Category Archives: Pedagogy

Constructing Effective Online-Learning Environments via the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework

As designers developing online courses, we’re always looking for purposeful ways to ensure that the instructor, content, and student interactions are strategic, cohesive, and meaningful.

What’s more, we are also tasked with staying abreast of and introducing faculty to research, theories, and methodology associated with constructing rigorous and effective online pedagogy.

At the 27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework was the focus of several sessions including sessions from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Springfield, and Capella University. Intrigued by the implications of the framework, I wanted to learn more about the framework’s efficacy in higher education.

The premise of the CoI framework suggests that creating an effective online experience requires a collaborative community. The CoI framework, developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) is defined as follows:

An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements—social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

  • Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison, 2009).
  • Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).
  • Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).

CoI is a framework that many higher-education institutions cite to inform, and in some cases measure, the effectiveness of online-course development.

The granular elements of the CoI Framework are listed in the table below. The “categories” and “indicators” provide explicit examples of how , the CoI model elements can be interpreted by an online-course designer.

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172.

In 2007, a peripheral resource, the CoI survey instrument was developed and ultimately, validated. This survey instrument correlates with the CoI framework and is being utilized in studies at some institutions as an end-of-course evaluative tool.

As a course designer, I’m always looking for ways to equip faculty with a slew of resources to get the wheels turning as they think through the course content and design.

For some professors, it can seem intimidating at the outset of development to segue from teaching face-to-face to online. It’s especially challenging to identify strategies that will translate to meaningful online teaching presence. One strategy to brainstorm ideas for not only teaching presence but cognitive and social as well is utilizing the CoI framework elements to flesh out assessments and learning activities that align with each.

For example, with social presence, the professor can structure discussions via group cohorts that are led by a weekly discussion leader. This strategy allows students to establish a rapport with the cohort members. Additionally, students are empowered and accountable for the content they are charged with leading during their respective week.

Concepts such as these would serve as an invaluable resource to faculty members, especially those new to teaching online. Creating a central repository for faculty members to share and collect resources may serve as a community for online pedagogical strategies.

RESOURCES

The Community of Inquiry website:
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/
http://communitiesofinquiry.com/methodology

Garrison D, Arbaugh J. Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education [serial online]. July 2007;10(3):157-172. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed August 29, 2011.

Arbaugh, J.B., Cleveland-Innes, M., Diaz, S.R., Garrison, D.R., Ice, P., Richardson & Swan, K.P. (2008). Developing a community of inquiry instrument: Testing a measure of the Community of Inquiry framework using a multi-institutional sample. The Internet and Higher Education. 11 (3-4), 133-136.

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Going Analog: The Why versus the How in Instruction

Note: Listen to this entry at Everything that FITS, an ongoing podcast for the DePaul community and the world at large, sponsored by DePaul University’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services department. Tune in for tips, tricks and useful information to help you teach smarter every day.

Technology is inescapable these days. It has made some things in our lives easier, and has changed the way we communicate with the world. It serves as our portal to our homes, schools, and jobs, and is in some cases the center of our social lives. Many technology tools that we now take for granted have augmented, and in some cases replaced, older analog technologies, enabling us to streamline and simplify our tasks. In many cases we ask ourselves how we ever got along without such a resource. Consider where we are now compared to twenty years ago with technologies like cell phones, e-mail and the Internet—or even just ten years back when social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster was just beginning—and you can see how much the landscape has changed in just a few short years. Kids growing up today don’t remember not having cell phones and always-on Internet access; now social networking sites aren’t just for amusement but have become a way of life for most of us. If you do anything embarrassing while someone is filming, you can bet that it will show up on YouTube for the world to see. All of these, in varying degrees, have changed how we interact with one another and with the world.

