Category: Musings

“Student Success” (a Cranky Post)

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments
horsedrinking
Here, let me help you. Photo by iapsii via Flickr. 

There is some limited agreement about “what’s wrong” with higher education. It is currently trendy to denigrate the lecture format, the high price of a college education, the usefulness of the curriculum, and the lack of focus on individual growth. The solution, depending on your view, might be MOOCs (free huge online classes), an acceptance of non-college-educated workers (no one wants to talk about that), or a focus on “student success”.  For those inside the current college system, this last is becoming most popular.

We admit that many of our students are underprepared, overly dependent, and unmotivated. A “student success” focus is designed to deal with these failings and enable students to graduate, presumably by somehow making them more prepared, less dependent and more motivated. Student services are ramped up, early alert systems enabled to provide counseling for those failing their classes. Even professional development for everyone from janitors to administrators is designed to promote “student success”.

However, the system as it exists is not set up to provide the type of personal attention that “student success” advocates say is needed. College is designed for the prepared, independent, motivated student – that’s what makes it “higher” education. Grades are assigned to those students to determine the level of their work compared to a discipline standard, and assessment assumes that the work they do is the result of their learning. At the undergraduate level, college is designed for general rather than deep learning, in a process that forces the student to do lots of reading and pay attention.

I commit heresy now when I say that this traditional design might be a good thing.

Certainly the patching we’re trying to do to fix it is counterproductive. If we accept and condone the underpreparedness, the dependency, and the lack of motivation, we increase the tendency of these students to come to college and expect high levels of deeply personal support. We refuse to say that a student is simply not ready for college, since this could both undermine their “self esteem” and hold them back for remedial work when they need to get their degree soon. So instead it falls on professors to desperately try to hold to a standard of college-level work, while both students and administrators exert pressure on them to ensure “student success”. Part-time college profs in particular know that if they don’t have a certain level of “success”, they’ll lose their jobs.

The view that profs should be deeply attentive to individual students is also leaking into the current arguments about online education. The recent New York Times article The Trouble with Online College has caused great consternation in the ranks, but what jumped out at me is the claim that online classes do not allow for “getting to know” ones students. (In response, some commenters insist that online classes have just as much or more personal interactions between profs and students as on-site classes. That’s true but it’s beside the point.)

I am increasingly having trouble with the argument that “getting to know your students” is the hallmark of class quality. Instead, quality education should create an environment for the students to get to know the ideas and the discipline. The energy for learning should originate with the student, who needs to study and work hard to figure out both the system and the content.  Professors are experts in their discipline, not in engendering character development. Their role is to model their scholarly engagement with their discipline, not their personal engagement with their students. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be good teachers, but it doesn’t define a good teacher as someone who really knows their individual students well. I will “know” a certain percentage of students, in person or online, as it happens naturally. And not knowing every student “well” doesn’t mean not contacting or following up with students who are doing poorly – that’s always appropriate. It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be nice – I’m an advocate of nice .

But over the past decade, I have watched my own students become increasingly unwilling to analyze collective feedback in terms of their own work. Instead they want individual feedback only, preferably in a one-on-one environment with me. At 40 students per class section, I cannot meet that expectation. But it’s a symptom of the individualized attention their sub-standard work has been given thus far. They know that the current system is focused on their “success”, and I’m supposed to make that possible rather than them. Instead of overcoming their own limitations (economic class, learning disability, living situation), they are taught that I will take those hurdles into consideration and lower my expectations. Some have internalized the learning problems and even learning styles they’ve been told they possess as individuals, and they see them as justification for lowered standards. I have students who tell me they can’t do the reading because they are visual learners. (I sometimes find myself mumbling “I’ll read it for you”, a line from Monty Python’s bookshop sketch.)

I realize I sound like a 19th century conservative here, and I am no proponent of Samuel Smiles or social Darwinism. But the dependency of students is expanding within a system increasingly dedicated to enabling their helplessness. Equal opportunity and equal access are the hallmarks of democracy and public education, and I strongly believe in them. But that does not mean equal “success”, especially at the price of academic standards, massive instructor workload, increased student dependency, and an environment that caters to the underprepared and unmotivated.

So I question the current focus on the success of the underprepared, dependent, unmotivated college student. I’m getting concerned that the prepared, independent, motivated learner is being subjected to a restrictive and limited education instead of college or university learning. I have very little time to spend with the high-B student who could be an A, because I spend so much time re-explaining directions and answering individual questions that I’ve already answered collectively, or tracking down poor-performing students to recommend they get tutorial help. This focus on their ‘success” may help them do a little bit better, but at the sacrifice of leaving the better students at the same level as when they came in. I don’t have time to help them make their very good work excellent.

Perhaps “success” should be defined as self-development into an independent learner who can learn something valuable from any professor in any class. It should mean succeeding within various environments and with various teaching styles, and being able to learn something regardless – success as a learner, as someone becoming more educated. (I cringe now when people go off on the track that education reform should be based on people following their own path for learning their own way, studying only those subjects they really care about. College is for finding out the value of subjects you don’t care about, but I guess that’s another post.) I certainly want student success to mean that they come in at a certain level of understanding and increase it in my class. Instead it’s coming to mean a passing grade after lots of detailed and personal help. Thus the cranky post.

Faculty don’t use all the LMS features. Maybe they shouldn’t.

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

For years I have complained that faculty use very few features of their LMS. And I have claimed that they do so because they allow the system to limit their pedagogy, using the LMS defaults and uploading content. Most instructors still use only what I call the Three A’s: announcements, assessments, and assignments. Many also use the discussion forums. Few use messaging, blogs, scholar, or any collaborative or synchronous features.

But my own relationship with the LMS is similarly superficial. I refuse to use deep features because I want to be able to leave the LMS at any time. If I built Lessons in Moodle (which I’ve always wanted to do because branched lessons would be a good technique for some things I do), I could never use them elsewhere. They’d be stuck in the system.

The fact that these systems are increasing in complexity means that we must know more about them to use them effectively. Moodle’s gradebook, for example, takes far more of my time in 2.3 than in 1.9. With the addition of new features (and bugs) it becomes necessary to spend much more time inside the LMS, figuring it out.

This LMS adjustment time is then not available for seeking out new ways to teach, or new technologies. Who can get all excited about the possible educational uses of Springpad or Mightybell or xtranormal when we’re busy trying to figure out how to create a non-numeric scale that translates to points appropriately in the LMS? Who can read about new online pedagogies when it takes hours just to figure out how to get from Messages back to the main course page?

lovemylmsSo perhaps the argument now is in favor of not using many features of an LMS. Maybe we should be using the LMS primarily as a shell, not learning too many of the bells and whistles but instead just making it a location or start page for the class.

If we shift that focus, then extensive workshops in Blackboard, Moodle or Desire2Learn are unnecessary. Beginning training is enough. Valuable learning time can then be switched to exploring on the open web, to discovering things we can link to that fit with our pedagogy, instead of figuring how to force our pedagogy to fit the LMS features.

At first I thought – this is a bad idea, because then we get deeply into technologies that may disappear tomorrow. What if I set up a whole course in Diigo and it goes under next year? What if I commit to Pinterest for a class and it disappears?

But then I realized that, as with the nasty transition from Moodle 1.9 to 2.3, the LMS doesn’t stay the same either. It updates to another version on an almost annual basis, forcing relearning and retraining of things that had been working perfectly well. The LMS is a yearly time suck anyway, and the deeper we go, the more it sucks.

So regardless, we have to recreate our classes all the time anyway. Might as well keep a more basic relationship with our LMS, and adapt to the new fun stuff instead.

The Peril of Being Mean

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Two things have happened that have caused me to think again about professor-student communications and attitudes, and how they may impact learning.

A couple of weeks ago in the POT Facebook group, I posted this in total frustration, as a response to the student attitudes I mentioned in my last post.

Just an idea…..

Subject: Response failure

Hi student,

Your email could not be answered because it did not contain one or more of the following:

1. a subject in the subject line
2. a greeting (such as Hi Professor)
3. your class name and section number
4. a full explanation
5. a sign-off or signature of your name as registered

As a result, we were unable to fulfill the usual response time. 

Please resubmit your email or Message for a speedier response.

History 111 Online

 I was only half-serious. Yet several teachers began to use it as a template for making actual reponses to students, thanking me for the idea and reporting results.

This is because teachers are frustrated. Obviously I understand that.

Then this week Donna Marques posted this video in the POT Facebook group.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naxrUWXLJy4]

I have watched this a couple of times. My gut reaction to the voice of the professor is negative – he sounds pompous to say the least. The student sounds stupid. I try to imagine a student watching this. The “A” student says “duh”. The “C” student says, “That teacher is mean. This video is mean. It’s making fun of me.” But the gut reaction of teachers is, “Yes! This teaches the student about responsibility!”

I have concerns about the affective domain and its impact on teaching. The video enforces the power relationship between prof and student in the discussion of rules and grades. The underlying assumption is that strict rules, and sticking to them, provides an equitable environment for student learning.

I have three problems with this:

1. Students do not respond the same way to this attitude and message. In fact, the type of student for whom this needs to be said is the exact type of student who will resent the message and learn nothing from it.

