All posts by Sharon Guan

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About Sharon Guan

Sharon Guan is the Assistant Vice President of the Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul University. She has been working in the field of instructional technology for over 20 years. Her undergraduate major is international journalism and she has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in educational technology from Indiana State University. She has conducted research on interpersonal needs and communication preferences among distance learners (dissertation, 2000), problem-based learning, online collaboration, language instruction, interactive course design, and faculty development strategies. She also teaches Chinese at the Modern Language Department of DePaul, which allows her to practice what she preaches in terms of using technology and techniques to enhance teaching and learning.

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Reinstating IDDblog: Let What I learned During the Pandemic Inform What I Do After It

This post marks the return of the Instructional Design and Development Blog, known as the IDDblog, after a 29-month hibernation. If you’ve been our blog reader, you may still remember one of our last scheduled posts in March 2020, titled “Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All.” That very timely post guided administrators and instructors on the selection of remote teaching methodologies when the coronavirus forced schools to move courses online in a matter of days. After that, IDDblog remained mostly static because staff members of DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning had to give up blog-writing to respond to the intense needs for faculty and student support as almost all of DePaul’s course offerings switched to remote.

I’ve heard a saying that to say Covid changed our lives is an understatement, and I couldn’t agree more. This global pandemic has brought something bigger than our common understanding of change. It threw us into what Yuval Noal Harari called “a large-scale social experiment” – an experiment that no government, business, and educational board would agree to conduct in normal times. In his article, “The World After Coronavirus,” Harari called for reflections at the global level, but I think it is the change that took place at the individual level that seems to be even more striking and unretractable. From the perspective of teaching and learning, the privilege we’ve lost for in-person instruction, the opportunities we’ve gained to access courses through a few clicks, and the habits we might have formed during this lost-and-found period are all worth reflecting on. As a guinea pig of one, I thought this blog could be a place for me to conduct my own reflection, like Michel de Montaigne did as he drew meanings and reasonings by looking no further than the life of his own.

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Online Intercultural Exchange: Save the lost (in translation) with an emoji ;-)

On October 9, 2019, President of the United States, Donald Trump, wrote a letter to the President of the Republic of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, expressing concerns and sharing his advice on the situation in Turkey. What version of this letter do you want to read? English? Turkish? I suggest grabbing the one floating around social media. It is simple, fun, and without the need for interpretation. It was written in a universal language: emojis!

Emojis placed to symbolize the message sent from President Donald Trump to the President of the Republic of Turkey

A picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to communicating with people from different cultures, that picture can be an emotional icon, called an emoticon, or a small pictograph of a face or object, called an emoji.

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Changing Fate with a Screen: High School Live Cast in China

From MIT’s open courseware to the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), I have seen a lot efforts being taken towards blending advancements in technology with the goodwill of making knowledge accessible to all. As an online learning professional, I have been following reports and research on the impact of open education, but never before have I been so stunned by the results of a report. The report, originally published in the weekly edition of Chinese Youth newspaper in Dec 12, 2018, was about a program that provides a full-day live broadcast of a prestigious high school to 248 high schools in the rural areas of China.  

Instead of listening to their own instructors, students in the rural or “far-end” high schools watch a live broadcast of instruction from a high school in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province. According to the report, the launch of project faced strong resistance from teachers in these rural schools. They protested by tearing books apart. Some teachers even took a whole week off and left students “staring” at the screen by themselves.

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Imagining the Future with China: A Report of a Study Abroad Course

Riding on a train that whistled 217 miles per hour, sitting in a car that solely relied on solar power, wandering in a bookstore that had no cashiers on site, and viewing a trading system without currency and government involvement. Those were some of the adventures 13 students from DePaul experienced this winter break in a study abroad course called “Imagining the Future with China.”

Pairing “China” with “the Future” is an interesting idea. For a long time, China had been characterized by its ancient history and deeply rooted culture. It is one of the four most ancient civilizations in the world. It has a history of over five thousand years. Its cultural heritage has descended through eleven dynasties. It was not until two decades ago that China started to catch up on economic development. There are plenty of data to show its growth, but as a non-economist and someone who cannot handle numbers, I would use this GDP graph to demonstrate China’s astonishing takeoff:

China GDP Growth
China GDP Growth from 1960 to 2017 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CN)

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Preparing for the Future When the Virtual is so Real

PS4 gaming consoleLike any mom of teens, I am trying to pull my 13-year-old son away from his game console and get him to try something that I think would benefit him for his growth—something like reading!

“But books are history,” Grant claimed. “And this…” he tilted his head toward the screen with his hands still fixated on the bat-shaped controller, “is the future.”

But, Grant, you see, history is…

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Teaching and Learning While “Life Happens”

The first time I read the expression “life happens” was in a syllabus of an online course that I was reviewing. The professor indicated that he understood there would always be reasons for students to not complete course work, because “life happens.” In the case of “life happens,” he asked students to communicate with him: “No response, no explanation, or showing no sign of life will result in an F!”

Over the years, the strict yet humorous tone of that syllabus stuck in my mind. And so did the notion of “life happens.”

Life happens. As much as you try to take control, life sometimes just takes its own course of action.

Then, on January 29, 2018, life happened to me.

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Manipulating Learning with Tools and Rules

Three months ago, I published a blog entry called “Summer Math Class with Khan Academy: A Case of ‘Manipulated’ Learning”. Ever since then, I have tried a few more rounds of manipulation on my IRB-free research objects—my two kids. As a proud mother of manipulation, I’d like to report on a couple of cases of manipulating learning—and behavior—with tools and rules.

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Summer Math Class with Khan Academy: A Case of “Manipulated” Learning

Teaching—when you think about it—is a process of manipulation.

Dr. Tom Angelo made this point when he was wrapping up his keynote presentation at the DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference in May 2017. Since then the idea of “teaching by manipulating” kept popping up in my mind like a little bud seeking its opportunity to break through the ground.

It seems to me the best place to sow the seed of manipulation is my home. As I once heard a conference speaker joke, “Do you know why psychologists have kids? No IRB!”

IRB stands for Institutional Review Board, a committee that reviews and approves (or disapproves) studies that use human subjects. It is a hoop that researchers must jump through—well, unless they are dealing with the human subjects that they’ve produced themselves.

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Designing an Instructor-Agnostic Course with a Sense of Instructor Presence

If you think the title of this blog is too complicated to understand, you can use an analogy, such as eating candy without a sweet taste, or drinking water to booze up, or anything that sounds oxymoronic, self-contradictory, and illogical.

If instructor-agnostic means removing the trace of any specific instructor, how could you create a sense of instructor presence in the same course? And why would you want to do it? Have you ever seen a course like that?

Before answering these questions, let me share a personal story with you. Two weeks ago, I received news that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Devastated by the phone call from her primary care physician’s office, which offered nothing but a quick read of the final diagnose, I struggled to find out anything about breast cancer—the causes, the symptoms, the types, the treatment, the chance of spreading. Yet none of the information on the Internet could put me at ease or  tell me how to deal with this life-threatening illness. I was overwhelmed by feelings of fear and helplessness until I received the phone call from Beth, a nurse from the pathology department of the hospital.

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Exploring Mindful Learning

Downward facing dog
Lift your right leg up
Move your right leg forward
Land your right foot next to your right thumb
Move your right arm forward…Warrior II
Bend your right knee, move your left arm up, and right arm down…extended side angle

The voice of my yoga instructor whistled by my ears as I followed the flow of movement. My mind drifted. What should I write for my blog?

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