I know a number of instructors who go to great lengths to do this. They create tutorials and visual pathways leading students through the class. They think out discussion prompts carefully, rewording over many semesters to get the phrasing right so students understand. They screencast, podcast, send messages and announcements and reminders.

The development of such assistive elements for a class takes time and effort. Our Jing workshops at the POT mini-conferences are filled every time with professors eager to help guide their students. Many appreciate the vast encyclopedia of resources that is the web, and create engaging activities that access what it has to offer. Some are creating social bookmarking sites and Nings, each with accompanying guides on how to use them for their particular class.

Years ago, when I was constructing my second online class, I wanted to use links inside my lecture to assist students in gaining depth on certain subjects. I created lectures in HTML with lots of links. Over the years, I revised the lectures. Often I wanted to keep the links to excellent websites, but the sites kept disappearing or moving, leading students to frustrating 404 errors. My effort to utilize the web from my own perspective, my own written lectures, was great pedagogically but it meant I had to either find the missing site or track down a new one. Even this semester, when I’ve offered students extra credit to find replacement websites for those that have disappeared, I feel trapped by what I created.

cc Flickr unloveablesteve

My audio recordings intensified the entrapment. Wanting to help students understand my lectures, I audio recorded them. Many students over the years, both visually impaired and not, have told me how much they appreciate hearing my voice and inflection. But this means that every time I revise a lecture, I must re-record. Not only re-record and upload so when they click the QuickTime button that section plays, but convert it to mp3 and re-zip the big file of all the lecture sections for those who download it and play it on the go. This also means that when a link disappears, I must find a new one or else me saying “link” in the lecture (as I did throughout for those not reading it and for the visually impaired) is silly.

If I decide to change something that affects the pathway of the course (create a wiki instead of a weekly forum, for example), I’d have to reconstruct all my visual guides, edit my FAQ, and re-do the screencast of how to make your way through the class. In addition, then, to a navigational overhaul I might wish to do, I have to remake all the assistive elements.

And I’m not even going to mention the entire technologies in which we create things, and then they disappear (OK, I’ll mention Furl, where I was trying to cache the web pages to prevent 404s).

Certainly, we have similar issues with classroom teaching, but often that is a matter of simply explaining differently in class. Here the technologies we want to use, want to use because they’re effective, mean far more additional work, stifling creativity and making us more reluctant to do something new.

And that’s bad in so many ways.

Nevertheless, all of us deviants have a Bb class assigned to us, even if it’s not visible to students. We are supposed to create links from there to where we want students to go, acknowledging that students use Bb like a portal. When I chaired the technology committee, I agreed this was a good idea, mostly because I was doing it anyway, so now we’re all supposed to do it.

So every semester, I erase all the Bb menu buttons so students won’t get confused — they can only click on my info page, and it opens in a new window to eject them from Bb.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a number of students always enter their class through Blackboard — they are unaware that the class is actually somewhere else. As I’ve commented elsewhere, even if they know it’s another site, they still call any class website “Blackboard” or “the blackboard”.

Well, this semester I forgot to make the Blackboard shells I’d set up available to students. It was an honest mistake. I did set them up, which takes some time, so obviously I meant to do it. I thought I had done it.

But yesterday I got an email from a student. You see, I have huge wait lists of people wanting to get in to very full classes. So if a student doesn’t “show up” at the site on the first day, I email them. Of course, I have already emailed all students via our enrollment system the week before, pointing them to the right place. This student didn’t get that email, but today got the one where I said I’d have to drop him if he didn’t show.

He wrote me that he went to Blackboard, but the class wasn’t there, so he asked at “registration” and they said wait, it will open. So it wasn’t fair of me to drop him.

Bad on so many levels! Totally understandable that it wouldn’t occur to him the class might be elsewhere, but he asked at “registration”. He obviously hadn’t gone anywhere else at the college’s website — we have many pages for the online class information, all of which are linked properly to my classes. We have a call-in Student Helpdesk. But all he had was my second email, which he happened to discover on the third day of class.

Here’s the strange thing. He was the only one. I swear, I had received only two other emails from students who couldn’t find my class, and that was because they had gone to the college’s Moodle installation instead of mine. This is out of 160 online students!

