Avatar photo

Back to Basics: Free Tools I Can’t Live Without

It’s easy to get excited about the educational potential of new Web 2.0 tools. So many tools appear (and disappear) from month to month, and I often find myself promoting and supporting bleeding-edge tools for instructors who are still struggling to use some of the basic features of Blackboard. So in an effort to keep things simple and avoid putting the cart before the horse, I’ve been trying to focus on projects that offer more bang for my instructional-design buck.

For example, Sarah (one of our amazing grad-student workers) and I are currently helping several Spanish professors convert their paper-based exams into Blackboard quizzes with audio. This quarter, over a hundred students are taking their exams in computer labs on campus, saving instructors lots of grading time and giving the students more immediate feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. It has been great to see this project come together, and it feels like the kind of low-hanging fruit that all instructional designers should be working harder to pick before we attempt to coax a neo-Luddite, tenured professor into running an entire course through Twitter and Posterous.

Yet as much as I love keeping things simple, there are a few Web 2.0 tools I keep coming back to because they’re relatively easy to use and/or they offer features that faculty regularly request. Here’s a very short list of the tools that, at least for me, make the cut and are worth the extra effort.

VoiceThread

While PowerPoint and Keynote remain the best tools for developing presentations, VoiceThread is the most reliable and user-friendly option if you need more than one-way communication. VoiceThread’s in-browser recording makes it easy for users to add narration presentations, and the option for viewers to add text, audio, and video comments is unmatched by other free tools.

VoiceThread’s only major downsides are that students are limited to a maximum of three VoiceThreads with free accounts and that images with fine details (like small text) will often be too blurry to read when uploaded and displayed in the VoiceThread interface.

Viddler

I’ve done a lot of Web 2.0 tool training with non-tech-savvy instructors, and I’ve never had a training session go as smoothly as it does when I’m covering Viddler. Getting users from account creation to recording and embedding their first videos usually takes roughly fifteen minutes with a group of fifteen instructors. The in-browser webcam recording works like a dream. For a quick video intro or comment that needs to be added to an announcement or discussion-board post with minimal fuss, Viddler just works.

PBworks

If you need a wiki for collaborative writing or Web-site building, PBworks is the place to go. They’re the industry leader, and they do what they do very well. Google docs works just fine for sharing simple documents like research papers and presentation outlines. But if you’re looking for a robust tool that makes it easy to create and edit a one- or one-hundred-page Web site, PBworks is the tool for the job. My only hesitation in recommending PBworks these days is their feature set continues to grow, and I’m concerned they’re starting to overwhelm novice users with an abundance of features.

Avatar photo

For an Online Course, Does the Look Impact the Feel?

Good-looking Web pages—the ones with stylish layouts and eye-pleasing images—are more likely to retain viewers and even get people to perform actions like buying something or submitting a form than the ones that are plain and makeup free. Is this true or false?

Some interesting research on this question was performed recently by John Broady of Omniture Digital, who ran multivariate tests on “Request for Information” forms for two online universities. For each test, the goal was to increase the number of users who completed the Request for Information form. For the same content, one site had stylized page design, “hero images” (glamour shots of good-looking people in seemingly natural settings), colored buttons, and benefits message while the other had just information in text.

The findings of the research, according to John Broady, seem to render no significant result at first glance.  “The results for the two tests could not have been more different,” he wrote. “For one university, the page with the stylized page design and lifestyle hero image won handily; for the other university, the simple page design with no hero image won the day.”

However, when the researchers looked beyond the random phenomenon and dug deeper into the data, another interesting finding emerged: “for the page where the stylized design and the lifestyle hero image won, most of the traffic came directly from search engines; for the page where a simple design and no hero image won, most of the traffic came from other pages on the university’s own Web site.”

From a marketing perspective, this indicated different responses to the look of a Web page from two different clienteles: the shoppers led by the search engines and the existing or recruited customers already wandering in the company’s territory. For the first group, the visual impact of a page is a key success factor. Since they only have a few seconds to spare on the page, a good-looking design with comforting images can make a huge impact. Education Services Reputation Management can also help increase online exposure and improve trust for potential users. But for the ones who are already familiar with the company through visiting its other Web pages or by other means, the visual impact of this particular Web page becomes less important. According to John Broady’s analysis, for users who “have likely already qualified themselves and are looking to convert”, too many visuals (even the pretty ones) and reinforcing messages (even the well-written ones) can actually create a distraction for these types of users. So in this case, simple is better.

