UM PLATO Program Newsletter

Fall 2018

It’s been a busy semester with our APLU site visit October 11-12, our awards luncheon October 11, the continuation of our student focus groups, and a new initiative to enrich Supplemental Instruction sessions with learning analytics. In this issue of the PLATO Program Newsletter, we’ll review the winners from the awards luncheon and a prestigious national award, summarize our recent successes, and let you know what is happening with the grant program in the coming months.

Online Learning Consortium Digital Innovation Faculty Award

On November 13, 2018, the Writing 101 course directors, Karen Forgette, Assistant Chair of Writing & Rhetoric, Guy Krueger, Core Lecturer, and Andrew Davis, Instructor and Instructional Design and Training Specialist, were honored with a national award by the Online Learning Consortium. We are so proud of the Writing 101 team for this incredible recognition.  

PLATO 2018 Teaching Award

Nominees are considered according to how they implemented adaptive courseware in their classes, and how they used courseware data to improve both student success rates and the course itself. The selection committee also considered the faculty’s commitment to professional development in teaching and learning. The awards luncheon was held October 11, 2018.

Dr. Carol Britson, Instructional Associate Professor of Biology, (pictured left with Provost Wilkin) is a skilled and dedicated teacher who uses adaptive courseware data to continuously improve her Anatomy and Physiology course, and to link the various elements of her course with a consistent platform. She also uses that platform to regularly solicit student feedback and makes adjustments to her instruction in real time, so as to maximize student learning. Finally, each week, based on the mastery data from various assessments in the course, Dr. Britson develops for her class detailed study plans designed to maximize consistent, mental retrieval practice across multiple formats.

Honorable mention went to Dr. John Wiginton and Dr. Tamar Goulet, pictured with Provost Wilkin.

Dr. Wiginton has improved student success rates and drastically reduced the drop rate for students in his general chemistry class after introducing adaptive courseware, TopHat, and Timed Response Quizzes, and flipping the class so that during class time students are actively learning and practicing chemistry.

Dr. Goulet uses technologies such as clickers and adaptive courseware to learn about her students and to personalize the learning experience for students in her biology 102.

PLATO Innovation Award

Innovation in education is a tricky business, especially in higher education, where changing up teaching strategies can result in pushback from students, hesitation from chairs, and innovation fatigue among faculty. We at Ole Miss are lucky to have an administration supportive of teaching innovation, and a faculty dedicated to continuous improvement. This semester, 15 faculty teaching with adaptive courseware agreed to pilot a program that employs learning analytics from adaptive courseware systems to better inform student leaders of Supplemental Instruction about the class’s progress through learning objectives. Because of their willingness to engage in evidence-based teaching, we present the innovation award to the following faculty:

In Mathematics – Michael Azlin, course director of college algebra

For Chemical Concepts, General Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry – Dr. Kerri Scott, Dr. Safo Aboaku, Dr. Daniell Mattern, Dr. Ryan Fortenberry, Dr. Emily Rowland, Dr. Gerald Rowland, and Dr. John Wiginton

For Biology 206, 102 and 104 – Dr. Carol Britson, Dr. Carla Carr, Evelyn Jackson, and Eden Johnson

For elementary and intermediate Spanish – Irene Kaufmann Cotelo and Diana Semmes

For history 121 – Dr. Chiarella Esposito

We also recognized four members of the School of Pharmacy who worked tirelessly this summer to create a brand new class, Becoming a Pharmacist, in adaptive courseware

• Associate Dean of Outcomes Assessment and Learning Advancement, Dr. Alicia Bouldin
• Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Dr. T. Kristopher Harrell
• Associate Professor of Pharmacy Administration, Dr. Erin Holmes
• Instructional Design and Training Specialist, Sarah Campbell

PLATO Community Builder Award

The University has created a culture of teaching excellence by supporting faculty who attend sessions on teaching and learning, and who present at conferences. This year we honored ten individuals who traveled across the nation, and even to Spain, to share their research and experiences with adaptive learning.

