Monthly Archives: February 2008

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Faculty Support

A few years ago at a conference, I had the opportunity to hear Eric Larson speak about faculty use of technology and support. Since then, my colleagues have heard me refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of faculty support, so I thought that it was time that I wrote a blog post about this.

Larson’s premise was basically that faculty use of technology loosely follows the framework of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, the higher needs on Maslow’s scale cannot be met if the lower needs have not been taken care of first. In Maslow’s hierarchy, the levels are as follows: Biological and Physical, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Cognitive, Aesthetic, Self-actualization, and Transcendence.

But how does this relate to faculty using technology? Starting with Biological and Physical, these are the most basic needs that humans have. What are the basic needs that faculty have when it comes to teaching with technology? They need things that work. Issues such as a broken mouse, no internet connection, or a computer that won’t boot fall into this section. This is basic technical support.

The second step is Safety. This is where reliability comes into play. For faculty to feel ‘safe’ using technology in their classes, they have to be able to rely on it to work correctly every time they need it. No one likes to look stupid in front of their students. If a faculty member feels that there is a great possibility for failure with a certain technology, they simply will not use it.

The third state, Belongingness and Love, is where the human element comes into play in both teaching with technology. On the technical side, faculty members don’t want to feel alone. To achieve this, faculty could be part of a group of others who teach with technology and can share the same fears and desires. Also, they need a relationship with someone to help them teach with technology, such as instructional designers or technologists.

Esteem is next on Maslow’s and Larson’s lists. Larson argues this point from a technical support standpoint by saying maslow2.gifthat faculty need to feel respected in their work needs and provides examples from a support standpoint. However, I feel that this is an area where confidence in using the technology comes into play. Faculty need to feel not only supported in what they do, but also confident that they can teach with technology and in a manner that surpasses teaching without it.

Cognitive is where faculty take their own time to truly understand how something works as it does. A comprehensive investigation into a teaching method can lead to new, creative, and innovative ways of teaching. Aesthetic is the investigation taken one step further. After knowledge about “how” is attained, exploration into “how to make it better” occurs. Investigation of teaching methods leads to new, creative, and innovative ways of teaching. By the time these levels are reached, it means there are few concerns from the basic levels.

Finally, Self-actualization and Transcendence cap the top of our hierarchy. These two needs are signs of a happy faculty member effectively, and perhaps innovatively, teaching with technology. Larson argues that Transcendence is the evangelism of teaching with technologies. Faculty who are at this level are happy to share and spread the news of how they teach in an effective manner and want to help others do the same.

While it would be nice to have an entire university filled with faculty at the top two echelons of the hierarchy, it would also mean that I’d be out of a job. All kidding aside, it’s a difficult level to reach on an individual level, much less as an entire university or college. All facets of technological and pedagogical support play a role in this hierarchy of teaching and learning with technology. And if all else fails, take a page from both Larson’s and my book and appeal to the Biological and Physical need—it never hurts to bring food.

To see a copy of the PowerPoint that accompanied Larson’s presentation, click here.

See Me, Feel Me. Why Am I Stuck On-Ground?

I have a confession to make. I design multimedia for online courses. I extol the virtues of online learning to anyone who’ll listen. Yet I’m taking a course on-ground. And next quarter, when given the choice between the on-ground and online sections of a programming course, I’ll lean towards the on-ground.

Why? That’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself. My stock answer is that I’m not disciplined enough for an online course. My wife’s amused by this rationale; she often tells me I’m the most disciplined person she knows. She has a point. I was raised by Scotch-Irish and German Protestant farmers and railroad men whose idea of taking it easy was waiting until after church to chop weeds. So discipline shouldn’t be a problem for me when taking an online course. What gives?

When I take a course on-ground, I know that I’m committed to be in that classroom 3 hours every week. I’ll show up because I know my absence will be noted. I’ll show up because I don’t want to miss any information. And this is important: I’ll show up for the experience of being in a classroom, of being a student among students. I like to see and be seen. Rational or not, it makes me feel like I’m a student.

That last reason is the most telling. Because other than this intangible, what exactly does a classroom have going for it? My current course is taught after work in an airless, overcrowded, and overheated classroom, in which a great number of my fellows are tuned out and concentrating on their Facebook pages or texting one another. I’m exhausted by the workday and hardly at my sharpest. My instructor is overextended and often underprepared and is further handicapped by balky classroom equipment, improper software, and the flagging energy level that frequents evening classes. While there certainly is useful information exchanged in our class, the real learning comes from the readings and exercises, activities that I complete because I want to learn and because I want to avoid the social embarrassment that could result from showing up at the next class unprepared.

