Category: CMS/LMS

The LMS and the adolescence of web learning

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

I am noting this semester that although our surveys still show a substantial preference among students for Moodle over Blackboard, more students than before are whining and saying they want just Blackboard.

The main reasons are that they’d prefer having all their classes in one system (convenience), and they don’t want to be confused by using a new system (ease).

I am concerned because I sense that the “one LMS to rule them all” viewpoint is getting more and more traction, and that the new argument (as opposed to administrative, top-down, management arguments) is going to be that students prefer it. Diploma mills like to standardize their LMS configuration for all their classes to control content and teaching, but they justify it by saying that it’s easier (read: better) for the students. This thinking is bleeding into public education.

While I understand the desire for convenience, I have long argued that when students take classes online, they are learning not only the subject matter but technology skills. Being exposed to more than one system means they are learning transferrability of those skills, which I think is important in the workplace. And it’s more important than the inconvenience of using a second log-in (which they do anyway because they have Facebook open at the same time).

On the issue of ease, there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here:

Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category.

Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course.

Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

And they haven’t been exposed to enough good online classes, or enough online classes that customize the system sufficiently. If you take five classes in Blackboard, and in each one the instructor has left the course menu items pretty much intact, than that is what you think a Bb class looks like. You know where all the buttons are.  The students don’t know this, but the way I would use Bb, my class could look just like it does in Moodle:

Well, pretty close anyway.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence:

1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.)

2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world.

3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)

In a world dominated by look-alike online classes, the tendency will be to assume all classes should be that way.

In a world featuring variety and creativity, the tendency will be to assume these as part of learning online.

I’d much prefer to both learn and teach in the latter.

Where’s the door? LMS or web/social media?

Lisa M Lane 11 Comments

Maybe it’s not really about a choice between an LMS and web/social media.

First, I found it interesting that Kelly Trainor (Yavapai College, Arizona) said in his faculty showcase that he uses a great WordPress blog for his class, but still uses Blackboard for the gradebook.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RF_duVyt0c&w=433&h=270]

Then, I discovered this cool resource of online teaching videos from the University of New South Wales, and watched this one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PjtX8EEx1Q&w=444&h=277]

And what occurred to me was that the issue is this:

And the question is: Where’s the door?

cc WordRidden at Flickr

If you want to take advantage of the affordances of both venues, where do you want students to enter your class? From the web or a social media site (Flickr, YouTube, Ning, Facebook, a WordPress blog) or through a Learning Management System (Blackboard, Ning)?

The front door is important. Ask any real estate agent.

With the door in the LMS, you can link out to open web sites or social media (or use course menu buttons to make things appear to be inside the LMS).

With the door on the web or at a social media site, you can provide a link to the LMS for whatever needs to be done there.

The choice here sets up different kind of hierarchies, implies differences in pedagogy, and creates different kinds of opportunities for learning.

Starting in an LMS implies:

  • closer connection with the college and its structures
  • greater concern for issues like security, privacy, homogeneity of systems
  • a similarity in importance put on tasks (if using a course menu)

Depending on how it’s used, it could also imply:

  • emphasis on presentation and content over interactivity and community
  • a teacher-centric model

Starting on the open web or in a social media site implies:

  • a greater connection with the outside world
  • greater emphasis on communication and creation
  • a supposition of diversity in tasks and approaches

Depending on how it’s used, it could also imply:

  • an emphasis on community over content
  • a more constructivist (or even connectivist) pedagogy
  • a more learner-centric model

I think it’s important to know what we’re saying to our students, not only with the “inside” of the course design, but with how you enter the space in the first place.

Trouble in Diigo-land

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

My students have been searching for primary sources for weekly discussion, and I have a small collection of websites that have them. So I put those sites in Diigo, tagged them by class (i.e. “hist104resources”) then used the rss feed from my account to post them in an Remote RSS block in Moodle.

No problem.

But a couple of weeks ago I decided to offer extra credit if students found similar sites full of sources, and posted them in Diigo. The I would take the public feed of all bookmarks tagged “hist104resources”, and the Moodle block would show everyone’s contributions.

My policy is if I’m trying something new, it’s for extra credit, in case it doesn’t work.

It didn’t work.

it should look like this

Two students tried right away, in two different classes. They found sites, bookmarked them, tagged them “hist104resources” and “hist111resources”. They never showed up in the Moodle RSS block. They also didn’t show up in a search for either tag at the Diigo website (I saved 10 bookmarks with the tag hist104resources – the site shows one).The students were frustrated. So was I.

So I read up a bit at the Diigo forums, and the workaround seemed to be to form a group, except that folks said that groups plus tags don’t work. I tried it, with a group “mcchistory” then using the tags. Pasted the rss feed. No go.

So I made three groups, one for each class. Forget the tags, students, just share to the Hist111 group or the Hist104 group.

This seems to be working better, although my first student tried to resave her bookmarks and Diigo made me moderate them (without emailing me, and despite the settings that say anyone can join and add things, and despite me having “immediate alert” set – I wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t been writing this blog post).

We’ll see how it goes but this seems bizarre to me. I’ve used Diigo for years (I switched from Delicious, though I have it set up to save there too). I love the annotation feature. But once I tried to turn the social bookmarking truly social, bad things happened. And no response to my @diigo tweets, either.

So Alexandra Pickett, who runs a class in teaching online at SUNY (which I didn’t know about and looks great judging from the website and bookmarks!), wondered why I was unhappy with Diigo. This is why. But her interest and success with it encourages me to give it another chance.

SOS or in light of the web?

Lisa M Lane

I’ve been grading student Contribution Assessments in my online classes. This is an assignment, done twice during the semester and worth 10% of the grade each time, where they have to do a self-assessment of their participation in the class and the contribution they’ve made.

The emphasis is on the forums, which is where the constructivist work goes on. As I’ve said in workshops, I consider my online classes to be 50% instructivist and 50% constructivist. Since the instructivist elements (planned reading and lecture) are prepped in advance, my energy during the semester is focused on the constructivist side, guiding them through finding and posting cool primary sources, then creating increasingly complex theses that use them.

My CMS (Moodle) lets me see where each student spends their time. I graded by comparing their self-assessment to their actual work in the forums, and their stats, including whether they used the Study Guides, looked at the sample exams I posted after a test, etc. And I started to notice something.

A number of the students doing just fine in the class were not viewing the Assignments. This is where I post the pages for assigned textbook reading, and a link to my lectures. I’ve worked very, very hard on these lectures, for every class. Yet here were A and B students not bothering to read them, and passing the tests anyway.

Why? Because the exams are 60-70% multiple choice, and 30-40% essay. The MC is based on the textbook and lecture, and the essay is based on the constructivist portion. But I give them Study Guides for all the multiple-choice, with all possible questions and two chances to practice and see whether they’re right. I planned for them to use these to do strategic textbook reading. But if, out of say 14 MC questions, only a couple are from lecture, why do the lecture? Why even open the Assignment in the first place? So they aren’t.

