All posts by Daniel Stanford

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About Daniel Stanford

Daniel Stanford is a Learning Design Consultant and former Director of Faculty Development and Technology Innovation at DePaul University's Center for Teaching and Learning. His work in online learning has received awards from the the POD Network, the Online Learning Consortium, NAFSA, the Instructional Technology Council, the University of Wisconsin, and Blackboard Inc. Follow @dstanford on Twitter | Connect on LinkedIn |

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+1 Intellect: Can Experience Points Improve Student Motivation?

When was the last time you felt a sense of accomplishment so gratifying that you threw your hands above your head and shook your fists with pride and elation? This gesture has been identified by psychologists as a universal expression made by people of all ages all around the world when they feel a sense of personal triumph. Italians call this feeling fiero, and the term has been adopted by game-designers to describe one of the most essential feelings a good game should provide.

In Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal proposes that most people’s everyday lives are shockingly fiero-deficient, and I have to agree. Most of us don’t complete our workdays with a fist-shaking gesture or spontaneous dance as we revel in our daily achievements, and much of our leisure time is spent on escapist forms of entertainment. If you can remember the last time you experienced a true fiero moment, chances are it was vicarious (e.g., watching a football player score a last-minute touchdown) or of no use to anyone in the real world (e.g., defeating a challenging level in Angry Birds).

McGonigal wants to change all that. To make the case for the ambitious assertion found in her book’s subtitle, she focuses on three key points.

  1. Reality is filled with tedious obligations and overwhelming problems that leave human beings feeling bored, powerless, and isolated.
  2. Games are humanity’s most effective tools for fostering engagement, empowerment, motivation, human connection, and a sense of accomplishment.
  3. The same principles that make games so rewarding and addictive can be used to change how we feel about and tackle unpleasant and daunting tasks in the real world—from cleaning our toilets to reducing global energy consumption.

To provide specific strategies for translating the best qualities of a good game to the real world, McGonigal proposes fourteen “fixes” for reality. Almost all of these fixes can be applied to education, and I hope to eventually assemble a group of DePaul faculty to read the book and discuss them further. For now, however, I’d like to focus on one of my favorites: “Meaningful Rewards When We Need Them Most.”

To introduce this fix, McGonigal describes a talk she gave at a conference in which she lamented,

‘If I have one regret in life, it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.’ Technically speaking, it’s true: if you were to add up every A I’ve gotten in my real life, from junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn’t come close to my World of Warcraft character’s intellect stat. Never mind the fact that there’s no score at all for getting smarter once you’re out of school.

McGonigal frequently refers to the motivational power of “leveling up”—a concept commonly found in role-playing games that provides players with progress milestones and encourages them to keep striving for higher levels of expertise. When a player levels up, it means his or her character has accumulated enough experience points to get improved strength, stamina, weapons, or other tools to help the player complete increasingly challenging missions.

In some games, completely leveling up a character can take hundreds of hours of gameplay. Yet players are rarely daunted by these lofty requirements because they are provided with a steady stream of smaller victories and positive feedback as they move closer to their next goal. During her conference talk, McGonigal mentioned that she wished some of this positive reinforcement could be extended to reality, allowing friends and strangers to give her experience points in recognition of her latest achievements. As a result, an audience member at the conference created plusoneme.com. The site bills itself as “gold stars for grownups,” and it provides a simple online tool that allows users to quickly recognize each other whenever someone demonstrates an admirable trait.

Initially, I thought, “What a great idea! Who doesn’t love to be recognized for their efforts? And wouldn’t it be great in an online course? This could make students feel more valued and connected without a big fuss or hokey bonding activities.” I even signed up for an account on plusoneme.com to try it out, but my blind adoration for the site was short-lived. Within a day or two, I opened my mailbox and pulled out the latest issue of The Atlantic. The headline, “How the Cult of Self-Esteem is Ruining Our Kids,” practically leaped off the page.

The text and image on the cover were promoting an article by Lori Gottlieb titled, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” Based on the headline and article title, it should come as no surprise that Gottlieb is one of many pundits blaming the indulgent parenting methods of the last few decades for creating a generation of entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed kids who are now entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed adults. It’s a backlash parade with Amy Chua serving as the Grand Marshal for 2011.

