Tag Archives: d2l-content

UX for Online Courses

Does your online course provide a positive user experience? To determine if it does, you might see how it aligns with information architect and user experience consultant Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb diagram.

Figure 1. The User Experience HoneycombUseful. First, is your course useful? The matter of whether the subject and learning objectives are ultimately useful to the student is certainly important, but here I’m thinking of whether the course supports the stated learning objectives. Does it provide the content and tools a student needs to meet learning objectives, or must the student search for solutions or create workarounds to overcome shortcomings, limitations, errors, or omissions? For example, if your course requires students to record and post audio comments, does it provide tools for doing so, or at minimum direct students to the appropriate tools and tutorials? Further, are the elements or components of your course useful? Do the graphics, audio, or video support learning objectives? Do the readings and assessments? Continue reading →

Cool Creative Commons Collections for Class

I am not very original and I like to find materials on the web to ‘spice-up’ my hybrid and online courses. However, I frequently find things that are wonderful, but I am never sure as to their usability with regards to copyright and fair-use. Fortunately, there is a wealth of resources out there that are available under some very clear and user-friendly licensing.  So, let me first briefly discuss Creative Commons licensing and then point you to some wonderful web sites that support either Creative Commons licensing or clearly stated licensing materials for use in your course.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has established some legal tools to allow content authors to share their creative works under six different licensing schemes. The schemes are outlined on the website. In the simplest of terms, all of the licenses require, as a minimum, attribution. This means you give credit to the author for the original creation. The rest of the licenses add on one or more of these attributes: NoDerivs, NonCommercial or ShareAlike. Rather than go into the detail, the site provides complete descriptions of the licenses in both a human-readable format (License Deed) or the less-friendly Legal Code. Below are a few sites where you can find some really great content licensed under CC.

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Progress Tracking in Desire2Learn: The Newer, Better Checklists

Two months ago, DePaul upgraded from D2L 9.4 to version 10.3, a leap of four versions. For our department, that means we’ve had 60 days of leading trainings on the big changes in the system; discovering, reproducing, and reporting bugs; fielding angry complaints about new annoyances that have popped up in this new version; and constantly manning the phones to answer instructor questions. In short, it’s been exhausting.

But I don’t want to talk about bugs or new annoyances. I don’t want to talk about how much time I’ve spent on the phone to get through this transition. I want to talk about something positive. So to take my mind off of all that, I’m going to write about the good part of upgrades–great new features, my favorite being student progress tracking.

What is progress tracking?

Progress tracking turns your Content area into a checklist for students. Every item in your Content can be something that students can check off as they complete it, or something that’s automatically checked when the student does something in D2L, like submit to a dropbox folder or complete a quiz attempt. This is what it looks like for a student.

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Quick and Easy Curving

Something Happened! — That Sinking Feeling

Sometimes the grade distribution on your exam seems a bit low — maybe even horrifyingly low.

Perhaps there wasn’t enough time to focus on a topic due to a holiday, a bout of illness struck, or maybe there was a question that was ambiguously worded. The assessment might be brand new and still needs some tweaking, or maybe the students just didn’t get it — there was a collective lapse in memory.

Whatever the reason, the grade distribution is low and it feels bad for you and worse for your students.

What Happened? — The Empathy Hat

Now that you’ve identified there is an issue, the next step is to identify the reason for the low scores. Continue reading →

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Instructional Designer 2.0; or, How do I explain my job to my grandparents?

When I taught high school English, saying my job title was an explanation in itself, mostly because anyone I was talking to had experienced high school English for themselves. The only difficulty was to convince them I was still an OK person even though I was a high school English teacher: “Don’t worry—I won’t be correcting your grammar or suggesting syntax improvements during our conversation!”

Now, when I say that I’m an “Instructional Designer,” the expression on most people’s faces is one of polite befuddlement—I may as well have said I’m a “Foley Artist” or “Happy Salad Model.”

That’s why I was surprised when Peggy Maki, the keynote speaker at the Teaching Commons Fall Forum, mentioned instructional designers. In her talk on the scholarship of teaching and learning, Dr. Maki was explaining the connections among program outcomes, course outcomes, assignments, and student learning, and she advocated for a clearer linearity across those elements. As an aside, she said (excuse my loose paraphrase), “And that’s why instructional design is so popular now.”

I was sitting right in front of Dr. Maki when she said this, and I think she saw my politely befuddled face. Popular? Instructional design? I think my friends and family have a vague understanding of what I do, Continue reading →

Is your Mind Set?

I teach several mathematics courses in the Liberal Studies Program at DePaul. For many of the students, this will be the only mathematics course that they will take during their entire college career, and many of them are apprehensive. I try to do a few things to allay their fears or at least help them see that they are in the same boat.

