Tomorrow, I will be making two presentations to two very different audiences. One is a free webinar I'm doing for the TLT Group (register here) -- the audience will be primarily college instructors and instructional designers. Another is for the California Community College Online Education Initiative -- the audience will be a diverse group of stakeholders collecting input about the important characteristics for a statewide LMS for California Community Colleges (for classes that are offered through OEI initative).
Both of these presentations will incorporate my experiences and my students' experiences with using VoiceThread as an asynchronous discussion tool since 2007.
"Experiences" is the key word here. This is not about a tool. It's about how teaching with a tool not typically found within an LMS toolkit can create a learning environment that impacts the student learning experience differently. It's about the importance of relationships and affective learning in an online environment. It's about the power of the human voice when a person is trying to figure out a new idea or delivering feedback. It's about supporting and inspiring students to be vulnerable. It's about what gets lost if online instructors rely only on the LMS toolkit. It's about how LTI integration with web-based tools saves faculty time (and money) and lowers the barrier of adoption of emerging technologies by providing embeds with a click, secure activities, grading from the gradebook, and automatically generated student accounts (with a single sign on), and the ability for students to generate their own creations that can be shared with a public audience (or secure to just the class registrants).
Below is a presentation you may review that provides the current (through Spring 2014) results of four consecutive semesters of anonymous online student surveys about how using asynchronous voice/video conversations impacts their experiences.
As I reflect on these findings, I am left with one question: Are we doing it wrong? What are your takeaways?
To be clear about my relationship with VoiceThread, I am a college instructor and instructional technologist who has taught online and face-to-face with VoiceThread since 2007. I supports faculty with the effective pedagogical application of the tool. The community college at which I teach has a sitewide license with LTI integration of VoiceThread into Blackboard and so does the university where I work as an instructional technologist. In the past, I was a paid higher education consultant for VoiceThread (to develop a higher ed webinar series) from 2012-2013. In 2013, I authored a self-published eBook with compensation from the last months of consultancy at VoiceThread. This eBook is available at no cost to VoiceThread site license holders and it is available for sale or rent to the general public. I receive royalties from the sales of the eBook. I am a doctoral student working with VoiceThread as my research site to explore how the use of an eBook as a faculty support resource for a web 2.0 tool impacts faculty perceptions about the tool. Currently, I receive no income from VoiceThread.
Last March, I was hired by CSU Channel Islands to support faculty with the exciting journey into online and blended teaching and learning. Between March and June, I worked furiously to develop a series of online courses for the small, creative, and entrepreneurial campus. If that sounds like an unsual way to describe a public institution of higher education, you're right. And that's one of the things I love so much about this institution -- and why I decided it was right for me to work here. :) It has a vibrancy and sense of curiosity about learning that makes me feel very at home.
Risky Business
Me Hanging Out with my CSUCI colleagues,
Jill Leafsted and Michael McGarry.
The simple fact that CSUCI was willing to hire me to work remotely to support faculty in this endeavor says a great deal. I know, I know -- how can hiring a remote employee have a "humanizing" effect? What am I, nuts?
Well, on the one hand, it really makes a great deal of sense. One of my major tasks is developing online trainings, facilitating these trainings entirely remotely, supporting the vetting of emerging technologies for the campus, and working with faculty (which I do through asynchronous and synchronous technologies). For example, I participate in one-on-one and group meetings with my colleagues via Google+ Hangouts. This process has been an enriching learning experience on both sides, I believe, as many individuals on campus have had the opportunity to learn experientially about the humanizing effect of technology without being explicitly told that's what their learning.
I don't want to come across as one who is advocating for the virtualization of brick-and-mortar campus employees. But I think there is something to be said about considering the option in certain scenarios when it makes sense. That requires a leader to do something against the grain of what's typical in higher ed tradition and that can be immensely difficult and scary. Roselind Torres would say this is a characteristic that defines a 21st century leader.
The Courses
The three courses I've developed for faculty are each two weeks long. We offered the first full series of the courses in the Spring (May-June), as I was developing the final course. The feedback has been extremely positive...but, yes, these are the early adopters so it's more likely to see positive reactions to online learning, in general.
The Tool Buffet, a suite of emerging technologies
with humanizing potential.
Click here to visit the site I've put together for CSUCI faculty, which includes a link to each syllabus. The How to Humanize Your Online Class course is a unique offering to CSUCI (as far as I'm aware). Its intent is to model to faculty how to effectively integrate outside (web-based) technologies into an LMS (in our instance, Blackboard), review recent research that explores how voice/video and social technologies are being used to improve teaching and social presence, experience the humanizing impact of select tools within an online learning environment, encourage faculty to experiment with emerging technologies, and to reduce to fear and anxiety often associated with participating online in video and voice. The faculty that complete the course each produce an online video introduction for their course, in a tool of their choice, and share it in a (closed) Google+ Community for CSUCI faculty, as well as create a "humanized course action plan" which is intended to be a reflective learning experience to help faculty be cognizant about their growth (this too is shared in the Google+ Community with peers).
