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Cold Rolled Steel and Knowledge: What Can Higher Education Learn About Productivity?
... Hopes for effectiveness have not been met [6]. The increased student diversity has not been addressed [26]. There are significant barriers to adoption and dissatisfaction with the courseware [16,17]. ...
... Otherwise, there is something wrong. It could be the learning material, the question, the answering alternatives, the feedback, etc, but the important thing here is that the system gives feedback to the course developers on where something is wrong, so that it can be improved (for a more elaborate explanation on OLI, see [26]; the underlying learning model, [13]; analytics included in the learning dashboard, [18]; and learning curves, [anon]). ...
... This might seem limiting, but the methodology has been used for courses in among other areas arts and humanities, social science and languages (see https://oli.cmu.edu/courses/). For a more elaborate explanation on OLI, see [11]; the underlying learning model [12]; analytics included in the learning dashboard [13]; and the use of learning curves to understand student mastery of skills and learning objectives [14]. ...
... Our position is that the most direct way for institutions to help students appreciate their educational experience is to align faculty grading practices with specific competencies and to visualize student learning for multiple stakeholders. Prior research has provided encouraging results suggesting that students and faculty can utilize personalized dashboards to improve academic outcomes [2,27]. This paper reports on a multi-year effort to measure and visualize student learning via a competency map by presenting preliminary evaluation results with MBA students. ...
Adult students often struggle to appreciate the relevance of their higher educational experiences to their careers. Capella University's competency map is a dashboard that visually indicates each student's status relative to specific assessed competencies. MBA students who utilize their competency map demonstrate competencies at slightly higher levels and persist in their program at greater rates, even after statistically controlling for powerful covariates, such as course engagement.
... Their activities also suggest that the comparison that one should be making is not between lecture classes taught by adjuncts and those taught by tenured professors (as many of the studies I cited earlier implicitly did), but between the various different ways of organizing and staffing a course and traditional lecture/discussion format. Academic 41 Marsha Lovett, Oded Meyer and CandaceThille (2008) 42 Candace Thille and Joel Smith (2011) institutions' focus in the future will increasingly have to be on how classes are structured and taught, as well as on the types of faculty teaching them How has the teaching of economics changed? National surveys have been conducted of the teaching methods used by academic economists in their classrooms in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010. ...
American higher education is in transition along many dimensions: tuition levels, faculty composition, expenditure allocation, pedagogy, technology, and more. During the last three decades, at private four-year academic institutions, undergraduate tuition levels increased each year on average by 3.5 percent more than the rate of inflation; the comparable increases for public four-year and public two-year institutions were 5.1 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively. Academic institutions have also changed how they allocate their resources. The percentage of faculty nationwide that is full-time has declined, and the vast majority of part-time faculty members do not have Ph.D.s. The share of institutional expenditures going to faculty salaries and benefits in both public and private institutions has fallen relative to the share going to nonfaculty uses like student services, academic support, and institutional support. There are changing modes of instruction, together with different uses of technology, as institutions reexamine the prevailing "lecture/discussion" format. A number of schools are charging differential tuition across students. This paper discusses these various changes, how they are distributed across higher education sectors, and their implications. I conclude with some speculations about the future of American education.
The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is an open educational resources project at Carnegie Mellon University that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OLI creates web-based courses that are designed so that students can learn effectively without an instructor. In addition, the courses are often used by instructors to support and complement face-to-face classroom instruction. Our evaluation efforts have investigated OLI courses' effectiveness in both of these instructional modes - stand-alone and hybrid. This report documents several learning effectiveness studies that were focused on the OLI- Statistics course and conducted during Fall 2005, Spring 2006, and Spring 2007. During the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 studies, we collected empirical data about the instructional effectiveness of the OLI-Statistics course in stand-alone mode, as compared to traditional instruction. In both of these studies, in-class exam scores showed no significant difference between students in the stand-alone OLI-Statistics course and students in the traditional instructor-led course. In contrast, during the Spring 2007 study, we explored an accelerated learning hypothesis, namely, that learners using the OLI course in hybrid mode will learn the same amount of material in a significantly shorter period of time with equal learning gains, as compared to students in traditional instruction. In this study, results showed that OLI-Statistics students learned a full semester's worth of material in half as much time and performed as well or better than students learning from traditional instruction over a full semester.
