Assessing Online Courses
I like the concept of Total Quality Management, originating in the United States with W. Edwards Deming and implemented with gusto in Japan initially. A few quotes from Deming that I like are: “Quality is everyone's responsibility.” “Does experience help? NO! Not if we are doing the wrong things.” and “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.”
Applied to the area of online education and course delivery the TQM concept suggests that every course can be improved. Of course, over time the “improvements” become smaller “tweaks” vs. major changes to courses. One way for online institutions to implement TQM in course management is to assess online courses periodically.
The rationale for conducting online course assessment can be summarized as:
• Validating the positive in courses
• Diagnosing issue areas in courses
• Identifying desirable course enhancements
Courses will all have positive elements or areas where the course is well constructed, content is well-presented, communication is constructive and timely, and course tools are used appropriately. And, courses – especially new courses – will generally have areas where enhancements can be identified and made. Once an institution decides that it is in their best interest to assess their online courses a series of questions should be addressed:
• An initial question to be answered is who will conduct the assessment? Will assessments be conducted by the instructor(s) teaching the course(s), someone at the institution other than the instructor(s), or a third party?
• A second question to be answered, a critical question, is what assessment criteria will be employed to review courses.
• The third question to be answered, if assessments are to have any positive outcome, is how will the assessment recommendations be implemented.
• A final question to be answered is how will a broad consensus be built among administrators and faculty around the conduct of course assessments, the criteria to be employed and the implementation process to be followed.
A well-designed and implemented course review process will provide measurable benefits to students, instructors and the institution. Enhancements made to courses will often increase student satisfaction, increase instructor satisfaction, and achieve the retention goals sought by the institution.
Ken Switzer, Ph.D.
Sr. Academic Trainer & Consultant
Taking The “R” Out Of RLO
I was in Singapore last month presenting at the ICT2010 conference. It was exciting to share best practices for online learning, teaching tips, and student engagement ideas with people from around the world. It was also a very new and odd experience for me personally. Not the conference and not the presentations – I do that almost weekly in my role at Pearson. I imagine I've spoken 150 times at conferences in one form or another - from keynotes to workshops to seminars. No, it was a portion of my duties at the conference that were strange. I was asked to represent not just Pearson, but essentially all of publishing, in a conversation (aka debate) about Open Educational Resources (OER).
So, I was up on the main stage with a Canadian University President, an industry guru who has created an open software option for creation Reusable Learning Objects (RLO’s), a representative from Creative Commons, another faculty member (nobody realized that I too was a university instructor), and a few others. Keep in mind that Pearson acquired eCollege (and me) two years ago. I know as much about publishing as I know about toddler learning behavior. (With my 3 year old daughter I have some on-the-job training, but nothing from experts…)
But there I was, engaged in a conversation about open resources and reusability with people who desperately wanted me to falter. I believe they were hoping I’d make some crazy statement about the ineffectiveness of repositories or how publishers hope all of the repositories just go away. But not only do I not believe that, nor does Pearson for that matter, I actually didn’t have to say anything negative about RLO’s at all. Why? Because the experts on the subject explained to the 400 person audience that of the hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of RLO’s in the world today, less than 1% were actually reusable!
It was a wonderful, rich discussion about how incredibly hard it is to create an engaging, effective learning object – whether it’s text based, video based, a simulation, a game, etc. However, adding in the notion that the object you create will also be reusable seems to be nearly impossible. Think about it. Why did you create the learning object in the first place? It was likely to teach YOUR students a specific idea / concept within the context of YOUR classroom. It will flow into the strategic thought you have around scaffolding for YOUR class. It will be tied to specific outcomes / objectives YOU might have. It will probably correlate to other learning ideas and other learning objects YOU’VE also designed.
As an example, I have a game that I use in my online classes. It reinforces two important, nonverbal ideas around chronemics (the study of how time communicates to others). It is a Flash-based exercise with fill in the blank trivia of sorts – the answers are cultural and fairly easy, but students see a giant clock with time slipping away as they fill out the card. My students love it and “get it” as a result of the exercise. But if I were to place that learning object in a repository, it would take quite a bit of contextual explanation and even more training around how I use it, how it could be used, and finally how to implement it (technically) on a page.