Here is a link to the Tool Buffet that is provided to faculty in the "Humanizing" course. Notice that it is created in a web-based tool (Populr.me) (the same tool used to create each online syllabus), which enables faculty to bookmark the URL during course and visit it later for continued learning (as it is continuously updated by me!). Populr.me also renders content very well on mobile devices, which makes it a great match for online learning. Each course ends with a live Google+ Hangout to dig deeper into questions that have been collected on a collaborative Padlet board throughout the 2-week class.
A Potential Humanizing Workshop with ELI!
Yesterday I had a great conversation with Veronica Diaz at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and we are discussing the possibility of offering the Humanizing course as an multi-week online session in May through ELI. Details will be shared as they come into focus!
On Friday, I spent the day sharing and learning with the User Experience Design team at LinkedIn in Mountain View. It was an awesome day! I grew up in the Silicon Valley and spent years of my life before I went into education commuting the freeways throughout the valley. The drive in to the LinkedIn headquarters was a reminiscent one for me personally and also provided me with ample time to reflect on the increasing role that technology plays in formal education and the social landscape that continues to transform our lives, the very nature of informal learning, and the possibilities it holds for transforming education.
Steve Johnson, LinkedIn's VP of User Experience Design (and a friend of mine from high school) invited me to join his team for the day and it started with my presentation, The Fractal Life: Harnessing Social for Authentic Agile Living. My presentation was very much a story about my own life as an educator and how, through my professional risk-taking -- inspired by two amazing parents and open heart surgery at age 34 -- and the intensive development, continuous nurturing, and on-going sustaining of my social networks I have been fortunate to discover my authentic passion and align it with career opportunities that make me look forward to every day.
Living authentically has given me clarity that vulnerability is not only important to being happy, it is the essential element that individuals should leverage as an ongoing feedback loop in their life. Using vulnerability as a feedback loop reminds an individual every day of the need to take risks, the need to lay our souls bare to understand who we are really are, what we are good at, and what makes us entirely miserable. The outcomes are not successes or failures; they are simply experiences that we loop back inside and sort through to identify what we have discovered about our uniqueness. In this way, our feedback loop transforms our life into something like a fractal, always in motion, taking in fresh experiences, while learning from everything -- yet, always guided the same, consistent pattern, our commitment to vulnerability and risk-taking.
Learning with LinkedIn
After my presentation, I had an exciting day sharing my experiences in higher education with leaders from the UED team. I am unable to write about the details, due to a non-disclosure agreement I signed upon arrival. But on a more broad level, I can share that conversation simply made me wanting more. While I had opportunities to share many of the realities that educators face when it comes to making sweeping changes within our organizations, the need to make these changes is more clear than ever.
LinkedIn has 300 million worldwide users and has extended the professional network experience into a virtual, global space. Fostering relationships has always been key to a successful career and as we prepare students for the future, ensuring they understand how to do so with social technologies is invaluable. A mindfully nourished LinkedIn network can be an invaluable resource for an individual seeking to make a career advancement or to a graduating high school student or community college student preparing to transfer to a university. Yet, how often is LinkedIn leveraged as a learning resource in college? How many college students are encouraged to connect with and/or follow subject matter experts on LinkedIn or research company pages? These are questions I'd love answers to! I'd love to work on an eBook that contains activities that leverage a tool like LinkedIn for learning.
As more workplaces adopt the social business model and social technologies continue to become more integral to informal learning, shouldn't we be building more ways to improve dialogue between the private sector and education?
I'll be moderating a fantastic Hangout on Air tomorrow, Thursday, May 15th at 4pm PT -- Active Learning with Google Drive: Tips & Strategies. +Kelly Falcone from Palomar College and +Gregory Beyrer from Cosumnes River College will be joining in to different perspectives about teaching with Google Drive. Kelly will be sharing her pedagogical tips and strategies for making your online, blended, or F2F class more active with some pretty impressive activities she has up her sleeve. The Hangout on Air will stream live online and all who view the live event will have an opportunity to contribute to an interactive activity Kelly will walk you through. Stunningly simple.
While Kelly teaches at an institution without an Apps Domain (a sitewide license to Google Apps), Greg teaches at an institution that has an Apps Domain. He'll step in to share his perspectives about the benefits and challenges this brings to the instructional experience.
Like all Center Hangouts on Air, the Q&A feature will be enabled. All you need to do is open the Google Event at the time of the Hangout on Air and the video will start to stream right there on the page. If you have a question, click the Submit a Question button and we'll see it! Just remember, we cannot respond in writing -- only verbally (a subtle but important point).
