Monthly Archives: June 2012

Enter Kanban: The SNL ID Team Gets Organized

In the School for New Learning Online, we adhere to a fairly rigid course-development schedule and course-readiness process. Each quarter, we have a robust set of deadlines to meet to get our schedule of 90+ courses built, revised, reviewed, and launched. And like any team of instructional designers, the SNL Online team has plenty of other projects and daily fires to put out as well. Keeping on top of our work and keeping connected with each other, especially when we need to share resources and skill sets, could be difficult at best. Isolated in our offices and buried under piles of work, sometimes our only connection was in those series of e-mails that we would inevitably send around and around to ask a simple question. You know those emails—the ones where everyone is copied and everyone hits reply all? Toward the end of last year, we were lucky enough to see our team grow to five with the addition of two new members. It became clear that we needed some new strategies for our work.

Enter Kanban.

After consulting with a local team-dynamics coach, Derek Wade of Kumido, we decided to try a team communication tool called Kanban. For a very low investment—tape, pens, and sticky notes—we could get started right away. We agreed on several things: we would have a team board put up in a common area; we would divide it into four categories of next, now, blocked, and done. We chose different colored sticky notes for each team member (I have pink, of course) and settled on daily fifteen-minute meetings at the board to update it and each other.

With that, we got started.

 
The SNL ID team’s Kanban board

The five of us have been meeting around the board, at least three times a week for nearly six months now, and we have noticed several significant changes in the way we work. First, we know at a very quick glance what the workload is for any team member at any given time. This has allowed us to better utilize each other and to know when someone is bogged down and might need a hand.

We also have developed a sort of “thermometer” to get a sense of how much course maintenance—those pesky fires we need to put out for faculty and students—we are each handling. One the left side of the board, we have a column labeled maint and we move our individually colored sticky note up or down to reflect how many fires we have going in a week. Keeping aware of this part of our jobs has helped us, and me particularly, become more aware of how we handle this area. I know seeing my pink sticky always at the top of the column has inspired me to adjust my general work day so that when these hot-button issues come in, they can be handled without interrupting the flow of my larger projects. For instance, I started handling fires in my inbox in the morning while settling in with my morning cup of tea, then moving on to other projects for the better part of the day. A similar time is set aside in the later afternoon. The number of fires doesn’t change, but the way I handle them—and my stress level—improved dramatically. 


Maintenance Thermometer

Lastly, while we all have reported favorable changes in our personal organization of work and tasks to varying degrees, each team member feels more connected and has seen our communication increase dramatically. We are in touch more often and have a much better idea of what is happening in our department. At the same time, the thrice-weekly short meeting sessions have meant less overall meetings needed for all of us. Our weekly staff meetings with the rest of the SNL Online staff are more efficient since we are already up-to-date on our work and our team progress. And, I’m happy to report, there are so many fewer reply-all e-mails.

As well as it has worked for us, a Kanban that never changes is one that has stopped helping you grow, so next for us is a redesign of our board. We’ll try to better categorize our work and evolve the process to reflect how we have grown since we stared using it. Watch this space for Kanban II: Electric Boogaloo.

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The Case for Oversharing

“Don’t you think it’s unprofessional to share a photo of your cat with your online students? I wouldn’t start a face-to-face class meeting with a slideshow of personal photos, so why should I do that online?”

I was caught somewhat off guard by this question during a recent faculty-development workshop that focused on building a sense of community in online courses. As part of a larger presentation and training session, I showed examples of videos and narrated slideshows that instructors had created to introduce themselves to their online students. While all of the presentations included information about the instructors’ professional backgrounds, there were also slides that showed them cuddling with beloved pets, building sandcastles with their children, or posing in front of monuments in exotic locales.

I’d always thought that sharing a bit of your personal interests and life outside of academia was a great way to find common ground and build rapport with students. Apparently, not everyone agrees. One workshop attendee went so far as to state that sharing personal details such as pet photos or baby pictures could call into question the credibility of an entire department or the university as a whole.

