and friendly. All these behaviours help create an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable to speak their minds and interact, both with their teacher and among each others.

But it is, of course, also about what methods we chose. For example, choosing to have students work in small groups is on average more effective than having them learn both individually or as the whole group together. And small groups become most effective when students have clear responsibilities for tasks and when the group depends on all students’ inputs in order to solve the task. Cooperation and social interaction can only work when students are actively engaged, speak about their experiences, knowledge and ideas, discuss and evaluate arguments. This is what makes it so successful for learning.

4. “The effectivity of teaching methods depends on how they are implemented.”

It would be nice to know that just by using certain methods, we can increase teaching effectivity, but unfortunately they also need to be implemented in the right way. Methods can work better or not so well, depending on how they are done. For example, asking questions is not enough, we should be asking open instead of closed questions. So it is not only about using large methods, but to tweak the small moments to be conductive to learning (examples for how to do that under point 5)

Since microstructure (all the small details in teaching) is so important, it is not surprising that the more time teachers put into planning details of their courses, the higher student achievement becomes. Everything needs to be adapted to the context of each course: who the students are and what the content is. This is work!

5. “Teachers can improve the instructional quality of their courses by making a number of small changes.”

So now that we know that teachers can increase how much students learn in their classes, here is a list of what works (and many of those points are small and easy to implement!)

Class attendance is really important for student learning. Encourage students to attend classes regularly!
Make sure to create the culture of asking questions and engaging in discussion, for example by asking open-ended questions.
Be really clear about the learning goals, so you can plan better and students can work towards the correct goals, not to wrong ones that they accidentally assumed.
Help students see how what you teach is relevant to their lives, their goals, their dreams!
Give feedback often, and make sure it is focussed on the tasks at hand and given in a way that students can use it in order to improve.
Be friendly and respectful towards students (duh!),
Combine spoken words with visualizations or texts, but
- When presenting slides, use only a few keywords, not half or full sentences
- Don’t put details in a presentation that don’t need to be there, not for decoration or any other purpose. They are only distracting from what you really want to show
- When you are showing a dynamic visualization (simulation or movie), give an oral rather than a written explanation with it, so the focus isn’t split between two things to look at. For static pictures, this isn’t as important.
Use concept maps! Let students construct them themselves to organize and discuss central ideas of the course. If you provide concept maps, make sure they don’t contain too many details.
Start each class with some form of “advance organizer” — give an overview over the topics you want to go through and the structure in which that will happen.

Even though all these points are small and easy to implement, their combined effect can be large!

6. “The combination of teacher-centered and student-centered instructional elements is more effective than either form of instruction alone.”

There was no meta-analysis directly comparing teacher-centered and student-centered teaching methods, but elements of both have high effects on student learning. The best solution is to use a combination of both, for example complementing teacher presentations by interactive elements, or having the teacher direct parts of student projects.

Social interaction is really important and maximally effective when teachers on the one hand take on the responsibility to explicitly prepare and guide activities and steer student interactions, while on the other hand giving students the space to think for themselves, choose their own paths and make their own experiences. This means that ideally we would integrate opportunities for interaction in more teacher-centered formats like lectures, as well as making sure that student-centered forms of learning (like small groups or project-based learning) are supervised and steered by the instructor.

7. “Educational technology is most effective when it complements classroom interaction.”

We didn’t have a lot of choice in the recent rise of online learning, but the good news is that it can be pretty much as effective as in-person learning in the classroom. Blended learning, i.e. combining online and in-class instruction, is even more effective, especially when it is used purposefully for visualizations and such.

Blended learning is not as successful as in-person learning when used mainly to support communication; compared to in-person, online communication is limiting social interaction (or at least it was before everybody got used to it during covid-19? Also, the article points out explicitly that instructional technologies are developing quickly and that only studies were included that were published before 2014. Therefore MOOCs, clickers, social media and other newer technologies are not included).

8. “Assessment practices are about as important as presentation practices.”

Despite constructive alignment being one of the buzzwords that is everywhere these days, the focus of most instructors is still on the presentation part of their courses, and not equally on assessment. But the results presented in the article indicate that “assessment practices are related to achievement about as strongly as presentation practices”!

But assessment does not only mean developing exam questions. It also means being explicit about learning goals and what it would look like if they were met. Learning outcomes are so important! For the instructor to plan the whole course or a single class, to develop meaningful tests of learning and then actually evaluating it, in order to give feedback to students. Students, on the other hand, need guidance on what they should focus on both in reflecting on what they learned during past lessons, preparing for future lessons, and preparing for the exam.

Assessment also means giving formative feedback (feedback with the explicit and only purpose of helping students learn or teachers improve teaching, not giving a final evaluation after the fact) throughout the whole teaching process.