What is The Center?
A next-gen online learning community designed to connect California's 112 community colleges. All Center events are free and open to the public. The Center is brought to you by @ONE.
Today, there is a lot of potential to leverage mobile devices for engaging and enriching learning. The challenges are in understanding how to ensure learners don't get excluded in process, keep costs low, and, of course, support effective pedagogy.
Recently, my good friend +Vicki Curtis who teaches ESL at Ohlone College mentioned to me that she was experimenting with the use of a new tool called Presentain in her face-to-face class. The features of Presentain at first sounded confusing to me but the outcomes of the experience (for both instructor and students) made me curious enough to listen and want to learn more. So Vicki and I stayed in touch while she continued to try it out and she soon let me know that she felt confident she was on to something good. Last week, she joined me as a guest for a Center Hangout on Air. And it was awesome!
Here is a quick overview of Presentain but if you really want to check it out, view the 40-minute Hangout embedded above. In it, you will see Vicki engage the live Hangout on Air audience in an interactive demo of the tool, as the virtual audience members play the role of students in her class (to be clear, Presentain is not intended for distance presentations -- it does not synchronously relay audio, in other words).
Presentain is available for free but you will find the need to upgrade if you like the product. The free version is pretty limiting, enough to get a taste. There is no "education" license, per se, they offer a staggered pricing plan based on features included. Click here for pricing information.
For the "presenter," Presentain requires use of their web app and free mobile app (available for Android and iOS). Prior to a live presentation (before a face-to-face audience), the presenter (let's use the word "instructor" for our purposes) loads one's presentation into the web app in PDF form. The presentation is stored there. At this point, the instructor can also create and store polls within the account (paying attention to the poll and presentation limitations of one's account type).
At the time of class, the instructor enters the classroom, takes out her mobile app (this could be a smartphone or tablet), and launches the Presentain app. Also, she logs into the Presentain web app from the computer in the front of the room (connected to a projector for the students to view). At this point, students are entering and settling in. On her mobile, she is able to view thumbnail views of the presentations she loaded previously. She selects the one she wants to present for the class and indicates whether or not polls will be included and, if so, pulls those into the queue. Then Presentain provides a PIN number to enter into the web app. Now the presentation appears on the computer screen and the Presentain web app provides a simple, unique URL to share with students!
Students are now ready for class. The instructor greets them and asks them to take out their internet devices (smartphone, tablet, or laptop -- anything with access to WiFi, provided there is WiFi in the room -- or else a network connection would be required on the device, of course) and go to the URL displayed on the screen. From there, the students view each slide on their device.
Presentain allows any student to view the instructor's presentain on his/her internet connected device, regardless of platform, via a URL (no account or log in required).
as the instructor clicks through her very few, slides that are beautifully designed with sparse amounts of text and Creative-Commons licensed images (grin). The instructor moves throughout the class, bending down to engage closely with each learner. She makes eye contact directly with each student as she moves through the room. She holds her mobile device in her hand and swipes the screen -- yes, it is acting as a remote. She doesn't even need to think about it.
Presentain turns the instructor's mobile device into a remote.
As she pays attention to her learners, that mobile device in her hand has also been transformed into a recording device. The microphone is picking up her words as she speaks and the app is recording the presentation as she delivers her content to the students.
Presentain turns the instructor's mobile device into a recorder.
Now, after three slides and ten minutes, the instructor pauses. She activates a poll on her mobile. It projects on the screen in front of the class and simultaneously the students see it appear on their mobile devices. They read the prompt and click their response. As they respond, the results of the poll appear dynamically in the form of a pie chart on the screen. The instructor enthusiastically engages with the responses and the students start to inquisitively ask questions about the concept that had just been covered. Together, they engage in inquiry to understand why most students chose A, while some other students chose B and C.
Presentain enables an instructor to use dynamic polls from a mobile device that students respond to on their internet connected devices (no log in or account required).
One student is still confused. He is embarrassed and does not want to raise his hand. So he clicks the "return to Dashboard" link on his iPhone's screen and from there Presentain gives him the option to submit an anonymous question. He types his question. The instructor receives an indication (that is not seen on the presentation screen) that a question has been received. She clicks the notification to review it and chooses to display the question to the class. She notes that she felt similar confusion about the topic when she was a student and then proceeds to clarify things using a real world analogy. The instructor prompts the class to submit questions if they have more, as time is running out.
Fifteen minutes have now passed. The instructor knows that's enough presentation time. It's time to move on to an activity. So, she stops the presentation on her mobile device using the Presentain app and requests the app to publish the recording. Within moments the recording is available and the link may be emailed to students and/or embedded directly in an LMS.