And so, at the end of the day, we are left with repositories full of good intentions, but unfortunately with little to no real value other than to possibly inspire a teacher to create a similar, but different working learning object for themselves…
So what’s the answer? Again, from the experts around me there were some answers, but they will take some real effort that isn’t likely to happen. For example:
Tagging – A common taxonomy or even folksonomy must be created and used by EVERYONE using a repository. That’s no easy task. I was once on a campus where the faculty senate had been asked to standardize the term in online classes used for presenting mostly textual / pictoral information. The word, “Lecture” had been suggested by the administration. (Online norming of nomenclature across a program is a best practice as students always know how to navigate.) However, in 2 hours, the faculty could not agree on an appropriate term. Some staunch opponents wanted “Presentation” while others wanted the term, “Reading” instead. Another department chair brought up the inclusion of YouTube videos on the pages and pandemonium ensued.
Design – These (r)LO’s must be designed with re-use in mind. But again, with the description above, that’s no easy task either. I barely have enough time to create learning objects for my own class, let alone thinking about the greater good of the world as I create them. (I realize I’m not as noble as I’d like people to think…)
Standards – After creating and tagging a learning object in ways that others can consume them, we then need to think about standardizing the platforms they are built on. What about using FLASH? It’s a nice medium that has been used for years by educators. There are more and more software options to create FLASH simulations, demonstrations, or games that are easy and cheap, if not free. So FLASH is perfect, right? Oh, wait…the iPad. That’s right, Steve Jobs seems to have made it his personal mission to kill that software. Well, what if my object is in PowerPoint? Isn’t it “universal enough” for people then? (Sorry Open Office users…) Ok, well how about I create my learning object using simple HTML code. Everyone knows that these days, right? (Sorry 90% of instructors out there who can read Latin better than HTML.)
Quality – I recently read a blog by a professor who was pleading for the world to give up textbooks and adopt only open source content. He was frustrated by his textbook publisher’s edition practices. (Luckily, it wasn’t Pearson as he called them out by name…) But I have to say, while I’m not a publisher by any stretch of the imagination, I have come to find great respect for what my new colleagues at Pearson do. Did you know that a textbook costs over a million of dollars to produce? Yes, I said million… Why? Take a marketing book. How many pictures, slogans, and commercials are represented there? A thousand? Two thousand? Do you know how much it costs to get permission to use that Tide ad or the Toyota picture? Every time the book is produced, Pearson pays intellectual property license fees. Add that to the author of the book who gets royalties. Don’t forget the editors, the auditors, the fact checkers, researchers, and the list goes on and on. And of course, don’t forget the warehouses and paper, etc. So, that one learning object (which is likely dozens if not hundreds of learning objects) costs a bunch of money to produce in a way that is educationally beneficial to our students. Have you ever seen an Open resource that is vetted to that caliber? What about the MyMathLab product? It has shown improvement in math comprehension, math retention, and math process orientation in the 20, 30, and even 50 percent quartiles. It’s based on algorhythms that require tremendous math subject matter experts talking to expert instructional designers working in collaboration with programmers
So what’s it going to take then? Well…quite frankly it’s going to take people smarter than me (I know, I know…easy enough) to create some innovative solutions that are easy to use, easy to catalogue, and easy to consume. People like the CETL in the United Kingdom who have created GLO Maker (www.glomaker.org), a planning & design tool that creates learning objects that are much easier to tag, share, and reuse. Other leaders are groups like Equella, a digital repository company that incorporates learning objects, content management, and integrated content authoring. Then there are the content repository sites like Merlot, Orange Grove, and others.
There are answers out there, but it’s going to take some work, some strategy, and some compromise to make it happen. Do I believe OER will ever replace monetized assets? No, I don’t think so. But I do believe that the two worlds can live quite harmoniously, creating a rich tapestry of content that can be pushed and pulled as required based on learning preferences, student needs, etc. But I think that’s a blog for another time…
Jeff D Borden, M.A.
Senior Director of Teaching & Learning
Plagiarism and the Online Class
In nearly ten years of teaching in higher education, I have seen my share of plagiarism from students (and, disappointingly, sometimes from published scholars, but that’s another blog). I’ve had tearful confessions, angry denials, pleas of ignorance or lack of intent, and assertions of innocence and coincidence. One student will forever stick out in my mind: during a midterm essay exam for which students were required to use their laptops, he, an 18 year-old freshman, downloaded an essay on Aeschylus’ Oresteia (three plays we had not read in class) so philosophically advanced that Homi Bhabha need not blush to have written it. He was expelled; when I submitted his paper with the original he’d copied to the citizenship office, I was told it was his third strike and he was out. (All I could think about was the money his parents had wasted on that first year of college; at the time, I was teaching at a private university where tuition, living expenses, and books together cost roughly $35,000 per year.) In the very first class I ever taught, one student plagiarized Friedrich Nietzche; in what I consider an almost humorous coup-de-grace, this past January, two students plagiarized the essay my university now requires all students to write at the beginning of the quarter explaining what plagiarism means to them.
