My Educational Diatribe

This is a very nice artcle by Tim Swanson about the old university model possibly becoming obsolete. He also touches upon the purpose of higher education in todays society.

Will the University Survive?

So podcasting seems to be all the rage in higher education. First it started with a few schools just broadcasting information items, but then schools such as UC-Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT started posting actual class lectures for the world to listen too.
Cool, now anyone can listen to the lecture of world-renown professors on all sorts of topics. In some classes, say philosophy or political science, that’s cool. But for a hard science such as chemistry it’s tough. And as far a useful tool for students, it falls down pretty hard. Don’t get me wrong, podcasting is better than nothing, but it has some serious drawbacks.
Podcasting weaknesses:
1. Audio (only) recordings of lectures. Students today are visual learners. They watch days worth of TV each week. Their eyes seem to receive more that their ears.
2. Whole lectures (55, 90, 120 min) make for large file sizes. These are huge files for students to download, and they might not even want the whole lecture.
3. The audio file contains pauses, breaks, discussions. When reviewing the material, the student does not want to listen to the dead air in every lecture. The time students are given to write information down, class discussions, question/answer periods drag the time out.
4. Difficult for students to find ‘right’ spot in the lecture. When students go back to the podcast for reviewing and just want to listen to the 10 minute section on a specific small topic, they have to hunt and peck for it, which gets frustrating for them.
5. Attention span of students less than 10 minutes Many studies have shown that students start to tune out of lecture after as little as a few minutes with all but teh most engaging instructor. 50 minutes lecture are a lot to slog through for an MTV generation student.

What I have begun doing is what I call ’screencasts’ (aka vcasts or vodcasts) which I content are better than podcasts for a few big reasons:

Screencasting strengths:
1. Audio and video recording of lectures ‘pieces’. I visually record myself stepping through my PowerPoint slides laying down an audio track on top. I use the same words, and examples as in lecture.
2. Files available to anyone on the planet who wants to watch and listen. Two words: Open Source
3. Short lecture segments (5-15 minutes) that cover 1~2 specific topics. These are recorded in my office (or at home) on my time and are broken up into logical pieces, containing only 1 or 2 topics. This plays in nicely to the attention span of the students
4. Recorded at ‘full speed’. There are no breaks, since I am alone talking to the computer when they are recorded. I get through the material in about 40% of the time compared toa standard lecture presentation.
5. Video gives visual reference. Students can easily follow along and see where I am at in the discussion.
6. When reviewing, students quickly find the part they are looking for. Since the files are posted and recorded by individual topic, finding the one they want to view is easy.
7. No need for expensive software or large server space. I address this elsewhere.
8. Screencasts transcend semesters. I will always teach about electroneagtivity, so I can use that screencast for multiple semesters, whereas I would have to re-record lectures each semester so as not to confuse my students.

Podcasting is new and exciting yes, but it seems like we need to take one more logical step and give our students a really powerful educational tool.

The future is also bright, with online education, distance learning, textbooks becoming moot, etc. I am just glad I am still young so I can enjoy this for a while.

This semester I have been screencasting my lectures for both first and second semester general chemistry. The students have loved it (comments and results from a poll will come soon) and they have used them as study tools as well as pre-lecture prep, without my even forcing it.

With each screencast, I was doing several things, each of which took some time…
1. Record the screencast
2. Produce the screencast into a flash file so I could post it on a ’streaming’ viewer for students who had slow connections.
3. Produce the screencast into a .mov file
4. Convert .mov file into .m4v file
5. Update the rss feed to iTunes music store so people could download .m4v file and watch on iPod or in iTunes

This took a lot of time, but I was trying to help two groups of students, those who wanted to download a local copy of the screencast and those who just wanted streaming video on the fly.

