All posts by Sarah Brown

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About Sarah Brown

Sarah has worked in the College of Education and with FITS since 2010. She also teaches in the Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse department. She earned her undergraduate degrees in Secondary English Education and Writing at the University of Findlay in Ohio, and after teaching at Miami Valley Career Technology Center in Dayton, Ohio for two years, she moved to Chicago to earn her MA in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul. When she’s not teaching or testing out a new technology, Sarah runs, crochets, and cooks.

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Instructional Designer 2.0; or, How do I explain my job to my grandparents?

When I taught high school English, saying my job title was an explanation in itself, mostly because anyone I was talking to had experienced high school English for themselves. The only difficulty was to convince them I was still an OK person even though I was a high school English teacher: “Don’t worry—I won’t be correcting your grammar or suggesting syntax improvements during our conversation!”

Now, when I say that I’m an “Instructional Designer,” the expression on most people’s faces is one of polite befuddlement—I may as well have said I’m a “Foley Artist” or “Happy Salad Model.”

That’s why I was surprised when Peggy Maki, the keynote speaker at the Teaching Commons Fall Forum, mentioned instructional designers. In her talk on the scholarship of teaching and learning, Dr. Maki was explaining the connections among program outcomes, course outcomes, assignments, and student learning, and she advocated for a clearer linearity across those elements. As an aside, she said (excuse my loose paraphrase), “And that’s why instructional design is so popular now.”

I was sitting right in front of Dr. Maki when she said this, and I think she saw my politely befuddled face. Popular? Instructional design? I think my friends and family have a vague understanding of what I do, Continue reading →

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Gamifying My Two Favorite Things: Running and Eating (and then Teaching!)

As a dutiful instructional designer, I’ve been paying attention to the concept of gamification. I’ve read some James Paul Gee, I’ve reflected on the time spent in my formative years (or *cough* last weekend) playing Zelda, and I’ve listened to our resident guru on the subject, Daniel Stanford, talk about how we could make the concept work within our courses and within D2L. But gamification remained only an interesting side topic that I sometimes devoted brainspace to until a couple of weeks ago, when I purchased the Fitbit Flex.

First, a disclaimer: I’m not trying to do any awkward product placement in our blog. There are several activity trackers out there, and I just happened to buy the newly-released Flex. Continue reading →

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TEDx Windy City: More than Just a Magic Berry

You know those awesome, addictive TED talks that can easily absorb hours of your time if you’re not paying attention? As it turns out, Chicago puts on an annual, local TEDx conference, and a couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday among the brilliant people.

As expected, the day was inspiring and brain-tiring, and I left feeling sure that none of those people waste time watching The Bachelor or reading the Craiglist Missed Connections or playing a pointless “find the hidden object” game on their iPad (guilty, guilty, and guilty). But I basked in their magnificent glow for several hours, and these are the two talks that stuck with me most: Continue reading →

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Please Don’t Interrupt Me While I’m Talking to Myself—Er, My Students

As a realist (read: former high school teacher), I know that introducing new technology for student assessment needs to be done with a healthy mix of sound pedagogical practice and efficiency. And, sometimes—particularly around, ahem, week ten of the quarter—efficiency can take precedence.

With those two qualifications in mind, I tried giving audio feedback to my students last year. I teach in the First Year Writing program, so I had students turn in texts to me via the D2L Dropbox, and for those assignments, I still used Microsoft Word’s track-changes feature to give them feedback.

But when it came time to look at the ePortfolios they were building in Digication, I felt like I needed to do something different, for a few reasons:

Functionality: Digication doesn’t yet have a feature for instructors to give in-line feedback on ePortfolios, though it’s something they’re working on. In the meantime, though, my first method was opening a Word document and typing into it as I read the student’s ePortfolio. This sort of worked, but I felt like I was spending more time describing what part of the ePortfolio I was looking at than I was actually giving feedback.

Genre Appropriateness: When students turn in texts, it makes sense for me to respond to them in text—I can make grammar/usage corrections easily, and if I want to show a student how to reorganize a sentence or paragraph for clarity, I can easily copy and paste that content to show changes. With ePortfolio content, which typically includes multimodal elements, it just seemed goofy for me to write up a reaction to the images and videos that the students had put in their portfolios.

