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Information Hoarders: Towards a More Simplified Design

After the show Hoarders was added to Netflix streaming last year, I went through a phase. It’s an addictive show, if you’ve never seen it. People who compulsively collect overwhelming amounts of what others would call clutter or even garbage are forced to clear out their accumulations or else risk losing their home, health, or loved ones. Invariably, there’s a teary scene in which the hoarder is asked to choose their family over their stuff and their bad habits—it’s just good television.

I bring up Hoarders because there’s a particular phenomenon that comes to light at least once an episode when the cleaning teams start digging through the overflowing closets: they find really nice, usable things that had been buried for years—things like brand new work clothes, office supplies, or cookwear. Of course, with these nice things having been inaccessible behind piles of more recent accumulations, the hoarder will have already bought replacements for them, sometimes repeating the cycle of buying, losing, burying, and forgetting they have the same item several times over.

Stay with me here, but I often see a similar phenomenon in some online-course sites.

There’s a tendency, if you’re not careful, to over clutter your course design to the point where you worry that your students won’t be able to find key pieces of information, so you reproduce that information in more places: in your syllabus and your course homepage and in the individual modules. I’ve seen courses do this for things like a deadline schedule for multi-part assignments, instructor contact information, and lists of links to online resources. If you follow this pattern for every piece of information that you think is just essential for your students, you can easily reach a critical mass of content in your course site that’s impossible for your students to navigate, and indeed impossible for you to navigate when you need to make changes or adjust content for the next quarter. And when you see that there’s so much content that your students won’t be able to find something essential, you duplicate that content again in an area you think will be more visible.

You see where this is going.

I don’t know that it’s realistic to have an online course that never duplicates information in more than one place, but the next time you’re thinking about how to surface an important piece of information, think twice about duplicating it in more than one place in your course site. Consider using these alternatives instead:

Better Organization with Descriptive Page Names and Headings

In some cases, you need to direct students’ attention to information they may not be looking for or particularly interested in, like an academic integrity policy. But other things, like deadlines and your contact information, students will actively seek out, and you just need to make it easier for them to find it. You can do this by making sure the names of your pages (topics in Desire2Learn) describe the content in them. It can take some time to think of good page names, but it’s time well spent. Try to put yourself in your student’s shoes: for example, if you saw a link to a page called “Faculty Bio,” would you expect that to also contain the instructor’s contact information? Maybe “Faculty Information” is a better name if the page also contains that information.

Also, for pages with lots of content, use headings to chunk information, and make it easier for students to scan the page to find what they’re looking for.

If you do this well, there will be only one logical place where students will expect to find the information, and they’ll look for it there.

Links

Rather than duplicating your content in multiple places, consider just linking to it. You don’t need to describe your assignment in the module introduction and in the Dropbox folder where the student actually submits it. You can just put the assignment description in the Dropbox folder, and instead of repeating that in the module introduction, simply link to the Dropbox folder.

This might seem obvious when you read it, but it’s one of those things that even the most experienced online instructors and instructional designers need to remind themselves of. We need to remember that we often don’t need more stuff in the course, we need to make it easier to find and access what’s already there.

Better Teaching through Play

As the parent of a toddler, I’m faced with the task of choosing a preschool for my son. The most important factor on my list? That the curriculum—if it’s even called “a curriculum”—be play-based. That means I want my son digging in dirt, running around outside, making up nonsense words to songs with his imaginary friends, and in general, just being the messy, loud, unorganized, joyful beast that he is. I don’t want there to be any concern about him reaching educational or developmental benchmarks, and I certainly don’t want there to be any evaluative assessments, report cards, or homework. This isn’t because I’m against learning, of course, but because I know (and research supports) that playing is the very best way toddlers learn. Consider looking into New Discoveries Early Learning Center if you’re looking for a preschool that can provide the right learning environment for your child.

In my time learning about instructional design geared toward working adults and college students (not a mutually exclusive distinction), I’ve seen “playful” design approaches applied to myriad subjects with great success.

