UCLA pulled out all the stops for the nearly 17,000 potential incoming freshmen and their families who visited campus for the annual Bruin Day on April 15, which for many, marked a final, exhilarating stop on their college-search journey.
By John Lynch
This article was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Recently, I had an unexpected revelation as I watched a colleague of mine work with a pair of instructors to “hybridize” their introductory foreign-language class.
The team spent weeks breaking down their expected learning outcomes, then more weeks drafting scripts for videos (to supplement the existing textbook) and quiz questions to help students practice those skills, then months recording the videos and building those quizzes in Moodle, our campus learning-management system. Finally, after almost a year of planning and production, the instructors were able to begin testing their new tools by rigorously comparing the learning outcomes of students in the hybrid sections to those of students in traditional-format classes.
Illustration by John W. Tomac for The Chronicle
Recent research indicates that creating an instructional environment rich in real-time data about student achievement is perhaps the most powerful positive intervention that an instructor can make. So I was excited to see that the new hybrid materials were designed to collect substantial data about student achievement and behavior throughout the course. Want to know how well someone understands past-tense verb conjugation? What about the vocabulary for giving directions? Or matching the gender of nouns, articles, and adjectives? All of these data are available, and given a properly designed dashboard, a skilled instructor could use them to personalize the learning experience of every student in the class. Alternatively, motivated students could use these data to direct their own practice.
But if such an intervention is so effective, why aren’t we doing this in all of our classes? The answer, of course, is cost — but not the cost that I expected. Specifically, it wasn’t the technological cost. Although the instructors used some innovative technologies in their course redesign, none of those is critical to the personalized-learning aspect: The quizzes could be delivered by any learning-management system, or even on paper, and one could reveal the same data in almost-real time with only a properly designed spreadsheet. Nor was it the cost of the instructional designer, or the educational technologist. The single greatest cost of the course redesign that I watched was the faculty instructors (or “subject-matter experts,” as they’re often referred to), who spent hundreds of hours planning and designing all of the new content.
More important, I also realized that faculty will be the biggest cost for just about any successful educational technology project. Instructional designers can advise instructors on learning outcomes and ways to measure them, but they cannot actually design the assignments or reconfigure the readings and other supplemental materials. Technologists can build a quiz in a learning-management system from a spreadsheet listing questions and answers, but they cannot create the spreadsheet in the first place, without an expert’s knowledge of the course content, and they certainly cannot record videos on an instructor’s behalf, authoritatively explicating a subject, even from a script!
A technology platform might be able to transform structured data into an easy-to-parse graph or dashboard, but it cannot structure that data by itself, and we’re still a long way from being able to effectively and efficiently measure “critical thinking and analysis” or “written communication skills” via multiple-choice questions. The instructor, the content expert, is the thread that ties all of these other pieces together, the one without whom the others would be irrelevant.
Unfortunately, when it comes to improving instructional outcomes, giving instructors adequate time and support for course redesign isn’t how most universities seem to spend their money.
Anecdotally, I can think of instructional “innovations” at many institutions where the administration paid a high price for a new, much-praised technology platform while expecting faculty members to voluntarily commit their own time to learning it and putting it in place. Unfortunately, technology platforms are rarely the holy grail. That is to say, they do not solve problems merely by being licensed. Instead, they must be learned and used, and using such tools effectively generally requires labor far beyond what faculty members can afford to do while still meeting their other job requirements, whether they are tenure-track or contingent.
Recent data indicate that faculty members broadly agree. A 2016 study from Inside Higher Ed examining faculty attitudes toward technology found that only 26 percent of faculty members think that they are fairly compensated for developing online courses.
The New Media Consortium reports that 66 percent of the respondents in a recent survey “felt that faculty members lack critical support to advance new teaching and learning practices.”
“Scaling innovative teaching and learning practices requires resources and incentives, yet pedagogical efforts are seldom incorporated in tenure review,” the report says.
I am excited by a lot of the cutting-edge ideas in educational technology, such as personalized learning and predictive analytics. I believe that college students at all levels would benefit greatly if we could all evolve our teaching method from “the sage on the stage” to a data-rich “conversation” with clear learning outcomes, effectively turning every class, no matter how big, into a small seminar. Even for the most qualitative of the humanities, there are viable models that would let us implement these teaching techniques without sacrificing any of the content, depth, or diversity of experience that has traditionally characterized our fields of study.
