Supporting community college faculty across the disciplines

I recently spent 48 hours in Northfield, MN (home of Malt-O-Meal) to work with educators from different disciplines and different organizations trying to find ways to increase two-year college faculty awareness of and participation in professional development opportunities.

The workshop was hosted by Carleton College and its Science Education Research Council.  SERC (http://serc.careltoncollege.edu) has amassed an impressive collection of resources across multiple disciplines including geoscience (the first discipline), chemistry, economics, mathematics, physics, psychology,  and more. 

The Pedagogy in Action page (http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/) has links for Teaching Methods, Activities, and Research on Learning. SERC is continually seeking to improve its website to become a one-stop launching point for finding discipline-specific lesson plans, research-based pedagogical strategies, student projects, career information--essentially anything of interest to an educator seeking to improve student learning.

SERC has also been learning how to run effective workshops.  We were given pre-workshop assignments to upload essays into designated spaces on the SERC website that were visible to the other  participants but not to the rest of the world.  And during  the workshop we were constantly moving from whole group to small group activities, mixing tasks from cross-discipline to the discipline-specific. 

Each group would choose a recorder, who wirelessly entered directly into the SERC system.  The others in the small working group could see the notes on their own computers during their discussion, and the notes were available to the whole group during the "share out" session. Working across disciplines allowed us to learn of challenges and strategies that gave us fresh perspectives for our discipline-specific discussions.

The real-time recording of discussions means that our notes won't be accidentally lost among papers or luggage during our journeys home. Eventually the notes from our workshop will be organized, polished, and made publicly accessible on the SERC site.

Joint Mathematics Meetings January 2011

The 2011 Joint Math Meetings started for me with the advisory board meeting of the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (MathDL). Both the MAA Reviews and the Classroom Capsules are currently free on the MathDL site to both MAA members and non-members.  The Reviews are useful mainly to faculty and libraries making decisions about purchasing books, but the "Classroom Capsules and Notes brings together the best of 114 years of the short classroom materials from the MAA print publications" and should be of use to all math faculty.

The MAA now hosts WeBWorK, an open source (free) web-based homework system originally out of Rochester U.  If your institution is unable or unwilling to host WeBWorK on its own server, the MAA will let you try out WeBWorK with up to 100 students from your school.  (And if you want to try it out with more students, ask anyway, and the MAA will try to find a participating institution that can accommodate you.)

Aaron Wangberg of Winona State U. has created an electronic whiteboard to work within WeBWorK.  His students are required to use the whiteboard to show their work before submitting their answers for the instant correct/incorrect feedback.  Mike Gage says this utility will soon be available to all the WeBWorK authoring community.

Warren Esty of Montana State U:  Theorem  The value of math skills has gone way down.  Corollary  We should focus our teaching toward skills that will add value.  Examples:  Being able to read math and to make the right things "come to mind."  (The idea of the latter example is that information and computation are both cheap, but knowing what is relevant to look up or to compute is harder to come by.)

At the CTiME sponsored panel session on the final day I learned a bit more about MathJAX, which is rapidly becoming the standard tool for putting math notation on the Web.  MathJAX is largely the work of Davide Cervone of Union College.

Much of the excitement about MathJAX is that it provides a much needed piece of the puzzle so that the potential of MathML can be realized.  Although MathML has been the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for putting math on the Web for 15 years, it has not been widely accepted by browsers.  MathJAX allows the author of a webpage to use TeX or MathML to specify math notation, and MathJAX instructs the browser how to display the math properly, even for browsers that do not know how to display MathML.

Steve Wilson (AMATYC Central Vice-President) told me that he spent a few hours in the exhibits room.  Besides the major textbook publishers and mathematical software providers, the exhibitors at JMM 2011 included WeUseMath.org, which showcases information and resources for students and faculty about careers, etc.  The ALEKS rep would give me no numbers at all about possible costs, but the WebAssign folks were happy to chat about costs or anything else.

One American Mathematical Society booth freebie was a report on an AMS survey about online homework systems.  By far the most frequently adopted were 1) MyMathLab, 2) WebAssign, and 3) WeBWork.  MML involved the most students (230K), then WeBWorK with over 100,000 and WebAssign with less than 100,000.  There was no effort to rate the relative quality of the different homework systems, but I found it interesting that the study divided the PhD granting institutions into those that were among the top 80 (as ranked by the National Research Council) and those ranking below the top 80.  For example, the response rate among the top 80 was 71%, for the rest of the PhD-granting universities the response rate was 65%.  For the masters-granting universities the response rate was 45%, for bachelor's 30%.  "The two-year college numbers were too small for any meaningful analysis" as "Only 11 responded" of the 30 TYC invited to participate.

