One of the recreational activities I started to participate in about six years ago is long distance voyageur canoe paddling.

In 2008 I was a member of a crew that paddled from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, to Thunder Bay, Ontario as part of the David Thompson Brigade.  It was a ten week trip down the North Saskatchewan River, the Manitoba lakes, the Winnipeg River and into the boundary waters down to Lake Superior - some 3600 kilometres.  The trip commemorated a similar trip made 200 years earlier by David Thompson, in his capacity as an explorer, trader, and mapmaker for the North West Company.  Anywhere from 12 to 15 voyageur canoe crews participated at any given time - a flotilla making its way east along the historic waterways of the fur trade in its heyday.

That trip changed my life, because it took me out of my busy but comfortable professional life and inserted me into an environment to which I was entirely unaccustomed.  At the beginning of the trip I was worried that I might not be up to it, but with the support of my crew-mates, and the many new friends developed along the way, I made it, and I was a better person for it.

By the time I reached Thunder Bay, I had lost 15 pounds, and grown a beard that was surprisingly grey.

At left is a photo of me when I arrived home.  As you can see, I was a bit weather-beaten, but on the inside I was entirely alive.

The beard soon disappeared, and I slipped back into my normal routine.  I had contracted the bug, however.  Some veterans of the 2008 trip and I purchased a 25' voyageur canoe (the "Red Rogue") from Western Canoeing and Kayaking in Abbotsford, BC, which we used for some short excursions in and around the Okanagan Valley.

In 2011 we signed on for the David Thompson Columbia River Brigade, a six week paddle of another dozen voyageur canoe crews from Invermere, BC, then south along the Kootenay River into Montana, down the Clark Fork and Pend d'Oreille Rivers, over to Kettle Falls, Washington, and then down the Columbia River to Astoria, Oregon, where we arrived two hundred years to the day after David Thompson made a similar appearance there in 1811.  It was another opportunity to meet old friends from 2008, and introduce new enthusiasts to the pleasure, and adventure, of voyageur canoe paddling.

On each of the 2008 and 2011 trips, the brigade organizers engaged Jay Macmillan, a documentary film maker to record the journey.  Jay has produced award-winning films of each trip.  Below you'll find a link to the trailer for the film he produced which documents the 2011 trip.  It's called Tracing the Columbia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7f9v1mbppM

For the future, plans are underway to stage a series of major canoe brigade events leading up to 2017, the 150th anniversary year of the beginning of Canada as a nation.

There are but a few symbols that people recognize as emblematic of Canada - the maple leaf, the beaver, Mounties - but I'm one of those who think that there is another symbol we should take time to remember - the voyageur canoe.

Here's a link to a tool called QuizStar.  It enables instructors to prepare online quizzes in multiple choice, true/false, and short answer formats.  It controls the time that students have available to them to complete the quizzes, and marks them automatically.

It seems to provide a useful adjunct to the downloading of content online that authors like Jose Bowen in Teaching Naked suggests we embrace so as to free up face time for critical thinking exercises.

As we probably all know (we were students once ourselves, after all), many of our learners will either fail to do assigned reading, or watch content videos, as we would want them to do, before class.  Bowen suggests quizzes for grades, administered shortly before class, to encourage learners to do the required reading/viewing.  QuizStar seems to be one of several software products that fills the bill.

http://quizstar.4teachers.org/

Here's a link to an article published yesterday for CNBC on the poor market in the United States for recent law school graduates.  Since the recession of 2008, lawyer unemployment has increased significantly, and law schools have decreased enrolment to reflect the realities of the current working environment.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100569350

Choosing a legal career is a big step.  The article notes that graduates of American law schools can expect to have accumulated student loan debt of between $125,000 and $250,000.  Considering the years of deferred income spent in school, that is a heavy burden for anyone to shoulder, and the landscape is made even more problematic given that the initial salaries new lawyers can expect to command on graduation have also declined.

