Statistician explores how faculty can excel in blended learning environments

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"Want to be rated an excellent instructor by your students?" writes Leslie King, Staff Writer and Emory Report.

Facilitate learning, show respect for students and communicate well and you are virtually guaranteed to get an overall rating of excellent, irrespective of anything else.

In a recent lecture sponsored by Emory's QuanTM, learning analytics expert Chuck Dziuban explained trends about the new learning environment that blends face-to-face and virtual instruction. 
Photo: Emory University News

The University of Central Florida's Chuck Dziuban said this unbreakable rule is based on data mined from 1.2 million end-of-course student evaluations of their professors and instructors. If the students rate them excellent in all three of those categories, they will inevitably be rated as excellent overall.

Dziuban explained this and more about today's blended learning environment in a recent speech entitled "Teaching and Learning in an Evolving Educational Environment." His public talk was sponsored by Emory's Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods (QuanTM).
 
"Whether you call it online learning, distributed learning, hybrid learning, blended learning, lecture capture, learning in a cloud, virtual learning, MOOCs, adaptive learning — buzz words enough for you? — I've been evaluating it for the last 20 years," said Dziuban, who serves as director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where he teaches research design and statistics.

"It changes; it morphs. What it was 20 years is nothing like it is today. What it is today is nothing like it will be two years from now," he said.

At UCF, "we have 60,000 students and growing. There's no way we can accommodate our student base in a physical space," he said. "All of our growth comes from the distributed learning environment. We're having a decline in face-to-face enrollment and rising online enrollment. That's a scary curve. We've already done the position paper on what this is going to look like five years from now and we need to make some strategic decisions about it."
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Additional resources

Dziuban also showed examples of how he taught his classes in Second Life. A recording of his Oct. 15 speech, along with a link to his presentation slides, is available below:
Teaching and Learning in an Evolving Educational Environment by Chuck Dziuban

Source: Emory University News and Events