Three of us trekked to Madison to attend the conference held at the lovely Monona Terrace. The drive down was good but the drive back had much rain which slowed us down a lot. We did stop and stock up on Wisconsin cheese (not myself though). There were some good sessions and some not so good. Here’s the highlights from my good sessions:
- Distance Learning Czar: It was clear that so many of the schools there were way into distance and online learning. The idea of someone in charge of distance learning was repeated especially at the session featuring Carlos a fellow Frye ‘09 alum!
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization. This technique was explained well at a session on Marketing online programs. The focus is clearly to capture students when they’re searching for an online program. Looking forward to getting the powerpoint on this one.
- Part Time Instructional Design: This session (see ppt) was the winner of Thursday for me. It laid out a program at Del Mar College where instructional design is done by a team: 2 faculty, 1 instructional technologist, 1 librarian, 1 director. The 2 faculty positions are 1 course release overloads for a term and are competitive slots — they apply for them. The team does instructional design with faculty, course reviews, mentoring, development of support materials, general sounding board for online learning.
- Quality Matters: Again and again places mentioned how they took the base QM rubric and modified it for their school. Seems like a no-brainer to do so we have a way to assess the quality of our online offerings. The question is who does the assessing and what is the result?
- Economics of Online Learning: you can expect 12 - 32% of tuition as revenue (25% typical) for an online program. I saw a session by someone from Compass Knowledge Group. They help institutions develop and run online programs. The data (based on 50 programs of various sizes) was useful in identifying the components and potential cost % of each. Another one I’m looking forward to the powerpoint for the details.
- Penn State Resources: faculty self-assessment and quality standards. From a session that described the complexity that is Penn State, two resources were of note. A faculty self-assessment allows faculty to test their readiness for online teaching. And quality standards
based on quality matters for their online courses.
- What do online students consider essential to their learning? Their perspectives match up well with, take a guess, the quality matters rubric. A study of 202 Penn State World Campus students found pieces what they consider essential to their learning and what pieces not so much — maybe a surprise but they don’t consider games and simulations essential to their learning. But that doesn’t mean those items don’t support their learning. The presentation is up at slideshare to see the details.
- Epson DC-06 Document Camera. For $299 you get a usb-based document camera that is so easy to use and captures a great picture. Time to dump our RCA-video based document cameras for a few of these.
I’m going to present with my colleague David Warch at this year’s Classrooms of the Future symposium. We’ll be presenting on how our campus raised awareness of the best thinking about learning spaces very quickly to respond to some new building projects. Of course I’m on the steering the committee for the symposium so….
The 2006 Educause sessions are now showing up as podcasts on the Educause blog site. If you dare, you can listen to my session here. I don’t know if you have the same reaction as I do to hearing a recording of yourself– but I had to stop listening after my first few sentences. It was painful. Next time I do an Educause it will be better.
I’ve been away from the blog for a while due to a hand injury. I hope to get back into the swing of things again.
The Feb/March issue of Innovate is out. Again they feature many interesting articles. An interview with Carol Twigg (I saw her in 2004 at the Distance Teaching & Learning conference in Madison — great keynote) brings me up to date on what she’s been up to. I hadn’t realized that she spun off the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) as an independent nonprofit. Makes sense to me. Gaming is a recurring theme showing up in 3 articles this time. The issue closes with Downes’ visit to the Sakai site. I like how he examines his experience using the site which I think gives insights to how using Sakai could go.
I came across a reference to this article in nature on the sciences using blogs and wikis. It points out some o f the strengths of Web 2.0 for the sciences. It also ties the origins of the web as a collaboration space for researchers into the modern technologies that make that real. The web up until now, Web 1.0 as it is now coined, was at its core far more static and siloed. I believe that researchers working in a wiki on a project is really the realization of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web. While I can see over-blogging as a distraction. I can also see having a blog on certain project where you document your progress through the experimental stages. It provides a nice chronological record of what you did, when, and why. I think it could capture the excitement better than a finished paper would — and serve as a tool for students, showing them the excitement of the field. As more younger faculty come up the ranks I suspect we’ll see a shift in collaboration tools used.
