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Clicking With Students
In addition to the thousands of freshmen and transfer students who arrived on the SDSU campus this fall, a new approach to undergraduate instruction also made its first appearance.
Mark Laumakis, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, is teaching a 500-student section of introductory psychology in a blended learning (or hybrid) format.
Blended learning involves integrating typical face-to-face classroom activities with online learning activities.
In his course, Laumakis is combining face-to-face lectures in the new, state-of-the-art lecture hall in the new Arts ands Letters building with online sessions delivered via Horizon Wimba, a web-conferencing tool that is integrated into the SDSU Blackboard course management system.
“Blended learning affords me the opportunity to leverage the strengths of both the face-to-face and online learning environments to help my students learn better,” said Laumakis, who has been a lecturer at SDSU for seven years.
Engaged Teaching and Learning
The face-to-face lectures are not your typical lectures, featuring a “sage on the stage” droning on and on in front of semi-conscious students.
Laumakis employs a highly engaging, interactive approach to teaching his 500 students. He makes extensive use of a new audience response system to engage his students and to help them be more active in the classroom.
Known as the Classroom Performance System (CPS), the practice involves the students’ use of a “clicker,” a remote control-like device that sends a signal to the instructor’s computer at the front of the classroom.
Students use remote control-like devices, known as clickers, to interact with instructors in large lecture halls.
(ITS and Aztec Shops are hosting an informational session about clickers. The event comes with a free lunch!)
Immediate Feedback
Laumakis frequently uses ConceptCheck questions integrated into his PowerPoint presentation slides to get immediate feedback on student comprehension of course content.
He also uses the clickers to poll the class and to do demonstrations, including demonstrations that permit the gathering of real-time classroom data to demonstrate the serial position effect.
Student feedback has been almost uniformly positive.
“Students enjoy the interactivity that the clickers provide and they also like getting to see right away if they are learning what’s being taught,” Laumakis said. “I like the immediate feedback that I get as an instructor, which lets me know if students are comprehending what I’m teaching them.”
Laumakis also noted the improved attendance that has resulted from his use of CPS clickers in his course.
“I used to struggle to get 300 students to show up for lecture,” he said. “Now I have 430 students or more there for every class. It’s amazing!”
More Blended Learning
Online sessions in Laumakis’ Introductory Psychology course are delivered via Horizon Wimba, a new tool available to SDSU faculty this year.
Horizon Wimba affords instructors the opportunity to combine voice, PowerPoint, and even web-based content to be delivered to students in synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Laumakis has designed his blended learning course to include approximately 40 percent online sessions to go along with 60 percent face-to-face sessions.
“Students seem to appreciate the flexibility that the online sessions in the blended course afford them,” says Laumakis. “They often attend the live sessions, which are held during the normal meeting time for the course, but they have the option of viewing recorded archives of the live sessions at their leisure. Students have told me that they appreciate the ability to review confusing content as much as necessary when viewing archived online sessions.”
Typical Activities
Typical online session activities include mini-lectures, demonstrations and web site-sharing.
Laumakis has also made extensive use of the polling tool in Horizon Wimba, which he uses in much the same way that he uses the CPS clicker questions in the face-to-face sessions.
Students can answer ConceptCheck questions, give their opinions, and participate in demonstrations from the comfort of their own home or dorm room. Students can “raise their hands” virtually and use a text chat box to ask questions as the online session proceeds.
In these ways, the online sessions provide similar levels of interactivity and the opportunity for active learning on the part of students.
Positive Feedback
Preliminary student feedback regarding the blended learning format in introductory psychology has been quite positive.
More than 80 percent of students who participate in the live online sessions rate them as good or better and a similarly high percentage of students rate the online sessions as being the same as or better than face-to-face lectures.
With increased enrollments seen for years to come at SDSU and with increased class sizes becoming the norm, blended learning represents a potentially powerful tool for instructors at SDSU.
Blended learning promises to offer the best of both worlds, engaging students during face-to-face lectures and reaching out to them to be similarly engaged with their coursework via interactive online class sessions.
The Department of Psychology is excited to be involved in these cutting-edge innovations aimed at integrating exciting technologies with sound pedagogy.
More Information
Laumakis is a pICT (People, Information and Communication Technologies) Fellow. pICT is supported by San Diego State University’s Qualcomm Institute for Innovation and Educational Success and housed in the Division of Undergraduate Studies.
The goal of the pICT is to develop SDSU’s undergraduates’ 21st century skills, knowledge and dispositions, by designing programs and initiatives that develop the faculty’s capacity to integrate principles of learning, digital know-how and 21st century key competencies in undergraduate general education courses.