Abstract

Psychology is taught at a dozen institutions across the province of Alberta.  These institutions range from large, urban universities, through community colleges offering transfer courses, to small, rural, private Christian university colleges.  Instructors from several of these institutions began to collaborate in 1998 in response to a provincial grant program for developing instructional technology.  Since then our collaboration has grown to include almost all institutions teaching psychology in Alberta. 

Some of our collaborative projects have included identification of core concepts in introductory psychology with accompanying item analysis of examination items to determine which concepts are difficult and poorly learned, development and evaluation of Web-based learning resources to help students understand and master some of these difficult concepts and evaluation of commercially-available technological course supplements.  Our province-wide collaboration has also allowed for the development of the Alberta Teachers of Psychology (AToP), which provides a forum for discussing technology and pedagogical issues in teaching psychology.  The annual meeting brings together instructors from large, research based universities, small, teaching-based university colleges, and community colleges offering university transfer courses.  Our latest collaboration is the development of the Great Canadian Psychology Web Site, designed to introduce Canadian students to contributions that Canadian researchers have made to the field of psychology. 

Throughout our collaboration, we have become sensitive to the myriad differences between our institutions, have strengthened links between our institutions, and have developed a large number of learning resources for teaching psychology.  Applying aspects of our model of collaboration, such as developing multi-department, multi-faculty, or  multi-institutional collaborations to apply for dwindling resources, conducting large-scale development, implementation, and evaluation projects, or sharing knowledge and resources across departments, faculties, and institutions, has great potential to enhance teaching and learning with instructional technology.

Introduction

Instructional technology has the potential to enhance teaching and learning, provide a wide range of students with greater access to information and learning opportunities, and advance research in teaching and learning.  However, all too often, instructional technology is developed in isolation, without consideration of pedagogical goals, current research on teaching and learning, or an understanding of the users of the technology.  Collaboration offers a means to improve development of instructional technology, by forcing a consideration of a wide range of issues that are important to the various collaborators. 

Psychology instructors in the province of Alberta are collaborating on basic research into teaching and learning with instructional technology, development and evaluation of different learning modules, and applying what we have learned to guide textbook publishers as they develop new media supplements for their psychology textbooks.  Generous provincial grant support has certainly enhanced our collaboration, but any group contemplating collaboration on instructional technology research, design, and evaluation can abstract and benefit from aspects of our model.

Teaching Psychology in Alberta

Over 15,000 undergraduate students take psychology courses each year from post secondary institutions in the province of Alberta.  These students attend large urban public universities (e.g. the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary), smaller public universities and colleges (e.g. the University of Lethbridge, Red Deer College), private university colleges (e.g. Concordia University College of Alberta, Canadian University College), community colleges (e.g. Keyano College, Grant MacEwan College, Mount Royal College), and a distance education university (Athabasca University). The students taking psychology courses and the nature and format of these courses are as varied as the institutions through which they are taught.  Students take psychology courses out of interest, to fulfill a requirement, or to complete a major, a minor, or honors program. Courses range from large (over 500 students) lecture courses, through smaller (up to 100 students) lecture courses, seminars, field placements, and individual study.  Students are exposed to a large range of learning experience, including evolutionary psychology and psychology from a creationist perspective, animal learning and human behaviour modification, neuroscience and neuropsychology, normative development and abnormal psychology. Learning is assessed through multiple choice tests, short answer tests, essay tests, review papers, reports of empirical research, behavioral assessment, and oral performance.

How do we enhance teaching and learning of such a broad range of courses taken by such a broad range of students enrolled in such a broad range of post secondary institutions across Alberta?  Indeed, are there any commonalities at all between our courses, students, and institutions?

Developing Collaborative Links in Alberta

Instructors from several Alberta post secondary institutions happened to be together at a textbook publishers’ new media marketing meeting in the spring of 1997.  Many of us were somewhat dismayed that the presentations centered on the bells and whistles of the new media and not on instructional need or pedagogy.  We decided that, since we were psychology researchers with strong backgrounds in cognition and learning, that our institutions should join together to try to influence the publishers to develop useful, pedagogically sound new media.  We began to identify some of the similarities and many differences in psychology teaching and learning across the province as well as research questions that needed to be addressed before developing pedagogically sound instructional technology.

