I recently came across Maria Anderson’s presentation Playing to Learn? while browsing through her Teaching College Math Web site. The layout of the presentation mimics a large game board with a flowing channel formed by consecutive progressing squares. Each forward click triggers either a panned movement or a zooming effect, which gave me the illusion of being in a video game.

Playing to Learn? on Prezi

SNL Online is in full mobilization mode preparing for the migration of eighty-eight online courses from Blackboard to Desire2Learn. A lot of experienced, well-educated, and well-intentioned folks have argued for a university-wide switch, and so we will have it.

Like all real change, the migration is and will continue to be disruptive; old ways of producing, teaching, and taking online courses will necessarily be uprooted and swept away with new theories and practices. Already there have been revelations and lessons learned; here are a few thoughts:

Hope for the best; plan for the worst.

Having recently done some cleaning and maintenance on several wikis to ready them for the spring quarter, I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned. Bear in mind these thoughts represent what I’ve learned building and administering premium workspaces in PBworks; other wikis may have different features and protocols.

Back in December of 2007, Rick Salisbury (see 12 Web Tools of Christmas Post) mentioned EditGrid as one of his top tools. While EditGrid is a great tool for creating shareable spreadsheets with many advanced, Excel-like features, I have found a new use for this application in online classes—virtual sign-up sheets! More than a few times in the past few months, I have needed a tool to allow students to sign up for something—be it to lead a discussion, create a blog post, or choose a book for review. With our current learning management system (LMS), Blackboard 8.0, there is no easy way to do this, so faculty are left using some sort of e-mail/discussion work-around or simply assigning students. While these work-arounds suffice, the process has always seemed clunky and overly difficult. I recently remembered Rick’s post, and the idea of using EditGrid to create a virtual sign-up sheet was born. I am currently piloting it in my own class, and students seem to be able to sign up without difficulty, and I am able to see the results easily. A win-win in my book.

All the talk about learning management systems (LMS) around the office lately reminded me of a dataset a couple of colleagues and I put together last year. Dr. Florence Martin, Dr. Yuyan Su, and I undertook the task of validating an instrument to measure LMS self-efficacy.

Bandura (1997) defined self-efficacy as beliefs in one’s abilities to carry out a desired course of action. I’ll spare you the details of orthogonal exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses.

One of the many variables we decided to examine was whether student LMS self-efficacy was a predictor of course performance. After all, is not learning the primary motivation for using a learning management system?

More and more over the past few weeks, I’ve found that I have been recommending that faculty visit a wonderful Wiki site called CogDogRoo, which was developed by Alan Levine. I usually make this recommendation when the subject of student presentations—and how to do them effectively in an online class—comes up. While there is nothing wrong with having students create PowerPoint presentations, I find that there are often other tools available that allow for better interaction and more creative presentation or just allow students to explore a new way to present information. Most recently, I have been working with faculty from our School of Education, and there is often a mandate that their students be able to effectively integrate technology into the classroom. As a parent, I am well aware that “technology integration in the classroom” often means using PowerPoint (including all of the crazy animation—don’t even get me started there) and Google. But I am finding that the faculty I work with feel empowered knowing that there are sites like CogDogRoo out there that can help inspire not only them but also their students to think about classroom technology in new ways.

Here’s a statement I have been hearing a lot lately that some may find surprising:

“I wish there was a video online about X. I searched on YouTube, but I couldn’t find anything.”

Now, X could be anything—Biology, Economics, Politics—and while I doubt the search came up empty, I understand the sentiment.

The great thing about YouTube is there is a great video about practically any subject or concept you can imagine. The problem with YouTube is there are a thousand awful videos about practically any subject or concept you can imagine. If you are looking for a specific video, you can probably find it on YouTube, but if you are interested in discovering video that be used in an educational context, YouTube can be really frustrating.

It’s easy to get excited about the educational potential of new Web 2.0 tools. So many tools appear (and disappear) from month to month, and I often find myself promoting and supporting bleeding-edge tools for instructors who are still struggling to use some of the basic features of Blackboard. So in an effort to keep things simple and avoid putting the cart before the horse, I’ve been trying to focus on projects that offer more bang for my instructional-design buck.

Ever run into a situation where materials that you used to link to in a class (or that you have bookmarked) are suddenly no longer available?  Ever wonder if there was a way to archive these materials so that they could be available to you (or your class) even if the Web site disappears?  While there may be no way to keep these links active forever, there are a couple of resources I use to help me find and/or maintain links to pages even after the links go away.  The first is the Internet Archive.

Perhaps it’s the end-of-summer’s-approaching ennui or plain old cranky, middle-aged contrariness, but as I witness the barnstorming enthusiasm for Facebook-like social media on display at any given online-learning conference and contrast that with the drumbeat reports of Facebook’s declining popularity, I can’t help but think that some of us are living in a state of denial.

I think our intent is good. We want to serve our students, we want to make it easy for them to communicate, we want to create a socially cohesive learning environment, and we want to give them the tools they need to succeed. We think we know our students; we think we know what they want. So let’s build our own social sites!