Carleton was very hospitable and Hawaiian on a cold Minnesota Friday. It was a good day at Gusday 10. We had some tweets going on throughout the day as well. I snapped some pictures too at facebook.
Here’s a rundown of my takeaways:
- Creating Engaging Online Courses - Luther Seminary
- they offer 60 courses online or hybrid
- been doing it for 10 years
- they are running the Jenzabar LMS which is limited so they build most course sites in HTML with the LMS page as the hub
- they have 3 people in the Learning Design and Technologies area
- they think of the learning objectives first, the technology second
- they build the courses for faculty, the faculty are the content experts not the builders
- they use a lot of flash movies from flip video cameras - faculty introductions and the like
- “Multi-Media Learning” by Mayer: 2 channels - audio and video, overload one and the other shuts down, too much visual in powerpoint and the audio part is lost too
- use camtasia studio for annotated ppt
- courses use small groups of 5, conference calls with group and instructor, group forums and course forum
- adobe connect to enhance call experience
- be specific in online courses, always
- use mid-course check-ins, critical incidents
- trying eportfolios this term
- http://www.luthersem.edu/ldt/
- Off-Hour On-Call Support - Bethel
- A Saturday outage got the attention of the administration
- Bethel has grown 20% in 5 years, new campus in Bloomington
- issue vs outage
- issue - (my monitor doesn’t work) not good for on-call, resolved during regular hours
- outage - (Blackboard is down again) right for on-call reporting
- using a definition from Georgia State
- providing 57.5 hours of on-call coverage (until midnight during the week and evenings Fri-Sun
- have a purpose statement - conduit for communication through a liaison to other staff, level 1 and 2 issues
- compensation? - 6 person rotation, 1 person / week, 1/10 flex time before next rotation (6 hours)
- equipment used
- netbook with mobile internet
- bomgard.com hardware remote access
- shared PDA phone
- phonetag.com - transcription and SMS / email creation of ticket with WAV
- phone tree on campus to get into off-hours VM
- started 10/1/9, about 2 calls / week
- process: someone calls regular number, it’s off-hours so they pick that option, it rolls to phonetag number and the leave a message, an SMS is sent saying someone called, in a few minutes a ticket is created with the message and another SMS is sent with the message text. The on-call person then decides it is an outage and does some initial triage and calls in the appropriate person if needed.
- Document Imaging - Carleton
- using Onbase from Hyland Software for 11 years
- being used in silos, not consistent use of fields
- not sharing documents across departments
- isn’t a replacement for the business application, just a place to store files like virtual filing cabinet
- the goal is not that it be easy to put documents in, rather it should be easy to find things in it
- ties to RP through another little app
- Project Management - Carleton and St Cloud State
- St Cloud started, they have a position that just does project management
- project vs operation work (sometimes fuzzy — are annual rollouts a project?)
- project has beginning and end
- 5 steps in process
- initiate - idea
- plan - scope
- execute
- monitor / control - check in w/stakeholders, watch scope creep
- closing
- project management - one project
- program management - managing group of related projects
- portfolio management - managing collection of all
- charter is entry point to process
- routine meetings to prioritize
- reach decision point - document and sign off
- communication plan for updates
- completion document, lessons learned, future projects, document what was done
- first create a process then find a tool to support it
- Carleton - just enough project management
- team of 4 ITS staff, shared, vet projects through group
- big P projects (large organizational projects, often external driven, by leadership, $$, visible, higher risk)
- little p projects (smaller team projects, by team leads, little $, little risk)
- they’re using a wiki to track - opened to key ppl outside of ITS
- charter is useful for people to organize thoughts about why it was great idea
- have different states for projects
- considering dotproject
- update projects 1/month
I really enjoyed Carleton’s approach to just enough project management — they provided the slides too. I think it could work for us as it’s enough to organize things but not too much to be onerous to people. The document imaging put a good perspective on the role of document imaging. The Off-hours session provided a cool system for capturing reporting of incidents and getting them resolved. Luther Seminary is doing some interesting stuff online and I noticed it is a full-service department — faculty record their video and drop off the flip.
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.