In Biology – Dr. Carol Britson and Dr. Tamar Goulet

In Writing & Rhetoric – Assistant Chair, Karen Forgette, Core lecturer Guy Krueger, and instructor, Andrew Davis

In Mathematics – Instructor, Jon-Michael Wimberly

In Chemistry – Dr. John Wiginton

In Spanish – Instructor, Edgar Serrano

PLATO successes Fall 2018

Undergraduate research  

• Two undergraduate research assistants conduct focus groups, analyse data, prepare reports, and are contributing to an article being prepared for publication.
  • Tyler England (Third-year pharmacy student) presented at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in Boston this past July.
  • Christie Forgette (Third-year education major) presented at the WCET Educational Technology Conference in Portland, Oregon on October 25, 2018.

Faculty support

• In the first two years of the grant we distributed $146,500 in stipends to over 70 faculty representing 9 departments.
• In 2018 we paid travel costs for 8 faculty from 5 different departments who gave presentations on adaptive learning at discipline-specific conferences.

Learning analytics  

• In August we sponsored 8 vendor training sessions to teach faculty how to use learning analytics from the courseware to identify struggling students early in the semester and to target teaching on the real-time progress of their class.
• This semester we are scaling a pilot of using learning analytics from adaptive courseware to provide SI leaders with real-time data on student mastery of learning objectives. Last semester we had one faculty member pilot the ACSSI program (Adaptive Courseware Supporting Supplemental Instruction) and this semester we have 15 faculty representing 5 departments in the program.

Publications

• Monroe, Stephen, and Patricia O’Sullivan. “The Early Educational Promise of Adaptive Courseware: Scaling the Use of New Technology Across an Institution.” Strategies for Teaching Large Classes Effectively in Higher Education, Cognella Publishing, 2018.
• O’Sullivan, Patricia. “APLU Adaptive Courseware Grant, a Case Study: Implementation at the University of Mississippi.” Current Issues in Emerging ELearning, scholarworks.umb.edu/ciee/. University of Massachusetts Boston Press, Vol. 5, 2018-2019.
• Vignare, K., Lammers Cole, E., Greenwood, J., Buchan, T., Tesene, M., DeGruyter, J., Carter, D., Luke, R., O’Sullivan, P., Berg, K., Johnson, D., & Kruse, S. (2018). A guide for implementing adaptive courseware: From planning through scaling. Joint publication of Association of Public and Landgrant Universities and Every Learner Everywhere, http://www.aplu.org/library/a-guide-for-implementing-adaptive-courseware-from-planning-through-scaling/file

Coming up….

December 10, 2019, Patti O’Sullivan (PLATO) and Katie Waldon (IREP) will travel to Scottsdale, AZ for the Big Data Caucus to discuss how to improve courseware learning analytics with other institutions and courseware vendors. The event is sponsored by the Association for Public Land Grant Universities and Every Learner Everywhere.

January 17-18, 2019, The CETL Winter Workshop with Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, author of Teaching for Learning and Dynamic Lecturing. The event is open to all UM faculty and takes place 9am – 4pm in the Jackson Avenue Center ballroom. Lunch is provided.

Feedback on Adaptive Learning from the Student Survey and Focus Groups

Meet the research team

Christie Forgette, a sophomore in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College and working toward a degree in elementary education, started with PLATO in Fall 2017. She leads student focus groups, transcribes audio files, codes transcripts for analysis, and creates presentations of research data in various formats. Christie helped plan and host PLATO’s first teaching awards luncheon, and co-presented PLATO research to representatives from the Gates Foundation. On April 18, 2018, she will present PLATO research at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Poster Session at the Inn at Ole Miss.

Michael Tyler England, from St. Louis, MO,  is an Early-Entry Pharmacy Student at the University of Mississippi in pursuit of a Pharm D. He joined the PLATO research team in February 2018, and is involved in conducting student focus groups, transcribing, and analysing data. Tyler is also organizing data from the Supplemental Instruction program and will be presenting it at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Poster Session at the Inn at Ole Miss on April 18, 2018.

