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.

Canvas Allows Late Submissions

We’re just starting the second week of the semester, and the online class I’m teaching just passed its first assignment due date (an article analysis blog post). Like most LMS Canvas lets the teacher set an assignment due date and a cut-off date after which no submissions will be accepted. In the four semesters I’ve been teaching on Canvas I don’t think I’ve set a cut-off date. I don’t think this has mattered, as I’ve found that students who don’t submit a project on time, probably won’t submit it at all unless they have a legitimate excuse. And since late submissions are marked as such by the system, I can choose to give them some or no points due to tardiness.

Canvas Excludes Ungraded Items

The gradebook in Canvas is interesting in that by default it calculates category and final scores excluding ungraded items. This is to provide a more accurate, up-to-date view of students’ total effort. However, there’s a small flaw in the system: it continues to exclude ungraded items after the due date has passed, even if there is no student submission, and even after all other student submissions have been graded. So a student who hasn’t turned projects in may, by default, appear to be in pretty good shape at mid-term–until you turn exclude graded items off.

I didn’t want to deal with this illusion this semester, so I decided that I would manually enter zeros for students who had not submitted a project on time, rather than just skipping over them and leaving the score blank. At the time I didn’t think about the fact that…

Canvas Sends Grade Change Notifications

One of Canvas’s best features is that users can set up multiple contact methods (email addresses, Facebook accounts, SMS numbers for text messages, etc), and can then define when and how they will be notified for a slew of different course activities, including instant notification of grade changes. I remembered this when, not more than two hours after I entered those zeros I received my own notifications from Canvas that 3 out of 5 of those students had added a comment to their score. Each had submitted the assignment (late, of course) and with an apology for falling behind so early in the semester.

This has never happened before, even when I’ve sent mass email reminders to the class after the first week of the semester. I can only conclude that receiving an individualized, albeit automatic, notification of the zero motivated the students to scramble and rectify their mistake, and fast.

Now some teachers (myself included) may be inclined to rub the slackers’ nose in it and ignore their late submissions. But it’s the first week of the semester, and by responding to the notification I felt, well, I can’t describe it any other way than pleased that they had reinvested themselves in the course. So I knocked some points off, but I accepted their late work, and encouraged them to meet their deadlines next week. By doing so I hope that I may have averted some early drop outs. It was a timely occurrence, as increasing retention has been on my mind; we’ll have to wait and see if there’s any difference in my attrition rates at the end of the semester.

Thus, I recommend that instructors consider how to maximize student learning with the time they might normally spend lecturing/discussing, a variation of what’s now being called The Flipped Classroom. I encourage them to set aside a consistent block of time each week for this, whether it’s a 3-hour block or 3x 1-hour blocks.

To illustrate, the online courses I teach are project-centered, and students can’t get enough feedback on the work they are doing. I’m trying two things to facilitate fast, effective feedback:

1. Projects are now submitted to a discussion forum (Instructure Canvas makes it easy to score both discussion threads and submissions with a rubric using their SpeedGrader) to give the rest of the class a chance to view, comment on, and learn from each other’s progress.

2. I record my feedback after the discussion is over for the week as a screen recording, targeting the parts that the class might have overlooked.

   I did this for the first time this week, limiting my feedback to 5min max. Student response seemed more immediate and positive. The free version of Jing enforces that limit, but I expect to save myself the time and trouble of uploading to ScreenCast.com by using Canvas’s built-in media feedback and WebCam Max. For my 25 students this cost me around 3 hours of time–not bad for a first go! Still less than I would have spent in the classroom, and now my homework feedback is done, too, so I consider it a win-win. A bi-win if you will.

I’m considering a redesign where the submissions would be, by default at least, public to the class in the form of a discussion forum. My pros and cons for this idea include:

Pros

1. Replaces regular weekly discussions with project-centric discussion
2. Increases opportunities for positive social interaction
3. Feedback of many eyes, peer review
4. Synergy of community support through each stage
5. Mimics feedback opportunities in professional work environments
6. Demonstrates students’ participatory academic work (via @injenuity)

Cons

1. Anxiety of exposure
2. Discouragement by sense of inferiority to others
3. Displaces expert feedback
4. Decreases planned, contextual or tangential discussions (see 1 above)

If you can add or modify this list, provide alternative ideas, or reference important research in this area, I’d love to hear from you.