But if we want to see serious experimentation with such teaching models, we need to first seriously consider how to compensate our instructors for the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours that such experimentation will take. Obviously, one possible approach is to actually pay them to spend extra hours on course redesign, via summer appointments or buyouts from other responsibilities. But there are other possibilities. For example, if leading universities took steps to ensure that evidence-based instructional innovation counted toward tenure advancement as much as an equivalent amount of time spent on research does, I expect that we’d see an explosion of valuable experimentation in this area.
I believe that the real barrier to widespread instructional innovation is not technical but cultural. The greatest cost of leveraging a new technology isn’t the tech itself, or the technical support for it; it’s the time required by local experts to build, revise, and sustain content that will make the most effective use of it. And since most universities do not compensate their instructors for this time, in either the short or the long term, that innovation isn’t happening nearly as fast as it could.
If successful teaching truly matters, universities (and the elected officials, donors, and other figures who influence them) need to invest more in giving faculty incentives to engage with evidence-based and learner-centric models. Will such an approach be expensive and full of false starts? Sure. But no more so, I suspect, than another 10 years spent buying software licenses in hopes of finding the holy grail.
John Lynch holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and cultures and is academic- technology manager at the Center for Digital Humanities of the University of California at Los Angeles.
Anita Ortega, a former UCLA basketball star and the first African-American woman to become a Los Angeles Police Department area captain, will be the distinguished alumna speaker for the UCLA College commencement on June 16.
UCLA faculty, students and staff in the Division of Social Sciences in the UCLA College are mourning the loss of Mark Sawyer, who was a professor of African-American studies and political science
Carol Bakhos is a professor of late antique Judaism and Jewish studies in UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, Bakhos says people are often surprised when she says she is not Jewish —
John Agnew, UCLA distinguished professor of geography, has spent his scholarly career examining the politics of place. He teaches courses in political geography and globalization, as well as sections in the department of Italian.
The crisis at Oroville Dam should be a wake-up call to those making infrastructure decisions today that will affect Californians for many years to come.
After years of being largely shut out of the Academy Award nominations — a trend that prompted the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign in 2016 — actors, writers, directors and even a cinematographer of color are among the nominees for the 2017 Oscars, which will be held Feb. 26.
By Jessica Wolf
Image: The Million Dollar Hoods website lets users examine incarceration data for dozens of areas in Los Angeles County. In this screen grab from the site, the red sections of Los Angeles County show where the most money is spent locking up people from that area.
As the realities of mass incarceration face increased scrutiny across the nation, UCLA researchers have launched Million Dollar Hoods, a website and digital mapping project that shows the disparate impact of the Los Angeles jail system — the largest in the United States.
Million Dollar Hoods maps how much money the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department spend per neighborhood to incarcerate residents in county and city jails.
The project’s goal is to provide unprecedented public access to jail data in Los Angeles and identify patterns of incarceration throughout the county. The maps also let users examine the data by race, gender, type of crime and leading cause of arrest for every neighborhood.
“What we have uncovered is that L.A.’s nearly billion-dollar jail budget is largely committed to incarcerating residents of just a few neighborhoods,” said Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, UCLA professor of history and African American Studies. “In some neighborhoods, such as Lancaster, Palmdale and Compton, tens of millions of dollars have been spent since 2010.”
Breaking down a billion-dollar jail budget
Since 2010 Los Angeles County spent more than $82 million incarcerating residents from Lancaster and more than $61 million incarcerating people from Palmdale, with DUI and possession of a controlled substance the top two causes of arrest. In that time, nearly $40 million was spent incarcerating residents from Compton, where the top cause of arrest was possession of a controlled substance.
Lytle-Hernandez, who led the project, secured the required data via requests to the sheriff’s department and LAPD through the California Public Records Act. The sheriff’s department repeatedly denied her requests but granted access in January 2016. Since then, she has worked with a team of UCLA geographic information systems experts to bring to Los Angeles a robust mapping database that has been successfully used in New York, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere.
