Monthly Archives: April 2008

Service and Online Learning

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.

Service Learning Diagram

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.

Listening to the User

I’ve been thinking a lot about usability these days. It’s not like I never considered the user; we document and provide print and video tutorials for a host of processes and procedures here at DePaul. But I recently had a long discussion with an instructor who took me to task for assuming that students would know how to play a file in iTunes U. He didn’t know to locate and click the play icon, or to double-click the file. He was frustrated and questioned the logic of having to explain to his students the process to access a video tutorial meant to explain yet another process. My impulse was to dismiss him as a clueless Luddite, but thankfully I heard him out.

This morning I was copied on an email from an irate student who couldn’t get her course-required third-party web app to install or work properly. It didn’t occur or matter to her that DePaul didn’t design or administer the application. Since the app was a required part of her course, for her it is DePaul, and her experience struggling with the software colors her perception of her course, her instructor, and the school.

What these two incidents have in common of course is usability, or lack thereof. Both illustrate that seemingly easy tasks are often anything but easy for many users, and that these struggles have a negative impact on user satisfaction and the perceived value of a tool, course, or institution. Why do we make these usability errors?

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that at least regarding computer literacy I assume others know what I know simply because I know it. That it’s obvious to double-click a file to open it, or execute it, or get it to reveal its function in some way. I assume others recognize that icons exist in an application to indicate functionality or some other important attribute that the user needs to know. I assume others know to check system requirements before downloading software, or at least know what system they use. After all, I argue, it’s 2008! These things are conventions, for crying out loud! And who doesn’t know how to install an application? Do we have to explain everything?

Well, no. But we do need to explain a lot more than we might think, and we need to make things a lot more obvious. How can we do that? We might start by incorporating some quick and easy usability testing before we roll out that nifty new Web 2.0 app or learning tool in our courses. Steve Krug suggests in Don’t Make Me Think that a morning testing session with a handful of users, followed by an afternoon debriefing, is an inexpensive and effective way to find out at the beginning of a project if you’re on the right track.

What happens too often is that decisions about tools and media are made in the optimistic afterglow of a distance education conference or by instructional designers like me reacting to industry hype or instructor pressures, and then passed down as blessings from the heights of Mt. Pedagogy. Then we are surprised and irritated when users reject our offerings for being too hard to use or protest our suggestions (diplomatically worded of course) that the problem is their own technological incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in rich media, in interactive tools and all sorts of whiz-bang features for online courses. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of scrolling through endless expanses of text. But I do think it’s time to work more closely with our users, to ask them what their needs are and how we might meet those, rather than deciding for them a priori and dictating what the solutions are going to be.

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Does Anyone Like Hand-Me-Down Course Materials?

For many institutions, online course development follows a publishing model. Faculty members are recruited and compensated to “author” content that will be used by multiple instructors. This approach has several advantages:

  1. Greater Accountability: Expectations can be clearly spelled out (and enforced) through a course-development contract.
  2. Higher Quality: Course materials are often edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by other instructors.
  3. Greater Efficiency: Ideally, faculty don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they teach a new course. The initial effort of the course author and instructional designer to create a core set of course materials saves future instructors a great deal of time in the long run.

There are also disadvantages to the publishing model. Perhaps the most commonly cited problem is the cost to the institution. Faculty who develop online courses are usually compensated with course releases and/or one-time payments comparable to what the instructor would receive to teach a single course. In addition, having course materials thoroughly edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by a panel of subject-matter experts can easily add several thousand dollars to the development costs of each course. Add usability/accessibility optimization, visual design improvements, and multimedia enhancement to the process, and the total cost per course can easily exceed $10,000.

Ten-thousand dollars can be a particularly hard number to swallow when compared to the cost of developing face-to-face courses. After all, faculty have been developing traditional courses without additional compensation for a very long time (and in K-12, the added costs of enhancing a course often come out of the instructor’s pocket). Of course, there are many arguments as to why online course development merits a considerable initial investment, such as:

  • Faculty are paid to be subject-matter experts, not technology experts.
  • The quality of the materials will be better as a result.
  • Online learning brings in tuition dollars that the institution wouldn’t otherwise receive.
  • The cost per course decreases every time the same materials are reused.

The problem that none of these arguments addresses is that many instructors (at least in my experience) simply don’t want to be required to use hand-me-down course materials. For as long as teachers have existed, many of them have shared syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignment concepts with their colleagues. I think most instructors value this tradition, but only when the materials are provided with no obligation.

As an instructional designer and a part-time instructor, I feel torn between two worlds. On the one hand, I recognize the benefits of clear, specific course objectives. I also see the value in providing standardized supporting materials to ensure students can meet those objectives. Yet, I also know that one of the best aspects of teaching as a profession is that you get to be the captain of your own ship (however humble it may be). You have a great deal of autonomy and, ideally, you’re free to experiment with teaching and assessment methods that might be a bit unusual as long as students master the critical course concepts.

I appreciate it when my colleagues offer to share their course materials with me, and I love to hear about what they’ve learned from their own experiences. At the same time, we have very different opinions about how to teach a course on basic web design. Some require students to write all their HTML by hand in Notepad and some introduce FrontPage on day one. I offer my students a compromise: we spend the first few weeks hand-coding before we switch to Dreamweaver.

None of our approaches have been criticized, which is fine by me since I’d sooner give myself an appendectomy with a spork than get reacquainted with FrontPage. However, that’s not to say I’m a curriculum-development anarchist. I do wish at times that my fellow interactive-design professors and I could all agree on a few things, like not introducing advanced tools like Flash or languages like JavaScript in a course where many students struggle with basic file-management concepts. Of course, I’m afraid to push for standardization because I, like many teachers, enjoy doing things my way, and I don’t want to find myself forced to teach from a pile of second-hand course materials. In the end, I like to think there’s a happy medium that embraces the best parts of the publishing model of course development while giving faculty the freedom they crave. Until then, you’ll find me slaving away over a hot laptop, creating course materials from scratch and complaining about the workload all the while.