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Slide 1Buenas Tardes! Good Afternoon! Everyone is telling us that higher education is under disruption, especially in areas of science and engineering. Years ago, professors used this cliché often in an engineering class, "Look to your right, look to your left, two of the three of you won't be here next year." Now, we are finding the demand of engineering students worldwide is presumably on the rise and we are doing everything to retain and recruit them. On the other hand, because MOOCs (massive open online courses) are being dreamed as a way to cut costs, your dean may soon say this at the faculty meeting, “Look to your right, look to your left, two of the three of you won't be here in three years.”Whether we are excited or apprehensive about this disruption, there is so much room for improvement that even the smallest changes that we make in our classrooms and interactions with our students can pay rich dividends. That is what I want to focus most of my talk on. I want to thank WEEF for inviting me to be here, especially Director Luis Alberto Gonzalez Araujo who kept me informed about every detail that has led to this talk. I want to thank Professor Javier Perez of Universidad Del Norte for the initial invitation and taking the risk of giving me a forum to talk about some of things that I feel passionate about as well as items that are not without controversy. I would be always grateful to Professors Jorge Brix and Humberto Gomez of Universidad Del Norte who opened me to the whole idea of visiting institutions outside of my comfort zone of USA. They have shown me unparalleled hospitality and deep friendship. After this talk, I am eagerly looking forward to panel discussion with my fellow colleagues, Drs. Dulce Garcia, Xavier Fouger, and Uriel Cuikerman.Slide 2: As the population is rising, technology becomes ubiquitous, and jobs are requiring skills that go beyond the secondary education, more and more young men and women are seeking higher education. And for many who come from a low-income family, going into engineering is a reasonable path to move up the socioeconomic ladder. I am going to just say it – if any country wants to develop a content life for its citizens, and encourage people as a whole through example, it would make every effort to financially help the lowest income quartile students who belong to the highest quartile group in their academic standing. Slide 3: There is no dearth of higher education institutions to meet the needs of the ever-rising number of students. India has 3 times the number of institutions of higher education USA has and 5 times that of China. But, does it put a country like India ahead in the game?Slide 4: No, because the gross enrollment ratio is quite low in the two populous countries in the world. The GER is the ratio between the enrolled population to the overall population in the age group that corresponds to that level of education.Slide 5: The most in need in getting the GER numbers high are countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa and South/West Asia. Although work still needs to be done, Latin America has shown large improvement in improving their numbers. This however has not translated into large economic growths, and analysis suggests that the long run growth of Latin America would improve significantly if the learning in schools were to improve.Slide 6: MOOCs. Many people believe that this is the panacea in improving access and affordability of higher education. If you have not heard the term MOOC, it stands for Massive Open Online Courses.Slide 7: To define a MOOC, Course stands for being like a lecture course you would teach in a classroom, Open stands for that one does not need to pay a fee or be registered officially for the course, Online stands for that it is offered over the internet, and Massive stands for that it can support indefinite number of students. There are many private players in the MOOCs, most popular being Coursera, Udacity and EdX. Coursera is the most popular with 4.7 million students, 444 courses and 87 partnering institutions.Slide 8: Although there is a lot of backlash about MOOCs such as its dropout rate and lack of instructor contact, many good things are coming out of this innovation. Learning management systems such as Blackboard and Canvas have to improve in their quality, and we as instructors and administrators are being challenged to work smarter and harder to make the classroom experience better. If an employer wants certifications at low cost, they do not have to send their employees elsewhere for training. A few universities have started giving credit for MOOC courses. They check your competency through proctored tests in the campus or at testing centers. But, it does come with a price to the society. As we are rapidly overcoming the digital divide of who has internet access and who does not, a digital divide will take place now - Who can afford the brick-and-mortar school and who will learn mostly online. Is that the kind of society we want? However, I believe that MOOCs in one form or other are creating access, have some of the best quality instruction in STEM areas and will bring equity in the society. Slide 9:The MOOCs started with good intentions. They were called the cMOOCs as they simply wanted the course to be offered for free outside of the university so that students from around the world would create a diverse discussion about the course. Then came the xMOOCs offered first by two professors from Stanford who offered a course in Artificial Intelligence in Fall 2011 to more than 140,000 students. It gained massive appeal amongst top schools in USA in a bid in my opinion to shake up the for-profit institutions in the USA and deflect the non-profit tax-exempt status of schools with large endowments. However, a new trend is starting where state universities such as SJSU are contracting the content of a course and using it to teach their courses. The students at SJSU use the materials from the EdX Circuits course and meet once a week to go through questions and in-class exercises. Passing rates in this bottleneck course went from a dismal 55% to 91%.I believe that MOOCs are going through a “trough of