However, as we grow accustomed to these new technological innovations, are we developing new skills to our benefit, or are we simply replacing older analog methods of accomplishing the same thing? And are there advantages to the new way over the old one, or are we “phasing out” skills that might still have some importance from time to time? Consider these examples:

  1. Although kids are still taught to read analog clocks in grade school, the majority of clocks being installed in schools these days are digital, or if they are analog, they include a digital readout at the bottom. The majority of clocks in most homes are digital too (your DVD player, clock radio, computer, etc.). As a consequence, fewer and fewer kids can read a wristwatch because they aren’t getting the practice. My wife teaches 8th grade, and she says she has a lot of kids who can’t tell time without a digital clock! This trend makes traditional wristwatches seem almost like relics of the past, but for those who still treasure these timeless pieces, watch repair services are essential to keep them in working order and preserve their charm. And for those interested in starting their collection, be sure to check out these replica watches for sale.
  2. Lots of people these days use maps from the Internet or GPS to get directions. But what if the information on the GPS is outdated, or the Internet directions are wrong? This happened to me recently in Colorado: after Google Maps led us into the middle of nowhere and off course, we pulled over and bought a state map, and that got us on the right track. However, this was only because I know how to read a map, which obviously won’t give turn-by-turn directions, and to use the compass I carry with me. We are losing the ability to navigate with map and compass, because the majority of the time you don’t have to know how to read them anymore. Many people are content to turn on their phone’s location service or their GPS and follow blindly from there, without truly knowing where they are or where they’re going; they just follow the directions and assume they’ll get there.
  3. The last time you had to do some mathematical computation, how did you do it? I bet you whipped out a calculator, used your computer or phone’s built-in calculator, or did a formula operation in a spreadsheet program. You probably didn’t reach for a pencil and paper to do some long division. Like telling time on analog clocks, they do still teach this in schools, but these days calculators are used at least as often, even on standardized tests. The state of Illinois gives aspiring teachers a Basic Skills Test that is roughly equal to the abilities in math and English of an 8th grade student. This test has a 77 percent failure rate as of 2010, and the failing scores are predominantly in math. Why? As someone who has taken this very test, I can venture a guess: calculators are not allowed, which means that test takers have to navigate that long division unaided. They are failing because they have been using calculators for so long that they have forgotten how to calculate by hand.

So what does this mean for us? Operations like telling time, navigating, and doing math haven’t changed, but the way in which we find answers in each system has, and our increasing reliance on these electronic devices is slowly removing the old ways simply because using them is easier. In most cases, the failure we are seeing isn’t the inability to choose what operation to perform; it’s the failure to do so without an electronic device’s aid. Thinking back a number of years to when we still needed road maps, we didn’t have any more trouble getting around than we do now even though mapping is available on nearly every phone. The ease of using the electronic counterpart is now overshadowing the old fashioned tried-and-true way. This may not be a problem in everyday usage, but it can be catastrophic when the technology doesn’t work. What if you don’t know how to do it the low-tech way?

This phenomenon of new technology replacing old has huge implications for the teaching world. More and more, students are coming out of K-12 and college with a set of skills that are predominantly plug-and-play; that is, they have the ability to solve a problem using a tool, but they don’t have the know-how to tell you what procedure they are following, or even why they are following the steps in that order. Instead, they know a procedure that says, “If I do thing A with tool X, I will get answer B.” There’s no intuition in this; the cognitive process has been removed altogether and replaced with an instruction manual of sorts. Problem solving cannot happen here unless the information to be plugged in is presented in the same way the student learned the procedure.

In the last decade, educational philosophy has increasingly focused on creating “authentic,” “real-world” problem-solving processes. The argument is that students need to be able to apply learned concepts to actual situations they will encounter instead of doing purely theoretical exercises. This concept is a fantastic idea in theory, but the catch to this is that many of the electronic replacements we are using are removing the theoretical portion and leaving only the process. There is no opportunity for students to see the theoretical knowledge being applied or to understand how it is being applied; they just plug in numbers and variables and get an answer. If the answer was all we were looking for, this would be enough, but obviously as instructors we are interested in students’ mastery of the theoretical, not their ability to plug and chug. We need to be sure that we’re teaching students the “why” part of the process, and not just the “how.” If you are going to use an electronic replacement for an analog activity, it is important to make sure that the resource still requires the student to do some thinking on his/her own outside of number-crunching. If there is a process that can be done by hand, the resource should be used to simplify that process rather than replacing it, and instructors should make sure that students can still perform the specified actions without any electronic help. If possible, teach the analog method first, so the tool will be perceived as a helper rather than the primary problem-solving method. For example, students learning to do bibliographic citations could be told to create citations on their own by hand, and then use an online bibliography tool like EasyBib or NoodleTools to check their work. In this way students learn to do the work on their own, and perceive the tool as a helper for difficult citations rather than as “the way to create citations.” Students learn to do the heavy lifting first, and the tool is secondary, rather than being the heavy lifter.

