Program for Online Teaching

Notes on Jim’s blogging workshop

15 January 201618 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Today I attended Jim Sullivan’s workshop “Blogging Across the Disciplines“. Although I’m always thrilled to listen to and learn from Jim, there were a few ideas I picked out that I’m going to work on.

The first was the way Jim’s class blogs with students emphasize the public nature of the blog. His class blogs make clear that the assignments are public writing, and he also posts to an audience rather than just to the students. When I blogged with students, I made the mistake of not emphasizing the public nature of the blog. Rather I was just using WordPress like an LMS. What I missed was the opportunity for students to change their writing in response to an audience (even if that audience doesn’t comment – I didn’t track the visitor stats either).

JimSBlog The second idea was the way Jim makes students read each others’ work. Not only does he refer to student posts in his own comments, but he has quizzes where the student must match the post author with an idea from that author’s post.

His prompts are also expert. Just one example: “pick a scene from The Devil Wears Prada and explain what it says about work in America”. Instead of assigning the movie (which students would have to either watch or view scenes from), that exercise is embedded in the prompt. The legwork is theirs. And he creates a theme for each class (this one is work).

Some of the participants at the workshop had great ideas. One requires that student posts have “novelty” as a rubric item. Another considered assessing based on “connections”. Clarity about the goal of each post is crucial.

There was discussion about using the methods of ones discipline to design and assess student blogging. The scientific method was mentioned, and some faculty like to have students directly apply knowledge in their posts (rather than just “write about x”). I could do that with the historical method – review it with students, then ask them to apply it to the secondary source articles I assign. In fact, I could do that now, just in forum discussion.

Almost everything I heard in the workshop would also be useful in LMS-bound forums, in fact.

The alst idea occurred to me during the workshop. A blog would be a great site for a Learning Community. I’ve worked at MiraCosta for over 25 years, and during that time there have been various experiments with team-teaching, cluster classes, cohorts, and learning communities. At present it looks like the process is pretty bound up in an administrative sense. But there’s no need for that. Take two classes that work well together, plan it with the other instructor, and have both classes post to a common blog. Instant learning community.

So thanks to Jim Sullivan for another fab workshop!

New directions for POT

30 January 201530 January 2015 Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Yes, we can certainly avoid the obvious jokes, but POT means Program for Online Teaching, the faculty volunteer program I’ve been directing since 2005. We began as a group of online instructors frustrated with the “training” being provided to those starting to teach online. These trainings mostly consisted of teaching faculty how to use technologies the college had purchased (later the LMS) and plug things into it. We wanted to have faculty consider their pedagogy first, then make the technology work for them.

We began by offering workshops through our college’s own professional development program, and gradually these expanded into full workshop days. We also created a website, and posted videos and materials from our workshops there. Faculty have found the site useful, but I’ve been maintaining it pretty much singlehandedly for the last few years. All of us who work as POT are college instructors with large responsibilities for teaching, departmental work, and disciplinary study. Many have joined us from outside our home college. Since 2010, we have offered the POT Certificate Class, an online course mentored and moderated by like-minded experts and teachers from around the globe. The class, too, has taken much time and yet no one has ever been paid to help. (Many of us are of the “sure, I’ll help you move if you feed me pizza” model of social responsibility.)

In the meantime, the field has changed. Since 2005, “instructional design” and “educational technology” have become their own disciplines, offering PhDs all over the place. Sponsored companies have been founded to host online courses on proprietary platforms. Administrative careers have sprung up in deploying and managing stables of online instructors at for-profit universities, offering “team-created” courses where the faculty member is only a “discipline expert”. “Best practices” have been promoted based on principles derived from the research of these new doctorates (many of whom used small sample sizes, creating their principles of whole cloth).

It is a world in which POT now appears anachronistic, encouraging what I call “artisan” courses, built as creative endeavors by individual instructors trying to translate their teaching strengths into the online environment. These courses are pedagogically and philosophically the opposite of the canned, instant-feedback, publisher-created “packages” and team-built classes and MOOCs that are now pervasive. Like artisan breads and hand-made cabinetry, these courses require more work to make and are individual in design. Their quality cannot be determined by a list of “best practices”, but by the love and attention that goes into their creation, and the passion and dedication of the teachers who are teaching within their own design.

We have watched these artisan principles undermined not only by forces beyond the institution, but by faculty new to online, who have been encouraged to think along cookie-cutter course lines. Classes where most of the content comes from a publisher course cartridge are being held up as models, locally and statewide, as online initiatives are developed to create more standardization and “accountability”. Faculty now come to POT hoping for “how to” workshops (“how do I get this to work in Blackboard?”) rather than approaching us with pedagogy they want to develop online. The POT Cert Class, which is free, global, and at the moment unsustainable, is being used by some to assure “training” rather than pedagogical preparation. We find ourselves in the position of providing a free service rather than a model, a service which surely should be funded by the state if “training” is so important.

My colleague Jim Sullivan and I have decided that the answer to all this training, standardization, and dependency is primarily journalistic. With all the information out there on “how to”, and all the institutional and administrative backing for training and standardization, it is important that we share, publicly and convincingly, the meaning and methods behind our “pedagogy first” approach. So we are changing the POT website, always in WordPress’ blog format anyway, into the Pedagogy First blog. Here we hope to invite the people for whom “pedagogy first” is the natural approach, to write and discuss. We will ask many of the wonderful people who have mentored and moderated our POT Certificate. We will ask folks to share their talents and techniques as well as their perspectives.

Because when mechanization encroaches on creative endeavor, it is important for artisans to articulate why their way is better, what value is added by their efforts.

Artisans unite.

Practice and principles

9 August 20149 August 2014 Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

The tension between theory and practice occurs in many fields, and it is certainly marked in online education. As with many academic disciplines, in online education the practice began without a foundation in research, since one can’t research what is essentially new.

As college professors, many of us began (years before there was online anything) by actually teaching. We had very little, if any, training in education or pedagogy. Some of us became good teachers anyway, because we loved what we did, we wanted to share our knowledge, and we cared about students. We learned about principles, research and techniques as we went along, and rolled them in to our practice.

So the idea that we should start with principles when introducing faculty to online teaching seems strange. We now have a good mix of professors who began as “just” practitioners, and those who have had training in teaching techniques. We learn from each other regularly.

So what are these principles, the ones I think should come later in the process? Jim Julius, our current Faculty Director of Online Education, recently put together a workshop on Foundational Principles. It was designed to be the “glue” that holds together a mashup of his office’s workshops with those of our Program for Online Teaching. We are running these this week.

His slides are great! Many of the useful principles I learned as I went along over the last couple of decades are there: Bloom’s Taxonomy, Universal Design, Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles, the Community of Inquiry model. So much useful stuff.

As a POT workshop presenter, I am not sure where to use these, however. I know that many faculty come to online teaching concerned about technology, time, and tools. They are professionals already in the classroom, and may be excited or fearful (or both) about teaching online. At POT, our motto has always been Pedagogy First. We want to start with faculty as professionals who have already developed their own approach to both their discipline and their teaching. To present them with principles seems to ignore the knowledge they already have, and suggests that they need to somehow “start over” to teach online, that they don’t have the information or skills they need. Our focus is on the individual instructor, and his/her pedagogical strengths. We want to help faculty translate these strengths into an online class, while exploring online environments and tools they may find interesting. So our approach goes the other way when it comes to principles – we help faculty review the methods they’ve already found effective, and work from there. The principles come up naturally during the evolution of practice.

3368092622_1db1cc79b6_z — The Cart Before the Horse, Flickr cc Emilio Labrador

As a practitioner, then, I find myself dealing with principles by reverse engineering from what I actually do. Here’s what I do, here’s what works – oh yeah, it happens to fit this model and is affirmed by this research. That may be proof of one of two possibilities: (1) I actually read this stuff somewhere without knowing it and unconsciously applied it (this seems unlikely) or (2) the techniques I developed through practice using (and continually revising) my pedagogy were good enough to be backed up by research that came later.

That does not mean that what I do could be considered “best practices”. Rather, they are the best practices for me to use, until I decide to try something else.

The concept of foundational principles, to me, seems to imply a model of “best practices” that apply to everyone. That may be a perfectly valid way to introduce newbies to online teaching, or it may do two very bad things for faculty: limit their approach by making it seem that a certain way is “right”, and intimidate them before they even start.

I am a historian. If I had been presented with the “principles” of History before I did any, I wouldn’t have gone into the field. Most disciplines are like this — the “methodology” or “proofs” course is taught at the sophomore or upper-division level, then again in graduate school.

