New Teaching Strategy – How effective?

The form of collaborative learning that I have described in my previous post was triggered by the need of the students. In the theoretical courses, like MIS, using too much of the traditional teaching style would make the students less comfortable due to boredom. My students are mainly PM students, working in the morning, and taking care of a family. They arrive often to my evening classes very tired, which makes engaging them in the Teaching process essential. The described method, for which I’m still trying to find a nice name, transform the students’ role from passive to active, he gets fully involved in researching the topic and need to understand it really well to be ready for the class presentation. I encourage the students to follow my style in enhancing the lesson by relevant videos and exercises. I also invite the students to challenge my style by taking this as opportunity to try all the ideas that they must have crossed their mind as they are attending my classes. I tell them that you must though some/many times that my teacher should have done this or that to make the lesson more interesting or understandable. They usually feel motivated by the appreciation of their point of views while giving them a chance to demonstrate them, and very often they start feeling the constraints that their teachers are dealing with on daily basis and as a result give the overall class environment a much deeper dimension.

The use of this strategy in technical courses, like web development, helps in cases where some details are favorable to be explored by the students directly to simulate similar requirements at the future workplace. Spoon-feeding every topic is misleading students in this case and not preparing them for the reality of their future, where technology refreshes constantly and it’ll be very different the moment they leave us with their degree. They need to learn how to build on the fundamentals achieved in the class and complement it by using their own research to update themselves on whatever they’re expected to know. This is always the case in IT and no one can teach anyone everything, IT professionals need to always know how to find the information they need on the fly. Again the students learn the topics allocated to them much deeper to be able to explain it to the class. In technical courses they are required to develop demos to show the rest of the class how the technology works. They also prepare exercises for their classmates and support them with troubleshooting as they are practicing the assigned exercise. All this give a very rich learning opportunity to those students, in addition to the other motivational benefits mentioned above.

New Teaching Strategy - Not really New !

One of the less traditional teaching strategies that I used in some of my classes over the past three years is the subject of this post, but I don’t have a name for it.

This is how it goes: I select some of the course topics, assign one topic to every group of students, the students research the topic with an objective in mind, that is, prepare a lesson on the topic for their classmates with all the necessary illustration material and supporting exercises. The students then deliver the lesson to the rest of the class and sometimes I assess them on the outcomes based on a marking scheme like the one below:

Criteria	Max mark
Lesson Plan	5 marks
1.       Clearly outlines the lesson objectives	1
2.       Clearly defines lesson parts	2
3.       Clearly defines duration allocated for each lesson part	1
4.       Clearly defines the ownership of the lesson part	1
Presentation	5 marks
1.       Camtasia recording	1
2.       Visually appealing and clear points to understand	1
3.       Covers topic in a reasonable amount of details	2
4.       References Slide	1
Demo	5 marks
1.       Relevant and clear scenario	1
2.       Student’s competency level with the delivered topic	4
Exercise	5 marks
1.       Relevant to the lesson objectives	1
2.       Simple scenario with very clear instruction	1
3.       Provide limited help to students while trouble shooting	3
Total	20 marks

In other occasions, I may have this as simply a formative class activity with no allocation of marks. I tried this teaching strategy with technical courses, reference the marking scheme above, as well as theoretical courses, like MIS. For theoretical courses, the duration given to the group to present is shorter than the practical courses in nature. Either way, students always found the method interesting and a nice routine breaker.

Now that I told you all about my innovative teaching strategy, I would like to invite you fellow blog viewer to help me give it a nice name … criteria: please make it sound like rocket science!

Aligning Strategies to Goals

The following are the learning outcomes and the assessments strategies for ITEC-N411 Management Information Systems.

