By Lisa, on April 30th, 2012%
I’m leaving Curt Bonk’s open online class “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success”, which started this week. It’s a class about retaining, motivating and engaging online students, and I’m leaving because I’m not motivated and not engaged.
It’s not because of Dr. Bonk – his work is very interesting.
It’s the classroom. I wanted to attend to see the new CourseSites from Blackboard, which is being touted as Bb’s “open” LMS. Maybe it would be innovative! A new LMS. I’m always very interested in learning management systems, and what they can do.
Well, it’s the same old Blackboard, with more white space, nicer fonts and some cool icons.
First assignment included two 44-page pdf files that were expensive to print and difficult to read online since they were double-spaced. Oh.
Well, OK. I went over to the discussion to introduce myself, and oh dear. Same threaded discussion – very 1999. With each iteration of Bb, I find it harder to believe they’ve done nothing with forums. Each person had started their own “thread” to introduce themselves, necessitating opening each one at a time or collecting those on the page.
Only those on the page can be collected. There are 30 pages of introductions.
A sense of chore, of overwhelming ennui, engulfed me. I saw that you can also blog instead. That’s good! I can blog as I go, on my own blog! And everyone will read it, and there will be comments, and I can comment on theirs! Oh….
I’m not going to blog inside a closed system, even if it’s open at the moment. Yes, I could add a link to my own blog to the wiki, but that’s not exactly integrated into the course. Pretty evident, then, that the main discussion would be in those horrible forums.
It’s only for a month. No, I can’t. I don’t use Bb anymore for exactly this reason. I will be happy to read Bonk’s works, on my own, and blog about them. I’ll miss the community. No, I won’t. I can’t miss this many people.
I’m spoiled. I blame George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Alec Couros. I blame Jim Groom. I’m used to aggregated blogs, embedded media, distributed conversation. I think of these things as being what open, online classes are all about. I blame my own class at Pedagogy First!.
You’ll say I didn’t give it a chance. You’ll say I’m being too picky. You’ll say…well, I don’t know what you’ll say, since I won’t be in the class.
By Lisa, on April 25th, 2012%
I was asked yesterday if I could work on some sort of comparison between Blackboard, Moodle, and web 2.0 for college classes.
I’ve got it. They’re like Lego*.
| Blackboard is like the Lego kits you get, the ones that make something in particular using exactly the parts inside the box. You can, of course, make other things out of the pieces, but you have to ignore the instructions and exercise a bit of creativity. Of course, most people buy the Lego kit in the first place because they want to make exactly what’s shown on the picture on the box.
So Blackboard gives you all the pieces as a set collection, with a map of what you should make: course menu buttons for each type of content, places to upload and make announcements, etc. You can make changes (put the propeller on the building – or change the course menu button to say “Week 1″), but you have to consciously break away from the plan. It’s not dangerous, but it can be scary. Instructure Canvas is a smaller kit, but it’s still a kit. Pearson’s LMS is like a kit too, as are the many others being produced by publishers and other ventures. |
 Flickr cc cbcd04 |
| Moodle is like the boxes of Lego you get with a certain number of each kind of block. There is no real set plan, except that you can only use as many bricks are in the box, unless you go buy more. There are only a certain number of single-peg bricks, only a certain number of blue. You can build whatever you want, but it’s limited by the number of bricks you have of each size and colour.
So Moodle gives you a page where you can add a schedule like a syllabus or topics in the center column, and blocks (yes, blocks) on the sides with small apps or information. You put in only what you want – no need to toss propellers aside looking for something else. There are limitations but the map is more flexible. |
 Flickr cc libertyandvigilance |
| Web 2.0 is like buying a bunch of Lego at a garage sale. You don’t know what you’ll get to start with, but it’ll be fun discovering what’s in there and figuring out how to use it. You imagine as you build and try different things. Sometimes you think two pieces don’t go together, and they do. Since you don’t know what’s there as you look into the box, you are open to possibilities. You plan ahead mostly to make sure you don’t run out of the bricks you might want to use, and you can always go to another garage sale and get more.
So using Web 2.0 elements to create a class is about exploring, picking and choosing, experimenting and seeing what works. You have to be more adventurous, more open, more flexible in the face of change. And what you end up with may be surprising or unexpected, but it will always be interesting. |
 Flickr cc jemsweb |
(* I will not offend my English friend Ed Webb by using the American vernacular for the plural: “Legos”).
