“How do I know students aren’t cheating?”

It’s a question that comes up frequently when working with faculty to design and build their online courses. And it’s a valid one. Academic dishonesty is a longstanding issue in higher education, one colleges and universities take seriously with zero-tolerance policies and severe consequences for offenders. As more courses are offered online or in hybrid formats, instructors’ typical methods of deterring and detecting cheating might seem ineffective.

As information has become more easily available, and more quickly copied (and edited so as to appear original), it’s easy to see how an over-stressed college student may be tempted to cheat in any course. Online courses add another layer of perceived anonymity and actual, physical distance between instructors and students that one would think makes it easier to cheat. (The idea is that it’s easier to lie to your computer screen than your instructor’s face.)

When your students don’t take their exams in the classroom, how do you know they aren’t sharing answers? When you don’t interact with students face-to-face each week, how can you really get to know them, their ideas, and their unique perspective (which makes it easier to spot plagiarized content)? How do you know the textbook answer key isn’t open on their desk as they fly through quiz questions?

I was recently asked to do some research on this topic, and, I have to confess, I still can’t answer those questions. Here are some things I did find out:

The bad news?

  • It was really hard to find solid statistics about how cheating in online courses compared to traditional courses. And those studies that did provide quantitative results often didn’t account for important variables. For example, one study found more students admitted inappropriate behavior in face-to-face courses, but failed to account for the number of online courses offered at that university. Much more research needs to be done in this area.
  • Everyone—students and instructors—perceives the online environment as one that is really well-suited for cheating. One survey found 74 percent of respondents felt it was easier to cheat in an online class, and 61 percent thought that their classmates would be five times more likely to cheat in an online class. (This adds to the unfortunate sense that online learning is somehow illegitimate or lacking the integrity of face-to-face courses.)
  • There is a looming prediction that as online course offerings increase, so will ways to cheat.
  • Though these stats include both online and face-to-face courses, an incredible 60.8 percent of college students admitted to cheating, and 95 percent of those who cheated reported never getting caught.
  • The online environment may open doors for “imposter students,” people hired to do students’ work for them.

The good news?

  • The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be a dramatic increase in academic honesty violations when you move your course online. According to this study, students in online courses are less likely to cheat than their face-to-face peers, contrary to common perception.
  • There are things you can do. Thank goodness! This paper outlines four strategies to curtail cheating in online assessments. I particularly like Strategy #3, which suggests modifying curriculum from term to term, and considering alternative, project-based assessments which necessitate creativity instead of giving the same multiple choice exam over and over. However, if that seems daunting, Strategy #4 is simple and effective: provide students with an academic integrity policy and talk with them about it.

Here are some resources if you’re interested in reading more:

“Impact of an Honor Code on Cheating in Online Courses” Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, June 2011. http://jolt.merlot.org/vol7no2/loschiavo_0611.htm

“Cheating in the Digital Age: Do students cheat more in online courses?” Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Spring 2010. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring131/watson131.pdf

“Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom” Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Fall 2009. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall123/stuber123.html

“Eight Astonishing Stats on Academic Cheating”, Online Education Database, 2002. http://oedb.org/library/features/8-astonishing-stats-on-academic-cheating

“Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe Not” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2009. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/do-students-cheat-more-in-online-classes-maybe-not/8073

“Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2012. http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-High-Tech/132093/

“The Shadow Scholar” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2010.  http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

“Ethics and Distance Education: Strategies for Minimizing Academic Dishonesty in Online Assessment”, Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Fall 2002. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall53/olt53.html

“Online Plagiarism and Cybercheating Still Strong – 61.9%”, neoacademic.com, February 2011.  http://neoacademic.com/2011/02/04/online-plagiarism-and-cybercheating-still-strong/

Getting Ready For Your Close-Up: Video Tips for Faculty

Making a video that will meet your objectives is not an easy task, but there are some simple guidelines to increase your odds of success. I’ve used this space before to describe the challenges I’ve encountered creating online course videos that are actually engaging to view, so it’s fair to ask why I keep returning to this subject, and why I harp so much on faculty preparation.

Here’s why. In my experience lack of preparation on the part of the on-camera talent (faculty, subject-matter experts, etc.) is the greatest obstacle to a successful video production. It’s an easily preventable waste of everyone’s time and efforts.

And it can be a substantial waste. Unless you’re making a quick webcam video introduction that will run at the start of the course and be replaced the next term, producing video is a resource-intensive undertaking. There are meetings to set goals and gather requirements, scripts that must be written and revised, production personnel and studios to be scheduled, props and digital assets to be assembled, editing and compositing in post-production; all before you get something to review and ultimately publish. Unless you have unlimited resources (and who does?) it’s imperative that the end product meets its purpose, whether it’s to add some social presence or help realize a learning objective. And you can be sure that its purpose won’t be met if it’s unwatchable.