Interestingly, all of the cases of plagiarism over the past ten years that stand out in my mind were committed by students in on-ground courses. To be sure, there have been a handful of students in my online courses who’ve plagiarized. However, in my experience, cases of online plagiarism have been much less common than cases in my on-campus courses. Is my experience unique? According to recent research, no. Between 1999 and the mid-2000s, a number of studies predicting that the rise in online teaching would witness a corresponding rise in plagiarism appeared. Beginning with George and Carlson (1999), research suggested that online learning environments, precisely because of the distance between teacher and student, were prone to higher rates of plagiarism among students. Such studies pointed to the fact that online students would have more opportunity to cheat as well as to the likelihood that they would have more technological know-how, knowledge they could use to discover new and better ways to cheat. More recently, however, studies have shown that students in online classes are in fact less likely to plagiarize or cheat than their traditional, on-ground counterparts. In a recent study, “Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom,” Donna Stuber-McEwen, Phillip Wiseley, and Susan Hoggatt (2009) argue that for a variety of reasons, cheating in online classrooms may be substantially less frequent than it is in on-ground courses. Similarly, Grijalva et al. (2003) suggests that online courses are less prone to problems of cheating and plagiarism than are traditional, on-ground courses. Why?
One theory is that a significant amount of plagiarism is prompted by panic: the student plagiarizes because he or she has waited too long to begin or is struggling with the assignment and has waited too long to ask for help. Because of the anytime, anywhere nature of distance learning, online students may be less susceptible to problems of this sort (Grijalva et al., 2003). Another is that the premise upon which studies arguing online students would be more likely to cheat—to wit, that they were more at ease with and knowledgeable about the Internet and its resources than their traditional on-campus counterparts—is shaky. Students who take online courses may be more at ease with technology than their on-ground counterparts, but this ease doesn’t by itself produce a willingness to cheat. Nor is it necessarily a safe assumption that students who choose to take on-campus courses are not tech-savvy and thus somehow less able to find ways to plagiarize if they’re so inclined. A third theory is that many online courses are structured to reduce opportunities for plagiarism and cheating: because of the early research suggesting online cheating was going to pose a huge problem, many institutions and instructors built their online courses with this idea uppermost in their minds and thus reduced the incidence of cheating from the start (Grijalva et al., 2003). This theory supposes that a potential problem created by new technology and the increase in online educational programs—cheating and plagiarism—can be at least partly resolved by the same technology and online programs.
Interestingly, the research supporting this third theory—that online courses are less prone to cheating and plagiarism because they’ve been built specifically to avoid it—has at its foundation a number of best practices that we on the Academic Training & Consulting team at Pearson eCollege suggest online instructors incorporate into their courses. When we conduct course reviews for our Educational Partners, these strategies are ones we recommend as pedagogically effective—but not because they deter students from cheating. Rather, each of these strategies has another utility: it enriches the quality of instruction and helps students to achieve the objectives of the course. Consider the following strategies:
- Use the syllabus to articulate clear and specific course policies with respect to plagiarism and cheating. Course policies in general are an essential component of any syllabus, whether it’s for an online or on-ground class. Your syllabus should provide a clear articulation of (ideally) the institution’s definition and policies pertaining to plagiarism as well as your own. These policies should contain clear statements about the consequences for violation. Such policies serve two important functions: first, by being open and clear about what plagiarism is, how it’s defined, and what the consequences for committing it are, you will help to prevent it; second, should punitive action become necessary, it will be fair because it was explained at the outset of the course.
- Establish an instructor presence in the course early. Introduce yourself to the students; they want to know who you are and that you are really there. Use first-person pronouns, provide a few biographical tidbits about yourself (i.e., that your daughter had a dance recital over the weekend, or that you and your dog went hiking—the kind of statements you might make in passing during an on-campus course). Establishing such a presence not only increases students’ comfort level in an online course—they know they’re not being taught by a computer—but if, as George and Carlson suggest, distance between educator and student produces an environment conducive to cheating, creating a connection between yourself and the students will minimize that risk.
- Maintain your instructor presence. Respond to students in the discussion boards throughout the semester, and provide feedback on written assignments. You needn’t overwhelm or dominate the discussions, but you should facilitate those discussions with a few comments or questions. Similarly, if students are submitting written work and hearing nothing from you about its merit, they will conclude, logically, that you either do not care what they submit or that you do not value their work. Either conclusion could potentially lead to cheating.