POT’s Certificate Class tries to combine advice, exploration, self-awareness and a bit of theory, but always starts with the instructor’s pedagogy, not principles. So if we err, and I’m sure to some we do, it will always be on the side of practice over principles.

Models for task-based open online classes?

4 June 20144 June 2014 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Lately it’s been kind of eerie in the world of open online classes, at least those taught by folks whose work I respect the most.

Emblem7Bmed This year, our Program for Online Teaching leadership for the POT Certificate Class was down to three overworked facilitators, plus our wonderful moderators and those who let us use their videos. The class was definitely a Small Open Online Class, and since it had assigned readings and a schedule, and since MOOCs have become mega-commercial horrors, I no longer call it a MOOC of any sort anyway. For such a small group (60 registered originally), the community was fabulous, both supportive and knowledgeable. A little over a dozen learners completed and earned a badge for spring semester, and/or a certificate for the entire 2013-14 year.

The format of the class was different from the previous year (2012-13), where I had struggled (as a non-programmer) with FeedWordpress to bring in everyone’s feeds. Instead we used a Google Site. We asked everyone to post a link to their blog post at the Site, and engage in discussion at the Site instead of in the blog comments. I was able to bring in blog feeds easily using Gadgets.

I just took a peek at Alec Couros’ DCMOOC, and noticed participants in their Google Plus Community posting links to their weekly blog post. Aha!

Now, when it came to our POT Cert Class this year, there were some issues. I wasn’t delighted with the non-nested discussions in Google Sites, and we discovered that three people couldn’t really run the class effectively, even with moderators, when all three facilitators work full-time plus. But the need, at our college and elsewhere, for pedagogically-based learning about how to teach online is still there. So we decided to create a self-guided Learning Pathway instead.

Then I discovered there was already a Google Plus Community, to which I was invited, called Learning Pathways. Aha!

Anyway, I started creating the new Pedagogy First! Learning Pathway (work in progress is here), and my colleague Laura Paciorek has been helping. The idea is that the pathway is essentially comprised of curated content and assignments for a portfolio, and that any individual or group could participate and use the site for a “class” or individual study. Then for community, we plan to use our own POT Google Plus Community (mostly because some folks don’t like Facebook, where we also have a POT group).

So then I find that Jim Groom has created a self-directed class for ds106. Based on the successful Headless ds106, it is called the Open ds106 Course. Aha!

The synchronicity is striking, or at least it strikes me. And the trends for these classes, and many more, defy a number of assumptions I made when all this cMOOCishness and openness stuff started. I mean waaaay back in 2005 or so (which is also when I started the Program for Online Teaching).

(NB: I am deliberately ignoring xMOOCs, those based in commercial or university-commercial collaborations. My focus here is on what I’ve called Task-Based MOOCs.)

I am surprised to see that when it comes to task-based open online classes:

1. We haven’t ditched the “course”.

While we all acknowledge the importance of connections and helping people be nodes in a network, what this looks like in practice isn’t that different from any other sort of dedicated community that uses online space to interact. And we all continue to create some sort of teacher-designed content, even if it’s just a pathway through assignments or a schedule or a set of expectations.

2. We don’t have a wide variety of platforms from which to choose.

I believe that Alec Couros began designing open courses in wikis, but now is using WordPress. Jim Groom’s ds106 is WordPress-based also. So was OCTEL. Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOCMOOC used Instructure Canvas, but for most of the open classes and cMOOCs, WordPress seems preferred. I’ve moved back to it myself with the Learning Pathway, although the discussion will be in G+. I recall when the choices were more diverse, and even a time when Alec and I were searching for an open discussion program that featured nested posts, as in Moodle and Ning.

3. The personality/persona of the instructor continues to be a factor in the success of an open class.

Jim Groom, David Wiley, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Alec Couros, Jesse Stommel — all have distinct, interesting personalities and teaching styles. Participants, even while creating communities and connections, are guided not only by the design of the class but by the instructor’s presence. Without a teacher who inspires, an open online class is just a website.

Given these similarities, do we now have models for independent open online classes? And when it comes to designing an open online class, have we hit our stride or are we in a rut?

Course Footprints

26 November 201326 November 2013 Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

This morning I attended the session Footprints of Emergence, led in the SCoPE community out of British Columbia by Jenny Mackness, Roy Williams and Simone Gumtau based on their recent work published in IRRODL.

I have followed, and even worked a time or two, with Jenny, and am always interested in watching whatever she is working on. Since I missed the first session on November 19, I viewed the recording to catch up on the ideas. Then during the session, I had printed out a footprint map and tried filling it in for the POT Cert Course.

To oversimplify enormously, the idea of the footprint is based on a kind of map for a particular course or “complex learning environment”, and the emphasis is pedagogy and course design. The base map is a circle, with more structured, prescribed learning experiences toward the center, and more “emergent” (self-directed, expansive, connectivist) elements toward the outside, with “chaos” being the ultimate outside edge. The circle is divided into four areas: Open/Structure (the space or environment and how it’s set up), Interactive Environment (the extent of contextualization and interactivity), Presence/Writing (the learning process and product, or the way the learning is realized), and Agency (self-direction and autonomy of learning). A blank map, available in Word (I just printed out the image) looks like this:

Each quarter of the circle contains many factors that can be scaled across from more prescribed to more open (here’s one of the charts to explain each). Each can be marked on the map with a dot, and then the dots connected to make a shape. The more the shape is inwards, the more prescribed and directed the experience. The more near the edges the shape is, the more it emphasizes emergent learning. You can see other people’s examples of their courses here.

My interest at first was mapping out the design of the POT Certificate Class, because I knew that much of it is prescribed and I would like it to be more open, although that’s difficult with beginners. I would be mapping the class from the point of view of the designer. As I began, Scott Johnson, who was also in the session and has been with us at POT Cert, offered to map from the point of view of the student. Here’s mine – a footprint of POT Cert as it actually is, rather than my ideal:

Then Scott emailed me and said something about evaluations, and suddenly many possibilities occurred to me:

POT workshops could have faculty map their courses. We could guide them through as we were being guided in this workshop.
My students in history classes could do it, and I could see how their view compared with mine (another form of student evaluation).
K-12 teachers could use this across the curriculum, sharing their maps with each other.
Department members who don’t get along could map their own course to discuss differences in pedagogy.

Because what this system does, in addition to providing a way to think through ones own pedagogy, is create a presentation of ones course that can be seen at a glance and compared to others. It’s much easier than visiting a dozen classrooms or clicking through a bunch of online classes. It could spark conversations about pedagogical goals.

What it doesn’t do is dismiss the more prescribed modes of teaching and learning. Although they are closer to the centre and therefore literally less “edgy”, more controlled environments, materials and assessments are by no means considered as irrelevant. This is refreshing, as in my own experience I have found it very difficult to apply the utopian connectivist principles I love as a learner to my role as a teacher of underprepared community college students.

In the chat, Jenny commented that the idea here was balance, but perhaps it is more than that. These map lines can become fluid, changing at various times in the semester, or even for the individuals in the class. Perhaps a class begins with, for example, very limited agency, but as the course continues, that agency becomes more emergent. That’s what happens in my classes – as the semester goes on students have more and more freeedom to bring in resources of interest to them, while at the beginning things are much more instructor-directed.

Although I will undoubtedly make some adaptations, I will be using this somehow, to generate conversation by having participants actually do something (instead of just telling them to “reflect”). A light bulb went on with this – there are many places it could go.

The new Google-dominated POT Cert Class

5 September 20135 September 2013 Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

Last year, the POT Cert Class was set up in a WordPress blog, and I used the FeedWordPress plugin to pull in everyone’s blog posts. As an open class, some people participating in the class were doing cool things other than following the syllabus, so there was a separate Deep End page for their posts, where I used HungryFeed. The whole setup is explained here and here.

It became too complex for one person to handle, particularly when that person is me and problems occurred, like feeds not being pulled in and the fix being code-level.

So this year I had different goals. The plan was that everyone still have their own blog, but share the link to their weekly post in the Pedagogy First Google Plus Community.

