To be Online or Not to be Oline

When using computers, there is a temptation to try to do everything on the computer. I am as susceptible to this as anyone. Computer programmers call this PAT (programming at the terminal). It has an insidious effect on effectiveness, productivity, and quality.

Computers are wondrous devices. I can find a paper on a hard drive in a blink, but it may take days to find on in my office. Keeping material on line can make it easier to find and accessible when you are away from your office. However, using material that is on line is another matter.

In one of my courses, I have a 200-page student guide. For many years, I had made this guide available to students in paper form. Last spring, however, I made it available online. The results were not so good. By tracking student accesses, I determined that many students were not downloading the reference. Instead, they accessed it every time they needed it, which was often. This introduced a time delay that certainly slowed their process and probably tended to break their concentration.

I suspect others downloaded the guide, but did not print it out. This leads to what I call the knothole effect. Imagine watching a baseball game through a knothole in a fence. You can see parts of what is going on, but can't see the whole picture. When accessing a 200-page PDF file on a computer, it is difficult to move from section to section. In paper form, it is flip-flip. At any rate, I've decided to go back to paper.

I've discovered a similar thing when managing an online course. All the pieces are there, but they may be slow to access and it is difficult to keep all the parts in sight. I just finished grading an exercise which requires me to keep six different files in view. I have dual monitors, but six files at once is just too much. I finally decided to have print copies of some of the files.

For example, I have a two-page grading sheet. The first part is a narrative. The second part is a grading rubric. For this, I had printed copies of the assignment and the problem. On my computer, I had LINGO (a mathematical programming application) to check each team's program file, a copy of the grading sheet from the previous phase, renamed as the new sheet, and the document I was grading. On line, I had the student team's presentation site, in case I needed to check supporting files.

After I did the narrative for a student report, copying phrases from the report as needed, I then looked at the previous narrative and commented on signs of progress. I did the same thing with the Rubric. After evaluating the report and determining the grade, I looked for and commented on signs of progress. Editing a copy of the previous grading document saved me a window and quite a bit of time.

Then, I printed out the grading sheets. These I will file away. However, another benefit is that when I entered the grades, I could look up the numbers quickly, rather than opening multiple files and scrolling down.

I've thought for quite a while that asynchronous education requires one to organize differently than for synchronous courses. I'm now thinking that another part of managing online courses is figuring out what to download and what to leave on the server, as well as what to keep as a file only and what to print out.

A quick Survey of Online Learning & Teaching Sites

A quick Survey of Online Learning & Teaching Sites

An assignment in CEL 560 was to look at some online communities. Here are my notes.

Quick Look

First, I did a quick survey of each of the sites.

• Edutopia.org focuses on K-12
• LearningTimes.org is a community of education and training professionals.
• MERLOT.org is a large site, organized by topic and discipline. One discipline is engineering.
• digitaldividenetwork.org is an organization concerned with reducing the barriers to making the Internet and information available via the Internet available to all.
• LERN.org is concerned with providing a wide range of resources and access to all sorts of learning, world-wide.
• sloan-c.org is concerned with improving online education and access to that education.
• teachertube.com contains a vast number of videos, organized by educational level and subject matter. During my initial survey, there was a technical problem. I will check back later.
• groups.yahoo.com/group/Online_Adjuncts/ is a discussion board for online instructors.
• Classroom20.ning.com in focused on Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies.

In-Depth Review of MERLOT

I decided to go back to MERLOT because it is organized in a way that I can quickly focus on post-secondary education in engineering, which is what I do. It also is indexed on other specific items that I use.

The site is organized into three types of communities: by discipline, by workforce development, and by partners. I decided to explore the engineering discipline.

Engineering

Within engineering, there are five groupings:

• teaching,
  
• people,
• learning materials,
  
• beyond MERLOT and
  
• showcase.
  

There is also an opportunity to join MERLOT and to be a reviewer. I decided to join. The first item seemed to be a tutorial, so I started there.

About MERLOT

The first and last links were broken, so I started with “Using MERLOT …” This consisted of six different examples, some of which used Java applets and others of which were primarily HTML. None seem particularly innovative, but they would definitely be useful, for someone interested in the specific topic.

