barralopolis

Designing for Online and Blended Learning: FLIP

April 28, 2019

barralopolis general flipped classroom, general, ONL191, online education, online teaching Leave a comment

A (digitally) flipped graffiti from Buenos Aires

This week’s scenario was about an instructor who is excited about online learning and wants to get started with a course of her own:

“I am keen to design my own online or blended learning course … I think I must …try to illustrate in a visual way what a good online or blended learning design could look like. I wonder which activity, module or course I should choose? “

My first thought was “Oh, my sweet summer child,” something Old Nan from the Game of Thrones books says to the Stark children. Meaning, you have not known the terrible winter yet. Online learning can do indeed amazing things. It can also be awful if not designed well. And when starting on the path, as in all innovations, there is always a curve of pain. No matter how much we follow the design principles and do our best, it takes some time to “get” online learning well.

Our group came up with lots of great thoughts and ideas about online course design, centered around the community of inquiry framework. My contribution was much more focused, related to a specific subtype of blended learning called flipped learning.

“Flipping” a classroom sounds quite logical: let’s put the repetitive content online and let’s do active learning in person. However, there is a difference between “flipped” classroom and “flipped” learning, per the Flipped Learning Network, a respected community of practice. They define flipped learning as a pedagogical approach where “direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.”

The website is chock full of information, tools, research, and all kinds of ways to learn about FLIP. In this blog posting, however, I would like to share briefly my own experience flipping a general biology course. My colleague and I started with backward design- what did we want students to be able to do at the end of each topic?- and scaffolded the material accordingly. Lectures were recorded in palatable (less than 15 minutes) chunks. Low stakes quizzes were assigned to the recordings to make students watch them. In the classroom, we had short lectures to address particularly challenging topics, and designed a variety of hands-on, inquiry-based activities. Our classrooms became noisy (because students were asking questions and discussing with each other) and dynamic. They chose a research topic of their interest, but had to discuss it with their peers. Liberated from the tyranny of long lectures, the instructors were able to interact more with the students, and go deeper into the material. Online discussions helped interactions between students. And…seems like students learned more also. This study was recently published.

Although the flipped classroom method has been in use for more than 15 years, it still has no unified theoretical framework or methodology (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Zuber, 2016), and it continues to present widely varied implementations across educational settings and academic disciplines (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Estes et al., 2014; Lage et al., 2000; Uzunboylu & Karagozlu, 2015; Zuber, 2016). So, I am not surprised that there are still lots of questions around what “flipping” means.

So going back to the original scenario…I would not start fully online. I would start with a flipped section (not the whole course). In fact, no need to record lectures right away- there is plenty of good quality material already available that just needs to be curated. And I would always have surveys and some kind of assessment to compare how students are doing. It is an iterative process, and it will take a few times to make it work right.

References

Barral, A.M., Ardi, V., Simmons, R.E. 2018. Accelerated Introductory Biology Course is Significantly Enhanced by a Flipped Learning Environment. CBE Life Sciences Education, 17(3) https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-07-0129

Bishop, J., & Verleger, M. A. (2013). The Flipped Classroom : A Survey of the Research. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (p. 23.1200.1-23.1200.18). https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2013.6684807

Estes. M. D., Ingram, R., & Liu, J. C. (2014). A review of flipped classroom research, practice, and technologies. International HETL Review, 4(7).

Flipped Learning Network. (2014). What Is Flipped Learning ? The Four Pillars of F-L-I-P. Flipped Learning Network, 501(c), 2.

