Category: Teaching/Pedagogy

Two Conferences

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I am currently attending the @ONE 2007 Online Teaching Conference, being partly webcast from Ohlone College in Fremont, CA. I was quite reassured to hear David Balch’s presentation “A View from the Trenches“, especially when he talked about his answer to faculty concerns about student identity (“how do I know the online student is the person enrolled in the course?”). His answer was the same as mine: unless we check ID, we also don’t know whether the student who walks into our class is the same one on our rosters. Other heartening elements included the new focus on interactivity and recent surveys that show that faculty resistance to online instruction is fading.

The Future of Education 2007 conference (University of Manitoba) just ended (I am still catching up on the recordings). I was fascinated by Dave Cormier‘s presentation and the reaction to it. He presented on “Snowclones, Clichés and Memes”. . . sort of. There were presentation difficulties, since the technology he was using went down during the presentation, which focused on using online community to create learning, with the attendees acting as the students. A lot of attendees were trying to understand the topic itself, which related to the use of language. Cormier used a Pageflakes site, and showed the potential of such a feed aggregator for creating online learning communities.

Also wonderful was Brian Lamb‘s “DIY: Educators Gone Wild” presentation on mashups, Open, Connected, and Social, which made me feel better about mixing up all that pure educational content.

What I always find wonderful about these conferences, in addition to the friendly and helpful colleagues, is the chance to see what pieces of technology are being used by people who actually know what they’re doing! The Future of Education conference was so professional: synchronous and recorded sessions with Elluminate, Camtasia recordings, Moodle website with discussion forums, Pageflakes site, and podcasts so I can listen now that it’s over. And thanks to the presenters and organizers, I’ll look more carefully at Pageflakes (aggregator), SurveyMonkey (for surveys), Drupal (another CMS) and MediaWiki .

I also learn what I don’t like: at the @ONE conference, they used CCCConfer, which has the bother of audio over the telephone instead of through the computer speakers (I have a dial phone and thus a crick in my neck from today’s presentation). In Firefox, I had trouble getting the webcast to work even though I had the plug-in (WindowsMedia, naturally) installed. I had to reinstall it and use Safari instead to see the video, which was of excellent quality. The people at CVC are fabulous, though, and I was delighted to see people I knew, like Andrea Henne of SDCCD, and meet new folks just starting out in teaching online. One excellent presentation by Patricia Delich focused on tips for developing ones first online class. Good resources she provided included an assessment of technology skills for instructors, 10 activities before starting development [pdf], and a good online course rubric for both design and evaluation purposes.

I confess, however, I am suffering from Web 2.0 conference burn-out. Which is too bad, since I’m off to ED-Media in two weeks!

Course Management Systems: Limiting the Imagination

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Teaching is an imaginative art. One first envisions what one wants to do in class, then tries to make it happen.

A few years ago, I got into a polite discussion with an administrator about the necessity of the college supporting a variety of Course Management Systems, rather than restricting faculty to only one CMS. At the time, I was pretty naive. I assumed that anyone with any sense would realize that the freedom of faculty to teach in their own way was a primary consideration at an educational institution. My naivete evaporated as he explained to me that the CMS was like my physical classroom; it created basic limitations on my teaching and embodied parameters I could not change. I wouldn’t ask to move the walls of my classroom, would I? or expect the college to move the chalkboard, windows or doors?

I was less than convinced, and have long played the argument out in my head. To me, the computer itself was more analagous to the classroom, and within that I demanded academic independence to dream my dreams and achieve my goals. The technology itself already contained ample restrictions — every time I turned around, there was something I couldn’t do online. As I continued in online teaching, and found myself more and more frustrated with the additional limitations imposed on my pedagogical imagination by Blackboard, I entered another stage of naivete. Here I assumed that all online faculty, like myself, put their pedagogical goals first and tried to force the technology to do things to help students learn. Thus, they must be experiencing similar frustrations.

I have gradually been attaining a different level of awareness. In giving workshops and going to conferences, I noticed great similarities among the classes presented inside both Blackboard and WebCT. At places where faculty actually had their courses on display, they all looked very much alike. A few buttons might be changed, the theme color, but overall faculty seemed to be retaining the structural organization and intentions of the default settings.

