Upcoming online courses at EMS

This just-concluded spring semester was the first time an online course offered at Eastern Mennonite Seminary made use of synchronous online activities, which we facilitate through WebEx. In ed-tech lingo, “synchronous” describes any activity that takes place in real-time, in online/virtual space. This is a particularly important moment for EMS because they have been doing online education at EMU the longest, since 1997 when an e-mail based correspondence course was offered. Around 2000, they switched over to LMS-based (Blackboard, then Moodle) online courses and basically hadn’t changed that formula since.

There are currently no comprehensive online programs – such as degree or credentialing programs – offered through the seminary, but a la carte online courses are offered every semester and through the summer, and are taken advantage of by residential and remote students alike. Core faculty have consistently taught these online courses, but there is a trend toward increasing use of remote adjunct instructors to teach them. Such was the case in the spring semester when I assisted Dr. Laura Brenneman (CJP alum, ’00), who resides in Illinois and taught an online Intro to Old Testament course for EMS in the spring.

I approached Laura last fall as she was preparing her course, and let her know that I was available to help support her and her students in the use of newer ed-tech offerings such as WebEX and online video.  She added me as an instructor in the course in Moodle, and we were off. So here are the ways she incorporated these technologies into the course…

Optional synchronous sessions: Review & discussion

Since students had already enrolled in the course with no sense that there would be a synchronous component, live sessions in WebEx were made optional and therefore did not impact students’ participation grades. Six sessions were conducted over the course of the semester.  As usual, both students and instructor entered the live session directly from the course page in Moodle. The sessions consisted of Laura reviewing content from the reading assignments, as well as some more open discussion time. At the outset, Laura polled the students as to when the optimal meeting time would be, and that time was kept consistent for all sessions. Since not all students could make every session, each was recorded and made available in Moodle after the live event, which some students took advantage of.

While there were some technical hiccups and some concern voiced on the part of busy students that live sessions made the convenience aspect of online courses a little less, well, convenient, Laura is confident that WebEx made a positive impact on the course. For one thing, students and instructor were scattered across a number of locales, so the possibility of seeing the faces and hearing the voices of others helped develop a deeper sense of connection. Laura noted that what was discussed in the live sessions began to trickle into another area of the course, the text-based/asynchronous forum discussions in Moodle (which is where the traditional bulk of an online course has played out). When conversations begin jumping across media, you know a thicker form of connection is taking shape, and with it – student engagement.

Online video

For one assignment, Laura tasked the students with reciting a passage of Scripture and using their webcams, YouTube, and a Moodle discussion forum to facilitate it in the digital realm. Students recorded themselves reciting the passage, uploaded the video to their own YouTube accounts (more on this below), marked them as “unlisted,” then pasted the links to the Moodle forum. Moodle then takes those links and automatically displays the video player, so everyone could watch each other reciting Scripture by scrolling down the forum topic.

For this assignment, my support consisted of a very basic overview of the process, with links to the YouTube upload page. Happily, I didn’t receive any further support e-mails, so everyone was able to complete the tasks for the assignment. The use of YouTube arose out of the absence of an EMU-owned online video platform, something we are very close to addressing. In the near future, faculty and students will be able to upload video from within the Moodle course itself, and it will be stored in a collection that is only visible to the people in that course and not published to a global-scale site like YouTube, also erasing the need to sign up for yet another online account. This will make video assignments even more streamlined. The more that technology can fade out of the picture, the better.

Next time around…

Already this summer term, Laura is teaching another online course for EMS, on the Sermon on the Mount. For this course she is using WebEx to hold regularly-scheduled “virtual office hours,” which gives remote students an opportunity to drop into their remote instructor’s “office” to talk about the course. Laura also plans on assigning student presentations, which could easily be facilitated through WebEx. These two new use cases show the various ways that synchronous tools such as WebEx can help address some of the problems of disconnection and disembodiment in online courses.

As the use of remote adjunct instructors looks to increase (reflecting broader trends in higher ed), I’m continuing to think about how EMU can structure support resources and best practices for these remote instructors and their students, so that EMU can ensure a more consistent level of quality in their online offerings and experiences.

My thanks go to Dr. Laura Brenneman (and her students) for being such a great partner in this new territory!

