Best Practices and Techniques to Engage Our Adult Learners October 8, 2015

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1 Best Practices and Techniques to Engage Our Adult Learners October 8, 2015 Why Use Technology in Your Teaching? For student-centred learning For active learning For communication/interaction/collaboration outside of the classroom To streamline marking (accountability) Plan How will it help you achieve your goals? Research What is the best fit for your needs? Modify Adapt the tool to your needs. Integrate Use the tool in your teaching. Practice Know how to support your students. Examples of Activities Using Technology Icebreakers Things - Find an object/digital image representing you/why you re taking the course. Post a digital image (of the object) on the discussion board and describe why you chose it and your expectations for the course. Peer and Team Activities Contest of the Week - With your peer, determine the name of a celebrity who has some relationship to the week s topic, and explain how they are connected. (No duplicates allowed.) How s My Driving? - In a discussion group, collaborate and create a summary that provides specific feedback on what you like/don t like about the course, including what you feel needs improvement and ideas on how to do so. Reflective Activities Aha! On a blog, document moments when something you read/contemplated makes sense with unexpected clarity (an insight or transformative experience). You may be asked to share these moments with your peers. Authentic Activities Team Problem Solving - In a private group discussion, collaborate to solve a problem assigned by the instructor. You have two weeks to solve the problem. Your grade will depend on individual participation and the accuracy and depth of the final answer. Games and Simulations Virtual Field Trips - Visit an actual location specified by the instructor. Report back to the group on your experiences (what you learned, what you can recommend, and if you would explore this place in person). Ideas adapted from Engaging the Online Learner, Conrad and Donaldson

2 SCENARIO 1: DENSE READINGS You are teaching a humanities course where students must read theoretical articles with abstract concepts. Many students find the readings challenging. From past essay submissions and discussions, it is clear that most students engage with the readings on a superficial level and fail to make meaningful connections between them. You have already minimized the reading volume, and introduced active reading and note-taking strategies. But many students still skip the more challenging articles. Could a technology-supported approach be used in this scenario? SCENARIO 2: GROUP WORK Students complain that they do not have time to meet each other to complete the group assignment collaboratively in your business course. Many students are working full-time while taking your course, and scheduling synchronous meetings can be difficult. Teams often take a divide-and-conquer approach with minimal communication, and the final product tends to contain conflicting information and lacks consistency in writing style. Could a technology-supported approach be used in this scenario? SCENARIO 3: CLASS DISCUSSIONS You ve found it difficult to elicit a rich class discussion that engages all of your students. In fact, you ve found that class discussions tend to be dominated by a small group of individuals. You are aware that some of your students may not be participating in the class discussion because they may be apprehensive about talking in class; they may have a fear of being criticized for making a dumb or irrelevant statement; they may feel their contribution may be negligible; or they may not be up-to-date with course readings. Could a technology-supported approach be used in this scenario?

3 Tools to Support Teaching and Learning Type of Activity Tool Type Tool Options Brainstorming/ Conceptualization Mindmaps CMAP Gliffy Mindmeister Collaborative Authoring Pinboard Padlet Online document processing Google Docs Google Presentations Google Spreadsheets Wikis MediaWiki PB Works WikiSpaces Communication Discussion Chat (Google Hangouts, LMS-based chat tool, Skype, etc.) LMS (e.g. D2L, Blackboard, Moodle) discussion board Video/Voice Telephone Voice Thread Web conferencing (e.g. Adobe Connect, Collaborate, Skype, etc.) Presentation eportfolio Blog/website (Google Sites, WordPress, etc.) Digication/Epsilen/Mahara Screen share Join.me Quick ScreenShare Skype Slide presentations Video screen capture Google Presentation Prezi VoiceThread Jing Screencast-o-Matic Screenr Web conferencing Adobe Connect, Collaborate, etc. Google Hangouts Skype Websites Google Sites Weebly WordPress