I graded down a bit students who hadn’t done the Assignment/Lectures, because I figured that was part of participating in the class. I think most people would see that “doing the work” is part of participation. Then a student wrote me:

My first response was, “oh, great, now they won’t even do the work without my telling them! better add it to the rubric…”

My lectures can no longer be assumed to be an inherent part of the class. I see my classes based around them because they took me so much time, and define the order of events. But students see them as supplemental, while they spend much time constructing work in the forums.

But wait. If the connectivists are right, this is actually a new issue. Not because students won’t do the work (hardly new), but because the nature of the web is theorized to be creating new forms of learning. With all the “information” available, what use is a textbook? I’m even getting rid of my textbook for summer, because my lectures are sufficient for “information” purposes in a compressed 8-week class.

But this may not be a mere pedagogical choice. It’s possible that new forms of pedagogy are being forced upon us by the nature of the open web, and the habits of people who use it. It’s strategic studying combined with the ability to pick and choose your work. Yes, I could add more lecture-based multiple-choice questions to the exams, and I likely will. But that’s not the larger issue.

My lectures, which I used to see as providing an active learning opportunity (they contain visuals, audio, self-tests), have become passive when compared to constructivist opportunities in the forums, and connectivist opportunities (which they may or may not use) provided by the web. The role of my creation has shifted, and I will also have to shift, sooner rather than later, or risk the irrelevancy that so many internet pundits say is automatic now that “everything” is on the internet.

Qualities of innnovation in online instructors

Lisa M Lane

I am considering what experiences and qualities make faculty members “innovative” when it comes to online teaching.

I’m thinking what’s necessary is:

1. Openness in their work — sharing class materials on the open web, using the materials of others, appreciating Creative Commons, blogging ideas.

2. Theory or research – A theoretical background, through reading or education or networking, in learning and how it’s done online. The ability to explore the research and come to ones own philosophy about applying it to ones own work.

3. Membership or activity in groups, learning communities and organizations that promote innovation in online education, such as the The New Media Consortium, Classroom 2.0, EdTechTalk, the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge open courses, and ones own personal learning network through social media.

4. Publication – by blogging and/or in journals promoting innovation, such as in education, IRRODL , EDUCAUSE Quarterly, and many other excellent open access journals.

5. Creation – use of open web applications and emerging technologies for creating materials, and a desire to create ones own materials that are engaging and meet learning goals.

6. Technicality – Some kind of backstage experience: writing HTML, programming, etc.

7. An understanding that online teaching is its own discipline.

Some of the things that I think that show lack of innovation are:

1. Closed work – where everything is behind a password and copyrighted.

2. Degrees from and teaching at institutions that require a “team” approach to course design instead of individual instructors designing their own classes (examples: National, Argosy, Ashford, University of Pheonix, Rio Salado, and anywhere under investigation by the federal government for False Claims).

3. Membership or activity in groups or organizations particular to ones discipline, but not engaged with online innovation, or in groups that say they are innovative but are primarily business oriented, with lots of sponsors from #4 and #5 below (this includes the League for Innovation in the Community College, EDUCAUSE, CUE, and any other group that seems to have strayed from its roots or charges $995 in conference registration fees).

4, Publication in journals that keep everything behind a paywall and charge high prices ($35/article) for viewing, such as journals published by Springer, Taylor & Francis, etc.

5. Extensive experience with traditional Course Management Systems (e-College, Blackboard, Moodle) using all the internal tools but nothing open, sometimes accompanied by full use of publisher course cartridges.

6. Use of exclusively high-level, high-cost, proprietary tools from major vendors (Adobe, Apple) for creating materials, which are then loaded into a CMS.

7. Strictly “front office” experience, always implementing someone else’s idea.

8. A perception that online teaching is a mode of instruction, a venue, an alternative, the future, or a field of knowledge that begins with technology instead of pedagogy.

Faculty and web technology: an exploration

Lisa M Lane

I keep hearing the wrong questions. Questions like “how do we get faculty to use technology?” Faculty, of course, use technology all the time, but that doesn’t mean they use computers or the internet for teaching.

The wrong answers then follow the wrong question. Faculty don’t know how to do it, so they need training. Or they are Luddites, and don’t like “technology”, so we’d better require that training. Or they are just lazy, so we need to force them to use what we spent so much money buying (c’mon everybody, all classes must be in Blackboard!).

Another wrong answer is provided by faculty themselves: “I don’t have time”. We all know that time is made, not found. We have time for things that are important to us. (My favorite joke about this is from Gardner Campbell’s No Digital Facelifts presentation from 2009, where he says for people who are into this stuff it’s like “day after day, I have a bag of gold, would you like a bag of gold? And people say, ‘Where do you find time for bags of gold? Oh, no, another currency to master!’)

So let’s try a better question: “why do faculty seem to think that web technology is not important to what they do?”

I propose that the basic use of any technology is to solve a problem. I was taught this years ago by one of my mentors, David Megill (he blogs here), who was always asking what problem the technology we were discussing was trying to solve. So do faculty think they don’t have problems? Hah! Faculty know they have problems — just listen in on any hallway conversation.

But some don’t see any connection between their problems and web technologies. Their primary concerns are often those of teaching and learning, such as student lack of preparedness, misunderstanding of a test question that throws off the whole exam, depth of grading and feedback being greeted with student apathy — these problems don’t seem to have technological solutions at all.

Faculty have instead been drawn mostly to the technologies that help them manage the non-pedagogical problems: keeping track of grades and enrollment (see, among many others, Mott and Wiley, Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network (2009) . I know very few faculty who keep a paper gradebook anymore; most at least do an Excel spreadsheet. They use the technology because it does the math for them. Those who are not enchanted with gadgets tend to be interested in those technologies that will do some heavy lifting, leaving them free to do what they care about most — teach.

I don’t think we should spend any time arguing with that. The new questions, then, should sound like this: what teaching problems can be solved with the new tools? would those solutions be good enough to make it worthwhile to invest some time learning the tools?

I have heard arguments both for and against the “pedagogy first” approach. The tools themselves can be inspiring, so it can be argued that if we were all playing around with multiple tools online, we’d see how they could be useful in our work. But the tools most people use (Amazon and Facebook) would not immediately be seen as useful to teaching. Shopping seems irrelevant to the task (learning by shopping cart?), and social networking seems to impact only one teaching area: direct communication with students. If you don’t have a problem with that (students come to office hours, speak up in class, and email you), why bother?

Instructional technologists, technology trainers, and techno-utopians, faced with faculty disregard for what they call simply (and incorrectly) “technology”, get frustrated and start acting like drug pushers. Often the institution creates a technology plan, complete with massive investment in capital improvements and human resources. People with little experience “in the classroom” decide on enterprise-level technologies for all, and are horrified that the systems in which they invested so much money are underutilized. All those servers, and everyone’s just doing email.

For faculty, the conversation must start in the classroom, with our own practice and pedagogical challenges. Perhaps the vocabulary should talk about “resources” rather than “tools”, because that’s the traditional language. A first focus should be on organizing and collecting those resources, as we do with printed matter, such as documents or lab books.

What if we set up a beginners method, and say that we’ll show faculty:
1. how to make good resources available to themselves and their students
2. how to collect and organize these resources
3. how to annotate, edit, adapt and collaborate around these resources, and
4. how to transfer their methods for discussing these ideas to an environment where everyone can work from wherever they are

What would the questions and answers look like if we did that?