Amherst College seal

In what is probably the first public “rejection letter” handed to the heretofore uncriticized MOOC phenomenon, Amherst College has said “No thanks” to joining the non-profit platform, edX. The piece at Inside Higher Ed offers some of the reasons why faculty voted down the prospect after months of negotiations with edX. They’re worth listing out there:

• Incompatibility with the liberal arts – MOOCs were conceived by folks in large and/or wealthy research institutions – Harvard, MIT, Stanford – and by folks rooted in the sciences. While Amherst is, like these others, an elite school (unlike EMU), it is 1) tiny by comparison (like us) and 2) a liberal arts school (like us).
• Pushing quantity over quality and connection – The “M” in MOOC stands for “massive,” as in “let’s get as many people in this thing as we possibly can!” Amherst explicitly structures itself around small, colloquy/seminar format courses. These two approaches are not easily reconciled, if they’re reconcilable at all, and Amherst faculty spotted this a mile off.
• Perpetuating an anemic pedagogical approach – Another thing Amherst faculty rightly spotted and resisted was the MOOCs use of the “information transfer” approach to teaching, simply digitized. Teachers lecture, students listen, teacher gives quiz, students take quiz, teachers grade quiz – wash, rinse, repeat, then give final. MOOCs currently have zero in the way of more substantive forms of engagement and assessment. Amherst faculty don’t teach like this and weren’t willing to take a step backward, pedagogically.
• “Mastery?” – MOOCs grant certificates of “mastery” for the completion of courses. The bar for what constitutes “mastery” in this case – watching lectures, taking simple quizzes – is incredibly low, to the point of almost completely emptying out the word of any substantive meaning whatsoever. Amherst faculty saw that granting ascent to this credentialing scheme would water down its own credibility as an elite institution. The “benefits” of spreading the Amherst “brand” in this manner were not seen to be inadequate. (The capitalistic/marketing language that’s used to justify these MOOCs – even the non-profit ones like edX – continues to grate at my nerves.)

Finally, the leader of the MOOC resistance at Amherst, neuroscience program chair Stephen A. George, provided an apt metaphor:

He compared edX to industrial agriculture. “Would we join some sort of agribusiness company that was taking over family farms and producing junk food if they offered us some incentive to do it?” George said.

(This should strike a nerve for folks at EMU, whose commitment to sustainability and care of God’s creation shows up in many concrete ways on campus, in and out of the classroom.)

As the house that helped cultivate the mind of one of the most brilliant authors in recent times, David Foster Wallace, it’s great to see Amherst exercise such reasoned and critical discernment around whether or not to board the the MOOC freight train. But is the engine slowing down? One professor mused, “2012 was the year of the MOOCs. 2013 will be the year of buyer’s regret.”

Doug lecturing in a local stream for the “streams and floods” unit

In a previous post, I showcased the work that Doug Graber Neufeld undertook to record his lectures for an online earth sciences course last summer. I mentioned that fact that Doug planned to reuse the videos to flip the on-campus version of the same course this spring.

Well, the spring semester at EMU is starting to wind to a close and I recently reconnected with Doug to get a sense for how that flipping experiment went and how the recorded lectures factored into the process.

(For the perplexed, the “flipped classroom” entails moving didactic content outside the classroom – usually to some digital online medium – thus opening up classroom time for other more engaged activities.)

First, from a pedagogical and student expectations perspective, Doug mentioned that the mid-semester feedback from his flipping of the classroom  was somewhat mixed. Some students reported wanting to hear lectures in class rather than online. Doug and I conjectured that this may be due to the fact that students in undergraduate courses are likely conditioned to being passive recipients of information in 50-minute class sessions, while the flipped classroom demands much more work on the students’ part. It’s harder to come unprepared, which raises the stakes for the student. Other students reported enjoying the lecture material online and the more engaged classroom experience.

Being a hard sciences guy, Doug did some experimentation and statistical analysis with this experiment as well, giving it a quantitative dimension. For the on-campus course and for each chapter of the textbook, the students had a few options. They could:

• Download/review the PowerPoint for the chapter; and/or
• Watch the lecture video

With each chapter came an in-class quiz. Using Moodle, Doug was able to check if there was any correlation between students’ accessing the online resources and their quiz scores. The results indicate that there was indeed a positive correlation between accessing the videos, even over accessing just the PowerPoint, and quiz scores. As Doug reminded me “accessing (the videos) doesn’t mean they used it” and that “correlation doesn’t mean causation.”

Even with those provisos, Doug feels the labor undertaken to produce the lecture videos was worth it for both his online and on-campus earth sciences course.

Upon reflection, one thing that Doug would change is the length of the videos. Some were as long as an hour, which is exceptionally long when it comes to online video. Doug would split content into smaller conceptual chunks and produce smaller videos. Doing so would not only make it easier for students to watch videos online, but it would raise the reusability factor of individual videos, perhaps even making some usable in other courses.

Many thanks to Doug for his pioneering work here and his willingness to reflect critically (even statistically!) on the experience and share this all with me. Now let’s get some more EMU faculty trying this out!

