Blog Posts

EdSurge Adaptive Learning Meetup

2/5/2016

Earlier this week Edsurge launched a special section of their website that focuses on adaptive learning. The content they published came from over six months of deep diving into the questions, innovations, and ideas that form our collective understanding of what adaptive learning is, is not, and should be.
Last night they hosted a Meetup in San Francisco and had the following education leaders present and drive a discussion:
Angela Estrella (Teacher, Instructional Coach and Parent)
Jennie Dougherty (Associate Director of Innovation, KIPP Bay Area)
Johann Larusson (Lead, Center for Digital Data, Analytics and Adaptive Learning, Pearson)
James Harrell (Talent Development Manager, Oakland Unified School District)
Esther Tricoche (Associate Partner, New School Venture Fund)
Elena Sanina (Senior Manager of Blended Learning, Aspire Public Schools)

Though the presentations focused on the K12 space, we stilled learned a lot about what educators need us, entrepreneurs and tech developers, to create products that will work most effectively. Here are some of the big takeaways:

1. Use simple language, and put the customer in the center when describing what a product or platform provides...not this:

While this copy might be succinct for technical folks and investors, it’s not clear what the value proposition is for the instructor or learner.

2. There are some general truisms that Edsurge’s research revealed about what makes the most effective adaptive learning tools, these rules make a lot of sense:

We were thrilled to see this slide as it supports everything we’ve set out to provide with our comprehensive tool: flexibility with teaching methodology, choices galore, promotion of active learning practices to drive engagement.

3. Most adaptive tools are designed for 1:1 interaction (one student/one computer), teachers and students want and benefit from collaborative tools and platforms in addition to 1:1 experiences.

4. [K12] Classrooms are full of learners that are at different comprehension and mastery levels.
We realize that there’s a general assumption that everyone who’s been admitted to a two or four-year school should be college ready, and that the population is level set, the reality is that this is not the case at all. College success is a serious issue not only for student bodies, which are composed of learners from even more disparate backgrounds than found in a K12 class, but for higher education institutions as well that want to increase matriculation, retention, and graduation.

5. Every ounce of technology needs ten ounces of humanity.
Can we have an amen? This statement drew the largest applause. Tech is great, content is king, and both need to be brought to bear with superb pedagogy. Nonetheless, teaching and learning transcend zeroes and ones. Without instructional engagement, and frankly learner enthusiasm, we’re not going to see the efficacy we want from the tools we design. So, we need to develop tools that drive quantifiable activities that move learners through a course of materials, but encourage and inspire a humanistic experience of active discussion and collaboration.

Check out #EdsurgeAL for more chatter on adaptive learning and last night’s Bay Area Meetup. Edsurge will be hosting a Twitter Chat with some of the authors and contributors from their guide - Thursday 2/11 at 5PST using the hashtag #EdSurgeAL. Register and they’ll you send a reminder.

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Getting Your Students Excited and Engaged in the Classroom

1/17/2016

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Gibbs Free Energy Equation

As effective educators, it is the professors’ responsibility to help students become engaged in the materials presented, no matter how boring or dry the topic might be on any particular occasion. Yes, I am saying that sometimes, even my own area of interest can be less than riveting when presented in the classroom. And, as hard as I try to make understanding the Gibbs Free Energy Equation inviting and exciting, students are not always caught up in my fervor for the material. In order to make such information more digestible and in fact, to get your students really engaged, there is a multitude of resources available to mobilize your students’ enthusiasm.

An active classroom is an engaging classroom. Here at CSUN in the biology department, many of our faculty have introduced competitive games into the students’ classroom experience. Using freely available web-based apps and programs such as Kahoot.it, PollEverywhere.com or Socrative (to name only a few), faculty tap into the natural desire to WIN that students (and everyone else, including department chairs, deans, and provosts) display when presented with a game. Unbeknownst to the students, grappling with real issues of biological importance during a game provides time for practicing and using biological concepts and ideas that reinforce learning. Students compete in real time for “real” prizes (nerdy science shirts or other swag usually received free from vendors, candy donated by faculty, and even money!).

View of a Kahoot Quiz.

What do you need to get started? Not much! I recommend trying Kahoot.it for the easiest learning experience. Make a short set of questions (3-5) and launch the game in the classroom. Students can use their cell phones to play. As the game proceeds, once a question is presented and answered, a bar chart showing all the responses is displayed, providing the perfect opportunity to discuss common misconceptions that might have lead to a large percentage of students picking the incorrect answer. Students are awarded some crazy number of points based on how quickly they picked the correct answer. And when the game is over, you can download an excel spreadsheet showing how each person responded to each question. Give everyone in class credit for being there and making an honest attempt at answering or use this as a quiz (be careful here since students are trying to be the fastest to get the correct answer). Your class will be fun and interactive, and students will learn without ever knowing it. Happy Kahooting!