This worried me. In these CMSs, the material is organized by type (“Course Documents”, “Quizzes”) rather than by topic or weeks. That is certainly not intuitive for those of us accustomed to a syllabus with a schedule. I wondered whether the CMS could be controlling the way a class was taught online, particularly among novice instructors. I began to develop a suspicion that at an introductory level, the CMS could actually determine the pedagogy due to several factors: insecurity about technological expertise, lack of knowledge about the CMS, and lack of dedication to pedagogical goals. The CMS was indeed being seen as the classroom, a physical set of immutable limitations.

A few months ago, I was looking at a colleague’s class as he told me about the limitations of WebCT, having changed over from Bb — he said he lost a certain feature he really liked, and indeed, I could see it was not there on his site. When I later looked at another instructor’s class in the same CMS, the feature was clearly evident on the main page. She showed me the settings she had used. The first instructor’s pedagogy had been hobbled simply because he didn’t know how to enable the feature. I also attended several workshops where I talked about Blackboard features that the instructors, most of whom had used Bb for years, didn’t know were there.

To get more information, I initiated a survey of Blackboard and WebCT users at a few local colleges. So far, results support the two top studies on the subject: University of Wisconsin (2003) and University System of Georgia (2005), which report that most faculty use the CMS for managerial tasks rather than to further their pedagogy. Class management features (gradebook, text upload, testing, email, discussion board) are used far more than interactive features (chat, discussion grading, virtual classrooms, reusable learning objects), even among experienced instructors. It was heartening that many were willing to customize the course menus and link externally from within the CMS, and most wanted to learn more about how to manage the system.

At the same time, I could see that few faculty use the many features of the web itself in their own work. Over half of the 57 faculty surveyed were unfamiliar with web elements such as RSS, blogs or wikis despite the fact that the same percentage have been using their CMS for three or more years. And again, that makes me wonder the extent to which the limitations of Course Management Systems are causing limitations in the pedagogical imagination. My work continues….

That Damned Affective Domain

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

AOL gives us The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work from the Wall Street Journal that is helping me understand our younger students. Although I’ve done a lot of research on the Educating the Net Generation, I have also noticed certain behaviors (in class and online) that have caused me to change my classroom management techniques.For example, over the last several years, I’ve noticed that more and more of my on-site students refuse to take notes, come and go from the classroom, have their cell phones on (and often out on their desks), stare at me with blank faces, and otherwise exhibit behaviors saying they are not really engaged in the class. They are very tied up in their “affective domain” (how they feel about an issue), which makes intellectual discussion and topical analysis difficult. It becomes obvious that they do not enjoy learning for its own sake if I start by, say, trying to teach them history.

Such distancing behaviors have, of course, always been frustrating. When I was a younger teacher, I used to get angry, threaten to lock them out of the room, roll my eyes when they walked in front of me while I was lecturing, and talked to many individuals after class about their behavior. Then instead I began putting in the syllabus those behaviors I considered unacceptable, and giving instructions (turn off your cell phone, etc.) I would arrange group work to increase their participation and then get frustrated when they chatted about anything except the assignment.

Well, now it’s different. I already noted in my post on Student Intelligences that many of my on-site students are Body/Movement learners. It’s a maxim of mine (and of the Classroom Assessment Technique crowd) that there is no point surveying students unless you bring the results back to them. I reported the results to them shortly after they took the survey. I told them that, given the fact that so many of them need movement to learn, they should feel free to come and go from the room as they pleased, just try to avoid walking in front of me while I’m talking. The first few weeks, a number left the room a lot. When they realized it was really no problem, they tapered off. Only the ones who really needed it were still doing it by mid-term.

Was I praising them? No. Was I indicating that they were special? Yes. I never said a word about the cell phones, except to one student who played with his all through class. During the final exam last week, a student’s phone rang loudly. She absent-mindedly stopped the ringer. Two minutes later it rang again, and she apologized, not to me, but to the class as a whole. That’s the type of behavior I want to engender.

In the online environment, I make recommendations about their learning style (body learners should put their laptop on a kitchen counter and move around between tasks). But because of the distance, they can’t see that I am willing to work with them as individuals. So I use lots of emoticons and a very easy tone, designed to cater to their self-centeredness in such a way as to engender an open mind on their part. I rewrite a lot of responses. I don’t hit “Send” if I’m upset. And I’m using a discussion technique that validates their affective tendencies (see my last post, below).

I figure it this way. If their minds close when they are not treated as special, I cannot teach them history. If I can respect their affective domain just enough to open their brain, I can teach them. Though I am an intellectual, and do not access my affective domain when undertaking mental activity, I have come to understand that they do. They do not separate their feelings (about me, history, the classroom, the campus, their colleagues) from their thinking. Gold star, anyone?