The medium is the message? (Photo by Vincent Diamante/Flickr)

First off: I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the word “proselytizing” above. In the highly secularized tech industry, it’s not uncommon to see someone with the job title “product evangelist.” This should strike those of us in Christian higher ed as funny. So I’m merely playing with that a bit there in the title (and the photo). Marketing as proselytizing. So this is on how we can – with webinars – proselytize with integrity.

Before transitioning into the Information Systems (IS) department last spring at EMU, I spent nearly all my four years of grad school working part-time for EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). Most of that time was spent as their web and social media resource, but one of my last projects there was helping design and facilitate the program’s first online restorative justice course last spring. So I spent most of my time there with a “marketing & communications” hat on but also started to get into the territory of “education” near the end.

After my move to IS, the CJP – its Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice in particular – has been one of my top customers, taking advantage of my proclivity to blur any number of lines; in this case the lines between “marketing” and “education.” Since last fall, the institute has hosted a series of free and paid webinars that have made heavy use of professional and social networks within the community of restorative justice practitioners. We have structured these webinars carefully, attempting to form and frame them as facilitated discussions, rather than the “sage on the stage”/talking head+PowerPoint slide presentations that I’ve grown accustomed to. In doing so we’ve not only drawn on those networks for potential webinar attendees, but with each webinar practitioners from that network have been brought in to discuss their piece of the burgeoning field of restorative justice. This isn’t necessarily new and novel, as I’ve seen it done in other webinars, but we’ve tried to pull all this off “the CJP way.”

In addition to the form being more genuine, we’ve also worked to make the content substantive and not just consisting in quasi-content masking the sales pitch. Yes, we do the sales pitch, but it takes place in the last 5 minutes of a 90 minute web event. So how successful has this marketing effort been? After our December webinar on RJ and trauma, with guest Elaine Zook Barge of CJP’s STAR program, she saw two new participants at a STAR training in February as a direct result of the webinar, and these folks are in talks to bring STAR to the area in which they practice.

Considerations:

• Know your network – As I mentioned above, we have leveraged the extensive restorative justice network that Howard Zehr has in order to spread the word about these webinars. Not everyone has such street cred, but in any case discernment should be made about who you’re trying to reach and how you’re going to reach them either before or during planning for other bits of a webinar. If a strategic marketing plan is already in place, this will be helpful. As an online event, social media can be very helpful here. Hopefully you’ve already built an online presence through not only a website but also social media. If so, then you already have a channel to start marketing. If not, there’s probably groundwork that needs to be laid before you can start running webinars.
• Know the pipeline – Think about how you want these events to channel people into your programs. As we’ve done with RJ and trauma, think about cross-program/inter-disciplinary opportunities.
• Paid vs. free – We’ve done both. Again, partly on the quality of our webinars and the reputation of Howard, we’ve been able to charge a small fee ($10) and not have that negatively impact attendance. In fact, it’s improved attendance. Free webinars can draw a lot of registrations, but when it comes time for the event, people with busy schedules find it easy to skip things they haven’t paid for, especially if they’re already working on their computers on something else.
• Paying the piper – Webinar software isn’t free. We settled on WebEx Event Center, mostly because we were already using their smaller-scale version – WebEx Meetings - for virtual class sessions in our graduate programs. As a subscription-based service, you pay for the max number of participants you want to handle. We started at 500, but after never getting more than 100 people in any particular webinar we dropped our subscription to 100, saving us a good bit of money. Covering these costs was part of the reason we went to charging for webinars.
• Recording - A frequent request we get from these webinars is: Can we watch this again later? Or, I’m busy at this time, is it being recorded? Think about whether or not you’ll record and if you are, think about who will have access to these recordings (especially if the webinar was a paid event).

So that’s a bit about what we’ve learned over the past six months of running webinars. If there are any other programs at EMU that are interested in pursuing this strategy, I’m ready to talk!

No matter how creative and inspired the teacher or pedagogue behind the wheel, the LMS is no match for the wideness of the Internet. It was born a relic — at its launch utterly irrelevant to its environment and its user.

In 2004 when I started back to college in my mid-20s to finish a bachelors degree in English, I was a web application developer by trade and also the software developer and community leader of an online discussion forum community, which consisted mostly of friends I had grown up with in my hometown. Blogs had become popular a few years before but this was right before things like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone pushed the digital revolution into the state we find it in now. But even in the early days of Web 2.0, I spent a lot of time working, playing, and creating on the web, using a wide array of web technologies – so I had a fairly good sense for what it was capable of.

So when I took my first hybrid course (1/2 online, 1/2 in the classroom), whose online portion made use of the WebCT LMS, I immediately thought: Is this it? If so, yuck. So even almost ten years ago I felt what the bolded statement above articulates. The LMS is not now, and perhaps never was, capable of facilitating truly web-based learning in a broad and deep sense.

