Teaching the Election and Public Trauma

Yesterday, I joined about half a dozen colleagues to discuss how we're handling the election and "public trauma" (e.g., continued police shootings of unarmed black men) in our classes. We never got past the election, which many would--and do--argue is its own public trauma. (Just today, for example, the New York Times published "Talking to Your Therapist about Election Anxiety.").

Some of my colleagues reported that it's been hard getting their students talking about the election at all. Perhaps students are exhausted. Perhaps they themselves are traumatized. I rue the fact that their first opportunity to vote is in this election, after two election cycles in which we had the option of voting for a rock star (at least in 2008). My students have working memories of just two presidents: Obama and George W. Now we're facing an election in which millions of Americans--the majority, even?--aren't voting for a candidate so much as they're voting against the other one.

Despite this, I've been having a good time in my class. I love teaching in big election years. Even this one. There is no better way to teach rhetorical analysis, argumentation, and logical fallacies than by analyzing political rhetoric, and I think that one can do so without making it so much about the rhetor than by making it about the audience. It's not about Trump or Clinton. It's about the values and beliefs their arguments are grounded in.

And it's about the evidence.

I first taught a major Presidential election in 2008, at Utah State. Most of my students shared a set of values and beliefs that differed from mine; which quickly taught me how to "teach the election" in a way that respected everyone's political perspectives (including mine): through Toulmin theory. If we make the entire conversation about the audience, then we're able to hold constructive conversations about why an argument may work for some people, yet not others. It's not about the rhetor being right or wrong (or worse); it's about what the intended audience needs.

I've been incredibly fortunate this semester to be able to apply issues that are furiously debated nationwide into my class. Less than a week before the semester began, University of Chicago Dean of Students sent incoming students his letter warning them that Chicago does not condone "safe spaces" or "trigger warnings." We got a lot of mileage out of that for the first month, which helped us establish the kind of classroom environment we want to have. I've used the safe space debate for a few semesters now, but this was the first one in which the course started with that topic. It worked really well not only to establish our classroom climate but also, I realize now, to prepare us for our conversations about the election (and more: while we have not explicitly addressed Milo Yanniapolous in class, the fact that he's coming here next week after having been banned from Twitter makes this conversation even more exigent).

I have my students use Twitter for a variety of reasons--to strengthen community in our blended class, to enter ongoing, public conversations responsibly, to research, to connect with others who are researching similar topics, to practice writing in different genres and context. Yesterday, we flooded Twitter with #whyIwrite testimonies for the National Day on Writing. We used it for the first two Presidential debates, as well.

For the first one, I asked students to live tweet the debate and identify logical fallacies the candidates employed, an assignment I've used several times. It's fun. And useful. Students don't even really need formal instruction on logical fallacies (many of them got it in high school, anyway); they just need a decent list of them and some good direction, both of which I provide on the prompt.

For the second debate, I asked students to analyze the evidence that the candidates used to support their arguments--including how they frame it--determine its effectiveness, and fact check it. I'm proud of this assignment; students did quite well with it: Debate #2 Activity. Most of them indicated that they didn't know very much about the subject they chose to analyze, so if nothing else, they learned a thing or two about issues like the Affordable Care Act, trade deals, and foreign policy.

Two days later, we watched John Oliver's February 14, 2016 segment on voter IDs, which analyzes (and effectively debunks) the argument that photo IDs are necessary at the polls to prevent voter fraud. (Shout out to Katherine Joshi and her UTAs for bringing this episode to my attention).

Students were instructed to write down every piece of evidence that Oliver employed to support his argument, which they'd been prepped for by reading about the rhetorical use of evidence in Inventing Arguments  [the relevant chapter is from Ramage, Bean, and Johnson's Writing Arguments) and The DK Handbook. We discussed why his choices were effective for his intended audience. I then asked him if those who support voter IDs would accept his argument, like the politicians Oliver uses in this segments. After a couple of moments of silence, students shook their heads no. "Why not?" I asked. "Why would they reject this? On what grounds?" "Well...they could attack his ethos...they point out that he's a comedian, so what does he know." "Excellent. What else?" "They could refute his evidence." "Yes, they could. He cites a lot of solid evidence, though, like the Brennan report." "Yeah but a resistant audience could still find a way to refute it."

Exactly.

And there's the rub. We live in a world in which facts don't matter. We're operating in multiple universes in which facts are facts to some people and conspiracies to others. (Indeed, given Trump's recent complaints of a rigged election, this lesson plan could not have been more timely. Lest I be accused of overstepping my bounds, note that this lesson plan occurred just before Trump's latest barrage of election-rigging accusations.) In light of this, I've found that the best I can do is teach students how to craft Rogerian arguments (which is what this lesson plan led to), ones that rely less on factual evidence and more on audience beliefs and values. This strategy serves me in a comp/ rhet course that's so heavily grounded in argumentation. What it means for the future of civic discourse and democracy is anyone's guess (or fear).

