Fancy Pedagogy

During our Advance Course Design Studio II this week, someone mentioned the term "fancy technology." As a group, we began to discuss how this term connected to Puentedura's (2011) SAMR model. From this discussion, a noteworthy term arose, "Fancy Pedagogy." Fancy tech seems to be a current topic of the technology that we should be using to teach online. It seems there is an abundance of attention (and funding) directed towards fancy tech, and [still] minimal deep attention on effective teaching. Many have described technology is a "tool," although I am not one of those. I have seen technology more as a magnifying glass. If your pedagogy is well aligned with research, then appropriate, relevant and meaningful technology will highlight your current pedagogy well. If, on the other hand, your teaching is not well designed using empirically-based effective instructional methods, then the fancy technology will highlight the gaps and most likely disconnect students from the content, instructor and each other.

I would like to share recent research on effective (fancy) pedagogy for your consideration.

AAC&U (Rodriguez & Koubek, 2019) adopted High-Impact Instructional Practices (HIIPs) because of their impact on engagement and learning outcomes.

In another study about effective pedagogy, White and Miller (2019) found that while pre and posttests showed students believed they were able to apply theory to practice, their responses to content questions did not show similar learning gains. This misalignment and overestimation has been found in computer skills (Grant, 2009), biology (Ziegler & Montplaisir, 2014) and chemistry (Adesoji, 2017). These findings are problematic because they indicate limited retention of skills and concepts and because students believe they understand, they are less likely to continue learning. The point is that effective teaching would have implemented appropriate feedback cycles, so that students did not arrive at these false elevated self-efficacies.

Finally, Michael Wesch created a helpful online teaching video that aligns with foundational learning theories, which he released before the current situation. You may recognize Wesch as the creator of the 2007 "A Vision of Students Today" video.

Rodriguez, R. & Koubek, E. (2019). Unpacking High-Impact Instructional Practices and student engagement. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,13(3).

White, E. & Miller, K. (2019) Mixed methods research to improve course design. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 13(1).