But as I set up the WordPress blog (which was there for the syllabus, widgets, static material), I realized that there was no need for two systems. After consulting with my colleagues Jim (our blog meister), Laura (our commenter and organizer), and Todd (our captain of synchronicity), I shifted the whole thing to a Google Site. There was no need for the Community, since I had some old gadget that could do discussion.

sitespost

The only miscalculation was that my old gadget nested discussions, but when I moved the discussions to the new site, they didn’t nest. This made me angry, but I got over it. In the first place, each person would be posting a link each week, and everyone would reply to them anyway. And in the second place, it wasn’t worth going back to WordPress just for that. I will miss nesting, but it had just become necessary to simplify.

It was also, as Todd pointed out to me (after his initial concerns about Site, which he works with a lot), an opportunity to learn while doing while learning while doing. That’s what POT is all about anyway. So the fact that I’d never run a Google Site shouldn’t matter, and will be a challenge, and what the hell.

Yes, we’re missing some things doing it this way. Some things are bad:

1. I created a Google Form to have people register, then I manually Share the Site with them, getting their info off the registration form. So they must have a Google account (and I thought a gmail address, but it seems OK so long as the whatever address is accessed via Google). Google does not allow people to just have comment permission – everyone who comments must have full edit permission. But I trust everyone in the class – I know they won’t mess up the site. So as names come in, I must Share with full permissions.

2. Sites will only allow use of a limited number of “gadgets”, which are kind of like WordPress’ widgets but far less flexible.

3. I could not figure out at first why people who were logged in to Google already, and were given full permissions, could not comment. Turned out there is a little, tiny, teeny-weeny “sign in” link at the very bottom of the page. I turned it into a big button. I also found out that when other people log in, they see a link to a Google survey. So I did this next to the button:

sitesbutton
4. The list of those allowed to Share cannot be reorganized, so it’s hard to see if I’ve added someone already.

5. Gadgets are blind. You cannot see them until you save them, so you can only see them in non-edit mode, so if you use a lot of gadgets it’s hard to see what the hell you’re doing.

6. There is a Google Discussion gadget that I could have used instead of my old gadget (I still have no idea where it came from) but that would require putting everyone into a Google Group, yet another little Google box that would have to be set up. Then the forums would be gadgets. Yick.

But I’ve been able to do some cool stuff:

1. Weekly discussion links in the Navigation menu.

This took a little work, but Site’s More -> Edit site menu settings let me add pages, call them what I wanted, and put them in the order I wanted into the menu.

sitesnavmenu

2. A good substitute for those feeds.

Although it’s not the central way to read everyone’s work, I was able to create a page of feeds using the same gadget over and over.

addgadget

3. The site can be open yet protected.

Everyone can see everything, but only those with Edit permission can comment.

4. More cool things I don’t know about yet.

But I’ll find them!

Do I have reservations? Only about every five minutes. How could we do this? How could we put our discussions into such a space, dominated and controlled by Evil Empire #2 (or is it #3? I’m losing track)? What if Google cancels Sites next month?

Be flexible, Todd tells me. Be nimble. OK. Let’s do it.

POT Cert changes

28 May 201328 May 2013 Lisa M Lane 9 Comments

pflogo2 We are planning for the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class for fall, and there will be some changes!

We’re keeping the independent blogs.

After discussion about having all participants as authors on one blog, we’ve decided that the “space of ones own” concept was too important to lose. MiraCosta instructors will continue to have the ability to get a blog through the college. For others, we’re no longer encouraging Edublogs (which makes you pay now to embed video). We enthusastically encourage a hosted blog of ones own, but we realize not everyone is up to that challenge. We are moderately encouraging WordPress.com. We’re noting that Blogger seems to work rather well, so it’s the first time we’ll recommend that. Since we aren’t aggregating, there are more choices – people could even use Tumblr.

No more FeedWordpress or a big aggregated blog

This turned into a nightmare that could only be improved by being a coder, which I’m not. Dealing with recalcitrant feeds (and finding them when people can’t tell where they are) became a major time suck. I can use another plugin to create a page of feeds if I want to, but it won’t be the core of the course. I still recommend the FeedWordpress method to anyone who has coding knowledge, time, and/or the staff to make it work. I have no staff.

Commenting will be part of a larger community are instead of on the blogs.

Last year, posts were aggregated and clicking to comment led back to the participant’s blog. The blog and comment (call and response) model has not been working as well as we’d hoped.

There are many reasons for this, but my take is the basic idea that blogs weren’t really intended for conversation, only commenting. One purpose of blog comments was to make sure participants knew they weren’t blogging into a void, but this wasn’t always achieved despite the very best efforts of our mentors, moderators and participants. Requiring comments leads to useless comments, and not requiring them leads to very few comments. The method was not fostering community. And no, I don’t believe it would have done so even if the comments had stayed on the aggregated blog. Moderators weren’t really moderating a conversation, but rather giving attaboys which, while important, did not provide real conversation.

Instead, we’ll be asking participants to share a link to their weekly posts in a new Google Plus Community, which is where all discussion and commenting will take place.

No, this is not ideal. There are privacy concerns (well, not so much privacy as Inappropriate Gathering and Use of Personal Information) in forcing folks to use Google. The same was a concern in our Facebook Group, where much interaction has taken place. But in order to introduce participants to the largest social networks being used for education, and in order to have meaningful, recorded and open synchronous sessions, we’ve decided to go with Big Brother.

Workload is reduced and more options provided

It’s a heavy course, with much reading and many tools. We’ve reduced these by providing options (for example, try a video or audio tool, not one of each). We are moving some of the readings into an “optional” column.

A badge can be earned for one semester

We’ve changed the structure to divide the 24-week class into two 12-week semesters, each with a different focus: Online Pedagogy for fall, and Online Education (for spring). Each can earn a badge, with both badges within two years required for the certificate.

This will provide a reward for those completing one semester, and choice of focus. Fall is heavier on pedagogy and course setup; spring is heavier on tools and theory. Beginners will be encouraged to start in fall, but more experienced online instructors are welcome to hop in for spring.

So we’re still working, but these are the ideas so far!

More on setting up a WP/FWP Open Online Class

6 November 20126 November 2012 Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I administer the technology for our POT Certificate Class. This is despite the fact that I do not code, don’t know PHP, and basically taught myself anything I happen to know, with a lot of help from my online network. Over a year ago, I posted about the initial setup.

One of our class participants, Jaime Oyarzo at the University of Alcala in Madrid, is trying to create a similar setup at his place, and so has been asking me about what I’ve done. Responding to him gave me the opportunity to pick apart what I’ve done a little more.

Participants set up their own blog wherever. Then I need to get the feeds from those blogs into the Pedagogy First! aggregated blog, using FeedWordPress. I use the Add Link widget (yes, I know it’s old) so participants can add their own, and have provided more extensive instructions for them about blogs and feeds. In particular, we want people who post on many subjects to not only use the “potcert” tags for their posts, but use the feed for that tag only. This is so only their class-related posts show up on the class blog.

The back end of this process is a little more complicated. When participants enter their information in Add Link, it goes directly into the Blogroll. The Blogroll is what feeds into FeedWordPress as a default.

I customize the titles of feeds and the names of participants to use their real names for everything. I change the titles of feeds by going into FWP’s Syndication area and using Feeds & Updates. Using the drop down menu to bring up a particular blog, I change the title and click manual control so it doesn’t revert back the next time the feed updates. When I do this, it seems to update automatically in the Links area. Then I go to Users and make sure their names are their full names by editing them individually.

I also want a widget listing everyone’s blog so that readers can go directly to anyone’s blog at any time. For this, I use a Links widget with a Link Category (this year I called it “Certificate Students, Mentors and Facilitators”). On the Links page, I make sure that everyone’s blog is in that category so it shows.

I created this visual primary to show Jaime what I was doing – he helped me refine it:

For some reason, this year I have experienced no CPU throttling that I’m aware of. I’m using CPU throttling to check load because I had big trouble with it in my summer Moodle class – only 40 students and it was constantly overloading. But despite last year’s problems, I haven’t seen any problems yet, even though I forget to optimize the database more frequently than every two days, the default setting.

So just FYI for anyone trying to do this without knowing how to code.

Following those comments

5 October 20125 October 2012 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Since the demise of CoComment and co.mments, it’s been as difficult as it used to be to follow comments on blogs.

Fact is, if people don’t put a subscribe or email followup button on their blog, it’s impossible.

The only solution I’ve found, especially for the POT Cert Class where we have many blogs and lots of commenting, is to make a Google Reader feed bundle out of the comment feeds.

Each WordPress and Blogger blog has a separate feed for all the comments. You can find them by adding “/comments/feed” to a WordPress.org or Edublog URL, or “/?feed=comments-rss2” to a WordPress.com URL, or “/feeds/comments/default/” to a Blogger URL.

