[David Harwood] Good morning everyone.
I'm happy to be presenting here to you today
with my colleagues, Eyde Olson, and Gosia Mahoney.
I want to share with you some approaches
that we've taken in a course that we think has found
a lot of success in engaging students,
in engaging students to communicate with each other,
but also to drive their own learning in some ways
to create a space and situations
where they can advance their critical thinking processes
through here as well,
so the title here of online content 'miner's.
I guess it's appropriate for some geologists
to have that line,
but really sending students out into the online
to go find information, bringing it back into the class,
in what we think is kind of a fun, interesting way,
and this platform that we've used to develop this is
this course that I developed maybe a decade or so ago
called Frontiers in Antarctic Geosciences.
The course is, last semester was delivered online
and in person, synchronously delivering it
but also having all the materials available
for asynchronous availability for folks as well.
It's a three credit gen-ed class.
It's not a prerequisite for anything,
so there's not, let's say the burden of
of content in some ways.
We're pretty free to go
where we want with this content.
The overall theme of the class pretty much is
understanding how our planet works
and what the role of Antarctica is, central
to all of Earth's different interactive spheres.
Climate plays a pretty big role in this
as well as advancement of science.
The course has a certification there
for both ACE 4 and ACE 9 in the UNL system.
The two things I want to talk to you today about,
giving you examples of this,
is something we call Antarctic Theater,
which is where a lot of the online mining comes,
but also something called a Packback,
which is a purpose, a purchase app that students use.
We used it for the first time this last semester.
Now I did present two years ago
some aspects of the introduction of Antarctic theater.
The first one of these approaches I want to talk about
in the 2019 pedagogy and technology session
but I'm going to review that generally here
so you get a sense of how it works,
and it also then carries into the Packback approach
that we take, and listed down there on the bottom
are some things that I think we perceive to be
very beneficial towards student engagement,
learning, and them driving themselves towards,
you know,
places they never thought they were going to go
in terms of understanding science,
and engaging, and really controlling their own learning.
The other aspect here is Packback,
and Packback is a commercial program
launched by students at Illinois State University.
I believe it exists to awaken and fuel
the lifelong curiosity that is resident in
every student.
But here's some of the motivation
for why we took this approach, right?
Things have changed.
We live in a search engine culture.
Memorization is less important
than it used to be.
We are all able to outsource
to the digital brain that's online there.
What's important is how we use information
that's out there, right?
And that's kind of the key
to our success, and to progress.
Developing critical thinking skills for future careers
and for lifelong, being lifelong learners
are good things, which we think the
approach we're taking here
helps to foster that growth.
Sharing what we learned with others
and problem solving together
are also components of this.
Students did appreciate, they were
receptive to these methods.
They've loved the peer engagement.
They loved the freedom to explore
and to share their new knowledge.
So the first component of this,
this Antarctic theater approach,
there's so much information that's out there
at their fingertips and online,
from sources that they are
familiar with using anyway.
We have them 'mine' the web
for their own benefit, but they bring back
some great resources that they evaluate together,
and then they share with the rest of the class.
Students are drawn into this self motivating
learning environment, you know,
where they engage initially
on their own,
but then they share asynchronously
with their peers.
Passive exposure to visual new
content that's discovered
and shared, you know,
within their teams
leads to greater engagement.
This has the potential to enhance learning in many
many different disciplines.
Maybe you'll find that this
could be useful to you as well.
We've been working with in teams
of three or four students in this process.
And just looking at all of these resources through here,
a wealth of information out there,
available in the form of videos.
Now, even thinking about teachers
that are teaching outside
of their contents area,
I think there's great potential
for bringing in high quality videos initially,
even having students find those, bring them in,
and then the teacher can direct them with the content.
So here's some quotes
from some students in how they
enjoyed the video approach.
I often benefited from searching for videos.
I often got 'sucked in' and found myself
watching lots of videos because
there are so many interesting ones.
I really enjoyed learning about Antarctica
in a visual way.
It allowed us to search topics
we are personally interested in,
while also learning about the theme.
The opportunity to search for
my own videos made me engage
and look for some unique information.
So in this process, we cycle through
four different themes.
Each theme has four different categories.
The four themes are shown here, and the themes track
basically the same aspects and
content of the course,
first bringing a sense of place
in there with Antarctic scenery,
with things like,
where rock meets ice, right,
where ice meets sky,
or the ocean,
but trying to bring the Antarctica
into the classroom with some really great videos.