Then I found Google video, which allows me to post the .avi file to the mother Google servers. Many of the problems of the old method vanished:
- When watching the video, it ’streams’ like any other google video, which is good for slower internet speeds.
- Students can download it as an .mp4 video. It looks like Google did the conversion for me, a step that took me a while before.
- The search function works. I did a search for ‘jcc general chemistry’ and my screencasts popped up first. Also a search of ‘Ka Kw’ brought up my talk on acid and base dissociation constants. Very nice.
- I uploaded the full size version (1280 some odd pixels wide, 50 Mb in size) of the screencast and google shrunk it down to fit their size (the downloaded .mp4 file is 12 MB, for a 15 min screencast), which did not do much damage the image quality, and the file sizes are nice and small (fast loading, it took about 20 seconds to back-load my 14 minute screencast) Google converted it for me, they also shrank it (something I did before)
- No need for Camtasia ($$) at all. Camstudio (which is free!) produces .avi files that can be posted.
- Initial production time is cut way down because now I don’t have to ‘produce’ them at all. I uploaded the source file directly, let Google shrink and convert it.
- iTunes no longer needed. I can set up my own RSS feed for people to subscribe to.
- No local server space needed. These files are good sized (10-20 MB each) and I have lots of them. Now I don’t have to worry about space limits, as the files are on google.

Now, there are some bad sides:
- It takes a long (20-30 min each?) time to upload the files. I must say that I am uploading the behemoth ~50 .avi source files, however.
- It was ~36 hours from the time I loaded my first files onto the server until the video was ‘approved’ by google, so you can’t post stuff quickly. After I had loaded ~15 videos, I seem to have been ‘fast-tracked’, so now my submissions are approved much quicker.
- If you want to download a ‘windows/mac’ version of the video, you end up having to download the Goggle video player. You can not save it as an .avi or something else. You can download a .mov version that plays on a video iPod just fine (and other video compatible portable technologies in the future)
- No hope of password protecting the screencasts, although you can charge people to watch them.

Overall, I think this is fantastic. The negatives are minimized once you get a good set of videos up. It works for all people (those who want to download and those who want streaming)

You can also embed the google video right inot any webpage, including a blog, just like this:
My question is why the big guys (UC-Berkeley and MIT for example) produce their lecture videos is RealPlayer (.ram) format. Ick. You have to download a (questionable) player to view the files, and they are too big.

This is just a taste of a much longer article that I want to write, but I want to get it down roughly here…
For thousands of years (think Socrates, Plato) ‘higher education’ was a place were the wisest of people came and literally sat at the feet of the wise men who contemplated the world and made advances in philosophy, science, and the arts. Those who came to these academies (Plato’s was the first real university per se) were the upper crust of society.
For the rest of us, we learned what we need to from our parents and other local elders. For thousands of years, humans died within miles of the place they were born. Almost everyone was a farmer, and learned the art of farming from their parents. No need for language, science, or mathematics because milking cows and planting seed did not require a such rounded education.
In the early 1800’s, the industrial revolution started lots of things, including formal education. With technology, fewer people had to farm the land, so we could train people for new jobs (different from what their parents were doing) so they went off to school. People moved into more cities and interacted with more of the world. A base knowledge of education was required to be a productive member of society. First is was K-5, then K-8, then K-12. Soon after formal education started, major universities (many in the US starting as teachers colleges) sprang up like daisies. At many of these schools (known as research-I schools) the millennia old style of young wise people coming and studying with the older wise people occurred. At Harvard, Stanford, MIT, the people who were discovering how the world worked were teaching the future scholars (leaders, teachers) all their knowledge so the students could start from there and move society on. Freshman classes containing 1000 students follow this model even today.
Two things have happened simultaneously to disrupt the 2000 year old University model 1)K-12 not being enough and 2) the internet
In today’s society, having only a HS diploma is considered a pretty crappy education. You need a college degree these days to get any sort of high paying job. It’s just a reality. College is now becoming a 13th and 14th grade if you will, but it is stuck in the old model. Compare the learning environment between a 12th grade social studies class in a small HS in rural Michigan in one year to a theater style lecture hall with 1200 students (no joke) in a History 101 class the next year. Those two systems are so completely different; many students have a hard time with the transition.
The internet has removed the universities as houses of intellectuals and information. If you wanted to be a historian, you read books (written by academics) and took college classes to become a historian. With the internet, that education can be received in a completely different way, requiring nothing from the college. If I want to learn about life in Russia, I would rather go read the local news from Pravda or read a blog from someone who lives there. Governments can no longer hide information like they used to. There are so many places to get information, why get it from an academic? ahh, because of that damn degree…
Degrees are what we need to get a job. It’s our proof that we slogged through the flawed educational system and can get a job. Even those degrees are becoming meaningless in some cases, take computer technology. If you have a 4 year degree in computer science, some would say you are 4 years behind and might as well be 30 years behind. People who hire IT professionals these days don’t give a hoot about your degree, they want experience.
These two things are intertwined. As people start getting their education from elsewhere (enrollment drops), employers will start recognizing that and put less emphasis degree attainment. (enrollment drops some more)
The universities are even helping it by posting lectures as podcasts on the ‘net for anyone to hear. We are even starting down a road where the traditional college textbook is no longer needed as every piece of information in it can be attained (for free) on the internet.
This can be discussed at some length. Maybe I will take a sabbatical and write a book about it�

PowerPoint for use in chemistry lectures
I found this little article in the most recent edition of Using Computers in Chemical Education. It describes the wonderful uses of PowerPoint in chemistry lectures in terms of impact, usefulness and educational value. I read over it pretty quick and found some way cool stuff.

So a long time ago I found a program called Camtasia which allows you to ‘record’ what is on your computer screen. A window, a defined area, or even the entire screen. You can lay down an audio track at the same time if you wish. Its pretty neat because you can film yourself doing something on the computer (editing a excel file, doing a calculation, etc.) complete with an audio track. At the time I first saw it, it was sort of clumsy and people could only watch the film if they had the Techsmith codec or you did 153223 special setting changes to get it to work on another video playback tool.
Well, it has now been three years and they are on version 3.0, and it now has much cooler effects. It is now very easy to edit the file as well as export it into multiple file formats (quicktime, window media, AVI, even SWF files) What is even cooler is when you set it up it plants itself right into PowerPoint (my lecture tool of choice) and you can record straight out of that without running both programs at once (PowerPoint and Camtasia)
So I got to thinking, why not record my lectures? I could wear a wireless microphone and record the entire lecture, then make the file available to students who chose to go back and ‘review’ the material again later. Lets face it, they only hear a portion of what I say because they are frantically writing stuff down. If they watch (and listen) to the film later, they will already have the lecture notes in their notebooks. They can follow along with the slides (so they know where they are) but they can focus on the words I am saying at the same time. They can go back and listen a second or third time as well.
I thought some more… The files sizes are going to huge if I leave them as 55 min videos. I could break them up into specific small 10-15 min topics. For example, one could be just on the atomic radius periodic trend (about 10 minutes long) That way if the student wants to review just that section, they can.
Yet more thinking…. Recording the actual lecture is probably not the best idea. There is a lot of dead air in there, with me pausing to give students time to write down the notes, me giving them time to confer with their neighbors about a question, me going back and forth with material, etc. Why not just record the portion where I am actually talking. I could go in an edit the lecture recording to pare it down, but ick, that’s too much work. Why not just sit down and talk continuously the words that I will say in lecture. Remove the dead air time (student scribbling/working), time for questions posed, discussed and answered, and you would be left with maybe 20-25 minutes of stuff. Nice and condensed in bite size pieces that can be repeated over and over again by the student as a review. Since it would be a different session, I might explain the same concept in a slightly different way, which is a good thing.
Still more… The resolution is too low to effectively take notes from (I want to cut down on students skipping class) by what I could do is make the audio feed available before lecture (a podcast?) I require my students now to go and read the textbook (portions of it) before I cover the material in lecture and they turn in a set of simple questions dealing with the assignment. I could instead require them to listen to an audio clip and answer similar questions.
Yup, more… I currently am posting these screencasts as flash files. Flash is a cool program that interactivity can be built in. With the right training, these could be made interactive with the students. Meaning, you could ask them a question and if they get it right, it moves on. If they get it wrong, it goes back and reviews some more.
Not done yet… PowerPoint is an effective tool, but for long drawn out problems, it is tough to setup. It might take me an hour to write one slide that involves a complex calculation. It takes an hour because of the tool. If I were doing by hand, it would take 5-10 minutes. I don’t mind doing the PowerPoint version of complex problems for lectures, because I know I will re-use them. What happens if a student wants one more example? What if they need me to explain how to do one of the end-of-chapter problems? Well, I don’t want to make a PowerPoint slide calculation for each one. Enter a nice cheap webcam. I film the piece of paper I am writing on and lay down the audio commentary, explaining what I am doing as I am doing it. I save that, post it, and then ANYONE who wants that explanation has it. I solve the problem once, and then I can slowly build a database of solved problems.
So here is a page with few examples of my ‘office’ lectures http://docott.com/files.141/screencasts/
Here is a great presentation on how to use podcasting, blogs, and screencasting to augment lectures from Professor J.C. Bradley at Drexel University
http://tinyurl.com/cqyjn
I would recommend viewing this screencast to anyone who is thinking about incorporating these technologies into their classroom.