On a more uplifting note, I'll end with this lovely message from our Canadian neighbors:

Preparing and Engaging Students: One Strategy to Connect Reading and Writing

"Close your eyes," I told my 388V students, those who serve as Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs) in writing classes, at the beginning of class the other day. "Imagine you are in the class for which you are UTAing. Your instructor just finished explaining the upcoming assignment and that the draft is due in a few days. Your students look uncomfortable--their faces range from confused to scared to angry. They don't feel prepared. You sympathize; it seems too fast. What could you do in this situation? How might you intervene? Freewrite for two minutes. Then we'll discuss."

This opening prompt wasn't hypothetical: it's exactly what had happened in my 101 class the day prior. Well, perhaps I exaggerated the student reactions; I don't recall seeing outright anger or fear on my 101 students' faces. Still, the Inquiry paper has come quickly. We haven't emphasized narrative enough. Or the writing process. Or refining the core research question. Not enough, anyway.

My 388V students offered a range of suggestions to this scenario, one that is all too common in our writing courses that easily pack two semesters' worth of learning outcomes into a mere 14 weeks:

• extend the deadline
• cut an assignment later in the semester (to make more time for the above)
• add extra UTA office hours
• contextualize the assignment as one piece of a larger whole 

Note that each solution speaks to a different need. The most common one--extend the deadline--gives students more time on their own. The second one acknowledges an overly ambitious syllabus that covers too much for the deep learning and transfer we all aspire to foster. The third affords more opportunities for students to seek and receive direct feedback. The fourth has the most to do with direct instruction: how we frame what we ask students to do. 

Extending the deadline is the most obvious, and arguably the easiest, solution, though I don't think it's the best one. First, it's likely to cause problems later on, as the whole semester is tightly packed. More importantly, if the problem is that students are underprepared, the solution is not that they have more time. They don't need more time. They need more guidance. They need more direct instruction, more practice, and more feedback. 

Before continuing, I need to give my 101 students their due credit. They are a particularly smart, self-motivated bunch. Several of them will figure it out on their own; our course site is teeming with tips, guides, and examples. The assignment prompt is explicit. They'll likely work it out.

Yet there's a time and a place to throw students to the wolves and have them figure things out on their own. I know this: I do it all the time in the earlier stages of a new unit. Students need to know what they don't know in order to value my instruction, the readings, the exercises, the activities. But this is different. We're past the early stages. They need to practice and get formative feedback. They'll get feedback from each other in the draft workshop, but they need my--and my UTAs'--feedback, as well.

This anecdote speaks to several pedagogical issues; the one I am most interested in at the moment concerns "getting students to do the readings," as Linda B. Nilson puts it in Teaching at Its Best. I recalled Michael Bunn's "Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom" (2013), which my 388V students recently read, as well. Yet neither Nilson nor Bunn are addressing the particular type of reading that I am this week in 101: instructional texts. The main reading I want students to read--and own--this week is a mere six pages out of Wysocki's and Lynch's DK Handbook (4th edition): summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. To most students, this is something they've been taught before. Likely several times. 

If I were a student in my own class, I'd open the book to those pages, see what they're about, and skim them in approximately 17 seconds. I'd see no reason to do any more than that. 

So, instead of doing what I usually do--assigning the pages and pleading with them in bold, red font to read the pages carefully--I didn't assign them as an isolated task. I wove the reading into a brand new, ridiculously convoluted activity. One of my "Lyra Specials." I cringed as I reviewed it in Google Docs. When I shared this new "Using Sources Activity" with my own UTAs, I asked them if students would be plotting my death. To my surprise, they said no. I had written it so that it was the only homework task between Tuesday and Thursday, and I explicitly stated that the end product--a paragraph--could be inserted directly into the upcoming draft. "This is good to mention," one of my UTAs said. "Yeah, this will give them an incentive." A purpose for doing it.

The activity has several purposes:

• to understand--truly understand--the difference between patch writing and paraphrasing, which I'm fairly certain is impossible without practicing both. In this exercise, students are only doing one of these (paraphrasing), but it's better than just reading about it. I have no reason to ask them to practice patch writing individually--it wouldn't be something that they can use. That's an in-class, collaborative exercise, not an out-of-class, individual task.
• to connect the "instructional reading" to their writing assignments (and, more importantly, of course, the writing they will do in all of their classes)
• to apply what they're learning in a low-stakes activity 
• to receive prompt, formative feedback on a core skill prior to finishing their drafts (should I choose to do so, which I will. I only have one 101 section this semester, so I can do it. In other semesters, this would be much more challenging).

