Welcome to Edubytes, formerly known as Flexibytes. This newsletter features articles that focus on innovations in teaching and learning in higher education.
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This report, from the Georgia Institute of Technology Commission on Creating the Next in Education, “is an effort to draw with broad strokes the nature of education that defines the technological research university of the year 2040 and beyond.” The commission identifies challenges and opportunities in the shifting landscape of higher education, and explore initiatives such as whole-person education, artificial intelligence and personalization.
Emergent EDU: Complexity and innovation in higher ed
“When we talk about innovation in higher education, what we are really talking about is how to manage, or account for, uncertainty,” writes Kristen Eshleman, director of Digital Innovation at Davidson College. In this EDUCAUSE Review article, Eshleman encourages institutions to rethink organizational structures and build innovation teams in order to “develop the frameworks that both speak to academic values and help us all adapt to a changing context.”
Future U Podcast: Shifting universities’ mindsets toward innovation
In this podcast interview, Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., talks about structures that Georgetown has created to introduce innovation and also how the school has fostered a culture of innovation that happens outside of those structures. Bass touches on some of the most successful outcomes, some of which are providing more flexible offerings for students.
Elon U. has been working to reinvent the transcript. And that has given it some eye-opening data.
Since 2015, Elon University has been experimenting with “visual” transcripts that blend together academic and extracurricular experiences. “Fewer and fewer places are requesting the academic transcript,” says Rodney Parks, the university’s registrar. “Let’s make a transcript more meaningful.” The school is now looking to mine student transcript data, combined with other data, to redesign campus programs based on factors such as student engagement and student experiences.
Learning analytics, student satisfaction, and student performance at the UK Open University
Tony Bates discusses a recent presentation by Bart Rienties, professor of learning analytics at the Institute of Educational Technology at the UK Open University. Rienties and his team looked at 151 courses and 111,256 students and students’ behaviour, satisfaction and performance at the Open University UK. Bates says, “this research provides quantitative evidence of the importance of learning design in online and distance teaching. Good design leads to better learning outcomes.” He argues that this knowledge be used in the design of all university and college courses, not only online courses.
The problem with "learning styles"Individual learning styles may not matter for student success, says Cindi May in this article from Scientific American. May, a professor of psychology at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, cites a study done at Indiana University, where 400 students completed a learning styles evaluation and answered questions about their study strategies. It was found that “most students are not employing study strategies that mesh with self-reported learning preferences, and the minority who do show no academic benefit.” May points to alternative techniques for student success, such as spacing out study sessions and self-assessment.
Five keys to motivating studentsThis article summarizes Paul Pintrich’s meta-analysis on student motivation. For example, the author discusses how higher levels of interest motivate students and how “students can catch motivation from a teacher who is obviously, unabashedly in love with the content and teaching.” Students’ motivation also increases when they are given some control over their learning, such as helping to decide the relative weight of exams and quizzes.
This article on the Open UBC website discusses UBC Vancouver’s call for Large Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) Transformation projects and its priority focus on the development or integration of open educational resources (OER). In the last funding cycle, more than 39 percent of TLEF projects incorporated strategies around open resources or practices. Other priority areas for this year’s TLEF call include strengthening and expanding Indigenous-focused curricula and developing approaches, resources or activities that actively engage with diversity and build capacity for inclusion in teaching and learning contexts. Letters of intent for these projects are due on July 12, 2018.
