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A couple weeks ago, I was part of a free webinar that was supposed to be a clinic. People were given simple tasks…sent off to do their work…and were to rejoin the group some 20 minutes later to share their work. The work that emerged was very divergent, and it became clear that these faculty and instructional designers all had different mental models going in. The presenter very graciously made positive comments on their works and quickly moved ...
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A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.
Subject matter experts ...
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Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.
They’ll ...
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For many freshman-level courses, it may be fair to assume that learners will be coming in cold to the learning domain. Coming in “cold” means that they lack basic background in the field. It also means that their skillsets may be scatter-shot in terms of the subject materials, and the learners may well be acquiring their learning skills as they go.
Strategies for supporting novice learners to a learning domain are manifold. First, one strategy involves building ...
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The opening of the article was riveting. An instructor of an introductory course in computer programming was noticing his student demographics, and the high probability that they…
“Are from some minority group Did some portion of their k-12 in a compromised educational system Are students not just out of high school and may be working Are not born in the United States Speak English as there (sic) second language Have very little (sic) computer skills May be dismayed by the ...
Continue reading The Challenges of the "Highly Anxious" Student Profile
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
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At the recent SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, KS, Tim Murphy presented on “Meeting the Challenges of International Online Teaching.” His task was to take part in online course redesigns for better acceptance by international audiences. He began with a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing place, language and culture, for a global classroom.
At one point in the presentation, he asked rhetorically whether synchronous communications were ever advisable for international online classrooms. One ...
Continue reading Adjustments for International Online Teaching
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 July 2009
A recent article referred to how some companies design technological tools for amateurs vs. novices. In a sense, instructional design may also differentiate between learners based on amateurs vs. novices—as a construct.
Okay, so definitions, first. A “novice” is a person who eventually aims to be an expert. This person is at the beginning stages of learning about a particular area of expertise. This person will be initiated into a field from elementary understandings to ...
Continue reading Designing Technological Tools (and Instruction) for Amateurs vs. Novices
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Remote learners have many of the same needs as face-to-face students. These needs go beyond the learning to such things as getting letters-of-recommendation. For many such letters—such as verifying writing skills and academic work—I have no problems writing emails or letters or filling out forms.
What things get tougher is when students ask for letters recommending them for certain jobs that mention skill sets that I have no knowledge about. These may involve customer service, private information handling ...
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A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
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A generic syllabus is one that captures the main contents of an online course: the course description, the defined learning objectives, the catalog information, related texts and resources, a course schedule (to show the overall e-learning trajectory and course structure), the grading structure, and course policies (civility clauses, accessibility issues, and others). I had assumed that it always comes with every online course build, but one of the faculty on the build team asked several times about what this syllabus ...
Continue reading The Uses of Generic Syllabi in Collaborative Course Builds
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Professional writers often forget what it’s like to be a starting writer. They forget how sensitive writers may be about their work and how hard it is to share. They forget how stinging simple critiques may be. They forget that writers often conflate themselves with their work.
As an instructor who regularly “workshops” student writing online, I am continually re-learning how to adjust to the changing young writers who take the courses.
In a workshop ...
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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Faculty members work with a number of audiences. They connect with their colleagues. They work with grant funders. They rub elbows with people from the business world, political environment, and military circles, and others. They work with students. They work with staff. And they also communicate with the general public.
Sometimes, their many constituencies are forgotten by those outside the professoriate or academia.
Faculty often do a great job of presenting concepts and contents to a class; they facilitate learning ...
Continue reading Sophisticates in Communicating by Digital Video
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David Shieh’s “These Lectures are Gone in 60 Seconds: Minute-long talks find success at a community college” got forwarded to us instructional designers by our supervisor recently. (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i26/26a00102.htm) This issue had come up because of a request by some departments for a presentation that would cover some topics that are critical for e-learning: new technologies, e-learning quality, accessibility, intellectual property, and some design principles. They wanted this all in a short time ...
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For years now, I’ve been watching freshman and sophomore students interact with each other in a variety of online courses. Even though most of the learning in my courses are asynchronous, the general co-learning in time among college students really enhances the learning experience.
