As part of his visit, Professor White has agreed to hold a public talk about his role as a leader in researching and developing better ways to assess student writing gains. It is titled “A Personal, Historical, and Tagmemic Look at the Assessment of Writing: from Multiple-Choice Bubbles to E-Portfolios.”  He will review the developments in portfolios and writing assessment since 1971, when, as an English department chair, he became involved in writing assessment by accident. Next year, his fifteenth book will be published by Utah State/Colorado State University Press. He is the recipient of many honors, including the 2011 Exemplar award from the Conference of College Composition and Communication.

Please join us on June 24 (time TBD) in Perkins 217 for his talk. For more information, please contact Jennie Saia of the Thompson Writing Center.

The Coursera course comprises six week-long units on topics such as Innovating in Healthcare, Prioritizing Needs, Sizing up the Market and Designing an Innovation. Students watch videos in which both instructors walk through a structured process to bring ideas to market (one with Dr. Barnes still in scrubs, straight from watching a neurosurgery!), and engage with each other around discussion prompts which delve into the complexities of each week’s topic.

Unlike some of the other MOOCs, Dr. Barnes and Dr. Lombardi designed their course to meet the needs of students who want to engage in the course at different levels. As Dr. Lombardi wrote:

We recognize and appreciate that many of the students have a host of family and work responsibilities and are trying to carve out time for this kind of personal and professional enrichment. For this reason, we would like them to enjoy as much ownership over this course and its content as possible within the constraints of a massive open online learning experience.

Students who wish to obtain a “Statement of Accomplishment” in the course can do so at two levels, either by passing weekly quizzes and participating at a minimal level in the discussion forums, or by also participating in two peer assessment activities designed to immerse the students in the process of moving from real-world observations to identification of a concrete healthcare need in their environments to starting the process of creating an innovation to address that need. Although students don’t have time during the 6 weeks of the course to work through the innovation and entrepreneurship process fully, serious practitioners will find all the detailed templates and planning documents they need if they choose to continue the process in “real life” after the course ends.

One of the fascinating aspects of the course, which is very satisfying to the instructors, is seeing students particularly from developing countries, discussing together how they might address healthcare issues in their areas. As Willie Williamson, the online course associate for the course wrote:

I have been amazed at discussions among healthcare professionals from rapidly developing countries who face an enormous burden in providing care to growing populations with growing expectations for high quality standards of care. This class has been a real medium for exchanging ideas about how to use innovative approaches to healthcare to increase access and quality without using the resource intensive model we use in the West. Additionally, the entrepreneurial spirit of folks in countries where you can’t rely on inefficient and/or non-existent public and private agents is very impressive.

The course has just over 36,000 students enrolled, of which nearly 14,000 have been active in the course so far, some way. There are 1,800 students posting in the discussion forum, in almost 750 threads so far. With the third week of course materials newly available, and the first peer assessment due in one week, it’s been gratifying to watch the engaged students dig in and grapple with the material, in the hopes of bringing their own healthcare innovation successfully to market!

This annual workshop also builds a community of Trillium Fellows to support each other in this exploration. Participants from previous workshops will help lead this year’s sessions.

Up to ten eligible Duke faculty can elect to receive a $500 stipend to a discretionary account for participating in the program.  Participants will attend the one-day Trillium workshop on May 8 and monthly meetings in Fall 2013 to discuss planning and implementing sustainability components in a specific course.  Participants will also prepare a blog post about their course for the Trillium website.

To register, please complete the registration form, preferably by May 1, 2013. For more information, visit the Trillium website or contact Eileen Thorsos (eileen.thorsos@duke.edu, 919-613-8207).

• The course delivered over 24 hours of video lectures and demonstrations
• Out of 40,000 students who viewed the first video, approximately 5,500 remained active throughout the course
• 2141 students earned a Statement of Accomplishment in this challenging course
• Student feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and the instructor found the experience rewarding
• Over 1000 hours of effort from the instructor, his TA and other staff went into building and delivering this course.

More information is available in our full report. We welcome your comments.

