WCET- Managing Online Education 2010

WCET- Managing Online Education 2010

This one snuck by me. It came out last month. As of yet I have only read the executive summary, but the numbers here do show that progress is being made in the area of campus awareness and acceptance of distance education. More importantly, it shows where the largest areas of resistance are. I say more importantly, primarily because the deficiencies point toward the areas that need the most attention. If one can identify the problems, then one knows where to allocate resources to improve practice.

The study focuses on the managerial middle, the policies and people that make up the distance education team at any given school.

There are a couple of gems in this overview that really do indicate opportunities for improvement are in ADA compliance, where over 50% of the 183 responding two and four year schools have no policy, or depend upon faculty to make certain that online courses meet the requirements. There is a huge opportunity, as I see it, for training and professional development in this area.

Likewise, and no surprise, the majority of issues and impediments are internal, not external.

The video is well worth watching. By far my favorite quote from the presenter, Casey Green, is “The easy part of the infrastructure is the hardware and the software. The hard part of the infrastructure are the the people and the resources. And the explosion of online ed really still demands people and resources.”

This does relate to excellence from the standpoint that it gives us a snapshot of where we are right now and what the prevailing forces, both positive and negative are from a distance education management perspective.

http://www.campuscomputing.net/survey

Government doing Distance Ed

OK. Short post that is more of an observation. As I look through the posts on USAJobs I see a trend. The military and other parts of the governmental structure appear to be embracing distance education (and I do use the term fairly loosely) right now.

Contrast this with some of the major universities in CA and a few other places pulling away from DL (or giving lip service without funding) in favor of brick and mortar presence, and it makes for an interesting time to be in this business. Less distance education in public educational institutions makes them less responsive and less able to cater to the needs of non-traditional students. At the same time the military and a few other areas of government are starting to embrace DL for training.

It does make me wonder if the future of distance education may end up somewhere other than academia. I would have never believed this possible up until the last year. In order to be a creative force do I now need to look at something other than Academe? Hmmmm...

Blackboard9, webCT 41, Volvos and Ford Escorts.

School started on Monday. I'm using BB9 exclusively, having weaned myself entirely from webCT. Not that the desire to continue with WebCT isn't still strong, but to use analogy, that relationship is over and it time to move on. BB9 is flashier, has more bells and whistles, better interface, more options. I have traded in my beloved Ford Escort of a Course Management System for a late model Volvo.

My old escort was really a strippy. Most of the functionality was minimal and a bit clunky. I knew where all the controls were on the tape deck and how to make the seat go to the exact position I like, I knew all the idiosyncrasies, and how to keep the windshield from fogging up in the rain.

The Volvo is different. It is svelte and has every option known to man. I know there is a way to adjust the seat, and I also know that some of these buttons on the dashboard control the sound system.

It is just the process of figuring out what I need to do that is the issue. I have three formal classes through Blackboard and I still don't know how turn on the windshield wipers, though I was taught to change the blades. :-) Also, it isn't like the old Volvo (BB6) I drove briefly a few years ago. The controls are in different places.

I very much like Blackboard 9. Almost as much as I like Moodle. But I really do miss WebCT 4.1 right now in the first days of class.

Transitioning to Blackboard 9 and training

Last Fall CSUB did a pilot of Moodlerooms as part of an investigation into alternative LMS systems once it was deemed that WebCT 4.1 (yes, 4.1) was no longer an option due to accessibilty issues. I was able to offer a course in Moodle for the first (and perhaps only) time. I have been familiar with Moodle for some time, since 2002 at least when I had it set up on a server at home and played with it extensively. The Fall semester was a great boon in that I was able to teach a course for K-12 teachers in using Moodle. I have been blessed in that a few have gone on to actually implement web enhanced and hybrid Moodle in their classrooms.

CSUB made the decision to go with Blackboard after the pilot. So now I must update my dated experiences with WebCT 4.1 to this new system. I am already familiar with the Blackboard from using it at different campuses, actually developing courses on it at one point, and last semester taking a real estate course in it.

I have decided it is time to take the Blackboard certification courses. Starting July 1st I'll be taking three courses in the Learning and Teaching certification track as well as in the advanced certification track. It will be the first professional development in this area I've done since 2007. I am very much looking forward to the opportunity. While I am not a Blackboard advocate particularly, in the same way I am not a Microsoft advocate though I hold four certificates there, it is the platform my university has standardized on and so is an area I must know as much as possible about. It will be an interesting experience. I will report back on anything remarkable as I go through.

