Monthly Archives: February 2012

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Desire2Learn: Rethinking the Online “Course Site”

Here at DePaul, we’ve got a well-established learning management system. For many faculty, this provides a means to deliver content in both text and multimedia forms to students anywhere in the world. Some faculty are using their course sites in really excellent ways, delivering lecture content, videos, discussions, and assessments entirely online. Many others, though, do not want to or believe they need to use the system. On first glance, a number of disciplines don’t seem to benefit from having this system in place; for example, a music instructor whose sole purpose at DePaul is to teach private lessons might not see the value in having a course site available, since they don’t have a syllabus and each student’s lesson content is different. A foreign-language instructor might not see the immediate value of a course site beyond being a syllabus repository, if the majority of the course content will be conversational speaking. However, there are many ways to leverage the technology available in the Desire2Learn system to avoid the woes of the “common course site.” In order to take a course site to these new places, we first have to break down exactly what the words “course site” mean to us as instructors and designers, and from there we can use the available tools to produce something truly beneficial to students.

A Desire2Learn course site is, in its simplest definition, nothing more than a website. When you access your course site, you are accessing a collection of Web pages associated with your course and a collection of students who have access to it. As you create content in your class, you are really creating a series of web links and web pages to convey your information. D2L does a great job of hiding most of the tough stuff from you, so for the most part the system really is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). You don’t have to know any code or special tricks to get the basics to happen. In a broader sense, a “course site” becomes that collection of web pages that, taken as a whole, comprise the learning materials for your course.

What if your course content doesn’t seem very internet-friendly? What if you’re working in a typically “analog” discipline that historically doesn’t make much use of Web resources? Keep reading for a few ideas that might help you rethink how you configure your class for online learning:

Idea 1: Lecture Delivery

Consider how much time you spend lecturing to your class. How many hours a week/month/quarter do you use in class for this? In order to maximize in-class discussion and reflection time, consider creating online lectures. You can record them yourself using screencasting software like ScreenFlow or Camtasia, or using online software like Screencast-O-Matic. Screencasting software essentially records whatever’s on your computer screen at the time, along with audio and/or video, and produces a video file that can be used in your course site. Students could be watching your lecture before they come to class, and then you can spend your class time discussing what they already know instead of having to present it for the first time. You can also be sure that they will get all the necessary information because they can stop, rewind, and watch over and over. You could use your course site to be the main delivery system for your lecture content.

Idea 2: The Listening Room

Suppose you are an instructor who needs to use numerous audio files for your instruction. This could be someone in music creating listening lists, someone preparing broadcasting examples for a journalism class, or a foreign-language professor providing conversation and pronunciation excerpts. D2L handles audio excellently, and can be used to present one or many examples at once. You can create content pages with audio files that will play back directly from within the page. If you have multiple examples that need to be grouped together, your FITS consultant can create a “channel” on our streaming server, so you can present a group of items as a unified whole (for example, if you wanted to present an entire Beatles album at once). There are a number of resources out there for audio files, but one of the best for music is the Naxos Music Library, which DePaul subscribes to. You can stream music directly from this collection and link to it in your course site, so students don’t have to go looking for the music. Giving your students audio examples directly in the course site will increase the availability of those materials to them for study: no more sitting and waiting for a recording to become available in the language lab or music library, and they can play and replay these files an unlimited number of times. You can embed audio in a page with descriptive text as well, so they will know a little more ahead of time about what they will be listening to.

Idea 3: The Theatre

It’s always a nice change of pace to show a film in class. This can help break up the monotony of lecture-response-lecture-response. However, what if films and film clips are a major part of the class? Consider a Television News class, where students may be frequently viewing historical newscasts or those of their peers, or a Literature in Film class, where students will be frequently viewing old films or film clips and making comparisons to the literature it is based on. If a clip is shown only once in class, it can be more difficult to ensure that students really got what you wanted them to get out of it. D2L handles video in much the same way it does audio; you can post a video clip in your course site and it will provide a player for you, so you can view it online. D2L can handle directly embedding clips from other websites like Vimeo, Viddler, and YouTube as well. You can also have channels built for your video clips if you want to show a specific set to students. Much like the lecture-delivery idea, this enables you to have students watch clips before class, so you can jump right into discussion of the clips instead of having to sit through them all in class. It also keeps those materials available to students, so they can watch them repeatedly to study for an upcoming exam. You can also embed a video clip in a page with some descriptive text content; this way they won’t just watch, but will watch for specific things.