Assessment also doesn’t only mean the final exam, it can also mean smaller exercises or tasks throughout the course. Testing frequently (more than two or three times per semester) helps students learn more. Requiring that students show they’ve learnt what they were supposed to learn before the instructor moves on to the next topic has a large influence on learning. And the frequent feedback that can be provided on that basis helps them learn even more.

And: assessment can also mean student-peer assessment or student self-assessment, which agree on average fairly well with assessment by the instructor but have the added benefit of explicitly thinking about learning outcomes and whether they have been achieved. Of course, this is only possible when learning outcomes are made explicit.

The assessment part is so important, because students optimize where to spend their time based on what they perceive as important, which is often related to what they will need to be able to do in order to pass an exam. The explicit nature of the learning outcomes (and their alignment with the exam) are what students use to decide what to spend time and attention on.

9. “Intelligence and prior achievement are closely related to achievement in higher education.”

Even though we as instructors have a large influence on student achievement by all the means described above, there are also student characteristics that influence how well students can achieve. Intelligence and prior achievement are correlated to how well pupils will do at university (although both are not fixed characteristics that students are born with, but formed by how much and what quality of education students attended up to that point). If we want better students, we need better schools.

10. “Students’ strategies are more directly associated with achievement than students’ personality or personal context.”

Despite student backgrounds and personalities being important for student achievement, even more important are what strategies they are using to learn, to prepare for exams, to set goals and regulate how much effort they put on what task. Successful strategies are frequent class attendance as well as a strategic approach to learning, meaning that instead of working hard non stop, students allocate time and effort to those topics and problems that are most important. But also on the small scale, what students do matters: Note taking, for example, is a much more successful strategy when students are listening to a talk without slides. When slides are present, the back-and-forth between slides and notes seems to distract students from learning.

Training strategies works best in class rather than outside in extra courses with artificial problems.

So where do we go from here?

There you have it, that was my summary of the Schneider & Preckel (2017) systematic review of meta-analyses of what works in higher education. We know now of many things that work pretty much universally, but even though many of the small practices are easy to implement, it still doesn’t tell us what methods to use for our specific class and topic. So where do we go from here? Here are a couple of points to consider:

Look for examples in your discipline! What works in your discipline might be published in literature that was either not yet used in meta-studies, or published in a meta-study after 2014 (and thus did not get included in this study). So a quick literature search might be very useful! In addition to published scientific studies, there is a wealth of information available online of what instructors perceive to be best practice (for example SERC’s Teach the Earth collection, blogs like this one, tweets collected under hashtags like #FieldWorkFix, #HigherEd). And of course always talk to people teaching the same course at a different institution or who taught it previously at yours!

Look for examples close to home! What works and what doesn’t is also culture dependent. Try to find out what works in similar courses at your institution or a neighboring one with the same or a similar student body and similar learning outcomes?

And last not least: Share your own experiences with colleagues! Via twitter, blogs, workshops, seminars. It’s always good to share experiences and discuss! And on that note — do you have any comments on this blog post? I’d love to hear from you! :)

Schneider, M., & Preckel, F. (2017). Variables associated with achievement in higher education: A systematic review of meta-analyses. Psychological bulletin, 143(6), 565.

Why students cheat (after Brimble, 2016)

First: educate & involve

If students don’t know exactly what we define as cheating, they cannot be blamed if they accidentally cheat. It’s our job to help them understand what cheating means in our specific context. We can probably all be a little more explicit about what is acceptable and what is not, especially in situations where there is a grey area. Of course it’s not a fun topic, but we need to be explicit about rules and also what happens when rules aren’t adhered to.

Interestingly, apparently the more involved students are in campus culture, the more they want to protect the institution’s reputation and not cheat. So building a strong environment that includes e.g. regularly communicated honor codes that become part of the culture might be beneficial, as well as helping students identify with the course, the study program, the institution.

Second: prosecute & punish

It’s not enjoyable, but if we notice any cheating, we need to prosecute it and punish it, even though that might come at high costs to us in terms of time, conflict, admin. The literature seems to be really clear on this one: If we let things slide a little, they become acceptable.

Ideally we would know what the rules and procedures are like at our institutions if we see something that we feel is cheating, and who the people are that can support us in dealing with the situation. If not, maybe now is a good time to figure this out.

Third: engage & adapt

Cheating is more likely to occur when there are no, or only weak, instructor-student relationships. Additionally, if students don’t feel engaged in a course, if they don’t receive enough guidance by the instructor, or if a course feels irrelevant or like they aren’t learning anything anyway, students are more likely to cheat. Similarly if a course feels too difficult or too time-consuming, if the workload is too high, or if they feel treated unfairly.

