Thursday, October 18, 2012

Dissertations and OER Hub

This presenter is arguing that dissertations should be published using open attributions. He wants to integrate the option to license openly into the doctoral process. Interesting. 

The next session was the one I wanted to hear, on the OER Hub, presented by folks from the UK Open University.  They wanted to provide a structure, a place for collect open resources.

He talked about the Learning Space at Open University, explained more extensively here.

Evaluating open texts

Dilbert - i like to have opinions, but not informed opinions. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DilbertDailyStrip+%28Dilbert+Daily+Strip%29

This session is dissertation research on the quality of open textbooks and how to measure that. I was hoping that he would present us with the

8 themes with two groupings

Technology ( related to the digital nature of the book)
Navigation
Access
Performance
Interaction

Content ( would be in any textbook)
Revelance
( other items that I didn't catch)
The research is still in process, so the takeaway that I wanted, how to evaluate the quality and could I use the tool to evaluate open course library resources.

The second part was also on adopting open textbooks in community colleges. Research showed that the adoption of Flat World Knowledge books had positive outcomes. I am using a Flat World knowledge text in my American Government class, so it is always nice to see this kind of info.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Viualizing Learning Data

This is a presentation from the Open Learning Initiative.  You may have heard about their open courses and incredibly powerful software behind them. Anyone can use these courses for instruction and we have a grant funded group in SAM teaching a statistics course through OLI.

I've personally been very interested in learner data and how faculty can use it to improve teaching and learning. I presented on this topic earlier this year at Whatcom CC. 

Also, Canvas, through Canvas Analytics, makes it really easy to see the data that is gathered and see what you can do with it.

OLI has created an instructor Learning Dashboard that helps instructors take the data and do something with it.  Howver, it is hard for faculty to know what to do with the data. 

I think Canvas makes what they are talking about pretty straightforward, but it is useful to think about how to talk to people about what to do with the data they get.  The cool thing that takes this OLI effort to the next level is they are thinking of integrating this info right into the course, so while you are working in your course, a flag might pop up next to an outcome that students are not meeting, so you as faculty can act in real time to address where students are struggling.

MIT Scholar

MIT Open Courseware is something that many of us are familiar with. MIT puts up syllabus, course notes, sometimes lectures and asssignments from all of their courses. They are not distance learning courses, they are meant to be a repository of resources for faculty, contributing to the community of scholars. They have over 2000 courses up there.

9% of their visitors are faculty, 40-some percent are students.  The big surprise is that another 40-some percent are independent learners - folks just learning for their own edification.

With those folks in mind, they have crafted some new courses called MIT Scholar. These courses are more courses, rather than just a materials repository. They pull together work from several classes on the same topic. They structure the materials in more of a course structure, with units or modules, etc. They are supporting community through OpenStudy ( website that facilitates online study groups).

Independent learners and students alike are enjoying this new format. However, creating the courses take significantly more effort on MIT's part to create.  Creating one of these courses is the equivalent of 7 regular classes. They only have limited resources, so as they create scholar classes, the regular classes are less current. So, they are trying to determine how to move forward. They are also wondering how these scholar courses work with MITx, the MOOC effort.

MIT Scholar - 12 courses

Best practices in open and online teaching

This session was presented by some K-12 educators from Utah. They made some useful points about how to think about why using open resources is important.

They emphasized how essential it is to have a detailed curriculum map before looking for OER. In essence, you have to know where you are going if you successfully want to get there. I blogged about Course Maps in my Stephanie Plans a Class blog.

They recommended using Google advanced search and OER commons as good resources for OER.

Slides and recording of this presentationhttp://openedconference.org/2012/program/day-1/day1-11am-c680/ 

Collaborative Book writing

There is a group in South Africa called Siyavula that is coming up with open textbooks.  They have written several books and last year the South African government printed out millions of copies of their books and gave them away to students for free. How cool!

As they tried to ramp up their book library, they determined that this could be efficiently done in authors workshops in a weekend. This model is based on the idea that bringing a diverse group together will create a product is better than something that comes from just one person.They bring a bunch of subject matter experts together, break them into groups and have the different groups.  All are volunteers, most haven't written in this way before.  They are using Google Docs to create the books. They usually have more than one workshop that they work on the book.  A couple of their recent books took 3 workshops.

They are giving badges to people to recognize their work on the project.  The badges will recognize not only writing, but some of the support work that folks do on the project.

Siyavula

Mozilla and open badges

Badges are an alternate method of credentialing. If you finish one of the popular MOOCs, what evidence do you have of your achievement? Enter the badge.
 
Mozilla is trying to put together a new badges ecosystem.  You can create your own badges that capture any kind of learning.  They are working on creating a universal standard.  They are making the badge more than just an image file, the image will be embedded with metadata that tells people about the badge, who issued, it, what was achieved, etc.
 
Badge backpack - a place to collect all of the badges in one place. Can categorize them - job oriented badges, hobby oriented badges, etc. Can push them out to social networks.
 
Openbadges.org.  You can go through an experience learning about badges and the backpack and earn your first badge.
 