It wasn’t all fun and glory. Typepad, unfortunately, only has comment feeds for individual posts, not for the whole blog. Also, these feeds pull in all comments from the blog, not just the ones related to the “potcert” tag (anyone know how to change that?)

I added each participants’ feed into Google Reader and made a bundle, available here.

Although I appreciate Google’s ability to do this, I don’t like reading anything as a bundle or in their Reader. I much prefer Netvibes. So I took the RSS feed from the bundle, and put it into Netvibes:

Not ideal, but at least I can see what’s up on the blogs!

Noyes and open course design

12 September 201212 September 2012 Lisa M Lane

I’m going to let industrial designer Eliot Noyes inform me a bit about course design, as I watch Alec Couros design his #etmooc open class by using a Google Group. Alec was one of the very first to offer open online classes, by offering a regular class to his teacher education students, but opening the class to the world to participate. I took Alec’s EC&I831 as an enrolled student, partly to learn from him, partly to get credit I needed to advance on the salary schedule, and partly to be part of an open class from the “inside” and study the class design.

Since then I’ve designed the POT Certificate Class, and have abandoned the MOOC idea (or at least what it has become) in order to do what we want to do. Similar to Alec’s initial design, we have a core group of “students” (even though they are non-credit) and a surrounding “community” of helpers and mentors.

I have watched the designs of the big MOOCs evolve into three models, and for a task-based open class I have concluded this is the best design for us. The course is aimed at a particular group – we’ve been calling them newbies or novices but it might be more accurate to consider them as teachers or trainers who have been limited in their experience using the web for teaching. This might be because they’ve been forced to use an LMS, or because they do not participate in their own online networks related to their teaching. Either way, they spend their time making lesson plans and teaching, not participating in MOOCs.

POT’s organizers and facilitators have made the decisions about course design for the POT Cert Class, and there is a centrality to that role of facilitator that I think is important. (I have never been a fan of instructional designers creating courses for others to teach, because I believe that the process of class design is an inherent part of teaching.)

At the root of the POT Certificate Class is the idea that the individual instructor determines his/her own pedagogical approach, articulates it, then realizes it in the online environment through various technologies. The class reflects its own goals about what we want our participants to become, designers of learning experiences for their students. So…

Good design:

1. Fulfills its function

This wouldn’t work with a free-for-all design, since its function it to offer a guided experience. Teachers do not naturally examine and articulate their own pedagogy. That is the first step. They also may not know which articles or videos might be beneficial in their process of realizing this pedagogy. While open exploration could ultimately lead to these goals, most of our participants are busy professionals who have limited web experience. They seem to benefit from guidance and structure at first, then interpreting the usefulness of the proffered sources themselves, and then having the freedom to choose both tools and method.

2. Reflects its materials

In this case, the “materials” would be the affordances of the open web, which is why assignments are not limited to particular technologies – there are many that work, depending on the teachers’ goals. (A closed online class in online pedagogy offered inside an LMS would be an example of a course that does not to reflect the “materials” of the web.)

3. Is suited to method of production

While we don’t have a “product”, we do have a certificate that is based on the idea of full engagement and exploration through the curriculum. This engagement is demonstrated through weekly tasks and reflection, posted on their blogs. In furniture design, the design must take into account the manner in which the final product will be (usually mass-) produced. Although mass production of certificates (or certificate holders) is not the goal, the quality of each participant’s experience must be grounded in the method, in this case guided exploration, reflection and the creation of artifacts.

4. Combines these in imaginative expression

In some MOOCs, the imaginative expression is the entire point of the class. In the POT Cert Class we provide the framework through the curriculum, but when participants create their artifacts each week (blog posts, videos, audio files, etc) they are combining the function, materials and method by creating their own works in pursuit of their pedagogical goals.

While this may seem instructor-centered, both in the facilitation of the course itself and the objectives we have for participants, the ultimate goal is always effective learning for our students. As with teacher education and faculty communities, the goals can best be achieved by teachers engaging in course design. Charles and Ray Eames designed their chair, but it’s the person who has it in their living room who benefits from its aesthetics and comfort.

I think Noyes’ elements are as useful for course design as they are for furniture design.

Image source: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/01/0127_eliot_noyes/source/2.htm

Workflows for the POT Cert blog

7 September 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane

Some information on how I’m formatting the WordPress blog for our Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class at Pedagogy First! (I blog, you know, to help me remember what I’ve done. In this case, I’m also blogging about this process because others are trying to design similar courses and ask what I’m doing.)

Bringing in the Feeds

To join the POT Certificate Class, participants have been adding their feed via the (outdated, I know) Add Link widget, which pushes the info into the Blogroll. Then FeedWordPress picks up the Blogroll to syndicate.

The feeds that are put into the widget usually need some hand-worked corrections. Some people don’t know their feed and just put in the blog URL. Others are rightfully confused by the stupid complexity of discovering a feed, or discovering the feed for the “potcert” tag that’s supposed to be used by folks who blog about other things also (thus this page of advice).

Customizing the Feeds by Hand

As the Blogroll gets longer, two things happen.

First, it’s hard to tell whose blog is whose. Add Link uses the standard name of the feed as it comes in, so it can be something like WhatamIdoinghere>>potcert. I have to go to the blog to see that WhatamIdoinghere is a blog written by John Smith.

I want to change the name to John Smith so it shows that way in the blog roll. To do this I have to go into FeedWordPress Syndication, go to the feed, and change the name to Edit manually. Otherwise (if I just change it in Links) it reverts every time a post is brought in.

Coming in through the Blogroll also means that all authors are added as Users. I also have to edit their names by hand, since they often come through oddly as the username from their blog.

Splitting Blog Posts into Two Parts of the Swimming Pool

Getting more complex, I wanted the Blogroll split into types of participants, listing Certificate Students, Mentors, Facilitators, Non-Certificate Contributors, and Cohorts under separate headings.

I only wanted the certain types feeding on to the main page, the Certificate Students and Facilitator posts especially, the posts that belong in the “shallow end” of the pool where newbies are learning.

I wanted the rest of the posts feeding onto a separate page that’s super easy to get to, for the “deep end” of the pool (with diving boards and toys and people doing cannonballs).

But, the way FeedWordPress works, only one Link Category can be syndicated. In the original setup, this Category is the Blogroll (a default). WordPress no longer supports subcategories. I tried the Hierarchical Links Categories plugin to create subcategories, but although it does list everything correctly in Links, the subcategories don’t show up in the Links widget for the Blogroll on the main page. So I had to group Certificate Students, Mentors and Facilitators as one category that’s really the Blogroll.

For the deep end, the separate page of contributions from Non-Certificate Contributors I loaded all their feeds into Google Reader, created a Bundle, then wanted to take the RSS feed for that bundle and somehow put it on a Page. I first tried the RSS in Page plugin. They did all feed, in full form, onto the Non-Cert Posts page. But they were ugly. The Google Bundle page itself looked great, but I was unable to embed it in a Page using iframes or templates. It just wouldn’t show up as a web page.

So I tried other plugins.

WP RSS Multi Importer let me add the feeds one at a time and attributed them to the source, but lost all the formatting, creating big blocks of text.

WP RSS Aggregator just put links, not the actual posts.
SilenceSoft RSS Reader did the same.
Fetch Feed shortcode pageable showed the html code of the posts.

HungryFEED was perfect. It let me take the Google Reader feed and format it so it looked good. I could even increase the size of post titles and authors.

I can see this as a good way to create a blog for any class (such as a History honors class) and allow external feeds of all kinds to be on a page – the readings could all be added this way, for example.

Alan Levine explained in a comment on my last post that I could use categories a certain way in FeedWordPress to do something similar, but I couldn’t figure it out. FWP had already added a ton of categories along with the feeds, and the way to get just one category to feed on the main page while another fed on a separate page was beyond me.

When the Blog Went Down

Thanks to Alan Levine providing a link to here, I was able to add a bit of code to the .htaccess file inside the WordPress folder for the blog to automatically redirect people to a static site while the blog was down. It was up and down in multi-hour stretches for the entire week before and several days after the class began, until Bluehost got tired of me begging and moved my account to another server.

At the end of the standard code in the .htaccess file, after # END WordPress, I just added:

Redirect 301 /wppf12 http://lisahistory.net/potcertbackup

This created the proper redirect and I just erased it when the blog was stable again.

