I recently participated in a 3-day workshop hosted by the Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC). This group “…is an emerging community of practice making the case that spaces matter to learning.” See http://www.pkallsc.org/ for more about the LSC and its ongoing work. I came away with much to think about, so I’m taking the time for a little reflection. Read more…
Spring break offers the opportunity to spend a few minutes checking out interesting (and sometimes even useful!) new software. Here are a few things that I’ve tried and liked:
Evernote is a very popular utility for keeping track of notes, to-do lists, snippets from web pages, documents and just about anything. It is available for Mac and Windows PCs, but its real advantage comes when used on a mobile device. It’s free, easy to use and a real productivity booster. Lots of people love it; I’m a little late in getting to the party, but I am not starting to use it on a daily basis.
Sophia is a brand new system intended to help people easily share tutorials and other instructional materials in brief “packets.” It’s an intriguing tool and I’ll be curious to see if it gets much traction. Be sure to read the Terms of Use carefully before posting any content, or inviting your students to do so. When posting content to the site, you are effectively giving the site operators license to your material. From their Terms of Use statement: “… we ask that you not send us any User Generated Content that you do not wish to license to us, including any confidential information or product ideas.”
The New Media Centers Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/) does a great job of helping to promote effective use of technology for education. They’ve recently started their “Cool Tech” site to help people find and share cool stuff (OK, some of it may be more cool than useful). Alan Levine, Vice President of NMC and a genuinely cool guy, invites members of the community to contribute to the site.
You can see what it’s all about by visiting http://www.nmc.org/cool You’ll find information about how to get & share stuff through a variety of channels.
Perhaps the coolest thing on this site so far is Posterous (http://posterous.com/) – one of the tools being used to collect recommendations for cool stuff.
Posterous makes it really easy to start a simple blog just by sending email. You don’t have to sign for an account; just send an email. You can include pictures, audio, video, links etc. Take a look at their FAQ page (http://posterous.com/faq/) for more information about what you can do with this cool new tool
This summer I’ve been involved in planning for how we’ll continue teaching in the event of a large outbreak of H1N1 – the dreaded Swine Flu. I’ve been asked to document how teachers can use technology as a substitute for some of the activities that would otherwise be carried out in the classroom.
It’s no surprise that most of the technologies (and the pedagogies behind them) that we’re recommending are the very same things we already advocate as effective ways to enhance teaching. You can see a summary of these recommendations on the SAS Computing web site at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/flu
Hopefully, we won’t face a true emergency situation this fall. But I am hoping that the threat of a flu outbreak will motivate more instructors to take advantage of services that are already available, and get them interested in new ways to engage with their students.
Many of the technologies we recommend are very basic, such as using Blackboard to make announcements, distribute documents or collect assignments. Others involve more creativity, such as using discussion boards, wikis or collaboration tools. Blackboard is the obvious first place to turn since it’s already tied into Penn’s registration systems and we’ve got good support systems in place.
But I’ll take this opportunity to put in a plug for one of my favorite technologies which is rarely used but could be enormously useful – even when everyone is healthy. That is, creating “screencast” movies to record basic lecture materials or technical demonstrations.
By moving some lectures outside of the classroom instructorss can free up more time for discussion and problem solving. Those using special software such as Matlab or SPSS in their classes can record tutorials on how to perform important functions. Screencast movies can demonstrate how to use Library resources for research. Basically, if you can do it on a computer, you can make it into a movie. Details are explained at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/record_lecture
The US Department of Education released a new report on 6/26/09 concerning the effectiveness of online learning. This report is a meta-analysis which analyzes the results of prior studies.
The attention-grabbing headline of this report states, “The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes…was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face.”
However, the authors provide this important caveat:
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium. In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction”
Later in the report the authors mention,
“Studies in which analysts judged the curriculum and instruction to be identical or almost identical in online and face-to-face conditions had smaller effects than those studies where the two conditions varied in terms of multiple aspects of instruction” (page xvi)
and
“In terms of instructional features, the online learning conditions in these studies were less likely to be instructor-directed (8 contrasts) than they were to be student-directed, independent learning (17 contrasts) or interactive and collaborative in nature (23 contrasts). Online learners typically had opportunities to practice skills or test their knowledge (42 effects were from studies reporting such opportunities).” (page 17)
In my humble opinion, this study validates the effectiveness of a variety of pedagogical techniques and thoughtful course design. These techniques can be applied to both online and traditional courses; the pedagogy matters more than the medium.