Eyejot in Moodle for quick video message

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

http://www.eyejot.com/flash/embed_player.swf?m=2DA8DD11116C6C00006698BD58

It adds instructor presence to a course to have video of yourself, so I started the semester with a quick video message. I recorded it in iTunes and had to use Quicktime to get it the right side, then embed it in a Moodle HTML block. Not very “user friendly”, though.

So today I tried Eyejot, which had been recommended to me by my colleague Pilar Hernàndez. It was super quick. I recorded the video, then had it emailed to myself. Following the link brought me to the page where I found the Embed code, which I then pasted into a Moodle HTML block. I sized it down in the block to 200 X 200 (their default size is too big).

This block is located at the top, and it looks different so I hope they see it as new. The quick (under 60 second) video plays in the block, situating me in the “classroom”.

I cannot tell so far whether this will help prevent the private emailed questions to me, most of which are already answered in the FAQ and are driving me crazy. There seem to be more than usual this semester, as well as students telling me the reason they’re having trouble is because they “don’t know anything about computers”. But it can’t hurt!

Another take, Mr DeMille

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Yesterday we hosted our first all-day Beginners Workshop for new online instructors, and as part of our information we talked about making a brief welcome video. I had made one, so we played it to the group.

http://lisahistory.net/media/IntroSpring11-2.mov

As I was watching myself, I was thinking, “this is really bad…I look so serious” at the same time as my colleague Pilar was saying “make it light! you’re not reporting the news!” I decided to redo on campus today instead of at my desk, but I forget so I did it using my laptop at a stoplight on the drive home after a miserable orientation:

http://lisahistory.net/media/drivinggreeting3.mov

I’m removing the first one and putting this one on my classes. (They’re small because they’re going in a tiny Moodle box.)

Sometimes even informal is too formal.

Seven things I’d want to know as a new online teacher

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

This started as a “things I wish I knew” list, but these are the biggies I’ve learned in 12 years of teaching online:

1. Save everything on your own hard drive.
Course management systems, and access to them, come and go. I now create all quizzes, discussion prompts and extensive directions (the things I plug into a CMS) in plain text files, then use copy-and-paste to put them into whatever system.

2. Serve yourself.
Serve your creations from a server where you rent space rather than the college’s server — link to or embed everything. You never know who’ll decide they own your stuff, or when resources won’t be available. And that “Web 2.0” company (think Ning) could go premium or be gone entirely tomorrow.

3. Trying to reduce workload can lead to better creativity.
Most online classes at public institutions contain too many students. Learning techniques of grouping students, clustering assignments, and using templates for activities is invaluable.

4. Online teaching is its own discipline, and we need to study it.
It’s not just a “method of delivery” or a “format” — it’s its own field, with a whole community of practitioners in K-12, college, training and consulting. It pays to be in touch with people who know the latest trends. Entire careers are being built by people who know nothing about teaching, but get advanced degrees researching it so they can get jobs and tell you what to do. Not knowing the jargon or the research, and being able to critique it, could mean less autonomy in your own work.

5. Knowing HTML will be a boon more times than you can count.
Entering (or copying and pasting — see #1) text into WYSIWYG editors inside various systems does not give you enough control. When something goes wrong (the text looks bad, the paragraph doesn’t indent correctly, the bulleting is mixed up) , clicking on < > and fixing it saves loads of time. Also, knowing just a bit of code means you can use other people’s cool ideas and plug them in yourself.

6. Sharing is important.
Current trends show that the “wild west” nature of the open web is moving toward more closed applications (think Facebook). Large media companies now dominate the web, but so far, access is low-threshold. This means we can share our work with each other just by putting it on the open web. Innovation, help, ideas, and reflection result from doing this.

7. Content isn’t a course.
More and more universities (Harvard, MIT, Berkeley) are offering their lectures freely and openly. But content isn’t a course — just plugging in someone else’s material doesn’t make it a class, much less your class. This is also true of publisher-created content. Student’s highest priority remains learning from the teacher, whether directly or through the pedagogy designed by the instructor. If you’re not creating the content pathway and facilitating the learning at every step, you’re not the teacher.

A possible SOOC set-up

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Having decided what to do about my SOOC (Small Open Online Class or Semi-Open Online Class, depending on how crazy it gets), I set up a WordPress blog to do it.

104blog

Basic steps to installing WordPress:

– Downloaded current WP.
– Created a new database in Control Panel – MySQL. (I have Lunarpages hosting.)
– Changed the config file and uploaded all files according to the Five Minute Instructions.
– Logged in to new blog.
– Installed Atahualpa theme.
– Added plugins:
Comment Form Toolbar — to allow students to add images by URL.
Comment Image
Comment Image Embedder is now… -> Comment-Images — — to allow students to add images by URL
Editable Comments (didn’t work) –> Edit Comments added and we’ll see
Email Users — so I can email all users
Insere Iframe — so I can use iframes to display pages, like the syllabus and Engrade book
User photo — so students can have a photo with their account
Custom Meta — so I can give instructions in the title of the Meta box and leave out the wordpress.org link

Stuff that didn’t work last time and won’t work this time:
Students use Reply (comment, essentially) to add their material — nothing in the universe lets them edit their own comments without editing everyone’s, so they can’t edit their comments once they’re posted.

Embedding my web pages

I have static web pages elsewhere for things like Grading policies and the Syllabus. The tabs at the top are Pages, so I createdone for each page, but to get a static web page to embed in an iframe is a little tricky, and involved templates.

In a plain text document, I have to create a template for each page, naming it something obvious, and saving it in the atahualpa folder.

They look like this (this one is called “iframetemplatehome.php”):

templatecode

and have to be saved as .php.

Atahualpa theme options

I discovered last semester that the Atahualpa theme is the best for something like this, because it lets you customize everything.

I got rid of the Posts and Comments images in the upper right corner — my typical students won’t know what they are, and Guest Students can use the text links at the bottom. I got rid of the “You may use these HTML tags” from above the comment windows by turning it off in Style & Configure Comments. (I don’t need it with the Comment toolbars, and they confuse people.)

For the header, I added three images to the themes-atahualpa-images-header folder, all 1200 w x 160 h. I added image credits and the college logo to plain HTML widgets.

For users I allowed anyone to register, then used the About the Class page to ask Guest Students not to register. I removed all the Links, then stole an idea from Jim Groom’s ds106 class and added the Add Links plugin so I have a widget where if anyone is working on the course at their own blog, they can add a link.

I made categories for each task (Post Theses Here! and Groupwork), and more child categories for each week and each group. I had to add a post to the Theses and Groupwork categories to get them to show, but I scheduled the Theses items to appear after the previous homework was due so they couldn’t post too far ahead and wouldn’t get confused.

I added the Simply Exclude plug in so that all posts to the Groupwork and Theses categories don’t appear on the main page. This way all discussion can be on the main page without other stuff interfering (like a…blog).

Now on to what I didn’t do last time — create scheduled posts for each week so that everyone (on-site students and Guest Students) can discuss some cool issues for each era. That will be the fun part!

