more predictions of online class increases

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/10/28/most-college-students-to-take-classes-online-by-2014.aspx

Filed under: education, learning, online learning

here it is, again

Here’s that new semester, the fall renewal, even though it’s still pretty hot outside. We are all excited about starting up again, before the complexity of courses, grading, student conferences, and committee work start to fill up all those moments we had planned to learn about new innovations in teaching and learning. Some of us have new ideas we’d like to try out in the classroom, whether on ground or online, and hope to keep up our excitement long enough to put the ideas in motion.

Pardon a personal note: I’ve been reading about online teaching, since I’ll be teaching online for the first time, reading about translating face-to-face practices into online experiences, all the while trying to keep three areas in mind–student/content interaction, student/faculty interaction, and student/student interaction. That doesn’t seem like a difficult organizational plan, until you start to fill in the blanks. Assignments and due dates are easy enough, but creating experiences that engage students as they work through those assignments is the hard part. All of a sudden I feel like an orchestra conductor waiting for the sheet music, and discover that I am the composer, too. I know that if I feel overwhelmed, students may have the same reaction, so my first order of business has been to retreat from displaying all the content of the semester at once. In a f2f course, I would never hand out all the assignments on day one, so why would I try to make them all available on our LMS? I’m giving myself permission to slow down and judge how the course is going in the first few weeks, leaving room for adjustment. I’m sure it would be nice to have the whole course and its content created on day one and just turn it on, but for this first time around, I need to test the waters a little. I’ll be busy in the evenings and on weekends.

Here are a few of the things I’ve been reading online:

Instructional Design for Online Learning: http://www.ibritt.com/resources/dc_instructionaldesign.htm

Getting Started Online: http://vfc.project.mnscu.edu/index.asp

Principles of Online Design: http://www.fgcu.edu/onlinedesign/index.html

Instructional Design Handbook: http://www.psuonline.pdx.edu/docs/id_handbook.htm

Guidelines for Teaching an Online Course: http://tltc.findlay.edu/onlinesupport/Guidelines/index.html

Teaching Strategies: Online Teaching: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tsot.php

Send me your favorites to post, whether about online teaching or not.

Filed under: 7 principles, course design, education, learning, online learning, pedagogy, student-centered learning, teaching, technology

persuasive (not gratuitous) technologies

Can you use technology this well to ignite your students? Well, it certainly is inspiring, and it shows that visuals really can illuminate ideas. It is a mashup of technologies, including even PowerPoint, but not gratuitous technologies added just to show that Rosling is hip or clever–the combination is as persuasive as the speaker, and I know that’s how you really want to use technology, too.

Filed under: aesthetics, cognition, communication, education, learning, presentation, teaching, technology

Howard Rheingold’s Vlog

more about "Howard Rheingold’s Vlog", posted with vodpod

I think you will find this discussion of 21st Century Literacies very interesting–they might not be what you think they are. Note the section on attention and think about how you feel when your students are seemingly distracted by the technologies at hand. Now imagine what your online students might be doing as you are teaching an online course. How will you deal with the issue of attention in that situation?

Filed under: cognition, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, learning, learning styles, literacy, technology

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

Do you agree with this list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies? The table shows former rankings of items from 2007 and 2008, providing an interesting view of how some have jumped radically into prominence and others have fallen away. PowerPoint still ranks high at #10–I was surprised by that. Look through the list and notice how many of the tools are free and web-based, even though a number of proprietary software tools, like Adobe Connect, Camtasia Studio, and Photoshop are still indispensible.

Filed under: digital literacy, document delivery, education, free stuff, learning, open source, software, teaching, technology

2009 Horizon Report

Download the 2009 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and let’s talk about it tomorrow.

[Sorry, got sidetracked by office visitors and I'm a day late with my response to the new Horizon Report.] Here are the six topics covered this year:

• mobiles
• cloud computing
• geo-everything
• personal web
• semantic-aware applications
• smart objects

I have some comments about three of them, but feel free to add your own comments about those or any on the list.