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. I soon discovered that the authors, Trena Paulus and Marsha Spence, are exhibiting a inversion of Jim Groom’s (now surely ubiquitous) post, “Blog…You keep saying that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means”. Whereas Groom explained the expansiveness of the word “blog”, Paulus and Spence reduce the meaning to nothing more than a discussion forum. Indeed, replacing the word “blog” with “discussion forum” throughout the article does little to reduce it’s meaning, nor an expectation that the year is, in fact, 1996.

Now, I could attribute this misuse of “blogging” to mere lack of creativity or fear of change, i.e., “How can we use this new tool in a way that’s not too different from the old tool?” Or I could blame the authors for simply not exploring and discerning the key differences of blogs and discussions before designing their activities. Or I could discredit TechTrends for peer-reviewing the article without recognizing that blog !== discussion forum. But none of that would be entirely fair, for, you see, Paulus and Spence are using Blackboard. And though the version is not specified, both the description of the tool and screen shots confirm that Paulus and Spence’s “blogs” are really just discussion forums with a fancy label. In short, these are course restricted, instructor-controlled, feed-less lockboxes where students can compose and reply to course topics.

A friendly pair of lockboxes. CC By-NC-SA by spike55151

Knowing this we might be inclined to rationalize the article by suggesting that the authors are themselves simply confused by Blackboard’s dubious marketing of the word “blog”, and TechTrends had to concede that if Blackboard calls it a blog, the authors are entitled to refer to it as such. And yet the authors write:

We chose blogs instead of asynchronous discussion forums for several reasons. We felt that undergraduates would be likely to perceive blogging as more engaging and motivating than the now-standard asynchronous discussion forums. Students can more easily incorporate digital images, video, and links to other Web pages into blog posts and comments. Group blogs in particular provide a venue for both individual reflection and peer interaction through discussion…

Are Paulus and Spence acknowledging the shell game when they claim that students are “likely to perceive blogging as more engaging and motivating” than discussuion forums? (My emphasis.) Are they admitting that this is all just a trick in order to stimulate attention? Examining their subsequent claims about blogs vs. discussions does nothing to dissuade this point of view, for none are exclusive to blogs, but rather common features shared with discussion forums. For instance, their claim about incorporating digital images, video and links being easier in blogs versus discussions is simply not true, though I do believe that the discussion forum convention undervalues these practices. And, though group blogs are the norm, they can, of course, provide a venue for the same reflection and peer interactions that the discussion forum supports.

Discussion Forum Vs. Blog

The different features and affordances found in discussion forums and blogs has been articulated elsewhere, and for years. One of the better such articles is Lee LeFever’s 2004 post “What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?”, in which he identified nine notable distinctions. I believe the three most important for education—and most unfortunately overlooked in the Paulus and Spence article are:

• Locus of control. LeFever writes,

  Weblogs are individual or small group resources- the control of content and value is driven by a single person or small group. Message Boards are group resources- the control of content and value is shared equally across all users.

  In a class environment an institutionalized “blog” set up by the faculty and owned by the temporary course web site is really no blog at all. Even if individuals have authoring control in their own instructor-designated lockbox, they have no control over the LMS course site itself, nor with whom the content is shared with. Remember, blogs default to publicly readable and persistent; LMS course sites are limited to extremely private and temporary. Further, blogs are owned and personalized by the individual. LMS course sites are owned by the institution and personalized—to a still startlingly limited degree—by the instructor.

• Intent. LeFever distinguishes between “centralized” and “decentralized” aspects of blogs and discussions, but I don’t think that particular phrasing is helpful here; I prefer independent (blog) versus dependent (LMS discussion). The intent of a blog, even an educational blog, if determined by the blog owner (owner, not just author). The blog owner may post course assignments on his or her blog, but ultimately the full purpose and beautiful potential of the blog is determined by the individual. You won’t find a LMS discussion forum/blog useful as an individual space for anything like that. Most discussion forums or message boards are product or problem-centric: users commune around a single specific topics, and new threads are usually initiated with a question. The intent of a LMS discussion—and the described intent of Paulus and Spence in their “blog” project–is to provide a private classroom space where registered course members can, asynchronously, discuss course-specific topics overtly delegated by the instructor. This example didn’t even provide students’ with their own lockboxes; they apparently had to share lockboxes with other students in an institutionally formulated group under the control of a TA.

• Content buckets. This ties in to ownership suggested by “locus of control”. Blogs are often sourced from an elegant and flexible content management system (not to be confused with a course management system), which provides a fertile space to be segmented and planted with whatever variety of flora preferred by the owner. The Bb “blog” described by Paulus and Spence does not allow the individual to categorize or appropriately tag posts for future reference. One can upload media, sure, but one does not maintain one’s own library of media, nor seamlessly call upon those artifacts when needed.

