Over the past several weeks, I have posted blog entries to describe some of the material that I am producing this summer in preparation for the fall. From what I can read, much of college education is becoming one huge Zoom session. Zoom has its place and can be quite beneficial, but I believe we can do better than putting all our eggs in a Zoom basket. To avoid that, though, we need to think deeply about the learning process. We need to attack the educational challenges in a creative fashion. All of the material I have discussed recently comes from ideas I have developed based on 49 years of teaching experience. You can do that as well. There is a lot more that we can do than just Zoom.
That observation is especially true as we come to the reality that a considerable amount of our coverage is going to be distance learning for the foreseeable future. Most of us have never experienced world-class distance learning which makes the fall especially daunting. Ask yourself an essential question: What would world class distance learning look like if that was your goal? Once you can envision it, you can create it.
So far:
--On
my July 22 blog posting, I wrote about suggesting the book Make It Stick to my fall students as an optional extra credit
assignment to help them become better learners.
How can that not be a good idea?
I have had several students email me in thanks for the advice.
--On
July 27, I described the “Guided Readings” I developed to help my students get
more from their textbooks. Why have them
pay so much money if they are not able to learn (at least) the basic material
in those chapters? For students, reading
the textbook needs to be more than a waste of time.
--On August 3, I explained my use of “Retrieval Questions and Answers” to help students immediately follow up their textbook readings. The students are given sequential questions (and their answers) to bring the important topics back up so they can make use of (and strengthen) their knowledge.
Today, I want to talk about auditory learners. I have often thought that some of my students were held back from achieving their academic potential because they were auditory learners rather than visual learners. Most learning experiences (books, written exercises, PowerPoint slides, and the like) focus on the information being seen. In much of our teaching, knowledge enters through the eyes. As the recent popularity in audiobooks seems to show, a considerable number of people absorb information by hearing. Consequently, I think at least one learning product for each class should focus on auditory learning. I want to have a supplement available that will be especially address the needs of those students.
Plus, students love their phones and they love to multi-task. In thinking about the fall, I wanted to include a learning exercise that took advantage of those personal preferences.
Therefore, this semester, for every chapter, I am creating approximately 20 minutes of audio questions and answers. I ask a question. I pause for three seconds to give the students time to consider their response. Then, I provide my answer. I immediately move to what I view as the next logical question. As I have said often, I like sequential learning. For 20 minutes, it is just question-answer-question-answer, but it is all auditory learning. Once again, as mentioned in my previous posting, I am obviously working on having students retrieve and use the information in many different ways.
I post the audio files on our learning management system (we use Blackboard). The students can listen whenever they want to test their understanding. Better still, they can download the app to their phones and listen while they do other things: eat, exercise, take walks, and the like. Every college student seems to struggle with time management. Audio questions and answers can be an efficient use of free time – even listening for a few minutes as they walk to class helps them work on information retrieval.
I needed to explain this to my students so, not surprisingly, I made a video. I’ve become fond of the screen recording feature on PowerPoint for quick and simple messages to my students. Below is the one that explains the audio questions and answers that will be available to them this fall.
As always with these videos for my students, I have more than the goal of introducing them to a learning technique. I am always trying to help the students become more confident and enthusiastic about the upcoming learning process. These are scary times. I cannot help them over every problem created by this pandemic, but I can help them have a wonderful learning experience. I want to assure them that they will learn a lot in the fall and make a good grade. There is a plethora of bad news in the world. I think we as teachers should provide some encouraging news.
I don’t think I can send you the audio questions and answers but I will be glad to share the transcript if you drop me a note at Jhoyle@richmond.edu.
Here is the video explanation that I sent to my students. Notice, I did not worry too much about being technically perfect. I just want to get the message out to them. They are students. They are not bothered by glitches.
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