In her post, A Rectangle is Not a Square, Melissa Koenig describes some of the differences between what most universities consider online courses and the newer model of MOOCs (massive open online courses). While I know it’s important to understand these differences when looking at the big picture of online education today, I’m also curious about the similarities. What can those of us developing and teaching online courses learn from MOOC design and delivery?
To get an inside look I enrolled in Model Thinking, offered on the Coursera platform. I almost couldn’t believe how easy it was to sign up and jump right into a University of Michigan course from my living room. As a course designer it is always a treat to peek into other institutions’ online courses. Typically you have to go to conference presentations to do this; I only had to provide a username and password. Imagine the shared learning that can take place when online course designers and instructors have such open access to one another’s materials. Of course there are intellectual-property and financial considerations, but ignoring these for a moment, it’s an opportunity to build on the success and innovation of others. Continue reading →
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.
I’ve had a Twitter account for several months, and aside from occasionally checking my feed to see what’s for dinner @RachaelRayShow, I really do not use it. In preparation for teaching my online Educational Technology class, I’ve been thinking about how I might use Twitter to enhance participant engagement with the material and with one another. The prerequisite course to this course includes an activity where students create a Twitter account and think about its possible uses in education. I would like to build on that foundation and use Twitter to promote a virtual community for sharing EdTech-related resources and trends, as well as ideas (or even logistics) about the course and course material.
I started by creating a new Twitter account that will be for professional/teaching purposes only,@EdTechEJS (so no Rachael Ray retweets on this one). I then started following a few Educational Technology–related users and groups, including some folks who run the program for which I teach.
Next I decided that to facilitate students’ access to the Twitter feed, I should embed it on our course site. When discussing this with a colleague, she suggested that instead of just embedding the @EdTechEJS feed, I create a hashtag for everyone in the course to use and display a feed of tweets containing that hashtag. With this method I am not the only person contributing to the feed; it is a collaborative effort, which is more in line with how Twitter is meant to work. The hope is that students will tweet questions or comments about the course material, share useful resources they find, and benefit from reading classmates’ tweets.
While searching for “create twitter feed from hashtag,” I came across this fantastic free tool called TweetBlender. TweetBlender creates an embeddable Twitter feed widget, and you can specify which “sources” will be displayed in the feed (usernames, hashtags, keywords). With this tool, I was able to create a feed that will display all of my tweets, as well as any tweet containing the course hashtag and the program hashtag. As I become more familiar with Twitter and what type of information I’d like to appear in the feed, I will add more sources. It may even make sense to add weekly topics as keywords for the feed as the topics come up in the course.
I am excited to see how this Twitter experiment goes. I really hope it makes the course site more dynamic and student driven. One challenge with using a Learning Management System is that most of the content must be posted by the instructor. Students have the discussion boards, but that is usually their only forum for contributing. The Twitter feed allows students to add content to the course site instantly and in a highly visible way. This endeavor should also force me to become more familiar with using Twitter effectively and better able to consult with faculty who would like to incorporate Twitter into their own course.
The topic of accessibility in course design is important, often overlooked, and for me a bit intimidating. So when I saw “Creating More Accessible Word Documents” as one of the breakout sessions at the Fusion 2011 Desire2Learn User Conference in Denver last week, I knew it was time to step outside my comfort zone and attend. Going into the hands-on session, I expected to be overwhelmed, but hoped to come away with a better understanding of accessible documents for online courses. The session exceeded my expectations, and I learned that designing Word documents for screen readers is actually quite simple. I also learned some really great tips about Microsoft Word in general and walked away feeling empowered with knowledge to better use Word and design with accessibility in mind. The presenter, Karen McCall, is a beta tester/accessibility consultant for Microsoft and Adobe, and you can find resources about accessible document design on her website: http://karlencommunications.com.
Here are some of Karen’s tips for creating more accessible word documents (in Word2007—directions vary slightly for other versions).
Screen readers cannot read any text in a text box, shape, or object , like those cute speech bubbles you can insert or an equation inserted as an image.
For an equation image, a screen reader needs the equation written out. For example, “Forty plus two minus twenty seven.”
