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The State of Mobile Learning

The use of mobile devices for education has been an interest of mine since 2011. But a lot has changed since the days of the iPhone 4 and the Nexus S: smartphones, which used to be the cutting edge of consumer technology are now ubiquitous to the point of being taken for granted. And technology vendors, who used to think of mobile as an afterthought, are developing apps and services with mobile compatibility as the first priority.

And I’ve seen attitudes shift among faculty too. As recently as 2015, many faculty I interacted with saw using smartphones for learning as so radical as to be frightening. In the last year, many faculty seem to view the notion as so obvious as to be boring.

Given these shifts in technology and attitudes towards the technology, this is a good time to check in on the current state of mobile learning, and it’s trajectory going forward.

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Hear Your Text: Benefits of Text to Speech

What happens when you get stumped while working on a piece of writing? Many writers, students, academics, and others choose to visit writing centers. More often than not, the first thing the writing center will suggest is to read the work aloud, and listen to what has been written. Why? Because your brain processes information differently based on how you receive it. Sometimes the key to writing is actually putting aside your pen (or keyboard) and taking a moment to listen to what you have written.

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Instructional Design Tools to the Rescue

Instructional design is a growing industry because many institutions and corporations are realizing that designing, developing, and delivering online curricula for their employees is extremely beneficial. As a result, employers are researching instructional design tools that would best fit their work environments. Research has shown that no matter what the industry, students and employees learn best when they are engaged and can interact with the content. Therefore, many businesses are seeking e-learning tools that can help their lessons be more interactive and help bring the training to life. The content usually contains animations, quizzes, walkthroughs, games, annotated videos, etc. This blog will give a brief overview of some instructional design software that can be used to create eLearning Content.

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Coordinating and Managing Meaning Across Cultures: Pearce for Global Learning Experiences

In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.

Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.  

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Even a Child Could Do It: Basics of Cognitive Load Theory

My son went to Kindergarten this year. He’s doing all the things I figured he would: math, reading, gym, music, art, recess, and the library. Once upon a time, I was a substitute teacher in K-12, and so I had a passing familiarity with kids’ worksheets. But this is the first time I have been a parent of a school-age child. Suddenly those worksheets he brings home are vastly more interesting to me. Looking over the exercises, I am reminded of the importance of the presentation of information; that is, how the instruction is designed for his developing brain to grasp what are sometimes difficult concepts, without making the tasks seemingly too difficult for him. We have all heard someone tell us to “take it slowly” when we are learning something new, or to make “baby steps” toward completing a larger goal. In a nutshell, these are some of the basic concepts in Cognitive Load Theory.

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Change Agent Training: Part 1

We know binaries can be problematic. Even if our intention is to place something on a spectrum between two poles — introvert or extrovert; risk-averse or risk-embracing; early bird or night owl, etc., — we still frequently default to binaries. The binary I want to unpack here is the idea that some people love change (enjoying the newness of things, embracing something they haven’t tried before) and others prefer steadiness and consistency.

And while I’m sure it’s true that people have dispositional tendencies towards one of those ways of being, change happens to all of us, no matter where we fall on that continuum. So can someone who falls into the “consistency, please!” camp develop the dispositions of the change embracers?

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Quick Tips to Reduce Course Management Stress

Vintage clip art man smiling and pointing to leftEmails, I get emails. Lots of them. Most of which are requests from faculty for help with their courses in D2L, and most of those are about courses that were designed in the absence of—or refusal of—input from an instructional designer (someone, shall we say, like yours truly). And most of the issues for which those emails plead help could be easily avoided by following some simple guidelines. So, in the spirit of making life simpler and less stressful for everyone involved with online, hybrid, or web-enhanced courses, I offer some suggestions:

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Thinking about Student Learning Holistically

We probably all have experience (either or own or hearing from a colleague) with frustration over our students’ seeming inability to apply what they learned in a previous class to our own classes. From a science teacher frustrated because they feel like they have to re-teach their students algebra or calculus skills they should have learned in a prerequisite class, to humanities teachers who feel like every new crop of students seemingly forgot their basic writing skills, to some of my own frustrations, this problem is prevalent.

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Teaching Diverse Learners: How the Universal Design for Learning framework can help instructors engage a range of learners

Door and Elevator DoorSidewalk cut-ins. Elevators. Buttons that open doors. If you’ve ever been out and about in a wheelchair, used a dolly to move furniture, or pushed a baby stroller, you know to look for and use these things. But the fact is these innovations are relatively recent and were not mandated until the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990.

While the aim of the ADA is to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities and provide for their access to public places, the effects of the law have impacted a broader segment of the population. This broader impact includes empowering individuals to take legal action to end disability bias to ensure a more inclusive environment for everyone.

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Improve Your Video Lecture Production with Free Open Source Software

I’ve recently gotten into a “maker” mindset, becoming more and more interested in the concept of makerspaces, hackerspaces, and generally improving my ability to make, repair, or upcycle the things I use on a daily basis. Besides using my wife’s broken laptop charge port as a big impetus to learn to solder, or installing various Linux distributions on various old computers or single board computers I have, I’ve been spending time watching YouTube channels of various makers or Linux podcasts. One thing I’ve noticed is that the video production of these channels is often very good, even when they seem like shoestring productions.

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