Three Spaces

This one I haven’t solved yet.

As it stands, I need all people who want to participate in the class to email me first, both to make sure we have room and so I can keep their email for my email list.

I also need all participants to provide information on a Registration Survey, including their blog URL and feed. We need their emails to contact them, their goals so we know who’s going for the certificate, their location to get them mentors nearby, etc. So I have a Google Doc survey for that.

But in addition to emailing me and doing the survey, participants also need to add their feed to the blog themselves. That’s three places they need to go.

On the main website, I have directions:

But oddly, not everyone follows them, so I have some some participants who just me, some who put all their stuff on the survey but no email and no feed, and some who put their feed into the blog without doing either the survey or emailing me (this I thought was rude so I put a password on it).

The three different places is confusing, and the survey is a problem because people can’t fully do it until they have a blog set up already, and that usually happens after they’re in the class.

A FAQ

The last step I’m working on is making a FAQ. The one from last year was only about the Certificate itself, how to get it, how to get flex credit at MiraCosta. It has become apparent that we need to answer questions about getting a blog, setting it up, finding a feed, understanding the terminology (blog, post, comment, feed, RSS) etc.

In future, we should provide an on-campus workshop to do some badly needed f2f for our own instructors, broadcast on the web or duplicated with cohorts, who I believe are already doing something similar. The two-week pre-class workshop in Facebook was designed to provide this, but for the most part those who attended it already had set up their blog. Newbies started right on September 1. Must be all that educational institution training! We may even pull back the date so people new to blogging can get set up before the class starts.

Dividing the Pool

4 September 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

I’ve gotten out the rope with the red floaty balls and divided the pool.

The main page of the POT Certificate Class now features posts from those who enrolled to earn a certificate, their mentors, and our facilitators. It’s the shallow end. We’ll all do the same thing, learn the same strokes, wear the water wings, till everyone is comfortable.

A separate page now features posts from those who wanted a larger experience, not so guided, more open to big ideas, comparisons and experimentation. It’s the deep end, where you can dive, swim laps real fast, or do cannonballs, and no one will complain.

Getting ready for the POT Online Certificate Class (the SMOOC)

8 July 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

I’m getting the new Pedagogy First! blog set up for the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class, our open online class to help prepare folks to teach in a web environment. We’ll start officially September 1. It’s a 24 week class that runs 12 weeks in fall and 12 weeks in spring. People can participate from anywhere as we learn and blog our progress together. We’re still drafting, but the syllabus and instructions are being set up here.

We had 90 participants to start last year, from all over the world, with 16 completing the full requirements for the certificate.

Our big change from last year is that, like the wonderful ds106 at UMW, we’re going to expect participants to set up their own blog in a hosted environment. Last year we encouraged the use of Edublogs or WordPress.com, but we quickly found out that these services are starting to charge money for the basic things we need to do, like embed media.

So we’re doing two things to encourage people to get in there and get dirty early on. The first is a two-week workshop prior to the class starting, which will take place in the POT Facebook group. Led by myself and Todd Conaway, we’ll try to answer questions and help people out. Our second approach is to move some of the reading and other tasks for later in the course, so that people can have more time to wrestle with WordPress in the first couple of weeks.

I’m having my own technical problems, of course, just like I did last year. Again, I am unable to figure out why some of the syndicated feeds coming in through FeedWordpress are saying “Comments are closed” even though they are set to open on both the home blog and in the theme and FWP settings on the aggregated blog.

As always, it’s just us, a small group of volunteer faculty we call the Program for Online Teaching, plus our previous participants and certificate earners helping as mentors and moderators. We call it a SMOOC because it’s a Small to Medium Open Online Course (unlike the Massive MOOCs with thousands of people – we’re small and we’re proud).

The tag will be “potcert12” in Twitter and elsewhere, and you needn’t commit to a certificate to join in the fun. Open, casual, one-night-stand participants are welcome – we’ll just need the feed for your tagged posts when the time comes. Won’t you join us?

Presentation on our SMOOC

4 July 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane

Laura Paciorek and I presented at Ed-Media last week and we created a video of the session (hard to see, since it’s recorded from a netbook), a slidecast of Laura’s presentation on Simul-learn setups for synchronous sessions, and a slidecast of my presentation on POT’s Online Teaching Certificate Class, here:

A SMOOC for preparing faculty to teach online http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=asmoocforpreparingfacultytoteachonline-120704125654-phpapp02&stripped_title=a-smooc-for-preparing-faculty-to-teach-online&userName=ProgramforOnlineTeaching

Here’s a transcript of the first nine or so minutes, for anyone interested in starting the class in September.

Why CC-BY just isn’t good enough

11 June 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

I was contacted recently by 3C Media, who does the media work for the California Community Colleges at the Chancellor’s Office. They let me know that my presentation for the POT Certificate Class from last February, Control and Freedom in Online Classes, was being converted and uploaded to YouTube. They asked me to help them apply a description, attributions, etc. Two things struck me about this. The first was that I used their Collaborate system for the presentation, and although I have no problem with this presentation being posted in public, I have used their system before for meetings and office hours that I would not want public. I had no idea they even looked at our meetings.

But I find another aspect even more interesting. When I went to fill out their form to help out, the only option for Creative Commons was the BY (Attribution) restriction, with reuse allowed. Or I could use the YouTube Creative Commons license which is, guess what, only Attribution also, reuse allowed.

A little while back, the controversy over the design of Curtis Bonk’s class led to some interesting comments from those involved in Blackboard/Coursesite, including here on my blog. In response to that and to Audrey Watter’s commentary , Jarl Jonas wrote that:

“once the course concludes, we will publish the package as an OER as a Blackboard and Common Cartridge package with a CC-BY license”

The term OER (Open Educational Resource) is used to distinguish it from a course cartridge that you may use only if you force your students to buy a textbook, or one that only works in one LMS.

I am seeing this more and more: CC-BY as proof of openness, a passport to the world of the trendy edupunks and transparency in education. But it’s not that simple.

Basic Attribution (CC-BY) doesn’t do much for open learning, or even sharing. It’s the NC (non-commercial) and SA (share-alike) aspects of Creative Commons licensing that makes for openness. Attribution simply means anyone can use the work so long as they attribute it, as part a Cartridge package or inside a website, but with no obligation to openness at all. They can take the package, close it off in a system, and charge for access to that system.

This is likely a misunderstanding along the lines of knowing the difference between openness as in Open API and openness as in Open Source. Some people think Open API and Open Source are the same when they aren’t. For example, here Pearson OpenClass is referred to as open source, when it’s actually open API. Open API is like Playdoh. We can make things out of it, but we can’t have the secret formula.

So we are confusing my presentation as posted on YouTube, or a free LMS course cartridge of Bonk’s class, with free, open (attributed, non-commercial, shared back) use of our work.

So, CC-BY isn’t good enough. We can’t any longer suppose that our work will not be of financial gain to someone, someday, in a new publishing model. And we must recognize it’s no longer really about content (which many of us post freely on the web).

Much of the content of Yale’s and MIT’s open courses are Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, and they are very specific that you can’t package and resell their stuff . But the companies that used to be creators of software for holding “content” are now hosts of learning platforms and providers of services (witness Blackboard’s aquisition of vendor Moodlerooms). They lose nothing by freely distributing the work of other people. Without a Non-Commercial clause, they can profit from it directly. Without a ShareAilke clause, they need not create and share anything of their own.

And they can use other people’s stuff to sell “community”. Information can be collected on hundreds or thousands of students coming to take a free course. These are future “customers”, and the information gathered may help future customers signing up for services. These companies will handle all that tough technology stuff — you just hand over your content, all CC-BY licensed so they can use it later.

Doesn’t sound like a good deal, or a very open one, to me.

So the presentation’s at Vimeo (where they let you choose CC BY-NC-SA).

Web 2.0 Fail: Back to the Tree at the Fork in the Road?

4 April 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Chris P Jobling via Flickr

This is a story of failure. Not, at first, the good kind of failure, the kind that leads to growth. In this case, it’s the kind of failure that leads you to go back on the trail, to find that tree around which you tied the ribbon, and take the other fork in the road.

For many years, I did all my web stuff myself. This was before a whole lot of software or webware – it was all HTML, which I taught myself from a For Dummies book (Quick Reference, 1997). Oh, and we had Webboard 1 (they’re on 9 now) for threaded discussion. Geeks used IRC and other ways to talk in real time. The sound of the modem was music to my ears.