Blog post by Mary Pat Stein, PhD. Professor Stein is an Associate Chair, Biology and Academic Technology Fellow at California State University, Northridge.

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Active Learning Is Trending in 2016

1/7/2016

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A lecture at the University of Bologna in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century. The lecturer reads from a text on the lectern while students in the back.

If you ask a group of college instructors what their greatest instructional goal is, the most likely answer you’d receive would be: engaging my students. Student engagement can be a serious challenge, particularly in the large, general education courses, which are often situated in old-school lecture halls. Luckily, active learning is trending—and we predict that it will become the norm in the next few years.

What is active learning? Active learning is an instructional approach that puts the student in the center of the learning. This teaching methodology actively engages the learner and is a contrast with traditional lecture-based approaches where the instructor does most of the talking and students are passive. Some of the many strategies that instructors use to promote active learning include group discussions, peer instruction, problem-solving, case studies, role playing, journal writing, and structured learning groups.

The evidence is overwhelming that employing active learning strategies leads to deeper learning, increased retention and higher performance. Recently, a group of instructors from the University of Washington conducted a meta-analysis of 225 studies on using active learning in STEM courses and found that average examination scores improved by about 6% and failure rates dropped 50% in active learning sections when compared to classes with traditional lecturing.

Several trends that we see as we travel to campuses across the country bode well for active learning:

Courses redesigned for improved outcomes. Increasingly, schools are incentivizing faculty to redesign courses around measurable outcomes, and these redesigned courses tend to employ a greater degree of active learning strategies.
Changing the role of assessments. Formative assessments, which are used to drive learning rather than to measure learning, are cropping up across the college curriculum. These can be used to personalize the learning for students, and to guide instructors to continuously improve the teaching. Also, schools are adopting strategies that promote active learning, such as e-portfolios and peer review.
Increased use of active learning classrooms. More of these flexible learning environments are cropping up on college campuses, along with professional development on how to use them effectively.
Use of mobile devices for learning. Ed tech tools are finally being designed to be mobile responsive. A host of recently launched apps makes it easier for students to use their personal mobile devices to access content and education platforms.
Collaborative faculty development. Higher ed faculty development budgets are increasing, and increasingly these budgets are being used for collaborative faculty learning experiences that model these successful active learning strategies.

You’ll be hearing a lot from the team, and me at Café Learn about active learning innovations, ideas, and subject matter experts. Tell us what you think!

Blog post by Carrie O'Donnell, Café Learn CEO and Co-Founder

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Hello, Instructors!

1/5/2016

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Welcome back to class! The Café Lean team hopes your holidays were relaxing and enjoyable, and you are rejuvenated for the new year and new term! As you probably know, the first few days of classes are a vital time to present your vision and set expectations for your classroom culture and your course requirements going forward. Also, before diving into content and curriculum, this is a great time to get to know your students. There is no doubt that a personable and interested instructor is more effective engaging with learners than the sage on the stage who sticks to the script of lecturing only. In preparation for your first few days of classes, we thought we’d share some active learning techniques and exercises that will motivate your students and create a culture of engagement.

Introduce Yourself and Get Your Students Talking
It is important to share a little bit about yourself, let students have a story to go along with your pedagogy, add value and insight to how you came to be standing in front of them, and create an environment of openness and familiarity. If your students know a bit about you and want to learn more about what you have worked hard to be able to share. Tell them things like where you’re from, what your education/teaching background is, what some of your interests outside the classroom are, why you teach, and what keeps you in the classroom. Tell them things like where you’re from, what your education/teaching background is, what some of your interests outside the classroom are, why you teach, and what keeps you in the classroom. If you feel ambitious, put together slides or a video with images, prompts, and quotes--the more vibrant, the better.
Keep in mind during the first week of the term some students may be ‘shopping’ for classes, adding and dropping courses as they please while looking for the right fit. If they invest in you and your story, they are more likely to stay enrolled. Your introduction to yourself and your course provides a good model for students to open up about themselves, to be more inclined to participate in class, and to ask for help when they need it. Students want to have a community in class and encouraging them to talk and interact with one another as soon as possible will foster this dynamic, so don’t hesitate to ask them questions about themselves.

Here are some cool ideas:

Mapping it out: If it is a geography/history/humanities class, have the students come up and place a thumbtack on where they are from on a big map at the front of the room, this will stimulate talks of diversity and differing world perspectives. If there’s time, ask them to pin a place on the map where they’d like to go, and ask why.