This is part of the reason that in my work for EMU, I’ve worked hard to supplement our use of the LMS. Rather than treating it as the alpha and omega of online teaching, I’ve situated it as a hub in a larger “ed-tech ecosystem,” which I’ve pictured in the following diagram:

(Click for the PDF version of the whole diagram)

It’s my hope that my continued work with faculty can help build a broader vision for what’s available on the web, whether faculty are teaching online courses or in the “traditional” classroom, whose brick walls are getting more porous as online tech encroaches even in physical teaching and learning space.

(Image by gbl55, remix of ‘la vaca de los sinvaca‘ by José Bogado/Flickr)

The experience of participating in the Intro to Philosophy MOOC over the past two weeks has my ed-tech brain buzzing with questions and possibilities. I’ll briefly say that my suspicions over lack of a sense of cohort were confirmed when surveying the message boards for the course, where tens of thousands of people are posting messages under the general rubric of whatever the topic of the lecture material is that week. (This week: epistemology.) So I have largely steered clear of the message boards, which in the Coursera sandbox leaves me with watching the lecture videos (which are good) and taking the assessments (which are incredibly easy). Hardly an engaging experience.

Luckily, I found the Twitter hashtag that’s being used for the course – #introphil – and I’ve been following the light chatter about the course there, rather than trying to keep up with the insanity of the message boards. That Twitter is a saner place to quasi-participate in the class (“quasi” because Twitter isn’t required by the course curriculum – more on that below) should say something. Think of it as the hallway outside a very noisy and massive lecture hall.

Interestingly, the few blog posts that I’ve read and commented on from the #introphil stream aren’t about the course content itself, but rather the form of the MOOC as provided by Coursera. So I guess you could say that 1) I’ve found a mild sense of “micro-cohort” w/ the bloggers who are writing about the course and sending links out over Twitter, and 2) I’ve found myself philosophizing about MOOCs more so than learning formal philosophy, which is the subject of the course!

In the process of this philosophizing, I discovered a new and helpful distinction between two approaches to the MOOC: the cMOOC and the xMOOC. (As if one “MOOC” wasn’t enough!) So hang with me while I unpack these distinctions and why they matter for how folks at EMU might approach MOOCs down the road…

(Very) short history of the MOOC

Before going into the distinctions, perhaps it would be helpful to see what Dave Cormier - one of the originators of the term “MOOC” – had to say about them in 2010, when Coursera and Udacity were just twinkles in the eyes of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurial Ivy League profs…

Here are a few highlights from the 4-minute video. MOOCs were intended to be…

• A response to increasingly distributed (and disconnected) academic disciplines in this digital age of information access (and overload).
• Open in a range of senses:
  • 1) They play out on the open World Wide Web, using what’s already laying around.
  • 2) Open to the widest number of interested learners possible (where the word “massive” comes into play).
  • 3) Available at no cost. (Though for-credit students in accredited schools could perhaps pay.)
  • 4) Open in that the work is created, shared, remixed, and improved by the whole community of teacher/learners. (More on this below.) Restrictive copyrights bad, Creative Commons good.
• Courses not wholly confined to nor owned by schools, institutes, or programs; but that they have start and end dates and participants (like a normal course).
• Decentralized in that both content and communication not live nor take place on any one platform belonging to any one organization (educational institution, software company, etc.) – but should rather be scattered across media networks (blogs, LMSs, YouTube, Twitter) and forms (text, audio, video, photos, digital art).
• Supportive of life-long networked learning – that one outcome should be that authentic people networks would emerge out of the learning process and persist after the end of the course.

The good MOOC for EMU

The vision that Cormier laid out a few years ago and called “MOOC” is now known as the cMOOC, the little ‘c’ standing for “connectivist,” though you could also say it stand for “constructivist.” This is contrasted with the later form, the xMOOC, ‘x’ standing for “instructivist” (or perhaps “transfer” – see below).

It is my recommendation, should EMU or other Mennonite schools consider going down this road, that we focus on the cMOOC.

The difference between the two can be summarized by referencing what Mennonite peacebuilder and educator, John Paul Lederach has called the transfer (instructivist) vs. elicitive (constructivist) approaches to teaching and learning. What Lederach called “transfer,” Freire called the “banking concept” of education – teacher as banker, information as bits of cognitive currency, student as passive recipients of said currency, and assessment models that basically offer quantitative “balance statements” on the students’ accounts/brains. But a growing body of research on teaching and learning has shown this banking model to be bankrupt (groan – yes, pun intended).

Yet this is the xMOOC, and this is what seems to happen inside the Coursera sandbox, though some (maybe I’m one of them?) are – like educational revolutionaries – trying to “liberate” the xMOOC, indeed the very course I’m taking!