So here are some preparation tips for successful video:

  1. Determine your objective. Working with your instructional designer (if you are lucky enough to have one), ask yourself what’s the purpose of the video. Do you want to introduce yourself and the course to your students? Or is there a process or procedure you want to demonstrate? Why use a video rather than text, a podcast, or narrated PowerPoint?
  2. Write an appropriate script. Some people are naturals on-camera and can speak smoothly without a script. However, most faculty will need a script and a teleprompter unless they’re participating in an interview session. Here let’s reiterate that writing for media is a much different skill than writing for academia. Remember that you will be speaking what you write; your students won’t be reading it. You want to write more for the ear than for the eye. There are many books on this topic; Robert L. Hilliard’s Writing for Television and Radio is an often-cited text and available through the DePaul library.
  3. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. The day of the shoot is not the time to give your script a first read-through. Reading aloud through your script will quickly make evident if you’ve included difficult phrases or cumbersome words that make a smooth delivery difficult or impossible. Rewrite the rough spots, and then practice with a friend, spouse, your handy instructional designer, or even alone in front of a mirror. But do it. Repeatedly.
  4. Dress professionally and simply.I suggest opting for a solid color suit for both men and women. If you find yourself addressing a clinical matter as a scientist or physician, feel free to wear a lab coat. For a more casual look, a solid shirt, blouse, or sweater would be suitable as well. It’s advisable to avoid patterns and flashy jewelry. Additionally, if you happen to be in front of a green screen, it’s crucial not to wear anything with green in it. Oh, and when it comes to the attire, remember to wear dress just like one of these hot pink prom dresses. See these guidelines here.
  5. Wear makeup on camera. Both men and women can use a little help with shiny foreheads and dark circles under the eyes, and that’s where makeup manufacturing companies come in. These companies specialize in creating high-quality products designed to address common cosmetic concerns, ensuring everyone has access to effective solutions for a flawless appearance. You don’t want to look haggard or washed-out on-screen; you can find some makeup tips here.

Making a successful video isn’t exactly rocket science, but it does require some basic preparation. So follow these simple tips and you’ll increase the chances of getting results your students will watch and you’ll be proud of.

The Hottest Thing in Higher Ed is in Your Pocket

News flash, people: almost every college student has a mobile device, and most won’t leave home without it.  And, not surprisingly, two words have recently combined to form a compelling phrase: mobile learning. And we’re not talking laptops. Mobile learning is about cell phones, smartphones, and tablets.

Mobile learning meets the students where they are

The students are on their phones. All the time—24/7. My dad once wrote me a limerick about a girl who talked so much on the (rotary) phone it stuck permanently to her ear. But I was only clocking an hour a night tops back then. These 21st-century kids may have an hour a day when they’re not on the phone. So since we are all interested in meeting our students where they are, why not make use of mobile devices to encourage continuous learning? Why not wean our students off of their Instagram feeds (partially, anyway) and get them hooked on their study flashcards in Studyblue? Why not ask them to take out their mobile devices for a real-time poll question during class as opposed to asking them to put the phones away?

Skeptical, are you? A note about the digital divide

It’s true, not all students own smartphones or tablets. But, a simple pay-as-you-go phone with SMS (text) capabilities is sufficient for many mobile-learning activities. It’s also true that some students do not have a cellphone at all. And, I’ve met a handful of faculty members who are sticking to landlines, thank you very much. But the best mobile-learning solutions include equipment workarounds. Students can form groups and use one smartphone between them, or simply use their web browser on a computer to complete the activity.

So, what does mobile learning look like in higher ed?

The possibilities are endless. Creative combinations of GPS, augmented reality, mobile cameras, and apps can create entirely new learning experiences heretofore unthinkable without mobile devices.

An example: I can’t say I fondly remember the days of art history survey courses when I was an undergrad in the last century. Unless my professor had Lady Gaga levels of stage presence, the lectures ran pretty dry. And the room was always dark, which worked well if one needed a quick nap. But imagine the student who signs up for art history in 2013. Instead of sitting in a dark classroom on a given day, she might walk over to the Art Institute of Chicago and listen to a podcast of her instructor speaking about the exhibits. Meanwhile, she tweets her classmates about her own observations. On her way out, she submits her answers to a quiz through her mobile device, and on the train home, she reviews mobile flashcards to prepare for her upcoming exam.