Presentain instantly provides an embeddable video of an instructor's presentation, enabling students to review class sessions or experience sessions that were missed.
Intrigued? Watch the Hangout. You can learn more at Presentain.com. Vicki Curtis can be followed on Twitter @LearningGuide12.
Do you have your students watch online videos in support of your classes? Are you using or thinking of using the flipped classroom model? You're going to love this!
I think what I love most about Videonot.es is that it is a tool designed to improve how we learn with online video, which is truly one of the biggest needs in education today. The recent video revolution has dramatically increased the amount of online video used to support formal and informal learning but, often, it's just tough to track what we learn with videos. Even when we deliberately take notes while watching a video and include the link to the video in the notes, the desire to view that very moment in the video again at which a concept was discussed or explained is experienced. And I imagine this is even more true for second language learners, dyslexics, and other "non-traditional" learners.
If you use online videos in your classes, take 4-minutes to watch the video I created below. It will show you the benefit of using Videonot.es and demonstrate how it integrates directly with Google Drive, creating a simple, cloud-based access pathway to your notes (which you can even share with others).
I'd love to hear from some of you who have been using Videonot.es awhile and might have some student feedback to share. My only hiccup I experienced was an inability to get the video to pause by using the combination key command specified on the screen. This may be user error. :-/
Recently, as part of my "Learn with Michelle" series, I had the pleasure to interview +sabita persaud, Assistant Professor in the Notre Dame of Maryland School of Nursing, about her intriguing application of Facebook in her accelerated online graduate nursing course. In this video, you will learn how Dr. Persaud transformed a medical case study (with permission from the individual's family) into a fictitious Facebook profile that her students "friended." As Persaud played the role of the patient, she revealed mysterious symptoms and reached out to her "friends" for help. The students responded by applying and synthesizing ideas from their learning units, offering opportunities for deeper learning and formative assessments to prepare for their exams.
What were the results of this experiment? How did the quality of the student interactions compare with previous activities, constructed in an LMS discussion board? Watch the video and find out!
Recently, as part of my "Learn with Michelle" series, I had the opportunity to Hangout with Wendy Gorton of Wikispaces and Robin Bartoletti of Academic Partnerships to take a deeper look at new, emerging developments in educational wikis. Robin shared how she has used a free Wikispace wiki to design and deliver a Micro MOOC and Wendy provided a helpful overview of some of the new features of the new "Wikispaces Classroom." The video archive of our conversation is below.
The eBook is a pedagogical resource for any educator seeking a more human connection in their online classes. The contents are a compilation of years of my teaching practices and research from using VoiceThread in my own online classes. For me, my experiences using VoiceThread have brought me closer to my students and taught me many valuable lessons about inclusive instructional design and the importance of providing students with options to express themselves through voice or video. These are some of the lessons I reflect on in the book. While this eBook is offered as a professional development resource for educators, it's also a reflection of my own (continuing) journey as a lifelong learner as a teacher.
Improving Pedagogical Support Resources for Emerging Technologies
The eBook is intended to fill an important gap by serving as a pedagogical support resource to faculty who may understand how to use VoiceThread, yet feel challenged about how to use it to effectivelysupport the learning needs of diverse students. This issue underscores a growing problem in education today. There is an increasing demand to provide pedagogical resources for faculty to teach effectively with emerging technologies. This is a problem that affects students, faculty, institutions, and the emerging start up companies themselves who are striving to cater to the educational marketplace.
New approaches to providing pedagogical support resources are needed. Creating resources to support effective teaching with emerging tools through institutional faculty development programs is not only redundant but unsustainable in our dire budgetary times. This problem demands a community-powered solution. And I believe faculty authored, self-published eBooks (like this one) could be a pretty exciting solution.
An Overview of the eBook
The eBook includes an introduction (which you may read for free), four chapters, and a "Final Thoughts" conclusion. Throughout the eBook, the reader finds "Dig Deeper" sections that offer more than 20 links to video excerpts from my own VoiceThreads and sample VoiceThreads. These links serve as illustrations of practices in action to help illustrate the concepts described in the text. While the book is not a resource about how to use VoiceThread, there are links interspersed in the text that direct the reader to the VoiceThread site to learn how to perform basic function with VoiceThread (creating, commenting, groups/sharing, etc.).
Chapter One: Maximizing Human Presence
This chapter includes an examination of the topic of social presence and the significant value it brings to both community building and improving learning in online classes. The chapter looks at recent research that validates the benefits of asynchronous voice and video in fostering social presence. The chapter also examines the use of VoiceThread as an effective tool for applying principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in online course design and demystifies some of the confusing misconceptions about accessibility and 508 compliance by pointing out what needs to be captioned or transcribed in a VoiceThread (and explains how to do it, including how to add closed captions to videos you upload into a VoiceThread). The chapter ends with an overview of a proven strategy from one of my own research studies that demonstrates how I increased my online students' voluntary voice or video comments from 25% to 75%.
