Teaching a MOOC

I've been thinking about you all and about the many posts in my head that don't quite make it onto the computer. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking through a relatively empty airport in Texas around 11PM, listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Slate's Culture Gabfest, when a poetry professor came on and started talking about his love affair with teaching a MOOC (massive open online class).  

He started out expressing his complete disdain for anything that would put any distance between he and his students and teaching online was clearly in that camp. Then, by some miracle, he started working with some technologists that he respected and before he knew it, he was teaching poetry to 10,000 people and it totally changed the way he thought about teaching. Very compelling listening - I recommend it to you.

On the MOOC note, I should say that this week, Canvas announced its new Canvas Network that will make MOOCs more possible for smaller colleges like Seattle Central. Indeed, we are one of the Canvas Network pilot colleges and will be sharing our US History II as a free self paced course.

Resources

• Slate's Culture Gabfest -http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest.html
• The Culture Gabfest You Big MOOC edition - start listening around 21:25 to jump right to the MOOC conversation.
• Canvas Network -https://www.canvas.net/ 
• Splash page for US History II on the Canvas Network - 

Student feedback on OER

I am presenting on a panel on Thursday about Open Course Library adoption and OER in general.  I thought I would share with you an informal survey of my students from summer quarter. I was sort of surprised by the results.

I don't know if you can really see this. Here are the options. Students were asked to select as many as are true for them.

• I think it is great not to have to buy a textbook (25%)
• I think it is a hassle to have to print out all of the readings (5%)
• I often read the readings on my desktop or laptop computer instead of printing them out (25%)
• I often read the readings on my mobile device instead of printing them out (5%)
• I like that I can get the readings for free, but I wish there was an option to buy a printout of all the readings in the bookstore (15%)
• Saving money on textbooks is really important to me (10%)
• I wish more faculty had free alternatives to a paid textbook (0%)
• I wish we just had a regular textbook (5%)
• No answer (10%)

I think the answers in bold are rather startling.  Some students did not trouble filling out the multiple options, so that may have skewed the results. I'll look forward to trying this survey again this quarter.

Moment of Panic

I've been slaving away on the orientation of the course all weekend, trying to get everything lined up, amazed once again and the astonishing number of balls one has to keep in the air to successfully launch an online class. No wonder it goes badly so often!

I spent 90 minutes this afternoon recording the orientation videos, using a headset to get some decent sound. I uploaded the videos to YouTube, posted the links in Canvas and was finally done.  Phew!

So, I was clicking through the orientation, about to go to bed, just making sure all is well for tomorrow when I played one of the videos and there was no audio. I turned up the volume. Nope, just no audio. I couldn't believe it. I really wanted to cry. I had checked each video as I recorded them (all 9 of them!) and they had sound then. Something must have gone wrong in the processing or in uploading to YouTube. I'd have to record them all again. 

I was just dejectedly leaving my computer when I noticed my headset was still plugged in. The audio was going into the headset speakers.  I unplugged them and, voila!, sound. What a relief! I can sleep in peace.

References
  one of my orientation videos

Standard 1 Paranoia

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I am not a perfectionist. However, I do try to get things mostly right.  However, in some areas, mostly right doesn't cut it.  The start of an online class is one of those times.  I will confess to you that this was brought home to me two weeks ago.

My American Government class was supposed to start at the beginning of fall quarter on September 24.  Through a series of administrative mishaps, the course never got scheduled.  As late as Sept 20, we didn't have an item number so even if students knew about it, they couldn't register.  Given the 50 million things on my plate, I found it easy to procrastinate finishing a class that might not even go.

When we finally did get an item number, on Thursday before the Monday start, there was some talk of making the course a compressed start. I've been playing with this idea and hoping to serve late arriving students by offering some 8 week classes nested in the 10 week quarter. I didn't know for sure that we were going to do this until Monday. Yes, the Monday that the quarter started.

Over the weekend, I was desperately working to polish off the course. To save time, I copied over lots of stuff from my Global Studies class.  I went through and modified most of it to match the current course and college, but there were a few things I missed.  Little things like that are crazymaking for the students.

Also, it was later in the day on Monday when the new course start date was confirmed. I wrote to the students, but several had already started the class and some were already confused by the little errors caused by a class that was mostly right.

QM Standard 1 is all about the start of a course (is the purpose of the course clear to the students and is it evient how to begin and move through the course), but it is really only part of the story. I believe this course meets every element of Standard 1, but if I link to the academic dishonesty policy at Highline CC for a class at Seattle Central CC, students will be confused. Some toss it off as an understandable error, but there are always a few students who take everything literally and are completely immobilized until they achieve clarity. Thus, my Standard 1 paranoia.

So, as I prepare for my new start on Monday, I really want it to be completely right - no errors.  I need to re-establish credibility with the students who were confused by the first day of confusion two weeks ago. Also, there is the cognitive load issue discussed in my last post - in 8 weeks, they have even less time to be confused.

I will, of course, miss something. We always do.  I'll let you know what it is and how it plays out in the coming weeks.

QM Conference and Modules

I'm at the Quality Matters conference in Tucson, AZ. As is often the case, the best part of the conference is the people I get to talk to between the sessions. 

Today, I sat down with George Guba, an instructional designer from North Carolina.  as we were talking course design, he talked about the challenges in persuading faculty to change their ways to more pedagogically sound practices, like getting away from weekly work.  I was aghast. I always use weekly modules.  I stopped him mid sentence - why would I want to stop using weekly organization and what would I go to instead?  He suggested that the research supported a two week module as being a better fit for adult learners who are learning online.  As he explained it, I could see his point -easier to get in the small nuggets of learning that are better than large chunks, easier to arrange around busy lives, etc. I could also see how this would work better in a 15 week semester than a 10 week quarter. I tossed that issue into the mix. He still advocated for two week units.

