I am working on my masters in Human-Computer Interaction in CDM at DePaul University.
At the moment I’m taking HCI 445: Inquiry Methods and Use Analysis, with Dr. Cynthia Putnam. The class focuses on observing user experience, and though it’s just getting started, so far it has taught me quite a bit about observing how people go about their daily work. One of the really informative exercises we did in class recently involved a visit to the reference desk at a bookstore chain located downtown.
I recently attended the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Conference held in Chicago. Besides being a day filled with references to DAM technology, DAM plans, and DAM systems, with the obvious puns intended, the day proved to be an interesting insight into what organizations are doing to manage their digital assets. While most of the presenters and attendees were from the corporate sector, there were, I believe, a number of lessons that can be applied to higher education.
The keynote speaker talked about immersive consumer experiences. The concept of these experiences is the idea of creating a multimedia experience that is better than the original. For example, the Van Gogh Alive exhibit immerses the user in Van Gogh’s work and in many ways provides a better experience than viewing these same works of art in a museum (where you may be viewing them through a crowd of people or behind glass or other barriers). This got me thinking about how we can make our online courses more immersive. What can we do to make them better than the classroom experience (the original)? And does this immersion always mean adding multimedia? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but it got me wondering.
The idea of making DAM systems more fun and game like was also a point of discussion. As in course design, this idea seems to be all the rage. The context for the discussion at this conference focused primarily on system design. In particular the speakers talked about the importance of making DAM systems fun and intuitive in order to garner buy in from the end user. In my mind, these same concepts can be applied in systems used in higher education for teaching and learning. If we are asking instructors and students to spend time in our learning management system, shouldn’t that experience be at the very least intuitive? I am not convinced that everything needs to be a game or that we need to simplify things to a point that it doesn’t seem serious, but intuitive and easy seem to be a good compromise.
Another lesson we can take from this field is the idea of system integrations. Many barriers exist when systems are in silos. The consensus, however, seemed to be a movement away from creating a one size fits all solution, but instead finding ways to share information between systems to create a seamless user experience. Meaningful system integration (not just linking between systems) is something that I feel is often lacking in our strategic thinking in higher education. The plan is usually one of two things: 1) buy one system and stuff everything into it regardless of whether or not it is the right fit, or 2) everyone does their own things and none of the systems work together, creating a frustrating experience for users and a less efficient system for administrators.
Perhaps one of the most relevant presentations was by the folks at Encyclopedia Britannica. When most people think about digital assets they think about images and videos. At Encyclopedia Britannica they also consider all their printed content to be digital assets. To make it easier to reuse and repurpose this content, Britannica breaks everything into small discrete chunks which can then be repurposed in a variety of ways.
We talk a lot about chunking when developing online content, but typically this is in reference to making the content more "digestible" by the student in order to reduce cognitive overload. The idea that this same concept could be used to make it easier to reuse and redeploy content over multiple classes is an intriguing one. Most instructors, for example, teach multiple classes in the same field. While they aren’t the same class, often a small piece of content used in one can also be used in another. The idea that you could have a database of all of these "chunks" of content that could be easily pulled into multiple courses is an interesting one.
Finally, the traditional use of a DAM system has obvious utility in higher education and in particular in the management of assets created during course development. There are many digital assets (videos, images, lectures, animations, etc.) that are created when developing a course—particularly when creating online or hybrid classes. Being able to quickly find and reuse these assets is imperative if we hope to realize a return on the investment (ROI) for creating them. If these items are able to be shared, creating a search schema that allows for quick and efficient retrieval is paramount. For those items that have copyright or intellectual property restriction, being able to track this information and make sure that all parties are aware of the restrictions is imperative to being ethical consumers of these assets. Making resources easier to find, share, and reuse will ultimately make it easier to sell the creation of these assets in the first place.
Our department is tasked with providing online-course design services to faculty. This seems like a straightforward job description, but there is quite a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and some of it may not even be readily apparent upon first glance. Today, I’m going to pull back the curtain and let you in on our "secrets" to give you a little better idea of what actually goes into the instructional- and course-design process. Here’s what happens when we design your course from start to finish, in a more or less orderly fashion:
Course site structure – It is important to provide a concise, consistent structure for the course, so that both you and your students can easily navigate the site without getting confused. In many of our colleges and schools, we provide a template model that contains many of the most common documents and tools and a consistent structure for course content. The main objective here is to make sure that students always know what comes next from week to week. This also helps you as you are deciding where things should appear in the course. We try and find strategies to minimize the apparent complexity of your course materials; even though students might be doing many complex tasks for you from week to week, it helps their confidence a lot to see something that looks manageable rather than unwieldy.
