Category Archives: Administration

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The Year in FITS

At the close of the year, we often take time to reflect upon the best and worst of the year that has just passed. This has got me thinking about how far our department—Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS)—has come in a mere eight months. In fact, FITS didn’t even officially exist until July 1.

Looking back, I can hardly believe that most of the staff responsible for doing all the training for the Blackboard to D2L transition hadn’t even started nine months ago. Until the third week in May, none of the individuals who would eventually provide all the training had themselves been trained. In seven short months, the FITS Central Support group has done an amazing job writing documentation and developing online tutorials.

This group is also responsible for developing, revising, and delivering the D2L training sessions. Heroically they have, to date, trained more than 650 faculty and 80 support staff. This transition could not have been as smooth without this dedicated team of individuals who sometimes found themselves training with an unstable system or for less than enthusiastic audiences. Throughout it all, they have kept their humor and their desire to help. I am also heartened to see the faculty we have trained embrace the new technology. We know that change is often hard, and we appreciate the effort that so many of our faculty have made to be open minded and willing to make a change.

As I look forward to the new year (and a full implementation), I am thankful for my colleagues and their willingness to always go the extra mile—so a public thanks to Eric, Alex, Lori, Sarah, Kayte, Liz, Elizabeth, Megan, Josh, and Emily. Happy New Year!

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Power Users and Casual Users

One of the questions that has come up as we’ve been training instructors on using the new learning management system, Desire2Learn, goes something like this: Why are they making us learn a new, complicated system when Blackboard did everything I needed it to?

It seems like a reasonable question. I’m not going to tell certain instructors that they aren’t using enough instructional technology when they’re getting their students to learn without it. If they are just using the Learning Management System to post their syllabus and e-mail students, I’m not going to tell them they should change their teaching style just for the sake of using the advanced features of a new system. And part of me feels guilty for making them take the time to learn a new system when they aren’t going to use the exciting, new features that were the reason for the change.

But for logistical and financial reasons, DePaul can only have one active Learning Management System, and the powers that be had to choose the one that they thought would best meet the needs of all instructors—including those who are teaching purely online classes and who need a lot of control and flexibility from the Learning Management System.

But this tension between different kinds of users is not unique to DePaul. It is present in all kinds of software development. Upgrades and improved systems bring new features and better efficiency, but you have to invest in installing and using the new system. And the pace of development can move faster than the ability of casual users to adapt to it.

Think about what happened when we all switched to Microsoft Office 2007. There was a major overhaul to the user interface. While those of us who do document design on a daily basis may applaud how much easier it is to access text styles and keep them consistent now, it was a big adjustment, and in the short term we all lost productivity. If you were the kind of person who only opened Word a couple times a week, it may have taken a long time for the increased efficiency in the new layout and features to cancel out the lost productivity when you were first learning the program, if that ever happened at all!

For whatever reason, software markets seem to be driven by the power users, who demand more advanced features and faster update cycles.

And more casual users are often required to update their software just to stay compatible with everyone else, even if what they have serves all their needs. If you’re using an old version of Microsoft Office, you can’t open the new file formats from Office 2007 without a special plug-in. If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, many of the Web pages you visit may not render properly—Google Docs, for example, no longer officially supports users on Internet Explorer 6. When casual users have to upgrade their technology just to interact with the rest of the world, it’s easy to see why modern luddites claim that the technology is controlling them rather than the other way around.

I’m not anti-technology of course—I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I was. I marvel at how much more I can do with a hand-held device today than you could do with the most advanced computers on the planet twenty years ago, and I’m always excited to try the next big thing in tech. But I think we need to keep thinking about the best way to reduce the friction on more casual users as we go chasing exciting new features.

Sick? No Excuse When You’re in the Cloud!

A respiratory virus had me by the throat—literally. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t something to share with colleagues. I avoided campus for a full week… seven days with no face-to-face time!

I did get in some total downtime, but I still “met” with two faculty members, redesigned three modules for an upcoming online course, and participated in a staff meeting.

I’ll be honest—I’m of mixed mind when it comes to 24/7 accessibility. I don’t have a handheld device, and my cell phone doesn’t even get answered all the time! Yet there are some times when things just need to get done and I’m the one to do them. Even if sick.

So how?

