For all you nice physicists who are hitting the blog because of the shout-out in the AAPT e-NNOUNCER, just scroll down three blog posts to find my listing of all my posts from AAPT.

I welcome guest posts about sessions that I didn’t make it to! Just drop me a note at stephanie (at) sciencegeekgirl (dot) com.

I was excited to see this recent posting from my institution, CU Boulder. If you’re a teacher looking to teach climate change in the classroom, a group of scientists, science education researchers, and middle and high-school teachers have developed and refined a set of problem-based lessons:

Visit them at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu

They say:

The result is a set of model lessons that focus on the following single driving questions:

• Evidence of Climate Change — How would we know if Colorado’s climate is changing and how will it affect me?
• Mountain Pine Beetles — Why are our forests dying?
• Zoo Poo — Does burning poo at the Denver Zoo reduce CO2?
• Modeling Climate — What makes you hot?

For those of you who wanted them all in one place (and I’m one of those people) here are all the posts that I wrote from the recent Physics Teacher AAPT/PERC physics teacher conferences:

1. Facing Facebook:  Social media in and out of the classroom
2. The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing Classroom Norms
3. Students’ understanding of energy:  Acting out our thinking
4. Students playing the “classroom” game can give silly answers
5. Out of one, many:  Five researchers analyze the same student video
6. Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last?
7. Common challenges in using clickers
8. Effective use of technology in physics education
9. Some memorable quotes from AAPT
10. Student reasoning in tutorials

Enjoy!

I’m finally getting a chance to finish my blog posts from the summer meeting of AAPT.  There’s just one more talk that I wanted to share with any of you who couldn’t be there – another delightful presentation from Corinne Manogue of Oregon State University.  Corinne is a colleague, we’ve both been working on creating new activities for use in physics courses beyond the introductory courses, though I’ve been focusing on the junior years and she’s firmly planted in the sophomore level.  Still, I’ve used many of her activities from the sophomore level to enhance our junior course, and I just find her approach inspiring.  You can access many of her developed activities at the Paradigms Wiki.

In her talk, she talked about her area of expertise – the middle division – and shared some of her insights about classroom norms, and how we can be more thoughtful and deliberate about showing students what we want them to do in our classes.  That description barely does justice to the gentle revolution that she advocated for our physics classrooms.  “I’m going to show you ways to implement things that you already know, in new ways,” she promised.

We have certain expectations of a situation, depending on what we see around us, she reminded us.  For instance, if we walk into a restaurant that has a menu on the wall, we know we’ll pay first, eat with our hands, and then leave.  If the restaurant has a printed menu, we know we’ll first get our food, eat with a knife and fork, and pay after we eat.

Similarly, we set up classroom norms from the start.  And it’s important that those classroom norms make everyone feel comfortable – women, minorities, shy white men, engineers – everyone!  In particular, when creating an interactive classroom, start out right.

1.  Don’t grade. If you want them to learn from an interactive technique, don’t grade it if you want them to learn from it.  This sets the stage that this is a low-stakes activity.

2.  Expect everyone to participate. If you’re not grading it, the expectation of participation still needs to be made clear, and made clear from the very first day.

3.  Don’t make them look foolish. Don’t expect them to do anything that you won’t model.  At some point early in the semester, she says, she gets up on the table during class.  In fact, she looks for any excuse to stand on a table, because it looks silly, and sets a new norm.

4.  Make it OK to make mistakes. She uses small whiteboards in her classes, where students can work through an answer to a question she poses.  These help get everyone involved, and nobody is left out.  However, students are a bit intimidated to begin with, not wanting to put something wrong on the whiteboard.  So, the first few times she does it, she doesn’t ask a student to explain why their answer is wrong to the entire class – that’s humiliating. Instead, what she does it to start with showing lots of student answers to the whole class, and talk as a group about which one is correct, and decide what’s productive about the different answers.  Later in the course, students are more comfortable and she asks students to stand up and show their answer, and defend it.  But early on, she clearly sets the norm that it’s OK to make mistakes, and that this is a classroom where ideas can be discussed productively.

What are our goals in the middle division, she asks?  We want students to move away from using problem templates, to use advanccorred notation, to break up complicated problems into smaller pieces, to be more confident in their problem solving ability and to reflect on their solutions and use their judgement as to their reasonableness.  In sum, we want them to move from being a novice to an expert.  And our teaching strategies have to reflect those goals.  Lecture isn’t a bad thing – it has value.  It paints the big picture, covers a lot of material, models good speaking and problem solving skills, and can control just what students get out of class and the questions that they ask.