Always supply “alt text” if you use an image. Insert alt text by right-clicking the selected image, selecting Size & Position (or Format Picture) and then typing in one to two descriptive sentences for the image. If the image is a link,the alt text should explain where the user will be taken upon clicking the image.
For text hyperlinks, only link the word(s) describing where the user will be taken. Screen readers can compile a list of links in a document, and if all links start with “click here to,” the generated list will not be easy to use. If, however, “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “YouTube,” are the link text, an alphabetized list of sites will be generated.
Apply styles like Heading 1 and Heading 2 appropriately in the document by highlighting the heading text and selecting from the Style menu. Screen readers recognize properly-styled headings, and this creates navigational points for the user to access the text. Creating a Table of Contents from your headings is also a helpful feature. Never set a sentence or paragraph as a heading, as it will make for a confusing navigation point.
If you are making a list, use the bullet or numbered list button, as opposed to just hitting Enter between lines. Again, the screen reader recognizes proper lists and will provide the user with information about the list (e.g., how many items in the list).
Do not type using all caps. Even those without a visual disability have trouble reading words in all caps because the brain cannot use the word shape to predict the word. (Every word in all caps is basically a rectangle.)
To turn your accessible Word document into an accessible PDF, do not “Print to PDF.” Instead, use the Save As PDF function, or use Acrobat to convert to PDF. When using Save As PDF, check the box for “Create bookmarks using Headings” and “Document structure tags for accessibility.”
The presenter also demonstrated several keyboard shortcuts that were new to me. As someone with a visual impairment, she finds it easier to use these shortcuts and keep her fingers on the keyboard than use the mouse to make several clicks on different parts of the screen.
Here are some miscellaneous fun Word tricks
To quickly create filler text on a page—especially helpful when creating a template—open a Word document and type “=RAND(5, 6)” (without quotes). In this example, 5 tells Word to create five paragraphs of text, and 6 indicates that each paragraph should have 6 sentences. These numbers can be adjusted to your need. If you want Latin text, substitute “LORM” for “RAND.” Otherwise the text is randomly pulled from the Microsoft Word Help.
Some PC keyboards have a key near the top that functions like the right-click on a mouse.
To style words as Heading 1, select the words, then type Ctrl + Alt + 1. For Heading 2, just substitute a 2.
Ctrl+Enter will create a new page. If you do this command with the cursor in front of the first word, you will create a blank page 1 and push the starting text to page 2.
Ctrl+End will take you to the end of a document.
Ctrl+Home will take you to the top of a document.
In addition to using these accessibility tips, I would like to try using different screen reading technologies to get a better idea of the user experience. Designing for screen reader use is just one piece of the accessibility puzzle, but it is a good start.
I had the opportunity to attend the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference in Oak Brook, IL, last week, and as with most education conferences, it’s left my mind full of questions—some answers, but mostly questions. There was a panel discussion on the second day, and some of the most interesting pieces related to research on blended learning conducted at the University of Central Florida (UCF).
Joel Hartman, Vice Provost at UCF (and EDUCAUSE Leadership Award winner) related some of the key findings from the study of about two million student evaluations taken over several years.
Overall, student satisfaction was higher for blended courses than for either face-to-face or online. (At UCF, blended means “courses that combine face-to-face instruction with online learning and reduced contact hours.”)
Regardless of format, a course has a 97 percent chance of getting an excellent overall rating if these three items receive excellent ratings: ability to communicate information, interest in student learning, and concern and care for students.
For blended courses, the student success outcomes used to be about 14 percent higher than face-to-face or online. Now that gap is much smaller, most likely because strategies from blended are being used in face-to-face and online courses, blurring the lines between the three types.
A phrase about blended learning that I heard at the session that has really stuck with me is “classroom-enhanced online instruction,” as opposed to “web-enhanced classroom instruction.” As students realize that valuable learning opportunities can occur online—on their own schedule and in their pajamas if they wish—they naturally begin to wonder, “Why am I driving/walking/riding to campus?” With blended courses, the in-class time has to seem “worth it”—full of the types of activities that are best done in person and not the types of activities that are better accomplished online. In each discipline these activities will be a little different, but I would like to think and read more about general principles for how to best take advantage of face-to-face time and online time when designing a blended course.
