Join us to discuss ten things engineers should learn about learning on Monday 5th February at 2pm GMT

See one, do one, teach one” is a popular technique for teaching surgery to medical students. It has three steps:

  • You see one: by watching it, reading about it or listening to it
  • You do one: by engineering it or making it
  • You teach one: by telling others all about it


If you’re teaching engineers, what do you need to know beyond the seeing and doing? Understanding how human memory and learning works and the differences between beginners and experts can improve your teaching. So what practical steps can engineers take to improve the training and development of other engineers? What do engineers need to know in order to improve their own learning?

Join us on Monday 5th February at 2pm GMT (UTC) for our monthly ACM SIGCSE journal club meetup on zoom to discuss a paper on this topic by Neil Brown, Felienne Hermans and Lauren Margulieux, published in (and featured on the cover of) the January issue of Communications of the ACM. [1]

We’ll be joined by the lead author, Neil Brown of King’s College London, who will give us a lightning talk summary of the paper to kick off our discussion.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Neil C.C. Brown, Felienne F.J. Hermans and Lauren Margulieux (2024) 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning, Communications of the ACM, Volume 67, No. 1. DOI:10.1145/3584859 (see accompanying video at vimeo.com/885743448 )

Join us to discuss the feeling of learning ❤️ (vs. actual learning) on Monday 4th April at 2pm BST

Learning can be an emotional process and we often don’t realise when we are actually learning. When you’re listening to an expert explain something well, it’s easy to mistake the speaker’s smooth delivery for your own understanding. You might feel like you’re learning, but actual learning is often hard work and feels uncomfortable. Join us to discuss actual learning vs. feeling of learning via a paper by Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin at Harvard University here is the abstract:

We compared students’ self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory college physics courses taught using 1) active instruction (following best practices in the discipline) and 2) passive instruction (lectures by experienced and highly rated instructors). Both groups received identical class content and handouts, students were randomly assigned, and the instructor made no effort to persuade students of the benefit of either method. Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. This suggests that attempts to evaluate instruction based on students’ perceptions of learning could inadvertently promote inferior (passive) pedagogical methods. For instance, a superstar lecturer could create such a positive feeling of learning that students would choose those lectures over active learning. Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning. That disconnect may have a detrimental effect on students’ motivation, engagement, and ability to self-regulate their own learning. Although students can, on their own, discover the increased value of being actively engaged during a semester-long course, their learning may be impaired during the initial part of the course. We discuss strategies that instructors can use, early in the semester, to improve students’ response to being actively engaged in the classroom.

From [1] and [2]

Thanks to Uli Sattler and Andrea Schalk for highlighting the paper. All welcome. As usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details are in the slack channel sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us.

References

  1. Logan S. McCarty; Kelly Miller; Kristina Callaghan; Greg Kestin (2019) “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: 201821936. DOI:10.1073/PNAS.1821936116 PMC: 6765278 PMID: 31484770
  2. Jill Barshay (2022) College students often don’t know when they’re learning: Harvard experiment reveals the psychological grip of lectures, The Hechinger Report

Join us to discuss when study turns digital on Monday 2nd August at 2pm BST

Public domain image of Coronavirus by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins at CDC.gov on Wikimedia commons w.wiki/ycs


The pandemic has accelerated changes to the way we teach and learn. Join us to discuss the Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure: a paper by Vegard Gjerde, Robert Gray, Bodil Holst and Stein Dankert Kolstø on the effects of the pandemic on Physics Education at a Norwegian University. [1]

In March 2020, universities in Norway and many other countries shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The students lost access to classrooms, libraries, study halls, and laboratories. Studying turned digital. Because it is unclear when this pandemic will cease to affect students and because we cannot know whether or when a new pandemic occurs, we need to find ways to improve digital study-life for students. An important step in this direction is to understand the students’ experiences and perspectives regarding how the digitalization affected their study-life both in structured learning arenas and their self-study. Therefore, we interviewed 12 students in an introductory mechanics course at a Norwegian university in June of 2020. Through a thematic analysis, we identified four broad categories in the students’ different experiences and reflections, namely that digitalization: (a) provides benefits, e.g. the flexibility inherent in online video lectures; (b) incurs learning costs, e.g. students reducing their study effort; (c) incurs social costs, e.g. missing being around other students; and (d) increases the need for structure, e.g. wanting to be arranged in digital groups to solve mandatory tasks. We also found that the 2019 students on average scored significantly better on the final exam than the 2020 students, d = 0.31, but we discuss why this result should be interpreted with caution. We provide suggestions for how to adapt courses to make students’ digital studying more socially stimulating and effective. Furthermore, this study is a contribution to the historical documentation of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details. Thanks to Sarah Clinch for suggesting the paper.