Lage, M. M. J., Platt, G. G. J., & Treglia, M. (2000). Inverting the Classroom: A Gateway to Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220480009596759

Uzunboylu, H., & Karagozlu, D. (2015). Flipped classroom: A review of recent literature. World Journal on Educational Technology, 7(2), 142. https://doi.org/10.18844/wjet.v7i2.46

Zuber, W. J. (2016). The flipped classroom, a review of the literature. Industrial and Commercial Training, 48(2), 97–103. https://doi.org/10.1108/ICT-05-2015-0039

Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

April 12, 2019

barralopolis general emotion, general, ONL191, online education, online teaching 1 Comment

Topic 3 of the ONL191 course was difficult. For a number of personal circumstances (myself included) only a few could participate in each synchronous lesson. The ones I participated in included interesting and thought provoking discussions. Two major issues came together, the collaborative and the online aspect of learning. How to make them work at the same time is quite a challenge. Another aspects that was touched on, but not deepened during the second meeting I attended was the fact that participants are very different- there can be cultural and/or language barriers. So there is no one list of things to do- there are lists of best practices, and which ones are applied depends quite a bit from the context of the group.

Personally, I struggled to find my niche in the conversation, but Anne saved me when she suggested I could draw from my experience teaching and facilitating online to contribute.

Now the funny thing is, most what I know about facilitation of groups is not something I have learned as a scholar. For more than 10 years I have facilitated conflict resolution workshops inside prisons and in the community as a volunteer, and along the way learned many tricks of bringing people together. Most of them have to do with finding what is shared among participants, listening and communication skills, and practicing empathy. I soon realized that those skills were useful in my teaching, and started to apply them in the classroom.

There are numerous variations of exercises like the one shown in the video, in which participants share aspects of their lives and relate to each other. In real life you would start with less sensitive statements and as group trust grows one introduces more personal topics.

Some of those tools can be applied and even enhanced online! One of my favorite icebreakers for online introductions is asking students to post a picture that is meaningful for them and share why, then ask others to comment. Some students will post pictures of themselves or their families, others will post about favorite places or activities. But it is amazing how much can be learned from one picture and the story that goes with it. People posting kid pictures immediately connect with each other, as those who have similar hobbies or traveled to the same places.

For online social presence I learned a lot from Michelle Pacansky-Brock. She has consistently worked on bringing awareness to the importance of community building online, and the tools to achieve it.

So, I confess, for this topic I worked my contributions a bit backwards- I started with the tools I use and then went looking for scholarly references to support them. Luckily I did not have to search too far- in an excellent review of online course design, which I go back regularly by Jaggars & Xu, there was plenty of discussion about the importance of social presence in online courses. And this blog posting about online collaboration by Terence Brake (thank you Anne for the tips) covers both practical (structure, timing, recording) and more social aspects such as language and inclusiveness.

At the end, I felt again the need to learn more about these emotional/social aspects, which tend to get into the field of psychology and learning. This topic coincided with a busy schedule at a conference and then a few days of unwinding visiting family, so I feel quite accomplished that I could even make it!

References

Terence Brake Nine tips for leading more collaborative conversations (2019) https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/features/nine-tips-leading-more-collaborative-conversations

brocansky.com by Michelle Pacansky-Brock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. ·
Evans, C. (2013). Making Sense of Assessment Feedback in Higher Education. Review of Educational Research, 83(1), 70–120. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654312474350
Jaggars, S.S. & Xu, D. How do online course design features influence student performance?, Computers & Education, Volume 95, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.01.014

Openness and OER

March 30, 2019

barralopolis ONL191 Education, OER, ONL191, online education 2 Comments

Flowers in 2 colors…metaphor for commercial and OER. Author’s picture.

Yesterday a friend of ours came to visit after a 2 month trip to different countries of Europe- he is very cosmopolitan. We chatted and shared our enjoyment of wide-ranging stimulating conversations on multiple topics. He because he had met a lot of interesting people during his travels and I because of ONL191. Seriously! One of the most enjoyable aspects of the course is when we have our zoom meetings and we look at the same prompt and come up with many different ideas.

As the topic lead for topic #2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness, I thought this would be much easier than Topic 1 about digital literacies. Hah! The collective brain of group #10 sprung into action and suddenly we had multiple threads going. Yes many of them were overlapping, but they were still distinct. That included looking at people’s attitudes to change, at different types of open (e.g. Creative Commons) licensing, open journals, open textbooks, quality…it is Saturday afternoon here in California and I am still collecting the material from my group members.