Document design and conversion – The initial response from most faculty to having a course site is to simply upload everything they have, and use the site as a dumping ground for course documents such as syllabi, readings, and assignments. In many cases these documents are in a wide variety of formats, which can cause issues for some students. For example, not every student has Word or PowerPoint, so placing documents in your course of this type may occasionally cause problems for students. We solve this problem by taking all of that content and converting it into Web-friendly formats. Many text documents are converted to HTML, PowerPoints are uploaded to one or more online sources so that they can be shown online without forcing students to download, and Web links are consolidated into a single document to minimize the amount of searching and clicking students have to do. There are a number of hidden advantages to this: using HTML can make a Word document that had been 800 KB into something that is now 8 KB, so your course site will load faster, and students can view your documents online without having to download them. Creating online versions of PowerPoints enables students to watch the content online, take notes, and fast forward, pause, and rewind in a way they couldn’t do with a traditional file. Using HTML files enables us to apply a consistent formatting to documents, which makes your course site look better and also reduces student confusion; things look like they belong together. Furthermore, this formatting allows you to provide descriptive text about the content you are using. You can group a presentation, link to some relevant documents and external websites in the same content page, and provide descriptions of why this stuff matters and how it is interrelated. Students go to one place for everything they will need to read, watch and prepare for whatever weekly assessments you will be giving them. Contrast this with the old way, where you give them a bunch of documents to download. You are essentially saying, "Here’s some stuff. How’s it related? You figure it out."
Objective and assessment design – You know what is going to happen in your course. You know what your outcomes should be for each student by the time they have completed the course. But do your students? We spend a lot of time working with faculty to make sure the objectives for their courses are attainable, measurable, and understandable to students. We teach courses all the time and assume that we are on the same page as our students. We teach the stuff and they learn it, right? To illustrate, in a certain week, what you really want is for your students to thoroughly understand Concept X. If you write an objective that says, "By the end of this week, students will understand Concept X," the first thing I’m going to say to you is, "Prove it." "Understand" is a pretty vague term in this case; it can vary widely from student to student, and in this abstract it is very hard to ensure that each student has attained the level of "understanding" you are looking for. Instead we recommend something like, "Describe the importance of Concept X in a marketing campaign with regard to personal and professional courtesy," or "Apply Concept X in creating visual resources for a marketing campaign." These objectives are then followed up with an assignment or assessment that really demonstrates to you that they do understand. The objective asking them to describe could be assessed with a written paper; the apply objective could see them creating visual aids for a campaign they are designing as part of the coursework. These assessments are then packaged into a convenient online format, so in most cases you can collect and grade entirely online. There are even tools to check the Web for plagiarism when students hand in papers!
Quizzes and Exams – If you’ve never given an exam online, you really should give it a try. All of those paper quizzes you used to give can be given online, and in the majority of cases can be made to grade themselves, so you get all that time back for instruction. Some instructors worry about the possibility of students cheating on online exams; the reality is that it is actually a lot harder depending on how you set up the exam. Some instructors create multiple versions of an exam to make it tougher to cheat. Well, imagine if you could give forty (or more!) students an entirely individualized exam, where no one would have the same questions, at least not in the same order, and with even the answer choices randomized. Furthermore, you can specify a time limit short enough that they can’t refer to their textbook if they want to answer all the questions in time and even password-protect your exam to make sure they only take the exam when you want them to. Try doing that on paper!
Audio and video production – Although we have a Media Production and Training department that handles the actual filming process and production, especially if you have a lot of videos, and our library handles digitizing and rights for longer copyrighted videos, we may help with the filming of screencasted lectures, audio podcast production, and the placement of all of these things into your course site. In many cases, we handle the transference of audiovisual resources from wherever they are into the final forms that will be perused by students. Some designers are experienced enough with the technology and production methods that they choose to do this stuff themselves. Either way, our primary concern is that these resources are integrated into the rest of your course materials in a way that is meaningful to your students and that shows them in context with the rest of the related materials.
Creating custom applications – In some cases, there may be a need for an exercise or application in your course that cannot be handled by an existing resource, such as with the tools provided in your course site or by finding something on the Web. In these cases, we may build a custom application for you. This is a time-intensive project, and not something we do very often, but some of the FITS staff have expertise in these areas, and can build custom games or other programs for your course that will provide yet another way to get the point across to your students.
Course QA – Arguably the final step with every course design is quality assurance, where we check the site from beginning to end, inside and out, to make sure you and your students are getting what was asked for. Here is a sample list of what we look for:
Just as there are an incredible variety of courses, there are an incredible variety of options available to you in course sites. If you can dream it, there is probably a way to do it somehow, or we might just make one up. Just ask us! One of our favorite parts of this job is to go where none have gone before; we love breaking new ground just as much as you do, so we invite you to put us to the test. Contact your FITS consultant for more information. We can be found at http://fits.depaul.edu/Contacts/Pages/default.aspx.
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.