In this age of electronic conveniences, it’s often difficult to try and “go analog” and do things the old-fashioned way when there are so many easy ways around to do it faster, cheaper, and with less human involvement. Still, the benefit to learners has remained the same, even though the times are a-changin’. Regardless of what the electronic world can create to “enhance” our lives, there’s still no substitute for old-fashioned know-how and human reasoning, and those who don’t need electronic crutches will always have an advantage. It’s important to remember that sometimes the old way is still a useful one, even if it’s not the easy one.

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+1 Intellect: Can Experience Points Improve Student Motivation?

When was the last time you felt a sense of accomplishment so gratifying that you threw your hands above your head and shook your fists with pride and elation? This gesture has been identified by psychologists as a universal expression made by people of all ages all around the world when they feel a sense of personal triumph. Italians call this feeling fiero, and the term has been adopted by game-designers to describe one of the most essential feelings a good game should provide.

In Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal proposes that most people’s everyday lives are shockingly fiero-deficient, and I have to agree. Most of us don’t complete our workdays with a fist-shaking gesture or spontaneous dance as we revel in our daily achievements, and much of our leisure time is spent on escapist forms of entertainment. If you can remember the last time you experienced a true fiero moment, chances are it was vicarious (e.g., watching a football player score a last-minute touchdown) or of no use to anyone in the real world (e.g., defeating a challenging level in Angry Birds).

McGonigal wants to change all that. To make the case for the ambitious assertion found in her book’s subtitle, she focuses on three key points.

  1. Reality is filled with tedious obligations and overwhelming problems that leave human beings feeling bored, powerless, and isolated.
  2. Games are humanity’s most effective tools for fostering engagement, empowerment, motivation, human connection, and a sense of accomplishment.
  3. The same principles that make games so rewarding and addictive can be used to change how we feel about and tackle unpleasant and daunting tasks in the real world—from cleaning our toilets to reducing global energy consumption.

To provide specific strategies for translating the best qualities of a good game to the real world, McGonigal proposes fourteen “fixes” for reality. Almost all of these fixes can be applied to education, and I hope to eventually assemble a group of DePaul faculty to read the book and discuss them further. For now, however, I’d like to focus on one of my favorites: “Meaningful Rewards When We Need Them Most.”

To introduce this fix, McGonigal describes a talk she gave at a conference in which she lamented,

‘If I have one regret in life, it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.’ Technically speaking, it’s true: if you were to add up every A I’ve gotten in my real life, from junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn’t come close to my World of Warcraft character’s intellect stat. Never mind the fact that there’s no score at all for getting smarter once you’re out of school.

McGonigal frequently refers to the motivational power of “leveling up”—a concept commonly found in role-playing games that provides players with progress milestones and encourages them to keep striving for higher levels of expertise. When a player levels up, it means his or her character has accumulated enough experience points to get improved strength, stamina, weapons, or other tools to help the player complete increasingly challenging missions.

In some games, completely leveling up a character can take hundreds of hours of gameplay. Yet players are rarely daunted by these lofty requirements because they are provided with a steady stream of smaller victories and positive feedback as they move closer to their next goal. During her conference talk, McGonigal mentioned that she wished some of this positive reinforcement could be extended to reality, allowing friends and strangers to give her experience points in recognition of her latest achievements. As a result, an audience member at the conference created plusoneme.com. The site bills itself as “gold stars for grownups,” and it provides a simple online tool that allows users to quickly recognize each other whenever someone demonstrates an admirable trait.

Initially, I thought, “What a great idea! Who doesn’t love to be recognized for their efforts? And wouldn’t it be great in an online course? This could make students feel more valued and connected without a big fuss or hokey bonding activities.” I even signed up for an account on plusoneme.com to try it out, but my blind adoration for the site was short-lived. Within a day or two, I opened my mailbox and pulled out the latest issue of The Atlantic. The headline, “How the Cult of Self-Esteem is Ruining Our Kids,” practically leaped off the page.

The text and image on the cover were promoting an article by Lori Gottlieb titled, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” Based on the headline and article title, it should come as no surprise that Gottlieb is one of many pundits blaming the indulgent parenting methods of the last few decades for creating a generation of entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed kids who are now entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed adults. It’s a backlash parade with Amy Chua serving as the Grand Marshal for 2011.

