Blog Entry
Hello, all: You are cordially invited to participate in a modified e-Delphi study re: MOOCs and feasibility.
This online survey is being conducted to sample some current insights, attitudes, and concerns about massive open online courses (MOOCs) to get a sense of the feasibility and near-term adoption of the offering of MOOCs by various universities and colleges. This will be conducted as a one-time modified electronic Delphi study to capture the insights of practicing faculty and administrators in higher education ...
Continue reading Invitation to Participate in a Modified E-Delphi Study re: MOOCs
Blog Entry
The current fad is still “MOOCs,” massive open online courses. A recent provost’s lecture featured a speaker who discussed some MOOC endeavors at his university. Some webinars have focused on the MOOC phenomena. A forthcoming issue in an international journal is focused around MOOCs. That said, there are some who say that the “MOOC hype cycle,” two years in, is heading to the “trough of disillusionment.” Maybe so. Maybe so.
More compelling, there are still the demographics: huge human ...
Blog Entry
Years ago, in a planning meeting for some new features for our campus LMS, there was a side conversation about building a pedagogy-agnostic platform for online learning. The concept was that the technology would enable a wide range of learning approaches and types. People could couple elements of a course, or they could de-couple elements. They were under no obligation to build a course in any particular way. Once a faculty member learned the tool thoroughly, he or she could ...
Blog Entry
THE INFORMATION DIET: A CASE FOR CONSCIOUS CONSUMPTION. Clay A. Johnson. Beijing: O’Reilly. 2012. $22.99 hardcover.
In a time of New Year’s resolutions and the launching of numerous diets and exercise plans, Clay A. Johnson’s “The Information Diet” uses the diet analogy for people’s consumption of information. The way he sees it, people are going for the sweet and highly-processed bad-for-you sorts of information. In this age of electronically delivered and personalized information, people can ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Strategic resolutions about information intake
Blog Entry
It’s totally not fashionable to own up to reading manuals. After all, there are intuitive interfaces. It’s not that hard to use many technology programs, at least at a base level. What I’ve learned is that these assumptions are a little reckless.
What is the organizational regime for the software, and what terminology is used? What is going on on the back end when a particular tool is used? How is the software used in various research ...
Blog Entry
Years ago, at a conference on the East Coast, I attended a session by a man working in instructional design who created an automated training (a slideshow) to fulfill compliance requirements for his private company. He had trainees from all over the world who had to go through the compliance trainings annually on a variety of topics, to fulfill a legal requirement, and his job was to make the training as direct and simple and effective as possible. Back then ...
Blog Entry
Assignments to an ID come in various forms. At the most basic level, a faculty member has a particular objective. He / she wants to achieve particular learning aims. Further, most of them already know how they want to achieve that objective. With those barebones goalposts, one knows in general how to proceed. The PI’s personality also affects the direction of the project. The other team members will also have feedback.
Of course, as one immerses into the information, one ...
Continue reading Under-specification of the Instructional Design Model
Blog Entry
In instructional design, one builds learning with short-term incentivization of the learning by building in rewards and even punishments to encourage human commitment to the learning at hand. Most of these incentives deal with success issues in the short-term. What is intriguing to me is how to design lifelong learning over time.
Then, when I was surfing on my iPad during a class that I’m taking, I ran across Charles Duhigg’s “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” in The ...
Continue reading The Science of Habit Formation and Lifelong Learning
Blog Entry
Blog Entry
At a recent conference, trainers for US federal workers said that their learning designs have to fit a particular learning profile—given the restrictive time schedules of federal workers. Federal workers work in a pressure cooker environment, and their workdays can shift with little notice depending on what is happening in government.
Those who work in the federal government have to keep up complex skill sets. Many have to earn post-graduate degrees to progress up the bureaucracy for their work ...
Continue reading Emerging Technologies in Federal Workforce Training
Blog Entry
It’s not often that an instructional designer—at least in higher education—gets to work on kinesthetic learning. Kinesthetic learning involves actual physical learning, muscle memory, a proprioceptive approach to embodied learning. Even now, I am not quite sure whether the particular project will be funded, but I thought it would be a good idea to explore kinesthetic learning.
In the popular literature, kinesthetic learning is done for military practices with high-intensity works that need to be ...
Blog Entry
Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).
Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might ...
Blog Entry
by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
Blog Entry
Various research writings have originated creative ways to capture information as a byproduct of work. For some, creating help texts and directions can be unwieldy and time-consuming. An article by Paris, Colineau, Lu and Linden summarized an endeavor that captured a procedural help based on how people used a computerized system. This automation was to help replace the “labor-intensive and tedious” writing and maintenance of procedural help texts. Their system apparently captures use information from various data streams: textual, graphical ...
