Exemplary Courses, Exemplary Designs, Templates Vs. Standards

Exemplary Courses, Exemplary Designs, Templates Vs. Standards
by Marie-Pierre Huguet, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (New York)
(plus two other people not there)
3 exemplary course winners
Templates and standards
Design recommendations

If you had to put the three academics on the rogers innovation curve:
One course innovator, one late majority, one laggard

Distance courses are shrinking for them, but blended courses are exploding

Course developers (instructional designers) – assigned to help academics and also some request help

Also have student workers, interns, and multimedia designers in the department
5 key components when designing courses

Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate - [key question Why?]

If you don't have enough instructional designers in your institution, it is a good idea to ask an academic from another discipline to get a fresh perspective

One computer science course – distance learning, fully online – won in 2003
Tried to do innovative stuff for the time, weekly chat sessions online, added flash, audio to the course
-Student feedback was that it was quite poor
-Wasn't run by other people in the future – too techie

Next course
International Business, late majority lecturer
Blended course – mostly distance learners
Tried to do such a bad job that he would never be asked to teach a distance course again in his first year
Built a community of learners, integrated technologies into the learning
Students satisfied, reproduced by others

Final course:
Engineering lecturer
Hates using WebCT – finds it unintuitive
Made it work for what the gain could be for students, but disliked the tool
High quality discussion on the discussion board
Assignment submission, tests
Had an anonymous Q&A so students did not feel threatened asking questions
Students did really well on the exam – professor surprised by the results, though something was wrong
High student satisfaction and other lecturers want to use this type of course

Lots of moving icons on the sites

Students didn't want too standard WebCT courses, as it looked too similar to other courses
Why use template? Need good branding, easier to maintain, easier for students and instructors to use

Have a “shell” for their courses. Some did not have staff information on them

Uses layout and design to catch the students attention – the html editing ability of WebCT (who designs the html?)

Standards are base-line sites from the templates – when you take control of that site, you can do what you want with it, but you will probably have to go through the designers.

Modification of the templates to allow for instructor ownership, which meets certain standards

Write a design brief for how the course will work. What technologies will you use? How will students interact with the content? How is the learning broken up? Make a flowchart for how it will appear. About finding the best fit for what the academic does well. If you love to talk, try the discussion board. If you hate talking to others, don't use it (or be a lecturer...). Highlight your strengths in what technologies you use.

Overall a more entertaining presentation than some, though I still felt like more focus was being put on style than substance (a bit like Vegas). It seemed a bit too classic WebCTish for me, in that regard. I think the learning activities were at the heart of it, thankfully, but a lot of what she talked about was flashing icons and good layout and design.

Last session

The last session I went to was on creating an online faculty commons as a space for interested faculty to share ideas and techniques about e-learning. Was a bit concerned as it was being run by someone on ex-WebCT, but figured the topic was generic enough that the platform wouldn't make a huge difference.

Unfortunately, the speaker was not very dynamic and it took a little while to get some pace. One of the lessons learned on the handout was that you would get low turnout in the beginning (which I figured might be the case, and was interested in what strategies had been employed to increase that turnout). Then I saw in the presentation that the project had started Spring 2008, and I had the realization I wasn't going to see those strategies after all, so I left and went to the Outcomes System meeting with Paul. Apologies to the speaker for leaving (as that can be quite annoying), but I just realized then I wasn't going to get much out of it.

Birds of a feather session – social networks and web 2.0

Birds of a feather session – social networks and web 2.0

Thankfully a smaller session with only 30 people. However I got bored of the way the conversation went (mostly about social networks, not social learning tools) and ended up working on my presentation for tomorrow part of the time. Before next session, met Erin from Schoolcraft College in Michigan and she agreed with my assessment of the session, as she was there but didn't say anything either, which made me feel less insane.

Melissa from Seton Hall University – pushing out information through facebook
-would students want to become a friend of their information center?
-so they took a Fan route where they can push information, but they don't see the students' personal private photos, etc.
-have gotten a good deal of faculty to sign up to get this information (does require faculty using facebook though, as this is their target audience, not students - not sure I would've chosen facebook in that case)

2 people using the Blackboard Sync plugin – says that the students love it and use it a lot. Helps with students missing out on new changes.

