Service and Online Learning

When I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s annual meeting in January of 2008, I was sitting in a general session, and I was thinking to myself about online education and what students ‘do’ in that environment. I then got to thinking about service-learning and how authentic, situational, and service-based assignments can be of great value to students.

All of that led to the thought that, for the most part, online learning and service-learning seem to be mutually exclusive. The question is, do they have to be?

To see what has been done in this arena, I did a search and found an article, a case study, from the EDMEDIA conference in 2002. Lesa Lorenzen Huber from Indiana University, in her paper titled “The Human Touch: Incorporating Service-Learning into an Online Course,” discusses an instance where she took on the challenge of incorporating service-learning into her online course. This was filled with a great number of challenges but also had a lot of rewards.

Service Learning Diagram

Let’s take a step back and establish the essence of service learning. According to Learn and Serve America’s National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, “service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” In the case of Huber’s experience, the service-learning component was to have the students serve the community by working with new, elderly residents in the area and to welcome them to the community.

Huber also had four features she wanted to be sure were included in her course, as they are important elements of any service-learning course:

  1. Service is clearly connected to the academic component and treated as a text via readings, discussion, speakers, etc.
  2. A reciprocal relationship between the university and the community makes each a partner in the education of students.
  3. Service meets a genuine community need as defined by the community-based organization.
  4. 4. The philanthropic and civic content of the students’ service is discussed and examined. It is the practice of citizenship, broadly defined, that distinguishes service-learning from practica or internships, which focus more on professional preparation.

These elements can directly lead to a rewarding student experience. However, in an online course, it becomes difficult to incorporate the element of service. How are such service projects set up with so many different communities interfacing at once? How are the variables controlled in order for service to be a ‘learning text’ when students come from different areas? How do you build a reciprocal relationship between the university and many communities?

Despite these concerns, Huber proceeded with her course. It wasn’t easy. “At the beginning of the fall semester I had decided this type of model to increase student involvement in a human services online course was just too problematic.”[i] Through the term, though, she received such overwhelming positive feedback from the students that she reconsidered.

In online courses, students often report feeling isolated while taking the class. Service-learning is one way to fix that problem. While they may not physically see their classmates, they will get out in the community and put into practice skills they are learning in the course and can then come back to the online class and discuss their individual experiences. This leads to a rich community interaction as well as a rich online discussion and interactions between students.

Expectations of online courses also become a factor. By and large, most online courses require a student only to log in to the computer and participate online or read a textbook in addition to writing papers. Online learning does not have to equate to computer-only learning. Courses can require the students to go out and complete a project, interview people, or do other types of assignments involving time and work away from the computer. Service-learning takes this to the next level, as the work outside the class and away from the Internet is not only an assignment but also a form of the text and an integral part of the course.

Service-learning courses are not easy to construct; nor are effective online courses. To combine the two together makes the creation of such a course even more challenging; however, with the greater obstacles come greater rewards and, in the end, more comprehensive and significant student learning. It is because of this that faculty should consider incorporating service-learning into their online courses and that the two do not need to be mutually exclusive.

 

[i] Huber, L. (2002). The Human Touch: Incorporating Service-Learning into an Online Course. In P. Barker & S. Rebelsky (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2002 (pp. 1164-1169). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Listening to the User

I’ve been thinking a lot about usability these days. It’s not like I never considered the user; we document and provide print and video tutorials for a host of processes and procedures here at DePaul. But I recently had a long discussion with an instructor who took me to task for assuming that students would know how to play a file in iTunes U. He didn’t know to locate and click the play icon, or to double-click the file. He was frustrated and questioned the logic of having to explain to his students the process to access a video tutorial meant to explain yet another process. My impulse was to dismiss him as a clueless Luddite, but thankfully I heard him out.

This morning I was copied on an email from an irate student who couldn’t get her course-required third-party web app to install or work properly. It didn’t occur or matter to her that DePaul didn’t design or administer the application. Since the app was a required part of her course, for her it is DePaul, and her experience struggling with the software colors her perception of her course, her instructor, and the school.

What these two incidents have in common of course is usability, or lack thereof. Both illustrate that seemingly easy tasks are often anything but easy for many users, and that these struggles have a negative impact on user satisfaction and the perceived value of a tool, course, or institution. Why do we make these usability errors?