McGonigal seems to agree that most people born around 1980 or later are particularly frustrated and bored with reality. However, instead of blaming parenting trends, she points out that these younger generations have grown up with engaging, empowering games, and that these games have made the shortcomings of reality more obvious and stifling than they have ever felt before. Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle through humiliation or forcing a toddler to play piano until her fingers bleed, scholars like McGonigal ask, “Is there a way to increase motivation, productivity, and fulfillment by turning the task at hand into a game?”

In McGonigal’s world, the answer is almost always yes. In one example, she notes that she and her husband have used the website Chore Wars to turn everyday household chores into competitive challenges. In the game, chores are assigned various point values, with the most unpleasant tasks receiving the highest number of points. By default, the points that players accumulate in Chore Wars have no material value. In McGonigal’s case, the current high-score holder has the right to choose the music whenever she and her husband drive somewhere together.

McGonigal claims this simple and free reward system has changed the way she and her husband view everyday housekeeping. She says the Chore Wars over-the-top fantasy world, in which users can collect experience points every time they “conjure clean clothes” or “rid the kingdom of toilet bowl stains,” has left her home cleaner than it has ever been. While I doubt that driving-music veto power would motivate me to clean my bathtub, McGonigal does provide more than her own household as a case study. Other users claim that Chore Wars’ has turned their children into an army of competitive cleaning machines, which I’m sure most parents would agree speaks volumes to the power of a little virtual encouragement.

That’s great for McGonigal, who could probably game her way through a root canal, and for kids, who aren’t embarrassed to think of a duster as a magic wand. But what about the rest of us? Can we really use game principles to make completing our grown-up, mundane obligations more gratifying?

At the risk of sounding like an over-indulged millennial, I wouldn¹t mind a little excitement and a virtual gold star once in a while for all my hard work. And I’m not ashamed if it takes a little imagination to get others to participate. After all, fiero is in short supply in these troubled times, particularly here in the land of Scholarshire, where the shadow of the evil Lord Profitus has cast a pall of terror across the land. If all it took was a kind word of praise in ye mystical comment box below for my blogger character to level up, wouldst thou aid me in my quest? Or wouldst thou side with the dark forces and leave me to rot in a cubicle, denied any reason to throw my hands above my head and shake my fists with pride and elation?

Let’s make a game of it and see.

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Building a Box to Think Outside of It: Standardizing Online Content Layout

The Article of the Future project, an initiative of Elsevier, recently released prototypes for the web-based display of research articles in six discipline areas. The templates amazed me with their thoughtful design that allows readers to easily breeze through research articles on the screen. The design is as simple as a three-pane view we usually see on a web page, with the article outline, the content, and the references section. But what strikes me the most is the design philosophy behind the project: to leverage the use of technology to make reading more convenient, efficient, and rewarding, which is the philosophy needed for online-course design.

For example, the layout prototype for a business-management research paper offers a content view with tabs that can expand the layout to include an outline on the left, a context information pane on the right, or both of them, with a single click.

In the content area, the prototype takes full advantage of the multimedia and user-control capacity offered by the web: from graphic animation and video abstracts to interactive charts and diagrams, it offers a full spectrum of options to the readers.

The idea that Elsevier has of building a standardized online layout for research paper coincides with the desire our students have expressed to have a common structure for all of their online courses. In this summer DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, during the online student panel discussion, one faculty member asked, if there was one thing that the students could name as the most important for an online course, what would it be? The answers given were: feedback and structure.

While it is quite understandable how important it is for faculty to provide feedback to students they’ve never or rarely met, why would the structure matter?

“So we don’t have to worry about where to find stuff,” the student said.

The “stuff” is the content and the “where” is the structure. If we save students from using their mental power to seek and search for the content, they can then use that mental power for the content itself. And, as Ruth Clark pointed out in her efficacy in learning theory, one critical goal of instructional design is but to achieve the efficacy in learning by reducing the wasted mental power and maximizing its use for the instructional purpose.

Parallel with the Article of the Future project, DePaul’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) is moving toward creating a standardized course shell for online and hybrid courses. This master course shell includes not only preloaded menu items and module structure but also built-in content such as orientation, instruction on course navigation, online learning guidelines and expectation, and where to begin with the course.

