Center for Teaching and Learning

Dr. Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. His scholarship addresses emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. His funded research includes four grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education to explore immersive and semi-immersive simulations as a means of student engagement, learning, and assessment. Dr. Dede’s co-edited book, Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement, was published by Jossey-Bass in 2005. A second volume he edited, Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods, was published by the Harvard Education Press in 2006. In 2007, Dr. Dede was honored by Harvard University as an outstanding teacher. On September 23, 2009, Dr. Dede presented at Austin Peay State University.

Before his presentation, he and I had a chance to sit down and talk, and I asked him the following question:

If we teachers reorganize our lectures into five-minute chapters in order to facilitate our students’ media-influenced attention spans, are we not forfeiting an opportunity to help build our students’ memories? Will we not ill-prepare our students for the concentration they’ll need in the workforce?

Before he answered the question, Dr. Dede pointed out that often in the workforce, a three-minute pitch to the boss in the elevator is more productive than an hour presentation in the conference room. In other words, effective brevity is just as important as a longer, more comprehensive approach.

He also argued that “concentration” doesn’t mean “concentration on one thought.” A complicated study is a weaving of multiple thoughts, a synthesis. So the pedagogical imperative is not that we teach our students to concentrate on one idea at a time.

With those caveats in place, Dr. Dede doubted the premise of my question. He didn’t believe that teachers should reorganize their lectures into five-minute chapters, even when they’re podcasting their lectures. He argued that students will listen to a speaker or an audio-visual file for an hour and a half if the presentation is interesting. Millennial students do not require soundbites in order to process information.

But they do require an engaging presentation of that information. Due to the wiki-structure of their user-created world, millennial students often do not accept titles like “professor” or “Dr.” as representations of authority. If the rhetoric of a blog is more convincing than that of a news site, millennial students will believe the blog over the news site. Rhetorical power is key to this millennial world of earned, not position-granted, authority.

Dr. Dede suggested that teachers determine their students’ starting places and then move them to the learning objectives. If students have five-minute attention spans, then the teacher might organize the early lectures to suit those attention spans, earn his or her position of authority through rhetorically effective presentations, and expand and complicate the lectures over the course of the semester.

I found Dr. Dede’s answer to be worthy of reflection. Not too long ago, pedagogues shunned the charismatic teacher for emphasizing his or her own likability over the importance of the material. If millennial students rely on rhetorical power to judge authority, do we not have to reconsider, at least in part, the pedagogical value of charisma? Is there a rhetorically powerful way of presenting all of the complex topics in the natural sciences? What are the implications of our having to rely on rhetorical persuasiveness to convince students that they should evaluate sources based on criteria other than rhetorical persuasiveness? Is an easily distracted student merely in an earlier stage of synthesis? Does our modeling the synthetic approach with our lectures and examples really move such a student to that more developed stage?

Both at Austin Peay and nationwide, course redesign has become a popular means of improving the retention of students. The idea behind course redesign is not to lower our expectations of students so that more students pass, but rather to rethink the ways we teach a course in order to better accommodate our students’ learning processes. So how do we brainstorm a redesign proposal? What should we take into consideration?

A standard way we can increase our students’ access to course material is to offer them many points of entry into that material. We can provide visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic options for our students to satisfy each learning objective. Some students have even undisclosed learning disabilities that impose obstacles to one particular learning style. Other students prefer one learning style over another. Often, students require the use of multiple learning styles before they can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. How can we provide these multiple options for our students to satisfy each learning objective?

It is true that most redesign efforts broach differences in students’ learning styles by hosting the course material in a variety of media online — or through purchased computer programs that purportedly resolve those differences. These technological approaches, however, do not always work.

What if a D2L shell becomes a mere repository for uploaded materials? Only those students who are already motivated to take the learning process into their own hands will bother with the uploaded resources. Moreover, not even those more motivated students are guaranteed to benefit from those resources. Without guidance, even motivated students can experience what we might call a “Baskin-Robins paralysis”: When there are a 101 options, many people don’t know which ones to choose and become paralyzed with indecision and inaction. Uploaded materials do not inherently encourage the students’ engagement, especially when those uploaded materials are not interactive.

Let us not forget the social element. No matter how good they are, neither digital resources nor purchased computer programs can resolve learning differences without a teacher’s drawing those diverse digital examples and exercises into class discussions. Most students learn socially. Until they experience other people’s interest in a topic and associate that topic with their own personal objectives (classroom social status or some higher objective), information remains meaningless to them. It lacks social signification.

The simple solution to all of these problems: departmental workshops.

1.) The more faculty members discuss how to encourage students to access learning resources, the more their students might use those resources.

2.) The more faculty members share with each other strategies for guiding students, for teaching them how to choose appropriate resources for their own specific learning habits, the more their students might discover an intimate relationship with learning.

3.) The more faculty members experiment with creating interactive course materials, the more their students might interact with those materials and retain some of that material under their fingernails — and perhaps more importantly, bring it with them, even beyond the confines of the course.

4.) The more faculty members explore how to take students’ solitary learning activities and transform them into social engagements, the more their students might engage the material while alone, specifically in order to interact better with their peers in the learning community.

Regular departmental conversations are important for a successful course redesign.

What if the departmental culture opposes a technologically enhanced course? Neither targeting different learning styles nor any of the four points outlined above requires technology. Technology is a tool, not an objective.

Student engagement with the material is the objective. An increase of student engagement will improve retention and graduation rates and enhance student learning. Brainstorm how to achieve the objective, not how to use technology in the classroom. Both your peers and students will thank you for it.