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.)

Rubrics? Really?

Yes, really.

Use rubrics, and use them often.

Even you, Mr. Chips.

Whether you teach creative writing online, environmental science in a hybrid setting, or computer programming face-to-face, use rubrics.

Please.

For the students’ sake.

Everyone will tell you that grading will be easier and faster with a rubric. I don’t care about that, though it may be true.

Don’t get hung up on the rubric design (grid or checklist?) or the style (analytic or holistic?) or the point system (how many points does one deduct for misspelling Glasnost?) In fact, forget the point tally, even. Scrap all of that for now.

Students, especially online students, want more feedback. And you’re probably not giving them enough.

One of the highlights of DOTS is when a group of students joins us for Q&A with the faculty. Professors have the opportunity to ask real live students what it’s like, what it’s really like, to take college courses online. And they get (mostly) straight answers. This week, I listened to one student lament that none of her recent online instructors gave her feedback until the very end of term. None?

What?

Moral of the story: use rubrics in your online courses. Start now. Believe it or not, “A” students want to know what they can do to improve. “D” students want to know what they are doing well (did I get nothing right?). If you aren’t doing a good job at telling them what’s working and what’s not, let your rubric do the talking.

That said, rubrics aren’t meant to replace written and/or verbal feedback. On the contrary, if you are one of the instructors who already provides ample, personalized feedback to students, please use a rubric in addition to your written and verbal feedback. That will not only keep your “human element” intact but also fill in any gaps that the rubric might not address.

I’ve heard a few groans when talking about this stuff. One professor, who shall remain nameless, responded to my prompt about rubrics with “Yeah, I use a rubric alright. It looks like this: [expletive] or not [expletive].” Funny, yes, but exactly my point!

Among other things, rubrics help instructors get clear on:

  1. the learning objectives for each assignment;
  2. how to classify above average, average, and below average work;
  3. what each student’s strengths and weaknesses are;
  4. what an entire class’s strengths and weaknesses are; and
  5. whether an assignment’s given instructions are clear or not.

What professor, in what field, should not be concerned with all of the above?

Perhaps you can come up with a wily response to that question—some kind of probe into what learning environments could, should, and/or shouldn’t be. But you, the instructor, can be as creative as you want to be when constructing a rubric. Go completely off the grid if you so desire. Include your students in the creation of the rubric! (Talk about a great way to encourage them to take ownership of their learning goals.) But no matter the approach you choose, prepare to spend some time designing and writing a rubric. Count on at least a few drafts and test drives. Use your learning objectives as your guide. Run your rubric by your instructional technology liaison. Check it against the “Rubric for Rubrics.” Eventually you will have a solid vehicle for feedback, and you’ll be able to drive that baby into the virtual sunset. With Mr. Chips.

Helpful resources:

Tools Are Just That

In the DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS), the facilitators demo a lot of tools. The number of tools is overwhelming for the facilitators, so it is no surprise that the number of tools is extremely overwhelming for faculty.

As facilitators, we often hear statements like “this tool doesn’t make sense for my class;” “this tool is too complicated;” “there are too many tools being presented;” “it takes too long to make stuff with the tools—I could never use them in every class.”

Fortunately or unfortunately, presenting tools is important. Bringing a traditionally face-to-face course online means some things will need to be done differently. Translating a lecture online requires tools.

The crux of the problem is not the tools, but the perception that using any particular tool is mandatory. We aren’t dictators determining what you have to use to run your class. We’re offering suggestions. Every tool in DOTS is a suggestion.

And we don’t suggest using all, most, some, or any of the tools. It’s up to the faculty to determine how their students will best learn the subject. The facilitators barrage faculty in the hopes that there will be something, somewhere, that might be useful in mitigating some of the challenges of bringing the course online.

As facilitators and instructional designers, we say, “think about your teaching style and choose one tool that fits how you like to teach.” Don’t commit to that tool. Use that one tool to accomplish one thing, in one class, in one module. If the tool works, great! Use it again for another module! If the tool doesn’t work or only works passably, you haven’t committed to it. Try one of the others.