Idea 4: The Gallery

Remember how much photocopying we used to do before each class? Every student needed to have a copy of every necessary page. In the case of instructors using images in class, sometimes this meant an awful lot more copying to show them, one to a page. Worse, a copy machine doesn’t necessarily reproduce images entirely accurately, so photocopies of the great works of western art probably don’t have the same effect as the originals. These days, digital copies of the images can be obtained and simply displayed online in your course site, where they will be available in perpetuity in a more authentic-looking form than a copied page. You can insert pictures one at a time into a content page, or you can use software like SoftChalk (available free at this link for DePaul users) to create an album that can be embedded and flipped through in a single content page. You can also embed photo galleries from other services such as Flickr into a content page; this can be a great way to create a gallery of student works that can then be displayed for the whole class after students upload to the external site. Imagine you’re teaching an Art History class. Wouldn’t it be great to have high-resolution images of the works you will be studying available right from within your course site? It would be a great help to students as they studied for exams, especially in those cases where they were studying things that weren’t necessarily in the book. Being able to do a side-by-side comparison in a flippable album would also reduce the amount of paging through the textbook a student would have to do to accomplish the same task.

Idea 5: The Tester

You’re probably aware that there is a pretty robust testing system inside D2L. It’s possible to do many things, including timed and randomized exams and surveys that vary their questions asked based on answers given. However, did you know that it is possible to use almost every type of content you can use anywhere else in a quiz question? That’s right, you can use images, audio, and video in a quiz question, as well as outside Web resources. An art professor could give an identification exam online by showing the work of art with each question. A Chinese language professor could give an exam in which students need to listen to an example and match the audio to the Chinese characters displayed. A professor teaching a film class could ask a question about a specific clip, and embed it right into the question; a music-history professor could give a listening exam online by providing audio examples for each question. If you’re using D2L for your classes, but not making much use of the Quizzes or Surveys tools, it might be a good idea to take a second look at the possibilities these tools offer. The reality is that almost every exam you could give on paper, you could also find a way to deliver online.

Idea 6: The Studio

Many applied courses such as internships, practicums, and private lessons don’t often make much use of a course site since so much of the course’s content is really about the student’s individual work and cannot be quantified on the same level as his/her classmates. Many of these sites end up with a syllabus and a few other general course documents and that’s about it. However, there are many reasons to use the system to make the site a resource even though not much “teaching” will happen through the site. For example, students enrolled in private music lessons not only have a weekly private session with the instructor but also one or more times a month meet with all the students of the same instrument/voice part for “studio class,” where they perform for one another, have guest speakers, and share common experiences. In this case, a course site for the entire “Trumpet Studio” could serve not as an instructional site (since that’s what happens in lessons) but as a repository for all students of that type. Sheet music and audio and video examples could be posted for general consumption by all enrolled students; since students at many different levels share the same studio class, there would be a wealth of knowledge and material available for younger students as they progress through the program. Studio class or concert performances could be recorded and then shared through the course site for the rest of the studio. As another example, a professional internship course site could be a repository for the most useful materials for students in that discipline rather than a teaching site. They know what they are supposed to do, but you can use your site to help them do it!

 

As you can see, there are multitudes of ways to make use of the Web space you have been given just by teaching at an institution that offers it. Just because you haven’t used a course site before for a course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t; with a little imagination you can turn a ghost town of a course site into a vibrant and truly useful resource that your students will keep using again and again. It’s our department’s job to help guide you through the selection, design, and production process to make your course site sparkle; just get in touch with your Instructional Technology Consultant or let us know at fits@depaul.edu whenever you’re ready to take that next step.

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Making Online Courses More Accessible by Design

Many years ago, before I moved to Chicago and began working at DePaul, my supervisor at a previous job took me on a field trip to a nonprofit service organization for the blind. At that time, I had never seen someone with a serious visual impairment use a computer. I had no idea how a screen reader worked, and all my knowledge of accessibility best practices came from second-hand sources I’d found online.

