Brainstorm in Progress: Humboldt State University

Showing posts with label Humboldt State University. Show all posts

Friday, October 24, 2014

Taking the Red Pill and Reclaiming Hosting

This blog has moved to http://geoffcain.com

Numerous metaphors seem apt here. I have been toying with the idea that Tim Owens and Jim Groom have been promoting for some time now: A Domain of One's Own and Reclaim Hosting. When I first heard the idea, I was not too keen on it because I was working in a community college with students very new to technology and with luddite faculty who were hostile to and afraid of technology. I couldn't imagine trying to get first generation college students with little exposure to computers and saying "oh yeah, you are not only going to learn how to save your paper to a thumb drive but you are going to host your own website on your own domain." But what is interesting to me right now is that I have students at Humboldt State who do not want to go online at all because they are afraid of all the corporate control of their information - they have heard Snowdon and Zuckerberg and want no part of that internet. Jim and Tim are providing that alternative.

"Founded in 2013, Reclaim Hosting provides hosting support for individuals and institutions that want to build out spaces online for personal portfolios, digital projects, and more." If you are interested in learning more, I would encourage you to explore Mary Washington University's Teaching and Learning Technologies page. Closer to home, Chris Mattia at California State University, Channel Islands is experimenting with the idea as an alternative to a learning management system. We have departments here at Humboldt State University that are using Wordpress blogs to run their courses, but Reclaim Hosting takes that one step further and hands the keys over to the students.

All I can say is that it has been surprising and fun. The technologies have advanced to such a state that anyone really can do this. My blog has been with Google since 2005. I had even older blogs on blogspot.com that are fortunately lost to the mists of time. I like this direction. This is a good time to get students, to get everyone, to think about who owns your information and what you can do about it. This is what I think the principles of Connectivism should lead to - not to just be a node in the network, but an active, aware node.

"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." - Morpheus, The Matrix

This blog has moved to http://geoffcain.com via Reclaim Hosting.

Monday, September 15, 2014

mLearning Initiatives at Humboldt State University

This just in from Morgan Barker, an instructional designer at Humboldt State:

Hello Staff & Faculty,

I would like to personally invite you to campus sessions centered around the topic of mobile learning. The eLearning department will be holding a monthly 2014-15 Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) session. Come join us -grab a cup of coffee and a croissant, during the session.

Sessions will run like an open mike forum - the perfect venue to start an academic discussion, ask questions, share your mobile lessons or learn from the campus community.

Fall Session Dates/Times - BYOD Mobile Learning Sessions

Friday, September 19th

Theme - Facilitate Classroom Use - mobile lessons, all disciplines

SH 117 9-10am

Friday, October 17th

Facilitate Collaborative, Content Sharing Elements, all disciplines

SH 117 9-10am

Friday, November 14th

Facilitate Field Journals, all disciplines

SH 117 9-10am

More Information - What is Happening at HSU with Mobile Learning? During Spring 2014 the College of eLearning facilitated a semester-long Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on mLearning that created a fun and safe environment in which faculty collaboratively explored, applied and shared mobile technologies and pedagogies to enhance student learning. Take advantage of these resources:

Collection of the mobile lessons (mLessons): Mobile Lessons in Higher Education
List of explored mobile apps: Spring 14 FLC mLearning Apps
Join us with our Twitter hashtag: #mobileflc
All Tweets will populate to our TagBoard: https://tagboard.com/mobileFLC

Cannot make these sessions? We will continue the use of #mobileflc and our tagboard mentioned above. This is a great way to see the conversations and add relevant content.

More and more events like this will be happening here as they are in the rest of the country. I am really interested in how these tools can change how students learn. I was very skeptical at first because when the iPad first came out, I saw it only as another consumption device and I associated "mlearning" with proprietary platforms. It is a different world now - the web has gotten to be a much more creative place to be since the dawn of Web 2.0 and it is really worth looking all of the ingenious uses of networks and even the simplest of tools. These events are the follow-up events that grew out of the mLearning Faculty Learning Community that Kim Vincent-Layton and Morgan Barker led last year - I highly recommend this and if you are on campus, please stop by.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Open Textbooks at Humboldt State University

The Jolly Giant Commons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I presented the other day at Humboldt State University's conference "Institute for Student Success." I was really pleased that the organizers seem to recognize economic barriers to education as a factor in student success. I am also very excited about some of the work already in progress here at HSU with open textbooks. Last year, I worked with Chris Callahan, one of our Biology instructors, to put his BIOL 102L online - human biology with a lab. The course used chapters from two open textbooks, numerous videos from Kahn Academy and elsewhere. The labs combined some simulations from Smart Science as well as a collection of experiments that the students could do in their own home. One of the requirements of the lab report had the students take pictures of themselves actually doing the experiments. It is amazing what some of these students could accomplish with a hotplate or a microwave in their dorm rooms!

