Getting to the bottom of neuroscience in education

I am very sad not to make it to the Association of Learning Technology conference on right now in Warwick (#ALTc), and the first two recorded keynotes that I’ve just viewed have already had me gripped. I’d like to focus on the one today by Lia Commissar who is part of the education team at Wellcome. You can view all the conference keynotes including Lia’s on the ALT YouTube Channel ( Education and Neuroscience: Issues and Opportunities). (Of course, Josie Fraser’s excellent one on trolling is also there).

Several education and neuroscience projects are underway to better inform educators about learning processes, and to dispel some of the mythology and misconceptions we have about how people learn, and that we have favoured learning styles, or use or left or right brain hemispheres. What interested me more are a series of projects looking actively at the brain and how it can impact on learning, using MRI scanning technology, looking at student sleep patterns to name a few of the ideas.

Let’s debunk some more myths.

As a physiologist of course I’m interested in the brain and central nervous system. But I’m also aware and very interested how our body systems act in concert, and it is not ever relevant to think of one system in isolation. And of course, when we start talking about the wonder of the nervous system, we usually forget another nervous system in our body that is as extensive as the brain, contains the same array of neurotransmitters and is located in the only part of our body that is able to work entirely independently of brain control. What am I going on about now? Our enteric nervous system in our guts.

“A north wind brings constipation”.

OK, so Hippocrates through his ancient and detailed observations didn’t always get it right, but he was probably the first to observe that stagnant water caused diarrhoea. The trouble with the intestines is they are very inaccessible, and therefore carrying out research to understand the mechanisms therein, is awfully difficult. To make matters worse it contains a ridiculously wide ranging number of cell types – epithelium, striated muscle, smooth muscle, immune cells (oh yes, most of your immune system is also in your gut), blood cells, nerve cells and sensory cells. The reality is also that humans are just mere hosts for bacterial and fungal ecosystems, large numbers of which also reside in our guts. We apparently are more bacterial than human.

Structure.

By Goran tek-en [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons, Available: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Layers_of_the_GI_Tract_english.svg

You can see how buried away the enteric nervous system is. It forms a series of mesh layers that extend along the entire lengths of our guts – from mouth to anus. The mucosal plexus, submucosal plexus and myenteric plexus are the main components, and they are connected to the central nervous system and brain via additional connections. Sensory information is gathered all the time and fed-back to the brain, and the brain elicits commands to control our gut functions. The gut contains:

Primary afferent neurones that senses food and chemicals within our gut.
Tension receptors monitor the contents and control peristalsis.
Glial cells, as with other parts of the nervous system, provide support.
“Pacemaker” cells (like in the heart) control motility patterns.
You find all the neurotransmitters that you find elsewhere – acetyl choline, serotonin, dopamine etc.

Gut-brain axis.

We know increasingly how vital the connections between the gut and brain are, and how the two systems work synergistically not just for our physiological processes but as part of our psychological ones. Some interesting medical studies looked at the use of psychotherapy for treating patients with gut disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome (Reed, 1999). We know ourselves about these connections – we often refer to having “gut feelings”, and that is simply our sensory environment in our guts responding before our brains provide more of an interpretation of what might be going on.

The gut and neurodegeneration.

This is such an interesting area of science, and this is no attempt at a literature review. However there are many interesting epidemiological studies (that have looked at patient populations), controlled medical studies and animal work that points to the gut and other peripheral systems being associated with the processes of neuro-degeneration. Science gets excited at treatments and discoveries that target biochemical markers in the brain, and rightly so, but research shouldn’t only focus there. Here are a few papers.

Some of this is fascinating – the first paper shows how important the vagus nerve is – that is the main route of connection between the gut and central nervous system. In patients where the connection was severed (as part of a previous operation), the incidence of Parkinson’s in that group was lower. The last paper shows some intriguing interactions between our bacterial flora and nervous system.

So what is the role of neuroscience in education?

The work funded by Wellcome is starting to explore just that. It is worth thinking that gut neuroscience seems to be involved in degeneration and the loss of cognitive processes, so I would think the gut most likely will also play a role in our development and ability to learn. I guess, that could be the next project for Wellcome to fund!

References

Chung, S.J., Kim, J., Lee, H.J., Ryu, H.S., Kim, K., Lee, J.H., Jung, K.W., Kim, M.J., Kim, M.J., Kim, Y.J. and Yun, S.C. (2015). Alpha‐synuclein in gastric and colonic mucosa in Parkinson’s disease: Limited role as a biomarker. Movement Disorders.
Haehner, A., Tosch, C., Wolz, M., Klingelhoefer, L., Fauser, M., Storch, A., Reichmann, H. and Hummel, T. (2013). Olfactory training in patients with Parkinson’s disease. PloS one, 8(4), p.e61680.
Kelly, L.P., Carvey, P.M., Keshavarzian, A., Shannon, K.M., Shaikh, M., Bakay, R.A. and Kordower, J.H. (2014). Progression of intestinal permeability changes and alpha‐synuclein expression in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease. Movement Disorders, 29(8), pp.999-1009.
Mulak, A. and Bonaz, B. (2015). Brain-gut-microbiota axis in Parkinson’s disease. World journal of gastroenterology: WJG, 21(37), p.10609.
Rahne, K.E., Tagesson, C. and Nyholm, D. (2013). Motor fluctuations and Helicobacter pylori in Parkinson’s disease. Journal of neurology, 260(12), pp.2974-2980.
Svensson, E., Horváth‐Puhó, E., Thomsen, R.W., Djurhuus, J.C., Pedersen, L., Borghammer, P. and Sørensen, H.T. (2015). Vagotomy and subsequent risk of Parkinson’s disease. Annals of neurology, 78(4), pp.522-529.