While I think some of the concerns raised during the workshop were taken to extremes because extremes are more fun to debate, the core questions were still valid. At the time, I was hard-pressed to come up with a response for the instructor who asked why we should begin an online course with a slideshow of personal details that we wouldn’t require students to sit through during our first meeting in a traditional course.  

Over the next few days, I thought about my relationships with my favorite professors from undergrad and grad school. When I thought about the experiences that brought us closer, I realized how many of them took place outside of a face-to-face class meeting. I remembered running into a professor at a coffee shop, hearing about her latest freelance project, and getting a bit of unexpected career advice that I’ve never forgotten. I remembered a study abroad adventure where I bonded with a French professor over our shared passion for architecture. These are the types of experiences that can be impossible to recreate with online students if we don’t take the initiative. If we don’t open the door to interaction that goes beyond revision notes and exam reminders, students won’t know they’re more to us than just submissions in a dropbox waiting to be graded. And if we don’t take the first step toward building an inviting, supportive online community, we can’t blame the technology when our courses feel cold and impersonal.

A few weeks after our workshop on community building, I met again with the same group of faculty for one of our final workshops. This time, we started our meeting with a discussion panel that featured three students who had taken online courses at DePaul. At one point during the discussion, I asked the students (in the most neutral way I could think of) how they felt about faculty sharing personal photos and information about their lives outside of work. Two of the students said they loved learning more about their professors and that this type of sharing helped foster a sense of connection. The third student said he found it mildly annoying, but didn’t feel it had a negative impact on the credibility of the instructor or the course. It wasn’t exactly journal-worthy proof of the merits of over-sharing, but I felt vindicated nevertheless.

Of course, we should avoid sharing information so deeply personal it could give students nightmares or cause them to file a lawsuit for emotional distress. And I will be the first to admit that sharing travel photos will be more meaningful if you’re teaching a course on global business and you explain what your trips to Saudi Arabia have taught you about cultural differences between American and Middle Eastern corporations. Similarly, sharing stories about your toddler’s penchant for asking surprising philosophical questions might be more beneficial in a course on child development. Yet, even sharing a video of your beloved Fluffy trying to remove her head from an empty tissue box—despite its complete irrelevance to the subject of your course and its potential to ruin your reputation as a serious educator—might have an upside. When done properly, oversharing tells students that your course is about more than just readings and thesis statements and online debates. It tells them that you care about connection and humanity and all the things that make great learning experiences more than just an exchange of money for information.

I can completely understand why faculty are eager to establish clear professional boundaries when teaching online. When every interaction is recorded, trying to connect with students in ways that feel authentic and spontaneous can be stressful. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say (on this very public and semipermanent blog) that most online students would prefer that we take these risks and provide opportunities for the type of informal bonding that often occurs more effortlessly face-to-face. If that means we occasionally miss the mark and bore them with photos of our stamp collections or a story about Fluffy’s last trip to the vet, then so be it. After all, when we ask students what they love about their favorite teachers, how often does “professionalism” or “never shared cat photos” top the list?

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Change Matters for Quality Matters

Quality Matters revised its online-course review standards in May 2011. A year later, I found the reasons for the change. While the Chinese would call this ma hou pao or criticizing/evaluating with hindsight, after-the-fact findings may be validating for researchers.

This belated finding, which illustrated a rationale for the QM rubric revision, was also accidental—the initial question I had in mind was: what are the standards for which the course reviewers are most likely to disagree with each other? I use “each other” because at this time, our limited resources only allow us to assign two reviewers per course. Since the Quality Matters scoring system is set up so that if one reviewer checks “yes” and the other checks “no,” it will take the “no” and mark the standard as “unmet.” I thought looking for the most disputed standards would tell me whose fault it really was: were these course-design problems or was the disagreement caused by the lack of clarity in the standard itself?

In the past five years since DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) was launched in 2008, DePaul has been using Quality Matters to review its online and hybrid courses. Course review is the last of the three-stage DOTS process following training and course development. To complete the process, a DOTS course has to be reviewed internally by DePaul faculty and staff who have been certified by QM as peer reviewers.

