danaleeling

With week eleven still in progress, engagement on the Instructure Canvas platform as measured by page views appears to be in line with post-midterm levels of engagement. This week also had a Monday holiday, which would be expected to reduce platform engagement. Engagement on the holiday Monday was the lowest level of engagement seen for a Monday this term. The pattern of rising engagement from Monday to Thursday has not been seen in any prior week. This new pattern leaves open the possibility that the three day weekend is disruptive of engagement. Faculty talk in a lunch room after a three day weekend sometimes mentions the perceived disruption to student progress in a subject after a holiday weekend, perhaps the page views data is also indicating a slow recovery. Platform metrics continue to behave in an expected pattern. The number of students has decreased in the run up to the last day to withdraw from a class, and those losses to withdrawals are now showing up in the platform metri...

 Monday was a holiday this week, thus Wednesday was used to introduce reflection and refraction. I opted to use the laser to demonstrate diffuse and specular reflection. Then I used the water tanks to demonstrate refractive effects. This term I included a hand waving introduction to n₁sin₁=n₂sinθ₂. After demonstrating refraction through a prism, I covered convex lenses and image formation. The class wrapped up with a visit to a fish tank. The class opened with an introduction to the coin in the basin. I should also introduce the disappearing test tube, but I need a heavy vegetable oil to pull that off. The board introduction for the two legs of the laboratory. Marcia and Derisalyn The graduated cylinders are at the edge of the table to enable measuring down from the surface of the water. Explaining the procedure as a measurement down from zero at the water surface reduced the tendency to accidentally measure up from the bottom to the image position of the penny. Still, one afternoo...

This term I found three different brands of fruit salad at Ace Office. Four cans proved more than sufficient for the class of 18. I opened the class with a set of three videos this term. Pinkfong's Fruit Juice Shake Shake , Don't Memorize Types of Fruits of Plants , and SciShow's Why Tomatoes are Fruits . This list should be revisited and revised as appropriate in future terms. The second video is a good introduction, but does not actually cover fruit types and is only a part one of two or three videos. Prior experience noted that the single SciShow video was insufficient as an introduction. The complication is that a number of videos opt for a more developmental system of fruit type designation which requires knowing the life history of the fruit. This exercise uses a morphological definition set. The result is that some videos will leave the students unnecessarily confused. The largest Pyrex bowl in the house was sufficient to hold all four for mixing purposes. A can open...

The small size of the class allowed for a paired t-test paper aircraft flight experiment. I asked the students to build any kind of paper airplane they knew to make. Then (curricular intervention) I taught them a new design with the hope that the new design would outperform their planes. The result was useful from the perspective of demonstrating a non-significant t-test for paired dependent variables. spreadsheet This would be hard to do in a larger class - the process takes times. The idea is that this mimics the sort of study in education or health where a pre-test or pre-survey is done, an intervention is taken (a new reading program, a new approach to treating symptoms for chronic pain that does not respond well to pain killers, etc.) and then a post-test or post-survey is administered.  The failure of the above was actually quite useful as it allowed for coverage of the issue of publication pressures, p-hacking, and the replication crisis seen in many fields. This null result...

Courses and instructors remained the same week nine to ten. The number of students dropped slightly. Other areas of the Instructure Canvas platform showed modest growth. Breaking out the number of assignments, students, discussions, and media recordings shows more clearly the growth in assignments. Files are not included in the above chart due to the complexity of interpreting the files numbers. Some files are word documents or portable document file format files uploaded by an instructor. Other files include images inserted into pages, quizzes, assignments and other areas of Canvas. Instructors have a 500 Mb file storage limit.  Academic content is tracked as assignments, which would include tests and quizzes in this case, discussions, and media recordings. Breaking out just those three categories indicates that assignments strongly dominate platform use.  With the week not yet over at the time this report was produced, page views in week ten appear to be on par with week nin...