By Lisa, on January 23rd, 2012
 Waaay back in 1999, a colleague and I offered hybrid History classes. We met with our students for an hour a week, and the rest was online. We each pulled in about 20 students the first time, and the students we had were very happy. But the next semester the dean said she couldn’t see what population we were serving, and hybrids disappeared.
Now they are back. I have had a couple of colleagues do some, and most warned me not to. They spoke of student confusion, high attrition rates, student resistance to doing the online work. Fiddle faddle, I said — if anyone can do these, I can. So I put two on the schedule for this semester. They almost got cancelled for low enrollment, but didn’t. They each have about (c’mon, guess) 20 students.
In the meantime, I have an inbox full of emails begging entrance to the online sections. I know that many will fail the online sections due to lack of self-direction and motivation (especially those asking to add once the semester has begun, which it did today). I think their motivation would increase if they had to be in class once a week. I also think being in class for a hybrid provides a balance, and a place to ask those technical questions, see what’s going on using the screen, talk together in person for some immediacy. I’ve told my students that my hybrids are not on-site classes with an online component. They are online classes with on-site discussion, kind of like a seminar. They’re gonna be great.
In 1999, the online thing was new, and the on-site thing was most familiar. Students were worried about the online part. Now it’s almost reversed. Online students want only online — they don’t want to come to campus. And that means there is a defined “online student” now.
I found an old student survey that the Technology and Pedagogy Committee did back in 1999 today, while I was looking for something else entirely. We surveyed whether our college students were interested in taking fully online classes, and they were tentative: 67% said yes. Now we squabble about whether online classes are “replacing” on-site classes, whether we will lose our position on campus if we “give up” sections to online.
I’d be interested to see some stats on how many students take both on-site and online classes at the same college, because I have a feeling it is less than five years ago. Perhaps on-site students aren’t as interested in online, and vice versa. Maybe they know their own needs, or maybe it’s all determined by their schedules, desire for flexibility, or misconceptions that online is easier (I know students who maintain this perspective despite their dismal performance in online classes because they don’t do the work).
The new committee I’m chairing now, MiraCosta Online Educators, had some meetings while I was on sabbatical, and today I listened to the recordings. An hour-long conversation took place over how to designate hybrid classes in the schedule. Some of our classes are 100% online, but others demand on-site testing, or an on-site orientation. We also envision synchronous online classes. How are these to be indicated in the schedule? How will students know what’s going on? (I happen to think these two questions aren’t as closely related as they seem – students rarely read the schedule.) Will students be there for these hybrids? Is it what they want?
Or do we have now online students, and on-site students?
By Lisa, on January 12th, 2012
So a friend of mine has an iP*d (dotted out to avoid the deluge of advertising in my comments), and I go to show her one of my classes, and I notice to my horror that none of my painstakingly embedded YouTube videos (including lecture intros I recorded) are visible.
Of course, I had done some research before using them instead of my embedded Quicktime clips in my own hand-Javascripted pop-up windows. And I thought I knew to use the old embed code because some browsers can’t handle iframes, and some students don’t know what a browser is, and are using Internet Explorer 0.02 or something.
But of course, the old embed code for YouTube is Flash, and iEverything doesn’t want Flash, it wants HTML5, which is supposedly the new YouTube embed code so…. aaarrggghhh.
Next task then, after redoing all the clips (we’re talking about 50 clips over three classes) the first time to change to YouTube embed code, is to redo all the embed codes.
So then I happen to notice I have also embedded a slidecast from Slideshare in my lecture too. Turns out that’s Flash too. I can get a sneaky iframe code from here, but I see that it won’t do audio. The audio is still Flash. My alternative version is on HTML pages with Quicktime audio, but it’s the wrong audio codec so the iP*d won’t play that either.
Which also means that all my lecture audio, obviously recorded in a wrong codec, has little play symbols crossed out. At least they can hear the music. I must have used a codec the sucker likes for the music clips somehow.
What other horrors await, I wonder? I know my students all bought this thing, this iP*d thing that I don’t understand because it’s just a big screen that I can’t connect anything to or do anything with, so I don’t have one and don’t want one. To cater to it is soooo annoying.