Learning Outcome	Cognitive level
Describe the main components of Information Systems with the emphasis on their effects on business processes, organizations and society.	Understand
Describe, using Internet technology, the impact that Information Technology will have on an organization’s strategy.	Understand
Explain the effects that MIS, DSS, CRM and ERP have on organizational communication and decisions making to increase productivity and efficiency in an increasingly competitive business environment.	Evaluate
Use a System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) methodology to explain how information systems are designed, developed and maintained to ensure that diverse and changing organizational needs are met effectively and rationally	Create
Analyze and report on at least two different system control and security tools and techniques to ensure high levels of efficiency in an organization’s information system without the danger of fraud or crime	Analyze

Assessment Strategies:

Element	Weight %	Description
Assignment	20% Video (group) Discussion (individual)	LO1 and LO2 Evaluate a real world Case on the experience of UAE based organization with implementing an Enterprise Application.
Midterm	20% INDIVIDUAL	LO1 and LO2
Project	30% Report (group) Presentation (individual)	LO3 and LO4 Real world consultancy report analysing a business problem and creating a viable IT solution for it.
Final	30% SWA	LO (All)

Teaching Strategies:

The teaching strategies in this course are blend of traditional and more innovative teaching styles. Delivering new concepts mostly done through traditional lecturing style, and less often using Independent Learning followed by peer tutoring activities. These strategies mainly aim at helping students to understand the new concepts, to be latter assessed on this understanding in their midterm and final tests.

Drafts discussion sessions, as well as, class and online case study discussions are also used to serve the same objective and also to help students develop their ability to analyze various real world scenarios and recommend solutions to them. Those analytical skills are then assessed through the course Assignment in which they need to identify a real UAE based organization that have implemented an Enterprise Application and develop a case study on this real experience.  The students analytical skills are assessed one more time in the course Project, together with their ability to create a solution for a real world business problem.  

100 ideas for assessment

A good Assessment Strategy need to provide a balance of group: individual assessed tasks, as well as traditional and innovative strategies. I think it's healthy to keep some kind of traditional assessment strategy to satisfy part of the students’ expectations. After all, there is a stereotype of the Teaching and Learning process that shapes part of the students' expectations. of course, innovation is expected, however, it should be a small component in the overall Assessment strategy, not to threaten the stability of the process, while meeting the rest of the students' expectations in having innovative assessments that answers their own generation's calls. 

Online multiple choice quizzes, when designed well, can make an excellent assessment strategy. I usually try to keep this kind of assessment long, to increase the challenge level, and phrase the question well to accurately test the students’ level of understanding. This method is also the most popular internationally among many reputed organizations as a method to grant professional certification, which is an integral part of the students’ continuing education in the future. Online multiple choice quizzes can work really well as formative assessment strategy. Quizzes can be based on big questions databases, configured to select random versions, and allow multiple attempts with ongoing average. Students can take such quizzes as they are revising as many times as they like and monitor their own progress. 

On the less traditional end, Digital Narratives and Case Study based tests can make very good assessment strategies. Digital Narratives allow students to express their findings in a creative manner and help shaping their Independent Learning activities as they are planning the production. They need to clarify their understanding of basic concepts and research around topics to be able to express them creatively, as a result get to a deeper level in their learning.

On the other hand, Case Study based test, where a case study is shared with the students prior the assessment date to familiarize themselves with the overall scenario and any difficult terminology. Students then, in couple of days duration, come to the assessment with all the useful resources they found in their research with relevance to the assessed case ready to answer the Test questions. The test questions are then shared for the first time at the beginning of the formal assessment session. This method help guide the students readiness for assessed tasks within specific context, which is similar to the situations they'll face at work, where they need to use their problem solving skills to relate the concepts they learned in their classes to particular real world scenarios.

What about your students?

This semester I'm teaching 5 different sections that I can classify into 4 distinct categories:

1. Level 9 eBusiness, PM, students

2. Level 7 Web Development, PM, students

3. Level 6 Business Administration, PM, students

4. Level 3 Computer Information Systems, AM, students

For the sake of this discussion, I'll select the first category. 