So the lesson here is to build strong relationships and make the courses both engaging and relevant to students. Making sure that the learning outcomes are relevant in the curriculum and for students’ professional development is, of course, always good advice, but in the light of making students want to learn and not have them feel like they just need to tick a box (and then do it by cheating because it really doesn’t matter one way or the other). Explaining what they will be able to do once they meet the learning outcomes (both in terms of what doors the degree opens, but also what they can practically do with the skills they learned) is another common — nevertheless now particularly useful — piece of advice. And then adjusting level of difficulty and workload to something that is managable for students — again, good advice in general and now in particular!

Of course, doing all those things is not a guarantee that students won’t cheat. But to me it feels like if I’ve paid attention to all this, I did what I could do, and that then it’s on them (which makes it easier to prosecute? Hopefully?).

What do you think? Any advice on how to deal with cheating, and especially how to prevent it?

Brimble, M. (2016). Why students cheat: an exploration of the motivators of student academic dishonesty in higher education. Handbook of academic integrity, 365.

Teaching field courses in a virtual setting

1 Reply

For many people it has been (and still is!) a huge hassle to quickly figure out ways to teach field courses in a covid-19 world, and I can relate so much! But I’m also getting more and more excited about the possibilities that are opening up when we think about fieldwork in a new way. And as I’ve been researching and teaching workshops for university teaching staff on how to transition field courses into a socially-distanced world, I have seen many exciting examples. In this blogpost, I want to share what I think is important to consider when transitioning field courses online, and some really amazing ways I’ve seen it done in the second half of the post.

Most importantly: Don’t despair, and don’t undermine whatever you end up doing!

Yes, we’d all prefer to be outside for our field courses, and not stuck to our home office, looking at our students’ faces in tiny moving stamps on a video call (at best) or talking into the wide, quiet void (at worst). There are many ways to bring fieldwork to life even in socially-distant settings, and even small “interventions” might have a large effect.

There are a couple of things we need to keep in mind:

Students might actually learn better in an unconventional setting

While we like to think that field courses are taught a certain way because they have been optimized for the specific learning outcomes, that might not actually always be the case. In many cases, they are just following a tradition without actually questioning it (and I’ll talk a little about why that is bad further down). And there are studies that show that sometimes virtual learning environments work better than traditional ones: Finkelstein (2005) showed for a direct current circuit laboratory that students who used simulated equipment outperformed students who went through a conventional lab course, both on a conceptual survey of the domain and in the coordinated tasks of assembling a real circuit and describing how it worked. So why would we assume that similar things might also be true for virtual field courses?

Virtual science is real science, too

Honestly, how many scientists do we know who are in the field every day or even only most of the time? Very very few. Most science these days happens virtually, whether data is acquired remotely, or whether scientists are using datasets that other people measured, or scientists working with numerical models. Virtual science is real science, too, and therefore even though it is not the only kind of science, maybe it’s helpful to convey to the students that while they are missing out on a fun experience (and certainly on some learning outcomes that we wish they had), they are still able to do real science.

(On that note: Kitchen Oceanography is also science! Check out this post for proof…)

Don’t accidentally undermine your virtual field work

That said, while I think it’s important to be honest about what is lost — the travel to an exciting destination, the experience of being on a research ship, the smell of a certain weather pattern, the feeling of different temperatures and humidities than at home — we need to be super careful to not undermine whatever we end up teaching virtually. It’s maybe not our first choice to do it this way, and we might not have spent as much time preparing it as we would have liked, but constantly telling students what they are missing out on is not going to increase their motivation in a time that is already taxing on everybody.

What are field courses?

When I’m speaking about field courses here, what I envision are the kind of field courses I am familiar with in STEM education: Excursions where biologists investigate an ecosystem, sea practicals where oceanographer spend time on a research ship, trips where engineering students look at structures for coastal protection in situ — basically outdoor teaching.

Following the classification by Fedesco et al. (2020), those would all either fall into the categories of

“collecting primary data/visiting primary sources”, where students enter an authentic, new-to-them research setting in order to do open-ended investigations on data that they generate while in the field, and where learning outcomes (partly — I would argue that many learning outcomes don’t) depend on the results of that data. Students are creating new knowledge and are actively participating in authentic research processes;
“guided discovery of a site”, where the instructor is familiar with the site and plans activities that help students discover things, leading to pre-defined learning outcomes, because students are working with skills and concepts that they learned earlier in the course and apply them to a setting that is known in advance; or maybe
“backstage access”, where students visit a site that people usually don’t have access to, for example a wave power plant (or, when I was teaching the intro to oceanography a looong time ago back in Bergen, a company that makes oceanographic instrumentation, thanks Ailin!).