By Lisa, on February 15th, 2012%
My hybrid classes are such a delight to me, but enrollment is low and gets lower as students discover they are real classes and they’ve overloaded their schedule. Trouble is, that means that fewer sources get posted in the forum each week. Since the writing in the class is all about creating and proving theses using the evidence posted by the whole class, when fewer people participate, there aren’t as many sources to use as evidence.
Right now I have several sections of the same class in Moodle, but I set the forums as Separate Groups. These are separate sections of the class, each with their own dynamic and needs. For two classes, one of each of the sections is the hybrid I see at San Elijo each week. A student stayed after class today, worried that there wouldn’t be enough sources since not everyone is posting.
Going back to my office to solve the problem, I was hoping there was an easy way to have my hybrid sections see what the online sections were posting, so they could use their sources also in their writing. In fact, now that no one is lost, and everyone knows where to post their work, there’s no reason why all sections of the same class can’t see each others’ sources and use them.
This proved to be a really easy fix. I simply changed each forum from Separate Groups to Visible Groups. But I needed a way to let everyone know what was going on, so I used Screenr.
Total fix time? Less than an hour, including the screencasts.
By Lisa, on February 7th, 2012%
 No, I am not a defender of Learning Management Systems. Au contraire. In fact, I have attacked them on numerous occasions as nasty silo software that encourages closed teaching, bad pedagogy, and the use of poorly designed defaults by novice web instructors.
But I am not a novice. I’ve been using Moodle for years, but this time wanted to be more open. So I put my syllabus and all the “presentation” aspects of my classes on the open web, on what I thought were well-designed tabbed web pages (here’s an example from my History 104). The tab that contains the entire class is the syllabus, an interactive syllabus where everything is linked. I am practicing what I (and my colleague Pilar Hernández ) preach. Then I put the forums and exams (just graded items) into Moodle, but students access these also from the syllabus. I need this bit of LMS because I have six sections of students and I need some automated grading and some easy see-all-the-essays options, and the gradebook. I hid all of the items in Moodle by simply putting them in Topic 2 and changing the setting to have only one topic, so they are available but no one can see them (including me) till they click the link and log in (here’s a post about this). In addition, I opened a Facebook group and linked to it as an option, also from the syllabus. I sent all students the URL to the main page, and linked to it from both Blackboard (where the college insists we must all have a site for every class) and Moodle, in case they logged in there.
In other words, I had a well-researched pedagogical design, definite instructional goals, and good support for students from the beginning (while Admissions was panicking because other teachers’ online students who hadn’t even heard from their instructors and didn’t know where to go were being dropped as no-shows).
But for the first week, it seemed to be an unmitigated disaster. My email, the Facebook group, the Help forums, were filled with students asking the same questions, just phrased differently. They couldn’t figure out what to “do”, where the “assignments” were. I found myself typing over and over that everything is on the syllabus. They kept assuming the entire class was in Moodle, and didn’t seem to actually be looking at the web pages at all. Maybe they weren’t clicking the tabs?
I created a video tutorial and posted it everywhere. It got 13 hits in the first hour. Things started to calm down (no one was so lost they dropped, and I responded to every single problem), but even now a question will pop up in Facebook, despite the fact that scrolling down to an almost identical question would net an answer.
Now, it could be that this many students get lost every semester, but they are so lost they can’t find the Help forum to post. Now that they have both that and Facebook, they post in Facebook. I’m not actually sure, then, that more students are lost than usual. I frequently have students lost in Moodle, not because it’s Moodle, but because I use the blocks for the various information in the class, with a weekly layout format. If I used Blackboard, I would similarly customize it and they would complain also. In both cases, there are two arguments:
(1) We should be teaching students that there is variety to both learning method and technology, in order to foster the kind of adaptation they will need both at university and in their jobs and careers, which will not use Blackboard, and
(2) By about the three weeks in, most students realize exactly what’s going on and are very grateful to have the class organized by week instead of type of assignment.
But, the system isn’t working so well for me either. I have to open two browser tabs for every class, the open web site and the Moodle class. I can’t get anywhere in the Moodle class either, and have to remember to click from the syllabus. With no friendly Moodle icons, the interactive syllabus is text-heavy (despite my little images). And reading across a chart may not be as intuitive as reading down a list of weeks in Moodle. In addition, because I have the assignments in a hidden topic, I can’t see them with the students’ profiles, so it’s hard for me to view their class activity at a glance.
So in this case, the advantages of using Moodle for the whole class would have been:
- Expectations fulfilled of the class being in an LMS (harumph)
- Easier integration and access to graded items
- Easier navigation for me
- Better (yes, I’m saying it) management
And the only disadvantage would be:
When I mentioned this in my hybrid class, students did not know what I meant by the “open web”. I said I had thought it would be easier for them if they didn’t have to log in to do the class. They looked at me in that tolerant way — you know it.