In other words, 99.38% of students found their class without using Blackboard. Despite this student’s brief distress (don’t worry — I tell them I’m dropping them but I always wait awhile so long as it doesn’t affect their record — he’s fine), that stat is amazing to me. It means they did use the website, or did check their email, or didn’t make assumptions, or just found their way like they would on campus when looking for their classroom. Only one other student had even mentioned the course not being in Blackboard.

There is hope.

The second chapter focused on learning styles. I was big into learning styles then, the idea of catering our teaching to hit as many learning styles as possible, based on Gardner’s multiple intelligences. I had even given presentations on the subject, including one at San Diego City College, which I was asked to reprise in 2008.

The chapters disppeared into the void for a couple of years. Then this fall, the editor contacted me. A new editor had been assigned at the publisher, and would I be willing to update the sources and do a little editing in response to her suggestions? Why, sure.

Trouble was (isn’t there always a problem?), I no longer believe what I wrote in 2007 about learning styles. I have, quite simply, changed my mind. (As the saying goes, if you can’t change your mind, how do you know you have one?)

I was conversing with a colleague at San Elijo, and we were discussing how students on campus have been using their challenges and difficulties in life as justification for not completing their work. My response was, “This is college. They’re here to overcome those things, not wallow in them.” Then I started thinking about learning styles, and how I’d changed what my students do in class in a way that clearly emphasizes writing: gathering evidence and developing a thesis. And how this semester, not for the first time, I had a student say to me, “Well, I’m no good at taking notes from lecture. I’m a visual learner.” But he wasn’t a genuine visual learner — he just liked pictures. He didn’t analyze visuals any better than he did text.

A number of my students have been told that they have a particular learning style already, before they get to me. They are beginning to figure it’s my job to cater to it. But I need them to write, too — we’re doing historical inquiry here. Is it good teaching to let them wallow in their “preferred” learning style?

So I decided to rewrite the chapter. First I wanted “Teaching the Students We Have”, with an emphasis on how students really are today, what they need, how we should teach them. My editor said OK. Then I changed it to “Reducing the Distance in Online Classes”, which involved less rewriting, but reducing the learning styles thing to a small section and bringing in some current research. My editor said OK (he’s quite amiable).

Then I found it. A great new study saying (ta dah!) that there is no evidence that catering to learning styles increases their learning, linked from this post at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Vindicated!

When the big fuss was being made about rubrics a number of years ago, I was skeptical. But I like anything that makes teaching more transparent (yes, I really will get to that post someday!). So I developed a rubric, and it is the heart of my students’ self-assessments of their work and participation. This morning, for example, I will receive from my on-site class their physical portfolios, where they suggest their grades for participation and work quality based on this rubric.

I have also studied excellent rubrics written by others, such as my brilliant colleague Louisa Moon, and use them myself to assure satisfactory grade progress in courses I’ve taken.

Rubrics are great, right? They let the student see exactly how the instructor is going to grade their work. The instructor has created the rubric based on how s/he really grades, what is actually sought, so the grading appears to be impartial and fair even though the qualities in it are subjective. It’s a great balance.

But here’s the rub of rubrics. They break down the grading process into little segments, and prevents a viewing of the whole.

A number of years ago, the wonderful Megill brothers (David and Don) taught me that no matter what, a grade is subjective. There is no such thing as “objective questions” or an objective grade. Grading is always subjective because it is always based on what the teacher wants.

I can try to list what I want, and give each item a point count. But what if a student does a superior job on one aspect, and not so well on another?

An example: let’s say I break down grading an essay into 4 points max for a solid thesis, 4 points for writing style, and 4 points for content development. The students created a thesis that should be published by Harvard University Press and turned into a book. I give him 4 points for that, but the writing’s kinda whatever and the content development not so hot considering how great a thesis it is. Total is thus 10 out of 12. I want to give him a 12 and write “OMG go back and develop this thesis and get the thing published!”

There isn’t room for this, even if I add an “overall quality” category or something, because then it applies to everyone. I have to break my own rubric.

When it comes to final grades, I do this naturally. My rules state that I reserve the right to reduce the grade due to:

instructor’s evaluation of overall learning, within one letter grade of total points earned. For example, your points could add up to a B, but if your overall work was not at the B level (see rubric, above), I could lower the grade to a C.