For one, online learners seem very supportive of each other. They pass along kudos and encouragements. They share personal life stories. They share photos—of desserts, of artwork, of ducks from a duck hunt, of ...
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There’s little doubt that these are stressful times for many. Posted student messages show a heightened concern for their studies. And behind that concern seems to be a range of personal challenges that only occasionally make it to the surface of the conversation.
Maybe the higher levels of student stress come from a new L/CMS and the higher learning curve in knowing how to use that. Maybe the higher stress comes from pretty ...
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Discussions have been rampant that e-learning may happen more and more outside the structures of a learning / course management system. The concept is that a cobbling of tools may offer learners a loosely coupled online learning experience at a lower cost than the proprietary or open-source L/CMSes may offer. The idea is that people may tap various user sources that are Web 2.0 and improve functionalities from there by adding contents and using the technologies in ways that ...
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A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
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A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on ...
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For many, deadlines just sort of blow right past them, and changes don’t get made. One of the more seductive aspects of digital content is that it feels sort of permanent even though it can so easily be updated. So much digital content in courses need updating because of changes in research, in available digital resources, in pedagogical methods, and in technologies.
Some make changes on the fly. As they realize there are issues to fix, they go ahead ...
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Addressing Learners’ Online Test Anxieties
“And one of the things about testing is that it’s harder to do better than you can do, but it’s easy to do worse than you can do.”
– Dr. Ann Johnson, in “A Map of the Stars: Using Test Data to Create Useful Academic Interventions”
Test anxieties have a way of manifesting in various ways. I’ve seen doctoral students, who were college administrators in their “real lives,” fall apart and walk out ...
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There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
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I have colleagues who speak dreamily of teaching online from their sailboats or vacation homes. They talk of never having to attend another faculty meeting. Theirs is a glammed-up idea of connecting to students via virtual means and wifi connectivity (or satellite-based connectivity).
Having spent a couple years now teaching online from a distance, via a campus that I’ve never yet physically set foot on, I can say that there’s something to be missed being at a distance ...
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Two faculty from unrelated fields (audiology and interior design) recently presented on how their respective programs use assessment plans. Both concur that assessment is generally just “good practice.” Within the general push to encourage assessments, programs have flexibility and may focus on different aspects to build in different years.
Both faculty are from fields with external accrediting agencies, which focus on the building of knowledge and skills in learners, and their feedback has enhanced the functioning of both programs. Audiology ...
Continue reading Completing an Assessment Plan: Two Programs (Part II)
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Our campus has an assessment conference earlier this month. The main message to faculty and administrators was the importance of assessing inputs and learning outcomes.
This endeavor is encouraged in part because of the upcoming accreditation visit for the university in a few more years, but program assessment has continuing value—to study and measure academic achievements, student learning, and even coincidental learning. This knowledge is not just for in-house use but for the requirement to publicly account for the ...
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Conventional wisdom has it that most of an online course should be complete before it launches.
A more challenging approach for experienced faculty is to use an “emergent” curriculum. That is a course that evolves the curriculum—with or without student input—as the course evolves. This may apply to learning that is also emergent in the world, such as a new course about a cutting-edge technology or policy or phenomena…which is rare but does occur now and again ...
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It usually takes several elements to go wrong in an online situation for things to get really nutty. And reversing this little catastrophe early in an online course is not difficult to see at all. First, I trusted in a pre-made class. While I had gone in and rearranged files, I hadn’t looked to check if the calendar was set up. I didn’t check to make sure that a learner walk-through was working. Mistake 1.
Next, I did ...
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One risk to having taught on a subject for a long time is to disconnect from the experiences of new learners. Long immersion in a topic also leads an instructor to having assumptions about how information may be approached, and hard as a person may try to fight this, it may lead to an intellectual stasis, a comfort.
This seems to be a pretty dangerous place to be as an instructor. And that danger is compounded by teaching online where ...
