Design. Technology. Learning.

Using Virtual Groups in Online Class

2007-05-04T10:46:00.000-05:00

by Don Smith

In my Professional Writing course I broke the class down into four groups to work on the same group project. The primary purpose was to teach the students how to develop agenda, conduct meetings, and write up summary minutes of actions taken, issues raised, and next steps. The project was for the group to serve as a search committee planning a search and developing an ad for the made-up position of market manager for the E-Z Educational Software Company. The secondary purpose of the assignment was to give them experience on the other side of the search process, since their next assignment was to be doing their own resume and a letter of application.

I appointed a facilitator for each group, who was to coordinate the discussion, gather input from the other group members, and submit a project report and then a final copy of the agenda, minutes, and ad. The group would share the same grade--with these exceptions: 1) the grade would not be lower than the student's average in the course but could be higher, and 2) those that did not do their share of the work would not share in the grade.

How did the assignment go?

1. Appointing a facilitator or group leader worked very well. Of course I chose capable and dependable students, and they took the job quite seriously.

2. As usual, though, some of the members also took the assignment seriously and helped the facilitators, and some of them took the opportunity to shirk.

3. I don't know how to create a situation in which each member would be as responsible as the leader, since everyone cannot be put in charge, but if I had it to do over, I would have each member submit to the instructor the same work each was supposed to submit to the facilitator (each was supposed to do draft agenda and minutes and send those to the facilitator for compilation into a single draft). A second benefit would be that I would not have to ask the facilitators to rat on their fellow students.

What were the technological challenges?

1. It is not very difficult to set up groups in WebCT--each with its own discussion board and chat room, plus whiteboard for posting messages. But the language WebCT uses is not so user friendly, at least to someone like me. So, I had to seek help from Na Wu and Kristy Holly, and they were very helpful.

2. The problem is in part that WebCT seeks to serve a great variety of faculty members with a great diversity of needs. So, there are also more bells and whistles and options than I need for the simple stuff I do. Next time I will know better how to cut through the unnecessary.

3. The students are not uniformly capable of using the technology. I assumed all would know how to use a chat room. They didn't. I'm not sure everyone knew what it was. So, next time I will be more basic in my instructions.

4. However, students are very resourceful. I did point out contingencies they could rely on to complete the assignment if the technology proved problematic. It did. In one class, the discussion board completely crashed, owing to some system malfunction (not something I caused, thank goodness, since I live in fear that I will surely break something sooner or later in my floundering around). But the students were quite up to the challenge. They found ways to connect and get the job done--except for those who were not going to do their share, regardless of convenience or lack of it.

All in all, I think the assignment was successful, in that most of the students learned something useful, not the least of which was how to conduct meetings online. And I learned something, too, about how to make the assignment more successful or at least less stressful in the future. Not that learning can or should ever be stress free.

Academic Search Tools

2007-05-02T16:44:00.000-05:00

Online resources can account for a significant portion of research for both students and faculty. The primary options for gathering online resources have been to a) spend time finding the material online, and then spend additional time making sure the resource is legitimate, and b) accessing online material from journals and books through the library system.

While both of these options will get results, there are some new search engines available to help you find reliable resources that you can use in your research, as well as material that you can incorporate into your courses:

Google Scholar—http://scholar.google.com/

Google Scholar is a Google-based search engine that returns scholarly results (which helps to ‘weed out’ undesirable websites). Peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, journals, and other literature may all be included in the search results. Google Scholar also allows submissions, so your works can be included in this search engine if you wish.

Google Books—http://books.google.com

Google Books is another one of Google’s specialty search engines. A search here will return a list of books related to the keywords you are searching on. In some cases you are able to view the full book online directly in Google Books without having to check it out at a library or purchase it in a store. In all cases you will get full bibliographic data and links that allow you to locate libraries or stores that have the physical book available.

Microsoft Academic Live—http://academic.live.com

Similar to Google Scholar, Microsoft’s Academic Live Search (still in its Beta phase) may return bibliographical information, abstract, or full text versions of scholarly articles.

These search engines are an excellent tool for saving time and locating resources that you may have otherwise had to do some ‘footwork’ to access.

The View on the Horizon

2007-04-24T11:02:00.000-05:00

The 2007 Horizon Report is now available. This collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative is a must-read for anyone involved with teaching and learning in higher ed. This annual report discusses key trends, critical challenges and technologies to watch that will impact higher education.

The key trends they have identified this year:

The environment of higher education is changing rapidly
Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate and communicate
Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given
Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship
The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship
Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to discuss each of the following six Technologies to Watch in more detail and I look forward to hearing your comments and questions about integrating these into your classroom.

User-created content
Social networking
Mobile phones
Virtual worlds
The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication
Massively multiplayer educational gaming

The first two of these technologies, user-created content and social networking, are already established on many college campuses. The time to adoption is one year or less. Are you using them?