2. The attitude perpetuates the dependence of the student (and professor!) at a very basic level of rules and obedience. The prof is now playing the low-level game of carrots and sticks, as if we were training dogs instead of educating citizens. At no point can we engage the larger issues of why one should follow deadlines and be responsible. This level of discussion is great for training hamburger flippers at McDonald’s, but not an educated citizenry.

3. It implies that a student will pass the class if they follow instructions. This isn’t true – some students will be cognitively unable to do the level of work required. And we can’t talk about that because of 1 and 2 above have already caused levels of emotion that make such a conversation impossible.

I cringe now when I hear profs say with pride that they allow “no late papers, I don’t care if they’re in the hospital!” or roll their eyes at yet another dead grandmother as an excuse. I’ve already made the point that we need to treat students like responsible adults, or they won’t behave that way. And, as I noted in that same post, I benefit from the fact that other profs are mean.

This doesn’t mean I’m recommending being a pushover. And keep in mind that I’m writing this while I’m experiencing my own crisis about students not following instructions. I have basic requirements for primary source posts – post an image, the author/artist, its title, date and a link. About half of my students refuse to follow the basic instructions, even to the point where I had another student message me this morning offering to help them do it right.

I can repeat the instructions, and I do, in multiple places. I can grade them down, and eventually I will. And sure, I could create a video or use the one above, thinking it’s designed to teach them responsibility.

But all it will do is cause resentment. And if they’re resentful, we won’t be able to get past their badly cited posts, and into historical analysis. I need the students who are cognitively able to do the work to follow me into doing real history –  that’s my real job. And they won’t follow me if they think I’m mean.

 

What’s Working and What’s Not

Lisa M Lane

Working

Crocodoc annotation

I have long been searching for a way to have students collaboratively annotate documents, so that they could examine primary sources together in a way that makes their learning visible. I considered building a class around Diigo but abandoned it when Diigo went down for over 24 hours – I couldn’t leave students dependent on it for a whole class. The other problem was that everyone would need an account, and it would be awkward to integrate with an LMS.So this semester I’m trying embedded Crocodocs. I upload the primary sources for that week from my workbook, and then embed the document in my course. Students can add their name to the list once they open the page, so they don’t need a Crocodoc account unless they want one so that it adds their name automatically.

This is working even though Crocodoc is moving toward a paid business model – a single Personal account is still free, and all the docs are in my account – each one is just set to be annotated by anyone.

annotateddoc2

It’s working pedagogically, too – students in my Honors class are annotating primary sources each week, answering each other’s questions, and posing their own. It’s a cool object-based way to work together.

Homework with open-ended questions

For my on-site Western Civ class, I’m trying homework that mixes open ended questions with factual questions, in “finish the sentence” format, for example:

  • The dates of the Ancient Period were approximately
  • The natural behaviors of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers may have led to religion that was
  • The natural behavior of the Nile River may have led to Mesopotamian kings

The results have made it possible for me to see their level of understanding quickly.

Open grading

In the same class, I’m not grading individual assignments, although I have begun indicating the “level” of individual assignments and pop quizzes. Students may request an assessment of their work up to three times per semester, using my Rubric to Rule Them All. It’s Week 4 and only one student has considered requesting evaluation this early.

In my online classes, I’m also trying a midway method between grading every forum post (these are really writing assignments, just in “public”) and grading them all at the mid-term and ending point. I’ve said I’ll randomly grade forum posts for a total of 40% of the grade, which leaves it open for me to grade more or fewer posts, as needed.

Not working

Student attitudes 

This semester they seem to be exhibiting some bizarre combination of the Ikea effect (they think if they put in lots of effort they’re doing it right), misguided self-esteem training (you are wonderful!), an inflated but unsubstantiated sense of computer competence (the opposite of what I used to get – they now assume it’s my fault instead of theirs), and the me-web (which has taught them to be the center of their own universe). It’s only about a half dozen students that seem to treat me like a combination of a computer and a South Asian helpdesk, but their constant queries (based on a disinclination to read anything I’ve posted) is taking up a disproportionate amount of my time.

104textbookcoversm
My own textbook

Don’t get me wrong – this was a very good idea and students were most appreciative of being able to have it printed at a discount at Office Depot for under $20. They use it and study it. In fact, they read it so closely that it’s short circuiting my own in-class stories. I don’t think of myself as using a narrative pedagogy, but obviously I’m mistaken. A great many of my lecture stories are in the textbook, since they are really written lectures. I kind of knew this would happen, just not quite so often.

They also forget to do the online context reading because the book is in hand, and they know I wrote it so figure it’s more important.

 

The LMS

Moodle 2.3 has got to be the most cumbersome, counter-intuitive product Moodle has ever produced. It is beginning to rival Blackboard in the opaqueness of its usability design. It has buried previously teacher-accessible functions in either the administrative settings (making them inaccessible) or multiple diabolical contextual menus, until the items you need are not only so deep you need a fishing pole, but are in a different ice hole than where you started. Moodle is suffering from roomsful-of-monkeys-on-typewriters syndrome. The alternatives would be Canvas (now with nested discussions but still relatively little flexibility and total dependence on them for a free class), paying for Ning (pay? me?), Blackboard (gag me with a spoon), or WordPress (where being admin is a major time suck). Perhaps I was more serious about going back to web pages and email than I realized.

Damn contextual menus

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Whoever invented contextual menus, I would like to confound him, thusly.

When he gets home from work, he parks his car in the driveway.

He cannot open the door until the engine is off.

He cannot see his briefcase until the door is open and one foot is flat on the driveway, then he may take it out of the car.

There is no key in his pocket until he’s right next to the door.

CC Flickr Mrs. Gemstone
CC Flickr Mrs. Gemstone

When he enters, he cannot see his dog until his body is fully in the foyer.

If he turns around to get the mail because he forgot to do that on the way in, his dog disappears.

When he turns back to the door, it is no longer there. Neither is his car behind him.

He must go back to where the car was so it appears, reopen the car door, sit in the seat, open the car door, put his foot down, and walk toward the front door to get into the house again. The dog will then come greet him.

Now it’s time for dinner….

Organizing etmooc

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

The brilliant and knowledgeable Alec Couros is trying to organize etmooc, a MOOC about educational technology. He’s got a Google Doc, a team of people helping, a Google Community group , an #etmooc hashtag, and a WordPress website. Wonderful, experienced, exciting people have been making a huge number of suggestions on approach, and resources, and speakers, and so much more. During a meeting of some of the helpers, some choices arose about how to organize the course:

Flickr cc dgray_xplane
  • Should it follow a syllabus (one was laid out originally, with topics and experts to invite to facilitate or speak or something)? or should participants organize it and/or determine content?
  • Should there be guest speakers and webinars, or a move away from that model?
  • Should it be like ds106, with a big database of assignments to choose from and lots of freedom and artifact creation?
  • Should the course be geared toward beginners, people new to online learning and the open web? or toward experienced MOOCers and avid ed techies?
  • Should there be any assessment? Badges? Self-assessment? No assessment? Formative? Summative?
  • Should the topics continue over time, instead of stopping when the next topic comes up? (Alan Levine had some great ideas about this and reasons for why getting away from the whole “course” idea would be good).
  • To what extent can a more organized approach be combined with a lot of freedom? Is there a spectrum between a typical university course and an open educational community?

Well….

If I were designing the course, my combination would be a main course with set topics that launch on a particular date (Alan’s idea), and after some basic introduction to the topic, development of a mini-community that continues with that topic.

For the main course, I would have a syllabus, start and end dates, and the list of topics, two weeks apart. Maybe 6 topics total so no one loses interest – a 12-week class. The strands happening now in the Google Community might work as topics: Connected Learning (this could include set-up), Digital Citizenship, Digital Storytelling, Open Learning, Tools in Context 1, Tools in Context 2.

The goal for each topic would be to develop a mini-community on that topic. The first task for each topic would be a collaborative document where participants put what they want to learn about (inquiry) and start listing resources (content). These resources could include materials from the “experts” who were normally be guest speakers, including their videos. If there are many participants in the topic, they could vote on the top 12 resources to focus on. The time for posting the list of questions and resources would be limited to a week or so, then reflection could begin on blogs and/or elsewhere (synchronous sessions, creation of artifacts, etc). For the sake of alignment, the facilitator for that topic would suggest contributions in a format appropriate to the topic (Digital Storytelling might look ds106-ish, Tools in Context 1 might suggest the use of Prezi or Diigo).

The mini-community for that topic established over the two weeks, we’d go on to the next topic. Again, brief introduction by the main instructor, then collaborative inquiry/question collection and resource gathering, then reflection and communication. And so on.

These topical mini-communities would each have their own space somehow, either as a Google Community topic or a WordPress tag or something, and at least one leader or facilitator (yes, someone would be in charge).  That mini-community could continue long past the course or not, continue for as long as it stayed alive. Participants could come and go from the main course, participating in all of the topics like a regular class, or in just one or two.

So you’d need one central instructor (Alec, or me if it were my course), then at least 6 facilitators (teams might be better), plus as many participants as want to join.

I’d have no assessments, no awards, no assumption of the acquisition of mad tech skilz by participants. There would be structure for the main course and at the top level of each topic, but freedom in reflection, creation and community. There could be guest speakers for individual topics if the mini-community wanted them, but none for the main course.

So, after thinking about it for a few days, that’s what I would do.