Learning outcomes in field courses

While field courses might have very specific, subject- and location-specific content, there are many learning outcomes that are common to most field courses, e.g.

social development
observation and perception skills
giving meaning to learning
providing first-hand experience
stimulating interest and motivation

(Compare Larsen et al., 2017, and others)

I think it is super helpful (always, but especially in this case) to look closely at learning outcomes, and to see how interconnected they really are. When I did this for the courses I am currently involved in, it turned out that surprisingly many of the learning outcomes can very easily be done virtually. Anything that is to do with planning of experiments, data analysis, learning of concepts could be disconnected from practicing observational skills or team working. And once they are disconnected, they can be practiced in different exercises which don’t have to rely on the same method of instruction. This makes it much easier to, for example, practice some parts in online discussions, while other parts required students to be outside and observe something themselves. The more things become modular in your mind, the easier it is to implement them.

What motivates students in field courses

When we think about field courses, we usually remember (and envision) them as extremely motivating because typically they are the occasions where students get super excited and want to dig deep and really understand the material. But why is that?

One explanation can be found in the self-determination theory by Deci & Ryan, where three basic psychological needs that need to be fulfilled in order for people to feel instrinsic motivation are described: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy in the context of a field course means that students typically get to decide more when they are out and about doing fieldwork than when they are passively sitting in a lecture, just consuming whatever someone else decided to talk about. They might or might not get to decide what kind of questions they work on, but even if they don’t they are a lot more free in how they structure their work, how they interact with peers during that time, …

Interacting with peers is an important component for the second basic psychological need: Relatedness. In field courses, students and instructors typically spend informal time together: sitting in a bus, waiting for a boat, during the actual fieldwork. This provides opportunities for conversations that might otherwise not happen, to relate to peers and instructors on a more personal level, to also experience instructors as role models.

Lastly, field courses help students feel competence in a way they usually don’t get to in normal university settings. They work long days, potentially under challenging physical conditions, on the kind of question that they feel is more authentic than the exercises they typically do. So this might be one of the few times where they feel competent in the identity they are trying to develop: as a professional in their chosen field.

Barriers to fieldwork

But all the benefits of fieldwork come at a price (Giles et al., 2020). And those costs are not to be underestimated, especially because the barriers to fieldwork are especially felt by disabled students and those from racial and ethnic minorities, all of whom are critically underrepresented in the geosciences anyway.

Barriers include for example

the financial burden of travel / equipment / functional clothing
the emotional burden of dealing with daunting practical aspects of being outdoors (toilet breaks, periods)
the physical burden of accessibility issues (the physically challenging aspects of fieldwork that are satisfying and fun for some can on the other hand completely exclude others)
the logistical and financial burden (and emotional!) of finding a replacement for caring responsibilities
the mental burden of dealing with previous or expected harassment and inappropriate behavior

In the light of all these burdens, there is an urgent need to consider what can be done to make traditional field courses more accessible! And I think having to reinvent so many things now is a great opportunity to make sure those barriers are taken down.

Things to consider when filming for virtual field courses

Virtual field courses seems to often mean “videos of the instructor talking”, whether in their office or in the field. When filming instructional videos, for me the most important points to consider are the viewers’ attention spans, and what might keep a viewer engaged.

As for the attention span, there are many different studies that find that the shorter, the better. Of course it always depends on the video and the material and lots of other things, but the best advice would be to really think about whether anything needs to be longer than 15 minutes in one go (unless it is extremely well produced).

In order to keep viewers engaged, it’s really important to not only keep students in the role of “viewers”, but to engage them more actively. But for the periods where they are “just” watching, it seems that it is helpful to have the instructor visible and make them relatable as an authentic person. Especially having more than one instructor that interact with oneanother makes it more engaging and also provides more potential role models to students.

A list of best practices for creating engagement in educational videos is given in Choe et al., 2019; my take-away from that here.

How to motivate students in virtual field courses

Haha, you were hoping for an easy answer here? I think keeping in mind the three basic psychological needs of students that I described in the framework of the self-determination theory (autonomy, competence and relatedness) is extremely important. The better we can find ways to give students opportunities to feel any and all of those, the more motivated they’ll be.

Good-practice examples of virtual field courses

(This section was first called “best-practice”, but then I noticed that I am showing quite a lot of my own work and decided I’d rather take it down a notch ;-))

There are many categorizations possible for the examples I’m showing below, but I went for the continuum from “fully virtual” on the one hand and then “fully synchronous outside” on the other.

Fully virtual

If you are doing a fully virtual field course, no matter whether it is video-based or text based, it’s really helpful to integrate activities that aren’t related to listening or reading, for example:

Working with pictures of real examples

Providing students with a picture of a field site, or some example of a process, or some instrumentation that they’ve just learnt about, and asking them to annotate the picture is a quick and easy activity that also helps you gauge the students’ level of understanding. This works well if you just want students doing something else than listening to you for 15 minutes.