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that at least regarding computer literacy I assume others know what I know simply because I know it. That it’s obvious to double-click a file to open it, or execute it, or get it to reveal its function in some way. I assume others recognize that icons exist in an application to indicate functionality or some other important attribute that the user needs to know. I assume others know to check system requirements before downloading software, or at least know what system they use. After all, I argue, it’s 2008! These things are conventions, for crying out loud! And who doesn’t know how to install an application? Do we have to explain everything?

Well, no. But we do need to explain a lot more than we might think, and we need to make things a lot more obvious. How can we do that? We might start by incorporating some quick and easy usability testing before we roll out that nifty new Web 2.0 app or learning tool in our courses. Steve Krug suggests in Don’t Make Me Think that a morning testing session with a handful of users, followed by an afternoon debriefing, is an inexpensive and effective way to find out at the beginning of a project if you’re on the right track.

What happens too often is that decisions about tools and media are made in the optimistic afterglow of a distance education conference or by instructional designers like me reacting to industry hype or instructor pressures, and then passed down as blessings from the heights of Mt. Pedagogy. Then we are surprised and irritated when users reject our offerings for being too hard to use or protest our suggestions (diplomatically worded of course) that the problem is their own technological incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in rich media, in interactive tools and all sorts of whiz-bang features for online courses. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of scrolling through endless expanses of text. But I do think it’s time to work more closely with our users, to ask them what their needs are and how we might meet those, rather than deciding for them a priori and dictating what the solutions are going to be.

Avatar photo

Does Anyone Like Hand-Me-Down Course Materials?

For many institutions, online course development follows a publishing model. Faculty members are recruited and compensated to “author” content that will be used by multiple instructors. This approach has several advantages:

  1. Greater Accountability: Expectations can be clearly spelled out (and enforced) through a course-development contract.
  2. Higher Quality: Course materials are often edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by other instructors.
  3. Greater Efficiency: Ideally, faculty don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they teach a new course. The initial effort of the course author and instructional designer to create a core set of course materials saves future instructors a great deal of time in the long run.

There are also disadvantages to the publishing model. Perhaps the most commonly cited problem is the cost to the institution. Faculty who develop online courses are usually compensated with course releases and/or one-time payments comparable to what the instructor would receive to teach a single course. In addition, having course materials thoroughly edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by a panel of subject-matter experts can easily add several thousand dollars to the development costs of each course. Add usability/accessibility optimization, visual design improvements, and multimedia enhancement to the process, and the total cost per course can easily exceed $10,000.

Ten-thousand dollars can be a particularly hard number to swallow when compared to the cost of developing face-to-face courses. After all, faculty have been developing traditional courses without additional compensation for a very long time (and in K-12, the added costs of enhancing a course often come out of the instructor’s pocket). Of course, there are many arguments as to why online course development merits a considerable initial investment, such as:

  • Faculty are paid to be subject-matter experts, not technology experts.
  • The quality of the materials will be better as a result.
  • Online learning brings in tuition dollars that the institution wouldn’t otherwise receive.
  • The cost per course decreases every time the same materials are reused.

The problem that none of these arguments addresses is that many instructors (at least in my experience) simply don’t want to be required to use hand-me-down course materials. For as long as teachers have existed, many of them have shared syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignment concepts with their colleagues. I think most instructors value this tradition, but only when the materials are provided with no obligation.

As an instructional designer and a part-time instructor, I feel torn between two worlds. On the one hand, I recognize the benefits of clear, specific course objectives. I also see the value in providing standardized supporting materials to ensure students can meet those objectives. Yet, I also know that one of the best aspects of teaching as a profession is that you get to be the captain of your own ship (however humble it may be). You have a great deal of autonomy and, ideally, you’re free to experiment with teaching and assessment methods that might be a bit unusual as long as students master the critical course concepts.

I appreciate it when my colleagues offer to share their course materials with me, and I love to hear about what they’ve learned from their own experiences. At the same time, we have very different opinions about how to teach a course on basic web design. Some require students to write all their HTML by hand in Notepad and some introduce FrontPage on day one. I offer my students a compromise: we spend the first few weeks hand-coding before we switch to Dreamweaver.

None of our approaches have been criticized, which is fine by me since I’d sooner give myself an appendectomy with a spork than get reacquainted with FrontPage. However, that’s not to say I’m a curriculum-development anarchist. I do wish at times that my fellow interactive-design professors and I could all agree on a few things, like not introducing advanced tools like Flash or languages like JavaScript in a course where many students struggle with basic file-management concepts. Of course, I’m afraid to push for standardization because I, like many teachers, enjoy doing things my way, and I don’t want to find myself forced to teach from a pile of second-hand course materials. In the end, I like to think there’s a happy medium that embraces the best parts of the publishing model of course development while giving faculty the freedom they crave. Until then, you’ll find me slaving away over a hot laptop, creating course materials from scratch and complaining about the workload all the while.

