Concurrent Session – “eLearning Digital Story Slam.” I’m going to have a biased opinion of this session, mainly because I was one of the presenters. This session was a showcase of 7 different digital stories, all using different tools and for different academic purposes. This presentation was planned remotely as all 7 of us live in various parts of North America, including 2 from Canada. We fielded several questions about digital storytelling and also mentioned Bryan Alexander’s book about the subject. The website (Google site) with information on our presentation can be found here.

Concurrent Session – “An Evolving Blogging Case Study – the Impact on Learning and Satisfaction.” To be honest, I’m not really sure what this presentation was about. I paid attention for the first 1/2 of the session but never fully understood the point. It was a data-driven presentation on “blogging” in their nursing course. I use the word blogging loosely because I didn’t get the impression it followed the traditional definition of blogging. Based on the presenters’ information, I got the feeling that students were contributing to a discussion forum instead. Their data looked to be well thought out and presented, but what I missed was the reason they did the study in the first place. I was still lost 1/2-way through the presentation so I decided not to stay the 2nd half.

Closing Keynote – “The Obviousness of Open Education.” Side by side with Gardner Campbell’s presentation, this was definitely one of the most inspirational of the conference. The openness of education is a huge topic these days with the increasing cost of education. Presented by Cable Green (Creative Commons), I was both frustrated and  inspired to help change the way content is perceived and delivered in higher education. Green referred to the word “free” such as “free beer” (cost) and “freedom” modifications. One of the biggest challenges these days is the rising cost of education and the restrictions that are put in place by publishers. Simply by making content accessible (adding alt tags) or translating it to another language, you break publisher copyrights. The statistics that Green presented were astonishing. Here is just one of them:

A single textbook for 1 course (ENG 101) at 1 community college in 1 state runs upwards of $9.6 million dollars that is given to book publishers.

In looking at this statistic, what if that school spent $1 million to to create an open textbook for that course, saving students millions of dollars each year. Now, what if that open textbook were adapted for all ENG 101 courses across the nation. Think of how much money that would save?!

Some links provided by Cable Green:

• Cape Town Open Education Declaration
• Saylor.org
• YouTube adopting Creative Commons licensing

2 closing thoughts about this presentation:

1. Content is now a commodity – students don’t come to an institution for the content, they come for the instructors, student services, etc.
2. The opposite of “open” isn’t “closed” – the opposite of “open” is “broken.”

Morning keynote – “From Here to 2020: Forces Reshaping Teaching and Learning in the Next Decade.“ Josh Jarrett is the senior program officer from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was the keynote presenter. The short version of my review is that I wasn’t impressed by his presentation. Jarrett provided slides upon slides of statistics regarding students in higher education, however it appeared that he focused mainly on community colleges. Most of the information that was presented wasn’t new knowledge and Jarrett didn’t really dig into the deeper meaning. One key point that I strongly disagreed with was that there will be “lower cost per student by 2020.” Anyone who can read a newspaper knows that the cost of education is greatly increasing, primarily due to the terrible economy. Jarrett also presented hat online learning is “content-driven” while setting aside the community aspect. Any educator who has dealt with online learning, whether teaching an online course or supporting online educators, knows that online education is just as community-driven as it is about the content. Many ITC keynote presenters (past and present) have action items, things that the audience can get motivated behind to start acting in their everyday teaching and learning. Jarrett left me, and others, wanting more. The only takeaway that resulted from this presentation was to sit and wait for the Gates Foundation to come up with a solution. Much of the presentation was spent talking about what the Foundation is doing and who they are partnering with, almost as if it was a sales pitch to throw money at the Foundation.

Afternoon concurrent session – “The Secret to Informal Personal Learning Networks.“ Before I go too far into this session, I do want to say that it wasn’t what I was expecting. I went into the session expecting to hear about a variety of PLNs and what you can do to be successful with your own network. The session was really promoting CyberSalon, a PLN that the presenters in the Southwest U.S. have been a part of. Talking about the importance of PLNs and what each of the presenters have gotten out of them, the presenters received several questions from the audience about how to go about starting their own CyberSalon. There were 2 presenters physically present and 1 presenter who was attending via Google Hangout. In talking with Barry Dahl about this session afterwards, we both agreed that the presenters could have done more to engage the virtual presenter. I definitely think that having an informal, unconventional PLN can be just as effective has formal professional development. While not unconventional, Twitter is an informal PLN that I have gained more knowledge than any other professional development opportunity.