During the first week, I ask them to participate in a discussion forum by responding to the following prompt:

“Most children have a natural affinity for mathematics; they take pride in their counting skills and enjoy puzzles, building blocks, and computers. Unfortunately, this natural interest seems to be snuffed out in most people by the time they reach adulthood.

What is your attitude toward mathematics? If you have a negative attitude, can you identify when in your childhood that attitude developed? If you have a positive attitude, can you explain why? How might you encourage someone with a negative attitude to become more positive?”

This quarter, the students responded very well to the discussion. Those who were comfortable with mathematics encouraged those who weren’t. As the quarter progressed, the students have bonded and helped each other both in and out of class. However, every time I ask this question (and I have for more than 5 years now), I see responses similar to these: Continue reading →

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Just-in-Time Teaching

What exactly is Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT)? Wikipedia defines JiTT as “a pedagogical strategy that uses feedback between classroom activities and work that students do at home, in preparation for the classroom meeting.” The goal of JiTT is to enhance the amount of learning that takes place during class time. The idea is that the instructor will give assignments that the students must complete and submit shortly before class, then the instructor will read the students’ submissions “just in time” to fine-tune the lesson of the day to meet the students’ needs.

The dynamics of today’s classrooms are constantly changing, including the kinds of students that fill these classrooms. Classrooms now consist of part- and full-time working students, commuters, and older students. They all come from different backgrounds and different levels of education. As a result, instructors’ teaching methods need to evolve in order to keep up with the varying student population. JiTT approaches these challenges by gauging the knowledge level of each individual student on a given topic. The feedback that is obtained from the out-of-class assignments help to maximize the effectiveness of class sessions. The feedback also encourages the instructor to construct team-building exercises. Before class starts, they are able to use the students’ feedback to create lessons that will allow the class to work together on the same objective.

JiTT assignments (often called WarmUps) allow students to take a more active role in their learning because it is their hard work that shapes the next class. These assignments should be built in a way that requires students to do a decent amount of research by reading a book or an online article, watching a video, etc. Instructors should also encourage students to practice using problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. The best way to do this is to create a few open-ended and short-answer questions that pertain to a subject that was not previously discussed in class.

With JiTT, student learning is enriched, and it increases the efficacy and success of classroom lessons.

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Keepin’ It Idiomatic: Basing Assessment on Authentic Knowledge

I first had a try with Garage Band about three years ago.  I liked the ease with which I could get started, the editing tools were easy enough to use, the sound libraries are realistic, and even finishing a track was relatively simple. However, after three years of using it on and off, I am using different software for most of my recording needs.  Simply put, Garage Band is hard to play.

Let me add a little background to this.  I’m a former music teacher, performer and clinician with a Master’s degree.  I’ve got more than twenty years experience on three of the instruments I have at my disposal through Garage Band, but I struggle to play them well in this software.  Why?  They are not idiomatically designed.  I just can’t get used to trying to play guitar or bass with my fingertips on a screen, touching to play a note. I’m expecting to finger a note, and strum or pick with the other hand.  Here it takes all my fingers just to punch out a decent bass line.  Oh, and did I mention that if I don’t hit the note in exactly the right place, the string will bend?  Ask any guitar player and they’ll tell you that bends aren’t easy to do, but Garage Band makes it almost necessary to bend if you want to play at all.  I miss the feel of the strings on my fingers too.

Now I know that Apple can’t make all those things happen.  There isn’t a way, at least not yet, to make the keyboard actually feel like I’m pressing keys, or make guitar chords that feel right. (By the way, these are next to impossible to do by hand.)  But I did have a hope that perhaps someone who is an actual musician wouldn’t have to feel like a fool using this software.  After many years of playing an instrument, muscle memory takes over.  You may not realize it, but you have learned to expect certain position cues, responses and reactions from the instrument that just aren’t there in a virtual capacity.  Unless the virtual instrument is an instrument first and a computer controller second, those features may never be there.  Whose guitar has only eight frets anyway?

Just as it is important to try and design music performance software that will actually be musical, it is important to make these sorts of connections in all kinds of education. Continue reading →

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Mixed Content makes for an Interesting Course Experience

For a while now, both Internet Explorer (IE) and Chrome have been blocking “mixed content.”  In the last few weeks, the most recent Firefox release (Firefox 23) has also begun doing so.  So, what is mixed content and why should you care?

When your web browser connects to any webpage, the webpage is sent to you by another computer called a server. Your web browser and the server know how to connect by way of a set of digital rules, or a “protocol.” There are two types of protocols your web browser can connect through:

  • HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or
  • HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

Secure webpages start with https in their URLs.  These sites have their connections to the webservers encrypted, making the information shared on them more secure from sniffers and man-in-the-middle attacks–in other words, from people who are up to no good.  Sounds good, right?  When you are making a purchase online, accessing your bank account, or taking an online class, you want your data to be secure.  So what then is the problem? Continue reading →