I also use this rule to boost a total up. After all, learning is about progression. If a student got lousy grades early in the semester, but improved as the course got more complex and involved, I want the final grade to show that progress, so I bump up a number of grades at the end of the semester. An “improvement” category wouldn’t make sense, except in an individual context.

That individual context is undermined by rubrics. I don’t grade on a curve, but rather try to grade each students’ work according to both a standard and individual progress.

And I think we all do this to a certain extent. Thus my relationship to the rubric has become fraught with suspicion. Is my rubric really doing the job I set it out to do? or is it sneaking around on me, limiting my options?

It’s become like Kleenex, at one time the top brand of facial tissue in the U.S. People say “hand me a Kleenex” instead of “hand me a tissue”. The brand has become synonymous with the generic item.

My evidence is that students often say things like “I posted in the Blackboard”, when my class is actually located in Ning or Moodle. I find it interesting that they know what “posted” means, but not where they’ve posted. It’s all just the web, a Narnia that exists somewhere behind their computer screen. If their other teachers have referred to their course being in Blackboard, that must be where the online courses live, back there behind the fur coats amd the ads for enhancing male potency.

I’m sure this would thrill Blackboard, though it annoys the hell out of me, and folks like Mike, a leader in applying technology to the problems of pedagogy, who’s being called “the Blackboard guy”. I frequently have novice faculty approach me and tell me they’re getting into online teaching, so they’re going to take a Blackboard workshop, and where do they sign up for one?

I am always shocked no matter how often this occurs. I never know where to start. Do I first mention that they need to decide what they want to accomplish, then look at technology? point out there are many other systems (and non-systems) they can use? point out that POT doesn’t do “training” but we are delighted to help with their pedagogical needs?

Instead, I think I should try to figure out what they mean by “Blackboard”. Then I’ll probably need a Kleenex.

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

At the end of the first eight weeks, when they do this for the first time, there are often revelations. Students are grateful I gave the assignment, because now they know they aren’t meeting expectations. Many promise to do better.

I learn from this that the assessment is important, because it makes them look at the Grading Policies page, where the rubric is. That page has been “required” reading since the beginning of the class. There were questions from it on the Tech Check/Syllabus Quiz, which is the first thing due in the class. And yet most have forgotten it, or never read it, or didn’t think it applied to them, etc. till the assessment.

What’s remarkable is that occasionally, the assessment at the end of the year also prompts discovery, or in this case, makes me aware there hasn’t been any.

My ending Participation Assessment says:

After carefully examining the grading rubric, your logs, and forum posts for the second half of the semester, consider in what ways have you improved or reduced your participation from the half-way point. Please briefly explain:
1. how may points you received on the first Participation Assessment,
2. how many you think you should have for this half, and
3. why.

One student wrote:

“I’ve actually probably participated less since the class begun. I just try to learn the information that is presented along with information in my book and take the tests and get the best grade possible. I’ve always not really understood the class discussions, since i can usually do the test with out them and i am really busy. I don’t think i should get to many points in the participation section! I’ll try to get by and do my with the tests.”

This student didn’t have a single discussion post since the first evaluation, and seemed unaware that the discussions aren’t just chatting — they constitute the bulk of writing for the class. I tell them this, of course, but I say it in the forums! And there’s no evidence here that he looked at the rubric at all.

I figure the Grading Policies page isn’t the only page not being seen by some. I know by looking at logs that many skip the Study Guides (and therefore don’t realize they contain all the multiple choice questions that will be on the forthcoming quiz). Or they don’t bother with the lecture. They read the book, and take the tests.

In terms of course design, I don’t consider the discussion 20% of the course, just 20% of the grade. It’s more like half the class, because it’s the processing and sharing of the knowledge learned via presentation and reading. It’s the heart, not a side activity. It’s lower stakes (not 50% of the grade)  because I want the students to feel free to explore. I assume they’re looking at the grading, and figuring where to spend their time for maximum grade impact. But I see increasingly that they don’t do that.

Rather, they make assumptions:

• Anything called a test or quiz is important.
• Anything called discussion you can miss.
• The textbook is the heart of the class and should be read carefully.
• Anything called an assessment could go one way or another.
• If it’s online, it’s self-paced and you don’t need to “show up”.
• All online classes are in Blackboard.