But activities, like the ones on her wiki, have a different effect.  Students get to practice something, see how it works in depth, and control their own questions.

If they can get it from lecture, she says, then lecture.  If they can’t get it from the lecture, though, we often make the mistake of putting it into the homework instead.  Students work on it, and get stuck, and the good ones come to talk to you, and “you have a wonderful conversation about that difficulty, and they then share the answers with the next student, who shares it with the next one” and so on.  That doesn’t actually help them achieve your goals for class.  Instead, she does activities in class.

As an example, she showed us part of her Acting Out Current Densities activity.

She chose about 10 physicists from the audience and asked them to come to the front of the room.   In true form, she stood on the table at the front.

Corinne -- on the table -- doing a similar activity with students

“You are all charged particles,” she said.  “I have a magnetic field meter, make it fluctuate.” The physicists, smiling abashedly, started to move around near her.

“Now make it nonzero, but not fluctuate,” she said.  After a bit of discussion, they moved in a circle around her.

“Make it read higher” she ordered.  They circled closer.

Now everybody’s on the same page, she said, and we’re all awake.  And this opens up the possibility for questions.  It changes the focus of the class, and allows you to really gauge what your students understand.

Why is an activity like this important for gauging understanding?  When we take the integral over knowledge, she said, we get the impression that everyone knows everything.  Socratic questioning lets us tap into the knowledge in the room.  On the other hand, when we take the integral over questions, as when people in the class ask questions during group work, we start to think that nobody knows anything.

So, I think the point that she was making was that we want to both use lecture (to frame) and activities (to involve), to tap students’ knowledge by asking them questions, and to tap their questions by providing them the space to do so.   That by setting the stage for both to happen productively, we can help many different students feel comfortable doing what is necessary for them to achieve the kinds of goals that we wish for them – a deeper understanding of physics, of problem solving, and of their own capacities.

We had a visit from Melissa Dancy today, to discuss her research, with Charles Henderson, on how and why faculty adopt new teaching practices.

We’ve put in a lot of magnificent effort, she said, to develop innovative teaching techniques that have proven effects on student learning.  Education researchers get frustrated, trying to tell faculty that their methods of teaching aren’t working, and showing the data to prove it.  Yet most instructors are still teaching by traditional lecture format.  Why?

Well, while we’ve done a lot of research on what constitutes good teaching practices, we’ve done very little research on effective dissemination techniques.  The intuitive technique, which doesn’t work very well, goes something like this:

1. We demonstrate that traditional lecture is ineffective
2. We show alternative approaches and data that shows that they’re more effective
3. We publish articles and give workshops to get the word out
4. We wait for change to happen.

But, it doesn’t.  Why not?

We often blame faculty — say they don’t care about their teaching.  Well, surveys show that’s not really true.  But faculty generally adopt new teaching strategies based on both personal and structural factors.  They modify them according to their tastes and situation.

Melissa, along with Charles Henderson and Chandra Turpen did surveys and interviews of 22 faculty to identify what it is that they want to do in their class. The good news is, education researchers’ dissemination efforts have indeed been effective.  Most faculty know about research based instruction methods:

• 87% know about at least one of the strategies on their list
• 50% know 6 or more strategies
• 48% use at least one
• 70% want to use more research based strategies

However, they aren’t always using these methods in ways that are consistent with what we know causes learning gains. For example, 41% of peer instruction users change something about the method, and only 28% of instructors have students discuss the answer during the question — a key feature of peer instruction!

Not surprisingly, most people cited lack of time as a reason for not using more research-based techniques.  The factors that were most predictive of using research based techniques were:

• Attending new faculty workshop
• Attended workshops related to teaching
• Satisfaction with instructional goals
• Reading journals related to teaching
• Being female (!)

But, people who had high reearch productivity or large class size were just as likely to use these research-based techniques, which flies in the face of some of our assumptions about hard-core researchers being less interested in teaching.

Let’s take peer instruction as an example.  Where did people find out about it?  They would usually find out about peer instruction from a colleague, and decide to try it.  They would then read materials to find out more.  However, we usually put out all these materials in the hopes that people will read them and decide to try it based on those materials, but it seems that most people go to the written materials as a second step.  Similarly, they use the effectiveness data as a second step — to  justify to others why they’re doing what they’re doing, and to bolster their own confidence that they’re making the right choice. They don’t use that data to convince themselves, however.