So why not take the course online? Why not spare myself the frustration, fatigue, and inconvenience of the on-ground experience? It’s commonly argued that a well-designed online course provides similar or superior opportunities for the exchange of ideas, for meaningful exercises, for peer and instructor feedback, and even for social connections. And there’s the ability to time shift, to log in and participate during the week at times that work for me instead of the demands of the university schedule. The only thing really absent is face time, the presence of others and myself in a physical space. The feel of a classroom.

I don’t really have an answer. But I’m concerned that if it’s this difficult for me to make the switch from on-ground to online when there are so many compelling reasons to do so, then we must be missing untold numbers of potential online learners. And that leaves us with a challenge. We can design a course to create and deliver a viable learning environment. Can we make it feel like someplace students want to be?

Checklists: Saving Lives, Transforming Education?

In the December 10th, 2007, issue of the New Yorker (it takes me a few months to catch up these days), Atul Gawande wrote an eye-opening piece, “The Checklist.” The article describes how the implementation of a simple medical checklist, developed by Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, slashed the rate of oftentimes-lethal intravenous catheter infections for patients in intensive care units in the state of Michigan. How? By including simple, no-brainer steps like “Step One: Doctors must wash their hands with soap” that doctors and hospital staff were skipping, thus causing easily preventable deaths and infections in their intensive care units.

It’s pretty mind boggling. If Dr. Pronovost could actually implement his checklist across the US (easier said than done), it would largely wipe out the multiplier effect of thousands of human error deaths from skipped steps across thousands of diagnostic and procedural combinations. The power of the Gawande article is that it underscores that some of the most basic tools are the most effective ones. The checklist is brilliant in its very simplicity, and I’m sure it can have dramatic applications across all sectors.

Though checklists of all kinds (revising, editing, homework, behavior) can be found in elementary and secondary educational settings, it is harder to find individualized, purposeful use of checklists at the higher ed level. I don’t think the need for them has necessarily diminished. Though students in the online classroom aren’t dying of infections in intensive care units, they are spending unnecessary time getting lost and confused about when and where to submit assignments and are having difficulty managing their time in the absence of face-to-face accountability in the online environment. I hear professors complain about late assignments, ignored e-mails, and work submitted that is hardly reflective of critical thinking.

I think that a greater use of individualized checklists would improve communications between instructor and student and allow students to spend more time on substantive, creative work. In the online classroom, students need specific instructions on how to submit their work and how to participate in online discussions. They need assistance and they need writing papers and guideposts for completing assignments. Instructors provide all of these instructions, but typically in an elaborate course syllabus supplemented with lengthy e-mails in addition to whatever is posted in the course itself. Too frequently, instructors’ e-mail communications to students are lengthy documents that students may barely read all the way through. Professors aren’t joking when they say: “My students don’t read the syllabus,” or, “My students don’t read my e-mail.” They probably don’t. Why not provide students a more direct, simple path to success?

Checklists are simple and direct. They filter out extraneous details and give students a priority list of items to read and do. Checklists could be provided for specific parts of the syllabus. A “Welcome Checklist” supplementing a very brief welcome note from the instructor could replace the traditional long welcome letter from the instructor that tends to contain entirely too much information. Checklists could ensure that students edit and check their papers, properly reflecting on each step. I suspect that instructors would receive an elevated quality of writing, in response to clearer and cleaner communication to students.

I think professors have been reluctant to use checklists because they involve this simplification of language, and so to some extent, instructors may feel checklists would enable students. Instructors expect students taking online courses to be able to read lengthy e-mails and take large tasks (reading and analyzing a case study; writing a paper) and automatically divide and sequence them out into a series of tasks independently.

But I think part of using checklists is adjusting to a need for an entirely simplified way of writing when communicating guidelines and expectations in an online course. We need to give over to this need for simplicity, standardization, and predictability that is not necessarily the standard way of communicating in academia. I think most instructors might be uncomfortable with embracing this format because it involves thinking and writing in a largely different way. Like most instructors, I’ve established a routine that was created before the age of e-mail and Facebook and text messaging. I grew up writing letters by hand, relishing the pure art of correspondence for its own sake. A checklist, in contrast, seems cold, and hardly feels like responsible and full communication. But I believe there is a way we can integrate checklists judiciously. You can still impart tone and personality in your email and your communications with your students, yet not lose them in a sea of verbiage.