4 Reflection Blogs Blogger Edublogs WordPress Role-playing and/or Storytelling Journals LMS-based journal tools Animation GoAnimate Comics Pixton Virtual worlds Minecraft Second Life Social Networking General Edmodo Facebook Ning Microblogging Tumbler Twitter Photosharing Flickr Social bookmarking Delicious Diigo Student Response Systems Task/Project Management Clickers iclicker Web-based response systems Poll Everywhere Socrative File sharing Dropbox Google Drive Scheduling Doodle Google Calendar

5 Activities to encourage creativity and get students thinking Oct 8, 2015 Prepared by Linda Koechli That s so random! This fun activity can get students creative juices flowing and encourage them to look at the day s lesson in a different way. It is also simple and easy to set up and can be easily adapted to a wide range of subject areas and class sizes. Find between five and ten random objects (e.g. keys, toy, plant, stapler, etc). The objects are then distributed to small groups or individuals who are given between three and five minutes to link the random object to the subject matter. The teams or individuals then present their object and links back to the class. For today s workshop: Pick an object from the table that you could relate in some way to an adult learner. Why would the linkage be important for you as an instructor to take into consideration? What could you do to help the student be successful in his/her learning?

6 Word Up (in today s workshop session: The Golden Envelope Challenge) This competition helps focus the attention of your learners throughout the lesson. Announce at the beginning of the class that you will be uttering six key words which you have concealed in a golden envelope and there will be a prize for anyone who gets all six correct. Variation: Ask students to collect six key words from a session and then, at the end, construct a catchy sound bite (or jingle, poem, quote, catchphrase, etc). These can then be collected together to form a record of key themes/ideas/facts.

7 Best Practices and Techniques Teaching An Adult Friendly Course Anne- Marie Brinsmead -Nurture a culture of empathy, respect, approachability and authenticity. Be very honest, authentic and earnest throughout your students and your collective engagement in participatory activities we ve been doing. (Don t have your students do group work while you re at the front of the class texting on your cell phone! Circulate, provide gentle mentorship and coaching throughout.) -Key is that you, the educator, open yourself up to your students and serve as living proof that you re glad to see them, you re excited to be with them tonight, to spark and spearhead learning that is mutually stimulating to our minds and to us as individuals. -Your enthusiasm for, and keen focus on, what is being taught, shared, and discussed is coupled with a genuine regard for your students insecurities, human frailties and academic fears and the tough, busy lives they lead before and after they share a week in the course with you. If a student comes in on crutches, you re the first to pull out a chair so that she may sit down. If a student asks a question, that student is the most important person to you at that moment. You show that you know that, for an adult learner, asking a question often feels risky and socially uncomfortable. You do everything to make the person feel that their question is the best thing to have happened at that moment. You answer it to the utmost of your ability. -Learner care is about making your adult learners feel at the level of each and every individual that their needs and curiosity are number one and you re there to make sure that they are sparked to grasp the concepts and the applications of functional knowledge learned to midwife the Ah ha! moments to which their minds will give rise! 1

8 -You endeavor to be as crystal clear, dynamic and caring as possible when connecting them to the code or keys to unlock the door to mastery. You give them sign posts along the way, letting them know what the end outcomes for that week s learnings are and giving them encouragement, stay tuned for more on a particular learning as it will take on greater significance and meaning before the night s over and as the weeks of the course unfold. -Stretch yourself to combine learner care with what s called andragogy, another way of saying adult pedagogy. Andragogy is about how to leverage adults lived experience when teaching them so that they retain what they re learning in long term memory and so that they successfully apply that learning successfully beyond you re the duration of the course and in their active lives. -One of the most powerful way to achieve learner care of the adult mind so that these transformative learnings come to life and crystalize is to use real-world examples that have elements that link back to your adult learners real-world knowledge and lived experience, comprising personal experiences that are relevant and of interest to them. -Please see next pages of a paradigm example of andragogy. 2