Blog Entry
So here was a pretty in-depth online training on two fairly large technological systems. One was an LMS, and one was an instance manager for that LMS. The learning involved the use of various slideshows, animated tutorials, and practice assessments.
In addition, these technical systems are deployed socially, for use in sometimes high-pressured academic environments.
Once all the mechanical parts of this training were built to spec, and the policy aspects for the role of the trainees upon graduation had ...
Continue reading Adding the Human Piece to an Automated Training
Blog Entry
It is a simple truism that most people would not want to be replaced out of their jobs. Suggesting that might make a person downright uncomfortable. So it was with amusement that I came across a phrase in my readings on automated learning: “offloading the instructor.”
That very blunt phrase highlights a very real factor in the support for automation of learning. Less offensive phrasing is usually used, more like “cost-savings.”
I recently co-presented on automated learning at this campus ...
Continue reading "Offloading the Instructor" and Automated Learning
Blog Entry
So over break, as part of a family road trip, I got to visit some condo models in Chicago. One in particular was a luxury building that involved the use of a sophisticated DVD with virtual depictions of the various units and the new building itself just a few blocks off the Magnificant Mile. The quality of this simulated experience was something only an established builder with many years of marketing could really build or commission. And this experience, while ...
Blog Entry
Dr. Xiangen Hu (University of Tennessee) presented at a recent conference on intelligent tutoring systems. He suggests that computer tutors may solve learner problems by tracking the history of learners' academic performances and their interactions with the computer and curriculum. However, to build such systems, a numerical value must be given to a stimulus-response pair (with behaviorist underpinnings) in the interactions. The computer tutors use natural language interactions, and he later said that for any ...
Blog Entry
For the past several years, a series of articles in academic journals have engaged the technological strategies deployed for customizing or adapting learning for different learners. This, of course, is done by the faculty (some) in an instructor-led course. However, in automated courses, the instructional design and the technologies then come into play to try to achieve this. The research discusses various strategies from creating learning models to profile users (based on psychology, cognition, preferences, personality ...
Continue reading Educational Technology Standing in for the Live Instructor
Blog Entry
One of the major skills / talents of seasoned instructors (and some new ones) relates to their live "run-time adaptation." This computer term refers to the operation of a computer program. As applied to instructors, this relates to how an instructor leads and supports a group of learners. This involves a fair amount of complex multi-tasking and the nuances of reading human behavior and meaning (verbal and non-verbal). This run-time adaptation also involves a deep body of knowledge about a particular ...
Blog Entry
How could the instructional designers (IDs) come together to build an online public-access course that people could come visit to learn more about the learning management system, AxioTM? The IDs would have to build using AxioTM. They would have to use copyright-released materials, many from KSU faculty (with their permission). They would have to show materials from a variety of curricular fields, with the learners ranging from K-12 through university. They would have to showcase some of the more common ...
Blog Entry
After all the sweltering heat yesterday, I am glad it's raining today. I have a million small tasks to complete before getting away from the office for two days to attend the 7th Annual SIDLIT (Summer Institute of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology) conference in Kansas City on Aug 3-4. I am excited and eager to present with my colleagues on the launching of the IDOS blog. I also plan to attend several sessions and have marked those sessions ...
Blog Entry
I can empathize with my colleagues when it comes to working with technology. I spent a good chunk of last week creating an example of a simulated message board with annotations for our Demo course for Axio Learning Online. Although it sounds like a very simple task, it has quite a few layers to it. First, you have to create an instructor (at least one, but there can be more) and several students in the course. Then you have to ...
Blog Entry
Gatekeeping as a concept makes sense. There are times when some people should have access to particular information and other times when they don't really need to know. I thought of this recently when I got turned away by some army folks at the nearby military base. It turns out I didn't have the full documentation needed to gain entry, and they were right. When I returned in the afternoon with the proper documentation, they very graciously gave ...
Continue reading Gatekeeping, Keys and Trying to get on Base
Blog Entry
An online instructor may breathe "life" into a course through his/her enthusiasm, experiences, personality, instructional design, and sheer telepresence. The communications and interactivity in such courses enliven and enrich the learning. Online instructors may often be the linchipin of the learning experience.
In academia, there is not often a lot of opportunity to use "boxed" pre-made digital courses. Simply, faculty are rather hands-on in their teaching, and they tend to be skeptical of the effectiveness of online courses without ...