Final Evaluation

One of the major things I have learned is that I should be more willing to actually apply my research and the theories I use as supports for my research in my classroom. For some reason I have always seen them as unconnected to the classroom. However, the classroom is itself an organization, and theories that apply to an organization apply just as well to the classroom as to a commercial enterprise.

I have also been underestimating the value of my personal experience in the classroom. The fact that I have seen changes and worked with the devices that we describe in class creates a link to the real importance of the topics to the students. Since they see themselves as part of "Conway's class", the fact that the leader of the class (thus, in some ways, the stereotype of the group member) is so engaged in the topic helps them to feel that way as well. My own enthusiasm is not just socially contagious, but helps underpin the students' own feelings of identity.

I did experiment with having the classes set some of the class norms last semester. I do not think that that experiment was very successful. Many of the norms the students came up with concerned course content more than in-class behavior. To the extent that they did address in-class behavior, only about half the time was it very relevant, and frequently went opposite actual desirable behaviors (e.g., one class felt that allowing use of any device, including phones, should be allowed during class sessions. I allowed this, and they spent all term texting rather than paying attention. :-). I will go back to the older approach I have on this, giving them rules; however, I will be working on a way to ground this in social identity, so that they will have an intrinsic motivation to follow the rules rather than extrinsic.

I feel that moving to a more formative problem based approach in my classes has definitely had fruit. The more I was able to apply these techniques, the more I feel my classes improved. The improvement was limited in the intro to IS classes, since my ability to control how the class works is limited by the fact that there are other professors, a course coordinator who is not me, and so on. In the courses I had more control over, I think that there was definitely considerable improvement.

I spent less time telling (explaining to students why I was an expert, explaining concepts) and more time showing (telling students about specific experiences I had that were germane to the topic, demonstrating how to use tools, and helping the students to use them in class).

As to how to improve in the future, I think much of my focus will be on finding ways to create something closer to the Aalborg approach in my courses. The full approach is of course not possible, because it would require institutional change. However, I can find ways of creating more realistic problems for the class to solve at the beginning of a semester, which will require learning the things that the class is supposed to provide. Much of this will come through development of simulations that I can run in class, which will additionally give me more opportunity to provide formative feedback on their performance.

In all, I have found the last year to be extremely valuable for my teaching ability. One of the major things I will be doing to continue this is to continue attending pedagogical sessions when appropriate, keeping an eye on the pedagogical cafe for useful topics, and start trying to keep up on the research in the field myself, rather than relying on someone to provide it for me. :-)

Thank you for the opportunity to learn that this year has brought me. :-)