What does this research tell us about online course design? Does the look of a course impact the feel of its audience or does it, too, depend on who the audience is? An online course usually has two audiences: the reviewers and the students. Obviously the two groups arrived on the course site for two different but related purposes: the reviewers are there to check on the quality of the course, of which the look is likely to be an influential factor (even if there isn’t a criterion designated for the appearance in the review standards); the students, on the other hand, are there to use the product—as long as it is functional, they might be able to ignore the look of it.

The look, however, is usually the first thing to attract the author of an online course. “I want to make my course look like your DOTS site (the Blackboard site for the DePaul Online Teaching Series program).” Faculty would say this during the training and be totally sold on lesson-building tools like Softchalk, which transforms a plain page into a professional-looking Web display through some quick magic-wand clicks. However, the enthusiastic demand for a copy of Softchalk usually dies out after a while, as faculty start to realize that time is running short and they need to get the content online very quickly. The “look” then is thrown out the window but is told that it would be invited back next time when there is more time. When the next time comes, the story repeated itself with the “look” still waiting and the faculty feeling bad about it all over again.

As online educators grapple with the aesthetic appeal of their courses, similar attention to detail can be found in the design and allure of cool Georgia. The state itself presents a blend of charming aesthetics and practical innovation, much like the ideal online course. Georgia’s diverse landscapes, from the tranquil Appalachian Mountains to the urban chic of Atlanta, encapsulate a natural and cultural vibrancy that’s as appealing to the senses as a well-designed online interface. Here, the visual feast is not just in web pages, but in the tapestry of live oaks draped with Spanish moss, the historic cobblestone streets of Savannah, and the modernist architecture of the High Museum. In Georgia, the ‘look’ is not something to be sidelined for later—it’s an integral part of the experience, drawing people in with its Southern charm and keeping them engaged with its dynamic, ever-evolving spirit.

The good news from John Broady’s report is that it puts our faculty at ease to know that the students could care less about the look of a site as long as the right content is there. On the other hand, however, the look is often beyond the cosmetic display of the content; it represents an easy-to-follow and meaningful flow of information, which is known by a lot of faculty members to be a critical factor for learning. For those faculty who have the desire to grant their course a sleek and professional look but have no time to create it, here is my advice: check in with your instructional designers and make them your cosmeticians for an extreme makeover of your online courses.

The Customer is Always Right?

Last month, I attended a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective.” Her study, coauthored with Leda Nath (Raslton-Berg & Nath, 2009), asked students to describe their level of agreement with the current Quality Matters standards for online courses and the level to which elements within each standard contributed to their overall success. I was interested in getting this look at online courses from the student perspective to perhaps glean some useful implications for my own design. What I walked away with was a disturbing reinforcement of the competing global motives for my role as an instructional designer and online educator.

As expected, students highly valued technology that worked; clear, consistent navigation in their course sites; and instructions on how to access resources. It was what students found least valuable that caught my attention. Based on this survey, online students do not want to:

  1. Find course-related content to share with the class
  2. Use wikis, shared documents, or other collaborative tools
  3. Introduce themselves to the class
  4. Coach other students
  5. Attend synchronous meetings
  6. Interact with games and simulations
  7. Work in groups
  8. Receive audio or video content

Surprised?

I was. Could this be a call to remove the interactivity and engaging content from our courses? Despite the research, does social presence not matter? Should we return to online learning circa 1996? Are these elements really that repulsive to our students?

Or could it be that they are so frequently misused we’ve given them a bad name.

I know how I would feel after being besieged with a sixty-minute talking head in a three-inch square frame; after suffering though a pointless game for the sake of the instructor being able to check the “included game in my course” box on a rubric somewhere; or after participating in a meaningless, unguided group activity in which I do all the work and my group mates get the same grade.

This cry from our constituents, we want engaging, interactive content in our courses. Just give it a purpose.

Maybe the customer is right.