Don’t sweat tech. Tech is just a tool. If a tool is broken or doesn’t work well, don’t use it. Get a new one. A different one. Try again.

To use a horrid cooking analogy, "don’t sweat a bad cheese slicer."

Don’t sweat cheese slicers. Cheese slicers are just a tool. If a cheese slicer is broken or doesn’t work well, don’t use it. Get a new one. A different one. Try again.

You don’t go to the store shouting about how all cheese slicers are wretched tools whose only purpose is to subvert your ability to cut cheese.

You find a better cheese slicer.

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Please Don’t Interrupt Me While I’m Talking to Myself—Er, My Students

As a realist (read: former high school teacher), I know that introducing new technology for student assessment needs to be done with a healthy mix of sound pedagogical practice and efficiency. And, sometimes—particularly around, ahem, week ten of the quarter—efficiency can take precedence.

With those two qualifications in mind, I tried giving audio feedback to my students last year. I teach in the First Year Writing program, so I had students turn in texts to me via the D2L Dropbox, and for those assignments, I still used Microsoft Word’s track-changes feature to give them feedback.

But when it came time to look at the ePortfolios they were building in Digication, I felt like I needed to do something different, for a few reasons:

Functionality: Digication doesn’t yet have a feature for instructors to give in-line feedback on ePortfolios, though it’s something they’re working on. In the meantime, though, my first method was opening a Word document and typing into it as I read the student’s ePortfolio. This sort of worked, but I felt like I was spending more time describing what part of the ePortfolio I was looking at than I was actually giving feedback.

Genre Appropriateness: When students turn in texts, it makes sense for me to respond to them in text—I can make grammar/usage corrections easily, and if I want to show a student how to reorganize a sentence or paragraph for clarity, I can easily copy and paste that content to show changes. With ePortfolio content, which typically includes multimodal elements, it just seemed goofy for me to write up a reaction to the images and videos that the students had put in their portfolios.

Depth: As an early graduate of the Mario Teaches Typing school, I can produce a few paragraphs of feedback for students pretty quickly. But my swift fingers are no match for my talking skills (note how I avoided the phrase “hot air” there).  And, there’s no law against combining some text feedback with audio, which is really easy to do in D2L with the Record Audio feature (see page 5 here).

Feelings and Stuff: Please don’t throw stones at me for saying this, but on occasion, I enjoy grading. This aberration usually occurs when I see the improvement/hard work/excellence/etc. in what a student has turned in. I do a little happy dance, and then I try to put that happy dance in text, and using ten exclamation marks just doesn’t seem to do it (and it probably weirds out students). A voice recording, where the student can hear how jazzed he or she just made me, comes much closer.

So, with all of these sound pedagogical reasons in hand, I gave it a try, and guess what? It also conveniently took much less time, and I still felt like I had given quality feedback to my students.

I did some digging to see if other instructors were trying this method, and I found Mary Lourdes Silva’s “Camtasia in the Classroom: Student Attitudes and Preferences for Video Commentary or Microsoft Word Comments During the Revision Process.” In her writing course for engineering majors, Silva gave students both Microsoft Word comments and screencasted feedback (capturing both voice and the student’s paper on the screen).

Silva reports that “…several students found the video commentaries more personable because they assumed that I spend more time on the video commentaries that on the Microsoft Word comments, although the Microsoft Word comments, on average, took 10 minutes longer per student per essay (10 pages in length).”

Also, of the sixteen students who watched the video, four students replayed the entire video twice, and eleven replayed parts two to four times. Silva also surveyed students, and of the seventeen who responded, eight preferred the video commentary, and six found a combination of the Microsoft Word comments and video to be most helpful.

The biggest obstacle Silva faced was video file size, which is the reason I still just record audio, which is a smaller file size. The problem is that I have to count on my students to open their ePortfolios and follow along while they listen to my feedback.

