Category Archives: Conferences

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Highlights from the 2014 ELI Conference

One of the best things about the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) annual meeting is the broad spectrum of institutions represented, from the Ivy League to large public and private universities to community colleges and small liberal arts schools. If you’re looking for colleagues who are grappling with the same challenges you’re experiencing at your institution, chances are you’ll find them at ELI.

The ELI audience is as diverse as the institutions they represent and includes instructional designers, faculty with a passion for technology, and IT professionals working in higher education. Unlike conferences that focus primarily on distance learning, ELI attracts a large proportion of CIOs and people passionate about the intersection of technology and physical learning spaces. As a result, the conference typically includes ample hands-on time with new gadgets and hardware. On Tuesday, I learned more about Arduinos during a hands-on “maker-space” session that left me missing my old Capsela set. At breakfast on Wednesday, I had a chance to chat with remote conference participants who roamed the venue using a device designed by Double Robotics. And just before heading to the airport, Jeremy Littau, an Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, let me test-drive Google Glass.

Of course, you don’t have to be on a first name basis with the staff of your local Radio Shack to get something useful out of ELI. The annual meeting agenda is brimming with presentations on everything from faculty development for online learning to predictions on the future of open-source textbooks and MOOCs. Here are a few highlights from some of the sessions I attended.

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Highlights from the 2013 NMC Conference

Every year, the New Media Consortium’s summer conference includes a plenary session known as “Five Minutes of Fame” in which a series of presenters have five minutes each to show off an innovative project or idea. To add a bit of levity and suspense, an official timekeeper shuts down any presentation that hits the five-minute mark by striking a large gong with a mallet. As a kid, I loved watching reruns of The Gong Show, so Five Minutes of Fame is easily my favorite part of any NMC conference. (For those of you too young to remember The Gong Show, picture America’s Got Talent, but with a lot more polyester.)

This year, the NMC conference also included another rapid-fire showcase known as the Emerging Leaders Competition. Continue reading →

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I Am Red, What Are You: Understanding the Color of Our Brain

My husband Lee and I were sitting at the dinner table one evening chatting about what we should do for the kids during the time when school’s closed and summer camp hasn’t started yet. I pulled out the computer trying to search for ideas. A couple of minutes later, I sensed this vibrating sensation on the floor that resembled a minor earthquake. It was mild, constant, rhythmic, and very annoying.

I moved my eyes from the computer screen to Lee. He looked at me—what? The vibration stopped for a second. I moved my eyes back to the computer—there, the rhythm started again.

This time I closed down the laptop. “Lee, do you know you are very blue?” I said.

“What?” He was completely lost. Continue reading →

GNLEs, Please

We sure love our acronyms at FITS HQ. If we’re not talking about D2L (our LMS), or DOTS, or MoLI, or our CRM, we come up with emoji to get our messages across.

My FITS colleague Jan Costenbader and I recently discovered another acronym with a much wider reach, a global reach, if you will. Globally Networked Learning Environments (GNLE). GNLEs are online learning settings in which students from far-flung countries convene as classmates to learn about the topic at hand in addition to exploring one another’s cultures.

Imagine, if you will , two undergraduate screenwriting courses: one based in the US, the other based in Ghana. Continue reading →

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TEDx Windy City: More than Just a Magic Berry

You know those awesome, addictive TED talks that can easily absorb hours of your time if you’re not paying attention? As it turns out, Chicago puts on an annual, local TEDx conference, and a couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday among the brilliant people.

As expected, the day was inspiring and brain-tiring, and I left feeling sure that none of those people waste time watching The Bachelor or reading the Craiglist Missed Connections or playing a pointless “find the hidden object” game on their iPad (guilty, guilty, and guilty). But I basked in their magnificent glow for several hours, and these are the two talks that stuck with me most: Continue reading →

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Mastery and Time

At a conference a couple months ago, I had the opportunity to hear Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, talk about the genesis of his organization and how his model of education differs from the traditional model. Khan Academy, for those unfamiliar with it, offers videos and automated exercises to help students learn a variety of subjects online for free. Khan Academy has also partnered with a few K-12 schools to make these online resources the central learning materials of certain classes.