Working with simulations

It’s fascinating how many really nice virtual representations exist online on all kinds of topics once one starts looking!

I was very impressed with this virtual arboretum I came across recently. If you were teaching about plants, this might be a neat tool for example when you want students to practice drawing plant features, for example.

Investigating a compilation of media

At the recent #FieldWorkFix conference, we were shown this platform for a virtual site assessment which I found super impressive: It’s basically “only” 360° pictures, movies and audio files that are located on a map, so students can do a virtual walk through a park that they would otherwise have visited. But the way this is done, by for example also including a picture of the parking spot and visitors center, makes it feel very real and relatable, and the other pictures, movies and audio files of the park make it possible to do the real assessment.

Another example that I find extremely inspiring is not of a whole site, but it’s a study guide on ID-ing different kinds of rocks. There is a large visual bank of rocks, each combined with the data that students need to make an ID, for example a scale so one can estimate the real size of the rocks, responses to different acids that give clues about the chemical composition, etc.. It seems incredibly comprehensive and like a lot of fun!

Investigating real data

There are of course also many amazing datasets compiled for different regions, for example Svalbox.no for Svalbard, where students can use gis-systems to access many different kinds of data in a geo-referenced frame. Combined with for example google Earth this can be used for free exploration into many different questions.

Creating the features you want to investigate

Last not least, if you want students to do some practical work at home in a virtual course, there is always kitchen oceanography, which in this context means hands-on activities that can be done solely with materials that students typically have at home already. It can mean investigating ocean currents in plastic cups with water, ice and black tea (for 24 easy ideas check out my advent calendar), or it can mean using bread or chocolate bars to simulate an investigation into how rocks behave under pressure. Or if you wanted to get fancy, you could even send out materials (e.g. sand samples in small zip lock bags to get a feel of different grain sizes). Doing small hands-on stuff at home can be a great way to change up long days of sitting in front of a computer…

With “remotely controlled kitchen oceanography” we’ve shown how small, hands-on stuff that students do at home can be combined with experiments with more complicated setups, that are streamed from my kitchen. We were all in a video conference and could therefore all see each others’ experiments while being able to really closely look at our own. Doing something similar with an instructor in the field should be easy enough (if the network and weather cooperate).

Virtual with “outdoor” aspects

As much fun as kitchen oceanography breaks are, sometimes it might be even better to get students out the door with a purpose.

Observe something related to your field right outside your door

I’ve long been a fan of local fieldwork, i.e. sending students out to discover something related to the course’s topic right outside their door. For examples see for example my post on hydraulic jumps that are everywhere, on #BergenWaveWatching, or on #MoreThanWeeds.

But how to implement it in a virtual field course?

One way to take the pressure off students when doing local fieldwork tasks was shown to us at the #FieldWorkFix conference in this super best practice example that I got to experience myself during a fairly intensive virtual conference day: During the one hour lunch break, we not only had to eat lunch, but were asked to go outside and follow the wandering cards on here. Those are cards that give you instructions for your short walk: “Follow something yellow”, “sit for 2 minutes and observe things around you”, “take a right turn”, that kind of things (I, of course, didn’t follow the instructions because I wanted to see some water during my lunch break). We were also instructed to take pictures of something related to our field course, upload it on a website and write a short description (which I did).

And it was a great experience: Within this one hour, I did manage to eat lunch, go outside, take a picture, upload it, and add a description. This let me get some exercise and oxygen, gave me a purpose for my walk, and also proved how easy and fast these kinds of tasks can be if you don’t feel that you need to go to The Best wave watching spot, see the most exciting plant, whatever, but instead just have to find anything related to the course. And it was great to see all the different pictures of participants coming together! This is a way to introduce the local excursions that I will definitely be using in the future to give students that feeling of competence but also a glimpse of one of the typical feelings of fieldwork: That time is precious and every minute and every observation counts. But that a lot can be gained in a really short time, too!

Outdoor asynchronous

If one of the learning outcomes is to practice observation and classification skills, working with citizen science apps like iNaturalist or the german Naturgucker are great. Both are parts of citizen science projects where everybody can upload pictures and other observations (e.g. audio files) that are then classified either by that person directly or through discussions on the platform. Here students contribute to “real science” by collecting data that is relevant for a larger purpose, and they interact with specialists and thus get feedback and feel part of a bigger community. I don’t know anything like that for my own topics, but in biology those are great tools.