Afternoon vendor session – “Five Effective Practices for Professional Development.” This was the only vendor session that I would attend during the conference. I normally don’t like vendor sessions because their purpose is to sell a product. Well, I’m not in a position to propose large, proprietary softwares, so I don’t care that much. This session was different, however. Barry Dahl, owner of Excellence in Education, clearly stated at the beginning of the session, that many of the things he would talk about were things that we could implement on our own. We didn’t need to hire him. That’s honesty I can believe in. Barry went through seven (instead of five) tips that can/will positively impact online education.

1. Administrators should join CCOBLA. This community shares ideas, effective practices, and other items between institutions that are in similar positions. Joining CCOBLA is free.
2. Conference Comes to You. Instead of spending $5000-10,000 to send some staff/faculty to a conference, host a conference at your own institution. Invite national experts to present and utilize on-campus expertise to help facilitate the conference. The cost can even out with sending individuals to a conference.
3. Accessibility training. Access e-Learning from Georgia Tech and Web Accessibility Training
4. Webinars
5. Peer review of online courses (voluntary and faculty-driven). Resource from Lake Superior College.
6. External course review, such as QM
7. Clarify expectations among stakeholders. What should students expect from online instructors (and vice versa), and expectations between instructors and administrators.

Excellent tips from Barry!

The concurrent session that I was going to go attend in the afternoon ended up not being what I was expecting, so I picked up the handout and left. However, I did attend:

Concurrent Session 3 – Universal Design in Practice: Teach Yourself to Design Universally Accessible Courses. This was apparently a big topic. I had no idea what UDL was before going into the session, but after the brief intro video (below), it was clear that most of the concepts were common sense. The primary aspects were providing multiple methods of engagement, representation, and expression. The organization that is known for universal design is Cast, which has a website devoted to the topic. The big topics were closed captioning and addressing accommodations for students with disabilities. For instructors that have questions about the resources that are available, they can visit the Association of Higher Education And Disabilities.One thing that I wish we could encourage is for LMS companies (or companies in general) to pair up with the creators of JAWS so that accessibility can be tested prior to software release. The fact that JAWS is always behind the times puts students with disabilities at an even greater risk. If and when institutions look to contract with software companies, ask them to fill out a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template so that they can be held accountable if accessibility problems occur. Another resource for faculty is to find Youtbe videos with closed captioning. To do so, search YouTube for “[term], cc” and only videos with closed captioning are returned. If instructors need to create closed captioning for their own videos, the best tool appeared to be screencast-o-matic.

I’d say it’s been a good day with lots of information!

Gardner Campbell keynote. Gardner Campbell is one of those names that you have to know in this field. As the director of innovative technologies at Virginia Tech, he is right on with the topics at hand. During his talk, Campbell compared teaching to a Skinner box, with the levers being grades, credits, etc. The biggest take away that I sort of knew but never acknowledged, was that learning outcomes should also include the things that you don’t directly teach students. Quality education should include not only the topics that you set out to teach your students, but also the things that they learn on their own, during the education process. Gardner called this idea “double-loop learning.” During his presentation, Gardner talks about the unlimited possibilities of online education and referenced the virtual choir, directed by Eric Whittacre (video below).

Concurrent Session 1 – Challenges and Opportunities in Hybrid Courses. As the first concurrent session of the conference, I was slightly disappointed. The presenters ended up being a panel who talked about their individual experiences of hybrid learning. The room was rather large and due to the popularity of the subject, I sat in the back of the room, making hearing pretty difficult. The instructors didn’t really talk about things that were new to me, which was unfortunate. The presenters made quite a few generalizations that I disagreed with, including “students prefer fully online courses, rather than hybrid format.” One point that I did commiserate with was that listing hybrid course offerings is something that many institutions haven’t adequately tackled. When students go to register for classes, they think that the course is either fully online or fully face-to-face. The presenters were all from Coastline Community College and they have set times for 2 days per week and then list a third day with TBA as the time. They suggested a way to fix this problem is to put a set time for that third day. I’m not sure that this solution would solve the problem, because students would then think the course is fully face-to-face. I don’t know that there is a good answer to this solution quite yet. There were a few questions asked by the audience that I thought stood out:

1. What institutional support is needed for hybrid/online courses? This is a topic that I was hoping they’d talk more about than they really did. The only aspects they provided were that science labs would require more support than a typical lecture course. There was no mention of faculty training or certification to ensure that they are qualified to teach online. I know my current institution doesn’t have a certification process like this because of how decentralized online education is, however I can definitely get on board with some sort of training for faculty. More about this to come later in the post.
2. How do you handle assessments? It was only a matter of time before this question came up, and low and behold, it did (in the first session, no less). The presenters completely dodged the question and left it alone. I think the presenters lost some credibility due to this. I may be preaching to some of the choir here, but stop giving multiple choice tests if you’re concerned about cheating! It’s all about application and higher-order thinking (Bloom’s Taxonomy) that proves when students have mastered the topics. Recall is not in considered higher-order. Okay, I’m off my soapbox now.

Concurrent Session 2 – Building Community in a Fully Online Class. This session was completely opposite from the previous. The presenter was engaged and I loved the things she talked about. One of the criticisms that instructors have when you propose them teaching online/hybrid is that you lose student engagement and/or sense of community. Barb Mathieson (Capilano University) definitely proved that wrong. She talked about many of the tools that she uses to create community online. The first thing that got my attention were the enrollment caps. In Capilano’s face-to-face courses, the enrollment is capped at 35 students while online courses are capped at 30. To create community, she uses tools like EyeJot to send video emails to students, WizIQ for synchronous communication (instructor-student and student-student) and JoinMe.com for remote screen sharing. She also creates groups of 3-4 students and lets them set up times when they meet, rather than dictating those requirements to students. Lastly, she has students create the test questions and then has students grade the answers to the questions they came up with. Done after giving students a copy of Bloom’s Taxonomy, she is incredibly surprised by the test questions each term. I think that these ideas are great, but getting buy-in from faculty is always going to be the hard part. One participant did ask how much time she puts into the course and she chuckled – clearly it’s a lot of time.

That’s it for now, I’ll post again about the afternoon sessions next!

One of the things I have been stressing about this week is my presentation at next week’s conference. I leave on Friday for the Instructional Technology Council e-Learning Conference in Long Beach, CA. I’m very excited to go seeing as it’s been 2 years since I have been with my instructional technology colleagues. I started going in 2009 (?) when I met @cmduke and @sherrymn, who ended up becoming good friends of mine. I was still a Masters student but when I graduated, I moved to the great state of Texas to work with them. They gave me an opportunity to gain experience as an instructional designer which then allowed me to take a position here at Miami University. Since the 2009 Conference, I’ve kept in touch with a lot of colleagues, including @barrydahl, @busynessgirl, @hhwebb, and @ajwms. When I started at Miami in February of 2011, I wasn’t able to go to that year’s conference and I felt like I had really missed out. Anyways, I’m presenting with a panel of colleagues (including some of those listed above) next week at a session titled, “eLearning Digital Story Slam.” The group of us will be presenting digital storytelling using a variety of tools and methods. I decided to create my digital story around the implementation of WordPress at Miami University. I’ve created the visual aspect, but can’t decide if I want to add an audio component. I suppose I should, if nothing else because the Prezi is fairly “slow” without it. Anyway, I will most likely be using Jing to add audio to the presentation early next week. I also need to document my processes into the Google Site that we’ll be showing the conference participants. Man, I feel like I have a lot to do!!

I’ve been doing some support with WordPress, mainly troubleshooting some of the complications that CELTUA has been running into with their site. It’s not too surprising, they are always making my life complicated. I’m running into a problem with our group’s blog. There are things I want to do that I know are technically possible, but because of the limitations we’ve put on end-user access to themes and the PHP. As much as I know we need to have these guidelines, as a WordPress designer in my free time, it makes me yearning for more. I guess I’ll continue looking for free themes that might work for us…

The course design projects are essentially completed from my perspective. I haven’t heard from the instructors in about 2 weeks (or more) and the last time I did, things were moving swimmingly.

