Note: This post is an extra one. Stay tuned for my post on Moore's and Kearsley's Chapter 5!
Chapter 5 of Bates and Sangra (2011), "Organizational Structures and Initiatives" addresses the challenges that universities face in managing Technology* writ large. It's a daunting task, to say the least; after reading this, I am far more sympathetic to the tasks that my large research institution faces with regards to IT organization, maintenance, and planning.
*The capital T I'm using for Technology is intentional: it's meant as a reminder that this is a ginormous topic, one that is overwhelming for me to imagine at a systems, or university-wide level.
First, there are (at least) two main branches of Technology to contend with: administrative and teaching and learning. Technology initiatives for administrative purposes came first; teaching and learning have haphazardly followed suit (Bates & Sangra, 2011, pp. 27-30). What this has led to in many institutions is an amorphous central IT division that is "responsible for telecommunications and campus network infrastrtucture and services...administrative software systems support, IT support, network access, and software maintenance of the institutional LMS" (Bates & Sangra, 2011, p. 115). This is fine. This makes sense. This alone is a hefty task, one that requires a healthy, well-funded staff with a "line of governance" that goes straight up to the Provost's office. I know this is the case at my institution; we have a CIO (a new one in the wake of the huge security breach last semester) and I'm sure if I went to our website I'd find the whole organizational structure for IT management.
I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to write what I know based on my five years teaching here as a technology-heavy faculty member. I regularly take workshops facilitated by the Learning Technologies Institute, a wing of the DIT. I know two of the instructional technologists very well. I think there are more. We created our own Office of Instructional Technology in our department a year ago; it's an office of two people: the full-time assistant director, with whom I work closely, and the Director who is also the overall Ops Director in the department. We also have our full-time tech god, who is in charge of the support services described in the quoted material in the above paragraph for our department.
I work for a huge R1 university. We need a lot of tech support. Like, a LOT. And not just support, but long-term planning. Innovation. Maintenance. Training. This requires being able to see into a crystal ball to know what kinds of technologies to pursue and which trends are unsustainable fads.
I'm sure we spend a zillion dollars a year on tech services and support. Here's the thing: If we have security breaches wherein the personal data, including home addresses and SSNs of faculty, students, and staff all the way back to the late 90s were compromised, how can we justifiably move some of the funding for basic security to faculty training and support?
This is making my head spin. It's also making me look at our new Teaching and Learning Technology Center (TLTC. I think that's the acronym.) in a different light. I've been cautiously optimistic about this center since I first heard about it last fall. Cautious, because my work over the last three years is largely the result of a new initiative (blended learning), the enthusiasm for which died sharply after just one year. I'm still around, but the excitement for BL was promptly replaced by the excitement for MOOCs, which are of course much sexier and have mega publicity benefits. BL is local. MOOCs are global.
The TLTC is subsuming the LTI and CTE, the Center for Teaching Excellence. In this way, it's taking the two bodies devoted to teaching and learning and bringing them under one roof, which I heartily support even more so after reading this chapter. Having two centers--one for "teaching excellence" and one for "learning technologies" is archaic and wasteful. They need to be in the same place. Learning technologies should not be seen as separate from teaching excellence--they should be part of it (because they are). At issue, of course, is a small thing called faculty buy-in. According to Bates and Sangra (2011), Virginia Tech and UCT have mandatory (?) faculty training, or "systematic policies and strategies to ensure that all faculty and instructors using technology had training in the use of technology for teaching" (p. 119). Well, that would be everybody, wouldn't it? Yet I can't imagine being the poor soul to announce to the university that all faculty have to do anything. Faculty autonomy is the last thing that we have.
This is running long; in my next post I want to look at faculty autonomy more closely--the phenomenon that students often have to deal with several LMSs or course websites in any given semester, based on faculty preference; the refusal of some faculty to learn how to use simple tools that will make their and their students' lives infinitely easier; the persistent fear that technology somehow threatens the human element of teaching or even that technology will replace teachers, etc. I also want to look at the overall budget of my institution. I know faculty are expensive, but I also know that the number one reason that tuition costs have skyrocketed over the past thirty years is administrative bloat. Yet looking at technology needs alone forces me to realize that the pejorative "administrative bloat" must of course include technology services and support. These jobs are vital. They are hopelessly complex: one tiny, yet critical example of this is that no university can attract students if their wireless access is even remotely problematic, something that is harder and harder to ensure when every person on campus is carrying at least two mobile devices at any given time. These jobs require significant expertise.