- Use a mixture of assessment formats. Don’t, in other words, rely exclusively on exams or quizzes. Such assessment formats are much more difficult to monitor for cheating than written assignments, such as essays or research papers. Rather, as we would recommend as a best practice, combine quizzes, self-assessments, exam, graded discussions, informal or response papers (perhaps posted using the Journal tool), and essays. Such a mixture of assessment types does more than make it difficult for a student to cheat his or her way to an A in your course; it also provides you with a variety of ways to interact with the student, thus assuring the student that you are present and interested. It also allows you to become familiar with the student’s “voice” and style as well as giving you a means of comparing expressions of the student’s knowledge of course material (i.e., does the student seem to ace all the exams or quizzes but falters in the discussions and papers?). In addition, it helps those students who may not perform well in one type of assessment format to demonstrate their grasp of the material—some students may freeze during exams, and others may find written expression particularly difficult. If you include both, students have more opportunities to succeed in the course.
It is a truism in teaching that if students want to cheat, they will find a way to do so. It’s inevitable that some students, no matter how much effort we put into prevention and deterrence, will plagiarize a paper. However, a well-structured course can help deter students from cheating while also improving their overall learning experience.
Jennifer Golightly, Ph.D.
Academic Trainer & Consultant
Works Cited
George, J., & Carlson, J. 1999. Group support systems and deceptive communication. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=874068.875945 (accessed August 13, 2010).
Grijalva, T., Kerkvliet, J., & Nowell, C. 2003. Academic honesty in online courses. http://ugs.usf.edu/pdf/courses/0708/cheat%20online%20pap.pdf (accessed August 12, 2010).
Stuber-McEwen, Donna, Phillip Wiseley, and Susan Hoggatt. 2009. Point, click, and cheat: Frequency and type of academic dishonesty in the virtual classroom. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration 12 (3). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall123/stuber123.html (accessed August 10, 2010).
Sweating the small stuff: Leveraging Course Announcements to Improve the Student Experience
I can still hear the phrase in the repository of my memory, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” This is usually what someone would say to me when I was working on a project and paying too much attention to the details, categorically labeled “the small stuff.”
I began to wonder what this scenario would look like in an online course. Many of us can think back to a time (or present reality) when we were a part of the design, development or delivery of an online course. As we do, we could begin to identify the major components of our online course and our efforts. Our list might include some of the BIG items that seem to stand out to most of us, like…
- Content- lectures, discussion questions, activities, and/or tests.
- Structure- organization of units, flow, navigation.
- Aesthetics- presentation or design.
Undoubtedly, these components are critical elements of our online course and our efforts as online faculty. In many respects, we might be tempted to consider that having these major categories ‘checked-off’ of our list is an indication of the completeness of our online course.
However, what of those items we might not have immediately considered? What of those things we may have (even subconsciously) categorized as the peripheral, the minor details or “the small stuff?”
As I ponder this, many things come to mind that I’d love to point out and discuss. To get us started, I’ll focus in this post on what you can do to leverage course announcements to improve the student experience in your online course.
Sweating the Small Stuff: Course announcements
You might be thinking at this point, “Course announcements??? How can these help improve the student experience in my online course?”
This may have triggered in your mind some of the standard announcements most of us have used and come to expect in online courses, such as a course-kick-off welcome message or maybe a reminder of a critical deadline.
What you might not have considered for announcements are those things that you know (as the designer and/or facilitator of the course) and could share with your students that could actually improve their performance and overall learning experience.
In order for announcements to add value to your online course and enhance the student experience, they must be:
- Helpful- provide good or valuable information.
- Relevant- apply to the student at their point in their journey.
- Timely- be just-in-time announcements or reminders.
This does include a welcome announcement or a reminder of a critical deadline. However, it might also include sharing that cool, new article you found in a journal. It could also mean sharing an upcoming broadcast, a great website, or a resource you found online that complements (or even challenges) a topic in your course subject matter. “If there is any hint of your subject in something like this, point it out to your students. Our world is always changing and you want your students to know that what they are learning is something very much alive, very much in use today” (Sull, 2008).
Helpful course announcements are those that provide students with valuable, relevant and timely information that applies directly to them and to where they are in their learning journey.
A helpful announcement might be a set of simple, navigational instructions that help orient your students during the first week so that they follow the best order of exploring the content in your course, especially those ‘housekeeping’ items they need to review prior to starting into Week 1 content.
A helpful announcement could also be a quick note about specific criteria you’d like to see included (or avoided) in an assignment submission but students generally seem to miss semester to semester. Think of how much of your time and student frustration this could save!
A helpful announcement could also be a brief weekly summary of what was covered in the previous week, where students are in the grand scheme of the course, and how they should proceed in the course in the upcoming week.
