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

dominating your CMS

Here’s an article to make you think about whether you are conforming to your Course Management System (CMS) or whether you are making it conform to your pedagogy. Lane suggests that novice Web instructors who learn the basics of their institution’s system before they think about the principles of teaching their course are working backwards and risk forgetting what they know about teaching well. The CMS dominates their course organization and, consequently, their teaching.

As someone who supports faculty use of Blackboard, and who is involved in the ritual training in its features, this article has me thinking. As an online instructor, it has me wondering how to evaluate what I’ve been doing. I think I started with the course and course objectives, and then moved into how it could be expressed within Blackboard, but we’ll see when I get a chance to reflect at the end of the semester.

If you have recently been trained to use Blackboard, do you think it has been dominating your pedagogy?

Lane, Lisa M. “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching.” First Monday 14.10 (5 October 2009).

Filed under: course design, online learning, pedagogy, teaching, technology

Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly

Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly.

Follow the link to read about the addition of math equation tools to Google Docs. In addition to enabling students to write with these tools, this gives faculty another tool for grading online–gotta save those trees and the printer ink!

Here’s my lame English major attempt to use the equation editor:

google equation editor

Filed under: Web 2.0, free stuff, hypertext, online learning, open source, technology , google

technology and a different kind of virus

Mention virus anywhere near a technology professional and the response is likely to be a cringe, followed by a series of questions: “Is your anti-virus software up to date?” “Are you playing safe on the Web?” “You’re not clicking on links in emails, are you?” Recently, though, higher education has been worried about a virus of the biological kind–H1N1.

I’ve overheard (on one listserv) more than a dozen colleges and universities discussing plans of how to keep their semesters going if droves of students are unable to make it to class, or told not to come to class to prevent the spread of swine flu.

One solution, or emergency response has technology coming to the rescue, sort of. No, your computer won’t make you better, but it might allow you to continue to conduct your classes at a distance. Here’s one example of a readiness strategy from the University of Oregon: <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/cmet/fluedtech.html>. They try to cover all the bases, from changing your syllabus, to widening the use of Blackboard, to re-thinking your face-to-face course as a hybrid.

In some cases, faculty will still be able to hold their classes and accommodate only a few students too ill to attend, but there just might be areas of the country that are so hard hit as to seriously affect semester completion. Are we (you) ready for that? Can you imagine how you might change your course organization and delivery to meet what the U of Oregon calls “radical adaptation,” particularly if you get sick? Perhaps the pandemic won’t materialize. After all, we remember the Y2K dud. But maybe we were safe, rather than sorry, because we were prepared. I’d start packing that teaching first-aid kit now.

Filed under: administration, communication, computers, document delivery, education, online learning, teaching, technology

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

eportfolio tools

Creating eportfolios as a course project is a good way to engage students in their coursework, if you present the eportfolio as an exercise in digital storytelling–specifically the story of their work and progress. If your institution has a campus-wide deployment of an eportfolio system, such as Epsilen or the Carnegie Foundation’s KEEP Toolkit (see comment below about availability), you can draw on common resources with which to introduce and support your students’ work.

There are a variety of free tools on the web, though, with which you and your students can be creative in crafting eportfolios to suit your course situation. Yours might be an essay-driven course, or perhaps yours requires students to create a lot of graphs and data-driven material. Or yours might focus on research and collaboration. Sometimes its easier to find the tools that work best for you than to reconfigure a template-based system.

Helen Barrett is a name you will run across in your research on eportfolios, and she not only provides expertise on the purpose of such work and lots of links to resources, she puts her money where her mouth is and has created a staggering list of eportfolios using all sorts of tools and methods, so that you have good models to view. Here are some of her resources:

Online Portfolio Tools (with links to models): http://electronicportfolios.org/web20portfolios.html

Portfolio and How-To on WordPress: http://hbarrett.wordpress.com/my-portfolio/

• Dr. Barrett’s Portfolio in a blog format with a special tab on how to create a portfolio in a WordPress blog.