Next one, when we're talking
about the process of doing science,
this theme, humans on ice,
scientists, tourist, explorers,
having the students see themselves there
by things that these others are doing.
Theme C: 'Doing Science'
is really getting into
the tools of the discipline
and the trade.
How is science done?
What do the bases look like?
What kind of facilities are available
on research ships at the South Pole station?
What does that look like, for example?
And then finally, toward the end of the class,
getting into thinking about evidence for change.
What do we see in the past?
What do future projections look like as well?
And by this time, students are wanting
to take ownership of our planet,
you know, and reverse the course
that we happen to be on.
The process here,
it's a bit of a wordy slide,
but the process here is,
students individually search
for videos, finding four or more.
They propose those to their team,
their teams review those,
optimally three to five minutes in length.
The teams then review
when they pick and nominate
the best five videos
into a larger pool, you know,
with top ranked videos
from four other teams, right?
So progressively we're filtering out, you know,
the less good,
and the best of the best
rise up to the top.
Students then vote to select the best videos
in each of these four categories,
as we rotate through this two week cycle,
and then we dedicate one class period to Antarctic theater.
When I first started doing this, we would actually go
to the Ross Theater, the university,
Nebraska Lincoln's on campus theater,
and have the value of having, you know,
a big screen, big sound, etc. in that,
kind of made it a little bit special.
But when you think about
the content that these students are experiencing
without really even knowing that they're
experiencing so much,
it's kind of a passive way to go.
When they're searching for videos,
you know, I asked them to do eight,
maybe a minimum of twelve
maybe on average,
I asked them,
how many was the most they did?
Some students were saying they looked
at 25 for each one of these
or so,
then they're reviewing their team members' videos.
So they're seeing another 12.
Then they're voting on
half of the class' nominations, right?
So they're seeing another 20,
and then alternating the videos
coming from each half of the class,
they're seeing 6 to 8 new ones in that.
So for each of these themes
they're seeing 50 different videos.
I have not had a complaint yet
about how much time this might take
because they're engaged,
they're engaged wanting to do this.
So the process by which this matures,
we use these different programs here.
Canvas Discussions is where the
proposals are put forward,
where the review and discussion goes forward,
and where the nominations take place.
I'll walk you through each of these in turn.
And then the information is
arranged into Google Forms
where they can vote, then.
The links are all there.
It's very convenient for them.
It becomes pretty seamless.
Even for negotiating myself to organize this
it works pretty well.
The students vote, we then pull those
into a playlist on YouTube that's
sent out to the students in advance
so they can track it.
There are some sheets
that go along with this for comments
as they're watching different videos.
But just to make it easy on everyone,
including ourselves in pulling this together,
there's a template on Canvas, right?
And all the information that we need
to build the next phase of this
come with this proposal.
Some of that might look like this, right?
With the title of the video, the videos here
which you right click,
you can quickly get a link
to paste into the next one.
The title's there, the time is there.
And there's some justification as to
why the video caught their attention.
This 'like' feature within Canvas discussions,
you know,
is also very useful for communicating
between team members of what they like.
We then build a voting sheet here with Google Forms.
This is basically like a multiple choice question.
All the links are there,
direct and easy for them,
just click on a link,
you're in YouTube,
you're watching a video
to walk through these,
pick the best of each
of these different categories, right?
And then that's the information that we use,
the output from that to decide
which videos to show.
And because the class is split in half
students are not always seeing the same videos they've seen
as we progress through this.
So here's a YouTube playlist,
pretty easy to develop as well.
You just click 'add' to the playlist for this.
This is 'Theme B: Humans on Ice'.
And you can see, this is what we played.
I think maybe that was last year,
even crediting the teams that
found these videos in here.
Theme D through here,
we can see these different categories
and the different videos
which would be basically the theater session through there.
So students seem to like this.
They think they're not learning
but they are still learning a lot.
I really liked Antarctic Theater.
And the way it makes you go out and search
for educational videos and learn things that interest you.
So putting the learning and putting the students
in their own driving seat
of learning is something that they really appreciated
and having freedom to be able to do that.
So this segues then into the second part of this talk,
the other approach that we've been using,
that kind of builds in part on the Antarctic Theater.
And this is through a Packback, right?
And Packback into this is
really emphasizing the power of questions, right?
Preschool through high school.
You know, we're traditionally,
the traditional approach in education is
that we're taught to answer questions, right?
But not to ask them in that way.
In this class, we decided we were going to break the rules
and fuel curiosity through questions
on topics that are of interest to the students.
