The most recent video posted on DePaul’s Teaching Commons features Mary Frances DeRose of the School of Public Service. The video focuses on what she’s learned about how to teach statistics since first arriving at the university.

Difficult Courses: Statistics, produced by videographer and animator Heather Banas, joins a growing number of short videos about teaching available in the Teaching for Learning video archive. Each video features DePaul faculty members—from a variety of disciplines—talk about how they teach.

I am not an objective observer. By way of honesty, I was privileged to produce some of the first videos for the DePaul Teaching Commons website. But, as a sometime qualitative researcher, I also can’t help seeing this archive as a growing collection of data! And have, therefore, noticed some themes!

Watch some of the videos and see if you don’t agree:

• Theme One: Some assessments are worthwhile, some are not.
• Theme Two: Real world examples engage students.
• Theme Three: Make good use of students’ time in the classroom.
• Theme Four: Use multiple techniques during class to address the varying abilities among students.
• Theme Five: Create opportunities for immediate feedback.
• Theme Six: Create opportunities where students can view their progress.

In the statistics video, I was particularly impressed by one assignment used by DeRose: returning to the same journal article (one selected by the student) several times throughout the quarter. Over the course of the class, students realize how much they have learned. An assignment to match all six themes!

An upcoming opportunity to hear DePaul faculty talk about teaching—this time live and in person—is the DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, May 6. Register today!

In the FITS Department, there are a few things we assume pretty often. We are tasked with providing technology training and support services to faculty and with designing and assisting in the implementation of online courses. So the technology part of the Instructional Technology Consultant or Instructional Designer is often what’s emphasized the most. The majority of the work we do involves interacting with, mastering, and then teaching emergent technologies. However, even before the explosion of all this technology, people like us were doing the same job with more emphasis on the instructional part. We are here to support teaching and learning first. Doing so with technology comes second, but it’s easy to forget this when we are surrounded with faculty who want the next big thing right now. Think back a long ways to the days when reel-to-reel films became available relatively cheaply. Before long, someone decided that these films would be great to show to students in school, and then the initial challenge was presented: how to incorporate such a novel experience as watching a film in school as authentic learning experiences. Once the novelty wore off for students, the next challenge was to continue to use audiovisual materials to enhance instruction rather than just relying on them as instruction in and of themselves. Thus, instructional design begins to be an important idea, as a changing world prompts new ideas and new challenges in bringing those ideas to fruition.

We live in a technological world; by most accounts we are firmly entrenched in the digital age, and technology of all types is becoming virtually inescapable. We take for granted the ability to do things that were impossible only a few years or even a few months ago. I’m just old enough to remember the first wave of personal computers in schools and homes, and today you can buy a calculator that will do more than that TRS-80 or Apple II was ever capable of. Not only are we improving these near-ubiquitous technologies at a relentless pace, but the pace of these improvements is also increasing as development cycles are shortened. Today’s college students probably don’t remember not having the Internet or cell phones, but the tipping point where just about everyone had them still happened within their lifetimes!

I’ve got a technological job. I spend my days exploring technologies on the cutting edge and helping professors integrate them into classroom instruction. I am usually in front of at least one computer, more often two, all day long, and I am connected to the world through a work e-mail account, a personal e-mail account, and an instant-messaging client. I’ve got a telephone, but honestly it doesn’t get used much, as most people seem to prefer e-mail these days. I couldn’t escape all of this progress if I wanted to; in fact, it’s my job not to! Some days I feel like a technological fire fighter, because it’s my job to run into the fires that everyone else is running away from.

With all of these technological marvels swirling around us all the time, it’s easy to lose focus on the real nuts and bolts of the task: designing instruction. The task is about people, about talking to them and finding out what makes their course tick, and then translating that into improvements in pedagogy, streamlined access to resources, and smoother technology integration in the classroom for those elements that are technology dependent. Even though we’re some of the chief pushers of technology at DePaul, the ideal we are striving for is to get the technology out of the way so the teaching can continue, unburdened by “How do I…” or “I can’t….” Instructors should be asking questions that begin with “I’d like to” instead of “I need to,” and students shouldn’t be confused as to why something is used in their courses; a well-designed course makes all of the answers transparent and linear.