So although I’ve fought the idea of an LMS as “familiar” territory (especially with so many Blackboard-minded students who approach any other system with trepidation), perhaps the very idea of an LMS is somehow reassuring. Perhaps all web information now needs a frame, like they have in Facebook and other closed sites. Without the frame, they can’t find “the class”, no matter how many markers I use. (I went ahead and opened up that Topic 2, so we can all see the graded tasks in Moodle now, but I can’t make a radical change three weeks in.)
But I won’t do this again. I actually heard myself say to colleagues, “Next time, remind me to us an LMS.” I must be losing my mind.
By Lisa, on November 10th, 2011%
aka Mass Management of 240 Students While Keeping My Stuff Open
As I discussed in my last post, I have suffered much guilt lately for feeling inadequate to the task of teaching next semester’s 240 students using a connectivist methodology. I am essentially designing a semester, not six classes, because the design has to work for me as well as my students. My solution for part open/part closed has come to this:
 All of my own presentation material will be on the open web via…a web page. Yes, I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I have found a number of old habits becoming new again. This includes saving everything I post online as plain text documents (including this post), keeping web pages and folders for most things that I do, and backing up the multimedia I make to my own hard drive.
Here’s the new design:
- Tabbed web page on open web to access information: syllabus, grading policies, FAQ.
- One page per course, not per class (in other words, three sites: History 111, History 104, History 105)
- Interactive syllabus with links to lectures, posting boards, exams, etc.
- Moodle for everything that’s graded: postings, quizzes, exams, formal discussion.
- Facebook group (one group for all 240 students) for social discussion, help, etc.
Tabbed web pages as the “front door” of the class
OK, so I figured out how to do tabs for my webpage so it’s easy to navigate. One tab is the Syllabus. I already have an intro page for each class (here’s the one for History 104). I have used the Escape from Blackboard technique to post the intro pages there too for students who think Blackboard is their online class portal. When I’m done designing the tabbed pages, I’ll replace those intro pages with the actual class webpages.
Interactive syllabus
Using the principles of an interactive syllabus, everything is linked from that page. The idea of an interactive syllabus is that the syllabus should look very familiar to students from their on-site classes. It becomes the main page of the class, because their tendency is to go there first. Other static pages are the other tabs. I can use iframes to put anything (for example, my FAQ, which is common to all my classes) I want on a tabbed page.
Moodle for everything that’s graded
The tricky part is the links into Moodle, my LMS. I want Moodle to handle the grunt work of tracking students and doing the grades. That means students will need to log in to Moodle for anything that counts as part of the grade or that requires Moodle to do what I want pedagogically. For example, I want students to post primary sources and theses, and rate each others’ posts.
Now, when I create a Moodle class that has all these elements (Quiz 1, Quiz 2, Quiz 3, Forum 1, Forum 2, etc. for 17 weeks) I don’t want students to see them all listed at the Moodle site. They’ll get confused and think the class is there instead of at the web page. So what I’m doing is putting them all under Topic 2 in the Topics format in settings, then changing the settings to only one topic. This way, the only thing they see at the Moodle class is direction back to the web page, but all the exams and forums can be linked by URL from the interactive syllabus into Moodle, which makes them log in for tracking. This trick is to put active items in an area, and then “hide” that area by making fewer areas in Settings. Here’s how I am doing it:
The only caveat here is that when a student looks at their grades, they can see all the items if they’re not hidden, so when I found that out I realized I need to set release times anyway.  Oh, well, it still prevents confusion upon entering the Moodle site.
In the interest of my own efficiency, there is only one Moodle site per course, with groups to designate the different class sections. So for History 111, where I have one hybrid and two online, it’s the same web page and the same Moodle site but using three groups to keep the gradebooks separate. No more changing things at several different Moodle sites when something needs changing.
Facebook group
I have changed the name of my old History 104 San Elijo FB group to Lisa’s History Classes. They can join the group without friending anyone.
Theoretical justification for this design
All my content should be open – my lectures are freely available on the web, and so are my class policies and design.
Students should only have to log in when they need to do something that counts toward the course grade.
240 students requires class management of grading and work — Moodle is convenient but I could also use Engrade for the grading. Discussion forums are harder. I am making a conscious choice in favor of Moodle here because of the simple, nested forums. They fit my pedagogy.
Constructivism is built into the course design — in the forums students choose their own primary sources from the web, post them, and decide which to use in support of their writing.