(on a side note, I really like the clean presentation of their powerpoint slides
 
Resources
Grades out, Badges In - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Language teaching resources

This session had presenter from New Zealand who presented many resources.

Spindle podcast - Automatic speech recognition. Only 30% accurate, but good in identifying key words, wordle , creates good words for tagging.

Toetoe blog - alannah's blog

Flax language resources - flexible language aquisition - this was very cool. If you teach English, you should check this website out. Alannah has some videos explaining how it works.

TED Talks have transcripts that were crowd sourced.

Business model for open education

Ariel Diaz from boundless learning spoke on open business models. Boundless is pretty controversial in reverse engineering learning materials and is engaged in big lawsuits.

The Boundless website has students type in the name of their expensive textbook and it aligns each chapter of that book with open sources that say basically the same thing,allowing students to learn really well without buying the text. It looks lovely and has a nice, mobile friendly interface. If creates flash cards and overview quizzes and allows aggregation of notes to make study guides. They also have smart notes that summarize the top issues from each chapter - sort of a cliff's notes for each topic and chapter.

They currently have 8 subjects and have the top 3 or 4 books in each subject. It is free now, but eventually it will be a student pay model.

They are doing some internal studies to see if student learning is similar with the OER.

Unfortunately, he never actually got to the part about open business models. However, I got to talk to him during lunch.  He said that what he hinted at during the talk, the student pay model, is the way they hope to make it happen. However, he thought there were lots of differnt models out there, some which have not even been thought about yet.


Boundless.com
Openstax.com

Open Ed conference

I'm in Vancouver now, at the open Ed conference. It is my first time at this conference, but it is a well established group.

Gardner Campbell did an amazing keynote that can't really be adequately summarized. His basic idea was that there is a lot going on with open education, but that as it has gained traction, it has moved away from what it was all about. He went on to posit that real open education fostered a deep level of thinking that we rarely approach in higher Ed. He talked a little about this elusive level of deep thinking, noting that even giving examples of it would undermine our ability to think deeply about it.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Useful lessons learned from QM research

Sometimes, when I'm talking about QM, people want to know "how do we know this works?". Well, the QM rubric is completely based on the research, but one still needs to determine whether it's application actually makes a difference.

In this session, we learned that it does improve student satisfaction, that it creates faculty professional development. Interestingly, one study showed that, in a college that had adopted QM, even faculty with no QM training improved, as people shared ideas and QM best practices with each other.

One interesting problem that QM has is that it is now so widely adopted that the elements proposed by QM for course design are being built in from the get-go, so it is harder to show evidence of change after a review.

Accessibility of online instructional materials : 15 aspects to consider

This should have been a good presentation, but it was sort of painful. The presenter was delayed by tech trouble and then spent the majority of the remaining time talking about the background and the history.

When he finally did get to the topic, he was nearly out of time and rushed through the points. Oh well, here are my notes from that session.

Are students getting the same kind of access / experience at the same time? This is increasingly the focus of federal OCR investigations. It is no longer sufficient to rely n accommodations. W need to build accessibility at the front end, not try to work around problems later.

Checkpoints in the metadata

Documentation
Text access - is the text there as text so it can be read by a screen reader
Text adjustability - change color, size, spacing
Reading layout -
Reading order - order for digital resources corresponds with the visual layout
Structural markup - lists, columns, headings, tables
Tables
Hyperlinks - can be seen and activated
Color and contrast
Language
Images - non text alternatives for images
Multi-media - is there a transcript
?
Interactive elements - things can be operated by keyboard alone

Painfully boring. Good information, but bad presentation. Finally got up and left.

Brain based design

This session, from folks at the Univ of Cincinnati, was certainly the most entertaining of the day. The presenters talked about some basic ideas that could inform instructional design that would promote universal design (addressed by QM standard 8). Here are my notes from the session:

Visual structure - wherever possible
Take stuff out of paragraphs
Turn into bullets or lists.
Help them to visualize the info
Use design to reduce fear and anxiety
Use rubrics
Built in redundancies - put the same info in several places to make it easy to find
Model schedule for students to know how to move through the course
One pager on how to be successful in the course
Learning guide (aka to do list)
Multiple opportunities to revise
Clear info on when feedback will come
Induce ease, not strain
Tolerance for error
More low takes assessments
Let students try things without worrying about failure
We look for patterns
Use same words for same tuff
Identify things (include the word "link" after links - especially helpful in Canvas)
How do we respond to accusations of "spoon feeding"? Making it easier for students to learn is a good thing. Go back to cognitive load argument, so student mental energy goes into learning.

Idea - use canvas videos for syllabus tour

Walk through of a QM - friendly LMS course template and checklist

There are several presentations on the topic of course templates. Templates make it much easier for a college to insure many QM standards are met.

The college presenting this session was a private college with a 4-person design team, including the faculty. So , this model is quite different from our instructor driven, solo process . Still, I thought we could take several things from it.

As we move to Canvas, it would not be difficult for us to create a template that folks would have available as an optional starting point. This could be modified by division or department. The template can also be a learning tool for faculty to use as a jumping off point for creating their own course templates. Of course, more
Variation in templates directly counteracts one of the major benefits of a template - consistency.