McGonigal seems to agree that most people born around 1980 or later are particularly frustrated and bored with reality. However, instead of blaming parenting trends, she points out that these younger generations have grown up with engaging, empowering games, and that these games have made the shortcomings of reality more obvious and stifling than they have ever felt before. Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle through humiliation or forcing a toddler to play piano until her fingers bleed, scholars like McGonigal ask, “Is there a way to increase motivation, productivity, and fulfillment by turning the task at hand into a game?”

In McGonigal’s world, the answer is almost always yes. In one example, she notes that she and her husband have used the website Chore Wars to turn everyday household chores into competitive challenges. In the game, chores are assigned various point values, with the most unpleasant tasks receiving the highest number of points. By default, the points that players accumulate in Chore Wars have no material value. In McGonigal’s case, the current high-score holder has the right to choose the music whenever she and her husband drive somewhere together.

McGonigal claims this simple and free reward system has changed the way she and her husband view everyday housekeeping. She says the Chore Wars over-the-top fantasy world, in which users can collect experience points every time they “conjure clean clothes” or “rid the kingdom of toilet bowl stains,” has left her home cleaner than it has ever been. While I doubt that driving-music veto power would motivate me to clean my bathtub, McGonigal does provide more than her own household as a case study. Other users claim that Chore Wars’ has turned their children into an army of competitive cleaning machines, which I’m sure most parents would agree speaks volumes to the power of a little virtual encouragement.

That’s great for McGonigal, who could probably game her way through a root canal, and for kids, who aren’t embarrassed to think of a duster as a magic wand. But what about the rest of us? Can we really use game principles to make completing our grown-up, mundane obligations more gratifying?

At the risk of sounding like an over-indulged millennial, I wouldn¹t mind a little excitement and a virtual gold star once in a while for all my hard work. And I’m not ashamed if it takes a little imagination to get others to participate. After all, fiero is in short supply in these troubled times, particularly here in the land of Scholarshire, where the shadow of the evil Lord Profitus has cast a pall of terror across the land. If all it took was a kind word of praise in ye mystical comment box below for my blogger character to level up, wouldst thou aid me in my quest? Or wouldst thou side with the dark forces and leave me to rot in a cubicle, denied any reason to throw my hands above my head and shake my fists with pride and elation?

Let’s make a game of it and see.

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The Instructional Technology X-Files: Enchanted iPads, Magical Clickers, and Online Courses that Beat Face-to-Face

“Students performed 20 percent better in the hybrid version of this course compared to the face-to-face sections taught by other instructors.” When I heard this statement during a presentation at the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in February, I did something I rarely do: I closed my laptop, looked straight at the presenter, and stopped multitasking for a full twenty minutes.

I find most educational-technology conferences are a lot like an episode of the X-Files with a cast made up entirely of Fox Mulders. Everyone wants to believe. There are a lot of technology cheerleaders and a lot of iPad sightings, and no one seems to notice that Dana Scully—the skeptical, pragmatic agent designed to bring Mulder back down to Earth—has gone missing. So when someone offers up a bold promise backed by actual bar graphs, I take notice.

The presenter, Professor T. Warren Hardy from the University of Maryland–Baltimore County (UMBC), stated that his students performed significantly better on their final exam largely due to his use of online self-assessments. Upon hearing this, I immediately put on my Agent Scully trench coat and asked myself why his conclusions could be off.

  • Was his final exam easier than the one used in other sections? No, all sections take the same final exam.
  • Did he give his students an unfair advantage by using final exam questions in his self-assessments? No, the final exam is designed by other members of the department who are not currently teaching the course. To ensure a level playing field, the instructors have no knowledge of the specific questions that will appear on the final exam.
  • What if he’s just a better instructor than the faculty teaching the other sections? That might hold water if it wasn’t for the fact that Professor Hardy’s students scored considerably higher than his own past students after he converted the course to a hybrid format with online self-assessments.

Of course, I’m sure there are other variables that might impact the validity of Professor Hardy’s findings. Yet, after hearing the unique steps that UMBC’s economics department takes to ensure a rigorous and standardized final exam for the five-hundred students who take ECON 122 every year, I felt the 20 percent difference on Hardy’s final exam scores were hard to dismiss.