The (mis)use of the Internet by students to buy term papers or plagiarize others’ writing is a major concern in Higher Education today. In the foreign language classroom, when it comes to the use of the Internet, the “elephant in the room” is the students’ use of websites like Google Translate or apps such as iTranslate to complete their work. This semester, four lecturers in Romance Studies released their findings on the use of these kinds of translation tools by Duke students. The data was collected during the Spring 2012 semester from a survey given to 900 undergraduates enrolled in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language classes at Duke. This research, conducted by Lecturers Joan Clifford, Lisa Merschel, Joan Munné, and Deb Reisinger, addresses an emerging issue in the field of second language acquisition — the use of machine translation tools like Google Translate — and examines user trends. The research team was awarded a Thompson Writing Program grant and was supported by Lecturer in Writing, Jennifer Ahern-Dodson.

With 71% of students reporting the use of Machine Translation (MT) tools often or sometimes in their language learning, there is a clear need to better understand how and when they are using them. The two most surprising responses were 1) 66% of students use MT as a dictionary and 2) 91% have detected an error in MT. Students explain error recognition through three lenses: personal knowledge of language, contradiction in textbook, and contradiction of what was learned in class or taught by the instructor.

In addition to exploring the student use of MT, an additional survey was distributed to faculty to assess their perceptions of MT usage in language learning. Over 76% of faculty do not approve of the use of MT by their students. A clear majority of professors stated that MT was not useful to elementary level students but 30% reported that it was somewhat useful to advanced students. They did not perceive any threat to the second language teaching profession because of MT tools.

In February 2013 the researchers presented their findings in a faculty forum on campus sponsored by the Romance Studies Department and the Center for Instructional Technology. See the full presentation of The Elephant in the Room to discover more about their research. A follow-up study in March 2013 takes this research further by investigating actual student practices in Google Translate through qualitative case studies. Researchers plan to disseminate findings in Fall 2013 and to perhaps expand the survey to include language students outside of the Romance Studies Department.

During each of the seven weeks of the class, students will engage in several typical MOOC activities, including watching a small number of short video lectures, completing a reading assignment, and completing short homework assignments and quizzes.

Dr. Starn is also offering his students the unique opportunity to participate in Google Hangouts with leading figures from the world of sports journalism and scholarship.  During these Hangouts, students will have the opportunity to interact with guests that include former major leaguer and ESPN commentator Doug Glanville, and the renowned sports writer Selena Roberts, who has been a featured columnist at the New York Times and Sports Illustrated.

The course will also feature an optional “Sports Movie of the Week,” in addition to several guest lecturers, and optional Google Hangouts with Professor Starn.

Starn has been filming a number of interesting lectures for the class, including one at a golf course; one demonstrating fishing technique; and one in front of the famed Cameron Indoor Stadium, the home of the Duke University Blue Devils, wearing a shirt of the rival University of North Carolina Tarheels.  “Duke is famous for its basketball team, and I thought I’d take advantage of the possibility of filming at their stadium and other sports locations around the area to add another layer of interest to the course,” says Starn.

In order to find out why Dr. Starn was crazy enough to wear THAT SHIRT next to Cameron, you’ll need to sign up for the course…and stay tuned!

Check out the introductory video for the class here:

It is a high honor to have a role in the education of people the world over who are as curious as I am about the structure and function of the human brain.

 Medical Neuroscience is based on Dr. White’s on-campus course for first-year medical students, requiring a college-level background in cellular and molecular biology, systems physiology and human anatomy and a significant time commitment (16 or more hours each week). Each week includes about six hours of video tutorials. Students who wish to receive a certificate must do well on six quizzes, two exams, a peer assessment and participate in discussion forums.

 The sense of community emerged almost instantly on the discussion forums; some participants joyously greeted Justin Johnsen, the online course associate for Medical Neuroscience, as they remembered him from his previous work on the first iterations of two other Duke Coursera courses, Introduction to Genetics and Evolution and for Introduction to Astronomy.  He’s gained a following for his careful discussion forum posts and quick attention to technical issues. Other students are exchanging tips on using previous editions of the textbook, renewing acquaintances from previous courses, welcoming new people and offering supportive comments.