It’s always a good day when the latest Innovate comes out. I immediately jumped to Steven Downes’ “Places To Go” column — not only because he’s talking about moodle, but because his columns have always been interesting. I honestly don’t know when he has time to eat and sleep. Have you looked at his web site? I could spend days there. I’m halfway through “Taking a Journey with Today’s Digital Kids: An Interview with Deneen Frazier Bowen” which is describing her keynote that I’m going to have see online. It illustrates the divide between the typical educator and the “digital natives.” I was able to watch the first 5 minutes of the keynote before the feed cut out. But it looked like a memorable keynote! This issue does seem rather K-12 focused but still of interest to others.
A few months ago I mentioned edublogs.org and thought it was for students too (it’s just for educators). Well, now there’s learnerblogs.org. According to the announcement it sounds like it is aimed at K12. But uniblogs.org was created to support the college and university segment. Hopefully they will get polished up like edublogs.org. At the moment they are rather rough. James at incsub sure has been busy!
Thanks to Sean who pointed out that edublogs is meant for educators rather than students. I had better read those FAQs!
I also wanted to link to my annotated bibliography version of the articles in my previous post. The annotations will give you an idea of what was studied in some of the articles.
Blogging has taken a real hit with fall semester looming. I will return!
My blogging sure has taken a hit as of late. Things have been busy at work (migration from Blackboard 5.5 to moodle 1.5 — and all of the customizations to moodle, course evaluations online — both a new set of questions and doing it online) and at home (our 2nd story is about to be removed and rebuilt anew).
The online course evaluations have been very interesting. It’s a real intersection of students, faculty and technology. You have the factors of student attitudes to course evaluations — are they anonymous? do the faculty care? does my opinion matter? And then the faculty attitudes towards evaluations — what if only students with negative opinions do them? non-tenured faculty worry about tenure decisions. And then the technology factor of being online adds the new variable of response rate. Doing paper evals during class gives a captive audience — the evals are optional, the faculty member has to leave the room, but the time allotted varies. The handwriting issue also comes into play for anonymity. Doing them online makes it easier to not do them. There hasn’t been extensive research on doing course evaluations online, but there are some articles I’ve found.
First of all, some effective practices are emerging. The TLT Group’s Flashlight Program BeTA Project has some insights to successful online evaluations. What is interesting is that several of the articles I found on the subject echo similar findings. Generally, institutions awkwardly start doing online evaluations. Sometimes things go bad, they try a few things to improve response rates, and then find things that work. These practices match quite closely the BeTA findings above.
What I find interesting is that the institutional culture around evaluations seems to influence their success when taken online. I’ve learned from smarter people than I that the social aspect can overwhelm a technology project. This is why Dr. Pike used Bolman and Terrence’s 4 frames (structural, political, human resource, cultural) when approaching the course evaluation redesign last summer (see our paper for more).
Back to some resources if you’re looking to move your institution to online course evaluations. I’ve tried to link to them all and note the institutions. Some focus on response rates, some are more general. Some have bibliographies that can lead you down more paths.
- “Student Feedback on Teaching: Online! On target?” - Cummings and Ballantyne, Murdoch University.
- “Student Feedback on Teaching: Reflections and Projections” - Refereed Proceedings of Teaching Evaluation Forum 28 - 29 August 2000, Perth, Western Australia
- “Lessons Learned From Online vs. Paper-based Computer Information Students’ Evaluation System” - Liegle and McDonald, Georgia State University
- “On-line vs. Paper-and-Pencil Surveying of Students: A Case Study” - Handwerk and Carson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (ERIC document RIEAAPR2001)
- “Administration of Web versus Paper Surveys: Mode Effects and Response Rates” - Matz, University of North Carolina (ERIC document ED439694).