At one point during our tour, we asked one of the volunteers to show us a website that was difficult for her to navigate. The site she chose contained a large navigation menu composed of at least fifteen tabs at the top of the screen. As she moved her cursor from the upper left corner across the links, each one was read aloud. She explained that, because this site had no link for keyboard users to skip the main navigation, she had to navigate through every link before she could access the more important main content below.

Once she made her way to the main content of the page, she moved from link to link, trying to find a specific document she needed to access. Each time she advanced to the next link on the page, the screen reader would read it aloud, and she would pause to listen to the first few syllables before deciding whether or not to move on. At one point, the screen reader simply said, “Click here,” and then read the URL of the link aloud, which was long and incomprehensible. Because the linked text didn’t describe what it linked to, our volunteer had to stop and listen to all of the text around the link to determine if the link would take her to the document she needed.

For some reason, this portion of the field trip stuck with me. Perhaps it was etched into my memory because it seemed like such an easy issue to fix. All the site’s author needed to do was link the actual title of the document or destination page instead of ambiguous terms like “Click here.” Or perhaps I remembered it because this small change provides two benefits. In addition to helping blind users navigate a page more quickly, clear link titles reassure all users that clicking a link should take them to a page or document with a title that matches the link. This might seem like a minor benefit, but considering how often links change and break in an online course, anything we can do to clarify where a given link should go is probably worth the extra minute it might take to reword it.

Ever since that day, I’ve tried to sing the praises of link titles that match the titles of their destinations. Of course, it’s always helpful to have a well-written piece of supporting evidence from a trusted source. So, you can imagine my joy when a friend recently sent a link to this excellent information graphic.


Source: “Web Accessibility for Designers,” Info Graphic from WebAIM.org

What I love about this info graphic is it reminds me that accessible design isn’t just beneficial for the disabled. Much of what makes content more usable for the disabled also makes it more usable for everyone. To illustrate my point, here are a few guidelines from the graphic with examples of how each one can benefit all users.

Plan heading structure early. Clear headings help break up long blocks of content into more digestible chunks, making it easier for students to take a break and pick up where they left off. They also make text easier to scan for key information when students review something they’ve already read.

Provide good contrast.  Low-contrast text isn’t just a problem for users with visual impairments or color blindness. High contrast color combinations are easier for everyone to read, particularly when text runs more than just one or two lines.

Watch the use of CAPS. In addition to creating a problem for screen readers, text in all caps is difficult to read and implies the author is shouting.

Use adequate font size. No matter how good your vision, tiny font sizes lead to eye strain and frustrate all users.

Make sure links are recognizable. Cascading style sheets make it possible to spice up a course with all sorts of unique visual formatting. However, when it comes to links, the universal standard of blue, underlined text is usually best.

While this graphic was created to highlight accessibility issues that would be most relevant for designers, there are other best practices that instructional designers have to consider. In some cases, it can be difficult to justify designing online courses with complete accessibility because it’s more cost effective to address certain issues when accommodations are needed for a specific student. Audio transcription for the hearing impaired is a common example of an accessibility feature that can be difficult to justify if a course includes a large amount of audio content, such as PowerPoint narration, YouTube clips, full-length films, or podcasts.

In some cases, it’s just not feasible to transcribe everything in advance. However, there are advantages to including transcripts in the initial course-development process even if a disabled student never requests them. For example, ESL students might read the transcript as they listen to help them identify words that were difficult to understand through audio alone. In addition, students might prefer to review a transcript when preparing for an exam instead of trying to locate the portions of a video that they need to watch again.

While it can feel overwhelming to design a course that follows every accessibility best practice, keep in mind that many are easy to follow with little extra effort, assuming you’re aware of them early on. For guidelines that feel daunting, it might make sense to accommodate disabled students on a case-by-case basis. As you evaluate each challenge and determine what merits extra effort up front, keep your audience in mind. While it’s easy to feel that all accessibility accommodations are a big investment for a relatively small group of users, the impact of many accessibility improvements are seldom limited to students with disabilities. And if you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who has pushed a baby stroller down a sidewalk in the last few decades. They can tell you how helpful curb cuts are, even though they might not realize they first appeared in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1940s as an accommodation for wheelchair-bound veterans.[1] Now those helpful little ramps are a standard feature that you’ll find at either end of every crosswalk in America, and I’m grateful for them every time I take a heavy suitcase to the airport.

