Monthly Archives: September 2010

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Keeping it on the Web

Our department fielded a question from a student recently about a Blackboard app for the iPhone. The student saw the app in the Apple App Store, but when she tried to use it, she found that it had to be enabled by the university, which it hadn’t been. Now, this is a bit of a moot point now since our university is transitioning from Blackboard to a new learning management system this year, but it got me thinking about the trend of apps for mobile platforms.

I got my first smartphone not too long ago—an Android device—and like anyone who gets a new smartphone, the first thing I did was download dozens and dozens of apps. How exciting it was! Games, maps, video services, content delivery! For the next few weeks I kept my eyes peeled on all of my most frequented websites. Does this site have an app? Does this company? Does this service?

But when the excitement wore off, I looked at some of the content-delivery apps and thought, why does this app exist? Couldn’t this information just be displayed in a mobile-friendly Web page?

Web pages—you remember those, right? The pages that display content by coding it into universally standard, non-proprietary HTML code. The pages that can be accessed from any computer or Web-enabled device with any browser and look and behave mostly the same. The pages that are not subject to any kind of approval process. I’ve seen an unfortunate trend lately where smartphone owners see their platform’s app store as their primary portal to the Internet and forget about the Web browser. If you’re on the look out for great websites to visit, you may use directories like 세상의모든링크.

More and more people, especially young people, are carrying a smartphone, and I think that trend is only going to continue. And as online educators, it’s going to be hard for us to not accommodate the one Internet-enabled device that students have with them at all times. In the next couple of years, departments like mine are going to have to start testing how usable educational Web tools are on mobile devices before recommending them to faculty, considering potential challenges related to internet crime.

Diving deeper into legal specialties, the expertise of cyber crime lawyers like this criminal lawyer Milton is increasingly relevant. These professionals, skilled in navigating complex internet crime legal challenges, play a pivotal role in today’s digital world. Their understanding of both technology and law helps in crafting robust defense strategies. It’s essential to have access to such expertise in our tech-centric society.

But locking content into a specific platform with an app isn’t the way to go. It isn’t ethical, because we shouldn’t be telling students they’ll be at an advantage buying one brand over another. It isn’t practical, because we would have to keep up with all new developments in mobile operating systems. And it isn’t necessary, because these devices have perfectly capable Web browsers.

This isn’t to say apps don’t have their place—there are many things a Web page just isn’t capable of. But for content delivery, let’s spend our time developing mobile-friendly Web pages rather than making apps.

Notes from the Field: Migration to Desire2Learn

Back in June, in “Resistance Is Futile: Embracing an LMS Migration,” I wrote about the challenges of SNL Online’s migration of about eighty fully online courses to Desire2Learn. I’d like to revisit some of the key discoveries and thoughts.

Time Is Not on Your Side

How much time do you think you’ll need to implement the learning management system, get all the stakeholders on board and trained, and successfully migrate your courses? Double that. Then double it again. You’ll thank me later.

It Won’t Happen That Way

As mentioned before, the migration tool that was supposed to make transferring courses from Blackboard to Desire2Learn easy didn’t work as advertised, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s sat through any vendor demo and then worked with an actual instantiation of the product. What was billed as a relatively seamless and problem-free process has been anything but, with a difficult and ongoing integration process with PeopleSoft making our production timelines irrelevant. Key tools, roles, and functionalities we’d relied on having either aren’t yet available or never will be, putting our design specs constantly in flux and making our production workflow reactive and inefficient. It’s certainly not the end of the world, but even our conservative estimates of production time and costs have proven overly optimistic in light of the D2L/PeopleSoft integration difficulties.

Did I Mention You’ll Need More Time?

We have a lot of talented people working really hard to make sure everything works as it should and ensure that this migration is a success for students and faculty. And they’re discovering on roughly a weekly basis that things we thought would work don’t. They need more time to test everything, and so will you.

An Ounce of Prevention

Our course design specs are the result of an iterative process that included a couple of rounds of user tests with students and faculty. As a result I’m able to rely upon real data when I work with faculty to explain our new design and protocols. I’m pleased to say that most seem to understand and appreciate what we’ve done and why. Some don’t though, and a disproportionate amount of time and energy is expended trying to sell them something that has already been made departmental policy. You might avoid this uncomfortable situation by bringing stakeholders to the table at the beginning of the migration planning. Of course, that will likely delay things, which will require yet more time.

Pain Is Growth

It’s really easy to get caught up in the stress of things and lose sight of the goal and its rewards. Disruptive and maddeningly frustrating as much of this process has been, we should ultimately have a much better learning environment for students and faculty. I’m learning I can juggle more cats than I’d imagined, and I marvel at the talent of my co-workers and the grace they show under pressure. Because of their dedication we’ll have a shiny new LMS ready to roll out in January. I’ll keep you posted.

To Act or Not to Act

For the past twelve years, I have worked in academic technology at an institute of higher education (with a brief eight-month corporate stint that taught me that my heart and soul truly is in education). However, my academic background is not instructional design but rather in communication arts and theater. I have to say this pairing of work experience and academic education has served me well, as the two routinely go hand in hand with my job.

 



Toronto – Wintergarden Theater by Cannon in 2D (http://www.flickr.com/photos/16462767@N00/3286021531/)

 

If you think about it, teaching can be seen as a performance. A performance occurs when there is a performer and an audience and there is communication between them. Sometimes it’s unidirectional coming from the presenter to the audience, and sometimes it is bidirectional with feedback coming from the audience, so the communication cycle is completed. This is the topic for this academic year’s Teaching and Learning Conference at DePaul University—the play and performance found in teaching and learning. The keynote speaker, Nancy Houfek, head of voice and speech for the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, will focus her presentation on the “act” of teaching. She will present specific skills that can be used by instructors to be more effective.

I have to agree that these skills are important for any instructor who lectures. The “Sage on the Stage” model of instruction will, in my opinion, always be present somewhere in our classrooms. There has, however, been a move away from a full “sage on the stage” model to a “guide on the side” model, where the instructor is more of a facilitator than a lecturer—a director rather than a performer. So how does the concept of theater play into this type of a classroom? Are the ideas and skills learned in a theatrical setting still useful?

Yes.

The classroom moves away from instructor-based play to student-based play. The students are the ones who experiment, create, and play with the content in order to present the material. They construct their learning like an improv actor would construct the scene or a playright would construct the script. The instructor needs to be well versed in the skills necessary to present, create, and perform in order to guide the students. He or she needs to be proficient in all of the beneficial performing and theatrical skills in order to be effective models for the students.

Theater skills in the classroom are twofold: for the instructor to use himself/herself in presenting content and modeling techniques for the students as well as for the instructor to teach to the students as they construct their own learning and become the “actors” in the room. While not every encounter needs to be worthy of an academy award, the basic skills of vocal projection, blocking, storyboarding, subtext, and storytelling, just to name a few, are skills that all students, regardless of disciple, will find valuable in their own teaching and learning.