When my husband and I moved in together, I had no problem sharing a living space and all the items usually shared in cohabitation. Except for one—I couldn’t share my computer. I’ve always been quite attached to the computer I use. I have things set up exactly how I like them, and I don’t like others messing with it. Change, on my system, isn’t always easy for me.

This week, however, I took a leap. No, I’m still not sharing with my husband. But I did do something monumental—I upgraded to Office 2007.

While this isn’t directly tied to educational technology per se, I have learned a few things in this new system that I am finding quite valuable in managing not only my time but also my sanity. I thought it would be nice to share a few of these things with you in hopes that you may also benefit from them.

One caveat, however: these items are for PC users only. Not to turn my back on Mac folks—in fact, I love my Mac as well. But these features just don’t cross over from one platform to another.

Blogs

I am an e-mail junkie. I like everything to come in via e-mail, and I squealed with glee when I learned that my voice-mail messages come straight into my Outlook (oh, unified messaging, how I love thee). Many people know that the best way of reaching me is to fire off an electronic message, and there’s a good chance I’ll get it sooner than any phone call. It’s a push technology where items come to me, instead of me having to go find it.

This push versus pull technology is why I have such a hard time keeping up with blogs. I have so many other things going on that I often don’t have the luxury of going from one Web site to the next to see what, if anything, is new.

Outlook 2007 has changed that for me. For that, I am quite grateful. In addition to making folders for your e-mail and sent items and filing away anything you may need at some point in the future, it will also collect RSS feeds for you.

As a quick overview, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s a way of subscribing to a blog. So, for example, let’s say you want to subscribe to this blog (which I highly recommend). You would tell Outlook to subscribe to this, and when a new post was created, it would come in as a new message into your IDD Blog folder in Outlook.

You can subscribe to all of your favorite places and catch up on your reading when you’d like—from the very same place that you check your e-mail. And when you’re done, you can just delete it like any sort of e-mail message. You can also forward the message on to others if it was something that a colleague may find interesting, too!

Tasks

Now, tasks are nothing new in Outlook. But, man oh man, has the functionality increased! You can flag an e-mail and it adds it to your Tasks list. In fact, you can even flag it to be done by a certain day. And it adds it onto your calendar in the Tasks list, so you can get a quick snapshot of things you need to do in a day—items that are time scheduled and items that are not.

The crowning glory for me, however, was something I found in OneNote. Thanks to Sharon Guan, I am now a OneNote convert. I’ll let you explore the software yourself to check out its coolness in its entirety. What I want to point out to you is that you can take any item you have in OneNote and flag it—just like you can flag e-mails—with or without due dates. And it automatically adds it to you Outlook Tasks list. If you forget what the task references, it contains a direct link back to the OneNote document so you can reference the cryptic notes you may have typed in.

And with that, I will now not only end this blog article but also mark “Completed” on my Write Blog Article task.

Last week my wife and I had dinner with an old friend who’d come in from out of town for a rare visit. She’s a remarkable woman, with a long stint in broadcasting followed by the acquisition of an advanced degree at UC Berkeley, which led to her current vocation as hospice chaplain in a major west coast city. Warm, intelligent, inquisitive and urbane; she surprised me with her announcement that she was about to start her doctoral studies. Online. And not at a school I would’ve guessed.

Because she’s such a hands-on kind of person her decision to study online seemed unusual to me, but I was really interested why she didn’t choose to pursue her studies at one of the universities in her area. Surely they offered online courses. Why this school, with so many prestigious alternatives?

Ph.D. = Driver’s License?

She allowed that she knew the degree wouldn’t be held in the same regard as one from the brick and mortars in her region, but that cost and flexibility had been deciding factors. Further, she assured me, the Ph.D. she would earn would be sufficient for attaining the job she wanted. It was, she concluded, the same as a driver’s license. It didn’t matter where you studied for it as long as you got one.