I have also found that a helpful course announcement could be a simple note to my students of something I came across that week that I had not seen before or had simply not considered in my study of the subject matter. This type of engagement with our students may seem difficult at first, even out of place, as we might feel that the focus of the course is the students’ learning journey apart from our own. However, we may come to find that our students are actually as interested in the social sharing around the learning that takes place in the course as they are in their own learning or in any other activity in our course. Moreover, we may come to observe that engagement and learning experiences can be triggered, enhanced, or deepened in the mutual sharing of our journeys.
Consider these questions:
- Is there something your students seem to ask semester after semester that you could address proactively in a course announcement?
- Is there an initial sequence you would like your students to follow upon entering your course? What about as they continue in the course?
- Is there something in the reading you would like your students to be sure to pay attention to in a given week?
- Are there bits of information, messages, reminders, and/or tips for your course that you could turn into announcements and save for use from semester to semester?
Leverage the course announcement section by providing your students with brief instructions throughout the course that will equip them to navigate where they are, where they need to go, and what they should be sure not to miss, without the guesswork.
Consistency is key. By guiding your students with a steady supply of navigational instructions, they will be better able to “clearly understand all components and structure of the course” as well as develop navigational competency as they make their way in and out of your course’s design framework (California State University, Chico, 2009).
When they are helpful, relevant and timely, announcements are a practical and handy way to get a variety of planned and unplanned information out to your online learners. From sharing current and relevant information about course topics to sharing a glimpse of your own learning experience, you can leverage the announcement section of your course to improve the overall student learning experience. So come on, sweat the small stuff in your course this semester and keep track of what works for you and your students.
Stay tuned for future entries on more ways to “sweat the small stuff” in your online course.
Rachel Cubas, M.Sc.
International Academic Trainer & Consultant
Pearson eCollege
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References
California State University. (n.d.). Rubric for Online Instruction. Retrieved August 5, 2010, from California State University, Chico: http://www.csuchico.edu/celt/roi/.
Sull, E. C. (2008, April 18). How to motivate your students. eLearn magazine.
The Future of Mobile Learning?
If you’ve had any exposure to media about distance education or online learning lately, then you’re probably aware that just about everyone is talking about mobile learning. It seems that with the exponential growth of the smartphone market, and the related boom in tablet computing, people are getting hip to the idea that learning not only doesn’t have to be relegated to the classroom, it doesn’t have to be relegated to a room, period.
With 3G and 4G connections, with wifi making its way into just about every coffee shop, and with Internet access now even available on many airlines, the opportunity to access content is — truly — everywhere. (Okay, well maybe not in the Kyzylart Pass of Tajikistan, but everywhere else.)
Let’s take a look at some of the logistics for making mobile learning a reality. First, the obvious: the iPhone and iPad. Apple’s App Store (available through iTunes) has pretty much cornered the market — at least for now — on third party applications for delivering content, whether it’s reading an Amazon book from the Kindle app or browsing through a Pearson interactive text delivered through CourseSmart. It’s such a popular business model that competitors like Google and Microsoft have (and are continuing to develop) their own app stores, Google Apps Marketplace and Windows Marketplace, respectively.
But, as tech columnist John Blossom reported in 2009, the “Application-centric” model is not the only option out there. Yes, it’s convenient — the user browses an app store, makes a selection, has fees charged to a pre-authorized credit card, and watches as the app is automatically downloaded and installed on his or her phone. Simple! This model works well for companies like Apple because it keeps users committed to their store.
But what most of these apps do is simply repackage information that is already available via the Internet. For example, need to refill your prescription from Walgreens? You can to go to Walgreens’ mobile site (using your smartphone’s browser, like Safari) and take care of business. Now that site gives you the option to download the “Walgreens App for iPhone,” which does everything you can do on their mobile site, but all in a nicely packaged little app that you can tap to launch, rather than bookmarking a mobile Web site. (Full disclosure: I’m an iPhone and Walgreens mobile app user, and I like both. So please don’t think that I’m denigrating either.)
My point here is that there was already a perfectly usable mobile site for Walgreens. Why was a separate app even necessary? And doesn’t creating an iPhone app — whether from Walgreens or thousands of other developers — suggest that a Google app and a Windows Mobile app are close behind? Three apps all to do the same thing? To quote comic Eddie Izzard, “No one can live at that speed!” It’s certainly not the most efficient business model to be sure. To have to create separate mobile apps for every kind of smartphone would require tons of wasted labor when a better option already exists!