Once, I worked with a team to revamp a day-long, face-to-face, lecture-driven training course on complex purchasing processes (are you bored yet?). Chunking the content into multiple shorter sessions was our first idea, but not an option. We needed learners introduced to all this information in one session. Our solution was to move the course into a computer lab and create an interactive day, where learners role-played scenarios and were sent on Web-based research “missions.” (We also changed the goal from comprehension and retention of content to familiarity with resources and ability to find answers to questions.) As students worked in groups to complete their research missions, I admit we occasionally played spy music in the background. Throughout the day, we reminded learners that in the afternoon, we were going to play a Jeopardy-type game about everything they’d learned, and there would be fabulous prizes for correct answers. (As I said “fabulous prizes,” I rustled a plastic bag of chocolate candies, so as not to get their hopes too high.)

Introducing this simple, game-like aspect to the day—a final mission where learners would have an opportunity to showcase their proficiency—completely changed the tone of the day from a passive, boring litany of lectures to a series of active, goal-oriented tasks.

The upshot of our silly music and fabulous chocolate prizes? Feedback said it was a little cheesy, but that, yes, they’d learned something and knew where to go to find answers to questions in a very complex organization. I’ll take that. The game itself may have been lighthearted, but it yielded serious results.

A few weeks ago, I helped out at DePaul’s Faculty Teaching and Learning conference. The theme this year was Playing with Purpose: Applying Game Design Principles for Learning. I attended a session with James Moore, Director of Online Learning with the College of Commerce, and Beth Rubin, Director of SNL Online. Both faculty members teach online and hybrid courses and offered great examples of integrating games and playful design aspects in their course design. Some quick examples:

  • Professor Rubin played the Telephone Game with an online class using real telephones. The goal was to teach a model of communication that included a sender, a receiver, and interference. She had played this game in face-to-face classrooms previously, and discovered it worked even better out in “the real world.” By the time the message reached the final recipient, it was completely garbled and students were intensely emotional about the experience and the effort they’d expended to succeed. In an online discussion forum of just nine students, over two hundred responses were posted, which displayed critical thinking and application of the theoretical model to the real world.
  • Professor Moore applies characteristics of video games (specifically Mario and Zelda, two of his favorites) when designing his Marketing classes. For example, video games have a narrative structure including an ultimate goal that is introduced straightaway, so Professor Moore is sure to introduce students to their final project at their first meeting. Video games also frequently provide what he calls “A Quiet Place to Explore,” where there are no threats or stress, and making mistakes is okay. To emulate this quiet place in online courses, Professor Moore creates a “Week 0” space where students can familiarize themselves with tools and play around with content on practice assignments that are not graded.1

What struck me is that, of course, all content doesn’t easily or organically lend itself to playful learning opportunities, but that with a little ingenuity and creativity, the enduring learning that happens when students are genuinely motivated and engaged—emotional states that are more likely to occur when we are playing. This is also why schools should work with School playground shelter specialists to create comfortable outdoor areas for pupils to learn and play, no matter the weather.

 

1. To view a video on Professor Moore’s presentation or download his presentation handout, visit http://condor.depaul.edu/jmoore/mario/

The Value We Bring to Students

Value creation. Differentiation advantage. Competitive positioning. What do those terms mean to you? Any MBAs out there? Anyone? I don’t have an MBA, but recently, those terms have come to mean more to me in the university context.

If you read Online Learning for Free?, the blog entry my colleague Elizabeth Schinazi posted a few weeks ago, you may already be on the same dog-eared and coffee-stained page.

Elizabeth closed her post with the following statement: I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.” Specifically, Elizabeth was stressing the importance of keeping track of the burgeoning number of free online offerings in higher education.