A Better Discussion

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I have been applying a technique to online discussion this semester that I have been very happy with, and I’ve been telling people about it. Discussion has been for a long time the unhappy weak spot in all my classes. I would create a discussion conference (Blackboard) or forum (Moodle) each week, with either questions to discuss or topics to work with. I tried to post a variety of topics so that the students would have options and would be able to discuss, rather than just post the same answer over and over. I required two posts per week, the first post by Wednesday midnight, and a second post replying to another student, by Sunday midnight.

In Blackboard, the limited threaded format caused serious boredom on my part. Every discussion every week in every class looked the same, my conference followed by nested links. I either had to click on each one to follow the topics, or “collect” them to read them all, but even sorting by date I couldn’t see who was replying to whom and it was all text and …. boring, boring, difficult and boring. So I wouldn’t go in that much because with forty students per class it was overwhelming, so I didn’t catch all the arguments and flaming, and when I went in to post myself to lead the discussion in a different direction, my own posts mixed in with all the others and were ignored, even when I started using an asterisk in the subject line so they would see it was me. Yuck. Partcipation would decline, and they weren’t really talking to each other anyway.

So I did some research. I read Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, Robert Tinker (Atwood Publishing 2000). The book had lots of great ideas, as you can see in my summary. I chose the role of “Leader of a Group Process” and posted a “tickler” on a single thread for each week (an idea I got from an article).

So for the week we study The West (my guinea pigs were US history students), I found a video clip from Edison labs of Native Americans from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. They are doing the Ghost Dance. All I asked was “What issues from this unit come to mind?”

From Sunday to Wednesday, I let them answer however they wanted. I notice over the past decade a tendency for college students to emphasize the affective aspects of their existence (how they “feel” about things, rather than rational thought). For this topic, students responded with pity (or callousness) — either way they were disturbed by the clip, which is what I intended. I let them wallow in affective areas till Thursday, when I posted. I summarized what they had said, freely quoting from their own posts, then guided the discussion toward a topic of historical perception and victimization. That let them know that:

1. I had read their posts and cared about what they said

2. I was guiding the discussion in a direction based on their own comments

3. the affective concerns would now be deepened into historical analysis

Because I was in Moodle, I could see all the posts on one screen, and made mine bold text, titling it “Take discussion from here, please”. Most did, replying to my summary/guidance post.

This technique has gotten me everything I want. I only go in to each discussion a couple of times per week, I can see the whole thing in one glance, I am getting faster at creating the summary with the quotes, and the discussion is deepening to the desired level at the end of each week. Participation levels are high. I’ve decided I prefer depth in discussion to breadth, especially since I wasn’t getting breadth anyway, and early student evaluations say they are happy.

Note: One student dropped the class early on. I emailed and asked if her dropping had anything to do with my class. She wrote back saying yes, she felt I was teaching us all to pity the Indians, and she didn’t come to college for that crap. (She had only seen the first part of the discussion.) I explained to her my entire pedagogy, including the affective aspects and my goal for analysis. She changed her mind and returned, and is now helping guide the discussion. There may be a lesson here for revealing ones pedagogical goals!

Mashing it up

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I am trying to get my head around the idea of a “mashup”, a cobbling together of two technologies, or uses of technology, or even media tracks, to create something new. It seems to belong in the same brain space as “sampling”.

A recent PC World article called Google Maps’ new “My Maps” feature a mashup, and it seemed to assume that readers knew what one was. Wikipedia, of course, has some good definitions, and indicates up front that its origin is in the seeming destruction of content.

But in one of the most interesting examples of a media mashup, a point is made that the process begins with deconstruction of content, then putting it together in a way that forms a new idea. The MediaCommons Project’s In Media Res has a mashup called “The Last Lion King of Scotland“, a video that uses footage from “The Lion King” and soundtrack clips from “The Last King of Scotland” (yes, it does sound odd, and it is!).

Even more interesting is the discussion, a commenting feature embedded in the page, enabling viewers to discuss the piece, and possible student-created projects using the same techniques. I’d love comments on these ideas!