References

Ralston-Berg, P. & Nath, L. (2009). What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective. Paper presented at Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, Madison, WI.

Quality Matters rubric standards 2008-2010 edition (2008). Retrieved from http://qminstitute.org.

The complete findings are also available at http://www.slideshare.net/plr15/what-makes-a-quality-online-course-the-student-perspective-1829440

Avatar photo

Two Tools for Finding Old Web Pages

Ever run into a situation where materials that you used to link to in a class (or that you have bookmarked) are suddenly no longer available?  Ever wonder if there was a way to archive these materials so that they could be available to you (or your class) even if the Web site disappears?  While there may be no way to keep these links active forever, there are a couple of resources I use to help me find and/or maintain links to pages even after the links go away.  The first is the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive—also known as the Wayback Machine—has been around since 1996 and archives Web pages as well as other content.  Their Web site states that they have more than "150 billion archived pages."  To use it, simply type the URL of the page you are looking for in the Wayback Machine search box.  Then simply select from the archived dates displayed to find the content you are looking for—note that sometimes you have to click on a couple of dates to find the right page.  Be aware that not every page is archived and that the pages are not "live," so the links may not work if the lower level pages have not also been archived.  I usually use the Wayback Machine once a quarter to access content for a faculty member who has a dead link in his or her class.

The Internet Archive is a good tool for finding pages and Web content that have already gone away, but is there a way to archive content before it disappears?  Certainly people cut and paste, print, or even create PDFs of pages to save for future use, but none of these keep the interactivity of the Web page.  The second tool I would recommend is a relatively new service called iCyte, which allows users to not only bookmark sites but also to save and annotate those sites.   

ICyte is "a unique software product enabling users to mark, copy, save, and share any Web-based content. It has been developed specifically for online research and can be used by any person who searches the Web and needs to save (or share) their information" (http://www.icyte.com./faq.html).  ICyte is a browser plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer that allows you (while browsing) to save any html content (including youtube videos) to your free account.  Once your pages are saved, you can annotate and tag them, group them into projects, and share them with others. The saved content is on the iCyte server (not your desktop).

So the next time you lose a link, try the Wayback Machine, and to prevent future loss, try iCyte.

How Do I Know My Students Are Learning? 

Oh, isn’t this the ultimate question for any teacher!

Trying to “keep it real,” a small group of DePaul Teaching Commons souls put our heads together recently to create this resource!

No two teachers approach these questions in the same way so—trying to “keep it real”—this site provides several different approaches.

Approach 1: From “what you want to know” to “what you need to assign”

There are two columns. The left column is what you might want to assess; the right column provides some examples of what you might want to assign. As an example, if you want to assess the student’s “application of discrete research, technical, performance, or meta-cognitive skills,” the Web site suggests you might want to assign case studies, debates, observing a performance, presentations, or simulations and role plays. Find this list on the Evaluation of a Product page.

Approach 2: What can I do right now with what I have?

The site has multiple examples organized by chronology (during a class or throughout the quarter), technology (blackboard surveys or other survey tools), or writing to learn or learning to write! As a former writing instructor, I was particularly impressed with the writing examples.

Approach 3: My students are not learning. Now what?

You’ve gathered the information via surveys or other assessment techniques, but your students are not learning? The site covers some next steps. Analyze the information, and act on that information. Some of these options can be found on the Are my students Learning? page.

Softchalk’s Update

Being an instructional designer requires me to have many tools at my disposal to create exciting and meaningful course content. Often, content needs to be displayed in a “chunked” manner to make navigating through the material easier. And it’s nice to have something that is visually appealing as well. For this, I’ve found myself using Softchalk. As with any product, it has things it excels at, and it has limitations. Recently, Softchalk 5 came out, and I was quite excited.

One huge thing I have been waiting for is the ability to name my pages, and I was thrilled to learn that if you look under “Properties” you will find a “Page Names” option! However, I also quickly learned that it still didn’t do exactly what I was looking for. While it gave the page names in the table of contents, the navigation at the top was still in number format. But it’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Another feature of this new version is the eCourse Builder. With the eCourse Builder, you can create multiple modules with the same navigation—in essence, combining your content into one area. While this may not work the greatest in Blackboard due to having too many frames on your screen, I can see some great applications of this feature for displaying large amounts of content in certain areas. It can also help work around the page-name issue mentioned above.