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:
|
Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction (100% disagreement rate). |
|
Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course (100% disagreement rate). |
|
The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media (89% disagreement rate). |
|
The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student. (88% disagreement rate). |
|
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.
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.
Value creation. Differentiation advantage. Competitive positioning. What do those terms mean to you? Any MBAs out there? Anyone? I don’t have an MBA, but recently, those terms have come to mean more to me in the university context.
If you read Online Learning for Free?, the blog entry my colleague Elizabeth Schinazi posted a few weeks ago, you may already be on the same dog-eared and coffee-stained page.
Elizabeth closed her post with the following statement: I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.” Specifically, Elizabeth was stressing the importance of keeping track of the burgeoning number of free online offerings in higher education.
I couldn’t agree more with Elizabeth. DePaul needs to keep track of the competition. I would also go a bit further and say that it is important that we as faculty keep track of our competition. I have heard several professors lament that free online universities will eventually put us all out of jobs. Even James Gee, the renegade speaker and scholar at the DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference last week, opened his keynote talk in crisis mode. “Everyone agrees [that higher ed] is in a crisis,” he announced. “But no one agrees on a solution.”
But, truth told, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If you’ve been to a motivational workshop recently, or better, attended one of FITS director Sharon Guan’s introductory Chinese courses, you know that the Chinese character for “crisis” includes the character for “opportunity.” I truly believe that the changing higher ed market presents a golden opportunity for us to reconsider the value that we as hybrid and online faculty bring to our students. What differentiates our online courses from the free options? Why will students sign up for our classes next quarter and not the free web offerings? Answering these questions will help us capitalize on the value we bring.
So, where do you start? Although determining the value of your courses will be a continual work in progress, here are a few near-term suggestions to assist you in making your online course the more desirable option for students.
Commit to Office Hours. Select two hours on different days when you can be available to students. If you teach a hybrid or fully online course, plan to log in to Skype for two scheduled hours each week. If you find your students don’t show up, let them know that you noted their absence and hope they will come talk with you. Find out if there are better times for them to meet with you. All too often, professors choose to offer “office hours available on request.” Any student who is already hesitant to reach out for help may fear that he/she will be a burden by requesting special time.
Establish Your Presence on the Discussion Boards. Read and respond to your students’ posts. It’s that simple. It takes time to do—it does. But the time and thought the students will put in to the discussion board is directly proportional to your felt presence on the boards. In addition, why not have your students create questions to propose to their classmates about the course content? You could then answer their questions and participate as ‘one of them’ as opposed to ”the man behind the curtain.”
Provide Substantive Feedback on Assignments. Providing substantive feedback requires time, but the more you prepare on the front end, the less time it will require when it comes to grading. Create a detailed rubric for each assignment. Not only will this let your students know your expectations, it will help you clarify what is and isn’t working about a student’s submission. Then, when you provide an additional two to three sentences of feedback, the student will more likely feel effectively ‘read.’
Link to Campus Services. This is a biggie. A recent Instructional Technology Council survey tracking the impact of eLearning at community colleges pointed to the necessity of maximizing student and technology support services for the virtual student. Your online students are probably underusing DePaul’s available resources. In your syllabi, be sure to outline the services available. In addition, provide multiple links to campus tech support and other student support services on your course homepage and throughout the course.
Whether it’s through office hours, interactivity on the discussion boards, substantive feedback on assignments, or how we connect students to the myriad support services available to them at DePaul, we are well equipped to meet this new competition. But, we need to make tracks. Now. In the recent words of Stanford University president John Hennessy on the topic of online learning, “A tsunami is coming.”
References:
Auletta, Ken. “Get Rich U.” The New Yorker. April 30, 2012. p.38.
Instructional Technology Council website. http://www.itcnetwork.org
I recently signed up to take a free online course, Human-Computer Interaction, through Stanford University. While I already have my master’s degree in HCI, I thought it would be a fun way to stay engaged and gain new insights into the field. That it was free certainly didn’t hurt. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for the course to get off the ground—what was originally a January start date, was pushed back to March and has now been shelved as “under-development.” I’m still on the mailing list and hopeful that the course will be offered soon.
In this month’s Wired, writer Steven Leckart chronicles his experience taking another free Stanford University online course. This course, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, and what started as an experiment of providing the course free to whomever wanted to take it quickly turned into something else—an astonishing 160,000 students signed up.
In both cases, the aim of these courses is to make learning accessible and free, opening up opportunities those who might not otherwise have them. Coursera, the site the HCI course is offered through has several other courses available from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of California–Berkley. While Thrun is spinning his course into a new company, Udacity devoted to creating a new education institution made entirely of free online courses, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also currently exploring this concept with their own initiative MITx set to launch in Fall 2012.
How these courses and programs will affect the future of online learning, we can’t know, but it does bring up some interesting ideas. I’m not suggesting that DePaul should start offering free online classes, but I do think it will be interesting to watch as these programs evolve and expand. I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.”