In our efforts to characterize and improve the performance of an existing steelmaking process or in our quest to generate
useful knowledge as a basis for the development of new manufacturing routes, measurements and models should be considered
as two interdependent requirements. Without measurements, our models are incomplete and unsatisfactory. Without models, we
fail to realize, or perhaps even comprehend, the potential significance of our measurements. Sometimes in our enthusiasm,
we construct sophisticated elegant models and forget the reality of the actual manufacturing process. In this computer age,
we need to remember again the importance of observations and accurate measurements. In addition, as engineers and applied
scientists, we have an obligation and a responsibility to facilitate the transfer of new knowledge into the realm of operating
practice. During this process of generation, evaluation, and communication of new knowledge, the knowledge exchange step is
perhaps the most difficult. In this context, the preeminent aim of collaborative activities between our educational institutions,
industrial organizations, government funding agencies, and professional societies is to ensure the availability of high-quality
people who not only understand the fundamental aspects and practical implications of their discipline, but also are fully
equipped with the essential skills of communication that will enable them to participate throughout their career in this most
challenging and satisfying activity, the science and technology of steelmaking.
The research on formative assessment and feedback is reinterpreted to show how these processes can help students take control of their own learning, i.e. become self-regulated learners. This refor-mulation is used to identify seven principles of good feedback practice that support self-regulation. A key argument is that students are already assessing their own work and generating their own feedback, and that higher education should build on this ability. The research underpinning each feedback principle is presented, and some examples of easy-to-implement feedback strategies are briefly described. This shift in focus, whereby students are seen as having a proactive rather than a reactive role in generating and using feedback, has profound implications for the way in which teachers organise assessments and support learning.
Even after repeated instruction, first year college chemistry students are often unable to apply stoichiometry knowledge to equilibrium and acid-base chemistry problems. The dynamic and interactive capabilities of online technology may facilitate stoichiometry instruction that promotes more meaningful learning. This study compares a technology-rich stoichiometry review course with a text-based study guide. The technology-rich course included: an overarching real-world story to both motivate the students and integrate ideas; the use of an exploratory virtual laboratory to support concept development and procedural practice; a variety of practice contexts; and feedback on both intermediate actions and submitted answers during student practice. The text-based study guide covered the same topics but without the dynamic interface, timely and informative feedback, or overarching storyline. Entering college freshmen volunteers were randomly assigned to either the technology-rich or the text-based materials. Analysis of post-test scores revealed a significant but small advantage for participants studying from the technology-rich course, but it was less important than the effects of SAT scores and gender. The degree of interaction with the Virtual Lab simulation was significantly directly related to post-test performance and eclipsed any effect of prior knowledge as measured by the SAT.
B ackground
Courseware for engineering education can feature many discrete interactive learning elements, and typically student usage is not compelled. To take advantage of such courseware, self‐regulation of learning may be necessary. Evaluation of courseware should consider actual usage, learning gains, and indications of learning self‐regulation.
P urpose (H ypothesis )
The research question focuses on how students' interactions with the courseware affect their learning gains. The hypothesis tested is that learning gains from online courseware increase with usage, and particularly with usage that suggests learning self‐regulation.
D esign /M ethod
Students in a lecture‐based statics course were assigned to study previously developed courseware as part of homework assignments. Learning gains were deduced from pre‐ and post‐ paper and pencil diagnostic quizzes, and from the first class exam. Credit was based on quiz scores, rather than courseware usage. Usage of interactive elements of the courseware was inferred from log files of students' interactions with the courseware, and patterns suggesting learning self‐regulation were identified.
R esults
High, statistically significant learning gains were found. Substantial usage was evident, with core learning activities initiated by, on average, three‐quarters of students. Learning gains and performance on the relevant class exam appeared to be more closely correlated with usage that indicated self‐regulation of learning rather than with total usage of the courseware.
C onclusions
Methods of assessing courseware should go beyond courseware features, learning gains, and student self‐reports of effectiveness to include monitoring of actual usage and analyses relating usage to learning. Self‐regulation of learning is likely to be critical to successful usage of courseware, and courseware should be designed to encourage it.