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.