Student Success: Things That Make No Difference

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Student “Success”

There has been great focus lately on that slippery, administratively-led, accountability-driven beast we call “student success”. Our college is creating entire plans designed to “help students succeed”, which means (depending on whom you talk to) passing their classes, transferring to university, obtaining a certificate, or just not dropping the hell out of college. (It does not tend to mean, interestingly, students succeeding in achieving their own personal goals like having a reason to get out of bed, or not getting kicked out of their parent’s house, or having somewhere they’re supposed to be, or hanging with their friends, or staying on their parent’s health insurance, but that’s the subject of another post.)

Sometimes the focus is on student services, making sure that students aren’t abandoned on campus, that they know where to go for help. But there’s also an instructional aspect. Recently, our Professional Development Committee received a statewide vision statement that included the sentence,  “All personnel will have ongoing opportunities to develop and expand the skills and practices that influence students’ ability to complete their educational goals”. I don’t think by “personnel” they mean janitors and those helpful people over in the cafeteria.

The implication in applying “student success” directives to instruction is that pedagogy has a strong influence on whether students succeed or not. This should be a no-brainer. It should be obvious that better teaching leads to more student success.

But it isn’t that simple, of course. If it were, teachers’ unions wouldn’t react so strongly about tying their pay to student grades. We wouldn’t have Hattie’s 2009 study showing that only 30% of student success variations are related to instructional quality. (or see here).  And we would have some agreement on what constitutes good teaching (a consensus on this rarely lasts long).

So here’s my anecdotal, non-scientific list, a short draft based on 25 years of teaching experience, of pedagogical choices that appear to make little or no difference to student success. None of them are based on research – yet. I have in mind a longitudinal study of my own pedagogical methods related to grades, but that would take a sabbatical.

What Doesn’t Seem to Matter

Giving all test questions in advance.

Multiple-choice or essay, it doesn’t matter. The top students use them to increase confidence as they get the A they would have gotten anyway.

Having open book (or open lecture, materials, web) exams.

Online or on-site, having access to materials may improve certain individual’s work (usually those who would get an A anyway), but not the overall grades. In online classes, the effect is negligible.

Community (see previous post).

Active interaction with peers increases happiness but not grades.

Using the web in class during a test.

Test scores vary little even when students have their devices and access to the web. This may be related to the kind of tests I design, which don’t test facts but force students to use them. If they don’t study and internalize the information, open access to it doesn’t help.

Methods other than lecture.

Class grades have been close to the same regardless of whether the primary mode of classroom activity was me lecturing, students working in groups, or student-led projects (for this last, the drop rate, however, is very high).

Peer grading or working publicly.

Despite what I’ve heard from others, I have seen no improvement in quality based on students writing in public or grading each others’ work – I do not see the peer pressure that is presumably at play here. Revision of exam works or essays in consultation with peers similarly causes little if any improvement.

So why bother?

Any difference, as I’ve been saying for years, is affective. Open book or open web exams make students less stressed about the test, because their fear is the failure of memorization. Same with giving questions in advance.

Some would say that since these pedagogical techniques make no difference, we shouldn’t bother doing them. Let’s have closed exams, no community, droning lectures. I see it the opposite way – there’s no reason not to have open access during exams or opportunities to form community. It does no harm and creates a friendlier learning environment.

It just doesn’t seem to improve “student success”.

My own textbook. How?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Textbooks are too expensive. Students in my on-site classes need a textbook. When I tell them to print out internet resources or documents, many don’t do it even when I tell them it saves them tons of money. When I post resources online, they may or may not read them, but if they don’t print them and have them in front of them in class, they are of only superficial use. I am not allowed to make copies for them at cost to the college – we don’t have a printing services that will sell to students and are limited to just syllabus and exams, pretty much.

This semester’s textbook, which I was trying for the first time, cost over $85 used. It’s got only greyscale illustrations, and is pretty small. It has a method and primary sources, rather than being an overview. I send them to Wikipedia for overviews. We have our book in front of us as we work (at least, those that bought it or bring it). They don’t tend to read what’s on Wikipedia.

I don’t like the book that much, as it turns out, and although I can use this to my pedagogical advantage, it makes the book worth even less. I found another textbook for next semester and asked the bookstore how much for the current 10th edition? $110 new/ $85 used. How about the previous 7th edition? The same. That’s ridiculous. This is a total ripoff. They can get the 7th edition for less than $5 used on Amazon, but the college contracts with Follett and we’re all required to order everything through them. And students prefer to just walk to the bookstore and get their books – few order them online anyway if they’re in an on-site class.

So next semester, I figure, I’ll do it differently. I’ll take all my online lectures and put them into a book myself. I’ll add in the primary sources I used to put in a coursepack. I’ll put it on Lulu. Except that the bookstore has an exclusive contract – we’re supposed to use Follett, with their minimum markup of 26%. They said, OK, we can order from Lulu, but why not use Premium Source Publishing, which does our coursepack? No, I told them, I refuse to use Premium Source Publishing for this since they own the copyright. That’s fine for a coursepack of edited documents, but not for my own writing – I want it licensed Creative Commons, which Lulu will do.

I have done coursepacks of primary sources before, and I recently stopped. I would spend many hours editing primary sources into the book. Then I’d send the pdf to Premium Source Publishing, which presumably got copyright clearance. I said presumably because I never saw the records on this, and in some semesters they left blank pages where they couldn’t get clearance and in others the pages were there even though the copyright holder was the same. They got a profit for producing the books, inviting me to add a dollar amount to each for my own royalty, which I never did. Then they sent my coursepacks to the bookstore, which marked them up 26%. The price continued to increase over time.

So I tried making the book available in pdf form for students and asking them to print it out themselves. Compliance was less than it would have been if they’d been able to buy it in the bookstore. Some care about money; some only care about convenience. Some won’t buy a book the whole semester no matter what.

I have spent the last few weeks creating my new textbook, but last night I got to the 1920s and realized I’ll have copyright problems adding in the primary sources. I did some research on copyright and recent cases. According to these, it’s possible that my book would be OK with all the content I want, so long as it’s for a non-profit institution and isn’t making me any profit. Since it’s my writing, I was considering a small royalty, but I can forgo that.

So now what? Lulu for my own writing, sold in the bookstore for their own profit and Lulu’s, with or without a royalty for me? Possible cost: $40. Then Premium Source for my document coursepack, separately? Another $40. Look! We’re at about the same price as a used textbook.

And before you tell me that my own work is of higher quality, let me assure you that is not the issue. My textbook would have my perspective, which we could then discuss and question in class. Another textbook would have another perspective,and we would discuss and question in class. The method is the same. “Information” is not the point.

But this is a baaaad formula. Publisher’s profits + student demands for convenience = high prices. Publisher’s profits + student demands for convenience + unpaid professorial work = high prices anyway.

So maybe I should head back to the online only idea, with my original idea of my own textbook with all the primary sources, only in pdf format. It would not be convenient for students who want to buy a textbook. But if they had a device (smarthphone, laptop, tablet, Touch), they could bring it to class on that device. If they didn’t, they could print it at the library. And if they read it online elsewhere outside of class, didn’t print it, and forgot to bring it to class, I could print up a few copies for myself to bring to class for working. Plus, the courts are way clearer  on this one, with no profit involved at all.

I think that’s the plan. For now, anyway.

Link marketing to educators?

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Over the last couple of years, I’ve received two types of emails that I thought must be marketing.

The first one notes a broken link on one of my class pages (usually using the outdated college URL), and suggests another one. When I don’t reply, I get:

Hi Lisa,

I’ve reported a broken link on your site miracosta.cc.ca.us/home/llane/courses/hist111/pw/syl.htm that links to http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/ and haven’t heard back, so I just wanted to verify whether you’re the right person to contact? If not, could you direct me to the person maintaining the website? If you would be interested in updating your website, I have a similar resource that you are more than welcome to use to update. Let me know!

Link Replacement Option: http://www.onlineuniversity.net/people-and-societies/her-majestys-prison-system/

Best,
Jennifer Jenkins

From this person I’ve gotten several, despite asking them to stop. I think that’s obviously link marketing of some kind.

The second one is much more complex. Example:

Good morning from Mrs. etc’s class,

I hope you don’t mind me getting in touch with you, but I’m in the midst of a class project that I was hoping you might be able to assist with. I’m a fifth grade teacher working with my students on learning internet research techniques, and we found your page http://lisahistory.net/hist104inclass/pw/lectures/19thcsci.htm.

For extra credit, I ask my students to suggest resources for the website maker to add to their page. We found http://www.cheapflights.ca/promos/sir-issac-newton-and-gravitation. Would you be willing to add it to your list of resources? The students would get not only credit but the thrill of seeing their suggestion there on your page!

Thanks,Sincerely,
Mrs. etc.

Note the link to “cheap flights”.

The first time I got one of these, I was so happy and I did it – went into the code and added their link, thinking so-and-so’s third grade class somewhere would be so happy. I got a note back that they were indeed. With this more obvious URL, I thought I saw marketing and wrote back to ask the teacher whether marketers are paying teachers to do this.

She apologized and told me no, she wasn’t being paid – the project was an idea she got from another teacher to help young students learn internet skills. I felt bad, and apologized, explaining the marketing I’m sure I’m getting in the first type of email.

Anyone have any information on these types of marketing to educators?