Now, this is especially relevant for me because my American Government class did not start 2 weeks ago. We decided very last minute (like the first day of the quarter) to turn it into a late start compressed class. So, the class begins on Monday, Oct 8.  I need to cram my 15 modules into 8 weeks.  I need to completely rethink the organization of the class.  I've been so perplexed by the best way to do this that I have put it off, hoping that clarity would come to me. Well, perhaps it has, in the voice of George.  I promised myself that I wasn't going to bed tonight without having this finished, so I'll let you know how it goes.

I also talked with Jo Ann Monroe from Tacoma Community College. I learn something new every time I talk to her - she's great.  Today we were talking at lunch about our Canvas pilots.  She talked about one challenge of Canvas being that it was very easy for students to skip (intentionally or unintentionally) important but non-assessed parts of the class, like lectures and readings, and just go straight to the assignments.  Jo said she took care of this by having the course open straight to the modules and requiring they be completed in order.  This would certainly achieve the goal of getting the student to move through the materials properly, but it also seems really big brother to me.

However, yesterday in a session on universal design (QM Standard 8), the presenters talked about cognitive load and course design. Should the student's mental energy go towards figuring out where stuff was and how to accomplish the work? Or is it better spent learning the material? Well the answer to that is a no-brainer - of course I want the energy going towards learning content. So, I am seriously planning to make those modules more linear and required.  Again, I'll figure this out today and let you know.

Resources:
Nuts and Bolts: Brain Bandwidth - Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design by Jane Bozarth

Crunch Time

Late Post - I originally wrote this on 9/21 but forgot to post it. . .

It's crunch time. The quarter starts tomorrow and, I will confess, I'm not quite ready (sounds like summer all over again!). Through a series of unfortunate events, my class didn't actually get scheduled until about 3 days ago. The uncertainty of it all enabled me to procrastinate, as is my habit.  So, now you can peek in on how a seasoned online instructor builds much of a class in just a few days.

On the positive side, I have been thinking about this for a long time. My syllabus was essentially done and I had built the structure of the class in Canvas using the Free for Teachers space.

As I'm building from scratch in Canvas, I am taking a Modules approach - I created 10 modules for each week, plus one for the orientation, syllabus documents (includes rubrics, expectations, etc), the service learning project, the final and a Start Here module. So, I have 15 modules in all. Next, I locked them down by date, so they don't open until the appropriate week (with an added bonus of no one being able to see there is nothing in the module yet). I took away many of the navigational tools to create a clean interface.

Outcomes Frustration

I've taught 3 Quality Matters workshops in the last two days and am in the second week of moderating a two week Applying the Quality Matters Rubric class online.  So, I am feeling all QM all the time at the moment.  One key aspect of Quality Matters is Alignment - essentially seeking to have everything in the class lead students to meet the course outcomes.

I'm working on making sure my American Government module level objectives are aligned with my course level objectives. I'm going to be honest with you - these course level objectives are horrible. They are not measurable and they omit about half of the important things one should be able to do at the end of an American Government class, including being a good citizen or a thinking member of our country (which to me is the key reason for students to take this class). I was talking with my dean about this and he observed that these objectives were written ages ago and need to be completely rethought.

So, I am struggling, as I imagine many of you do, to make the class that needs to be taught align with the objectives that I have. I am getting around it by thinking broadly about the language of the objectives. For example, one outcome is to "Explain the changing nature of government" and under that, I am including many of the media pieces of the class, where students examine media depictions of the government and explore how that matches with what they know to be true.

The other option, which I am also likely to take as I pull things together in these last days, is to have some portions of the class that do not align with the outcomes that are there.  For this class, meeting the existing outcomes seems like only about 2/3 of the class. The other 1/3 really focuses on using the understanding of American Government to become a good citizen. So this class as it stands would not live through a Quality Matters review, as I confess that I likely will have some module level objectives that don't align with course level objectives.

Are any of you struggling with alignment? Trying to make the course you think should be taught align with the ancient objectives of a course that used to be taught?

Reference:
American Government Alignment Outline - in Workflowy
Quality Matters website

Course Structuring - Technology last

The quarter starts in less than two weeks and I am scrambling to get everything organized. I am especially conscious of the fact that I will be out of town at a conference every week in October. So at least the first several weeks of my American Government class needs to be completely done.

I have been using Workflowy to organize my American Government class and create my course map. Workflowy is essentially an outlining program.  I personally love outlines - I have a linear mind and ordering things in lists like this makes me happy.  I know it is not for everyone, so you might want to use mind maps or whatever. 

When planning an online class it is incredibly tempting to dive right into the learning management system, but resist the temptation!  The technology should be last.  You want the technology to support what you are doing, not the other way around. If you don't know what you are doing, then you can't know how to support it. So, start with your outline, your course plan, your outcomes/objectives.  

This is hard, I admit. For me and I'm guessing a lot of you, playing with the technology and thinking of how it can improve teaching and learning is great fun. But in the crunch time of the last couple of weeks before the quarter, there is no time for fun. I have to be focused and get this course map/outline done. You'll see how successful I am by checking out my live Workflowy American Government Outline.

I know I'm not the only one to get to September and wonder where the summer went. I have dozens of blog posts that I wrote mentally but somehow never managed to get my fingers to the keyboard.  Now, my Summer 2012 Global Studies class is done.  It was a whirlwind of craziness. This week, I will write several posts on my experiences with Canvas and lessons learned.

I'll also be gearing up for my American Government class, which was also sadly neglected during the summer months.