An article which summarizes the findings of the report is available at
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/29/online
and the full report is available at
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
In a previous post, I described some free, commercial tools that instructors and students can use for creating web sites for course projects. But planning a web project requires more than just finding the right technology platform. As an instructor, you need to consider what type of material is – and is not – appropriate for their students to post on open web sites. You need to be mindful of your students’ rights concerning the privacy of their personal information and academic work.
Privacy of student information is a complex topic. Technical, pedagogical, cultural and legal factors will all impact how your students share their work in public forums. Educause published a very helpful guide on one type of public web assignment – student blogging. See http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI8006.pdf
U.C. Berkeley has a concise and helpful page with suggestions to instructors planning online projects. Please see http://teaching.berkeley.edu/onlineprojects.html
What follows is a very brief overview of some issues you should consider when planning assignments. I’ll be working with privacy experts and other instructional support staff at Penn to provide more detailed guidance in the future.
Be clear about activities and goals. Students are usually enthusiastic about the opportunity to publish their course work on open web sites. They welcome the opportunity to have their work contribute to the community or advance scholarship in their field. Make it clear to your students from the outset what aspects of their work will be posted publicly, and why. Discuss issues of appropriate content and ask your students to let you know if they have concerns about posting their work publicly. If at all possible, review the plan for these activities at the start of the term so students will know what to expect and can decide if they want to continue with the course.
Offer alternatives. Your students have the legal right to control how their academic work is shared. If students express concerns about the privacy of their work, be prepared to offer alternative ways for them to complete the course requirements.
Avoid discussing sensitive personal information. Avoid activities which might lead students to disclose sensitive personal information about themselves or others. Caution them not to post information which could lead to identity theft (home address, date of birth, etc.) or compromise the privacy of their family, friends or classmates. This is especially important when medical or psychological history may be involved. If you have an activity that might lead students to disclose personal information, plan to conduct those activities using Blackboard or other systems provided by your school which will restrict access to students enrolled in the course.
Protect the identityof individual contributors. It may be possible for students to include their work in a course site without publicly disclosing personal identifying information. For example, you may have students composing the contents of a web site in a wiki on Blackboard or another protected system. The wiki will allow you to see and evaluate individual contributions, then export the final draft to a web-ready format which won’t reveal who contributed what. In other cases, you can have your students post to blogs or other forums using pseudonyms to protect their privacy.
Get permission from people who appear in photos or recordings. If your students will be posting pictures or audio/video recordings to publicly viewable sites, they need to get permission from the people who are seen or heard in those pictures or recordings. This is especially important when dealing with telling personal stories or commenting on controversial issues.
Respect copyright and provide citations. Appropriate use of copyrighted material in educational activities is a very complex subject in its own right. If you’re planning activities in which students might want to re-purpose copyrighted materials you need to become familiar with the principals of “fair use” and review those guidelines with your students. Of course, the usual rules about citation for academic work also apply to work posted on the web.
Encourage students to save their work. Commercial services such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Google Sites and others offer great functionality and convenience. But you and your students have little control over what will happen to these sites over time. Whenever possible, students should save personal copies of the materials they post to these sites. This can help protect against possible loss and assure that they will continue to have access to their own intellectual work products.
I encourage instructors of courses in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences to contact me if they have questions about issues concerning privacy of student work, or if they are planning assignments in which students will post their work to publicly viewable web sites.
Instructors at other schools should contact their instructional technology support providers, or school privacy officer.
-John MacDermott
SAS Computing
Many instructors want to get their students involved in contributing content to web sites for class projects; in some cases, they want the students to build a site from scratch. IT support staff (such as myself) are typically reluctant to provision resources on University systems for such projects. Setting up and maintaining sites can consume a lot of staff effort, plus there are concerns about system security, managing permissions, etc.
Fortunately, there are now lots of ways that instructors can have students build web sites using free services that are available to the public. Below are links for just a few of these services.
Of course, before creating assignments that will generate publicly-viewable web sites, instructors need to make sure that the assignment will not invite students to disclose confidential or personal information. I’ll have more about that topic in my next post.
http://www.blogger.com
It’s easy for students to create accounts and start posting within just a few minutes.