Yes, we love technology and try to find new ways to use it all the time, but not just because we can. Instructional design is about ideas, not stuff, and the end result should be a memorable learning experience for students no matter how it is reached. Instructors will still teach, and students will still learn, and we will still be standing in the middle of those two, working to make the jobs of both parties easier and more fulfilling and to keep them all looking forward.

In the world of instructional design, it is a given that a set lead time is necessary for online-course development. With faculty availability, course load, and designer workload in mind, the instructional designer wants to plan up front to make as much time and room for the development process as possible. To nail down course objectives, learning activities that meet those objectives, media assets, and any of the other myriad pieces of course content, an instructional designer generally favors the cushion of perhaps two terms ahead of when the course is to be taught to coordinate with the instructor and the other members of the design team.

On the other hand, “on the fly” course development—that is, building a course as it is being taught, week by week—is a common, if little desired, practice. Instructors have many priorities, including academic travel, which too often trump their commitment to developing new courses. Resourceful instructional designers make a course happen, even when bumping against (and past) deadlines. Designing on the fly can seem like the least-desired way to develop an online course offering, but is it always?

Software development, a field not too far flung from online training and teaching, has recently begun to realize a sea change in the dominant process philosophy: from traditional, upfront “waterfall” process to iterative, adaptive, “agile” methods. Waterfall is a process where the activities flow down an orderly succession of steps, such as:

1. Concept
2. Requirements
3. Architectural design
4. Detailed design
5. Coding and development
6. Testing and implementation

This linear series of steps is in contrast to the “agile” concept of development, where projects are built in iterations, with regular retrospection into the needs of the customer and how the evolving project should adapt to meet them.

Image courtesy Kumido Adaptive Strategies

At its core, agile believes that it is impossible to know everything required to build software up front, that the customer can only gain that knowledge from the process itself.¹ And so it often is with course development! Until a course is actually taught to students, it can be impossible to determine whether it will meet their learning needs as it is designed. That tool for the synchronous session never worked as it was promised and will need to be abandoned for a better option, or you realized during the quarter that those five-point discussions need to be turned into written assignments.

This isn’t to say that the structure of a course should be changed midstream. The syllabus given to students at the beginning of the offering term is essentially a learning contract and sets an expectation for the learning experience to come. But what if the process of developing the course allowed for a more iterative model? What would a more agile approach to instructional design look like? How could we design learning modules that are highly adaptable and easily changed? Can we embrace the idea that learning materials and programs are not designed, then built, and only then evaluated—let alone that they are produced with the expectation of updates and new versions to be produced? How do we adapt the course-development process to allow for much, much more feedback from the learners and educational stakeholders?

As e-learning becomes online learning and online learning becomes a major component of the educational model, our development techniques and philosophies must also evolve. All development up front is an ideal, but perhaps it is an ideal of the past.

¹ Extracted from: Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, James R. Trott – NetObjectives Lean-Agile Series.

This is an analogy Dr. Carol Wren used to describe her feelings about online teaching—feelings that are shared by many participants of our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. “Teaching online,” as she says in the video below, “is sort of like learning a second language. You have to take what is unconscious and make it conscious. It is going from what you might call a cognitive understanding and making it metacognitive—that is, thinking about what you are doing.”

Carol’s analogy strikes me — a person who cuts across both fields as a trainer/promoter of online teaching and as a learner/instructor of a second language. Thinking about my own experience in learning (and then teaching), I believe a second language provides me with deeper understanding of how and why faculty would relate it to their feelings about teaching online. Without Carol’s permission, I am taking the liberty of adding a few validating factors to her comparison of the two dichotomies: teaching face-to-face versus teaching online and learning your first language versus learning a second language.