Are people using Pronto? – 3 people

• Not getting very heavy use from faculty or them encouraging their students to use it
• Another one had it in development server – no one using it
• Another university had more success, but only in pocked of the university, such as really keen academics.
• Do we want to be online all the time, ready to chat with students? Suggested it was useless otherwise (though I am not sure I agree that you have to be there to facilitate the chats)

Should we have a university portal? Or just push all information out so students can use whatever portal they want? (Why not both? I think eventually students will all pick different ways to pull in the information, but is really premature to think everyone is using an RSS feeder and personalised portal)

Use twitter during the lectures to get feedback? Could have a log of the conversation afterwards which would be more useful than the lectures themselves. (Why not just get rid of the lectures and try something else?)

Someone asked if anyone used social networking and learning tools to evaluate lectures and lecturer created resources. Seemed there was a fundamental flaw in that to me, but other people suggested ways to try to get that to happen. Was going to have a word in private afterwards about having the students create the resources rather than just rate them, but then someone talked to this lady for 15 minutes and I gave up and went to lunch.

Virtually Present: Using Blackboard software and building blocks to provide online training and support

Virtually Present: Using Blackboard software and building blocks to provide online training and support by Mary Jane Clerkin, Berkeley College

They run a series of online-only staff development workshops for academics wanting to teach online. The first is an online tutorial about teaching online that is two weeks long and tries to get academics to see the perspective of a student online and asks them questions about how they feel about online learning to determine if it is suitable for them (Not sure if they do this at the end as well, to see if any minds have been changed during the process). It includes online research through library databases, online discussion and submission of writing assignments. They were big Wimba fans for leaving audio and video everywhere in the site and said Pronto was effective for supporting their staff members via instant chat.

Encourages their academics to come to staff development events - have 12 at BbWorld this year. There's a central online resource center Bb site where everyone who does the course gets access too. In there is a reading group, lots of resources, conference listings, etc. Might be good to have upcoming e-learning conferences listed somewhere easily accessible at SHU for interested staff.

The part I didn't get is they said all meetings with academics were held online for them too, along with discipline specific discussions. Of course there were screencasts and self-help resources in the online centre too.

Then, after the intro course, you must take another 3 three week courses to be able to learn about instructional design for online (only) courses. They linked into help desks, library directors, student support in these courses, which was good. However, I thought it was a rather draconian way of getting people to do staff development. By the end of the third course they have finished planning out and creating an online course which is then compared to a strict checklist for approval, which is finally carried out by the Online Dean to evaluate if it is suitable to be online.

Students must take a course called Road to Success in Online Learning to determine if they will be suitable for online learning before they can sign up for an online course too.

I asked her what about blended learning, how did that work? She said that they did blended learning, but did not elaborate about how that did or did not fit into the system. I couldn't imagine every single lecturer in the university going through this type of process to be able to use Blackboard at all, so I'm not sure what training is necessary for those folks, or if most people can have Blackboard without any training. I got the impression not, which seems to be causing its own problems. In general an OK session, in that I saw a different way of doing things, but I don't think most of it applies to us.

Birds of a Feather: Deepening staff engagement with e-learning

This was a share your stories session, which I thought I might be able to get some innovative staff development stragies out of. Unfortunately it was disappointing for several reasons. First, there were 100 people in the room, which is not good for sharing. Second, the room was set up like a lecture hall, meaning you could barely discuss anything.

Finally, there just weren't many new ideas being put out there. The way many people got people to come to staff development events was "We raffle off an iPod, camera, or give them cash". Not sure bribery is a good long term incentive to continue with e-learning. The other take on bribery was that your department gets a laptop to use if you come to our 8 introductory training sessions (which seemed like a lot to start out with at once).

The other one was Leeds Met saying it was mandatory that they engage in a minimum way with many different aspects of e-learning. While I don't totally disagree that is should be mandatory, you do lose a lot of good will in the process, and you just know that mandatory means nothing to some academics.

Having academics involved in a committee steering or driving e-learning was considered groundbreaking news at the end of the session, and the idea of running show n' shares seemed to have never occurred to many people. It was kind of a scary session where I was afraid to speak less I either insulted all the other people or just got mobbed. Not that there was time for me to speak with the 20 people waiting in line behind the microphone though. The session didn't really touch on the core issues of induction for new staff or actually encouraging staff who are using it in limited ways to deepen their engagement. It still focused mostly on those who were not engaging.

Project NG

http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/ if you want to take a look yourself

Started with a funny spoof ad of old Bb talking to NG, like the PC versus Mac type ads. They pointed out there were 2,200+ people at the conference, which is massive I think.