Chapter Two: Rethinking Learning
This chapter recontextualizes learning from our formalized academic framework into everyday language, which is an important step for instructors who want to improve their teaching skills. We look at concepts like scaffolding and flow and apply them to Bloom's taxonomy. I share specific examples of how I used VoiceThread as a formative assessment tool to scaffold learning in a flipped classroom and share the student survey results from this experiment. Chapter 2 also examines the importance of encouraging 21st century students to become content creators, rather than consumers of information and examines how VoiceThread is effective for fostering this skill, as well. To lead students towards this skill, I suggest scaffolding students' own VoiceThread skills by developing them from beginners using the commenting feature to editors of VoiceThreads and then creators of their VoiceThreads. To demonstrate this process, I carefully explain in detail the steps of a student-edited VoiceThread project and a student-created VoiceThread project from my own class with links to examples includes and my own instructor reflections.
Chapter 3: Eight Elements of an Effective Designed VoiceThread
This is a chapter that discusses the nuts n' bolts of how to put together a solid VoiceThread activity that communicates clear expectations, grading criteria, fosters consistent norms, directs students appropriately to where they should comment (when, how many times). I include further tips, illustrations of sample slides, and a video tutorial of a sample VoiceThread.
Chapter 4: Facilitating Learning with Feedback
One of the most valuable and important components of a learner's growth and development comes from the feedback she receives from a teacher. When a student is learning online and the feedback is delivered in a timely manner through warm voice or video, the results are greatly improved from text-based feedback. Students respond more favorably to voice/video feedback (this is tied back to the research in chapter one), as the nuance of the human voice results in less hurt feelings and the context of the message is better understood. This chapter guides you through some important mechanics about how to facilitate feedback effectively with VoiceThread using a system I have developed using VoiceThread's Identities and special "feedback" avatars plus the comment re-ordering featuring. I also discuss different approaches to leaving feedback for students, how to model norms through feedback, how to deliver micro-lectures through feedback, and more. All of these examples are illustrated with video excerpts to enhance your learning.
I hope you find this book valuable. I hope it improves your ability to use VoiceThread as a valuable tool in your online classes and I hope your students find VoiceThread as empowering as mine have.
I welcome your reviews on Smashwords! Please spread the word! :)
There are now a total of six 1-hour webinar archives in the VoiceThread training library. Keep this resource in mind for spring, summer, and fall faculty development planning.
Topics to date include:
How to Save Time with VoiceThread for Moodle
How and Why to Flip Your Classroom with VoiceThread
Supporting All Learners with VoiceThread
Supporting Student Success with VoiceThread
Making Sense of Assessment with VoiceThread
Integrating VoiceThread into the Campus-Wide Teaching Toolkit
This morning I had the pleasure and honor to present the keynote at Ohio State's Innovate 2011 conference. At the request of the participants, I have shared the presentation on Slideshare. You may view and/or download the PDF here and it's also embedded below.
To view many of the media resources shared in the presentation, please visit the Shared Resources page of my blog (or just click on the Shared Resources tab above).
Thanks to all who attended and please keep in touch. I would love to learn more about your own learning innovations. And, finally, this was the most active Twitter backchannel I've ever experienced during a presentation. I love it! If you have any lingering questions you'd like to ask, feel free to leave them here as a comment and I'd be happy to respond.
Online learning is a lot like eating dinner. It can be like a quick cruise through a drive through, providing a fast and convenient option for appeasing your hungry belly as you strive to meet the rest of your daily commitments.
Online learning can also be like eating a warm, delicious home cooked meal amidst a group of friends or family. This eating experience is different because sitting at the table involves more than just appeasing a hungry belly. It provides opportunities for conversation, reflection, sharing, and good hearty debate. Essentially, this meal involves being included in a community...even if just for a brief time.
Learning online is similar -- and each type of learning experience can serve a specific group of learners effectively. Unfortunately, online students too frequently crave the home cooked meal but, instead, are delivered a bag with a burger and fries.
Imagine showing up at your mom's house for a family dinner and being greeted with a bag of McDonald's at the front door. Imagine going to McDonalds for a quick bit and being expected to come in for an evening of conversation and discussion. You likely wouldn't appreciate either scenario.
I think it's time for students to understand the type of meal they'll receive before they register in an online class rather than unveiling it on day one.
As K12 districts around the nation continue to ramp up their online class offerings, they are acknowledging that teaching online requires a unique skillset from teaching in the classroom.
Education Week is offering a free webinar on September 23rd at 11am PST that will showcase this conversation and also touch upon strategies for online teacher evaluations and the critical importance of communicating effectively with students in an online setting.