Good article: Be VOCAL

Lisa M Lane

I have just discovered the Journal of Interactive Online Learning, and an article by John R. Savery of the University of Akron entitled “BE VOCAL: Characteristics of Successful Online Instructors” (Vol 4, No. 2, Fall 2005). VOCAL is a list of attributes:

V = Visible – the concept of having a social presence online so that students are aware of an interpersonal relationship. Helpful strategies include having a website about you including a photo and hobbies, making comments in a timely manner, using Announcements to broadcast mesages throughout the semester, and using brief video or audio messages.
O = Organized – since learners have a greater responsibility to manage their time, we can help by providing good organization, providing assignments and due dates early (I recommend these at the beginning of the class), explaining the rules of the class, providing a social interction area, creating a forum topic for class procedures, offering alternative formats for information, and using “selective release” of materials.
C = Compassionate – “Email provides an unusual combination of intimacy, privacy, and distance” and compassionate management of student issues is very important, including direct communication with individual students, ice-breaker techniques to create community, making exceptions, and reminding individuals of class rules.
A = Analytical – this relates to assessment, since many factual question will only test what students have in front of them; strategies include tracking students’ progress, providing smaller and more frequent assessments, providing the opportunity for students to evaluate the course at the mid-point, and assessing participation.
L = Leader-by-example – concerns exhibiting the online behaviors you wish to see and providing helpful feedback, sharing information about yourself informally, following through with promises, modeling communication, using public and private communication channels appropriately, and creating an end-of-class activity to provide closure.

Much of this advice is very useful, in particular the first three items. If an instructor is Visible, Organized and Compassionate, success is much more likely. I had the most trouble with the last one, since it concerns the affective domain. I am not a “touchy-feely” instructor, and have had to become one in an online environment (lots of smily faces!) in order to overcome the formality of my writing and the distance inherent in the medium.

I did not agree with the entire article. I believe we instructors have a right to privacy, and do not think that discussing our personal lives and hobbies is necessary to maintain student rapport, though I will consider revealing more about myself than I do now as I continue to evolve online. I also do not agree that “asking recall type questions is pointless”, since I want students referencing their texts and materials, and excellent fact retention can rightfully earn a C-level grade in my class. Certainly a B or A requires interpretation and analysis, but I see nothing wrong with using multiple-choice tests as review and/or to assess facts. But overall a good article! 🙂

TechEd #2: Quick Multimedia

Lisa M Lane

Nanda Ganesan of Cal State LA gave a presentation on “Rapid Development of Multimedia Modules” in which he demonstrated not only good presentation technique (I took heed since I am presenting April 20 at Miramar!) but great information on how to quickly create enriching materials.

The goal is simulating the in-class experience as closely as possible. I was gratified to hear Dr. Ganesan refer to PowerPoint with narration as “sleeping aids with no side effects”, since I consider most of them to be the 21st century version of film strips. He did not reject PP entirely, however, and part of his demonstration showed how one could use a webcam to create video inside PP.

What most impressed me was his use of a “smartpad”. Using Camtasia and an electronic pen (Seiko’s $99 Inklink), Dr G created quick presentation diagrams (his sample was a computer network), explaining as he drew. This gave spontaneity to what was obviously a recorded presentation. In my classes, there are certain lectures where I use a chalkboard (really!), such as my childish (but creepy) sequence on the development of trench warfare in WWI and my diagram of the Iran-Contra scandal connections. These would be quite effective online using this technique, much more so than the still diagrams I use instead.

Throughout the demonstration (and he let the audience choose demonstration rather than presentation — very on-the-fly!), Dr G showed basic setup of big programs like Camtasia, Captivate and Snagit (I would use $69 Snapz on my Mac instead). His point was that only a few settings need be changed to get started and create something FAST. This made getting started look much less daunting for workshop attendees! Plus, the product one creates doing things quickly adds that spontaneity that helps recreate the classroom experience.

So I got a good lesson on how to present a workshop (do what the audience wants), good reasons for creating units on the fly (which I tend to do anyway), and ways to make a “how to” workshop more effective (show just a few key things and make it look easy).

TechEd #1: Wikis

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Debbie Faires of San Jose State University helped me understand some good uses for wikis. I currently use wikis only for quiz development (students add and edit questions, from which I choose for the quiz if they do enough work!). I began this last year using pbwiki (see the original wiki we made by using “history103” as the password). Now I use the wiki inside of Moodle.

