All posts by Daniel Stanford

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About Daniel Stanford

Daniel Stanford is a Learning Design Consultant and former Director of Faculty Development and Technology Innovation at DePaul University's Center for Teaching and Learning. His work in online learning has received awards from the the POD Network, the Online Learning Consortium, NAFSA, the Instructional Technology Council, the University of Wisconsin, and Blackboard Inc. Follow @dstanford on Twitter | Connect on LinkedIn |

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Four Ways to Improve Online Lectures

I recently signed up for a subscription to News In Slow French, a weekly news program for French students. Each episode features two announcers who discuss current events at a slow pace, making it easier for non-native speakers to understand. I’ve listened to several hours of old episodes over the last few weeks and there are several things I like about the way the lessons are designed. Here are four practices I’ve observed that I believe have relevance for anyone producing online lectures.

1. Provide Interactive, Just-in-Time Remediation

News in Slow French does a great job providing supplemental information for terms that might be unfamiliar. (See the screenshot of an interactive transcript shown below.) This strategy can be replicated in a variety of formats by linking unfamiliar terms and concepts to supplemental readings and/or videos.

Interactive Transcript Screenshot
Click to view the full resolution image

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Lessons from My First MOOC: A Student’s Perspective

Earlier this year, I made a resolution to see a MOOC through to the end and earn a verified certificate of completion. I hoped the experience would provide an opportunity to study something completely new while answering a few burning questions I had about MOOCs. Questions like:

  1. How hard is it to earn a verified certificate?
  2. How will Coursera know that I did the work myself?
  3. Will I have to wear a Clockwork-Orange-style eyeball opener to stay awake through the video lectures?
  4. How many ideas can I steal and use when designing my own courses?

Here’s what I learned.

How hard is it to earn a verified certificate?

Not hard. So far, I’ve been able to meet the minimum requirements for the verified certificate by putting in one to two hours per week. As long as I get a perfect score on all the quizzes, I can earn a certificate “with distinction” and never participate in a single discussion or peer-reviewed activity. If I could bear the shame of a distinction-free certificate, I’d only need to maintain a B average on the quizzes. It’s also worth noting that all of the quizzes in my MOOC could be retaken once with no grade penalty, and only a minor penalty on the third and final attempt. Continue reading →

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Seven Deadly Sins of Online Course Design

I took my first online course in 2004 while pursuing my MFA. It seemed like a novel idea at the time, and I had no clue I’d be spending the next ten years up to my eyeballs in online courses. Since then, I’ve helped faculty design dozens of online and hybrid courses, taught several of my own, and evaluated online courses and professional development programs from a variety of institutions.

Over the years, I’ve seen certain design issues surface again and again. I had hoped to stockpile 95 of these “course design sins,” then nail them to a door in a Martin Luther-esque call for reform. That vision was later revised as I realized (A) 95 is a lot of sins to identify and (B) Martin Luther didn’t have to compete with the latest Buzzfeed list of 15 dogs wearing tiny hats.

In light of those realizations, I’d like to share with you my top seven course design sins, along with practical tips for atonement. Continue reading →

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Highlights from the 2014 ELI Conference

One of the best things about the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) annual meeting is the broad spectrum of institutions represented, from the Ivy League to large public and private universities to community colleges and small liberal arts schools. If you’re looking for colleagues who are grappling with the same challenges you’re experiencing at your institution, chances are you’ll find them at ELI.

The ELI audience is as diverse as the institutions they represent and includes instructional designers, faculty with a passion for technology, and IT professionals working in higher education. Unlike conferences that focus primarily on distance learning, ELI attracts a large proportion of CIOs and people passionate about the intersection of technology and physical learning spaces. As a result, the conference typically includes ample hands-on time with new gadgets and hardware. On Tuesday, I learned more about Arduinos during a hands-on “maker-space” session that left me missing my old Capsela set. At breakfast on Wednesday, I had a chance to chat with remote conference participants who roamed the venue using a device designed by Double Robotics. And just before heading to the airport, Jeremy Littau, an Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, let me test-drive Google Glass.