Blog? Student blogs? LMS? Uh oh. LMS.

Lisa M Lane 12 Comments

Planning my first online History honors course, I immediately assumed I’d be doing something different, more connectivist, more open-ended. I figured it would start, as so many good things do, with a fresh WordPress blog.

But then I thought, the students should each have their own blog. Edublogs and WordPress.com don’t have enough free features, though, and they might get caught in freemium traps. That’s OK – my college now has WordPress. I found out that another instructor had set up blogs for all his students last semester. Except that it was extremely time consuming, involved a separate server, and he used an assistant to do the hands-on setup. I have more students and no assistant –  I’ll end up teaching WordPress more than history and dreading sys admin as a massive time suck.

Better go with a single blog under my own control, multi-author.

So I made one. Even made a really cool banner.

 

Then I started thinking some more, as I began downloading the many plugins: Akismet for spam, Comment Form toolbar so they could embed media in comments, Comment Image for a similar thing, comments-like so they could “like” each other’s comments, Custom Meta for better guidance signing in, Email users so I could email them all, iframe Preserver to help the pages with info, nCode Image Resizer to prevent huge images, Simply Exclude to control visible pages, Top Commentators to add a little competition, User Photo, WP Super Cache to prevent overloading the CPU, etc etc etc.

I started to realize what I was doing – trying to make WordPress more like an LMS. Moodle in particular.

What was gained by doing this? A public space, which they may not want anyway. My own control with my own rented server, which I could also have using my own Moodle. A blog format, with more independence and reflection. Did I want that?

I started to think about my students. Yes, it’s an Honors class, with a lower enrollment cap so we can get to know each other better and a tip hats to more individualized instruction. But only some students are from the Honors program – the class is open to anyone. I lost a student in my standard class this semester and encouraged her to enroll for this one. Even a higher number of Honors students doesn’t mean they’ll know anything about blogs. I’ll still be teaching WordPress.

That’s OK, said I, let’s look at pedagogy! To go all connectivist and bloggy, I’d have to give up some things. Textbook? No big deal getting rid of that. Quizzes? I’d love to ditch them. My forums where I have them post a primary source then write about the collection they’ve built, and it all shows on the same page so they can compare their work and revise?  Um…..

No. It came down to a pedagogy meets technology decision. For students to post sources each week and form a collection on a blog, they’d need to use tags (for both era and topics) so the sources would post onto a page for that era or be easy to find later. They’d need to search tags to find evidence. I’d need to set up many pages. The format would be sloppy, and as the class advances into using more evidence for writing, things would get very confusing. Blogs are call-and-response systems, not repositories. Tagging is not natural behavior for ordinary mortals on the web – it must be taught.

Perhaps my goals don’t really dovetail with the blog format. It’s not like ds106, where you pick and choose and create and move on – here the work is dependent on that of others, not just referencing that of others. It’s not like a CCK class, where you participate in the sections you’re interested in. Here there is a set curriculum, and a particular method I want to use, a method that has students discovering, interacting, writing extensively, practicing… it sounds blog-like, but it’s done a different way.

I started to argue with myself. Again, what was I gaining from using WordPress? Did I want the shift to reflection implied by the use of ongoing posts? Did I want to recreate something like the POT Cert Class? Did I want to teach the students, not only about WordPress, but about the big web world, the people who might read and comment, the difference between the open web and an LMS, the possible joys and dangers? Sure, I could do all this, but did I want them focusing on that stuff instead of finding great primary sources, observing their colleagues, and creating their own theses based on a slow, modelled, practiced development of their historical thinking? With so little time that they’d be willing and able to dedicate to the class, did I want to use time teaching these (admittedly valuable) things, when they were not central to my objectives?

So I’ve backed away, to my own Moodle install. I feel like a traitor, but it won’t be the first time. I’ve created something, a method I love, a method I want to write about and publish about, and I happened to create it inside a particular LMS where it works well. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work outside it. I can indeed recreate it inside WP or a Ning or somewhere else (though Blackboard would be a nasty challenge). If I combine this method with the convenience of grading posts, having them spend their outside recess time looking for sources, and teaching them about sources and citations and writing and how to use the big web to do history …it will be better for all of us.

Alan Levine made this for me only a short time ago (translated roughly as “I use an LMS only for management”). I wonder whether this is already not true, or whether it’s management in the sense of managing a pedagogical process, or whether it’s just a matter of choosing the best tool for the job. Maybe I’ve never risen above having too many students in each section, and I want that drop-down grading menu. Maybe I’m maturing away from the knee-jerk reaction against an LMS, a reaction which makes no sense anyway given my own ability to twist the suckers into almost anything I want them to be. Maybe it’s all a massive justification to keep a familiar workflow so I can focus on developing a new class.

I confess – I’m really not sure.

 

Previous posts along similar lines:

Doctor’s notes and the issue of trust

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Today a student emailed apologizing for not being able to come to class because her car broke down. She offered to bring me the tow slip and garage bill as evidence.

I frequently have college students offer me doctor’s notes.

I tell them I don’t need these things, but it occurred to me today (as I answered the car-challenged student) that it’s because I much prefer to take a student’s word.

I find being handed doctor’s notes and towing slips vaguely offensive. They imply that I don’t believe the student, without giving me a chance to show I do.

I believe them because it is the polite, adult thing to do. Keeping your word is an important expectation; in fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a major component of being an adult. One can’t walk around as an adult with the assumption that your word will not be accepted. To do so keeps you apart from adult society.

If we are going to say we value honesty, to the point of recommending the electric chair for plagiarism and execution for Wall Street bankers (not that I’m against that, you understand), the only way to get it is to make honesty the default expectation. We know as teachers that expectations are important – we are told that we need to have high expectations for our students, and that many will rise to meet them.

And then we demand a doctor’s note when they’re absent?

Besides, if we insist on documentation, we also have to develop complex rules for what’s excused and unexcused. A dentist appointment or trip to Greece one could have rescheduled? the death of a pet? the nanny didn’t show up? the I-5 was crowded? Frankly, it takes less time to give a test later for reduced credit than to come up with a constitution for allowed excuses.

Two weeks ago I had a student miss a great deal of class. Her friend was dying in the hospital, his family was both crazy and absent, and she needed to be there. She did her coursework while he was sleeping. Who would write that note? The nurse who brought his morphine?

So I trust them, because it’s polite, conveys trust, and is a hell of a lot easier.

 

 

 

The Unhelpful Dichotomy

Lisa M Lane 10 Comments

I sat in on a fascinating discussion about blogging  today on Connected Learning (recording here), but came out annoyed and frustrated, feeling like I’d witnessed yet another echo chamber on educational technology.

It seems that there now exists a two-sided model for discussing the intersection of education and web technology, wherein both parties disdain the other’s point of view.

In one corner, we have the edu-techno-utopians, which includes many wonderful people whose work I deeply respect. They want learning out in the open, freed from the constraints of systems (and sometimes schools), where students control their own web spaces, their own digital identities, their own destiny.

In the other corner, we have the cautious majority, worried about exposing our young people to bullying, stalking, identity theft, unemployableness (is that a word?) and other harm. They want protected spaces, gentle slopes of learning, adult control of the environment.

Until recently, the two parties (and many others) were engaged in active and productive discussion. Now their explorations have hardened into positions, pro or con, for or against.

The edu-techno-utopians answer concerns about privacy and protection by declaring that control of ones own digital identity is the key. While that may be true, they rarely acknowledge how totally unprepared most people are to engage at this level. Most people do not know what a blog is, much less how to moderate comments (or turn them off) or prevent spam. They do not know which of the online things they do can be seen by others. They still type URLs into the Google search bar.  They think their Facebook status updates can only be seen by their friends when they haven’t changed the settings to do that. The only technology where common understanding could be said to be fairly accurate is email.

With respect to Gary Larson’s cartoons about dogs , I illustrate the problem like this:

The edu-techo-utopians seem to have a sink-or-swim mentality when it comes to throwing people out onto the web, with a delightful tolerance for failure and vulnerability that many mortals do not have. They want to encourage this tolerance in everyone, but don’t have much regard for differences in temperament or personality. Most of the edutech gurus were educated in types of educational environments they now deride, have read lots of books, and came to web technology when it was still young, free and individually controllable. They learned over a long period of time, yet are impatient with others who want to do the same. They are also, with very few exceptions, individualistic personalities who don’t care that much what other people think of them (I know because I’m one too). It’s uncomfortable for them to acknowledge that most people are not like them and don’t really want to be.

The cautious majority include people who know they don’t understand the web, and people who know they do. The ones who know they don’t understand, and say they don’t understand, are blasted for being ignorant or lazy. The ones that do understand the web, but raise various concerns, are treated like they’re living in a past idyll that doesn’t exist anymore, or are refusing to participate in the way of the future. They keep the world of the web at arm’s  length, and are uncomfortable with efforts toward openness. Some are concerned about the legalities of copyright, or the protection of minors, or being made fun of. They see the world changing in a way that exposes people unduly, places objects above people, subsumes real life to screens and gadgetry, and prevents authentic face-to-face contact. Some just don’t want to learn about any of it – “technology” is a section in a magazine, and you can just skip it and move on to sports.