  I’ve referred to the LMS “blog” space as a lockbox. By comparison, a blog is a kind of shoebox for one’s treasures. Kids tend to love shoeboxes as storage places because they are (1) easy to color, paste paper onto, and otherwise personalize, and (2) they’re wonderful tools for sharing one’s best content, like a captured preying mantis, or a collection of baseball cards, or even a mini-theater for screening one’s creative works:

  
  A shoebox theatre, complete with iPod screen. CC By-NC by Photo Giddy

  One can not lift the lid of a LMS lockbox to show the world one’s treasures; indeed, a key feature of blogs proves this even more ridiculous, because we have come to take for granted the news feed provided not only by a blog, but by its myriad comments streams as well.

Does it Really Matter?

Calling a LMS discussion forum a blog creates the potential for a number of problems:

• It confuses people. It confuses students, it confuses teachers, it confuses researchers and evaluators. In this case the authors cite “faculty interest in using ‘cutting-edge’ CMC technologies”–is that what we’re calling the discussion forum these days?
• A “blog” without the affordances of a blog simply won’t reflect the benefits of blogging, which I’ve alluded to above but ultimately tie in to lifelong learning and personal attainment of flow.
• Discussion forums don’t encourage blogger behavior. Sure, discussion forums encourage a number of valuable practices, especially for education, but they are not blogs. They don’t provide the same full, individual ownership of a learning/sharing space; they don’t encourage the same habits of authorship, such as rich hyperlinking, self-reference, and editing; they don’t provide the same accountability, the same awful, glorious pressure to perform in a public space; the community is centered around the product or problem, not the individuals ties; finally, and perhaps because of this latter distinction, discussion forums don’t grant individuals the opportunity to be recognized by professionals in their fields.
• It allows the LMS to define our educational technology practices and manipulate our expectations within the boundaries of their closed system and tertiary business goals–at a time when the most innovative practices are happening all around us, born of self-organizing communities and experimental practitioners in the outworld.

I don’t mean to rail on the Paulus and Spence article–it does sound like they reached some of their goals for increasing interaction and learning intervention with their use of the Blackboard discussion forum, and we need to read about that, too–even in 2010. But the mislabeling of a forum as a blog is just another example of re-branding an old practice to make it seem hip again. Discussion forums can be very effective for learning at multiple cognitive levels. Blogs are powerful in their own right, and much of their potential has not surfaced yet in educational practices. But the two are very different tools, and should be utilized with specific ends in mind that capitalize on their individual potentials, and promote life-long use of these networked technologies that are in accordance with the authentic community beasts that learners will encounter in the wild.

* Alternate title courtesy of Chris Lott

Distance Education Clearinghouse, University of Wisconsin- Extension:
List of Certificate Programs
http://www.uwex.edu/disted/certificates.cfm
Includes University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Wisconsin Stout, University of West Georgia, Appalachian State, California State Hayward, University of Illinois Springfield, Indiana University, Learning Resources Network, Manakau Institute of Technology, Nova Southeastern University, Pace University, Penn State, Portland State, St. Lawrence College, Simon Fraser, Texas A&M, Touro University, University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, University of Colorado Denver, University of Maryland, University of Washington
- Sheryl Hansen, Director, Professional Development Programs, Ohio Learning Network

Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas:
http://www.oit.sfasu.edu/facdev/certprogs.html
Online Instructor Certification Series: This set of three workshop series is designed for faculty who are developing or delivering complete web- based courses. After successfully completing the three series, faculty will be certified by the Office of Instructional Technology as an Online Instructor.
- Lauren Scharff, Ph.D., Director for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, United States Air Force Academy

New Mexico State University: http://extended.nmsu.edu/academics/otl/index.html
Graduate Certificate in On- line Teaching and Learning (OTL): for professionals in business, government, education, or other settings who want to develop their knowledge and skills in online teaching and learning. OTL utilizes technology- based environments to actively engage students in designing formal educational projects that meet professional objectives. The five 3- credit course sequence provides an intense immersion in a dynamic online environment and culminates in an online teaching practicum.
- Eugenia D. Conway, Associate Director, The Teaching Academy

University of West Florida:
Peer review for on- line courses: Quality Matters process, http://uwf.edu/atc/QM/
Training: Offered by UWF Academic Technology Center, Sloan- C, and Quality Matters.
Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty- centered, peer review process designed to certify the quality of online courses and online components. Sponsored by MarylandOnline, Inc. Quality Matters has generated widespread interest and received national recognition for its peer- based approach to quality assurance and continuous improvement in online education.
- Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D., Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment; Associate Professor, Psychology