By the numbers (as of the afternoon of  April 8th): Over 43,000 students are registered for this course, and so far 5,500 students have accessed the course.  Over 3,800 students watched the introductory video about the instructor, and nearly 4,000 students took a preliminary quiz on their previous knowledge. There are over 1,400 posts in the discussion forum.  The videos have been watched by 5,500 participants, for a total of 23,000 streaming views and 26,000 video downloads.

Click Dan’s image to see the Course info page on Coursera.

Quick Statistics

“A Beginner’s Guide To Irrational Behavior” is one of Coursera’s highest-enrolled courses, with the number of registered students currently reaching 142,061. During the first full week of class, 66,014 people have been active students. 48,624 students have watched videos, thereby amassing 423,548 video streaming views and 119,894 video downloads.

International Appeal

Duke University’s Coursera offerings have appealed to a worldwide audience thus far, and “Irrational Behavior” is no exception.

Of the 30,762 people who indicated their country of residence in the pre-course survey, 10,691 (34.75%) live in the U.S. The countries with the next largest number of students in the course are India (1660 respondents, 5.40%), United Kingdom (1,404 respondents, 4.56%), Canada (1,283 respondents, 4.17%), and Brazil (961 respondents, 3.12%).”

The following map was created to show the distribution of students who completed the pre-course survey. Mouse over to see the number of students in each country.

What do students do for a grade?

In-video free response question: How should people set a value on the price of coffee?
Student Responses: 17,302

Students watch video lectures and read research articles related to the weekly topics. They then take quizzes that test the knowledge learned from each of these sources. Later in the class, students participate in a peer-graded writing assignment and take a final exam. While some of the in-video quizzes are in the traditional multiple-choice format, there are other open-ended questions which have yielded a rich collection of responses. To the right, you can see word cloud visualizations depicting the most frequently-used words from the students’ responses.

In-video free response question:
Why do some countries have very high organ donation rates and others have very low organ donation rates?
Student responses: 22,404

“Don’t Click Here.”

A button labeled “Don’t click here.” is a small yet intriguing feature of the course’s navigation bar. Students are interested and fascinated by how their actions in the course are being studied, which is made evident by the numerous questions posed in the highly active discussion fora. There are many posts related to the enigmatic button, and one particular thread, “The ‘Don’t Click Here’ tab” has 147 posts and 5,300 views. As an example of this curiosity, one student asked, “Is this some sort of surrealist intervention? Perhaps it is impossible to “click here”(?) Is the representation the reality? “Ceci n’est pas une pipe?” as Magritte would or wouldn’t say.”

The enigmatic “Don’t Click Here” button: Seems legit.

Posts related to this topic represent a mere fraction of the 11,677 combined posts and comments created since the pre-course launch. Oh, and while the button appears to be quite harmless, you’ll have to join the class yourself and click the button to see what happens!

Google+ Communities

One of the new and relatively unique aspects that has developed with this class is its Google+ community. Communities are a recently introduced feature on the Google+ social platform, where users can choose to interact with each other, and have been used to great effect in other MOOCs such as MIT Media Lab’s “Learning Creative Learning”. While 3,600 students have already joined the Google+ community for “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” representing only 5-10% of active students, the level of activity in the community is astonishingly rapid and fun to watch.

Students’ posts flow down the page like a waterfall, including everything from videos, asking and responding to questions, or simple comments that say, “hello” from a student’s hometown. At any given moment, you might see a new face appear on the page, excited to learn and share their experiences related to the course.

Students can post directly to the front page on the Google+ Community for the “Irrational Behavior” course.

Google+ Hangouts: Face-to-Face Interaction, with a challenge

A major criticism of online courses of all sizes is that students lose the “face-to-face” interaction that is prized in many traditional in-person classes. Google+ Hangouts provides a virtual face-to-face medium for the informal interactions that would happen in a real classroom, or in the hallway before and after class. The tool was piloted in other classes, such as Duke’s largest-enrolled course, “Think Again.” In these pilots programs, however, students ran into the problem of coordination. Incidentally,  this is a problem that Dan has written about before in other contexts. Students would excitedly join a Hangout hoping to interact with other students from their MOOC, only to find an empty room because there were no other users in the Hangout at that time.