I'm confident enough in my understanding of the content
of what I'm teaching, wherever the students take me
I will know how to corral them back
to where I want them to go.
But they engage first,
even before content is delivered,
they stay with me, well, in a better way I think.
So this is the sales pitch I gave to the students
so they would follow this approach.
Learn to know and apply,
not just to remember.
Let your curiosity drive your learning.
Learn for the fun of it,
how it should build skills,
you will use it the rest of your life and work.
Questions are often more important than answers.
You learn more with a wrong answer than with a right one.
Answers can be wrong, but questions can't, right?
Every great innovation is born out of a great question.
So after hearing this they're scratching their heads
but eventually they came along
to see where we were going.
So here's the process.
This is the approach and how it works.
Students every week would post one question
on Packback, and they would
build and develop that question.
Students, other classmates would read those questions
and then comment.
The requirement was that students would post one question.
They would also post two good responses
by Friday to their classmates' questions.
Initially the Packback themes were related
to the assignments they had already completed.
The way that Packback works is
that artificial intelligence drives a lot of this.
It helps guide the students
to developing really great questions, right?
It coaches them on writing skills,
as I'll show you in a second.
It's assigned curiosity points
to the questions for those that are
really, really well developed.
50 curiosity points was the threshold
for full points.
30 curiosity points was the threshold
for the responses.
We lowered that down to 30
because it helped open up the conversation
and make it more free.
Gosia and I tried to stay out
of Packback in some ways,
guiding, phrasing, redirecting,
perhaps highlighting great posts,
but for by and large
we wanted this to be student space
where they would not feel
that they were being judged or evaluated, right?
Questions must be supported
with background for the contents
and explanation of why this
was of interest to them.
So we all know Bloom's Taxonomy, right?
What makes that question a good question?
Well, a good question is one that it can't just
be a yes or no answer.
Questions in this tier here
come in at around this level.
I asked the students,
I'm still, my sales pitch here.
At what level do you think your employer is
going to want you to engage on the job?
So building lifelong skills in this,
I put up this contract for them, you know.
Some things that I agreed to do was to create a safe
no judgment space for students' curiosity to bloom.
I would welcome bad questions because they eventually
become good ones regarding curiosity and expressed
wonder as highly as the right answer,
teaching how to ask great questions.
And celebrate the curiosity
and moments of wonder of the students.
But the students, as part of this
contract would need to engage fearlessly
in their self-learning and exploration,
stay on task with these things,
explore what interests them
and share that with others,
trust that this is good for them.
Enjoy learning, maximize your investment in school.
And importantly, here in the last one,
engage even when you don't know the answer,
and accept that not knowing is actually
part of the learning process.
Some general goals we set initially for Packback
was to build a sense of community,
particularly here during COVID time
this was important.
But to give students a safe space
where they could ask questions,
where they could interact,
where they could answer other students' questions,
where they could teach each other without
actually the instructor or TA involved in there.
Students were very engaged with this material,
as I'll show you in a bit.
The artificial intelligence of Packback
improved their writing skills.
One of them to learn how to speak
like geologists and write like geologists
as scientists.
Pursue questions that were of interest to them
and engaging students in the process of science.
So here's how the course structure for Packback worked.
We have nine different weekly postings
that were due of a question,
and then responses to other students' questions, right?
Students were asking questions about previous assignments,
like the first one that already had questions built
into this, there's 50 cool facts about Antarctica.
They were to pursue three of those in some greater depth,
find out information online
and also ask some questions about that.
So the first Packback was pretty easy.
What the students did was just pick one
of the questions they had already asked
and then develop it further, present that, share that
and then go and post some others.
You can see that the Antarctic Theater themes
are interspersed through here as well
as we would walk through them.
We also have a series of 13 blogs
from a science team in Antarctica.
So questions coming from reading those blogs,
making note of those.
And a really interesting thing
with this as well with each theater,
because it was two weeks for each theater to develop
until we actually saw the videos.
But I told them at the very start of each one
that there will be a Packback question coming from this.
So actually for three weeks, it was in their mind
behind the scenes, perhaps, but that they would be
in an inquiry mode here
at some point in the future.
Well, this is how this played out.
I'm really proud of this group of students
and staying with this,
the posting rate stayed pretty high.
We didn't launch it until the fourth week
just to give them a chance to get set up with things
and be able to comment back on the previous assignments.
And you can see that their
average curiosity scores stayed high through here,
compared to the national average
of Packback postings of 50.
This particular class stayed up there
around 70, 74 or so.
