Category: The Web

Early adventures with H5P

Lisa M Lane

I can’t remember how I found H5P, but it was probably when I was looking around for a substitute for Zaption.

Zaption allowed you to create interative video, forcing the student to do a short quiz or answer a question before continuing viewing. Several of my colleagues spent long hours creating Zaption videos. Then Zaption went under.

People lost their work. I don’t like losing my work. That’s why all my lectures, and anything I don’t want to rewrite, is both on my own hard drive and on the web server I rent on Lunarpages.

H5P looks like a startup based on open source. It can create interactive elements like video, flashcards, etc. Right now it works as a plugin for Drupal, Moodle and WordPress. Moodle is being sunsetted at our school and we never used Drupal. I know WordPress.

I installed a new WordPress blog on my server, using their never-fails 5 Minute Installation.

[Side note: Starting a new WordPress blog is a cure for creative teaching block, and the blues. Just as a Cajun recipe starts with “first, make a roux”, I start with “first, create a database for WordPress”.]

I installed the H5P plugin, using their instructions.  Here I got stuck, as my WordPress kept telling me the file was too big to load. I kept messing around with php.ini files until I gave up and created a new one inside my public_html folder.

I created a basic interactive video from my introduction for my students. You can see it here.

You have to see it there because, as I discovered, I cannot embed this post into Canvas. [Nightmares start “first, know that this will not work in Canvas”.] So I stopped creating H5P stuff until I realized that Canvas does not deserve to host certain things within its iframe. Since I had already begun to link out my lectures so my Javascript mini-quizzes would work, I figured I can link out whatever. Students will get used to it, because it’s hard to embed things and most instructors won’t bother with SSL and all that crap.

Since I’ll be using WordPress in this way, I used the Atahualpa theme and deleted all widgets, adding my log in and admin to the footer. I will link to the post, of course, but don’t want students clicking around and getting confused.

The LMS and the End of Information Literacy

Lisa M Lane 21 Comments

Having worked with the Canvas system deeply for several months, and then worked closely with an online student who needed help at various levels, I have concluded that the underlying philosophy of Canvas (and OEI in California) is to remove the information literacy requirement for online learning.

Canvas’ defaults encourage a simplistic, linear course with step-by-step navigation for all tasks. The features for instructors to customize extensively, have students collaborate, and make grading meaningful, are conspicuously missing. When requested in the community, such features meet with success mainly when they adhere to the basic philosophy of simplicity.

computerizedlearningThe implication is that any depth must exist within the instructional materials accessed through the system. At the top level, the environment in which the student must work, the danger of cognitive overload is mitigated by providing as few options as possible. It is a clear return to 4th grade “computerized learning”, the kind that takes place in a lab. Pupils sit at stations, and the software guides them step-by-step by pressing as few buttons as possible. With visual and touch-screen interfaces, this is now even easier. Complete a small task, get instant feedback, press ‘Next’.

The fact that such interfaces prevent branching, distributed, or complex learning is considered to be a feature, not a bug. All information is “chunked” for easy understanding and assessment.

Back in the early 1990s, we were all excited about the open web and its possibilities for the exploration of human information. We were able to look up things that had previously been inaccessible before, and we developed pedagogies designed to use that easy-to-access information. To do so meant designing our own pathways through the material, to help students turn their study into knowledge.

With the coming of the read-write web, it became possible for users to interact with the software in online spaces. IRC and other forms of synchronous chat had been available, but required some technical knowledge. Web-based interactions, which required little technical understanding, became simpler and easier to use. With the development of private web spaces like Facebook and Google, companies came to control the interfaces, simplifying even further what we needed to know to use the tools, and pruning the content we could access easily.

wikinoAlthough at first there had been plans to teach information literacy as a school requirement, this trend has tapered off because of such ease of use. In many places, information literacy is still articulated as a goal, but is not implemented in any meaningful way. The result has been students who have no idea what to type into Google when asked to find, for example, information about American imperialism in the late 19th century. We already are aware of the challenges of distinguishing between good and bad sources of information, and want students to distinguish between a scholarly source and a pop culture source. But instead of increasing skills, the fear of bad websites has led to banning certain things, through filters in grade schools and syllabus dictates in college. (When I encouraged my student to use Wikipedia to find primary sources, she was aghast, telling me it had been drilled into her head for years never to use Wikipedia for school.)