The real student learning objectives are here:

• Distinguish between summarizing, patch writing, and paraphrasing
• Evaluate which source would be best for a given task
• Read scholarly sources efficiently
• Analyze arguments at a college level

I've read just a couple of the students' paragraphs so far, and I am ecstatic--these are exceptionally strong draft paragraphs that engage scholarly sources. To more thoroughly address the issue of adequate preparation that I open with in this post, I plan to update next week's homework schedule to incorporate more direct (read: forced) revision tasks. 

Ultimately, I don't want my awesome students to create and submit mediocre-to-decent Inquiry Papers, the first major--and arguably most important--assignment of the semester. I want awesome students to write awesome inquiries. And that means doing more on my end to help them do that.

Note: This Google Doc link to the Using Sources Activity allows for comments, which I warmly welcome.

Putting the Learning (back) Into the LMS

The case against the learning management system (LMS) is loud as it's ever been. From the early days of WebCT and Blackboard, in the early 2000s, to the present, critics have lambasted the LMS (also known as the CMS, or course management system) for institutionalizing learning, for putting fences around learning, for privileging efficiency over learning, for treating the learning process as a problem to solve rather than a state of inquiry to foster. The LMS, it is said, is designed for administrators, not teachers. Whether referred to as the LMS or the CMS, the latter two words are the same: "management system."

These criticisms are warranted. For the most part, I agree with all of them. Where I differ from many is in allowing the many problems with the LMS to direct my use of it. Blindly adopting the LMS without critically analyzing its features or refusing to use the LMS out of principle are equally problematic approaches: they're reactive.

I don't like being told what to do any more than anyone else. I naturally resist anything that even faintly smells authoritative. Yet resisting a system needn't mean refusing to participate in it at all. That, in effect, is allowing the system to win. A more responsible resistance requires more effort. A more responsible approach focuses on the first letter of the acronym: learning.

If you teach college students, I have some questions for you.

• Do you use online resources--readings, videos, websites, etc.-- in your course? 
• Do you expect your students to do any research for your course, be it through the free web or your library's databases?
• Do you include any kind of collaborative learning in your course, from ad hoc group work in class to longer group projects or assignments?
• Do you include any kind of discussions about your course topics and themes?
• Do you assign any readings? Do you want students to read those readings?
• Do you imagine that students can connect what happens in your course to the outside world?
• Do you respond to students' written work? Do you want them to make use of your feedback?
• Do you communicate with students between classes?
• Do you want your students to take ownership of their own learning? 
• Do you use any catch terms like "student-based learning," "learner-based learning," "active learning," "constructivist learning," or "community of inquiry" to describe your course? 

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, chances are that you and your students use the Internet in some way in your course.

If you use the Internet in some way in your course, and if you use it regularly, why not have a home for all of your online materials and activities? One home. One website. One place.

It's 2015. Our students live online. Our students deserve a website for our courses. This can be a non-LMS site; if you've been using your own website on WordPress, or Wix, or Weebly, or Google Sites, or something else, great. If you haven't, I recommend that you analyze, learn, and use your institution's LMS.

Here's why.

Making Your LMS Work for Students Will Improve Your Students' Learning

• Students Deserve to Understand How Your Course Works. We know how our course works; we designed it (at least, most of us have. More on this below, under Teaching). Yet our students don't. Ideally, you explain this in your syllabus, and ideally, you discuss this (and your syllabus) within the first week of classes. Yet once students are deep into the semester, they may not remember what you discussed in Week 1. They may not understand how the theory relates to the current assignment, or why you're skipping around the textbooks, or why they're seemingly working on multiple things at once. You can help them through your LMS, which is your 24/7 "office hour" that clarifies course concepts and instructions, with many features:
• Overview Pages: Much like the syllabus explains the course as a whole, overview pages explain the current unit or week (or however you organize your course). You can write a brief overview of what this unit is about, explain what students should know by the end of it, and include internal (in the LMS) links to related areas like the Modules or Content Area that for readings and resources, the discussion or blog areas, and other activities, practice and graded quizzes, assignments, and so forth.
• Key Links on the Home Page: Consider building a graphic syllabus so that students can see how the course is designed at a glance, or a page that's simply titled "How This Course is Organized" that supplements the syllabus and semester schedule.
• When Students Understand Your Course, They Can Take Ownership of it. Lauded practices that we want to foster like "student-directed learning" and "self-paced learning" aren't going to happen if your students don't feel as though they have agency in your course. Help them take control of their own learning by showing them how to take control of your course.
• Additional Resources: Do you provide any external links and resources to your students? These can include supplemental resources to reinforce what you go over in class for students who need a little bit more or additional resources that may be of interest to some students who are simply interested in going beyond what you do in class. How do you share these with students? How do you communicate that these are recommended, not required resources?
• Campus Resources: You probably include campus resources like the library home page, the student support office, the Writing Center, and so forth in your syllabus, but when students need these quickly, chance are that they're on their phone or their laptop and the syllabus is somewhere else. They have access to your website, not the syllabus. Where can you put these where students will find them quickly?
• Student Progress: If you use your LMS to track and grade any of your student assignments, students will automatically see that grade--regardless of whether you open the course's "grades" tool. The running grade automatically appears for students when they click on their grades area in their individual LMS account. Take advantage of this early and often by using your LMS to grade more than just the major assignments, which often give your students a distorted sense of how they are doing in your course. For example, if you only use the LMS to grade major assignments, and a student earned a C- on the first one, then that student will think that she has a C- in your course overall. She probably doesn't; you probably have other things like participation and discussions that also contribute to the overall course grade. Make grading areas for the additional assessments so that students have a realistic sense of their standing in your course. If you don't do this, you are inadvertently confusing students. Students deserve grade transparency. Students benefit from knowing how they're doing in your course. Knowing what their "real" grade is will keep them far more motivated than knowing that their "real" grade is different than what the LMS says yet not knowing what it is. 