People

There is an editorial board and a set of volunteer peer reviewers. This is good, for faculty who want peer reviews of their work for promotion and tenure reasons. It is also an opportunity for faculty who want to expand public service by volunteering to review.

Learning Materials

Here, I found the statement, ”MERLOT defines a learning material as "any digital entity designed to meet a specific learning outcome that can be reused to support learning".
This is certainly broad enough.

The link to the collections did not work. Instead, I was directed to return to the home page, where I found a link that did work. The resources are indexed. There was a total of 6930 items under science and technology. Of those, 150 were found when I entered “engineering.”

The advanced search was more precise. I found 24 items under industrial engineering of which about ten interested me. Most were contributed by Dr. Hossein Arsham.

Assessment

This seems to be a very promising site for finding and contributing materials. The indexing makes it easier to find specific items and the peer review adds to the value of contributing materials, as well as assuring high levels of quality. I will definitely return here often.

For Next Time #4: How can I do this?

Many years ago, I "read" How Do I Do This When I Can't See What I'm Doing?: Information Processing for the Visually Disabled, by Gerald Jahoda. (Actually, I listened to it on tape.) Although merely dyslexic, I found this to be extremely useful. Gerald's main idea was to explain to people, who have been doing things in a certain way all their lives, how to continue to do them, now that they could no longer depend on their vision.

Thinking about the kinds of difficulties that my students are having with different aspects of online technology, it has occurred to me that I should set up a sort of FAQ based on the same principle. That is, a single place students can go to find out how to do specific things, such as check due dates, straightforward ways to transmit images, and how to get the feedback on assignments. These are things almost all know how to do in f2f classes, but many seem to have unusual difficulty managing them online. Right now, I have all sorts of information, but it is distributed in the syllabus, general instructions, and so on. Having a single place to check might help.

Technically, though the full FAQ is planned for the next class, there is no reason not to start it up now. I'll just reorganize the current material and viola! the FAQ. However, I have another reason for starting it up now. I want my current students to tell me what they are having trouble with. After all, if I plan to produce something useful for students, who would know better what should be in it, or at the least, what I left out. Also, if items in the FAQ are not quite as clear, concise, and brilliant as I think when I write them, students with a bit of experience under their belts will be better able to let me know.

Bye for now,
John Mullen

For Next Time 3: Computer Programming

It appears that over the years, the concept of computer programming has evolved and that my current students do not have a clear idea of what it entails. They confuse data entry with programming and have difficulty with MatLab, which uses a procedural language. They think of writing spreadsheets or constructing databases as programming. While these activities are important and do involve telling a computer what to do, they use applications languages. The most serious problem is that they do not execute a sequence of commands in an order that is evident to the users.

Next time, I need to be clearer on the role the student plays and avoid buzzwords, such as "programming." In addition, I need to check in preliminary exercises that students are sufficiently computer literate and, if necessary, provide additional guidance on such basics as what a directory is, data specifications vs. writing code, how to respond to certain errors, and finally, that they will, in fact, need access to MatLab. We are in our eighth week and I have a couple of students who finally decided to order the package. Now, they are waiting for it to arrive by snail mail. An earlier assignment, no matter how simple, would have sent the message sooner.

Happily, most of the class is on track. Because I don't ask them to do anything more complicated, with respect to MatLab, than they have already done, they have the skill now to rise above small examples and tons of tedious calculations. However, there are still stragglers and it is their situation I would like to avoid in the future.

Next Course 2

Well it looks like I have to do these one at a time. This time, I'm interacting with students primarily through e-mail and occasionally by telephone. I'm considering also opening a chat room at the same time. The advantages are that students become more familiar with WebCT chat, and can share in the discussion of common issues. The disadvantage is some students don't want to admit that they don't know something in front of others. Of course, they can always lurk.

I can start doing that this semester, but I noticed that students have already started using the chat rooms, so getting them online sooner is not so much an issue. The second thing I need to think about is when to start this. I should do it sometime before the first team assignment, but should probably wait a week or two into the semester when I'm sure that students have the basic WebCT items under control.

The related item is Skype. I have students that are pretty far away and might call me, except for the expense of the call. Being available on Skype could help them. However, if they don't have a connection with a high enough data rate, this could be no help. For those using employers' resources, company policy and firewalls could be barriers.