Download your copy of the report today and start thinking about the possibilities.

I'm Your Teacher, Not Your Internet-Service Provider

2007-04-16T16:38:00.000-05:00

Is this what you wanted to say to your students? If yes, read this article I'm Your Teacher, Not Your Internet-Service Provider and you will find more shared experiences between yourself and the author.

Although the article was written back in 2003, it looks like the students are still the same. 24/7 office hours, the students missing the deadlines, technology difficulties......the frustrations are still in the online courses, too. However, the author was not beaten by all of these, instead she had a positive attitude and shared a lot of thoughts and suggestions on finding the solutions in the article.

By the way, it's a very humorous one and really worth reading:-)

New Treasures in OpenCourseWare

2007-04-05T08:14:00.000-05:00

As a valuable and innovative distance learning resource, OpenCourseWare has grown up firmly in the recent years (for more information, read another post OpenCourseWare Grows Up). Along with the development of OCW, a bunch of useful tools and resources have been provided for the users to benefit more from OCW.

For the OCW provider institutions, eduCommons, a learning management system designed specifically for OCW, is freely available now. The participating institutions can simply upload their course materials into eduCommons and have an OCW site similar to that of Utah State University. Such a LMS may take OCW into its next period.

For the users, OpenCourseWare Finder is a handy tool to browse or search for courses in specific disciplines. Some other open resources include Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, Flickr: Creative Commons, and so on. Various resources can be found on these websites, including electronic books, text, music, media, image, and animation. All the resources are free, but usually some rules apply to the usage of them, including non-commercial usage, share-alike distributing, etc. It is a good idea to check the websites for such requirements before one uses the resources.

More and more people are taking advantage of OCW. According to what I learned in a seminar on the UH main campus last Friday, the Utah State University OCW has approximately 2000 visitors per day. The number is continuingly increasing, while is still not the most among all the OCW sites. Among all these users, 48% are self-learners, 31% are students, and 15% are faculty.

Title V News

2007-03-21T16:33:00.000-05:00

We have some small but important updates regarding Title V this week. The mentoring portion of the grant is well under way with the first few mentor training sessions already completed. The e-mentoring course itself is under development, and a trip to CBC is planned for this Friday (3/23/07) to kick off the collaboration between CBC mentees and UHV mentors. If you would like more information regarding the online mentoring program please contact Robert Cortez: cortezrs@uhv.edu

The Title V website is up and running! Additional information regarding all three components will be added as the grant progresses. We hope to have some bulletins and newsletters available on the site within the next few weeks. The website should prove to be a useful resource for anyone involved in Title V or anyone with questions regarding Title V. The website is located at http://www.uhv.edu/titlev.

If you have any questions not answered on the website, please email them to titlev@uhv.edu.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the site itself, please email bretts@uhv.edu.

What’s Happening in the Other Online Courses?

2007-03-14T17:36:00.000-05:00

Once in a LTD workshop, a faculty member told me now and then he felt he was in a "technology vacuum", and he would love to learn what his peer faculty members are doing in their online courses.

Obviously he is not the only one who has this feeling. Having the same thoughts, the educators of Sloan-C have collected several effective practices of learning effectiveness, which include class participation, discussion, rubrics development, peer evaluation, virtual lab, and many other aspects of online course. Each practice is briefly summarized, and the URLs to the courses and the relevant resources are provided.

Learning about what the other faculty members are doing in their online courses is interesting, and can often bring great inspirations and ideas. Therefore, we always cordially invite you to share your online teaching experience with the other UHV faculty!

What's on the Horizon?

2007-03-09T17:39:00.000-06:00

Each year the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project publishes a report discussing new technologies that will impact education. The 2006 Horizon Report was a collaboration between NMC and EDUCAUSE and the results are well worth reading. Download your copy here from EDUCAUSE.

From the report, the technologies to watch include,

Social Computing
Personal Broadcasting
The Phones in their Pockets
Educational Gaming
Augmented Reality and Enhanced Visualization
Context-Aware Environments and Devices

Social Computing (collaborative online tools) and Personal Broadcasting (podcasting and video blogging) are already exploding and this report describes the "time to adoption" as one year or less, so the time is now. Further, within two to three years, the Phones in their Pockets (enhanced mobile devices) and Educational Gaming (simulations, virtual worlds, social play and others) will become widely adopted tools for education.

Read this report and then think about "where do you want to go?" It's a much different world online that it was just a few short years (maybe months?) ago. And, remember this was last year's report.

HTML Tips Pt. I - Writing HTML vs. Using a Webpage Editor

2007-03-02T08:07:00.000-06:00

HTML has the reputation for being a tool for ‘advanced’ web designers or computer programmers. The truth is HTML is nothing more than a way to tell a web browser how to format content. Web browsers can’t distinguish between bold type, italics, paragraphs, or other formatting options on their own, so they depend on HTML ‘tags’.