Debbie noted that some of the best wikis have WYSIWYG editors, like Seedwiki which has a formatting bar instead of code. For most wikis, you must know the syntax to create links. She was fond of Google Docs, where each user is color coded for easy reference, and the wiki opens automatically in edit view. Flickr, I was reminded, can be used to have students annotate images easily, as a collaborative project. And Bubbleshare (which I learned about at a WOW2 podcast) can create slideshows to share. Debbie also reintroduced me to Zoho.com, which has chat and show applications as well as wikis.

One use is document creation collaboration among faculty. It is recommended that one not use the word “wiki”. I already violated this tenet when MiraCosta developed its Technology Plan in a wiki on my advice, using the defunct schtuff.com, now absorbed by pbwiki. I realize now that more people would have been less afraid to use the sucker if I’d called it a “collaborative document” or just “a document we can all edit”.

But the most fascinating aspect of the presentation was the usage tips. Here’s what I can do with a wiki:
* Appointment signup — everyone can see everyone else’s time slots, and sign up for meetings or office hours
* Ongoing collections — sustained collections of information that stay and are updated from semester to semester
* Podcast editing — students add time markers to class podcasts to make it easier for all students to scan to a particular topic
* Assignment sharing — students add their assignment and all appear on one page, making a large document collection
* User guides — students creating user guides (to the Course Management System, for example) to help other students
* Student book reviews — students can share individual readings with others
* Lecture links — students can create and update links that have gone down or moved
* Spreadsheet creation — the online form of each student or group giving a report on one aspect, but all are responsible for learning the whole thing (the example was each group being assigned a particular nation and reporting on working conditions)
* Resource page — student-created and edited collection of readings

One instructor assigned students to report individually on the conglomerated knowledge represented in the wiki, and assigned individual grades this way.

Debbies presentation wiki (of course!) can be found at TechEdWiki.pbwiki.com.

The extraordinary ease of Moodle

Lisa M Lane

I have just been through the wringer with my hosting service, which provides Moodle as a script but doesn’t have actual support for the software itself. I am currently teaching five classes in Moodle, and discovered something called a cron job wasn’t working properly. Cron jobs apparently are self-checks that Moodle runs which send things out (like forum posts students have subscribed to, or my announcements). I learned a few weeks ago how to set mine to run every 10 minutes, so everyone would stay updated. But a few days ago my host contacted me saying that my cron jobs were exceeding my allotted CPU usage, and this had to stop or they’d force me over to a private server. I didn’t have the knowledge to really deal with this, but the Using Moodle user posts seems to have saved me (not for the first time), and all seems OK for now.

moodleSo after several late nights grumbling (a mild term) about my hosting problems, I return to Moodle itself today to grade tests and (again not for the first time) find myself totally delighted with the ease of using it. Today’s example is that I was adding in the correct answer to essay questions before I started grading, and I was able to make them purple so I could easily see the difference between a student’s answer and my own feedback. Then, instead of grading quizzes on a student-by-student basis, I was able to use Manual Grading to see all instances of answers to the same question, and grade all of them on the same screen page. While breezing through this, I noticed that a good student had a better answer than my own. So I just opened the quiz and changed the feedback. No problem, instantly saved, viewable immediately by students, even though I was in the middle of grading and the quiz had already been deployed. Try that, Blackboard!

[Regarding the hosting problem, I’m going to start recommending that folks use a Moodle Partner host, like ClassroomRevolution.com.]

IOC #1: Interactivity is not a luxury anymore

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Tracking reports of useful sessions I attended at the IOC conference, one of the best was by Daniel Franc of WebStudy Inc. What was most interesting was his focus on the shift that’s happening now, just the last few years, from content to interactivity.

It used to be that one defined the effectiveness of an online class from the quality of its content, but that has changed. Franc cited a study by eLearning Guild from 2005 showing that most Learning Management Systems were being used to deliver content, and compared it to the 2007 version showing that most were being used for collaboration, knowledge management, and virtual real-time classes. Just putting content online leads to a decline in student motivation, while interactivity increases it.

Franc’s was one of several sessions emphasizing interactivity as not just supplementary to online learning, but as an essential component. There were several sessions on podcasting (see podcastforteachers.org) and Web 2.0 tools (such as pipes and Second Life). Jonathan Finkelstein, founder of LearningTimes and author Learning in Real Time, led us through a synchronous exercise in Elluminate (which I notice is now quoting this blog in its advertising!). He divided the whiteboard into portions and we all added nouns, verbs and adjectives. Then four of us rearranged the words to make poems, while one person verbally described the action. A very interesting lesson both in group construction and in simply describing rather than interpreting as a learning tool that all could benefit from.