One tool that I really want to use in asynchronous outdoor teaching myself are geocaches. Geocaching is a virtual treasure hunt: small “treasures” (often tiny plastic boxes) are hidden and can be found using an app tht gives clues where to look. Geocaches can also be virtual, and are already used for educational purposes for example as “EarthCaches“. This special form of geocaches has been developed by the Geological Society of America and the goal is to bring people to geologically interesting sites and teach them something related to that site. Wouldn’t it be awesome to do something like that for your class?

Geocaches are peer-reviewed before they appear on the app, so a lower threshold version of the same idea could be QR-codes that you hide in the area you want your students to investigate, and have the QR-codes link to websites that you can easily adapt with the seasons, or update from year to year, or have full and easy control over. Of course you might need to check the QR-codes are still there before you run the class the next year, but this is fairly low-key if you are working close to home. (Close to home being an important caveat: in fully virtual semesters, students might actually not be where you are. Please consider ways to accommodate them!)

Outdoor synchronouns

In the last workshop I ran on virtual field courses, a participant told us about a tour guide system his institute had just bought in order to be able to do in-person excursions. The devil is in the detail, of course (how do you make sure all students can see while still maintaining the necessary distance from each other?), but that sounded like a great idea.

Ideas for assessment

Depending on what is being done during the virtual field courses, traditional forms of assessment might still work, or maybe they need to be adapted. What you could consider is including activities into your assessment that are motivating students in themselves, for example asking them to write Instagram or blog posts (and check out this blog post for a grading rubric for Instagram posts!).

In my experience, writing for a different audience than just one overwhelmed instructor is very motivating to students, both because they can use it to show their friends and family what they are doing all day long, and because social media provides the potential for super positive feedback (check out Robert’s tweet about one of my kitchen oceanography experiments that just received its 330th “like” today!). An assignment like that helps on all three psychological basic needs that help foster intrinsic motivation: feeling autonomous, competent and related. So why not give it a shot?

What is your experience with virtual field courses? Do you have best practice examples to add to this? Please share!

References

Ronny C. Choe, Zorica Scuric, Ethan Eshkol, Sean Cruser, Ava Arndt, Robert Cox, Shannon P. Toma, Casey Shapiro, Marc Levis-Fitzgerald, Greg Barnes, and H. Crosbie (2019). “Student Satisfaction and Learning Outcomes in Asynchronous Online Lecture Videos”, CBE—Life Sciences Education, Vol. 18, No. 4. Published Online: 1 Nov 2019
https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-08-0171

Fedesco, H. N., Cavin, D., Henares, R. (2020). Field-based Learning in Higher Education: Exploring the Benefits and Possibilities. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 20, No. 1, April 2020, pp.65-84. doi: 10.14434/josotl.v20i1.24877

Finkelstein, N. D., Adams, W. K., Keller, C. J., Kohl, P. B., Perkins, K. K., Podolefsky, N. S., Reid S., LeMaster. R. (2005). When learning about the real world is better done virtually: A study of substituting computer simulations for laboratory equipment. Physical review special topics – Physics education research 1, 010103

Giles, S., Jackson, C. & Stephen, N. Barriers to fieldwork in undergraduate geoscience degrees. Nat Rev Earth Environ 1, 77–78 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0022-5

Larsen, C., Walsh, C., Almond, N., & Myers, C. (2017). The “real value” of field trips in the early weeks of higher education: the student perspective. Educational Studies, 43(1), 110-121.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. New York: Guilford

#TeachingTuesday: Some things I read about making good lecture videos

1 Reply

Just imagine you had written an article on “Student Satisfaction and Learning Outcomes in Asynchronous Online Lecture Videos”, like Choe et al. (2019) did. What excellent timing to inform teaching decisions all around the world!

Choe et al. compare 8 different video styles (all of which can be watched as supplementary material to the article which is really helpful!), 6 to replace “normal lectures” and two that complement them, to investigate the influence of video style on both how much students are learning from each, and how they feel watching them.

The “normal lecure” videos were different combinations of the lecturer and information on slides/blackboards/tablets/…: a “classic classroom” where the lecturer is filmed in front of a blackboard and a screen, a “weatherman” style in front of a green screen on which the lecture slides are later imposed, a “learning glass” where the lecturer is seen writing on a board, a “pen tablet” where the lecturer can draw on the slides, a “talking head” where the lecturer is superimposed on the slides in a little window, and “slides on/off” where the video switches between showing slides or the lecturer.

And the good news: Turns out that the style you choose for your recorded video lecture doesn’t really affect student learning outcomes very much. Choe et al. did, however, deduce strengths and weaknesses of each of the lecture formats, and from that come up with a list of best practices for student engagement, which I find very helpful. Therein, they give tips for different stages of the video production, related to the roles (lecturer and director of the video), and content covered in the videos, and these are really down-to-earth, practical tips like “cooler temperatures improve speaker comfort”. And of course all the things like “not too much text on slides” and “readable font” are mentioned, too; always a good reminder!

