Designing Across Nine Time Zones: Twiddla to the Rescue!

Sometimes you need a no-cost way to work collaboratively and synchronously at a distance. For instance, earlier this year I was a member of a graduate-student team designing an interactive app for the iPad. We had a member in Saudi Arabia, another on the eastern seaboard, and several members spread across the Chicago metro area. We obviously couldn’t meet in person to sketch out ideas and critique them. We needed a way to post design documents, mark them up, and discuss in real time. Fortunately for us, we discovered Twiddla, a collaborative workspace with a free version that proved indispensible.

Getting Started

Twiddla describes itself as a real-time collaboration tool. I liked that it was simple and easy to use; just navigate to http://twiddla.com and click Start a New Meeting:

Twiddla gives you a clean, easy-to-use interface. The toolbar has controls for a virtual whiteboard, tools for adding and annotating documents, images, and web pages, and a real-time collaborative text editor that Twiddla calls an EtherPad. There’s a basic text tool for annotating the display and simple drawing and shapes tools too. Twiddla also offers some fundamental tools to edit and arrange items and a basic administrative tool that allows you to add users and edit your profile.

Once you’re in your meeting room you can edit your profile, invite other users, and load your images, documents, Web pages, or media.

Add and Mark Up Documents

My team needed to be able to see, discuss, and mark up each other’s sketches in real time. Here’s an example of a PDF uploaded to Twiddla and marked up with the drawing tool:

This ability to view and mark up sketches was invaluable to my team, allowing us to review, critique, and iterate in real time, despite being separated by thousands of miles. Twiddla now has a real-time voice tool, but we opted to use Skype for synchronous voice and created a no-cost, real-time collaborative workspace with a combination of ease-of-use and powerful visual tools I haven’t found elsewhere.

While I consider Twiddla far easier to use, more powerful, and better for my purposes than wikis, Google Docs, or Web-conferencing tools like Wimba, it also has extended functionalities like the ability to insert math formulas or upload widgets and code that make it a great collaborative tool for math, science, multimedia, or programming:

Is It Right for You?

There are of course some limitations to the free version. You don’t have a named user account, so you can’t set up a workspace far in advance and send out invitations later. You can’t hold simultaneous meetings, and you’re on your own for tech support. You also can’t archive or save your work for future use, and you can’t have a password-protected private meeting, which might preclude using Twiddla with students in some situations. Paid versions eliminate those shortcomings and add features like unlimited storage, SSL security, custom URLs, and presenter/moderator controls for as little as $14 a month.

However, the free version works really well for me. So if you’re looking for a powerful, no-cost, easy-to-use collaborative workspace, Twiddla deserves your attention. Check it out at http://twiddla.com.

Happy Holidays!

Management by Exception (MBE)

As a long-time project manager in the software engineering industry and especially during my time at Apple Computer, I’ve had to work in environments with a frenetic pace, to say the least. Limited time was available to manage multiple projects, let alone deal with the intricacies of the details. Hence, I learned early on to deal with the exceptions rather than the norms. This is a widely used management strategy called Management by Exception (MBE).

Management by Exception
Management by Exception is a “policy by which management devotes its time to investigating only those situations in which actual results differ significantly from planned results. The idea is that management should spend its valuable time concentrating on the more important items (such as shaping the company’s future strategic course). Attention is given only to material deviations requiring investigation.”
 
(from Wikipedia)

How does this relate to teaching online classes and D2L specifically? Well, D2L provides a wealth of reporting tools for tracking student progress. You can spend a lot of time and effort using these tools to track how much time a student spent in a module or on a quiz or even how long they were logged on to D2L. For example, the screenshot below shows the statistics for the time spent in a module for one particular course (the student names are omitted).

This particular module should have taken the student between 45-60 minutes to complete. Now, I could use this report to measure student engagement and perhaps even give them participation points for the time spent in the module. However, there is a big ‘gotcha’ in this report, and it relates to the little information icon at the end of all but the second line. If you click on the icon next to the first line, you get the following dialog:

This means that the student’s time in the module was not accurately reported. It is most likely because the student navigated away from the D2L module in a nonstandard fashion. They may have simply closed their browser or gone to a different webpage. In other words, they just ‘disappeared’ in D2L’s view, thus losing the ability to track their time. In reality, student #1 probably spent more time in the module than indicated in this report. On the other hand, the last student in the list spent 5 hours and 34 minutes in the module. If the student is logged into the module and goes off to make dinner leaving the browser up and running, then the time is still recorded by D2L.

So that leaves us with the question, “How should these reports be used if they are inaccurate?” It simply goes back to the original premise of management by exception. If a student is having difficulty in a class, such as poor performance on quizzes, lack of participation in a discussion, or other performance issues, you can use these reports to check how much time they were actually online. You are dealing with the exception rather than trying to use the reports for evaluating engagement of each student. Simply put, they should not be used to measure actual participation due to the inaccuracies of the report.