Still, as cool as all of this may sound, mobile learning will never supplant the face-to-face classroom, or the online classroom for that matter

Mobile learning simply augments the instruction that already exists. Clark Quinn, one of the leading mobile-learning pundits, drops the "augment" verb every three sentences when you hear him speak. And if he’s not saying it, he’s implying it. Mobile learning enhances; mobile learning enriches. It is the trim and the moldings, not the foundation. Perhaps that is one of the more appealing features of mobile learning in the instructional-technology domain: it does not, and cannot, claim it is an educational magic bullet. It is not the cure-all for your under-engaged students. It may only appear in the form of one or two activities each quarter. But if the mobile solution is placed in the right context, the results may be downright magical.

Mobile learning may be magical, but is the outcome higher achievement

Research has only just begun in this area. If higher levels of engagement lead to higher levels of achievement, it would follow that mobile learning is promising in this regard. Returning to the art history example: when all is said and done, do you think this student might have had better knowledge transfer via a traditional slideshow carousel in a dark lecture hall? Perhaps, depending on her learning style. We’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. But there is tremendous value in offering our students learning activities that engage students in news ways and incorporate the technology they are already using. Not just for them, either. Imagine the palpable delight when you ask them to power up their phones.

For more information about the Mobile Learning Initiative at DePaul University, contact MoLI.

Mastering D2L Checklists

In FITS we are big proponents of using the Checklist feature in D2L. Using Checklists gives students an opportunity for self-assessment and eases the pressure on the instructor to answer "when is XYZ due" questions.

But every tool has a cost, and the cost of using the Checklist feature (with dates) is that whenever you copy a past or current course Checklist into an upcoming course, the dates are all out of whack and need to be updated (since dates don’t automatically roll forward in D2L).

In this post I’ll cover:

  1. Modifying Large Numbers of Date-Specific Checklist Items Quickly (Part 1)
  2. Condensing Checklists from 10 Weeks to 5 Weeks (Part 2)

Part 1 – Modifying Large Numbers of Date-Specific Checklist Items Quickly

Now the big secret isn’t really a secret. This process is essentially using Excel to pre-format the dates, keyboard shortcuts to copy/paste, and CMD+Tab (OS X) or ALT+Tab (Win/*nix) to navigate between Excel and Firefox.

First thing you need to do is update the syllabus with the new assignment dates. I recommend to my professors that they update the information on their syllabus first so they have a master list of assignments and dates to pull from.

Now that the syllabus is updated (ha, wasn’t that easy?) open Excel and copy/paste all the tasks/checklist items into Column A and the dates they are due into Column B. Ensure the dates in Column B are formatted as MM/DD/YYYY (for example: Wednesday, July 4, 2012 would become 7/4/2012) since MM/DD/YYY is the format D2L uses. This part, converting the human-readable dates to dates D2L can use, is probably the most time-consuming part of the whole process of updating Checklists.

Now that you’ve got your prettily formatted tasks/checklist items and their dates, go into the Checklist area of the course (https://d2l.depaul.edu/d2l/lms/checklist/checklists.d2l?ou=<whatever the OU is>) and you should see all the Checklists.

  1. Click on the Checklist you’d like to edit.
  2. Check the box at the top of the list of Checklist items (Fig.1, 2).
  3. Click on the double pencil Icon (Fig.1, 3).
  4. You should see a page with the Checklist item information displayed nicely (Fig.2).
  5. Go to Excel and click on the cell in Column B that corresponds with the first Checklist Item.
  6. Press CMD+C or CTRL+C to copy the information in the cell.
  7. Press CMD+Tab or ALT+Tab to go back to Firefox.
  8. Click on the date for the checklist item and press CMD+A or CTRL+A to "Select All" the information in the cell and then press CMD+V or CTRL+V to paste the contents of your clipboard into the cell.
  9. Press CMD+Tab or ALT+Tab to go back to Excel.
  10. Press the down arrow to go to the next cell down in Excel.
  11. Repeat Steps 6-10 for all the Checklist items.
    • Note: The key here is to make sure you are using the shortcuts. Think about the patterns your fingers are making as you CMD+Tab, Down-Arrow, CMD+C, CMD+Tab, Left-Mouse Click, CMD+A, CMD+V, CMD+Tab, etc. It’ll take a while but after 3-5 items your fingers will start to remember the pattern and you’ll get faster.
  12. Once all Checklist items have their dates updated, click SAVE to save the fruits of your labor.

(Fig.1)

(Fig.2)

Congratulations, you are on your way to modifying your enormously long list of Checklist item dates in record time.

Now enjoy your repetitive stress injury.