So blending artificial intelligence feedback
while the students are writing
really helped them improve their writing.
Let me just show you how this works here a little bit.
Yep. So Gosia and I would post the instructions
for this, and I can go in here and edit this.
The students once they post it can't edit it
but the instructors can.
And what you'll see in the instructions that I'm
trying to give here to spark their curiosity
to give them some direction,
when I would be typing through here,
curiosity, credibility,
communication, convention,
these scores would be increasing.
This circle would be completing.
You can see communication here is
only halfway through that.
Students could watch as they're writing
and see how things are improving for them,
for their score.
And then after posting those instructions
the students would post their questions, you know,
behind that with a general question
and then supporting information
for some of that.
For example, here's one student's question
as a citation in where she got some information,
and then other students are posting their comments
with sources and other information beyond that.
So an asynchronous discussion was going
on and actually thriving in this.
And it starts out by just asking a question,
clicking on this red bar right through here,
and you can already see
that the artificial intelligence is guiding them
with some tips, right?
Tips for writing, for developing your question
through there, guiding some information in here as it goes.
So the artificial intelligence is helping these
students improve their ability to write.
We can see those who received
the highest curiosity scores for this community.
Taylor, Leah, Tim, Samuel.
Samuel actually went way up here to the top,
top fourth highest, but he actually
showed great growth as he advanced through this.
It was interesting to see his name on both of those.
Taylor up here, just to show some improvement through this.
This was her first post from Packback, number one.
She got 64 curiosity points.
Her second or last post.
You can see it's that much more in depth.
She has some formatting, some bolding in here, a source,
a couple sources, a nice image in here as well.
And you can see she's got 96 points
really near the top of some of this.
I asked the question of
did the students' writing really increase?
Are they using more sophisticated language,
discipline specific vocabulary?
So here's Taylor's first four weeks of words.
And here's her last five weeks of words.
I haven't really taken a close look to see
how this has improved or not.
She's a top student anyway
but it would be interesting to see
in these different grade bands,
high, middle, and low,
what kind of improvement in there.
Great potential for studying this kind of thing.
Here's some quotes from some students in this.
I enjoyed using Packback and having conversations
with my classmates to see what they were thinking.
All the Packbacks were very engaging
and helped me learn more
about the course concepts
by doing my own research and
being able to look at what others researched.
I really enjoyed how we got to answer other students'
questions and learn from them.
I like how Packback made you think more
and formulate complex questions
to build our analysis of the material.
It was another activity we could do ourselves
without a specific format.
It forced us to think about
what we were learning in different ways,
and expanded our curiosity about the material.
I particularly liked that post through there.
So some things that we took away from this, right,
was that there was still high quality engagement
of the students by the end of the semester.
It actually surprised us that they stuck with this.
And we're still engaged.
I think that there was a social side to this course
this semester from Theater and Packback
even during COVID isolation
where they appreciated having the ability to engage
with each other here.
They welcomed this open learning format.
So just some kind of parting comments
through this: right answers only get us
to where we've already been.
That's revisiting knowledge
whereas great questions move us forward,
opening new potential.
It takes courage for teachers to let go of their classroom,
but the students are actually better for it.
It's about their learning, right?
So let them discover.
Bring content in after they've engaged.
Let them 'mine' deeply online,
bringing rich content
to their peers and to you.
I know I've benefited in my regular course delivery
because of material that students have brought
in to me, and students who might not engage
in person in the classroom may engage very well here.
So Packback and the Antarctic Theater,
these two approaches we've taken,
I think we've found
that students appreciate it.
They engage well.
They learn a lot.
We have a final reflection at the end of the course
and they really comment on
their welcoming of the freedom to engage,
to be guided in their own exploration through this.
Been wondering what Packback means
but it's basically flipped.
It's like 'backpack', but it's flipped,
and thinking about that as well, right?
It's about learning more than teaching,
asking questions rather than giving answers,
or student led instead of teacher fed.
So hopefully some of these approaches
of getting students out there,
getting them looking for information,
bringing that home,
like a scavenger hunt in some ways,
but then filtering through
the best of the material that comes in
and then building on that, you know.
Often I would be reflecting during lecture,
back to the Antarctic Theater videos that we saw,
because we shared that as a common experience.
To cite back to something that
we had shared in that.
So hopefully, yeah, you might be able to draw something
from this into your classroom, and yeah,
I think students will be,
would welcome the engagement
outside of a standard, you know,
content centered course.
Right. Thanks.