That option is the Web App. And believe it or not, Web Apps are nothing new. That Walgreens mobile site I just mentioned? A Web app. Need to track your spending and balance your checkbook? “There’s a Web for that,” says Blossom. Want to play a game to learn music theory? Yep, there’s a Web for that, too.
Tricia Duryee pointed out in July last year that Apple’s Steve Jobs originally trumpeted the idea of “[building] for the Web,” in other words, of delivering content via the Safari browser. But a year later — and now just about exactly two years since then — he opened the app store and switched our thinking to “There’s an app for that.”
But that was two years ago, and in Internet time, that’s practically an eternity. Apple’s marketing machine notwithstanding, there’s no inherent reason why developers must create separate apps for every platform that exists.
Where does that leave mobile learning? Educational developers and instructional designers cannot (should not) commit themselves to merely one mode of delivery. That is, one should not commit to delivering content via the iPhone at the expense of users of Droids, Blackberries, or Sprint Evos. What’s most important is reaching every student possible using whatever devices they choose to use.
At the same time, to develop separate apps for every existing and emerging mobile platform would be a tremendous waste of time and energy. Yes, there are some instances where an app native to each system may be necessary. But for the most part, delivering interactive content can be accomplished with the same basic code for Safari on the iPhone as for Google’s browser on the Droid — especially with the advent of HTML5 (which is a discussion for another time.)
In short, what we educators should expect to see coming down the pike are new modes of delivering content that are browser based and that are simpler and more cost-effective to deliver. By keeping labor time and costs low, we get more content for less money and in less time than we have seen before. And in that, we all benefit.
Not coincidental with the writing of this blog post, Pearson has recently released Pearson LearningStudio Mobile Solution, a Web App that allows students to check grades and announcements, read and post to discussion forums, and have a dashboard-like view across all their courses in the process. Our developers are thinking ahead on this — there is no app to download; access is available on the iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc.; and as new features and updates become available, users won't have to wait for app updates to be approved by an über-store. We end-users reap the benefits of Pearson's quick and cost-effective development. Bonus!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to refill a prescription…
-- Rob Kadel, Ph.D. --
-- Academic Trainer & Consultant --
Thoughts on the iPad in Education
You might not have to take a look at the search trends to guess that Internet search traffic for the iPad is on par with President Obama and LeBron James. Since the iPad’s launch on April 3rd, over 10,000 apps have been created for the device; that’s nearly 90 apps a day. And you can probably guess that there are already more than a few articles about the iPad in Education. But I have two observations that I think are worth putting out into educational cyberspace.
First, despite all the hullabaloo, the iPad is really not about the device. The beauty of the iPad’s design is that it’s a digital canvas that becomes and facilitates so many things. It’s a book, newspaper, game, compass, menu, recipe, calendar, calculator, communicator, encyclopedia, guitar tuner, sketch pad, research tool, conversion tool, star chart... It is what we want it to be; it is what we make it to be. The mindset is shifting from ‘this-is-what-a-device-can-do-for-you’ to ‘show-what-you-can-do-with-this-device.’ Apologies to JFK, but perhaps the best phase is: “Ask not what the iPad can do for you; ask what you can do with the iPad.”
Second, the iPad meets us where we are. Let’s face it, our lives are hybrid. We’re offline and we’re online and the line between the two has been blurred for a while. We live mobile lives and we don’t think twice about getting and receiving information day or night, no matter where we are. The days are (or soon to be) over when education is tied to location. It first moved from the campus/classroom to the home/library/coffee shop with the personal computer; now it’s moving from the computer’s location to me. Perhaps ironically, I think the iPad is to hardware as Google’s mission statement is to information. It’s a bold move in making the computer readily accessible to more people. It meets the young, the old, the savvy and the novice with ease.
iPad-like devices have just been born; we have definitely not yet seen the best of what they will be or will bring. But, to me, if one of the purposes of education is along the lines of ‘preparing younger generations for the future’, then iPads (and devices like it to come) facilitate the natural next steps from where we are today to education anywhere-anytime.
Luke Cable
Academic Trainer & Consultant
Pearson eCollege
Some are asking, is technology making your students stupid?
A colleague sent me the article, Linked In With: a Writer Who Questions the Wisdom of Teaching With Technology by Marc Parry. If you find yourself reading educational articles, you’ve probably heard or read Nicholas Carr’s theories about the role of computers in business or the much talked about article: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” If you some how missed it, I recommend reading this above mentioned article. It is thought provoking. Who doesn’t like a good controversy?