Tags work like quotes. When a writer wants you to know that someone says something, he or she uses quotes. Likewise, when a web designer wants a browser to display something like bold type, he or she uses ‘tags’. We’ll get into more detail with tags in future blogs.

Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and even Word automatically create HTML for you, so why should you spend time trying to learn HTML?

Knowing some basic HTML will save you time. Webpage editors don’t always give you the result you expect. You will be able to spot the problem and fix it immediately rather than spending time trying to make it work (or settling for what you get) in a webpage editor.

HTML generated by editors is inefficient. Inefficient code can cause some parts of your page to be inaccessible to certain browsers, and can also cause excessive load times.

Take these two sentences for example:

This is sentence one.
This is sentence two.

If you put these sentences into Word and save it as a web page you will end up with a file that contains over 100 lines of HTML. You could get the same visual result writing your own HTML in just six lines. The extra HTML causes the Word file to be over 50 times larger than necessary, and even these simple sentences may not be formatted as you expect in certain browsers.

It’s not necessary to code your entire site by hand (or even know every HTML tag) to make your page more effective and efficient. Next time we’ll take a look at the various tags and how simple it is to write your own HTML. In the meantime, here are some great HTML resources:

http://www.w3schools.com/html
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html
http://www.echoecho.com/html.htm

Virtual Groups in Online Courses

2007-02-22T10:58:00.000-06:00

Hey folks, Bev here. Na will be back soon (next week), but left me with a message that she wanted me to post for her in her absence. So, here goes...

Virtual group activities are important tools in the online class, in which students learn in both a constructivist and social approach. In other words, students learn both from their own practice and from the teamwork and communication of the group.

For those who are interested in using virtual groups in your online courses, consider reading the article, Virtual Group Problem Solving in the Basic Communication Course: Lessons for Online Learning. Below is the abstract:

Skepticism about online instruction often erroneously blames the electronic medium for shortcomings in instructional design or technique. This essay discusses the performance expectations for fully online group problem-solving via threaded discussion boards. Four years of administering this assignment in a basic oral communication course yield detailed instructional guidelines that enrich the online learning experience and fulfill general education competency mandates. Experiences with online group problem-solving should encourage educators to adapt to technological innovations in pedagogy.

(Roy Schwartzman. Virtual Group Problem Solving in the Basic Communication Course: Lessons for Online Learning. Journal of Instructional Psychology, March 2006.)

In the appendix, several virtual group activities are suggested. Although the application of virtual groups discussed in this article involves communication courses, the idea can be applied to many other disciplines, too.

Have you used virtual groups in your online course? Do you have any thoughts on using virtual groups? Please share your experiences in the comments area. We will also be hosting more discussion on virtual groups in the future.
[Na Wu, Feb 1, 2007]

Tips for Recording Audio

2007-02-16T15:40:00.000-06:00

Ready to start podcasting? Here are some audio recording tips to help you get started. Above anything else, the important thing is to just get started. Your first recordings may not be "Grammy winners" but they will improve with time and experience.

1. Write a script. Make it conversational, not textbook. You don’t have to follow it word-for-word, but it will help guide you and minimize long pauses (while you think about what to say). Create a PDF of the script and include it with your podcast.

2. Use a quality headset with microphone and position the microphone about 3" from your mouth. You don't have to spend a lot of money. I use a Logitech Premium USB 350. Talk in a normal, conversational voice.

3. Record at the highest sampling rate and resolution, e.g., 16-bit and 44.1 kHz. You want the original recording to be high quality. When you export as mp3, the quality will be compressed and file size reduced.

4. Start and end your podcast with a few seconds of music (about 5-10 seconds). Fade the music out as you begin to speak. Fade the music in at the end. Do not use copyrighted, commercial material, e.g., from movies or albums. My favorite site for finding music tracks is PodsafeAudio. Free to use under the Creative Commons license.

5. Edit your recording to remove the pauses, ums, ahs, coughs, squeeky chair, shuffling papers, etc. A very easy-to-use, open source (free) audio recording and editing tool is Audacity. Note: Remember to download and save the LAME Encoder to export your files in the mp3 format.

That’s it. You’re ready to get started. Do you have any other recording tips that you want to share? Let us hear about them in the Comments area.

A Good Article on Online Course Design and Faculty Development

2007-02-09T16:04:00.000-06:00

Na is on vacation (in China!) and she asked that I post this on her behalf while she is gone.

I would like to recommend the following article, which discusses best practice from Washington State University on the relationships between online course design, faculty development, and effective student engagement.