1. Mobiles carries over last year’s topic of Mobile Broadband, and I won’t be surprised to see it again until we all have mobile devices that have access to broadband and data plans. I think there are still too many people wearing blinders about our students’ access to both broadband and devices that can access the web. Many students are lucky to have laptops with which they can access our wireless on campus. So, I always take with a grain of salt ways of using cell phones in the classroom that require Web and email connectivity. So many recommended classroom uses are based on the iPhone, possibly the most expensive of the smart phones, without consideration of students’ actual devices, that I am wary of the success of such projects. I do agree, however, that we are moving closer to a time when the mobile device is commonplace and ubiquitous.
2. Geo-Everything: Again, the ability to use geo-location/GPS to tag locations, depends on mobile devices to a great extent, if you are in the field. And the report’s examples do illustrate that field work, particularly in the sciences, makes good use of geo-tagging. I’m grateful that they also include a use in literary studies of mapping out geographical locations in literary works. They use the example of The Travels of Marco Polo, and provide a link to an idea using Google Earth to explore literature. Much like recreating a virtual literary space in Second Life, this kind of visualization is engaging as it inspires students to think creatively in imagining more fully the author’s depictions.
3. Personal Web. This is particularly interesting to me, as I am thoroughly invested in having access to information at my fingertips and publishing my ideas, whether it be here on this blog, in Twitter or Facebook, on my personal Website, or my ePortfolio. The customization of personal Web space through widgets, for example, is a step in creating your own Personal Learning Network (PLN), part of the ability to educate yourself. Combined with tools like Zotero and Delicious that let you aggregate resources in links or bibliographic entries, and that let you have access to the collected resources of others, today’s students participate in their own development in ways we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago. Read a previous post about do-it-yourself sites, like PageFlakes for an example.

What I like about the Horizon Report is that is prods us to look to the future, says it’s okay to wonder about how technology might advance and how educators might use it. I think it can often have us thinking about what’s available now, as well, which is good, because now is where we are.

Filed under: digital literacy, education, innovation, learning, technology

writing, revising, and a record of it

Thanks to Gardner Campbell for recommending this short, but fascinating, video about one Wikipedia page transformation over time: Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut (temporary link until the original one becomes available again). The evolution from single sentence to accepted full page is a good example of how what Udell calls “a loose federation of worldwide volunteers” can commit to creating an honest and valid record of cultural history.

Why would this be interesting to you? Well, it would be a great example to students of the value of editing to produce good quality writing (and Campbell echoes this idea). What if your students were assigned, alone or in groups, to work in a wiki to create a report or write a paper that showed all their revising history? It would be a terrific record for students who generally write over existing text when revising in a word-processing program and lose those previous passages. In one sense, the wiki space allows us to return to that world of manuscripts and handwritten notes that have thrilled students of textual studies for decades. More importantly, it would give today’s digital students a deeper connection to their writing processes and make them better writers and thinkers.

I’d love to hear about your experiments with wikis in your courses.

Filed under: digital literacy, learning, peer review, student-centered learning, wiki

there are Pilots and pilots

You’re all familiar with college pilots of technologies that are being considered for campus-wide adoption–those are the pilots with a capital P that seem to drag out over a good portion of a year, all with the best intentions, not necessarily in this order:

• arrange with a company for a pilot
• recruit volunteer faculty to participate
• form a committee
• train faculty
• troubleshoot the technology
• gather feedback from faculty and students
• evaluate the technology
• decide whether or not to commit to the technology

I’m surely leaving something out, but you know the process. Such a process is necessary for contracted technologies that are going to cost a pretty penny to implement.

Then there are the pilots that you might be implementing on your own from a wide choice of free Web 2.0 or Open Source tools. Certainly, it’s not necessary for a college to go through a formal adoption strategy for a free tool–no money changes hands, and what works in your discipline and class might not be the best tool for the next person’s class. We’re missing the point of teaching creatively if we try to stifle creative experimentation with free tools.

