Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference, Day 1

Pat Boone exhibit

This is my first time at the annual Next Generation Learning Spaces conference, happening this year in Los Angeles.  The first day consisted of three workshops focusing on new ways to think about innovation and entrepreneurship on campus, active learning and faculty development, and change management. In the late afternoon, I was able to visit Pepperdine University's library that just opened after a full-scale renovation of its 1970s space, including a Pat Boone exhibit.

Work with Emerging Technology to Accelerate your Campus Culture

Teggin Sumners, San Francisco State University

The presentation focused on pushing the concept of Makerspaces into its next iteration. Right now, many makerspaces are informal spaces for students to innovate, often not connected to a particular course or curriculum, and thus potentially not giving all students structure to succeed in such spaces.

Focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, many universities are now taking the next steps to create not only spaces for innovation but processes and structures for students to innovate and then turn that innovation into a successful enterprise, turning the students into entrepreneurs.

Such a shift is happening now out of the realization that our work force needs across the globe will be radically changing in the next 20 years or so, making it necessary for us now to rethink the way we are teaching our students.  Some universities create innovation hubs, connected to particular degrees, others are opting for innovation learning communities.  The key components to consider are 

Strategy

Financial and human resources

Support infrastructure

Entrepreneur education

Start-up support

Evaluation approach

Universally designed

Sustainable

before you can think about what that kind of space needs to look like

Meta-Active Learning Can Help Faculty Engagement and Success

Beverly Bondad-Brown, California State University, Los Angeles

This workshop focused on giving faculty opportunities to think about active learning while experiencing it, so the workshop itself was giving us the same opportunities through multiple activities.

As we are already doing a lot of this at Auburn, the most valuable piece was the set of cards they graciously shared that we will be able to use in our future faculty sessions.

Change Management:  Interdisciplinary collaboration amongst faculty, technology providers and site planners

 Maggie Beers, San Franciso State University

In front of yet another scary statistics highlighting how California will be short 3 million workers by 2025 because not enough students are graduating college even though the number that enters has doubled, we learned about the six academic cultures, how they think and what they value, and how we can use this knowledge to create communication plans to talk to these different audiences to push for innovation.

The discussion is based Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy by William Bergquist.

In addition, Maggie also shared a card set with different questions for future planning of learning spaces based on the Learning Spaces Rating System created by Educause. These cards allow for better sorting of where one still needs to do work, especially in a group setting.

She also reminded us of the principles of diffusion of innovation: Compatibility, triability, complexity, advantage, observability, and how we need to consider these for large-scale active learning implementations.

ELI 2018, Day 3

The final day of ELI covered Universal Design in Learning (UDL) and what Artificial Intelligence and Robotics may mean for higher education, our profession and the future.

Embracing challenges in UDL

Oakland University brought some excellent points to the discussion on creating an environment for Universal Design in Learning and where it creates some conflict with following recommendations for accessibility.

In particular, you want to remove barriers to learning and increase access, which means phrasing your approach as a social justice issue for all rather than a legal requirement for a few may be more convincing for many faculty.

They have seen evidence of increased student success and retention because of increased access opportunity and have created online videos both to make it easier for faculty to get started and student-created videos to show faculty the barriers students encounter when their course is not UDL structured.

Where the conflict with ADA compliance becomes visible is in the need to close-caption all video content made available to all students - if we want to give out students choices to access the material then we need to make sure this is all captioned, but that takes additional time that we often do not have.

We also need to remember to give our students some guidance -- they do not always know that there are different ways to access and thus learn materials and may not know the best way for them to learn.

CAST is another good resource for all things UDL.

What AI and robotics may mean to our professions and education - Diane Oblinger

The final keynote reminded us how technology, in particular AI and robotics, is changing the job world at amazing speed, and we need to take this into consideration at all levels of education.  Many of the current existing jobs will no longer exist in a few years, including such professions as stock brokers (you can already trade online, so why need people who are proven not to be as expert as they claim).

Elliq

Robots and AI will not be able to replace the critical thinking connected to ethics, but they will be able to provide social comfort for, for example, the single elderly -- see as an example Elliq, an Israeli product that interacts with older people, encouraging them to engage in activities, reminding them of tasks to keep their lives structured.

Other areas where AI is making major impact is: 

• knowledge curation
• online mediation
• online legal advice
• online medical advice and connecting within medical community
• job placement that is more fair

By 2030, many of our current professions will have gone through radical relearning because the technology will have introduced new dimensions that we cannot quite see yet. How nimble is higher education to adjust curricula, degrees, or certifications to account for such changes?  As Oblinger reminded us, what used to be called soft skills will become even more important, the core skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and life long learning.

ELI 2018, Day 2

Day Two of this year's Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) brought interesting discussions on navigation privacy in a data driven world, non-cognitive factors, overcoming obstacles in academic technology leadership, the future of learning spaces as growing experiences, and making makers.  In the middle of all of this, my colleague and I had a productive poster presentation.