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Dr. Michael Wesch always offers an engaging presentation, mixed with aptly used high tech, and there are always surprises—of the technological kind and absolutely of the human kind. In a recent standing-room only presentation at K-State, he spoke of the need to use technologies to help college students engage with learning. (“A Portal to New Media Literacy: Engaging New Technologies to Engage Students”)
He showed his digital ethnography dashboard http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography To show his uses ...
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K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group will meet Nov. 20, 2008, from noon to 1 p.m. at the Union Stateroom 1...
Current or potential SL users are welcome to attend.
Contact Larry Jackson at ljackson@ksu.edu for more information.
Continue reading K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group Meeting
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Every quarter or two or three, I get into an online scape. Most scrapes can be seen forming like a storm cloud from a long way away. Usually, a student takes offense at a perceived slight because they’ve received a particular comment about their writing. They’ve conflated their idea of self with their work. Or their grades aren’t what they feel they deserve: they assume that they have earned full points before they’ve done any work ...
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Usually, by the 2nd, 3rd or 4th weeks of a 10-week term, students will start emailing me with a dilemma, which goes something like this: “I ordered my book as soon as I had the money to pay for it, but it hasn’t arrived yet, so may I get a deadline extension to turn in late work?” They then sometimes include the clause that the book may take up to 3-4 weeks to arrive from the day of ordering ...
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E-learning mitigates time and distance to a degree, but it does not totally collapse time.
At around the 8th week of a 10-week quarter, occasionally, a student will come up with a proposal that goes something like this: How about if I do all the work I missed in the prior 8 weeks and graduate because this is the last course I need? The student promises a Herculean effort to get a course done in a very short time. The ...
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The warning signs of high maintenance online learners come early. Give me about a half dozen postings in a course…or the first half dozen emails, and a pattern establishes itself fairly quickly. Or maybe one gets a suspicion early…even if it may take a while longer to fully bear out (or not).
They’ll asked an inordinate number of questions that have already been answered in the course announcements and documentation. They will second-guess the teaching ...
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IGI Global has a book coming out titled "Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning" this July 2008. This is edited by Drs. Ugur Demiray of Anadolu University and Ramesh C. Sharma of Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Main Book Site http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985
Table of Contents http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985&v=tableOfContents
This book takes more of an international and global perspective.
Continue reading Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning
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Some public debate has surrounded the issue of public universities and colleges displaying greater responsibility for their troubled students, in order to head off potential on-campus violence.
There have been government studies on students who engage in violence on campus. There have been various universities that have shared publicly some of their endeavors, usually through their counseling support programs for students.
Recent articles have suggested that such institutions of higher education need to be more interventionist. They need to take ...
Continue reading A Watch List of Troubled Students...and Virtuality
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A self-professed “peripatetic” professor, Dr. Chris Sorensen presented on “A University without Walls” at the final Provost Lecture of the year at K-State on Apr. 24.
He pointed out that those in academia tend to specialize in their respective fields. Yet, the creativity happens in the interfaces between domains of knowledge. He used Arthur Koestler’s idea of “bisociation” from “The Act of Creation” to show the interstices where new things may coalesce—in the intersections between disciplines and human ...
Continue reading Expanding the Traditional Lecture in F2F Space
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While driving in to work today, I was thinking about a new crop of online students, and it occurred to me that online learners do have a system of self-regulation of learning as a group. What does that mean? Well, online learners create a sense of community online, and they regulate their own community - in a sense.
They pay attention to each other’s asynchronous posts. They read each other’s works with interest and share joys ...
Continue reading The Self Regulation of Virtual Community by Online Learners
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There’s something charming about being able to watch a small college come online in creating an online program. What’s even more intriguing is watching from a distance and through the framework of an online course to train the faculty, staff and administrators—using the LMS they’ve selected for their program.
Having never set foot on the campus of this college and only driven by the small town where it’s based once on my way elsewhere, I ...
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The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching just released its Mar. 2008 issue (Vol. 4, No. 1). Please find the current issue at the link below.
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
Check it out.