Brown, G., Meyers, C.B., Roy, S. (2003) Formal course design and the studnet experience, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 7(3), 66-77.
http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v7n3/v7n3_meyers.asp

Abstract:
What impact does collaboration between faculty and professional course designers have on the student learning experience? As the use of technologies increases, educational institutions have to find ways of identifying an daddressing expectations about how technologies can best be incorporated into the teaching and learning experiences. This paper reports on efforts at Washington State University to develop and assess the course design and faculty development process and the impact the process has on student learning experiences. Theresults of a comprehensive set of faculty and student surveys from five groups suggest that the systematic coruse design process improves students' opportunities for faculty-student interaction, student-student interaction, and other elements associated with best practice. The implications of this study for faculty development and policy implementation are discussed.

Five Ways to Reduce PowerPoint Overload

2007-02-08T13:15:00.000-06:00

It’s happened to everyone at one time or another: you’ve started a new PowerPoint presentation and the first thing you see is the dreaded blank slide. You may not be 100% sure how to start, but you’re pretty sure something should be on it.

A blank slide tends to invite the urge to fill it with as much information as possible, and before you know it things have gotten out of hand. What can you do during the design process to make sure you don’t overload your audience with information? In their article Five Ways to Reduce PowerPoint Overload, Cliff Atkinson and Richard E. Mayer discuss ways of overcoming this common occurrence:

I. Write a clear headline that explains the main idea of every slide. Rather than providing a title for your slides, consider using a more conversational headline.

II. Break your story into digestible bites using the Slide Sorter view. The Slide Sorter view allows you to see your entire presentation at a glance. Look for consistency in the amount of information on each page — you will be able to immediately spot slides that are overcrowded.

III. Reduce visual load by moving text off-screen and narrating the content. Too much text on a slide will force your audience to read everything (whether they comprehend it all or not). Keep text on slides to a minimum, and use the Notes Page view to type out the details in a narrative form. This not only allows you to print out comprehensive handouts, but it allows you to organize your thoughts and reduce dependency on notes during a presentation.

IV. Use visuals with your words, instead of words alone. A slide full of text is not as effective as a slide with text and images.

V. Rigorously remove every element that does not support the main idea. Too much of anything on a slide will overwhelm your audience — keep things as simple as possible, and rely on your own knowledge and narration as the focal point of a presentation or lecture.

You can read the full article here. If you have any information or tips to share regarding this topic please post in the comments area below.

Online Education How-to Guides

2007-02-01T09:08:00.000-06:00

Are your students first-time online learners? Are they struggling with group activities? Are they frustrated with the feeling of isolation? …Online Education How-to Guides share useful tips with the students on how to survive and be successful in the online class:

· How to Prepare For Your First Online Course
· How to Set Up a Home Office for Online Learning
· How to Write an “A+” Discussion Posting
· How to Avoid Plagiarism
· How to Effectively Participate in a Live Chat Session
· How to Avoid Isolation in Your Online Class
· How to Survive Virtual Group Work
· How to Do Online Research

Check it out and share with your students!

Is Videotaping Your Entire Lecture the Best Option?

2007-01-26T14:42:00.000-06:00

When deciding whether to videotape your lectures, consider the following:

Who is your audience? Do they have high speed or dialup internet connections?
What is the topic or content being discussed? Does it require a demonstration, experiment or simulation? Do you need to show facial expressions or body movements?
What is your lecture/presentation style? Do you typically lecture with slides? Do you present from a lectern or move around the classroom? Do you frequently write on the whiteboard?

Generally, there is not much benefit to putting entire lecture videos online. Besides the technical considerations of editing, file size, viewing quality and bandwidth, students may easily become distracted or bored watching a long lecture video and miss important concepts. On the positive side, they may be taking notes, but still not watching the video. You should use video only when it offers a clear benefit to the learning process.

Here are some suggestions for putting lecture video online:

Use video for visually communicating actions that are difficult to explain verbally. Try to avoid the "talking head" video lectures.
Break long videos into several short video clips by task or concept. Videos can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Typically 8-10 minutes is an average attention span.
Take the time to plan your recordings. Consider the environment, i.e., background, lighting, noise, etc. and your participants.
Plan ways to show things instead of only telling about them.
Be energetic and dynamic.

If your lecture does not require visual communication, you should consider recording audio only to accompany a slide presentation or lecture notes. To add narration to your slides, consider using Adobe Breeze, which publishes the presentation in the Flash format. Or, simply record your audio and post as an .mp3 file with your lecture notes.

Please help us learn by sharing your experiences using video lectures in your online classroom.

OpenCourseWare Grows Up

2007-01-19T12:15:00.000-06:00

Since MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001, this project has grown not too fast but firmly. MIT plans to publish course materials of all its courses online, including syllabi, lecture notes, quizzes, and so on, for everyone to use freely, yes, freely. More than 900 of MIT’s 1800 courses have been published so far. If you would like to know more about OCW, you may read The Chronicle’s article ‘Open Courseware’ Idea Spreads.

