A dozen years ago when I completed all the required courses and prelim exams for a doctorate, my dissertation chair, Dr. Jerry Summers, said to me, “Congratulations, Sharon! You are now on your own!”

He was alerting me that on the dissertation journey, no one else would be holding the reins for me.

Frightened by the notion of being on my own and the rumor that only 20 percent of the ABDs who left their program end up finishing their dissertation, I declined a few “outside” job offers and took a position within my alma mater. Since there wouldn’t be any reminders from my dissertation committee, I rallied up what I called a “butt-kicker committee” to check on my progress on a regular basis. It includes a mentor who ran after me every Wednesday for more chapters, a boyfriend who threatened to break up if I didn’t finish, and my parents who pressured me by cooking super nutritious meals.  

Today, when I think of that process “metacognitively,” I see that the fear of being “on my own” that triggered me to do something about it was an essential reinforcement for me to complete my degree. The danger of being on one’s own is immense—it can make a disciplined person procrastinate and a procrastinator drop off. When work and life keep presenting mini deadlines day in and day out, it is so easy to neglect the big, long-term deadline you’ve set for yourself—like getting a course ready for online delivery.

Like writing a dissertation, this “on-my-own” syndrome has been a major road block for online-course development. When a professor’s day is constantly filled up with teaching, meetings, and researching activities, that deadline for putting together a carefully designed course will likely be pushed, rushed, or expunged.

To beat the odds, a professor from DePaul’s College of Education came up with the idea of opening his course development schedule and experience to the world. On January 5, Dr. Chris Worthman published a blog post on the Center for Educational Technology’s website called . Developing a Hybrid Course: In the Beginning…. In his blog, Chris announced that he will post a weekly update on the progress of developing his hybrid course. The content, in his own words, will include “what I have done, experienced, and been thinking about; what excites me, scares me, and leaves me scratching my head; and, generally, just what this means to me professionally.”

Chris’s idea of blogging his progress strikes me as such a brilliant idea—more brilliant than my butt-kicker committee (even though there were no blogs back then). I see that by turning a course-development project into a reality show, Chris sought out 1) an effective motivation strategy for himself, 2) a professional-development example for his faculty peers, and 3) a model for his students, which is the most important and cleverest aspect of it.

A Motivation-through-Visibility Strategy

As Chris mentioned in his blog, he is “in the enviable position this quarter of developing a new course for a new program that will be taught for this first time in spring 2012 as a hybrid.” Everything about this course was new—including he himself to the experience. Chris was put on a schedule by his instructional designer and initiated the blog to “hold himself to it.”

If making my dissertation visible to my mentor, boyfriend, and family helped create an audience that trigged me to contribute and deliver for their readership, Chris’s action of blogging about his course surely has pushed this “audience effect” to a much higher level. Researchers have found that motivation generated through visibility has been a driving force for the success of online systems such as Wikipedia. Knowing the existence of an audience, as they found, may be sufficient to trigger contribution on its own. So, for Dr. Worthman, having to present his progress every week makes moving his work forward an inevitable action that he now owes to his readers like me. This motivation-through-visibility strategy left him no room to fall back.

A Professional-Development Example for Faculty Peers

In his blog, Chris wrote, “This will be an exercise into the unknown for me because I am not used to spilling the details of a new experience in this way. I hope, however, that it will provide others—like you—with some insight into my professional development and invite others—like you—to share your own experiences, particularly as it relates to digital technology use.”

As the director of his school’s Center for Educational Technology and the associate dean for Curriculum and Academic Programs, Chris has the responsibility of leading faculty into the new era of teaching and learning, which is heavily influenced by the use of digital technology.  When it comes online learning, faculty may have been exposed to sample courses or bits and pieces of stories shared by online-teaching veterans, but very rarely do they have the opportunity to observe the whole process and almost never do they hear the pains and gains associated with each of step of development.

From an initial pledge of doing his work openly, to toiling with Softchalk, to a metaphorical analysis of online-course development, to juggling among elements within a course, his blog brought faculty members a real picture of what it is like for a faculty member to develop a new course in a new modality under a very tight schedule.

A Role Model for Students

I always feel that higher education—as it is now designed—seems to position its faculty and students into two very discrete groups of “knowledge providers” and “knowledge seekers,” or the ones who know and the ones who don’t.