Course Materials Matter

Student complaints about the high cost of textbooks may seem as inconsequential and predictable as their laments about the lack of convenient parking on campus, and yet there are a few key differences faculty should note. First, while faculty share the experience of parking on campus with students, they do not share the experience of being required to purchase course materials. Thus, while faculty may be aware of the cost and availability of parking spots on campus and can sympathize with how these factors might affect students’ choices about transportation, many are not aware of the cost and availability of course materials and how these factors might affect students’ choices about their education.

According to a 2016 survey of faculty by the National Association of College Stores, “the majority of faculty consider quality of content (81%) and price (74%) when selecting course materials. Quality is key as 61% indicated it is the most important factor when selecting materials, while just 10% considered cost the most important factor. Those who assign a digital textbook were 10% more likely to consider cost to students.”

However, related reports, Faculty Watch and Student Watch, found that while 87% of faculty believe the course materials they choose are essential to student success in their course, only 55% of students feel the same way about course materials.

Although there is increasing use of Open Educational Resources (OER) by faculty at colleges and universities in the U.S., thanks in large part to Z-Degree programs, only 30% of faculty are aware of these free resources and only 9% of faculty have replaced expensive textbooks with OER content.

According to a survey conducted by the Independent College Bookstore Association (ICBA), reported in the Campus Computing Project, faculty are not convinced digital course materials offer a significant value over print course materials. However, nearly half of the respondents indicated they would be more likely to adopt digital course materials if they provided learning analytics to help them better track student progress.

In PLATO student focus groups, we are learning that students at Ole Miss will often forego purchasing course materials if they perceive the course materials will not significantly help them succeed in the class. There are two factors at play here. First, digital materials such as adaptive courseware are often underutilized by faculty, who most often use them only for homework practice and the delivery of formative assessments such as weekly quizzes. According to our focus groups, faculty are not utilizing learning analytics provided by these platforms to track individual and class-wide student progress. In addition, focus group students were disinclined to purchase digital materials when the work performed in them does not constitute more than 10% of their overall grade.

Second, students are frustrated by expensive access codes to course materials that do not align with instructor lectures or high-stakes exams. High costs are an especial problem for students who pay for course materials with loans and scholarships that require them to purchase course materials through the University bookstore, which consistently charges higher prices for course materials than online third-party vendors or direct purchasing through the publisher’s website.

Some students described the digital content as a completely separate course from the instructor’s lectures, or a loosely-related add-on to the course. Others expressed frustration that faculty are not using the digital content to prepare students for exams and explained how time constraints force them to choose between completing lessons in the courseware and studying for exams. Thus, the courseware which was developed to help students succeed in a class, when misaligned with learning objectives or underutilized for learning analytics, can present obstacles for students in terms of workload and expense.

Best practices for adaptive courseware, as outlined by the PLATO Program, include

1) Integrated adaptivity: Faculty should consider choosing courseware with adaptive features integrated throughout the platform rather than the more common e-book model in which the adaptive features are add-ons.

2) Aligning content: faculty who customize a base course or build their own course in adaptive platforms have a deeper understanding of the content in the courseware and are more likely to teach that content rather than teaching from lecture notes and leaving students on their own regarding adaptive courseware content.

3) Learning analytics: at the heart of personalized learning is the data from learning analytics that allows faculty to track student progress and provide individual and class-wide interventions. These interventions not only maximize student-instructor contact hours, they target teaching so that the right lesson is delivered to the right student at the right time.

4) Active learning/flipped classroom: With base content delivered in adaptive courseware, faculty can use face-to-face contact with students to address higher-level concepts, to supervise team-based and individual practice of concepts, and to engage students in extended discussions about course concepts. When faculty flip the classroom, any worry about covering the course content goes away, because no longer do faculty have to say it for students to learn it.

5) Multi-modal content delivery: Students do not learn best when lectured at for hours a day and when individual learning consists mainly of reading texts. Students want to engage with course content, with their instructors, and with each other. This requires the presentation of content in different modalities such as video, analysis of images, graphs, and charts, student-student discussion and student-instructor discussion, collaborative practice activities, low-stakes formative assessments, and interactive digital activities.

Adaptive courseware that is aligned with other course content, reasonably priced, and utilized in such a way as to maximize student learning can make all the difference to students, and can make teaching a much richer experience for faculty.

