Teaching Statement (Dec 2018)
The transmission of information is a basic requirement in education.
Interestingly, it is also the easy part.
The
more challenging, important and higher-level role of a teacher is to manage motivation.
To some extent, as I mentioned in the past, this is a leadership
problem. Many of the general techniques in leadership will similarly apply
to teaching.
For example, the first principle of leadership is that "if we take care
of our people, our people will take care of us." Similarly, "if the students
know that the teacher cares, the students will learn."
The exercise of leadership and influence in person is well
understood. The question that I have been studying over the past 5
years is: how do we extend this influence online in the situation were we
do not ever see the student in person?
At Inflection: Fully Online Interactive Teaching
Online education has been on the rise over the last few years. While the
initial MOOCs were a lot more hype than substance, it seems to me that the
offering of online education has finally matured. Furthermore, I believe
that we are at the cusp of a new revolution with interactive online teaching
at its heart.
After many years of work and preparation, I have in recent times
successfully executed a fully online class where students are not taught in
person. All interactions are via a learning management system and the
interactive teaching tool Zoom.
My hypothesis for why online teaching has not been successful in the past
is that teaching is an inherently social activity. Things are
different today because we are now able to replicate many social
interactions using available online tools.
Making Online Learning Social
To make learning social, I have successfully adopted and deployed the
following:
- Interactive online teaching using Zoom
- Activity feeds
- In-platform messaging
- Forums - regular and video
- Gamification
Interactive online teaching
Zoom is an online meeting and teaching tool, much like CISCO WebEx, which
I had been using for a couple of years.
While I had earlier been skeptical about the efficacy of online
interactive teaching compared to traditional classroom teaching, I have come
to realize that interactive online teaching can be almost as effective as
face-to-face classroom teaching. The problem with online teaching is that
most people don't know how to do it properly. Most people intuitively know
how face-to-face classroom teaching works because they grow up with that.
This is set to change.
My experience is that conducting interactive lessons online is completely
different skill set from face-to-face classroom teaching, and it can be
quite unnerving for a teacher who is used to classroom teaching. Students
actually have to be taught how to be online students and to interact with
the online platform because lessons can be conducted. However, once the
protocols are established, it can become quite natural. The response of my
students to teaching with Zoom have been very positive.
Baking Social Interactions
into the Learning Management System
One of my key advantages as a teacher that I have exploited quite
shamelessly is that I am the master of software. Instead of being the usual
teacher who goes around looking for the tool that meets his/her needs, I can
decide what I need and have it built to my satisfaction.
Coursemology.org is the online
management system that my students have built over the past 5 years. Why
would I want to build my own LMS when there are already so many out there?
Well, one reason is because I can(!). But more seriously, it is because by
doing so, I gain the flexibility to innovate on my terms.
Online social interactions have more or less been perfected by social
networks, like Facebook. Therefore, the natural approach to making online
learning more social is to borrow features from social networks.
Activity Feeds. There is peer pressure when one goes to class.
Basically, if we go to class and people are all attentive and hardworking,
we will tend to conform. Students are shown an activity feed on what the
rest of the class is doing when they log in. This tells them that they are
not alone. :-)
In-platform Messaging. Messaging apps like Whatsapp and
Facebook Messenger are the norm when the young people communicate with each
other. In our platform, we have also built in a messaging system that allows
the students to communicate with the teaching staff directly. The messages
can be tagged to a particular question or even a specific piece of code.
These SMS-like interactions provide for almost realtime and instantaneous
feedback that is perhaps even more convenient than face-to-face meetings.
Forums. We also have regular forums that allow students to ask
general questions and the teaching staff is activated to police the forums.
We also have systems to ensure that no question is left unanswered. We have
online video clips in place of lectures and we even have a specialized forum
to allow students to ask questions that are tagged to a specific point on
the video timelne. This allows the teaching staff to understand the context
of the questions and helps us identify the parts of a recorded video that
might be wanting or not sufficiently clear.
On Gamification
I was one of the first teachers to pioneer gamification in 2010.
Gamification is also a social mechanism that we have successfully
implemented and validated over the years. Coursemology.org was originally
built to support gamification.
Gamification, together with timely feedback, provides the students will a
sense of progress and this helps to improve student motivation and
engagement. Also we have badges and achievements.
The leaderboard is also a social mechanism. It creates competition among
the top students in the class and applies pressure on the remaining students
to keep up. The kiasu culture in Singapore probably contributes somewhat.
All in all, I have shown that gamification works, but in the numerous
talks that I have given over the years, I have also emphasized that
gamification is not some silver bullet that will magically make teaching
better. Consider it an icing that can make a good cake even better. If a
cake is bad, no amount of icing can make it a good cake. We should first
focus on designing a course well before gamification is applied to further
engage the students.
Consider the fact that there are now thousands of games on the Apple
AppStore. All the games will pretty much have the same gamification
elements, i.e. leaderboards, achievements, etc. Why are some games
successful, while other games are not? Basically, the underlying game must
actually be fun before the gamification can be effective. In the same way,
effort must be put into course design so that the students feel like they
actually learn something when the do the homework. The gamification merely
provides an additional sense of progress.
The Next Step:
Scaling up by an Order of Magnitude
I have shown that we can effectively teach some 300 students in a
fully online mode of teaching. This means that we can effectively do
away with the traditional classroom!
Over the next few years, my plan is to figure out how to scale up by 10,
or maybe even a hundredfold, without sacrificing effectiveness. I am
under no illusions that this will be straightforward -- but if it isn't
hard, it isn't worth doing. :-)