Give them what they want

I’m fascinated by this commodification of higher education and its acceptance. At both the recent Sloan-C symposium in Carefree, Arizona and an enrollment management workshop a couple of weeks ago I heard a lot of discussion about how traditional student populations are declining, how the survival of educational institutions is dependent upon attracting and retaining non-traditional (usually adult) students, and how both Millennial and adult students demand educational opportunities and experiences that are decidedly consumer-based and market driven. Give them what they want or watch your college wither and die, keynote speakers declared.

It’s rough out there

I understand the pressures that inform a prospective student’s decisions on what, how and where to study: I’d love to be studying theology or literature for personal and spiritual growth, but I invest my school’s tuition waiver benefits in professional development courses. And I understand the need for institutions to adapt strategically. It’s rough out there in consumer society.

My friend’s decision was pragmatic; she’d pursued her ideals as a younger undergraduate and graduate student and was now positioning herself in a competitive marketplace. Higher education must also adapt and make practical, unsentimental strategic decisions to survive and prosper. I do not pretend to have any answers to how we do that without abusing our principles. But I like to think we stand for something greater than market share. That we take a position rather than seek one. And that we’re more than mere commodities.

I’ve been thinking a lot about usability these days. It’s not like I never considered the user; we document and provide print and video tutorials for a host of processes and procedures here at DePaul. But I recently had a long discussion with an instructor who took me to task for assuming that students would know how to play a file in iTunes U. He didn’t know to locate and click the play icon, or to double-click the file. He was frustrated and questioned the logic of having to explain to his students the process to access a video tutorial meant to explain yet another process. My impulse was to dismiss him as a clueless Luddite, but thankfully I heard him out.

This morning I was copied on an email from an irate student who couldn’t get her course-required third-party web app to install or work properly. It didn’t occur or matter to her that DePaul didn’t design or administer the application. Since the app was a required part of her course, for her it is DePaul, and her experience struggling with the software colors her perception of her course, her instructor, and the school.

What these two incidents have in common of course is usability, or lack thereof. Both illustrate that seemingly easy tasks are often anything but easy for many users, and that these struggles have a negative impact on user satisfaction and the perceived value of a tool, course, or institution. Why do we make these usability errors?

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that at least regarding computer literacy I assume others know what I know simply because I know it. That it’s obvious to double-click a file to open it, or execute it, or get it to reveal its function in some way. I assume others recognize that icons exist in an application to indicate functionality or some other important attribute that the user needs to know. I assume others know to check system requirements before downloading software, or at least know what system they use. After all, I argue, it’s 2008! These things are conventions, for crying out loud! And who doesn’t know how to install an application? Do we have to explain everything?

Well, no. But we do need to explain a lot more than we might think, and we need to make things a lot more obvious. How can we do that? We might start by incorporating some quick and easy usability testing before we roll out that nifty new Web 2.0 app or learning tool in our courses. Steve Krug suggests in Don’t Make Me Think that a morning testing session with a handful of users, followed by an afternoon debriefing, is an inexpensive and effective way to find out at the beginning of a project if you’re on the right track.

What happens too often is that decisions about tools and media are made in the optimistic afterglow of a distance education conference or by instructional designers like me reacting to industry hype or instructor pressures, and then passed down as blessings from the heights of Mt. Pedagogy. Then we are surprised and irritated when users reject our offerings for being too hard to use or protest our suggestions (diplomatically worded of course) that the problem is their own technological incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in rich media, in interactive tools and all sorts of whiz-bang features for online courses. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of scrolling through endless expanses of text. But I do think it’s time to work more closely with our users, to ask them what their needs are and how we might meet those, rather than deciding for them a priori and dictating what the solutions are going to be.

For many institutions, online course development follows a publishing model. Faculty members are recruited and compensated to “author” content that will be used by multiple instructors. This approach has several advantages:

1. Greater Accountability: Expectations can be clearly spelled out (and enforced) through a course-development contract.
2. Higher Quality: Course materials are often edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by other instructors.
3. Greater Efficiency: Ideally, faculty don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they teach a new course. The initial effort of the course author and instructional designer to create a core set of course materials saves future instructors a great deal of time in the long run.