On May 19th, I had the pleasure of presenting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, as the keynote for the EduSoCal10 conference. The event was a creative venture to substitute the Educause regional conference that did not take place on the west coast this year. I'd like to thank Crista Copp, Director of Academic Technology at LMU, and Michael Berman, CIO of CSU Channel Islands, for this speaking opportunity. LMU has shared this presentation, in addition to many other of the day's sessions, as videos on their iTunes U site. I have embedded my presentation below, with permission from LMU.
My presentation explores the art historical role of innovation and risk-taking in western society, highlighting the potential of creativity in teaching to unhinge higher education from its lecture-based traditions. The presentation showcases a specific case study in teaching innovation from my community college History of Women in Art class that examines the learning effects of an instructional model that embraces active learning in the classroom, rather than passive delivery of lecture. Student feedback and survey results are included. This case study was also shared last September, 2009, as an Educause Learning Initiative webinar titled, "Teaching Without Walls."
I'd like to take this opportunity to respond more deeply and thoughtfully to one question I received from the audience. My presentation criticizes the effectiveness of lectures as a learning activity. I was asked (not verbatim), "Given your perspective of lectures, why, then, did you select to deliver your content via lecture?" I had considered the contradiction embedded in my lecture style as I was preparing my content but, truly, hadn't worked through it entirely. In my response to the question, I acknowledged that contradiction but didn't have a clear answer as to why I delivered my presentation via lecture. Now I can lucidly explain this, as I've spent some time thinking about it.
Lectures do have value in learning and I believe my case study demonstrates this fact. However, if I'm given 16-weeks with a group and my goal is to facilitate they their learning of a variety of concepts and ideas, lecture alone is not an ideal activity, especially to fill my precious face-to-face time with my learners. Lecture has an important role in learning but it's not only piece of how we should be facilitating deep learning. As facilitators of learning, we need to engage our audience actively in critique, debate, and discussion to promote higher levels of learning, as well as meet the "offline" expectations of our digital generation of students who are deeply informed by YouTube and TiVo who are most likely to say, "If it's passive content like a lecture is, share it with me digitally so I can watch it when and where it's convenient for me, I can rewind and forward the content, and learn at my own pace."
When teaching a class on a campus, I believe this moment in higher education is our moment, as "teachers"-- not deliverers of information -- to implement technology into our instruction (via web-based tools outside the classroom) to enable us to have more time to work directly with our students in a live setting -- without technology -- resulting in more dynamic, relevant, and enriching learning for our students. "The World is Open," as Curtis Bonk has demonstrated, and our Googled, YouTubed, mobile society has capsized the relevance of a learning model that is based on showing up at a specific time and place, twice a week, for sixteen weeks to hear a professor deliver information that is available in the pocket of most students. It is time for our classroom model to be transformed by technology, just as the rest of the world has been.
Enjoy the video (56 minutes). I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Last September 2009, while still employed at CSU East Bay as their Director of Online and Hybrid Support Center, I had the awesome opportunity to share my teaching innovations through a webinar hosted by the Educause Learning Initiative. The archive of the 60-minute presentation, titled Teaching Without Walls: Life Beyond the Lecture (which soon thereafter became the name of my consulting business), is now public and I invite you to watch and listen and share it with your colleagues.
The presentation is an overview of a semester-long teaching experiment in which I removed all lectures from my community college History of Women in Art class. The passive lecture content was pre-recorded as audio/visual podcasts (or enhanced podcasts) and shared through a link in Blackboard along with an illustrated text-transcript of the lecture; providing students with a choice in how they would access the lecture content. After completing the lectures online, my students engaged in interactive online VoiceThread discussions and learning activities, in which they applied lecture concepts in an effort to begin to reach the unit's learning objectives. After completing the pre-class assignments, students came to class where we spent all of our time actively engaged in discussion, analysis, and debate about the unit's content. Randomly, students were also given "active learning assignments," for example, "Go to the mall and critically observe your visual surroundings. Analyze the actions and signs that contribute to the social enforcement of the "male gaze." Share your experiences in class and evaluate whether or not our society constructs a passive experience for women, situating them as objects of the male gaze. Is this an extension or break from the effects of western culture's history of art?"
The shift in my course design and pedagogy was strongly influenced by the research I had done about Millennial students. I wanted to explore the success of this type of learning environment, in an effort to fundamentally question the effectiveness of passive lectures and active classroom time in the construction of critical thinking, visual literacy skills, as well as the success of crafting personalized, relevant learning experiences for 21st century students.
The end of the archive reveals compelling student survey feedback. I hope you enjoy it and learn from it! Please share your thoughts if you take the time to watch!