You can take a peek. Suggestions welcome!

A false start on a SOOC

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I’ve decided to try planning one of my spring courses as a SOOC — a Small Open Online Class. I am simply not ready for anything Massive or Massively Open. Rather I want to start with what I already do, and let others join in.

So what I wanted do was offer one of my standard half-instructivist, half-constructivist classes in Moodle, which are traditionally closed but allow self-enrolling. I wanted to give my enrolled students the same private, individual feedback as I always do on tests, and group feedback as I always do in the forums, where image collections are constructed and theses developed. But on top of that I wanted to allow Guest Students who would be able to access all lectures and materials, and participate in the forums, but not mess up my gradebook. They could do tests if they want, but I wouldn’t be grading them, so only the multiple-choice would grade, and that’s already automatic.

I figured out I could create a Guest Student role and a Guest Student group. A separate role would make it so that each list of students would be separate in Assign Roles, so I could easily check official registration and drop the enrolled people who no longer wish to participate. The group function would separate the two cohorts in the Gradebook, so long as the whole course was based on groups. I went to my US course and set the Course Settings to Groups, visible and not forced, so activities could be set in common (like the forums). I was pretty sure there wasn’t a way, however, to have the system automatically sort those who get an account and “enrol” in the Moodle class. It wouldn’t be able to automatically put them in separate groups — I’d have to do that by hand.

So then I would have an Open-Closed MOOC, only smaller, with people coming in to my LMS instead of me moving the whole course outside the LMS. (While I would love to engage in the more open pedagogy and teach a real Open-Open MOOC, there is no way I can do this starting, as I must, with over 200 students each semester in five different classes.)

But then I discovered I can’t do any of this, because MiraCosta does not host our own installation of Moodle. Rather we have an external vendor, Moodlerooms. The college’s account allows a limited number of participants — I can’t fill it up with external people who aren’t enrolled. Oh no! Now what?

So on to idea #2. Start with my on-site class instead, since that’s not in a LMS anyway. I could take this class and put all the materials on an open WP site. I already have online lectures, and a textbook. I don’t usually use my online lectures for an on-site class, but what the heck. I spent most of today creating a new WordPress blog and setting it up. To be continued…

CC “False start” photo by Stephen Downes via Flickr

Blogs and wikis in a CMS?

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Because of their popularity, the makers of course management systems (pretty soon we’ll just say “Blackboard” like we say “Kleenex” to mean all CMSs) have added social networking tools. These blogs and wikis, are, of course, inside the courses, which are inside the system.

When these “Web 2.0” tools first appeared in CMSs, I actually considered using them, but by then I had moved to Moodle to get away from Blackboard’s horrible threaded discussion forums. The nested forums in Moodle were much better, but the blogs there were tied to the students profiles. In other words, you’d click on a student’s name somewhere in the class, and go to a separate page to read their blog. Clunk, clunk, no thanks.

If I were going to use blogs with students, I would think I had two choices. I could have one big blog and make all of them authors (my English prof colleague Jim Sullivan does that very successfully) or I could have each student make their own blog, then have RSS feeds aggregated somewhere (Netvibes, maybe, as Michael Wesch does) so I could follow them more easily. I would do this because my goal would be students feeling they have ownership of their work, and their own space. It would also be good if they got input from the outside, although there can be other issues with that, of course. Also, if they wanted to continue blogging, it would be easy for them.

This last, the perpetuity of their work, is important as a default. As a student, I used to save all my returned papers. But students in an online class lose all their work unless they’ve saved it themselves, and that only works for written stuff before there’s any feedback. Or they have to copy and paste everything. So a blog inside a CMS would defeat pretty much everything I’d want students using blogs for!

Wikis are a different matter, because essentially to me a wiki is one of two things. It can be a website space like a blog, controlled and updated primarily by one person, usually the instructor. Or it can be a collaborative document, like a Google Doc. (I will say I don’t see much in between, having repeatedly witnessed wikis set up by one or two people fail as collaborative websites, with the originators begging in vain for participation form other people — there is still a fear of editing someone else’s “place”.)

A collaborative document can be totally appropriate for the internal dynamics of a course. A few years ago, I used a wiki (PB Wiki, now PB Works) to have students create the class quizzes together. I could see who was participating, and have quiz questions written by the students themselves. That wouldn’t need to be public or perpetual.

But such transient work is likely the exception — in general, I think that adding social networking tools to course management systems undermines the broader learning goals of those tools, which tend to be more public (i.e. “social”). Social takes time, and there is at most a semester in a course environment. In addition, I’m not sure students understand the limitation of doing things like this inside a CMS — they may assume, like Facebook users, that’s it’s all out there forever. I notice very few college students understanding the basics of internet architecture….but that’s a whole other post!

As the Moodle(room) Turns

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

Clues and a partial solution to my Moodle Backup and Restore problems have occurred. Only die-hard Moodlers are gonna be interested in this one.

In June, I began the process of trying to Restore some classes off of one Moodlerooms installation (an account I paid for) to MiraCosta’s Moodlerooms’ installation. Backing up a zip file to my own hard drive is fine, but a Moodle installation is needed to Restore so one can see the actual course, if a student has a grade grievance or issue a year or two down the road, or I just want to see how I taught the class back then.

Moodlerooms has provided me good service on my own account at $500 a year, an offer they extended for an additional year beyond when they actually got rid of it for more expensive accounts I couldn’t afford (they extended my offer because I wasn’t notified quickly enough to do anything). So since June, I’ve been trying to figure out how to “move” my recent but completed backed-up courses where I could see them for real at a later date. I had tried to restore into my own Moodle installation, but this had failed. Besides, they are all MiraCosta students, so I thought it would be good to have it in MiraCosta’s account.

[An aside: I wanted my own account because I could administer it, in particular use the Edit Profile function so I could change my students’ passwords for them when they got locked out. MCC’s helpdesk isn’t open evenings and weekends, which is of course when online students need help. In the new version of Moodle, it isn’t even possible to give me that function using permissions — only the admin can do it now.]

You would think that moving classes from one installation to another when both are run by the same vendor would be easy, but we’ve been working on it since June. We did try everything, including having our administrator at the college do the restore — no go. It took a few months to figure out that one problem was the site identifier was the same for both accounts, a discovery which has helped Moodlerooms prevent some problems in the future, but which still hasn’t solved my problem. I am still unable to move a course over with the users, and since student grade and work tracking is what’s important, the courses are useless without the users.

Once the site id was corrected this month, the problem changed — when I try to restore, instead of giving me user errors, now the system strips the users halfway through the restore process, removing all user data. Moodlerooms support was able to upload a course successfully by going through all the student emails and making sure they were the same in both systems. That was a big clue.

It would, of course, take many hours for me to compare lists of 30 or so students from 20 or so courses, making sure that everyone’s email address lines up.

However, the very first user to cause an error, we discovered today, is me, in my student guise. I have an account I call Student A. I enroll Student A in almost all my courses so I can log in as a student and see things. Yes, Moodle has a drop-down to change roles, but it isn’t quite as good as logging in as a student. Because I don’t want to get emails as a student (or have to turn that function off for every class) I use fake emails, and it turned out I hadn’t been consistent about this.