But if all the courses look the same, will it be like an attack of the clones? What about creativity, innovation, and character?

As an instructor who strives to make every class refreshing, memorable, and profoundly “unique”, the hat that I also wear as an administrator of instructional technology helps me face reality, in which, as Gerry McGovern pointed out, the formality is merely the shell, the content inside of it is the one that is winning us the competitive advantage—whether for a web site or for a course. Besides, a consistent format, as Lee Schulman pointed out during his speech at DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, is critical for student success. Without a box, no one will be able to think outside it!

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Instructors as User-Experience Designers

In April, Dr. Constance Stanley of the University of Colorado gave a day-long workshop titled “50 Ways to Teach with Impact” to the Chicago Area Faculty Development Network. To my surprise, the workshop presented techniques grounded in user-centered-design best practices. The workshop was geared toward instructors teaching in a face-to-face classroom; however, many of the strategies could easily be transferred to an online class. As a former user-experience analyst and current instructional designer, I found the bent of the workshop to be a welcome integration of these two disciplines.

Whitney Hess wrote the blog post “Guiding Principles for UX Designers” for UX Magazine that went gangbusters in the Twitterverse. Her guiding principles correlate nicely with Dr. Stanley’s “50 Ways to Teach with Impact.” Let’s take a look.

Guiding Principles for UX Designers

50 Ways to Teach with Impact

Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it

Pre and post interviews

Make things simple and intuitive

Metacognitive activities throughout course

Acknowledge that the user is not like you

Administer VARK learning-style preference

Have empathy

Realize that the student is bombarded with information and pressure to multitask

By taking the student perspective and needs into consideration, the instructor becomes a user-experience designer of the classroom environment. Dr. Stanley provides numerous techniques that emphasize engaging the student at multiple levels so as to “hook” each student. This is similar to the best designs, which allow users easy and seamless access to a service or product.

Details on Dr. Stanley’s strategies:

Pre and post interviews: To get a feel for the prior knowledge and assumptions of the students, instructors require that students take an online survey with questions about the content at the beginning of the course. With the results, the instructor now “understands the problem.” Tweaking the content and its delivery to make it accessible and engaging for a particular class of students is “attempting to solve the problem.” The post interview gives the student a sense of “where they have come” and gives the instructor valuable feedback on their content-delivery choices or user-experience design.

Metacognitive Activities: Dr. Stanley stated that, “these activities ask the learner to observe ‘the way things are’ versus ‘the way I make them as a learner.’” In other words, students are put into situations that ask them to reflect on their process and understanding of the content. Examples of these types of activities are: self-assessments; selecting from a choice of activities based on their preferred modality of learning; or having a dialogue with peers about their understanding of the content. By creating these opportunities, instructors provide pathways for students to access the content in simple and intuitive ways.

VARK (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic) learning preference assessment:Students and the instructor answer a quick sixteen-item questionnaire to find out their learning preference. The instructor receives the student results anonymously. By knowing the breakdown of learning preferences within a particular class, the instructor can adjust the delivery of the content to meet student needs. In addition, the instructor can be cognizant of his/her own learning preferences so as not to tilt the presentation of content towards that modality; thereby “acknowledging that the user is not like you.” The assessment is available at: http://www.vark-learn.com.

Influx of Information/Multitasking: Being empathetic to the bombardment of information students are faced with via text messages, e-mails, twitter feeds, etc. is essential in understanding the “user.” Designing a course experience that capitalizes on these devices and information streams encourages students to participate, because their frame of reference is being acknowledged. Rather than competing, play along with it. Poll Everywhere presents a content-related question to the student that is answered via text. Instructors can project the real-time results on a screen in the classroom or present them in an online collaborative environment. Multitasking and information overload are part of our students’ realities; so let’s use the very devices and technologies that vie for their attention.

The instructor as a user experience designer—I like that idea. Through the strategies presented by Dr. Stanley, instructors get a sense of the audience, their needs, and their preferences. Using these “specs” to inform the design of content delivery will lead to student engagement and participation. As one of the pioneers of user-experience design Donald Norman said, “Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.”