So, we might conclude:

• Dissemination should focus on methods that involve personal contact with faculty
• Written materials should be geared towards helping faculty learn more, rather than convincing them
• Data should be presented to bolster their decision, rather than to convince them

So, dissemination is a poor model of creating change. We can’t just lecture people about making more interactive teaching!

We have to move towards a more effective model of change:

• Building communities to create social connections.  For example, the Modeling curriculum has been very effective, in part because they built a community first — they give ownership to the teachers, who teach the modeling workshops.
• Provide materials in a modifiable form, and support instructors in making effective modifications
• Support instructors as they implement it, rather than just giving it to them at the start
• Do some research on the barriers that instructors face in implementation
• Get into policy to create institutional opportunities for change

I’ve posted several items about educational technology from AAPT on my other blog, TheActiveClass.  You can see those here:

• Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last?
• Common challenges in using clickers
• Effective use of technology in physics education

At the AAPT meeting, the folks from Seattle Pacific University have taken one session by storm, to discuss their thinking and experimentation on students’ idea of energy.  They’re working, in particular, on embodied cognition — learning activities that involve the body to symbolically engage in a scientific problem.

Lane Seeley opened out with the claim that there is a real disconnect between the type of energy that we teach about (chemical, potential, kinetic, etc.) and the energy that we care about (Red Bull, SUV’s, wind and solar energy, etc.).  There is, of course, a connection between the two, but we need to help students to build that bridge. Looking around on YouTube he found that young people are spending time, not just taking video of interesting things related to energy, but also having interesting discussions in the comments section of each video.  By looking around at YouTube, he suggested, we can find out what kinds of energy students care about, and see them having (sometimes) productive discussion about those ideas.  For an example, take a look at any of the YouTube videos on the Gaussian Gun.

Sam McKagan described an activity that they’ve created called energy theater. A box is pushed across the floor by a person’s hand.  Our task is to describe what happens in that process.  Each person is a chunk of energy — some people are the energy in the hand, some are in the box.  Each has to describe their energy (chemical, kinetic, potential) with sign language or a colored card.  Different areas in the room correspond to different parts of the scenario — one part of the room is the floor.  They then act out what happens in that process. You can do this with a variety of different types of energy scenarios:  The box is shoved, a box is pulled to the edge of a table by a pulley system, etc.

There are two main models of energy — energy as activation (“I’m energized” or “I have energy”), or energy as substance (the body is a chunk of energy).    Energy as activation can really support a qualitative sense of energy as something that gets things going.  Energy as substance suupports quantitative thinking about energy, and ideas of conservation.  Energy theater forces the idea of energy as a substance – people don’t appear or disappear (so energy is conserved), people place themselves in different areas of the room (energy is located in the body).

Since we understand our world in terms of bodily experiences, and research suggests that it’s helpful to take on the role of an entity for figuring things out, this is a promising approach for conceptual learning in physics. This seems to help students get in touch with the ideas of energy in a way that other representations don’t allow.

Eleanor Close talked about how these activities let us communicate in a wider variety of ways than normal classroom activities do.  For instance, two soccer players having an argument are communicating through words, tone, gesture, posture, symbols (like a referee caard).  A lot of these options aren’t available in a classroom, where students are fixed in place and facing one direction.  Tutorials or small groups have less restriction, but words are still the main way that people communicate meaning in those environments.  Energy theater, on the other hand, allow participants to make use of many more modes of meaning — symbols (cards indicating their type of energy), body orientation, posture, and more.

For example, a box is shoved suddenly across the floor, with energy transferring from the hand to the box.  What happens then?  Participants communicate what they think is happenening.  For example, the participants try to determine what will happen to the energy in the hand as the hand begins to push the box:

“When we push, we turn to green.”

They turn their cards to indicate a change from chemical to kinetic energy.  So, the words suggest that she sees themselves as chunks of energy, changing form. Their symbols, of colored cards, allow them to see if the other people in the room agree (i.e., if they’re flipping their cards to green too).  The teacher also emphasized the word “green”, encouraging others to follow her lead.  All these different modes of communication that participants use during energy theater give us a much richer ability to assess the outcomes of these activities.