Our group had a “retreat” yesterday where we spent the morning talking about our vision and how to proceed with our services from this point forward. With IT Services across the university under scrutiny, many of the things we want to do and accomplish has to wait to see how our group will be changing (if at all) in the near future. 2 of the new items that I volunteered to investigate the feasibility of were 1) short podcasts (audio and video) about edtech topics, and 2) 30-minute topic-specific webinars. I think both would be fun and can be useful, however I’m not sure how to get the word out. One of the things we started talking about yesterday was marking/advertising our group and the services we provide. Since we are within the division of IT Services, it’s our (maybe just my) understanding that we have to use the official IT Services channels for advertising our events and such. I brought up the idea of creating a listserv for ALT clients to advertise webinars, seminars, workshops, etc. that we put together. The listserv could be made up of anyone that uses our services (SGIDs, course designs, 1-on-1 consultations, etc.). We didn’t come to any decisions yesterday about how to move forward with marketing strategies and I expect we’ll be talking about it in the coming weeks/months so that we can begin re-branding ourselves.

Well, I think that’s all for this week. I’m hoping to set aside time on Friday morning before I leave for the airport to write a weekly update. I’m hoping for that one to include info on iTunes U at Miami University.

WordPress Project. As much as I want this project to be done, it’s far from it. There are things that we’re missing to fully promote the WordPress service. I’ve tried to reach out for updates on the missing pieces, however I’ve had no luck in getting responses. Those groups that are participating in the pilot are asking for assistance, which I completely expected, however without these missing pieces, I can’t reference support documentation that we’ve written. Essentially, without these missing pieces, my level of involvement and work is extremely high and it doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon. Needless to say, I’m quite frustrated about this.

Social Media FLC. This week was our first meeting of the spring term and to be honest, it wasn’t my best meeting thus far. One of the serious problems we’ve run into is teaching schedules are different than the fall (which is to be expected), and this is making scheduling our meetings to be more difficult. We have people who need to come late or leave early and because of that, we can’t have a fully engaging meeting. Aside from that problem, this month’s topics were Skype and social bookmarking and our guest speaker was Jason Abbitt. Jason is a faculty member in the Educational Psychology department at Miami University and has experience using social bookmarking in his classes. His presentation including some data that he collected about the use of social bookmarking and what he would change should he implement this learning activity again. Overall, I thought it was great information and I hope the FLC members thought the same. I’m hoping next month’s meeting goes better for me, but only time will tell. Find out more information about the Faculty Learning Community on the Exploration of Social Media in Higher Education.

Course Designs. I’ve been working on 4 course designs since late fall, all of which are currently in full implementation. Overall, my work related to the design/development of the courses is over, however I still feel like I could do more. I received an email from one of the instructors late last week about creating a rubric, and to be honest, I dropped the ball. I was supposed to schedule a meeting with him to work on creating the rubric and I didn’t; I was supposed to prepare a template for said rubric that I could send him, and I didn’t. I’m fairly disappointed in myself about this and I hope things are going well in his course despite my lack of effort.

On top of these projects, I was out for 1.5 days because I’ve been feeling under the weather. I’m so glad today is Friday and I hope next week is better.

• Was I too busy to make time?
• Did I not know what to say?
• Was I afraid of the negative content I might divulge and who would read it?
• Did I not know how to document the reflections (or if it should be documented at all)?

What I ended up realizing was that I just didn’t know how to document reflections. I could easily sit at my desk, zoning into oblivion, “thinking” about what I had done that week. The problem with that is that there is no “accountability.” Granted, I don’t want people judging my work by the weekly reflections, but I want to be able to keep myself accountable when it comes to critically analyzing my progress. Anyways…

That’s where this site comes into play. I’ve been contemplating this site’s future for the last few months and I think I have just solved the mystery! Henceforth, this site will collect my weekly reflections for ongoing projects. Any and all clients that I’m directly with will have their names removed, although I may spill their department affiliation if it’s relevant to the project. I’ve also set a recurring event on my calendar to remind me to write my weekly reflections.

For those of you that are really interested in personal events, check out Katie and I’s blog.

If you want to follow my educational thoughts, I’ll be posting a link to a site in which I am a contributing author later this month.

Cheers!

Maybe this is why I don’t like reading…

Anyway, I have decided that instead of just complaining about lack of programming to fit my needs, I will now contribute back to the community. The website for the podcast is still in it’s development stages, however I’ll soon reveal the name, cohosts, recording schedule, etc.