MP3s and the Degradation of Listening

Don’t get me wrong! I own three iPods, which I use extensively and absolutely adore for their portability and other obvious advantages. I, of course, use them differently than most listeners. (If you are lazy or impatient, feel free to jump to the bottom of the page and read how.) Most listeners use mp3 players and mp3 files in ways that severely degrade sound quality and eventually deteriorate the listener’s ability to even tell the difference between good and bad sound quality. But more on this a little later.

Disclaimer: For the cynics amongst you, I am not sponsored by any record label trying to boost CD sales; I could actually not care less. All the information below is not product-specific, is based on facts, and is common knowledge to anyone with a basic understanding of the physics of sound, digital sound processing, hearing physiology, and auditory perception. Ignore at your own risk!

CD sound quality

First, let me address some fundamental issues related to the relationship between CD sound data rates and sound quality.

CD quality is usually described in terms of:

  • sampling rate (44,100 samples/sec.),
  • bit rate (16 bits), and
  • stereo presentation.

Doing some simple math, we can figure of that CD-quality sound corresponds to a data rate of 1411 kbits/sec. (44,100 * 16 * 2 = 1,411,200 bits/sec. = ~1411 kbits/sec.) Sampling rate determines the upper frequency limit (corresponding, in general, to timbre, or sound quality) that can be faithfully represented in a digital sound file (about half of the sampling rate). Bit rate determines the dynamic range (i.e. difference between the softest and strongest sound) that can be faithfully represented in a digital sound file (~6 dB per bit).

Given the maximum frequency and dynamic range of safe and functional human hearing (~20 kHz and ~100 dB respectively), CD-quality digital sound is very close to the best sound quality we can ever hear. There have been several valid arguments put forward, advocating the need for sampling rates higher than 44,100 samples/sec. (e.g. 98,200 samples/sec.), bit rates higher than 16 bits (e.g. 24 or 32 bits), and more than two channels (e.g. various versions of surround sound). Depending on the type of sound in question (e.g. the sound’s frequency/dynamic range and spatial spread) and what you want to do with it (e.g. process/analyze it in some way or just listen to it), such increases may or may not result in a perceptible increase in sound quality. So for the vast majority of listening contexts, CD-quality sound (i.e. 1411 kbits/sec. data rate) does correspond to the best quality sound one can hear.

Compressed sound quality

Now, let’s move to compressed quality sound, whether in mp3, iPod, Real, or any other format.

Every sound-compression technique has two objectives:

a) to reduce a sound file’s data rate and therefore overall file size (for easier download and storage) and

b) to accomplish (a) without noticeably degrading the perceived quality of the sound.

Sound-compression algorithms basically remove bits from a digital sound file and select the bits to be removed so that the information that will be lost will not be perceived by listeners as a noticeable loss in quality.

Compression algorithms base their selective removal of information from a digital file on three perceptual principles:

  1. Just noticeable difference in frequency and intensity:
    Our ears’ ability to perceive frequency and intensity differences as pitch and loudness differences respectively is not as fine grained as the frequency and intensity resolution supported by CD-quality sound. So it is possible to selectively remove some relevant information without the listeners noticing their removal.
  2. Masking:
    Strong sounds at one frequency can mask soft sounds at nearby frequencies, making them inaudible. It is, therefore possible to remove digital information representing soft frequencies that are closely surrounded by much stronger frequencies, without the listeners noticing the removal, since they would not have been able to hear such soft sounds in the first place.
  3. Dependence of loudness on frequency:
    Even if different frequencies have the same intensity they do not sound equally loud. In general, for a given intensity, middle frequencies sound louder than high frequencies, which sound louder than low frequencies. Given the phenomenon of masking described above, this dependence of loudness on frequency allows us to remove some soft frequencies even if they are further away from a given strong frequency, providing an additional opportunity to remove bits (information) from a digital file without listeners noticing the loss. In addition, the dynamic range of hearing is much lower for low than for middle and high frequencies and may be adequately represented by ~10 versus 16 bits, offering one more possibility for unnoticeable data-rate reduction.