I suppose the best way to illustrate this is an example from an online course I taught a few years ago. This was an introductory Mathematics course and I received the following email from a student:

“I wanted to email you because I was checking my vista for homework and was disheartened to find that we had a test this coming Tuesday. I was caught off guard by this, because in our previous class we weren’t informed that we would be for sure having a test. I feel that it would be only right to let us know that there would be a test at least one class period before. I was wondering if there was anyway that we could postpone the test to review the concepts that will be on it.”

Normally, I am a really nice guy and would give consideration to a student having difficulty; however, I checked the report and found that this student had been online a total of 18 minutes during the previous two weeks! Needless to say, the test was not postponed. While I did not use the reports to measure student progress, they were helpful in dealing with this exception.

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L’immersion? Mais oui!

(Listen to this entry in the Everything that FITS podcast.)

My wife and I just had the opportunity to visit Montréal over Columbus Day weekend, and it provided a nice little vacation, as well as an opportunity for me to practice my French skills. I was a little nervous at first, because although I had a French minor as an undergrad, that was twelve years ago, and I’ve had very little formal practice since. I guess that goes with speaking a language that isn’t used very much in North America, with the exception of Québec. My first attempts at speaking again were a little stumbling, as I made reservations for accommodations and tickets over the phone. I was often fishing for the right verb or term to use. However, I was really surprised at how quickly it all came back to me with only a little practice. By the second day, I was having lengthy, involved conversations with people, which I would then have to attempt to translate back to my wife. It was after having a detailed conversation about wine with a restaurant’s sommelier on Saturday night that I began to think I might not be as rusty as I’ve been telling everyone. I’d never actually talked about wine in French before, but I found myself navigating a discussion about tannins and different aromas in the wine’s nose with ease. My wife didn’t speak more than a few words of French before we went on the trip, and although she still didn’t know a lot more afterward, she speaks with a great accent.

All this was possible through the magic of language immersion. Yes, I could have brushed up on my French before the trip (and I did, a little), but this was not nearly as effective as being dropped into the streets of Montréal and knowing that we weren’t going to get directions to our next destination if I didn’t know how to ask. Being forced to practice not only what I knew how to say but also listening and responding to others in an unscripted fashion reawakened my comprehension skills. I can also say that once that switch has been flipped, it’s hard to change it back; I found myself saying “pardon” to people on the streets of Chicago instead of “excuse me” for most of the next week!

This anecdote illustrates in a concrete way the power of immersion in language learning. The fact that I could spend a weekend in Montréal and come back nearly fluent again after over a decade of very little practice shows immersion’s ability to generate near-native fluency without making the learner aware that it is happening. When you get thrown into the deep end like this, if you have the rudimentary skills necessary, most of the time you end up swimming, and swimming strongly. This was not true immersion, i.e. learning mathematics and science in French to expand my skills in math and science as well as French, but submersion; I was the foreign-language speaker with all the natives, and it was sink-or-swim. Still, it provided an opportunity to reacquire skills at a much greater rate than practicing at home.

As educators, we are constantly searching for ways to create activities and assessments in our courses that will not only challenge our students in the present but also prepare them for similar as-yet-unknown challenges in their disciplines in the future. We make them jump through hoops in our courses, believing that each hoop is getting them a little closer to our ultimate goal, that of fluency with the materials and processes at hand. However, even though we may think we are immersing our students in that world of content, we often are just giving them a boat to travel across the surface. Consider the following scenario:

A marketing professor is teaching his students about the processes involved in targeted marketing (the practice of selecting specific strategies or materials in order to best attract a particular group of individuals). His current objectives are:

  1. Students will select a group to target.
  2. Students will select a strategy to market a product to this specific group.
  3. Students will develop a marketing campaign aimed at this specific group.

Based on these objectives, it would be very possible to create an exercise in which students select a group, use some typical strategies outlined by the textbook in reaching that market, make use of instructor-provided data and generate a marketing campaign. This could even be a project that could take a whole term, depending on how the various pieces of the exercise are presented. Sounds good, right?

Let’s take another look. I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the need for authenticity in student exercises, and this is yet another place where it’s easy to think you’re giving students a real-life, hands-on experience, when in fact you’re giving them strategies from a textbook and data from a box. Is this a good real-world exercise? Well, for the most part it is. These kinds of simulation exercises are given in many classes, and it does teach students how to process and analyze data. In many cases, this will adequately prepare students for performance in the real world, assuming that they are predominantly dealing with mostly cut-and-dry data.