Quality Matters conference

I am at the Quality Matters Conference in Tuscon,AZ. The keynote was about federal regulations related to distance learning. This was very interesting for me, but I imagine it felt irrelevant to many attendees,especially faculty. Indeed, I spoke to a faculty member from Skagit who is here and thought it was a complete waste of time.

However, one important takeaway was about the last date of attendance for online students. I've been doing it based on the last login date. However, if we get a financial aid audit, they'll be looking for the last date of academically related work. For example, a paper submission, discussion post, etc. that is easy to track and will be even easier with Canvas, but we'll need to get the information out. I think it also ties nicely with my effort to get faculty to have attendance activities in the first week to use as a basis for dropping students for non- attendance.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Notes from other folks

There were lots of Washington folks at InstructureCon.  Here are some notes from some of them:

The fun video from the Keynote has been posted. It sort of captures the vibe of the conference.

Forecast for InstructureCON12 - Cloudy with a chance of AWESOME from Instructure on Vimeo.

Creating mobile friendly classes

Rick Murch-Shafer of Creighton University

Question - can an online course be completed in such a way that it can be completed on only a mobile device.

The presenter clarified that, for the purposes of this talk, mobile computing is tablet computing and, specifically, the iPad. He is not talking about mobile phones and not really android tablets like the nook tablet or Kindle ( he asked how many people in the room had an android tablet with them right now. No one raised their hand. He asked how many had iPads - many people raised their hands. I have a Kindle fire and made a choice to leave it home. If I had brought it, it would have been in addition to my iPad, instead of it)

What can we do in course design to make course more mobile friendly.

Mobile safari browser makes it fine to use the native LMS, even without the app
Readings work well (files). Indeed, mobile device is a better reading experience than desktop
Quizzes
Communications
What doesnt work well
Flash based content (does work on the Kindle fire)
Uploaded media through Kultura (the on the fly recordings) . Alternately, you can use YouTube
Synchronous meetings
submitting assignments (can't save files to iOS so it is not possible to attach files - new canvas iOS app allows uploaded assignments
Google docs - doesn't work well on iPad. Can put files on Google Drive and can upload them to canvas with Polaris Office or Quick Office
New canvas iOS app has Dropbox integration and the ability to email document

1 create in Pages or whatever. Email to self with share feature
2 open the attachment and open in other app - canvas shows up as an options. Choose it and submit the assignment - cool!

Preparing students
Put it in the syllabus/ getting started
What apps do they need to have?
Workflow - have explicit instructions for the students
Standardization and support for faculty ( create some standard language for syllabus saying "this class is mobile friendly"
Clarity on minimum system requirements. Which mobile devices will it work for?

One commenter recommended the puffin browser for viewing flash

Outcomes in Canvas to help with outcomes

John Louviere, Utah State University

The first part of this presentation was about what outcomes are and how they relate

1. Begin with the end in mind. What is the end report that you will be trying to demonstrate?

3. Have a plan - for example, try this 4 step proces. Begin with the end in mind and design the reports beforehand
Design measurable outcomes
Map outcomes with courses
Map outcomes to assessment
Organize outcomes by subaccount
Rubrics - use them to collect outcomes data
Design the rubrics up front
Evaluate Outcomes mastery
Deign assignments and quizzes
Use speedgrader
Reporting
Custom reporting using student competency report (need admin status)

Related info with step by step how to guides (including an editable one) at tinyurl.com/87wnecc.

Canvas community

Matt McGhie from Instructure

The community is on the Instructure website. Can subscribe to either all postings or to individual threads. Can unsubscribe in the same way.
Forums to watch
  • -Announcements
  • Ask a question (correct answers are tagged). There are Canvas coaches in the forum (Renee Carney from lower Columbia is one of them!)
  • Feature requests. You can vote for features you want and the ones with the most votes rises in priority. Make feature requests by explaining the problem you are trying to solve and let the Canvas folks find a Canvas way to solve it (as opposed to saying "I want you to build feature x).
    • There are 3 statuses: planned, blank, not planned (not going to put this in Canvas)
  • Release notes and screencasts - they do a release every 2 weeks. They post release notes 1 week before the update. They do a screencast showing what the new features can do in about 2 minutes - cool! I'm Definately going to subscribe to this.
  • Best practice webinars - typically the second Friday of each month. Taught by coaches and Instructure folks. Recordings are posted there for later viewing.
Canvas community created resources. At the bottom, hard to find, but this is where normal folks can go in and put their cool stuff. (I saw one on using outcomes features).

Share updates with faculty with a "what's new in canvas?" with a link directly to the screencast. Another college uses an email listserv. No one here seems to use the announcements.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Concluding thoughts on Day 1

This was a really good conference day. I gleaned lots of good information and met many interesting people. The 30 minute sessions were very intense - 8 sessions in one day, plus the keynote and a general session - 10 information packed sessions!  Needless to say, most people were feeling pretty overwhelmed by the end of it all.
I'm glad to know the sessions were all recorded and the related session content are in separate Canvas modules in the conference classroom.  I will need to go back and watch several of the sessions that I missed.

