Pedagogy

Second Thoughts on Online Education (Or At Least The People Reporting On It)

Been out for a bit to help welcome a new EduGeek in the world.  I come back hoping to find a great new world of Ed Tech, grown and matured since I last left it.  Instead, I find the same silliness, like this article in the New York Times:

Second Thoughts on Online Education

You probably don’t even need to read it to know what happened.  A large university did a study where they compared the outcomes of a large lecture hall class to the outcomes from an “online” course with taped lectures.

Bad pedagogy vs. bad pedagogy – guess who won?  Oh, come on and say it with me – whining can help you feel better.  Ready?

Who won? No one.

Oh, the author talks about what the results possibly tell us, because certain groups (men, minorities, etc) performed worse in the online version than their counterparts in the face-to-face version.  Some crazy theories about why this is so are also posted: men like to procrastinate (and online videos help that), people that can’t speak English can’t pick up as well on non-verbal clues online, etc.

Could it possibly be that taped online lectures – no matter how well produced – are boring? No one likes to watch a talking head on a screen for hours.  Certain groups probably performed poorer just because they got bored faster.

Guess that brave new world of educational utopia is still down the road a bit….

College Professors Striking Back at Technology – With Technology?

You just can’t make this stuff up.  Here is the name of a recent article on The Chronicle:

College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back

The first thing that any decent intro to educational technology course teaches you is that technology is not just a computer.  Chalk boards are technology.  Books are technology.  “Technology can refer to material objects of use to humanity.” This also includes over head projectors and calculators.

In fact, we have probably all read the quotes from people that were opposed to books way back in the day.  I even remember once reading a quote that talked about how writing on bark was better than chalkboards or something like that.

So how did the professor strike back at technology? But forcing students to use a blue book.  Which is technically also technology.  Confused? So are the students in these courses I would bet. The professor also used an overhead at some point I would be willing to bet, or at least turned on the air conditioning if it got hot.

Worst quote of the article?

“tech-based learning feels more like IKEA—a lower-price, build-it-yourself option.”

Sad. Really sad.  Just taking out technology and talking at students doesn’t make a class high quality.  In fact, I have been in many face-to-face courses that would be a K-mart Blue Light Special if this metaphor is continued.

“In that way, some professors see emphasizing the benefits of chalk-and-talk methods as defending their craft against pressures to cheapen it.”

That is great – I see great value in face-to-face learning.  Just don’t defend your side by cheapening technology-based learning.  Lower-price, do-it-yourself? Give me a break.

Taking Control of Our Futures

This quote nails a thought I have been having on the head.  Sherry Turkle quoted by Net Gen Skeptic from an interview with Digital Nation:

“I don’t really care what technology wants. It’s up to people to develop technologies, see what affordances the technology has. Very often these affordances tap into our vulnerabilities. I would feel bereft if, because technology wants us to read short, simple stories, we bequeath to our children a world of short, simple stories. What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.”

In other words, Technology is not like dancing with the bear (the bear tells you when to stop or how to dance). Humans have learned how to train bears. We need to realize that we are in control of technology. We need to stop sitting around worshiping what technology tells us is happening, and start making things happen ourselves.  Too many adults sitting around drooling over youth that we are forgetting that we need to actual be adults. As Bono once said “Many people die at 17 and put the funeral off until they are 77.”

For the One Millionth Time, This is NOT Online Learning…

The Chronicle boldly proclaimed today that “Online Learning May Slightly Hurt Student Performance.” How do they know this? A “study found that students who watched lectures online instead of attending in-person classes performed slightly worse in the course over all.”

That sound you hear is the collective world of EduGeeks around the world firmly planting their palm to their fore head. Online lectures are ten times as boring as the face-to-face version, so no wonder they performed so bad.

(that last statement is based on the results of my scientific study of the volume of snores originating from a few online lecture video based courses I know of)

One of the authors even had this to say: “It’s limited evidence, but I think it’s the highest-quality evidence that’s available.”

Sorry, but it is not anywhere near as good as the other evidence out there.  The previous analysis of online learning by the U.S. Department of Education (that this article mentions) actually looked at many different actual forms of online learning. Not the wanna-be online learning beast called video lectures.

UPDATE: just as a note, The Chronicle did edit the original article and title to “more accurately characterize the research.”  The original title is in the link above. Also, the quote from the authors above was also removed, but it was originally there.