I’ve continued to give audio feedback in subsequent classes, and my students anecdotally report feelings similar to Silva’s students—the combination of some Word commenting and some audio works for them.

I’ve also gotten better at recording audio: I speak more slowly, ramble less, and give clearer direction to students to let them know exactly what I’m looking at.

Audio feedback won’t work for every assignment, but evidence suggests that it’s a worthwhile option for some assignments, from both the instructor and student perspectives. At the very least, nothing beats the look on someone’s face when they knock on your office door, expecting to interrupt a meeting, and find that it’s just you talking to your computer.

Flipping Your Classroom

One of the hot trends, particularly in secondary education, is the flipped classroom. According to the pioneers in the field, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, "In this model of instruction, students watch recorded lectures for homework and complete their assignments, labs, and tests in class"1. While one may think that this is the model we use for blended or hybrid classes, it is not. Instead, the flipped model really applies to face-to-face classes. The authors point out that the model is a mixture of direct instruction and constructivism. Is it not just having the students watch a video lecture online; a well-constructed flipped class online session includes learning activities and discussions that supplement the lecture.

In the flipped classroom, the instructor prepares a series of short videos or lectures using tools such as Screencast-o-matic (a screen-capture tool), Voicethread, or other similar tools. The lectures are uploaded to D2L along with interactive questions or discussion threads. Students watch the lectures and participate in the discussions as ‘homework.’ The face-to-face class time, then, is available for instructor-guided activities such as labs, group projects, or other student-centered learning activities. Some activities may include working on what we think of as ‘traditional’ homework, the advantage being that if a student is stuck on a concept, the instructor is there to provide help and immediate feedback.

Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to flipping the classroom. On the positive side, I watch many students in my classes scrambling to take notes while I lecture. If they miss part of the lecture, it certainly can’t be repeated. In the flipped model, on the other hand, they can rewind the lecture and play the part they didn’t quite understand, over and over. (Though I am not sure how many students would want to hear me over and over.) Keep in mind that I teach Mathematics and frequently work through algorithms and steps in solving problems. The ability for students to replay those steps is, in my mind, a major advantage. This is also helpful for students with learning disabilities or those for whom English is a second language. Secondarily, all of the lectures are archived and available for the student to go back and review. This assumes that the lecture material is well organized and catalogued so that the student can find it easily.

There are also advantages once the student is in the face-to-face session. You, as the instructor, now have time to personalize the interaction with your students, guiding them and answering questions directly as they work through the assignments in the classroom. You also now have time for creative and engaging projects in small-group activities with you present as the facilitator and coach. Your classroom now becomes a studio, a laboratory, a simulation lab, or a role-play environment—not just a lecture hall. Some instructors encourage their students to write down questions they have when watching the lectures and then spend one-on-one time during the class answering those questions, or they may collect the questions via email and answer the most common one to the entire class.

Of course there are disadvantages. If the student does not watch the lecture, or is multi-tasking (texting on their cell phone or watching TV) while watching the lecture, then they are ill-prepared for the classroom portion. Some instructors incentivize this by embedding self-assessment exercises in the lecture using a tool such as SoftChalk (which is a DePaul-supported tool). Another criticism is that many instructors deliver engaging and interactive lectures in class that they feel simply cannot be captured in a video or other online activity. They feel that two-way communication will be lost in the impersonal nature of online delivery. This is, of course, a challenge faced by instructors in the development of hybrid or fully online instruction. So here is a chance for a commercial plug: your friendly FITS instructional designer can help you make your online lectures engaging and interactive.

One might ask if there are particular disciplines in which flipping the classroom makes more sense? As an instructor in lower level Mathematics, I can see tremendous benefit there, as well as many science courses where the lecture content can be delivered online and the class time spent productively with laboratory/problem-set activities. The flipped classroom, however, is not restricted to the sciences and is successfully used in a wide variety of disciplines. There is a wealth of literature and opinions on the subject. Here are a few websites that are worth viewing if you would like more information on the subject.