The eBusiness group that I'm teaching are sharing the same objective that majority of the students I met had, that is, achieving a Bachelor degree to improve their employment opportunities. Some also are interested in postgraduate education to achieve higher social status and make their families proud. Both objectives, together with other more individually specific objectives, work as motivators for this group of students to continue their education, in a rather tough circumstances  while doing a full time job and taking care of their immediate and extended families.

Most courses studied in the eBusiness program are theoretical in nature, which implies the need for good attendance of class discussions and doing the necessary follow-up reading and research. The above described circumstances work against my students’ interest and give them very slim chance to read the assigned material. This makes class time so precious in their learning process. This group mainly learns from the teacher in the class, and less often through the class assignment and project.

The assessment strategy of the course is 50% group work in the shape of and assignment and a project. The rest of the course assessment is based on two individually written case study based tests. The students are given a case 2 days prior the assessment date and asked to research it using publicly available resources, in order to answer the exam questions during a 2 hours assessment session.

Not the Teacher’s Role

Module 3 of my PGCTHE studies commenced with the following task:

“What are the essential skills your students need to learn? … The aim here is to define the "right skills" the students need to learn in order to survive in the working life - how else can you tell if you are teaching the right things if you have not identified what the right skills are?”

The above question was based on the sequence of thoughts generated from the following video: “Teaching Teaching and Understanding”.

Many years ago, at least 4 or 5, Mark Curcher shared this video with DMC community, I watched it carefully then and found it very interesting and making loads of sense. From my experience in developing Course Outlines, it is not the teacher’s role to identify the “right skills” that students need to be equipped with. The task requires a holistic perspective, considering various factors outside a single institution boundary, which a teacher specialized in a specific discipline cannot easily grasp. Then who should do so?

This is quite an easy question to answer, since the task is already done. Fortunately, HCT leaders have already identified the “right skills” that our students need to survive in the working life. Those skills are the core of “The HCT Learning Model” that is published in the 20^th page of our institution catalogue, year after year, well, probably not always in the same page! Of course, a teacher won’t be able to develop the right skills in his/her own students if those skills are not identified first, to give a sense of direction for all the following efforts in guiding the students as they are making their way  towards their careers.

According to the authors of “The HCT Catalogue”:

“HCT has identified the following graduate characteristics under four categories that should guide program and course development and approaches to teaching and assessments:

I.                     Knowledge of Core Subjects and Global Issues: Knowledge of specific discipline, Global awareness, Civic literacy, Health literacy, and Environmental literacy.

II.                    Learning and Innovation Skills: Entrepreneurial literacy, Creativity and innovation, Critical thinking and Problem solving, Communication and Collaboration.

III.                  Information, Media, and Technology Skills: Information literacy, Media literacy, and ICT literacy.

IV.                  Transferable Lifelong Characteristics: Flexibility and adaptability, Initiative and self-direction, Social and cross-cultural skills, Productivity and accountability, Leadership and responsibility.“

Reflecting again on my experience with developing Course Outlines, aligning the individual course Learning Outcomes to the identified Graduate Outcomes is a corner stone in the overall Course Outlines development. The Learning Outcomes are further defined with the specific Cognitive Level following Bloom’s Taxonomy. The main challenge I believe is in actually implementing this blue print in the classrooms. The development of standardized assessments, like the SWAs, is supposed to be a measure of Quality Control to ensure the fulfillment of each course specification across the HCT system. However, standardized assessments come with their own set of challenges that hinders the achievement of this goal.

My argument, in brief, is that Teachers' role is to equip students with "the right skills", but identifying those skills need to continue to be the role of curriculum leaders.

References

HCT Central Academic and Students Services. (2011). Higher Colleges of Technology 2011 - 2012 CATALOGUE. UAE.

Bloom B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc.