Part 2 – Condensing Checklists from 10 Weeks to 5 Weeks

If you’re teaching a 10 week course in 5 weeks, instead of spending a considerable amount of effort on condensing two weeks of checklists into one, try renaming each of the weeks into A/B categories as follows:

  • Week 1 becomes Week 1A
  • Week 2 becomes Week 1B
  • Week 3 becomes Week 2A
  • Week 4 becomes Week 2B
  • Week 5 becomes Week 3A
  • Week 6 becomes Week 3B
  • Week 7 becomes Week 4A
  • Week 8 becomes Week 4B
  • Week 9 becomes Week 5A
  • Week 10 becomes Week 5B

Now you have 10 weeks of checklist content condensed down into 5 weeks. This also helps keep your "10 Week Professor" mental-model intact, so there is low or no cost having to re-learn where information is in the checklist (it’s in the same spot, but with a different name).

Now you can start removing or shuffling content from the checklists if necessary and the students have solid cognitive divisions between blocks of content (rather than jamming two weeks of probably-not-totally-related checklist content into one checklist).

Conclusion

You are now a Checklist master.

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Course Design: Behind the Curtain

Our department is tasked with providing online-course design services to faculty. This seems like a straightforward job description, but there is quite a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and some of it may not even be readily apparent upon first glance. Today, I’m going to pull back the curtain and let you in on our "secrets" to give you a little better idea of what actually goes into the instructional- and course-design process. Here’s what happens when we design your course from start to finish, in a more or less orderly fashion:

  1. Course site structure – It is important to provide a concise, consistent structure for the course, so that both you and your students can easily navigate the site without getting confused. In many of our colleges and schools, we provide a template model that contains many of the most common documents and tools and a consistent structure for course content. The main objective here is to make sure that students always know what comes next from week to week. This also helps you as you are deciding where things should appear in the course. We try and find strategies to minimize the apparent complexity of your course materials; even though students might be doing many complex tasks for you from week to week, it helps their confidence a lot to see something that looks manageable rather than unwieldy.

  2. Document design and conversion – The initial response from most faculty to having a course site is to simply upload everything they have, and use the site as a dumping ground for course documents such as syllabi, readings, and assignments. In many cases these documents are in a wide variety of formats, which can cause issues for some students. For example, not every student has Word or PowerPoint, so placing documents in your course of this type may occasionally cause problems for students. We solve this problem by taking all of that content and converting it into Web-friendly formats. Many text documents are converted to HTML, PowerPoints are uploaded to one or more online sources so that they can be shown online without forcing students to download, and Web links are consolidated into a single document to minimize the amount of searching and clicking students have to do. There are a number of hidden advantages to this: using HTML can make a Word document that had been 800 KB into something that is now 8 KB, so your course site will load faster, and students can view your documents online without having to download them. Creating online versions of PowerPoints enables students to watch the content online, take notes, and fast forward, pause, and rewind in a way they couldn’t do with a traditional file. Using HTML files enables us to apply a consistent formatting to documents, which makes your course site look better and also reduces student confusion; things look like they belong together. Furthermore, this formatting allows you to provide descriptive text about the content you are using. You can group a presentation, link to some relevant documents and external websites in the same content page, and provide descriptions of why this stuff matters and how it is interrelated. Students go to one place for everything they will need to read, watch and prepare for whatever weekly assessments you will be giving them. Contrast this with the old way, where you give them a bunch of documents to download. You are essentially saying, "Here’s some stuff. How’s it related? You figure it out."

  3. Objective and assessment design – You know what is going to happen in your course. You know what your outcomes should be for each student by the time they have completed the course. But do your students? We spend a lot of time working with faculty to make sure the objectives for their courses are attainable, measurable, and understandable to students. We teach courses all the time and assume that we are on the same page as our students. We teach the stuff and they learn it, right? To illustrate, in a certain week, what you really want is for your students to thoroughly understand Concept X. If you write an objective that says, "By the end of this week, students will understand Concept X," the first thing I’m going to say to you is, "Prove it." "Understand" is a pretty vague term in this case; it can vary widely from student to student, and in this abstract it is very hard to ensure that each student has attained the level of "understanding" you are looking for. Instead we recommend something like, "Describe the importance of Concept X in a marketing campaign with regard to personal and professional courtesy," or "Apply Concept X in creating visual resources for a marketing campaign." These objectives are then followed up with an assignment or assessment that really demonstrates to you that they do understand. The objective asking them to describe could be assessed with a written paper; the apply objective could see them creating visual aids for a campaign they are designing as part of the coursework. These assessments are then packaged into a convenient online format, so in most cases you can collect and grade entirely online. There are even tools to check the Web for plagiarism when students hand in papers!