Obviously the project needs money, and fortunately, it’s supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. With the foundation’s support, many other institutions join MIT now, although many of them plan to release selected courses instead of all, like MIT. In addition, some institutions have their own features. For example, Yale University announced last year to have the lecture videos of selected courses online.

The other institutions working on the OCW project are: Carnegie Mellon University, Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Open University of the UK, Tufts University, U. of California at Irvine, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Utah State University.

OCW can be a great resource to UHV instructors and students who work on online courses.

Title V News

2007-01-18T08:16:00.000-06:00

We’d like to take some time this week to give you a quick overview of the Title V Grant and its current status. If you have not yet heard, UHV is working in cooperation with Coastal Bend College on a grant designed to increase enrollment on both campuses and improve distance learning capacities through three components:

Component I—Coastal Bend Cougar Connections
Component II—Distance Learning Academies
Component III—UHV Connections

UHV will primarily be involved with Components II and III. We won’t go into the details of Component II at this point, but this component will consist of three academies designed to help faculty improve their online courses and save time in the process. A few ‘extras’ will be issued to faculty members who successfully complete the program.

Component III is the mentoring portion of the grant. UHV students who qualify to become mentors will be guiding and motivating CBC students in an effort to close the gap between the community college and university.

If you are a student interested in becoming a mentor, please contact Robert Cortez, Title V UHV Connections Coordinator: cortezrs@uhv.edu

In addition to updates through the LTD blog, a website devoted to Title V is nearing completion. Full details of each component will be available on the site, as well as bulletins and newsletters. We plan to implement a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQ) section on the site, so if you have any questions regarding Title V or any of its components please email bretts@uhv.edu, or stop by UW133.

Jumpstarting Your Course Discussion Board

2007-01-13T15:05:00.000-06:00

Well, here it is…the start of another semester online. How do you get your students involved early? Discussions should be an integral part of your online course. But, don’t wait until you dive into content-related discussions to get students talking. Instead, have them jump in with non-threatening, introductory discussions that will 1) acclimate them to the technology and 2) start to build community among participants.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Create an introductions forum/topic for your students to get to know you and each other.

Introduce yourself and introduce the course
Ask students to introduce themselves—they will generally take their cue from your post, so if you include information like family, hobbies, study interests, etc., they will likely do the same
Create a fun or unusual icebreaker activity, i.e.:

One word—students post one word (or animal, city, piece of clothing, etc.) that describes them and why.
Unusual fact—students post an unusual fact about themselves
Unusual travel story—students post a brief story about a travel/vacation incident
Three things—students list their three favorite…websites, people, foods, jobs, etc.

Create a casual forum/topic for your students to interact with each other on non-course-related topics, i.e., “Coffee House”, “Cyber Lounge”, etc.
Create a technology help forum/topic for students to seek assistance on technology issues.
Create a course help forum/topic for students to post course-related questions, i.e., where do I find…? when is the test again? etc.

Reminders:

Define expectations. Create a rubric for graded discussions identifying your expectations for quality and frequency of posts.
Define conduct rules. Provide netiquette resources.
Clearly state the purpose of each topic/forum, including any social or help topics.

Building an active and engaging discussion board is critical to conducting a successful online course. Stay tuned for more tips and strategies to build and facilitate interactive online courses. Please share your ideas and experiences using the comments below.

Improve Your Syllabus for Better Planning and Communication

2007-01-11T13:49:00.000-06:00

Welcome back to UHV! It must be very hard to say Goodbye to the holiday break, but the new semester is also exciting with all the plans. One of the most important plans is the syllabus—the plan of your course, which is also the basis of the students’ personal studying plans. In this post, I would like to offer some resources or suggestions that you might find helpful when developing or revising your syllabus.

Being Informative
As standard practice, a syllabus needs to include detailed information about course content, textbook, prerequisite, instructor contact information, grading policy, course schedule, university policies, and so on.
Syllabus Checklist A pretty clear checklist created by University of Minnesota.
Writing a Syllabus The author asks ten inspiring questions on developing online syllabus. Several resources are also recommended.
Creating an Effective Online Syllabus A good article with a sample syllabus.

Being Clear
A good online course syllabus should be easily understood, accessible, and reflecting current content ("The ABCs of online course syllabi: anticipate, build on objectives, and collaborate. " Online Cl@ssroom, May 2006). A good idea is to use various font styles, such as bold, italics, or different fonts, to highlight the important information. This is especially useful if your syllabus has long paragraphs. One tip is to ask a family member or friend to read the syllabus draft from a student’s perspective, and it’s easier for them to identify the points that are not clear enough.

