The following techniques can be employed to address the issue of plagiarism in an online setting. Some of the techniques are specific to Desire2Learn while some are general guidelines to consider when creating assessments.
From Flickr
TEDx Windy City: More than Just a Magic Berry
You know those awesome, addictive TED talks that can easily absorb hours of your time if you’re not paying attention? As it turns out, Chicago puts on an annual, local TEDx conference, and a couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday among the brilliant people.
As expected, the day was inspiring and brain-tiring, and I left feeling sure that none of those people waste time watching The Bachelor or reading the Craiglist Missed Connections or playing a pointless “find the hidden object” game on their iPad (guilty, guilty, and guilty). But I basked in their magnificent glow for several hours, and these are the two talks that stuck with me most: Continue reading
I Love Technology
I love technology! I am always one of the early adopters. I must have the newest and shiniest gadget or software that is still in beta. Right now, I have a preorder in for the Leap Motion Controller, an input controller that senses your individual hand and finger movements so you can interact directly with your computer. How do I plan to use it? I have no idea, but it looks “cool.” Such is my relationship with technology. Cool is good.
This obsession with the latest and greatest technology sometimes clashes with either practicality or, more importantly, common sense. As instructional designers, we are always looking for ways to help our faculty be more productive in designing and implementing blended and online courses. Likewise, we are always seeking creative and innovative approaches to improve student engagement. Continue reading
Hybrid courses: What Do You Digitize? What Do You Keep in the Classroom?
Let’s start this off by defining exactly what a hybrid course is. A hybrid course is the blend of face-to-face interaction such as in-class discussions, group work, and live lectures with Web-based technologies such as discussion boards and virtual chat rooms (wimba/collabortate). Since hybrid courses are still a very new concept, there is still much to learn on how to find the right balance between face-to-face and online learning activities.
The concept of going to college has been constantly changing over the years. These days, many students are trying to figure out ways to balance full time jobs, as well as family responsibilities, with classes. For these students, finding class schedules that don’t overlap with their work schedules can be very difficult. The introduction of online courses has helped these students, as well as those who have who have different learning styles. But on the flip side, there are students who find online courses to be lacking in the human connection that most students get in a face-to-face class. That is why hybrid courses are now becoming a viable third option. Continue reading
Learning by Annotating: A Story of My “Busy” Textbooks
On the January 21st edition of the New York Times President Obama’s Inaugural Address was published online—in a unique format. This format was described by a faculty member of DePaul’s WRD program as the way that writing was supposed to be in this day and age.
As shown in the screen capture above, this report is different from the traditional form of commentary, where comments are inserted between quotations. Instead, it took full advantage of Web technologies to include text, video, and annotation that can be delivered selectively through a click. Continue reading
How a Spreadsheet Helped 90 Percent of My Students Earn a Pulitzer
If you think keeping traditional students motivated is a challenge, try getting experienced, brilliant college professors to do their homework with nothing but passion and positive reinforcement at your disposal. That’s where I’ve found myself for the last few years as the lead designer and facilitator of the DePaul Online Teaching Series.
On the one hand, I love that I don’t have to evaluate the DOTS participants. The program is designed to introduce faculty to new tools and techniques and get them inspired about what’s possible as they make the transition to online teaching. As a result, the atmosphere of every workshop meeting is positive and supportive. On the other hand, this means I have to get creative when it comes to assignment design and maximizing participation.
Just before our December 2012 cohort began, I was desperately seeking a simple way to give faculty a big-picture view of everything they could accomplish during DOTS. For years, we’d been giving faculty clear assignment instructions and checklists to help them stay on track, but we lacked a single place in the course where they could see all of the assignments at a glance. This left many faculty feeling unclear on just how DOTS was going to help them get a jump start on essential course-building tasks. The pieces were all there, but with no way to see how everything fit together and track their progress, the assignments felt disconnected and faculty weren’t particularly motivated to share their latest triumphs.
To solve this problem, I wanted to tap into two commonly used elements of game design that increase player motivation: progress indicators and competition. Continue reading
Looking Back is Looking Forward
“Television, kinescopes, and in-service education.” How can you resist a chapter title like that?
As a latent historian, digging around among old library books is a favorite pastime of mine. (Remember: books, too, are a “technology!”)
A Guide to Instructional Television (1964), edited by Dr. Robert M. Diamond, McGraw-Hill, caught my eye not too long ago. Here’s what I learned:
Kinescopes work well for in-service teacher training, says William Hansen of the Union School District, Cambrian Park, California, because presentations on live TV made at great expense could be captured and distributed widely to be reshown at any time and the price was minimal. A Kinescope, by the way, was a movie camera set up to record a live television program (pre-videotape).
Dr. George E. Bair of the South Carolina Educational TV Center reports that rural students taught algebra and geometry via TV were tested using a nationally standardized test. Mean results for the rural-television-taught students were consistently equal to or greater than mean results for the non-television students in metropolitan systems.
Dr. Diamond, in his summary chapter on the potential for instructional television reports, “Often in the comparisons of televised instruction with standard teaching techniques the teacher has simply been moved into the television studio with a minimum of change. Unless the techniques that make television teaching more effective are used… and unless enough time is devoted to lesson preparation, the true effectiveness of the medium will remain unknown.” (p. 250).
Change a few words, and these findings could be as valid today as they were in 1964!
Kiinescope – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope
Chicago Is Our Classroom
One of the rotating banner graphics on DePaul University’s homepage boldly proclaims, “Chicago is our classroom,” enticing prospective students into a world of experiential learning in a bustling city with rich cultural, scientific, and career resources.
DePaul takes its identity as an urban university very seriously, but after the excellent Chicago Quarter program freshman year, how many DePaul instructors utilize the amazing resources of the city to teach their classes? How many instructors have even thought about what the city offers to their discipline?