Easy to Build, Easy to Maintain, Easy to Update - Building Courses with Canvas


The presenter, Kevin Reeve from Utah State, talked about how using a course template and thinking with reusability in mind, made the course more easy to reuse. His main thing was a course template. ANGEL has templates built in, so they are pretty easy to use. With Canvas, the presenter needed to put his Page template into a Wiki page as to not mess up stuff that automatically appears in other parts of the course.

He has found that students get distracted by the main page stream or stuff in "coming up".  Students may come into the classroom for a reason and then get distracted and don't do what they meant to do.

He created ease of use for students by thoughtfully chunking information together.  By putting the all of a module's content into an assignment, it puts everything the student needs in one place. This is very handy for folks using the mobile app.  This would only really work if you only have one assignment per unit.  However one could put all related course materials and links in the assignment and that would work for multiple assignments.

The presenter emphasized the importance of using descriptive names in the things you create to make the different views more meaningful to the students.

He wonders whether the students still appreciate a downloadable syllabus (I think yes). 

Integrated Communication - the Human Touch


Looked at 4 tools to try and determine which tools helped the students feel more connected to the faculty and to each other.
  • announcements.  Canvas announcements are different in that students can respond to them , turning them into a kind of discussion
  • discussions 
  • chat and whiteboard  really helpful in math (although the whiteboard has to be open in another window).  A good way of doing online office hours.  It sounds like the whiteboard has issues - we have access to Collaborate, which sounds like it would work better. Plus, one can record in Collaborate.

She would remind students of the online office hours and got lots of traffic.

- media inserts - a little film strip in the upper right and you can automatically record audio/video and it will be inserted in the area of the course. Can also use it in speed grader. 

Google plus alias - can code messages as they come into gmail  - she has a blog post in the course that explains how to use this tool to organize mail.

Students polled in 3 classes- top 3 were notifications, conversations, and assignment feedback
Some question as to whether the students knew what the tools were when they were answering the survey.  Students in other classes had slightly different responses.

She had students scan the math homework.  They can use apps on their mobile devices to make PDF documents as an alternative to scanners.

I think this was one of the more useful sessions - practical stuff.  I will definately survey my students on this question of preferred tools. 

Reference - Graham, Charles (2006) models of blended learning in higher education - similar to idea of transactional distance.

How Edison State College Uses Canvas for More than Just Courses


Getting folks in the administrative level involved with Canvas early was an important part of getting full buy in
At their college, they have everyone enrolled in Canvas. 

Student organizations and student government and student life groups use the system.

Met with teams of different users throughout the year and as they do that, more groups are reaching out to them and they are doing less outreach.

The college is using the following tools with groups:
  • File sharing
  • Collaboration and wikis
  • Notifications ( especially important to the non course users since they are not often in the LMS)
  • Discussions
  • Announcements
  • Tracking
  • Conferences and chat
  • EtherPad for agendas
  • Adjunct teaching portfolios - actually all portfolios will eventually move to canvas. Faculty put in their data as assignments and the department head uses the Speed Grader to evaluate the portfolios.
  • Great way to gather data and could use it to track to outcomes - with the analytics could be very powerful.

They organize these "courses" into sub accounts.

They don't have the people create the courses on their own, as they prefer to work with staff so they are aware of the great tools and how to use them.

They use the Courses structure instead of groups because there is a limitation of 500  mb on groups and that cannot be changed.  Also, courses can be in a subaccount  structure easily.

Seamlessly Incorporating Learning Outcomes into Online Course Design


Linda Ralston, University of Utah presented this workshop on using Outcomes in Canvas. She spent the first part of the workshop talking about forming Outcomes, which wasn't very interesting to me. I wanted to get to the use of the various Outcomes tools in Canvas.

She uses the outcomes page in Canvas and clearly maps the assignment , quiz questions, rubrics, etc .  Students can run a report to demonstrate where they mastered and did not master the outcomes.  

As with many workshops, the best stuff was at the end and she hurried through just how to make use of the tools she mentioned.

Materials from the presentation are available at Https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/33329

Killing PowerPoint: Effective Online Lectures Using Canvas Tools


Rebekah Grow from Univ of Utah talked about the potential horrors of PowerPoint. In doing so, she shared a very funny YouTube video which does a lovely job of showing what not to do.



The presenter suggested the following tools in Canvas as potential replacements for flat PowerPoint decks-
- pages - you could do around 16 slides per page, use audio tool to narrate
- kaltura media server
- link to existing resources like YouTube

It seems to me like some of these ideas are addressed technically by using Tegrity, though the pedagogical issue of PowerPoint is important to consider.

She has all the info from the session in an open course located at Utah.intructure.com/courses/49573.  This course is linked in the modules pages.

Getting Started With Canvas Session - Part 2

(delayed posting from Wednesday, 6/13) I'm going to use my upcoming Fall American Government class for this part of the getting started session, focusing on actually building a class.

In-line Previewer - when you upload a file, a preview of the file shows up on the screen, so students can see what the file says without having to download and open it.

