For the past two years I’ve been thinking about this question, first as a member of the Provost’s Task Force for Quantitative Pedagogy, and now as a member of two follow-up efforts (the Weissman School’s “implementation committee” and the Zicklin School’s “quant group”). If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to share some of what I am hearing.

First, I asked young alumni as well as hiring managers who recruit Baruch’s BBA graduates.

They told me that to compete for the best entry-level professional positions, one needs spreadsheet fluency (some said that PowerPoint presentation skills and Access database skills are key too). And once on the job, according to Accountancy’s Harry Davis, young Excel and Access database “whiz kids” are receiving promotions earlier, especially at smaller firms where such skills are invaluable. Just yesterday someone told me that she perceives a double standard on Wall Street: all else being equal, Ivy League entry-level job candidates can say, “sure, I can learn MS-Excel visual basic macros” whereas a Baruch candidate would probably receive additional scrutiny over such statements.

Next, I surveyed our undergraduate BBA students (i.e., my MGT 3121 students.)

Students tell me that they want stand-alone courses in Excel modeling and they want Excel deeply embedded in business courses where it makes sense. I’ve heard this so many times that it motivated this article for my professional society’s monthly magazine.

Next, I asked Patricia Imbimbo and C. May Reilly at Baruch’s STARR Career Development Center.

They tell me that the need for spreadsheet and modeling skills are so great that they developed their own training program. The two-dozen or so students who qualify for the Financial Leadership Program (FLP; formerly called Wall Street Careers) receive three half-day Excel workshops on shortcuts, pivot tables, if statements, solver, vlookups and visual basic macro programming. In addition, Training the Street gives FLP participants additional modeling instruction. If our most promising graduates need such training, what does this say about the other 2000 BBAs who expect to graduate this year?

I asked my industry contacts at professional meetings.

They stress the importance of analytical thinking in business and the buzzword du jour: “business analytics.” Despite the current 26-year high in unemployment, analytics is a growth area. Consider this: IBM sees great promise in business analytics consulting. Tom Davenport’s 2006 Harvard Business Review article and subsequent book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning are best sellers. The term analytics is so popular that INFORMS launched a new online magazine called Analytics. Professor Peter Bell at the Ivey School of Business gives other examples that include the end of the Boston Red Sox’s infamous post-season curse (e.g., see this 60 Minutes interview with Red Sox statistician Bill James). You sports junkies may enjoy the journal Interfaces “Analytics in Sports” special issue.

I asked colleagues at other business schools.

Some are leading the way with innovative new courses in spreadsheet modeling. Those that replace traditional course titles such as “quantitative models for management,” “management science,” or “decision models for management” with more contemporary titles such as “decision making with business analytics” or simply “business analytics” are realizing unprecedented class enrollments. Peter Bell tells me that the Ivey School doubled its MBA enrollments in a traditional management science course with some simple name changes (and careful attention to content). They’ve been so successful that the MBAs requested a follow-up class and faculty replicated the approach in the undergraduate curriculum. He wrote about some of these experiences here.

The idea of the FRO blogging project, a collaboration with our colleagues at Advisement and Orientation, is to provide first-year students with an online, public space for reflecting on a number of required projects and activities as well as their experiences of acclimating to college life — to give our incoming students yet more curricular opportunities to write and, in the process, to increase engagement and deepen their thinking about what they are learning and experiencing in their first year at Baruch.

Luke’s post details some of the nitty gritty of the project, which is one big experiment (a full-scale pilot, if you will) that we hope will teach us quite a bit more about the pedagogical potential of online personal publishing in introductory programs and courses. We hope, for example, to look closely at the tremendous variety of writing we have seen in the FRO blogs so far (from well articulated, impressively developed posts resembling mini-essays to brief, informal missives written in like SMS text messages) and explore ways in which to better teach students the conventions of college-level written discourse. For now, we’re focused fairly heavily on logistics and mechanics and look forward to building on and refining the programmatic and pedagogical aspects in coming semesters.

Student blogging seems to be a natural fit for typical Freshman Seminars, so I would expect that other schools have tried something like this though it does appear as though we at Baruch are blazing new trails. If you know of other schools doing something similar, please let us know.

It recently occurred to me that very little has been written about the Schwartz Communication Institute’s most ambitious and potentially most promising project, our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool, or VOCAT. I have presented on VOCAT a number of times over the years (most recently at the 2009 Computers and Writing conference in June), but have not yet written about it in any kind of real detail. So it’s high time to remedy that.