Increasing numbers of students have no conception of what constitutes a website, or a link, or a browser. With no understanding of how to navigate a complex web page or database, students have become unable to comfortably navigate a complex online course, regardless of the LMS. It is possible that only students with more sophisticated web skills are able to benefit from the learning pathways we design. As instructional designers remove more and more of our responsibility to construct these pathways ourselves, the “best practices” encourage computerized learning goals such as chunking, instant feedback, and tightly controlled pathways at the expense of discovery, integration and community.

While I would prefer, for the sake of our democratic society, a metacognitive awareness of the control exerted on us by our tools, I have to admit the temptation to follow the larger trend. We have successfully trained an entire generation not to think while using an electronic tool. We may no longer be able to expect them to do so for the sake of their education.

Related posts:

The Monsters of Canvas

Lisa M Lane
Goya, The Sleep of Reason Begents Monsters (1798)

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters (1798)

 

We all know that in any system, there are things that go wrong or are difficult to use. We all know people who love their previous LMS, and will hate whatever they’re forced to change to. We all know that learning curves are something we need to ride, trying not to fall off. We journey on…

But occasionally a system begets monsters.

Here are some of the early monsters of Canvas, and the brutality committed to your hard work:

Code Stripping Beast – If Canvas doesn’t like your code, your Javascript or your HTML commenting, it strips it. Other LMSs do that too. But Canvas is monstrous in that it eats everything within your naive HTML commenting, deleting the content between the tags. There is no warning that it will do this.

Quiz Question Ogre  – If you change a question in a Question Bank, it does not change the questions in any quizzes you’ve created. You might not know this, and go blithely along thinking it has.

Disappearance Dragon – Things other than code mysteriously disappear. If you’ve created a page and linked it on other pages, and you change the page’s name, Canvas can no longer find the file. After a few minutes, neither can you.

Structural Cyclops – Canvas is myopic about its own structure. If you page through a Module using “Next”, which is clearly intended as the default navigation, Canvas does not understand when the Module is done. It just continues into the next Module with no warning, necessitating that you design some form of “Start of Week x” and “End of Week x” pages to alert students so they know they’re done.

Transport Troll – You cannot move select items from one Canvas course into another, like the rubric you just spent three hours developing, or those “End of Week x” pages you made for each week. You have to remake rubrics for each course until you have it set to be saved for just that course. (Update: if both courses are within the same Canvas install, you can import particular content from another course – just don’t every use Export unless you want the whole course, and beware of the Set-Up Siren!)

Set-up Siren – Canvas seduces you with the idea that it can import. But it cannot import individual items you need, like that quiz set you backed up from another LMS.  Without any warning (something like “if you import, everything you’ve done will be erased”), it wipes out everything except its own content when you import, despite the deceptive list of imports implying you can do it more than once.

I’m sure I will find more of these in my Odyssey, a journey in a ship with sails made of Canvas.

First road test of Hypothes.is

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

It’s all about annotation, and I’ve been comparing Kami and Hypothes.is. Last semester, I used Kami  ($50 for no ads) for students to annotate text with my History of Technology class. I had some success, but I was not happy with its limitations, so this summer I tried Hypothes.is instead.

The students were offered a video tutorial on how to use it. I made a group just for them. The assignment was extra credit — for each of the three classes I uploaded an article for them to read and annotate, replying to each other. Sample instructions:

Extra credit for up to 3% of the grade:
1) Get your own account at Hypothes.is at https://hypothes.is/register. Please use your name as enrolled for the username.
2) Join the test group at https://hypothes.is/groups/n3an6ndm/test-group.
3) Go to https://via.hypothes.is/fand.lunarservers.com/~lisahi2/hist104/AnAggravatingAbsence.pdf
4) Annotate the article with your own responses and answer those of others. Annotations are graded on academic quality, connections to coursework, acknowledgement’s of others’ ideas, and evidence of understanding of the article.