The ELI website also shares a link to an audio recording of my speaking with three of my students at the end of the semester. Their dynamic voices are still some of the most compelling reasons for shifting our pedagogy and design of IN-CLASS learning experiences, in my opinion.
Just came across the superb presentation on SlideShare by Maria Puzzifero, CSU Global Campus, and Kaye Shelton, of Dallas Baptist University. I quickly marked it as a favorite, shared it on Twitter and I'm encouraging a contemplative review of the ideas here too.
The content shared here is of extreme relevance to all of higher education today and situates education today within an extreme paradigm shift, the pedagogical demands of which online learning is poised to meet. I'm elated to see such a timely conversation focused specifically on online teaching and learning, when so many of my day-to-day conversations and reflections seem to be pertaining to managing class size increases in the wake of more detrimental budget cuts.
I have always believed that if learning is truly valued as the outcome of an educational experience, then pedagogy will be the driver that determines the tools we use to deliver our courses, the number of students in a class, the questions we ask as we design the environment in which our students learn. The presentation shared here is clearly situated within the context of the learning needs of 21st century citizens. Unfortunately, the realities of college professors today reveal a different story.
For those of you out there who teach english, be sure (if you haven't already) to join the powerhouse social community English Teacher's Companion Ning, created by San Francisco-based high school english teacher Jim Burke (gosh, I'm already feeling self-conscious about my grammar as I write this).
I've been poking around in Jim's amazing community for a day or so but I first heard about it when it was awarded the ever so prestigious 2009 Edublog Award for Best Educational Use of a Social Networking Service. Bravo! I believe social networking is still the most underutilized aspect of web 2.0 in education. I've shed light on Ning in previous posts and discussed how I've used it in my own teaching as a supplemental environmental to a learning management system for students to share and reflect in response to specific blog prompts through text, image and video.
Well, Jim has embraced Ning and molded it into a resource for english teachers (but there are clearly lessons here for all teachers!). I, for one, had a light bulb moment just as I watched one of the wonderful videos that was shared by a member of the network, Tim Larkin, a teacher from Burlingame, CA. Tim has his english students create visual mind-maps to communicate ideas and concepts after reading MacBeth. Hmmm.
Now I've seen mind mapping before and I've been very intrigued about it as a learning process. For awhile I've been trying to theorize a way to make this activity work successfully in an online environment but couldn't put my finger on the right tool to make it work. But as I watched the video below (recorded with a liberating Flip video camera, by the way -- I love mine too!) which illustrates the colorful, lively mind map created by Larkin's student, I thought, "Would Prezi work for this?"
As the video swirled in and out in a circular motion, it began to remind me of the Prezi zoom/canvas interface which allows the user to place content anywhere on the clean white canvas, much like a stretch of white paper. The interplay of images and text in the mind map have a clear correlation with Prezi too -- but, with Prezi, the content could become interactive, taking the reader/user to a level beyond the surface of the "paper." Intriguing. Anyone want to give it a a try? If you do, please share!
Last week I shared my new VoiceThread for Online Teaching and Learning: Practical Design and Student Perspectives with you. It was a hit on Twitter (ranking in top 5K tweets, exciting for me!). I am now finished with the production so I thought I'd "re"share it with you in a new post.
What's new? You will find the addition of two "Winning Moment" excerpts from actual VoiceThread activities with my online students. The slides are video files (screen recordings of excerpts from the original VoiceThreads) that have been imported into VT (many people don't know that you can use movie files as your media selection in VoiceThread, greatly expanding your instructional flexibility!). The video excerpts will first play with a brief audio introduction from me that explains the context and the pedagogical signficance of each excerpt. I hope these are useful to those who are dabbling with VT or who'd like more concrete examples of how it can promote personalized feedback, develops a strong sense of community and offers a far superior environment for visual learning than text-based LMSs.
You'll also, notice the final slide which links you to my own educational consulting company, Teaching Without Walls. I am available for in-person or online VoiceThread training or presentations for your department, school, organization or event.
Here it is ... enjoy!
If the text in the embedded VoiceThread below is too small, please view the full size version.
I read an article today in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today that told about U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan's, concern about the need for teacher colleges to improve. His message was aimed at graduate schools around the nation that provide teacher preparation programs, indicating that they are outdated and need a refresh.
As I read this article, I clearly see that it's vague and makes no effort to identify how the programs need to be updated. But it left me thinking about a comment that was left on the VoiceThread I shared with you all in a recent blog post. I received a comment on the first slide of a VoiceThread I shared from Maryanne Bergos, who shared with us that she teaches a fully online class for pre-service teachers that introduces them to a variety of free web 2.0 tools that hold potential for teaching and learning (VoiceThread being one of them). "Hmmm...what a great idea," I thought! After hearing Maryanne's comment, I became quite enthused as I imagined an entire movement of exciting new curriculum lighting up around our country inspiring young, new educators about the possibilities that emerging web 2.0 tools (free web 2.0 tools) hold for them and their students.