VOCAT is a teaching and assessment web application. It is the fruit of a collaboration between the Schwartz Institute and mad genius code-poets at , Cast Iron Coding, Zach Davis and Lucas Thurston. It is still very much in development (perpetually so) but is already in use in introductory speech communication and theater courses as well as a number of assessment projects. Our career center used it effectively a few semesters ago as well. To date, approximately 3200 Baruch students have used the tool.

VOCAT was developed in recognition of the principle that careful, guided review of video recordings of their oral presentations (or of any performance, for that matter) can be remarkably effective for aiding students in becoming confident, purposeful and effective speakers. It serves as a means for instructors to easily provide feedback on student presentations.  It enables students to access videos of their performances as well as instructor feedback and to respond to both. It likewise aggregates recorded presentations and instructor feedback for each user and offers an informative snapshot of a student’s work and progress over the course of a given term or even an entire academic career. Presentations can be scored live, as students perform, or asynchronously once the videos have been uploaded. (Our turnaround time at this stage is between one and seven days depending on how many sections are using the tool at once — once some of the key steps happen server-side, turnaround time will not be as much of a concern.) Built on the open source TYPO3 content management system, it is a flexible, extensible and scalable web application that can be used at once as a teaching tool and as a means of data collection for research or other assessment purposes. (Screenshots are available here. I am also happy to share demo login info with anyone who would like to take a look — please email me at mikhail [dot] gershovich [at] baruch [dot] cuny [dot] edu.)

While VOCAT is quite feature-rich at this early stage, especially when it comes to reporting, data export, and rubric creation, we are always thinking about ways in which the tool can be made more robust and flexible. Currently, we are playing around with adding a group manager feature for group presentations, tagging for non-numeric assessment, moving from QT to Flash video, video annotation, as well as server-side video processing and in-line video and audio recording. We are also considering allowing users to choose to enable social functionality to take advantage of web 2.0 tools for sharing and commenting on one another’s work. And since, at its core, VOCAT is a tool for aggregating and responding to anything that can be uploaded, we’re thinking about other uses to which it could be put. It could easily, for example, be adapted for writing assessment. And someone once suggested that it could be useful for teaching bedside manner for medical students. Adapting VOCAT for these purposes is hardly a big deal.

The platform on which VOCAT is built is open source but the tool itself is not yet open. Right now, it is Baruch’s alone. Whether it should stay that way is a question much discussed around here. Here at the Institute we face several critical issues around open education, not the least of which is conflicting views on student access of Blogs@Baruch. In regards to VOCAT, however, the one thing constantly on my mind is the tension between an internal drive to share the tool as an open-source web application and build a community around it (there are no shortage of interested parties) and the pressures (or maybe a pernicious institutional common sense) that seem to compel us to keep VOCAT proprietary and use it to generate as much revenue as possible. I have heard arguments that VOCAT should be Baruch’s alone — that we should charge for its use and seek private funding for its deployment and development. This is a business school, after all, and I’m sure promoting and marketing VOCAT could be an interesting project for an upper division Marketing course.

Yet, I am inclined to believe that VOCAT should be shared freely and widely with other institutions and that other developers should be encouraged to develop for it.  A great many more students would benefit and development would certainly be accelerated as more and more schools add features they need that could then be adopted for use here. Were VOCAT open, in other words, it would evolve quickly and probably in ways we haven’t even imagined. And that is very exiting.

In the coming months, I hope to continue to present on VOCAT and to gain insights into the roles it can play in communication intensive courses or in a communication-focused curriculum of any sort. More importantly, I would like to move towards opening it up and will work with our developers on the features and functionality that facilitate sharing. I hope also to draw upon the tremendous expertise of my friends and colleagues involved in the open education movement and learn from those who have worked with and developed various open source tools for teaching and learning. Listening to others’ ideas for VOCAT has been invaluable to thinking through what this web app could ostensibly do with the right sort of development.  could be and how to best realize its full potential as a teaching tool — both in terms of deployment, training, and development.

I’m curious to hear what sort of advice instructors give to students about citing sources for slide presentations. While it easy to envision a final slide that is a reference list, it seems to be trickier to develop best practices for identifying sources in slides that make up the main part of a presentation. Should you use numbered notes? An author-date notation set in parentheses? A source note at the bottom of the slide? To what extent can the rules that are delineated in the major style guides (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) be applied to slide presentations? Do these rules, which were created to support the needs of scholars writing books, articles, and reports, work well in a medium like slide presentations, where there is a great deal of flexibility in the way text can be presented?

