This week's 12 o'clock Scholars and Summer Grant Faculty Showcase

CELT wants to thank all of you for your participation in the 12 o'clock Scholars Brown Bag on Monday, March 26 and in the Faculty Showcase by CELT Summer Grant winners on Wednesday, March 28. This message is also being sent to the celtblog at celtblog.blogspot.com. (Editor, please be on the alert!)

At the Brown Bag, led by ECET's Gary Steffen (a CELT Advisory Board member), we reflected on the theme of "Challenges of teaching in the 21st century" and its close connection to understanding the characteristics of Millennials and Nexters who will be entering our classrooms over the next 10 years. Gary noted that the two February teaching conferences had really opened his eyes to understanding Millennial, who are slowly becoming the majority in his classroom. He observed that the high school seniors entering our classrooms today were in 8th grade when 9/11 occurred. Their remembrance is different from those who were adults at that time. The chief concern might have been "How many days off will we get?" This observation highlights a fairly wide gulf in perspective. (See http://www.ihets.org/progserv/education/vb/archive.html#Jan07 for a Profile of the Four Generations now found in our classrooms.)

We noted that our students have difficulty connecting what they learn in a course to what they will do in "real life". I observed that in some cases we could do a better job of communicating the relevance. There is also difficulty in getting students to make connections between classes in the same subject area. Again, it was noted that an academic program should first look at modifications in who teaches the courses and in any changes in sequencing that might help students see the relevance of one course to another.

I asked what skills the group thought a professor would need in the next few years. Facilitating civil discourse would seem to be important no matter what subject matter one is teaching. Modeling and practicing respectful critical thinking is important for students who face an extremely diverse world in which they must make complex moral choices. Students seem to need the "Critical Behaviors" course where they learn time management, study skills, classroom behavior, and many other "learning basics". Teachers also need an understanding of the "intrusive parent" behavior and how to deal with it constructively.

Knowing how to integrate technology appropriately into a course was another skill. Participants noted that completing assignments using technology, especially those with self-grading or allowing for correction, were far more attractive to students than assignments without technology. We noted how much even young children learn from games. I asked if perhaps it was not just the technology, but the characteristics of the game environment, that promote learning. I referred to Malone's theory of Fun (read a .pdf copy of Malone's 1980 paper linked to this ACM portal page http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802839.) If you look at Gagne's "Events of instruction" (http://ide.ed.psu.edu/idde/theories.htm) and Keller's ARCS theory of motivation (also on the ide web site) alongside Malone, you will see some parallels. Learner control, just the right amount of challenge, immediate and appropriate feedback, just in time information, fantasy, and curiosity are all elements present in a game that make it fun, and are all elements present in the best teaching and learning environments. Players will stick with a game that possesses these attributes for hours, and learn. How could one's course integrate these principles for a more engaging learning environment? Could you incorporate more curiosity and fantasy in your course? (Could you have fun imagining this?)

In Wednesday's presentation of two CELT summer instructional development grants, Peter Goodmann, ECET, explicitly set out to create a fun learning environment in ECET 107. He presented his freshman students with a wireless radio building project instead of the traditional labs. The goal was to build a working "ham" radio with an international reach. It was a challenging project that utilized the concepts they learned in class, and required the student to direct their own learning. This was the first part of a three part project spanning 3 courses that would result in a transceiver. The other innovation was the portfolio that students were asked to assemble, including a reflective journal. Students were thrilled when their radios worked. They weren't as thrilled with the portfolio, but Peter hopes to try the portfolio again on a smaller scale because it gets students to write and to reflect on their learning.

Pam DeKoninck and Sarah Beckman built games into the online portion of their hybrid NUR 362 Critical Care course with help from Sam Birk, CELT Instructional Designer. The games were designed to promote drill and practice of the terms that students will meet on their nursing certification exams. Neither teacher had taught online before, and benefitted greatly from the two and a half day seminar that they took from the Nursing department at IUPUI. They were most pleased with the online discussion board, which they found was just as rich and beneficial as their face-to-face discussions. Their WebCT course is full of innovations. Pam and Sarah said they had both discovered an exciting new role, that of facilitator of learning.