  4. Quizzes and Exams – If you’ve never given an exam online, you really should give it a try. All of those paper quizzes you used to give can be given online, and in the majority of cases can be made to grade themselves, so you get all that time back for instruction. Some instructors worry about the possibility of students cheating on online exams; the reality is that it is actually a lot harder depending on how you set up the exam. Some instructors create multiple versions of an exam to make it tougher to cheat. Well, imagine if you could give forty (or more!) students an entirely individualized exam, where no one would have the same questions, at least not in the same order, and with even the answer choices randomized. Furthermore, you can specify a time limit short enough that they can’t refer to their textbook if they want to answer all the questions in time and even password-protect your exam to make sure they only take the exam when you want them to. Try doing that on paper!

  5. Audio and video production – Although we have a Media Production and Training department that handles the actual filming process and production, especially if you have a lot of videos, and our library handles digitizing and rights for longer copyrighted videos, we may help with the filming of screencasted lectures, audio podcast production, and the placement of all of these things into your course site. In many cases, we handle the transference of audiovisual resources from wherever they are into the final forms that will be perused by students. Some designers are experienced enough with the technology and production methods that they choose to do this stuff themselves. Either way, our primary concern is that these resources are integrated into the rest of your course materials in a way that is meaningful to your students and that shows them in context with the rest of the related materials.

  6. Creating custom applications – In some cases, there may be a need for an exercise or application in your course that cannot be handled by an existing resource, such as with the tools provided in your course site or by finding something on the Web. In these cases, we may build a custom application for you. This is a time-intensive project, and not something we do very often, but some of the FITS staff have expertise in these areas, and can build custom games or other programs for your course that will provide yet another way to get the point across to your students.

  7. Course QA – Arguably the final step with every course design is quality assurance, where we check the site from beginning to end, inside and out, to make sure you and your students are getting what was asked for. Here is a sample list of what we look for:

      1. Is the site orderly and easy to navigate?
      2. Are the majority of files in the most universal format possible? (Will they work on many different computers with many different kinds of software?)
      3. Do all of the links within the site go where they are supposed to? Are there any that need to be fixed?
      4. Do all of the images display as intended?
      5. Are there typos or grammatical errors that must be corrected?
      6. Do all of the multimedia resources work as intended? Are they as universal as possible?
      7. Is your gradebook properly set up to calculate student grades as it should be?
      8. Do your course objectives map into the exercises and assessments you have chosen properly?
      9. Are audio, video, and text articles you have chosen provided in the site in a way that will comply with copyright and fair use laws?
      10. For any materials you have chosen to date-restrict on the site, are they correct?
      11. If you are using course tools not available by default, are they available and properly configured?

Just as there are an incredible variety of courses, there are an incredible variety of options available to you in course sites. If you can dream it, there is probably a way to do it somehow, or we might just make one up. Just ask us! One of our favorite parts of this job is to go where none have gone before; we love breaking new ground just as much as you do, so we invite you to put us to the test. Contact your FITS consultant for more information. We can be found at http://fits.depaul.edu/Contacts/Pages/default.aspx.

Enter Kanban: The SNL ID Team Gets Organized

In the School for New Learning Online, we adhere to a fairly rigid course-development schedule and course-readiness process. Each quarter, we have a robust set of deadlines to meet to get our schedule of 90+ courses built, revised, reviewed, and launched. And like any team of instructional designers, the SNL Online team has plenty of other projects and daily fires to put out as well. Keeping on top of our work and keeping connected with each other, especially when we need to share resources and skill sets, could be difficult at best. Isolated in our offices and buried under piles of work, sometimes our only connection was in those series of e-mails that we would inevitably send around and around to ask a simple question. You know those emails—the ones where everyone is copied and everyone hits reply all? Toward the end of last year, we were lucky enough to see our team grow to five with the addition of two new members. It became clear that we needed some new strategies for our work.

Enter Kanban.

After consulting with a local team-dynamics coach, Derek Wade of Kumido, we decided to try a team communication tool called Kanban. For a very low investment—tape, pens, and sticky notes—we could get started right away. We agreed on several things: we would have a team board put up in a common area; we would divide it into four categories of next, now, blocked, and done. We chose different colored sticky notes for each team member (I have pink, of course) and settled on daily fifteen-minute meetings at the board to update it and each other.

With that, we got started.

 
The SNL ID team’s Kanban board

The five of us have been meeting around the board, at least three times a week for nearly six months now, and we have noticed several significant changes in the way we work. First, we know at a very quick glance what the workload is for any team member at any given time. This has allowed us to better utilize each other and to know when someone is bogged down and might need a hand.

