By Lisa, on May 11th, 2012%
I noticed that Dave Cormier is using a single course blog for his ed366 class, with students as authors. Back in November, I was working on this issue with Brandon Davis-Shannon, whether it is better to have students run their own blogs or work on one big blog, and I’m thinking about it again as I plan my History 103 for fall.
I have done one big blog before, but never many student blogs (except for the POT Certificate Class). Dave has done both and notes:
It is interesting to me that engagement would be lost when students run their own blogs, versus posting on one big blog. It brings up questions about where students perceive the course is located, as well as the usual issues about motivation and self-motivation.
In addition, it may be about the changing world of online courses in the past year or so.
The typical online course offered by an institution is one kind, and for this model students translate their classroom thinking to the online class. The thinking is that on-site the class is held in Room 601, and online it’s held in Blackboard (or another LMS) or at a particular URL or website (though that’s more rare).
It’s hard for students to really see a course that’s held “on the web”, or one where their work is based in their own space, and aggregated somehow for all to see. That involves a mental shift much greater than just on-site to online.
That mental shift is encouraged by MOOCs, at least in their Couros/Siemens/Downes/Cormier/Groom model. Self-direction and/or connectivism are engrained in the format of the classes. (I’m gonna call it the CSDCG model, because no one can stop me.)
But there is another pseudo-MOOC model now, subdivided into two categories which sometimes overlap: institutional (think Stanford, MIT) and commercial (think Curtis Bonk’s class in Coursesites). These are beloved by the New York Times and the Chronicle, who are seeking to reframe educational trends. They are becoming the mental-shifting model instead of the original MOOC design.
That may be because they are held in Learning Management Systems or sites that act like LMSs (I’m afraid I have to count WordPress here, because of its use in this context). This model perpetuates the idea that “class is here“. Yes, you can run your own blog, but it’s preferred that you blog “inside the classrom”. It’s just easier for people to get their head around the idea that the class is at the instructor’s website. It fits with their current thinking, but expands it into the world of blogging. It also fits for instructors who need the two things LMSs are best at: enrollment management and grade tracking.
That seems to be the middle ground, and pedagogically it may be better not to push the envelope too much with students (at least if you want them to stay enrolled). Despite my own learning preferences, which are open and aggregated, most students aren’t conceptually ready for this kind of learning, and the cognitive dissonance overcomes their willingness to engage (which, for some, wasn’t that high to start with).
We can argue for years whether their lack of readiness is apathy, behavioral training in K-12, or cultural ennui, but most of us “practitioners” are interested in what works: what keeps them enrolled, encourages engagement, allows some independence, but doesn’t cause panic. Plus there are increasing concerns about asking students to create their own space at third-party sites, which collect and use student information and content in ways we may not consider ethical.
The WordPress Multi-User site, or the LMS that’s open to all, or the main blog where all blog within it but can have their content exported to save (which is what Dave is doing) may then be the preferred models for balancing these issues with those of exploration and innovation. They are being chosen because they take into account concerns of pedagogy and comfort, not because they can handle 1,000 students and use their content and personal information for other ends, but because they work.
 NB: The only obvious exception to this balanced model is Jim Groom’s (plus) ds106, with its student-run blogs aggregated to a main WP site, and where clearly something magical happens. And possibly my own POT Certificate Class, where I have no idea why it (sort of) works, but I dare not apply it to a standard college class.
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 March 23rd, 2012%
An excellent post by Tony Hirst notes the many classes being offered by entities that are not universities.
As we unpack the ideas of what makes up a class (and, I think, a school and education in general), it is possible we will find that the sharing factor (not the fee or the choice of classes) will be the main distinction between publicly funded higher education classes and the commercial “classes” being offered everywhere by everyone else.
An entity may offer classes in order to to create better-trained workers, or qualified beauticians, or registered health care workers, but if the models, techniques and approaches being used aren’t shared beyond the (paying) students, they aren’t contributing to the greater good. The pedagogical models aren’t shared, and in many cases are trademarked, copyrighted, or otherwise hidden from access.
So even if they’re “free” or “open”, courses offered by publishers, Condé Nast/Vogue, The Economist, The Guardian, Cisco, Google, or The Learning House are closed in their business model. They offer courses, often on contract in order to provide to other closed entities. Their intent is to sell their product, one way or another, even if that product is a method or approach.
But certainly public institutions work for the public good, at least that is why the public pays them. (I am not sure what to think about private universities such as Stanford and MIT in this regard, because they do offer classes with the intention of furthering knowledge, but this knowledge is often closed and very expensive.)
This distinction in intention is why public institutions particularly should be sharing not only their classes, but the knowledge of pedagogy and content embedded in their faculty. (No, I promise not to go off on why all faculty should blog.)
The value of a class, then, is not just in the content, but also in the perspective and intention behind the offering. Would you rather take a class in constitutional law from an institution that wants your money, or from one dedicated to creating an educated citizenry?
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 November 24th, 2011%
This week I have been attending to the various discussions around the recent work of Jon Dron and Terry Anderson, including the Hot Seat forum related to the 8th International Conference on Networked Learning (no, I’m not going to Maastricht) and Jon’s presentation at the Change MOOC (the web space for this is here). Sources also include Dron and Anderson’s 2009 article Lost in Information Space: Information retrieval issues in Web 1.5.
I am intrigued and delighted with an approach I see as middle ground between the Web 1.0/closed classes/LMS/hard tech/group focus and the Web 2.0/open education/network/connectivism focus.
For the former, the model seems to be formal groups of people, such as a class, using closed but comfortable ways to learn online in a manner prescribed by an instructor, with the result being a grade.
For the latter, we have the open ideas of networks, learning taking place in weak and strong connections, with softer technologies that provide for more creative work. Looser forms of assessment (such as badges and feedback) follow this model as well.
In the middle of this dichotomy is what Dron and Anderson call Web 1.5, and what they refer to as “sets”, unintentional collectives of people who learn within a shared interest. Thus there is a middle ground between the horribly limited, walled garden system and the wild, diffuse, scary openness of networks.
These discussions are especially timely in light of my own efforts to find such a balance between closed/open, safe/scary, hard/soft in designing my online classes for next semester, where the unscary stuff (my own work, such as lectures, information, readings) is completely open, but the scary stuff (anything graded, such as student forums, quizzes, and essays) is closed in the Moodle LMS.
It is not, as I’ve noted, an ideal balance or compromise, because unlike the Elgg VLE used by these authors, I do not have granularity of permissions where students may choose exactly what elements of their work are open or closed.
I had thought that creating a broader “group” in Facebook (of all my students, not just those enrolled in one class) would design some openness for them, but of course I have been reminded that Facebook is closed too. It’s just an LMS with advertising, and a flat social space. On the other hand, at least there isn’t any hierarchy, and perhaps there is comfort there within a more open way of communicating, if not a more open role.
As much as I love the far out, wild west, final frontier elements of open web-based learning for my own use, I do not think my students are ready to the extent that I could handle helping 240 of them manage it. At the same time, the limitations of LMS-based education drive me crazy. So it’s productive to envision Web 1.5 pedagogies that could, in Jon’s Goldilocks analogy, get to a point of “just right”.
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.
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