“Much like the Million Dollar Blocks projects in New York and Chicago, we are looking at the costs of incarceration by identifying the communities where the most has been spent to incarcerate residents,” Lytle-Hernandez said. Million Dollar Hoods differs from those projects in that it uses local jail data versus state prison data.
Image: Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail in downtown. Los Angeles operates the largest jail system in the United States. PHOTO: Mike Fricano/UCLA
“We made this choice because Los Angeles operates the largest jail system in the United States and we wanted to betterunderstand the impact of L.A.’s jails and lockups,” Lytle-Hernandez said.
Lytle-Hernandez pointed out that the dollar amounts posted on the Million Dollar Hoods map are conservative estimates owing to gaps in how the departments track this information. For example, the sheriff’s department does not record the number of days spent incarcerated by people who may have posted bail but then returned to custody after trial. The data also do not capture information on prisoners transferred into the L.A. County jail system from city police departments or the California state prison system.
For many of the communities mapped in this project, the total cost of incarceration to the L.A. County jail system is actually much higher, Lytle-Hernandez said.
Connecting data to personal stories
“But the costs of incarceration are more than fiscal,” Lytle-Hernandez added. “So we are committed to also sharing the personal experiences that residents of L.A.’s Million Dollar Hoods have had with arrest and incarceration, allowing for a fuller accounting of the social costs of incarceration, to families, communities and society at large.”
The Million Dollar Hoods research team has partnered with the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, which is currently holding a series of public hearings on policing in Los Angeles. At these hearings, the commission is inviting community members to share their experiences with law enforcement officers and agencies. The Million Dollar Hoods website hosts video footage of testimony from these hearings.
Geographic information systems technologists Yoh Kawano and Albert Kochaphum from UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education coded and mapped the data and built the website. Robert Habans, a fellow at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, identified data trends and developed the formulas that revealed the rate of daily incarceration costs per prison bed.
Image: Incarceration data for Lancaster, California. PHOTO: milliondollarhoods.org
Collaborating with law enforcement, advocacy groups and media
The team plans to work with LAPD and the sheriff’s department to regularly add information to the maps. Million Dollar Hoods research partners also include several community-based organizations that are working to reform systems of incarceration in Los Angeles. Representatives from Critical Resistance-Los Angeles, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, Dignity and Power Now, and Youth Justice Coalition are collaborators in the Million Dollar Hoods project.
Million Dollar Hoods also has partnered with Los Angeles public radio station KCRW for a six-episode series that launched Sept. 13. Off the Block will examine how a trip to jail, even for just a few hours or days, can upend many lives, tracing the path from city block to jail block and back.
Lytle-Hernandez will also release her new book City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles this spring. It is a history of incarceration in the city from the days of Spanish conquest to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion.
In City of Inmates she marshals two centuries of evidence to show that incarceration has historically and consistently operated to remove, banish, and otherwise eliminate unwanted communities from the city. Across time, some of the communities most targeted for incarceration have been indigenous peoples, sexual minorities, non-white immigrants and African Americans.
UCLA’s Million Dollar Hoods project is supported by the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
LEARN MORE:
Visit Million Dollar Hoods at http://milliondollarhoods.org
Listen to episodes of KCRW’s Off the Block at http://kcrw.co/2ejmN5t
YEARLONG COURSE HELPS FRESHMEN BETTER UNDERSTAND THE AGING PROCESS AND OLDER ADULTS
By Dan Gordon
A participant in the nonprofit Wise Adult Day Service Center in Santa Monica, California, talks to UCLA student Emma Skeie, who took the yearlong cluster course “Frontiers in Human Aging.”
One of the first tasks freshman Suzannah Henderson was assigned in the course “Frontiers in Human Aging” called for her to reflect on ageism in America and the negative stereotypes about older adults that are everywhere, from the grumpy old man portrayed on TV to birthday cards that poke fun at dotty old folks.
For Henderson, who had not thought about ageism before, reflection turned into revelation. “I didn’t even know ageism was a thing, but I learned that it is,” said Henderson, who completed the yearlong course in June. “It was eye-opening, and that was just the beginning.”
“Frontiers in Human Aging” is one of 10 cluster courses offered to freshmen that are interdisciplinary, explore major issues of timely importance and are taught by teams of three or four distinguished faculty members.
