Step outside of the course management system

Even the best course management system has limitations.  Since they are designed primarily to protect student data and insure reliable, secure access to course content and assessments, course management systems have walls.  While the walls are digital, they are no less real.  These walls control what information can be accessed, when it can be accessed and by whom.  As you’re considering what types of content and interaction to add to your course shell in a CMS, remember that the boundaries will limit you, your students and your class.  If you’re thinking of incorporating any of the following aspects into your course, you may want to consider stepping outside of the CMS.

1.  You want your students to author content for worldwide access.  When students in your class are completing research or writing content that you want them to share with the world, you need to look beyond the walls of the CMS.  A colleague of mine has her advanced Spanish students write blogs outside of the CMS so that native Spanish speakers can comment on their work.  Locked inside a CMS, the blogs would not have the global reach and the same authentic nature as they do in more accessible locations.

 2.  You want your students to author content they can use after a course ends.  While a CMS provides secure access to course content, what happens when the course ends?  What happens when a student graduates?  Usually, student access to course content and to the work they’ve contributed ends at the end of the semester or when they leave the institution.  If you want students to have more open access to course content or want them to develop materials that they can use later in their careers, break free of the CMS. For instance, a blog or a wiki would make great portfolio tools that students can use to showcase their work beyond the dates they are enrolled in a course or at an institution.

3.  You want your students to interact with people not enrolled in a course.  Technically, most CMSs will allow you to add guests or guest speakers to a course shell.  At some institutions, however, the process of adding an “outsider” can be cumbersome or forbidden. Stepping outside of the CMS opens your students to a host of communication options like Google Hangouts or Skype and does not limit their interaction to the people enrolled in the course or working at your institution.

4.  You want to develop a learning community that lives after the class has ended.  Opening up an old course shell is like visiting a ghost town.  The discussion boards are the lifeless remains of engaging conversations.  The modules stand as empty edifices where occupants once played.  I’m being a little dramatic but the reality is that most courses within a CMS are only active when students are enrolled in a course.  But what if you wanted to foster a learning community that lived beyond the confines of the course?  Consider having your students join Twitter and develop a hashtag unique to your group or course.  This way, participants can still interact with one another long after the virtual tumbleweeds have descended on your course in the CMS.

5.  You want your students to be creative and utilize the landscape of tools available online to demonstrate their learning.  Most CMSs have a limited number of interactive tools and assessment options.  Opening a CMS discussion board to embeddable content from outside sources can really tap into your students’ creativity.  Students could make movies that they post on YouTube, make interactive webpages using Glogster, or play out a debate with GoAnimate.  While these tools live outside of the CMS, they can help to embed a creative element to your dull CMS.

Are there other activities that would prompt an instructor to step outside the CMS?  Share your ideas in the comment section below.

Applying principles of good instruction online

Almost 25 years have passed since Chickering & Gamson offered seven principles for good instructional practices in undergraduate education.  While the state of undergraduate education has evolved to some degree over that time, I think the seven principles still have a place in today’s collegiate classroom.  While originally written to communicate best practices for face-to-face instruction, the principles translate well to online formats and can help to provide guidance for those of us designing courses to be taught online.

1.  Encourage contact between students and faculty.  Students need to know how to contact their online instructors and should be encouraged to communicate with us when needed.  In my online courses, I identify multiple means of contacting me (email, Skype, Twitter, etc) and clearly post times when I’ll be available to chat during online office hours.  While few students utilize the online office hours I provide, offering this time communicates to students that I am available if they need assistance and that I value this interaction.

2.  Develop reciprocity and cooperation among students.  For those of us who believe that people learn through socially constructing their understanding based on their experiences, this principle is critical.  Online courses should not be independent study classes.  Online instructors need to build collaborative structures into their courses to promote student-to-student interaction.   In my experience, I find that students who feel isolated in an online course have difficulty being successful.  In my online courses, I incorporate collaborative and interactive ventures early on.  I also try to foster discussions where students communicate with one another, share ideas and debate concepts.  While interacting with the instructor is important in an online class, it is also important that students have a space where they can discuss concepts with one another as well.

3.  Encourage active learning.  Learning is not a passive activity.  For students to learn, they must actively engage with the content in thoughtful, purposeful ways.  As you develop your online course, consider ways to build active learning into the course content.  This can include utilizing tools with a course management system (discussions, for instance) or not (GoAnimate, Animoto).  But active learning isn’t limited to technological avenues in online courses.  Someone teaching science online could utilize hands-on lab activities developed with common everyday items.  Someone teaching psychology or sociology online could have students conduct observational work at a park or at the mall.

4.  Give prompt feedback.  This can be tricky, especially with instructors teaching larger online classes.  While tackling hundreds of papers can be overwhelming, students need to receive prompt feedback to know whether they are being successful or what they need to do to improve.  If you see that there are larger assignments in your class that will take you some time to provide quality, constructive feedback, communicate this to your students.  You should also include some smaller assignments that will not take as long to assess. While some experienced online instructors use the course management system to build automated responses into their courses, I believe that some students still need personalized feedback on their work that comes directly from their instructor.