Electronic Portfolios.org: http://electronicportfolios.org/

• This is a gateway site to many of her pages. She’s been at this for almost two decades and her examples are well worth visiting

I have used course portfolios in composition courses, in which students select drafts and graded papers, reflect on the process of creating them, and evaluate their own writing process and progress in a course. It is the truth that I find some of their best writing in their reflections and in their presentation of the portfolio. I have not asked students to use online tools for such a project, but look forward to doing it soon. Now that we can take advantage of more methods of telling stories, using audio, video, and photos, I think the results could be very interesting.

How would you use today’s tools to suggest creating an eportfolio?

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, education, grading, innovation, online learning, presentation , eportfolio

internet searching and brain function

This study is making the rounds as evidence that there are new ways of thinking for those experienced on the web:

UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.

I’m not hoping that anytime soon the inexperienced will stop pooh-poohing the web as evidence of a lost attention span, but it’s a start. Change is hard to accept because it’s hard to see as it happens, but I think we are developing new ways of thinking/reading/analyzing information.

Of course, the study was for middle-aged+ users, and the intended results seem to be more about how to keep our minds active and healthy as we age, but the evidence of brain stimulation and improved brain function (or the possibility for it) will surely be studied on a broader range of ages. Interesting stuff for educators.

You can download UCLA’s image of the brains here.

Filed under: digital literacy, online learning

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

flip that course 5

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

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

ADDRESSING LEARNING STYLES ONLINE: THE R2D2 MODEL

SOURCE: Bonk, Curtis J., and Zhang, Ke. “Introducing the R2D2 Model: Online Learning for the Diverse Learners of This World.” Distance Education 27.2 (2006): 249-64.

In our face-to-face classrooms, we might be more aware of the need to address diverse learning styles, or it might be that we have just become accustomed to mixing up the presentation of material without really thinking about why we do it. It’s the fashion today to present speech, text, media, collaboration, feedback–we live this way and so, maybe, we work this way, too.

There is a danger in online courses of missing opportunities to create such experiences. We might be tempted to present all material using one method, whether it is a PowerPoint with a text script or narration, a video lecture, or a written lecture. In doing so, we also miss the opportunity to address learning styles.

The article referenced here offers “an easy-to-apply, practical model” (250) particularly for online learning. Bonk and Zhang’s model focuses on “the type of tasks, resources, and activities that one may want to embed in an online course . . . to address different human learning strengths” (251). Here’s a diagram I created from the article’s tables to highlight the 4 areas in the model, read, reflect, display, and do. Click on the image to enlarge:

I have not included the technologies from the article, just the tasks. In 21st-century technology terms, we are moving too fast for a scholarly article to keep up. But check out the entire tables in the article, then make up your own activities around the technologies that will make them possible.

The point is that we are still responsible for addressing our students’ learning styles in online environments. The environment does not dictate a single method of presentation or work any more than our classrooms should. The R2D2 Model works with your own course design instead of prescribing a pattern of organization and serves as a reminder of the variety we can add to online courses.

Filed under: document delivery, learning styles, online learning

flip that course 3

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

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

COMMUNICATION

Who would have thought that this concept, so central to the face-to-face classroom dynamic, would be such a necessary feature online, where perhaps none of your students are working at the same time? You might have thought of an online course more like those old correspondence courses, in which students sent you papers and you graded them and sent them back.

Today, we–teachers and students, both–expect a more sophisticated experience even in asynchronous environments, and communication is key to establishing the relationships that create the sense of being in a class. I will divide the topic into two areas: (1) communication among students and (2) communication between teachers and students.

Communication Among Students

At least three (3) of the “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” that I posted about last summer, principles generally known as the Chickering and Gamson principles, address communication. These principles are especially appropriate in online courses, where the lack of communication can leave students feeling isolated and contemplating dropping the course, and faculty feeling as if they don’t know their students.

In a classroom, we take for granted the opportunity to ask questions, wait for responses, and participate in the back and forth of Socratic dialog that can lead students through complex material toward knowledge and understanding. We don’t have to abandon our goals, but we do have to reconsider how to achieve them.