Helena Loof from my group brought in the Pencil analogy for adoption of technologies and I love it. I hope I’m one of the sharp ones…feels like it. On the other hand I have been very slow with OERs, and this week’s topic has been a bit of soul searching as to why. And to help that, I decided to focus on OERs for teaching, specifically textbooks. They are in vogue- check out this report by Seaman and Seaman (2018).

http://www.e-learn.nl/media/blogs/e-learn/quick-uploads/p1238/hewlett-pencil-metaphor.jpg?mtime=1450618533

Disclaimer: in my university, I have the responsibility of being a “Course Lead” for a number of courses, most of them high volume and taught by multiple faculty. So a decision to adopt let’s say an OER textbook for the course is not only affecting my course, it affects all the faculty teaching the course. And that’s when things get complicated.

Textbooks are more than just textbooks. The pure content of basic chemistry or anatomy is probably not going to change a lot between any type of book. But do I or any of the other instructors have time to actually read the OER book to be sure everything is correct? Don’t we love the instructor companion sites of commercial books where we can download the slides, figures, and testbanks that go with the book so we do not have to prepare them ourselves? Research indicates that many faculty cite lack of trust in the quality of OER material and lack of ancillary resources in OER textbooks as their barriers to adoption (Hassall & Lewis, 2017).

Except that we still have to. The courses I have taught for many years now, I have chopped down much of the unnecessary content coming from the publisher material, corrected and improved the test questions, curated videos, recorded materials, made much better presentations…probably spent more time on fixing the commercial content than I would have needed to start from scratch.

And then of course, is the thorny issue of quality (Delgado et al, 2019). Do the writers of OER materials have the time and motivation to rigorously proofread their work and keep it to date? Another aspect that was not discussed widely in our group was accessibility. Do OER materials comply to requirements that the materials are compatible with screen readers for visually impaired students? Are all audiovisual materials close captioned or transcribed?

Of course the main question is, does the use of OERs benefit our students? One of the main reasons to use them is cost (Griffith et al, 2018;Martin et al, 2017). Commercial textbooks are expensive, and it is known that many students do not buy or even rent the books. Just by providing access to materials should in principle improve student learning. However, studies are fuzzy and conclusions hard to decipher (Johnson, 2018,Judith & Bull, 2016)

Personally, I love the idea of using OERs but am held back by many of the aspects discussed above. It is my hope that creative solutions can be made to combine the openness and low/no cost of OERs with stability and support.

In one of my courses, an online nonmajors general biology course, we reached a good compromise. Through negotiations with a smaller commercial publisher, we got a very discounted price for 6 month access to their product in an electronic format. The product is embedded into the LMS and charged as an additional fee, so all students have access to it from day 1. This product is more than the book- it has adaptive quizzes, which are very popular among students, animations, videos, and a rich testbank. Instructors are free to use additional OER material. For me, this combines the best of the 2 worlds- the support and reliability of commercial publishing with the flexibility and freshness of OER.

Indeed, the supposedly “narrower” topic did balloon into a many-headed Hydra. I do enjoy how an open-ended prompt can bring so many different perspectives. Once done, I’ll update with the finished Prezi presentation. Until then, stay tuned!

UPDATED: here is the link to our Prezi- enjoy!

References

Delgado, H., Delgado, M., & Hilton III, J. (2019). On the Efficacy of Open Educational Resources. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 20(1). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3892

Griffiths, R., Gardner, S., Lundh, P., Shear, L., Ball, A., Mislevy, J., Wang, S.,
Desrochers, D., Staisloff, R. (2018). Participant Experiences and Financial
Impacts: Findings from Year 2 of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.

Hassall, C. and Lewis, D.I. Institutional and technological barriers to the use of open educational resources (OERs) in physiology and medical education Advances in Physiology Education 2017 41:1, 77-81

Johnson, S. (2018, October 11). Does OER actually improve learning?. EdSurge.

JUDITH, Kate; BULL, David. Assessing the potential for openness: A framework for examining course-level OER implementation in higher education. education policy analysis archives, [S.l.], v. 24, p. 42, mar. 2016. ISSN 1068-2341. Available at: <https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1931>. Date accessed: 30 mar. 2019. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.1931.