If the process of learning was a race, the only ones who are running are the students; the professors are merely standing on the side to advise and to make some judgments. Those who belong to the professor clan never get to show the ones struggling on the track how they had approached the finish line and never get to rejoin the race—well, not until they begin to learn something new—like teaching online.

When it comes to building technology competencies, online teaching provides faculty members a unique opportunity to meet their students at the starting line. Not only does it put professors in the students’ shoes but also offers students an opportunity to observe how professors conduct the race. The latter can be achieved through a very careful design, like the one Chris Workthman is trying to accomplish. By implementing project-based learning, Chris, tried to develop an authentic learning experience for his students—by letting them experience what he is experiencing. As he said, in his January 19 blog, A Few Thoughts on Process, “To a large degree, what I am experiencing in designing my course is what I want my students to experience when they develop modules on different components of the English language arts.”

Besides teaching them the way of learning, it is even more critical for a professor to cast a spiritual influence on the students, such as the attitude that one should carry in dealing with the unknown. “I want them to jump, with no fear of failure but a level of realism that suggests they are going to have to work hard,” Chris wrote. “I want them to envision themselves as teachers doing actual teacher work. I want them to have a certain level of frustration that forces them to think at a meta-level not only about what they are doing but about teaching and learning in general.”

Lee Shulman once said, “Only when we have something to value, will we have something to evaluate… and we cannot value something that we cannot share, exchange, and examine.” Yet, it takes a lot of “guts” for one to be totally open to that action of sharing, exchanging, and examining. Chris Worthman’s blog reminded me of a comment George Clooney once made on using social media: “I would rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands [than use social media].” Although it’s meant to be a celebrity’s act to defend his privacy, it also showed how hard it is for people to open up their thoughts. For this, Chris’s idea of sharing your course development stories is more than brilliant—it is very brave! I am looking forward to seeing his hybrid course lead, inspire, and transform his students into online learning troopers in the coming spring quarter.

(Listen to this entry in the Everything that FITS podcast.)

My wife and I just had the opportunity to visit Montréal over Columbus Day weekend, and it provided a nice little vacation, as well as an opportunity for me to practice my French skills. I was a little nervous at first, because although I had a French minor as an undergrad, that was twelve years ago, and I’ve had very little formal practice since. I guess that goes with speaking a language that isn’t used very much in North America, with the exception of Québec. My first attempts at speaking again were a little stumbling, as I made reservations for accommodations and tickets over the phone. I was often fishing for the right verb or term to use. However, I was really surprised at how quickly it all came back to me with only a little practice. By the second day, I was having lengthy, involved conversations with people, which I would then have to attempt to translate back to my wife. It was after having a detailed conversation about wine with a restaurant’s sommelier on Saturday night that I began to think I might not be as rusty as I’ve been telling everyone. I’d never actually talked about wine in French before, but I found myself navigating a discussion about tannins and different aromas in the wine’s nose with ease. My wife didn’t speak more than a few words of French before we went on the trip, and although she still didn’t know a lot more afterward, she speaks with a great accent.

All this was possible through the magic of language immersion. Yes, I could have brushed up on my French before the trip (and I did, a little), but this was not nearly as effective as being dropped into the streets of Montréal and knowing that we weren’t going to get directions to our next destination if I didn’t know how to ask. Being forced to practice not only what I knew how to say but also listening and responding to others in an unscripted fashion reawakened my comprehension skills. I can also say that once that switch has been flipped, it’s hard to change it back; I found myself saying “pardon” to people on the streets of Chicago instead of “excuse me” for most of the next week!

This anecdote illustrates in a concrete way the power of immersion in language learning. The fact that I could spend a weekend in Montréal and come back nearly fluent again after over a decade of very little practice shows immersion’s ability to generate near-native fluency without making the learner aware that it is happening. When you get thrown into the deep end like this, if you have the rudimentary skills necessary, most of the time you end up swimming, and swimming strongly. This was not true immersion, i.e. learning mathematics and science in French to expand my skills in math and science as well as French, but submersion; I was the foreign-language speaker with all the natives, and it was sink-or-swim. Still, it provided an opportunity to reacquire skills at a much greater rate than practicing at home.