In “The Reluctant Online Professor,” by Cynthia L. Corritore, PhD, Creighton University, published online in eLearn Magazine, Corritore describes the following experience using blog discussions:

There were several things that I believe made the course so successful. One key was the blog discussions. Initially, the posts read as individual, unrelated, formal discourses, even though I had provided guidelines and a movie about how to participate in a blog discussion. So, for the first two weeks of the course I graded the blog discussions very strictly and provided a great deal of individual and team feedback. I tried to convey that these discussions were analogous to classroom exchanges in which they must build on the ideas of others. It took about two weeks of low grades and extensive feedback, but they suddenly “got it.” The blogs became surprisingly high-level, extremely energized discussions with application of course content, relevant life and work experiences, and examples from the students’ independent research.

While posting every day caused significant complaints from the majority of students in the first week, by the end of the second week most were posting multiple times a day to each of their team blogs. It was extremely exciting to see all of this interaction happening, and it exceeded my expectations. I had never seen this level of discussion in a class, even onsite. My boring class had become exciting and engaging!

The team element of the course was another key to success. My experience with students is that they tend to become cohesive over time, but these online teams did that and more. I saw the students come together and develop into organized learning groups. Everyone was consistently positive and supportive of each other.

Whether we would use free commercial blogs or the Blackboard Discussion Board, such development of students into a community of learning would be a good substitute for face-to-face discussions, as well as a good way to assess understanding. Notice that Corritore applied strict principles for participation and grading, which clearly communicated high expectations and resulted in those expectations being fulfilled.

The lesson here is that in order to achieve communication among students, you must convey clear methods and expectations, and you must guide students as much as needed until they are able to perform on their own.

Here’s a diagram and short table of findings from The Sloan Consortium on “Relationships Between Interactions and Learning in Online Environments.” Specifically, the section on interaction with classmates supports the idea of community-building, the one thing we fear will be absent online.

Here’s a more traditional article from Mary Ann Kolloff, Assistant Professor, Eastern Kentucky University on “Strategies for Effective Student/Student Interaction in Online Courses.” As this article suggests, you must design course activities in a way that allows you to stand on the sidelines observing as much as possible, so that you are not “overwhelmed with online teaching.” Just as in the classroom, you can become the only one learning the material if you cannot create situations in which students can develop their own understanding.

Update: Let me add this terrific article full of specifics on how to conduct a successful online discussion forum: “Dialogue-Intensive Learning“ by Richard Dool, D.Mgt, Assistant Professor, Seton Hall University. I will mention it again at the beginning of the next post for those who miss this update.

Next, we’ll tackle the communication between teachers and students.

Filed under: 7 principles, communication, online learning

flip that course 2

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

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

So, now that you have reflected on your face-to-face course, how you teach, and what your goals are, let’s talk more specifically about the course layout as expressed in your syllabus. It is a good idea to use your current syllabus as a guide.

One of the resources I suggested in the first post, Optimizing Your Syllabus for Online Students, addressed options for translating your syllabus:

• the rationale
• the classics
• the map
• the contract
• the schedule

Let’s look at the map, since it might be the most unlike what you do now. I suggest, though, that if you take the term map seriously and create a visual representation of the course flow, that you also provide a typical text version as a supplement. Together, you will be addressing different learning styles, as well as urging students to think about the course in different ways.

Here’s an example of a concept map that I used in a course. It was linked from the online text syllabus:
The two large blocks represented the two main texts in the course, and the overlapping small blocks represented concepts or topics that would be considered in relationship to those texts.

The map also shows the two parts of the course and that the second part is devoted to concepts in practice, whereas the first part is more theoretical.

Clearly, this is not a substitute for the components in a traditional syllabus, but there are other sorts of maps that you can devise.

Still in the model of a concept map, you can create an organizational chart that would contain all assignments and that would show the progression through the course, as well as the relationship between assignments. Here is a map distributed by Blackboard at a weekend workshop on course design. It shows more details about how course goals will be achieved through assignments and how Blackboard tools will be incorporated:

I can also imagine a map more like a roadmap or terrain map, which might not be as difficult to make today with available mapping tools, like Microsoft Visio, for example. I recently installed that software, and I can see that it will work better if I sketch out a map idea first.

Maybe the direction of your course won’t change, but you should be open to that possibility in your re-design.

Filed under: online learning, syllabus, teaching