Hunter Close then discussed how these activities promote empathy with a hypothetical entity (i.e., energy). Physicists discuss physics in odd ways sometimes.  They’ll say things where they’re clearly identifying as a physicist “I made these measurements” or where they’re talking about an inanimate object, “When it comes down, it’s in the domain state.  But they say odd things that are in between the two:  “When I come down, I’m in the domain state.”  These weird grammatical constructions were not confusing to the physicists.  We do this all the time — we look on a map and say “we are here”.  But no, we’re in this room, in truth.  Still, this kind of talk happens a lot.  This is called “indeterminate construction.”  The original researcher (Ochs, 1996) who looked at how physicists do this suggested that by using these constructions, they’re taking on the role of something that they’re struggling to understand.  It lets us take on the role of something that we’re not, and is especially useful when we’re trying to figure something out as a group.  It’s particularly helpful when were looking at a graphic representation together and trying to make sense of it.  So, what energy theater does is to take on this tool that scientists do and use it in instruction.  Energy theater is designed to involve participants symbolically in the thing that they’re trying to understand.  What he’s found is that when learners pretend to be the energy, they create much more complex diagrams of the scenario than they did when simply discussing energy in the abstract.  What scientists generally do is to understand the natural world, and draw a diagram to represent their understanding of that natural world, and engage with each other symbolically in trying to understand that diagram.  But for new learners, we’re going the other direction — we have the learners engage symbolically in the natural world in order to understand it, and then draw a diagram to represent that understanding after they’ve engaged in that symbolic representation.

Rachel Scherr discussed how these physical activities get cognition out of the head, letting us observe thinking a new way. Consider the scenario where a person is pushing a box on a frictionless surface.  Energy travels from the hand to the box, with none going into the floor.  So, what needs to happen is that some of the chemical energy units in the hand must go into kinetic energy, and then some of those kinetic energy units in the hand must travel to the box.  This is fairly complicated to act out as a group.  How do they figure out what to do so that everything comes out right?  They designated one person to tag people to change from chemical to kinetic energy, and to go from the hand to the box.  A certain kind of tap meant to change form, and another kind of tag meant to move from the hand to the box.  This made the decisions and ideas of the group visible, so that the group and observers could discuss just what was happening during the process of transferring energy.  So, her point is what this group activity does is to take cognition out of an individual’s head, and make it physically explicit in the group’s activities — so we can directly observe the group’s thinking in a way that we can’t when people are just figuring things out on their own.

Very interesting ideas — preliminary, but with promise.

I just ran across an interesting new study with the provocative title, “Eyeballs in the Fridge:  Sources of early interest in science”.  Here’s a short review.   You can read the original article here.

This was particularly interesting to me because I’m a person with a strong early interest and aptitude for science, but in a way I left the fold, since I’m no longer a “traditional” bench scientist.  I’m still in science education, and loving it, but what urged me along the science path, what was that force that ended up driving my life in this direction?

People are generally very worried about the state of the scientific enterprise in the US.  We need more scientists in the workforce.  Most people are tackling that problem by addressing the piss-poor levels of scientific literacy — by improving science teaching, for example.  But there is an implied causality there:  If people understand science better, they’ll want to do it for a career.  This study went looking for other things than simply “doing well in science”  that affected whether kids went into science as a career.

There’s a great book called “Talking about Leaving:  Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences” by Seymour and Hewitt.  In interviews, they found that a lot of students — male and female — were turned off by the abstract nature of science classes in college, and the competitive edge.  That seems to be echoed in the general literature — kids often leave science because it doesn’t seem to be a vibrant, interesting field, but rather a boring and autocratically-taught subject.  People who stay in the sciences, on the other hand, have a deep intrinsic interest in the subject that transcends the drill-and-kill that often happens in the school.  They have a spark.

So, what is that spark makes people want to be a scientist?

To answer the question, these researchers interviewed scientists and graduate students in physics and chemistry, and looked for some general themes.  For giggles, I’ll share where I fit into these data.

1.  The Timing of the Spark

The vast majority of people wanted to be a scientist before middle school – though this was more true for the physicists than for the chemists.  About a third had their interest sparked in middle or high school.  A surprising number said that they were “always” interested in science.   Women and men responded roughly the same.

I think that I might fall in that 30% of “in middle school”.  I remember finding out what a physicist was in 8^th grade – someone who “figures out how the world works” and I said that I wanted to do that.  Though my father was a chemist, I don’t recall a lot of interest in science in elementary school.   On the other hand, one respondent’s quote, “I don’t know, my father’s a biologist so I was kind of raised in a house with I guess scientific influence” kind of struck a bell.  So maybe I’m an “always” girl.

What about you, dear reader – when did you become interested in science?