Question: A student gives a presentation. He has a heavy foreign accent and is at times incomprehensible. Overall, the speech seems well researched and on target. What do you do?

a. Give him an A.

b. Subtract points for incomprehensibility and give him a B.

c. Tell him that the presentation was unacceptable and that he should improve his oral communication proficiency.

Instructors cite a variety of reasons (often with a kernel of truth) why they let incomprehensibility slide:

1. “Asking a student to reduce his/her accent is embarrassing and discouraging.” — It is true that accents are windows to our identity, and that a student changing his/her accent may experience a tangible sense of loss or feel repercussions from home culture friends and family.

2. “It’s not possible to reduce accents in adults. Native accents can be achieved only when we learn the language before puberty.” — It is true that, after the brain hemispheres separate at puberty, a native-sounding accent tends to be more difficult to achieve.

3. “People who don’t understand foreign accents are prejudiced. They should try harder to understand.” — It is true that sometimes the problem lies with the listener. Don Rubin (University of Georgia) conducted a study some years back, in which a recording of a native English speaker was played to undergraduate students. They were told that the speaker was a college instructor and asked to rate his comprehensibility. Some groups were shown a photo of a Caucasian, others a photo of an Asian-looking individual while the recording was played. Although the recording was the same, the Asian-looking individual was ranked less comprehensible than the Caucasian.

Despite these valid objections, I believe it is paramount that we encourage students to improve their oral language skills to a level where a benevolent native speaker can understand without straining. We are doing our students a disservice if we don’t.

Our nonnative students are sometimes being ostracized by native-speaking teammates, who don’t want them to participate in presentations for fear that their grade will be jeopardized. And our nonnative Baruch graduates are sometimes dismissed at the early stages of the job interviewing process, due to heavy accents. The first practice often happens under the radar; the second when it’s too late, and students have left the college. In my view, both practices are unethical. We have a responsibility to provide students with an education that promises workplace success.

How to approach the issue? One way would be to adopt a threshhold model by which we evaluate presentations (as well as papers) only if a basic standard has been met? Any student falling below this standard is asked to revise. A threshold model would require a common standards on what constitutes acceptable form (e.g., more than five errors per page or five incomprehensibilities per minutes of speech, and additional work is indicated).

In my experience, most students welcome the opportunity to improve. When I told a Russian student in a public speaking class some years back that he was not going to pass the course unless he worked on his comprehensibility, he committed himself to weekly tutorials and almost daily language lab work. The change in this student in only one semester was extraordinary. He changed from a low-proficiency speaker to one that was 100% comprehensible.

We are lucky that Baruch offers free services to assist the students: SACC has a number of professional speech tutors (not students, but trained professionals) who work with students one-on-one. We also have a new and well-equipped ESL speech lab that is open 10 hours most days, and even on Saturdays. The lab features tons of excellent materials not only on pronunciation, but also grammar, vocabulary development, conversation management, and more. For more information, please see http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab

Considering that communication skills are consistently ranked at the top of skills desired by employers of college graduates (and oral skills usually outranking written skills at that), we need to make our students aware of these services and make adequate communication skills an integral part of our evaluation procedures.

What point(s) made in any of the posts or comments thus far stand(s) out most to you?

What do you know now that you did not know before?

What will you do differently now as a result of participating in the Teaching Blog? (I am defining “participating” broadly – reading, commenting on, or writing posts.)

What issues have been raised that need further discussion or most need addressing by the College?

The drafts were supposed to be proofread and in decent shape. The students knew that they can gain back only half the subtracted points through revisions. I also encouraged students to show me their drafts before submitting them to catch problems early on. None of the six students did. They also didn’t go to the Writing Center, although I reminded them several times of its existence.

The classes are capstone courses in communication studies, where the focus usually is on oral communication. The six students’ presentations were quite good, and their course grade, as a result, may be in the C or even B range (despite the paper).

With the courses being capstone courses, most students are seniors; for some, this is their last semester. I am trying to determine how students have been able to get to the end of their college careers, without being able to write adequately.

There is a model of writing learning goals that requires specific evaluation standards (e.g., “students will be able to . . . with 80% accuracy”). If not all students can reach this goal, then the instructor failed (due to inadequate teaching skills or standards that were too high).

My questions:

Do students get to their senior year without adequate writing skills because instructors tend to focus on content, not form?

Should we simply disregard the few students who perform very poorly?

Should we perhaps make it a prerequisite that inadequate writers visit the Writing Center once per week (i.e., without a record of WC attendance, the students won’t pass the course)?

