Incorporating Affordable Learning Solutions

From my experience as an undergraduate, I was unable to afford college textbooks.  I had to hope I could get access to textbooks in the university library, but that was not always possible as other students may have already borrowed the books.  Not to mention the additional time and effort it would take to simply go to the library, and yet you could still come back empty-handed.  As a result, a major part of my success in some college courses was dependent on how well the instructor covered the required material, the resources that the instructor provided, and how much the instructor aligned their instructional materials with their assessments.  It was not an ideal learning situation, but my finances dictated such an approach for several of my college classes.

As part the DISCOVERe tablet initiative at Fresno State, I have learned about California State University (CSU)'s Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) program.  The purpose of CSU's AL$ is to reduce course costs through a variety of Open Educational Resources (OERs), so that more students can access the materials they need to be successful in their college courses.  Given my experience as an undergraduate, I knew AL$ was something I definitely wanted to take advantage of for the college courses I currently teach.

I was initially apprehensive about finding anything relevant for my courses, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the open-source, freely available resources for science courses.  For example, in my initial searches I found an Introductory Chemistry text that covers all the material in my General Chemistry course.  For my Physical Science class, I also found two Introductory Physics texts.  More recently, I was directed to the OER commons website that also includes many terrific resources for introductory science courses.

Now that I have found such resources, the question is how to incorporate them into my courses?  It is not an automatic transition, because there are already prescribed texts for the larger science courses I teach. These prescribed texts have been agreed on through previous instructor and department meetings, and book orders have already been placed for the academic year.  As a starter, I have provided the aforementioned OER resources to my students, but I have still noted the department prescribed text in my syllabus.  I have also moved my homework activities from a publisher website that comes with the prescribed text to Blackboard instead, which is free for students.  As such, students are not tied to the prescribed text unless they prefer to buy it. Therefore, each of my 200+ students can now save themselves $100-250 each semester.  As for the long-term, broader discussions are needed across instructors and the department to see how AL$ can be embedded more so that all students can benefit.

Integrating Student Tablets Into Lectures

Over the spring semester and a week in the summer I completed a professional development course at Fresno State for an initiative known as DISCOVERe.  The purpose of the DISCOVERe program is to support faculty in redesigning their courses to leverage the benefits of tablets, so that students can improve their conceptual knowledge while also developing their technology skill-set.  I will be teaching my tablet-supported General Chemistry class starting next week with over 100 students.  I hope to share some of the things I learn over the course of the semester through blog posts and to gain insight from others.

Before taking the DISCOVERe course I was a little skeptical about students using tablets within a lecture-based approach.  From my research, I know many ways that educational technology benefits students' learning.  However, using tablets in lectures presented me with a mismatch of what is typically a teacher-centered approach and the student-centered approach that using tablets would require.  I realized that DISCOVERe was asking me much more than to simply use tablets.  DISCOVERe was asking me to question my role and my students' role within my classes in order to effectively leverage the benefit of tablets.

In terms of Chemistry Education, there are great and open-source simulations that help explain many microscopic concepts such as the atom, concentration or pH.  Such concepts are difficult for students to grasp given that such phenomena cannot be seen with the naked eye.  Some examples of helpful simulations to support students include PhET simulations, Molecular Workbench, and Chemcollective. Before the DISCOVERe program, I was using these resources in a mostly didactic manner through demonstrations, despite a Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) approach.  Students would make predictions about a phenomenon through iClickers, I would demo the simulation, and then I would call on individual students to offer explanations. 

The prediction part of my POE approach was fine, but the advantage of using tablets this semester is that my students can now simply follow a link to observe and explore the simulations, as opposed to being bored by observing me do a demonstration.  My role can now switch from demonstrating to ensuring all students are able to use the simulation on their own.  Further, through the DISCOVERe program, I had the opportunity to trial Socrative, which allows for students to submit open-ended responses.  I previously had obvious difficulty in getting a response from all students in a large lecture class given time constraints, but through Socrative all students have an opportunity to participate and share their ideas on the simulations.  I will be able to view student responses in real time to get a much broader sense of their understanding than before and know what conceptual challenges to target.

I am looking forward to thinking about other ways to take advantage of tablets in my course throughout the semester.  I can already see from the activities I am developing that there will be better opportunities for student engagement.  I think what might be challenging is if students are ready to see their role as taking more ownership.  Much of this responsibility can reside with individual students, but I can help this process by setting clear expectations of students' role at the beginning of the semester and by consistently using activities that align with such expectations.