In addition to praising his students’ performance, Hardy’s co-presenters from UMBC noted that his course was a regular in the University’s list of most-active Blackboard courses. Hardy attributed his students’ extensive and frequent use of Blackboard largely to his course’s reliance on adaptive release. Adaptive release refers to a set of restrictions that can require students to view and interact with certain online content and/or assessments before new instructional materials are made available. In Hardy’s course, students were required to access learning materials and complete quizzes for each module before subsequent modules could be accessed. Hardy and his colleagues believe this approach helped students pace themselves and decreased the odds that they might skip vital content needed to succeed on the final exam.

Perhaps even more impressive than the student performance in Hardy’s initial hybrid offering was the fact that his hybrid students continued to score higher than their peers in subsequent course offerings. In addition, when the course was offered fully online in the summer of 2010, students scored even higher than those in previous hybrid sections.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much of the improved student performance was due to the online self-assessments, adaptive release, or other unique aspects of Hardy’s online course design and teaching style. However, his findings clearly show that low-stakes knowledge checks and conditional release of content can have a significant impact on student performance. While I still consider myself a skeptic, even Agent Dana Scully had to admit once in a while that supernatural phenomena do exist. Whether it’s the wolf-man, alien abduction, or online courses that prove more effective than face-to-face, the truth is out there and we owe it to our students to keep digging.

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Helping Digital Immigrants Feel at Home

If you’re an instructional designer or an educator with an interest in technology, you’ve probably heard someone use the term “digital native” to refer to young students who are innately tech savvy because they’ve been using the internet and digital technologies for as long as they can remember. You’ve probably also heard someone refer to today’s instructors—particularly older educators—as digital immigrants because they lack the same level of “fluency” in the technology skills, language, and culture that digital natives possess.

When Marc Prensky wrote “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in 2001, he presented several spot-on observations about how some older instructors are unwilling or unable to embrace digital technology and culture in the same way that some immigrants never embrace the language and customs of a new country. While a few of his observations are lighthearted, he insists that the consequences of this trend are quite serious. To drive this point home, he claims that game-based learning can be used in all subject areas and implies that educators who reject this idea are dumb, lazy, and ineffective.

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is “this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn’t work for my subject.” Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include “thought experiments” where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt—on the spot—to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List. It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators—not to mention ineffective—to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach and that the Digital Natives’ “language” is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea.

In his 2006 article “Listen to the Natives,” Prensky continues to emphasize that instructors must change their ways and place higher emphasis on engagement, stating, “As educators, we must take our cues from our students’ 21st-century innovations and behaviors, abandoning, in many cases, our own predigital instincts and comfort zones. Teachers must practice putting engagement before content when teaching.”

As someone who spent much of his childhood (and now a decent chunk of adulthood) playing video games, I love the idea of instructors integrating more games, simulations, and challenge-based learning activities into their courses. And there is mounting evidence that computer games can provide students with critical skills they need to succeed in the 21st-century job market.  A 2006 Wired article, “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!” describes how management at Yahoo! considered a candidate’s achievements as a leader in the multiplayer game World of Warcraft to be an asset that set him apart from other applicants for a position as senior director of engineering operations.

Unfortunately, what educational-game-loving scholars fail to acknowledge is that even when we can prove that students have learned something more effectively and efficiently through game-based learning, we have to consider the return on investment. And by investment, I don’t mean the amount of time students have to spend playing the game in order to master a particular number of concepts or commit a certain number of facts to memory (although this should be evaluated as well). I’m referring to the amount of time and money it takes instructors, instructional designers, graphic artists, and programmers to develop educational games—or any multimedia learning resources for that matter.

Any game designer will tell you that even a high-budget, state-of-the-art video game will look dated within a few years of its release. Even the games featured on Prensky’s own company website, games2train, are showing their age. This isn’t necessarily an indicator that Prensky and his team are poor game designers. It just confirms that games often take a great deal of time and money to build and have a relatively short window of usefulness before they need to be updated or completely redesigned.

I think Prensky would argue that at the very least, instructors could do more to engage digital natives with low-tech games and simulations that increase learner engagement. His suggestions for games to teach philosophy or the Holocaust don’t necessarily require much more than a good set of role-playing instructions or a collection of powerful images from concentration camps and a provocative discussion prompt.