One of my goals with this presentation was to find other faculty who might be interested in open textbooks or who may already be working with OERs and open textbooks: I was not disappointed.

Laura Hahn and Scott Payton of HSU, and Lance Lippert of Illinois State University have written a textbook in Wikibooks called "Survey of Communication Study." The text is for the capstone course for the BA and the interesting part is that the capstone includes having the students edit and update the textbook. As an instructional designer, I am always interested in new models of open textbook creation and I think this is very innovative. It has the potential of combining open textbook authoring with portfolio assessment. This is a great answer to the question "who is going to maintain and update an open book once it is published?" This turns the "textbook" into a living community of scholarship rather than a static object of consumption.

There are other projects here that I will be writing about later so watch this space! Good things are happening at Humboldt State.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Humboldt State's Moodle Office is Makes the News!

Humboldt State University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our own inimitable Bill Bateman's video tutorials for Moodle 2.5 are featured at the Moodle News Website as were four of his videos for 2.3.

Bill is the lead Moodle Support Specialist in Humboldt State University's Moodle Office located on the third floor of the library. Bill's team manages the day-to-day operations of the learning management system, one-on-one student support, one-on-one faculty support as well as going out to faculty offices and classrooms. The Moodle Office is a good place to drop in for help and a cup of coffee. And if all that wasn't enough, Bill still takes the time to produce the video tutorials. The instructional design team and I rely on the Moodle Office pretty much on a daily basis.

Moodle News is the international hub for all things Moodle. It is the brainchild of Joseph Thibault a Course Manager at StraighterLine.com, and Mel Benson, a writer who runs Moodlerific.org, a site to share and explore Moodle ideas. She is also Moodle tech support for a school district Minnesota. Moodle News is a valuable resource for all things Moodle: it "is a collaborative project bringing order to news and information pertaining to the open source project and learning management system called Moodle. We scour the web for the freshest, most interesting and valuable Moodle information and publish it here."

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Using a Blog-Based Environment to Support a Community of Learners

Presentation notes for: "Using a Blog-Based Environment to Support a Community of Learners"
Institute for Student Success, Humboldt State University
Presenters: Daniel Fiore, Riley Quarles, Claire Knox, and Child Development Faculty

Riley introduced everyone by saying that the network of blogs (Wordpress) created with the Child Development department began with solving a problem: communication. Claire Knox pointed out that there was learning that they wanted visible to everyone, they wanted everyone participating in the conversations. They wanted the learning to not be locked down behind a learning management system. Resources for the presentation are at the Child Development site for the Institute.

They created a network of blogs to support their program. The network of blogs arose from the users - the needs of the faculty. All of the course blogs reflect the interest and needs of the individual classes. The blogs serve as eportfolios.

The department blog provides calendars, advising, and a link to all of the other classes. The site supports online and hybrid courses. It allows students to feel and be connected throughout the program.

They also wanted to engage alumni in an open site. They are expanding the community to include former students. Students create their own blogs that feed into course and department sites. They are using RSS feeds and categories in Wordpress.

Blog posts help students get to know one another before they work together in the class or in other classes. This has increased the sense of connectedness and community.

The students sign up for a blog at Wordpress.com, send the address to the instructor, the instructor puts them into a plug-in that gathers the students postings that are labeled or catagorized according to the class instructions. The pulg-in automatically pulls in all of the materials that the students tag to the class blog. Instructors and students then comment on the postings.

The blogs allow students to explore topics further. The instructor was using the blog to post more articles and resources and the students began to do the same on their blogs.

Carole said that she is not a technological person but found that Wordpress was easy to use and the program allows the faculty to go at their own pace in using these tools. The blogs assignments were good tools to discuss web presence, communicating online, and our web history. They had conversations about how the blog can represent the student to prospective employers and how what you put online represents you.

They want the students to carry their experiences in the program and their relationships after they leave the program. Learning management systems do not allow that. They want the learning community to continue.