I couldn’t agree more with Elizabeth. DePaul needs to keep track of the competition. I would also go a bit further and say that it is important that we as faculty keep track of our competition. I have heard several professors lament that free online universities will eventually put us all out of jobs. Even James Gee, the renegade speaker and scholar at the DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference last week, opened his keynote talk in crisis mode. “Everyone agrees [that higher ed] is in a crisis,” he announced. “But no one agrees on a solution.”

But, truth told, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If you’ve been to a motivational workshop recently, or better, attended one of FITS director Sharon Guan’s introductory Chinese courses, you know that the Chinese character for “crisis” includes the character for “opportunity.”  I truly believe that the changing higher ed market presents a golden opportunity for us to reconsider the value that we as hybrid and online faculty bring to our students. What differentiates our online courses from the free options? Why will students sign up for our classes next quarter and not the free web offerings? Answering these questions will help us capitalize on the value we bring.  

So, where do you start? Although determining the value of your courses will be a continual work in progress, here are a few near-term suggestions to assist you in making your online course the more desirable option for students.

Commit to Office Hours. Select two hours on different days when you can be available to students. If you teach a hybrid or fully online course, plan to log in to Skype for two scheduled hours each week. If you find your students don’t show up, let them know that you noted their absence and hope they will come talk with you. Find out if there are better times for them to meet with you. All too often, professors choose to offer “office hours available on request.” Any student who is already hesitant to reach out for help may fear that he/she will be a burden by requesting special time.

Establish Your Presence on the Discussion Boards. Read and respond to your students’ posts. It’s that simple. It takes time to do—it does. But the time and thought the students will put in to the discussion board is directly proportional to your felt presence on the boards. In addition, why not have your students create questions to propose to their classmates about the course content? You could then answer their questions and participate as ‘one of them’ as opposed to ”the man behind the curtain.”

Provide Substantive Feedback on Assignments. Providing substantive feedback requires time, but the more you prepare on the front end, the less time it will require when it comes to grading. Create a detailed rubric for each assignment. Not only will this let your students know your expectations, it will help you clarify what is and isn’t working about a student’s submission. Then, when you provide an additional two to three sentences of feedback, the student will more likely feel effectively ‘read.’

Link to Campus Services. This is a biggie. A recent Instructional Technology Council survey tracking the impact of eLearning at community colleges pointed to the necessity of maximizing student and technology support services for the virtual student. Your online students are probably underusing DePaul’s available resources. In your syllabi, be sure to outline the services available. In addition, provide multiple links to campus tech support and other student support services on your course homepage and throughout the course.

Whether it’s through office hours, interactivity on the discussion boards, substantive feedback on assignments, or how we connect students to the myriad support services available to them at DePaul, we are well equipped to meet this new competition. But, we need to make tracks. Now. In the recent words of Stanford University president John Hennessy on the topic of online learning, “A tsunami is coming.”

References:

Auletta, Ken. “Get Rich U.” The New Yorker. April 30, 2012. p.38.

Instructional Technology Council website. http://www.itcnetwork.org

Public Speaking Online: Can It or Can’t It Be Done?

Business and professional communication is an essential skill, but it no longer takes place solely in person. An important component in preparing students to segue to a professional career is ensuring that they have a plethora of experiences—today, this should include working in a virtual space.  

Many industries offer telecommuting options, require global Web-based presentations, etc. Students who are charged with working in these organizations must understand the etiquette when communicating synchronously and asynchronously.

So developing an online course in public speaking must include a myriad of opportunities to create experiences that enable students to hone communicating in an online context.

As the instructional designer for this type of online course, I spent countless hours researching what strategies other institutions (higher education and professional industries) employ when teaching a public speaking course online (one of the more popular online courses) or communicating in a professional setting.

After sifting through several examples, I created sample projects segmented by synchronous and asynchronous solutions. It was important to distinguish between the types of solutions to ensure that students get experience working with each. See the sample projects listed in the table below.

Synchronous Presentations

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing a web conferencing solution, create groups of students that deliver presentations in real-time to one another along with the faculty member.
  • Wimba
  • Adobe Connect
  • Blackboard Collaborate

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing a video recording device, require students to obtain a set number of audience members and someone to film them delivering a speech.

