Monthly Archives: September 2008

Open Course Repositories Online or The Best Things in Life Are Free

Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

Examples

I) MIT’s Open Course Ware (OCW), established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, currently offers over 1,800 online courses that are enriched with multimedia content and teach thirty-five subject areas within the arts, sciences, and humanities. Being created exclusively by MIT, OCW is backed by MIT’s commitment for permanent updates but is not open to user contributions. It is essentially an electronic and multimedia-enriched version of almost all of MIT’s academic curriculum, including lecture notes, video lectures, exams, etc., offered for free, offering no certification or credit, requiring no registration, and, as indicated on the site, providing access to “materials that may not reflect the entire content of a [given] course.”

II) In a slightly different approach, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative currently offers an eclectic list of only about a dozen courses, which, however, are fully and exclusively developed for online students and are supported by ongoing educational research addressing course design and outcomes. Faculty from all over the world can create a free account and use the repository’s tools to create online courses that can be offered for free or at a nominal fee if credit is required. An educational initiative of a much larger scope than MIT’s OCW, the Open Learning Initiative organizes symposia, maintains pedagogical and education-technology blogs, and offers workshops on using and customizing existing-courses and on developing new, effective online courses.

III) Connexions is a collaborative, free, scholarly content archive that seems to share useful features from both resources discussed above, so I will be spending some more time on it.

The Connexions project started at Rice University in 1999, with the first non-Rice Connexions course contributed by the University of Illinois in 2002. Similarly to MIT’s OCW, Connexions has grown extensively and currently holds over 4,500 course modules, covering most typical disciplines and topics addressed in higher education. Similarly to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, new content is welcome and can easily be created by faculty from around the world, following a simple registration process.

The resource offers full courses (called ‘collections’), individual course modules, or stand-alone learning activities. Materials and learning activities are very well aligned, while remaining modular for flexibility in course customization. Based on my use of the resource, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness instructors are best off mixing and matching modules and activities from multiple collections and possibly supplementing them with additional (especially multimedia) materials. Connexions holdings are often linked to relevant course Web sites within the authors’ academic institutions, providing additional resources and context for understanding the materials.

The numerous items related to music (my area of expertise) are listed under “Arts,” with thirteen of the seventeen “collections” and approximately a third of the over four-hundred modules within Arts addressing music or sound-related topics. Items related to acoustics can also be found under “Science and Technology,” and, following a recent partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), Connexions will also be developing a set of signal-processing educational modules and courses.

In its vast majority, the content is accurate, well presented, supported by references to relevant literature, and occasionally enhanced through multimedia resources. Depending on subject area, special plug-ins may be required, all of which are downloadable from within the relevant learning object’s page. Usability features may change slightly with each course and contributor, but all courses/modules checked are clearly organized and very easy to use. The repository itself is also well organized and visually appealing, and it has clear instructions for use when necessary. Although not formally peer-reviewed, the collections are monitored by an editorial team and an oversight board, helping maintain high content standards.

The quality and learning impact of the resource was recently recognized by Harvard University’s Berkman Award (Berkman Center for Internet & Society), presented to Connexions founder and Rice University professor R. Baraniuk for his role in creating the repository. The learning impact and sustainability of this and other open educational resource repositories was addressed in a recent article from the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects.

We are all usually wary of anything offered for free, and for good reason. When it comes to free education, however, there are serious reasons (e.g. motivation of those offering it) and evidence (see above) that support rehashing the cliché: “the best things in life are free!” I have personally found the free resources discussed very useful and plan to become a contributor in the near future.

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Do You Like Me? Check Yes or No.

My mother is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in retail for many years. She often says that the toughest thing about her line of work is the demand to always be “on”—to be perky, pleasant, enthusiastic, and accommodating at all times. Now that the new quarter is under way and I find myself teaching again, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similar pressure for instructors to be “on” when interacting with students.

The last time I taught, multiple students noted in their evaluations that I seemed annoyed and impatient when answering their questions. It came as a bit of a shock, particularly since my previous round of evaluations had turned out so well. After a healthy dose of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, I traced my steps and recalled a few instances in class when I was visibly frustrated with students who weren’t keeping up with a tutorial. I also knew I’d been particularly bad about reminding students if I’d already answered the same question multiple times, and I had probably mentioned more than once that certain mistakes on the assignments could have been avoided by reading the assignment instructions more carefully.