Christoforatou and Freedman have achieved an inter-disciplinary collaboration that eludes most of us – even those of us charged to collaborate by the mission of the Learning Communities program. Most of us try, but cross-disciplinary course coordination is tough. It’s difficult to pick up a new discipline over the summer. But Christoforatou and Freedman have discovered another way to coordinate their courses, and neither had to train in the other’s specialty. In fact, their approach embraced the differences among their disciplines even as it reinforced particular ways of thinking and doing. So, how did they do it?

Rather than searching for terminological, conceptual, or other content overlaps between Art 1000 and English 2100 (good luck finding them!), the innovative instructors decided to weld their courses at an epistemological point. When they realized during their first meeting that they both embraced the concept of knowing the world via abstraction (abstract art, abstract linguistic concepts), they ran with the idea. Since then, they have crafted a cross-disciplinary collaboration complete with field trips and complementary assignments. Christoforatou has embarked on a quest to learn about abstract, modern art (alongside her students), while Freedman (and the rest of the LC) has been introduced to creative approaches to the text employed by Medievalists (hint: they are often surprising, ironic, and highly abstract). Rather than trying to incorporate graphic design into English 2100 or composition assignments into Art 1000, the two have achieved crossover in a more meaningful way. They teach to their strengths while reinforcing each other’s attempts to inculcate habits of critical thinking in their first-year students. The result? A partnership that has proved professionally fulfilling… and never-ending lines of students outside their offices.

Most of you are probably familiar with the old saw: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I once heard a coda: Those who can’t teach, teach pedagogy. I used to find the notion funny, but as I’ve observed new faculty beginning their careers over the years I’ve come increasingly to appreciate just how much craft goes into teaching. Good teachers may make it seem effortless, but it’s not. This perhaps explains why many folks think that teaching doesn’t call for as much a skill as other occupations. One antidote to this tendency to overlook the techniques we’re employing in the classroom is to devote a bit of time to pointing out to our students just what it is we’re doing. This can serve both to make them aware of the cues and signals we’re sending them, and to get them to understand how they can put this awareness to work in the rest of life. Here are a couple of the very simple things I point out to my students.

One is the way I use the whiteboards. I’ve never adopted PowerPoint because for me it seems to constrict spontaneity, creative flow, and opportunities to let students’ questions and arguments shape the direction of the class. I can write something on the whiteboard and then come back to it as often as I find myself needing to in the course of a lecture or discussion. Sometimes I return again and again to a key concept. At some point early in the term, I stop and point out to students that if they pay attention to what I’ve been doing, they will see that a particular term or phrase or illustration on the board has gradually acquired a halo of surrounding emphases, underlining, circling, stars, etc. “If you see a concept on the board that’s been well marked-up,” I tell them, “you should be sure to mark it up in your notes. Highlight it, draw big arrows pointing to it. I can assure you that when you’re writing your essays it’s a concept you’re going to want to include, to explain, and to emphasize.”

Likewise, when we’re reading in class, going over crucial passages in whatever text has been assigned, I explain to them that they should be highlighting the passages I’m dwelling on. And if I repeat a phrase or passage several times, slowing down and reading it dramatically, I tell them they should be marking it up accordingly, because it’s something that’s bound to be useful when they’re writing about the reading. (I note in passing here that that despite all the problems with the high costs of books, I urge my students to purchase their own used copies so that they can bring them to class and read and mark them along with me.)

One more example. I occasionally stop and exhort my students to be clever enough to figure out just what it is that Prof. Petersen wants from them, and then give it to him—it’s what we used to call “psyching out” the professor. College, I tell them, is real life, not simply an interlude before it begins. “When you get a job,” I explain, “one of your primary tasks is to figure out what your bosses want from you, and then give it to them. The classroom’s no different, really. I’m trying to teach you things I think are important, and I’m doing all I can to get you to pay attention to them. So pay attention to me, figure out—based on these cues, subtle or direct—what it is I think is most important, learn it, and then write essays that demonstrate to me that you’ve learned it. (This doesn’t mean rote memory, just a focus on key ideas.) Voila! You’ve figured out how to get promoted at your first job.” Simplistic, perhaps. But these are all small ways of showing students how to observe what’s going on around them, how to gauge what’s important, and how to find out what they’re being expected to know and do.

(Glenn’s caveat: I’m writing this for new teachers, folks still struggling to find their way in the classroom, not for seasoned professionals, though the old salts among you are welcome to it.)