Different compression algorithms (e.g. mp3, iTunes, etc.) implement the above principles in different ways, and each company claims to have the best algorithm, achieving the most reduction in file size with the least noticeable reduction in sound quality.

Digital music downloads and the stupefaction of a generation of listeners

Regardless of which company and algorithm is the best, one thing is certain. No matter how the previously discussed principles are implemented and no matter how inventive each company’s programmers are, there is no way for the above principles to support the over 90 percent reduction of information required to go from a CD-quality file to a standard mp3. In other words, reducing data rates from CD quality (1411 kbits/sec.) to the standard downloadable-music-file quality (128 kbits/sec.) is impossible without a noticeable deterioration in sound quality.

In fact, the 139th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America devoted an entire session on the matter, with multiple acousticians and music researchers presenting their perceptual studies on the relationship between compression-data rates and sound quality. Based on these and other, more recent, relevant works, it appears that data rates below ~320 kbits/sec. result in clearly noticeable deterioration of perceived sound quality for all sound files with more than minimal frequency, dynamic, and spatial spread ranges. (E.g. listening to early Ramones at low or high data rates will not make as much of a difference as listening to, say, the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” album.) Such low data rates cannot faithfully represent wide ranges of perceivable frequency, intensity, and spatial-separation changes, resulting in ‘mp3s’ that include only a small proportion of the sonic variations included in the originally recorded file.

As data rates drop, there is a gradual deterioration in

a) frequency resolution (loss of high frequencies, translated as loss of clarity),

b) dynamic range (small, dynamic changes become noninterpretable by the compressed file, resulting in flatter ‘volume’ song profiles), and

c) spatial spread (loss of cross-channel differences, resulting in either exaggeration or loss of stereo separation).

When this degradation of sound quality is combined with the fact that most young listeners get their music only online, what we end up with is a generation of listeners that is exposed to, and therefore ‘trained’ in, an impoverished listening environment. Prolonged and consistent exposure to impoverished listening environments is a recipe for cognitive deterioration in listening ability. That is, in the ability to focus attention on and be able to tell the difference between fine (and, if we continue this way, even coarse) sound variations.

Such deterioration will not only affect how we listen to music but also sound perception and communication in general, since our ability to tell the difference between sound sources (i.e. who said what) and sound source locations (i.e. where did the sound come from) is intricately linked to our ability to focus attention on fine sound-quality differences.

What you should do

a) Do not listen to music exclusively in mp3 (or any other compressed) format.
Go to a live concert! Listen to a CD over a good home sound system, set of headphones, or car stereo!

b) Unless a piece of music is not available in another format, do not waste your money on iTunes or any other music download service, until such services start offering data rates greater than 300 kbits/sec.

c) When you load CDs on your iPod or other devise, select the uncompressed conversion rate (e.g. .wav or .aif formats). If you don’t have the hard disk space on your player to do this, convert at the highest available data rate (currently 320kBits/sec on iTunes).

d) Finally, get a good pair of headphones for your mp3 player! The headsets given out with iPods and most mp3 players are of such bad quality that they essentially create a tight bottleneck to the quality of your digital files and players. The response of these headphones has been designed to match the low quality of popular iTunes or other mp3 files (128 kbits/sec). Mp3-player manufacturers do this for two wise (for them) reasons:

i) poor quality headsets are cheap to produce and good enough to reproduce the poor quality mp3s files you are fed, and

ii) poor quality headsets prevent you from creating/requesting music files at higher data rates because when listening over such headphones you cannot even tell the difference between good and bad sound quality.

Well, what can I say? Wake up and listen to the music!

Avatar photo

Viewing Faculty-Development Programs through the Lens of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) Framework

The key word for technology integration in teaching and learning is “integration.” Integration means not to run the elements—technology, teaching strategies, and the subject matter—in isolation. The call for building an integrated model of three domains of knowledge has been made by both researchers and practitioners. In 2006, two scholars from Michigan State University, Punya Mishra and Matt Koehler, put all the pieces together and formulated a conceptual framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK), also known as TPACK (Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge). Their work was soon acknowledged by the Technology Committee of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), who decided to publish a monograph on TPCK and its application on various disciplines of teacher education.

As a member of the technology committee and one of the editors of the book, I consider my term with the AACTE tech committee the most productive period of my life: I not only mothered two children during this time, but also served as a nanny for the committee’s baby: the Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Educators.