  1. “Curb cut.” Wikipedia

Do you Pin?

The first step is admitting you have a problem, but if I have an addiction to Pinterest.com, at least I’m in good company. Though Pinterest has not released its total number of users, it estimates a 329 percent increase in unique visitors from September to December 2011, and social-media agency Ignite estimates over 4 million registered users. This infographic shows Pinterest’s impact in the social commerce arena and highlights how referral traffic from Pinterest is much greater than Google+. Pinterest also just won Best New Startup at the fifth annual Crunchies awards this week.

So What is Pinterest?

The site’s About page describes Pinterest as a virtual pinboard that:

…lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Why Do I Pin?

So much of what we consume on the web is visual, and “pinning” an image to my board that is linked back to an original source has been a great way for me to organize different interests and areas of my life. I used to e-mail links to myself, take a picture with my phone, or in extreme circumstances print out an image. All of this information was scattered and not necessarily connected to its source if I needed further information. In addition to organizing my own life, the site helps me feel connected to my friends’ wedding plans, do-it-yourself projects, and favorite new recipes—in a more efficient and enjoyable venue than Facebook provides.

I knew Pinterest had become an extension of myself when in one day I used it:

  • on my phone to show the hair stylist a celebrity haircut I had pinned
  • on my Nook Color to pull up a healthy recipe for dinner
  • on my laptop to show my husband decorating ideas I had gathered

Does Pinterest Have a Place in Education?

While I am always eager to explore the potentials of a mainstream technology for effective use in education, I’m not yet convinced that Pinterest is a good fit, but hope to be proven wrong. Certainly for design-related coursework, or maybe a nutrition course where recipe-gathering is appropriate, Pinterest could be a natural organization solution. I am interested to know if educators are finding meaningful uses with their students, or perhaps in presenting content. I once had similar doubts about Twitter and Facebook for use in education and have since seen examples where these mainstream technologies were leveraged effectively. The way Pinterest allows users to easily connect with others who have similar passions and interests could have a place in developing professional learning networks, especially for those in creative fields. For now I will keep up my own pinning and watch to see how the increasing consumption and sharing of visual information is addressed in the education sector.

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Making Online Course Development a Reality Show

A dozen years ago when I completed all the required courses and prelim exams for a doctorate, my dissertation chair, Dr. Jerry Summers, said to me, “Congratulations, Sharon! You are now on your own!”

He was alerting me that on the dissertation journey, no one else would be holding the reins for me.

Frightened by the notion of being on my own and the rumor that only 20 percent of the ABDs who left their program end up finishing their dissertation, I declined a few “outside” job offers and took a position within my alma mater. Since there wouldn’t be any reminders from my dissertation committee, I rallied up what I called a “butt-kicker committee” to check on my progress on a regular basis. It includes a mentor who ran after me every Wednesday for more chapters, a boyfriend who threatened to break up if I didn’t finish, and my parents who pressured me by cooking super nutritious meals.  

Today, when I think of that process “metacognitively,” I see that the fear of being “on my own” that triggered me to do something about it was an essential reinforcement for me to complete my degree. The danger of being on one’s own is immense—it can make a disciplined person procrastinate and a procrastinator drop off. When work and life keep presenting mini deadlines day in and day out, it is so easy to neglect the big, long-term deadline you’ve set for yourself—like getting a course ready for online delivery.

Like writing a dissertation, this “on-my-own” syndrome has been a major road block for online-course development. When a professor’s day is constantly filled up with teaching, meetings, and researching activities, that deadline for putting together a carefully designed course will likely be pushed, rushed, or expunged.

To beat the odds, a professor from DePaul’s College of Education came up with the idea of opening his course development schedule and experience to the world. On January 5, Dr. Chris Worthman published a blog post on the Center for Educational Technology’s website called . Developing a Hybrid Course: In the Beginning…. In his blog, Chris announced that he will post a weekly update on the progress of developing his hybrid course. The content, in his own words, will include “what I have done, experienced, and been thinking about; what excites me, scares me, and leaves me scratching my head; and, generally, just what this means to me professionally.”