Then Web 2.0 happened, and it was so exciting and easy to use all the cool stuff. Flickr for photos! Blogger and WordPress.com for blogs! Twitter for microblogging! You could post all your stuff, even create stuff, and there it is, all for free. No need to know HTML!

I should have known better. I’m a historian.

Problems at Pedagogy First!

Most of our participants at Pedagogy First!, at our encouragement, have been using Edublogs or WordPress.com for their blogs. At first, these blogging services provided for free the means to upload the things our participants created as part of the class. But, as time has gone on, fewer features have been enabled for free accounts at these services.

The number of plugins that both services offer has also decreased. We have been exploring workarounds in response to the decline in services like embedding media. First it was Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, where you could just by typing the URL into WordPress.com but Edublogs wasn’t so easy. Then we couldn’t get Edublogs to embed Jing or Slideshare (and WordPress.com could only if we used Vodpod).

Now our intrepid participants are posting audio and sure enough, WordPress.com won’t let them embed audio on the free account using an upload. So the trick here is to upload ones audio “somewhere on the web” and put in a shortcode like .

To upload “somewhere” means they really should have access to a web folder somewhere and know how to ftp to it, or try a service (I tried yourlisten.com, but it didn’t work). As they helped each other, they discovered Soundcloud could work. But this sort of thing is dicey and inconsistent, and it freaks out the newbies. Come on, everybody, let’s run all over the web looking for ways to do something simple!

Problems for Me

At the same time, I have been experiencing problems with my own free services. Posterous won’t convert my video to embed it, regardless of the codec used. I recorded the weekly message to my students in Eyejot, and it didn’t send it to me for four days. Flickr wants money to share my photos with others.

And then I look at ds106, harbinger of all things self-participatory. Jim Groom at UMW just raised money for a separate server, and they’re giving students domain names and web hosting so everyone can run their own blogs (not, you’ll note, using WordPress.com or Edublogs).

Going Backward

So is it time to go back to that tree? Back up (beep, beep, beep) the road of Web 2.0 “freemium” service providers, who (like insurance companies) are charging us more and delivering less, and get back to that DIY spirit? I always recommend some DIY anyway – keeping your files on your own computer to protect them from loss, never writing anything directly into a system. Now we may have to build learning units around it.

As we revise the syllabus for next year’s Pedagogy First! class, I’m asking my colleagues whether we should recommend some hosting, and teach everyone how purchase hosting space and create their own blog (as ds106 did last year). Our college’s super computer guy is happy to administer some WPMU blogs for MiraCosta participants, which is wonderful, but every plugin will have to be approved and updated, and/or faculty will need to be taught how to use their web folder and upload things, a whole different level of web comprehension. They won’t know why they should make the choice between uploading to their web folder and uploading into WP — too many choices is bad for newbies. And, if this year is anything to go by, 75% of participants won’t be from MiraCosta, or won’t want a MiraCosta-controlled blog. We’ll need to teach them how to not only set up a blog but get a hosting account (likely at Hippie Hosting for $12/year), install WordPress, and then set it up. It’s a year long class, but still…

This was the sort of thing we taught in 1998. Here’s some HTML. Here’s how to ftp. Now have fun. Blog platforms should make it easier, but in their current push toward monetization, they really are adding another layer, something else to be learned, instead of substituting for that back end knowledge. We didn’t whine in 1998 about learning the back end — you had to know some in order to teach online.

Walking away

As for me, I’m creating a new WordPress blog of my own and using Posterous Importer to transfer my ds106 blog. And I’m crawling through those php.ini files trying to fix problems, knowing I cannot expect novices to do that in the fall.

I also know, of course, that you can never really go back….

A Hangout Video: Differences Between Online and On-site Pedagogy

21 March 201228 August 2018 Lisa M Lane

Some members of the POT certificate class met in a Google Plus Hangout last week to talk about the differences between online and on-site pedagogy, and two of us tried to record it (myself, using Screenflow, and Walter Muryasz, using Snapz Pro).

On Walter’s video, he was never seen in the big window, because it was his computer (I think), and the visual quality wasn’t that good. On my video, I was never seen in the big window, though the video quality was better. On Walter’s video, he could not be heard. On my video, I could not be heard. In my case, I realized this was because I had not checked the button for recording microphone audio, only computer audio. I feared echo.

Which is funny, since the only way to get a full audio recording for this was to use Audacity to combine the audio from both videos. There was echo anyway even before I did that, and loud sounds of people sniffing (including me), clearing throats, rustling papers, but…

What the hell. We got a recording, and it was a damned good discussion. I’m also going to upload it to YouTube to see if I can get it to caption, at least at a rudimentary level.

Differences Between Online and On-site Pedagogy from Program for Online Teaching on Vimeo.

Embedding in WordPress.com and Edublogs

16 February 201218 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

When the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class began over at Pedagogy First!, we asked everyone to start a blog for posting their weekly assignments. Not wanting to cost anyone anything, we recommended Edublogs and WordPress.com. We got together a big syllabus of assignments, and thought we were off and running.

Oooops. Some of the things we were asking people to do wouldn’t work, even though we tried to be helpful with the how-to. These were things that were second nature to those of us running our own blogs on our own servers, like embedding video, audio and slideshows. We’re used to full access to a myriad of plug-ins for doing fun things. But these just aren’t available on the free services, and we didn’t know.

It’s audio, video and screencast time, and some people can’t embed to show us their stuff.

So I’m researching workarounds.

For WordPress.com

Here’s one for using Vodpod to embed Flickr, by Gavin Wray. I tried it and here’s the result. It worked, but I did it differently.

http://www.screenr.com/embed/83ys” />http://www.screenr.com/embed/83ys” allowFullScreen=”true” wmode=”opaque” AllowScriptAccess=”always” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” />

So I went to all this trouble, only to find that Flickr slideshows (and YouTube and Vimeo) embed just fine anyway, just by putting their URL on a separate line in a post!

Vodpod as workaround

So I tried things that can’t be embedded that simple way. Vodpod was the answer to two issues:

1) Slideshare, a slidecast with music. Vodpod said it wouldn’t accept the embed code from that site. So I just put in the URL. And it worked.

2) Jing. I used the URL http://www.screencast.com/t/gL1VF7SS2 and no problem. (It wouldn’t work with a Quicktime upload I put in Screencast, but it worked fine with a standard Jing in the Flash format.)

(Vodpod kept saying it was uploading to Facebook instead. But I told it WordPress, and it can’t load to Facebook because it doesn’t have my account.)

For Edublogs

In Edublogs, this Vodpod trick doesn’t work. You get an error code in Vodpod saying you need XML-RPC services, which you can’t enable without Edublogs Pro. That makes Slideshare and Jing a problem for Edublogs. Know any workarounds?

SMOOC half-way point

2 January 20122 January 2012 Lisa M Lane

I am going over the mid-year surveys from our Pedagogy First! SMOOC (Small-to-medium open online class), and looking for patterns. It was a Google spreadsheet survey, so the summary isn’t very user-friendly, but here it is because it has pretty pie charts [pdf]. 42 people filled it out.

An overview of what’s up:

93% believe the class so far has been a positive learning experience. This is very high!

In terms of objectives, 62% are taking the class to improve teaching skills, and 21% to increase their knowledge of online tools for teaching.

In terms of goals, 62% intend to earn a POT online teaching certificate, while 24% are following along but intend to post only occasionally.

About the certificate, 38% are earning it to fulfill their own expectations, and 24% to advance their employment options. This is despite the fact that the certificate is an informal badge, issued by the volunteer Program for Online Teaching faculty, not an accredited institution of any kind. 36% are not going for the certificate.

So far, 29% have fulfilled the entire syllabus, and 17% plan to make up missed work.

31% started off well but personal or professional conflicts meant they stopped participating. This is of the 42 answering the survey, but the original number of participants was about 90, so most people have dropped. This was expected given the attrition in other MOOCs.

In terms of community, about a fifth feel strongly connected, and a fifth feel only partly connected. More interestingly, 38% say they feel only partly connected and that’s fine – we have a number of independent learners.

The sticky post we use for each week at the top of the blog is helpful to 76% of those surveyed. 88% felt the weekly email was helpful. So it may be that doing both is a good idea.

57% participated to some extent in the Facebook group, but 36% didn’t by choice. I know that several participants are leery of Facebook because of their horrid privacy policies, but given the 38% that don’t want more community connections, 57% is pretty high!