Making Your LMS Work for You Will Improve Your Teaching

• Course Design: Where do your students start? Where do they end up? What are the main concepts, and how are they sequenced? Is that the best sequence? If you have broad, recursive concepts that you want students to work on over the course of the semester (e.g., "research skills,") do you return to those concepts at several different points in the semester, or do you handle all of that, say, in Week 4? Is that the best strategy? Why?
• Course Content and Materials: Making good use of your LMS's often ill-named sections like "content area" or "modules" requires that you take a bird's eye view of your course to understand how it's organized. Do you organize your course chronologically? Thematically? By the assignment sequence? By textbook chapter? When you see how you currently group your materials, ask yourself: does this make sense? Does it make sense to your students?
• Model Audience-based Writing: Those of us who teach (or assign) writing of any kind in our courses inherently deal with audience-based writing. Practice what you teach by designing your course site for those who are interacting with it: your students.
• Owning Your Course: When you've asked the questions above, you'll likely start reorganizing your course in the way that makes sense to you, the instructor. In so doing, you will improve your sense of agency over your course, especially if you are teaching an existing course that has been handed to you.
• Instructor Ethos: When students can log onto your course site and find what they are looking for easily, when all of the links work, when they can submit their activities without any hiccups, when your instructions are clear and your course is well-organized, you have demonstrated that you, the instructor, are trustworthy, knowledgable, and student-centered. This isn't to say that one broken link will ruin you; it will happen, and you and your students will survive. But the course site should work the way that it's supposed to most of the time. And when it does, you will earn your students' trust. This is particularly useful for novice instructors. You may not "own" your course (particularly if you've inherited it from your program) as much as you'd like to, but you can own your functional, user-friendly, aesthetically-pleasing course site, and that will go a long way to boosting your confidence in the classroom. 

OMDE 603: DE Course Design and Faculty Agency

The most significant difference between f2f and DE course design can be summed up in one word: faculty agency.

Designing and "delivering" a course is a complicated process in any environment. Most college faculty have little, if any, training in course design and pedagogy (this is widely researched and published--see, for example, Bean's (2011) Engaging Ideas, Fink's (2011) Creating Significant Learning Experiences, or Nilson's (2010) Teaching at its Best), so they're already at a disadvantage. Most faculty teach the way they were taught, for better or for worse. At least they have a model, though. At least they remember what it was like to be a student in a f2f environment. This is far less likely with DE instructors.

Enter instructional designers. Enter, at large, single-mode DE institutions, Web designers, audio and video designers, "subject-matter experts," editors, and so forth ((Moore & Kearsley, 2012, p. 102). Enter a complex systems model for course design and "delivery." As OU UK has been doing this for forty years, I would anticipate that their courses are slick. Polished. Professional. Awesome.

But most institutions that offer DE courses are not single-mode DE institutions.

It's easy to see the advantages of the large course team model. No one can be expected to be an expert in all of these areas. Subject matter expertise at the doctoral level is hard to come by; expecting academics to become as proficient in web design as they are in their own fields is one step short of unreasonable. 

Yet what Moore and Kearsley (2012) and Caplan and Graham (2008) do not address adequately is faculty agency. By this I mean the actual creation of the course--designing course objectives, or even if those are already defined by the program or department, designing the assessments, activities, and resources that will help students meet those course objectives. In other words: teaching. 

Both Moore and Kearsley (2012) explain that the key to effective DE course design is organization: breaking course content "into self-contained lessons or units" (p. 105). Caplan and Graham (2008) refer to the individual components that make up these isolated lessons and units as learning objects, which, "ideally…are designed to be shareable, resizable, and repurposed so that they can work in multiple contexts" (p. 248).

