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.

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.