By Lisa, on January 11th, 2012
Extending on my Wild West metaphor from my last post, and my students as cats or dogs metaphor from long ago, I’m playing with another false dichotomy as I take a break from writing my book chapter. I think that teachers tend to be either ranchers or farmers. And I know because I’m a rancher.
 flickr cc stevecadman As a rancher, I provide vast lands of resources and fenced areas for safety. I take the group to new grassy areas as needed to help their growth. I make sure they are provided with the basics they need to thrive. But they do the work, seeking out the food, water and salt. I round them up and brand them, but of course they don’t do everything I tell them, and so long as they’re OK I leave them alone. If one or two wander off, I try not to worry – all of them cannot be expected to thrive. My ranch is open. I do not choose the qualities, abilities, or potential of my stock. Instead I focus on creating the best environment possible.
Ranchers as teachers focus on creating a learning environment that is rich in resources and community, spending much time in preparing the right conditions. They are concerned with the doings of the group and provide freedom for both success and failure.
I know many teachers who are farmers. They plant the seeds and help the crops grow. They tend and coddle, feed and water. They get rid of weeds that might inhibit growth and fret when a plant doesn’t blossom or thrive.
Farmers focus on the students individually, get involved in their personal challenges, and show sympathy. They provide extensive support in terms of counseling, and helping students find resources. They often spend extra time with individuals in office hours, teaching and re-teaching what was taught in class.
As a rancher, I am both fascinated and annoyed by the efforts of farmers, who want to fence off my stock when they need to graze, encouraging them to expect assistance. They help students enormously in terms of safety and caring, but provide less in terms of freedom. I worry that students coddled by farmers will have trouble in their jobs, expecting bosses and co-workers to always help them out. I worry that they won’t be able to move beyond circumstances like poverty, broken homes, tough jobs, and difficult schedules to get a university degree. Instead, I want to foster independence and strength.
In both cases, of course, ranchers and farmers are caretakers. We do not see the final results of our efforts once our stock or crop leaves our land. We cannot say which way is best. But whichever role is more like ours, we need to understand and appreciate the other. But clearly, I’m a rancher.
By Lisa, on January 9th, 2012
In thinking further about the ideas presented by Jon Dron as “Web 1.5″, there may be another perspective to solving the problem of balancing the teacher-focused, top-down, LMS environment of Web 1.0 with the communal, discovery-based, sharing environment of Web 2.0 (see Dron and Anderson’s Lost in social space: Information retrieval issues in Web 1.5, 2009).
 New York (Library of Congress)  A cowboy, 1900-1920 (Library of Congress) I’m going to consider Web 1.0 and its suburb, the LMS, as life in the big city. Web 2.0 is the Wild West. [Note: I will also be using the Wild West analogy also for the chapter I'm writing for the e-book Open Online Learning and Teaching being edited by Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Rita Kop.]
Assuming the instructor is responsible for creating the environment for learning, there are many places along the spectrum between too closed (big city) and too open (Wild West). If students are accustomed to closed systems (which they often are from standard classrooms and learning management systems), then simply throwing them into the Wild West of the open web is not a good idea. They will be far too busy managing the affective elements of dealing with the open web as a learning space (something akin to Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief) to be able to learn anything. It’s culture shock.
Before our Program for Online Teaching Certificate course began, the feeling most participants expressed in starting the class was “excited”. After a few weeks, that changed to “overwhelmed”. I think we made the mistake of thinking that people who emailed and used course management systems and indicated interest in an open class in online pedagogy were already in Abilene, Kansas, an outpost of organized civilization surrounded by territory full of cowboys and Indians. We didn’t understand that they were big city folk, accustomed to having their services provided in a centralized way.
And yet we wanted them working on the open web, blogging or posting where all can see, sharing and behaving like netizens and contributors to the deep well of all internet knowledge. We didn’t envision them roping calves on the first day, of course, but we wanted them to enjoy the challenge and try twirling a rope.
One step at a time may sound silly, but it might be best to approach things that way, gradually revealing ones reasons and intent as time goes one. So in week one, we might say the task is to set up a blog, and we give advice and tutorials to do that. Then week two is to post something in text, week 3 with an image, etc. all focused on the course content. And as we go along, we explain a bit more each week about why we’re doing this (i.e. posts are for reflection, which is good for learning and sharing; images can help us see what you’re talking about, etc.).
We haven’t quite been doing this, in our effort to balance pedagogical study and tool exploration. Each week we have been doing something different, having them try a new tool. It may be like saying, “look at that cactus”, “watch out for that snake”, and “doesn’t that saloon girl look pretty in those boots?” all at once. It’s possible we should be revealing the trail in a better way.