Digital Narratives Project Glog

Learning with Digital Narratives & Social Media Tools

Discussed Digital Narratives are the product of an action research that started at the beginning of the second semester of the academic year 2011-2012. The aim of the research was to create learning opportunities that effectively addresses some of today's educational trends, like:

• Equip today's students with skills required for the future job market
  Wagner (2010) suggested seven skills as required to survive in the future job market. He emphasizes the importance of discontinuing teaching practices that prepares students with skills for jobs that won't exist anymore upon their graduation. Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment, was an attempt to create learning opportunities that would make students acquire four out of the 7 skills that Wagner identified:
  1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
  2. Effective Oral and Written Communication
  3. Accessing and Analyzing Information
  4. Curiosity and Imagination
  
   
• Empower students to take ownership of their learning, through structured Independent Learning and peer tutoring 
  Mitra (2007) concluded from long years of research, that learning can become a self-organized process given the right pedagogical structure. He highlights the power of the group of learners in sharing knowledge is a self-organized manner. Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment, provided students with both opportunities: Independent Learning and Peer Tutoring in authentic learning environment.
  
   
• Encourage students to learn with, rather than from technology
  Jonassen, Howland, Marra, & Crismond (2008) argued that the lack of effective use of educational technology when merely utilized for the purpose of storing information for later retrieval. This makes technology no different from books and libraries. According to Jonassen et al., effectiveness in the use of educational technology is achieved when learners use it to create and construct knowledge. The process of developing objects with technology fosters deeper thinking and learning. Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment, demanded the construction of Digital Narrative for a real world business scenario, as a result of field investigation and information analysis.
  
   
• Increase students engagement by employing Social Media tools in the learning process 

In their book, "What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media", McLeod & Lehmann (2012) stated that:

"There is near-universal agreement that schools must find ways to transform older teaching practices in order to harness the tools that students have at their disposal today".

Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment, defined YouTube as a sharing platform for produced Digital Narratives, and YouTube comments as the media for the online discussion.

• Explore ways for the next ubiquitous technology to be used in the curriculum
  
  
  Robin & Pierson (n.d.) identified Digital Imaging as the next ubiquitous technology and stressed the need to innovate ways to use it in delivering curriculum. Robin et al. employed Digital storytelling model (Center of Digital Storytelling, 2004), to introduce a rich technology-integrated pedagogy for undergraduate teacher education students.
  
  
  Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment concept is inspired by the research findings of Jonassen et al. and Robin et al. as highlighted in the third educational trend above, Jonassen et al. emphasized the need to learn "with" rather than "from" technology. Robin et al., on the other hand, emphasized the effectiveness of using Digital Storytelling in the curriculum. Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment created a learning opportunity for students to:
  
  
  
  1. independently review literature and select a specific subject
  2. independently investigate a real world case study in the UAE business context
  3. creatively put their findings in a digital story
  4. publish their stories using Social Media tool
  5. utilize peer tutoring and online discussions to teach each other the details of their selected subject
  
   
• Transform teacher's role from instruction to mentoring and facilitating
  
  
  Many researchers have strongly recommended the need to redefine teachers' role, to take more of a facilitation and mentoring shape. ESTEVE (2000), described the expectations from teachers today, and facilitating group work came at the beginning of the list. Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment, contributed another practical model as to how this recommendation can be realized in classrooms. 

The Concept

To put the above educational trends in action, the Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment got introduced as part of the BMGN-N340 "Management Information Systems" course plan. The Assignment Outlines described the expected development of a real world case study, which describes the business case behind an Enterprise Application investment. The students were asked to put their findings in a creative Digital Narrative to be shared and discussed using Social Media tools.


Learning Objectives

Using Bloom's Taxonomy, the learning objectives of this MIS assignment can be defined as follows:

1. Evaluate how enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence.
2. Describe how supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers.
3. Explain how customers' relationship management systems help firms achieve customer intimacy.
4. Identify the organizational challenges posed by enterprise applications.
5. Describe how enterprise applications provide platforms for new cross-functional services.
    