Martin, M., Belikov, O., Hilton III, J., Wiley, D., & Fischer, L. (2017). Analysis of Student and Faculty Perceptions of Textbook Costs in Higher Education. Open Praxis, 9(1), 79-91. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.9.1.432

Seaman, J. E., & Seaman, J. (2018). Freeing the textbook: Educational resources in U.S. higher education, 2018. Babson Survey Research Group. [Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0]

The Importance of Culture in Learning

March 11, 2019

barralopolis general digital literacy, general, ONL191, online education 3 Comments

The first topic in the ONL191 course is Online participation & digital literacies. Both the introduction to the topic and the related webinar asked us to reflect on our digital identities and experiences. And the PBL scenario for the topic brings a student who is not very familiar/comfortable with online technologies and is apprehensive of an online course he/she is enrolled.

As I prepared for studying the materials provided, I found myself in an interesting spot of the digital Visitor-Resident continuum proposed by White & LeCornu (2011). While I consider myself a quite comfortable resident of the digital space (more in some places than others), I “need” to physically interact with the material in order to be able to retain information. In the old days of paper I would highlight and write notes on articles and book pages. For videos or audio I need to take notes- otherwise the information just passes me by. So that’s what I did: lots of highlights on the articles and notes on my iPad using the Apple pencil. Old habits die hard.

What White & LeCornu proposed is an improvement over the currently rather maligned “digital native” vs “digital immigrant” dichotomy coined by Prensky. The digital visitor vs resident terms are defined as a continuum both in time and in scope. This flexibility allows for both longitudinal changes and variation in usage across multiple platforms. Reasons for variations may be multiple, from brain development to technological “geekishness or even age.

The article fits well with my own experience. I consider myself a bit on the geeky side, therefore I was never shy to try new things. The learning curve from those first personal computers to the internet and then mobile devices has gone for many years, but it has been a steady uphill. However, moving from “digital” as a tool to place and then to space…that was a major change. It happened in 2011 when I joined Twitter as part of the “Building Online Community using Social Media (BOCSM)” course by my dear friend and mentor Michelle Pacansky-Brock. I was hesitant for a while, and feared being “out” there with a public profile. Michelle was gentle and encouraging, I decided to give it a go, and the rest is history. For me Twitter is an invaluable source of information (and for the echo chambers and the ugliness, I have gotten quite good at zoning those out).

But this is where the topic scenario and my own experience converges: I was apprehensive of a new tool (which was taking me to an unknown place/space). Why did I give it a go? Why did I succeed?

The response is manyfold, of course. The course design provided a safe space and a supportive community by allowing the participants to share reflections, stories, and pictures. By the time the Twitter assignment came we were already comfortable blogging. The instructor was supportive and encouraging. And somehow all that worked with me and for me.

So as we as a group move from Focus to Investigate, I know where I am heading: looking into the cultural aspects of our digital identities and learning of best practices to support students coming from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. Through a course I recently took with Michelle, Humanizing Online Learning, I became acquainted with the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond. While the book is mainly for K12 teachers, I am finding it a very useful reading.

And am also reading Doug Belshaw’s book on digital literacy, a framework that was mentioned during the webinar. I like the 8Cs of digital literacies, and particularly how he places “cultural” at the top. He says “Focusing on the Cultural element of digital literacies can be transformative and empowering. In a similar way that learning a new language can give individuals a new ‘lens’ to view the world, so having an understanding of various digital cultures and contexts can give people different lenses through which to navigate new and familiar spaces.”

References

Belshaw, D. (2014). The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. Retrieved from http://digitalliteraci.es
Hammond, Z., & Jackson, Y. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students.
White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).

On the student side of the great divide (and some PBL thoughts)

February 27, 2019

barralopolis ONL191 Education, ONL191 4 Comments

I teach online a lot. In fact, I am teaching online now- a non majors general biology lab course. Students do some hands-on labs at home, and they also complete virtual lab experiments and simulations, watch videos, write lab reports, and post and comment on discussion boards. So being at the same time a student in the ONL191 course is quite interesting.