If the message was simply, “Let’s rethink the design of our assessments and learning activities so they’re more interactive and engaging,” I’d be all for it. However, what I often hear (and what I hear from the faculty I train) is that instructors feel pressured to make their course material as riveting and addictive as the bestselling video game du jour.  That’s a lot to live up to, especially for a faculty member who, until recently, was feeling quite proud of herself for finally learning how to resize and crop a photo in PowerPoint.

I’m overjoyed when faculty come to me with grand visions for a multimedia game or simulation, but I know they often feel daunted when I tell them what they’ll need to contribute to the project. That’s why I typically brainstorm with them to find the most low-tech solution that meets their needs, then we build on that as time allows. I also like to look at their learning materials and ask a few questions to make sure we’re not putting the cart before the horse. Some of these questions include:

  • Are the course materials broken down into manageable segments?
  • Can students easily stop reading, listening, or watching and pick up where they left off later?
  • Is it clear to students why they should read or watch each resource?
  • Are resources prioritized? Is it clear which resources are the most important and which resources are optional?
  • Will students know what terms to watch for or what questions to ask themselves as they go through the material?
  • Are there ungraded knowledge checks to ensure students know if they’ve missed something?
  • Do some assessments require application of the concepts? Are students asked to think critically about what they’ve learned?
  • Do discussions encourage an exchange of diverse ideas and opinions? Or are students simply asked to regurgitate content from the resources and provide answers that will be repetitive and unoriginal?

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think it’s a good place to start. It might not generate the same buzz as turning a Holocaust lesson into a video game and accusing veteran professors of being lazy and behind the times, but at least we can rest assured that our priorities are in order and our courses are built on strong foundations. In addition, addressing fundamental course-design questions first and encouraging digital immigrants’ efforts does more than improve course quality. It provides digital immigrants with a starting point that feels welcoming and manageable—an Ellis Island of instructional design, if you will. It builds their confidence and encourages them to try new things. It replaces shame and guilt with pride and optimism.

We might not be able to completely transform an academic environment that can be hostile to digital immigrants, but we can strive to be better ambassadors of the digital culture we love. In the process, we can foster a melting pot of ideas and approaches to teaching that draws strength from diversity. And that’s the kind of immigration reform that benefits digital immigrants and digital natives alike.

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Foreclosing on Face Time: Online Learning and the Housing Crisis

Richard Florida is perhaps best known for his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class in which he proposed that the future fortunes of modern cities would depend on their ability to attract innovative, white-collar professionals. He labeled this group of workers the “creative class” but noted that this group extends far beyond artists and designers to include scientists, engineers, and other problem solvers who use outside-the-box thinking to overcome challenges in their fields. 

This spring, Florida published The Great Reset, which focuses on the current recession and its impact on urban development. Florida claims that the recession presents a valuable opportunity for the U.S. to scrap failed policies and move in a new direction to meet the demands of a changing economy. One of the key theories he presents is that the government subsidizing of home ownership (through tax deductions and low interest rates) has severely limited the mobility of the American workforce at a time when workers desperately need to move to find work. Florida believes that rather than continue to encourage Americans to buy homes and put down roots in one city for the long haul, our post-recession economy should encourage renting and mobility and embrace the natural cycle of boom and bust that allows some cities and regions to thrive while others wither and die.

While I don’t believe that we’re going to become a nation of renters overnight, I know firsthand that the housing crisis has left many members of generations X and Y questioning the value of owning a home. For the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who are unable to sell their homes and unable to find fulfilling jobs close to those homes, the carefree and unattached life of a renter certainly has a renewed appeal.

All of this is good news for online learning for obvious reasons. Distance education is designed for people who want to learn without being bound to a particular place. If the recession is forcing Americans to appreciate the value of being mobile, many people might also reevaluate their views on the value of spending years stuck in one place just to get an education.

But what if Florida is wrong? Surely many people put down roots in one place for a host of reasons that outweigh their desire to go wherever jobs are plentiful. With that in mind, it seems likely that employers will be forced to make some compromises in order to attract the best talent. One compromise that seems likely to continue to gain traction is telecommuting—allowing workers scattered across a city, region, or country to work wherever they please.

