Saturday, July 5, 2014
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.
Friday, July 4, 2014
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:
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
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:
- Blogs provide an opportunity for an instructor to gain rapport with the students and understand their needs and backgrounds.
- 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.
- The instructor can identify issues and challenges faced by students by reading about their experiences with the assignments in their blogs.
- For an information technology course, students can learn and understand about a blog itself—both the concept and the technology.
- 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
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Initial Thoughts on OMDE 603: Technology in Distance Education and e-Learning
The next several posts I write will be devoted to a course I am taking at UMUC for my Certificate in Technology in Distance Education and e-Learning. Incidentally, this particular course, OMDE 603, shares that title.
So far, we have reviewed the history of technology in Distance Education (DE) and discussed definitions and terminology for DE. We spent a week on asynchronous and synchronous technology and are midway through a module on Web 2.0 technologies.
There's a way in which much of this has been review for me. I took two courses for this certificate last semester: OMDE 601, which is the foundations course for DE, and a tech-heavy course, DETC 630, which focused on emerging technologies in DE and e-learning. Both of those courses prepared me well for this one. The historical context and terminology was covered in OMDE 601, and asynchronous and synchronous technologies, as well as Web 2.0 technologies, was covered in DETC 630. To that end, I'm a little stuck on what to focus on in this post that demonstrates "critical thinking attributes regarding the course readings and ideas related to class topics." I'll do my best.
First, what's interesting about Technology in DE and e-learning is that the two--technology and DE--are inseparably intertwined. Distance Education is only possible through technology and always has been (Peters). For its first hundred years, students and teachers relied on the postal service--trains and planes. Mostly trains. The middle section, sometimes referred to as the "second wave," saw improvements in speed and communication with telephones, radio, and television. The 1970s saw the first generation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) with discussion boards, and then the whole world changed in the 90s with the Internet.
Of particular note is that the pedagogy changed during these waves, too. We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago; it wasn't until two-way communication between student and teacher and student and student was reliable and widely available that notions of constructivism and student-centered learning came into play. The pedagogy of constructivism really took hold, or became dominant, in the 1990s and has remained so ever since, to the best of my current understanding. Note that I was steeped in constructivism and student-based learning when I was trained to teach; I'm also a compositionist. So, my field and my training give me a strong bias for not just constructivism, but social constructivism.b
The liveliest conversation thus far has been about asynchronous v synchronous technologies. I of course have a lot to say on this because of the way I structure my courses. There is a lot of bias against synchronous technologies (at a distance) in general, and especially here at UMUC, for good reason. First, synchronous technologies deserve their bad rap. Until quite recently, issues of access, reliability, and strong Internet connections have made it virtually impossible for quality synchronous sessions to happen at all (note that I'm specifically talking about web conferencing, as that's what I know best). While vast improvements have been made in these areas, at least in the United States, the technologies themselves are rudimentary, which leads to live sessions in technologies like the painfully ugly AdobeConnect that often aren't much more engaging than a face-to-face lecture. I do my best in here, but I know that I'm not taking advantage of the potential of web conferencing like I could and am eager to do. It requires a paradigm shift that I haven't completely made. For an excellent post on this, see Hybrid Pedagogy's "An Affinity for Asynchronous Learning."
Second, for the purposes of "true" DE (i.e., 100% at a distance), synchronous sessions are impractical. Students take DE courses for convenience and flexibility. Students are in different time zones. Students have crazy schedules that preclude being able to log on at a fixed time every week. So, there's bias.
That said, even web conferencing affords an immediacy that is simply not possible on discussion boards or even pre-recorded instructor videos or podcasts (both of which are great, by the way). Discussion boards are rich, critical, reflective--this is where integrated learning happens (Garrison and Vaughan). Live sessions are also valuable, though: they bring everyone together. Students can chat with each other in real time. Instructors can answer questions in real time. Students can see and hear their instructor and, depending on the way the class is set up, each other. Social presence and instructor presence is inherently higher in synchronous sessions. It just is. I don't know that it's completely practical for an institution like UMUC...but I think that this program (Master's of DE) could benefit from incorporating more live sessions than what I'm seeing now. I attended one live session last semester in DETC 630 which was, I'm afraid, fairly useless. It was simply the instructor going over a couple of websites, which had already been done in a short video I had just watched prior to attending the live session. Not well handled, but it's a learning curve--it takes awhile to get the hang of running live sessions, to which my students, and especially my TAs, can attest.