  • Dropbox: http://dropbox.com – This free Web tool has saved me multiple times. Some days I am on multiple campuses, and sometimes I need to access a file from home. I was introduced to this tool while collaboratively writing content for the DePaul Teaching Commons—four writers in four completely different campus locations!
  • Google Docs: http://docs.google.com – An old standby that many faculty know how to use! So good for those subject-matter-expert/instructional-designer content-building activities.
  • Wimba – The synchronous tool integrated within our learning management system—also works as a wonderful “meeting space” when discussing online course content.
  • The Telephone – Do not throw out the old technologies! The landline still has better sound than 99 percent of cell phones, so if your ear is clogged, pick up the phone! And still the best way to hear/participate in a staff meeting.

Best, of course, is not to get sick at all.

But that technology has yet to be perfected.

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.

Resistance is Futile: Embracing an LMS Migration

SNL Online is in full mobilization mode preparing for the migration of eighty-eight online courses from Blackboard to Desire2Learn. A lot of experienced, well-educated, and well-intentioned folks have argued for a university-wide switch, and so we will have it.

Like all real change, the migration is and will continue to be disruptive; old ways of producing, teaching, and taking online courses will necessarily be uprooted and swept away with new theories and practices. Already there have been revelations and lessons learned; here are a few thoughts:

Hope for the best; plan for the worst.

D2L has a migration tool that was pitched as a magic bullet that would make moving over course content a breeze. That’s likely true for certain kinds of course configurations under certain conditions. Your results may vary. Ours certainly did: our requirements for course structure and design make the migration tool essentially useless, and migration will take more time and resources than anyone had imagined.

The demo is not what you’ll get.

Know how automotive writers always insist you drive the exact make, model, and trim level you intend to buy? On the roads you normally drive? The same principle holds true with your new LMS. We’re discovering to our dismay that some of the key features we’d planned on using in our new course designs don’t work when D2L is integrated with other systems—PeopleSoft in our case. The IS boys and girls at our university strongly suggested this might be the case, and so far they’ve been right. Not the end of the world, but definitely a buzz-kill.

Test. And test again.

This certainly applies to the LMS and its features as a whole (see above), but here I’m thinking about our actual course template, or master design. What was argued for in design-planning meetings as being best for users turned out to be unwanted, disregarded, or disliked by actual users in actual user tests. We took the results, revamped our designs, and will run more user tests. User tests aren’t infallible, but they help us make informed decisions and, we hope, better user experiences.

Get everybody on board.

Migrating from one LMS to another is a huge, complex endeavor. We realized early on that a successful migration was going to be more than just our instructional-design team could handle; course authors had to be consulted, faculty needed to be trained, student workers hired and trained, roles and permissions within the LMS defined and assigned, tasks identified, processes created and tracked—and all this in addition to the actual design and reconfiguration of courses.

Our school’s operations team excels at project management and planning, so our design group met with them to map out the project and set up systems to implement, record, and track our process and progress. Seeing all our tasks written on sticky notes and posted to the wall was intimidating at first, but it gave us a realistic look at the challenge we faced and a means of organizing, prioritizing, and delegating. While the project is still enormous, we now have a plan and structure in place that will help us succeed.

Remember to breathe.

While certainly daunting when looked at as a whole, the project is really a set of discrete tasks, most of which can be broken down into still smaller tasks. If I remember that, and take some deep breaths every now and then, there’s actually a certain amount of fun involved. Then migrating to a new LMS becomes just a complex puzzle to be solved, and I can concentrate on finding and fitting the appropriate pieces. Stay tuned.

FERPA and the Web 2.0 Classroom

For the Educause Learning Initiative’s annual meeting, I’ve been preparing a workshop about various legal issues to keep in mind when designing assignments for a course. Specifically we’ll look at copyright, Creative Commons, and FERPA.

Most people look at me funny when I mention FERPA. Working at different institutions of higher education, it is always mandated that I know something about FERPA. Usually it’s just that student educational records are private, that they shouldn’t be shared, and that directory information can be shared unless a student opts out. Normally FERPA is seen as the concern of administrative offices that hold what have been traditionally seen as student records (grades, registration dates, etc).

But FERPA actually covers a bit more than that, and it comes down to how ‘educational record’ is defined. According to the Department of Education, “Education records are currently defined as records that are directly related to a ‘student‘ and maintained by an ’educational agency or institution‘ or by a party acting for the agency or institution.”

This goes beyond grades and dates of attendance. It can include anything submitted by the student to an agent acting on behalf of the institution in the course of their academic endeavors. So yes, this would include an assignment submitted to a faculty member for a course.

Now, I know most faculty members wouldn’t go about giving access to student submissions to anyone who asked, but there tends to be a gray area that can straddle the line of allowable or not.