A friend of mine in Seattle runs a consulting firm that helps companies manage geographically isolated employees. In talking with him about his business during a recent visit, I kept thinking about how valuable the experience of being an online student is for anyone who ever needs to work from a distance. Online courses teach students much more than just how to be good accountants or nurses or programmers or teachers. Online learning also teaches students how to communicate, collaborate, build relationships, and solve problems without being in the same place at the same time. The future of the housing market might be difficult to predict, but it seems clear that technology continues to make working remotely a more viable option for more workers. With that in mind, I can’t think of a better way to prepare today’s students to be flexible, mobile workers than through coursework that transcends geographic boundaries and even the occasional upside-down mortgage.

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Daniel Pink’s Three Factors that Motivate Creating Thinking

Sharon’s recent post about encouraging student creativity got me thinking about assignments that foster innovation and originality. As someone who spent a lot of money to obtain an M.F.A., I have a vested interest in anything that promotes the value of creative education, which is why I’m a fan of Daniel Pink’s work. Pink is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2006 book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. In the book, Pink proposes that we’re experiencing a shift from the information age, which valued knowledge and logical, left-brain thinking, to what he calls the conceptual age, which values innovation and six key “senses.” These senses include:

  1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the senses
  2. Story – Adding narrative to products and services, not just argument
  3. Symphony – Adding invention and big-picture thinking, not just detail focus
  4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition
  5. Play – Bringing humor and lightheartedness to business and products [1]
  6. Meaning – Incorporating a higher purpose into products and services

Pink has gone so far as to proclaim that the M.F.A. is the new M.B.A. and that creative professionals such as artists and designers are the innovative problem solvers who will lead the much-hyped new economy. While I don’t want to oversell the value of an art-school education, I think most educators agree that we’d all love to integrate creative thinking and problem-solving skills into our assignments. Of course, fostering creativity in higher ed comes with several challenges:

  1. How do I motivate students to do great, innovative work?
  2. How do I ensure they’ve mastered essential concepts and skills?
  3. How do I grade their work fairly?
  4. How do I grade their work in a reasonable amount of time?

I realize the last three questions are often the ones that matter most to instructors, but they’re also the most irrelevant if we don’t first address question one when designing creative assignments. As luck would have it, question one is also the focus of Daniel Pink’s newest book, Drive. The following video presents some of the key findings from the book and addresses some common misconceptions about what motivates people to think outside the box.

(This amazing animation was created by a company called Cognitive Media and I have to say I think their work merits a blog post all its own. For another great example, check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Smile or Die”.)

Pink’s presentation proposes that three key factors foster creative thinking: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Hopefully, educators can find it comforting that money and material gain are nowhere to be found in this list, since we can’t start offering students 50 dollars for every great idea they come up with. I feel fortunate to teach in a discipline where these motivating factors seem easy to incorporate into the projects my students complete. In my Web-design course, I allow my students to choose what type of site they would like to create and what type of client they’d like to work for in creating their final projects, giving them a great deal of autonomy. I require that the project result in a completed, fully functional Web site, ensuring students will have a sense of accomplishment and mastery. And I encourage students to work with a nonprofit or small business that normally couldn’t afford a professionally designed site, providing a sense of purpose.

It might seem hard to imagine how other disciplines can incorporate these factors into their assignments, but I’m sure it’s possible. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out all our multiple-choice quizzes and other standardized assessments, and it doesn’t address how to grade creative projects fairly and quickly. But I think when we focus on creating assignments that motivate and inspire students, they tend to go beyond the requirements of any grading-criteria checklist we could have dreamed up. And in the process, they might just inspire us to stop watching the clock and enjoy the task of reviewing and evaluating their work.

 

1. Summaries of items 1 – 5 were taken from the Wikipedia entry for A Whole New Mind.

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The Death of Flash or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs has been waging an increasingly wounding war for years on Adobe’s Flash platform. It all began with Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, which was conspicuously lacking Flash support. At the time, hardcore techies poked fun at Apple’s iPhone ads that promoted it as the smartphone that finally offered “all the parts of the Internet.” The phone’s lack of support for Flash (and Java) even prompted Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority to label the ads as misleading and insist that Apple stop airing the ads in the UK.

While some hardcore iPhone naysayers continue to cite its lack of Flash support as a major shortcoming of the device, many users stopped caring the minute Google began offering a customized version of YouTube for the iPhone. More recently, Google has gone a step further, experimenting with the emerging HTML5 standard and its support for embedded video without the need for third-party plug-ins like Flash. Some predict this experiment is a key step in a larger plan at Google to abandon Flash completely.