Pedagogy

The pedagogical approach of the assignment was fully learner-centered in nature. This is due to the employment of many active learning opportunities:

1. Starting from the Independent Learning approach to better understand the nature of the three categories of Enterprise Applications as described in Chapter 9 of the course textbook.
2. The full involvement of students in designing the research to understand the circumstances surrounded a real-world scenario of a real organization while investing in such system.
3. The development of Digital Narratives by the students to present their understanding and findings as a creative digital story.
4. The peer tutoring through sharing of the Digital Narratives using YouTube and asking students to view other teams products.
5. And finally, students discussed the shared Digital Narratives in a semi-controlled online discussion, following the rules outlined in the "Discussion" component of this Marking Scheme.

HCT Graduate Outcomes

The developed pedagogical approach of the Discussed Digital Narratives Assignment, meets the HCT graduate outcomes, except for Mathematical literacy (GO8):

1. Communication and information literacy (GO1)
2. Critical and creative thinking (GO2)
3. Global awareness and citizenship (GO3)
4. Technological literacy (GO4)
5. Self-management and independent learning (GO5)
6. Teamwork and leadership (GO6)
7. Vocational competencies (GO7)

Sharability, Replication and Sustainability

The outcomes of this experience were constantly published using the teacher's blog baraayousuf.blogspot.com with colleagues across the system. In addition, Google Hangout video conferencing service got also utilized to digitally meet keen colleagues and answer their questions. The feedback received was very positive, and it is expected to see some of the participants trying the assignment in their own courses.

The influence of using Digital Narratives as part of the Higher Colleges of Technology business programs on improving students' readiness for the 21st century job market; is the topic of an empirical research project that the teacher is planning. The success of conducting this research would help in understanding the effectiveness of the method in the HCT context, and as a result produce a sustainable model.


REFERENCES

Center of Digital Storytelling, C. D. S. (2004). Seven elements for digital storytelling. Retrieved February 2012, from Http://www.storycenter.org/memvoice/pages/tutorial_1.html

ESTEVE, J. M. (2000). The Transformation of the Teachers' Role at the End of the Twentieth Century. Educational Review, 52(2). Retrieved from http://oppimateriaalit.jamk.fi/edusociety/files/2010/06/Thetransformationofteachersroleartikkeli.pdf

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M., & Crismond, D. (2008). Excerpt from Meaningful Learning With Technology. Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall (pp. 5-10). Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall. Retrieved from http://www.education.com/reference/article/how-does-technology-facilitate-learning/?page=3

McLeod, S., & Lehmann, C. (2012). What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media. John Wiley and Sons.

Mitra, S. (2007). Hole in the wall. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Robin, B. R., & Pierson, M. E. (n.d.). A Multilevel Approach to Using Digital Storytelling in the Classroom Design of an IT Graduate Course in Digital Photography An Emerging Focus on Digital Storytelling. Technology.

Wagner, T. (Harvard E. S. (2010). The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It (First Trad.). Basic Books.

Digital Narratives Samples

The YouTube Discussed Digital Narratives are configured as “Listed”. This means that the viewer needs to have a direct link to be able to access the any Digital Narrative.

During the Assignment, all students had flexible access to the class YouTube channel, which is dmcMISclass, to facilitate the videos uploads and the following discussion using YouTube comments. The password to the channel got changed upon reaching the Assignment deadline.

Discussed Digital Narratives links:

Parzel: http://youtu.be/Z07bZEfYLcM

Barclays Bank: http://youtu.be/0sy2quQjo8Q

DP World: http://youtu.be/U3bsjVFeNdk

DUCAB: http://youtu.be/WH9PTIzTTZk

Union Co-op: http://youtu.be/LzXsgAI2E2I

Dubai Customs & NCI: http://youtu.be/N5ZobqWybB0

Dnata: http://youtu.be/e1T_puFFZFI

Carrefour: http://youtu.be/DXjWuBKcv-0