At around the same time, the Alberta Ministry of Advanced Education and Career Development (now Alberta Learning) announced a new funding program, the Learning Enhancement Envelope (LEE), to support the integration of technology within the post secondary curriculum in the province. Between 1997-2000, $40 million was distributed to post secondary institutions to expand learning opportunities for Alberta post secondary students, improve learning through the use of technology, increase productivity of instructors, and transform learning within the province.  Some of these funds were distributed in the form of research and development grants to individual or groups of researchers within and across Alberta post secondary institutions.  In the first round, psychology faculty from the University of Calgary, Athabasca University, and the University of Alberta submitted separate proposals for developing and evaluating psychology resources and the University of Alberta and Athabasca University were successful in obtaining funding.  In the second round, the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta submitted a successful collaborative proposal.  In the third round, smaller institutions joined the collaboration and, in the fourth round, seven (of 13) post secondary institutions teaching psychology in Alberta and two Canadian textbook publishing companies collaborated.

The LEE program no longer exists but nine post secondary institutions have teamed up with Access Network to receive a new grant through the Alberta Learning Curriculum Redevelopment Fund (CRF).  The goals of this funding program expand on the goals of the LEE program to include adapting traditionally delivered learning materials to a distance/alternative delivery format, acquiring or developing new media productions, producing broadcast video material and encouraging further collaboration among Alberta post secondary institutions.  Our current project, development and evaluation of the Great Canadian Psychology Web Site, began in May 2003.

Collaborative projects

The following examples demonstrate the breadth of our collaboration:

Students have great difficulty mastering the genre of the empirical research report. Reading the Research is a Web-based module to help students learn to read and critically appraise published reports of empirical research.  An instructor inserts a summary of a published research report within an interactive module that includes self-test questions presented in pop-up boxes and a discussion forum. An example of Reading the Research is found at http://web.psych.ualberta.ca/~varn/Kenrick/Reading.htm. Collaborators at the University of Alberta and at Grant MacEwan College evaluated students’ perceptions of, use of, and learning from Reading the Research (Varnhagen & Digdon, 2002).  First and second year students reported finding the module useful for learning to read this genre of writing and extent of use of the module was correlated with students’ understanding of the associated research. Reading the Research is used by psychology instructors at a number of post secondary institutions in Alberta in a range of courses, from introductory psychology, to methods courses, to upper level courses in psychology.

Instructors have long suspected that some concepts are inherently more difficult for psychology students to grasp.  Collaborators at the University of Calgary, Red Deer College, and Keyano College identified core concepts in psychology and measures of difficulty of test items designed to assess these different core concepts (Ellard, Nairn, Scialfa, & Simms, 1999; Scialfa, Legare, Wenger, & Dingley, 2001).  Relatively frequently updated links representing the different core concepts in psychology are found at http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/psychlinks/concepts.html.  Instructors can select definitions and links from this database to assist in instruction or include on course Web sites.

Textbook publishers and new media designers promote new media as enhancing learning and understanding.  Are flashy new media modules more effective in presenting concepts than are traditional lectures? Instructors at Concordia College of Alberta and representatives from a major psychology text publishing company compared conceptual learning in these two formats.  Although students preferred the computer learning module, students in the traditional and computer groups performed comparably on fact-based multiple choice exams for the concepts taught either using the new media or in traditional lecture format (Heller, Rooney, & Steffler, 1999, 2000).

As well, our collaboration led us to form the Alberta Teachers of Psychology (AToP), a forum for discussing innovation in teaching and learning in psychology.  All instructors teaching psychology at a post secondary institution in Alberta are invited to participate in the forum.  We have an annual meeting, a Web site for disseminating information about the annual meeting and reports from our collaborative projects (http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~atop), and an e-mail list.  AToP meetings are made possible through donations of space and support by the host institution, sponsorship of meals and breaks by textbook publishers, and occasional grant funding. 

Abstracting Principles of Collaboration

We have been fortunate to have funding resources available in Alberta to assist our collaboration.  However, our success in obtaining grants and in securing large amounts of funding is more likely due to the nature of our collaboration than the availability of funds.  Three aspects of our collaboration appear particularly important for our success over the past six years: (a) including a wide range of stakeholders, (b) building on our individual strengths, and (c) extensive communication.