I’ll go ahead and answer the question that some like Nicholas Carr are asking – no, technology is not making our students stupid. It is a decent premise for which he cites a few studies to back up his assertion. I can tell you right now that I could find an equal number of reputable studies to support technology use improving education. I can cite studies that show students who learn content in a hybrid classroom (where some content is delivered face to face and other content is delivered via technology in an asynchronous environment) perform better on end of course mastery exams than students who learn the same content in 100% face to face classes.
But this isn’t about pitting his anti-technology citations against my pro-technology citations. This is about education and what techniques we should employ to educate our students of all ages. You’re not going to be surprised when you hear my answer. I think that Nicholas Carr might actually also agree with me. He would just need to abandon his headline grabbing byline and talk about what works instead of swinging his red herring all over the place.
So if technology isn’t making our students stupid, what is? Bad teaching. This isn’t a new, ground breaking theory for which I’m going to get a grant to study further. This has been the case since humanity began. If you use poor teaching techniques, the students will not learn. If you throw technology into the classroom of a teacher or instructor using poor teaching techniques, it does not improve the mastery or retention of the students. The same occurs with throwing money at the problem (we need to spend more money on education!) or recycling old ideas that didn’t work the first time (picture the pendulum of educational theory that swings back and forth every five years or so).
You may be thinking, sure it is easy to say but what does that look like? Here’s an example that Dr. Bernie Dodge of San Diego State University shared with me and other educators at the recent ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) national conference in Denver. His overall premise is that an engaged learner is a learner who will master concepts and ideas. What does that look like? Check it out. This child is fully engaged.
The presentation that I had the opportunity to see was about taking good teaching techniques back to our classrooms and using technology when appropriate. We all know that but sometimes, it is refreshing to hear it all over again. We looked at sites such as Slate Magazine’s News Dots and 360 Cities to discuss ways that we could use those tools to teach our students. The advantage of attending this session was that I not only walked away with a few new technology tools I can use but also a long list of activities and techniques I can use with that technology to teach my students to master the content.
It isn’t about the technology. It is about good teaching. We need to do all we can to support good teaching techniques in our classrooms whether they are face to face, hybrid or fully online. Make technology the tool that engages the learner and not just the fix we throw at the low-scores-on-state-exams problem. Maybe take a minute or two to read Nicholas Carr’s article because there are many out there that do rely only on the technology. We need to be aware of that and combat it at every turn. Then take more than just a few minutes to read and watch Bernie Dodge’s presentation on engaged learning. If we read it and implement it, the answer to the question will be easy – no, technology is absolutely not making our students stupid.
- Pamela Kachka, M.A.Ed. –
Academic Trainer & Consultant
Pearson eCollege
Dodge, PhD, B. (2010, June 28). Engagement - iste - 2010. Retrieved from http://webquest.org/workshops/engagement7/
Parry, M. (2010). Linked in with: a writer who questions the wisdom of teaching with technology. The Chronicle of Higher Educaiton, 56(39), Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Technology-Making-Your/66128/
Web 2.0 with a Purpose
Web 2.0 is a ubiquitous topic at conferences, in academic journals, blogs, and in the teacher’s lounge. Everyone is looking to get into the game but technology is often perceived to be a solution instead of a tactic to achieve a learning goal.
On July 4th, The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an interview with Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and a 2008 article in the Atlantic Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr has gotten attention for challenging the prevailing notion that the information age is inherently good. Carr’s writing reminds me of the work of Marc Prensky who writes about the differences between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants and suggests that our brain structure might be changing because of the way that we take in and process information.
In the Chronicle’s interview with Carr, his basic premise is that our constant access to technology dilutes our ability to focus and the tendency to multi-task actually reduces learning results. While I wouldn’t dispute most of Carr’s arguments I do believe that educators should challenge themselves to explore pedagogically sound integration of Web 2.0 technology into their classes for several reasons. Most importantly, because allowing students to actively participate in producing course content deepens the learning process and makes it more relevant to their lives. This tends to increase intrinsic motivation for learning because students feel like they own more of the experience.
While leading a conference recently at Virtual Educa 2010 in Santo Domingo I asked participants to self-select into a Web 2.0 app they wanted to explore for potential inclusion in the course they teach for the next academic term. Several participants were struggling to figure out which app group to join so I’d have to ask them about a need they were experiencing in their classrooms. This was an excellent way to get them to think about how technology could help fill a need or gap in the learning experience.
There are well over a thousand Web 2.0 apps that can be used to support a learning goal. Most are free which removes a significant barrier to adoption. Here are a few aggregation sites for review.
