Jul 28 2010

Making Your Online Course “Timeless” Posted by Berlin Fang

Removing Time

As you design your online courses, keep in mind that there is a possibility that you will reuse the content in other semesters which may be longer or shorter.  For instance, you initially design an online course to be taught within six weeks and you have modules named week one through six.  In another, shorter semester (such as a summer semester), you may need to offer it for a three-week period.  To avoid the hassle of changing all the time parameters, here are some suggestions that may make your work easier.

  • If you want to provide a timeframe for students, use the syllabus or a separate calendar to do so.  Try not to use other specific dates in your course content.  You will find that it is going to be annoying and tedious to change them later on.
  • Create folders not for particular weeks, but for “units” or “modules”, preferably around a particular theme.  That way, you can configure your pace of covering these units more easily if the duration of teaching changes.
  • Try to avoid mentioning of particular dates in your texts, especially in the attachments, which you would need to download, change, and then re-upload.   Instead, use the “modify” tool or “selective release tool” to control the release of your content or activities.
  • Anticipate text book updates, so it is sometimes a good idea not to mention chapter 1, 2, or 3, if there is a possibility that chapter 1 will become chapter 2 in the next edition.  For written text, it is fairly easily to change, but be especially careful if you are want to record your lecture in video or audio formats.  You basically cannot change such references without recording them again.

Another not so related thing to watch for is to specify the time zone you will be using (Central Time) if you do have to use dates and time for specific activities (such as exams) as students may be in a different time zone especially during the summer vacation.

Tags: , , — 3:54 pm
Jul 23 2010

Why Non-Tech-Savvy Professors Often Design the Best Online Courses Posted by Berlin Fang

Things in the world often work in funny ways. In the Book of Jonah, the Lord asks Jonah: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.” (Jonah 1:2) We all knew what Jonah did: he fled, got swallowed up by a big fish and then went back to Nineveh to get the job done. When Jonah was asked to go to Nineveh he must have asked: why me? People in Nineveh were supposed to be the very opposites to the people he is supposed to help.  Also, Jonah probably thought he didn’t know anything about these people to be properly equipped to do the work.

In case you are wondering why I am going with this, I am going to fast forward to 1972, when President Nixon visited communist China to normalize the Sino-US relationship. It seemed ridiculous for Nixon, an outspoken opponent to communism, to visit China, and equally ridiculous for Chairman Mao, an outspoken opponent to capitalism, to welcome him. Yet we saw what happened later.

The point I am trying to make is: unlikely people can make miracles happen, in spite of conventional wisdom we might have about such people and such situations. The same is true for online education. The conventional wisdom is that online teaching and learning are for the tech savvy, but this has been proved wrong again and again.

This morning, Jimmy Young and I were talking about good online courses and we discovered that many good online courses were actually designed and taught by people who do not seem to be tech-savvy at all. We concluded that designing and teaching an online course is not about “tech-savviness”. It is more about “organizational savviness” to use Jimmy’s apt term. In other words, good visual, message, and pedagogical sense play by far a greater role. For the technology parts, there are often support teams to help.

Here are some reasons why non-tech-savvy professors can design good online courses:

  1. Today’s Learning Management Systems are designed for the average user, not the technology expert. To design an online course, you really do not need to know any computer language other than perhaps English.
  2. Non-tech-savvy professors rely more on support folks like us who spent more time observing and learning and experiencing what works and what does not and therefore can avoid many pitfalls.
  3. Non-tech-savvy people are less likely to assume any technical skills of students either as they know what they themselves come from, therefore it is more likely for them to be proactive about potential problems.
  4. Non-tech-savvy professors are often more open to advice by other professors and professionals in terms of course design.
  5. There is sometimes some “late-comer advantage” in terms of technology use. Non-tech-savvy professors can take advantage of the latest versions of softwares that usually offer better functions, features or user interfaces, when more tech-savvy professors were involved in more complex systems that were there when these later versions did not exist. And it is hard to leave an older system for a different one. Many non-tech-savvy people do not have this problem.
  6. Non-tech-savvy professors do not care much about sophisticated technological bells and whistles, which often result in leaner, better courses for the user.

