Monthly Archives: June 2011

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Ideas for Using D2L to Make Better Use of Your Class Time

I hope we’ve gotten past the point where some instructors out there believe the Learning Management System is only for online classes. At the very least, it’s a great way for instructors in a face-to-face class to post the syllabus and other course documents and to e-mail students between class meetings. But Learning Management Systems, like Desire2Learn, have so much more to offer to the face-to-face class, especially if you’re one of those instructors who never seems to have enough class time to cover everything. Here are some ideas for using Desire2Learn to get more out of your class time.

  • Course Q&A Discussion – Set up a discussion area for questions about course or assignment requirements to minimize the amount of class time you spend on these questions. Any question you answer online will be permanently accessible to other students with the same question later. There’s an added benefit to you, because there’s a possibility a more attentive student will answer questions so you don’t have to.
  • Set up Groups – If you use groups in your class and have students select their own groups, consider using the D2L Groups tool instead. You can post a description of what each group will have to cover and have students choose which group they want to belong to. D2L allows you to set up how many groups you want or select the maximum numbers of members for each group.
  • Primer Discussions – If you like to start your class with a discussion to get students thinking about the subject-matter, consider moving these discussions online and having your students respond before class. You can even pull up your course site on the projector at the beginning of class to highlight certain student responses.
  • Course Introductions – You want to allow your students to get to know each other, but you don’t want to use class time for all of your students to tell everyone their interests and aspirations. Set up a discussion area, or simply ask your students to fill out their profile.
  • Assignments for the First Class – You won’t win any popularity contests, but if you have a lot of material to cover, and your course only meets once a week, you might want your student to do some reading before the first class. Use D2L to email your students and post a news announcement to tell students they have an assignment before the class starts.

These are just a few ideas. The possibilities are endless. If you’re a DePaul instructor and need some help getting started, we encourage you to contact the FITS department.

D2L Migration: A Look Back

Last September, I reported on the Blackboard to Desire2Learn migration at SNL Online, as we moved from our initial planning and design phases to full production and review modes. I promised then I’d keep you posted; I had no idea how all-consuming the migration would prove to be.  Changing requirements, mission creep, and faculty training kept us continually challenged; here’s a look back at each:

Changing Requirements

We developed a course template through an iterative process that included a couple of rounds of user testing with faculty and students. Though we did extensive requirements gathering before developing our prototypes, because of extremely tight time constraints we did so based on our test instantiation of D2L. Platform strengths and shortcomings became known as the actual D2L production environment was installed, and we found ourselves in a long cycle of review and redesign. These redesigns came while our course migration was well underway, which resulted in having to rebuild courses already converted in a meticulous, labor-intensive process. Much of this was likely unavoidable, given we were gathering requirements and developing templates while our IT department struggled to integrate an unfamiliar and untested platform. More time to research, design, test, and iterate on a stable installation in advance of the actual migration would have prevented a lot of headaches.

Mission Creep

We designed our migration procedure to include a course-author review process; authors would review their converted course to ensure accuracy and in doing so would become oriented to D2L.  However, what had been envisioned as essentially a proofreading exercise quickly morphed into rounds of actual course revisions, which exponentially increased the workload. The courses were better for it, but once again more time to plan and allow for contingencies like this would’ve been helpful.

Faculty Training

The paradox of D2L is that the very features that are so empowering for some faculty are confusing and intimidating for others.  FITS devoted enormous amounts of manpower to create extensive documentation and video tutorials for faculty university-wide, but because of the unique nature of the SNL Online template and program we had to have specialized materials and training for our faculty. Changing user and system requirements complicated this process, and my team is still developing training materials as new needs and problems are identified.

The Rollout

Though there were problems both avoidable and unanticipated, the initial rollout of D2L in January was remarkably trouble free. Our user testing gave us a template that leveraged D2L’s strengths and that students found easy to use. Faculty unfamiliarity with the platform and its tools—despite generous training and support resources—required far more attention than student difficulties.
Overall the migration was a tremendous success.