Drag and Drop - you can just highlight files and drag them into the Canvas files area. You can do this in ANGEL too, but it seems much easier here.

Assignment building - If you create Assignment 1, you can just click on a "plus"symbol and it will automatically create Assignment 2, with the name. This makes it quick and easy to scaffold the course. One will, of course, need to go back and fill in the details. But this simplifies the process of creating the course structure, which should have good implications for course design and navigation.

Observation - a lot of the tools I'm seeing here are things we are used to having in ANGEL. However, the thing that is different here is they are much easier to access and use. It is important to remember, though, that Instructure is a fairly new company (founded in 2008) and there are some things that we are used to in ANGEL that they don't have yet. One thing that has come out is that they don't have the ability to add layers of security in testing, like you can do in ANGEL with the secure browser setting.

What is Instructure? - Canvas is an open source learning management tool.  Anyone can take it and adapt it for their own use, like Moodle.  Instructure is a company who has taken Canvas and customized it and hosts it, provides support, etc, for a fee.  The State is contracting with Instructure to use Canvas as its learning management tool.  We could just take the open version of Canvas and adapt it for our uses as a state and host it ourselves. However, this would involve hiring a team of people and buying a lot of servers.  The eLearning Council determined it was much wiser and more cost effective for us to contract with professionals rather than try to do it ourselves.

On the other hand, if, by some horrible chance, Instructure were to get bought out by some gigantic learning management company that shall not be named, we could stay with Canvas if we chose, and would not be forced to change, as is happening with the ANGEL buyout.

Visualizing data from Canvas

They announced in the keynote that Canvas Analytics would launch today. In this session, Seth Gurell from Utah Valley State has created a fancy workaround to pull out some Analytics about site visits and quiz questions. The nice part, of course, is the visualization, making the data into a visual representation that is interactive.

One can use the paid version of Wolfram Alpha to upload data from Canvas and create scatter plots and histagrams. He showed a demo and the graphics were almost instantly created.

In the session, I sat next to my colleague Sue Galloway from Centralia College. Sue is in the last portion of her doctorate, so is spending lots of time embedded in data. But we both felt that most faculty wouldn't be able to make productive use of this kind of data. We noted that it would be important to partner with institutional researchers at the colleges to understand how to make use of these graphic visualizations.

In the question portion, someone asked the presenter how he made use of the analytics. Interestingly, he had not gotten around to using them yet.

Snapp - a tool that will analyze discussion board data if you can extract it from Canvas.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Piloting and navigating our way to quality courses

This Session, by folks from
Bucks county community college, looked at transitioning to Canvas and making use of Quality Matters in the process.

The session had several good ideas. Including making sure that folks started using Canvas right after getting training. This information could cause us to adjust the way we do our pilot.

They also noted that, in their experience, it was easier to train people who had never used the LMS than to retrain folks used to another system. They were. Moving from Blackboard - I think moving to Canvas from ANGEL will be much easier.

InstructureCon keynote

Josh , the CEO of Instructure gave a very amusing keynote called Cloudy with a chance of Awesome. It talked about the state of the LEarning Management market and the awesomeness of Canvas and Instructure . Some takeaways
* automagically - in cloud computing, there are no tiresome waits for new versions, fixes happen
* there was a great story about research on monkeys that I won't try to type out here in my iPad. It talked about resistance to change.
* tl;dr (too long;didn't read) I'll be using this one.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Collaboration Workshop Part 2

We're starting with the Conference tool, which allows web conferencing. We have access to Blackboard Collaborate, which at first glance, seems much, much more robust. It allows for synchronous collaboration with presentations, desktop sharing, etc. It could be used ideally for virtual office hours. One big downside is that the webinar can't be recorded and viewed at a later time.  The presenter noted that it works for smaller groups with large bandwidth.

Now, we're trying Skype. It's not working very well. In preparation for this session, everyone associated a Skype account with their profile.  When we came in today as a group, it showed everyone as "offline" and there didn't seem to be a way to get online from within Canvas. The moderator seemed to think it was a browser thing - if you are not using the most recent version of the browser, it might not work. Anyway, it's cool that you can do use Skype within Canvas, but given the the other tools, I'm not sure why I would use it.  The presenter started with an explanation of communication intimacy.  Using a tool like Skype is pretty intimate, so one would want to take care in using it.

We're wrapping up with learning scenarious, sharing ways we would use these collabotation tools in our teaching.  One tool we're using is the Collaborations tab which has integrated Google Docs and EtherPad - both of them make it easy to make collaborative documents.  Google Docs is more robust, but folks need a Google account to use it effectively.

The wrap up of the session is also fairly chaotic. I was just observing to my table colleagues that I wish the presentation would be more systematic, presenting the tool, giving examples of how it might be used, identifying the pros and cons and then playing with the tool (or maybe play first then pedagogy).  The way this was presented made it all really confusing. I suppose they assume we are all familiar with the tools, but even so, if the point of the presentation was to explore collaboration, I wish we'd done so more systematically.

