I spent a beautiful fall weekend inside windowless meeting rooms surrounded by enough Post-It notes, flip charts and colored markers to stock an Office Deport Store.  For me, this is usually a cruel form of torture.  But the event was organized and attended by a group of dedicated, experienced, thoughtful and genuinely nice practitioners from all facets of higher ed.  It was an international group of faculty, senior administrators, facilities managers and instructional technologists.  Several architects who have worked on innovative learning space projects also participated.  And yes, there were even students present who spent Friday night sharing their perspective on how the physical environment affects learning.  The collective wisdom of this group was impressive.

The workshop focused on four fundamental questions:

1. What are the qualities that we want to see in our students and graduates?
2. What kind of learning spaces will support development of these qualities?
3. How can we know what works and share that knowledge?
4. What are we going to actually do about all of the above?

What are the qualities that we want to see in our students and graduates?

This was an important question to start with and brought out terms like

• creative
• curious
• resourceful
• adaptable
• action-oriented
• problem solvers
• good communicators
• effective users of technology

Notably absent from this vocabulary was “well informed.”  The implicit assumption is that if students are all of the above, then “well informed” will naturally follow.  This is an assumption that needs to be questioned.

These qualities stand in sharp contrast to the tone of many traditional lecture classes and the spaces in which they happen:

• sit still, eyes forward
• be quiet – don’t speak unless spoken to
• do what you’re told to do – no more and no less
• refrain from using the technology that is so integral to everything else you do

What kind of learning spaces will support development of these qualities?

 We discussed a variety of formal and informal learning spaces – classrooms, labs, libraries, lounges, etc.  For me, the biggest attraction were the “active learning” or “collaboration” style classrooms, many of which are based on the Scale-Up format (Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs  http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/).  These rooms can support a variety of subject areas, but I am especially interested in how they are being used in the sciences.  I was surprised to see the extent to which the pedagogy and facilities have been refined and disseminated. Both the rationale and the results of this format are compelling.

A video from University of Minnesota provides a concise testimonial

Many of the students present at our workshop have taken chemistry classes in a similar facility at UMBC  and  provided the same kind of comments about their experience.

How can we know what works and share that knowledge?

This tough question is at the core of  the LSC’s work.  We reviewed several aspects of effective assessment processes.  Again, I was impressed by the extent of existing information about the efficacy of active learning strategies, best practices, and lessons learned through experience.  Many good links are posted on the LSC resources page and through the SCALE-UP site.

A detailed report from University of Minnesota provides quantitative evidence of positive effects on learning outcomes, and supports the anecdotal information presented in their video.  Read the report from Educause Quarterly, 33, 3, 2010. 

“…our evidence strongly suggests that when controlling for nearly every other factor, the [active learning classroom] had a significantly positive effect on student learning outcomes as measured by course grades.”

What are we going to actually do about all of the above?

Another tough question, but one for which I (hopefully) have an answer.  In my job I have the opportunity to work closely with some of our leading faculty, our senior administrators, Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning, the Provost’s Classroom Committee and the Penn Libraries – especially the Weigle Information Commons.  I want to develop a partnership among all these groups to concurrently explore the pedagogical value of active learning methods along with the facilities and technology requirements, the administrative, financial and practical realities of operating active learning classrooms.  My goal is not to promote a specific vision of how education ought to be done, but to help make sure that we collectively make well informed decisions about how to build our teaching spaces going forward.

The time for this partnership is ripe since we are at a point when we can move beyond meeting the minimum requirements for traditional classrooms.  By September 2012, all of Penn’s Central Pool classrooms will have at least basic computer projection capabilities.  SAS will soon begin architectural design of a new life sciences building for Biology and Psychology.  A little further out, we will be looking to improve facilities for Physics and Math.  All of these opportunities require a forward looking approach to both pedagogy and classroom design.

None of this is simple or easy to accomplish.  But given everything I learned this past weekend, I can’t sit still, be quiet, and do only what I’m told.  That’s not what we want to promote at Penn.

I recently created my first .epub file. This is a type of e-book file that can be read on Android devices, the Nook, Sony Reader, and portable Apple devices among others. The files are a little odd in the way they need to be formatted. Here are a few resources I found helpful when creating my first document.

http://calibre-ebook.com/
Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. This program allows you to convert between several different formats.

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Sigil is Google’s free multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor.

Adobe TV ebook creation using InDesign
This is a link to a series of three videos on Adobe TV about ebook creation using InDesign. These are what I primarily used to get started, and they helped a lot, although you need a little bit of an InDesign background to get started. You also need to be using InDesign CS4 or CS5 to export the .epub file.

• 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.
• Sigil is a free, open source utility for creating documents in the ePub format for display on iPad, Kindle and other readers.  Available for Mac, Windows and Linux, easy to install; good documentation available.  Jutoh  is another inexpensive ($40) option for creating ePubs.
• Google Document Viewer is a free utility for presenting PDF documents in the format the Google uses for its online books.    It’s not really all that useful, but it’s dead simple to use and lets you claim the moral victory of having published something in an electronic book format.
• 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.”
• CMap Tools is  a free, intuitive tool designed to generate concept maps.  Concept maps are a good way to visualize complex relationships among a variety of factors.  It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, and include collaboration features. The CMap site includes good information about the tool itself, and the theory of concept mapping in general.  After just a few minutes of playing around with CMap, I was able to generate this simple chart which I’m using to help me understand how to get better outcomes from technology initiatives (click the graphic below to expand to a bigger size).
  