Then, a couple days later, I read Duncan's article. There's such a gap between these two feelings I have right now. I'm not exactly sure where Maryanne is teaching but hopefully she'll come back and leave a comment and share more with us here and maybe some others will enlighten us about your own teaching program and how "current" they are. What are your reactions to Duncan's message? If you are part of a teaching program or have graduated from one recently, do you feel it is in need of a refresh and, if so, in what way? And then the next question would be, "If the program is current -- is the school you are teaching at outfitted with current technology and ready to support your 21st century teaching skills?"
But today I want to take this question into our colleges and universities, suggested already by the humorous video that greeted you at the start of this blog post. Teaching programs produce educators who generally enter our K-12 educational system. But what about all of our professors in higher education who enter college classrooms with generally no understanding of instructional methods whatsoever? This is not a personal criticism of a college professor, although I could bet my laptop there will be many who will read this and take it that way. This is an objective criticism of the training and hiring process in hiring education from an individual who has experienced it firsthand. We have fostered a system of higher education that welcomes subject matter experts into our college classrooms who rarely have any understanding of pedagogy beyond the skills they have observed in their own "training" throughout their undergraduate and graduate careers which, I would bet, are primarily still comprised of lectures. I won't go into my "lecture" rant here.
So, as I reflect on Duncan's call to refresh teaching programs throughout our nation, I beg us to widen this circle of inquiry and reflection and ask, "How would the quality of our college teaching change if a teacher training course was required at the master's level for every discipline?" I'm referring to a history student earning a master's degree, a math student earning a master's degree, a chemistry student earning a master's degree, etc.
I leave you with one final story that I think about probably way too much. In 1999 I graduated with my master's degree in art history. At the time, I knew I wanted to teach at the community college level that that's just what I went on to do. However, my roommate, we'll call her Allie, chose to continue on for PhD. She was admitted to an excellent program in New York. Ninearduousyears later she completed that PhD degree. She called me to enthusiastically share that she had obtained a sabbatical replacement position at a college in New York, a very competitive position that she was very excited about. I rejoiced in her excitement. Wow, she worked hard for this!
However, what dismayed her and left her chilled to the bone was the fact that the department that she'd be teaching in had its classrooms equipped completely with digital projectors and she was expected to build her lessons with digital images, although the college was not providing any for her. In her years of training as a student teaching assistant, Allie had only taught with color slides. The classrooms at this college had no slide projectors and she had none of her own. She had always relied upon the collection of her graduate institution. But now she was on her own.
She was an analogue art history professor stranded in a digital art history world. Allie had no clue how to locate digital images or how to prepare digital presentations. What she had was over $120,000 in debt and a PhD degree that qualified her to teach. But was she prepared to teach?
As I think about Allie's situation, I can only imagine the realities of new grads who, in this dire job market, land a job (does that still happen?) and find themselves teaching online. Heck, I imagine veteran college instructors making this transition too and feel the same way. Imagine that cold, hard reality. Sure, if you're a full-time faculty member, they likely have access to a faculty development center, and hopefully it has online training fully integrated (but I know for a fact many do not). In fact, We know from the recent APLU-Sloan survey (that did not include community colleges in the sample) that 4-year faculty are dissatisfied with the support they receive for teaching online and support includes online pedagogy training and instructional design assistance. But imagine how this dissatisfaction grows if you are a part-time instructor.
According to the 2009 Community College Center for Student Engagement survey, 67% of community college faculty are part-time instructors. That's an enormous percentage of the faculty teaching within the two-year institutions across our country. We also know from the annual Sloan-C surveys that that the rate at which students at two-year colleges take online classes is about double that as in four-year institutions. More than one-half of all students enrolled in two-year institutions are taking one online course (this data was recently confirmed for me in an email exchange with Jeff Seaman from Babson Research, although the data was not included in this year's Sloan survey report, Learning on Demand). Hmm. Seems to me that there's a pretty significant argument here for putting out a call for updating the teaching skills of our college instructors.
The question becomes...who is the advocate for this lofty call within higher education? How do we, as a nation, improve the teaching preparation of our college professors for the 21st century to include face-to-face, hybrid and online instruction?
Here is a new VoiceThread presentation I'm working on to showcase some practical instructional design strategies for integrating VoiceThread into an online class, as well as powerful student comments and survey results I've collected. Please feel free to click on the "Sign In or Register" icon in the lower left corner if you'd like to leave your own comment on the "Thoughts? Questions? Ideas?" slide at the end.
If you find this presentation helpful, please note, that you are welcome to copy the embed code in VoiceThread and share it on your own website/blog and the content remains fully collaborative and interactive!