An Unconscious versus a Conscious Process of Learning

In learning to speak our native language, we observe, imitate, and interact. Most of these actions are taken without any awareness that we are learning. In this sense, learning to speak one’s first language is more of a natural and unconscious process, which is somewhat like how many of us get into the teaching practice in the classroom: we observed, for years and years, how it was done by our teachers, picked up the ideas, and carried them into our own classroom.

Learning to speak a second language, on the other hand, is a much more cognizant process that requires not only the intentional effort of memorizing and practicing but also a clear awareness of the learning effort itself. It takes some thinking to bring up a word and some more thinking to piece together a sentence—just like when we start to put a course online. It requires not only knowing what technical tools to use to carry the instruction but also how to conduct it. And often, what comes after the interpretation process is something that is completely “foreign:” a one-hour-long presentation is now four pieces of short videos followed by some online discussions; a term paper becomes a three-phase assignment that requires self-review, peer review, and instructor review; an in-class quiz is an online test with auto-feedback. The only difference is that instead of calling it “interpretation,” we call this process “instructional design.”

Implicit versus Explicit Rules and Objectives

While speaking a native language, one doesn’t have to think about grammar, sentence structure, and tenses. Your verbal expression follows the flow of your thinking, naturally and intuitively. Your thoughts are put forward in the form of words without any attentive effort.

When I asked my students why they would use “I have been to New York” instead of “I went to New York,” they said, “Well, ‘cause it sounds right.” But why does it sound right? Without knowing this “why,” we—the nonnative English speakers—wouldn’t know when to use which, and you—the native English speakers who are learning Chinese—wouldn’t know which Chinese word you should use.

Teachers and students both know the rules in the face-to-face class intuitively since they both grow up in this kind of environment, which is like knowing their first language, but all the “grammars” need to be clearly spelled out in the online world: what is expected, why it is expected, how to achieve the expectation, and when to achieve it.

For online students, you have to show them the ropes to avoid the drops.

The Cultural Connection

Language isn’t an independent entity. It represents the culture it stems from, and it is always attached to that culture. Isn’t it the same for online teaching? In order to teach online, you have to not only learn the skills to instruct through this medium but also prepare yourself to see the online world, which has developed (and is still developing) a culture of its own. Being open to that culture, talking to people coming from that culture (e.g. online students), and understanding the expectations of that culture become an important part of online teaching, just like when learning a foreign language. The sense of cultural sensitivity is essential to the online world where even font types can carry meanings that could impact the impressions of a viewer in front of the screen that is a thousand miles away.

The Surprising Benefit of Knowing Another

Students in my Chinese language class never thought that they would have to think more about English when they were studying Chinese. Likewise, it usually caught faculty by surprise when they realized that what they learned about online teaching was impacting the way they teach in the classroom.

Dr. Christine Reyna, a psychology professor, told us during a wrap-up interview with DOTS, “One thing that is really surprising to me about DOTS was how much it challenges me to think differently about my face-to-face class.”

After running eight editions of DOTS in the past three years, we are no longer surprised by comments like this. Examined closely, DOTS seems to be fulfilling the kind of profession education that Dr. Lee Shulman is calling for: to make the learners not only gain the skills but also the mentality and the moral of the profession they are studying for. When it comes to teaching online, what lies behind the technical skill is the pedagogical knowledge, and what goes beyond the knowledge is the virtue of being an online instructor.

So what is the virtue of an online instructor? I would say that an online instructor is the one who has the following attributes:

• Well organized (since an online course needs to be well organized, and an organized site is a reflection of the organized mind of its instructor)
• Advanced planning (since an online course is like an airplane that can’t be built while flying it; it takes a lot of planning prior to the launch)
• Caring and thoughtful (since this is the moral base for any user-friendly interface)
• Predictive (because all the foreseeable obstacles, either the logistical or the technical, need to be anticipated and addressed ahead of time)
• Concise and focused (since this is the only way to catch student’s attention before they click away)
• Efficient and responsive (as demanded by the pace and the turn-around time of online communication)

Now tell me, will any of these characteristics turn around to benefit teaching in the classroom?