Dan will speak in the Class of ’55 Conference Room on the second floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center on Friday February 25 from 10:30 to 11:30 am. Then he will join some members of the Weigle Information Commons Faculty Advisory Group and Program Partners Group for an informal lunch.

This will also be the Weigle Information Commons’ first event to be simulcast via a web broadcast with a twitter back channel for questions. It will be interesting to see how that works out! We are asking folks watching online to use the hashtag #dancohen to send in questions during the live lecture. Go to this page to watch the live broadcast.

Over the past year, the Program Development Group at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) has developed and implemented the Penn LPS Commons, a custom-built online learning environment designed to center participants on the social interactions that drive learning communities. Built with Drupal and Moodle, the LPS Commons includes social networking, learning management and collaborative web 2.0 tools as well as robust permissions models which allow select elements of online learning communities to be shared with public audiences as institutional Open Educational Resources (OERs). In our beta year, we’ve delivered 27 blended and fully online courses to over 1400 participants from 65 counties. Whew!

As we emerge from our first year of work, we’d like to invite the campus community to come and hear us talk about our efforts both designing this new online environment and optimizing flexible instructional designs which allow student-generated conversations to drive the online course experience.

Please join us as we co-host the March meeting of the Pennsylvania Distance Learning Association (PADLA) on March 16, from 8:30-11:45 am in the Bodek Lounge at Houston Hall. Complete details about the event can be found on PADLA website. Members of the Penn community can attend this event for free, but others are asked to register in advance.

Hope to meet you there!

Consider this blog post an advertisement of sorts for a great resource I think anyone interested in educational technology should be reading whenever they get the chance!

Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

This month’s brief examines backchannel communications, which I mentioned in my recent post on designing interactivity into live web conferences on the Adobe Connect Professional tool. While our online faculty harness the power of the backchannel to foster participation and drive lecture content, I wonder whether others here at Penn are experimenting with using backchannel tools in their face-to-face teaching.

Anyone out there using chat, IM, Twitter, or Google Wave for group participation in their face-to-face classes? If so, would you consider sharing your activity with us here?

If not, what do you think are the potential pros and cons of enabling backchannel conversations to become a part of the student experience in face-to-face classes at Penn?

In a New Media Consortium web conference tomorrow entitled The Future of Video in Education, Dr. Marni Baker Stein, Director of Program Development at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, will be speaking about our innovative use of open source video on the Penn LPS Commons using Kaltura.

Our “revolutionary video project” involved the delivery of over 30 hours of broadcast-quality lectures in a fully-online non-credit course to more than 1000 participants in 62 countries on 6 continents. Course participants watched the video lectures and discussed them using tools of the social web. Come hear a bit more about this and other exciting video projects:

Connect@NMC: Kaltura Inspire: The Future of Video in Education

This Webinar will explore how video and new forms of multi-media enabled learning are revolutionizing education across the country. Video in Education now goes beyond simple publishing and includes internal university ‘YouTubes’, deep learning management system integrations, collaborative video editing assignments, video for distance education and libraries, and media-powered blogs and social networks. Kaltura has developed an open source alternative to proprietary video platforms that is flexible, easy to integrate and includes custom tools specifically for education.

Join us for a showcase of revolutionary video projects. Penn State’s Chris Millet, Penn’s Marni Baker Stein, 2Tor’s James Kenigsberg, and Kaltura’s Leah Belsky.

Note you will have to pre-register to attend via http://www.kaltura.org/education-webinar-registration?ref=NMC

Over the next few months we’ll publish here descriptions of other video projects we’re working on with Penn faculty. In the meantime, why not share some information about a project that you’re involved with?

Faculty and staff at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) have been using web conferencing software for the delivery of live lectures in online courses and web-based orientation and information sessions for the past three years. As more folks at Penn start using web conferencing tools, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned about best practice in the design and delivery of real-time, online sessions.

1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.

Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.

• Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.

• Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool. As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.

• Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.

• Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.

• Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation. You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.

2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.

• Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.

• Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.

• Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.

• Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.

3. Control your verbal delivery.

• Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
• Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
• Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
• Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.

To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:

RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.

• Student Engagement Strategies
• Best Practices and Technical Tips

Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:

• Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.

• Best Practices for Delivering Virtual Classroom Training

Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.

I found it interesting – but difficult - to teach this way. I spent much time preparing handouts (sample spreadsheets of “before” and “after”) and worrying about pace and structure. I chose a traditional approach where I shared my screen and manipulated Excel and then asked participants to “watch and repeat” on their own computer.

The technology worked quite well and the participants all seemed to keep up, and be eager for more. But being the presenter, I had this odd sinking feeling that I was shouting down a deep, empty well.  I have presented at several conference sessions online – but I have no expectation of audience participation when I am lecturing. It felt much stranger to conduct a small-group hands-on workshop completely online. We are planning to try this again in January and suggestions for how to structure the activity to be more interactive and less didactic would be most welcome!

Japanese Tea Room

Persian Court Yard

German Wirtshaus