The Best Place To Learn IS On The Web

Much has been said recently about how the Web is making us more stupid. I blame Bing really – they said that humans are basically so dumb that we go on search overload if we can’t figure out a simple page of links.  I don’t feel “stupider” than I did before the Internet :)  Maybe I am just so ignorant that I don’t realize how dumb I am.

Finally, however, the New York Times brings some reality… and some actual science… into the debate with “The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our Brains.”  My two favorite quotes:

“Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how ‘experience can change the brain.’ But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk.”

…and…

“It could be argued that the Web, which is the ultimate library of words, video, images, interactivity, sharing and conversation, is the quintessential place to learn.”

And thousands of EduGeek around the world then said… “amen”…

Edit: made some changes, just in case people didn’t get my use of humor with the word “stupider.”

Will The Internet Start Looking More Like the World, or the World Like the Internet?

I was pondering future trends last week while watching the evening weather forecast.  Forecasting while watching a forecast?  Anyways… We were in for a possible round of severe weather that week. The news anchor put up a map of “storm spotters” – a network of people that would call in from their homes and tell what is happening in their area.

In other words, forecasting the weather is starting to incorporate crowd sourcing.

We have seen a giant push to get websites to work intuitively… and to even start thinking for us.  So on one hand – the Internet is starting to look more like the real world.  But I think even more often we are starting to see the world around us looking more and more like the Internet.  The powers that be are starting to see that there is power in crowd sourcing and social networking.  I wonder what real-life social networks we will see spring up next?

The real question for us is – can we use these ideas in education?  What if we took this weather stations ideas and applied them to a class? What if, instead of one large class, we broke that class down into smaller units based on geographic location.  Each smaller group forms a study group of sorts that watches issues related to the class subject in their area.  The small groups are loosely tied to one another in a way to share what they are learning about the subject.  The small groups would study local events or places. In this situation, the LMS would become more like the newscast – aggregating all of the input in one spot for everyone to benefit.

What if time and location became irrelevant for synchronous classes? What if you were grouped with a small group of people that lived near you when you sign up for a class, and then that group decided what day and time to meet for class?  The instructor would then send out assignments each week or maybe record a video for the group to work through. Maybe the instructor even met with each group.  then the groups send in their work to the class and the instructor aggregates all of the information coming in from each group and summarizes them for the entire class (which would essentially include all small groups no matter where they meet in the world).

Potentially, you could ave hundreds of students all meeting in a synchronous fashion, but all still in a way that fits their schedule.  This is, of course, another area where there is technology to do this… but we need one that is more specifically geared for educators.

Problems with ADDIE

At some of our recent conference presentations, Harriet and I have been discussing our problems with ADDIE. We usually get a large show of support when we say ADDIE doesn’t work well.  But we also get some passionate objectors.  Our presentation is not meant to criticize ADDIE, so I decided to save that for a blog post. So here we go – hold on tight.

If you take your time and follow the ADDIE process, you will end up with great course content.

For many people, this is a great statement. For an active learning constructivist like myself, this is a bad statement. Sound crazy? Here is why.

First of all, most of us aren’t afforded the time that it takes to go through the entire ADDIE process.  That is just life. People want their class now. “Well then,” you might say, “you are still going through ADDIE whether you realize it or not.” Is that really a good thing? Do I really want to walk into a restaurant someday and have the waiter tell me “sir, you already ate a nice steak. You didn’t realize it, but you really enjoyed it. I have charged your credit card, and thanks for the generous tip.”  You may not agree with me, but personally I want to be aware of what I am doing in life.

Second problem is the major focus on the production of content. Look… I know ADDIE. I teach ADDIE in an online class. People need to know what ADDIE is to see if it works in their corner of the work world.  I have seen hundreds of people go through the ADDIE process, and they always produce a mountain of passive learning-based content. I know ADDIE well enough to know that if you focus enough, you can come out with an active-learning based class.  But there is just something about ADDIE that steers so many people into writing a book. We need a process that just naturally steers people in to creating active, hands-on, higher-order thinking focused lessons, not sit-and-soak passive online lecture reading.

What is my beef with content? Some people today even talk a lot about how quality online classes MUST have quality content. Well, I’m about to say something that may rattle a few cages out there. Ready?

Content production is becoming irrelevant more and more every day.

Do you really think that you are the first and only person to ever write about the subject you are writing about? Let me introduce you to a site you need to use more.  Every piece of content you could possibly write is already online somewhere. Probably half of the opinions you want to write are already somewhere. In education, we need to get over the notion that we are producing so much original content. It is already out there – in probably a hundred places.