Although 48% are happy with the colleague connections, 24% want more emphasis on commenting on each other’s blogs. This is interesting, since everyone has been encouraged to do this, and doing so is up to the participants. 21% want a Google group or more formal place for discussion (only 3 people want to use Facebook for this). If we set something up, of course, the risk is fewer blog comments, so….

Mentors have been very or somewhat helpful to 53% of participants, but 21% didn’t get help and didn’t ask for it, and 26% didn’t know who their mentor was. We might want to put out a list so that mentors feel more responsible and participants know who to contact. We relied on mentors to contact their 4 or 5 mentees, but there may have been a communication gap.

45% see online teaching as a mode of delivery, which is probably the most basic definition. 24% see it as a separate discipline. Others didn’t choose either, or believed they were combined. Only 14% saw it as a subset of teaching in general.

74% claim to have gained confidence in selecting tools for online teaching. This is excellent.

81% feel ready to build a class around their own pedagogy instead of being led solely by the technologies they’re using. Also excellent!

Concerning class design, 60% like it the way it is, with assigned readings/viewings, required posts, and participants blogging in their own space. Comments indicate participants want more about designing discussion, building community, and creating assessments, with an emphasis on reflection. 12% (five participants) wanted less work overall.

Participants have enjoyed blogging, reading the Ko and Rossen textbook, trying lots of tools, and interacting with a community. Concerns mostly revolved around participants not having the time they hoped they’d have to participate more fully, and some felt there was just too much, especially too many tools to try. Since one of the things they most enjoyed was trying the tools, and one of the biggest concerns was too many tools, these may cancel each other out.

Seven participants (17%) indicated they would have liked less tool exploration and more emphasis on the reading in the first semester. Although this isn’t very many articulating this, I saw evidence that this was a problem in other ways, including frustration with tools in the first several weeks. This was exacerbated by people needing help and time setting up their own blog. We may need to provide more time for that in the first few weeks.

Notes from POT Luck 8 Dec 2011

8 December 20118 December 2011 Lisa M Lane

Today a group of us met in Google Plus Hangout. Everyone from the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class and Facebook Group is always invited, and it’s an open session. Today we had Todd, me, Walter, Norm, Maha, and Ted from POT Cert, and we were joined by Zack and Scott (that’s geographic representation from Arizona, northern and southern California, Dubai, New York, Alabama, and Japan).

Run by our Captain of Synchronous Sessions, Todd Conaway, the sessions have fallen into a Thursday pattern. Although originally envisioned as question and answer sessions for POT Cert Class participants, or maybe even a training or how-to opportunity, the fact that more experienced people tend to join has transformed the format into something more exploratory. The past few times people have shared sites they’re working with, in particular those focused on collaboration, mirroring what we’re doing in the sessions. As a result, we have spent several hour-long sessions following each other into various collaborative environments and trying things out together in real time.

But sometimes we’re awfully silly. Maybe it’s the Google Hangout moustaches, or the way we all go into somewhere and one (always one) of us can’t get the damn thing to work, or the serendipitous arrival of people we’ve heard of but never met. Maybe it’s how I can say, “I don’t know if this works on a smart phone” and everyone whips out their phones to try. We all have our little foibles (Ted won’t do anything Facebook; I won’t do anything that costs money). Anyhow, it’s quite fun.

So I said I’d take notes today, which we had designated a POT Luck — everyone bring something to share. Walter shared how he uses instapaper‘s “read later” feature to stay organized, and showed us the resource page for Curtis Bonk’s The World is Open and his popular video series about online teaching. Ted shared how he used Zoho Sheet‘s embed code to embed a formula-based assessment worksheet into a Posterous class blog. We talked about apps we played with last time, particularly Qikpad (for instant collaboration with polls and features), and tried to watch video together. We looked at ifttt so we could Put the Internet to Work for Us and, although fascinated by the variety of conditional activities, weren’t sure yet that we had a good way to use it.

Other failed ideas included: FERPA t-shirts that say “It’s OK – I am not doing this in records maintained by the school”, having everyone pitch in for one Livescribe pen and mail it around, and actually reading instructions on a $6 bar of salted chocolate. We were enchanted by Scott’s use of a fancy radio microphone that made him sound wonderful despite the early hour in Japan, and he contributed a site for transcribing mp3 for captioning if used in Chrome.

We’ll do it again — all our distributed activities like this are posted on the … Distributed Activities page at the class site. The class is open, the synchronous sessions are open — won’t you join us?

Why it’s gotta be faculty

29 November 201118 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Here’s my new acronym: FLCP. It stands for Faculty-Led Community of Practice.

I am working my way through the implications of Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice, mostly trying to decide whether the Program for Online Teaching‘s open, online Certificate Class is one, or should be one, or could be the start of one, or isn’t one at all.

As I did this, I began to consider that what makes our class different is that POT itself, our own group that facilitates the class, is led by faculty. Now, I love educational technologists, instructional designers, and people with masters degrees in the technology-oriented areas of education. But these positions are new compared to college faculty (which go back to the Middle Ages). Both are hired by institutions, to be sure. But there are some major differences that I think justify why communities of practice, particularly those relating to online teaching and the use of internet technologies for education, should be led by faculty.

The first and most important is that faculty-led communities can provide a focus on individual pedagogy instead of institutional goals, procedures, and culture. Often IDs and ed techs answer to the computer department heads, or deans of technology. They must keep institutional goals, enterprise systems, and political issues in mind. This can make individual pedagogy a secondary issue. The emphasis is often on enacting college policies (fulfilling transfer requirements,or student learning outcomes) rather than developing an instructor’s own approach. And often these possible approaches can be trapped due to institutional decisions to limit pedagogy through the support of a particular LMS or campus-developed system. I can’t think of a single educational technologist working at a college who has the power to make decisions about which technologies the institution supports. They, and instructional designers, tend to be caught in between the decisions of higher ups who want to invest in enterprise systems and make everyone use them, and the faculty trying to find their way.

Since centralized IT and educational administrative systems tend to focus on standardized systems, the institutional solution to unprepared faculty tends to be an emphasis on “training”. In this case the word is improperly used to define preparation for teaching online. “Training” is designed to bring everyone in the group to the same place, such as a level of skill for using a piece of software — training everyone to use the features of a learning management system would be a primary example. “Preparation” does not carry that connotation of homogeneity. “Education”, which would be even better, might suggest individual goals as the foundation of the work.

So instead of “best practices” (now often the domain of “experts), we could focus on “our practices”, those that best match the instructor’s strengths with the technological possibilities.

Faculty-led projects can also break down hierarchy. If the core group includes adjunct faculty, then barriers are broken down between full-time and part-time faculty. When it comes to teaching with internet technology (or just teaching in general), both groups have exactly the same issues. Folks connected to administration and technical services have to consider the groups differently (one clearly gets more support than the other), but a faculty group doesn’t.

In addition, if faculty are able to lead such a community, it says something in response to a novice’s concerns about being overwhelmed, having too many students, too much work, too much to do. Working with the technology is what educational technologists, administrators, and instructional designers do all day as their regular job. When they try to lead faculty in making changes, there is a feeling that, sure, those guys can do this stuff all the time, because it’s all they do. If a faculty member (or several of them) have made time for this, it must be crucial somehow to our main job, teaching.

Another benefit is that faculty-led communities of practice can act separately from formal evaluation processes, program reviews, curriculum development, etc. They can also work across the disciplines, apart from discipline-specific and department politics, including turf wars and disputes over standards.

I’ve been reading portions of Palloff’s and Pratt’s The Excellent Online Instructor, and at the end of a section they say that if you don’t have a formal process for getting online faculty together, you can make it yourself by hosting brown-bag lunches or hosting a synchronous meeting online. Although this is true (in some ways that’s how POT began) this puts faculty leadership in a backup position, when it should be the main idea. Faculty groups shouldn’t be playing shortstop to what technologists hit — they should be pitching.

But of course there are a couple of caveats. In George Otte’s article on faculty development and blended learning, he warns against “Shock and Awe”, having highly experienced and competent online faculty held up as a model to emulate. He says people admire such faculty (they are shocked by how much time it must have taken and awed by the result), but they think they are exceptional and don’t copy them. He claims that community-building is primary, and suggests an emphasis on hybrid courses as a good middle ground to encourage faculty to build dedication to teaching online.

Whether it emphasizes the hybrid model or one that’s fully online, a community of practice formed and led by faculty should be the place where new faculty are welcomed into a culture that puts teaching first. In this way, they can develop their own online pedagogy in a supportive environment.

