University of Michigan: Using Data to Drive Instruction!

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article today examining classes at the University of Michigan where professors seek to use data to monitor and engage students in instruction. It examines a large lecture where one faculty member struggles to use “clicker” type software. A comparison is made to virtual classes where:

“the subtlest gestures are preserved in digital amber. Colleges that are largely online, like the University of Phoenix and Southern New Hampshire University’s College of Online and Continuing Education, sit atop vast deposits of data describing students’ interactions with instructors, peers, readings, and quizzes.

Those data can be mined for insights about teaching techniques that are not working and concepts that students are failing to grasp. They also can be used to design software that adapts on the fly to the needs of individual students, an approach that many advocates see as online education’s trump card against traditional instruction.”

The article describes the approach being taken at Michigan by Provost Martha Pollack to encourage faculty to consider data-drive approaches:

“As for pressure from the top, the administration at Michigan has opted to use carrots, not sticks, to steer instructors toward innovative teaching techniques. Ms. Pollack, the provost, has appointed a task force to support faculty members who are using data to shape their teaching.

The task force has created a series of grants that will offer as much as $3-million to professors who propose “large-scale changes to instruction and/or infrastructure” that enable their colleagues to “implement new learning approaches for sustainable and replicable adoption.” It has also made smaller grants available to professors with “shovel ready” projects that put teaching-and-learning tactics under a microscope.

Ms. Pollack says she hopes that framing data-driven teaching as a research opportunity will harness the instincts of professors. “The faculty here are very smart, and they’re very competitive,” she says. “When they see experiments that work, they want to be on the cutting edge, too. So if you created an environment that’s hospitable to experiments, and those experiments bear fruit, then other people come along.”

The provost acknowledges that online colleges have an advantage over traditional universities when it comes to capturing “click by click” data from classroom exchanges. But she does not think that universities necessarily need to be collecting that fine-grained data in order to become as evidence-driven as they need to be.

“I still think there is an enormous amount of data that you can capture and analyze” without turning classrooms into controlled laboratories, says Ms. Pollack. “My goal is not to ensure that every single faculty member changes the way they teach. My goal is to have a group of people who are excited about innovation and who are trying out new sorts of things.”

Provost Pollack appears to have the right approach.

Tony