The latest Educause Review just came out with several interesting articles. There was much focus on the economic context higher ed is in right now.
- Managing in a New Reality by Philip J. Goldstein
Goldstein points out that working within a tight budget is not new to IT organizations — cuts happened as recently as 2004 in many organizations. He gives several areas where IT leaders can leverage the current crisis to create a better future for their organizations and institutions. He also points out several areas where IT leaders can support their institutions in different areas where things will be done differently.
- Top 10 IT issues for 2009 is out
Some things did jump out at me. Both in this article and the one above ERPs and the disconnect between the promise and the value realization comes up. Many institutions find a lack of buy-in from the administration as to the use of the ERP and process improvement. Change is difficult and changing the way something has always been done is more difficult. But as people are asked to more with equal or negative staffing levels the ERP can help. Governance came up too, something I’ve been interested in. With budget pressure IT needs transparency in its spending to help other units understand where it spends and why. I was surprised to see LMS/CMSes bringing up the end of the list. That is, I was surpised to see them on there at all.
- Essential versus Strategic IT Investments by James Hilton
This should sound familiar as he talked to us at Frye about this exact topic. I can’t say I’ve listed to the audio of the interview but the excerpt sounds to be just like our session with him.
- Learning and Technology — “In That Order” by Malcolm Brown
I was looking forward to this piece since he posted to one of the Educause lists looking for students to participate. He interviewed 14 students inviting them “to suggest what educators should be thinking about as we plan our learning environments for the next two to four years.” These observations and the specific examples in the article are good reminders with fall approaching. He found the common messages to be
- “too much or unfettered technology is bad and directly hinders learning; and
- the use of technology should not come at the expense of personal interaction both in and outside the classroom.”
U. of Michigan’s Online Teaching-Evaluation System Fails
Uh-oh. Not good press for Sakai (though it’s not mentioned in the article). UMich is in my annotated bibliography for online course evaluations which is why I know they’re Sakai. The comments on the article unfortunately echo the polarizing reaction to online course evaluations. Maybe I’ll post too….
I was listening to Weekend Edition today and was spellbound by this story on Video Games Live. This is a traveling concert experience where a full orchestra plays video game songs with a multimedia show behind. For one thing it brings young people into concert halls which is great. But I’ve been thinking about how its another way the virtual life more of us are experiencing is brought into our real life. There’s of course the World of Warcraft gold farmers that make the news that shows how commerce can crossover between worlds. That should not be surprising. If there’s money to be made people will find it.
But I find it interesting that people are seeking traditional (real) expressions of the experiences they have in virtual worlds. I know hearing certain video game themes trigger memories of completing a difficult objective and the sense of accomplishment that followed. This is so interestingly similar to how different pop songs make us think of times of our lives and what we were experiencing then. This is also a strange generational connection. Parents of today’s kids played video games, although visually simpler, just like the kids are. Both can come to this concert and share in a strangely modern experience of virtual meets real.
Well, maybe not the future. But it is impressive. The more AJAX-driven Web 2.0 techologies (click on those if I’m making no sense) I see the more I want our academic web services to use them — thinking CMS/moodle here. Netvibes is just a fluid portal that I’d love to have for a campus portal. I’m still just amazed at how in a web browser I click and edit and move objects around — just like a desktop application. There have been some AJAX-based modules developed for moodle.
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.
I just saw that the ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control, and Learning is out. While the full study weighs in at a hefty 140 pages, the Key Findings is a brisk 10 pages and is a must-read. A few points jumped out at me in the key findings:
- “Students spend 11-15 hours / week using electronic devices” (not cell phones). That is a lot of time.
- “Students view technology in the classroom as supplemental to their course experience, not as transformational.” I’m torn on this one. On the one hand as a technologist I want technology to be transformational. But on the other hand I am happy that students want the face-to-face interaction. I know that some faculty worry that all of these technologies are going to ruin education. But it seems clear that students know where knowledge and teaching come from and where learning happens, though they might not realize it.