Our collaborative team includes university professors, college instructors, undergraduate and graduate students, new media directors and developers with textbook publishers, and, most recently, producers and developers from our local educational television station.  This broad representation allows us to deal with a wide range of issues and develop research and technology that is applicable to a wide range of institutions. For example, Reading the Research was originally developed at the University of Alberta for use in large classes.  The module was modified at Grant MacEwan College to assist students in discussing complex methodological articles and then a discussion component was built into the final Reading the Research module.  Now the module is used in various ways across the province: In introductory courses, the module may be used to introduce students to research literature; in second year courses, it may be used to help students discuss the research; and in some senior level courses, students create their own summaries and discussion questions to share with their peers.

Students are particularly important members of the team.  Our technology resources have all been designed for undergraduate students. We involve graduate and undergraduate students in needs assessment, design and development, and evaluation of our resources. Much of our programming is done by undergraduate students completing a Psychology Internship.  Students in the Internship program learn to apply what they have learned about Psychology by working in a related field for 16 months between their third and fourth years of university.  Interns have helped design and have programmed many of our resources and have conducted needs assessments, formative evaluations, and summative evaluations (Gushta, Grace, & Varnhagen, 2002; Hirsch & Apedoe, 2001; Peters, 2002; Peters & Varnhagen, 2003; Varnhagen, Apedoe, & Winship, 2000).

Collaborators build on each other’s strengths.  For example, instructors from Keyano College and the University of Calgary were concerned that some concepts in introductory psychology were more difficult for their students than other concepts.  At the same time, another instructor from Red Deer College was developing a list of core concepts in introductory psychology.  Faculty from these three institutions worked together to investigate and define common core concepts and, with statistical expertise from the University of Calgary, examined item difficulty on examinations testing these concepts. 

Finally, we communicate with each other and others in the province through our e-mail list, the AToP annual meeting, and posting our meeting summaries and presentations on the AToP Web site.  At a meeting of AToP, the Keyano and University of Calgary group presented their hypotheses about differential difficulty of certain core concepts and a number of instructors from other institutions offered their exam questions and results for analysis.  Through publisher support, we have also brought in keynote speakers from across Canada to share their work at AToP and participate in our collaboration. This has allowed us to reach beyond our province.  Joint publications and presentations have allowed us to disseminate our findings and demonstrate our deliverables throughout Canada, North America, and Europe.  Thus, we advance the scholarship of teaching and learning by disseminating our research and resources to a wider audience through peer-reviewed presentations and publications (Hutchings & Schulman, 1999).

This collaborative model is currently being expanded to province-wide collaborative project, the development and evaluation of the Great Canadian Psychology Web Site.  Canadian psychology research is showcased in this site:  Organized by researcher, the site provides a contextualized biography of each researcher, a virtual tour of the researcher’s lab where students learn the methods used by the researcher through simulations and demonstrations, and a research replication where students contribute interactively to replicate a specific research projects conducted by the researcher.  Experts in each area are providing the content (e.g. a cognitive psychologist is providing content for Fergus Craik, an internationally renown cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto), textbook publishers are providing access to copyrighted video and print material, and Access Network, our local educational station, is assisting with development of the site and producing new video footage.

Collaborating with Access Network is rewarding for both AToP members and for Access. Access helps us with copyright, they will be creating new video footage, and they will produce a special television program on great Canadian Psychologists to introduce the general public to the contributions of Canadians to psychological research and practice. 

We are also embarking on developing a rare collaboration between textbook publishing companies.  Instructors have begun requesting “Candianizations,” that is, textbooks that represent Canadian research and perspectives.  Canadianizing a U.S. text is very expensive however, and, because of the expense, publishers are unable to allow for major revisions of these texts to emphasize the role of Canadian research in advancing the field of Psychology.  So, most Canadianizations merely replace U.S. examples with Canadian examples (e.g. Independence Day is replaced with Canada Day, the President is replaced with the Prime Minister), replace U.S. statistics with Canadian statistics (e.g. U.S. Census statistics are replaced with Statistics Canada statistics), and add Canadian research citations.  In many cases the examples and statistics are not interchangeable (e.g. bilingual education is a very different concept in the U.S. and Canadian educational systems) and important Canadian research cannot be included because it wasn’t included in the U.S. text (e.g. sensation of pain receives little coverage in U.S. introductory Psychology texts yet the major theory has been developed by a great Canadian Psychologist, Ronald Melzak, at McGill University).  We have begun discussion with several of the largest publishers of texts used in Canada and each is willing to contribute copyrighted material, programming expertise, and/or content.  If multiple publishers do enter into our collaboration, the Great Canadian Psychology Web Site will be the first multi-publisher collaboration in Psychology. 