That is the question I’m asked every time I tell someone what I got my degree in or what I do for a living. What is instructional design? How do I explain this ever-changing field? I could give them the textbook definition—instructional design is the practice of arranging media and content to help learners and teachers transfer knowledge most effectively. But this definition is only the tip of the instructional-design iceberg.

What many people do not know is that instructional design has been around for decades. The field has its roots back in World War II, when the US military was faced with the challenge of training a large number of people to use complex machinery. The training model the military created worked so well that it was applied to the civilian work force. Businesses started creating their own training program to get their workers trained quickly and efficiently, including hiring interim polonais workers to meet immediate needs. Instructional design only advanced as the years passed. It might go by different names, but there is instructional design in every training manual or tutorial someone looks at.

In this rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for efficient accounting practices has never been more pronounced. With the integration of Bright’s comprehensive solution for streamlining accounting business workflows, many firms have witnessed significant improvements in their day-to-day operations. The software’s ability to handle complex financial data with ease and accuracy is a game changer. This has not only saved time but also reduced the margin of error in financial reporting.

Delving into employee training and development, the right data can be transformative. A dashboard that provides detailed insights into employee performance and learning patterns is invaluable. Such tools not only facilitate better training programs but also help in tracking progress. A notable example in this area is InetSoft.

Today, instructional design encompasses a lot more. Instructional design can be used to create 3D educational movies about the solar system or how to load a camera. It can be used to make fun but education games. It can be used to create flight simulators for the Air Force. It can be used to create a simple tutorial video on how to check and change your oil.

And at DePaul, we are using instructional design to help instructors create courses that are taught not in a classroom but through the computers, where students can learn at the pace that best suits their lifestyles.

Every time I prepare to teach a class or run a workshop, I think back to one of my favorite scenes from an episode of The Simpsons. Principal Skinner has taken an almost-bursting carload of newspaper to the recycling center and is discouraged to see that a half-ton will only get him seventy-five cents. He complains, “That won’t even cover the gas I used to go to the store to buy the twine to tie up the bundles.” The hippie running the place tells him, “It sounds like you’re working for your car. Simplify, man!”

We laugh at this bit of humor, but honestly it’s exactly what many of us do when we are preparing to teach with new technology resources. We are very sure that we want to make use of this new piece of technology; after all, we love it, so surely our students will too, right? We cheerfully load our classrooms full of hardware, software, music and video players, document cameras, interactive whiteboards, classroom response systems, and other equipment focused on accomplishing a specific set of tasks, confident that we have the knowledge and proficiency with them to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re also sure that what we do with our shiny new toys is bound to revolutionize what we do in the classroom every time we teach this material.

In reality, each of us is driving around with a carful of newspaper and no idea of what kind of results we’ll wind up with. We forge ahead into the class intent on delivering exciting new content and too often are derailed by a host of unforeseen issues either with the technology itself or the unexpected effect it has on the delivery of otherwise familiar content. We put that half-ton of effort into making the class work and wind up with seventy-five cents of educational value when it ends. Therefore, it’s up to us to make sure we have the mixture of expertise, practice, and technical know-how necessary to make technology tools work for the class and not against it. Here are five steps to think about before you add that cool new toy to your class.

• Do you know your stuff?