So if we as Anabaptist-Mennonite educators think that our teaching transforms (borrowing a phrase from John D. Roth) – and if we want/need to be imaginative about how to take that elicitive, transformative pedagogical approach into the digital age – then one place we should be looking is the ambitious yet charitable approach that Cormier laid out in 2010, before that vision was co-opted by venture capitalists and Ivy League institutions who seem to think that watching lectures and taking quizzes online is “the future” of higher education. No, there is a more excellent way…

If you’ve never engaged in a live Twitter chat, it’s an experience. If there are a good number of people on the chat, things happen very quickly, and threads of conversation quickly branch out from the start of the conversation, which in this case was the question from @HybridPed – “What is a learner?” – WHOOSH, you’re off! One participant commented on how stressful the experience was, and I said there’s a certain amount of surrender that’s beneficial to accept in these frenetic conversations. Just let it wash over you. It’s also an interesting experience in reading, since you have to use your rational faculties to try and piece together the strings of conversation flying by you at 140 characters per tweet/per second.

In the course of the chat I favorited a few comments. (Note: These don’t follow each other…)

• @petradt: Iteresting how summative assessment immediately dominates pedagogical discussion. In my dream world, only formative assessmt. #grrrr #digped
• @petradt: @allistelling Totally agree. Also, some students find teachers disingenuous if they pretend 2 b just one of them.Acknowledge power. #digped
• @writingasjoe: @vrobin1000 Heck. What if the system didn’t ENCOURAGE passivity. #digped
• @slamteacher: @HistoriErin We need to reframe failure as something productive. Take away penalties. #digped

And  I had this nice exchange with one of the organizers, @slamteacher:

@slamteacher: @petradt @bonstewart It’s a conversation, not a silent auction, I think. We have information they don’t, and vice versa. #digped
@DistanceEd_EMU: @slamteacher And I think “information” shouldn’t be the only thing teachers would want to impart… #digped
@slamteacher: @DistanceEd_EMU Agreed, of course. Short-hand for all we bring and all they bring to the table. #digped
@DistanceEd_EMU: @slamteacher So both need to be ready for learning as “let me show you a more excellent way” -? #digped
@slamteacher: @DistanceEd_EMU Yes please! That sounds like the perfect opener to a semester. #digped

In the course of the chat, I also picked up a link to this intriguing-sounding e-book: Teaching As a Subversive Activity [PDF] by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner.

The threads I latched on to had to do with education-as-formation (and not just the transfer of information), as well as the constraints and norms that institutions and institutional cultures put on teaching, for better or worse. We also talked about culture change, and how activist/revolutionary teachers will have a hard time changing the systems in which they work overnight (they won’t change overnight). This reminded me of sociologist, James Davison Hunter’s propositions about culture and culture change from his book, To Change the World:

• Culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations
• Culture is a product of history
• Culture is intrinsically dialectical
• Culture is a resource and, as such, a form of power
• Cultural production and symbolic capital are stratified in a fairly rigid structure of “center” and “periphery”
• Culture is generated within networks
• Culture is neither autonomous nor fully coherent

Looking forward to tracking with this group again in their next chat!

Whoo whoo!

Many like Nathan Harden are saying that the MOOC signals “The End of the University as We Know It.” Free online higher education, Harden argues, is part of the shifting sands for established higher ed institutions in the U.S. If you put much stock in 20-30 year predictions (I don’t), schools like EMU run the risk of being crushed by “the unsentimental beast of progress.” Sounds terrifying!

Elsewhere, media theorist and video game designer, Ian Bogost warns against unfettered MOOC euphoria in his piece up at The Atlantic: Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Saved Online. Bogost argues that…

“Information” was never enough. Information is only intelligible given the proper knowledge, context, and opportunity. Likewise, knowledge is produced and shared within a complex infrastructure supported by a web of different agencies and organizations. Even if made cheap or free for consumers, that knowledge still requires other, more foundational knowledge, community affiliation, and economic freedom to convert into meaningful use.

This sociological insight that Bogost raises is a good check to the kind of starry-eyed optimisim that seems to accompany what I call “smashy smashy” pieces like Harden’s that paint traditional higher education institutions as being dead men walking. And unsentimental beasts of progress have a tendency to create some pretty terrible unintended consequences.

So what does that mean for Mennonite education? What are the contexts and opportunities that can take our educational offerings beyond mere information transfer for our learners? What complex infrastructure and diffuse web of agencies and organizations are (or aren’t) we drawing on to support and carry out our work?

One tactic, playing off the “beast” analogy, might be gleaned from the words of Jesus in Matthew 10: “I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” On a practical level, I’m giving this a shot in the coming weeks by participating in the “Introduction to Philosophy” course being offered by The University of Edinburgh, via MOOC provider, Coursera. My intent here is to check out what all the fuss is about and “demystify” the MOOC, because I’m not convinced that they provide what Harden characterizes as a “full-blown interactive experience.”