All of the course content from the courses stays visible. Students can look at other classes and see how course materials are related to other courses. They begin to link what they are learning to their other classes. Students can go and look at any courses that they are going to take in the future. They can see how all the courses fit together. Faculty can also visit the sites and find new ways to make connections to other classes in the program. Typically, faculty in purely face-to-face courses might not have that opportunity. The blogs also serve as a community orientation site.

They have also had a lot of discussions about privacy - there are some materials that they put into Moodle (the learning management system). Observations of children or copy written materials, for instance, need to be kept private.

Even though the environment looks structured, the community created by the students and their comments represents another network within the network - this is like the idea of rhizomatic learning posited by Dave Cormier. There are opportunities here for collaborative learning and team-based projects. Blogs allow students to communicate their processes, to reflect on how they learn. Peer instruction and support can begin in this network and follow them throughout the program (also much like Eric Mazur's ideas on peer instruction). This is also a good example of students learning through their connections with one another (connectivism).

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

eLearning 101: An Open Class for New Online Learners

Humboldt State University (Wikipedia)

Our new class is slowly taking shape. The course will be based on our old DE 101 (Distance Ed 101) which in turn was based on HIM 100 (a Health Information Management class where we introduced students to networked learning). It is also based on my experiences with CCK08 (the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes) and DS 106 (Jim Groom's project-based digital storytelling class), both of which I think represent the best of the MOOC idea. I was calling our course a MOOC but I am absolutely disgusted with some of the online classes that are going under that name right now - I would not want to give my faculty the idea that we were following a model that didn't build in student support, or value engagement and interaction, and valued venture capital over learning. I believe that we can create an open course that uses the best of these classes, uses actual research into the needs of our students, and then help students learn to be independent, life-long learners, with a dynamic learning community that they can take with them through college and into their professional lives.

The structure of our course owes a lot to the excellent work of Humboldt State Universities instructional designers, like Riley Quarles who has developed the structure of the blogs for our Child Development program. Dan Fiore, another instructional designer I am working with, is putting together Wordpress and an open badge system.

The students for this course are new to online learning, but of the 1600 students who responded to our survey, 95% use Facebook. At the typical university that hosts MOOCs, there is a higher level of motivation and skill sets (Stanford for instance). What we know about this population is that we need to have modules on things like time management, online communication skills, motivation, study skills, and how to create a personal learning network. One of the key purposes of the course is to help the students figure out how to form online learning communities for academic and professional support. We do have a module called "LMS" (learning management system) and that is specific to our campus' installation of Moodle - other campuses could insert their LMS of choice there.

The MOOCs that I have participated in were made up mostly of grad students and education professionals. My work has mostly been in community colleges and state colleges, so the tools and skills we are teaching are different.

Where we are now:

1. We are using Wordpress. There will be a main course blog that will link all the topics of the course (which may be on pages or separate blogs). The facilitators will have blogs as will the students. The students will choose or create an assignment on the topic and post to their blog. This feed will be aggregated on the topic blogs.

2. We are using open badges. I know that motivation is an issue in online classes in our university system, and all the research I have read says that badges are one of the ways to address that issue. Plus, I want the students to have a

3. We are gathering data. We have sent out a survey to our students to see how they are accessing the web, where they are accessing it, and what tools they are already using. The course is based on previous courses and orientations I have created but each is different according to the needs of the student population. For instance, at Tacoma Community College, we had more students involved in virtual worlds like Ever Quest and Second Life. Humboldt State only had 6% of the respondents in online games.

4. Updating course materials. The course materials are from previous courses and orientations. All of the modules will be openly licensed with a CC-NC-SA license.

5. Getting out to the learning communities and asking people to help get out and push. I went to the Open Ed 13 conference to learn more about open badges and to meet more people who are teaching in MOOCs. I will be presenting on this at the DET/CHE conference in San Jose next week.

The illustration below is s rough sketch that is evolving - this is not meant to be a traditional hierarchical course but student driven: the student chooses which modules are important, the student chooses the assignments from the module (or creates one) and gets together online with students to complete the work.

