Monthly Archives: August 2009

How Do I Know My Students Are Learning? 

Oh, isn’t this the ultimate question for any teacher!

Trying to “keep it real,” a small group of DePaul Teaching Commons souls put our heads together recently to create this resource!

No two teachers approach these questions in the same way so—trying to “keep it real”—this site provides several different approaches.

Approach 1: From “what you want to know” to “what you need to assign”

There are two columns. The left column is what you might want to assess; the right column provides some examples of what you might want to assign. As an example, if you want to assess the student’s “application of discrete research, technical, performance, or meta-cognitive skills,” the Web site suggests you might want to assign case studies, debates, observing a performance, presentations, or simulations and role plays. Find this list on the Evaluation of a Product page.

Approach 2: What can I do right now with what I have?

The site has multiple examples organized by chronology (during a class or throughout the quarter), technology (blackboard surveys or other survey tools), or writing to learn or learning to write! As a former writing instructor, I was particularly impressed with the writing examples.

Approach 3: My students are not learning. Now what?

You’ve gathered the information via surveys or other assessment techniques, but your students are not learning? The site covers some next steps. Analyze the information, and act on that information. Some of these options can be found on the Are my students Learning? page.

Softchalk’s Update

Being an instructional designer requires me to have many tools at my disposal to create exciting and meaningful course content. Often, content needs to be displayed in a “chunked” manner to make navigating through the material easier. And it’s nice to have something that is visually appealing as well. For this, I’ve found myself using Softchalk. As with any product, it has things it excels at, and it has limitations. Recently, Softchalk 5 came out, and I was quite excited.

One huge thing I have been waiting for is the ability to name my pages, and I was thrilled to learn that if you look under “Properties” you will find a “Page Names” option! However, I also quickly learned that it still didn’t do exactly what I was looking for. While it gave the page names in the table of contents, the navigation at the top was still in number format. But it’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Another feature of this new version is the eCourse Builder. With the eCourse Builder, you can create multiple modules with the same navigation—in essence, combining your content into one area. While this may not work the greatest in Blackboard due to having too many frames on your screen, I can see some great applications of this feature for displaying large amounts of content in certain areas. It can also help work around the page-name issue mentioned above.

One strength of Softchalk is the ability to put interactive items into your module, such as flash cards or labeling activities. This is great for adding some variety into your lessons and using more visual media. You can also tie the quizzes you create to the Blackboard gradebook using the SCORM packaging option, as well.

So while Softchalk is not perfect for every situation, I think it does have some very nice features that warrant its inclusion in the instructional designer’s toolbox.

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End-User Manipulation: The Value of Your Ingenuity

With any product, the goal of a good designer is to anticipate and meet the needs of the user, since it is the user who holds purchasing power.  It is difficult (or impossible) to fully anticipate what a user will do with a product—think of the warning labels on products like irons, which may seem ridiculous (i.e., “Do not use the iron on clothes that you are wearing.”) but which show how far companies must go to protect themselves from the “ingenuity” of users.  However, it is often user manipulation of a product that can lead to improvements in the technology, which is why so many companies clamor for consumer opinions and ideas about how their products can be used.

Steven Johnson, in his article “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live,” describes end-user manipulation of technology in this way:  “It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.”  There are two levels of value in this scenario:  value was created with the original product, and value was added when it was manipulated for other uses.  With technology, the magnitude of brainpower held by users is a resource, and whether their products are physical items or services like Twitter, companies are tapping into this wealth of user ingenuity.

Apple is one example. The iPhone and iPod Touch have become popular because the physical interface of these products allows for increased and unique interaction by the user (think of the maze game featured in the early Touch commercials that utilized the movement of the device to roll the ball through the maze).  The initial value of the product was strong, but Apple added to that value by taking advantage of the brainpower of users.  They created the iPhone Developer Program, which invites users to create their own applications to sell in Apple’s App Store.  While Apple has maintained strict controls over which applications are sold, many individual designers and technology-design firms are competing in this market, no matter how silly their applications may seem.  This is an incredibly smart move by Apple:  they don’t have to invest in designers to create these additional products, and they still get to take 30 percent of the profits of these applications.  Their only costs are operating the App Store and paying a team to make decisions on marketable applications and run the store’s interface.  For a very low overhead, they are reaping a huge profit by utilizing public brainpower.

Other technologies are following suit.  Delicious.com, a social-bookmarking site, has an area where users can submit their ideas and suggestions for how to improve the service, and Delicious team members respond to these user posts.  By creating this space for user feedback, Delicious is acknowledging the value of user input and improving its services by listening to the consumer.

So why are we talking about this? Part of technological literacy is realizing that the developers aren’t infallible. They don’t know all the unmet needs that a new technology could meet with a little user manipulation. Everyone benefits when there is a relationship between the user and the developer.

Building Social Media for Students: A Waste of Time?

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!

I’m afraid it’s wasted effort for the most part. Here’s why.

First, we’re replicating existing services and efforts. My department has ruminated for months about a social site for our adult students. Well, surprise! Students who wanted a social space have already created their own Facebook group, demonstrating again the truism that individuals can and do move faster than committees. Will these students abandon the group they created for a university-branded one? I’m betting not.