Today, Adobe has even more to worry about than being locked out of the massive iPhone audience and the potential loss of visibility on YouTube.com. With iPads currently flying off the shelves and Jobs making increasingly catty comments about Flash to the press, geeks everywhere are quick to proclaim that Apple is driving another nail in Flash’s coffin. Adding insult to injury are the big-name online video providers following Google’s lead. ABC has already created the ABC Player for iPad and rumors abound that Hulu will eventually release a similar application.

So why does any of this matter to instructional-design professionals? While Flash won’t die out overnight, its waning popularity is a very immediate concern for anyone involved in the development and distribution of instructional media. Obviously, anyone who specializes in Flash development has to wonder if it’s wise to continue to tie his or her fortune to a platform that might be obsolete in five to ten years. Similarly, anyone who creates content that might rely on Flash for distribution might need to re-examine how they deliver content to students. This is particularly true if you want students to access that content on an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad.

One major ray of hope in the Flash deathwatch has been Adobe’s promise to add an iPhone application compiler in Flash CS5, which was just released on April 12. This compiler is supposed to allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications, and Adobe has already uploaded many examples to the App Store. However, iPhone developers have already begun citing recent changes to the iPhone Developer’s Agreement, which now states, “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.” In other words, don’t use some other program with some other language to create iPhone apps.

This is all very bad news for Flash developers. However, it’s really a loss for software developers everywhere. Flash might not be perfect, but it is beloved by a cultish following of developers for one key reason: it keeps things simple. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Simple? Isn’t this the same tool that brought the world useless animated introductions with spinning logos and the never-before-needed “skip intro” button? Yes, it’s true. Flash allowed some awful people to do some awful things, but Flash doesn’t kill users. Designers do. When used for good, Flash has simplified life for many programmers by allowing them to create sophisticated applications that look and function consistently across all major browsers on all major operating systems.

Without Flash, designing a Web site that looks tolerably consistent in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8 can be a major headache, let alone trying to make that same site play nice with Firefox and Safari. And for the real masochist, you can try to accommodate Chrome and Opera users too. Now, add to these hassles all of the variables that come with designing for mobile devices—seemingly infinite variations in screen sizes, unpredictable data connections, and controls that range from numeric keypads to full QWERTY keyboards to touch screens where every link needs to be big enough for a grown man’s fat, sausage-like index finger to click without clicking three other items in the process.

Flash promised to spare developers many of these heartaches by letting us build once and deploy to any browser and even create a desktop version any user could download and run via Adobe’s AIR runtime environment. And with CS5, we finally thought we were getting somewhere. We could finally create a single app that could run on the Web, on the desktop, and on any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. Unfortunately, it seems Apple isn’t too keen on Flash developers sullying its beloved App Store with inferior code converted with an inferior compiler. So for now, it seems developers and anyone else with a vested interest in mobile learning are still stuck with a difficult decision: stick with Flash and hope for a cease fire, or try to play catch up with developers who’ve spent years mastering programming for Mac operating systems. I, for one, am keeping option three on the table: abandon technology altogether and start working on a Ph.D. in history. Because no matter how many iPads he sells, Steve Jobs probably won’t force me to relearn the events that lead up to the Treaty of Versailles.

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What Vegas Can Teach Us about Online Learning

I’m a fairly typical, multitasking, always-connected member of generation Y (or a late gen-Xer, depending on who sets the cutoff date). My laptop and I are rarely apart, and I quickly run out of things to occupy my time when I’m deprived of high-speed internet access. (My parents finally upgraded from dial-up just before the holidays and, as a result, I finally agreed to stay with them for more than 48 hours.)

In short, I get bored easily, which is why I’d always suspected that Las Vegas might be my ideal vacation destination. After all, Vegas is designed for people who can’t focus. Buffets are abundant—ideal for those who can’t even commit to a particular entrée for an evening. Cirque du Soleil shows are multiplying like rabbits—perfect for anyone who loves live theatre but hates paying attention to one performer for more than fifteen seconds. Nearly every casino offers a superficial imitation of some ancient city or wonder of the world—fantastic for the tourist who can’t imagine spending an entire week in just France or Italy or Egypt. You could also go through the detailed analysis of US poker and understand what you can do when you want to gamble online.