Brick wall exercise: Give your students a notecard when they enter the class and provide them with a brief window of time to decorate their card with their name and whatever they want to visually or textually include about themselves. Then, have the students pin up their square/rectangle cards onto a designated wall in the classroom to mimic a brick wall. Keep this wall up all semester so the students have a reminder of the diversity and togetherness of the class. If the classroom is not yours exclusively, you can do this virtually in a shared Google slides presentation! Have each student add a slide on their own and scroll through the slides to see the diversity of the student body. You can store this within Cafe Learn so students can view it throughout the whole semester.

First day graffiti: Place large flipcharts around the room with one of the below phrases on each and markers in different colors. Invite students to walk around the room and write responses, chat with each other and the teacher as they do. After there are comments on every flip chart, the walk to each one and talk a bit about one or two of the responses. If you run out of time, you can conduct the debriefing during the next session.
Note: This can also be conducted within Café Learn using hashtags to each sentence stem and students answer the prompts electronically via the chat feature.

I learn best in classes where the teacher _______________.
Students in courses help me learn when they ___________.
I am most likely to participate in classes when __________.
Here’s something that makes it hard to learn in a course.
Here’s something that makes it easy to learn in a course.

Best and worst classes: At the front of the class, whether on a projector, a whiteboard, or within Cafe Learn’s chat feature post: “The best class I’ve ever had” and underneath it “What the teacher did” and below that “What the students did.” On another section write, “The worst class I’ve ever had” and then the same two items beneath. Ask students to share their experiences, without naming the course, department or teacher, and begin filling in their responses based on what they call out. They can do this within Café Learn using the hashtag feature. If there’s a lull or not many comments about what the students did in these classes, add some descriptors based on your experience with some of your best and worst classes. In 10 minutes or less, two very different class portraits emerge. Move to the best class section of the board and tell students that this is the class you want to teach, but that you can’t do it alone. Together you have the power to make this one of those “best class” experiences.

Simple Ice Breaker Activity:

Have the students introduce themselves to their classmates. Encourage them to meet their seat neighbors. In a smaller class, you might have them introduce each other.
Ask students to write down the answer to the following question on their blank paper (without putting their name on it): “What would encourage you to participate in class discussions? Are there rules that your classmates should follow that ensure everyone feels comfortable? What would they be?” You may have another question you would find more useful in your class on day one. The two techniques below work well with any question.
Call on a reporter: After students have had time to complete the question, call on one person to share. Inevitably that person will feel uncomfortable as will the whole class. Now, let that person know they are not going to share their answer. They have a few minutes to gather group answers. They will simply become a “reporter” for surrounding students, and this should take the pressure off the student. In the meantime, have the other students discuss with their group, explaining you might call on some of them too.
Pass the Paper: After you discuss a few of the student answers, try another technique. Have the students pass their note cards randomly to a neighbor. Each student should exchange a notecard with neighbors several more times until the class responses are well shuffled. Now, ask if some students will volunteer to read an interesting answer on the card they have in front of them. Let students know that if they are comfortable, they can always share their own ideas. Shuffling is one way to make people less self-conscious about sharing.

Have Your Students Review the Syllabus
Too often an instructor passes out the syllabus and expects the students to read it on their own. In reality, they do not. Or, often the instructor wastes valuable class time dictating the terms of the syllabus while the students read along. Instead, give your class a purpose to read it! Group students into teams and give them a few minutes to read the syllabus together. Then, using Café Learn’s assessment feature, or a hard copy quiz, have the groups race to complete the quiz. The first group who completes it with a 100% score can receive public recognition or a fun prize…whatever fits your style!

Let us know what activities you’ve used in the past that have proven to build great learning environments, we’d love to share them with the Café Learn community.

Blog post by Andrew Marcelle, Engagement Manager

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Higher Ed Edtech Trends: Looking Back at 2015 and Ahead to 2016...and Beyond

12/15/2015

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Like many of us here at Café Learn, the end of the year is a great time to look back at some of the resolutions and goals we planned earlier this year, see what was accomplished, or what was not. As a company, we do this with our growth plans and ideas for product development. To do so properly, we must assess what's happening around us in the education space and schools, but most importantly by listening to what we've learned from our clients.

Earlier this year many predictions were made about tech growth trends in higher education. In January, the website University Business published an aggregate list of university thought leaders' opinions on what we should have seen this year.