Second, we’re too late to the game. Facebook is hemorrhaging members, as the cool kids move on.  Twitter is the heir apparent; fast, flexible, and mobile. It certainly has great potential; see James Moore’s excellent presentation at http://preview.tinyurl.com/mg74tv . And as mobile devices become more ubiquitous, you’ll see more and better apps like MobilEdu, created by Terribly Clever Design and recently acquired by—wait for it—Blackboard.

So what does Blackboard know that you and I should? When to recognize that the game has changed. Blackboard realized they couldn’t design a better mobility app than the whiz kids from Stanford and stopped wasting time trying to. They’re free of denial and playing to their strengths. The same lesson applies to social media growth—rather than waiting for slow organic reach, many influencers and brands opt to buy IG followers cheap to give their accounts an initial boost, making it easier to attract organic engagement and stay competitive in a fast-moving digital space.

We should play to ours.

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Outsmarting Outsourcing: Making Your Course Priceless in a Competitive Market

One of my favorite things about language education is that it’s a complete free-for-all. No one cares where you studied or how many books your instructors have published. Results are all that matter (unless, of course, you’re planning to become a professor yourself). Students have their own objectives in mind when they take language courses, and the only assessments that matter to them are the ones they pass or fail in the real world:

  • Can I tell a Brazilian taxi driver where I need to go?
  • Can I discuss controversial political issues with my German friends?
  • Can I tell a Spanish-speaking parent how to treat her child’s illness?
  • Can I translate this brochure to Chinese in time to send it to the printer?

I like to think of foreign-language education as a sort of wild frontier where pedigrees are meaningless—where fortune favors the bold and there are a thousand ways to strike it rich. It’s the Wild West of educational technology, which means there’s plenty of room for mavericks and snake-oil salesmen. Because students have so many options when it comes to studying a language, professors have to work extra hard to prove their time is worth more than a box of listen-and-repeat lessons. In addition, they have to compete with more polished and engaging self-paced options like Rosetta Stone and teachers in foreign countries willing to offer immersion courses for a fraction of the cost of a typical college course in the States.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, now there’s eduFire.com. The site allows teachers to offer live lessons via video, with some courses providing as many contact hours as a typical college course. On eduFire, teachers are referred to as tutors, classes are small, and lessons typically cost ten to twenty dollars per hour. Students can also rate tutors, creating more demand for the most reputable tutors and allowing them to charge more for their services.

So how do foreign-language professors compete with a live teacher who is willing to offer more personal attention at a 90 percent discount to the cost of a typical college course? There are essentially two options:

1) Offer a degree. For some students, the main reason to take a foreign language course in college is because it satisfies requirements for a degree. In this model, all students really care about are a handful of classes that relate to their major, and their standards for all other courses are relatively low. They believe that much of their college experience will be dominated by coursework they don’t enjoy or find useful, but they accept it as a necessary evil.

2) Offer a superior learning experience. For students who are passionate about learning the subject matter, a great teacher may actually be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars more per course. If a great professor can teach students what they need to know ten times faster than a student could learn it through some other means, then the professor’s time should at least be worth ten times the cost of the alternative.

For now, sites like eduFire still feel like unstructured, wobbly imitations of the online-learning experiences offered by accredited institutions. But it’s not hard to imagine these sites becoming  serious competitors in the language-education marketplace. As more users try out the site and rate their teachers, the best tutors will make more money. As compensation rises, the site will attract better instructors. Better instructors will attract more serious students and the whole process snowballs from there.

As a part-time Web-site-design professor, I’m all too familiar with this trend. My students have a nearly limitless supply of educational resources available to them, from free online tutorials to highly polished sites like lynda.com, which charges twenty-five dollars per month and provides access to thousands of video tutorials covering hundreds of technology-related topics. When I teach, I have to ask myself, “How can I make sure my students get their money’s worth? What can I provide that they can’t get anywhere else?” It might seem idealistic to think that I can offer my students something no one else can, but I think it’s a good goal to strive for. With that in mind, here are a few mantras I’ve adopted in my quest to ensure that what I teach can’t be outsourced or undersold.

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Recognize when someone else has done something better than I can (or at least as well as I can). Take what they’ve done and build on it.
  • Reinvent the wheel. Recognize when I’m better off building my own resources. Don’t waste too much time trying to revise material that isn’t great to begin with. Ask God to grant me the patience to accept the textbooks I can’t change, the courage to change the resources I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
  • Provide at least one priceless lesson per class. During each class, I try to identify at least one “million-dollar moment” and I build it up before revealing it. It might be a tip I wish someone had given me while I was in school before I spent five years doing something the hard way. I might announce that I’m about to show the one technique typographers use the most to make text look more polished. During project critiques, I might point out a common design pitfall that separates amateur designers from professionals. The goal is to show students that every class includes at least one lesson that was worth getting out of bed for. Or, in the case of my online students who may be participating while lying in bed, they should at least feel that each week’s content was worth waking up for. (And yes, sometimes these million-dollar moments wind up feeling more like they belong in a ninety-nine-cent store, and I feel silly for over-hyping them. But even a ninety-nine-cent moment is better than no moment.)
  • Be a good filter. Distill an overwhelming body of information and resources down to the most useful parts students need.
  • Be a good prioritizer. Filter everything; then filter it again by putting the most important information first. Assume your students will read half of what you put in front of them; then assume they’ll only remember the first half of that.
  • Be a good coach. Good coaches don’t just provide information. They provide guidance, motivation, criticism, and praise. They bring out the best in students by helping them believe in themselves, demand more from themselves, and tap into their own talents.