Khan Academy has branched into other subjects, but it started with math and still tends to focus on STEM subjects. And one of the fundamental realities of learning math is that it’s cumulative; anything new you’re taught is based on what you’re supposed to have learned before. If there are gaps in your understanding of the previous topic, you’re going to have a very difficult time learning what comes next. This is true of other subjects too, but it’s especially true of math.

This is in line with my personal experience. I was always a high performer in math classes in K-12, until my junior year of high school, when I was out sick a lot over the course of a few weeks during a trigonometry unit. I tried to catch up, but after that, everything stopped making sense to me. I wound up getting a C in the class, and though I continued to show high aptitude in quantitative reasoning (bragging rights: I got an 800 on that section of my GRE even as a liberal-arts major), I never took a higher math class.

The problem, as Khan sees it, is that our education system keeps moving students forward onto new material regardless of how well they understand the last unit. The amount of time spent on each topic before moving on is constant while the level of performance of each student is variable.

When Khan Academy works with K-12 schools, that model reverses; since each student can work through the online videos and exercises at his or her own pace, the system can require the student to demonstrate mastery of a topic before moving on. Level of performance is the constant, and the rate at which students move through the material is the variable. This allows students who are behind the curve to spend as much time as they need to on a topic to truly understand it, but it also allows exceptional students to keep learning. There are no speed limits in this model—Khan reports that many elementary students were doing high-school-level math by the end of the year. (The problem with this model, of course, is that it makes the most sense if implemented institution-wide. For an individual instructor teaching a course that’s a prerequisite for other courses, you’re expected to to cover a pre-defined body of material no matter how well each student performs.)

So what do instructors do if the lectures are served in online videos and the assignments are corrected automatically? In a word, teach. One-on-one. To the students who need it, when they need it. Imagine a world in which 100 percent of instructional time was spent interacting with students or providing detailed assignment feedback. And how instructors spend their time interacting with students can be improved by technology as well. Khan Academy’s software provides detailed analytics of student progress to inform the instructor exactly where a student needs help. If a student is missing a lot of problems related to a specific concept, the instructor can intervene, re-explaining the subject, walking through additional examples, and more.

I think a lot of us would think that, now that the technology enables it, this model is more sensible. And there’s a more pressing reason to look for ways to spend more of your time interacting with students rather than lecturing. Your direct interaction with students is the main point of differentiation where we can offer value over the massively open online courses (MOOCs) that are growing in popularity.

So what can instructors take away from this?

1. Start to get out of the business of lecturing and grading objective assignments, because otherwise, you may soon find that you’re essentially spending all your time providing zero value over something like Coursera, which can do it at great scale and thus much lower cost than your class. Either start recording your lectures for re-use so you can flip your classroom, or find high-quality digital materials you can use in your course to substitute for your own lectures.

2. Your maximum value as an actual human being over the MOOCs and automated classes of the world is your direct interaction with students, whether that’s in the form of providing expert feedback on assignments, helping them with difficult concepts, or coaching them on how what they’re learning now will be applicable in the rest of their academic careers or in their jobs. Be prepared to do more of that.

3. Look for opportunities to require your students to demonstrate mastery before moving on to a more advanced topic. Give students a chance to retake online quizzes until they’ve gotten a perfect score, and don’t let them see the next module until they do. Don’t just make students write a proposal for their final paper—make sure they use your feedback and update the proposal before they go on to the module about research. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all method for doing this that will apply to every discipline, but there are options.

If you can combine rich digital resources, either created by yourself or leveraged from others, with a renewed focus on individual student interaction, plus methods to ensure students achieve mastery before moving on to new material, you can expect higher student performance.

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Lessons from Digital Asset Management for Online Courses

I recently attended the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Conference held in Chicago. Besides being a day filled with references to DAM technology, DAM plans, and DAM systems, with the obvious puns intended, the day proved to be an interesting insight into what organizations are doing to manage their digital assets. While most of the presenters and attendees were from the corporate sector, there were, I believe, a number of lessons that can be applied to higher education.

The keynote speaker talked about immersive consumer experiences. The concept of these experiences is the idea of creating a multimedia experience that is better than the original. For example, the Van Gogh Alive exhibit immerses the user in Van Gogh’s work and in many ways provides a better experience than viewing these same works of art in a museum (where you may be viewing them through a crowd of people or behind glass or other barriers). This got me thinking about how we can make our online courses more immersive. What can we do to make them better than the classroom experience (the original)? And does this immersion always mean adding multimedia? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but it got me wondering.