That said, Ruth Reynard suggests that you can run your own pilot in your own classroom with these free tools, and that it becomes a good learning experience for your students to be involved in evaluating the effectiveness of the pilot with the small p. In “6 Ways not to become Rote Using Technology,” Reynard suggests using a pattern of implementation similar to the one above, but more tailored to your course:

1. Get your hands dirty;
2. Set up the “pilot” parameters and criteria;
3. Involve the students in your reflective evaluation;
4. Always survey students about the technology specifically;
5. Always identify the connection with learning outcomes; and
6. Modify your use and adjust when needed (remain open to change).

I’m reminded of the EDUCAUSE surveys of students that reveal student preferences for technology that faculty know how to use well, and think this approach strikes a balance between the creative innovator and the expert. Capital P pilots aim for achieving a standard of expertise before implementation and lower-case p pilots engage students in innovation and evaluation of technology and learning. There is good cause for both to be happening.

What Web 2.0 tools have you tried out in your courses and to what success?

Image Author: Luca Cremonini Source: http://www.railsonwave.it/railsonwave/2007/1/2/web-2-0-map Original Source: Markus Angermeier Source: http://kosmar.de/archives/2005/11/11/the-huge-cloud-lens-bubble-map-web20/
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, learning, open source, pedagogy, pilots, teaching, technology

you must write a blog in this course: here’s why

Yesterday’s Campus Technology article, “Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students,” is a terrific reminder that we cannot just throw technology at students and expect them to accept it blindly or use it intelligently or learn from its use.

Here are Ruth Reynard’s list of mistakes in brief:

1. ineffective contextualization
2. unclear learning outcomes
3. misuse of the environment
4. illusive grading practices
5. inadequate time allocation

I have used both group and individual blog assignments with undergraduate and graduate students. For my purposes, I found the group blogs more effective, but in either case, I made certain to tie the assignment to my course learning outcomes, and I explained in writing how to develop a blog, what I would be looking for, and how the blog would be graded, for example:

Course outcomes that could be achieved through a blog assignment: In a graduate course on information technology for leaders, a few things I wanted students to be able to do by the end of the course were (1) Develop a personal perspective on innovation and the future of information technology, (2) Work collaboratively on a topic related to information technology, and (3) Think critically about and report on issues in scholarly articles related to information technology. As you might see in these desired outcomes, students need to develop a voice on the course general topic, and a published blog is a great place to develop your voice.

Stating clearly what you want from the students and from the assignment: I informed students that  the blogs should “peak readers’ interest in a way that would make them want to comment.” I told them that I wanted “interesting and serious posts on their topic.” Finally, I told them that the “blogs should show that they are becoming well read in the area of their topic.”

Teaching how to blog: Don’t assume that students who have read or created blogs have thought much about the blog as a genre of writing or that their experience has been productive. Teach students how to blog and their learning will be better accomplished.

• I offered examples of group blogs so that students could see how team members might complement each other or how they might write opposing views on a topic without becoming a public fight.
• I suggested that “contributors on group blogs develop their own identity or personality, and that readers might look forward to hearing from one particular member of a group blog if they exhibit diverse opinions.”
• I suggested places where they might look for resources to write about, particularly news items or professional articles related to their topics, and how they could integrate their own voice and opinion into posts that cite resources.

Be clear about how the project will be graded: In addition to a required number of posts, usually 3 per week from the group, however they divided that among members, I would grade the blogs on the following elements:

• Quality and interest of posts.
• Interest to educated general readers.
• Interest of linked articles.

_________________________________________________________________________________
Reynard makes a point in her articles that I second strongly–blogs are not discussion boards. In a workshop once, a faculty member wondered why I didn’t comment on every post and expect students to do the same with each other’s blogs, because he saw them as a public discussion board. As Reynard notes, one’s blog post is a published statement, and whether or not readers write comments is not really a concern of the blogger. Readers may carry on their own conversations, as desired, but I wouldn’t suggest that the blogger get involved, unless desired. Comments can certainly tell you if your ideas are conveyed as you meant, and you may get good ideas from readers, but the purpose of the blog, as I see it, is to polish your voice and learn to articulate your subject.

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, communication, digital literacy, grading, learning, teaching, technology

flip that course 6

Read the entire flip that course series on translating traditional courses for online delivery:

1. Brainstorming
2. Course Layout and Syllabus
3. Communication Among Students
4. Communication Between Students and Faculty
5. Addressing Learning Styles
6. Packaging Content

Sixth in a series on how to translate a face-to-face course into an online course.

