Serendipity35

When I first started this blog in February 2006, I was excited that a few dozen people were reading a post after just 48 hours. As the weeks went on and I really decided what the foci was to be, I was a bit disappointed that the numbers didn't suddenly surge, though I had no reason to believe they should surge.

It took a month or more before I began looking at the stats and noticed that the numbers on the early posts were moving up faster as time went by. The blog posts had legs. People were finding posts weeks/months after I wrote them through the wizardry of search engines, tags and links from other bloggers.

Looking back at an entry I did back in month one on Web 2.0, I see that it now has had 25,388 hits. Even the first entry I did as a test that explained the 35 part of Serendipity35 now has almost 14,000 hits.

Now, we don't make any money on the site, so hits don't have that kind of value, but it is nice to know that what you write is being read.

I find it interesting to sift through the stats (thank you Tim & Webalizer) to find:

• that last month we were averaging 6631 hits per day (at times, more than 1000 an hour)
• how many people have come to the site from the mention we got in PC Magazine
• or on a foreign blog about ?? in a language I can't read (an explanantory comment below from any of you would be welcome)
• that the top search terms that brought people to Serendipity35 are things like cloning, olpc, kindergarten, minority report, cartoon family, father knows best, one day university, pedagogy, andragogy and classroom
• that the top countries outside the U.S. that we have readers in are Germany, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Australia, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom

The latest National Survey of Student Engagement (AKA "Nessie" from NSSE) surveyed 260,000 freshman and seniors at 523 four-year colleges and universities.

NSSE tries to measure "engagement" (how involved students are in academics and campus activities) to assess quality rather than the criteria found in popular rankings like those of U.S. News & World Report.

Overall, the survey reports that students who participate in collaborative learning and educational activities outside the classroom and who interact more with faculty members get better grades, are more satisfied with their education, and are more likely to remain in college.

But the gains from those same engagements are even greater for students from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds, or who come to college less prepared than their peers.

Some interesting results:

• student engagement had a "compensatory effect" on grades and students' likelihood of returning for a second year of college
• activities such as collaborating with peers on projects inside and outside the classroom helped students overcome previous educational disadvantages
• nontraditional students (adult and distance learners) engaged as often in rewarding educational activities as did traditional-aged students taking classes on the campus
• DL students reported higher levels of academic challenge and greater developmental gains than their campus-based peers did.
• DL students were less likely to participate in group projects than their traditional peers were, but spent a comparable amount of time writing papers and preparing for class
• DL students reported interacting with faculty members about as much as trad students - primarily using online forums
• 63% of DL were first generation, compared with 42 percent of other students
• For those of you interested, as I am, in andragogy, the survey found that adult students were more engaged in classroom activities, more likely to come to class prepared, ask questions in class, and rewrite papers before submitting them than their younger counterparts
• nine out of 10 students in both the F2F & DL populations rate their college experiences as "good" or "excellent."
• students on average spend 14 hours a week preparing for class - however, faculty reported that they felt 24-30 hours was appropriate (entering freshman reported expecting to spend 16-20 hours per week
• Some gender differences among first-year students: women spent more time than men preparing for class and were more likely to write multiple drafts of an assignment before submitting it
• women were less likely than men to interact with faculty members outside of class
• women used e-mail more frequently to communicate with an instructor and were more likely to perform community service or volunteer work
• men were more likely to: tutor or teach other students
• discuss ideas from assigned readings with faculty members outside of class
• work outside class with classmates

Read the full 2006 reports at http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm

PEDAGOGY is a a term I hear used by teachers, especially in the writing of reports & grants and in making presentations at conferences. I have found that since moving from the world of K-12 education (where all teachers have at least a general knowledge of educational theories and are required to attend professional development workshops on new techniques) to higher education, that professors are hesitant to talk about (some even hesitate at the pronunciation of the word) pedagogy.

Pedagogy literally means "leading children." Andragogy comes much later and was a term coined to refer to the art/science of teaching adults.

Malcolm Knowles and others theorized that methods used to teach children are often not the most effective ways of teaching adults. In his The Modern Practice of Adult Education, Knowles defines andragogy as "an emerging technology for adult learning."

His four andragogical assumptions are that adults:

1) move from dependency to self-directedness

2) draw upon their reservoir of experience for learning

3) are ready to learn when they assume new roles

4) want to solve problems and apply new knowledge immediately.

Adults over 21 are the fastest-growing segment of today’s "undergraduates," especially in distance and online education. That would seem to indicate that we should all be considering the implications of andragogy in our teaching.

Although originally andragogy was seen as "pedagogy for adults", I now find theorists looking at it as an alternative to pedagogy. By this they mean that andragogy can be used as a learner-focused approach for teaching people of all ages. The contrast is then that pedagogy can be seen as a "teacher-centered or directive" learning, and andragogy as "learner-centered/directed" learning.

What considerations might we make in designing courses for audiences that we consider to be adults? What considerations might we make if we want our course to be more learner centered?
From the educational theory, I have sifted out these conditions.

I agree that adults learn best when:

• they feel a need to learn the content
• they have some input into what, why, and how they learn
• the learning’s materials & methods have a meaningful relationship to the learner’s past experience
• and their own experiences are used as a learning resource
• what is to be learned relates to the individual’s current life situation
• they have as much autonomy as possible
• anxiety is minimized
• freedom to experiment
• their learning styles are taken into account
• a cooperative learning climate
• opportunities for mutual planning
• the teacher can diagnose learner needs & interests and then formulate learning objectives based on that
• they are given clear sequential activities for achieving the objectives

There are certainly things in that list that would benefit students of any age (learning styles, for example) but other items (life experience; input) do sound like more important considerations for the adult learner.

I suppose that one reason all this is coming back into my focus is that I'm preparing a new graduate course for next semester and I know I'll be teaching students who are older, working in the field - and I'll be teaching them online.