Practical Pedagogy

Interactive Workshop on

Using Sakai Tools in Diverse Teaching Scenarios

Getting to Know You

Who are you?

What makes you interested in this session?

Who are we?

What’s Pedagogy?

Definition Pedagogy- the art or science of teaching, initially referred to the teaching of the young

Assumption Good pedagogy depends upon and incorporates good theories of learning

Challenge How to connect good theories of learning through

good pedagogy to the practical activities of good teaching

What’s Sakai?

Open Source Software project Community of Software developers Framework/Architecture for hosting content Suite of Tools Collaboration and Learning Environment

Practical Pedagogy & Sakai

DefinitionPractical Pedagogy - Strategies for putting pedagogical values into place

Assumption Its possible to put pedagogical strategies into effect using Sakai

ChallengeSakai has not been fully designed with pedagogy in mindSakai is loosely coupled collection of toolsSakai is highly configurable, fairly flexible, very multi-faceted

Interactive Exercise

Step 1 - Form groups consisting of individuals from different

universities with diverse Sakai interest and experience Step 2 - Select a teaching scenario and review it in your group

Step 3 - Come up with some concrete ideas on how you would configure a Sakai site to meet the needs of your fictional instructor

Step 4 - Share your ideas with the larger group Step 5 - Post to Confluence

Step 6 - Brainstorm ideas for sharing scenarios and getting

faculty more involved in pedagogical design of tools

Sample Scenarios

Public Health 512 : Critical Analysis of Health Disparities Biology 163: Organic Gardening Communication 220: Public Speaking Greek 101: First-year Modern Greek Spanish 401: Fourth-year Spanish Cohort Problem Resolution Classics 310: Art History/Classics Business 700: Socially Responsible Entrepreneurship

Sample Scenario #1Greek 101, 102

George Stephanopolous teaches first year modern Greek at Amherst College. He was introduced to Sakai through his department, which began using it as a collaboration tool last spring. He believes the web’s ubiquitous and global nature make it an obvious tool for foreign language instruction.

He would like to use his course environment to expose students to the richness of Greek language and culture, and he believes he can motivate them through the use of multi-media files and web based interaction. His course is addressed to students with little to no knowledge of Modern Greek. It places equal emphasis on the acquisition of speaking, listening, reading, writing and cultural understanding. He would like to replace the standard in class grammar drills with online activities that help students grasp key grammatical structures so that they can apply these when they meet together in person.

Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:• Students must use Greek as much as possible in the classroom and in their web-based course environment.• Students must spend significant amounts of time listening to Greek passages and commenting upon them with the

class.• Students must practice reading passages aloud and will be evaluated by their peers and their instructor.• Each term gets progressively more difficult and requires longer periods of listening, speaking, engaging in

conversation.• Students must learn to write using Greek characters.

Sample Scenario #2Cohort Problem Resolution

This case presents a problem that needs to be solved with a cohort of students. This is unrelated to a specific course. Rather, it addresses the needs of an entire program. The statewide secondary teacher education program has a regular annual new cohort of 200 students. The current number of students enrolled in the Secondary Teacher Education program is approximately 325, indicating a 37% drop-out rate by the second year. The traditional program experiences only a 10% drop-out rate. The following difficulties need to be resolved:

• The highest drop out rate occurs during the first two modules. • Learners appear to take considerable time to become familiar with the processes of working and

learning online, causing them high stress in the beginning of their education.• Learners often have unrealistic expectations of what learning online involves, often confusing it

with a more traditional distance learning format such as videoconferencing.• Learners indicate they miss the “personal connection” made with face-to-face environments.• The cohort must remain an online cohort in order to maximize the numbers of new teachers being

trained in many rural areas.

Public Health

Public Health 512 – Critical Analysis of Health Disparities

Caroline Wang is a senior faculty member in the field of public health. She’s been teaching a course on health disparities at the University of Michigan for the past 3 years.The course asks students to critically analyze the complexity of health disparities rooted in multiple levels of historic and contemporary inequities. These levels include health care systems, health policies and health care professionals.

Caroline’s goal is to use a Sakai course site she built over the summer to engage students in critical analysis of health disparities and encourage them to work collaboratively on innovative solutions to such disparities.

Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:• ｷｷ This course uses multiple guest speakers with extensive experience in specific areas of health disparities• ｷｷ This course requires students to analyze cases and to engage in peer analysis/review• ｷｷ This course has students in multiple time zones• ｷｷ This course requires students to engage in a community project that must be supervised by the faculty

member

BIO 163: Organic GardeningBiology 163 – Organic Gardening

Jim Sweeton teaches Biology 163 at Mesa Community College. He has decided to try adapting the course to an online environment so that students can sign up to take it in the school’s new distance education program offered in Sakai.

Organic gardening provides an in-depth study of the principles and practices of modern home gardening through a basic understanding of biological science. Plants, soils and climates are studied in relation to the production of vegetables, herbs, flowers, and perennial food plants. Biological and chemical approaches to gardening are discussed in with the goal of helping students to formulate their own approach to growing things organically.

Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:• This course requires students to work with a partner to evaluate different approaches to organic

gardening and come up with a plan for their garden.• This course requires students to build their own garden and have it reviewed on an ongoing basis.• This course requires students to formulate and share their philosophy of gardening throughout the

class.• This course requires students to conduct experiments using different soils during the class.

Spanish 401SP 401, 402 Fourth Year Spanish

Raquel Flores is in her first year of teaching advanced Spanish in Middlebury College’s summer language program. She believes the web is an obvious tool for foreign language instruction and was frustrated with older modes of foreign language instruction used in her graduate program. She would like to use her online course to bring Spanish alive for her students.

The curriculum is developed around various texts that illustrate the use of Spanish in various Spanish-speaking countries. Grammar principles are reviewed through extensive spoken and written use of Spanish in context. Raquel likes to encourage outside research and interpretation of cultural aspects of the course. She finds students learn more when they evaluate each other and are more motivated when they work together on projects.

Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:

Students must use Spanish 24 hours a day and posts to the online course environment may only be in Spanish.• Students must ask all questions to the class, using one of the Sakai tools.• Students must submit weekly essays for review• Students are often asked to participate in online surveys or take pop quizzes through their course environment

• During their second semester, students must work in groups on a current social issues facing young people in a Spanish speaking country and must present their findings to the class. Projects may be in the form of text, images, blog entries,

multi-media narratives or vlogs.

Next Steps - Get Involved!

Sakai Collab - Pedagogy Workgrouphttp://www.collab.sakaiproject.org

Sakai Confluence http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence

Sakai Jira - http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence

Help us come up with ideas for circulating innovative examples of teaching and learning with Sakai.hreeves@rsmart.com