PLATO Program numbers Spring 2018 Semester

Semester Wrap-up

Please plan on attending our semester wrap-up luncheon where we’ll present feedback from the Spring 2018 student focus groups and survey.

When: Monday, May 14, 12noon – 1:30pm 

Location: Lamar Hall 323,  Writing & Rhetoric Conference Room

Check out this story published March 12, 2018 by NPR’s Marketplace:

Each year, ELI surveys the higher education community to determine key issues and opportunities in post-secondary teaching and learning. These key issues serve as the framework, or focal points, for our discussions and programming throughout the coming year. More than 900 community members voted on the following key issues for 2018.

Click the Educause logo below to read more about each issue.

Introducing PLATO’s newest faculty participants

BIOLOGY

Carol Britson, Lecturer of Biology

Eden Johnson, Instructor of Biology

CHEMISTRY

Safo Aboaku, Instructional Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Walter Cleland, Associate Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Amal Daas, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Steve Davis, Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Jared Delcamp, Assistant Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Dan Mattern, Margaret McLean Coulter Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Jason Ritchie, Professor of Chemistry

John Wigington, Instructional Assistant Professor of Chemistry

ECONOMICS

Michelle Matthews, Visiting Associate Professor of Economics

Ronnie McGinness, Lecturer of Economics

FASTRACK and STUDENT SUCCESS,

Jacqueline Certion, Coordinator of Enrollment and Advising FASTrack

Latanya L Dixon, Academic Mentor, FASTrack

Ernest Gray Flora, Academic Mentor, FASTrack

Susan A Nicholas, Academic Mentor, FASTrack

Jamie Nelms, Instructor in Sociology and Anthropology and the CSSFYE

 Rebekah Costomiris Holmes Reysen, Assistant Director for Academic Support Programs for the CSSFYE

Suzanne Wilkin, Academic Mentor, FASTrack

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Erik Hurlen, Instructor of Mechanical Engineering

PHYSICS

Luca Bombelli, Chair and Professor of Physics & Astronomy

Bin Xiao, Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics

SPANISH

Julia Bussade, Director of Basic Portuguese and Spanish Language Programs

Karla Duran, Instructor of Spanish

Gabriel Garrido, Instructor of Spanish

Maribel Sullivan-González, Instructor of Spanish

Irene Kaufmann, Instructor of Spanish

Edgar Serrano, Instructor of Spanish

WRITING AND RHETORIC

George Atkins, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Michelle Bright, Adjunct Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Jenny Bucksbarg, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Gretchen Bunde, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Chip Dunkin, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

LaToya Faulk, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Shirley Gray, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Alison Hitch, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Emily Howorth, Adjunct Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Kellye Makamson, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Jane Meek, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Dave Miller, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Sara Olsen, Adjunct Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Colleen Thorndike, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Marc Watkins, Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric

Dr. Kerri Scott was presented with the Teaching Excellence Award for her work in transforming Chem 101, Chemical Concepts, using adaptive courseware: Pearson’s Mastering and MyChemLab. Pictured from left to right: Chancellor Vitter, Dr. Kerri Scott, Keynote speaker, Dr. Meaghan Duff of Educause, and Provost Wilkin.

Karen Forgette, Guy Krueger, and Andrew David were presented with the Team Award for their collaborative work transforming the Writing 101/100 curriculum using Lumen Waymaker adaptive courseware. Pictured left to right: Chancellor Vitter, Karen Forgette, Andrew Davis, Guy Krueger, Keynote speaker, Dr. Meaghan Duff of Educause, and Provost Wilkin.

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Teaching Critical Thinking Learning Community

PLATO has partnered with CETL to offer a Teaching Critical Thinking Learning Community at UM. The group met August 8 to view and discuss a webinar on teaching critical thinking presented by Dr. Linda Nilson of Clemson University. The learning community will be meeting both online (through Blackboard Communities) and in person twice each semester. If you are interested in joining the Teaching Critical Thinking Learning Community, please email adaptivelearning@olemiss.edu.