However, this exercise, while it might be comprehensive, lacks the “messiness” associated with a more authentic experience. When you’re dealing with real data and real firms, things happen that you aren’t really prepared for in a “canned” exercise like I just described. Data points don’t always tell a story; sometimes they are scattered in such a way that they don’t show any relationships at all, or perhaps the data suggest a conclusion altogether different than the one students are striving to prove. Target markets change all the time, as the whims of a fickle population change. A real firm might have an enormous amount of data far in excess of what is needed or is relevant and so might require any number of weeding out processes to obtain actually usable data. Given all these possibilities, the internship model is about the truest experience out there, because it provides the opportunity to practice skills gained in class as well as to see how things actually work outside the classroom “ideal situation” bubble. However, not everyone has the time to devote to an internship in every academic program. Therefore, it is up to us as instructors to not only provide the tools to solve the problems our students will face in the real world but also to expose them as much as possible to the actual chaos that can happen within it. As much as we always try to tell our students that there are standardized procedures for everything they will face, we know that the real world doesn’t always work that way.

What does this mean for us? As we are creating assessments and exercises for our students that are supposed to be real-world simulations, we should be striving as much as possible to simulate real-world situations in their construction. Rather than giving students data from a set, show students how to obtain various data from various places and have them obtain it themselves. Have them create their own research rather than telling them what questions to ask and what data correlations to look for. In this way they can encounter the chaos they will find in the future when research and data don’t always play well together. Most importantly, giving students this more realistic experience will allow them to make mistakes. We often think that guiding students to be mistake-free will be the best learning experience, but we also know that students can learn just as much from failing and needing to come up with an alternate solution to a problem. Just because it’s real-world data doesn’t necessarily make it a real-world exercise; students need to feel like they have some ownership, and they have to be exposed to the imperfections right along with the methods.

So it’s now been a few weeks since our French immersion experience, and I can say at this point that a little refresher was just what I needed. I tried really hard to speak well, and I failed plenty during that time too. Fortunately, the locals were nice enough to correct me or suggest a different wording, but those mistakes also helped me learn even more and recall things I really shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place. My wife has been inspired to learn more French and is now doing audio lessons on her morning commute. The early immersion experience has been quite helpful to her as she navigates conversational expressions, because her ear has already been attuned to the nuances of the language; she’s getting more out of the instruction than she would if she were just presented with canned audio and conversation because she already knows how to listen to it.

Creating an immersive learning process can be tougher, messier and less predictable than just giving out textbook problems and quizzes, but real life doesn’t have a textbook, and students won’t be able to refer to a handy manual when they encounter situations they might not be prepared for. Immersion is tremendously valuable for teaching students to think on their feet and to adjust as necessary. It’s worth the extra effort on our part to help bring a little more of the outside world into the classroom, because our students will be that much better prepared to venture out into it later.

Getting my Tweet Wet

I’ve had a Twitter account for several months, and aside from occasionally checking my feed to see what’s for dinner @RachaelRayShow, I really do not use it. In preparation for teaching my online Educational Technology class, I’ve been thinking about how I might use Twitter to enhance participant engagement with the material and with one another. The prerequisite course to this course includes an activity where students create a Twitter account and think about its possible uses in education. I would like to build on that foundation and use Twitter to promote a virtual community for sharing EdTech-related resources and trends, as well as ideas (or even logistics) about the course and course material.

I started by creating a new Twitter account that will be for professional/teaching purposes only,@EdTechEJS (so no Rachael Ray retweets on this one). I then started following a few Educational Technology–related users and groups, including some folks who run the program for which I teach.

Next I decided that to facilitate students’ access to the Twitter feed, I should embed it on our course site. When discussing this with a colleague, she suggested that instead of just embedding the @EdTechEJS feed, I create a hashtag for everyone in the course to use and display a feed of tweets containing that hashtag. With this method I am not the only person contributing to the feed; it is a collaborative effort, which is more in line with how Twitter is meant to work. The hope is that students will tweet questions or comments about the course material, share useful resources they find, and benefit from reading classmates’ tweets.

While searching for “create twitter feed from hashtag,” I came across this fantastic free tool called TweetBlender. TweetBlender creates an embeddable Twitter feed widget, and you can specify which “sources” will be displayed in the feed (usernames, hashtags, keywords). With this tool, I was able to create a feed that will display all of my tweets, as well as any tweet containing the course hashtag and the program hashtag. As I become more familiar with Twitter and what type of information I’d like to appear in the feed, I will add more sources. It may even make sense to add weekly topics as keywords for the feed as the topics come up in the course.

