Idea?

Well, OK, it is an actual idea, so the real quesion is whether it is any good. Most ideas are not.

Anyway, I need to take at close, very close, look at the Quality Matters rubriic. As more than one person has noted to me that QM tends to focus on relatively low-level issues, some of which are so basic that they are probably not even worth researching. Well, suppose that is true. What would a set of guidelines, even a rubric, for online courses be like that went beyond that? Suppose we had ways of looking at what kinds of activities were used in the online course? How are they organized? Do they include key things such as Gagne's nine events and the ARCS model? Are there places where students' beliefs are challenged? What kinds of questions are asked in the discussions? And so on.

OK, it could be a good idea, so tomorrow I start looking at QM.

Checking In

In the absence of anything specific to talk about, I thought I'd keep my hand in on this blog with just summarizing where I am with my two online courses this semester.

Instructional Design: We had the first class last week on Dimdim (and accessibility services created a transcript for it). This week was the first on Palace. Still having some difficulty keeping folks focused, especially on something like Needs Assessment, which seems pretty abstract and perhaps irrelevant to most. I haven't really worked out how and what to teach in that step. It's partly successful, but it could be much better. What I do need to do is redesign each part of the process. Hard to find the time for that. I am, however, finding a little time to do a demo project on the wiki, step-by-step. It is about the basics of the nautical rules of the road.


Instructional Applications of the Internet: This course always starts out seeming to be chaotic, but it really does seem like much of it has to overlap. It does work itself out, although neither the students nor I may be able to see it at first. Discussions and other things going well, but I'm discovering a lot of places that need more planning.

Improving My Teaching:  I'm working on two things for improvement this semester. I may have mentioned this in an earlier post. Doing better at discussions---that's going pretty well. I"m much more active and so far I'm keeping up with reading the posts. That's important since it is so discouraging when I get behind by hundreds of postings. I'm trying to add to discussions and answer specific questions, without taking them over completely. Using Vista better--mostly that has been to use the assignment tool and gradebook better. The other thing I should do is make learning modules. Maybe that will be next semester.

A new project

I keep telling myself (and others) that I try to work on one thing about my teaching every semester. Some semesters that's even true. The big one, of course, was with my feedback on assignments, especially using audio files. I have decided to try to work on two things this semester. That might be a mistake, since it is hard to keep track and concentrate on too much, but I'll try.

First, I will try to do better in reading nd responding to student discussion postings. I don't want to do what Cindy does, which is respond to every posting (and give it feedback and points as a posting, not jsut respond to the content). That seems like overkill to me, especially for graduate students. More self-servingly, I just don't want to spend the time and effort! But I do want to do better and be more systematic about it. First, I will try to be better about posting questions, but I will systematically rather than haphazardly, reduce that over the course of the semester. Second, I will at least read each posting. Third, I will respond to the content of many postings, if I have something useful to say. Finally, I will not go more than three weeks before giving points in any courses where I do give points for online discussions.

Second, I will make better use of Vista's features. I don't much like the system, but I can do much better on things such as using the assignments, gradebook, and calendar together. I'll work on that this semester. Next semester maybe I can use other things such as goals and learning modules.

One thing that I have learned a bit about this semester is adapting to the needs of a deaf student. I have had only a handful of students over the years who required accommodations, but this has been interesting. I was going to use Dimdim but it turns out that in this situation The Palace is very well adapted to her needs. I have had a few videos captioned, plus I will need to provide outlines of some audios that I made. Also, clearly, I cannot use audio feedback with her. It has forced me to think a bit about the course again. Always a good thing.

New Semester Approaching

I've been preparing for Spring semester. I sent out emails to those registered for Instructional Design and Instructional Applications of the Internet on Monday. Even two weeks before the beginning of the semester, I didn't beat everyone to the punch. I had already received some emails asking about textbooks and other issues. I told the ID class that I would be using Dimdim for orientation and maybe later, alternating with The Palace (an oldie but goody). I quickly received a return email from one class member who, it turns out, is deaf. Hmmm, Dimdiim won't work well there, without someone to transcribe what I say (the students say very little in Dimdim bu tthey do use the text chat). Looks like what I'll need to do is use Palace for most of the classes. That resolves any issues with her in the day to day communications. I will also send along a list of YouTube videos that I use now, which they will caption. I also have some audios that I made, so I will need to type out the same information. Finally, I can't use the audio feedback with her. This is one of the few times I have had a student who needed accommodation, so I'm learning a lot here. I do sort of wish there were a way that I could be informed as soon as a student signs up. It would have affected my initial email to the class.

Not much else interesting going on in preparing for classes. I keep meaning to go through the QM rubric to be sure that I am covering all the important factors. I wonder when I'll have the time.