 It may be best, at this point of “overwhelm”, not to explain too much. We want to be transparent about our teaching methods, but we could reveal these gradually, as things arise. Throwing out learning theories and pedagogical explanations right away is like giving a city boy a saddle and pointing him toward a horse — he knows the two things are connected but it doesn’t make sense immediately, even though the clear goal is to move forward.
We need to be a little less Jack Palance, and a little more like a tour guide. While a certain amount of challenge is great, and very important to learning, we need to not forget the comfort of being more on the big city side, having decisions of how to structure learning be set in advance.
By Lisa, on January 9th, 2012
Having abandoned my search for an easy way to save pdfs to Diigo, it happened accidentally by just using Chrome. Chrome opens pdfs inside a browser tab, where my Diigolet works comfortably. However, there are some problems.
The biggest is that I cannot highlight. So I can save but not annotate. When I try, this happens:
Also, it can’t grab the title of the work, so I have to title it manually.
But it’s a step in the right direction, I think.
By Lisa, on January 3rd, 2012
I look with some consternation at the classes I’m setting up for spring. I have put all the presentation information on the open web, but because I need to track 240 students (40 each for 6 class sections), all graded assignments are trapped in an LMS (in this case, Moodle).
At the same time, of course, I read everywhere how the model is shifting, and in particular how the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are pushing both connectivism and open learning. The latest is Kop, Fournier and Mak’s A Pedagogy of Abundance or a Pedagogy to Support Human Beings? Participant Support on Massive Open Online Courses (2011). The idea is that the social connections in open courses need to provide the bulk of the support for learners: “We would argue that one of the major challenges is to create a pedagogy that supports human beings in their learning where the social connections people make on the network provide their learning support.” This comes up against the idea of the importance of the instructor: “teacher presence supports cognitive presence”. The study concludes that connections with both other students and the instructor are significant, which mirrors conclusions in studies about ordinary online classes.
Several differences exist between the MOOC model and my History classes.
MOOCs have learning objectives determined by the learners, where mine are determined by course descriptions at universities and student learning outcomes. This necessitates that I track learner progress toward those objectives, and quantify them through individual grades.
In MOOCs the level of participation is of importance mostly to the facilitators (you can see my discussion of engagement with brainysmurf here), where in mine retention of students and preventing them from dropping is significant to both my faculty evaluations and the chances to offer the class again.
Legal concerns in a MOOC are the sole responsibility of participants, whereas my classes are offered by an public institution that has to abide by certain state and federal laws in order to receive funding.
But the main difference is that MOOCs are Massive. There may need to be a point of critical mass in order for community to form effectively enough to support student learners. My class limit of 40, which seems excessive to me for the kind of individual monitoring I’m forced to do, may be too small to form that kind of support structure, even with a facilitator as active as myself.
However, 240 (the total of all my students together), may be large enough. If so, the Facebook group, where all my students may join, could provide a space for that community.
So back to the graded assignments trapped in the LMS. I am not concerned about the exams — the multiple-choice quizzes are individual and instantly scored for instant feedback (which is their other purpose, in addition to ensuring content exposure required by the course of study). The essay exams are also individual and are simply easier to mark inside the LMS.
But the “discussions” are trapped there too, though I don’t call them that. They are “sources and writing” forums, where students post sources and construct mini-essays based on the collection they create. I have to track them to track participation, so they’re inside the LMS.
These “sources and writing” activities are what’s causing my consternation. Clearly they should be on the open web. Students could be blogging, then finding the sources on each others’ blogs and creating their theses as posts. But I cannot track them with the granularity I need for 240 students, so they’re trapped.
My sense is that community support is not likely to arise in a forum where the class starts with 40 students, but maybe 27 will actively participate, and of these (experience suggests) only about 7 will actively engage with what other students have written rather than just searching for sources to do their own work. So I’m hoping that 240 in a Facebook group will provide the community element necessary for support when my classes are not MOOCs.
The larger question is whether there is a critical mass that should be achieved to provide such support, and whether a part of the class needs to be an emphasis on participants learning how to support each other. This “development and practice of peer facilitation, mentoring, and coaching” mentioned in the article would have to be intentional and part of class design. If I am unable to fully organize a formal mentoring system (which would take a great deal of time), perhaps the Facebook group can be a place where those connections can be made, if enough students participate.
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