Collaboration Workshop

The workshop started very chaotically, but we did get a chance to learn that Canvas facilitates students adding themselves to teams.

We talked about the value of group work and the reality that group work is hard work. Is it worth it? The group in the room was split on the issue.  The presenter noted that successful group work is not appropriate for all activities. 

In creating teams, the moderator emphasized having the "Right People" - know your students before grouping them for a high stakes.  She recommended putting the least productive people in one group to lessen the negative impact.

Build in "play time" for students to get familiar with the technology.  If you don't, the moderator says that students will play with your first assignment. So, craft expectations then give students a fun activity to experiment with the tool.

We played with the Chat tool. In addition to the typical option of text chat, you can video chat or audio chat - fun! The images resize as more people join the chat. The presenter said she had once had 16 people in the video chat.

We did a brief exercise on learning styles and had the class take a survey identifying who learned in which ways. She talked about the importance of having learning activities that honor each learning style, especially for groups. She would work to put like styles together, especially at the beginning of the class, since like groups work better together.

It's time for a break. I've been sitting at a table with folks from Utah Valley University which has used Canvas for over a year. It's been very interesting.

Getting Started With Canvas session - part 1

I'm at the Canvas conference, called InstructureCon. I'm signed up for 2 pre-session workshops.  The first one is called Getting Started with Canvas. The first portion of the 3 hour session is learning about Canvas from the student perspective. Here are some of my favorite features.
·         The Calendar - pulls in info from all of the student's courses or not. Also, you can sync it with Outlook, Google Calendar, etc. Nice!
  • Submitting work - there are lots of options for submitting an assignment. Students can upload a file, link to a Google Doc, type in text, etc.


Students can also upload or record media right into Canvas - cool!
The recording feature is throughout Canvas - you can record discussion posts, 

Thoughts about this session - we started from the student perspective.  This was pedagogically a good idea, but practically, everyone in the class was desperate to get started actually creating classes. They had almost no patience for the student experience. I would flip it.
OK - time for a break. More in the next post.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Canvas and Digital Storytelling

I split this session, which again had many things I wanted to learn about. First I went to hear Renee Carney from Lower Columbia speak on transitioning to Canvas. I mostly wanted to hear the concerns expressed by folks in the room to give me an idea of what might be worrying faculty at Seattle Central as we prepare to transition. I want the process to be as stress free as possible and the better we understand people's concerns, the better we will be able to address them.

Then I went to a session on digital storytelling. Usually I am very strategic about the sessions I choose - how will this session help me directly in my teaching or how will it help me to help other people. This session just looked cool. I had no idea how I would use it, though I do now (I'm going to integrate it into my service learning project).  The presenters, Lisa Predovich and Lakeisha Jackson from the College Success Foundation, talked about the process of teaching student to tell stories using the 6 word memoir as an example (mine was "share - what have you got to lose?). They showed examples of student digital storytelling that was incredibly powerful.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to fit something so complex into my summer course, but I am definitely going to think about it for fall.

Arts, Crafts and . . .Assessment?

The afternoon session on Thursday was jam packed with things I wanted to see all at the same time. I finally decided to go to this session on making assessment concrete.  I really had no idea what that was going to look like, but I trusted my former Cascadia collegues Travis Timmons, David Ortiz and Dave Dorrarcague would do something great and I was right. Wow. They created these machines or dashboards to look at an assessment through the lens of the various hoped for outcomes to see if you can get there from here.  

I can't really describe the workshop in this blog post, but I would love to have these guys come to Seattle Central to present on this topic. It was probably the coolest assessment idea I've ever learned. I can't wait to give it a try. 

Plenary Session on the future of Higher Education

The plenary session on Thursday morning looked at the future of higher education.  The presenters pulled together several scary headlines about how higher education is failing and needs to do things differently. They also posed some good questions about how we should think about the disruption - should we push back or should we do things differently?

They did not attempt to present any answers. Rather, they encouraged participants to discuss at their tables and write down their thoughts in an action research exercise. They will use the information to inform a follow up session that they will do on Friday morning.  They also asked participants to consider the plenary themes as they moved through the other conference sessions.

It was interesting talking to people about this after we left the session. I made a presentation on disruptive innovation in higher education at the Tegrity conference a couple of weeks ago. I've been reading articles about this topic for at least the last 18 months or longer. But to many people, this was the first time that they had heard many of these ideas and it left some of them shaken.

Qualitative methods to assess student learning

I attended the pre-session on Wednesday. The session, put on by Bill Moore from the State Board and Robin Jeffers from Bellevue College, focused on research methods related to the qualitative data that faculty tend to gravitate towards. 


They offered hands on opportunities to form research questions along with the chance to evaluate some real data from undergraduate research going on at Bellevue College. The session was helpful in giving me a framework for using some of my methods courses from grad school in a practical manner in the classroom (which was what I was hoping it would do).  


While I know that people tend to push back against the evidence culture that seems to be evolving, Bill and Robin showed how this kind of data can really inform improved teaching.

Workshop on group communication

This workshop presents several ideas from a small group communication class on structuring group work. Ideas included having a "norming agreement" between the students, being clear with the students about why you are doing group work and allowing for self and peer evaluations.