  • This infographic is a good illustrated overview of the flipped classroom with some outcome-based results (but not cited). There is also a good comment section with both pros and cons.
  • Flipped Learning held a conference here in Chicago this past summer. Their website has a wealth of information.
  • Another similar organization is at flippedlearning.org
  • Edutopia has a good and balanced article.
  • A very balanced and more thought provoking article can be found at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: “To Flip or not Flip: That is NOT the question”. As we all rush to get on the latest bandwagon, this brings us back to the concept that is it good teaching that makes the difference. Technology can be an enabler, but it is not the solution.

 

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Choices—Too Much of a Good Thing?

One of the things to be praised about Desire2Learn is the flexibility it offers to instructors in the way they can present course materials and content. You don’t just have to tell students to go to the Quizzes tool for an exam; you can link to it from Content, from a Checklist, or even from within an already-established HTML page. You can create a special widget that will link to it, or a News item that points to it. You can even make a special navigation bar button that will go directly to it for that all-important final. More is better, right?

Not always. Some instructors provide multiple links to the same documents, quizzes, or content, in an effort to make things easier for their students to navigate. Although this gives you incredible versatility in how you can set up your course site, linking in many different ways can, in fact, actually reduce the overall perceived usability of your course site. Furthermore, you may be creating extra headaches for yourself in course design to maintain all these links. Consider these things:

  1. What if you change the location of a piece of content that is linked to from three or four different places? It creates a situation in which every time you move content around, you risk breaking not one, but three or four different links, which you will have to replace manually.
  2. Having multiple links to the same thing can in some cases reduce the security you have been careful to apply to certain materials. For example, you might have a link to a quiz that is set to appear in Content with a release condition, so students must satisfy a condition in order to see it. At the same time, you must remember to set the same condition for every link to that quiz in your course site, or you risk students getting into the quiz without your knowledge. Here’s the even bigger kicker: if you create that quiz link in an HTML page in Content, or in a News item, you simply can’t apply the release condition to it even if you wanted to.

On the surface, since the majority of complaints we get as instructors from students about our course sites are access-related, it would seem to make sense that the more ways we give them to find things, the less likely they are to have these issues. However, this is only partially true. When students are confused about where to find things, giving them more links may or may not actually have any effect. It’s like applying the scattershot approach to solving the problem. “If they can’t find one link, I’ll give them four, in different places. That should do the trick.” However, is this really a solution, or just a quick fix?

The real solution lies in how we think about a course’s UI, or user interface. Desire2Learn does a great job of making a lot of the hard stuff easy by presenting an interface that is fairly intuitive. For example, when you first come to a Course Home page, you will see News items front and center, you will be notified about upcoming course events, and you will see a navigation bar that presents the major tools that will be used in the course. It is pretty obvious that the notifications are there to be read, and are visible for that purpose. It also is pretty obvious that there are a number of features in the navigation bar that are important to the functioning of the course.

Beyond that, as much as we wish we could, we can assume nothing about one course site as compared to another. No two course sites are created equally, as the flexibility D2L offers instructors also means that they can make radically different course content without changing much of anything in the default ways their site runs. For example, some instructors use the Quizzes tool extensively for all their exams in a course, while some use it only for low-stakes ungraded weekly problems. Some instructors eschew the Quizzes tool altogether for essay exams, using the Dropbox tool instead so they can run essays through Turnitin plagiarism detection. If you’re a student coming into a course site, can I assume you will know just what to do, given this huge array of possibilities, if you are just dropped into the course site?

Of course not. Therefore, the onus is on the instructor to provide a clear path to navigating success in the course, which includes the course site. Rather than giving students many different ways to do the same thing, which in some cases will confuse them, it turns out to be far better to give them one, but to explain it completely.