They see the other side as proselytizers of an unfinished faith, and its proponents as special cases. The crazy tech folks are people to admire for their mad skilz, but not people one emulates. The cautious majority want their children to grow up with an understanding of all this stuff, but by learning from teachers who control that environment. Many teachers and professors also belong in this group. Some are very much aware of their shortcomings when it comes to understanding technology, and want to stay where they’ve been told it’s safe – inside the learning management system.  They will innovate in there if at all. They are often busy people who want to spend their time teaching their subject, not learning the intricacies of the web.

Until the two sides begin to appreciate the other’s view, there will be no progress. Ironically, the cautious majority is more open to learning new technology than the edu-techno-utopians are to developing models based on lack of knowledge. Any roomful of faculty shown a new technology will have some people leave excited to learn more. But only a few utopians (and I love them and can name them) leave a room after talking to concerned or ignorant teachers wondering how best to create models, processes and environments that take their needs into account.

That’s gotta change.

 

 

A course is a course of course

Lisa M Lane 8 Comments

Except when it’s a class.

At my college, and in many colleges and universities, a worthwhile distinction is made between a “course” and a “class”.

A “course” is created with a title, rough outline of topics, and various legal requirements. It’s an offering of the institution.

An individual instance of a course is called a “class” or “class section”. It’s offered by a specific instructor in a department.

A “course” is what articulates (transfers) to other colleges. It’s what’s in the catalog. A “class” is in the schedule of classes each semester, taught by different instructors. Within a class, the instructor makes the syllabus and determines which instructional methods will be used in order to fulfill the goals of the course. A course is just the framework on which the instructor builds the class.

In online venues, these terms have gotten confused. People talk about offering open online courses, when they mean classes.

Except that they don’t, necessarily.

Classes differ each time they’re offered. The MOOC called CCK08 is a different class from CCK11. But the model has shifted now to MOOCs offered by for-profit (or for-profit-to-be) institutions, and the shift is away from the class model.

So there is a reason Coursera is not called Classera. A number of the MOOCs invoke their massiveness by acting as large course frameworks, standardized, depersonalized, and marketed. An open online class, by contrast, features the elements that an instructor would include in any class, including presentation and interaction. Presentation can be created by the instructor, the students, or through materials and artifacts that are made available. Interaction is between the students and the material, the students and other students, and the students and the instructor. Even with a constructivist pedagogy, these elements are designed into any class – only the balance differs.

But the last two elements of interaction (student-student and student-instructor) are being left out in large offerings. This problem is not unique to online classes. Large on-site classes may have little interaction among students or between students and the instructor. Interaction may exist when Teaching Assistants provide it, which is the norm at most universities, so the TA may take the place of the instructor and also facilitate interaction among students. But if they didn’t, the class wouldn’t feature student-student or student-instructor interaction. It would just be a course, a framework without a heart.

This is why correspondence courses were called “courses” – a student participated in a course of study, got feedback from an instructor independently, and didn’t interact with other students. Online, these might best be called “tutorials” – you interact with the material yourself, take auto-graded tests, and get a grade. You have taken a course. A class implies colleagues.

If the prof-free, automated, massive model isn’t really a class, one shouldn’t expect class elements from it, nor the satisfaction one might get from talking a class. Many students report that what they like most about classes is not the subject, but the instructor’s approach and their working relationships with their colleagues. This affective evaluation cannot be applied to courses, only to classes.

I realize the distinction is not black and white, but there is a conceptual difference that should be explored by both those offering courses/classes and those taking them.

Escape the Complexity by Looking Backward

Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

This was one of the worst starts to the semester ever, thanks to the horrors of the Moodle integration with the college’s enrollment system. In getting very little sleep working out complex problems by simply observing the behavior of Moodle, I became not only exhausted but also increasingly uncomfortable with the complexity of the system and my dependence on it.

We all know I am not a fan of the LMS, and yet I use one because I have so many students whose work must be monitored. This semester it’s 220+ students, in six class sections. My preferred pedagogy demands that I be personally involved in presentation, interaction and assessment, so it is a lot of involvement per student – this is not MOOC land. Moodle has served me well, despite the fact that it is a closed silo or walled garden (choose your metaphor), except…

Except that as time has gone on Moodle, like every LMS, has increased in complexity. Features multiply, usability issues become new features instead of being repaired in the previous format, and more layers are added (such as the contextual menus). The college is in Moodle 1.9, but I piloted 2.0 with my summer class on my own server, and am currently piloting 2.2 with my fall on-site class on the college’s contract with Mooderooms. The forced integration of the enrollment system with Moodle 1.9 added another layer of complexity.

Rewind to 1998, when I began teaching online. There was no LMS. What we had were standard HTML web pages for presentation (syllabus, lectures, readings), and a little program called Webboard for discussion. Most exams and papers were submitted via email, and we would create folders in our own email system for each student or class. When the LMS arrived (and actually we had three of them to choose from then), it seemed ridiculously cumbersome and old-fashioned to use email for assignments or Webboard for interaction, so we switched over.

from Colin Milligand’s 1998 paper http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/jtap-573/573r1-2.html

Well, now it is the LMS that has become ridiculously cumbersome. The sheer number of Moodle operations that were affected by the integration of the enrollment system was appalling: it impacted everything from faculty being able to control the short name of their course to whether a particular student could be added to a group. And as the complexity of these systems increases, “security” issues cause administrators to block more and more permissions for faculty, including the ability to change a student’s password. This forces faculty further and further from the heart of the system.

The obvious thing to do is leave the LMS and go forward, into the land of social media or WordPress. With 240 students, no funding, the inappropriateness of ad-based websites for education, the number of good sites (like Ning) that have gone premium or want you to advertise for them, and the fact that I don’t code, the options would be limited. I always think of WordPress, but given what happened this summer with my provider, I’m not so sure.

So what if we left the LMS to go backward instead of forward?

Presentation would again be via web page. That’s no problem. HTML5 may not be ready for prime time, but hyperlinks still exist, and javascript makes popups and mini-quizzes function in all browsers. All that code I stole way back when still works. The only thing that’s really changed is CSS. No biggie – I disagree with separating form from content, but I can follow a CSS book the same as I can follow HMTL directions.

If you think about it, Google Sites is basically going back to this “make a web page” idea. So is Weebly and other sites that help you make a web page. And embedding media is easy now that so many sites give you embed code (I damn near memorized the tome “QuickTime for the Web” during the early 21st century- such feats are no longer necessary).

Interaction spaces abound. Assuming that the issue of privacy and being treated like a commodity can be resolved, absorbed, accepted, or otherwise set aside, social spaces are available. Wikis, though not yet as user-friendly as they should be, work as spaces. For the squeamish, good old bulletin board scripts still exist (although I haven’t found one yet that accepts embedded media and nests the posts).

For record-keeping and gradebooks and quizzes, Engrade is still there and getting bigger. Or, even more basic, a private spreadsheet kept on your hard drive isn’t a bad idea. One could use Dropbox to access it and grade anywhere. Emailed essays would be even easier to categorize and process now than they used to be, with email programs allowing tagging and automatic folder placement.

The technologies used in the “old days” are highly reliable. HTML is a standard. Old embed codes work almost everywhere. Simple gradebooks and quiz programs are just databases. Less complexity, fewer parts, fewer things to break.

If we went all the way back, we could teach faculty much of what we were taught back in 1998. Somewhere between then and now we stopped creating things and began plugging “content” into other people’s systems. Building our own spaces might have made us more creative. It could have made us less tolerant of software controlling us instead of the other way around,  in the same way that learning to garden or cook makes you less tolerant of mass-produced food. If we revived these skills, learning the old ways of DIY HTML could even change the attitudes that stifle pedagogical creativity.

And it would get us out of the LMS and back to a simpler world. Less convenient, perhaps (not as many 7-11s on the corners, no home delivery) but less complex and easier to understand, manage, and fix.

We could call it the Back to the Web movement. As with Back to the Land, we’d learn less about how to conform to things that aren’t sustainable, and spend our mental energies on things that are.

Noyes and open course design

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

Higher Ed and the Monastic Space

Lisa M Lane 5 Comments

Lately I’ve been engaged in a conversation in G+ with Laura Gibbs, George Station, Donna Murdoch and Edward O’Neill. We’ve been talking about the current controversies in higher ed in terms of the value of on-site versus online education, in particular the role of the physical classroom, and the extent to which it may no longer be needed. The question of whether the online classroom will/should/can replace the physical classroom is, of course, a very old (what, 14 years?) topic. But I’m seeing different metaphors now.

The most significant, I think, has to do with space in which to think. For example, I personally like a certain amount of clutter. I like to be surrounded by books and objects. But I also find clearing counters and hiding objects create a different kind of work space, one more conducive to contemplation as well as relaxation.

If we accept that when people learn new things, they need space and time for reflection, the question with online learning concerns the environment where reflection can take place.

My classroom on campus

The physical classroom, at least at the college level, is often a fairly sterile space, without much clutter. I recall when I was first hired that I frantically hung posters on the walls and wondered why there weren’t any bookshelves in the room. It seemed like a place that was too clean and bare to learn anything.

Now I look at my computer screen, cluttered with disorganized files. And my browser, with its many tabs open. Emails come in, ads pop up, while I work and try to learn things. Yes, students have grown up with multiple distractions like this. But in many ways I’m actually more accustomed to it than they are, since I grew up hating silence and quiet. I had the TV (not the radio – that’s only one input) blaring while I wrote every paper in college and grad school.