I feel my most important job as a college professor is to teach critical thinking skills, not to teach complex one-use algorithms to students. The students I teach in my General Chemistry class want to go on to become doctors, pharmacists, engineers, etc. They need the skills to look at a problem, know what information they have, and solve the problem. My job is not to teach them the content of general chemistry, because unless they are going on to be professional chemists (almost none of them are) in 5 years, they will have forgotten 90% of the content I teach them. Do we honestly believe that those students who gets As in our class remember all of that stuff? They do not need practice in recognizing a system as (just like that problem I did in college) and then solving it. They need practice in true critical thinking involving never-seen-before problems.
If we truly believe that critical thinking is what we want to teach students, then let us teach and test that, not memorizing a set of algorithm or a bunch of not too useful tables of information (10 different metric prefixes, every single chemical symbol, all the exceptions to every rule we teach, what oxidation state REALLY means, etc.). I have told many classes that what I am doing is teaching them how to think, and using chemistry ideas and concepts as my tool. I know they will forget the content, I just have to accept that, which is tough.
My exams contain questions that the students have never seen before. They are slight variations of problems done in class, but involve multiple concepts in one question. If the students understand the base concepts (as taught in class) then they should be able to manipulate that knowledge to solve my (previously unseen) problem. My exams are tough, I want them that way.
When we work on complex, multi-step calculations, I try to teach them to come up with a “plan” first. For example, I might have a problem that states “Magnesium metal reacts with hydrochloric acid to form hydrogen gas and aqueous magnesium chloride. If I have 3.0 g of magnesium metal, how many mL of 6.0 M HCl must I add to completely react the magnesium? Now, in my mind, coming up with the plan ” Mg -> mol Mg -> mol HCL -> V HCl” is all I really want them to do. Once they have that plan figured out (which is the hardest part for them) the rest is just plugging numbers into the equation and their calculator. They have plenty of practice using their calculator from math class, so why work that skill? That’ easy, why test it?
Well, ok, exam time comes and the students freak out. They get test anxiety and get flustered easily and start making the problems harder than they really are. I want to reduce that negative reaction on exam day. What I really want is to give them time to think about the problem beforehand. I think I might have come up with a solution.
What if, 3 days before the exam, they saw this on my website:
1. XXX metal reacts with YYYY to form ZZZ and AAA. If I have 3.0 g of XXX, how many mL of 6.0 M YYYY must I add to completely react the XXX?”
There lies nothing but the root of the problem. There is not enough for the person to pound out the calculation. (well maybe a sample if they put numbers in) There is way too much unknown. What they can do, however, is struggle (and study?) how to do that problem. They come up with the procedure, but can’t do the problem. Great.
Understand that I want student who studied and learned the concepts to get 90+% of the points available. I want the students who don’t care or study to do poorly. It might sound crass, but I have a job to do as a General Chemistry professor. If you cannot succeed in my class, you will never move on to become a doctor, engineer, or pharmacist. Sorry. The students who want to be successful (the smart ones as well as those middle group who just have test anxiety) will study these partial problems and get the plan down so they will do well on the exam. Those who don’t study will do poorly, as usual. Perfect. Since I am giving them ‘most’ of the exam early, I can ask slightly harder questions. I of course will not help them with these partial problems beforehand (defeats the purpose)
I gave my first exam today and the students did what I expected, made it harder than it was. I think I will try this before my next exam.