There were a lot of good ideas, but I could see that several of them would take a lot of time. Since I could see how essential some of the activities were, it is clear that one should not launch into group work activities without being willing to commit to the time needed for groups to form properly.

I asked the presenters for ideas around groups online and, unfortunately, but non surprisingly, they had no suggestions.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Tegrity policies roundtable

Policies
Intellectual Property
At these colleges, faculty own what they do unless the college has separately paid them to develop materials for reuse
Recording retention policy
Both schools have a 2 year policy and will help faculty archive if needed
One college is doing 6 weeks after the term and asking faculty to move things they want to save to the private classroom. This prevents clutter and makes faculty think thoughtfully about what they want to retain, particularly since most recordings don't need to be retained. Might be really short given grade challenges and incompletes. One person asked about whether it might apply for legal discovery.
May need different policies for student recordings and test proctoring recordings. Pam from Tegrity reminds us that Tegrity allows the downloading and re uploading of content. There is also a 3rd party product that will download groups of recordings from the cloud
Student consent to be recorded
Syllabus statement informing students that they are being recorded; noting that faculty may redistribute but students may not
Other college says that if the recording contains readily identifiable students, then they need to get student permission before using the recording outside the class.
Slu.edu/capture - policies driven from the pedagogy - what kinds of classroom interaction would be appropriate for recording. Think about educational records and FERPA, for example.
UWT uses the blanket release form that everyone has to sign at the beginning of the quarter.
What about guest lecturers ? Ask ahead of time and get written permission from them in writing. Make sure they know that the information will be shared with the public via a public link.


Recording location scheduling - neither college has a policy since most recordings happen outside the classroom. ((idea - identify the best rooms for Tegrity and give scheduling priority in those rooms for faculty using the tool)). Most not using the remote administration, can be dangerous for all.

Recording access - both colleges manage access through the LMS

Download options - instructors make this determination, and to be responsible to consider copyrighted material. They should link to copyrighted material rather than recording it. Neither college monitors compliance with copyright .

duplication/ redistribution by students : students may make recordings unless prohibited by the instructor. However, students cannot redistribute without express permission of the instructor.

Closed captioning/ transcription - both colleges do on demand because the cost is prohibitive. At one college it is paid for by the disability services office. One way to manage is using old recordings from a previous quarter and send it to the transcriptionist. One person asked if the recordings are suppressed until the transcript is produced. May not need to think about the suppression issue of the recordings are not a requirement. If the recording is not in lieu of class time, then not required.

Ue for student assessments

Flipped classroom - both colleges permit

DVD distribution - one college only does it if a student is in a low bamdwidth area.

Demonstrating the impact of Tegrity

This is a dissertation presentation. As a former doctoral student, I feel compelled to attend support other doctoral students, even though the presentations tend to be dry.

This presentation presented some interesting data about the impact of Tegrity on the students at the college. Essentially, he found that students who are highly motivated do way better in classes supported by Tegrity than traditional students. This says to me that we could find some great outcomes with using Tegrity with our professional technical programs, where students are highly motivated to achieve to improve job prospects.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Student feedback using Tegrity

Instructor who teaches Microsoft Access and Excel. She often needs to give contextual feedback for students, showing them how they made mistakes in the database, etc.

She opens the student submission and records in Tegrity, using her private classroom. She then generates a class link and pastes that into the ANGEL comment box. Remember when generating the link, remember to uncheck the authentication so students can easily view from email etc.

She only makes the video when significant comments are needed - for other students

Block the students name out and re use the video as instruction for future students or create a special recording for students in general

Lots of time saved, faster than typing and reduces student visits and questions. Usually her videos are only 1-2 minutes long. Students can watch it over and over. Personalized feedback makes the student feel like she is more connected to them, can feel like an office visit for students.

She has surveyed students. She has found that they view the classroom Tegrity recordings more than they did before.

To stay in motion, she keeps Tegrity open in one tab and ANGEL open in another tab so she doesn't wait for it to upload, she keeps on grading and goes back to Tegrity later to grab the link.

Student success via video recording

My former Cascadia colleague Colene White, a communications faculty, presented on doing student recordings. She records students in the classroom doing public speaking. She has students handle the cameras and records a separate recording for each student. She has the students review the video and critique it. She can review them as well.

Other suggestions:
Have foreign language speakers give feedback on accent
Give students feedback using Tegritys instructor notes. Could also record self commenting on the speech as it is playing.
Students could reserve a study room in the library for recording, check out the equipment from the library. Can be a challenge in speech classes when students need an audience.
Student recordings of students doing PE activities . For example, showing that they could do 50 push ups.

Tablets and Tegrity

Tablets and Tegrity
The room is packed, they had to bring in extra chairs.

The presenter teaches Chemistry, frequently at 8am. His reasons for using Tegrity are typical
-Commuter campus, classes often cancelled with late starts in the winter
-Students had very, very different skill sets coming into the class
-Lots of existing videos, but he wants tudents to see how he does it.