I just returned from my first Vegas trip, and unfortunately, it seems all of the city’s catering to multitaskers comes at a high price. At first, I was drawn in by the bells and whistles. A slot machine featuring stars from the hit ‘70s game show Password? Amazing! Where do I insert my money? A shopping mall with a maze of canals and happy couples riding in gondolas while being serenaded by a man dressed like the Hamburgler? Incredible! I’ll take two tickets, please.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the bells and whistles lost some of their appeal. “Doesn’t that gondolier know any songs other than ‘Mambo Italiano’?” I wondered. “And why does the attendant in the Parisian pastry shop sound like Marisa Tomei?” I could squint my eyes and pretend the stamped concrete was real cobblestone and the faux-finished walls were made of real plaster. Yet, eventually, I had to accept that underneath it all, Vegas was largely composed of some very mundane raw materials—primarily concrete and overweight chain-smokers.

The same holds true for online courses. We can try desperately to hold our students’ attention with flashy games and constant variety.  We can reel them in with the promise that we won’t make them work too hard or stare at any one thing too long. But sometimes what’s fun or easy isn’t what’s best. A bad discussion prompt is not better just because it takes place online. A boring lecture is not more interesting just because you’re watching it on an ipod. And a hamburger with half a press-on nail wedged under the bun is not better just because it was served by a young woman from Des Moines dressed like Cleopatra.

I like to joke with participants in our faculty-development workshops that there is one key to being an amazing online instructor: just be riveting. Of course, that’s easier said than done. But we all have ways of presenting material that can keep students hanging on our every word. By choosing what to present and how to present it, you can make your lectures and assignments funny, relevant, scary, provocative, or inspiring. And you don’t need technology bells and whistles to do this. Professors have been creating riveting lessons long before the advent of the first educational technology—paper. (And just imagine all the awful things teachers have forced students to read and write simply because it was finally possible to do so without a hammer and chisel!) That’s not to say educational technology is useless. It’s just important that we don’t let it be a driving force when designing a course.

A colleague recently sent me information about the PBS program titled Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier. Portions of the show featured several educational technology scholars discussing the importance of engaging today’s multitasking, millennial learners. There were the usual cliché shots of students texting and updating Facebook while their dinosaur of a professor drones on from the stage below. The scholars talked about the need to keep students engaged the same way their favorite computer games do, with one scholar promoting an entire school curriculum built around game-based learning. While I salute educators for their openness to new teaching methods, I think it’s critical that we not lose sight of what truly makes for an engaging course and what great teachers have been doing right for hundreds of years. In the end, there’s no need for flashing lights and faux finishes if you already have the real Eiffel Tower and great pastries.

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Back to Basics: Free Tools I Can’t Live Without

It’s easy to get excited about the educational potential of new Web 2.0 tools. So many tools appear (and disappear) from month to month, and I often find myself promoting and supporting bleeding-edge tools for instructors who are still struggling to use some of the basic features of Blackboard. So in an effort to keep things simple and avoid putting the cart before the horse, I’ve been trying to focus on projects that offer more bang for my instructional-design buck.

For example, Sarah (one of our amazing grad-student workers) and I are currently helping several Spanish professors convert their paper-based exams into Blackboard quizzes with audio. This quarter, over a hundred students are taking their exams in computer labs on campus, saving instructors lots of grading time and giving the students more immediate feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. It has been great to see this project come together, and it feels like the kind of low-hanging fruit that all instructional designers should be working harder to pick before we attempt to coax a neo-Luddite, tenured professor into running an entire course through Twitter and Posterous.

Yet as much as I love keeping things simple, there are a few Web 2.0 tools I keep coming back to because they’re relatively easy to use and/or they offer features that faculty regularly request. Here’s a very short list of the tools that, at least for me, make the cut and are worth the extra effort.

VoiceThread

While PowerPoint and Keynote remain the best tools for developing presentations, VoiceThread is the most reliable and user-friendly option if you need more than one-way communication. VoiceThread’s in-browser recording makes it easy for users to add narration presentations, and the option for viewers to add text, audio, and video comments is unmatched by other free tools.