I usually find that I’m in a great mood for the first few weeks of the quarter. I answer repetitive questions with glee. Students who don’t follow directions don’t keep me up at night. Nothing can dampen the feeling that I’m living my dream of being a professor and that I’m single-handedly changing the world. But the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. Like a Starbucks barista at the end of an eight-hour shift or a J. Crew salesperson who has just been asked to fold the same twenty pairs of pants he just folded two hours ago, the normal wear and tear of the job begins to drain my reservoir of patience. Eventually, it gets harder to answer the same question five times with a smile. It gets more painful to grade assignments in which students disregard the rubric I so meticulously and lovingly constructed. By the end of the quarter, it can be difficult not to take things personally that have little or nothing to do with my abilities as a teacher.

When I reflected more on what went wrong during my last term in the classroom, I realized I wasn’t just in a bad mood. I had also brushed off a critical task that I had performed the quarter before: asking my students for feedback before the middle of the term. The first time I tried it, I worried that surveying my students would draw attention to my lack of experience. I didn’t want to seem needy, but I was even more afraid of waiting until the end of the quarter to find out what my students really thought of me. So, I gave them an incredibly simple survey with only two questions:

  1. How challenging is the course so far? (This was a multiple-choice question.)
  2. Do you have any suggestions on how I can improve the course? (This was an open-ended question with a comment box.)

This survey was helpful in two ways. First, I learned that I was flying through my software demonstrations and needed to slow down. Second, I showed my students that I genuinely cared about them and wanted to make the course the best it could be. While I can’t say that my little survey made all the difference in my evaluation results that quarter, I feel certain that it played a significant role. When I taught again, I was a bit overconfident, having passed the last quarter with flying colors. I meant to ask my students for feedback but never got around to it. I told myself the students wouldn’t complete it, that I should have done it the week before, or that I should wait until next week. It was always the wrong time to ask for feedback, and before I knew it, the opportunity had slipped through my fingers.

This quarter I’m determined not to make the same mistake. I’ve already asked my students a few simple questions and their responses have helped me correct a few small problems that would have magnified over time. I made sure to include a question about my attitude and patience level, and I plan to offer the survey again to help me snap out of any funk that might set in as the quarter progresses. Asking for feedback early on also goes a long way to foster goodwill. Because I teach in a creative discipline, I have to offer a lot of criticism to help students improve. I can tell them all day long that they shouldn’t take this criticism personally, but giving them the opportunity to critique my teaching helps me lead by example. It also gives the students a chance to blow off some steam before the final evaluations, and I’d much rather get the worst over with early and in a survey that no one has to see but me.

Surveys can be conducted through Blackboard, but it can be difficult to convince students that they are truly anonymous. DePaul employees have the option to use QuickData, our home-grown tool that allows faculty to create surveys by completing a few simple forms. Because these surveys can be taken from any computer and don’t require students to log in, faculty might find they get more frank and honest feedback. For instructors outside DePaul, Web-based survey tools like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo offer a similar promise of anonymity. Of course, giving students the freedom to say whatever they like about their instructors has its downsides. However, I find it’s better to embrace this early in the quarter when there’s still time to do something about it. Hopefully, the result is a better learning experience for everyone and fewer disgruntled students venting several weeks’ worth of frustration in a course evaluation that will be read by department heads.

My students aren’t really my customers and I don’t like to think that I’m obligated to put on a happy face at all times and serve them like a Ritz-Carlton concierge. However, I do think student feedback is essential if I’m going to become a better teacher. When this feedback comes only once at the end of the quarter, it’s easy to feel defensive and powerless. That’s why it’s so important to ask students for regular feedback. It might make me seem a bit needy, but that’s an adjective I can live with, and I know my mom would agree. But just to be sure, I think I’ll send her a survey.

Textbooks 2.0

Up until now, the reports of the death of the textbook industry have been greatly exaggerated. Remember when the PDF was going to change everything? But this week, I have seen a couple of really cool stories that have convinced me that the traditional market for textbook is in its last days.

The first story is the preview of Plastic Logic’s new electronic-reading device, which premiered at this year’s DEMO conference. You can watch the five-minute demo below.

While similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which was launched last year, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is made from plastic instead of glass. That makes it lighter, thinner, and more durable. But what really sets it apart from the Kindle is that it’s open. The Kindle is a closed system. The only content I can read on a Kindle is content that Amazon makes available. That stinks. I want to determine what I read on my e-reader. I want to read my documents, my reports, my PowerPoint presentations. If I have a digital copy of a book, magazine, or textbook, I should be able to upload it to the e-reader. Plastic Logic lets me do that.

The second story that helped seal the fate of the textbook industry comes from WNYC’s On the Media. It’s an interview with Preston McAfee, an economics professor at the Californina Institute of Technology. Dr. McAfee was unsatisfied with the intro-to-economics textbooks on the market, so he wrote his own, and then he did something really cool. He licensed his textbook under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use the book for noncommercial use. Dr. McAfee hopes that other economists will add to the book, improving it, and thus create an open-source textbook. If it works for software, why not textbooks?

