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).

Designer Blends

I have spent two years designing, redesigning, and improving my blend. I have spent an inordinate amount of time making and editing lecture videos, rewriting lessons for asynchronous online days, modifying them for synchronous AdobeConnect days, and scrapping both lessons at the last minute to teach the lesson face-to-face. I have surveyed my students extensively, exhausted my TAs, and pushed myself to the breaking point in getting this blend right--all while simultaneously rewriting my syllabus each semester to incorporate more lessons on information and digital literacy and transform many traditional assignments into digital ones.

From day one, my mission has been not just to maintain but to strengthen the productive, interactive community of learners that is paramount to my teaching. I believe that deep learning is rooted in Dewey's collaborative constructivism: we learn through doing, with each other. Critical inquiry and deep learning is predicated on a safe, supportive learning environment. As such, "going blended" has meant taking advantage of synchronous activities to foster exploration and experimentation in Googledocs and face-to-face classes and asynchronous activities to foster reflection in discussion boards and Voicethreads. My students are free writing, experimenting, drafting, revising, editing, and polishing work that is significantly better at the end of the semester than it is at the beginning. They are collaborating with each other more comfortably. They are writing more on the discussion boards than they ever could speak in class. We know each other better than we did even in my highly participatory, horseshoed-desked, discussion-based traditional classrooms.

The rewards can be seen through my students' writing and self-awareness. If writing is thinking on the page, and my job is to help students think critically about themselves as learners and writers, then my students need to be writing more. They are: My students produce an average of 70 pages of writing every semester, 30 of which are revised and polished. Even in my early semesters teaching blended, my students were making greater improvements in their writing than my students had in my traditional classes. They are reflecting on their digital literacy and media addictions, their research skills, and how well (or not) their high school teachers prepared them for college writing and research. They are providing more and better feedback to each other because they have more time to write careful feedback online. Plus, the online feedback is written, so students can't forget what their peers have said. They just need to go back and look.

If blended learning is seen as a method to save time and resources and increase convenience, then it's never going to gain acceptance among educators, especially compositionists. This does not bode well, for more and more college courses are being offered as blended/ hybrid every year. Resistance from compositionists is warranted if the format is pedagogically unsound, but done well, the format is not simply pedagogically sound: it's pedagogically obvious. Students are writing more, interacting more, and reflecting more. They are doing this by writing more. The net result is that my blended students are making incredible progress in fifteen short weeks, progress that I never would have thought possible three years ago. As a writing teacher, I will take nearly any risk if there's a possibility that it will help my students become better writers. The risks are high. The rewards are real.

Redemption: Voicethread to the Rescue

Opening up Voicethread the morning after an asynchronous day and finding scores of new comments is like running downstairs on Christmas morning and finding a pile of presents.

Here's my view of all of my Voicethreads:

The yellow comment boxes alert me that there are new comments on those three Voicethreads. Yesterday's classwork. Unlike the Voicethread from three weeks ago, yesterday's was simple and straightforward: comment on the quote sandwich in two of the following paragraphs.

Reason #1 that Voicethread rocks: students can see me as I'm going over the prompt. I've listened to myself on Voicethreads in which I've only given audio prompts; those are fine, but I believe that being able to see me, as dorky as I may look, helps to humanize this activity. It boosts instructor presence, obviously, but it also makes it so that adding an audio comment is less intimidating. If I can add a video comment, students can an audio comment.

Reason #2 that Voicethread rocks: We can hear each other! We're only in a brick and mortar classroom once a week. While many of my online days are synchronous, students can only hear me and my TA, not each other. They type in the chat box or in Googledocs, but it's not the same. Hearing each other's voices helps build "social presence." I ask them to introduce themselves when they start to speak so that subsequent students can reference them by name.

Reason #3 that Voicethread rocks: when recording, we can draw on the slide. 

I'm asking students to point out specific things in paragraphs, so being able to point to the area they're talking about is super helpful. The drawings fade after seven seconds, so the slide doesn't get too cluttered.