- “Online Student Evaluation of Instruction: An Investigation of Non-Response Bias” - Thorpe, Drexel University
- “Findings from the 2001 Pilot Administration of Your First College Year (YFCY): National Norms” - Sax, University of California, Los Angeles
- “Online Course Evaluations: Lessons Learned” - presentation at The CALI Conference for Law School Computing 2005
- “Online Student Evaluation of Instruction” - California State University Fresno TLT
- “The Effects Of Delivery Mode Upon Survey Response Rate And Perceived Attitudes Of Texas Agri-Science Teachers” - Fraze + more, Texas Tech University
- “Online Student Course Evaluations: Review of Literature and a Pilot Study” - Anderson + more, University of Kentucky
- summary of online course evaluation trial - Finke from email list archive
- “Summer 2004: Summary of Response Rates for Online-Delivered Course Evaluations” - Conn + more, Northern Arizona University
- “Online Course Evaluations: One Institute’s Success in Transitioning from a Paper Process to a Completely Electronic Process!” - presentation at Association for Institutional Research Forum 2005
- “An Experimental Investigation Of Student Response Rates To Faculty Evaluations: The Effect Of The Online Method And Online Treatments” - Dommeyer + more, California State University
- “Incentives The Key Ingredient for Successful Web-based Course Evaluations” - Murphy, University of California
The new issue of Innovate is out and it focuses on educational uses of gaming. Kurt Squire, COTF X afternoon keynote, has an article about his experiences using Civilization III.
This link is making the rounds too. U of Saskatchewan Library has a list of peer-reviewed academic journals with RSS feeds. What a great way to keep an eye on your discipline’s journals. I hope more scholarly resources start to take advantage of RSS. It could be a great time saver for busy faculty wanting to keep on top of publications.
Running a multi-user version of the blog software I’m running here, edublogs hopes to be the place for students and educators to blog. Hopefully it will take off. Here’s the press release
http://edublogs.org - Launched!
http://edublogs.org is an totally unique project aimed at teachers, researchers, writers and educators the world over.
Basically you get to set up a free WordPress blog (by far the best blogging platform out there!), 10MB of upload space (extending to much much more down the line), an enormous stack of beautiful themes and to be part of a unique community.
You could use a blog to record and annotate important resources and ideas, to propose and discuss anything under the sun, to progressively develop your thesis, to publicise and discuss your publications with the world or just to develop your digital identity.
Either way, http://edublogs.org is a no-strings-attached, open source, ongoing and freely available service for you and you’re invited to take part!
If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to contact James Farmer at james[at]edublogs(dot)org
I stumbled upon this newsletter that speaks highly of the presentation given by my partner-in-blogging at the COTF conference in May.
I’ve been catching up at work from being gone and hope to get some more reading in today so I can post here.
I saw in my RSS feeds that the new issue of Innovate is out [requires free registration]. Hooray! There’s some good articles as always. One author’s name jumped out at me, Kay Wijekumar. I thought, “No, is that the same person who I saw in 2002 at educause?” And yes, it was! Now I just have to fix my Innovate login so I can read her article. Here’s their summaries of the articles I am looking forward to reading:
New technology tools and practices are exciting on their own, but making them work within Web-based course management systems is often a challenge. Kay Wijekumar outlines the best ways to design and conduct an online course with such constraints—and proposes software changes that would make CMSs more effective and user friendly.
Educators like those above spend significant time and energy on technology integration, yet their effort may not be recognized in tenure and promotion considerations. Expanding this matter to another area of faculty responsibility, Ellen Cohn and Bernard Hibbitts reexamine the traditional definition of public service. In particular, they question its division from teaching and research and argue that service can be just as valuable online as in person. Two exemplary Web sites that serve both an academic purpose and the public good illuminate their discussion.
Marc Prensky suggests how one common device could move us closer to that vision. Cell phones are portable, powerful, and already in the hands of millions of students. Rather than ban mobile technology from the classroom, Prensky contends, educators should embrace it as a flexible learning tool. Like cell phones, weblogs have obvious social uses and less appreciated educational applications. Drawing on pedagogical theory and personal practice, Stuart Glogoff documents the ways in which blogging can build community, enhance knowledge construction, and increase interactivity in both online and hybrid courses.
OK, pretty much every article is on my list to read.
The latest issue of the Sloan-C View has some initial results from their April workshop on blended learning. They defined some key elements of blended learning:
Courses integrate online with traditional face to face class activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner in which a portion (institutionally defined) of face to face time is replaced by online activity.
I am looking forward to some further publication of workshop results.
I stumbled upon this faculty development site that has many links of use to both new and seasoned faculty. Maybe I’ll check out some of the links. I clicked on ‘Constructivist Teaching’ and found even more links…. maybe later. Too much good stuff to read now.