One strength of Softchalk is the ability to put interactive items into your module, such as flash cards or labeling activities. This is great for adding some variety into your lessons and using more visual media. You can also tie the quizzes you create to the Blackboard gradebook using the SCORM packaging option, as well.

So while Softchalk is not perfect for every situation, I think it does have some very nice features that warrant its inclusion in the instructional designer’s toolbox.

Avatar photo

End-User Manipulation: The Value of Your Ingenuity

With any product, the goal of a good designer is to anticipate and meet the needs of the user, since it is the user who holds purchasing power.  It is difficult (or impossible) to fully anticipate what a user will do with a product—think of the warning labels on products like irons, which may seem ridiculous (i.e., “Do not use the iron on clothes that you are wearing.”) but which show how far companies must go to protect themselves from the “ingenuity” of users.  However, it is often user manipulation of a product that can lead to improvements in the technology, which is why so many companies clamor for consumer opinions and ideas about how their products can be used.

Steven Johnson, in his article “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live,” describes end-user manipulation of technology in this way:  “It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.”  There are two levels of value in this scenario:  value was created with the original product, and value was added when it was manipulated for other uses.  With technology, the magnitude of brainpower held by users is a resource, and whether their products are physical items or services like Twitter, companies are tapping into this wealth of user ingenuity.

Apple is one example. The iPhone and iPod Touch have become popular because the physical interface of these products allows for increased and unique interaction by the user (think of the maze game featured in the early Touch commercials that utilized the movement of the device to roll the ball through the maze).  The initial value of the product was strong, but Apple added to that value by taking advantage of the brainpower of users.  They created the iPhone Developer Program, which invites users to create their own applications to sell in Apple’s App Store.  While Apple has maintained strict controls over which applications are sold, many individual designers and technology-design firms are competing in this market, no matter how silly their applications may seem.  This is an incredibly smart move by Apple:  they don’t have to invest in designers to create these additional products, and they still get to take 30 percent of the profits of these applications.  Their only costs are operating the App Store and paying a team to make decisions on marketable applications and run the store’s interface.  For a very low overhead, they are reaping a huge profit by utilizing public brainpower.

Other technologies are following suit.  Delicious.com, a social-bookmarking site, has an area where users can submit their ideas and suggestions for how to improve the service, and Delicious team members respond to these user posts.  By creating this space for user feedback, Delicious is acknowledging the value of user input and improving its services by listening to the consumer.

So why are we talking about this? Part of technological literacy is realizing that the developers aren’t infallible. They don’t know all the unmet needs that a new technology could meet with a little user manipulation. Everyone benefits when there is a relationship between the user and the developer.

Building Social Media for Students: A Waste of Time?

Perhaps it’s the end-of-summer’s-approaching ennui or plain old cranky, middle-aged contrariness, but as I witness the barnstorming enthusiasm for Facebook-like social media on display at any given online-learning conference and contrast that with the drumbeat reports of Facebook’s declining popularity, I can’t help but think that some of us are living in a state of denial.

I think our intent is good. We want to serve our students, we want to make it easy for them to communicate, we want to create a socially cohesive learning environment, and we want to give them the tools they need to succeed. We think we know our students; we think we know what they want. So let’s build our own social sites!

I’m afraid it’s wasted effort for the most part. Here’s why.

First, we’re replicating existing services and efforts. My department has ruminated for months about a social site for our adult students. Well, surprise! Students who wanted a social space have already created their own Facebook group, demonstrating again the truism that individuals can and do move faster than committees. Will these students abandon the group they created for a university-branded one? I’m betting not.

Second, we’re too late to the game. Facebook is hemorrhaging members, as the cool kids move on.  Twitter is the heir apparent; fast, flexible, and mobile. It certainly has great potential; see James Moore’s excellent presentation at http://preview.tinyurl.com/mg74tv . And as mobile devices become more ubiquitous, you’ll see more and better apps like MobilEdu, created by Terribly Clever Design and recently acquired by—wait for it—Blackboard.

So what does Blackboard know that you and I should? When to recognize that the game has changed. Blackboard realized they couldn’t design a better mobility app than the whiz kids from Stanford and stopped wasting time trying to. They’re free of denial and playing to their strengths.