Sources:

Otte, G. (2005). Using blended learning to drive faculty development (and vice versa). In J. Bourne and J. Moore (Ed.), Elements of Quality Online Education, Volume 6 in the Sloan-C Series (pp. 71-83).
Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2011). The Excellent Online Instructor: Strategies for Professional Development. Jossey-Bass, An Imprint of Wiley.
Wenger, E. (2006). Communities of practice – a brief introduction. Retrieved from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro.htm.

Class design: is One Blog the middle ground?

27 October 201118 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

I have now been a student in three separate classes where I ran my own blog to do the class assignments (CCK08, EC&I831 and ds106). My classes for students are all designed with an LMS-based forum, within which outcomes have been achieved well thus far (I implemented the basic format in 2009).

So now, as I consider departing from an LMS for at least one of my classes for spring, the question is: should I have each student create his/her own blog, then aggregate them, and have them comment on each others’ blogs for discussion? That’s been the model in all three classes I’ve taken, and is the model for Pedagogy First!, where we’ve been using 90 individual blogs for the POT Certificate Class, aggregated to one central website.

But is this the best way for my own classes?

In a more typical online class, discussion takes place in a forum. This keeps things focused and in one place. People are used to forums. All the classes I’ve seen with distributed activities instead of forums have students begging for a forum, whether it’s a threaded forum in an LMS, a Google group, or a Ning. People want a central place to talk, and an aggregated blog made of up all their disparate posts can become just an information center, not a coffee house.

My brilliant colleague Jim Sullivan teaches English composition using a class blog. Students are all authors on it, and they blog there, not on their own blogs. We’ve discussed this many times, and I’ve rejected it because students don’t control their own space. I think they should, but I’m aware that the idea of helping hundreds of students with their technical problems has been a major hurdle to moving ahead. Now it occurs to me that Jim’s approach may be the pedagogically middle ground rather than just easier and more convenient for me (I like pedagogical middle grounds).

A traditional forum in an LMS is set in its pattern and closed in its format (once the class is over, you usually can’t access it). Having everyone create their own blog lets students have their own permanent space, but really doesn’t encourage discussion (as I’ve discovered running Pedagogy First!). Is the One Blog approach the middle ground?

Is it open and available?

It can be open and as loose as I want, and since I run my own WordPress I can promise it will stay open (Jim runs his own Typepad).

Is there a sense of student ownership?

While students don’t run their own space, students may feel that the One Blog is their space collectively, rather than individually (a classroom they can help create). This could subconsciously create a feeling of community.

Does it provide a good place for discussion?

Yes — not as much as a traditional forum, but more than individual blogs, because it is in one place and everyone is signed in just once, rather than being a guest on other people’s blogs. Plus, WordPress comments are nested. I have searched long and hard and have been unable to find forum software that is free, nests the comments so you can see which comments reply to which, and will tolerate multimedia.

Isn’t Ning a middle ground?

Ning is a social networking platform, a damned good one (nested! multimedia!), but to use it for free you have to advertise for Pearson. That isn’t middle ground — if there’s any advertising in my class at all (and I think there shouldn’t be) it should be incidental, not deliberate and appearing as if I am a spokesperson sponsoring a product (in many ways, this includes Blackboard and Moodle). And I don’t have time right now to figure out how to use an open source social networking platform (such as Oxwall) on my own service.

Although until now I’ve only used blogging for class as a student, I do use the blog platforms for my History 103 and History 104 at San Elijo. They’re not actually blogging on these (in terms of reflection or graded items), but rather posting theses for papers they turn in, and working together to create collections for class presentations. I could start by expanding this set-up into the One Blog format.

Sooooo…..

what am I not thinking of here as I make this decision?

Embedding stuff: the missing manual

24 October 201118 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

We’ve had some assignments at Pedagogy First! lately where we asked people to embed stuff, but didn’t tell them how! 8-0

Sooo….Here is a YouTube video on embedding a Slideshare slidecast into Blackboard, Moodle and WordPress:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um6qfT_gpbU&w=533&h=301]

Here is another, on embedding a Jing video from Screencast.com into Blackboard, Moodle and WordPress:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTmJwtTBBFM&w=524&h=296]

And here is one on embedding a YouTube video (like these) into a WordPress post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVSMHyANdLY&w=527&h=297]

Comment feed bundle to get around the GFWC

22 October 201118 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 8 Comments

We’ve had a problem in the POT Cert Class at Pedagogy First! One of our mentors, Brandon Davis-Shannon, made a Google bundle for all the feeds coming in from everyone’s blogs, which is great. Plus he posted for everyone on how to use them.

It turns out that edublogs is blocked in China, so our participants there can only read the posts either through Pedagogy First! which is aggregated, or Brandon’s bundle. But they can’t read the comments (or post any) so they’re missing the conversation.

This morning I took Brandon’s idea and began making a bundle for comments, by going to everyone’s blog to grab the comments feed. This proved slow to do individually, and difficult because some don’t have an RSS feed for posts, much less for comments. So I began doing this (change to 480p if you actually want to see it):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D8yNXeMTEc&w=960&h=720]

The bundle is here. But there were a couple of problems (listed to both warn people and ask for help!):

Posterous — I couldn’t find a comment feed for Posterous blogs (thus two blogs are missing from the list)
Tags and categories — while it’s not too bad to find the comments feed for all WordPress and Blogger blogs, and not too hard to find feeds for tags or categories, I could not figure out how to do both — get a feed for comments that are responses to posts only in a specific tag or category

Simulearn: running a simultaneous on-site/online connected workshop

18 October 201118 August 2025 Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

You can do this yourself, with three people (though a tech person or two is helpful to make sure the lab stuff is working!), a couple of webcams, and a few computers. No need for fancy technology.

Two years ago, I wanted to figure out how to broadcast a Program for Online Teaching on-campus workshop and have online people participate too. My colleague Laura Paciorek was enthusiastic. Of course, we wanted to do it for free and on our own. I wanted a camera in the lab, so people online could see both the presenter and the people in the lab. At first we borrowed a flash-memory video camera from Media Services, but it was tricky to connect into the computer so we switched to a webcam.

The energy came from Laura, who took on the lab end. I became the facilitator online, in an Elluminate room. We did it a few times, with varying degrees of success, and as it became more complicated Laura felt we needed to document what we were doing, which we did here in this web page. We weren’t sure what to call what we were doing, but it was simultaneous and people were learning, so we called it Simulearn.

At about the same time, I attended an online sesson at the High Tech High School in San Marcos, and saw that they were doing the same thing, but with a camera at the back also so people could see the audience, and people on webcams at home. So we added that. Then we needed another person at the back of the lab on that camera, so we asked for another POT volunteer to man the computer at the back of the room. (Thanks, Lyle!)

Then Laura felt that presenters needed to be more prepared for what we were doing, since they needed to be aware of the online participants, use a microphone, and answer questions arising from the chat. So Laura made an excellent tutorial:

http://content.screencast.com/users/CDProfLaura/folders/Jing/media/9bcd102e-ff3e-4906-868d-07a294527e8c/jingswfplayer.swf

Some of this record-keeping was in case Laura or I missed a session, but I continued to get confused about how we were setting it up, since I was never actually in the lab location. So yesterday I got into Gliffy and created this graphic. Laura says it’s OK.

It’s OK to be behind

14 October 201114 October 2011 Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

cc Rob Cottingham http://www.robcottingham.caI

I am noticing that some POT Certification Class participants are doing great work this week, even if they’ve missed some work before. Folks are catching up!

If you’re not one of them, it’s OK. Behind doesn’t matter so much. Yes, we have due dates (each Thursday starts a new week) and no one knows better than I do that stuff can pile up if you don’t get to it.

But if you do plan to get to it, and you really will, that’s OK. Your mentor may ask if everything’s OK, but we’re not here to apply more pressure. Life is pressured enough!

Sure, it’s best if everyone is doing the same thing as the same time, but life doesn’t always work that way, and this is supposed to be life-long learning. Our schedule is to motivate and keep you on task, to provide some structure and a framework for particular topics.

We have a half-way point, where you’re going to show off all your work so far, so think of that as the ultimate deadline. End of the semester. Just like a class you might be teaching.

And in the meantime, enjoy what you’re learning and doing. Playing with some of the tools can be inspiring, especially if your pedagogical goals have already been identified and articulated. Most importantly, those goals are yours. So focus on what forwards your pedagogy, and let the rest get a bit behind.