  • Optional: Require students to pan the audience to ensure that the criterion is met
  • Camera phone/video camera
  • Flip camera
  • Video camcorder

 

Asynchronous Presentations

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing a video-recording device, require students to record themselves delivering a speech.
  • Webcam recording
  • Camera phone/video camera
  • Flip camera
  • Video camcorder

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing an application that enables audio narration, require students to create and record a narrated PowerPoint presentation. Students submit the PowerPoint.
  • Screencast software
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Voicethread

Each of these examples lends itself to creating different experiences for students to communicate professionally in a virtual space.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in global work settings, students who are acclimated to presenting in multifaceted formats are better equipped to deliver on-demand and work with a variety of technologies.

Follow Up: Creating Engaging Online Video

Last fall, I wrote about the challenges of creating engaging video for online courses. Disappointed with the end product I was getting by serving in a mostly advisory capacity, I declared that I would take a more hands-on approach. I was hopeful that by requiring early ideation sessions, script review, rehearsal, and on-site art direction I’d be able to get results that would meet faculty goals and that students would actually watch.

I’m still waiting for that happy day to arrive. I hadn’t anticipated that it would be so difficult to get stakeholders to deliver a draft of a script on deadline, let alone to find time for substantive review and iteration. Rehearsals? I haven’t been able to schedule one yet. As far as art direction, I’ve bumped up against the realities of working with media services that have limited abilities and capacities; without the resources to do extensive compositing and editing in post-production, there’s very little you can do with a static one-camera set up.

Still, the status quo is hard to defend. In the absence of sufficient preproduction planning and active involvement during the shoot, too often what’s created is a hard-to-watch presentation consisting of a speaker at a podium superimposed over hard-to-read PowerPoint slides. The effectiveness of this presentation approach in a live classroom is debatable, but it’s rarely successful online.

Even better-conceived productions suffer from lack of adequate planning and constraints. Rushed into production at the last minute, a recent shoot with two engaging professors discussing a topic dear to them failed because it was too long to sustain interest and relied too heavily on post-production that our campus media services were unable to deliver on deadline.

I’m still hopeful that a more hands-on approach will ultimately be successful. Building in lots more time for preproduction should help, and my department is taking steps to bring more production in-house for greater control of outcomes. I’m also hoping to find a way for our faculty to work with DePaul’s television studio and personnel; the ability to create multicamera interview productions would give us a powerful way to deliver engaging, high-quality online video.

Get Lazy and Automate

“But being lazy means you aren’t productive, right?”

Lies!

Being lazy is about getting as much done as you can with as little effort as possible. Think “task streamlining” rather than “task avoidance.”

The tasks that take the most time for me are repetitive text-manipulation tasks and responding to email, so those are the two things I’ve worked on automating the most.

The tools I prefer are Autohotkey (free) for Windows or Text Expander ($35) for Mac. Both allow you to set up keyboard macros which will perform longer text-entry tasks. I will not go into incredible depth for either of them, but I will go into the basics of why they’re useful.

What Email Signatures?

We all have to sign our emails; it’s polite.

And it takes a while, especially when you add up the 10 to 20 seconds you spend per email every day. Today I sent fifty-six emails. Fifty-six emails multiplied by 15 seconds to sign the email (on the conservative end) is 840 seconds which is about 14 minutes per day spent signing emails.

But wait, I use signatures!

Well that’s great but it’s not flexible. My signatures vary depending on who I am emailing. To manage your email efficiently, finding a way to streamline or automate this process could save valuable time and make email communication smoother. I use formal signatures and informal signatures and all sorts in between.

For example, when I type “ssq”, Text Expander types:

If there is anything else I can help with, please let me know.

Regards,
Ian at FITS

This is great! Now I never have to think about how to sign off on an email again. I write what I have to say, type “ssq”, and send it off.