Closing the gap, more educators get it (and so do I).

OK. I follow Ray Kurzweil and Marc Prensky, and think Alvin Toffler may have been talking more about education than other disciplines without knowing. As educators we have aresponsibility to meet our students where they live. Some of this can be started in K12, but that is dependent upon the technology that the district has available, the willingness of those teaching, and the technosavvy of the administration.

I'm sorry, but the 'if we build it they will come' mentality won't work if we are using the wrong materials and blueprints.

Who is our target audience and what is their comfort level not only with technology, but with change in general?

Another article acknowledges the importance of dealing with modern material. Closing the Gap Between Education and Technology by Chris Riedel in THE Journal discusses some of the revelations (or is it proselytizing) of Mark Benno. You can find the article here.

An interesting point related was the lack of watches in classrooms. This got me thinking about my digital immigrant self and how I have come to use technology.

I have not worn a watch since I bought my first PDA in 2002. No reason. Two months ago I bought an old tech Nokia 9300 to replace another Nokia that was terribly difficult to text using. Hey, I've been involved with computers since the TRS-80 days, so QWERTY is very natural to me.

Now it starts to blend. I have a PDA that is also in many ways a mini-laptop, I have Internet access (though the original browser on this Symbian Series 80 phone is truly dismal), and the only piece of regularly used technologies missing are a decent camera, a PC emulator like Virtual Box, and a higher resolution screen, or a miniaturized pullout adjunct screen like that on the new Thinkpad W700ds, and a decent MP3 player. My understanding is that the E90 addresses much of the shortcoming.

Add some voice recognition software tied to a decent browser and you have a combo for online discussion groups that would be useful indeed. Or even better something that would allow you to video blog to your course management system, the N95 with its dual cameras comes to mind. So the use of video clips or video blogging on the fly and easily creating posts in threaded discussions from the car (with phone or perhaps even enhanced GPS *????* ) becomes not only possible but almost easy.

Of course the article takes a little different tack. I'm married to a QUERTY keyboard for comfort, which in and of itself dates me. The article talks about multitasking that takes on a different flavor, actually taking in information from different sources literally at the same time. In my life the only equivalent I can come up with is when I am on the elliptical. I'll frequently listen to music (I recently discovered Dave Matthews and am exhausting that catalog now) while watching the news with the SAP program on to read the dialog. That is in some sense the spirit, if not the actual application, that is mentioned in the article. Now if I am listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour while watching the news on the elliptical, and actively participating in both then I might be closer.

I know, I know. Some will say that multitasking is not a good thing, that it decreases efficiency. All you need to do is plug the terms multitasking and efficient into Google to see the debate. But the fact remains people do it. Serial or Parallel? True multitasking or merely task switching (think GEM vs. Windows NT ). You be the judge.

But I digress. :-)

"Kids use technology in ways many of us would never think of, he said. " That's a good start.

This article is worth reading and the ACOT2 programis worth following.

Discussion diaries as a reflective assessment tool?

We use LiveText as our ePortoflio system here. It provides the ability to create an overarching portfolio as a means of demonstrating personal growth through the program. Each final portfolio requires a piece from each course that demonstrates an understanding of the material presented in the course. Currently, this is usually the major project and a reflection. I read something this morning about a webinar on discussion portfolios. This got me thinking about the purpose of the signature piece in an online course. Many courses have, being partially constructivist (and sometimes even constructionist I would argue) in nature, a high value on the discussion posts in any given course. Does it make sense then for the discussion, since it is weighted heavily and also represents (hopefully) the evolution of understanding by a student in a given course, to use the discussion in some form as the signature piece?

My thought would be to create a discussion diary (within LiveText or what have you) where students can post favorite discussion posts or threads and create reflections on these threads later in the course. Basically a kind of ongoing monologue on the posts they find important to themselves and what it comes to mean over the rest of the course. This could replace or augment the project as the demonstrative piece.

Then, over the course of the program, the diary could become part of the final portfolio, perhaps with an overarching reflection on the discussions themselves. This wouldn't diminish the need for a rubric for discussion performance, but perhaps could split it into two sections, the first a pure assessment of quantity with the discussions themselves, and the other rubric run against the diary as part of assessment at the end of the quarter.

One of the things I like best about this idea is that it would show growth over the course of the quarter better than the major project would, in that it is not a single research-based test point in the class, but more of a continuum over time, showing multiple points in the development of understanding of the topics presented . The rubric would be a real challenge to develop.