PACKAGING CONTENT

Following from the last post on addressing learning styles in an online environment, faculty need to think about how to package the materials of their course to present to students, allowing those read, reflect, display, and do activities to take place.

Reading and Listening: Your presentation of concepts and background information, of anecdotes and history, of facts and issues–generally called a lecture, even if you don’t pontificate from behind a lecturn–can be offered in multiple formats. And not only is that a good idea in itself, but it can help you break up a long presentation into multiple shorter ones that are easier to digest. Here are some examples, but consider using more than one:

1. PowerPoints with narration. Whether narrated directly into PowerPoint or using another software that imports your PPT slides, this is a good way to interest students. Your voice provides a point of contact that is absent from online text. Your inflection, clarifications, even your laughter and mistakes, help create a connection that adds to understanding. We are all familiar with how hard it is, for example, to use humor in writing, or to be sure that our readers are reading sentences as we wish. Here, you have a chance to use verbal cues to ensure understanding.
2. Audio podcasts. Maybe you don’t need PPT slides, maybe you usually just lecture and don’t even write on the board. Then you might want to simply record a lecture and post it directly on Blackboard or on our iTunes U site as an mp3 file that students can download to their mp3 players.
3. Print lectures. Many students appreciate reading a lecture at their own pace and marking it up as they read. If you lecture from notes, you could either offer those notes or expand them into a prose version. Even if you offer a multimedia lecture, you might want to provide a script to go along with it.
4. Video podcast. If you have the equipment or the time to go where there is some recording equipment, a video lecture can be another way to make a connection, one that is more like being in the classroom. Students will see and hear you and take notes as usual.
5. Discussion boards. If you usually break up lectures with question and answer periods, you can provide those experiences in a discussion forum. You will have to be clear about structuring when students should participate in them, by noting how many lectures or readings should be covered before participating, for example: “After reading ch. 1 and listening to the first lecture, begin your participation in the first discussion forum, called Ch. 1 Discussion. Be sure you know the guidelines for participating, found in the assignments list.”

Reflecting and Observing: Generally, your students get a chance to reflect between classes, and your online students who need to think before they speak will surely follow a schedule that suits them. But at some point, you need to see the results of reflection to know how the material is being processed or internalized. If you are used to seeing student writing only on two exams and one paper per term, you may want to consider several smaller writing opportunities where more frequent feedback is informative for both you and your students.

1. Discussion boards. You get double duty from discussion forums as they appeal to both of the Rs in the R2D2 model. Students can observe the conversations between their peers and you, and can also put their own reflections into writing–remember the old, I don’t know what I think until I see what I’ve said? Such forums can be a significant part of the course grade or a minor part, and you can get out of it what is good for your subject.
2. Reading/watching/listening reflections. Short reflective writing assignments, which can be as formal or informal as you like, give students a chance to think-out ideas away from the eyes of their peers, although you could decide to create small groups that would share reflections. This is slightly less immediate than a Discussion Board, where some students will respond as soon as they read a post. These writing reflection might encourage more self-editing and more polished ideas.

Consider such assignments as responses for all the media you assign–films, audio podcasts, performances, scholarly articles.

Display: “For visual learners, who prefer diagrams, flowcharts, timelines, pictures, films, and demonstrations.” Imagine how many times in the face-to-face classroom you ask students to look at something, whether it’s a website you bring up on the screen, your own diagram of an idea on the board, a handout of a photograph or drawing, or a library book you pass around. You know how such visual artifacts affect students’ understanding by illustrating new perspectives, and you need to replicate these moments online, as well. Incorporating the visual may be more regimented from your point of view, but remember that students can look again and again, whenever they need to look.