Theoretical problems
The constructivist element is not the “front door” of the class — you need to go down the hall to get to it. This argues in favor of putting everything into the discussion forum, but then the content I created isn’t as open and students have to log in to get to anything.
The constructivist activity isn’t public — to do this, I could use WordPress as the platform instead of the web pages and Moodle forums. However, I do not believe I can effectively manage 240 students without a separate blog for each of the six classes. Monitoring users and pseudonyms will be difficult, not to mention monitoring activity. I have tried BuddyPress and other CMS-style plugins but can’t get them to work easily on this scale.
And yes, I could change my mind about all this next week, but for now this is my design for spring.
By Lisa, on November 8th, 2011%
As I examine the various ways I could configure my classes for next semester, my knowledge of the many choices means I really am thinking about everything. But the central feeling ends up being guilt instead of anticipation.
I know all the wonderful options to make classes more exciting, more student-led, more exploratory. I’ve even done some of them (I recall the semester the students did the textbook exams but everything else was their own guided projects). And I did design Pedagogy First! for the POT Certificate Class, which is open and guided in what I think is a great balance. Surely I could do something like that?
Well, for the first time ever, I’ll be teaching six classes in spring instead of five, with 40 students in each (minimum). I have scheduled two new hybrids, one for Western Civ II and one for U.S. History II. I have four online classes, one for Western Civ II, two for U.S. History II, and one for History of England. So that’s three preps, as they say (a prep is a class different enough that it requires its own resources, structure, retooling). Except it feels like five preps, since hybrids aren’t the same as online classes.
My guilt is from the realization that I can’t manage 240 students in a free-form, MOOC-y way. Yes, we do it with Pedagogy First! and 90 “students”, but the assessments there can be much looser, the objectives much broader, and the content much more diverse. The faculty learning there are highly motivated. And although I’m not stuck in K-12 land with its concrete standards, I do have content outlines (so very 1990) that I am supposed to follow to make the classes transfer to university, and student learning outcomes. The outcomes don’t worry me, because I wrote them for the most part, and they are all about skills that historians need to demonstrate anyway. The content I’ll hit one way or the other. So really, I have the enviable freedom to structure these classes however I want.
 I could use blogs and wikis instead of Moodle, and a central blog and Engrade again for the on-site (now hybrid) classes. I could have them blog and collaborate in documents and work in teams and use WordPress and make videos and … oh my god, 240 students?
That number keeps popping into my head, in creepy neon light like the Bates Motel sign (cue Bernard Hermann music here).
Only a couple of things keep me from feeling like a failure as I “tentatively” set up the four online classes in Moodle, willing myself to believe they are just drafts, backups for the upcoming blogs, and the PB wiki, and the Canvas Instructure (actually, that’s just an LMS you can’t edit well), and the Flickr group I want to make but probably won’t.
A week or two ago, Dave Cormier gave a presentation for Alec Couros’ EC&I831 (I sit in when I can, which isn’t often enough). He spoke about rhizomatic learning and nomadic learning and other cool and inspiring stuff, and I wanted to move on with my work but felt stuck. Then one of Alec’s students, Chelsi, wrote a post that reminded me what Dave had said in response to a question about dealing with standards, that he said you do this stuff when you can.
Well, I do a lot of cool stuff. I’m really proud of the design of my discussion forums, where students select and post their own sources based on their interests, and craft historical theses. I want to see that happen again. I want to add a weekly synchronous session based on a skill set, with each week a different skill, where all my students can come and benefit, not just one class. Some direct instruction and, I hope, discussion in real-time. I’ve never done that. I want more peer evaluating, and fewer graded essays so there’s more chance to practice. I want to switch to weekly, instantly-graded reading quizzes so they have instant feedback. I want to run two of these with no textbook. I love the broadcasting I can do from the classroom to students at home, and the online students could view it too.
I also want everything open, but if I use Moodle to manage the gruntwork (exam -> gradebook, track forum posts, etc) it’s closed (though I could allow guests, of course). I can piece together my own grunts (Engrade, for example) but that’s a lot of clicks for six classes. The lack of connection between their tasks and the gradebook seems like the Grand Canyon with this many students.
I know, excuses, excuses! I talk the talk but won’t walk the walk. But do I really need to prove anything to anyone?
So I’m just going to say this: for this one overloaded semester, I might have to sacrifice some of the external openness in favor of internal openness, some real-time contact with my students, and some time spent giving feedback in the forums. Because that’s when (and where) I can do it. And I’m quite sure that by the end of the semester, I will have written an article justifying the approach as being that LMS/opened balance I read about all the time. Or not.
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