Wired Ivy

Wired Ivy

A podcast for academics who teach online.

  1. www.globetrotters.edu

    04/26/2022

    www.globetrotters.edu

    As the world reopens, in fits and starts, higher ed is attempting to speed away from the pandemic as quickly as possible. But the end of the academic year is now on the horizon and, for academics, that means it’s time for an assessment.  A glance in the rear-view mirror, a review of the virtual content and activities created to address a specific, limited-term situation, and consider whether some of those tools might be more durable than intended. Such is the experience of today’s guests. Faced with university travel bans and course rosters full of students who were counting on study abroad programming and credit hours, Karen Edwards and Sandy Strick of the University of South Carolina, and Tori Ellenberger of Australia’s Deakin University, shifted gears from globetrotting to web surfing with barely a tap on the clutch pedal.   In the process, they discovered a fleet of readily available digital resources that addressed their immediate needs, allowing students to meet the same personal, cultural, academic, and professional learning outcomes established for in-person educational travel.  But wait, there’s more!  The resulting instructional strategies will be used to augment upcoming board-a-physical-airplane excursions, a new intentionally virtual study abroad course has been approved at University of South Carolina to be offered each summer going forward, and Wired Ivy’s own Dan Marcucci has revised his approach to leading global study after hearing Tori, Sandy, and Karen describe their experiences and insights.  Trust us, you’ll want to take notes!

    51 min
  2. Made to Measure (Dan Marcucci & Kieran Lindsey)

    02/23/2022

    Made to Measure (Dan Marcucci & Kieran Lindsey)

    High-stakes academic assessments create conditions that motivate students to cheat.  At the same time everyone wants a laudable level of academic integrity in higher learning.  Fair or not, for many years there has been a dismissive accusation that online learning was particularly vulnerable to massive cheating.  Then, when universities made the wholesale emergency pivot from in-person to virtual classrooms in March 2020, there was a corresponding and predictable uptick in anxiety over how to prevent cheating when the instructor wasn’t even in the same physical location as the learners.  This all conveniently ignores the fact that ensuring academic integrity has been a perennial goal and challenge in all forms of education, regardless of the mode of delivery. Test proctoring software and plagiarism checkers are offered as high-tech solutions to what has been framed as a problem created by technology.  We will set aside, for the moment, legitimate apprehensions raised by these software solutions – collection of bio-metric data, spyware and privacy, promoting a surveillance culture, malware vulnerabilities, to name but a few.  The important point is this focus on technology is a distraction from the underlying problem.  High-tech fixes only encourage an arms race where  students improve their methods, and educators increase their policing tactics.  It doesn’t mitigate the reason for cheating – we included in the show notes links to research about this.  But academic integrity shouldn’t begin with Crime and Punishment, it should start with Sense and Sensibility.   What if, rather than trying to win an academic integrity skirmish, we make assessment activities that promote the original learning objectives?

    53 min
5
out of 5
17 Ratings

About

A podcast for academics who teach online.