For the past twelve years, I have worked in academic technology at an institute of higher education (with a brief eight-month corporate stint that taught me that my heart and soul truly is in education). However, my academic background is not instructional design but rather in communication arts and theater. I have to say this pairing of work experience and academic education has served me well, as the two routinely go hand in hand with my job.

Toronto – Wintergarden Theater by Cannon in 2D (http://www.flickr.com/photos/16462767@N00/3286021531/)

If you think about it, teaching can be seen as a performance. A performance occurs when there is a performer and an audience and there is communication between them. Sometimes it’s unidirectional coming from the presenter to the audience, and sometimes it is bidirectional with feedback coming from the audience, so the communication cycle is completed. This is the topic for this academic year’s Teaching and Learning Conference at DePaul University—the play and performance found in teaching and learning. The keynote speaker, Nancy Houfek, head of voice and speech for the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, will focus her presentation on the “act” of teaching. She will present specific skills that can be used by instructors to be more effective.

I have to agree that these skills are important for any instructor who lectures. The “Sage on the Stage” model of instruction will, in my opinion, always be present somewhere in our classrooms. There has, however, been a move away from a full “sage on the stage” model to a “guide on the side” model, where the instructor is more of a facilitator than a lecturer—a director rather than a performer. So how does the concept of theater play into this type of a classroom? Are the ideas and skills learned in a theatrical setting still useful?

Yes.

The classroom moves away from instructor-based play to student-based play. The students are the ones who experiment, create, and play with the content in order to present the material. They construct their learning like an improv actor would construct the scene or a playright would construct the script. The instructor needs to be well versed in the skills necessary to present, create, and perform in order to guide the students. He or she needs to be proficient in all of the beneficial performing and theatrical skills in order to be effective models for the students.

Theater skills in the classroom are twofold: for the instructor to use himself/herself in presenting content and modeling techniques for the students as well as for the instructor to teach to the students as they construct their own learning and become the “actors” in the room. While not every encounter needs to be worthy of an academy award, the basic skills of vocal projection, blocking, storyboarding, subtext, and storytelling, just to name a few, are skills that all students, regardless of disciple, will find valuable in their own teaching and learning.

In a previous entry, I laid out this scenario:

You want to use some Web 2.0 technology in your course, so you have each student create a blog on Blogger to have them chronicle their work and thoughts through the term. As an instructor, you visit these sites and leave comments on the blog. In order for you to keep track of which student has which blog, you ask them to have their names on the front page of their blog and for them to e-mail you the URL so that you can go through them all, moving from one blog to the next. No grades are shared via the blog, and your final evaluation for the student comes in feedback that you provide within the Gradebook area of Blackboard.

Is this a violation of FERPA?

There were some very good answers in the comments section, and now it’s time for me to share mine.

The short answer is yes.

There are a few land mines in this scenario, but the one that jumps out to me is that the instructor leaves comments on the blog regarding the student’s posts. When an instructor reads a student-submitted work—as a blog would be when it is read and graded by the instructor—it is then considered part of the student’s educational record. Remember the definition of an educational record according to FERPA (PDF): “Education records are currently defined as records that are directly related to a ‘student’ and maintained by an ‘educational agency or institution’ or by a party acting for the agency or institution.” When the instructor leaves evaluative feedback for the student in a comment to the post, he or she violates FERPA by making his or her evaluation of that part of the student’s educational record public.

Another land mine in this scenario is the fact that the blogs were not necessarily made private, so anyone could view them and associate the student’s name with the course they are taking and reveal that they are students in a particular course, term, and institution. Requiring the student’s name to appear on the front page is also a red flag.

Since you were so good at answering my last question, I pose another to you: what could an instructor do differently in this assignment to keep the academic objective of the assignment (self-reflection) without violating FERPA?

Being an instructional designer requires me to have many tools at my disposal to create exciting and meaningful course content. Often, content needs to be displayed in a “chunked” manner to make navigating through the material easier. And it’s nice to have something that is visually appealing as well. For this, I’ve found myself using Softchalk. As with any product, it has things it excels at, and it has limitations. Recently, Softchalk 5 came out, and I was quite excited.

One huge thing I have been waiting for is the ability to name my pages, and I was thrilled to learn that if you look under “Properties” you will find a “Page Names” option! However, I also quickly learned that it still didn’t do exactly what I was looking for. While it gave the page names in the table of contents, the navigation at the top was still in number format. But it’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Another feature of this new version is the eCourse Builder. With the eCourse Builder, you can create multiple modules with the same navigation—in essence, combining your content into one area. While this may not work the greatest in Blackboard due to having too many frames on your screen, I can see some great applications of this feature for displaying large amounts of content in certain areas. It can also help work around the page-name issue mentioned above.

One strength of Softchalk is the ability to put interactive items into your module, such as flash cards or labeling activities. This is great for adding some variety into your lessons and using more visual media. You can also tie the quizzes you create to the Blackboard gradebook using the SCORM packaging option, as well.