References

  1. Gjerde, Vegard; Gray, Robert; Holst, Bodil; Kolstø, Stein Dankert (2021). “The Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure”. Physics Education56 (5): 055004. doi:10.1088/1361-6552/ac031e

Join us to discuss the tyranny of content on Monday 5th July at 2pm BST

CC-BY-SA image of Bill Gates by Kuhlmann MSC via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/3W7k

If content is king, then his rule is tyrannical. Bill Gates once remarked that “Content is King” but In the kingdom of education, how much do educators oppressively inflict content on their learners? What can be done to reduce the tyranny of content? We’ll be discussing this via a paper by Christina I. Petersen et al, here’s the abstract:

Instructors have inherited a model for conscientious instruction that suggests they must cover all the material outlined in their syllabus, and yet this model frequently diverts time away from allowing students to engage meaningfully with the content during class. We outline the historical forces that may have conditioned this teacher-centered model as well as the disciplinary pressures that inadvertently reward it. As a way to guide course revision and move to a learner-centered teaching approach, we propose three evidence-based strategies that instructors can adopt: 1) identify the core concepts and competencies for your course; 2) create an organizing framework for the core concepts and competencies; and 3) teach students how to learn in your discipline. We further outline examples of actions that instructors can incorporate to implement each of these strategies. We propose that moving from a content-coverage approach to these learner-centered strategies will help students better learn and retain information and apply it to new situations.

All welcome. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details.

References

  1. Petersen, Christina I.; Baepler, Paul; Beitz, Al; Ching, Paul; Gorman, Kristen S.; Neudauer, Cheryl L.; Rozaitis, William; Walker, J. D.; Wingert, Deb; Reiness, C. Gary (2020). The Tyranny of Content: “Content Coverage” as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It. CBE—Life Sciences Education19 (2): ar17. doi:10.1187/cbe.19-04-0079

Join us to discuss why minimal guidance doesn’t work on Monday 2nd November at 2pm GMT

Minimal guidance is a popular approach to teaching and learning. This technique advocates teachers taking a back seat to facilitate learning by letting their students get on with it. Minimal guidance comes in many guises including constructivism, discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, active learning, inquiry-based learning and even lazy teaching. According to its critics, unguided and minimally guided approaches don’t work. Join us to discuss why via a paper [1] published by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark, here is the abstract:

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert–novice differences, and cognitive load. Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

This is a controversial, heavily cited and politically motivated paper which has provoked numerous rebuttals, making it an ideal candidate for a juicy journal club discussion! Thanks to Quintin Cutts for this months #paper-suggestions via our slack channel at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com.

As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details and meeting URLs.

References

  1. Kirschner, Paul A.; Sweller, John; Clark, Richard E. (2006). “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching”. Educational Psychologist. 41 (2): 75–86. DOI: 10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1 (see also altmetric.com/details/564640 for online attention scores)

Join us to discuss how video production affects student engagement Monday 3rd August at 11am

As Universities transition to online teaching during the global coronavirus pandemic, there’s increasing interest in the use of pre-recorded videos to replace traditional lectures in higher education. Join us to discuss how video production affects student engagement, based on a paper published by Philip Guo at the University of California, San Deigo (UCSD) from the Learning at Scale conference on How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos. (MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course). [1] Here is the abstract:

Videos are a widely-used kind of resource for online learning. This paper presents an empirical study of how video production decisions affect student engagement in online educational videos. To our knowledge, ours is the largest-scale study of video engagement to date, using data from 6.9 million video watching sessions across four courses on the edX MOOC platform. We measure engagement by how long students are watching each video, and whether they attempt to answer post-video assessment problems.

Our main findings are that shorter videos are much more engaging, that informal talking-head videos are more engaging, that Khan-style tablet drawings are more engaging, that even high-quality pre-recorded classroom lectures might not make for engaging online videos, and that students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos.

Based upon these quantitative findings and qualitative insights from interviews with edX staff, we developed a set of recommendations to help instructors and video producers take better advantage of the online video format. Finally, to enable researchers to reproduce and build upon our findings, we have made our anonymized video watching data set and analysis scripts public. To our knowledge, ours is one of the first public data sets on MOOC resource usage.

Details of the zoom meeting will be posted on our slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com. If you don’t have access to the workspace, send me (Duncan Hull) an email to request an invite to join the workspace. The paper refers to several styles of video production, some examples below.

Khan style tablet drawings

The paper refers to Khan style videos, this is an example, taken from Khan Academy course on algorithms, khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms

What is an algorithm? Video introduction to Khan Academy algorithms course by Thomas Cormen and Devin Balkcom

Talking Heads

Some examples of talking head videos:

How to frame a talking head with Tomás De Matteis

There’s more than one way to do talking head videos, see Moving to Blended Learning, Part 3: Types of Video at www.elearning.fse.manchester.ac.uk/fseta/moving-to-blended-learning-part-3-types-of-video/

Making video-friendly slides

Steve Pettifer explains how to make video-friendly slides


Lose the words! Your PowerPoint / Keynote presentation should not be a script or a handout

References

  1. Guo, Philip J.; Kim, Juho; Rubin, Rob (2014). “How video production affects student engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos “. Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference: 41–50. doi:10.1145/2556325.2566239. see also altmetric.com/details/2188041 for online attention score

Join us to discuss blended learning & pedagogy in Computer Science on Monday 6th July at 3pm

What is innovative pedagogy? CC-BY licensed picture by Giulia Forsythe

Join us for our next journal club meeting on Monday 6th July at 3pm, the papers we’ll be discussing below come from the #paper-suggestions channel of our slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com.