There are also disadvantages to the publishing model. Perhaps the most commonly cited problem is the cost to the institution. Faculty who develop online courses are usually compensated with course releases and/or one-time payments comparable to what the instructor would receive to teach a single course. In addition, having course materials thoroughly edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by a panel of subject-matter experts can easily add several thousand dollars to the development costs of each course. Add usability/accessibility optimization, visual design improvements, and multimedia enhancement to the process, and the total cost per course can easily exceed $10,000.

Ten-thousand dollars can be a particularly hard number to swallow when compared to the cost of developing face-to-face courses. After all, faculty have been developing traditional courses without additional compensation for a very long time (and in K-12, the added costs of enhancing a course often come out of the instructor’s pocket). Of course, there are many arguments as to why online course development merits a considerable initial investment, such as:

• Faculty are paid to be subject-matter experts, not technology experts.
• The quality of the materials will be better as a result.
• Online learning brings in tuition dollars that the institution wouldn’t otherwise receive.
• The cost per course decreases every time the same materials are reused.

The problem that none of these arguments addresses is that many instructors (at least in my experience) simply don’t want to be required to use hand-me-down course materials. For as long as teachers have existed, many of them have shared syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignment concepts with their colleagues. I think most instructors value this tradition, but only when the materials are provided with no obligation.

As an instructional designer and a part-time instructor, I feel torn between two worlds. On the one hand, I recognize the benefits of clear, specific course objectives. I also see the value in providing standardized supporting materials to ensure students can meet those objectives. Yet, I also know that one of the best aspects of teaching as a profession is that you get to be the captain of your own ship (however humble it may be). You have a great deal of autonomy and, ideally, you’re free to experiment with teaching and assessment methods that might be a bit unusual as long as students master the critical course concepts.

I appreciate it when my colleagues offer to share their course materials with me, and I love to hear about what they’ve learned from their own experiences. At the same time, we have very different opinions about how to teach a course on basic web design. Some require students to write all their HTML by hand in Notepad and some introduce FrontPage on day one. I offer my students a compromise: we spend the first few weeks hand-coding before we switch to Dreamweaver.

None of our approaches have been criticized, which is fine by me since I’d sooner give myself an appendectomy with a spork than get reacquainted with FrontPage. However, that’s not to say I’m a curriculum-development anarchist. I do wish at times that my fellow interactive-design professors and I could all agree on a few things, like not introducing advanced tools like Flash or languages like JavaScript in a course where many students struggle with basic file-management concepts. Of course, I’m afraid to push for standardization because I, like many teachers, enjoy doing things my way, and I don’t want to find myself forced to teach from a pile of second-hand course materials. In the end, I like to think there’s a happy medium that embraces the best parts of the publishing model of course development while giving faculty the freedom they crave. Until then, you’ll find me slaving away over a hot laptop, creating course materials from scratch and complaining about the workload all the while.

I recently returned from a trip to Thailand, where I was teaching a cohort of graduate students how to use library databases for research. A common question that I was asked upon my return was why an in-person visit was necessary to teach these skills.

I find it interesting that many people believe that technology and in particular synchronous technologies are a panacea that can replace the face-to-face classroom environment. While I believe that these technologies are powerful and can and do extend the reach of traditional classrooms, I also believe it is important to make wise decisions about the use of technology based on the potential audience and their unique needs and attributes.

In this particular situation, where English was not the students’ first language, where their prior experience using libraries was mixed, and where their access to reliable technology was not a given, face-to-face instruction made the most sense.

I believe that instructors who are being asked to take their classes online need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages carefully. What is the motivation for moving to even a hybrid model? Can the students’ needs be met effectively?

I believe that there are certain courses and certain students that should be taught face-to-face in a real classroom. Statistics and math courses are two that come to mind. I suppose there are those that would argue that many people can and do learn these subject without the need to be in a classroom, but I would argue that there are many more students who require the personal interaction that only a live human standing in front of them can provide. This isn’t to say that there aren’t successful online math and statistics courses but more to argue that before you take the entire math department virtual, you take the students’ needs into consideration.