I would love to talk to anyone who is working on a similar project. Feel free to email me or leave a comment. I will also post updates and my presentation here as things take shape.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Biology eAcademy: Preliminary Meeting

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) (Wikipedia)

This week, I am at the California State University's Biology eAcademy. We are meeting for three days. The eAcademys are basically mini-conferences getting facuty together from across the system to look at proven course redesign practices in subjects that are "bottle neck" courses - courses that have the highest failure rate. "Proven course redesign" are course designs that have proven to increase student success. I am here with Chris Callahan and Michael Camann, faculty from the Biology department at Humboldt State. I am here because in my role as Director of Academic Technology, I also work as an instructional designer and I am working with Chris Callahan to develop a Human Biology course for HSU. This meeting of other Biology professors who have successful online courses has come at a good time.

Kathy Fernandez opened the meeting today to talk about 21st century learners: she says that students are used to immediate feedback, media rich environments, and instant access to information and data. We can be skeptical about online learning, but as instuctors, we should be curious and willing to explore. We have new tools and approaches. Students are used to a high level of engagement. Our eAcademy is a way to create a learning community (this is phase 2 of the eAcademy). There are professional learning communities coming out of the eAcademys. We are here to explore, connect, and engage with one another. Common topics on Course Redesign includes: quality online teaching and learning aligning outcomes with assessment.

Gerry says that he does not want to have this be a top down project from the Chancellor's office. He wants this to arise from this faculty community. He wants us to be skeptical - we have to look at the evidence and real measures.

CSU wants to increase on achievement and graduation rates. We need to use course redesign but also analytics. Kathy Fernandez says that we gather over 200 mb of data in our ag research on cows but gather very little data on our students. The CSU wants to use live data sources for decision making. Learning analytics covers activity in a course LMS, gathering real-time data every 24 hours, to provide a quicker

"Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs." - George Siemens.

Kathy then shared a case study on a team taught intro to religion course that was converted to a hybrid course. The course had over 370 students. There was a 10 percent increase in students getting higher than a C, but there was also an increase in students who got F's. They then used data from the LMS and then demographic data from PeopleSoft. The tools they used were Excel, Tableau, Stata, IBM spss, and R. Blackboard and Moodle (Martin Dougiamas) are working on other tools. They found that final grade and LMS use were significant factors. Things like "first in the family to go to college" was less significant than use of the LMS for the grade. "At risk" students was not a significant factor.

Micheal: Accessing an LMS is a learning activity, simply being something isn't.

But at-risk students had to work harder to get the same grade. It is harder to get a B as an under-represented minority and Pell elgible student.

The question for us is: How do we reach these students?

She talked about Blackboard learning analytics. The CSU has a STEM grant for student analytics. We need analytics tools for all of our LMSs. Analytics tools will show us how they are engaging in the course.

We had a discussion about whether students are ready for online learning and how to prepare them.

We then discussed how to communicate with at-risk students.

For Moodle - there is a program called "X-Ray Research" SRL. It creates a data dashboard.

Friday, September 13, 2013

MOOCs and Student Support

Internet Penetration (% Population). Red
indicates no statistics available. (Wikipedia)

I read an article this week that I found via Stephen Downe's blog that is from the eLearning Africa News Portal called "The Underlying Inequality of MOOCs" by Alicia Mitchell. The main issue that Mitchell has with MOOCs is an old argument against all online education: the "digital divide." Unlike the education writers of the 1990s, she looks at the issues of poverty and connectivity and says that we have to be mindful that not everyone has access or the same means and skills that those of us in more privileged parts of the world may have. I do not argue that there is not a digital divide, I just don't think stopping online learning is a great solution to that problem. She does not make the leap that many have in the past with a "therefore," online learning is not viable or should be curtailed etc. I actually agree with her and my "therefore" is that, broadly, we need to continue to work for economic justice and universal education. Africa is a hot bed of online learning, open education resources, and innovation specifically because of the problems discussed in her article. And my more focused "therefore" is say this is exactly why we need a MOOC to help students "learn how to learn." That is what we were getting at when we created "DE 101" - an free, two-week, fully online orientation to online learning. That was in a "traditional" online course format. The one I am working on here at Humboldt State University will be a MOOC called "eLearning 101."