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The Instructional Technology X-Files: Enchanted iPads, Magical Clickers, and Online Courses that Beat Face-to-Face

“Students performed 20 percent better in the hybrid version of this course compared to the face-to-face sections taught by other instructors.” When I heard this statement during a presentation at the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in February, I did something I rarely do: I closed my laptop, looked straight at the presenter, and stopped multitasking for a full twenty minutes.

I find most educational-technology conferences are a lot like an episode of the X-Files with a cast made up entirely of Fox Mulders. Everyone wants to believe. There are a lot of technology cheerleaders and a lot of iPad sightings, and no one seems to notice that Dana Scully—the skeptical, pragmatic agent designed to bring Mulder back down to Earth—has gone missing. So when someone offers up a bold promise backed by actual bar graphs, I take notice.

The presenter, Professor T. Warren Hardy from the University of Maryland–Baltimore County (UMBC), stated that his students performed significantly better on their final exam largely due to his use of online self-assessments. Upon hearing this, I immediately put on my Agent Scully trench coat and asked myself why his conclusions could be off.

  • Was his final exam easier than the one used in other sections? No, all sections take the same final exam.
  • Did he give his students an unfair advantage by using final exam questions in his self-assessments? No, the final exam is designed by other members of the department who are not currently teaching the course. To ensure a level playing field, the instructors have no knowledge of the specific questions that will appear on the final exam.
  • What if he’s just a better instructor than the faculty teaching the other sections? That might hold water if it wasn’t for the fact that Professor Hardy’s students scored considerably higher than his own past students after he converted the course to a hybrid format with online self-assessments.

Of course, I’m sure there are other variables that might impact the validity of Professor Hardy’s findings. Yet, after hearing the unique steps that UMBC’s economics department takes to ensure a rigorous and standardized final exam for the five-hundred students who take ECON 122 every year, I felt the 20 percent difference on Hardy’s final exam scores were hard to dismiss.

In addition to praising his students’ performance, Hardy’s co-presenters from UMBC noted that his course was a regular in the University’s list of most-active Blackboard courses. Hardy attributed his students’ extensive and frequent use of Blackboard largely to his course’s reliance on adaptive release. Adaptive release refers to a set of restrictions that can require students to view and interact with certain online content and/or assessments before new instructional materials are made available. In Hardy’s course, students were required to access learning materials and complete quizzes for each module before subsequent modules could be accessed. Hardy and his colleagues believe this approach helped students pace themselves and decreased the odds that they might skip vital content needed to succeed on the final exam.

Perhaps even more impressive than the student performance in Hardy’s initial hybrid offering was the fact that his hybrid students continued to score higher than their peers in subsequent course offerings. In addition, when the course was offered fully online in the summer of 2010, students scored even higher than those in previous hybrid sections.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much of the improved student performance was due to the online self-assessments, adaptive release, or other unique aspects of Hardy’s online course design and teaching style. However, his findings clearly show that low-stakes knowledge checks and conditional release of content can have a significant impact on student performance. While I still consider myself a skeptic, even Agent Dana Scully had to admit once in a while that supernatural phenomena do exist. Whether it’s the wolf-man, alien abduction, or online courses that prove more effective than face-to-face, the truth is out there and we owe it to our students to keep digging.

Additional Resources

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Ready, Set, Act: Running Your Show in the Classroom

The sound so vibrant and rich, the tone so vivacious, the gesture so pulsating, and the emotion so poignant and touching, it brought tears to the eyes of the audience as they listened to the recitation of the “poem”—or what they thought was a poem.

“It was done in Russian by a renowned actor from Russia,” my father said as he described the performance, conducted by a visiting Russian actor to his theatre troupe in China in the 1950s. Although none of the Chinese audience could understand a single word of it, they were completely mesmerized by the presentation—until one of them raised the question: what is it saying in the poem?

No, it wasn’t a poem. With a short pause, the actor revealed, through an interpreter, what he was reciting—a restaurant menu!

So with all the feelings and passions he could project, he was reciting something like cabbage rolls, fish sautéed with onions and mixed with hard-boiled chopped eggs and, oh, potatoes mashed then mixed with eggs and smetana!

This story came to my mind as I started to plan for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference with colleagues from the office of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. The theme we selected for this year’s conference is teaching as an act of body and brain. Inspired by Nancy Houfek’s philosophy and practice of using theatre techniques to enhance teaching (see the video below), we decided to bring her to DePaul as a keynote speaker to talk about the power of acting or how to induce tears by reading a menu.