I had been concerned that they would automatically post in Public instead of in the Test Group, because I could find no way to limit that or point them directly to the group page – the choice is made only via a drop-down menu in the upper right corner. Sure enough, several students posted in Public and missed the discussion going on in the group. I will have to add this to the instructions as well as in the tutorial.

I had thought that analysis and counting their contributions would be made easier by the brilliantly conceived Hypothesis Collector, created by John Stewart. It worked great last night. Unfortunately, when I tried it this morning, it only gave me the posts that had been made as of last night. I simply couldn’t get it to work and had to manually count annotations to assign points. I have been contacted by Jeremy Dean of Hypothes.is for ways to integrate with Canvas – this might be a huge help next year.

I am considering providing my next class textbook, The American Yawp, with my own annotations. The book, an open textbook, has a number of faults and omissions that would make for great learning opportunities for students. My own annotations would be like mini-lecture commentary, glossing on the text. But for some of the summer articles (one out of three of mine) in Hypothes.is, the section one highlights is quoted in the annotation without spaces, which is ugly. Also, there is little color or design in the annotation box to alert the student to the presence or unique character of an annotation.

Samplehypothesis

I think Kami looks better for this, and then I will export my pages as PDF for the students.

Kamisample

I had originally thought I could use The American Yawp’s own affordances as an updated online text, but just got an announcement that, ironically, their current update will be integrating Hypothes.is. Each page served by them will then come up with an invitation to annotate publicly. While this might or might not help students with the text, it provides an additional way for students to go wrong beside the Public or Group problem, so I don’t think I’ll be working off the Yawp html pages regardless.

Don’t get me wrong – the business model of Hypothes.is is wonderful. They make a real effort to reach out, adapt and update. In fact, that’s one of the reasons for this post – to provide input that I hope will continue its improvement as an open source product made by people who really understand the value of text annotation.

Adventures in Accessibility Part II

Lisa M Lane

https://amara.org/embedder-iframe

Having discovered how to more easily caption videos I upload into YouTube, I have now had to deal with video clips that others have uploaded to YouTube. This seems to mean putting an overlay with captions on top of the video, then embedding the overlay on my lecture pages.

In the old days, I used Overstream, which is still there.  It was pretty awkward, and now I’ve forgotten how to use it. Our accessibility specialist Robert Erichsen recommended Amara.

My first video captioning experience on Amara was a nightmare. I was working on a cartoon, which I now have memorized, about Nikola Tesla:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/O2ZxvEoOvbY?rel=0&showinfo=0

If you click the CC, you’ll see the awful automatic captioning, which is unusable. (Does YouTube have something against punctuation?)

So I put it in Amara, but the timeline kept shifting when I made a mistake. I had to keep dragging handles right and left, and different segments got mixed up. It took me hours just to straighten it out. Then I got the embed code and put it in my lecture so it looked like this:

I noticed a couple of things:

You can still see the YouTube CC symbol so it’s totally possible to accidentally play the hideous YouTube auto captioning instead.

The embed code was super simple, so simple you can only customize it in “advanced embedding options” with four bits of code, mostly to turn the captions on or off without the viewer clicking.

You cannot change its size. In YouTube itself, to embed any clip, you can easily change its size using the suggested sizes or the dropdowns:

YouTubeembed

Not in Amara – I have to go into the code and reduce the size proportionally. I do remember how to do this algebraicly, but I graduated high school so that I’d never have to use algebra again, so I use a ratio calculator.

And, I can’t center it. Even though it’s in “div” tags, it won’t center the div. Or accept “span”. I have to create a table by hand and center the table.

And (last one, I promise) you cannot see it in WYSIWYG. Not in Dreamweaver, anyway. At all. I can’t find it. Of course, having to use a table helps – I can set the width and height of the table. At least then I see a blank rectangle.

I appreciate that it’s a free program, but this still seems awfully cumbersome.

Embedding Hypothes.is in Canvas

Lisa M Lane

This is one of those posts I’m writing so I don’t forget how to do something.