They have to discover that it’s not that way, but to discover one has to explore. As I see all these wonderful ideas to get students to explore (using collaborative or connectivist methods) they have to actually peruse the class website, understand the rules and the process. My class isn’t that much different from a traditional class, yet I have a very non-traditional element in the way I use discussion and participation assessments (where they get to assess their own learning). If students can’t even accept this, what chance do more radical methods have?

I know, I have heard that one has to throw out the whole thing (university, grading, teacher-directed anything) for it to work. But I refuse to believe this. If I do that, I will spend the entire class with teacher-directed instruction on how to do the class! Once I created an (on-site) honors section where all we did was write one research paper, meeting an hour a week throughout the semester. Just one paper. Instead of talking history and ideas during our hour-long sessions, I ended up having to instruct them on how to write a paper. Even with a list to guide them, they did not know how to do basic college English 101 things, like make an outline, do basic research, develop a thesis. Of the 12 who started the section, only 3 finished. Their assumption? That I would lecture on history for the 16 hours, and they’d memorize it. My radical method was great for 3 students. That doesn’t hack it in my job.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/ / CC BY 2.0

This means that designing an online class is not just an exercise in transferring pedagogy, or plugging things in. It is an awareness that the exact same difficulties that haunt us in on-site classes are not magically solved online. These challenges include students not attending class, not reading the syllabus, not understanding when they ask a question and it is answered, not asking questions when they need to, missing tests, having low reading ability, being inexperienced at processing basic information, and not being aware of cues given to help them.

Sometimes we focus so hard on the “online” aspect of the class that we forget these problems exist, or think they are replaced by scary tech problems instead. The scary tech problem comes down to one: if the only way the student will understand what’s necessary is to be talked to into his face, then he will not understand. If he couldn’t understand anyway, no matter how many different ways it’s explained, then that’s the way it is. Whether it’s online or on-site, all we can do is provide resources and repeatedly remind the students that those resources (the instructor, the rules posted or handed out, the entire internet, that site or handout about plagiarism) are there for them.  We can try to counter assumptions, but we cannot eliminate all obstacles.

We are, as teachers, in the business of changing minds. Despite this, we are often reluctant to change our own.

Over the years, I’ve adopted a number of policies, many of them draconian. When I was a new teacher, these were designed to keep students from walking all over me, since I was young and inexperienced. I remember being so frustrated with students being late to class that I locked the door one night ten minutes into class. That one showed up on an evaluation.

I have since changed my mind, on that and a number of other issues:

• I ignore lateness for the most part, though if it’s excessive I give a hearty, cheery, pointed hello to the individual as s/he comes in.
• I don’t care if their cell phone rings during class — heck, mine might. Most of my students think they’re fitting school into their lives, rather than the other way around. I just ask them to go outside if they need to take the call.
• I have a lot of kinesthetic learners, and I am fine if they leave the room and return during class. I just ask that they don’t treat me like a TV — if I’m talking to the class, we should adapt the “blocking” to not cross in front of each other.
• If a student falls asleep in class, I ignore that and catch the student as s/he leaves with a concerned comment, asking if they’re OK.
• If students ask about a policy or rule I haven’t created yet, I ask them what they think and we do it together. After all, if it were that important to me, I would have the rule set already.
• I don’t ask for a doctor’s note, nor do I distinguish excused from unexcused absences. I figure that’s why I teach college instead of lower grades. Whether they miss class because the surf’s up or because they were in the hospital, the result is the same. They missed class and need to consult the policy on that (no makeups, half credit max for what was missed).
• I tell them why I’ve designed things the way I have (to increase skills from factual to analytical), why I want homework done every week (practice), why it has to be typed (others in the group have to be able to read it), why I don’t like what the authors of their book did in this chapter, etc. [I'll blog more late on this "transparent pedagogy".]
• I do not spend extensive office hours listening to them talk about their abusive families, their nasty job, their medical diagnosis, the tough life they’ve had — as I said to a colleague, they are here in college to overcome these things, not wallow in them. I’m there to show them what to focus on and make recommendations for how to focus on my class if their life challenges allow it.
• I apologize when I screw up, whether it’s a wrong date on the syllabus or a bad log-in procedure on the website.
• I never try to be their friend, their mother, their parole officer, or their boss. I am there to provide an environment, resources and an approach in which they can learn history. Whether they choose to take advantage of it is up to them.