2.  Who instilled the spark?

So, who was responsible for creating that spark?  Most people (45%) said that it was self-generated:

I liked toys like tinker toys and building blocks and taking things apart and seeing how they worked from early on. Science play was kind of more my inclination rather than physical play. (Female, Professor, Chemistry)

Another 40% said that their interest came from school activities, and another 15% from family.  Some said that their families had pressured them into science. But these results were very different for men and women!  More men said that they were motivated by self-interest (57%) whereas most women said they were motivated by school (52%).

I’m pretty sure that I fall into the “school” category, with some small influence of family.  I liked science in school, I was good at it, I was influenced by a few special teachers.  The fact that Dad was a chemist was more of a background support rather than a strong initial factor in my interest.

3.  What was the type of interest?

For about 50% of people interviewed, they were intrinsically interested in science to start with.  So, they tinkered at home with electronics, did experiments at home, and read science or science fiction.  I know I read science fiction, but I was never much of a tinkerer.  I wish that I had been.  I feel I’d be a better scientist now.

Many others (38%) mentioned school activities as sparking their interest, like classes, science projects, and teachers.  Unsurprisingly, teachers really left a mark on several students — either through encouragement or through disparaging words.

Fewer people mentioned family as an important source of interest, but all mentioned them as an important source of support.

Here is the story that sparked the title of the article, indicating the importance of school activities in encouraging a love of science:

When I was in third grade, my teacher did something you couldn’t do in class  anymore—we dissected cow eyes. And I thought it was so cool and so much fun that he sent a bunch of extras home in a paper bag, and reminded me to put them in the fridge  when I got home. And so I did. [When my mom came home she] said, “Hey, how was your day?” I said, “Great!” and I just went about my business and forgot the eyeballs in the fridge. She thought it was leftover lunch and went to open it up, and there were, like, four or five eyes looking back at her. And so all of a sudden I heard this screaming, and I realized what I had done … then from that point I started to really love science.
(Female, PhD student, Chemistry)

So, the take-home messages here are:

• Both men and women get interested in science early.  SO…. efforts to improve secondary level education and interest in science may be misguided!  We need to catch kids younger.
• School experiences are important to many (40%).  Teachers’ support can encourage interest that’s already there, but it can also foster a new love for science.
• Men more often find their initial spark of interest in science within themselves; Women more often find it in school activities.

So, something that we in the museum community have known for a long time — giving kids engaging activities is just as important as teaching them the content they’ll need to know on the test.

The paper concludes:

We used to believe that improving science education meant better training for teachers and increasing student understanding of scientific principles. We assumed that improving instruction and performance would lead to greater numbers of scientists in the pipeline. The results of this analysis make us believe that there are other factors that play a more significant role in getting students to consider careers in science. From the teaching perspective, it seems that including a variety of content and activities to engage students with different interests, providing an engaging classroom environment, and allowing students to feel comfortable asking questions about their understanding are all important factors that can improve student interest in science.

This is a post geared more towards parents than teachers because, after all, parents are the ultimate teachers, right?  It’s summer, and kids get to turn their brains off for three months.  Well, mostly.  Connie “The Science Club Mom” shares her experiences on how to do some fun science projects for kids as part of a geeky-cool science club over the summer.

———-

If your child is a fan of the cartoon “Phineas and Ferb,” then you’ve probably heard the show’s theme song and its siren song calling, “There’s 104 days of summer vacation, and school comes along just to end iiiiiiiiit…”

In a related vein, at my daughter’s school’s year-end awards ceremony, the (somewhat crotchety) gym teacher “Mr. Downer” announced (much to the kids’ dismay) that all the parents had agreed that there would be no TV or videogames that summer. Only reading and outdoor play. I got his point but was silently thinking, “Bite me.”

Still, “Mr. Downer’s” point is a fair one. What’s a hard-working, well-intentioned-yet-pressed-for-time parent to do to keep their kids’ learning going over the summer? Some of our kids will go to camp over the summer. Others will ship off to distant relatives’ homes for July. (Atlanta! Chicago! Jamaica!) There will be beach trips and pool trips and days spent at amusement parks. But what about reading? Learning those multiplication tables and double-digit subtraction? Is the time right for teaching Susie and Johnny the Great Authors? Didn’t I once read something, somewhere, about a “Shakespeare for kids” audiobook?