As Nancy points out, the techniques used by actors to captivate an audience can very well be borrowed by professors to engage students in the classroom. Yet in our daily practice, we as teachers often focus almost solely on the content and leave the delivery of the content to chance.

Content is critical, but without gaining the attention of your audience, it won’t come across. While the story of menu reading is a bit extreme, it does convey a very strong message: sometimes when it is done extremely well, the presentation can overpower the content! Even if we can’t go that far, it can at least help us capture the attention of our students.

There is a common attribute shared by the profession of acting and the practice of teaching: both require a high dosage of passion. We teach largely because we are in love with it. The difference between us and actors is that they seem to know better how to make that passion visible—through their voice, gestures, and body languages. We teachers, on the other hand, rarely make any conscious choice about the nonverbal messages that we convey, especially when we are in the classroom.

On May 6th, following Nancy’s keynote speech, DePaul Theatre School professor Natalie Turner-Jones will lead a practical workshop exploring theatre-based techniques that can be applied to the classroom environment. She will explain why the way we use the classroom space, gesticulate to make a point, move, breathe, or pause all convey a clear message to our students and how making conscious choices in these areas empowers teachers to create an engaging and playful learning environment.

So, if you haven’t yet, please mark your calendar for May 6th’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference and registers online at http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/Conference/registration.html

DePaul Instructors Talk about Teaching

The most recent video posted on DePaul’s Teaching Commons features Mary Frances DeRose of the School of Public Service. The video focuses on what she’s learned about how to teach statistics since first arriving at the university.

Difficult Courses: Statistics, produced by videographer and animator Heather Banas, joins a growing number of short videos about teaching available in the Teaching for Learning video archive. Each video features DePaul faculty members—from a variety of disciplines—talk about how they teach.

I am not an objective observer. By way of honesty, I was privileged to produce some of the first videos for the DePaul Teaching Commons website. But, as a sometime qualitative researcher, I also can’t help seeing this archive as a growing collection of data! And have, therefore, noticed some themes!

Watch some of the videos and see if you don’t agree:

  • Theme One: Some assessments are worthwhile, some are not.
  • Theme Two: Real world examples engage students.
  • Theme Three: Make good use of students’ time in the classroom.
  • Theme Four: Use multiple techniques during class to address the varying abilities among students.
  • Theme Five: Create opportunities for immediate feedback.
  • Theme Six: Create opportunities where students can view their progress.

In the statistics video, I was particularly impressed by one assignment used by DeRose: returning to the same journal article (one selected by the student) several times throughout the quarter. Over the course of the class, students realize how much they have learned. An assignment to match all six themes!

An upcoming opportunity to hear DePaul faculty talk about teaching—this time live and in person—is the DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, May 6. Register today!

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The Nuts and Bolts of Instructional Design

In the FITS Department, there are a few things we assume pretty often. We are tasked with providing technology training and support services to faculty and with designing and assisting in the implementation of online courses. So the technology part of the Instructional Technology Consultant or Instructional Designer is often what’s emphasized the most. The majority of the work we do involves interacting with, mastering, and then teaching emergent technologies. However, even before the explosion of all this technology, people like us were doing the same job with more emphasis on the instructional part. We are here to support teaching and learning first. Doing so with technology comes second, but it’s easy to forget this when we are surrounded with faculty who want the next big thing right now. Think back a long ways to the days when reel-to-reel films became available relatively cheaply. Before long, someone decided that these films would be great to show to students in school, and then the initial challenge was presented: how to incorporate such a novel experience as watching a film in school as authentic learning experiences. Once the novelty wore off for students, the next challenge was to continue to use audiovisual materials to enhance instruction rather than just relying on them as instruction in and of themselves. Thus, instructional design begins to be an important idea, as a changing world prompts new ideas and new challenges in bringing those ideas to fruition.

We live in a technological world; by most accounts we are firmly entrenched in the digital age, and technology of all types is becoming virtually inescapable. We take for granted the ability to do things that were impossible only a few years or even a few months ago. I’m just old enough to remember the first wave of personal computers in schools and homes, and today you can buy a calculator that will do more than that TRS-80 or Apple II was ever capable of. Not only are we improving these near-ubiquitous technologies at a relentless pace, but the pace of these improvements is also increasing as development cycles are shortened. Today’s college students probably don’t remember not having the Internet or cell phones, but the tipping point where just about everyone had them still happened within their lifetimes!

