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Some of the chairs at IU have been very resistant because
they are afraid that any time the faculty spend publishing
anything like this will dilute the reputation of the department
and keep it from being ranked in one of the top ten nationally.
And other chairs say no, this really, the people who are doing
the kind of reseach that are getting us ranked in the top ten
nationally are not the ones who are turning their energy
to this.
And this is simply increasing the quality of our teaching
and our total research output, and it's a good thing.
So different, at the chair level and above,
different administrations have taken different views,
but I think we're in the middle of a fairly large shift
nationally in terms of taking this more seriously,
and you're agreeing.
(Dr. Hoadley). Yes.
(Dr. Nelson). Yeah.
(male speaker). What stuck a little for me
about the programs you're doing for your graduate students,
about the programs set up at IU to, sort of, I guess
change how the future teaches.
(Dr. Nelson). Well, that has several layers.
One is, they're a series of departmental courses.
So that for example, every second or third year for most
of the last 30 years, I taught a course in alternative
approaches to teaching college biology.
It was a Biology Department course that carried
graduate biology credit.
And we now have 28 departments doing that, and that's
the first level.
The second level is, some graduate students have taken
to doing projects themselves.
So one of our graduate students told her major professor
that she wanted to do a scholarship of teaching chapter
in her dissertation, and if she couldn't do it at IU she'd just
switch to another institution.
Her major professor was not herself overwhelmed
with graduate students and took that as a worthwhile bargin.
So she did a chapter in her dissertation
on a small scholarship of teaching and learning project,
explicitly reducing by one the number of chapters in biology.
They agreed on the scope of the dissertation at that point.
And what she found was that she was turning down job interviews.
Now she did work, she also worked with one of
our SOTL projects, another one.
So she had two significant experiences besides
the teaching course.
And she was getting so many invitations for job interviews
that she was turning them down because she already had six and
was pretty sure she was going to get one of the six that
she would like better than the places she was turning down.
Her research-oriented colleagues who had not done anything
in teaching were getting no job interviews for research that
was at least as significant as hers, if not more significant.
We know it takes a few experiences like that
to begin to make a dent.
One of the post docs of a National Academy of Sciences
member who took my teaching course got a job at a state
university because, the dean said, he'd had the course.
That was the reason he made the interview list.
Other students have come back and said, the Dean told me,
at College X, good little liberal arts colleges,
that they never interview any PhDs from Big Ten universities
because they have no interest in and no ability to teach.
Well one of the outcomes of my course is, every week they write
a journal on how to apply learning styles to what they
want to teach, how to apply critical thinking to what they
want to teach, how to apply active learning, et cetera.
And then they turn those journals into a teaching
statement, a teaching statement that says what they're going
to do about diversity, what they're going to do instead
of straight lecture, what they're going to do about
learning styles, et cetera.
And they said, but, you know, you've had the course
and your teaching statement said.
And then graduate students do group projects and so forth
for SOTL, either with faculty or independently.
And there's a whole set of institutions that are using
undergraduates to do SOTL projects in conjunction
with faculty.
Places like Elon College, and Portland State.
And somebody over here had their hand up?
Yes, ma'am.
(female speaker). I was interested
in your mentioning disciplinary conventions in your area.
I teach, right now I teach mainly courses in how
to teach reading.
But we use the term discourse, so if somebody's interested
in researching more about that, the term discourse might be
an advantage to them if they're going online
and looking for resource.
(Dr. Nelson). Yeah, disciplinary
discourse conventions.
Right, good, thank you.
Good, good, good.
(male speaker). What advice would you give
to faculty about the, relative to the integration of
technology into their courses, and then transforming that
into scholarly work as part of the research and sharing that?
(Dr. Nelson). There's an advanced literature.
There used to be a website, I think they took the website down
and turned it into a book called "No Significant Difference",
which was hundreds of papers finding no significant
difference between relatively comparable delivery online
and offline.
For people who are pushing distance education,
they find that really consoling.
I would say the faculty member should find that very alarming.
The number of papers that have found a significant difference
is smaller than you would expect if there was no effect.
That is, you expect 5 per 100 to be significant, right?
Actually it's running about that.
It's running very close to 5 per 100 are significant,
often in favor of distance learning.
Now the reason for that, of course, is neither system
is adaptive in the fields I suggested at the start.
Neither system actually says that early in the course
we should figure out what students are not triumphing and
start asking how could we modify the pedagogy to make it work.
And relatively insensitive pedagogy is equally well
delivered online and in person.
It's only if you have frameworks that allow you to,
see, it's not a matter of caring, you do have to care.
It's not a matter of believing that every student
has the potential to succeed.
It's helpful if you believe that, too.
But it's a matter of having the frameworks that allow you
to respond adaptively to what the students need.
This is the kind of thing that schools of education have tried
to get worked into how teachers go out and work
at a pre-K through 12.
But it's not the kind of thing that those of us with PhDs
have ever even thought about.
We haven't had the framework to ask those questions.
Stephen J. Gould has an essay called
"For Want of a Metaphor", where he says that somebody
working on the [unclear audio] a couple centuries ago
understood the question really clearly but couldn't answer it
because he had no metaphor for program development.
No player pianos, no car-controlled moves,
to say nothing of computers.
And faculty members who care about and believe in students
still are left powerless by the lack of appropriate alternative
hypothesis because they don't know the literature that allows
them to think about it that way.
I certainly didn't, for a long time.
When I read Perry's book about intellectual development
of undergraduates--I didn't read it until I was a professor,
perhaps because he didn't write it until I was a professor,
and I found myself in much of my thinking at a level
he called sophomoric.
This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.