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A situation that occasionally arises is that of course sabotage. This refers to the purposeful cause of destruction or defacement of an online class through particular behaviors. Just this last quarter, I had a student who actively engaged in several weeks of this. It's to the credit of the learning management system (LMS) that he couldn't get very far with his misdirected anger and behaviors. I'd like to address this because it would be hugely naive to ...
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Several years ago, as part of an educational program that I taught for, a special cohort of students were integrated with my online classes. With them came an administrative lurker. This person is a very ethical and professional individual who has held many positions of responsibility in various universities around the US. She has lurked with a great sense of finesse, and I thought that I should probably write a little something about the proper protocols for live class lurking ...
Continue reading The Proper Protocols for Live Class Lurking
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The relationship between learners and an online instructor is defined by the structure of the course but also by their interactions.
I'm not sure what went awry, but I'm starting to feel a bit like a bill collector. I've never actually been one. The only one I ever spoke with was one of my students who moonlighted as a bill collector. She said she used charm to get people to pay their bills. She said - and I ...
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Shortly, I'll be taking a fairly long road trip as part of a family household move. It will be during an intense part of the summer quarter when several weeks' work will be due in condensed weeks. And this quarter, like all others before it, has involved students straggling in late with a variety of reasons for their lateness. To use a running analogy, they will be coming in to the final stretch and will have to sprint the ...
Continue reading To Share or Not: Teaching Online from the Road
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 July 2007
As sometimes can happen with a project, I was bulding one thing under false assumptions and my supervisors were thinking I was making something else. The divergence wasn't serious, but it meant an extra layer of work later on. My small piece in a project was to teach college composition and research writing courses to Native American students, in a cohort model. One aspect of this project was to create Native case studies as part of a curriculum. My ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 July 2007
When Dr. Michele Lansdowne of the Salish Kootenai College (SKC of Pablo, Montana) went looking for a curriculum for Native American students of business, she found very little that resonated. She found even less in terms of business endeavors on an American Indian reservation. That dearth of academic materials in this field led her to start a project of interviewing American Indian entrepreneurs on reservations, in a grant-funded project that resulted in a widely used text and multimedia CD set ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 July 2007
To get ready for the Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop, I read through various cases from the site. There was an interesting "choose your own adventure" type of quality to these cases.
Various author voices came through clearly, and a range of sourcing strategies were used to capture the information.
"Sovereign Still from the Forest to the Plains" (Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff), "Indian Identity in the Arts" (Tina Kuckkahn, J.D.), "Evil Water" (Dr. Subodh K ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- Current Cases (Part IV)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2007
Getting hands-on is a fine way of learning how case studies may be experienced.
It was a couple of years in the making - this case. Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff started out with the relationship building that is so critical to doing research in Indian Country. Without trust, without a clear showing of personality / motive / "heart," there would not be sufficient synergies or motivations to "do business" there. In her ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- A Forestry Management Case (Part II)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 July 2007
The invitation to present came just about half a week before the conference itself was to be held. I was not brought in to be a space filler but rather to contribute a small bit of knowledge - about half an hour's worth. The knowledge base for my presentation had been in the works for at least two years, but even prior to that, I'd been learning a lot about interactivity, learning communities, DLOs and such. I was looking ...
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At the beginning of summer term, learners tentatively begin preweek with some tentative emails. There are the queries about books, where digital resources may be, and some other probes about the class. There are the few brave souls who'll crack a joke or two. There are some who'll come rambling in with a raft of personal questions. There's the perennial sharing of nicknames and preferred choices of how the students want to be addressed ...
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SoftChalk Lesson Builder's most recent Webinar involved a presentation by Lisa Young, a hydrology professor at Gateway Community College (part of the 10 Maricopa Community Colleges of Phoenix, AZ). Young also is a part-time elearning coordinator and co-chair of the RLO Action Group. Some 100 individuals had gathered online to listen in on "Re-usable Learning Objects - The Maricopa College System" (June 13).
Young used a purchased template from SoftChalk that was made for the particular college ...