After testing Hypothes.is for annotations, and realizing that the Redirect Tool in canvas would force an ordinary webpage with annotations to only open in a new tab, I figured out something.

Canvas will only embed secure (SSL) pages (those with an address starting https://). All my web pages are just plain ole http. But it turns out that my host, Lunarpages, can create an SSL page by just using the URL of the server (https://fand.lunarserver.com/username + rest of the URL). So any page I already have can become a secure page by using this URL instead.

So to make this happen automatically, here’s the workflow:

1. Create my own webpage with text and images.

2. Include the hypothes.is code in the HTML of the page

https://hypothes.is/embed.js

3. Use the Redirect Tool in Canvas, using the URL of the page, but with the Lunarpages server preface (in this case https://fand.lunarservers.com/~lisahi2/)

redirectapp

4. Voila:

hypothesisincanvas

Annotation: Kami vs Hypothes.is

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

This semester I have begun using Kami (previously Notable PDF) so that my students can annotate scholarly articles I’ve uploaded in pdf. This has worked well. But Kami has ads (yucky Google-style sidebar crap), so I’ve just asked my department to purchase the $50 upgrade to remove them.

In the process of realizing payment was required to prevent Kami ads telling me and my students about the “early signs of a heart attack!”, I took a second (third?) look at Hypothes.is, a service with more of an educational/edupunk attitude.

Some distinctions follow. (Keep in mind that Kami is just for pdfs, while Hypothes.is also does web pages. There are many tools that allow you to annotate web pages by adding a layer. Crocodoc, which I used to use happily, is gone. Many other annotation plugins that are for private, browser-based use. And Diigo is just more than I need.)

Appearance
Kami has bigger font and is better on phones and mobile devices. It’s showier, with lots of big buttons for the features, and you can have your photo showing next to your posts. PDF rendering is a bit better in Kami.

kamientry

Hypothes.is fits better on the page and its annotation panel retracts. The toolbar creates wiki-like coding which is awkward – even bold and italics look funny in draft mode.

hypothesisentry

However, in Kami, though you can write and draw on the pdf, there is no formatting at all available in the annotations. How can I make a point without italics?

Cost
Kami, as noted, has ads or you pay. Hypothes.is is free.

Support
Both seem to have good support. Within minutes setting up my free account, and then again when I paid, Kami contacted me. Within minutes of creating a group in Hypothes.is, they contacted me.

Embedding in an LMS page
Kami works in an iframe in Moodle. Hypothes.is doesn’t seem to. Kami works using the Redirect tool in Canvas. Hypothes.is, despite the https designation in via, forces a new tab in Canvas. (Sorry, I don’t have gloves on so I didn’t touch Blackboard.)

Tracking students
Neither system (nor any annotation app, to my knowledge) works with LTI or inside the LMS, so I have to track manually. Kami allows me to upload pdfs of the articles right into their system, then any student with a Kami account can have their name on their annotation. For students who post as a “guest” I request that they sign their annotations so I know who posted. I have to remind them. Hypothes.is lets you see public annotations on the page, but you must have an account to annotate, so there will be no “guests” to track.

How annotations work

In Hypothes.is, the annotation area appears as a slide-out panel. It automatically posts any highlighted text in the annotation box, and allows for nested replies, which could generate true discussion. In Kami, the annotation panel takes up some real estate on the right of the screen, with the document zoomed out on the left (you can zoom in). Replies have a grey background and are attached below the original annotation post, but are not nested.

In Hypothes.is, the “via” proxy feature allows me to make any web page available for annotation just by adding https://via.hypothes.is/ to the front of the URL. So I thought I’d try Hypothes.is on the open textbook I just adopted, The American Yawp. If you sign in with Hypothes.is, you’ll see that the page (I looked at Chapter 8) has already been annotated, obviously by other students. You can see it without an account at https://via.hypothes.is/www.americanyawp.com/text/08-the-market-revolution/.

But I can create a “group” for just my class, and everyone must use the drop down at the top of the annotation entry box to select the group name. This limits the page to just those in the group, both viewing and making annotations. Kami doesn’t need groups since the URL of my uploaded file is only shared with my students.