While nurturing this baby, I felt myself grow with it, just as one can learn a zillion things in a very short time from being a mother. Since mothers do not have time for theory, let me give you a quick bullet-point summary of TPCK:

tpckone.jpg

  1. TPCK(as shown in the graph above) is the intersection of three bodies of knowledge: technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge.
  2. It’s a level of competency at which a teacher will be able to teach the content knowledge (CK) using the right method (P) and with the right technology (T).
  3. There is interaction and interconnection between the three domains (changes in one section will affect the others).
  4. Teaching is a creative process of navigating through the TPCK landscape.
  5. TPCK calls for teacher education to be delivered through a combined model of T, P, and CK, instead of teaching each of them as single subject.

The power of a theory lies in the fact that it provides you with a lens through which you can have a dissected view of a phenomenon, seek reasons behind the facts, and search for better solutions. By plugging TPCK into my daily practice of faculty support and development, I was able to seek reasons behind a few phenomena, such as the following:
“We are overwhelmed!”
– Faculty dissatisfaction with the training program
A typical response we get in a faculty evaluation of a training program is that they are overwhelmed: too much technology, too much information—all to be absorbed in such a short time. (And honestly, they don’t have more time to give you!)

Using the TPCK model to view and analyze knowledge distribution within a faculty-development program, I see that each of the three domains is usually represented by three unique groups: faculty as content knowledge experts, instructional designers as pedagogical specialists, and technologists as the technology gurus.

tpcktwo.jpg

The difference between TPCK for preservice teachers and TPCK for college faculty is that, for faculty, the content knowledge has already been well established, presumably not through a TPCK approach. Therefore, they need to acquire pedagogical and technological knowledge through some make-up programs, such as faculty development in teaching with technology, teaching-excellence seminars, and technology/course-design boot camps.

The other two groups, instructional designers and instructional technologist, on the other hand, have in-depth knowledge in the pedagogy and technology domains.To them, each of the domains—pedagogy and technology—constitutes a discipline by itself (or in some cases, one joint discipline of instructional technology). As Mishra and Koehler pointed out, each discipline has special forms of knowledge that are comprised of knowledge, methods, purpose, and forms of presentations. Like any other discipline, instructional design/instructional technology has its own “rules and regulations” as well as its own disciplinary thinking, which Gardner describes as “mental furniture” or the mold in which people think.

With good will and a strong motivation to help, specialists from the T and P groups have a higher goal of using the development program as an educational process to make the faculty group adopt the disciplinary thinking of their own domain. (A measurement of success at this point would be, “Have you changed your teaching philosophy to become a student-centered instructor?”) To make this happen, one has to bring in the whole discipline, including the knowledge, the methods, the purpose, and the forms of presentations. Now we are talking about knowledge domains, taxonomies, genres of educational philosophies, cognitive process, inventories of teaching styles, inventories of learning styles, and various instructional design models including both the classical and the newly invented ones. Have I missed anything? I’d better not because every construct serves as a base for another, and together, they formed our discipline of instructional technology—or half of it, since the technology part has not been brought in yet. Now imagine squeezing all of these into a few weeks of training (in a condensed format of course—with a reading list for more in-depth exploring). Cognitive overload? It surely will be.

The TPCK framework raised the importance of context and discipline sensitivity as well as the argument of teaching different disciplines differently. Mishra and Koehler cited Donald’s critique of content-neutral, simplistic one-size-fits-all educational strategies. This means faculty-development-program designers have to be extremely sensitive to the faculty’s discipline and tailor their support in a specific and concrete manner. Building a learning community is a great idea. Using blogs and wikis is cool, and collaborative, problem-based learning is a popular concept, but what if a faculty member is just trying to figure out a way to convey some concepts to his first programming class?

Fifteen years ago, a professor in my COBOL class explained the difference between hardware and software as such that “hardware is the male portion of the population that does the work, but it has to be told by the software, the female portion of the population.” It was a bold (and perhaps gender-biased) explanation, but an understanding of the two technical terms of hardware and software was achieved instantaneously and remained in one student’s mind till today. I see this as a good example of TPCK where a faculty member who has in-depth disciplinary knowledge of computer science deployed an effective teaching strategy—a simile to connect a new concept with student’s prior/common knowledge. (I doubt he had ever had a workshop on Schema Theory of Learning.) The technology was a blackboard. And guest what? It worked.