Or I can type “sse”, and Text Expander types:

Regards,
Ian at FITS

“Yeah but that takes no time to type—you must type really slowly.”

Nope!

It took me 4.8 seconds averaged over six attempts at typing it really quickly.

Don’t believe me? You try.

Actual Email Messages

Now think about the longer text you type over and over and over.

Here’s a sample short snippet I type five to fifty times per day:

Greetings,

Your add user request has been completed. Please log in and ensure that the user(s) appear as they should.

It’s a greeting and one line of text all of which takes about 16 seconds to write. So again, lots of time wasted writing the same thing over and over and sometimes I’d misspell things or send the wrong information or whatever further extending the time it takes to write.

The rate most people perform composition typing at is nineteen words per minute (Karat, et. al., 1999). If you compositionally type similar bodies of text regularly you’re wasting time.

Now imagine if that were two paragraphs consisting of three to five sentences typed two times per day. Times four per week (lucky you, working four days a week). Times four weeks per month.

Now let’s take my wonderful body of add-user text above, which is about twenty words. If compositionally you type nineteen words per minute, it will take you one minute to type that sentence, times three sentences per paragraph (low end), so at three minutes per paragraph times two paragraphs, you’re spending six minutes per day composing each email. If you have two students or coworkers a day who ask similar questions, you are spending 12 minutes a day doing unnecessary, repetitive work.

Multiply that by your generous four-day work week, times four weeks per month, and you’re spending 3.5 hours per month writing just that one email over and over. Now if you regularly compose five similar emails, it scales quickly.

Suddenly you are at 15 hours per month wasted.

And knowing you, everything is misspelled, has coffee spilled on it, and the really important bit of information got left out anyway.

Horrifying.

References

Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568-575.

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Cloning the Research Librarian and Other Solutions

Problem: Student–to–Research Librarian Instructor ratio is 60:1.

Solution: A collaborative effort between the faculty, research librarian, and instructional designer to design and embed online tutorials in the learning management system, Desire2Learn (D2L)…quickly.

It is mid-October and the January 2nd winter quarter start date is fast approaching. Nursing 400: Theories of Nursing will be offered as a hybrid for the first time. The instructional designer and faculty have been working feverishly to produce narrated PowerPoint lectures, embed video clips, write content and assignment instructions, develop rubrics and engaging discussion prompts, and integrate images and graphics. The course hinges on a multistep research-project assignment and the librarian instructional time is vital for students to have a successful course experience.

How will the students become familiar with the massive amount of library resources available to them vital to their research-project assignment? The research librarian usually conducts face-to-face instructional sessions on information literacy (IL) and useful library resources. However, the number of students in the winter cohort is much larger. He figures he needs two to three clones of himself to conduct all the scheduled face-to-face sessions plus advise students and tend to faculty research requests.

In comes the instructional designer. What about embedding online tutorials right into the course so that you can focus on advising students and handling special requests? Ding-ding-ding! Of course, the research librarians have already thought of this. They created a YouTube channel with tutorials about general library resources; but for this course, tutorials are needed that specifically address the research needs of nurses. The librarian, instructional designer, and faculty decide on four topics crucial to nursing students who are at this stage in their study and research novices. After input from the librarian and faculty, we get to work on the scripts and create the accompanying PowerPoint slides. The British accent of the research librarian coupled with his witty humor creates an entertaining and authoritative sounding product.

Now where to place these tutorials? We decide to create a “widget” in D2L that resides on the course home page so that students see it every time they log in and it’s quickly accessible. The faculty clearly directs students within the introductory course announcements to the tutorials that also include a short video introducing the research librarian and providing his contact information. Mid-course, we nervously solicit feedback from students via an embedded survey within the course.

Select Survey Results

6 question survey; n=20

Question 2: Did you feel successful when researching your topic after viewing the tutorials?

Yes

95%

No

5%

Not sure

0%

Question 3: Given the option, would you have preferred online tutorials, in-person library instruction session, or both?