At the same time, I know many students who do very little classwork outside of the physical classroom. On-site students seem to think that everything to do with learning should take place in that space. It’s a challenge I’ve been working with for a number of years. I was “flipping” the class before it had that name, moving more and more analysis into class time, reducing lecture and shifting the delivery of facts to out-of-class time. The result, predictably, is little reading or listening outside of class, which I anticipated. I now aim for balance.

In declaring the end of Higher Ed as we know it, Edward O’Neill writes that we have a Higher Ed system based on mistaken beliefs, such as proximity being necessary for quality, and learning being transmitted by contact with smart people via osmosis. He writes

In short, colleges and universities are to the mind what monasteries once were to the spirit: places where you lock yourself away in close proximity to powerful souls whose vibrations will influence you deeply by a kind of prayerful osmosis.

CC licensed mbac via Flickr

Monasteries were a place for the mind also, as were medieval universities where a great deal of “study” (quiet, independent study) of texts was key to learning. Even today, most of the great intellectuals, whether they are teaching at universities or not, would tell you of many hours spent in contemplative study. I always find it amusing that so many of the techno-utopians and 2.0 educational reformers have degrees and knowledge based on extensive book learning. Deep learning can’t happen without deep reflection.

So, in the online world (by which I mean both online classes and the always-on-electronic world where many of our students live), where is the space for contemplative study? Could it be the physical classroom?

In suggesting a special place for the physical classroom, I risk the wrath of my colleagues in educational technology, MOOCs, and the other wonderfulness that is learning online (maybe Jim Groom will ask me which side I’m on again!). But I have seen students who need the physical classroom to learn, and it isn’t just because of osmosis or time management issues or tradition or industrialized education or Pavlovian training.

They need it because the physical classroom provides the only even partly contemplative space they have, a space where they are supposed to pay single-minded attention even if they choose to watch surfing videos on their laptop instead, a space where they are supposed to think about one subject for over an hour, a space where some of them actually learn better than online. I have students contact me when they’re not doing well in an online class, and they are very apologetic that they just seem to “need the classroom”. Ira Socol noted, in rejecting the flipped classroom for public schools, that a lot of kids do not have a supportive environment for study outside of school. That is still true in college. We’re a commuter campus with limited library hours. I have students who were kicked out of the house when they reached 18, or can’t think at home because they miss their deployed spouse. They need classrooms.

Our exciting “new models” for higher education are models that counter industrialized and standardized education, which is great. They emphasize collaborative work, social learning, and the affordances of the web in achieving greater learning through guided exploration and community, all fabulous things. But in promoting them as a substitute for “old style” learning, they also risk eliminating a place that may have become the last monastic space in which to work with the mind.

Three Kinds of MOOCs

Lisa M Lane 42 Comments

We are so into MOOCs now that it’s too much for me. Gotta apply Ockham’s Razor 2.0 to this stuff.

At the Ed-Media conference, I attended a session by Sarah Schrire of Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv. In her discussion of Troubleshooting MOOCs, she noted the dificulties in determining her own direction in offering a MOOC in the “Stanford model” MOOCs versus the “connectivism” MOOCs. I found myself breaking it down into three categories instead.

Each type of MOOC has all three elements (networks, tasks and content), but each has a goal that is dominant.

Network-based MOOCs are the original MOOCs, taught by Alec Couros, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier. The goal is not so much content and skills acquisition, but conversation, socially constructed knowledge, and exposure to the milieu of learning on the open web using distributed means. The pedagogy of network-based MOOCs is based in connectivist or connectivist-style methods. Resources are provided, but exploration is more important than any particular content. Traditional assessment is difficult.

Task-based MOOCs emphasize skills in the sense that they ask the learner to complete certain types of work. In Jim Groom’s ds106 at UMW, the learning is distributed and the formats variable. There are many options for completing each assignment, but a certain number and variety of assignments need to be done to perform the skills. Similarly, our POT Certificate Class focuses on different topics for each week, and skills are demonstrated through sections on design, audio, video etc. in an effort to expose learners to many different formats and styles in online teaching. Community is crucial, particularly for examples and assistance, but it is a secondary goal. Pedagogy of task-based MOOCs tend to be a mix of instructivism and constructivism. Traditional assessment is difficult here too.

Content-based MOOCs are the ones with huge enrollments, commercial prospects, big university professors, automated testing, and exposure in the popular press. Community is difficult but may be highly significant to the participants, or one can go it alone. Content acquisition is more important in these classes than either networking or task completion, and they tend to use instructivist pedagogy. Traditional assessment, both formative and summative, may be emphasized. Mass participation seems to imply mass processing.

So I’m rejecting both the Good vs Bad MOOC model, and the million-points-of-MOOC approach, and going for a triad.

The price of participating in Wikipedia

Lisa M Lane 10 Comments

Almost exactly a year ago, I was engaged in a conversation with my online network about why there wasn’t a good article in Wikipedia on MOOCs. I was particularly disappointed that those who not only offered them but did so with a good background in educational theory were not contributing to the article. I wrote a blog post about the response, which essentially encouraged me to get into Wikipedia and start writing. Others joined. I did what I could in the time I had, and haven’t looked much at it since.

Then today I again went to the article, because I was looking for something on MOOCs to add to the syllabus for the POT Certificate Class for 2012-13, the SMOOC (Small to Medium Open Online Class) that I facilitate, for free. I was horrified to find this:

I am being accused, along with Stephen Downes and George Siemens, whose MOOCs are extensively referenced in the article, of self-promotion and of creating the term MOOC for our own purposes and to link to our own content.

The SMOOC I teach isn’t even in the article. I was focused on the history and cleaning up some of the language. None of my own work, which frankly isn’t widely known anyway, is linked or mentioned in any way.

In the Talk tab, a couple of people point out that the list of MOOCs in the article is outdated, and needs to include the Stanford AI and Coursera MOOCs. Very true! Why did these commenters point that out but not add them to the article? One can criticize or comment, but the number of people helping is rather small if you look at the list of contributors (where I am still, strangely, the one who made the most changes).

I have been an active participant online for years, and ironically it is the current crop of corporate-based MOOCs and the massive expansion of for-profit online “colleges” that has caused me to participate less. But to be accused of self-promotion is ridiculous. I make no money with the SMOOC I facilitate, I work at a public community college in California, and I have no business or commercial aspirations at all. I’m Little Miss Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

In fact, I see myself as a public servant, and it is an extension of this feeling of responsibility that encourages me to participate in online venues. I thought I was being helpful by editing the Wikipedia article, and I assumed others would come along and do some too.

This is very discouraging. It shouldn’t hurt, I guess, but it does. As a supporter of open education, open community, sharing and public participation, it’s more than disheartening. I am accustomed to the idea that working openly subjects ones work to public criticism. But here a moderate effort at providing some information has been interpreted as self-promotion. It does make me think twice about the extent to which I should spend time contributing to what I thought was a larger sphere of knowledge. I might be thinking more than twice from now on.

 

Why (social) networks matter

Lisa M Lane

A response to Alec Couros for use in his unkeynote address.

Networks matter because:

* You want to know.
You want to know what others are thinking, and doing, and writing about the topics of interest to you. This curiosity can be satisfied by searching around, but you can better see the threads when you’re in a network.

* You’re in the know.
You want to have people to bounce ideas off of, and you welcome input. You realize that your network isn’t about having close friends necessarily (though some may become close), but about sharing ideas and resources.

* You just know.
You know the people in your network, even if you’ve never met them. You know their ideas and some personal things and the stuff they make. This can inform your practice.

* You just never know.
You never know where your next idea will come from, or your next useful connection, or your next flash of insight. It might come from following someone’s link, or thinking about a Tweet, or looking at someone’s slidedeck.

* Who knows?
Your network can lead you to other people’s networks, where you can find even more people who are in the know. Anything can happen!

The Reemergence of Bifurcation in Higher Ed

Lisa M Lane

KCRW’s To The Point was in the trend as it focused on why college is so expensive, and asked whether online learning is becoming the way to get an education (starts at about 8 minutes in).

The recent emphasis of cost and student loan debt in discussing the worthiness of a university education is not just the result of the economic depression, though it may seem that way. The discussion is certainly much more centered around cost-benefit analysis now than ever before. We argue, as in this radio program, about why costs are going up, and how students are taking out huge loans that can’t be paid back.

Dana Summers c Tribune Media Services 2011

I work at a community college, the ultimate guarantor of opportunity in getting a college education: low tuition, small class size, no entry requirements. As universities fill up and begin to cancel guarantees for admission (UCSD will be ending its TAG program in 2014, seriously impacting my students) community colleges are clearly what they have always been: the best deal for completing lower division work.

Whatever else you think of the conclusions of her 2010 book DIY U, Anya Kamenetz did a great job reviewing the history of higher education in this country.  She notes that there has always been an exclusionary aspect to college – a small percentage of the population attended college at all in the 18th century, and though larger now the traditional divides of race and class still exist in terms of college attendance.

As expenses rise, the wealthy can continue to go to college, the poor must continue to rely on government support and tuition breaks to go to college, and the middle class borrows more and more money to go to college. As with the loans undertaken to buy houses that were larger than they needed, the middle class now complains that the amount they’re borrowing for education isn’t good value and the cost is too high (I have little sympathy for those borrowing huge amounts to go to Harvard instead of their state college.)

