Category Archives: Conferences

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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.

Additional Resources

Add a Pinch of Classroom, a Dash of Online—Blend Well

I had the opportunity to attend the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference in Oak Brook, IL, last week, and as with most education conferences, it’s left my mind full of questions—some answers, but mostly questions. There was a panel discussion on the second day, and some of the most interesting pieces related to research on blended learning conducted at the University of Central Florida (UCF).

Blender

Joel Hartman, Vice Provost at UCF (and EDUCAUSE Leadership Award winner) related some of the key findings from the study of about two million student evaluations taken over several years.

  • Overall, student satisfaction was higher for blended courses than for either face-to-face or online. (At UCF, blended means “courses that combine face-to-face instruction with online learning and reduced contact hours.”)
  • Regardless of format, a course has a 97 percent chance of getting an excellent overall rating if these three items receive excellent ratings: ability to communicate information, interest in student learning, and concern and care for students.
  • For blended courses, the student success outcomes used to be about 14 percent higher than face-to-face or online. Now that gap is much smaller, most likely because strategies from blended are being used in face-to-face and online courses, blurring the lines between the three types.

A phrase about blended learning that I heard at the session that has really stuck with me is “classroom-enhanced online instruction,” as opposed to “web-enhanced classroom instruction.” As students realize that valuable learning opportunities can occur online—on their own schedule and in their pajamas if they wish—they naturally begin to wonder, “Why am I driving/walking/riding to campus?” With blended courses, the in-class time has to seem “worth it”—full of the types of activities that are best done in person and not the types of activities that are better accomplished online. In each discipline these activities will be a little different, but I would like to think and read more about general principles for how to best take advantage of face-to-face time and online time when designing a blended course.

Even though I didn’t win the Samsung Galaxy tablet, the conference was enjoyable and gave me a fresh perspective on course design and teaching. I highly recommend viewing the slides from the keynote address for some thought-provoking statistics and arguments about higher education today and where it needs to be in the future.

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Ready, Set, Act: Running Your Show in the Classroom

The sound so vibrant and rich, the tone so vivacious, the gesture so pulsating, and the emotion so poignant and touching, it brought tears to the eyes of the audience as they listened to the recitation of the “poem”—or what they thought was a poem.

“It was done in Russian by a renowned actor from Russia,” my father said as he described the performance, conducted by a visiting Russian actor to his theatre troupe in China in the 1950s. Although none of the Chinese audience could understand a single word of it, they were completely mesmerized by the presentation—until one of them raised the question: what is it saying in the poem?

No, it wasn’t a poem. With a short pause, the actor revealed, through an interpreter, what he was reciting—a restaurant menu!

So with all the feelings and passions he could project, he was reciting something like cabbage rolls, fish sautéed with onions and mixed with hard-boiled chopped eggs and, oh, potatoes mashed then mixed with eggs and smetana!

This story came to my mind as I started to plan for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference with colleagues from the office of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. The theme we selected for this year’s conference is teaching as an act of body and brain. Inspired by Nancy Houfek’s philosophy and practice of using theatre techniques to enhance teaching (see the video below), we decided to bring her to DePaul as a keynote speaker to talk about the power of acting or how to induce tears by reading a menu.

As Nancy points out, the techniques used by actors to captivate an audience can very well be borrowed by professors to engage students in the classroom. Yet in our daily practice, we as teachers often focus almost solely on the content and leave the delivery of the content to chance.

Content is critical, but without gaining the attention of your audience, it won’t come across. While the story of menu reading is a bit extreme, it does convey a very strong message: sometimes when it is done extremely well, the presentation can overpower the content! Even if we can’t go that far, it can at least help us capture the attention of our students.

There is a common attribute shared by the profession of acting and the practice of teaching: both require a high dosage of passion. We teach largely because we are in love with it. The difference between us and actors is that they seem to know better how to make that passion visible—through their voice, gestures, and body languages. We teachers, on the other hand, rarely make any conscious choice about the nonverbal messages that we convey, especially when we are in the classroom.

On May 6th, following Nancy’s keynote speech, DePaul Theatre School professor Natalie Turner-Jones will lead a practical workshop exploring theatre-based techniques that can be applied to the classroom environment. She will explain why the way we use the classroom space, gesticulate to make a point, move, breathe, or pause all convey a clear message to our students and how making conscious choices in these areas empowers teachers to create an engaging and playful learning environment.

So, if you haven’t yet, please mark your calendar for May 6th’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference and registers online at http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/Conference/registration.html

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.

The Customer is Always Right?

Last month, I attended a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective.” Her study, coauthored with Leda Nath (Raslton-Berg & Nath, 2009), asked students to describe their level of agreement with the current Quality Matters standards for online courses and the level to which elements within each standard contributed to their overall success. I was interested in getting this look at online courses from the student perspective to perhaps glean some useful implications for my own design. What I walked away with was a disturbing reinforcement of the competing global motives for my role as an instructional designer and online educator.

As expected, students highly valued technology that worked; clear, consistent navigation in their course sites; and instructions on how to access resources. It was what students found least valuable that caught my attention. Based on this survey, online students do not want to:

  1. Find course-related content to share with the class
  2. Use wikis, shared documents, or other collaborative tools
  3. Introduce themselves to the class
  4. Coach other students
  5. Attend synchronous meetings
  6. Interact with games and simulations
  7. Work in groups
  8. Receive audio or video content

Surprised?