One thing they point out that I wasn’t so clear to me before is that it’s important that the lecturer is visible and that they maintain eye contact with the camera. Of course that adds a layer of difficulty to recording lectures — and a lot of awkward feelings and extra work in terms of what to wear and actually having to shower and stuff — but in the big scheme of things if it creates a better user experience, maybe it’s not such a big sacrifice. Going forward, I’ll definitely keep that in mind!

Especially making the distinction between the roles of “lecturer” and “director” was a really helpful way for me to think about making videos, even though I am playing both roles myself. But it reminds me of how many considerations (should) go into a video besides “just” giving the lecture! If you look at the picture above, you’ll see that I’ve started sketching out what I want to be able to show on a future video, and what that means for how many cameras I need, where to place them, and how to orient them (portrait or landscape). When I made the (german) instructions for kitchen oceanography, I filmed myself in portrait mode, thinking of posting them to my Instagram stories, but then ended up editing a landscape video for which I then needed to fill all the awkward space around the portrait movie. Would have been helpful to think about it in these terms before!

Choe et al. even include a “best practice” video in their supplementary material, which I find super helpful. Because even though in some cases it might be feasible to professionally produce lectures in a studio, but that’s not what I (or most people frantically producing video lectures) these days have access to. So seeing something that is professionally produced but that doesn’t (seem) to require incredibly complicated technology or fancy editing is reassuring. In fact, even though the lecturer appears to have been filmed in front of a green screen, I think in the end it’s not too unsimilar to what I did in the (german) instructions for kitchen oceanography mentioned above: A lecturer on one side, the slides (in a portrait format) on the other.

In addition to the six “lecture” videos, there was a “demo” video where the lecturer showed a simple demonstration, and an “interview” video, where the lecturer was answering questions that were shown on a screen (so no second person there). Those obviously can’t replace a traditional lecture, but can be very useful for specific learning outcomes!

The “demo” type video is the one I am currently most interested in, since that’s where I can best contribute my expertise in a niche where other people appreciate getting some input. Also, according to Choe at al., students found that type of video engaging, entertaining, and of high learning value. All the more reason for me to do a couple more demo videos over the next couple of days, I’m already on it!

References:

Ronny C. Choe, Zorica Scuric, Ethan Eshkol, Sean Cruser, Ava Arndt, Robert Cox, Shannon P. Toma, Casey Shapiro, Marc Levis-Fitzgerald, Greg Barnes, and H. Crosbie (2019). “Student Satisfaction and Learning Outcomes in Asynchronous Online Lecture Videos”, CBE—Life Sciences Education, Vol. 18, No. 4. Published Online: 1 Nov 2019
https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-08-0171

“Excursion week” in Oceanography 101 while physically distancing

Learning about concepts, observations, experimentation

Of course I can’t give you a solution that perfectly replaces a field course by something that isn’t a fieldcourse. But that doesn’t mean that many of the learning outcomes usually associated with field courses can’t be had in non-fieldcourse settings.

What are the learning outcomes that you care about most? Understanding of specific concepts? Then maybe those concepts, even though most impressively seen at the location where you typically go for your field course, can be observed in other places, too, if students are guided to find them. Or learning to observe following a specific protocol? Then maybe this protocol can be followed (or mostly followed) while collecting a different type of data than it is usually used on. Here are a couple of suggestions of ways to do this:

A: Field course at home

There are two different scenarios that I think can work well here: Having students explore the world right outside their home with a focus on topics from their course, or having them explore the enormous amount of available datasets on the internet.

A.1: Exploring the neighbourhood

Assuming students are able to walk around outside their homes (as they currently are where I’m at), having them explore the neighbourhood. There are different kinds of tasks that could work depending on your learning outcomes:

A.1.1: Find examples of specific science concepts

The tasks can be very specific (“find examples of hydraulic jumps“, “observe tidal flows in a river by watching moored structures move“) or not so specific (“pick a topic related to our class and find a way to observe it”). I think this is a really nice task because it helps students discover how prevalent the concepts are in their daily lives, rather than being something that only exists in books and lectures and really far-away locations that field courses would go to. Careful, as you see with my wave watching, this can get addictive!

A.1.2: Explain something you know for sure they will be able to observe

If you know where your students currently are, you can also ask them to observe specific features and explain them (“Make a time series of positions of that moored structure in the tidal river and relate the positions to the tidal cycle“, or for tons of ideas in Bergen see #BergenWaveWatching on Elin’s blog). This is also a really nice task, again because it brings concepts from the lecture into students’ real lives. It’s also maybe a little easier to relate to the rest of your course since you have a better idea of what they will be observing and interpreting.