The idea of making DAM systems more fun and game like was also a point of discussion. As in course design, this idea seems to be all the rage. The context for the discussion at this conference focused primarily on system design. In particular the speakers talked about the importance of making DAM systems fun and intuitive in order to garner buy in from the end user. In my mind, these same concepts can be applied in systems used in higher education for teaching and learning. If we are asking instructors and students to spend time in our learning management system, shouldn’t that experience be at the very least intuitive? I am not convinced that everything needs to be a game or that we need to simplify things to a point that it doesn’t seem serious, but intuitive and easy seem to be a good compromise.

Another lesson we can take from this field is the idea of system integrations. Many barriers exist when systems are in silos. The consensus, however, seemed to be a movement away from creating a one size fits all solution, but instead finding ways to share information between systems to create a seamless user experience. Meaningful system integration (not just linking between systems) is something that I feel is often lacking in our strategic thinking in higher education. The plan is usually one of two things: 1) buy one system and stuff everything into it regardless of whether or not it is the right fit, or 2) everyone does their own things and none of the systems work together, creating a frustrating experience for users and a less efficient system for administrators.

Perhaps one of the most relevant presentations was by the folks at Encyclopedia Britannica. When most people think about digital assets they think about images and videos. At Encyclopedia Britannica they also consider all their printed content to be digital assets. To make it easier to reuse and repurpose this content, Britannica breaks everything into small discrete chunks which can then be repurposed in a variety of ways.

We talk a lot about chunking when developing online content, but typically this is in reference to making the content more "digestible" by the student in order to reduce cognitive overload. The idea that this same concept could be used to make it easier to reuse and redeploy content over multiple classes is an intriguing one. Most instructors, for example, teach multiple classes in the same field. While they aren’t the same class, often a small piece of content used in one can also be used in another. The idea that you could have a database of all of these "chunks" of content that could be easily pulled into multiple courses is an interesting one.

Finally, the traditional use of a DAM system has obvious utility in higher education and in particular in the management of assets created during course development. There are many digital assets (videos, images, lectures, animations, etc.) that are created when developing a course—particularly when creating online or hybrid classes. Being able to quickly find and reuse these assets is imperative if we hope to realize a return on the investment (ROI) for creating them. If these items are able to be shared, creating a search schema that allows for quick and efficient retrieval is paramount. For those items that have copyright or intellectual property restriction, being able to track this information and make sure that all parties are aware of the restrictions is imperative to being ethical consumers of these assets. Making resources easier to find, share, and reuse will ultimately make it easier to sell the creation of these assets in the first place.

Better Teaching through Play

As the parent of a toddler, I’m faced with the task of choosing a preschool for my son. The most important factor on my list? That the curriculum—if it’s even called “a curriculum”—be play-based. That means I want my son digging in dirt, running around outside, making up nonsense words to songs with his imaginary friends, and in general, just being the messy, loud, unorganized, joyful beast that he is. I don’t want there to be any concern about him reaching educational or developmental benchmarks, and I certainly don’t want there to be any evaluative assessments, report cards, or homework. This isn’t because I’m against learning, of course, but because I know (and research supports) that playing is the very best way toddlers learn.

In my time learning about instructional design geared toward working adults and college students (not a mutually exclusive distinction), I’ve seen “playful” design approaches applied to myriad subjects with great success.

Once, I worked with a team to revamp a day-long, face-to-face, lecture-driven training course on complex purchasing processes (are you bored yet?). Chunking the content into multiple shorter sessions was our first idea, but not an option. We needed learners introduced to all this information in one session. Our solution was to move the course into a computer lab and create an interactive day, where learners role-played scenarios and were sent on Web-based research “missions.” (We also changed the goal from comprehension and retention of content to familiarity with resources and ability to find answers to questions.) As students worked in groups to complete their research missions, I admit we occasionally played spy music in the background. Throughout the day, we reminded learners that in the afternoon, we were going to play a Jeopardy-type game about everything they’d learned, and there would be fabulous prizes for correct answers. (As I said “fabulous prizes,” I rustled a plastic bag of chocolate candies, so as not to get their hopes too high.)

Introducing this simple, game-like aspect to the day—a final mission where learners would have an opportunity to showcase their proficiency—completely changed the tone of the day from a passive, boring litany of lectures to a series of active, goal-oriented tasks.