I am excited to see how this Twitter experiment goes. I really hope it makes the course site more dynamic and student driven. One challenge with using a Learning Management System is that most of the content must be posted by the instructor. Students have the discussion boards, but that is usually their only forum for contributing. The Twitter feed allows students to add content to the course site instantly and in a highly visible way. This endeavor should also force me to become more familiar with using Twitter effectively and better able to consult with faculty who would like to incorporate Twitter into their own course.

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Teaching in Disguise: Are You Game?

My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out.

Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, I didn’t feel like forcing him to learn something that he was not interested in—until one day he said to me, “Mommy, do you know why I can’t speak Chinese? It’s because you never taught me when I was a baby!”

As a mother, I had been used to being named the source of all faults, but this particular accusation brought me chills—I would be considered a criminal, at least by myself, if he brought up the same claim when he graduates from high school.

Ridden by guilt, I sent him back to Chinese school this fall.

On the first day of school, dropping Grant off at the first graders’ classroom was quite dramatic: all the parents and their well-behaved kids watched me struggle to break away from his clenching and screaming. But then something happened, and it made my Chinese-resenting son fall in love with learning Chinese. This something was a computer program on a CD that was given to first-grade Chinese students as a homework assignment. After learning the rhymed text in class, students were supposed to unscramble the sentences by dragging the characters to the right location. They were timed for their action and given a code to copy down to their homework booklet as proof of completion.

With his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand fiercely moving the mouse, Grant completed his weekly assignments at once and moved on to the next lesson by himself. Once in a while, he would throw his hand over his head and shake his fist, announcing with excitement “yeah, I got it in fifty seconds, Mommy” or “seriously, Mommy, I’ve got it in zero seconds before!” I know that zero-second record was a miscount because he couldn’t read the Chinese word for a minute that stood in front of zero seconds, but nevertheless, I was thrilled—not just by my son’s progress but more by witnessing live evidence of the impact of technology or, more precisely, the strategy of making learning a fun game.

When I put my instructional designer’s hat on to analyze this learning scenario, I see that this simple, computer-aided learning exercise designed by Dr. Liping Ma as part of her Chinese-language curriculum contains quite a number of gaming characteristics, even though it wasn’t branded as a game. In fact, it carries elements of all three general good-game design principles summarized by Dr. James Paul Gee (Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines):

  • Empowered Learners—It was not me dragging him into a classroom; it was he himself driving the mouse and the movement of the words.
  • Problem Solving—There is a challenge for Grant: he has to compete with himself to complete the task in shorter and shorter times.
  • Understanding—Grant has to comprehend the rules of the game as well as the foundation of it, which is the meaning of each Chinese character (even though he didn’t realize that).

Using technology as its powerful carrier, games—in all forms and shapes—are invading our lives. They are commonly viewed by parents and educators as a threat—an evil monster made with some additive ingredients that competes with us for our children’s, our students’, and even our own attention and making it hard for all of us to focus on the right things, such as learning. In dealing with this “threat,” we have tried to shut it out (can you guess how many places I have tried to hide my son’s Nintendo DS?); we have used it to incentivize (“If you finish your homework, you get to play Nintendo for twenty minutes”); and in some rare cases, we have used it as a tool to teach (such as downloading a math or a spelling game to cover up the true purpose of learning with the mask of a game).

Above and beyond these commonly used strategies, there are people who have been trying to push the battle to a whole new level: they have dived into the core of the monster to detect those ingredients that have made it so evilly appealing and addictive. They are the researchers from both sides of the battle field: learning scientists and game designers. And they found out that designing a good game follows the same instructional-design principles that have made learning happen in an effective and pleasant way:

  • it engages the player/student with the appropriate level of challenges
  • it rewards the player/student with incentives (points, scores, levels, and/or encouraging words)
  • it offers chances for nonwinners to try again
  • it provides rules and support in clear and intuitive ways
  • it fosters a sense of competition either with others or with the player him or herself
  • it puts the player/student in the driver’s seat to make choices and to control the progress
  • it offers a combination of consistent elements (so you don’t get lost) and surprises (so you don’t get bored)
  • it calls for sensory involvement of eyes, hand(s), and brain
  • it makes it possible for one to play as someone else
  • it connects the players and/or forms a community

(This list will grow longer after more ideas and practices are shared by DePaul faculty at the Annual DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference—Playing with Purpose: Apply Game Design Principles for Learning, on April 20th, 2012. Please stay tuned for the Teaching Commons announcement.)

I hope as you read through this list, you will share my feeling that it is not just games that are everywhere—those game ingredients are easy to find in our lives and in our teaching practices. The other day, when Grant got back from his Chinese school, he gestured a high five to me—“Mom, guess what, I earned eight points for my team today!” I heard my heart chirping with gratitude to his teacher who probably hadn’t noticed that she had just “game-ized” a dry character quiz.

