This seems to have a lot of potentials for language, arts, geography, and film classes… maybe more (How many classes nowadays do not need any kind of visual demonstration?).   The most attractive feature about this software is that you can even annotate video content.  For instance, you can play a video clip, pause at a particular point and then comment on it, with your text, voice or even video!  More interestingly, you can share the video with students and let them comment on it with video.

Unfortunately, with the free account, you can only create three threads.   If you are like me, you could probably erase earlier threads and start new ones to stay within the limit.

The software also allows one to make “digital stories” in similar ways like Photostory and Photopeach.    Next time you want students to comment on visual content (artwork, for instance), give voicethread a try!

• Export to Word
• Include headings
• Print with an answer key
• Print for students who need to take the test by hand

If you have ever created a test directly in Blackboard, you know that it makes administering and grading the test easy.  However printing the test from Blackboard is not practical.  For instance, suppose a student’s laptop crashes in the middle of the test, or a student has a disability that makes taking a computerized test difficult.  With Respondus, you can print a copy of the test to give to the student, and you can increase the font size within Word if need be.

Click here to search for test banks from major publishers.

Supported Tools:

There are a number of applications that the North Institute traditionally support.  You can find more description from our Applications page which describes some of the most frequently used tools we support.

• Blackboard: our learning management system to post content and conduct some class activities for your traditional as well as hybrid or online courses.  You do not have to do anything to download it.  Just log in to http://bb.oc.edu to see your course shells.   You can use your Blackboard course to post course documents, discussions, assignments, tests and manage student grades.
• Respondus:  a really handy test creation and management tool.  OC has a site license and you can download it to your computer from \\judah\dist\respondus.  Click here to learn more.
• Lockdown Browser: a special browser for conducting secure tests.  It’s available to students and faculty.  Most students have it installed on their computer already, but you might want to download it yourself just to see how it works.   Click here to learn more.
• Turnitin: It is a web-based service to check plagiarism in student assignment.   Click here to learn more.
• EndNote: a Bibliography management tool for your or your students’ research needs.  Click here to learn more.
• Survey Monkey:  a survey creation and management tool.  Click here to learn more.
• Course Media Manager: a tool to help you upload and mange course media.  Click here to learn more.
• InTouch: OC’s mobile application that students can use to retrieve course or school information. Click here to learn more.
• Here:  an application to help you take class attendance using students’ mobile devices or laptops.  Click here to learn more.
• Sign up:  a tool to make signing up for class activities or office hours easier.  Click here to learn more.

Free Web Tools:

There are also many free web tools which may help you in your teaching, and here are some of them:

• Jing: This tool allows you to create a 5-minute screen-casting session, such as narration for PowerPoint presentations, or instructions for your syllabus or a demonstration on how to navigate your online course.  It is available for both Windows and Mac users.  (http://www.jingproject.com/)
• Delicious: A good tool for online bookmarking, most useful if you use different browsers or computers, as all bookmarks will be stored on the web (http://www.delicious.com)
• Voki: An avatar kind of of tool to create 1-minute instructions.  This is especially good for giving short class instructions.  If you do not want to record, you can type and the Voki tool can turn your text into audio.  (http://www.voki.com/)
• Photostory: If you have a series of photos or images to demonstrate, this is probably the best tool to use.  You can record your narration over each image individually.  It is available only for Windows users.  (http://tinyurl.com/4f869)
• Academic Earth: Online video lectures (http://academicearth.org/)
• Google Forms/Docs/Calendar /Translate:  Google forms allows you to create easy online forms.   Google Docs allows you to share online documents that multiple users can collaborate on if needed.   Google Calendar is a web-based calendar.  Google Translate is a very handy tool to translate documents from one language to another.  You can Google these applications out.
• Diagrams: This is a tool to create some quick diagrams (http://www.simplediagrams.com/)
• Photopeach: This is an easy tool to showcase a series of photos.  You can add background music from its recommended music or youtube.  However, with the free account, you cannot add your own music.   (http://photopeach.com/)
• Diigo: This is an online clipboard for you to bookmark places you visited and to take notes as you browse the web.   (http:///www.diigo.com)
• Slideshare:  This is an web site for you to share your slides online.  Once it is shared you can email or embed the slides without having to attach them every time. (http://www.slideshare.net)

Professional Development Resources:

Here are some web sites that may provide more information about educational technology tools and best practices.  It’s a good idea to subscribe to their RSS feed, if available, to get their updates pushed to your feed reader.

• Faculty Focus:  provides articles on innovative strategies, best practices and fresh perspectives on what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to teaching, learning, and leading in higher education today.  URL:  http://www.facultyfocus.com/
• Free Technology for Teachers: provides free resources and lesson plans for teaching with technology.   http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
• The Teaching Professor: has a blog, newsletters and conferences to “provide ideas and insight to educators who are passionate about teaching.” http://www.teachingprofessor.com/
• Prof Hacker: A Chronicle of Higher Education blog that “delivers tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education, Monday through Friday.” http://profhacker.com
• The Speed of Creativity: Oklahoma educator and innovator Wesley Fryer’s blog to document his ” journey of learning and collaborate with other educators and lifelong learners around the globe.”  I constantly find useful tools and inspiration from his posts.   http://www.speedofcreativity.org/
• Tech Tip of the Day: provides weekly tips from Tammy Worcester, Educator, Author, and Presenter.  http://tinyurl.com/2vxz48
• Tech & Learning: Tech & Learning magazine’s web site that has rich resources on best practices, tips and tools related to technology and teaching. http://www.techlearning.com/
• Open Culture: provides interesting cultural and educational media information on the web. http://www.openculture.com/
• North Institute Website:  last but hopefully not  the least, you might bookmark the North Institute site and subscribe to our RSS feed for tips, resources and best practices that may help you in your teaching:  http://ni.oc.edu

Please feel free to suggest additional tools and resources to us if you find any that would help other professors.

Note:  Person in photo is not Jimmy Young or Berlin Fang.  Photo was taken from Mr. Roger Woodward (April Food’s brother)’s amazing woodwork workshop.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

• Reclaim Privacy site
• Facebook posting tips
• Know your settings
• Oklahoma Christian University on Facebook

Thanks to Ann for the webinar!