One thought is to form a summer science club for your child(ren), his/her friends, neighborhood kids, and anyone else who might want to tag along. A quick Internet search of “kids’ science books” brought up a wealth of reading material, including The Everything Kids’ Science Experiments Book by Tom Robinson (2008), which we used last summer. We also bought Neil Ardley’s (1993) 101 Great Science Experiments: A Step-by-Step Guide and (my daughter’s pick) My Big Science Book by Simon Mugford (2003). Want to make white carnations change color? Build a turbine out of bendy-straws and toothpicks? Make something called “magic milk”? These books will tell you how to do it. There are also plenty of other science experiment books as well. I also picked up You Can Be a Woman Marine Biologist by Florence McAlary and Judith Love Cohen (2001) since I’m trying to convince my girly-girl daughter that growing up to be a scientist is more interesting and practical than, say, a princess.  [[Note from Stephanie: Also consider all the books from the Exploratorium, such as "Exploratopia" or "Science snacks" or their websites for easy at-home activities such as Science Explorer or Science Snacks]].

The one down side (to me) of planning engaging science experiments from scratch is that you have to assemble all the materials yourself, which can entail a bit of running around. Who wants to spend an entire Saturday morning driving to five different stores to buy coated wire, batteries, small light bulbs, molding clay, food coloring, wire strippers, bulb-holders, thread spools, and poster paint? (For the record, “magic milk” probably only requires the purchase of food coloring, since you likely already have milk, liquid dish soap, and plates in your home.) So for the tired, overworked, and otherwise lazy among us, there are the pre-packaged science kits. For Christmas 2009, Santa brought my daughter the Scientific Explorer’s Mind Blowing Science Kit for Young Scientists, and we’ve done a number of the experiments from that, including making color-changing volcanoes. The nice thing about kits like these is that they provide you with many of the harder-to-locate items, such as polyacrylamide crystals and red cabbage juice. (When was the last time you picked those up from your local grocery store?) I’m also a fan of the Ein-O-Science line of science-in-a-box kits for about $8 each.

A handmade rocket

Ah, but have I mislead you? I started off discussing summer science bridge activities and instead lead you into a review of products that can be used for in-the-house science. What about the summer? What about the outdoors? Nature? The sun? Summer brings great opportunities for doing outdoor experiments. I’ve bought various Steve Spangler items including an air-burst rocket ($32.95; requires a bicycle-pump); solar bags ($12.95; they also sell string to go with these, but you can use any old string from your house, including kite string which works just fine); the solar race car ($10.95; they have other little solar robots too);  and sun sensitive paper ($6.95 for a pack of 15 sheets; they also sell sun sensitive fabric, but I haven’t tried it yet). The solar bags and rocket were especially fun, and can tie in with a science-related discussion (“What makes the rocket fall to Earth?” And “What makes the solar bags rise? Answer: Once the bags are filled with air, sealed off, and placed in the sun, the air molecules inside them begin to move around, causing the bags to rise.”)

To return to the original point of this posting, as parents we have to keep the learning going over the summer. But it doesn’t have to be dreadful. A little planning + purchases of key items + a bunch of kids = learning disguised as fun. The kids might even forget about the TV (for a little while).

Connie_The_Science_Club_Mom is a content writer for Online Schools and Online MBA who gives advice on the pursuit of education and living a healthy life. In her free time she enjoys planning science experiments and trips for her girls’ science club.  Email her directly at scienceclubmom (at) aol (dot) com.  Image courtesy of Connie.

Just a little promo fora recent post I wrote at The Active Class on Online Office Hours (thanks to Rhett of DotPhysics for the suggestion).  Here’s a sneak preview:

I recently sat in on a series of workshops for newer faculty at the university, and was surprised by a resounding theme among those academics in those first stressful years:  How do I get students to email me less?  I hadn’t realized the full flooding impact that instructors face with emailed questions from the multitudinous hordes.

I’m not sure I have the be-all-end-all answer to this challenge, but one option that I have heard praised by instructors is that of online office hours.  If students are emailing because the in-person office hours are inconvenient because of location and/or times, then online office hours could be of some assistance in reducing the deluge. … From an article in the Cornell Sun:

“Usually it comes down to some last-minute thing. If the student has questions, it’s far easier for me to IM them rather than to do an exchange of six different emails back and forth” [said Prof. David Williamson at Cornell.]

Holding office hours online could have other benefits:

• You won’t have to come to campus to talk to your students.
• If discussions are archived, then students who weren’t able to attend can benefit from peers’ questions and discussions.
• All students in the office hour can participate and discuss with one another, instead of waiting in a line outside the instructor’s door to get individualized attention for their question (which may be shared by others).
• You can offer hours at more popular times (such as evenings) when more students can attend.

Read more here