Google+ Hangouts: A solution

“Irrational Behavior” provided a new tool designed to resolve the coordination problem. A Hangouts Scheduler was implemented in the course, intended to encourage students to meet up over a given topic. This tool uses the Google+ communities as a way to organize Hangout events and invite other students to join. To get started, course staff set up two “Irrational Behavior” events each day where students would get together and discuss a specific topic, which are not necessarily attended or moderated by the course staff.

The Google+ Hangout scheduler helps students coordinate their own video conversations within the course community.

I personally joined a couple of the Hangouts to get a feel for how they were going. While one Hangout I joined was a bit awkward and needed some prodding to get conversation started, I joined another and was very impressed by how smoothly the conversation progressed. This particular event was set up to discuss how default options shape our behavior. When I joined, students were already deep into discussion about how irrational decision-making on forms affects voting and politics around the world. One student from South Carolina explained that many of their electorate admitted that they voted for an unknown state senate candidate named Alvin Greene. They voted for him not because of his political platform, but because his name was listed at the top of the ballot. Furthermore, even though voters did not know anything about this candidate who had no advertising budget, they still voted for him because his name reminded them of the musician Al Green. Voting for this candidate exhibited irrational behavior, for sure!

Another student from a country in the Middle East remarked that their country has a problem with people voting long after they were dead. This discussion of “cemetery voting” was echoed by another student in Chicago who explained that election night in Chicago was sometimes humorously referred to as the “night of the living dead voters,” which drew chuckles from each of the ten people in the hangout.

Guest Speakers and Google+ Hangouts On-Air

Prof. Dan Ariely held “Office Hours” in a Google+ Hangout On-Air with 35 Coursera students (10 participants at a time).

In addition to each week’s video lectures from Prof. Ariely, the class includes videos from guest speakers who have research projects or stories to tell that are related to the week’s theme. Prof. Ariely and some of these speakers will be joining Google+ Hangouts On-Air throughout the class. “On-Air” is a special type of Google+ Hangout that allows the video to be streamed live on YouTube for a wide audience, and is also recorded for later viewing. The Hangout was offered in an “Office Hours” format, where Prof. Ariely answered questions with Coursera students from around the world. Prof. Ariely hosted his first Hangout On-Air on March 30th, and over the course of an hour he was able to connect with 35 students from the class and many more over YouTube.

Prof. Ariely commented at the end of the talk about his experience with the “experiment” running the Google+ Hangout On-Air:

“…it was very nice to see some of your faces and your comments. You know, when we were taping the class, there was nobody there, I was just imagining a student. It would have been nice to do it after a Hangout so I had at least some faces to imagine when I talk, but it’s very nice for me to know that there are people on the other side, and they have faces and questions and so on. So thank you very much and I’m looking forward to doing it again!”

Watch the video recording from Prof. Ariely’s first Google+ Hangout On-Air below.

Duke Sakai is scheduled for an upgrade (from version 2.7 to 2.9) May 11. The upgrade will provide over 500 bug fixes and keep Duke current with other peer institutions also planning to upgrade to Sakai 2.9 this year. During the upgrade, Sakai will be unavailable for 6-8 hours. After the upgrade, Duke Sakai users will notice some graphic enhancements to Sakai’s interface, but most of the core Sakai tools (Discussion Forums, Gradebook, Syllabus, Resources) will function (and look) the same way they currently do.

Sakai 2.9 will also provide the Duke community with a new tool called ‘Lessons.’ This tool will replace the Modules tool (currently in Sakai) with a much more robust set of features for displaying course content. We’ll be providing more information about Lessons on the CIT blog, at the Sakai support site, and at the upcoming CIT Showcase.

For more details on Sakai 2.9, see the Sakai community’s release page.

Summer and Fall 2013 terms available

Faculty can create Sakai course sites for Summer and Fall 2013 courses. If you’re a program coordinator or staff assistant tasked with creating several courses at once, we also have some other options available – please refer to our previous CIT blog post.

To keep up-to-date with changes to Sakai, subscribe to the Sakai News listserv or visit the updated list of changes maintained by the Duke Sakai Team.