As educators, we are constantly searching for ways to create activities and assessments in our courses that will not only challenge our students in the present but also prepare them for similar as-yet-unknown challenges in their disciplines in the future. We make them jump through hoops in our courses, believing that each hoop is getting them a little closer to our ultimate goal, that of fluency with the materials and processes at hand. However, even though we may think we are immersing our students in that world of content, we often are just giving them a boat to travel across the surface. Consider the following scenario:

A marketing professor is teaching his students about the processes involved in targeted marketing (the practice of selecting specific strategies or materials in order to best attract a particular group of individuals). His current objectives are:

1. Students will select a group to target.
2. Students will select a strategy to market a product to this specific group.
3. Students will develop a marketing campaign aimed at this specific group.

Based on these objectives, it would be very possible to create an exercise in which students select a group, use some typical strategies outlined by the textbook in reaching that market, make use of instructor-provided data and generate a marketing campaign. This could even be a project that could take a whole term, depending on how the various pieces of the exercise are presented. Sounds good, right?

Let’s take another look. I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the need for authenticity in student exercises, and this is yet another place where it’s easy to think you’re giving students a real-life, hands-on experience, when in fact you’re giving them strategies from a textbook and data from a box. Is this a good real-world exercise? Well, for the most part it is. These kinds of simulation exercises are given in many classes, and it does teach students how to process and analyze data. In many cases, this will adequately prepare students for performance in the real world, assuming that they are predominantly dealing with mostly cut-and-dry data.

However, this exercise, while it might be comprehensive, lacks the “messiness” associated with a more authentic experience. When you’re dealing with real data and real firms, things happen that you aren’t really prepared for in a “canned” exercise like I just described. Data points don’t always tell a story; sometimes they are scattered in such a way that they don’t show any relationships at all, or perhaps the data suggest a conclusion altogether different than the one students are striving to prove. Target markets change all the time, as the whims of a fickle population change. A real firm might have an enormous amount of data far in excess of what is needed or is relevant and so might require any number of weeding out processes to obtain actually usable data. Given all these possibilities, the internship model is about the truest experience out there, because it provides the opportunity to practice skills gained in class as well as to see how things actually work outside the classroom “ideal situation” bubble. However, not everyone has the time to devote to an internship in every academic program. Therefore, it is up to us as instructors to not only provide the tools to solve the problems our students will face in the real world but also to expose them as much as possible to the actual chaos that can happen within it. As much as we always try to tell our students that there are standardized procedures for everything they will face, we know that the real world doesn’t always work that way.

What does this mean for us? As we are creating assessments and exercises for our students that are supposed to be real-world simulations, we should be striving as much as possible to simulate real-world situations in their construction. Rather than giving students data from a set, show students how to obtain various data from various places and have them obtain it themselves. Have them create their own research rather than telling them what questions to ask and what data correlations to look for. In this way they can encounter the chaos they will find in the future when research and data don’t always play well together. Most importantly, giving students this more realistic experience will allow them to make mistakes. We often think that guiding students to be mistake-free will be the best learning experience, but we also know that students can learn just as much from failing and needing to come up with an alternate solution to a problem. Just because it’s real-world data doesn’t necessarily make it a real-world exercise; students need to feel like they have some ownership, and they have to be exposed to the imperfections right along with the methods.

So it’s now been a few weeks since our French immersion experience, and I can say at this point that a little refresher was just what I needed. I tried really hard to speak well, and I failed plenty during that time too. Fortunately, the locals were nice enough to correct me or suggest a different wording, but those mistakes also helped me learn even more and recall things I really shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place. My wife has been inspired to learn more French and is now doing audio lessons on her morning commute. The early immersion experience has been quite helpful to her as she navigates conversational expressions, because her ear has already been attuned to the nuances of the language; she’s getting more out of the instruction than she would if she were just presented with canned audio and conversation because she already knows how to listen to it.

Creating an immersive learning process can be tougher, messier and less predictable than just giving out textbook problems and quizzes, but real life doesn’t have a textbook, and students won’t be able to refer to a handy manual when they encounter situations they might not be prepared for. Immersion is tremendously valuable for teaching students to think on their feet and to adjust as necessary. It’s worth the extra effort on our part to help bring a little more of the outside world into the classroom, because our students will be that much better prepared to venture out into it later.