Watching lecture videos and participating in online discussion forums is about half of what constitutes student activity in these courses. Simple quizzes and peer-reviewed reflections constitute the other half. In a course of thousands to tens of thousands of students, with such shallow activities, what kind of human connection and meaningful community-building is possible? Is this really the future of education? If it is, ew.

For one, human beings are not capable of swimming in ponds that large with any meaningful sense of belonging and connection, and education that transforms needs a lot more than cognitive/FYI bits with some robo-graded quizzes and internet chatter thrown in. All the studies that are cited to support MOOCs seem to center on information transfer and retention gauged by assessment scores, which assume the “brains on toothpicks” picture of the human person. There are a host of research disciplines that have helped us see that humans are lot more than walking brains. Learning theory has caught up on this, but teaching – and apparently online teaching at the dawn of the MOOC age – has not.

But what, if any, tricks can be gleaned from MOOCs? And not only the approach the courses take themselves but also the business model? It’s true that the cost of higher education is spiraling out of control and shows no signs of being reigned in. So there does seem to be a value in being able to reach a broader audience by lowering the barriers to entry in higher ed. How can Mennonite higher ed respond? What kind of broader audience might we be trying to reach? Bogost couches his piece in terms of addressing societal inequality in higher ed:

Education, particularly the education of populations that most need it to improve their lot, is tied up with a political and economic situation that is not sufficiently addressed by merely connecting some of its output to the Internet, or by abdicating public responsibility to do otherwise to the first salesman who offers a sort-of viable alternative…

As a tradition concerned with the plight of “the least of these,” what kind of network could be built between, say, tech-savvy Mennonite entrepreneurs and providers of Mennonite higher education to offer free/reduced cost courses, perhaps even entire programs? Could we look into badges or credentialing? Is there a “web of different (Mennonite) agencies and organizations” that could be marshaled to address these concerns of cost and access to higher education? Could we provide a more widely-accessible educational platform that outperforms MOOCs on the scale of interactivity and transformational education?

• A broken financial model (including reduced congregational support of colleges)
• Rise of the for-profits (University of Phoenix, et al.)
• New faculty majority (non-tenure track faculty)
• MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses, for the uninitiated)
• Hostility to faith

While I would characterize the last point more as the increasing reality of a multiplicity of faiths (“faith” being understood in a rather big-tent/more-than-religions kind of way) rather than hostility to (Christian) faith, I think his other points are well worth pondering for Mennonite higher education in general. Here I’ll offer a few comments on how I think these relate to ed-tech at EMU, which is my domain, and how we can move forward to face these challenges.

When I started my work in this role eight months ago, ed-tech was a hot topic in the news. The UVA presidential debacle was just a few weeks away, and in its wake MOOCs and “the future of higher education” would be on everyone’s lips. Even some folks here at EMU wondered if we could hop on the MOOC train. I was skeptical, and I wasn’t alone. After the hype (kind of) subsided, many ed-tech and tech gurus that I respect and whose work I follow began to reflect critically on the potential shortcomings of the MOOC, and they all had to do with engagement.

In a post today to CNN, media theorist of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff, argues that “Online courses need human element to educate,” continuing on to say that:

…education does not happen in isolation. Whether it’s philosophy students arguing in a dorm about what Hegel meant, or fledgling Java programmers inspecting one another’s code, people learn best as part of a cohort. The course material is almost secondary to the engagement. We go to college for the people.

I couldn’t agree more, and I think Mennonite higher education has something to offer here, should we take up the challenges identified by Ewert with the emphasis on human connection and community, which is frequently held up as an Anabaptist-Mennonite value.

Here are three different approaches that make significant use of ed-tech that I think EMU (and other Mennonite colleges and universities) can look to…

1. Blended learning

Professor Mike Keppell of Charles Sturt University is referenced in this helpful post that blended learning is a “thoughtful fusion” of face-to-face and online teaching and learning experiences. As I’ve proceeded through my work, it’s become clear to me that innovations in ed-tech are opening up all kinds of opportunities for not only distance learning, and not even traditional on-campus courses, but also by the weave of those two for a third category: blended learning.

On-campus courses, particularly in the undergraduate program, could make moves to integrate more forms of online engagement – to hit the buttons of the Facebook generation not only for the sake of meeting them where they’re at, but also teaching them – by showing them – to be better digital citizens from an Anabaptist-Mennonite perspective while still being part of a vibrant on-campus community.

Our adult degree completion program could begin offering more blended learning opportunities to keep the valuable aspect of face-to-face relationship and cohort-building, while also providing more flexibility for busy schedules by moving some activities online.

