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Advice from one of the new AI gurus, Ethan Mollick, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

3/29/2023

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Advice from one of the new AI gurus, Ethan Mollick, from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-ai-to-do-practical-stuff

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #Chatbot #DALLE2 #TechnologyInTeaching #TippingPoint #DisruptiveInnovation #HigherEducation #AppliedLearning #OpenAI  #Bing #Microsoft #MicrosoftOffice #MicrosoftBing #Google #Bard #GPT4 #EthanMollick

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Image Source: https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-ai-to-do-practical-stuff
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Hannah Makes Me Smile - Project-Based Learning Benefits

6/28/2022

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Enjoy Hannah energy, and discover the benefits of applied learning in the form of Project-Based Learning.
Click the link for the video: https://vimeo.com/500466152/b6a3ecfa5f

Hannah makes me smile. She was in the first course that I taught. In 2012, I was teaching a Business Leadership course in Hanoi for Keuka College. 

Last year, I recorded Hannah talking about the benefits of experiential learning, especially Project-Based Learning, which is the method I used. Students worked in teams for the full semester to apply what I was teaching them. I asked some of my previous students if they would let me record interviews of them explaining the value they received from participating in my Project-Based Learning courses. At the time, I used these recordings to help my new University of North Carolina Asheville students understand why I was teaching them with these methods.

Hannah mentions a company she works for. It might be hard to hear. The company is Hyundai. Hannah also talks about the real estate investment business she started and continues to run.

#ProjectBasedLearning  #ExperientialLearning #Hanoi #KeukaCollege #UNC #UNCAsheville #UniversityOfNorthCarolina #StrategicManagement #Marketing #Leadership #AppliedLearning
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Skills Students Need - Importance of Experiential Learning

5/26/2022

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McKinsey: These are the skills you will need for the future of work. This graphic appears in the article on Page 3 as Exhibit 1.
My recent research has explored the contrasts between teaching using exclusively lectures and exams and teaching using experience associated with the material students are learning. This is important because I believe that students learn and remember what they do better than what they read, cram, and regurgitate on exams. I believe that students need to internalize what they are learning so that they will be able to apply this to their future lives and careers.

The broadest term for this is experiential learning. Governments globally have recognized that education should evolve to teach the skills and competencies students will need - in addition to teaching the basic academic content. Here are two examples:
  1. Canada establishes a Pan Canadian Global Competencies Framework for Education: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/news/canada-establishes-pan-canadian-global-competencies-framework-education
  2. 21st Century Competencies - Singapore Ministry of Education: https://www.moe.gov.sg/education-in-sg/21st-century-competencies

In 2021, McKinsey published an article listing 56 foundational skills students should develop to prepare for their lives and careers. The article, titled "McKinsey: These are the skills you will need for the future of work," is available online at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work/. The introduction states:
"To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize."

As a teacher, I continuously search for ways to help my students develop at least some of these skills while they are learning the academic material in my courses. Students whose prior education comprised almost exclusively lectures and exams become frustrated with the activities that require them to develop and employ these skills. By the end of a semester, some students finally get what they were doing and benefit from their work. Sadly, many students are so resistant that they don't understand. Yet all of these students will enter the workforce, where they will need these skills.

Understand why you teach the way you do so that you can explain it to your students.

Tell your students why you teach the way you do.

#ExperientialLearning #21stCenturyCompetencies #SoftSkills

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Project-based learning in action

11/20/2021

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​Kolb, D. A. (2015). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. FT press.
​I am wading through a total of 71 lengthy end-of-semester analysis and reflection papers for my two UB Singapore MGO 403 Fundamentals of Strategic Management course sections. The reflection portion encourages my students to engage in the David Kolb (2015) Reflective Observation and Abstract Conceptualization stages of experiential learning. The other two stages are Active Experimentation and Concrete Experience. The students engaged in these all semester long by working in teams and a complex global strategic management simulation. Although there is a fair bit of flattery in this section of one student's paper, it is consistent with what many other students wrote in their reflection passages.

"MGO 403 has to be one of the most innovative courses that I have taken during my 4 year tenure in the University of Buffalo. While it still contains similar elements of various other courses that are related to management, such as a structured system of quizzes based on chapters from the textbook, it introduced the element of the BSG simulation which is something that can be applied to any real world management situation. Not only did it introduce elements of teamwork but it also gave us an avenue to deep dive into the inner workings of a company, which we had to make important decisions for, in the short run as well as the long run. Some of the other highlights from this course was the Plastico assignment which made us analyse the team structure, management and general problem solving aspects of business. The whole exercise was meant for us to understand and critically think about a simulated business environment, which could take place in any day to day operations of a business. The other highlight is also this individual assignment which makes us write about a company and the very real life problems faced by the same due to the Covid-19 pandemic."

​#ExperientialLearning #ProjectBasedLearning #UniversityAtBuffaloSingapore

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Recent UNC Asheville Graduate lydia nielsen Discusses the value of project-based-learning

9/30/2020

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University of North Carolina Asheville 2020 graduate Lydia Nielsen talks about the value of project-based learning with her marketing instructor, Paul McAfee.
Lydia Nielsen, a spring 2020 University of North Carolina management graduate, was on a Promotion Management marketing project team that produced an actionable Playbook with promotion recommendations for the local non-profit OM Sanctuary (https://omsanctuary.org/).