And scene. Stop right there. Suggest to faculty that a learning object designed wholly or partly by another faculty member can be dragged and dropped into her own course, and you're likely to face significant resistance. Teaching faculty have been (partly) hired on the basis of their expertise and teaching effectiveness. Outsourcing teaching preparation time--which is exactly what course design is--devalues the unique perspective that each faculty member brings to bear over her subject and her innovative ideas about how to teach what she knows better than anyone else. Everyone with a doctorate has, through the dissertation, made a unique contribution to the field. Why would anyone expect faculty to willingly import someone else's learning object?

I'm harping on this because I take issue with Moore and Kearsley's (2012) language when they describe what is needed for a DE course design team: "Some special skills and attitudes are needed to be a successful member of" a "design team, and these are not the skills and attitudes normally associated with university academics. First, it has to be recognized that no individual is a teacher in this system, but that indeed it is the system that teaches" [italics original] (p. 104). I don't necessarily disagree with this argument. I disagree with the sentiment. The risk here is that administers and staff are too likely to look down on faculty for being recalcitrant. They are too likely to dismiss legitimate faculty complaints about loss of agency, and are too likely to ostracize faculty that don't "buy in" to the "delivery" model.

Why the scare quotes around "delivery"? Because it's antithetic to pedagogy. Delivery smacks of anonymity and business-like efficiency. Delivery removes the student from the process entirely, except as the recipient of a pre-packaged product. Instructional designers and technical experts can help faculty--greatly--but I believe that this model of course design is a temporary one, one that will recede as faculty themselves have grown up with the technology they will then use when they become teachers themselves. Then they'll have both the subject matter expertise, the technical ability, and, with any luck, the pedagogical training that they need to design and teach good courses. It's this last piece--pedagogical training--that warrants the most attention. Then everything else will fall into place.

References

Caplan, D., & Graham, R.  (2008). The development of online courses.  In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 245-263).  Retrieved from http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/second_edition.html

Moore, M., and Kearsley, G. (2012). Course design and development. In Distance education: A systems view of online learning, pp. 97–125. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

OMDE 603: Is Blogging Worth It?

It depends on the objective.

This question has been asked about blogging for as long as blogging has been around. I remember sitting in class almost ten years ago, as an undergrad, with my awesome professor, a woman who had little patience for--well, many things. Blogging was one of them.

"I don't understand blogs," she said dismissively. "It's like putting your journal online. Your private life. Who cares? Who cares about your private life?"

Lots of people might, depending on who you are. But she went too far here; blogging needn't be private. It's personal--one's own thoughts about something. About ideas. It's the difference between memoir and personal essay. Thoreau would have been blogging from Walden Pond. Emerson would have been a prolific blogger. Their essays were written to be read--they wrote for an audience, like bloggers. In other words, blogging is branding. It's sharing who you are and what you do for the purposes of building an audience. For readers, it's a way of getting to know someone better.

In education, blogging is another way of promoting critical thinking and reflective learning. We figure out what we think by writing, as Joan Didion (and many others) have said. Written. As a writer and writing teacher, I believe this wholeheartedly; this is what I teach my students. I don't ask them to blog, however. It's not a primary medium for them. They don't read them. They may stumble upon them while looking something up, but they don't read blogs, or blog posts, in situ. (Well, they don't read anything in situ, but I digress).

I'm far more interested in getting students to write and think and discover with each other, in community. This is my problem with blogs: they're devoid of context. The vast majority of them, especially the ones we ask our students to write, don't have a real audience. They're public, but virtually no one reads them. We read the discussions. Instructors read the discussions. Blogs? Not so much. Who has the time to read a bunch of blogs? That requires clicking on 15 different links. That takes work.

We were assigned two articles on blogs in Module 3: Web 2.0 Technologies for DE. One of them is Pang (2009): Application of blogs to support reflective learning journals. In it, Pang lists the following advantages:

1. Blogs provide an opportunity for an instructor to gain rapport with the students and understand their needs and backgrounds. 
2. Blogs allow for monitoring of student progress so that the instructor can step in if the student is falling behind. A blog provides for continuous student feedback as opposed to waiting until the end of the semester for student feedback—which may be too late for corrective action.
3. The instructor can identify issues and challenges faced by students by reading about their experiences with the assignments in their blogs.
4. For an information technology course, students can learn and understand about a blog itself—both the concept and the technology.
5. Students modify their behavior in reaction to the content contained in the instructor's blog.

In my experience, none of these apply to this course. The first one happens in the discussions, not the blogs; the instructor isn't commenting on these blogs. Only we are. That affects #2 and #3, as well; there is no continuous feedback, so these are moot. #5 isn't applicable; the instructor doesn't have a blog, or hasn't asked us to read it. So, the only one that applies is #4: this is an education course, so we're learning by doing--learning about blogs and their value by keeping our own.

In that sense, this activity has been useful in reaffirming why I don't ask my students to blog. I want to engage with the course content and ideas--with other people! So, I'm heading over to the discussions now. At least I know that what I post will be read.