It seems a bit pejorative to say that you should strive to make your course sites “foolproof,” but that is exactly the way to go about it. This is something we at FITS are always encouraging instructors to do. When students arrive at the site, do they find instructions that tell them how to get started? Is there a clear and consistent navigation scheme present that students can easily figure out? Are materials there given titles that demonstrate where they fit in the hierarchy? The best course sites should take little to no extra time on your part to explain, because they should be simple enough to navigate and understand that a first-timer should know what to do. Are your typical procedures pretty much the same from week to week? If so, trying to keep everything consistent as far as look and feel will greatly reduce any confusion later on. Here are a few things to think about and do that can help:

  1. Give students a “Welcome” News item on your Course Home page that links directly to the syllabus, schedule, and other pertinent materials to get them started right away.
  2. Use an easy-to-follow module structure in Content. Many professors use a week per module, but you could use a case study, a unit, or anything you can think of, so long as the module structure is consistent and easy to figure out.
  3. Use the same consistent structure for your modules in Content each week, including keeping things in the same order (you might think ordering doesn’t matter to students, but it definitely does). If you have additional materials for some weeks, put them at the end of the week’s list.
  4. Brevity is key. Students hate exhaustive detail (and sorry students, I don’t mean in long reading assignments!). The more complicated your course structure is, the more likely a few will get lost!
  5. If you’re not using the tool in the navigation bar, get rid of the button. Some students will actually email you asking about why you don’t have quizzes when you might not even be doing online quizzing!

Rethinking your user interface isn’t easy; in fact, it can be one of the hardest things to do in taking a course online. But fear not: we’re here to help. You can find your college or school’s embedded Instructional Technology Consultant at http://fits.depaul.edu/Contacts/Pages/default.aspx , or you can get answers to those burning course design questions by emailing fits@depaul.edu.

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Mastery and Time

At a conference a couple months ago, I had the opportunity to hear Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, talk about the genesis of his organization and how his model of education differs from the traditional model. Khan Academy, for those unfamiliar with it, offers videos and automated exercises to help students learn a variety of subjects online for free. Khan Academy has also partnered with a few K-12 schools to make these online resources the central learning materials of certain classes.

Khan Academy has branched into other subjects, but it started with math and still tends to focus on STEM subjects. And one of the fundamental realities of learning math is that it’s cumulative; anything new you’re taught is based on what you’re supposed to have learned before. If there are gaps in your understanding of the previous topic, you’re going to have a very difficult time learning what comes next. This is true of other subjects too, but it’s especially true of math.

This is in line with my personal experience. I was always a high performer in math classes in K-12, until my junior year of high school, when I was out sick a lot over the course of a few weeks during a trigonometry unit. I tried to catch up, but after that, everything stopped making sense to me. I wound up getting a C in the class, and though I continued to show high aptitude in quantitative reasoning (bragging rights: I got an 800 on that section of my GRE even as a liberal-arts major), I never took a higher math class.

The problem, as Khan sees it, is that our education system keeps moving students forward onto new material regardless of how well they understand the last unit. The amount of time spent on each topic before moving on is constant while the level of performance of each student is variable.

When Khan Academy works with K-12 schools, that model reverses; since each student can work through the online videos and exercises at his or her own pace, the system can require the student to demonstrate mastery of a topic before moving on. Level of performance is the constant, and the rate at which students move through the material is the variable. This allows students who are behind the curve to spend as much time as they need to on a topic to truly understand it, but it also allows exceptional students to keep learning. There are no speed limits in this model—Khan reports that many elementary students were doing high-school-level math by the end of the year. (The problem with this model, of course, is that it makes the most sense if implemented institution-wide. For an individual instructor teaching a course that’s a prerequisite for other courses, you’re expected to to cover a pre-defined body of material no matter how well each student performs.)