Of course, you don’t have to be on a first name basis with the staff of your local Radio Shack to get something useful out of ELI. The annual meeting agenda is brimming with presentations on everything from faculty development for online learning to predictions on the future of open-source textbooks and MOOCs. Here are a few highlights from some of the sessions I attended.

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My Oversharing Adventure: Travel Notes from the Land of Millennials

I give you my word that by the end of this article, you won’t feel bad about yourself. You won’t feel behind the times because you refuse to tweet course announcements, or follow your students on Instagram, or friend them on some new app that tells you what they had for breakfast.

I care about your feelings because I understand your pain. I was born in one of those years that generation X and millennials have agreed to treat as a demilitarized buffer zone. Part of me feels a kinship with those who came before me. I share their concerns about online privacy. I’m a little worried about those NSA data bunkers and the fact that kids today don’t return phone calls. I even hesitated to list the year of my birth in this very public blog post, which is probably a sign I’m not a true millennial.

On the other hand, part of me longs to burn my gen-X passport and defect to the reckless frontier that is the Republic of gen-Y. To learn what I’ve been missing, I recently embraced my dual citizenship and spent a few weeks living as a native among the millennials. Within days, I went from shaking my fist at Miley Cyrus, with her twitpics and her twerking, to sharing artsy photos of melted ice cream and Vine videos like a true gen-Y artiste. I also created a profile on Vizify, which took my yawn-inducing data from LinkedIn and transformed it into a slick collage of photos and infographics. (For more on that, view the video below.)

I like that my Vizify profile peels back the professorly veil just a bit without leaving me overexposed. Continue reading →

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Highlights from the 2013 NMC Conference

Every year, the New Media Consortium’s summer conference includes a plenary session known as “Five Minutes of Fame” in which a series of presenters have five minutes each to show off an innovative project or idea. To add a bit of levity and suspense, an official timekeeper shuts down any presentation that hits the five-minute mark by striking a large gong with a mallet. As a kid, I loved watching reruns of The Gong Show, so Five Minutes of Fame is easily my favorite part of any NMC conference. (For those of you too young to remember The Gong Show, picture America’s Got Talent, but with a lot more polyester.)

This year, the NMC conference also included another rapid-fire showcase known as the Emerging Leaders Competition. Continue reading →

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How a Spreadsheet Helped 90 Percent of My Students Earn a Pulitzer

If you think keeping traditional students motivated is a challenge, try getting experienced, brilliant college professors to do their homework with nothing but passion and positive reinforcement at your disposal. That’s where I’ve found myself for the last few years as the lead designer and facilitator of the DePaul Online Teaching Series.

On the one hand, I love that I don’t have to evaluate the DOTS participants. The program is designed to introduce faculty to new tools and techniques and get them inspired about what’s possible as they make the transition to online teaching. As a result, the atmosphere of every workshop meeting is positive and supportive. On the other hand, this means I have to get creative when it comes to assignment design and maximizing participation.

Just before our December 2012 cohort began, I was desperately seeking a simple way to give faculty a big-picture view of everything they could accomplish during DOTS. For years, we’d been giving faculty clear assignment instructions and checklists to help them stay on track, but we lacked a single place in the course where they could see all of the assignments at a glance. This left many faculty feeling unclear on just how DOTS was going to help them get a jump start on essential course-building tasks. The pieces were all there, but with no way to see how everything fit together and track their progress, the assignments felt disconnected and faculty weren’t particularly motivated to share their latest triumphs.

To solve this problem, I wanted to tap into two commonly used elements of game design that increase player motivation: progress indicators and competition. Continue reading →

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Lessons from Four Years of Faculty Development

For the last few years, one of my key job duties has been developing the curriculum and facilitating workshops for the DePaul Online Teaching Series. DOTS is a professional-development program that helps faculty make the transition to online teaching through thirty-six hours of workshops, trainings, and online-learning activities. Since the program’s inception in 2008, we’ve collected extensive feedback from our 239 graduates across all 14 cohorts to find out what they liked about the program and how it could be improved. In response, we’ve tweaked everything from the readings and assignments to the software we promote and the way we arrange the seating for face-to-face workshops. Today, faculty interest in DOTS continues to grow, and our most recent cohorts have set records for total applications and enrollment. 

