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  • Closing the Idea-to-Curriculum Gap

    By Joshua Kim June 8, 2010 9:26 pm EDT

    One advantage of learning technology is it can help us close the gap between and idea and curriculum. When I first started teaching (in grad school in 1993) the task of finding teaching materials was extremely time consuming. I remember spending lots of time at the photocopy machine, transferring charts and graphs to plastic transparencies that I'd display in class with the overhead. Collecting VHS tapes to show video segments in class was a particular passion of mine - leading my (shared) grad student office that was cluttered with tapes. Good teaching content was a scarce and valuable commodity, and it was difficult to rapidly locate and process "just in time" non-text based curriculum.

    Today we are able to find and share rich curricular materials with amazing agility and ease. YouTube, Google Image Search, and FlickR, combined with the ease of sharing these materials in the LMS (as links or embed code), has moved rich curricular development from a scarce to an abundant good. Where in the past we may have shared with our students only a few short video clips, images, or diagrams, we can now offer a buffet of evocative educational materials.

    Beyond scale, the other big change is agility. It is possible now to introduce new rich curricular materials into the course once the class is in progress. When I'm teaching a course I'm always highly attuned to any materials, information or stories that relate to the curriculum we cover. I'll hear a story on NPR, or read a newspaper article, or watch a movie that will cause me to say "this story or scene perfectly illustrates what we are talking about in class." More often than not, the NPR story, newspaper article, or movie scene is available online - and can be linked to the LMS with a few clicks of the mouse.

    I ran into an example of this phenomenon this week. I'm reading Dan Ariely's terrific new The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. At one point Ariely describes a FedEx commercial to illustrate the "not-invented-here" bias. In the commercial, a bunch of business people are sitting around a table listening to their boss inform them that they need to find ways to save the company money. A dorky looking junior employee speaks up, saying that: "Well, we could get an online account with FedEx and save ten percent on all our shipping costs". At this point everyone at the table is silent, until the boss repeats word-for-word the junior employees suggestions (this time with an authoritative hand chop). At that point, all the employees around the table cheer and congratulate the boss for his brilliance.

    As I was reading Ariely's description of the commercial I kept thinking how well this video would fit in to illustrate a number of concepts in classes I might teach or work on. The fact that the video funny and short goes a long way toward improving its worth as a curricular object. Sure enough, I was able to search YouTube and find the commercial. I then took the embed code, and pasted it into to a discussion board for a course on Internet Marketing that I'm currently co-teaching. The point I want to make for my students is about the reasons I have them find and share articles and videos related to the course materials, as by finding the materials themselves (and making an argument as to why they are relevant to the course and their fellow learners), the content will be more important, relevant and memorable for them. I had been struggling to get across my rationale for my teaching methodology, the FedEx video perfectly capture the idea in 30 seconds.

    Have you found that learning technology, the combination of your LMS and YouTube/Google/Flickr, has also made it easier for you to find and share "just in time" materials for your courses? Any short, funny videos that illustrate core teaching points that you'd like share?

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Comments on Closing the Idea-to-Curriculum Gap

  • are we having fun yet?
  • Posted by Ed Garay at University of Illinois at Chicago on June 9, 2010 at 8:15am EDT

  • I often find myself saying I wish I was a student today :: indeed the opportunities for engaged learning, ubiquitous learning and sound pedagogy are endless.

    We do a number of interesting things at a graduate class we teach on Health Informatics, a lot on collaborative learning, student group and individual assignments always with a steady stream of modern class communication. Early in the semester, for example, our students start the final group project using a wiki; using Blackboard groups, we give them private group discussion boards and other tools to talk and collaborate before going public with their work.

    I also like to give our learners prescribed sets of questions to pick from for individual assignments plus the usual must make at least two meaningful critiques to fellow student postings. Multimedia is encouraged but must be embedded as I feel file attachments disrupts communication. Love it when our weekly discussion boards grow into the hundreds.

    Discovery learning has also worked very well for us, as well as the in-depth sharing of our students personal experience in healthcare. Most of our students are healthcare professionals and MBA graduates so we are very lucky they have so many valuable content to share. I particularly like to engage the physicians and nurses in the class - their practical experience, case studies and everyday job affords them to make quality contributions via Web 2.0 technology or otherwise.

    Nothing beats nurses, pharmacists and physicians putting class content into the context of their everyday work life. They can explain, better than Ed Garay, the true benefits and impact of wireless computing in the workplace, or how intelligent medical forms entered on tablets and slates can be indeed effective, avoid handwriting recognition errors and/or tap into the medical records, put two and two together, and sound an early alert as soon as needed.

    We also bring in selected RSS feeds into our Blackboard course sites to easily provide timely and diverse source for class discussion. This coming Fall, I plan to use our new UIC Fusion personal learning environment to give our class an even richer and easier social learning platform for their work. I wish indeed I was a student today...

  • Ed's ideas
  • Posted by Joshua Kim at Dartmouth on June 9, 2010 at 9:15am EDT

  • Ed...the classes you describe sound amazing - I really caught your enthusiasm. On the topic of multimedia...I Googled you and got this great brief clip:

    Meet SLATE Member Ed Garay, Univ. of Ilinois at Chicago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBiLha3qIYY

    An example of how we can use the Web to instantly connect, learn and see people in our community.

  • technology in the classroom
  • Posted by ESLombard , retired on June 9, 2010 at 3:00pm EDT

  • I have been a passionate exponent of educational technology since 1962 and earned a PhD in it in 1969, but I am developing serious reservations when I read the letters from current enthusiasts and note their English style albeit current conversational/E-mail English. I want to believe that, at least academic language, our English can be easily read and understood by foreigners and possibly scholars hundreds of years hence. I can only with halting rereading understand what they are saying today. So much for passions! Moreover, because our students are overwhelmed with skillful, ever more compulsively creative media promoters, we
    may find ourselves competing ourselves out of business.
    I have come to believe that creative educators should be teaming up, perhaps commercially, with evocative, creative media people in the design of self-instructional materials that motivate and provide essential information.The classroom teacher, using good, standard English should by his/her example encourage thoughtful discussions and disciplined writing using the tutorial where appropriate. Clearly, the media materials will need constant updates and revisions pro-
    viding ample opportunities for creative educators to clarify and motivate many more thousands of students, particularly the on-line WalMart enrolees.

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