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

Is this a violation of FERPA?

Please discuss. I have my own interpretation and viewpoint on this—I want to know yours.

CAEL 2009: What about Online?

A couple of weeks ago, I was a presenter at the CAEL 2009 International Conference. CAEL (The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) is by definition broadly interested in assessing and serving adult learners in a variety of programs; nevertheless, I was struck by how few workshops offered anything geared toward online learning.

This isn’t a small matter. Each keynote speaker I heard addressed the importance of serving the underserved, of finding ways to identify, assess, and recruit adult populations who would benefit from increased access to adult and/or continuing education. There’s tremendous opportunity for institutional growth, they declared, and there’s a moral obligation and societal responsibility to do so. However, most presenters were thinking of these efforts as they pertain to on-ground, classroom-based models. Online learning–if mentioned at all–seemed to be regarded as an add-on option of dubious value to traditional academic delivery.

This kind of perspective has to change if there’s any hope of bringing significantly more adults into our community of learners. Do those who sit on marketing and enrollment committees really want to exclude everyone who might benefit from and contribute to a university learning community but for their inability to be physically present in a traditional classroom? Wouldn’t it be better to design and build a scalable online program that could reach and serve adults regardless of their geographic location? Wouldn’t it be better to spend marketing dollars to identify and attract adult learners to an online program, adults who because of family, work, or other obligations will never step foot in another traditional classroom but who could and would take courses online if given the opportunity? Social media marketing is also a highly cost-effective way to expand your reach. You can visit this website to increase your chances of attracting organic engagement. 

I hear all the time that we must not cannibalize our on-ground programs, as if access to education were a kind of zero-sum game. News flash: a single parent facing a long after-work commute in rush-hour traffic to attend even a suburban-campus night class will almost never occupy a seat in your classroom unless he or she has exceptional resolve and resources. That same person could and would complete a degree online if it’s made available, attractive, and affordable.  My evidence of this is anecdotal, but I’m convinced it would be affirmed by some targeted marketing research. Of course, that would take institutional vision and commitment. And a change of perspective, looking out and away from the classroom to where new opportunity awaits.

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Putting a Concrete “Why” in Front of a Necessary “How”: Ideas for Faculty Technology Training

“Often faculty don’t need more training on the tool, they need more training on the affordance of the tool and how to use it to support learning.” Patricia McGee, associate professor from the University of Texas, made this statement while offering tips for training faculty on teaching with technology in the newsletter Higher Ed Impact: Weekly Analysis, published by Academic Impressions.

What she said about learning the tools versus learning the affordance of the tools reminded me of a lot of trainings and conference presentations I have attended, which are usually made up of a lengthy PowerPoint presentation followed by a little bit of product/project demo. The PowerPoint usually covers vendor introductions, the tool’s primary functions displayed as bullet points, a theoretical framework or the background of the product/project (sometimes), the implementation process, and eventually, student feedback. If I am lucky, I might be able to get a few screenshots of the site or a quick run-through of the final project, but often these come at the very end. While a big introduction does help build expectations, without any concrete examples, it is hard for me to understand what exactly this particular technology could bring to my own teaching practice.

Compared to academies, tool providers seem to do better at addressing the issue of affordances up front. If you’ve read Melissa Koenig’s blog entry Story-Telling Tools—Beyond PowerPoint, you might have noticed that almost all of the tool sites incorporate a good number of samples on their home pages (check out PhotoPeach, Gloster, and Toondoo). This shows that the tool producers have figured out the best way to capture the attention of today’s busy and impatient Web visitors—by showing (instead of “telling”) them what has been done by and with the tool. The only challenge here is that many of the examples are for a “general” audience instead of being targeted at educators. Examples of faculty and student use of technology for instructional purpose are usually not presented in one collection. However, that does not mean that they cannot be found (Isn’t it a general rule that you can find anything on the Internet?). It is up to the trainer to locate the appropriate examples that could get instructors thinking, “How should I use this in my class?”

Speaking of selecting appropriate examples for faculty, Patricia McGee provided another practical tip in the article—adopting a tailored approach. Offering generic examples of educational use of the technology is not good enough, since faculty in different disciplines will have different needs. One type of technology that works well for one content area may not work for another. Given the various needs of different disciplines, Patricia McGee pointed out that campus-wide training might not be the ideal option. This is exactly why we developed a tailored DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program with a well-matched combination of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) and implemented a liaison model to embed technology consultants in schools and colleges. Now it is time to bring the same tailored mode beyond the systematic program (such as DOTS) and implement it into all training events.