Another problem is that this requires synchronous communication, which may be difficult because of the time zone problem or individual work schedules. Many students may prefer e-mail and the discussion board. I need to include these is options, too.

I think what I will do this semester is put together a survey, asking about capabilities and preferences. I can use that to decide which way to go in the next few weeks. Also, the class I have the semester seems to be quite diverse, so I should be able to get a good read on what will work in general. Then, next semester I'll do a similar survey at the beginning, just to be sure that class is similar to this one.

In doing all of this, I need to be careful of overwhelming the students with too much technology. Also, I need to bear in mind that different students will have different preferences. My objective here is to facilitate interaction with me and eventually interaction among the students. The specific way in which students do this is not a course objective. As long as it happens, how it happens is secondary. If I provide options, then the students become familiar with the technology. Then, it's up to them to decide what to use.

Also, I need to consider three different scenarios. One is when the student wants to communicate directly with me. The second is when students on a small team want to communicate with each other. The third would be a general interaction involving the whole class. The different scenarios might be best dealt with using different choices. At this time, I do the whole class interaction asynchronously. I should probably continue to do that until such time as I have more options in the first two.

Finally, I need to point out from the beginning the use of Matlab as a way of communicating mathematical ideas using text. I think this is a lot faster than the equation editor, and in many cases more to the point. This has occurred to me recently and I am doing this now, but next time I will do this from the start.

Towards the Next Course

Each semester, I keep a journal entitled "For Next Time," into which I put items that occurred to me during this semester about things I would like to do differently next semester. Of course, these would only be things that I cannot change this semester.

While many of the items are specific to a particular course, some are applicable to common elements of different courses. What I'm going to post here are elements that are specific to online elements of almost any course I might teach.

This semester I had a wide range of student capabilities with respect to WebCT, computer use, and familiarity with the whole idea of distance education. Focusing on WebCT, next time I plan to monitor the situation more closely than I did this time. Specifically,

This time I started by making sure that each student could send me an e-mail via WebCT, download and submit an assignment, and completing a quiz. There were a few stragglers, but by the end of the second week pretty much everybody could do this. However, I missed a few items:

• At this point, after taking five quizzes, some people are still taking an hour to complete a five minute quiz. I need to check this sooner next time. Also, I think the people that are taking an hour may be taking the quiz before reading the material. Next time, I think I'll make the quiz available a few days later then the associated assignment and emphasize the fact that the student should complete the assignment first. (I can do this now, but next time I should do it from the start.)
• This time, I had a unit zero covering some WebCT basics, but I did not cover this in the assignment or quiz for week one. Next time, I will ask specific questions in the first assignment about such things as where to find class notes, how to find feedback, where the self check exercises are, and how to properly respond to e-mail and discussion board posts. ( use quote for e-mail and reply for posts).
  
• Then, in problem set 2, ask for specifics from the feedback and notes from problem set one. Also, have at least one exercise that refers specifically to a particular self checked exercise. This should expose any uncertainty early. This time, too many students were not aware of these elements in spite of several announcements about them.
  

Course Design v 0.1

Here is a first whack at designing a course. This model is based on the Instructional Systems Approach to Teleteaching (ISAT) model developed by Thom Cyrs while at NMSU.

I had initially hesitated to use this model as a basis, but noticed that it is about the same age as typical models on the Instructional Design and Development website. Some points of note are:

• The different blocks represent different sub-processes which would interact with each other, as shown, over time. However, the frequency of interaction varies. During course operation , blocks 4, 5, and 6 interact quite heavily.
• The model is not only for instructional design and re-design, but also a framework for managing the course.
• The numbers indicate the order of considering the sub-processes during initial design, but as with all design processes, the subsequent refinements are driven by circumstance and information.
• This is a top-level model. Each sub-process will acquire more detail as I continue to adapt the model. For example, I tend to use a backwards course design approach in Block 2.
• Additionally, Blocks 2 through 6 are synchronized with respect to each other and time. As the course progresses, knowledge that students have achieved one milestone means I can go on to the topics built on that milestone.
• While this model does not address the issue of facilitating interaction directly, but that is one of the objectives in Block 2

Instructional Systems Design

Background

In the Spring of 1992, I was fortunate enough to take EDUC 501, Essential Strategies for College Teaching, from Thom Curs, who was the Director of the Center for Educational Development at NMSU. Although the title did not indicate so, the course was specifically for new faculty engaged in distance education. Since most faculty had little or no background in education, leave alone distance education, the course was both intense and focused. We met once a week in a windowless room in the basement of Milton Hall and hit all aspects of the topic as hard as we could.