5.  Emphasize time on task.  Learning takes time.  Students and faculty working in online spaces need to realize this.  Just because an online course may be more flexible schedule-wise does not mean that it won’t require a significant time commitment.  It’s important for instructors to communicate expected time commitments but also be realistic with their expectations.  Assigning students to read a 500 page book in a day may not be completely realistic.  Have high expectations but respect students’ need to have time to interact with the content and learn.

6.  Communicate high expectations.  While it’s important to have high expectations for students, it is also critical that these expectations are clearly communicated to students.  It is also helpful to communicate clear expectations for participation and for interaction. Do you want your students to log on daily?  Do they need to submit assignments in a certain format?  Is it okay for them to use emoticons in their discussion posts?  These are just a few of the areas that online instructors need to consider as they develop an online course for the first time.

7.  Respect diverse talents and ways of learning.  Students learn in a variety of ways.  While there will undoubtedly be some text-based content in an online course, it cannot be the only mode of delivery or assessment.  Draw on the host of multimedia options available online to deliver content to students and to assess them.   Instead of typing out some long lesson on the Middle Ages, check out YouTube or Vimeo for some available videos.  Or better yet, use a screencasting tool like Jing to record a customized lesson.  Instead of assigning a 10 page paper, have students create a video where they demonstrate what they’ve learned.

Ivory towers, fear the MOOC!

Technology folk love their acronyms.  You have RAM and ROM, DVDs and HD.  You can send a PDF or download a BMP.  Or maybe you want to use HTML to create a website or use a VGA cable to connect a monitor.  But MOOC?  That is probably a new one for most people.  Whether you’re familiar with the term or not, if you work in education, you’ll definitely be affected by the emergence of MOOCs, if not today then someday soon.

MOOCs are Massively Open Online Courses that allow students to network with people from around the world and learn through their participation and interaction.  While the acronym is a little awkward, the unabbreviated title is very descriptive.  MOOCs are massive because they draw students from around the world and because many courses put no limitations on the number of students who can enroll.  MOOCs are open since many courses are free for students who want to take the class (unless they want to earn credit from the institution).  And lastly, MOOCs are online courses since the content and interaction occurs completely online.  At first, some educators may see MOOCs simply as a difference in scale from a traditional online course.  While a traditional online class may have 30-50 students, a MOOC can have hundreds or thousands of students taking the class. For instance, a MOOC offered by Harvard this spring had over 100,000 people enrolled in the course and over 10,000 students take the midterm for a grade.  The numerics aside, however, MOOCs also offer learners a more open learning experience than a traditional course would.  Rather than organizing course contents and participation inside an institutional course management system, MOOCs distribute course materials and communication across a variety of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, blogs and wikis.  All of the course material and interaction is out in the open for the class to access whenever they want, not just when they are students at the institution.

So, why are MOOCs such an ominous presence in education?  To start, last week Harvard and MIT jumped head first into the MOOC market with edX, a collaborative endeavor that hopes to offer five free online courses this Fall.  The edX announcement comes a few weeks after Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with Coursera to offer online courses where students can “learn from world-class professors, watch high quality lectures, achieve mastery via interactive exercises, and collaborate with a global community of students.”  For free.

MOOCs have the ability to disrupt traditional higher education as we know it.  When Harvard, Penn, MIT and Princeton start offering their classes online for free, it changes the landscape of admissions and recruitment nationwide.  It’s like a four star restaurant has suddenly popped up in every neighborhood and is offering Filet Mignon for free.  How does any other restaurant compete with THAT??  That’s what MOOCs can potentially do to higher education. With 25% of graduating seniors carrying more than $50,000 in debt from college, MOOCs will undoubtedly attract students who want to learn content without the financial burden of traditional institutions.

Still wondering about MOOCs?  Be sure to check out the following videos which should help to explain MOOCs in more depth.

Success in a MOOC

Knowledge in a MOOC

Creatively represent data with infographics

They seem to be everywhere.  Pick up a magazine or newspaper.  Visit any news site.  Check out your Facebook or Twitter Feed. Infographics are popping up all over the place.   For those new to the term, infographics are information graphics.  While some academics may argue that any graphical image displays information, infographics offer new ways to visually represent data so that statistics can be more easily digested and understood.  Typically, infographics utilize colorful images and text to make really complex data simpler to understand.  Wondering what an infographic looks like?  Check out these examples.

Just How Big is Apple?

Mobile IT Usage in Higher Education

Education by the Numbers

Infographics as a field is not new.  For centuries, mathematicians and scientists have sought new ways to display information.  It is only over the last couple decades, however, that infographics has emerged almost as a form of art.  Really complex and colorful infographics are shared virally online like a funny YouTube video or a witty meme.  Beyond their social value,  however, infographics can offer a unique alternative to the traditional paper or presentation assignment.  Rather than assigning a large research paper, consider having your students create an infographic to display their research.  Helping students be able to represent and interpret data is a critical skill for living and working in the 21st Century.  As David McCandless says in his TED talk on Data Visualization:  “We’re all suffering from information overload or data glut.  And the good news is that there might be an easy solution to this.  We just have to use our eyes more.”  Infographics do just that.