PreQuiz glory and role of assessments

Lisa M Lane

A few years ago I was influenced by a story I heard of a professor who worked hard to prevent cheating online. He created a huge test bank of hundreds of questions, from which the software selected for each quiz. One day, after adding another bunch of questions to the test bank, he found a printout containing single question (including those he’d just added) left in his classroom by a student. At first he was furious, then he decided that if a student was going to study the entire bank of almost 1,000 questions to pass his tests, they were studying anyway and what the hell.

Last semester I began making “PreQuizzes”, repeatable no-grade quizzes containing all the multiple-choice questions that would be on the real quiz. (My quizzes are 70% multiple-choice and 30% writing questions — I figure 70% is a C and if you can only answer factual questions in history that is C-level performance.) I set the software (first Blackboard and now Moodle) to not let them see the answers, just the final score, thinking if they had to take it repeatedly without knowing which ones they missed, they’d have to study harder!

Last night a student IM’d me. She said why didn’t PreQuiz #2 let her see her answers, like in PreQuiz #1? We discovered that I had accidentally set PreQuiz #1 in “adaptive mode” (I’m new at Moodle), which lets students answer each question individually, then click Submit to find out instantly whether they got that question right. They could immediately try again for a right answer. She said it had been very helpful!

My first thought was, “Yeah, I’ll bet!” That was not what I had in mind. I told her that, and she said, oh, but it had been so helpful to her to be able to look things up one at a time. She’s a good student. I asked her, if I did them all that way, wouldn’t in make the students lazy? She said, yes, the lazy ones, she wasn’t going to lie. I thought about it while she chatted with others (she carries 19 units and lives online), then decided, what the hell. All the PreQuizzes are now adaptive mode, with bunches of questions, and we’ll see how it goes!

My decision is based on current research involving quizzes as learning, which integrate assessment with the class instead of having it represent an end to learning (see in-class example). This is an important point, since MiraCosta and many other colleges are formulating Outcomes and Assessment plans to cater to results-oriented environments of accountability (such as state legislatures). Many of us learned in our own education that “the test” is the end result of studying a particular topic, and many of us discovered that we forgot the material as soon as we took the test, yet we still push this method.

To use the current edu-speak lingo, we could replace such “summative assessments” with “formative assessments” (see Penn State article).
In an online environment, immediate feedback has a role that is increasingly being recognized as crucial. At a recent conference, I learned that the high speed of broadband increases student frustration, because they see the internet as instant. They no longer go get a cup of coffee while waiting for something to download. When they don’t get an “instant” result (or an instant solution to their technical problem, email, whatever), frustration skyrockets at a much faster rate.

Perhaps my PreQuizzes will solve several problems: they provide instant feedback for every question (reducing frustration), integrate assessment into the learning process, and still force them to study bunches of questions if they haven’t done the reading fully. Maybe they’ll even drink less coffee!

Temper, temper

Lisa M Lane

It’s getting to be that time of the semester when I lose patience. From my end of the wire, it seems I’m writing the same things over and over: “Yes, the first post of the week is due Wednesday midnight, it says that on the main page”, “no, you don’t have to subscribe to the forums”, “please use Messages rather than email”. The students, of course, whether or not they read the posts of others, are asking individually and have no idea I’m answering the same damn questions for four different classes.

The solution? Frequent breaks, quantities of ones favorite beverage, and liberal use of emoticons. Sometimes adding that 🙂 at the end of the response makes me go back and change the tone of the note. So very California! Have a nice day.

Getting them on the web

Lisa M Lane

Sure, it’s a done deal with a fully online class: students have to go to the internet to take the class. But what if you’re using online materials for an on-site class? I made a few suggestions to a colleague of mine yesterday. We bumped into each other at Trader Joe’s and she said students were dropping her classes because they don’t want to go on the web to do the homework she’s posted. They say they don’t have a computer, or DSL, don’t want to go to the lab…

I have done some things to force my on-site students, comfortably, onto the computer:

1. Do an orientation
The second or third class meeting I reserve a computer lab and we all go there, the whole class. We all go into the class site together.
Why? Most of them are afraid of the computer. It has nothing to do with connections, etc.

2. Demonstrate
The class website is up on the screen every day in class. I show them how to do things.

3. Sell it
I point out how cool it is for me to be able to work at night or whenever. For classes using labs, it’s more convenient than having to go the the lab and log hours there. Be enthusiastic about how they can get information any time about how they’re doing.

