During this break, I was looking at some of the various web spaces of a new online colleague of mine, Ed Webb, a Poli Sci prof in Pennsylvania. He’s got classes working in various spaces such as Wetpaint, and he’s doing cool things like having them use Meebo to chat while they watch a movie. And it made me think about synchronicity.
Most of what I do with my online students is asynchronous. This is because I acknowledge that many of them take an online class because they cannot attend a class on campus at a particular time (most of our online students live inside our district). Several years ago I tried to set up online office hours, but it was a problem because I have four online classes. Each has its own course inside the CMS (before it was Blackboard, now it is Moodle). There is no convenient way to open a chat with all classes at once, other than IM. And I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer students use IM these day (although I have spent some time in the last few weeks adding GoogleTalk chatback badges to my web pages instead of just Yahoo and AIM status indicators). Moodle does let you open a meta-course and enroll everyone, then link their course to that meta-course but man, what a pain.
To get a place where a group could meet synchronously, I could go to the web and open a room somewhere, like Yahoo or ooVoo, and link to it from the class, but this would require students to get an account an log in, and I’d need them to log in so I could see who was there. Or I could use Elluminate inside Moodle, and trust them to be OK with the extra step and Javascript download, but even there they must enter a name. They could just type in any old name to join the discussion. I picture myself leading a synchronous discussion with a couple of dozen students, recording it and having to jot down names, the quality of what they contribute and how long they stay. Sounds like a pre-web nightmare.
How could I track participation? Don’t I need something automated with up to 200 students?
In thinking on this, it occurred to me: tracking is, by itself, the biggest problem with Web 2.0 for activities that count for the grade. The biggest reason we all use a CMS in the first place (especially now that there are other wonderful options) is just that: tracking, of grades, participation, performance, portfolios. The asynchronous environment, inside a closed system, is simply the easiest way to track student activity.
As I plan for Spring, I consider things like this….
Yeah, those Class Management Systems are slick. So what is the problem? Why are they not good enough?
I had a few random thoughts.
Is there a distinction between “tracking” and “evaluating” that the CMS is not able to bridge? For instance, after we are alerted that the student has done something – left some foot prints – the instructor still has to go to the material and evaluate its quality.
The most impressive use of tracking I have seen used was when a student had claimed participation and the student could be easily shown that none occurred. There was no track. (or the software failed.)
Though Moodle claims to be designed to provide knowledge building tools for the student to construct his/her own knowledge, it still requires an instructor to provide constructive criticism and simply to help – as a knowledge builder it is just a mode of connection between the other class participants. BUT Moodle also provides the basic assessment tools common to F2F classroom. This is presently the basis of any CMS – the management of the learners. Teacher as boss, teacher as cop.
Presently, I see no immediate alternative to teaching in an educational institution without using a CMS. The way the courses are structured “this will be accomplished in this time frame” — and “the assessment will be reported as usable data” (= grades) limits the instructor to having to simplify the evaluation to be able to find the time to actually convey the ideas of the material. Enter the CMS!
One difficulty presented by the active and collaborative learning opportunities opened up by web2.0-type technologies is precisely in the much-despised area of assessment. Personally, I find grades largely irrelevant to the learning process. But society demands ranking and seals of approval etc. And so we must.
It helps conceptually to separate, and assess separately, process and product.
Product is relatively easy – grade the paper/presentation/video/podcast/game whatever. Collective work gets a collective grade and collective feedback (the latter being more to the point, from a learning perspective).
Process is so much harder. Time on task has to be part of what we look at. I have found Bb next to useless for meaningful tracking. It may be that we come down to self-reporting on this. Inevitably, that means not much weight in the grade (considerations of equity, ‘objectivity’ etc.). But I am planning to require logs – yes, weblogs, although whether fully public or in a walled garden I have not yet decided – for the main projects in this semester’s classes. If students are noting their process as they go, then their blog will provide timestamps etc. Of course it is possible to record things they haven’t actually done. But we’re smart enough to spot those, enough of the time, at least.
I would happily dispense with a CMS altogether, except that the walled garden allows me to share materials (fair use only, of course) that I could not reasonably do in a more open environment. I’m looking at alternatives to that. One of my courses this semester will be built in PBWiki, one in Moodle. I’ll be using my blog to reflect on how the two approaches go, and will be particularly interested to get your feedback, Lisa.
I don’t have distance learners (yet), so haven’t had to deal with the virtual office hours issue. Googletalk is the only IM I use. Most students seem happy with reasonably rapid email turnaround time. A few like the IM option, but use it rarely.
And hey, look – that’s my name up there at the top of your blogpost!
Happy new year.
No doubt. This is the rub. I keep hoping that elluminate will continue to improve.