All posts by Sharon Guan

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About Sharon Guan

Sharon Guan is the Assistant Vice President of the Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul University. She has been working in the field of instructional technology for over 20 years. Her undergraduate major is international journalism and she has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in educational technology from Indiana State University. She has conducted research on interpersonal needs and communication preferences among distance learners (dissertation, 2000), problem-based learning, online collaboration, language instruction, interactive course design, and faculty development strategies. She also teaches Chinese at the Modern Language Department of DePaul, which allows her to practice what she preaches in terms of using technology and techniques to enhance teaching and learning.

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Create a Trailer … for Your Course…by Yourself

An intro, to let students know what will happen in the class; a highlight, to capture the meaning of the subject; a heads-up, on what to expect; and maybe, a rationale, for the format in which the course is delivered.

To accomplish all of these in a quick and engaging way takes more than a syllabus or a course homepage. It requires condensing the course description and combining the presentation with multimedia or special effects…like a movie trailer.

According to a report by the Chronical of Higher Education, course trailers have become increasingly popular with the growing use of social media. The report cited Harvard University as an early adopter of course trailers because students there spend the first week of the semester “shopping” for courses they may want to take. So course trailers are a big help for boosting student interest and attendance.

Here is a course trailer for CS50 at Harvard University, a course that focuses on an introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming:

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Beyond QualityMatters: Introducing the Pedagogically Distinctive Features (PDF) of DePaul Online Courses

In 2008, DePaul adopted QualityMatters (QM) as the quality standard for online and hybrid courses developed through the DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. During the past eight years, nearly two hundred courses have been through the QM internal review process at DePaul.  Since 2011 when the first instructor was rewarded with a QM star for developing a course that met all of the QM standards, the number of QM star recipients has increased drastically.  These days, becoming a QM star has become a common expectation of all faculty participants of DOTS.

As designers, we are pleased by the numbers and the feeling of “getting a hang of QM”; on the other hand, we ask whether this is the place where we want to be – because that pounding question remains loud and sound: Does QM guarantee a successful learning experience for students?

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Jokes, Infographics, and Instructional Design

I came across a Chinese joke the other day talking about how hard it is to be a foodie in the Qin Dynasty. With a series of cartoon images, it shows a hungry foodie time-traveled to a restaurant in the Qin Dynasty. He tried to order one meal after another just to find that none was available because they were either not invented or not imported yet.

At a first glance, it is a merely a joke made for fun; but if you pay a bit more attention to the content, you will find that it embeds quite a bit of knowledge in terms of the development of food culture in China. It reminded me of note cards I made for high school history class when we were learning about the dynasties in China and the development of agriculture. If I add the chart of dynasties, these series of cartoon image would present a vivid image of food history in a country that prides itself for its culinary culture:

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Learning by Messaging: Social media apps and the classroom

On the first day of class, I asked my students, “How many of you have a smart phone?”

Everyone raised their hands.

“Great!” I said. “Take them out—if they aren’t already—because you will do a lot of messaging in this class. Go to WeChat.com and download the app to your phone.”

After the students created their accounts, I gave them my phone to scan the bar code for the class group I created within the app. This allowed the students to effortlessly scan the barcode for the class group I had set up, showcasing the user-friendly and advanced capabilities crafted by developers like the skilled react native developers sydney.

Within 15 minutes, all fifteen of them were in the Chinese 104-101 WeChat group. After the setup, I began explaining what WeChat is, and how I’ve used it in previous classes.

WeChat is a mobile messaging app developed by a Chinese company called Tencent Inc. According to DMR, as of Aug 22, 2015, there are 800 million active users. It’s user-ship has surpassed Twitter and continues to grow rapidly and globally. It is threatening the global social media market and has been referred to as the potential “Facebook killer”.

In my Chinese language class, I use WeChat to serve the following purposes: Continue reading →

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Why Do We Educate?

June 8, 2015 is a special day for high school graduates in China. It is the day to witness 10 million students enter college exam sites to try and earn themselves admission into colleges. Students are told that every point they earn on this exam will significantly impact the rest of their lives because whether or not they can make it to a college and what college they get into will define who they will become.

While I still get butterflies in my stomach when I think about my college exam day, I couldn’t find a word to describe how I felt when I saw the picture of the book-tearing event that occurred a day prior to this year’s national college exam day. The picture below is a scene at a Henan Province high school prior to the exam day. Students tore their textbooks, study notes, learning materials into pieces and tossed them in the air like party confetti!

book tearing event

I have heard about students burning their books to mark the end of a painful era of studying, but never as massive and violent as this! In a country where education is seen as the means for everything, what causes this hostile attitude towards the carrier of knowledge and symbol for learning?