Depth: As an early graduate of the Mario Teaches Typing school, I can produce a few paragraphs of feedback for students pretty quickly. But my swift fingers are no match for my talking skills (note how I avoided the phrase “hot air” there).  And, there’s no law against combining some text feedback with audio, which is really easy to do in D2L with the Record Audio feature (see page 5 here).

Feelings and Stuff: Please don’t throw stones at me for saying this, but on occasion, I enjoy grading. This aberration usually occurs when I see the improvement/hard work/excellence/etc. in what a student has turned in. I do a little happy dance, and then I try to put that happy dance in text, and using ten exclamation marks just doesn’t seem to do it (and it probably weirds out students). A voice recording, where the student can hear how jazzed he or she just made me, comes much closer.

So, with all of these sound pedagogical reasons in hand, I gave it a try, and guess what? It also conveniently took much less time, and I still felt like I had given quality feedback to my students.

I did some digging to see if other instructors were trying this method, and I found Mary Lourdes Silva’s “Camtasia in the Classroom: Student Attitudes and Preferences for Video Commentary or Microsoft Word Comments During the Revision Process.” In her writing course for engineering majors, Silva gave students both Microsoft Word comments and screencasted feedback (capturing both voice and the student’s paper on the screen).

Silva reports that “…several students found the video commentaries more personable because they assumed that I spend more time on the video commentaries that on the Microsoft Word comments, although the Microsoft Word comments, on average, took 10 minutes longer per student per essay (10 pages in length).”

Also, of the sixteen students who watched the video, four students replayed the entire video twice, and eleven replayed parts two to four times. Silva also surveyed students, and of the seventeen who responded, eight preferred the video commentary, and six found a combination of the Microsoft Word comments and video to be most helpful.

The biggest obstacle Silva faced was video file size, which is the reason I still just record audio, which is a smaller file size. The problem is that I have to count on my students to open their ePortfolios and follow along while they listen to my feedback.

I’ve continued to give audio feedback in subsequent classes, and my students anecdotally report feelings similar to Silva’s students—the combination of some Word commenting and some audio works for them.

I’ve also gotten better at recording audio: I speak more slowly, ramble less, and give clearer direction to students to let them know exactly what I’m looking at.

Audio feedback won’t work for every assignment, but evidence suggests that it’s a worthwhile option for some assignments, from both the instructor and student perspectives. At the very least, nothing beats the look on someone’s face when they knock on your office door, expecting to interrupt a meeting, and find that it’s just you talking to your computer.

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When “The Social Network” Penetrates the Rest of our Lives: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

When we learn something new, it’s natural (and often helpful) to reference previous experiences. In the trainings we’ve been holding for Desire2Learn, we’ve often found ourselves making comparisons to other Web tools in hopes of fostering connections to the new system.

With D2L, one of the first comparisons that comes up is Facebook. When we show people how to create a profile, they are entering information “as they would on Facebook.” Then, once they’ve added a picture of themselves, that picture displays in discussions “like it does on Facebook.”

I wanted to step back from this comparison for a moment, though, to ask, “How useful is this practice? What is the cost-benefit ratio?”

The Good: Familiarity Breeds Usability

In many cases, yes, using knowledge of other tools to learn a new tool is helpful. Usability studies (often from Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert I love to cite) show that features of websites that we can “learn” will make our experiences with a site better.

For example, on most websites, companies place their logo in the upper-left corner of the screen, and this logo serves as a link to the site’s homepage. This wasn’t always the case, but once this feature became available on several websites and users “learned” to click the logo to go back to the homepage, it caught on as a common feature across the Web.

Profiles and other tools operate in D2L do seem to be taking cues from social networking. It’s helpful to see a student’s face next to their discussion posts, and students in online classes appreciate the extra touch that “seeing” their instructor throughout the course provides. Since this is a familiar feature from Facebook, it can make the Discussions tool more usable.