So what do instructors do if the lectures are served in online videos and the assignments are corrected automatically? In a word, teach. One-on-one. To the students who need it, when they need it. Imagine a world in which 100 percent of instructional time was spent interacting with students or providing detailed assignment feedback. And how instructors spend their time interacting with students can be improved by technology as well. Khan Academy’s software provides detailed analytics of student progress to inform the instructor exactly where a student needs help. If a student is missing a lot of problems related to a specific concept, the instructor can intervene, re-explaining the subject, walking through additional examples, and more.

I think a lot of us would think that, now that the technology enables it, this model is more sensible. And there’s a more pressing reason to look for ways to spend more of your time interacting with students rather than lecturing. Your direct interaction with students is the main point of differentiation where we can offer value over the massively open online courses (MOOCs) that are growing in popularity.

So what can instructors take away from this?

1. Start to get out of the business of lecturing and grading objective assignments, because otherwise, you may soon find that you’re essentially spending all your time providing zero value over something like Coursera, which can do it at great scale and thus much lower cost than your class. Either start recording your lectures for re-use so you can flip your classroom, or find high-quality digital materials you can use in your course to substitute for your own lectures.

2. Your maximum value as an actual human being over the MOOCs and automated classes of the world is your direct interaction with students, whether that’s in the form of providing expert feedback on assignments, helping them with difficult concepts, or coaching them on how what they’re learning now will be applicable in the rest of their academic careers or in their jobs. Be prepared to do more of that.

3. Look for opportunities to require your students to demonstrate mastery before moving on to a more advanced topic. Give students a chance to retake online quizzes until they’ve gotten a perfect score, and don’t let them see the next module until they do. Don’t just make students write a proposal for their final paper—make sure they use your feedback and update the proposal before they go on to the module about research. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all method for doing this that will apply to every discipline, but there are options.

If you can combine rich digital resources, either created by yourself or leveraged from others, with a renewed focus on individual student interaction, plus methods to ensure students achieve mastery before moving on to new material, you can expect higher student performance.

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Lessons from Four Years of Faculty Development

For the last few years, one of my key job duties has been developing the curriculum and facilitating workshops for the DePaul Online Teaching Series. DOTS is a professional-development program that helps faculty make the transition to online teaching through thirty-six hours of workshops, trainings, and online-learning activities. Since the program’s inception in 2008, we’ve collected extensive feedback from our 239 graduates across all 14 cohorts to find out what they liked about the program and how it could be improved. In response, we’ve tweaked everything from the readings and assignments to the software we promote and the way we arrange the seating for face-to-face workshops. Today, faculty interest in DOTS continues to grow, and our most recent cohorts have set records for total applications and enrollment. 

In the summer of 2012, DOTS won the Sloan Consortium Award for Excellence in Faculty Development for Online Learning. Before I received the news, I’d already committed to giving a presentation at the Sloan-C annual conference to share some of the “secrets” of DOTS’ success. While I was excited I’d be able to mention the award as part of my presentation, I also felt added pressure to include useful tips and lessons that the audience hadn’t heard before.

To prepare for the presentation, I reviewed four years worth of DOTS survey feedback, looking at trends in answers to multiple-choice questions and identifying common themes in the responses to open-ended questions. Because I’d read all of the survey results before as each cohort completed DOTS, I had several assumptions about which aspects of DOTS would be the most praised and which would be the most criticized. However, poring over all the data in a single day and quantifying the results revealed a few interesting and unexpected results.

While I’d like to save a few secrets for the Sloan-C attendees, I thought I’d share some of my favorite findings here.

  1. Faculty loved screencasting no matter which tool we used. Over the years, we’ve tested and trained faculty to use just about every screencasting tool imaginable. (Most of our faculty currently use Screencast-o-Matic.com.) We always knew faculty liked screencasting because it was an easy transition from traditional lecture delivery. What was a bit surprising was the fact that 14 percent of survey respondents mentioned screencasting training as one of the most useful elements of DOTS—more than any other tool or concept. In addition, negative comments were almost nonexistent regardless of which screencasting tool they tried.
     