So while Softchalk is not perfect for every situation, I think it does have some very nice features that warrant its inclusion in the instructional designer’s toolbox.

Here at DePaul, we have the DePaul Online Teaching Series program (DOTS), where we work with faculty to help prepare them for the unique challenges of teaching online. It’s an intensive program that begins with a crash course in designing an online or hybrid course and goes all the way through working with a design consultant to get the course completed and evaluated.

In order to help the faculty effectively accomplish this, we give them the tools they will need to create their course, including a laptop computer, a webcam, a headset microphone, software, and a portable voice recorder. Doing this ensures that they have all the technology they will need to produce a robust, dynamic, and interesting course.

I received a phone call today from an instructor who went through the DOTS program asking about what resources were available to a student who wanted to produce videos to submit to the class. This got me thinking about the aforementioned technology toolkit we give to faculty. At what point will the students need a similar toolkit?

A great deal of focus in course design is often placed on creating instructional materials for the students to consume. For example, they watch a video, read an article, or view a Web site. There is not much focus on student-created content—regardless of whether it is eventually offered up for assessment. The majority of the time, students interact with the material through writing a paper, posting to a discussion board, or taking a quiz.

However, what happens when an instructor would like to send off her students to create materials for assessment similar to what the instructor can produce for the students to consume? Where does a student, especially an online student, obtain the required video camera, microphone, or editing software?

This thought process, combined with a conversation I had the other day about technical requirements for online students, made me wonder if we will see not only tech specs for computers for students in the future, but also what they will need as peripheral devices in order to succeed as a student in an increasingly visual and technical world.

I can’t wait to see where this may lead.

When I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s annual meeting in January of 2008, I was sitting in a general session, and I was thinking to myself about online education and what students ‘do’ in that environment. I then got to thinking about service-learning and how authentic, situational, and service-based assignments can be of great value to students.

All of that led to the thought that, for the most part, online learning and service-learning seem to be mutually exclusive. The question is, do they have to be?

To see what has been done in this arena, I did a search and found an article, a case study, from the EDMEDIA conference in 2002. Lesa Lorenzen Huber from Indiana University, in her paper titled “The Human Touch: Incorporating Service-Learning into an Online Course,” discusses an instance where she took on the challenge of incorporating service-learning into her online course. This was filled with a great number of challenges but also had a lot of rewards.

Let’s take a step back and establish the essence of service learning. According to Learn and Serve America’s National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, “service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” In the case of Huber’s experience, the service-learning component was to have the students serve the community by working with new, elderly residents in the area and to welcome them to the community.

Huber also had four features she wanted to be sure were included in her course, as they are important elements of any service-learning course:

1. Service is clearly connected to the academic component and treated as a text via readings, discussion, speakers, etc.
2. A reciprocal relationship between the university and the community makes each a partner in the education of students.
3. Service meets a genuine community need as defined by the community-based organization.
4. 4. The philanthropic and civic content of the students’ service is discussed and examined. It is the practice of citizenship, broadly defined, that distinguishes service-learning from practica or internships, which focus more on professional preparation.

These elements can directly lead to a rewarding student experience. However, in an online course, it becomes difficult to incorporate the element of service. How are such service projects set up with so many different communities interfacing at once? How are the variables controlled in order for service to be a ‘learning text’ when students come from different areas? How do you build a reciprocal relationship between the university and many communities?

Despite these concerns, Huber proceeded with her course. It wasn’t easy. “At the beginning of the fall semester I had decided this type of model to increase student involvement in a human services online course was just too problematic.”[i] Through the term, though, she received such overwhelming positive feedback from the students that she reconsidered.

In online courses, students often report feeling isolated while taking the class. Service-learning is one way to fix that problem. While they may not physically see their classmates, they will get out in the community and put into practice skills they are learning in the course and can then come back to the online class and discuss their individual experiences. This leads to a rich community interaction as well as a rich online discussion and interactions between students.

Expectations of online courses also become a factor. By and large, most online courses require a student only to log in to the computer and participate online or read a textbook in addition to writing papers. Online learning does not have to equate to computer-only learning. Courses can require the students to go out and complete a project, interview people, or do other types of assignments involving time and work away from the computer. Service-learning takes this to the next level, as the work outside the class and away from the Internet is not only an assignment but also a form of the text and an integral part of the course.

Service-learning courses are not easy to construct; nor are effective online courses. To combine the two together makes the creation of such a course even more challenging; however, with the greater obstacles come greater rewards and, in the end, more comprehensive and significant student learning. It is because of this that faculty should consider incorporating service-learning into their online courses and that the two do not need to be mutually exclusive.

[i] Huber, L. (2002). The Human Touch: Incorporating Service-Learning into an Online Course. In P. Barker & S. Rebelsky (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2002 (pp. 1164-1169). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.