A short wish list for online homework systems

I take it for granted that electronic homework systems cannot effectively grade any math problem that requires students to write coherent sentences.

All the electronic homework systems allow the possibility of students submitting answers that won't be machine graded.  This capability greatly increases the variety of types of questions that can appear in an electronic exercise set.  There is an issue of how students enter math notation and figures (hey, just let them  photograph their handwritten answers with their cellphones and upload the jpg file), but the principal reason that I'm reluctant to include such problems is the fear that grading online will be cumbersome.

There are several ways to make life easier for the instructor faced with grading a single "essay" problem from a large set of students.  First, the interface for viewing individual responses should be intuitive and effortless.  Don't make us click on a link to open one student's response and then have to close that file before opening the next. 

It would be better to have "zoomable" thumbnails of each student's answers spread across the screen, with mouse flicks or dragging to scroll.  Should the instructor have the foresight to provide a grading rubric for the problem, that rubric should be visible (or at least available) to the student when working the problem.

In many cases, the availability of the rubric could reduce the instructor's need for to make copious comments.  For further convenience, the instructor should have a few editable paste buffers holding common comments (like "You need the product rule" or "This is not an equation").

WeBWorK as an answer key

The principal author (Kathy Yoshiwara) of the project materials being used at Pierce believes that our  students misuse the answer keys found at the back of math textbooks.  She believes students need to struggle at times for an answer, rather than always be able simply to find the answers in the book (and to work backwards from there).

On the other hand, we recognize that students can benefit from the  reassurance of knowing that they've successfully solved a math exercise, or from the knowledge that their first efforts were in error.  As part of our student success projects for developmental math, we have been hiring student tutors to check off that students have correct answers before the students are allowed to submit their portfolios.

But we'd prefer that the tutors' time be spent in actually working with the students.  So we have begun to code answers to drill-type exercises into the open source online grading system WeBWorK.  Students will type in their answers online at home or in a computer lab, and will get immediate feedback as to whether or not their answers are correct.

We will still grade by hand the questions that require complete sentences as answers, and we will still  check the student work on the drill problems when we collect portfolios.  But students will now have a means of checking the accuracy of their answers before coming to the classroom and without needing to consult our tutors.

Removing students from a Moodle roster

Pierce College now creates an online course shell for each class of each instructor using Moodle, an open source Learning Management System.  The school automatically populates each Moodle course with students as they enroll in the corresponding real section.

However, the student remains enrolled in the Moodle course even after dropping (or being excluded) from the real course.

Removing a student from a Moodle course is non-intuitive.

First, click on "Assign roles" (in the Adminstration block).

Click on "Student" in the first column ("Roles").

Select the student from the left column (CTRL-click to select multiple students).
Click on the "Remove" button.

WeBWorK

I've been using the open source homework system WeBWorK for the past few semesters.  The first couple of times, my classes were hosted by the University of Rochester (thanks to Michael Gage) and now by xyzhomework.com (thanks to Patrick McKeague).

The bank of problems in the WeBWorK National Problem Library is thin on the types of problems we want to use at Pierce College in our intermediate algebra class, so I've been authoring most of the problems.  The fact that all the authoring tools are made available to instructors is one of the nice features of WeBWorK, probably second only to the fact that it's free.

The downside is that without the huge work force associated with the big publisher-owned homework systems, the product is not so instructor-friendly.  We don't get all the bells and whistles that we might expect if we've only see the popular MyMathLab from Pearson.

I only just learned how to change a student's score on a graded assignment.  It goes like this:

• Go to the Classlist Editor (the first link under Instructor Tools in the Main Menu).
• In the row for the student of interest, click on the "Assigned Sets" value (in the fourth column--it has a form like  "m/n").
• Click on the name of the appropriate set (in the "Edit set for..." column).
• Find the problem of interest, and adjust the value of "status" (typically change "0" to "1") to give credit.

On the other hand, WeBWorK is (like the commercial product WebAssign) publisher-independent.  You could use it with a textbook from any publisher you use, or even (as with our program) if you are using materials that do not belong to any publisher.

The MAA is assuming the responsibility of maintaining WeBWorK (http://webwork.maa.org/moodle/) from its original home at the University of Rochester.