What a 3D Printer Taught Me About Learning

If you aren’t an ardent follower of the maker movement, or involved in it yourself, you might have missed the hype about 3D printing. 3D printing has grown from a niche market for creating small prototypes or parts into a multi-billion dollar business spanning industries from medicine to even residential home construction.

3D printer

Supporters of 3D printing are quick to point out its educational value, where students can bring their digital designs into the physical world. The most straightforward educational uses for 3D printing align most closely with the so-called STEAM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math), but there are a number of other fields, such as anthropology and history, where scholars are exploring its potential for both teaching and research.

However, my own experience with 3D printing is far more modest than, say, how some scientists are printing living cells. In fact, I’ve only successfully printed one thing in 3D: a small blue clover cup. Since then, I haven’t been able to replicate my success, which in fact was predicated by a number of failed attempts. Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Strategies for Revising Recorded Lectures

Few teaching tasks are as loathsome as re-recording videos for your online course. 

In fact, I’ve been trying to come up with potential comparisons for about 20 minutes, and the closest I’ve come is the sinking feeling in your stomach when you survey the stack of final papers/projects that loom before you during finals week. While a root canal might be preferable to re-recording course videos, here are two practical recommendations that helped me when I set out to complete this undesirable task: Continue reading →

It’s Time to Talk About Deadlines

In September of 2018 I decided to take a leap of faith and go back to school to get an MFA in Game Design. I don’t have a background in games, my undergraduate degree is in music performance, but I’ve always loved games and when I found DePaul’s MFA in Game Design program I knew this was the path I needed to take.

This may sound ridiculous, but when I enrolled in graduate school I did not expect to be challenged by (and greatly struggle with) deadlines. Without giving the wrong impression about my overall self-confidence, deadlines have never really been a problem for me. Most of my career before going back to school was as a corporate copywriter: deadline city. If I was used to meeting tight deadlines literally every single day then surely I’d be able to handle following a syllabus and staying on top of things in school.

These are just a few of the thoughts that mocked and bludgeoned my consciousness as I fell into panic, disbelief, and about 60oz of cold brew while frantically pulling my first all-nighter to finish a project for school.

What happened? 

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Can You Save Time with Checklist Grading?

I am a proponent of using rubrics to grade students’ work. This is for a variety of different reasons that could warrant their own blog post. Moreover, I strongly believe that grading is a critical element of the teaching and learning process. It is our chance as instructors to let all of our students know where they are exceeding expectations and where they might need to do a little more work to achieve our intended learning outcomes. 

As I began my grand adventure in educating college students, I committed to making grading not simply the exercise of assigning grades, but ensuring that grading was a teaching tool. This meant ensuring that grading was a formative process both for me as the instructor and for students’ in their learning. I thoughtfully and carefully constructed rubrics for every assignment I gave students, selecting criteria and then defining three to four performance levels for each criterion. When I graded, I agonized over exactly which performance level to place each individual’s work. Any time I did not assign students to the top performance level, I would take a lot of time to provide detailed feedback about what students could improve in their next assignment to achieve the top performance level.  Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Learning Theories & Cognitive Psychology in Higher Education

If you teach college students, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you barely have time to brush your teeth, let alone ponder how well-established learning theories and principles could improve your teaching. So, for the sake of your well-being and your oral hygiene, I’ve rounded up a few oldies but goodies and some practical tips that are relatively easy to implement. With any luck, you’ll be ready to roll out a new evidence-based teaching strategy in less time than it takes to microwave a Lean Cuisine in the faculty lounge and inhale it at your desk.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Difficulty in Academia: Limits and Benefits

How hard is too hard? Is there an optimal failure rate for learning? Robert Wilson, Amitai Shenhav, Mark Straccia, and Jonathan Cohen would say yes.  In their 2018 study, The Eighty Five Percent Rule for Optimal Learning, the researchers set out to discover the “sweet spot” for difficulty in academia. They found that the spot where the most learning occurs –one that is not too hard so as to create frustration, but not so easy so as to not warrant doing– is a 15% failure rate.  What does this mean for students?  At its most simplistic level, it means that if you get 15% of the answers on an assessment wrong the test is at the optimal difficulty. 15% wrong? Wait that is only an 85% (or a B+), won’t that mess with my GPA (and perhaps my self-esteem)!? 

While I don’t think we can go so far as to say that an 85% is the ideal grade, I do think that we can do more to design classes that both encourage and reward failure.

Continue reading →

3 Quick Ways to Increase Student Engagement in Your Lectures

Studies have shown that student participation in lectures leads to students having greater motivation in the classroom, becoming better critical thinkers, and ultimately, learning more effectively. For students to reap the benefits of class participation, however, they actually have to participate. This can occasionally be challenging. 

Below are three activities I keep in my back pocket to stimulate meaningful student participation. 

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Changing Fate with a Screen: High School Live Cast in China

From MIT’s open courseware to the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), I have seen a lot efforts being taken towards blending advancements in technology with the goodwill of making knowledge accessible to all. As an online learning professional, I have been following reports and research on the impact of open education, but never before have I been so stunned by the results of a report. The report, originally published in the weekly edition of Chinese Youth newspaper in Dec 12, 2018, was about a program that provides a full-day live broadcast of a prestigious high school to 248 high schools in the rural areas of China.  

Instead of listening to their own instructors, students in the rural or “far-end” high schools watch a live broadcast of instruction from a high school in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province. According to the report, the launch of project faced strong resistance from teachers in these rural schools. They protested by tearing books apart. Some teachers even took a whole week off and left students “staring” at the screen by themselves.

Continue reading →

DePaul’s Mission in the Classroom

In common to most, if not all, teachers, I always commit myself to designing and carrying out successful teaching. In particular, I subscribe to the notion that teaching success correlates with students learning. Accordingly, part of my job as a teacher is to identify and facilitate ways of learning that best match the kinds of learning that needs to occur in my courses. Because there is no such thing as an all-purpose approach to teaching (or one-size fits all approach), I understand the need to maintain a life-long commitment to continuous improvement upon my teaching and learning. Thus, I intentionally make every effort to keep abreast with evidence-based developments on approaches to teaching and learning. For example, I regularly read journal articles and books related to teaching and learning. I attend the Annual University Teaching and Learning conference, the University Fall Forum, and other teaching and learning workshops. Among the many lessons I have learned is the critical role that the classroom climate has on students learning. Indeed, course climate has been suggested as a very important component in the design of effective instruction. For example, Ambrose et al. (2010) suggested seven principles for effective teaching based on literature research and their own teaching experiences. Two of these principles seem to explicitly connect learning with the climate of the course.

Continue reading →

Troubleshooting Common Videoconferencing Problems

With increasing technologies being used to facilitate global learning experiences (GLE) and guest participants in the classroom, technical difficulties are inevitable (as with any technology). Such unplanned technological mishaps often lie beyond the control of participants and instructors, so as with any collaborative effort to meet, it is best to prepare for common scenarios.

Consider the following scenario: You have invited a remote guest speaker in Germany for an hour-long class lecture. Since this lecture is a big deal due to the labor-intensive logistics planning (which include coordinating time zone differences, course scheduling, language coordination, appointments with the instructional technology support at your institution, and much emphasis for participation from your students), you are very much hoping that the videoconferencing tool you’ve selected will work. 

Despite your careful planning, testing, and prior use of the technologies at hand, sometimes, things just won’t work out. When things do not work out, here are some ways to save your videoconferencing event.

Continue reading →