All posts by Alex Joppie

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About Alex Joppie

Alex has been with FITS since 2008, when he started out as a student worker while earning an MA in professional and technical writing from DePaul. Now he is an instructional designer for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and the Theatre School. Alex earned his BA in English from Concord University.

Alex follows tech news feverishly, loves early-morning runs by the lake, and is always up for a board game night.

A Brief History of Academic Integrity Panics about Disruptive Technology
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A Brief History of Academic Integrity Panics about Disruptive Technology

When ChatGPT emerged last year, a segment of academia panicked in response to articles suggesting that students could get an AI to write their term paper and you, the instructor, would be none the wiser. Some are ready to write a eulogy for human authorship altogether. Continue reading →

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Do You Speak My Design Language?

My wife and I recently returned from a two-week trip to Italy. It was my first time ever in the country and my first time to Europe in over a decade. We were hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB for over a week, living out of a carry-on-size bag each, before we stayed at a place that included a much-needed washing machine. But as we got ready to wash our clothes, there was a problem. We had no idea what the icons on the machine meant. 

A circular dial with small icons around the sides. Continue reading →

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The State of Mobile Learning

The use of mobile devices for education has been an interest of mine since 2011. But a lot has changed since the days of the iPhone 4 and the Nexus S: smartphones, which used to be the cutting edge of consumer technology are now ubiquitous to the point of being taken for granted. And technology vendors, who used to think of mobile as an afterthought, are developing apps and services with mobile compatibility as the first priority.

And I’ve seen attitudes shift among faculty too. As recently as 2015, many faculty I interacted with saw using smartphones for learning as so radical as to be frightening. In the last year, many faculty seem to view the notion as so obvious as to be boring.

Given these shifts in technology and attitudes towards the technology, this is a good time to check in on the current state of mobile learning, and it’s trajectory going forward.

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Knowing That They Know What You Think They Know

Illustration of areas of brain dedicated to types of memoryAfter students watch an online lecture, what do they know? What do they think they know? How do you know what they know?

Instructors just venturing into online learning often have the valid concern that they might not be able to tell if their students are “getting it.” Without being able to see students during the lecture, they won’t see the encouraging nods, the confused raised eyebrows, the glazed-over look of boredom. And when your students have so many potential distractions available on the Internet just a click away, it can be troubling to not know how much of their attention you have when they’re watching your lecture.

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Send Students Out on a GooseChase

metal compassFor as long as I’ve been interested in mobile learning, I’ve been on the lookout for apps that allow instructors to use mobile devices to structure student learning experiences outside of the classroom. Maybe you want students to go the Art Institute, look at three paintings in person and answer questions about them. Maybe you want students to visit seven buildings downtown with different architectural styles. Maybe you want students to go to the Bird and Butterfly Sanctuary and take pictures of migratory birds. Or maybe you want students to visit a few different ethnic neighborhoods, and you just want verification that they actually went.

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Making Your Course Mobile Friendly

Responsive D2L interfaceIn fall 2017, DePaul upgraded our installation of our learning management system, D2L, to the “Daylight” interface. One of the primary reasons D2L underwent this design overhaul of the entire system was to implement a principal called “Responsive Design.”

Responsive Design is a method of web design whereby developers build one version of a website that is designed to adapt and scale to whatever device it is accessed from. This is in contrast to the early days of smartphones, when developers would create a separate “mobile” site, which you would be redirected to if you were accessing it from a smartphone or tablet. Instead, there is only one version of the site, but the elements move, resize, and adapt depending on the size of the screen the site is viewed from.

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Be Careful of the Expectations You Set

At FITS, we have a number of strategies that we like to recommend to help keep students organized and on task:

  • Use the “Completion Tracking” feature in the D2L Content tool so students can check off items as they complete them.
  • Set due dates that will be pushed to the calendar tool and encourage students to subscribe to their calendar so that it syncs to whatever personal calendar they use.
  • Use use the News tool to send updates and, again, encourage students to subscribe so they get updates via email.

But there’s a danger in all these strategies. If you don’t fully commit to them they can backfire spectacularly, and rather than help keep students on task, only create confusion about what they’re supposed to do.

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Building in Revision: Five Tips for Building New Courses That Will Make Re-Offers Easier

When you’re developing a new online or hybrid course, it’s hard to look beyond the first course offering. After all, there might not be a second offering if you don’t focus your attention on making sure the course goes well the first time around, and developing the course always seems to take more time than you think it will. It’s hard to put much attention into making the course workable for future offerings. So here are some quick tips to keep in mind when developing a course to make life easier on yourself when you offer it the next time. Follow these tips, and your future self will thank you.

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The Year of Virtual Reality

If you haven’t ever had a virtual reality experience before, you probably will in the next twelve months.

Virtual reality is coming online in a big way. VR headsets for high-end gaming PCs started shipping this past spring. This fall, Sony is launching a VR headset for its PlayStation 4 game console. Beyond gaming, Google has been experimenting with VR for two years, using phones and a cardboard holder. The low-tech, low-cost solution was designed to get VR into the hands of as many people as possible, and Google has already managed to get many developers on board with cardboard, creating games, simulations, and more. Google has created K12-focused Expeditions, where users can get the full 3D and 360-degree experience of being somewhere very few could ever go–like the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef, and even the surface of Mars. YouTube is also filling up with 360-degree 3D videos that are meant to be consumed with virtual reality devices. But VR isn’t always just consumptive–apps like Tilt Brush allow users to create 3D paintings in midair. And Google is getting ready to launch a more sophisticated VR platform with its next Android release in a few months, to build on and enhance their Cardboard platform. 2016 is the year of virtual reality.

As an instructional technologist, my natural tendency is to get excited about new technology and its potential in higher education. My instinct is to imagine all the possibilities that the next big thing affords for our classes and to push for the rapid adoption of the latest and greatest tech. But in the case of virtual reality, I’m a little skeptical that it’s going to be a true transformative technology for a couple reasons.

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