Undergraduates are another population of students that I believe benefit from the interaction of a live instructor standing in front of them. Again, I am sure there are undergraduates who successfully take online classes and have great experiences, but I would argue that this is more the exception than the rule. Most undergraduates that I know are just learning how to balance their responsibilities and adding the responsibility of managing an online learning experience to the mix is a recipe for disaster. I find it laudable that schools often want to find ways to extend their campus to those most vulnerable of dropping out or not even starting, those students for whom time is precious, since they are juggling home, work, and school responsibilities. However, I would argue that too often the time commitment of an online class far outweighs the potential benefit of not having to be in class on a particular day or time. I would also argue that these students are precisely the ones that need the extra attention that a live teacher in a face-to-face class provides. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this extra attention is that it makes students feel like they belong to a community.

Given all of this, you may think that I don’t believe online instruction is a good option, which isn’t true. Instead, I believe that we as instructors and instructional designers need to make good decisions about which classes and which students are part of our online classrooms.

A few years ago at a conference, I had the opportunity to hear Eric Larson speak about faculty use of technology and support. Since then, my colleagues have heard me refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of faculty support, so I thought that it was time that I wrote a blog post about this.

Larson’s premise was basically that faculty use of technology loosely follows the framework of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, the higher needs on Maslow’s scale cannot be met if the lower needs have not been taken care of first. In Maslow’s hierarchy, the levels are as follows: Biological and Physical, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Cognitive, Aesthetic, Self-actualization, and Transcendence.

But how does this relate to faculty using technology? Starting with Biological and Physical, these are the most basic needs that humans have. What are the basic needs that faculty have when it comes to teaching with technology? They need things that work. Issues such as a broken mouse, no internet connection, or a computer that won’t boot fall into this section. This is basic technical support.

The second step is Safety. This is where reliability comes into play. For faculty to feel ‘safe’ using technology in their classes, they have to be able to rely on it to work correctly every time they need it. No one likes to look stupid in front of their students. If a faculty member feels that there is a great possibility for failure with a certain technology, they simply will not use it.

The third state, Belongingness and Love, is where the human element comes into play in both teaching with technology. On the technical side, faculty members don’t want to feel alone. To achieve this, faculty could be part of a group of others who teach with technology and can share the same fears and desires. Also, they need a relationship with someone to help them teach with technology, such as instructional designers or technologists.

Esteem is next on Maslow’s and Larson’s lists. Larson argues this point from a technical support standpoint by saying that faculty need to feel respected in their work needs and provides examples from a support standpoint. However, I feel that this is an area where confidence in using the technology comes into play. Faculty need to feel not only supported in what they do, but also confident that they can teach with technology and in a manner that surpasses teaching without it.

Cognitive is where faculty take their own time to truly understand how something works as it does. A comprehensive investigation into a teaching method can lead to new, creative, and innovative ways of teaching. Aesthetic is the investigation taken one step further. After knowledge about “how” is attained, exploration into “how to make it better” occurs. Investigation of teaching methods leads to new, creative, and innovative ways of teaching. By the time these levels are reached, it means there are few concerns from the basic levels.

Finally, Self-actualization and Transcendence cap the top of our hierarchy. These two needs are signs of a happy faculty member effectively, and perhaps innovatively, teaching with technology. Larson argues that Transcendence is the evangelism of teaching with technologies. Faculty who are at this level are happy to share and spread the news of how they teach in an effective manner and want to help others do the same.

While it would be nice to have an entire university filled with faculty at the top two echelons of the hierarchy, it would also mean that I’d be out of a job. All kidding aside, it’s a difficult level to reach on an individual level, much less as an entire university or college. All facets of technological and pedagogical support play a role in this hierarchy of teaching and learning with technology. And if all else fails, take a page from both Larson’s and my book and appeal to the Biological and Physical need—it never hurts to bring food.

To see a copy of the PowerPoint that accompanied Larson’s presentation, click here.