If you’re wondering where to get started with an infographics project for your class, Angela Alcorn gives the following tips for people wanting to design their own infographics:

• Keep it simple! Don’t try to do too much in one picture.
• Decide on a colour scheme.
• Research some great facts and statistics.
• Think of it as a visual essay: ensure your arguments hold and are relevant.
• Remember that it’s all about quickly conveying the meaning behind complex data.
• Draw conclusions.
• Reference your facts in the infographic.
• Include your URL so people can be sure who made it.

While these would serve as a good starting point for instructors wanting to design a project using infographics, there are some great sites that would help with the visual aspects of an infographic project.  Piktochart is one site that gives users all the graphical tools needed to create their own infographics for free.  Visual.ly is another site that offers great examples of infographics and free, easy-to-use tools to create simple infographics.  Another great starting point is a series of posts from the New York Times which feature infographic lesson plans and curricular ideas.  While they are mostly designed for a K-12 environment, they can also give collegiate instructors some ideas for integrating infographics into the courses.

Head in the clouds? Check out these cloud storage options!

The past few weeks have been busy times for the cloud storage industry.  With each passing day, it seems that some new company announces a new cloud storage service.  Whether it’s Microsoft with their SkyDrive, Google with its Google Drive, Amazon with its Cloud Drive or Apple with its iCloud, almost everybody is getting into the cloud storage business.  While some may be suspicious that these companies are making a mad dash for everyone’s data, I think the emergence is just the natural evolution of the web and the current economics of technology.  These companies are trying to become the collaborative hubs in our lives.  They want to offer us a one-stop commons area where we can work, learn, play, interact, communicate and collaborate easily.  Cloud storage is just one more effort to get our business and have us using their services.  To help folks make informed decisions, I thought I’d briefly review a few of the major free cloud storage services and talk about the educational benefits for each.

Google Drive:

One of the newest cloud storage services on the market, Google Drive offers 5 Gb of storage for free.  Users can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month.  Uploaded files can be shared with other Google users in the same way that Google Docs are shared.  Since Google has set the standard for collaboration with Docs, it’s only logical that they would build Drive into the Docs architecture.  They really intriguing feature is the ability to comment on any type of document (PDF, photo, video file, etc) or even software applicaitons.  This could create some great educational opportunities.  Educators can upload a paper into Google Drive, share it with a class and have them comment ON the document or edit the paper together.  Google Drive has released Mac and PC apps to make uploading simpler and mobile apps are planned for the future.  It’s only a matter of time before people are accessing Google Drive on their smartphones and iPads.

Amazon Cloud Drive:

Cloud Drive allows users to upload music, photos, videos, and documents from their computer and access them from other locations.  The entry level plan is free and offers 5 GB of storage.  Upgrades are available for $10/year for each 10 Gb of storage needed. For instance, 20 GB of storage costs $20 a year while 1 Tb of storage costs $1000 a year.  While Google Drive is built on collaboration, Amazon’s service is built on allowing access to purchased media.  Cloud Drive users will be able to access the songs and HD videos they’ve purchased anywhere.  Cloud Drive even offers a special media player so users can stream their stored music to another location.  Without clear sharing options, I see Cloud Drive as more of an individual consumer service than an educational or collaborative one.

Microsoft SkyDrive

Offering a whopping 7 GB of free storage, Microsoft is trying to lure users to its online storage service SkyDrive.  SkyDrive offers some of the same features that Google Drive offers (sharing of documents and collaborative features) but already offers mobile apps for many major smartphones.  While SkyDrive offers Office Web Apps to coordinate with MS Office products, my initial concern is with sharing those documents with friends and colleagues.  I already know many of my friends’ Google Docs usernames and have existing hundreds of documents already saved on Google Docs.  I don’t know if 2 GB of extra free storage will cause me to jump ship from Google.

Dropbox

Dropbox is actually one of the older cloud storage services available.  For regular readers of the 8 Blog, you’ll recall that I wrote about the service two years ago.  The service hasn’t changed much over that time, except for becoming integrated in a variety of mobile apps for smartphones and tablets.  Unlike Google Drive and MS Skydrive, Dropbox offers little collaboration ability.  Users can share documents but cannot comment on the documents or edit them together.  Users get a paltry 2 Gb to start but can earn more by inviting friends.

iCloud

Much like Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, Apple mainly created iCloud to allow users to store and access their purchased media.  Bought a song on iTunes?  With iCloud, users can download it to all of their devices easily.  Bought an app in the AppStore?  Users can download it from iCloud to install on other iDevices as well.  Apple provides 5 GB of iCloud storage for free, but iTunes music, apps, books and Photo Stream don’t count against that total.  Additional storage can be purchased for $20 per year for 10 GB, $40 per year for 20 GB or $100 per year for 50 GB.   Educationally, iCloud might be beneficial for pushing apps to a classroom sets of iPods or iPads. Without any interactivity that could foster cross device collaboration, however, iCloud is more of an individual consumer service than an educational one.