If every rebellion has its roots in oppression, maybe the following images can offer us some explanation of the cause.

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Under the Dome: What a Documentary on Air Pollution Taught Me about Instructional Design

More than 100 million views in less than 48 hours!   This is the growing count of viewing record of Under the Dome, a documentary on air pollution in China, which aired online on Feb 27th.   It was produced by renowned investigative journalist Chai Jing, who used her own money—more than $156,000—to fund the production.

After watching this one-hour-and-forty-minute-long recording, I felt that calling it a documentary was overrated. This “recording” does not possess any signs of cinematography–no visual effects, no theme music, and no artistic post production. It’s merely a TED talk with a lecturer in the front and a PowerPoint presentation displayed in the background—in short, a recording of a lecture.

From the instructional design perspective, both methods–the long lecture and the PowerPoint–are not innovative. Yet, I found myself captivated by this presentation not only because of the sensitivity of the topic and the charisma of the speaker, but also by the “ways” that the “instruction” was designed.  I call it “instruction” because the producer declared three very clear educational goals at the beginning. Chai Jing’s goals were to educate her audience on the following: 1. What is smog? 2. What caused it? 3. How do we deal with it? From constructing fundamental knowledge, to calling for specific actions, this recording addressed all learning objective levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy: Continue reading →

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Becoming a Learning Coach with DESIRE

The concept of a “learning coach” was introduced by Dr. Jose Bowen during his keynote speech at the 2014 DePaul Annual Teaching and Learning Conference while discussing the new role of a college professor.  When the knowledge held in the brain of a professor can no longer compete with the phone that is in the hand of a student, as he humorously pointed out, maybe it’s time to think about what makes a professor the most valuable.  During his presentation, Dr. Bowen called everyone’s attention to a painful reality: the vastly available content delivered through the Internet free of charge is depriving the professor of the privilege of being the knowledge owner and resource!  The value of a “residential” professor—verses the ones teaching to the world via the Internet—lies in the fact that s/he can be actively involved in the learning process with the students by monitoring and guiding them to the end result.  That role, as Bowen put it, would be a “learning coach”. Continue reading →

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From Content Critical to Content Cheap: The Change of Online Course Value

In the December issue of the Campus Technology magazine, Gerry McCartney, CIO at Purdue University, was cited in “What Will Happen to MOOCs Now that Udacity Is Leaving Higher Ed?” for his response to the downward spiral of the MOOC.  McCartney “applauded the MOOC makers for demonstrating that ‘content has almost no value…”, and when it comes to the value of this type of education, “the money is not in the content”.

McCartney believes that the learning experience delivered through a MOOC is like learning from watching The History Channel. It is merely access to content—a low-value type of education.  In his opinion, one can get the best Chaucerian professor to publish a book for everyone in the world to read, but it is impossible for the same professor to offer a class to teach everyone in the world because learning requires personal interaction. Personal interaction, as Gerry McCartney points out, is the high-value type of education—something that is not scalable in a MOOC.

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Sex and MOOCs

The commonality of sex and the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is they both are very attractive: while the former has been attractive since the beginning of mankind, the latter has become a “hottie” within the last year or so.   In the past few months, the two concepts caught my attention through parallel encounters: one from a book about late-life adventures in sex and romance by Jane Juska who loves using this male masturbator, the other through a series of diaries published by instructional designers at the University of Sheffield on their research and implementation of MOOCs.

Although vastly different in genre, content, audience, and purpose, Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman and the diaries of Sheffield’s MOOC experiences intertwined and interacted in my mind. They reminded me of the joy of learning through narratives and stories.

As someone with an instructional design background, I shouldn’t be surprised to see that learning happens as an outcome of both casual and intentional experiences. Many learning theorists, from John Dewey to Art Chickering, claim that learning is a result of interaction and connection, and after reading both Juska’s book and the MOOC diaries, I felt a desire to share some of concepts I encountered: Continue reading →

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I Am Red, What Are You: Understanding the Color of Our Brain

My husband Lee and I were sitting at the dinner table one evening chatting about what we should do for the kids during the time when school’s closed and summer camp hasn’t started yet. I pulled out the computer trying to search for ideas. A couple of minutes later, I sensed this vibrating sensation on the floor that resembled a minor earthquake. It was mild, constant, rhythmic, and very annoying.

I moved my eyes from the computer screen to Lee. He looked at me—what? The vibration stopped for a second. I moved my eyes back to the computer—there, the rhythm started again.

This time I closed down the laptop. “Lee, do you know you are very blue?” I said.

“What?” He was completely lost. Continue reading →