Since graduating, Lydia has used the Playbook she and her team created for job interviews. Listen as Lydia explains the value that Project-Based-Learning is bringing to her after graduation. Click here to listen to Lydia's story: ​vimeo.com/456229272

#unca #uncasheville #management #project-based-learning #pbl #experientiallearning #highereducation

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Education at a Crossroads

8/16/2020

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As an instructor in higher education, I have experience teaching seated, hybrid (online and seated), and online only courses. With online courses, I have taught asynchronous and synchronous classes. The difference is that synchronous online classes meet live and offer students the opportunity (if taught well) to interact with their instructors. Asynchronous courses do not meet live. Students watch videos, read posted links and materials, and take assessments. Give me a choice, and I will teach students in a classroom where we can truly interact. Currently, our choices as instructors are severely limited.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought higher education to a crossroads. The New York Times article linked below explains the challenges educators face. My personal view is that the changes that occur over the next year will affect the way we teach permanently, and importantly, the financial situation of colleges and universities. To reduce tuition for online courses will require dramatic reductions in fixed costs and ongoing operating costs. I teach capstone Strategic Management courses at several universities. This is the year when the effective application of Strategic Management principles will be critical to the survival of our higher education systems.

Here is the New York Times article:

As Colleges Move Classes Online, Families Rebel Against the Cost

"Schools face rising demands for tuition rebates, increased aid and leaves of absence as students ask if college is becoming 'glorified Skype.'"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/covid-college-tuition.html


#highereducation #onlineeducation #tuition #educationcosts
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Image Source New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/covid-college-tuition.html
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"ICE: Foreign Students Must Leave The U.S. If Their Colleges Go Online-Only This Fall" (NPR)

7/7/2020

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This newly implemented requirement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be one more financial nail in the coffin of many colleges and universities, at least if foreign students decide to drop out of their U.S. schools because they are not allowed to remain in the U.S. This could be an added financial stressor for schools.

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To the extent that students leave American campuses to return to their countries, this also will hurt the economies surrounding those campuses - lost rent, grocery spends, and incidental purchases.
​
https://www.npr.org/…/ice-foreign-students-must-leave-the-u…

#education #highereducation #foreignstudents #college #university
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Source Getty Images, downloaded from https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/06/888026874/ice-foreign-students-must-leave-the-u-s-if-their-colleges-go-online-only-this-fa
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a new set of rules for foreign students in light of the coronavirus pandemic. International students cannot enter or stay in the U.S. if their college offers courses only online in the fall semester.
Eva Hambach/AFP via Getty Images
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A Problem for College in the Fall: Reluctant Professors - NY Times

7/3/2020

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Thank you to the MOBTS (Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society - https://mobts.org/) team - and to the many presenters - for organizing a week that was both enlightening and exhausting. I learned so much about teaching through the selfless sharing of the presenters and the other participants. This conference represented a community of practice.

My focus during the workshops was on developing the most effective possible teaching methods for fully online classes. My fall courses all will be online. My students deserve an effective "educative" experience, to use one of Dewey's terms. We lose much of the social aspect of learning, at least the face-to-face aspect, with fully online courses. I received wonderful ideas from the MOBTS conference that will guide me toward delivering a psychologically safe and rich educative experience this fall.

This NY Times article illustrates a concern I have for the fall. Some professors may refuse to teach in classrooms. They will clash with university policies requiring seated classes. On many campuses, I suspect that the start of the fall semester will be chaotic. I am better prepared now than I was a week ago. Thank you MOBTS.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/coronavirus-college-professors.html

#highereducation #covid19 #sociallearning #health #mobts​
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More about Academic Integrity in Our Changed World

6/15/2020

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Please take two minutes to read the article at this link from a Singapore newspaper:

"NUS students get zero marks for cheating on take-home exam"

As students take more college courses online, either fully or in a hybrid seated+online configuration, getting the students to maintain academic integrity increases dramatically. It simply is too easy for a student to cheat if they are taking an exam or writing a paper online with no oversight -- i.e., without proctoring. Why does this matter to me? Two simple reasons:

Students who study to learn the material feel cheated by students who collaborate or plagiarize on exams.
  1. Some students -- think nurses, accountants, engineers, doctors, and other professional practitioners -- will be expected to have actually learned what they studied when they start to practice medicine, design buildings and bridges, or handle corporate and personal accounts.
  2. In a recent year, partway through a semester in a capstone strategic management course I taught in Singapore, I was talking with my students about academic integrity. One student raised his hand and I called on him. He said, and this is a verbatim quote: "Professor, it isn't cheating if you don't get caught." This actually happened!

After discovering that exam scores were significantly higher -- i.e., 20% or more higher -- with online multiple-choice question (MCQ) exams, I did an experiment in one of these capstone courses. I put a low-stakes MCQ exam online, scheduling it to be open for 30 minutes during a regular seated class session. The exam was intended to be taken independently, not collaboratively. The students had ten minutes to complete the exam during the 30-minute window. They started in the classroom, and then could go wherever they wanted to complete the exam during that 30-minute window.

