Blog – Page 12 – UMass Amherst

Remote version of Physics 132 in response to COVID-19

TL;DR: My syllabus addendum for the second half of the semester can be found at this link. For comparison and reference, the original syllabus is at this link. (I hate it when people bury the information you really need behind a bunch of stuff. Recipe websites, I am looking at you! I don’t want your entire life story.)

March 9-13: what a week before spring break! At the beginning of the week, things were very much up in the air. By Wednesday morning the other four colleges in the 5-College Consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith) had all closed for the semester, with UMass still undecided. Then, mid-day on Wednesday, we found out (via the Boston Globe!) that UMass would be doing remote learning for essentially all undergraduate courses for the two weeks after spring break until April 3. By Friday, it was announced that all courses (including graduate courses) were to go remote until the end of the semester and all faculty were to avoid campus as much as possible.

How to teach a two sections of a team-based learning class with a total enrollment of 458 remotely? Moreover, what about those students who may not have internet off campus, are in time-zones with 11 hour time differences, or now have new additional responsibilities? One of the things you quickly learn about teaching large courses: minimizing special cases is key. You simply cannot deal with each student individually. There are simply not enough hours in the week. You must find systems that work for most people giving you the bandwidth to deal with the individual students who most need your attention.

In my class, the material that can be placed into short videos already has: those videos form my prep homework. Replacing class with a series of video lectures and online homework would rob my students of yet one more community they have; I know for a fact that some of the teams in my course have become quite close. I cannot rob them of that right now.

So how to do this while at the same time acknowledging that many of my students are working under less-than-ideal circumstances? A combination of synchronous and asynchronous delivery modes. There are a few small carrots to attending the synchronous modes, but no punishments for not being able to attend them. This encourages students to attend the synchronous modes if they can, but allows for other options for those who cannot. Finally, I thought a “syllabus” was important, I want to be as clear to my students as I can to try to put their minds at ease.

We will see how this goes.

Pretending to be a biologist for a day!

This past Saturday, Brokk Toggerson participated in the ASBMB Northeast Catalyst Conversations for 2020 at UMass Amherst as a panelist talking about OER. In particular, about the gradual transition from OpenStax to, a stack of pdfs, to the custom books we have now developed. The biggest hurdle to many faculty is, as it was for us, the online homework systems. Our experience with EdFinity seemed well received.

In addition to being on a panel, it was interesting to see some work from the biology DBER community as well. Some interesting ideas over lunch with Sarah G. Prescott, an Associate Professor from UNH Manchester, resulted in some ideas about how to better implement Twitter in the classroom. This was tried in 132 a few years ago, without much success. The students found the assignments to be “busy work” and there were significant technical challenges getting everyone setup. However, the motivation for the assignments, encouraging students to find applications of physics in their everyday lives or fields of study is still important. Prof Prescott’s main ideas were:

Make each assignment relevant or don’t do it (obvious but always good advice!)
Make the first few assignments simply about engaging with academic Twitter. This will make the entire activity more relevant to them as they can see how this can benefit them.
Have screen captures etc. about how to get setup, including how to make a dummy account.
Make students turn-in a screen shot. Again, a video on how to do this may be needed, but these are much easier to grade than us finding students’ posts on Twitter!
Grade using a mastery model: they must include everything or no points. This is easy to grade and scales well. A few drops ensures that this does not negatively impact anyone’s grade.
Finally make the the technical use of Twitter part of the assignments: threads, hashtags, etc.

Definitely something to think about going forward. Always fun to see how other disciplines do things!

Taking the plunge with a new book format and a new homework system for Physics 132

This semester, I have decided to finally take the plunge for migrating the Physics 132 textbook from the pdf generated by the OpenStax CNX platform to a much-easier-to-edit format of Pressbooks and simultaneously moving the online preparatory homework from Pearson’s MasteringPhysics (to which I will not link, search for it if you are interested) to Edfinity. This is quite a journey and a lot of work, but I think it will pay off.

The new book can be seen at http://openbooks.library.umass.edu/toggerson-132/. It is being built as we go for the current semester, but have a look!

Discussion of Open Textbooks in the NYTimes

NYTimes Opinion 11 December 2019 – How Professors Help Rip Off Students: Textbooks are too expensive.

Another interesting article from the NYTimes related to our work here at the physedgroup. This most recent article talks about the fact that textbook prices have increased over 1000% since the 1970’s! The article specifically talks about economics, but many of the details mentioned are relevant to physics as well: $250 books, with $50 access codes for homework systems, all familiar refrains for undergraduates taking physics courses.

A Neat and Different Way to Organize Content

A colleague working in Open Educational Resources at UMass’s W.E.B. du Bois Library just brought my attention to an article: Vo, Mai K., and Jonathan C. Sharp. “Design, Development, and Content Creation for an Open Education Physics Website for MRT Education.” Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences 50, no. 2 (June 1, 2019): 212–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmir.2019.03.180. This article describes a new open-education physics website http://openphys.med.ualberta.ca/. I encourage folks to go check it out.

This Open Phys site is meant to be a way for medical professionals to learn more about modern physics, specifically those that underpin the MRI. However, what is really interesting about the site is its structure: the fundamental topics are displayed as tiles.

The topics at OpenPhys are presented as tiles — The main page of Open Physics presents the various topics as tiles. Students can, after exploring the “User Guide” can proceed in any order they wish.

When the student selects a topic, they are directed to a map with the information. This structure is more flexible than a standard book as there is no requirement for a linear progression. I feel that for some topics, such a non-linear presentation is particularly useful; I remember as a student having trouble with statistical mechanics because, to me, it felt very non-linear. My study strategies involved outlines – a very linear organization. This method worked great for electricity and magnetism which, I and every textbook I have ever seen, feels has a very linear progression. However, this method failed me in statistical mechanics. Only when I took the course again in graduate school, and made a map at the end of the semester did the material “click.” As an instructor, I have drawn on that experience and sometimes suggested to students that a map may be helpful. I never know which topics a given student will see as linear, as it depends upon their own perceptions and educational background.

The topics of the electron model of the atom are arranged in a map showing the connections between topics. — The map of content for the “Electronic Structure of the Atom” unit

In addition to content presentation, this site makes use of multi-modal presentation, mixing videos and text, as well as H5P to incorporate formative quizzing.

I really like the idea of this method of presentation and the fact that this source code for this site is on GitHub under Creative Commons Attribution 4. 0 License makes it easy to adapt and incorporate into my own materials. I do wonder, however, about the accessibility of this format. The multiple points of access and variety of paths through the material would seem to be a plus, but the format could also be confusing. Moreover, how effectively could someone navigate this site if they use a screen reader or are reliant on input devices other than a mouse? These would be important questions to explore before incorporating it into my curriculum.