Each year approximately 120 UCLA freshmen journey through “Frontiers in Human Aging,” learning about growing old from multiple vantage points – biology, psychology, sociology, ethics, policy and public health — through lessons delivered by a wide-ranging group of faculty experts and from older adults themselves, via hands-on community service experiences.
Faculty from across campus
While many instructors are brought in as guest lecturers to cover the vast scope of disciplinary approaches to the study of aging, the course’s three core UCLA faculty members have connections to the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine: Paul Hsu, adjunct assistant professor in epidemiology; Lené Levy-Storms, associate professor of social welfare and geriatrics; and Rita Effros, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine who specializes in immunology.
“Our goal is to convey to students the concept of aging as a lifelong phenomenon, and to show students that there are multiple dimensions to the aging process, which is inherently interdisciplinary,” Levy-Storms said.
Students learn that there are positive aspects of aging, for example, the wisdom that comes with experience and the increased time older age affords to giving back to society, she said. The first-year students also gain a fuller appreciation of their elders through an assignment in which they are required to interview someone about his or her life.
“The students tend to forget that older adults were once young,” Levy-Storms said, “or that they will one day be old too.”
Students also learn about aging at the cellular level, including what is known and being investigated about the biological aging processes and the potential to manipulate them for better health. Issues are raised about how gender, race, ethnicity and social environment interact with aging. Ethical questions, economic concerns and intergenerational dynamics are explored. Students delve into aging-relevant policy, from Medicare to the implications of the Affordable Care Act for older adults. Psychological and social elements of aging are discussed, as are the differences among chronological, social and functional age. They find out about successful approaches to remaining mentally, socially and physically engaged later in life.
Hsu noted that nearly all of these discussions are guided by public health concepts, including the importance of prevention and health promotion and the role public health has had in the last century in increasing life expectancy in the U.S. by more than 30 years. “Many students haven’t really heard about public health before,” Hsu said. “I try to introduce them to what it means to treat populations as opposed to individuals, including promoting immunizations and other strategies, as opposed to waiting for people to get sick.”
Beyond the classroom
Students also spend meaningful time interacting with older adults in the winter quarter through a five-week service-learning experience in which they are placed in agencies that serve elders, such as senior centers, assisted-living facilities and adult day care centers. The students keep journals where they reflect on their experiences and link them with classroom and book concepts.
The lessons can be poignant. Henderson spent her service-learning time at a senior living community, interacting with residents who have dementia. She found herself bonding with one older man who reminded her of her grandfather.
“He was a kind, soft-spoken person who would be reading his Bible when I came in,” Henderson said. “He was always eager to participate in conversation. He would talk about how he had done track and field when he was younger and how much he loved physical activity.”
But Henderson learned that people with dementia commonly experience ups and downs in their cognitive and physical functioning. “One day I came in, and he wasn’t doing well at all,” she recalled. “He tried to stand up after lunch, and his knees buckled and he almost fell. It broke my heart to see someone I had really connected with struggling like that.”
“They are more than just grandparents; they are individuals with a wealth of knowledge, wisdom and life experiences to share.” – Freshman Suzannah Henderson
Inspiring action
Nonetheless, Henderson came away from her year in the “Frontiers in Human Aging” cluster energized, to the point that she is now contemplating enrolling in UCLA’s gerontology interdisciplinary minor and ultimately pursuing a career working with older adults.
“When I was younger I really didn’t think about these things, but in college your perspective broadens, and you begin to become more analytical about the world,” she said. “Now I see older people and realize they are more than just grandparents; they are individuals with a wealth of knowledge, wisdom and life experiences to share.”
Levy-Storms said one of the unstated goals of the yearlong cluster course is that it will lead more students like Henderson to become interested in careers working with older adults or on elder-related issues. “There is such a need and so many opportunities, whether it’s in public health, medicine, law, policy or any other field you can think of,” she said.
The students aren’t the only ones who come away from “Frontiers in Human Aging” feeling energized. “You don’t typically encounter 18-year-olds who are interested in gerontology,” Hsu observed. “To see it in these students is inspiring.”
UCLA freshmen are learning about aging and older adults in the classroom and from the elders themselves.
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