The upshot of our silly music and fabulous chocolate prizes? Feedback said it was a little cheesy, but that, yes, they’d learned something and knew where to go to find answers to questions in a very complex organization. I’ll take that. The game itself may have been lighthearted, but it yielded serious results.

A few weeks ago, I helped out at DePaul’s Faculty Teaching and Learning conference. The theme this year was Playing with Purpose: Applying Game Design Principles for Learning. I attended a session with James Moore, Director of Online Learning with the College of Commerce, and Beth Rubin, Director of SNL Online. Both faculty members teach online and hybrid courses and offered great examples of integrating games and playful design aspects in their course design. Some quick examples:

  • Professor Rubin played the Telephone Game with an online class using real telephones. The goal was to teach a model of communication that included a sender, a receiver, and interference. She had played this game in face-to-face classrooms previously, and discovered it worked even better out in “the real world.” By the time the message reached the final recipient, it was completely garbled and students were intensely emotional about the experience and the effort they’d expended to succeed. In an online discussion forum of just nine students, over two hundred responses were posted, which displayed critical thinking and application of the theoretical model to the real world.
  • Professor Moore applies characteristics of video games (specifically Mario and Zelda, two of his favorites) when designing his Marketing classes. For example, video games have a narrative structure including an ultimate goal that is introduced straightaway, so Professor Moore is sure to introduce students to their final project at their first meeting. Video games also frequently provide what he calls “A Quiet Place to Explore,” where there are no threats or stress, and making mistakes is okay. To emulate this quiet place in online courses, Professor Moore creates a “Week 0” space where students can familiarize themselves with tools and play around with content on practice assignments that are not graded.1

What struck me is that, of course, all content doesn’t easily or organically lend itself to playful learning opportunities, but that with a little ingenuity and creativity, the enduring learning that happens when students are genuinely motivated and engaged—emotional states that are more likely to occur when we are playing. This is also why schools should work with School playground shelter specialists to create comfortable outdoor areas for pupils to learn and play, no matter the weather.

 

1. To view a video on Professor Moore’s presentation or download his presentation handout, visit http://condor.depaul.edu/jmoore/mario/

Constructing Effective Online-Learning Environments via the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework

As designers developing online courses, we’re always looking for purposeful ways to ensure that the instructor, content, and student interactions are strategic, cohesive, and meaningful.

What’s more, we are also tasked with staying abreast of and introducing faculty to research, theories, and methodology associated with constructing rigorous and effective online pedagogy.

At the 27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework was the focus of several sessions including sessions from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Springfield, and Capella University. Intrigued by the implications of the framework, I wanted to learn more about the framework’s efficacy in higher education.

The premise of the CoI framework suggests that creating an effective online experience requires a collaborative community. The CoI framework, developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) is defined as follows:

An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements—social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

  • Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison, 2009).
  • Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).
  • Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).

CoI is a framework that many higher-education institutions cite to inform, and in some cases measure, the effectiveness of online-course development.

The granular elements of the CoI Framework are listed in the table below. The “categories” and “indicators” provide explicit examples of how , the CoI model elements can be interpreted by an online-course designer.

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172.

In 2007, a peripheral resource, the CoI survey instrument was developed and ultimately, validated. This survey instrument correlates with the CoI framework and is being utilized in studies at some institutions as an end-of-course evaluative tool.

As a course designer, I’m always looking for ways to equip faculty with a slew of resources to get the wheels turning as they think through the course content and design.

For some professors, it can seem intimidating at the outset of development to segue from teaching face-to-face to online. It’s especially challenging to identify strategies that will translate to meaningful online teaching presence. One strategy to brainstorm ideas for not only teaching presence but cognitive and social as well is utilizing the CoI framework elements to flesh out assessments and learning activities that align with each.

For example, with social presence, the professor can structure discussions via group cohorts that are led by a weekly discussion leader. This strategy allows students to establish a rapport with the cohort members. Additionally, students are empowered and accountable for the content they are charged with leading during their respective week.

Concepts such as these would serve as an invaluable resource to faculty members, especially those new to teaching online. Creating a central repository for faculty members to share and collect resources may serve as a community for online pedagogical strategies.

RESOURCES

The Community of Inquiry website:
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/methodology

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed August 29, 2011.