DePaul University: http://www.idd.depaul.edu/dots/index.html
DOTS: DePaul Online Teaching Series: DePaul Online Teaching Series
(DOTS) is a faculty development program that trains and assists faculty to become successful facilitators of online learning. The program builds online readiness among faculty through an immersive, hands- on experience. 36 Hours; includes hardware, software, support, stipend, and certificate.
- Todd Diemer, Teaching Commons Program Manager

Illinois Online Network (ION):
http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/courses/students/mot.asp
Master Online Teacher (MOT) certificate: part of the Making the Virtual Classroom a Reality series. The MOT is a non- credit award earned after successfully completing 6 courses in the MVCR series; there are three required courses, a core option, an elective, and a capstone practicum course. Over 400 people from around the world have earned their MOTs since the first recipients in 2001.
- Scott B. Johnson, Program Coordinator, Illinois Online Network

Ball State University:
Certification for Online Instruction (COI):
This certification is not required to teach online, but a few departments are leaning that way, and the associate provost is encouraging more departments to consider it.
COI is 6- week course based in Blackboard that includes modules on the following topics: Introduction to online teaching (theory/pedagogy); Content delivery; Communications; Assessment of student learning; Local resources Each of those modules is built around the same structure: Reflections on the teacher’s current face- to- face teaching practices in that area; Readings or videos; Asynchronous discussion board activity (with standard post/reply/summarize cycle); Individual assignment (Planning Document).
We think the strongest part of the class is this Planning Document.
After each module, participants are prompted to apply their learning and reflection to their planned online course. They actually plan out what they will do in the course (e.g., how they will deliver content- readings, lecture videos, interviews, virtual field trips, student- generated content, etc.), and what they need to do/learn to make that happen. By the end of the course, each participant has a concrete plan for their online course- very applied.
We have only been doing this for about a year and a half now (and are off this fall as we revise the course to match our Blackboard 9 upgrade), but we have gotten very good responses from everyone who finishes the class (obviously, a few drop out each semester when they realize the time commitment). The only down side to the program is that it takes a big time commitment for us to teach, and administrators didn’t factor that into our load when they asked me to create/teach the course.
- Greg Siering, Ph.D., Faculty Development Coordinator, Office of Teaching and Learning Advancement

On Thursday I shared an hour with Terri Rowenhorst of NROC introducing folks at WCET 2009 to open education and some of the ideas and directions orbiting around it. Mine was just a half-hour pres, and didn’t get into some of the meatier bits that interest me; nonetheless the slides and video may be of interest:

• “Openness as a Catalyst for Education” slides on SlideShare
• “Openness as a Catalyst for Education” video on ustream

You may have already heard some of the Twitter buzz about Chris Lott‘s presentation, “Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis”, so here are links to his slides, video, and wiki:

• “Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis” video on ustream
• “Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis” slides on SlideShare
• “Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis” wiki with matrix

Chris let me moderate this session, and it was exciting to monitor the backchannels on Twitter and ustream for questions, ideas, or challenges that I could interrupt him with. As always, Chris did a fabulous job presenting a continual stream of rich ideas on technology and learning. I must admit I may have underestimated both Chris and the WCET audience prior to the session; both seemed quite comfortable with complex and provocative notions embedded in our connected culture and interplaying with Ong’s concept of a “secondary orality”.

Coincidentally, I watched 49 Up last night, and took particular notice when Nick, a physics professor at UW Madison, commented on how his job in the classroom is to (misquoting, surely) “show the students why they should care about this stuff” and to “make the books more interesting”.

It sounds like such a simple thing, and teachers have been doing it since textbooks and formal schooling began. But it’s a thing most textbooks (and perhaps most packaged, static content) are inept at. Why? Perhaps because teaching provides a human-to-human interaction wherein participants can, on-the-fly, read and respond to each other appropriately, strategically building interest and engagement. These human-to-human interaction can trigger affective responses that enlarge perspective, enhance interest, or increase retention.

Live classroom teaching also allows the teacher to follow tangents, abandoning pre-planned curriculum entirely and ending up a places not originally intended, but nonetheless valuable for the divergence. I have experienced the pleasure of such tangents many times as a teacher; indeed, I usually end up learning about the subject myself, learning about student needs, and learning how to teach better the next time.

So that’s my initial thought. What’s yours? What is not replaceable in teaching? What do we risk losing as we move more and more instruction online, as we realize grand dreams of opencourseware, self-directed learning communities, etc?

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.