Donald Farish, President, Roger Williams University, Rhode Island, Daniel Porterfield, President, Franklin & Marshall College (PA), and Paul Combe President and CEO, American Student Assistance, all spoke to affordability and the need for higher ed institutions, both private and public, to make education more accessible and cost effective for students. We can probably all agree that this is a trend we'll see in 2016 and beyond.

Mary Hawkins, President, Bellevue University (NB) and Carol A. Leary President of Bay Path University (MS) both spoke to personalized online learning and real-time analytics, to 'trends' that are integral to the Café Learn platform experience, and student success and retention. Add this to, Thomas Bennett’s, Chief Technologist, Delta College (MI) point on academic technology, digital literacy for faculty.

Campus Technology also published a list of trends to watch. Contributing to this list were:
Kyle Bowen, director of education technology, Penn State University
Josh Baron, senior academic technology officer, Marist College
Bob Bramucci, vice chancellor of technology and learning services, South Orange County Community College District
Ed Chapel, senior vice president, NJEDge, and former VP for IT, Montclair State University
Pam McQuesten, vice president, information services and CIO, Southwestern University

The panel detailed the following trends:

Learning spaces
Badges/badging
Analytics
3D printing
Openness (as in open source content and software)
Digital
Consumerism (as in user experience, not monetization)
Adaptive & personalized learning

Looking forward: Todd Zipper, President and Chief Executive Officer at The Learning House, posted a list of trends (some not so new) that are gaining traction now, and might garner more spotlight in 2016. They include:

MOOCs, while not the bright-shiny-object of a few years ago, the experience is being refined and integrated into programs.
Competency-based education, competency-based models, which teach students fine-grained skills rather than concepts, also allow students to apply their experience to their education. This model, which is ideal for older learners or those who are seeking specific skills, can be streamlined for faster completion times.
Learning “boot camps” and nano degrees

Bernard Bull, the Assistant Vice President of Academics & Associate Professor of Education at Concordia University Wisconsin and author the blog Etale - Digital Age Learning also includes MOOCs and Competency-based Education to his list for higher ed trends. His list highlights:

Self-directed and self-blended learning
Customized/personal programming
Virtual reality

We are proponents of many of the 'trends' and frankly see most of these ideas as progress in the digital age and not flash-in-the-pan projects. There are many changes happening in education today, as there is so much need for change. If we work hard developing good and useful tools, and keep our eyes on students and their needs, we'll create accessibility and pathways to both academic and professional success, not just in the next year, but beyond. What are some 'trends' or tools you'd like to use or have developed for your classroom?

Blog post by the team at Café Learn

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Our New Site!

12/3/2015

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We are very excited to have launched our new website. We’re especially excited to share our website with you because it authentically captures what we aim to do in the classroom, in fact, all of the photographs (except for the team headshots) were taken by Nathan Brown, a recent graduate of CSU Dominguez Hills, in Professor Michael Grimshaw’s Management class. These are real students, in a real class, using Café Learn. Here’s what Professor Grimshaw has to say about it:
The team at Café Learn has been extremely supportive and positive to work with and the students have adapted to using it very easily. They use the attendance polling when they first come to class each day and then can use the collaborative features of the ALC to work on their projects and discuss the assignments together with the guidance of the Café Learn portal.
...
I am planning on using the Café Learn programs in the Spring for my 2 MGT 412 classes...the bonus is that the text that we use is included in the small charge that the student pays to be a subscriber so they actually pay very little to use this excellent program in their learning and collaboration.

As we continue to grow as an organization, we have no doubt that we'll continue to learn from the instructors we work with, and their students. Our site will act as an archive of tried and true active learning best practices and resources. Let us know what you think, if you have activities you'd like to share, and if Café Learn sounds like a good fit for your class.

Blog post by the team at Café Learn

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Customer Satisfaction Delivered—What We Learned from Our Engaged Learning CSU BootCamp

8/31/2015

I loved the interactive nature of the BootCamp. It was engaging and full of suggestions based on researched pedagogical perspectives. I came out knowing MUCH more about the CSU's initiatives, Café Learn's platform, and OER availability. In addition, I learned about course design, specific online resources, and teaching techniques to benefit my students. The BootCamp was also relaxed and enjoyable--interacting with other professionals in a casual environment with great food helped to make it a wonderful experience!
Karen Swett, Communications Studies, CSU Northridge

The faculty participants loved the BootCamp. While not everyone surveyed was quite as enthusiastic as Professor Swett, the overall feedback we received universally positive satisfaction ratings from the faculty survey of our debut event. Our participants learned a lot—and so did we. We are still learning how to combine our innovative technology experience with professional development to empower instructors to help their students succeed.