August 24, 2016September 4, 2016

Textbooks cost whaaaat?

£184.07.

£289,710.

£26 million.

#CutTheCosts

So I’ve done some fag packet calculations this evening because I’m so increasingly concerned about the financial welfare of my students. When I was at the 2014 Open Ed Conference in Washington and first started hearing about open textbooks, I conducted a very quick and dirty survey with some of my students. I realised I had no idea about their textbook purchasing habits, or indeed, how this fitted into the wider context of their university experience. I really should write that up. There were 69 responses from science students. Nearly 80% had part time jobs. They on average spent (based on their estimations) between £300 and almost £1000 on text books.

What about our textbook recommendations?

Clearly our degree programmes are structured around credit-bearing modules, and it is a requirement of validation and professional body accreditation to make recommended reading lists. This can comprise books that are strongly recommended to accompany each module, plus those that provide supplementary reading. Of course, every book recommended is available in the library. But what if someone really did come along and buy – even some of them? And as academic teams, do we ever sit back and think of the prices of those books we are recommending?

What I’ve done is compiled the reading lists of all the compulsory modules for our Biomedical Science degree. This degree is offered at 91 universities across the UK, and I am pretty confident that their lists will look the same. This excludes similar courses – clinical sciences, medical sciences. Let’s just stick with Biomedical Science for now.

Students have 4 compulsory year 1 modules, 3 in year 2 and select 3 in year 3. These estimates assume a student will by a text relating to each important area, so there may be more than one strongly recommended text for some modules. I’ve also not accounted for one or two modules where the books from the first year will do for modules later on.

So to purchase a good range of books that = 33 texts.
For year 1 that = 10 texts.
7 books are priced way over £100.
Kindle versions are really no cheaper.

So this already sounds ludicrous, but it is what we recommend. So why do we recommend and advise on books in this way?

£184.07?

This was the Amazon price of the most expensive book recommended. My prices were based on Hardback cover, Paperback or Kindle versions, and I took the most expensive price on offer which may be through Amazon or a private provider. Of course there are second hand versions available, but unfortunately for science, go back more than one edition, and it will be generally out of date.

£289,710?

If all the students enrolled onto these modules purchased all of the books, the grand total is £289,710. The largest first year module has over 200 students and the most expensive book there is £184.99 for a hardback version of a core physiology text. In fact this was the text I purchased in my degree, so possibly a good investment over the years although mine is certainly 20+ years out of date. I certainly would look round for a previous edition, paperback version instead, but for a chunky core book, you’d still be talking around £50.

£26 million.

The thing that worries me most about education is the vast amount of duplication of lecture and content creation, that teaching resources are discarded when people leave or retire, and I’ve written about this before. Of course, any excuse to share Kevin Mear’s excellent cartoon capture of mine and David’s session “the cost of not going open“.

The cost of not going open is also unfathomable for students across the nation. Multiply up the cost of Biomedical Science textbooks from one university to the other 91 that offer the same course, and yes, that is the figure in the millions.

But what about some real numbers?

In my 2014 textbook survey, students claimed an average spend between £300-1000.

Huffington post article showed how costs had risen by over 800% over the last three decades in College Textbook Prices Increasing Faster Than Tuition And Inflation. Figures in the article are similar to my fag-packet ones, with students on average spending about $655 on textbooks, with the most expensive being around $300.

In the 2010 National Union of Students (NUS) report What are the Costs of Study and Living, over £1000 was attributed to books and additional equipment. Further NUS reports like Debt in the First Degree detail the financial burden that students experience, and how it leads to many holding down jobs whilst studying. And we often wonder why they don’t attend classes? What is the progression and success rate for those students who have to work? What is the impact financially of those who for whatever reason have to drop out, or delay a year because work has impacted on their study?

Anyway, this isn’t intended as an in-depth academic study of the area. But we absolutely need to do just that! We also need to be providing flexible study choices for students and think about the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of the education systems we offer.

Added resources:

Unite Students Insight Report: http://www.unite-students.com/about-us/insightreport

Florida Orange Grove student report: https://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/file/3a65c507-2510-42d7-814c-ffdefd394b6c/1/2016%20Student%20Textbook%20Survey%20Draft%205.pdf

Bryan Alexander blog post: https://bryanalexander.org/2016/09/03/one-week-of-bad-stories-about-higher-education-financing-and-i-feel-fine/

August 23, 2016August 23, 2016

Open education! Open education? Open. Education.

UNESCO (2016) believes that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.