References

Pang, L. (2009): Application of blogs to support reflective learning journals. DE Oracle @ UMUC. Retrieved 4 July 2014 from http://contentdm.umuc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16240coll5/id/1

OMDE 603: Thoughts on Course Design and Development

I just finished reading Moore's and Kearsley's (2012) chapter on course design and development, which I paired with Caplan's and Graham's (2008) chapter on the Design and Development of Online Courses, in Anderson's Theory and Practice of Online Learning.

Both chapters essentially say the same thing: It takes a village to develop a good online course.

Moore and Kearsley may be well-intended, and they each speak from extensive experience, but they're almost condescending in some places: "Many academics resist the discipline and supervision in working in a systems way. However there is very little doubt that there is a direct relationship between the time and effort put into the Instructional Systems Design and the ultimate quality of the distance education program" (p. 100). College faculty are routinely referred to as recalcitrant children. If administrators and staff want faculty buy-in, they need to be more careful with their language.

It feels as though both of these chapters are aimed at administration buy-in, i.e., do not expect your faculty to put their courses online all by themselves. They can't do it. And they shouldn't be expected to.  Caplan and Graham (2008) write, "Many instructors typically underestimate the time and assets required to develop, maintain, and offer an online course" (255). I'd argue that administrators are guilty of this to a much larger extent--especially if they aren't currently teaching or haven't taught for awhile. Every single aspect of the course, from the big-picture items like course objectives to the tiniest items like determining how and when students will interact in a synchronous online session, needs to be figured out in advance. Far in advance. No one can reasonably do this alone.

I have done a lot of this alone, of course, which hasn't necessarily been a crisis. I'm an eager student as much as I am an eager teacher, so it has been natural for me to read up on course design and online learning as well as blended learning best practices. I go over every lesson plan with my TAs, both in advance and after the class is over, to figure out how to improve on what did and did not go well. This is fun for me. It probably isn't fun for everybody.

Based on my experience, the most important point that Moore and Kearsley (2012) make is that the "information communicated in distance-learning materials should be organized into self-contained lessons or units. One of the reasons a person enrolls in a distance-learning program, rather than simply research the subject alone, is that a course of study provides a structure of the content and the learning process" (p. 105). In other words, the student trusts that the instructor will design a well-organized course, one that's clearly marked along the way. One that has a map. A legible one.

Since teaching blended classes, I have become much better at chunking material and organizing it into modules. Last semester, I finally released my ideal of having thematic modules and simply had a new Module every week. I give them subtitles so that students understand what they're about, i.e., Week 2: Critical Reading and Summary. But I've found that having a new Module every week has greatly reduced confusion--we are *here* in the semester. Week 8. Go to the Week 8 module if you're confused. If you're still confused, go to Week 7. And so forth.

In all: two chapters about course design. Good advice. Idealistic, but if more administrators understood how complicated it is to prepare and deliver an online (or blended) course, that would help all of us.

References:

Caplan, D. and Graham, R. (2008). Design and development of online courses. In Anderson. & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning (2nd Ed.). Edmonton, AB: Athabasca Press

Moore, M.G. and Kearsley, G. (2012). Distance education: a systems view of online learning. 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

OMDE 603: Learning Technology Units and Faculty Training

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.

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).

Blended Interactions

The second week in BlendKit14 focuses "Blended Interactions" and essentially addresses two different things: student-student interaction and student-instructor interaction. These are two of the three components in Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2000) Community of Inquiry Model. It makes sense to leave the third one--student-content interaction--out for now, as this week seems to be more about Social Presence and Instructor Presence. The people. 

Anyone who knows me knows that this conversation is at the core of my pedagogy and, increasingly, my research. To me, Blended Learning makes it possible to facilitate the most effective and engaging interactions between students and between student and teacher. This is critical for writing courses. Plenty of research suggests that it's critical for any discipline, but I'll only speak to what I know. As a writing instructor, my first job is to facilitate a healthy, safe, supportive learning environment. Only then will students be able to share their work, accept and give constructive feedback, and feel compelled to revise and revise some more. Writing is a process. Learning is a process. Both writing and learning are social acts.

Since I started teaching blended courses two years ago, I have taken advantage of the discussion forums much more than I could in the past. In a 100% face-to-face class, discussion boards are always homework in a class that already has an obscene amount of homework. In a blended class, discussion boards can be both classwork and homework. It's taken me a couple of semesters, but I've finally arrived at a model that makes discussion boards 20% of the course grade. We have one every week, and most of them have structured responses, e.g., go back and find two people to respond to. 150-200 word responses (on top of their 250-300 word posts). That's 2-3 pages of informal writing every week on topics that range from personal expression (like the introductions in Week 1) to reflections to analysis. They work, when designed well. 

