The Faculty Story: William Kettyle
When faculty experiment with technology enhancements, there is often a ripple effect whereby thoughts about how to use a technology lead to other thoughts about pedagogical changes in the course, and then perhaps back to thoughts of technology.
This was the case with Professor William Kettyle, Head of Health Sciences and Technology, when he introduced into his class three augmentative devices over a couple of years: classroom clickers (personal response systems), wikis, and a one gigabyte USB flash drive with all course materials for students to use during the semester.
Professor Kettyle has a particular challenge: his course meets once a week for three hours. He knows that sustaining engagement for three hours is not easy.
“The class is an ordeal or adventure or concert or whatever one wants to think about a 3-hour class, but 3 hours of lecture is not acceptable, I don’t think.”
His response:
Here’s one way he uses clickers:
“The other teaching tool that I have used for a number of years are called quickies, which are 10 or 12 little adventures that exercise one’s knowledge of some problems. So, the diabetes quickies: here are six patients, all of whom have blood sugar of 380. Oh, my gosh, that’s way too high, there’s six of them, and they all have exactly the same blood sugar. Unbelievable. But they got there six different ways. And they are going to get out of there six different ways. So the idea is Can you quickly go through that list, and with your clickers you can say, is this ice cream gluttony, is this type one diabetes, is this type two diabetes, is this a laboratory error, and they can select the thing.
“If the vast majority get it right, next case. If they don’t get it right, where you been? What’s up? Here’s the next case. It’s off the same list of explanations. Get it right, ok, move on. And so, we set up a culture and environment where you declare yourself. We don’t keep a record of who’s clicking, but we do keep one of how they do on a question and that could inform how that topic gets dealt with, going forward.
“There often shouldn’t be a right answer [when using the clickers]. There can be many right answers. You see where you are in the consensus and reasonable people, well-meaning people, can disagree about what’s most important here. Let’s have that conversation, ok? That’s a wonderful use of the clicker.”
Professor Kettyle has been able to keep innovating in his class with help from the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology. In the spring of 2007, he began meeting with OEIT to explore using a wiki in this class. Wikis are not about publishing, as are blogs, but about group collaboration. A wiki group can both post files and edit other members’ posts. The addition of a wiki for this class would add yet another way for the students and faculty to engage with each other.
Moving from idea to implementation was daunting. Professor Kettyle asked OEIT for guidance.
“OEIT was incredibly responsive. They set up a meeting, came and showed me a bit about wiki. They set up a sandbox; I began to play around with it.”
“A student became involved in the wiki project through her UROP experience. “In addition, I hired the services of a recent MIT graduate, who actually took this course two years ago. Almost as a teaching assistant, but not quite. She is working in the laboratory here but is not a student but an employee. In any event, we carved some time for her to work on the wiki project too. With these two students, then, we brainstormed, we idea-generated around these technological devices, these systems, that might enhance the teaching experience.”
There was already a Web site that served as a portal into a data repository. But, “it seemed to me that wiki could offer an interactive place in addition to a data warehouse for information. And I think – this was the first year we used wiki – and I think Jim [from OEIT] and I learned a lot about wikiship issues with regards to what might work and what might not work.”
“I have been trying to devise wiki bait material, things that will get people to go to the Web sites. The wiki-quickie of the week would be a question posed to the class. And then individuals could respond to it.”
“Things like generate a mnemonic to keep track of the control mechanism of the hypothalamus and the pituitary. Or, here’s a funny looking scan of a thyroid, what’s going on here? And people could then post their responses. It’s the kind of thing we used to do with the blackboard.”
Use of the wiki was required and was made part of the activity and work of the course.
Professor Kettyle used the wiki also for one-minute papers. “For example – it doesn’t work as well with a wiki as on paper – one minute paper at the end of class. Could be collected, which is anonymous. I can tabulate and then, make sure at the beginning of next class that those islands of lack of coherence or clarity are dealt with. “ He considers a “fantasy” about a future use of wiki:
As he was talking with his OEIT collaborator, “another idea came up. There are three or four courses offered at the same time – at the medical school – for the basic same group of students. The overlap is probably 80% but not 100%. They’re studying cardio-vascular, physiology, respiratory, and endocrine, which is the course I teach. We are very disciplined, specific in our course work.”
“Well, in fact there are patients who have all four of those things. So, the idea of doing some collaborative sessions has often been talked about but not done very well. My latest thinking about it is to have such sessions but to somehow wikify, to somehow make them dynamically available, or more dynamically available, off hours, so if there’s a video from it, or a list of findings and a list of thoughts and some discussion about that, put it into the context of what’s happening with the kidney. Let’s say diabetes is a great example. People die of diabetes and have heart disease, often have kidney disease, and they have insulin and glucose problems, so let’s put it together and teach to the patient as opposed to a specific issue.”
In this account of Professor Kettyle thinking through pedagogy and technology issues, we see an experiment in action. He perceives the pedagogical need, looks for technology options, talks with experts, incorporates the technology into the class plan in some meaningful and important way, and then learns from the experience to let him improve his use during the next semester. Technology is just part of the picture, but it helps add features he couldn’t have had before, and those features then spur on additional thoughts toward fundamental changes.
The OEIT companion story
Wikis are popular – at least as something to mention -- but it’s not clear that most people know what they actually do or how to use them in class. Professor Kettyle’s story is about a well-planned and promising adaptation of teaching methods to incorporate a wiki in a Health Services and Technology class at MIT.
OEIT’s work with Bill Kettyle, led by Jim Cain, educational technology consultant & learning spaces administrator, has been very productive in part because Kettyle presents a big picture of what he wants overall in his class. Then, whatever technology options he wants to consider fit into that larger picture. He presents analogies about how he used paper or the blackboard in the past and what might be the analogous uses with wikis or clickers.
He also sees how the various technologies, Web site, clickers, USB flash drives, and wikis all accomplish their separate tasks and how they complement each other. He understands the experimental nature of using technology in teaching and learning so he does a “run” one semester and then assesses – in the case of wikis with OEIT – the technology experience of the previous semester and how to improve and add new uses next semester.
One lesson that OEIT has learned from this collaboration is that, since many uses of technology are, at this point, necessarily experimental, it may be best that the department bear the financial cost of the technology, and not the students, in the first semester or even as a permanent arrangement.
Kettyle represents the new phase on educational technology: trying out a combination of many technologies to see what combinations work. He is re-thinking how he uses the Wiki, and has come up with suggestions for modifying the MIT wiki so that it can provide much more useful information for students. Jim Cain says that Bill Kettyle presented two essential goals for his work with OEIT: 1. Teach effectively and 2. Learn from students. By opening new channels of interactions, the technology options Jim Cain helped Professor Kettyle impement may help on both counts.
This collaboration continues.
Office of Educational Innovation and Technology
Building NE48, Cambridge, MA 02139-4044
Phone: (617) 252-1981; Fax: (617) 452-4044