I’ve got a technological job. I spend my days exploring technologies on the cutting edge and helping professors integrate them into classroom instruction. I am usually in front of at least one computer, more often two, all day long, and I am connected to the world through a work e-mail account, a personal e-mail account, and an instant-messaging client. I’ve got a telephone, but honestly it doesn’t get used much, as most people seem to prefer e-mail these days. I couldn’t escape all of this progress if I wanted to; in fact, it’s my job not to! Some days I feel like a technological fire fighter, because it’s my job to run into the fires that everyone else is running away from.

With all of these technological marvels swirling around us all the time, it’s easy to lose focus on the real nuts and bolts of the task: designing instruction. The task is about people, about talking to them and finding out what makes their course tick, and then translating that into improvements in pedagogy, streamlined access to resources, and smoother technology integration in the classroom for those elements that are technology dependent. Even though we’re some of the chief pushers of technology at DePaul, the ideal we are striving for is to get the technology out of the way so the teaching can continue, unburdened by “How do I…” or “I can’t….” Instructors should be asking questions that begin with “I’d like to” instead of “I need to,” and students shouldn’t be confused as to why something is used in their courses; a well-designed course makes all of the answers transparent and linear.

Yes, we love technology and try to find new ways to use it all the time, but not just because we can. Instructional design is about ideas, not stuff, and the end result should be a memorable learning experience for students no matter how it is reached. Instructors will still teach, and students will still learn, and we will still be standing in the middle of those two, working to make the jobs of both parties easier and more fulfilling and to keep them all looking forward.

Course Development: Is On the Fly Always Bad?

In the world of instructional design, it is a given that a set lead time is necessary for online-course development. With faculty availability, course load, and designer workload in mind, the instructional designer wants to plan up front to make as much time and room for the development process as possible. To nail down course objectives, learning activities that meet those objectives, media assets, and any of the other myriad pieces of course content, an instructional designer generally favors the cushion of perhaps two terms ahead of when the course is to be taught to coordinate with the instructor and the other members of the design team.

On the other hand, “on the fly” course development—that is, building a course as it is being taught, week by week—is a common, if little desired, practice. Instructors have many priorities, including academic travel, which too often trump their commitment to developing new courses. Resourceful instructional designers make a course happen, even when bumping against (and past) deadlines. Designing on the fly can seem like the least-desired way to develop an online course offering, but is it always?

Software development, a field not too far flung from online training and teaching, has recently begun to realize a sea change in the dominant process philosophy: from traditional, upfront “waterfall” process to iterative, adaptive, “agile” methods. Waterfall is a process where the activities flow down an orderly succession of steps, such as:

  1. Concept
  2. Requirements
  3. Architectural design
  4. Detailed design
  5. Coding and development
  6. Testing and implementation

This linear series of steps is in contrast to the “agile” concept of development, where projects are built in iterations, with regular retrospection into the needs of the customer and how the evolving project should adapt to meet them.

iterative design
Image courtesy Kumido Adaptive Strategies

At its core, agile believes that it is impossible to know everything required to build software up front, that the customer can only gain that knowledge from the process itself.1 And so it often is with course development! Until a course is actually taught to students, it can be impossible to determine whether it will meet their learning needs as it is designed. That tool for the synchronous session never worked as it was promised and will need to be abandoned for a better option, or you realized during the quarter that those five-point discussions need to be turned into written assignments.

This isn’t to say that the structure of a course should be changed midstream. The syllabus given to students at the beginning of the offering term is essentially a learning contract and sets an expectation for the learning experience to come. But what if the process of developing the course allowed for a more iterative model? What would a more agile approach to instructional design look like? How could we design learning modules that are highly adaptable and easily changed? Can we embrace the idea that learning materials and programs are not designed, then built, and only then evaluated—let alone that they are produced with the expectation of updates and new versions to be produced? How do we adapt the course-development process to allow for much, much more feedback from the learners and educational stakeholders?

As e-learning becomes online learning and online learning becomes a major component of the educational model, our development techniques and philosophies must also evolve. All development up front is an ideal, but perhaps it is an ideal of the past.

1 Extracted from: Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, James R. Trott – NetObjectives Lean-Agile Series.