We should play to ours.

Avatar photo

Outsmarting Outsourcing: Making Your Course Priceless in a Competitive Market

One of my favorite things about language education is that it’s a complete free-for-all. No one cares where you studied or how many books your instructors have published. Results are all that matter (unless, of course, you’re planning to become a professor yourself). Students have their own objectives in mind when they take language courses, and the only assessments that matter to them are the ones they pass or fail in the real world:

  • Can I tell a Brazilian taxi driver where I need to go?
  • Can I discuss controversial political issues with my German friends?
  • Can I tell a Spanish-speaking parent how to treat her child’s illness?
  • Can I translate this brochure to Chinese in time to send it to the printer?

I like to think of foreign-language education as a sort of wild frontier where pedigrees are meaningless—where fortune favors the bold and there are a thousand ways to strike it rich. It’s the Wild West of educational technology, which means there’s plenty of room for mavericks and snake-oil salesmen. Because students have so many options when it comes to studying a language, professors have to work extra hard to prove their time is worth more than a box of listen-and-repeat lessons. In addition, they have to compete with more polished and engaging self-paced options like Rosetta Stone and teachers in foreign countries willing to offer immersion courses for a fraction of the cost of a typical college course in the States.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, now there’s eduFire.com. The site allows teachers to offer live lessons via video, with some courses providing as many contact hours as a typical college course. On eduFire, teachers are referred to as tutors, classes are small, and lessons typically cost ten to twenty dollars per hour. Students can also rate tutors, creating more demand for the most reputable tutors and allowing them to charge more for their services.

So how do foreign-language professors compete with a live teacher who is willing to offer more personal attention at a 90 percent discount to the cost of a typical college course? There are essentially two options:

1) Offer a degree. For some students, the main reason to take a foreign language course in college is because it satisfies requirements for a degree. In this model, all students really care about are a handful of classes that relate to their major, and their standards for all other courses are relatively low. They believe that much of their college experience will be dominated by coursework they don’t enjoy or find useful, but they accept it as a necessary evil.

2) Offer a superior learning experience. For students who are passionate about learning the subject matter, a great teacher may actually be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars more per course. If a great professor can teach students what they need to know ten times faster than a student could learn it through some other means, then the professor’s time should at least be worth ten times the cost of the alternative.

For now, sites like eduFire still feel like unstructured, wobbly imitations of the online-learning experiences offered by accredited institutions. But it’s not hard to imagine these sites becoming  serious competitors in the language-education marketplace. As more users try out the site and rate their teachers, the best tutors will make more money. As compensation rises, the site will attract better instructors. Better instructors will attract more serious students and the whole process snowballs from there.

As a part-time Web-site-design professor, I’m all too familiar with this trend. My students have a nearly limitless supply of educational resources available to them, from free online tutorials to highly polished sites like lynda.com, which charges twenty-five dollars per month and provides access to thousands of video tutorials covering hundreds of technology-related topics. When I teach, I have to ask myself, “How can I make sure my students get their money’s worth? What can I provide that they can’t get anywhere else?” It might seem idealistic to think that I can offer my students something no one else can, but I think it’s a good goal to strive for. With that in mind, here are a few mantras I’ve adopted in my quest to ensure that what I teach can’t be outsourced or undersold.

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Recognize when someone else has done something better than I can (or at least as well as I can). Take what they’ve done and build on it.
  • Reinvent the wheel. Recognize when I’m better off building my own resources. Don’t waste too much time trying to revise material that isn’t great to begin with. Ask God to grant me the patience to accept the textbooks I can’t change, the courage to change the resources I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
  • Provide at least one priceless lesson per class. During each class, I try to identify at least one “million-dollar moment” and I build it up before revealing it. It might be a tip I wish someone had given me while I was in school before I spent five years doing something the hard way. I might announce that I’m about to show the one technique typographers use the most to make text look more polished. During project critiques, I might point out a common design pitfall that separates amateur designers from professionals. The goal is to show students that every class includes at least one lesson that was worth getting out of bed for. Or, in the case of my online students who may be participating while lying in bed, they should at least feel that each week’s content was worth waking up for. (And yes, sometimes these million-dollar moments wind up feeling more like they belong in a ninety-nine-cent store, and I feel silly for over-hyping them. But even a ninety-nine-cent moment is better than no moment.)
  • Be a good filter. Distill an overwhelming body of information and resources down to the most useful parts students need.
  • Be a good prioritizer. Filter everything; then filter it again by putting the most important information first. Assume your students will read half of what you put in front of them; then assume they’ll only remember the first half of that.
  • Be a good coach. Good coaches don’t just provide information. They provide guidance, motivation, criticism, and praise. They bring out the best in students by helping them believe in themselves, demand more from themselves, and tap into their own talents.
Avatar photo