Now I feel like I should stop writing this blog post and get our staff together to redesign our own faculty-development programs. I will share with you more of my findings from viewing things through the lens of TPCK in a few weeks. Here is a heads-up of what I will discuss in my next blog post:

  • Is the course good enough?
    –the different views between a faculty member and an instructional designer
  • What if pedagogical knowledge is my content knowledge?
    –missing a leg in the T-P-CK tripod
  • Paradise
    –the ideal curriculum of a faculty-development program
Avatar photo

Online Learning: Panacea or Curse?

I recently returned from a trip to Thailand, where I was teaching a cohort of graduate students how to use library databases for research. A common question that I was asked upon my return was why an in-person visit was necessary to teach these skills.

I find it interesting that many people believe that technology and in particular synchronous technologies are a panacea that can replace the face-to-face classroom environment. While I believe that these technologies are powerful and can and do extend the reach of traditional classrooms, I also believe it is important to make wise decisions about the use of technology based on the potential audience and their unique needs and attributes.

In this particular situation, where English was not the students’ first language, where their prior experience using libraries was mixed, and where their access to reliable technology was not a given, face-to-face instruction made the most sense.

I believe that instructors who are being asked to take their classes online need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages carefully. What is the motivation for moving to even a hybrid model? Can the students’ needs be met effectively?

I believe that there are certain courses and certain students that should be taught face-to-face in a real classroom. Statistics and math courses are two that come to mind. I suppose there are those that would argue that many people can and do learn these subject without the need to be in a classroom, but I would argue that there are many more students who require the personal interaction that only a live human standing in front of them can provide. This isn’t to say that there aren’t successful online math and statistics courses but more to argue that before you take the entire math department virtual, you take the students’ needs into consideration.

Undergraduates are another population of students that I believe benefit from the interaction of a live instructor standing in front of them. Again, I am sure there are undergraduates who successfully take online classes and have great experiences, but I would argue that this is more the exception than the rule. Most undergraduates that I know are just learning how to balance their responsibilities and adding the responsibility of managing an online learning experience to the mix is a recipe for disaster. I find it laudable that schools often want to find ways to extend their campus to those most vulnerable of dropping out or not even starting, those students for whom time is precious, since they are juggling home, work, and school responsibilities. However, I would argue that too often the time commitment of an online class far outweighs the potential benefit of not having to be in class on a particular day or time. I would also argue that these students are precisely the ones that need the extra attention that a live teacher in a face-to-face class provides. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this extra attention is that it makes students feel like they belong to a community.

Given all of this, you may think that I don’t believe online instruction is a good option, which isn’t true. Instead, I believe that we as instructors and instructional designers need to make good decisions about which classes and which students are part of our online classrooms.

What Can Online Educators Learn from Advertising?

When the final numbers are counted, online advertising is expected to have grown over 25 percent in 2007 to over $21 billion (BusinessWeek). Even a struggling U.S. economy and a looming recession don’t seem capable of stopping the party any time soon (www.clickz.com). One reason online ad spending has grown so rapidly is its ability to provide very detailed analytics. Online campaigns allow advertisers to gather very granular information on who saw an ad, when, how may times, and so on. Ad firms have whole staffs devoted to tracking online campaigns, evaluating data, and determining the effectiveness of the campaign. DoubleClick and Nielson/NetRatings generate millions each year helping to aggregate this data.

Ideally, online classes should be subject to the same level of analysis. Faculty and instructional designers have lots of tools to assist them with the planning and implementation of an online class but very little to assist them in evaluating the class and improving on it for the next quarter or semester. Data is often hard to get at (Have you ever tried to make sense of server logs?) and often there is not enough time and resources to produce a meaningful report that provides any insight.

That’s why I am excited by the Backlot Content Management System by Ooyala. Designed as a video-ad-campaign manager, the system allows you to quickly generate really useful reports that will be extremely valuable to online educators. Backlot lets you see how many times a video was watched, how much of it was watched, how many students watched it, how many times students replayed the video, etc.

backlot.jpeg

The reporting interface is easy to use, and Backlot includes a download-to-Excel feature should you want to slice and dice your data even more. It beats trying to decipher server logs. I think it can be a huge asset in allowing educators and researchers to truly determine the effectiveness of video in online classrooms.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Faculty Support

A few years ago at a conference, I had the opportunity to hear Eric Larson speak about faculty use of technology and support. Since then, my colleagues have heard me refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of faculty support, so I thought that it was time that I wrote a blog post about this.

Larson’s premise was basically that faculty use of technology loosely follows the framework of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, the higher needs on Maslow’s scale cannot be met if the lower needs have not been taken care of first. In Maslow’s hierarchy, the levels are as follows: Biological and Physical, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Cognitive, Aesthetic, Self-actualization, and Transcendence.