There are students who reach out a week before class starts with concerns or questions. There are those who never email or say anything on the live sessions. Some will write long and detailed emails. Others prefer to text (I have a google number for this). Once in a while there will be a student who wants to talk or have a face to face online meeting. Just yesterday I had an online meeting with a student who is on a Navy ship somewhere far away to clarify a technical issue. It was strange and at the same time touching to connect in spite of the distance.

So I am looking at myself now, starting the ONL191 course. How do I behave? I am eager and also a bit worried. It is ok now, but come April, I will be attending a conference and traveling. So I want to do as much as possible now that I still have some bandwidth. My main focus will be problem-based learning (PBL).

Although I did my doctoral studies in Linkoping University, I never practiced PBL. By the time I spoke enough Swedish to teach, my time was almost over. So one of the aspects that really interests me in the course is getting more acquainted with it. Here in the USA I have met PBL people- they tend to be more in medical and dental schools.

The ONL191 course has plenty of references listed, and I have downloaded a few of them already, but first thing I do is try to connect with existing knowledge. This is, in fact, the third step in Gagne’s 9 events of instruction: Stimulate previous knowledge.

Went into my Mendeley library folder of teaching articles, and searched for PBL. Few articles popped up, one of them a review I have used before, D’Avanzo’s article on changes in biology education since the publication of the groundbreaking Vision and Change report in 2011. The article gives a nice introductions to PBL, and the points to a network to coordinate the case study and PBL networks for biology. The website, however, seems quite inactive since 2012, so I do not know what happened there.

And this is it for tonight. More PBL reading coming tomorrow, this time more updated!

References

D’Avanzo, C. (2013). Post-vision and change: do we know how to change? CBE Life Sciences Education, 12(3), 373–82.
Gagne, R. (1985). The Conditions of Learning (4th Ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

To be a good teacher

February 25, 2019

barralopolis general general, teaching 2 Comments

Off road instructor Ron Delgado and yours truly during graduation.

This past weekend I was very far from academia: dh and I attended an off-road driving clinic in the Anza-Borrego desert. Going on long road trips off the beaten track has been one of the best ways for us to disconnect and enjoy free time, or as it is called these days, “self-care.” My knowledge of driving off-road is rudimentary and experiential. After the workshop I feel much more comfortable with it, as now I understand the theory behind many decisions made on the road.

Just to clarify, off-roading is not what some (insert bad word here) did when they entered pristine areas of Joshua Tree or Death Valley National Parks and drove donuts on fragile ecosystems. Responsible off-roading means to use designed trails to drive to places not accessible on foot or “normal” vehicles, stay on those trails, follow a number of rules, being knowledgeable about vehicles and basic survival, and overall behave as adult human beings.

Funnily, during the workshop I could not leave my academic/scicomm hat completely behind- I was amazed and very impressed by the instructor (Ron Delgado) who led the 2-day workshop. Here is a list of some of the things he did, which are completely applicable for any scicomm/teaching experience:

Setting the tone and expectations: as one of the few females in the group, I appreciated him saying up front that no macho attitudes would be allowed, and that one of his goals was for everybody to have fun. Through his words and actions, he created a community of mutual respect and trust.
Use of visuals and simple analogies. There was a lecture in the beginning and then some on-the-ground demonstrations to explain basic concepts such as the “wheel cheat” and the importance of tire pressure. I have tried before to understand those, and found the explanations terribly boring and complicated. Doing it hands-on was night and day (active learning, anybody?)
Use of visuals part 2. I am usually terrified on being sideways in a car. He had everybody driving up a hill so we were sideways, with a visual aid showing an incline of 28 degrees. Up to 30 degrees was safe. He told everybody to memorize how it looked like so we remember in the future that it was safe. Note: we had to.
Scaffolding of the exercises. That is pretty obvious, but I appreciated when he showed at the end of day 1 the (steep) hill we were going to descend the next day. It added an element of choice. Everybody came back, but it was nice to know what to expect.
Asking for feedback. At regular intervals, he asked for feedback- this is what you expected? How are we doing? Too much, too little? There were feedback forms at the end of day 1 to fill out (and at the end of day 2 also).
Last but not least, encouragement and support. I did pretty well most of the time, but was terrified of the last hill. It took me a while to decide I would try it. Ron took some time to make it sure I was calm, and directed me (and all the others) via radio. He praised everybody who cleared the hill. In the higher education world, we are often told that “this” and “that” high tech gizmo/app/analytics will do the trick to identify the students falling behind, AI will send personalized messages, adaptive technologies will train students according to their needs and so on. But, at the end of the day, it takes a human connection between a teacher and a student to help that learning magic to happen.

