Course redesign: body by BYOD

My goal is not to convince every teacher and student that using a tablet computer in the classroom is the panacea for student success, much less convert every course to incorporate technology. Over my last three semesters of teaching some of my classes in a tablet-based fashion, there are several key lessons learned. The most critical of these is:

Understand when a tablet is useful and when it is not

Related Best Practices are:

1. Take advantage of things a tablet can do that a smartphone or laptop cannot do as easily
2. Don't force your students into money-spending situations, be it tablets or apps or other course materials
3. Be equitable: don't enact policies that are exclusive to certain student groups

There will be times to adhere to Best Practice 1 (leverage the capabilities of a tablet). Those times might include instances where form factor, touchscreen, and processing power are important. For example, a teacher might prefer tablets over laptops or smartphones:

• in a classroom with small desks and poor wi-fi internet access where the purpose of employing technology is to facilitate student writing (cellular internet access and a larger keyboard makes a tablet a top choice over a smartphone or laptop)
• in a course where travel/site visits, including photography/videography, are frequent (cellular internet access and built-in camera, as well as relatively small size/weight are key)

However, there are plenty of engaging activities to pursue in the classroom that could use a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Every one of us can easily improve course efficiency and/or student engagement with such a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach. This is a useful approach when your student demographic and campus resources indicate that every student can have an internet-enabled device in class (e.g. many campuses have student laptop loaner programs). Unless you have extensive upper administration support (e.g. financial and infrastructure), BYOD will be the best way to start.

Being device-agnostic (and operating system-agnostic, too) is especially important to address Best Practices 2 (keep costs low) and 3 (be equitable). If all students in your course already have a smartphone, laptop, or tablet, it might be best to accommodate their devices and not require new purchases.

A key step in building your BYOD course is to find free apps that are platform-agnostic (e.g. work on Apple, Microsoft, and Android operating systems). Fortunately, there are many quality apps that are free and are available through the Apple and Microsoft app stores and Google Play. The best way to ensure that your app is device-agnostic (e.g. works on mobile operating systems + laptops) is to find web-based apps.

A great example of this is Socrative, which can be run either through a mobile app or in a web browser. This app is great for in-class quizzes, informal assessments, and even taking attendance, it is easy for students and instructors to use, and it is free. Other key apps include Google apps (e.g. Drive, Docs, Sheets) and a PDF viewer/annotater (e.g. Adobe Reader; Xodo).

Enjoy imagining and executing the vision for your BYOD course redesigned to incorporate technology! If you're still not sure how to start, here's a great first step: identify one process in your class that could be more efficient using technology. For me, technology was the immediate solution to taking attendance (though I understand not all of you record attendance in your classes). Find one app that you can use to accomplish your one goal. This is not always easy to accomplish. Thus, on campus, I'm advocating having our tech-engaged faculty actively reach out to colleagues to facilitate this initial step of reflection, as it is understandably difficult to self-critique when one might not be familiar with the ways technology might be able to improve efficiency and student engagement. If you have these colleagues, please reach out to them for their advice and feedback! You have one such colleague here, so please post any feedback or questions below.

Straight from horses' mouths: Fall '15 data roundup

Now that two semesters of tablet instruction have passed, I'm enjoying learning from my students which aspects of my mobile technology instruction are successful and which are not. Reviews of last term's assessments have revealed some interesting responses and trends. My hope is that sharing these student attitudes and impressions with you will both catalyze changes to your teaching as well as provide some cautions about teaching with mobile devices. To start, let me briefly recap what I've been doing in the classroom (Approaches), and why (Goals).

Tablet Course Redesign

Goal	Approaches	Apps Employed
Provide students with resources that support their studying and learning	Create instructor-recorded (and captioned) lectures and exam keys Provide PDF lecture slides/exercises/URLs/resources prior to class Facilitate group work and peer instruction/interpretation/critique	ExplainEverything (for lecture recording/screencast) Adobe Acrobat and others (for PDF annotation) Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, Classroom (for collaborative writing and analysis)
Expose students to authentic disciplinary practices	read and interpret data from primary literature (e.g. PubMed) access databases related to genetics (e.g. OMIM, NCBI nucleotide) use web-based tools for sequence analysis (e.g. transeq, BLAST) Open-internet group exams	Web browser
Employ evidence-based teaching practices	Flipped classroom (students first access material before class on their own, especially to learn factual information, then come to class with questions and ready to practice and employ the factual information to solve problems and discuss issues) Active learning	Socrative (for anonymous in-class student polling and quizzes) Google Classroom (for distributing and collecting in-class exercises)

I'll share here the good (and the not-so-good) data on progress toward achieving these goals. These data and student comments are from IRB-approved assessments from the Fall 2015 semester of my genetics course.