The flipped classroom –  which moves didactic instructional content (such as lectures) out of the classroom and into online media – would be one concrete practice under the general description of blended learning.

“Blended learning,” then, is helpful not as a discrete category or single approach, but by how it shows a continuum for engagement – from face-to-face to online.

2. Cohort-based online programs

Our MS in Nursing program is to my knowledge EMU’s only online degree program, and it was recently praised by graduates in this EMU News piece. They have done a wonderful job of honoring the commitment to embodied relationships (in a highly embodied vocation!) by building online cohort groups. As each new cohort comes in, the program schedules a multi-day on-campus experience that serves not only as an orientation, but as a cohort-building exercise. Students unable to make the orientation due to distance or scheduling conflicts are included through WebEx. But the face-to-face experiences don’t stop there – they just move to the virtual. Each course in the program includes some degree of synchronous teaching and learning experience, using WebEx, in addition to the standard Moodle-based activities such as discussion forums and paper submissions.

Other online offerings around EMU have mostly been offered a la carte, supplementing programs that are mostly on-campus oriented. While a cohort vibe can certainly form over a single semester and a single online course, it’s a bit more of a challenge, especially if a single faculty member is teaching a combination of online and on-campus courses. It’s usually the online courses that suffer when loyalties are divided like this since the skills for teaching well online aren’t as widely held.

I’m starting to think – and am getting some support on this from conversations around campus – that more programs should begin taking the online cohort model seriously; not only from a recruiting students standpoint, but also for how faculty are loaded. The consequences of not doing this might include offering what, to the potential student, would appear to be sub-par online courses, which would ultimately begin to be more of a resource drain, rather than doing what many hope of online programs – i.e. bringing in new, more, and different students. (As I’m arguing, though, online programs with integrity and imagination should be about a lot more than simply making more money.)

3. Collaborative programs

Due to economic conditions, some state higher ed institutions – community colleges with colleges/universities, for instance – are already partnering to pool resources, share costs, and offer more robust degree and training programs. Why can’t Mennonite institutions do this from a stance of not only protecting institutional viability (which is mostly a reactive stance), but also from a proactive, positive stance of sharing the collective fruits of our labor? Mutual aid has long been another practice valued in the Anabaptist tradition.

While it is true that from an IT and organizational perspective, forging such partnerships has very messy, challenging implications once the rubber hits the road, if the work is pursued carefully with administrative, academic, and IT stakeholders all at the table – the potential could be great. Mennonite higher education has not only its peer group to work within, but also its connections to K-12 Mennonite schools and Mennonite congregations in the denomination(s). Collaborative programs could help strengthen the connections across these various constituency networks.

Conclusion

Eastern Mennonite University’s tagline is “A Christian university like no other,” and it’s been a commitment of mine to take this seriously when it comes to my work in educational technology. Our president has joked that this tagline might strike some Mennonites as odd, given our traditional reputation as “the quiet in the land” and seeking to be humble in our Christian witness.  Mennonites, in other words, are not known to be loud-mouth braggarts. He’s gone on to say, though, that we hope to wear this tagline and live it out with “humble confidence.”

We need to take that humble confidence to the challenges that Ewert identified above, and ed-tech will certainly have an important role to play in addressing a number of those challenges.

[Note: This post was later picked up by the Mennonite World Review, and appears here on their blog.]

Doug Graber Neufeld, professor in and current chair of the Biology department, is one such faculty member. This past summer Doug taught his first fully online course – “Earth Sciences” – that is, as Doug explains, “an introductory science course that covers traditional aspects of earth science (e.g. planetary sciences, geology, natural resources, etc).” Having traditionally taught this same course in an on-campus format, Doug wanted to at least partially address the lack of face-to-face connection in a fully online course, so he turned to recording video lectures. “I wanted students to have visual input from me in explaining the material which…supplemented their readings (e.g. by bringing in local issues), and served as a stimulus for online discussions.”

Before I go into the details of how Doug went about doing this, let me first show a finished product, because the way in which he went about lecturing is pretty awesome…

For part of the “streams and floods” lecture, Doug stood in a local stream and held forth. (Click for the lecture video on YouTube.)

Working within constraints

Doug considers himself “reasonably computer-savvy,” and that certainly bears itself out in this case, as he took a fairly DIY approach with minimal help from Information Systems. Doug took care of the lecture content prep, room setup, filming, editing, and posting the digital video files of his lectures. The only help he received along the way came from his sons, who served as “field cameramen” when Doug moved outside the classroom for his lecturing. Along the way, Doug hit a number of bumps in the road which required him to do some creative problem-solving.

1. 