The result is that, as in the 18th and 19th century, the exclusionary element of higher education is reasserting itself. The wealthier class will attend the expensive universities, and those who are not wealthy will not be able to afford to go to the major universities. This may increase the value of the B.A., since fewer will be given by those universities.

The idea of college as an entitlement will fade at these higher levels. As Daniel Luzer notes, people can pay $40,000 at Harvard or at Occidental, but they’ll feel less screwed if they go to Harvard.

The new abundance of for-profit online colleges is testimony to the desire to get a college degree even if the quality of the education is poor (as I believe it is in most of these places, based on my understanding of their canned courses and lack of pedagogical freedom and preparation in their faculties).  Online education is the answer to place and time conflicts, and an answer to finding alternatives to old pedagogies, but it is not a cure for high costs or socio-economic class divisions. (I had hoped to see online education become absorbed into teaching pedagogy in general, and although I work very hard at helping online teachers, I am dismayed at the perpetuation of the distance ed mode as a way of creating standardization and tracking instead of pedagogical innovation.)

As Diane Ravitch notes, the fact that recent changes may lead to fewer university degress is not a bad thing economically, since only 23% of the jobs opening up in the next few years will not require a BA or higher. She says under the new economy, college should be for those who want to learn. This is another kind of bifurcation, similar to that noted as part of the 18th and 19th century in Kamanetz’s book, between the vocational/trade learners and the college/intellectual learners. Actually, it’s similar to every timeframe – ancient Greece comes to mind.

I do believe that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college – that’s part of my programming as a democratic American. But if the intellectual and financial standards are high, some will not be able to. Colleges should offer scholarships and governments should offer aid (more in grants than loans, but loans should be extremely low interest) for those who are academically excellent but don’t have enough money. This would maintain our goal of allowing anyone with the intellectual talent to go to college, which is good for the country. Instead we’ve gone way past that into schools where many are on scholarship, including the wealthy,  and community colleges ar expected to focus on “student success” and get everyone transferred to university who wants to transfer.

We should be able to say “you’re just not college material”, but it’s unfortunate that today’s combination of high prices and overenrolled universities may be the only way to do that.

Why CC-BY just isn’t good enough

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). 

Ethics, Wikipedia and the History Textbook

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Wikipedia has now come far enough along that I am comfortable using its pages in place of a textbook, as I did for the first time last semester.

After the adventure that was failed hybrid classes, I now have another regular on-site class at San Elijo campus for fall: Early Western Civilization.

Unlike my Modern US History, my Modern West, and my History of England classes, this class:

  • has no collection of Lisa lectures I can use to substitute for a textbook
  • has not been taught online ever
  • has recordings of a previous semester’s lectures with slides I’m not sure I want to use (example here)
  • has always used a traditional textbook along with my own primary source book

Having requested a desk copy of the current edition of the previous textbook, I not only looked at it but used its test bank to create Aiken versions of all multiple-choice questions to prepare them for uploading into Moodle, which took several hours.

Even so I keep hesitating to adopt the textbook, thinking maybe I could instead take the transcripts from my slidecasts and write a small textbook this summer (eek!).

Then today I came across Wikipedia books, the idea that you can put together a book using Wikipedia articles you select. You can print as pdf or export as open doc. It turns out there are thousands of such books, made when Wikipedia users cobble together (or “curate”) the content.

It seems to me there are some considerations here as I contemplate the direction I have been and seem to be heading here. Naturally I turned first to some Twitter folks to make sure I wasn’t doing something unethical (the ethics seemed dicey to me – see below).

 

Considerations of the profession

Here’s where the dicey ethics come in.

Some very good historians collaborate on history textbooks. My mentor used to get dissed by his colleagues for spending so much time rewriting and revising the third of the undergrad text for which he was responsible. Monographs may be important to professional respect and moving the field forward, but for many university instructors it’s their textbook that pays the bills.

So if I use a Wikipedia textbook (and indeed, if I continue as I have begun, using my own lectures instead of a textbook for two of my classes), I am affecting the historical profession. Historians mostly have government or university jobs, and their money often comes from writing books, and instead of using those books I’m doing this. I do not think the AHA would approve at all.

Versus considerations of pedagogy

Many people think that textbooks are full of factual historical information, and we all remember having to memorize historical facts. But all history textbooks are innately interpretive — the authors and publishers pick and choose the topics, and the newer interpretations are integrated into the texts (which is why new editions are important).

The teaching of history has many levels, but at the college level the focus should be on analysis. To make full use of a textbook, students must analyze the perspective of the textbook itself. If one is using a published textbook, pedagogical approaches may include analyzing the text’s interpretation.

Historians make choices when they teach, since there is never enough time to cover everything. By “cover” I don’t mean what history teachers call “coverage” (making sure they talk about or assign reading for every era or topic in the chronological outline). I mean covering information about, and allowing students to practice:

  • analyzing primary sources
  • constructing historical theses
  • analyzing perspectives on an event, era or topic
  • researching historical topics
  • understanding historiography (that is, the history of History)
  • creating new paradigms

In a community college class, I can’t do them all, so my focus is on the first two – primary sources and historical theses. I also work on these skills within the context of students researching topics of interest to them. Since I am not using the textbook to analyze historiography or discuss the textbook’s interpretation (except occasionally), I only need it for facts and chronology. Such a factual framework can now be obtained in many places online, though of course each may be presented with its own interpretation.

Given this use, it is not necessary for my students to pay $125 for a textbook.

Trumped by consideration of usefulness

With Wikipedia Books I can put together the pages I assign, and they can get it printed on demand through Pediapress, though for a color book (do I even need color?) that’s a lag time of  15 business days. But I can export as pdf and students can download. I don’t need peer-vetted accuracy (we can talk about that in forums) or objectivity (none exists in the discipline anyway) for the uses I’m making of the information. Wikipedia’s legal policies allow this no problem (and thanks to Chris Lott for pointing me to them).

If I were able to get Pediapress books printed quickly enough (naw, I don’t need color), it would be good to have the 10% support the Wikipedia Foundation. If not, I could go with some ebook format or leave it as pdf. I can do what I do with my documents workbook – tell them to print it.

Some students will grouse, because they’d rather go to the bookstore on campus and pay $125, or use the price as an excuse not to buy a book. The first will eventually fade due to the Powers of Convenience, and the second it’s good to eliminate. Publishers will complain, but these are the same publishers that have created systems designed to trap rather than share, creating overpriced books with unnecessary features and PowerPoint lectures that can’t be dismantled, and “rented” textbooks that can’t be written in and the access to which disappears at the end of the class.

What publishers offer these days is comparable to the Lego sets to which I compare the LMS. Instead, Wikipedia provides a set of Legos I can put together how I like.

I only wonder now whether there’s a way for the historical profession to benefit from this instead of lose.

It’s just not working out the way we thought it would

Lisa M Lane 17 Comments

Back when I started teaching online in 1998, before LMSs and Google and text messaging, the future looked very free and very open. The educational pioneers who realized the potential of the World Wide Web for teaching and learning taught themselves HTML, figured out primitive discussion board programs, and saved images over and over to get them small enough to load over a 28 or (wow!) 56K modem.

Somewhere in the romance of the modem’s buzzing and the joys of webpage design was the feeling of freedom and openness that later would need to be defended.

And defend it we did, in open educational resources and our work on the open web. The enemies were clear: copyright, course management systems, and institutional inertia, as portrayed in this 2005 Flickr comic by Leigh Blackall.

With Web 2.0 came even more enthusiasm, as the web achieved its long anticipated role as a worthwhile tool for global communication, a place for the exchange of ideas and social progress. And the enemies changed too. Unlike the LMS or copyright, it’s been harder to recognize these enemies because they simply were not there before.

Gradually, closed spaces (Facebook, Ning, even Google if you understand what they’re up to) have become the norm, as have monetized sites. The spaces that were free are no longer free, although many of us freely contributed our own work to these sites, providing the basis of their popularity in the first place. Crowdsourcing, celebrated in story and song, has become the exploitation of the work of others in order to make money or provide cheap customer service. The use of personal information for marketing purposes is widespread, and creative people are leaving the platforms that brought everyone into the agora in the first place. Scholars at first enthusiastic about the future now see it as a lonely place. And I see conversations where people who care deeply about the web, education for the 21st century, and learning theories are beginning to back away from proselytizing about academic openness.

A need for protection emerges that wasn’t there before. Few people understand the technology into which they type their credit card numbers and post their status updates. For every party animal posting naked pictures there is a poor noob giving his account information to a sham company. For-profit online “colleges” charge huge fees for canned courses and leave their students poor and jobless. Blogs are watched for signs of terrorist activity. A single post can ruin a career. And if you miss it on the news, you can watch it on YouTube.

The environment has changed, and where before college instructors could take the position that our students know the web better than we do, and after all they are adults, these justifications begin to sound hollow. The desire to move our students into open environments with their ideas and creations can sound as much like ignorance of exploitation as a call to academic freedom and knowledge creation. This isn’t about stupid cat videos and the occasional stalker anymore — it’s about users becoming the products in the marketplace and the amusements in the panopticon.