In light of this, several law schools have changed the focus of the legal education they deliver.  The traditional form of delivery has always emphasized exposure to content.  This is not a surprise, as legal education is largely rule-driven; it is only when the rules are embedded that analysis and the development of plausible arguments or plans of action can follow.

Now, law schools are emphasizing skills training - how to manage clients, how to conduct trials, and how to operate a law firm. 

It seems to me that this re-configuration creates an environment that is ideally suited to the types of hybrid learning espoused in Jose Bowen's book, Teaching Naked.  If the lecture-oriented delivery of content could be downloaded to online resources that law students would be required to absorb pre-class, face time in class could be employed in creative discussions about such things as the proper roles lawyers play within society, mock trials, mock interviews with clients, and the way that lawyers should address the ethical problems which so often arise in practice.

If law students were to graduate with those types of skills, I believe they could expect to occupy the high ground in a difficult job market.

References:

Bowen, J. (2012).  Teaching Naked:  How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass Wiley

Here's a link to a video produced in 2011 providing some startling statistics regarding the extent to which the students of today are wired into digital resources, and how outmoded an educational delivery system based on books and lectures has become.  Indeed, the video asserts that online learners outperform students who participate in face-to-face sessions.

I'd like to see some research that supports that statement.  In Teaching Naked, Jose Bowen expresses the view that face time is invaluable in order to develop the higher learning, critical thinking elements at the top of Bloom's taxonomy (Bowen, 2012).

A useful message in the video that I do accept is that our learners will only get to an understanding of a subject matter if they are able to create and share as an integral part of the learning process.  As the video says: "Tell me, and I will forget.  Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand."

I still use a chalkboard, at times.  I wonder how long it will be before you will only see chalkboards in a museum? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zKdPOHhNfY

References:

Bowen, J. (2012).  Teaching Naked:  How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass Wiley

Another thing that interests me is the declining usefulness of Powerpoint as a pedagogical tool.  Here's a link to another McMillan video on powerpoint, which highlights the way powerpoint presentations should, and should not, be made, on a delicate subject. Very funny, indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=WGiePuNFXwY

 

One of the things that interests me is ways that we can encourage students to take on a more active role while in class.  Here's a link to a short video posted by a Syracuse University professor showing how he integrates a live Twitter feed into his interactive lectures.  Not only does it permit the students in the room to post comments in real time, but it is available to anyone else who wants to participate outside the classroom as well.  Talk about a way to invite the world into the room!

 

Here's a link to a session delivered by Sir Harold Evans on the origin of Franchising.  The use of the franchise as a business model was developed by a Canadian, believe it or not.  It shows the way I'd like to download my law lectures for online viewing.  The only problem is, I'd have to hire an artist to do the drawings.  I have no facility in that department (I was the last person in my class in Grade 4 to get a pen).

 

One of the presentation tools that has taken a lot of heat over the last while is Powerpoint.  It seems like just yesterday that I was spending hour after hour creating slides, with clip-art images drawn from the Internet, that I hoped would become the focus of my classroom discussions.  The problem was, the slides themselves became too much of the focal point during class, and interaction between me and the students diminished.

Take a moment to access the video below.  It illustrates how Powerpoint can be integrated into a presentation, but does not overpower it, or BECOME the presentation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i68a6M5FFBc

An important takeaway for me after viewing this video was the advice that you should plan out your presentation on a piece of paper BEFORE creating a Powerpoint.  That way, you'll avoid letting Powerpoint itself determine the way your presentation flows from one idea to another.  It's almost as if the program itself is leading us to that dead zone we've all experienced.

Given students' short attention spans, instructors need to shake it up every 10-15 minutes or so, by making use of other presentation techniques, along with Powerpoint, e.g. writing on a whiteboard, circulating a handout etc.  If I could learn how the creators of this video do their artwork onscreen, it would also augment the opportunity for me to download some of the course content into online resources that students could review in advance of the class, thereby freeing up face time for the higher order learning challenges we all want to have our students confront.