Dr. James Paul Gee said, “Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates).” By making it explicit, the game-design principles can offer us some clue to establish those right conditions so that the misconception of learning-as-work will be corrected by learners who then would reclassify their act of gaining knowledge as a leisure activity.

One evening after finishing my work-late day, I came home to find my husband battling with our five-year-old daughter and six-year-old son on the living room floor. With my daughter fiercely grabbing Daddy’s legs, my son pulled the pillow from his hand and jumped underneath the coffee table—“touchdown!” he yelled. As the two little ones marched on for another round of football, I heard my husband stopping them, “Grant, what was you score? OK, 38… So with a touch down, you get 6. What is your score now? What about the one point for the kick….”

As he paused to add the numbers up in his head, my little football player had no clue that he was taking a math class in disguise. But for the Daddy, he surely was game in catching a teachable moment to build some learning—thanks to that ten years spousal influence!

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What Mobile Platforms Could Do for Higher Education but Aren’t (Yet)

If you’re the type who likes to follow trends in technology, you know one of the most remarkable trends in the last few years is the pace of innovation in mobile platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. If you have a smartphone, it’s probably already become your notepad, your navigation system, and your external memory, and in a few years, it could be your wallet, the brains of your computer, and your home automation system. I have to confess that I spend more than a little time tracking each new development in the smartphone/tablet world.

And every time I see a new component, a new sensor, or a new interface method that gets added to a mobile platform, I have an idea for a use for it in higher education that would enhance learning or enable learning activities that were impossible before. But so far, very few of these technologies are configured in such a way that we can effectively utilize them in higher ed.

In the spirit of keeping an eye towards the future, I’m going to present some educational use cases that utilize the unique technological capabilities of mobile platforms. In most cases, the underlying technology to do these things exist now, but the user options in the software are too limited.

I want to clarify that I’m interested in the new affordances of these platforms. While there’s no shortage of educational “apps” in the Android Market or the iPhone App Store, they’re mostly self-contained programs that could have been made just as well for a computer, with a touch interface added. They don’t tap the new potential of the these platforms, which represent a unique convergence of technologies—portable internet access, GPS sensors and compasses, orientation  sensors and accelerometers, cameras and microphones, touchscreens—and operating systems that make it easy for programmers to utilize and combine them.

As I discuss these use cases, I’ll mostly be referencing Android, as it’s the platform I’m more personally familiar with.

Image Recognition

Imagine you’re an art history teacher. You assign your students to visit the Art Institute of Chicago and look at a special collection of paintings. Your student scans a painting with his mobile device’s camera. The software recognizes the painting and a recording you’ve made about the painting starts playing through his headphones while notes appear on the screen. The notes contain links to related information and more paintings from the artist. The student is then given a short quiz asking questions about the techniques at use in the painting, all while he’s looking at the real thing.

Why We’re Not Quite There

The Google Goggles app can scan and recognize famous works of art today if you take a picture of one—I tried it the last time I was at the Art Institute—but the best it can do is pull up web search results relating to that painting. Which is great for an independent museum visitor who wants to learn more about the artist, but there’s no way for an instructor to leverage that technology to create some custom media or applications for his class that can be played or displayed when an image is recognized—at least, not without learning how to program.

Connected Textbooks

Imagine your student is in a doctor’s office with an unexpectedly long wait. She didn’t know it would take so long, so she didn’t bring her backpack. But she always has her smartphone with her, so she pulls up an academic text that she had been reading on her e-reader. The software remembers where in the middle of the chapter she left off, so she doesn’t have to try to hunt for the last page she read on the small screen. As she’s reading, she highlights a passage and pulls up a menu to make a quick note on her smartphone keyboard. She gets home later, logs onto the book on her computer, finds the note she made and pastes it into the text of a paper she’s working on.

Why We’re Not Quite There

The big problem here is the number of academic texts available in cross-platform e-book systems is severely limited. Also, many popular e-book platforms don’t support user annotations or automatic syncing between devices, and fewer support the automatic syncing of annotations.

Note Taking

Imagine your student is reading a dense, theoretical book that she has taken out of the library for a research paper, the kind of challenging text you need to read aloud in order to grasp and unpack the author’s full meaning. She come across a passage she wants to record in her notes, but she fears that if she stops to copy it down, she’ll lose track of the point the author was making and have to re-read a few pages, and she may have trouble making out her handwriting later anyways. Instead, she takes a picture of the page with her smartphone, which uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to translate the image into editable text and sends it to the notes file on her computer. In the front of the book, the library has inserted a QR code that, when scanned by her phone, gives the full citation in MLA and APA format, which she can copy directly into her works cited page.

