a surprising misconception

I spent much of the weekend marking first-year biology exam papers. It was a lovely weekend & I really didn’t want to miss all the nice weather, so I ended up finishing the task well after midnight last night. And in the process I identified evidence of what is, on the surface, a really puzzling misconception, one that relates to the effects of X-chromosome inactivation.

Now, we’d spent quite a while in class discussing X-chromosome inactivation in female mammals: why it happens, how it happens, & its phenotypic effects (anhydrotic ectodermal dysplasia, anyone?). One of the images I used in this discussion was of Venus, a tortoiseshell cat with an extremely unusual colour pattern:

This image comes from the NBC News site, but Venus is a very famous purrball who even has her own Facebook page, and I’ve blogged about her previously. She’s either a chimera, or we’re seeing a most unusual (but not unique) example of the typical X-inactivation tortoiseshell coat pattern. Anyway, I used a similar image of Venus and asked

What is the most likely explanation for the colour pattern shown in the coat of this female cat?

And about 90% of the class answered, “co-dominance”. Which really made me stop & think.

Why? Because it suggests that, while I’m sure they could quote me chapter and verse regarding a definition of co-dominance, they haven’t really thought any further about what that means in phenotypic terms. For if codominance were in play here, with both alleles for coat colour being expressed in each cell where the gene’s active, then we shouldn’t see that clear definition of the two halves of the cat’s face. Instead, both should be a fleckled mix (is ‘fleckled’ a word? Yes, it is; Shakespeare for the win once more) of black & golden hairs (rather like roan coats in cattle & horses).

And this gives me pause – & cause – for thought, because this isn’t a mix-up that I’d have even considered before. Is ‘codominance’ their shorthand for one gene, or the other, being expressed (due to X-inactivation)? Or do they really think that’s how codominance works? If so, it does suggest that a) I didn’t really explain codominance (or X-inactivation) all that well this year, & b) I need to review what I do before teaching that particular session again.

 

 

reflections on using AdobeConnect in a tutorial

Recently I went to a couple of seminars/tutorials on using AdobeConnect in teaching & learning. As I vaguely remember saying somewhere else, this bit of software looked a bit like panopto might, if it were on steroids, & I could see how it could be a very useful tool for use in my classes. Not least because (as you’ll have gathered from my last post), there’s some concern around student engagement, particularly among those who don’t actually come to lectures, & AdobeConnect seemed to offer a means of enhancing engagement even if students aren’t physically present.

I decided that I’d like to trial it in the two pre-exam tutorials I’m running this week (my class has its Bio exam on Friday – the last day of the exam period. No prizes for guessing what I’ll be doing for most of the upcoming weekend :( ) I would really, really like to use it during lectures, so that students not physically on campus can still join in, but, small steps…

So, first I set up my ‘meeting’. Work has made this easy by adding an AdobeConnect widget to the ‘activity’ options in Moodle, so that was pretty straightforward; I just needed to make the session ‘private’ so that students signed in using their moodle identity. The harder part of the exercise lay in deciding what to actually do when in the meeting room. In the end I set it up with a welcome from me, a ‘chat’ area, so students could ‘talk’ with each other & ask questions, and a ‘whiteboard’ so that I could draw (& type) in response to those questions. And, when the class actually started, I spent a few minutes showing everyone there (the 20 or so who were there in the flesh, & the 8 present via the net) what each of those ‘pods’ was for & how to use them.

You certainly have to keep on your toes when interacting with a mix of actual & virtual class members! My thoughts & observations, in no particular order:

• remember to press ‘record’ right at the start, if you’re intending to record a session!
• next time (ie tomorrow) I’ll remind those physically present that they can log into the meeting room too – this could, I suppose, be distracting, but it also means that they would be able to participate in polls, for example. I did it myself, at the launch of our ‘connect week’, just to see what everything looked like from the on-line perspective.
• it was really, really good to see the ‘virtual’ students not only commenting & asking questions, but also answering each other’s questions. I hadn’t expected that and it was a very positive experience.
• but do make sure that you encourage this cohort to take part; they need to know that you welcome their participation.
• the rest of the class seemed to quite enjoy having others interacting from a distance.
• next time, I’ll bring & wire in my tablet, & use that rather than the room computer. This is because I do a lot of drawings when I’m running a tut, and while you can draw on the AC whiteboards, using a mouse to do this is not conducive to nice smooth lines & clear, precise writing. I <3 touchscreens!
• it’s very important to remember to repeat questions asked by those in the room: the microphone’s not likely to pick their voices up, & if you don’t repeat the question then the poor virtual attendees won’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about.
• with a pre-exam tut it’s hard to predict what resources might be used, in terms of powerpoints, web links & so on. For a lecture I’d be uploading the relevant files right at the start (ppts, video links & so on), but today I was pretty much doing things on the fly. However, I’m running another tut tomorrow & have put links to a couple of likely youtube videos into the meeting page already.
• Internet Explorer seems to ‘like’ some AC actions more than Chrome; the latter wasn’t all that cooperative about ‘sharing my screen’, which seemed to me to be a better option than uploading at one point in proceedings.
• as a colleague said, doing it this way meant that overall I had more people in class than would have been the case if I’d only run it kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face) – what’s not to like?
• for me, the whole session was quite invigorating, & I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of learning to use a new piece of software to improve the classroom experience.