   Difficult lighting conditions

   Audio quality and lighting – Doug used a consumer-grade Flip-style camera to film his lectures. This presented challenges when trying to film himself standing before a projection screen with slides. Lighting in such a situation is sub-optimal for filming, since overhead lights had to be turned off in order for the screen to be visible, which puts the lecturer either in the dark or in the projector’s beam. The lenses and mics on USB handheld cameras are designed for close-range capture, but the camera had to be placed a good distance back to capture both the screen and shadowy lecturer, which degraded audio quality. The audio was also hard to get right in the outdoor filming settings, since the amount of noise in an urban setting in the summer is usually quite high (lawn mowers, air conditioning units, traffic, etc.). But Doug said his approach was “to make an ‘adequate’ video lecture…rather than a perfect one,” so he was willing to live with the shortcomings in A/V quality.

2. 

   Screen from Videopad

   Video editing - Since Doug was moving from classroom to field in his lectures – requiring separate filming sessions for a single lecture – video editing became a necessity. Doug was savvy enough to address this himself, using a free desktop editing program, Videopad for Windows. Movie Maker for Windows or iMovie for Mac are two other free options oriented toward the normal computer user. This step, however, might discourage less tech-savvy faculty wishing to do lecture capture. Information Systems is not adequately resourced to offer video editing services for projects such as this, so faculty wishing to do video lectures that require editing will have to be willing to learn as Doug did, or find capable helpers such as work-study students. (We’re also looking into other software platforms that enable desktop-based lecture & screen capture, which would help address some of the challenges in this and the previous point.)

3. File sizes for video - High-definition digital video files are, in general, huge – especially edited, hour-long lectures such as Doug produced. Working with such large files in the editing process, Doug chewed through the hard drive space on his EMU-issued workstation, prompting him to buy an external hard drive. But the file size challenge doesn’t end at the workstation. Once a lecture has been edited, it has to be posted online somewhere to be accessible to students. Doug first tried posting the video files directly to Moodle, but this wasn’t possible because of 1) the file size limitations in our Moodle site, and 2) inadequate browser-based video player functionality in Moodle. So for lack of a better solution, Doug uploaded the videos to his personal YouTube account, marked them “hidden” to keep them out of public searches, and posted links to the videos in his Moodle course.
4. Time investment – Doug confesses that doing this took a lot of time. Having done a handful of digital video projects myself, I can sympathize completely – video editing takes a lot of time, especially when you add in a learning curve for beginners. The time investment is compounded by the requisite shifts that one must make to take this newly acquired technical skill into pedagogically useful territory. This kind of shift isn’t unique to the process for producing video lectures, as I’ve also heard this complaint from faculty conditioned to the traditional classroom environment making the jump to discussion board-based approaches to online instruction.

However…

Given all the challenges listed above, Doug is still enthusiastic about the experiment. Despite being filmed and used last summer, these video lectures are in fact an ongoing experiment for Doug. This spring when he teaches the course in an on-campus format, Doug plans to re-use the video lectures to “flip” his classroom. The flipped classroom was a hot topic of discussion in ed-tech this year, and a few EMU faculty in both undergraduate and graduate programs have expressed interest in giving it a try, and Doug may be one of the first.

In Doug’s case, he will list these videos on Moodle just as in his online course last summer. Students will be required to watch these videos prior to class sessions, along with any reading and homework that is also assigned. When students actually get together in the classroom, their time with Doug will be opened up for other activities such as lab exercises. These activities will likely vary from professor to professor, and discipline to discipline, so I’m eager to hear how these experiments with the flipped classroom go (and share more stories/case studies here!).

Toward a more hospitable environment

Now let’s see how this experiment lights up on the Ed-Tech Ecosystem diagram…

As I mentioned above, Doug had to resort to using his own personal YouTube account to post his lectures. This is not a sustainable practice if recorded lectures are to be used on a more regular basis at EMU, especially if Information Systems has a role to play in any of that work (and I think we do!). So I’ve highlighted the Moodle/YouTube connection here, but I’ve also half-highlighted the “Lecture capture” and “Rich media platform” (a.k.a. “online video platform”) bubbles. Here’s why…

We are in the final stages of acquiring an online video/rich media platform for EMU, which will allow us to keep all our educational videos under the EMU roof, so to speak – stored and organized on a centralized system and accessible directly through Moodle. Videos will in fact be embeddable directly into Moodle content, such as pages or activities. (You can also do this with YouTube videos, starting with our recent transition to Moodle 2.4.) I’ll be posting more about this in the coming weeks, once things are finalized, up and running, but I mention it here just to say that the environment for posting, distributing, and sharing video lectures (among other forms of educational video content) will soon become much friendlier. And as I mentioned above, we’re also looking into ways to facilitate easier lecture capture, which is a step before posting content to a video platform.

So stay tuned for more on the rapidly changing ed-tech ecosystem and how faculty can take advantage of it in on-campus or online teaching!