PHILIP PEARCE: Yes, so I think that the real difference
between when you guys first ran the course, which I think
was in 2015, and now when I run the course,
is that Jen has helped to develop this online MITx
platform.
Now it's really a flipped classroom course.
So it has this blended learning aspect to it
where the students complete online reading before they
attend the classroom hours.
And then in the classroom, we really go through examples,
worked examples, where the students
can apply the theory that they've learned while they
did the online reading.
I think this is the key thing that you guys and Jen
and myself really saw the course being
when I started teaching it.
JEREMY ORLOFF: So how do you ensure that they
do the online reading?
PHILIP PEARCE: So the online reading
has many examples where the students can attempt something,
attempt a question.
And 10% of the grade for the course,
is given to them for getting these questions right.
It's a small incentive, just to make sure that they
complete the online questions.
And of course, we get feedback data
to know how many students do those questions.
And it's relatively easy to check to make sure
that student do them.
JENNIFER FRENCH: So that the way that the online notes are
structured is that they are hosted on the MITx
residential platform.
And so all of the reading, there is no text book.
All of the reading is online.
And there are questions interspersed between the text.
And so it's these questions that are really
depending on the text before IT, which tell us
if the students have been doing the reading because they can't
answer these questions without actually attempting this work.
I think some of the parts that were really useful about using
digital tools in having students interact with the content were,
one, is that we use the sketch response tool,
so we could actually have students draw pull diagrams
and pull zero diagrams.
And they could get automatic feedback on whether or not
that was correct.
We could also have them sketch responses to a system
and get feedback on that.
The other thing that's nice is that it really
makes some of those simple examples
that you often have to spend a lot of time in class doing,
we can now do those online, and have
the student get immediate feedback, see the answers.
These are things that maybe it's not worth doing in class
when you have someone like Philip who's there.
And instead now he can spend his time
working through the really complicated examples
and giving the scaffolding and fading
to help them do much more interesting problems
than on the homework.
PHILIP PEARCE: Yeah, I agree actually
and that's another way that I really
see this course as maximizing the kind of utility at the time
that the students spend with me and with each other.
So we go through more involved examples where
they have to really stop and think about things,
rather than the kind of rote examples, where you just
really make sure that you understand
a specific little concept.
JEREMY ORLOFF: So do they--
do the students turn in homework in this course?
PHILIP PEARCE: Yes.
So the way it works is in terms of them getting
a grade is we have the online lectures in which they
have to answer questions.
And we give that a small--
10% of their grade is from the online examples.
And then we have problem sets in which
they have to answer slightly more involved questions.
And they're handed in once every week.
And then we also have a midterm and a final exam.
JEREMY ORLOFF: So one of the great virtues
of having online questions, in my opinion,
is students get immediate response to their answers
as opposed to waiting a week or something
and getting their homework turned back to them.
And, of course, who needs to get the bad news.
They don't the sheet to see where their mistakes were.
And with an online setting, one of the great advantages
is students see right away whether they
understand something or not.
JENNIFER FRENCH: Yeah, I agree.
And then I think also a lot of the literature
shows that it's actually when you're first
learning something, that that immediate feedback
is the most useful.
And actually when you're doing more complicated things,
sometimes then the immediate feedback is less helpful.
And so that actually really is built into the way
the course is run.
One thing also that we do is that we actually
have a problem set checker for the homework.
So they actually know before they even turn it in
if their answers are right.
PHILIP PEARCE: And that's something
that we decided to add in this time
that we taught the course, this time I taught the course.
So in the previous times I taught
the course, some of the feedback that we got from the students
was that they would like to have even more online examples.
And one of the things that we did
to rectify that is that we made this-- or Jen implemented
this problem set checker, so that the students at the end
of each lecture could see the problem
set and answer the questions and get some immediate feedback
on them.
JEREMY ORLOFF: And by the lecture,
you mean the online unit that they were going through?
PHILIP PEARCE: Yes, exactly, exactly.
So after they've done the online reading,
they can also see the problem set and answer the questions
and get them checked.
JEREMY ORLOFF: Another great I think about the online version
is the way the Mathlets get integrated into the course,
very seamlessly integrated into the text.
JENNIFER FRENCH: I agree because I
think that one of the things that
is hard for novice students is to interact with the Mathlets
because they were really designed
both as a student-facing tool, but also
an instructor-facing tool, really to demonstrate things
in lecture.
And so for a student who doesn't know what's going on,
sometimes it can feel like there's
just too much going on, too many sliders, too many buttons.
And so instead, we can embed it in the web page,
and then have really guided problems and guided activities
that help them understand how to interact with it,
and to help them figure out what they should be looking for,
and what are the real responses of interest.