At the time, Dr. Cyrs was developing a concept he later called Instructional Systems Approach to Teleteaching (ISAT). This is a framework for designing, operating, and updating distance courses that took into account the technology, as well as all the things normally covered in course design. The basic assumptions were:

1. Almost no one gets it right on the first try. In spite of all the wonderful things we were learning, nothing replaces experience.
   
2. Even if you are lucky enough to get it right on the first try, the world still continues to change.
   

Bottom line was that we needed to build into our design a means of continually monitoring the effectiveness of what we were doing, adjust things as we go, and use what we learn in every offering to improve the next.

Perspective

As I approach the problem of redesigning a course on the basis of what I learn in OTLC, I maintain a particular point of view. Thom emphasized beginning with educational objectives and evaluating options in view of those objectives. This was not a new idea to me, but Thom assured us that it was a good one to retain in this new, strange environment. So, when I look at a technology, I evaluate it in terms of what may be accomplished with it and what other technologies might accomplish the same. I'll give an example.

Lets say I want students to be able to determine the expectation of a discrete random variable. Of course, I'll expose students to some examples of correct and incorrect ways, then state the rule, which is E[X] = sum over all values of x, the term xp(x). Now, the main question is "How will I know the students understand this?" At this point, I can consider several options, such as

• Providing a number of self-checked exercises, which will help assure students understand the computations correctly,
• Asking simple questions on computation in a test or quiz,
• Asking more difficult questions in which the students need to recognize the random variable, and
• embedding this problem in another, larger, problem.

And so on. Now each item can be implemented in a number of ways. For example, I've implemented self-checked exercises with printed problems, hints, and answers. I've done the same using links for hints in WebCT. Other possibilities include self-checked quizzes in WebCT with randomized values, and, if I were really ambitious, modules in Java. All of these options are viable, but some are better than others. In the old days, when Internet connections were slow, I used pencil and paper, but with better average access to the Internet, I'm using WebCT tools more. That is, regardless of the technology, I want to be sure students understand how to compute an expectation. I choose the technology which I think has the best chance of working. Over time, the educational objective may remain the same, but as technology evolves, the manner of implementation changes.

Objective

I have been teaching a long time and teaching distance courses about fifteen years. However, things change and I feel a need to change. In the past, while I've focused on interacting with students, as my classes become more geographically diverse, I have become more and more aware of the need to foster interaction among my students. Thus, I am most interested in how to do this in a way that increases the quality of learning.

Approach

At this time, my basic approach is to facilitate the sort of interaction I've noticed in face-to-face classes. That is, fostering first small group interaction, then gradually expanding the circle of contacts. It seems to me that an interactive group of four to six students has a great deal of instructional benefit and, given the level of the technology, about as much as I can expect in the first few weeks.

Another aspect is the use of technology. The range of technological sophistication among my students is immense. I have students who are definitely computer gurus, while others who are not. I spent a lunch hour on the phone last week with a student who did not understand the concept of "folders" in windows and tended to place files that needed to be in the same directories in odd locations on his hard drive. I find that people only absorb a certain amount of new information, then ignore the rest. Thus, I try to introduce technology in stages. This means, of course, that I need to structure the course with this end in mind. For example, although I provided examples of MatLab use in the first lecture, I did not require students to use MatLab until the fourth week. Even then, I made the mistake of putting two new ideas: running MatLab and setting up a data structure to represent a network, in a single exercise. Next time, I'll split the two ideas into two exercises.

A third aspect is the matter of encouraging students to integrate with the larger community as a whole. The course I plan to redesign is IE 561 - Workplace Safety. This is an ideal online course in that virtually all the source material and reference material is on line. So, in addition to the usual objectives in my courses, in this one I want to encourage students to go to reliable sources when they need them in the future.

Well, that is what I plan to do. We'll see how well I do it.

Asynchronous Education

Odd thoughts on conducting classes with students located over ten time zones.