Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

For the past year I’ve been spearheading UVU’s Hybrid Teaching Initiative through our Innovation Center. We’ve focused most of our efforts on designing, conducting, and revising various forms of our HTI workshop series, from a 12-week version to a 3-day version.

Now I’m gathering fuel for reflection, evaluation, and possible expansion of our efforts. Some of that fuel comes from existing research literature, of course, but I’m especially interested in new or unsung anecdotes of hybrid course redesigns from your schools and institutions.

So, whether you’re a teacher, a student, an instructional designer/technologist, or administrator — higher ed, k12, or corporate — please e-mail or post your hybrid course experiences and anecdotes. I’m interested in both successes and failures as a means of contextualizing and analyzing process and outcomes.

Knewton has put together a tidy little infographic on Blended Learning (K12) that’s worth examining–even if you’re in higher ed (more…)

I’ve been teaching online courses in Instructure Canvas for a while, but stumbled upon a fascinating phenomenon today thanks to one of Canvas’s built in features. This plays out due to a number of system settings, so bear with me (more…)

It’s not news that teaching an online course does not necessarily mean less work for the instructor–just different work. At least it should. Nor does it necessarily mean more work. We’ll get to that. In my mind, online courses are a challenge primarily because they front load course preparation, but often with additional resource expenditure to ensure engaging learning design. Faculty may suggest that teaching an online course is itself more work, too, but I don’t believe that’s typically the case (more…)

I’m working on an online university course redesign that prompts students to develop web design skills through a series of weekly projects that build upon the previous week’s work. In the past these projects have been submitted privately to the instructor, though students have been encouraged to post their submissions to their blogs or personal web sites, and simply submit the URL as a means to encourage collegial interaction and openness (more…)

Or, Blogs, “Blogs,” and Discussion Boards*

I subscribe to TechTrends as part of my AECT membership. It has a great subtitle (Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning) and it is peer reviewed, though I don’t know if it’s considered a journal or a magazine (I lean towards “magazine”). Sometimes there are some good articles, sometimes there are bad ones. One particular article in the September/October 2010 issue caught my attention: “Using Blogs to Identify Misconceptions in a Large Undergraduate Nutrition Course”. Not exactly a home run of a title, but I’m interested in examples of student blogging in action, so I read on (more…)

I found this old e-mail from the POD mailing list describing a number of faculty certification programs for online teaching. I’m posting it here more as a reminder to myself as Marc and I move forward with a hybrid faculty development program here at UVU (more…)

I traveled to Denver this week for WCET 2009, and though I was sunk with a cold on the second day, so far I’ve enjoyed participating in the conference, and, as always, have found the Twitter backchannel (#wcet09) a great way to connect with more ideas, and more people (more…)

Darren Draper stirred up another conversation on his blog yesterday (Hacking the Curriculum) which intersects a number of my interests: independent study, reusable course content, and open education, and reiterates the question, what is not replaceable in teaching? In the live classroom? In individual instructor-developed curriculum? And how far can we stretch the re-usability of online educational materials? (more…)

Continuing from yesterday’s post, 31 Out of 95 E-Learning Ideas Ain’t Bad, here’s the second half of my pick of the strongest e-learning ideas found in Patti Shank’s useful book, The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning.

17. Use electronic flash cards (p 184). (Coincidentally, @KenWoodward and I are working on providing an extremely reusable flash cards app for both desktop Web browsers and handheld devices.)
18. Drag-and-drop activities for self-assessment within a lesson (p 194).
19. Use pre- and post-assessments to demonstrate the value of the e-learning (p 205).
20. Provide flowchart(s) to illustrate processes (p 216). (I’ve found these are easy to create in most spreadsheet programs.)
21. As part of prototyping and design, write a learner scenario to describe possible interactions with e-learning (p 221).
22. Tap into learners’ “emotional brain” with personalized learning models (Concrete experience; Reflective observation; Abstract hypothesis; Active testing) (p 226). (This model is similar to Stevick’s Observe – Span – Do, which I’ve found to be effective in language learning.)
23. Use content templates to rapidly turn out lesson pages with a consistent look and feel (p 228; p 232).
24. Use concept maps and causal loops for navigation as an alternative to linear navigation for complex concepts (p 240). (I do recall some early studies of hypertextual learning suggested that non-linear navigation is risky at best.)
25. Embed hyperlinks to glossary entries within the lesson content (p 249).
26. Provide a printable summary of lesson content as a study aid (p 265).
27. Develop a virtual campus to help wholly distance learners orient themselves and feel connected (p 287).
28. Use visuals to show relationships between course concepts (p 291).
29. Slow down or speed up motion to demonstrate complex physical skills (p 301).
30. Create an interactive, multidimensional timeline for subjects such as history that weave events in places and times (p 308).
31. Use still and interactive graphics for complex or obscure physical concepts (e.g. atoms, cells, galaxies, tidal pools) (p 312; 315; 318; 321; 324).

These 31 ideas are the choicest out of Shank’s 95+ picks. Note that I’ve written 95+; Shank explains at the end that there are more than 95 ideas in this book, despite the title. She suggests that the element of surprise can help learning along, yet at the same time she notes that she herself wouldn’t have noticed, and the book doesn’t even number the ideas so that you could know there were more than 95. Really, who’s going to be keeping count in their head?

Length and those minor complaints aside, I recommend this book to instructional designers or technology-minded teachers, if only to see the screen-shots illustrating the most useful and innovative ideas.