3 Takeaways From the SXSWedu Conference

Digital courseware and other tools that aim to “personalize” the college experience were all the talk at the SXSWedu conference here last week — along with at least a few voices warning that colleges have so far failed to adequately inform students of how those innovations are being used to track students’ activities.

The four-day event, an offshoot of the popular South by Southwest music and film festival, brought together some 10,000 participants from all walks of education: teachers and professors, administrators and policy wonks, and publishers and ed-tech company officials. There were even a few actual students in the mix.

Here are three trends that emerged from conversations among people attending:

Colleges Need to Better Explain New Data Tracking

Colleges are using courseware and advising systems powered by tools that track student activities electronically as they work their way through a course — and in some cases, around the campus itself — via their student IDs. But the norms of the new learning environments are still evolving.

That’s true for how the systems interact with students, with professors, and with the designers of courses.

“What’s the contract that actually exists between the institution and the learner” that spells out “what is shared and with whom and how?” asked Phillip D. Long, associate vice provost for learning sciences and deputy director of the center for teaching and learning at the University of Texas at Austin. In a session on data in education, Mr. Long said colleges have “failed miserably” in letting students understand how deep the “the wake of their digital presence” runs. “We have the obligation to make this more transparent.”

Students may not need to understand every element of the data engine of a so-called adaptive course, or of an advising system that sends them a text message if they’ve missed too many tutoring sessions. But, said Mr. Long, they should at least be told “the intent of the algorithm,” he said.

Professors need that understanding too, said David Lindrum, a course designer at a company called Soomo Learning, especially if a system is going to prompt them to “nag students about homework.” Even more important for getting faculty members’ buy-in, he said, “we need to show them the impact it’s having.” The tools need to be “sophisticated enough that it’s not stupid” but not so complicated that professors don’t want to bother with them, he said.

Mr. Lindrum said having the analytics data on where students typically stumble and need extra assistance in a course can improve the shape of the material. “Once you’ve designed courses in a data-driven fashion, you won’t want to go back,” he said.

Professors Need to Learn New Teaching Tricks for the Digital Age

When professors decide to start making videos — either to try “flipping” their courses or to make a MOOC — they need to learn how to make effective use of the “visual layer,” said Roman Hardgrave, chief of product at Marginal Revolution University, an online education platform for free economics courses started by two professors at George Mason University.

“If a professor writes a script, they’re pretty much going to write a lecture,” Mr. Hardgrave said during a session called “Lights, Camera, Lecture,” about producing better teaching videos. So his organization encourages professors to work with a filmmaker to write a script together, to come up with the best visuals to complement the information being delivered.

Jodi Beggs, a lecturer at Northeastern University who makes playful online teaching videos that she gives away on her website, Economists Do It With Models, described a clever way to do a visually arresting video on the cheap: Use a pane of glass as a whiteboard, writing out notes with chalk markers.

The panelists emphasized that educational videos need to feel authentic, and that students can detect any phoniness or moments when someone is reading a script that they don’t truly understand.

Do the online videos need to be funny? asked a professor in the audience. “I like the word ‘irreverent,’” said Ms. Beggs. “What people tend to respond to is just not seeming too formal.”

The Chronicle hosted a morning of programming at the event, “Trends, Teaching, and Transformation,” that included a session where experts and the audience viewed videos used in college classrooms and weighed in on their educational value. One participant noted that research had found that the slickest videos aren’t necessarily better than low-tech productions.

Students Want Change

At most education conferences, students are invisible. But at one panel, at least, several local students who attend competency-based institutions online were given an hour to describe what it’s like to attend college under that format. One of them, Briana Corona, a 23-year-old mother of two, said she had enrolled in Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America after she “couldn’t see a graduation day in sight” after starting out at Austin Community College. “This is a new pathway, and it needs to be heard about,” she told the audience.

Separately, another group of students, from the for-profit experimental college known as Minerva, undertook an experiment to make their presence directly more visible to SXSWedu attendees.

The 18 students, who flew in from San Francisco, where they are based for their freshman year, distributed tiny colored LED lights to speakers and other conferencegoers to whom they spoke. By the end of the four days, wherever attendees were clustered, observers could spot at least a few of the purple or green lights glowing in the plastic cases that held our badges.

“It was fascinating to walk around the conference with loads of random people walking around with the lights,” said Rosemarie Foulger, one of the students, who transferred to Minerva this year from the University of Birmingham, in England.

But as much as she was pleased with the visualization experiment, Ms. Foulger said she was somewhat disappointed by the lack of boldness she heard from speakers or attendees. “No one was going far enough in higher ed,” she said. They “seemed to be making tweaks.”

Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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