So today, if I went into each course and removed Student A before doing the backup, I was able to Restore successfully, with all users and their work, but only to my own Moodle (one I just use for practice). It still won’t work on Moodlerooms. BUT at least it’s backed up where I can see it! So I have been happily (is that the word?) backing up and restoring courses all day. I am up to 22 courses restored where I can at least see them on my own installation. Out of 22 courses, the system has caught only two student email conflicts, which were easily resolved.

I do not know the moral of this story. Beware vendors raising prices? What you don’t code can hurt you? Whatever it is, I’ve got 22 courses backed up just in case…

First full-out test of WP in class

Lisa M Lane

Today was the first major “test of the system”, using the WordPress blog for student activity.

They have been posting their thesis just fine, but today it was time to use the site in class, as the place for groups to create presentations with images.

I had to add two plug-ins to make the images happen in the first place — one is in Russian (no one seemed to notice) and provides a toolbar with an icon of a picture that lets you add the URL of an image on the internet, and one with a link that lets you add one from your desktop. Most of them used the first one, but they had to help each other figure out how to find the direct URL of an image (rather than the website it was on). I helped a few students with this, but most figured it out.

In my second day survey, 33 of the 40 students (now 38) said they could bring a laptop to class for the days we would use them, but not all did so. I had gone ahead and ordered all six (now eight) laptops from Media Services just in case. These laptops all have dead batteries and have to be plugged in, requiring a series of power strips and students to have to move their groups, but they’re better than no laptop. Last semester each group used only one, but I really needed one laptop per person. A few students tried using their smart phones — iPhones worked best.

Persian-history-5
The task was to find three images of primary sources from before 500 BC and create a thesis about what they had in common. In Ning, each group had its own section. In WordPress, I made each group its own Category, then added a first post. Any member can then Comment to post something, and the image toolbar and link shows up.

The students were somewhat uncertain at first, but I don’t think that was the technology — each group had several people who were happy to experiment and use the machines to complete the task. It’s more that we are new to each other, Labor Day meaning this is only the fifth class I’ve had with them. Also, many did very poorly on the first quiz, so I started the activity after we discussed that and I gave them an additional quickie extra credit question. (If you’re pedagogically curious, this was because I noticed on the test that they did better on questions from lecture than on reading, and I wanted to see if they retained something we talked about after almost two weeks.)

Challenges:
* Students made mistakes but could not edit or delete their own comments. I do not yet see a setting for that. I logged in on the class computer and went to the comments, so group members could come up and delete any mistakes, but of course that meant they could delete anything by mistake. Not a good solution, though it worked for today.
* Unlike Ning, WordPress’ image plug-ins don’t have an intuitive way to resize an image.
* The right side column impeded the main column, making it too narrow — I’ll look into a fix for that.

Cool Things:
* I let groups choose how they wanted to work and present. Some chose having individuals add things; others chose to put it all in one comment.
* Once they got started, they were all working together and going exploring on the laptops. Looked like archaeology with laptops as the tool.
* I noticed during presentations that students used the mouse of the presentation computer in one hand (not on the desktop) so they could control things efficiently while talking — looked cool.

OK, gotta take a look at those settings!

Encountering Balrog 9…I mean, Blackboard 9

Lisa M Lane

Oh, my, that start page is ugly. Looks like all they’ve done is moved everything to little menus on the side.

OK, let’s customize that home page. Add my own banner, which has worked and looked beautiful on everything from a plain web page to WordPress. Hmmmm….

Looks like maybe we’re not getting the idea of a white background?

OK, I’ll click that cool gearwheel on Announcements. Maybe I can change settings there to email students or something. Oh, a click down just to do this?

OK, I’ll do a welcome announcement. I’d like a snazzy font for it — this HTML tool bar, which I had to click Thawte’s “Trust” to get to appear, certainly seems full-featured. Oh, these are the only fonts?

It’s starting to feel a little Microsoft here. And it took me a minute to figure out how to get back to the Home Page, where my Announcement isn’t actually in the announcement box — it’s just a link.

So really, nothing’s changed except that you can now embed more media — the toolbar is more complete and lets you upload or link out to a URL. Very, very good. But the discussions are still threaded rather than nested, too many clicks are required to get to something simple, and it’s still got that DOS feel.

I haven’t gotten swiped off the bridge, but it’s not looking good so far…

Then my colleague Pilar Hernández did a screencast to show me how she’s made her Bb site for her class behave more like Moodle. We’re still in the mines, but maybe there’s some light showing…

http://content.screencast.com/users/ProfesoraPilar/folders/Jing/media/42ff6a78-280e-459b-9451-5cb9e707c16b/jingh264player.swf

Now We’re Getting Open Insidious Pedagogy

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

When I first used the term “Insidious Pedagogy” in regards to Learning Management Systems,  I mainly meant the big commercial systems, like Blackboard. Taking a look at Nixty, advertised to be the cool open LMS, I’m having to extend my appalled-ness.

I read the review by Jared Stein.

I read the argument Alan Levine had with Nixty’s founder.

The reasons they are unimpressed can be added to my own reasons, which should surprise no one given my views on the built-in pedagogies inherent in LMSs. In the discussion with Alan (who dared to use the word “pedagogy”, saying that there was none in the idea of viewing a video then taking a test), Glen of Nixty says:

“In one year, to use your word, we will have a better idea of our pedagogy.”

I hate to break it to you, but Nixty does have a pedagogy, and a strong one. It isn’t possible to create an LMS without one. Here it is, in the course fomat itself:

Step one, step two, step three, or… mix up the steps! This is not an issue of Nixty needing, as Glen replies to Alan, to “be more social“. The complaint isn’t about the potential for interaction, though as Alan points out, discussion must be designed. [Nixty’s default discussion setup is “Questions? Thoughts?”. Hardly likely to make me jump in there.]

As near as I can tell, there is no way out of separating the “course” into Lessons, Discussion and Tests, though Jared Stein used the latter two to create activities. It’s like have the old Blackboard menu back, where you couldn’t change the buttons.  Right now Nixty’s navigation alone seems like an enormous step backward. I assume that eventually the course design itself will be more customizable, but defaults are important, and indicate the pedagogy.

At this point, however, Nixty looks to me like a shell for taking content created elsewhere (Yale, MIT), plugging it in, and putting a discussion and test area with it for the “instructor” (read: tutor, graduate student, underpaid adjunct, person off the street getting minimum wage) to “teach” it (read: assess the work of students who pay to take the class). This, as Jim Groom points out in the comments on Alan’s post, makes Nixty “another corporate LMS that decides to do away with the professor”.

Except the professor is right there: it’s a badly compressed Donald Kagan, lecturing on Ancient Greek history from Yale, who paid him to do that but who benefits not at all from the “open” course designed around his work (though apparently I can donate).

There’s something insidious about that too.

WordPress/Buddypress: No Joy Yet as Ning Replacement

Lisa M Lane 21 Comments

What I want to do:

Create a website with a few static pages linked as URLs (syllabus, grading policies, Engrade) preferrably in iframes, a forum with a series of topics (Week 1, Week 2) for students to post their thesesand a place where each of six groups has a forum/place where they can post text and images for display as they present.