This post is already a mile long, so I'm going to hold off on Web 2.0 technologies until my next post. Above, I've mentioned Otto Peters, one of the giants of DE scholarship, and Randy Garrison and Norman Vaughan, two DE scholars who have cornered the market on blended learning in higher ed (the title of their 2008 book). Garrison is also one of the original authors (with Anderson and Archer, 2000), of the Community of Inquiry model, in which the social presence and instructor presence concepts are rooted (or, rather, my introduction to them is).
So far, we have reviewed the history of technology in Distance Education (DE) and discussed definitions and terminology for DE. We spent a week on asynchronous and synchronous technology and are midway through a module on Web 2.0 technologies.
There's a way in which much of this has been review for me. I took two courses for this certificate last semester: OMDE 601, which is the foundations course for DE, and a tech-heavy course, DETC 630, which focused on emerging technologies in DE and e-learning. Both of those courses prepared me well for this one. The historical context and terminology was covered in OMDE 601, and asynchronous and synchronous technologies, as well as Web 2.0 technologies, was covered in DETC 630. To that end, I'm a little stuck on what to focus on in this post that demonstrates "critical thinking attributes regarding the course readings and ideas related to class topics." I'll do my best.
First, what's interesting about Technology in DE and e-learning is that the two--technology and DE--are inseparably intertwined. Distance Education is only possible through technology and always has been (Peters). For its first hundred years, students and teachers relied on the postal service--trains and planes. Mostly trains. The middle section, sometimes referred to as the "second wave," saw improvements in speed and communication with telephones, radio, and television. The 1970s saw the first generation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) with discussion boards, and then the whole world changed in the 90s with the Internet.
Of particular note is that the pedagogy changed during these waves, too. We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago; it wasn't until two-way communication between student and teacher and student and student was reliable and widely available that notions of constructivism and student-centered learning came into play. The pedagogy of constructivism really took hold, or became dominant, in the 1990s and has remained so ever since, to the best of my current understanding. Note that I was steeped in constructivism and student-based learning when I was trained to teach; I'm also a compositionist. So, my field and my training give me a strong bias for not just constructivism, but social constructivism.b
The liveliest conversation thus far has been about asynchronous v synchronous technologies. I of course have a lot to say on this because of the way I structure my courses. There is a lot of bias against synchronous technologies (at a distance) in general, and especially here at UMUC, for good reason. First, synchronous technologies deserve their bad rap. Until quite recently, issues of access, reliability, and strong Internet connections have made it virtually impossible for quality synchronous sessions to happen at all (note that I'm specifically talking about web conferencing, as that's what I know best). While vast improvements have been made in these areas, at least in the United States, the technologies themselves are rudimentary, which leads to live sessions in technologies like the painfully ugly AdobeConnect that often aren't much more engaging than a face-to-face lecture. I do my best in here, but I know that I'm not taking advantage of the potential of web conferencing like I could and am eager to do. It requires a paradigm shift that I haven't completely made. For an excellent post on this, see Hybrid Pedagogy's "An Affinity for Asynchronous Learning."
Second, for the purposes of "true" DE (i.e., 100% at a distance), synchronous sessions are impractical. Students take DE courses for convenience and flexibility. Students are in different time zones. Students have crazy schedules that preclude being able to log on at a fixed time every week. So, there's bias.
That said, even web conferencing affords an immediacy that is simply not possible on discussion boards or even pre-recorded instructor videos or podcasts (both of which are great, by the way). Discussion boards are rich, critical, reflective--this is where integrated learning happens (Garrison and Vaughan). Live sessions are also valuable, though: they bring everyone together. Students can chat with each other in real time. Instructors can answer questions in real time. Students can see and hear their instructor and, depending on the way the class is set up, each other. Social presence and instructor presence is inherently higher in synchronous sessions. It just is. I don't know that it's completely practical for an institution like UMUC...but I think that this program (Master's of DE) could benefit from incorporating more live sessions than what I'm seeing now. I attended one live session last semester in DETC 630 which was, I'm afraid, fairly useless. It was simply the instructor going over a couple of websites, which had already been done in a short video I had just watched prior to attending the live session. Not well handled, but it's a learning curve--it takes awhile to get the hang of running live sessions, to which my students, and especially my TAs, can attest.
This post is already a mile long, so I'm going to hold off on Web 2.0 technologies until my next post. Above, I've mentioned Otto Peters, one of the giants of DE scholarship, and Randy Garrison and Norman Vaughan, two DE scholars who have cornered the market on blended learning in higher ed (the title of their 2008 book). Garrison is also one of the original authors (with Anderson and Archer, 2000), of the Community of Inquiry model, in which the social presence and instructor presence concepts are rooted (or, rather, my introduction to them is).
Thursday, May 8, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
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.
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