This of course is not bad news for those who are tech-savvy, as technological background can take them further if they are design-savvy, organization-savvy as well.

However, the discovery of non-tech-savvy people designing some of the best online courses certainly is good news for those who do not think they can do it.

Tags: , — 11:14 am
Jul 23 2010

Life Is Tricky and Online Communications Don’t Solve That Problem Posted by Berlin Fang

This is a response I got from Dr. John Harrison for my last post about “dropping the veil”:

I agree that certain students are much more forthcoming online than face to face. This summer I had a Senior Bible Seminar class with a female student who never spoke up in class and appeared very shy in her group work, even to the point of becoming red faced and emotional when the group had to present and she didn’t present anything. However, her online contributions were often outstanding. In fact, many times I thought they were the best in the class. So I was glad that she had that outline to express her well-informed thoughts to the class.

You are also correct that students can say things online that you wish they wouldn’t say, but then again that can happen in face to face encounters as well. Life is tricky and online communications don’t solve that problem.

I would love to thank Dr. Harrison for the example he provides about online/offline differences of communication, and the insightful observation that online communication do not necessarily solve all the problems. In many cases it can be make things worse. Those who has doubts about that, you will think differently after reading Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway’s novel Who Touched My Blackberry (I think it needs a sequel called Who Touched my iPad, for the same of journalistic and literary neutrality towards Apple.)

10:18 am
Jul 22 2010

From Graveyard of Unused Research to “A Quiet Revolution in Scholarship” Posted by Berlin Fang

In March, I was contacted by a website called Just Listen for permissions to record some of my articles into audio files to be distributed on their web site.  After I learned that I didn’t have to do the recording myself, I said OK, go ahead and I almost forgot about it.   They then did record some of these articles and sent to me.   I listened to them, and the recording was done by some real professionals speaking much better Chinese than I do.   Then they sent me the log in information to check traffic to these audio articles.   I didn’t check it as their site was fairly new and unknown and I didn’t think I write anything anybody would be that interesting for people to consider downloading.  But I forgot one simple fact, there are  close to 1.4 billion people in China.

Today, after reading an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, I thought about this site and went to log in and check.   I was pleasantly surprised to find that it has quite a number of downloads, ranging from 2444 to 17401 for each of these recorded articles, with the most downloaded article being  “When Young, Read Omnivorously”, something I wrote as a reaction to Chinese parents’ tendencies to ask kids to read only textbooks and textbook-related materials.

Download Info

Download Info

You never know what can happen if you put your stuff online for public access. Whatever I wrote I cannot unwrite as it has been downloaded to someone’s computer or other audio device through Just Listen’s repository of audio files. Fortunately I hope I haven’t written about “Big Foot powered by cold fusion” kind of stuff.  So I am not terribly worried.   If I wrote something stupid, well, I have to remind myself that I am human  and I err.  There is little to be done now except perhaps writing another one in which earlier errors can be clarified or corrected.  But mostly I felt very pleased.

The Chronicle article I talked about is called Digital Repositories Foment a Quiet Revolution in Scholarship. It introduces some similar approach to the one used by the web site that offered to record the articles I wrote.   The staff at the repository did the hunting and uploading and distribution mainly to make it as easy as possible for the authors.

The featured institution is the University of Nebraska at Lincoln which has a Digital Commons program to help faculty expand the audiences for their work.  “They will take care of almost everything:  checking publishers’ contracts, uploading documents, even copy-editing and proofreading.”  All that the professors have to do is to “send Digital Commons a CV or publications list.”   Isn’t that sweet?

The digital commons program did help the faculty in spreading their expertise to wider audiences.   The university’s 92-year old emeritus professor Robert Katz got the highest number of downloads for the things that he wrote years ago.  Without such a platform, many of his writings would probably be forgotten.

Several other universities have adopted this digital repository approach to spread faculty research and writing.  Harvard has a DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) program to offer similar open-access repositories for faculty.  As adoption for faculty is often low, Harvard uses an “opt-out” method instead of “signing-up” method.  University of Wisconsin has a “MINDS” project to document faculty research and publications.