In another look back to the 90s, I am really concerned about so-called "MOOCs" that are massive, not particularly open, online courses that are based on a one-way distribution of information and then tests. This is a huge step backwards. Especially when there are such better models out there such as Stephen Downe's and George Siemens' Connnectivism and Connective Knowledge MOOC or Jim Groom's project-based DS 106. There are all of these great models out there (often called "cMOOCs") but the ones that get all the attention are the ones supported by the Ivy Leagues and a lot of grant money. The entire MOOC phenomena is being judged by players like Sebastian Thrun who just figured out that online students need student advisors, mentoring, and tutors. These are things that many people have been writing about and more importantly doing for years now. In the article "Udacity CEO Says 'Magic Formula' is Emerging," David Carr reports:

Thrun's magic formula is not a fully automated online class featuring prerecorded videos and Web-based assessments. In other words, it's not a MOOC at all. To get better results, he said, "We changed the equation and put people on the ground." By adding mentors and a help line, and making phone calls to remind students to do their work, Udacity found it could get more students to do the work, finish the course and pass. Longer term, he has some ideas about using adaptive learning software to eliminate some of this labor, but for now it takes manpower.

The press, publications like the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Information Week are now defining MOOCs by such phrases as "a fully automated online class featuring prerecorded videos and Web-based assessments." This is not innovation, at least, not innovation in education. It may be an innovation in platform building, fund raising, or grant writing, but it is not an innovation in education. Real online courses and truly massive, open, online courses are engaging, interactive, and focus on building learning communities and networks. There is a rich body of literature and research that discusses the importance of student advising and support. If it has taken this long for Udacity to figure out what we all learned about online education in the 90s, I don't think I will live long enough to see them figure out the importance of learning communities and PLNs.

But it is not enough just to be against something. I am going to keep using the term MOOC even though the term is missapplied by the press and highly funded institutions and businesses. We need to keep building instances of MOOCs that counter the prevailing notions. I will be posting updates here as I continue to work on the eLearning 101 MOOC.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Essential Skills for Online Students

(Photo credit: London College of Fashion short courses)

I am writing up a page for our students here at Humboldt State University on the study skills needed to be a successful online student. The same skills needed for success in face-to-face courses are needed in online courses, but my research shows that the following are particularly important for online learners:

Motivation and Self-Discipline - There is often no set schedule - you must make real commitment to your assignments and deadlines. Remind yourself often why you are in school and what you want to accomplish.
Time Management - Use the calendar in gmail or any task list that will notify you like "Remember the Milk." Print out the course schedule and enter the dates into an online calendar.
Effective and Appropriate Communication - Even though you are online, your classes are an academic environment; communicate accordingly.
Engagement - Be an active learner. You have to take responsibility for your education. Ask questions. Ask questions in the forums where other students will benefit from the answers, and don't be afraid to answer questions either.
Collaboration - Forming online study groups and participating in discussions online can make all the difference in an online course. The connections you make are as important as what you learn.

I am basing a lot of this on my previous research working in community colleges with our DE 101 class - an introduction to online learning. I am also very interested in the Connectivist perspective here: we need to include more in our student prep courses on networking which is important for students to connect to content, their peers and instructors. Being able to build smart networks is at least as important as the subject matter because the networks will allow students to continue their learning long after the class is over.

I am unsatisfied with our "tech skills" list too. Lots of emphasis on software and not enough on what you would use it for. We need to teach students how to be effective in MOOCs, mlearning and other platforms and educational environments - not just the online learning model of the 90s.

What would you add to this list? What habits make your students successful? Add them to the comments or email me and I will include them in the list.

Friday, February 08, 2013

MOOCs and Other Four-Legged Chickens

I have just moved to Humboldt State University. The college is fairly rural but we get a lot of folks from urban areas. I over heard a very interesting conversation between some students in the cafeteria. One of them was freaking out because there was a rat in the garden outside that they could see outside through the window.
She yelled "what is that hopping around?"
One of her friends said "that has to be a bird."
She said "but it has four legs and a tail."
"But chickens have four legs," said the other, "at least, that's what you get in the bucket." They went back and forth. The wood rat hopped away and her three friends went on debating the nature of birds and mammals.
You might wonder how someone could make such a mistake. But imagine if the only time you have ever really thought about chicken was when it was in a soup, a sandwich or already in a bucket. If you order fried chicken, you can get a whole assortment of parts but it would be difficult to piece back together a whole bird.

MOOCs are going through what I am thinking of here as a "four-legged chicken" stage. There are a lot of educational experiences and platforms that are being described as MOOCs: there is the original "Connectivist" or networked based MOOCs, task-based MOOCs, and content-based MOOCs. Some even describe collections of videos as MOOCs. There are many variations. Because the MOOC acronym has the word "class" in it, many educators are expecting to see their own definition of a class which is often a face-to-face class or a "traditional" online class where they have the most control. When the description of the MOOC does not meet the definition of a class, the conclusion is that it will fail as an educational experience. Many of the arguments I have read against MOOCs will latch on to one aspect of the course or only look at one kind of MOOC and then condemn the whole idea. Many of the arguments are re-hashes of arguments against online learning that were already fought and won 15 years ago (i.e. "No Significant Difference," student identity issues, etc.). Online learning was the four-legged chicken of the 90s.