We also have developed a sort of “thermometer” to get a sense of how much course maintenance—those pesky fires we need to put out for faculty and students—we are each handling. One the left side of the board, we have a column labeled maint and we move our individually colored sticky note up or down to reflect how many fires we have going in a week. Keeping aware of this part of our jobs has helped us, and me particularly, become more aware of how we handle this area. I know seeing my pink sticky always at the top of the column has inspired me to adjust my general work day so that when these hot-button issues come in, they can be handled without interrupting the flow of my larger projects. For instance, I started handling fires in my inbox in the morning while settling in with my morning cup of tea, then moving on to other projects for the better part of the day. A similar time is set aside in the later afternoon. The number of fires doesn’t change, but the way I handle them—and my stress level—improved dramatically. 


Maintenance Thermometer

Lastly, while we all have reported favorable changes in our personal organization of work and tasks to varying degrees, each team member feels more connected and has seen our communication increase dramatically. We are in touch more often and have a much better idea of what is happening in our department. At the same time, the thrice-weekly short meeting sessions have meant less overall meetings needed for all of us. Our weekly staff meetings with the rest of the SNL Online staff are more efficient since we are already up-to-date on our work and our team progress. And, I’m happy to report, there are so many fewer reply-all e-mails.

As well as it has worked for us, a Kanban that never changes is one that has stopped helping you grow, so next for us is a redesign of our board. We’ll try to better categorize our work and evolve the process to reflect how we have grown since we stared using it. Watch this space for Kanban II: Electric Boogaloo.

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The Case for Oversharing

“Don’t you think it’s unprofessional to share a photo of your cat with your online students? I wouldn’t start a face-to-face class meeting with a slideshow of personal photos, so why should I do that online?”

I was caught somewhat off guard by this question during a recent faculty-development workshop that focused on building a sense of community in online courses. As part of a larger presentation and training session, I showed examples of videos and narrated slideshows that instructors had created to introduce themselves to their online students. While all of the presentations included information about the instructors’ professional backgrounds, there were also slides that showed them cuddling with beloved pets, building sandcastles with their children, or posing in front of monuments in exotic locales.

I’d always thought that sharing a bit of your personal interests and life outside of academia was a great way to find common ground and build rapport with students. Apparently, not everyone agrees. One workshop attendee went so far as to state that sharing personal details such as pet photos or baby pictures could call into question the credibility of an entire department or the university as a whole.

While I think some of the concerns raised during the workshop were taken to extremes because extremes are more fun to debate, the core questions were still valid. At the time, I was hard-pressed to come up with a response for the instructor who asked why we should begin an online course with a slideshow of personal details that we wouldn’t require students to sit through during our first meeting in a traditional course.  

Over the next few days, I thought about my relationships with my favorite professors from undergrad and grad school. When I thought about the experiences that brought us closer, I realized how many of them took place outside of a face-to-face class meeting. I remembered running into a professor at a coffee shop, hearing about her latest freelance project, and getting a bit of unexpected career advice that I’ve never forgotten. I remembered a study abroad adventure where I bonded with a French professor over our shared passion for architecture. These are the types of experiences that can be impossible to recreate with online students if we don’t take the initiative. If we don’t open the door to interaction that goes beyond revision notes and exam reminders, students won’t know they’re more to us than just submissions in a dropbox waiting to be graded. And if we don’t take the first step toward building an inviting, supportive online community, we can’t blame the technology when our courses feel cold and impersonal.

A few weeks after our workshop on community building, I met again with the same group of faculty for one of our final workshops. This time, we started our meeting with a discussion panel that featured three students who had taken online courses at DePaul. At one point during the discussion, I asked the students (in the most neutral way I could think of) how they felt about faculty sharing personal photos and information about their lives outside of work. Two of the students said they loved learning more about their professors and that this type of sharing helped foster a sense of connection. The third student said he found it mildly annoying, but didn’t feel it had a negative impact on the credibility of the instructor or the course. It wasn’t exactly journal-worthy proof of the merits of over-sharing, but I felt vindicated nevertheless.

Of course, we should avoid sharing information so deeply personal it could give students nightmares or cause them to file a lawsuit for emotional distress. And I will be the first to admit that sharing travel photos will be more meaningful if you’re teaching a course on global business and you explain what your trips to Saudi Arabia have taught you about cultural differences between American and Middle Eastern corporations. Similarly, sharing stories about your toddler’s penchant for asking surprising philosophical questions might be more beneficial in a course on child development. Yet, even sharing a video of your beloved Fluffy trying to remove her head from an empty tissue box—despite its complete irrelevance to the subject of your course and its potential to ruin your reputation as a serious educator—might have an upside. When done properly, oversharing tells students that your course is about more than just readings and thesis statements and online debates. It tells them that you care about connection and humanity and all the things that make great learning experiences more than just an exchange of money for information.