If you’re interested in following my new adventure, let me know via comment (below). I’ll send you an email once the website and podcast is live!

Learning is hard. No one said it was easy and if anyone told you that when you were a child, then they were merely trying to protect you. It’s a lie. The students of this generation fall within the confines of basic dualism. It’s you versus them, right versus wrong, and so forth. There is no in between or grey area, and there is definitely no critical thinking. This is, more or less, a generalization of college students (primarily first-year, but holds true for students all the way through advanced degrees). The challenge that instructors of higher education face is that focusing on these surface topics and teaching to the test is what’s expected by students. (click here to see my thoughts on this topic) As I learned from today’s seminar, learning is only done when the 4 different parts of one’s brain is being utilized. Lecture and spoonfeeding doesn’t cut it. What needs to be done, from day 1, is to promote and foster an environment of critical thinking. Critical thinking is what forces students to use multiple (if not all) of parts of their brain.

One of the methods in which critical thinking can be taught is to use perspective- (or role-) taking. Having students assume the role of another individual or audience forces them to view a situation from a different perspective. This “other viewpoint” can help students make conclusions about why something is the way that it is. Effective in theatre, chemistry, history, and virtually every other field, perspective taking can interest students and foster critical thinking, at the same time!

There are 2 common questions about fostering critical thinking / perspective-taking that were raised during today’s seminar:

1. How do you get students engaged to begin perspective-taking?
2. How do you assess perspective-taking?

The answers were pretty simple, actually. And if you’ve spent anytime in professional development for higher education, you probably already know the answers…

How do you get students engaged to begin perspective-taking?

The primary answer to this question is to involve a topic that they are already familiar/engaged/invested in. For example: If talking about gravity, begin with an example about skydiving. You have to hook them to begin engagement, and then it’s another task to keep them engaged. Many instructors think that it’s not their job to do this. And no disrespect if you are one of them, but this demographic would be wrong. If you don’t relate the topics to real-life and interesting concepts, students aren’t going to care and therefore won’t remember what you’re trying to teach them. There are studies that prove that students who have authentic learning experiences, learn more. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because this type of learning uses all 4 parts of the brain. Summary: use real-life examples to hook students’ interest.

How do you assess perspective-taking?

Assessment is always a buzzword that has instructors re-evaluating their teaching methods. The short answer is that the assessment should follow the in-class learning activities. If the class discussion has students relating concepts to real-life ideas, tests should do the same. And for God’s sake, stop using multiple-choice tests! By having students write about topics in an authentic way, they have more of an opportunity to show off what they know and there’s less chance for cheating,

Today’s seminar had great information, some of which was new and some not-so-new. But nonetheless, it’s important to understand the difference between surface learning and deep learning. Critical thinking and perspective-taking are examples of deep learning, forcing students to do more than just regurgitate facts. By teaching critical thinking, students move from the realm of dualism to formal operational thinking, having the ability to test different theories to make determinations. Don’t be a surface learning instructor, force your students to be engaged.

My feeling is that, the more critical thinking that’s involved, the better. Students don’t necessarily agree with this, because it poses more work for them. However, in the long run, the ability to think critically is what’s going to stick with them after the semester ends. One of the frequent complaints from educators is that content is not retained after the assignment, reading, or exam. While this is a broad generalization, there is merit to this, the reasons of which I’ll explain in a later post. However, it’s the non-content related skills that are most important, even more-so than remembering what year the Spanish Inquisition began (for example ). This is because it’s the life skills that all students will use, regardless of coursework, career choice, or life experiences.

Students want to be spoon-fed. They want all of the answers handed to them so that they have the answers to the test. Yes, I went there… This is a matter of whether or not to teach to the test. I have always been against this practice and will continue to be until my dying day. Unfortunately, this problem of wanting to be spoon-fed goes to the masses. Today’s students are different than generations past and it’s the responsibility of the educators to ensure that students are learning as much as possible, even if that means altering the expectations of what skills students are taught.

In conclusion – screw the spoon-feeding. Make students use critical thinking to obtain the knowledge. It may require a little prodding to point them in the right direction, but don’t hand out the answer like it’s candy on Halloween. Stick to your guns, educators!

Was this even a coherent post?

What are your thoughts on spoon-feeding today’s students?