I gave the students a countdown to the start of the exam, and the second the exam window opened, about 75% of the students ran out of the classroom to the tables in the hallways to form groups to take the exam together. The remaining 25% of the students stayed in the classroom. I had told everyone that they should take the exam the way the normally would, so they did. One group at a large table had a single student take the exam during the first 10-minute block and watched that student, advising him if he was unsure of the answer. When he finished they regrouped into three smaller groups and then watched and advised the one student in their smaller group has he or she took the exam. Finally, the remaining students went to their computers to take the exam in the last 10-minute block, with the students who had completed the exam watching and helping.

I knew this behavior existed from a few years back, when I discovered extremely high scores on a Masters-level online exam that -- are you ready for this -- nursing students were taking. Eventually, one of the students in the class complained. To her -- she had studied hard for the exam and had taken it by herself as instructed -- it was unfair that other students had high grades without actually learning the material. She had observed students in her class taking the exam in teams at computers in the library.

Many of my friends feel it is unfair to use plagiarism checking tools, or online exam monitoring tools. We would proctor the exam in the classroom. Why should we not proctor it online? And how do we treat the students who learn the material who feel cheated by the students who do not learn but plagiarize or get help during online exams?

Of course, we could stop giving MCQ exams. But students can cheat in online essays or open-ended question exams just as easily. I use the MCQ exams only to confirm that the students are reading and understanding the course material. I even give the students the subject of every question on the exam a week ahead. These exams account for a relatively small portion of the final grade. If I catch a student cheating on one of these, the student most likely will fail the course. But I need the monitoring tools for online exams to catch the cheating. (And yes, I use question pools and random question delivery to limit cheating. I've had a student answer a write-in question that wasn't on his delivered online exam because someone else had told him the question that the other student had received and this student gave the answer to that question.)

I use Project-Based-Learning methods with students working together all semester in teams. We could just give team-based grades. But if you teach, you know there are a lot of social loafers who expect the other team members to do the work, but expect the same grades as their team members.

I hate online exam monitoring. We must use it; out of fairness to students who try to learn the material, and because students will be expected to know what we teach when they start their careers.

This article, about online cheating in an Engineering program at the National University of Singapore (NUS), illustrates the problem. Congratulations to NUS both for giving the students zero grades, and noted their academic integrity failure in their permanent records. If we sanction students for cheating, and have ways to identify cheating, we may be able to reduce the "It isn't cheating if you don't get caught" mentality.


#college #highereducation #academicintegrity #integrity #honesty #onlineeducation #onlineexam
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Academic Integrity in the New Online World

4/27/2020

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Image source - https://gateway.iupui.edu/Communities%20of%20Practice/Academic%20Integrity.html
​"A 2017 study by Kessler International reported that 76 percent of surveyed students said they had copied text from someone else’s assignments. Slightly more (79 percent) admitted to plagiarism from internet sources. Around 72 percent said they’d used mobile devices to cheat.

"An astonishing 42 percent of students admit to purchasing custom papers or essays online, and 28 percent have paid someone to do their online work. Sadly, many of them thought it was ok to cheat"
(Source https://www.pearsoned.com/deterring-cheating-online-course/).

The move to online education has forced many instructors to face the problem cheating by students in online courses. I've dealt with this since 2014, when I first taught courses online. Without help from the IT department in for form of academic integrity insurance programs, managing student integrity is severely challenging. 

Plagiarism checking applications help. I use them when available, such as SafeAssign in Blackboard, which some of my schools provide through their Learning Management System (LMS). I let the students see the percentage of content matched by SafeAssign (also, TurnItIn, provided in some other systems), and I let them resubmit their paper. Students who discover a high percentage of matches often rewrite their papers without the plagiarized content and resubmit. The result is that after the first round of paper submissions, the students do original work at the outset of new papers.

Question pools help when they can deliver random sets of questions to each student. For example, in Blackboard, I can create a question pool of 50 questions for a 10-question text. Students each get a randomly selected set of 10 questions, in random order, and with the answer sequences (e.g., A, B, C, D) randomized. This helps discourage students from using a screen recording application so that they can share the exam with other students, as each student gets a different exam.

The best tools I've used are LockDown Browser with Respondus Monitor. The student cannot browse away from the exam, and the monitor application records the video and audio of the student's setting, actually halting the exam if the students full face exits the camera's view, for example. This however requires that students have the necessary equipment, and must be arranged before a course starts. Otherwise, some students will be disadvantaged. This is a highly intrusive tool set, but having used it the first time this semester, I have found that the students accept the situation. It really is no different than if they were taking the exam in a classroom with my proctoring from the front of the room.

The Pearson article helps provide perspective and is worth a quick read.

#highereducation #college #onlineteaching #teachers #onlinecourses #academicintegrity #cheating #plagiarism
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    Paul McAfee

    My experiential learning Activities blog includes examples from my international teaching experiences. The Research blog includes studies I have read and comments on others' research, as well as my own.

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