Updating My Syllabus

I realized I was working from the wrong version of my syllabus. Finding the rignt version reminded me of some good statements I've added in recent years. I thought I would share them with you.

Confidentiality - this was created after a presentation I gave on Web 2.0 technologies and student privacy. 
Confidentiality. Your student records are protected by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). This includes the privacy of your interactions in this class. It is important that everyone respect the privacy of our classroom. Do not share out the work, discussion posts or other communications of your classmates without their express permission. For more information on your rights and obligations in this regard, visit http://www.highline.edu/home/catalog/07-09/appendices/college_policies.html#rights.

Submitting Your Work: Please note that all assignments must be posted in Canvas. Assignments will not be accepted via email or by any other means for credit. If you are having technical trouble, you may submit via email as evidence that you did the work on time. However, work submitted via email will not be graded. The work submitted via email must be submitted in Canvas within 2 days of the due date or regular late penalties will apply. A Help Desk Ticket must accompany late submitted work to be eligible for the two day extension.

Necessary Reworking

Inevitably, when faculty first hear that we are changing to a new LMS, the response is not delight, but dread. One motivator for that dread is the certain knowledge that the things you had all nicely arranged will need to be reworked.  There is simply no way around it.  I am in the heart of that reworking now and, I'll be honest with you, its painful and annoying.

Stuff I'm reworking:

• Course Content - I leave content locked until we get to it. In ANGEL I did that by locking down folders. In Canvas, apparently I need to lock down individual items because locking down the module equivalent of the folders did not actually hide or prevent access to the content.  I'm popping regularly into the Student View to see what can be seen.
• Quiz Questions - In ANGEL, I used quiz banks for all my quizzes. So, I'd have a bank of 20 questions, for example, and only 10 questions would be on the quiz.  My actual quizzes had no questions in them, just a link to the quiz bank. Unfortunately, my ANGEL quiz banks came over as a single bank, all 620 questions.  I am going question by question through the massive bank and moving them into new banks. Incredibly painful.  In future, I would populate my quizzes in ANGEL first, delete the quiz banks and then move them over.
• ANGEL pages - the ANGEL pages (Add Content > Add Page) came over nicely. However, as far as I can tell, I can't edit them in Canvas.  I'm creating Canvas Pages and copying and pasting the HTML over from ANGEL. 

On the fun side, students are starting to be active in the class, accepting my course invitations,  completing the Pre Class Assignment and taking my pre-class survey, which I'll share with you next week, after it is complete.

I'm leaving for a 2 1/2 day meeting on Sunday, so between now and Sunday morning, I need to complete my course orientation and week 1.  I've got my work cut out for me.  I see some corner cutting in my future.

Also, I am inspired by this great video of Mr. Rodgers. Learning is good. New is good. I'm growing ideas in the garden of my mind. I plan to play this at the start of every Canvas training to get us in the right frame of mind. And when I'm feeling frustrated, I'll take a break and listen to it myself.

Crunch Time for Global Studies

While I am generally a very calm person, I must admit to feeling slightly panicked at the moment. I really need to send out the student pre class assignment letter today and I am totally not ready.  As I prepare, I'm making notes for you as to what I'm doing.

• Permission: A couple of weeks ago, I got permission from the eLearning director and my department chair to use Canvas for this class.  Highline isn't moving to Canvas right away, so this will be a bit of a shock for students. Plus, they won't be able to get support from campus or other normal channels, so I had to be sure everyone was ok with that before proceeding. 
• ANGEL: We're not using ANGEL, but some students might still go there. So I set up my ANGEL classroom by turning off all tabs (except course and manage), deleting all content from the Course page except Announcements and setting up an announcement with visible dates for the whole quarter telling students that our class is in Canvas.

• Observers: I set up department chair and eLearning director as observers (what can observers see?)
• Orientation Activity:  I copied and pasted this over into Canvas Pages. I also used the Assignment for the Backup plan and Quizzes for my survey (to do a survey, you add a quiz and choose "ungraded survey").  After adding the content, I organized it in the Modules area.
• Lock Down: this class is still very much under construction. In ANGEL, it is super easy to make the content invisible to students. Canvas is much more open.  As far as I can tell, I can make content inaccessible but not invisible.  I locked down all of the modules except for the Pre Class Assignment and the Syllabus content.  Here is what it looks like:

• Explanatory videos: I made two (well, it ended up being three) videos explaining how students can log into the class, update their profiles and notifications and do the orientation assignment.  I meant for this to be two videos but I forgot that notifications was a separate step when setting up the profile.  I didn't want to re-record it because I needed to invent a new student email address each time I did the recording so I could walk them through signup.  I also tried to make the initial login video general enough that anyone could use it.
• Welcome to Canvas
• Notifications Supplement
• Doing the Pre Class Assignment
• Edit the Welcome Letter: I changed up my Welcome Letter to accomodate the change to Canvas and warn the students what was coming.

Phew! I think I'm ready to send the message to students. This all took me about 3 hours - not too bad, considering I didn't really know what I was doing.  The one piece that gave me headaches was trying to find instructions for students.  More on that in a separate post.

Outcomes in Canvas

I've spent a lot of time talking about learning outcomes. Starting off with outcomes is key to good course design and to Quality Matters design in particular.  Canvas is supposed to make integrating outcomes easier than ANGEL.  I went to a couple of sessions at the conference on outcomes but no one did what I needed - talked about how to plug my existing outcomes into Canvas. I could try to figure it out, but since I only have 10 days left, I don't have time for that. Off to YourTube.

Canvas has a YouTube channel.  Once there, I clicked on Search Channel and searched for Outcomes (on a side note, before I did that, I saw a section called InstructureCon 2012- they already have all the conference sessions up on YouTube - cool!).  So, my search yielded 7 results including an Instructure Best Practices video, 42 minutes called Introduction to Learning Outcomes, below.  42 minutes sounds like a long time, but I will multitask while I watch and I will synthesize what I learn into something quick and easy for you in a future post.