OK, a blog is not the same thing as a “web site,” but in many cases it gets the job done. It’s one of the easiest ways to get information posted in a timely way. Contributors can post to their blogs via email, making it possible for them update content from almost anywhere via mobile devices
http://sites.google.com/
Google Sites lets almost anyone build a site without having to know HTML. Everything the students need to do happens in a standard web browser, so there’s no need for special software like Dreamweaver. Many students already have google accounts, so they can get started quickly.
http://www.webs.com/
Webs is another free service which provides an impressive array of supported features, including calendars, photo galleries, forums, various widgets, statistics tracking and much more. Sites created through webs.com will include an advertising banner, but if you can live with that, it’s a great resource.
http://freehostia.com/
Is an internet hosting site that offers a basic service tier for free with no advertising; there is a $10 per year fee for registering a domain name (e.g. myclassproject.org). This is a good choice for those who want the complete flexibility for developing a site from scratch, without having to use preformatted templates, etc. It requires that users understand how to transfer files via FTP, etc. But it does offer a traditional Unix hosting environment for free for sites which don’t need a lot of storage space of expect large numbers of visitors; sites can be upgraded to accommodate more space and traffic for reasonable fees.
I came across a helpful web site that I wanted to share.
http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/intro.shtml
The site provides a synopsis of a book which is now somewhat out of date (published 2002), but still provides some useful tips in concise form.
The book is called E-tivities by Dr Gilly Salmon. According to the author, “E-tivities is the word I give to frameworks for online active and interactive learning.” Most examples cited concern how to make effective use of text-based discussion boards such as those found in Blackboard and other learning management systems). It’s not hard to extend the principles to other types of asynchronous online activities.
On the web site, the 5 Stage Model page is helpful for conceptualizing how a well structured E-tivity supports learning. It shows the basic actions at each step for both learners and moderators.
http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/5stage.shtml
I also liked the Building e-tivities- key principles extract from chapter 4.
http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/extracts.shtml
I look at this list not so much as a cookbook recipe for how to structure an activity, but rather as a checklist. Use it to apply a reality-check to the activities you’re planning.
At a recent meeting about technology support for SAS students, several student pointed out that they would like to see their instructors make better use of the Grade Center function in Blackboard. In particular, they were urging their instructors to use the Grade Center to track all graded assignments – not just mid-term or final exams. By having a complete picture of how they’re doing in the course, they’ll know if they need to get help or make adjustments to how they approach their coursework.
The Grade Center in Blackboard is a very versatile tool for recording and communicating grades, but it can be a little intimidating to instructors because there are so many options. A good place to start is the Blackboard Quick Start guide, which offers an overview of the key functionality and brief summaries of how to perform common tasks.
On December 1, 2008 Penn Library courseware support specialists will be offering a workshop for faculty on how to use the Grade Center. See http://wic.library.upenn.edu/workshops/#SBBG for details.
Or contact the instructional support staff for your School for help in learning how to use the gradebook effectively. SAS faculty can contact instructional-support@sas.upenn.edu
Do you have a research collaborator, subject matter expert or other guest whom you would like to invite to speak with your class?
It’s no longer necessary to reserve special videoconferencing rooms in order to make a connection between your class and a remote participant. The new breed of web conferencing tools – iChat, Skype, Windows Messenger and others – along with a simple webcam and microphone makes it possible for your guest to connect directly from their office, lab or even their homes. SAS Computing has assembled a portable system that lets us bring these desktop conferencing technologies to your classroom. The system includes a laptop computer, video camera and wireless microphones; it connects to the classroom projection system. The result is that we can get good pictures and sound transmission in most classrooms with as little as 15 minutes of setup time. If your guest doesn’t have access to a webcam, they can simply connect via telephone and we’ll be able to set up an audio-only session.
SAS Computing portable conferencing equipment
Even though the technology is relatively simple, a successful videoconference session requires some planning. You and your guest will want to agree on goals for the session, and how to structure the conversation. Will they start with a presentation, and then open up to Q&A? Will your students be presenting their work for evaluation and comment by the guest expert? Will you need to display Powerpoint slides or other visual material in the session. Consider how you will moderate the discussion in the classroom. You’ll want to encourage a lively exchange but avoid having people talking over each other.
SAS faculty who want more information about videoconferecing for their classes should visit http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/mms/video_conferencing_services or contact the staff at SAS Computing Multi-Media Services. Faculty from other schools at Penn should check with their computing support providers to what options are available.