Navigating privacy in a data driven world (Jules Polonetsky) reminded us that the Council of Europe is soon (May 2018) coming  out with new regulations on data privacy that will affect also many non-European countries as new technologies. Key changes:

1. A company dealing with EU citizen private data, regardless where the company is located, has to comply with these new GDPR rules
2. Penalties can be up to 4% of annual global turnover or $20,000, whichever is greater
3. Consent language must be clear and precise, with clear indication what happens to protected data
4. Breach notifications need to be issued within 72 hours
5. Users have the right to access their data
6. Users have the right to have their data erased
7. Users have the right to take their data with them
8. Institutions are responsible for having data protection officers rather than negotiating with all the different countries their users hail from

This impacts any higher education institution enrolling students from EU countries.
Add to this innovative new technology that allows for multiple data access points for one person, and you can see how this can get quite interesting for everyone involved. For example, when you talk to your smart devices at home (Alexa, Siri, and all the other strangely named women around your house), do you know what happens to your requests? Are they forgotten or are the stored for some future use (AI development)? How often do we take the time to review the privacy settings of our social media tools, even when they try to force us to review them?
One interesting point about the ethical implications of any of this was to have a philosopher at the table when such discussions become important.


Incorporating Noncognitive Strategies to improve Learning Success discussed McGraw Hill's research on procrastination and learner profiles. While the findings are not surprising, it is good to have numbers associated with our common sense reactions.
Combining different disciplines, like Learning Science, Neuroscience, Behavioral Economics and Econometrics, new models can be developed, like the econometric model of skill formation, eg Eckman and Cunha's Technology of Skill Formation, 

Here some points out of this model:

1. Multiple skills are required for success
2. Cognitive skills only one part
3. Skills evolve over time
4. Skills are complementary build on each other
5. Different skills are malleable over time to different degrees
6. Different skills have different critical and sensitive periods
7. Skill gap emerges very early and persists
8. Non cognitive skills can be more malleable at larger stages

Other factors such as health and economic status also affect our skill formation
In their procrastination research of over 2 million data points from 100,000 students using the McGraw Hill learning platform, the presenters found that up to 50% of students procrastinate to some degree, and that the longer they procrastinate the more likely it is that they will fail their assignment completely. This of course makes sense, but to have the number of 37 times more likely to fail if you always procrastinate could be a good number for faculty to use when working with their students on noncognitive skills.  How to work against this - build in early low-stakes assignment to identify procrastinators and then give them the support to change such habits.
The learner profiles they developed (out of almost 700 students) include average student, gritty, struggler, coaster, plugger.  The gritty students tend to be the most successful ones as they keep sticking with it.Only 12-15% of our students fall into the gritty or coaster (students who just get it) categories, so the question is how we can move more students to the gritty stage (and this is where growth mindset would come in)

Kyle Bowen, Penn State, discussed The future of learning spaces is growing experiences, with such entertaining and useful terms as Cone of Distraction (the cone of viewers forming behind a person using a laptop) increased by the Probability of PowerPoint (use of a boring PPT in class). He reminded us that amazon ships everything in way too large boxes to ensure that one box fits all -- we have the same attitude with our classrooms. He reminded us that lecture has 10 sf per student, in comparison to 3.5 sf on a plane, 10.5 sf on a subway and 22 sf at Starbucks.
The takeaway is that our classrooms need to be designed to grow experiences - which may mean that we take the class out of the room completely.  Let's build spaces for creation; and let's move away from limiting ourselves to writing as creation.

Finally, Making makers   Students at the center of education, technology, and innovation, highlighted Brandeis and Wellesley's maker spaces and what it allows their students to do. The maker mindset includes prototyping and startup, design thinking in practice, a moment when I say I need this thing and it does not exist yet so I make it myself. Makers find gaps, find something that can be used differently, figure out how things work, collaborate and, most importantly, do all of this without any instructions or roadmaps.  Intrinsic motivation is 

Fail faster and fail smarter. Encourage breaking things and then fixing them.

And in the middle of this, Jerisha and I had our fabulous poster session....

Poster session at ELI

ELI Day One, Part Two

Here some notes on the sessions for the first day of this year's ELI (Educause Learning Initiative).

The keynote by Bernard Bull, Concordia University in Wisconsin focused on Experiments, Entrepreneurs, and Innovations that are Shaping the Future of Higher Education. As academic transformation remains the leading issue at higher education institutions across the spectrum, his talk reminded us that we are again seeing education in unconventional ways and places. He watches trends and is interested when, for example, a trend jumps out of its domain (eg, health care) and into a different one (eg, education) as it shows that more than one small group of the population value the idea, and he is also very much interested in the concept of self-organized learning, which you may have seen in the amazing Hole in the Wall example.  