In Hypothes.is, I can also upload a pdf of the chapter, and put https://via.hypothes.is/ in front of it, and have a fresh (OCR, not quite as clear, but totally workable) copy only my students can work with. This also means that any pdf I upload will work, and it can still be hosted on my server, although the annotations are hosted at Hypothes.is.

Coding my own webpages

In Hypothes.is, for my own webpages, I can add the code into the page like this:

https://hypothes.is/embed.js

https://hypothes.is/embed.js

The annotation panel then appears on the page. This is good for my primary sources, which are all in HTML anyway. I also can make web pages with pictures from the open text, and we can discuss them. There is no such feature with Kami.

Privacy and copyright

In Hypothes.is, at the bottom of the annotation entry window it shows the Creative Commons license as Public Domain, meaning

“You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”

I do not use this cc designation on my own work – I use NC (non-commercial) and SA (share alike). I am uncomfortable with the idea that others could use things I and my students write, and sell them. However, on the Hypothes.is FAQ it says:

Annotations made privately or in a group are the property of the individual user (“All rights reserved”) and are ?not? in the public domain or licensed under Creative Commons.

If I make a group, things are more private so long as everyone remembers to use the drop down for the group So I figure I’ll use groups for Hypothes.is. I do not know who “owns” Kami’s annotations, but I have inquired.

Mobile

Although Jeremy Dean of Hypothes.is indicated to me that it wasn’t yet completely mobile-friendly, on my phone Hypothes.is worked much better than Kami.

So I’m sticking with Kami for this semester (even in a History of Technology class there’s a limit how many things you can ask students to sign up for). But Hypothes.is’s flexibility, nesting, and server-side Javascript makes it a serious contender for next year, though the iframe incompatibility is a definite issue.

Notes on Jim’s blogging workshop

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).

JimSBlogThe 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!

Challenges of the Experiment

Lisa M Lane

In my last post I detailed my experiment for Fall, wherein I will teach one section of modern U.S. History online using a publisher’s course package, adding only my own discussion topics (four) and writing assignments (five). All other presentation materials and assessments will derive from the package. The class will take place in Blackboard, our fully supported college system.

There are challenges already. The package is set up by chapters, yet chapters cannot be assigned individually inside Blackboard. I have “linked” my Pearson package to the Blackboard class, but all this means is that a button can be used from inside Blackboard which takes you out to the Pearson site. (Supposedly the Blackboard gradebook will reflect the Pearson grades – I’ve “linked” that too.)

PearsonListBut that’s not the real challenge – it’s the material. For each chapter, there is a long list of resources: document activities, image activities, map activities, “closer look” features. Since each of these has at least one question attached (I assume that’s the “activity” – there’s nothing else active here), I assumed these were multiple choice questions, for automatic grading. Turns out most of them are “essay” questions, all of low quality (i.e. “what is x talking about in this document?”), that I would have to grade. I’ve assigned over a dozen for each chapter. Besides, the whole idea of the experiment was to be using their pedagogy as much as possible instead of mine.

So now I’ve spent many, many hours creating multiple-choice questions, one for each document or image. Because I’m an experienced teacher, my questions are good and require critical thinking even though they’re multiple-choice. That in itself may undermine the experiment.

The other (huge) challenge is the quality of the materials. Not only are the questions stupid, but the items themselves do not contain full citations. Some are just copyrighted “Pearson”. Many do not name a photographer, or just say “Library of Congress”. PearsonClipSome don’t even have a date! They let you into just enough code that I can kind of correct some of these by adding words to the title. But there are audio files with no lyrics or transcripts. And, worst of all, the primary source video clips (Edison’s footage of Annie Oakley, footage of the Rough Riders) are in low resolution and look terrible. I could find better quality of the same footage using Internet Archive. There are also typographical errors in the transcript and in the titles and descriptions of the sources.

The interface for me requires a lot of deep drilling to do things, and the system persists in showing items I supposedly made invisible because I won’t be using them. It does, however, distribute any changes I make across the system.