Continue reading An Aligned RLO Effort in a Community College System
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Now is that time of the term when students start to slump. While online courses may seem to be ones where it's harder to keep a hand on the pulse of the learning, as a long-term virtual instructor (and a F2F one, too), I can sense when learners have hit their limits and are running on caffeine fumes, blocks of fudge, high energy drinks, and sheer will. (There are those running on the energy from putting in the exercise ...
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Years ago, I presented a small session on another campus about how to build unique aspects to an online course. The context was that the faculty were inheriting pre-built courses used at the state level in a college consortium. These pre-built courses were well conceptualized, professionally built and porous and flexible enough for instructors to add their own designs and personal touches. Effective teaching and learning often involve a degree of personalization, the application of the ...
Continue reading Inheriting Online Courses...and Owning Them
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Brent Anders (of the Office of Mediated Education) and M.E. Yeager (a doctoral candidate in the College of Ed at KSU) created the following video to publicize a forthcoming course offered by Dr. Fred Newton and Professor Art Rathbun. Andrea Mendoza (graphic artist with OME) created the snazzy logo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tucjbL1GdU
Blog Entry
As a seasoned college instructor, I've had a fair amount of experience dealing with "grade hounds." Grade hounds are those learners who focus a lot on their formal grade. That's not a negative in and of itself. That gives an instructor some leverage in the teaching and learning / learner motivation department. Where grade hounds get a little exasperating is when they do some of the following things.
They'll wait until their peers have ...
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Course management for an intimate online course of 20 differs greatly when there's a course of 200 - 1000 students. When I worked in colleges for many years, I saw the occasional "larger" course, and these were for topics that students really enjoyed, and maybe the higher end number of learners was about 60 or 70. Having taught at universities for over five years, I have had some experiences of teaching a face-to-face course with several hundred learners. Some of ...
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One of the more creative forms of teaching online at the university level involves the use of custom-originated case studies. In the Native American learner context, these teaching cases are used to surface new research and to provide learners with more open-ended and analytical learning online.
www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases
The following public site (out of The Evergreen State College) recently debuted and may be helpful.
Continue reading Native American Teaching Case Studies Online
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Like the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz, I have been thinking of heart and the lack of it. What sparked this was a face-to-face meeting with some of my online students. Usually, it takes a while to build relationships to the point where candor is assumed. In this case, the candor came right out early on. Students "check heart" before they can take risks with an instructor. The question was, did I have a "heart" for them?
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Back in November (a full year ago...or rather a couple months), one of my blogs dealt with the issue of using free e-texts in lieu of textbooks (in a unique course design situation) and the internal debate about the pros and cons of that.
I thought of a colleague who told me once that she earned some $70 from selling the free book samples she got from book reps of various book companies that ...
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Back in the day, when I worked with my students who were building websites for clients, the conventional wisdom was to build in-house capacity in terms of information. This meant that they would do the research and collect the information needed and make it their own. They were not advised to link out to dynamic sites with relevant information because these sites could change their contents at any time. They could take a political turn that the students might not ...
Continue reading In-House Capacity or Reliance on the WWW Wilds
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One of my favorite memories about my doctoral students when I was teaching overseas was their enthusiasm and hard-working approach to the world. The classrooms, though, were another matter. Here I was in an agricultural university in the NE part of this country...and we used chalk and chalkboards, stencils and hand-typed texts, cassette tapes and tape players. The podium usually was constructed of wood and usually had some broken pieces, so one's leg could ...
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As a new young instructor with the UNDP in PR China (my third and fourth years there), I'd been getting subtle hints that a prior American instructor hadn't come across so well. For a while, my students would avoid telling me outright what it was that made her somewhat distasteful to them. Since she was on their minds, I knew I would eventually get the story. The story went like this...and the reasons ...
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Last week, I talked about the presentation from FETE on arousing curiosity in students, in class. Today, I will share some tips I got from the discussion. Before I talk about it, I would like to say these are by no means my ideas, but ideas/comments from everyone in the presentation.
Here is a summary of the tips that was voiced in the presentation ( in no particular order):