I can completely understand why faculty are eager to establish clear professional boundaries when teaching online. When every interaction is recorded, trying to connect with students in ways that feel authentic and spontaneous can be stressful. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say (on this very public and semipermanent blog) that most online students would prefer that we take these risks and provide opportunities for the type of informal bonding that often occurs more effortlessly face-to-face. If that means we occasionally miss the mark and bore them with photos of our stamp collections or a story about Fluffy’s last trip to the vet, then so be it. After all, when we ask students what they love about their favorite teachers, how often does “professionalism” or “never shared cat photos” top the list?

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Change Matters for Quality Matters

Quality Matters revised its online-course review standards in May 2011. A year later, I found the reasons for the change. While the Chinese would call this ma hou pao or criticizing/evaluating with hindsight, after-the-fact findings may be validating for researchers.

This belated finding, which illustrated a rationale for the QM rubric revision, was also accidental—the initial question I had in mind was: what are the standards for which the course reviewers are most likely to disagree with each other? I use “each other” because at this time, our limited resources only allow us to assign two reviewers per course. Since the Quality Matters scoring system is set up so that if one reviewer checks “yes” and the other checks “no,” it will take the “no” and mark the standard as “unmet.” I thought looking for the most disputed standards would tell me whose fault it really was: were these course-design problems or was the disagreement caused by the lack of clarity in the standard itself?

In the past five years since DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) was launched in 2008, DePaul has been using Quality Matters to review its online and hybrid courses. Course review is the last of the three-stage DOTS process following training and course development. To complete the process, a DOTS course has to be reviewed internally by DePaul faculty and staff who have been certified by QM as peer reviewers.

As of May 2012, forty-seven DOTS courses have been through the QM review process. A compiled view of forty-seven QM reports indicated that a number of standards unmet by the courses were due to different choices made by the two reviewers. For some standards (e.g. 5.2, 6.4), the frequency of disagreement were as high as 100 percent, meaning for all of the courses that failed this element, one reviewer selected “yes” and the other, “no.” The following graph presented the top five split-decision standards.

The standards with the highest split-decision rates are:

  • SD 5.2

Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction (100% disagreement rate).
  • SD 6.4

Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course (100% disagreement rate).
  • SD 6.7

The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media (89% disagreement rate).

  • SD 4.2

The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student. (88% disagreement rate).
  • SD 3.3

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation. (80% disagreement rate).

Now you can see that something’s not right with these standards—they must be hard to interpret or not make much sense for either the authors or the reviewers.

Having used two versions of QM rubrics allowed me to check further and see when and with what version of the rubric the split-decisions between reviewers had taken place. It turned out that for almost all of the top five spilt-decision standards, the disagreement happened while the old version of Quality Matters was used—or prior to May 2011. The following table shows changes made in the new version of QM for the identified standards.

Disagreement

Rate

Standard

Old QM

New QM

 

100%

(all for the old version)

SD 5.2

Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to this course, student-student interaction

Learning activities provide opportunities for interaction that support active learning

100%

(all for the old version)

SD 6.4

Students have ready access to the technologies required in the course.

Students can readily access the technologies required in the course.

89%

(all for the old version)

SD 6.7

The course design takes full advantage of available tools and media.

<eliminated>

88%

(all for the old version)

SD 4.2

The relationship between the instructional materials and the learning activities is clearly explained to the student.

The purpose of instructional materials and how the materials are to be used for learning activities are clearly explained.

80%

(all but one for the old version)

SD 3.3

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation.

Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of students’ work and participation and are tied to the course grading policy.

Given the fact that the number of courses reviewed with the new rubric is similar to those reviewed with the old, the significant decrease in disagreements between reviewers strongly demonstrates the value of the revision. The changes have definitely made the standards more understandable, reasonable, and applicable. It also verified the necessity to continue the effort of collecting data, which will help to identify new issues that will surely emerge with the evolution of technology, the change of pedagogy, and the new demand of online learning.

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Classroom Copyright Perils

Recently, I attended a faculty professional-development event and, as is often the case at such things, the subject of putting pdf copies of course readings directly into one’s course on the university learning management system (LMS) came up. As I sat quietly (or at least attempted to), a faculty member showed how easy it was to simply upload these files into their course. "But can I do that?" someone asked. "Don’t I have to use the library reserve process?"