Mind you, on that last – it was my impression that the classroom experience was improved. And you’ll have gathered that I truly did have fun. But I’m not a learner in the way that my students are. So I asked them for feedback (interestingly, so far I’ve had only one comment + my response on Moodle, but as you’ll see we’ve had a reasonable dialogue on Facebook) – and here’s what they said:

So next year I will definitely be using this during lectures, and to interact with my Schol Bio group & their teachers – and I think we’ll definitely have one tut a week (out of the total of 6 that we offer) that’s via AC, so that students that can’t come onto campus can still  get the benefits of that sort of learning environment.

angst around lecture recordings

These days there seems to be a fair bit of angst in the tearoom, centred around using panopto: students are watching panopto recordings (or not) rather than coming to class, and for some colleagues this seems to be a Bad Thing & should be Stopped.

Now I’ll admit that I see a drop in numbers attending the lecture, from time to time – usually ahead of a test in another paper, when students want a bit more revision time, or when there’s an essay due for me & they’ve left things till the last minute. And there are a range of other reasons for students preferring ‘virtual’ classes over the real thing (eg Karnad, 2013). Personally I’m fine with that; students have a lot of conflicting demands on their time and if they choose to manage those demands by dealing with the most pressing issue first & catching up on class later, I don’t see it as a huge problem (apart from the fact that I wish some of them would develop some better time management skills, & maybe we need to look at how we help with that). And the reality is that we’re going to come under increasing pressure to deliver a truly flexible learning experience as population demographics change.

So it’s saddening to hear comments along the lines of ‘well, we should leave the recordings up for just a week, to force students to watch them soon after delivery’. This really runs counter to the idea of supporting flexibilty, & also of encouraging truly independent learning. I mean, on the one hand I’m often told that our students are adults now and we shouldn’t be keeping tabs on things like lab attendance, and yet on the other there’s this quite punitive attitude around coming to/viewing lectures. Talk about contradictions!

Yes, of course there are things we can do better! A conversation with each semester’s classes around using lecture recordings ‘properly’ eg watching in a timely manner, and what the literature tells us about the results of not doing this, certainly wouldn’t go amiss, and would help our students really start to come to terms with the realities of a modern university. (Here’s an example of good practice in this aspect of teaching & learning, one that I think that my own institution could well emulate.)

But we should also think about how to change our own techniques so that students actually want to be in every lecture that they can possibly attend. If they perceive no additional benefits in a kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face) class, compared to a recording, then there is no incentive to come along. As the (anonymous) author of this excellent resource for teachers says

Students will want to attend the live lecture because of the way you structure it to include some interactivity and will then obtain further value from reviewing portions of the live lecture as they add to their notes and reflect in order to deepen their understanding.

While the author makes it clear that making lecture recordings available can have a positive impact on student learning and on retention, they also point out that there’s little benefit overall if lectures follow the ‘traditional’ format. (Now where have we heard that before?)

Research suggests that recording traditional lectures adds relatively little pedagogical value to the student learning experience. Therefore add pedagogical value by ‘seeding’ the face-to-face lecture with student tasks or activities, or follow-up questions for discussion and research, so that students can benefit from reviewing your lecture recording and use it to add depth to the reflections that they are already making in the live lecture.

For after all,

[the] main goal of providing recorded lectures is to engage students in blended learning experiences that facilitate a flexible self-paced mode of learning and review that supplements rather than replaces the need to attend the face-to-face lecture.

Karnad, A. (2013) Student use of recorded lectures: A report reviewing recent research into the use of lecture capture technology in higher education, and its impact on teaching methods and attendance. LSE Report.

University of Canterbury (no date) Best practices for recording lectures. Echo 360 for staff