Prepping my class in Canvas

I decided to teach my Summer class in Canvas. I also decided not to do anything with my course space until after the conference. Well, that time is now.  I mentioned in a previous post that the course moved over easily, but that moving over a messy class resulted in a lot of mess in Canvas.  So, I deleted that class, cleaned up my ANGEL class and imported it into a new Canvas classroom.

I had all of my ANGEL content organized in folders and subfolders.  Canvas caught the top level folders but not the lower folders. For example, I had a top level folder called "Weekly Work" and in that folder, I had separate folders for each week.

It seems easy enough to create new modules and drag and drop content into the right place. But it seems like that might be time consuming.  I thought instead to go to the Files area to try and organize stuff there.  I realized quickly that doing it in Files wouldn't work because ANGEL gives files giberish names which were carried over into Canvas (so this is really an ANGEL flaw, not a Canvas one).

In my Intro to Canvas session, they talked about the Modules as being the last thing to do, after assignments were created, etc. One would just organize things there, not build there.

I fiddled around looking at other options and I'm thinking the easiest way to go will be to build in the Canvas way and copy and paste from ANGEL rather than work fully with my imported content.  We'll see how this goes. . . .

Mobile Statement

I'm back from the Canvas InstructureCon and raring to go. Good thing too, because it's crunch time - class starts in 10 days and I am really not ready.

I attended a great session on thinking about mobile access for classes. Canvas has a great mobile app for the iOS.  The presenter clarified that when he said "mobile" he really meant iOS, specifically iPads.  He said he really didn't think people wanted to or actually did engage in course work on their mobile phones, the screen was too small. I totally disagree - especially since you can record submissions, freeing one up for typing.  Anyway, he was restricting his thinking to tablet computing.

Then he said that android tablets were not really relevant in this discussion. He asked how many people in the room had an android tablet with them in the room. No one raised their hands. I have a Kindle Fire, but I'd left it at home.  He then asked how many people had iPads with them in the room. Dozens of people raised their hands, including me. Point made.

He recommended that, if you were making your course mobile friendly, you should put a mobile statement in your syllabus so students know what specifically they can do on what devices.  I have crafted one that I still need to test out, but its a start:

Mobile Access - This class is mobile friendly. Using the browser on your mobile device, you should be able to do the following activities:

• Access course readings
• participate in discussion
• take quizzes

You can also download the Canvas App on your Apple iOS device (iPad, iPhone, Touch) and have access to even more features.

Two things missing from this list are viewing course videos and submitting assignments. Both require some work arounds or the Canvas App. On the Canvas App page, a note at the bottom states that the App functionality is only available to Canvas customers, so I don't think you can use it with the free for teachers access. But I'll test it out and see.
 
Resources:
Canvas Mobile - includes a little video on what you can do with the Canvas mobile app.
My Global Studies Syllabus

Canvas Pre-conferences

Today was the first day of the Canvas conference, with AM and PM pre-conference sessions. The AM session was Getting Started with Canvas, which ended up being unsatisfactory in several ways. We started by learning the student view of Canvas. Unfortunately for the presenter, everyone in the room was very eager to learn how to design their own Canvas space and had little patience with learning the student view. It made the whole first part of the session rather chaotic.

The second part of the workshop, on the instructor view, was better done.  We built a simple course and had time to play with some of the tools.  But, even though I feel like an absolute beginner with Canvas, I don't feel like I learned a lot more than I already knew.  This could be because Canvas is supposed to be so incredibly easy to learn that even the little I know is a lot.  I'll know more about that by the end of the Conference.

In the afternoon, I did a pre-session on Canvas Collaboration tools. There are a lot of them.  Most are integrations of third party products like Google Docs, Scribd and Big Blue Button.  Sadly, during the workshop, most of the tools didn't work the way they were supposed to. Also, the organization of the workshop was also rather chaotic.

My takeaway message on the collaboration tools was to be very deliberate with my use of the collaboration tools and make sure I support students fully in their use.  The best piece of advice from the presenter was to give students adequate time to "play" with the tools, otherwise they would turn the first assignment into a play session and things might not turn out as hoped. So, first assign something fun using the tool and then move on to the real work.

Still, despite the chaos, I felt like it was a good day. I met some really interesting people and exchanged some great ideas.  It's been nice to talk to people at colleges that have used Canvas for a few years. We spend a lot of time amongst ourselves in Washington and it is delightful to talk to people from other places in the country.

Editing my Flat World Knowledge Book

I selected my textbook, American Government and Politics in the Information Age, published by Flat World Knowledge. They went through a process to confirm that I am really a faculty member.

One of the benefits of using a Flat World Knowledge book is that I can edit the book to my exact specifications, editing,  adding and deleting content as I wish. I got a hard copy of the book and am reading through it, striking stuff I don't want and making notes about the things I want to add/edit.  I also made a photocopy of the Contents page to have sort of an overarching view of where I was going.  Since everything I have is on paper, I decided to try getting this online so I can see how it works.

After logging in, I had a hard time figuring out how to edit the book. I finally went to the Catalog and clicked on the Plus sign next to my textbook title. There, a small link says "customize this book".  Then a pretty snazzy web based version of the book pops up making it theoretically pretty simple to edit the content. 

After a few minutes, though, I found I was having trouble moving things the way I wanted to. I wished there was a little video tutorial.  Voila! I looked in the Help section and including several short tutorials on using the editing tool MIYO.  I'll watch them and give you an update soon on how my adoption is going.