Some repositories prove to be hard to maintain as there is a lack of participation by faculty, as in most cases, I would assume that faculty members have to upload their works themselves.  What University of Nebraska did was an exception not the rule.  In the case of my articles, the web site seems to depend on advertisements which they insert into the recordings, therefore there is a financial motivation for doing all the work for me while I provide my content.

But in spite of the problems of maintenance I believe in the future of open-access repositories.   Many articles were written and then lie in some file folders or hard drives or internal databases which can be “graveyard of unused research” as the article calls it.   It is a shame that they did not get to be read by people who might otherwise benefit from them.   They can be used and reused.  In another article from the Chronicle, it is reported that only 45% of all papers published by the top 4,500 scientific journals get cited within 5 years after their publication?  What about the 55%?  Buried somewhere unfortunately.

There is a door leading out of the graveyard, and it is called “open access”.  Open access has its share of problems, but eventually, the benefits outweigh the shortcomings.

Tags: , , — 5:39 pm
Jul 21 2010

Dropping the Veil: When Group Projects Goes Online Posted by Berlin Fang

Mask

Mask

When I was studying at Syracuse University, one of my professors Dr. Nick Smith always have group projects for his evaluation classes throughout decades of his teaching. He often prefaced an inroduction about project requirements with horror stories about students breaking into fights or taking each other to courts while doing group projects.

Nonetheless, he would then give us another group project.

The reason is simple. Student group projects cannot be any worse than working groups when they are out there doing “real” projects. Isn’t education about preparing people for the future?

I have rarely heard of any good things about group projects from either students or professors. Nor do I enjoy group projects. But in retrospect, I found I learned most from group projects.

In the 2010 Blackboard session called “Managing Experiential Learning Programs: A Case Study of Integrating Blackboard Technology into Experiential Curriculum” Dr. Michael Londrigan of the Fashion Merchandising Departments of LIM College said something that I thought was really insightful about group projects.

He actually found that it is easier if you take group projects online. When asked why that’s the case, he said that the online format helped to “drop the veil”. When students are face-to-face with each other, courtesy, fear, other psychological factors or group dynamics prevent people from dealing with issues in an open and honest fashion. When online, things can be made to sound more straightforward. Student A can tell the group: “Guys, you need to throw in your weight to get this done,” whereas he or she might not want to say so in a face-to-face setting for fear of a protest, an argument, a rebuttal, a jeer or a punch in the face.

This goes in line with my general observation that people can behave very differently online, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. When we talked about Facebook several weeks ago, I heard Ann White mention that perfectly normal people can behave nastily online saying things they wouldn’t be saying in a face-to-face setting. Once again, the veil is dropped.

Professors can certainly take advantage of these behavioral differences. I have often heard how shy students (especially international students) become involved in online discussions. A journalism professor once told me about the interesting effect this has on face-to-face meetings later on. The professor said international students used to be shy in class, contributing little, if not nothing, to the discussions in class. She took the discussion online, and these students started to be actively involved. Back to the classroom after the discussions, she observed that these international students were much more talkative as a result of the online discussions, which must have emboldened them in some way. There must be a fancy name for this kind of effect, but I will leave this to psychologists to figure out.

In addition, it is not as easy for someone to “hide” in an online setting as statistic tracking adds some healthy stress for students to get involved. They know that if they don’t throw in their weight, there are statistic tracking tools that can show who is working and who is slacking.

So, next time you have a headache with a group project, try taking it online. It may seem counter-intuitive as it sounds like it is going to complicate group management, but that is well worth it if students will have a more intensive and productive learning experience.

And also, once they graduate into the workforce, they will participate in virtual teams any way. I do not know about you, but I log in my work information online, through ProjectPath and our ticketing system. There are virtual teams and virtual projects everywhere nowadays. So it would help to get students ready.

Note: The photo above is a photo that I recently took of two masks. I cannot find a good one about veils, so I guess dropping the masks will do.