VoiceThread’s only major downsides are that students are limited to a maximum of three VoiceThreads with free accounts and that images with fine details (like small text) will often be too blurry to read when uploaded and displayed in the VoiceThread interface.

Viddler

I’ve done a lot of Web 2.0 tool training with non-tech-savvy instructors, and I’ve never had a training session go as smoothly as it does when I’m covering Viddler. Getting users from account creation to recording and embedding their first videos usually takes roughly fifteen minutes with a group of fifteen instructors. The in-browser webcam recording works like a dream. For a quick video intro or comment that needs to be added to an announcement or discussion-board post with minimal fuss, Viddler just works.

PBworks

If you need a wiki for collaborative writing or Web-site building, PBworks is the place to go. They’re the industry leader, and they do what they do very well. Google docs works just fine for sharing simple documents like research papers and presentation outlines. But if you’re looking for a robust tool that makes it easy to create and edit a one- or one-hundred-page Web site, PBworks is the tool for the job. My only hesitation in recommending PBworks these days is their feature set continues to grow, and I’m concerned they’re starting to overwhelm novice users with an abundance of features.

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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.
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You Get What You Pay For

My coworkers like to joke that an endorsement from me is the kiss of death to any Web 2.0 tool. It seems every time I turn around, some new tool I’ve recently tried is shutting down. Last year, I fell in love with Omnisio, a tool that allowed users to create compilations of YouTube video clips. Omnisio also had some basic editing features that let users trim out whatever they didn’t need from each clip, making it possible for instructors to assemble highly focused montages of useful video clips.  Within a few weeks of the time I’d discovered Omnisio, Google bought the company. The Omnisio site currently states that its staff is thrilled to be using their skills to improve YouTube, but so far, Omnisio’s features are nowhere to be found.

After my Omnisio heartbreak, I stumbled upon CircaVie, AOL’s tool for building time lines that could be enhanced with images and video. CircaVie always lacked a few key features that would have made it ideal for educators, but it was easy to use and worked with any AOL or AOL Instant Messenger account name. So I began recommending it to a few instructors and even included it in a few conference presentations. Sadly, the CircaVie site was shut down on January 15, 2009.

The list goes on. As of June 15, online video editing tool JumpCut will be no more. (This was particularly surprising, since JumpCut is owned by deep-pocketed Yahoo!) On June 12, I received an e-mail from Flowgram, a Web-based alternative to PowerPoint, announcing that they’d be closing up shop by the end of the month.

As I ran down the list in my mind, I realized that all of these tools had one thing in common: almost all of them had no source of revenue or depended entirely on ads to stay alive. I used to think free tools like these were a great way to work around the limitations of a bare-bones learning-management system. I also thought they could provide an interim solution while committees took months or years to approve a university-wide rollout of a new tool.

Now it’s clear to me that the best things in life aren’t always free. While we still need quick solutions for small-scale pilot projects, it’s important to recognize that you often get what you pay for when it comes to educational technology. And by that, I don’t mean the expensive tool is always the best. I simply mean when you pay for something (even if it’s just a few dollars), you usually get something in return (like a more reliable service that doesn’t shut down overnight).

While it’s sad to see innovation squelched by the almighty dollar, the current recession has done us all a favor in a way. By killing off weaker startups, there’s room for the best to thrive. For example, VoiceThread offers a great service that makes it easy to build presentations with voice comments, and the thinning of this field should make it easier for VoiceThread to grow its base of paying subscribers. And more paying customers means more money to invest in a reliable, useful product. If you’re a business owner who accepts card payments, you know how important it is to get the cheapest card payment machine for your business.

Similarly, more people should warm up to Evoca, one of the few audio-sharing sites that offers in-browser recording and embeddable audio players. I was a bit disappointed to discover a while back that Evoca stopped offering permanent, free accounts. (They now only offer free thirty-day trials.) But I completely understand why this change was needed. Bandwidth isn’t free, and Evoca now charges a reasonable $2.95 for their basic account, which offers enough storage to meet most instructors’ needs.

So the next time you’re looking for a quick fix to an educational-technology dilemma, ask yourself if there’s a tool available that you can actually pay for. Even if there are free alternatives, it might be worth suffering through a bit of paperwork and shelling out a few dollars a month for something that won’t be here today and gone tomorrow.