Just reading content is becoming less important today. Knowing what to do with content is what people need to know in more and more jobs. They need to evaluate, reflect, connect, and expand ideas. Your students do not need to know how witty you can be in re-stating what is already in the textbook. They need to take content and do something with it.

That is the world we are coming to today. Can you use ADDIE to create a course that prepares students for this? It is possible.  In my experience, it is not likely. That is why we need a new instructional design process.

When Staleness Creeps In To Your Content

No matter how student-centered you are, no matter how often you tell others you are not a “teacher” but a “coach”, at some point you are going to be putting some content in to your course.  Even coaches will sit down their players and show them how to do things on a regular basis. Your students need to hear from you – and I don’t just mean a weekly due date reminder or an occasional “atta boy” comment.  Students need to hear your take on issues, facts, controversies, current events, trends, etc.

For most of us, a blog has been the extent of how we keep the content flowing while avoiding the creation of online textbook monuments.  Blogs are great for that, but they do have a few short-comings.  For one, they tend to be text heavy – which can grow stale after a while. You can insert images, videos, and audio clips in posts – but that takes a lot more time and effort to accomplish even after you have produced the media.  And even if you own a iPhone, blogging is much easier if you are sitting at a desk. Blogging on the go sounds great, but it is still pretty time-consuming.  If only there were a way to make this all easier…

Enter in to this equation Posterous.  Their tag line says it all: “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”  That is the basic idea – but here is low-down. You create an account, based on your email. Then you create an email and send it in.Posterous takes your email and turns it in to a blog post. The subject becomes your title and the body becomes your post. But that is not all. You can add tags with ease.  But you can also attach images, audio files, and videos – andPosterous will crunch it all for you and add it to your post. You can even designate where you want the pictures to go in the post.

But that is not where it stops. Posterous will then push that content out to any site you want it to:  Twitter, Picassa, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, and even a WordPress blog (there are even a few sites they publish to that I had never heard of).  They only give you about a Gigabyte or so of storage (you can buy more) – but you can always use other sites to hold your larger media – like videos (on YouTube). Posterous does all of the heavy lifting for all of that.

So how can this help the educator/coach/what-we-are-supposed-to-call-ourselves-now? Well, for one – it makes mobile blogging much easier.  There is even an app that lets you take advantage of the built-in camera on your smart phone to shake things up a bit each week. After a couple of weeks of text blogs – why not record yourself and post a video blog? Or why not go somewhere in the city and film something that connects with your content? A civic event, an art exhibit, building architecture, etc?  Maybe even go talk to a colleague or content expert and record the conversation (with permission, of course), and then upload that audio one week as a blog post. I know these will not be the best produced videos in the world, but the spontaneous nature of them will give the students a sense that they are “following you around” as you practically apply what is being taught in class.

Why not even make it seem more like a tour of your subject? You serve as the lead journalist of the group. Take them on a tour of the city from the perspective of your subject. Mix up the media (text, audio, video, images, etc) each week. Don’t get so formal with everything you say. Start off some of your posts with statements like “You know, I was pondering the engineering concepts in this week’s reading while at Starbucks – and I had this revelation about the relationship between this coffee cup and this week’s subject.”  But really film yourself at Starbucks having the revelation.

The less you script it out for yourself, the more fun you will have and the more students will enjoy it.

Remember what I posted a few weeks ago about Delicious as content? Posterous can push your content to Delicious. So add your class tags every week and your content will be inserted in to your class stream on Delicious seamlessly.

Oh – and don’t forget those web cams on your desktop computer. You don’t necessarily have to have a smart phone to do any of this. I know this might be hard to believe, but good revelations can also hit us while we are sitting at our desks.  So do some media productions there if you like.

(this post was cross-posted at Soundings)

Adding Value and Battling Staleness in Online Classes

Think back to some of the best courses you took during college. What made those courses so great for you? Well, other than the ones that were an easy A – what made them interesting to you over other courses? Probably one factor was an interesting instructor. Many instructors like to just read from the textbook or (even worse) a PowerPoint.  You know for a fact that their class is probably exactly the same this semester as it was last semester and the semester before that.

In other words: BORING!

The classes that most students end up liking are taught by instructors that are talking to them about current events and new information related to their subject. The course that you get this semester is slightly different than the one last semester. In other words – there is a a greater value in showing up to this course, because it will be interesting and relevant (and slightly different from what your roommate learned last semester). The instructor is reading and researching the subject and keeping you up to date on the course subject.