This seems obvious at first. “Well, of course I do! I’m teaching it, aren’t I?” However, to make sure students get the most out of the class, you should know your material well enough that you don’t really need any notes. I was told by a former professor long ago that if you can’t teach your entire class session with notes on one side of a 3 x 5 card, you’re not ready. This guy used to do graduate-level lectures that lasted two hours with no notes whatsoever; he was so familiar with the material that it was just a matter of recall. This idea is great to consider when you are thinking about bringing something new into the class. In case something goes wrong with the technology, you can go on autopilot, and you can focus not on the things you already know but on the one new variable, making your technology work and using it to enhance your instruction.

• Can you make it work?

Again, this answer seems obvious. “Well, it’s mine! Of course I’ve mastered this stuff!” Then surely you know how to troubleshoot all of your wireless connectivity issues, connect your hardware to audiovisual equipment in the classroom, and make sure that any content that needs to be authenticated can be. (If you’re scratching your head right now, you haven’t mastered the technology.) It’s not enough to know how to do this one really cool thing that would be so fantastic in class; you’ve got to be prepared for the fact that it might not work at first and know how to fix the problem. Although it’s always possible to call someone from the Technology Support Center to fix technology problems, there is no guarantee that they will be immediately available or that their solution will be quick. If you’re teaching an evening class, that fix might not be available until the next day or even later. This also assumes that whoever comes from the TSC knows how to fix the technology you’re having trouble with, and if it’s your new toy from home, they might not have any idea. In cases like this, you have to be the expert!

• Can you teach it with this?

Especially when adding new technology to the delivery of a lesson, it is extremely important to make sure that the instruction itself is well paced and makes good use of all available resources. It’s also important to make sure that you know exactly when, where, and how the technology piece will integrate with the lesson. Are you adding in a new delivery system to be used all the time, or is this only for one lesson? Is your new technology going to be a central feature of the lesson, or is it really just a cool “bell-and-whistle” feature that will ultimately distract your students and detract from where you wanted to go? Be sure that the “cool factor” of your new device will be outweighed by its instructional value in the classroom. Don’t think about the neat stuff it can do; think about how you can use it to enhance the quality of your instruction. Too often we assume we can enhance a lesson we’ve had trouble teaching in the past with that exciting, new piece of technology; it usually only makes things worse, because students get distracted by the cool stuff when there is already weaker instruction and lose track entirely.

• Do you have a backup plan? Or, “What if it doesn’t work?”

Most of us remember back to those days when we didn’t have computers in every classroom, when we didn’t have projectors and interactive whiteboards, when we didn’t have iPods and iPads, et cetera. We still learned just fine, and our instructors taught us without all of the equipment we take for granted now. The question we forget most often when bringing new technology into class might just be the most important: what happens if it doesn’t work? There is no bigger disaster than having your presentation take a nosedive because you were counting on the technology and found that it didn’t work the way you figured it would, or refused to work at all. Just like with everything else, technology-integrated lessons need an emergency plan. Be ready to do it analog-style if the tech won’t work this time, and have a plan ready in case it never does. The students have to learn this stuff whether or not you wow them with fancy devices!

• How will you evaluate your results?

In the case of technology, there aren’t always well-defined ways to assess the effects of your technology use on instruction. If you’re simply using new technology to teach old material, the only benchmarks you may have are students’ comprehension rates compared to you not using the technology. If you’re using a new tool to deliver specific content types that you haven’t taught before, you don’t even have a frame of reference to compare it to. In this case it might be useful to survey your students on their reactions to the new instructional tool to gauge its effectiveness before you use it a second time. If you’re using the tool to present material that they will be tested on later, test scores are a great measure of effectiveness; you can see right away what they did and didn’t get, and that can be directly attributed to your performance in front of the class.

I don’t in any way want to discourage anyone from experimenting; after all, that’s what my job, like my other stay at home jobs, is about! I think one of the most important aspects of being a good teacher is the willingness to explore and expand the scope of what instruction is and how to go about it. However, we have to make sure that whatever we do is backed by solid pedagogy, content knowledge, and a well-developed game plan. Armed with this set of tools, we can get our money’s worth for that half-ton of work!