In a recent news story, EdSurge asked What If Students Are the Biggest Barrier to Innovation? According to the article, both anecdotal and survey data indicate that students often resist technological advances in course delivery and assessment. This sentiment is echoed by another EdSurge story, posted a day after the first, entitled: Students Say They Are Not as Tech Savvy as Educators Assume. The second story is a summary of a student voices forum and town hall sponsored by EdSurge at the New Media Consortium (NMC) conference in Boston, June 13-15, in which a dozen students from across the nation shared their frustrations and suggestions regarding college readiness.

The students spoke of the confusion and difficulty in having to operate in several education systems at once, how they are not taught, but expected to know how to use Microsoft Office and Google apps, and how universities too often communicate with them through antiquated channels such as email and phone calls. In addition to the student forum and town hall at the NMC conference, UMass Boston biology instructors presented their failed pilot of Habitable Worlds, an online course created by Arizona State University’s School of Earth & Space Exploration and ASU Online, powered by Smart Sparrow, and funded in part by the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Why did the pilot fail? Habitable Worlds is the Mercedes-Benz of online courses with its high definition graphics, professionally produced video, and adaptive technology. But in this case, function won out over form. Students at UMass Boston prefered courseware they can easily operate over luxury courseware that did not integrate well with the LMS.

A common theme from these stories debunks the idea that Millennials are digital natives with an instinctive knowledge of technology. In truth, a significant percentage of college students are not Millennials, and even those that fall into that generational category are not masters of digital technology. According to the students at the NMC/EdSurge forum, when they arrive at college, they are proficient only in certain digital spaces such as social media, music, and other entertainment.

My experience as an instructor aligns with what the NMC/EdSurge forum students said, although without comprehensive data, it is difficult to say if the digital skills gap is a universal phenomena or not. My Pharmacy Ethics course, which is not offered to first-year students, is a flipped, hybrid in which course content is delivered online and face-to-face sessions are reserved for active learning and guest speakers. Class activities rely on the Realizeit Learning platform, Google collaboration apps, and several external websites. It took me by surprise when students struggled using Google Drive as a collaboration tool. More surprising was how many students do not know how to take screenshots, how to insert images into a Word document, or how to save a Word document as a PDF. So, while students had no problem navigating the courseware, it was the basics of Word and Google that tripped them up when completing group work and individual assignments.

Whether or not the digital skills gap affects a large number of students or a small number of them, it is essential to student success that we recognize the possibility for gaps and address them. However, closing the gap will require a meeting in the middle for students and instructors.

Rather than penalizing students for not knowing how to use digital tools, I provide written, video, and in-person instructions, impressing upon them that Microsoft Office and Google apps are tools they’ll continue to use as students and professionals. I have only recently started texting students immediate action information, and their positive response to this form of communication tells me I should have done this years ago. As my university’s operating system allows me to text without using my cell phone, I do not have to worry about sharing my personal phone number with students. Finally, I am working to reduce the number of account sign-ins by integrating them into the LMS. This will allow students to access multiple tools and platforms with one sign in.

However, because of the variety of tools and platforms, students will never get the UX simplicity they want regarding a single sign-in for all academic digital tools and platforms. They do not seem to struggle with multiple sign-ins on social media, which tells me they simply need to apply this skill set to academic and professional sites. As older generations understand all too well, for the sake of account security, it is a necessary inconvenience to have separate sign-ins for online banking, social media, professional tools, and a myriad of other digital platforms that help us organize our life.

Students need to be trained in Microsoft Office and Google in order to function in a professional setting. The key is to provide step by step directions and to walk them through using these tools. Telling students the importance of these digital skills is also important because they don’t always make connections that seem obvious to us.

Another interesting takeaway from the NMC conference is how students do not always want the best digital experience, they want the one that gets them what they want or need in that moment. However, at most universities, faculty preference determines which EdTech tools students must use, and if faculty do not understand the limitations of students’ digital skills, this can create frustration for both students and faculty. My experience is that students will ‘skill up’ as long as we provide instruction and assistance. Students having limited digital skills does not mean students are a problem, it simply means they are not trained in those skills yet.
Patricia O’Sullivan, PLATO Program Manager

What Happened When I Stopped Lecturing (click on link to read the full article)