The result is that I haven’t had a student “discipline” problem in many years now. I recently realized in talking with an associate (who was having problems with her class) that I have a whole different perspective now. I set a few broad rules for the class that I expect everyone to follow, but I am open to individual exceptions at all times. I don’t tell the students this. They find out when they come to me, person to person (and online), with a problem. I am grateful they want to be responsible for their work, and they are grateful for my flexibility.

I did not set out to create an environment of mutual respect, but just to be myself and relax a bit, so we could focus on history. I won’t compromise on the quality of their work, the skills I want them to learn, or the progress I want them to make. But I have indeed changed my mind about controlling the setting through extensive rule-making that is designed, really, to assert my own authority. I already have authority. It’s given to me by the situation of teacher and learner, and by my own confidence in myself and my work.

I avoided grading all morning. I cleaned out my in-box (down to 76 messages!), worked on a project that’s not due for weeks. All because I wrote a really bad essay question, and the results were terrible.

The question was:

“Choose any specific piece of art from the Modern Art and Music section of the lecture, and explain in thesis style how it represents the prevailing ideas of this timeframe.”

Most students couldn’t answer the whole thing; either they didn’t tell me about an artwork (I got movements instead) or they didn’t know what the “prevailing ideas of this timeframe” were (this was for the 1920s). It didn’t matter that I linked to the lecture section; the answers were awful. A total disaster.

When this happens, I think my question is bad, and I make a note in Zoho Writer to change it next semester. But I think it’s a bigger issue. It’s not just a bad question. It’s out of alignment with what I’m doing now in discussion, where they create their own stockpile of primary sources each week then work on creating historical theses.

That method I’m very happy with, and I think it is bringing more students toward satisfactory work toward the important Student Learning Outcomes of using evidence and creating interpretive historical theses (our outcomes are based on historical skills, not content knowledge).

All my classes feature seven evenly spaced quizzes during the semester. Each have some multiple-choice questions from the text or lectures, but at least 30% is based on two essay questions. In my on-site class, I create the essay questions on the fly each time, because they are based on what we do in class. I am gradually making the questions imitate the format I’m teaching them: thesis, followed by three pieces of evidence or eras/topics supported by evidence.

But online, I create the essay questions in advance, because I like to get all my online classes “set up” before the semester starts. They tend to check content, or try to get it combined with the context (like my lousy question). Only near the end of the class do I do the thesis-evidence pattern. And now that they’re doing it in discussion, this doesn’t make sense.

It’s TIME to ALIGN.

Megill argued that mass education itself is problematic, especially with its efforts to create “student learning outcomes” to apply to all courses and every student. He argued for “multileveled education not defined by arbitrary degrees.” In response, Winston argued that community colleges are there to provide access to all, precisely for those degrees, our “ticket” in society.

These ideas connect to the main paradox of community colleges: we are open access, yet provide transfer-level curriculum that takes the place of the first two years at university. Universities, of course, choose their students; we do not. So for those of us who teach transfer classes, can we provide the equivalent university experience? By law, we must, for everyone who comes: grades alone determine who is suited and who isn’t for academic work.

But the bigger question is whether we are here to provide “schooling” (with its requirements and degrees and accountability) or “education” (a meaningful experience of discovery for each student, something only that student can make useful in their lives). Megill is critical of “schooling” and wants “education”; Winston sees the value of “schooling” as an opportunity for all to possibly achieve in society.

And this connects to, interestingly enough, educational theory itself, particularly the new field of connectivism, pioneered by George Siemens and taught with Stephen Downes in the mondo CCK09 massive open online course. I was a member of CCK08 and tracked my learning in a blog. That class was clearly “education”, although I also got “schooling” credit. But the premise of connectivism itself was clearly “education”, and many of its adherents are anti-schooling.

As usual, I think we need a combination of both.