One of the implications of online technology is a global educational community that transcends the narrow confines of the traditional post-secondary institution, and perhaps makes it irrelevant.  Here's a link to a short video in which a thinker asks the question whether we've ever considered how utterly irrelevant the current structured form of education is for students, and that un-learning and re-learning are the only true literacy skills that productive people will need in the 21st century.

The truly amazing part of the video is how it shows a choir of 2000 people singing an aria together in real time, with moving results.

The brave new world of digital media, and education.  Total customization.  Perhaps no institutions at all.

In Teaching Naked, Jose Antonio Bowen argues that instructors at post-secondary institutions must learn to become curators of their students' educational experiences, so as to encourage them to participate more fully in the development of their own learning (Bowen, 2012). 

As a curator, the instructor acts more like a facilitator than a sage on the stage.  For Bowen, the lecture must therefore play but a minor role in the curator's toolbox.  He argues that most instructors who rely on lectures for learning do so by default.   Indeed, he goes further, and asserts that the vast majority of lectures are of modest quality, and some are entirely lacking in utility.  While he acknowledges that there is a place for lectures in learning, he believes they must be employed strategically, and only where it is clear that the context demonstrates they represent the best pedagogy.

Instead of lectures, Bowen suggests that instructors should focus on seeking ways to ensure that students are integrated into the learning process.  This means that in addition to communicating high standards, instructors must spend time establishing a supportive learning milieu, and guiding the way students learn, in order to achieve educational outcomes.  If instructors do not commit to making this type of change, he says, students will vote with their feet and retention rates will continue to decline as students opt for cheaper, and more relevant, online alternatives.

I use interactive lectures to deliver my law courses, and they are generally well received.  Many students like lectures as a delivery tool.  At the same time, I have had students who have clearly been bored during lectures, either because the format does not engage them, or the content is not challenging.

I also had the experience recently where I asked my students in a course to read the textbook chapters in advance of class, and to perform online quizzes so that their absorption of the content could be documented.  I also told them that class time would be reserved for student presentations and interactive discussions referencing the topic material outlined in the syllabus for that week.  During the course of the semester several students came to me and complained that I was not teaching them anything.  Several of them stopped coming to class.  I suspect that the reason was that they believed they could learn what they needed to learn on their own.  Still others – the ones who "got it" – enjoyed the deeper exploration of the curriculum subjects that the in-class discussions encouraged.

I was left thinking that one size can never fit all situations, that students come in all shapes and sizes, and that pedagogical theory will never provide a uniform answer that will cure all the flaws in a particular formula for the delivery of learning.

If student retention is the concern, there are many factors apart from the in-class experience that will determine if a student stays on and completes a qualification.  A summary of recent research suggests that between ten and twenty percent of post-secondary students do not complete their program of study, while others take considerably longer to complete than expected (Albert, 2010).  At Simon Fraser University, a 2007 report revealed that 6000 undergraduates entered the institution annually, but only 4000 bachelor's degrees were being awarded each year (Morris & Heslop, 2007).

Is the classroom experience the key factor in determining whether students will stay and complete?  Again, the research indicates that there are a number of additional factors affecting the ability, or desire, of students' to continue, including psychological, financial and familial stressors, many of which may have little or nothing to do with the format in which instruction is delivered.  Academic integration may only be one factor.  Others would include the extent the student is integrated socially into the institution, and the extent to which the institution offers support services to its students. 

Still other factors may include the age and cultural characteristics of the students that are recruited (Albert, 2010).  The latter is a significant criterion, as many of my students come from Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and the Caribbean.  For Chinese international students, for example, the learner-centred active participation model that Bowen champions for class is entirely foreign.  In most Chinese education, student work is individual, group work rarely occurs, essay writing is sporadic, the format is lecture-driven, and the focus of assessments is on exams (Zhang & Zhou, 2010).  Students reared in that sort of environment will have significant difficulty entering a flipped classroom, at least initially.

Does this mean that Bowen's remedy for lower retention misses the mark?  I do not think so.  What Bowen appears to be saying is that the way learning is delivered may mitigate some of the impact of the other factors I have noted when it comes time for students to decide whether they are being enriched in the classroom to the extent necessary to convince them to continue with their programs of study (Bowen, 2012).