(I know that there are technological pessimists out there who would interpret this scenario as a shortcut that would reduce the time and depth of the student’s engagement with the text. That may be true in some situations for some students, but ussually making the process easier allows students to spend their mental resources on the content they’re trying to understand.)

Why We’re Not Quite There Yet

Right now, the Android version of Google Docs can use OCR to translate a picture into editable text that you can copy and paste directly into your research project—kind of. Consumer OCR technologies are still maturing, and the margin for error is high. Right now, Google’s OCR does well for short pieces of text on a flat surface, but it doesn’t recognize text on a curved surface, like a page that curves into the spine of a book. Also, not all smartphone cameras are created equal, and some aren’t reliable enough at capturing crisp images—a necessity if the software is going to be asked to interpret text.

Some people think that print itself is going to be phased out and that this technology will be made moot as more and more texts are published digitally in the first place, but I would guess that the OCR technology will catch up long before we’re in a position to do away with paper books entirely.

There’s nothing to stop libraries from including QR codes containing full citations with each book in their collection now—they would just need to be able to justify the cost.

Map Making

Imagine a sociology class focusing on food deserts in urban areas. As part of their field work, students go out in small teams and walk every block in a given neighborhood. Every time they come to a drug store, convenience store, or grocery store, they use their smartphone’s GPS and map software to make a waypoint that identifies what kind of store it is and to enter other quantitative and qualitative data. After every group has completed their field work, the data is combined to create a complete map, which can be made public as a layer on Google Maps.

Why We’re Not Quite There

Google Maps allows you to star a location, which will save it, sort of like a bookmark, within your Google account. But right now the mobile versions of Google Maps don’t let you combine a collection of starred locations into a map, with labels and descriptions, let alone share those points with others to create a combined map.

Getting There

These are just a few examples. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say the possibilities are endless. Of course, even if the software gets configured in such a way to make it easier for educators to tap into, we’ll still face the obstacles of actually making sure students have access to these devices.

  • Cost—Will we ever reach a point where students are expected to have mobile connected devices? Will the prices of cellular data plans drop enough that this is a reasonable expectation of already financially strained students? Will universities be able to provide assistance or lend out devices in cases where assignments require them?
  • Standardization—Will the same or similar applications be available in all major platforms? And if not, would a university or department be able to require a specific platform without putting an undue strain on students who may have already bought a different device on contract?
  • App stores tend to be geared towards consumers. Will administrators be able to buy apps in bulk and deploy them to, say, a class of students’ devices? And if you could buy apps in bulk, would you be able to disable the licenses on students’ own devices and reuse them on the class next quarter?

I can’t say what the answers to these questions will be, but if the pace at which smartphones and tablets are evolving and being adopted continues, I have little doubt that we’ll see them more and more in higher education.

Are Instructors Ready for Show Time?

Attend any conference on distance learning and you’ll hear lots of enthusiasm for instructor videos in online courses. Whether they’re DIY webcam course introductions or sophisticated in-studio productions, the general belief is that more video equals a better course. I’ve long been an advocate for increasing the use of instructor video, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that not every instructor is ready for show time.

Why? Mostly it’s because the qualities that make for a good video require skills and attributes that aren’t necessarily found in all, or even most, faculty. Engaging images and narrative aren’t usually what’s presented in a classroom PowerPoint. Brevity is a must, but many academics lecture even when coached not to. Ease and comfort on camera are essential, but I’ve seen too many recordings that feature white-knuckled instructors gripping a podium and staring blankly into the middle-distance.

This isn’t the fault of the instructor. Writing for media and performing for video are specialized skills not part of the typical Ph.D. program. And I’ve been guilty of handing faculty a couple of video production guideline documents, offering some generalized tips, and then being disappointed when the results are less than desired.

No more. I’ve decided that I need to be involved every step of the production process, from ideation to script review to preproduction rehearsal and on-site coaching and art direction. It will be a much longer and labor-intensive process, but I think it’s absolutely necessary to get results that everyone can be proud of.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that some faculty just aren’t able to appear on camera in a way that adds value to their course. While unfortunate, it’s a fact that a stiff, sweaty delivery by a visibly uncomfortable professor leaves a poor impression of his or her abilities as a teacher and, by extension, the program or school. For them there are other ways to add social presence. I’ve worked with faculty who are clearly unsuited for video but who produce really engaging audio podcasts. It would be irresponsible for me to insist on video when using audio gives a much better result.

So are instructors ready for show time? A few are, some others can be made ready, and some will never be. The challenge is to identify which media best suits an individual faculty member, diplomatically guide them to that media, and then follow through with lots of hands-on direction and oversight.

Constructing Effective Online-Learning Environments via the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework

As designers developing online courses, we’re always looking for purposeful ways to ensure that the instructor, content, and student interactions are strategic, cohesive, and meaningful.

