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Tag: learning

University Offers High-Tech Homework That’s Tailored To Students

By Gabrielle Russon, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

ORLANDO, Fla. — Tiffani Harper’s online homework seemed to have a mind of its own. It knew that she learned best by watching videos and detected what topics she struggled to grasp.

“It’s teaching me the best way to study,” said Harper, 32, a UCF student from Sanford.

Harper’s nursing class is part of a growing pilot program that uses cutting-edge technology to personalize online homework for students. The University of Central Florida is one of a handful of schools in the country using the adaptive-style learning for several online courses, school officials said.

At a school as large as UCF — one of the biggest in the country with 63,000 students enrolled — the program is especially important, they said.

“It personalizes a learning experience for a student who could potentially be in a large class. It won’t feel large. … They get the help they need,” said Thomas Cavanagh, who oversees the university’s online learning. “It’s a really nice way to mitigate the size issue.”

As part of the class, assistant professor Julie Hinkle monitors the students’ online homework to see where they need help and detecting where they succeed or fail. The software even tells her how much time Harper spent studying — eight hours and 22 minutes for one recent section.

Armed with that knowledge, Hinkle might change her lectures for her students in class or send out emails and hold more office hours for her online-only students.

The material itself can change, giving students more review when they get problems wrong. The homework also adapts to fit learning styles.

One day, for instance, Harper watched a YouTube video of a doctor explaining a complex chemistry lesson on a kidney disorder. Others might learn better if they read a text or look at a diagram.

So far, some psychology and nursing classes are part of the adaptive learning pilot, but Cavanagh said it will expand in upcoming months to include certain math classes and the final two years of a bachelor’s degree in applied science.

So far, UCF has invested about $37,000 on the software, training and startup costs for the pilot, which began last school year.

“For some of the basic courses or technical degrees, I think it makes a lot of sense,” Cavanagh said. “If we’re serious about student success, I think we have to look at it. It’s sort of incumbent on us to try these kinds of experiments and see if they work.”

But he also acknowledges the pilot program isn’t a natural fit for every class, like English, where there is no easy computer logarithm to score essays.

On a recent day, Harper sought refuge in a cubicle in the quiet room at the UCF College of Nursing.

She is a college student who experienced life before she ever arrived on campus by joining the work force, getting married, becoming a mom.

But when her husband’s grandmother was dying, Harper saw the tenderness of how a hospice nurse put Chapstick on the sick woman’s lips, and how the nurse cared enough to explain the dying process to the family. That motivated her to enroll in nursing school.

In the quiet room, Harper started her online homework by answering a question about how much she knew about the kidneys in the human body.

“A reasonable amount,” Harper clicked, remembering her previous anatomy class.

That was the starting block. From there, the homework could generate easier — or more difficult — questions, depending on the student. If she got one wrong, there could be more readings, more diagrams, more videos that Harper could study on her laptop screen.

Like anything in education, students take away what they put in.

“I’d rather get it wrong than a lucky guess because I want it to teach me the material,” Harper said.

The online homework was a first taste of the material, but the stakes were not that high. If Harper got it wrong, she could go back and try different questions to improve her score or study more before her exam.

“Well done!” flashed on her screen as Harper answered a question right and moved to the next part.

©2015 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Tiffani Harper, a nursing student at the University of Central Florida, takes notes as she demonstrates her Personalized Learning web courses at UCF on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

 

Best Teachers Can’t Get Hired By Public Schools

Best Teachers Can’t Get Hired By Public Schools

By Francis Barry, Bloomberg News (TNS)

To understand why the U.S. education system is mired in mediocrity, start by listening to Scott McKim’s story.

McKim can claim a master’s degree in watershed science, an undergraduate degree in meteorology, with minors in math and physics, and statewide teacher of the year honors for his work as a math and science teacher at a middle school in Alaska. In his free time, he led a student club that installed a wind turbine, started a cafeteria composting program, and built a greenhouse. He also helped develop a charter school devoted to outdoor education and STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math — and managed to get a second master’s in teaching, with a focus on science and math instruction.

As STEM subjects become increasingly important, McKim is exactly the kind of teacher the U.S. needs more of. Yet now, at least in New York state, he can’t get a job teaching at a public school.

McKim and his wife wanted to move from Alaska to the Adirondacks in upstate New York. But it was easier to get certified in Vermont than New York, so McKim moved to Vermont, figuring he would teach for a year there and then transfer his certification to New York. Initially, the plan worked — he got his teaching certification from Vermont and taught middle school science and math. But when he tried to get certified in New York, he was told, in effect: Go back to school.

In New York, McKim could have taken exams to become certified to teach Earth science — but nothing else. That presented two problems. First, there were no Earth science openings where he wanted to live. Second, in rural areas, schools often don’t have enough students to employ a full-time Earth science teacher, so getting a job can require teaching multiple subjects.

But to teach math and physics in New York, McKim needed ten more credits in physics and eight more credits in math — even though he has a minor in each and experience teaching both. For McKim, investing the time and money necessary to prove his academic credentials — after all he had already achieved inside and outside the classroom — “wasn’t too appealing.”

Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state education department, declined to comment on McKim’s case, but said that certification requires coursework equivalent to an undergraduate major: “Strong content preparation in undergraduate coursework is an essential element in teacher preparation and certification.”

Helpful, beneficial, useful — sure. But essential? The author Jonathan Franzen, who received a B.A. in German with an English minor and once taught fiction writing at Swarthmore College and Columbia University, wouldn’t be eligible to teach American literature to middle school students in New York. Similarly, New York is working to recruit computer science teachers, yet if Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg applied for jobs, the state would tell the Harvard dropouts to finish college first — and after that, they would need to complete a master’s degree to obtain a permanent certification.

Of course, a successful career does not a great teacher make, and it’s reasonable to require professional development work for those without traditional qualifications. But rather than ruling them categorically unqualified, if they can’t cut it as teachers, allow them to be fired, as would happen in any other profession. But rather than making it easier to fire bad teachers, states are making it harder to hire good ones.

McKim supports high standards for teacher certification: “Much of what is wrong with our educational system can be traced back to colleges/universities not adequately preparing teachers,” he wrote in an e-mail. That’s a problem that New York and other states are tackling. But there is a world of difference between a certification system that is intellectually rigorous and one that is bureaucratically rigid.

As states move toward a set of common standards for students through Common Core, they ought to do the same for teachers, allowing them to move from state to state without difficulty. At the same time, principals ought to have the flexibility to hire teachers based on their ability and experience, not their academic credits.

The problem can also run in the opposite direction: In some states, teachers can actually be penalized for having too many credits. In Vermont, for instance, a master’s degree isn’t required, and since union contracts usually mandate higher salaries for teachers with advanced degrees, “instead of hiring based on merit,” McKim says, “districts are forced to hire based on cost.”

Despite being deemed unqualified, McKim decided to move to New York anyway, where he eventually found a teaching job — as an adjunct college professor. That’s a loss for the local middle school students and a troubling sign for the future of education in the U.S.

Photo: wecometolearn via Flickr

How Much Has Obama Learned?

WASHINGTON — Our political system is not accustomed to the kind of battle that is going on now. President Obama has been slow to adjust to it. The voters are understandably mystified and frustrated by it. In the meantime, the economy sits on the edge between stagnation and something worse.

The president’s speech to Congress and the Republican presidential debate last week should have taught us that we are no longer in the world of civics textbooks in which our political parties split their differences and arrive at imperfect but reasonably satisfactory solutions.

Now, we face a fundamental divide over the most basic questions: Is government good or bad? Can public action make the private economy work better, or are all efforts to alter the market’s course — by Congress, the president, the Federal Reserve — doomed to failure?

When politicians and their supporters believe the other side is pursuing policies that would destroy all they cherish, compromise becomes not a desirable expedient but “almost treasonous,” to use the phrase tossed about by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

Under these circumstances, taking enormous risks with the country’s well-being, as House Republicans did in the debt-ceiling rumble, is no longer out of bounds. It’s a form of patriotism. When your adversaries’ ideas are so dastardly, it’s better to court chaos, win the fight, and pick up the pieces later.

And to make matters worse — and more confusing — the two sides are not equally distant from the political center. We are in an age of asymmetric polarization.

Precisely because they believe in both the government and the marketplace, Democrats are always more ready to compromise. Obama’s economic address last Thursday was seen as tough and firm because he finally called Republicans in Congress out. Progressives liked the new fortitude, and also the relatively large sums of money Obama would mobilize to jolt the economy back to vibrancy.

But there was nothing remotely radical (or even particularly liberal) about Obama’s ideas: tax cuts, many of them business-friendly, and new spending for such exotic projects as, well, schools and roads. As the president said, his proposals had all drawn Republican support in the past.

He was, however, talking about a Republican Party that existed before it was taken over by a new sensibility linking radical individualism with a loathing for government that would shock Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and, for goodness’ sake, Robert Taft.

Thus, the GOP sees the solution to the crisis in the measures its right wing has always favored: gutting regulation, keeping taxes on the affluent low, cutting government programs, and stopping Ben Bernanke and the Fed from doing anything to put the unemployed back to work that might risk the tiniest bit of inflation and thus dilute, even momentarily, the wealth of the already wealthy.

Last week’s Republican debate was instructive in showing how deeply this new orthodoxy has penetrated. Bashing Bernanke and the government was in. Perry joined in the doctrinaire foolishness his rivals displayed in an earlier debate. He echoed them in saying he would reject a budget deal based on $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. (A colleague of mine suggested the candidates should have been asked how they felt about ratios of 20-to-1 or 50-to-1.)

Up to this point, Obama has acted as if nothing much had happened inside the Republican Party. He kept talking about bipartisanship and tried not once but twice to make a big deficit deal with John Boehner. Quite predictably, both blew up in his face.

The president seems to have awoken to the danger he faces. In his speech to Congress, he pointedly addressed those who believe “that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.” He added: “That’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”

But that is precisely who most of the Republican Party now thinks we are.

The president has offered eloquent defenses of the role of government in the past, only to revert to bipartisan fantasies that, in the end, always make him look weaker. The central question — for his jobs plan and his future — is whether this time he sticks with an analysis of the nature of our political fight that sees it as it is, not as he wishes it were.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group