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

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

evolution of clickers to no clickers?

I’m collecting information on how faculty can employ classroom response (clicker) technology on the cheap. Before we buy into a product, particularly one that students have to purchase that are of no use outside the classroom, I think we need to explore using cell phone text messaging or SMS.

Even a top company like Turning Technologies has been moving fast in the direction away from the independent clicker. First they created the anytime, anywhere Response Card Anywhere that you could use on a field trip, and now they have software for your phone–Responseware.

That’s cool, but why payware in a world of freeware?

Then there’s the Open Source Poll Everywhere software that is free for classes of 30 or less. That’s a pretty tight limitation that would only work for a select few classes. I will be trying it out and reporting in a formal document to distribute to faculty.

Here’s a sample poll from Poll Everywhere. The Keyword is the phrase that begins with “cast”:

Make your own poll voting question with Poll Everywhere

I’m sure that if there’s not one already, that the Apple iTunes App Store will have one soon for free, but then there’s the cost of an iPod Touch or iPhone to deal with, and that’s an even bigger cost.

I’m probably going to suggest a wait and see how it all turns out before we commit to a campus-wide contract.

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In response to the comment, below, I tried a Google form poll (although not with any respondents, yet). They are really easy to make, and you’ll notice in my second question that you could choose other, and that would become part of the class discussion. Alternatively, I could have let the audience type in their “other” response.

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As noted in Chris’ blog description, students would need to be in a computer lab or have individual access (mobile or laptop). In such a situation, I think the Google option is good. I especially like that it is not connected to PowerPoint. I certainly don’t want to promote PPT unless necessary and done very well. Breaking up a presentation/discussion by going to the Google form, seems a good way to keep a variety of actions in a class.

Filed under: Web 2.0, grading, pedagogy, student-centered learning

should you remove your talking head?

My, that sounds a little painful, but it might be in your students’ best interest.

There’s been an interesting thread on the NMC (New Media Consortium) listserv (please read this post about our membership in the NMC) about whether a talking head in an online presentation–think Presenter or Connect–is a distraction to students/attendees.

[Removed a video of my own talking head for vanity reasons--bad lighting, etc. I was just musing about the value of my talking head in this post. Next time, I'll have my avatar speak.]

One argument cites this research on the eye movement of online viewers: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html If the article research is true that watching is a passive mode, then we should think hard about whether the presence of the speaker’s talking head creates a passive response instead of an active engagement with the presentation content. Of course, if the presentation is recorded, we have to work hard to make it interactive, but at the least, taking notes during the presentation, even if the slides are being copied, is active.

Anecdotally, I have, myself, been mesmerized by a talking head in a recorded presentation and missed some slide material, having to go back once I shook off the trance.

The counterargument refers to lecturers whose dynamic presence positively influences learning, but are we capturing that kind of presence with only a small talking head in a corner module? One post cites Richard Mayer’s The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2005) as supporting little effect from the small head image. Another post cites and attaches one of Mayer’s articles, “Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning” (Educational Psychologist 38(1): 43-52. © 2003, Erlbaum.), which discusses the possibility of cognitive overload in processing material in multimedia environments.

What do you think about all this as you struggle to create presentations? I’m wondering if we can have the talking head come in at appropriate moments–those moments when we might pause in the material and ask viewers a question to make them stop and think. In a recorded session, this could be during a poll or quiz. Or it could be a moment when you ask viewers to write a short response, one of several, all to be submitted to you after the entire presentation.

I’m not ready to say “off with their heads” yet, but neither do I think we should use them without due consideration of their effect.

Filed under: cognition, communication, education, pedagogy, student-centered learning, technology

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

what principles drive your use of technology?

Having been an assistant professor or instructor for many years before moving into instructional technology, I am guided by the same principles that guided my instructional pedagogy in the classroom. Here’s what motivated my technology-enabled teaching projects:

• understanding that my role as guide or facilitator would redirect the center of the class toward students
• wanting to shift the work responsibility and choices of action to students through collaborative design
• appreciating the power of ownership students could achieve in their work
• incorporating moments for reflection and feedback
• getting students out of their comfort zones–which is generally the tired research essay
• providing new tools and situations in which students could apply knowledge
• providing projects that were directed at real audiences of readers or users
• respecting and valuing students’ self-evaluation

This is not a new revelation to me, and perhaps not to you; I just wanted to state it. By pigeon-holing instructional technology off in some corner as an unnecessary bells-and-whistles office, institutions stifle innovative pedagogy.

What I hope you see in this list is that we all have the same goals in education, whether teaching face-to-face or online, whether we use technology in the classroom, or out of the classroom, or not at all.

Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, education, pedagogy, student-centered learning