I was happy and grateful to be reminded of the human side to learning. Thank you, Ron!

Recap 2: the NSF grant

February 21, 2019

barralopolis general general, grant, Hispanic, Ocean plastic, science education Leave a comment

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a lot of people working together to get a grant. The fact that three years after starting a project basically from scratch we were awarded a NSF grant is quite a feat by any standards.

This was not our first, of course. We had applied for a couple of private foundations and to the California Sea Grant. One very important lesson from the failed applications was to request a call (if possible) with the grant administrators to learn what went wrong. Often we had the “who dis” problem, grant agencies not knowing us, and were recommended to seek collaborations with more seasoned institutions. One time, when we wrote our first course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) grant, we were told that more details were needed regarding the mechanics of the education research part. That was a huge help for the NSF grant.

For a timeline of how we started and expanded, there is our experiment.com website, where we got some crowdfunding and have kept updates. A relevant milestone was the collaboration with Dr. Jeff Bowman at Scripps, thanks to a connection with Dr. Emelia DeForce.

My university has an excellent grant specialist, who was and is in charge of all the boring details including the official paperwork and the gory budget forms. But a grant starts and ends with the narrative, and that was a tour de force. Especially because we had basically only one week to write it!

It was helpful that both Rachel Simmons and I are night owls so we were writing into the wee hours, often at the same time using Dropbox and Word online. Once we had a working draft, excellent collaborators and a writing consultant smoothed out the wrinkles and ensured we stayed within the page limits. Finding an external evaluator willing to write an evaluation plan in three days was also epic (short version: networking is critical).

The rest of it is history- waiting months, hearing back, rushing to get IRB approvals and write revisions. And then the news.

We have been rolling now officially since October. Three groups of students have completed the experience, new reagents are accumulating in the lab, and there is a paid research student in the lab. A week ago I had the pleasure to visit University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where a group of grantees presented their project and compared notes in a STEM meeting. It was heartwarming to be with a group of educators who feel very strongly about widening access to STEM for all students, especially Hispanics.

Folkloric Dance performance by the UTRGV students in McAllen, TX

Recap 1: the paper(s)

February 20, 2019

barralopolis general flipped classroom, general, publishing 1 Comment

When I returned to blogging after 4 years, I had a small list of accomplishments/tasks that happened since 2015 I wanted to share. So here is the first in a series of (hopefully) short recaps of the past few years.

While my institution is mainly a teaching one, one is expected to do research and publish. Way back in 2015 I blogged about “number crunching.” That study, a retrospective study of an online course redesign was the beginning of a synergistic and fruitful collaboration with my colleague Dr. Rachel Simmons. It was published in the Journal of Research In Innovative Teaching, a semi-internal journal by my university. The peer review was surprisingly stringent, and it was a good exercise for what was yet to come.

Some time in 2015, the Dean of my school announced small internal grants for “teaching pairs” who wanted to try out novel teaching approaches. I teamed up with another colleague, Dr. Veronica Ardi, in “flipping” a majors general biology course. That project made it through the wringer of the ASM Biology Scholars Program, meaning it received plenty of amazing feedback, critiques, and recommendations while still happening (so there was time and room to improve it). The data were rich and very complex, but thanks to Rachel’s magical data fingers, they started to make sense.