In the summer of 2012, DOTS won the Sloan Consortium Award for Excellence in Faculty Development for Online Learning. Before I received the news, I’d already committed to giving a presentation at the Sloan-C annual conference to share some of the “secrets” of DOTS’ success. While I was excited I’d be able to mention the award as part of my presentation, I also felt added pressure to include useful tips and lessons that the audience hadn’t heard before.

To prepare for the presentation, I reviewed four years worth of DOTS survey feedback, looking at trends in answers to multiple-choice questions and identifying common themes in the responses to open-ended questions. Because I’d read all of the survey results before as each cohort completed DOTS, I had several assumptions about which aspects of DOTS would be the most praised and which would be the most criticized. However, poring over all the data in a single day and quantifying the results revealed a few interesting and unexpected results.

While I’d like to save a few secrets for the Sloan-C attendees, I thought I’d share some of my favorite findings here.

  1. Faculty loved screencasting no matter which tool we used. Over the years, we’ve tested and trained faculty to use just about every screencasting tool imaginable. (Most of our faculty currently use Screencast-o-Matic.com.) We always knew faculty liked screencasting because it was an easy transition from traditional lecture delivery. What was a bit surprising was the fact that 14 percent of survey respondents mentioned screencasting training as one of the most useful elements of DOTS—more than any other tool or concept. In addition, negative comments were almost nonexistent regardless of which screencasting tool they tried.
     
  2. Self-pacing eliminated nearly all complaints about hands-on software trainings. For the first three years of DOTS, we ran hands-on software trainings with a traditional, follow-the-leader approach. A trainer would demonstrate each step on a projector while faculty followed along and completed the same task on their laptops. This approach led to many complaints that the trainer was either moving too quickly or too slowly, and less tech-savvy faculty would often hold up the class as they struggled to keep up. To resolve this, we shifted to a self-paced approach. The trainer now begins with a fast-paced demonstration that lasts roughly ten minutes. During this time, faculty observe without attempting to perform the task. Next, each participant is given a handout and asked to complete a basic task in the software while staff members mingle and provide one-on-one support as needed. This approach has been very well received and allowed us to better meet the needs of our participants regardless of their level of technology experience.
     
  3. Showing amazing examples can backfire. Ten percent of respondents mentioned feeling overwhelmed by some aspect of DOTS. While this isn’t surprising—DOTS has to introduce many new tools and course-design strategies, after all—I found it interesting that some faculty cited the high quality of the example courses as a contributing factor. When we only showed courses with very polished video lectures, interactive games, and multi-level content navigation, some faculty felt intimidated and assumed these courses represented a minimum standard they would have to follow. To address this, we began adding sample courses that provided high-quality instruction with fewer bells and whistles. We also made more of an effort to remind faculty that certain courses had already been through years of revisions after being taught several times.

Through careful evaluation of faculty feedback, we’ve been able to implement strategies like the ones above to ensure DOTS keeps getting better with each cohort. While I’m thrilled we received external recognition from an organization like Sloan-C, I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve always viewed DOTS as a work in progress with room for improvement. As a result, our 2012 spring and summer cohorts were among our largest ever, and received satisfaction ratings of 95 percent and 96 percent, respectively. In addition, a recent graduate of our first cohort in 2008 paid us an incredible compliment by “auditing” DOTS this summer. While she felt DOTS was invaluable as she began her online-teaching journey four years ago, she didn’t want to miss out on the new tools, techniques, and activities that her colleagues raved about after completing the program in 2011. This type of evangelism and passion for the program explains why one of our biggest challenges as we plan future DOTS cohorts is finding meeting spaces on campus big enough to hold all of our new participants and our repeat customers.

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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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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