1. Ask students to submit photos and other “graphic representations” that they find related to a topic. They can attach images to Discussion Board posts or submit them to you to post.
2. Create a slide show or folder of images with clear connections to readings.
3. Consider creating at least one video of yourself, either presenting content that includes showing a visual object or demonstrating a process.
4. As suggested in the second post of this series, create a visual representation of your course in diagram, map, game board, story board, or whatever creative way you can imagine. There’s a terrific textbook on how to use critical theory in writing about literature, Texts and Contexts, 3rd. ed. (New York: Longman, 2001), that illustrates each theory with a drawn landscape, complete with roads and landscaping and buildings that represent critical concepts (stop by the office to see and example). I can’t tell you enough how these visual landscapes have helped me in my own understanding and articulation of complex theory.

Do Something! “For tactile/kinesthetic learners, who prefer learning by active doing, experiencing, hands-on, and often also group work.” Some task that requires a complete cycle of gathering, analyzing, producing, particularly in a group, will add not only a dimension of doing, but will go a long way in creating a communal experience. (I hear all the naysayers about group work, and you will have to set out your strict guidelines for group behavior.)

1. Assign case-studies to groups on the main topics of the course. Ask for their input on how to present their findings to the class.
2. Invite audio and video presentations. These could include narrated PowerPoints, interviews with relevant people in the field of study, personal performances.

Filed under: document delivery, learning, learning styles, online learning

classroom capture technology

The initial idea of an iTunes U site is to provide students access to course material, generally in the form of podcast lectures, not as an excuse for skipping class, but for the possibility of reviewing difficult material.

Were you ever present at a lecture or discussion that was so riveting that you couldn’t take notes, listen, and participate at the same time? Which did you choose? Limiting your choice to taking notes is certainly limiting and has less of an impact on learning than the other two choices. What if you could skip the notetaking and focus on listening and participating. that would be great, but what would you do later without copious notes? That’s where the ability to replay such an experience comes in.

Campus Technology reports on a study from Coppin State University that “indicate[s] that class capture technology that allows students to view lectures online after the fact can improve course retention rates and grades.” Isn’t that exactly what we would like to happen? Coppin State used Tegrity Campus software to capture lectures, and that software presents what can look more like a webinar, with both video lecture and notes. iTunes U podcasts might not be as complex, but the idea of making a lecture or discussion available for review, can be just as valuable.

I’m excited about the possibilities. You?

P.S While you’re checking out higher ed iTunes sites, go over to YouTube and check out UC Berkeley’s YouTube site for a similar way to reach students and the world at large.

Filed under: education, learning, teaching, technology

what’s the context?

Received a newsletter from eLearnCampus.com today, a trusted organization, and was happy to hear a discussion about a glut of content and a lack of good “context.” I’ve been thinking about that recently, even though we are primarily a face-2-face school and this company focuses on online learning. I see a lot of Blackboard sites, which in our limited version are deliverers of content. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the features we don’t have, so I can’t say for sure that Bb offers blogs, wikis, or podcasting tools, but those would be the types of tools that go beyond the file cabinet model of most LMS. But maybe we should be putting as much emphasis on context as content.

I can’t say it better than the newsletter:

It is time to focus on context. In other words, we must move past the presentation of content to the creation of context wherein learners can can apply and reflect upon the new knowledge they encounter. It is a matter of moving beyond “knowing” something to being able to do something with this new knowledge (e.g. make a good decision, solve a problem, improve a process, resolve a conflict, etc.) [emphasis added]

I’m always worried that while it’s easy to say we need to use technology to advance pedagogical purposes in the classroom, it’s not that easy to figure out how to convert old-style exercises into new ones when the only technology in the room is one computer on a podium. For that reason, I like the writer’s focus on context instead of on technology:

Creative Learning Design

• Encourage active and applied learning via immersive cases, games and branching scenarios
• Challenge learners, allow them to fail in safe environments and to learn from failure
• Provide learners with opportunities for self-reflection

Enabling Community

• Connect peers and allow them to learn from each other
• Connect experienced pros with novices in mentorship relationships

Facilitate Learning on Demand

• Nothing puts learning into context better than allowing learners to access it at the point of need and then use it immediately

Learning context, learning environments. Physical as well as social and psychological spaces within which to learn. It has me thinking.

You can read the original article here.

Filed under: document delivery, education, learning, teaching, technology