9 Paradigm Example of Andragogy Here s an example from our Data Analytics, Big Data and Predictive Analytics Certificate program. Sochi Olympics Stray dogs. GPS / Security camera footage. How to avoid stray dog challenges at future winter Olympic games. Open source data on the web. Learners have already learned how to use the R programming language to create not only a query in order to mine, clean and extract meaningful data, but they have also learned how to create in combination with a query in R AND the data-enhancing use of data analytic tools such as Hadoop, Hive, Pig and Oozie, what are called Data Set Query Models whereby they can program and set up an entire query model with multiple queries and query subsets in order to mine, scrub and extract data from complex, pre-existing data sets available for free on the internet, thus answering different, multi-dimensional questions being asked, all in real time. By carrying out this realworld application using open source data from the Internet, they are successful in then analyzing the multiple queries and their output multidimensionally in order to engage accurately in data driven decision making and author recommendations such that the stray dogs disaster (for the dogs) and major problems for humans at the Sochi Olympics may be avoided at future winter Olympic games. The students involved have been watching the Olympics and sports for years, in their lived experience. Most have an interest in one sport or another as a spectator or a participant, from childhood onward. They share the experience of the Winter Olympics every 4 years with friends and family. It is an experience that, when connected to applying data analytic functional knowledge and R computer language programming, math and statistical competencies to the experience, the learning that unfolds from it is personally relevant, pertinent and meaningful. The learning 3

10 metaphorically attaches to the existing lived experience and gives rise to ah ha or I get it! moments, which cognitively has been proven to assist adult learners in order to retain mastery of the concepts and application in long-term memory. Real-life examples are the ultimate, positively impactful augmentations of adult learner care. Real-life applications serve as gateways to acquiring long-term functional mastery. How, you might ask? By applying the functional knowledge to real-to-life applications adult learners crystalize, at the level of each individual learner and their lived experience, deep, meaningful, awe-inspiring learning outcomes that the adult learner then OWNS, outcomes that become what I call the adult learner s comfort zone of knowledge maturity, for life. [Another example: Kellogg s cornflakes]. *** In conclusion, my motto for teaching the night class in an adult learner friendly, adult learner care atmosphere is, whatever you do, love it! 4

11 Teaching Adult Learners Workshop on October 8, 2015 Jim Bryson in his e- book Engaging Adult Learners - stated that he has four core principles that he uses in his approach to teach adult learners: 1. Teaching is Dialogue. 2. Learning is Engagement. 3. Growth is Discovery. 4. Knowledge is Application. He also added that we could engage adult students with curriculum content through its delivery and applying a set of teaching methods interesting enough to engage participation. Some of the strategies he listed : Using group activities as methods for increased interest and participation. Focusing on the most relevant content. Creating an environment where participation is low- risk and high- reward. Varying activities to engage attention and sustain concentration. Shifting emphasis in response to the dynamic process of learning. Group Activates on Applying Knowledge: Theory of teamwork: Picture Belbin s Team Roles 1. After student have finished working individually, form groups of 5 to 7 students. Tell the group members to share their icons, decide which one best represents each roles. 2. Each group presents their answers. 3. Ask questions on which ones were the easiest, difficult and why. Discuss the suggested figures by the theorist in the class and why. Role Playing: Functional Group Role Playing Creative problem solving: Selling the CN Tower } The CN tower is no longer structurally sound. It will be dismantled and replaced with a new tower. The city would like to recover a portion of the cost of this project by selling all or part of the structure. Your group is responsible for identifying another use for the tower that will allow the city to sell it. The tower can be sold as is or in smaller sections. The only limitation is that it can not be sold for use as a tower. } In your groups generate a variety of possible ideas for new uses for the tower. } Discuss all ideas and choose one. } Select a spokesperson to sell the tower to the class. Prepared By Dalia Hanna, Program Director, Community Services, The Chang School