Be Interactive
As part of an online course, the syllabus can be interactive by using hyperlinks to link to relevant resources. The advantages are: 1) it’s easy to keep the content current; 2) the students have the opportunities to find more information by themselves as needed. "The information that may be linked includes:
· Publisher website
· Information for organizations/affiliations to course or program information
· Reference materials for weekly discussion areas
· Classical research
· Graphics
· Sound bites
· Video clips
· Photographs or slides
· Instructor’s email address"
("Interactive syllabus improves course accessibility." Online Cl@ssroom, June 2005.)

Please share your ideas and comments on developing online course syllabus in the comments area below.

Happy Holidays!

2006-12-19T17:22:00.000-06:00

The holidays have arrived and we are taking a break. I want to wish all our readers a very happy holiday season and a prosperous new year. I hope you get everything on your list ;-) I'll be looking for the iPod (or Zune or Creative Zen Vision:M) under my tree!

We'll be back in January with more tips and strategies to help you design an effective and engaging online course.

Happy New Year!

20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have

2006-12-14T08:49:00.000-06:00

This is an interesting list in which the author listed the skills that she believes an educator should have. They look very basic at first sight, but read it again…do you have all of them? Do you think you need all of them? What technology skills do you think are needed to teach online?

Link to the article: http://thejournal.com/articles/17325

Media in the Lives of our Students

2006-12-12T12:15:00.000-06:00

My apologies to you as I have been remiss in posting here. Lots of stuff going on and more to come on that later. For now, I have a couple of resources that I think are important in helping us understand the technology-savvy student.

First, are you feeling exhausted (as I am) just trying to keep up with all the latest technology? Multi-tasking might be the solution. At least that’s what our young people seem to be doing. They are still spending a little more than 6 hours a day using and interacting with media (just as they did when surveyed six years ago), but this study shows that they are now typically using multiple types of media at one time. Now they can pack over 8 hours of media content into the same 6 hours by multi-tasking!

The Kaiser Foundation released a report (2005) on the use and effect of media on the lives of children 8 – 18 years old. To view a free copy of "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8—18 Year-olds", go to http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm

So, what should we do as educators? The students of the "Net Generation" (those born in the 1980’s and later) have different expectations and attitudes about the world around them. They can’t imagine their world without technology and it impacts everything they do, from playing to communicating to learning to working. To help educators understand this generation and their learning expectations, EDUCAUSE published the electronic book "Educating the Net Generation".

“This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.” View this book in its entirety or by chapters, either online or as PDF at http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=5989&bhcp=1

This is an excellent resource and I will be referring to excerpts in the future as we talk more about technology and learning.

Next time....what's on your technology wish list?

Get reluctant students enthusiastic in online courses

2006-11-29T16:47:00.000-06:00

When the students start their first online course, they have different levels of enthusiasm. All enthusiastic students are alike; each reluctant student is reluctant for his/her own reason. No matter what the reason is: the fear of technology and computer, or the concern of social isolation, there is a way you can deal with it. Errol Craig Sull shared some tips in his article “10 Ways to Get Reluctant and Downright Scared Student Enthusiastic About Taking Online Course” (Online Classroom, June 2006)

An informative and friendly welcome email is very important.
“Address possible student concerns before they’re brought up”.
Anticipate student concerns and be ready in advance. (Find the answers; draft the email announcements, etc.)
“Never make yourself out to be a computer god”.
Communicate with the students using WebCT tools frequently, instead of waiting for their WebCT mails. Some students are just not used to online communication at the beginning.
Talk to your students when needed—face to face or on the phone. Let the students know it’s still an option to talk to you even in an online course.
Never accept computer awkwardness as an excuse for later assignments. (The students will be more enthusiastic to solve the computer problems.)
Have resource and contact information ready.
Keep reminding the students of the advantages and benefits of online courses over f2f courses. Give the students motivation and confidence.
Archive the questions and problems your students have met, so you will be more ready and experienced for next semester.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-21T13:59:00.000-06:00

This week we won't have posts on instructional technology. Enjoy your turkey and have a great Thanksgiving! See you next week.

Benefits of Online Education

2006-11-16T09:37:00.000-06:00

Mark Kassop made a good summary of the benefits of online education in his article ‘Ten Ways Online Education Matches, or Surpasses, Face-to-Face Learning’.
Click here to view article.

UH Faculty Showcase - Reflections

2006-11-13T09:57:00.000-06:00

Wow! There’s some really interesting stuff going on in UH and UHV courses! If you didn’t have a chance to attend the 2006 UH Faculty Showcase, you missed a chance to see and hear about how some of our faculty are using technology to engage students and improve learning in their courses. The showcase was held this past Friday, Nov. 10th at the UH campus, M.D. Anderson Library.

The opening and closing keynote was delivered by Dr. Curtis Bonk, Indiana University professor and Senior Research Fellow with the DOD's Advanced Distributed Learning Lab. His enthusiastic and inspiring presentations offered many examples, tips and techniques for integrating new technologies effectively into your course for a more engaging, interactive, and visually-appealing learning environment.