He stressed that one piece of the teaching and learning is the choice of educational institution, and if there were better ways for students to choose which institution is a good fit for them, then they could be more successful (he did not address how these students would then go about and pay tuition if they were to be selected for one of the very expensive institutions). This kind of alignment may also lead to more holistic measuring, and he reminded us that measures and algorithms, while more reliable, can either amplify or muzzle values and beliefs.

One of the examples of innovative education was Promazo, a group that connects students with companies for paid internships to solve problems that would be outsourced anyway.  The Wayfinding Academy helps students become clearer in their passions and interests making a traditional higher ed degree more meaningful as it cuts out multiple changes of majors that can extend time students put into a degree.

Finally, he considered that methodological and philosophical pathways can be a useful addition to curricula and programs, giving students additional choices for the path of study, but also giving institutions the chance to rethink their curricula away from simple compliance and accreditation.

 Second session of the day focused on Student Success with two short presentations, one focusing on the importance of stressing growth mindset, the other showcasing the development of a portal to pull together disparate online platforms to create a learning community. The first discussion is grounded in Carol Dweck's research on growth and fixed mindsets, and how clear communication about the two mindsets can already change attitudes and thus improve chances for success.  Students who are exposed to these two mindsets will make better choices in non-cognitive skills. Key takeaway from this session is also how you articulate your praise.  As growth mindset assumes that anyone can improve any skill through practice, feedback needs to focus on the practice and effort part, not create an environment that focuses on innate qualities.

Secret Decoder Ring

Third session of the day focused on the Secret Decoder Ring:  Why Faculty Choose to Pass on Faculty Development.  Three universities presented their approaches to faculty development, Northwestern, Wisconsin-Madison and Purdue, and their findings focused on empathy but also on focusing on culture and influencing change through this awareness.

ELI, Day One, Part One

Sticky note table top

The Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) is meeting this week in New Orleans, and we have two teams from Auburn University presenting about various aspects of learning at the conference.

I am here to see what I can learn about virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and just reality in general.  My Monday morning workshop focused on . VR and AR: Driving Pedagogical Innovation through Vision and Strategy, giving us plenty of food for thought with examples of existing various realities, suggestions on gear, and worksheets to tackle strategic and implementation challenges.
The two presenters, Maya Georgieva and Emory Craig, have been working for years in this field and written a number of Educause pieces discussing various aspects of virtual and augmented reality.

Here some pointers on these different aspects if you have not thought too much about this yet:
1. 360 degree video is probably the easiest to accomplish, filming an existing location in a full 360 degree circle to create a somewhat immersive experience. All you need is a 360 degree camera, a sense of what kind of space makes sense to be captured this way, and some experience in post-production, eg editing, stitching the video together. Panopto now allows for 360 degree video uploads.
Yosemite video is one example of a 360 degree video - note the instructions under the video for best user experience and that you can drag the video inside its window to see different perspectives.

2.  Augmented reality allows for an overlay or embedding of virtual or graphic elements into a real video environment.  Think Pokemon Go as the most obvious popular example. Both Apple and Google have been developing engines that allow for the design of such augmented realities.  Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore allow all of us to create our own realities to some extent.
ARKit Examples
ARCore Examples

3.  Virtual Reality is the full immersion into a completely design virtual environment.  This tends to be the most complex environment to design, especially as we have been already exposed to very expensive versions of virtual reality, making it potentially difficult to compete with our previous experiences in the gaming world.


Why would this be of interest to us in education? Consider that each of these can do one of the following:
 - Take your students to places they would otherwise not be able to go to because it is too expensive, to time intensive, or too dangerous.
 - Allow your students to interact with an environment that in the real world would be too expensive or dangerous to work in, like a lab, power plant or other workplace experience.
-- Allow your students to learn from their mistakes in this environment before they encounter stressful situations in the real world.
 -- allow your students to be agents in making decisions in this kind of environment
 --  Allow your students an active part in creating such environments, with all the situational factors that need to be considered when creating aa compelling learning situation.

The technology may still be in its toddlerdom (I think we are past infancy), and with the emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, we will be able to give more choices to the users of such situations.

Here some examples of what is already out there, many of the cross-university collaborations with a lot of student input:
Virtually Ulysses - James Joyce's Dublin to bring a complex piece of literature to life and make it potentially easier to understand
1772 Gaspee Affair -- historical event reinvisioned
Visualizing the impossible - architecture students create physically impossible constructions
L.A. Children's Hospital Trauma Training - medical students are immersed into chaotic ER situations to deal with the entire situation not just the immediate medical crisis
Berlin Wall - students play different roles in a very emotional historical situation, allowing for the creation of empathy for different participants
Oregon 3d virtual microscope - moving into the molecular level

and yes, the furniture was also cool with a table top consisting of sticky notes.