11:30 am
Jul 20 2010

Product vs. Productivity: A Tale of Two Mindsets Posted by Berlin Fang

I just returned from a Blackboard annual conference in Orlando. I went to quite a number of sessions listening to people sharing their uses of Blackboard or various Blackboard-related products. Like before, faculty development is a big issue for many institutions. Dr. Wang Qiong from Beijing University complained that one of the greatest challenges is that few faculty members show interest in the training sessions that her Center offers. She said she came to learn what the US colleagues are doing. Ironically, that is the same struggle people in the US face. This reminds me of the joke that the Indian Chief were asking the tribe to prepare for harsh winter due to weather reports on the TV, while weatherman on TV said you’d better prepare for a harsh winter as all the Indians are busy piling firewood for winter. Using other nations as a frame of reference is an unreliable business indeed.

As I wandered through the sessions held by faculty or staff, it gradually became clear that faculty members often advocate easy-to-use, web 2.0 kind of tools that can help them to easily develop and deploy a course components, while most technology folks are obsessed with functions and features of the latest product. There probably lies the key to faculty development in terms of educational technology: Professors do not really care how cool a technology is. They care what can help them accomplish what they want to accomplish. That’s also where the dilemma lies. Many products are indeed designed with the intention of increasing productivity in the long run. When and where did the message get lost, so that we impress them as a product support specialist, rather than a productivity consultant as we probably could better position ourselves to be? There might be three main reasons:

  1. Lack of need analysis: Interventions are implemented without asking for faculty or student input. The good old ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) model seems still very valid today.

  2. Lack of cost-benefit analysis: When we try to gain faculty attention, we should understand that we are competing with all the other things on their full plates. What matters a lot to us may not matter to them as much as we would like. To register our solutions on their radars, it is important to communicate the cost (time, learning curve, potential risks if any) and benefits (time saved, productivity, reusability, increased student reach, etc.) in a transparent fashion so that they know what is at stake and what benefits they can see.

  3. Lack of professional service: I found the surest way to turn away a Professor is a poor service. While more technologies are becoming services, it is easy for a technical professional to say: “We have warned you in policy about this use or that, and it is your fault that you do not read it.” These are true, but not helpful, nor professional. These may cover one’s grounds, but alienate a customer and sometimes creates cultural divides between technology staff and faculty. I see this happen in other professional services, but it is a mine field that educational technologist will do well to stay away from. We can and we should do better than that.

During the conference, I had a meeting with our regional Blackboard representative. She praised us for our adoption rate (A 2007 faculty need analysis survey shows that 80% of our faculty use Blackboard in one way or many.) To take educational technology uses to the next level, we will need to move beyond “wide uses” to “deep uses” so that technology can be utilized to increase opportunities for learning and teaching. In such transitions, productivity, not the product, will win their hearts and minds, though product may be a place to start.

2:03 pm
Jun 4 2010

Facebook Privacy Links Posted by Berlin Fang

Thanks to Ann White for giving us some pointers to Facebook privacy in a webinar this afternoon. Ann also shared with us the following links that may help us better manage our Facebook settings:

Thanks to Ann for the webinar!

Tags: , — 10:12 am
May 25 2010

What is Facebook Killing Next? Posted by Berlin Fang

I have heard that Facebook has killed the auto industry:

“Facebook destroyed “cruising the burger stand.” You could have two Corvettes and drive them both at the same time and not look as cool as you could make yourself look on Facebook.”

Some believe that Facebook killed church:

So why has mobile social computing affected church attendance? Well, if church has always been kind of lame and irritating why did people go in the first place? Easy, social relationships. Church has always been about social affiliation. You met your friends, discussed your week, talked football, shared information about good schools, talked local politics, got the scoop, and made social plans (”Let’s get together for dinner this week!”). Even if you hated church you could feel lonely without it. Particularly with the loss of “third places” in America.

Facebook is also blamed for killing literature.  For instance, what happened to mistaken identities?  Mistaken identity no more.   So, is teaching the next target?

Social media sites like Facebook are growing in popularity in all generations. More frequently, lines are blurring between social strata, including the student-teacher relationship. What are the best practices concerning privacy, “friendship”, and sharing of information? Now that Facebook is facing wide-spread media scrutiny involving their own privacy practices, how does this effect what information you share about yourself or your students?