New NG stuff I liked the most:

• students can change the design, layout, and colour of the portal
• adding in more external portal channels
• drag and drop in the portal (and everywhere)
• announcements aggregates in a way that makes sense
• ability at portal level to zoom in on what's new in a course or organisation with student or instructor dashboard
• can now get email or SMS alerts when grades released, assignments submitted and ready to grade, and other options
• can add page breaks, sections and dividers for tests
• Highlights your groups first, not all groups you are not part of
• Control panel below the left hand menu, not a separate screen, consists of menus
• Students can create groups at portal level
• Bb Sync will work on mobile, iPhone, MyYahoo, iGoogle soon
• MyPlaces link at the top allows for easy jumping to other sites you are enrolled on
• Easier to embed YouTube videos, google maps, etc.
• Can change the look inside a course with themes (so looks like older Blackboard style if you want)
• Blogs and journals (private blogs) built-in
• Groups get a summary of what is for their group, including content or assignments

Anyway, I'm quite happy about it really. It looks good and seems quite similar to what was there, but way better. I don't think staff will struggle too much with the changes, though we will have to figure out what options we want on, what language pack settings, etc.

Take the Mystery out of Digital Content Management

Take the Mystery out of Digital Content Management
by Robert Bobeldyk, Calvin College, 2 years
Erik Dearholt, Tulane University, New Orleans area, 1-2 years
Wayne Twitchell, Grinnell College, new to content system, piloting this year

Why did they start using the content system?
Needed e-portfolios (CC)
Repetition of files, not wanting to copy everywhere (CC)
Post-Hurricane Katrina – wanted to host more content off site (TU)
Try to enrich the student and staff experience – for competitive advantage (TU)
Try to lift administrative strain in the post-hurricane world (TU)
Came from IT department, crumbling old storage issues (GC)
Looking for web-based content (GC)

What examples of use, interesting initiatives?
Get support staff to support academics (GC)
WebDav caused confusion – so they used Xythos as a helper application (GC)
Use e-portfolios, to get students to record service performed in the community (TU)
Create a teaching portfolio (TU)
Reduce the university admin paper trail (versioning has been invaluable) (TU)
Career development sends out a portfolio of their trainee teachers for the student to potential employers, so the students are presenting a portfolio of their work (CC)
Everyone has a master course for CPS101 (that never disappears), the real course folder using the content system's course content (that does disappear each semester), and a collaborative space for their department (in the institutional space). - Teachers pull in materials from all three folders. So, uses the course/organisation folders but in a different way than just standard (CC)

GC – doesn't use course folders – only institutional – all set up by his secretary, as only 300 people, Not much of a help for our situation.
GC – had problems where users download a file and hit save, it doesn't work (as read-only without web dav). So managed to get Xythos drive that emulates the network using a mapped network drive. Another fee for Xythos (whose t-shirt I have incidently).
CC – has another different program which maps the content system to a drive for easy editing
TU – just using WebDav

CC- Created a directory for each department with two sub directories, resources and users for each one
-batch created user directories in the user field
-in resources, the directory is given equal rights to everyone with read/write/manage.

Another guy said when the divisional folders are set up, then only the assistant dean and his/her administrator gets manage access. Seems like quite a high level person to give access too.

What are the benefits?
Student webspace – used MyWebSpace tool to shorten URLs (CC)
Students with disabilities – realized things like audio files easier without IT department needing to make CDs and send them out to everyone (CC) – Why not doing this before?
Reduced administrative load on IT department (TU)
Working collaboratively on documents from around the globe (for student on foreign exchange for example) (TU)
Not many benefits yet as in pilot (GC)

Challenges:
Lots of administrative use – some concerns from administrators that their jobs would disappear (North Florida)
Persistent cookies can cause browser crashes and the learning system to never load sometimes (audience member) – though they must constantly login for WebDav – which is why GC used Xythos

Probably the best parallel session I went to today, as got to hear some different ideas for how things are set up. 2 of the 3 using a helper application to ensure WebDav-esque functionality is working right, though maybe if Blackboard lifts that 100 character limit in a new version, that would help. I do see a network drive mapping advantage though.

CC's use of fake master courses that don't disappear sounded interesting too, as it gets over rollover problems to some degree. I wonder if people remember to put the right files in the right places though with three different areas to choose from.