Expertise is expensive. Our president is telling universities that we must keep tuition down. Meanwhile, adjuncts like myself make half of what public school teachers make. This whole enterprise is fracked up. Like completely.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Friday, June 13, 2014
Initial Thoughts on OMDE 603: Technology in Distance Education and e-Learning
The next several posts I write will be devoted to a course I am taking at UMUC for my Certificate in Technology in Distance Education and e-Learning. Incidentally, this particular course, OMDE 603, shares that title.
So far, we have reviewed the history of technology in Distance Education (DE) and discussed definitions and terminology for DE. We spent a week on asynchronous and synchronous technology and are midway through a module on Web 2.0 technologies.
There's a way in which much of this has been review for me. I took two courses for this certificate last semester: OMDE 601, which is the foundations course for DE, and a tech-heavy course, DETC 630, which focused on emerging technologies in DE and e-learning. Both of those courses prepared me well for this one. The historical context and terminology was covered in OMDE 601, and asynchronous and synchronous technologies, as well as Web 2.0 technologies, was covered in DETC 630. To that end, I'm a little stuck on what to focus on in this post that demonstrates "critical thinking attributes regarding the course readings and ideas related to class topics." I'll do my best.
First, what's interesting about Technology in DE and e-learning is that the two--technology and DE--are inseparably intertwined. Distance Education is only possible through technology and always has been (Peters). For its first hundred years, students and teachers relied on the postal service--trains and planes. Mostly trains. The middle section, sometimes referred to as the "second wave," saw improvements in speed and communication with telephones, radio, and television. The 1970s saw the first generation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) with discussion boards, and then the whole world changed in the 90s with the Internet.
Of particular note is that the pedagogy changed during these waves, too. We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago; it wasn't until two-way communication between student and teacher and student and student was reliable and widely available that notions of constructivism and student-centered learning came into play. The pedagogy of constructivism really took hold, or became dominant, in the 1990s and has remained so ever since, to the best of my current understanding. Note that I was steeped in constructivism and student-based learning when I was trained to teach; I'm also a compositionist. So, my field and my training give me a strong bias for not just constructivism, but social constructivism.b
The liveliest conversation thus far has been about asynchronous v synchronous technologies. I of course have a lot to say on this because of the way I structure my courses. There is a lot of bias against synchronous technologies (at a distance) in general, and especially here at UMUC, for good reason. First, synchronous technologies deserve their bad rap. Until quite recently, issues of access, reliability, and strong Internet connections have made it virtually impossible for quality synchronous sessions to happen at all (note that I'm specifically talking about web conferencing, as that's what I know best). While vast improvements have been made in these areas, at least in the United States, the technologies themselves are rudimentary, which leads to live sessions in technologies like the painfully ugly AdobeConnect that often aren't much more engaging than a face-to-face lecture. I do my best in here, but I know that I'm not taking advantage of the potential of web conferencing like I could and am eager to do. It requires a paradigm shift that I haven't completely made. For an excellent post on this, see Hybrid Pedagogy's "An Affinity for Asynchronous Learning."
Second, for the purposes of "true" DE (i.e., 100% at a distance), synchronous sessions are impractical. Students take DE courses for convenience and flexibility. Students are in different time zones. Students have crazy schedules that preclude being able to log on at a fixed time every week. So, there's bias.
That said, even web conferencing affords an immediacy that is simply not possible on discussion boards or even pre-recorded instructor videos or podcasts (both of which are great, by the way). Discussion boards are rich, critical, reflective--this is where integrated learning happens (Garrison and Vaughan). Live sessions are also valuable, though: they bring everyone together. Students can chat with each other in real time. Instructors can answer questions in real time. Students can see and hear their instructor and, depending on the way the class is set up, each other. Social presence and instructor presence is inherently higher in synchronous sessions. It just is. I don't know that it's completely practical for an institution like UMUC...but I think that this program (Master's of DE) could benefit from incorporating more live sessions than what I'm seeing now. I attended one live session last semester in DETC 630 which was, I'm afraid, fairly useless. It was simply the instructor going over a couple of websites, which had already been done in a short video I had just watched prior to attending the live session. Not well handled, but it's a learning curve--it takes awhile to get the hang of running live sessions, to which my students, and especially my TAs, can attest.
This post is already a mile long, so I'm going to hold off on Web 2.0 technologies until my next post. Above, I've mentioned Otto Peters, one of the giants of DE scholarship, and Randy Garrison and Norman Vaughan, two DE scholars who have cornered the market on blended learning in higher ed (the title of their 2008 book). Garrison is also one of the original authors (with Anderson and Archer, 2000), of the Community of Inquiry model, in which the social presence and instructor presence concepts are rooted (or, rather, my introduction to them is).