By nature we are all creatures of using the path of least resistance. Is it easier to simply upload everything myself into my course than to plan ahead and have someone provide me access through the library? Absolutely! The question, however, isn’t (or shouldn’t be) is it easier, but what is legal. As it turns out "fair use" is not an easy thing to determine and even those (like libraries) who are perhaps the most versed at the process are not immune to getting themselves into trouble. In 2008, Georgia State University was sued by three publishers (Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publications, and Oxford University Press) for copyright infringement for materials placed on the university electronic-reserve system. 

The ruling in GSU’s case just came down last week, and the judge, by and large, ruled on the university’s behalf. This case has been closely watched in university circles especially in light of some fairly restrictive cases just north of the border in Canada. Barbara Fister’s blog entry on the GSU decision poses some interesting thoughts on the topic of what happens if institutions decide to avoid risk by simply paying higher fees to license-collecting agencies without regard to fair use.

This is essentially what has happened and is happening in Canada where Access Copyright (the Canadian license collection organization) is attempting to severely increase rates and have claimed that "posting a link" is the same as making a copy. Potentially, a university who accepts the new fee structures could now be responsible for a $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and be subjected to surveillance of campus email accounts.

In light of the turmoil in the world of copyright clearance and fair use, what are faculty members to do when it comes to making decisions about using excerpted materials in their classes? The short answer is stick with the professionals. If you don’t think that the publishing world is watching, think again. If a library can get into hot water, don’t believe that you are only small potatoes. The best option is to work within your university’s copyright and fair use policy and your library reserves process.

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Information Hoarders: Towards a More Simplified Design

After the show Hoarders was added to Netflix streaming last year, I went through a phase. It’s an addictive show, if you’ve never seen it. People who compulsively collect overwhelming amounts of what others would call clutter or even garbage are forced to clear out their accumulations or else risk losing their home, health, or loved ones. Invariably, there’s a teary scene in which the hoarder is asked to choose their family over their stuff and their bad habits—it’s just good television.

I bring up Hoarders because there’s a particular phenomenon that comes to light at least once an episode when the cleaning teams start digging through the overflowing closets: they find really nice, usable things that had been buried for years—things like brand new work clothes, office supplies, or cookwear. Of course, with these nice things having been inaccessible behind piles of more recent accumulations, the hoarder will have already bought replacements for them, sometimes repeating the cycle of buying, losing, burying, and forgetting they have the same item several times over.

Stay with me here, but I often see a similar phenomenon in some online-course sites.

There’s a tendency, if you’re not careful, to over clutter your course design to the point where you worry that your students won’t be able to find key pieces of information, so you reproduce that information in more places: in your syllabus and your course homepage and in the individual modules. I’ve seen courses do this for things like a deadline schedule for multi-part assignments, instructor contact information, and lists of links to online resources. If you follow this pattern for every piece of information that you think is just essential for your students, you can easily reach a critical mass of content in your course site that’s impossible for your students to navigate, and indeed impossible for you to navigate when you need to make changes or adjust content for the next quarter. And when you see that there’s so much content that your students won’t be able to find something essential, you duplicate that content again in an area you think will be more visible.

You see where this is going.

I don’t know that it’s realistic to have an online course that never duplicates information in more than one place, but the next time you’re thinking about how to surface an important piece of information, think twice about duplicating it in more than one place in your course site. Consider using these alternatives instead:

Better Organization with Descriptive Page Names and Headings

In some cases, you need to direct students’ attention to information they may not be looking for or particularly interested in, like an academic integrity policy. But other things, like deadlines and your contact information, students will actively seek out, and you just need to make it easier for them to find it. You can do this by making sure the names of your pages (topics in Desire2Learn) describe the content in them. It can take some time to think of good page names, but it’s time well spent. Try to put yourself in your student’s shoes: for example, if you saw a link to a page called “Faculty Bio,” would you expect that to also contain the instructor’s contact information? Maybe “Faculty Information” is a better name if the page also contains that information.

Also, for pages with lots of content, use headings to chunk information, and make it easier for students to scan the page to find what they’re looking for.

If you do this well, there will be only one logical place where students will expect to find the information, and they’ll look for it there.

Links

Rather than duplicating your content in multiple places, consider just linking to it. You don’t need to describe your assignment in the module introduction and in the Dropbox folder where the student actually submits it. You can just put the assignment description in the Dropbox folder, and instead of repeating that in the module introduction, simply link to the Dropbox folder.

This might seem obvious when you read it, but it’s one of those things that even the most experienced online instructors and instructional designers need to remind themselves of. We need to remember that we often don’t need more stuff in the course, we need to make it easier to find and access what’s already there.