What’s more, we are also tasked with staying abreast of and introducing faculty to research, theories, and methodology associated with constructing rigorous and effective online pedagogy.

At the 27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework was the focus of several sessions including sessions from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Springfield, and Capella University. Intrigued by the implications of the framework, I wanted to learn more about the framework’s efficacy in higher education.

The premise of the CoI framework suggests that creating an effective online experience requires a collaborative community. The CoI framework, developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) is defined as follows:

An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements—social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

  • Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison, 2009).
  • Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).
  • Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).

CoI is a framework that many higher-education institutions cite to inform, and in some cases measure, the effectiveness of online-course development.

The granular elements of the CoI Framework are listed in the table below. The “categories” and “indicators” provide explicit examples of how , the CoI model elements can be interpreted by an online-course designer.

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172.

In 2007, a peripheral resource, the CoI survey instrument was developed and ultimately, validated. This survey instrument correlates with the CoI framework and is being utilized in studies at some institutions as an end-of-course evaluative tool.

As a course designer, I’m always looking for ways to equip faculty with a slew of resources to get the wheels turning as they think through the course content and design.

For some professors, it can seem intimidating at the outset of development to segue from teaching face-to-face to online. It’s especially challenging to identify strategies that will translate to meaningful online teaching presence. One strategy to brainstorm ideas for not only teaching presence but cognitive and social as well is utilizing the CoI framework elements to flesh out assessments and learning activities that align with each.

For example, with social presence, the professor can structure discussions via group cohorts that are led by a weekly discussion leader. This strategy allows students to establish a rapport with the cohort members. Additionally, students are empowered and accountable for the content they are charged with leading during their respective week.

Concepts such as these would serve as an invaluable resource to faculty members, especially those new to teaching online. Creating a central repository for faculty members to share and collect resources may serve as a community for online pedagogical strategies.

RESOURCES

The Community of Inquiry website:
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/methodology

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed August 29, 2011.

Arbaugh, J.B., Cleveland-Innes, M., Diaz, S.R., Garrison, D.R., Ice, P., Richardson & Swan, K.P. (2008). Developing a community of inquiry instrument: Testing a measure of the Community of Inquiry framework using a multi-institutional sample. The Internet and Higher Education. 11 (3-4), 133-136.

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Introducing the “Everything that FITS” Podcast

In June 2011, the FITS Department began production of Everything That FITS, an ongoing podcast for members of the DePaul community and the world at large, focusing on instructional technology, pedagogy, and teaching and learning. Podcasts may contain audio transcripts of blog entries on the iddblog.org site, interviews with faculty and staff members, or other content to be determined. We’re dedicated to helping you find your inspiration to teach smarter!

New podcasts will be added on a monthly basis, and you can subscribe to Everything That FITS through iTunes U at DePaul. Use this link to access the Podcast.

Happy listening!

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Going Analog: The Why versus the How in Instruction

Note: Listen to this entry at Everything that FITS, an ongoing podcast for the DePaul community and the world at large, sponsored by DePaul University’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services department. Tune in for tips, tricks and useful information to help you teach smarter every day.

Technology is inescapable these days. It has made some things in our lives easier, and has changed the way we communicate with the world. It serves as our portal to our homes, schools, and jobs, and is in some cases the center of our social lives. Many technology tools that we now take for granted have augmented, and in some cases replaced, older analog technologies, enabling us to streamline and simplify our tasks. In many cases we ask ourselves how we ever got along without such a resource. Consider where we are now compared to twenty years ago with technologies like cell phones, e-mail and the Internet—or even just ten years back when social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster was just beginning—and you can see how much the landscape has changed in just a few short years. Kids growing up today don’t remember not having cell phones and always-on Internet access; now social networking sites aren’t just for amusement but have become a way of life for most of us. If you do anything embarrassing while someone is filming, you can bet that it will show up on YouTube for the world to see. All of these, in varying degrees, have changed how we interact with one another and with the world.

However, as we grow accustomed to these new technological innovations, are we developing new skills to our benefit, or are we simply replacing older analog methods of accomplishing the same thing? And are there advantages to the new way over the old one, or are we “phasing out” skills that might still have some importance from time to time? Consider these examples:

  1. Although kids are still taught to read analog clocks in grade school, the majority of clocks being installed in schools these days are digital, or if they are analog, they include a digital readout at the bottom. The majority of clocks in most homes are digital too (your DVD player, clock radio, computer, etc.). As a consequence, fewer and fewer kids can read a wristwatch because they aren’t getting the practice. My wife teaches 8th grade, and she says she has a lot of kids who can’t tell time without a digital clock! This trend makes traditional wristwatches seem almost like relics of the past, but for those who still treasure these timeless pieces, watch repair services are essential to keep them in working order and preserve their charm. And for those interested in starting their collection, be sure to check out these replica watches for sale.
  2. Lots of people these days use maps from the Internet or GPS to get directions. But what if the information on the GPS is outdated, or the Internet directions are wrong? This happened to me recently in Colorado: after Google Maps led us into the middle of nowhere and off course, we pulled over and bought a state map, and that got us on the right track. However, this was only because I know how to read a map, which obviously won’t give turn-by-turn directions, and to use the compass I carry with me. We are losing the ability to navigate with map and compass, because the majority of the time you don’t have to know how to read them anymore. Many people are content to turn on their phone’s location service or their GPS and follow blindly from there, without truly knowing where they are or where they’re going; they just follow the directions and assume they’ll get there.
  3. The last time you had to do some mathematical computation, how did you do it? I bet you whipped out a calculator, used your computer or phone’s built-in calculator, or did a formula operation in a spreadsheet program. You probably didn’t reach for a pencil and paper to do some long division. Like telling time on analog clocks, they do still teach this in schools, but these days calculators are used at least as often, even on standardized tests. The state of Illinois gives aspiring teachers a Basic Skills Test that is roughly equal to the abilities in math and English of an 8th grade student. This test has a 77 percent failure rate as of 2010, and the failing scores are predominantly in math. Why? As someone who has taken this very test, I can venture a guess: calculators are not allowed, which means that test takers have to navigate that long division unaided. They are failing because they have been using calculators for so long that they have forgotten how to calculate by hand.

So what does this mean for us? Operations like telling time, navigating, and doing math haven’t changed, but the way in which we find answers in each system has, and our increasing reliance on these electronic devices is slowly removing the old ways simply because using them is easier. In most cases, the failure we are seeing isn’t the inability to choose what operation to perform; it’s the failure to do so without an electronic device’s aid. Thinking back a number of years to when we still needed road maps, we didn’t have any more trouble getting around than we do now even though mapping is available on nearly every phone. The ease of using the electronic counterpart is now overshadowing the old fashioned tried-and-true way. This may not be a problem in everyday usage, but it can be catastrophic when the technology doesn’t work. What if you don’t know how to do it the low-tech way?

This phenomenon of new technology replacing old has huge implications for the teaching world. More and more, students are coming out of K-12 and college with a set of skills that are predominantly plug-and-play; that is, they have the ability to solve a problem using a tool, but they don’t have the know-how to tell you what procedure they are following, or even why they are following the steps in that order. Instead, they know a procedure that says, “If I do thing A with tool X, I will get answer B.” There’s no intuition in this; the cognitive process has been removed altogether and replaced with an instruction manual of sorts. Problem solving cannot happen here unless the information to be plugged in is presented in the same way the student learned the procedure.

In the last decade, educational philosophy has increasingly focused on creating “authentic,” “real-world” problem-solving processes. The argument is that students need to be able to apply learned concepts to actual situations they will encounter instead of doing purely theoretical exercises. This concept is a fantastic idea in theory, but the catch to this is that many of the electronic replacements we are using are removing the theoretical portion and leaving only the process. There is no opportunity for students to see the theoretical knowledge being applied or to understand how it is being applied; they just plug in numbers and variables and get an answer. If the answer was all we were looking for, this would be enough, but obviously as instructors we are interested in students’ mastery of the theoretical, not their ability to plug and chug. We need to be sure that we’re teaching students the “why” part of the process, and not just the “how.” If you are going to use an electronic replacement for an analog activity, it is important to make sure that the resource still requires the student to do some thinking on his/her own outside of number-crunching. If there is a process that can be done by hand, the resource should be used to simplify that process rather than replacing it, and instructors should make sure that students can still perform the specified actions without any electronic help. If possible, teach the analog method first, so the tool will be perceived as a helper rather than the primary problem-solving method. For example, students learning to do bibliographic citations could be told to create citations on their own by hand, and then use an online bibliography tool like EasyBib or NoodleTools to check their work. In this way students learn to do the work on their own, and perceive the tool as a helper for difficult citations rather than as “the way to create citations.” Students learn to do the heavy lifting first, and the tool is secondary, rather than being the heavy lifter.

In this age of electronic conveniences, it’s often difficult to try and “go analog” and do things the old-fashioned way when there are so many easy ways around to do it faster, cheaper, and with less human involvement. Still, the benefit to learners has remained the same, even though the times are a-changin’. Regardless of what the electronic world can create to “enhance” our lives, there’s still no substitute for old-fashioned know-how and human reasoning, and those who don’t need electronic crutches will always have an advantage. It’s important to remember that sometimes the old way is still a useful one, even if it’s not the easy one.