So far, we have reviewed the history of technology in Distance Education (DE) and discussed definitions and terminology for DE. We spent a week on asynchronous and synchronous technology and are midway through a module on Web 2.0 technologies.
There's a way in which much of this has been review for me. I took two courses for this certificate last semester: OMDE 601, which is the foundations course for DE, and a tech-heavy course, DETC 630, which focused on emerging technologies in DE and e-learning. Both of those courses prepared me well for this one. The historical context and terminology was covered in OMDE 601, and asynchronous and synchronous technologies, as well as Web 2.0 technologies, was covered in DETC 630. To that end, I'm a little stuck on what to focus on in this post that demonstrates "critical thinking attributes regarding the course readings and ideas related to class topics." I'll do my best.
First, what's interesting about Technology in DE and e-learning is that the two--technology and DE--are inseparably intertwined. Distance Education is only possible through technology and always has been (Peters). For its first hundred years, students and teachers relied on the postal service--trains and planes. Mostly trains. The middle section, sometimes referred to as the "second wave," saw improvements in speed and communication with telephones, radio, and television. The 1970s saw the first generation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) with discussion boards, and then the whole world changed in the 90s with the Internet.
Of particular note is that the pedagogy changed during these waves, too. We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago; it wasn't until two-way communication between student and teacher and student and student was reliable and widely available that notions of constructivism and student-centered learning came into play. The pedagogy of constructivism really took hold, or became dominant, in the 1990s and has remained so ever since, to the best of my current understanding. Note that I was steeped in constructivism and student-based learning when I was trained to teach; I'm also a compositionist. So, my field and my training give me a strong bias for not just constructivism, but social constructivism.b
The liveliest conversation thus far has been about asynchronous v synchronous technologies. I of course have a lot to say on this because of the way I structure my courses. There is a lot of bias against synchronous technologies (at a distance) in general, and especially here at UMUC, for good reason. First, synchronous technologies deserve their bad rap. Until quite recently, issues of access, reliability, and strong Internet connections have made it virtually impossible for quality synchronous sessions to happen at all (note that I'm specifically talking about web conferencing, as that's what I know best). While vast improvements have been made in these areas, at least in the United States, the technologies themselves are rudimentary, which leads to live sessions in technologies like the painfully ugly AdobeConnect that often aren't much more engaging than a face-to-face lecture. I do my best in here, but I know that I'm not taking advantage of the potential of web conferencing like I could and am eager to do. It requires a paradigm shift that I haven't completely made. For an excellent post on this, see Hybrid Pedagogy's "An Affinity for Asynchronous Learning."
Second, for the purposes of "true" DE (i.e., 100% at a distance), synchronous sessions are impractical. Students take DE courses for convenience and flexibility. Students are in different time zones. Students have crazy schedules that preclude being able to log on at a fixed time every week. So, there's bias.
That said, even web conferencing affords an immediacy that is simply not possible on discussion boards or even pre-recorded instructor videos or podcasts (both of which are great, by the way). Discussion boards are rich, critical, reflective--this is where integrated learning happens (Garrison and Vaughan). Live sessions are also valuable, though: they bring everyone together. Students can chat with each other in real time. Instructors can answer questions in real time. Students can see and hear their instructor and, depending on the way the class is set up, each other. Social presence and instructor presence is inherently higher in synchronous sessions. It just is. I don't know that it's completely practical for an institution like UMUC...but I think that this program (Master's of DE) could benefit from incorporating more live sessions than what I'm seeing now. I attended one live session last semester in DETC 630 which was, I'm afraid, fairly useless. It was simply the instructor going over a couple of websites, which had already been done in a short video I had just watched prior to attending the live session. Not well handled, but it's a learning curve--it takes awhile to get the hang of running live sessions, to which my students, and especially my TAs, can attest.
This post is already a mile long, so I'm going to hold off on Web 2.0 technologies until my next post. Above, I've mentioned Otto Peters, one of the giants of DE scholarship, and Randy Garrison and Norman Vaughan, two DE scholars who have cornered the market on blended learning in higher ed (the title of their 2008 book). Garrison is also one of the original authors (with Anderson and Archer, 2000), of the Community of Inquiry model, in which the social presence and instructor presence concepts are rooted (or, rather, my introduction to them is).
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