College instructors are looking for help to innovate and evolve their courses—and particularly tools and techniques to engage students in deep learning. And, we are learning how to combine our innovative technology experience with professional development to empower instructors. We welcome assessment, we know how to learn from it and make improvements for the next Engaged Learning BootCamp. Our participants told us that the most valuable and engaging training they received was learning how to create formative and adaptive learning assessment to help their students succeed.
I liked that the Chancellor's office is backing a move towards affordable learning and innovative teaching styles.
Christopher Anicich, Marketing, CSU Fullerton

We are especially pleased that Cal State and other systems and institutions are focused on helping their faculty embrace new course constructs. We created Café Learn to be a course development platform that empowers instructors to embrace and adopt proven teaching strategies. The Café Learn technology allows for the streamlining of this movement. And, the BootCamp provides direct access to educational thought leaders, that gives faculty the practiced confidence to drive student engagement in their classrooms as well as virtually.

The Engaged Learning BootCamp took place at California State University (CSU) Dominguez Hills. The BootCamp was funded by CSU with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This professional development seminar was designed to introduce the faculty to an arsenal of tactics for driving student engagement. This article was originally published in LinkedIn.

Blog post by Carrie O'Donnell, Café Learn CEO and Co-Founder

If You Build It They Will Learn It—Instructors Shape Up at Our Engaged Learning CSU BootCamp

8/24/2015

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog article questioning whether or not education was ripe for innovation. Today, many states are funding and mandating innovation around course design and delivery, and instructors are clamoring for ways to drive student engagement and increase retention rates. I put my money towards supporting these initiatives and committed to empowering instructors and institutions to make great course design accessible and affordable. This month, my partners and I launched Café Learn, a platform for higher education innovation.

Similarly to two years ago, I’m again writing while on the road, but this time I'm NOT returning from a lecture-based conference on disruption in education. This time I'm coming from a hands-on professional development experience designed and managed by Café Learn, my own innovative and disruptive company--our first Engaged Learning BootCamp at California State University (CSU) Dominguez Hills. The BootCamp, funded by CSU with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, was designed and organized to introduce the faculty to the Café Learn platform, and to provide an arsenal of tactics for driving student engagement.

During the BootCamp, we focused on how to design campus-based courses that focus on student mastery of outcomes and content affordability. Julie Schell, an international expert in Peer Instruction, flipped classrooms, and pedagogical innovation debunked some of the myths around flipping the classroom. For example, she confirmed that lectures still have great value—as long as they're delivered in chunks and broken up with other learning activities. TJ Bliss, Program Officer in the Education Program at the Hewlett Foundation, led a candid conversation about Open Educational Resources.
Leaders at CSU facilitated hands-on workshops and then participants worked in course-based cohorts to build their courses. Leslie Kennedy of CSU Affordable Learning Solutions explained the CSU AL$ initiative and provided strategies for finding and curating affordable, library and open education resources. Emily Magruder, system-wide head of faculty development, helped faculty to create outcomes-based courses, and Debra Jackson of CSU Bakersfield provided innovative approaches to assessment. Mary-Pat Stein, of CSU Northridge, brought down the house while introducing us to a slew of free (or close to free)student engagement tools.

The two-day event drew instructors from 17 CSU institutions, who worked in discipline-based cohorts to build their courses engaging AND affordable courses using the Café Learn platform. A cohort of business professors from Fullerton, Dominguez Hills, and Bakersfield, for example, brainstormed on ways to share outcomes and related resources across the business curricula. They connected as colleagues, didn’t hesitate to share and discuss issues they'd face trying to engage with their students, and were empowered to create the course experience of the future, together.
Again I ask, is education ripe for innovation? Of course it is, but as Julie Schell noted, “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the pedagogy.” Café Learn makes it easy to deliver learning experiences that are based on great pedagogy. Our platform empowers instructors to create engaging and successful class experiences—not to mention, have some fun. We can all agree with Mary-Pat Stein, “Make it fun, every day. I know that if I’m not having fun, they're not having fun.

Blog post by Carrie O'Donnell, Café Learn CEO and Co-Founder. This article was originally posted on Linkedin.

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ideas and research
on high impact learning

EdSurge Adaptive Learning Meetup

Getting Your Students Excited and Engaged in the Classroom

Active Learning Is Trending in 2016

Hello, Instructors!

Higher Ed Edtech Trends: Looking Back at 2015 and Ahead to 2016...and Beyond

Our New Site!

Customer Satisfaction Delivered—What We Learned from Our Engaged Learning CSU BootCamp

If You Build It They Will Learn It—Instructors Shape Up at Our Engaged Learning CSU BootCamp

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