Clearly MyHistoryLab is just a book supplement, rather than a full course cartridge, and yes, I expected much more. REVEL, their new, more interactive program, only became available yesterday, so I can’t use that yet because I don’t have time to play with it and make assignments. Stuck with MyHistoryLab for this semester, I can only hope this will be a semblance of the experiment I planned.

The Jekyll and Hyde Experiment

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Cybermen_formation_DoomsdayAs I continue to advocate hand-made “artisan” online classes and openness and freedom, all forces are moving in the other direction. New education initiatives lead us into forced, system-wide learning management systems, standardized rubrics for evaluating what makes a “good” online class, and tracking mechanisms that give surveillance a whole new meaning.

So I’m going to give the other side a try.

cc licensed Vicky Hugheston via Flickr
cc licensed Vicky Hugheston via Flickr

Right now my online classes are designed and developed by me, and taught in the only LMS that allows for nested single page forums (Moodle). Nested single page forums are essential to the primary source assignments I believe are best for students (and on which I published awhile back).  My self-designed classes feature my own lectures, written in HTML by me, with embedded media elements throughout. I wrote all the quiz questions myself, and have moved almost everything toward free, open resources (one class still has an atlas). My writing assignments are scaffolded and designed to support my learning objectives and student learning outcomes.

But this semester one of my class sections will be different.

For one section of US History, I will abandon all artisan elements of my class. I have searched through the modern US History course packages and cartridges available from the major publishers. They were all quite expensive. I chose the least expensive option with the best textbook (Faragher’s Out of Many). Pearson is developing what they call a REVEL package for this text, but although due out this month it does not appear to be finished yet, so I will use the previous package, MyHistoryLab.

blackborgflickrI’ll use Blackboard as the LMS. I’ve linked the Pearson MyHistoryLab account to the Blackboard course. Although this was supposted to provide “integration”, what it provided was essentially a button that links the student out to the Pearson MyHistoryLab website. Frankly, I was expecting something a little more sophisticated. I know that several of my colleagues use course packages that are more seamless, but I guess History isn’t one of the hot sellers for this stuff.

For this Blackboard class, I am making sure I have all the elements written up in articles on “Best Practices” for online classes, including:

  • BestPracticesNextExitAn introductory video about me containing some personal revelations
  • A forum for students to ask questions
  • A full syllabus with complete schedule and all pertinent rules required by the college
  • Discussions with insightful prompts (no “one answer” questions) and required interaction
  • Frequent low stakes assessment (robograded)
  • Speedy evaluation of all work (mostly robograded)
  • A variety of media – text, documents, images, and video

One thing I can’t bring myself to do is write a statement of Netiquette. I just can’t do it. Since I removed such a statement from my syllabus, I have had absolutely no problems with anyone posting bad things.

I am striving to make the class as standardized as possible. I will, however, have to change a couple of things. MyHistoryLab doesn’t cite its sources for primary source images or documents. They just write “Copyright Pearson” on everything. Some of the photos don’t even have a date. None name the photographer. This is bad History. But it’s a publisher’s product, so it must be OK, right? Nevertheless, I may feel obligated to add a few accurate citations.

The other thing I can’t do is substitute my writing assignments for Pearson’s. My scaffolded assignments fulfill half of my student learning outcomes, so I’m keeping them. It’s just that instead of students going out on the web to find their own sources and pursue their own interests, they will have to use sources from MyHistoryLab.

Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde (1)I call this the Jekyll and Hyde Experiment because it feels like I am two different instructors. Jekyll teaches “old-fashioned”, hand-made classes designed to provide students with choices and freedom within a structure. Hyde will teach with materials and assessments developed and sold by someone else.

I realize that many, many online teachers have to be Hyde all the time. At most for-profit diploma mills, faculty teach a course developed by a “team”. The only way to insert their own personality is in the Staff Information page and their Discussion Board prompts. So this experiment should also give me a better understanding of my colleagues who have far less freedom than I have had.

Then we will see. Will the students in the canned section do better than in my artisan sections? Will they be happier? Will it make any difference at all?  I’ll blog as we go….