But how does this relate to faculty using technology? Starting with Biological and Physical, these are the most basic needs that humans have. What are the basic needs that faculty have when it comes to teaching with technology? They need things that work. Issues such as a broken mouse, no internet connection, or a computer that won’t boot fall into this section. This is basic technical support.

The second step is Safety. This is where reliability comes into play. For faculty to feel ‘safe’ using technology in their classes, they have to be able to rely on it to work correctly every time they need it. No one likes to look stupid in front of their students. If a faculty member feels that there is a great possibility for failure with a certain technology, they simply will not use it.

The third state, Belongingness and Love, is where the human element comes into play in both teaching with technology. On the technical side, faculty members don’t want to feel alone. To achieve this, faculty could be part of a group of others who teach with technology and can share the same fears and desires. Also, they need a relationship with someone to help them teach with technology, such as instructional designers or technologists.

Esteem is next on Maslow’s and Larson’s lists. Larson argues this point from a technical support standpoint by saying maslow2.gifthat faculty need to feel respected in their work needs and provides examples from a support standpoint. However, I feel that this is an area where confidence in using the technology comes into play. Faculty need to feel not only supported in what they do, but also confident that they can teach with technology and in a manner that surpasses teaching without it.

Cognitive is where faculty take their own time to truly understand how something works as it does. A comprehensive investigation into a teaching method can lead to new, creative, and innovative ways of teaching. Aesthetic is the investigation taken one step further. After knowledge about “how” is attained, exploration into “how to make it better” occurs. Investigation of teaching methods leads to new, creative, and innovative ways of teaching. By the time these levels are reached, it means there are few concerns from the basic levels.

Finally, Self-actualization and Transcendence cap the top of our hierarchy. These two needs are signs of a happy faculty member effectively, and perhaps innovatively, teaching with technology. Larson argues that Transcendence is the evangelism of teaching with technologies. Faculty who are at this level are happy to share and spread the news of how they teach in an effective manner and want to help others do the same.

While it would be nice to have an entire university filled with faculty at the top two echelons of the hierarchy, it would also mean that I’d be out of a job. All kidding aside, it’s a difficult level to reach on an individual level, much less as an entire university or college. All facets of technological and pedagogical support play a role in this hierarchy of teaching and learning with technology. And if all else fails, take a page from both Larson’s and my book and appeal to the Biological and Physical need—it never hurts to bring food.

To see a copy of the PowerPoint that accompanied Larson’s presentation, click here.

See Me, Feel Me. Why Am I Stuck On-Ground?

I have a confession to make. I design multimedia for online courses. I extol the virtues of online learning to anyone who’ll listen. Yet I’m taking a course on-ground. And next quarter, when given the choice between the on-ground and online sections of a programming course, I’ll lean towards the on-ground.

Why? That’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself. My stock answer is that I’m not disciplined enough for an online course. My wife’s amused by this rationale; she often tells me I’m the most disciplined person she knows. She has a point. I was raised by Scotch-Irish and German Protestant farmers and railroad men whose idea of taking it easy was waiting until after church to chop weeds. So discipline shouldn’t be a problem for me when taking an online course. What gives?

When I take a course on-ground, I know that I’m committed to be in that classroom 3 hours every week. I’ll show up because I know my absence will be noted. I’ll show up because I don’t want to miss any information. And this is important: I’ll show up for the experience of being in a classroom, of being a student among students. I like to see and be seen. Rational or not, it makes me feel like I’m a student.

That last reason is the most telling. Because other than this intangible, what exactly does a classroom have going for it? My current course is taught after work in an airless, overcrowded, and overheated classroom, in which a great number of my fellows are tuned out and concentrating on their Facebook pages or texting one another. I’m exhausted by the workday and hardly at my sharpest. My instructor is overextended and often underprepared and is further handicapped by balky classroom equipment, improper software, and the flagging energy level that frequents evening classes. While there certainly is useful information exchanged in our class, the real learning comes from the readings and exercises, activities that I complete because I want to learn and because I want to avoid the social embarrassment that could result from showing up at the next class unprepared.

So why not take the course online? Why not spare myself the frustration, fatigue, and inconvenience of the on-ground experience? It’s commonly argued that a well-designed online course provides similar or superior opportunities for the exchange of ideas, for meaningful exercises, for peer and instructor feedback, and even for social connections. And there’s the ability to time shift, to log in and participate during the week at times that work for me instead of the demands of the university schedule. The only thing really absent is face time, the presence of others and myself in a physical space. The feel of a classroom.