Some problems remain. Certain D2L tools still don’t work properly in our environment; intelligent agents don’t work at all. However, the folks at D2L are dedicated and responsive, and I’m hopeful that these issues will be resolved.

We plan to do a follow-up study to determine how our design can be improved and another to test whether students do better academically with one design versus another. There’s some debate in my department on whether usability and pedagogy are sometimes incompatible; I’d love to see the results of a study addressing that concern.

In a future post I’ll look at lessons learned and what I might do differently given similar circumstances.

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Instructors as User-Experience Designers

In April, Dr. Constance Stanley of the University of Colorado gave a day-long workshop titled “50 Ways to Teach with Impact” to the Chicago Area Faculty Development Network. To my surprise, the workshop presented techniques grounded in user-centered-design best practices. The workshop was geared toward instructors teaching in a face-to-face classroom; however, many of the strategies could easily be transferred to an online class. As a former user-experience analyst and current instructional designer, I found the bent of the workshop to be a welcome integration of these two disciplines.

Whitney Hess wrote the blog post “Guiding Principles for UX Designers” for UX Magazine that went gangbusters in the Twitterverse. Her guiding principles correlate nicely with Dr. Stanley’s “50 Ways to Teach with Impact.” Let’s take a look.

Guiding Principles for UX Designers

50 Ways to Teach with Impact

Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it

Pre and post interviews

Make things simple and intuitive

Metacognitive activities throughout course

Acknowledge that the user is not like you

Administer VARK learning-style preference

Have empathy

Realize that the student is bombarded with information and pressure to multitask

By taking the student perspective and needs into consideration, the instructor becomes a user-experience designer of the classroom environment. Dr. Stanley provides numerous techniques that emphasize engaging the student at multiple levels so as to “hook” each student. This is similar to the best designs, which allow users easy and seamless access to a service or product.

Details on Dr. Stanley’s strategies:

Pre and post interviews: To get a feel for the prior knowledge and assumptions of the students, instructors require that students take an online survey with questions about the content at the beginning of the course. With the results, the instructor now “understands the problem.” Tweaking the content and its delivery to make it accessible and engaging for a particular class of students is “attempting to solve the problem.” The post interview gives the student a sense of “where they have come” and gives the instructor valuable feedback on their content-delivery choices or user-experience design.

Metacognitive Activities: Dr. Stanley stated that, “these activities ask the learner to observe ‘the way things are’ versus ‘the way I make them as a learner.’” In other words, students are put into situations that ask them to reflect on their process and understanding of the content. Examples of these types of activities are: self-assessments; selecting from a choice of activities based on their preferred modality of learning; or having a dialogue with peers about their understanding of the content. By creating these opportunities, instructors provide pathways for students to access the content in simple and intuitive ways.

VARK (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic) learning preference assessment:Students and the instructor answer a quick sixteen-item questionnaire to find out their learning preference. The instructor receives the student results anonymously. By knowing the breakdown of learning preferences within a particular class, the instructor can adjust the delivery of the content to meet student needs. In addition, the instructor can be cognizant of his/her own learning preferences so as not to tilt the presentation of content towards that modality; thereby “acknowledging that the user is not like you.” The assessment is available at: http://www.vark-learn.com.

Influx of Information/Multitasking: Being empathetic to the bombardment of information students are faced with via text messages, e-mails, twitter feeds, etc. is essential in understanding the “user.” Designing a course experience that capitalizes on these devices and information streams encourages students to participate, because their frame of reference is being acknowledged. Rather than competing, play along with it. Poll Everywhere presents a content-related question to the student that is answered via text. Instructors can project the real-time results on a screen in the classroom or present them in an online collaborative environment. Multitasking and information overload are part of our students’ realities; so let’s use the very devices and technologies that vie for their attention.

The instructor as a user experience designer—I like that idea. Through the strategies presented by Dr. Stanley, instructors get a sense of the audience, their needs, and their preferences. Using these “specs” to inform the design of content delivery will lead to student engagement and participation. As one of the pioneers of user-experience design Donald Norman said, “Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.”