A.2: Exploring the interwebs

This is just a quick side note, but of course there are TONS of data available on the internet. From observations of salinity, temperature, pressure mounted on seals in Antarctica, to winds and waves observed from satellites. Many of them even come with interfaces ready to do easy plots. And I’ve been a big fan of the lovely people on Twitter (shoutout to @aida_alvera and @remi_wnd particularly, I always love your posts!) that post interesting features from recent satellite images. So much to discover! Trying that for myself has been on my to do list for quite a while. You’d think I would find time for it during Corona isolation, wouldn’t you?

A.3: Ask others for observations that students can work with

Kinda like what I do with #friendlywaves where people send me pictures of waves and I try to explain the physics I see (while dreaming that it’s me on that ship in Lofoten…). This would be so much fun if students took pictures of interesting features they saw (or went through their old pics) and then shared them and asked each other for ideas what might have happened there. Or if you asked people to take pictures for you, or accessed webcams (like this one, looking at Saltstraumen, the strongest tidal current!), took screenshots and analysed those. I’d totally be in!

[Edit 13.5.2020: Here is a cool example of a virtual field course that was done at UNIS, using videos of field sites and discussing them in groups]

B: Kitchen Oceanography

Of course, #KitchenOceanography is my solution to everything. Need to make a class more interesting? Bring some #KitchenOceanography to the classroom! Can’t teach in-person classes but want people to still have hands-on experiences? Let them do #KitchenOceanography at home! Feel down in isolation and need something to cheer you up? Do some #KitchenOceanography!

So here are a couple of ways to have students do #KitchenOceanography while physically distancing.

B.1: Following my 24 days of #KitchenOceanography

If you haven’t seen my 24 days of #KitchenOceanography yet, you might want to check it out. If you want to give your students a recipe for kitchen oceanography, there is probably something in there that works with your Oceanography 101 class! You could ask them to do one experiment that you find most relevant to your class, or pick one they find most interesting, or distribute all 24 experiments over all the students and have them report back.

And even though I’m so depriciatingly talking about “recipes” and structured activities, be assured that for most students things won’t end after they’ve done the experiment. There is ALWAYS something they observe that they still want to figure out, so there will be more experimentation going on than you expect!

B.2: Problem solving

This is a little more difficult to do if you and your students only communicate electronically and you can’t give them physical samples to investigate (but if you can place samples somewhere where students can easily and safely pick them up, you could for example give them salt water samples and ask them to figure out the sample’s salinity, or give them a fresh water and a salt water sample and ask them to figure out which one is which only using ice cubes). But there are still tons of ways problem solving can be practiced, for example by asking students to figure out ways to measure temperature, salinity and density.

B.3: Open-ended investigation

This is the most fun way to do kitchen oceanography, but depending on whether students have ever done these kinds of experiments before or not, it might be worth starting with a more guided kitchen oceanography experiment. But ultimately, this is where you ask students to figure things out in their kitchens. Currently on the list of things I want to try when I get the time (again, how is Corona isolation not the time for this kind of stuff? But somehow it isn’t): Can I actually see a change in the refraction of a spoon in a glass of very cold salt water as compared to warm fresh water? How big is that density effect? Would I be able to see the spoon bend where it goes through a density stratification in my glass? I bet you, once I start playing with this, that’s that for that evening!

C: Bonus idea: Ocean podcasts & books

There are two oceanography-themed podcasts that I really enjoy listening to (and I’m not a podcast person!): Climate Scientists and Treibholz. Both would be great to listen to interviews with super cool scientists while dreaming yourself away to expeditions to the Arctic or Antarctica. There is so much to learn from other people’s experiences in the field — why not ask students to listen to other people’s experiences with a focus on either the science, or the methods, or anything else?

And of course there are tons of books that would lend themselves to that, too, for example xplorer’s diaries. Nansen’s “Farthest North” (1897) for example fits super well if you wanted to talk about the discovery of dead water…

Bringing it all together

The big question is: Once your students have done the tasks of finding/producing and describing phenomena, what do they do with that? It might not come as a surprise, but I think that they should be encouraged to publicly share them on the internet. Both because it’s a good opportunity for them to build their scicomm profile, but also because there are surpisingly many people who get really excited about (read here how Prof. Tessa M Hill‘s student Robert Dellinger posted a video of an overturning circulation on his 70-ish follower Twitter account, and the video has, as of April 16th, 70 retweets and 309 likes!) and that’s such a motivating feedback for them!

Of course, the sharing and excited reactions could also happen within your university’s learning management system, but honestly … no. Ask them to share it via social media! I, for one, am definitely more than happy to comment and ask questions and share my excitement there! :-)