Even though I didn’t win the Samsung Galaxy tablet, the conference was enjoyable and gave me a fresh perspective on course design and teaching. I highly recommend viewing the slides from the keynote address for some thought-provoking statistics and arguments about higher education today and where it needs to be in the future.
Have you ever sat down to compose an email or make a phone call and realized that what you want to say would be better expressed by showing someone your computer screen while talking about it? Some processes, ideas, feedback, or explanations are difficult to convey with only visuals (text and static images) or only audio (a phone conversation). In this situation, a screencast could be very useful. Screencasting software can capture the visual of what is on your computer screen—websites, mouse movements, Word documents—as well as the audio of your speech, creating a narrated video for your audience. This is actually the process that was used to create all of the helpful tutorials on the Teaching Commons Desire2Learn page.
I have found screencasting especially valuable when explaining assignments and clarifying expectations in an online course. It’s also useful for teaching my parents new tech skills when I can’t visit them in person. To discover additional ways that screencasting can make your life easier, read these screencasting success stories.
If you would like to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing screencasting software, you can. Or you can opt for a free, downloadable program called Jing. With Jing, your screencasts can be up to 5 minutes in length and can be uploaded and stored at Screencast.com. If you are using the Jing free version, you will receive two gigabytes of storage and two gigabytes of bandwidth per month. (As with most free software, there is also a pay version of Jing, which offers additional storage and features.)
The first time you run Jing, you will be prompted to provide an email address, create a display name, and choose a password. This creates your Screencast.com account, and you will use this login to access your files once they are uploaded to Screencast.com.
In the following video, I demonstrate how easy it is to create a screencast using Jing once you’ve downloaded the software to your computer.
If you want to share a video you’ve saved to your Screencast.com account, one option is to embed it in a Web page. In the Desire2Learn system, videos can be embedded anywhere you have a text editor box—for example, a News Item, a Discussion Topic description, or an HTML page. This video at the Teaching Commons site demonstrates the process for embedding a video in Desire2Learn. Screencast.com also provides a link to your video, and you can share this link with others.
Good luck future screencasters, and feel free to share your own success story with a reply to this post.
It is easy to think that Learning Management Systems (LMS) are only useful for fully online courses or those specifically designed to be “hybrid.” If you teach a class that regularly meets in person, why would you consider using an LMS? The answer is that online tools available in an LMS like Desire2Learn offer a one-stop solution for the out-of-class support students are expecting.
Outstanding “in-person” courses are expected (by both students and instructors) to incorporate a wide range of online-support and online-learning activities.
In-person course instructors are expected to organize and link to online external readings and relevant external Web sites, interactive problem sets, simulations, and games.
Instructors expect and are expected to structure and guide online discussions and blogs outside of class in addition to their teaching role during the in-person class time. Students want to receive regular e-mails from their instructors, to be able to access syllabi, grades, and class lists outside of class, and ideally, to view slide shows or lectures presented during live class online.
A helpful visualization of the survey results is below, and the full report is available here.
These survey results interest me because they are consistent with my own expectations for a face-to-face course, which have been influenced by my experience as an online student and online instructor. I am interested in the factors that influenced the survey participants’ expectations and how many of them have experienced formal online learning. As an online student and instructor, I had access to most of the highly rated online tools mentioned in the survey. I cannot imagine taking or teaching a course, including a face-to-face course, without this robust online support.
To meet student expectations about online support, an instructor might employ a range of separate tools. For example, she could use an online gradebook tool, create a Web site, maintain a public Google calendar, organize student e-mail addresses in a mail client, and create a blog or message board for discussions. All of these tools would be scattered across multiple URLS, with various logins, degrees of security, and kinds of technical support.
In contrast to this ad hoc approach, a Learning Management System provides a central, organized location for online tools and resources—behind a secure login and with institutional support. If additional tools are needed, they can be linked from this one site and embedded in the context of the course. Use of the LMS relieves the individual instructor of many responsibilities and provides students with a streamlined experience of online course resources.
As DePaul transitions to a new LMS this year, those involved in the design and delivery of in-person courses should consider the available tools and how they can be used to support student learning beyond the classroom walls. Bill Gates advocates this combination of online support for in-person classes, in his 2010 Annual Letter: “So far technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning.”