As for the difficulty that arises when different students have different expectations about the way learning should be delivered, and the format within which they will experience their own education, Bowen encourages institutions to experiment with customization.  He also wants institutions to take risks.  In order to compete, he says, colleges and universities must leverage their best assets, and find a specialized niche.  They will need to offer something that sets them apart from their competitors and, ideally, offer it with less cost (Bowen, 2012).  All of that, I think, can be harmonized with the reality that different students have different needs.  Indeed, to act otherwise may simply ignore the problem.

While there may be several reasons, apart from the way learning is delivered, which may influence students to interrupt, or bring to an end, their participation in an educational program before completion, I cannot but agree with Bowen that institutions must leverage what makes them unique in order to improve the learning experience.  If so, it seems likely that some students, at least, will be induced to remain on track.

I also agree that there is probably a growing cadre of students, and parents who fund them, who will be increasingly sceptical of the value of a lecture-based approach to learning if costs continue to rise, and the content that is delivered is made available at less expense online.

At the same time, there are other students who have different expectations regarding their learning, especially those who arrive from offshore.

I think that teaching naked is an approach that has the potential to re-invigorate many existing post-secondary institutions.  This is due to the fact that a lecture-based approach often seems to underutilize the expertise of faculty, and the desire of most students to be enriched, notwithstanding the financial and other sacrifices they are making when they choose to attend at school.

Bowen appears to recognize these nuances when he suggests that institutions need to customize their learning formats to the needs and convenience of the students they attract.  In my own classes, then, it may be worth the effort to offer different types of learning formats in different sections of the course, making sure that the students who register are made aware of the distinctions.  For students who are more comfortable, at that particular stage of their learning, with content delivered live, the course may have more of a focus towards content delivery in class, with follow-up later.  For students more hard wired, technology may be employed to deliver content pre-class, with the integration of the content into higher orders of thinking reserved for face time with the instructor.

In the end, the delivery of learning appears to be about flexibility.  Institutions need to be cautious about grasping silver bullets; but they must learn to be nimble when considering the design or the courses, and the programs, they choose to offer.

References

Bowen, J. (2012).  Teaching Naked:  How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass Wiley

Albert, S. (2010). Student Retention – A Moving Target.  Council of Ontario Universities Discussion Paper.  Retrieved from: http://www.cou.on.ca/publications/academic-colleague-papers/pdfs/online-learning-disussion-paper_final-may-5

Morris, D. (2007). Understanding Student Retention at SFU – Report #2.  Why Are Students Leaving SFU?   Simon Fraser University Institutional Research and Planning. 

Retrieved from:http://www.sfu.ca/content/dam/sfu/irp.students/documents/understanding

_retention_rpt_2.pdf

Zhang, Z., & Zhou, G. (2010).  "Understanding Chinese International Students at a Canadian University:  Perspectives, Expectations, and Experiences," Canadian and International Education/Education canadienne et internationale:  Vol. 39:  Iss. 3, Article 5.  Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cie-eci/vol39/iss3/5

Some further thoughts regarding Jose Antonio Bowen's book, Teaching Naked, to which I referred in my post on February 25, 2013, below.

Throughout the years I have been exposed to teaching at the post-secondary level, a major pre-occupation of both instructors and administrators has been to establish protocols for the prevention of cheating on exams.

In Teaching Naked, Bowen poses a question that drives a stake through the heart of this obsession.  He queries why, with so much information available on the Internet, it can be considered cheating for students to make use of that information when writing an exam?  After all, he says, making exams fully open book, which includes making them open Internet, creates a scenario that mimics exactly what students already do when they seek out information, and what they will continue to do when they graduate and exit into the world of remunerative work.

I teach law courses to business students.  Historically, I have asked my students to write closed book exams.  Intuitively, I have thought that this is the best form of assessment, because it seems to test the amount of content they have absorbed, and asks them to apply that "knowledge" in order to resolve legal problems they may encounter in their lives as business owners, entrepreneurs, or managers.