Where are the safety zones in such an environment? Without new paradigms and innovative thinking, people will logically retreat back into copyright, learning management systems, and institutional standardization. Where before it might have made sense to say we should make sure everyone is web literate, now such literacy extends beyond critical thinking about websites into a deeper understanding of what the using the web means for individual privacy and independence. This time, the enemies of openness and freedom won’t need to argue their philosophical reasons – they’ll argue that they’re protecting people.

And the trouble is, they may be right.

Diluting the Kool-Aid

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

Finding myself arguing social benefits of an LMS was a sobering experience. It happened tonight in a COOLCast featuring Bon Stewart, who had mentioned that she prefers networks to systems like Moodle because the students can find each other. I shared my story of discovering students finding each other using Moodle Messages. Then I actually argued that some students might feel more comfortable contacting each other inside an LMS, where there is a commonality with other students, all of whom are taking the class. This might be more comfortable than Facebook, where you are supposed to be “friends”. In the LMS, you are clearly colleagues and might feel freer to call upon each other for, say, help with the class.

This, combined with my last post including some good things about an LMS or course blog, means I’m diluting the Kool-Aid.*

I know the strong flavor of connectivism, the headiness of open networks, the high of networked learning. I’ve experienced and studied it in the CCK08 class four years ago, in the joy that is ds106, in Twitter, in Facebook, and Diigo and Google Plus. I am a networked person, a networked teacher. I’ve read Vgotsky, Holt, Tapscott, Gladwell, Kamanetz, Rheingold. I’ve taken class with Siemens, Downes, Cormier, Couros and Groom. My articles on why Learning Management Systems are badly designed and anathema for novice online instructors still hold true.

Yet I’ve been continually skeptical (some would say critical) of ignoring the bad impacts of social media, the privacy violations, the perpetuation of teenage popularity contests through such sites as Technorati and Klout. I’ve also read Lanier, Bauerlein, and Carr. And I’ve watched in horror as the wonderful openness that is MOOCs gets commercialized and monetized and universitized and systematized.

I’ve used Blackboard and Moodle and WordPress. I’ve watched my own students get lost, inside and outside an LMS. I’ve seen them ignore the obvious, mislay the instructions, forget the deadlines, fail the class, inside and outside an LMS. I’ve also seen them fly outside the box, discover wonderful things, build their own learning, both inside and outside an LMS. In my SMOOC I’ve guided a global contingent of adults in using their own blogs, aggregated to a central blog, and had some get lost, and some get joy.

And each semester I agonize over using Moodle again, feeling trapped in my 6 sections of 40 students each. But I am not a novice online instructor. I create meaningful assignments, and make informed choices about what I have my students do and not do. I can force an LMS to do what I want. So why do I feel pressured to “network” my students’ class experience? Will their learning really improve if they search the web for primary sources and post them on their own blog instead of in a dedicated class space? Will they learn history better communicating with fellow (18 and 19-year-old) students in the space where they talk to their friends? Will they become better historians if they follow their own interests to the exclusion of, for lack of a better term, the canon of historical “content” considered basic knowledge in other countries?

All the flavors are important: self-directed learning, open education, constructivism. But a watered-down version, inside an LMS or on a common blog, can let them join the party without passing out in the bathroom. They can use the open web for their research, finding their sources, then return to the familiar “classroom” to get information, post their work, discuss with colleagues.

But me? I can drink the Kool-Aid straight up to study all this. I want it as strong as I can get it for my own learning about the web as an environment for learning and an educational tool. But I wouldn’t want that if I were taking an online class in biology, math, or literature. I wouldn’t want to go find my colleagues in Facebook if I didn’t understand that Coleridge poem or what Assignment 1 was supposed to be about. I’d want a classroom, and class colleagues, and a space I know is dedicated to learning. I’d at least want to start with watered down Kool-Aid and a sippy cap, then get the strong stuff in a big girl cup when I have more experience.

Or, at least, that’s what I’m thinking today.

 

* Cultural literacy note: “drinking the Kool-Aid” is a tasteless reference to the Jonestown Massacre

Where’s your class? musings on course location

Lisa M Lane 8 Comments

I noticed that Dave Cormier is using a single course blog for his ed366 class, with students as authors. Back in November, I was working on this issue with Brandon Davis-Shannon, whether it is better to have students run their own blogs or work on one big blog, and I’m thinking about it again as I plan my History 103 for fall.

I have done one big blog before, but never many student blogs (except for the POT Certificate Class). Dave has done both and notes:

It is interesting to me that engagement would be lost when students run their own blogs, versus posting on one big blog. It brings up questions about where students perceive the course is located, as well as the usual issues about motivation and self-motivation.

In addition, it may be about the changing world of online courses in the past year or so.

The typical online course offered by an institution is one kind, and for this model students translate their classroom thinking to the online class. The thinking is that on-site the class is held in Room 601, and online it’s held in Blackboard (or another LMS) or at a particular URL or website (though that’s more rare).

It’s hard for students to really see a course that’s held “on the web”, or one where their work is based in their own space, and aggregated somehow for all to see. That involves a mental shift much greater than just on-site to online.

That mental shift is encouraged by MOOCs, at least in their Couros/Siemens/Downes/Cormier/Groom model. Self-direction and/or connectivism are engrained in the format of the classes. (I’m gonna call it the CSDCG model, because no one can stop me.)

But there is another pseudo-MOOC model now, subdivided into two categories which sometimes overlap: institutional (think Stanford, MIT) and commercial (think Curtis Bonk’s class in Coursesites). These are beloved by the New York Times and the Chronicle, who are seeking to reframe educational trends. They are becoming the mental-shifting model instead of the original MOOC design.

That may be because they are held in Learning Management Systems or sites that act like LMSs (I’m afraid I have to count WordPress here, because of its use in this context). This model perpetuates the idea that “class is here“. Yes, you can run your own blog, but it’s preferred that you blog “inside the classrom”. It’s just easier for people to get their head around the idea that the class is at the instructor’s website. It fits with their current thinking, but expands it into the world of blogging. It also fits for instructors who need the two things LMSs are best at: enrollment management and grade tracking.

That seems to be the middle ground, and pedagogically it may be better not to push the envelope too much with students (at least if you want them to stay enrolled). Despite my own learning preferences, which are open and aggregated, most students aren’t conceptually ready for this kind of learning, and the cognitive dissonance overcomes their willingness to engage (which, for some, wasn’t that high to start with).

We can argue for years whether their lack of readiness is apathy, behavioral training in K-12, or cultural ennui, but most of us “practitioners” are interested in what works: what keeps them enrolled, encourages engagement, allows some independence, but doesn’t cause panic. Plus there are increasing concerns about asking students to create their own space at third-party sites, which collect and use student information and content in ways we may not consider ethical.

The WordPress Multi-User site, or the LMS that’s open to all, or the main blog where all blog within it but can have their content exported to save (which is what Dave is doing) may then be the preferred models for balancing these issues with those of exploration and innovation. They are being chosen because they take into account concerns of pedagogy and comfort, not because they can handle 1,000 students and use their content and personal information for other ends, but because they work.

NB: The only obvious exception to this balanced model is Jim Groom’s (plus) ds106, with its student-run blogs aggregated to a main WP site, and where clearly something magical happens. And possibly my own POT Certificate Class, where I have no idea why it (sort of) works, but I dare not apply it to a standard college class.

Leaving an open online class

Lisa M Lane 99 Comments

I’m leaving Curt Bonk’s open online class “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success”, which started this week. It’s a class about retaining, motivating and engaging online students, and I’m leaving because I’m not motivated and not engaged.

It’s not because of Dr. Bonk – his work is very interesting.

It’s the classroom. I wanted to attend to see the new CourseSites from Blackboard, which is being touted as Bb’s “open” LMS. Maybe it would be innovative! A new LMS. I’m always very interested in learning management systems, and what they can do.

Well, it’s the same old Blackboard, with more white space, nicer fonts and some cool icons.

First assignment included two 44-page pdf files that were expensive to print and difficult to read online since they were double-spaced. Oh.

Well, OK. I went over to the discussion to introduce myself, and oh dear. Same threaded discussion – very 1999. With each iteration of Bb, I find it harder to believe they’ve done nothing with forums. Each person had started their own “thread” to introduce themselves, necessitating opening each one at a time or collecting those on the page.

Only those on the page can be collected. There are 30 pages of introductions.

A sense of chore, of overwhelming ennui, engulfed me. I saw that you can also blog instead. That’s good! I can blog as I go, on my own blog! And everyone will read it, and there will be comments, and I can comment on theirs! Oh….

I’m not going to blog inside a closed system, even if it’s open at the moment. Yes, I could add a link to my own blog to the wiki, but that’s not exactly integrated into the course. Pretty evident, then, that the main discussion would be in those horrible forums.

It’s only for a month. No, I can’t. I don’t use Bb anymore for exactly this reason. I will be happy to read Bonk’s works, on my own, and blog about them. I’ll miss the community. No, I won’t. I can’t miss this many people.

I’m spoiled. I blame George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Alec Couros. I blame Jim Groom. I’m used to aggregated blogs, embedded media, distributed conversation. I think of these things as being what open, online classes are all about. I blame my own class at Pedagogy First!.

You’ll say I didn’t give it a chance. You’ll say I’m being too picky. You’ll say…well, I don’t know what you’ll say, since I won’t be in the class.