According to the  CDW 21st-Century Campus Report, faculty’s lack of technology knowledge remains the greatest campus technology challenge perceived by students, and training is the type of support most needed by faculty. Whether faculty training is useful has become a determining factor for how successful technology integration on campus is. The answer to this could be as simple as a tailored training curriculum structured in a meaningful sequence. The one I’d like to propose includes the following three easy steps:

  • Step 1: Provide concrete and relevant examples (a demo of the affordance)
  • Step 2: Pause to choose the best tool for meeting instructor needs
  • Step 3: Train on the use of the chosen tool and the necessary technology

Building Social Media for Students: A Waste of Time?

Perhaps it’s the end-of-summer’s-approaching ennui or plain old cranky, middle-aged contrariness, but as I witness the barnstorming enthusiasm for Facebook-like social media on display at any given online-learning conference and contrast that with the drumbeat reports of Facebook’s declining popularity, I can’t help but think that some of us are living in a state of denial.

I think our intent is good. We want to serve our students, we want to make it easy for them to communicate, we want to create a socially cohesive learning environment, and we want to give them the tools they need to succeed. We think we know our students; we think we know what they want. So let’s build our own social sites!

I’m afraid it’s wasted effort for the most part. Here’s why.

First, we’re replicating existing services and efforts. My department has ruminated for months about a social site for our adult students. Well, surprise! Students who wanted a social space have already created their own Facebook group, demonstrating again the truism that individuals can and do move faster than committees. Will these students abandon the group they created for a university-branded one? I’m betting not.

Second, we’re too late to the game. Facebook is hemorrhaging members, as the cool kids move on.  Twitter is the heir apparent; fast, flexible, and mobile. It certainly has great potential; see James Moore’s excellent presentation at http://preview.tinyurl.com/mg74tv . And as mobile devices become more ubiquitous, you’ll see more and better apps like MobilEdu, created by Terribly Clever Design and recently acquired by—wait for it—Blackboard.

So what does Blackboard know that you and I should? When to recognize that the game has changed. Blackboard realized they couldn’t design a better mobility app than the whiz kids from Stanford and stopped wasting time trying to. They’re free of denial and playing to their strengths.

We should play to ours.

Keeping It Visible: The Joys of Offline Organization

Keeping on top of the daily multitude of tasks we all have in our work is like having another full-time job. There are a number of tools available to the most casual computer users, from the tasks and to-do lists in Microsoft Outlook, to Apple’s Project X, to a variety of Web programs like blist.com and Zoho. In IDD, keeping up with the dynamic nature of the academic environment is especially challenging. Anyone stepping into my shared workspace in the IDD offices at the DePaul Center will quickly notice my own low-tech yet cutting-edge (I think) solution to task management: sticky notes and a wall.

It looks something like this: there are three columns of stickies, each headed by a large note which categorizes that column. “Upcoming Tasks” in the left-most column, followed by “Current Tasks” in the middle, and “Items for Inspection” on the right. Projects or tasks that I need to complete, but which are not a priority today go in the “Upcoming” column. Those things I am working on today belong in the middle. If a project is large, I break it up in to smaller pieces that can be completed more quickly. Those finished projects, or tasks that require the review or “inspection” of others to be considered complete, go under that last large sticky.

Though I’d like to, I can’t take credit for this system. I first learned of the sticky-note revolution from my husband, an agile process-management consultant who teaches the sticky-note idea to teams in a variety of fields, from software to education. What the sticky notes do for me is help keep my workload visible to me and to anyone who needs to know what I’m working on and the status of those projects. At a glance, my colleagues can see where my efforts will be focused on a given day, and this knowledge facilitates ready discussion. The portable nature of the stickies also allows me to reprioritize my work each day. I can reach up and peel off a project under the “Current” heading—perhaps a course that has been shifted to future quarter—and replace it with a new, more immediate task. Should I run into a problem with a task, or need more information in order to complete it, I add a “flag” sticky to that task. Flags are a bright color and list the issue to be resolved. They are removed when the impediment is. Of course, the act of moving a completed task to that finished column gives me a boost in a very real, tactile sense which helps keep my motivation to continue on to the next task.

Adapting the sticky note system to my work in IDD keeps me organized, but also flexible, adaptive and motivated to move that next sticky into the “done” column. I love a good Web app as much as the next person, but I also appreciate simplicity and ease with which I can keep myself organized with just a few adhesive note and a good black pen.