UNESCO Paris (2002). Participants then adopted a Final Declaration (Annex 6) in which they “express their satisfaction and their wish to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open Educational Resources.”

The Cape Town Declaration (2007) (supported by Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Shuttleworth Foundation) stated…we are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

I do love the global open education community because it gave me a home where my ideas for education could be firmly routed. I have shared open educational resources (OER) for over ten years. The aspirations above have inspired me, my colleagues and my students. But you know what, unless we actually evaluate these objectives, we will never know what we have actually achieved!!! So come one, we all need to wake up to the idea of sharing our research strategies to carry out some good evaluations of where we are.

(And if you don’t know about Blake 7. You should. And goodbye for the next few hours, days or weeks –https://youtu.be/NWv2WWNZzhw).

I know research takes a huge amount of time and effort. But couldn’t we sneak just one or two little questions in, really?

These are super papers out this summer:

Nicole Delimont (2016), Kansas State University

“UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND FACULTY HAVE POSITIVE PERCEPTIONS OF OPEN/ALTERNATIVE RESOURCES AND THEIR UTILIZATION IN A TEXTBOOK REPLACEMENT INITIATIVE”, in Research in Learning Technology.

524 students were surveyed and 13 faculty teachers were interviewed regarding the adoption of open books on a range of biology and maths subjects. That is a considerable chunk of work. Students were kinda satisfied. There again, if you ask students anything, they are generally kinda satisfied. But what about those who might not have afforded education in the first place, or those who learn in different ways? Did using open textbooks transform their experiences, because I’d really love to know.

I loved the faculty (teaching staff) responses – generally finding the adoption and repurposing of textbooks rather difficult but absolutely rating their experience with this open text book initiative as very strong. This study is super as it gets beneath the surface, and the open questions and answers start to reveal the benefits of open texts in that they are more up to date and customisable. Student responses to the use of an open textbook were firstly financial, they supported the idea and they liked having an online book.

But as Peggy Lee once sang, “Is that all there is”? “Then let’s keep dancing”.

Olga Belikov (2016), Brigham Young University.

“INCENTIVES AND BARRIERS TO OER ADOPTION: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF FACULTY PERCEPTIONS”, in Open Praxis.

Another paper just out, is on 218 faculty (teacher) responses as part of the 2014 ‘Babson’ survey. Staff were asked about their perceptions of OER and were invited to leave an ‘open’ response at the end of the survey. The top three barriers were – need more information, lack of discoverability and confusing OER with other digital resources. In terms of positive responses, the top response was a generally positive idea that this is “the way of the future”, that OER contributed to better student costs and equity of study, and that resources were equal to traditional materials.

The open comments are as always very revealing, but I wonder if responses for a wider and more varied population (as part of a series of studies), would give rise to a broader framing of the barriers and incentives to using OER or open textbooks? And why not include some of the bigger ambitions of the OER community round diversity and opportunity? This study and many others is really interesting – around 10% of students have different learning needs, yet, this isn’t at the front of our minds.

Barbara Stack Illowsky (2016), Foothill-De Anza Community College District (USA) and a multi-centre research collaboration.

“EXAMINING STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF AN OPEN STATISTICS BOOK”, in Open Praxis.

This is a nicely conducted study that has asked students about their perceptions of cost and quality of open texts adopted for the teaching of statistics. 231 students completed the survey. The survey results were nice and gave a good glimpse into student textbook purchasing habits – something of which we know very little. Although the texts were offered for free online, some students liked a printed copy. The numbers of hours a week used was similar to other texts, and always rather disappointingly, in terms of quality, the majority saw the open text equal or better than the commercially available alternative. Only 13% saw it as worse. Either students have different understanding of the term ‘quality’ as we do, which I suspect, or the book was released in a similar format and didn’t intend to explore any more creative elements – collaboration, multimedia, links to further resources.

It is interesting that students when offering feedback will often use words like “confusing” and not “comprehensive”. What does this really mean? When we questioned students about what they valued in terms of resources, they referred to ease of discovery, quick to use, and resources that didn’t require time and effort to understand. This might be quite different from the ambitions of faculty and teaching staff.

“The book is written simply and clearly. This made it easy to understand and less ‘taxing’ to read. The collaborative aspect of the course built in the text encourages group learning which I have found to be beneficial to my learning.” (Illowsky paper).

Recommendations?

These studies are insightful and I am no way intending to underplay the huge amount of work that has gone into them. These are fantastic initiatives and clearly open education is reaching out to hundreds of students. However I am just being inquisitive regarding some of the more interesting goals that the community talks about yet never really evaluates:

Does open education offer equal opportunities for all those who wish to learn and to reap the benefits that education can offer, or even a short course or forming a network can offer?
Does open eduction address social inequality and other recognised inequalities within our education systems, such as in “Causes in differences of student outcomes“?
Does open education offer a high quality education – linked to sustainability and peace?
Are we really addressing access and accessibility?

Evaluation is central to us all achieving these goals – I look to the US, Africa and elsewhere for evidence to present to decision makers in MY country. So go on, sling in a few interesting questions. If you don’t, Avon will come after you.