Trouble I’m having:

In trying both Buddypress and other WordPress themes, there seems no way to have different groups where they can post images easily (preferably URL-based with resizing).

The plug-in Comment-Images Comment Image Embedder allows images to be embedded from URL only, but only in Comments on the main posts, not as replies in forums.

embed

The plug-in Comment Image creates a box for upload, but again, only for Comments on the main post, and only jpg.

browse

The plug-in Forum Attachments for Buddypress allows images to be added, but only from the hard drive, in forum replies.

attachment

Obviously I am trying to replicate Ning, which let me create six groups easily, and have each of them be able to add images using either URL or upload and then resize them by dragging the corners.

I have tried three different Buddypress themes and two regular WordPress themes. I have a week to put my class somewhere.

Entering the Mines of Moria

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Ning went commercial, but it worked great for my on-site San Elijo class. So where should my class be this fall? I need a posting board, a gradebook (I linked out to Engrade from Ning no problem), and somewhere they can work in groups posting images and text to illustrate group presentations.

I applied to Pearson for a free Ning, but they’ll brand it even if they ever do approve me. Could use Moodle, of course, but that’s boring — all my online classes are there already. Would like something more Ning-like, but Spruz and Wackwall have ads or are creepy (at least until Wackwall releases its Oxwall code in a few days). Grou.ps looked good but a colleague of mine had trouble with it. Facebook? Um…maybe later, when I really feel like ducking my head to crawl into the creepy treehouse.

My college is upgrading to Balrog, I mean Blackboard, 9. I have been invited to pilot it for fall. So perhaps, just perhaps, I should run the class there. I’d learn about Bb9 so I can help faculty, and I’d see how much web 2.0-my I can plug into it.

I haven’t offered a class in Bb in years. I have this sense of going to the dark side, without the cookies. Or descending into the Mines of Moria. Will I survive? If I do, will I be forever changed? Perhaps I shall emerge as a White Wizard, wiser than before….

Moodle Horror

Lisa M Lane

So the college contracted with Moodlerooms to offer courses a few years ago. Lots of faculty were happy to have it. I already had my own $500/year account with them, so for a couple of years I ran my classes in that installation, where I could be the administrator and do cool things the college bureaucracy wouldn’t let me do, such as updating a student’s profile when they forgot their password. I didn’t need the support package provided in the college’s contract (outsourced to AELearn and basically useless for complex questions) so controlling my own classes more than made up for any issues.

NOW, however, Moodlerooms is getting rid of that $500/year account, so I’m trying to transfer last semester’s classes (at least) into the college’s installation.

Keep in mind: both installations are Moodlerooms. Same version of Moodle. Same everything.

I cannot Restore my classes into the college’s installation with users. In other words, I cannot transfer any of my courses whole, with the students. At first I thought something was terribly wrong, a horrible bug, a conflict. I upgraded my own installation (on my rented server, not Moodlerooms). That took hours, because I had to change the code so it would let me Restore large files. Must be a really bad bug. Still it failed, same reason.

Then I discovered, no, this was done on purpose, to prevent student accounts being changed accidentally. It’s not a bug.

I did a support ticket. AELearn told me do it without users. I controlled myself enough not to put expletives into the reply email, explaining I need to restore whole courses, with users. AELearn told me I need to match up all the users, make sure the profiles are exactly the same in my own installation as in the college’s. I have hundreds of students. That’s a manual process that would take huge numbers of hours. Moodle will not tell me which accounts are in conflict. It stops the entire restore no matter what.

On suggestion of AELearn, which after all did have a very good person contact me, I tried a manual check of the 33 students left at the end of my History 104 last semester, found three email addresses typed differently or changed from the ones in the college’s system. I changed them manually in my system to match, but it may no difference — still no restore. My support person has now referred me to Moodlerooms directly, where they are working on the ticket.

Apparently there may be something with the course ID number, but since the protection is there to prevent the erasure or unintended changes in student accounts already in the system, I doubt that this will work successfully.

Just another example of the ways in which transferring information is said to work across systems, but it doesn’t. Integration is, in many ways, not real, and in many ways the database structures seem to date back to medieval times. We’ll see what happens.

Helping students get txt reminders

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I have often thought I’d like a system to txt students reminders of deadlines in online classes, but all the methods I’ve explored over the last half dozen years or so involved too much work on my part, collecting cell phone numbers and such. So I’m going to try this semester to let Google Calendar do the heavy lifting.

I put all my deadlines for each class into its own Google Calendar. This was relatively simple, since I could duplicate entries and move them easily. Since Google insists on both start and end times, I just made them within a minute: something due at midnight runs 11:59pm-12:00am, for example. It took me about 90 minutes to do three full classes.

I then followed the instructions at the Google Calendar page for letting people save all the events on a calendar. I wanted a button that students could click to load my calendar into theirs. Next to this button I put a link to instructions on how to get Google Calendar to send you txt message notifications. It looks like this, pasted into an HTML block in Moodle:


We’ll see if it works.

Notes from Sloan-C’s Emerging Techs

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Notes from Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, which I attended as a live virtual participant:

From Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 as a 21st-century LMS with Linda Wallace of Pepperdine: Idea of Google Apps as a mid-point between an LMS and a PLE was briefly mentioned but I think was a valuable perspective.

From Engaging online dialogue: The pedagogy of annotation-enhanced discussion forums with Cindy Xin of Simon Fraser University, Canada: need to try Marginalia in Moodle, which allows students to add comments and annotations to each other’s forum posts.

From eScholars: Encouraging the Use of Emerging Educational Technologies Through a Collaborative Faculty Development Program, the idea that everyone offering cool faculty development tracks gives stipends to faculty participants and are run by instructional designers instead of faculty. Very depressing.

From Enhancing Moodle to Engage Students; Powerful Teaching that Makes Moodle More Effective, a combination of tools embedded in Moodle for interaction, including free tools like VoiceThread and Xtranormal (and paid-to-adapt WizIQ, AuthorLive) in a great web page to demo these.

From How 2 Lrn W Ur iPod: Using a fully online Moodle course to teach students how to be better learners with technology with the brilliant Kevin Kelly of SFSU: the idea of an “online flex hybrid” where students can choose whether to come to on-site class and participate or view the class live or recorded online and participate asynchronously.

From MERLOT classic award winners on Brief Hybrid Workshops: University of North Carolina, support for the idea we are already developing at POT for faculty development of creating brief under-5-minute learning objects (oh, that term!) surrounded by support materials and synchronous or asynchronous community discussion for various topics. Excellent webpage resource as an example.

From Beyond Grades—Comprehensive Student Assessment Using Common Desktop Tools with Rebecca Peet of UCSC: the old-style workaround gradebook: using Microsoft Excel as a rubric-styled gradebook with a template to fill in the blanks, and Word’s Mail Merge to send individual grade reports to students via email.