disillusionment” but will evolve as an integral part of the higher education landscape.Slide 10. Learning ApproachesSlide 11. The Program for International Student Assessment, PISA is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy. It is very much a functional skills test. Two countries come at the top in this exam and they are Finland and South Korea. The secret to Finland’s success started when they decided to revamp their education system in the 1980s. All teacher training schools were closed and instead absorbed in the prime universities in the nation. This allowed only the top 10% of the students a chance to attend teacher training schools. Every teacher needs a master’s degree. Finnish kids do not go to school till the age of seven, have little homework, and hardly get subjected to standardized testing. Teachers have full control of how they want to teach and test their curriculum. However, there is a very important part that is overlooked when people talk about the Finland model. When Finland revamped their education system, it was based on valuing equality more than excellence. All schools, no matter, where they are located get the same capital and same quality of human resources. And, there are no private schools in Finland. The problem facing education in the world is not the diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society. Therefore, I iterate again, a policy to finance higher education of the brightest kids from low-income families is the reform that needs to be addressed if we truly want higher education to be transformative.And then there is the South Korea which is also successful in the PISA tests. Their model is based on rote memorization and cramming. Students spend most of their time studying. They go to private after-school tutoring places called Hagwans. Recently, the government had to put a ban on the Hagwans being open after 10pm and even paid rewards to citizens for reporting violators. Now given these are the two extremes, one would simply ask the question – which approach should I choose. This is what many experts would present to you as the only alternatives and hence create what is called “alternative blindness”. I believe that there is a better way which is inclusive and works for all by creating flexible approaches. Technology is helping us to do that.Slide 12. Present information in different ways, provide multiple ways of expression, and develop multiple means of engagement.Slide 13:Slide 14:Slide 15:Slide 16:Slide 17:Slide 18:Slide 19:Which Learning Techniques are the Best?Slide 20: In a recent study led by John Dunlosky of Kent State University, a meta-study of ten learning strategies were examined. As much as we like to believe, common techniques such as highlighting and rereading were found to be of low impact.Slide 21:Techniques such as self-explanation are of medium impact. Interleaved practice is getting some attention from cognitive scientists. If you absorb information easily, we tend to think that it is learned well. In fact, the opposite is true. More the extra effort spent by the brain, more the brain thinks that it is worth keeping. Now they have found that by changing to small fonts or using bad punctuation promotes learning by what scientists call cognitive disfluency. However, we do not need to follow these unpopular ways of creating disfluency – we can develop interleaved practice by creating a problem set with mixed difficulty rather than grouping them as a certain type of problem. Slide 22What came to the top in learning strategies are practice testing and distributed practice. Practice testing means that we simulate the same environment, time limitations, and restrictions as the actual test. So if you want your students to do better, give them a mock test inside the classroom or at home. Now people say – are you not then teaching to the test and are we not supposed to get away from too much testing! Well, if your assessment techniques are aligned to what the course objectives are, then that is a nonissue. Practice testing forces retrieval and proper retrieval is essential for developing higher-order thinking skills in our students. And this practice testing needs to be cumulative as it gives even more opportunities of retrieval. Distributed practice, also called spaced repetition, has a high positive effect on learning. Distributed practice again reinforces retrieval, which is important for long-term memory. The formula suggested is 10% of the gap between tests. For example, if you are giving a test every 30 days, you as a teacher have to create practice opportunities every 3 to 6 days for students.Slide 23:Slide 24:Slide 25:Slide 26:Slide 27Researchers such as David Meyer of University of Michigan have documented 4 negative outcomes when students multitask while doing schoolwork. First, the assignment takes longer to complete. You are spending time on another activity and then you have to familiarize yourself again with the task at hand.Second, there is mental fatigue caused by dropping and picking your thought process. Imagine that you are texting your friend as well as writing a lab report. The two require you to write but the level of writing is informal in one and technically formal in another.Third, students’ may have memory failure because if one was multitasking during the memory process, it may not get encoded the way it should be. So then, the recall of the information can fail not because one was multitasking at the time of recall but when the information was being coded in one’s brain. Fourth, one develops inept learning. Higher order thinking skills suffer. In a study published by the US National Academy of Sciences, one group of students were asked to learn something and another was asked to do the same but while counting number of sound tones that would come on intermittently. They found that both groups did equally well in a task that was given to them. But when asked to use the information in another context, the multitasking group had more issues doing so than the nonmultitasking one.Slide 28:Slide 29:Slide 30:Slide 31:Slide 32:Slide 33:Slide 34:Slide 35:Slide 36:Slide 37:Slide 38:Slide 39:Slide 40:Slide 41: ................
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