Educause 2017, Day 4

The final day of the conference started off with the University of Kentucky discussing its findings for their first year of having 17 active learning classrooms across campus. Interestingly enough, it appears that they did not worry about faculty development ahead of time but simply assigned faculty to the new and redesigned classrooms.  Sometimes faculty did not know they were teaching in this new space until just a couple of weeks before classes started. They do have an impressive number of 42% of their students having had a class in a TEAL space during this first year. Their discussion of stakeholders did not include faculty and students, which I also found surprising. They used surveys and classroom observation with the Minnesota observation tool and some interviews to gather data, also focusing on final grades.

One takeaway for me was the following up with individual faculty who participated in surveys to ensure that the lines of communication stay open by acknoledging their concerns. Their data included all sections of all courses, with historical data, to ensure for the final grades that a good comparison could be established.  This analysis did show that even though not all faculty used the spaces well, students nevertheless improved grades, and, possibly more important, some underserviced student groups saw an improvement in retention in the second year.

Indiana University showed off its concept of Reality Studios - up to 25 implementations of virtual reality stations that are available to students outside of class, making it easier for them to take the time and fully immerse themselves into the VR.  In conjunction with their MOSAIC initiative of learning spaces, they are now taking advantage of the relatively inexpensive hand held VR devices after 20 years of more expensive VR development and display.  They reminded us that a lot of VR is run through the STEAM platform, leading to possible problems purchasing licenses for the university. Some of the VR examples were Anatomy:  The Body VR Journey inside a cell; Apollo 11, Geography, Music:  Soundstage; Astronomy:  Titans of Space; and finally a simple Media playback tool:  Simple VRVideo Player.  The future will bring mobile VR as right now you need to still stay tethered to the computer that is processing the VR.

Temple Grandin

The conference closed with Temple Grandin discussing Developing Students who have Different Minds.

Key takeaways there are to remember that Algebra should not be used to deny students who are visual thinkers access to the sciences, and that our insistence on providing students on the spectrum special accommodations without giving them truly different ways to learn, through, for example, hands-on internships, is depriving all of us amazing opportunities as it means that potential innovation does not get the stimulus it needs to thrive. In addition, she pointed out that overspecialization leads to a loss in creativity.

Educause 2017, Day 3 - Part 2

Safiya Noble

As promised, a different post on the Algorithms of Oppression and Safiya Umoia Noble's discussion on how search engines reinforce racism.  For a short video on what she is talking about, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRVZozEEWlE
Dr. Noble is faculty at the University of Southern California, focusing on racism, sexism and other oppression as they occur on the internet. Her talk was a clear call to action to improve our efforts in educating everyone to be digitally literate in order to be able to tell opinion and advertisement from facts that are more objectively presented. Focusing on the Google search engine, as it holds practically a monopoly on the market of search engines, Dr. Noble pulled together two points that we need to remember:

1. People trust Google to give them the truth - a trust that comes primarily out of positive experiences with such things as getting good directions through Google Maps, helpful suggestions what to do, reliable information on common facts in Physics, Chemistry, History.  (and of course it starts to get a little iffy when it comes to history).
2. People forget that Google's search engine is an advertising machine and that the search results can thus be manipulated in favoring certain sites over others because a company pays Google or tweaks its metadata to play the engine itself.

If you take these two points in combination, it becomes clear quickly that we cannot trust our searches quite as easily as we have been thinking.  Her examples show that the algorithm, designed by primarily white men (this is a guess on my part), perpetuates stereotypes about women and minority populations in this country.  And while Google publicly has stated that the algorithm cannot be tweaked as it is the truth, evidence suggests otherwise. 

Gillespie on algorithms

The recent UN ad campaign shows that Google's search suggestions are rather troubling.

When a couple of years ago a tweet went viral about what happens when you search for three black teenagers and then three white teenagers, the search results changed miraculously over night to appease the troubled customers.  However (and this is my side note), we should not underestimate that one of the driving forces for these searches is previous search histories, which suggests that this country may be in even more trouble than we thought.  Another example of such claim to an authentic search was the search for unprofessional and professional hair styles -- all examples of unprofessional hairstyles were images of black women wearing their hair naturally, while all professional hair styles were white women wearing carefully braided buns and other constricting hair constructions.

So, what to do about this obvious but nevertheless practically invisible racism and sexism? Not using search engines may no longer be an option, but remembering that Google is an information broker is essential, and remembering the sources for more reliable information (eg, government databases, library databases) is essential.  Her example of the South Carolina murderer Dylan Storm Roof is quite telling. In his online diary, he described how he could not believe that mainstream media had not been reporting on certain types of crime -- that moment of not believing should have made him aware that his line of online inquiry had let him down a rabbit hole of fake fascist news. Unfortunately, because he already agreed with such views, he continued and ended up murdering black Americans in their church.