- “Most students have used a course management system (CMS), and most have had positive experiences.” This surprises me some as I tend only to hear about the negative experiences in my profession. I generally believe most have at least a neutral experience (not bad) now that we’ve moved to moodle. But a recent article in our student newspaper had a student saying they didn’t like having materials in the CMS because they had to use a computer to get at the materials. I guess there are always exceptions.
- “According to responding students, IT is improving their learning. Students report that our institutions and our faculty are integrating IT inconsistently into courses.” They found that instructor IT skills had the largest positive impact on student engagement in the course. Here we have the challenge of instructional technologists. How do we help all of the faculty to consistently use IT effectively at some arbitrary level? In all honesty we’ll have plenty of work for the next decade or so. As more faculty come into the fold who have grown up with technology (and more retire), I believe we’ll see a shift in needs. I’m not sure I know what that shift will be. I often wonder if it will be a shift to more support for teaching skills. Learning how to teach isn’t so much part of the graduate experience as it once was. At least that’s my perception based on conversations with senior faculty.
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.
It’s been busy in blogland while I was away. My RSS feeds are full of articles! Here’s some tidbits:
The problem of U of Phoenix ads showing up on the web next to small colleges in searches (something that has been noticed in this region) warranted an article in the Chronicle. After the Phoenix president was confronted at a conference this practice was corrected. But search engine ad placement will always be tricky for small institutions that don’t have large marketing budgets.
I might have to be careful here if I ever need to change jobs! I am liking these Chronicle first-person articles by pseudonym-ed professors from midwest liberal arts colleges.
The Encyclopedia of Distance Learning looks interesting (though pricey). The table of contents is most impressive as is the editor list. Judith Boettcher visited Augsburg a year or two ago (I forget exactly when) and she was an impressive woman to talk to.
I was listening to the World’s technology podcast (July 8th) and was interested in the segment on the role of social technologies in the London bombing aftermath. With most voice communication networks overwhelmed, people used their blogs to post “I’m alright” so that friends and family would know. And camera phones and social picture networks like flickr generated immediate pictures of the aftermath. Even though the voice systems were overloaded, the phones could connect to the internet and upload pictures! One woman started a wiki for people to build an information center on the tragic event — several news outlets followed with pages for people to post their accounts. It seems like these technologies are linking people both in text and images after a major tragedy like never before.
In addition, On The Media had a bit on wikipedia’s entry on the bombing. It fascinates me that this page did not exist and then was created and is filling with information on the event. And the page will continue to change as details unfold. The segment is worth a listen. It really helps differentiate wikipedia from an encyclopedia and from the media. The social nature of these technologies — wikis, blogs, personal devices, flickr — fascinates me in that they allow for the construction of information in almost realtime by everyone.
I’m just finishing up listening to the podcast of the Auricle interview of Dublin City University’s Morag Munro on their moodle migration. It’s a good listen. They’re running moodle for 13,000 students on a single server with a backup/development server standing by. They easily linked it to their authentication system and their student information system. Had I seen this when I was in Dublin last week maybe I would have looked them up? Well, probably not. I was able to not think about work for those 2 weeks which was a record.
Back to podcasting. I’m finding I’m using podcasts as tivo for radio (which is not uncommon). My habit has been to take the podcasts for FutureTense, On The Media, and The World: Technology and burn them to CD for listening in the car. It’s been great to have my favorite radio spots whenever I want them. If I was really crafty I’d get an iTrip for my iPod and just use that. But I still like the simplicity of the CD.
From the Wired Campus Blog (this one has had some good stuff!), 2 Indiana University grad students did a research study on privacy and the public sphere. Using public information, they sent customized emails to students that appeared to be from their friends directing them to a website which required authentication. Once there they authenticated with their IU logins — oops!
I find this so informative/educational for people. We always try to tell our faculty, staff, and students don’t believe the From and don’t click on web links in emails (especially if you’re not expecting them!). I was amazed to read that the students did go through their IRB — Human Subjects Committee — process. People just trust email too much.
Catching up on my RSS feeds today, I found these gems:
The Wired Campus blog has had some really good items. It’s worth subscribing to via RSS!
I just read that NASA has started a podcast. Copy this link to your Podcasting software.
Read more…