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.
With the end of term approaching, our faculty needed a way to read all of the posts in a forum without having to click into each discussion. They got used to this feature in Blackboard so I wrote a new view of a forum that accomplishes this. I made it part of our Augsburg moodle library. After you add a button to the standard forum view anyone can collect the posts — it also respects groups (at least in my testing of it).
I’m working my way through the latest Educause Quarterly. With a cover on e-learning, how could I pass it up?
First, there’s “Laptop Use in University Common Spaces.” At first I thought cynically, “oh, a survey to see if students are using laptops — they are!” But once I read it I saw they were interested in how students are using their laptops in these spaces. Of most interest was the need for power and secure storage. It’s amazing how many leave them unattended. The need for power is easy to miss — batteries don’t run forever!
Next is “E-Learning—A Financial and Strategic Perspective.” This well-researched article does a good job of hitting the key aspects of e-learning that impact the bottom line: use of adjuncts and overhead costs. It also hits on the concerns of faculty about the use of adjuncts, course development, and quality.
Following that thread is “Uniting Technology and Pedagogy: The Evolution of an Online Teaching Certification Course.” This article explains a model of certifying faculty to teach online using an online course — the faculty get to be online students. I think it provides a good framework for fulfilling this need — assuming you are able to invest in making the course as good as it needs to be. There are some good examples of the challenges the faculty faced when they were in the role of online student.
And lastly, “Professional Development for IT Leaders” gave me some things to think about along with “CIO Effectiveness in Higher Education.” Of course the former takes place in a large university with many different IT opportunities. But it makes me think what do I want to do? where do I want to go? do I want to move more into management and more distant from the end-users like faculty? Those questions won’t be answered today…..
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.
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 noticed several m-learning posts in the blogs I read. Here is a link to mlearnopedia.com in case you want to read more about m-learning.
Things haven’t been too exciting for me in the blogosphere as of late. But from the Online Learning Update, this article on m-learning for ‘hard to reach’ young people is interesting. I could see how the Net Generation (still working on that book, I’ll summarize soon) could take to m-learning. In case you haven’t heard, m-learning is the term coined for mobile learning often with cell phones or PDAs. I don’t think it would work for me. I still have a cautious truce with my cell phone. It’s never glued to my ear nor do I enjoy looking at its little screen. But I am not of the Net Generation.
A new study from the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness looks at what makes for successful internet-supported learning. That could be online classes, or just courses that use the internet in a significant way. Their difficult-to-read website offers the full report in PDF, chapter-by-chapter on the web, or a summary version. It’s a bit big to look at right now but…..
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A new short paper in the refereed e-journal, “International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning ” takes on highlighting 6 elements that they suggest make for effective e-learning design. It’s not bad. The abstract…..
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Another Educause gem today, “Faculty and Administrators Collaborating for E-Learning Courseware .” It mirrors a lot of what the eteam worked on this summer — incentives and funding, misconceptions. But it also hits hard at ownership and usage rights. The eteam didn’t spell out a clear recommendations in those areas, but this article gives 3 paths to take….
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From Online Learning Update , I found this article entitled “How Distance Learning Changes Faculty .” It’s a quick read. Based on the experiences of 6 faculty teaching online MBA courses, the author talks about ….
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From an interestingly-titled blog, Michelle’s Online Learning Freakout Party Zone, comes some references to rubrics for online instruction . As we want to refine our rubrics, these resources may prove useful.
This page gives brief summaries of what the various regional accrediting bodies are doing with e-learning. It’s interesting how different regions have different focuses — evaluation, hybrid programs, keeping up with new programs, etc.
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You should recognize Sloan-C from their Effective Practices , Online Learning Surveys and JALN . The proceedings from the November 2004 conference are now online.
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