The Bad: Identity Crisis

Unfortunately, something that we learn in one tool doesn’t necessarily translate to every other space on the Web. If the Discussions tool in D2L looks like a Facebook wall, will students have the savvy to switch to a professional tone when they enter an area whose appearance usually reads “social”?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I would argue that this is an important teachable moment. We are communicating more and more online or via text, and the ability to switch your persona and your tone in different scenarios is a valuable one. These can be the most difficult learning curves to overcome, since it’s harder to differentiate between two similar items than it is to differentiate between opposites. In this case, familiarity is at the core of the problem, but by setting clear expectations and modeling effective professional communication, you will help students learn a skill that is a “must” for their future professional lives.

The Ugly: Social Network Contempt = New Tool Contempt

I can’t say that I’m as big a fan of Facebook as others in my demographic, and I sometimes worry that making comparisons to Facebook can be problematic for our audience in trainings. Many people aren’t the happiest with Facebook right now due to some recent troubles with changes they made to privacy settings, so I don’t want to bring any negative baggage to the new system.

While these are negative experiences we may not want to associate with a new tool, I think they can also make us smarter users overall, which never hurts when we’re learning. Rather than encountering a rude surprise when we discover that our D2L profile information (where we shared our love for bubble baths and interest in YouTube videos of babies using iPhones) is available to everyone in our academic classes, we know to ask questions about information availability up front.

Whether you’re thrilled or horrified to see features familiar from social networking sites find their way into your learning management system, remember that you don’t need to use these features any more than what helps you as an instructor. There may be a trend toward social networking, but don’t let that force you into constructing 140-character assignments.

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Teaching Frustrations: Why Don’t Students Follow My (Clearly-Labeled, Logically Organized, and Bold/Highlighted/Flashing) Instructions?

Instructors who teach in online environments often devote extensive time and energy into designing a Web space that is inviting and useful to students. But frustration inevitably ensues when, despite the careful consideration given to the most logical placement of a discussion forum and the “clearest” instructions provided to students on how to post to the forum, the instructor still receives e-mail from students asking, “So, where is this discussion forum? And what am I supposed to do?” Why has this gap in communication occurred?

One reason for this may be the typically linear design of course sites. Often, learning-management systems adopted by universities have default settings that establish some of the design considerations for the instructors—i.e., the location and style of course navigation. These linear designs generally have the best intentions, since they try to organize information so that students can navigate course material easily, following step-by-step instructions and information.

However, with recent developments in eye-tracking software showing how users really view content on the Web, we can see why this linear design isn’t quite ideal. This video shows a user’s eye movements when scanning IKEA’s Web site, and several other examples available online confirm this rapid pattern of eye movement that jumps all over the page. It’s no wonder, then, that students miss the carefully placed, bolded, and highlighted instructions for turning in an assignment that you were sure everyone would see and follow—considering how the brain ingests and computes information from the screen, it’s easy to see how a linear design style for course materials might not match the ways in which users view the content.

So, what is the solution? Unfortunately, there isn’t a Band-Aid design scheme that addresses this issue, and because instructors are often working within an institutionally mandated learning-management system, course design happens within set boundaries. One important step is usability testing, which can reveal issues that designers can’t see once they are invested in their design decisions. This may seem like an onerous and time-consuming task, but it doesn’t need to be—usability guru Jakob Nielsen recommends five users for testing, but as this data shows, even finding two or three people to look at your course and perform key tasks can give you helpful information to improve your course design.

Another important step is realizing that, just as in face-to-face classrooms, your goal (for students to follow instructions) needs to clearly align with your assessments:

  • Include instructions in a logical location, as determined by your course design.
  • Ensure that students have seen these instructions. One effective method is to give students a graded quiz at the beginning of the term that asks them to locate important information throughout the online course.
  • Show students that following instructions is important by grading them on it. Depending on your class, you might make part of an assignment’s grade based on following the assignment’s instructions, or you could refuse to accept an assignment until the student has followed the directions.

Again, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for designing courses that adhere to the ways users view information on the screen. This also isn’t a “lost cause” for instructors—just because users naturally view Web content in a nonlinear way doesn’t mean that the design of online course materials needs to be completely overhauled. Thoughtful design can help students, but supporting your design with clear expectations and assessments can also help students navigate your course more effectively.

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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.