Why am I bringing this up in a blog about educational technology? Because the biggest trend in consumer technology in the past five years can enable instructors to create unprecedented student field experiences and connect those experience back to the classroom. The trend I’m talking about, of course, is the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices.
This video shows how one instructor utilized students’ own mobile devices last year to help them engage with the city.
This is just one example of what mobile learning can do. And though the specific activities in this video are unique to the educational outcomes for this course, there are numerous possibilities for using mobile devices to help students engage with the city across academic disciplines.
Check out the DePaul Teaching Commons Mobile Learning Page for more information.
Effects of Web Fonts in Online Learning
Google Web Fonts makes it easy to customize the typeface you use in your online documents. You just search or browse through Google’s offering of fonts (there are hundreds!), then select and add them to a collection. You place some code provided by Google in the head of your web page HTML, and presto: you (and your readers) now have shared access to fonts that were heretofore unavailable. It’s an easy and effective way to control the typefaces displayed on your online content. What’s not easy is determining whether this is a good thing for online learning.
Why? Because research has shown that font selection has a demonstrable and statistically significant effect on learning and the perceived truthfulness of a text. Some of the findings are surprising.
One of the normally unquestioned principles of usability in web design is to facilitate ease of reading, and font selection is a key factor in the achievement of that end. Some fonts like Verdana and Georgia were designed for the web and are easier to read than others, making reading faster and less fatiguing. This facilitates the scanning for information that typifies much online activity.
There are also affective or branding considerations. A serif font like Times might be selected for an article on Renaissance literature because of its associations with academia and the humanities, while a sans-serif font like Arial or Helvetica might be chosen for a scientific journal. Choices like these influence how a message is perceived and evaluated, and for skilled Web design Twickenham designers they are intentional decisions.
Where things get more complicated is in online learning. While it’s generally accepted that ease of reading is a highly desirable goal in most web based applications, it turns out that this is not necessarily so for online learning, where the goal is to comprehend and retain knowledge. Research in 2010 by Princeton University psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer and reported in The Economist demonstrated that learning retention was improved by making text harder to read. In other words, choosing fonts that slow down a reader should aid in their retention of difficult material. To achieve better website design and functionality, it is advised to work with experts in memphis web design and development.
There’s also research on the effect of typefaces on perceived truthfulness or authority of information. Errol Morris reported in a two-part New York Times series on the results of a study designed to test whether certain typefaces influence the credulity of information. He argues that the form of writing can’t be separated from its content, and that the selection of a typeface has a direct impact on the believability of information. His study demonstrates that this effect exists and is statistically significant.
The upshot is that while web font services like Google Web Fonts (and Adobe Edge Web Fonts) provide an easy way to manipulate the typefaces used on web pages, this ability comes with an increased responsibility of designers to carefully consider the context of their use. If your goal is to make it easier for your students to remember difficult material, you should consider making the information harder to read. And if you want them to believe what you write, don’t use Comic Sans.
Moving Online: What You Lose (and Gain)
Last month, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) and talk with a number of faculty who are just starting to teach online. A common concern raised during our talks was what would be lost when translating face-to-face material into online or hybrid versions.
Faculty worried that they would no longer be able to recognize confusion on their students’ faces and might miss opportunities to clarify. They lamented that they would miss witnessing moments of discovery or realization when things finally clicked for students. They worried their students would have a difficult time forming connections amongst themselves, and that students wouldn’t feel like they had a real relationship with the instructor.
One instructor talked about how during one of the final meetings for a class he loves to teach, students rehearse and perform short sections of plays. This reminded me of a Shakespeare seminar I took in college where I stood before a group of awkward English majors and awkwardly delivered the memorable “ducket in her clack-dish” line from Measure for Measure while acting out the scene. I’ll remember that class—and that stretch of dialogue—for the rest of my life, because of the physicality of the experience and the way it truly brought the play to life.
I tried to find an image of a clack-dish, but the internet hasn’t expanded that far yet. So here’s Shakespeare.
How could we possibly create a similar experience in an online classroom?
These concerns are valid. While I would argue that there are ways to achieve high interaction between students online, and there are definitely ways to assess how your students are processing the material so you can provide appropriate feedback, modality does matter. There is no online counterpart that could capture the magic of theater in a classroom. Shakespeare was meant to be spoken aloud to a crowd hungry for entertainment. If an instructor feels too much would genuinely be lost if a course is moved online, maybe it shouldn’t be.
Because the truth is, it’s different. Anyone claiming to be able to accomplish precisely the same outcomes online perhaps hasn’t thought everything all the way through.
More than once during DOTS, our wise facilitator (Daniel Stanford) advised faculty to take a moment to “mourn” something that would have to change when they taught a course online.
And once we soothe our anxieties and mourn our losses, let’s recognize that there are genuine advantages to an online course. There are worthy pedagogical outcomes that are actually easier to accomplish with an online course. So, have a moment of silence for the chemistry we’ll lose by not breathing the same air and think about the possibilities. Here’s a short list of stuff online course do better than face-to-face course.
In an online course,
- … you can introduce your students to peers on the other side of the world and watch them work together.
- … students can rewind your lecture and listen to it again (especially the tricky parts that you might have to repeat a few times in a face-to-face class before it made sense).
- … you can see otherwise introverted students shine on discussion boards.
- …students can determine the pace of materials. (Students won’t get bored if you’re moving too slowly, or frustrated if you move too quickly.)
- … you can provide quick, private feedback if a correction needs to be made.
- … you can often reuse content from quarter to quarter. (Once you get that introductory presentation done for your 101 course, you may never have to deliver it again. You can just transfer it to your next online class and spend your energy on interacting more with your students.)