To learn more about such topics, you are invited to join us this Thursday on May 27th, at 1:00 PM for a Webinar led by our resident social media expert Ann White.

In this discussion, you will learn some simple guidelines, practices, and tools that will give you, your coworkers and employer, and your students greater security while using Facebook.

This webinar is open to OC faculty and staff, to sign up, click here.

Tags: — 2:31 pm
May 25 2010

Reading in the Clouds Posted by Berlin Fang

img_0021

Once upon a time (in the early 90s approximately),  I found an old book about a particular literary history.  Next to a passage someone wrote in pencil a comment saying a particular theory was not valuable.  And then, next to this comment,  another person wrote a comment to that comment:  ”You don’t know what you are talking about.  This actually means… ”  It gave me pleasure reading this early form of a message board.

One might say that all of such good tradition with old books will be lost with electronic devices.  Actually you give some and take some.  Some electronic readers now offer functions that are reminiscent of shared reading experiences mentioned earlier.   The Amazon Kindle makes use of its “whispersync” tool to actually “crowd-highlight” parts of a particular book, as shown on the left.

Though mainly a solitary activity, reading also has a communal aspect to it, as shown in the existence of book clubs and the joys that follows the discovery that you and the person you meet are reading the same book.  It is also interesting to see how a particular passage strikes a cord in different people’s minds.   I’d assume it should also help an author in finding out how the market react to the things he or she writes.

2:04 pm
May 21 2010

Life after Technology Failures Posted by Berlin Fang

Yesterday, I went to a webinar together with several professors. The webinar was about student engagement using mobile tools, organized by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Blackboard. It was a rather high-profile webinar with hundreds or perhaps over a thousand participants. Unfortunately, during the seminar, there was an issue of slideshow display. There were several times that the slides were expected to advance to, say slide 36, but it kept looping back to slide 7. As part of its crisis management action (which was impressively quick), Chronicle and Blackboard soon sent an apology:

Unfortunately, we understand from many of our attendees that technical difficulties prevented the slides from advancing properly to follow Mr. Till and Mr. Dennett’s speaking points.  The problems were caused by a system failure of our third-party Webinar vendor; it was not the fault of, nor could it have been avoided by, Blackboard.

Other than the finger-pointing that would make the webinar vendor unhappy, this was well intended.  Of course we know it does not have to reflect badly on Blackboard, which specializes in asynchronous solutions, not webinar or web conferencing.  So Blackboard, cheer up and take it easy.

I can understand how frustrating it is for someone who is supposed to display how certain technologies work when technical failures occur.   Blackboard may feel bad about it, yet the audiences just feel a little tickled, not to “laugh at misery”, but out of empathy.  We all know how that sometimes happen.  Humans are not perfect, how can the technologies humans invent be perfect?

Sometimes it might be better if we stop using the word “technology” if only temporarily, because it is used to mean so much so loosely that it does not mean much when we are dealing with concrete issues.   For instance, Mobile learning tools that Blackboard tried to show yesterday may not have anything to do with a particular web conferencing platform they use.  And classroom presentation facilities present totally different challenges from online teaching tools that it is not helpful to expect an online teaching guy to know exactly how to fix a particular classroom technology.   This would be like to ask a plumber to fix your termite problem.

Two weeks ago, I was doing a presentation about technology use when I found I couldn’t use the remote control for advancing slides (I usually use the white apple remote control for my MacBook and I never used the other one).   I said that I never watch TV and the audiences laughed understandingly.

Technology failures may be frustrating, but it is usually no big deal.  We can all live with a few technical errors once in a while.   Good preparation will minimize a lot and there are always some alternatives we can pursue when one solution does not work.  With some rehearsals and diagnosis, most of the problems can be solved to make things work again.   Plan B and Cs are also helpful.  Yesterday I fortunately downloaded the slides in advance in preparation for such technical failures, and that helped some.

It could be worse, such as a blue screen at the opening of Olympics (Beijing, 2008):

Olympics

Tags: , , — 12:29 pm
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