As for my face-to-face classes: I do very little lecturing. I could, in fact, do more (I'll come back to this later. I'm realizing now at the end of the semester how much I haven't adequately addressed, content-wise, which I need to figure out over the summer). What I do instead is a lot of group work in response to maybe a ten-minute presentation. In order to create a close community of writers in a format that only has 75 minutes of face-to-face contact, the group work is critical. I also set up the desks in a horseshoe (at least, I usually do) so that we're all looking at each other. When possible, I sit down, too, so that I'm part of the circle like everybody else.

Going forward, I know that I want to have more hands-on time with student writing before they submit their formal assignments for a grade. I think that I can do more of this in the f2f classes, though it's tough; we have so much to do in all three classroom environments (f2f, AdobeConnect, and asynchronous OL days) that it's hard for me to see how exactly I could provide direct feedback live. But I know I need to get my hands on students' drafts earlier. I can, too--their drafts are uploaded electronically for peer review, so my TAs and I have access to them. We need to do more than skim these--we need to provide more written feedback on them. It's time-consuming, but vital. 

That's my takeaway from Spring 14. I feel good about the sense of community in my classes, but I need to provide more direct instruction and direct feedback. More instructor presence, both in the classroom and one on one with students. 

Classwork v Homework in BL Courses

Week 1 in the #BlendKit14 MOOC has been devoted to defining blended learning and determining the learning outcomes for our courses. Here are my learning outcomes for 101:

I missed this week's discussion board, as I joined the course a week late, but I read through the very active discussion on defining blended learning. It was interesting to watch people work through some confusion between flipped classrooms, blended learning, and hybrid learning. The distinctions between flipped and blended has always been clear to me, but I've also always emphasized the difference between classwork and homework, something that I think has helped me conceptualize my course and, I hope, has helped students understand it, too. In a flipped classroom, traditional homework activities are done in class, and "content delivery" happens through video lectures, etc., at home. The seat time is the same, however. In blended, on the other hand, a certain percentage of face-to-face seat time is replaced by online learning--and that learning is "class," not homework. I spend a whole page on this in my syllabus, which I may add here at some point to demonstrate how clear I need to make this for students (and me, for that matter). It's structured exactly like a f2f class, really:

MW class schedule: two 75 minute classes per week. In between the two classes is homework, so:

Monday class

HW for W

Wed class

HW for M

The only thing that's different is that the Wednesday class is online. The thing that makes it work is that all classwork must be in by midnight on Wednesday. That's critical to maintain the distinction between "homework" and "classwork." Critical!

If there's one thing I can pass on to anyone about to take on blended learning, this is it: define your online classwork as classwork and make sure students know that it's due on the same day. That way, the online classwork will feel different than homework. Seriously: I cannot emphasize this enough. It's too easy for blended classes to feel like "so much work." It's not so much work if you make sure that you're only asking students to do seventy-five mintute's worth of work during the online class (e.g., one ten-minute video lecture, an activity, and an ungraded quiz). Bonus: try to have the stuff that students do for the online classes different than what you normally assign for homework. This isn't always possible, but it's helpful. For example, I never assign readings during class--readings are homework activities. Videos, however, are usually class activities, not homework activities. Make sense?

Here's the other artifact we created this week, which is related to this distinction (somewhat): 

The glue between OL and f2f classes is the discussion boards. This is something I need to work a lot on; the discussions that my students have on those boards are fantastic, yet I don't bring them into the f2f classes nearly as

much as I want to.

I'm working on this (right along with incorporating the readings more explicitly in class, too). I'm getting there... and little artifacts like these help me keep my eye on what "there" looks like.

​

BlendKit2014

That's right, folks! In my spare time, I've enrolled in a five-week, ill-timed MOOC that stretches over the end of the semester, which of course means that I'm doing this in addition to grading the Classical Argument Paper and facilitating my first-ever Digital Project assignment.

I'm nothing if not optimistically ambitious.

So: this short chapter asks some good foundational questions about BL, basically: how should we define it, what can we do differently in a BL environment, and how will we design it. The opening relies heavily on the excellent McGee and Reis (2012) article that I drew from for the BL Faculty retreat back in January. Most importantly, it ends with their call for a complete redesign--a transformation. Here's the quote I particularly like from that article: 

"Transforming blends are blends that allow for a radical transformation of the pedagogy, a change from a model where learners are just receivers of information to a model where learners actively construct knowledge through dynamic interactions. These types of blends enable intellectual activity that was not practically possible without the technology" (McGee and Reis, 8).

The key is that this radical transformation is not just about active learning; it's about active learning through activties not possible without the technology. 

As I've been maintaining for some time now, BL is not about convenience or saving on resources. It assuredly does not save on resources--not human resources, anyway. Instead, BL is about good pedagogy. I can do things in my classes that I can't do in a 100% f2f classroom. As I wrote in a recent proposal, some things are simply more efficient asynchronously--detailed, sentence-level peer review or critical analysis. Some things are more efficient in a face-to-face classroom: draft workshops, freewriting, problem-based group work. And some things, like information literacy lessons or concision presentations paired with guided revision practice, are more efficient online through Adobe Connect and Google Drive. 

