Stanford MOOC goes to extremes to teach Environmental Physiology
Researchers Anne Friedlander and Corey Dysick spent 48 hours at the 14,000-foot summit of Pikes Peak to study the impact of high altitude on the body for a Stanford online course.By Aja Couchois Duncan
The human body is amazing, as is the video that accompanies Anne Friedlander's Environmental Physiology course – which will be offered as a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to the public this winter.
To dramatically demonstrate the body's mysteries and its amazing adaptations, Friedlander, a consulting professor in human biology at Stanford as well as an athlete and scientist, created a series of stories and endurance tests, with the video camera rolling.
She was joined by the experimental subject of the course and the protagonist of the environmental physiology story, Where's Corey Now? or even more accurately, What in the World Is Happening to Corey Now?
Corey Dysick, teaching assistant for the course as well as a decathlete and Stanford alumnus, was exposed to a number of extreme environments to explore the impact these environments have on his – and, by extension, everyone's – body.
Stressing heart and brain
For one chapter, Dysick and Friedlander spent 48 hours at central Colorado's Pikes Peak, which tops out at 14,114 feet above sea level, to study the impact of high altitude on the body. In another, they flew in fighter jets to experience the effects of g-forces, or extra gravities.
In the chapter on stress, Dysick and Friedlander jumped from a plane at 15,000 feet over the Nevada desert to explore physiological responses to extreme stress on heart rate, cognition and pain threshold.
Students in the class will be immersed in the resulting sensory-rich videos.
Each of the chapters is followed by interviews with experts on the impact of environmental stressors on the body and with master athletes who have accomplished extraordinary feats such as scaling Mount Everest. These interviews are coupled with Friedlander's lectures covering the latest scientific findings about the impact of extreme environments on the human body, with practical tips on how people can mitigate some of these effects.
Friedlander first created the course out of a passion for the science of physiology. But the MOOC version, Environmental Physiology: Your Body in the World, was driven by another interest as well. "There is a gap between how we communicate scientific information and the people who we want to reach, those who would be most interested in it," she said. "As scientists, we are trained to talk only to each other. But science, particularly the science of the human body, affects everyone every day.
"Stories are the foundation for most learning," Friedlander said. "Our brains are programmed to process stories that have some type of emotional content that we can connect to. This enables us to engage and put information into a context." As a result, the information is integrated and retained.
Friedlander designed the online course so that participants can walk away with a basic understanding of environmental physiology – of how the human body fits into the world. But more than that, she said she wants people to gain a full appreciation of the human body's capacity. "Humans are the most adaptable animals on the planet," she said. "We can go from extremely low temperatures to high temperatures, from low altitude to high altitude, and survive pretty well."
Through its seed grant program, the Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL) provided Friedlander with technology and video production expertise to support her inquiry-based learning goals. According to Amy Collier, the director of digital learning initiatives for VPOL, "The grant enabled Anne to develop the story-telling component of the course, creating a meaningful narrative for science education."
As a result of the story-based teaching methodology, Collier said, "Course participants can formulate their own hypotheses regarding what is happening to Dysick's body based on interactions between the external environment and his physiological responses."
Dysick said the course has had a major impact on his own understanding of physiology. "I've learned a ton," he said. "I've had the opportunity to learn firsthand how my body changes in response to extreme conditions. But more than that, participants are getting closer to the origins of the material they are learning. Instead of reading textbooks, participants travel with us to labs around the country as we talk with scientists whose research is generating the knowledge they are gaining through the course."
Shared opportunities
As one of a number of public online courses being offered this winter though OpenEdX, Stanford's open source platform, Friedlander's Environmental Physiology course reflects the university's willingness to openly share learning opportunities that result from faculty experiments with online instruction in their own classrooms. For example, Friedlander's winter MOOC course content is being used – flipped classroom style – to teach her Exercise Physiology (HB135) course this fall. Support for the flipped content came from the Dean of Humanities and Sciences and the Program in Human Biology.