But… can this be done online… where classes are usually canned and solidified months before the first day of course?

Through the modern miracle of technology, the answer is yes – if you plan ahead.

You are probably teaching a course in a subject that you like. That means you are also probably reading blogs, articles, journals, and other websites related to that subject.  What if your students could follow you as you do all of this reading? What if they could research with you – and this research became the course content? What if they discussed what you read that week, instead of some canned, stale question you stuck in a “discussion board” months ago?

Technically, this is possible with a blog. But do you really want to log in and create an entire blog post for every article, blog post, etc, etc. that you find… several times a week? Sound too tiring to you? Well then I have two words for you:

Social Bookmarking

You have probably heard of sites like Delicious and Digg.  Did you know that you can use these sites as the content for your course? Ditch the pre-processed cheese html zip file, pdf, or (shudder) audio lecture recording and go flexible, relevant, and easy.

Here is one idea: create an account in Delicious. Then come up with a tag just for each class – edtc3320, for example.  Then install a Delicious bookmark plug-in for FireFox or Chrome (if you are using Internet Explorer, well… I am sorry).  You can then send your students to the page for your specific class tag, and they can use whatever RSS reader they want to follow you. You can even create multiple tags for different classes.

As you come across different articles and links that would apply to your class – bookmark them in delicious and tag them for the class you want to read them. Maybe even add a second link of ‘edtc3320week1’ or whatever to help students organize them better. Delicious lets you write short comments on each link – so let students know why you bookmarked the link. Then add a discussion question for each link. For your class discussion, tell students that they have to answer at least one question raised during each week’s readings.

But don’t ditch the blog just yet – you are the content expert, so you have great insights to add to everything you read, and delicious has a short limit on comments.  So blog about what you want, and then bookmark your blog post in Delicious. It gets added to the flow that students have to read each week.

Dynamic content, active learning, reflection, and rapid course design all in one neat package! Want to be really fancy? Get a RSS feed widget, and then insert that in to your LMS course for the students that don’t get RSS. They can just click on the content page and it will be there for them in the walled garden…errr… Learning Management System.

Want to see what this could look like? Well, as I find resources I like online, I have created a Delicious tag just for EduGeek Journal readers to follow:

http://delicious.com/grandeped/edugeekjournal

Follow me in your favorite RSS reader to see what this could be like.

{this post is being cross-posted at Soundings: Best Practices in Teaching and Technology]

The Future of Education: The ABCs vs. the EFGs

I’ve been pondering an article called “Future Ed: Remote learning, 3D screens” for a few days now.  While this article covers some interesting geeky stuff (such as ocular implants and 3-D screens), there are also some great nuggets of wisdom in there about how what we teach needs to change –   along with our technologies:

Barker pointed out that with more tech-savvy learning, the curriculum will have to change, too. He and his wife funded a five-year experiment in Chattanooga, Tenn., to create a 21st-century curriculum founded not just on learning the ABCs, but also the “EFGs”: Eco ed (“How do we interact with the planet?”), Futures ed (“How do I shape my future?”), and Global ed (“What is my relationship with other human beings?”).

Each student had to learn a 500-word vocabulary in six languages and, in sixth grade, choose one in which to be fluent, including cultural knowledge. Physical fitness focused on lifelong sports such as tennis and golf, not team activities. Grade levels were kindergarten “through competence” — that is, when students accomplished all of the program’s lofty goals, they graduated.

Personally, I get more excited about these approaches to changing education than others.  The “death to the university” concept is too much “baby and bathwater” to me, and the open education movement is too caught up in hopeless romanticism (or unhealthy bitterness) for my taste. I don’t think people in either one of these movements have really thought about what would happen if they got their way.

Think about it – you don’t want to drive across a bridge designed by someone that learned engineering through following an engineering blog do you? Or, for that matter, get operated on by a surgeon that learned surgery by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.  After Universities die and education goes free and open, people will begin to realize that we need to be able to prove that people learned what they needed to in order to do certain things. Then we will need to hire people to track who learned what, and those people will need a place to work and store records. We’ll go out and buy the empty college buildings, which will cost money, so we will start charging for education again. We’ll just end up right back where we started.

Or, we could listen to the people that want to reform what we have and end up in a better place overall in the end.

Anyways, the article I mentioned above covers a lot of ground in 4 pages, so give the whole thing a read with an open mind. Assessment, socialization, and realistic school reform (i.e. ideas for change that involve educators keeping their jobs) are all covered.