Toward a new semester

Well, back to work tomorrow, at least part time. With just a couple of weeks before the start of the next semester, I need to send out the introductory emails very soon. Otherwise, I'll be answering individual messages from students getting antsy about the course. That turns out to be an essential part of online courses. It used to be that students expected to receive a syllabus and other instructions at the first class. It's no longer good enough. Mostly, though, I just wish I had the time, energy, etc. to redesign courses every semester or at least every year.

Audio Feedback

I spent the day making recordings of my feedback on the current assignment for Instructional Design. Took about five hours, all told. I do wonder whether the idea of audio feedback is good. Or rather I wonder how good. What are the limitations? Are there individula differences in its effects? I know that some people believe that they do better with the written feedback, But that probably doesn't take into account the fact that I give a lot (sometimes A LOT) more information with the audio. An example of that are the two dissertation proposals I responded to recently. Not sure why I did it, but I put Word comments directly in the document. The other, I did audio feedback. I'm not sure how many typed comments I put in the one, but I spent close to two hours talking about the other.

With the Instructional Design projects, I can give anywhere from a couple of minutes to fifteen minutes or more. I originally started doing it exactly because I was dissatisfied with writing emails about ID projects. I would do whatever I could to minimize the time it took, including saying as little as possible. That didn't give people much opportunity to make changes to improve their projects. The audio seems to give the chance to give a lot more corrective feedback. It does take a long time itself, though. Let's say an average of 15-20 minutes per person-assignment. That includes the first reading, the feedback, and preparing and posting the files to the Web for people to listen to.

The big question, of course, is whether it does any good. One student and I are doing some research currently to test her ideas about cognitive load and feedback. We are hypothesizing that the effects of reducing extraneous load in feedback witll parallel those of reducing it in instructional presentations. We are suggesting that audio feedback reduces extraneous load over textual and that feedback embedded in a document reduces it over feedback supplied separately. Our current data collection isn't going to successfully tell us that, though, so we will try to get some English teachers to help us out in Spring semester.

I have another question about it, however, That is, do people actually use the feedback? The ID course could be a place to start to look at that. If I had people go back to posting their projects on a wiki (that I control), I could, completely unobtrusively, find out whether the projects changed after the feedback. And whether the changes followed the feedback. I will look back at previous semesters first and then see if I could plan it for Spring. Still might need a different course to do a more experimental (quasi-experimental?) approach, such as seeing whether written feedback or audio feedback is used more.

Anyway, I'll be doing more feedback tomorrow in other courses.

Trying to get started again

I haven't been very good about writing in this blog for a long tme. But I've been pretty successful in writing my sailing blog, so maybe I can do this. In addition, I suspect that it might help a lot in keeping me on track in teaching. I have had a tendency to be slow in starting semesters in that I don't keep up with feedback and other key tasks for the first few weeks. Finally, I need to do better in paying attention to all classes on a regular basis.

So, where am I now? It is over halfway through the Fall semester. I'm almost caught up with most tasks for the three (four if you count freshman orientation, but it is not online) courses that I am teaching. That's a good thing because I'll be at the Sloan conference for several days next week. I don't want to spend a lot of time on courses while there.

Instructional Design is going reasonably well. I have alternated between using The Palace (my usual synchronous tool) and Dimdim (KSU has an open source installation of it). I have had students complete a questionnaire on the technology after each class session, so I can compare their views of them, once we get to that data. My own view continues to be that the audio systems (such as Dimdium, Elluminate, Learnlink, and so on) encourages one to lecture way too much. One of the things I like about Palace is that it all but forces me to find ways to keep the class interactive. (Other things include the price--free--, the cross-platform nature, the ease of using breakout rooms (try that with Dimdim), the low bandwidth, and others.)

That said, this week's ID class last night went quite well. I made key points but made sure to punctuate them with student activities. The pacing was good, and I ended at the planned time (Motivation: I was hungry!). Even when I lost the connection and had to come back in as a participant, not "host" I worked with the person who was identified as host to get control back with little problem In fact, my voice connection was clearer after that!

Most of these students either do not have microphones or refuse to admit it. That means that the real media involved here tend to be one-way audio, with a two-way text chat. I check the text chat for questions as well as for answers to my question. It seems to work pretty well as a system. I have not been using such things as showing websites, etc. but I am learning to use the whiteboard. Dimdim's whiteboard is mediocre for a couple of reasons, but the most annoying thing is that students (probably only one or two) play around with it, even when I put key terms or other notes up. They switch pages, copy and paste, move things, etc. I need to see if there are technological or social fixes for that.

Tomorrow and Sunday I need to complete the feedback for the next ID assignment as well catch up on the feedback for other courses before I leave. I'm noping it won't take too long!