  2. Self-pacing eliminated nearly all complaints about hands-on software trainings. For the first three years of DOTS, we ran hands-on software trainings with a traditional, follow-the-leader approach. A trainer would demonstrate each step on a projector while faculty followed along and completed the same task on their laptops. This approach led to many complaints that the trainer was either moving too quickly or too slowly, and less tech-savvy faculty would often hold up the class as they struggled to keep up. To resolve this, we shifted to a self-paced approach. The trainer now begins with a fast-paced demonstration that lasts roughly ten minutes. During this time, faculty observe without attempting to perform the task. Next, each participant is given a handout and asked to complete a basic task in the software while staff members mingle and provide one-on-one support as needed. This approach has been very well received and allowed us to better meet the needs of our participants regardless of their level of technology experience.
     
  3. Showing amazing examples can backfire. Ten percent of respondents mentioned feeling overwhelmed by some aspect of DOTS. While this isn’t surprising—DOTS has to introduce many new tools and course-design strategies, after all—I found it interesting that some faculty cited the high quality of the example courses as a contributing factor. When we only showed courses with very polished video lectures, interactive games, and multi-level content navigation, some faculty felt intimidated and assumed these courses represented a minimum standard they would have to follow. To address this, we began adding sample courses that provided high-quality instruction with fewer bells and whistles. We also made more of an effort to remind faculty that certain courses had already been through years of revisions after being taught several times.

Through careful evaluation of faculty feedback, we’ve been able to implement strategies like the ones above to ensure DOTS keeps getting better with each cohort. While I’m thrilled we received external recognition from an organization like Sloan-C, I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve always viewed DOTS as a work in progress with room for improvement. As a result, our 2012 spring and summer cohorts were among our largest ever, and received satisfaction ratings of 95 percent and 96 percent, respectively. In addition, a recent graduate of our first cohort in 2008 paid us an incredible compliment by “auditing” DOTS this summer. While she felt DOTS was invaluable as she began her online-teaching journey four years ago, she didn’t want to miss out on the new tools, techniques, and activities that her colleagues raved about after completing the program in 2011. This type of evangelism and passion for the program explains why one of our biggest challenges as we plan future DOTS cohorts is finding meeting spaces on campus big enough to hold all of our new participants and our repeat customers.

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Rules on the Tools: Technology Alternatives for Internet Users in China

I visited China this summer and found that many of the Internet tools that I use every day here in the United States cannot be accessed in Beijing: Google, my browser homepage, shows up blank; YouTube appears as an empty page, as do Facebook and Twitter. I felt like I was put into the experiment group of the wave-making research conducted by Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in 2010, where students were cut off from their connection with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AOL for a week. But that was just a week. How did the people of the most populated country in the world survive without these digital connections all the time?

After asking the locals, my puzzle was soon resolved and by attending the conference of Educational Innovation through Technology at Tsinghua University. The answer became clear: social media in China is as ubiquitous and impactful as it is in the rest of the world; however, because most of the popular tools are banned by the government, these social-networking functions are carried out through alternative technologies. While sitting in the sessions about social-media tools and their use for education, I tried to build a connection between the tools that I heard about and the tools that I used in the States. In the end, I came up with the following grid that summarizes the pairing of our social-media tools and their Chinese equivalents:

Tools

Their Alternatives in China

Google Search Engine

Baidu

Facebook

Renren

Twitter

Weibo

IM+Skype+WebConf

Weixin

YouTube

Tudou, Youku

Google vs. Baidu

Baidu is called the Chinese Google, but CNN Money said this might be an insult to Baidu. Comparing to Google’s 50% market share in the United States, Baidu dominated with 78 percent of the Chinese internet market in the fourth quarter of 2011. Before I learned from friends that I could access Google from its HongKong site, Baidu seems to be the best choice for me for conducting online search in China. Although I didn’t find an English interface for Baidu, its striking similarity to Google makes it possible for non-Chinese users to launch a search.