I don’t really have an answer. But I’m concerned that if it’s this difficult for me to make the switch from on-ground to online when there are so many compelling reasons to do so, then we must be missing untold numbers of potential online learners. And that leaves us with a challenge. We can design a course to create and deliver a viable learning environment. Can we make it feel like someplace students want to be?

Checklists: Saving Lives, Transforming Education?

In the December 10th, 2007, issue of the New Yorker (it takes me a few months to catch up these days), Atul Gawande wrote an eye-opening piece, “The Checklist.” The article describes how the implementation of a simple medical checklist, developed by Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, slashed the rate of oftentimes-lethal intravenous catheter infections for patients in intensive care units in the state of Michigan. How? By including simple, no-brainer steps like “Step One: Doctors must wash their hands with soap” that doctors and hospital staff were skipping, thus causing easily preventable deaths and infections in their intensive care units.

It’s pretty mind boggling. If Dr. Pronovost could actually implement his checklist across the US (easier said than done), it would largely wipe out the multiplier effect of thousands of human error deaths from skipped steps across thousands of diagnostic and procedural combinations. The power of the Gawande article is that it underscores that some of the most basic tools are the most effective ones. The checklist is brilliant in its very simplicity, and I’m sure it can have dramatic applications across all sectors.

Though checklists of all kinds (revising, editing, homework, behavior) can be found in elementary and secondary educational settings, it is harder to find individualized, purposeful use of checklists at the higher ed level. I don’t think the need for them has necessarily diminished. Though students in the online classroom aren’t dying of infections in intensive care units, they are spending unnecessary time getting lost and confused about when and where to submit assignments and are having difficulty managing their time in the absence of face-to-face accountability in the online environment. I hear professors complain about late assignments, ignored e-mails, and work submitted that is hardly reflective of critical thinking.

I think that a greater use of individualized checklists would improve communications between instructor and student and allow students to spend more time on substantive, creative work. In the online classroom, students need specific instructions on how to submit their work and how to participate in online discussions. They need assistance and they need writing papers and guideposts for completing assignments. Instructors provide all of these instructions, but typically in an elaborate course syllabus supplemented with lengthy e-mails in addition to whatever is posted in the course itself. Too frequently, instructors’ e-mail communications to students are lengthy documents that students may barely read all the way through. Professors aren’t joking when they say: “My students don’t read the syllabus,” or, “My students don’t read my e-mail.” They probably don’t. Why not provide students a more direct, simple path to success?

Checklists are simple and direct. They filter out extraneous details and give students a priority list of items to read and do. Checklists could be provided for specific parts of the syllabus. A “Welcome Checklist” supplementing a very brief welcome note from the instructor could replace the traditional long welcome letter from the instructor that tends to contain entirely too much information. Checklists could ensure that students edit and check their papers, properly reflecting on each step. I suspect that instructors would receive an elevated quality of writing, in response to clearer and cleaner communication to students.

I think professors have been reluctant to use checklists because they involve this simplification of language, and so to some extent, instructors may feel checklists would enable students. Instructors expect students taking online courses to be able to read lengthy e-mails and take large tasks (reading and analyzing a case study; writing a paper) and automatically divide and sequence them out into a series of tasks independently.

But I think part of using checklists is adjusting to a need for an entirely simplified way of writing when communicating guidelines and expectations in an online course. We need to give over to this need for simplicity, standardization, and predictability that is not necessarily the standard way of communicating in academia. I think most instructors might be uncomfortable with embracing this format because it involves thinking and writing in a largely different way. Like most instructors, I’ve established a routine that was created before the age of e-mail and Facebook and text messaging. I grew up writing letters by hand, relishing the pure art of correspondence for its own sake. A checklist, in contrast, seems cold, and hardly feels like responsible and full communication. But I believe there is a way we can integrate checklists judiciously. You can still impart tone and personality in your email and your communications with your students, yet not lose them in a sea of verbiage.

I’ll spend the next few weeks integrating a few checklists into the design of the online class, to showcase the checklist as being an important, very low tech tool. I am purposefully keeping fancy checklist/tasklist applications out of it for the moment, though I sometimes feel I have tested out every checklist/tasklist application that exists. This is more about the mindset than the technology. It’s captivatingly simple.