No More Syllabus

Warning -- soap box!

I'm the Academic Dean for Colorado Community Colleges Online and in that role I often play referee between faculty and students. Far too often the dispute is around the acceptance of late work and the inability of all learners to meet all deadlines. I'm in the community college world, so most of our learners are adults with jobs, families, crises, and many activities with many levels of importance in their lives. As faculty (because I wear that hat also) our goal is to help the learner meet a set of learning outcomes with respect to our field. In our interaction with the learner that is actually our only official goal.

Learners are taking our classes with the goal of meeting those same learning outcomes.

The problem comes when meeting the class schedule becomes the primary learning outcome and when the learner's grade reflects, not her understanding of the course material, but rather her ability to complete all required course activities on time.

Faculty have some rights in this debate of course -- they are also adults who need to have some control over their own schedule and they also need a way to evaluate the learner's understanding of the material. In most educational settings however, the faculty appears to have all of the rights, all control over the course schedule, assessment schedule and type. How much better and exciting would education be if some of this control was ceded to the learner?

For a much better post on this topic read Tomorrow's Professor on Death to the Syllabus - http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2007/11/834_death_to_th.html#more.

A solution discussed in that post and in many other books (Learner Centered Teaching by MaryEllen Weimer for example) and articles is a jointly developed syllabus where learners help develop the activities by which they will be assessed. Another solution is a more traditional syllabus but with flexibility in assignments built in, from something as straight-forward as allowing learners to take 5 out of 7 exams (they choose which ones to drop) to a more complex set of assignments of which learners choose a certain number from several categories.

Ideas such as these will help keep learners engaged in the course while alleviating the conflict between measuring learning outcomes and measuring learners' ability to meet fixed schedules.

Lisa

More Encouragement for Open Source - Google Highly Open Participation Contest

From the Website (http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/)

Google is holding a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We will work with ten open source organizations for this pilot effort, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research.

The list of projects open for participation includes Moodle and Drupal - both exciting projects in the area of content management.

Lisa

Educational Rap

My teenagers even thought this was pretty good rap.

http://www.educationalrap.com/music/index.html

Lisa

Textbook Costs - Denver Post

The Denver Post recently ran a series of articles on the high costs of text books and student reactions to those costs. This quote is from the article by Howard Pankratz published on October 17th, 2007, Students Rally for Cheaper Books:

Throngs of students on the Auraria campus signed a petition today calling for cheaper textbooks and accountability by book publishers and university faculty that they hope will lessen their financial burden.

The petitions, to be sent to the Colorado legislature, asks legislators to take action this coming session.

"In many ways it — buying books — is like getting a root canal," said Chris Dezember, 39, a theater major at Metropolitan State College. "I spend $500 to $600 a semester on books. It gets costly."

College textbooks are a $6.2 billion industry, according to the National Association of Stores. The College Board estimates that students spent about $940 on books and supplies in the 2006-07 school year, a 30 percent jump in the past five years.

The most recent article (Collegians' book, tuition concerns on same page) quotes students as working towards a legislative solution:

Students from Colorado State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Metro State College and the University of Northern Colorado are already working together to push for legislation that would make textbooks cheaper.

I think most business people would see a legislative solution to high textbook costs as cumbersome and inappropriate. There are many other possible solutions among which is NROC and open source content for at least some courses.

Lisa