My take on MOOCs is that there needs to be more focus on how they work - this is the instructional design component. On one hand, we are early in the research, but MOOCs have been around since 2008. Most educators are just now hearing about them because, as Stephen Downes has also pointed out, they were only recently picked up by the big name universities which then attracts the attention of the Chronicle of Higher Ed, the Horizon Report, etc.

Recently an instructor created a MOOC that, for a number of reasons, failed. Of course that happened - this is a new teaching and learning environment. We are still learning how all the pieces fit together. Face-to-face and online classes have also failed. There are face-to-face colleges with worse retention and student success rates than some online colleges. This is not the "I told you so moment" that some think it is. I feel very strongly that we can't dismiss MOOCs because, in my experience, some of them work very well (George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Jim Groom). The current state of the research is thin, we need more data, we need to work out the best practices. And in the end, you cannot assemble a chicken from a bucket of KFC.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Six Factors Driving Online Enrollments

Image by proper dave via FlickrThis was the article that I wrote for the Times-Standard's Tech Beat:

Many students are taking online classes at College of the Redwoods and Humboldt State University. Even though online learning is called “distance learning,” the majority of our online students are from here on the North Coast. Research, and our experience at College of the Redwood's Distance Education department, has shown us that despite the fact that online learning takes more motivation and commitment on the part of the student, online learning is an increasingly popular option. Why is becoming a more popular option? Here are six reasons that we believe are driving student online enrollment:

1. Flexibility
Online students can work on their courses and listen to lectures between jobs, appointments and other classes. They can access their course materials 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Course work can be done around family schedules, and students can study on their phone, laptop or anywhere else they have an Internet connection.

2. Accessibility
For some students, such as those in wheelchairs or the blind, attending courses on campus can be challenging. Some students use adaptive technology, like screen readers, to assist them in class. In an online environment, the other students and the teacher may not even know that the online student has a disability. In turn, that can make online classes more attractive to students with special needs. In addition, students who are non-native English speakers also get the benefit of being able to review an online lecture multiple times or review complex concepts at their own pace.

3. Reduced cost
Attending courses online saves the students money by eliminating the expenses of gasoline, bus fares, and parking fees. Some instructors use online, free text books (such as College of the Redwood's Math Department) to further reduce the cost of attendance. If instructors are accepting papers online, students and schools alike save money in printing costs.

4. Engagement
Students in online classes tend to communicate more thoughtfully. Some students find it difficult to speak in class. Posting to an online discussion forum allows students to take their time and formulate their thoughts in ways that the face-to-face classroom environment may not allow. In our experiences with teaching online, we have found that we actually know our online students better than many of our face-to-face students because of the social dimension of online learning. Students often find that online classes provide more personalized attention.

5. Networking and technology skills
Online classes give students real world skills. Students who take online classes become more proficient and comfortable with using computers. Through assignments, discussion forums and group projects, students can learn to connect with one another online and with information in meaningful and useful ways. These 21st century skills are increasingly in demand by the workplace. Some students prefer to learn in the same medium they are using for managing information and communication in their life outside of school.

6. Online learning creates options
Students who take online classes know they have options. If a student needs to take a class that they need to graduate, they will be able to take it online if they have to. Students who take online classes are more likely to take classes in order to update their professional skills further into their careers. They will have the ability to take advantage of online training and “webinars” their future employers or universities may offer.

One of the problems with online learning is that students have spent 12 years or more learning how to be face-to-face students and never learn about the time management skills needed to be an online student. Fortunately, more students at College of the Redwoods are taking advantage of the free, two-week, fully online orientation to distance education called “DE 101.” If you are interested in learning more about online learning, or a CR student interested in DE 101, email Geoff Cain at geoff-cain@redwoods.edu.

Geoff Cain is the Director of Distance Learning at College of the Redwoods. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Redwood Technology Consortium. Want to know more about technology and education? See Geoff's blog at http://www.geoffcain.com.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Diversity in the Sciences: Is it as difficult as it appears?