App Libraries
- Kathy Schrock’s List: web20 tools (http://www.diigo.com/list/Kathyschrock/web20tools)
- E-Learning Web 2.0 Tools and Applications (http://www.go2web20.net/#tag:e-learning)
- Map of the World 2.0 (http://www.appappeal.com/web-2-0-application-world-mosaic/)
Map of the World 2.0
I challenge my workshop participants to first use an app in their personal lives for a month because we’re not likely to integrate technology into the curriculum if we’re not comfortable with it ourselves first. So go for it! Have some fun with technology this Summer and then try including it in your course this Fall. Let me know how it goes!
Parry, M. (2010). Linked In With: a Writer Who Questions the Wisdom of Teaching With Technology. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Technology-Making-Your/66128/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Brian McKay Epp | Academic Trainer & Consultant| Pearson eCollege
Teaching digital “natives”
We’ve all heard about the digital native / digital immigrant divide as initially proposed by Marc Prensky. However, we can’t make the assumption that because our students may be digital “natives,” then they must be instantly comfortable with all technology-related tasks we give them. Even when learners “do possess a good degree of computer literacy, they may not have ever used those skills for formal learning” (van Ameslvoort and Shiozaki, 2009, p. 24).
For example, a study by Kennedy and colleagues shows that while it is true that for traditional age college students, there is near universal access to certain tools (mobile phone, computer, email), there is variability in the tasks that students are doing with these tools. For example, over 50% of students responding hadn’t built or maintained a website, used RSS feeds, created a blog or commented on one, contributed to a wiki, or used their mobile phone to access services on the web, or send or receive email (although almost 80% sent text messages daily).
Helpser and Eynon considered different types of internet activities (including shopping, entertainment, fact checking, social networking, finance, and diary) undertaken by internet users of different ages. They discuss that while age / generational differences was a convenient initial idea for Prensky to propose, the reality is more complex than that. One needs to consider gender, education, experience, and breadth of use to explore variability in internet usage by task. It is most helpful to consider a “continuum of engagement instead of being a dichotomous divide between users and non-users” (p. 515).
So what’s an educator to do? A study reported by van Amelsvoort and Shiozaki discuss success factors in helping students become more proficient in the educational use of internet technologies. These factors include: requiring the regular use of the technologies in multiple courses, providing active instructor support and engagement through all stages, and allowing sufficient time for students to do the work. Fortunately, with a little planning these shouldn’t be that hard to carry out. So don’t make any assumptions about the level of technological proficiency your students have, and design your course or curriculum to help develop the skills your students will need to be successful.
– Gail E. Krovitz, Ph.D. –
Director of Academic Training & Consulting
Helpser, EJ and R Eynon. 2010. Digital natives: where is the evidence? British Educational Research Journal 36(3): 503-520.
Kennedy, GE, TS Judd, A Churchward, K Gray, K-L Krause. 2008. First year student’s experiences with technology: are they really digital natives? Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 24(1): 108-122.
van Amelsvoort, M and Y Shiozaki. 2009. Developing digital natives at a junior college in Japan. Proceedings of the Third International Wireless Ready Symposium. Accessed here: http://opinion.nucba.ac.jp/~thomas/vanamelsvoort2009.pdf
Engagement for Success
When students in our online courses are fully engaged they are likely to be successful – by a variety of measures. Engagement can be defined as students actively participating with sufficient motivation to persist throughout the term, learn the pertinent material in line with course objectives, complete the course with a passing grade, and return for another online course in the program or at the institution.
To facilitate student engagement an active and “present” instructor will identify and address common obstacles to student success and also identify and provide opportunities to engage students and contribute to their success. In dealing both with obstacles and opportunities in the course, an instructor will likely address four core areas of engagement:
• Student and the technology
• Student and the content
• Student and the instructor
• Student and other students
The degree of learner engagement in a course will depend, in large part I would argue, on the ability of the instructor to reduce obstacles and increase opportunities.
As we work with students it is, I believe, important to realize that student emotions mediate all learning. Students arrive in our courses full of emotions of varying types, emotions surrounding the four core areas of engagement. A supportive learning environment where engagement is encouraged and fostered will increase positive emotions (such as excitement, pride) that foster learning and reduce negative emotions (such as fear, insecurity) that undermine learning. Student emotions thus encapsulate their other traits that accompany them online:
• Experience
• Knowledge
• Skills
• Goals
• Abilities
• Motivation
• Self-regulation
In fostering student engagement, while being cognizant of the conflicting emotions students carry with them, instructors can help ensure student success in their courses – and as an additional benefit, help ensure instructor and institutional success as well.
-- Ken Switzer, Ph.D.--
Sr. Academic Trainer & Consultant
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