Resources

Flat World Knowledge - http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

Tutorials Page - http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/Tutorial-Videos

Plagiarism

Wow - it's been a couple of weeks since my last post. I'm sorry! I've been drowning in work that has to be done as opposed to the proactive work that I'd like to be doing.  I'm guessing you haven't missed me, since you're probably swamped too.

Today, Renee Carney of Lower Columbia, Connie Broughton of the State Board eLearning and I presented at the eLearning Community, a weekly opportunity to get professional development around eLearning topics and tools. 

One thing I mentioned in my piece is my Plagiarism Team. The Plagiarism Team is a place students go when I am concerned that they are plagiarizing. It's been my experience that students are often genuinely surprised when I accuse them of cheating - they apparently didn't know that copying and pasting whole paragraphs from academic articles was cheating, even when they cited the source. Given that, I go for the educational approach as opposed to the punitive approach.

So, in the Plagiarism Team, the student gets access to Highline's Plagiarism Tutorial.  They also lose access to the rest of the course - they cannot move forward in the class until they successfully complete this brief unit on plagiarizing.  

Highline's Plagiarism Tutorial, created by the fabulous librarians there, gives a wonderful explanation of the various aspects of plagiarism and how to avoid them.  You might check to see if your own library has one or just use the great one at Highline. 

After they complete the tutorial, the students take a quiz that I created based on the tutorial. They have to get 100% on the quiz and they can take it unlimited times until they get all of the questions right. Once they do, the rest of the content is unlocked and the student can move on with the class.

What do you do to prevent plagiarizing? And what do you do when plagiarizing occurs?

Resources:

Highline's Plagiarism Tutorial - http://flightline.highline.edu/reference/ILModules/plagiarism/

eLearning Community past recordings -http://elearninginwa.blogspot.com/p/elluminate.html -  Scroll down to July 20 for the presentation that Renee, Scott Dennis and I did last year on this topic. Today's session should be linked there soon. Also check out the other great recordings.

Welcome Letter

Well, we are 5 weeks out from the start of Summer Quarter. Ideally, I'd be farther along than I am, but I've still got plenty of time to get this well established class gussied up for Summer. 


Two weeks out from the start of the quarter, I write to my students with my Pre-Class Welcome Letter. This is the start of my orientation period. My orientation goal is two fold. One is to let students know what they are getting into and make sure that they have time to drop the class and take something else if this isn't what they wanted. 


Two is to make sure they are set up to succeed once we start substantive work on Wednesday of week One.  Towards that end, I have them do a very low stakes activity for every technical task I expect them to do during the quarter.  For example, I expect folks to know how to post to the discussion board, so I have them post their introduction on the discussion board. I expect them to be able to take quizzes, so I have them take the syllabus quiz.


So, this will all get started with my Pre-Class Welcome Letter. That launches my Welcome Activity, within ANGEL.  I expect students to do this activity before the quarter starts. This insures that they are able to log into ANGEL and if not  they can seek help before the crunch time. It also make sure they are ready to hit the ground running on day 1.


The Welcome activity has 5 steps, but I might whittle it down to 3:

1. Welcome information - read a little bit about what it is like to be in an online class. This used to be way more involved years ago when we didn't have a slick learning management system like ANGEL and most students had not taken online classes. However, times have changed. I'm wondering now whether I should delete this step and incorporate it into another step.
2. Do a system check - This helps students know whether there is something about their computer setup that will cause problems.  Since ANGEL does a system check every time students log in, this might be another step I can eliminate.
3. Find your Learning Style - I like this as a way to have students take responsibility for their learning. I have them use this quiz - http://people.usd.edu/~bwjames/tut/learning-style/stylest.html
4. Prepare a backup plan - this has students prepare for the inevitable technical problems that arise. I also have them report back on their learning style and plan when they are going to work on the class.  I make suggestions on how they might do this with the 15 Hours document.
5. Get to Know ANGEL - I encourage folks to do the ANGEL tutorial if they have not used ANGEL before.

A Canvas Import

I'm not sure what happened to the week, but here we are at the other end of it, without the catching up that I had hoped to do. Oh well.


My college, Seattle Central, will be piloting Canvas in the fall and we're starting to make plans and everyone is getting quite excited. In that spirit, I decided to export my class from ANGEL and import it into Canvas, just to see how it worked. I recorded the experience in real time for your viewing pleasure.


The whole process was really very easy. The main lesson I took from the experience (which I should have remembered from moving from Blackboard to ANGEL) was to clean up my classroom BEFORE doing the export. Delete all those miscellaneous files and assignments that I don't use any more. That whole idea of "garbage in, garbage out" is alive and well when it comes to moving from one LMS to another.

Book selected for American Government

I selected a book for American Government. I will be using Flat World Knowledge's American Government and Politics in the Information Age. As I mentioned in a previous post, Flat World Knowledge texts are open source and free for students to read online. They are completely editable and students can select from many formats to have the content printed if they wish.  I need to move aggressively on customizing the book - I learned that I'm about 2 weeks late on my fall book order! Why order a book? I'd like to have a few in stock for folks who prefer the traditional page (which, to be honest, includes me when it comes to textbooks).


I also discovered a cool new tool that will make it way easier for me to do course mapping. I am using Workflowy.  I'm an outline kind of girl, so this tool just works for me. Here is my Workflowy Course Map for American Government. As with everything - this is a work in progress - I only discovered Workflowy this weekend and already I'm lovin' it.


Resources:
Workflowy - www.workflowy.com

Dynamic Calendar

Last week was insane and I did not have a chance to post at all. This week I hope to make up for it with 2 posts a day. Today's post was motivated by an email from a student who will be gone for a week during summer quarter and wonders if she should take the Global Studies class.  That motivated me to get out my Dynamic Calendar.  