If I were to permit students to have unlimited access to outside resources during exams, including access to the Internet, the risk that is presented is that the answers the students will provide will not be the genuine product of their own thinking, but a parroting of information that they retrieve elsewhere.  As one observer has noted, the exam "would shift from being about the synthesis of concepts [the students] had learned and held in their minds into an Internet scavenger hunt for solutions to the questions we pose" (Golub, 2005).

If so, it can be argued that the marks the students receive will amount to an assessment of thinking that is not their own.  My gut tells me that smacks of cheating.

The risk that students will be tempted to cheat if they are permitted easy access to external electronic resources, in particular, is a real one.   Golub notes that in 2002, twelve University of Maryland students were found to have cheated when they were found to be text messaging each other during an exam (Golub, 2005).  The same article observes, however, that since we encourage students to make use of technology, it would be counter-productive if we were to insist that students put away their laptops and other electronic devices in order to write open book exams.  To do so would mean, in effect, that the exam would become a closed book exam. 

Nor would it resolve the dilemma for instructors to insist that students print out all their notes.  Apart from the environmental implications, it is not practical to expect students to reproduce an e-text in hard format (Golub, 2005).

Donald Norman wrote an article in response to Golub's concerns (Norman, 2005).  In it, he posed a different question – what is the purpose of an examination?  For Norman, the question is not whether examinations should be written in a context that prevents cheating.  Such a focus turns instructors into enforcers.  Rather, instructors should concentrate on becoming facilitators who guide students to employ all the resources on offer in order to solve problems that are important in our lives.

This is, in fact, what Bowen preaches.  He says that the existence of the Internet has re-defined what is meant by cheating.  Making exams open book and open Internet creates an environment that is much more akin to the real world of work.  For Bowen, doing well on closed book tests may only prepare today's students for nothing more than more closed book testing.  Truly open book tests offer students the opportunity to analyze more and memorize less, which is what instructors should, in the end, be encouraging students to do.  The answer to fears about cheating is to prepare exams that test thinking skills, and not the absorption of factual content.

If the primary purpose of testing is to provide an opportunity for students to document how much factual information they have stored in their minds after taking a course, I think closed book exams are probably a useful tool.  They will not, however, constitute a valuable preparation for the type of testing of their work that will occur after they graduate.

In the world of work, a premium is placed on working in collaboration with others, sharing information, and analyzing various sources of data before adopting a plan of action based on consensus.  Such a process would look like cheating if students were to apply it in the classic exam format in school.

For me, Bowen's approach makes more sense.  We need to get beyond the mere repetition of facts.  In order for students to develop a deeper understanding of a subject matter, in a way that will assist them in their lives after school, they need to know how to find the relevant information that is available, evaluate it, and develop their own solutions based on it.  If that means they are relying on what others have thought about the problem at hand, so be it.  In reality, that is what everyone does now anyway.

In terms of testing, a focus on analysis, evaluation, and creativity simply means that the questions posed need to be more carefully crafted.  The questions we ask must therefore engage students at the higher levels of thinking, which will permit them to make full use of all the resources that are available, good and bad, and challenge them to consider how they will employ them to resolve important problems.  That is quite a bit different, and much more exciting, than merely regurgitating facts.

References

Bowen, J. (2012).  Teaching Naked:  How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass Wiley

Golub, E. (2005).  PC's in the Classroom & Open Book Exams.  Ubiquity, March 2005.  Retrieved from http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1066320

Norman, D. A. (2005).  In Defense of Cheating.  Ubiquity, March 2005.  Retrieved from http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1066347

In his 2012 book Teaching Naked:  How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, SMU dean Jose Antonio Bowen advocates the removal of technology from the post-secondary classroom, and replacing it with sessions that maximize the opportunity for students to apply online content in a face-to-face interactive way that will enhance their learning.

Bowen's thesis is that technology has offered instructors a template for delivering content online, before class.  The corollary is that the traditional method of delivering a first exposure to content, the classroom lecture, may be as dead as the dodo. 