Resources that support student learning

97% of students reported that they used instructor-recorded video to help study for exams, and 90% of students reported that watching recorded lectures was critical.

"I really like the tablets because I could see the lecture notes on my tablet clearly and I also really like the recording of the lectures because those really help me with studying for the test."

Over half of the students indicated interacting with other students during class more or much more than normal. Over 80% of students reported remaining in the same groups during the semester. Only half of the students knew their other group members prior to the start of the semester, but 62% of students reported interacting with each other outside of class. This suggests, to me, that employing group work as part of this course might have improved student sense of belonging and also enhanced peer instruction.

Exposing students to authentic disciplinary practices

Much to my satisfaction, the vast majority of students reported that using a tablet computer in this class helped them grow "some" or "a lot" in the following areas:

• having authentic experiences in genetics
• achieving a better understanding of the relevance of genetics to the student personally, or to humanity
• improving quantitative reasoning skills (graphic, predicting, estimating, analyzing data sets)
• improving information literacy skills (knowing where to find information relevant to genetics, how to evaluate its legitimacy)
• working collaboratively in groups

Using evidence-based teaching practices

Two-thirds of students reported that focusing in-class time on exercises and question-and-answer sessions contributed to their success in the course.

When asked about how study habits changed during the term, student responses included (emphases mine):

• For other courses, I usually rely on the textbook and homework problems to study concepts. In this class, I was more interested in studying the relevence and application of concepts, which prompted me to rely more on outside resources like the internet. I focused more on interactive, application problems than just memorizing facts.
• I started to go through the audio recordings over and over again. Also stopped taking notes and started paying attention.
• I really liked how we had to read the chapter we were going to discuss in class, before class. I would love to do this for every class, but i dont have the incentive too and am too busy. But in this class, it was part of the hw grade, so i did it knowing it was not a waste of time but counted towards my grade.

Other tidbits

• 65% of students typed notes using their tablet devices
• 91% of students felt like they used their tablets in class as much as they had expected
• Importantly, almost 90% of students self-reported spending the majority of time spent in class using their tablet for on-task activities.

The not-so-good results (or, "Things to keep in mind when deciding how/whether to use mobile technology in the classroom")

Over a third of students indicated that they asked questions in class either less or much less than normal.

When asked about whether students felt that using tablets reduced the quality of instruction, some of the more negative responses included:

• Difficulty concentrating due to tablet and constant shift in attention among multiple apps
• It is very helpful, but some students can get easily distracted from it as well
• Sometimes the professors would have issues with technology, which in turn kind of look away time from the students. 
• I prefer taking notes on paper and by writing it helps me more to remember
• I feel that I spent a lot more time figuring out how to use apps and the tablet to submit assignments than actually learning some of the material. Spent more time learning how to use the apps.

Looking to the future

Although a sizeable portion (about 15%) of students disagreed that a tablet-based class was better than a traditional lecture class, the vast majority of students (including many in that 15%) said that they would suggest to friends that they enroll in a tablet course.

Beyond this course, academic IT approaches are spreading on campus, with 84% of students in my class indicating that they used their tablet for coursework in other courses.

Conclusion

In sum, I'm buoyed by the successes I've had in redesign, but there are clearly places where my course redesign with technology needs tweaking, including:

• more consciously considering the degree to which I demand that students use technology (e.g. as opposed to paper)
• the number of ways (and therefore number of different apps) we use the tablets each day

Finally, as always, it is even more clear that managing student expectations and articulating instructor goals, motivations, and expectations is critical to ensure the best possible experience for students entering the unfamiliar and potentially stressful environment of a technology-redesigned course.

New term, new opportunities!

Tablet Pedagogy posts are back from a well-deserved holiday hiatus! Today is the first day of the semester at Fresno State, and instruction begins next Tuesday.

This semester, I'm taking a leap and tablet teaching all three of my courses (Genetics, which I've taught twice before as tablet instruction-based courses; Evolution; Applied Bioethics)! This effort will reach over 150 students on campus, and I'm excited about applying what I've learned in new situations.

To make things even more interesting, I've taken on the additional goal of teaching Genetics using open-access educational resources to offset the cost of the tablet purchase!

Finally, I've been selected to lead a group of colleagues from across the California State University system to help them redesign their genetics courses with technology!

In all, I'm really looking forward to sharing with you, over the course of the semester, many topics, including best practices for:

• Incorporating open-access resources
• Moving toward a bring-your-own-device model for class redesign with mobile technology

Thanks for following along!