Conclusion

The province of Alberta provided us with a means for beginning our collaboration but we have developed our own model for collaboration.  This model has provided close to one million dollars in research and development funding, numerous presentations and publications of basic and applied research, and has allowed us to influence new media production at several textbook publishing companies.

This collaboration is also not any of our primary responsibilities.  We are loosely organized and each of us participates as we have time and opportunity.  We have involved undergraduate and graduate students whenever possible and they have greatly enhanced our products and our evaluation research.  However, our collaboration has had an important impact on research into instructional technology, has resulted in the development of pedagogically sound and useful educational resources, and has advanced teaching and learning of psychology.

Our model of collaboration can be extended beyond Psychology instruction. Successful collaboration probably will only come from a grass-roots approach, not from an administrative decision.  Instructors within a department may begin collaborating on a course, possibly through team teaching. Colleagues from different institutions may discuss a teaching issue or problem at a scholarly conference and continue their communication as they return to their home institutions. The Alan Blizzard Award represents the importance of collaboration to teaching and learning in higher education.  This award from the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, sponsored by McGraw-Hill Ryerson, acknowledges collaboration in the scholarship of teaching.

Graduate and undergraduate students can—and should—share in the collaboration.  Students can search the literature, develop teaching ideas and assignments, and develop instructional technology.  Students are often more technologically advanced than their instructors and have the time, energy, and skills required for good graphics design and sound instructional programming.  Encouraging student stakeholders to become involved in the design and development of instructional technology develops important “buy-in” as well as ensuring student-friendly technology development.

Building in research components and presentation opportunities assists faculty in justifying instructional technology development and evaluation.  More importantly, dissemination advances the scholarship of teaching.  From collaboration to dissemination of generalized principles of teaching and learning, the whole endeavour equals much more than the sum of the parts of instructional technology development.

References

Ellard, J., Nairn, S., Scialfa, C., & Simms, C. (1999, June). At the core of introductory psychology: A content analysis. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, Halifax, N.S.

Gushta, M., Grace, D., & Varnhagen, S. (2002, June). Pedagogy, performance, and evaluation: Issues in Web-enhanced instruction. Presentation to the sixth annual meeting of the Alberta Teachers of Psychology, Edmonton, Alberta.

Heller, R.B., Rooney, B., & Steffler, D. (1999, June). A critical evaluation of alternative modes of delivery in the teaching of introductory psychology. Poster presented at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education conference, Calgary, AB.

Heller, R.B., Rooney, B., & Steffler, D. (2000, May). A critical evaluation of computer-based supplements for introductory psychology: Part 2. Paper presented at the fourth annual Alberta Teachers of Psychology conference, College Heights, AB.

Hirsch, R. & Apedoe, X.,  (2001, May). Breaking down barriers: Helping instructors develop and use instructional technology. Presentation to the fifth annual meeting of the Alberta Teachers of Psychology, Edmonton, Alberta.

Hutchings, P., & Schulman, L. S. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations, new developments. Change, 31 (5), 11-15.

Peters, T.C.A. (2002, June). What do students want (in Web-based supplements)? Presentation to the sixth annual meeting of the Alberta Teachers of Psychology, Edmonton, Alberta.

Peters, T.C.A., & Varnhagen, C.K. (2003). What Web-based course supplements do students want?  Paper submitted for publication.

Scialfa, C., Legare, C., Wenger, L., & Dingley, L. (2001). Difficulty and discriminability of introductory psychology test items. Teaching of Psychology, 28, 11-15.

Varnhagen, C.K., & Digdon, N. (2002). Helping students read reports of empirical research. Teaching of Psychology, 29, 160-165.

Varnhagen, C.K, Winship, I, & Apedoe, X. (2000, July). Development and evaluation of Internet instruction in Psychology. Psoster presentation to the International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, Sweden.