To this, Bowen offers a heartfelt "amen."  For him, lectures are poor transmitters of content, and even worse tools for classroom learning.  Instead, class time should be spent creating value.  In education, this means the development of critical thinking skills.

Bowen argues that class time is the proper forum for developing such skills.  The delivery of content is better suited to the online world that technology invites us to utilize.

Bowen's message is delivered with passion, and his statistics suggest that if institutions of higher learning do not adapt to the technological environment millenials are wired into, they will find that their students will vote with their feet, and purchase cheaper, more customized, and ultimately more fulfilling experiences elsewhere.  That message is frightening.

The implications for my own mode of teaching are no less unsettling.  I teach law courses, and they are highly content-driven.  If I downloaded podcasts of my lectures that students might review before class, what would I do during class time?  I'd have to develop entirely new assessment tools, and lesson plans incorporating exercises that would engage my students in the higher level cognitive skills that underlie an ability to think critically.

That entails a lot of work.  As Bowen points out, it would also require me to focus more on what the students are learning, rather than what I am teaching.  Substituting monitoring and mentoring for the delivery of content will mean a loss of control, potentially, and that makes me a bit nervous.

Bowen's argument is that with the exception of the few elite institutions who can continue to rely on their brand to fill seats in lecture halls, the traditional residential colleges and universities must adapt to what students really want, or risk disappearing entirely.  Increasingly, students are seeking an education that has value, which means that they may not continue to absorb the high cost of the traditional post-secondary education, unless the institutions offering it are able to demonstrate it results in significant learning that will be of use after graduation.  In Bowen's view, the delivery of content in class can be accessed more cheaply elsewhere, and it fails to leverage the opportunity for more significant learning that face time with an instructor, and other students, can provide.

Class time that consists of lectures, and a reliance on Powerpoint, is often boring. Having said this, a concern I have about downloading content onto students for review preclass is that it may exponentially increase the amount of work they will be doing in each course, which may in turn cause them to rebel.  Sitting in a lecture hall and listening to an instructor deliver content may not be exciting, but it is certainly less work.  And if instructors are not lecturing, some students may feel that they have been short-changed.

As an instructor, I recall that the best teaching experiences involved lively interactions with students.  One can get a hint of interactions of that type in lectures, when a student will ask a question, but it seems to me that is merely the tip of the iceberg.  In order for students to be truly invested in the material, a departure from lectures is absolutely necessary.

The courses I teach involve a lot of content.  Some of these courses require that the stipulated content be delivered in order for my institution to receive accreditation.  I have not employed technology to any significant degree in order to supplement what I say in class, and so it is content that absorbs much of class time at my disposal.  Several of my students have indicated that I am a good lecturer.  I feel good about that, but I am left feeling that the experience could be better.

Bowen's suggestion that the content be jettisoned from class time is worth pursuing because it offers up an opportunity for the students to go to the next level in class.  I suspect that many students will not be happy about this, because it will require them to spend more time prepping, and it will force them to be active participants when we get together in class.  It will also require me to focus my class time on developing ways for my students to work with the material, and to allow them to acquire a deeper appreciation of the nuances that lurk within it.

The re-orientation that teaching naked offers will be a challenge for all, at least initially.  However, the content will still be delivered, and the opportunity to make a more profound investment in thinking about it that the time freed up in class will offer should pay major dividends.

February 24, 2013.

A little about me.  I am a lawyer in private practice in Kelowna, British Columbia.  For many years I was a trial lawyer, but in the last several years, my practice has focused on mediation and arbitration.  I am also a professor in the Okanagan School of Business at Okanagan College in Kelowna, where I teach law courses.

In my recreational life, I paddle voyageur canoes down the major river systems of Canada and the northern United States, along with a dedicated cadre of other water warriors.

The primary purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts on education, and how curricula should be delivered at the post-secondary level.

Welcome to my blog

Hi, I'm creating my blog, as we speak.  More to come, when the urge strikes me.