He recommends
-Tablet pc
-Wacom bamboo
-IPad and stylus (he uses a Wacom stylus)

tips to remember
-Important to have a script
Have a quiet location for recording
-Use a wired mic, not the one on the tablet PC for higher quality and sound consistency
Intermixed PowerPoint and writing the problems out - the mix works well for students

He connects his iPad to his computer, does the slide show and writing on the iPad, recording on the desktop computer in the classroom.

iPad roadmap
Create content ( PowerPoint)
Export in iPad friendly format . He puts his PowerPoint file into a PDF . He manages animations using ppsplit. - an add on that breaks out the animations into separate slides. Downside - files get very big
get content on the iPad - use Dropbox. Has an iPad app. Also recommends Goodreader app - he says it is better than the Dropbox app and it syncs effortlessly with Dropbox. Good reader is really good at marking up documents.
annotate the content during the lecture - how can you doodle on the screen - use the Airsketch app. Airsketch will take what is on the iPad and puts it in a browsers window, so does not require an install on the desktop. Get the paid version ($10) to have it read PDF . Requires a browser with HTML 5 (anything but Internet Explorer). iPad and lectern must be on the same network,

He notes that using the iPad in this way allows student interaction - he draws it and then can hand the iPad to the student hand have them do it. Allows him to wander around the class or sit down with the students

Full presentation at
Bitly.com/HtyAqy

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Professional development training made easier with Tegrity

The main point of this session is to
think Beyond the traditional classroom in Tegrity implementation.

Make it simple to use

Give toys to those who like to play with them to foster innovation.

Make the ownership of the training the departments through a "train the trainer" model. Then IT can get out of the way. If and when the trainers need help, they'll let you know.

Trainings are often done in classrooms. These guys have many of their classrooms outfitted with microphones.

They also have campus wide leadership training

Every member of faculty and staff is in Tegrity and the LMS. Allows good use for HR required trainings.

Great tool for training new adjunct faculty on procedures for the college.

Use nuggets in the LMS to push out Tegrity trainings to Faculty, they show up in every class.

Spend the money on good equipment since the bad stuff costs twice as. Much to replace.


Building a strong Tegrity house and vision

This presentation is about rolling out Tegrity successfully on campus. Since we are early in this process, I thought it would be good to attend.

The first member of the group spoke of program implementation in a nursing program. She noted that the faculty were very old school and implementing technology resulted in panic for eventual people. Since they did it program wide, everyone had to be on board with doing it. They addressed this by having someone with them when they recorded for the first time. the department decided to record every single class. Students have grown very dependent on it- they love it.

They noted two kinds of recordings. One is the typical lecture, but the other is skill sets- how to start an IV, etc. these sessions were done with a camera and are carried forward from quarter to quarter. Students review it before the lesson, then practice it in the lab and then they can watch again later. They have seen greatly improved outcomes in the student clinical experience. Enabled students on maternity leave to persist.

Learning areas - they had to learn how to be effective with the microphone- for example when they go to the bathroom. Another thing was knowing to repeat the questions asked by students do that when students watched, they knew the questions being answered.

For the skill sets, the IT folks added giant hdtv sets so that students in the classroom could get a really close up views. They used a video camera operated by a fellow faculty member.

In the college of education, they had an expectation for online faculty to have at least 1 Tegrity recording, generally the course introduction. They also had the faculty share best practices with each other in small groups. Also having students use Tegrity recordings for eportfolios and job applications.

Goal to use for all campus open meetings.

Tegrity updates

Since we are fairly new to using Tegrity, the updates are not as powerful for us. However, I will note a few things of interest.

- Tegrity Tweets, allows students to subscribe and get a tweet when a new lecture pops up.
- interesting note 45%of students view Tegrity using a tablet or mobile device. In response, Tegrity will now allow faculty and students to record lectures using the Tegrity app. They seem to think faculty won't use this- the primary audience is students.
- android apps will cache recordings for offline viewing.
- improved functionality for the Mac.and iPad.
- audience question about cheating - students using two screens - Tegrity responds that it is obvious when watching the eye movement of the student. Also, including the requirement of audio enables hearing odd sounds that indicate cheating.

Improving Student Outcomes across Washington

The conference is kicking off with a panel discussion with several of my colleagues from eLearning departments t the Washington community colleges including Connie Broughton from the SBCTC, Ann Garnsey-Harter at Shoreline, Renee Carney from Lower Columbia and Jerry Lewis from Columbia Basin. The information was mostly stuff I knew, about how Tegrity is being implemented in Washington State. In the end of the session, though, was good, with some mentions of how folks are actually using on their campuses. For example, Lower Columbia has outfitted 20 rooms with Logitech orbit cams, with great success. All reported a high level of satisfaction from faculty, students and eLearning staff.

Stephanie's Conference Blog

I really love going to conferences. It is great to have the chance to hear the perspectives of others and to bring new information back to my campus. As part of the "bring information back" piece, I am starting this conference blog. I will try and make at least one post per presentation of each conference I attend. 

This week, it's Tegrity. The nice part about this is that, hopefully, I will have links to the presentations and you'll be able to watch them for yourself.