Reason #4 that Voicethread rocks: I know immediately if they've understood the lesson. This lesson focuses on the "quote sandwich": how to integrate sources properly in a text. Full rhetorical context, including the main aim of the overall text, the quote (or paraphrase), restate the quote in your own words, analyze the quote, and "forward" it, to use Joseph Harris's term. This lesson was presented in a video lecture I made with Camtasia. I don't use the bells and whistles in Camtasia--the quizzes or polls--so until I started using Voicethread, there was no way for me to know if they truly "got it" (let alone watched it) until I looked over their drafts.

Okay, this could happen through a discussion board, but that wouldn't be nearly as good. They just watched me, in the video, go over several paragraphs, pointing out what is or is not working in the samples. Then, they do the same exact thing in this Voicethread. They didn't read the lesson--they watched me. Practicing in a Voicethread is the most logical way to reinforce what they just learned.

Reason #5 that Voicethread rocks: Students can see the text, listen to each other, and add their audio comments all in the same place. You can't do this with a discussion board.

 Here is a Voicethread from last semester. I've gone back to this one because it doesn't include student work (visually)--they are commenting on political cartoons from October, 2013.

The thumbnails on the left and right of the slide represent seven different students. I'm playing this slide now; you can see that I'm listening to the first student's comment.

How cool is this? I mean, seriously? I'm about to write a proposal for this semester's ITL Conference. I want the entire campus to know about this and to adopt this--I think this is an extraordinarily powerful tool for writing teachers like me, for art/ art history teachers, for architecture, media studies, math--the applications are endless.

Thank you, Voicethread, and thank you, students, for bringing me back to my properly enthusiastic state!

Deflation

My class is impossible.

I essentially teach a year-long course in fifteen weeks, and student rightfully resent it. I have spent almost five years refining my class so that it's manageable, so that students won't freak out, so that they won't turn on me when I introduce the first paper. I have designed a logical, perfect sequence from summary to rhetorical analysis to Inquiry paper.

But we still need one more week. Yesterday should have been devoted to invention: to refining the inquiry to a solid research question, to freewriting, to explaining the dinner party, to introducing the quote sandwich. I love the activity K came up with that we didn't have time for: students would pair up and conduct one-minute interviews with each other. Then, we'd introduce the quote sandwich, and then we'd guide students to create a quote sandwich with a direct quote from the person they just interviewed, and then they'd exchange paragraphs to see how their partner represented them in text. It's a really good exercise--paragraph building with each other's quotes.

Yet we didn't have time for it. Instead, we spent forty minutes workshopping the sample Paper 1 as a class--which went well, at least in two of my three classes--and then fifteen minutes going over the paper itself, how it grows out of the Rhetorical Analysis that was due last night, and how the full draft of Paper 1 is due this Saturday morning (which was changed to midnight in my second two classes).

Students aren't ready. They haven't refined their inquiry question. They don't have all of their sources. They have no idea what they're writing about. It's an impossible task.

My class is impossible.

Students have every right to resent it. Yesterday, I watched as their expressions shifted from openness to shock to deflation to resentment. Tomorrow's asynchronous class has them watching three back to back video lectures that were never designed to be viewed in one day. They're all mine--they will be sick of hearing my voice by the time they get to the Voicethread. It's a boring class, activity-wise, but they need all of that content tomorrow so that they have what they need to finish those drafts.

My class is impossible to like, which hurts me deeply.

Incredible Voicethread!

Okay, I've only listened to two slides so far in just one of my sections, but what I've heard is incredible! These are the moments that make all of the hours it takes to prepare an asynchronous day--a *good* asynchronous day--worth it. Voicethreads don't necessarily take too terribly long to prepare, but because this was our first one of the semester, I had to add a couple of slides just about what Voicethread is and how to use it.

The longest preparation time was designing and explaining the prompt. This is definitely a "Lyra Classic": A hyper-organized, hyper-specific prompt with assigned summaries to comment on and elaborate points to cover. Each student had to respond to two summaries--one on the article they did their own summary on and one on an article they did not read. The prompts for each response were different. I had to write that all out, make sure I assigned groups to the right summaries, and record myself on my webcam walking them through all of the prompts. On a couple of them, the amount of times I say "um" is horrible--absolutely horrible--but because it took me about six hours to put all of this together, I did not rerecord those slides. I did have a script for some of the slides, but not all of them. Yes, scripts help to cut down on the "ums." More later--I just wanted to quickly shout out how impressed I am with my students on only their fourth day of class!