Faculty presentations ranged from extending the classroom through podcasting to digital storytelling to instructional uses of tablet PCs. Two UHV faculty also presented—Dr. Richard Gunasekera presented “Forensics on the Web and in the Lab—“Online CSI” and Dr. Barba Patton presented a session on “Using Breeze for Synchronous Meetings and Collaboration”.

Recordings of the sessions will be made available soon on the UH website and I will pass that link along as soon as it is online. In the coming weeks, I will also share more of the highlights from these presentations and discuss ways you can implement them in your courses.

11 Time-saving Tips for Teaching Online

2006-11-08T17:11:00.000-06:00

Do you feel teaching online is more time-consuming than you expected? Errol Craig Sull, who teaches English composition for Excelsior College, shared some interesting tips on the August '06 issue of Online Cl@ssroom.
1. Always keep a hard copy of your online grades to avoid the possible technical difficulties.
2. Keep copies of all substantive student emails, papers, etc. you might just need it sometimes.
3. Remind your students to use the Internet for research. Build up their research skills, and get yourself fewer questions.
4. Always reach out to students for additional resources. Encourage the students to build up the course with you together.
5. Keep an excuse file to tell the true ones from the false ones, and to track the students’ attendance.
6. Make editing/correcting templates, so by copying and pasting, you save the trouble of typing common comments repeatedly.
7. Make use of free electronic greeting cards to help with student rapport, and let the students know you are there!
8. Keep the best examples of student work for the future students. The students would love to see a peer’s successful project.
9. Look over your emails waiting to be sent at least twice before sending them to avoid the errors.
10. Play student for one day prior to the beginning of a new class—double check your course much more effectively from a student’s perspective.
11. Always look at your actions in the course as both instructor and student for same reason as above.

What do you think about these tips? Do you have some good tips to share? Drop a line in the comments.

Add Breeze Virtual Meeting Spaces to Your Online Courses

2006-11-06T10:12:00.000-06:00

What can you do in a Breeze meeting room?

Upload PPT slides or JPG images in advance or on-the-fly
Annotate slides as you discuss them
Write or draw on blank whiteboard spaces
Share your computer screen with participants (desktop or applications)
Broadcast your audio and video (video on broadband only)
Facilitte Q & A through an open text chat or moderated Q & A format
Query participants through prepared or on-the-fly polls
Share files with participants
Customize the meeting room layout
Record meetings for future playback

When could you use Breeze with your online courses?

Breeze can be used as a supplement to your existing online course, anytime that real-time interaction could enhance learning. Here are just a few ideas:

Explanation of complex topics, especially where visuals, e.g., equations, diagrams or drawings, can improve understanding
Software demonstrations
Guided website tours
Online office hours for one-to-one attention
Review sessions for exams
Group presentations
Guest speakers or experts

For more information about Adobe Breeze at UHV, please visit our website at http://www.uhv.edu/breeze, request an account and schedule a training session.

Synchronous Communication in Online Course

2006-11-01T15:37:00.000-06:00

The lack of live communication has often been considered an inherent drawback in fully online courses and the accompanying feeling of detachment through distance and time can frustrate instructors and students. But, through the development of instructional technology, synchronous communication can return to your online classroom.

Mary Brady, an Education professor at Wayne State University, tried virtual, synchronous online lectures by using the Virtual Classroom tool in Blackboard (Online Cl@ssroom, June 2006). Students spent up to one-fourth of their class time in the synchronous sessions where she gave live lectures, and students worked on group projects.

With synchronous meeting tools, you and your students can have similar teaching and learning experiences to those in a traditional classroom, with virtual tools like slides, whiteboards, multimedia, document sharing and so on. Adobe Breeze Meeting is one of the tools.

The idea of real-time communication in the online world can be exciting. However, as with planning any new course element, you should consider the following questions before jumping in:

-Do I need synchronous communication or collaboration in THIS course?

-How will synchronous sessions fit into the whole course and connect with the other components of the course?

-What will I and the students do in each synchronous session?

-How many synchronous sessions will there be?

-How long will each session be? (Brady’s were between 45-60 minutes.)

Another big concern about adding synchronous meetings to your online course is finding a time convenient for everyone. We all know how HARD that can be. But, what Brady did is to post a sign-up sheet in her course at the beginning of the semester for the student to register for several available dates. And, if you set up group sessions, it may be easier to find times for smaller groups of students.

Think about what you do in your face-2-face classroom, and then consider using a synchronous communication tool such as Adobe Breeze to accomplish similar tasks in your online class. What do you think? Please share your ideas.

Enhancing Your PowerPoint Can Be a "Breeze"

2006-10-28T13:21:00.000-05:00

PowerPoint can be an effective tool in a face-to-face classroom because the slides can help to organize your content and keep you on track with your discussion. They can be a medium to display charts and diagrams that relate to your lecture. But, the key to an effective lecture is what is discussed “between the bullets” and the Q & A between you and your students.