This clip from Teacher’s Pet (1958) — and indeed the whole film, regardless of how one feels about Clark Gable and Doris Day — brings the issue into relief. Gable is a high school drop-out, a die-hard experienced journalist (”newspaperman”) and Day is a college journalism instructor (at a night school, like community college). He has “education” in terms of practical experience, she has “schooling”, and each shares their point of view with the other. Each becomes changed as a result. Romantic nonsense aside, it’s a good film for highlighting these issues.

Image from SkycaptainTwo at Flickr

I was recently made aware that we may need to justify our “training” of online faculty for accreditation reports. Occasionally, I hear that we should have a program for “training faculty to teach online”. Everyone who teaches online, goes the argument, should be required to complete such a program. Other colleges offer training, at least through @ONE group, or have required workshops. Do we?

Note first that we have no “training” for on-site faculty, those who work in the classroom, with or without supplemental electronic technology. Something is perceived to be very different with teaching online, despite the fact that the course description, transfer requirements, materials, standards, student learning outcomes and everything else are identical regardless of “delivery format”.

And we need to define the word “training”, since two areas are often combined which shouldn’t be.

Technical training means teaching the use of the technology. Unfortunately, doing so is often used as a substitute for the development of an instructor’s online pedagogy, which should come first. Many other programs drill the technology and have faculty fit their pedagogy to it, as opposed to the other way around. The result is cookie-cutter courses and little innovation, plus an unhealthy reliance on expensive, enterprise-based CMSs like Blackboard.

Such training may not even be needed if the instructor knows the web, and those who do spend much time online tend to find training “requirements” intolerable (I know I do). Such training is commonly requested by faculty themselves on a “just in time”, need-to-know basis, from technical staff. It should never, ever be required. In the case of POT, we supplement the college’s technical training with faculty-led workshops on new technologies we know work for teaching, but which wouldn’t be on anyone’s “training” radar because they are not commercial systems. It would be bizarre to require it.

The other area I’ll call “training in teaching online“. Some colleges have a workshop or two in this, often called “Introduction to Online Teaching”, usually as a single offering among multiple workshops on how to use Blackboard. Sometimes such intro workshops are taught by faculty, but usually by those who are not experts in online pedagogy (or those who say they are experts but only teach about teaching, having PhDs in Education). POT, instead, uses experts in pedagogy (active professors in the disciplines) to teach about online pedagogy.

I don’t like to call this “training” — though some do. What is it? Teaching? Collaborating? Learning? Let’s try “preparation” or, I know, even better: “professional development”.

Such professional development for effective online teaching should be faculty-led. Technical training in commercial systems should be provided by technicians as needed. Online teaching standards, curriculum, etc. should be determined by departments and Senate, the same as they are for on-site classes — they are, after all, the same courses.

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

So how do we know that our online teachers are doing a good job? How do we know if they need “training”? The same way we know this about our classroom teachers, of course.  At our college, the hiring committee, then the Tenure Review Committee, determines the need for any additional professional development or skills acquisition as part of the evaluation process. Departments set standards for the teaching of the discipline, and department chairs and administrators evaluate faculty work.

Unfortunately, these colleagues and administrators, those doing the evaluating, are often uncomfortable with online teaching. I know any number of them, people I respect, who really don’t think teaching a class online is “real”, that it involves real learning or real teaching. Perhaps they are the ones who need to be “trained” in online pedagogies, since they are having trouble determing standards for online. In almost all cases, basic pedagogy (such as Chickering and Ehrman’s seven priniciples for good practice in undergrad ed from 1987) apply the same to online as on-site classes [see the TLT interpretation (1996) and this fabulous white paper from Virginia Commonwealth University (2009) about which I'll write more anon]. The weakness is one of understanding on the part of colleagues and administrators, and, in some cases, lack of meta-cognitive pedagogy (whether online or on-site) among faculty.

The misconceptions about the validity of online teaching are only encouraged by using the word “training”. It implies a false proposition: that instructors need to learn the tools first, and that once they have done so they will develop good online classes. Neither of these is true. Instead, instructors should be encouraged to examine their pedagogy as they begin to teach online, and be provided with extensive technical support as they develop courses based on their chosen pedagogy. And powers-that-be (accrediting agencies, Chancellor’s Offices, and our own colleagues) should be aware that the need is for creating a good environment for encouraging such practices, instead of certifying “training in teaching online”.