Image via Wikipedia

I am still digesting my notes from the Institute for Diversity in Learning and Teaching that was held at Humboldt State University on May 20th and 19th. Our Thursday morning keynote speaker was Dr. Tuajuanda C. Jordan. Jordan has devoted much of her professional career mentoring students and working with programs designed to retain underrepresented minorities in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines. She talked about Xavier University and how why are #1 at getting African American students into medical school. Students have to not only learn to be students but learn to see a career in the sciences as a viable option. She stressed that instructors have to present the human side to science and scientists.

She showed us some real problems in science education in America. There is only a small percentage of students in the U.S. is graduating the 12th grade at the "proficient" level in science (able to conduct simple experiments and draw conclusions). And no minorities are graduating at the "basic" level.

Minorities are underrepresented in the sciences and without differing viewpoints in science we miss new ways of looking at problems. We stifle creativity and innovation. We need a broader-based pool of potential scientists. Minority students tend to come from disadvantaged teachers. Students need more than remedial classes - they need to be non-stigmatized and they need a curriculum that has real science research and experimentation built into it - not "cookbook" science classes where all the experiments succeed. Jordan has started programs that incorporate real research along with committed passionate teachers.

Jordan says that the k-12 schools need to foster the "scientific temper," minds that are creative, rational, open, and tolerant. They need to be taught problem-solving, thinking, and communication skills. Students need to meet real scientists early on in their education - they need outreach, mentoring, and counseling. We need to improve teacher training and not let people who do not care about the practice of science become teachers.

She asked that we increase access to college: it needs to be more affordable; we need transition programs that teach study skills and basics like how to talk to a professor. She discussed peer-led study groups and strong, persistent, consistent, and visible leadership on campuses.

Her presentation dove-tailed nicely into the universal design presentation from the day before. At College of the Redwoods, each online class has a visible link to our 24/7 online tutorial services. I think there is more that we can do here at C of R to promote study groups and peer mentoring.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Applying Universal Design to Large Classrooms

Image via Wikipedia

In another session at the Humboldt State University's Institute for Diversity in Learning & Teaching, Dr. Janye McGuire gave a very useful and informative presentation called "Applying Universal Design for Learning in Large Classrooms." I was immediately attracted to this presentation because sometimes there seems to be nothing larger than an online class, yet at other times, nothing more intimate. Those who have taught online no what I mean. I seemed to have known more about my online students' children, interests, and pets than in my face-to-face classes. In the online class, students tend to communicate with a consistency and persistence that in lacking in face-to-face classes - especially large classes. And yet, online classes seem to share some of the same problems as face-to-face classes.

"Universal Design" was defined as integrating accommodation, multiple learning modalities, engagement and interaction into course materials as the course is developed instead of as a tacked on after thought. She gave the analogy of architecture: there are architects who build in accessibility into their buildings and make really elegant, beautiful, and functional designs. And then there are buildings that are retrofitted with a ramp in the back.

One of the things that I appreciate about Universal Design is that it does not get bogged down with learning theory: it is a very practical approach that makes no claims to the secret inner workings of consciousness and how the mind supposedly works. I have found a lot of value and usefulness from learning styles and developing materials with an eye on learning styles. Universal Design addresses these issues and allows me to side-step the objections of Behavioralists or other "-ists" and "-isms" that have some ax to grind from pedagogy that does not match up with their pet epistemology. As an instructional designer, I already want and try to do all the things that Universal Design asks - I want to make my courses accessible, multi-modal (e.g. visual and audio), and to increase the interactivity and engagement of the course.

As a former English teacher, I was always asking myself why English teachers only had one way of assessing a students' ability to organize thought and communicate (the paper) when we were moving into a world where they would be asked to do so much more (presentations, multimedia, Skype, etc.). The media is changing and the discipline is not.

She discussed the seven principles of Universal Design:

Equitable Use
Flexible Curriculum
Simple and Intuitive Instruction
Multiple Means of Presentation
Success-Oriented Curriculum
Appropriate Level of Student Effort
Appropriate Environment for Learning

All of the examples that she gave were very appropriate for the online class as well as the large classroom. She applied these principles to promote multiple means to interact with the material, fellow students, and the instructor. She uses these principles to build community. I also liked that she removes the reliance on tests and exams in her online courses - this ties in nicely to the ideas of Bain and Deep Learning - if your learning is tied to tests, students tend to learn for the tests rather than learn the material in a deep and meaningful way (see previous post).