Although the interface of Baidu doesn’t present a problem to English speakers, the result might cause some confusion. For example, if you put in an English word in the text box, what you get as the result may be Chinese sites or Chinese translations related to the words. The engine also reserves the top finding for its own encyclopedia. A search for DePaul University, for example, will yield a top result of a Chinese version of a DePaul overview from Baidu encyclopedia instead of www.depaul.edu. This says clearly that Baidu is meant for Chinese users.

Facebook vs. Renren

Renren, a leading social network in China, looks, feels, and works like a clone of Facebook. Beside its Fackbook-like interface and functionalities, Renren, which means “everyone” in Chinese, shares the same origin as Facebook: it started as a campus networking system in 2005 and stayed that way for four years. In August 2009, it dropped its original name of Xiaonei, which means “on campus,” and began to aim at a boarder market of “everyone.” According to Financial Times (September 25, 2012), Renren claims that it has 157 million active users, which is 15 percent of the 995 million users claimed by Facebook.

Tempted to find the difference between Renren and Facebook, I created an account at renren.com. After filling in (and being strongly encouraged to fill in) my real name and personal information such as name, birthdate, profession, schools attended, and interests, I was granted an account. The look of my Renren site reminded me a lot of my old Facebook page before it got messed up by the “timeline” scheme.

One thing that I wasn’t asked to enter was my religion and political view and there was no status report on my “relationship” either. In addition to all of the Facebook-ish clickables, Renren has an icon on its upper right corner that says “write journal” (see images below). Like embedding a blog into a Facebook site, this function enables people to go beyond a quick note. Users can express themselves in-depth and with length in a blogging manner. One other thing that tells the difference between the east and the west in terms of data sensitivity is Renren’s exposure of visitors. When I logged into my Renren page the day after the account was created, it displayed a guy who had visited my page. Oh my god, do I want to know who visited me? Or do I want anyone to know that I visited him or her? No wonder there has been no English interface for Renren—no American would like that kind of exposure!

Twitter vs. Weibo

It will be an understatement to Weibo to call it the Chinese version of Twitter. As a system pushed out by China’s Internet giant Tencent after Twitter was blocked by Chinese authorities in 2009, Weibo delivered a broad array of social-network functions available in both Twitter and Facebook. Like Twitter, it creates a virtual land of fan clubs for celebrities by allowing the users to be fans or followers (see image below).

Weibo, which claimed more than 233 million registered users, launched its English Interface in Nov 2011.

IM+Skype+WebConf vs. Weixin

I was shocked by how quickly email is becoming obsolete in China. Although most of my friends still have email accounts and still check them once in a while, they almost all opted for this new app called “Weixin,” which means “micro-message” in Chinese and is called “WeChat” in English. WenXin or WeChat can be downloaded to various mobile devices or a computer. It allows users to send voice, video, photo, and text messages. By indicating your location, it can also help users find friends nearby. The group chat feature allows a web-conferencing kind of environment where a number of users can communicate at the same time.

YouTube vs. Tudou and Youku

It feels depressing and disabling not being able to access YouTube, and there isn’t one system in China that can resemble all the fame and content YouTube possesses. The role of video content sharing is shared among a number of tools, of which “Tudou” and “Youku” are the two dominant ones. Both sites are targeted specifically at Chinese viewers without any interface options for English or any other languages.

As you can see, it was quite a learning experience for me to find and experience all of those alternative technology solutions due to China’s rules on the tools. All of those wouldn’t have been necessary—at least for myself—had I known that there were tools designed to deal with the rules.

The technique of “fan qiang” which means “bypassing the firewall” is no stranger to most of the local users in Beijing, even though it was deemed illegal by the government. While to the instructors with students in China, it would be very helpful to know what can and can’t be accessed there, as a traveler, downloading an application, such as Freegate, to your computer prior to your trip to China will make you feel at home with your computer. This is something I haven’t tried, but certainly will for my next trip.

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Lessons from Digital Asset Management for Online Courses

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.