Monthly Archives: March 2010

Podcasts, Predictions, and Pedagogical Productivity

The November/December, 2005, issue of Educause Review carried an article titled “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education” by Gardner Campbell. He predicted that podcasting would assume great prominence in higher education. Describing a scenario in which students subscribed to prelecture course materials, Campbell pictured these learners eagerly listening to warm-up materials as they skipped merrily to an in-person class session. Podcasting generated interest for a time and many faculty began to think about recording classes or talks and sought devices to accomplish this (we found that the Sansa Clip, at a six-hour recording capacity and a cost of under 25 dollars became a favored item). But by 2010, it doesn’t seem to be a prophecy fulfilled. As Bugs Bunny would chomp on a carrot and ask, “What’s up, doc?”

What’s up is that several factors shine the light of reality on a premise that seems to have been formed in the dark! Here’s why:

  • Faculty learned that there’s no free lunch in creating quality listenable audio. Just recording classroom audio isn’t enough. It takes time to edit out gaps, noises, and uninteresting segments. (If this weren’t the case, cassette recorders would have become a classroom staple beginning in the 1960s when they became commercially available.)
  • An audio recording device doesn’t necessarily pick up both student questions and answers—giving you the equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.
  • It takes more work to copy audio from a sound recorder, transform it into mp3 format, and upload it to an accessible place than many people thought.
  • And maybe Campbell’s idea wasn’t very accurate in the first place!

To be sure, our iTunes University Web site has accumulated some types of course-supporting audio material. Available statistics show that the most listened-to recordings are those that either are required listening for some assignment or in some way support an assigned textbook—for example, an audio version of a textbook for use by students with reading difficulties. But we suspect that Campbell’s happy scenario has suffered from some of the realities of life. For one thing, anecdotal comments of students indicate that they regard iPods and their ilk primarily as entertainment devices, not learning tools. Then too, technology may have already passed plain audio by—sites like YouTube are much more interesting since they provide video as well as audio. In addition, the options for how students spend out-of-classroom time have greatly expanded with cell-phone texting and social networking sites, both of which now consume ever greater amounts of attention—and how many hours in the day does a person have anyway? And quite likely most important of all, technical or detailed lecture content that demands focus and concentration is just not the same as music when it comes to listening and doing something else. You can miss a few bars here or there in a tune and still catch the vibes. Miss a few phrases or sentences in a lecture on some complicated concept and you may pretty well be lost for all that follows.

What’s the point? The point for faculty interested in moving ahead with technology is that you need to choose your shots wisely. Don’t invest your precious time and energy based on assumptions about a technology that looks like it simply can’t miss. Get some help on your forays into teaching technologies from course designers who can help you benefit from what’s out there to enhance your pedagogy and make your class-prep and in-class time—and your student’s out-of-class time—as productive as possible. If your institution has the foresight to provide access to course designers who can help you, make use of their expertise and assistance. They’re not there to tell you what to teach or how to teach but to help you channel your efforts into techniques that are optimally productive for your specific requirements. And they might even show you some things that you didn’t even know existed!

To be honest Dr. Gardner, we felt your 2005 scenario rocked! But it’s 2010 and the world seems to be marching to the beat of a different drum.

Conduct Detrimental to the Team?

Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

One of the great challenges and opportunities in online teaching and learning is the capacity to leverage the medium to take a distributed environment and create community. One needs only a moment to see the proliferation of social networking as evidence for the ability of the Web environment to support community. Clearly, not all tools work as envisioned, nor do all courses benefit from the use of certain tools. Yet, does a compelling argument even exist to not make use of such technologies in online learning? But what is the appropriate action when a discussion board is hijacked or a class blog goes up in flames?

Classroom management is not a subject often discussed in online-learning circles. With the increasing socialization of our online courses, is conduct detrimental to the team an issue? And what can be done about it?

We all agree it is imperative to continue striving to improve each student’s learning experience while maintaining an equilibrium that promotes the use of social tools and the establishment of an environment of respect.

The question is how?

I am curious to learn about strategies for dealing with, or better yet, preventing such conduct from this community.

FERPA and the Web 2.0 Classroom: Part 2

In a previous entry, I laid out this scenario:

You want to use some Web 2.0 technology in your course, so you have each student create a blog on Blogger to have them chronicle their work and thoughts through the term. As an instructor, you visit these sites and leave comments on the blog. In order for you to keep track of which student has which blog, you ask them to have their names on the front page of their blog and for them to e-mail you the URL so that you can go through them all, moving from one blog to the next. No grades are shared via the blog, and your final evaluation for the student comes in feedback that you provide within the Gradebook area of Blackboard.

Is this a violation of FERPA?

There were some very good answers in the comments section, and now it’s time for me to share mine.

The short answer is yes.

There are a few land mines in this scenario, but the one that jumps out to me is that the instructor leaves comments on the blog regarding the student’s posts. When an instructor reads a student-submitted work—as a blog would be when it is read and graded by the instructor—it is then considered part of the student’s educational record. Remember the definition of an educational record according to FERPA (PDF): “Education records are currently defined as records that are directly related to a ‘student’ and maintained by an ‘educational agency or institution’ or by a party acting for the agency or institution.” When the instructor leaves evaluative feedback for the student in a comment to the post, he or she violates FERPA by making his or her evaluation of that part of the student’s educational record public.

Another land mine in this scenario is the fact that the blogs were not necessarily made private, so anyone could view them and associate the student’s name with the course they are taking and reveal that they are students in a particular course, term, and institution. Requiring the student’s name to appear on the front page is also a red flag.

Since you were so good at answering my last question, I pose another to you: what could an instructor do differently in this assignment to keep the academic objective of the assignment (self-reflection) without violating FERPA?