My dynamic calendar was created by my friend James Peyton, economics faculty at Highline.  He showed it to me at least 10 years ago and it's been working for me ever since.  I like having a one page download for students to see the whole class schedule. Though my class basically follows the same pattern every quarter, I was always having to tediously  change every date for each new quarter. This calendar is an excel spreadsheet. I change the first two dates in the calendar and all of the rest of the dates automatically update to this quarter. Woo hoo!


Just a note about how I schedule my quarters. Following the model of WAOL and the advice of a wise Highline colleague, Diana Lee, I start my weeks on Wednesdays and have work due on Tuesdays at midnight. This has several advantages. First, work is not due on weekends. We know students wait until the last minute and then have questions. I don't want to answer those questions on the weekends. So, I have work due during the week when I am happy to answer questions.  Also, this schedule makes it easy for the students who want to work primarily on weekends or primarily during the week to both be happy.  


Additionally, I use the first two days of the quarter for orientation, to get the students up to speed, doing introductions, etc.  By Wednesday of the first week, we're ready to roll with real work, as opposed to sacrificing the whole first week for that kind of activity, as I've seen people do. I've suggested this model to lots of people and everyone who tries it is really happy - you should give it a shot.


Here is the link to my draft schedule for Summer 2012 and here is a link to a basically blank dynamic schedule that you can adapt for your own use. It is set up for the 8 week summer quarter, but here is one for a 10 week quarter.


Resources
8 Week Dynamic Calendar Template
10 week Dynamic Calendar Template

Online Group Work

Today, I am sharing with you one of my biggest teaching fears - group work. Group work is something I avoid like the plague if I can. However, this quarter is all about being open and I imagine that I am not the only person terrified of group work. 


With that in mind, I decided to try a small group project in my American Government class. I also decided to talk to a few of my favorite communications faculty for suggestions on how to make it not so scary. 


So here, in the first of a series (I hope) is an interview with Debra Waddell. Debra is a part time faculty at Cascadia, Shoreline, Edmonds Lake Washington and Walla Walla.  She teaches in every format, including several online communications classes. We sat on my deck last Sunday and chatted about the scary aspects of group work and how to avoid it. I think I can sum it up by saying plan for conflict.


Online Group Work Interview with Debra Waddell (about 20 minutes)


I have not tried posting audio in a blog before. I've uploaded the file to my Google Drive and am sharing out the file. It's a little clumsy, it won't stream, you'll need to download the file. If this link doesn't work for you, let me know. 


In the interview, Debra references a great team contract format initiated by Cascadia instructor Danielle Powell, in the reference section below. 

Resources 
 Danielle Powell's team contract (Thanks Danielle!) (As always, if you decided to make use of any shared resources, be sure to give credit where credit is due!)

Technology Takeover

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a series of stories on Marketplace called Robots Ate My Job, in which David Broncaccio drove from coast to coast trying not to have personal contact with anyone, dealing only with automated hotel check ins and self checkouts, etc. It was very interesting.


Over the last few weeks, I've been at several meetings and conferences where I encountered a very real fear among faculty that technology would take over their jobs. This, for example, was a frequent unspoken message when folks talked about why they didn't use Tegrity (what if my students stop coming to class?).  


This fear is, frankly, baffling to me.  In my mind, if technology can do the same thing that I do, that means it probably does not require my two terminal degrees to get that job done.  So, hooray for technology - I'll let it do that job while I do something more worthwhile that does require at least one of my fancy degrees. Technology isn't stealing our jobs, it's liberating us from the mundane to really engage with students in a more authentic way. It's a tool that makes it easier for us to do our jobs.


Of course, if you are reading this, I'm preaching to the choir, so I'll get down off my soapbox. I'll wrap up this commentary with a brief postscript. On my way home from the ATL conference, I stopped for lunch at Jack in the Box.  In the lobby of the restaurant was a big machine urging me to use it to place my order instead of the friendly looking woman at the counter. Thinking of the Broncaccio story, I decided to try the machine.  I should say that I am one who generally opts for self check out at the grocery store and ATMs instead of going in the bank. The Jack in the box machine was quick and easy to use. However, it somehow felt rather unsatisfying. I would have preferred to chat for a moment with the friendly woman at the counter.

Back from the ATL conference

I had a great time at the Assessment, Teaching and Learning conference. It was fabulous to see so many of you there, particularly my former colleagues at Cascadia.  I always enjoy this particular conference for the opportunity to see people I haven't seen for a while and the great ideas generated not only in the sessions but in the hallway conversations.

It was one such "hallway conversation" (actually, it was outside of the Starbucks) when someone advised that one should take a moment after the conference to reflect and then take two or three good ideas and commit to incorporating them. That seemed like wise advise, so here are my three ideas from the conference that I'm going to integrate into my upcoming teaching.

(Some of the links below are to my conference blog. I like to blog conferences as a way to remember what I learned and to share some of that information out with others.)

1. Data Collection. I attended a pre-session on gathering qualitative data. I like to survey my students fairly regularly, but it is somewhat inconsistent. I'm going to be a lot more strategic with my surveying and have all of my questions planned out before the quarter starts.

2. Digital Storytelling.  I attended a fabulous session on digital storytelling.  I think it could have good application in both of my classes on the Service Learning Project. I really need to explore this idea, though, as it might be too much, given all the other stuff I do in the classes.  I have to question myself as to whether this would just be using technology for the sake of using technology or whether it will increase student learning significantly enough to justify the effort of me and the students.