Arbaugh, J.B., Cleveland-Innes, M., Diaz, S.R., Garrison, D.R., Ice, P., Richardson & Swan, K.P. (2008). Developing a community of inquiry instrument: Testing a measure of the Community of Inquiry framework using a multi-institutional sample. The Internet and Higher Education. 11 (3-4), 133-136.

Learning About Word in the Mile High City

The topic of accessibility in course design is important, often overlooked, and for me a bit intimidating. So when I saw “Creating More Accessible Word Documents” as one of the breakout sessions at the Fusion 2011 Desire2Learn User Conference in Denver last week, I knew it was time to step outside my comfort zone and attend. Going into the hands-on session, I expected to be overwhelmed, but hoped to come away with a better understanding of accessible documents for online courses. The session exceeded my expectations, and I learned that designing Word documents for screen readers is actually quite simple. I also learned some really great tips about Microsoft Word in general and walked away feeling empowered with knowledge to better use Word and design with accessibility in mind. The presenter, Karen McCall, is a beta tester/accessibility consultant for Microsoft and Adobe, and you can find resources about accessible document design on her website: http://karlencommunications.com.

Here are some of Karen’s tips for creating more accessible word documents (in Word2007—directions vary slightly for other versions).

  • Screen readers cannot read any text in a text box, shape, or object , like those cute speech bubbles you can insert or an equation inserted as an image.
  • For an equation image, a screen reader needs the equation written out. For example, “Forty plus two minus twenty seven.”
  • Always supply “alt text” if you use an image. Insert alt text by right-clicking the selected image, selecting Size & Position (or Format Picture) and then typing in one to two descriptive sentences for the image.  If the image is a link,the alt text should explain where the user will be taken upon clicking the image.
  • For text hyperlinks, only link the word(s) describing where the user will be taken. Screen readers can compile a list of links in a document, and if all links start with “click here to,” the generated list will not be easy to use. If, however, “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “YouTube,” are the link text, an alphabetized list of sites will be generated.
  • Apply styles like Heading 1 and Heading 2 appropriately in the document by highlighting the heading text and selecting from the Style menu. Screen readers recognize properly-styled headings, and this creates navigational points for the user to access the text. Creating a Table of Contents from your headings is also a helpful feature. Never set a sentence or paragraph as a heading, as it will make for a confusing navigation point.

Select Heading Styles in Word

  • If you are making a list, use the bullet or numbered list button, as opposed to just hitting Enter between lines. Again, the screen reader recognizes proper lists and will provide the user with information about the list (e.g., how many items in the list).
  • Do not type using all caps. Even those without a visual disability have trouble reading words in all caps because the brain cannot use the word shape to predict the word. (Every word in all caps is basically a rectangle.)
  • To turn your accessible Word document into an accessible PDF, do not “Print to PDF.” Instead, use the Save As PDF function, or use Acrobat to convert to PDF. When using Save As PDF, check the box for “Create bookmarks using Headings” and “Document structure tags for accessibility.”

The presenter also demonstrated several keyboard shortcuts that were new to me. As someone with a visual impairment, she finds it easier to use these shortcuts and keep her fingers on the keyboard than use the mouse to make several clicks on different parts of the screen.

Here are some miscellaneous fun Word tricks

  • To quickly create filler text on a page—especially helpful when creating a template—open a Word document and type “=RAND(5, 6)” (without quotes). In this example, 5 tells Word to create five paragraphs of text, and 6 indicates that each paragraph should have 6 sentences. These numbers can be adjusted to your need. If you want Latin text, substitute “LORM” for “RAND.” Otherwise the text is randomly pulled from the Microsoft Word Help.
  • Some PC keyboards have a key near the top that functions like the right-click on a mouse.
  • To style words as Heading 1, select the words, then type Ctrl + Alt + 1. For Heading 2, just substitute a 2.
  • Ctrl+Enter will create a new page. If you do this command with the cursor in front of the first word, you will create a blank page 1 and push the starting text to page 2.
  • Ctrl+End will take you to the end of a document.
  • Ctrl+Home will take you to the top of a document.

In addition to using these accessibility tips, I would like to try using different screen reading technologies to get a better idea of the user experience. Designing for screen reader use is just one piece of the accessibility puzzle, but it is a good start.