The flexibility and affordances that technology provides is picked up later in this chapter, in the Kaminski and Currie section: "a course enhanced with online resources and communication tools will add educational value to any face-to-face course by making resources available to learners and by providing opportunities to deepen learning through dialogue and sharing" ("Can you make," para. 2). 

I am curious about this BlendKit, especially at this early stage, because I think that to an extent, it's extraordinarily difficult to grasp what a blended course might look like without a model to analyze. These two case studies at the end aren't particularly helpful in this regard. The first one doesn't have enough detail. The second one does, but the table that compares OL, Facilitated OL, BL, and Studio-based instruction is, I'm afraid, distracting. It would be more effective if she just focused on how she formatted her class without pausing to compare it to other models. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who went through a two-day crash course in BL Course Design at my institution, which was unfortunately not that helpful because most of the research and recommendations for BL course design is for medium and large lecture classes. In that sense, this second case study appears like it might be like mine (small), but she never tells us how many students she's dealing with, which is needed to understand how the disucssion forums and the f2f workshops are run. That said, the fact that she refers to one model as the "studio-based model" implies that she's dealing with less than 20 students, like I am in my writing courses.

Ultimately, both courses need more detail so that others can truly see how these courses work. This is what was missing for me three years ago in my crash course, and this is what is available in some of the literature. I understand that this is a MOOC, however, and it appears as though this has been designed for those with limited time to read scholarly articles. However, if anyone does, here are a couple I highly recommend:

Ginns, P. and Ellis, R. (2007). Quality in blended learning: exploring the relationships between online and face-to-face teaching and learning. Internet and Higher Education (10) 53–64.

Schaber, P. et al (2010). Designing learning environments to foster affective learning: comparison of classroom to blended learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 4(2), 1–19.  

​I'll add these to the Diigo site, if they're not already there, as well as anything else from my own Diigo Library. 

​I'm looking forward to the next few weeks!

Inventing the Digital Remediation, Part 1

It's Saturday morning. Saturday is my day off, not only from work, but from the Internet.

That's funny.

It's Saturday morning on the cusp of Week 12 in a 15-week semester. My students are (ostensibly) revising and polishing their Classical Argument Papers, due Monday. I am (still) inventing the final Digital Project assignment, the prompt for which I should probably give my students, oh, Monday.

I don't want this to be hard. I want it to be awesome.

The concept is straightforward enough: I want my students to take their academic research public. I want them to remediate their CAPs into a (born) digital text for a public audience. I want my students to write for a really real audience. I want their work to be seen.

It's been pretty easy to figure out what I want them to do. I want them to build a website. My original idea for a group project, which I had come up with under the auspices that I am asking them to do something challenging, so working in a group would be easier, is gone. JL is right--it has to be an individual project. Having a website that's part body image and the media, part women in STEM, and part same-sex education is too messy. Each student needs their own space so that the project is devoted to one argument.

I want them to build a website (instead of a blog) because I want lots of things on there. I want them to have a robust reference area that includes their working bibliographies (hyperlinked, when possible) and stasis grids. It would also be cool to link other related sites--even each other's--devoted to their topic. And I want audience interaction--there needs to be some way for the audience to engage with the site, even beyond comments. I'm thinking polls and surveys.

Okay, so I have a pretty good idea of what I want. The question is: what do they need to get there? This is where it gets tricky. In order to build a visual argument, my students need some basics in visual analysis. Fine. Writing Arguments has an okay chapter on that, part of which they're (theoretically) reading this weekend. Last week's one-post discussion board asked them to find three images that have something to do with their topic and write about why they're strong. I did that even before assigning the readings, as I wanted them to come up with their own criteria for what makes a visual argument work.

I just looked at one of them, and it's great! The student pulled a pie chart, a political cartoon, and an advocacy ad, all of which make strong arguments about his topic (which I won't even include here, as I'm still hyper-cautious about identifying students on here. Which will likely shift dramatically over the next couple of weeks as my students, um, publish their work online). See, this is the kind of stuff I want them to add to their websites.

Maybe I should have them go back in this week and add to their analysis, once they have some formal understanding of fonts, colors, and C.R.A.P. (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity)? Here's Mike Rundle's blog on C.R.A.P., which I may use instead of the excerpt from Robin Williams's book, The Non-Designers Design Guide*. Or I could use this, from LifeHack.

*Wait, the second edition is available full text for free?

*blink*

What. 

Okay, now I have an idea. Stay tuned (in theory. This is my second post this month, and it's the 19th). But seriously: I do want to post on this, if for no other reason than to post the links that I've found the most useful for creating this project.

I'm basically modeling the inquiry process for my students...next semester, of course.

Le sigh.