3. Assessment Dashboard.  Hands down the best session I attended was one by my friends at Cascadia on creating an assessment engine or assessment dashboard.  It is sort of a physical manifestation of outcomes, to help look at individual assessments to determine whether they are achieving all of the goals one is trying to achieve. Genius.  I will aim to build my own dashboard this weekend, while it is still fresh in my mind.

Assessment & Measurement

Today I am looking at my Global Studies course through the lens of Quality Matters Standard 3 on Assessment and Measurement.


First, I realized, I should have this course organized on a course map. Since I already have all of the course and module level outcomes written out in the course, I just copied and pasted them into a table.  I also thought this would be easier since I repeat the exact same assignments during each week of the quarter. The next step will be to make sure everything maps, per Standard 3.1.  This standard requires that the assessments measure the learning objectives and are consistent with the course objectives.


So, as I fill in this chart, I am putting the specifics of each assignment in and making sure everything maps to the course outcomes.  So this is draft 1 and later on I will post the final version.  If something doesn't map properly, I can either adjust the assignment so that it does map or I can create something new that will map.  


I am also planning on using the LMS to map my outcomes, something I have never done. You can do this in ANGEL and in Canvas.  I will be teaching in ANGEL this summer, so I'll be using its its outcome mapping feature. I will show it to you in this little Jing video.  


Standard 3.2 requires a clear course grading policy, which I have in my syllabus, in my course orientation and in my rubrics.  I always have to check that things add up properly, since when I change stuff, the calculations always seem to get a bit messed up. When we do Quality Matters reviews, that is one place we often see small problems.


Standard 3.3 makes sure that specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of student work and that they are tied to the grading. Again, this is in my rubrics.  I make heavy use of ANGEL's rubric tool. I understand that Canvas has a nice rubric tool as well, so I'm looking forward to learning that.


Standard 3.4 makes sure assessments are sequenced, varied and appropriate for the level of the class. Although I have the same assignments throughout the class (ie. 10 essays), all of the work get more complex as the class goes along. I add variety also through the activities attached to the discussion. I always have them do something, like look for invasive species in their neighborhoods, and then discuss the activity on the discussion board.  The thing you don't want to do here is have a midterm and a final.  That is pretty much the opposite of sequenced and varied.


Finally, Standard 3.5 gives students multiple chances to measure their own learning. This is the standard that, in my experience, people most often fail to meet. The commentary in the rubric notes that this can be met through self tests, interactive games with feedback built in, peer reviews and model papers. I have model papers, but that used to be it. To add more opportunities, I added a second chance on my weekly quiz. Now, instead of getting to take the quiz once, they can take it twice, making the first time a self test. They get the highest of the two scores.  Students LOVE this, it makes them very happy and it was really very easy for me to do. Talk about win/win.


Reference:
Mapping Outcomes in ANGEL in 3 minutes - http://youtu.be/wE3SkSqckk0
Using Rubrics in ANGEL - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL1SZmbcuLc - from Centralia's amazing Kathy Brooks.
Using Rubrics in Canvas - http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4210/l/40813-what-are-rubrics-in-canvas-video 
See the links in the Navigation bar for links to my class, the Quality Matters Rubric and more.

More sources for Open Textbooks

I noted in my last text about open educational resources that it was hard to find actual textbooks. However, just today Tom Caswell from the Open Course Library sent out 3 new resources for Open Textbooks. Sweet!

Here are 3 new tools for your OER toolbox:

1.       Open Stax College (http://openstaxcollege.org/) – offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today’s student budgets.

2.       Online Textbook Adoption Tool – Akademos recently launched a new textbook adoption tool at http://adoption.akademos.com/.  They want to add more Open Textbooks to their reviews, and I’m working with them to line up some promotional codes that will give faculty reviewers a $40 credit in TextbookX.com. They ask that those interested please leave reviews on two books (1-2 paragraphs for each book) and fill out the rating rubric. I’ll send the codes out when they come.

3.       Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) – a great effort out of the University of Minnesota to create a peer reviewed catalog of open textbooks. U of M's press release is below.  There's also a great story on NPR: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/04/23/university-open-source-textbooks

Back to the Course map

A couple of days ago, I posted about using Canvas for my American Government class. I forgot to add, however, that it is way too early to actually be putting things in the LMS. I am still working on my course map, which is limited by the fact that I am still working on my module level outcomes.  Once I have sketched out my module level outcomes and my initial ways of measuring the achievement of those outcomes (the assessments), then I'll have a basis for selecting my materials.

Now, I know this seems convoluted and backwards. But if we are really centered on outcomes and student learning, then the outcomes and measurement needs to be at the beginning, not at the end.

That being said, I'm a bit behind (the story of my life!). I can't believe I'm already into week 4 of this project. My course map should be mostly done at this point, so I'm giving myself a goal to get it finished this week. Stay tuned!

Resources:
American Government Course Map
Blank Course Map 

The Dangers of sitting

For a lot of us, especially those of us who teach online, sitting is an occupational hazard. How much of a hazard has been in the news a lot lately (see, for example, last month's story on NPR, Sitting All Day is Worse For You thank You Might Think).  So, making little notes about staying healthy is something I've tried to incorporate into my training for online faculty.  A story yesterday in Mashable (The More You Sit the Sooner You'll Die) reminded me that I should  share with this group.  I thought this Infographic from Mashable pretty much says everything you need to know.

I bike as my primary way of getting to work, but, as the NPR and Mashable stories makes clear, that's not enough. I have a ball chair and a standing desk and a bike desk (though I admit I don't use either half as much as I should). Sitting continues to be a huge challenge for me. What, if anything, are you doing to limit the dangers of sitting?