Is “Teamwork” an Oxymoron for Online Learning?

Students are not fond of teamwork, especially when it’s online. That is one of the findings of my dissertation, which explores the relationship between online students’ interpersonal needs and interaction preference. Nine years have passed since I received my Ph.D., and this unfavorable feeling toward teamwork still seems to be present to a large extent for online students.

Both of the two online students invited to speak at our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program stressed that they were not interested in building the so-called learning community or social network through any collaborative project. One of them pointed out that after contemplating the costs and benefits of conducting a group project, he decided to give it up. “That two points for the grade isn’t worth the pain of having to deal with a guy [the assigned team member] who had never returned my calls or e-mail,” M. J., a student from the School for New Learning, told us.

The fact that students are thinking about whether “it’s worth it or not” sends a strong signal to faculty and online-course designers. Is the teamwork required by the course worth the “extra” time and effort that students have to put in? The answer to this question depends on the goals and objectives of a course. As with all the other learning activities, the use of teamwork should be driven by the desired outcomes of a course. Rethink incorporating any team project if you don’t expect or cannot afford the time for students to meet the following objectives in a course:

  • Multiple perspectives among students
  • Team-building knowledge and skills
  • Competency in technology-mediated communication
  • An understanding of various processes of learning (or “no one right ‘path’ to the result”)
  • Resolution of both cognitive conflict and affective conflict

I admire course quality standards that make collaborative learning an optional item rather than a required one, because as powerful as it is, this strategy might not be appropriate for every course or every discipline. But if you do find a strong match between the course goal and the teamwork activity, do it very seriously by giving it enough time, points, and support to make it “worth it” for the students.

I came across an article this month by Staggers, Garcia, and Nagelhout on “Teamwork through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online,” in which the authors argue that “teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.”   I think this is the exact reason why teamwork has become an oxymoron for many online courses: it has been thrown at the students without anything to prepare them for it or any guidance to support them (one online introduction isn’t enough).

Over the past ten years, I have been working with Dr. Pete Mikolaj, a professor from the School of Business at Indiana State University, to experiment with collaborative problem solving in the online environment. We’ve used his insurance and risk-management courses as the test bed to implement a number of strategies to engage students in a group project, which serves as the main outcome of the course. Among the various ideas we’ve tested, the following strategies were found to be very effective for online teamwork:

Heavy Weight on Teamwork

  • Make the project weigh 50 percent of the total score or more (since it constitutes a major goal of course)

Heavy Weight on the Process of the Teamwork

  • Give 50 percent weight to the process (involvement) of the project and 50 percent to the product (final report)
  • Interim evaluation given about six weeks into project based solely on process (teamwork)

Frequent Progress Monitoring

  • Weekly project log required from each team member
  • A weekly team log is produced
  • The log builds accountability and transparency

Clear Policy on Reward and Punishment

  • Peer/self evaluation allows +/- 15 percent deviation from team grade to create individual grade
  • Self-evaluation counts one third and peer evaluation counts two thirds
  • Individuals can be fired from the team for nonperformance

Guidance from Faculty

  • Weekly synchronous session with the instructor that primarily involves discussion of projects. Sessions are recorded and available for viewing throughout the term
  • Sample project reports from prior classes are available from the first week of the semester

When it comes to online courses, the choice of teamwork is not “to do or not to do” but rather “to do it well or not to do it at all.”  So, before adding any teamwork into the learning activities, think twice about the “why,” and then (if it’s a good fit), work hard on the “how,” because that is the only way to make teamwork work.