Online Tutorials

50%

In-person Instruction

5%

Both

45%

Open-ended Question: Would you change anything in the online tutorials? 

No, I thought the tutorial was very self-explanatory and covered all the necessary topics to adequately navigate through the DePaul library resources.

I think that everything was well covered

No, I thought it was enough to get me started, navigating things like this usually requires me to play around in it.

I thought it was very thorough. I like how it was broken up so that if we forgot something, we could go back and rewatch a section without having to rewatch the whole thing.

No, I think it would be beneficial to have the tutorials as an overview for an in-person tutorial.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, it is helpful to look at a more comprehensive study of student content retention and the effectiveness of online tutorials versus face-to-face instruction.

Alison Brettle and Michael Raynor published a paper in Nurse Education Today titled “Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods” (2012) which looked at the question of whether an “online tutorial was as good as face-to-face training for teaching IL [information literacy] skills to students nurses.” (p.2) The study of seventy-seven students added evidence to the previous claim by Carlock and Anderson (2007) that suggests online tutorials and face-to-face instruction of IL and research skills are equally effective methods.

The small student sample from NSG 400 seems to validate these findings.

We will continue to iterate the online tutorials based on student feedback and performance. It is also important to listen to that 5% who do not find the tutorials equally as helpful as face-to-face instruction; where are the gaps? We will look for solutions that capitalize on the scalability of online tutorials while integrating the irreplaceable value of face-to-face instruction. We can’t clone the research librarian, but we will continue to seek other solutions.

References:

Brettle, A., Raynor, M. Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods, Nurse Edc. Today (2012), doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2011.12.003

What Happens to the Self-Published When We Go Paperless?

I have a particular penchant toward the self-published.

You see, I grew up with printed pages still warm from a Kinko’s copy machine. I was taught with manifestos stapled sideways, printed in perfect punk-rock attitude and do-it-yourself aesthetic. A girl who was awash with the unspoken mission statement of “anyone-can-do-it” chanted by movements like Riot Grrrl and Act-Up, I learned that you didn’t have to hit the New York Times Best Seller List to be considered an author. I learned that, given time, a typewriter, and some dimes for the copy machine, you could print your own stories, your own news, and your own ideas. I learned that my voice and thoughts counted. I learned the magic of self-publishing.

So it’s no wonder that when I went to teach for the first time, I was influenced by pedagogical tactics that pushed for decentralizing knowledge. When setting up our reading list, I worked hard to use anthologies, collect stories from multiple voices, and use small-press books by relatively unknown authors.

Moreover, I wanted the texts we read to exist outside of the echo chamber that can be created in academia. The feedback of one text calling to another, that text calling to a next, all reverberating until the topic at hand is buried beneath layers of rhetoric. I wanted fresh views, even if the topics we were discussing were well known. I wanted my students to hear the poetry in knowledge, the lyricism in all our different epistemologies. So, I brought them zines, written by local authors, and even brought in my thesis, which a friend of mine had formatted into a folded-in-half, 8”-by-11” zine. Basically, I wanted my students to tap into a more creative, yet still academic means of learning.

But now? Now, I’m a little worried. What will happen to the self-published when we all go paperless? It’s hard not to hear the clamor of eBooks and digital readers, let alone not see them in the hands of all the morning commuters. I’ve heard all about how libraries across the country are digitizing their catalogs; I’ve seen how the old paperback novel is now kindling the fires of online eBook sales. It’s hard not to see that every nook of the Internet is saturated by the phenomenon.

But, for a girl like me? A girl who not only self-publishes her work, but is a hopeless consumer of zines and small-press works, well, I worry about the impact on small-press and indie authors when we go fully digital and paperless.

But there is hope. If you search the Internet a little bit, multiple web-based zine libraries are popping up, all with digitized archives ready to be downloaded and consumed. (If you’re interested, check out the list of zine archives from zinebook.com.) For indie authors, Smashwords.com is the place to go, with its wide selection of self-published eBooks. And then, of course, there is Apple’s release of iBook Author, the Mac-based application that allows anyone to create their own multi-touch textbooks. So, suffice it to say, at the moment, there seems to be space still for the self-published, ready and waiting to fill your digital bookshelf.