As of May 2012, forty-seven DOTS courses have been through the QM review process. A compiled view of forty-seven QM reports indicated that a number of standards unmet by the courses were due to different choices made by the two reviewers. For some standards (e.g. 5.2, 6.4), the frequency of disagreement were as high as 100 percent, meaning for all of the courses that failed this element, one reviewer selected “yes” and the other, “no.” The following graph presented the top five split-decision standards.

The standards with the highest split-decision rates are:

  • SD 5.2

Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction (100% disagreement rate).
  • SD 6.4

Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course (100% disagreement rate).
  • SD 6.7

The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media (89% disagreement rate).

  • SD 4.2

The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student. (88% disagreement rate).
  • SD 3.3

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation. (80% disagreement rate).

Now you can see that something’s not right with these standards—they must be hard to interpret or not make much sense for either the authors or the reviewers.

Having used two versions of QM rubrics allowed me to check further and see when and with what version of the rubric the split-decisions between reviewers had taken place. It turned out that for almost all of the top five spilt-decision standards, the disagreement happened while the old version of Quality Matters was used—or prior to May 2011. The following table shows changes made in the new version of QM for the identified standards.

Disagreement

Rate

Standard

Old QM

New QM

 

100%

(all for the old version)

SD 5.2

Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction

Learning activities provide opportunities for interaction that support active learning

100%

(all for the old version)

SD 6.4

Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course.

Students can readily access the technologies required in the course.

89%

(all for the old version)

SD 6.7

The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media.

<eliminated>

88%

(all for the old version)

SD 4.2

The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student.

The purpose of instructional materials and how the materials are to be used for learning activities are clearly explained.

80%

(all but one for the old version)

SD 3.3

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation.

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation and are tied to the course grading policy.

Given the fact that the number of courses reviewed with the new rubric is similar to those reviewed with the old, the significant decrease in disagreements between reviewers strongly demonstrates the value of the revision. The changes have definitely made the standards more understandable, reasonable, and applicable. It also verified the necessity to continue the effort of collecting data, which will help to identify new issues that will surely emerge with the evolution of technology, the change of pedagogy, and the new demand of online learning.

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Classroom Copyright Perils

Recently, I attended a faculty professional-development event and, as is often the case at such things, the subject of putting pdf copies of course readings directly into one’s course on the university learning management system (LMS) came up. As I sat quietly (or at least attempted to), a faculty member showed how easy it was to simply upload these files into their course. "But can I do that?" someone asked. "Don’t I have to use the library reserve process?"

By nature we are all creatures of using the path of least resistance. Is it easier to simply upload everything myself into my course than to plan ahead and have someone provide me access through the library? Absolutely! The question, however, isn’t (or shouldn’t be) is it easier, but what is legal. As it turns out "fair use" is not an easy thing to determine and even those (like libraries) who are perhaps the most versed at the process are not immune to getting themselves into trouble. In 2008, Georgia State University was sued by three publishers (Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publications, and Oxford University Press) for copyright infringement for materials placed on the university electronic-reserve system. 

The ruling in GSU’s case just came down last week, and the judge, by and large, ruled on the university’s behalf. This case has been closely watched in university circles especially in light of some fairly restrictive cases just north of the border in Canada. Barbara Fister’s blog entry on the GSU decision poses some interesting thoughts on the topic of what happens if institutions decide to avoid risk by simply paying higher fees to license-collecting agencies without regard to fair use.

This is essentially what has happened and is happening in Canada where Access Copyright (the Canadian license collection organization) is attempting to severely increase rates and have claimed that "posting a link" is the same as making a copy. Potentially, a university who accepts the new fee structures could now be responsible for a $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and be subjected to surveillance of campus email accounts.

In light of the turmoil in the world of copyright clearance and fair use, what are faculty members to do when it comes to making decisions about using excerpted materials in their classes? The short answer is stick with the professionals. If you don’t think that the publishing world is watching, think again. If a library can get into hot water, don’t believe that you are only small potatoes. The best option is to work within your university’s copyright and fair use policy and your library reserves process.