Fast forward 2 years, and the results of that study were published in CBE Life Sciences Education. It was a long and winding road, with sections put in, removed, put again, and finally removed. And oh so many versions. It is known the grit and stubbornness required to be published…and we had it.

Now what I learned from that experience is…1) Collect your data considering the data format your numbers person is going to use. We started collecting data in a certain way, and with every iteration I had to copy/paste/transpose to make them the right format for the statistics program. It was painful, but it made me intimately connected to the raw data and soon I could spot errors right away, 2) Let sit the latest revision for several days before sending it away, so you get out of the tunnel vision stage, 3) Practice and perfect the art of being diplomatic in writing when people doubt your statistics or experimental design, and 4) Help the reviewers. And what I mean by that…make their job easier. Both to review the original paper and to read the revision. Not to mention minimizing noise such as typos and grammar issues, which can usually be done following #2 above.

So that is for today. I am trying to catch up before ONL191 gets full speed next week!

I am back!

February 19, 2019

barralopolis general, ONL191 general, Ocean plastic, ONL191 4 Comments

This is the complete picture of my cover picture at ONL191. Me trying to get some air in Anza Borrego desert some time March 2018.

Well, it has been a while. Almost 4 years! Guess it has been busy. I am back because of the Open Networked Learning course: ONL191.

How do I know about it? When I visited Sweden last year, my friend Gizeh told me about it. Gizeh and I go way way back, to Cuba and our times at the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology in the late 90s. Funnily enough, after many years we have arrived to a similar place of interest: online learning, active learning, innovative STEM practices, use of media for teaching, social media. I am curious to explore the European side of the field, and I signed up for the course. First requirement, you need a blog! So I just connected this one to the course, and now am feverishly writing an update.

Last time I blogged (October 2015) I had just lost a sampling system in my ocean plastic set and was slightly deflated. In December I broke my ankle walking on a wide and mellow trail in the Mojave road, which set me back a couple of months, but then got back to action. Plastic research, education research, and some cool service activities.

Highlights of the past years include becoming a member of the ASBMB Public Outreach Committee (recently renamed Science Outreach & Communication) and as such getting more involved in outreach activities; a paper published in CBE Life Science Education about flipping a majors general biology course, and the best of it all, getting a NSF STEM education grant for the plastic project in collaboration with Jeff Bowman from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The grant (from application to the first months in action) has a pretty steep learning curve. But we are finally doing what we wanted originally…have students participate in authentic and fun research as part of their coursework.

Last Saturday morning, a group of students visit SIO pier to learn about ocean research.

And this is it for now. I am really glad that ONL191 has pushed me back to blogging. Onward and onward!

Unbowed, unbent, unbroken…but slightly deflated

October 23, 2015

barralopolis Ocean plastic Ocean plastic 2 Comments

A beautiful morning, washing away the disappointment.

The title comes from the words of House Martell of The Song of Ice and Fire books. They have a nice ring to them, and it was a nerdy way to console myself when last weekend I arrived to the buoy of my plastic sampling system, just to find the set of cages gone.

Of course this is not new for me. Experiments have a way to go wrong for many reasons besides human error. I was warned by several of my friends who have done environmental sampling that there was always a risk for people tampering with them. My other concern were the surf and the waves, but after one week the system looked robust, so I stopped worrying. Big mistake.

So we paddled back after I dipped my tubes in the water to at least have a set of water samples. Calls and visits to lifeguard and water authorities did not brought any information, so I had to accept that my cages (and several weeks of preparation) were gone.

Life goes on. New cages have been ordered, and I am in the lookout of other, less visible location. To be honest, I prefer to tackle this problem to cell lines contaminated with Mycoplasma. But still…

barralopolis

Designing for Online and Blended Learning: FLIP

Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

Openness and OER

The Importance of Culture in Learning

On the student side of the great divide (and some PBL thoughts)

To be a good teacher

Recap 2: the NSF grant

Recap 1: the paper(s)

I am back!

Unbowed, unbent, unbroken…but slightly deflated

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