But how do you provide an effective lecture in an online class using those same PowerPoint slides? One way is to add your audio narration to the slides—to give your online students that content “between the bullets”. Another method is to create some interaction with the slides—have your students answer questions to check their understanding as they move through the slides. Break your slides into logical stopping points (maybe every 5-6 slides) and throw in a question or two that they must answer before moving on. This gives them a mental break and a chance to review what they have just heard (and read).

Here at UHV, we have licensed Adobe Breeze Presenter. This tool integrates directly into your PowerPoint application and enables you to record, edit and synchronize your audio, add quiz questions, and customize the look of your presentation. You publish your presentation in a web-ready Flash format that can easily be viewed online with a web browser and the free Flash Player. It works well in WebCT, too!

Visit our Breeze webpage for more information.

See ya next week!

Communication In The Online Courses

2006-10-25T09:44:00.000-05:00

In the 2006 TxDLA Conference, I happened to step in a room, and heard an interesting presentation, which discussed the abuses and misunderstandings of employing PowerPoint slides in the online courses. As a fact, PPT slides, which were used to show figures, key points, and so on, in the face-2-face presentations have been used extensively in online courses nowadays. However, uploading the PPT slides used in a traditional classroom to WebCT, is that all?

Very often, no. Although the subject matter is the same, many differences exist between the traditional classroom and the online classroom:

-The class settings are different.

-The students are different.

-The way to teach is different.

All in all, it can be regarded as one thing: the approaches of achieving successful communication and information delivery are different. What should we do, then, to adapt to these differences?

Workshop Schedule Is Online Now!

2006-10-23T14:04:00.000-05:00

The schedule of the Fall workshops provided by LTD can be found on our website.

Click here to view the details and register now!

RSS Feeds: Following a Blog is Easy!

2006-10-19T18:07:00.000-05:00

Of course, if you are only following our blog or maybe one or two others, you can always bookmark the websites or add them to your favorites and just remember to visit often to catch the latest news.

But, one big advantage of blogs is your ability to "subscribe" to it, much like you would subscribe to a magazine or newspaper. RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is the technology that enables you to subscribe to the website or news feed. Think of an RSS reader as the mail carrier that delivers your magazine or newspaper right to your doorstep, so you don't have to visit all the websites (stores) independently to get your news from each one. For a detailed tutorial on RSS, you can visit, http://www.wizard-creek.com/rss/tutorial/.

There are a lot of good RSS readers (also called aggregators) available and they all have slightly different features. Here are three recommendations for users with different viewing preferences. All three will enable you to subscribe to blogs, podcasts and other news feeds. Click the link to view a short tutorial on our website for each RSS reader.

CITA RSS Aggregator - a stand-alone application installed on your Windows computer for Internet Explorer users
Wizz RSS News Reader - a Firefox browser plug-in that works right in the browser window
NewsGator - an online RSS reader that you can visit from any computer connected to the internet

That should get you started. Have you found a different RSS reader? Do you have any recommendations for RSS readers? Use the Comments link below to share your experiences!

See ya next week!

Welcome to Our New Blog!

2006-10-16T08:38:00.000-05:00

Welcome to “Design. Technology. Learning.”, the new blog of UHV’s Learning Technologies & Design group.

Along with the new semester, a lot of exciting changes have happened around the university. One of the changes was the restructuring and organization of the new Student and Academic Services (SAS) department. As part of this change, Bev Hoerig and I are now a new group, Learning Technologies & Design (LTD), within the SAS department. Although we have moved downstairs to UW133, we are still here to help you with the design of your online courses and the use of various technologies to achieve your teaching and learning goals.

Today is the “Grand Opening” of this blog and the new LTD website. We will use them as the platform to communicate with the UHV online learning community. You will find information about instructional design, technology, events, useful resources and much more. At this time, we plan to post twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday. Of course, I will have no problem if, once in a while, a good post needs to be delivered on Tuesday :- )

As a format for communication, a blog has several advantages over others, such as a listserv, newsletter, or even a standard website. First of all, you can add comments to a blog! You read an interesting post and you have an opinion. Add your comment to that post and there…you’ve started a conversation. As we all know, discussion and the exchange of ideas can often be just the inspiration you need to help you find that great idea lurking in the back of your mind.

A second advantage to using a blog for communication, is the way in which a blog is organized. A blog is displayed and archived chronologically. This always places the most recent blog entry at the top, so you know you are seeing current information and commentary.

Another advantage is the convenience of following a blog by subscribing to its “RSS feed”, so that your news reader will automatically notify you of recent postings. If this part sounds Greek to you, stay tuned. I will recommend some good RSS readers in the next post.

Let’s start blogging!