Last September, I reported on the Blackboard to Desire2Learn migration at SNL Online, as we moved from our initial planning and design phases to full production and review modes. I promised then I’d keep you posted; I had no idea how all-consuming the migration would prove to be. Changing requirements, mission creep, and faculty training kept us continually challenged; here’s a look back at each:
Changing Requirements
We developed a course template through an iterative process that included a couple of rounds of user testing with faculty and students. Though we did extensive requirements gathering before developing our prototypes, because of extremely tight time constraints we did so based on our test instantiation of D2L. Platform strengths and shortcomings became known as the actual D2L production environment was installed, and we found ourselves in a long cycle of review and redesign. These redesigns came while our course migration was well underway, which resulted in having to rebuild courses already converted in a meticulous, labor-intensive process. Much of this was likely unavoidable, given we were gathering requirements and developing templates while our IT department struggled to integrate an unfamiliar and untested platform. More time to research, design, test, and iterate on a stable installation in advance of the actual migration would have prevented a lot of headaches.
Mission Creep
We designed our migration procedure to include a course-author review process; authors would review their converted course to ensure accuracy and in doing so would become oriented to D2L. However, what had been envisioned as essentially a proofreading exercise quickly morphed into rounds of actual course revisions, which exponentially increased the workload. The courses were better for it, but once again more time to plan and allow for contingencies like this would’ve been helpful.
Faculty Training
The paradox of D2L is that the very features that are so empowering for some faculty are confusing and intimidating for others. FITS devoted enormous amounts of manpower to create extensive documentation and video tutorials for faculty university-wide, but because of the unique nature of the SNL Online template and program we had to have specialized materials and training for our faculty. Changing user and system requirements complicated this process, and my team is still developing training materials as new needs and problems are identified.
The Rollout
Though there were problems both avoidable and unanticipated, the initial rollout of D2L in January was remarkably trouble free. Our user testing gave us a template that leveraged D2L’s strengths and that students found easy to use. Faculty unfamiliarity with the platform and its tools—despite generous training and support resources—required far more attention than student difficulties.
Overall the migration was a tremendous success.
Some problems remain. Certain D2L tools still don’t work properly in our environment; intelligent agents don’t work at all. However, the folks at D2L are dedicated and responsive, and I’m hopeful that these issues will be resolved.
We plan to do a follow-up study to determine how our design can be improved and another to test whether students do better academically with one design versus another. There’s some debate in my department on whether usability and pedagogy are sometimes incompatible; I’d love to see the results of a study addressing that concern.
In a future post I’ll look at lessons learned and what I might do differently given similar circumstances.
Now that the transition from Blackboard to Desire2Learn is complete, it is time to start looking forward to what additional functionality or systems faculty need to be effective and efficient in online teaching. To this end, I have been spending some time in the last couple of weeks pulling together a list of faculty to participate in a focus group.
Gathering names is always a tricky business, and one thing that I have become increasingly aware of is that in any strategic-planning process, it is important to listen to all voices, not just those who are the loudest. This is especially true when looking at technology adoption. Often it seems easier to go back to those faculty with the most to say, those who are already strong advocates, or those that are friendly to new technology. While it is easy to listen to the early adopters and technologically savvy, to do so at the exclusion of other voices runs the risk of alienating your primary audience.
Those early adopters are often at what we refer to as being at the bleeding edge of technology. Wikipedeia defines bleeding edge technology as being "so new that the user is required to risk unreliability, and possibly greater expense, in order to use it." While it is important for there to be people out front experimenting with the possibilities, this is not where most of your users (nor the institution) will be, for obvious reasons.
When you add technology into the mix you also find that some faculty are more hesitant to voice an opinion because they don’t feel as though they are as technologically savvy or competent. While these individuals may not be able to recite a list of technological solutions to a problem, they often have real needs that can be expressed regardless of the solution. When gathering requirements from faculty, it is important, therefore, to take the specific technology out of the conversation. For example, instead of asking faculty "what other technology would you like to see the university adopt," ask questions like "what would you like to be able to do with your class that you currently can’t," or "what frustrates you about the technology currently available to you," or even more important, "why are you not using this tool?"
The "why are you not using this" question can be just as important if not more important than the "what do you need” question. For example, if the goal of the university is to have 100 percent participation in the use of the learning management system, it is important to find out why some faculty choose not to participate. Let’s not assume that we know the reasons or that if we build it they will come. Instead, we need to hear from all the voices about what is working, what isn’t, and what the true need is.
It is important to remember that any planning process should always include feedback and input from all stakeholders not just those with the most to gain (or lose) and that planning requires compromise between these same stakeholders—adoption should not alienate the greater population for the benefit of a few or vice-versa. We must always remember to listen to the voices of all users before making our decisions.