Chris’s idea of blogging his progress strikes me as such a brilliant idea—more brilliant than my butt-kicker committee (even though there were no blogs back then). I see that by turning a course-development project into a reality show, Chris sought out 1) an effective motivation strategy for himself, 2) a professional-development example for his faculty peers, and 3) a model for his students, which is the most important and cleverest aspect of it.

A Motivation-through-Visibility Strategy

As Chris mentioned in his blog, he is “in the enviable position this quarter of developing a new course for a new program that will be taught for this first time in spring 2012 as a hybrid.” Everything about this course was new—including he himself to the experience. Chris was put on a schedule by his instructional designer and initiated the blog to “hold himself to it.”

If making my dissertation visible to my mentor, boyfriend, and family helped create an audience that trigged me to contribute and deliver for their readership, Chris’s action of blogging about his course surely has pushed this “audience effect” to a much higher level. Researchers have found that motivation generated through visibility has been a driving force for the success of online systems such as Wikipedia. Knowing the existence of an audience, as they found, may be sufficient to trigger contribution on its own. So, for Dr. Worthman, having to present his progress every week makes moving his work forward an inevitable action that he now owes to his readers like me. This motivation-through-visibility strategy left him no room to fall back.

A Professional-Development Example for Faculty Peers

In his blog, Chris wrote, “This will be an exercise into the unknown for me because I am not used to spilling the details of a new experience in this way. I hope, however, that it will provide others—like you—with some insight into my professional development and invite others—like you—to share your own experiences, particularly as it relates to digital technology use.”

As the director of his school’s Center for Educational Technology and the associate dean for Curriculum and Academic Programs, Chris has the responsibility of leading faculty into the new era of teaching and learning, which is heavily influenced by the use of digital technology.  When it comes online learning, faculty may have been exposed to sample courses or bits and pieces of stories shared by online-teaching veterans, but very rarely do they have the opportunity to observe the whole process and almost never do they hear the pains and gains associated with each of step of development.

From an initial pledge of doing his work openly, to toiling with Softchalk, to a metaphorical analysis of online-course development, to juggling among elements within a course, his blog brought faculty members a real picture of what it is like for a faculty member to develop a new course in a new modality under a very tight schedule.

A Role Model for Students

I always feel that higher education—as it is now designed—seems to position its faculty and students into two very discrete groups of “knowledge providers” and “knowledge seekers,” or the ones who know and the ones who don’t.

If the process of learning was a race, the only ones who are running are the students; the professors are merely standing on the side to advise and to make some judgments. Those who belong to the professor clan never get to show the ones struggling on the track how they had approached the finish line and never get to rejoin the race—well, not until they begin to learn something new—like teaching online.

When it comes to building technology competencies, online teaching provides faculty members a unique opportunity to meet their students at the starting line. Not only does it put professors in the students’ shoes but also offers students an opportunity to observe how professors conduct the race. The latter can be achieved through a very careful design, like the one Chris Workthman is trying to accomplish. By implementing project-based learning, Chris, tried to develop an authentic learning experience for his students—by letting them experience what he is experiencing. As he said, in his January 19 blog, A Few Thoughts on Process, “To a large degree, what I am experiencing in designing my course is what I want my students to experience when they develop modules on different components of the English language arts.”

Besides teaching them the way of learning, it is even more critical for a professor to cast a spiritual influence on the students, such as the attitude that one should carry in dealing with the unknown. “I want them to jump, with no fear of failure but a level of realism that suggests they are going to have to work hard,” Chris wrote. “I want them to envision themselves as teachers doing actual teacher work. I want them to have a certain level of frustration that forces them to think at a meta-level not only about what they are doing but about teaching and learning in general.”

Lee Shulman once said, “Only when we have something to value, will we have something to evaluate… and we cannot value something that we cannot share, exchange, and examine.” Yet, it takes a lot of “guts” for one to be totally open to that action of sharing, exchanging, and examining. Chris Worthman’s blog reminded me of a comment George Clooney once made on using social media: “I would rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands [than use social media].” Although it’s meant to be a celebrity’s act to defend his privacy, it also showed how hard it is for people to open up their thoughts. For this, Chris’s idea of sharing your course development stories is more than brilliant—it is very brave! I am looking forward to seeing his hybrid course lead, inspire, and transform his students into online learning troopers in the coming spring quarter.