I’ll spend the next few weeks integrating a few checklists into the design of the online class, to showcase the checklist as being an important, very low tech tool. I am purposefully keeping fancy checklist/tasklist applications out of it for the moment, though I sometimes feel I have tested out every checklist/tasklist application that exists. This is more about the mindset than the technology. It’s captivatingly simple.

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The Importance of Defining Computer Literacy

Compared to digital illiteracy, traditional illiteracy is relatively easy to spot. For the most part, people who can’t read and write don’t sneak into universities undetected and they don’t often hold down white-collar jobs. I know it’s tempting to argue with me here. This is the part where you want to derail my entire opening argument by telling me all about a student who graduated from University X and couldn’t even sign his own name. Or you might want to rain on my parade with the tale of the Fortune 500 CEO who had his son write all his memos. While I’m sure such things have happened on rare occasion, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s fairly easy to design an assessment that can determine if someone can read and write at a particular level of proficiency.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as easy to determine if someone is computer literate. The problem isn’t that we lack the means to test a person’s level of technology-savvy. The problem is that no one can agree on specific minimum, universal standards that define basic computer literacy. And even if we established such standards, no one seems eager to require faculty or students to take a computer literacy test before being approved to dive into the world on online learning. As a result, universities across the country encounter very similar problems as they try to develop online learning programs. Instructors are asked to develop online courses, but they don’t know how to create zipped files or edit a photo. Students are encouraged to take online courses, but they might not know where to find files on their hard drives that they’ve downloaded. Help desk staff wind up answering educational technology questions, but insufficient training and bureaucratic problem-logging systems prevent them from answering these questions quickly and effectively.

So, what is the instructional designer’s role in this whole debacle? Are they just co-dependant enablers who can’t say no? Are they guilty of encouraging computer-illiterate faculty to explore new, painful ways to torture computer-illiterate students without ever addressing the underlying literacy problem? Of course, many professors’ level of computer literacy improves as they work with instructional designers to develop online courses because an instructional designer’s job often includes technology training. Yet, this doesn’t resolve the concern I hear faculty express most often when I’m encouraging them to use a new tool in their courses:

“I don’t have time to learn how to use this new technology, let alone teach my students how to use it.”

Of course, all instructional designers have their own ways of mitigating this. They promise it won’t take long to learn how to use a new tool. They vow to be there for faculty throughout the quarter whenever questions arise. One of my old bosses had no authority to motivate faculty to complete their courses on time, so she spent a lot of time trying to catch flies with honey—and coffee and donuts paid for out of her own pocket. (I suspect this approach is quite common for instructional designers whose job security depends on producing a certain number of online courses a year.) Whatever technique is employed to get faculty on board, the instructor’s concern about time constraints and professional priorities remains valid.

I think most academic administrators would agree that it isn’t fair to expect teachers to be both experts in their fields of study and expert users of the latest educational technologies. However, they’d probably throw in a caveat that a certain level of basic computer literacy is essential in any job field today, including education. Yet, until everyone (at least at the institutional level) can agree on what that essential level of computer literacy is and what should be done to ensure it is met, it seems futile to try to define the role that students, faculty, technical support, and instructional designers must play in a successful online learning program. Before we introduce instructors to the wonders of podcasts or encourage them to set up instructional blogs or wikis or virtual classrooms, shouldn’t we make sure faculty and their students possess certain fundamental digital media knowledge? Shouldn’t we be sure they possess certain basic digital media skills, like how to perform a basic image edit in a tool like Photoshop and export the file in the ideal format for its intended use?

I think every institution could benefit from a required computer literacy course with a curriculum developed and approved by a well-rounded teams of experts. It’s tempting to believe that such a course isn’t necessary for most students today. 85% keyboard for coders were made to add ease to their work. So many students already know how to add photos to their Flickr accounts or embed a YouTube video in a MySpace page. However, as someone who has recently taught undergrads how to build basic webpages using HTML, I can tell you that learning to use a social networking tool does not a computer literate person make. These accomplishments belie a very superficial knowledge of how the Web—and digital media in general—truly works, and that lack of knowledge almost always shows up later when it’s too late to do anything about it.

I’m not sure how realistic it is to think that computer literacy training and/or standardized testing could ever be forced upon the faculty at most American colleges and universities. Addressing the student side of the problem is probably an easier place to begin, and its benefits would extend far beyond the development of online learning programs. If nothing else, we’d at least ensure that our students are truly prepared for that “digital, global, information-driven economy” I keep reading so much about. Plus, we’d avoid the embarrassment of graduating a generation of students who will one day shock their closest friends by revealing they never learned how to zip a file or edit a photo or compress an audio clip.