Buzzwords and jargon were rampant! This bingo card would have been useful. Also I kept hearing turn key. But some jargon was helpful. Somewhere I picked up the concept/jargon of “iterative development” — I think we need to consider this perspective for both Blackboard and Moodle instead of just “buying” them.

From Educational Networking: Building Models for Social Networking in Education with Steve Hargadon: Social networking + LMS + live collaboration is his future model. Hargadon seemed somewhat enamored of Blackboard’s recent aquisition of Elluminate as fulfilling this model. I don’t like social networking tools (blogs, wikis) inside closed systems that disappear when the class is over — I think this undermines the broader learning goals of those tools. Instead of seeing social networking under an educational umbrella, I’m seeing education happening under a social networking umbrella. Let’s deal with that.

From Where’s My Stuff? Are your students content with your content? with Sherry Lindquist: techniques to control what students see. I agreed with this in terms of preventing confusion and having students feel overwhelmed. I did not agree in terms of controlling release of forum responses until a student has responded. If you have to do that, you’re writing a lousy prompt. Disconnected students will drop if forced to put themselves forward like that. Connected students will contact each other in Facebook. I’d rather see them learn!

My biggest disappointment was the fact that few (if any) emergent technologies were introduced (Voicethread is not at all new), and virtual participants had to rely on Twitter (hashtag #et4online) to participate in real time becauase Mediasite’s commenting was not really that synchronous. Also, many of the cool techniques were based on individualized activities and feedback impossible for me to implement with 200 students each semester.

Connections were great, though. My favorite co-participants included Kelvin Thompson, with whom I hope to be writing an article called “Linking Out and Widgeting In: Leveraging Your LMS with a Crowbar”.

I don’t feel dirty, but I would like an edupunk virtual conference to clear my palate…

Visioning the Future of the LMS

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Here is what I wanted to hear when I virtually attended the LMS panel at Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning:

  1. Commercial LMSs will allow the disaggregation of the parts of their systems, so that faculty can mix, match, combine and remove any element easily.
  2. They will provide options of open or closed for any of these elements (so that, for example, student blogs can be open on the web but assignments closed).
  3. LMSs will standardize code (XML? HTML5?) to provide seamless import, export and integration among systems and outside of a system, for example to create a separate e-portfolio.
  4. LMSs will have the ability to integrate any app on the open web.
  5. They will be programmed properly to work on a wide variety of mobile devices and platforms.

What I heard instead:

  1. LMSs are enterprise systems, period.
  2. Their best use is for student tracking, content aggregation, outcomes assessment, and systemization.
  3. They are and should be used in order to provide accessibility, FERPA and other legal compliance for the institution.
  4. They should get better at tracking and using their own internal data.
  5. Faculty aren’t that innovative and so they need an LMS.
  6. Students get upset when the LMS is changed.
  7. Faculty shouldn’t use Web 2.0 apps to cobble together their own LMS because it’s too hard to support and doesn’t have the tracking, aggregation, outcomes assessment, legal protections, etc. (Nor do we have any of this for classroom teaching, but that seemed to not be recognized as a disconnect.)

Suffice it to say I was very disappointed. Didn’t sound very emergent to me.

Let’s try this:

  1. Envision a world where the LMS is a collection of detachable, useful, independent tools that can be open or closed.
  2. Envision instructors selecting on an opt-in basis which of these elements they would like to use.
  3. Envision students being exposed to many different tools, learning experiences, and web elements as appropriate to their various classes, which would increase the skills of sorting, aggregating and evaluating information they will need in their future careers.
  4. Envision choice and academic freedom as the two great values in distant education decision making.

I’m sure there’s more. Add your own.

Now I don’t just TALK a good RSS

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Oh, sure, I know how to do it. I get what the orange symbols mean and I tell other people how to use social bookmarking for their classes. But do I do it? No. Not yet. I’m waiting for my History of England to be an honors sections, and everything to go all student-created and constructivist because I’ll only have 25 students instead of 40.

But then, the “need” hit. Some students have trouble finding primary sources (or even recognizing them, as I’ve noted). And I enjoy looking for English primary sources as much as the next person… well, ok, more.

I’m so frustrated with my textbook for the class that in looking for a better one, I was of course considering not using one at all. I went to a site that has a huge book-type thing (Britannia.com) but it now has so many flashing ads it could induce seizure. So I checked out the BBC history site, and there was so much good stuff. But they’ve already told me on the evals, they really want a printed textbook.

In looking at the cool sites, however, I came across some good collections of primary sources, Adding such sources is the half of the whole discussion idea, since last fall. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to collect all the cool sites I was finding? I started to bookmark them in Firefox and thought, that’s dumb. So I began collecting them in Diigo. First I tagged them “hist105”, as I do everything related to that class.

Then I started adding a “hist105resources” tag. I went into my Diigo bookmarks, confined the list to that tag, and copied the RSS button’s code (right click, copy link location).

Then I went into Moodle, and added a Remote RSS Feed block to the main course page, pasting in the RSS code. I called it “A few primary source sites”.

I realize I could go even further. I searched on Diigo and no one else uses the tag. I could have students use Diigo and tag what they find, and it will be automatically added to the block so long as I change to the RSS button code on the page referencing everyone’s tag, not just mine. That would take 2 seconds to do.

But…one step at a time. If I have them use the tag and collect, I’ll have to teach them Diigo and bookmarking and tagging as well as how to identify a primary source. That on top of a textbook, my lectures, seven quizzes, a weekly discussion requiring posting and thesis writing seems like to much. For me, if not for them!

But at least now, I’m not just talking RSS — I’m using it for an actual class.

Back away from the ledge, please

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

I was working on the POT website. One of our wonderful facilitators, Laura Paciorek, had sent me some sample self-assessments she uses with her students. She had mentioned them at her Elluminate session “Connections in Online Classes” last Friday (the recording is here) and had been asked to share. So I went to the website to post them on the Handouts page.

It’s really a WordPress blog, so I went to upload the two pdf’s. It was very easy. Then I thought — wait a minute, this isn’t how I do things!

I put everything in a folder on the college’s server, a folder for all our Program for Online Teaching stuff. The website used to be a plain website. Then it was in Moodle. Everything was linked to the files in the web folder.

I tell everyone new to online teaching: don’t enter anything into the LMS you don’t have to! Keep it all in your own files, in your own folder, and link. Every button in Blackboard can be changed to show one of your pages. All you have to enter into an LMS are your quiz questions and discussion prompts, and even these should originate as plain text files you keep on your hard drive.

Why? because who knows whether that system, that package, will be available five years from now? or next year? What if you teach at two colleges mandating two different systems, and no one lets you export? what if you change your mind? what if your pedagogy takes a different turn? what if someone gives you freedom you didn’t have before? what if everyone went to the same restaurant on the same day and ordered blintzes? (They don’t, but I worry about these things…)

So what the heck was I doing uploading pdf files into WordPress? I must have been mad. I put them in the web folder, uploaded, and linked.