Show me the pedagogy!

The first paper is a short chapter by Katrina Falkner and Judy Sheard which gives an overview of pedagogic approaches including active learning, collaborative learning, cooperative learning, contributing student pedagogy (CSP), blended learning and MOOCs. [1] This was published last year as chapter 15 of the Cambridge Handbook on Computing Education Research edited by Sally Fincher and Anthony V. Robins. A lot of blended learning resources focus on technology, this chapter talks about where blended learning fits with a range of different pedagogic approaches.

A video summary of all sixteen chapters of the Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research, including chapter 15 which we’ll be discussing

Implementing blended learning

The second paper (suggested by Jane Waite) is Design and implementation factors in blended synchronous learning environments [2], here’s a summary from the abstract:

Increasingly, universities are using technology to provide students with more flexible modes of participation. This article presents a cross-case analysis of blended synchronous learning environments—contexts where remote students participated in face-to-face classes through the use of rich-media synchronous technologies such as video conferencing, web conferencing, and virtual worlds. The study examined how design and implementation factors influenced student learning activity and perceived learning outcomes, drawing on a synthesis of student, teacher, and researcher observations collected before, during, and after blended synchronous learning lessons. Key findings include the importance of designing for active learning, the need to select and utilise technologies appropriately to meet communicative requirements, varying degrees of co-presence depending on technological and human factors, and heightened cognitive load. Pedagogical, technological, and logistical implications are presented in the form of a Blended Synchronous Learning Design Framework that is grounded in the results of the study.

We look forward to seeing you there, zoom details are on the slack channel, email me if you’d like to request an invitation to the slack channel. Likewise, if you don’t have access to the papers let me know.

Short notes from the discussion

Some of the questions discussed on the day:

  • Inclusion raises a number of questions in terms of room management, gender balance – was this a consideration?
  • What effect do you think the absence of anyone F2F would have on the case studies and/or your outcomes?
  • How scalable is this approach? Can it be used with classes of 200 or 300 students?
  • Constructive alignment plays an important role in getting this kind of blended learning to work, see the work of John Biggs e.g. Teaching for Quality Learning at University book

Further reading from co-authors

Jaqueline Kenney, one of the co-authors of the paper we discussed joined us for the session (thanks again Jacqueline). Matt Bower also emailed some suggestions of work that follows on

  • See related work Collaborative learning across physical and virtual worlds: Factors supporting and constraining learners in a blended reality environment DOI:10.1111/bjet.12435 and blendsync.org
  • Bower, M. (2006). Virtual classroom pedagogy. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, Houston, Texas, USA. DOI:10.1145/1121341.1121390
  • Bower, M. (2006). A learning system engineering approach to developing online courses. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education – Volume 52, Hobart, Australia. 
  • Bower, M. (2007). Groupwork activities in synchronous online classroom spaces. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, Covington, Kentucky, USA. DOI:10.1145/1227310.1227345
  • Bower, M. (2007). Independent, synchronous and asynchronous an analysis of approaches to online concept formation. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Dundee, Scotland. DOI:10.1145/1268784.1268827
  • Bower, M. (2008). The “instructed-teacher”: a computer science online learning pedagogical pattern. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Madrid, Spain. DOI:10.1145/1384271.1384323
  • Bower, M., & McIver, A. (2011). Continual and explicit comparison to promote proactive facilitation during second computer language learning. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Darmstadt, Germany. DOI:10.1145/1999747.1999809
  • Bower, M., & Richards, D. (2005). The impact of virtual classroom laboratories in CSE. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. DOI:10.1145/1047344.1047447As well, this Computers & Education paper specifically relates to a study of teaching computing online:
  • Bower, M., & Hedberg, J. G. (2010). A quantitative multimodal discourse analysis of teaching and learning in a web-conferencing environment–the efficacy of student-centred learning designs. Computers & education, 54(2), 462-478.

References

  1.  Falkner, Katrina; Sheard, Judy (2019). “Pedagogic Approaches”: 445–480. doi:10.1017/9781108654555.016. Chapter 15 of the The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research
  2. Bower, Matt; Dalgarno, Barney; Kennedy, Gregor E.; Lee, Mark J.W.; Kenney, Jacqueline (2015). “Design and implementation factors in blended synchronous learning environments: Outcomes from a cross-case analysis”. Computers & Education86: 1–17. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2015.03.006ISSN 0360-1315.