I was. Could this be a call to remove the interactivity and engaging content from our courses? Despite the research, does social presence not matter? Should we return to online learning circa 1996? Are these elements really that repulsive to our students?

Or could it be that they are so frequently misused we’ve given them a bad name.

I know how I would feel after being besieged with a sixty-minute talking head in a three-inch square frame; after suffering though a pointless game for the sake of the instructor being able to check the “included game in my course” box on a rubric somewhere; or after participating in a meaningless, unguided group activity in which I do all the work and my group mates get the same grade.

This cry from our constituents, we want engaging, interactive content in our courses. Just give it a purpose.

Maybe the customer is right.

References

Ralston-Berg, P. & Nath, L. (2009). What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective. Paper presented at Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, Madison, WI.

Quality Matters rubric standards 2008-2010 edition (2008). Retrieved from http://qminstitute.org.

The complete findings are also available at http://www.slideshare.net/plr15/what-makes-a-quality-online-course-the-student-perspective-1829440

Liveblogging at the 2009 DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference

Today is the 14th Annual DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference focuses on ways that personalism plays out in various teaching practices at DePaul. Eric Iberri, Melissa Koenig, and Jeanne Kim (as “iddresources”) will be liveblogging Dr. Punya Mishra’s keynote, “Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World” and a few other sessions if time and technologies permit.

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Thoughts for Teaching “Digital Natives”

I recently returned from the NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services) Annual Conference interestingly entitled, Barbarians at the Gate? The focus of this conference was on the impact that “digital natives”—defined as those born after 1980—and emerging technologies have on the future of information services.  As one might imagine, based on the conference title, there is a perception that digital natives are very different than those of us outside this generation.  The word “barbarian”also implies that somehow their skills are not as refined as those of us born before 1980.  But is this really the case?

Conference keynote speaker, John Palfrey, author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, found in his research that adoption of new technologies is more dependent on socioeconomic status than on generational affiliation.  This idea was echoed by Dr. Ian Rowlands, managing director at the Center for Information Behavior and Evaluation of Research, and director of the Research Centre for Publishing, University College London.  In his research, he found that in the UK those over 65 were online four hours more per week than 18-to-24-year-olds.  Both of these findings refute, in part, our common perceptions of technology utilization.  In the end, it seems as though search behavior and technology utilization are less of a generational issue and more of an issue of access.  This raises the question that if socioeconomic status and access to technology define who uses technology, are “digital natives” really different than the rest of us?

Mimi Ito is a research scientist at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, Annenberg Center, University of California and a visiting associate professor at Keio University. His research has found that there are some fundamental differences in what digital natives do with information (a link to her speech from the conference can be found here).  In particular, the idea that digitalnatives use information and media to tell stories about who they are—essentially making and sharing media is a fundamental literacy for this generation.  This is a fundamental change from previous generations and one that we should take note of.  This generation can be defined (again loosely as not all digital natives have access to technology) as being part of a remix culture.  To many in this generation, it is okay to take something that exists, change it slightly, and republish it.  Traditional ideas of copyright are not as important to them as it may have been to previous generations.

As instructional designers, what does this profile tell us about how we should be designing classes for the newest generation of college students?  I would argue that we should consider the following:

  • Use of media should be purposeful and provide meaning to the course—these students are not going to be impressed that instructors can embed a video lecture in their class. 
  • Information should be provided not only in multiple technology formats (video, audio, multimedia, text) but also in various genres (narrative, fiction, nonfiction) and remixing should be encouraged.
  • Along with traditional research papers, course assignments should also allow for multiple means of completion including the creation of digital media like short films, animations, digital images, etc.
  • Students need to be educated about laws around copyright and fair use.  Creative Commons licensing should be encouraged.
  • Collaborative spaces should be provided for those students who prefer to work in a collaborative environment while options for those students who prefer individual work are still maintained.
  • Inquiry and problem-based learning should be included as well as more traditional methods.

So are “digital natives” really that much different than the rest of us?   I would argue that what these “natives” really want is to be able to find information quickly, easily, and freely; use what they find to create new knowledge; and easily share what they find and create with others.   Does that make them different?  You decide.

Three Things I Learned at SLATE

The annual SLATE conference was held on Thursday and Friday of last week (October 9 and 10). SLATE is the Blackboard users group for the Chicagoland area. This conference has been growing every year; this year I found participants from as far away as Kansas, Nebraska, and the St. Louis area. While a few vendors attend—primarily those providing Building Blocks for Blackboard—the conference provides a balance between technology and pedagogy (how to employ the technology to achieve learning objectives).

Here are three things I took away from this year’s SLATE conference:

  1. READI—an online test to measure a student’s readiness for online learning. This tool was presented by North Park University, where it has been employed both for their online students and as a faculty-development tool. READI, short for Readiness for Education At a Distance Indicator, provides the student with a report about his or her learning style, individual attributes, technical knowledge and competency, reading speed and comprehension, and typing speed and accuracy. In addition to the report—which also shows students how they compare to others who have taken the test—students are provided with links to helpful online resources.
  2. EQUELLA—a learning-object repository that can be used with multiple types of content management systems. Southern New Hampshire University presented on how Equella is being used for its online courses.
  3. Blogs and Wikis for Writing—Heath Tuttle from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln gave this informative presentation. While he is currently able to use the learning-objects Building Block in Blackboard, he started using Blogs and Wikis for his writing classes before that was available.