(I had a cool infographic here, but was asked by the creator of the infographic to remove it and the reference to their website)
Resources:
Just how Dangerous is Sitting All Day (contains the above Infographic) from Mashable
The More You Sit the Sooner You'll Die by Sonia Paul on Mashable
One Year at my Standing Desk from Lifehacker
Sitting All Day is Worse For You thank You Might Think from National Public Radio

A quick post about Instapaper

I don't know if many of you are Instapaper fans, but today I found an article that solved a big problem and I was so delighted I thought I would share it. 


I find lots of articles through email newsletters and one of my favorite ways to browse through those is on my iPad during a found moment.  The downside is I had no way to save the articles I wanted to read later without copying and pasting, which is annoying and time consuming. Today I found a way to add an Instapaper Read Later bookmark for Safari on the iPad. Woo hoo!  


Here are the instructions.  They are, I admit, rather cumbersome, but if you are a big user of the iPad and Instapaper, they are well worth the 5 minutes or so needed to follow them.


Reference:
A visual guide for installing the Instapaper read later bookmark on the iPad by Lorenzo Orlando Caum

New twist on the flipped classroom

The flipped classroom has been in the news a lot lately. This is when you have students prepare for an interactive classroom experience by getting the lecture online before class. This idea stems from the understanding that lecturing isn't a great way to teach nor is it a very good use of classroom time.  With the rise of tools like Tegrity for lecture capture and the ease of course management systems, putting the lecture online is becoming more and more popular for hybrid and traditional instruction.


In a great article titled Rethinking the Way College Students are Taught by Emily Hanford, on instructor goes a step beyond simply flipping the classroom. He engages the students in teaching each other by tying the preparatory reading (or lecture) with student generated areas of confusion. He then uses those points of confusion as the basis for peer instruction, where the students help each other understand the confusing topics.


I spoke last week at the Tegrity Conference on the future of lecture capture. One of the questions that came up in my presentation was, if we don't spend our time in the classroom lecturing, students will feel cheated, like the teacher isn't doing their job. Well, my response was that the teacher needed to be engaged, not just sitting sipping a latte and reading a magazine while the students were in conversation. This is a great model for that engagement.


It is also a great model for hybrid instruction and the overarching challenging of tying together the online with the  face to face instruction. 


I'm struggling, though, to think of applications of this idea for the fully online classroom, which is generally asynchronous and thus slower moving. While this can and does happen in a discussion forum, it doesn't seem like it would be quite as dynamic as what is described in the article.


What do you guys think?  How might you implement dynamic peer instruction in the fully online classroom?  Have you tried this in your hybrid or face to face classes? How has it worked?


Reference:
 Rethinking the Way College Students are Taught by Emily Hanford

Experimenting with Canvas

Here in Washington, the community colleges are preparing for a presumed move from our ANGEL learning management system to Canvas. This is in its very early stages and it will be several months before eLearning departments will have access to Canvas classrooms to play around with. 


In the meantime, my colleague, Renee Carney from Lower Columbia Community College, told me that you can get a free for teachers Canvas account from the Instructure website.  I'm going to give it a shot and see if it will work as a staging place for my course while I wait for our real access to Canvas to begin.


Sign up was easy and, while waiting for the confirmation email, I watched the 5 minute overview video. I set up my course, added an assignment and one student.  It was all terribly simple yet robust.  As soon as I get some content in there, I'll give you a log in to check it out. In the meantime, you might want to get your own Free for Teachers account with Canvas.


Resources:
 a free for teachers Canvas account from the Instructure website

Course Objectives

It is an amazing sunny Saturday here in the Pacific Northwest and sitting inside at my computer is almost a crime. Still, the thrill of Quality Matters calls :-)


Standard 2 on Learning Objectives (also known as Course Outcomes) is the heart of the Quality Matters rubric and the heart of a course.  Everything needs to lead back to the objectives. If something does not connect to the objectives, it does not belong in the course.


Today, we are looking at learning objectives in the context of refreshing my existing Global Studies class. Standard 2.1 wants to insure that my course outcomes are measurable. Here is a link to my syllabus, where you'll see my measurable outcomes as one of the first items. 


Measurable outcomes is something that folks really struggle with. In teaching the QM rubric, I've learned about  great resources that I will share with you.  One is the Helpful Hundred, 100 verbs that are active and measurable. Exchanging your passive or non-measurable verbs with these active and measurable ones is a great way to improve your course.


Standard 2.2 looks to the module level objectives, making sure they are consistent with the course level objectives and measurable.  I talked a little about module level objectives already, so I'll refer you to that.


Standard 2.3 makes sure that all of the learning objectives are written from the student's point of view. What will the student be able to DO when this objective is met?  So phrase your objective like this, "At the end of this unit, you will be able to _______".  


Standard 2.4 requires that instructions clearly explain to the student how to meet the objectives. I do this in my syllabus and in each of the course assignment descriptions.  In the syllabus, it looks like this:

Weekly Quizzes – For each week you will have a short, objective quiz. The quiz questions will be multiple choice or true/false and will be graded automatically by ANGEL so you get instant feedback. The assignment goals are to

 Insure you have read and understood the material

 Give you a quick measure of how you are doing

 Provide alternative for people who are uncomfortable with writing to demonstrate knowledge

Finally, Standard 2.5, which require that the learning objectives are appropriate to the level of the course. Another handy tool I learned about from my Quality Matters training is the Bloom's Verb Wheel. This looks at the different levels of the Blooms taxonomy and aligns it with appropriate verbs and activities. For example, for an intro course, "knowledge" is a common goal. In the verb wheel, I see that aligned with verbs like "describe", "recognize", and "label". Next I see appropriate assessments like "text reading".


Resources:
The Helpful Hundred
Blooms Verb Wheel
Find the links to the Quality Matters Rubric and other helpful links in the navigation bar on the right.