Online Learning for Free?

I recently signed up to take a free online course, Human-Computer Interaction, through Stanford University. While I already have my master’s degree in HCI, I thought it would be a fun way to stay engaged and gain new insights into the field. That it was free certainly didn’t hurt. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for the course to get off the ground—what was originally a January start date, was pushed back to March and has now been shelved as “under-development.” I’m still on the mailing list and hopeful that the course will be offered soon.

In this month’s Wired, writer Steven Leckart chronicles his experience taking another free Stanford University online course. This course, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, and what started as an experiment of providing the course free to whomever wanted to take it quickly turned into something else—an astonishing 160,000 students signed up.

In both cases, the aim of these courses is to make learning accessible and free, opening up opportunities those who might not otherwise have them.  Coursera, the site the HCI course is offered through has several other courses available from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of California–Berkley. While Thrun is spinning his course into a new company, Udacity devoted to creating a new education institution made entirely of free online courses, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also currently exploring this concept with their own initiative MITx set to launch in Fall 2012.

How these courses and programs will affect the future of online learning, we can’t know, but it does bring up some interesting ideas. I’m not suggesting that DePaul should start offering free online classes, but I do think it will be interesting to watch as these programs evolve and expand. I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.”

How am I doing?

As an instructor in an online or hybrid course, I want to know how the students feel about the content as well as the structure of the course. I have given a number of surveys for both my hybrid and online courses that include both an initial survey and an end of quarter survey. While the university has an official assessment instrument for the evaluation of instruction, I find an informal, anonymous survey in my courses has helped me fine-tune the course for the next time it is offered. In this survey, I not only ask about the content matter, but also about the format and structure of the course. I ‘bribe’ the students to take the surveys by giving participation points or extra credit for completion.

Attitude and Demographics

As a matter of course, I ask a few questions at the beginning of the quarter to gather some demographic information as well as some attitudinal questions. I repeat the attitudinal questions at the end of the quarter to see if there have been fundamental shifts in the mindset. Here are some example results from a large lecture Mathematics class that was conducted as a hybrid (semester results)

(Click for a larger version.)

Course Content

At the end of the course, I ask a number of questions relating specifically to the course content as well as the layout and structure of the course. Course content is, of course, specific to the material being taught, but I also ask questions directly related to the layout and structure of the online materials. Here are some sample question with results from the same hybrid course (with a few content specific questions).




Free response questions

In addition to the standard survey questions, I ask students several open-ended questions that, for me, provide the greatest insight to their feelings about the course. Knowing that the results are anonymous allows the students to open up, and I have found that they really don’t hold back. Here are a few sample open-ended questions with a few student responses:

What do you think was the biggest factor in your success or failure in this course? Your response is anonymous

“being able to watch the videos over and over…but there sometimes needed to be more videos with more examples not just one because sometimes everything wasnt worded the same as how its written in the book”

“I tended to put all of my homework off until the night before class.”

Please add any information that you think will me improve this course for the next semester. Your response is anonymous

“ALL ONLINE. Teach the students how to use the online site before you start giving them assaignments on it. I was really confused in the beginning because no one said how to use the website, but now i understand it. “

“no global warming assignments, there are bigger issues to worry about no body pas [sic] attention to global warming anyway. make this class easier, this type of math isnt important for some majors, it just creates stress and wastes students time. as long as people can do basic adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing they will be good to go in life.”

ED NOTE – this is common

Conclusion

I have found these surveys to be an invaluable tool in reworking my course for the next time it is offered. I generally do not share data with anyone else, but I believe it provides a valuable insight to where any potential trouble spots are. If you wish to add a pre-post survey to your course, your instructional designer can assist in putting an anonymous survey in place.