Whew, that was close…

FERPA Schmerpa, the LMS and open ed

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I’ve been involved in a discussion with an online teaching colleague about FERPA and its implications. Periodically, FERPA issues emerge, usually at the administrative level. I’ve seen this at a number of institutions of higher ed. Faced with a law that seems to protect student privacy (even when it allows, in my opinion, violations such as the release of ones address in a directory), colleges tend to take a draconian approach to prevent lawsuits (and loss of federal funding, though this has apparently never happened). Everything educationally open one might want to do could be a potential FERPA violation, including blogging, content creation, bookmark sharing, and commenting on the open web. My colleague’s concern in particular was whether it was OK to post evaluative instructor comments on a student’s open blog.

Image cc by xiaming at Flickr

In the course of our discussion we looked at a discussion about FERPA and Web 2.0, plus some campus policies and checklists (like this one from Oregon and this one from Winona and this from University of North Florida) as well as the law itself. Since I’ve been teaching for 20 years, I’ve heard several times that I must not post grades where students are identifiable on the list, and I know that some colleges say secret names are OK but others say not. Colleges differ in how they interpret FERPA. Most of the interpretations date from the pre-internet era, though some like the Virginia Commonwealth University have an updated version specific to online — it’s not very different, though.

I have not worried too much about FERPA since I discovered the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Owasso Independent School Dist. No. I011 v. Falvo, where the Oyez site notes:

In a unanimous opinion delivered by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Court held that Peer grading does not violate FERPA. The Court reasoned that peer-graded items did not constitute education records protected by FERPA until a teacher collected the grades on the students’ papers or other items and recorded the grades in the teacher’s grade book. In reaching its conclusion, the Court noted that peer-graded items were not “maintained” within in the meaning of FERPA, as the student graders only handled the items for a few moments. Moreover, the Court stated that each student grader, by grading assignments, did not constitute a person acting for an educational institution within FERPA.

As far as I’m concerned, this covers most of the things I do that might be perceived by someone as problematic.

In all my online classes, every week, students post evidence in a forum, then create a thesis and post it. I do “evaluate” these theses in a sense, though I do not “grade” them, by commenting on the theses of several students on the forum, noting which are factual and which interpretive and why. I occasionally ask students to take on a colleague’s thesis and say how it could be improved.

Is this peer grading? It could be, except that the comments are not “grades” — they don’t “stick” nor are they recorded individually in the gradebook. But in student self-evaluations (the private part with just the student and me), students comment on their own achievements and I put a grade on the combined effort of eight weeks of forum work.

I frankly don’t see a whole lot of difference between this and what I do in an my on-site class when groups do presentations and I comment aloud on how they did, strengths and weaknesses, to expand the discussion. It’s instant feedback, but the purpose is to keep all of us on the same subject at the same time. If I gave them feedback and asked questions later and privately, only that particular group would learn, and by then the class will have moved on. Sometimes students peer grade the presentations, and I post every group’s combined “grade” and comments, although these do not translate to anything formal since I don’t grade groups at all except as part of a student’s participation grade.

To me, posting/presenting and commenting is open work and open education — for my online classes, this process is behind a wall right  now only because I’m in a Learning Management System (Moodle), but it shouldn’t be. If I instead used a Ning, I could set it to be closed, “just for students”, but I’d like everyone to see the work. This is where I’m heading with online teaching — open courses. Learning should be open — if it is, people will be less afraid to try out their ideas, absorb and respond to criticism. They will also be part of a larger community. That’s how the web works, and these are important skills for my students’ careers. But much of this approach could be seen under the formal rules as FERPA violations, so do I dare open things up?

Then it occurred to me: perhaps using outside websites gets around some FERPA foolishness.

Image cc by h.koppdelaney at Flickr

If I am using a college-supported LMS, clearly it could be argued that the entire course is a record maintained by the institution, especially if we are archiving whole classes. In fact, that seems to make an online class more FERPA-protected than an on-site class, since for an on-site class the instructors alone maintain all records except the final grade, in piles of gradebooks and old assignments in their office. FERPA has been around a long time, yet no one has ever asked me about the records I maintain for on-site classes. But an online class is stored, the whole thing, often by the institution.

So here’s the cool thing. If we are having students use Blogger and are commenting on their posts, for example, how can it be claimed that it is “maintained” by the institution? I can see the privacy violations, of course, that many try to solve by allowing students to use aliases, but I can’t help but wonder whether using outside technologies don’t actually protect us from FERPA violations!

In my totally non-legally trained fly-by-night interpretation of FERPA, the only thing that needs to be behind a wall is the gradebook. Engrade (or a pay-to-play online gradebook) can do that, so no problem. Obviously this is not the first time I’ve posted on the issue of why bother with an LMS (must be something about April!). But in seeing those interactive websites we love as not only a place to learn but a place where the very lack of institutional control might be a benefit to us and our institutions, I think I’m making strides here.

What can I do for open education?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Hey professor

I was just wondering if there was any way i could download the content of this class to my computer. I really enjoy the lectures and all the info and active links and there are a lot of posts that i would like to go back and read again. If there is an easy way to get it all that would be really cool. I also was wondering if it is possible to go back and do the same for previous semesters? Well if there is a way just let me know thanks for an awesome class.

— Patrick

OMG Patrick, I thought (I do sometimes think in SMS), here I read all this stuff about open education and I don’t even have a clear way for you to get to the material afterward?

It’s not that my classes are open — they’re not. They’re closed in several ways. They are full of enrolled students, so many (40 per class) that I cannot keep up, so they’re seriously closed. We’re a week into the semester, so you can’t join us — the class is closed. The classes are in Moodle, a learning management system and thus a closed silo, a walled garden, a protected “course” that provides a safe classroom-style space but makes visible lifelong learning require links out to the web and multiple passwords.

But my lectures are on the open web, and always have been. Not by design — when I started constructing them there was no place to put them except the open web. Or a passworded folder. I asked the MCC computer folks back in 1998 to make me folders called “pw” for each of my classes, but didn’t do much else. Since then, I link out to the lectures from whatever system I’m in or syllabus web page I’m on. I revise these lectures continually and upload them to space on a hosted site, and they’re just there, available by URL. But in my online classes in Moodle, because they’re linked out, one might not wish to track all those URLs. They aren’t all on one page, but rather grouped with the discussions and quizzes in each week’s block.

Since the forums are locked inside Moodle, and the class is made invisible (I don’t delete them) after the semester is over, those would be much harder to get to later on. In fact, even if I left them open, I plan to move away from my private Moodlerooms account soon now that they’ve raised the price from $500 to $1500 a year, so the content might not be there later anyway. Even if we used a Ning or Facebook instead of a CMS, who’s to say that will be there ten years from now? The open web spaces we construct things in won’t even be there (she thinks as she spends hours late at night constructing a Prezi).

But the lecture I can do. My only hesistation is that I link and embed some copyrighted material. So if a movie studio sends me a cease and desist letter, I’ll have to do some editing. But isn’t it worth it to have a place where students can at least access my lectures later on? Even if they’re a bit different? Should I archive the old ones?

Anyway, I sat right down and made a webpage of all the lectures from all my classes, and am encouraging other instructors (as has Patrick) to do the same. I may not be ready to walk the whole walk of open education, but I can at least do that. And let anyone come in who wants to for their own enrichment — I have my first unofficial “auditor” attending a class this semester. I gotta think hard about the rest….