You can listen to the whole interview here:

I see the combination of these two ideas really changing the textbook industry. The e-reader eliminates the need for a physical object, and the Creative Commons open-source textbook eliminates the expense of the content. In addition, it allows faculty to create a textbook that is unique and tailored specifically for each individual class and that can actually be updated and revised during the quarter. It makes me want to go back to school.

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Transformational Learning: a Substantial Change in a Subtle and Intuitive Way

“Change,” a slogan of the Obama campaign, is undoubtedly winning its own presidential bid in the buzzword competition. The word “change,” probably of Celtic origin, is defined as an action to make different or to shift from one to another (Merriam-Webster OnLine). It can mean anything from a slight alteration to a radical transformation. When it comes to education, I think that change is, in fact, the ultimate goal of teaching and learning: change from unknown to known, from viewing things from one level to viewing them from another, and from systematic knowledge acquisition to an individualized, conscious battle of lucidity (Morin, 1999; George Siemens 2008). And that ultimate form of change as a result of learning is called “transformational learning.”

About a month ago, I attended a session on language learning and VoIP at the Wisconsin Distance Learning Conference. The presenter, Kerrin Barret, shared the findings of her dissertation studying a cross-cultural language-learning community supported by synchronous VoIP. Although her focus was on the role of VoIP in improving cultural and linguistic competencies, she found (with pleasant surprise, I am sure) that transformational learning occurred across participant groups in the online English-language-learning program, which involved teachers from the United States and students from Taiwan and mainland China. One of the themes that emerged from her study was that by participating in this online program, either as teachers or students, her study population became interculturally competent, which made them view the world as well as themselves differently. This perspective change echoes Merizow’s definition of “transformational learning”: a “disorienting dilemma” occurs in an adult learner’s life to cause her or him to reflect critically, with the end result that the individual’s conception of him/herself and worldview is inexorably changed.

During the presentation, I asked Kerrin, the session participants, and especially myself a question: should transformational learning be made a specific goal of our programs? The follow-up question in my mind was: will making it a goal of the programs give them a better chance to achieve the result, since curriculum design is becoming more and more goal-driven? At that moment, two examples came to my mind: my Chinese language class and DOTS, our faculty development program. For the former, I always wanted to make the class go beyond just the words and grammars; and for the latter, we have been striving to make an impact on faculty’s view and practice of teaching instead of just developing a couple online courses.

In seeking an answer to my own question, I thought about why transformational learning has not been made a goal of either my class or our program. I saw two reasons: 1) the goal seems to be so far above the ground for any teacher and student to achieve over the course of a class or a program; and 2) desirable as it is, making a class or a program a transformational learning experience to anyone doesn’t seem to be a demandable task, nor can it be measured easily with any form of standards. And when it comes to faculty development, a third reason is that faculty are put off by being preached to, which they see as humiliating.

This debate of “to be or not to be” is actually well documented in the literature of transformational learning, where two seemingly different views of transformational learning are presented: one view, represented by Mezirow, emphasizes rationality or rational, critical reflection; and the other, led by Boyd and Meyer, stresses the intuitive and emotional nature of the transformational process.

As a big follower of Etienne Wenger, I tend to agree with Boyd and Meyer because, as Wenger pointed out, “learning cannot be designed.” (Note: he didn’t say instruction cannot be designed, so that’s no job-security threat to instructional designers.) “Ultimately, it (learning) belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.” (Wenger, 1998)

If the result of transformational learning is so personal and hence uncontrollable, what can we, the educators, do to help one achieve this ultimate form of learning? Despite their different views on the process of transformational learning, all researchers and theorists seem to agree that educators play a significant role in the student’s perspective transformation, and “fostering transformative learning in the classroom depends to a large extent on establishing meaningful, genuine relationships with students” (Cranton, 2006, cited by Karrin 2008).

“Relationship” is the key word that I picked from this passage. As factual information becomes more and more accessible to everyone in its various forms of presentation, the role of educators is changing from knowledge carriers to relationship builders, trust agents, mentors, and role models for students. A class or a program provides us an opportunity to serve in that support role of difference-making.

If change is now a dream of all Americans, a dream of a transformational change as a result of learning should, then, be a “secret” goal of all American educators. It is an explicit but unstated goal with the greatest reward for both the teachers and the learners. The “medal” was awarded when a student in Kerrin’s study said, “I feel from learning I am different”; my dream came true when a student wrote me a card saying, “you taught me more than Chinese but how to be a considerate and caring person;” our goal was met when faculty said in their interviews, “DOTS makes me think about teaching differently.”