4. Use it as a feedback loop
Send everyone an email the first week, with the URL to the site and instructions. Post the grades and feedback there. Post homeworks and exercises that offer immediate feedback, like some automatically-graded multiple-choice items.

We hear a lot of crap about how technology-savvy these students are, especially the young ones, and it isn’t true. They don’t think of technology as we do. It’s just a way to do something. If they IM or txt message, that’s what they know. If they do email, it’s with friends. They don’t trust (or maybe even like) the incursion of school into their internet time, or vice versa.

Many of them are scared to mess something up on the computer. In fact, just this morning I found out a student had erased the entire class wiki, where we’ve all been developing the first quiz. It was no problem for me: I just went back and reset it at an earlier version, and copied and pasted the missing stuff students had added. But this student would be so embarrassed if I singled him out this morning, so I won’t. We’ll all go over the wiki together anyway today, and I’ll discuss things more generally! 🙂

An overwhelming start

Lisa M Lane

I have already had e-mails from online faculty reflected what I’m thinking too — how overwhelming it is to have students enthusiastically participating and asking questions before and during the first weeks of class.

I get the sense that if we are trying hard to connect and get them involved at the beginning, it will pay off, but it’s a tremendous amount of work the first week or so. When I emailed all my students the Wednesday night before class started, I had two immediate challenges. One, my ISP (AT&T/Yahoo/SBC/whatever) didn’t want me sending emails to 200 addresses. I had to keep unplugging and replugging my modem and router to create a new IP address to get the messages out, 40 at a time. Two, students went into the classes in droves, signing themselves up for Moodle accounts and doing everything I asked them to do the first week, and more!

My IM, Messages and email have been buzzing with enthusiastic, nervous and energetic comments and questions. Almost every took the Tech Check extra credit quiz. The intro posts in discussion have been numerous and detailed (a little too detailed to my mind — why would anyone put their address and home phone number in their profile?)

But it comes down to this, an IM conversation with a student that went something like this:

Student: This is great! Thanks for doing this IM thing. It’s really helpful.
Me: I’m glad you like it, but it’s getting kinda crazy! 🙂
Student: No, it’s not crazy, it’s helpful.
Me: Well, I have 200 students, so I’m kinda going crazy.
Student: Oh, yeah, I can see that!

And I am. But it’s good to know I’m catching them early, because I want to know who’s committed and who’s not, who’s a novice and needs extra help, who can lead the others. It’s exciting…but exhausting.

Student intelligences

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

We haven’t even started the semester, but already my students are coming into the classes, which I opened last Wednesday. I sent them all an email with instructions, since the classes are in Moodle rather than Blackboard. My first assignment is to take the Multiple Intelligences survey and introduce themselves in the context of their survey results.

Many of my students are rating very high on nature and body movement, then music. I guess I was expecting more visual/spatial, since I’ve been trying to cater to visual learners. I’m going to track this, and get a general result for my 150+ students all together, and see what comes out. I need a way to do this electronically, huh? Anyway, I’ve got to think about how to reach nature and body movement learners, though I have recently learned that online body learners do better in online classes if they have the computer on a high counter, and can move around the room and come back easily as they work. What do I do with a nature learner in a history class?

Ideas for online discussion

Lisa M Lane

One of my weakest areas recently has been online discussion, and not just because Blackboard’s new discussion board is execrable. I’ve been reading up on a good method for summarizing student’s contributions and moving the conversation forward: Collison et al’s Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators (2000). I created a summary for our roundtable workshop next week.

The main idea is that the instructor’s posts are “interventions” in the discussion. They should list mini-quotations from several student posts, noting common areas, tensions, etc. in the thread. The instructor then could take on one or more roles, generating a new direction, setting up a concept for reflection, mediating a polarized discussion, or offering an alternative view. All this while trying to avoid grandstanding or hijacking the conversation. The point is to guide the students’ interaction with each other in a way that furthers class goals, answering the needs of the larger group.

A 2001 video at MCC library

Lisa M Lane

In this case, of a Dallas Tele conference on the challenge of retaining online students (2001). Enchanted by the ideas of Joyce Bishop of Golden West, who had great ideas about multiple intelligences in online learning. I’m following her advice and have changed the first week’s discussion in all my online classes to have students take a Multiple Intelligences Assessment and discuss their results and what they need to make the class a successful experience for them.