Stanford's use of OpenEdX enables course material to be shared widely and repurposed for other learning settings, because when using the open-source platform, universities control the licenses for their content and can release content in a variety of configurations to a variety of audiences without special permission from a third-party platform owner. It also means the platform itself is available for use by other universities and educational providers.
"Our main goal is to improve teaching and learning through the effective use of technology," said Vice Provost for Online Learning John Mitchell. "There are many ways to use technology creatively in on-campus courses and MOOCs are one model that enable us to experiment.
"By advancing faculty-driven teaching initiatives, we can transform how time is spent in the classroom and then share the content we develop openly with other educational institutions. We can also share new features as we add them to the OpenEdX platform."
This is especially important to Friedlander, who said she sees in the OpenEdX platform the opportunity to address gaps in scientific education on a large scale: "Other institutions can adapt the course for their student populations. Teachers in high schools can use the material to enhance their science classes or instructors at community colleges can build physiology courses around some of the units. Really, the sky is the limit.
"This is one of the benefits of a Stanford OpenEdX MOOC," she said. But the benefits of the Environmental Physiology MOOC go beyond its open platform and broad access. According to Friedlander, "all of the background work that has gone into designing this course has made me a better teacher."
Harvard and Stanford are the two best universities on Earth. Now you can take their courses free of charge through EDX! This way you could stay home, work, grow professionally, and take online courses from the legendary couple.
Most online students take free college courses from nonprofit organizations, such as EDX and Coursera. Many smart students drop out of mainstream colleges now, attending online colleges. Without fundamental reform, universities will not be able to compete with cheaper and more effective online education providers. While many young people are still going to university, a growing portion of the best and the brightest students have given up attending classes, because the information is available in a more easily ingested form online. The number of online educational offerings has exploded in recent years, but their rapid rise has spawned a critical question: Can such virtual classes cut through the maze of distractions — such as email, the Internet, and television — that face students sitting at their computers? The solution is to test students early and often. By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreases by half, note-taking triples, and overall retention of the material improves.
While online classes have exploded in popularity in the past few years, there remains shockingly little hard scientific data about how students learn in the virtual classroom. A lot of people have ideas about what techniques are effective. There’s a general folk wisdom that says lessons should be short and engaging, but there’s an absence of rigorous testing to back that up.
It’s not sufficient for a lecture to be short. You need to have the testing. Just breaking it up and allowing them to do something else, even allowing them to re-study the material, does nothing to cut down on mind-wandering, and does nothing to improve final test performance. The testing is the critical component. Those tests act as an incentive for students to pay closer attention to the lecture because they know they’ll have to answer questions at the end of each segment.
Whether it’s in the classroom or online, students typically don’t expect to have to summarize a lecture in a way that makes sense until much later on. But if we give them an incentive to do that every now and then, students are actually much more likely to set everything else aside, and decide they can get to that text after class, or they can worry about their other class later, and they’re able to absorb the material much better.
Another surprising effect of the testing is to reduce testing anxiety among students, and to ease their fears that the lecture material would be very challenging. We know that there is mind-wandering in classroom lectures. Testing intervention has stronger results. It’s not enough to break up lectures into smaller segments, or to fill that break with some activity. What we really need to do is instill in students the expectation that they will need to express what they’ve learned at some later point.
Recent developments in higher education, with leading institutions starting to offer courses online, suggest that the Internet is going to disrupt this industry, just as it has already disrupted the music and book industries and many others. We are entering a period of experimentation with new business models for higher education, with MOOCs (massive open online courses) the most prominent among these. Much MOOC attention is focused on EdX and Coursera. MOOCs are in the midst of a hype cycle, with expectations undergoing a wild swing. At this early stage, it is not clear what the final product of online education will look like. But regardless of the specific form the new industry will take, there is likely to be more competition, lower costs, and higher quality. This is great news for consumers of higher education. Universities must shift their business model from the centuries-old notion that a professor lectures students, to a more collaborative, interactive model. Instead of being the sage on the stage, professors should be the co-pilot for students as they explore and collaborate online to acquire knowledge.
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